Is the world ready for a new generation of ERP?

Beyond the Big Four

For most senior leaders, the ERP market appears deceptively simple. When organizations talk about ‘ERP’, they mean SAP, Oracle, Workday or Microsoft Dynamics. The choice feels binary: which established platform should sit at the heart of the enterprise? This framing is comfortable, but it’s also increasingly incomplete.

Outside that familiar frame, a very different ERP landscape has been forming. It is broader, more fragmented and in places, far more innovative than many large organizations realize. Open-source platforms like Odoo have matured into fully functional ERPs serving millions of users worldwide. AI-native finance platforms such as Campfire, Rillet and DualEntry have rapidly emerged with radically different assumptions about what a general ledger should do. Alongside them sit vertical-specific ERPs, composable finance stacks and specialist platforms, such as DOSS, an AI-native operations solution targeted at global CPGs.

This ecosystem is no longer theoretical. It’s being adopted by real companies, some surprisingly large and at material scale.

The evidence of adoption

Odoo is already deployed in complex, global organizations including Toyota Material Handling and Sodexo, not as experimental pilots, but as operational systems running targeted parts of their business. These aren’t replacements for SAP across the entire enterprise, but pragmatic alternatives where flexibility, speed and cost matter more than legacy conventions.

AI-native platforms have gone further. Fast-growing companies like Replit and PostHog have migrated off NetSuite entirely, attracted by continuous close, automated reconciliation and fundamentally different economics. These aren’t garage startups: PostHog processes millions in revenue, and Replit operates at significant scale with complex multi-entity structures.

The pattern is consistent: companies are choosing new-generation ERPs not because legacy vendors can’t deliver, but because the new platforms are optimized for different priorities:

• Speed of deployment
• Transparency of data models
• Modern user experience
• And, critically, cost structures that don’t require seven-figure annual commitments

They are not evidence that tier-one ERP is obsolete, but they are evidence that the boundary of what must sit inside it is narrower than it once was.

Why the new generation is compelling

The appeal of new-age ERPs comes down to three fundamental differences.

First, architectural simplicity. Modern ERPs are built on contemporary cloud-native architectures with API-first design. They don’t carry decades of accumulated complexity. Integration is cleaner, data is more accessible and development cycles are faster.

Second, economic rationality. Open-source platforms like Odoo offer perpetual licenses and transparent pricing. AI-native platforms typically charge per-entity or per-user at fractions of traditional ERP costs. For a mid-sized subsidiary or a carve-out business, the total cost of ownership can be an order of magnitude lower.

Third, intelligent automation. AI-native ERPs embed machine learning into core processes, automated reconciliation, anomaly detection, intelligent categorization. What required armies of accountants and consultants to configure in SAP comes partially pre-built. The promise is not just cheaper software, but fundamentally less manual work.

These gains come with trade-offs. AI-driven processes can be harder to explain, validate and evidence than deterministic configurations. For regulated organizations, this shifts, not removes, the assurance burden. The operational win is real, but the governance model must evolve alongside it.

For specific contexts such as new subsidiaries, digital ventures, operational units with straightforward requirements, the advantages are material. The question is whether they’re sufficient to challenge the incumbents at enterprise scale.

The existence of this wider ERP world raises an uncomfortable question for large enterprises: if credible alternatives already exist, why do most PLCs still behave as though they do not?

Compelling, but hesitation remains rational

The answer lies less in technology and more in history. For decades, ERP earned its place as one of the most conservative choices a leadership team could make.

SAP and Oracle were not selected because they were elegant or efficient, but because they were trusted. Auditors understood them, regulators were comfortable with them and boards could sign off multi-year, nine-figure programs knowing that while delivery might be painful, the risk profile was well understood. ERP became infrastructure, and infrastructure is not something large organizations experiment with lightly.

For large, listed enterprises, caution and conservatism is not irrational. New-age ERPs are still uneven in their maturity, and ERP selection is as much an emotional choice of confidence and trust as it is a rational choice.

Many new-age AI-native ERPs are finance-led rather than enterprise-wide. This is a very deliberate choice on their part, but it means they lack the depth of embedded controls required for SOX compliance, GxP validation or complex statutory reporting across multiple jurisdictions. Their ecosystems are thinner, with fewer specialist consultants, fewer pre-built integrations, less proven behavior under regulatory stress. Auditors haven’t spent decades validating them, and for a PLC they can sometimes be a leap of faith.

There’s also the question of scale. Can these platforms handle the transaction volumes, entity complexity and reporting requirements of a global PLC? Some can, in theory. Few have been stress-tested in anger. For a FTSE 100 CFO, replacing the group ledger with Campfire or DualEntry today would be bold. In many cases, it would be irresponsible. The risk-reward calculation doesn’t yet stack up for mission-critical finance.

This is the tension. New-generation ERPs are compelling enough to gain real traction, but not yet mature enough to displace incumbents at the enterprise core. So, what’s the likely path forward?

The more likely future is thinning, not replacing

The disruption unfolding in the ERP market will not arrive as dramatic big-bang replacements. It will arrive through gradual erosion.

New ERPs will continue to appear first in subsidiaries, carve-outs and new digital businesses. They’ll be adopted where speed and cost efficiency matter more than institutional conservatism. Over time, this establishes a beachhead by proving the technology, building internal capability and demonstrating that alternatives can work.

But the more profound shift will happen at the core itself. Not through replacement, but through thinning.

Traditional ERP was designed to be the place where work happened. Process logic lived inside the system. Intelligence was embedded in configuration. Users went into ERP to think, decide and act. That model is slowly being dismantled.

AI and agentic orchestration are pulling intelligence out of traditional ERPs. Increasingly, the ERP becomes a system of record and compliance, while reasoning, process automation and decision-making move into AI layers that sit across multiple systems. Users stop ‘working in SAP’ and start working through copilots, agents and intelligent workflows. The ERP remains underneath, but it’s no longer where value is created or where users spend their time.

As this happens, the monolithic ERP gets thinner and thinner until what remains is essentially a transaction ledger with strong controls and audit trails. At that point, the psychological and technical lock-in weakens. The question shifts from ‘can we replace SAP / Oracle?’ to ‘what are we actually paying SAP / Oracle to do?’

For some, the answer will be that we don’t need an SAP or Oracle at all. A more lightweight and cheaper ERP ledger will serve the same outcomes.

For CFOs and executive teams, this shifts the real question. It is no longer simply which ERP vendor to choose. It is which parts of the business genuinely require tier-one ERP controls, and which parts are carrying cost and rigidity out of habit rather than necessity. It is about deciding where assurance is non-negotiable, and where experimentation is acceptable. In other words, ERP strategy becomes portfolio management, not vendor selection.

This is the architectural endgame: traditional ERPs thinned to their irreducible core, surrounded by an ecosystem of intelligent agents and modern applications, such as Ramp for spend management, Rippling for HR and Nume as your AI CFO. Once organizations reach that state, the new generation of ERPs, leaner, cheaper, more transparent, suddenly looks far more credible as a replacement for what’s left.

A useful test is this: if a process would require the CFO to personally defend it to a regulator or auditor, it belongs in the tier-one core. If not, there is scope to innovate.

In conclusion: Not yet, but sooner than you think

Are large enterprises ready for a new generation of ERPs today? No, not for mission-critical finance functions.

But the idea that this is a distant, ten- or fifteen-year horizon is comforting fiction. The thinning has already begun. AI is already mediating how people interact with ERP. And the new platforms are already proving themselves in increasingly material contexts.

What makes this moment different from previous cycles of ERP ‘disruption’ is pace. AI-native platforms are improving month by month. Open-source ecosystems are deepening quickly. Agentic AI is reducing dependency on where data and logic physically live. The limiting factor is no longer software capability. It is organizational readiness.

Boards need to be comfortable governing hybrid cores. Audit committees need to distinguish between where assurance is mandatory and where it is assumed. Finance leaders need operating models that allow selective experimentation without compromising trust. Those capabilities take time to build, which is why this shift still feels slow. But it is moving faster than many expect.

SAP and Oracle will not disappear and will keep innovating to challenge the rise of the new-age ERPs. That is not the point; the more interesting question is how much of the enterprise they will still need to own when that day arrives. Leaders who assume ERP is settled may discover, sooner than expected, that the center of gravity moved while they weren’t looking.