Rootstock Represents the Manufacturing ERP Vendors in PricewaterhouseCooper’s Technology Forecast Quarterly

Joins SAP, Oracle, Blackstone, McGraw Hill Construction and Partnerpedia Discussing “Future of Enterprise Apps – Moving Beyond Workflows to Mindflows”

SAN FRANCISCO – November 20, 2013 – Rootstock Software®, the leader in cloud manufacturing and supply chain applications, today announced that President and CEO Pat Garrehy has joined a list of leading experts from SAP, Oracle, Blackstone, McGraw Hill Construction, and Partnerpedia to cover the “Future of Enterprise Apps – Moving Beyond Workflows to Mindflows” in PwC’s quarterly Technology Forecast, out this month. Representing the Manufacturing Cloud ERP vendors and users, Garrehy discusses integration-ready applications, how users will create their own interfaces to fit their work.

According to PwC, “A confluence of trends such as mobility, cloud, application programming interfaces (APIs), analytics, and others are giving rise to apps, which we call mindful apps, that blend human and software intelligence and make human cognitive processes part of the enterprise business processes. In doing so, these mindful apps expand the purview of enterprise applications to include human thinking and augment humans’ capacity for knowledge work.”

In his interview, Garrehy stresses that, in the next ten years, large enterprise customers will want operating division’s supply chain applications to include much more than just their own financial systems. With Rootstock Cloud ERP, for example, they will need to provide meaningful data into the corporate financial system. Those software ERP systems on public, best-of-breed ecosystems are already architected to consider interfacing and/or integrating to other applications. Not only will they interface with corporate financials, those that support manufacturing plants in a best-of-breed eco-system like force.com as an example, will also work with a number of PDM systems, configurators and quality control systems. As predictive analytics gains popularity over the next decade, they will feed a number of predictive analytics models as well.

“In order to easily achieve these interface and integration varietals, there are important technical considerations that one must consider when developing within a best-of-breed ecosystem,” explains Garrehy. “For example, on the force.com platform, this means that all the business logic is on the back end and every single file or table we develop is hardened and has the potential to be called by some other application. We must expose all of our fields in a manner that is easily accessible but the integrity of that particular table is maintained. However, once done, it makes integration and interface to other applications developed on force.com or with an API that accepts force.com data, much easier to achieve that integration or interface.”

Garrehy also discussed how, in the future, different users will use different screens, each more conducive to the way they work. For example, there will be Rootstock’s data analytics intensive screen which would be used by C-level executives and there will be Rootstock’s simple transactional screens, used by workers on the line. In addition, customers will be able take their favorite third-party app, create new interfaces and put them on top of Rootstock’s manufacturing Cloud ERP and other applications. In effect, users will develop their own interfaces.

The full article is available at www.pwc.com/technologyforecast.

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