Brown did deep research, talked with lots of analyst and experts, and brought Workday in for the project. "For a smaller institution that doesn't have a large IT staff, it's compelling," he says.

So far, Brown is halfway through the first HR phase, which is expected to be completed in about 12 months. The finance pieces will be finished in two years. Normally, SaaS isn't such a long process, but in this case there's lots of intricate work needed to rewrite old mainframe code and functions that were written in the old COBAL days, Pickett says. "So we have to do a big redesign and introduce new functions and workflows that didn't exist before. It's a massive rewrite of old to new. It's a process that we want to get just right."

Using Workday, the school's SaaS ERP systems will be on cloud servers that also handle accounts and data for other Workday customers in a multi-tenant environment. The multi-tenant environment doesn't trouble Pickett due to the prevalence of security audits and other controls used by the vendor. "These guys have done this before. Those are the kinds of things that you look at and you ask questions about. Nothing is risk-free, but this is something that a reasonable professional can live with."

Meanwhile, in Sanibel, Fla., finance director Sylvia Edwards says that city officials had similar considerations when they began looking to replace the city's aging ERP infrastructure. Sanibel had been using ERP from SunGard since 1995, but decided this year to move to SaaS ERP from due to lower costs and less demands on the city's five-person IT staff.

Moving to the cloud provided the city of Sanibel with an extra and unanticipated disaster recovery benefit. "We're on a barrier island, so if there are any storms that approach, we have to evacuate the island," she says. "This works hand-in-hand with SaaS ERP. If you have to evacuate, you just take a laptop and you can set up anywhere."