Small businesses often rely on long-since outgrown systems such as Quickbooks, lashed together with a range of best of breed point-solutions, each one with its own architecture, user interface, and data input needs, often requiring the same data to be input multiple times.

Try as they might, legacy ERP players have not yet made a dent in the vast and untapped market that is small and midsized businesses. So instead they raise maintenance fees for existing clients, acquire and graft on point solutions, and look for new technology plays to get existing customers interested in spending more money.

At the same time there has been an explosion in the number and popularity of small, best of breed web-based business . From Google Documents to Salesforce.com CRM, these applications are often delivered via the cloud, offer fairly narrow functionality with a mostly fixed set-up and non-configurable user interface, have very limited industry-specific functionality, are easy to deploy and use, are mobile and social, and compared to the legacy ERP systems at least, are cheap. Sometimes, in fact, they are even free.

What gave rise to the interest in these Web-based tools? Various factors are influencing business management software decisions, such as:

· the explosion in mobile users