"Market consolidation is always hard for customers when it happens," Martens said. "When you see a vendor buy a company where there is some overlap in their businesses, that's certainly a cause for concern" and can affect your deployment and ERP strategy.

" and it looks like it will close," she says. Private equity firm Apax Partners recently acquired Epicor, is taking them private and is merging them with Activant in a deal announced this spring. "We're still waiting to see how these consolidations will affect customers."

Forrester is currently working on a new study with a focus on the future of ERP and reviews on seven interesting trends in the marketplace, according to Martens. "It's more optimistic about the market than it is pessimistic," she says. "There really is a sense that ERP apps are truly changing in terms of what they're going to do and what they're going to look like. The demand from customers is that the apps are going to have to be much more usable.

"I think part of that is the changing demographics of users who grew up using the Internet," compared to past ERP users who adapted to the software that was put in front of them, she says. Today's new corporate ERP users "have certain expectations of what the applications should look like and how they will work," she says. "Vendors will have to work on making them more usable and more personable. I think it's one of the messages you're hearing from vendors, as they are now including more business intelligence capabilities in with ERP so users can do querying of their ERP data and present the results in more arresting ways."

So does that mean that we'll see more gamification of ERP applications, where they could take on more playful, entertaining or intriguing characteristics of video games?