Finance Is Moving to the Cloud Much Faster Than Expected

SINGAPORE, September
13, 2017 — A major shift
is taking place in how enterprises select their financial management applications,
with a migration to cloud applications happening faster than expected,
according to Gartner, Inc. A recent Gartner survey of senior finance executives
found that by 2020, 36 percent of enterprises will use the cloud to support
more than half of their transactional systems of record.

Gartner surveyed 439
global senior financial executives (including 410 who had implemented cloud
strategic and financial corporate performance management solutions) from
January through March 2017 to explore their technology perspective, influence
of IT, needs and priorities in technology investment.

According to the
survey:

According to the
survey, smaller and midsize organizations are adopting cloud more rapidly
than larger organizations, with 44.6 percent of smaller organizations, 37.7
percent of midsize enterprises and 40.4 percent of large organizations planning
to move to the cloud over the next three years.

“We have found
that most clients asking about these financial business application markets are
solely interested in the cloud option,” says John Van Decker, research vice president at
Gartner. “Many enterprises that currently run on-premises solutions want
to move to newer solutions that put more control in the hands of the end user,
and reduce the effort required when compared with on-premises upgrades.”

Gartner has found that
the human capital management and procure-to-pay markets have already been
migrating their business applications to the cloud, while the office of finance
has been slower to move. However, things are changing for the finance
organization. CFOs are usually more conservative about moving their data to the
cloud, however, given the current change in the market there will be a steady
migration over the next five to 10 years.

Cloud solutions are
still developing and do not have uniform capability to meet the needs of all
verticals, company size and local markets, and clients will need to do their
due diligence when evaluating cloud solutions in these markets.

“The Gartner
survey showed that 93 percent of enterprises see the cloud being utilized for
half of enterprise transactions in the future,” said Mr. Van Decker.
“The cloud has definitely changed the game for financial management
business applications. Vendors have responded with new and rearchitected
platforms in the cloud, and most have de-emphasized their on-premises
solutions, in favor of cloud implementations, which are more profitable for the
vendors, while reducing the effort of local IT support.”

Gartner
clients can dive deeper into the survey results in “Survey Analysis, Once in the Cloud, Where Does
Finance IT Go?” To address the momentum and market shift to the cloud, Gartner
has published three Magic Quadrants covering financial management and
performance management applications, primarily by the office of finance.
Gartner clients can learn more in:

Additional information
on trends in the financial services industry will be provided during Industry
Day at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017. Follow news and
updates from the events on Twitter using #GartnerSYM.

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE:
IT) is the world’s leading research and advisory company. The company helps
business leaders across all major functions in every industry and enterprise
size with the objective insights they need to make the right decisions.
Gartner’s comprehensive suite of services delivers strategic advice and proven
best practices to help clients succeed in their mission-critical priorities.
Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, USA, and has more than
13,000 associates serving clients in 11,000 enterprises in 100 countries. For
more information, visit gartner.com.