It might just be an outdated assumption among many enterprises that when it comes to deploying an enterprise software solution that you only have two alternatives; either a “conventional” on-premises solution or a cloud-based ERP solution. There is, however, a third type of ERP deployment these days, and that is the hybrid ERP solution.
Most people have a fair amount of experience with the on-premise systems as they dominated the past 25-30 years of IT history. And most people have at least some exposure to the currently more fashionable cloud based systems, and are aware of the benefits, advantages and drawbacks of each approach.
Is the pure cloud solution currently being pushed by most vendors inherently superior to the older on-premise concept? In certain applications and verticals, that may be an easy answer, but the answer is surely not a “yes” across the board. One could make the argument that cloud based technical offerings based on subscription pricing are preferred by ERP vendors for reasons that have less to do with customer interests and satisfaction and more to do with making their lives easier and more profitable.
Hybrid solutions allow the user to pick and choose which parts of the process flow to house internally, providing inherently more control and security over data and proprietary mechanisms that might not remain so in the cloud, while using the cloud for external interfacing and data exchange that rates much lower on the securtiy and privacy ladder. For example, a financial system calculating payments and producing reports for payment recipients could house the actual payments, both raw and processed data, in an internal database while pushing the reporting and communications workflows invloved out to a cloud based system. In theory, this is just the next level of distributed system theory isn't it? You select which components (database, programming, reporting, file transmission, user dialogs) you want to keep control over locally and push the rest outward to the vapors.