#Shopify and #ERP - two words you don't often find in the same sentence. I watched Shopify’s announcement yesterday about its Global ERP Program and wondered what the point was -- there were already ERP integrations in their app store right?

The quote that struck me was this:
"Through the Global ERP Program, merchants can now access a suite of certified apps directly integrated with Shopify, without needing to rely on third-party implementations to connect their ERP to Shopify."

Not rely on a third-party implementation and "ERP" don't exactly belong in the same sentence. It struck me that the goal was very Shopify -- reduce total cost of ownership, promote easy setup.

The connections appear to be built by the ERP itself, or likely the company's leading integrator (people like Microsoft often pay VARs to manage key integrations, even if it's not mentioned publicly).

The real trick here is I expect these integration to be "kneecapped", especially by the larger vendors like Oracle Netsuite. That's not a cheap system to install or setup. As a result this is not something "plug and playable" -- so what % will be connected automagically? 20%. Less?

However, this is a base where most companies need experienced partners. Rather than trying to cut integrators and VARs out of the loop, it seems to me they need to be going the other direction here at the same time, right? What happened to the "no code", "configuration" and "customization" framework just announced? Does this fit in here? How? It might help explain where they see the role of VARs and integrators, instead of pretending that VARs don't have a role in the ecosystem.

It would be nice to have them use the same messaging for once.

Something to watch.