One of my recent blog posts talked about the emergence of a few natively cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions that leverage salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. But looks might be somewhat deceiving here—while the products might be brand new and hosted on the latest cloud architectures, their owners and founders have been around the ERP block a few times before.

Take Rootstock Software’s co-founders Patrick “Pat” Garrehy and Chuck Olinger for example. They each have over 35 years’ expertise building software for complex manufacturing environments (Lockheed, Solectron, etc.). I’ve known them for over a decade, since, prior to Rootstock, they were involved with Relevant Business Systems. That ERP product, now part of Aptean after the recent merger of CDC Software and Consona Corporation (the latter in turn acquired Relevant ERP back in 2006) has had a couple of incarnations within Relevant Business Systems (at some stage also called INFIMACS).

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