Nice article on ERP

Have been hearing of this stuff called ERP, CRM etc. Knew about them at some abstract level but never was very clear until I stumbled on this nice piece of article on ERP.
http://www.cio.com/research/erp/edit/erpbasics.html
Ends the article with this note:-

The difficulty of getting ERP and e-commerce applications to work together—not to mention the other applications that demand ERP information such as supply chain and CRM software—has led companies to consider software known alternately as middleware and EAI software. These applications act as software translators that take information from ERP and convert it into a format that e-commerce and other applications can understand.