> It's possible that your bargaining position vis-a-vis the ERP company would be worse if you were an employee. But probably not if you were a founder. And surely the ERP company's bargaining position relative to your company is better than yours.

I don't think that this is the case as the value they add comes with opinion entrenched in the belief of the path that their product should take. This opinion actually has caused them to flat out refuse to do some work which in my opinion is an opportunity to make things better for the company that has originally taken on this ERP system as their central authority of information. I actually came in from a friend of mine who knew that I was familiar with Coldfusion. Ultimately in my exploration for knowledge I have become intimately entrapped by the ERP data model based on the simple fact that it is esoteric and inflexible which has in fact been proven by how the front-end interface is a kludge of C++ utilities, C#, and some shell scripts. Upgrades continue to happen but they give me 0 faith that the small company that they are (ERP) has a clear path to less of a kludge of a system. It gives me solace that as long as their opinions are strong contrary to the revenue model of my employer that in fact I will be useful for a long time. The moment the ERP company actually understands the niche they are pursuing is the moment I will have less of a potential for work. Until then they can fight their way upstream against their customers as much as they like and their customers will hedge their bets until they can migrate to something better. It is assumed I am less in line with the directive of the customer and have my own agenda against the ERP company when in fact I am elongating the runway for my company to operate until they have a better plan to migrate away to a solution that doesn't assume so much about their customers. Manufacturing knows they have to evolve yet they have made past decisions that they realize they can only mitigate by extending their systems without having to pay the high prices their vendors request. How is this not a good strategy? It's not like I am a contractor and trust me when I say that my company is better off with my SPOF than just the SPOF of their ERP company. Lose the ERP company and you not only lose the company and their regular updates but you lose the custom development of that company which will be 10 times more when the developers that were fired become independent contractors themselves.

It's just business.