Vendor advantages aren’t purchaser advantages
I first heard about Epicor’s determination when certainly one of my long-time purchasers, an organization for whom ERP reliability is mission-critical, reached out with deep issues. Like so many others, they’re being pushed into the cloud not by constructive enterprise drivers, however by the withdrawal of the on-premises choice. Their worries are removed from theoretical. Simply final 12 months, main outages reminded us that the cloud, for all its strengths, isn’t any panacea for danger. Add authentic worries about latency, compliance, and new safety fashions, and it’s clear that this transition creates anxiousness proper alongside alternative.
Let’s be clear about what’s motivating this development. For Epicor and its friends, shifting to SaaS means they will focus their assets, decrease assist prices, speed up innovation, and simplify patching, safety, and integrations. With Epicor Cloud, for instance, each buyer runs the identical core code, patches are pushed universally, and working bills fall in consequence. It’s a sound enterprise technique for distributors to achieve recurring income, much less model sprawl, and a extra streamlined engineering group.
That effectivity usually comes on the expense of buyer alternative. Enterprises are requested to cede infrastructure management, settle for new dependencies, and belief that the vendor-managed setting will meet all their necessities for safety, latency, uptime, and regulatory compliance—generally with solely restricted visibility or contractual recourse. For organizations that chosen on-prem software program exactly due to their distinctive wants, it is a seismic change that may’t be solved by merely “lifting and shifting” their functions.