E10 from E9 Upgrade - On our own or with Epicor assistance?

Epicor ERP. To bring my DT back on site I got a quote around $100k in licenses we would need to purchase. We had Vantage 8 on prem and moved to 10 in DT.

I may have gotten bad information but you may want to ask the question and get it in writing prior to moving, I did not and regret it.

//edit: not a formal quote, I guess an “estimate” idea from my CAM? It wasn’t ever sent out for a quote, it was outside of my ability to pay.

Ah, yes your CAM is the person for that. I am ignorant of our licensing and sales details. I have my brain full of MSFT and Azure pricing though if you ever need to try to understand MSFT licensing :persevere:

In SaaS, you do not have to buy the software again. There are situations where you can choose to but that is not the normal Public Cloud (DT) situation. Now, you may be walking away from a previous purchase when moving to SaaS but that’s different from what you said.

On a hot project right now, but am starting my Cloud posting here offline…

Mark W.

Wait. I see now you meant if you want to go back on Prem…NVM. :flushed:

Right. We had purchased licenses and were current on maintenance and had run 8 for years. We moved to cloud, and when I inquired about what it takes to go back on Prem, I was told we had to re-buy all our licenses again. It seemed … draconian. But, i didn’t ask before getting in bed with the cloud offering, so I’m kind of stuck with whatever answer I get.

It depends on your complexity and capability. I did E9 to E10 solo it took about 3 months of working time, to understand the process, the uplift.

E9 to E10 migration is very easy, its the Uplift that takes time if you want to do it right.

You are correct. Moving to their cloud means you will forever be paying their subscription at whatever prices they decide to charge down the road there is no going back. If you don’t like their service levels or performance you are out of luck unless you want to spend about $4k/user to re-purchase a perpetual license

Many don’t realize there are authorized partners that will host you on Azure, handle all the same tasks Epicor does (with better support) with far more access to and freedom to your instance and data, AND, you’re epicor maintenance isn’t likely to go up in price, or up much. Nothing compared to what vendors do with locked in SaaS pricing. Also you can integrate with any 3rd party, not just the ones that Epicor resells

Just google ‘epicor azure hosting’ and see some of the non-epicor top listings.

Maybe because we were early Dedicated Tenants, but we wrote in our contract that we could go back to our On Prem license if the service did not live up to the billing. We also wrote that we would pick up support without a catch up if we went back on-prem.

So here are some questions you should ask when moving your E10 into Azure:

  • Who pays for installs/upgrades? (included with Epicor SaaS)
  • Who pays for Azure storage and compute? (included with Epicor SaaS)
  • Who are you paying for E10 (non-infrastructure) Support? (included with Epicor SaaS)
  • What is the DR plan?
  • What add-ons are available?
  • Are you disciplined enough to stay on cadence? (your support will go up if not)
  • Are there artificial limits in the software? (Public Cloud does suffer from some MT code. e.g. cannot access all Ice.tables, tenant logic probably slows down some queries)
  • Do you have an Azure-style control panel to monitor and control your instance?
  • Are you just lift-and-shifting or can you exploit other Azure features like burstable computing for quicker MRP runs? International routing over the Azure backbone?
  • How can you limit your surface area for attacks? Are you leaving SSMS/SQL ports open to the Internet? Using unsecured ODBC?
  • How much time do you want to manage your E10 system vs running it?

There are pros and cons to each decision and no one decision is right for every company.

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My understanding is Epicor ‘lifts’ you to the latest version (a process that doesn’t take much time via the newer installers). But the customer is responsible for testing and retrofitting all customizations. Epicor SaaS gives you the impression that like say Gmail, you just ‘get upgraded automatically’, but in reality they are just upgrading the software version. If a SaaS and outside hosted/on-prem customer had 0 customizations, reports, baq’s etc, than you do save some time (between 10 minutes and 4 hours depending on how big a leap we are talking) but as soon as you add customizations into the mix, the delta in uplift time becomes much smaller versus the negatives.

Also, do you not think when initial SaaS contracts expire, like virtually every other SaaS vendor, they will be increasing the prices (maintenance & support has remained basically fixed for on prem for 15 years) . They know now that you are on ‘rental’, the pain of switching to a new ERP is such a high threashold that they have little incentive to keep prices the same as they try and please the investors. This is not unique to Epicor. You see this with Netsuite etc.

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Well, I don’t have that impression! What actually happens (and is described completely by Epicor) is this:

  • Your Live is copied to Pilot
  • They Upgrade the Pilot
  • You test the new version
  • They provide a tool to show all of your changes to the system (Unique Business Component Dashboard) which list items you should check.
  • You make the fixes in Pilot to your customizations
  • A few days before going live, Epicor takes the changes and puts them into a Solution
  • Over the weekend, Epicor upgrades live and applies the solution
  • Run the post reports testing and go live

Not sure what negatives you’re talking about.

Sure, of course. This needs to be taken into the calculus. The cost of maintaining maintaining hardware on prem will also continue to rise. The cost of all cloud providers will rise - Epicor or 3rd Party. There are pros and cons for every solution. As for both users and software providers, how we use utility computing has not shaken out just yet.

My only recommendation to companies is not to feed the pets. The more you can minimize dependencies (customizations, 3rd party products, etc.), the more leverage you have with the providers since it will be easier to move than if you build something that’s very unique to you.