I’ll add some perspective here as both a customer and someone who’s been very public about our cloud transition.
We made the decision to move to Epicor Cloud well before any of these recent announcements. For us, it wasn’t about marketing buzzwords or “innovation” — it was driven by very practical internal reasons: scale, growth, and access across multiple geographic locations. Those needs weren’t going away, and on-prem was increasingly becoming friction instead of an enabler.
I’ve presented at Insights on our transition and tried to be very open about what that experience was actually like:
What was relatively easy
- Database migration
- The core upgrade itself
What was hard (at the time)
- SSRS report migration
- Client deployment
What’s objectively better now
- Our aging on-prem app server and database space issues are gone
- Restores are simple and fast
- The Cloud Management Portal is genuinely a solid tool
- Cloud support has been very responsive in our experience
- Replication database solves a few integration issues for us
- System performance across 12 sites.
From a platform operations standpoint, cloud has absolutely delivered value for us. I am a happy cloud customer — for our needs.
I’ve seen some estimates on cloud hosting costs, they are actually cheaper than you would guess.
That said… we all hear the same thing, over and over, and it’s not noise:
Upgrades are breaking things that should not be breaking. EpiUsers should not be Epicor’s QA team. They have to improve the QA process to be a cloud only option. Epicor’s QA team uses this site for customer feedback and gauging the temperature of the community. This must improve.
We flex our upgrades, initially due to timing. Fortunately for us, this means most issues are worked out before we upgrade about two months after the initial release.
@timshuwy and team, thanks for communicating this clearly.