I think Epicor Leadership should visit on-prem installations that utilize Epicor to the max, to see some real magic.
I also think large Cloud customers would be so jealous to see that we solve problems and do things at 5-10x speed, even when adhering to SOX Compliance (Segregation of Duties), and Publicly Traded Corporate red tape. If you are on the Cloud, you are actually harming yourself with your implementation being 100x more painful than they have to be, pushing the hosting aside.
I could have never solved the code how to create my own Landed Cost Disbursement option and logic without on-prem, not in a million years.
There should be an Annual On-Prem vs Cloud Race where you have to solve 5 problems, or describe logic, the fastest and in-depth answer takes home 50,000$
On-Prem has SQL Trace Tools, .NET Decompilation Tools, IIS Debuggers, Tracing among other things… Cloud only has Trace and will miss all the logic in the triggers to understand why something is behaving the way it is
If you do an upgrade I can tell you exactly within 15 minutes what the upgrade uplifted, touched, changed by simply comparing the SQL Data and SQL Schema? Most of the times it doesn’t matter, but still it’s something the Cloud folks cant do.
If I run MRP I can run SQLYog and tell you exactly what MRP did, I can time capsule the entire SQL Write, Deadlocks, Reads and graph them out, I can find the needle in the haystack and figure out easily that Epicor has a bug in their min/max calculations, without scratching my head for 6 months and Epicor saying “its you.”.
I can snapshot my database, run MRP and diff the database and exactly understand what happened.
On-Prem is a strength, not a weakness. 
Real solutions and in-depth knowledge on here usually came from folks on-prem.
In order to solve that Copy to Excel issue, if you go to support it will take you a very long time, because they will ask the same questions before ever escalating it to @pferrington or @aidacra (not to fix it, to merely understand it, that you must have a default printer even if its a PDF Reader)
- Is it a driver issue
- Is it a registry issue
- Did you recently update Windows?
- Let’s rollback that Windows Update because Windows is known to have problems.
- Is it a Windows Profile issue (only happens to 1 person)
- Reinstall Office 365
- Is it a Office 365 Update issue
- Is it a COM issue
- Can you upload Event Viewer Logs
- Is Anti-Virus blocking writing to Temp folder causing a delay
- Let’s Reinstall .NET Framework
- Etc… Etc… Etc…
Who would have guessed a Printer had anything to do with Copy to Excel… Support would be completely lost and I dont blame them.
A User now must involve Epicor Support and Local IT since they are not Local Admin, and have no clue what any of your questions mean, and if you scale that to 400 users, yeah you still need an on-site IT Team regardless… The Cloud doesnt fix that.
You could just:
- Debug first, and take Epicor out of the equation (98% of the time the answer is solved in STEP 1).
- The rest of the steps or enjoy 120 minutes of your time to do other things
That above is of course a Classic Client example to keep it simple, but stuff like that also happens on the Server Side which on-prem folks can diagnose with ease.