This is understated in all of this… sitting on the same OS, same hardware, firmware, firewall, whatever… it all gets hacked and taken advantage of and when the only way to mitigate that risk is to upgrade those things what then? What happens when that upgrade breaks the “legacy” ERP system or maybe a vital integration we have running because our “legacy” ERP system didn’t have the functionality in it.
Idk Mark, this seems to me to be a growing force to staying somewhat current. Does it mean we must choose SaaS… no, but it’s becoming more and more of a requirement- the need to mitigate risk by upgrading things that will eventually break some/all functionality of an older ERP system.
Mark man I love your posts. Look at all those potential solutions to getting Epicor the SaaS billing and version control they’d like and everything that everyone is talking about here. That’s my whole thing, we know the people at Epicor, I know they too see what we’re seeing. I find it hard to believe that they aren’t going to step up in many of the ways you just suggested, albeit “glacially”, which, let’s face it, may be too slow for a lot of our companies- in which case alternative ERPs may be sought. I’m still hopeful they’ll double down on their cloud investments and address many of the points you made about being “cloud ready” and offering alternative hosting options. Great post Mark.
There’s several years between now and 2028.1/the end of life for the OS/Framework requirements that 2028.1 runs on should a lot of us sit on 2028.1 for years after it comes out for them to resolve/meet the needs that we all have shared on this post and others regarding the many issues with Kinetic and/or SaaS.
This hope may not be enough for the business leaders at our companies to trust and plan on, so again, the sooner Epicor can address these concerns for a lot of us, the more we can invest in a future on the platform, otherwise they may start having to look at alternatives.
Yes, you on-prem folks have time while us existing SaaS customers can only hope they’ll invest to make SaaS better. Same with Classic sunset, they should focus of making Kinetic UI more solid.
I’ve been saying for years Epicor ERP should have gone open source years ago, and for awhile I thought it was going to happen (Linux containers) etc. Their cloud offering is not up to par with competitors (Acumatica) and I believe they should start over with a different cloud offering.
We have almost 4 years to have made a decision and acted upon it while under “support”. I will be carefully watching to see what happens and if it makes sense for the business, switch when necessary.
Man oh man, wouldn’t this solve both sides of the problem elegantly. You’re thinking in exactly the right direction Sometimes the obvious answers really are the right ones. Let’s hope this gets some attention. Hard not to see the appeal to a solution like this.
Side bar on read-only DBs: we have it - I can’t confirm pricing, but it is additional. Two gotchas that might be of value:
the replication service can fail silently You only find out when your stale data bites you in the tail. This has happened to us twice, but not for a couple years. We created our own safety net that writes a timestamped record to a UD table every 5 min, then a BAQ to sees how old the most recent record is and sends a notification when it exceeds 15 min.
your BAQs will use the replicated (read-only) database by default, I assume for load balancing. This can be overridden per BAQ, but not something that is obvious
As other posts have stated this effects those that recently implemented Epicor with the understanding that On-Prem will be supported ongoing.
We went through a massive selection process and one of the key points was doing analysis on O-P vs Cloud and hands down O-P fit our company the best. We selected Epicor for the O-P option and went live 2023. Since we knew we were O-P we have customizations that are only available O-P.
We also were stuck with classic customizations during implementation due to bugs in Kinetic that we are converting currently. This equates to wasted time and money from the Classic → Kinetic change and now we are faced with further waste in O-P → Cloud. This will not make us more efficient, save us any money, or sell more product. We are a manufacturer and are driven by these KPIs. Sometimes those KPIs are lost on the service industry, like Epicor, that are supposed to be in tune with their customers.
I echo the sentiments of change from CapEx to OpEx and we have weathered some down years by adjusting maintenance contracts. We will no longer have that leaver to pull knowing our “utility” will by turned off if we can’t pay the bill. Know your customer base.
I understand the world is changing, we are all in technology and it doesn’t stand still for anyone (nor do we want it to). Be a leader and don’t just follow the industry trend of cloud only solutions.
Surely more along the lines of forwarding to prepared communicators and avoiding support saying something consequentially off script. Maybe there’s a legal consult this time? I sure do hope so.
WCF is not going anywhere as MS told back then
Sometimes the obvious answers really are the right ones. Let’s hope this gets some attention. Hard not to see the appeal to a solution like this.
You only find out when your stale data bites you in the tail. This has happened to us twice, but not for a couple years. We created our own safety net that writes a timestamped record to a UD table every 5 min, then a BAQ to sees how old the most recent record is and sends a notification when it exceeds 15 min.
