Even some of us SaaS victims err… customers feel that way.
There are many other companies doing this with on-prem. I can think of three other on-prem solutions we have that are all subscription based now. That previously were perpetual licenses.
Paying SaaS pricing while paying for your own hardware and staff might be more eye watering than you would expect. One would hope there is some sort of discount for hosting the container yourself..
Yeah I agree removing the Infra cost on their side should remove the “infra cost markup” 
It would be a hard swallow to charge the same price for both models. Though that’s a fight I will leave for the bean counters. My gripe is technical mostly, access and control.
Yeah, I would hope it’s not the EXACT same price. I know the other solutions I mention have different on-prem vs. SaaS subscription pricing.
She is actually a nice person. I spoke to her when she was new to Epicor at Insights. We talked a LOT about cloud at the time when Public Cloud was newer. (She, and a few others, had come over from Oracle. Is she more marketing than technical?
Is she inauthentic? Not at all. Every time I’ve spoken with her, she seemed genuinely interested in everybody’s opinion and was taking everything in - which is what you want in a marketing person. IMHO.
Okay maybe my wording was a little harsh, I don’t mean to imply she is inauthentic herself, she has of course been put in an impossible position by the powers that be and I have empathy for how difficult her situation must be right now. But I still think Epicor’s approach as a whole has been inauthentic, and she is part of the team tasked with trying to sell it.
She doesn’t have a choice but to sell it.
Well not that I am paying for it myself personally 
, I wouldn’t even have that big a problem if it was the same price because it would still leave us in a better situation than SaaS (in its current state). Really my chief concern in all of this is that our business ends up with a worse overall ERP at the end of the day. The “and the subscription fee will cost much more than maintenance” is more of a post mortem wound for me (again says the guy who isn’t actually paying ).
You made a great point in the video that SaaS doesn’t really save much money on infrastructure. We still need most of our other servers and we still need our infrastructure people on salary. The marginal cost of the ERP servers compute/storage is what, 20k per year on the high end?
OK… I am jumping onto my soapbox for a moment. I promise this is brief and OSHA approved.
During the Automation Studio launch, before I moved into the Kinetic PM role, I actually reported to Kerrie. So this isn’t armchair commentary. I’ve worked with her directly.
Kerrie is one of the most authentic people I’ve worked with at Epicor. She genuinely cares about people, customers, and how Epicor shows up. She’s a strong speaker not because she’s polished, but because she believes what she’s saying. That comes through in her webinars and interviews, which are all publicly available if anyone wants to judge the evidence instead of the vibes (see Epicor.com webinars and search her out on Youtube).
Yes, she runs marketing. No, that does not mean she’s disconnected from reality or trying to hand-wave product concerns. I’ve seen her listen to hard feedback, ask uncomfortable questions, and push internally for clarity over fluff. That part doesn’t make it into YouTube clips.
Totally fair to debate the answers, the messaging, or the strategy. That’s healthy. But turning it into a personal critique misses the mark. Kerrie is a good human doing a very visible and sometimes thankless job.
OK, i will jump off my soapbox… back to your regularly scheduled (civil) debate.
Yes. To be fair…
Tom also said:
I would add that Kerrie has Strong Mom Energy. (We talked about our kids, too.)
Tim, again that was far from a personal attack. The pitch and overall position from Epicor is what is inauthentic.
Cute too.
The delivery of the announcement was harsh and came across as the decision was already made and not an opening for feedback and dialog. It could have been approached as, “Hey, we’re considering going SaaS only in 2-3 years. What do you think?”. I think this would of avoided many ruffled feathers.
I think Kerrie did a great job on the pod cast representing Epicor’s position. I hope for a middle ground as discussed here and on the show. We’re SaaS --but-- one of the selling points for us was we could go back to “on-prem” if we choose too. Customer choice is still important and I hope Epicor realizes that now.
My $0.02:
Seems a simple way to keep their customers hostage and be able to charge w/e they want in the long run. If their offering was STABLE and CONSISTENT when upgrades and ‘new features’ are released there was QUALITY to these releases, I would feel less like a victim.
I think Epicor is dismissing/ignoring this fact. Just because Epicor would potentially move to SaaS doesn’t mean our data center goes away or any of the salaried staff. We still need the DC for everything else. The app servers don’t go away. The SQL servers don’t go away. Maybe the overall spend is a little less but it’s not like moving to SaaS removes the data center costs.
100% agreed. Immutable containers (with minor configuration and extension capabilities) seem by far the most logical and best overall solution in my opinion.
I think that the advantages and benefits of having a single deployment path is hard to fully communicate, and appreciate, across all aspects from design and development to documentation and support. While from a vendor cost perspective, each model and option does add real costs which is why, unfortunately, I agree that I don’t think the pricing difference would be much, if any at all, between self-host vs Epicor or affiliated partner hosted (like other ERP options). Just the additional documentation and support/troubleshooting costs could easily exceed that of the saved hosting costs. Particularly if it only ends up being dozens or hundreds ‘self-hosting’ medium term.
TLDR… CONTAINER CONTAINERS we have been saying this for a Veeeeeeery long time. Seems logical to me.
What exactly is in the proposed containers? This is a bit new to me. Can we still do anything we want with SQL server?
I would expect that the container would connect with your on-prem database. or another container running the database (be it Postgress or MSSQL)