Kinetic upgrade: Going Cloud vs Stay On premise

We are currently on premise, soon to upgrade to Kinetic by april 2023… (our test kinetic should be installed today so we can finaly have fun (or dispair) with it!

BUT
There are discussions about going cloud. We acquired a new company about 2h drive from us that need to have Epicor installed. The discussions are:

A) We stay on premise, and company B connects to our servers.
B) We stay on premise, and we have a server and company B has it’s server and there is replication involved. (never done that)
c) We go cloud.

Mark, you mentionned some issues that are not available in cloud in the following post from Marianne:

Continuing the discussion from Cloud Migration considerations and advice:
You mention that going cloud you should forget about stored procedures and views…

We are heavilly customized (over 190 customizations and Dashboards) we do use SQL
Scallar-Valued functions (mostly used by BPM, and directives)
Aggregate Functions (used in BPM and Directives)
and of course views…mostly used by our .Net apps DLL.
So your input kind of indicated those are not available in the cloud version… Meaning we could not go cloud…but isint SQL server used in the cloud ? if so why whould functions not be available? I just want to understand thats all…

We are also using UD forms calling .Net DLL (a lot of those) all because Epicor is not perfect for our line of business we had to adapt… Are those also in jeopardy ? I am still waiting to test even if the Kinetic version would work if we stay on premise…, or if we would need to redesign to make them web apps…?

thanks

Pierre

Sounds like a good opportunity for privately hosted cloud (Azure).

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If you are heavily customized, is 5 months enough time to migrate to kinetic?

With your level of customization I’d recommend you go Cloud “Hosted” on Prem. Like we do, we are hosted by Azure but we manage our own instances and servers. We have 41 plants across the entire country all using our one Epicor instance.
Nothing wrong with cloud but you do lose some flexibility which seems like you are using.

Another option which in your cause may work rather well, is to run Multi-Company and two separate Epicor instances. One there, one here, do multi company via MQueue messages (supported) Multi-Company External.

So you’d basically run two Epicor Distinct Instances, that send messages to each toher.

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I’m with the others above, if you intend to go cloud, use paid hosting through Azure and manage your own servers. You are basically just moving your Epicor and SQL servers on Azure and keep full control.

Our plan is to first go ‘Classic Kinetic’ with the same looks as our current version… where I think would be working ok and feasible within 5 months.
Then go through all our custos and try to convert to the Kinetic web look within the next year or two.

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Yeah, you definitely do not want to go SaaS. Doing your own cloud is doable though.

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So are you saying that using a cloud on prem we would be able to keep our use of views and functions or that any cloud solution will have the same inability to use them.?

The use of two instances I guess would mean doubling the cost right?

Thank you all for your input. We are having a meeting tomorrow with our CAM and I wanted to have a better understanding of the possibilities before hand…

Pierre

I bet they recommend the Epicor cloud…

Yes. You would have your own servers with your own databases that you would still manage.

If you go on a SaaS plan, you do not have direct access to the database. You can only interact with the DB through a BAQ.

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the on-prem should be quoted “on-prem”, because it’s not really on-prem, but in YOUR own Azure cloud - private, for you, and in reality, like @HLalumiere said - think of it like moving your appserver and SQL server to a new office and extending your network to it. It takes some work connecting the two networks and you need to get familiar with doing your own hosting in Azure, but you retain 100% of the control AND functionality that you need/want.

Epicor’s SaaS offering is different because you are on their servers, in their environment, and you lose some functionality because of that.

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I concur with Jose. To be clear, there are several ways to go “cloud” discussed in that post.

With SaaS, you have no access to the SQL Server. With Single Tenant hosting or Public Cloud hosting through Azure or AWS, you do have access to the SQL Server.

As for customizations, just because we CAN do something, doesn’t mean we should do it.

  • Can we make business object calls in classic customizations? Sure. But they won’t work in Kinetic.
  • Can we make external dlls? Sure. But they are tied to specific versions.
  • Can we access the database directly with views and functions? Again, sure. But you may not be getting the most up-to-date information.

Could you take these challenging customization practices and put them into Epicor SaaS?
Nope.

Could you put them into the Azure cloud?
Absolutely.

Should you?
:thinking:

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Are your pilot and dev instances of Epicor in Azure as well?
We are looking at azure for IAAS.

Yes everything is on azure and yes we use azure as iaas at least for epicor / erp related parts

We use their load balancers too, azure sql, vms, analysis services, backup solution, DNR etc.

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