We are considering moving from On Premises to Cloud and I wanted to better understand and get some advice on what would be the best fit of hosting model for us.
What are the main pros and cons that you’ve found for Epicor Cloud (SaaS?) vs Private Cloud (IaaS?) vs On premises?
We are currently on Epicor version 10.2.400.13, with 2 main facilities and multiple users working remotely from different parts of the world. We also have a high level of customizations, for which I understand that control and flexibility are an important part of the decision to a certain extent, but have to be balanced with the costs and risks of On-prem.
Also, is there any hosting providers you would know/recommend that are based in Australia?
Btw, many thanks @Mark_Wonsil for the knowledge you’ve shared on cloud options, it has helped me understand a bit more on this, as I’m completely new on this topic and feeling a bit lost on what’s the best path to take.
First of all, don’t worry about being new to the topic. This is actually a benefit. As we get older, we stick to what we know and stop surveying the landscape for different ways to do things.
Epicor has/is introducing more options for their SaaS product since I used it. Multiple regions with Multi-company if you have larger facilities around the globe. @timshuwy spoke of an Enterprise SaaS version giving you more control but I don’t know all of the details.
SaaS vs Cloud Provider
With SaaS, you’re on the standard upgrade cadence, which means looking at your customizations and making them upgrade friendly. Any direct DB access is gone and no views, or stored procedures, etc.
With the Kinetic web UI, speed will be better than the .NET client but we still have to work through the newness.
If you’re already an O365 company then Azure becomes attractive since Azure AD can be your identity provider for both 365 and Epicor. You also open up the ability to use other Azure tools like Azure Front Door which lets your users authenticate then jump onto the Microsoft global network and bypass regular internet traffic to get your hosted server. I have not tried this with the .NET client but the Kinetic Web UI should work with this. Again, not sure if Epicor has offered this but it does provide a little extra speed and security.
Not sure if Simon Hall (@hally) is still lurking here but he may know more about the Australian cloud landscape - especially Epicor providers out in the marketplace.
Yes still lurking, been taking a break from things for while…always happy to help…
If you were moving from on-prem to cloud (SaaS) then you want to identify any potential issues that may arise from customizations and supporting them going forwards. If you are going to do IaaS then you are in much more control with respect to the upgrade process and those customizatons.
With IaaS you have more administration responsibility (e.g. Patching OS/ SQL Server) and if you don’t have those skills in house then you would be relying on your cloud service provider (i.e. MS Cloud Service Provider CSP) this may or may not be covered by their agreement. Typically they don’t have the Epicor knowledge to assist with things like installation, app server configuration etc.
In the previous place I worked the CSP stood up the infrastructure, and Epicor did the install, then I was left to pickup the pieces and assist with the implementation, data import, administration and maintenance.
If you are looking for a CSP then I’d take a look at the MS partner search Find the right app | Microsoft AppSource or drop me a message and I will let you know the name of the CSP that was used and my previous workplace.
Although there is no reason why you couldn’t run Epicor on IaaS in another platform like AWS…(EC2 instances would need to be Windows )
to fully understand what our offerings are in the future, you really ought to talk to your CAM or better yet, come to Insights and talk to the Cloud product managers. There are some new offerings for Cloud including two new upper-end offerings. Most companies won’t need the “Enterprise” (the one with the most options)… Enterprise is the most flexible with the cadence of upgrades, allowing each customer to choose when upgrades happen. It also gives lots more test environments and a ginormous database. There is a new mid-sized level of SaaS that has more flexibility as well.
one thing that people dont always consider about running in the cloud is the total cost of ownership for Cloud vs On-Prem… Over a 5 year period, the TCO is higher for on-prem… Compare the types of cost for each:
So once you move to the cloud, you no longer need to be concerned about server hardware & support. DB/OS admin, backups, etc are taken care of. Your current License and Support are converted to a subscription. The only expense that is there for both models is the Upgrade expense, but even then, it goes down in the cloud because Epicor does the actual process of installing and running the upgrade over a weekend for you.
5 years ago we went from multi-tenant Epicor cloud to on-prem, and that was the right thing then. I know Epicor’s cloud has gotten a lot better since, so I want to be open minded.
Biggest reason we left the cloud was MRP. Slow is not even the half of it. We do about 3x the business today that we did then, and yet even then MRP would run for exactly 9 hours in the cloud and then quit. (Support didn’t understand that they had a timeout in the web.config and kept blaming us for it.) So our business would have gone under if we hadn’t left the cloud.
All of that to say, I hope it is better now.
So @timshuwy what can you say about hardware performance? Could our company run MRP on Epicor’s cloud today?
I know you’d need some data. If it helps, MRP churns out about 2.4 million JobMtl rows each Sunday and of course all the PartDtl and POSugg data to go with.
I know that we are currently working with a couple of HUGE customers who run MRP and also WANT to move to the cloud. We are doing a proof of concept to make sure that they have satisfactory MRP performance before they take the plunge into the Enterprise solution I mentioned. @JasonMcD, I am sorry to hear about your experience, and 5 years go, when we were doing the MT thing, we did have some challenges and we did changes in our deployment model. Yes, things are much better now.
With the old Multi-Tenant product, that’s completely believable.
The ironic thing is that this situation is exactly what the cloud is good for. Technically, you should be able to scale up your server once a week, run MRP, then scale back.
Even better, but with some serious re-architecting, the MRP data data would be exported and a dedicated cluster of machines would run MRP then move the results back to your database.
That is very good to hear. that there is real dedication to real customers. That’s what I wanted to hear.
So this is where I am ignorant (well, one place of many). You say that I “should be able to scale up…” But what do you mean by me doing it? Like I literally have to administer hardware? This sounds like the opposite of the promises of the cloud.
Not necessarily you, sorry about that, but it could be you, Epicor, or the cloud provider itself. For example, when MRP starts and the CPU usage crosses a certain threshold, most cloud providers offer a way to automatically scale up to a more powerful VM, then automatically scale down when the demand recedes. If your application supports it, the cloud can also scale out to multiple servers, and scale-in to fewer servers. (And when I say servers, it can be containers too). The promise is that you don’t have to over provision servers to run your MRP once a week. Why not just rent the compute only when you need it?
Currently, the Kinetic Cloud is a “lift and shift” implementation. It provides a lot of benefits of the cloud but isn’t able to exploit all of the potential yet. Epicor will have to re-architect some of the functions so they can run burstable. Scheduling, MRP, and Cost Roll Up are all good candidates for this. I don’t know how Epicor does infrastructure, so it may not be possible in some subscriptions to add server scaling capability.
Again, you have the full spectrum of control here. You can run this in a cloud yourself or a 3rd party like Epicor can run it for you.
@Mark_Wonsil OK, interesting, thank you. Sounds like the technology all exists to make it seamless and unnoticeable in a good way. But exactly how Epicor itself might fully take advantage of all of that is unknown or remains to be seen. (@timshuwy Care to give away any trade secrets?)
I am always curious myself, but hopefully this is not derailing from the original post and is just clarifying the options.
Yeah, I’m not bitter about our first go around with the cloud or anything, but I certainly am a lot more cautious. Being fully on-prem certainly has some big annoyances, and my boss and I both have discussed going to the cloud many times.
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