Has anyone heard anything from Epicor about contract concessions being offered in response to the pandemic? We are over-subscribed for users at current staff levels because of layoffs. We are asking, but all we have seen so far is an offer to switch from annual to semi-annual billing, with a waiver of the standard 5% processing fee.
This came across my LinkedIn feed recently…
3 Likes
Glen,
What does your contract state? We’re on-premise, and even though the original maintenance contract didn’t have a 90 day notice clause, we’re not able to “give back” a module and avoid getting charged annual maintenance if we haven’t done that more than 90 days before our maintenance renews. Holy run-on sentence! Sorry.
Does cloud let you scale up and down as needed, or is it similar to on-prem where you buy x seats, and get charged for all of them?
1 Like
Hi Andris,
I am guessing the contract is similar. We signed a three year contract, and generally you are not allowed to make changes. We had two changes so far, to drop modules that would never be used (Salesforce Integration (which is being deprecated), and CRM Only licenses (that our implementation partner recommended, but we did not wind up using)).
So no scaling up and down, which really sucks - that should be one of the benefits of SaaS.
My favorite line from that article …
“… but the raping and pillaging of customers will cause weakness in a vendor’s business eventually.”
How does a business get back into good standing? With a heart felt, “Sorry about the raping and pillaging …”?
2 Likes
LOL - yes, a well written and insightful article. This pandemic will definitely differentiate between those businesses who are true partners and compassionate, versus those with only short-term self-interest in mind.
I don’t know, but Microsoft seems to be managing it to some degree… 
Every type of contract will now need a pandemic clause.
We rent a house at the beach every summer (just for 1 week), and the contract says that there are no refunds for reasons beyond the control of the property owner. I’m guessing a “Stay at Home” decree by their local government is beyond the property owners control.
1 Like
To be fair, most cloud companies have a “pay-as-you-go” billing model. E10 is still an on-prem product not designed to meter usage…yet. So in fairness to Epicor, they are paying for all of the Azure consumption its cloud users use for a fixed fee. They may well have a different model that gives the flexibility of month-to-month but I would imagine that it would be more expensive than a three-year plan.
The article talked about 3rd-party providers coming in to do the more innovative things but I’m not sure that Epicor would allow someone to “resell” their software in such a method.
1 Like
Fair enough - they are not the only company that locks in SaaS usage (cough) Salesforce (cough). But at least an annual true-up would be nice.
And we are not dealing with normal day-to-day business circumstances here.
My usual schpiel to vendors is that both parties need to be healthy and profitable for a good relationship - kind of back to the points in the article.
1 Like
This.
Some companies will play the short game (quarter by quarter) but others will play the infinite game. See book by Simon Sinek.
1 Like
Thanks for the link, Mark - adding to my reading list!
Love Simon Sinek - my fav. Ted Talk of all time:
2 Likes
Mark,
You, and a whole lot of other people! His video has been consistently in the top ten TED talks for a while.
I tried to get the e-book from the library, and there are almost 70 holds on the six available copies 
Glen