Looking to see what you great experts think about the cloud vs on-premise. Looking for those who had on premise and went to cloud, as well as those who went to the on-premise from cloud; and why for both. I see pros and cons on both sides, but very interested in the cloud based set up. We currently have on-premise but researching the cloud based ERP.
Are you talking about SaaS?
CLOUD single tenant may be OK⌠no experience
CLOUD multi-tenant is problematic (in this case, the 3rd Sunday of each month)
1) Executable software that had been loaded into PILOT last month was loaded into Production
a) Any test-work in PILOT needed to be completed by prior Friday
b) What had been in PILOT for a month⌠may not have been âfully-testedâ or tested at all!
c) " "⌠might have issues.
d) After Pilot goes to Production⌠some things working in production last month⌠now broken
2) Re-start of any Task/app server was not in your control⌠coordinated per other tenants, might take 24 hrs
3) Cloud-support (12 months ago) was in-experienced, super-quick-trained.... lacking!
4) Your actual cloud-location might be out-of-country (or different time zone)
5) CLOUD (per EPICOR) added an additional layer of Epi-staff... making things more difficult to coordinate with Support/Developers/fixes
6) Corrections per 1-c and 1-d to revert to prior deploy were not communicated well!
7) Monday morning after 3rd Sunday was ALWAYS an..... intriguing experience
8) Customizations (to gen a non-standard Epi-screen) or deploy a NEW screen.... YIKES!!!
You'd finally get a custom screen deployed, then need to tweek it, possibly a few times.
Each-redeploy process usually took 24hrs +
tough to get things completed!
9) Benefit(s) - remember #3, but your company did not necessarily need IT staff
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@jadecorp Thatâs enough to make me rethink that! LOL! We were just looking at ways to streamline somethings, and maybe go smaller on servers if we went cloud. But I donât want the kind of hassle your talking about! Although I would only need a single tenant. We only have one location.
@Aaron_Moreng Yes, I believe so.
Joe is talking about Multi-Tenant. There is a new product called Dedicated Tenancy that doesnât have many of those issues.
We are moving from our Single-Tenant servers to the Dedicated Tenancy. In ST, we had a full-time Epicor rep who we had a monthly meeting. He (Fabio) was EXTREMELY responsive to issues and communicated things very well. Epicor Managed Services (EMS), did backups, restores, patches etc. We would get a case in EpicCare that would just show up saying, âYour MRP has been running for 16 hours, it might be hanging, would you like us to kill it?â Having facilities in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, we were getting 24X7, follow the sun support. We simply could not afford to do this on our own. If I needed a patch from development installed, all the communication occurred at Epicor. They just asked when can they take the system down. The downside of ST is that you have to pay Epicor Professional Services for upgrades, so we didnât upgrade that often - and by that, I mean never. Weâve been on 10.0.700.4 for two years.
In DT, we give up some control but we think the trade-off will be worth it. Our users are already used to Epicor SaaS. Here are the differences:
The Pilot is database is a copy of your Production and is refreshed on the third Sunday of the month. Unlike MT, this is your database and your companies. You are not sharing that instance with others. As new fix releases arrive, they are installed into the Pilot for testing. Epicor knows where you BPMs and Customizations touch and try to guide testing. An Excel spreadsheet shows all the fixes in that version (downloadable from EpicWeb). It is up to the users to test before the upgrade. For larger releases 100, 200 or 10.1 to 10.2, you have a one-time option to defer the upgrade but they give about six to eight weeks to test. We currently are testing 10.2.100.3. and the DT people are scheduled to be upgraded the weekend of the 18th. Those who defer will go in February. They seem to be good about quarter closes, etc. There is no Professional services required for your upgrades. Iâll have to check about the TaskAgent, not sure about that one on DT. When you install DT, you select where your Datacenter is and they keep it geographical: Americas, EMEA, Asia. The Americas is currently hosted in Austin, TX.
The real âweaknessâ in my mind is automated testing. Iâve been looking at Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) testing methods to check that not only the software delivered by Epicor works as it used to (or should) but also that our users are using it as we modeled, which Epicor can never test for.
Much of the software industry is going to continuous development: Microsoft with Windows and Office, Adobeâs Creative Suite, and Googleâs - well, everything. Smaller more frequent releases are easier than the really big ones every 18 months. With continuous releases, we need continuous testing and, in my opinion, we should have been doing that anyway.
Mark W.
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Oh, and you never have to send a copy of your database to support ever again. They already have it.
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FYI - Multi-Tenant is when up-to 10 companies use the same executable environment, separate DBâs.
Single tenant⌠(more costly) but it is YOUR PRIVATE environment !
If you are âvanillaâ, and do not need your own IT staff⌠then single tenant is an option.
Un-aware of what Mark W shares in his post.
@Mark_Wonsil you should look into the Epicor Automation Tool for this purpose. We have successfully used it to do âautomatedâ testing. It is basically a macro application which you can use to record certain behaviors within Epicor youâd like to test automatically. Then you can run whenever to see if the same behavior is maintained and it works across versions. It is quite nice⌠though not as a nice as some of the continuous integration tools⌠It does help A LOT!
For example you could record a Quote to Cash transaction from beginning to end in version 10.1.400 and then play that back in 10.1.600 and see if everything worked accordingly. It does MARVELS for upgrade testing.
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@Mark_Wonsil What about backup locations? Do you know about the redundancies setup in case of a major natural disaster in Austin?
Glad you like DT. I did a lot of effort and guidance on that and it took awhile for the data center to adapt and the numbers got crunched. Happy to see it in the wild and well received.
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I appreciate this thread and the âcloudâ discussion going on in our customer base. I am located in âSilicon Forestâ here in Portland and have a bunch of dotBombs running around so I am always balancing hype vs first mover and looking at a balance to ensure we are providing a decent service to the customer. Having lived through 3 dotBombs (barely) I appreciate this world more than many.
I keep coming back to original discussion in a past life when âApplication Service Providersâ were the rage in the mid 90s (dotBomb 1/3). C levels are looking to outsource IT at some level just as they have outsourced a clerk position in accounting to handle AR invoicing - now I have the Account Temps âBobs hereâ commercial stuck in my head. It makes sense for a company to scale out manpower in some roles and I have met many a CFO that takes advantage of this scale out ability. I donât know of too many C levels that outsource their CFO position though. Thatâs the balance they try to strike to find âminimal viable operationsâ level. One hiccup in $ flow causing layoffs can cause years to recover loyalty and enthusiasm in employees.
We are having the same conversation now in IT. I think everyone pretty much gets the virtualization need these days. Protecting the virtual instance is important (a pet) but the physical hardware under it is disposable (cattle). Scale that out and entire data centers are being done away with and replace by Azure / AWS / GCP, etc. The costs are getting just too darned cheap. Companies just buy computers by the container and never even touch the systems - just auto shutdown fails and when 50% of the servers are dead, ship the container back to HP or Dell or whomever for repairs and plug in the next container. The scale is nuts and makes things too cheap for any of us to run our own centers anymore unless very specialized. Auto backups, off site, replication all built in? Itâs nuts to try and justify that doing that with your own hardware and employees is a market differentiator for your business 
Things will continue down this path until we are back to â5 computers in the worldâ - wondering how many old farts like myself get that line 
The issues are well documented above by Joe. There are trade offs. I think one size fits all is a horrid model in clothes, shoes and in SaaS. You may want to take advantage of cloud but it should not take advantage of you. You donât want to buy the cheapest everything all the time, you need to pay for what your business needs - not Armani but maybe some solid Dockers or Carhartt. You should have that choice. I love that we offer that to you. ST and MT are fine for that need. DT was a missing offering I championed forever and was ecstatic to get it live. We as an industry are still trying to figure this out - heck we are still trying to figure out software engineering - itâs still a baby engineering discipline in the scope of things.
Look at what fits you and ask questions.
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@Bart_Elia I couldnât agree with you more. I am just looking for user experience in a broad sense. Just beginning to look at SaaS and so specific questions havenât yet formed. First I want to see how good the SaaS is. If itâs horrible, I wouldnât touch it regardless. But if itâs good, I will take a deeper look. Appears there may be something to consider and ask deeper questions. I also agree that I do not want my company to get to a point they donât need me! That is not a good thing.
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Let me know when that happens. I have yet to ever see an IT org get to the bottom of their todo list. There is always work. You might not be swapping hard disks anymore but I am sure there is something else of value being requested.
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@josecgomez, Yes, Epicorâs Automation Tool is a good start and a part of what Iâm proposing with BDD. ATE is testing the the UI and Business Logic of the software. Thatâs great but now I have REST, WEB/Mobile clients, ServiceConnect, or a custom application interfacing with Epicor. How do I test for all of that?
But I not only want to test the Epicor UI but also my users. For example, Epicor will let users post a Bank Statement into a future period. From a âworking as designedâ perspective, that is perfectly fine to the software. IRL, I will never know what transactions will have cleared a bank in the future. (If I did, I would get a job on Wall Street!) So a behavior I want to test for is âWe do not post Bank Statements with items into the future.â Another behavior might be, âIf a Sales Order Line is associated with a Project, the Sales Category must match the Projectâ
What I want is a way to declare the accepted behaviors in the system and have multiple levels of testing to insure these behaviors are being followed. In the case of the Project/Sales Order-Category, I would enforce this in two ways: A BPM that prevents mismatched Sales Categories and a BAQ that identifies any that have gotten through. After all, I may implement a new rule later and want to check for previous occurrences and account for those in some way. Now we are not just testing on the third week of the month, we are testing continuously. And we are not just unit checking the Epicor software but weâre testing how we agreed as a company to use it.
Two of the BDD tool-sets Iâve been looking at are Cucumber(SpecFlow for .Net) and Gauge. Both of these tool-sets have you write your requirements in way that you can build automated testing suites in VisualStudio. Thereâs a bonus in doing it this way. These specifications can be formatted into living documentation. Change your documentation and your tests get updated! Everybodyâs business process documentation is up to date, right? 
This BBD way of testing is relatively new but I think itâs going to catch on - especially in the new world order of continuous software releases.
Mark W.
Actually BDD has been around for some time ~2009 (I am a BIG fan). Its starting to catch on as some tools vendors are starting to hype it to sell their products. Some good, some bad. I have not tried either you mention so will be curious to your feedback.
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Mark and others,
I have been working with three companies - one on Express Cloud the other two on MT Cloud.
What I have found is that yes, Epicor will push out a new release ready or not for your customizations.
They do give you some time - 10.2 was launched in September with a sandbox of your database - so you actually had three databases running.
Oct. 15th - Pilot was updated to 10.2.100.2 for testing.
Nov. 7th - Pilot was updated to 10.2.100.3 for testing
Nov. 11th - Production was updated to 10.2.100.3 (ready or not for your company)
So, some issues have popped up,
- Handheld not working
- Bartender not working
- Crystal reports not workingâŚ
Some of these were caught prior to the final upgrade, others werenât.
The Cloud staff has been very responsive.
Epicor support still has not understood that a customer is on the Cloud.
I have been asked almost everytime, after giving the Site ID, what version are you on.
When I state âthe cloudâ they will ask, what version is the cloud on.
In summary - if you go to the cloud - you still need a support person outside of Epicor that understands how the system works. For small companies, there are many independent and partner consultants that are there to help you. If you are large enough to have an employee cover Epicor great.
If you are vanilla, itâs not a bad way to keep current on the software and new features that are launched.
To add to Bruceâs excellent post:
Nov. 18th - Dedicated Tenancy Users had their production systems migrated to 10.2100.3.
They, too, had the sandbox and Pilot databases. DT users do have the option to delay the upgrade - once. Those who didnât upgrade last weekend will be upgraded in February. The sandbox disappears but they will have their Pilot databases for testing.
Things like Electronic Interfaces are a little more trouble to test when you donât have access to the server like we did with Single Tenancy (or on-prem users) but I think with time, weâll see some innovation in this area. ST and DT are good ways to start wading into the cloud-based world of Epicor.
Mark W.
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Hello Mark,
We also are on multi-tenant as you know, one operation is the east US and one in Korea. Korean transactions like part transactions are using the US time rather than the Korean time. We have our time zone offset set up correctly.
Is this just the way multi-tenant works? Would GL entries on the last day of the month in Korea possibly enter day 1 in the GL of the next period if done late enough in the day?
GL Entries are based on the âApply Dateâ and not the date entered. So while they may look like they were entered after the period closed, you have full control in Epicor in which period the transaction goes with the Apply Date. Itâs a blessing and a curse. You can accidentally put something a year or two into the future if youâre not careful.
Mark W.
Hello Mark,
Thank you for all the replies. I guess I should have asked about the other transactions like shipments, inventory transfers, etc. Would the default tran date be the system date of the cloud server or EST which is HQ for the company?
Thanks,
John