Vendor benefits aren’t buyer benefits
I first heard about Epicor’s decision when one of my long-time clients, a company for whom ERP reliability is mission-critical, reached out with deep concerns. Like so many others, they’re being pushed into the cloud not by positive business drivers, but by the withdrawal of the on-premises option. Their worries are far from theoretical. Just last year, major outages reminded us that the cloud, for all its strengths, is no panacea for risk. Add legitimate worries about latency, compliance, and new security models, and it’s clear that this transition creates anxiety right alongside opportunity.
Let’s be clear about what’s motivating this trend. For Epicor and its peers, moving to SaaS means they can focus their resources, lower support costs, accelerate innovation, and simplify patching, security, and integrations. With Epicor Cloud, for example, every customer runs the same core code, patches are pushed universally, and operating expenses fall as a result. It’s a sound business strategy for vendors to gain recurring revenue, less version sprawl, and a more streamlined engineering organization.
That efficiency often comes at the expense of customer choice. Enterprises are asked to cede infrastructure control, accept new dependencies, and trust that the vendor-managed environment will meet all their requirements for security, latency, uptime, and regulatory compliance—sometimes with only limited visibility or contractual recourse. For organizations that selected on-prem software precisely because of their unique needs, this is a seismic change that can’t be solved by simply “lifting and shifting” their applications.
