Epicor Bets on Microsoft Azure in the Cloud

Epicor Software Corp. at an Epicor Insights 2018 conference this week announced that Microsoft Azure will become the primary platform on which it will deliver cloud applications on going forward.

Thierry Bonfante, vice president of global product management for cloud at Epicor, says Epicor will continue to support a variety of instances of its software running in existing clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). But the primary focus will be on developing a suite of complementary analytics applications that extend the capabilities of the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and distribution management applications running on-premises.

At the same time, Epicor this week announced an Alliance Independent Software Vendor (ISV) program through which it hopes to attract third-party application developers to build applications leveraging data stored in Epicor applications.

Bonfante says most of Epicor’s existing customers are midmarket IT organizations that have not expressed much interest in deploying core ERP applications in the cloud.

“It’ll be a hybrid environment,” says Bonfante.

In general, Bonfante says, awareness of the cloud is quite high. But when it comes to moving core ERP applications to the cloud, most midmarket organizations are conservative, especially when it comes to security and a perceived loss of control.

However, Bonfante says he does expect midmarket organizations to benefit from advanced analytics running in the cloud that are then used to inform ERP processes running in a local data center.

Despite all the hype surrounding digital business transformation, the willingness to modify core processes remains uneven. In some organizations, there are individuals either in IT or within a line of business (LOB) willing to drive change. But in the absence of that leadership, organizational inertia remains a powerful inhibitor to change.