Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 01 | Page 41

FEATURE Sabby Gill, Executive Vice President, Epicor International. Epicor ERP on cloud • Ability to take cloud based apps and move them on-premises • Choice is the most important from a customer perspective • Dual strategy, channel partners and direct accounts • Easier for cloud applications to inter-operate than on-premises • Epicor’s new slogan – Grow business not software • ERP on-cloud no different from other cloud applications • Millennial individual expects totally different experience in workplace • Never going to have half the relationships partners have • We are not too late and it is not too early • What happens if a customer decides to pull back from cloud to onpremises for Epicor that it can never fill. “We are never going to be able to have half the relationships that those partners have.” Epicor is therefore investing in improving the skills of its channel partners and its support to enable them to go to market with cloud based solutions, on-premises solutions, or any others. www.intelligentcio.com However with rapid digital and business disruptions and transformations, no mainstream enterprise application vendor can afford to restrict its options for existing and new customers. A customer in-cloud may want to switch back to on-premises. Gill believes a direct relationship with the end customer is required in order to provide choice to the customer at the right time. “It is great to have cloud deployable products but what happens if you ever decide not to and you want to pull back. You need that ability to be able to take cloud based applications and move them on premise. So to us, it is choice at the end of the day from a customer perspective,” he explains. With mainstream and startup ERP vendors having already rolled out and penetrated in-cloud opportunities, is it not too late for Epicor? Remarks Gill, “I believe that it is never too late, and I do not believe it is too early. I think we are at the right time because there is this paradigm shift with the cloud. More and more organisations are starting to adopt it. A lot of big cloud companies have already laid down the foundation that allows us to then go and leverage it.” Epicor’s approach is therefore to invest in both sides of its dual pronged strategy – invest in channel partners and invest in its direct to customer channel. Its new tag line, Grow Business Not Software, INTELLIGENTCIO 41