This effectively levels the playing field in this area of business, Daniells added. Cloud computing refers to on-demand provision of computer services via a computer network rather than a local computer. Users or clients do not have to own any software to use and access word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, pictures, address books and any other data, according to Wikipedia. “It is now possible for a company to get access to the latest technology for a fixed monthly fee, with little or no capital expenditure. It's another example of the Internet leveling the playing field, and enabling companies of all sizes to be competitive,” he said. “Today, Epicor offers its customers a variety of cloud-based on-demand services that add value to their on-premise enterprise resource planning (ERP) investments. Our plans are to continue to offer solutions to customers with complete choice and flexibility in how they deploy our solutions, including on-premise, hosted, or on-demand via the cloud,” he said. Cloud computing will continue to grow in popularity over the next decade, said Daniells. While not suitable for all customers, cloud computing can help reduce infrastructure costs, increase utilization and enable the centralization of IT systems in distributed organizations, he said. Epicor offers Saudi customers an innovative and flexible solution that has been built on technologically advanced infrastructure. With Web 2.0 concepts to provide users a collaborative enterprise business application experience, Epicor delivers a business architecture suited to any enterprise regardless of country, industry or access device. “Today, more than 400 customers worldwide are live on the next-generation ERP, with a further 1,500 projects in process. Epicor 9 has been shipped to more than 2,100 businesses in 60 countries, including shipments to more than 900 new customers,” he said. Manufacturers, distributors, financial institutions, service firms and retailers are using the system globally, he said. Epicor's enterprise business solution is built on a second-generation service-oriented architecture (SOA), Epicor Internet Component Environment (ICE) 2.0. The backbone of Epicor's next-generation ERP solutions, Epicor ICE, fuses Web 2.0 technologies with Epicor True SOA™ to deliver business architecture for application-to-application integration and business-to-business collaboration, he said. “We've had a lot of interest in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East since launching the cloud version or Epicor Manufacturing Express Edition (Epicor Express) in North America in 2010, but in truth, full-blown ERP SaaS offerings are only just reaching the tipping point where customers are ready to trust running their businesses in the cloud,” he said. Every vendor has implemented SaaS versions of their products in different ways and many of these only offer SaaS, which ties customers into a solution that would be costly to move away from, he added. “That is why we took time to ensure that Epicor Express actually offers customers flexibility in deployment options – they can go from SaaS to on-premise with as little difficulty as possible, since it's the same code base for both deployment options,” he said. He said one of the next points of differentiation is his company's aspiration to add a social voice to ERP by integrating status updates, news feeds and broader SharePoint communities to provide an even more powerful tool to achieve best-in-class business performance.
