ERP Cloud Vendors are appearing almost daily, how to choose?

There are now probably 25+ viable vendors who sell their software ‘in the cloud’ and who claim to be ERP Cloud Vendors.  Now the terminology can be confusing and I wrote about what each means here.

ERP Cloud Vendor – Which to look at?  My personal opinion is you really want to look at ERP Cloud Vendor solutions that are built as true ‘multi-tenant’ models.  This means that one instance of the software can host multiple customers.  There is a reason why a dedicated web server hosting is $100+/month and a ‘web site’ hosting service is $7/month or so.  This is because one server can host 100 or more websites, but a dedicated server, can only support one customer.

Many traditional premise based solutions from the big players like Sage, SAP or Microsoft, can be ‘hosted’ and can even be purchased in the ‘monthly per user per month’ pricing model.  However, only a handful are true multi-tenant and not some premise solution just running on a remote server.

At Clients First, virtually all of the solutions we sell can be purchased in a ‘saas’ model and we have clients on nearly all products running ‘in the cloud.’  However, relative to customers looking for the true economies of scale benefits of Multi-Tenant, we generally recommend either SAP Business By Design or Epicor Express as the ERP Cloud Vendor of choice.  Epicor Express being stronger for manufacturer’s and Business By Design stronger for distributors and professional services companies. 

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