Clients First USA
Clients First knows their software, but they are also astute business people, and they really understand manufacturing and distribution in particular.
Jimmy Witcher, COO, Merrick
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Posts Tagged ‘Hosted Solutions’

ERP Cloud Vendor–Which SaaS Solution is for you

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

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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SaaS vs. Cloud ERP vs. On Premise Computing. Will 2011 be the big breakout year?

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

imageAccording to Panorama Consulting Group, a respected mid-market ERP think tank, they are starting to think so.  Eric Kimberling and I actually seem to have a pretty parallel feeling on the market.  Both of us felt the solutions were seriously overhyped.  However, based on more recent surveys, the various leads I’m seeing cross my desk, etc, I’m starting to think I may have ‘misunderestimated’ the growth.

Now, I want to be clear, I still think it will be a relatively small part.  In my opinion, less than 15% of all deals.  The survey says large numbers are considering ‘the cloud’ but I also have found many folks consider it because of the hype but when the run the numbers, realize that on-premise is often far less expensive over a 10 year cost calculation.  Read on for more.

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New Jersey (NJ) SAP Business by Design. SAP has the Future of Enterprise Software covered

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Enterprise software is an industry of laggards

This might seem like a drastic statement to make but the reason in simple – Once a customer has invested in package or system it is expensive and quite a challenge to replace the system. Quite a few organizations are still running their main system on Mainframes and then have gone on to invest in specific packages that are built / deployed around these “Legacy” systems and having deep tightly coupled integrations with them.

Now this is on the software side, but now on the services side most consulting & IT Services companies have grown fat supporting & enhancing these applications, where the incremental value delivered for the customer organization has been limited if non existent. So not only in software product and maintenance the customers end up spending a lot in terms of support and maintenance.

The reasons for this situation to persist are many but will not focus on that here. (more…)