Epicor Commerce: Is eCommerce Going to Favor A SaaS Hybrid Model As Well?
The eCommerce market has been growing this past year, and according to a study by Forrester Research, 18% of North American and 23% of European enterprises are planning major upgrades to their eCommerce platforms in the near future. Today, CDC announced today that it would be purchasing a Canadian ecommerce developer, and Epicor Software announced this month that they would be joining that market with their Epicor Commerce solution. Epicor offers a suite of applications designed to work across multiple product lines, known as Extend solutions, and Epicor Commerce will be a part of that family.
Epicor Commerce touts standards-based Microsoft .NET technology and support for AJAX, and encourages collaborative B2B and B2C activities. The platform provides customers with the ability to create elaborate eCommerce Web designs, and can deploy web content, images, and marketing promotions and programs. The pages created are search engine friendly, and are optimized for traffic from all major search engines. In addition, Epicor Commerce provides automatic synchronization of information on products, pricing, customers, and inventory levels directly from the user’s ERP system; it also supports order placing, and payment methods from COD to credit card.
Epicor is a leader in retail ERP, so this product is more than apt; even better, Epicor Commerce is available in both on-premise and SaaS formats. During these tough economic times, many companies are looking for ways to cut costs and overhaul their web presence, which makes the SaaS deployment option all the more relevant. The Canadian company CDC is planning to acquire, Truition, is also a SaaS vendor, and likely they will roll out eCommerce solutions incorporating Truition technology within the next year.
As noted before on this blog, the “hybrid model” of both SaaS and on-premise components has been proliferating this year, and it’s nice to see more companies embracing on-demand technologies. And it is particularly nice to see Epicor and CDC—as two heavyweights in ERP—making headway in the SaaS market. Many ERP companies have, for a while now, been under fire remaining largely on-premise, and while these two companies are here offering definitive SaaS ERP solutions, it’s good that they’re showing comfort with the new technology.
[Photo courtesy of webappick.]
