Epicor Software Corp., in a bid to increase use of Web-based portals among its ERP customers while, at the same time, make more efficient use of its own development resources, today said it will replace its existing portal products with a single portal based on Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint technologies.
The new portal product, dubbed Epicor Portal 8.2, will become the common portal offering for Epicor's ERP product line -- Enterprise, Vantage/Vista and iScala --when it becomes generally available in the fourth quarter of this year. Epicor, however, will continue to support internally-developed portal products currently available for its various enterprise application suites, according to Scott Smith, senior manager of product marketing at Epicor. Like its current portal products, Epicor Portal 8.2 will require customers to pay an additional software license.
The new Microsoft-based portal will replace a collection of different portal products the company had developed for its ERP product lines. For example, Epicor currently sells several Web-based access products for its Vantage line: Customer Connect, Sales Connect and Buyer Connect. The company sells a separate product, Enterprise Information Portal, for its Enterprise ERP suite. A true portal add-on is not currently available for Epicor's iScala product line.
Building its new portal strategy around Microsoft's SharePoint technologies will allow Epicor to make better use of its development resources "because we will be able to focus on a single [portal] product," Smith said, in an interview. In addition, Epicor will be able to make new features available across its ERP product lines faster and concurrently.
Today, for example, Epicor's portal products don't include online discussion or document management features. The new SharePoint-based portal will include those features -- as well as search -- consistently across Epicor's product line.
Epicor also hopes that basing its portal products on the widely-used SharePoint technologies will increase the number of ERP customers who use its portal offerings. (Microsoft estimates that there are 40 million users of its SharePoint portal technology.)
Soon after the company introduced portals in 1999, said Smith, between 25% and 50% of Epicor ERP accounts licensed the portals.
"More recently, that number has dropped to 10%-to-15% of companies licensing portals for their initial deployments," said Smith. "Our goal is to get back to the 25%-to-50%-percent range."
The move by Epicor to embrace the SharePoint portal technology is consistent with the company's strategy of becoming more aligned with Microsoft. With its September 2004 release of the Vantage 8.0 ERP suite, Epicor became one of the first ERP vendors to deploy its suite entirely on Microsoft's .NET Framework.
Epicor said its new Portal 8.2 product will build on both the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services -- which provides basic online collaboration and content management capability -- and SharePoint Portal Server, which uses a directory to aggregate multiple SharePoint sites and allows documents and other content to pass between them.
Epicor also will use server-based .NET controls --- called Web Parts -- to add industry specific content such as workflows and reports to its portal offering, said Smith.
Although Epicor increasingly competes with Microsoft business applications such as Great Plains and Axapta in the mid-market, Smith said the company saw no risk in tying its portal strategy so closely with Microsoft. That's because, he said, Epicor and Microsoft Business Solutions (the Microsoft unit responsible for business applications) will be on an equal footing in accessing and implementing SharePoint technology.
In fact, said Smith, at least initially Epicor will offer a more complete implementation of SharePoint technologies across its business application products than Microsoft. Microsoft's Axapta product doesn't currently use SharePoint portal technologies, noted Smith.
Epicor's decision to cast its portal lot with Microsoft entails few risks, agreed David Mario Smith, a research analyst at Gartner Inc. (Stamford, CT.) In fact, said Gartner's Smith, it may very well help Epicor remain in the mainstream of portal technology where its products will be able to take advantage of emerging standards such as JSR (Java Specification Request) 168, which promises to permit portal interoperability.