Epicor announced the schedule for final on-premises feature releases of its three flagship ERP platforms—Epicor Kinetic, Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor BisTrack. The move affects thousands of manufacturing, distribution, and building supply customers who must now evaluate cloud migration timelines as the vendor transitions its 20,000-strong cloud customer base toward AI-powered cognitive ERP capabilities.
Kinetic will receive its final on-premises feature release in 2028, while Prophet 21 and BisTrack will conclude on-premises development on schedules yet to be fully detailed. Following these releases, customers will enter Active Support phases before transitioning to Sustaining Support, which provides security patches and operational continuity but no new features.
“Our cloud investments enable us to deliver secure, scalable, and current Cognitive ERP capabilities that help businesses make better supply chain decisions in an increasingly complex world,” said Vaibhav Vohra, president and chief product and technology officer at Epicor in a press release. The company plans to deploy its AI-powered Ascend with Epicor migration program, featuring AI tooling for data migration analysis and customized readiness assessments, to streamline customer transitions.
How This Changes Day-to-Day ERP Operations
For technology executives managing on-premises Epicor deployments, the announcement triggers immediate planning requirements around capital expenditure shifts, data migration complexity, and operational continuity during multi-year transitions:
- Cost and ROI transformation: Cloud ERP converts capital expenditure models to permanent operating expenses with monthly subscription fees. However, companies eliminating on-premises infrastructure have achieved 34% cost savings and 75% improvement in operational efficiency through intelligent workflows and AI automation, according to IBM Consulting client engagements.
- Integration and AI capabilities: Organizations with heavily customized on-premises deployments face complex migration paths, particularly those maintaining custom code extensions. Cloud-native architectures reduce integration timelines by approximately 30% through standardized APIs and pre-built connectors. Cloud deployments unlock AI-powered features including predictive planning for demand forecasting and zero-touch accounting that reduce manual finance work by up to 70%. Epicor positions its outcomes-based AI agent pricing as a priority, allowing customers to access conversational ERP capabilities without managing infrastructure.
- Migration readiness: Industry analysis indicates 60% of enterprises require professional “health checks” before beginning technical migration, assessing data quality and integration architecture. Epicor’s Ascend program addresses this through automated landscape analysis tools that generate customized readiness assessments. Technology executives should prioritize vendors demonstrating proven migration methodologies, AI-powered data migration tooling, and industry-specific process templates.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Cloud-first strategies become vendor-mandated migration imperatives. Epicor’s announcement represents a broader industry pattern where ERP vendors sunset on-premises innovation to concentrate resources on cloud-native architectures, forcing customers into migration decisions on vendor timelines rather than business readiness. For system integrators and implementation partners, this creates sustained professional services demand through 2030 as thousands of companies navigate complex data migrations, but also intensifies competition for skilled migration architects.
AI-powered ERP capabilities redefine functional expectations and business cases. The convergence of cloud infrastructure and embedded AI fundamentally alters ERP ROI calculations beyond infrastructure cost comparisons, with cognitive capabilities delivering measurable working capital and productivity improvements that on-premises systems cannot match. Evaluation frameworks must now assess vendors’ AI roadmaps, composite AI architectures, and explainable recommendation engines alongside functional fit.
Parallel system support costs become critical risk factors. Companies face dual-platform costs during cloud migration, maintaining full support for legacy systems while building cloud environments, which is a burden many organizations underestimate in initial planning. This demands executive-level project governance and phased migration strategies that sequence business unit transitions to minimize parallel operation periods.
