The nearly 4,000 attendees at Epicor’s Insights 2019 event in Las Vegas spent a good part of their time in the Mandalay Bay Conference Center discussing some of the biggest technological trends now reshaping the enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) market — artificial intelligence, the move of user data from on-premise computer systems to the cloud, and the increasing popularity of SaaS system offerings.
Most folks in the electrical market know Epicor for its Eclipse and Prophet 21 ERP systems for distributors, but may not realize the privately held company with sales of over $900 million also provides software for manufacturing (its largest business segment), retail, lumber and automotive supply.
CEO Steve Murphy told editors at a press event that business was good and that Epicor was making progress on one of its major goals — to become the cloud vendor of choice and to help more of its users move to its cloud offering, which is built on the Microsoft Azure platform. Murphy estimated that 24% of Epicor’s customers are already on the cloud and that 76% had not yet made the move. Several seminars at the event offered insight into what users can expect when making the transition and the Solutions Pavilion at the event was staffed with a small army of technical experts on cloud computing and many other features of Epicor’s various software packages.
A big product launch at Insights 2019 was the release of the company’s AI-based Epicor Virtual Agent (EVA), which will first be available to Prophet 21 users. Murphy said in developing EVA, Epicor harnessed artificial intelligence so that EVA can “solve real business problems better than a user can.”
According to the press release announcing the launch, “Developed to execute tasks and recommend, predict, and adjust actions within set parameters, EVA appears on-screen as a virtual assistant that users can access via text or voice. Powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), users can access EVA from their mobile devices and the agent will deliver targeted information to help them make better, faster decisions.”