Unit4 ditching on-prem in favor of SaaS come 2025

Unit4, the enterprise software provider popular with government and medium-sized businesses, has announced it will end support of its on-prem systems on December 31, 2024. The decision, which CEO Mike Ettling announced in a letter to customers earlier this month, affects on-premises Unit4 ERP, Unit4 Financials by Coda, and …

[Casca]

Talk about shooting itself in both feet and the head...

[b0llchit]

Ehm, yeah, STONITH translated to STOCITH and STOCITF, where 'OC' stands for "Own Company".

And they want to integrate with Microsoft 341 (or are we already at 340). Might be a good time to assess the situation and walk a new cheaper path without them.

[GlenP]

Yep - we're planning to deal with this by ditching Unit4. If we're going to have to migrate from on-prem to the cloud we'll do so with someone else.

[HMcG]

Absolutely. The last company you want to use to migrate to cloud services is the one forcing you into to by pulling the rug from under your feet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing better than having a fixed end date before you've even started scoping out the work required.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting.

I wonder what their angle is?

They aren't doing this for shits and giggles, and they sure as hell aren't doing this for their customers' benefit. Anyone know where the money trail goes?

Just a bit curious....

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're planning to use AWS or Microsoft cloud infrastructure then they probably regard it as a minimum risk way to cut costs. Move customers to a subscription model priced to cover the underlying cloud costs plus own costs plus profit, mirror all extra/optional AWS/MS cloud costs (plus profit) in subs agreement, mirror all AWS/MS service level commitments in subs agreement. Remove any in-house dev/test systems, move all dev/test/support to cloud, reduce numbers of dev/test/support staff.

[Management Order]

Their angle is to make more money by moving for a licence and support on premises model to a monthly recurring service charge on a cloud model. This boosts EBITDA which investment companies like. It will end up costing customers more. No IT supplier changes what they do to make life cheaper for customers.

[John70]

The story on 1st Jan 2025 will be redundancies at Unit4 since they will no longer need people to maintain their on-prem equipment.

[KevGTI77]

It's not true SaaS

It's the same decades-old Agresso, hosted on Azure and in many cases separate instances for each customer, the same software that was hosted on-premise. Gun are held to customers' heads for the sole purpose of increasing revenue for Unit4. You had a perpetual licence, now you don't, what was relatively cheap is VERY expensive. Cloud vendors at their best, it;s the biggest con of the last few years. You can't even get access to your data...limited to 40 tables...wow so generous of you Unit4.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's not true SaaS

It is delivered using Citrix. So that says it all.

[fattybacon]

Re: It's not true SaaS

Not entirely true, what they haven't migrated to the web, which is most of it, will still be delivered by Citrix and the old Desktop app, but they will severely limit the number of those licences. Everyone else will use a browser.

[AndersG]

Does anyone have a clue what this means for a customer that has a lot of adaptions? I understand that some stuff, like AG6, presumably used for reports, will not be supported? What else? Any idea what the cost will be for migration?