IRVINE, Calif.

Epicor Software Corporation (NASDAQ: EPIC) announced today that it is experiencing strong demand for its Epicor Outsourcing services from industry-leading companies such as be2, Ericsson, National Multiple Sclerosis Society and Tomra of North America. Through Epicor Outsourcing, which includes Application Hosting, Application Management, and Business Process Outsourcing, Epicor is reducing the overall cost of a company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, while helping manage and minimize risk across its organization.

In today’s volatile economy, in order to maintain focus on strategic business objectives, companies more than ever are looking to ensure they are optimizing their IT spending, which is driving them to explore the utilization of outsourced services. As companies look to reduce costs across their organizations they are placing a particularly high level of scrutiny on internal processes. External solution providers—especially those that have deep pre-existing knowledge of the company’s operations such as Epicor—are proving effective in reducing costs, while increasing responsiveness and profitability. Providing a single point of accountability, innovative solutions and a dedicated team of industry and IT experts, Epicor Outsourcing offers knowledgeable and consistent management of a company’s IT investments, with superior cost effectiveness in the long-term.

Epicor chairman, president and CEO, George Klaus commented, “While still a relatively small part of our overall services business, we have seen our number of outsourcing customers more than double in the past two years. Epicor is in a unique position to provide our customers with additional services that leverage Epicor-specific knowledge to enhance the value of their IT investments while reducing the associated costs.”

Klaus continued, “Epicor Outsourcing services are supported by a dedicated core team of consultants, solution architects and industry experts with an average tenure of 10 years in manufacturing, distribution, retail and services sectors. We believe the current economic environment provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the value of these services to existing and new customers, and we look forward to building on the momentum we have established.”

Industry analyst Dennis Gaughan of AMR Research recently wrote about the impact of the declining economy on the IT Management market and said he is seeing a “fundamental shift in how the IT management market will evolve.” Gaughan continued, “Customers are looking at how to utilize service providers and outsourcers to take over key IT processes and conduct much of the remote management of their IT infrastructures.

Forrester Research in a September 2008 report titled The Three Archetypes Of Service Providers reiterated the need to leverage vendor expertise, “CFOs in particular are beginning to value both the cost containment and the long-term cost predictability that outsourcing can provide. While many companies typically lack a good understanding of the existing internal costs associated with desktop services, the price and cost transparency associated with external service delivery often leads to better financial planning.” Furthermore, “as outsourcing helps convert fixed costs into variable costs, it releases capital for investment in other areas of the business.”

Single-Source Delivery and Support
Aiming to help customers better leverage long-term IT investments, reduce operational costs, and optimize resources in the face of unprecedented global market challenges, Epicor Outsourcing offers a strategic set of IT management services.

Epicor Hosting provides the first step towards the end-to-end management of a customer’s IT environment with a secure, high availability environment for the deploying customer systems. Epicor’s cost-effective hosting solution combines hardware, infrastructure and services to provide customers secure, scalable and uninterrupted access to their business applications.

Epicor Application Management delivers end-to-end management of Epicor applications and support functions, taking IT outsourcing a step further by providing complete application portfolio management via comprehensive hardware, infrastructure, and software maintenance. Epicor helps ensure that systems and software are available and up-to-date at all times, providing 24x7x365 management and access to support personnel.

Epicor Business Process Outsourcing offers customers the opportunity to transfer the day-to-day management of non-value add operations and processes so they can refocus internal resources on core operations and initiatives.

Through its worldwide operation centers, Epicor Outsourcing provides a suite of services that leverage its core competencies, are right sized for small and mid-sized businesses and provide a strategic option to improve the bottom line.