v9 to v10 On Premise upgrade

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Brett
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    We are looking into the options of upgrading On Premise or migrating to the cloud. We have Financials, Procurement and Supply Chain. Infor says they are having a difficult time finding 3 references for us that upgraded On Premise because all of there clients are migrating to the cloud. Although when I asked for 3 references with the cloud migration I can only get 2. The Network Administrator is freaking about losing control of the servers, database, and security not to mention the latency we will experience for some of our remote location with small amounts of bandwidth and the CFO thinks the cloud is the best solution. Any reviews of On Premise vs Cloud will be greatly appreciated.
    Kat V
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      We are upgrading v9.01 to v10.0.5 but not to the cloud: Finance, SCM, HR, and Payroll. I would not be your contact, but if you email me at kvila@mhs.net, I can forward to our dba.
      Frank Dusek
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        You didn't mention any specs on what you have now (Unix vs windows, oracle vs sqlserver, etc....)  In our case, we did on premise (we were Live on Infor 10 a/o May, 2015)  We are AIX, oracle for LSF and Landmark.  Full suite (fin/hr/payroll/smart office/POU/IPA) and the topic never came up to change platforms or go off site.  I would think that would be a decision not taken lightly or just on a perceived cost savings.  Under the timeline you now face, it may be difficult to fully flesh out all the pros and cons properly.  As for the Infor claim that 'everybody is going to the cloud' I would only hazard a guess that this particular Infor person is not using the same 'facts' that are being presented to the rest of the user community.  The last 'Infor 10-State of the Union' document I have seen was dated June-2015.  At that time there were 120 customers live on Infor 10, of those, 85 were some type of upgrade of existing customers.  It also had a Hosted vs. On-premise stat that I believe was representative of all 120 live Infor 10 customers and that was 65% On-premise and 35% hosted.  So I can certainly see why they are unable to come up with 3 references. 

        If you want to see a document the could be considered "All things Infor 10" go to the inforxtreme support page and find KB # 1444526 or Topic # 29307 and you will find 10 pages of links to documentation for all things INfor 10.  If you go to page 8, you will see a link to the State of the Union document mentioned above.  The link is called "Lawson 10 SOTU presentation"

        Good luck in your upgrade, May 2016 is starting to loom large on the horizon......

        Carl.Seay
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          Infor is on a big sales push for UpgradeX and CloudSuite. I have not seen recent numbers, but based on our upgrades, I would agree with the 65/35 split Frank mentioned. Which actually is quite a lot if you think about it.

          There are a lot of factors to consider. Just my opinion: if you have a strong Lawson Tech and Network Admin team, there is less incentive to move to the cloud. If you have a small team and struggle to support Lawson or the infrastructure, then I would definitely consider it. There have been enough Lawson clients move to the cloud that it's stable and has defined processes in place now.
          Brett
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            Thanks everyone for your replies. Frank we are on LSF 9.0.1.8 on a Windows platform with SQL database. We are a small shop with a few customizations in Lawson and it is running very well with few problems. We started looking to update or environment to the latest version of LSF 9 so we could update the OS's on our servers and then we had a turnover at the CFO position. Our new CFO is looking at the cost savings if we go to the cloud. I just hope it's not a rain cloud. Although, we could use more rain in Texas. Thanks again.   
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            Cathy
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              Jumping in late here but wanted to say DON'T believe Infor's hype on converting to Windows in the cloud.  We are in the middle of a conversion and it is not going well because the cloud infrastructure and support are not ready for it.  We've had nothing but problems from day one and continue to struggle with both Infor, Windows and V10.

              We are upgrading and converting from Unix and V9.0.1 to Windows V10.0.5 for our entire Lawson suite - HR/PR, Finance, Supply Chain and Process Flow and adding several Landmark modules.

              I completely agree with the previous reply that if you have a strong Lawson support team and System Admin...stay in-house.

              Carl.Seay
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                Feel free to reach out if you're stuck on any issues. We've run into a few Cloud related issues and more than happy to share information.
                mikeP
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                  We are in the process of converting from v9 on AMS hosted to v10 on AMS "cloud" hosted, and we've had several issues.  One is that as AMS standardized how they treat hosted customers, they've  placed additional restrictions on what they will let us do. 

                  E.g., in our v9 hosted environment, they shared out the entire d:\lawprod\law folder, which, among other things, let us look at source, and config files when support would ask us to check something.  Now, the won't share that, and it looks like we'll need to put in a lot more AMS service request incidents.

                  OTOH, they say they will give us more permissions on our "nonprod" (that's what they call "dev" now) servers, which is something they wouldn't do in the past. If that comes to pass, it will be very helpful.

                  Anyway, we're still early in the process, but we're happy to share what info we do have.

                  dcaiani
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                    We've just finished (sort of) an on premise upgrade. It was a disaster from day one and not because of the on premise vs. cloud debate but because of the incompetence of the Infor people doing the upgrade. We still are having issues in IC, LBI, IPA, and BSI.

                    I totally understand why they can't find you 3 references, I'll just assume that they can't find 3 customers that are happy with their upgrade. I would suggest getting in touch with a Lawson partner, maybe Team Absolute or Cyber.
                    pbelsky
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                      Just FYI, we did a 9.0.1 to 10 on-premise upgrade with Ciber and were very satisfied with the work they did. We did have them come on site, but my understanding is that most of their customers have them do all the work remotely. We have a small but savvy Lawson team and had the contractors come on site to educate our admins and also to help establish the new partner relationship.

                      We went through an RFP process to choose a partner, and I liked all of the 3rd party contractors we interviewed - Ciber, RPI, AVAAP, Absolute. All were priced very competitively and I would have been quite happy to go with any one of them.   

                      Srinatha Nanjundaiah
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                        In case of on premise upgrade - what is your strategy for Lawson Disaster recovery?

                        Did you install a separate DR instance for Lawson? If yes, how do you keep the DR instance in Sync with PROD in terms of CTP/MSPs, customization, security, etc.? Thank you.