Epicor and CNRG Announce First Epicor Eagle Hosted Conversion
Home Hardware Center goes live with Software as a Service hosted environment.
Epicor Software Corporation announces the company’s first major implementation of Epicor Eagle delivered in a software as a service (SaaS) hosted environment. Home Hardware Center, the first retailer of Central Network Retail Group (CNRG) to undergo the hosted solution conversion, successfully completed integration in early February 2013.
CNRG, founded in Mississippi in 2011, was formed with the goal of assembling partnerships with strong retail brands and developing strategic formats to leverage a best-in-industry management and technological infrastructure. The company operates 41 home center and hardware stores in seven Southern states – 38 of those currently operate using Epicor solutions.
CNRG strives to offer consumers regional merchandise selection and availability provided by independent hardware chains and home centers while taking advantage of the merchandising efficiencies enjoyed by national chains.
“CNRG is a multi-brand, multi-format retailer in the hardware and home center industry,” said Boyden Moore, president of CNRG. “Many of our acquisitions have been Epicor customers and we needed to pull them together. We challenged the team at Epicor to come up with a solution that made more sense to us. We feel strongly that a cloud-based or hosted solution provides a better infrastructure for the speed and flexibility our company needs. Epicor was able to fulfill that requirement by offering us the Epicor Eagle hosting service for our 21 Home Hardware Center stores. The transition from our server to the hosted server was extremely smooth.”
Home Hardware Center, based in Mississippi, is the first CNRG retailer to make the switch. “The conversion and go-live was an absolute success,” said Jimmy Smith, chairman of CNRG and founder of Home Hardware Center. “The integration with our multi-store layout was fast and seamless. There was no downtime, all our stores and terminals were up and running first thing Monday morning.”
“We are pleased to announce the successful implementation of the hosted Epicor Eagle solution in partnership with CNRG,” said Craig McCollum, executive vice president and general manager, retail distribution solutions for Epicor. “In today’s businesses, every resource must be weighed in order to operate at maximum efficiency with cost effectiveness at the top-of-mind. Hosted solutions can provide significant time savings over on-premise environments, which allows for more time to focus on driving business initiatives and serving customers.”
CNRG’s Home Hardware Center now runs their business from a highly error-tolerant datacenter environment by subscribing to the Epicor Eagle hosting service. “We believe with Epicor Eagle hosting our data and our business is safer than it has ever been,” said Smith. The company’s critical business data is located in an Epicor Tier-4 datacenter that provides significant redundancy and fault-tolerance in regards to power, network circuits, backups, security and server hardware.
The latest version of the Epicor Eagle software includes comprehensive hosting capability that enables businesses, like CNRG, to offer use of their software to independent retail members. This important feature allows for the support, growth, increased efficiency, and safety for the retailers. All proprietary information is protected for each business using the Epicor Eagle hosting service.
For more information regarding Epicor Eagle hosting service please contact Epicor at 888-463-4700 or your Epicor representative.