SUMMER 2026

24 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S

24 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK COMPUTER INSIGHTS, INC. 108 Third Street, Bloomingdale, IL 60108 TEL 1-800-539-1233 EMAIL sales@ci-inc.com WEB www.ci-inc.com WHERE SHOULD YOUR ERP SERVER LIVE? by Dennis Cowhey A Practical Framework For The Deployment Decision There’s a question quietly disappearing from the ERP conversations happening at fastener distributors right now: where does your server live? For a growing number of vendors, the answer is no longer yours to give. Cloud. That’s it. Migration timeline attached. New pricing model attached. Take it or take it. We at Computer Insights see this differently. We think where your ERP server lives is a real business decision — one with meaningful tradeoffs in cost, resilience, and control — and one that should be made by you, not for you. The Business Edge TM runs on whatever deployment model you choose: on your own server, in a co-location facility, in a managed hosting facility, or in the cloud. From the software’s perspective, those four options are identical. From your business’s perspective, they’re very different. This article walks through the four options, the dimensions that actually matter when you’re deciding between them, and a few scenarios that show how different distributors land on different answers. The goal is to help you make the decision the right way — with the facts, in your own context — rather than have it made for you in a vendor’s roadmap meeting. The Places Your Server Can Live ⬡ On-premises - The server sits in your building. You own it. But you don’t manage it — we treat your on-prem TBE server like an appliance and handle it remotely. What you provide is straightforward: a network connection, power, limited internet access, and a cool, dry place to put it. Hardware lifecycle is typically three to five years, after which you refresh. There’s no monthly hosting bill — just a one-time hardware purchase and an optional maintenance agreement. ⬡ Co-location - A server you own lives in a professional facility — a “colo” — that handles power, cooling, physical security, and network connectivity. You pay a monthly facility fee. We manage the server remotely (the same appliance model as on-prem), and your user experience is the same as if it were down the hall. ⬡ Managed hosting - A close cousin of co-location: the hosting provider owns the hardware rather than you, and you pay an all-in monthly rate instead of buying a server. Same off-site facility model, same remote management by us, same user experience. ⬡ Cloud - You rent compute capacity from Azure or AWS, monthly, indefinitely. The cloud provider handles the physical infrastructure underneath, but the cloud environment itself — compute instance configuration, VPN setup, ongoing infrastructure management — is yours to manage. We give you the specs and the OS image; you stand up the environment. Once it’s running, we configure TBE on it and handle the application from there. BUSINESS FOCUS ARTICLE CONTINUED ON PAGE 96