EAC: Infor ‘Can Compete,
and Win, Against the Best’Posted on - 01:50 PM on Thu, Mar 07, 2013

Enterprise Applications Consulting calls Infor "a force to be reckoned with" and likes Infor's "well-thought out approach."

EAC principal analyst Joshua Greenbaum attended the Infor Innovation Summit in New York recently, then shared his findings in a blog post titled "Infor the Innovator: Is There Room for Another Horse in the Race?"

Here are some excerpts:

• "The phoenix that is rising from the ashes of the likes of Baan, Marcam, Mapics, and more rolled up vendors than you can safely count definitely looks like a force to be reckoned with."
• "There's an important cultural side to what (CEO Charles) Phillips and his top lieutenants-among them industry veterans Duncan Angove and Stephan Scholl-are doing. … Instead of being sequestered in their respective seats of power, the Infor team sits and works together, within sound and sight of the rest of the company. This office layout isn't only a refreshing change from the usual mountaintop aerie Office of the CEO,  it helps define a culture of openness and accessibility …"
• "Infor's major challenge has been to leverage the breadth of its myriad products and provide a coherent upgrade and innovation path for its customer base. … To rectify this, Infor has embarked on an ambitious strategy to create a single user experience,  mobile and social platform, and  analytics and workflow environment for its top products."
• "The company has been building out a single integration platform, called ION … Infor is opting for a more light-weight XML-based event pub/sub model that is easier to build, easier to maintain, and more likely to actually be used than some of what its competitors have tried, and failed, to build over the years." 
• "If ION really fulfills its promise then Infor will have done what Oracle, in particular, has failed to do: rationalize its portfolio through integration and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts."
• "The company is further refining its cloud strategy, offering new customers the option of road-testing their Infor apps in the cloud and then, as needed, deploying to an on-premise environment or remaining in the cloud, whichever makes the most sense.  This isn't necessarily the orthodox cloud strategy that the orthodox cloud crowd would like - which is great, IMO. Customer choice should always trump orthodoxy."
• "In all, it's a well-thought out approach to rationalizing a huge portfolio of products …"
• "The essence of Infor's strategy is to tackle what is commonly referred to as the micro-vertical market, as specific vertical industries like dairy or brewing, as opposed to looking at the market through the lens of larger categories like food and beverage. … Building software and going to market specifically for these micro-verticals makes tremendous sense." 
• "The great thing about the enterprise software market is that, once you leave the domain of the very largest companies, the number one competitor in most geographies and verticals is "other"-a set of companies too small to be statistically relevant by themselves in any large scale market survey.  If Infor has its way, they're going to seriously dent the impact of "other" in the market. And if they do, the non-others-SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft-are going to have another big competitor to worry about."
• "Infor isn't just selling maintenance contracts for aging software-it can compete, and win, against the best."

Read Enterprise Applications Consulting "Infor the Innovator: Is There Room for Another Horse in the Race?" Joshua Greenbaum, February 21, 2013.