Post Implementation – Taking the Darkness Out of the Cloud

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United States-September 14, 2021, 01:00 PM

New leader is reshaping Infor Managed Services to meet customers’ evolving SaaS needs

Moving to the cloud is a scary prospect for IT organizations—but it is much easier with an IT expert by your side for the long haul, making sure your applications environment is running efficiently and you are optimizing its benefits.

As a public sector organization was upgrading to the cloud recently — from an on-premises Infor solution to Infor’s Financials & Supply Management SaaS solution — the leaders realized they didn’t have enough IT staff or application expertise to fully manage their new solution after go-live. They wanted to keep their scarce staff resources focused on continuous digital transformation, enabled by further adoption of their new Infor capabilities, rather than on day-to-day upkeep of the solution.

Enter Infor Managed Services or IMS. The team clarified the key post-go-live activities required — monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting — and developed a cost-effective model to deliver the depth and breadth of skill sets needed to successfully manage the environment. Doing so allowed the customer to free up its people to focus on higher value-added activities while simultaneously reducing the operational risk of developing a cloud-savvy internal team.

Outsourcing makes cents

Joe Sande, SVP, Infor Managed Services

“As our customers are moving their workloads from on-premises to the cloud, they are in need of Infor support — testing, management, evolving — for their new environment,” says Joe Sande, Infor’s new SVP of Managed Services. “Workloads that are now being moved are ‘hard,’ and need additional care and feeding. Customers need not only management, but a trusted business partner that is deep into the technology and one that not only understands their business, but understands value is delivered through operational efficiency.

What’s new with the new IMS

Sande joined Infor recently from IBM with a significant background in cloud transformations and customer service. His mandate is to reimagine and realign the services organization to give customers what they need now to thrive in this fast-evolving business-cloud world.

He says the new Infor Managed Services offerings are packed with enhanced capabilities to support customers. “We have developed four support pillars to provide a full suite of services that complement traditional software-as-a-service (Saas) support,” he says.

The four pillars are:

  • Business Application Support – supporting users with more complex support queries
  • Application Administration – helping customers administer and manage their Infor deployment
  • Release Impact Management – supporting customers to ensure that each Infor release is successfully deployed and doesn’t interrupt customer operations
  • Extension Lifecycle Management – managing, updating and modifying customer extensions to ensure the deployment functions smoothly with other customer systems

Committed to customer success

“We aim to help each customer maximize their value from our powerful solutions. But ERP environments require constant attention. They demand proactiveness to respond to any crisis, reduce the risks inherent in IT, as outages have direct financial implications to a company’s ability to service their own client base,” Sande explains. “We strive to be an extension of our customers on all testing and post-go-live management tasks to maintain and even improve their environment. We are committed to providing world-class support our customers can’t get anywhere else.”

To deliver on that commitment, the IMS team is expanding in size to ensure global coverage, and is expanding its skills. “We are equipping our consultants to be self-sufficient and strive to handle tickets quickly to minimize mean time to recovery—MTR,” Sande says. “One of the key tenets is to equip the teams with an Agile attitude, so that issues can be both triaged and resolved by the first responders. Our support model centers on our deep-rooted knowledge of the Infor technologies, industry experience, and a maniacal focus on proactively driving problem resolution and preventing reoccurrences.”

Bottom line

Sande wishes every customer would check in to see what Infor Managed Services can do for them.

And to know this: “We have the skills, industry knowledge, and energy to support any client environment. We will respond, communicate, prevent, and correct any issue. We want to demonstrate the strength of the Infor product suites and the energy and enthusiasm of our services support organization, and to partner with our customers to support their success.”

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