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Infor recently hosted its Inforum user conference in NYC with an impressive 7,000+ attendees. During his keynote address, Charles Phillips, CEO, repeated themes for Infor's strategy that has been given at previous events (this consistency is a good thing): - Industry solutions (micro-industry solutions needing no customization)
- Design (usability with the internal creative think-tank Hook & Loop)
- Science (analytics, big data, machine learning with the internal Infor Dynamic Science Labs located near MIT in Massachusetts
- Internet with cloud and SaaS deployment
Infor's Comprehensive Product Strategy
Later, Stephan Scholl, President, provided some numbers to back-up Infor's success in moving its customers to the cloud.
- 7,000 unique cloud customers
- 62 million users subscribing to Infor Cloud
- 12 AWS data centers hosting cloud customer data
- 103 countries connecting to Infor Cloud
Internet of Things
During the conference, Pam Murphy, COO, presented the release of the new Infor IoT product. It has a well-thought through product architecture that leverages other Infor assets like ION, and shows connectivity to the device level. An Infor blog posted after the Inforum event states "Infor IoT will have two initial objectives: First, to deliver on connected intelligence as a means of unlocking new business value and opportunities. And second, to offer customers a scalable and consistent platform rather than a set of individual applications and components that may or may not work seamlessly together, as they must."
Included in her presentation was a specific predictive maintenance (PdM) application - which is the major business opportunity for Internet of Things (IoT) per ARC's research. Infor Predictive Maintenance application offers the device and data management, and algorithms and machine learning needed to identify a pending failure.
Infor IoT Architecture
Unfortunately, many organizations depend on ad-hoc communications for maintenance personnel to be engaged before the failure. To successfully prevent the dreaded unplanned downtime, ARC has been advocating business process automation (BPA) through to the enterprise asset management (EAM) application. This BPA was included in Pam's presentation which showed an integrated business process across sensors, analytics, Infor Ming.le for collaboration, and Infor EAM for execution of the maintenance work order.
Last Word
IoT has become a key enabler for innovation and new business models among today's leaders. With this announcement, Infor established its intent and capabilities with customers looking for solutions involving IoT. What was shown looks promising, and Infor has indicated that more details on its platform and signature product offerings around predictive maintenance will follow soon. Over the coming weeks and months, ARC will continue to press Infor for details and pass along updates to you.