Strategy and New Products at Inforum 2014

Inforum Event

The Inforum 2014 event was well attended with over 6,000 participants. New Orleans provided a nice venue. Infor provided several strategic and new product announcements.

Infor's Core Strategy

Infor has presented its strategy in previous events, and this Inforum was consistent. A summary of its strategy includes:

• Offer solutions for micro-verticals tailored to the industry-specific business processes. This includes systems integrators on aligned spaces even though they are often regional focused.
• Focus on internet with "Cloud First" application development, sales engagement, and user deployment
• Develop user interface experiences people love using the company's Hook & Loop internal creative agency

Charles Phillips, Infor CEO, Presents Infor's Strategy

Product Announcements

The company made several product announcements - some available now and others expected in the near future. The key products that caught ARC's attention include:

• Infor Xi: A new platform for its next generation of products. Infor Xi builds on Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, and uses standards like HTML5 and XML. Infor announced a unified Financial Suite build on Infor Xi with the help of Hook & Loop to prevent "spreadsheet nightmares" and fit the common finance business processes.

Charles Phillips Presents Infor Xi Features

• Infor CloudSuite: Includes common functions like finance, purchasing, inventory management and human capital management (HCM) which will be incorporated into the micro-vertical applications that Infor is bringing to the cloud using Infor Xi. Infor's Cloud First strategy seems to be working, with 2,600 cloud customers globally and a 2015 Q1 revenue increase of 22 percent for software license fees and subscriptions.

Pam Murphy, COO, Presents Infor CloudSuite

• UpgradeX: for moving customers from one of the many Infor applications to Infor CloudSuite. Infor UpgradeX allows customers to evolve their existing investments directly to Infor10x running into the cloud. The salesforce is now incented to sell cloud over an on-site license.

Infor EAM

Infor EAM continues to be a primary solution for the company. As we learned in a presentation during the opening session of Inforum, Infor EAM will be supported in Infor Xi, CloudSuite, and UpgradeX.

Soma Somasundaram, EVP, Global Product Development, highlighted Infor EAM in his main presentation. Kevin Price, Product Director, updated us on Infor EAM's capabilities in one of several related breakout sessions.

Soma Somasundaram, EVP, Global Product Development, Presents
Infor EAM Features

Vertical solutions are built through three channels:

• Infor product development created and supports standard configurations in these editions: Enterprise, Healthcare, Hospitality, and Transit
• Infor EAM consulting services implement configured editions for other verticals including manufacturing, oil & gas, pharmaceutical, and facilities (more may be added)
• Infor EAM partners also implement configured editions for additional verticals including airports and radio asset management

Infor EAM Functions as Presented by Kevin Price, Product Director

Dynamic Science Labs

Big Data and analytics are gaining importance for improving performance. Infor has established an office called Dynamic Science Labs near MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts to exploit this opportunity. The office, staffed mostly by PhDs, will build Science Apps for all industries served by Infor. Ziad Nejmeldeen, Chief Scientist, Infor provided insight into the group's research, which focuses on asset lifecycle management (ALM) and predictive analytics.

Conclusion

Founded in 2012, Infor's Hook & Loop creative agency has infused usability improvements into the company's products; particularly improvements that focus on the needs of end users, rather than IT or executive management. This has generated enthusiastic support from clients. ARC's assessment is that Hook & Loop has become a sustainable core competitive advantage for Infor.

The "Dynamic Science Labs" for analysis and predictive analytics repeats the strategy used for Hook & Loop, i.e., an autonomous group with a focused objective located among the talent pool. "Big Data" has large quantities (volume), fast (velocity), in many formats (variety) that require new approaches for analytics to extract and gain value. A less rigorous approach could yield results that confuse cause with effect. Infor's approach applying real scientists should help avoid this trap. Similar to what the company has done with design through Hook & Loop, it will make science a core competency.

Infor has many applications that it acquired years ago - many continue to be successful providing major sources of revenue, and funding for further product development. Some, not so much. Infor Xi and CloudSuite will represent a significant hurdle for some applications, which may slowly fall behind and atrophy. Customers should ask for a review of the future development plan and assess using UpgradeX to get to a fully support application i.e., Infor CloudSuite.

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Keywords: Infor, Cloud, EAM.