Infor – the enterprise software giant that everyone skips over as they look from SAP and Oracle to Salesforce.com and the new breed – rolled up in London this week, the latest stop on a 20 city global tour to roll out the latest iteration of its suite of applications. Infor is a changed beast these days.
There’s a new management team in place under former Oracle President Charles Phillips that looks like an Oracle alumni reunion, a conscious effort to create an Infor brand and a determination not to be overlooked any more. And it’s all about the Cloud. Duncan Angove, president, Products and Support, Infor, explains:
“Cloud is a huge part of our strategy. Because we are private, we don’t have to worry about cannibalising licence sales. We have a million different users in the Cloud with traditional SaaS applications. Most of our talent management applications are in the Cloud, for example. Every application is 100% multi-tenant and run on Saavis in the US and Amazon elsewhere.”
Such is the commitment to the Cloud, argues Angove, that Infor prefers to compare itself to Cloud vendors rather than its more ‘traditional’ competition:
“When we look at our strategy we need to compete on the basis of speed. We aren’t the largest vendor so we need to be the fastest. When we benchmark that speed, we do so against the Cloud vendors. We compete with SuccessFactors, Taleo and Workday for example and we compare our speed against them. That’s the world we live in. In HCM, that train’s gone – it’s in the Cloud now. ”
Next up in the Cloud is an expanded relationship with Salesforce.com that was previewed at the recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. This sees the coming together of Salesforce.com’s CRM and SFA offerings with Infor’s ERP expertise – and is set to realise some tantalising hints from the Salesforce.com camp in recent months in terms of a Marketing Cloud. Angove explains:
“Epiphany was always really really strong in marketing. For marketing we think the Epiphany assets are terrific. Our new relationship with Salesforce.com is to bring to us the sales and services position to serve the rest of the market that we don’t know. Almost every customer we spoke to wanted us to work with Salesforce.com. Marc [Benioff] called it Inforce. The next step is to build the Marketing Cloud. There isn’t an end to end marketing suite in the Cloud. ”
Leaving aside the inevitable rebuttal to that comment that would doubtless come from Marketo – founder and CEO Phil Fernandez, former CEO of Epiphany until Infor bought it – the Marketing Cloud is something that Benioff has been dropping into conversations as a teaser, but on the bones of which he has yet to put any real meat. So is Infor going to build the Marketing Cloud for Salesforce.com? The answer is seems is affirmative:
“Marketing to date for Salesforce.com has been about the marketing of the sales side. No-one has produced a holistic marketing solution that’s about out-bound and in-bound marketing. That’s what we can do – and all built on Salesforce.com. So you’ll have Infor, the third largest ERP firm with a fantastic marketing application and the scale of the Cloud from Salesforce.com and its development platform. No-one else can do that. All the current Marketing Cloud guys out there are really small and undercapitalised. ”
But this does all beg the question that can be put to any of those ‘small’ Marketing Cloud guys as well: why should marketing automation work this time around when it never really entered the mainstream on previous occasions?
“We don’t use the term. It’s comparable to CRM. The first round of CRM wasn’t really about customer relationship management, it was more about customer sales transaction management. It’s the next generation of CRM that’s more about social media that is really about building a relationship with the customer. Social will play a big role in the Marketing Cloud. ”
Such ambitions seem entirely typically of the new Infor regime which clearly no longer wishes to be seen as a gatherer up of other software firms – a sort of vast holding company for assorted applications, most recently those of Lawson Software. Angove admits that there is a drive to define a genuine brand for Infor:
“Infor never had a brand in itself. It would invest in brands that it acquired, like epiphany, but not its own brand. When I first met with some of our Sun Systems customers and said I was from Infor, they asked me if I was from ‘the holding company’! We will have some brand bridging of course. Lawson, for example, has an incredibly strong brand. But as we have moved from selling individual siloes, it helps if our software is branded Infor. The market wants integrated software. That’s Infor 10, our new enterprise offering that has all the things you’d expect of an integrated suite – common look and feel and so on – and all built on our own integration offering. ”
So the ‘third man’ wants attention and it’s planning to put the planks in place to achieve this. Angove states:
“The market wants a third choice. The approach we’ve taken is very different to the competition. When we met with analysts in New York they all said that what we are doing is the very opposite of Oracle and SAP in every respect. We’re disruptive. We’re privately-held, we can make bigger bets and be more disruptive. ”
“Infor has many of the pieces needed to establish itself as a large-vendor alternative to SAP and Oracle – while there are still some good independent tier two ERP vendors in the market they lack the scale of privately held Infor with its $2.5bn of annual revenue and 70,000 plus customers. As a mid market player with very strong vertical capabilities, Infor can cause a stir in the mid market and upset SAP and Oracle’s plans in this area. Its “alternative vendor” position will provide buyers with a strong negotiating weapon, which will put more pressure on prices across the board. ”
But Eager adds:
“The company still has a way to go in terms of executing on its product-first approach and ridding itself of its old image. It will also be interesting to see how its Cloud strategy plays out - although the technology is there (and provides customers with a choice), the strategy needs further articulation. But we think Infor is positioned to take a more active part in the changing enterprise application landscape. ”
