The announcement of Infor24 has an interesting sub-text to it which highlights how cloud-based services are likely to develop as a complex mesh of services and applications.
Infor is already known for its range of business management tools aimed at the SMB marketplace. These include CRM, Enterprise Asset Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, and Expense Management packages. Three packages from the range are now to be found out in the cloud under the banner of Infor24, the company’s first steps towards providing these applications as cloud-delivered services.
The three are Expenses Management, Asset Management and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), all of which are key components in the efficient running of any business. There are a couple of other aspects to this that make a bit more interesting, however.
The first is that all three packages will be integrating using Infor ION, the company’s recently introduced suite of interoperability and management services. The objective of ION is to provide a seamless integration bridge between Infor applications whether they run on-premise or in the cloud. The key functions this allows are the rapid building of connections between the applications, and collaborative communications between them. Following on from this come the abilities to organise and manage more complex business processes, and analyse what is happening in the business, based on solid data.
It is fair to say that one of the drawbacks of some ERP systems is the cost and complexity of this integration process. And for many users, particularly in the mid-sized business sectors with limits set on their IT budgets, the costs involved can make ERP systems prohibited territory. Yet for every business, the objective is not just to gather solid data – important though that is. The ultimate goal is to make timely, sound decisions based on the analysis of that data, which requires good and straight forward integration and information management capabilities.
The second aspect is that Infor24 will be available via Microsoft’s Azure service. To some extent this is hardly surprising as Infor and Microsoft already have a long-standing partnership. Infor is pressing ahead with developments of new versions of the applications suite that will fully exploit Azure technologies, such as SQL Azure.
As they will be delivered from the Azure datacentres this does open up a variety of potential routes to the Infor services for users. The availability of ION means that existing Infor customers can still run those applications they consider business-critical as on-premise services and integrate them with lower priority applications now located out in the cloud.
But it also demonstrates the range of access and business opportunities the cloud now presents to both cloud service users and service providers. Just a couple of scenarios help to make this point.
For example, it could easily be possible for current non-Infor customers that are Azure users to sign up for services via that route. In addition, it also creates the possibility for third party service providers to access Infor24 via Azure and integrate it with their own offerings.
This could indeed, even end up as a `white label’ solution, where the service provider that has the most acceptable brand for any given market sector is seen to be providing the best-of-breed tools and applications as a complete service, rather than a package of components from different suppliers.
This is not to suggest that this approach forms part of Infor’s current planning. But it does place the company in a good position on the start-line for the marketing changes cloud computing will bring, with a set of tools that many mid-sized businesses will require.
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