We had the opportunity to speak to Infor's management during its London roadshow yesterday and it is evident that the ERP and business management vendor is entering a new phase of its life, led by the much revamped management team that it started putting in place 11 months ago (and includes Oracle’s ex-president Charles Phillips plus several other ex-Oracle execs, see here), and its Infor10 launch. While the acquisitions that have characterized Infor to date (including the approximate $2bn Lawson purchase earlier this year) are likely to continue the company is focusing its efforts on product development and integration.
Although the company does invest in products post-purchase and has spent the last few years designing and executing a SOA-enablement programme across its portfolio, its image is that of a serial acquirer with limited emphasis on cross application integration and innovation. Now its wants to be known as a product-centric company, able to compete on the quality of its products.
Infor10 introduces some good features (including the lightweight ION middleware that provides integration and workflow capabilities but also support for multiple mobile devices and mobile enablement, event management, social computing, and reporting and analytics). ION is notable because unlike the heavyweight middleware from SAP and Oracle, its design (based on loose coupling) may be better equipped to enable its customers to cater for the rapid changes that mobile and social business models are bringing about. As Duncan Angove, president of products and support said, being a late mover has its advantages. The rapid change message is similar to that of Unit4 and its BLINC architecture, which is helping Unit4 a make good progress in the market (see Unit4 bagging bigger contracts and Unit4 chipping away at SAP).
As well as making disruptive technologies such as mobile and social and hot technologies like analytics core to the architecture Infor has also designed what it describes as a “consumer grade experience.” At its heart this means flipping the structure of work so it is data and event driven and in-context, rather than being focused on data entry and silo’d functionality. The consumer grade experience is Infor’s take on bringing the best approaches of the consumer web into the business environment. It looks like it has made excellent progress here in terms of thinking about how users work and delivering the information they need to role-based, personalized and contextual workspaces where aspects of the user interface have more in common with social networks and TweetDeck than traditional “command and control” application interfaces.
There is much more to the Infor company and product revamp of course. In terms of what it means for the supplier market, 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. For the quarter ending May 31 2011, Infor said it had total revenue of $509m, a year on year increase of 12%, while licence revenue was up 28% to $130m. We estimate it is one of the top 30 suppliers of software to the UK market.
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. 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.