I had a chance to listen to Kevin Samuelson, the new CEO at Infor, along with his executives on what he calls Phase 3 of Infor's evolution, focused now on Customer Centricity and Execution. Phase 1 was Build and Acquire. Phase 2 was SaaS transformation.
To me, this is more of a continuing reboot of Phase 2. I had been very excited at the start of Phase 2 and then saw Infor under-deliver over the next few years.
As I have written:
"Infor had once been called an “ERP graveyard,” as it had accumulated a wide portfolio of ERP brands including Baan, Lawson, MAPICS, SSA Global Technologies and Systems Union. Those in turn had made acquisitions of their own (such as Lawson buying Intentia). Since they arrived in late 2010, Infor CEO Charles Phillips and his team have been reinvigorating the company. Phillips had called Infor “the world’s largest start- up.” The differentiation Infor promised was CloudSuite for 15 verticals (such as automotive, fashion, and food and beverage) and three horizontals (including corporate and human capital management). Since then, in spite of sizable investments from Koch and others, Infor has not delivered on its promise of vertical functionality."
Without the industry-specific operational functionality, Infor was forced to compete more on horizontal finance, hcm, crm and analytical functionality and its investments in UX with an in-house design agency against Workday, Salesforce and other cloud vendors. In spite of initiatives like UpgradeX, Infor struggled to migrate its on-premise customer base to the cloud without the vertical functionality.
Infor had benefited from the emergence of Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Previous CEO Charles Phillips used to say "Friends don't let friends build data centers". They took some of the capital that would have put towards the infrastructure and applied it into application functionality. Except that they did not architect the product to be multi-tenant like many competing cloud products. I have seen several of my analyst friends heatedly dissect Infor's architecture. Infor has been gradually rolling out specific products in multi-tenancy.
Rod Johnson, Head of Americas touched on their go to market, implementation accelerators and value points. The goal is to encourage legacy customer moves to the cloud. That to me, again, is part of the reboot if customers on such a vast array of products can be consolidated to a smaller, newer portfolio of products.
Kevin and team are modest in what they are promising this time. They are concentrating on 4 core ERP engines - LN for discrete manufacturing, M3 for process manufacturing and distribution, S3 for service industries and back office, and CSI for midmarket. Unbelievably, the competition there has not evolved much, so even after a decade Infor believes it can still do well with these engines. And they are breathing new life into what they call Edge Applications like EAM and CPQ. Especially in areas like EAM, Infor has never had much competition.
What's negative from their point of view is that competitors are starting to focus on verticals. At Dreamforce last month, I saw 7 very well put together industry sessions each with big brand customers on stage (I wrote about some of them here). Workday has been doing well in healthcare and the government sector and with its Prism Analytics and increasingly with its Cloud Platform partners will do even better. Plex has moved into MES for the auto industry. Plenty of startups and SIs are targeting other verticals.
However, we are entering a new decade. Every one of its competitors has had recent changes at the top and Infor similarly deserves a fresh look. In that spirit, I am looking forward to Phase 3 of their evolution.
