Infor Gearing Up for Growth in 2012
In a recent interview with EnterpriseAppsToday, Computer Economics President Frank Scavo said much of the current ERP investment activity revolved around incremental additions to existing implementations. ERP’s 60 percent-plus penetration rate means “there just aren’t as many opportunities for brand new implementations,” Scavo said.
Incumbents with large installed bases like Oracle and SAP, and to a lesser degree Microsoft and Infor, benefit from this trend, Scavo said.
Still, ERP vendors are attracting some new customers. Infor, which also sells CRM, supply chain and workforce management software, said it added more than 2,500 new customers in 2011, increasing its total customer base to more than 70,000.
It reported 17 percent license growth for the twelve months ended in November. Growth in its core ERP business in the second fiscal quarter, also ended in November, was up 25 percent over the previous year.
Infor CEO Charles Phillips, an Oracle veteran, said the company is focused on a “disruptive strategy of delivering release after release of deep industry features that eliminate cumbersome customizations, productize geographic localizations and provide in-context business intelligence with projects measured in months not years.”
Infor, which targets midmarket companies, closed out 2011 with a flurry of announcements, all based on a theme of growth.
In November it said it would move its headquarters from Alpharetta, Ga., to New York City where it plans to hire 75 new developers to staff an Innovation Center. That continues an employment boom that began in 2011, during which Infor added 500 software engineers. Beefing up its engineering staff helped it ship 69 new products in 2011.
Perhaps its most significant release was Infor10, which it said offers an enhanced user experience and industry-specific functionality. It also rolled out Infor10 ION, a middleware technology it promised would ease integration between Infor and third-party applications.
It is also likely designed to put Infor on more of an even footing with Oracle and SAP, both of which sell middleware offerings. The first ION connector, introduced last month, is designed for SAP applications. Infor promises a connector for Oracle applications in 2012.
Infor in September partnered with Salesforce.com to create three new InForce applications on Salesforce’s Force.com development platform. The apps are InForce Everywhere, which will bring Infor ERP data into Saleforce; InForce Order Management, a quote, order and proposal application; and InForce Marketing, which combines inbound and outbound campaign management with Infor’s CRM Epiphany recommendation engine. According to Infor, the partnership also includes a multi-million dollar investment from Salesforce.
Infor also acquired software from several of its channel partners in late 2011, including a quality control application from RSVP Business Systems and service management applications from Single Source Systems.
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