Fit for the Job?

Those of you who follow Infor, the third largest enterprise applications vendor in the market, would know about Charles E Phillips. He has been out of the limelight since becoming the CEO in 2010. That was because he has been planning about the future direction of the company’s large portfolio of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software applications. Read on to know more about his plans for the future.

Since his arrival, the company has reduced expense in the back office and invested it into product development. Secondly, Infor has been investing smartly. He has been spending 90% of his time with the development organization, going through product strategy and helping in decision making.

He has made a single mobile team that is now much larger and efficient. Before, there were two or three people trying to build mobile applications. Coming to the verticals, the company is big in fashion, high-tech, aerospace and automotive. Charles has made Infor micro-vertical focused as well. If he hadn’t done that, people at micro-level verticals would have to build and customize themselves.

The rest of the industry is looking at analytics, hardware and in-memory databases as a basis of competition. Infor is going in the opposite direction. Charles, as mentioned before, has made the company put more money into the micro-verticals. They want to get done with the last mile when it comes to formula management for micro-verticals, and want to inform them that they don’t need consultants, they can get started today.

Phillips believes SaaS is a key area for growth across the company. Infor has a million subscribers in the cloud, and it’s the only company who has multi-tenant enabled in the cloud that can run on-premises. Charles says this will allow them to do hybrid deployments. Charles and Infor are also going to announce an upgrade center at the installed base very soon. This will allow them to ask customers to directly upgrade to the cloud, as they would already know about the app. The upgrade center will be focused on the cloud. Charles wants to exploit this opportunity, as the installed base is huge, and infor can double the cloud business.

Infor is competing with Epicor and Microsoft Dyanmics at the low end while with SAP and Oracle on the high end. The company also has the same customers for plants that has SAP and Oracle for financials.

Charles is trying to increase the reputation of Infor. The company is also building XML documents, which is the language of the internet. They also have started going back to older version of their software. This, Charles believes, will have the same benefits for every customer in the 21st century.