Infor10 to compete head on with Oracle and SAP

Infor10 is the culmination of a strategic review following Charles Phillip’s (of ex-Oracle fame) installation as CEO and the massive overhaul of senior executives which followed it.  Speaking to FSN yesterday, Duncan Angove, Infor’s president of products and support, said that in the past the business had focused on the challenge of integration and the mid-market but a fresh look at strategy had revealed products that were often leaders in their market segment and very large scale customers such as Boeing and Pfizer.

The new team (eight senior executives out of 12 have changed since last year) concluded that they want Infor to compete on the basis of product differentiation.  Hence Infor10 is principally about assembling product suites in each of the 13 vertical markets underpinned by a common architecture.  “The market wants to buy suites of applications,” Angove told FSN “and we have picked the best applications from our portfolio for each market segment.”  Hardly a revolutionary concept in marketing terms but a seismic shift for Infor that has struggled in the past to shed its image as an aggregator of products and whose product offerings sometimes seemed more like a patchwork quilt than a cohesive set.

The new strategy strongly aligns Infor with SAP and Oracle which for many years have been organised on market segments lines with specialised functionality and process maps within the products.  “There is no point providing customers with functionality they don’t need or want.  It clutters up the applications and confuses them,” added Angove.  “and we are going to support micro-verticals as well, for example, butchers and bakers within the generic food vertical,” he said.

Infor is also de-emphasising its relationship with Microsoft which according to Duncan Angove re-enforced a mid-market positioning. On the hardware front Infor is cuddling up to IBM and offering special bundles based on IBM’s Power Systems.

But the most interesting part of the new strategy is the refreshing approach that Infor is taking to product development.  It has invested heavily in software engineers claiming that more than 430 have been added to the headcount even before the recent acquisition of Lawson Software.  Much work has been done on common user interfaces, workspace, analytics, reporting, master data management and mobility.

The developments build on its integration and middleware strategy, "Infor ION" announced last year and provides some exciting innovations, especially around Social Media.  (More about this in a special feature in next week’s FSN).

Infor is on an upward trajectory. It is growing strongly (possibly taking market share) and with a new product focussed strategy seems to be winning hearts and minds.  Its new management team, many of whom are ex-Oracle know exactly how Infor’s two largest competitors operate.  They have them clearly in their sights.