Infor has overhauled its business applications, making them fast, integrated, social-enabled and tempting to look at. Will the charm work on enterprises?
By Sanjay Gupta
“Enterprise software sucks.”
No, it’s not the intent of this writer to denigrate what’s essentially the pillar of operations for most enterprises around the world. But this comment, coming as it did from the boss of the third-largest enterprise applications and services company in the world, did have somewhat of a pleasantly shocking value.
But before Charles Phillips, the CEO of $2.8 billion Infor, made that comment at the company’s annual gathering, Inforum, this year, he proved his point by showing screenshots of apps from rivals SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, taking swipes at how ugly, difficult-to-see, crowded and user-unfriendly those screens looked.
It is possible that Phillips chose only those screens that looked particularly bad, or that users of those software didn’t mind how the screens looked since they must have been using them for years or even decades. But what he proceeded to unveil next made the import of his message quite clear: in our changing business and everyday world, increasingly dominated by real-time information, social media and the impact of user-friendly design, the time may just be ripe for upending how business apps are written, designed and used.
The screen that didn’t suck—at least not the one that was shown—was done in elegant pastel colors, and the elements, functions and fields were laid out clearly, as if inviting the user to come start working. Of course, it was a leaf taken out from one of Infor’s own new applications.
The “show factor” notwithstanding, what the execs rolled out was impressive for what it could mean for Infor in particular and the enterprise software segment in general.
What’s new
Let us get some facts out of the way first. As per Phillips, Infor spent about $1.1 billion over the past two-and-a-half years in modernizing its products (part of which, of course, went into making sure they don’t suck). Murphy said that the company saw 1248 customer go-lives last year (2012). In terms of revenue, Infor grew 17% compared to the previous year, notching up its cloud subscribers to an overall total of 3 million users. In addition, it added over 600 more developers to its staff, taking the total strength of its engineering talent to 3,500.
Now, these are certainly not very large numbers in absolute terms, especially when one thinks of bigger rivals such as SAP and Oracle. But what Infor has been trying to do is quite significant in proportion to its own size and ambitions.
According to Angove, “We are reshaping the future of work…[through] dense information expressed beautifully and quickly.”
Among the key things that Infor announced at the event: Infor 10x enterprise suite of applications that span 12 focus verticals as well as business apps for financials, human capital management (HCM), enterprise asset management (EAM), supply chain management (SCM), product lifecycle management (PLM), and customer relationship management (CRM).
In a company announcement, Infor said, “Infor 10x unites a multi-purpose middleware platform featuring social, mobile, analytical, and cloud capabilities…All major applications feature a reinvented HTML5 user experience, the new Infor Ming.le collaboration platform, and pervasive in-context analytics embedded throughout workflows that are packaged within the Infor ION integration framework.”
The entire release will follow a phased approach, starting with Infor ION, Infor Ming.le, EAM, CRM, Hansen, LN and SunSystems applications (many of these refer to products from a string of acquisitions Infor made over several years in the past). The rollout is expected to be complete in the latter half of 2015.
The big attractions
From the hype and the excitement generated at the event, it seems that much of the company’s success in the next couple of years will revolve around these things: an easy-to-use, redesigned interface (what Infor calls the Soho experience), embedded social media for working within the applications, and the integration platform ION (some folks at Infor don’t like the term “middleware”).
Plus, there’s one more thing that Infor is indeed very proud of: its ability to provide specific solutions not just for the big vertical segments like automobiles or food and beverages, but for micro-verticals such as equipment dealers for trucks or bakeries and breweries.
The apple of most eyes at the event, however, was Hook & Loop, Infor’s own creative unit that draws upon a wide array of talent, including designers, copywriters, filmmakers and, yes, developers. Formed “with the mandate to create experiences people love,” Hook & Loop has put form and function together in an appealing sort of way for Infor’s new applications.
The India story
The name Infor itself may not evoke much response at first in India, but mention BaaN, SSA Global and Lawson (companies acquired by Infor) and a lot of hands will show up. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for the company, which is sure to increase its focus on the Indian market (at the moment, just 10% of its global revenue comes from APAC).
“Over the past 2-3 years we have been putting in place the right structure to enable growth in the APAC region. We plan to double our revenue in the next three years,” said Tim Moylan, Vice President, APAC & Japan. The company will drive its business mostly through channel partners and focus on segments such as distribution & logistics, retail and fashion.
TCS, one of the larger solution partners for the company, has two centers of excellence and around 170 people trained on various Infor platforms, according to Rajendra Chaudhari, Global Head – Niche Growth Platform (NGP), Enterprise Solutions. Chaudhari said that Infor has great penetration in the retail space, especially in warehouse management. It is the No. 1 vendor in APAC in this category, and its customers in India include Big Bazaar, Peter England, Allen Solly, Trent, and Landmark.
While partners like TCS work with almost all big vendors, there are smaller partners of Infor, many of them focusing exclusively on Infor. One such firm is Avaap. “We were actually associated with Lawson, which Infor acquired sometime back, and we have continued our association with the parent company,” said Dhiraj Shah, President & CEO, Avaap. The company develops bolt-on products to make ERP more efficient. In fact, it recently got a partner innovation award from Infor for its automation module for regression testing for S3.
Shah is happy to have been dealing exclusively in Infor-based solutions and has been able to grow his firm in tandem with Infor. However, asked about the challenges Infor might face in future, he said, “The challenge for Infor will be to maintain a healthy balance in gaining versus losing its people as the company continues to grow rapidly. Another challenge will be to make their product internationally work as well as they do in the U.S.”
In addition, providing good local support for its software could be a challenge, according to Anil Nashikkar, Vice President, KPIT Cummins. He is quite gung-ho about Infor and the new product rollouts but also pointed to the wait-and-watch approach adopted by many customers of Infor-acquired Lawson (which in turn had acquired Sweden-based Intentia; how many of Intentia/Lawson customers upgrade to new versions or software from Infor remains in question).
Nevertheless, there are those who bought BaaN way back and are moving on with Infor. Take the case of Merino Industries, which deployed BaaN in 2000, updated to LN in 2010 across three manufacturing locations and 54 distribution warehouses, and now plans to add on more solutions from Infor (demand planning, CRM and ION are under consideration).
“The new GUI is very good compared to the old version. Efficiency of production planning has improved from 82% to 97%, capacity utilization has gone up by 5% and inventory has reduced by 14%, which is equivalent to savings of $3 million annually,” said Sharda. The challenge for Infor, according to him, would be in terms of branding and lack of implementation skills in the Indian market.
Arjuna Sirinanda, CEO of apparel manufacturer Brandix, which is both a customer and a partner, said that implementing Infor’s M3 ERP has benefited the company through better capacity utilization and improved visibility of orders through the manufacturing chain. He spoke highly of the social network approach of Infor for its new launch. “There will be much more demand for business collaboration for tools like Ming.le,” he said. He is looking forward to M3 being rolled out as a service.
Prasham Kamdar, Managing Partner, Ptex, another Infor partner, summed up Infor’s new approach to business software: “They are trying to make enterprise systems as user-friendly as Facebook.”
Now, it remains to be seen to what extent the new products and look-and-feel help Infor boost its customer base from the current 70,000, especially in emerging markets such as India, China, Brazil and others. The next Inforum should be interesting to watch.