The Infor OS Platform: Unlocking human potential through the power of data
The Infor OS Platform: Leveraging an API gateway and data to unlock human potential
02
WRIT TEN BY
HARRY MENE AR PRODUCED BY
CR AIG DANIEL S
MARCH 2019
03
w w w.i nfor. com
We sit down with Joseph Pascaretta and Massimo Capoccia of Infor, USA to talk about Infor OS, Infor ION, Birst Analytics, Coleman AI and Infor Data Lake.
I
was actually a customer of Infor before I joined the organization,” remembers Joseph Pascaretta, Vice President & General
Manager Infor OS at Infor, USA. “I liked it as an organization so much that I joined the company. It feels like a large start-up.” Massimo Capoccia, 04
Senior Vice President Infor OS, Technology confirms: “I have a career where I’ve had the opportunity to build a platform from scratch, from the beginning. That has been an amazing journey.” Between them, Pascaretta and Capoccia have over 16 years’ experience at Infor. Headquartered in New York and with 168 offices globally, as well as over 15,000 employees serving 68,000 customers, Infor is a global leader in business cloud software products for companies in industry specific markets. “We believe that data is really at the center of unleashing human potential,” says Pascaretta. “We have an Intelligent Cloud Digital Gateway: a way to be able to bring all of that data together, but then allow organizations to innovate effectively and quickly, leveraging real tools and assets all delivered in the Cloud.”
05
w w w.i nfor. com
“I was actually a customer of Infor. I liked it so much that I joined the organization” — Joseph Pascaretta, Vice President & General Manager, Infor
06
From the Infor OS API gateway and
the major differentiator”. He adds:
integration of third-party applications,
“No other enterprise software organi-
to its own Coleman Artificial Intelligence
zation is doing what we’re doing. They’re
(AI), to an infinitely scalable Data Lake,
doing elements of it in pockets and silos,
Infor understands the necessity for
but not all together as one integrated
powerful machine learning systems
platform solution delivered fully in
to handle the vast quantities of data
the Cloud.”
inherent to Industry 4.0. Infor is applying
“Thinking about data as the critical
machine learning to Big Data and
asset is really the foundation of all this,”
scaling it infinitely using the power
says Pascaretta. Traditionally, compa-
of cloud computing. Pascaretta notes
nies store data in data warehouses
that the integration of data, AI and
which filter all incoming data that has
cloud scalability is “the huge value
already been processed for specific
proposition of what we’re doing and
purposes. “The first mistake that
enterprise organizations make when you want to have data storage for multiple person consumption is that they think that the data warehouse is the place to be,” notes Capoccia. “But that’s actually what people were doing five or 10 years ago.” With the everincreasing quantities of data enterprises are presented with, the necessary approach Infor recognises is to pair Big Data with AI applications. “If you want to use the same data that has been filtered for analytics for an AI application, you’re going to miss a lot of other types of data,” Massimo explains. E XE CU T I VE PRO FI LE
Joseph Pascaretta
Joseph is Vice President & General Manager for the Infor OS business unit where he is responsible for global growth, business development and strategic partnerships. During his career, Joseph has held a number of business development, business strategy, engineering, sales and marketing roles in software and technology fields and has been recognized as Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Product Solutions. Joseph specializes in building businesses and launching innovative new products and solutions.
w w w.i nfor. com
07
08
E XECU T I VE PRO FI LE
Massimo Capoccia
An experienced and impassioned technology executive, Massimo Capoccia specializes in technology, software architectures, and enterprise software strategy. He has built three architectures and platforms from the ground-up and understands the life-cycle management of a software product. In his current role as Senior Vice President Infor OS, Technology, he invests his time meeting with customers and prospects, discussing strategic value of software, and supervising architecture development projects.
“We really believe in offering complete solutions, both on the platform and on the application.So if a functionality is not really our core,we partner with a third party” — Massimo Capoccia, Senior Vice President Infor OS, Technology
09
“If you want to do an enterprise search,
market data, all the documents, all the
you’re going to miss other types of
IoT readings”. “Everything you think of
data as well. So, a data warehouse is not
when you think about data – it can go
complete, per se. You need a different
there,” he adds. “From the Infor Data
type of storage that allows you to store
Lake, we will integrate automatically
structured and unstructured data all
with a data warehouse. We have an
together in a very cheap way.”
elastic search as well as an index, so
This is where Infor’s Data Lake comes
you can search the data warehouse
into play. “The Data Lake stays on
even built for indexing data like you
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ama-
would do with a Google search.”
zonS3 technology, which is available all
Infor ensures the security of its Data
the time and is very cheap and scalable,”
Lake using its proprietary security
Capoccia explains, adding that the Data
platform. “We have a huge investment
Lake stores “all the transactions, all the
in security,” says Massimo. “We provide w w w.i nfor. com
CLICK TO WATCH : MASSIMO CAPOCCIA, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT INFOR OS, TECHNOLOGY - INTRODUCTION TO INFOR OS
a single sign-on, user management, and permission management platforms.” Traditionally, there is a danger of gaps in security appearing between a core platform and third-party software, but Infor prides itself on the degree to which its OS integrates with third-party applications. “Even if you would build an application on top of Infor, maybe an AOI platform, it would still respect the security,” Capoccia notes. Once Infor has gathered a customer’s data, its AI and analytics services come into play. “Being able to consume
“You need a different type of storage that allows you to store structured and unstructured data all together in a very cheap way” — Massimo Capoccia, Senior Vice President Infor OS, Technology
w w w.i nfor. com
11
C O M PA N Y FACT S
•●19 of the top 20 aerospace companies •●9 of the top 10 high tech companies ● •●18 of the 25 largest US healthcare delivery networks •●18 of the 20 largest US cities
12
•●19 of the top 20 automotive suppliers •●17 of the top 20 industrial distributors •●15 of the top 20 global retailers •●4 of the top 5 brewers •●17 of the top 20 global banks •●9 of the 10 largest global hotel brands •●8 of the top 10 global luxury brands
and leverage analytics and business intelligence across all of an enterprise’s back-end systems is definitely key,” says Pascaretta. “So we leverage our Infor Birst Analytics platform that is designed to optimize complex business processes. The idea is that it’s faster time to value and it’s deployed in the cloud. So once you have that data together, being able to see into the data and leverage analytics and business intelligence around it is definitely critical.” Named after the inspiring physicist and mathematician Katherine Coleman Johnson, whose trail-blazing work helped NASA land on the moon, Infor’s Coleman AI platform represents a giant leap for artificial intelligence at scale. This platform allows users to retrieve, analyse and leverage data into business decisions such as preventative maintenance, inventory optimization and inventory predictions. The Infor Coleman AI platform also recognizes patterns in behavior to help businesses automate processes like purchasing. “Every time multiple users ask a question, we’ll apply machine learning to optimize the answers back to the users,” Capocw w w.i nfor. com
13
INFOR, USA
$3.1bn+ Approximate revenue
2002
Year founded
15,000+
14
Approximate number of employees
cia explains. Coleman’s automation
“We really believe in offering complete
services also extend to ordering and
solutions, both on the platform and on
invoicing. To transfer paper invoices to
the application. So if a functionality is
a digital format for Coleman, Infor has
not really our core, we partner with a
partnered with Ephesoft for its ocular
third party,” says Capoccia.
character recognition (OCR) needs. With such a strong focus on propri-
“HCL Technologies is another one of our great strategic partners, not only
etary software, Infor draws a sharp
from an implementation side but also
divide between high investment, high
for next generation digital transforma-
focus in-house products and the use of
tion engineering and delivery,” Pas-
trusted third-party partners also
caretta adds. He explains that HCL
working on the cutting edge of tech.
provides customer-specific engineer-
15
ing expertise when a client wants “to
external users. “Once you have data,
take their technology to the next level”.
being able to unleash and innovate -
The two companies first partnered in
that’s a key thing to what we’re
2015, with HCL dedicating hundreds of
providing,” Pascaretta concludes.
employees to support Infor. 2019 will be an exciting year for Infor, Pascaretta and Capoccia agree. The Infor Data Lake will have a global compliance platform built on top of its existing security systems, and new features on Coleman AI are set to launch, as well as Infor OS support for w w w.i nfor. com
Infor 641 Avenue of the Americas, New York – NY 10011 T +1 866 244 5479 www.infor.com