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IN TERVI EW
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CHARLES PHILLIPS
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s recently as last year, Infor was still being described as one of the biggest companies you have never heard of. Despite global sponsorship deals with top golfers, basketball teams and tennis stars, Infor’s PR machine had not elevated it to the dizzy heights some of its numbers suggest it should have attained. However, the recent announcement of a second stage of significant funding from their long-time backers, Koch Industries, could catapult Infor into the big league with a mega-money IPO, potentially valuing the company at $50bn - maybe more - making Infor the biggest NYC tech IPO in history. Established in 2002, Infor has grown, almost silently, to become the world’s third largest ERP vendor behind the mighty Oracle and SAP. And while under the stewardship of Charles Phillips, a former Oracle board executive, it has developed a vast array of products that has seen global sales push beyond $3bn. Infor boasts a customer base of 68,000 companies supported by more than 15,000 employees and nearly 2,000 partners globally.
Micro-verticals Infor’s approach to building applications is unique - it has hundreds of product lines serving ‘microverticals’ with solutions optimised specifically for each business class. For example, instead of a product for the food and beverage sector, Infor offers discrete products for butchers, bakers and maybe even candlestick makers. Each product is embedded with specific insights amassed from other similar users to create a solution for everyone that is almost as personal as your fingerprint. ERP Today discusses the changing notion of customisation in ERP platforms elsewhere, but with this unique take on vertical centricity, Infor is changing the game with a suite of applications born in the cloud that offer tried and tested processes to organisations that historically had to rely on heavy local customisations to retain their competitive advantage. Infor applications are built on a proprietary single-stack operating system which is integrated with all of the function-
Under the stewardship of Charles Phillips Infor has developed a vast array of products that has seen global sales push beyond $3bn 42
E R P T O D AY
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ality across its portfolio including applications, document management, CRM, eCommerce and analytics.
Multi-tenant cloud Although SaaS is developing some degree of maturity it is still a very fluid sector. Most of the action is taking place in the infrastructure layer rather than in core applications. Cloud comes in many forms; public or private, SaaS, IaaS or PaaS, hybrid-cloud, single-tenant and multi-tenant – to name just a few. At the beginning, cloud was usually a singletenant private offering where a single instance of the software and infrastructure served just one unique customer. Essentially, everyone who was on the cloud was on their own little piece of internet with no connectivity to other cloud users and no sharing of instances and environments. More recently, multi-tenant clouds have become popular with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of customers sharing the same applications, infrastructure and databases, but with each parties’ data isolated and invisible to the others.
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he benefits of a multi-tenanted cloud are obvious; lower costs through economies of scale, updates rolled out across all users with virtually zero downtime and elasticity that provides a level playing field for enterprises of all sizes, being just three. Infor has led the way in the adoption of multi-tenanted architecture and Phillips sees this as a key advantage over his nearest rivals. He said: “We launched a multi-tenant strategy in 2015 and now we have all of our core solutions and cloud suites fully multi-tenanted. It’s not just one or two applications, it’s the full cloud suite and environments. This drives significant efficiencies for our customers in terms of costs, time to implement and provides monthly updates across the full spectrum of applications to all customers, at the same time.”
European eco-system Despite being headquartered in New York, more than 40 percent of Infor’s business is based in Europe. The company has seen its SaaS revenue grow by 36 percent in the last year and can now boast some very impressive names as its European customers; BAE Systems, Travis Perkins and Liberty Steel have all adopted Infor’s full suite of technology and gaining traction in this sector is breaking new ground for Infor. In the past it had been seen
