New York based Infor may not be a household name the way IBM or Microsoft is, but the tech giant has close to 13,000 employees, 70,000 customers and $3B in annual revenue. Infor's main business comes from providing business applications (such as CRM, ERP, HR) to specific industries such as pharmaceutical, aerospace, automotive and healthcare. Leveraging their expertise in these "vertical solutions", they then then develop more granular applications, or micro-verticals. For example, for heathcare they provide solutions in areas like fleet (ambulance) maintenance or nurse scheduling.
My interest in Infor is in the excellent way they have integrated collaboration capabilities directly into their business applications. Rather than just providing an enterprise social network, Infor developed Infor Ming.le, which runs seamlessly across their vertical solutions providing collaboration features directly in the context of where people are working. For example, below you can how an employee can start a conversation directly from within a Sales Order. The post will link back not only to this order, but also to the customer record in CRM and the part number in ERP.
Infor has put a great deal of work into making Infor Ming.le attractive and easy to use. In fact, they created their own in-house design firm named Hook & Loop that is responsible for the overall user experience of Infor Ming.le.
Currently Infor Ming.le is only available on-premises, but a cloud version is planned for Q3 of this year.
Customer Considerations
It is clear that Infor Ming.le has been designed from the ground up to be deeply integrated not just into the look of Infor's business applications, but into the workflow of the way people use them. Existing Infor customers should certainly look at adding Infor Ming.le to the products they currently use, thus enabling employes to stop just working and start working together.
For company's choosing a vendor, Infor is not alone at delivering collaboration capabilities within enterprise applications. Other options include SAP JAM, Oracle Social Network, Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft is starting to provide Yammer integration with Dynamics. When evaluating, look very closely at the level of integration each vendor offers with business applications, the deployment/hosting options, mobile access and extensibility for 3rd party add-on. During your technical evaluation, make sure to read about Infor ION, the architecture behind Infor's business applications and Infor Ming.le collaboration platform.
