Infor moves to the cloud with innovation and (micro) vertical flavor

We learnt a lot from Infor – as expected – and as pretty much nothing except for sensitive customer information was under NDA – we had a lively tweet stream collected here.

Here are my top 3 takeaways from the fully packed day:

• From Soho to Gramercy Park – A little more than a year ago, Infor presented a new user interface paradigm called Soho – after the hip Manhattan neighborhood. It was the first result of its acquisition of design agency Hook & Look and was a promising new user interface. Contrary to sceptics expectation, Infor managed to bring this user interface to all of their go-forward products – making Infor’s products one of the most consistent user interfacince experiences in the industry. Interestingly Infor is not resting on its laurels and the creative team has come up with a new paradigm – code named Gramercy Park (which, as I learnt, is an even more desirable New York neighborhood). And the new paradigm looks improved to the current Soho paradigm, it’s a responsive design (no surprise) – and operating on very high fidelity across devices. And UI techniques like progressive reduction have not been seen in enterprise software (at least by me) – so far. I was also impressed by the normalization of screen types, a technique that not only helps product development, but also the user as interaction becomes consistent and the application behaves as expected. So credit goes to Infor not to tune Soho with little improvement steps – but to go to the next level of user interface. Few vendors innovate on a new UI after a year or so already.

Picture of the new Infor Gramercy Park UI paradigm

• HCM leads – As expected the most complete and advanced major automation block (Finance, HR, Purchasing, Manufacturing, and CRM) is Infor HCM. With assets from Infor, Lawson, Enwisen, the recent acquisition of Peopleanswers – it is not only a complete HCM suite, but it also has a consistent user interface – one of the few complete HCM suites to feature that. Behind the scenes though a lot of work remains, Infor has largely solved the integration via ION. But again, instead of taking a breath, Infor is actively re-writing key HCM automation functionality on its go to technology stack. Adding more science – as Infor calls it – to the HCM process is a generally welcome addition and differentiating move to HCM. This summer Infor will ship its CloudSuite Corporate product – which is formed by Financials and HCM and will see its HCM suite fully run in production on AWS. A true innovation in the enterprise software space – as no other vendor (to my knowledge) offers to run production of a major automation block on a public cloud service. Even though not all functionality is harmonized and unified, Infor still deserves credit for this innovative move.

Picture of Infor's HCM Marketecture

• From (Microsoft) to Open Source and AWS – As with all vendors with acquired portfolios, Infor has accumulated a staple of technology stacks over time. The most recent consolidation (about 3 or so years ago) was around a Microsoft centric technology stack. But consolidating on a single technology stack is not trivial and Infor did not conclude that process. Instead of that Infor has re-calibrated its technology stack strategy with a focus on open source. COO Murphy ran us through the pro and cons on the database side – and in this area – as in all others – the open source option win out –in this case PostgreSQL / EnterpriseDB. With a JBoss / Tomcat based presentation and application tier and utilization of either AWS for cloud or RedHat for on premises installs, Infor has completely moved to open source on the technology stack side.

Picture of ION capabilites

• At the heart of Infor’s technology stack is ION, which was introduced the other year and started out as a file broker (maybe a not giving it enough credit) that allows Infor and 3rd party applications to declare and transfer data feeds in a XML format. Infor was shrewd to not position ION as more – but now it is becoming more, gaining the capability to also invoke APIs on the data it transports. Worth to mention that these APIs will be able to be invoked both locally and remotely. And this makes a lot of sense for Infor, given the expected hybrid deployment scenario of their customers. But it also means that Infor no longer has to replicate functionality, but can start putting functionality into one place and maintain it in one place only, too. This next release of ION is supposed to ship summer this year. And with that ION becomes more than ever the key integration technology for Infor customers. 

MyPOV