Infor's ambitions

May 11, 2007 from ITBusiness.ca – “Infor Global Solutions was only founded about five years ago by a group of investors from Golden Gate Capital, but it has used that time to purchase close to 20 smaller companies. This includes the takeover last August of SSA Global, which owned the Baan product line, for US$1.4 billion, and more recently Toronto's Workbrain, a human capital management company, for about US$227 million. Infor now claims more than 70,000 customers, 8,100 employees and US$2.1 billion in annual revenues, putting it in third place in the overall business applications market...

Instead, Infor is developing what Frichol called Open SOA, a services-oriented architecture that will provide interoperability between Infor's products and those of other vendors…”

“Customers don't want to hear there's a migration strategy, a convergence strategy or those types of things. They want to continue with their product line essentially unchanged,” Frichol said. “We are not attempting to smash the products together into a single solution set.”

180 View – Infor also includes Visual Manufacturing, Syteline, Mapics, Systems Union, GEAC and many other systems. Infor speaks of continuing to invest in these systems and building links between the systems so that they can work together and complement each other. However, there is a lot of overlap between systems, and Infor will need to better explain their product roadmap.