Infor Moves Into Government With Hansen Acquisition

May 16, 2007 from AMR Research – “Given Infor’s current size and desire to grow, it was only a matter of time until it looked to nonmanufacturing industries. For its first several years, Infor targeted the manufacturing and distribution industries, buying software companies with a strong presence in the industry: Geac, Lilly, and Mapics. It then turned to distribution industries with the daly.commerce, NxTrend, and Aperum acquisitions. The company supplemented all these purchases with additional supply chain functionality, such as demand planning from Mercia. Then came the acquisition of SSA, which doubled Infor’s size.

The most recent acquisitions have been for products and customer bases that are strong within the service industry segments: enterprise asset management (EAM) vendor Datastream, financials and performance management provider Extensity, and workforce management application vendor Workbrain. With Hansen, Infor gets an extensive set of public entity operations capabilities for managing building permits, business licenses, parks and recreation, water distribution, and sewerage.”

180 View - When we seek solutions from Infor for our manufacturing clients, it’s difficult to know which one is the best suited. At least when it comes to public sector operations, it won’t be confusing which of Infor’s products to consider.

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.

Who is the No. 3 enterprise software company? You may be surprised

November 21, 2006 from Baseline Magazine - “SAP and Oracle have the top two spots nailed down, but who's next? SAS Institute? CA? Sage Group? Microsoft? How about Infor Global Solutions?

If that name registered a complete blank, you would be far from alone. Infor, which is headquartered in Atlanta, claims to be the third biggest enterprise software company in the world, but it has an identity—or lack of identity—problem.

Over the past four years, the venture capital-backed private company has quietly snapped up a host of players in the enterprise software market—some with familiar names, like SSA Global, Mapics, Epiphany, Extensity, Geac, Systems Union and Formation Systems. Infor has forged a collection of primarily mid-market players into a sizable conglomerate with annual revenue of about $2.2 billion, says chief executive Jim Schaper.

180 View – We think that Infor has a lot of great products. The question is what happens to these products in the future. And just as importantly, what happens to the key developers of the software. Speaking from personal (Michael Burns) experience, software is like a baby to the people that build it. They spend countless nights working on the system, take pride when it works well and will do whatever it takes to make it better. Often in these acquisitions, the key people find themselves with a severance check or sitting in the corner with no responsibility as the new team has taken over. When this happens, the software system will not be long for this world.

Systems Union is acquired by Infor

August 3, 2006 from Computer Business Review – “Extensity was created in March 2006 following the acquisition of Geac Computer Corp Ltd by Infor's backer Golden Gate Capital. Geac's ERP assets were consumed by Infor while its financial and business-performance software was used as the basis for the newly formed Extensity. At the time the Geac assets were split as a consequence of Infor's commitment to supplying ERP for selected verticals within the manufacturing and distribution sectors. It was felt performance-management represented a different class of application that did not have a home within Infor. The decision to bring the assets into the Infor business suggests a changing belief system, although Infor described it as an acceleration of its strategy.

Meanwhile, Extensity was in the process of acquiring Systems Union Group, a UK-based provider of financial and performance management solutions. Infor has continued with and concluded the Systems Union transaction so now it is also part of the Infor business.

"We are broadening our offering to include solutions that will enable our customers to improve performance throughout the organization," said Jim Schaper, chairman and CEO of Infor. "Companies can now choose fully integrated solutions for specific industries as well as best-in-class standalone solutions from one provider."

This trio of acquisitions means Infor will now have annual revenue of $2.1bn and approximately 70,000 customers, and will be the undisputed leader in terms of market share and revenue within the growing mid-market sector. It will also have something like 40 different applications, using different code bases and system architectures, and the cost of backing its "never sunset an application" policy.

The Atlanta, Georgia-based company has also added substantial debt to its balance sheet. The two-stage transaction was financed through a combination of cash on balance sheet and committed debt financing. The aggregate facilities are comprised of a $150m revolving credit facility, a $2.25bn term loan facility, and a $1.425bn senior subordinated bridge facility.”

180 View – It’s too bad that Systems Union was not able to survive on its own. Hopefully it will be one of the survivors in the Infor world of software.

Infor Buys SSA Global

May 16, 2006 from AMR Research - "This is a bold but risky move by Infor. There has not been a successful consolidator vendor in the software market to date; just look at Geac and Computer Associates...

The combined companies represent $1.6B in revenue. Infor is expected to pay $19.50 a share for SSA, a 25% premium over Friday’s closing numbers. This all-cash deal is expected to close in the next 90 to 100 days, assuming the SEC doesn’t get involved. We expect the 37,000 joint customers of SSA and Infor to receive this news with very mixed emotions. Even though SSA had to incorporate several acquisitions itself, it did a better job of rolling out an architectural platform and communicating its long-term development plans than Infor did. Any new acquisition creates some disruption to the customer base. This acquisition, significant enough to dilute senior management attention, puts at risk development plans and strategies of both customer sets.

The hard work will be the rationalization of a mix of supply chain and ERP products with the combined SSA and Infor. Infor now owns the former BPCS, Baan, Prism, Protean, Infinium, BRAIN, SCT, Lilly, and MAPICS ERP products. In addition, its supply chain products include EXE, NxTrend, daly.commerce, and Mercia. Finally, add to those products an asset management product from Datastream, and you have some product lines that are complementary, but some that are competing and overlapping as well."

180 View - Infor has acquired a hodge podge of systems. Although some of them are highly regarded, questions remain about their future. Unless Infor dispels the concerns, the real winners will be Infor's competitors who pick up new clients unsatisfied with the new owners.