Infor set for push into cloud and big data analytics

Infor's entire enterprise relationship management (ERP) software portfolio will be available as software-as-a-service applications from 2012, as the firm extends its partnership with Salesforce while expanding its own Mongoose cloud development platform.

Infor president Duncan Angrove said in an interview with V3 that the company will also make a push into the big data analytics market in January.

The Infor cloud partnership with Salesforce was announced in September when the two firms launched InForce, a set of Infor ERP applications that runs on Salesforce's Force.com cloud platform and integrates with Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

The Infor applications launched at the time included Order Management, Marketing and CRM Epiphany.

Angrove said that Infor will soon release a native sales application for Force.com, and "release any other sales and marketing applications on the same Salesforce platform".

"Meanwhile we will use our own cloud platform, Mongoose, to make our other applications available in a cloud environment," he added.

Angrove explained that Infor will release a big data analytics product in January, which will be based on a partnership with the open source Hadoop project.

The product will use the Infor ION suite, released in September, to integrate data from Infor and non-Infor applications, including information that flows from social media streams.

Angrove said that the information will then be copied into Hadoop and analysed, partly through Infor's own in-memory business intelligence technology.

Angrove also said in the interview that the company will continue to develop its latest flagship product, Infor10, in an industry-specific direction. Infor10 is the firm's first fully integrated enterprise suite of ERP applications.

"Infor10 will continue to be specialised industry by industry because we believe the next wave of growth in the software market will be industry specific. We find that a lot of the investment customers make in software is on bespoke development and we aim to fill in these gaps for them," he said.

"The rest of the industry is not focused on this. They are either focused on creating in-memory databases or on the next version of the mainframe."

Angrove added that the Infor business has seen a big change in the past 12 months now that it has a new management team and strategy.

"We are the third largest enterprise applications software company after SAP and Oracle, but not many people have heard of us as we previously had the wrong strategy," he said.

"We used to focus on the mid-market and, because we were privately held, we were not really picked up in the financial press."

Angrove explained that the company has seen double-digit licence growth in the past year and added 2,500 new customers.

Infor has recently been showing off Infor10 at a roadshow event that visited 25 cities around the world.

"We used to focus on individual products but we realised the market needed a suite of integrated software and we wanted to show this off," said Angrove.