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.