Infor goes after Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft's new purchase Yammer with Social Space

Infor is gearing up to compete in the fast growing enterprise collaboration market, launching a new application called Social Space this month.

In an interview with V3, Infor president Duncan Angove said the application will be available as a module within the Infor10 Workspace, an offering geared at giving users a unified interface across Infor applications.

Infor Workspace, described by Angove as "in-context business intelligence" allows users to automatically see information relevant to their role in the business. With Social Space, users will be able to quickly share this specific information with their colleagues through the click of a button, he added.

"The core part of the social networking product will be a news feed that will unify both people and processes," said Angove.

"It's similar to what Salesforce did with Chatter. Users will be able to easily share their ERP screens, for example, by right clicking and choosing the option to share on their news feeds."

Social Space, which Infor has been working on since last November, will also allow users to form groups, said Angove.

Other enterprise social networks can be integrated with Social Space, he added, including Yammer.

The release of Social Space follows news last week of Microsoft's plans to purchase Yammer for $1.2bn.

Angove also outlined Infor's current product roadmap.

"This year Infor will be shipping 102 new applications for enterprises, more than ever before," he said. Many of these applications will be industry-specific applications and mobile, he added.

At the end of 2012, the next version of Infor10 will be shipped.

"In the last 12 months, Infor has hired 600 business engineers in order to give the next major release a tonne more industry specific functionality.

"There will also be more integration to third party applications like SAP and Oracle," said Angove.

"Expect more cloud applications, more mobile, more social networking and a big push around analytics."