Infor has been around for a very long time, but it actually only became a real player when Charles Phillips Infor CEO made it his affair. Before Phillips, Infor was reluctant to embrace new technology and wanted nothing to do with the cloud. After Phillips, Infor turned all that around. In fact, the cloud is just one of the bold moves that Infor has made. They have committed to working together with Amazon Web Service to do this, using Cloudsuite.
According to Phillips, going on Amazon using Cloudsuite is really going to set them apart from today. It means they are one of the first companies of its kind to truly move to the cloud with its full infrastructure, instead of only a few operations. Committing to the cloud on such a large skill is risky, but it will bring about some significant benefits. One of those is that Infor doesn’t have to build its own data center, which means they can keep the prices lower as well.
Cloud companies usually start by building a data center. In fact, that is often the main investment for new companies. Infor, instead, will build a relationship with Amazon, which will also ensure that Infor doesn’t have to deal with the data sovereignty issues that many are dealing with. All of these happenings with AWS provide cost optimization for the companies. AWS can really help with saving a lot of money, mostly by not having costly server centers.
Not Everyone Is Happy
Moving everything onto the cloud is a move that hasn’t made everybody happy. Some businesses are conservative by nature, and see the cloud as nothing but a system over which they have no control, and that others can easily hack in to. Phillips understands this, and wants to ensure customers understand that on premise solutions will continue to exist. However, what he does not want to do is enable clients to create their own cloud, in a way that Hewlett Packard has done. If they do this, then they will also start to want customizations, and they will need to upgrade as and when it is right for them. What Infor wants is to develop Software as a Service (SaaS), in which there is no room for this.
How to Convince Clients
What Phillips wants prospective cloud clients to do is to forget about the apps they have right now, which have been customized and customized again. Rather, he wants them to look at what the business processes they need are, and will then build a demo based on that. By using the demo, people can see for themselves whether or not it will work for them.
Infor is making big changes, and with big changes come big ripples. But Phillips is happy to ride those ripples and he has his team behind him for that. Plus, it seems that his strategy is working, because at his latest report, the tipping point between in house applications and SaaS applications was at 50/50, and he expects it will soon tip in the favor of SaaS overall. It seems that when Phillips says he will do something, he will do it.