Partners – who needs partners
One thing that Infor do not seem to have is technology partners, bucking the trend in the industry that may well see them falter at some point. With the purchase of Saleslogix they now have a CRM solution that has seen their nascent partnership with Salesforce and Inforce seemingly left to flounder.
Infor are starting to get traction with the large SI’s but it is interesting that there have been no conversations with other companies such as Microsoft. The only exception being AWS, who they seem to have an extremely close relationship with as they host their solutions.
The relationship with IBM also seems solid but one does wonder what the future holds as their traditional AS400 based solutions may well migrate eventually into the AWS cloud. This lack of partnerships is a risk, many companies will see benefits in adopting an approach that sees them take cloud solutions from multiple companies, spreading the risk between different solution providers. It also make its easier to migrate from one to another if required.
It will be interesting to see whether this attitude changes over the next few months though after talking to Stephan Scholl, it doesn’t seem likely.
Conclusion
The big issue for Infor is brand awareness. Even in the IT industry they are not that well known. They are starting to rectify that with advertising in the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal and expect more soon. With 45 million users in the cloud already they cannot be discounted and once they have delivered a few marquee clients on their HCM solution then Workday, Oracle and SAP may start to treat them more seriously. At the moment there seem to be dismissive of them, it is a risk that they may well regret.
If Infor can deliver their new financial application on time, and there is no reason to suspect they won’t then they could be seen to be a threat to the No 2 position that Oracle holds. For the moment though there is a long way to go, but with companies like Flextronics and Ferrari using their software and bigger deals to be announced expect to see a lot more brand advertising over the next few months. CIO’s should expect to see both their channel and direct sales force knocking on their door soon too.
Workday already has HCM firmly embedded in the market and its financial application is starting to gather momentum, Infor will become a serious threat as they bring their products out and it may be that we are witnessing two new giants of the ERP industry. The question is whether there is room for four of them.
The fifth, Netsuite has been steadily growing momentum as well, obtaining larger and larger deals as awareness of its products is wider known, the next few months and years should be interesting. If Oracle were to buy Netsuite as their next generation application and put the might of their sales and marketing teams and development strength behind it then that would be one way for Oracle to stop the rot that many commentators seem to believe may be happening.
