03 Nov Inforum Europe – time flies when you’re reinventing a software business
Time flies when you’re turning around a software company.
Remarkably it’s five years since Charles Phillips stepped up as CEO of Infor and kicked off a radical reinvention of a firm that had, over the years, become best known as a collector of other software firms.
But as Phillips put it on day one of the Inforum Europe conference in Paris today:
There’s nothing wrong with a software company that can’t be fixed if you have great products.
Five years on and $2.5 billion in investment later and Infor’s now boasting north of 45 million users in the cloud at 75,000 companies across 96 countries. That includes 17,260 new customers over the five years.
On the product front, much work has been done to unify the Infor portfolio and to place design at its heart, courtesy of the firm’s Hook & Loop operation in New York.
Among the priorities now for the firm is to invest more in a number of areas, including boosting the brand profile of Infor. This hasn’t been a priority to date. That said there has been an uptick in medic coverage over the past 18 months, up 56% in the US and 17% in Europe.
The Infor X upgrade programme has had a good deal of traction, supplemented now by a new offering Lift and Shift. Or as Infor President Stephan Scholl pitches it:
Give us your data center.
We will take your mission critical applications and run them on Infor Cloud Suite. So before you do an expensive hardware refresh, we can get you up and running in 4-6 weeks.
After that ‘Lift’ period, the Shift modernization can take place between two to 24 months, at the user’s own pace. Then from 24 months onwards Infor assumes responsibility for innovation and upgrades.