Andrew White

Some of my colleagues just published a note updating users on Infor’s recent user group (see Inforum 2008: The Infor Brand Emerges?) .  Did you say, “who’s Infor?”  Despite its age, Infor is a $2bn+ business applications vendor that has, over several years, acquired multiple ERP, CRM, SCM and PLM offerings.  See archived research Infor Acquisitions Form Major Business Applications Company published in 2006.  Today the vendor sells across the globe into numerous industries across distribution, process and discrete sectors.  However, the name Infor remains less visible than many of the individual brands the vendor has acquired.

I have only looked at the vendor’s SCM, analytics, and MDM technologies.  In the SCM market the vendor sports some pretty good, even best of breed, capability, that heralds back to the companies founding.  Agilisys was formed out of the spin-off of the SCP engine that was part of SCT Adage, a process ERP/manufacturing vendor.  Agilisys, originally a niche SCP vendor, became Infor.  Later acquisitions have led to the consumption of a discrete best of breed SCP engine also, originally known as Mercia Software (a vendor I had interviewed with way back in time, though I turned them down in order to move to the US).  Other acquisitions have led to some other interesting offerings, though some not neatly aligned to the two SCP offerings already mentioned.  Thru-Put Technologies was an old “drum, buffer, rope” engine (think The Goal) designed to optimize discrete product scheduling, that had been acquired by MAPICS, that was itself acquired by SSA.  So Infor now owns that IP but alas it remains focused in-plant, and not yet applied to distribution. 

Analytics, or more precisely, Performance Management (that is, the embedding of analytics and business intelligence capability inside the business process) and MDM remain challenges.  Admittedly these would be challenges for any vendor that has acquired so many different applications each with their own architecture.  Infor has an interesting approach to supporting analytics (see the note above) but certainly has changed, for the better, its views on MDM.  When I started talking to Infor about MDM (June 2005) MDM was a lower priority, even following the foundation of a SOA strategy.  Back then I said that this approach looked odd; how could an architect settle on an SOA strategy that promised cross department/application integration and composition, without some notion of an end-to-end (interoperable data model?  Not 12 months later, MDM had moved up the priority list at Infor, and even now, is a much higher priority for the vendor.  This is no criticism of the vendor; this question comes up many, many times in end user conversations.  Infor was, and is, reflective of how our mutual customers view this technology.  Thankfully Infor is now more able to participate in the conversation with its users about how it can help in this area.

Bottom Line: MDM, as part of a methodical and broad EIM strategy, should precede and/or be part of, any broad SOA strategy.  See When SOA Breaks, What Then? and SCM Vendors Support Master Data Management as a Precursor to SOA.