Speaking to a reported 5,000 Infor and legacy Lawson customers, the former Oracle president introduced a new and veteran executive team that includes Melanie Lougee, product strategist for HR service delivery; Duncan Angove, president of products and support; Soma Somasundaram, SVP of global product development.
Phillips also announced a mix of product upgrades for business intelligence, collaborative and social applications, localization and more baked into the Infor10 Suite. The company has also built several mobile applications, user interfaces and connecters on its ION middleware platform.
Infor10 ION Intelligence adds context relevant BI features into the remade ION Workspace interfaces used in conjunction with other Infor10 applications, making relevant information available without specific user training, the company said. Advanced analytics and reporting were also announced but not detailed.
Paul Hamerman, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says Infor’s BI platform for operational reporting coming out of applications is based on Cognos 10, and Infor also supports a proprietary analytic reporting platform within-memory OLAP.
“They are also creating a lot of prepackaged dashboards so they have more content in context around the BI strategy,” Hamerman says. “There they can render KPIs and other metrics similar to what Oracle has been doing in its suite.”
On the collaboration, sharing and social front, the new ION Workspace is a contextual environment for networking and role-based information.
Infor also announced a new version of the Lawson Talent Management application and a new CRM Interaction Advisor for its customer relationship management suite based on Epiphany. The company also updated an interactive relationship connecting Infor applications with Salesforce.com.
Infor President and former Lawson CEO Stephan Scholl talked about business gains at privately-held Infor, where he said revenues are near $3 billion, customers number more than 70,000 and the company has experienced multiple consecutive quarters of double digit growth. Lawson and Infor were “officially” combined earlier this month and the company is the third largest provider of enterprise applications after Oracle and SAP.
“Charles Phillips has made some significant changes to the strategy,” says Hamerman. “They have changed their image a bit in that the perception and reality is they own a bunch of acquired products, but they’ve beefed up their software development for connectors and wrappers and UIs and even new applications.”
The company says it is spending more than $300 million in R&D this year and will deliver almost three times as many features as were introduced in 2010.
Jim Ericson is editorial director of Information Management, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jimericson.
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