What was alluded to at the Inforum 2012 conference back in April 2012 (and talked about for the last several months in the media) finally took place on October 18, 2012, when Infor announced the grand opening of its new headquarters in New York City. This move not only announced the vendor’s new “digs,” but also introduced Infor’s new brand. The related press release briefly touched on Hook & Loop—Infor’s new in-house design agency. In addition, Infor revealed the launch of a new ION Experience Center at the operations center in Alpharetta, Georgia, its former HQ. Read the rest of this entry »

Infor today announced that DeltaValve has implemented Infor PLM Discrete, adding to DeltaValve’s existing deployment of Infor SyteLine ERP system. 

In the discrete product lifecycle management space (PLM) space, Infor is not necessarily a best-of-breed stand-alone solution. In fact, it’s quite late to the pure-play PLM party (as opposed to the differentiating capabilities it offers in the process PLM space with Optiva PLM). Read the rest of this entry »

If you still think open source software platforms can’t attract enterprise software solutions, well, think again. Infor is collaborating with Red Hat to deliver Infor’s ERP suite on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Infor has announced the general availability of its Customer Interaction Hub. The solution—built specifically for financial services and telecommunications industries—provides Infor CRM Epiphany Suite users with an organized structure for storing and making visible customer interactions. As part of Infor’s effort to enhance customer experience, the hub displays all client interactions to ensure adequate customer dialogues. Infor’s initiative underlines that they do not intend to neglect their Infor CRM Epiphany Suite in favor of its Saleforce app, Inforce Suite.

Today, at Dreamforce, Infor announced the launch of Inforce Marketing, a marketing automation system developed on the Salesforce Platform. Some of the new functionality includes an improved visibility over leads, costs, results, and revenues; multi-channel support for campaigns that can include e-mail, direct mail, social media, and telemarketing; lead validation and assessment; and reporting and analysis tools that plan, manage, and monitor revenue objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) across each stage of the revenue cycle. I would be interested to know how Infor plans to manage Inforce and Epiphany (its other CRM solution) in parallel.

Part 1 of this blog series started by expressing the “New Infor” sentiments (backed up with concrete examples and rationale) following my recent attendance of Inforum 2012. Then the article provided some historical background and described the lineage of the products that currently form the Infor10 HCM portfolio.

The article also detailed some technical and organizational issues on both the former heritage Infor and Lawson Software’s human resource (HR) and talent management products’ side. In light of these issues, which were discussed in Part 1, it is small wonder that some market observers have wondered whether Infor can make sense out of this daunting inheritance of a portfolio. Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

Swiss investment bank UBS selects cloud-based Oracle’s Fusion Human Capital Management
Industry tags: Finance and Banking
“With extensive worldwide operations, UBS provides its clients with wealth management, asset management, and investment and (in Switzerland) retail banking. A cloud-based HCM solution indeed can be a good option, technically. Traditionally there have been concerns revolving around security and data ownership, which is especially the case for a Swiss financial institution. But as a long-term Oracle customer, USB has elected to deploy cloud-based application across all its operations in over 50 countries to cover about 65,000 employees. I believe the vendor’s reputation was another significant factor in this decision.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

City of Hayward, California selects Tyler’s Munis ERP
Industry tags: Public Administration and Defense
“Hayward’s 25-year-old ERP system was overdue for replacement. The old system cannot meet today’s requirements and lacks much functionality. After scrupulous research and comparison, Hayward settled on the Munis ERP system from Tyler Technologies. The city will deploy multiple modules: financials, HR management, utility billing, content management, and self-service for vendors, clients, and employees. The software vendor will also provide the city with improved everyday business processes in order to increase overall service levels for Hayward residents.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

Kimberly-Clark Professional selects PROS Pricing to support sales
Industry tags: manufacturer of tissues, personal care, and health care products
“Apparently, PROS’ SAP integration capabilities were very important to the manufacturer (a SAP ERP user), as was the vendor’s pricing data science. To increase revenue via optimized pricing was the driving factor here. In addition, PROS has a lot of experience in the paper industry, and it understood the client’s business. The parties were reportedly quite sincere while talking about the project team too. In general, PROS very much promotes a partnership approach, as evidenced by its over 96% renewal rates.”—P.J. Jakovljevic, Principal TEC Analyst

• TEC article (Jan 2012): Two Vendor Execs Discuss the Current B2B Pricing Market (and Its Future)

Read the rest of this entry »

What TEC’s recent in-depth article Waking Up to a “New Day” at Infor hinted, my attendance of Inforum 2012 in late April confirmed. Namely, Infor started out as a traditional acquirer and market consolidator, but that is old news now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions are becoming increasingly important to enterprises in a strategic sense. However, not all PLM products are created equal, especially in light of their different origins. Read the rest of this entry »

The first of week of May marked a flurry of news by up-and-coming cloud enterprise applications vendors. During salesforce.com’s Cloudforce event in Chicago, Kenandy, Inc. announced release 2.0 of Kenandy Social ERP, the first cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system built entirely on Force.com, salesforce.com’s social enterprise cloud computing platform. The new release adds financials and order management to Kenandy’s manufacturing management core, specifically for product companies. Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS & DEPLOYMENTS

European manufacturer of construction chemicals selects IFS Applications
Industry tags: Process manufacturing, mining
“Polish corporation Atlas Group, which operates 18 business entities and 5 mines in Poland and internationally, has selected IFS Applications as its corporate-level ERP system. The first areas slated for implementation will be financials, distribution, manufacturing, maintenance, controlling elements, consolidation, trade management-commerce portals, WMS, and document and quality management. Atlas Group is a typical “sweet spot” IFS client, as the product provides good functional support, particularly in process manufacturing and mining.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• TEC profile for IFS Applications
• Compare process ERP software now!
• Compare mining software now!
• Press release

Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

The SuperYacht Group selects NetSuite
Industry tags: services industry
“The holding that includes magazine and Web site publishing, event hosting, marketing consultancy, and creative services has consolidated and centralized all its activities on cloud-based NetSuite ERP. The company has replaced its point solutions—solutions that had obviously become too tiny for them. The group has reported increased productivity, compared to operations under old systems, and quicker business processes.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Analyst

• TEC profile for NetSuite
• Press release

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions are becoming increasingly important to enterprises, to a strategic degree. However, not all PLM products are created equal, especially in light of their different origins. Read the rest of this entry »

In this day and age of globalization, ever-shorter new product introduction (NPI) cycles and overall product lifecycles, partner collaboration, and whatnot, product lifecycle management (PLM) software solutions have lately increased their strategic significance to enterprises. In his recent Forbes blog post contribution, PTC’s CEO Jim Heppelmann touts PLM as a new path to shareholder value. He argues that the PLM repository of data should be an enterprise system of record rather than mundane transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP) data. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series articulated the acute need to bring supply chain planning and execution together so that enterprises can react quickly in an informed and confident fashion. The Boston Red Sox‘ September 2011 collapse was used as a poignant example of how even the best long-term planning can be rendered useless if there is no responsiveness during crunch time.

In general, if we know that our plans are inherently wrong to start with – because we can’t forecast and predict accurately – why do we still insist on religiously executing that plan? On the other hand, if you need to make a change, shouldn’t you be able to evaluate the holistic consequences of your decision, especially in these days of scarce credit and working capital?

Read the rest of this entry »