Infor is a different kind of software company -- four years old with 30+ years’ experience. There’s a consistent 95% customer retention rate (one of the highest in the industry) and 72% of licence revenues are generated by the company’s current customers. And with 25% of its 70,000 customers on iSeries, Infor is home to some major iSeries vendors, such as Geac/JBA, BPCS, Mapics, plus other smaller solutions.

In fact, Infor is the world’s third largest provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, with some $2.1bn in revenue, and the 10th largest software company in the world. The company obtains 41% of its revenues from Europe, principally Germany, UK, Benelux and France, with iSeries contributing “about 25%.”

Other key areas of software applications include supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), corporate performance management (CPM) and enterprise asset management (EAM).

Now, Infor is to help advance enterprise software application interoperability through its membership and board of directors position with Open Applications Group, Inc., a not-for-profit organisation focused on developing independent standards that improve the state of application integration worldwide.

“Our membership with OAGi highlights Infor’s commitment to the development and pursuit of open standards for enterprise applications,” says Bruce Gordon, chief technology officer of Infor. “Utilising the OAGi standards for communication between our solutions and third-party applications reduces implementation time; so further lowering our total cost of ownership.”

Most enterprise software is unable to seamlessly communicate with other applications. A lack of standards complicates implementations, leading to time consuming integration of third party applications and customer involvement, which unnecessarily occupies valuable IT resources.

“Infor is a leader in providing software for the enterprise,” says David Connelly, CEO of the Open Applications Group. “We look forward to its leadership on our Open Applications Group board of directors and standards development workgroups.”

“Using service-oriented architecture, SOA, we are embarking on projects to service enable business processes and have prepared a blueprint on how a common environment will operate,” says Gordon. “We are using OAG to do work with us. The blueprint involves looking at what precise data management is needed for solutions. We are looking at separating products to match the blueprint, so there’ll be iSeries SOA and open series SOA, but with the same SOA,” he adds.

“We are introducing an iSeries centre of excellence,” says Morgan. “JBA and Mapics form one virtual team, and BPCS and Infinium are in another, for example, and we are to bring them all together under the umbrella of one large team. It’s a move forward to stop having people building extensions to the software.”

“The JBA System 21 field service management module and pricing and promotion in BPCS for example, which are far superior to the applications residing in other systems, are being upgraded and encapsulated, to be made available to other iSeries-based customers,” says Gordon. “Where components in one family are better than others, by applying SOA methodology each can be offered to all our customers.”

The Power architecture in Mapics is being adopted by Infor as its common architecture. Training up of UK company staff is proceeding at Studeley near Birmingham over a three month period.

Having made over 25 acquisitions in the last 54 months, Infor is not resting on its laurels and has not finished on the acquisition trail. There’s very much a policy of build, buy or partner, with organic growth expected to make 10-12% of business this year and for the next two years. “We look at potential acquisitions from three angles,” says Gordon. “We’ll identify any weaknesses, seek intellectual property and products, then target to buy intellectual property and products. Next, we might need to get geographical reach. Finally, there’s vertical specialities and expertise.”

Building on that, Infor wants to see revenues of $3bn within two fiscal years and chairman and CEO Jim Schaper wants $4bn soon thereafter. Indeed, the plan is to be in the top five global software companies, if not the top three. This, of course, bodes well for all things System i, and Infor is working with IBM on several projects.

Gordon points to Mapics and how existing customers told the company what they were looking for from Infor. “We launched Mapics XA onto the Power architecture and one year after buying the company, we’ve grown revenues 50% quarter by quarter on licence revenue from both existing and new customers,” says Gordon. Listening to customers obviously pays.