Infor is nowadays covered by media and analyzed by many businessmen because of the direction in which it is going. When compared with other cloud service providers on the market at the moment, Infor CEO Charles Phillips decided to take a new direction, one that has a truly huge potential and that was never actually glorified by anyone so far. Even Infor CEO Phillips’ wife saw this as a large risk. However, it is definitely a risk that paid itself out because of the success that was achieved.
What Is So Shocking With Infor?
In business we tend to see companies that play it safe. This is quite normal. Infor decided not to play it safe and tap into a previously uncharted market. The focus that was put on the retail industry is not something that was necessarily new but it was never something that was handed on at a unique level. We basically mean that Infor wants to use the products that were delivered in order to offer exactly what these companies need.
The common approach is to basically try to cover the companies that were covered by others in the past. This is what brings in safety. When you try to convince people to use something that they did not in the past you may end up faced with problems.
How Did Infor Succeed?
Since we are faced with something that is quite new, what is really interesting is figuring out how Infor managed to be successful on the long run with the new strategy. The premise was incredibly simple. Instead of developing new apps and creating standard feature packages, Infor created customized service processes and acquired smaller companies that already developed the services that Infor needed.
The idea behind the really aggressive investments was to simply create something that was perfect for small to medium sized companies working in the retail industry. Specific applications were created to help those firms that do operate in specific parts of retail. For instance, CloudSuite offers a set of applications that run through the internet and that do bring in the features needed only by companies in the fashion industry. This set is not going to be good for companies in the Pharma industry. For that part of the retail market Infor offers a different set of features.
Conclusions
Infor is a prime example of a company that does not shy away from taking risks. It is something that is really important at the moment in a market that can only be described as being tricky to navigate. Charles Phillips had a really interesting vision that did lead to success. There is basically no way to duplicate this success because of Infor being the real innovator in this part of cloud computing.
In the future we do expect to see Infor growing and getting closer and closer to the level at which market giants like SAP and Oracle are. Many specialists even think that Infor is going to be stronger in cloud computing when compared with these two.
