Privately-held enterprise applications firm Infor says it saw organic licence revenue growth of 17% in the 12 months to the end of November, and 16% organic licence growth in its most recent quarter.
The acquisitive firm has a largely new management team including former Oracle president Charles Phillips who took Infor’s reins as CEO in October 2010. Since then the focus has been not only on acquisitions – the firm’s backers acquired Lawson in October last year – but also on accelerating internal product development.
"Infor now has one of the largest engineering organisations in the world dedicated to innovating in business applications," said Phillips. "Business processes have become more complex and dynamic while most of the software industry’s investment drifted to infrastructure. Customers are responding to Infor’s tidal wave of new industry features, consumer-grade user interfaces, and Infor10 pre-integrated suites."
In a recent interview with CBR, Phillips said: "The main focus is accelerating the roadmaps and delivering products more quickly, modernising applications and delivering mobile technology in areas that people didn’t expect. In the past 10 months we have shipped more new features than the company had seen in the past three to four years – that type of acceleration in terms of innovation."
In all, four executives from Oracle took senior management roles at Infor. "One of the good things about having a team that’s worked together for a long time that has similar approaches is we make decisions quickly, and we all believe that the pace of business and decision-making has to be faster. It’s a way we can differentiate ourselves," Phillips said.
As well as the rapid integration of Lawson into the Infor business, the other major news on the product front recently was the launch in September of Infor 10. It wasn’t just the improvements to the ERP product that was newsworthy, but also the news around ION Suite, claimed to be a lightweight middleware layer built into the software that helps to ease any integration challenges customers would otherwise face.
What is not said, at least publicly, is that this is also clearly designed to outmanoeuvre Oracle’s Fusion Middleware and SAP’s NetWeaver middleware lines.
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In the last 12 months Infor says it has added 2,500 new customers and expanded its relationship with over 12,000 existing customers.
The firm said that EBITDA margins improved to 27%, and new customer additions and support subscriptions accelerated. Growth in Infor’s core ERP business in the second fiscal quarter was up 25% over the previous year, the company said. Full financials that are required of fully publicly-held companies were not disclosed.
Read an in-depth feature with Infor CEO Charles Phillips here.
