I’m sorting through dozens of pages of notes from last March’s Infor analyst conference, and trying to find the hook for a blog post that will shine that revelatory ray of light on the present and future prospects for enterprise software’s best kept secret.
Turns out that’s harder than it may seem. The problem with Infor is that they are doing pretty much everything right. I like how they are approaching the major issues of the day, such as AI and IoT, by being practical and proscriptive, instead of pie-in-the-sky and DYI. I like their approach to the cloud, and the degree of services they are planning on providing as they work hard to shift their feckless customer base out of the 20th century and into the modern era. I especially like the micro-vertical approach: The customer stories we heard at the conference were replete with descriptions of industry-specific functionality that helped Infor’s customers do those specific things that make all the difference in a world trying to balance the need to standardize where it makes the most sense and differentiate where it has the most impact.
There was no especially interesting hook coming from a review of the Infor team that presented to us, there was only one lightweight among them (no names, please), and several very impressive new stars. The core issues of ROI and TCO were also well-handled: Infor and its customers talked a lot about value, and when one of their financials customers opined that “the full implementation with Infor was less than an upgrade to Oracle,” the story was both credible and revealing.
And so, my dilemma. What do you say about the company that says it all? Then I realized there still is that one big lacuna in the whole story: marketing. This is still a company that is largely either not known at all or is known as the biggest and baddest serial roll-up company in my favorite website, ERP graveyard. Infor who? To his credit, CEO Charles Phillips also began the process of addressing the marketing problem by putting his newly hired CMO, Ashley Hart, on the spot and on stage at the very end of the summit to say hello. And not much else because, as she admitted, she was a) only a few minutes on the job, and b) hadn’t expected to be singled out to speak to the analysts.
That’s fine, discretion under the circumstances is much better than pretending that this big a problem can be sussed out right away and tackled with a couple of easy sound bites. But it’s no secret that the marketing side of Infor’s growth and success is the one big thing that really needs help. It was fine to fly under the radar during the rebuilding phase – rationalizing a zillion disparate brands, products, industries and customer bases into a single cohesive company with a single cohesive strategy was no small feat. Indeed, Phillips’ ability to corral all these assets and people into a holistic strategy is one of the more impressive CEO feats I’ve ever seen.
The more I look at it, driving a new marketing strategy and building brand awareness won’t necessarily be as complex as building a single Infor out of a graveyard full of legacy brands, but it will be just as important. Maybe more so.
Infor is entering the big leagues at a moment when selling enterprise software is changing from a CIO-sale to a line of business sale, from a tech sale to a solution sale, and from an on-premise sale to a cloud sale. Which means that what cinched the deal for Infor back when it was SSA, or Lawson, or Invensys, or Baan, or Marcam, or ASK, or Intentia – you get my drift – is so different today as to be indistinguishable.
Selling isn’t the only thing that’s changed, marketing has too. Targeting a multitude of personas and influencers, using metrics to track costs and results, making sure omnichannel doesn’t mean one size fits all – there is a whole world of newness in marketing that Infor frankly hasn’t really been visibly tracking for the last few years. Deliberately – Phillips knows that investing too early would have been a waste.
But now is clearly is the time.
What’s in Infor’s corner? Phillips himself, for starters. Tech marketing is a personality play, whether it’s Satya or Marc or Larry or Anil or Sergei or Mark Z, tech company leadership is part of the game itself, and companies whose CEOs are on a first name basis with their markets are definitely in a leadership position. That’s an important reason why IBM is hurting, Ginny (Ginny-who?) Rometti has somehow eschewed playing this role. Some other companies I know but won’t mention are also starting see that their lack of first name recognition is a problem to be solved or else. (Send me your guesses, there’s a prize for the winner.)
I think Charles Phillips could definitely cash in on this opportunity: he’s not a wild man like Marc, so don’t expect Woodstock-like conferences and endless celebrity speakers. Charles is more the careful, thoughtful type like Satya. And he’s hugely credible, a great speaker, a standout leader, and as well known in the industry to insiders as anyone. He just needs to be known as well to outsiders too.
The Koch Industries investment and partnership is also huge. I wrote about how big a deal this is last summer, and I don’t think the bigness has diminished a bit. The only problem I foresee is that Infor needs its Koch implementations to be hugely successful so that they can serve as reference customers on the keynote stage and in more closed-door customer meetings.
And therein lies a problem: Implementation culture across the enterprise software market is historically a culture of mediocrity, and that culture is only getting more mediocre as the move to the cloud strains the talent pool of partners and internal consultants alike. Infor can’t afford to mess up these early wins at Koch, nor can they afford to let the global systems integrators, who have only recently engaged with the Infor ecosystem, muck up Infor’s cloud implementations the way they are doing across the industry – delivering mediocrity and tons of trouble tickets that end up straining vendor/PaaS providers’ tech support resources. Unfortunately, in the cloud, and that’s Infor’s cloud and anyone else’s cloud, there’s so much at stake and too little control for safety.
The company’s micro-vertical industry strategy is another fantastic opportunity to tell a uniquely Infor story, and one that dovetails neatly with persona marketing and storytelling. One of the best examples of this at the analyst event was a presentation on the micro-vertical “differentiators” that Infor can bring to two industries: fashion and food & beverage. In the Infor lexicon, fashion is made up of apparel, footwear, accessories, luxury, and home textiles, and each micro-vertical has specific offerings (leather/hide attribute management for footwear, roll attribute management for textiles) that speak to the specialized use cases, and therefore users, of each of these micro-verticals. Same with food & beverage, which is distinguished by specific functionality for dairies, non-dairy beverage manufacturers, bakers, prepared food manufacturers, and confectionary manufacturers, among others. As it should be.
These micro-verticals are a storyteller’s dream: how a dairy does a better job with grading the fat content of its products using Infor, or luxury good manufacturer handles serialized goods production and management with Infor can provide rich, highly differentiated stories that, if presented right, balance nerdy inside baseball detail with highly differentiated customer results and value that will speak volumes to the line of business buyer/influencer who until now has been left out of the picture.
What else? I think Infor should do more to highlight the migration stories of its legacy customers: These 70,000 legacy customers will one day soon, if not already, need digital transformation and a move to the cloud. The stories of the customers that have already figured it out and are part of the company’s 71 million-strong cloud user community need to be told. It’s only hope for moving the tens of thousands of customers still living in the 20th century to Infor’s cloud and not some other vendor’s cloud.
Finally, I think Infor has a gem in its GT Nexus logistics network acquisition that could really bring it some much needed recognition, provided the company focuses on the different buying audiences for this solution. The word “audiences” is key, as the grand, overarching vision of a business network that acts as the nervous system of an interconnected global supply chain still has no single, vice president of business networks buyer. In the meantime, focusing on what GTN can do for supply chain planning and execution, spend analysis, warehouse management and logistics by looking at the different LOBs that could benefit from this kind of interconnected view could be itself an important differentiator. I also love the finance angle: use GTN as a “rating” tool to help lenders understand supply chain risk and reward companies that can mitigate that risk using GTN. There’s a lot of goodness to spread around the enterprise here.
The bottom line for Infor is that it’s clear the rebuilding phase is over, marked by the evident maturity of the company and my sort of tongue-in-cheek comment about how there’s no real hook to the Infor story any more. And that means stepping up to the big leagues and putting a little marketing swagger into the message. The timing ought to be propitious: Microsoft Dynamics is still struggling to be heard in the vacuum that Satya Nadella and team initially surrounded their enterprise software products with two years ago, Netsuite is in the firm and able hands of Oracle, so they’re completely vulnerable, and SAP is still struggling to articulate a single, comprehensive vision and product roadmap for the mid-market and not-so-large enterprise market where Infor is naturally strong.
The time is nigh, Infor, market leadership is there for you to win or lose. So get in the game already.
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