January 10, 2012, 4:10 PM — Infor CEO Charles Phillips mostly kept out of the limelight after landing the job in October 2010, following a high-profile stint as co-president of Oracle.
That's because he was busy figuring out the future direction of Infor's vast portfolio of ERP (enterprise resource planning) software applications, which make it the industry's third-largest ERP vendor after SAP and Oracle.
Phillips, who was known for his role in Oracle' long series of acquisitions, engineered a big one soon after arriving at Infor, when the company and its primary shareholder Golden Gate Capital bought Lawson Software in April 2011 for about US$2 billion. The new CEO also pumped additional money into development, hiring hundreds of developers and announcing plans to move Infor headquarters to New York's "Silicon Alley."
Now, several months after the launch of Infor10, a next-generation set of technologies, Phillips spoke at length about where Infor has been and intends to go in an exclusive interview with IDG News Service.
IDGNS: When you first arrived at Infor and took a look around, what needed fixing?
Phillips: The priority for me was reorienting resources into products and away from other areas. We basically reduced our expense in the back office and shifted all of that into product development. I think that the company had a stable customer base, but hadn't delivered enough innovation and change. Some customers tend to view that as a good thing, but I think you're better off shipping a lot of innovation even if it means a little disruption.
So with that in mind, the second thing we had to do was invest more wisely. Even though the company had invested a huge amount on R&D, and we obviously increased that, the way it was being spent wasn't optimal, in the sense that each distributed development group got to make their own decisions, and they largely did that with input from a very small number of customers. They were doing very tactical things, you know, changing the screen from blue to red, that sort of thing, because they talked to the same three customers.
You want to step back and look at ways that can differentiate yourself, things that can make a big difference for a lot of customers and translate into commercial success. You want to push back and say, why is that on the road map versus something else, and force people into a disciplined conversation with a process behind those decisions. Just doing that alone, you get a lot of development capacity back because you stop doing things no one cares about.
IDGNS: That being said, you have all these applications and customer constituencies, was it a challenge to normalize the development process?
Phillips: Actually, the development organization was ready for change. They weren't sure what that was, but they wanted a focus on products. That's what we brought, and that's where I spend 90 percent of my time, it's with the development organization, going through product strategy and helping to make those decisions. That part, getting change to happen, was actually less difficult than I expected. Engineers like a challenge.
IDGNS: Let's talk about your recent technology launch, Infor10, which includes components such as the ION middleware framework for tying together various Infor software modules.
Phillips: We've come up with a strategy and architecture that takes advantage of our strengths and helps customers as well. There are things that don't have to be in the core [application] engine, whether it's localizations or reporting, or a number of things that are infrastructure-related ... things that you don't need to do 20 times across all of your applications. You build it once. That gives us a lot of efficiencies.
That's what we're doing with Infor10. We build the localizations once, we build the reports once, and that way we can rev the engine, which has the industry functionality in it, a lot faster.
When I got there, every team had their own mobile team. Two or three guys trying to build mobile applications. We have one mobile team now that's much larger and much better, plus we save money, because when you add it all up you don't need 50 guys building it.
IDGNS: You just alluded to the importance of industry-specific functionality. What verticals are you focused on now and in the future?
Phillips: We have about 13 verticals we're focused on, where we already have strength and an installed base. Just to highlight a few of them, we're really big in fashion, we're big in automotive, high-tech, aerospace.
