I was a little skeptical about Infor as a company, looking at the pace they have been acquiring all the companies. It is hard to prioritize the R & D, support and Sales & Marketing of the various software products. This is especially true in times when the competition is tough, customers are unforgiving and the gloomy outlook of the economy-in-general.

Infor's CEO Jim Schaper has differentiated his company from aggregrators by announcing continued commitment and spending on Research & Development to the tune of$325 Million over the next 4 years. These are the dollars that will directly help the customers in not only increasing the usability of the current Infor application that they use but also make it easy to tap in to the functionality of other Infor application relatively easily. This is made possible by the SOA based framework, which is event driven. The framework itself will be delivered free of cost to any Infor user for the number of user licenses that they currently possess. Additional useage licenses can be purchased and integrations to the legacy/other applications can be done by purchasing the Development studio, the price of which is reasonable as well.

Some of the key improvements announced include Infor MyDay, DEM 2.0, Enterprise SOA framework, MDM. Time permitting I will try to type up some of my notes from attending various sessions for these improvements. I also saw a growing trend of MK and Baan IV users interested in upgrading to Baan ERP Ln.

About Infor Myday:

I was able to get a glimpse of the Infor MyDay at the Inforum 08 conference. This is a new Web 2.0 user interface for Infor applications. This is part of and is based on Infor's SOA strategy. It can supposedly serve as an interface with any of the Infor applications.  According to the road map, Infor MyDay will be available for select Infor application in early 2009, at no additional charge to active maintenance customers, with additional support to be announced throughout 2009.

I gathered that Infor is trying to come up with a few pre-defined screens and reports that may be most common to some commonly used business functions. The customers are able to develop their own screens or customize the screens using a studio which will be sold separately. From what I understand the studio doesnt cost much also. (Less then $1000 is what I heard). I dont have a screen cap of what I have seen but I was quite impressed with the interface, it seemed more like a web 2.0 application and the end user could perform simple sorts, filtering etc.

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