Focus on microverticals from 'the new Infor'

After years of acquisitions culminating in the purchase of Lawson Software in the middle of last year, Infor is ready to move forward, with a strategy of targeting specific microverticals with its enterprise application software.

Almost 5000 guests attended the company’s Inforum 2012 conference at the end of last month, including Asbjorn Aakjaer, Infor’s New Zealand country manager, who spoke to TechDay about the approach from ‘the new Infor’.

"We feel our competitors’ products are reasonably generalist,” Aakjaer says, "trying to address the needs of all organisations.

"That’s not really the best way to get value out of an ERP.”

For example, a chicken farming company may come under the vertical ‘food and beverage’, but will still have very specific needs, such as being able to shift in its resource records from the number of chickens to the weight of meat.

"If you want to work with a brewer or a baker or a chicken processor, although they’re all technically food and beverage, their needs from a software perspective are very, very different.

"We’re looking at building our solutions with that sort of deep industry functionality.”

Aakjaer says Infor will continue to stick to microverticals within its preferred verticals; in New Zealand, these include local government, manufacturing, distribution and heavy equipment.

With over 30 staff in New Zealand, Infor sells both direct to customers and via a reseller channel.

"We also have consulting partners who provide technical consulting and infrastructure partners for cloud and hosting.”

For the future, the company is focusing on its Intelligent Open Network (ION) integration platform, offering customers deeper integration between their applications.