Charles Phillips has been CEO of Infor for some time now, and he is now at a critical point. Investing very heavily in completely changing the software the enterprise has, the time for results is now. With Charles Phillips’ wife Karen at his side to support him through this and his philanthropic enterprises, he feels he can make it.

What he seems to be doing is to get Infor to catch up to other big companies. Many of the companies that he now classes as his competitors are those who saw consumerization and cloud trends coming. These are the companies that are seeing the greatest growth, and this is what he wants to emulate.

As always, Phillips does things differently, however. With Infor, his difference is that he targets micro-verticals inside very specific niche industries, rather than offering a one size fits all solutions. Recently they launched the 10x enabled suite of apps, and the company is trying very hard to get customers to migrate over to it. The 10x enabled suite is basically a standard platform that comes with a user interface that is consistent across the board. These interfaces are 100% cloud based and they use the Ion middleware created by Infor. The Ion middleware enables data to easily be stored and integrated across the board.

Infor ranks third in enterprise software companies, coming after SAP and Oracle. However, this is still incredibly impressive, particularly since it is a relatively new company. In fact, Phillips himself usually describes Infor as the largest startup company in the world. This is not so much because the company itself is completely new, but rather because he completely transformed it since becoming SEO. Interestingly, before becoming Infor CEO, he was Oracle’s president, a main competitor now. While there, he acquired 70 different companies, which transformed the company. He seems to be repeating this now, attracting people who used to work for Oracle, and making his first multi-billion dollar acquisition just four months after starting his new job.

Infor is now ready to really start selling, and it is heading towards a time period in which it will have to provide its worth. This may be difficult, since the world is already hugely competitive. They will have to, somehow, take on cloud providers that have already been established, including Salesforce.com and Workday. However, Phillips is confident that he can do it, and if his past history is anything to go by, he probably will do it.

A Focus on Amazon

Phillips has announced that Infor is now truly committed to cloud. To prove this, they entered into a partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services). By creating this partnership, with AWS being a true cloud giant, Phillips aims to get a step ahead of all the other companies, because he will not have to create data centers all over the world. This will also benefit customers, as they can instantly migrate their applications. Plus, they may move their entire industry, and not just their fringe apps, over to the cloud.

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