By Sonal Desai, November 1, 2011, 1500 hrs
Come H12012, the third largest ERP vendor Infor would start offering applications on the cloud.
The company has released a product Syteline also named Infor10 Business that uses the cloud as a disruptive mechanism to host solutions. “At present, it is being localized to meet the needs of Indian customers,” said Souma Das, Regional VP and MD, Infor India.
Infor has outlined some enhancements that will be delivered to Syteline this year. Some of the key products that are already shipping include a new Infor Workspace, a cloud version of SyteLine, as well as integration to cloud versions of Infor EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) and Infor XM (Expense Management), new mobile apps for IT managers and production management—with additional applications being delivered for sales, finance, and the executive team, Infor ION integration to other Infor applications and the new Infor Vault for data management, a new customer portal—a supplier portal and also enhancements to CRM and project management.
He said that Syteline is targeted toward the mid-market, aimed at the auto, furniture manufacturers and the component markets; would be released in the next couple of quarters. It would be sold on premise as well as on the cloud.
The USP of the offering it is that it can be customized (on the cloud) with the same code. Details of the pricing would be released during the launch.
Infor would meanwhile, continue to work with 25 partners in the country, and appoint more as the India strategy unfolds. The strategy is in line with the vision of Charles Phillip, CEO, Infor who outlined a strategy to organize applications into solution suites targeting 13 vertical industries.
We have a three pronged India strategy, Das said. One is to aggressively go after the automotive (component manufacturing) and the furniture manufacturers in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities, two is to directly work with the upper mid segment (Rs 500 crore to Rs 1,000 crore) and three is to work with very large corporate, PSUs and utilities with tier-1 SIs such as TCS, HCL, Wipro.
“We would focus a lot more on marketing, and have earmarked marketing budget of 10-12 percent of our APAC revenues for India,” said Chip Coyle, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Infor. “We would participate in industry focused, product centric events. Focus would be on supply chain management, enterprise asset management (EAM), human capital management (HM) and CRM. All these events would be either Infor-led, or third-party led.”
Globally the company has 1500 customers. In India, it has 500 active customers of which 300 are for ERP. The rest are split between Lawson, SCM, FM, SCM, EAM and 40 customers in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. |