In late February I attended Spark, the Scout annual user group meeting. This was the third and likely the last such meeting, as Scout was recently acquired by Workday. Scout’s users represent a new breed of purchasing managers and executives looking to change the role of the purchasing department. This change is critical for businesses. Saving money is the essential job of sourcing and purchasing departments. But departments can go far beyond that, helping support product and go-to-market strategies that are more complex and innovative. To empower this change, the bulk of conference content included experience-driven advice from practitioners who are pioneering the evolution of sourcing and procurement.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
expense management,
Financial Performance Management,
Digital Technology,
Digital Commerce,
Operations & Supply Chain,
Enterprise Resource Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
purchasing,
sourcing
Infor described this year’s Inforum user group meeting as a coming-out party for a large startup company. Such a debut was necessary because Infor had been operating in something of a stealth mode for the past three years: a limited marketing presence, no unified message and a weak, sometimes inconsistent brand identity. It also needed to formally introduce Infor to customers of Lawson, the ERP supplier it acquired last year. The “startup” designation is meant to signal that Infor has been able to render a decade-long consolidation of dozens of smaller companies into one cohesive entity.
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Topics:
Performance Management,
Salesforce.com,
SAP,
Social Media,
Sustainability,
ERP,
Human Capital Management,
Marketing,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Epiphany,
expense management,
Lawson,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
IBM,
Operational Intelligence,
Oracle,
CRM,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Infor,
Information Applications (IA),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain,
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Financial Performance Management
I recently got an update from Workday that focused mostly on its Financials software. This part of the company’s business management suite has received less development attention than the HR aspects since the company’s founding in 2005. The bulk of Workday’s development investment has aimed at making its human capital management applications an industry leader and adding related capabilities such as payroll. It’s hard to argue against this strategy, if only because Workday is the spiritual offshoot of PeopleSoft; founded the company after Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, which he also founded. This pedigree gave the new company an advantage with workforce management software buyers. Moreover, adoption of cloud-based ERP has lagged far behind that of other cloud-based applications such as sales or workforce management, especially in the larger companies that have been Workday’s target market.
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Topics:
ERP,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
expense management,
financial,
PSA,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Oracle,
Workforce Performance,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Infor,
Tidemark,
Workday,
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Professional Services,
Project Management
I recently met with Infor’s management team, led by CEO Charles Phillips. Phillips joined Infor in October 2010 after leaving Oracle, taking several other executives with him, including Duncan Angove, now president of Infor, and Pam Murphy, now the COO. In addition to the changes in the executive suite, Soma Somasundaram, who had been at Infor and its predecessor companies since 1995, became EVP in charge of R&D. A private company, Infor had been keeping a low profile for the past several years, probably because results were nothing to brag about, and I suspect Phillips wanted to wait until there were substantive improvements to point to before fully engaging with analysts. Subsequent to his arrival, Golden Gate Capital, the private equity firm that assembled Infor from dozens of once-independent software companies, acquired ERP vendor Lawson Software in July 2011. Lawson itself had merged with Intentia, a Swedish ERP company in 2005. I estimate pro-forma 2011 revenues for Infor plus Lawson for a full year at $2.7 billion (the company has not published this number). This is only a fraction of 2011 revenues for SAP (about $14.5 billion) and Oracle’s applications ($6.8 billion). Infor reported that organic growth in license revenues was 17 percent, roughly in line with comparable companies, and executives indicated in the meeting that maintenance renewals have improved.
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Topics:
Salesforce.com,
Social Media,
ERP,
Human Capital Management,
Marketing,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Epiphany,
expense management,
Lawson Software,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Infor,
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Financial Performance Management
