Infor CEO ready to fight SAP
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(InfoWorld) - Midmarket applications vendor Infor Global Solutions Inc. sees challenges for companies like SAP AG and Oracle Corp. to adapt their enterprise software products for small and medium-size business. Earlier this month, SAP announced plans to establish a dedicated SMB unit and expand the company's footprint in the huge midmarket, a move that Infor Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jim Schaper thinks is easier said than done. In an interview with IDG News Service, Schaper talked about Infor, a relatively young provider of business applications that has grown through acquisitions and now generates more than US$2 billion in annual sales, and discusses growth markets and competition with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Corp.. The following is an edited transcript. IDGNS: The midmarket means different things to different people. How do you define it? Schaper: Midmarket customers are typically independent businesses that range in revenue from $25 million to $2 billion. We believe that somewhere between 60,000 and 62,000 customers of our total 70,000 customer base are in the midmarket. If we compare that with SAP, which estimates that 65 percent of their 36,000 customers are SMBs or little more 23,000, we are clearly twice the size of SAP in the midmarket. IDGNS: How large is the market you're going after? Schaper: Our market is globally 1 million prospective customers, including the plants and divisions of large enterprises. IDGNS: Why do you include these? Schaper: A number of very large global enterprises run our applications on a decentralized plant or division basis. That's why, for Infor, a classical view of an SMB definition doesn't work. IDGNS: Why should a midmarket company choose Infor and not SAP or Oracle, which have substantial expertise in business software and have stepped up efforts to target SMBs? Schaper: We fill a hole in the market. We have maximized on what smaller niche providers provide -- namely business-specific solutions with domain expertise to implement them -- and on what the large players have to offer: global distribution. We provide our customers with global reach, alternative channels and products built for their markets at the lowest total cost of ownership. IDGNS: SAP would argue that it also offers products with deep industry-specific functionality. Would you disagree? Schaper: If they're digging down deep, then they've just started because that hasn't been their business model in past. They said they will do this primarily through partners. IDGNS: SAP does offer different versions of its software for different markets. Could this provide a competitive edge? Schaper: They've attempted to take a tier 1 product and move it down market. You don't leave the complexity of the product behind, or the cost or length of time it takes to implement. IDGNS: And Infor has a different approach? Schaper: Our products were built for the markets they're serving. We're not attempting to take a product that was built for large enterprises and cram it down into the midmarket. We're equally not trying to take something that is prepackaged for mass consumption and move it up market as Microsoft is trying to do. There are inherent complexities that are built into a product to serve large enterprises. IDGNS: So what do SMBs want? Schaper: They want very specific functionality at the lowest total cost of ownership with the least amount of complexity. IDGNS: Where are your customers? Schaper: Fifty percent of our revenues come from the Americas, 41 percent out of Europe and 9 percent out of Asia Pacific region. IDGNS: How important is China? Schaper: Not unlike every other software company, including SAP, it is our highest growth area. We have typically looked at the Chinese market, earlier in the evolution of Infor, as a market where we wanted to go after multinationals, whether U.S. or European-based. We have now moved with some new product capabilities into the mainland Chinese market, which is a much lower-end market but one where we believe we're perfectly positioned IDGNS: And what challenges do you face in this particular market? Schaper: You start small but your products must be able to scale quickly because what today is a local Chinese auto supplier, for example, is likely to become in a few years a global supplier as China exports automobiles to the U.S. and Europe. This is coming in the next 18 months. IDGNS: Do you offer any on-demand or hosted services? Schaper: We do but not for all applications. Most of what we build is at the request of customers. They have a lot of influence in our long-term development plans. But there are components that can be provided on either a hosted or on-demand model. Asset management is one, customer relationship management is another. But when you get into the extended supply chain, like warehouse management, planning and scheduling -- all core ERP applications -- we just haven't seen customer demand for that. Our products are capable of being hosted and we will host them as we see customer demand. IDGNS: What about open source? Schaper: Open source is a key contributor to Infor and we will be a key contributor to open source over time. It is one of the critical differentiators in our business strategy of how we will SOA-enable our applications.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Blog: SAP said it plans to formally respond by midnight (PST) Monday to Oracle's lawsuit, which claims SAP's wholly owned subsidiary TomorrowNow accessed Oracle's proprietary support and maintenance information beyond contractually allowed levels.
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The growing confrontation promises to be an epic business battle.
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A boardroom battle is looming at Sovereign Bancorp Inc.  that could cost company chief Jay Sidhu his job and pose a problem for shareholder Banco Santander Central Hispano , The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
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At its Worldwide Partner Conference, the software giant will be working on its conflict resolution skills as it faces a new world order.
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Richard Lawson, the co-founder of Lawson Software, talked about why SAP is the No. 1 ERP software vendor instead of his company, what his firm is doing now and why Oracle's buying spree presents "a huge opportunity."
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SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies&#39; software will take longer to achieve.SAP agreed to pay $6.8 billion for the business intelligence vendor in October. It has now secured more than 87 percent of Business Objects&#39; shares, more than enough to control the company, CEO Henning Kagermann said at a press conference on Wednesday.Business Objects is now a division of SAP led by its former CEO, John Schwarz. The plan is to integrate its analytics technology more tightly with SAP&#39;s business applications, but also to keep selling standalone products that work with other vendors&#39; software.&quot;While we&#39;ll clearly align ourselves to SAP, we are equally committed to non-SAP customers, platforms and environments,&quot; Schwarz said. &quot;Our intention is to have a business intelligence solution on top of Oracle that&#39;s better than Oracle&#39;s own business intelligence solution.&quot;The companies announced nine software packages that will go on sale this month and combine products from Business Objects and SAP. They include Financial Performance Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Visualization and Reporting.The financial package, for example, includes strategy management and planning tools from SAP and financial consolidation and profit management tools from Business Objects, said Doug Merrit, the head of SAP&#39;s Business User division.Those products were already sold separately, and the packages don&#39;t involve any significant integration work. They are intended to give the companies&#39; sales teams something to go out and sell -- although customers should also see a pricing benefit compared with buying the products separately, Schwarz said.The long-term goal is to integrate the companies&#39; software more tightly to form what Kagermann called a &quot;closed loop.&quot; The idea is that SAP users, acting on information from Business Objects&#39; analytics tools, will be able to more quickly adjust underlying business processes running in SAP Netweaver, Kagermann said.SAP will also offer Business Objects&#39; tools as part of its new suite of on-demand business applications for medium-sized enterprises, called Business ByDesign. The team developing Business ByDesign &quot;will be able to pick the best from the Business Objects portfolio and merge it into Business ByDesign,&quot; Kagermann said.Business Objects already offered its products on demand and had 70,000 subscribers at the time of the acquisition, Schwarz said. The job of merging the BI tools into Business ByDesign has not yet started, however, he said.Business ByDesign is still very new. SAP aimed to have about 100 customers live on the system by the end of 2007, a modest target, and its goal for 2008 is &quot;to prove that we can build a profitable volume business,&quot; Kagermann said.SAP&#39;s news coincided with the announcement from its biggest rival,&#160;Oracle, that it reached a deal to buy middleware vendor BEA Systems for $8.5 billion.BEA is in a different business from Business Objects, but Oracle&#39;s move to expand itself further through another big acquisition only helps to validate SAP&#39;s decision to acquire Business Objects. It was the biggest deal in SAP&#39;s history and broke the vendor&#39;s tradition of not acquiring large companies.SAP bought Business Objects for its technology, not its customers, Kagermann said Wednesday, although he sounded pleased about the new customers that SAP will gain.&quot;After you eliminate the joint customers, we&#39;ll have by far the largest installed customer base in the world. There will be probably more than 60,000 customers using one of our products,&quot; he said.Asked about the BEA deal, Kagermann seemed reluctant to be drawn away from discussing SAP&#39;s own merger, but he did take a quick jab at his rival.&quot;So far we are competing very successfully in the market,&quot; he said. &quot;I was a bit surprised [by the BEA acquisition] because Oracle has said they are the leading technology company, and now they are acquiring technology, which is interesting to me.&quot;SAP Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker was more outspoken. &quot;He has to pay more and more for less and less,&quot; he said after the press conference, referring to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. BEA is &quot;not really that big,&quot; he said.Kagermann reiterated that SAP&#39;s strategy is to grow its core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically, but it won&#39;t rule out another big acquisition to strengthen the company in a new market.
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Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi discusses his company's goals and the competition in the data integration services market.
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Blog: Eric Jackson, the man who asked Yahoo CEO Terry Semel if he had a 'fire in the belly' for his job, is preparing to launch a new Internet-based campaign against another under-performing company.
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Investors await earnings for the database software maker, looking for signs of advances against industry leader SAP.
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The CEO of the embattled internet company hopes to avoid a takeover, while trying to reassure his workers -- even though many stand to lose their jobs regardless of what happens.
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At this week's Directions 2004 user conference, Sanjiv Sidhu, the co-founder, chairman and interim CEO of supply chain management software maker i2 Technologies Inc., talked about his company's plans.
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A boardroom battle is looming at  Sovereign Bancorp Inc.  that could cost company chief  Jay Sidhu his job and pose a problem for shareholder Banco  Santander Central Hispano , The Wall Street Journal  reported on Friday.
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SAP confirmed Tuesday that Aliza Peleg, managing director of SAP Labs U.S., will leave the business applications company by the end of next month. Her departure follows that of Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, whoÂ resigned from SAPÂ on April 1.
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An SAP initiative to more tightly align its business software with Microsoft's tools is about to bear fruit.
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IAC/InterActiveCorp. Chief Executive  Barry Diller said on Monday he saw opportunities as news  increasingly moves to the Internet from newspapers, and his  company was close to announcing a new product.
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BARCELONA, Spain  - Europe's biggest software  maker SAP could need a year more than anticipated to reach its  profitability target as it spends on research, development and  marketing, its chief financial officer said on Thursday,  sending its shares lower.