An important part of Infor's pitch is that it offers the same applications in the cloud and for on-premises deployment.
Last year, the company said it expected half of its new sales in 2016 would be cloud rather than on-premises, and, according to president Stefan Scholl, that was the case as at 30 April.
The company's extensive installed base among customers using the software on-premises will take a long time to wash through before cloud revenue represents 50% of the total.
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Travis Perkins chief executive John Carter said his company was doubling its turnover every five years, and already offers more than one million SKUs. It faces growing competition, customer expectations are rising, so Travis Perkins needs to give its people the tools they need to serve their best customers effectively, in part by being able to provide personalised offers and also by streamlining routine tasks so they can spend more time with those customers.
Phillips said Travis Perkins — which has more than 2000 outlets and more than 28,000 employees — was probably the world's biggest biggest adoption of mission-critical cloud software. While the value of that deal was not mentioned, senior vice-president of global CloudSuite strategy and sales, Lisa Pope, said Infor has multiple contracts each with an annual values of at least US$10 million.
Infor is seeing "ridiculous" growth in its cloud business, chief operating officer Pam Murphy told iTWire, stressing that this is for mission-critical systems such as ERP, not just peripheral functions.
According to Pope, a growing number of Infor customers are showing interest in the cloud, and probably half of them will actively consider migration during the next year or so. The company is close to the point where its customers consider cloud to be the norm, she said.
Users of Lawson (ERP and financials) are among the fastest moving, she said, largely because of the cost pressures facing healthcare providers in the US and the way Infor's cloud reduces the total cost of ownership (to the extent that you can "own" software delivered as a service) by around 20%.
Manufacturing is another key segment: "we really make sure they are comfortable with security."
One example is Hong Kong-based TAL Apparel, which recently began a project to migrate from M3 to CloudSuite Fashion. Vice-president of IT, Kai Kiang, said the new software is "much better than a generic ERP" and that the company expects to make most of its new software investments in the cloud as it can then concentrate on business value (such as process improvement) rather than infrastructure (eg, tuning databases).
Cloud will mean improved security, he suggested. The upfront cost of on-premises implementations can lead to pressure to cut corners on "non-essential" areas including security, whereas cloud providers have to get this aspect right from the start.
Asked whether there were any signs of a "pushback" against the cloud by Infor customers, Phillips said Infor's use of AWS was seen as an advantage. And a hybrid approach with some applications on premises and others in the cloud is supported, and Infor provides single sign-on capability across the two platforms.
In the short to medium term, Pope expects most existing customers to use the hybrid model, as there has to be a particular reason to move a function into the cloud. So if a company sets up a subsidiary in a new country, it may make sense to run its software in the cloud even if the rest of the organisation still uses on-premises.
In the event that AWS does not have data centres in a particular country and customers require onshore processing, Infor would work with local cloud providers, Pope said. And since AWS has a relatively small presence in China, Infor is looking for additional options from local providers. But "we definitely made the right choice" by picking AWS as primary cloud partner, she said.
None of Infor's competitors have data centres in more countries than AWS does, said Murphy, describing Amazon's recent decision to set up a UK region as "perfect timing" in the light of the Brexit vote.
She said there are regular discussions between Infor and AWS about the demand for new locations, and "we find them very receptive... we're a strategic account of theirs".
To make it easier for customers who need to replace or upgrade their hardware but do not feel ready to migrate to a multi-tenanted cloud system, Infor offers a Lift and Shift program that moves an existing system — complete with any customisations — from the customer's data centre into a single-tenant environment, and then assists with the full cloud migration over a period of up to two years.
Infor stresses the way its current software addresses the needs of customers in various industries without requiring customisation, but "lift and shift" is primarily aimed at those still running old — in some cases, very old — versions.
Disclosure: The writer attended Inforum 2016 in New York as a guest of Infor.
