Info is now the largest enterprise applications vendor, after SAP and Oracle, growing substantially though acquisition over the last decade. It has a strategy of evolving its products through the extensive use of cloud technology.

“Our philosophy is to have loosely coupled applications,” Lisa Pope, Infor’s senior vice president for cloud, told iTWire. “We are evolving them all to the cloud so that no code sits on the client.”

Pope was in Australia for Infor’s annual user conference. She said many Infor clients were running in a dual cloud and on-premise environment, but that there is an increased acceptance that cloud is the way of the future.

“Not everyone is yet comfortable with the cloud for mission-critical applications,” she said. “So we give them an option to run in their own environment. We’ve developed the tools to allow them to bring their customisations with them as they move to the cloud.

The new vertical applications are examples of how Infor’s products are evolving, Pope said. “Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage and CloudSuite Fashion offer customers a flexible approach for hosting applications, with a lower upfront IT investment and a subscription-based delivery model.” The packages are powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS)

“Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage is specially designed to meet the needs of process manufacturing customers and provides tools to improve margins by solving common challenges such as short-shelf life and ingredient variability.

“Infor CloudSuite Fashion provides small- to large-sized fashion, apparel, footwear, accessories, luxury goods, and textile companies with a full suite of tools to manage the entire fashion process from design, development, and sourcing, to production, distribution, customer service and finance.”

Infor quoted analyst group Gartner in support of its cloud strategy. “Cloud services will ultimately help manufacturing operations create, improve or sustain manufacturing improvements; provide multisite and multitier visibility; scale more effectively than traditional, on-premises approaches; and contribute toward a flexible and agile manufacturing network.”

Pope says both product suites will offer industry-tailored functionality such as forecasting and demand, production planning, scheduling, tracking, traceability, recipe management and quality compliance.

Infor now has 73,000 organisations as customers around the world. It has swallowed up some of the best known names in applications software, some of them previous acquisitions from companies it has subsequently itself acquired.

They include Baan, Dun & Bradstreet Software, Geac, Intentia, Lawson, MAPICS, SSA and Systems Union. It is headed by Charles Phillips, previously heir apparent to Larry Ellison at Oracle.