Infor Going After SSA's Customers

Published: January 10, 2006

by Alex Woodie

A battle between the two largest consolidators of OS/400-based ERP software companies ensued last month when Infor unveiled a conversion package for helping customers of SSA Global migrate to Infor's ERP solution. Infor's conversion package targets users of PRISM, which Infor officials characterized as an aging ERP product with a grim future.

"Until now, PRISM users have been faced with a difficult choice: continue using an aging ERP system with limited support and no plans for future development or invest considerable time and resources to converting to a new solution," said Jim Byrnes, senior vice president and general manager of Infor, which is based in Atlanta. "With Infor's conversion package, these companies are now able to efficiently and effectively transfer essential data to a new Infor ERP solution, allowing them to reduce migration costs and start benefiting from the proven and forward-thinking solutions that Infor provides."

Infor says its conversion package can eliminate hundreds of hours of labor that would normally be required for a conversion. Several PRISM users have already made the switch to Infor, including Mid-Coast Electric, Midwest Motorcycle, Tampa Tile, Peterson Electric, ME Campbell, Active Electric, and Cardinal Building Materials, the company says.

SSA acquired PRISM in early summer 2004 when it bought the Marcam software unit, which was composed of the PRISM and Windows-based Protean ERP suites, from Invensys, a British provider of industrial control products. The Chicago-based conglomerate kicked off its consolidation strategy in earnest last May when it unveiled ERP LX, a new ERP suite written in IBM's Eclipse Java IDE, and a set of tools for moving users of BPCS, which has the largest installed base among its acquired product lines. The company said at that time that it would deliver throughout 2005 additional migration packs for the PRMS ERP suite, which has the second largest installed base, followed in order by packs for moving users from KBN, PRISM, and Infinium MM/PR product suites to ERP LX (see "SSA Delivers New ERP LX Platform for iSeries"). However, SSA has not made an official announcement regarding the status of the conversion packs.

While current data about exact customer bases is hard to come by, it would seem that Infor has accumulated the largest iSeries installed base of any OS/400 ERP vendor. An Infor executive said last summer that the company was approaching 9,000 iSeries customers, a number that will go up when it completes its acquisition of Geac and its estimated 1,500 System21 customers. SSA, by contrast, probably has about 7,000 iSeries customers, and a similar number of ERP LN (Baan) customers. By comparison, J.D. Edwards had about 6,700 customers (most of which were OS/400 shops) when it was acquired by PeopleSoft in June 2003.