Infor Tells Channel Partners to Focus on Infor Products

Published: September 21, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

ERP software giant Infor was hosting its global sales event for its sales reps and channel partners in Orlando, Florida last week, but not everyone was invited. In fact, in the middle of August, the company sent out an email to its partners that read them the riot act: either sell Infor software exclusively, or don't bother showing up.

Infor's decision to require exclusivity of its partners is not surprising. And as the software business consolidates and the remaining partners offer a wide variety of solutions across most platforms, the practice that Infor has put into place of requiring exclusivity may become more common. Infor is, of course, a conglomeration of many ERP software suppliers--including the former MAPICS, Geac, SSA Global--that have had their own channels and practices before being merged into Infor.

Here is the note that Infor's channel partners received on August 17:

"Over the past year, we have had conversations regarding the representation of competitive solutions and the direction from Infor to eliminate situations where our partners are representing them. There are several reasons for this stance by Infor, including the fact that a partner relationship works best at the highest level when 100 percent of the mindshare is concentrated on one relationship, the opportunity for Infor proprietary information to be shared, deliberately or not, with the competition exists, and consistency across our entire partner organizational goals."

"As a step toward executing on this strategy, partners that are carrying competitive products will be asked to present a plan for moving away from those competitors, exchanging those solutions for comparable Infor solutions, and re-focusing their organizations around a 100 percent Infor mindshare. As we close out this quarter and begin a new one, this will be a prioritized issue for us to work with you on."

"In the interim, please be advised that partners who are currently engaged with solutions that are competitive to Infor's offerings, will not be invited to attend the September sales meeting in Orlando. An invitation is being sent out to all partners on this meeting, and if you are engaged with a competitive solution we are asking you NOT to register for this meeting at this time. You should contact your Channel Partner Manager to work through your individual situation."

While the Infor sales event was just kicking off, I talked to Rick Parker, senior vice president of field marketing about the email and Infor's exclusivity policy. "It is our policy to have exclusive channel partners," explained Parker. "They are not resellers," he said, meaning that software channel partners are, by their nature, more tightly coupled to the vendor and generally have deep expertise in one set of solutions. This is unlike, for instance, the many companies that resell a wide variety of servers from many different vendors. "Infor channel partners get treated just like employees--they get all of the same email," said Parker. "And because of this, it would be very bad for us to have people representing competitors at an event like this one." Parker said that the number of partners affected by this email was "very small," but he did not elaborate further.

Approximately 2,500 people were at the Infor sales meeting in Orlando, including sales reps and presales people from Infor as well as channel partners. Infor has approximately 500 channel partners from all over the world, and they drive about 20 percent of the $2.1 billion in aggregate sales that privately held Infor generates on an annual basis. (Golden Gate Capital, a venture capitalist, owns a 73 percent stake in Infor after the closing of the SSA acquisition back in August.) About $1.1 billion of that revenue is the maintenance stream from its many software products in use across its 70,000-strong customer base.

Presumably, after the sales meeting is over, Infor will publicly roll out its three-year product roadmap for the various software suites, which Jim Schaper said Infor would create and talk about when the SSA deal was completed back in August.

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