Infor Cuts Price of ION Middleware by Over Half
May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie
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Infor is temporarily reducing the price of its ION Foundation suite by 60 percent. The price cut, which was announced at last week’s Inforum 2012 conference, was made to encourage Infor customers to adopt the middleware component that’s key to the vendor’s product strategy–and just as important for Infor customers that want new functionality. Now through July 31, Infor is offering a one-time discount of 60 percent off the cost of ION Foundation, a suite of tools that includes:
If you’re an Infor customer, you’re probably already aware of the importance of ION in the vendor’s product strategy. Nearly every new product or feature that the company is rolling out to its massive base of 70,000 customers relies on ION and its XML-based integration engine to connect the new with the old. New Infor products that require ION to broker connections back to the ERP suite include: Infor Motion, the suite of mobile apps that provide iOS interfaces (and soon Android and maybe even Windows 8 interfaces) for Infor ERP products; Inforce, the CRM and sales force automation (SFA) offering jointly developed with Salesforce.com; and Business Vault, the yet-to-be-released new real-time business intelligence offering. ION, which stands for Intelligent Open Network, also handles external integration between the 15 or so Infor10 ERP suites that it is focusing on selling into its core target markets of manufacturing and distribution (and now healthcare thanks to the acquisition of Lawson), and the add-on products that Infor sells into this base, such as business intelligence (BI), enterprise asset management (EAM), product lifecycle management (PLM), human capital management (HCM), and on-premise customer relationship management (CRM). ION is also expected to play a role in the yet-to-be-released System i Cloud. ION is currently available to all Infor10 applications, which includes the historic BPCS, MAPICS, and System21 products (which now have new names). ION is currently available for A+, a distribution-focused IBM i ERP system that isn’t sold through Infor’s IBM i division. Lawson M3 and Infinium are not officially Infor10 apps, but they’re expected to be ION-ized in the near future. Customers running non-Infor10 applications, such as PRMS, PRISM, and KBM, can also use ION, but it requires additional work on their part. Over the past two years, Infor’s IBM i-based ERP systems have been updated with support for specific XML-based business object documents (BODs) that ION recognizes. These BODs are based on OAGI document standards, which enables loose coupling of applications. Infor says that, due to this loose coupling, the integrations don’t break when the underlying ERP software is upgraded. For more information on ION, see Infor’s website at www.infor.com. RELATED STORIES Infor Expands Salesforce.com Work as 1st Joint Customer Goes Live The ‘New’ Infor Keeps Commitment To IBM i Customers A ‘New’ Infor Proclaims Need for Speed
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