Infor Lures PeopleSoft Customers with New Program
May 14, 2013 Alex Woodie
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Infor is targeting Oracle‘s PeopleSoft customer base with a promise to lower maintenance costs by 20 percent if they move to Infor’s products, most notably its Lawson S3 software. Don’t be fooled by the name of Infor’s latest program, called “Save the People.” While Infor CEO Charles Phillips is to be applauded for his charitable work and his donations of time and money to good causes, “Save the People” isn’t about giving disenfranchised individuals a leg up in the world. No, Save the People is all about building an ERP juggernaut … and sticking it to Phillips’ former bosses at Oracle along the way. Infor made no bones about its intention to poach disaffected PeopleSoft customers and bring them into the Infor fold at its recent Inforum 2013 user conference in Orlando, Florida. According to company executives, it has been regularly winning business from PeopleSoft customers for some time. Oracle hasn’t been investing in the product as much as customers would like, Infor executives say. Infor is displaying a bit of swagger with the promises it’s making with this program. “The campaign is simple: We will reduce your current PeopleSoft maintenance run rate by 20 percent, guaranteed,” Infor co-president Stephan Scholl said at the recent Inforum event. Infor has several financial and accounting products that could be a destination for former PeopleSoft customers. But the product that will get the most attention is Lawson S3, which has a similar footprint as PeopleSoft and is strong in the same types of services-based organizations (schools, hospitals, law firms, financial services firms) where PeopleSoft is historically strongest. All of the top Infor executives are ex-Oracle executives. Phillips, of course, was instrumental in building Oracle’s acquisition strategy, which started with the PeopleSoft-JD Edwards buy. There doesn’t appear to be much animosity here. But there is quite obviously a desire to compete, and to play hard, against Oracle. Now that Save the People is out of the bag, one wonders what may come next. Oracle has been applauded for its work to keep JD Edwards World current, but the company obviously is quite eager to move users of World, which runs only on IBM i and Power Systems, to EnterpriseOne, which can run entirely on Oracle’s platform. Could “Save the World” be next from Infor? RELATED STORIES That Old AS/400 Gets Some Love at Inforum 2013 Infor CEO Throws Down on ERP Competitors with New SoHo UI “Infor Exudes Total Confidence at Annual User Confab”
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