Where Infor Is Headed With Its ERPs For IBM i
November 17, 2025 Alex Woodie
As the largest provider of IBM i-based ERP systems that isn’t named Oracle or SAP, Infor wields a significant amount of influence over the midrange marketplace. Companies that run XA, LX, and System 21 rely on Infor to keep their ERP systems up-to-date and viable with changing business and technology requirements. To that end, Infor shared some of its roadmap items with the user community during the recent inPOWER 2025 event.
More than 450 people attended the inPOWER 2025 conference, which took place in late September in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. The event was sponsored by the XA, LX, System 21, and Enterprise Integrator user groups, and featured more than 120 sessions dedicated to three primary IBM i-based ERP systems sold by Infor, and which collectively compose Infor’s Compass Group.
Tony Fleischman, a senior sales executive with Information Systems Engineering (ISE), a Wisconsin-based IBM i software and services company, provided an inPOWER 2025 recap last week that provided a good overview of the event and Infor’s IBM i product roadmap. (ISE was one of the organizers of inPOWER 2025.) You can view Fleischman’s recap on the Infor IBM i Users website, which is hosted on WorkOutLoud.
The biggest collective news impacting all XA (formerly MAPICS), LX (formerly BPCS), and System21 is that Infor is planning to support IBM i 7.6 soon. The ERP software company has not yet supported the new operating system, which IBM launched in the spring of 2025. But it is expected to be delivered in 2026.
Another big item that spans all three ERPs is the delivery of REST APIs for each application. These APIs have been a long time in coming, and when they’re finally delivered (likely in 2026), they will open up all sorts of functionality.
Infor is also warming customers up to a new user interface technology called System i Workspace (SiW) Liberty across all three products. According to Fleischman, Infor wants customers to move from the existing technology, called System i Workspace Anywhere (SiWA) to SiW Liberty, which is Java 17 compliant and supports Tomcat 11 and IBM WebSphere Liberty middleware. SiW Liberty is due in the third quarter of 2026, Fleischman said.
SiW Liberty will provide a new user interface that works with WebSphere Liberty.
“The key point of System i Workspace is to bring green screen functionality as it exists today into that thin client,” Fleischman said. “It still functions the same, the same keys – those types of things. For an average green screen user, it’s going to look very, very similar. But you can with both System i Workspace today and with Liberty in the future, do more and more of that in the thin client browser.”
A key component of Infor’s product strategy is to invest its developer hours on creating technology that can be shared across its various ERP systems, including those running on IBM i as well as those that don’t. The Infor Development Framework (IDF) is central to Infor’s shared work on IBM i, while its Infor ION (Intelligent Open Network) and Infor OS (operating service for cloud integration) spans all Infor products.
Infor continues to push IDF forward across XA, LX, and System21. The Java-based framework was originally developed by MAPICS two decades ago to boost flexibility at the user interface level, and Infor has adopted it for its other IBM i-based systems.
IDF components such as PowerLink, Link Manager, Net-Link, have provided Infor ERP customers with the capability to move from 5250 green screens to Windows or browser-based clients, while System-Link provided an XML-based interface for transaction processing. Another component called Enterprise Integrator provides the capability to add objects on the server side, such as for adding database fields.
“The initiatives are unique within each of these, but they also are similar as far as the foundational technologies,” Fleischman said.
Infor is pursuing a cloud strategy for its IBM i-based ERP systems. Infor is giving these customers the option to move their existing ERP applications and data and run it in Infor’s cloud. It’s also giving customer the option to migrate to a non-IBM i-based ERP system. In either case, adoption of Infor OS technologies for integration, workflow, security, and single sign-on will be encouraged by Infor to make those moves easier.
Infor develops common technologies like Infor OS, IDF, and SiW that lay on top of the core capabilities delivered by individual ERPs, said ISE’s Tony Fleischman in a recap video.
“There’s more and more effort being put in by Infor across the board for enablement of Infor OS,” Fleischman said. “And one more comment there – it’s all moving to the cloud. You have options in a lift and shift strategy from Infor to take your existing IBM i footprint, any one of these three ERPs move them to the cloud, . You will get a great amount of managed services from Infor for these footprints, but still with your own specific environment, your data, your customizations, your unique usage of the system in a hosted environment at Infor in the cloud.”
Fleischman also provided some more detailed roadmap data for each of the three ERP systems. He credited the Infor product managers – Dave Rapacz for LX, Adrian Masters for System21, and Ross Freeman and Hari Mangalam for XA – for providing information to inPOWER 2025 attendees.
“All four of these guys are very involved in their applications. They’re very accessible to you as XA, LX, or System 21 customers, and give us a lot of guidance, a lot of content for the event itself,” he said.
Infor LX
The current release of Infor LX (formerly BPCS) is version 8.4.2. Infor says it will continue enhancing 8.4.2, and move to the next version, 8.4.3, “based on demand for disruptive changes that require a release.”
“LX 8.4.2 will continue to be our lead release where we will deliver functional and technical improvements in a non-disruptive and agile delivery method,” Dave Rapacz said, per Fleischman’s presentation.
Infor has sought specific technical requirements from its LX customer base through its Enhancement Request System (ERS). Infor says it’s working on dozens of functional enhancements based on specific requirements it’s received through the ERS, including things like “planned and firm planned order inquiry” and “indented BOM [bill of materials] inquiry.”
Infor is planning to deliver other requested functionality, such as EDI customer order view in IDF and new MRP inquiry in IDF, via its planned support for a REST API. That is currently in development and is expected to be released in early 2026, the company said.
System21
Infor System21 is currently at version 3.2, which Infor delivered in 2022 alongside IDF version 10. That application delivered more than 100 user-requested enhancements to business processes, along with another 80 enhancements to the HTML5-based Web user interface.
Infor is currently working on System21 version 3.3, with a targeted release date of the third quarter of 2026. According to Fleischman’s presentation, version 3.3 will bring enhancements such as support for a full 132-column emulator, new localization features for Brazil, Java modernization, support for Europe’s NIS2 initiative, and support for Windows Server 2025.
Other enhancements planned for System21 include support for SiW Liberty, a new GenAI function for PDFs, and better IDF integration, such as expanded IDF enquiry and SiWA drillback. Infor plans to release support for Infor Messaging Service (IMS) to reduce Wintel server dependencies while running in the cloud. It also plans to release a REST API for System21, along with support for IBM i 7.6.
XA
The Infor XA product is currently in a transitional phase. Infor recently announced that XA Release 9.2, which it first released in 2019, will reach end-of-life in September 2026. It is encouraging XA customers to upgrade to XA Release 10, which it released in 2021, as a stepping stone to eventually get to XA Release 11, which just became available this fall.
XA Release 9.2 provided enterprise financials and cloud support, while XA Release 10 introduced Net-Link as the primary user interface. With XA Release 11, Infor is delivering functional enhancements in areas like the shop floor, labor and employee management, e-commerce, and financials.
Infor has a range of enhancements planned out for XA Release 11.0 through 11.3 in the coming years. XA Release 11.0 is due to get the REST API, as well as support for Java 17 and better output management functions, while later releases (11.1 through 11.3) will focus on shopfloor functionality, pick/ship, packing, and enhancements to enterprise financials, among others.
Infor is also planning to begin deprecating Host Presentation Server (HPS) with the IDF component called Host-Link with Release 11. Host-Link is an IDF component that works with Power-Link to basically bring non IDF applications into IDF, “somewhat as a screen scrape,” Fleischman said. Infor does not recommend running HPS, which requires a Windows server, on XA Release 11.
Providing better educational materials around XA and the other ERPs has been a priority at Infor and the Compass Group, which is the group within Infor dedicated to IBM i products. There are three courses available for XA, including one on XA 11 materials and two on its new labor capabilities.
“They are available on-demand,” Fleischman said. “They are part of Infor U. You can access them from any PC, and there’s no charge for these tools.”
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