Infor Touts Growth, Makes an Acquisition
January 10, 2012 Alex Woodie
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Although it’s not publicly owned, Infor shared some financial results with the public earlier this month. The software giant says revenue from software licenses grew 17 percent for the 12 months that ended in November. Infor also announced the acquisition of certain products from RSVP Business Systems that are designed to bolster the quality control systems of manufacturers. Infor shares are not traded on the stock market, but sometimes the company acts as though they are (and there continues to be speculation that sometime soon, they might). To that end, the company shared a small fraction of the numbers that a publicly owned company would be required to disclose. The top and bottom line figures–revenues and net income (or loss) weren’t provided. But Infor did share its earnings before interest, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margin for the second fiscal quarter that ended in November was a healthy 27 percent. Perhaps more pertinent to IBM i customers, the revenue attributed to Infor’s core ERP business was up 25 percent compared to the same quarter the previous year. The company says it added more than 2,500 new customers during 2011, and sold software or services to 12,000 existing customers. Further, Infor says it shipped 69 new products, 1,904 new features, and 2,001 customer enhancement requests last year. The company has been quite vocal about its intent to continue to invest in programmers and engineers to foster its development efforts, which is reflected in Infor’s claim that it hired 500 engineers in 2011. The company plans to hire 75 more this year to help staff its new headquarters in New York City. Infor CEO Charles Phillips boasts that his company has “one of the largest engineering organizations in the world dedicated to innovating in business applications.” The former Oracle co-president is charting a path that’s putting Infor into more direct competition with Oracle and SAP in certain industries. “Infor plans to continue a disruptive strategy of delivering release after release of deep industry features that eliminate cumbersome customizations, productize geographic localizations, and provide in context business intelligence with projects measured in months and not years,” Phillips states in a press release. Infor’s heavy focus on manufacturing was evident in its acquisition of the Quality Control Solution (QCS) and other products from RSVP Business Systems. RSVP is an Infor business partner, and its QCS software was built with Infor’s “Mongoose” development toolset. The software helps manufacturers track, control, and manage the quality of products as the manufacturer moves them through daily processes, such as receiving, manufacturing, and shipping. Owing to the use of Infor development tools, QCS and the other RSVP applications are already compatible with Infor10 ERP Business (SyteLine) and other Infor applications. It’s unknown if QCS is compatible out of the box with Infor’s line of IBM i-based ERP systems, but it’s foreseeable that they would work with the premium Infor10 products that make use of the ION middleware.
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