Charles Phillips and What He Achieved So Far at Infor

Charles Phillips is a man with a vision. He developed his vision as a young boy, living on military bases. He knew then that he wanted to be involved in technology, and that is a dream he followed throughout his career. And it has been a very interesting career, one in which he has set himself apart as a true leader. His career now spans many years and many different companies, and includes the U.S. Military, Wall Street, and various tech companies. Where he really made his mark, however, was as President of Oracle. For Charles Phillips Oracle wasn’t the pinnacle of his success, but rather a stepping stone to his next career – CEO of Infor.

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Charles Phillips and Infor

At Infor, Phillips become a CEO for the first time in his impressive career. And it seemed that he started exactly where he left off at Oracle. Within just a few months of starting, he acquired Lawson Software for the sum of $2 billion. His acquisition strategies are what enabled Oracle to experience a 300% growth during his time as President, and he clearly wants to repeat this with Infor. By acquiring Lawson Software, he was able to add human resources and health care to the industry portfolio of Info. But what makes it different is that he doesn’t just focus on health care as a blanket industry. Rather, he pushes for products that serve niche markets within the industries. For instance, he has developed a software solution specifically designed for hospitals.

Since he started as Infor’s CEO, he has also been able to hire some 1,500 new members of staff. He has completely revamped the executive management team, hiring some high profile players, some who came directly from Oracle. He also moved the headquarters of Infor from Georgia to New York City, where he shares a single table with his management team. Plus, he has been able to create 70 new Infor products, leading to 2,500 new customers. These include Heineken and Ferrari. It is no surprise, therefore, that Infor is now at a really new level of playing field.

In fact, Infor seems to have found the leader of its dreams. Phillips has taken an aggressive acquisitions approach, with one of his latest acquisitions being GT Nexus, a true global player. GT Nexus is the world’s largest cloud-based software company. Today, Infor has some 70,000 individual companies. They have a presence in 194 countries the world over, and enjoy a revenue in excess of 43 billion per year. Clearly, with Phillips leading the way, Infor is really moving ahead. Now third largest of its kind, after Oracle and SAP, some believe it may soon grow to even overtake these two. Clearly, Charles Phillips aims to make Infor the leading software solutions company, and when he has a vision, he never stops until he actually gets it. Infor certainly is the company to watch at present, for some with anticipation and for others with real fear.

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Infor Truly the Third Titan?

There has been a so-called ‘duopoly’ in the world of enterprise software, held by Oracle and SAP. Microsoft has been a third contender, but was never truly a competitor. But now, there is Infor. What frightens the industry is that it is led by Charles Phillips Infor CEO, previously Oracle President. The world is now holding its breath for a true battle of the titans!

Oracle and SAP have a big problem, which is that companies who need a new ERP system on premise simply won’t turn to them anymore. They are too expensive, and setting the system up leads to significant downtime. That said, the money still seems to go to them, albeit from customers who are still stuck in lengthy contracts for maintenance and licenses. In 2011, Oracle earned some $28 billion, and SAP earned some $17 billion. Infor, at that time, ‘only’ took in $3 billion. Not much of a competitor, in other words.

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However, Charles Phillips, Infor’s relatively new CEO, is trying to break the duopoly to pieces. He has worked for about two and a half years to make sure that the company goes through, in his words, “a complete reboot”. He has completely changed the company’s management team and their strategy. No longer will Infor focus on building scale to products and innovation. Rather, they completely revamped their key assumptions and totally redesigned the architecture to achieve this. In so doing, the company now has 800 new developers on their books, and they have already developed 300 products.

While this is a good strategy to make Infor profitable, it doesn’t mean that SAP and Oracle are vulnerable. According to Phillips, however, the duopoly doesn’t have a strong integration strategy, because they don’t integrate cohesively. Instead, they have a bunch of ‘loosely coupled’ pieces, which can get confusing. Plus, Infor is focused on specific verticals, rather than entire industries. Their hottest area is health care, which is a huge one.

Another issue that Phillips says the other two have is poor usability. The minute you walk into the Infor headquarters, you will see their motto, which is ‘no fugly software’. They have approached their user interface with a focus on design, creating a thing of beauty that is also easy to use. As an added bonus, Infor offers everything as software as a service, which means people can try it and install it with ease, through the Amazon Web Services cloud.

So is Infor a true competitor for the big two out there? Two years ago, people would have laughed at that idea. Today, however, Infor takes up a shared second position in the enterprise software world, together with Oracle. And considering much of Infor’s management team was previously employed by Oracle, there seem to be some ripples in the industry. What the future holds is always anybody’s guess, but dismissing Infor in the way that Microsoft has been dismissed for years would certainly not be a good idea for the duopoly as a whole.

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