Ashish Dass
Vice President and Managing Director, South Asian Subcontinent, Infor

Brand Positioning vs. Marketing Tactics 

Infor is a leading provider of industry-specific cloud applications with more than 16,000 employees, over 90,000 customers and 71 million users of Infor Cloud in more than 170 countries. We believe that with the market dynamics compelling businesses to strategize and react faster, there lies a huge void across industries, to which smarter technologies can play an important role. 

We have a three-pronged approach as part of our strategy in India. It involves new customer wins across multiple industries, a laser sharp focus on innovation to deliver purpose-built software for cloud, and a robust partner network. To facilitate software, we have created an internal creative development group called Hook & Loop. It is driven by a group of fashion designers, who know how to make the end product look good and are driving our digitization initiative. 

Impact of Digitization on Businesses

India is riding a new digital wave which is disrupting business models and transforming every industry. Digital technologies are changing at an exponential pace, and in this context, partners help give us on-ground insights on the evolving market dynamics.  

Digital transformation has led to the emergence of new breed of customers, largely impacting their behaviour. Accessibility to emerging technologies such as AI and ML has led to rising expectations from customers. Having said that, enterprises are starting to incorporate cloud as a core IT infrastructure. The changing technology landscape, volatile economy and dynamic business needs have further bolstered the growing adoption of cloud by enterprises. We believe that cloud computing will continue to emerge as a champion supported by other emerging technologies such as AI, ML.

Keeping the current technology and business trends in mind, Infor is also channelizing its efforts towards AI. We have launched Coleman, an enterprise-grade industry-specific artificial intelligence platform designed to augment work, automate business processes, and advise users in the enterprise. Much like Infor CloudSuite that marked the first industry-specific ERP suites in the cloud, the introduction of powerful AI into business applications through Infor Coleman marks another milestone achievement in the evolution of enterprise software. In addition to Coleman, Infor has introduced 176 new products in the last 12 months to match pace with the evolving business trends. 

R&D driving Growth

R&D plays a crucial role in the developments at Infor and we have invested around $3 billion in R&D in the past six years. We have in place a Center of Excellence at Hyderabad which houses about 2,200 team members. The Hyderabad CoE supports global as well as India operations and we are working on customers like Boeing, Ferrari, from our India CoE. A lot of our application development happens from India; so in a sense you can call it ‘Made in India’ solutions. Our Philippines R&D center also reports to the India CoE which is another 2000 people. We have a good 4500 people in the Indian subcontinent who are not just developers and R&D guys, but they are also implementation consultants. So we have our own services arm which is called ICS (Infor Consulting Services).