LawsonGuru Blog
Thought-Provoking Commentary for the Lawson Software Community
Inforum 2012
April 27, 2012
Posted by on Following the acquisition by Infor, Lawson’s annual conference (CUE) has morphed into Inforum, which was held this past week in Denver. I didn’t attend, but I watched the video feeds of keynotes, read the executive/analyst briefings, and of course received my usual eyewitness reports and unsubstantiated rumors. In addition, I’ve included some article links at the bottom. My thoughts:
- Infor projects itself as a “new” enterprise software company, with a startup mentality. It’s all about execution, and the speed of that execution. In fact, they even have an SVP of Speed.
- Infor’s key differentiation is their focus on specific industries, and specifically, “micro verticals” – very specialized industries. In other words, it’s not just “food & beverage” but rather dairy, meats, bakery, etc.
- Infor acquired Lawson in order to enhance to their product portfolio, specifically HR/Talent Management and Financials. Lawson also offered some additional vertical-focused customer bases, with a strong presence in healthcare and public sector. According to Infor CEO Charles Phillips, this acquisition presented a highly complementary industry / product mix with very little overlap.
- Infor 10
- A common application infrastructure offering: UI/Workspace, Master Data Management, Localization, Analytics, Reporting, and Mobility
- ION middleware provides integration based on XML documents
- Achieving integration using industry standards
- Integrates at a very high level in a loosely-coupled fashion
- Localization via “local.ly” (cloud-based) service
- Business Vault
- Since Infor 10’s integration occurs at the ION middleware layer, every transaction is captured into a common searchable data warehouse
- Cloverleaf, previously acquired by Lawson, is now part of ION, offering a “clinical bridge”, combining various healthcare data repositories across departments, e.g. patient revenue, Cloverleaf/HL7, EPIC, Cerner, etc.
- This is an example of Infor’s intention to model and integrate various commonly-utilized business data streams and make them available to all organizations in a given industry.
- Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) extension for healthcare
- An interesting integration (again, using ION) across various products across the Infor portfolio to delivery an industry-specific solution: item utilization and replenishment, product recalls, preventive maintenance, energy usage, patient usage/billing, etc.
- Lawson S3 10 demonstrates that Lawson S3 is now clearly an Infor product. I’ll elaborate in a future post.
Some Inforum-related news articles:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/infor-next-steps-an-unsurprising-ipo/4072
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/232900910
http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3353307/infor-in-sources-design-team/
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Does anyone have a soft of the Inforum 2012 session schedule? I need it for my CPA CPE and I seemed to have misplaced the hard copy I had.
Thanks!