Strengths and Cautions - Infor Performance Management

Strengths

•Infor's CPM suite has particular strengths in strategy management and BP&F. The latest release, Infor PM 10.1, supports the Infor Open SOA to increase back-end interoperability and front-end information delivery through the newly announced clients Infor MyDay (role-based portals) and Infor Decisions (ad hoc analysis). This will enhance its capability to compete in large, global CPM deals and integrate CPM with more of the Infor product family.

•Infor has again made good progress on previous CPM and financial-management road map announcements by delivering Infor PM 10.1 and the new, low-priced midmarket planning offering (Infor PM Business Edition, released in August 2008), financial reporting using XBRL tagging support has been added to Infor PM Office Plus (Excel add-in), and there are longer-term plans to tag data for XBRL within the applications. Other planned enhancements are to support Linux and Unix environments.

•Infor has a large installed base (approximately 70,000 customers) using its transactional applications in the midmarket and enterprise space, which are ideal target markets for its CPM solutions. Infor cites more than 3,000 PM customers, and has a widespread global customer base with products available in multiple languages. With Infor PM 10 and Infor PM Business Edition, there is plenty of potential to further cross-sell and penetrate net new accounts.

•Infor has again seen steady growth during the past year in CPM sales with its enterprise solution Infor PM 10. Infor has integrated its CPM and BI capabilities, enabling customers to deliver a unified BI and PM framework, renaming the former MIS components Infor PM Application Studio (Web client), Infor PM OLAP (analytic engine) and Infor PM Office Plus (Excel add-in).


Cautions

•Infor has made an effort during the past year to raise awareness of its PM portfolio through influencers and direct marketing to customers; however, awareness remains relatively low. This will limit its ability to compete for new business outside its installed base, unless it can build greater awareness.

•Lack of awareness of the Infor PM brand is a challenge in the firm's installed base. Many customers are unaware that Infor offers a CPM solution, or that the CPM products they use are owned by Infor. Consequently, customers may look elsewhere, and installations could be replaced without Infor being invited to bid, owing purely to a lack of awareness.

•Infor faces tough competition, and has yet to prove that it can gain wide acceptance with IT and finance departments in preference over CPM offerings from the other large vendors.

•Infor has had challenges to best locate PM and has reorganized its sales force several times, between central teams and separate business units. The company has spent a lot of time training the generic sales force to understand where CPM fits, and now has a central PM sales team in Americas and a PM center of excellence in EMEA.

Source :
Gartner