Infor Adds 'MyDay' Interface and SaaS Apps

At Infor's annual "Inforum" conference in Las Vegas last week, I saw a significant step toward helping everyday business workers and managers access information and leverage analytics in a new, Web-based interface to enterprise applications called Infor MyDay. For those of you who might not keep track of application vendors as we do at Ventana Research, Infor is the third-largest enterprise applications company in the world, with more than $2 billion in revenue and 75,000-plus customers.

Tapping its large customer base and years of research into understanding what is needed to make business more productive and effective, Infor has developed a new class of user interface and role-based capabilities for enterprise applications. Infor MyDay provides information to specific roles to help enable easier actions and decisions to improve results of workers handling daily tasks. Infor MyDay will begin to roll out to ERP customers under maintenance and in 2009 will reach Financial Management (FM), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and other Infor applications to address the need to access, search and interact with specific information related to key tasks and activities. This includes the metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) needed to guide workers.Infor has been spent significant time building its application platform and service oriented architecture (SOA) framework to integrate Infor applications and third-party apps into a single business user environment to streamline daily tasks and activities. Going beyond the approaches offered by Oracle and SAP, Infor is using the latest technology from its performance management products to create an environment that integrates responsibilities, goals, and reporting structures to bring a persona-based role capability called Infor MyDay. By extending the power of performance management into the daily roles of workers and managers, Infor is one step further in bridging the performance management gap from executives to the front-line of business. Infor also believes it can further streamline decision making between Infor MyDay and Infor Performance Management in 2009.

For those of you who are not familiar with Infor Performance Management, see my review in the 2007 Mid-Year Ventana Research Scorecard on Performance Management.

It's not good enough for Infor to just advance applications with Infor MyDay for those who pay maintenance, as many organizations would rather have someone else manage the applications and IT infrastructure. Infor has stepped boldly forward where others have had limited success to make the new applications available in an on-demand manner as subscription-based software-as-a-service offerings. Available first will be the Infor ERP SyteLine, Infor Enterprise Asset Management and Infor Expense Management applications, but rollouts are expected to continue with other applications in 2009 and 2010. Infor will have to demonstrate its ability to centrally manage applications across thousands, not just hundreds, of companies. This is no easy task, but Infor definitely has the resources and energy to meet this new challenge.

No doubt these moves by Infor will be closely examined as they set their sights on expanding their position in the industry to expand their value to organizations of all sizes.

Let me know your thoughts.At Infor's annual "Inforum" conference in Las Vegas last week, I saw a significant step toward helping everyday business users access information in a new, Web-based interface called Infor MyDay... Infor has also stepped boldly forward where others have had limited success to make the new applications available in an on-demand manner as subscription-based software-as-a-service offerings.