Manufacturing- a promising vertical for Infor in India

Considered the world’s leading industry based cloud solution provider, Infor is today, in a good position to grab market share from even its biggest competitors. Focusing on the number one position in cloud applications, Infor recently launched Cloud Suites for healthcare, automotive, industrial cloud suite business- a horizontal solution for services industries.

In an exclusive chat with Jeff Abbott, Senior Vice President-Global Alliances and Channels, Infor and Anjan Thakur, Director Sales & Country Head (channels), Infor India, itVARnews finds out Infor’s India vision and the technologies they offer.

1. What are the major technologies and solutions you have for India?

Anjan Thakur: For the Indian market, we are focused on ERP. We have achieved a very good market share for Supply Chain management products, and have launched a new product in the CRM segment called sales Logic. Now we look forward to its successful adoption. These are primarily the areas that we try to target for the India market.

2. Which are the verticals you are targeting in India?

Anjan Thakur: In India we focus on Manufacturing, extremely successful in fashion- textile (in India market we cover Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as they are very rich textile markets). We have started approaching the food and beverage market, we are extremely strong in automobile which could be termed as a sub segment into the manufacturing or anything which is discreet manufacturing.

So far manufacturing is contributing as high as about 70% from India to our total revenue and the rest comes from micro verticals but the total umbrella is manufacturing followed by Textiles. We have tied up with Thermax, L&T Shipyards, Aditya Birla, Trend, across product lines.

3. How many channel partners do you have in India? What is your criterion for their selection?

Anjan Thakur: In our channel count, numbers are not important, it is more of quality. This is because our channel partners need to have specific vertical knowledge, product knowledge or domain expertise to go and position our products into that market. We are extremely fussy and strict about whom we are choosing and why. At present we have 25 channel partners across the country and we plan to grow it to 45-50 in next two years.

In order to select our channel partners, we have a matrix that we use- which territories, segments or verticals and which products we want to sell. Based on that we identify strength s and skills in prospective partners and only then we engage in a detail business planning exercise with them.

Our partner program has clear evaluation criteria. We follow a complete performance based matrix. If a partner is not confirming to certain revenue structures or other disciplines that we expect from them, the partnership may not work. On the other hand, our program provides capabilities where a partner could get promoted to highest levels within a year twice or thrice.

4. What are the other benefits that a partner receives on joining Infor?

Anjan Thakur: Our focus is on enablement and training. We are the only other technology company still offers a free certification because we feel the faster a partner grows is a better solution rendering for us, since the faster he builds the capacity in the market. So that is our biggest focus in the first couple of months after the partner joins us.

The program itself provides various forms of accelerators, in addition to the commission they get for achieving different targets that Infor sets. These are all part of the programs. There are separate market development funds for gold and silver partners which allow them to grow in the market. We have partners who have built solutions on our platforms, which we add to our price lists, so that gives them a completely separate revenue generation channel.

5. What role does your channel partner play in expansion of market share for Infor in India?

Anjan Thakur: They play a tremendous role. Worldwide our channel partners constitute about 27% of the total Infor market share. In India it is much higher and is about 40-45%. For almost a new entrant in this market, we realize that there are two types of market expansion that we have. One is the territorial, and for that the best way to have territorial expansion is to have partner presence beyond the metros. It is the Tier 2-3 cities which are showing tremendous growth today, as far as SMB is concerned.

While we have consolidated on our metro partner landscape, the next step is to focus on tier 2 and tier 3 which gives us additional customers. Our Go To Market is about new customer acquisition and that’s what the channel partners are all about. We have a completely separate team which looks after our large direct accounts.

6. How do you plan to tackle the enterprise strategies based on emerging technologies like cloud, in terms of differentiation?  What products do you have around the cloud management services, and how is Infor different from other players in India?

Jeff Abbott: We are building applications and putting them in the cloud. In April we signed a global agreement with Amazon Web Service, and now they are our global partner for cloud infrastructure. We are the only enterprise cloud solution provider that focuses exclusively on applications and industry solutions. Many of our competitors are building their own solutions, even own data centres, they focus on data base and technology. With   Amazon we want to focus on specifically providing the best application for the customers and leaving the data centres to the experts in AWS. They have the most competitive pricing, the best overall security strategy in the market and customers love their service, so they are the perfect fit for us.

Anjan Thakur: We have been talking about cloud in India for a couple of years now, but the proliferation into cloud has not yet been as fast as expected and for India there are reasons enough – infrastructure, logistics, security issues, trust issues, the type of business , the types of data, even customers were not too keen going the cloud way. Over the last couple of months the cloud has picked up. Over the next couple of years the movements might be slow in terms of adaption, but it is very important that as an alternative, adoption it is bound to happen.

7. Mobility is the biggest driving force for direction of application development today. What does Infor have to offer in that space?

Jeff Abbott: Mobility is core to the application strategy. We have a new architecture common solution deployment we call Infor XI and XI. It includes a lot of things – the architecture of the internet or the open standard from the internet as well as fully multi tenancy enabling all of our solutions is one. It also has a mobility platform for all our applications. There’s a dedicated mobility team within the development organisations that oversees the mobility aspect of every solution as it releases.

8. How does Infor collaborate with partners for business planning?

Jeff Abbott: We have a deliberate and exclusive partner strategy so whether its channel partners or alliance partners, we have frequent meetings with all our partners and chart out customised plans for all our products. For our alliance agreements we visit our business plans on an annual basis. The business plans are focused on specific countries, industries and solution areas and there are specific business targets for us for license sales, new customer penetration, adoption of digital solutions and how we getting into Infor customer base.

9. What is your GTM?

Anjan Thakur: We don’t carry the same product across different verticals. We are clear in our strategy or market direction that we have chosen 12 verticals and one horizontal market space. We address those markets with specific solutions which have products or domain features of that vertical as much as possible within the product itself. Advantage this offers to the customer is that of minimum amount of customization or modification required when implementation is done.

We are micro vertical or vertical focused.

Our products are not typical ERP drab screen. We feel that every end user may or may not be IT savvy but may require using ERP to do his job; therefore the user interaction design of the ERP dashboard need not be very complicated. For this we have tried to make it user friendly like a Smartphone or iPhone. Our ERP screen makes work fun.

We think we build beautiful products which deliver to customer requirement rather than pulling the product to meet the customer requirements.

10.  What is your approach to market?

We have 15 more ERP products that we sell across the world and each product is important for each vertical. So we have different ERP solutions for different verticals. We have a set of solutions suitable for particular verticals that makes us unique from competitors in the market. Because of our architecture and look and feel of the product we have started snatching higher and higher market share. This is even though Infor is not an ERP company; we are a business application company.

In India we have launched our cloud suite strategy for partner community. We call it the cloud suite academy. The academy will engage all our partners in driving more and more business and to grow their own business in Infor Cloud Suite. Our intention in coming years is to dominate in the cloud technology space.