Infor is one of those organizations that falls into the smaller (rarer) 10% or so of firms that actually preview its forthcoming events with a fully-detailed set of information and stories related to what attendees might expect.
Not known as Infor Inforum this year, Infor Now 2023 is still hosted in New Orleans, which was the location of the last major customer, user and partner event of this kind in pre-pandemic times. Taking place from October 4-5 in the city they call The Big Easy, what can we expect?
According to Infor VP of platform technology Rick Rider, the past few years have taught his team that gone are the days when historical relationships and industry grit, tenacity and know-how served as differentiators. He talks of what he calls the ‘remote reality’ of modern distributed business that creates both obstacles and opportunities that have fueled new business models.
This, he says, sparked detailed research in composability and agility.
“At Infor, it’s been our objective to partner directly with customers to prove out innovative use cases such as machine-learning-embedded intelligence, as well as complete operational automation fueled by predictive insights. We knew that to help our customers retain their competitive advantages, we had to embrace this challenge with levels of accuracy and speed unseen in the market. Fortunately, we had an engine and a culture that could really fuel this motion: Infor OS (Operating Service),” said Rider.
A keynote speaker at Infor Now, Rider will of course be joined by Infor president and CTO Soma Somasundaram.
Always keen to provide the hard core software engineering and real world data science professional view on how the Infor platform is evolving, Somasundaram will want to explain how various departments of the company’s business are orchestrated to showcase the work of ‘fusion teams’, a term that we can explain as cross-functional working units composed of more than one department with more than one domain specialism and more than one core skillset.
No fluff, just real stuff
Infor promises to positively avoid ‘marketing fluff’ and talk about outcomes and solutions in real industry language. It will showcase AI and enterprise automation outcomes while also discussing roadmaps for the future.
“[This event] will showcase the next evolution of Infor. We plan to market ourselves through our customers’ successes and prove that we are your co-innovation partner for the long haul,” enthused Rider.
We can also expect Infor to cover AI & ML in depth. There will be sessions on analytics and reporting, on the company’s cloud technology and data fabric approach – and we can also expect Infor to talk about the quest for a unified user experience as it also covers essential governance, risk and compliance requirements.
More than ‘just’ ERP
It is (arguably) important not to just think of Infor as an ERP company, but also as a financials platform specialist and as a business that spans Human Capital Management (HCM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Workforce Management (WFM).
Finally here, let’s remind ourselves that Infor is specifically industry-specific in its market approach and that means solutions aligned for industrial manufacturing, food & beverage, distribution, fashion, automotive, apparel – footwear & textiles, plus also aerospace and defense.
