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Infor shows strong growth

By | January 3, 2012, 9:16am PST

Summary: Infor is benefiting from the freeing up of IT budgets, closing out the calendar year strongly.

Infor closed out 2011 with strong, double digit growth. While the company does not release financial details it claims:

  • 17% license growth in the 12 months to 30th November, 2011
  • 16% organic licence growth for its second fiscal quarter
  • EBITDA margins up to 27%
  • Year over year growth in Infor’s core ERP business up 25%

The lack of financial insight is frustrating, especially since we do not know what impact these improvements had on Infor’s rumored debt mountain. However, the company appears to be benefiting from a fresh focus that saw it add 2,500 net new customers during 2011 and expand its reach among 12,000 existing customers.

As part of the press release, Infor reminded the market that it is not just another rollup play:

Infor added more than 500 software engineers in 2011 and announced plans to hire an additional 75 developers in its Innovation Center, which will be housed at the company’s new headquarters in New York City. Infor shipped 69 new products, 1904 new features and 2001 customer enhancement requests – up more than 70 percent from the previous year.

It also reminded us that Infor has created a strategic partnership with Salesforce.com that includes a multi-million dollar investment into Infor. Details of development progress were not revealed.

Expect to hear me talk more about Infor in the coming year. They are shaping up to become interesting again as they provide more lightweight integrations to third party applications like SAP and, of course, Salesforce.com

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Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991.

Disclosure

Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett is committed to maintaining the independent and opinionated stance that his writings are well known for and does not enter into contracts that would limit his freedom of expression in any way. However it is important in the interests of full disclosure to inform readers of those relationships so they can form their own judgment. This page therefore lists all Dennis Howlett’s current business relationships.

Dennis’s consulting arrangements occasionally bring him into direct or indirect business relationships with some of the companies about which he writes, and/or their competitors. Where such a relationship exists, it is disclosed at the end of any article that references the company concerned.

Dennis owns AccMan, an independently produced blog covering the professional services market, primarily focused on Europe. It is currently sponsored by selected TextLink Ads and named sponsors in the ‘Sponsored Content’ block.

He is a member of Enterprise Advocates, a loose association of consultants, and analysts who are concerned with the buyer side of the buy-sell enterprise relationship.

He is a paid contributor to IT Counts, a site dedicated to discussing technology issues as they related to ICAEW members. He also advises ICAEW on certain aspects of its member outreach programs.

He is an SAP Mentor and participates in SAP Mentor webinars. He has recently produced a guide for SAP resellers wishing to record customer videos. Other than as disclosed here, Dennis maintains no business relationship with SAP and is not financially rewarded for his role as a Mentor.

Dennis maintains relationships with a range of end user organizations and in all cases is subject to non-disclosure agreement. He has no current ‘paid for’ relationships with ITC vendors except as disclosed above although certain vendors comp travel and expenses claims. For the benefit of doubt, T&E reimbursement is a common practice among European based writers. It is often the only way we can attend important events. Even so it doesn’t impact our analysis of what vendors have to say. If you believe otherwise then feel free to ignore what is written here.

Except as mentioned above, Dennis has no other investments in any tech industry participants. This page last updated 23rd February, 2010.

Biography

Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991 in a variety of European trade and professional journals including CFO Magazine, The Economist and Information Week. Today, apart from being a full time blogger on innovation for professional services organisations, he is a founding member of Enterprise Irregulars and an investor in a European start-up. Prior to, Dennis was technology and tax partner in a British firm of Chartered Accountants for 10 years. Prior to that held various senior finance roles across a broad range of industries.

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Internal management has been approaching strategic business partners with add-on modules to their various ERP platforms and giving the ultimatum "sell your product to us or we'll develop a replacement internally and push you out." They've already purchased Single Source Systems (Field Service) and RSVP (Quality) and apparently have their sights set on Lake Co. (Advanced Shipping). They are clearly flush with cash and feel they are in a position to take control of their stack rather than share with partners. Their moves have all made sense so far...we'll have to wait and see if that continues. A lot of times companies go on buying sprees like this and wind up trying to expand the scope of their operation (Oracle and Microsoft excel at this) rather than consolidate and improve upon their existing code base. Based on these recent acquisitions as well as the strategic direction their software has taken, it would seem that Infor is trying to position itself as a tier-1 ERP vendor. I expect two years from now they may well be.

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