Infor To Move Onto Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform
Today, Infor announced plans to run its applications on Microsoft’s Azure, an Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. This move is part of an industry shift from on-premise to on-demand ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions, and will also further tie Infor with Microsoft. The newest models of Infor products will be released through Azure next year.
Previously, Infor’s cloud products (Expense Management, EAM, and SyteLine) were separate offerings on Infor’s own cloud computing platform. Throughout next year, they will instead be made available on Azure.
The Infor applications running on Azure, known as Infor24, will utilize Infor’s recently announced ION framework, which will allow the applications to work alongside on-premise software.
Less than a month ago, Infor representatives stated that the company will standardize its applications using Microsoft SharePoint and Silverlight technologies. The company’s products will have a unified user interface called CompanyOn. The new interface will be a centralized location for business reports, statistics, dashboards, and third-party feeds.
Infor did consider using other cloud infrastructure offerings, such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or Salesforce’s Force.com. But Infor decided against these systems, said Soma Somasundaram, senior vice president of global product development an Infor, because of a lack of a robust developing environment, and in Force.com’s case, a focus on applications developing from scratch.
Somasundaram also noted that Infor’s Java-based and Microsoft .NET-developed applications are supported by Azure.
Infor hopes that by moving its cloud-based ERP offerings to Azure, the company can reduce its pricing. Azure should be able to track specific gauges of usage (such as CPU, bandwidth, storage, etc.) and Infor can charge accordingly.
Infor has not yet decided whether it will offer LN or other ERP products as part of the Infor24 product lineup on Azure. Somasundaram said that customers today are more interested in extended business applications as opposed to core ERP. Infor may, however, make its human capital management (HCM) application available as part of Infor24.
Comments (0)
Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed