Infor Inc. made a deal with Amazon.com, Inc. to leverage Amazon’s cloud infrastructure and hasn’t looked back. Now it claims to be the world’s largest cloud enterprise software provider, according to Infor President Stephen Scholl.

At the Inforum 2014 conference, Scholl sat down with theCUBE’s Jeff Kelly and Dave Vellante to talk cloud adoption, security, and strategy.

Infor has been “elbowing” into the financial space, looking toward big and middle-market customers alike. Scholl described the Infor approach as “one customer at a time,” but also stressed that there’s a good reason companies of both sizes turn to Infor to get a grip on cloud services.

What distinguishes Infor from other cloud providers, Scholl said, is that it operates on “Cloud 3.0,” meaning that the company doesn’t own its own data centers. That’s Amazon’s role. Scholl said mid-market businesses as an underserved market and that other cloud companies don’t have the “breadth and functionality” to provide them with access to a global network and meet their “up market requirements.” Infor can, he said, because it uses Amazon cloud infrastructure and offer localizations.

Scholl defended Infor’s relatively late entry into the market as an advantage because it enabled the company to piggyback on existing infrastructure. Customers get the benefits of Amazon functionally and security, while Infor  handles the back-end work like systems administration and software licenses.

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Scholl sees cloud infrastructure transforming the way companies approach IT. Customers are “sick and tired” of having to run their own IT infrastructures, he said. They want to take advantage of cloud functionality but don’t necessarily want to manage it.

Infor is moving to help customers learn how to moved their business to the cloud. The vendor has been working on migration scripts and other tools to help customers make the switch for the past seven months.

At the moment, most customers prefer a hybrid cloud environment, Scholl noted. They maintain a suite of applications on their own platform, get new divisions running in the cloud, and use Infor’s ION middleware to integrate cloud applications back into company’s existing infrastructure. It’s a step-by-step process, he said, rarely a big bang implementation.”

Image via Infor.com