Infor Inc., the privately-held enterprise juggernaut with a knack for flying under the industry’s radar, is following in the footsteps of its better-known competitors to the public cloud. But while SAP SE and Oracle Corp. are adjusting for the new way of delivering applications one product and strategic acquisition at a time, the stealthy software powerhouse is diving in headfirst – and rebuilding everything from scratch.

At Inforum 2014 in New Orleans this week (see SiliconANGLE’s coverage here), the company unveiled an entire lineup of cloud-based solutions more reminiscent of an Amazon Web Services (AWS) summit than a suit-and-tie user conference dedicated to backoffice systems. That’s hardly a coincidence. Infor was among the first major industry players to migrate its entire operations onto the retail giant’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform, a pivot that the new services extend over to the product side.

At the tip of the spear is Xi, a cloud-based implementation of the company’s Infor 10x stack that brings together financial management, analytics and social collaboration capabilities under an HTML5 interface accessible from any device. The idea behind the offering is to provide a centralized replacement for the complex tangle of applications that can be found at most large organizations today minus the integration faults and sprawling management costs.

Infor is rolling out Xi alongside a string of additions to its CloudSuite line of vertical-specific services, which also runs on AWS. The new products include a pre-packaged enterprise resource management (ERP) system for midsize companies that don’t have the resources to support on-premise deployments, an accounting toolkit built in collaboration with top consultancies and a workflow management solution for healthcare organizations.

The homegrown offerings are joined by a complementary lifecycle management (PLM) product licensed from Aras Corp, a software supplier based in Massachusetts that sets itself apart from more traditional enterprise vendors with an open-core business model. The company is among the dozens of partners that made their presence felt at Inforum 2014, a list that also includes other niche players such as Business Software, Inc., which took the opportunity to show off its cloud-based payroll and tax services. The ecosystem is a central part of Infor’s plans to extend its reach deeper into vertical markets that are embracing the cloud.

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