Zahid Tractor & Heavy Machinery Co., Ltd., the flagship company of the larger Saudi Arabia-based Zahid Group, went to an internally developed IT system 30 years ago. With most of those original developers retiring, Zahid Tractor was faced with the question of whether to continue to maintain its existing system or change course and go with something new.

Barig Siraj, director at Zahid Tractor, and Nasser Bayram, managing director of the Commercial Vehicles Division at Zahid Tractor, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Inforum 2016 at the Javits Center in New York City, to talk about how Zahid Tractor is making the shift from the old to the new.

Changing times require IT modernization

Zahid Tractor is the largest Caterpillar dealer in the world, according to Siraj. And being Saudi Arabia-based, its company has been forced to change as the Saudi economy has changed from an oil-based economy to a manufacturing economy. The old, legacy IT system that was in place was no longer feasible, so the company chose to migrate to a new, comprehensive, “out-of-the box” system. The company it chose for that change was Infor, Inc.

“So what you need to have is a platform that has support for that diversification when all that changes,” explained Bayram. “You cannot support that in house. The dynamics are so fast, so quick … to do that you have to build an army of people to recreate one of these available off-the-shelf packages.”

Why Infor?

There are many enterprise IT vendors on the market, so why did Zahid Tractor choose Infor? When making the decision which IT partner to go with, Zahid shortlisted three companies: SAP, Microsoft and Infor. It then conducted an exercise where the actual business users came in with their various issues and then had the three vendors present solutions. Those same users then gave ratings of the vendors, and at the end of the day, Infor was the clear winner.

“No one interfered or intervened to influence any direction,” said Bayram. “It was purely done based on the merit of the evaluation of the business scenarios and the compatibility of the solution with our business scenarios.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE