Is getting acquired always just code for selling out? Are you just handing over your business to a big, faceless conglomerate so it can strip-mine your assets and toss your unique approach and branding in the dustbin? At the least, most deep-pocketed companies will want to remake acquisitions in their own image — at IBM, they call it “blue washing.” Infor, Inc. just acquired retail cloud provider Predictix, LLC — is it going to “red wash” them?

Molham Aref, executive at Infor and former CEO of Predictix, said it is going in the opposite direction. “We want to inject this sort of scrappy DNA into this larger company,” he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Inforum 2016 in NYC.

He said that Infor is fully onboard, and the company admires Predictix’s signature style and want to keep it “agile and fast and fun.”

“We’re being kept together as a cohesive unit. And we’re having a whole bunch of Infor people added to the team, and we’re running it in the high-growth way we’ve been running it,” he said.

It does seem that larger companies can freshen their image these days by acquiring a younger boutique company — or in some sense, being acquired by them.

Is on-prem a hindrance?

Aref spoke about the challenges large legacy companies have keeping up with newer, more agile players. Predictix is an all-cloud company, and Aref said ironically some cloud/on-prem companies insist, “We’re better because we’re both.”

He spoke about a customer it won away from three or four larger contenders. “We all got the same data, and we were all asked to make the same predictions. Our predictions had at least 25 percent less error than the next best guy’s.”

He said the secret sauce was, “We weren’t constrained by on-prem,” and added that the number of cores it can utilize in the cloud vastly outnumber those that can be used by companies tethered to on-prem.

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