Over the past month, Infor, Inc. has made some key decisions about acquisitions to strengthen its position in the retail vertical. At the end of June, the company completed a merger with Predictix, LLC, a consumer-demand forecasting technology company. This month, Infor announced its intent to acquire Starmount, Inc., a leading in-store experience software company that is expected to raise the bar on a customer service.

Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, theorized that part of the Infor strategy is to acquire companies and grow them to compete in various verticals. Corey Tollefson, senior VP and GM of Infor, joined the theCUBE during Inforum 2016 in NYC to discuss how through mergers and acquisitions, Infor will enrich the experience for retailers and consumers.

From legacy to real digital

Tollefson, who has been with Infor about 18 months, said it was the culture and the passion of being disruptive in conventional thinking that brought him to head up the new retail division.

“The market needs it. So we’re just marrying the market,” Tollefson explained. “So if you look at the prevailing legacy solutions that have been out there for years — it’s pre-mobile, pre-social, pre-Internet — a lot of the retail ERP [solutions] have been written in the 1990s … and we just thought the time was right for a technology provider to come up with some fresh thinking and be innovative and adapt to all the changes that retail has been facing,”

He added that Infor has a real digital practice. Infor’s Hook & Loop team is the traditional core of going after the user experience with all of the company’s retail customers. “That is what the retail industry needs and wants, and it’s not a collection of old legacy products … that, in fact, I’ve never felt more invigorated, and the market is reacting with wallets,” he said.

Predicting all the ‘rights’

Comparing the in-store shopping experience to the endless aisle of Amazon, Tollefson explained how Infor’s intent to acquire Starmount is to be able to provide retail brands with a better in-store experience along with the ability to personalize the shopping experience and help shoppers get what they want quickly, even if it is not in the store.

Another advantage for Infor is the finalization Predictix merger. The analytics platform offers retailers the algorithms they need to make sure they have the right product in the right store at the right price point at the right time. The difference between Predictix and the legacy solutions is that the platform was built to be cloud-native on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and has a configurable platform for micro-verticals. Tollefson illustrated this difference by describing how machine learning offers capabilities that go further than comparing past sales history by providing other factors around weather and holidays to get the optimal forecast.

“We have an innovative team that believes in disruption and doing something in retail the way it should be, but we also have the backing and scale of a company like Infor where we can make these strategic bets,” Tollefson affirmed.

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