Infor Inc. followed up its June 2017 acquisition of Birst Inc., a cloud-native business intelligence, analytics and data visualization platform, with the announcement today of Coleman, an artificial intelligence platform for CloudSuite applications. How those two platforms will complement Infor’s strategic direction was the central question as the company kicked off its Inforum 2017 event in New York.

“One broad brush of AI across every application probably won’t make sense. I want some more meat on the bones in terms of strategy,”said James Kobielus (pictured, left) (@jameskobielus), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

Kobielus and his co-hosts Dave Vellante (pictured, right) (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (pictured, center) (@knightrm) analyzed the strategic details around Infor, Coleman and Birst and discussed the company’s mission to drive revenue in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. (* Disclosure below.)

The Coleman introduction showcased digital assistant and conversational interface features, but theCUBE analysts wanted to see more on how Infor would leverage the technology to stand apart from competitors.

“It sounds impressive, though it’s an early announcement and they’ve only begun to trickle it out to their vast suite,” Kobielus said. “What is their timeline for rolling out those Coleman capabilities so customers can realize that value?”

Koch Industries investment stake

Another area that theCUBE analysts discussed involved the $2.5 billion stake in Infor that was completed by the investment arm of Koch Industries in February.

“The substantial amount of the investment goes into running the company,” said Vellante, who viewed the Koch purchase as an opportunity to “build up the equity and float it some day in the public market.”

The investment also underscores the rising significance of Infor’s place in the increasingly competitive business software market. “For a unicorn, for a privately held company, this is up there with Uber and Airbnb,” said Knight.

Infor’s strategy has been to offer business applications to serve a range of micro-verticals in competition with other software rivals, such as Oracle and SAP. “It’s a war of attrition in the ERP space. I want to get a sense for how Infor tends to differentiate their suite,” Kobielus stated.

The analysts noted that Infor has continued its partnership with Amazon to deliver application suites through Amazon Web Services. Vellante pointed out that Infor’s application portfolio is full of “hardcore enterprise apps” and that 55 percent of Infor’s revenue comes from the cloud.

“A lot of these apps are becoming cloud-enabled,” Vellante concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Inforum 2017. Neither Infor Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE