Businesses inside and outside technology are learning what happens when cloud takes infrastructure out of the picture. Infor Inc. opted to build its business applications on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud to makes its developers’ jobs easier. They work smarter now, differentiating up the stack with industry-specific suites of cloud applications for enterprises.

Is this drilling down to specific problems what entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen meant when he said, “Software is eating the world”?

“Maybe ‘it’s helping the world’ might be a better way to put it,” said Charles Phillips (pictured), chief executive officer of Infor.

Business is calling on technology not just for storage and compute, but for ready-to-wear solutions to specific financial, human resource and productivity issues, Phillips said during an interview at the Inforum event in New York. A trend towards hiring software executives to run non-tech companies is emerging for similar reasons, he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.) 

“You can learn retail faster than they can learn how to program,” he said.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Charles Phillips in our Guest of the Week feature.

Infor buys things to fill a hole

Infor has focused on verticals intensely in the past few years, Philips said. It bills its CloudSuite as fully-fashioned, mission-critical applications that do not require any modifications. Doubling down on instant gratification, Infor has just unveiled artificial intelligence robot Coleman. The company claims Coleman can take detailed directions, perform tasks, and share information based on users’ unique and changing needs.

Infor acquired Birst, a cloud-native business intelligence platform, in response to customers’ demand for desktop analytics. “We don’t buy things just for scale,” said Philips. “We buy things because it’s a specific value proposition for customers or it fills a hole.”

To spread its products widely, Infor has a “huge distribution channel,” newly augmented by major Service Integrators, Phillips stated. Accenture PLC, Capgemini SE, Grant Thornton LLP and Deloitte Consulting LLP are now onboard as Infor SI partners. These new relationships will break any remaining constraints to scaling out, Phillips believes.

This is timely, since Infor and Koch Industries Inc. just penned a deal that will stretch Infor in new directions. “It will be one of the largest global implementations ever, of any financials project, of any HCM [Human Capital Management],” he said. Koch is also a major bankroller; the multinational corporation invested $2.5 billion in Infor last November.

The company’s latest partnership began with a prior project Infor oversaw at Georgia-Pacific Corp., a Koch Company. GPC tapped Infor out of frustration with its provider at the time, SAP SE. Excessive cost and lagging pace were among GPC’s complaints regarding SE. “We had the micro-vertical features; they could get going quickly,” Phillips said.

Infor completed the implementation without hitting the budget ceiling. “Word travels when you come in under budget inside of Koch,” Phillips stated.

Indeed, it traveled all the way up to Koch’s chairman and chief executive officer Charles Koch. Phillips eventually met with Koch to plan the companies’ joint trajectory. “He’s an MIT grad, very technical, so I wasn’t sure what I was getting into,” Phillips said. The two found common ground in their passion for product innovation. “We hit it off very well.”

AWS services are the new infrastructure at Infor

Infor owes much of its product success to the cloud and the specialty software it enables, according to Phillips. Its industry-ready cloud applications that won Koch and other customers rely heavily on AWS services.

Infor shopped the whole aisle before choosing a cloud on which to build CloudSuite. “We met with Microsoft, IBM — you name it. And at the time, AWS was just so much farther along,” Phillips said. In terms of services, capabilities, entrepreneurial spirit and scale, “It wasn’t even close,” he added.

DynamoDB NoSQL database, Kinesis real-time data streaming platform and S3 storage are some AWS services Infor uses. Coleman’s conversational interface comes courtesy of AWS Lex natural language tool. These services create a flywheel effect that allow Infor’s developers to untangle problems and innovate in industry verticals, Philips explained.

“I don’t want them worried about infrastructure. Just write the application,” he said.

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