The evolution of Infor OS mirrors Infor Inc.’s growth as a company. OS, or Operating Service, is the unifying foundation on which Infor users run cloud-based, user-friendly enterprise tools, and the company has steadily enhanced the platform over several years as it has announced new features in its product portfolio.

A key element of Infor OS involves the continued integration of Coleman, the company’s artificial intelligence platform. Infor announced the launch of its platform for embedded machine learning models in Coleman last month, which will run on Infor OS.

“Our idea is if you buy an industry cloud suite, you must feel like it came from Infor,” said Soma Somasundaram (pictured), chief technology officer of Infor. “It all should work together as an integrated suite; it should all be sharing data for analytics. That is the whole idea behind building Infor OS.”

Somasundaram spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Inforum event in Washington, D.C. They discussed the role of application management in the operating service and the importance of providing a wide range of cloud deployment options to Infor’s customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Building software not databases

An important hallmark of Infor OS and the firm’s enterprise approach involves applications and allowing customers to access data and APIs as needed. “We’re all about applications,” Somasundaram said. “We’re not building databases; we’re not building our own data centers. We’re a business software application company.”

Infor has also recognized that today’s enterprise computing world is a heterogeneous one. The more options it can provide customers to run different applications and workloads in a multitude of cloud environments the better.

“If a customer is running Salesforce and they don’t want to replace that, we need to be able to work in an environment where it’s running in a different cloud, a different layer,” Somasundaram explained. “So we built Infor OS and the layer to be able to deal with that kind of hyper deployment. Ultimately, the customer has a choice.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Inforum 2018. Neither Infor Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE