Under the leadership of CEO Charles Phillips, Infor Inc. “has delivered.” That’s according to Ray Wang, Principal Analyst, Founder & Chairman of Constellation Research. Many in the industry weren’t sure whether Phillips would utilize a “buy, slash, and burn operation” with Infor’s late-to-the-table cloud initiatives, but the company’s actions have been very unexpected to the analyst. Wang sat down with Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly on theCUBE at Infor’s annual Inforum conference to discuss the enterprise software provider’s success and competitive advantages, as well as the digital disruption occurring throughout the tech market and economy at large.

Infor’s advantages over SAP

Many customers had been with Infor for a long time, but even more new customers are turning to Infor as they move out of the industrial age and into the digital one, Wang observed. “If they know what they want, Infor is ready to build it,” he said. That’s one of Infor’s main value points, but most of that building can be re-used for others within the same industry. Micro-targeting, Wang said, distinguishes Infor from its competitors. There aren’t “a lot of vertical-specific clouds.”

Wang observed that in head-to-head deals, Infor often comes out on top of SAP SE because “they deliver the requirements and promises to build that into the core product.” SAP, Wang said, deviated from their app-centric vision in order to incorporate its Big Data platform HANA, but now is refocusing on applications, making it their priority to get “the apps onto the platform.”

For Wang, the differences between Infor and SAP suggest a shift in approach. “Infor,” he said, “is going straight to the vertical and then building against those.”

Read more after the video.

The age of digital disruption

In a preview of his Inforum panel on September 17th, Wang shared some insights on digital disruption, noting “two percent of the fortune 500 have been decimated” by the rapid changes taking place in the tech industry. He cited an American Enterprise Institute study which found that 88 percent of the original Fortune 500 have essentially disappeared. “It’s happened,” Wang said, “because of the internet, because of a set of technologies, and massive amounts of digital disruption.”

Infor is among those companies not only surviving in an era of digital disruption, but enabling others to leverage the advantages of modern data centers with efficient networking, accessible storage and scalable cloud components.

Wang’s own research firm could be considered a digital disruptor as well, focusing its business themes around data-driven decision making and technology optimization. Wang was sure to point out that he didn’t mention a single technology or specific role that Constellation fulfills or supports for its clients because it aligns “with what end users want to do around business problems.”

Companies come to Constellation, Wang said, because they want to figure out whether they’re going to be disrupted, to figure out “what could possibly come out of nowhere and hit us.” He called out Uber, Inc. as an example of a company that completely disrupted the taxi business, saying his company helps clients anticipant disruption and enables companies find opportunities to meet customer demands and find new sources of revenue while innovating.

photo credit: Tsahi Levent-Levi via photopin cc