With over 100 designers, Infor, Inc.’s internal creative agency Hook & Loop is one of the top three creative agencies in New York City. In an interview for theCUBE at Inforum 2014, Infor CEO Charles Phillips discussed why the company formed Hook & Loop and how basing its headquarters in New York City was key to the agency’s success.

Phillips believes that there are two reasons why organizations never really discuss the UI of enterprise applications: the people buying them don’t have to use them and the people using them don’t have a choice. As a self-proclaimed gadget guy, he admitted that he never liked the look of enterprise applications and wondered why they couldn’t look like the beautiful consumer applications created by companies like Apple Inc., Google Inc. and Samsung Group. Hook & Loop was created to solve this issue by developing enterprise applications that are as stunning as they are easy to use.

In the process of forming Hook & Loop, Infor wanted to go for people from a different world who created designs for entertainment purposes. This type of creative quality offers a great understanding on how to engage an audience, a characteristic that traditional enterprise design isn’t known for. “They think of UI differently,” said Phillips. He admitted that Infor didn’t have that skill set, and the only way for the company to get it was to find people who weren’t enterprise guys, who know and care about beauty and design. Phillips stated that there are a lot of people in New York City who fit this description and that this was one of the reasons why Infor based its headquarters there. “It’s hard to find these people. They’re not in some recruiter’s book,” he added.