As theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media, team commenced its coverage of Inforum 2016 at the Javits Center in New York City today, cohosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41) plotted Infor, Inc.’s progress since the last biannual event.

Inforum is a user forum for Infor customers, and during the two years between events, the company spends that time investing in new innovations and then unveiling them at the conference. This year, Inforum 2016 is boasting about 14,000 participants, which is significantly higher than 2014’s event, according to theCUBE hosts.

A focus on industry specificity

“What we heard two years ago was this shift to the cloud, this notion of no customized modifications in the cloud and going the last mile — focusing on industry specificity and bringing in beautiful design,” Vellante remarked.

According to Vellante, Infor is a collection of companies that have been around over a decade. The company has acquired a rollup of different businesses, including Hook & Loop, a New York design firm; Lawson Software, an ERP software company; McCormack & Dodge, a developer of mainframe financial software, as well as other legacy software companies.

“They have completely reinvented the company shifting to SaaS [Software as a Service] building on top of AWS [Amazon Web Services] bringing in beautiful design,” said Vellante.

Collecting for growth

The team discussed Infor’s CEO Charles Phillips’ dedication to growing the company. “It’s extremely rare in the software industry for a financial buyer to take a bunch of software companies, roll them up, and then modernize them and renovate them for growth,” explained Gilbert, who went on to say, typically, when acquisitions of software companies happen, they are put on life support, R&D shuts down and the company survives on maintenance revenue.

Calling the strategy clever, Gilbert pointed out that Infor is moving surface apps onto the cloud and making it less sticky, which Vellante agreed is better than a “forklift” move to the cloud for the enterprise.

Infor is a private company, which according to the analysts allows the company to write its own narrative without a 90-day shop clock, which provides speed to market and agility.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE