A decade ago Infor, Inc. may have been struggling, but throughout Inforum 2016 it became clear that the company is currently working with innovation in mind. Day One of the Inforum 2016 event ended on promising developments and announcements. Providing insights on the event’s first day were Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. The duo was live from Inforum 2016 at Javits Center in NYC.

A $3 billion company that’s growing 9–10 percent a year, Infor is also investing cash into the business, making acquisitions and creating a strong story for itself. This was Vellante’s and Gilbert’s second Inforum, and they noted how large it has become with lots of attendees.

“The ecosystem is still young and yet to blossom, but they’re working on it,” said Vellante. One way to do that might be to open the platform up a bit, but they seem to be afraid to do that, he added. But, he thinks it would go a long way toward innovation.

Innovation in architecture and changing economics

Still, Infor is being innovative from a software architecture point of view. “What Infor has done is re-conceived the applications around a bullseye point where the core is hard to change, but away from that core it becomes easier to make modifications,” said Gilbert. The company has been making incremental progress, starting with the user interface, then working down the levels from CRM to industry-specific engines in the back.

In previous systems, all dependent on the customer’s on-prem requirements, you had to support every customization and every new version. “It was a mess — spaghetti code,” added Gilbert. With this new model of architecture, you make much faster progress. In another innovative move, customers can buy and implement analytics solutions without upgrading their transaction systems. “Now companies can change the economics of their IT investments,” Gilbert said.

End of day one

Looking toward the future, Vellante pointed out that with how well this event is going and how great it is for marketing, it should be an annual event, not biannual. There’s been strong messaging out of Day One, and Vellante and Gilbert added that there is much to come and many more guests they will talk to on theCUBE during the rest of the event.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE