Infor, a New York-based cloud software specialised by industry, has landed a massive $1.5 billion investment from its existing shareholders Koch Equity Development, LLC (KED) and Golden Gate Capital.
This investment builds on KED’s investment of more than $2 billion in early 2017, and it represents an important milestone as Infor considers a potential IPO in 2019 or 2020, subject to market conditions.
“Koch and Golden Gate Capital have been phenomenal partners for Infor, and all of our 17,300 employees are excited about this milestone as we prepare for the next stage of growth,” confirms Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor.
Infor has invested approximately $2.5 billion in product design and development over the last five years and delivered more than 475 new products, 1,870 integrations, and 20,700 industry features in its CloudSuite product line. Infor CloudSuite is now the only fully multi-tenant ERP suite spanning front and back office applications, as well as logistics with global support (in terms of languages, currencies, and localisations).
With over $3 billion of revenue in fiscal year 2018, Infor became the first company to move mission critical ERP application suites to public clouds for entire industries. “Infor’s CloudSuites are the foundation for digital transformation for more than 9,500 customers in 110 countries. Infor applications span financials, manufacturing, supply chain, human resources, and customer relationships,” said Jane Thomson, Managing Director of EOH Infor Services, Infor’s Master Partner in Africa (operating as a Gold Partner). “Over the last five years, Infor has consistently gained market share in cloud applications, and 70% of its software license revenue is now derived from cloud applications.”
Fundamental to Infor’s strategy is its ability to engineer each CloudSuite for a specific industry. Infor eliminates the need for expensive customisations and runaway consulting engagements. Customers routinely lower costs by 25% or more by retiring mods, eliminating big bang upgrades, and reducing infrastructure costs after moving to CloudSuite. Infor has expanded its presence in key industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, the public sector, and hospitality.
“Companies see the value in shifting their enterprise applications to the cloud but can’t make that transition until critical industry features are replicated there. Infor built these previously bespoke features as standard cloud services and now has access to valuable data across business functions to build predictive analytics and insightful correlations on our Coleman AI platform,” says Phillips.
Infor CloudSuite is also future proofed for innovation. “Infor applications run on public scale clouds and open source infrastructure not tied to a single data store and scale out at lower costs using commodity compute and storage on demand. Vertical integration is a legacy of on-premise computing, and modern applications leverage global, commodity infrastructure,” concludes Thomson.
