June in review: niche IT news

Infor CEO talks AI plans, democratizing retail and rethinking ERP

After six years as the CEO of Infor, Charles Phillips has successfully helped the company through a  transformation into a profitable, and valuable cloud-based software company. Since the 2016 investment from Koch Industries, Infor has been growing and investing in its cloud services and improving automation. On the topic of AI, Phillips says: “We will be launching that, but doing it differently. Not just AI for AI’s sake. We want to pick specific industry use cases that make sense for us and our customers. A lot of people announce things and they sit there thinking, what should I do with AI? It will be infused inside of our applications, the same thing we did with science and optimization. We will bring it to you as an application enhancement. It will touch a lot of applications, but it won’t overwhelm you where you have to learn a whole new framework.” Phillips also dishes on the Birst acquisition, government opportunities and more. Infor also stands to benefit from Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, a current Infor customer – since Infor runs its cloud service on AWS. Phillips told Diginomica, “Everybody was calling. I’ve talked to both companies already. We will just have to figure it out because there’s a scenario where that could be very good for us. We want to validate that first before we say anything.”

Infor completes acquisition of Birst to augment its cloud services

Infor has announced that it has closed its acquisition of Birst. Birst is a platform for sourcing and presenting data insights in order to drive business decisions. After announcing its intent to purchase the company in April, Infor has finalized the deal. Birst describes itself as delivering “accurate, actionable content in an intuitive, self-service environment.” Built using open source IT  from Facebook, and Google, Birst’s BI software allows users to combine data from various sources in order to receive answers to business problems and concerns in real-time.

Redefining business intelligence for the enterprise

The news of the month really seems to be the acquisition of Birst. Infor president, Duncan Angove, takes to the Infor blog to talk about the acquisition and how it is going to drive innovation within Infor. Birst’s BI – Comprehensive Business Intelligence is going to bring great value to the current 65 million plus users of Infor Cloudsuite. Check out more on the Infor blog.

Our top 5 session picks for Inforum 2017

Inforum will take place New York’s Silicon Alley at the Javits Center. Learn how Infor will reimagine enterprise software and see  Grammy Award-winning artist, Bruno Mars, who headlines the Customer Appreciation Concert on Wednesday, July 12 at 8:30. Washington Frank USA will also be in attendance  – look for us in the halls between sessions! Our team will host a business card drop competition and have keychains and brochures to give away. In the meantime – we’ve picked our top 5 sessions to attend – let us know if you agree with our picks!

Did we miss something in the exciting world of Niche IT or Infor news?  Let us know in the comments below, or by tweeting us @washington_frk.