What to expect from Infor Inforum 2019
The Computer Weekly Developer Network (CWDN) team has packed up its Mardi Gras party beads, loaded up on jambalaya and shrimp creole recipes, downloaded a copy of The Big Easy and read up on supply chain ERP best practices.
It can only mean one thing. CWDN is headed to Infor Inforum 2019 in New Orleans.
As the largest city in Lousiana, New Orleans boasts a sprawl that takes up a larger landmass than the state-capital Baton Rouge… so with the stage set, what can we expect from the conference?
Infor core competencies
By way of a reminder, Infor is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) company with specific core competencies in supply chain, customer relationships, data analytics and enterprise management — all of which is/are cloud-centric, if not also cloud-native.
Infor works with customers in industry sectors such as food and beverage, process manufacturing, distribution and healthcare — and this is important.
It’s important because one of Infor’s main USPs is its dedication to building what it likes to call ‘industry-specific cloud applications’, in direct terms.
Themes for 2019
Among the case study sessions Infor has scheduled for the event, a handful of them appear to focus on its Infor Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management (Infor d/EPM) technology.
In terms of what this is, d/EPM combines software-centric business tools and financial performance management into one EPM software package — it is designed to provide a means to report and measure past and current performance and forecast future activities in real time.
Other Infor technologies showcased will include Infor CloudSuite covering everything from facilities management, to federal financials & supply management… and onwards to areas such as billing, inventory intelligence, supply chain transport management and everything in between.
The CWDN team will also aim to look at Infor’s approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) with its Coleman AI product — named after the inspiring physicist and mathematician Katherine Coleman Johnson, whose trailblazing work helped NASA land on the moon.
We will also aim to look at the Infor OS cloud operating system in more depth at this year’s show.
Infor has broken out its presentation sessions as follows.
- Customer presentations: Success stories and best practices.
- Product sessions: Dive deeper into product (beginners to advanced).
- Panel discussions: Expert perspectives.
- Vision/roadmap sessions: The vision for the company as a whole.
- Partner sessions: Certified partners, account managers and customers.
- Industry sessions: Trends discussed by industry type..
- Speed Sessions: Short focused sessions on a variety of industry and product topics.
There’s also an Expert Insights session, which is an ask the experts event, obviously.
“Inforum 2019 promises to be an exciting blend of education, networking, and personal development opportunities for the professionals joining us in New Orleans this year,” said Soma Somasundaram, Infor chief technology officer. “Whether they are developers, data engineers or C-level executives, customers will learn about some recent developments – including Infor OS – a gateway for innovation, as well as many new industry-specific features and innovations. We’ll also talk about our Platform-as-a-Service and how developers can use it to create AI-driven projects that scale. There will also be roadmap sessions, case studies and opportunities to engage with the Infor product development teams as they share new features and offer practical advice on leveraging Infor solutions to the fullest potential.”
Infor’s complete product sets spans: Customer Experience Management, Enterprise Asset Management, Enterprise Performance Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Enterprise Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Configure Price Quote, Product Lifecycle Management, Service Management & Supply Chain Management.
Products include Infor ION purpose-built middleware, Infor Ming.le business collaboration software, Infor Analytics for business intelligence, Infor CloudSuite a software deployment platform and Infor Mongoose for application development.
The event hashtag is #inforum2019