Infor doubles down on APAC with cloud and AI

Infor is doubling down on the Asia-Pacific region as a key growth engine by leveraging its deep expertise in building software for the manufacturing sector and embedding artificial intelligence (AI) into its platform to attract new customers.

Speaking to Computer Weekly on the sidelines of a customer event in Stockholm last week, Infor CEO Kevin Samuelson noted that APAC’s strong manufacturing base makes it a key market, where the company has seen growing interest from customers of rival firms who have been frustrated by complex upgrade paths.

“Asia has been a very high-growth region for us, and it’s an important one,” Samuelson said. “We’re incredibly focused on manufacturing and distribution, and Asia serves as a massive hub for that.”

The company is targeting companies with revenues of between $100m and $5bn, a “sweet spot” where its industry-specific capabilities are more affordable and come with lower implementation risks and support costs compared to competitors. “That really resonates in the Asian market,” Samuelson said.

He added that Infor has also built an extensive partner ecosystem and a direct team to both sell and implement its software for customers in the region.

“We found that to be an important combination because with all the innovation happening, we want to make sure we’re involved even if a partner is deploying,” he said. “That gives customers a lot of comfort that we’re going to make sure it goes well.”

However, organisations will have to move to the cloud to fully harness Infor’s capabilities, including its recently announced AI agents that help automate workflows. “Our view is that it’s just not going to be an option to stay on-premise, as your competitors that move to the cloud will ultimately have a significant advantage,” he said.

To ease the cloud transition, Infor has launched its Leap programme, a fixed-fee, fixed-timeline migration service designed to de-risk the move for new customers as well as existing customers who may still be using its legacy on-premise software. The programme aims to make the switch more affordable and predictable by addressing common barriers, like budget overruns and project delays.

Key to Infor’s regional growth is its longstanding partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Samuelson said the hyperscaler’s growing datacentre footprint across Asia helps address data residency and sovereignty concerns. “The AWS story helps a lot, because in most countries where there’s hesitancy about the cloud, it’s really about the data and not so much the technology,” he added.

Regarding AI, Samuelson noted that companies have started to focus more on driving value and outcomes from their AI initiatives. “There’s a lot more discernment now than there was 12 months or even six months ago,” he said. “Companies aren’t just adopting AI for the sake of it; they are doing it to create value and put more rigour into selecting use cases.”

On its part, Infor is building out agentic AI capabilities by systematically working through its value maps and catalogue of thousands of industry-specific processes. The goal is to pinpoint the most valuable processes within specific micro-vertical industries, such as fish-paste manufacturing, and then build agentic capabilities for each one.

Infor is also looking to drive process innovation through AI agents, which, when combined with process mining, can help organisations identify inefficient workflows and automate changes in real-time. This will help them respond more quickly to suppy chain disruptions and geopolitical uncertainty.

“We’re already reasonably far down that path,” Samuelson said. “It’s going to be the result of both technical innovation and companies getting comfortable with allowing a system to do a lot of those things.”

While some technology leaders have suggested that powerful AI agents could make enterprise applications obsolete, Samuelson believes that reality is still a long way off, especially for the complex operational systems Infor provides.

“For software to be made obsolete, you have to evolve to a point where there’s a super-agent that can handle all these different processes and their unique requirements,” he argued. “I believe that risk is still far off.”