How Phitomas became Infor’s partner of the year in Southeast Asia

“When we meet the client and we want to help them grow, we need that extra set of skills which maybe new partners can provide. So, we need that kind of support. So, if you ask me what we need from Infor, we need that ecosystem. We need them to build that quality ecosystem,” says Irwin Koh, CEO and Founder, Phitomas, an Infor partner in Southeast Asia.

Infor launched its Infor Partner Network (IPN) earlier this year with the aim of enabling an ecosystem of partners to innovate, sell, and deliver Infor solutions to our customers. IPN’s unified approach closes knowledge gaps, amplifies industry-specific solution expertise, and ultimately delivers greater value to customers across various industries.

To understand how partners in Asia are benefiting from the new program, CRN Asia had a conversation with Terry Smagh, SVP and GM, Asia Pacific & Japan, Infor and Irwin Koh, CEO and Founder, Phitomas, an Infor partner in Southeast Asia. Both Smagh and Koh shared the partner relationship as well as the importance of working together to get the best outcome for customers.

Can you tell us a bit more about the partnership between Phitomas and Infor.

Koh: We've been an Infor partner for almost two decades. To put it in a nutshell, we are the last mile service provider that brings together the innovation from Infor to our customer's business requirements.

Like Infor, we are very focused in the manufacturing sector. Over the years, we have developed domain expertise in this sector and that's our value to our clients across Southeast Asia. We were awarded the partner of the year for Southeast Asia and Korea for Infor last year.

The new partner program is a game change as iIt's quite different. While we've been partners for a long time with Infor, over the recent years, the partner program has evolved to be very comprehensive.

The main thing is the enablement portion. We can only do well if the enablement program is good because technology is evolving fast. We need the mechanism and the resources to be enabled as partners.

IPN has a lot of training programs and assets for partners to enable. Infor also has the right solutions for the market that we serve, which includes manufacturing and mid to large companies.

How is the adoption of AI among customers? Do they understand where to begin and how to begin?

The challenge with AI for us, at least for our clients in adoption right now, is really to find use cases that drive real business outcomes. So, it's not new. There are use cases for AI in the past like predictive maintenance, automation and such.

But AI technology has evolved tremendously. There are now more opportunities in other areas like supply chain, engineering and more. So, AI is very huge, and a lot of customers try to comprehend and go what can I do with it? But they are lost. So, to some extent, Infor’s Velocity Suite helps the customer a lot because they already have some use cases ready for clients to start with. And then from there, they reimagine how they want to run their business with this new technology.

So, for us as a service provider, we try to bridge that gap by understanding what's the business outcome the customer is looking for and try to map against what the technology is able to do and not able to do.

Smagh: When I look at technology as an enabler, we always hear this third-party perspective. For Infor and where our partners come into play, warehouse management and supply chain is massive especially in countries like Malaysia. We’re talking about the last mile, distribution centers, 3PL logistics, which is massive. The other big thing that we are seeing is the shop floor of manufacturing excellence. We are seeing a huge perspective of telling us how we get shop floor optimization.

With that said, how is Infor enabling partners in providing customers what they really need?

Smagh: Phitomas has done a great job and that's why they won the partner of the year last year. It's really about being the trusted business advisor. If we can't do it, we cannot do it.

At the end of the day, we are not selling a product, a feature or function. We're selling a service. We want to sell them customer value for longevity. I prefer to have a customer saying, hey, I don't think you need a solution from Infor today, but you might need something else in a different space.

I love my competition because I actually co-exist in my competition where they can't do what we can do, and we suddenly respect those boundaries. And there are partners that don't only do Infor because they need that ecosystem. Because in order to know and leverage and be the trusted business, they need to be able to have the ability to do that. Otherwise, you'll be stuck in that corner. I want them to become bigger and better.

In terms of where things are with warehouse management, manufacturing excellence, supply chain planning, we're seeing a lot of that and we're also seeing very niche perspective of workforce management.

Are you looking to grow your partner ecosystem?

100%. So, it's a growth in the ecosystem. When we look at our ecosystem, we're looking at our partners.

Firstly, we want to make sure all our partners are super successful. And how do we get super successful partners? We want them to be overachieving the partner program criteria. We also want them to be extremely expanding their business. And expanding the business can be in many different ways from headcount management, customer acquisition and also going to other places where things are.

When we look at partners today, we are looking at partners right from a pyramid perspective. We would like to work, and we are working with some of the global GSIs. And then thereafter, we are looking at local integrators. Then we have elite resellers like Phitomas, where they both resell, and they go out there and provide a service to their clients.

So, being in our business, we don't want everybody to just be a channel. So, we are very picky. With the partner programs out there, we've been having a lot of applications from partners that just want to be us. We don't want column folders. We don't want paper pushes.

I do not want to have partners just for the sake of it and diluting the pie. I prefer to have three to five to six partners per region. That's all.

The rule of thumb I've had over the years is no more than three or four partners per country. And so, when you look at ASEAN in five countries, that's 15 partners.

In order to support 15 partner organizations, that's a lot of work. Because providing them a demo environment, marking development funds, doing events with them, supporting them on services, doing them, making sure that their project goes live successfully. This is a full-time job.

So, vis-a-vis everybody can be a partner. But why? How do you differentiate? So, for example, if you are a customer today and you call for a tender and I have 10 partners responding, you would go wow, my chances of winning are very high. But nope. It's a dog-eat-dog world. Because you are not selling any value because all I know as a vendor is that I'm going to get X and you guys go fight for the Y. We don't want to do that here. So, I'm very targeted.

In fact, when my guys come to me and they tell me about recruitment, I always push back and say three to five max. So yes, we are growing the partner ecosystem, but we are very targeted.

For the existing partners, if a partner comes to us and says, I've got this and that and the other, I'm not just going to sign them up for that opportunity. I'm going to ask them to collaborate and work with my existing partners. I think that's how we want to have a very good, successful and happy ecosystem.

What are your expectations from partners?

Smagh: I want to make sure that our customers are extremely satisfied with the service offered and also the solution that we offer at Infor. I want our customers to not only start with that particular opportunity that they were sold into. It might be purposeful but also expand that footprint.

So, customer value is number one, which basically segments into customer satisfaction in terms of where things are, customer reference availability, which is so important for us.

And then its market penetration. The idea here is to really ensure that we penetrate the market. We coexist with our partners to make sure that we are going to the next phase.

In order for us to grow, we are investing a lot in our technology. We keep rolling out new technologies in the cloud. In fact, we got marketplaces opening in Japan, in Australia in the next six months. So, we are doing a lot of this on AWS.

We are doing a lot of these to ensure that the ecosystem is well sourced, resourced, and also then at the end of the day, the satisfaction value is high.

As a partner, what would you like to see more from Infor?

Koh: Actually, it may sound paradox, but we actually want them to get more partners because digital transformation is very complicated. It's not an easy task.

You need very specialized partners. And we all know that we cannot do everything. So, we are good at what we do. And I think Infor has taken that approach for many years already.

But then today, the market demands more. Customers need more solutions and sometimes, more than what we can offer.

When we meet the client and we want to help them grow, we need that extra set of skills which maybe new partners can provide. So, we need that kind of support. So, if you ask me what we need from Infor, we need that ecosystem. We need them to build that quality ecosystem.