Infor remains focused on enabling specific industries in APAC

“If you look at the sweet spots of what Infor does, we are very strong in manufacturing, very strong in food and beverage, and very strong in the supply chain. We know exactly where we want to be and how we want to engage these customers,” says Terry Smagh, SVP and GM, Asia Pacific & Japan at Infor.

In April this year, Infor announced the general availability of the Infor Velocity Suite. The complete offering of solutions and services simplifies process innovation and helps customers stay agile, adaptable, and innovative.

The Infor Velocity Suite is built on the Infor Industry Cloud Platform and is designed to eliminate barriers to process innovation through a package of Infor’s most advanced technologies and services proven to help customers realize value. This includes the capabilities to work with AI workloads as businesses look to enhance their productivity and efficiency.

CRN Asia recently caught up with Terry Smagh, SVP and GM, Asia Pacific & Japan to understand more about their focus in the region, especially with the increasing digitization demands from customers.

What makes Infor different to other vendors in the industry?

We feel that we differentiate by doing a couple of things differently. If you look at the sweet spots of what Infor does, we are very strong in manufacturing, very strong in food and beverage, and very strong in the supply chain. We know exactly where we want to be and how we want to engage these customers.

And we go very deep. Our tacit knowledge of these industries is unreal. We pivoted ourselves to be, let's be good too great to where we know we can. So, there are a few things that we don't do here in Asia Pacific. We are not in industries like telco or FSI or healthcare.

And the simple reason is focus. We want to focus on how we grow differently. Recently, in the last 15 months or so, we launched a whole brand-new perspective of Velocity as a solution.

Now within Velocity as a platform itself, it is so robust whereby we are putting three perspectives differently. You've got AI or genetic AI, robotic process automation and process mining. If you were to go out there and buy these things separately, you can. But what's missing is integration and the know-how of the specific industries.

We have taken that and said all this is on a platform. It is modular and the extensibility and API connectors are there. It also has the best practices to be industry first.

A lot of our competitors out there are looking to rise by making sure their customers get upgraded. We don't force ourselves to upgrade.

And when we mean upgrade, we mean really upgrade. It's not a real re-implementation as we've got a very strong installation. Our customers love our sticky solutions because they work. Our net return rate is close to over 90 percent while our customer satisfaction scores are about 97 percent.

Can you tell us more about Infor in Asia Pacific?

Infor in Asia Pacific has also grown a lot in the last three and a half years. We've got about 8,400 people so far. We've got two large development centers, one in Hyderabad India, which we opened about two years ago, and the other one is in Manila.

We have offices from Shanghai all the way to Sydney where we do a hub and spoke model where we support the business itself. We have huge investments in India recently in terms of where things are. And then in ASEAN, we are represented literally everywhere. We've also just opened a big perspective in South Korea.

So, these are all big specializations in verticals and what we want to do in the markets that we see. We are very strategic in our intent but very tactical in the way we execute. And we can't do that alone. It's where the partners come into play.

Can you tell us about how you work with partners?

We've always looked at partners saying how do we actually work with partners. We really went to the field and looked at what does a good partner program look like. We don't want to just copy and paste every other partner program. Every client of CRM has a good partner program. There's a normal standard and we want to do it very differently.

So, we rewrote the entire program. In fact, we never had one to start with, we literally went back to the drawing board. And in January this year, we launched what we call the Infor Partner Network globally.

And I dare to say safely, we have one of the most robust partner incentives in the market. Being in the business for the last three decades myself, I've never seen us be so aggressive to do that. For simple reasons, we believe that the partners are the trusted business advisors to their customers in those countries.

We want to use that. We want to support them in terms of where things are. So that's what we have done the last 18 months or so. We're really taking to push a few things forward very differently. We have got the partners engaged in it.

So, when we talk about partner programs, it's not about incentives. We're making sure that we enable them well, from partner development, partner enablement, product development, to how to go to market with, and how do we actually have strategic stuff itself.

Is the focus the same in all markets in APAC?

There's a lot of similarities in terms of the markets that we go after in APAC. Maybe only one priority of the focus might change in the market. For example, Japan, auto is 70% of our primary focus. In India, we're going into manufacturing and in Australia it is food and beverage.

But the core verticals of where we are absolutely there. The verticals that we say we don't want to be are consistent throughout. It's not that we can't do the FSIs or the telcos. It's just like where is the win rate going to be 90%? Where can we provide our customers with absolute solution value from the outset? And that's how we segregate the market.

So do you have partners in each market to drive those conversations for you.

So firstly, not every market has been channel friendly for us because we are their greenfield. We never had a channel program for Infor. So, at a corporate level, we have taken this to be a very serious matter, and we say we want to go out there and do this for the channel.

So, we've got partners like Phitomas in markets in Southeast Asia. Markets like Malaysia is a very robust market for us as it's not small, it's large and it's in a sweet spot of what we do.