The food processing industry offers a good potential

As the world moves to the next level of technology

development, where is the demand for ERP arising from?



ERP is a crowded market place and the demand comes primarily from three places.
First, install base-customers continue to add a lot of licenses. And, as the

economy gathers pace, this will become a major platform on which we will deliver

on. Secondly, Infor caters to the needs of lots of small and mid range companies

because they upgrade their processes and systems when their initial installments

fail to meet their requirements. Thirdly, emerging geographies like Latin

America, particularly Brazil, India, China and Eastern Europe like Turkey and

Russia offer a lot of opportunities.

What are the opportunities in India?



In India, opportunities are in plenty in the mid market. For example, in the

automobiles segment, there are opportunities in tier-2, 3 and 4 towns. Apart

from these, cities like Pune, Ahmedabad and Chennai are growing at a fast pace

with respect to the auto manufacturing industry. Since India is one of the

largest consumers for the automobiles segment, there are a lot of opportunities

for Infor in this space. Apart from automotive, even the logistics and

manufacturing space is showing promise. The ERP market in India is still

witnessing growth in the mid-market segment. This includes organizations in the

discreet manufacturing and process manufacturing industry like chemicals and

pharmaceuticals.

How important is SMB as a sector?



The SMB sector is important as a couple of our ERP platforms fit there.

Infor has about 70,000 customers in the SMB space and derives revenues to the

tune of $50 mn to $2.5-3 bn annually from this segment. In India, Infor focuses

mainly on companies in the upper mid level space.

Which are the verticals and technologies Infor intends

to focus on?



The food processing industry offers a good potential and therefore, we would

like to focus on this industry in India. Apart from that, the beverage sector

has also witnessed remarkable growth in the recent years. Hence, this will prove

beneficial for our SCM product line. Pertaining to technology, Infor plans to

upgrade its offerings globally, including in India. We think that Open Services

Oriented Architecture will be better than all our products. This will allow

customers to easily integrate between our solutions and those of our

competitors. Over a period of time, we would like to make all our offerings

cloud enabled.

Shilpa Shanbhag



shilpas@cybermedia.co.in