ERP giant Infor woos the A/NZ channel to deliver leveraged growth

The winds of change are blowing through ERP software giant Infor as the company refocuses to become a strong channel player, especially alongside the large consultancies and systems integrators.

That is a key message delivered by the company’s senior vice-president and general manager of Asia-Pacific and Japan, Terry Smagh, at a series of roadshows across the region.

Smagh, is pursuing what he calls the “leverage model” of growth, through channel partners.

“There are two levers of growth in any software company: organic growth, which is go out there and maybe put 50 or 60 people and try to see what hits the wall and how fast you can grow; or the leverage model, which is a channel network,” Smagh said.

In his 25 years in the business with the likes of IBM and Qlik, Smagh has always worked on the latter whereas Infor was usually identified with the former.

“The mandate is that we are one hundred per cent serious about how we want to drive value in the ecosystem and how important partners are for us,” Smagh told ARN at the company’s Velocity World Tour event in Sydney last month.

Present and presenting were major customers including Australian dairy giant Bega and New Zealand fishing firm Sealord.

As Smagh sees it, there are three layers to the ecosystem, the large systems integrators, technology partners such as AWS and Microsoft and finally resellers who could be anything from a ten-person shop upwards.

“When we look at it, we’re no different from any other software vendor out there, whereby we are looking to accelerate our reach to the ecosystem,” he said.

While that delivered scalability for Infor and its partners, it also served the needs of customers with a support infrastructure where Infor couldn’t do so directly.

That delivery and service aspect is vital, especially in areas of significant project risk such as ERP deployments.

“From a delivery perspective, our partners and Infor jointly drive reduction in risk and consistency in delivery,” Smagh said.

“Our partners network provide access to a wide ecosystem of accredited skilled Infor consultants. Additionally, Infor delivers with its partners in a variety of models to drive capacity, capability and consistency.”

Some partners, for instance, bring specific industry knowledge and focus on one sector and on a single Infor CloudSuite.

“This provides an environment of expertise, leveraging knowledge and driving consistency for clients,” Smagh said.

Others work in co-delivery models with Infor’s professional services bringing additional skills such as wider integration, programme management or organisational change management and with Infor bringing product knowledge.

“Coupling these skills on the larger and more complex projects reduces risk and helps assure outcomes,” Smagh said.

So, given Infor has not been the most partner centric of companies in the past, what does the shift to the channel look like on the ground?

“I’ve been in the business for two years,” Smagh said. “And a lot of the senior management, have been in the business for just less than three years. It’s a big mindset shift in terms of how we want to do the business.

“So we’ve been proactively working behind the scenes the last, I would say, two years engaging on this.”

Having realised the channel was the fastest growth lever, that has cascaded throughout Smagh’s APJ region and is being dovetailed into the firm’s global ecosystem programme to make sure there’s a systematic mode of communication, operation and support.

“We are 100 per cent committed to take this forward,” he said. “We’ve assembled teams and new people around it with go-to-market strategies aligned with the channel in regards to what we want to go after.”

Infor is also building relationship with the large global integrators and consultancies.

“I’ll be honest we are playing catch up here,” Smagh said. “We’ve been out of mind out of sight for a long, long time, but the good news is that the variety of new leaders that I’ve brought across APJ are not new to those guys.”

VP and managing director Pacific Richard Everett, for example, was hired eight months ago.

“He’s a known industry veteran in this space,” Smagh said. “He’s known to the systems integrators. He is known in terms of what he’s done with the projects they’ve done.”

Those big firms liked to work with with the people they know and have been successful with in the past, he said.

“The vendors they have been successful with always have a driver behind that,” Smagh said. “I’m very confident that my new leaders in APJ, are those drivers in those fast cars that have those connections and networks and reach.”

Getting the message out into the market and among partners and potential partners was not just the job the alliance person or the channel manager, he said. It was the job of every representative in the market.

“That said, we’re not going to be signing 100 partners up,” Smagh said. “That’s not the model. We want to be strategic in the intent of where we are going, but also very tactical in how we execute.”

Rob O’Neill travelled to Infor’s Velocity event in Sydney as a guest of Infor.