Charles Phillips became known all around the world when he became an Oracle executive. His moves were analyzed and did bring a huge company growth during his time at Oracle. Now Charles Phillips role as CEO of Infor steps in to compete exactly with Oracle. Infor, commonly referred to as the “biggest enterprise software company you’ve never heard of”, is gaining ground at a really fast pace, although we cannot actually say that it is a true competitor for Oracle.
What is really interesting is that the mass media is now portraying this as a revenge story, with Phillips trying to get back at Oracle. That is not actually the case since the entire story is about competition. An official spokesperson for Charles Phillips declared the fact that there is no real revenge since there is huge amount of respect that exists for Ellison and everything is a decent competition. Most media representatives fail to highlight the time when Phillips helped Oracle after leaving the company with a fight against SAP thanks to an IP case.
Charles Phillips declared for Quentin Hardy from the New York Times that Oracle is a large company but it is one that tries to create a hardware system. This is seen as being confusing since the company is software based. Because of this, when looking at applications, Oracle is considered to be much easier to beat. While SAP can also be beaten by Infor, it is Oracle that should be the very first step.
The reason why we are talking about the company that is the biggest and that you never heard of it is that few actually know about it and understand the size that exists. Infor is a company that is privately owned. In the year 2012 it almost hit the $3 billion revenue benchmark. That means that the company has around the same financial strength as the popular Salesforce.com. It is a stat that did surprise everyone, including Marc Benioff.
The estimated worth of Infor stands at an impressive $16.1 billion, with November being the last time it was analyzed. Just like SAP and Oracle, the main part of the operation is offering enterprise resource planning (commonly referred to as accounting software) together with human resource software. The software is tailored for specific niche industries, like automotive design and breweries.
Charles Phillips is now building Infor in a similar way to how he helped Ellison when working at Oracle. Because of this we are faced with many acquisitions, around 2 or even more per year. Phillips did work as the right-hand man of Oracle until a personal scandal appeared and he left the firm in 2010. That personal affair actually was ugly and Phillips resigned. The interesting part there is that his replacement was Mark Hurd, who was also involved in sex-scandal.
The real reason why the departure appeared is most likely the public tension between Phillips and Ellison. All started with Phillips talking about how Oracle wanted to double the amounts spent on acquisitions and Oracle eventually denied this story.
At the moment, it was reported that Charles Phillips wants to keep buying niche areas so that he eventually becomes strong enough with Infor to be a serious SAP and Oracle threat.