Charles Phillips Infor CEO has affairs with many different companies, some of which could be seen as competition. For instance, his cloud provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS) instead of his own. He may also start a deal for HANA with his largest competitor – SAP. Since he joined Infor, he has completely transformed it, and it seems that there is no stopping him.
Phillips is a man with experience. He has been everywhere: the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Marine Corps, Wall Street, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, and now Infor. Wherever he went, he left a trail of brilliant ideas behind him, taking the companies to new heights. And he’s doing it again with Infor.
Named the ‘turn around CEO’, he has taken Infor out of the shadows in which it was hidden, and placed it in direct competition with other big companies like Oracle and SAP. The latter two have always been in the spotlight, but Infor is stealing their limelight by being innovative and embracing change.
The minute he took up CEO position, he started to change things. He hired a brand new senior management team, many from Oracle. He redesigned various product lines. He added 1500 engineers and 800 designers. And he moved the headquarters of Infor from Georgia to New York. What he wanted was to create a thing of beauty, and an experience people love. And he has achieved it.
Infor today is a recognized brand, far more so than before Phillips. Branding is something he didn’t do for the first two years as CEO. He wanted to have products ready that emulated the brand he had in mind. He kept quiet, and few people even knew what he was up to. But now he’s back with a vengeance, and he is taking the world by storm.
Investors love him as well. He had made a number of promises, and he has exceeded their expectations. Asking for between three and four years of investment, he delivered in just two. He did far more than even he could have anticipated, thanks to his team.
Infor also wants to surprise. Their latest surprise was Infor 10x, which enabled the company to create something that ran so fast, the customer could barely keep up. Because of this, they developed the revolutionary Upgrade X, which means customers no longer have to update, it is done for them, all through the cloud, as Software as a Service (SaaS).One of the reasons why this is so attractive is because it keeps costs down for customers, and it ensures they experience no downtime. For the customer, everything simply always works, and the system grows with them, understanding and anticipating their needs.
Infor now enables clients to migrate to the cloud at a fully fixed fee. This means there are no nasty surprise. They also don’t have to engage in complex costing exercises, as it is precisely clear what they will pay – and what they will gain – by making the switch. Infor truly is doing amazing things.