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A Team of Former Rivals Offers Words of Advice
Left: Bruce Richardson, Chief Strategy Officer, Infor
Right: R “Ray” Wang, Partner, Altimeter Group
For years, Ray Wang, a partner with Altimeter Group, and Bruce Richardson, chief strategy officer at Infor, worked for competing research firms. Ray was VP and principal analyst at Forrester and Bruce was chief research officer at AMR Research. With mutual respect and admiration, both vied to be the most influential analyst in the nearly $100 billion business software market. The two former rivals recently sat down for a dialogue on how business leaders can take advantage of today’s changing software landscape, including the tectonic shifts brought by cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Bruce: Ray, you’ve been a strong proponent that CEOs must continue to invest in new products and services, despite a harsh economic climate. We’re doing that at Infor. We’re investing an additional $300 million in R&D budget to help accelerate the development of new software in several areas, including collaboration and analytics. How do you convince a risk-averse buyer that now is the right time to invest?
Ray: We’re typically seeing customers follow a corporate hierarchy of needs in prioritizing projects. Despite the recession, customers are continuing to invest in regulatory compliance because they have to, and in operational efficiencies in order to fund growth. As the economy improves, there’s going to be money to invest. Software spending is expected to go up 5% in 2010. The key is to apply new technologies to business models, organizations and processes to spur innovation.
When most people hear “innovation,” they immediately think about new gadgets. Yet our research shows that the most successful companies are those that focus on creating innovative business processes. What’s Infor doing here?
Bruce: Ray, you’re completely right. Before Apple shipped the first iPods, the company focused on creating competitive advantages in design, sourcing, content and delivery.
While Infor is not in the consumer electronics business, we want to deliver similar levels of improvements around the whole customer experience. We continue to invest in making our products much easier to use. Our new Infor Flex program is designed to “bend” to fit the way that our customers prefer to buy our software and manage upgrades. We also offer special financing and implementation options to best match a customer’s budget and needs. It may be a small point, but we have vowed never to retire a product that our customers are still using or to raise maintenance prices to absurd levels to cause them to upgrade.
Ray: That’s refreshing to hear. I’ve published several Software Bills of Rights, including one for SaaS. The goal is to help customers change the tenor of conversation with their vendors. I can tell you our clients are looking for vendors they can partner with, not fight over contract terms with.
Bruce: While I’m no longer an analyst, I can’t resist talking about technology trends. We’re going to get very aggressive in delivering tools to help improve collaboration inside and outside the enterprise. We’re also developing an ambitious program for cloud computing and SaaS, so that customers have more choices for quickly and easily integrating Infor solutions with third-party software running in their data centers. Anything else that I should have on my agenda?
Ray: Some of the new technologies our clients have asked about are social CRM, location-based services and supply chain, and crowd-sourced product innovation.
The dialogue with Bruce continues online. Visit www.infor.com/dialogue