INFOR on AMAZON CLOUD

Just my two cents:

All the big players who can't afford to offer cloud services are putting their software onto Amazon or other PaaS/IaaS/Saas solutions for pretty straightforward reasons-

1. Cost - displace the cost for hosting/managing a massive infrastructure (give that part and all of it's cost-concerns to Amazon) and charge a markup for these services. Easy way for Infor to make more money and lessen operating costs since Amazon can take advantage of economies of scale for it's cloud patform. Infor can still charge you for hosting, even though it's not actually hosting. It's just managing your share.

2. Easier to release updates or manage software with cloud hosted clients. (This makes subscription model licensing easier to justify and a distributed workforce)

3. Risk management. Who can I displace the [legal] concern for managing data and cloud-based security on? Yup, Amazon.


How will this affect orgs upgrading to 10?
You'll have a bunch more security concerns to keep you up at night. Think Target, Home Depot, Chase, Anthem data breaches. Now imagine every company that uses [insert hosted cloud-based software solution here]- Infor or not. Yeah, exactly.

Lawson Landmark - Infor seems to have made it clear that Lawson LSF's days are numbered, but not in any short timeframe. You'll probably see spikes of orgs transitioning. But like everything, it will be feast or famine.

Infor is probably in the top 6 for big-name solutions. There are many negative customer-experiences, but it's hard to tell if this will hurt Infor in any big way or if they can learn from mistakes and come out shining... too early to tell. In general though, large companies have the advantage of saying "Oh yeah, you've got how much data and customizations built in and you want to transition to a different vendor? We'll help you make your 500-year transition plan."