PRODUCT NOTE.

INFOR CLOUDSUITENO TWO CLOUDS SHOULD BE ALIKE

By P.J. Jakovljevic, TEC Principal AnalystApril 2015

www.technologyevaluation.com

Technology Evaluation Centers

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Infor CloudSuite—No Two Clouds Should Be Alike

Industry focus and web-based cloud architecture are two major pillars of Infor’s

recently-minted strategy, with the third being developing beautiful software and

experiences that users enjoy. Figure 1 shows Infor CEO Charles Phillips talking

about these strategic pillars at the Inforum 2014 conference this past fall.

Figure 1. Infor strategic pillars

Perhaps the best example of that three-prong strategy at the Inforum 2014

conference was the announcement of Infor CloudSuite Healthcare, offering care

delivery organizations access to healthcare-specific functionality, analytics, and an

implementation accelerator for rapid time to value within a cloud environment.

Infor CloudSuite Healthcare builds upon Infor’s offerings available on Amazon

Web Services (AWS), as Infor is categorically known for not being in the business

of building its own expensive and taxing data centers.

Healthcare Functionality As the Figure 2 depicts, Infor Healthcare’s footprint is quite broad, possibly

unmatchable in the market at this stage, in part due to former Lawson Software’s

long focus on the industry and multiple prudent acquisitions in the past. Namely,

there is surgical instrument management (via former Apexion Technologies),

nurse scheduling (via former VasTech), and clinical data integration (via former

Cloverleaf, often beating and/or replacing Oracle eGate and Orion Health in deals).

Most recently, Infor quietly acquired GRASP Systems for patient acuity, which puts

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it in a competitive situation with Kronos (former OptiLink) and GE Healthcare

(former API Healthcare).

Figure 2. Infor CloudSuite Healthcare footprint

Healthcare organizations can benefit from focused solutions for financial

management, supply chain management (SCM), enterprise asset management

(EAM), enterprise performance management (EPM), expense management,

continuous monitoring, enterprise resource planning (ERP) to electronic medical

record (EMR) connectivity, business intelligence (BI), analytics, and human capital

management (HCM) tailored specifically for healthcare organizations. In addition,

hospitals happen to have lots of assets and use plenty of energy, and the top-

notch Infor EAM suite comes in handy. Infor has a pilot hospital customer whose

assets (beds, rooms, offices, operating rooms, etc.) have been IP-enabled for

location information and whose doctors and nurses are equipped with wearable

devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. For example, an emergency

situation at a certain patient location can quickly be routed to the closest

available personnel with the required skills.

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Figure 3. Healthcare industry problems

Infor has recently added chief medical officer and chief nursing officer positions,

beefing up its healthcare DNA and understanding of the industry’s problems and

issues (see Figure 3). Infor CloudSuite Healthcare solutions can meet the needs of

the healthcare industry and healthcare-specific business processes, including

managing complex clinician pay plans, tracking and validating clinical

competencies and job-specific performance reviews, grants management,

coordination of recalls, patient charge capture, care workloads and assignments,

pre-built clinical system connections, and patient-specific supply reordering,

amongst many others.

In addition, through a flexible, subscription-based delivery model and employee-

based pricing, care delivery organizations can lower upfront IT expenditure and

total cost of ownership (TCO). The suite aims to significantly lower capital and

ongoing investment in IT, while still providing the most current functionality for

organizations to respond to changing needs, sustainable margins, and comply

with complex regulations and requirements—all while delivering high-quality care.

Contrary to manufacturing or retail sectors, healthcare organizations are still

unable to measure outcomes vs. costs and tasks, and it’s no wonder that

healthcare is envisioned to take an even 21 percent of the U.S. GDP in a few years

(from an already-hefty 18 percent, in spite of 50 million uninsured before

Obamacare). To that end, Infor is busy getting ready for the Health 3.0 framework

as seen in Figure 4. The aforementioned Cloverleaf integration suite seems to be a

hidden gem here, especially in light of hospitals going IP-addressable (medical

instruments, staff wearing devices, proximity beacons, etc.), so that the IoT and

big data concepts can help with optimized scheduling and advice. Infor Epiphany

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Interactive Advisor predictive analytics could also be used for advising the best

next step in treating patients. All newly developed and revamped Infor solutions

are contextual and location-aware.

Figure 4. Healthcare framework evolution

The solution also enables care delivery organizations to take on innovation at their

own pace, upgrading at a speed that accommodates their unique timing and

business needs with functionality specifically engineered for healthcare,

delivering a significantly different approach than other horizontal ERP solution

providers. Infor also offers its market-leading healthcare customer base, which

includes over 1,200 organizations using Infor Lawson for financial management,

SCM, HRM, payroll, and talent management. The UpgradeX Program is a clear and

simple path for upgrading or migrating older Infor Lawson solutions to the cloud,

allowing customers to take advantage of all of the functional enhancements in the

upcoming Infor Lawson/S3 10x along with the next-generation analytics, mobile,

and collaboration technologies. Customers will receive a completely new version

of the Infor Lawson/S3 solution running on AWS, plus all the services required for

a migration or upgrade: software, hardware, OS licenses, IT operations, and yearly

upgrades executed by Infor.

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Nothing Without Compelling User Experience Marc Scibelli, Infor’s chief creative officer who heads the internal Hook & Loop

creative agency with about 200 designers (up from only 15 in 2013), is always

happy to talk about Infor software’s current and upcoming look and feel. The

original SoHo user experience with the Ming.le social networking tool was not

only about a snazzy consumer-like social user interface (UI), but also about being

useful and sending contextual info to employees. The true value of social tools

and collaboration is evident when they help concrete business processes and

solve actual situations/issues, e.g., field service work, product development work,

order management and fulfillment, etc. To that end, sharing posts creates

newsfeeds for relevant folks in Ming.le, while the social business graph capability

means following not only people, but also assets, orders, warehouses, etc.

Infor’s upcoming user experience is about a minimalist UI that still delivers a lot.

More information doesn’t improve usability; clarity does, and thus the focus is on

ruthlessly eliminating bloat. In the past, many have designed products for only the

so-called power users, and the majority of casual users had to live with the

“tyranny of the super users.” Infor’s user experience is designed for a mobile

world, but not necessarily “mobile first,” as each device has its best purposes (and

proper real estate) for certain situations. The upcoming Glide feature will leverage

predictive analytics for a moving/changing UI based on the context, whereby the

Infor ION middleware application programming interface (API) will provide

intelligent routing to the proper screens.

Infor’s current SoHo release includes configuration catalogs, search without losing

a search momentum (facet search tags), and contextual relationships (anchor–

items of relations) to account for changing contexts. For example, in Figure 5,

medical staff is the anchor, while their patients and procedures are related.

But if one drills down into, say, Patient CG (identified by initials only, due to the

HIPPA privacy regulations; see Figure 6), the patient becomes the anchor with lots

of related items on the right side of the screen.

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Figure 5. Infor Healthcare Workforce Screen

Figure 6. Infor Healthcare Workforce Screen

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In Conclusion Healthcare is Infor’s hottest vertical, where the vendor rules in many market share

metrics: 200 hospitals in seven Canadian provinces, 81 out of 98 public hospitals

in the Netherlands, 21 of 25 integrated delivery networks (IDNs), 72 percent of

the U.S. hospitals with more than 150 beds, five out of six best supply chain

departments of the year. In total, there are over 5,000 healthcare provider

customers, touching over 250 million lives in over 500 major cities and metro

areas.

Reportedly, 30 out 34 recent ERP evaluations have lately selected Infor Healthcare,

typically beating Oracle and Workday. This should be a blueprint for Infor on how

best to compete in its other industries of focus, such as automotive, food, public

sector, etc.

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