By Don Sambandaraksa
Thursday, August 02 2007 04:15 PM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62030286,00.htm

Infor, a vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in the manufacturing, distribution and service sectors, has a six-year master plan for services oriented architecture (SOA) that fits into existing installed technologies rather than the "rip and replace" models that many of its competitors advocate.

Infor's chief technical officer Bruce Gordon and area vice-president for Asia Mark Wang explained that 2007 marked the second year of a six-year "more inclusive" SOA plan. Unlike competitors who preferred marketing hype, Gordon said that Infor knew that it would be a long, gradual process rather than a magic bullet.

"Our competitors are going to write one new application to replace existing applications and SOA-enable that. The analogy is like a USB hub; the central piece or core application that you can connect things to. I don't think that they're right. People have existing systems. You have to do something that works with what is there today. Our SOA strategy is different, we continue to build the individual pieces," he said.

Unlike many others before him, Gordon said that the cost of an SOA system would be higher than the cost of maintaining a legacy system. But by investing in an SOA system, the companies were investing in agility. Existing systems could first be encapsulated and then ripped and replaced later on, rather than having to go in and change overnight, which no company would risk.

Extending Infor's applications was also much easier than the competition's, Gordon claimed.

"No, we're not getting the buzz out of the development community or computer science graduates, but I tell them, two and a half years ago we were (worth) US$350 million, today we are US$2.3 billion," he said.

As for the software as a service bandwagon (SaaS) that is sweeping the industry by storm, Gordon said that Infor already had a wide spectrum of options from fully-hosted services to a hybrid system where the customer-owned software ran on Infor maintained data centres to the traditional on-premise deployment.

The hype about SaaS was nothing really new. The real benefit of SaaS was not the model but rather it was one way of lowering the cost of ownership of software and enabling a shorter time to market. SaaS, however, was not the only way to get that done, he said.

For instance, Infor's enterprise asset management software, Datastream, used to take up to 100 days to procure, install and get up and running. Now with, a "Fast Start" edition which is pre-packaged and preconfigured, the average time has been slashed to 15 days with a hosted solution.

This in turn has opened up new markets rather than just the corporate sector which had the resources to implement its own enterprise software.

Gordon explained how today's ERP solutions were now taking advantage of new technologies in novel ways. For instance, while the warehouse had long seen the use of barcodes and, more recently, RFID tags, one new innovation was the wireless directive. The person in the warehouse went around with a barcode or RFID scanner and a headphone and when something was picked, the ERP system would give immediate feedback such as where to go next or if they had picked up the right item or not, he said.

Gordon stressed that this was an evolution rather than a revolution. Companies have been using handheld scanners in an offline mode for years, but the increased processing capability of the handheld units had made more and more processing possible at the edge of the network, he said. The biggest benefits were actually in training warehouse staff and though 3G technology, these technologies were no longer limited to the warehouse but could be deployed live anywhere, he said.

Another interesting new development was the real-time monitoring of assets through smart sensors, he said.

Infor's offers solutions to companies with revenue between US$30 million to US$2 billion and Thailand has many companies within this sweet spot. Wang explained that Thailand did much more manufacturing than Singapore and many Thai companies are now going regional, such as the CP group.