Infor Buys Starmount, Retail Software Maker
Many things are changing lately for Infor. There are so many huge acquisitions that took place in the past few years, with Starmount being just the latest. Everything started with once president at Oracle, Charles Phillips became Infor’s CEO and the company strategy was modified for expansion and growth, with the purpose of making the entire business model much more effective.
The Starmount purchase appeared because Infor wanted to improve the CloudSuite Retail offering, being more converged now towards specific commerce offerings. As with everything of such a magnitude, the deal terms were not highlighted but given the latest acquisitions by Infor, it is expected that close to market value was paid for the purchase.
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CloudSuite Retail stands out as the ERP merchants platform that is industry focused from the offerings available from Infor. Starmount is a company that creates mobile shopping, point of sale and even store inventory software for management purposes in omni-channel retailing systems.
We keep seeing that Infor is intensely focused on retail industry modifications ever since the business launch of the Infor Retail unit in the summer of 2015. That was a launch that took place together with a very profitable collaboration that was established with retail giant Whole Foods Market. The deal saw the iteration and implementation of the above mentioned CloudSuite Retail platform in the Whole Foods business environment. Whole Foods was basically the testing ground for the software in order to see how it can be revamped and how the supply chain operations can be improved.
The move was then made stronger with the purchase of GT Nexus in order to support the supply chain network, the purchase of Predictix in order to deal with demand management. Starmount was acquired in order to improve store systems using the cloud based software.
Infor is quickly offering more and more services. Just some days ago we saw the announcement another branch in the company, one that offers digital consultancy. We are referring to H&L Digital, an Infor unit that is going to offer offerings based on digital-as-a-service as a model. Infor aims to make the customers generate brand new revenue streams while creating differentiated IP.
H&L Digital is going to be an actual extension of the system called Hook & Loop. This is Infor’s in-house application design agency. Its main purpose is to deal with customer’s customers. H&L Digital is going to be led by Marc Scibelli, Infor CCO. He was also responsible for Hook & Loop creation when it launched in 2012.
On the whole, Infor is trying to improve all the services that it offers at the moment for its already big customer base, trying to expand and be much more complete than it was a few years ago. Every single new acquisition aims to get something that is lacking for the systems that are in place. Implementation is impressively fast and Infor is quickly growing up to the point at which it will be a really strong competitor for the current giants in the business software industry, SAP and Oracle.
Guest Author: Lolita Di
