When watching the Day 2 keynote of Inforum 2013 today, I could not help but thinking that it was somehow of a let down in comparison to yesterday's Day 1 keynote. That's often the case at user conferences, but I have not experienced such a contrast in a while.
And I wonder why? The keynote started with LMS and then spend a lot of time on HCM, two topics I am quite passionate about. So hope it wasn't me... I am still a bit puzzled... let me know if you had the same impression and maybe can articulate it better.
Let's look at the takeaways of the keynote.
Hotel Demo revisited
Duncan Angove and Stephan Scholl came back to the hotel check-in demo - which obviously a lot of people and not only yours truly, liked a lot. Unfortunately, it looked a little different than the rich process UI with the extensive use of the flipcard UI metaphor we saw as part of the Hook&Loop section of yesterday's keynote:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
And I will stick to my line from yesterday, that demos should be top notch and transport next generation capabilities... unfortunately this demo didn't (like yesterdays): A check-in agent has to ask for a maintenance fix in a suite, to give that suite to a late arriving loyal guest. Nice. Ming.le front and center, and if it was the purpose to demo Ming.le - it worked. But: A 21st century enterprise application would have scheduled the fix to suite beforehand (make sure more valuable rooms are available) and alerted the check in agent to reserve the room for the tardy, but loyal guest.
The need and pitch for LMS
Pam Murphy did a good job explaining how Infor's large product set requires even more product training material and that Infor basically identified both a corporate and a product need for LMS. Certpoint (the former Vuepoint) seemed to be the best fit - and typical Infor style - was acquired on March 4th. A good review by Constellation's Yvette Cameron can be found here. The general education session by former Certpoint CEO Ara Ohanian (and only executive I know carrying the title of Chief Happiness Office before the CEO title) was informative, and I guess was to lay the groundwork for significant sales campaigns into the Infor installed base. On way or the other Infor customers will use Certpoint.
With a recent acquisition I was not expecting a Soho style user interface on top of Certpoint, but it would have been good to see LMS in action. To my surprise the later HCM demo then had one, see below:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
Off to HCM
There was some disappointment yesterday, that HCM wasn't part of the Day 1 keynote, but today it got more clear why, Day 2 was about pitching the truly horizontal products.
Infor labels HCM modules a slightly different than other vendors, but the 5 main categories (Select, Develop, Deploy, Measure and Reward) make sense, though they take a moment to get used to:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
The idea of the demo was that Dr. Soma would run through the requisition, hiring, onboarding of new nurses for a hospitals emergency room. Very good idea to give the horizontal HCM processes a vertical flavor, but I would have liked to see them go way deeper than the props with the ubiquitous stethoscopes. The ICU nurse identified the need for more nurses needed with the help of Labor analytics:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
Again - I may annoy you here - but I would have expected the system to alert the chief nurse and management that there is a shortage of up to 4 nurses. That doesn't also happen overnight, so there are some other failures in the management of the hospital, that good enterprise software should uncover. It's important as one of the Ugly findings on Infor yesterday was, that the Infor enterprise applications already are a teenage age. Even more important for Infor to show in demos how 21st century ready they are.
The HR Services user interface looked very clean and is one of the better efforts in the industry to provide the HCM start screen for an employee:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
But the density and information richness of this 1st screen somehow got lost when navigating to the orgchart, which nicely displayed the already to be hired positions:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
The twist that the user does not know how to hire in the system, something which is not a day to day activity, was a good idea and a good opportunity to show the Infor knowledgebase:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
And off we were to a nice recruitment screen, with some embedded analytics to score and suggest, who the best candidate to hire will be (at this point we forgot that we needed to hire four new nurses, which would been interesting to evaluate any bulk hire features):
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
And the offer letter get send out to the lucky candidate, temporary logins for background check etc information are available, and of course the letter gets shown on a tablet:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
I was impressed by the clear desgin of the onboarding screen:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
It was good to see that Infor HCM will take even care of more secondary HCM automation areas like Benefits:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
And no HCM demo from a leading provider without mentioning and showing total compensation:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
And finally - employee goals and how to achieve them:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
Overall an impressive demo of the Infor HCM suite. It shows a consistent user interface and looks like covering all the bases of the HCM portfolio.
Thinking about this - it makes Infor HCM the most complete HCM suite out there. Oracle and SAP have to live with the respective Taleo and Successfactors dichotomy, Workday does not have recruitment (yet) and some other areas, same for Ultimate. This should be a window of opportunity for Infor to leverage, and with Stephan Scholl's Peoplesoft career roots, something I would expect Infor to make a run for.
Configurator - another central component?
Next was an surprise to me, Duncan Angove presented the intent to acquire configurator partner TDCI, who then presented with their president and SVP of strategy on stage for 10 or so minutes. Again it felt to a certain point like an education session for the general audience, similar to what we saw with LMS earlier. And in contrast to Certpoint, the acquisition of TDCI hasn't happened yet. So I understand the vagueness.
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
The surprise was that Infor bought a configurator company, certainly a good one. But existing Infor customers using other Infor configurators maybe wondering about their investments. Obviously this could not be addressed pending the early stage of the acquisition. And there is certainly a competitive angle to this given TDCI's integration and partnerships with Oracle and Microsoft.
You can certainly make the point, that a configurator could be a similar central element to Infor's integration strategy like Ion and SkyVault (read more here). But it will require significantly more integration work. Could this be a hint that Infor will maybe sooner than later build a next generation enterprise application in the cloud as the go to future platform? The data is already there thanks to Ion.... we will see.
Finally EAM
Last but not least a fortissimo in the Infor portfolio EAM. Presented by Soma Somasundaram it was again a (lenghty) education what EAM is and how it matters to pretty much all customers in the audience.
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
And Infor has an impressive collection of functionality to address the many EAM challenges. To tackle the wide diversity of the EAM world based on the asset nature with different editions is certainly wise, but poses similar resourcing and investment questions as the microvertical strategy does. But here is the impressive list of only some example EAM editions:
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| Screenshot form Inforum 2013 Day 2 Keynote |
MyPOV
A solid 2nd day at Inforum 2013 left me impressed with the breadth of the Infor HCM offering. More clarification around the pending TDCI acquisition is needed. It opens the speculation on the longer term Infor system landscape, with the company possibly reinventing itself on a modern cloud based platform beginning with the value creation chain for configurable products. On the long awaited EAM front, I have similar concerns as with the overall microvertical strategy: Infor may end up with not enough developers to create, maintain and support all that functionality.
Overall my view on The Good, the Bad, the Ugly from yesterday hasn't changed, don't miss reading the post here.
[Update April 25th 8:01 PST] - You can watch the replay of the keynotes here.
