The cloud story

Khaled AlShami, VP Solution Consulting, Infor, tells Tahawultech.com how the company stands out from the rest of the competition by being ‘in’ the cloud vs being ‘on’ the cloud.

How is Infor doing things differently?

Let’s begin with the Infor cloud story which is, indeed, unique because of our partnership with Amazon Web Services. We consider that as a strategic partnership for many years. We bring the best of both worlds-we bring industry-specific solutions fit for purpose and we get from Amazon web services the best availability, the best performance, the best uptime-when you get these together, you give customers the best experience that they anticipate, which will allow them to do what’s essential for their business instead of trying to manage their infrastructure.

If you look back, say five to ten years ago, the cloud was not as mature as it is today-everyone was talking about how it’s the next best thing. However, not everyone realised the true definition of the cloud-you could be in the cloud, but you could be a hosted solution where the server is located somewhere outside other than your organisation. But when you’re on a true SaaS multi-tenant application, with a public cloud provider, then you get the best availability, you get the best SLAs that are possible, and this is key.

Customers today realise the difference between being on a hosted, single-tenant solution vs being on a multi-tenant solution, because that’s the insurance policy they have to sustain their business operations with minimal disruption and to secure the projects that they have in the future.

What we tell our customers is that is that when they move with us on our true SaaS application journey, this is going to be your last upgrade project. This is not just sales or marketing talk, it’s truly the last upgrade project. From there on, we take care of every upgrade that is happening with a pre-defined maintenance and upgrade windows on monthly basis.

The last thing I tell my customers is that they need to make a call whether they want to be ‘in’ the cloud or ‘on’ the cloud-there’s a huge difference between the two-living in the cloud on an application designed for the cloud, for the Internet architecture and an application that is just sitting on a server somewhere else.

Why is GITEX important?

GITEX is an opportunity where you can see the strategy of the country; how companies are aligning themselves to serve the government’s vision.  It’s also a very good opportunity to meet our customers and to showcase to them the latest developments that we have made this year, with a clear focused message that we are an industry-specific cloud solution provider and that makes a big difference. Everyone is now looking for specific solutions for specific needs. This is what we’re good at and we can help our customers embrace the digital life well.

What about Infor’s approach to being industry-specific?

The approach is very simple. You need to understand your customer’s business. This is what we do. So, if you look at our industry CloudSuites, you will see years of experience, best practices in the domain. We have made every effort to make sure that we shorten the time to value for our customers – we need to reduce the cost of implementation for our customers, and you need to work with them to generate quantifiable business outcomes that they are aspiring to. So, it’s not about just installing a new business application, it’s about making sure you are helping your customer achieve success.

In short, Infor’s innovative cloud technologies, which work seamlessly with the world-class capabilities of AWS, can give your organisation the power and responsiveness they need to stay ahead in a business environment that’s fiercer than ever.