Infor prepares to roll out ‘Mongoose’ development platform

Infor is moving into the PaaS (platform as a service) market with an offering called Mongoose that is based on its long-standing internal IDE (integrated development environment), the company announced yesterday during the Inforum conference in Denver.

The IDE is aimed at the Infor10 ERP suite, which was formerly known as Syteline. It generates Microsoft .NET code and is quite robust, to the point where some Infor partners have used it to develop applications that were so marketable that Infor acquired the companies, said Infor CEO Charles Phillips.

“We decided to formally productise it and come up with an ISV strategy,” Phillips said. Infor will take a royalty off applications partners build, and it will also be available for customers, including as a cloud-based service, Phillips said.

Mongoose largely is based on the Microsoft technology stack, which Infor has embraced as part of a strategic partnership. But it also offers some flexibility on components, including the ability to use Oracle’s database, according to Phillips.

The wealth of intellectual property honed over the past 15 years by Infor programmers for Mongoose gives it an edge over, for example, building out ERP extensions on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, Phillips said.

“There are plenty of tools that let you lay out a nice screen. It’s the plumbing underneath that’s important,” he said.

Infor isn’t planning to host the cloud version of Mongoose on its own; currently the vendor uses Amazon Web Services and Savvis, Phillips said.