Infor Delivers Service-Oriented Architecture Roadmap.

Web 2.0 Home Pages and Innovative SOA Components Planned for 2008

LAS VEGAS -- Infor today announced the roadmap for Infor Open SOA, its service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework, to customers at its annual user conference. Customers at Inforum 2007 will receive details on Infor Open SOA including SOA-based interoperability between solutions and exciting new development projects, such as dynamic role-based home pages and SOA-based components that will evolve their Infor solutions to meet future challenges.

At Inforum, the company provided customers with the latest statements of direction for Infor ERP LN, Infor ERP SL (SyteLine), Infor ERP Visual, Infor HCM Workforce Management, and other solutions. The statements of direction provide insight into SOA-enablement and other product development priorities. Inforum attendees also have access to a large number of sessions devoted specifically to SOA, ranging from business process innovation to tools and infrastructure. In individual solution sessions at Inforum, customers will get specific details on what Infor Open SOA means for their products and how they can take advantage of it to transform their business.

"Complexity is the bane of enterprise software because it leads to high costs and a loss of focus on the core business," said Bruce Gordon, CTO at Infor. "With Infor Open SOA, we are providing both power and simplicity. We are committed to delivering innovations that can coexist and add value in the most diverse IT environments."

Standards-based interoperability

Infor is enriching solutions through phased feature packs and incremental upgrades that are non-disruptive and provided, at no cost, to customers on a current maintenance plan. The initial phases are focused on enabling solutions to use standardized business object documents (BODs) for linking business process flows across solutions in a publish/subscribe, event-driven and decentralized framework. The framework leverages native support for the Open Applications Group Interoperability Standard (OAGiS) for document exchange via the Infor Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

"Customers will receive tremendous value from the built-in support for integration standards such as those from OAGi," said Bob Mick of ARC Advisory Group, on March 13, 2007, in response to the announcement of the Infor Open SOA strategy. "This gives customers a ready-made, industry-wide community for standardization, eliminating the cost and delays associated with developing internal company standards or extending proprietary messaging and interfaces."

Infor Open SOA is designed to enable interoperability between Infor solutions, third-party applications and in-house innovations. Infor Open SOA-based interoperability enables customers to extend their existing solutions to address new business challenges through the rapid introduction of other best-in-class applications. Customers receive the benefits of a pre-integrated solution, but retain the flexibility to conduct independent, non-disruptive upgrades. Through Infor Open SOA interoperability, customers avoid the costly need to rebuild point-to-point integrations when business conditions require changes to IT systems.

For instance, Infor announced SOA-based interoperability between solutions such as Infor ERP SL, Infor Enterprise Asset Management Enterprise Edition and Infor SRM SupplyWEB. Through Infor Open SOA, these solutions can now be combined to create a powerful suite that gives manufacturers end-to-end capabilities for manufacturing processes, supplier collaboration, and asset tracking and maintenance.

Role-based home pages

Infor demonstrated new role-based home pages to customers at Inforum, the first generation of which are already available in Infor ERP LN. The next generation, available in mid-2008, will be dynamic and configurable Ajax-based web pages that present data from multiple systems, both Infor and non-Infor, in an easy-to-use and understand format. These role-based home pages introduce unique Web 2.0 functionality to enterprise users, including personalization and "enterprise-mashup" capabilities for visualizing data. Role-based home pages are planned for dozens of organizational roles, ranging from executive to managerial and operational levels, and are applicable to multiple product lines through Infor Open SOA.

For example, a role-based home page for the vice president of sales could include alerts on overdue contracts, a role-based list of expense reports for approval, graphs of current sales breakdowns by region, and key performance indicators for the fiscal year. Through the home page, the sales executive can drill down to the original application, such as the CRM system to view customer details on an overdue contract. These capabilities are made possible by the Infor Open SOA framework, which seamlessly ties together analytics, reports and other critical data into an intuitive user interface.

Solution evolution

Part of the vision of Infor Open SOA is the ability to evolve solutions through smaller, self-contained components that are based on native SOA technologies and interoperable by design. These components will access the collective business-specific functionality and industry experience that runs throughout all of Infor's solutions. Through Centers of Excellence, which pool the domain expertise of Infor's global development teams, the company is creating innovative components that can be leveraged across its solutions portfolio to create agile business-specific solution suites.

One example of this is multi-books accounting, a new Infor development project slated for delivery at the end of 2008. Multi-books accounting addresses the business problem faced by companies operating in global markets, who must conform to multiple accounting standards, currencies, calendars and charts of accounts. Based on intellectual property resident in Infor's leading financial solutions, multi-books enables companies to more easily comply with multiple accounting requirements and quickly respond to global regulatory demands. Deployable as a SOA component to Infor's ERP and financial solutions, multi-books can run concurrent with an existing Infor and non-Infor general ledger or as the primary accounting component for the solution.

"Enterprising companies want to maintain and build on their existing investments, but at the same time they want the freedom and ability to innovate," said Mike Frichol, vice president of industry and product marketing for Infor. "Infor Open SOA strikes that balance. It's a gradual, evolutionary path that they can travel at their own pace. Now they have a roadmap that shows the exciting future in store for our solutions."

About Infor

Infor delivers business-specific software to enterprising organizations. With experience built in, Infor's solutions enable businesses of all sizes to be more enterprising and adapt to the rapid changes of a global marketplace. With more than 70,000 customers, Infor is changing what businesses expect from an enterprise software provider. For additional information, visit www.infor.com.