Infor is a company to watch and the competition – Oracle and SAP – is doing just that. Infor has recently formed a new alliance partnership, joining forces with West Monroe Partners LLC. This means one thing only: they are after SAP and Oracle’s market share. This is further demonstrated by the fact that Infor has employed Salesforce and Workday consultants as well.

Charles Phillips Infor CEO and ex-Oracle President, is a man with a vision, and he is doing all he can to achieve that vision. By forming a new Infor Alliance Partnership (IAP) with West Monroe, he has consultants on board in both the world of technology and business. Plus, West Monroe is tied to a number of Asian and European partnerships as well, although they don’t yet form part of the IAP. Rather, it seems West Monroe is there to help Infor implement, integrate, and support the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) that Infor has developed.

The IAP has been an exciting development for both companies. It is designed to help lower maintenance costs and risks for clients, thereby ensuring organizations can optimize the lifecycle of their assets at all times. In so doing, reliability and safety is improved greatly as well. Infor, meanwhile, comes up with competitive solutions to also reduce cost and risk.

More than Asset Management

West Monroe isn’t there solely for the EAM, however. It is believed that they are also there to help launch Infor’s new HCM, which is a financial cloud suite due some time this year. West Monroe, therefore, is likely to work on the Infor Public Sector Suite (Hansen), the Infor Ming.le and the InforION at the same time. The InforION is the important one, because this is what keeps all the cloud suites Infor develops together, enabling full integration.

If West Monroe does work on ION and helps them easily integrate client applications, they could use this to encourage people to migrate from SAP or Oracle into ION instead. West Monroe has a lot of experience in various different micro-vertical industries, exactly what Infor also focuses on. As such, their partnership is a true alignment of goals.

The fact that Infor is working together with West Monroe is a huge thing. It seems that they are doing this because they want to move people away from SAP and Oracle and towards them if they are looking for enterprise software. Infor now has a solid, strong presence in the top tier of software development companies, and Oracle is worried in particular. It may seem that the announcement that they are working with West Monroe isn’t that big of a deal, but when you consider that Infor is already working together with Ferrari and Heineken, any such partnership is an important one.

Will Infor actually take over from SAP and Oracle? Nobody knows. But the fact that they are making some huge changes, and that Oracle in particular is worried about them, is a very important sign.