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Vietnamese Inforum is an annual customer event organised by Infor, one of the leading providers of industry-specific enterprise software, serving a multitude of organisations in manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, automotive, aerospace and defence, public sector and more.
Inforum was a much anticipated in-person event at Infor, where the company’s top executives shared highlights of past projects as well as roadmaps for the future.
As a result of the pandemic, the entire Inforum experience has been reimagined to cater to a much larger audience virtually, making it convenient and unforgettable for both clients and partners.
This year, the event (renamed Inforum Digital) took place on January 25th and 26th, with 55+ sessions and an impressive lineup of both solution and industry experts. There were multiple sessions dedicated to the healthcare industry and deskless workers, covering challenges the industry faces and solutions to potentially elevate hurdles, streamline and automate operations, and thus improve overall productivity.
The event was also a chance for Infor to announce the winners of the 2021 Infor Customer Excellence Awards, an annual award that recognises customers that drive innovation and showcase exceptional business results.
The complete list of winners for the 2021 Infor Customer Excellence Award can be found here.
Highlights of Inforum Digital 2022
2021 continued to be an incredibly taxing year, which forced businesses to think, plan, and act fast. When it comes to technology, businesses want to quickly and efficiently deploy solutions with fewer risks and fewer costs while keeping the built-in industry functionalities.
Do such solutions even exist?
Read more: Inforum 2020 – Unprecedented Challenges, Real Opportunities
Providing industry-specific solutions has always been what Infor strives to deliver. In recent years, the company has expanded rapidly to meet the increasingly complex demands of both its customers and the markets that they serve. Moving to the cloud is one of Infor’s vital moves, which sets the next phase in the revolution of Infor.
The company has also invested significant resources in research and development to build and deliver business processes "out-of-the-box," a move to which Soma Somasundaram, Infor Chief Technology Officer, refers as "the next step of innovation for industries and micro-verticals."
Another key differentiator for Infor is its next-generation cloud operating platform, which acts as the foundation for its solutions and transformational initiatives—Infor OS.
The platform gives customers more than just flexibility. It is a toolbox packed full of in-context content, analytics, a connector, a homepage, an AI model, and more, ready at our fingertips, enabling businesses to react quickly to changes and establish a competitive advantage.
Read more: Data Lake on Infor OS
Adding to Soma’s comment, John Frank, Infor President of Customer Experience, stated that the customer-facing teams have been collecting and compiling insights that they gleaned across all customers. Those valuable insights are fed to the product team, who then incorporate them into solutions, making them even more tailored and industry-specific.
How Infor presents itself to the customers also changes. Instead of giving the customers a blank sheet of paper and asking what they want Infor to do, teams have been advising businesses on how to get processes, models, or workflows as close to the industry’s best practices as possible.
Let that sink in for a moment. Out-of-the-box functionalities combined with last-mile content are what Infor provides its customers from day one. Imagine how much time and resources one can save compared to deploying horizontal software and then tweaking and twisting it to fit the size and needs of your specific business.
Read more: Industrial and digital titans merge - Koch Industries acquires Infor
Nevertheless, hitting every sub-industry and micro-vertical is practically impossible for Infor to achieve alone. They need to embrace a much larger ecosystem, its network of partners. The robust ecosystems are now expanded even more with the launch of the Infor Marketplace, which is not just your ordinary listing platform.
This central repository is designed for Infor’s 65,000 plus customers to access a wide range of Infor and partner solutions and services. With Infor Marketplace, they can discover plugins, widgets, extensions, visualisations, or apps pre-integrated with Infor software or built with Infor platform technologies based on their needs and industry.
What's more, this modern enterprise ecosystem showcases not only Infor-made products but also contributions from Infor’s vast networks of partners. This is where innovation and collaboration meet.
In the coming months, the Infor Marketplace is expected to provide additional capabilities to Infor’s independent software vendor partners, which should simplify customer acquisition, billing, payment processing, and automated provisioning. Going forward, Infor plans to develop it into a real-time provisioning platform where users can conduct frictionless e-commerce.
The key to Infor's success today boils down to understanding each customer’s business and their key value drivers. But it does not centre around technology and software. As Kelvin Samuelson, Infor CEO, said in his keynote speech, "We need to speak the customers’ language as implementing best practices, knowledge, insights, and processes into the products may not be enough… We only succeed when our customers succeed. We win when you win."
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