Infor is refocusing on channel sales

JasonC

Infor has been heavily recruiting partners recently, first in EMEA and South America, and how in North America.

If you are interested in selling some legacy technology, albeit with good functionality, this is your opportunity. Of course you'll have to ignore the company's recent history of mistreating its partners, you'll compete from time to time against its direct sales team, and you'll wonder what small portion of that small R&D budget will go to your product. Seems like a good deal, right? Ok, maybe not.

If you have familiarity with Infor and it's channel strategy you may recall that a couple of years back they came out with an exclusivity requirement. Partners selling their stuff plus competitive solution like Dynamics were forced to choose one or the other. If they continued selling and supporting Dynamics, SAP, Sage, etc, Infor would sever ties with them and take over their customer relationships.

But now Infor is once again convinced the channel is the way to go, growing its partner base from 500 a couple of years ago to nearly 1,500 today. A story in IT Jungle today talks about their new channel recruitment push in North America. Most of the channel growth to this point has been in other regions.

Here are some open questions...
> Are they still requiring exclusivity?
> Around which products are they recruiting partners? (I'm hearing it is Visual Manufacturing and Syteline)
> How much of Infor's revenue does the channel provide today? Two years ago it was reportedly about 20%.

It's hard to imagine Infor could grow the channel while maintaining that exclusivity requirement. If they are recruiting for the Visual Manufacturing product, aren't they after reseller firms that have expertise in selling ERP solutions to manufacturers? That seems a bit easier than finding firms that do not sell ERP to manufacturers and convincing them to build a practice around your solutions.

I'd be interested to hear if any of you get a call.

Jason
www.partnercompete.com

Alex_Chow

Thanks for sharing this valuable information Jason.

The admins should create a Dynamics Competitors forum for people to express their thoughts on your posts.

JasonC

Glad to know the information is valuable.

A separate forum for competitive discussions? I don't know, it sounds like you're setting me up for a long term committment here. :-)

I think that idea is fine if we stick to conversations about competitive news and events. I'd not want to get into deep conversations about competitive sales tactics on a site that can be read by the competition.

DenSter

I've heard a story like that where a Dynamics competitor forced the partner to choose. The partner then split up the business into one company for Dynamics, one company for the other one. They operate out of the same office, with the same people, but on paper they are two different companies. It's a bad idea to start with, and I don't think it's entirely enforceable.