Business in the cloud

With the increasing dynamism of business processes, interface with customers presupposes easy access. There’s no better venue to establish that quick relationship than over the Cloud.

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Infor, the third-largest enterprise software provider in the world servicing over 70,000 customers, has adjusted its platforms and suites for this development. The cloud is not as uniform or all-encompassing as layman’s terms imply. Embedded within it are specific infrastructure that may or may not permit the smooth rollout of software for business applications.

Infor Business Cloud applications, a set of products perfected for specific industries, take business applications to the Cloud with the goal of reducing complexities in customer engagement. They also target the reduction of IT costs for businesses while empowering them to generate changes along with the caprices of the market. As Infor’s CEO Charles Phillips would be apt to promote, Infor Business Cloud applications are all for flexibility, while retaining business focus on customer satisfaction.

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Infor’s Cloud-friendly services are especially tailored for backroom applications such as HR and talent management, financial management, and sales force automation. The range of applications is set to widen, especially given Infor’s headstart in Cloud-based enterprise software.

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The company is actually one of the pioneers of Cloud-based software, and at the moment boasts two million subscribers. The main asset of this feature --- Web availability of enterprise processes and solutions --- magnetizes customers most. Easy access means needing nothing more than a Web browser to conduct business.

Read more about enterprise software through this blog.

Charles Phillips and facing the demand with Infor Hospitality

Technology advances out of a need to eliminate complexities, a rule that remains true in today’s business applications. Infor, led by Charles Phillips, creates ERP solutions tailored to the needs of various sectors, the hotel industry included. After all, running a hotel is not as easy as lounging in one.

Charles Phillips | Image Credit: Homivo.com

Charles Phillips | Image Credit: archithings.com

Hotels seek to provide its customers with the feeling of being at home away from home, an end that starts at the reception area, and entails giving customers what they need when they need it. For a business that thrives on direct customer contact and quality interaction, nothing spells “success” more than a front office that can readily respond to any demand or concern.

Infor Hospitality is a set of applications that offers solutions for various aspects of hotel management. True to Charles Phillips’ word, the suite contains applications specially designed to ram up the quality of service that the front office provides. When integrated with a hotel’s front office and on-property technology, the suite facilitates better services by providing a centralized view of the guests and more opportunities to improve business operations and the delivery of services. Included in the suite are:

• Infor HMS – This combines the front office with sales, marketing, and central reservations, and provides a unified look at guests and the business’ performance.


• SoftBrands Epitome PMS – This creates a business system that manages property, converts information into knowledge, and potentially boosts profits by streamlining operations and increasing revenue and occupancy.


• Infor Starlight PMS – This creates a customizable, flexible, and central guest, company, and travel agent index that proprietors can readily access.


• SoftBrands Hotel FrontRes PMS – This helps manage reservations, sales, purchases, and services.


• SoftBrands Core CRS – This integrates and distributes data about guests, inventory, and rates across the company.

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For more information about Charles Phillips, visit this Facebook page.

Charles Phillips: Infor leads web-based support with Infor Xtreme

According to Charles Phillips, Infor’s culture of speed has several facets. Aside from helping customers run faster by providing software with sophisticated functionalities, the company also responds to its clients and works to solve their problems as fast as possible. With this aim at the core of its services, it is no wonder that Infor’s Xtreme Support program would be counted among the leaders of Web-based support today.

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Customer support plays a role so vital to both organizations and their customers that it can be a deciding factor in a company’s success. For customers, it can spell the difference between a maximized and a wasted investment in enterprise software. This contributes largely to customer satisfaction, which in the long run, may affect a manufacturer’s performance in the market.

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Charles Phillips’ Infor is clearly pushing the envelope in terms of its customer support services, as seen by the recognitions it has garnered. Infor Xtreme Support was recently counted by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) among the “ten best support sites.” This was in recognition of the support portal’s capability to assist Infor customers in resolving technical problems quickly and minimizing business process interruptions. The Xtreme Support program also won the 2012 MarketTools ACE Award for support in March this year.

Infor Xtreme Support is a user-friendly and customizable Web-based portal, a part of the company’s Xtreme Support program. It was redesigned and re-launched in January, and offers easy-to-access critical support resources including software patches, updates, knowledge base, online communities, and more. It also features a new user-grade interface that allows users to set their viewing preferences in order to facilitate faster and more effective access to information.

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For more information about Charles Phillips, Infor’s CEO, visit this Facebook page.

Charles Phillips: Infor addresses the needs of a city-sized customer

Charles Phillips’ Infor is known for its industry-specific ERP systems. It delivers sophisticated enterprise solutions that fit its customer’s needs and processes to a T, even if the client concerned is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country.

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Infor recently included San Antonio, the largest city in Bexar County, Texas, in its growing clientele. The company is more popularly known as a source of innovative software and tools used in private enterprises, but together with Lawson, it also offers solutions designed for the public sector. In this area, Infor focuses on industry expertise, and shares best practices among industries like healthcare, utilities, and transportation.

Part of Charles Phillips’ “New Infor” is the company’s emphasis on product development. This is in order to produce more innovative software for its diverse client base.

As the 19th largest city in the U.S. in terms of population, San Antonio demanded a powerful IT system in order to efficiently manage its complex infrastructure and business operations. It identified a total of 3,500 functional and technical requirements to automate and streamline its processes, covering data delivery and the creation of effective budget-related decisions.

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To address its numerous IT needs, Bexar County selected Infor's Lawson solutions: Lawson Financial Management, Lawson S3 Supply Chain Management, and Lawson Business Intelligence. These solutions allowed the county to make better budgetary decisions, and improved the management of the end-to-end procurement process, from sourcing vendors to managing ongoing contracts. The county was also able to realize savings with the streamlined process and accurate data, and is currently expecting additional savings in the future.

“We were confident the Lawson solution would be simpler, functionally richer, and more cost-effective," says Susan Yeatts, auditor of Bexar County.

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For more updates on Charles Phillips of Infor, visit this Twitter page.

Shifting gears: Speeding up a Charles Phillips affair

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The motto “Survival of the fastest” embodies the spirit of the enterprise software giant Infor. The company has begun shifting gears from within under the auspices of current CEO Charles Phillips. An affair like this is typical for Phillips, who has behind him a long career in enterprise applications. A former U.S. Marine, Charles Phillips has a management style that involves rapid deployment and aggressive expansion, evidenced in his days in Oracle up until 2010.

Speed is the byword that characterizes the Infor company strategy. Having made key changes to the company’s interior organization, Charles Phillips has been instrumental in the positive developments of the company in the past year. These changes reflect the attitude of continuous change and rapid development that is part of the corporate culture of Infor, later manifested in the improvements in product delivery, integration, and upgrades made in its flagship product Infor10.

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Rapid deployment and changes have been part of many of Charles Phillips’ affairs since his days as the co-president of Oracle. While it remains early to give a judgment on his performance, he appears to be on the right track as far as the current developments at Infor in the past year show. Time will tell if this affair would be a repeat of the growth generated by Charles Phillips at Oracle.

More information on Infor and many other Charles Phillips affairs can be accessed on Twitter.

From Charles Phillips

Charles Phillips, CEO: Accelerating Infor’s development

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The seeds sown by the Oracle Four at Infor have started bearing fruit. Formerly co-president of Oracle, Charles Phillips the CEO has been instrumental in the many leaps forward Infor has made in the past year alone. The company has had an annual organic license growth of 17 percent in 2011. The company has started making waves through new acquisitions, the most notable being that of Lawson Software.

The company’s growth can be attributed to the inward focus that Charles Phillips has made over the past year. Charles Phillips saw to it that the internal distribution of resources would be sent to research and development.

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And it shows. The company has recently released Infor10, a new program suite with a new user-friendly interface, and a middleware layer that makes quick work of upgrades. The attitude that Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, holds is that of speed. Phillips stands by the company’s motto of survival of the fastest. Reflecting on this attitude, Infor has become an official sponsor to racing giant Scuderia Ferrari.

Charles Phillips Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan, Getty

Coming from a military background, Phillips has a characteristic management style that emphasized swiftness. This is reflected in his days as Oracle’s president, where he planned the major acquisitions that the company had made. While it is too early to tell if the successes that Charles Phillips had at Oracle would make a comeback, things are looking up for the CEO’s new affair.

More information on Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, can be accessed on his Twitter.

Charles Phillips: Infor at full year of growth

After a full year under the strategies put in place by the new management under CEO Charles Phillips, Infor has grown considerably. The company reports a 17% annual organic license growth in the past year, with the most recent quarter receiving 16% organic license growth on November 2011. It also reports improved EBITDA margins at 27%, with new customer additions and support subscriptions acceleration.

From Charles Phillips

At the second fiscal quarter, Infor reports growth in its enterprise resource planning business—representing the core of the company’s services—by up to 25% compared with last year. This strong financial performance is the acme of the major internal transformation the company has undergone within the past year, driven as it was by major investments in industry-specific business applications. The company now has 2,500 new customers and expanded its relations with 12,000 of its current customers.

From Charles Phillips

These and other changes were spearheaded by Charles Phillips; Infor has, in the first few months of his management, been turned upside down with its resources shifted toward engineering, hiring 500 new engineers in the process. The company has also moved to New York City’s “Silicon Alley.” Other improvements include a new product line—Infor10—and a strategic partnership with Salesforce.com, a leader in enterprise cloud computing software.

From Charles Phillips

For Charles Phillips, Infor is up for an exciting new year as 2012 offers more opportunities for growth. More information can be accessed on Twitter.

Charles Phillips: Manifesting Marine values in business

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The U.S. Marine Corps is a proud organization built upon many values. A former Marine Captain, Charles Phillips retained some of these values, and has applied these into his business strategies. Phillips’ corporate affairs have shown what he has said: that his management style was heavily influenced by his military upbringing.


The Marines are among the icons of the U.S. Military, having engaged in many of the nation’s finest moments. A member of the U.S. Marines is expected to uphold a set of values that encourages them to become better citizens—among them are integrity, tact, and decisiveness. A former Marine himself, Phillips has carried these values over to his new career in the world of enterprise software.

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The Charles Phillips business strategy can be described in three words: quick, aggressive, and strategic. This was first implemented during his time as the president of the enterprise software giant Oracle and manifested many of the aforementioned values, primarily decisiveness and tact. The acquisitions made by Oracle were not only fast but well-thought-of; Phillips had focused on acquiring a lot of big-name companies into Oracle’s wing, propelling the firm towards further growth and prosperity.


This strategy eventually proved successful—today, Oracle now sits at the top of the enterprise software industry alongside SAP. Now the CEO of Infor, Phillips continues to apply the strategies, which owe their existence in part to his Marine upbringing.

Charles Phillips Photo Credit: Getty Images

More information on Charles Phillips and his background is available at his Twitter.

Charles Phillips and Oracle: A legacy of expansion

One of the leaders in the enterprise software solutions industry is Infor’s current CEO Charles Phillips, who was once Oracle’s president. Phillips had been instrumental in molding the latter into one of the two biggest players in the software solutions field.

From August 15, 2011

Prior to 2003, Oracle was a far cry from what it is today. Most of its acquisitions in the past eight years have been minor ones, lacking in name recognition. That all changed when Phillips took the reins. The seven years that marked his tenure as president of Oracle were marked by many strategic acquisitions that were both aggressive and quick. These opening moves eventually helped the company compete head-on with industry leader SAP.

From August 15, 2011

Under the compass of Charles Phillips, Oracle experienced unprecedented revenue growth at 300% with a profit of $26.8 billion in fiscal 2010 alone. The company had at one point become Charles Phillips’ mistress; his dedication to work, plus effective management and strategy plus constant and quick innovation, resulted in the Oracle of today. And although Phillips had moved on since his resignation, his legacy laid the foundations for Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems not long after.

Charles Phillips Photo credit: Flickr

Currently, Charles Phillips is the CEO of Infor, a company he is currently grooming to be the third major player in the enterprise software industry after Oracle and SAP.




More information about Charles Phillips and his Oracle days can be accessed on his Facebook page.

Charles Phillips and his wife: Paying forward after the payoff

Most people see financial success of their hard work when they reach a certain age, and Charles Phillips and his wife Karen are among them. Phillips, once a captain in the U.S. Marines, is now the CEO of Infor Global Solutions and has a business pedigree that included executive positions in companies such as Oracle, Viacom, and Morgan Stanley and Co. Despite this, however, he and Karen have found the time to give back to the community.

From Charles Phillips

After leaving the army, Phillips entered the business world. Here he has built a strong career, working in the executive level. Prior to entering Infor, he was the co-president of Oracle, another software solutions provider; under his wing, the company made several strides forward through successful acquisitions. At Infor, he is gearing the company towards a more growth-friendly, transparent direction.

Charles Phillips Photo credit: Getty Images

Through hard work, Charles Phillips and his wife have gained a lot, but they do not stop there. The two have since invested a lot of time and money in charity, having jointly established the Phillips Charitable Organizations (PCO), which brings financial aid to those in need. The beneficiaries of their charities include African-American single mothers and disadvantaged students who wish to specialize in science, technology, and engineering fields. PCO operates differently from other philanthropic organizations by cutting back on the red tape through micro-charities.

Charles Phillips Charles Phillips

While reaping the fruits of their labor, Charles and Karen continue to pay forward what they have received from the community. More information about Charles Phillips’ professional and charitable works is available on his Facebook page.

The two-fold focus of the Charles Phillips Charitable Organizations

Yield, gain, pay it forward.

From August 15, 2011

One of Charles Phillips’ priority businesses is philanthropy. Charities have been commonly used by organizations as a channel to fulfill their corporate social responsibility—but Mr. Phillips and his foundation take their funding services to a more personal and effective level of helping their target benefactors.

Phillips Charitable Organizations (PCO) opens up a new way of being generous, the kind that deviates from the cushy, glamorous-Boarded groups and focuses on what truly matters—linking together the ones in need and the ones who want to help. Instead of the traditional galas and other similar fund-raising events, PCO’s strategy has been the establishment of micro-charities requiring no administrative overhead that can make decisions on their own. This has also allowed Charles Phillips and the Organization's Board of Directors to focus on groups of interest that may not get much attention in the normal course of events.

From Getty Images

The two-fold target of the openhanded organization is composed of single mothers and disadvantaged students inclined in engineering. Its observations within the African-American community inspired PCO to take part in the complex challenges faced by a woman occupying two lead roles in a household. Its big heart goes to those women whom it believes have the strength and determination to take responsibility for their children.

Engineering students are also on PCO’s list as two of its board members are engineers by paper and profession. Its main thrust encompasses those who have the interest, aptitude, and financial need to explore STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Charles Phillips’ foundation expresses its desire to develop the country’s catalysts in the making, stating that: “We are strong believers in the value of hard skills as opposed to general purpose degrees. The easiest
path to a job is to do something in short supply and difficult to achieve.”

From August 15, 2011

Follow Charles Phillips’ organizational involvements on Facebook and Twitter.