I get asked the question a lot – “Why is Infor taking such a different approach to SOA?”

It really started with going around the world talking to customers about their enterprise software. Early on in this process, it became clear to me that packaged software would disappear if we didn’t solve a fundamental problem, which is the cost, risk and complexity of upgrades.

We knew in 2002, back when Infor was founded, that this was a problem and that we would have to move in a new direction to solve it. It wasn’t a big secret… all our competitors knew it too and the entire industry has since moved towards SOA as the answer. (SaaS is another answer, and we’re doing that too, but it doesn’t address existing investments.)

The problem customers want to avoid is the need to ‘rip and replace.’ That meant a gradual, phased approach to SOA… and that’s where we parted ways with the competition. The value of SOA is business agility without IT disruption, but to get to that point they require their customers to go through major disruptive software upgrades. That’s the definition of paradox.

It’s no wonder that customers aren’t rushing to upgrade to these kinds of SOA platforms. The analyst figures bear this out. The benefits just don't outweigh the costs and risks. In this kind of model, the money that customers pay for maintenance doesn’t deliver a lot of value. We knew that wouldn’t work for our customers.

So while we are completely re-engineering our approach to software, moving from a centralized model to a centralized and decentralized model, it is a revolution by evolution. That means incremental upgrades that deliver SOA-enablement and the ability to expand existing systems through component-based development. It's SOA that's customer-centric rather than vendor-centric.   

In my next post, I’ll talk in more on the “How” - how we are gradually re-engineering our codebase and what this means in detail. But I think this answers the question of why we are taking such a different approach.

Posted by Bruce Gordon, CTO