Infor Expanding Channel Partner Ranks

Over the past year, Infor has launched worldwide Channel Partner recruitment drives, the latest of which was just announced in North America.

Dennis Michalis, SVP for Global Partners at Infor, sat down with me to talk about Infor’s Channel Partner Program, the kinds of programs Infor offers, and the state of the industry.

Note: For more on the North American Channel Partner Program, attend the webinar on May 14. It will be archived on the Infor website, as well. You can also visit the Global Channel Partner Program site for more information.

Editor: What is the state of the industry for value-added resellers and other types of partners in enterprise software? How are they coping with the downturn?

Dennis Michalis: Obviously, the recession is the biggest issue facing the industry today. For small businesses, where a lot of our partners’ efforts are focused, spending is definitely tighter. In general, companies at the lower end of the market don’t set aside capital to maintain spending in a downturn.

And some regions are more affected than others. A lot of it depends on the focus. We may have two partners in the same city, one focused on automotive and another on distribution, who are facing different levels of intensity.

Our goal is to help all of our partners get through this and come up swinging in the recovery. We are helping them with access to capital through financing programs for customers, tuning our programs to match the environment, helping them to create their own, and just in general giving them the tools they need to compete and win business.

ED: What role do Channel Partners play in Infor’s business?

DM: Channel Partners are vital to our business. We have over 1,400 Channel Partners globally and they contribute over 20 percent of our license sales, a key metric for our growth. Partners are also active in professional services and support, and are one of the reasons we have an overall high level of customer satisfaction.

The Channel Partners represent reach to certain business segments and territories, extending the reach of our direct sales presence, providing competency in specific domains, languages, and verticals, and really serving customers or markets that require a high degree of agility. For a large company, Infor has a tremendous amount of agility, but it’s hard to match the focus and local knowledge that our partners bring to the table. They give us local domain expertise and access to markets that we couldn’t serve as effectively on our own.

ED: Infor has launched a number of partner recruitment initiatives globally. What’s behind this?

DM: Over the past few years, we really focused on building our Channel Programs and investing in the partnerships that we had. A lot of our partners focused on a single solution years ago, but if you look at how Infor has grown over the years, the depth of our portfolio has expanded substantially. So with the partners that had the desire and capacity to absorb more solutions, we wanted to look at helping them take one or more complementary products.

Engaging with them on this front was a big part of the agenda. Now that we’ve invested so deeply and created these onramps for enablement, the desire to attract more partners is natural.

ED: What makes Infor’s Channel Partner Program different from others?

DM: First and foremost, our portfolio. We offer partners more than just one or two solutions; we offer complete industry footprints. We are making substantial investments in SOA. That complete solution statement is not something that others can make, especially when you consider our best of breed capabilities. Within many of these markets, our partners can offer extension solutions to customers of other ERP vendors without the need to sell an entire Infor suite.

The portfolio is complemented by the way we interact with the partner and engage them in our business. We are intimate, open, and promote their growth. How we onramp them and help them develop a business is a deeply compressed process—others take months, we do it in weeks. We assign a Channel Manager liaison, someone that works with them hand-in-hand in the field and gets them support when they need it.

The partner has access to all the training and support that our direct sales staff gets. We build marketing programs that are tailored to their needs. If a partner focuses on a constrained geography, and they want help with marketing, we give them the ability to co-opt our materials to create their own content and literature. We’ll help them with business development so they can focus on working with customers.

Lastly, we know Infor offers an extremely lucrative compensation package relative to the competition. Alone, that’s not enough, but when you add it to the strength of the portfolio, the openness of our technology, and the enablement we provide, that’s a compelling combination for a partner.

ED: Does Infor require exclusivity from partners? 

DM: We recognize partners have other major partnerships and that is healthy – so long as it is not directly competitive to us.

There are competitors of ours who really don’t care whether the partner carries competitive products from other vendors, as long as they produce. That’s a different orientation than Infor.

Because of the degree to which we share confidential information with our partners, and make them a part of our company, we don’t want them competing with us in a heated situation one day and then doing business on our behalf the next. That’s different than saying we won’t take on a partner that sells a non-competitive product from another vendor though.

We treat partnerships seriously; we help businesses grow. To that end why would we do that with someone who would not be aligned with our interests?

ED: What’s the profile of a prospective Infor Channel Partner?

DM: We are interested in any business that is disciplined or focused on a market, industry or geography, where it’s not just an opportunistic play. That is the greatest set of factors of whether their investment model matches ours. If you have one or two customers that might be interested in an Infor solution over the next few years, that’s OK, but it’s not necessarily the prime target for us. We’re looking for long term partners who can help find the business, win the business, and keep customers happy. Those are the kind of Channel Partners we have, and the ones we are interested in continuing to attract.

Posted by Wade Coleman, Editor, Infor Blog