Charles Phillips and Infor's culture of speed

Charles Phillips, Infor’s CEO, understands that in a sector as competitive as technology, what a company needs to excel is more than just products that deliver results, but a culture that is able to cope with the fast pace of business.

Charles Phillips Photo Credit: seminar.windowsitpro.net

Infor is currently among the top software companies in the world. Recently, it released Infor10, its newest product line anticipated to revolutionize business with its set of innovative and sophisticated features. Fusing mobile technology with best-in-class applications and speed, Infor10 is seen as the future of business software, allowing users to accelerate operations to keep up with the ever increasing velocity of commerce.

From Charles Phillips

For Charles Phillips, Infor’s position in the industry places it in the heat of the competition. But for him, Infor’s edge over its considerably larger competitors is its corporate culture that may be summed up in its new slogan, “Survival of the fastest.” Indeed, Charles Phillips, its CEO, fosters a zeal for speed and continuous motion among the members of his company.



“Charles Phillips and his wife, together with two friends, established the Phillips Charitable Organizations to help aspiring minority engineers finish their studies and give assistance to poor single mothers.”

“It is a core value for us, and our mantra, internally and externally,” Phillips said.

From Charles Phillips

Infor not only helps its customers by providing software applications that will help them run faster but also makes sure that it answers its clients’ concerns promptly and solves their problems. Additionally, Infor takes steps to make decision-making faster and to lessen bureaucracy, enabling it to respond more quickly.

Learn more about Charles Phillips and Infor by visiting Mr. Phillips’ Facebook and Twitter.

Charles Phillips: Infor’s finest revealed

Charles Phillips Photo Credit: Kudzucreative.com

Featuring mobile accessibility, smooth product integration, and a user-friendly interface, Infor10 represents a new development in the company’s product roster. Working behind the scenes prior to the release, Charles Phillips, Infor’s new CEO, has been bringing the company toward a new direction, reflected entirely in the new brand.

The new product line, Infor10, boasts of a middleware layer that, while limited in scope, offers fast, smooth integration among the products in its roster—the first in the history of Infor. This striking first feature is part of the company’s efforts to move away from its holding company image and provide its clients with more innovative solutions.

Charles Phillips Photo Credit: Sapphiresystems.com.uk

The middleware layer allows the industry-specific suites in the Infor10 to remain unique while remaining integrated; the company believes that integrations should be part of the application, not the implementation. The programs are provided with a new, user-friendly interface (Workspace) and mobile accessibility through smart phones (Infor10 Motion).

From Charles Phillips

Steered by Charles Phillips, Infor’s new direction aims to provide its clients with faster, more efficient solutions that don’t need to rely on doing something over multiple platforms; as Phillips puts it, “You build it once.” This is the case with Infor10, which not only is considerably smaller as a result (as it comes in 3 CDs) but also is considerably faster and easier to use.

More information on products and innovations in Charles Phillips’ Infor is available on Twitter.

Charles Phillips and Infor: Changing from within

The enterprise software industry is marked by the need for constant innovation. Now headed by its new CEO, Charles Phillips, Infor is poising itself toward the top. The company must now equip itself with the necessary internal organization to ensure superior products and performance in the face of the competition.

From Charles Phillips Photos

Once the highly acclaimed president of Oracle, Charles Phillips has remained low-key since his arrival at Infor. Although he continues to plan out acquisitions, Phillips has devised a different strategy based on what he has seen from within the company. His main focus is research and development, which has yet to realize its full potential from within.

From Charles Phillips Photos

For Phillips, the gameplay for Infor is mainly internal. Reassigning more of the resources toward products and R&D and away from other functions is the first order of business for Charles Phillips. Infor is also set to move to the Silicon Alley of New York City, and reposition itself to also adopt a software-as-a-service (SaaS) policy. Under this new framework, Phillips would turn his attention to acquisitions, foregoing the “splashy” billion-dollar ones done by Oracle and SAP in favor of compatible albeit smaller SaaS-based companies.

From Charles Phillips Photos

These changes are among many that Charles Phillips has in store for Infor in the coming months. More information on Charles Phillips and Infor is available on Twitter.

Effective management: Charles Phillips’ mistress in the corporate world

A skill for management is, for former members of the U.S. Marines like Charles Phillips, a mistress that would continue to linger for some time. Phillips attributes his flair for management to his military background; a former Marine captain himself, Charles Phillips continues to embody the values initiative, integrity, tact, and decisiveness, and apply them in his new arena.

From Charles Phillips Photos

The commitment that the U.S. Marines have in their values is renowned the world over. His time with the Marines has allowed him to carry on these values, which have indeed proved remarkably useful in the corporate world. The marine at heart had wowed the enterprise software industry with a surprising level of management competence for having propelled the once-obscure company Oracle toward the top of the industry.

From Charles Phillips Photos

For Charles Phillips, a mistress in management has proven to be an affair to remember. His time at Oracle had been marked by an aggressive campaign for expansion, which gained him a reputation for efficiency, swiftness, and effectiveness. Now the CEO of Infor, Phillips plans to continue and top his success at Oracle, aiming to live up to the company’s attitude for constant innovation and to make it the third player in the enterprise software industry.

From Charles Phillips Photos

An almost military-like efficiency is the hallmark of the companies under Charles Phillips’ wing. Learn more about Charles Phillips and his mistress in effective management on Twitter.

The Oracle years: Charles Phillips’ mistress in the industry

Today, Oracle is one of the largest enterprise software companies in the industry. Much of this milestone was made possible by Charles Phillips, whose mistress had been the company itself for seven years. During his tenure, the company grew by leaps and bounds, eventually challenging the then-sole industry leader SAP for a share of the markets.

From Charles Phillips

Before Charles Phillips, Oracle had been growing steadily but slowly for eight years. The less-than-stellar acquisitions it did make were relatively minor ones, consisting of small-name companies. This all changed when Phillips was named president of the company by CEO Larry Ellison. The company shifted gears for a more aggressive attitude toward acquisitions, beginning with the purchase of PeopleSoft in 2005 for $10.3 billion.

From Charles Phillips

In the seven years that Oracle had been Charles Phillips’ mistress, it had made great strides in terms of growth. The company’s revenues grew up to 300%; profits from sales reached $26.8 billion in 2010. The foundations laid by Phillips in Oracle led to the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, by far the pinnacle of its growth in the industry, shortly after he had left.

From Charles Phillips

Currently, Phillips is the CEO of Infor, where he is joined by three other former Oracle executives. He plans to continue his legacy at his new company and aims to make it join Oracle and SAP at the top of the industry.

More information on Charles Phillips and his old mistress Oracle is available on his Facebook page.

Charles Phillips: Committed to excellence

There’s getting the job done, and getting the job done right. To achieve the latter is Charles Phillips’ goal, which he continues to pursue to this day. Phillips’ commitment to the pursuit of excellence has its roots in his days in the military. He owes his management style to his experience as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps, which he carried over when he entered the world of business. In addition, he had been described as a “products man,” specializing in selling and improving innovative software products.

From Charles Phillips

Excellence having made the impression as Charles Phillips’ mistress, paved the way for many other things. Phillips was once president of Oracle, now one of the two giants of the enterprise software industry; in his term he had expanded the company through many quick and strategic acquisitions and mergers. This performance is what he hopes to emulate in Infor.

From Charles Phillips Photos

Charles Phillips’ Infor is a company whose main driving force has been innovation. Now at the helm, Phillips hopes to up the ante for the company to attain its current goal: to be the third major player in the industry. He aims to achieve this through innovative tweaks in the company’s products as well as quick and aggressive acquisitions.

Whether it’s through better software applications or effective management, the quest for excellence never rests for Charles Phillips.

From Charles Phillips Photos

More information is available on his Facebook page.

Oracle, SAP, Infor: Three's a crowd

Jason
Stamper Published 29 November 2011

Former Oracle president and US Marines captain Charles Phillips has taken
the reins at the third-largest enterprise applications company, Infor. So
what is his strategy for the firm in the era of cloud computing, and would
he share his thoughts on Oracle's moves since he left? Jason Stamper finds
out.

There are not many technology CEOs quite like Charles 'Chuck' Phillips.
Prior to a career on Wall Street that saw him rise to managing director of
Morgan Stanley, Phillips was a captain in the United States Marines Corp.

"One of the advantages of military services early on in life is that you get
a chance to develop a leadership style and understand organisational
dynamics at a young age," Phillips says of the experience.

He's certainly needed that leadership style. From the managing director role
at Morgan Stanley he was plucked by Oracle chief Larry Ellison to become
Oracle president in 2003. It's a position he held for seven years, while in
2009 the was appointed as a member to the President's Economic Recovery
Advisory Board to provide President Barack Obama and his administration with
advice and counsel regarding the economy, in such high esteem was he held.

In October last year
he took the CEO role at the ERP, CRM
and SCM applications firm, Infor.

During his seven years at Oracle he had a dramatic impact. In the eight
years before he joined, Oracle had made only minor acquisitions, small firms
like Steltor, Indicast, NetForce - not exactly household names.

But with Phillips on board it was a different story. In 2005 Oracle bought
PeopleSoft for $10.3bn, followed shortly after by retail apps firm Retek for
$630m. That same year it snapped up banking applications company i-flex for
$900m, and then in 2006 Siebel for just shy of $6bn. The acquisitions kept
on coming: Hyperion, BEA Systems and many more.

Phillips played a key role in these, believing Oracle needed to diversify
rapidly and help to consolidate the market, building an entire 'stack' of
software and hardware that would eventually see it buy Sun Microsystems

shortly after Phillips left.

While he was in the president's seat, Oracle experienced revenue growth of
300%. He and Ellison's strategy certainly seems to have paid off so far: for
fiscal 2010 Oracle enjoyed total sales of $26.8bn, up 15% year-on-year
including the effect of acquisitions.

None of that matters to Phillips now, of course. Asked whether he believes
Oracle was right to buy hosted CRM player RightNow
last month, he says: "I can only speak for Infor, so all I
can say is we will continue to make a few acquisitions ourselves, but
balance that with aggressive internal investment." 'Aggressive' is one of
the words you are likely to hear from Phillips quite a bit. That and
'speed'.

The 'Oracle four'
Infor was founded in 2002 under the name Agilisys, in Alpahretta, Georgia,
and today the new company is the result of around 40 acquisitions. It's
privately held, with the majority shareholder being Golden Gate Capital.

There were four senior executives who joined Infor from Oracle late in 2010
and early this year, including Phillips. Duncan Angove came over as
president of products, marketing and support, Pam Murphy is now COO, and
Stephan Scholl is now EVP global field operations. One Infor insider says:
"It almost felt like an Oracle takeover."

So what was their plan? "We started with a three-month deep-dive, detailed
business reviews," says Angove. "Charles [Phillips] is definitely a product
guy, and he was looking at how we set out a compelling roadmap. We'll be
doing different acquisitions, not buying cash but buying products.

"Right from the first three months there was this whole emphasis on speed.
People have been shocked at how fast we have made decisions. For instance,
when we bought Lawson
we closed it on the Tuesday and on the Wednesday we
approved the hiring of 71 new engineers in that business," he adds.

Phillips picks up the theme: "The main focus is accelerating the roadmaps
and delivering products more quickly, modernising applications and
delivering mobile technology in areas that people didn't expect. In the past
10 months we have shipped more new features than the company had seen in the
past three to four years - that type of acceleration in terms of innovation.

"One of the good things about having a team that's worked together for a
long time that has similar approaches is we make decisions quickly, and we
all believe that the pace of business and decision-making has to be faster.
It's a way we can differentiate ourselves."

In its fourth quarter Infor saw sales of $510m, up 10% year-on-year. It's
still a long way off the numbers one and two in this space - Oracle and SAP
- but Phillips is not satisfied with being the number three. "Everybody
always wants to improve," he says. But he does note that it's a large
market, surely large enough to support at least three big players.

Infor 10, ION
As well as the rapid integration of Lawson into the Infor business, the
other major news on the product front recently was the launch in September
of Infor 10. It wasn't just the improvements to the ERP product that was
newsworthy, but also the news around ION Suite, claimed to be a lightweight
middleware layer built into the software that helps to ease any integration
challenges customers would otherwise face.

What is not said, at least publicly, is that this is also clearly designed
to outmanoeuvre Oracle's Fusion Middleware and SAP's NetWeaver middleware
lines.

ION is claimed to connect and integrate Infor and non-Infor applications,
storing information in a common format and repository. "ION creates the
mobile, social and flexible enterprise," says Soma Somasundaram, SVP global
product development at Infor. "Because it's lightweight and built using open
standards, ION installs much faster than heavy middleware, and allows
customers to get up and running quickly and efficiently so they can focus on
their core business."

It's clear why ION will be needed - Infor is the result of around 40
acquisitions, and if these products are to be brought together in a
meaningful way, a robust and flexible middleware layer was vital.

As Angove says, Phillips is a product guy as much as a manager. "We want to
be perceived as a company that builds very beautiful applications. We use
the term 'consumer grade UI' in the sense that we want to bring some of the
social computing concepts and interfaces to the way people consume their
applications," he says.

What about cloud computing - what's Infor's story here? "We have a million
subscribers in the cloud today," Phillips claims. "We have a multi-tenant
application suite, CloudSuite, and customers can use that today. What's
unique about our strategy is that the same CloudSuite applications can be
deployed on premise, so customers can decide - they can deploy in a hybrid
fashion, they can still choose to have some locations where they want
cloud."

So what do the analysts make of all this talk of speed, integration, better
user interfaces and cloud?

For analyst firm Ovum, the outlook for Infor is generally positive. The
company's analyst Somak Roy notes: "Overall, the outlook is promising and
the most important building blocks are already in place, but success will
now depend on the nuts and bolts of execution." Roy also notes that a recent
partnership with Salesforce.com is "a big deal".

Summing up how the firm would like to be perceived, Infor's Angove says: "We
have the mindset of a start-up even though we do over $2.5bn revenues. We
want to move fast at scale. It's like the rugby player Jonah Lomu - big but
fast."

Ironically perhaps, Ovum's Roy believes the firm needs to calm things down a
little after the numerous initiatives Phillips and his team have been
getting on with: "Infor's success will be good news for the ERP market but
the company should now settle into a period of stability involving
tactical-level changes only."

Whether one believes it is moving too fast or merely taking the fight to
Oracle and SAP - not forgetting other rivals such as Microsoft Dynamics,
Sage, and cloud ERP, CRM and HR rivals like NetSuite, Workday and SugarCRM -
is open to debate. But with Phillips at the helm there are few signs that
the company will be slowing down any time soon.

Don't miss!
Infor or enterprise applications watchers will want to listen to the entire
audio podcast with Charles Phillips and a longer transcript of this
interview at www.cbronline.tv.

Phillips also spoke to CBR about Steve Jobs
, and the impact the last Apple boss had on the world
of technology. You can read his thoughts on that here
.