Infor is now a Koch company: Megacorp swallows cloud ERP outfit after investing billions in early-stage funding Cloudy ERP outfit Infor has been picked up by Koch Industries after investment biz Golden Gate Capital sold off its remaining equity stake. New York-based Infor lays claim to 68,000 customers with over 71 million cloud users. While the financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, Bloomberg reported the deal valued …
I understand Old Koch, father of the 4 brothers, was the son of a Dutch immigrant born in Workum, and his only connection to the Jews was building an oil refinery for the Nazis. And many more for Stalin.
But afterwards his, and his sons', politics sadly degenerated into dribbling libertarianism.
Except for the fact Infor has a number of specialized applications such as those for Aerospace, Automotive, Process Industries, Project Industries, Configure and Quote, Microsoft is totally (not) their equivalent.
Cloud computing was a godsend for Infor because it alleviated and concealed some of the difficulties inherent in ERP premise implementations, reduced customization risk, and obfuscated differing code bases. Infor grew through aggregation of different specialized software for different industries developed by different specialized suppliers, and mainly those that were on the periphery of greatness at one time, like Baan for example.
I see this as a support revenue play with ancillary benefits accrued through Koch Industry adoption (home-cooking) of the software for their own businesses. Secondly, and for a short period of time (until their competitors that use Infor software migrate to other software), Koch having insight into their own and new industries and common practices of those companies they may wish to emulate viewed from the other side of the mirror.
Smart play especially as the US increases the Buy American mantra.
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