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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Thursday, January 25, 2007 4:52:40 PM   | Abstract: | Through an aggressive acquisition strategy, Infor has become the third-largest application software company, but its technology and product vision is very different from that of Oracle and SAP. |
Jim Schaper, the chairman and CEO of Infor Global Solutions, likes to talk about the beach house he is building on the Georgia coast. Some day, Schaper says, he'll retire there and study the tide while recalling his 30-plus years of managing technology companies. But for Schaper, that day is still a long way off. The high-energy, 53-year-old former college track star has big plans for his $2.2 billion, privately owned company. Within the next two years, Schaper says, he wants to build Infor to between $3 billion and $3.5 billion in annual revenues. And, by the time he retires, he expects Infor to be a growing, publicly traded company with annual revenues upwards of $4 billion. Don't bet against him. In the past four years, mainly by acquiring a string of 19 software companies mostly serving mid-market manufacturing customers, Schaper has helped Infor grow from a $35 million, little-known vendor of process manufacturing systems into the world's third-largest supplier of enterprise software, trailing only SAP and Oracle. With the financial help of private equity firm Golden Gate Capital, Infor has swallowed a series of successively larger software vendors, culminating in its recently concluded $1.6 billion purchase of SSA Global. Over the past three years, Infor's customer base has grown from 2,000 to 70,000. [Click to continue] |