In a move that will help the enterprise software vendor integrate its many acquired product lines, Infor on Tuesday outlined its service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy, called Infor Open SOA. On a conference call with members of the press, Infor CEO Jim Schaper and CTO Bruce Gordon said Infor Open SOA will differ from the SOA visions of the company's main enterprise applications competitors — SAP and Oracle — in two major ways. The first is that Infor Open SOA will be based on an "event-driven" architecture, whereby end customers can deploy and upgrade interoperable applications and software components with little or no disruption to other enterprise systems. Infor's middleware will remain platform-independent by adhering to industry standards such as the XML-based Open Applications Group Interoperability Standard (OAGIS). Infor officials said customers will be able to create their own ecosystems of Infor and non-Infor software components, without having to rip and replace systems to conform to proprietary middleware technology. The second differentiator, Infor said, is that Open SOA will be delivered within incremental product update releases, and will come at no additional cost to customers. Product updates also will include business process components that can be mixed and matched to suit customers' varying needs. "Infor's approach says customers are going to need different products for different situations, and that efficiencies have to start with the realization that customers are going to use systems in very different ways," AMR Research analyst Ian Finley said in an interview. Schaper and Gordon said Infor will provide further details on specific product roadmaps closer to the time of its next user conference in the fall. The SOA strategy described yesterday fits well with Infor's acquisition-based business strategy, Finley said. According to Schaper, that strategy will continue. On the conference call, Schaper said Infor has been working on its SOA plan for more than two years. Indeed, the company discussed plans for an open, standards-based approach to product integration at an industry analyst and press briefing held in the summer of 2005. The idea behind the approach, at the time referred to as Corestone, was to place acquired or newly developed applications within a universal client framework that would provide a common user interface, navigation method, and messaging standards for all Infor products. Yesterday, Schaper said Infor's customers want solutions that are "flexible and agile" because many of those customers are increasingly facing challenges such as mergers and acquisitions, complex legal requirements, the interchange between domestic and offshore operations, and competitive threats. Consequently, most want to run enterprise software applications without maintaining large IT shops. "They want systems that last 10 to 20 years, not five to seven years," Schaper said. "They don't want to rip and replace and have to move to a new platform." According to AMR's Finley, Infor is banking on the idea that customers will continue to prefer a modular way of buying and integrating components into their enterprise systems. He said SAP takes a different tack. "SAP's [approach] says systems already are too complex and customers don't want to assemble their own systems; they want the risk taken out by the vendor," Finley said. Oracle, he said, sits somewhere in the middle. The big ERP provider still plans to move customers to its Fusion platform in the future, but has pledged continuing support for all of its current product lines. Finley said that the vendors' varied approaches to SOA are all valid, and that there is enough room in the market for all. SOA adoption today is still more complex and costly than any vendor is necessarily willing to discuss, he added. While Infor has pledged a standards-based approach to SOA, he noted, some users will say that standards go only so far and that there inevitably will be loose wires in Infor's approach, with a lot of work required to ensure smooth operations. Regardless of the specific SOA approach among vendors, the universal message from enterprise customers has been that systems, in general, are too complex and that they want an easier way to manage product implementations, at as low a cost as possible, Finley said. Infor's Open SOA announcement, he said, could appeal to those who want to avoid a rip-and-replace approach. "Rather than a brand new way to build applications, this is a pragmatic way of saying you can keep your [software] assets and reuse them," he said.