Less than a month after announcing plans to standardize its collection of ERP and other enterprise applications on Microsoft infrastructure technologies, Infor today said it will relaunch its cloud computing initiative and deploy it on top of Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure-as-a-service offering.
Infor said the cloud-based versions of its SyteLine ERP suite for mid-sized companies, its Expense Management, and its Enterprise Asset Management offerings all will be relaunched as multi-tenant applications running on the Azure IaaS platform. Expense Management will be the first Infor application available on Azure beginning in the first half of next year, said Infor Senior Vice President of Product Development Soma Somasundaram in an interview with Managing Automation. Infor’s EAM and SyteLine applications will be available on Azure in the second half of 2011, he said.
For the past 24 months, Infor has offered the three products as single-tenant applications running on its own cloud computing platform. To date 500,000 individual users have signed on for one of the three available Infor cloud-based applications.
The relaunch of Infor’s cloud strategy, now known as Infor24, advances the company’s strategy to become more aligned with Microsoft. Late last month, Infor said it would standardize its collection of enterprise applications on Microsoft infrastructure technologies, including Silverlight graphical user interface tools, SharePoint portal tools, the Microsoft SQL Server database platform, Reporting Services for business intelligence and analytics, directory tools for single sign-on tools, and the Windows Server operating system. The strategy, intended to provide a consistent user experience and management structure across Infor applications, replaces a best-of-breed approach under which different Infor applications used different infrastructure tools, some from Microsoft and some from other providers, such as IBM.