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Jeanne Newberry, senior vice-president of business development at New York-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) company Infor, is preparing to launch what she describes as “a defining moment for partners”: the company’s first new partner programme in over eight years.
A pilot with 28 global partners is ongoing and many meetings have been held to to elicit feedback and ensure Infor gets it right before launch on 2 January 2025, Newberry told Reseller News last month on the sidelines of the company’s Velocity conference in Amsterdam.
The changes reflect Infor’s decade long development from a company set on acquiring industry vertical ERP players and their associated intellectual property to one that, after years of investment, has now redeveloped those assets into a series of industry vertical “cloud suites”.
Those acquisitions didn’t only deliver different platforms and technologies, but also up to a dozen different go-to-market models some of them predominantly direct.
With its journey of acquisition and redevelopment effectively complete, Infor is ramping up its challenge to incumbents such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and others, with partners in the front line.
However, the old partner programme, while lucrative for some, was not so much for partners who were heavily focused on cloud.
The new programme is an expression of Infor’s ambition is to “double down on partners” and grow software-as-a-service (SaaS) exponentially, Newberry said.
In that cause, Infor is shifting from a model that was specifically reseller focused to a programmatic engagement across all partner types and all go-to-market “motions” in what Newberry described as a “cloud-modern” engagement model.
“We think about our partners and how they add value across the entire customer journey,” she said. “We’ve only recognised and rewarded them for that resell.”
Globally, Infor has around 3,000 partners in its ecosystem. Many of these resell but also source, co-sell and deliver Infor technologies.
“We did not have a way to engage with partners programmatically at scale, prior to launching this programme which is based on a framework,” Newberry said.
The previous programme also had individual partner quotas and bonus points and was fairly intense for partners to manage.
The new one will be volume-based and aligned with Infor’s cloud vision so it is scalable, repeatable and partners are incentivised and know what to expect, Newberry said.
With hundreds of new innovations in the Infor stack, partners also needed greater support and enablement. Overwhelmingly, they also wanted a level paying field — a merit-based programme aligned with SaaS.
“We are looking to support partners in a very different way than in the past to ensure delivery success with the customer at the centre,” Newberry said.
“What that means from a support perspective is, whether it’s a complex sales pursuit or we are shifting towards a very complex implementation, we will have a delivery success model that supports those partners across that journey.
“We have to do a better job of enabling our partners to deliver our technology to customers.”
While Infor had been heavily focused on certification for its delivery partners, that has also been expanded to address partner craving for access to the vendor’s sales tools, methodologies and enablement.
That includes learning paths that are persona-specific to help build customer intimacy.
Distributors are not yet a large part of the play, with a “limited go-to-market” in place in US with a distributor offering public service capability.
That could change over time, especially to help service “long tail” customers with fewer seats and gain access to distributor marketplaces.
Infor plans to introduce its own marketplace in 2025 but already participates in the AWS Marketplace, which Newberry said could be considered a “non-traditional” distributor.
That sets up a win-win, with Infor gaining new customers and AWS more greenfield workloads in its cloud.
Partner sentiment to these developments had been overwhelmingly positive, Newberry said.
“They are seeing the engagement and commitment from Infor in a new way,” she said. “It’s through the programme and our entire leadership team who are all-in with our partners.”
After all, seventy per cent of all software purchases, especially in the ERP space were influenced by a partner, she said.
“Partners have a craving a formalised programme and engagement model from Infor and that’s what we are delivering.”
None of the partners included in the pilot are from the Australia and New Zealand region. However one, US-based Fortude, has an office in Melbourne.
Rob O’Neill attended Infor Velocity as a guest of Infor.