Getting the Band Back Together: Infor CloudSuite Retail Gets Tuned Up

Talking about my generation, a lot of us held out hope that the Fab Four would reunite, which was until the music died outside the Dakota one early-December night 35 years ago.

As Infor previewed its long-expected launch of CloudSuite Retail on a recent mild early-December day in New York City, one thought rang out among many important conclusions - Duncan Angove and Charles Phillips are getting their old band back together.

Infor’s new retail vertical initiative is bringing about several key members of the original Retek troupe and more from the company’s recent Oracle days back together.

Sure, a few are missing - some starting their own gigs, with others joining established bands or remaining offstage, but Infor CloudSuite Retail is gearing up for its own Rolling Thunder Revue with a core of vintage players and plenty of new talents on several important instruments.

It’s sure to give everyone something to talk about.

Shaking Up Business as Usual
Learning from one’s mistakes is good. Having the opportunity to do that is a lot, isn’t it?

The CloudSuite Retail team certainly is bound and determined to do the former. That effort began more than a year ago when Duncan Angove and Corey Tollefson, Retail SVP and GM, listed all of the limitations associated with the current set of legacy solutions built in a pre-social, pre-mobile, and preomni-channel world and what Infor’s customers hate about the retail enterprise software business as usual - a courageous gambit few others could stomach.

That led the company to three guiding principles it has followed to launch CloudSuite Retail - a customer-first shared-success commercial business model, an unrelenting focus on disruption, and an employee centric entrepreneurial culture that’s transparent, innovative, and agile. Inverting the design paradigm and starting from the end-user expectation, Infor has turned past practices on its head.

The executive management team’s intimate experience with, and responsibility for, much of the retail enterprise software built over the past 10–20 years and still sold today creates another exceptional executive modus operandi - deep and frequent focus on product and application development.