With everything moving to the cloud, Tarik Taman, General Manager, India, Middle East & Africa at Infor tells us why Infor found the perfect partner with AWS.
Q: What are Infor’s plans for GITEX this year?
A: For us as a company, we established ourselves as the first truly industry cloud company in the world. While most of our competition around the world is just starting to figure out cloud, we’ve been there for a long time and we’ve been doing it with the hard stuff. What I mean by the hard stuff is complex manufacturing, running entire governments on the cloud, running entire industries like hotels and hospitalities or hospitals.
We’ve only been in the Middle East with a direct presence for the last two years. GITEX last year was only a few months after we had opened up our first set of offices. We went from 18 months ago, having 10 employees in the Middle East and one office, to having five offices and 220 employees.
Essentially, we’re taking Middle East to the same market share level as quick as we can, as we have in the rest of the world. GITEX is a platform for us to elevate our brand, get in touch with more customers and be able to showcase our differentiation.
Q: Is Infor launching any new products this week?
A: Our products have been pretty consistent for the last few years. We always introduce these products into new industries. We have geographical major announcements. For us, since we already are in 14 major industries, from aerospace and defence to hospitality, healthcare, government, etc., we’ve been in these industries for a few years. We are adding one to two new industries a year.
We are not announcing anything new this year at GITEX with the exception that our major infrastructure partner, AWS/Amazon, has just announced a data centre build for opening here in the region. We use AWS around the world as our infrastructure provider, so we’ll be one of the first companies to have an industrial strength data centre right here in the gulf.
Q: What were Infor’s priorities when looking for a cloud partner? And how did AWS meet these criteria?
A: When we started on the path to becoming the first truly industry cloud provider, we were thinking about do we build a bunch of data centres around the world; how much capital; how much expertise and how much core competence do you need for that; or do we partner? We looked around and there was one dominant provider, which was AWS. We know the philosophy of the chairman which is, provide customers with as much value as possible and as much quality as possible for the least amount of money.
Together, we’ve collaborated on spending a lot of money and energy around security, operating systems, redundancy, fail over. Netflix and Infor are the two biggest partners that AWS has in our respective categories. Between us, we have millions and millions of users and customers. We’re convinced we found the right partner and we’re convinced they’re going to win the future of the cloud infrastructure and that we’re going to win the future of the cloud business system.
Q: How do you see companies leveraging the cloud to remain competitive?
A: Everything from security to dynamic business processes to going global, are all things that the cloud can provide almost every company better than they can do it themselves. Companies have gotten stuck in a rut by spending their technology spend and keeping the lights on. Keeping their data centres on, figuring out how to upgrade their systems, making sure the security is always patched.
Most companies, such as hospitals, or manufacturers or government organisations, it’s not their core competences to have all of that IT capabilities. They’ll never be as good as the big companies, like AWS and ourselves, at making sure you have secure solutions that are always upgraded, and always updated, that are beautiful and innovative. They can spend time managing and optimising their business processes. Aside from lowering costs, it will free up organisations to spend money on re-inventing themselves every few years because if they don’t, their competition will.
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