Infor continues its series of acquisitions with the purchase of Starmount, a rather newcomer in the store systems provider industry. This follows acquisitions of demand management companies and supply chain networks companies. According to Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, the move was made in order to further expand the range of services offered for business users due to increasing demands.
Starmount was a Texas based company that constantly experienced a growth of over 40% per year. Among the most known of the customers we have Perry Ellis, Abecrombie & Fitch, Urban Outfitters and the Burlington Coat Factory.
The acquisition is ongoing and after it will be complete, Starmount is going to offer mobile shopping assistant, point-of-sale and even store inventory management. All comes with a well-built data-rich commerce hub that streamlines operations, engage shoppers and more of huge value for Infor and its customers.
The company that is now making waves in the cloud technology industry launched the Infor Retail business in 2015, during summer. The premise of the launch was a strong collaboration with Whole Foods Market. The aim was to create a merchandising system that is modern and this led to future acquisitions that would help to improve the network, including the highly mediatized purchase of GT Nexus. Starmount was aimed to help with store systems and we also saw Predictix that aided with demand management.
Wade Gerten, Infor vice president of digital and customer experience, declared that the market was litered with antiquated software that was create tens of years ago. The modern retailers need much more than what is present at the moment. Alternatives that are built with the aid of the cloud technology available and with a mobile native support. Infor is going to now be able to bring such complex solutions on the market at a much higher speed.
The Starmount acquisition is just the latest one of the different possible purchases planned with the main purpose of basically creating what was dubbed as a social networks built for companies. The idea was to simply make sure that all the companies involved in the supply chain are able to cooperate and communicate. This is not easy to do at the moment since we are faced with obvious technology gaps that have to be covered. For instance, when a supply problem appears, it is difficult to deal with it really fast. The companies that are affected will be faced with delays since they will learn about the problems through regular communication channels.
Infor is expected to keep investing in new technology or to acquire new companies. This is really important since many specialists believe that this is the company that will be a competitor for market giant Oracle in the future. However, Infor staff always declared that this is not their goal. The main focus is always put on the customers and being able to deliver services of a really high quality based on the exact needs of the clients. Constant communication and high quality services are always the real priorities.