MANMAN vendor wants to run datacenters
November 6, 2015
The yearly conference for Infor software customers wrapped up this week, meaning that MANMAN sites have some new dogma to process on the way to migration. Infor has lots of alternatives for these established HP 3000 sites to consider when they migrate. We've talked to one IT manager who said Infor prospective apps have made owning MANMAN and running it on a 3000 less costly.
The future for MANMAN and any legacy ERP app is up in the cloud, according to its CEO Charles Phillips. ERP for the cloud has been the mission Kenandy has pursued for more than three years, but it's good to see the concept has gained traction at a major ERP vendor like Infor.
The Infor president Stephan Scholl said this week (hat-tip to the Diginomica website)
Give us your data center. We will take your mission critical applications and run them on Infor Cloud Suite. So before you do an expensive hardware refresh, we can get you up and running in 4-6 weeks.
Getting a customized application environment working in six weeks or less sounds bold, especially to the MANMAN customer who's fine-tuned software to match business processes over the last 20 years. At Conax Technologies, that's exactly what happened. That well-fitted tuning is also what's holding Conax to MANMAN.
Infor's Phillips is not the only CEO aimed at delivering ERP via offsite hosting. (Sorry, I mean the cloud. A fellow can get confused once the development moves out of a company-run datacenter.) Kenandy's CEO was promoting wholesale ERP change earlier this year, in the weeks before Sandy Kurtzig turned over her job to a handpicked successor.
The website went on to quote Kurtzig about the scope of change looming for companies that are using massive ERP like SAP or Oracle.
Every single piece of ERP software in the ERP space is going to be replaced over the next 10 years, so it depends on where each company is in the stage of that replacement.
Kenandy likes to say that it can integrate well with other on-premise ERP software, a claim that could mean MANMAN and Kenandy might be working side by side in the years to come at migrating 3000 sites. Change comes slowly and in phases to companies like Conax. Nobody is in a hurry to move off ERP apps that work, especially after the MPE hardware has been refreshed by adopting the Charon HPA emulator.
That day of change is coming, though. After the Dreamforce conference this fall, Forbes took a look at the prospects for companies like Kenandy to compete with vendors like Infor or SAP, firms who have built empires upon massive software stacks.
In Kenandy’s case, the big question is whether it can take business away from market leader SAP. What it has found is that existing SAP customers come to Kenandy for their ability to orchestrate SAP, Salesforce, and other functionality.
The Kenandy advantage lies in its adoption of the Salesforce1 platform. The newest tool is Salesforce1 Lightning, a suite that enables developers like Kenandy to create intuitive, modern interfaces. Kenandy sponsored Lightning presentations at the Dreamforce conference, and is "Lightning Ready." The company also sponsored a talk by Geoffrey Moore. He's the icon who authored Crossing the Chasm — and once wrote that platforms like the HP 3000 leverage unique value for customers by preserving investment.
The relationship between MANMAN's design and Infor X, or other Infor alternatives, will be measured against Kenandy's software that was kicked off by MANMAN-ASK founder Kurtzig. Infor expects that its cloud-based revenues will make up a majority of company revenues, according to Diginomica. Kenandy has no on-premise business to protect, however. Its success is lashed to cloud ERP exclusively.