On June 4, 2019, the event IBM INFOR I ROADSHOW MILAN took place in Me Milan Il Duca Hotel in Piazza Repubblica in Milan, a special occasion to gather all the Italian Infor and Twingroup IBM i customers and to present the future roadmaps of IBM and Infor. In a suggestive frame as the Hotel Me Milan, the event succeded to seal, once again, the strong relation between IBM and Infor which, since many years, collaborate in the IBM Infor Alliance.
After the IBM intervention, it was the time of Ross Freeman, System I Strategy Leader, Senior Product Manager ERP XA, who presented the Infor strategy for the coming years: more than 3 million dollars of investments have been allocated to Infor solutions. Infor's global strategy will focus on A.I. (Infor Coleman) Analytics (Infor Birst), network (commerce & IoT), cloud (Industry Cloudsuite), on specific industry functions and on the Infor OS digital cloud platform. One of the solutions included in the Infor strategy is the technology of Infor Birst, an analytics platform aimed at improving, in a simple and fast way, the coding and management of the most critical information in the company.
Rabah Krouchy, VP of Birst, provided a general overview of the solution. Infor Birst is in fact a modern and innovative tool of decentralized BI, which offers rapid analysis and improved coding of complex data, processes and models and it is fully integrated with Infor ERP solutions. In order to provide technical information and to give customers interesting moments on exchange of ideas, in the afternoon there were instead parallel product sessions: one dedicated to Infor XA customers, the second one to Infor LX customers and the third one dedicated to System21 customers. There are numerous improvements that will affect Infor XA including the total replacement of the Powerlink, significant improvements to the Net Link and the launch of the cloud version.
In addition, the new "Enterprise Financials" solution has been added to the Infor XA bundle. It offers significant advantages in terms of product functionality and flexibility, allowing XA customers to maintain current data and configuration by leveraging the power of IDF (Infor Development Framework) . This is one of the issues presented during the speech of Gherardo Maspero, Managing Partner of Twingroup. In addition to a general overview of the new EFIN solution, which also includes the new EGLi configurable general accounting, other new solutions were also presented such as e-invoicing-passive cycle, which will allow the supplier invoice to be recorded and accounted for automatically.
The parallel Infor LX session, presented by David Rapacz, System I-Product Manager ERP LX, focused on the IDF platform for graphic improvement of the solution, the cloud version and the presentation of the new graphic release 8.4.0., available also in Cloud. The event certainly did not disappoint expectations: it was an opportunity to bring together the majority of Infor's Italian customers on the IBM i platform under one “single roof”. Great satisfaction from the IBM, Infor and Twingroup teams for the performance and positive feedback of the event. We are very happy to have received so many applications from Infor & IBM customers and the positive feedback received during the meeting. Our goal was not only to present the innovations related to the solution but also to give voice to the requests of our customers, to allow them to make an exchange of ideas and to discuss directly with IBM & Infor. This meeting will lay the foundations for the creation of an all-Italian IBM user group, a constant and proactive meeting point for retaining our Italian customers and providing increasingly cutting-edge IT solutions in line with real business needs.