In this NRF 2017 interview I spoke with Erick Rowe, VP of industry strategy at Infor Retail, a recently added micro-vertical suite of applications for the Retail industry.

Infor was born in 2002 as Agilsys and has since evolved rapidly and made over 40 acquisitions to build a complete set of capabilities in enterprise software serving over 58 million cloud users and $2.8 B in revenues making it the 3rd largest enterprise software vendor.  The final evolution of Infor started in 2010 after a new management team lead by Charles Phillips an Oracle executive and 3 others took over and started a transformation of the technology into the Cloud culminating into what is CloudSuite now.  

The cloud back-end of Infor software is mostly running on Amazon Web Services, AWS.

One of the other key developments was the organization and focus on what Infor calls "micro-verticals" which are a level below what would be called a vertical focus.  One example of a micro-vertical is the Fashion toolset.  And in 2015 Infor started a focus on retail and has expanded rapidly from 2 team members to 900 today in a short 2 years.

Infor Retail has also grown by forming strategic partnerships with retailers such as DSW in building a Converged Commerce experience expected to be rolled out across DSW stores in the coming year.

We had a great conversation discussing different aspects of the transformation retail is undergoing and how technology is the main driving force.

Here is a list of the recent Info acquisitions in the retail and commerce sector:

- Infor acquired Starmount in Aug 2016 to add omni-channel "Converged Commerce" capabilities, 

- Acquired Predictix in June 2016, a ground-breaking provider of cloud-native, predictive, and machine-learning solutions for retailers.

- Infor acquired GT Nexus in August 2015, which at the time was a leading cloud-based "global commerce" platform, with customers such as Nike Inc., Adidas AG, Home Depot Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co.

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