Infor, a leading provider of micro-vertical application
suites, has introduced DevOps as part of an initiative to migrate its enterprise
application suites to a cloud platform. The significance of this should not be
lost. Infor is not a young, Web 2.0 unicorn
that was born with DevOps DNA. Infor is
a 14 year old privately held software supplier with over 70,000 customers
across multiple micro-vertical markets. Infor’s
industry-specific applications are mostly deployed and managed on-premise. The move to a cloud based AWS platform is as
much of a paradigm shift for Infor as it is for its diverse customer base.
Infor’s leadership
team launched the company’s annual user conference last week with keynote details
about Infor XI’s cloud strategy and partnership with Amazon Web Services. CEO
Charles Phillips explained the reasoning behind the move while COO Pam Murphy recounted
the technical efforts behind the scenes.
Both acknowledged the necessity
of creating a function that would be dedicated to cloud operations. Standing in
front of thousands of customers, Ms. Murphy described Infor Labs and how its
DevOps practices would ensure that the right operating procedures were inserted
into the development lifecycle. According
to Ms. Murphy, DevOps would bring “fully
automated hands-free cloud operations that improves efficiency, effectiveness,
consistency and security while reducing manpower requirements. “
Infor’s recognition
of DevOps as a critical business success factor for its next generation of industry
suites is impressive. Brian Rose, Senior
Vice President of Infor Labs and a key member of Infor’s management team for
the past nine years provided some insight.
“The motivation behind
developing and growing the DevOps team was driven by our ‘Cloud First’
strategy. Over the last 18 months, Infor underwent a significant transformation
to deliver industry solutions in the cloud. This required
development teams to gain a new understanding of the technical operations so
that our products operate optimally and cost effectively in the cloud.”
“Our DevOps team
worked closely with the development and cloud operations teams to develop
standards for the cloud. Further, they were responsible for setting and
maintaining the cloud standards including the development of architectural
components that allowed for the automation of provisioning, patch
processing, upgrades, backups, restores, monitoring and the development of a
portal to provide a self-service option for these functions,” Rose explains.
Infor Labs has
already seen results from DevOps. “The benefits that we have experienced
include the reduction of the provisioning of an industry suite from weeks to
minutes, decreased implementation time and costs for our customers, and
solutions that are optimized from a technical ops perspective that allow our
cloud infrastructure to scale so that we can support the thousands of customers
that we have today in the cloud and the ability to scale to support the
thousands more that we see moving to the cloud in the future, ” says Rose.
While DevOps is not
intended solely for applications in the cloud, software providers such as Infor
that publicly promote the value of their own DevOps culture increase proof of
concept while serving as role models for their enterprise customers. If the primary objective of DevOps is to
improve speed to market and time to value, who better than a trusted commercial
software provider to demonstrate real world insight and results.
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