In this episode, Steve and Sam are joined by Jennifer Noonan, Vice President and General Manager of CX and IPMC business units at Infor.
The conversation begins with Jen offering a refreshingly clear overview of Infor’s mission to deliver industry-specific software solutions, particularly for sectors such as manufacturing, distribution, and healthcare. She outlines how Infor CRM SLX (formerly SalesLogix) has evolved to meet the needs of modern businesses, focusing on delivering deep functionality without requiring extensive customization.
Listen to this episode here, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jen dives into Infor’s vertical-specific go-to-market strategy, emphasizing the importance of tailoring solutions to distinct industries and micro-verticals. The group discusses how Infor CRM fits into this approach, serving as a matrix layer that spans multiple industries while offering nuanced capabilities depending on the operational focus, whether it is manufacturing, distribution, or services. Jen shares insights into the complexity of determining the best ERP fit, especially in hybrid organizations, and how Infor addresses this through core ERPs supported by integrated modules.
One major highlight is the role CRM plays in unifying customer relationship data with operational systems, such as ERP. Jen talks about how integrated solutions reduce friction for users—particularly sales and customer service reps—by putting everything from sales order history to pricing at their fingertips. She emphasizes that CRM should act as the system of engagement, capturing leads, communications, and customer interactions. At the same time, ERP retains its role as the system of record for financials and fulfillment.
The episode concludes with a look at Infor’s innovation strategy under Koch Industries, which has enabled the company to adopt a long-term perspective on product development. Jen reflects on the rebranding of Infor CRM, which now includes ‘SLX’ as a nod to its SalesLogix heritage, and how cloud transformation has retained the platform’s robust customization capabilities.
The discussion encompasses a range of topics, from marketing automation to CPQ integration and the importance of thoroughly rethinking business processes during CRM implementations.
Full Transcript
STEVE: Welcome to CRM Talk, the show that brings you the latest in CRM and CRM related news and information. This is Steve Chipman along with my co-host Sam Biardo. And today’s special guest is Jennifer Noonan. Jennifer is Vice President and General Manager of CX and IPMC business units at Infor. Jen, welcome to our podcast.
JEN: Thanks, Steve. I’m delighted to join you both today. Big fan of the podcast, and so I welcome the opportunity to introduce CRM to your listeners, or Infor CRM to your listeners. They know CRM.
SAM: Yeah, and it’s great because Steve and I are old SalesLogix partners. That’s how we met. It’s got to be like 15-20 years ago now. So, it’s it’s great to see and still be working with Infor CRM, or Infor, the old SalesLogix. And very, Infor is now coming back into the limelight as a great product, particularly integrating with all their ERPs. So we want to explore the reemergence of a very strong contender in the market and its evolution to where it’s at today.
STEVE: Yeah, and Jen, if you could just start by giving us a little bit of for our listeners, a little bit of background on Infor, the company’s mission, the types of clients that you serve?
JEN: Yeah, of course. So, if you go and read the website, what you’ll get is a description that goes something along the lines of, Infor is a global leader in industry-specific cloud software, and our goal is to help organizations across manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, and other sectors operate more efficiently, which sounds like a lot of marketing speak, right? So what that really means in in everyday terms is that we’re a very large software company. So, one of the top four largest ERP providers in the world. And like most software companies, we’re all about helping our customers operate with better efficiency and and maximizing their revenue. And so for us, we do that by providing business applications that give our customers what we call last-mile functionality, or a real industry-specific depth.
So solutions that don’t need heavy customization to meet our customer needs. And what you see in the market is that a lot of software providers, ERP providers in particular, have this one extra large, super-duper, everything to everyone ERP that’s supposed to do it all. Infor’s focus is more on bringing it down to individual industry and micro-vertical levels. And we do that for more than 60,000 customers worldwide. They range from tiny, small, medium businesses right through to some of the world’s largest enterprises, like some of Infor CRM’s customers are major American financial services or banking customers. So we do a lot of things for a lot of people, but in reality, who we are is a really, really big software company.
STEVE: And and how do you approach the market? Do you have different teams covering different verticals? What’s your general go-to-market strategy?
JEN: We do. In general, so there’s a differentiation between Infor as a whole, and then CRM in particular, right? So, for Infor as a whole, we’re by and large organized by vertical and industry teams, really allowing us to drive down into what are the specific value offerings for the industry that we’re focusing on. Infor CRM, as you can imagine, plays more of a matrix kind of across the gamut role there, because a lot of our capability is is quite common depending on those different industries that we’re looking at. And then there’s some specificity when you get down to a more granular level on on where manufacturing might be slightly different to distribution. And then somewhere like service industries, right? Where goods and physical materials and the supply chain that relate to them are less important and it’s more about coordinating individuals to go and provide a specific service. So it, that sort of shifts things when you’re looking down at the CRM level.
STEVE: Is it Is it always obvious what the right product market fit is for ERP or sometimes do you have to really delve down to determine whether a prospect would be better served with ERP A or ERP B, if that makes sense?
JEN: There’s there’s usually, so it depends, everyone’s favorite answer, right? It really depends. I mean, at an overarching level, you do have businesses that very squarely sit into this is a manufacturer, and they manufacture windows and doors. And Infor, for example, has some products that really, really benefit window and door manufacturing organizations, and there it can be pretty straightforward. But increasingly in the market, we do see an increase in the number of kind of, I guess, hybrid businesses, if you like, where it’s a manufacturer that does some distribution, or it’s a distributor that does some kitting and maybe even elements of manufacturing. In which case, we do dive a little deeper and get in under the covers. Most of the ERP offerings that we have are quite broad and flexible, and the way that we structure it is really that in any case, you have the core of the ERP and then you have complementary solutions that are part of a suite sitting around them, and that can also be one of the places where you’re bringing in specific capability that might bring more flexibility to an original offering.
But ERP itself, you know, if we if we go back to that, and I don’t think we’ll spend most of our time on it, ERP itself is a complex sales cycle. There’s a lot of discovery, there’s a lot of refinement, there’s a lot of understanding the challenges that a customer’s trying to meet and and what it is that they specifically need. So, we don’t, although we typically have a core offering for that industry, there’s still going to be a lot of work to ensure that we really are proposing the appropriate solution.
STEVE: And are customers, regarding CRM, are customers coming to you more than ever asking for a CRM solution? What what’s the interplay between Infor and its customers with regard to CRM solutions at this point?
JEN: Yeah, so, and and you’ll find this across most of the industry and most ERP companies, right? Most of the ERPs have some level of capability around some kind of CRM offering built in. Now, in some cases, it might be as basic as just account and contact management, right? In other cases, they’ll have more of what my team affectionately refers to as CRM light. Where it can handle a basic and straightforward sales process and a basic and straightforward sales organization. And so for those companies, they don’t need to buy an additional product. I mean, we’d all love for them to, but they don’t need it, and they can make do or or function perfectly well with the light capability that is included in an accounting system or an ERP system or wherever it may be. We’ve even seen in some cases, some of the marketing automation vendors, right, building some light CRM into what they do. And that’s really for those organizations that have a very basic sales process and a very basic sales operation where marketing’s leading the charge and all sales is doing is capturing orders, perhaps.
The customers that are coming to us are really looking for more of, you know, what CRM says it does on the label: customer relationship management. So when they’re coming to us, they’re saying, help me to better manage, to get more out of my customer relationships. And so the scope or or the vision of exactly what that includes has really expanded over the years and continues to expand. And I think the two of you could probably attest to this from the early days of CRM, right?
Back then, it was more around contact, opportunity management, and over time it’s grown so that customers now they’re looking for a CRM that’s going to integrate seamlessly across their operations and really give them visibility to all of the factors that are influencing their customer’s relationship with their organization.
And so it’s really where the start of the conversation is, I think, for us a lot of the time is I want to do something more complex, I want to do something more strategic, less transactional with my customers, and that’s that’s when people are coming to talk to us.
STEVE: And then how about the interaction or integration between CRM and ERP? Are customers asking for specific things such as I want my field reps to be able to see sales order history before they walk in the door of a client? What what types of things are people asking for in the CRM that may originate in the ERP?
JEN: Yeah, so there’s a lot, right? And it’s I’m going to start my answer in a slightly different place, if I may.
What we see where where systems are not integrated, or where different point solutions are being used, is that your sales team or your customer service team or whoever they may be, they’re having to jump between different solutions.
So they’re, you know, they’re trying to talk to a customer, the customer rings up cranky because they have an order that hasn’t arrived yet. And now your rep has got to go talk to someone in the the shipping team or someone who has access to the ERP that can tell them where that shipment is and why my customer who I just called to ask them if they wanted to buy something is now giving me an earful because I’ve got a delivery that’s late, right?
So what we’re trying to do, and to answer your question more directly now, is have a look at what is the organizational data, and we’ll often talk about it in terms of ERP data, but it’s not really. It could be coming from anywhere. It just typically will come through an ERP because that’s often the hub in a hub and spoke kind of model of the organization’s technology. The kind of information that they need to be able to see on a day-to-day basis is helping them, you know, we talked about CRM, customer relationship management, give them the information they need to manage that customer relationship and to have everything they need at their fingertips in real time.
So, for example, you’ve got a sales team who needs to have access to open invoices to be able to have informed conversations around the account status or upsell opportunities. You’ve got credit hold status, for example, so that reps don’t waste their time pursuing deals or chasing customers where a deal an order can’t be fulfilled or might indicate risk. You’ve got sales teams needing visibility into sales order history so that they can understand buying patterns and reorder reordering cycles, and then using that information in the CRM where the sales rep is working and deciding what they’re going to do today and how they should prioritize things, to lend them some insight that can really drive then action into what’s going to generate the most revenue for the business.
And so a lot of that kind of back-end organizational data around orders, even pricing information. So if you’ve got an approved or a predefined pricing plan or discount rate with a particular customer on particular SKUs, to be able to draw that straight through from your financial systems so that your rep doesn’t have to go and do a quote and then go and find out what the order was and then come back and provide the quote to the customer. It can all be done in real time and provide a much better customer experience. Is that all making sense?
STEVE: And I’ve got one more question, I’ll hand it over to Sam, because Sam, as usual, I’m monopolizing the the questions. But the question I had is, the thing that I’ve seen a lot in the past is that an organization has an ERP system. The sales people have logins. They do their their quotes through that system. And then, and then a heavy, not not a light, but a heavy CRM is introduced, and then the question always comes up, should we transfer the quoting capability over to the CRM system and everything that goes along with that, inventory, and then have a mechanism for managing that in CRM so the the reps don’t have to live in two places, yet when an order is accepted, there’s an easy way to push that into the ERP system so things work almost as seamlessly as they worked when everyone was working out of just the one system.
So, my question, I guess, is, are are you seeing that where the the question does come up, where should we be doing our quotes? Is that something that we should keep in the ERP? Is that something we should consider migrating? And it obviously, there’s dependency, it depends, the dependency is on the simplicity or complexity of the quotation process, I would suppose.
JEN: Yeah, I mean, our goal is that the individuals within the organization are working on a common set of data, right? And then each person, each resource should ideally be able to do their job in as few places as possible. Ideally, just one.
So, if we are talking about a sales person creating a quote, we want them to be able to do that in CRM. Now, there’s a balance there on how that thenmoves back and forth within the organization, because the accepted quote or the order, I would say, belongs to the ERP.
So as soon as we have a quote, goes through, becomes an order, it goes to the ERP. Although in CRM, you might say we need to be able to track changes to the order, it goes back to the ERP and the ERP is the master of that data, because it’s also pushing that out to inventory teams, warehouse teams, finance teams, whoever else, right? But typically sales people don’t do a great job of working within the ERP, and often when you talk to CIOs or CFOs or whoever, they don’t really want their sales team in the ERP. It’s not the place.
STEVE: They’re They’re a threat to the integrity of the data.
JEN: Yeah. I’m not commenting on that more, but I don’t want to offend your sales team who are listening, right? But absolutely. And so, you really, you know, we’ve got this common pool of data that’s being easily shared back and forth throughout the organization to any of the systems that need it. And so, typically for like core company data, so billing, shipping info, financials, transactions, that the ERP should own that.
But before the CRM purists come at me, right? The CRM, let’s define it a little differently. It becomes the system of engagement. So that’s where the relationship, that’s where the sales team is engaging, and that’s where we see things like relationship history, pipeline, communications, sales activities, that all should live there. And that stuff doesn’t go to the ERP. So the CRM is going to be the single source of truth for a big subset of organizational data that just doesn’t belong in the ERP.
So, for instance, leads or prospects who have not yet been promoted to customer status, they haven’t made an order yet, we don’t clutter up the ERP with prospects or random web leads. They don’t belong there. Initial pricing, sales conversations that don’t go anywhere, again, they shouldn’t be cluttering up an ERP. And heaven knows we have zero need to be tracking marketing campaign involvement in an ERP. So, what’s really important is that the systems that you have are working in concert and that you clearly define what needs to happen where, and then maintain a really clear process on who’s meant to do what where, in as few places as possible, to make sure that you have the adoption and you have the data integrity that can track through the system.
SAM: And a perfect opportunity for Sam to pick up. Well, I was going to say that the single source of truth is sort of transformational. It starts out in the CRM, but you’re right, when the order gets placed, all of a sudden portions of it become the ERP, not the CRM. Yeah. And best example of that is, you know, the ship to information, the actual order itself, and basic account information. Yeah. And then there’s stuff that is you don’t really have a single source of truth for. So, ancillary contacts in the company, they could be managed in the ERP, they could be managed in the CRM. But
JEN: I I argue for CRM on that one, but yes, I know what you’re saying.
SAM: We we have customers who are so black and white on this that we have one customer who it took me five years to talk them out of having a system where if someone made a change in the CRM, it sent an email to somebody on the ERP side to confirm that that change was good, and then automatically approved it with a button that we’d built for them. And I just said, that’s really not the best way of doing it. They had really one person managing their system who just did approvals for change. And thank God they’re now no longer doing that. But that’s again caused because I’m guessing somebody went through and and, you know, overwrote a bunch of CRM data that then synced to the ERP.
JEN: I was going to say, I bet that was I bet that was a a legacy of some sort of organizational childhood trauma, right? Where there’s something’s gone wrong at some point and at the time, that was the best approach they could think of for controlling to ensure that never happened again. Yeah. But, talk about overhead.
SAM: Well, we’re seeing a lot of, as people are building workflows now, we’re seeing a lot of companies just take their manual process and automating it as opposed to really rethinking it. And we’re we’re now seeing the companies who did that running into issues. For example, we have one company where they have several manual approvals. At, you know, if something is over if an order’s over a particular size, Joe has to approve it. But all the data that Joe’s going to look at is already in the CRM, and we we’re trying to argue Joe doesn’t need to see this anymore. It should just automatically be approved or not approved based on from rules in the system.
So, when we talk about like CRM quotes to ERP order requirements, is that true for most customers that they they want to start with a quote in the CRM and and maybe move it to an order in the ERP or how does how does that normally flow in in how does quoting get introduced to the ERP from the CRM?
JEN: Yeah, it’s normally, so, well, it depends on your solution set as well, and the nature of your organization, right? Because if you have very complex quoting, so I talked about, you know, windows and doors, for example, where it’s all made to measure, then you might have a quoting engine like the quoting engines are typically called CPQ, configure price quote, right? And you might be using CPQ. But even so, most of the time, because the sales conversations are starting with a rep and being tracked in CRM, we do typically see that that quoting process happens in CRM. It can be pulling data through and pricing data through and discounting data through from the ERP. It might push you across to CPQ to do your configuration and then bring that data back into CRM or, you know, ship it straight to the ERP and they connect depending on what you’ve designed.
But normally we would see that the quote, the quote initiation and the quoting process is is largely managed through CRM. But as I said, once it’s an order, then the ERP owns it because it’s affecting all these other places that, you know, you don’t want to integrate CRM to every other application in your business. You’re going to integrate CRM to your ERP or your accounting system, and the other tools are also going to be talking to that. And so it just really streamlines the way that you set up your organization and the way that you’re able to manage data throughout your organization.
SAM: And when you’re done with the order and it’s placed, now we have to calculate commission. So where does that happen? Is that happened in the CRM or the ERP or maybe that’s something we still do on spreadsheets, who knows?
JEN: Well, it depends. So often you’ll have, so depending on the ERP, it’ll have payroll capability that will be able to do commissions calculations, in which case it’ll happen there. Other organizations will have a separate HR tool where it might be happening over there. But the data that informs the commission will be coming from CRM because that’s where you’ve tracked the bookings for the individual rep, right? And then it’s flowing through from there.
SAM: So, when does marketing solutions come into play then? Is that something, I know Infor has a incredible marketing solution designed for enterprise level customers. Can you elaborate a little bit about where marketing would play in the strategy here?
JEN: Yeah, it used to be that marketing was at the start of the funnel, right? This was your initial lead generation kind of awareness sort of step. And then you saw a handover of a lead to sales, and then ever so nicely in all the all the diagrams, it just moved to closed, and tadah, it was done. We have a different concept of, and I don’t just mean me, Infor, I mean we, the the business ecosystem, the world in general, has a different concept of marketing now, because marketing is involved at so many different points of the funnel. You have much more account-based marketing that’s working tightly hand-in-hand with your sales team.
And so it really is so so connected that I find it hard to kind of separate the two out. Obviously, within CRM itself, what you’re looking for and the main kind of activity that’s happening there or tracking that’s happening there is to understand what messaging is being pushed to a particular customer, right? So when I go to that contact record, I want to know that they received these emails or these, heaven help us, 47 emails last week and now they’ve unsubscribed. But I want to know what messages we’ve been sending to them. I want to know what offers we’ve provided to them. And so as a rep, that’s the level of visibility I need, as well as to then be able to promote an individual to be included in a specific campaign or a specific messaging stream.
And then because we’re tying that to marketing, that’s where you can start to see, well, which of the opportunities there that were marketed were marketing generated or influenced by marketing, which ones are closing? And what’s the role that they’re playing? Because marketing, I was going to say more than ever, but to be honest, my career started in marketing and I don’t remember a time where this wasn’t the case. Marketing really needs to justify the return on their spend. They’re, we called it ROMI, right? Return on marketing investment. And so it’s really critical that that’s flowing through alongside our opportunities and alongside our orders so that they can track which campaigns are effective and really justify the budgets that’s been given to them. Because if they’re not showing revenue generation, then they’re just a cost center. Does that answer your question?
SAM: It does. Yeah. And it’s sort of interesting because, you know, over the years, Infor grew by acquiring, right? They they they picked up Syteline and they picked up Lawson and then I don’t even remember all the brands that they had picked up. I know they had some government solutions like Accela. So, and I know that Infor CRM is really promoting cloud. The cloud suite is, can you elaborate a little bit on what products that Infor CRM integrates with and where where it’s going with the cloud solution and all the different what do they call it? Infor OS components that go along with it?
JEN: So, the reality is that all the Infor applications, I mean, there are probably a few exceptions, but let’s just in general terms, all the Infor applications have a shared data lake. And then we have a well-structured tech stack, Infor OS, and they all use, so they use a common, specifically designed middleware, basically, for workflow and data orchestration. So, you know, if we really look at the depth of where integrations have been built out most specifically to an ERP, for instance, it’s probably CloudSuite Industrial, which used to be called Syteline, or CloudSuite Distribution, which used to be called SxE, that have the deepest integration.
But the reality is, whether it’s, you want me to give you some names? Like Lawson, LN, M3, LX, any of those, right? We were talking about a product here earlier and and someone said, “Oh, Infor reporting.” I’m like, “But what other names does it have? Help me with this. Where did it come from?” The reality is it doesn’t matter so much because we always have this deep capability to pull the relevant ERP data directly into the CRM interface and help the users be able to make those decisions without switching systems. So we we package up our solutions in what we call, as I said earlier, cloud suites, right? A CloudSuite Manufacturing or CloudSuite Industrial or CloudSuite Distribution. And basically the way that’s designed is it’s got a core product, typically an ERP, although there are a few exceptions. And then there are all of these component pieces, right? These other edge solutions, if you like, of which CRM is one, CPQ that I mentioned earlier is another one, Birst, our analytics tool, is another one. They’re all they’re all in there within that cloud suite designed to provide a complete offering to our customers.
And so it’s, you know, we’ve also got, you mentioned marketing. We’re actually building some of our marketing capability deeper into CRM at the moment. So as of later this year, it won’t sit as a separate application, it’ll actually be embedded in CRM. But for the most part, it provides our customers with that ability to have a look at what they’ve got, have a kind of ready-made Infor ecosystem that’s ready for them. But if there’s a piece they don’t need because they already own something else, they get to decide, right? Or their business is exceptional, they don’t need that thing. They get to decide. So it just provides them flexibility. But at the same time, because it is sort of pre-predefined, it allows us to roll it out a lot faster and allows our customers to realize value a lot faster. Because for anyone who’s been involved in an ERP project, if you don’t have some element of like organization and readiness to go, they can be big and they can be expensive, those implementations.
SAM: Well, it’s been about five years since Koch Industries bought from Sfwiftpage, I believe, SalesLogix. And I was actually thinking what pre-question was, Steve and I, I think Steve and I met when we were both working with Pat Sullivan at SalesLogix, who then got sold to Sage, which then got sold to Swiftpage, and then got sold to Infor. But over the last couple years, the number of features and the way the system has been architected and become multi-tenant, things like that, have really accelerated. So can you elaborate a little bit about how Koch’s investing and how that’s affecting Infor CRM?
JEN: Yeah, I I’d love to actually, because I was a doubter, I’ve got to say. I mean, I’ve seen, I’ve worked in software pretty much my whole career. I’ve seen so many acquisitions and been part of quite a few, right? And then we were bought by Koch, and I kind of went, “Uh, here we go again.” Right? And at the outset, you know, you go into a new company and you hear, they tell you their position, and they’re selling you their vision, and they’re talking about how it’s going to be different here and why. And and then there’s always that rubber hits the road kind of moment where you go, “Ah, it’s the same as everywhere else.”
Koch has been really, really interesting because I’ve been surprised and impressed by how much of the, how much of the the talk, I guess, how much of the message actually is is has turned out to be real. So, when Koch acquired Infor, they really brought with them this long-term investment mindset. They’re not a listed company. We’re not a listed company, right? We’re a privately held company. And so they are able to take a longer-term view and they also have a really deep belief in digital transformation. That’s why they acquired Infor, because by and large, they’d previously been, you know, a manufacturing business mostly.
And so what that’s allowed us to do is to really accelerate our R&D, especially in cloud, as you mentioned, in analytics, in industry focus. And then it it lets focus on practical innovation, right? What delivers real value for our users and our customers, rather than just chasing the latest market hype. So for me personally, to kind of explain what I mean like that, as I said, I’ve worked for public companies and companies that were prepping to go public. And I’ve got to tell you that that focus on the quarterly earnings call is not necessarily a great thing for decision making.
Too often, I’ve seen big compromises in strategy or a short-term focus on decision making just to make sure that you hit a quarterly number, even if doing so meant making a bad deal or compromising quality. I’d be surprised if there’s a single like corporate professional or salesperson on the call who who would be able to say they’ve never seen that happen. We’ve all seen what quarter-end pressures can do, right?
And so when I look at it from my own perspective in managing Infor CRM, what Koch provided is the ability for me to take a longer, more strategic perspective on what we’re building within Infor CRM. And ironically, I think, what that freedom for long-term thinking and planning and and sticking to a longer goal has done is that, as you said, Sam, it’s enabled us to deliver a lot more in the past five years than anyone expected, because we weren’t constantly being pulled off course by the latest quarter-end emergency or the latest, “We must have a message about this because the market wants it and now.” You go, “Okay, but let’s make sure it works.”
SAM: When Steve and I started working with SalesLogix way back when, it was the number one CRM in the world. Right. And it got, when it was acquired by Sage, it was still the number one CRM in the world. I think in those days, the competition was Siebel. Salesforce wasn’t even around yet. Yeah. And they had a, the one of the GMs came up with a plan that was going to cost, I think it was like 40 million to retransform it into a cloud, in those days it was a SaaS solution, and they got turned down by the investors because no one would want to put their stuff in the cloud. And there now we know what that means. Bad investing. Yeah.
STEVE: But Jen, I’ve got one one wrap-up question, which is a little bit off topic, but since you’ve been involved in marketing, the question is around rebranding. And it’s something I think about a lot where you see, in many cases, you after an acquisition, you really have to rebrand to fit the brand in with the rest of the the lines. But a lot of times, original brand names run really deeply. Google Workspace is still G Suite to 50% of people. X is still Twitter. Is it challenging to have all these brands and have them get relabeled and making sure that everybody knows what you’re referring to at any given point in time? Do you need some sort of cheat sheet for a new engineer so they know what platform is being talked about by someone?
JEN: We we caved a little on Infor CRM, because it was justcalled Infor CRM. And we have so many customers, and even our partners, not looking at anyone in particular on this call, who will still frequently refer to it as SalesLogix, right? So we actually went back and and renamed, relabeled the product Infor CRM SLX, just to get that little tribute to Sales to SalesLogix in there.
The reality is, Infor CRM, you know, it it sits on and it benefits from the immensity and the strength of everything that SalesLogix built, right? So Sam, you talk about back in the day, it was it was originally designed as an on-prem solution, right? And what that offered to the customer base at the time, and this was at the time when when you put in enterprise software, you did customize it, and everyone customized it, and that was normal.
And Infor CRM SLX still offers that capability to our customers, which in in many cases, becomes really important. There are things that you can do in terms of configuration, and then sometimes there’s just something extra that you need to be able to do, and we do provide that option for them. It does mean that as a cloud solution, it took extra work to get that to cloud, because typically in the cloud, you’re locking down some of those things that you would have let people do on premise. And, you know, big kudos to my R&D team because they’ve done a phenomenal job of maintaining that that breadth of capability and that, you know, letting the system be a framework that you can build on. They’ve done an amazing job of bringing that into the cloud. It’s it’s not as easy as as people assume it should be.
But the expertise is there, and you know, as as Sam just said, with folks like the two of you that have worked in CRM since since CRM became a thing, right? One of the areas that we’re really lucky is we have a phenomenal channel or a phenomenal group of resellers and consultants and implementers who have been with or around this product for, I mean, it’s coming up on 20, 25 years maybe for some of them. So these are really the the fathers and the grandfathers in some cases of CRM.
And it, you talked, you asked earlier, Steve about that, or you talked about, you know, the the customers who, no, it was you, sorry, Sam, I apologize, who who just want to go and take their manual process and put it into their CRM. And we see that a lot. And I think that’s one of the big areas where we encourage our customers, and where our model is a little bit different because we do have this expertise for implementation for CRM. We’re not saying here are some training videos, put it in yourself. You can if you want to and you have the expertise.
But in reality, putting a new solution into your business is the opportunity to stop and take a step back and have a look at your process and the way you’re working. Have a look at the tool or the solution that you purchased and and the opportunities that it gives you and really reassess your processes and figure out, how do you make the most of your solution to be way more efficient once it’s implemented and give something back to the sales team that are going to be using it because now their lives are easier. That’s how you drive adoption. I just went so far off track on that answer.
STEVE: You asked. Well, I think you brought up the whole concept of digital transformation coinciding with implementation of a platform.
JEN: Let’s pretend it was intentional and not just me off track.
STEVE: All right. Well, with that, Jen, thank you very much for joining us today. It was a real pleasure to hear all your insights, and thanks again. And Sam, thank you as well.
JEN: Thank you both for the opportunity.