Published on the 06/09/2011 | Written by Newsdesk

Software vendors Infor and Salesforce.com have revealed plans to release three new applications for Force.com, integrating Infor’s ERP solutions into the cloud platform…

The new apps are named InForce Everywhere, InForce Order Management, and InForce Marketing and are being touted as bringing “the power of the back office to the front office”.

Additionally, Salesforce.com made an undisclosed investment in Infor as part of the agreement.

Through the partnership, Infor will build and deliver InForce Everywhere, a native Force.com application that brings ERP data from Infor solutions into Salesforce; InForce Order Management, a quote, order and proposal management application; and InForce Marketing, which will leverage Infor CRM Epiphany for marketing automation and recommendation technology. Infor says it will develop additional applications on the Force.com platform over time.

“Sales professionals in Infor’s large manufacturing customer base need fast and easy access to the critical product and order data in our applications, and we will render that rich data in Salesforce,” said Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor.

“This partnership will help customers focus on building and selling great products instead of configuring databases, middleware, BI tools, or disk drives. Our customers need to automate processes in hours and days, not months and years and skip the classic 3-by-3 ERP project – 3 years, 300 million, and 3 CIOs. They need results faster.”

Their plans provide some insight into the various strategies being employed by ERP vendors to make their solutions more cloud-friendly. The solution will particularly appeal to Infor clients considering CRM implementations.

Infor has also partnered with Microsoft and is using Sharepoint to web-enable components of several of its ERP applications, including the popular Syteline product.

When released later in 2011, InForce Everywhere is touted to offer:

• A 360-degree view of invoice, contacts, quotes, shipments, receivables, orders, and RMAs (return merchandise authorisations) across the enterprise.
• A way for Salesforce users to view orders from Infor ERP applications.
• Access to customer information and transactions from the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud using InForce Everywhere.
• Connection to ION, Infor’s standard integration platform.
• Salesforce Chatter, which will make all of this data social to more effectively and quickly engage with customers through features like social profiles, status updates and real-time feeds.
• Infor’s 700+ sales people and more than 800 channel partners the ability to resell bundled Salesforce CRM into more than 75,000 customers.

InForce Order Management will:

• Deliver a comprehensive quote, order and proposal management application built on Force.com.
• Integrate with Salesforce CRM to give Sales and Service Cloud users a clear and accurate view of pricing and availability.

InForce Marketing will:

• Offer a comprehensive global marketing automation system built on Force.com.
• Include inbound and outbound campaign management and lead maturation integrated with the Infor CRM Epiphany recommendation engine.