Digital Transformation Digest: Coleman Is Infor's AI Play, Workday to Open Up Its Platform, and More
Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation
Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.
Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.
Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998.
Twitter: @chriskanaracus
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Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.
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Infor has an AI platform, and its name is Coleman: The big news at Infor's Inforum conference this week in New York is Coleman, its entry into AI (artificial intelligence) for business applications. Here are the key details from its announcement:
A pervasive platform that operates below an application's surface, Coleman mines data and uses powerful machine learning to improve processes such as inventory management, transportation routing, and predictive maintenance; Coleman also provides AI-driven recommendations and advice to enable users to make smarter business decisions more quickly.
In addition, Coleman acts as a smart AI partner, augmenting the user's work. Coleman uses natural language processing and image recognition to chat, hear, talk, and recognize images to help people use technology more efficiently.
Coleman is named after Katherine Coleman Johnson, an African-American physicist and mathemetican at NASA who made key contributions to the success of the moon landing.
Infor executives provided more details of Coleman in a question-and-answer session with press and analysts.
While the announcement came seemingly out of the blue, Infor has actually been working on Coleman for quite a while, executives said. Its elements include Amazon Web Services' Lex chatbot platform and machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow as well as one Infor acquired 18 months ago with the purchase of Predictix, which has a focus on retail scenarios.
Coleman is industry-specific by design, said Infor president Duncan Angove: "We're not in the business of building a horizontal machine learning platform." It also wants to use Coleman as a means to encourage customers to upgrade. Infor has more than 8400 cloud customers, but 90,000 overall. Migrating the rest to its Cloudsuite lineup is a top priority.
In most cases, Coleman will be included as part of Cloudsuite, not sold separately in discrete applications. "It's one reason our customers should seek to upgrade, so they can turn on Coleman," Angove said.
POV: Coleman was an announcement Infor clearly had to make now if only for the sake of perception, given that every enterprise apps vendor needs to tell an AI story in the current market. While insisting a number of Coleman elements are available today and with customers, this week's announcement marks a step in a longer journey for Infor—one that could indeed have resonance with customers.
Workday pulls the trigger on PaaS—finally: While Workday has long provided a configuration layer for its cloud HCM apps, the underlying platform remained closed off. At last year's Workday Rising conference, executives confirmed that a PaaS offering was in the works, but didn't provide concrete details.
The time has now come for Workday to launch its PaaS, CEO Aneel Bhusri said in a blog post:
Today, we are ready to take a big step forward on our extensibility journey by announcing our intent to open our platform to customers and a broader ecosystem of partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), and developers.
And like everything we do, we based our decision on customer input. Simply put, a growing number of customers have been asking for a more open Workday platform. They want to use Workday as a cloud backbone that supports cohesive, digital workflows across multiple business applications—reflective of how their people work and how their businesses operate in today’s hyper-connected, real-time world.
By opening up the Workday Cloud Platform and entering the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market, Workday intends to enable customers and our broader ecosystem to use our platform services to build custom extensions and applications that can significantly enhance what organizations are able to accomplish with Workday.
While Workday's software is written in Java, the company's developers work in an abstraction layer built on a proprietary language called XpressO. It's a similar approach to that taken by Salesforce.com and its APEX language for the widely used Force.com platform.
Workday's PaaS will give customers the ability to create new business processes and integrate third-party applications, among other things, Bhusri wrote. More details will be forthcoming at Workday Rising later this year.
POV: Workday has been talking about PaaS for a few years now, so in that sense this announcement is a long time coming. As Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller notes, Workday has had one of the most proprietary and closed-off platforms in the SaaS business. Those qualities don't fly so well in today's environment, and therefore Workday has made a smart move. Now it's about the execution.
SAP user group eyes line-of-business for member recruiting: One result of digital transformation is the evolution of IT departments' relationship and partnership with business users. That view is backed up by Paul Cooper, chairman of the UK and Ireland SAP User Group, who tells the Register:
"One theme for the next couple of years will be around driving our line-of-business membership," Cooper said.
"What we're seeing is, as the cloud becomes more important to people, as well as Software-as-a-Service, the IT department's role is changing, while the business user is becoming more important.
"They can go and put a [project] together and roll it out almost without the IT department's involvement, so for us it's important that we start to attract the people using those solutions, to help them share their knowledge and learning."
POV: The concept of "shadow IT" is nothing new. But if digital transformation efforts are to take hold most effectively, all parties need to be at the table and in communication. The rise of easily purchased, richly functional SaaS apps also ups the shadow IT stakes significantly, althought it's not as if line-of-business users are going to roll out a new SAP ERP system without plenty of IT involvement.
Legacy Watch: Mainframe woes at the Graybar Hotel: A potentially "long-term" mainframe system outage at the Milwaukee, Wisconsin County jail system is making conditions inside a bit more arduous than usual.
It's meant that bookings and releases are being held up since they must be processed manually, Milwaukee Patch reports. It has also impacted lawyer visits, phone communications between inmates and family members, and inmate commissary accounts. The problems continued after IT staffers ordered replacement parts that didn't work, according to the Patch report.
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