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Wheelings & Dealings: Infor to Acquire Saleslogix in a Bid to Unseat Salesforce in the CRM Arena

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Wheelings & Dealings: Infor to Acquire Saleslogix in a Bid to Unseat Salesforce in the CRM Arena

August 20, 2014
By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

When it comes to hosted customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, not many companies have been able to give Salesforce a serious run for its money. The company is often considered as the first and last name in hosted CRM, which shouldn’t necessarily be the case, since there are a number of compelling alternatives that make speak to business niches better than Salesforce.


In a bid to be one of the companies that presents Salesforce with some serious competition, enterprise software solutions provider Infor has purchased Arizona-based Saleslogix from previous owner Swiftpage (which purchased it, along with Act from Sage, early last year). The terms of the purchase were not discussed. Infor has stated that it expects its existing relationships with Salesforce.com (News - Alert) will remain intact and friendly, particularly the Inforce solution that ties data from Infor applications with Salesforce.com CRM.

The Saleslogix solution can be run as either a premises-based product or it can be deployed from the cloud on Amazon Web services. Once the acquisition is complete, Infor said it plans to emphasize the latter delivery method.

“This was pretty much a no-brainer for us,” Infor CEO Charles Phillips told PC World, citing factors such as Saleslogix’s similar approach to application integration as Infor, tight coupling with Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook, more than 1,700 customers and “a pretty good partner channel.”

Infor also reportedly plans to offer more industry-specific versions of the Saleslogix solution, and spend some money in research and development to further develop the product.

"CRM systems have typically tracked a small subset of customer, marketing, and sales data. Infor's industry applications have a vast repository of information on a customer's overall interactions derived from deep industry processes we automate and we'll build in context analytics that deliver unique customer insight," said Phillips in a statement. "Infor can now deliver the first truly end to end demand-to-supply chain, from lead to ship, by integrating marketing and sales processes with supply chain planning, sales and operations planning, and production scheduling in real time."

The Saleslogix acquisition is expected to be particularly attractive once it is effectively tied to Infor’s existing enterprise resource planning solution. The company says it expects to extend CRM with industry-specific attributes and processes integrated with Infor ERP applications beginning with Infor CRM Automotive, CRM Healthcare, CRM Public Sector, and CRM Manufacturing. 

The deal is expected to close in the next several weeks. 




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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