Industry observer Harshal Kallyanpur recently conducted an interview with Greg Corgan, president Global Field Operations, corporate senior VP, Infor on how his company plans to duke it out with the industry heavyweights, such as SAP and Oracle (News - Alert).

One way is by simply focusing on different competencies. “We don’t try to go head-to-head with SAP or Oracle in the ERP space,” he said, explaining that Infor wants to “concentrate on mining our own install base. In India, we have over 600 customers with almost 400 customers on Baan LN.”

From a new business point of view, he told Kallyanpur, “Our strengths lie in our offerings for the mid-market and small businesses. The competition sells solutions to enterprises, banks, telecom service providers etc, while we focus mainly on manufacturing and distribution companies.”

In fact, Corgan disputed the notion that it’s a head-to-head battle at all, that it depends on how you define the terms. “If you compare apples to apples, SAP (News - Alert) or Oracle are bigger than us -- but if you only pick the manufacturing and distribution verticals worldwide, we have more customers than SAP and Oracle combined.”

Licensing, maintenance, and support services are a big aspect of Infor’s offerings, as Kallyanpoor noted, asking Corgan with cloud computing and how the software delivery model changes, “How are you re-positioning your solutions to make them available via this model?”

Customers are not demanding the base ERP to be delivered as a service, Corgan replied, saying they “are investing a significant amount of money in going after peripheral applications. We have a number of solutions such as our expense management solution that can be offered as a multi-tenant hosted service. In about five years from now we will have all our solutions available via a cloud option.”

For now, though, he explained Infor’s strategy as “starting with the ones that we think will have traction— such as expense management, EAM, and a few supply chain components.”