Infor Acquires Orbis Global

Enterprise applications and services company Infor today announced its acquisition of SaaS marketing resource management software company Orbis Global.

Orbis will function as a standalone company called Infor Orbis, according to George Wright, senior vice president and general manager of Infor Epiphany. Grant Halloran, Orbis' cofounder and CEO, will remain at the helm of Infor Orbis and report to Wright at Infor. All of Orbis' employees and members of its development team will remain in tact, Wright says.

"They will stay very focused on supporting their existing customers and drive new business [while] the Infor Epiphany team continues to work with our large enterprise accounts, bringing the Orbis MRM functionality into those accounts and to their new customer acquisition conversations," Wright told CRM.

One of the core benefits Orbis brings to the Infor Epiphany suite is its ability to help the software provider extend beyond its own personal strengths in inbound and outbound marketing to address an area where there was feasible need for growth—MRM functionality and digital asset management. Also, being a SaaS product, Orbis gives Infor flexibility in deployment options for enterprise clients. With Orbis blended into Epiphany, users get a closed-loop CRM solution for stronger marketing life-cycle management.

Over the past year, Infor has been receiving more requests for flexibility in deployment, and had launched Inforce Marketing built on the Salesforce.com platform for that very reason. Inforce Marketing allows the company to service enterprise-scale companies down to the SMB who needs an economical approach to marketing automation.

In response to the Infor Orbis acquisition, Gartner research vice president Kimberly Collins wrote in a news analysis piece that in order for Infor to compete with vendors like IBM, SAS, and Teradata in integrated marketing management applications, it needed to invest in "a more robust MRM solution."

As a company, "Infor Epiphany will continue to invest aggressively both organically and make the right acquisitions as necessary to help our customers and prospects ensure they do have the best products and solutions that they need to do their job," Wright remarks.

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