Thursday, July 20, 2006

Infor's support for Lilly Visual customers

A source inside Infor contacted me regarding a post I wrote earlier this month on open source ERP gaining adherents. His issue is not so much with the main point regarding the growing attraction of open source ERP. Rather, he believes that the eWeek article I referenced misrepresents the experience of Lilly Visual customers since Lilly was acquired last year by Infor.

He writes,
The idea that customers are leaving VISUAL software in droves is absolutely inaccurate. In our fourth quarter in the U.S. alone we sold 50+ new sites of VISUAL. It was an all-time best quarter for us at Infor in general. We still support our VISUAL customers as always through our affiliate channel. That has not changed one bit. The core organizational structure in Hampton, the former headquarters of Lilly, is still intact.

The eWeek article references the opinion of one customer leaving VISUAL. It should also be noted that we came out with release 6.51 in January, and 6.5.2 is coming out September 1st. So those who say that there have been no core enhancements have not looked at the two previous releases. We also continue to add integration for point solutions from other products in the Infor line.
I have not had any recent first hand contact with Visual customers to check their experience with Infor's support since acquiring Lilly Software. I've noted in the past that Visual had built out some nice functionality for lean manufacturing and constraint-based scheduling. I would love to hear first hand reports from customers of Infor's continued support and enhancements to the product.

If you're a Visual customer, feel free to email me or add a comment directly to this post.

Related posts
Open source ERP gaining adherents
Infor aquires Lilly Software: vendor consolidation continues

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