Infor, whose wide range of data-driven business applications are used by some 70,000 customers, announced an agreement to purchase Saleslogix, one of the founding companies of the CRM business. Terms were not disclosed, but a company official said Infor expected to close the deal within a month.
Saleslogix will be rechristened Infor CRM and placed into the Infor CloudSuite, providing it with enhanced sales and service capabilities. Infor plans a major investment in the product, increasing its scalability and refreshing its user interface to bring it up to levels that its enterprise-level clients have come to expect.
“It makes all the sense in the world for us to own our own CRM company. Our customers want to connect the demand and the supply chains and we needed this connection in the middle,” says Grant Halloran, global VP and GM of Infor Integrated Marketing Management Group, who himself came to the company via the acquisition of Orbis last year. “CRM completes the picture for them, generating leads, furthering sales force automation, and bringing back-office analytics into the solution.”
Infor, which is known for enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions pegged to specific verticals, intends to imbue Infor CRM with industry-specific attributes. Its first four introductions will be CRM Automotive, CRM Healthcare, CRMP Public Sector, and CRM Manufacturing. “CRM has to deliver differently for different verticals,” Halloran says. “Some of the data used will overlap, but hospitality is more about marketing and social listening while healthcare is more about patient engagement.”
Halloran also noted that marketing automation solutions, such as its Interaction Advisor product, will be integrated with Infor CRM to provide the system with real-time personalization and contextual recommendation capabilities for salespeople.
Saleslogix Corp. was founded in 1998 by CRM pioneer Pat Sullivan, who also created ACT! contact management software. Later renamed Interact Commerce Corporation, it was acquired in 2001 by Sage Group, the third largest ERP software supplier after Oracle and SAP.
