Leaders in ERP: Soma Somasundaram, President & CTO, Infor

Introduction: 

This is the ERP Advisor.  

Shawn Windle: 

My name is Shawn Windle with ERP Advisors Group. I'm the founder and managing principal. And we have been extremely fortunate to meet with some of the top leaders in ERP as part of our Leaders in ERP interview. really incredible folks that are changing the face of ERP and really for decades and decades into the future. And today, I'm extremely happy to have the president and CTO of Infor, Soma. Soma, it's so good to see you. Thanks for joining us. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, thanks for having me on this. You know, exciting to be here, to share the platform with other folks like me. And you just introduced me as Soma. My full name is Soma, Soma Somasundaram. No one dare pronounce the last name. That's why I always joke that there's only a few people with one name. There's Prince, there's Madonna, there's Sting, and there's Soma. 

Shawn Windle: 

There's Soma of ERP. It's kind of true. Yeah, tell us a little bit about your background. I mean, you've been in ERP for quite a while. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, yeah. I hate to admit it, but I've been there in this industry from the mainframe days to the mini computers to client server and now cloud. So long journey over four decades. It just so happened that I spent all of my time in the ERP supply chain in that space. Almost all of it in engineering, product management, those kind of roles. So, like you said, I'm currently the CTO and president here at Infor. But my journey, goes back a long ways into four decades in the past. 

Shawn Windle: 

That's perfect. And it's incredible experience. It seems like the more you know about the past of ERP, the more you can predict what the future's going to be. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

That is a true statement. Yeah, absolutely. 

Shawn Windle: 

Good. Well, we're excited to jump into some questions that we have here. But as we go, we can kind of rift through anything that comes to your mind that you would like to talk about. We have a lot of folks that'll be hearing this into the future. So let's jump in. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yep. 

Shawn Windle: 

So we're going to focus a lot on, of course, AI. We're going to talk about machine learning and also some of your relationships with some of the world's top hyperscalers and a couple other things, some legacy software. So we got a lot to jump into. So here's my first question for you. What do you think is the biggest roadblock that businesses are accounting as they are implementing their AI strategies, like for real, you know, historical data, data silos? What are some of the things that you're really seeing some of those use cases? 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, I mean, this is obviously a hot topic. When we talk about AI, first of all, let's bucket them into traditional AI ML on one side, which has been there for a long period of time. And then you have generative AI, which is more recent development, right? So if you broadly categorize them into two buckets, the what, I mean, another data point to also have in the backdrop is that in the industry, technology industry has spent roughly $3 trillion as of mid last year, $3 trillion in technology investments. And according to one of the studies, the return so far, real revenue that was generated using those technologies is about, 30 billion or somewhere thereabouts. So it is, so we have a long ways to go in terms of getting benefit from these investments. They are exciting new developments, but here are the roadblocks people face, right? So you have technology for technology's sake. What do you do with it, right? Like, so you have to integrate these technologies into your current ecosystem. The kind of customers we serve, they run their business process using several enterprise applications, whether it could be, you know, I'm at Infor, so it could be Infor applications, it could be, you know, Salesforce or other applications running their business processes. Now, everyone is... coming up with these new technology components that they're integrating into those pieces of software. But how do you really leverage the technologies to harness the data that you have? Every provider, every software provider wants them to use their technology to solve your problems. But if I put myself in the customer's shoes, I have all these different systems, some of which are legacy, how do I harness all this data into one place? That's one problem. And then if I solve a problem, how do I automate the business process or optimize the business process without human beings have to touch the keyboard? That's the second problem with the myriad of technologies that they have. And thirdly, getting business processes changed requires change management on the end user side. How do I handle that? How do I make it as intuitive as I can to make it more adoptable, if I can say it? Those are sort of the roadblocks I feel like customers face in terms of bringing these technologies to fruition. 

Shawn Windle: 

Now, that's a great summarization of really how AI has evolved. And then what's the truth of it, right? I mean, this is something I think we found in working with Infor is that you all have very pragmatic solutions. The types of things you're putting in place solve real business problems for customers, whereas some of the other use cases that we see in the industry are a little highfalutin, if you will. But that makes a ton of sense. And we can't have a conversation about ERP without AI and the change management component. And let me just ask you on that change management side, specifically around AI, are you all seeing customers, even of various sizes, that are saying, hey, I've got to have this as my business changes and evolves going forward into the future? Tell us about that. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, so the customers definitely want these technologies in their footprint so they can start to deliver value to the business. But what happens is that if I have these technologies that I embed into my business process, now let me give you one example. There's a solution out there that predicts, you know, your ETA. Supply chain is very hot these days in a lot of disruptions. So if I have a solution that predicts, here's your ETA, predicted ETA. Now, if it only tells me that, it's not very helpful, then it goes ahead and gives me a recommendation, here's what you should be doing, right? So there is there is a level of trust that needs to be built between the user, the educated user who is making these decisions today to the machine that is recommending this solution. How does the user trust that this solution is what they would have come up with if they were to do it? You know, they want to implement that that particular recommendation. So this is what I would call an explainable AI, that ability to give a background in terms of here's how the decision was made so the user can get comfortable. And over time, the user, let's say nine times out of 10, they take the recommendation that was given, you turn around and then the user can delegate the work to the machine and just make it a notification versus an approval request. So there's a progression that needs to happen in terms of change management. In this particular use case, you could see it. It takes a little while to sort of walk with the user, make them comfortable with the decisions that are being recommended, and eventually the user trusting the system to do the job. 

Shawn Windle: 

I love that. I mean, for years, I can think of our clients that use MRP systems like what you all have and many others. And they would run a report, right? Here's the results of what the MRP says. Here's what you should purchase for which locations and which products, et cetera, et cetera. And then they throw away the plan and they go do something else. I think that point about having that background of why the decision was made will definitely help with the change management factor for sure, of really situations and business processes and functions that software's been trying to solve for a long time. So that makes a lot of sense. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Right. 

Shawn Windle: 

So tell us a little bit about the partnership that you all have with one of the largest hyperscalers in the world, AWS. What does AWS contribute to your tech stack and the strategy overall, and what are the benefits customers should expect to see there? 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, great question. So, you know, as a technologist, you want to invent everything yourself. That's just the way we think. But The industry, technology industry is moving so fast that no one organization can kind of own up to everything in the technology stack. So when we built our cloud journey, started our cloud journey, we had a decision to make. Either we build the application, we build the technology infrastructure, and we run it for the customer. That's one way to go to market. The other way to go to market is pick a hyperscaler who's leading the world in terms of cloud infrastructure and technology innovation, and then basically take their investment and embed in our solution, right? So tens of billions of dollars of R&D that is being spent by AWS, why can't we take that and make it part of our solution? I'll give you a couple of examples. We have a data lake, right, where we collect all this data in a near real-time manner and in an event-driven architecture. We use S3 for storing that data. We're building industry use cases with AIML. We're using SageMaker as the underlying service that we are leveraging for that. We're using Bedrock for generative AI. We use Glacier for archiving. So on and on and on. If I use all of these services as if it's part of my solution, we feel we can leapfrog in terms of our innovation capability. And we can do better than anyone else in the market, quite frankly, because that ability to have the openness to embrace industry innovation Ultimately, putting the customer at the center of this, we're trying to make their lives better. Why can't we do that together? That was the idea, so there is a huge amount of benefit we are getting, and we're deployed around the globe in various regions, depending on where the customer is located, and we're able to support in one instance. Yeah, the global footprint of that customer. So we have localizations built into the solution and so on and so forth. So the relationship that we have with AWS is a special one. And the solution that we have deployed in the cloud is a multi-tenant deployment, meaning one instance running every customer in a given industry in that particular instance. So there's a lot of benefit that comes from that. 

Shawn Windle: 

Soma, I would have to say that is probably the most elegant definition that I've heard of that relationship with AWS. As you probably know, when we do a selection process, we always do a technology deep dive with all of the vendors that we work with. And I'm always amazed at how this relationship that you guys have, it puts you at a whole different level of competition. Now, I should say, Soma, you're not paying me to say the things that I'm saying. These are the observations that I've seen throughout many, many selections. And I think that relationship will be more vital, if you will, for any of the customers' decisions going forward, and especially if you have customers that are traditionally more manufacturers, distributors, heavy industries that maybe don't focus as much on the tech platform as much as feature functionality. I think it's a big differentiator for you guys. And the way you described the leveraging these components within the solution, you kind of handle the AI problem on behalf of your customers, right? They're coming to you and have for decades, really, for these technology solutions. And now with that coupling, the tech stack together kind of coupled in, I can see how that can make a huge difference. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, no, absolutely. Just to add to that, you think about all these innovations, right? Either you're automating a business process or you're optimizing a business process or providing insight to a user to make better decisions. It's got to be one of these three things. So any one of those things you look at, you need sort of two key ingredients. One's data. How are you going to leverage, harness this data in the customer's ecosystem into one place? that you can leverage for driving innovation, whether it's insight or optimization. and automation. And the second is you need a really strong API backbone that allows you to then inject that finding into that business process, right? If you have those two ingredients in place, then sort of sky's the limit. You can then bring all these innovation together. We have the AWS services I talked about. Think of that as the bottom layer where we're leveraging all of that. We have a layer above that which sort of exposes data and API and of course security through a layer. And then you have the apps on top of that. So by doing that in a composable way, I think it makes it a more a future-proof architecture for the customer. I'm not talking about, I'm not advertising info. I'm just talking on behalf of the customer. That's what they need to have to be able to have a future-proof architecture. 

Shawn Windle: 

Now, it makes a lot of sense. And I can remember back to, ooh, a long time ago, that's all I'll say too, to where we were building out these integration frameworks when they were really kind of new on the market. And trying to solve that problem of having the integration platform as part of the business process automation apps themselves, it was really hard. Like it was a really hard problem to solve. I think we've gotten there. But like you said, now with this incredible investment, that the hyperscalers and these mega, mega billionaires have put into even just physical infrastructure like buildings and cables. And we have many clients that do different parts of that whole process. We have data centers, we have folks that pull the cable, we have construction companies, project management companies that run the construction of a data center. So there's this whole micro industry built around this incredible infrastructure that's going in that we never had before that I think makes a lot of the visions that we've had for decades actualized. So just like you said, I think you did a great job of kind of pulling all that together. So thank you. I would like to now kind of go back to the beginning a little bit. And one thing that we've seen with the platform and the portfolio of products that Infor has is you've got a lot of great products that are micro vertical focused, some that are more horizontal. So you've got a lot of customers out there and it can be tough to make the decision to migrate. Actually, it can be like super hard, right? So what have you seen that's really motivating some of your customers, maybe some of the other customers that you're taking and picking up? What's motivating that change and what are they missing out by sticking with their legacy systems, especially around the context that we've talked about here. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, it goes back to what I just said a couple of minutes ago. Ultimately, the customers' IT organization or the business owners who are running the operations, they want not just to digitize the business process. That was done 25 years ago, right? Business process re-engineering and trying to get this business process rolled out through using an ERP. They've all been there, done that. But if I now look at it in 2025, you're trying to take this to the next level, meaning I have the business process defined. and I have the ability to digitize that. Now, how do I bring more productivity, right? To bring more productivity, I need access to data in a way that is easy to harness this data, make sense out of this data. And second is once I go figure out whatever it is, whether it is AI/ML or through just basic analytics, I get to a decision point to implement the decision I need APIs. So customers realize while the technology of the past still works, it's still serving the needs, but in order for them to really advance quickly with all these new technologies we are talking about, you need, unfortunately, an under underlying architecture that supports that level of fluidity in terms of how I want to make this business process flexible and easy to go influence. And that is one main reason that customers are looking to go to the latest and greatest, especially in the cloud. That's one. Second is cloud is ubiquitous, right? Like, so You don't have this, you need a supercomputer to run a process for half an hour in a day, like MRP, may consume a ton of compute. But once it's done, I don't need that level of capacity. Well, you have the ability to have resources, you know, scale up and down in the cloud, and I only pay for what I use. That's a benefit. So your costs in terms of how you manage it becomes cheaper if you go to cloud. And 3 is security, right? Like so, you know, touch wood, I'm going to say this and hopefully not prove wrong, major data breaches have not happened in public cloud, right? They happen in private, where it's very hard for any organization of any size to really throw the amount of resources that these hyperscalers are throwing to make this environment really secure, right? So, and that those are probably the key three reasons I would say customers want to get to a safer, scalable, and, you know, an environment they can use for innovation for the future. 

Shawn Windle: 

Makes a ton of sense. And something that we've even seen firsthand where we had a customer recently where we had selected CloudSuite Industrial from Infor, started the implementation. And the implementation was hard. It was very hard. It was an organization had been on another platform for a while that had basically been sunsetted and they weren't used to the structured systems of ERP. So getting the data elements correct and getting those relationships, et cetera, et cetera, was difficult. We were going along, going along, and then bam, they got hit with a security breach. Now this is with their old systems and with their old network and servers and everything. And the CEO called me and said, well, I think we're just going to try to go live next week. with CSI. And I said, I love it. Let's go with it. Because the old servers were being held ransom, frankly, and they didn't want to pay it. We had moved all the data out of the systems already. So they just said, just, you know, please, you know, something, some kind of agreement or whatever was made about whatever kind of not releasing it. But then they were able to go live with a cloud-based system where that problem never went away. And now this company who makes scientific measuring devices can focus on what they do for a living versus dealing with cybersecurity. So is a great point. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah. 

Shawn Windle: 

Let's wrap it up here. And I think here, especially at this time and in this place, we do need to talk a little bit about, especially with your strong manufacturing distribution customer base, I'd say one of the strongest really. I have to ask about tariffs and just real-time changes, macroeconomic changes that are affecting the micro-customer. What do you see as sort of how software, from a software perspective, how does software help to mitigate some of that risk and uncertainty? 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, so opinions on tariffs aside, right? So it is here, right, that uncertainty is here. How do you deal with it, right? So I'll give you an example. Suppliers, many ERPs have ability to import prices on a periodic basis. Suppliers give you new prices for their products and you update. This is a process that's a known process. Well, many of the customers that I've spoken to are saying they're not getting changes every quarter, they're getting multiple changes in a day, right? So when that kind of the rapid frequency in which changes are occurring, it creates a huge amount of workload on the customer. So we actually work with one customer to use generative AI to really scrape off of emails, you know, it's not coming through EDI, ability to see price changes that are coming through, you know, it could be in different languages, you know, this particular customer had both Spanish and English, ability to scrape of that, create the API, run a workflow, and make these changes in an automated way into their systems as an example, right? So having the ability to be able to react, that's one thing that we can help the customer with. The second is purely like, you know, can the system handle tariffs in an elegant way without workarounds that they can then run through their invoicing process on both payables and receivable side and run the business, smoothly. That's other thing in terms of capability that you need to have in the solution to support the customer. So these are just a couple of examples. And the third is ability to see supply chain, you know, changes. stuff coming from one locale suddenly shifting to a different locale because they switched a supplier to a different country, different region. The ability to quickly adapt to that and provide localization in the software that can help. Because if you switch to a different locale and the system doesn't support that, locale needs, then you're out of luck. Then it creates a lot of headache. So these are all the different aspects. I'm not covering everything, but you could see the amount of work that we need to do as a software provider and they need to do as a customer to bring this to have us, you know, operations run, continue to run smoothly. 

Shawn Windle: 

No, those are great use cases. I think, again, we're having a lot of clients calling us saying, Hey, I want to hold off. I'm not ready for this. And we're saying, we definitely understand it is an unusual time, a lot of changes, opinions aside, but they're happening. And with the manual work that's required to do the three things that you just talked about, It could really impact businesses very, very negatively. And I think we'll see kind of how things pull out here, but I think long term, we're gonna get there. I think if you look at sort of the, you all, of course, are servicing customers around the globe. We do as well. If we don't put these technology underpinnings in place now, things are only going to be changing. I mean, we've always talked about that, that the only constant is change. But with a software solution, like what you're talking about and the platform that has a lot of these pre-built solutions into it, even being able to have the AI, the generative AI within your environment, your ERP environment already, that we don't have to go out and get another product or some kind of tools that just, we don't know where the data's going. And you guys have handled that problem. So I totally agree. I think now is really a great time to look at that investment. and kind of sets you up for the future for a lot of growth. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as a final point, I mean, we touched on it implicitly, having industry specificity does matter. On the one side, you need data and API, the technology infrastructure. On the other side, the data is only relevant if it is specific to that customer and their industry, right? Like, so having the ability to support that whatever industry the software provider supports to the last mile, the last inch of capability that you can support the customer with so they don't have to have workarounds. And the data they generate is actually relevant for their industry that can be leveraged for all of these innovations we just talked about. So the basis of all of this is industry specificity. Then you layer in the ability to have data and API and all this technology infrastructure help propel that organization forward. 

Shawn Windle: 

Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Soma, this has been great. I kind of want to keep going, but I have a feeling our listeners are done. They have been filled with technology, I think, for the next week. And I'm going to re-listen to this video too, because you said a lot of things that I hadn't even thought about before. So I would ask our listeners, just check it out, right? The goal of this is to hear from some of the top leaders, right, the leaders in ERP series. And Soma, clearly, you're really driving the technology direction of Infor in a way that's really innovative in the market. So I can't tell you how much we appreciate your time and your insights today. 

Soma Somasundaram: 

Yeah, likewise. Enjoyed the conversation. 

Shawn Windle: 

Okay. Thanks, Soma. And for all the listeners, check out our next Leaders in ERP presentation. Thank you so much.