Midmarket applications vendor Infor Global Solutions continues to buy out its peers to become a US$3 billion business within a year.With Infor's most recent purchases of SSA Global, Extensity and Systems Union (SU) in August it has raised it annual revenue to $2.1 billion, putting Infor firmly in third place sizewise behind market leaders Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.Infor intends to continue acquiring in a bid to boost annual revenue to $3 billion within 12 months and to $4 billion over the next two to three years, according to Jim Schaper, Infor chairman and chief executive officer.

"We will continue to look for supplementary acquisitions in verticals in which we under perform or which are greenfield [for us] like retail and the public sector," he said in an interview Monday. Currently, Infor focuses on meeting the needs of distributors and discrete and process manufacturers across a number of verticals, with emphasis on the automotive industry.

Infor is currently honing its Open Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy and will release details and begin delivering offerings in December or early January 2007, Schaper said. For SOA integration between different Infor products, the technology will be free. Infor will charge "a nominal licensing fee" to customers looking to use the SOA technology to integrate Infor software with third-party applications, he added.

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Prashanth Rai