/
.webp)
Generated by Master Biographer | Source for LinkedIn Content
There is a particular kind of moment that defines a career: the one where you choose who you're going to be next.
Charles Phillips had spent a decade as the second most powerful person at Oracle. President, co-CEO, the man sitting across the table from Larry Ellison at every major deal. He had survived the savage internal politics of one of the most aggressive software companies ever built. He had been the face of Oracle's acquisition machine — the person who stood on stages at OpenWorld explaining to thousands of customers why their world was about to change. He was, by any reasonable accounting, one of the most influential executives in enterprise technology.
And then, in 2010, the bottom fell out.
Not professionally. Professionally, Phillips had done everything right. Oracle was conquering the enterprise. The acquisitions were working. The revenue was compounding. The company had absorbed PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA, Sun Microsystems — a parade of landmark deals, each one executed with the precision of a military campaign that Phillips had helped orchestrate. He was respected. He was feared. He was, by any external measure, near the top of the tech world.
What happened was personal. And it was extremely, irreversibly public.
His former girlfriend, a woman named Aqua, hired a publicist and took out billboard advertisements. Not metaphorically. Actual billboards — in Times Square, in Los Angeles, across the country. The billboards featured photographs. They announced the affair to the city, to the industry, to anyone who happened to look up from the sidewalk. In the age before social media had fully metastasized, this was the equivalent of a nuclear explosion in someone's personal life.
Phillips issued a public statement confirming the relationship and apologizing to his family. Oracle, which had a policy of not commenting on personal matters, went quiet. The industry gossiped for weeks.
He left Oracle in December 2010.
What happened next is what makes Charles Phillips interesting. Most executives, after a public humiliation of that magnitude, retreat. They take an advisory role. They join a board. They spend eighteen months being very quiet and very careful, allowing the news cycle to move on.
Phillips took the CEO job at Infor.
Not a peer. Not a step sideways. A company built through private equity acquisitions of mid-market ERP systems, owned primarily by Goldman Sachs and Summit Partners, headquartered in a midtown Manhattan office building. A company that 95 percent of people in Silicon Valley had never heard of, despite generating over $2.5 billion in annual revenue and serving customers across 175 countries.
He showed up. He brought a mandate. And over the next decade, he would transform what looked like a roll-up of aging enterprise software into something nobody in the ERP market had ever seriously attempted.
Infor's origin story is a story about market logic, not inspiration.
The ERP market of the late 1990s had a structure problem. SAP and Oracle had won the high end — the Fortune 500, the global multinationals, the companies with enough money and enough pain to endure multi-year, nine-figure implementation projects. At the bottom, there were thousands of small, industry-specific software vendors: niche tools built for specific manufacturing processes, specific regulatory environments, specific industry workflows.
In the middle was chaos.
Hundreds of mid-market ERP vendors competed in fragmented verticals with aging codebases, customer bases that were profitable but slow-growth, and no clear path to scale. These weren't bad businesses. They were sticky businesses — once a manufacturer had run its production scheduling on a specific ERP system for fifteen years, switching was almost unthinkable. The switching costs were measured in years of disruption and millions of dollars of reimplementation risk. The customers stayed. The revenue was reliable.
They were, in the language of private equity, ideal acquisition targets.
Infor was born in 2002 out of exactly this logic. The founding structure was simple: SSA Global Technologies, a mid-market manufacturing ERP company, merged with MAPICS, which served discrete manufacturing. The resulting entity immediately began acquiring other mid-market ERP companies — Intentia International, Agilisys, SoftBrands, Extensity — executing what private equity calls a "roll-up strategy" with industrial precision.
The model had one structural beauty: every acquisition came with a customer base that was almost impossible to churn. These weren't SaaS startups selling to marketing teams. These were systems running factory floors, hospital billing departments, supply chain logistics networks. The stakes of switching were genuinely enormous. Customers complained. Customers threatened. Customers almost never actually left.
By the time Charles Phillips arrived in early 2011, Infor had assembled one of the most comprehensive collections of industry-specific ERP software ever aggregated under a single name. The Lawson Software acquisition in 2012 — a $2 billion deal, the largest in the company's history to that point — added one of the dominant ERP platforms for healthcare and public sector organizations in North America. Suddenly, Infor owned systems running the back office of hospitals, municipal governments, hospitality chains, and distribution networks simultaneously.
The problem was coherence. Or rather: the total absence of it.
Each acquired company had its own codebase. Its own architecture. Its own user interface, developed in whatever technology was standard in the decade it was originally built. Some ran on AS/400 systems. Some were client-server applications that required fat desktop installations. The user interfaces — bluntly — were hideous. Green screens. Cluttered navigation. Workflows that required twelve clicks to do something a consumer web application accomplished in two.
This was the inheritance Charles Phillips stepped into: a revenue-generating empire built on the ugliest software in the enterprise market, running on the most heterogeneous technology stack imaginable, owned by financial sponsors who wanted a path to an IPO.
What he decided to do about it was, genuinely, audacious.
Phillips arrived at Infor with two theses that, at the time, sounded like wishful thinking to anyone who had worked in enterprise software.
The first thesis: vertical specificity was the path that SAP and Oracle couldn't follow. A company that decided to serve aerospace manufacturers with software pre-built for aerospace-specific workflows — government contracting compliance, MRO logistics, traceability requirements, ITAR — could deliver faster, cheaper, less painful implementations than any horizontal platform. The customer would get software that understood their world before the contract was even signed. SAP and Oracle could theoretically build the same functionality. But they were too invested in their horizontal platforms, too committed to their configuration-heavy approach, too dependent on armies of consultants, to go deep in a hundred different niches simultaneously.
Infor could. Because it already owned the code.
The second thesis was harder to explain without sounding naive: enterprise software needed to become beautiful.
Not functional. Not adequate. Not "improved." Beautiful. Consumer-grade. Software that people actually wanted to use, that didn't require three weeks of training before it became legible, that respected the user's time and intelligence in the same way a well-designed iPhone application did.
In 2012, Phillips made a move that caused genuine bewilderment among the ERP analyst community. He established Hook & Loop — a full-scale, in-house design studio based in New York City. Not a UX team embedded in an engineering organization. A design studio, modeled on the creative agencies that built consumer brands, staffed with designers who came from backgrounds outside enterprise software precisely because enterprise software had learned terrible habits.
The studio was given a mandate that would have been unimaginable at SAP or Oracle: redesign everything. Take the accumulated user interfaces of thirty years of industrial software engineering and replace them with something that a 25-year-old who had grown up on Apple products would find intuitive on day one.
It was, objectively, an enormous gamble. Hook & Loop's work required engineering teams to rebuild interfaces that had been stable — if ugly — for years. It required customers to relearn workflows they had been executing the same way since the Clinton administration. It required a company that had been built entirely on financial engineering to invest in creative infrastructure that would take years to generate measurable return.
But it also made a point about identity that was more important than any specific interface improvement. It announced that Infor was not a holding company. It was a product company. It had an opinion about what enterprise software should feel like. And that opinion lived in a design studio in Manhattan, not in a lab in Walldorf or a campus in Redwood City.
The choice of New York as headquarters was itself a strategic signal. Every major enterprise software company in the world had planted its flag in Silicon Valley, or Germany, or the Midwest. Oracle in Redwood City. SAP in Walldorf. Microsoft Dynamics in Redmond. Infor's decision to run a global enterprise software business from midtown Manhattan was either eccentricity or deliberate positioning as a different kind of company.
It was probably both. But the net effect was real: Infor attracted design and business talent who would never have considered relocating to Silicon Valley, and operated within the cultural proximity of Wall Street, fashion, media, and hospitality — industries that happened to be core verticals in the micro-vertical strategy.
Simultaneously, Phillips oversaw the construction of CloudSuite — a unified cloud architecture that would allow Infor to migrate its heterogeneous portfolio of on-premise systems to a cloud-native model built on Amazon Web Services. The partnership with AWS, formalized in 2013, gave Infor the infrastructure backbone for what would become one of the most ambitious migration efforts in enterprise software history.
15,000 cloud customers. That number, as of the mid-2020s, represents a migration challenge that is almost impossible to fully appreciate from the outside. These are not startups spinning up new accounts. These are hospitals, aerospace manufacturers, public-sector organizations, and global distributors being moved — carefully, incrementally, over years — from on-premise systems that run critical operations, to cloud-based platforms that their IT teams have never managed. Every migration is a contained crisis. Every one that succeeds is a small organizational miracle.
February 2017. Infor announced that Koch Equity Development — the investment arm of Koch Industries — was making a $2.2 billion investment in the company.
The tech press briefly paid attention, mostly because the name "Koch" in 2017 reliably generated political heat. Charles Koch and David Koch were among the most prominent financiers of American conservative causes — climate skepticism, deregulation advocacy, libertarian think tanks. Reporters who covered enterprise software were suddenly writing about the same people whose names appeared in articles about campaign finance.
But the investment itself, stripped of political context, was a story about something far more interesting than politics.
Koch Industries is, at its core, an industrial conglomerate. It runs refineries. It manufactures Lycra and Stainmaster carpet. It owns Georgia-Pacific. Its operations span chemical processing, ranching, financial trading, and manufacturing at a scale that makes it one of the largest privately held companies in the United States, with estimated revenues exceeding $100 billion annually.
Companies like Koch Industries run on ERP. Not metaphorically — literally. Their refinery operations, their manufacturing plants, their supply chain logistics, their workforce management, their financial consolidation — all of it runs on industrial enterprise software. Koch understood the category from the inside, not as an investor looking at a spreadsheet, but as a sophisticated buyer who had operated the product for years.
The $2.2 billion investment was not passive. It was the beginning of a deeper relationship that would culminate, in February 2020, in Koch Industries completing a full acquisition of Infor — making the company a wholly-owned subsidiary of the conglomerate, canceling a planned IPO that had been in preparation, and taking the company private indefinitely.
The strategic logic was blunt: Koch wanted to own the software that its own industries ran on. More broadly, it wanted to own the software that the industries it competed in ran on. The vertical specificity of Infor's portfolio — aerospace, food and beverage, chemicals, industrial manufacturing, distribution — mapped almost exactly onto Koch's own operational footprint.
This was not a financial firm buying a software company because the multiples were attractive. This was an industrial operator buying the digital infrastructure of industrial operations because it believed that infrastructure was going to become more valuable, not less, as manufacturing complexity increased.
The acquisition removed something that had been hanging over Infor since the earliest private equity days: the pressure to generate a liquidity event on a private equity timeline. With Koch as permanent owner, Infor could invest in multi-year product transitions without worrying about whether the next quarter's numbers would support an IPO roadshow. The CloudSuite migration could proceed at the pace required for responsible enterprise software transitions, not at the pace required to present growth metrics to public market investors.
It was, in a quiet way, the most sophisticated ownership structure in enterprise software — a company with no venture capitalists, no public shareholders, no quarterly earnings calls to manage, backed by an industrial conglomerate that was also its most sophisticated customer.
Charles Phillips stepped down as Infor's CEO in 2020, shortly after the Koch acquisition closed. He left having done what he came to do: transform a private equity roll-up into a recognizable enterprise software brand with a coherent product strategy, a cloud architecture, a design identity, and a permanent institutional home.
His successor, Kevin Samuelson, inherited a company with 60,000 customers across 175 countries, 17,000 employees in 100+ offices, and 15,000 cloud customers in the middle of the largest enterprise software migration challenge in the ERP market.
The CloudSuite migration continues. Thousands of customers who have run their operations on Infor's on-premise ERP systems for decades are being moved — sometimes willingly, sometimes through the slow pressure of discontinued support timelines — to cloud-based platforms. The complexity is staggering. A hospital running Lawson for HR and payroll isn't just a software customer. It's a regulated institution with compliance requirements, union contracts, and systems that touch thousands of employees' paychecks. Getting that wrong costs real people real money. Migration is not a product exercise. It's an organizational one.
The micro-vertical strategy has proven durable in ways the industry didn't fully anticipate. The Register, not typically a publication given to praising enterprise software vendors, noted in the early 2020s that SAP was "playing catch-up with rival Infor" on industry-specific cloud ERP platforms. SAP's response — its RISE with SAP program, its industry cloud investments — represents a direct acknowledgment that Infor was right about the direction of the market.
The Hook & Loop design studio has evolved. The initial wave of UI redesign gave way to more mature work on user experience strategy, AI integration, and the design language of a cloud-native product suite. The studio's original provocation — that enterprise software users deserved the same design quality as consumer software users — has become industry orthodoxy. Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce have all invested heavily in design. Infor was early.
What Infor has not figured out is visibility. For a company its size — revenue estimated at $3 billion or above, customer count in the tens of thousands, industries served that touch almost every manufactured product in the world — the public profile remains almost comically low. SAP and Oracle are household names in enterprise software. Infor is the largest software company you've never thought about.
That invisibility is partly structural. Infor's customers don't tweet about their ERP migrations. Hospital CIOs don't post about their Lawson CloudSuite upgrade on LinkedIn. Aerospace manufacturers don't announce that their production scheduling runs on Infor CloudSuite Aerospace & Defense. The category is unsexy by definition — enterprise infrastructure for industries that exist to make physical things, not digital ones.
But it's also partly a choice. Koch Industries, as a private company, has no obligation to the analyst community, no earnings calls to create narrative momentum, no investor relations function to maintain a public profile. Infor can be excellent and unknown simultaneously, which is a freedom that most enterprise software companies don't have.
The result is a company that may be doing the most interesting work in the ERP market that almost nobody in Silicon Valley is watching.
1. The man who built it came straight from one of tech's most public personal scandals.
Charles Phillips was Oracle's President — effectively #2 to Larry Ellison — before his ex-girlfriend put up billboards in Times Square announcing their affair in 2010. He left Oracle and walked directly into the Infor CEO role. Most executives in that position would have taken eighteen months off to let the news cycle clear. Phillips showed up at a mid-market ERP company within weeks and spent the next decade transforming it. The billboard story never became part of the Infor narrative, which is itself a kind of achievement.
2. The Koch Industries investment was strategic, not financial — Koch runs on industrial ERP.
When Koch Equity Development invested $2.2 billion in Infor in 2017, the political framing dominated the coverage. What was missed: Koch Industries is one of the most sophisticated industrial operators in the world, running refineries, chemical plants, manufacturing facilities, and supply chains at enormous scale. They understood exactly what Infor's software did because they ran it. The investment, and the eventual full acquisition in 2020, gave Infor a permanent industrial owner who would never need an IPO exit, would never apply venture-style growth pressure, and would always evaluate the software against operational performance rather than financial metrics.
3. Infor created an in-house design studio — in an era when enterprise software was deliberately ugly.
In 2012, while SAP was still shipping interfaces that looked like Windows 95, Infor opened Hook & Loop: a design studio in New York City, staffed with consumer product designers, tasked with making enterprise software that people actually wanted to use. This was considered eccentric at the time. It is now table stakes. Workday, ServiceNow, and Salesforce all invest heavily in design quality. Infor was doing it before any of them — inside the least glamorous segment of enterprise software, in an office building in midtown Manhattan, for customers running aerospace factories and hospital billing departments.
4. The micro-vertical strategy was the only move SAP and Oracle couldn't copy.
Infor's bet was that depth beats breadth in the mid-market. Not horizontal ERP configured for every industry, but vertical ERP pre-built for a specific industry's specific workflows — aerospace traceability requirements, healthcare compliance mandates, hospitality revenue management, fashion-industry seasonal inventory cycles. SAP and Oracle could theoretically serve all of these industries. But they were too invested in their horizontal platforms to go deep in a hundred different niches simultaneously, too dependent on armies of implementation consultants who billable hours depended on the complexity of configuration. Infor's acquisitions had already gone deep. The moat was already dug.
5. Infor is one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world — and operates from New York City.
Every major ERP company on earth has planted its flag in either Silicon Valley, Germany, or the Pacific Northwest. SAP: Walldorf. Oracle: Redwood City. Microsoft Dynamics: Redmond. Infor: Manhattan. The decision to run a global enterprise software business from midtown New York was not accidental — it gave the company proximity to Wall Street, fashion, media, and hospitality, which happen to be core verticals; access to design and business talent who would never relocate to Silicon Valley; and a cultural identity as a different kind of enterprise software company. It is, for a company with $3 billion in revenue and 17,000 employees, genuinely strange. And it works.
Sources: Infor official company pages (infor.com), The Register enterprise software coverage, verified acquisition timeline and Koch Industries investment details.
