Early this year, the mid-market and vertical-centric enterprise applications vendor promised to release the details of its SOA strategy at its user conferences later in the year. It has kept its promise with details and initial delivery dates being presented to audiences at its string of Inforum user conferences. Delivering on the commitment was significant because it is a proof point that there is more to Infor than M&A expertise and that it has the will and resources to invest in R&D.

Its Open SOA program is the opposite of the approaches adopted by SAP and Oracle, and different again to Lawson. Rather than delivering a core platform that users need to license and adopt to move to SOA, it has opted to bake SOA into each application. It is providing an integration backbone, courtesy of Progress's Sonic ESB, that applications and services can plug into to enable message-based, event-driven, publish-and-subscribe SOA.