Infor CloudSuite, RPI Consultants, and more with Keith Wayland

Michael Grace talks with RPI Consultants Managing Partner Keith Wayland about why companies should plan their migration to Infor CloudSuite V11 sooner rather than later, and a bunch of other interesting topics related to Infor and RPI. 

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Tech Pro Unicorn podcast brought to you by RPI consultants. A podcast about the magic of digital transformation through technology. Each week, we’ll cover topics related to ERP, RPA, business transformation, leadership, healthcare, and unicorns.

Michael:

All right. Welcome to Tech Pro Unicorn podcast Series Two, here in March. And we are joined by my guest Keith Wayland, who’s the managing partner at RPI. Welcome Keith.

Keith Wayland:

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Michael:

Awesome. If you could just take a moment and introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience.

Keith Wayland:

Sure, absolutely. My name is Keith Wayland, I’m a managing partner at RPI Consultants. I’ve been in the ERP space for just over 20 years now, specifically in professional services mostly related to Infor CloudSuite and Lawson.

Michael:

Awesome. Well, welcome. Thanks for taking the time. Today, we’d like to talk a little bit about CloudSuite, I know it’s something that really the masses are now starting to turn their attention to and really starting to make an effort to move towards. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to pick your brain and get some of your experience.

Michael:

And we’ll start with asking, really, how is CloudSuite making a difference? What’s the difference between CloudSuite versus Version 10?

Keith Wayland:

Sure. So I’m going to assume that we’ll have some listeners that are familiar with Lawson, which is a ERP system that started in the mid ’70s and some that are potentially not. And I guess the biggest thing in CloudSuite it is part of the new wave of ERP software. And potentially two of the most critical elements of that are that it is SAS software, and what that really means is that there are a lot of folks sharing a single instance, kind of that Amazon experience and everybody’s sort of working off the same platform and that has some key long-term consequences. And the second is the way that it’s built is it’s sort of a modern coding infrastructure which allows it to be more nimble in terms of its updates and evolution, and scalability.

Michael:

Awesome. So it’s similar to maybe what other users are familiar with cloud systems? I saw a great quote somewhere and somebody said, “Cloud isn’t some mysterious thing, it’s really just somebody else’s computer.” And so-

Keith Wayland:

So it is-

Michael:

Yes.

Keith Wayland:

Go ahead.

Michael:

Go ahead.

Keith Wayland:

In a sense that it’s been true in certain cases where they put it on somebody else’s computer and call it cloud, but true cloud is what they call multitenant where we’re all sharing the same core platform that we’re working on. And CloudSuite is true cloud, not pretend cloud, if you will.

Michael:

Awesome. Okay. And what would you say the key benefits are that customers get when they move to the multitenant cloud?

Keith Wayland:

So I think there’s three major ones. The first is that the folks that build CloudSuite along with probably a lot of the other current generation of ERP systems are the ones that worked on ERP implementations in the ’90s and early 2000. And when you’re building something