When Jim Schaper dropped the bomb on public when he announced that Charles Phillips will be the new Chief Executive Officer of Infor and he will be stepping down as Chairman, a lot were surprised. Phillips was, until September 6, 2010, the President of Oracle, a technology giant. He will be replaced in Oracle by Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard’s former CEO. When you hire someone to be your successor, people will not ask any question, but when you choose a successor which happens to be the former President of your rival, now that will get people start talking.

However, despite many claims that Phillips is not a good choice for Infor, Jim Schaper believes that it is probably one of the best and healthiest decisions he has ever made for the progress of Infor. He admits that there are some public missteps that Phillips has done, but apart from that, his clean record brags of three A’s: achievements, accomplishments and acquisitions which he is best known for. For almost eight years of being Oracle’s President, the company has seen nothing but major expansions through acquisition under Phillips tenure. Phillips was the man behind the magnanimous development of the company which led them to million-dollar deals from multi-national companies and made Oracle as one of the key players in the field of software innovation.

Basing from that, Jim Schaper holds not anxiety or skepticism that Charles Phillips is the man that Infor is just looking for to make drastic, aggressive and bold decisions to see itself grow further in the future. After his induction as CEO, he ultimately started on the job without any ado. First thing first, he familiarized himself with the system of Infor from day one and at all aspects and angles. He studied the strengths and weaknesses of Infor that he can use for their advantage. Phillips believes that Infor has a steady market base, but what hinders the company from total revolution is that they are afraid to innovate and opts to just stick to the products that they already have. For this, product development was the first thing he targeted along with the reduction of the production cost.

Recently, Charles Phillips has engineered and is presently ironing out for the launch of the next-generation set of technologies that will seek to end all fears of Infor in formulating something new and something different for the market. This set of new technologies will be called as Infor10.