Infor Gets Ready for System i Conference at Opryland

September 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

In two weeks, Infor will be holding its 2011 System i User Conference at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. The three-day show will feature educational sessions for users of BPCS, MAPICS, and System21, as well as a solutions expo and networking opportunities for Infor customers. Also, Infor is hosting a user conference for its Infinium customers this week.

The focus of 2011 System i User Conference (Infor deliciously refuses to abide by IBM’s 2009 name change) is providing education for Infor’s three primary IBM i-based suites. These include Infor10 ERP iEnterprise (LX) (formerly called Infor ERP LX and BPCS before that); Infor10 ERP Discrete iEnterprise (XA) (formerly called Infor ERP XA and MAPICS before that); and Infor10 ERP Process iBusiness (formerly called System21 with Geac and JBA).

In case you missed it, Infor recently rebranded as Infor10 its primary go-to-market ERP suites and its industry-specific solution packages. The products and solutions that bear the Infor10 brand are the ones that will, among other things, be updated to work with Infor10 Workspace and Infor10 ION, the names of its graphical front-end and enterprise service bus (ESB) offerings, respectively.

LX will have five tracks, System21 will have three tracks, and MAPICS will have six tracks. There will be more than 150 sessions that include technical product training, product introductions, and case study presentations. Sessions on ION, Workspace, and CRMi (Infor’s IBM i-native CRM system) will also be mixed in, as well as general Power Systems and IBM i presentations by IBM. There will even be some sessions about third-party products, such as IntelliChief and GXS.

While BPCS, MAPICS, and System21 get all the glory, the 2011 System i User Conference will also feature tracks for the three lesser IBM i-based suites, including Infor ERP PRMS, Infor ERP PRISM, and Infor ERP KBM, Infor says. These products, as you can see, did not get renamed under Infor10, which means they are not as strategic to Infor.

This is the second year in a row that Infor has held a System i conference. Apparently, it held its first System i conference last year in Phoenix, but it didn’t tell the press about it. Like all software vendors, Infor cut back on physical user conferences following the global economic crises of 2008. In 2009, Infor held a virtual user conference (see “Vendors Go Virtual with Annual User Conferences“).

The 2011 System i User Conference costs $950 per person to attend (the early-bird discount deadline has long since passed). For more information and to register, see www.infor.com/events/20111002-systemi-conf.

Meanwhile, Infor is hosting its Infinium User Conference 2011 at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. The conference, which started yesterday and wraps up today, sports five tracks and 46 Infinium-specific sessions.