Taking desk analysis into the room
I have spent much of this year tracking what Infor is building. In early May, my first piece mapped the Velocity Suite architecture, the Agentic Orchestrator, and their industry-specific agent library. A few days later, a follow-up examined early production deployments across Turtle, Zahid, and Coram. Writing from the desk gives you architectural clarity, but nothing replaces being in the room. Heading to Orlando for Velocity Week is a welcome chance to meet the analyst relations team, sit down directly with product leadership, and see how these deployments are holding up in practice.
Infor handles the foundational operational core: finance, HR, supply chain, and shop-floor manufacturing, built around specialized industry requirements. Manufacturing is the vertical I follow most closely, but hospitality is just as relevant this week because of the venue itself.
When the customer buys the company
One of the clearest signals of enterprise software value is when a client relies on a platform so heavily that they decide to own it. That is precisely Infor’s story. Long before Koch acquired Infor, Georgia-Pacific, a Koch subsidiary, ran Infor across its process manufacturing operations. Experiencing that operational necessity firsthand led to an initial investment, which eventually culminated in a full buyout.
That shift in ownership matters for buyers. As CEO Kevin Samuelson often points out, core enterprise accounts typically stay ten to twenty years. Being privately held shields their product roadmap from 90-day earnings pressures, giving them leeway to invest in long-term engineering rather than short-term quarterly posturing.
That patience shows up commercially in programs like Leap, Infor’s fixed-fee migration initiative for on-premise customers moving to CloudSuite. Waiving first-year software subscription fees and bundling Velocity Suite at no cost lowers the barrier to modernization. In Orlando, I will be watching for Leap customers who have crossed that first year to see how their operations and costs settled.
A conference hosted on customer ground
Velocity Week convenes at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando (1,501 rooms and 524,000 square feet of dedicated meeting space). Industry sessions open on October 6, followed by product tracks on October 7 and 8, alongside a dedicated Velocity Suite track running the full three days.
Rosen Hotels & Resorts is not just a backdrop; it is an active customer. In late 2022, Rosen expanded its existing Infor EPM budgeting setup to run financials, HR, workforce management, and analytics across its properties on Infor. Gathering an enterprise audience inside a facility managed by the host’s own back-office software sets a grounded tone for the week.
Looking for the builders and the field reality
The part of Infor’s AI approach worth watching closely is the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) program. Instead of leaving teams with standard templates, Infor embeds engineers directly with clients to co-develop workflows and see them through go-live. Infor’s Rick Rider noted that their AI Adoption Hub now supports these field engineers, driving most 2026 AI solutions into live production in under a month. Team Air Distributing remains a standout public benchmark: three functional agents live in under two weeks, solving a manual screen-lookup process that once consumed 15 to 20 minutes per check.
While keynotes will detail upcoming capabilities ahead of the October 27 digital broadcast with Kevin Samuelson and Soma Somasundaram, my priority is the peer conversations between sessions. I want to hear how teams are experiencing forward-deployed delivery: Who sat down with your group? How long did production take? What workflows are delivering value right now?
My May analyses outlined the architectural foundation and early customer proof points. This trip is about connecting with the teams, validating that momentum on-site, and reporting back on what Infor delivers on stage.
Rosen Shingle Creek property details: 1,501 rooms, 524,000 sq. ft.
Team Air deployment timelines: Infor case data, 30 June 2026 (three agents in under two weeks; 15-20 min lookup reduction).
Implementation timeframes: Rick Rider, Infor, 12 Aug. 2026 (sub-four-week production average).
Koch enterprise ownership history: Kevin Samuelson executive interviews.
