Enterprise resource planning software is usually confined to the activity within an organization’s four walls. When products or services inevitably flow out to partners and customers, who or what keeps track of them?

“Our belief was you should extend that [ERP] and encompass an entire network,” said Duncan Angove (pictured), president of Infor Inc. This vision spurred Infor’s 2015 acquisition of the GT Nexus cloud-based supply chain management platform, Angove said in an interview at Inforum 2017 in New York.

GT Nexus is built to conduct trade and commerce over an entire network, Angove told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

This provides one information model for the entire supply chain, which is powerful in itself, Angove explained. “And now when you move the CloudSuite on top of that, it’s like one plus one is five,” he said.

Infor just announced Networked CloudSuites, which extend mission-critical applications outside an enterprise across the whole value chain. It is based on the original Infor CloudSuite — industry-specific applications delivered on the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud.

“Ultimately, CloudSuites will run completely nakedly on the network. And that gives you some very, very interesting information models,” Angove said.

Networked CloudSuites is one piece of Infor’s portfolio imbibing its new artificial intelligence technology, Coleman. “We can leverage machine learning services to make the CloudSuites conversational,” he said.

Coleman not just glorified Alexa

The chat function of Coleman owes much to AWS’ Lex natural language interface, Angove stated. However, neither Coleman nor Infor’s broader AI offerings end there. Coleman is currently being tuned for computer vision and image recognition AI totally apart from Lex.

Infor is currently mining open-source communities for the latest AI innovation to enrich its software, according to Angove. Infor also has partnerships in academia where AI research and innovation advance faster than that in open source, according to Angove.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Inforum 2017. Neither Infor Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE