As organizations turned to IT service providers to help manage complex software deployments, ERP vendor Infor leaned in on channel partnerships. The move paid off. Infor, a privately held subsidiary of Koch industries, saw partner-fueled growth outpace its direct business last year.
The partner pivot took time. Infor has spent 18 months shaping the strategy, moving away from a traditional, transactional ecosystem toward a model focused on recurring revenue, co-selling and long-term customer outcomes.
“This is a new Infor,” Jeanne Newberry, SVP of ecosystem and business development at Infor, told Channel Dive. “Our partners are saying, ‘this is a new Infor. We are experiencing a massive and seismic shift in how you engage with us.’ It’s not prescriptive, but it’s collaborative.”
According to Newberry, resale partners drive roughly a quarter of Infor’s annual contract value bookings, while delivering about half of the company’s implementations globally.
Infor launched a revamped partner program in January 2025 after six months piloting the approach, aligning it with a product shift toward cloud-based ERP, AI capabilities and industry-specific services. The goal was to rethink how partners are rewarded across the customer lifecycle rather than through traditional point-of-sale incentives.
“We wanted to drive bookings growth from a cloud perspective, move our customers who are on prem to cloud, and ignite new logos,” said Newberry.
To get the program rolling, Infor increased investment in marketing development funds, partner enablement and co-selling support, particularly for partners that lacked mature demand-generation operations.
At the same time, the company began measuring partner delivery quality more aggressively, introducing customer sentiment scoring tied to implementations and integrations. The vendor said customer sentiment around partner-led delivery now matches scores for its own professional services organization.
The AI effect
Infor’s channel moves reflect a broader industry shift, as AI reshapes traditional services revenue.
Newberry acknowledged that many partners are moving away from heavily customized implementation work toward consulting, advisory and AI-focused intellectual property.
“Agents are changing how the world will run today and in the future,”Newberry said.
Partners are rethinking where long-term profitability comes from as AI becomes part of the ERP implementation playbook.
Historically, ERP partners generated substantial revenue from customizations and large-scale integrations. But customers are increasingly demanding faster deployments, industry-specific functionality and clearer business outcomes.
“If we’re moving from an era of everything being customized and extensions being built that oftentimes lock customers into these monolithic environments, part of that conversation is saying: ‘what are the outcomes you want to achieve?’” said Newberry.
Partners are shifting to strategic consulting and change management services wrapped around more standardized implementations, she added..
Selective expansion
While Infor expanded its partner base by about 10% last year, the company is taking a selective approach to onboarding new firms.
“We are not looking for volume. We’re looking for value,” Newberry said.
Infor plans to recruit fewer than 50 new partners globally this year, prioritizing firms with AI expertise, industry specialization and stronger go-to-market capabilities.
The company is particularly focused on manufacturing sectors in the U.S., UK and Germany, where demand for AI-enabled modernization is accelerating.
According to Newberry, customers are eager to adopt AI technologies but are still struggling to determine how those investments fit their businesses.
“Our customers want to embrace AI. They’re not sure how,” she said.
Uncertainty is creating opportunities for partners capable of combining business process expertise, data modernization and AI advisory services.
Infor also sees growing demand for targeting support as customers move toward agentic AI environments.
“We’re looking for partners who have capacity around change management practice, because we know that’s critical to our customers,” said Newberry.
SaaS first
Another major component of Infor’s channel push is recurring revenues. Infor has built lifetime SaaS commissions into its partner program, an increasingly uncommon move in a market where many software vendors have reduced those margins over time.
“We are one of the only vendors that is offering and has built into our programmatic approach lifetime SaaS commissions,” she said.
The goal, she added, is to incentivize partners to remain engaged with customers long after deployments go live.
Infor is also deepening its relationship with AWS as part of the channel strategy. The company runs on AWS infrastructure and sees increasing alignment between the hyperscaler’s industry-focused go-to-market strategy and its own vertical ERP ambitions.
After expanding the alliance to drive generative AI adoption and signing on as a launch partner for AWS European Sovereign Cloud last year, Infor collaborated with the hyperscaler on agentic tools for manufacturing companies that it rolled out in April.
Infor’s long-standing infrastructure relationship with AWS has evolved into a more formalized co-sell motion, Newberry said.
“That had not been an engine for us from a co-sell perspective in the past,” said Newberry.
