Charles Phillips' comeback means competition for Oracle

• Former Oracle co-president%2C now Infor CEO%2C is taking on ex-employer
• In battleground for enterprise software%2C Infor is trying social-network-like look
• Specialized software and unique headquarters underscore new approach

NEW YORK — When we last heard from Charles Phillips, he was an embattled Oracle executive who resigned in 2010, entangled in an executive power play.

Today, he's on the precipice of a comeback story that borders on cool revenge.

On Monday, his enterprise-software company, Infor, rolls out Infor Ming.le software — a social business graph that took two years to design. A re-imagination of stolid spreadsheets, it comes with a Twitter-like look in the guise of clearly labeled areas for sales results, tasks, alerts and activity feed. Workflow is depicted in a Timeline-like graphic. The Web version is available, followed by iPad and iPhone in the summer.

Optimized for use on iPads and iPhones, the software is geared for Generation-Y users accustomed to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. "We understand social (media) and wanted a beautiful user interface," Phillips, who is company CEO, says from Infor's highly stylized headquarters in New York's Flatiron neighborhood. "It's open, yet elegant."

In Infor, Phillips has one heck of a comeback vehicle to make life hard for Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO and his old boss. The company, based here, is the world's third-largest provider of business applications and services. With more than 70,000 customers in nearly 200 countries — among them, Ferrari, Boeing and Heineken — and 13,000 employees, Infor rang up $2.8 billion in revenue last year, sometimes at the expense of Oracle and SAP.

Infor is "poised to re-emerge as a legitimate third option to the SAP/Oracle Apps duopoly," says Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher.

A NEW ORACLE ADVERSARY

Oracle is a target for multiple reasons for Phillips, who was effectively jettisoned to make room for Mark Hurd after Hurd resigned as Hewlett-Packard CEO and became Oracle's co-president. Both companies are vying for many of the same industries and companies.

The irony is delicious: Ellison, who has famously preached the evisceration of business rivals, now faces the possibility of being upstagedby a former loyal lieutenant. "Larry was fine with the (executive) departures," Phillips says, recounting how Ellison was informed of the impending defections of Phillips and three other Oracle execs for Infor in 2010. "Better they go to Infor than SAP."

Oracle and SAP declined comment on Infor.

Oracle's core business is relational databases, but it went on a multibillion-dollar buying spree — overseen by Phillips — over the past decade to snap up hardware companies such as Sun Microsystems and cloud-based applications providers.

Infor, which went on an acquisition spree of its own of smaller software companies, has spent the last seven years rewriting big industry-specific applications from older software languages into .Net and Java programming languages.

Infor hopes its social-networking-like software will not only solve business problems but resonate with customers. The company is eyeing a dozen industries such as hospitals, automobiles and pharmaceuticals, and companies with revenue of $50 million to the largest global enterprises.

The idea is to let Oracle and SAP duke it out over bigger accounts while Infor scoops up relatively unattended parts of the market. Phillips plans to add a new industry every 18 months.

Infor is one of a group of new-age enterprise-software companies, such as NetSuite, Salesforce.com and Cloudera, that are chipping away at Oracle's business, says 10gen CEO Max Schireson, another former Oracle employee.

Since landing at Infor 2½ years ago, Phillips has assembled a new executive management team — including three other Oracle alums — and engineered the $2 billion buyout of Lawson Software, adding health care and human resources to Infor's growing portfolio of industries. "A fragmented industry (like software) needs consolidation," Phillips says.

He's also engineered a unique workspace and culture. Infor occupies two stories in what was once a World War II-era naval post office in New York's Flatiron neighborhood. In just a few months, it's been converted into a sleek space with conference rooms named after jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Dexter Gordon and Count Basie to reflect the collective improvisational nature of the company and its culture. A 20-foot-high by 12-foot-wide electronic screen digitally displays the arrivals of guests. Plush red chairs in the shape of lilies round out the fashionable decor.

"No bean bags," Phillips deadpans, in an allusion to more pedestrian digs in Silicon Valley where he worked for eight years.

From his new East Coast digs, Phillips' biggest worry could be cloud-based companies such as Workday, which offer an increasing range of enterprise applications to large companies and small.

But he betrays no worries. "Workday has a 1990s look," he says. "SAP is too big, and has too many processes to get things done."

"We have a two-year head start on our competitors with a beautiful design," he says. "Applications should not make corporate customers suffer."