I have always been a bit irritated by the marketing line about the company who’s really good/big at X you’ve never heard of, but ought to: how is that my fault? Do more outreach or stop whining, say I (and don’t ever try the ‘stealth marketing’ line on me again).

But it is at the same time really good for customers and the overall health of the market to know there are options for projects or even more in business software that aren’t the standard two or three ‘usual suspects’. Even better: when these other options aren’t start-ups but have longevity and an established customer reference base to talk to.

Infor Global Solutions, previously Agilisys, a privately-held US firm that specialises in software from financial systems and resource planning (ERP) to supply chain and customer relationships, meets that criterion.

Chances are you won’t be that familiar with the name but you probably will be with some of its constituents. Assembled Lego-style from all sorts of companies over the past decade – remember brands like SSA Global, Systems Union, GEAC, Qurius? – UK customers like BAE Air Systems, Cadbury’s, Scottish & Newcastle and Trinity Mirror are served along with the base cohort of mid market manufacturers (SSA for instance was all about manufacturing and the IBM AS/400/iSeries, of course) the conglomerate now serves.

What’s Infor about ‘really,’ though? All companies need a focus. The firm of 2010 says is all about connectivity and data sharing of a range of back-end enterprise apps in what is held to be an easy to use workflow and reporting front-end, mainly for mid-range companies.

This is at least the aim of its recently announced ION system, its Senior Vice President of Global Product Development Soma Somasundaram told CBR, with the emphasis being on easier "application integration, business process management, and shared data reporting".

Why would such companies need such a system? "Our software aligns the technology with the way these smaller businesses operate in the real world – by exchanging entire documents such as sales orders or purchase orders rather than individual bits of data," he claims. "This type of integration has previously only been affordable to the biggest corporations with huge budgets for middleware projects."

The clue to why companies like Infor will always exist is in that last sentence: the firm of 2010 at least is all about trying to offer more affordable functionality to mid sized firms that the likes of SAP and Oracle will ‘eventually’ get round to, once their heartland enterprise customers are taken care of.

It’s a fine idea, and so you won’t be surprised to hear that Infor is set to provide a new cloud initiative based on Microsoft Azure and continues to research niche opportunities for mid market manufacturing players in order to identify opportunities to what it calls reduce complexity and you and I call putting bread on the table.

ION will find a market – not a huge one and Oracle needn’t worry. But it will be of use to a good chunk of the global ERP and business software base that don’t always want to buy the latest and greatest from the Big Boys. And it’s good to see that companies like SSA that had such terrific legacy still have some relevance in today’s world; a legacy, of course, that only has value if it continues to help mid-size firms meet the challenges they face today, not yesterday.