Charles Phillips and the case for beautiful business software

An enterprise software company is an unlikely place to go looking for filmmakers. Charles Phillips went looking anyway. At Infor, the former Marine captain and Oracle president helped assemble an internal creative agency whose recruits came from worlds accustomed to earning an audience. Advertising, graphics and film had something to teach the people building the systems that employees were obliged to use. The resulting encounter had the makings of a very awkward dinner party.

Phillips recalled the early introductions with amusement. The software executives wore suits. The prospective designers arrived with T-shirts, tattoos and different expectations. Both groups had reason to wonder whether they had the right address. He wanted the newcomers to have authority, recruit their own colleagues and build a company within the company. It became Hook & Loop. Familiarity with enterprise software was optional; the ability to make something people wanted to use was the point.

This is an unusually revealing episode in a career usually described through job titles. Phillips had studied computer science, served in the military, analyzed technology companies and worked for Larry Ellison. By the time he became Infor CEO in 2010, he knew the industry from several angles. Yet his answer to a problem inside it included hiring people who had spent their careers elsewhere.

Before the boardroom, a box of computer parts

Phillips was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in June 1959. His father served in the Air Force, and the family moved during his childhood. His own early attraction was to the machinery. As a high-school student, he became interested in the components from which hobbyists assembled personal computers. A computer-parts shop owner noticed his curiosity and took him under his wing. Clubs gave him people to build with and a reason to keep asking how things worked.

He earned his computer science degree at the United States Air Force Academy in 1981, then served in the Marine Corps until 1986, reaching captain. His unit was the 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines, at Camp Lejeune. The educational itinerary kept expanding: an MBA from Hampton University in 1986 and a law degree from New York Law School in 1993. Computing, business and law made an expansive course of study for someone whose work would repeatedly cross professional borders.

His civilian career took him through financial firms and into technology research at Morgan Stanley. There he became a managing director and a familiar interpreter of the software business for investors. The computer enthusiast now had a second set of questions: how did a company make money, where could it expand, and which competitors stood in its way? Those questions would travel with him.

Crossing to the other side of the spreadsheet

In 2003, Phillips moved to Oracle, becoming president and a director. Larry Ellison had brought an analyst inside a company the analyst understood. Phillips helped oversee the field organization and participated in an acquisition program that expanded Oracle across business applications and other technologies. Watching companies combine from Wall Street is one occupation. Helping the combined businesses sell and operate together is another.

Oracle gave Phillips a lesson he would later state with very little ceremony: “Speed is better than perfection.” A long debate could consume so much time that the situation under discussion had already changed. His preference was to decide, proceed and correct the course when necessary. That approach had obvious attractions for an executive facing a portfolio of products and a market that continued moving while people were in meetings.

Infor offered a new test in 2010. The company already had customers, experienced engineers and a substantial collection of industry applications. Phillips increased development investment and led acquisitions, including the roughly $2 billion Lawson transaction announced in 2011. Buying software businesses was familiar territory. Giving the assembled company a more coherent product direction required another kind of work.

New York was part of the product plan

The relocation from the Atlanta area to New York had a practical purpose. Phillips wanted access to people who cared about design. Infor opened its Manhattan headquarters in 2012, putting its leadership within reach of a creative labor market that did not necessarily spend its mornings contemplating enterprise resource planning. Geography became a hiring decision, and hiring became a product decision.

Hook & Loop grew quickly. In September 2013, it had about 80 people, up from 15 at the beginning of the year. Its director, Marc Scibelli, became Infor’s chief creative officer. This gave design a place in the executive conversation as well as a place on the screen. Even the agency’s name had a practical streak: hook-and-loop fasteners make a complicated fastening problem pleasantly easy to solve.

The designers worked with application teams on a consistent experience across products. The SoHo design system supplied a common visual language, including work on mobile interfaces. That mattered for a business assembled through acquisitions. A customer moving between applications should not need the software equivalent of a phrase book. The ambition reached beyond better-looking icons to the steps people took, the information they needed and the interruptions they could avoid.

Phillips also sat with his executive team around a shared table, without private offices. Decisions could happen in conversation. The furniture made access more immediate, though it also deprived everyone of the traditional executive defense: a closed door. The arrangement fitted a company trying to persuade its own people that design and communication belonged in daily work.

A cloud strategy with a short punch line

In March 2014, Phillips took the stage at an Amazon Web Services summit in San Francisco. Infor was bringing industry applications to AWS through CloudSuite. He supplied a line that made the infrastructure decision easy to remember: “Friends don’t let friends build data centers.” A business software audience had been given something close to a bumper sticker.

The division of labor was consequential. AWS would provide cloud infrastructure; Infor could concentrate on the applications and the industrial knowledge inside them. CloudSuite initially addressed areas including automotive, aerospace and defense, and hospitality. An application for a particular industry needs to understand its processes. Moving it to the cloud does not remove those differences. The strategy paired a shared technical foundation with specialized business functions.

Infor also used the term micro-verticals for the smaller specialties within broad industries. That language can sound like a marketing department dividing a dictionary. The underlying problem was concrete: companies in different lines of work need different functions, and changing generic software to fit can become a project of its own. Phillips wanted more of that industry knowledge built into the application. Design supplied a consistent way to reach those functions; specialization supplied a reason for the customer to care.

By March 2016, AWS reported that Infor had released 13 industry CloudSuites serving more than 45 million users across 96 countries. Those figures describe that moment in the company’s cloud program, rather than a present-day count. They help explain why Phillips’s design experiment belonged alongside a large infrastructure decision. Both involved deciding what Infor should build itself and where it should draw on other people’s expertise.

Who gets a seat at the table?

Phillips’s interest in widening the talent pool extended beyond the creative agency. Infor’s relationship with the Posse Foundation grew from a local Atlanta partnership in 2010 into national support. By spring 2016 the company was a career partner in several cities, sponsored events and funded programs. Phillips also helped Posse launch its Veterans Program in 2012, connecting his military background to a route into higher education.

He became a co-founder and co-chair of the Black Economic Alliance, which organizes business leaders around economic opportunity for Black communities. His advice to people entering technology has emphasized acquiring technical expertise, showing tangible work and seeking experiences beyond familiar circles. That combination makes sense beside the parts-store story. Early access to a knowledgeable person can change which careers seem possible.

His public affiliations also reach into New York’s cultural life. He serves on the Apollo Theater board, alongside corporate roles involving American Express, Bloomberg and Compass. These appointments are different jobs with different responsibilities. Taken together, they put him in rooms where software, capital, culture and public life meet, a recurring feature of his professional route.

The next company is someone else’s beginning

Phillips’s Infor chapter changed formally in August 2019. Kevin Samuelson became CEO, and Phillips became chairman. The company filing records the transition taking effect on August 20. Infor subsequently became a wholly owned Koch Industries subsidiary in 2020. The distinction between running a company and chairing it matters in a career often compressed into a single line.

At Recognize, which he co-founded with Francisco D’Souza and David Wasserman, Phillips returned to evaluating businesses with an operator’s experience behind him. The firm invests in technology services and works with founders and management teams. Its second fund closed in June 2025 with more than $1.7 billion in commitments. The stated focus included companies with enterprise values of approximately $50 million to $500 million, a different scale of problem from managing Oracle’s global business.

On September 29, 2026, Verizon announced his election to its board. The appointment added telecommunications to a set of responsibilities already spanning investing and several corporate boards. It is the latest dated development in a working life whose changes have generally kept him close to technology while moving his vantage point.

“Culture becomes your chief operating officer.”

Charles Phillips

Looking back on leadership, Phillips has used a compact image: “Culture becomes your chief operating officer.” The thought connects the Marine unit, the shared executive table and the designers arriving in the wrong clothes for the right meeting. An organization cannot bring every decision to one desk. People need to understand the direction well enough to act themselves. At Infor, that direction included an ordinary wish with expensive implications: make the working day easier for the person at the keyboard.