Kevin Samuelson - CEO, Infor

Kevin Samuelson once helped prepare an interview by hauling signs off a conference floor. Dirk Beveridge, who was about to interview him, recalled an unstaged room and a CEO willing to walk into the hallway and help fix it. It is a modest scene for someone running an enterprise software company. There is no dramatic entrance. The scenery has to be carried in.

The episode offers a useful place to begin a career that can otherwise disappear into titles. Samuelson has been a chief financial officer, an operations executive and, since August 2019, the chief executive of Infor. He has helped buy businesses and finance their growth. Before any of that, he was a teacher in Bulgaria. His working life has crossed several kinds of organization, each with a different answer to the question of what counts as useful work.

At Infor, the answer has become increasingly specific. Samuelson talks about software that knows an industry, implementations a vendor should help see through, and relationships that continue after a customer signs. Enterprise software can make those ideas sound terribly abstract. His career supplies the people, places and practical obligations behind them.

A classroom before the balance sheet

Samuelson is a native of Washington state. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, then began his career at the American School in Sofia. A literature graduate teaching in Bulgaria is an unusual opening chapter for an executive later associated with mergers and acquisitions. It also resists the tidy assumption that a technology career must begin with a technology credential.

There is no need to invent a straight line from the classroom to the boardroom. Teaching and running a software business are different jobs. The interesting biographical fact is that he did both. Before joining Infor, he also worked in equity research, with positions at firms including Robertson Stephens. His next professional setting involved studying companies rather than teaching students.

Equity research asks what makes a business work and what might change its prospects. Those are useful questions to carry into a company assembled from other companies. Samuelson joined Infor at its inception in 2002. The early task was acquisition and integration: bringing applications and businesses together to develop expertise in particular industries. The English graduate had arrived at a business where the list of acquired names would become a substantial reading assignment of its own.

Forty acquisitions, then a second act

By the time Samuelson was named CFO in 2011, the appointment announcement credited him with more than 40 strategic acquisitions and over $5 billion raised in financing. Those figures describe the scale of his assignment. They also point to the less photogenic part of building a software business: financing a purchase is one job; integrating what has been purchased is another.

40+Strategic acquisitions
credited by 2011

$5bn+Financing raised
reported at that appointment

An acquisition carries products, employees and customer commitments into a new organization. The balance sheet can record a transaction more neatly than a customer can absorb a change of ownership. Infor’s early expansion therefore created an ongoing practical question: how could a growing portfolio become something customers could actually use together?

Samuelson left Infor in 2013. His outside roles included chief operating officer at outdoor retailer Backcountry.com and chief financial officer at InsideSales.com. By December 2014, an InsideSales announcement listed him among its executives and identified his preceding Backcountry role. These were different operating environments: ecommerce, sales technology and enterprise business applications do not share the same daily rhythm.

He returned to Infor in 2016. The departure and return give his biography a second act inside the same company. He had helped build its early portfolio, worked elsewhere, and came back before taking the CEO position. It is a more particular story than uninterrupted ascent through a single hierarchy.

A career with a return journey

2002Joins Infor
2011Named CFO
2013Leaves Infor
2016Returns
2019Becomes CEO

The company changes. The career comes back around.

The clock after the handshake

On August 21, 2019, Infor announced that Samuelson would succeed Charles Phillips as CEO. Phillips became chairman, and Samuelson joined the board. The company credited its incoming chief executive with helping grow annual revenue from $35 million to $3 billion through strategic acquisitions. It also described his involvement in operations, sales and large customer wins. He came into the job with responsibilities extending beyond the finance function.

Clicker in hand, next mile ahead. Samuelson on stage in a photograph published with coverage of his move into the CEO role. Photograph: ERP Today.

In 2020, Infor became a wholly owned, standalone subsidiary of Koch Industries. The ownership arrangement became part of Samuelson’s explanation of how the company should work. Koch had been both an investor and a customer. Its businesses included manufacturing operations with everyday reasons to care about enterprise systems.

At Inforum that September, Samuelson interviewed Charles Koch about the acquisition and its implications. The conversation returned to investment, change and mutual benefit. For Samuelson, that last idea meant software helping customers succeed and customer experience feeding improvements back into the product. An industrial owner also gave the software company access to businesses doing the kinds of work its applications were meant to support.

By 2021, Samuelson was explaining customer relationships in terms of ten or twenty years. He advised buyers to look for a partner, secure involvement beyond the IT department, and limit customization. His argument changes the clock used to judge a sale. A signed contract has a clear date. The usefulness of the resulting system emerges over a much longer period.

A decade is plenty of time for a feature list to become outdated. It is also enough time for requirements, staff and business conditions to change. A vendor making Samuelson’s argument takes on a continuing obligation: the relationship has to remain useful after the original sales presentation has lost its novelty.

Knowing the work down to the nouns

Samuelson’s recurring case for Infor rests on industry specificity. A manufacturer or distributor has processes that make sense within its own trade. Software designed around those processes can arrive with more of the necessary work already understood. The attraction is concrete: fewer steps spent teaching a general system how a particular business operates.

His description of innovation has been equally practical. In 2019, he discussed usability, deployment and readiness, and argued that customers should be able to take Infor’s innovation and make it their own. He also described borrowing useful ideas between industries. Hospitality, for example, could learn from supply-chain approaches to inventory and capacity. Expertise need not stay inside the department where it first became useful.

“We don’t chase ideas lacking substance.”
Kevin Samuelson, 2019

Acquisition decisions continued to reflect those concerns. In 2024, Samuelson explained Infor’s interest in Acumen’s trade-promotion capabilities and Albanero’s data-management technology. One addressed a specialized business requirement; the other addressed the quality and migration of the information running through enterprise systems. Data cleanliness has a distinctly unglamorous name for something on which ambitious software promises depend.

There is another pleasing detail in his public profile. An interviewer described him as a fan of calculus. English literature and calculus can coexist in the same person, despite the organizational chart that school subjects sometimes suggest. His biography accommodates words and numbers without requiring either to apologize for the other.

The teacher gets another audience

In February 2022, Samuelson and Infor CTO Soma Somasundaram judged business pitches from New York City high school students. The students had developed companies through a Futures and Options program, working on mission statements, organizational charts, employee handbooks and growth strategies. Their exercise included some of the paperwork that makes a business more than an exciting name.

Samuelson said he enjoyed hearing the problems the students wanted to solve and appreciated the ambition of their solutions. The episode brings the former teacher back into contact with young people presenting ideas. It is a small event beside an acquisition history, but a personal profile benefits from keeping the scale of those moments intact. Listening to a student pitch is useful work too.

An AI demo still needs a working week

Samuelson’s more recent interviews carry the industry argument into AI. In October 2025, he described a change in customer conversations: the rush to obtain new tools was giving way to more scrutiny of where those tools could create value. He emphasized mapped processes and usable data. The difficulty was getting an ambitious capability to behave productively inside a real operation.

That same month, he discussed Infor’s Asia-Pacific opportunity through its manufacturing and distribution focus. The specificity could run as far as fish-paste manufacturing. It is an excellent antidote to a software conversation conducted entirely in grand abstractions. Somewhere, somebody has a particular product to make, and a general-purpose promise still has to survive the particulars.

His October 2025 essay on Infor Leap addressed another part of the problem: reaching the cloud in the first place. The offer was presented as a fixed-fee, fixed-timeline migration package for existing on-premise and single-tenant customers, subject to its terms. He emphasized standardized processes, predictable milestones and continuing partnership after go-live. These were delivery promises, with costs and schedules attached.

In April 2026, Infor announced further Velocity Suite capabilities and limited availability of an enhanced Agentic Orchestrator. Samuelson described its AI approach as the result of years spent developing industry platforms and process knowledge. The emphasis remained on fitting the technology to the work. His July appearance on NYSE Live continued the discussion of adoption, and he is scheduled to join other Infor leaders at an October 27 digital event about enterprise AI.

The questions ahead are practical enough to outlast a launch calendar. Does a system understand the process? Can its users trust its actions? Does the vendor remain involved when adoption becomes difficult? Samuelson’s career has put him on several sides of those questions, from studying companies to buying them and operating them. The former teacher now leads a software business making a case for detailed knowledge and continued responsibility. The next mile begins when somebody has to put the idea to work.

Keep reading. Keep watching.

Profile updated 11 October 2026.

Kevin Samuelson and the business of staying useful