Enterprise software provider Infor has unveiled its service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy, aimed at offering firms the ability to benefit from SOA without needing to upgrade their legacy systems.

Infor Open SOA is an event-driven architecture that enables interoperable applications and software components to be deployed or upgraded with little or no disruption to current enterprise systems, according to the vendor.

“If firms have one product running on iSeries, and another on Unix, and one on Wintel, because of the way we’ve designed our architecture it can support all three,” said Bruce Gordon, Infor’s chief technology officer. “Customers can change their systems without having to spend a lot of money.”

Open SOA lets firms create their own platform-independent “ecosystem” based on software components from Infor, third-party vendors or internal development teams. Gordon said there would be a “small charge” for integrating components from third parties.

Infor has already built the underlying event-driven architecture, but Gordon said that it would take until 2010 to service-enable the majority of the firm’s applications.

“We intend to focus on customer priorities first,” Gordon added. “We’ll do a big push around customer relationship management and operational sales systems, as well as financials.”

Bob Mick of research firm ARC Advisory Group welcomed the “minimal change” requirement. “SOA is built by end users, and the Infor SOA strategy brings this to the front by supporting and integrating a large variety of new and existing customer technology platforms quickly,” he added.