Charles Phillips doesn’t have plenty of patience for old perceptions of his company. Elevate the numerous ERP, CRM, HCM and asset management pieces and parts rolled up into Infor, and Phillips, CEO, is probably going to show the discussion to the company’s ION integration services layer, the slick new task-oriented user interfaces or the Ming.le social and event hub.

Sitting in a conference room in Infor’s slick new headquarters in Manhattan’s trendy Flatiron neighborhood, Phillips is filling InformationWeek in at the two latest initiatives within the reinvention of Infor. The 1st is UpgradeX, a program designed to accelerate Infor’s move into the cloud by helping customers move to the most recent, 10x versions of Infor applications managed by Infor and running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

The second one initiative is Rhythm, a cloud-based e-commerce platform that Phillips says may help customers build state-of-the-art Web storefronts backed by product configuration capabilities, recommendation engines, search and content management capabilities.

UpgradeX and Rhythm are both scheduled to be announced on Thursday. Phillips is concentrated at the grand strategic vision, but he has ready answers at the nitty, gritty details. On UpgradeX, the “Upgrade” part is what Phillips is hoping Infor will help customers do more quickly and simply within the cloud. The “X” part is the fill-in-the-blank name of the application the customer currently has deployed on-premises, whether that’s LN, M3, Lawson or SyteLine ERP systems or Infor’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) application.

[ Want more on Infor’s latest enterprise apps moves? Read Infor Bets $500 Million On Enterprise App Refresh. ]

At least 20% of Infor’s business is already within the cloud, whether that’s EAM, the Enwisen HCM app or cloud hosted deployments of current applications. With UpgradeX, Phillips says Infor has built all the tools it needs to move customer data from on-premises to the cloud, and it’s ready to move customers to the latest versions of its applications.

“It’s like a normal application upgrade except now the machines, the patching and the upgrades will be managed by us and we make the move as risk free as possible,” Phillips says. “We flip them to a subscription from paying maintenance, and from that point on they’re paying a per-user fee just like any other SaaS application.”

Phillips insists that most customers won’t miss customizations when moving to a single (multi-tenant) version of their apps because the most popular custom capabilities have been built into the latest upgrades. What’s more, customers will be able to pilot and test the cloud-based apps in sandbox environments before moving apps from their own data centers into the cloud.

Infor partners with both IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud capacity, but Phillips says demo deployments are handled on IBM’s cloud while production workloads are handled on AWS because “it’s inside the countries we have to be in, it’s cheaper and we do not need a lot more than ping, power and pipes,” whereas IBM’s strength is in offering cloud application management in addition to cloud capacity, Phillips says.