>>Welcome to data, citizens, to anyone I'm thrilled that so many of you joining us this year for what I think will be our best conference yet. This is always my favorite moment of the year. And what makes it especially meaningful for me at this time is that we've all faced so much uncertainty over the last year. Being able to bring together or community of data, citizens, data professionals, customers, and partners gives me so much energy. We all share the same passion to use data, to create positive change in our work. And in our lives 2021 has been called a year of transitions and rightfully so the pandemic has changed our lives, our businesses and our society. It has changed or world. There's been a number of notable shifts over the last 18 months. And I like to bring up three shifts that I personally connect to. >>And these will likely resonate with many of you too. First as a shift though, it's remote work at the start of the pandemic, tens of millions of people across many industries, transition to working from home. This transition happened and presented really fast. And in many cases have happened overnight. For me not being able to meet our customers and our federal court. He begins in Berson, especially during such turbulent times. I've always actually welcomed over 200 new colleagues. New Colombians was especially hard. The second is of course, a shift towards online retail in the U S e-commerce was forecasted to reach 24% of total retail sales by 2024, but by July, 2020. So four years earlier, it had already reached 33% that has translated into an enormous boost for delivery companies. And finally, the supply chain reinvention, the pandemic reveal the complexity and vulnerabilities in the supply chains of many different companies from raw materials to freight disruptions, to labor shortages. >>The damage from the pandemic was felt everywhere. For example, my wife and I have been waiting for us for over six months for a four year old daughter's first bike. Now, many companies are oriented towards data and analytics to reduce costs and better understand, manage and optimize their entire value chain. Now, the one thing that all of these shifts have in common is that they accelerated the massive growth of digitization. This transition to digital isn't new, but how much it has accelerated. Hasn't been easy for organizations in many cases as has happened under enormous pressure. And that digitization has resulted in two related trends. First, an explosion of digital channels, which has created unprecedented amounts of new data, this more volume and more variety of data than ever before. It's been distributed broadly across organizations. Again, this is not a nutrient, but one that has also accelerated imagine just the amount of data that is now on tick-tock. >>It's also a great example of the responsibilities and risks that come with all of that data. This brings me to the second trend and risk that we had started seeing even before the pandemic, the creation of ever more data silos, these silos result in disjointed and often ineffective data teams. And what is more concerning is that it's often a lack of confidence in the outcome. This leads to an overall lack of trust in the information we need to solve this every day, maybe every hour, every minute we rely on data to make both transactional and transformative business decisions. Every organization today depends on mission, critical insights and data critical processes. What happens if suddenly there's a data problem, this could impact our resourcing or customers or back-office or entire ecosystem, the integrity and the reliability of data has real immediate, uh, long-term implications for our businesses and our reputations. >>And this will determine the trajectory of our success. We all feel the weight of data, the immense opportunities and potential implications associated with it. And this is a lot of pressure to bear, but I believe that we have the ability to take control of our data to become more effective and how we work to be more productive and to ultimately generate faster and better outcomes. I believe this is a pivotal moment as organizations transition from reacting to the pandemic, to building a healthy new, normal, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make good use of our data and by doing so, I believe we can achieve extraordinary things by making trusted data more accessible and more usable. We can do even more. We can get more out of our work. Uh, we can put more work into it. We can help our organizations serve more customers and enrich more communities with trusted data. We have the power to change things for good and with it, there's no limit to what people, businesses or society can achieve. When we are United by data, >>The world doesn't just run on information. It runs on people living their passion, dreaming big ideas, but without information without the data, those ideas won't become innovations. That's why at Colibra we're changing how organizations use data. So our customers can change the world. We make data easier to access by making it usable, manageable, and practical. We make it make sense. So people have a common language to share and shape their ideas. And no matter how far and wide that data is scattered, we make sure it's all within reach, connecting the disconnected, joining the disjointed so people can collaborate and trust that their data won't slow them down so they can prove that data has the power to change things for good, doing more enriching, more, helping more together with Collibra. You can be United by data >>United by data. All of us here are United by our passion for data. We are all data citizens, and there's so much power in this community. Uniting is also what the Colibra data intelligence cloud or product does it unites your entire organization to deliver accurate, trusted data for every use for every user and across every source managed, trusted, and accessible. These are the crucial elements that will give your teams the ability to easily collaborate and make every data workflow more productive. There's also some of the experience and the impacts of our customers take Freddie Mac. For example, it's driving their data ecosystem transformation with 5.5 billion data points and over true trillion dollars in assets. Under management, Freddie Mac leveraged Columbia to support the digital transformation and management of its data ecosystem. They eliminate duplicate data, spending improve data lake productivity and drive enhance data quality while delivering increased value for their customers. >>It's also at the heart of what Yelp is doing to connect its engineers, to trusted data unleashed product innovation and instill a data-driven culture. And why companies like audio and BT are promoting the importance of data, culture, and making data easily accessible to the data citizens throughout their organization. Over the next couple of days, the knowledge shared by our partners, our customers, guest speakers. And could you begins, will inspire and energize you to keep moving forward as change agents United by data. Again, I'm so glad to kick off data citizens and thank you for being here with us.

(upbeat bright music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicone Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are having a Cube Conversation here in the studio. We're just about ready to hit the crazy wave that is the conference season. So, it's great to still have some time to do some studio stuff before we hit the road. And we're excited to have a new guest that's never been on the cube before. He is Daniel Hazarika, the CMO of Reflektive. Daniel, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you. >> So, you guys are working in the cool space. Kind of the new age, HR management for lack of a better term. We've had Patty Mccord on before, who obviously was seminal in kind of the Netflix culture. Which was, I think, pretty early days and kind of saying throw out, throw out traditional annual reviews. Kind of, throw out regulations around expense reports. Throw out, kind of, a lot of these traditional mechanisms to manage people and really say, you know, what are we managing people to? And we should be giving them feedback on a regular basis, and we really need to, kind of, bring this into the modern era. And that's smack in the middle of what you guys do. >> Absolutely, yeah. I mean a big part of what we do is managing employees to be high performing. And that's the big tagline for her, is high performance culture. >> Right. >> It's critical to have, as part of that, a more active and ongoing role with your employees. That's why they can do things like remove expense report guidelines. Because they know we're on the pulse of whether this person is actually performing or not. And, by knowing that, we can have faith that they're, we trust them. That they'll do the right thing when it comes to deciding on what they spend on. >> Right. >> So, I think we sit right at the center of this and we're really excited to be a part of it. >> So, let's back up a little bit and just give everyone kind of the 411 on Reflektive. >> Absolutely. >> How many people are you? How long you've been around? >> Yeah. >> Some of the basics. >> Yeah. So, we were founded in late 2014. We have 3 co-founders; Rajeev Behera, Erick Tai, and Jimmy Tyrrell. They more or less were actually people managers themselves. They realized this was a gap in, you know, in managing work forces and, you know, classic model of technical founder and then more of a product person and then they got together and built this really cool tool. >> So what was the big hole? Cause there's are a ton of HR applications out there. >> Absolutely. >> There's big ones likes Workday, you know, whose done been very successful on the SaaS Model. What did they see that was the big hole even though there's all these huge traditional kind of HR applications? >> Absolutely, yeah. So, what happened was, there is a fivish year-old Berson framework, they talk about this systems of engagement and systems of record, right? >> Right. >> And so these tools that you mention that were great at helping catalogue what happens in a business, and do all the compliance processes required, right? But what happened was the world changed. Things, in terms of social media, the way people were getting information, the pace of things accelerated quite a bit and these tools struggled to handle the day to day. And didn't live where people worked. And, those are big gaps. So, they saw this and said, okay, well there is something here where we can go in and insert ourselves in the flow of people's work and help them actually get the information they need to be high performing. >> So, was the entry point the annual review? What was kind of the entry point >> Yeah. >> To get people to think about HR in a different way and to adopt the technology? >> Yeah. >> I think, I think that ultimately there is some form of review that happens and they built that functionality. But, what was really interesting to the market was that actually the concept of real time feedback and the mechanisms, building the mechanisms, by which you could actually bring that into that platform. And actually factor that in when you're doing reviews, right? There's, this eliminates things like recency bias things that, hey a review is happening at the end of the year, I'm going to remember what happened the last 3 months. I'm not going to remember that you killed it, you know, in March of that year. So, we're helping solve for that. And they've saw great results doing that. >> Right. So, you've got all types of kind of little, I don't know apps is the right word >> Sure. >> Solutions. Or, you know, kind of activities that enable people both as the employee as well as the manager as well as the HR people to have kind of this ongoing back and forth relationship. So, I was wondering if you could dive into some of those applications and what's, what's working really well that's different than things used to be? >> Yeah. So, the modern kind of version of what we do, cause things have changed much over the past few years, we have a core kind of performance management offering. We also have an engagement offering and we also have a people intelligence offering. And these are the three pillars by which we kind of enable all those people that you just talked about. And so, when we go back to the performance piece, there's many different components, but, we believe that employees need feedback in the moment. They need a way to also do annual reviews. They need a way to set goals and be clear with their manager on what those are and what progress is. And we also believe that those things have to exist in the flow of day to day work and that's why do things like have a Slack integration, integrate with Gmail, Outlook, all these different kind of places where people actually live day to day. >> Right. >> Then, you know, the other layers that I spoke about are engagement. We like to be able to do broad surveys to companies and, you know, get a pulse on high level, what is the emotion out there? How are people feeling about management? How are people feeling about, you know, even the snacks in the kitchen? Simple stuff like that. >> Right. >> And, then last but not least, all of that information has to feed into somewhere so that the management of an organization can get the insights they need to make decisions. And that's where the people intelligence comes in. >> Okay, this is a lot of different layers to the story. But the one that, when I was first preparing for this interview, and like, oh my goodness, another tool, right? >> Right, yeah. >> Another desktop app. I forget what the statistics are of all the tabs that we have open >> Yeah. >> With our Salesforce and Outlook and all these things are open. But, you guys took an interesting approach, 'cause you actually integrated with some of the apps that you presume I have open like Slack as opposed to, you know, kind of forcing me to have that one more tab. How does that work and how has that, you know, kind of impacted adoption? >> Totally yeah. This is where the foundations of our company kind of come into play. So, our founders came from Mobile Applications. They knew, and games specifically, so they know how to optimize for things like active users daily, monthly, all that, right? And, taking that lens to it, they said, okay, we really do need to encourage adoption. How do we make that happen? To your point, too many tools are open. Some are required to do your job like email. Others are kind of optional. We're, we're, you know, honest with ourselves. We say, hey, we're in the optional category. How do we solve for that? How do we still get people to use this? So, we said, we're going to plug ourselves into Slack where people actually communicate day to day. We're going to show up in Gmail. We're going to show up in Outlook. We're going to go to all these different places where people are already working. We actually even integrate with Jira, the engineering tool. And we said, that's the way we'll actually get the information into our system that we need, and then we can service all those insights that we talked about. >> Is it like a, is it a pop-up? Is it some encouragement when I do some activity say, say with you on a project, you know, oh Jeff, by the way, do you have any feedback for Daniel? Or, oh Jeff, by the way, somebody's looking for feedback on Daniel. Or, I mean, how does the mechanics work and, then, what have you seen in terms of adoption what works, what doesn't work? >> Yeah. I mean, it definitely gets traction. Because, I think, specifically Slack, and, you know, we're a Silicon Valley company, a lot of our earlier customers were Silicon Valley companies, and they all use Slack. It's pretty >> As do we. >> Yeah. There you go, right? So, I think from that perspective it's really easy to use. You can see all the active recognition, for example, happening in your company. And, in channel, you can also go in and input recognition for other people right there just at mention and, kind of, invoke that. >> So, are they kind of channels then within Slack, around? >> Recognition can be a channel but the actual input of feedback you can do that right from the keyboard, yeah. >> So, interesting, talk about feedback versus recognition. How does that play out in the real world? Cause those are two very different words and two different, very different motivations. >> You bring up a great, great point and it's in an ongoing debate, like how do you, kind of, name these two different things? Frankly, recognition, to the broader market, ends up being more or less positive feedback, right? That you feel like you want to put a public stamp on. >> Right. >> But, there's an important distinction here because there's also negative feedback and there's also just feedback that people want to give that's positive but they don't necessarily want to share that with the entire world, or with the broader organization. So, we wanted to create a safe space for them to be able to do that at every single, in every single use case. And, so, that's what, that's where the delineation between recognition and feedback comes in is that you can go public, private, you know, public and also broadcast to the whole company. And we wanted to give people the avenue to do all those things. >> Right. So, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about goals and goal management. How does that kind of module work and/or how does that tie back to, kind of, some of the corporate goals and corporate initiatives? Can you tie it back to your project and are these things integrated or is it, kind of, a stand-alone? Does it operate like an annual goal or a quarterly goal or, you know, how does that piece of it work? >> Yeah. So, the way that we find, you know, the highest performance cultures doing this, they do, kind of, adjust goals on an ongoing basis. Ideally quarterly. I think that's probably the favored, kind of, happy medium right now. >> Okay. >> And, that does start with company level goals, then it goes to departmental, then it goes to individual or team, sub-team, goals. And, all of these people have, you know, we can call, you can do SMART goals, you know, you can do objectives and key results. You can do whatever format you want and it's pretty flexible as a platform but all of that cascades down and you can go work, you know, coordinate between people and get visibility. You can have public goals, private goals and that's part of our whole commitment to transparency in the platform. >> In terms of your customers, and their adoption at a corporate level, not necessarily the individual, is it more of a stick or is it more of carrot? Are people figuring out that they need to change and yours is the tool to give them an avenue to the new way? Or, is it kind of new and provocative and, we've been doing annual reviews since, since my dad's dad's dad, you know, I'm not quite sure about this ongoing thing. What's kind of the reception and how's the market changing? >> Totally. Like with anything, you know, either tech adoption or lifecycle, a lot of our early adopters have just picked up on the fact that the market for talent is extremely competitive now. And some have got to different maturity levels in understanding what they need to do to deal with that, right? Our earliest adopters, they just got it right away. They said, like, we, our workforce is asking for more in the moment feedback. They want to know what their goals are clearly and be able to measure against them and be able to go and point back, hey, I actually achieved that, or I did not. And, so, that has helped us a lot with the earlier adopters. Just saying, like, we built something that's ideally suited to what you need, they way you need to evolve. >> Right. >> Part of, I mean, the task of any kind of innovative technology is we have to go educate the market too. We know that universally people are struggling to retain talent. What we do to educate them is to inform them of, here's actually what the workforce is looking for. We've done a ton of research. HBR articles, we've seen Gallup Research, we've seen all sorts of stuff that tells you the world has changed, the workforce is expecting certain things, and we've built something around those needs. >> Right. >> And, so, the more we do our job as marketing, you know, to make sure the market understands that, I think the more Reflektive will see success. >> It's funny in one of Patty's recent media posts, she talks about foosball tables and billiard tables, like, that's not what drives employee happiness and satisfaction. I mean, they look good, I guess, on the tour before you take the job but, I don't know, there's a lot of other things that drive happiness and retention in this super competitive market. That's not the ping pong table. >> Absolutely. Especially in the case of Patty McCord, I mean, she's indexing everything around, you want to have the highest performing people stay and you don't necessarily care to actively manage the ones who are not. And what she has, you know, espoused many times is that, when, the highest performing people actually love this. They love that there's transparency around the business value they're driving. They love to know exactly where they stand. They love to have feedback so they can improve and be better. And, so, you can see how there's a lot of, like, parallels here between what's she's talking about that high performing cultures do and what the platform that we've built enables. >> Right. What about the pesky lawyers that are saying there are all these compliance issues and we're still, we're still operating off of laws that were established before and this is a little bit funky and we're not really sure how to deal with it? >> Yeah. I mean, what we've actually found is, so, there's specific customers, even of the size of Airbnb, who will highlight that we helped them combat bias. And the way we do this, and evidence that they are not biased in the way they do reviews, and the way we do this is, I think the concept, is ultimately the concept of real time feedback. Because this stuff is being logged as it's happening, no one can say, oh, it's the end of the year now and you just remember what happened in the past few months, you're ignoring all my great, you know, all my great work that happened before that. This is not fair, You know, that recency bias they call it, is eliminated. >> And that actually, in the end, helps with the lawyers because we can say, this was all cataloged in the moment as opposed to way later. >> Right. We have to train among contract to your concept. You're supposed to turn it up the last month. So, they forget about the crappy stuff that you did earlier in the year. >> Exactly. >> And do well. So, Dan, before I let you go, just, you've been around a little while, you've been in the Valley, you've been at a number of startups, you've been here for about a year, I'm just curious, kind of, as you've come to Reflektive and been there now, what was the biggest surprise, kind of, entering this space, entering this company that you didn't necessarily expect now that you've been there for a little bit? >> Yeah. I think what was most interesting, actually kind of exciting, was to observe how similar the transformation that HR is going through right now is to the transformation that marketing went through ten years ago. I'm seeing the movement to being more data driven, to getting active information on how campaigns are running, all this stuff. That evolution is happening in HR right now. I'm seeing, you know, more and more people scientists. I'm seeing more and more people who are turning people management into a science. And, I think that a lot it has to do with record low unemployment. The market for labor got so competitive that people have started really paying attention to this as a problem and trying to understand better outside of just simple compliance things. How can we actually actively manage our workforce into being high performing and happier. That's really interesting for me. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sharing your story. >> Absolutely. >> Alright. He's Daniel, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We're having a Cube Conversation at our Palo Alto studios. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (exciting music)

>> Announcer: Live, from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube! Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Inforum, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host, Dave Vilante. We are joined by Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here. Thank you guys for coming. >> So you're fresh off the keynote. A big deal. Thousands of people here at the Javits Center. What would you say is the most exciting to you about being here and what you really want us participants, attendees to come away with? >> Well, there's a lot of energy at the conference. And people can see the investments we've been making. All the innovation. And just the feedback we're getting is just keep doing what you're doing. You guys just really change the industry. The idea of a network commerce and a network ERP coming together is something new. They like the fact that we kind of find these new areas on our own. People are buzzing about Coleman, our new AI announcement, that platform as well. So it's been fun getting the feedback. >> So talk a little bit about Coleman. Talk about the naming of Coleman. >> Yeah, so it's named after Katherine Coleman Johnson, who is one of the early pioneers in NASA. She was a researcher mathematician there to calculate a lot of the orbital fractions that were needed for reentry. And John Glenn relied on her. And she's in the movie, Hidden Figures. And got to know that movie pretty well, because along with about 30 other African American executives, we raised enough money to send almost 30 thousand kids to see the movie for free. We screened it probably three months before it hit the theaters. And a lot of buzz. We didn't know a lot about it ourselves, so we learned a lot about them. So I was excited to say, if we're going to have an AI platform, why not name it after her? Such a pioneer. And it worked out. Her family was at the event and they were just blown away. And they're asking, can I get copies of everything? And taking pictures with us. So, I thought it was the highlight of the show. >> You know, I liked your first slide today and yesterday in the analysts meeting. It basically was your strategy in a nutshell. Micro verticals was sort of the starting point, the decision to go AWS cloud, The GT Nexus network component, burst analytics and then Coleman AI. Just fit together so nicely and it sounds great. And then you also said, look. Cloud and mobile and social, that's table stakes today. It's really sort of a new ball game. So my question is, you know, the slide's nice. It sounds great. How fully baked is it? >> Yeah, well, we're, I think we're, you know, we've had some time now. We're building the network. And so we've been working on figuring out the right integration points and where the value add was. And so, we're already able to kind of ship things like ASM directly to our ERP. And we showed in context where you can click on the order, an M3, for example, and see where it is on an ocean container. So we've already done a lot of that work. And there's only more to come. We want to, we didn't mention it today, but we want to attack the EDI market and commoditize that and have it be a free service. Because we already have a network. We can ship packets around it. Doesn't cost us anything. And we do that for some customers today. So we have more that we could have talked about that we didn't get to. So a lot of it's real today. >> We also heard at the analysts meeting, in great depth, and a little bit today, you had the CFO of Koch industries up there, made a large $2 billion plus investment. Koch is also a customer. And was a customer prior to the announcement of the investment. How did that all come about? Can you share that sort of story with us? >> Yeah, so we had a very successful project at Georgia Pacific. They brought us in because they were frustrated with SAP. It's too expensive, taking to long. We had the micro vertical reaches that could get going quickly. And we collaborated with them and added a few other things they wanted. So that went very well. And kind of, word travels when you come in under budget. (laughter) And one thing led to another. Made a trip to Wichita at their invite, and hit it off very well with Charles Koch. He understood what we did, he's an MIT grad, very technical. So, wasn't sure what I was kind of getting into. But once I started talking to him, he clearly understood everything else. And the more technical the conversation became, the more animated he got. So, clearly he's our kind of guy. We're product people. And so, we hit it off very well. >> And they're becoming a larger customer. You're getting deeper and deeper into that account. But there's an old saying, you know, God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. And so, you guys have emerged as this really viable alternative to SAP and Oracle. But how do you go from where they are to this cloud native platform that you guys have developed? >> Well, it'll be one of the largest global implementations ever. Of any financial project, of any HCM. 130,000 employees, which is great. So a project of that scale, that happens usually top down. When they're invested and ready to go. So they have four members on our board. And including the CFO, including the president of Georgia Pacific, and many other important executives. And so the guys who run the divisions, many of them are on our board and learning this stuff and excited. So they're actually pushing us right now. Which we think is great. We have a weekly cadence call with all these senior execs of all the projects to make sure here's where we are, are you getting what you need, are people responding. I mean, they are driving. These people know how to execute. And that's why they're $115 billion. It's great for us, great for them. They're pushing us. So I'm not too worried about that, given what I've seen so far. >> When you think about the long term strategy of Infor, you're now one of the most well-funded unicorns along with Uber and Air B&B. Where do you go? What do you sort of see as sort of the long term play here? >> Yeah, post world domination? (laughter) Then after that, we have other industries we want to get into. There's a few acquisitions we probably will consider. We want to expand our network. These networks grow up by vertical and by industry. There's a few other vertical we want to get into. But the list of things that we could build and what people are asking us to build is almost endless. You know? And they like the way we do these kind of digital transformation projects. There's lots of those out there. And so, we just want to make sure we have the ecosystem where we can implement. That's why it's so important to get a censure, Cap Jim and I, and Grant Thorton and Deloit, they're all taking training as we speak. Filling out their practices. Which we didn't have a year ago. So, that was our kind of constraint to scaling. We just couldn't take on so many projects. But now we can. >> I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the structure of the industry, the software industry specifically. I mean, you're fairly famous for having sort of predicted consolidation, and then orchestrating that consolidation. Mark Andreson's famous for saying software's eating the world. I think Bennioff said there's going to be more non tech companies that are SAS companies than tech companies. Do you expect we'll just see a sort of de-consolidation of software? Or maybe a bi frication? Where maybe some of the enterprise guys acquire, but there's all these burgeoning, blooming flowers of software companies emerging. What's your point of view on the software industry and its structure? >> I think you'll see more industrial companies wanting to own software. I think you'll see software executives running non software companies. Most companies think they have to get digital. And a lot of the board of directors recognize that and recognize they don't have the expertise to do that. And so a lot of software executives get asked to run non tech companies for that reason. Because you can learn retail faster than they can learn how to program. And if you've been building the applications for those verticals, you actually kind of know the vertical pretty well. So I think you'll see some of these domains over time where people have to become more technology fluent. And the way to do that is to bring in tech people. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you sort of as a follow up on that, you see Amazon buys Whole Foods and is getting into grocery, they're a content company. Apple's get the financial services. And you know it's because of digital. It allows you to sort of jump industry value chains. But for decades, people just stay within their own little value chain silo. Do you expect that to change as well? Where executives are able to traverse industries? >> I think so. Technology is causing that. There's enough disruption and fear where people are willing to consider something completely different than they were before. And that helps us, because usually we need someone to either take an action because they see an opportunity or because they're worried about getting disrupted. That's how these big projects get started. That's part of the reason why our growth is so good right now. >> Is that's what's driving it? Is it the fear of being left behind? >> It's probably equal amount of both. They see opportunity, I should be doing something, but I don't know what. So we have to tell them the what. Or, I'm worried about what everybody else is doing. I don't want to get Ubered out. And we tell them how not to be in that position. So we're getting an audience at senior levels that we couldn't before. Just because it's top of mind for everybody. >> How about, talk about MNA a little bit. And what you look for in an acquisition candidate. You have a platform, that's probably dogmatic about running on that platform. But talk a little but more about what you look for. >> We usually want next generation thinking in a technical platform that we don't have to completely rewrite. Because we don't to kind of pollute our architecture. If it's a modern architecture where we can graph it on to our information OS, as we call it, that's fine. So we don't buy things just for scale. And that was kind of early strategy for the company 10 or 15 years ago. We buy things because it's a specific value proposition for customers or fills a hole we think we need to fill. >> Okay. >> I would rather buy something that is small, maybe not much traction, not much revenue, but a great product. Because we have a huge distribution channel and we can grow it pretty quickly. We can fix all those other problems if the product is there. >> Well, the burst acquisition is very interesting because you saw the ascendancy we were talking about earlier, Rebecca. Saw the ascendancy of tableau, and Christian Chabeau, very articulate, would talk about the slow BI companies and really de positioning them. You're positioning is actually quite compelling. Not the old, takes forever to build a cube. And not the lightweight version of just a visualization. You're sort of the best of both worlds. Maybe unpack that a little bit. >> Yeah, that's the attractions we saw in Berson's. You need some of those enterprise features to understand fragmented and enterprise scale data. That's a hard problem. Having a nice desktop tool that can only handle a single table or gives you conflicting information so you can't have any semantic meaning across different data sources. It's nice to get answers quickly, but if they're wrong, that doesn't help you. So, we need somebody who could handle the back end. Our customers were asking us to do that. They want us to be the analytic layer, a system of record for analytics, because other companies don't want to do that. SAP or Oracle will say, just use all my stuff. I don't want to connect to anybody else. And we know that we have to coexist. And if we can build that analytic layer, we think that's strategic high ground. Let's own that. And if we can replace some of the underlying systems later, great. You know? >> I was just going to talk about, I was going to switch gears entirely and talk a little bit about politics. Before the cameras were rolling, you were on Obama's economic recovery board, which was led by Paul Volker. You've been to Washington, met with Trump, met with Pence. I'm curious about how you view the roll of business in advising government. In which directions to take, and the approach. >> I think it's increasingly important in a sense that, especially with the current administration, they should respect business opinion. Because he's a business guy. Secondly, so many of our institutions people don't trust any more. THey've kind of lost some of that credibility. I hope we can turn that around. But in the interim, we have to have other people who can fill in for some of that. And, especially tech companies. People want to know what tech companies think. And so, I think we almost have a duty to try to fill in some of that. And every part of the economy and the government has been effected by technology. They want to understand it. We can help them do that. >> And so many of your customers are in fact municipalities, and cities, and public school systems. >> That's a good point. We have 1500 state and local governments and federal customers. And that's a fast growing part of our business right now. And we're rooting a lot of federal agencies as we speak. Because they're going through an upgrade cycle as well. Something called Fed Round they have to get certified in. And they want to move to the cloud. And we're doing both of those with them. >> Now, you also talked about how you see technology executives perhaps moving into other industries. Do you see them also moving into public service? Do you see that as a possibility? >> That's going to take longer. That's probably later in their careers because of the economics of that. But every now and then, you'll see one do it, yeah. >> So, a question on cloud. It was almost by necessity, I would argue, that you gravitated toward AWS. Smart move. Others have said, you know, Oracle in particular, we're going to own the whole stack. We can make a lot of money owning the whole stack. If you had to do it again, would you pursue that same strategy, and why? >> Well, when we got there, the company was just trying to build a cloud business. We were doing it traditional. Trying to own data centers and, you know, doing data sharing. We could have done that and continued with that over time. But I just thought it wouldn't provide the elastic compute and the scale of data management that I thought was coming. We looked at all the platforms that we out there at the time. We met with Microsoft, IBM, you name it. And at the time, AWS was just so much further along in terms of services available, capabilities, entrepreneurial spirit, scale, it wasn't even close. In our minds, anyway. And so, they were great partners to work with. For us, it's been the right decision. They've helped us a lot. >> Yeah, and seeing your arc as maybe a question. But you're pretty technical. Maybe a better question for Duncan or Soma, but I'll ask you. Because you're more technical than I am. When you look at your architecture slides, there's a lot of Amazon in there. >> There is, yeah. >> There's like this dynamo dv, looks like some kineses, there's S3, there's all kinds of flywheel oriented tech. I wonder if you could sort of elaborate on that in terms of the impact that that has not only on you, but ultimately on your customers. >> Yeah, no. That was by design, by my direction. I wanted to take advantage of every single serviture we could on AWS. Because every time we do that, that's less work for my developers. I don't want them to worried about infrastructure. Just write the application and be an industry expert. So any time they come out with a new service, you name it. Whether it's Promethium, archiving, backup. We were one of the early customers of RedShip. We take advantage of it. Because it's cheaper for us to do it that way and we get the scale that we need. And we get it in multiple countries. So when any other strategy than that, we have to replicate things in multiple places and we have to figure out how to make it work on AWS. >> And I know we're limited on time, but if software's eating the world, software's going to eat the edge. So talk about your edge strategy. >> Well, it depends on what you mean by edge strategy. I think that software eating the world is true. Maybe it's helping the world, is a better way to put it. But almost every product that we see its inside of now. That's actually good for us, being the largest vendor for asset management. Every IOT company is coming to us because all that data is meaningless unless you can generate a work order or requisition and get something fixed, schedule someone to come. That's what we do. So all of that data needs to end up on a repository. That can effect the business process. And we own that business process. >> Well, something that we've said on the Cube since the early days of so-called big data is the practitioners of big data are the guys who are going to do well. It's not necessarily the guys selling big data infrastructure. And that's proven true. You guys never talked ever, I don't think, about big data. But you're a data company now, first. >> Yeah, and we've collected a lot more data than we ever thought we would. And so, now we've got to figure out how to use that. >> How to parse it, how to use it. >> Exactly. Which is why we added the next two layers of that stack. >> That will be next year's summit. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Next year's Inforum. Well, Charles Phillips, thanks so much for joining us. It was a pleasure. >> Great. Thanks you guys. >> See ya, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Valante, we will have more from the Cube's coverage of Inforum after this. (upbeat music)