(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C., it's TheCUBE. Covering InForum, D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, good morning and welcome to day two here on theCUBE at Inforum 2018. We are in the nation's capital, the Walter Washington Convention Center, and thank goodness the sun's come out today. Everybody's got big smile and cheery faces, it's good to see. Dave Vellante, John Walls here. We're just on top of the show floor. You'll see a lot of activity a little bit later on in the day. And it's a pleasure to welcome our first guest of the day, Billy Southerland who's the CEO of IronRoad. Billy, good morning to you. >> Good morning, thank you guys for having me on. >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> How's the show been for you so far? >> It's been great. Yeah, it's been great. Outside of the fact that we got bumped from our hotel when we first showed up so (chuckles) No, but show's been fantastic, always great to network, learn what other folks have going on and yeah, been phenomenal. >> Tell us about IronRoad. What you do and why you're here. >> Yeah, so we're an HR and outsourcing company. And we've been doing HR and payroll since 1997. Company started really just with an idea. So as we have grown through the years, working with mostly small to medium size businesses, we had an opportunity with Infor just a couple years ago to partner with them on the payroll side of things. And so it's been a new opportunity for us, one that our team is incredibly excited about. Just great opportunity to partner with some phenomenal software and so yeah, that's-- >> So, services that you guys provide, so HR, payroll, you've got a portal, onboarding. Take us through that. Is that full suite of-- full complement of services? >> It is, yeah. So our typical client is a smaller to medium sized employer and we'll go in and so many of the things that they've got to do internally that have nothing to do with why they got into business, they can outsource to us. So, anything from the beginning to the end of an employee's life cycle is what we manage. You name it and we do it for them so that they can go and focus on what they do. >> So let me probe that a little bit. So if I have-- let's say I have an HR issue with an employee. Maybe they're a little older and I'm concerned that I am going through the right steps giving that employee the right guidance. I don't want to expose my company to any lawsuits or whatever. Can I call you up and say, hey, give me some guidance on how I should handle this from an HR perspective? What do I have to document? You would help me with that? >> David, that's the perfect example, right? And so the whole liability of being an employer is something that they can share with us, right? So, somebody that focuses on HR knows those laws and rules and regs. They can pick up the phone, they call us, they say, hey Billy, got an issue, can you come out? One of our folks will go out, consult with them, make sure that everything's documented, managed properly. And yeah, that's exactly what we would do. >> Okay, so with healthcare compliance, Obamacare, PTO policies. I'm a small company. I want to make sure that I'm not killing my cash flow with balance sheets stuff. I mean all that stuff, you can help with? >> You got it. Yeah, absolutely. You bring up healthcare. I don't know any employee, employer regardless of the size who's not dealing with that, right? So the whole ACA compliance with Obamacare has been a tremendous boom for our business because people are looking left and right, how do we deal with this? What do we do? It's so complex for them, they're looking for experts to manage it. >> I mean that's kind of the tip of the spear. That's why, particularly small, mid-size businesses, it's healthcare first because it's so expensive and it's so important to the employees, right? >> It is, yeah and I would say most folks that we deal with it's number two line item right after payroll, right? I mean they're dealing with healthcare and everybody's looking for answers. It's like, how do we do this? And the employees are asking the same question, right? And they're looking at the employers saying, give me a solution. There is no real solution outside of being able to maybe aggregate with some other smaller employers so we can go to the large healthcare companies that are out there and say, okay I tell you what, we got about 5,000 people here now. What do you think about our buying power at this point? >> You get some scale and then do the works. >> That's it, you just scale it, exactly right. >> Okay, 1997. Well, first of all, you're Cincinnati-based, I'll come back and talk about that. But 1997, just coming into the dot come boom, the state of software was, back then PeopleSoft was the gold standard. There was no cloud, really, you had these software companies doing, forget what they even called it now, but it was like software as a service pre-SAS. Kind of clunky software and now you fast-forward to today, you know, you're all cloud, you're agile but so how'd you get started? Take us through kind of the technology progression. >> Yeah, so the start was an interesting one. I wish we could tell you we had a great idea but it was a complete accident, right? We were trying to, I was trying to help out two different friends who were in two separate businesses. They both had done extremely well in their separate businesses. So they started what is now IronRoad and after about 12 months, both of them had done so well in their other businesses, they looked at each and said, they each thought the other one was going to be pulling the wagon, right? And so neither one of them wanted to do it. So one of the guys came to me and said, hey Billy, you want to buy 50% of this? And I said, well, what is it? And he explained it to me and I said, I love this concept, it's a great idea. And so I said, how much? He said, $8,000. (laughing) >> It's like a lawnmower. >> I bought half a lawnmower, right? >> Such a great idea, you sure you don't want to charge more? >> Yeah, I said, $8,000? But he had no clients, right? They had a little bit of software that they purchased to be able to do the payroll. So that's really where we started. So kind of caveman like you said, David. And so-- >> What's your client base now? What do you have? >> So we're using the Infor Cloud base. The human management capital system. >> As far as the number of organizations that you're serving. How have you grown the business? >> Pardon. Yeah, so you know really, it's just been good old-fashioned hard work for us. We've not made any purchases, no acquisitions. And so we got some amazing people that have a real passion about what we do and we do it really well. The differentiator between us and some of the big guys that are out there really is our people. Your people talk about that but our people are really focused on it. So you know-- and pretty soon, that reputation begins to spread. Like you said, we're in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently we're operating in 38 different states. So little bit at a time, year after year, we've been digging and digging and digging. In regards to the question you asked, David, right? So we start with the lawnmower and here we end up sitting with you guys talking about Infor and this cloud-based suite that we've been able to manage and bring in and so really exciting for somebody like us. >> So talk a little bit more about the CloudSuite, how you use it, how you use it to differentiate from the competition, you know why it's maybe better than some of the other alternatives you see? >> That's a great question. Because most our businesses' professional employer organization. Most of the PEO softwares are fairly limited in what they can offer the employers that they're working with. And so we vetted, we had Anka Kalp... Our CIO was vetting five different systems a couple years ago. And in the midst of vetting those five different systems, we were introduced to Infor, right? As we began to see what this software could do, we started getting really excited. You talk about a differentiator in the workplace, nobody else has it, right? And so we started learning more and more the human capital management system for us, we started thinking, man if we could take this to employees-- employers, that have anywhere between 500 and 5,000 employees, this is a real differentiator for us, right? And so nope, like I said, nobody else in the PEO space has this software and it's been a tremendous opportunity for us to take to the marketplace. >> So that's kind of your sweet spot, 500 to 5,000? So not under 100, right? True SMB is kind of not your sweet spot? >> Well, actually we'll go all the way down to 20 employees. But the 20 employer companies, the resources that they have internally to be able to integrate the systems is a little more challenging. But we get it done. And so anywhere between 20 and probably 5,000 employees are the typical employer that we're working with. >> So what kind of integration items does a customer have to think about, specifically? >> So by integration-- >> You said, small companies don't have the resources to do the integration so what has to be done to do that integration? >> Yeah, so it's a lot of lifting, right? I mean, there's lots of work to be able to establish the systems with the employers that we're taking, you know, the software to. Just a lot of hands on between IronRoad and the companies that we're dealing with so the smaller companies are really focused on, you know, going out and doing whatever it is whether they're contractor, doctor's office. So to be able to have a resource that can dedicate the time, to be able to activate the system and make it do what they want it to do is somewhat challenging for the smaller employers. >> But wouldn't they have to do that with any outsource HR provider? >> They would. They may not be able-- they probably are not taking the software to the depth of its utilization or potential utilization. So they're kind of doing without it. >> So the bigger guy's getting more business value out of your offer. >> There's no doubt about it or the smaller guys, it just takes a little bit longer to get 'em there. That's really the challenge. They both get the same value, just takes a little bit longer. >> 21 years you been doing this. So, you've obviously seen business change. >> Not that old, I don't know how that happened. >> Well, you started very young. (laughing) >> I'm glad you said that. I wondered why they skipped me with the makeup. I thank you guys. >> Don't need it. We do. (laughs) So you been 21 years. >> Yes. >> So you've seen business change, right? >> Yes. >> You've seen technology change, right? >> Oof, night and day. >> So where now? Where are the pain points now? Because it seems like, oh we've solved all these problems, right? Automation, things are much easier. Well, there's always a, yeah, but. So what's the but now for your folks? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us in our industry is getting the message out. When we look at PEOs in Ohio, for example, about 2% of the workforce is working with the PEO. Because they're so few of 'em out there doing it really well, getting that message out to the employer because once we get 'em, once they come in and they see, you know you said they got to do this if they're outsourcing HR anyhow. Once they become aware of what's available to them, they don't leave, right? >> So their pain's still the same. >> Pain's still the same. >> You're just trying to get out, to let them know, you can help. >> That's it, that's it. I think that's probably our biggest pain point is how do you get this message out and different parts of the country, obviously, you've got different attitudes towards or people move at different paces. In Ohio, there's still, I'm looking at David saying, what is PEO? I've never heard of it. I don't know if I trust you. And so overcoming that is probably our biggest obstacle. >> Billy, you talk a little bit about Infor, it's products. If I understand it correctly, you're both a consumer and essentially a reseller of the services, which means you're running on the Amazon Cloud so talk about your relationship there, why Infor, why the product, how does it compare? Because you probably evaluated everything. >> We did, yeah. Yeah, we did. You know, for us, like I said, we vetted five different companies that we were looking at. And when we had a chance to look at the Infor proposal, the differentiator for us not only was the software, from our perspective, far and above better than anything else that we were looking at. They provided us with an opportunity since we were purchasing the software to be able to provide an in-tenant solution for current clients that Infor has. So an Infor client that looks at the software and says, hey, I want this, and yet they're still outsourcing their payroll, now has the ability to buy the software and outsource the payroll to IronRoad. And so you're taking the best in class cloud suite services from a human capital management system to the marketplace. And partnering with a company like Infor that really is a dream come true for us. >> So what makes it best in class? I mean, you know, Oracle's got good software. You got SAP out there, Workday's the hot company. Why is Infor, you said, better? Why is it better? >> Yeah, I think for us, just the ease of the employer being able to utilize the system. You can have the best thing in the world and people are people are people are people, right? They got to be able to get on there and use the stuff. And so I think the ease of being able to just the user-friendly side of what Infor does. They certainly have every option you can imagine. The capability, the software is as good, if not better, than any. But the ability for people to pick it up quickly and be able to use and make it real for their small business, to me that's the key, right? >> Was the use of AWS Cloud a factor? >> Um... >> Was that kind of transparent to you? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not really. Yeah, yeah. >> Is there an aha moment when you're out there when you are pitching? And when you look up people and the processes they go through and they been doing it the same way for decades? So when you break through, how do you know you've broken through? What is it that you use to break through? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah and for them, once we're able to articulate what this system actually does, there is an aha moment. And it's almost disbelief. It's because there's so many years of doing it the old way, right? And then they look and see it's kind of like me looking at the software that your company's created that was phenomenal, right? They're looking at it and go, come on, really? It really does that? And it's, yeah, it really does that. (chuckles) And we can do this different and you can go sell more widgets, right? >> Showing Billy our video search software, so I appreciate that. >> Amazing! I mean, it's unbelievable. >> It is. >> Yeah, Star Trek. >> So I want to ask-- >> Baiting myself. >> We're all in the same boat. >> I want to ask you about the resources that are required for you to do integration with Infor. Actually, so outside funding, other than the $8,000 that you put in, have you guys raised outside funding? >> David, that was a lot of money at the time, man. >> Yeah, no doubt. >> (laughs) A lot of money. >> You could do a lot with $8,000, but you can't build a full software suite so have you taken outside capital, or? >> We haven't. >> So, self-funded. >> Yeah, we're self-funded and frankly, fortunately, we've been able to manage through it. This partnership with Infor for us is a big big step for us, right? But at this point, we've been able to manage that without any funding outside and... >> Okay so it's not like an intense engineering effort, right? You're turnkey-ing this stuff largely. So you put more of your effort on onboarding clients from what I understand, right? >> Right and working with other Infor partners. Bails, for example, was our implementation manager and so our folks working with Bails to make sure because we've got hundreds of clients that in lots of different industries that we've got to go out and roll this implementation out into, right? And so it's a little different than the typical Infor arrangement because they're so many different industries represented just through IronRoad. >> And you guys dog food this? They don't like when I say dog food. Do you drink your own champagne? So you're utilizing your-- >> Much better. (chuckles) >> You're utilizing the Infor software in-house, correct? >> We are, we are, yeah, yeah. If, you know, from an implementation standpoint, easy to do that, right? You have somebody like Bails and Cyndian that has helped us, phenomenal at what they do, great partners for Infor. But then we've got to turn around and take that out to hundreds of different employers. So scaling that is a bit of a challenge. And again, depending upon the amount of resources that the different clients have, which all changes depending upon their size. But it's been great, yeah. So far so good, thank you so much Yeah, appreciate it. >> Well, Billy thanks for your time. We do appreciate it and I assume at Cincinnati, that you might be one of those long-suffering Bengals fans. >> Hey, time out! Hey, two in one. >> I know. >> Two in one, Andy Dalton. We're not big Carolina fans right now. >> One in two here in New England. >> You guys are trouble. >> Well, we'll see after this week. >> The 40-something maybe hit the big Tom. >> Alright. That discussion to continue off the air. Billy Southerland, IronRoad CEO. >> Thank you guys so much, yeah, enjoyed it. >> We'll continue. We are live here in Washington D.C. at Inforum 2018. Back with more on theCUBE in just a bit. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, welcome back. We are here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us here as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 18. We're in Washington D.C., at the Walter Washington Convention Center. I'm John Walls, with Dave Vellante and we're joined now by Rahul Pathak, who is the G.M. at Amazon Athena and Amazon EMR. >> Hey there. Rahul, nice to see you, sir. >> Nice to see you as well. Thanks for having me. >> Thank you for being with us, um, now you spoke earlier, at the executive forum, and, um, wanted to talk to you about the title of the presentation. It was Datalinks and Analytics: the Coming Wave of Brilliance. Alright, so tell me about the title, but more about the talk, too. >> Sure. Uh, so the talk was really about a set of components and a set of transdriving data lake adoption and then how we partner with Infor to allow Infor to provide a data lake that's customized for their vertical lines of business to their customers. And I think part of the notion is that we're coming from a world where customers had to decide what data they could keep, because their systems were expensive. Now, moving to a world of data lakes where storage and analytics is a much lower cost and so customers don't have to make decisions about what data to throw away. They can keep it all and then decide what's valuable later. So we believe we're in this transition, an inflection point where you'll see a lot more insights possible, with a lot of novel types of analytics, much more so than we could do, uh, to this point. >> That's the brilliance. That's the brilliance of it. >> Right. >> Right? Opportunity to leverage... >> To do more. >> Like, that you never could before. >> Exactly. >> I'm sorry, Dave. >> No, no. That's okay. So, if you think about the phases of so called 'big data,' you know, the.... We went from, sort of, EDW to cheaper... >> (laughs) Sure. >> Data warehouses that were distributed, right? And this guy always joked that the ROI of a dupe was reduction of investment, and that's what it became. And as a result, a lot of the so-called data lakes just became stagnant, and so then you had a whole slew of companies that emerged trying to get, sort of, clean up the swamp, so to speak. Um, you guys provide services and tools, so you're like "Okay guys, here it is. We're going to make it easier for you." One of the challenges that Hadoop and big data generally had was the complexity, and so, what we noticed was the cloud guys--not just AWS, but in particular AWS really started to bring in tooling that simplified the effort around big data. >> Right. >> So fast-forward to today, and now we're at the point of trying to get insights-- data's plentiful,insights aren't. Um, bring us up to speed on Amazon's big data strategy, the status, what customers are doing. Where are we at in those waves? >> Uh, it's a big question, but yeah, absolutely. So... >> It's a John Furrier question. (laughter) So what we're seeing is this transition from sort of classic EDW to S3 based data lakes. S3's our Amazon storage service, and it's really been foundational for customers. And what customers are doing is they're bringing their data to S3 and open data formats. EDWs still have a role to play. And then we offer services that make it easy to catalog and transform the data in S3, as well as the data in customer databases and data warehouses, and then make that available for systems to drive insight. And, when I talk about that, what I mean is, we have the classic reporting and visualization use cases, but increasingly we're seeing a lot more real time event processing, and so we have services like Kinesis Analytics that makes it easy to run real time queries on data as it's moving. And then we're seeing the integration of machine learning into the stacks. Once you've got data in S3, it's available to all of these different analytic services simultaneously, and so now you're able to run your reporting, your real time processing, but also now use machine learning to make predictive analytics and decisions. And then I would say a fourth piece of this is there's really been, with machine learning and deep learning and embedding them in developer services, there's now been a way to get at data that was historically opaque. So, if you had an audio recording of a social support call, you can now put it through a service that will actually transcribe it, tell you the sentiment in the call and that becomes data that you can then track and measure and report against. So, there's been this real explosion in capability and flexibility. And what we've tried to do at AWS is provide managed services to customers, so that they can assemble sophisticated applications out of building blocks that make each of these components easier, and, that focus on being best of breed in their particular use case. >> And you're responsible for EMR, correct? >> Uh, so I own a few of these, EMR, Athena and Glue. And, uh, really these are... EMR's Open Source, Spark and Hadoop, um, with customized clusters that upbraid directly against S3 data lakes, so no need to load in HDFS, so you avoid that staleness point that you mentioned. And then, Athena is a serverless sequel NS3, so you can let any analyst log in, just get a sequel prompt and run a query. And then Glue is for cataloging the data in your data lake and databases, and for running transformations to get data from raw form into an efficient form for querying, typically. >> So, EMR is really the first service, if I recall, right? The sort of first big data service-- >> That's right. >> -that you offered, right? And, as you say, you really begin to simplify for customers, because the dupe complexity was just unwieldy, and the momentum is still there with EMR? Are people looking for alternatives? Sounds like it's still a linchpin of the strategy? >> No, absolutely. I mean, I think what we've seen is, um, customers bring data to S3, they will then use a service, like Redshift, for petabyte scale data warehousing, they'll use EMR for really arbitrary analytics, using opensource technologies, and then they'll use Athena for broad data lake query and access. So these things are all very much complimentary, uh, to each other. >> How do you define, just the concept of data lakes, uh, versus other approaches to clients? And trying to explain to them, you know, the value and the use for them, uh, I guess ultimately how they can best leverage it for their purposes? How do you walk them through that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, there's, um. You know, that starts from the principles around how data is changing. So before we used to have, typically, tabular data coming out of ERP systems, or CRM systems, going into data warehouses. Now we're seeing a lot more variety of data. So, you might have tweets, you might have JSON events, you might have log events, real time data. And these don't fit traditional... well into the traditional relational tabular model, ah, so what data lakes allow you to do is, you can actually keep both types of the data. You can keep your tabular data indirectly in your data lake and you can bring in these new types of data, the semi-structured or the unstructured data sets. And they can all live in the data lake. And the key is to catalog that all so you know what you have and then figure out how to get that catalog visible to the analytic layer. And so the value becomes you can actually now keep all your data. You don't have to make decisions about it a priori about what's going to be valuable or what format it's going to be useful in. And you don't have to throw away data, because it's expensive to store it in traditional systems. And this gives you the ability then to replay the past when you develop better ideas in the future about how to leverage that data. Ah, so there's a benefit to being able to store everything. And then I would say the third big benefit is around um, by placing data and data lakes in open data formats, whether that's CSV or JSON or a more efficient formats, that allows customers to take advantage of best of breed analytics technology at any point in time without having to replatform their data. So you get this technical agility that's really powerful for customers, because capabilities evolve over time, constantly, and so, being in a position to take advantage of them easily is a real competitive advantage for customers. >> I want to get to Infor, but this is so much fun, I have some other questions, because Amazon's such a force in this space. Um, when you think about things like Redshift, S3, Pedisys, DynamoDB...we're a customer, these are all tools we're using. Aurora. Um, the data pipeline starts to get very complex, and the great thing about AWS is I get, you know, API access to each of those and Primitive access. The drawback is, it starts to get complicated, my data pipeline gets elongated and I'm not sure whether I should run it on this service or that service until I get my bill at the end of the month. So, are there things you're doing to help... First of all, is that a valid concern of customers and what are you doing to help customers in that regard? >> Yeah, so, we do provide a lot of capability and I think our core idea is to provide the best tool for the job, with APIs to access them and combine them and compose them. So, what we're trying to do to help simplify this is A) build in more proscriptive guidance into our services about look, if you're trying to do x, here's the right way to do x, at least the right way to start with x and then we can evolve and adapt. Uh, we're also working hard with things like blogs and solution templates and cloud formation templates to automatically stand up environments, and then, the third piece is we're trying to bring in automation and machine learning to simplify the creation of these data pipelines. So, Glue for example. When you put data in S3, it will actually crawl it on your behalf and infer its structure and store that structure in a catalog and then once you've got a source table, and a destination table, you can point those out and Glue will then automatically generate a pipeline for you to go from A to B, that you can then edit or store in version control. So we're trying to make these capabilities easier to access and provide more guidance, so that you can actually get up and running more quickly, without giving up the power that comes from having the granular access. >> That's a great answer. Because the granularity's critical, because it allows you, as the market changes, it allows you... >> To adapt. To move fast, right? And so you don't want to give that up, but at the same time, you're bringing in complexity and you just, I think, answered it well, in terms of how you're trying to simplify that. The strategy's obviously worked very well. Okay, let's talk about Infor now. Here's a big ISP partner. They've got the engineering resources to deal with all this stuff, and they really seem to have taken advantage of it. We were talking earlier, that, I don't know if you heard Charles's keynote this morning, but he said, when we were an on prem software company, we didn't manage customer servers for them. Back then, the server was the server, uh software companies didn't care about the server infrastructure. Today it's different. It's like the cloud is giving Infor strategic advantage. The flywheel effect that you guys talk about spins off innovation that they can exploit in new ways. So talk about your relationship with Infor, and kind of the history of where it's come and where it's going. >> Sure. So, Infor's a great partner. We've been a partner for over four years, they're one of our first all-in partners, and we have a great working relationship with them. They're sophisticated. They understand our services well. And we collaborate on identifying ways that we can make our services better for their use cases. And what they've been able to do is take all of the years of industry and domain expertise that they've gained over time in their vertical segments, and with their customers, and bring that to bear by using the components that we provide in the cloud. So all these services that I mentioned, the global footprint, the security capabilities, the, um, all of the various compliance certifications that we offer act as accelerators for what Infor's trying to do, and then they're able to leverage their intellectual property and their relationships and experience they've built up over time to get this global footprint that they can deploy for their customers, that gets better over time as we add new capabilities, they can build that into the Infor platform, and then that rolls out to all of their customers much more quickly than it could before. >> And they seem to be really driving hard, I have not heard an enterprise software company talk so much about data, and how they're exploiting data, the way that I've heard Infor talk about it. So, data's obviously key, it's the lifeblood-- people say it's the new oil--I'm not sure that's the best analogy. I can only put oil in my house or my car, I can't put it in both. Data--I can do so many things with it, so, um... >> I suspect that analogy will evolve. >> I think it should. >> I'm already thinking about it now. >> You heard it here first in the Cube. >> You keep going, I'll come up with something >> Don't use that anymore. >> Scratch the oil. >> Okay, so, your perspectives on Infor, it's sort of use of data and what Amazon's role is in terms of facilitating that. >> So what we're providing is a platform, a set of services with powerful building blocks, that Infor can then combine into their applications that match the needs of their customers. And so what we're looking to do is give them a broad set of capabilities, that they can build into their offerings. So, CloudSuite is built entirely on us, and then Infor OS is a shared set of services and part of that is their data lake, which uses a number of our analytic services underneath. And so, what Infor's able to do for their customers is break down data silos within their customer organizations and provide a common way to think about data and machine learning and IoT applications across data in the data lake. And we view our role as really a supporting partner for them in providing a set of capabilities that they can then use to scale and grow and deploy their applications. >> I want to ask you about--I mean, security-- I've always been comfortable with cloud security, maybe I'm naive--but compliance is something that's interesting and something you said before... I think you said cataloging Glue allows you to essentially keep all the data, right? And my concern about that is, from a governance perspective, the legal counsel might say, "Well, I don't "want to keep all my data, if it's work in process, "I want to get rid of it "or if there's a smoking gun in there, "I want to get rid of it as soon as I can." Keep data as long as possible but no longer, to sort of paraphrase Einstein. So, what do you say to that? Do you have customers in the legal office that say, "Hey, we don't want to keep data forever, "and how can you help?" >> Yeah, so, just to refine the point on Glue. What Glue does is it gives you essentially a catalog, which is a map of all your data. Whether you choose to keep that data or not keep that data, that's a function of the application. So, absolutely >> Sure. Right. We have customers that say, "Look, here are my data sets for "whether it's new regulations, or I just don't want this "set of data to exist anymore, or this customer's no longer with us and we need to delete that," we provide all of those capabilities. So, our goal is to really give customers the set of features, functionality, and compliance certifications they need to express the enterprise security policies that they have, and ensure that they're complying with them. And, so, then if you have data sets that need to be deleted, we provide capabilities to do that. And then the other side of that is you want the audit capabilities, so we actually log every API access in the environment in a service called CloudTrail and then you can actually verify by going back and looking at CloudTrail that only the things that you wanted to have happen, actually did happen. >> So, you seem very relaxed. I have to ask you what life is like at Amazon, because when I was down at AWS's D.C. offices, and you walk in there, and there's this huge-- I don't know if you've seen it-- there's this giant graph of the services launched and announced, from 2006, when EC2 first came out, til today. And it's just this ridiculous set of services. I mean the line, the graph is amazing. So you're moving at this super, hyper pace. What's life like at AWS? >> You know, I've been there almost seven years. I love it. It's been fantastic. I was an entrepreneur and came out of startups before AWS, and when I joined, I found an environment where you can continue to be entrepreneurial and active on behalf of you customers, but you have the ability to have impact at a global scale. So it's been super fun. The pace is fast, but exhilarating. We're working on things we're excited about, and we're working on things that we believe matter, and make a difference to our customers. So, it's been really fun. >> Well, so you got--I mean, you're right at the heart of what I like to call the innovation sandwich. You've got data, tons of data, obviously, in the cloud. You're a leader and increasingly becoming sophisticated in machine intelligence. So you've got data, machine intelligence, or AI, applied to that data, and you've got cloud for scale, cloud for economics, cloud for innovation, you're able to attract startups--that's probably how you found AWS to begin with, right? >> That's right. >> All the startups, including ours, we want to be on AWS. That's where the developers want to be. And so, again, it's an overused word, but that flywheel of innovation occurs. And that to us is the innovation sandwich, it's not Moore's Law anymore, right? For decades this industry marched to the cadence of Moore's Law. Now it's a much more multi-dimensional matrix and it's exciting and sometimes scary. >> Yeah. No, I think you touched on a lot of great points. It's really fun. I mean, I think, for us, the core is, we want to put things together the customers want. We want to make them broadly available. We want to partner with our customers to understand what's working and what's not. We want to pass on efficiencies when we can and then that helps us speed up the cycle of learning. >> Well, Rahul, I actually was going to say, I think he's so relaxed because he's on theCUBE. >> Ah, could be. >> Right, that's it. We just like to do that with people. >> No, you're fantastic. >> Thanks for being with us. >> It's a pleasure. >> We appreciate the insights, and we certainly wish you well with the rest of the show here. >> Excellent. Thank you very much, it was great to be here. >> Thank you, sir. >> You're welcome. >> You're watching theCUBE. We are live here in Washington, D.C. at Inforum 18. (techno music)

(fun, relaxing 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 2017, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Stephan Scholl, he is the president of Infor. Thanks so much for joining us. >> My pleasure. >> For returning to The Cube My pleasure, yeah, three years in a row, I think, or four now, yeah. >> Indeed. >> Well, we skipped a year in-between. >> That's right! Three years. Anyway, it's good to be here. >> This has been a hugely successful conference. We're hearing so much about the growth and momentum of Infor. Can you unpack this a little bit for our viewers? >> Yeah, I mean... People always forget, we only started this aggressive Cloud journey literally three years ago. When we announced at Inforum in New Orleans that we were pivoting the company to Infor industry-based CloudSuites, everybody looked at us and said, "Well, that's an interesting pivot." "Why are you doing that?" Well, as I said yesterday, we really saw a market dynamic that you see retail just getting crushed by what Amazon was doing, and it was obvious, today, but then it wasn't so obvious, but that was going to happen everywhere, and so we really got aggressive on believing we could put together a very different approach to tackling enterprise software. Everybody is so fatigued from buying from our competitors traditional, perpetual software, and then you end up modifying the hell out of it, and then you end up spending a gazillion dollars, and it takes forever, and then if it does work, you're stuck on old technology already, and you never get to the next round of evolution. So we said why don't we build CloudSuites, take the last model industry functionality that we have, put it in a Cloud, make it easy for our customers to implement it, and then we'll run it for them. And then, by the way, when the newest innovation comes up, we'll upgrade them automatically. That's what Cloud's about. So, that's where we saw that transformation happening. So in three years, we went from two percent, as I said, to 55 plus percent of our revenue. And, by the way, we're not a small company. Nobody at our size and scale has ever done that in enterprise software. So what an accomplishment. >> So a lot of large companies, some that you used to work for, are really slow. And, you know what, lot of times that's okay, 'cause IT tends to be really slow, as you move to the Cloud, and move to the situation where, "Okay, guys, new release coming!" What are your customers saying about that, how are you managing that sort of pace of change, that flywheel of Amazon, and you're now innovating on and pushing to your climate? >> Well, they're excited. And, I'll tell you, I remember standing up in Frankfurt, Germany, 18 months ago for a keynote, and said the Cloud is coming, I almost got kicked out of Germany. (laughing) They said it's not going to happen in Germany, "No, we're an engineering pedigree," "We're going to be on premise." >> "You don't understand the German market!" >> "You don't understand our marketplace!" And, we're really close friends with Andy Jassy at AWS, the CEO. The AWS guys are unbelievable, and innovative, and we said, "You know, you guys got to build" "your next data center in Frankfurt." So they put hundreds of millions of dollars investment in, built a data center. What's the fastest growing data center in Europe, right now, for them? Frankfurt! The German market, for us, our pipeline is tenfold increase from what it was a year ago. So, it's working in Germany, and it's happening on a global basis, we have, I think yesterday 75 customers from Saudi, from Dubai, from all the Middle East. Cloud is a great equalizer. And don't underestimate... I'll take luck to our advantage anytime. The luck part is, there's fatigue out there, they're exhausted, they've spent so much money over the last 20, 30 years, and never reached the promise of what they were sold then, and so now, with all the digital disruption, I think of the business competitive challenges that they have to deal with. I mean, I don't care, you could be in Wichita, Kansas building up an e-commerce website, and compete with a company in Saudi tomorrow. The barest entry in manufacturing, retail, look at government agencies, we're doing nine-figure transformations in the Cloud with public sector agencies. Again, two years ago, they would've said never going to happen. >> Rebecca: Yet the government does spend that kind of... >> Mike Rogers, the CIO, was saying to us, "Look at all the technical debt" "that we've accumulated over the years," "and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse." "If we don't bite the bullet and move now," "it's just going to take that much longer." >> That's right. And they're leap-frogging. I mean, I'm so excited, government agencies! I mean, there's even some edicts in some places where Cloud-only. I mean, this whole Gold Coast opportunity, 40 plus different applications in Australia, all going into the Cloud to handle all the complexities they have around the commonwealth games that they're trying to deal with. I mean, just huge transformations on a global basis. >> At this conference, we're hearing about so many different companies, and, as you said, government agencies, municipalalities, transforming their business models, transforming their approaches. What are some of your favorite transformation stories? >> My favorite one that we're doing is Travis Perkins. John Carter, I think you guys maybe even interviewed him last year when he was here. CEO. Old, staid distribution business, and taking a whole new fresh approach. Undoing 40 to 50 different applications, taking his entire business, putting it online. He deals with contracts... So, they're the Home Depot of the UK market, and right now, if you drive up into that car port and you want to order something, it's manual! Sticky notes, phones, dumb terminals, I need five windows, I need five roofs, I need five pieces of wood. Everything is just a scurry. He wants to put it on, when you drive up next year, you're on an iPad, what would you like? Oh, by the way, you want to make a custom order on that window frame? You want to make green, yellow, red, you want to order different tiles of roof styling? Custom orders is the future! You, as a contractor, walking into that organization, want to make a custom order. That, today, is very complicated for a company like that to handle. So, the future is about undoing all that, embracing the custom order process, giving you a really unique, touchless buying process, where it's all on an iPad, it's all automated. You know what? Telling you here's your five new windows, here's a new frame want on it, and, by the way, you're going to get it in five days, and three hours, and 21 minutes. Deliver it to your door. And, by the way, these guys are huge. They're one of the biggest distribution companies in all of the United Kingdom, and so that's one of my favorite stories. >> Can we go over some of the metrics that you've been sharing. I know it's somewhat repetitive, but I'd like to get it on-record. There's 55%, 84, 88, over 1100, 3x, 60%, maybe start with the 60%. I think it's bookings grown, right? >> That's right, yeah. License sales growth last year alone. And, you know what, I looked at... You know, I see it, Paul always keeps me honest, but I think I can say it anyways, which is, I looked at everybody else. You look at the... I don't want you to mention any competitors' names, but you look at the top five competitors that we have, we grew faster than they did last year on sales of CloudSuite. >> Dave: Okay, so that's 60% bookings growth on Cloud. >> Correct. That's right. Yeah, I mean, when you think of our competitors, I saw 40s, I saw some 30s, I saw maybe 52 at the next one down. So, people don't think of us that way, so we were, at the enterprise scale, the fastest-growing Cloud company in the world. >> Okay, and then, 3x, that's 3x the number of customers who bought multiple products, is that correct? >> Correct. That's exactly right. So think about that transformation. They used to buy from us one product, feature-function rich, great, but now they're buying five products, eight products from us. So 3x increase, year over year, already happening. >> Okay, and then there was 1100 plus, is Go-Lives. >> People always ask us, "You're selling stuff." "Are they using it, is it working?" So you got to follow up with delivery, so we're spending a ton of money on certification, training, and ablement, look at the SI community, look at the... Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini, and Grand Thornton. Four of the major SIs in the world, that weren't here last year, are all here this year. Platinum sponsors. So, delivery on Go Lives, the SI community is embracing us, helping us, I mean, I can't do hundred million dollar transformations on my own with these customers. I need Accenture, I need Deloitte. Look at Koch! Koch's going to be a massive transformation for financials, human-capital management, and so I've got Accenture and Deloitte helping us, taking a hundred plus billion dollar company on those two systems. >> And then 84, 88, is number of... >> Live customers, I'm sorry, total customers that we have in the Cloud. >> Cloud customers, okay, not total customers. >> No, no, we have 90 thousand plus customers, and then 84, 85 hundred of them are Cloud-based customers. >> You got a ways to go, then, to convert some of those customers. >> Well, that's our opportunity, that's exactly right. >> And then 55% of revenue came from the Cloud, obviously driven by the Cloud bookings growth. >> That's right. Exactly. So, I mean, just the acceleration, I mean, as I said, when we started this thing in New Orleans, two or three percent. Now, tipping point, revenue, I mean, it's one thing to sell software, but to actually turn it into revenue? Nobody at an enterprise scale has done 2% to 55% at our size. Lots of companies in the hundred million dollar range, small companies, you know, if we were a stand-alone Cloud company, we'd be one of the largest Cloud companies in the world. >> So the narrative from Oracle, I wonder if you can comment on this, is that the core of enterprise apps has not moved to the Cloud, and we, Oracle, are the guys to move it there, 'cause we are the only ones with that end-to-end Cloud on prem to Cloud strategy. And most companies can't put core apps, enterprise apps in the Cloud, especially on Amazon. So, what do you say to that? >> Well, it's 'cause they don't have the applications to do that. Oracle doesn't have the application horsepower. They don't have industry-based application suites. If you think of what fusion is, it's a mishmash of all the applications that they bought. There's no industry capability. >> Dave: It's horizontal, is what you're saying. >> It's horizontal. Oracle is fighting a battle against Amazon, they declared war against AWS. I'm glad they're doing that, go ahead! I mean, I don't know how you're going to do that, but they want to fight the infrastructure game. For us, infrastructure is commoditized. We're fighting the business applications layer game, and so, when you look at SAP or Oracle or anybody else, they have never done what we've done in our heritage, which is take key critical mission functionality for aerospace and defense, or automotive, we have the last mile functionality. I mean, I have companies like Ferrari, on of the most complicated companies, we've talked about those guys for years, no modifications! BAE, over in the UK, building the F-35 fighter jets and the Typhoon war planes. It doesn't get any more complicated than building an F-35 fighter jet. No modifications in their software, that they have with us. You can only build Cloud-based solutions if you don't modify the software. Oracle doesn't have that. Never had it. They're not a manufacturing pedigreed organization. SAP's probably more analogous to that, but even for SAP, they only have one complete big product sect covering retail, distribution, finance, it's the same piece of software they send to a bank, that they send to a retailer, that they send to a manufacturer. We don't do that. That's been our core forever. >> So your dogma is no custom mods, because you're basically saying you can't succeed in the Cloud with custom mods. >> Yeah. I mean, we have an extensive ability platform to do some neat things if you need to do that, but generally speaking, otherwise it's just lipstick on the pig if you're running modified applications. That's called hosting, and that's what these guys are largely doing. >> You know, a lot of people count hosting as Cloud. >> That's the game they're playing, right? >> They throw everything in the Cloud kitchen sink. >> That's right. >> Okay. >> And as we've talked with you before, we've spent billions... We all are R&D's at the application layer. We do some work in the integration layer, and so on, but most of our money is spent in the last mile, which, Oracle and SAP, they're all focused on HANA and infrastructure, and system speed, and performance, and all the stuff that we view as absolutely being commoditized. >> But that's really attractive to the SIs, the fact that they don't go that last mile, so why is it that the SIs are suddenly sort of coming to Infor? >> Well, you know what, because they finally see there is a lot of revenue still on the line in terms of change management, business-process re-engineering. You take a company like Travis Perkins, change their entire model of doing business. There isn't just modification revenue, or integration revenue, there is huge dollars to be had on change management, taking the company to CEO John Carter by the hand, and saying, "Here's how you're going to transform" "your entire business process." That more than makes up in many cases high-value dollars than focused on changing a widget from green to yellow. >> And it's right in the wheelhouse of these big consultancies. >> And they're making good money on digital transformation, so what are the digital use cases? Look at Accenture, they're did a great job. I think 20 plus percent of their business now is all coming from digital. That didn't exist three, four years ago. >> Well, you have a lot of historical experience from your Oracle days of working with those large SIs, they were critical, but they were doing different type of work then, and is it your premise that a lot of that's going away and that's shifting toward. >> The voice of the customer is everything, and it may take time, you can snow a customer once, which we've already done in this industry of software. We told them buy generic-based software, Oracle or SAP, modify it with an SI, take five years, implement it for a hundred million dollars, get stuck on this platform, and if you're lucky, maybe upgrade in ten years. Whoever does that today, as a playbook, as a customer, and if an SI can sell that, I'm not buying that. You think any customers I know today are buying that vision? I don't think so. >> Dave: Right there with the outsourcing business. >> Another thing that's come out of this conference is attention to the Brooklyn Nets deal. Can you talk a little big about it, it's very cool. >> I love those guys. >> Dave: We're from Boston, we love the Brooklyn Nets, too. >> Rebecca: They can play us anytime. Every day. >> Dave: For those draft picks. >> Bread on those guys. You know what it is. And Shaun, the GM, the energy... I use that a lot with my own guys. Brooklyn grit. And they're willing to look and upturn every aspect of the game to be more competitive. And so, we're in there with our technology, looking at every facet, what are they eating? What's the EQ stuff? Emotional occlusion. How's that team collaboration coming together? And then mapping it to... They have the best 3-D cameras on the court, so put positioning, and how are they aligning to each other? Who's doing the front guard in terms of holding the next person back so they can have enough room to do a three-point shot. Where should the three-point shot come from? So, taking all the EQ stuff, the IQ stuff, the performance, the teamwork, putting it all into a recipe for success. These guys are, I'm going to predict it here, these guys are going to rock it next couple years as a team. >> But it's not just what goes on in the court, too, it's also about fan engagement, too. >> All that. Well, fair enough, I get all excited about just making them a much better team, but the whole fan experience, walking into a place knowing that if I get up now, the washroom line isn't 15 miles long, and at the cash line for a beer isn't going to take me 20 minutes, that I'm on my app, you actually have all the information and sensors in place to know that, hey, right now's a great time, aisle number four, queue number three, is a one-minute wait for a beer, go. Or have runners, everything's on your phone, they don't do enough service. So there's a huge revenue opportunity along with it, from a business point of view, but I would also say is a customer service element. How many times have we sat in a game and go, "I'm not getting up there." (laughing) Unless you're sitting in the VIP area, well, there's revenue to be had all over the place. >> Yeah, they're missing out on our beer money, yeah. >> It's ways for a stadium services, which are essentially a liquor distribution system. >> Exactly right. But to do that, you got to connect point of sales systems, you got to connect a lot of components, centers in the bathroom, I mean you got to do a lot of work, so we're going to create the fan experience of the future with them. And preferences, the fact that they that when you walk in past the door with your app and if you have Brooklyn Nets app, that we know who your favorite player is, and you get a little text that says, Hey, you know what, 10% discount on the next shirt from your favorite player. Things like that. Making a personal connection with you about what you like is going to change the game. And that's happening everywhere. In retail... Everybody wants to have a one-to-one relationship. You want to order your Nike shoes online with a green lace and a red lace on the right, Nike allows you to do that. You want to order a shirt that they'll make for you with the different emblems on it and different technology to it, those are things they're doing, too. So, a very one-to-one relationship. >> Well, it's data, it's more than data, it's insights, and you guys are, everybody's a data company, but you're really becoming a data and insight-oriented company. Did you kind of stumble into that, or is this part of the grand plan six years ago, or, how'd you get here? >> Listen, this whole... I mean, to do Cloud-based solutions by industry is not just to solve for applications going from infrastructure on-premise to off-premise. What does it allow you to do? Well, if you're in AWS, I can run ten thousand core products... I can run a report in ten minutes with AWS that would take you a week, around sales information, customer information. Look at all the Netflix content. You log in on Netflix, "Suggestions for You". It's actually pretty accurate, isn't it? >> Scarily accurate, sometimes, yes. >> It's pretty smart what goes into the algorithm that looks at your past. Unfortunately, I log into my kid's section, and it has my name on it and I get all these wonderful recommendations for kids. But that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about. Customers need that. It's about real-time, it's not looking backwards anymore, it's about real-time decisioning, and analytics, and artificial intelligence, AI is the future, for sure. >> So more, more on the future, this is really fun, listening to you talk, because you are the president, and you have a great view of what's going on. What will we be talking about next year, at this time. Well, it won't be quite this time, it will be September, but what do you think? >> I think what you're going to see is massive global organizations up on stage, like the ones I mentioned, Travis Perkins, a Safeway, a Gold Coast, a Hertz. Hertz is under attack as a company. The entry point into the rental car business was very very hard. Who's going to go buy 800 thousand cars and get in the rental business, open ten thousand centers? You don't need to do that anymore today! >> Dave: Software! >> It's called software, the application business, so their business model is under attack. We're feverishly working with their CEO and their executive team and their board on redefining the future of Hertz. So, you're going to see here, next year, the conversation with a company like Hertz rebounding and growing and being successful, and... The best defense is a good offense, so they're on the offensive! They're going to use their size, their scale. You look at the retailers, I mean, I love the TAL story, and they may make one out of every six shirts. Amazon puts the same shirt online that they sell for $39.99, TAL's trying to sell for $89.99. They're saying enough of that. They built these beautiful analyzers, sensors, where you walk into this little room, and they do a sensor of a hundred different parts of your body, So they're going to get the perfect shirt for you. So, it's an experience center. So you walk into this little center, name's escaping me now, but they're going to take all the measurements, like a professional Italian tailor would do, you walk in, it's all automatic, you come out of there, they know all the components of your body, which is a good thing and a bad thing, sometimes, right, (laughing) they'll know it all, and then you go to this beautiful rack and you're going to pick what color do you want. Do you want a different color? So everything is moving to custom, and you'll pay more for that. Wouldn't you pay for a customized shirt that fits your body perfectly, rather than an off-the-rack kind of shirt at $89.99? That's how you compete with the generic-based e-commerce plays that are out there. That use case of TAL is going to happen in every facet. DSW, the DSW ones, these experience centers, the shoeless aisles, that whole experience. You walking in as... The most loyal women shoppers are DSW with their applications, right. >> Rebecca: (laughs) Yes, yes. >> And how many times have you tried a shoe on that doesn't fit properly, or it's not the one you want, or they don't have your size, or you want to make some configurations to it. You got one, too! >> Ashley came by and gave me this, 'cause I love DSW. >> I mean, they're what, one of the biggest shoe companies in the world not standing still, and Ashley is transforming, they went live on financials in like 90 days in the Cloud? Which for them, that kind of innovation happening that fast is unbelievable. So next year, the whole customer experience side is going to be revolutionary for these kinds of exciting organizations. So, rather than cowering from this digital transformation, they're embracing it. We're going to be the engine of digital transformation for them. I get so excited to have major corporations completely disrupting themselves to change their market for themselves moving forward. >> What is the Koch investment meant to you guys, can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, obviously, we hear two billion dollars, and blah, blah, blah, but can you go a little deeper for us? >> I mean, forget all the money stuff, for a minute, just the fact that we're part of a company that is, went from 40 million when Charles Koch started, taking over from his family, and went to 100 plus billion. Think about that innovation. Think about the horsepower, the culture, the aggressiveness, the tenacity, the will to win. We already had that. To combine that with their sheer size and scale is something that is exciting for me, one. Two is they view technology as the next big chapter for them. I mean, again, not resting on your laurels, I'm already 100 billion, they want to grow to 150, 200 billion, and they see technology as the root to getting there. Automating their plants, connecting all their components of their employees, gain the right employees to the right place, so workforce management, all the HR stuff that we're doing on transformation, the financials, getting a global consolidated view across 100 billion dollar business on our systems. That's transformation! That's big, big business for us, and what a great reference to have! A guy like Steve Fellmeier up yesterday, he'll be up here next year talking about how he's using us to transform their business. There's not many 100 billion dollar companies around, right, so what a great reference point for us to have them as a customer, and as a proved point of success. >> Well, we'll look forward to that in September, and seeing you back here next year, too. >> Look forward to it. >> Stephan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, appreciate it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, that is it for us and The Cube at Inforum 2017. See you next time.

>> Narrator: Live from the Javits Center in New York City. It's the Cube, covering the Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are wrapping up the Cube's day two coverage of conference here in New York City at Inforum. My name is Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dan Barnhardt. He is the Infor Vice President of Communications. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yes, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here two days in a row. >> It's been a lot of fun. We've had a great time. So yeah, congratulations, it's been a hugely successful conference, a lot of buzz. Recap it for us, what's been most exciting for you? >> Sure, this was our second year having a forum in New York, which is our home town. I think it was a more exciting conference than last year. We unveiled some incredible development updates, led by Coleman, our AI offering, which is an incredible announcement for us, as well as Networked CloudSuites, which takes the functionality from our GT Nexus commerce network, and bakes it into our CloudSuites, the mission critical industry CloudSuites, that we offer on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Those were really exciting developments, as well as some other announcements we made with regard to product. And then, in addition to product, we had a lot of customer momentum that we shared. Last year, we had customers like Whole Foods and Travis Perkins up here. We continued the momentum with big enterprise customers making big bets on Infor, led by Koch Industries who invested more than two billion dollars this year at Infor, and are now modernizing their human resources and their financial operations with Infor CloudSuites. Moving to the cloud HR for 130,000 employees at Koch Industries which is an incredible achievement for the product, and for cloud HR. And, that's very exciting, as well as other companies like FootLocker, which were recognized with the Innovation Award for our Progress Makers Award. They're using talent science, data science to power their employees, not to power their employees, but to drive their employees towards greater productivity and greater happiness, because they've got the right people in the right fit for FootLocker, that's very exciting. And, of course, Bank of America, our Customer of the Year, which uses our HR solutions for their workforce, which obviously is exceptionally large. >> Yes, there was a great ceremony this morning, with a lot of recognition. So, let's talk a little bit more about Coleman, this was the big product announcement, really the first product in AI for Infor. Tell us a little bit about the building blocks. >> For certain. We have a couple of AI offerings now, like predictive hotel pricing, predictive demand and assortment planning in retail, but we have been building towards Coleman and what we consider the age of networked intelligence for multiple years. Since we architected Infor CloudSuite to run mission critical ERP in the cloud, we developed the capability of having data, mission critical data that really runs a business, your manufacturing, finance, distribution core functions, in the cloud on AWS, which gives us hyper-scale compute power to crunch incredible data. So, that really became possible once we moved CloudSuite in 2014. And then in 2015, we acquired GT Nexus, which is a commerce network that unites, that brings in the 80 percent of enterprise data that lies outside the four walls, among suppliers, and logistics providers, and banks. That unified that into the CloudSuite and brought that data in, and we're able to crunch that using the compute power of AWS. And then last year at Inforum, we announced the acquisition of Predictix, which is a predictive solutions for retail. And when building those, Predictix was making such groundbreaking development in the area of machine learning that they spun off a separate group called Logicblox, just to focus on machine learning. And Inforum vested heavily, we didn't talk a lot about Logicblox, but that was going to deliver a lot of the capabilities along with Amazon's developments with Lex and Alexa to enable Coleman to come to reality. So we were able then to acquire Birst. Birst is a BI program that takes, and harmonizes, the data that comes across CloudSuite and GT Nexus in a digestible form that with the machine learning power from Logicblox can power Coleman. So now we have AI that's pervasive underneath the application, making decisions, recommending advice so that people can maximize their potential at work, not have to do more menial tasks like search and gather, which McKenzie has shown can take 20 percent of your work week just looking for the information and gathering the information to make decisions. Now, you can say Coleman get me this information, and Coleman is able to return that information to you instantly, and let you make decisions, which is very, very exciting breakthrough. >> So there's a lot there. When you and I talked prior to the show, I was kind of looking for okay, what's going to be new and different, and one of the things you said was we're really going to have a focus on innovation. So, in previous Inforums it's really been about, to me anyway, we do a lot of really hard work. We're hearing a lot about acquisitions, certainly AI and Coleman, how those acquisitions come together with your, you know, what Duncan Angove calls the layer cake, you know the wedding cake stack, the strategy stack, I call it. So do you feel like you've achieved those objectives of messaging that innovation, and what's the reaction then from the customer base? >> Without a doubt. I wouldn't characterize anything that we said last year as not innovative, we announced H&L Digital, our digital transformation arm which is doing some incredible custom projects, like for the Brooklyn Nets, essentially money balling the NBA. Look forward to seeing that in next season a little bit, and then more in the season to come. Some big projects with Travis Perkins and with some other customers, care dot com, that were mentioned. But this year we're unveiling Coleman, which takes a lot of pieces, as Duncan said sort of the wedding cake, and puts them together. This has been a development for years. And now we're able to unveil it, and we've chosen to name it Coleman in honor of Katherine Coleman Johnson, one of the ladies whose life was told in the movie Hidden Figures, and she was a pioneer African-American woman in Stem, which is an important cause for us. You know, Infor years ago when we were in New Orleans unveiled the Infor Education Alliance program so that we can invest in increasing Stem education among young people, all young people with a particular focus on minorities and women to increase the ranks of underrepresented communities in the technology industry. So this, Coleman, not only pays honor to Katherine Johnson the person, but also to her mission to increase the number of people that are choosing careers in Stem, which as we have shown is the future of work for human beings. >> So talk a little bit more about Infor's commitment to increasing number to increasing, not only Stem education, but as you said increasing the number of women and minorities who go into Stem careers. >> Certainly. We, you know Pam Murphy who is our chief operating officer, this has been an incredibly important cause to her as well as Charles Phillips our CEO. We launched the Women's Infor Network, WIN, several years ago and that's had some incredible results in helping to increase the number of women at Infor. Many years ago, I think it was Google that first released their diversity report, and it drew a lot of attention to how many women and how many minorities are in technology. And they got a lot of heat, because it was about 30, 35 percent of their workforce was female, and then as other companies started rolling out their diversity report, it was a consistent number between 30 to 35 percent, and what we identified from that was not that women are not getting the jobs, it's that there aren't as many women pursuing careers in this type of field. >> Rebecca: Pipeline. >> Yes. So in order to do that, we need to provide an environment that nurtures some of the specific needs that women have, and that we're promoting education. So we formed the WIN program to do that first task, and this year on International Women's Day in early March, we were able to show some of the results that came from that, particularly in senior positions, SVP, VP, and director level positions at Infor. Some have risen 60 percent the number of women in those roles since we launched the Women's Infor Network just a couple of years ago. And then we launched the Education Alliance Program. We partnered with institutions, like CUNY the City University of New York, the New York Urban League, and universities now across the globe, we've got them in India, in Thailand and China, in South Korea to help increase the number of people who are pursuing careers in Stem. We've also sponsored PBS series and Girls Who Code, we have a hack-athon going on here at Inforum with a bunch of young people who are building, sort of, add-on apps and widgets that go to company Infor. We're investing a lot in the growth of Stem education, and the next generation. >> And by the way, those numbers that you mentioned for Google and others at around 30, 34 percent, that's much better than the industry average. They're doing quote, unquote well and still far below the 50 percent which is what you would think, you know, based on population it would be. So mainly the average is around, or the actual number's around 17 percent in the technology business, and then the other thing I would add is Amazon, I believe, was pretty forthcoming about its compensation, you know. >> Salesforce really started it, Marc Benioff. >> And they got a lot of heat for it, but it's transparency is really the starting point, right? >> It was clear really early for companies like Salesforce, and Amazon, and Google, and Infor that this was not something that we needed to create talking points about, we were going to need to effect real change. And that was going to take investment and time, and thankfully with leadership like Charles Phillips, our CEO, and Marc Benioff were making investments to help make sure that the next generation of every human, but particularly women and minorities that are underrepresented right now in technology, have those skills that will be needed in the years to come. >> Right, you have to start with a benchmark and then know where you're moving from. >> Absolutely, just like if you're starting a project to transform your business, where do you want to go and what are the steps that are going to help you get there? >> Speaking of transforming your business, this is another big trend, is digital transformation. So now that we are at nearing the end of day two of this conference, what are you hearing from customers about this jaunting, sometimes painful process that they must endure, but really they must endure it in order to stay alive and to thrive? >> Without a doubt. A disruption is happening in every industry that we're seeing, and customers across all of the industries that Infor serves, like manufacturing, healthcare, retail, distribution, they are thinking about how do we survive in the new economy, when everything is digital, when every company needs to be a technology company. And we are working with our customers to help first modernize their systems. You can't be held back by old technology, you need to move to the cloud to get the flexibility and the agility that can adapt to changing business conditions and disruptions. No longer do you have years to adapt to things, they're happening overnight, you must have flexible solutions to do that. So, we have a lot of customers. We just had a panel with Travis Perkins, and with Pilot Flying J, who was on the Cube earlier, talking about how their, and Cook Industries our primary investor now, talking about how they're re-architecting their IT infrastructure to give them that agility so they can start thinking about what sort of projects could open up new streams of revenue. How could we, you know, do something else that we never thought of, but now we have the capability to do digitally that could be the future of our business? And it's really exciting to have all the CIOs, and SVPs of technology, VPs of technology, that are here at Inforum talking about what they're doing, and how they're imagining their business. It's really incredible to get a peek at what they're doing. >> You know, we were talking to Debbie earlier. One of the interesting things that I, my takeaway is on the digital transformation, is you know, we always say digital is data and then what we talked about was the ability to traverse industry value change, not just vertically but horizontally. Amazon buying Whole Foods is a perfect example, Amazon's a content company, Apple's getting into financial services. I wonder if you could comment on your thoughts on because you're so deep into micro-verticals, and what Debbie said was well I gave a consumer package good example to a process manufacturing company. And they were like what are you talking about, and she said look, let me connect the dots and the light bulbs went off. And they said wow, we could take that CPG example and apply it, so I wonder when we talk about digital transformation, if you see or can foresee your advantage in micro-verticals as translating across those verticals. >> Without a doubt. We talk about it as adjacent innovation. And Charles points back to an example, way back from the creation of the niche in glass, and how that led to additional businesses and industries like eyeglasses and fire preparedness, and we look at it that way for certain. We dive very deep into key industries, but when we look at them holistically across and we say oh, this is happening within the retail industry, we can identify key functionality that might change the industry of disruption, not disruption, distribution. Might disrupt the distribution industry, and we can apply the lessons learned by having that industry specialization into other industries and help them realize a potential that they weren't aware of before, because we uncovered it in one place. That's happening an awful lot with what we do with retail and assortment planning and healthcare. We run 70 percent of the large hospitals in the US, and we're learning a lot from retail and how we might help hospitals move more quickly. When you are managing life and death situations, if you are planning assortment or inventory for those key supplies within a hospital, and you can make even small adjustments that can have huge impact on patient care, so that's one of the benefits of our industry-first strategy, and the adjacent innovation that we cultivate there. >> I know we're not even finished with Inforum 2017, but we must look ahead to 2018. Talk a little bit about what your goals for next year's conference are. >> For sure. You're correct, we're not finished yet with Inforum. I know everyone here is really excited about Bruno Mars who's entertaining tonight, but we are looking forward to next year's conference as well, we're already talking about some of the innovative things that we'll announce, and the customer journeys that are beginning now, which we'd like to unveil there. We are going to be moving the conference from New York, we're going to move to Washington DC in late-September, September 24th to 27th in Washington DC, which we're very excited about to let our customers, they come back every year to learn more. We had seven thousand people attending this year, we want to give them a little bit of a variety, while still making sure that they can reach, you know, with one stop from Europe and from Asia, cause customers are traveling from all over the world, but we're very excited to see the growth that would be shared. This year, for instance, if you look at the sponsors, we had our primary SI partner Avaap was platinum partner last year. In addition to Avaap this year, we were joined by Accenture, and Deloitte, Capgemini, Grant Thorton, all of whom have built Infor practices over the last 12 months because there's so much momentum over our solutions that that is a revenue opportunity for them that they want to take advantage of. >> And the momentum is just going to keep on going next year in September. So I'll see you in September. >> Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate you guys being here with us for the third year, second year in a row in New York. >> Indeed, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Inforum 2017 in a bit.

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you buy Infor. >> Welcome back to Inforum 2017 everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Duncan Angove is here, the President of Infor and a Cube alum. Good to see you again Duncan. >> Hey, afternoon guys. >> So it's all coming together right? When we first met you guys down in New Orleans, we were sort of unpacking, trying to squint through what the strategy is. Now we call it the layer cake, we were talking about off camera, really starting to be cohesive. But set up sort of what's been going on at Infor. How are you feeling? What the vibe is like? >> Yeah it's been an amazing journey over the last six years. And, um, you know, all the investments we put in products, as you know, we said to you guys way back then, we've always put products at the center. Our belief is that if you put innovation and dramatic amounts of investment in the core product, everything else ends up taking care of itself. And we put our money where our mouth was. You know, we're a private company, so we can be fairly aggressive on the level of investment we put into R&D and it's increased double digit every single year. And I think the results you've seen over the last two years, in terms of our financials is that, you know the market's voting in a way that we're growing double digits dramatically faster than our peers. So that feels pretty good. >> So Jim is, I know, dying to get into the AI piece, but lets work our way up that sort of strategy layer cake with an individual had a lot to do with that. So you know, you guys started with the decision of Micro-verticals and you know the interesting thing to us is you're starting to see some of the big SI's join in. And I always joke, that they love to eat at the trough. But you took a lot of the food away by doing that last mile. >> Yeah. >> But now you're seeing them come in, why is that? >> You know I think the whole industry is evolving. And the roles that different and the valor that different companies in that ecosystem play, whether it's an enterprise software vendor or it's a systems integrator. Everything's changing. I mean, The Cloud was a big part of that. That took away tasks that you would sometimes see a systems integrator doing. As larger companies started to build more completely integrated suites, that took away the notion that you need a systems integrator to plug all those pieces together. And then the last piece for us was all of the modifications that were done to those suites of software to cover off gaps in industry functionality or gaps in localizations for a country, should be done inside the software. And you can only do that if you have a deep focus, by industry on going super, super deep at a rapid rate on covering out what we call these last malfeatures. So that means that the role of the systems integrators shifted. I mean they've obviously pivoted more recently into a digital realm. They've all acquired digital agencies. And having to adapt to this world where you have these suites of software that run in The Cloud that don't need as much integration or as much customization. So we were there you know five, six years ago. They weren't quite there. It was still part of this symbiotic relationship with other large vendors. And I think now, you know, the reason for the first time we've got guys like Accenture, and Deloitte, and Capgemini, and Grant Thornton here, is that they see that. And their business model's evolved. And you know those guys obviously like to be where they can win business and like to build practices around companies they see winning business. So the results we've seen and the growth we've seen over the last two to three years, obviously that's something they want a piece of. So I think it's going to work out. >> Alright so Jim, you're going to have to bear with me a second 'cause I want to keep going up the stack. So the second big milestone decision was AWS. >> Duncan: Yeah. >> And we all understand the benefits of AWS. But there's two sides to that cone and one is, when you show your architectural diagram, there's a lot of AWS in there. There's S3, there's DynamoDB, I think I saw Kinesis in there. I'm sure there's some Ec2 and other things. And it just allows you to focus on what you do best. At the same time, you're getting an increasingly complex data pipeline and ensuring end-to-end performance has to be technically, a real challenge for you. So, I wanted to ask you about that and see if you could comment and how you're managing that. >> Yeah so, I mean obviously, we were one of the first guys to actually go all in on Amazon as a Cloud delivery platform. And obviously others now have followed. But we're still one of their top five ISV's on there. The only company that Amazon reps actually get compensated on. And it's a two way relationship right? We're not just using them as a Cloud delivery partner. We're also using some of their components. You know you talked about some of their data storage components. We're also leverage them for AI which we'll get into in a second. But it's a two way relationship. You know, they run our asset management facility for all of their data centers globally. We do all the design and manufacturing of their drones and robots. We're partnered with them on the logistic side. So it's a deep two way relationship. But to get to your question on just sort of the volume and the integration. We work in integrations with staggering volumes right? I mean, retail, you're dealing with billions and billions of data points. And we'll probably get into that in a second you know. The whole asset management space, is one of the fastest growing applications we have. Driven by cycle dynamics of IoT and explosion in device data and all of that. So we've had for a very, very long time, had to figure out an efficient way to move large amounts of data that can be highly chatty. And do it in an efficient way. And sometimes it's less about the pipes in moving it around, it's how you ingest that data into the right technology from a data storage perspective. Ingest it and then turn it into insights that can power analytics or feed back into our applications to drive execution. Whether it's us predicting maintenance failure on a pump and then feeding that back into asset management to create a work order and schedule an engineer on it. Right? >> That's not a trivial calculus. Okay, now we're starting to get into Jim's wheelhouse, which is, you call it, I think you call it the "Age of Network Intelligence". And that's the GT Nexus acquisition. >> Yeah. >> To us it's all about the data. I think you said 18 years of transaction history there. So, talk about that layer and then we'll really get into the data the burst piece and then of course the AI. >> Yeah, so there were two parts to why we called it "The Age of Network Intelligence". And it's not often that technology or an idea comes along in human history that actually bends the curve of progress right? And I think that we said it on stage, the steam engine was one of those and it lead to the combustion engine, it lead to electricity and it lead to the internet and the mobile phone and it all kind of went. Of course it was invented by a British man, an Englishman you know? That doesn't happen very often right? Where it does that. And our belief is that the rise of networks, coupled with the rise of artificial intelligence, those two things together will have the same impact on society and mankind. And it's bigger than Infor and bigger than enterprise software, it's going to change everything. And it's not going to do it in a linear way. It's going to be exponential. So the network part of that for us, from an Infor perspective was, yes it was about the commerce network, which was GT Nexus, and the belief that almost every process you have inside an enterprise at some point has to leave the enterprise. You have to work with someone else, a supplier or a customer. But ERP's in general, were designed to automate everything inside the four walls. So our belief was that you should extend that and encompass an entire network. And that's obviously what the GT Nexus guys spent 18 years building was this idea of this logistics network and this network where you can actually conduct trade and commerce. They do over 500 billion dollars a year on that network. And we believe, and we've announced this as network CloudSuites, that those two worlds will blur. Right? That ultimately, CloudSuites will run completely nakedly on the network. And that gives you some very, very interesting information models and the parallel we always give is like a Linkedin or a Facebook. On Linkedin, there's one version of the application. Right? There's one information model where everyone's contact information is. Everyone's details about who they are is stored. It's not stored in all these disparate systems that need to be synchronized constantly. Right? It's all in one. And that's the power of GT Nexus and the commerce network, is that we have this one information model for the entire supply chain. And now, when you move the CloudSuite on top of that, it's like this one plus one is five. It's a very, very powerful idea. >> Alright Jim, chime in here, because you and I both excited about the burst when we dug into that a little bit. >> Yes. >> Quite impressed actually. Not lightweight vis, you know? It's not all sort of BI. >> Well the next generation of analytics, decision support analytics that infuse and inform and optimize transactions. In a distributed value chain. And so for the burst is a fairly strong team, you've got Brad Peters who was on the keynote yesterday, and of course did the pre-briefing for the analyst community the day before. I think it's really exciting, the Coleman strategy is really an ongoing initiative of course. First of all, on the competitive front, all of your top competitors in this very, I call it a war of attrition in ERP. SAP, Oracle and Microsoft have all made major investments on going in AI across their portfolios. With a specific focus on informing and infusing their respective ERP offerings. But what I conceived from what Infor's announced with the Coleman strategy, is that yours is far more comprehensive in terms of taking it across your entire portfolio, in a fairly accelerated fashion. I mean, you've already begun to incorporate, Coleman's already embedded in several of your vertical applications. First question I have for you Duncan, as I was looking through all the discussions around Coleman, when will this process be complete in terms of, "Colemanizing", is my term? "Colemanizing" the entire CloudSuite and of course network CloudSuite portfolio. That's a huge portfolio. And it's like you got fresh funding, a lot of it, from Koch industries. To what extent can, at what point in the next year or two, can most Infor customers have the confidence that their cloud applications are "Colemanized"? And then when will, if ever, Coleman AI technology be made available to those customers who are using your premises based software packages? >> So yeah, we could spend a long time talking about this. The thing about Coleman and RAI and machine learning capabilities is that we've been at work on it for a while. And you know we created the dynamic science labs. Our team of 65 Ph.D.'s based up in M.I.T. got over three and a half four years ago. And our differentiation versus all the other guys you mentioned is that, two things, one, we bring a very application-centric view of it. We're not trying to build a horizontal, generic, machine learning platform. In the same way that we- >> Yeah you're not IBM with Watson, all that stuff. >> Yeah, no, no. Or even Auricle. >> Jim: Understood. >> Or Microsoft. >> Jim: Nobody expects you to be. >> No, you know, and we've always been the guys that have worked for the Open Source community. Even when you look at like, we're the first guys to provide a completely open source stack underneath our technology with postscripts. We don't have a dog in the hunt like most of the other guys do. Right? So we tap in to the innovation that happens in the Open Source community. And when you look at all the real innovation that's happening in machine learning, it's happening in the Open Source Community. >> Jim: Yes. >> It's not happening with the old legacy, you know, ERP guys. >> Jim: Pencer, Flow and Spark and all that stuff. >> Yeah, Google, Apple, the GAFA. >> Yeah. >> Right? Google, Apple, Facebook, those are the guys that are doing it. And the academic community is light years ahead on top of that of what these other guys will do. So that's what we tap into right? >> Are you tapping into partners like AWS? 'Cause they've obviously, >> Duncan: Absolutely >> got a huge portfolio of AI. >> Yeah, so we. >> Give us a sense whether you're going to be licensing or co-developing Coleman technologies with them going forward. >> Yeah so we obviously we have NDA's with them, we're deeply inside their development organization in terms of working on things. You know, our science is obviously presented to them around ideas we think they need to go. I mean, we're a customer of their AI frameup to machine learning and we're testing it at scale with specific use cases in industries, right? So we can give them a lot of insights around where it needs to go and problems we're trying to solve. But we do that across a number of different organizations and we've got lots and lots of academic collaborations that happen on around all of the best universities that are pushing on this. We've even received funding from DAPA in certain cases around things that we're trying to solve for. You know quietly we've made some machine-learning acquisitions over the last five, six years. That have obviously brought this capability into it. But the point is we're going to leverage the innovation that happens around these frameworks. And then our job is understanding the industries we're in and that we're an applications company, is to bring it to life in these applications in a seamless way, that solves a very specific problem in an industry, in a powerful and unique way. You know on stage I talked about this idea of bringing this AI first mindset to how we go about doing it. >> So it's important, if I can interject. This is very important. This is Infor IP, the serious R&D that's gone into this. It's innovation. 'Cause you know what your competitors are going to say. They're going to deposition and say, oh, it's Alexa on steroids. But it's not. It's substantial IP and really leveraging a lot of the open source technologies that are out there. >> Yeah. So you know, I talked about there were four components to Coleman, right? And the first part of it was, we can leverage machine-learning services to make the CloudSuites conversational. So they can chat, and talk, and see, and hear, and all of that. And yeah, some of those are going to use the technology that sits behind Alexa. And it's available in AWS's Alexa as you guys know. But that's only really a small part of what we're doing. There are some places where we are looking at using computer vision. For example, automated inspection of car rental returns, is one area. We're using it for quality management pilot at a company that normally has humans inspect something on a production line. That kind of computer-vision, that's not Alexa, right? It's you know, I gave the example of image recognition. Some of it can leverage AWS's framework there. But again, we're always going to look for the best platform and framework out there to solve the specific problem that we're trying to solve. But we don't do it just for the sake of it. We do it with a focus to begin with, with an industry. Like, where's a really big problem we can solve? Or where is there a process that happens inside an application today that if you brought an AI first mindset to it, it's revolutionary. And we use this phrase, "the AI is the UI". And we've got some pretty good analogies there that can help bring it to life. >> And I like your approach for presenting your AI strategy, in terms of the value it delivers your customers, to business. You know, there's this specter out there in the culture that AI's going to automate everybody out of a job. Automation's very much a big part of your strategy but you expressed it well. Automating out those repetitive functions so that human beings, you can augment the productivity of human beings, free them up for more value-added activities and then augment those capabilities through conversational chat box. And so forth, and so on. Provide you know, in-application, in process, in context, decision support with recommendations and all that. I think that's the exact right way to pitch it. One of the things that we focus on and work on in terms of application development, disciplines that are totally fundamental to this new paradigm. Recommendation engines, recommender systems, in line to all application. It's happening, I mean, Coleman, that really in many ways, Coleman will be the silent, well not so silent, but it'll be the recommendation engine embedded inside all of your offerings at some point. At least in terms of the strategy you laid out. >> Yeah, no, absolutely right I mean. It's not just about, we all get hung up on machine-learning and deep learning 'cause it's the sexy part of AI, right? But there's a lot more. I mean, AI, all the way back, you can go all the way back to Socrates and the father of logic right? I mean, some of the things you can do is just based on very complex rules and logic. And what used to be called process automation right? And then it extends all the way to deep learning and neural networks and so on. So one of the things that Coleman also does, is it unifies a lot of this technology. Things that you would normally do for prediction or optimization, and optimization normally is the province of operations research guys right? Which again it's a completely different field. So it unifies all of that into one consistent platform that has all of that capability into it. And then it exposes it in a consistent way through our API architecture. So same thing with bots. People always think chat bots are separate. Well that too is unified inside Coleman. So it's a cohesive platform but again, industry focused. >> What's your point of view on developers? And how do you approach the development community and what's your strategy there? >> Yeah, I mean, it's critical right? So we've always, I mean, hired an incredible number of application engineers every year. I think the first 12 months we were here, we hired 1800 right? 'Cause you know, that's kind of what we do. So we believe hugely in smarts. And it sounds kind of obvious, but experience can be learned, smarts is portable. And we have a lot of programs in place with universities. We call it the Education Alliance Program. And I think we have up to 32 different universities around the world where we're actually influencing curriculum, and actually bringing students right out of there. Using internships during the year and then actually bringing them into our development organization. So we've got a whole pipeline there. I mean that's critical that we have access to those. >> And what about outside your four walls, or virtual walls have been four? Is there a strategy to specifically pursue external developers and open up a PAZ layer? >> Yeah we do. >> Or provide an STK for Coleman for example, for developers. >> Yeah so we did, as part of our Infor Operating Service update. Which is, you know, the name for our unified technology platform. We did announce Mongoose platform was a service. Our Mongoose pass. >> Host: Oh Mongoose, sure. >> So that now is being delivered as a platform with a service for application development. And it's used in two ways. It's used for us to build new applications. It's a very mobile-first type development framework too. And obviously Hook and Loop had a huge influence in how that ships. The neat thing about it, is that it ships with plumbing into ION API, plumbing into our security layer. So customers will use it because it leverages our security model. It's easy to access everything else. But it's also used by our Hook and Loop digital team. So those guys are going off and they're building completely differentiated curated apps for customers. And again, they're using Mongoose. So I think between ION API's and between all the things you get in the Infor Operating Service, and Mongoose, we've got a pretty good story around extensibility and application development. As it relates to an STK for Coleman, we're just working through that now. Again, our number one focus is to build those things into the applications. It's a feature. The way most companies have approached optimization and machine learning historically, is it's a discrete app that you have to license. And it's off to the side and you integrate it in. We don't think that's the right way of doing it. Machine-learning and artificial intelligence, is a platform. It's an enabler. And it fuses and changes every part of the CloudSuite. And we've got a great example on how you can rethink demand forecasting, demand planning. Every, regardless of the industry we serve, everyone has to predict demand right? It's the basis for almost every other decision that happens in the enterprise. And, how much to make, how many nurses to put on staff, all of that, every industry, that prediction of demand. And the thinking there really hasn't changed in 20, 30 years. It really hasn't. And some of that's just because of the constraints with technology. Storage, compute, all of that. Well with the access we have to the elastic super-computing now and the advancements in sort of machine-learning and AI, you can radically rethink all of that, and take what we call and "AI First" approach, which is what we've done with building our brand new demand prediction platform. So the example we gave is, you think about when early music players came along on the internet right? The focus was all around building a gorgeous experience for how to build a playlist. It was drag and drop, I could do it on a phone, I could share it with people and it showed pictures of the album art. But it was all around the usability of making that playlist better. Then guys like Spotify and Pandora came around and it took an AI First approach to it. And the machine builds your playlist. There is no UI. AI is the UI. And it can recommend music I never knew I would've liked. And the way it does that, comes back to the data. Which is why I'm going to circle back to Infor here in a second. Is that, it breaks a song down into hundreds if not thousands of attributes about that song. Sometimes it's done by a human, sometimes it's even done by machine listening algorithms. Then you have something that crawls the web, finds music reviews online, and further augments it with more and more attributes. Then you layer on top of that, user listening activity, thumbs up, thumbs down, play, pause, skip, share, purchase. And you find, at that attribute level, the very lowest level, the true demand drivers of a song. And that's what's powering it right? Just like you see with Netflix for movies and so on. Imagine bringing that same thought process into how you predict demand for items, that you've never promoted before. Never changed the price before. Never put in this store before. Never seen before. >> The cold start problem in billing recommendation areas. >> Exactly right, so, that's what we mean by AI First. It's not about just taking traditional demand planning approaches and making it look sexier and putting it on an iPad right? Rethink it. >> Well it's been awesome to watch. We are out of time. >> Yeah, we're out of time. >> Been awesome to watch the evolution, >> We could go on and on with this yeah. >> of Infor as it's really becoming a data company. And we love having executives like you on. >> Yeah >> You know, super articulate. You got technical chops. Congratulations on the last six years. >> Thanks. >> The sort of quasi-exit you guys had. >> Great show, amazing turnout. >> And look forward to watching the next six to 10. So thanks very much for coming out. >> Brilliant, thank you guys. Alright thank you. >> Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, this is Inforum 2017 and this is theCUBE. We'll be right back. (digital music)

(upbeat digital music) >> Announcer: Live, from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome to day two of theCube's live coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City at the Javits Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-hosts, Dave Vellante, and Jim Kobielus, who is the lead analyst at Wikibon for AI. So we're here in day two, fellas. We just heard the keynote. Any thoughts on what your expectations are for today, Jim, and what you're hoping to uncover, or at least get more insight on what we learned already in day one? >> I'd like to have Infor unpack a bit more of the Coleman announcement. I wrote a blog last night that I urge our listeners to check out on wikibon.com. There's a number of unanswered issues in terms of their strategy going forward to incorporate Coleman AI and their technology. You know, I suspect that Infor, like most companies, is working out that strategy as they go along, piece by piece, they've got a good framework then. We have Duncan Angove on right after this segment. Dave and I and you, we'll grill Duncan on that and much more, but that in particular. You know, I mean, AI is great. AI is everybody's secret sauce, now. There's a lot of substance behind what they're doing at Infor that sets them apart from their competitors in the ERP space. I want to go deeper there. >> So, yeah, so I'm looking at the blog right now. But what are the particular questions that you have regarding Coleman, in terms of how it's going to work? >> Yeah, well, first of all, I want to know, do they intend to incorporate Coleman AI in their premises-based software offerings? You know, for, I'm sure the vast majority of their customers want to know when, if ever, they're going to get access to Coleman, number one. Number two is, when are they going to complete the process of incorporating Coleman in their CloudSuite portfolio, which is vast and detailed? And then, really number three, are they going to do all the R&D themselves? I mean, they've got AWS as a major partner. AWS has significant intellectual property in AI. Will they call on others to work with them on co-developing these capabilities? You know, those are, like, the high-level things that I want to get out of today. >> Rebecca: Okay, okay. >> Well, so a couple things. So, I mean, the keynote today was okay. It wasn't, like, mind-blowing. We had customer appreciation, which was great. Alexis, who is from Foot Locker, cube alum was up there, and B of A got customer of the year. I met those guys last night at one of the customer appreciation dinners, so that was kind of cool. They all got plaques, or you know, that's nice, little trophies. I heard a lot about design thinking, and they shared some screen shots, essentially, of this new UI, started talking about AI is the new UI. It was very reminiscent of the conversation that we had in May at the ServiceNow Knowledge conference, where they're bringing consumer-like experience to the enterprise. It's always been something that ServiceNow has focused on, and certainly, Charles Phillips and Hook and Loop have been focused on that. The difference is, quite frankly, that ServiceNow showed an actual demo, got a lot of claps as a result. Infor said this is ready to be tested and downloaded, but they didn't show any demo. So that was sort of like, hmm. >> Jim: They haven't shown any demos. >> Rebecca: Yeah. >> Is it really baked out? Steve Lucas was up there. He killed it, very high energy guy. You know, again, another cube alum. He's been in our studio, and he's an awesome dude. >> Jim: He's awesome. >> And I thought he did a really good job. >> From Marketo. >> Talking about, you know, the whole engagement economy, you know, we think it's going a little bit beyond engagement to more action, and systems of an action, I think, is a term you guys use. >> Systems of agency or enablement, yeah. Bringing more of the IoT into it and robotics and so forth, yeah. >> And then DSW was up there. I said yesterday, "I love DSW." I tweeted out that, you know, the CIO had a picture, Ashlee had a picture of DSW, and I said, "Okay, when the girls and I go to DSW, "I break left, they go middle-right, "we meet at the checkout to negotiate "what actually goes home," so that was good. It was kind of fun. And then a lot of talk about digital transformation. Marc Scibelli was talking about that, and IoT and AI and data. So that's sort of, you know, kind of a summary there. As you know, Rebecca, I've been kind of trying to make the math work on the $2-plus billion investment from Koch. >> Rebecca: Yes, this is your-- >> And the messaging that Infor is putting forth is this is a source of new capital for us, but I'm-- >> Rebecca: You're skeptical. >> You know, as a private company, they have the right not to divulge everything, and they're not on a 90-day shot clock. Charles Phillips, I think, said yesterday, "We're on a 10-year shot clock." I said, "Okay." I think what happened is, so I found, I scanned 10-Qs, and I've been doing so for the last couple of days. There is virtually no information about how much, exactly, of the cash went in and what they're doing with it. And so, I suspect, but there are references to Golden Gate Capital and some of the management team taking some money off the table. Cool, that's good. I'm just, it's unclear to me that there's any debt being retired. I think there is none. And it's unclear to me how much cash there is for the business, so the only reference I was able to find, believe it or not, was on Wikipedia, and it says, "Citation still needed," okay? And the number here, and the math works, is $2.68 billion for 66.6% of the company, and a valuation of $10 billion, which Charles Phillips told us off-camera yesterday, it was $10.5 billion. So you can actually make the math work if you take that $10 billion and subtract off the $6 billion in debt. Then the numbers work, and they get five out of 11 board seats, so they've got about 45% or 49%, I think, is the actual number, you know, voting control of the company. So here's the question. What's next? And now, a couple billion for Koch is nothing. It's like the money in my pocket, I mean, it's really-- >> Rebecca: Right, right, right, the empty, yeah, exactly. >> And I suspect what happened is, 'cause it always says "$2 billion plus." So in squinting through this, my guess is, this is a pure guess, we'll try to confirm this, is that what happened is, Koch provided the additional funding to buy Birst recently. That upped their share to 66%, and maybe that's how Koch is going to operate going forward. When they see opportunities to help invest, they're going to do that. Now, one might say, "Well, that's going to further dilute "the existing Infor shareholders," but who cares, as long as the valuation goes up? And that's the new model of private equity. The old model of private equity is suck as much cash out of the company as possible and leave the carcass for somebody else to deal with. The new model of private equity is to invest selectively, use, essentially, what is a zero-interest loan, that $6 billion debt is like free money for Infor, pay down that debt over time with the cashflow of the company, and then raise the valuation of the company, and then at some point, have some kind of public market exit, and everybody's happy and makes a ton of dough. So, I think that's the new private equity play, and I think it's quite brilliant, actually, but there's not a lot of information. So a lot of this, have to be careful, is speculation on my part. >> Right, right. >> Well, the thing is, will the Coleman plan, initiative raise the valuation of the company in the long term if it's, you know, an attrition war in ERP, and they've got SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, all of whom have deep pockets, deeper than Infor, investing heavily in this stuff? Will Coleman be a net-net, just table stays? >> Well, so I think again, there's a couple ways in the tech business, as you guys know, to make money, and one is to invest in R&D and translate that R&D into commercial products. Some companies are really good at that, some companies aren't so good at that. The other way to make money is to do acquisitions and tuck-ins, and many, many companies have built value doing that, certainly Oracle, certainly IBM has, EMC back in the day, with its VMware acquisition, hit probably the biggest home run ever, and Infor has done a very good job of M&A, and I think, clearly, has raised the value of the company. And the other way is to resell technologies and generate cash and keep your costs low. I think a software company like Infor has the opportunity to innovate, to do tuck-in acquisitions, and to drive software marginal economics, so I think, on paper, that's all good, if, to answer your question, they can differentiate. And their differentiation is the way in which they're embedding AI into their deep, vertical, last-mile approach, and that is unique in the software business. Now, the other big question you have is beautiful UIs, and it sounds really great and looks really great, well, when you talk to the customers, they say, "Yeah, it's a little tough to implement sometimes," so it's still ERP, and ERP is complicated, alright? So, you know, it's not like Infor is shielded from some of the complexities of Oracle and SAP. It might look prettier, they might be moving a little faster in certain areas, they might, they clearly have some differentiation. At the end of the day, it's still complicated enterprise software. >> Right, exactly, and we heard that over and over again from the people, from Infor themselves, and also from customers, is that it isn't seamless. It's complicated, it involves a lot of change management initiatives, people have to be on board, and that's not always easy. >> Well, and that's why I'm encouraged, that to see some of the larger SIs, you know, you see Grant Thornton, Capgemini, I think Accenture's here, Deloitte-- >> Rebecca: We're having Capgemini later on the program. >> Deloitte's coming on as well. And so, those guys, even though I always joke they love to eat at the trough and do big, complex things, but, this is maybe not as lucrative as some of the other businesses, but it's clearly a company with momentum, and some tailwind that, in the context of digital transformations and AI, the big SIs and some of the smaller SIs, you know, like Avaap, that we had on yesterday, can do pretty well and actually help companies and customers add value. >> And with a fellow like Charles Phillips at the helm, I mean, he is just an impressive person who, as you have pointed out multiple times, is a real visionary when it comes to this stuff. >> Yeah, except when he's shooting hoops. He's not impressive on the hoop court, no. >> No? Oh! (laughing) >> I tweeted out last night, "He's got Obama's physique, "but not his hoop game." >> Oh! (laughing) >> So don't hate me for saying that, Charles. But yes, I think he's, first of all, he's a software industry guru. I think he, you know, single-handedly changed, I shouldn't say that, single-handedly, but he catalyzed the major change in the software business when Oracle went on its acquisition spree, and he architected that whole thing. It was interesting to hear his comments yesterday about what he sees. He said, "You'll see a lot more tech industry "CEOs running non-tech-industry companies "because they're all becoming SAS companies." >> If they have been so invested in understanding the vertical, they really get it. You can see someone who worked on a retail vertical here going in and being the CEO of Target or Walmart or something. >> Yes, I thought that was a pretty interesting comment from somebody who's got some chops in that business, and again, very impressive, I mean, the acquisitions that this company has done and continues to do. You and I both like the Birst acquisition. It's modern-day BI, it's not sort of just viz, and I don't mean to deposition Clik and Tableau, they've done a great job, you know, but it's not, it doesn't solve all your enterprise-grade, BI sort of problems. And, you know, you talk to the Cognos customer base, as great of an acquisition as that was for IBM, that is a big, chewy, heavy lift that IBM is trying to inject Watson and Watson Analytics. I mean, you know, you used to work at IBM, Jim. And they're doing a pretty good job of that, improving the UI, but it's still big, chunky, Cognos BI. Build cubes, wait for results. >> Yeah. So in many ways, the Birst acquisition for Infor and their portfolio is a bit like the thematics that IBM's been putting out on HTAP, you know, injecting analytics into transactional processing to make them more agile, and so forth. What I like about the Birst acquisition, vis-a-vis Coleman and where Infor is going, is that the Birst acquisition gives them a really good team, the people who really know analytics and how to drive it into transactional environments such as this. They've got, I mean, ostensibly, a deep fund of capital to fund the Coleman development going forward. Plus, they've got a really strong plan. I think there's potential strong differentiators for Infor, far more comprehensive in their plan to incorporate AI across their portfolio than SAP or Oracle or Microsoft have put out there in public, so I think they're in a good position for growth and innovation. >> Well, we have a lot of great guests coming up today. As you said, Duncan Angove is going to be on, up next. So, I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante and Jim Kobielus, we will have more from Inforum just after this. (digital music) (pensive electronic music)

>> Narrator: 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 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dhiraj Shah. He is the C.E.O of Avaap. Thanks so much for joining us. You're a Cube veteran. >> My pleasure. >> So welcome back >> Yeah. >> I should say. >> Absolutely. >> Not a rookie anymore. >> Right, right, right. So Avaap is a major strategic partner with Infor. So just walk us, Tell our viewers a little bit more about the relationship and where we are. >> Absolutely. Avaap's been a partner with Infor now for the last six years and prior to that, with Lawson. We've certainly come a long way. We started it 11 years ago as a single individual. Last year when we were here, we were here as a platinum sponsor and the big announcement this year is we're a diamond sponsor. So it doesn't get larger and add great stage presence and one of the big announcements we had this year, was Go Live with Infor's new CloudSuite Financial. The first customer to go live on that Palos Help, was actually an Avaap customer, that we brought live in nine months. >> And they were mentioned in the keynotes. >> Yes, Roger was on main stage. Gave a great presentation and what we centered our belief in, is you have the enterprise software provider, which is Infor, in this case, you have the system integrator, which is Avaap and then you have the customer. For any successful outcome, you need all three of these to really partner and do well. And that's what was exhibited with Palos. >> I'm always interested in companies that place bets on an ecosystem and the leader of that ecosystem is somewhat obscure. Certainly was six years ago. I mean, I saw this in the service now community. You're a hot company. You're growing like crazy and I saw early on, companies like yours in their community say we're going to make a bet and they've done very well. They've succeeded wildly, then get acquired by Accenture and CSC, so maybe great things ahead in your future. But take us back to the decision to bet on Infor. What led to that decision. >> Absolutely, looking back is always great right? Then you know the bets have paid off. But when you make 'em, it's not the same. Our business was, prior to 2012 when we made this decision, was centered around Lawson. We had some staff augmentation business and we had micro strategy BI business. And in 2011, Infor acquired Lawson. And when Infor acquired Lawson, there was a huge amount of apprehension in the customer base. Cause everybody was thinking here comes the external team that's going to come and annihilate the customer base. >> Dave: Yeah in the private equity cash suckout. >> Yeah, so that's what they're going to do. I had the opportunity to listen to Charles and his executive team, in one of their first meetings. And Charles was very clear in his vision. He said two things I want to focus on. One, build software that's easier to use, that's beautiful and that's not upgraded every year. And the second thing was, industry focus. Now six years go, you look at the enterprise software platforms, SAP, Oracle, nobody had industry focus. It was the same piece of software, one size fits all. And Charles came in and said, industry specific software. So we bought into that vision and we said this is going to be a huge opportunity in the ecosystem and fast forward six years. We were about 20 people at that time as a entire company. We have 25 people here at Inforum. more people just attending and 450 consultants globally now. >> You know Charles Phillips is a real, is a true software visionary because if you go back a decade plus a go. If you were an industry specialist, you were a VAR. Yes, Yes >> and you weren't going to to have a multi-billion dollar valuation. That was not a way to make the big dollars, right and so it is still, was, sort of a somewhat risky bet. >> It definitely was. Cause it seems we were much smaller back then but still to shut down those businesses over night and I still have the letter that we wrote to our customers and our employees and said we believe in this and that belief has really catapulted both our organizations It's really helped Infor and it's helped Avaap to kind of, and that's one of the lessons I learned as an entrepreneur. That wonderful things happen when you focus and build really strong partnerships. >> So that letter will some day be in a museum, I'm sure but. >> Dhiraj: I think we, from your mouth to God's ears. >> But let's talk about that. That easy to use, beautiful software that is transforming specific industries. >> Dhiraj: Yeah. >> Let's talk about retail. >> Yes. Absolutely. So retail was a huge announcement last year, when they announced they're going to go after Infor as a company and build a new wordicle. We invested alongside them as their single largest partner to go and give support. What they were doing around Retail is multiple things. Because prior to this, what Infor had was a ERP platform. Financials, human capital management. What they wanted to invest is we write the merchandising system, which is at the heart of a retailer. Not been done for the last 20 years. And they're rewriting and made an announcement with the best retailer, Whole Foods and that project kind of kicked off. The second piece they did was they filled in a gap with merchandise financial planning, assortment planning by buying a company called Predictings. So Avaap, kind of went ahead of it and we started a project alongside them over the past year and now we're independently going to markets. So Payless, we just signed a contract to implement merchandise financial planning for them. And then the final leg to this will be the point of sales, which would be StarMount, which is another system that they acquired and now the whole story around retail is coming in. Cause as we hear, retail's really getting hurt. And there's a huge technology change happening in the market place. >> Now, does GT Nexus fit into that as well, in terms of compressing the, you know if you build to order, kind of. Somebody's was giving an example of a couch today. You order a couch from some retail store and it takes 12 weeks to deliver. We've all sort of been there. Does it fit into that equation? >> You know it does. Because there's a whole shipping, receiving and the point of contacts through that guy that comes into the play there and GT Nexus, as you saw on the stage today, the amount of traffic that's being used through GT Nexus, it's going to help a lot of the retailers from all they're receiving and mobile supply chain functionality. >> Let me say real consumer frustration. You order something and you wait and you wait and you wait and you're excited and all of a sudden, weeks later you get the notification, sorry. >> Rebecca: Yeah. >> It's going to either be delayed or sorry we can't deliver that. So that's lost revenue. I mean, how many times does that happen? >> Yes and when you go to website, it's a different order. When you go to a mobile page, it's a different order. >> Dave: Oh yeah. >> When yo go into the store, it's a different order. So bringing all of that together for the single back office user experience is really what is going to transform the user experience to your point. >> So, speaking at another industry or user experience and this is, more important than buying a couch, let's say your health. Then this is another way in which Infor and Avaap are really transforming of the way we shop for medical care. So give us an example of what you're doing. >> Absolutely. We're very passionate about health care. So health care is our largest wordicle by size. So about 75 percent of our business is in health care and Infor has a large presence, Two thirds of the hospitals in the nation use Infor for their ERP software. Give a simple example, we were talking retail earlier. When you go into a retail store and you want to buy a piece of clothing, you know what it's going to cost you to purchase that and the store knows what their cost is for that, cause everything's coming from a single system. In hospital's case, there are two key systems. We have EHR, which the electronic medical system and you have your ERP, which is your back office system. Your revenue, comes from your EHR system, which is typically an Epic or Asserner. And your cost information comes from your lossing system, which is 75 percent of the time, Infor. They don't talk to each other. Now the acquisition of Burst gives a tremendous opportunity for us to connect the two systems together, bring that data forward, so the hospital operators know, at the time of admission and check out, what was the revenue and what was the cost, so they can do margin analysis. >> So you can see how that benefits the hospital but it also benefits the customer. >> In the end of the day, >> The patient. >> Absolutely. Because patient outcome is what's at the heart of all the changes that we're driving toward and when there's a lot, We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars that hospitals are burning in inefficient systems right now. And if that's saved, where's that going to go? Towards better care. And that's where dollars need to be focused. Not in holes that need to be plugged in technology. >> So Dhiraj, explain where Avaap specifically adds value. Where do you pick up from the technology that Infor provides? >> Absolutely. So prior to a year ago, our focus was just on the Infor side of the platform with ERP and a year ago, we acquired a company called Falcon Consulting. Best in class, top category leader for revenue cycle, to bring an Epic expertise. So now, we have both the EHR expertise and the ERP expertise. And in fact, this was our first foray outside of Infor and we got permissions form the Infor executive team, cause this we saw as a strategic way to service the entire health care ecosystem. And that's really helped us get knowledge from both sides to now build the integration platform to service. >> And so is it the full life cycle of plan, design, implement and manage? I mean, you start with strategy and? >> Yeah, so we're starting with the office of the CIO and CFO and organizational readiness and talking about strategy consulting. Vendor selection, ERP and after, once we get into the actual implementation cycle, that's where we do the implementation of the ERP or the EHR. Once implementation is done, the third piece of it will be optimization cause most systems that implement are not optimized. You know, they're on the same archaic system that were implemented many, many years ago. And then the final piece to that is continued support. As technology is evolving so fast. You heard Charles speak about so many new technology. It's hard for customers to keep up, so we do outsource application manage service to help support their. >> So talk just a little bit more about the whole microvertical strategy. We're interested in . I mean obviously, it's real. >> Dhiraj: Absolutely. >> But what is the impact to you as a partner and your customers. >> That was a new concept for us. Cause we saw it, okay Wordicle, great and then Charles came and said, 'No No Wordicle is not enough, it's microwordicle.' So one of our businesses is manufacturing. So you take the business of process manufacturing, the process manufacturing for your brewer versus your baker versus your food distributor, very different. So we then started taking Infor's product and started building applications in the presentation layer that are adapted for those industries. So CloudSuite Food and Beverage has a variation. So Old Neighborhood Foods is one of our top customers and they're one of the largest suppliers of all porks in the northeast. So how do everything that goes behind the making of the sausage and all the recipes, all of that is very different in a business, than Albert, say if Albert's since then got a bakery that we're implementing the same product. >> Dave: And you add that value? >> Yes. >> That's a custom code that you write or? >> No, these are using Infor's tools because Infor has presentation layer tools that we use to build microwordicle specification. Reporting analytics, all of those are driven for those industries. >> So you're composing the tooling. >> Dhiraj: Correct. Correct. >> Essentially is what you're doing. So is there any application development? Any low code or is it all no code? >> Zero code on the application side. Cause that's what, being in a cloud, that's one of the controls that come in. So the systems of the 70's were all customized in the application layer and then every time there was an upgrade, you would have to go through a huge exercise to retro fit them. All of that goes away. Beause with the cloud, you don't have control of the application wear. So all these tools that I'm talking about reside in the presentation layer. >> Okay, do you run into situations though, where you say, it would be nice if I had this custom modification and what happens in that situation. You go back to Infor and ask them for it or do you say to those guys, Hey can you extend your platform to give me a low code development capability or some kind of pass layer that. >> That's a very good question and that's a real world problem that our delivery team faces and we had to mature ourselves to. I would say a majority of the case. 80 to 90 percent of the case, we go back to the customer, to have a conversation with them to adjust their process. Most, eight out of ten times, it's the customer that doesn't want to change the process. >> Dave: Yes of course. >> And that's why they want the software to fit that. We've learned through the chain management mechanisms to have educated conversations with the customers cause it's a lot more painful to change the software than to do that. In the two out of ten cases, there are exceptions of building plug-ins or going to Infor. So one of the things with our partnership with Infor, we actually give, have a direct line with their product development team and if there's a change that customers are requesting that others would benefit from, it quickly gets into their queue and then it's part of the product set. >> Well that's interesting. That's a whole nother line of questioning now because you think about the old days of technology. Technology was so mysterious. But the process you knew, right? >> Yes. >> And today, it's changing. Technology is pretty much demystified. Everybody has AI, right. But it's the process that becomes somewhat unknown. Think about IOT and the Edge and these are all, these are sort of wild west processes. >> Most often overlooked cause for project failure is chain management and organizational readiness. And that's the part we lead in with to ensure organizations understand the investment they make in ERP is not just getting a vendor to come in and do this plug and play but to have their organization adapt to what the technology really is best suited for. >> That's great. Well Dhiraj, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube. >> Well thank you. >> It's been a fun >> it was real pleasure. >> a fun conversation. >> Yeah. >> Enlightening. >> Look forward to it. >> Enlightening even to Dave. >> Absolutely, I always learn. >> Yeah. Alright, thank you. >> Thank you for joining us. We'll have more from The Cube at Inforum 2017 in a bit. >> Dhiraj: Thank you. Alright.