>> Live from Washington DC. It's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well good afternoon and welcome back to Inform18, we are live in Washington DC, the nation's capital for this year's show. Joining Dave Vellante and me is Corey Tollefson, who is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for retail at Infor. Corey good to see you today sir. >> Good to see you, good to be seen. >> Yeah, right (laughs) it is, under any circumstance right. >> Absolutely. >> So retail, you talk about a world that's kind of upside down now. The brick and mortar guys are, they aren't brick and mortar anymore. So talk about the state of the industry if you would a little bit since it's moved to the digital platform and how that's changing your work with it. >> It certainly was simple 20 years ago. Manufacturers manufactured things, wholesale distributors distributed things, and then retailers sold things. Right, and so the whole business model has been disrupted. Mainly because of the advent of the mobile phone, a mobile device. I said it last year it feels like everyday you wake up and it's very chaotic and there is a lot of disorder. And I think it's an amazing opportunity for retailers to reinvent themselves into a modern 21st century retailer. Everyday is a challenge but we're working on it. >> So what's it like, I mean, every retailer I talk to has this sort of Amazon war room. They're trying to use their physical presence to drive online. They're really getting creative. Amazon continues to do super well. There are those who are predicting the end of of retail stores because of AI etcetera. What's your take? You're knee deep in this business. >> Well I feel, I mean Amazon certainly is bringing a lot of downward pressure. It's the first digital, retail is the first industry to be digitally disrupted. It is happening in healthcare, its happening in manufacturing, but retail brought on the initial wave so to speak. And what I'm seeing is a lot of the middle of the road retailers that don't have too much of an online presence, their legacy brands that maybe had their following 20 years ago. They're going to get squeezed out because the middle in this group is going to get squeezed out. The high end brands that control their own brand image, they brand manufacture their own products, they also have their own retail stores. Those are the companies that are uniquely qualified to compete and thrive against Amazon because the last I looked having stores and having an outlet for immediate gratification of getting products and services is a good thing. The retailers that we are working with are combating that against pure plays like Amazon. >> But there's some consumer friction there right, and it's generational, so how we shop is different then how our kids shop. They look at retail in a very different, through a very different prism then we do. So how do you address that in terms of, how do you help your clients address that through different segmentation of their audiences and addressing those unique problems? >> Well even as a kid I remember that the retail shopping was a destination shopping experience, so we'd load up the family truck, and we'd go to a mall, and spend the whole day. There would be entertainment there, there would be restaurants to eat at. We'd shop and then we'd come home, it was a destination. Try doing that when it is 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year on your phone, suddenly the social engagement, with social media, and Snapchat, and Twitter, and Facebook. Facebook is a little old for a lot of the younglings now, but the moral of the story is social media takes on everything and that's where the influence is. And that whole shopping experience it used to be, well I'm just going to get some product information and then I'm going to go into the store. That's been completely disrupted as well. One other aspect of this is the whole concept of consumerism is disrupted. There is a lot of, you know you look at a lot of the cool brands that are in other adjacent industries whether its Uber or Airbnb, they don't own any of their assets. Same thing is happening in retail, a lot of the new emerging brands are going to have disruptive business models. Like you go into a store and they don't even have any inventory. It's all made to order right. So there's a lot of disruption that's happening and we're working with a lot of brands to help. >> So talk about the next big thing NBT, next big thing in retail is that one of them? I go into a store and say that's what I want send it to my house, what else? >> Well I think one of the next big things that we're working on is the whole concept of machine learning. I think you guys have heard about this before, but the whole technology singularity where its the point in which there is no differentiation between engaging with a customer. Oh sorry engaging with a human versus engaging with a computer. We're not that far away and its a little bit scary. I think we talked about it a couple years ago but the whole concept is why do I need to interact with a human being for my shopping experience? I can just interact with a chat bot, for example. As long as I the customer gets the information I need to make an informed decision, I don't really feel weird talking to a computer anymore. >> Yeah so that's the idea of systems of agency, right, where the machine is taking action on behalf of the brand, and the consumer either doesn't know or doesn't care. >> Right that's right. >> So do you have customers that are on the precipice of doing that? >> Yeah we do. In one of the areas I have talked about this before, machine learning-based demand forecasting. So getting better at forecasting the right product, the right skew on a store-by-location basis. And what we do is we leverage a lot of the inherent capabilities of the internet. A lot of companies talk about cloud as simply a cost reduction. We view cloud as taking advantage of the world's greatest super computer which is the internet. And so, that's one of the areas in which we've been using machine learning. >> So what's the, you say the company, that mid-lane, or middle range, what are they to do now? Because they are kind of stuck, they have their challenges, they have this legacy approach that they are kind of in a tough spot. >> The die has been cast, if I was in their shoes, a lot of these middle of the road retailers. I would look at finding ways to optimize what I have. So whether that's optimizing your inventory, optimizing your labor. That's another thing we talked about, Charles this morning mentioned the whole concept of unleashing maximizing human behavior and unleashing human capital. For years we've been on shows like this talking about products, instead it's about engaging your customer. Everybody's a customer, if you're in healthcare you're a customer. In manufacturing distribution, you have customers. To look at it more from a human element around store associates, I think there's are a lot of middle of the road retailers that have an old iconic brand that could reinvent themselves with time and enough patience. >> How do you deal with the inevitable, well first of all how do your customers deploy your software? It's in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> It's in the Amazon cloud right? >> Well three years ago we made a fundamental decision that we were not going to be an on premise company. So we are a cloud-only applications provider. The second decision point we made was, do we want to be suite or best-to-breed. And when we say suite that was our decision. The third point was, how do you want it to be able to be deployed? So when I started off in this industry which felt like yesterday. I feel like I'm super old now, I started off as a software developer for a company called Retech out of Minneapolis. You know I was doing batch forms, and Oracle PL/SQL and everything was tied to the database, and the user experience was basically a graphical depiction of a database. (Dave laughs) But back in those days-- >> And it still is in a lot of apps. >> Yeah. In those days it was pretty much all about developing that individual code. I kind of lost my train of thought on that. The way you can deploy our assets is on an individualized basis. You can deploy our demand forecasting engine for example. You can deploy our allocation and replenishment engine. And when you tie it all together, you can have a suite that doesn't need to be deployed like it used to be in the old days is where I was going. Which is you have to deploy the whole data model to get all the information that you're looking for. >> Okay so in retail you've got the inevitable, oh well, I'm going to run this in Amazon, they're my big competitor, they're disrupting me. What's the conversation like with customers? How do you guarantee we're protecting their data, you point to Netflix and say hey it's working for them? What do you say? >> Well I think, I mean we're Infor, we're a big company. It's on a case-by-case basis. Yes we have a relationship with AWS and yes they are a strategic partner for us. That doesn't preclude the fact that we work with Google we work with Azure. We are cloud agnostic in retail so, it hasn't been as big of an issue as a lot of industry critics and analysts have made it out to be. >> So if there were an issue, you'd could run it anywhere you want. >> Yeah you just swap it out yeah. >> Alright I want to change gears here. Announcement on the stage today, keynote Van Jones from CNN was talking about #YesWeCode, an organization he has an affiliation with. You've created this, well launched an initiative NextGen. First off explain what that is but fill us back up to the genesis of that because as we found out just a few moments before it's a pretty interesting journey. >> Yeah. >> That you personally were involved in. >> Yeah, I know I am sure a lot of friends and family that know me well are going to be tired of hearing this story. I will give you the condensed version, which is-- >> Take your time. >> Growing up in Minneapolis, I was a huge Prince fan like most Minneapolis people are. And through serendipity I met Prince's brother, and Prince's brother pre-social, pre-internet, pre-mobile, put me on Prince's private guest list for parties at Paisley Park. And so here I am I had a loving family, and I can't believe my mom and dad would let me do this, but I am 16, 17 years old going to parties with Prince. And when I say parties I mean these were intimate parties, maybe the most was 50 people in his house. Sometimes there's like five of us, and what happened at these parties were he would play new music. If we danced and got up there and jammed with him, then he'd put it on an album. If it wasn't very good, or he felt like there wasn't a good strong reaction he put it in his vault. So we were a test case, a Petri dish so to speak, for his music. And I got to build a relationship with him as much as anyone that could. He was a very stand-offish person, but a brilliant artist, and a brilliant human being for that matter. I got to build that relationship and through that relationship I met Van Jones. We hooked up again at one of Prince's memorials a couple of years ago after his death, and we looked at each other and we connected and I said I'm in the technology industry. And he goes we got to talk because there's some things related to Prince's legacy we should really talk about. Which ties us back to #YesWeCode and the announcement we made today about GenOne. >> For GenOne excuse me I said NextGen. >> Yeah GenOne. >> My fault. >> Yeah no, no worries. And the genesis of this was Prince, Rogers Nelson, and Van Jones had a conversation right after Trayvon Martin was shot and killed. And a lot of people suspect the main reason was he looked suspect because he had a hoodie on. And here is an African American kid wearing a hoodie, they follow him and bad things happen right. Van Jones asked Prince directly he goes, you know clearly that guy was racist. And Prince said, think again, maybe if that was a white kid in Silicon Valley wearing a hoodie he'd be a dot.com billionaire, but because we haven't produced enough people of color in CEO level positions in our tech industry, that's on us. Meaning we need to develop more of our own. And so this project means a lot to us, because of the fact that we don't think diversity is just a check box that you have on your corporate mission statement. We think diversity can change the DNA of your company and it can influence better products, solutions, and services to our customers. So it's really important for us and this is just the first step of a multi-echelon, multi-year, multi-faceted program. That we want to take this and roll it out to the entire industry. I'd love for Salesforce and Oracle and SAP and Workday. I'd love for all of them to adapt a program similar to this. This isn't pride of ownership, it's the right thing to do and putting brilliant kids and brilliant minds that maybe came from a bad circumstance, they all deserve a chance too. And it only makes all of us better, and I feel like a lot of great things have happened to me in my career and I feel like I have to give back. And if I can be a small part of this with Van, so be it. >> So that's a very thoughtful response by Prince, and you were saying earlier Corey it was sort of hard to get to know him. Was that typical of Prince, was he sort of introspective and maybe pensive and prescient in that way? >> Well the piece the people that don't understand about Prince is that the whole story of his life is written in his music. And he's released over two thousand songs, you know I'm sure the family and the estate might see this but I've heard another couple thousand songs that have been unreleased and it's beautiful brilliant music and his whole life story is there. You just need to listen to the lyrics, or read the lyrics and listen to the music. >> So was... You mentioned this story, and I just thought 17-year-old kid, I mean with all do respect you don't look like one of Prince's friends right. You're a Minnesota guy, he was too, but just different and I think, did you ever just think that what in the world am I doing here? >> I had that moment, I will never forget that one moment. So it was probably the summer of 1995, Prince was standing five feet from me. He had his right hand strumming his electric guitar, his left hand was playing lead keyboard lines on the keyboard, his right foot was controlling the pitch of the guitar, the left foot was controlling the pitch on the keys, and he was singing vocals and dancing. And I said to myself, I pinched myself, and I said this moment in time, if Amadeus Mozart was standing here he would be blown away. Because there is nobody in the history of music that can write, produce all this great music, but also maintain that look, that image. And then the musicianship, he's a musician's musician. You know we talk about Lenny Kravitz, I ran into Lenny Kravitz about 20 years ago sitting on Prince's couch. He probably doesn't remember me, I am pretty sure he doesn't. >> We'll find out tomorrow night. >> We'll find out tomorrow, but I mean the moral of the story is he was a musician's musician. I'll never forget sitting on the couch and this really soft spoken gal said to me she was really nervous to perform tonight. And I am like don't worry you go this, and it was an 18 year old Alicia Keys. And Prince behind the scenes had been cultivating and developing talent whether its Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Nora Jones, you know. These people he helped develop behind the scenes, and no one really knew it. >> Well his band members were always incredibly talented. I don't know if you ever saw Prince live. >> Nope, did not. >> You've saw him many times. Man as he would say, that band was tight. (laughing) >> That's right. >> Well the program's a great legacy. >> It is. >> And one that is certainly not apparent, but it is great to know that back story to know the generation of that. What got going and certainly I think there's a lot seems like of emotional equity that you and the company have invested, to make sure it's successful as well. >> We think that it was Prince's legacy, but we feel like he has passed the torch between Van, myself and Charles. This really means a lot to us. So we want to take it to the next level so, we are pretty excited. >> Fantastic. >> Congratulations. >> Thanks for having me here. >> Thanks for sharing the story too. I'm glad and it's just wonderful and look forward to talking to Charles about it, when we have him on tomorrow. Alright back with more we are live here, theCUBE is covering Inforum18 in Washington D.C. 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>> 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 live coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Corey Tollefson. He is the senior vice president and general manager for retail here at Infor. Thanks so much for returning to The Cube. >> Happy to be here. >> Good to see you again. >> Looking forward to this, again. >> So you were, this was launched about 18 months ago, so give our viewers a status update, where are we? >> Well, it's been an amazing ride, so just 12 months ago, I think we talked about the initial prognosis of the business unit. Yeah, we just ended our fiscal year, we did about 77% year over year growth, we expanded into new markets like New Zealand and in Europe, we just opened up a brand new office in London, and we're thrilled with the market reception of our solutions. >> So talk a little bit about the solutions that you're coming up with, I mean, retail, or actually, let's back up. Let's talk a little bit about the state of retail right now and what the retailers themselves are feeling, and also, the customer experience. >> Yeah, I mean, anybody that shops understands that retail is in a complete disorder. I'd say chaos and disorder right now. >> Let's do some shopping! >> (laughs) >> Yeah, exactly, well, that's a great point. So when you think of retail, think of post World War II, where basically, the premise for retailing was an anchored mall with knowledgeable shoppers, or knowledgeable workers, associates that knew about their product, they were very product-centric. It was all about taking the car and the family and going to a destination and making it about your day. The reality is, the e-commerce world has changed the business model so much that retail is centered around these iPhones, and the smartphone, that it's 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and that the power of the information has now shifted from the store associates, to the actual consumer, so consumers and customers can walk into a retailer and have more knowledge, not only about the products that you're selling, but even your inventory levels, you know. Looking online, being able to buy on, search online and come into the store and purchase something, so. >> Yeah, so, I mean, there was always an asymmetry, pre-Internet, the brands had all the power, they had all the information, and then it's, as you say, it's totally flipped. In many ways, digital transformation is about trying to create that balance of power again, back in the hands of the brand, right? >> Yeah, I mean, it's funny how, if you look at it over the last 20 years, at first it was the brand and the manufacturers had all of the influence, and then, the whole concept of category management and allowances and things like that in the '90s, the retailers started to have the influence. Now the reality is, it's not even the retailers or the brands anymore, it's the customer. The customer and the consumer have all the influence in the world, which is making so much chaos and disorder around what's retail and the lines have blurred between what's a brand manufacturer and what's a retailer. >> So everyone's got their sort of, I've got to compete with Amazon strategy. What are you seeing that's, that's actually working? >> Well, what's happening in the industry, you know, you may have heard that Amazon put an offer in on Whole foods and ... >> I have heard that, yeah. >> You may have heard about that, so, what it does is it's basically validating our strategy two and a half years ago, when we had the idea of putting together this retail team and what we've done since then, around, you know, modern, beautiful applications that are fueled by science and analytics, that have a beautiful user experience, all those types of technologies are codified over the last two years, and best practices that we've created by using our relationships with Crate & Barrel and Whole Foods and DSW and Nordstrom, as opposed to stuff where that was written in the 1990s. So that's what we believe has been helping our, our progress so far. >> So you've worked with Macy's and Nordstrom and Williams-Sonoma, DSW. What do you think customers want? I mean, you're talking about beautiful applications, a user experience that is satisfying and easy. >> Well, it's funny that when we talk about things like this, I mean, I just mentioned beautiful user experience because customers want to enjoy the shopping experience. You know, Duncan mentioned it earlier on the main stage around next-generation applications are almost headless. You know, the next UI is AI. >> (laughs) >> Right, it's the, it's the UI that doesn't exist, and that's where our applications are going as well. Now it's about holding onto that data, that analytics, that science, and presenting that in a format that's an offer to our customer's customer. >> Speaking of AI, you're really the first cloud suite that is going to be able to take full advantage of Coleman, the new product to launch today. Tell our viewers a little bit more about how you anticipate using Coleman. >> Well, I could get into the whole, "Coleman, tell us to look up a promo, "Coleman, tell us about this price change," there's all those different types of technologies. We're exposing all the data, so anything can be accessible by Coleman around our analytics platform. And one thing that does differentiate us is, we don't view our systems as silos, so, our execution engine for core item merchandising and our omni-channel merchandising system, and our advance analytics and forecasting and planning and replenishment system, are built on one common stack, so that it's common whether it's analytics or execution, they're converged together, so it allows us to be able to take advantage of technologies like Coleman. >> So there was an article in the journal the other day talking about how Apple was actually behind in ... You'd use the example of Siri, anybody who's used Siri knows that it, maybe not quite as where we'd like it to be, and Google and Amazon have the data, and maybe that helps them sort of lead. What is your corpus of data, obviously GT Nexus is part of that, what, but you've got to have the data source, it's all about the data, what's your data corpus? >> I'll give you a real world use case, so two years ago, when we announced the Whole Foods project, one of the design principles that we definitely went forward with, was the whole concept of no, no hierarchies, unlimited attributing, unlimited information around item, because we want to take all that information and all that attributes associated with the item, and we want to load it up into our machine learning solution. >> So, very flat. >> Very flat. We want to load that up into our advanced machine learning in our data platform in the cloud, and we can make as many science recommendations against all that information that's aggregated. So, ah. That's one of our ways in which we differentiate as well. >> Okay, and then, the other thing is, when I look at your, and we saw Soma was presenting to the analysts yesterday and putting up some architecture slides and, there was a lot of AWS in there. It appears that you're heavily leveraging that Amazon, sort of innovation flywheel. How does that affect your business? >> Well, it's a sticky wicket, right? I mean, what we've learned from working with Amazon as well as AWS is they're distinct organizations and we spent a lot of time with AWS because they spend so much money, it's been a nuclear arms race over the last decade to see who could spend the most money to build the best infrastructure and plumbing, and there is a wall that segments the two from each other, but that doesn't preclude us from working with other clouds. There's other clouds that we can use from our customer. I mean, some of our customers have requirements around leveraging Microsoft or Google, and we're happy to work with those clouds, too. >> I want to talk a little bit about international expansion. You mentioned a new office in London and also a new one in New Zealand. London seems like an obvious destination, New Zealand, not as much. Can you just explain to our viewers a little bit about why those two places? >> Well, I think the first part of that is, it's English-speaking. >> Okay, fair enough, yes. >> It's a little bit easier with less translation requirements related to those markets, but what we really like about London, is it feels like they're catching our momentum that we had two years ago in North America, and the reception we've had in London has been insane. And I wish I could be in a position to announce all the recent wins that we've had in Europe, but there's going to be more to come as well, in announcements. >> Okay, so, what are you hearing here? A little over a year in, what are the customers here telling you? What they like, what they don't like, what they want. >> Well, I think what a lot of customers are asking for is, they want to see acceleration a road map. They believe in concepts like Coleman that we had mentioned this morning, they want to take advantage of that as quickly as possible. And for us, we can provide a prescriptive journey, and it doesn't need to be a big bang where you have to deploy this huge, monolithic system. I would love nothing more than to have all of your system, all of our customers and prospects take advantage of all of our systems, but the reality is, there's some legacy systems they don't want to touch, that's okay, that's fine, we can make SAP smarter by having the best analytics platform in the retail on the planet, we believe, you know. We can take advantage of that horizontal ERP that you're running by taking advantage of some of the burst functionality, where we can come in and start taking information out of different, disparate silos. So there's not just one way of digesting an experience with Infor. >> So a lot of the ways in which companies are competing with Amazon is obviously with data, utilizing data in new ways, personalizing the experience as you mentioned, Europe, Europe, you know, last year dropped a bomb called GDPR, and the whole privacy piece and it goes and, the penalties go into effect May of '18. How are you rethinking, privacy and data protection, in this new era? >> You know, the irony on this question is, two years ago, if you would have asked the same question, the onus would be on us to provide accessibility and provide proof that it's better to go with a cloud provider? The dialog has shifted to the point where, you know, we talked about it earlier today, we've got hundreds of people that are working in cloud ops, as opposed to our retailers that might have a handful that use it, so it's almost like the onus and the risk is on our retailers of not trusting a cloud provider, for that service. >> It's true, I mean, Amazon absorbs a lot of that risk for GDPR. So, then, how do the retailers think about data protection? I mean, they don't just wash their hands and say, "Okay, Amazon will take care of it." Are the discuss, are they more sort of, data protection brokers or strategists or? >> Well, I think it comes back to, there was some interesting behavior back in the mid-90s between a couple retailers and Amazon and, that's where a lot of the trepidation came from, of working with them, I keep harping back to, there is a pretty distinct line between AWS and Amazon, and what we find is, they don't even talk to each other. So if they're listening right now, they, that's probably, that's not a knock on them, that's actually congratulations that they are completely separate units, that we don't feel like there's any issues related to privacy or, the biggest concern isn't privacy, it's around having access to information around that SKU and that item and that price point. They don't want Amazon to be able to see that price point and suddenly offer up a promo based upon inside information. >> Okay, you know, sure, I buy that. I, you know, I think Amazon is pretty reputable in terms of that, that brick wall between the two companies, but specifically, I'm talking about personal information, and how that's protected, or just generally, security, well, I guess security again, the onus is on the cloud provider, but, are you, is that a board level discussion? Is that more of a wonk level discussion in IT or just? >> Over the last two years it's evolved to the point where it's not even a discussion point anymore. >> Because of the cloud. >> Because of the cloud, the cloud adoption as well as the standards that AWS has put in place, it's almost like they've created the industry standard for, to which others now compete with. >> Great. >> So. >> When you're thinking about the future of retail, is there a piece of advice that you could give to retailers? They're listening now, they're watching The Cube. Retailers who are fearful of a digital transformation, resistant to one, or know that they have to transform in this way but just can't quite seem to get over the hump. >> Well, every day I meet with a retailer, and it's the same sentiment. They understand and appreciate that if they don't adopt, they're dead. And it's really, it's really a grave situation, and the reality is, I think we're going to usher in a golden age of retailing, because, what's left behind is the old adage of, let's just expand and create more store space and more shelf space, and we'll just see our margins go higher and our revenues go higher. Those days are done, so they need to make the most they can out of the space that they have, and the reality is, any single store, it's almost like a node on the network, and I wanted to tell this story. So last night, I was boarding a plane and I realized my shoes were not packed. It's because I didn't have them, I left them in London last week, and the reality is, I'm not the best shopper when it comes to making these decisions. So I called my personal shopper at Nordstrom. She had all the information on me. She played it against her BI report on, these are the types of trends, style, color, class, and she came back and said, "Corey, "I'm going to purchase these for you." And I said, "Great, I'll pick them up "at your Nordstrom location in Manhattan." And she said, "Oops, it doesn't open until the spring." And I thought I was completely out of luck, and the reality is, she said "don't worry about it, "there's a distribution center not that far behind, "we'll ship it directly to your hotel." And guess what, lo and behold, this morning, my shoes were there. That's the type of modern retailing that all the non-Amazon, non-Walmart.com retailers can do to be successful. >> But it's not headless. I mean, there was a human being involved, yeah. >> There was a human being there, but we're working on next generation apps, specifically with Nordstrom too, to help them create that experience so we can eliminate the heroics and make that embedded into a new modern platform. >> I love it, I love it, I'm excited. >> Okay, but wait, wait, wait. Why couldn't Amazon replicate that with its AI and, you know, geniuses and alpha geeks? >> It's the human interaction. I don't want to just necessarily interact with a bot, on Amazon.com. I called my personal shopper live, and said, "This is what the situation is, can you solve it for me?" So then she took that back, she ran it through the calculations and came back and said, "Here's what you need and I'll ship it to you." >> Well, the other thing that I think about is the physical store. Some, like every time I buy sneakers on Amazon, they never fit, so, okay, so I want to go into DSW. I love DSW. >> (laughs) >> We do, too. >> It's, like, my favorite shoe store in the world, and of course my girls love it too, so. But so, there are many situations where you really actually want that physical, look and feel and touch. >> And think about what you just said, so with DSW, most of their customers are avid shoe shoppers and they love shoes. The differentiation between DSW and Amazon is that, I believe the numbers are pretty much 70% of North America's population is within 5 to 10 miles of a DSW. Think of that as competitive advantage, being able to buy online, pick it up in the store after work, there's no delay in shipping, that's really why Amazon's trying to get into the retail space with-- >> And by the same, unless Whole Foods starts-- >> There could be a drone! >> selling shoes ... (laughs) >> Or there could be a drone, that would deliver it to me in a couple hours. Anyway, but this is next year's Inforum. This is, these are all the themes. >> That's going to be amazing, to sit down with you and talk about this year after year. >> I know, we, at the golden age, it's soon to be upon us. Corey Tollefson, always a pleasure to sit down with you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much, appreciate it. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have our wrap just after this. (peppy techno music)

(electric upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well welcome back here on theCUBE along with Dave Vallante I'm John Walls as we wrap up our coverage here at Inforum 18, Washington D.C. Nations capital. Again just saying which we are between Capital Hill and the White House here. And just on top of the show floor Dave had a chance to check out the goings on down. So good feeling here. Good vibe on the floor. Good feeling on the Keynote stage. I know tomorrow, good lineup as well but just your thoughts as we wind up here on day one. Well I think Charles Phillips is an awesome host. I mean first of all he looks great up there. He's tall. He's thin. He's got has this awesome suit on. I mean the guy is just dressed impeccably. Add to that his mind. I mean he's a very clear thinker, a clear strategist. He's able to articulate the value, the strategy that Infor has and has had for quite some time and the value that it brings to customers. So I really like listening to him. He's not a hype machine. Unlike, you know, so many in this industry who are incredibly successful, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff you know others you know love to hype what they do. Charles throws a little, few little jokes in there but very low key as we heard this morning. And it seems to be working. I mean as a private company they can write their own narrative. Alright if this were a public company people would be hammering them on the debt. They'd be knocking them on the top-line growth. Cause the Income Statement, you know, from a growth stand point is not exploding but the SAS pieces of the business are. So but you know Wall street, they would be picking at this scabs. So as a private company, they're not subject to the 90-day shot clock. And so as a result they can write their own narrative which I think is incredibly important for this company right now because they have a large installed base of customers that they're trying to move to their new platform. Move, migrate you know, those are scary words for customers. And so the competition, this is why. Why is Oracle coming at Infor so much? Two reasons there may be others. But number one. Infor is hurting Oracle. They're taking share away and Oracle you know, think that they should have 100% market share. Same with SAP. The second is that it sees an opportunity to fight back you know the best, the best defense is a good offense. And so they're trying to go after those customers that Infor's trying to woe to their new platform. And any time you moving it's an opportunity. You know we saw this with big acquisitions like Dell and EMC. You know EMC took their eye off the ball, others came in allowed a company like NetApp to come back. So you see that certainly HP, when it was splitting up, got distracted so you see that and so now what's key about sessions like this, events like this, is it allows Infor to stay relevant. To put a relevance story in front of its customers. So what is that story? It's got a platform. It's got a full stack. It's investing in R and D. It's innovating with technologies like AI. It's building organic innovation. And it's bringing in inorganic through acquisition. Things like Birst for modern BI and injecting that throughout its application portfolio. It's got a full-suite. It was interesting somebody said we had to make a bet, do we go full-suite >> Or best-of-breed. >> Or do we go best-of-breed. >> Right. >> I would argue by going micro-vertical they can claim both. It's very hard to be both best-of-breed and both full-suite. I mean I would agree if you just want to do one thing, you're probably going to do that one thing better than anybody else. And so I'll grant you that. But I think that the balancing act is how do you stay like best-of-breed or near best-of-breed with that full-suite? And I think Infor's found the answer with micro-verticals. And bringing in technologies like AI. Was very impressed with all the robotic process automation talk this morning. That's going to be a huge business it's already. I mean it's growing like crazy. So if I'm an Infor customer and I'm an old Legacy customer I'm thinking: "Wow these guys are really making "some interesting investments." "Yeah I got to spend, "and I got to maybe migrate "but if I don't I'm going to get digitally transformed "by somebody else." And they didn't actually put a lot of scare tactics in there but maybe that's something they should, might want to add in, is some examples of customers that are, that have been left behind. But maybe that's bromide in the industry today. But I think that, that relevance message came through load and strong and I think it's critical for this company. >> I think interesting just to start with the Keynotes, and then we heard it throughout the various guest that we had here on the program today was that it's a compony that really knows who it is. At least that's the feeling I get. Knows where it's going. So it inspires a lot of confidence, right. He does, Charles does. The company does. And they're just kind, they're just real comfortable in their own skin for one. And two, they're committed to other principles outside of business. I'm talking about the diversity and inclusion. That's just not flab, that's really who they are. That's their DNA. I think there's an appealing aspect there too. >> Yeah and so. And then we heard a lot, you know, the Coke industries investment, two and a half billion. I said two billion earlier it's two and a half billion. That money didn't show up in the Balance Sheet, okay. So again. You get to write your own narrative as a private company. So there's still three hundred and thirty-eight million on the Balance Sheet you know, still quite a bit of debts. So again, Wall Street would be picking at that but doesn't even come up, at this event. Customers aren't really asking those questions. They want to see a company that's viable. This company is clearly viable. They have thrown off a lot of cash that's why private equity and organizations like Coke Industries are interested in them. Because it's cashflow positive, they see a lot of, you know, financial upside for this company. So that's kind if cool. They other things is Hook & Loop the Design firm that Infor bought you know, several years ago we heard how that's evolving and becoming a fundamental part of, not just design but product development. I think that's pretty impressive. Many companies are doing that now. These guys got in first and so they're a little bit ahead of the game. I think they're, they're innovating in a way that I think has ripple effects for customers. I mean the customer experience. You hear a lot about diversity at this company, I mean this is not to me lip service. >> Right. >> You know Charles is really serious about this stuff. And he's got the platform to do it and he's investing in it. And so, you know, you see a lot of substantive examples. And I think that will pay off. It will pay dividends. The Four Horsemen now have been sort of evolving. There's a succession planning with the Four Horsemen, right. Because Stephan and Duncan have, have moved on. You know they've left the company or at least they're not front and center anymore. They're LinkedIn still says they're working with Infor so they're somehow affiliated. But they don't have operating roles. It's clear. But Charles and Pam still do. And so you're seeing an evolution there. We're going to ask the head of HR tomorrow about that. We heard from, you know Martine, back to the diversity. Corey Tollefson talking retail. You know again, Micro industry. You know, we know, he didn't mention it, but you know guys like Macy's, Safeway, these are decent sized customers of Infor. We're seeing the partner ecosystem grow. We had Capgemini on today. Grant Thornton is out there. You know Deloitte and others that. >> Accenture is out here I think. >> Accenture's out here, yeah. So that's, that's important. Again I think, I think Coke Industries helped nudge some people in there. "Like Hey, we just made a big investment." "We're a big client of yours." >> Didn't hurt. >> "You're going to pay attention." (laughing) >> "And find some opportunities." Probably said: "Look it's got to be subsidize, "It's got to be a win-win but we want you to look in earnest." And I think others have. I've heard that there's been multi-million dollar deals that these guys have have catalyzed. Kevin Curry from Public Sector, a critical space for Infor, he has almost a thousand customers here and Amazon has a huge presence in Public Sector and they're drafting off of that. And then of course we ended with Raul from AWS which was fun interview. AWS is obviously winning in so many different fronts. Big partnerships with guys like VMware. Obviously number one in Cloud, others I guess if you add up all the revenue are number one. But really Amazon's number one in cloud. >> That's right. >> We know they're tops. Because they're in a. For their serve market, which is infrastructure as a service, they're by far the leader and they started the whole thing. Tomorrow we got Charles Phillips coming on. We got Pam Murphy the two, what I consider founders of Infor. They weren't right, but they were the founders of, the new co-founders of the new Infor if you will. And some customers coming on. So really excited to be here. >> Big day, look forward to it. >> Yeah. >> And we, unfortunately I can't share this with you at home but Venus Williams on the Keynote stage tomorrow. Looking forward to that. Talking about the human potential. Shackles going to be here. Had a last minute cancellation so they've Venus Williams in and talk about really thematically, very consistent to her life story with what Infor is talking about here this week. And we're glad to have the opportunity to be here with you throughout the week, and the show. So that's it for day one here at Inforum 18. From Dave Vallante, I'm John Walls, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE and we'll see you back here tomorrow from Washington D.C. (electric upbeat music)