>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us, the CEO of Avaap. Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon! >> Good to see you again! >> Absolutely, big pleasure, it was great talking to you for the last two years, and a pleasure to be back here. >> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap, I've read a little bit, I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language, what do the five letters represent? I mean how did you come up with the title? >> You know, that's the first question that gets asked, the two questions I get. >> Sorry to be cliche, but I'm just really curious! >> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?" and the other question is, "What is Avaap?" and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at Avaap, so, Agni, which is fire stands for passion, 'cause I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do; if you're passionate, you'll follow through and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation, sky is tied to goals, we're very ambitious. We've been able to have a rocket ship type of growth, so far, and we continue to aspire to do more. We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience, cause we like to be globally eco conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy, and the more there is transparency, the better there is organizational development. >> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions, and the relationship with Infor, walk us through that a little bit, of why you're here. >> Absolutely, so, we are Infor's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that, because we just came off the stage getting four awards with Infor this year. >> Congratulations! Fantastic. >> Yeah, thank you very much. They were overall partner of the year five years in a row. Our partnership with Infor, started five years ago, before that it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room, and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said "I want to do two things, I want to make software that is industry specific." And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said "We want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies. Cloud, mobile, big data." Right? So I had a great opportunity, and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the Infor basket, and just doing Infor. And that served us well of going from 20, at that point we were like 25 employees, to having over 450 today. >> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past is you got in early, and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in, so you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding? >> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead, so that actually, that's a question I got, is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't, because it's a validation of what's occurring in this eco system with the big system integrators coming in. And with a rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs, because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management, and we do what we do best, which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services. >> The deep, deep Infor, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? Infor's specialty is the last mile, micro-industry capabilities, and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep Infor expertise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So give us an example of, you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera. Where do you come in? where does Infor sort of, where does their micro services, or micro-function leave off, and where do you pick up? >> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example, in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christus Health, they are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60 thousand employees. They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, Supply Chain, Financial. Went through a large system selection process the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to Infor and Oracle as the two lenders that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on Infor as their vendor of choice, they did a services RFP, which we partnered with Deloitte, because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services, that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor, that we have within our healthcare team. So, we bridged and built an alliance, that, today is starting the project journey in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus, to make that project a success. >> In the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that Infor and Oracle had, were what? the coverage of the functionality across the suites, was it the cloud capabilities? What's the high level of that? >> So the one thing that I will tell you, is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable, so the way it's starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud, there's a lot of education already around single tenant, and multi-tenant, and they understand. So it starts with the cloud platform, that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform, and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant, as opposed to individually hosted for each customer. And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see what not a product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but their business processes, and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where Infor really came ahead at Christus. >> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean, Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?" I'm presuming the customer cares because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Verses okay, we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? >> Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts a customer to have to take their system down, and then bring it back up, and here it's done without the customer even finding out, so it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is a cost, which in today's world not as much, because hardware's become very cheap. But it's still conquered hardware that's sitting on the premise, as opposed to individually putting it out there, as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security, on multi-tenant capable software, it's more secure than your single tenant capability. >> And Avaap brings that to the table. So it's not, I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function, so yours is what? Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? >> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align, and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have a offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today, and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process, and post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare, is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR, you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR, and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other. And the systems need to be really integrated, to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that, so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in. >> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? >> Right. >> So what's goin on these days? You obviously, last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, there's some uncertainty around that, certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers, EMR is still you know, a big deal. What are the hot trends, what are the drivers, and how are you guys responding? >> ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market, so there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars, of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in a midst of what I think, is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry are on ERP platforms that we're seeing, there were 55 system selections done, just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years, we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. >> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead. >> So swap-- what's... the fundamental of that decision? >> So there are a lot of legacy providers, so the market is going to get consolidated, so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers, there's, if you count mid market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base. >> Very fragmented, isn't it? >> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright. >> So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform, officially said that they are stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional, individual health system that exist in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded, because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. >> Yeah I mean a lot of these, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini-computer era it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX, and we'll become a valuated re-seller, and healthcare was such a huge opportunity, and so under technologized, not a word but, and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated, now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right? >> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. >> Yeah, and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time, to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary, and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform, and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled, for the healthcare industry, specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today. >> Who does that last mile functionality, if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor, is it the SI, is it some other internal software developer? >> So, the software developers as Infor is, trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS, as an example come in, to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. >> You do that work, is that right? >> We do that work, absolutely. >> Okay, and then, how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their road map? Soma's got his ERD pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys, and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become advantageous for others? >> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product, that's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board, ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out. >> Well you could. >> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs >> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific, and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team, that allows us to see their road map and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP, for healthcare. So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point, manual, laborious, takes a business uses away. So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation, which has been in the field, we have, close to 100 customers using it, allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle, and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. >> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare, you have another interest inside of your business, with a little Beatles connection. So fill us in on that a little bit. >> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one, and I definitely want to talk on both of them, because those are important parts of our business, One is retail, we did get retail partner of the year award, and Stella McCartney, is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter, and has built a very reputable shoe company, that's a brand highly sought after, and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications, using cloud suite fashion, which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform. >> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right? >> That's cool, that is cool! >> Absolutely! >> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here, thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Congratulations on all the progress! >> It's always good to be here! >> It is full speed ahead. Good for you. Dhiraj Shah from Avaap >> Thank you! >> Back with more on theCUBE. We're at in Informen, Informer rather, (laughs) I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum! >> Inforum! >> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing) >> 2018, D.C. Did it again. >> Excellent! (bubbly 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.