>> 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)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, welcome to the nation's capital, a rain soaked Washington DC. We're here for Inforum 18, Dave Vellante, John Walls We're in the Walter Washington Convention Center. The fourth time, theCUBE has been at an Infor show and getting bigger and better than ever, David. >> That's right John. This is, let's see, the first one was in New Orleans several years ago. Then Infor skipped a year, and then did Javits couple years in a row. That's sort of the headquarters of where Infor is, very close to the Javits Center. And Charles Phillips, of course, lives in New York City. And this year they decided to come to the nation's capital. I mean, Infor is an interesting company. About $3billion in revenue, essentially it is a private equity roll up. From Golden Gate and others, that really the roots of it are in Lawson Softwares. Some of you may remember Lawson Softwares, the enterprise software company. And then Charles Phillips came on, and of course he was the architect of Oracle's M and A. Probably spent $30 plus billion for Larry Ellison, remaking Oracle. Completely transforming Oracle, brought some of that expertise to Infor in this private equity play, this roll up. And then bought many, many software companies, rolled them up together and really started to compete, using a different model. So, Infor's sort of expertise, if you will is around so called Micro verticals, so they cover a lot of different industries, hospitality industries, they got also manufacturing, ERP, >> Retail financial >> Retail financial, health care, and then they also have horizontal applications like Human Capital management. Their differentiation, is several fold. One major point is they go after what they call the last mile. So they call this micro verticals. So the last mile functionality that would normally have to be customized, Infor does that work for you. Now, the advantage of that is two fold. One is you don't have to do a bunch of custom mods all that hard work is done. The second is, another part of the differentiation is cloud. So they chose, several years ago to go with AWS cloud to put their SaaS on the cloud. Charles Phillips said 'hey when we were an on-prem software company, we didn't manage our own servers for our customers. Or manage customer servers, we didn't do that. So why would we do it in the cloud? We don't want to compete with Google and Microsoft and Amazon in terms of scale, so were going to put our software on the Amazon cloud.' So that's another point of differentiation, the reason that is so important in the context of custom mods, is if you're rolling out new upgrades on a periodic basis, and you hear this a lot from Servicenow customers, for example another cloud software company. You can't do custom mods and then take advantage of the new releases. Because you're going to be way behind. Okay, so you have to have that hard work done so that you can avoid those custom modification. And that is something Infor has been very proud of. So as I say, $3billion company. Last year they took a $2billion investment from Koch industries. Now that investment, largely went to recapitalising the company, the private equity guys probably took some money off the table as did the four, what I call the four horsemen. They were the four, sort of new founders of Infor including Charles Phillips, Pam Murphey who is still there and then two others Duncan Angove and Stephan who have left the company, so they have got some succession planning now. We saw a different, two new faces up on stage Soma and we're going to have some other folks on that we'll introduce you to. But so, now we're entering a new phase and it's the phase of what Charles Phillip's coined 'Human Potentials'. So big focus this year on human capital management, we heard that. Big focus on AI, they talked a lot about robotic process automation. I just had a meeting, last night at the airport in DCA with the head of marketing at an RPA company, UiPath, they are smoking hot, they just raised 225 million they have gone from 2 million to 200 million over night. And that space is exploding, it was interesting to hear Charles Phillips talk a lot today about Robotic process automation, RPA. Which is essentially software >> Break that down for me. >> So RPA is software robots and software robots are used to automate mundane tasks. Having machines do very specific tasks and you are seeing this a lot in financial services and a lot of back office automation. It's not physical robots moving around, it's basically software based processes that machines can do. Repetitive processes, that machines can do better. Machines don't get tired, so they can do these repetitive tasks, take that away those mundane tasks away from humans. You heard a lot of conversation about that today. You also heard a little competitive fire. So Oracle is now taking ads out against Infor, we've seen that. All the cabs here, many of the cabs have Oracle branding on them. So Oracle is paying attention to Infor. >> And they're right down the road here too, by the way. You know, I mean, Western Virginia not far so this is their backyard. >> Well congratulations Infor, Oracle is paying attention to you that means, must mean you're hurting them We've seen this before with others, I mean we certainly saw it, you know in past days with IBM, we see it extensively with Workday. We've seen some kind of, tit for tat with SalesForce, even though SalesForce is one of Oracles largest customers. So that's been kind of fun, fun to watch. And now Infor, so Infor clearly is doing some damage, to the traditional guys. Oracle, SAP, Workday maybe not so much Workday is growing like crazy, but Infor claims it is growing SaaS revenue 50% faster than Oracle's SaaS revenue. It's growing double the rate of SAP, and growing as fast almost as Workday, is kind of what it claims. And so, this whole enterprise resource planning, HCM, vertical market software, horizontal software the market is always been hot. It's a huge, huge market. Many, many, tens of billions, it's probably a hundred billion dollar TAM. And the big, big whales are of course Oracle and SAP, and then of course, SalesForce and you've seen the emergence of companies like ServiceNow which has quite a bit of different strategy but with Oracle, with Infor's sort of Oracle heritage a lot of people in the company came from Oracle so they know where the skeletons are buried they know how to compete, they have relationships with the customers. And they're offering some differentiation, as they say with those Micro verticals, the last mile, and the pure cloud model. Now, if you look at the income statement you'll see the SaaS portion of the business only represents about 25% of the revenues but remember, that's a ratable model. So you're only recognizing revenue as you're, as the months go on, so you're billing sort of monthly if you will, or recognizing monthly. And so, as a result that skews and dampens the effects of the SaaS software, I think from a booking stand point is probably much higher, proportion of bookings I would guess closer to 50% as they said they took $2billion last year from Koch industries. That $2billion dollars didn't really hit the balance sheets, they get about $330million on the balance sheet. And they've a lot of debt, because they you know did you know, it was a private equity you know leverage deal. They did a lot of acquisitions, so they've probably got about $5.7billions of what they call net debt, which presumably is debt after cash. So I would guess close to $6billion in debt. They're a quasi, they're not a public company they're a private company, but they act in many ways like a public company, I would suspect within the next couple of years here, if this kind of growth continues that you'll see an IPO, from Infor. Although, presumably Koch industries, we heard Koch on stage today, they said they've made $15billion in investments in technology companies. $2billion, this has to be one of their largest. And, but that's patient capital. They get the benefit of the cash flow, they can probably take dividends if they want to do that. And if they're smart, and they invest and they can take market share from Oracle and SAP and others, and gain share in the market space, they can do an IPO. They're revenues are $3billion, their valuation, they implied a valuation based on the Koch industries investment is $15billion. So if they can take that $15billion to $30billion 20 to 30 billion, there's going to be a nice return. >> You know I thought, what's interesting about Koch too they talked about this, it's certainly as you talked about 2billion right. They put the money in, but they're also, it's a symbiotic relationship, in that that Koch is using it's organization as a test lab. For a lot of products and services, that Infor is producing. And allowing them to refine that under the Koch umbrella before they take it out to the market place. So that's pretty true, I feel like seems to makes sense. You have a company that has 60,000 world wide employees, you're in dozens of countries, you've a chance to let them take their products to scale, in maybe a somewhat more friendlier, controlled environment before you take it out to the marketplace. That seems to make a lot of sense. >> Yeah, we heard the CIO of Koch industries today and I talked to him last year, and we were talking about some of the technical debt that they had, again going back to those custom modifications that I was talking about earlier. They were in this terrible virtuous cycle almost a negative virtuous cycle where they had so many custom mods that they couldn't make changes. So the applications were becoming voxalised, so they were becoming non competitive and that is the last thing that a line of business wants to hear, is 'hey we can't make the changes, right IT says no, we can't touch the code, it's working or changes take too long. They take months or sometimes years, to get to a major release and so as a result Koch was looking for ways to simplify its application portfolio and its application infrastructure. The other thing that Koch industries has brought is, you might notice on the show floor here, you see Accenture, you see Deloitte, you're seeing Grant Thornton, now these guys weren't really going after, or going hard after the Infor base before. I think, a company like Koch industries does a lot of business with these SIs and so I think Koch has introduced the SIs to the Infor opportunity and maybe nudged them a little bit and say 'hey as a big you know supplier to us, we're a big customer of yours we want you to pay attention to that opportunity and in earnest go look at ways to partner with Infor. And that's happened, my intelligence suggests there are many multi million dollar deals that are being capitalized by these big SIs and they do a ton of business with SAP and Oracle. So that's another positive in the tail wind that Koch industries, I think it's brought to the table. >> Alright, you mention human potential which is the real overarching theme of the show here this week. Again, we're here in Washington DC. I was just listening to Van Jones from CNN. One of their anchors and political contributor talking about that as his personal mantra but certainly that intersects with what Infor is talking about in terms of unlocking human potential and using technology to do that. Share a little light from Charles Phillip's perspective the key note address that he gave, in terms of how do they view human potential and unlocking it with the use of their services? >> Well we're going to have Charles Phillip's on so we'll certainly ask him that but Charles Phillip's is a guy with a lot of potential. And that he is realizing that potential >> Lot of track record too >> Exactly, this is an individual with a military background, he became I don't know if you know the story but he became a highly successful Wall Street analyst. He wrote the seminal piece in the 90s that said the software industry, is too many software players and is going to consolidate. Larry Ellison, prior to reading that used to denigrate competitors for writing cheques not code. Meaning, his competitors were acquiring companies instead of innovating. Well then, he went on a spending spree probably 30, 35 million dollars in acquisitions orchestrated by Charles Phillips. And they totally remade Oracle starting with a soft hostile takeover. And then now you see Oracle, obviously this Saas powerhouse with many many companies that were bought in. Charles Phillips left Oracle, became the CEO of Infor and we heard today, architected an entirely new strategy with a stack, they call this thing the Stack. I'll just go through this briefly, I wrote about it last year, in the WikiBon blog. They've got the Infor platform, the Infor OS and then it goes all the way up to AI, the last mile software, the cloud. They have this thing called GT nexus, which is a supply chain network and that where their IoT play fits. Then they bought a company last year called Birst, to do BI and analytics, and then on top of that is Coleman. So they've got this stack that they are basically infusing into their applications, and I will answer your question. Essentially what they want to do is, use automation and artificial intelligence to essentially coach people, worker, as they're doing their jobs. So we heard today, that there are more openings than there are unemployed >> Employees, yeah. >> And productivity is going down. So Infor, Charles Phillips wants to attack that problem through software and automation. How do you do that? Well, if you could use artificial intelligence to monitor people's KPIs, they didn't use those terms but that is essentially what they are doing. And then provide feedback on outcomes, 'hey you could have done it differently. You could have done it more quickly. The outcome could have been better if.' Also, analyzing other factors like the relationship for example, using data to analyze the relationship between say tenure or were you recently promoted or turn over on the productivity of for instance stores, retail stores for example. And so, you're seeing an infusion of AI and software and automation in to the entire application portfolio to unlock the human potential. That's one part of it, the other part of it is Charles Phillips is big on diversity, big on women in business, and so that's another angle that I am sure we are going to hear more about this week. >> I thought it was interesting too any time a show comes to Washington there is a reason. And it's generally federal sector based, policy based. There's a regulatory undertone of some kind. And it was addressed somewhat on the key note stage here this morning. But the idea, the notion was that federal regulation and federal mandates, whatever, can't keep up the pace. They just can't, and it really is up to the tech sector because it works on a much different time frame, right? I mean, changes are made by the minute, whereas policy gets shaped by the year. You know, up on the hill here, not far about 3 miles 2 miles from here. So, the tech sector's responsibility in that regard in terms of being more diverse, of having more inclusivity, of looking at environmental considerations. All these things, and of unleashing human potential. And not at making a government do that. Not letting a regulation do that. That certainly plays in the Infor's thinking as well, I would think? >> Yes, so first of all we were down here at the AWS public sector event in June. And there were ten thousand people here. So AWS has a huge presence here. Infor and AWS are big time partners. And remember the CIA was the first deal, the first cloud deal, that AWS did, they won. IBM contested it, the judge eviscerated IBM in his ruling. Basically saying they were gaming the system. They were purposely misinterpreting the RFP. Amazon won hands down, it was a huge victory for Amazon. Forced IBM to go out and capitulate and purchase Softlayer for $2billion. I believe that only helps a company like Infor who has decided to be all public cloud, with AWS and drafting off AWS' deep ties to various government agencies, in the GovCloud. So for instance, AWS was first with fedramp. First with a lot of different certifications and security hurdles. And so Infor can just draft off of that. The CIA, again a big account, we heard the CIA talk in June about how security on the worst day of cloud is better than its client server applications on their best day. And so, I suspect Infor is doing business with the CIA although that's not come out publicly. But I would think that there is an advantage Infor has because of that AWS relationship. And that makes DC all the much more important for them. Well, we are at Inforum 18, we have a full 2 days of scheduling for you. Great guest coming up here on theCUBE. I am with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls We'll continue here on theCUBE live from DC right after this break.

>> 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.

(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)

>> 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 Inforum 2017. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Marc Scibelli, he is the chief creative officer here at Infor. Thanks so much for returning to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me again, it's good to see you guys. >> So last year, the big announcement was H and L Digital, Hook and loop digital. Bring us up to speed, give us a status update of where you are now. >> Well we're a year later, I think what's really important is that we've established our application development framework, which allows us to rapidly deploy our prototypes, rapidly deploy the projects we're working on for a lot of customers. We've had a lot of wins over the last year. We're working closely with Brooklyn Sports, both the basketball team and the stadium and entertainment center. We're working with Travis Perkins, we're working with American Express. So we've got a lot of great client wins in our belt. We've learned a lot over the last year, but most importantly we've been able to actually fine tune our application development framework to bring that stuff to market very quickly for our customers, which has been a very big deal for us. >> So you mentioned a couple of client wins, Brooklyn Sports, let's unpack that a little bit, tell me a little about, tell our viewers specifically what's gone on. >> Yeah so, Brooklyn Nets basketball team here in the U.S., player performance a little bit down, so we're working with the performance coaches, we're working with the telemetric data that's coming out from the players. Things as it pertains to the arc of the ball throw, or the scale to models of how they perform or how much sleep they're getting. We're tying into a lot of IOT devices that the players use. We're bringing all that data into one place for the performance coaches and then allowing them to make better decisions on the field, on the court, in real time. So you'll see actually, behind you guys is our half court. We've actually set up a half court to show some of that data that we're bringing in about player performance. We actually run an NBA player assessment and show your player readiness, I hit like an eight percent readiness (Dave and Rebecca laugh) >> Rebecca: There's still time. >> Yeah five, eight I didn't think I was going to get very far in the NBA. >> High single digits. >> High, yeah, high, real high. So we're working a lot around player performance, certainly. And also with Brooklyn Sports Entertainment around the Barclay Center here in Brooklyn, how they can start to brand that experience. Nobody really has an affinity for an arena, you go and see Beyoncé or you go to watch the Nets. You don't really think about going to the Barclays Center, so how do you start as soon as they walk in the door, engaging with the customer using technology to drive all this value all the way through. How do you find the shortest beverage and bar line. How do you find the cleanest bathroom. How do you find, to get beverage and drinks and food delivered to your seat. That's all going to be technology that's going to drive that. A lot of our clients we've installed the digital backbone underpinning of that with our cloud suite. And now it's our job to commit a certain, creating these apps that differentiate them in the market place, help Barclays compete against other next-gen stadiums. >> So the Nets example it's similar to Moneyball but different, so he's talking the arc of the ball and so the remediation of some of those, the optimization of some of those, is just different training patterns or different exercises or drills that they could do. Whereas Moneyball it's like this unseen value, unbased percentage for example, are there analogs to Moneyball? Like I was listening to an interview with an owner the other day and the interviewer was beating him up about one player and he said well if you look at the deeper analytics, I'm like oh, deeper analytics what does that mean? So are there deeper analytics? >> Absolutely, you know we've left a lot of the basketball to the basketball professionals. When we started this thing the GM said to us, "Should we really get this started with" "you guys? What do you know about basketball?" We looked around and it was like an Englishman next to me and myself and we're like we don't know a lot about basketball but we hope that, that's what you're bringing to the table. We know a lot about how to bring the data science together, we can bring the AI in, we can bring all that together for your performance coaches and work with them Just like we didn't know a lot about farming and agriculture but we can work with feed companies to help them optimize for their customers. So it's not about what we knew about basketball but up to your point, those performance coaches are definitely finding those little nuggets of data to help those teams perform better. I couldn't tell you more off the top of my head cause that's how little I know about basketball. My eight percent performance rating will show you that, but they are looking inside that data and able to find that. And the trick is bringing it to them in real-time, bringing it so that they don't have to go into deep excel documents. That's what they were doing before. It was all stored in excel and they had to go through it and maybe somebody make a pivot table or something. >> Rebecca: Or watching play tapes. >> Or watching play, absolutely, of course. And by being able to assess all of that data too as well and bring that into the feed and be able to actually assess that and report it back into the larger system we're providing. It gives them a lot more visibility so they can find those little nuggets that they know as basketball professionals. >> And Burst is part of this solution? >> Not currently, no, but certainly we will be needing the Burst into that play, yeah. >> So Thomas Perkins is another example -- >> Marc: Travis Perkins. >> Travis Perkins, I'm sorry, that you mentioned. What kind of things are you doing there to make make that company able to really use data more wisely? >> So Travis Perkins, one of the largest building manufacturing supply company in the U.K. over 2000 distribution locations across England, very strong in its footprint. It's a really strong brand in terms of, sort of the Home Depot of the U.K. They put in M3 last year, it was a big announcement and it was a very large initiative for them and that's the digital backbone we talk about. So now it's our job we're coming in now we're automating a lot of their systems for their distribution centers so they get a better customer experience. So when I go into a Travis Perkins distribution center, I can get what I need much quicker so that's kind of the baseline thing that we come in and do. We look at ways to optimize for example if I could fah-bin with my truck and actually just pull my truck fah-bin, you know it's me, my order is ready. I don't need to get out of the truck, they pack my truck and I just drive out the other side. How do we create engagements for visibility models for the distribution managers to be able to see what's selling, what's not selling. Who's performing, who's not performing. Those are the things that we do as the baseline of the experience and then additionally to that, we look at new business models with them. So we're actually helping them think about new ways that they can create subscription models or ecosystem models. So, for example working on, they're working on the tool locker rental, setting up a,basically locker or rental facility, then using software to be able to access that locker and then you sort of create a subscription model to that. I'm able to just pull up, punch in a code, that's my tool locker, I get my tools right out of it and I can drive right off. And then doing it in places geographically that make a lot of sense for them. So that's kind of the best time, I think we get these signature experiences and optimize on top of the backbone, but then we create these whole new business transformation models of these companies, that's really exciting, really helpful. >> So retail's an interesting example everybody's got an amazon war-room trying figure out how to compete, where they can add value. What have you seen specifically in the retail business? >> I just moderated a panel with the CIO of DSW and the COO of Crate and Barrel on either side of me and it was exciting to see their, they feel a disruption but they're certainly eager to take it over. So, on the Crate and Barrel side we're seeing them be, really beat up by the Wayfairs of the world, three billion dollar valuation. They can get the market much quicker, they're running products in a much different way. Where Crate and Barrel has a much longer lead timer, the CPQ model. They've got to configure pricing, quoting, get it out. Takes 12 weeks to get a couch. How do you get, on the supply chain side, how do you get that shorter. So they're working with Infor to get that supply chain shorter. So they can compete on a shorter lead times but we're coming in to help them do is also look at how can you start to create experiences while you're waiting for that couch to be produced. Or while your shopping online what are things that you can do to know how long it'll take to get that item. And now that we just take all that digital backbone of that supply chain and create new experiences for it. On the DSW side we've been working really closely with them on point of sale as well as deep customer experience, apps for them with their employees. They really see their employees as the key tool to driving loyalty to their stores. So, we've been working on brand new apps in the mobile space that'll help their employees be able to serve their customers a lot better, have a much more tied loyalty program to their job performance with the customer's loyalty. So, a lot of great things there that we're working hard on. But certainly it's a massive behemoth of competing against amazon as a retailer. >> So what's your advice then for a company that is, and you're talking about companies that are already being very thoughtful and planful about this transformation, and understanding first of all that they need to transform, that they need to change or else they'll be left behind. So what's your advice for companies that are just starting on it? >> I think we kind of look at this as a holistic approach, we cannot take a little nibble bite-size out of the problem. So when it comes to digital looking at the entire ecosystem, looking at the operations, looking at the customers, looking at the employee. Saying what are we doing on our core backbone of the operations to make that run efficiently, to automate that. Let's do that, let's get that out of the way of all those people, let's make that run as quickly, as streamline as possible. Our cloud suite certainly help companies do that. And then, let's look at how we can start to transform the way they do their, they function inside their business by creating these functionally integrated models between all three. Between the operations, the customer and the employee. And let's create new experiences that live on top of that of that backbone that drive new value and until you do that, until you leverage your brand, like Crate and Barrel can leverage their brand if they just shorten that supply chain and start to optimize how they deliver. DSW can leverage their brand as a shoe warehouse if they provide a larger assortment and a better experience in-store, they can compete against amazon. So, to do that, we need them to, I would recommend companies, think of the approach holistically and not as a small little bites of just let's create this app and this one app is going to solve our problems. It's not, you got this much larger holistic approach you need to take. >> What percent of the Infor portfolio has Hook and Loop touched, affected? >> So, Hook and Loop core, certainly the GA products have touched everything. You'll see tomorrow on-stage Nunzio Esposito, our new head of Hook and Loop core. Who's running the business that when I first met you, I was running. They're doing very well and they've touched, I would say percentage-wise, 80% of the product if not more. Certainly their products are driving our business, like EAM, ACM financials, they have re-invented. And you'll see it tomorrow, they have done some incredible work. They just, they'll be releasing tomorrow, it's pretty exciting, a new UX for an entire cloud suite, so that pretty incredible. How Colman will be integrated into our cloud, it's a big deal so how do you create UX for that. And then certainly of course, how much UX and UY do you take away because you introduced Colman. You could take a lot of UX and UY away, a lot of functionality gets stripped away. So it's changed the methodologies we've used in the Hook and Loop core team but Ninzio has done a great job challenging himself to do that. >> Rebecca you were saying when you read the press releases around Infor they use terms like beautiful and so it's very apple-esque. Where do you get your inspiration? >> I think it's the consumer great products we talked about years ago when I first met you. The idea that how I function, like daily life at home, should echo how I function at work. Certainly now we're getting inspiration for how companies that are born digitally are creating these models that drive them. How we can help other companies do that as well. so, we're inspired by everything that touches us. To be honest , I still use my TEVO, I might be the only person left, (Dave and Rebecca laughing) That's not true they're doing very well >> I like the little sound effects of TEVO, I know what you mean. >> I can't say I'm the only person, but I'm probably the only person that'll admit it. That I love my TEVO. But these are things that I've watched them, not just change their UX like we did with Infor five years ago, but now they've changed their business model, they've changed what they've become as a hub and as a digital solution. How they used media channels to drive their business, I think that's incredible and it's a similar journey we're going on. So, there's a lot to be inspired by. >> Why should the consumer guys have all the fun? >> Marc: Yeah exactly. >> So how do you keep your team, you're the chief creative officer, so how do you, you talked about what inspires you and what inspires the company as a whole but how do you, keep a culture of creativity and innovation going? How do you keep the momentum? >> We've been really fortunate to have a really great support system by the executive team, Charles Phillips, Duncan Angove, certainly have been incredible about needing a team like Hook and Loop. When I met David it was 15 people maybe a little more, and now it's a 120 that run that core team. We launched H and L Digital last year, we were like nine people and now we're over 40. That investment, those dollars they put back into these kind of endeavors are really indicative of that . And I think that it comes through to the creatives and the people that we bring in that this is the kind of investments that Infor is interested in. We have a beautiful working environment inside New York City inside our headquarters. We have a beautiful new garage we just opened up, an innovation lab, we get to play with the greatest toys. I think we're actually very, very fortunate, to be inside a company like Infor and get to work with the people, we get to work with as designers, and as creatives. And that was an up hill slope to keep people motivated to do that as creatives and we call them left brain creators. I think we're there now, we turn away a lot of people to come work for us now. So it's pretty exciting. >> New York, London, Dubai, right? >> That's exactly right thank you, yeah. We are, we opened London just recently, we're opening Dubai next and we have two teams in New York. It's pretty exciting. >> Rebecca: Great. >> Love to see the Dubai. >> Yeah, Dubai is being built up right now, we have an office there already. >> could be the next destination, >> Cube Dubai. >> We should do a cube Dubai, that'd be great, they would love it there. >> Alright. >> I love it. Well Marc-- >> Put that on the list. >> Marc, thanks so much for joining us it's always a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante we will have more from Inforum after this.

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. >> Welcome to day one of theCUBE's coverage of Inforum here at the Javits Center in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are also joined by Jim Kobielus, who is the lead analyst for artificial intelligence at Wikibon. Thanks so much. It's exciting to be here, day one. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Rebecca. Really, our first time, we really worked a little bit at Red Hat Summit. >> Exactly, first time on the desk together. >> It's our very first time. I first met you a little while ago, and already you're an old friend. >> This is the third time we've done Inforum. The first time we did it was in New Orleans, and then Infor decided to skip a year. And then, last year, they decided to have it in the middle of July, which is kind of a strange time to have a show, but there are a lot of people here. I don't know what the number is, but it looks like several thousand, maybe as many as 4000 to 5000. I don't know what you saw. >> Rebecca: No, no, I feel like this is a big show. >> Jim: Heck, for July? For any month, actually. >> Exactly, particularly at a time where we're having a lot of rail issues, issues at LaGuardia too, so it's exciting. >> theCUBE first met Infor at the second Amazon re:Invent. I remember the folks at Amazon told us, "We really have an exciting SAS company. "It's the largest privately-held SAS company in the world." We were thinking, is that SAS? And they said, "No, no, it's a company called Infor." We said, "Who the heck is Infor?" And then we had Pam Murphy on. That's when we first were introduced to the company, and then, of course, we were invited to come to New Orleans. At the time, the questions around Infor were, who is Infor? What are they all about? And then it became, okay, we started to understand the strategy a little bit. For those of you who don't familiar with Infor, their strategy from early on was to really focus on the micro-verticals. We've talked about that a little bit. Just a quick bit of history. Charles Phillips, former president of Oracle, orchestrator of the M&A at Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel and many others, left, started Infor to roll up, gold-funded by Golden Gate Capital and other private equity, substantial base of Lawson Software customers, and then, many, many other acquisitions. Today, fast forward, you got a basically almost $3 billion company with a ton of debt, about $5 billion in debt, notwithstanding the Koch brothers' investment, which is almost $2.5 billion, which was to retire some of the equity that Golden Gate had, some of the owners, Charles and the three other owners took some money off the table, but the substantial amount of the investment goes into running the company. Here's what's interesting. Koch got a 2/3 stake in the company, but a 49% voting share, which implies a valuation of about, I want to say, just under four billion. Let's call it 3.7, 3.8 billion. For a $2 billion to $3 billion company, that's not a software company with 28% operating margin. That's not a huge valuation. So, we'll ask Charles Phillips about that, I mean, some of this wonky stuff in the financials, you know, we want to get through. I'm sure Infor doesn't want to talk too much about that. >> But it is true. It is, for a unicorn, for a privately-held company, this is one of them. This is up there with Uber and Airbnb, and it's a question that, why isn't it valued at more? >> My only assumption here is they went to Koch and said, "Okay, here's the deal. "We want $2 billion plus. "You only get 49%, only. "If you get 49% of the company in terms of voting rights, "we'll give you 2/3 in terms of ownership. "It's a sweetheart deal. "Of course, it's a lot of dough. "You get a board seat." Maybe two board seats, I can't remember. "And we'll pump this thing up, we'll build up the equity, "and we'll float it someday in the public markets, "and we'll all make a bunch of dough "and our shareholders will all be happy." That's the only thing I can assume, was this sort of conversation that went on. Well, again, we'll ask Charles Phillips, see if he answers that. But James, you sat in yesterday at the analyst event, you got sort of the history of the company, and the fire hose of information leading up to what was announced today, Coleman AI. What were your impressions as an analyst? >> Well, first of all, my first impression was a thought, a question. Is Infor with Coleman AI simply playing catch-up in a very, I call it a war of attrition in the ERP space. Really, it's four companies now. It's SAP, it's Microsoft, it's Oracle, and it's Infor duking it out. SAP, Microsoft and Oracle all have fairly strong AI capabilities and strategies and investments, and clearly they're infused, I was at Microsoft Build a few months ago. They're infusing those capabilities into all of their offerings. With Coleman, sounds impressive, thought it's just an early announcement, they've only begun to trickle it out to their vast suite. I want to get a sense, and probably later today we'll talk to Mr. Angove, Duncan Angove. I want to get a sense for how does, or does, Infor intend to differentiate their suite in this fiercely competitive ERP world? How will Coleman enable them to differentiate it? Right now it seems like everything they're announcing about Coleman is great in terms of digital assistance, conversational interface, everybody does this, too, now, with chatbots and so forth, in-line providing recommendations. Everybody's doing that. Essentially, everybody wants to go there. How are they going to stand apart with those capabilities, number one? Number two is just the timeline. They have this vast suite, and we just came from the keynote, where Charles and the other execs laid out in minute detail the micro-vertical applications. What is their timeline for rolling out those Coleman capabilities throughout the suite so customers can realize they have value? And is there a layered implementation? They talked about augmentation versus automation, and versus assistance. I'd like to see sort of a layer of capabilities in an architecture with a sense for how they're going to invest in each of those capabilities. For example, they talked about open source, like with TensorFlow, which is a new deep learning framework from Google Open Source. I just want to get a deep dive into where the investment funds that they're getting from Koch and others, especially from Koch, where that's going in terms of driving innovation going forward in their portfolio. I'm not cynical about it, I think they're doing some really interesting things. But I want some more meat on the bones of their strategy. >> Well, it's interesting, because I think Infor came into the show wanting to message innovation. They're not known as an innovative company. But you heard Charles Phillips up there talking, today he was talking about quantum computing, he was talking about the end of Moore's Law, he was obviously talking about AI. They named Coleman after Katherine Coleman Johnson. >> Here's my speculation. My speculation, of course, they recently completed the acquisition of Birst. Brad Peters did a really good discussion of Birst, the BI startup that's come along real fast. My sense, and I want to get confirmation, is that, possibly, Birst and Brad Peters and his team, will they drive the Coleman strategy going forward? It seems likely, 'cause Birst has some AI assets that Brad Peters brought us up to speed on yesterday. I want to get a sense for how Birst's AI and Coleman AI are going to come together into a convergence. >> But wouldn't they say that it's quote-unquote embedded, embedded AI? >> Jim: It'll be invisible, it has to be. >> You know, buried within the software suite? We saw, like you said, in gory detail the application portfolio that Infor had. I think one of the challenges the company has, it's like some of my staff meetings. Not everything is relevant to everybody. Very clearly, they have a lot of capabilities that most people aren't aware of. The question is, how much can they embed AI across those, and where are the use cases, and what's the value? And it's early days, right? >> Oh, yeah, very much. And you know, in some of those applications, probably many of them, the automation capabilities that they described for Coleman will be just as important as the human augmentation capabilities. In other words, micro-verticalize their AI in diverse ways going forward across their portfolio. In other words, one AI brush, broad brush of AI across every application probably won't make sense. The applications are quite different. >> I want to talk about the use cases, here. The selling points for these things are making the right decision all the time, more quickly. >> Jim: Productivity accelerators for knowledge workers, all that. >> And one of the other points that was made is that there are fewer arguments, because we are all looking at the same data, and we trust the data. Where do you see Birst and Coleman? Give me an example of where you can see this potentially transforming the industry? >> "We all trust data." Actually, we don't all trust data, because not all data is created the same. Birst comes into the portfolio not just to, really great visualizations and dashboarding and so forth, but they've got a well-built data management backend for data governance and so forth, to cleanse the data. 'Cause if you have dirty data, you can't derive high-quality decisions from the data. >> Rebecca: Excellent point, right. >> That's really my general take on where it's going. In terms of the Birst, I think the Birst acquisition will become pivotal in terms of them taking their data-driven functionality to the next level of consumability, 'cause Birst has done a really good job of making their capability consumable for the general knowledge worker audience. >> Well, a couple things. Actually, let me frame. Charles Phillips, I thought, did a good job framing the strategy. Sort of his strategy stack, if you will, starting with, at the bottom of the stack, the micro-verticals strategy, and then moving up the next layer was their decision to go all cloud, AWS Cloud. The third was the network. Infor made an acquisition of a company called GT Nexus, which is a commerce platform that has 18 years of commerce data and transaction data there. And the next layer was analytics, which is Birst, and I'll come back to that. And then the top layer is Coleman AI. The Birst piece is interesting, because we saw the ascendancy of Tableau and its land-and-expand strategy, and Christian Chabot, the CEO of Tableau, used to talk about, and they said this yesterday, the slow BI, you know, cubes, and the life cycle of actually getting an answer. By the time you get the answer, the market has changed. And that's what Tableau went after, and Tableau did very, very, well. But it turned out Tableau was largely a desktop tool. Wasn't available in the Cloud. It is now. And it had its limitations. It was basically a visualization tool. What Infor has done with Birst is they're positioning the old Cognos, which is now IBM, and the micro strategies of the world as the old guard. They're depositioning Tableau, and they didn't use that specific name, Tableau, but that's what they're talking about, Tableau and Click, as less than functional. Sort of spreadsheet plus. And they are now the rich, robust platform that both scales and has visualization, and has all the connections into the enterprise software world. So I thought it was interesting positioning. Would love to talk to some customers and see what that really looks like. But that, essentially, was the strategy stack that Charles Phillips laid out. I guess the last point I'd make as I come back to the decision to go AWS, you saw the application portfolio. Those are hardcore enterprise apps which everybody says don't live in the Cloud. Well, 55% of Infor's revenue is from the Cloud, so, clearly, it's not true. A lot of these apps are becoming cloud-enabled. >> Jim: Yeah, most of them. >> Most of them? >> Most of them are, yeah. BI, mode-predictive analytics, most AI. Machine learning is going in the Cloud. >> 'Cause Oracle's argument is, Oracle will be only one who can put those apps in the Cloud. >> 'Cause the data lives in the Cloud. It's trained on the data. >> Not all the data lives in the Cloud. >> It's like GT Nexus. That's EDI, that's rich EDI data, as they've indicated for training this new generation of neutral networks, machine learning and deep learning models continuously from fresh transaction data. You know that's where GT Nexus and e-commerce network fits into this overall strategy. It's a massive pile stream of data for mining. >> But, you know, SAP has struggled in the Cloud. SuccessFactors, obviously, is their SAS play. Most of their stuff remains on-prem. Oracle again claims they have the only end-to-end hybrid. You see Microsoft finally shipping Azure Stack, or at least claiming to soon be shipping Azure Stack. They've obviously got a strategy there with their productivity estate. But here you have Infor-- >> Don't forget IBM. They've got a very rich, high-rated portfolio. >> Well, you heard, I don't know if it was Charles, somebody took a swipe at IBM today, saying that the company's competitors have purchased all these companies, these SAS companies, and they don't have a way to really stitch them together. Well, that's not totally true. Bluemix is IBM's way. Although, that's been a heavy lift. We saw with Oracle Fusion, it took over a decade and they're still working on that. So, Infor, again, I want to talk to customers and find out, okay, how much of this claim that everything's seamless in the Cloud is actually true? I think, obviously, a large portion of the install base is still that legacy on-prem Lawson base that hasn't modernized. That's always, in my view, enforced big challenges. How do you get that base, leverage that install base to move, and then attract new customers? By all accounts, they're doing a pretty good job of it. >> I don't think what's going on, I don't think a lot of lift-and-shift is going on. Legacy Lawson customers are not moving in droves to the Cloud with their data and all that. There's not a massive lift-and-shift. It's all the new greenfield applications for these new use cases, in terms of predictive analytics. They're being born and living their entire lives in the Cloud. >> And a lot of HR, a lot of HCM, obviously, competing with Workday and Peoplesoft. That stuff's going into the Cloud. We're going to be unpacking this all day today, and tomorrow. Two days here of coverage. >> Indeed, yes indeed. >> Dave: Excited to be here. >> It's going to be a great show. Bruno Mars is performing the final day. >> Jim: Bruno Mars? >> I know, very-- >> You know a company's doing good, Infor, when they can pay for the likes of a Bruno Mars, who's still having mega hits on the radio. I wish I was staying long enough to catch that one. >> I know, indeed, indeed. Well, for Dave and Jim, I'm Rebecca Knight, and we'll be back with more from Inforum 2017 just after this. (fast techno music)