(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to Vegas, Lisa Martin with John farrier. We are live at AWS reinvent in the expo hall at the sands convention center. There's tons of people in here. You could probably hear some of the background AWS expecting 65,000 or so folks. John, how many of those 65,000 and have you talked to in the last two days? >>Well, I can hear all the conversations happening at once. It's about hybrid cloud, IOT edge data, machine learning. my head's going to come. >>I was going to say lots of cool stuff. John and I are pleased to be joined by Greg Coralville, the VP of products and strategy for Blackberry Q. Next group. Welcome to the program >>to be here with 65,000 of our closest friends. >>His friends. Exactly. So Blackberry, cute X. What's it all about? >>What's it all about? Well, we do software. We do embedded software for mission critical systems at this event, at the AWS reinvent over showing a software and a really cool car, a karma, and we're connecting it to the AWS IOT backend services and showing some really, really cool use cases. Some of which are near term summer, which are a bit longer term are pretty exciting. Take a quick minute to describe Kunis. Is background acquired by Blackberry system history legacy? Exactly. Just take a quick minute to explain that. So we were founded in 1980 and then developing software for mission critical devices and medical, industrial. And then we started developing software for automotive in 1998 so we've been in automotive for about 20 years and developing originally an infotainment and then digital instrument clusters, telematic systems, gateways, safety systems, acoustics systems, pretty much becoming the software platform in the car because in the car, the car, the software is to be reliable, safe, secure. >>So we're trusted to deliver that. In automotive, we were acquired by Blackberry in 2010 and we're bringing the best of Blackberry and automotive and all of our other markets. So Lisa and I always talk about IOT is RPA automation. All this stuff's going on. But one of the things that comes up is we're trying to grok what's the software development environment in the cloud, in the car, and a Amazon one by having great API APIs. Yep. That was one of their core design principles. Is there a similar design principle from a car standpoint? Because if I'm an app developer, I just love, I have my mobile app sit on the car, right? But I don't want to have to become an expert on all the nuances of is there a connector? So is there going to be multiple platforms? What's the, what's the principle? Can you explain that a great question and great observation. >>So cars traditionally have been proprietary, pretty much closed systems and started open up with CarPlay and Android auto or all of a sudden you saw your mobile device being able to communicate with the car and now I could run Android apps, I could run iOS apps and started to open it up a bit. And now what you've seen is cars are becoming more connected, they're becoming more automated, eventually autonomous. Um, they're definitely, and what you're seeing in the car is in order for that car to really evolve and to offer connected services and shared mobility and the electrification that's occurring, the automotive industry is going through a disruption. We've all heard that and it really is true. So to the point where the electronics in the car, the networks in the car, the software in the car, it's getting completely redesigned and you're seeing a lot more high end processors. >>You're seeing safety critical systems, which have always been in cars, but now you're seeing a lot more complexity. And that speaks to exactly what we do. So where that car's going, if you think about it, is moving to more of a software platform. You have applications and mobile devices. Why? Because you've got Android and you've got iOS. That car is moving to that sort of a common platform where with the help of AWS connected services, the cubix Blackberry Punic software platform in the car, all of a sudden that'll open the door to that kind of environment to applications, to connected services. And that's exactly where it's going. So connectivities, it's here and it's going to be predominant through a pretty much all the vehicles coming off the line in the coming years. So you're going to see the connectivity and now we can bring the services and the apps to that vehicle. But at the same time you got to keep it safe, got to keep it secure. Gotta keep it reliable. You know, it's the classic mobile device, bingo literal device on wheels, right of two ton mobile device on wheels. >>Doc disruption sounds really cool and it's consumers. We just had this expectation that we can have whatever I want, the whole experience I want. And obviously as everything evolves, we want it to be safer and safer. And as there's laws and regulations that govern, Hey, you're going to get hefty fines if you're seeing with this device and you're driving. But disruption is really challenging, right? We talked, we got some great examples yesterday on stage with Andy Jassy of Goldman Sachs, right? How many years old are they and how they have leveraged disruption to revolutionize their consumer business or healthcare revolutionizing. I'd love to get your perspective on what are some of the automakers that are bleeding edge going, we get it. We want to work with you guys so that they understand that this the, you know, the, the mobile devices, the connected device on wheels is going to be transformative for their business. >>Good point. So first of all, every automaker we work with and we work, we work with almost 50 auto makers and we're over a hundred. We're in over 150 million vehicles and multiple systems in the cars. They're all putting safety first. That's never really changed. But that remains primary, primary objective. And to your point is how do you maintain that safety net reliability while at the same time opening the door to connectivity, making sure that vehicle is secure and resilient to attacks and whatnot. And you've seen some of those attacks in the past. And the industry is learning. Um, but that's, that's exactly what, that's what speaks to us and what we do. Same thing with AWS. If you think about what we do, we're plumbers. We, we build plumbing in the car, AWL splits, plumbing in the cloud. And I've had that call, those conversations with AWS and they're like, yeah, we're plumbers. >>And I said, so are we, we're going to get along great. But to your point, we have to keep our eye on security. Our definitely our eye on privacy and safety. And that's exactly what we do. As much as we all want the consumer apps and the connected experience at the same time, we can't compromise on that. So the good thing in automotive is there's a automotive safety standards, ISO two, six, two, six, two and whatnot, which we've certified our products to and we're going to keep doing that and keep delivering that software in the car. But that's awesome for 0.2 ton mobile device on wheels. So we got to always be aware of that. Great opportunity. People want more conduct and safety too. And that's a huge thing. Security and safety. I want to get to that in a second, but I got to ask you, um, what is the relationship that you guys have with Amazon? >>Could you explain that? And what are you guys doing at reinvent this year? Is your leg a presentation demo? Take a minute to explain the relationship between queen Nixon and Amazon web services and what you're showing here. Well, we're in the connected home exhibit. In fact, we're in the quote unquote garage where we've got a vehicle, a beautiful karma Rivero GT. And I was told it's the first time there's actually a car at reinvent. So that was pretty cool. And it's a cool car if you get a chance, come on over. And what we've done is we've taken the karma vehicle and we've actually connected it to AWS IOT. So if you think about what we do, we do software in the car, as I was saying earlier. And then we worked with the Amazon team, with the AWS team to say, okay, what can we do? So one of the things we're doing is we're doing battery monitoring and prediction in terms of the life of the battery. >>That's one of the things that we're doing. The other thing we're doing is personalized cockpit, which is, which is pretty exciting. And, and the last thing we're doing is kind of a business to business demonstration, um, where it's data orchestrations. If you think about the vehicle, there's a lot of sensors on the vehicle, a lot of information available on the vehicle. And what we're doing with AWS is pulling information from the vehicle, putting it in the cloud. And then we've got a few examples that we're using. So one of them is an application for an auto detailing company where they might want, you might want to have your vehicle detailed where we can make the position of your vehicle available, GPS, the VIN number. So the identify the identification of the vehicle. Um, and then you could actually contract with that expert detailings what we called them to come to your vehicle, clean the vehicle, detail your vehicle within a finite period of time securely. >>And then you'll get notified when it's done and whatnot. We're doing facial recognition in the vehicle and we also put some ML in machine learning in the car. We're actually showing gesture recognition where I can fold the mirrors with a, with a peace sign or victory signs. I could have the mirrors fold in. Uh, I can, I can interact with the infotainment system. I can personalize the music and whatnot. So really personalizing the cockpit. But all through the power of AWS. Sorry, what are we going to have to the car flying cars? Come on Jetsons flyers. I love this coming. Maybe not the flying carpet. Wow. Okay. Flying cars. Fine. I mean, I always say anything else that's in star Trek or star Wars will be invented. So I'm respecting some flying vehicles. All fun aside. Yeah. Now the serious conversation is safety and security. >>Worst case scenario, my car is hacked. Take over. This is a fear. Again, it's the worst. It's a doom season here. Those stories are straight. All IOT device. It's a car. How do you guys view the security posture? Um, good question. This is concerned. It might be on people's mind. Yeah. And that's what really speaks to where our company has been for almost four decades now. You know, when people would ask me, Hey, where would I find Punic software? Blackberry Punic software, I'd say almost everywhere, but the desktop. So where things have to be reliable, safe, secure work all the time. That's where you'll find our software. So factory floor, we're in laser eye surgery. Machines are in patient monitoring devices, MRI machines. And so essentially those areas which are safety critical, where safety, security and reliability, you know, our top real really industrial IOT thing, big time, big time. >>And that's the cool thing about walking around reinvent. There's all kinds of industrial devices and control. So if you go to the car now, if you think about the vehicle, same fundamental needs, reliability, safety, security, and we're trusted to deliver an automotive. So security is one of those things. It's not static. So when you, when you, when you make something that's secure, you're really building something that's resilient to attacks. So you'd be as resilient as possible to prevent attacks. And then you do whatever you can to prevent any malicious act or actions on that. So we will monitor what's going on in the system. We'll monitor any communications going to the car, for instance. So the minute we detect something a bit of normal, we can take action based on that. So that, that's absolutely key, especially given the cars connected and more and more becoming connected. >>What's the opportunity is in a trucking industry, when I think of the number of sensors on trucks, the regulations that you know for drivers safety in terms of how many hours they actually have to be able to can drive. What's the opportunity there for Q next? >>Good question. So everything we're doing in the car, which I should generalize and say a vehicle applies to trucks. So if you think about trucking or vehicles or drones or anything like that, you have multiple sensors that you have to interact with. You have to interpret that information, you have to take action based on that information. So if we look at trucking specifically, everybody knows a major shortage of truck truck, truck drivers. So when people ask me about autonomous cars and Hey, when are we going to see autonomy's vehicles? I always look at trucking and we're working with companies, trucking companies that are using our technology. And one of the first use cases that they're putting forward is something called platooning, where you'll actually have the first truck on the road with a driver and any other trucks on the road. We'll be operating autonomously essentially following like a train if you want on a highway, and then they'll have a starting location and a drop off location and that all of a sudden becomes a real world scenario, which makes use of the same sensors, LIDAR, radar cameras, et cetera. >>So from a trucking perspective, we look at it very similar to a car and automotive perspective because they need the same fundamental technologies. So pretty exciting. Like I said, what we do applies all over the place and again, all going to be connected. But grant, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate, I want to get your final thoughts, at least from my perspective on developers. When you see deep racer, you see that trend. It's kind of, they've got LIDAR, it's kind of a toy, but people geeking out on this. And so I would imagine that we're going to see an emergence of a software development environment where as a controlled sandboxes, cause yeah, they've got the concern with the industrial equipment. Exactly. Yeah. How do you balance that old school industrial mindset of, you know, IOT with the new rapid agile product development? Yeah. And to your point, we're going through that transition now. >>So this is where things like Sage maker come into play where I can develop out and develop and refine machine learning models in the cloud. You still have those tight control loops that you need and there's tools for that. So that's the deeply embedded stuff that's controlling actuators and whatnot. You still need that. But to your point, you need to be more iterative. You need to be more agile, need to develop according to the safety standards and the various industries that they might be in. So it's that is evolving and it's evolving at exactly the right pace. Really glad to see that evolution. But to your point, all of these devices are going to become interconnected. There's going to be new opportunities. And from a developer perspective, you know, we can't hire enough developers. No one can. It's really exciting whether it's IOT cloud developers or embedded developers. >>There's such an exciting future ahead. And I got to ask, this is just popped in my head. So I want to ask, cause I'm curious, um, spectrum and RF power is great, but you need connectivity to make an IOT device work, right? How do you guys, how does the car folks look at conductivity? Just when they get to a spot they can connect. So is it managing the spectrum? How are cars thinking about the connectivity? So we work very closely with the modem vendors. For instance, in today in cars you'll see Bluetooth, you'll see wifi, you'll see 4g. Obviously there's the emergence of 5g. Um, vehicle to vehicle communications is through something called DSRC. Essentially wifi 5g is going to come along, so now you're going to be able to have throughput and also what's called low latency. So quick turn around on your messages and the information being exchanged. >>So that too is evolving from a, from a QA software perspective, we'll make use of whatever modems there. But to your point, we also have to deal with the cases where I've lost connectivity. I still need that V vehicle to operate safely. And especially if you consider that the systems might be, um, uh, the systems might be connected or we don't want to make, make it such that they're dependent on that connectivity. So you have to have fail over scenarios and whatnot, but cars will become connected, devices will become connected. We're going to take advantage of that connectivity, but not be dependent on that connectivity. >>Well, Greg, please let me know when that, uh, personalized service is available so that my car can be found and detailed. They'd find it right in my driveway going lady, please. It's been a pleasure, a really cool stuff. Blackberry Kunis thank you for joining John. We'll be, we'll have to go check out that car for John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live in Vegas at AWS. Reinvent 19. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well good afternoon, and welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 2018, live from Washington, DC. We're in the Washington Convention Center centrally located, I got to tell ya. The White house less than a mile that way, Capital Hill's just right up the street as well. We're kind of caught in the middle. Bad spot to be these days! (laughing) >> I hope you're not setting the tone for this. >> We'll leave that alone. >> I like being in the middle, personally. (laughing) I'll take it from both sides. >> When you sit in the middle of the road, there's a six inch yellow line, you get it equally hard from both sides. >> Bring it on! >> So, lets stay away from that. Dave Vellante, John Walls and Rod Johnson, who is the EVP of Manufacturing and Supply Chain, and the GT Nexus Business Unit at Infor. Rod, good to see you Sir! >> Great to be here, thanks guys. >> You're okay with being in the middle? >> Yeah, sure! Yeah, of course. >> Independent thought, right? I love it. >> Middle of the road. It's the place to be. >> So you're the new kid on the block, right? >> One of them, yeah. >> You've been here, just at Infor for a few months now, assuming the EVP role. How's it been for you so far? >> Hey, it's been a breath of fresh air. I was 11 years with one of our competitors, the Oracle Corporation. Its quite a breath of fresh air. Go with a company that's agile, innovative, much more customer centric. I think the timing is perfect for a company like Infor, that's really grown up in these key industries and working with customers for over decades. Now its made this transition to the Cloud, and now I think all the markets are waking up. It's not just CRM or HR, they're looking at: How do I take advantage of all this innovation, the Cloud's the platform, and who's the companies that really understand our type of business, whether you're a distribution company, or a food company, or an A&D Company. So it's a great time to be here, there's a lot of good energy, a lot of good innovation. A lot of good buzz from the customers about what we're doing. >> Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. I mean, you're right. The model of just having an install base that you can have locked in and just keep milking is very hard to do these days. Unless, you know, some of the private equity guys have done it, that's clearly not the case here at Infor. You know, Oracle is successful at it. I think it's because they do spend a lot of money on R&D, but boy oh boy! That model, you can't just go and reinvent that. >> Right. >> You're going to fail. >> Right. >> And if you're trying to hold on to that model, maybe they're the exception that proves the rule, but you're going to be toast. You know, in the long run. So you see what Amazon's doing, you see what Microsoft; how Microsoft completely pivoted away from that model. >> Right, Right. >> And Infor's riding that wave. >> Right, right. Hey, this is a business model. Fundamental business model change. You know, we can talk a lot about the technology, but transitioning from a product company that sells a license that sits on a maintenance base is a model that's no longer viable for what customers expect. They want a service provider that's delivering continuous innovation in service, and that's a big change. That's a big change to how we engage with our customers, how we support them, the service levels we're committing to. So, I lived through a bunch of that stuff at Oracle, transitioning to the cloud had a role for the last six years; doing that both from a sales and a global strategy role. Here, we're trying to do it better, faster, and never lose sight of the customer. >> So, you've serviced the manufacturing sector. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's still a lot of Infor's business that install base and that maintenance. You're in the process of transitioning those customers. >> Yeah. >> So, that takes a lot of care, a lot of feeding, cause anytime there's a transition everybody wants a piece of that action. So how's that going, what's the conversation like, and why should they stay with Infor? >> The conversation is, One: We really believe in a pragmatic business-led path to the Cloud. There's not going to be any forced march, no technology agenda that's going to drive us. It's got to be driven by value. We've got to present a business case to them that makes sense. That makes them more productive, now allows them to better engage with their customers, delivers innovation to their supply chain. So that's what we're spending a lot of time talking about. What's the case for change? What's the business case for change? I mean, all of the stuff about operating the Cloud, the service levels, potential total co-services, great! But, at the end of the day we deal with pretty, we're dealing with manufacturers. They're pretty down to earth. They know that they make their money building stuff, and shipping stuff and servicing that product. So we got to be engaged at that level, to show them how we help them do that better. I think the excitement is growing. That they recognize that there is real net new business value, new innovation that could really help their business. >> So lets talk about that. Forced march is a powerful phrase and you certainly see that in the industry. Thinking about supply chain, and the opportunities to drive even more efficiencies out of the supply chain, maybe through automation, we've heard a lot about RPA. >> Yeah. >> Maybe even bring back some of that offshore manufacturing. >> Right. >> That's certainly a conversation >> Right. >> that's going on in your world, so talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so one of our diamonds in the Infor portfolio is a product called GT Nexus. Which is, its been around for about 20 years. We have 65,000 companies around the world who are operating on a common network based platform that provides supply chain visibilities, supplies supply chain financial processing. Connects brands to their manufacturers to provide all the visibility and control and that. So, that's a powerful capability because you're right, it's an incredibly dynamic time. With the change of trade wars, weather events that are ever increasing. The supply chain's a very hard thing to manage. So if the asset is we've got a platform that enables companies to connect much deeper in their supply chain then use that information to make far better decisions on how they get their products to their customer at the right cost. So, and I see, you know the supply chain market, I always think of this transition to Cloud in waves. You know, we had the first wave breaking was the sales. Then the HR, the finance function. Operations in supply chains is the one that's cresting on the horizon. And you know, keep that going, we've got our surfboards in the water, we've got great capability. And we're really, really excited about what we can do for our clients! >> You got to ride the waves or you'll become driftwood >> How big is that wave? >> Well, hey that's the biggest market, right? I mean, you look at the size of the Enterprise software spend. Core ERP supply chain industry functionality is the big piece. It's probably two. It's probably by an HR, CRM, financials together, and it's not even as big as sort of the industry supply chain, manufacturing, procurement market core ERP market. So, its big! Its a big opportunity, but it requires a much more sophisticated response because you talk to our customers they're like hey, we operate our plants 365 days a year, three shifts sometimes in peak seasons. We can't afford an environment that isn't mission critical, that doesn't step up to service levels. So, you know, we're working really hard to address the mission critical system challenge, not just the benefits and payroll. >> So, there's certainly an opportunity with AI, with machine learning, certainly more analytics, bringing that to the manufacturing world. >> Oh yeah. >> So that's clearly fundamental to your strategies. >> Yeah. >> Is that, in your view, the tipping point to get really this whole market moving? >> I think. I mean I would agree with you. Its sort of an accumulation of digital capabilities. Certainly, mobility's sort of proved that its important, but its a little bit of a nice-to-have. Some of the innovations around user experiences, is really important but nice-to-have. I think that is the game changer. When you can use data as a weapon, a competitive weapon that you can make decisions faster, and how you discount your product or how you identify shortage faster than someone else. That's where, there's real money that comes out of that. >> What about Block Chain? We hear a lot about Block Chain in the supply chain and cutting out the middle man. We haven't heard much here about it, its not something. We're going to ask Charles. Somebody said to me, Once Charles gets on it, boom the company is behind it. >> Yeah. >> But, how real is that in manufacturing and supply chain specifically? Is it just way too early? Do you think there's potential there? Have you looked at it? >> Obviously we've looked at it, we've worked on with customers on prototypes. There's a couple areas, you know, there's a lot of hype as you guys know. You talked to a lot of us, a lot of hype in that space. It's certainly unproven in a lot of areas. But we think in the area of supply chain financing, Block Chain has a very, very powerful, you know, where you have multi parties, you've got suppliers and logistics companies and banks all who need a piece of information. We need distributed capabilities around that. We think there's a big potential in some of that area. We're talking. We're working with some of the banks on that. We think in the area of getting deeper into the supply chain around sustainability, to the ethical and traceability of the Supply Chain. You know, where you're goin down. Yeah we got customers in the pero business that are going down to the farms. They want to know exactly the lineage of all of their stuff that's going into their product that's ending up in a consumer. That's potentially a more efficient mechanism, to have all these different entities collaborating on a distributed model. So, I mean; and especially if we talk about the GT Nexus Network. There's natural extensions to it. That it already is a common platform that is serving a wide variety of companies, logistics companies, and manufacturers. So there's a lot of natural exit points from that, sort of, that integrated network to support a couple of these more extended processes that are a little bit more distributed. >> Yes, the smart contracts maybe fits there, and you talked about distributed a couple of times. What about IOT? The pendulum seems to be swinging now. Obviously Cloud is hot. Its got a re-centralization. But IOT's a whole new world. You get a lot of IT companies kind of pushing the IT model top down into operations technology and we don't think that's the way it's going to work. That the OT guys are actually going to drive the standards and the trends. What are you seeing? >> Well I think yeah hey, the people that have the, that make the equipment, you know, make the pipelines. Hey, obviously they got a big stake in this. You know, they understand how their kipid works, they know how to attach the sensors. They know how to translate things that are going on in the machines into data. We're going to be, and we're going to be taking that data, and how do you connect it to a business process. That's something that they don't understand. They don't understand how a heat event could translate, could connect to a maintenance process and how do you deploy a technician with the right part to go in there so they can offer some proactive service? So I think there's going to be a very tight partnership, where people coming from the equipment up, or the asset up, connect with the people that understand process analytics and sort of execution. >> Yeah. You talked about sustainability there just a moment ago, so obviously companies, their focus is changing in that regard. Right? People are paying more attention, a lot of that is being customer driven. >> Right >> At the same time too, in terms of distribution, in terms of manufacturing, customer expectations are changing too. Right? >> Right. >> We expect things on a much different time table. >> Absolutely. >> So how are you helping your clients recognize all those things? Like you're thinking about tomorrow today, and trying to get them to address that in terms of their technology plays down the road to meet these really fast changing demands. >> Yeah, I mean one of our really dominant industries is distribution. You know, probably three out of five distribution companies around the world run our software. So distribution is a space, typically between the manufacturing world and the consumer or the retail world is under tremendous pressure. While Amazon is inching into distribution centric industry so there's a lot of pressure from that, but there's also rising expectations that you have to do instantaneous fulfillment. That you have to provide complete visibility into where my order is, when am I going to get it, because I don't want to carry this supply. You got to carry it. So we're seeing a big rejuvenation of that industry, a little because of the pressures driving them to rethink e-commerce, to rethink the types of services they're providing to their companies. That even in some cases they're sneaking into retail, and having that type of experience because they need to compete in different ways. And I think that's always, the industry change is good for companies like us that have a lot of experience in the industry cause we can help them! Ya know, and they need a catalyst, right? They need a catalyst to go out and change and rethink how they operate, and it's created a pretty interesting opportunity. >> So, I wonder Rod if you could talk a little bit about, I know you're only a few months in, but just your impressions of the differentiation. Give us the bumper sticker pitch. Why Infor? How are you different? >> So, I mean, three things. Just netted out three things. Industry, and we talk a lot about industry. We talk a lot about last mile, its real. Its compelling to our customers. They're tired of having to finish the software for the vendor at their site. They want the provider to finish the software and take it to meet their unique needs. Two is I think even though we're smaller than some of the big, big names out there, I think pound for pound we out innovate almost every company. And I can talk very specifically, transitioning from a very, very large competitor. When you're actually looking into the detail of what we've actually delivered around AI, or what we've actually delivered around analytics or mobility, and pound for pound we fight way above our weight on that front. And I think, you know, if you look at even what we've done at Hook and Loop Digital over the years, the types of proof points we have with customers are something that very few of our competitors could boast. So I think, digital over use term, but just sort of understanding how this new technology works and being able to translate that to our customers is huge. And three, is culture. I think we have a fast oriented culture. There's not a lot of levels. We can cut through the nonsense for our customers pretty quickly. We organize around our customers, we don't have 3,000 sales teams trying to sell them piece parts so we can do the solution thing. And we're really working hard to differentiate on customer centricity. I made the comment yesterday at our executive forum that, in general, service at Enterprise Software stinks. You wouldn't accept, ya know, if a retailer was treating you the way the average Enterprise Software, you wouldn't accept it, right? You'd go somewhere else. We've had the benefit, or we've had customers that have such big investments in us, they have to deal with it. And we need to, we have an opportunity to fix that, to change that, to really reorganize and reorient our customer around the outcomes that matter to them. And its so important, if they're going to trust us. And its really about trust. They got to trust us to run their applications, our mission critical applications in our Cloud. We need to really change the game on that front, and we're doing a lot of things structurally. Like for example, maybe someone talked about were taking development customer support in Cloud operations, integrating that into a common organization. So, there's no finger pointing. If something goes down, its not well its the network, Its a bug, Its a knowledge issue. It's one team that's accountable for making sure that we resolve that issue rapidly. Same on the field side. So now we're organizing for manufacturing and distribution. Really, all the resources we need to both sell and service, deliver for our customers in a common team, so there's accountability. And on both sides. There's our product side, product and Cloud ops side, there's accountability and from a sort of customer engagement or accounts management accountability. And then, you know, we got to do a lot of things around service and automation, and better, proactive. We're running their cloud, we should be able to tell them, hey, this isn't running optimally. We need to come in and do this change. I mean, that's where we need to get. That's where the industry needs to get. And we want to get there first. >> Well, you're on the right path. >> Yeah. >> Again, congratulations on the new position, >> Yeah, thank you! >> and we appreciate the time here today, and wish you all the best down the road. >> I appreciate what you guys do. I love your show and content. >> Thank you, Rod. We appreciate that. Thank you sir. Back with more here on theCUBE. We are at Inforum 2018. We're in Washington, DC. (electronic jingle)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well, good morning. Welcome back here on theCUBE. We are live in Washington DC, at Inforum 2018. You can tell, Infor's just over the shoulder here. We're on top of the show floor, looking down, and a lot of buzz, a lot of activity out there. Good to be a part of that excitement here in DC. I'm John Walls, along with Dave Vellante, and we're joined by, he said, "Just call me Soma." Soma Somasundaram, who's the CTO at Infor. Soma, good job on the keynote stage this morning. Thanks for joining, appreciate that. >> Yeah, and yesterday. >> Yup, yup, thanks. >> So, talk about a couple of new products, one launched, one in beta. Why don't you go ahead and tell our audience a little bit about that, about what you're bringing to the marketplace now? >> Yeah, so, you know, we have, you know, as I mentioned in today's keynote, we're all about product innovation, and we're engineers. Charles is an engineer, I'm an engineer, and we're constantly driving new innovation. So, some of the innovation, there's fundamentally, we want to build what I would call a shared services platform that all of our cloud suites can utilize. There's no need for each of the applications to go reinvent the wheel to build a middleware, or a data lake, or an API layer, so we built a shared services platform, which is what we called Infor OS. As part of Infor OS, we continued to release new things. You heard today, we released something called Infor Go. As the name might suggest, the idea is that you as an employee in one of the customer organizations, you want to have, easily go to the app store, download something called Infor Go, it automatically is configured for your role. It gives you, if let's say you're a salesperson, it gives you access to CRM data, to curate your pipeline, it gives you access to employee data, because you're an employee of the organization, gives you ability to file expense reports, because you're a traveler. You get the idea. So, in a role, you don't want to be dealing with 20 different apps. It's just one thing. You just go in, one sign on, you get access to everything you need. That's one announcement we made. That's on the technology side. And on the functional side, you know, we launched a new CRM this morning, and the idea there again is that, we're in the CRM business not to build a horizontal CRM. Our idea is, you build, anything you do must be industry-specific, right? When you are selling and servicing an excavator, and you are a dealer of moving equipment, you want to know what kind of configuration installed, what kind of accessories I can sell to this farmer, what kind of terrain they're operating on. That is industry-specific. So to us, that is important. That's what we're doing with CRM. We built it on obviously our own platform, technology platform, multi-tenant, running in the cloud, but the main differentiation is industry, right? So that's something we announced. We've been on building a next generation HCM suite, which we talked about a lot yesterday. The final piece of that is payroll, which is important. So that payroll, which just went beta this morning. It's all built on the exact same platform, with Infor OS, multi-tenant, and it's highly extensible, so that completes our HCM suite on a unified platform. Those were the announcements we made today. >> So I wanted to talk a little bit about the platform. So last year, after Inforum 17, I wrote a blog post, and I put up the strategy and technology stack, and I kind of missed the OS underneath. So we'll come back and maybe course-correct that. But one of the problems with enterprise software, especially suites, is there are a lot of cul-de-sacs. You go down a road, and then you hit a dead end, and then you have to come all the way back, and if you want some other function, you have to go down and come all the way back, and it's a very frustrating user experience. So, I'm inferring that what you guys have done is try to address that and other problems with a platform approach. So a platform, in my view, beats products. So maybe talk about platform and what that means to you guys, and then I would love to get into the sort of conceptual and actual stack. >> Yeah, so, it is what should be common sense, in my opinion, that if you buy a HCM suite from a provider of software, you buy ERP from that same provider, you buy travel and expense application from the same provider. You would think that they all have the same user experience, and are integrated out of the box, they all seamlessly work together, with single sign-on. That would be a normal expectation as a customer, I would think, but unfortunately, the market's not going that way, right? Everybody's got their own, even within one company, you have multiple products, they don't work together well. Our idea is that if you buy an industry cloud suite, you must feel like it came from Infor, it all should have one single user experience, it all should work together as an integrated suite, it should all be sharing data for analytics, and so on and so forth. So that is the whole idea behind building this Infor OS. So, Infor OS has got several services underneath, starting with, you know, user experience, which is developing a hook and loop. So we have all of the controls, whether it's a dropdown box, or a grid control, or date picker, they all behave exactly the same way. Whether you're in CRM, or HCM, or inside a purchasing application, they all work the same, right? So, starting with that, then you go-- >> So if I can interrupt, so the Infor OS has the core services that you need, that the software needs to access for any function that you're building, correct? >> Exactly, yeah, yeah. >> Okay, please. >> So it's user experience, then you have integration. We have one integration layer called ION, and ION supports both an API layer, if you want to build a mobile app, you need APIs into the software, so built a lot of APIs into our applications. Those are exposed through a single gateway. There's one way to get into Infor applications through this API layer. We built that as part of Infor OS. We also built Coleman, which we announced last year. Coleman depends on two things. One, a lot of access to data, so I can crunch and do machine learning, and a lot of access to APIs. So what if you could create an acquisition, tucked into a device, versus having to open up a form, right? To do that, you need APIs. If you can order Domino's pizza from home, using Alexa, why can't you do that at work? So we built this framework for those kind of things. So it's got APIs, it's got Coleman, it's got data lake. So all of this data is in one place, so you can build analytics. We have Birst, which sits on top of the data lake, and I can go on. So that's really what we're doing with Infor OS. It's really, that's very, very important. It's not like your Intel Inside kind of thing. Without Infor OS, Infor apps don't work. >> So, if I can, if you bear with me, just to conceptualize the stack, the OS is at the bottom layer, and then you've got your micro-vertical functions as sort of the next layer, and then the cloud, which is really AWS, is the cloud infrastructure, then you've got the GT Nexus, essentially, the network commerce platform, so all those data and supply chain connection points that you have access to, Birst, the analytics, which was in acquisition last year, and then the Coleman AI completes the stack. My question is, as it relates to, for instance, Birst, that was an acquisition. So, you have to bring that in and do some engineering work to make it fit into the stack, is that right, or is it just kind of bolted on? >> No, you know, so, everything has to be done with the conscious way of design, right, so it just doesn't happen by itself. So, Birst is a fantastic world-class analytics platform, right? They as a company built a world-class platform that allows for department analytics, so if you're working in sales or working in marketing, you can go bring your own data, you can do analytics. It's great at that. At the same time, it's great at enterprise analytics, where you have all of this data in one place, you harmonize the data and do that. As a platform, it's a fantastic platform, but we're about delivering content on top of that platform, so we need to bring the network data, like you said, we need to bring the industry data, we need to bring the employee data from HCM. Bringing it all together and exposing that using Birst as the visualization layer is how we are exposing it. So to that extent, Birst was connected into the data lake, and it sits on top of the data lake, leverages that data. We built a semantic layer, which reflects the model of data that we have in the data lake, so yeah, it does, and we have the single sign-on, so it actually surfaces within Ming.le, within the homepage of a purchasing manager or whoever, and that's work, that's what we did. >> So you essentially re-platformed it. So of course, part of the due diligence is how challenging it's going to be to do that, how fast you can get that to market, but this is complicated. It requires a significant engineering resource on Infor's part. We talked about this a little bit at the analyst meeting last year, the industry analyst session. Couple things, one is the integration and exploitation of AWS cloud, and all the services there, the data pipelines, and the services there, but also modern software development. You know, microservices, and containers, and all of that good stuff. Can you talk about those sort of two dimension and any other points that you'd like to emphasize in terms of the things that Infor developers are doing to create this modern platform? >> Yeah, so, first of all, you know, we are all about applications, right, so we're not building databases, we're not building our own data centers, we're not building our own operating systems. We're a business software application company. Our belief is that if you try to verticalize and try to innovate on every single layer of what you do, it stifles innovation. Why not embrace industry's innovation, right? Can we out-spend AWS, in terms of building a cloud infrastructure? I don't think so. >> No way. >> No one can. And so, it's important to focus on what you do best, and leverage innovation that's coming in outside the four walls of Infor, to embrace that to deliver what the customer requires. So, what we really did is we took the AWS services, and we encapsulated them into our application, so when the application does disaster recovery, it's actually AWS services, right? When we call Elasticsearch, we're using AWS services there. We use DynamoDB for graphing the data in the data lake. Much like Facebook works on Open Graph, of trying to find people who are connected to each other, data inside the data lake is connected, right? Sales order is connected to a sales person. It's connected to a customer. Customer is connected to returns, and so on and so forth, so, we've done those kind of things. So, we've built a layer above the web services of AWS to actually create hooks into the application that leverages that, and we built our application itself in a sort of a microservices architecture. Granular APIs is a better way to describe how we did it, so that those granular APIs can be used in a digital project to create your own mobile app. It's the same APIs that are used in Coleman, for our digital assistant, or chat bots. All of those things require clear thought in terms of design, how you expose the functionality, and how you expose data, and that's what we did. >> Yeah, so, as a developer, in an engineering organization, having access to those primitives, those granular APIs, gives you what, greater flexibility, if the market turns, you can turn more quickly. I mean, it's more complicated, right, but it gives you finer grain control. Is that fair? >> Absolutely the case, yeah, and by the way, we know that the world is heterogeneous, right? I would love for a customer organization to just use Infor for everything, nothing else, right? But that's probably not realistic. So we built this to be able to work in a heterogeneous environment. So creating APIs and having this loosely-coupled architecture allows for that to happen. Ultimately, the customer has a choice. We obviously have to work to earn their business, but if they have other things outside of Infor that they're running in their ecosystem, you need to be able to embrace that. So this architecture actually allows for that. >> So it's the architecture, but if you're saying, if I'm a customer, and I want to run in the Google cloud, or Azure, technically, at least in theory, you can support that, but do you actually do that today, or is that sort of roadmap stuff? >> Technically, you could do that, right, but we obviously leveraged a lot of AWS services in our stack. What I meant to say in heterogeneity is that if you run a non-Infor application, right, so like, Salesforce for CRM, right? I would love for the customer to use Infor CRM, 'cause we think we are very competitive, but if they are running Salesforce, and they don't want to replace that, we need to be able to work in that environment, where it's running in a different cloud, it's running in a different architecture. So, we built Infor OS and the layer to be able to deal with that kind of hybrid deployments. >> Technically, what's the enabler there? Is it just sort of an API-based framework, or... >> It is API-based framework. It's also got federated security built into it. It's got the middleware understands, ION understands that data could come from a non-Infor system. As long as you're talking, you know, you go to United Nations, if everybody there has a headset, to really translate what anyone is saying, versus if everyone speaks English, well, world would be wonderful. >> But they spoke English yesterday. (John laughs) >> I got one more, I got one more geeky question. Anytime I get the head of engineering, you know, the CTO-- >> You love this. >> We love to get into it. The audience eats the stuff up. >> Yes. >> And we love the business talk too. But, I've heard a lot about multi-tenant architecture. My friends at servers now make a big deal about multi-instance, saying, oh, and I don't know if it's, if it can't fix a feature kind of thing, or if there's really, you know, additional value there, but the claim is it's more secure. Multi-tenant, I think conceptually, is certainly more cost-effective. What's your take on sort of multi-tenant? Why is it important? Maybe discuss the security levels that you guys engineer in, your comments. >> Yeah, yeah, if you have something that you can call it a feature, you can, like you said, but our belief is that multi-tenant architecture allows for faster innovation, easier update to the customer, to keep them current, and you know, you think about having thousands of individual instances that you have to update, on a weekly basis, because we will get to a weekly update. We are currently doing monthly update, and we get to a weekly update. That requires a natural act to create automation to be able to update all of them. I mean, there's, you know, you could argue which is really more pure, but multi-tenant architecture for us is one single application server farm that is able to work for different tenants, understanding their configuration, their business process, and operate the way they want it to be operated, but it is running in one single farm, that we can update as frequently as we need, without obviously causing disruption, so that is, I think is a good design scenario. Having said that, we actually isolate the data of a tenant, right, because you could have a scenario where all tenants' data is in one database. We don't do that. We actually insulate tenants so that data is not permeable. You can't go across tenants. So, we think that this is an elegant way to architect and keep it agile, and we can bring innovation faster to the customer. >> So when you go from monthly to weekly, to daily, to hourly, to minutely. Every customer comes with you, whereas in the multi-instance world, you actually have to plan for it. You've got to plan the migration. You're maybe N minus one, or maybe even N minus two, if that's supported, and it's more disruptive. >> That's correct. >> Okay, and then, you've got to engineer, you know, the security, and other factors. Thank you for that explanation. >> So, I always like to get back to, at the end of the day, you know, what are folks doing with what you're providing them, right? So, in kind of like your new services world, your new product world, what are some of the more, I guess, unique ways in which your customers are putting these great tools that you have to work for them, that you would like to use as kind of the poster child of success, and say, you know, we're providing this new value and these new enhancements, and give you the chance to take it to others, and use them as examples? >> Yeah, so, fundamentally, I'll be remiss if I don't start with the industry, right? So, it may not be very sexy, but ultimately, if I'm in a food and beverage industry, I really need to have a piece of software that understands that, right? Like for example, if you're an ice cream plant, you pay by part of a carton, you don't pay for the gallons of milk you get, right, so, does the software understand that? Right, if it don't, then you have to work around it, right? So, it may not sound sexy, but that's important to us, right? So, customers deploy without customization is very, very important for us. That's why we call it last man functionality. But if you flip to the technology side of things, I think that we're just scratching the surface in terms of what users want to do with Coleman. Coleman digital assistant, for example, like I earlier said about placing an acquisition target into a device. I think our idea is that every single employee of our customer organization should be using technology. Typical ERP, as it was deployed 20 years ago, only power users used it, right? Other people wrote on a piece of paper and sent it around. >> Same thing with decision support. There was like, three guys, two guys in the company who knew it. You had to go ask them to build a cube for you. >> Exactly. That doesn't scale, exactly. And we're living in a very diverse, global sort of set up. It doesn't work if you have three people who understand how to do BI, you know, two people who can create work flows, and I always like to use this example of this website called ifttt.com. I don't know if you've tried this or not. It literally stands for if this, then that. If I can go and describe something, and if this happens, then do that. Why can't we do that in enterprise software, right? Why is it that you have to go to knock on the door of IT to do it? So our idea is to bring that level of innovation, so we can innovate, our partners can innovate, customers can innovate, we don't step on each other. >> I got to ask you about a topic that we've heard a lot about this week, is robotic process automation, and you guys have essentially intimated, or at least, I've inferred that you've got quite a bit of capabilities in that regard. We're talking about software robots here, essentially, to replace sort of humans doing mundane tasks, or maybe augment humans. What is the capability that you have with RPA? Is it something that you're shipping today, and I have some follow up questions, if I may. >> Yeah, so, we built ION when we started building this years ago. We built it with the notion of build it on a data-rich architecture, right? What I mean by that is when something happens, an event happens in an application, a sales order is taken, or it's updated, give me a full copy of that document, that anyone can understand, right? That is a foundation of what you need to be able to externalize things like RPA. So we have access to the document as things happen. That's point number one. Point number two is that we built the Coleman AI platform, which we talked about earlier today. That actually leverages that workflow, as points in the workflow, to be able to go and do AI-based services that are hooks that are there in the workflow. So, where human beings need to intervene, I give an easy example. How often, like, there are people reporting to you, I do, and we get expense reports that people submit. First of all, I don't even look at them, Michelle looks at them, and do you think she opens and actually looks at how much somebody spent for dinner? No, you just push the button and approve. Why are we doing that, right? Why can't a robot figure out is there something that looks not quite right, then flag it, versus having to do this mundane work? So why can't Coleman do that? That's the way we've done it, and it's because we have a workflow engine, we have the API architecture, we have an AI platform, it's easy to wire these things together and having data externalized allows us to do that. >> So, in looking at the RPA market, there's several companies out there, and a lot of software companies, many of which are very, very complicated. You can't get your hands on the software. There is some, or maybe one in particular, it's easy, you download it, and it's low code or even no code, so I would imagine, I'm envisioning some kind of studio for a user like myself, who can, you know, is not technical, who can use it, and then maybe some kind of orchestrator, to be able to actually effect what I want done to get done. Is that something that you're shipping today, or how do I do it, as a user, and is it low code or no code? >> As an end user, if you are trying to figure out, yeah, I'll go to them to deploy, then obviously, you need a data scientist, okay? So, that part of it, we have a platform that is available for the data scientist, to be able to go look at the data, curate the data set, allow them to deploy different algorithms to figure out which one work, is the right for certain, then deploy that, and when you say deploy, it automatically creates an API, and allows for use anywhere. From an end user standpoint, like I said, this ifttt.com, you should be able to go in and say, set up your own alerts, that if I see, if you see, you know, X, Y, Z happen, let me know, or if I see X, Y, Z happen, you know, do this. So that part of capability exists in the platform, right? So, you can't completely replace data science and everything with the real end user doing it, but if you package the services in such a way that an end user can actually pick and choose and deploy, that can be done today. >> Your expense report, or approval example, and there are many, many others, so, are great, thank you for great. >> Soma, thank you, for the time too. We appreciate that. Thanks for dropping in, and again, great job on the keynote stage, and wish you success down the road here. >> Thanks a lot, appreciate it. >> I don't think you need it, though, I think you've got your, your act together really well. >> And your hands full. >> Yes, you do. A lot going on. All right, back with more here. We're live in Washington DC. You're watching theCUBE.

live from Washington DC if the queue covering in forum DC 2018 brought to you by in for and welcome back here on the cube inform 2018 we're live in Washington DC continuing our day to coverage here on the cube along with de Ville on tape I'm John Wallace it's now a pleasure as well to welcome Eric Noren to the cube is the managing director of the CFO and enterprise value consulting at Accenture good morning Eric Harry a good morning to see you guys glad to have you with us we appreciate the time yeah let's talk about first the relationship assurance your and in for I know you've had you've been elsewhere right doing some other things with other folks and have kind of migrated back into the in four fold what led to that and what kind of successes are you having well so we're very excited about the partnership with with in for this is kind of like the really the second year for us right now as we go into the second year the first year was really driven from the partnership and the work that we do at Koch Industries and that that client experience kind of led us into a variety of different paths of partnership with with in for we've been doing work with with in for products for many years but we just our alliances just kind of blossomed in this past year into a variety of different areas focusing on the cloud suite financials focusing on GT Nexus in the supply chain space and now we're getting more and more excited about bursts and we're also getting very excited about the the whole the way the infor OS platform is just blossoming and and being tailored to a variety different industries and you've got you've got three offerings right if I remember right that you're taking out that you're taking to your client base as we speak once you give us a rundown of what you're up to well in our practice we have in our CFO and enterprise value practice we have an offering that's all around digital finance that's one of our biggest areas and that's really all just about the intersection of platform technology and how it enables the next generation of the finance function for the CFO so that we cloud that could also include things like you know automation and artificial intelligence applied to the finance function we see in our recent research here that CFO role as pivoting really not to be not really as focused on the books and records and being the controllers right but the CFOs role is now becoming more focused on being the digital steward the value architect of the enterprise and so the core of Finance is being digitized so that the transaction handling can be done more in an automated and efficient way and then freeing up the talent to focus on analytics and value-add and that really allows the CFO to focus more on driving insights into the business driving growth and what we call enterprise value so I totally agree the role of the CFO is transforming quite dramatically you know long gone in my view anyway are the days of CFO equals bean-counter this is a little there's a controller for that and no bean counter by the way is not a pejorative I run a business and I'm happy when people are counting those beans but it's not the CFO's role they're really transforming you see some Rockstar CFOs certainly in the tech industry like Scarpelli Tom sweet to just name a couple right reporting still matters compliance still matters but the CFO is taking a much more strategic role I'm really interested in this this this digitization of finance double-click on that yeah what does that specifically mean maybe you could give us some examples well I think that a couple things one is cloud right also I would say one thing is how transaction handling is moving from paper into all aspects of touchless transaction handling one is that harnessing the data to for transaction so it's touchless between vendors and customers and how that just flows through the system in a more digital way less paper more digital more touchless integration more automation right and then with that platform enabling things like artificial intelligence or machine learning being applied to these patterns of transaction handling so it can do the compliance checking in the reconciliation and so that the accountants right are enabling these algorithms to check things and don't have to do it themselves right but then there's also this whole context of of digital sort of process automation that that yields new ways of working you know new ways of looking at efficiency in terms of how and where the work is done right there was a view of like shared services and how we enable a digital operating model where there is there's work that can be done you know in with business unit intimacy and then there's work that can be done from other locations but then enabled by digital technology that's common and standardized right in a common platform that's also scalable and flexible and so putting all those things together is what we call digital finance I love this conversation and Accenture is like the best of the best you guys gets deep industry expertise and domain expertise I'm interested in Eric and in what the organizational structure looks like because when we talk about digital you're talking about data yeah and when you talking about data you're talking about monetization in some way shape or form not people I think got confused in the early days of big data so we can sell our data and more importantly as how data contributes to the monetization of the company sure and and how you can harness that and invest in that and that's really where the CFO comes in but he or she is not an expert at at digital not an X not a chief data officer or chief digital officer but they are an enabler they got to understand the strategy they got to pay for the strategy and maybe help course-correct it so what are you seeing is the right organizational regime to take advantage of digital well I think it first off it's integrated and it's and it's and it's focused on integration and collaboration for sure I think that there's a role where finance has the the business acumen and the insights to find out where the the story of enterprise value where it is now where it could be relative to the drivers of the business and but what's going on in the industry or the adjacent industries they can take advantage of so it's really all about you know a partnership between you know let's say finance right and let's say bringing in new talent and skills like data scientists and all those kind of you know digital skills and integrating it into finance so that it could be more accessible and then and then translate it into opportunities for for the business units so so a couple examples could be just one just getting a when we say monetization I think there's two things one is cost reduction where could you just use data to just understand the business in all aspects of where costs and how they're behaving and just being farm Warp know precise about where there are opportunities to reduce costs increase your bottom line right and that that in of those is value then there's the other side on you know revenue up left where there could be optimization of pricing optimization of your discounting strategy all those things that get into maintaining and improving your revenue without any additional cost of goods sold correct cost of sales right exactly that's a great example rights right your your operating structures it stays the same they're getting more leverage out of that that's writing and then there's other things where there's adjacent opportunities in to just gain market share right just to say well where there's opportunities with and really what we want to say is that by applying all this intelligence it's focused on really the theme is focused on customer experiences like what are the customer experiences that could be enabled with digital digital technologies in a seamless touchless way that are just differentiating the company you know in the market customers are and I think the world is changing its disrupting so the ways in which customers are interacting with businesses are expecting these kind of digital experiences very much inspired by a lot of the digital native companies they're out there in the market so the traditional companies that don't have those experience need to catch up and invest in these kind of customer experiences give me an example I mean how about expectations and and so let's say for example if you're a telco alright and you've got experiences that are about paying your bill or experiences have to do with services that you need by going to a call center all right now maybe you can have you know the traditional route of talking to someone or maybe there's a way you can go between the information and the channels that you have between your telephone your the mobile app between the website being able to talk to someone and having chat bots and the mix and how you coordinate all those different experiences so that that the customer can come in and get their questions answered in a very efficient way in some cases the the chat BOTS and the kind of sophistication that they can have to to to address the customers question right on the spot in a very timely way helps them just say I got my question solved and I'm happy with that experience right same thing with having information about I'm getting a you know service supply to my home how do I know that I'm having that same certainty of the service supply to the home much like the certainty that consumers are experiencing kind of like when they get an uber and they're like hey I know that the car is only five minutes away and it's coming and I have that certainty of an experience now that's being applied to other kind of customer experience it's a lot of situation I'm there at three things so first was saved money you know example RP a jerk something to help you drop money to the bottom line just cutting out mundane tasks yeah the top the top line operating leverage and that's around analytics may be optimizing pricing was the example you gave now the third I'll call Tam expansion which is which is really gaining share you leveraging your digital strategy to maybe try to be an incumbent disruptor just disrupt before you get disrupted now that last one has more risk associated with it because there are there are additional cost you've got other cost of goods sold you go to market cost but the reward could be you know huge these are the conversations is a great great proxy for the conversations that are going on with your clients yeah absolutely and I think that look you know there's the the market is going through changes constant disruption is coming in different forms whether it be through technology or other kind of industry integrations and you know they're different in the different we I specialize and more the communications me in technology industry alright and so those those are where I spend most of my time and and what's going on in communications right now and what's going on with communications and media is a quite interesting time on how content and distribution of content is changing and the way that the next generation of consumers are going to think about you know consuming media and how advertising is distributed we're going through a tremendous transformation in that space and all the companies are kind of racing to to be have that advantage of how they connect with the consumers at scale in a seamless connected way so that they have that that that ability to continue to serve them in new and innovative ways so let's talk about them so you said comms and media are we talking telecoms yeah okay and then tech industry is in IT technical yeah I mean tech suppliers tech suppliers yes girls just go and and companies like novo those kind of companies that are in that those guys are pretty forward-thinking in terms of technology adoption oh absolutely okay the telco business is really interesting right now though absolutely hardened infrastructures they get over the top suppliers coming in the cost per per bit is going down but they can't charge more you know this you know very well yeah they're going through some really radical transformation at the same time they have a huge opportunity with content yes you see and people make some moves yes absolutely about what's going on in that business a little bit more well you know there was the recent you know Comcast just an acquisition of sky is quite Norway we got 18 t going through the Time Warner thing and then you have so that's a Content play that I think is just frees up some opportunities for for companies like Comcast and AT&T you know to start really servicing their customers and a new profound way you know to be able to say it could be you know content that is suited to different demographics and to get those consumers at scale not only to keep them you know comfortable with the and and very delighted if you will with the kind of wireless service and flexibility they have with that but then to be able to see all the range of content that it could be consuming all of which is coming back to those companies as data as the consumers are watching all this content and having better control visibility of all the different patterns that they're seeing in the use of this content so they can then in turn shape different kinds of programming and shape different kinds of advertising programs that are tailored to those demographics and there's an it there's an underlying infrastructure transformation that's going on so it's something as basic as you know things like network function virtualization not to get too geeky out here but I'm trying to to make their their infrastructure more agile so they can compete with the OTT suppliers and they're trying to vertically integrate as content yes Rogers absolutely in this whole next wave of 5g is is a huge thing that's gonna come to us and that's that's a big disruption that's just starting and will happen in the next three to five years that will level be coming due so everybody's trying to get digital right yeah yeah yo that you talk to but do you do you when you go beneath that to the organization it's harder to get people you know to actually move do you get do you see a sense of complacency of people saying well you know not we're doing pretty well in our industry or I'll be retired before this all happens I mean how do you compel well I think that I mean that does exist in certain industries and certain types of companies you know I think that's the whole point about talent right and I think when we come back and look at talent is really when we think about change not only is the technology changing but the the talent that's available not only in the finance function but in all parts of an enterprise the the the the next generation of folks that are going into the workforce are just coming from a different place in terms of how they use technology in their lifestyle but how they want to apply to their as a customer but then how they want to do it as an employee and so for when we have that conversation about well what is the future going to look like a lot of it will come down to well what does digital mean as an experience for your consumer and your customer but also what does it mean for the talent and and we believe that look talent is a critical asset in every and every company it's the biggest asset that we have in a center right so how do we inspire and have folks have been enabled to use digital technologies to have that entrepreneurial you know sort of platform to use these digitally native tools that's really the key and I think that any kind of you know CFO that's like thinking about betting on the future that talent is very much a part of that stories it's definitely about technology is very important it's an enabler it's a platform however it's the talent that will be using the platform to take those info sites and drive growth in the wild card is data all right that's the new oh yeah absolutely I mean when a variable in the equation yeah this data putting data at the sort of score of your organization and having the talent that knows how they'll exploit your day that's right and I think it's like when I think about talent there's I mean there's different specializations right but I think the talent is really about the collaboration you see people who are able to work with other different cross functions and say well how do we how do we build and find this together how do we discover where the opportunity the insight is together right and you know there's you know there's differences between you know stuff which I said like the you know things that are known and we just optimized what we have and then there's going into the new areas right that I haven't been discovered yet and I think that the thing about the the the talent that's curious you know we like the way to think about like okay curious about what could be or what's out there and using data not as a as a hurdle but harnessing the power of data to go into these areas and start exploring and using all those different tools to explore where could we go and one of the things it's doing is it's not about you know we talked about analytics and some of the tools that are out there it's not about necessarily precision in this moment it's about direction of where you can go and exploring and continuing to find the facts that support investment it's your point I mean the the tools and the tech aren't the hard part it's the it's the unknown it's the people right you know the processes around that right getting everybody on the same page to collaborate it's like old dogs new tricks I mean I mean so yeah never simplifying but you you are trying to bring new tricks yeah to folks and there's a generational awareness that you're the difference between the people they have coming up and where they said that's right and we think that look you know by bringing the fresh new talent in to the organization that and of itself has has the team operating and working differently because not only they have new tools but there's new a new way of talent being integrated you know new talent and experienced talent you know seeing how these things come together to wither with a mandate again on superior business outcomes like let's go after these prizes it's worth it to get this right to make these investments because if we get it right there's an opportunity to grow revenue to grow to grow profitably to gain market share right so there's a there's a it's hard okay there's culture change and change this is normal okay digital transformation is not an easy thing to do all companies go through you know different things but it's worth it in the end yeah and it enforced talked a lot at this show about new new ways to work what I call new ways to and I think there's some substance there yeah absolutely Eric thank you and for the record we are always open to new tricks we do like new tricks okay good it'd be good to have you with us okay my pleasure guys Norman ceinture back with more on the key we're live here in Washington DC [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering Inforum D.C. 2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well, back here on theCUBE, we are at Inforum '18. We're in Washington, D.C. here in the Walter Washington Convention Center. Not far from the White House. It's about a mile that way, and Capitol Hill's about a mile that way, I think. I know we're right in here, but I know we are smack dab in the middle of it. Dave Vellante and John Walls and Kevin Curry, who's the SVP of the global public sector at Infor. Good to have you with us. Good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here. Thanks for your time. >> So public sector, you're in the heart of it here, and you were telling us before we went on the air that you've got more than 700 clients here at the show this week? >> We do, we do. It's the best attendance we've had yet for Inforum, and I joined about six and a half years ago. And we built this business pretty much from the ground up. So it's been a great experience, and now we're starting to get a lot of adoption within the government, across the government, from federal to state to locals. >> What's the process been like, especially across those three, because I assume they're all different? You know, local, state, federal, everybody has different pain points and there's different tolerances. >> They do, they do. I mean, there's different micro-verticals within each of those statements. As an example, if you look at local governments, it could be anything from transit agencies to K-12 schools, to public works, to police, to fire. They all have all different requirements. State's the same thing, whether it's Department of Transportation or Department of Health and Human Services. And then when you get the federal side of it, then it's from the intelligence community to Department of Defense, healthcare within Defense, like the VA and DoD and Defense agencies as well. So it's a pretty wide swatch of use cases and business cases that you need to be able to sell to. >> Charles said something interesting in the keynote today. I want to ask you about it. He said, "We made a strategic decision to go to the cloud. "We didn't want to compete with Google "and Amazon and Microsoft for CloudScale. "That didn't make any sense for us." And he said, "When we were an on-prem software vendor, "we weren't managing servers for our customers." Now what struck me there is if you look back at the software company back in the day, they really didn't care about the server, right? It was just sort of infrastructure. It was kind of irrelevant to them. The cloud feels different. It seems like a more strategic relationship with Amazon. You know, we talk about Teresa Carlson and what a force she is in the government. AWS in the GovCloud has been a huge force. They had a giant lead. So have you been able to draft off that or is it just another sort of infrastructure platform? >> No, they're a major strategic partnership there with AWS and NN4. At the company level, and especially for me, with the government, they've made the right investments at the right time, I mean, and they actually have cloud environments that are very specific to different segments of the government and to different geographies. So as an example, in the federal government they have an intelligence cloud called C2S, which we work with them on. There's a very large procurement out right now for the Department of Defense called Jedi, which Amazon's going after, as well as the other larger cloud providers, so we're obviously riding that horse with AWS. And also for local governments, and they've done all of the compliancy for the government, whether it be FedRAMP, whether it be CJIS for those departments that are worried about the justice type of requirements. And as you get outside of the U.S., they're putting clouds and we're a global company as well, putting clouds in all the right places. They have a G-Cloud offering in the U.K. and as we talked about earlier when we sat down, they're opening a cloud in the Middle East right now too, in Bahrain that I think traces on oil over there as we speak. >> Right, right. The first Middle East country to claim cloud first. But it just seems like there's a strategic advantage there. And even with the other cloud suppliers. I mean, you know, Google's got its niche, big niche, you know, Microsoft, with its software state, but it seems like Amazon, they talk about that flywheel effect, brings certain technologies that, you know, when you talk to Soma, you guys have been able to take advantage of. It just feels a lot different than the old traditional server manufacturer. Oh, it's a Unix box and there's no difference between vendor A, B and C. >> Absolutely correct. And for us, we've taken advantage of the tools that Amazon has and obviously, we're doing all the compliancy on our applications and they've got whole the infrastructure piece of it, so the two work very well together. >> And that has allowed you to focus on your knitting, if you will. >> Yes. >> The things that you do best, which is a micro-verticals, suite across the application portfolio, bringing AI to the equation, automation, we heard a lot about robotic process automation, which is probably a hot topic in the government. >> Yes. I mean, Charles famously, he may have had a quote. I'm sure you heard it. It's friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Great quote. >> You know, that's not a business we're in. We're a software company. >> Right. >> So the public sector, obviously a different animal than the private sector. Very different needs, different constituents, you got tax payers, you got all that. When you bring the technology into the public sector, what does that do for it or how does that have to be, I don't know, re-conformed or adapted? And ultimately, what's the payoff, right? What's the return on that investment? >> So it was actually pretty shocking how quickly the government has adopted and moved towards the cloud. Typically, they're laggards. Everything happens in the commercial market and then government's a little bit of a late adopter, right? But we're seeing them very quickly go to the cloud and there's a lot of reasons for that. One being, you have an aging workforce. Okay, so the baby boomers are all retiring so a lot of that intellectual knowledge is going out the door. Two, is there's some economies of scale to be realized by doing that because once you're in the cloud, I mean, it's up to the vendor who's maintaining it to maintain that for you. So, you know, the people behind the scenes, they have to do it. You know, when you upgrade your software to go from one release to the other, it's automatically done for you. I mean, so there's real cost savings to be had, you know, from a care and feeding perspective there as well. Also a lot of the, on the ERP side of the things, a lot of the systems that are out in the marketplace today that governments have bought, like the Oracles or the SAPs, a lot of these systems are at end-of-life and the companies are no longer supporting them. So it's a re-implementation for them. You know, and so now they're looking, okay, if we have to re-implement and we have to look at our new options, we're going to do it in a cloud. >> So when you've been around as long as I have, Kevin, >> Right. >> you've seen the pendulum swing. You don't have to agree so vehemently. (laughing) But from mainframe to client server and so you're back to the cloud, and now with IoT, it seems like the pendulum is swinging back to a distributed environment. So help us understand where IoT fits to the cloud and even your on-prem business. >> Okay, so like I say, cloud is a pretty broad topic, okay? We have multiple applications that would run in that environment. So when I look at IoT, I think of things like our asset management platform. We have a very strong enterprise asset management platform that runs in the cloud or runs on-prem. And if you think about infrastructure as an example, which government has a lot of, okay. Think about the ability to have sensors on different pieces of equipment and being able to read that information. Think about using drone technology, okay, to be able to do physical inspections under bridges, so you're not having people having to climb around underneath there. I mean, so being able to do live feeds of data and be able to streamline the way you do business and have that automatically captured within an application. So yes, that is one area where we see it. I mean, I think you're going to see more and more of robotics and artificial intelligence and all the things come into play. I think you heard a lot about that here and it's here. I mean, they were things we saw in movies before but now the technology's here today. >> Well, the other thing we heard this morning that Charles has always talked a lot about the data. You guys always talked about your data lake. I like to think of it as a data ocean. You think about all the data out of GT Nexus and, you know, your customers that are providing data to inform. The data model starts to really expand and you guys have seemed to really take advantage of that. Talk about the data, the importance of data, the importance of securing data to the government. >> Well, think about that. I mean, there's islands of information that governments have that if they were able to consolidate that data and put some intelligence into it, be able to make business decisions versus, you know, one system sitting over here, one system sitting over here and none of them ever communicating or talking to each other. You know, the ability to, You could do from anything from, just think about crime statistics, okay? The ability to deploy resources where the crime is and then as it moves, be able to further deploy resources. You know, New York, years ago, did things like that with CompStat when they were cleaning up Times Square and so forth. But just think of that as a concept, realtime being able to manage data. >> So you've got, here at the show, we were talking about earlier, 700 and some odd clients, 725. You've got the federal forum for the first time. Why now? And what are you getting out of that or what do you hope to get out of that at the end of the week? >> So the whole executive team and our board of directors have made significant investments in this marketplace because they understand that government is a very large beast, if you will, and there's a lot of opportunity for deployment of our solutions and there's a real need to solve problems for constituents here as well. So they've made very significant investments in things for security like FedRAMP, compliancy. You know, some companies are doing it on some of their solutions. We're doing it across the board on all the products that we take to the government marketplace. So we're invested in it. You've probably heard today, Charles talked about the fact that we're going to have a federal cloud suite, which we are. So that means federal financials, okay? Actually being able to solve all the problems for the federal government and comply to all their needs and all the things that are part of mandated accounting for the federal government. They made all the right investments and human capital management would be another area. If you think about, we've got an application called Talent Science. The ability to hire the right people for the right job and retain those people. Just think about, ICE is a good example. You heard that they have to hire thousands of people to deploy on the borders, right? How do you quickly ramp and hire these right people if you don't have the right tools to do it? >> You were quoted in TIME magazine, Marc Benioff's new publication, about America's crumbling infrastructure. What role do you see technology playing generally and specifically in for software and helping with that problem? >> So we do a lot today around infrastructure. As an example, we have a very strong presence in transit agencies here in the U.S. New York City runs us, amounts to about a trillion dollars worth of assets there. So anything moving in, out or around the city, so subways, buses, trains, tunnels, bridges, Metro-North, Long Island Rail Road. L.A. runs us, San Francisco runs us, Chicago runs us, Dallas runs us and many others. So we're managing all of that infrastructure. So you hear a lot about infrastructure bills coming out of the federal government. And they're right. I mean, a lot of these tunnel, a lot of these bridges and tunnels and even roadways were built back during World War II, right? And they're aged, you know, they are starting to crumble and there's going to be a lot of money spent to do that and when it comes to rebuilding those types of things, there's a lot of assets that are going to need to be managed, you know, to do that. So we think there's a real opportunity for software such as what we bring to the marketplace to help with that process. >> How about talent retention? I mean, obviously, as administrations come and go, you know, people move, but there's been a lot of brain drain. I mean, take the Patent Office, people in commercial industry stealing some of the best and brightest out of government. Can software play a role in helping better retain, train, you know, evolve growth paths and careers? >> Yes. I guess, in a couple different ways. I mean, number one, I think the applications of today versus the applications of yesterday have changed so much. I mean, you look at, you know, the applications you have on your mobile phone. The ability to have that look and feel, I mean, our kids today are going to go into the workforce and they won't settle for anything less. They're going to want to have that look and feel. They're going to want to have those intuitive type of applications that help them do their job. And that's the kind of offering we're bringing to the marketplace. Then from just actually bringing the right people and we have an application called Talent Science, as an example, where actually there's multiple different areas of your personality that it can determine and map it back to your top performers in your company. And determine the right people for the right job where they'll fit into that environment and then they would thrive hopefully. And it should increase retention on the staff. In government, we've actually sold it to Department of Health and Human Services for hiring case workers. Okay? Or to police departments for hiring of law enforcement. So there's a real opportunity to take those types of applications and do some pretty creative things. >> What's, I hate to say, the pain side of it. But dealing with the government obviously contracts is an issue, right? And a challenge sometimes maybe for you. I'm curious, in a quickly evolving space such as yours, how do you help them keep up with you and their regulatory oversight and whatever mandated restrictions they have? All those things, you know, that come with government. It just doesn't square up with what you do. >> It is, it's a very, again, to your point, it's a different, it's a different industry with different requirements. And everything here is very open and above board. It's open procurements. Everything is competitively bid. There are contractual vehicles that you competitively bid for that'll allow you to be able to do business a lot easier in the future. I mean, in the feds you have things like the GSA 70 Schedule. U.K., you have something called the G-Cloud contract. A lot of states have vehicles where you can bid for it, so all states and local can buy off of those contracts without having to go to a competitive offering. So there's ways that the business can get done without having to go through a lot. >> Every hoop and every, yeah, right. >> The major pain process. But then there's also competitive RFPs, which, you know, well, they'll put a bid out, it'll be very detailed. You have to answer 3,000 requirements. And then after that you'll end up going into an orals and a demo process and, you know, nine months later, they're going to pick a winner. (laughs lightly) Then you go through, but then you have to go through a very painful contract negotiation process. >> That's the process I was talking about. (laughing) Exactly what I was talking about, right. >> Right. >> Yeah, yeah. Well, Kevin, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. >> It's my pleasure. >> And it sounds impressive, right, with the turnout you had, so I'm sure you're very, very pleased with the response you've had here on the show for so far. >> I am and I thank you for your time and >> You bet. >> have a good show. >> Look forward to seeing you down the road. Alright, sir, thank you. Back with more here live on theCUBE. We're at Inforum '18 and we are in Washington, D.C. >> I'm quite sure they got me pinned up back here, but I can't-- (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Washington D., it's the Cube. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> And welcome back to Inforum '18. We're live here in Washington DC as Inforum has brought its show to our nation's capital. I'm John Walls along with Dave Vellante. It's now a pleasure to welcome Vice President of corporate communications Dan Barnhardt. >> Thank you. >> Hey Dan, good morning to you. >> Good morning to you. Good to see you again. >> We were kidding before we got started about why you're here in Washington. We think it's for the weather, right, because it's so nice. >> It's gorgeous. >> But there is a reason. I mean, you've released a federal product today, have an announcement we'll get to in just a moment. But about coming to Washington. You've been in New York before, you've been in New Orleans. Why DC, why now? >> Well, it's important for us to make sure that our customers can access the event. We've got more customers that came this year than came previous years, certainly, than last year. And it's important to be in a city where it's accessible for our customers not just in the US, but also from Europe and Asia Pacific, Latin America and Washington DC's very accessible. We also are one of the largest suppliers to public sector organizations. That's, uh, local, state, and federal government. We've got a particular focus on federal government and fed ramp compliance this year, which we achieved. And, so, we're here so that we can show off some of that new technology that you just mentioned. >> Yeah, what about the significance of that? Of reaching the compliance goal. And what does that mean to the business going forward? >> Well, it's yet another example of the benefits of our cloud strategy and working with the AWS beginning in 2014. Infor was the first large ISV to embrace a public cloud. And Amazon and Amazon web services in particular has been very helpful in achieving fed ramp. They have a lot of federal customers. They've got a very large federal agency with three initials that is a customer and they require compliance with all of the federal regulations that continually change and the utmost security for customers and we're able to offer that to our customers as well. >> Yeah, we were talking on the kick off about that - how you guys can draft the AWS innovations and things like fed ramp and other compliance. They were first, they were way ahead of anybody. You as an ISV, you don't have to worry about all that stuff. I mean, you've still got to connect to it, but they do a lot of the heavy lifting, so that's cool. You got some other hard news. >> Well we also are able to focus on our products by doing that. We don't have to invest in proprietary cloud infrastructure or data centers or databases. We can focus on delivering innovation in our products and functionality that makes a difference for our customers. Their business is not - their customers don't care what infrastructure they're running on, they care how they're able to provide goods and services. So Infor focuses just on delivering better goods and services for our customers. >> What Charles said at the keynote this morning - our strategy, we didn't want to compete with Google and Amazon and Microsoft for scale of cloud. That made no sense. It also made the point that when we were an on prem - exclusively on prem software company, we didn't go out and manage servers for our clients. So we don't want to do that. So, big differentiator for sure, from some of the other SAS players. >> And it's paying off now in a way that our competitors are starting to come after us when they used to not want to acknowledge us. One of our larger competitors - on premise legacy vendor - had an anti-Infor ad on their homepage. They've got cabs outside of here. >> We're talking about- - Yeah >> And then Charles said, ya know if you're - we're welcome the competition here if you'd like to see innovation in enterprise software, this is the place to be. >> Well, congratulations, right, 'cause, well, you know, when Oracle's coming at you, it means you succeeded - that's good. Um, other hard news that you guys had this week - you got true cost accounting in healthcare and some other things, take us through those. >> Well health care has been a major focus industry for us, just along with government, which we mentioned. Um, seventy plus percent of large hospitals in the United States are automated using an Infor software. And healthcare has been an industry that's undergone a lot of disruption, obviously, for the last ten, twelve years, with the Affordable Care Act and others. And we're trying to figure out - we as a society are trying to figure out - how to deliver better care to patients, that's the goal for healthcare organizations. And to do that, they need to better understand what's the cost of care. So the Infor true cost, which we announced in January and have now delivered and have customers implementing, will help our customers understand better what is the cost of the care that they're giving so that they can give better care to their patients and allocate their resources in a way that will help more people heal better and feel better. >> We heard on the intro to the keynotes today, Turing, Edison, and Coleman. It sounded like it was Charles' voiceover. I don't know if it was or not, but >> It was. >> It was. He's got the smooth, mellifluous voice. Um, last year Coleman, Catherine, Coleman, Johnson - you named your AI offering platform after her. Give us the update where you're at today, you've got some other announcements around that as well. >> We do. It's a big announcement for Coleman here. We've got the GA of Coleman digital assistant, which is - enables humans to have - everyone to have an assistant at work with them to help automate certain functions such as search and gather, which can take twenty percent of people's time just collecting the information to make a decision. But now with Coleman digital assistant being live and customers implementing and going live on it right now, they're able - users are able to ask Coleman to fetch information and deliver not only the information but predictions and smart intelligence that helps people make better decisions and be more productive. >> So we had a lot of conversation this morning about robotic process automation, which is really interesting. I mean, essentially, we're talking about software robots taking over mundane tasks to humans. Now a lot of people like to talk about how - and we talked about this in the Cube all the time - how, oh, the machines are taking away jobs, but in speaking to numerous customers about RPA, they're thrilled that they don't have to do these mundane tasks because it makes them more valuable, they're doing more interesting things, and they're getting offers from others that are asking them to do this type of automation for their company. So they're more valuable to their existing company and outside companies. So, RPA - hot topic. You guys are leaning in hard. >> We definitely are. We definitely believe that there are jobs that - there are functions that can be better served by automation, particularly search and gather that we mentioned. There are multiple functions that will always be done by people. Human interaction is not going to change so we are looking to have a digital assistant make productivity better. Productivity is a function of being able to do more, having more workers, and we'd like to do both with this. We'd like people to be more productive using artificial intelligence assistance. And, also, a conversational user experience with software will make it easier and less intimidating for a lot of people to interact with technology at work. And we think that will also help people be able to be more productive in their jobs and have more people able to take more jobs that right now or in the past have required a level of technical expertise that you won't need when you can simply ask the computer to do something for you using your own conversational language. >> Some major data points - excuse me - >> That's okay. that came out of the keynote this morning - one is that there are now more job openings than there are unemployed individuals and productivity, even though the tech spending is booming, it doesn't show up in the productivity numbers. We saw this actually, you know, a couple decades ago in the nineties. And all of a sudden you saw this massive productivity boom. I've predicted that with automation and artificial intelligence you're going to see something similar. It seems like Infor's on a mission - that human potential tagline - on a mission to really drive that productivity and help close those gaps. >> We definitely are. Our tagline is "design for progress" and we are looking to promote progress around the world and do what we can in order to help human progress and the theme at Inforum is human potential and that's what we're looking to do here. We have seen a lot of productivity growth in people's personal lives. I now - I don't know how to set a timer to cook anymore, I just ask Alexa to do it, but we haven't seen that at enterprise yet. So we're bringing consumer grade technology that people have gotten used to in their everyday lives but they don't see at the office. We're bringing it to the office to help make them equally as productive as they are in their personal lives. >> Yeah, that's what I wanted to hit on, actually, was the theme of the show. We're talking about human potential and which Hervan Jones talking about that, you know, from a personal mission statement if you want - that's the way he worded it. But, what's the broad scope of that in terms of how you apply that thematically throughout the company when you talk about human potential, because it's just not you, obviously you're trying to do that for your clients, you're trying to do that for the people they serve, do it for taxpayers, right, through the federal sector. But talk about that from the thirty thousand foot level about human potential - unlocking that and how Infor totally is, I guess, trying to illustrate that or put that in place. >> Certainly. The first thing I would mention is our human capital management. Infor is a very large provider of HR software - there's others that are perhaps better known, but Infor has many customers that are using our HR software, but they're also using our software for other key functions. And by integrating those two things, we're able to help people be their best self at work. Because it's not just the HR management, but the HR system knows what you're working on, they can help with professional development, and talent management, and align that to the business processes that the company has. We're also looking to engage workers. As you mentioned, there are more job openings than there are unemployed people that we believe seeking employment right now, but they're not very engaged. So we're hoping to have technology and learning management to help engage more workers. And then we'd also like to increase new business creation. One of the things that Charles mentioned that slowed down is the introduction of new businesses and small businesses. We believe one of the reasons for that is that there is so much business automation that goes on that in order to achieve that to be competitive requires so much capital investment that it makes it difficult to start a new business. But if we're able to automate a lot of that business, we're able to make it really easy through Infor cloud suite for new business starting, we feel like we'll be able to help entrepreneurs generate new businesses which will employ more people and offer more engaging and rewarding jobs and help fill some of those gaps that we have. >> We've talked a lot about AI - not just some magic thing that you throw at your business - it has to be operationalized and the likely way in which organizations are going to consume AI is it's going to be infused in applications. And this is exactly what your strategy it, isn't it? >> It is. The artificial intelligence is only going to be as smart as the amount of data that it can access and that it can analyze. It doesn't have a brain, it looks at data and learns from that data and where it tells you. And Infor has access to data that very few companies have - mission critical data, ERP, data manufacturing, distribution - core processes that we're able to put in the cloud, and not just in the cloud, but in a multi-tenant cloud environment where it can be drawn from analytics, from our burst analytics engine. And then, Coleman can make decisions based on that data - not only from within the enterprise but across the network using GT Nexus commerce network. >> Yeah, so we're hearing a lot about HCM, of course, at this show, you know, human potential, fits into talent management, HCM. You guys have a very competitive product there, it's sort of a knife fight with some of the large SAS players, but I was excited to see so much attention paid to HCM as a key part of your SAS portfolio - your thoughts? >> I do, I agree with you and I think one of the differentiating points that we just mentioned was that Infor HCM also connects to Infor systems that automate core business processes. So it's not just about those business processes, but also knowing who the people are that work on them and helping companies navigate. So much time is wasted from what we would call tribal knowledge - an employee getting up to speed or figuring out how to navigate inside an organization, particularly a large enterprise. And Infor HCM can help make that easier, but they can do that while attached to a business process so that everything can move faster and more efficiently for the customer. >> I wonder if you could comment, Dan, on this notion of best of breed versus a full suite. It seems like - so for decades, there's been this argument of oh, best of breed point products will sometimes win but full suite, people want a single throat to choke and that integration - It seems like with your micro-vertical strategy you're trying to do both - be both best of breed and have a full suite across the enterprise application portfolio. Is that right, you know, do you feel like you guys are succeeding at that, uh where do you think you fit in that whole spectrum? >> That is correct, and it's one of the things that we're able to do because of our cloud strategy - is to offer the complete suite and the artificial intelligence that comes on top of it. In the past, when there wasn't an artificial intelligence layer, there wasn't the machine learning that needed to draw from all of that data, best of breed individual applications would work. But now that we're trying to pull data together so that you can make more intelligent and you get actionable insights that let you make more intelligent decisions, that requires an integrated suite. And that can be done now in a multi-tenant cloud environment that couldn't be done before. >> The other thing I would observe - we talked about this, John - is - >> I'd also really quick just add that I think that that's proving to be correct in the amount of growth that we're seeing. Infor is significantly outgrowing from a revenue perspective. Oracle, more than forty percent last year, more than double the rate of growth of SAP and our growth rate for cloud applications is up there with work day which is setting the bar for cloud software companies. >> Yeah, that's true, that's a great point. I mean work day has set the bar and this is an example of what was essentially a narrow point product there to, of course, trying to get into other spaces. Of course, SAP and Oracle always have had a large suite. Your strategy has seemed to be working in terms of being a place where a customer can come in and access a lot of different functionality. The other thing that we heard today - a year in - is the Koch Industries investment. I was noticing that you now see Accenture here, you see Grant Thorton, Deloitte- >> Capgemini >> Yeah, Capgemini - these people are taking notice of - I would imagine Koch Industries does a lot of business with those guys and one of the gentlemen from Koch told me last year - said "Hey, we're going to expose these SI's to the Infor opportunity." It seems like it started to happen and I've heard that there's been several large deals that they've helped to catalyze, so it's great to see that presence here. Talk a little bit about the Koch Industries dynamic and what that's brought to the table. >> Well, the Koch relationship for Infor has been so helpful. First, obviously, there's a large infusion of cash from the investment. It was 2.5 billion dollars - one of the largest tech investments that wasn't an acquisition in history. And we're able to use that capital to increase more functionality. Not only that, but Infor has an industrial background. The majority of our customers are in manufacturing or distribution - industries that Koch Industries is a big player in. So not only do we have a great partner, but we have a living lab in one of the world's best and most efficient companies with which to develop our software, implement our software, and test our software. And we've got a willing partner in Koch that can do that and provide a lot of that expertise. >> I was telling Dave that that's what really struck me listening to the keynote was that - yeah - it's this wonderful symbiotic relationship and they gave you money - that's nice, right - but you have an opportunity now to roll out services, products, experiment a little bit. >> We do. >> See how it works within the Koch family, if you will, before you take it out further and so you've got this great test lab at your disposal that you didn't have before. >> And like Infor, Koch is a private company, so we don't feel the same pressure to provide quarterly return to shareholders that public companies do. So we're able to invest more of our revenue in development and R and D in ensuring that our products are going to deliver the best experience and the best functionality for our customers. >> Well, to me, the key for Infor - a key - is you've got a large install base and you're trying to get that install base to come to a more modern, SAS-like, cloud-like platform. To do that, you got to be relevant. So, the stuff like Coleman, the burst acquisition, your micro-verticals - those are all highly relevant. You know, your ability eliminate custom mods because you go that last mile. Highly relevant to companies that have to place a bet. Now, when they have to move to this new world, you know, others are going to try to grab them, so you got to hang on to them. To me, relevance, and showing a road map, and showing an investment, and things like R and D, is critical - your thoughts? >> I agree with you, I think that's the reason that we're seeing those large global system integrators partner with Infor now and develop practices that Accenture and Deloitte, Grant Thornton, and Capgemini, that will implement Infor software at their customers. They're having the demand from the customers that they're working with, including up to the largest of enterprises, for Infor software, just simply because we are able to automate processes and help them get to a level of automation that will let them compete in the digital era. There are companies all over are fearing that they're going to be disrupted by a digital, native competitor or a digitally enabled competitor. And we're looking to help Infor customers become digitally enabled themselves and to be that disruptive competitor in their field. >> Well, Dan, we appreciate the time >> Thank you very much. >> Good seeing you, thanks for having us here. >> Thanks for coming back again. >> Overlooking the show floor, got a great seat - >> Yeah, a lot of activity down there. >> And, uh, good luck with the rest of the show. >> Thank you very much. >> Dan Barnhardt, from Infor back with more. Live on the Cube here from Washington DC at Inforum '18. (bright, electric 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.

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

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City. It's the Cube. Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to by Infor. >> Welcome back to the cube'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, and Jim Kobielus who is the lead analyst for Wikibon in AI. So guys we're wrapping up day one of this conference. What do we think? What did we learn? Jim you've been, we've been here at the desk, interviewing people, and we've certainly learned a lot from them, but you've been out there talking to people, and off the record I should say. >> Yeah. >> So give us. >> I'm going to name names. >> Yes. >> If I may, I want to clarify something. >> Yeah, okay, sorry. >> I said this morning that the implied valuation was like three point seven, three point eight billion. >> Rebecca: Okay. >> Charles Phillips indicated to us off camera actually it was more like 10 and a half billion. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But I still can't make the math work. So I'm working on that. >> Okay. >> I suspect what's happened, was that a pre debt number. Remember they have a lot of debt. >> Yes. >> So I will figure it out, find out, and report back, okay. >> You do. >> So I just wanted to clarify that. >> Run those numbers okay. >> I'll call George. >> Kay, right, but Jim back to you. What do think is the biggest impression you have of the day in terms of where Infor is? >> Yeah, I've had the better part of this day to absorb the Coleman announcement which of course, ya know AI is one my core focus areas at Wikibon, and it really seems to me that, well Infor's direct competitors are the ERP space of all in cloud it's SAP, it's Oracle, it's Microsoft. They all have AI investments strategies going for in their ERP portfolios. So I was going back, and doing my own research today, just to get my head around where does Coleman put Infor in the race, cause it's a very competitive race. I referred to it this morning maybe a little bit extremely as a war of attrition, but what I think is that Coleman represents a milestone in the development of the ERP cloud, ERP market. Where with SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, they're all going deep on AI and ERP, but none of them has the comprehensive framework or strategy to AI enable their suites for human augmentation, ya know, natural language processing, conversational UI's, Ya know, recommenders in line to the whole experience of ya know inventory management, and so forth. What infor has done with Coleman is laid out a, more than just a framework and a strategy, but they've got a lot of other assets behind the whole AI first strategy, that I think will put in them in good steady terms of innovating within their portfolio going forward. One of which is they've got this substantial infusion of capital from coke industries of course, and coke is very much as we've heard today at this show very much behind where the infor team under Charles is going with AI enabling everything, but also the Burst team is now on board with it, and the acquisition closed last month Brad Peters spoke this morning, and of course he spoke yesterday at the analyst pre-brief, and so David and I have more than 24 hours to absorb, what they're saying about where Burst fits into this. Burst has AI assets all ready. That, ya know Infor is very much committed to converging the best of what Burst has with where Coleman is going throughout their portfolio. What Infor announced this morning is all of that. Plus the fact that they've already got some Colemanize it's a term I'm using, applications in their current portfolio. So it's not just a future statement of direction. It's all that they've already done. Significant development and productization of Coleman, and they've also announced a commitment Infor with in the coming year, to bring, to introduce Coleman features throughout each of the industry vertical suite, cloud suites, like I said, human augmentation, plus automation, plus assistants, that are ya know, chat bots sort of inline. In other words, Infor has a far more ambitious and I think, potentially revolutionary strategy to really make ERP, to take ERP away from the legacy of protecters that have all been based on deterministic business rules, that a thicket, a rickety thicket of business rules that need to be maintained. Bringing it closer to the future of cognitive applications, where the logic will be in predictive, and deterministic, predictive, data driven algorithms that are continually learning, continually adapting, continually optimizing all interactions and transactions that's the statement of direction that I think that Infor is on the path to making it happen in the next couple of years in a way that will probably force SAP, Oracle, Microsoft to step up their game, and bring their cognitive or AI strategies in portfolios. >> So I want to talk some more about the horse in the track, but I want to still understand what it is. >> Jim: Yes. >> So the competitors are going to say is oh. It's Alexa. Okay, okay it is partially. >> Jim: Yeah sure. It's very reductive that's their job to reduce. >> Yeah you're right, you've lived that world for a while. Actually that was not your job, so. >> If you don't understand technology, you're just some very smart guy who talks a good talk. >> Yeah, okay. >> So, yeah. >> So, okay, so what we heard yesterday in the analyst meeting, and maybe you found this out today, was is conversational UX. >> Yes. >> It's chat wired into the APIs, and that's table stakes. It augments, it automates, an example is early payments versus by cash on hand. Should I take the early payment deal, and take the discount, or, and so it helps decide those decisions, and which can, if you have a lot of volume could be complex, and it advises it uncovers insights. Now what I don't know is how much of the IP is ya know, We'em defense essentially from Amazon, and how much is actual Infor IP, ya know. >> Good question, good question, whether it's all organically developed so far, or whether they've sourced it from partners, is an open issue. >> Question for Duncan Demarro. >> Duncan Demarra, exactly. >> Okay, so who are the horses in the track. I mean obviously there's Google, there's Amazon, there's I guess Facebook, even though they're not competing in the enterprise, there's IMB Watson, and then you mentioned Oracle, and SAP. >> Well, here's the thing. You named at least one of those solution providers, IBM for example, provides obviously a really sophisticated, cognitive AI suite under Watson that is not imbedded however, within an ERP application suite from that vendor. >> No it's purpose built for whatever. >> It's purpose built for stand alone deployment into all manner of applications. What Infor is not doing with Coleman, and they make that very clear, they're not building a stand alone AI platform. >> Which strategy do you like better. >> Do I like? They're both valid strategies. First of all, Infor is very much a sass vendor, going forward in that they don't they haven't given any indications of going into past. I mean that's why they've partnered with Amazon, for example. So it's clear for a sass vendor like Infor going forward to do what they've done which is that they're not going to allow their customers apparently to decouple the Coleman infrastructure from everything else that ya know, Infor makes money on. >> Which for them is the right strategy. >> Yeah, that's the right strategy for them, and I'm not saying it's a bad strategy for anybody who wants to be in Infor's market. >> So what is in Oracle, or in a SAP, or for that matter, a work day do, I mean service now made some AI announcements at their knowledge event. So they're spending money on that. I think that was organic IP, or I don't know maybe they're open swamps AI compenents. >> Sure, sure, A they need to have a cloud data platform that provides the data upon which to build and train the algorithm. Clearly Infor has cast a slot with AWS, ya know, SAP, Microsoft, Orcale, IBM they all have their own cloud platform. So >> And GT Nexus plays into that data corpus or? >> Yeah, cause GT Nexus is very much a commerce network, ya know, and there is EDI for this century, that is a continual free flowing, ever replenishing, pool of data. Upon which to build and train. >> Okay, but I interrupted you. You said number one, you need the cloud platform with data. >> Ya need the conversational UI, you know, the user reductive term chat bots, ya know, digital assistant. You need that technology, and it ya know, it's very much a technology in the works, its' not like. Everybody's building chat bots, doesn't mean that every customer is using them, or that they perform well, but chat bots are at the very heart of a new generation of application development conversational interfaces. Which is why Wikibon, why are are doing a study, on the art of building, and training, and tuning chat bots. Cause they are so fundamental to the UX of every product category in the cloud. >> Rebecca: And only getting more so. >> IOT, right, desk top applications. Everything's going with , moving towards more of a conversational interface, ya know. For starters, so you need a big data cloud platform. You need a chat bot framework, for building and ya know, the engagement, and ya know, the UI and all of that. You need obviously, machine learning, and deep learning capabilities. Ya know, open source. We are looking at a completely open source stack in the middle there for all the data. Ya know, you need obviously things like tenserflow for deep learning. Which is becoming the standard there. Things like Spark, ya know, for machine learning, streaming analytics and so forth. You need all that plumbing to make it happen, but you need in terms of ERP of course, you need business applications, and you need to have a business application stacked to infuse with this capability, and there's only a hardcore of really dominant vendors in that space. >> But the precious commodity seems to be data. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Precious commodity is data both to build the algorithms, and an ongoing basis to train them. Ya see, the thing is training is just as important as building the algorithms cause training makes all the difference in the world between whether a predictive analytics, ya know ML algorithm actually predicts what it's supposed to predict or doesn't. So without continual retraining of the algorithms, they'll lose their ability to do predictions, and classifications and pattern recognitions. So, ya know, the vendors in the cloud arena who are in a good place are the Googles and the Facebooks, and others who generate this data organically as part of their services. Google's got YouTube, and YouTube is mother load of video and audio and so forth for training all the video analytics, all the speech recognition, everything else that you might want to do, but also very much, ya know, you look at natural language processing, ya know, text data, social media data. I mean everybody is tapping into the social media fire hose to tune all the NLP, ongoing. That's very, very important. So the vendor that can assemble a complete solution portfolio that provides all the data, and also very much this something people often overlook, training the data involves increasingly labeling the data, and labeling needs a hardcore of resources increasingly crowdsource to do that training. That's why companies like Crowd Flower, and Mighty AI, and of course Amazon with mechanical terf are becoming evermore important. They are the go to solution providers in the cloud for training these algorithms to keep them fit for purpose. >> Mmm, alright Rebecca, what are your thoughts as a sort of newbie to Infor. >> I'm a newbie yes, and well to be honest, yes I'm a newbie, and I have only an inch wide, an inch deep understanding of the technology, but one thing that has really resonated with me. >> You fake it really well. >> Well, thank you, I appreciate that, thank you. That I've really taken away from this is the difficulties of implementing this stuff, and this what you hear time and time again. Is that the technology is tough, but it's the change management piece that is what trips up these companies because of personalities who are resistant to it, and just the entrenched ways of doing things. It is so hard. >> Yes, change management, yes I agree, there's so many moving parts in these stacks, it's incredible. >> Rebecca: Yeah. >> If you we just focus on the moving parts that represent the business logic that's driving all of this AI, that's a governance mess in it's own right. Because what you're governing, I mean version controls and so forth, are both traditional business rules that drive all of these applications, application code, plus all of these predictive algorithms, model governance, and so forth, and so on. I mean just making sure that all of that is, you're controlling versions of that. You've got stewards, who are managing the quality of all that. Then it moves in lock step with each other so. >> Rebecca: Exactly. >> So when you change the underlying coding of a chat bot, for example, you're also making sure to continue to refresh and train, and verify that the algorithms that were built along with that code are doing their job, so forth. I'm just giving sort of this meta data, and all of that other stuff that needs to be managed in a unified way within, what I call, a business logic governance framework for cloud data driven applications like AI. >> And in companies that are so big, and where people are so disparately located, these are the biggest challenges that companies are facing. >> Yeah, you're going to get your data scientists in lets say China to build the deep learning algorithms, probably to train them, your probably going to get coders in Poland, or in Uruguay or somewhere else to build the code, and over time, there'll be different pockets of development all around the world, collaborating within a unified like dev ops environment for data science. Another focus for us by the way, dev ops for data science, over time these applications like any application, it'll be year after year, after year of change and change. The people who are building and tuning and tweaking This stuff now probably weren't the people five years ago, as this stuff gets older, who built the original. So you're going to need to manage the end to end life cycle, ya know like documentation, and change control, and all that. It's a dev ops challenge ongoing within a broader development initiative to keep this stuff from flying apart from the sheer complexity. >> Rebecca: Yes. >> So, just I don't Jim, if you can help me answer this, this might be more of a foyer sort of issue, but when we heard from the analyst meeting yesterday, Soma, their chief technical guy, who's been on the Cube before in New Orleans, very sharp dude, Two things that stood out. Remember that architecture slide, they showed? They showed a slide of the XI and the architecture, and obviously they're building on AWS cloud. So their greatest strengths are in my view, any way the achilles heel is here, and one is edge. Let's talk about edge. So edge to cloud. >> Jim : Yes. >> Very expensive to move data into the cloud, and that's where ya know, we heard today that all the analysis is going to be done, we know that, but you're really only going to be moving the needles, presumably, into the cloud. The haystacks going to stay at the edge, and the processing going to be done at the edge, it's going to be interesting to see how Amazon plays there. We've seen Amazon make some moves to the edge with snowball, and greenfield and things like that, and but it just seems that analytics are going to happen at the edge, otherwise it's going to be too expensive. The economic model doesn't favor edge to cloud. One sort of caveat. The second was the complexity of the data pipeline. So we saw a lot of AWS in that slide yesterday. I mean I wrote down dynamo DB, kineses, S3 redshift, I'm sure there's some EC2. These are all discreet sort of one trick pony platforms with a proprietary API, and that data pipeline is going to get very, very complex. >> Flywheel platforms I think when you were talking to Charles Phillips. >> But when you talk to Andy Jasse, he says look we want to have access to primitive access to those APIs. Cause we don't know what the markets going to do. So we have to have control. It's all about control, but that said, it's this burgeoning collection of at least 10 to 15 data services. So the end to end, the question I have is Oracle threw down the gauntlet in cloud. They said they'll be able to service any user request in a 150 milliseconds. What is the end to end performance going to be as that data pipeline gets more robust, and more complicated. I don't know the answer to that, but I think it's something to watch. Can you deliver that in under 150 milliseconds, can Oracle even do that, who knows? >> Well, you can if you deliver more of the actual logic, ya know, machine learning and code to the edge, I mean close the user, close to the point of decision, yes. Keep in mind that the term pipeline is ambiguous here. One one hand, it refers, in many people's minds to the late ya know, the end to end path of a packet for example, from source to target application, but in the context of development or dev ops it refers to the end to end life cycle of a given asset, ya know, code or machine learning, modeling and so forth. In context of data science in the pipeline for data science much of the training the whole notion of training, and machine learning models, say for predictive analysis that doesn't happen in real time in line to actual executing, that happens, Ya know, it happens, but it doesn't need it's not inline in a critical path of the performance of the application much of that will stay in the cloud cause that's massively parallel processing, of ya know, of tensorflow, graphs and so forth. Doesn't need to happen in real time. What needs to happen in real time is that the algorithms like tensorflow that are trained will be pushed to the edge, and they'll execute in increasingly nanoscopic platforms like your smartphone and like smart sensors imbedded in your smart car and so forth. So the most of the application logic, probabilistic ya know, machine learning, will execute at the edge. More of the pipeline functions like model building, model training and so forth, data ingest, and data discovery. That will not happen in real time, but it'll happen in the cloud. It need not happen in the edge. >> Kind of geeky topics, but still one that I wanted to just sort of bring up, and riff on a little bit, but let's bring it back up, and back into sort of. >> And this is the thing there's going to be a lot more to talk about. >> Geeking out Rebecca, we apologize. >> You do indeed, it's okay, it's okay. >> Dave indulges me. >> No, you love it too. >> Of course, no I learn every time I try to describe these things, and get smart people like Jim to help unpack it, and so. >> And we'll do more unpacking tomorrow at two day of Inforum 2017. Well, we will all return. Jim Kobielus, Dave Vellante, I'm Rebecca Knight. We will see you back here tomorrow for day two. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube, covering Inforum 2017, brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Corey Tollefson. He is the senior vice president and general manager for retail here at Infor. Thanks so much for returning to The Cube. >> Happy to be here. >> Good to see you again. >> Looking forward to this, again. >> So you were, this was launched about 18 months ago, so give our viewers a status update, where are we? >> Well, it's been an amazing ride, so just 12 months ago, I think we talked about the initial prognosis of the business unit. Yeah, we just ended our fiscal year, we did about 77% year over year growth, we expanded into new markets like New Zealand and in Europe, we just opened up a brand new office in London, and we're thrilled with the market reception of our solutions. >> So talk a little bit about the solutions that you're coming up with, I mean, retail, or actually, let's back up. Let's talk a little bit about the state of retail right now and what the retailers themselves are feeling, and also, the customer experience. >> Yeah, I mean, anybody that shops understands that retail is in a complete disorder. I'd say chaos and disorder right now. >> Let's do some shopping! >> (laughs) >> Yeah, exactly, well, that's a great point. So when you think of retail, think of post World War II, where basically, the premise for retailing was an anchored mall with knowledgeable shoppers, or knowledgeable workers, associates that knew about their product, they were very product-centric. It was all about taking the car and the family and going to a destination and making it about your day. The reality is, the e-commerce world has changed the business model so much that retail is centered around these iPhones, and the smartphone, that it's 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and that the power of the information has now shifted from the store associates, to the actual consumer, so consumers and customers can walk into a retailer and have more knowledge, not only about the products that you're selling, but even your inventory levels, you know. Looking online, being able to buy on, search online and come into the store and purchase something, so. >> Yeah, so, I mean, there was always an asymmetry, pre-Internet, the brands had all the power, they had all the information, and then it's, as you say, it's totally flipped. In many ways, digital transformation is about trying to create that balance of power again, back in the hands of the brand, right? >> Yeah, I mean, it's funny how, if you look at it over the last 20 years, at first it was the brand and the manufacturers had all of the influence, and then, the whole concept of category management and allowances and things like that in the '90s, the retailers started to have the influence. Now the reality is, it's not even the retailers or the brands anymore, it's the customer. The customer and the consumer have all the influence in the world, which is making so much chaos and disorder around what's retail and the lines have blurred between what's a brand manufacturer and what's a retailer. >> So everyone's got their sort of, I've got to compete with Amazon strategy. What are you seeing that's, that's actually working? >> Well, what's happening in the industry, you know, you may have heard that Amazon put an offer in on Whole foods and ... >> I have heard that, yeah. >> You may have heard about that, so, what it does is it's basically validating our strategy two and a half years ago, when we had the idea of putting together this retail team and what we've done since then, around, you know, modern, beautiful applications that are fueled by science and analytics, that have a beautiful user experience, all those types of technologies are codified over the last two years, and best practices that we've created by using our relationships with Crate & Barrel and Whole Foods and DSW and Nordstrom, as opposed to stuff where that was written in the 1990s. So that's what we believe has been helping our, our progress so far. >> So you've worked with Macy's and Nordstrom and Williams-Sonoma, DSW. What do you think customers want? I mean, you're talking about beautiful applications, a user experience that is satisfying and easy. >> Well, it's funny that when we talk about things like this, I mean, I just mentioned beautiful user experience because customers want to enjoy the shopping experience. You know, Duncan mentioned it earlier on the main stage around next-generation applications are almost headless. You know, the next UI is AI. >> (laughs) >> Right, it's the, it's the UI that doesn't exist, and that's where our applications are going as well. Now it's about holding onto that data, that analytics, that science, and presenting that in a format that's an offer to our customer's customer. >> Speaking of AI, you're really the first cloud suite that is going to be able to take full advantage of Coleman, the new product to launch today. Tell our viewers a little bit more about how you anticipate using Coleman. >> Well, I could get into the whole, "Coleman, tell us to look up a promo, "Coleman, tell us about this price change," there's all those different types of technologies. We're exposing all the data, so anything can be accessible by Coleman around our analytics platform. And one thing that does differentiate us is, we don't view our systems as silos, so, our execution engine for core item merchandising and our omni-channel merchandising system, and our advance analytics and forecasting and planning and replenishment system, are built on one common stack, so that it's common whether it's analytics or execution, they're converged together, so it allows us to be able to take advantage of technologies like Coleman. >> So there was an article in the journal the other day talking about how Apple was actually behind in ... You'd use the example of Siri, anybody who's used Siri knows that it, maybe not quite as where we'd like it to be, and Google and Amazon have the data, and maybe that helps them sort of lead. What is your corpus of data, obviously GT Nexus is part of that, what, but you've got to have the data source, it's all about the data, what's your data corpus? >> I'll give you a real world use case, so two years ago, when we announced the Whole Foods project, one of the design principles that we definitely went forward with, was the whole concept of no, no hierarchies, unlimited attributing, unlimited information around item, because we want to take all that information and all that attributes associated with the item, and we want to load it up into our machine learning solution. >> So, very flat. >> Very flat. We want to load that up into our advanced machine learning in our data platform in the cloud, and we can make as many science recommendations against all that information that's aggregated. So, ah. That's one of our ways in which we differentiate as well. >> Okay, and then, the other thing is, when I look at your, and we saw Soma was presenting to the analysts yesterday and putting up some architecture slides and, there was a lot of AWS in there. It appears that you're heavily leveraging that Amazon, sort of innovation flywheel. How does that affect your business? >> Well, it's a sticky wicket, right? I mean, what we've learned from working with Amazon as well as AWS is they're distinct organizations and we spent a lot of time with AWS because they spend so much money, it's been a nuclear arms race over the last decade to see who could spend the most money to build the best infrastructure and plumbing, and there is a wall that segments the two from each other, but that doesn't preclude us from working with other clouds. There's other clouds that we can use from our customer. I mean, some of our customers have requirements around leveraging Microsoft or Google, and we're happy to work with those clouds, too. >> I want to talk a little bit about international expansion. You mentioned a new office in London and also a new one in New Zealand. London seems like an obvious destination, New Zealand, not as much. Can you just explain to our viewers a little bit about why those two places? >> Well, I think the first part of that is, it's English-speaking. >> Okay, fair enough, yes. >> It's a little bit easier with less translation requirements related to those markets, but what we really like about London, is it feels like they're catching our momentum that we had two years ago in North America, and the reception we've had in London has been insane. And I wish I could be in a position to announce all the recent wins that we've had in Europe, but there's going to be more to come as well, in announcements. >> Okay, so, what are you hearing here? A little over a year in, what are the customers here telling you? What they like, what they don't like, what they want. >> Well, I think what a lot of customers are asking for is, they want to see acceleration a road map. They believe in concepts like Coleman that we had mentioned this morning, they want to take advantage of that as quickly as possible. And for us, we can provide a prescriptive journey, and it doesn't need to be a big bang where you have to deploy this huge, monolithic system. I would love nothing more than to have all of your system, all of our customers and prospects take advantage of all of our systems, but the reality is, there's some legacy systems they don't want to touch, that's okay, that's fine, we can make SAP smarter by having the best analytics platform in the retail on the planet, we believe, you know. We can take advantage of that horizontal ERP that you're running by taking advantage of some of the burst functionality, where we can come in and start taking information out of different, disparate silos. So there's not just one way of digesting an experience with Infor. >> So a lot of the ways in which companies are competing with Amazon is obviously with data, utilizing data in new ways, personalizing the experience as you mentioned, Europe, Europe, you know, last year dropped a bomb called GDPR, and the whole privacy piece and it goes and, the penalties go into effect May of '18. How are you rethinking, privacy and data protection, in this new era? >> You know, the irony on this question is, two years ago, if you would have asked the same question, the onus would be on us to provide accessibility and provide proof that it's better to go with a cloud provider? The dialog has shifted to the point where, you know, we talked about it earlier today, we've got hundreds of people that are working in cloud ops, as opposed to our retailers that might have a handful that use it, so it's almost like the onus and the risk is on our retailers of not trusting a cloud provider, for that service. >> It's true, I mean, Amazon absorbs a lot of that risk for GDPR. So, then, how do the retailers think about data protection? I mean, they don't just wash their hands and say, "Okay, Amazon will take care of it." Are the discuss, are they more sort of, data protection brokers or strategists or? >> Well, I think it comes back to, there was some interesting behavior back in the mid-90s between a couple retailers and Amazon and, that's where a lot of the trepidation came from, of working with them, I keep harping back to, there is a pretty distinct line between AWS and Amazon, and what we find is, they don't even talk to each other. So if they're listening right now, they, that's probably, that's not a knock on them, that's actually congratulations that they are completely separate units, that we don't feel like there's any issues related to privacy or, the biggest concern isn't privacy, it's around having access to information around that SKU and that item and that price point. They don't want Amazon to be able to see that price point and suddenly offer up a promo based upon inside information. >> Okay, you know, sure, I buy that. I, you know, I think Amazon is pretty reputable in terms of that, that brick wall between the two companies, but specifically, I'm talking about personal information, and how that's protected, or just generally, security, well, I guess security again, the onus is on the cloud provider, but, are you, is that a board level discussion? Is that more of a wonk level discussion in IT or just? >> Over the last two years it's evolved to the point where it's not even a discussion point anymore. >> Because of the cloud. >> Because of the cloud, the cloud adoption as well as the standards that AWS has put in place, it's almost like they've created the industry standard for, to which others now compete with. >> Great. >> So. >> When you're thinking about the future of retail, is there a piece of advice that you could give to retailers? They're listening now, they're watching The Cube. Retailers who are fearful of a digital transformation, resistant to one, or know that they have to transform in this way but just can't quite seem to get over the hump. >> Well, every day I meet with a retailer, and it's the same sentiment. They understand and appreciate that if they don't adopt, they're dead. And it's really, it's really a grave situation, and the reality is, I think we're going to usher in a golden age of retailing, because, what's left behind is the old adage of, let's just expand and create more store space and more shelf space, and we'll just see our margins go higher and our revenues go higher. Those days are done, so they need to make the most they can out of the space that they have, and the reality is, any single store, it's almost like a node on the network, and I wanted to tell this story. So last night, I was boarding a plane and I realized my shoes were not packed. It's because I didn't have them, I left them in London last week, and the reality is, I'm not the best shopper when it comes to making these decisions. So I called my personal shopper at Nordstrom. She had all the information on me. She played it against her BI report on, these are the types of trends, style, color, class, and she came back and said, "Corey, "I'm going to purchase these for you." And I said, "Great, I'll pick them up "at your Nordstrom location in Manhattan." And she said, "Oops, it doesn't open until the spring." And I thought I was completely out of luck, and the reality is, she said "don't worry about it, "there's a distribution center not that far behind, "we'll ship it directly to your hotel." And guess what, lo and behold, this morning, my shoes were there. That's the type of modern retailing that all the non-Amazon, non-Walmart.com retailers can do to be successful. >> But it's not headless. I mean, there was a human being involved, yeah. >> There was a human being there, but we're working on next generation apps, specifically with Nordstrom too, to help them create that experience so we can eliminate the heroics and make that embedded into a new modern platform. >> I love it, I love it, I'm excited. >> Okay, but wait, wait, wait. Why couldn't Amazon replicate that with its AI and, you know, geniuses and alpha geeks? >> It's the human interaction. I don't want to just necessarily interact with a bot, on Amazon.com. I called my personal shopper live, and said, "This is what the situation is, can you solve it for me?" So then she took that back, she ran it through the calculations and came back and said, "Here's what you need and I'll ship it to you." >> Well, the other thing that I think about is the physical store. Some, like every time I buy sneakers on Amazon, they never fit, so, okay, so I want to go into DSW. I love DSW. >> (laughs) >> We do, too. >> It's, like, my favorite shoe store in the world, and of course my girls love it too, so. But so, there are many situations where you really actually want that physical, look and feel and touch. >> And think about what you just said, so with DSW, most of their customers are avid shoe shoppers and they love shoes. The differentiation between DSW and Amazon is that, I believe the numbers are pretty much 70% of North America's population is within 5 to 10 miles of a DSW. Think of that as competitive advantage, being able to buy online, pick it up in the store after work, there's no delay in shipping, that's really why Amazon's trying to get into the retail space with-- >> And by the same, unless Whole Foods starts-- >> There could be a drone! >> selling shoes ... (laughs) >> Or there could be a drone, that would deliver it to me in a couple hours. Anyway, but this is next year's Inforum. This is, these are all the themes. >> That's going to be amazing, to sit down with you and talk about this year after year. >> I know, we, at the golden age, it's soon to be upon us. Corey Tollefson, always a pleasure to sit down with you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much, appreciate it. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have our wrap just after this. (peppy techno music)

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum 2017, brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Inforum 2017, I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Chip Coyle. He is Infor's CMO. Thanks so much for sitting down with theCUBE today. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we just kicked off the show, the general session, Charles Philips, a lot of other Infor executives up there on the main stage talking. Lay it out for us. How many people are here. What are sort of the big themes that you're trying to get across here. >> Yeah, well, first of all it's great for Infor to be having our conference here at the Javits Center. It's about 10 blocks from our home-- >> Rebecca: Your own back yard. >> In New York City, and so this year, we've got nearly 7,000 attendees over the course of the week. Many component programs as we do every year with our partner summit, with our various conferences for the different individual customer constituencies, and executive forum, and of course, a big customer appreciation event happening tomorrow night. >> You've also made some big announcements. I'm talking mostly about Coleman AI, and Burst. I want you, if you can unpack those for our viewers a little bit. >> Yeah, I would say the theme of the conference this year is the age of networked intelligence. And what does that mean? Well, we've had, for the last several years, a layered strategy in our business, starting at the foundation with very deep industry functional applications. Purpose built for the different industries. We've taken all of that technology and moved it to the cloud, so that you get the benefits of the efficiencies and the network capability of taking your applications to the cloud. We recently, a year ago, acquired GT Nexus, which expands our capability, in a broader sense, to a commerce network, and we're able to incorporate that into our traditional applications in different industries. And then, just a couple of months ago, we acquired a business intelligence software company, Burst, which brings some really great technology for business intelligence that we can layer on top of all of our applications in this network environment. And then finally, today, the big announcement was Coleman, as you said, and that was to take our new artificial intelligence platform and really create just profound new ways that the workers in the different industries and their different companies across the networked enterprise, can interact in a business setting, much like people do in a commercial setting today. >> Can you, Chip, talk about the evolution of the brand promise. So when we first met Infor, at AWS Reinvent, it was like who was Infor? Trying to educate people on who Infor is. And so I felt like last year was your sort of stamp of this is how Infor and why Infor is relevant, and now, there seems to be sort of an undertone of innovation. So can you talk about the evolution of the brand and what you see as the brand promise. >> Well, we are very consistent in our branding and positioning of Infor as really the first industry cloud company. We're the ones who have been, at an accelerated pace, bringing the most deep, industry-rich, functional applications to the cloud. And that has created a great layer now, for all of these future innovations that we have talked about today with the benefits of business intelligence enabled applications built right in, so that you can truly have all the information you need at the right time, for the right purpose to make immediate business decisions. And then the potential and capability of artificial intelligence on top of that. >> As the chief marketing officer, can you talk a little bit about how these innovations change how you do your job, and how they make your life easier, in terms of making the right decision at the right time, making the decision better, having the right data? >> Yeah, well some of the other announcements that we're making this week, actually are in my particular line of business, which is marketing, and one of those, for example, is we're broadening our Infor CRM suite, with a link to LinkedIn's Sales Navigator. So that brings a whole set of important data to, about customers, to enable better customer interactions, for our customers. So that's something that we look to be using in our business, along with Marketo, which is a new business partner, as the engine, or the marketing automation platform to fuel our marketing business. So that's how it's impacting me directly in what I do. >> So I wonder if you could help us sort of debunk some of the myths. So Oracle would say enterprise apps aren't moving to the cloud, and we are the company to move them to the cloud, and we're the only company that can move them to the cloud. You know, SAP, it's got it sort of some cloud going on, but most of the stuff remains on prem. We heard today 55% of your revenue comes from cloud. And we know you made a decision years ago to run on AWS. Help us understand, I mean these are core, hard core enterprise apps that are running in the cloud. So help us debunk some of those myths and add some color to that. >> The traditional processes of rolling out major applications and enterprise applications in an enterprise is completely changing. And it's also changing because of the capabilities of the cloud. And the approach that Infor takes, which is very easy to assemble and configure with our Ion technology and collaboration technology, such as Mingle, to put these applications in place in a much faster way for our customers than some of the traditional players in the ERP market have been accustomed to do. And they just don't have the current technology approach or foundation to be able to move quickly to the cloud, as we do at Infor. >> In talking about Infor, you talked a little bit about the brand evolution, how are you getting the word out? Infor is really a sleeping giant in the technology industry. How are you getting your name out there? >> Well one thing that we want to do with our brand is show, well first of all, introduce Infor to the world at large, that hasn't heard of us. And the way that we want to do that is by showing what kind of benefits we can give to customers in different industries. So we just recently launched our first-ever TV commercials. They have run on shows like Meet the Press, and some of the CNBC and MSNBC shows. That has, incidental, all of that was developed entirely, 100% in house, with Hook and Loop, our creative in-house creative agency. So we're very proud of that. We're looking to do more of that with TV. We also have a relationship with the Brooklyn Nets here in New York, where on the business side, we're enabling them with performance and team analytics with a whole slew of applications of that with biometric readings and imagery, when they're moving around on the court. That can then be used to help fine tune and make decisions on which personnel to use, which, what are the best players to be able to, say, shoot a free throw after one day of rest versus two days of rest. That level of analytics. So we are, in that partnership with the Nets, are also in a branding way, going to be on the Nets jersey starting this September with an Infor patch on the jersey. And we're announcing that also, this week. >> Awesome. This is definitely a New York theme here. We're here at the Javits Center, Brooklyn Nets, Hudson Yards, another huge project that you guys are intimately involved in. Not a lot of vendors are explicitly mentioned in that. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Well, Hudson Yards as a development is unique in that it is really a completely self-contained city in all respects. Where the concept is to be able to network the data and information of anybody within that city, with respect to where they live in the high-rises, where they shop in the retail stores or grocery stores, where they eat in the restaurants, and where they work with all of the businesses that are locating there, too. So that gives you so much potential to rethink how information can enable, just the way that you move about, even in the city. From keyless entry into facilities, to voice-activated tasks, like, can you please restock in my groceries in my refrigerator in my condo. So there's so many ways that that can be a broad showcase for the true smart city of the future. >> These are high-end clientele. This is very New York. I want to shift gears and talk about the eco system a little bit. There's a few names that I, maybe they were here before, but I hadn't seen them, at least prominently, certainly IBM, you mentioned Marketo, a great interesting partner, hot company, and some of the SIs are sort of coming out of the woodwork. >> Chip: Yes. >> Now when you think about your strategy for sort of micro verticals, the SIs, I always say, they love to eat at the trough. And if there's not a lot of customizations, they're not interested. However, you've attracted them, because you've now got a substantial enough estate. So talk about that evolution of the eco system. >> We're proud to have as our diamond sponsors this year, AVAAP, as well as Marketo. And AVAAP has been a longstanding partner for, implementation partner for us, in expanding areas. Their heritage is with Lawson in health care and they're doing a lot of implementations across our business in all geographies, in all industries. But what's new this year is we also have attracted some new, some of the big SIs, such as Deloitte and Accenture, Capgemini, Grant Thornton. So they have all come in as sponsors and we're really on the cusp of some big and bigger and better things with them in the different businesses. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you about is Infor has a unique way of attracting interesting speakers. I've done probably five or six thousand interviews in the last five or six years, and some of the most interesting have been at Inforum. Deborah Norville came on in New Orleans, last year Lara Logan, Naomi Tutu, Karina Hollekim, amazing three women interviews. >> Rebecca: This year Susan Rice. >> This year Susan Rice was here, so what's that all about? They're not techies, they're just interesting people. What are you trying to do there? >> Well, we have a program, the Women's Infor Network, WIN, that was created by Pam Murphy, our chief operating officer, and starting a few Inforums ago, we wanted to use Inforum as a platform to showcase innovative women in the world. And it's a little bit of a departure from our product and technology messages. And this year, we've got, as you mentioned, some great inspiring women, like Jill Biden, the former first, vice president-- >> Rebecca: Second lady. >> And also, Susan Rice, as you mentioned. So, it's going to be, it's always a very popular session. >> Yes, and we're looking forward to having those women on theCUBE, too, tomorrow. >> Chip: Absolutely. >> Chip, thanks so much for joining us, it's been a pleasure. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante. We'll have more from Inforum 2017 after this. (techno music)