>> 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 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 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)

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