Image Title

Search Results for Infor OS:

Massimo Capoccia, InforOS & Rick Rider, Infor | Inforum DC 2018


 

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering Inforum DC 2018 brought to you by Inforum. >> Well we are back here at Inforum 2018 in Washington DC John Walls with Dave Vellante. We are in the nation's capital and joined right now by Massimo Capoccia who is SVP of Info OS and Rick Rider, product director at for common at Infor. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us, >> Thank you >> Good to see you both. >> Thank you for having us >> Thank you >> Let's start first off good job by the way >> Welcome to keynote.. thanks stage this morning we had some time to shine out there. Your thoughts about the show in general so far? We've been a couple of days in now, how is it going for you? >> Yeah, very very well the customers have received the Infor OS and the technology innovation and what we do with the AI very very well. You know lots of people in the hub, lots of sessions, so lots of interest on the technology innovation for Infor OS and for Infor as well. >> Sure, Rick for you? >> Yeah, its been great, it's been interesting. What we are finding out is getting a lot of this out in front of customers and partners is bringing up some interesting opportunities for us moving forward. So it is not everyday we get the opportunity to get in front of these many people within our network, so it's been great. >> So we'll be hearing from folks Let's talk about AI, especially for those who maybe don't know, haven't embraced it yet. What are the Hesitation, reservations, I mean what are you hearing from them as far as what's going to trigger them to make a decision? >> Yeah, to be honest I think they have been hesitant in the past just because it hasn't really been clear. We have talked about AI in the technology community, it's been hard to define. Some people might in fact define incorrectly, because we are making assumptions about what technology can and can't do. I think what we are uncovering. I feel we've got a pretty unique approach to what we are doing here with Infor OS and common connected to it. We are working directly with customers to identify use cases on how we can apply AI. Rather than just starting at the top and saying, "hey we should be doing all these great things and let's see how we can make it work for our customers." It's kind of we are flipping the script and starting backwards and saying, "hey what are the issues? What are the opportunities the customers have? How can we build the technology using AI to make it meaningful?" So we have business impact they want. And by doing that, I think it's a lot more understandable, it's a lot more relatable, it's a lot more trust able from our customers. >> We from in theCUBE here, watch and observe the ascendancy of the hype and so called big data. And which is sort of moderated now. But in data is plentiful, insights aren't. and so we feel we have come to the conclusion that the innovation recipe, if you will, for the next decade or so, is data, applying machine intelligence, that data and having a cloud to be able to scale it. Having cloud economics to be able to track innovation. You guys seem to have all three >> Yeah >> Of those pieces But AI without the data is just.. I don't know what it is? >> Right? Excited. >> Data without the ability to extract (laughs)...you know insights... What good is it? >> Right >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Then you got to have cloud to scale it. Your thoughts on from a platform perspective with that means? >> Yeah, Absolutely. So I was seeing the interview that you were doing with Charles, says we build this platform from the beginning. And one of the big element is that we have you know, made it possible to synchronize you know real time all this data that the applications will generates, into a single place called the data lake. So when you have the data and data lake then you can do many many things and not only analytics and reporting, which is the classical use case, but now it allows you to do AI. And the difference is we don't have one domain of the data. So some of the vendors have only CRM data or ACM data or financial data. With Infor we have all different domains of data. So we can go from ACM from financials, to asset management, to IoT readings for IoT devices, to ERP and CRM also. So when you combine when you can cross and combine the relationship with this data, then your AI is much more smart and intelligent. When you have only the AI focused on a domain, is less intelligent. So that's actually the power that we do. And our Coleman will take advantage of that, you know that you know rich data lake. >> Okay and we talked a lot to someone earlier about the stack. and that the bottom layer, is the OS >> Yes >> So everybody is familiar with what the operating system does in computer science. How is your OS similar and different? What's the function that it does if we can double-click on that? >> Yeah, so we.. It's in for operating service and we call it a service. Because it's not actually in the database and operating system level, right? So we believe... We are more in the application technology. We are the layer that takes you know the bare technology and makes it usable for a business, for an enterprise. And we build applications on top of it. So what we believe at Infor, when you have an architecture with this composite of a suite of applications. Or even the new Microsoft architecture that developers built. You still have to deliver a uniform user experience, a uniform business process, uniform security and data management and even AI. So if you look at services like Facebook or Netflix, they have maybe the entire Microsoft architecture thousands of that, but the experience is one.alright? Thus what we want to bring it to the enterprise. Infor OS big.. that unify the experience both from the end user and business process, to the enterprises. And we do it for all the cloud suites. Infor OS is all the cloud suites not just one but all of them the same services. >> So, I love the Netflix example, because if you think about digital... digital transformation, digital business. My experience with Netflix is just with Netflix I don't have a... There's no marketing department, sales department service department. I do have a problem, I go to Netflix on my app(laughs) I interact with... >> Absolutely >> So that's... I considered that what's called a product. So Rick, how does this capability get translated into product? >> Yeah. You know one thing that you brought up a lot earlier is, with all this interconnectivity and how we have to package things. So we've got all these different services that OS offer. So we've got the data lake, we've got the API gateway. We've got the integration platform, and... All those pieces is what bring this together to where, we can actually deliver something to our customers. In my case, it's an AI model or it's RPA, because of all these things are packaged together. So they don't actually see what's happening, because it's already packaged for them. >> Okay, so... what I was saying the Charles, you probably you might have seen it, is when we first discovered Infor was like, "What do you guys do?" It wasn't clear exactly what you guys were doing. But he said, and I believe him, was always our vision to have a platform. Now that... the... it's not opaque anymore, the platform is pretty clear. Now you've added the Birst Analytics, you've added Coleman AI on top of that. So you know Andy Jassy AWS always talks about the flywheel effect. So I suspect that you're entering this flywheel phase. What is that phase? What does it kind of mean for you guys, for customers, in terms of innovation? >> Yeah, is a very good question. Actually I worked for years with... We started with this platform, this journey with Charles and we start really with... okay, what's the first first issue. You know, we want to solve the integration promise. We want to give an integration platform. Then we build that. Then we start to say, okay, we want to unify the experience. We build a unified portal with a single sign on. Then we say, okay, we want to unify the data, we build a data lake. So we continue to build out the platform. We are now at the level we have a platform and its unique platform because you can say it fits in one Magic Quadrant. Because yeah, it does the iPass in the past. So with all these magic quadrants. But it doesn't fit in one, it's in all of them, right? So and in... The analyst looks at that and say, Okay, we have a platform doesn't fit in one, if it's in all of them, right? >> The Magic Quadrant is now becoming outdated, because... >> Exactly. >> Because its as you said... I don't need 15 stove pipes... >> Exactly. >> With the stove pipe thinking. >> Exactly. So.. >> With all due respect to my friends at Gartner (laughs) >> But the Fly wheel is... Yeah, the platform is going to become more and more important, relevant. The customers that... you know are in the cloud, are not in the cloud, they will use the platform to get to the cloud. It's going to be a new enabler for those customers are still on premises, to go to the cloud. We the Infor OS is enabler for hybrid process. So some some application can be in the on premises or in the cloud. With the OS they can take the journey and get to the cloud and their own place. >> So architecturally, you don't care. >> We don't care what the application side, >> Okay. But you've certainly done a lot of work to optimize AWS, you know, we're AWS customer, we know it's, it's not trivial, you have to, you know work it. It's simple, developers love it, but to really take advantage of it, integrate it with your processes will take some work. But architectural, you don't care. But it's not. That's not a that's not an offering statement, is it? I mean, today, can I run that multi cloud, run their software anywhere? >> Well >> Doing that? >> Well, today, we have a mix off, we use open source library, but we do utilize AWS, the data lake is built on S3. On AI, we use Laks, or Sagemaker for the training on the models. So we do a lot of AWS, Because it gives you our computing power and any out of the box solution for certain certain pieces. What we do we build interfaces to our application, so that our customers doesn't need to take care of all the plumbing, it's all interconnected and done. So that's, that's one of the power of Infor OS. It brings that application technology layer, between the business application and you know, the basic, you know, technologies >> And the customer doesn't want to think about the plumbing these days, right? >> Right. >> To most customers, infrastructure is irrelevant, you know, again, apologies to my hardware, friends, but they don't care about hardware, right? I mean, >> Yeah. >> It's interesting, Charles said in the keynote yesterday, when we were an onPrem software company, we didn't manage servers for our customers. Customers didn't care really about the server, and any more than they care about the plumbing today, right? >> Right. Yeah. And if I want to relate that to the AI space, all the training, all the science, all the highly computational things that we have to do, customers don't really want to know what that means or how to use that. So what we're actually doing is in conjunction with some of the AI services we're working with, with AWS is we've built a modeling platform to where they're operating in one location. They've got no concept of where this is hosted, what's going on behind the scenes, and then we connect it, we expose an API, and they can do any sort of RPI that they want to. >> So...I mean you are talking about when you talk about your customers, and they don't care about, you know, what's behind the curtain, they just wanted it to handle, maybe something up front, but yet, you have to understand what they can do. Right? You have to understand their potential. So how do you do that, when you're dealing with different companies, different sizes, different priorities, different challenges, they're different technology stages. How do you all address them individually and help them get to that better place? >> Yeah, I think, you know, it's never a one size fits, all right. So we try to give them what we've called citizen developer tool sets in the past. And I've even started to try to say, citizen data science tool set. So how can we make it more consumable by all types of users? So yes, we can provide templates, we can create these things that might work somewhat out of the box. But each one of these customers their data is, is just slightly different than need to make tweaks. So we really want to be able to, you know, provide all that flexibility. And it gets back to we start with our use cases. And then we build from there. So we get all that feedback, and make sure we're making we're hitting those key points. >> So I want to pick up on something you said about citizens, citizen data scientists. I've used that term before in front of data scientists some of them don't like it, right. That denigrates what they do. And it's true, a data scientist is a math whiz, maybe a stats, was there a data hacker they can code, Okay. And that's not every business person, right? Clearly. However, when you think about things like our RPA, I mean, you really want to enable business users. You don't want to repeat the same problem that we had for years with things like decision support, where you had two people in the company that knew how to build a Cube. And you had to have line up with an ask, please can you build my cube, I have a deadline while everybody else does too. Just there wasn't effective. So things like our RPA and low code, citizen data scientists spread that technology throughout. Now, part of that is having a platform that is I vision a studio, whereas a user, I can actually create some kind of process and code that in software, you know, code it. It is something that's repetitive that I don't have to do every day. I do it every day, I do it the same way. Somebody gave the example might have been Soma, I know somebody else, expense report approval? >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> I've never not approved and expense report. I don't crack them open. Look, I don't know, maybe every now and then somebody does. Somebody does, by the way. (laughs) >> (shouts) So don't get any idea here. >> I always press the approval button, right? Why can't a robot do that and look for anomalies and say, Oh, a $300 scotch? That's... >> Yeah Yeah. Absolutely... So is that a capability that you're working on, that you have today. That what I'm envisioning a studio and then I imagine this got some orchestrator... >> Yeah. So yeah, so if you look at throughout all Infor OS, is completely Model Driven. So either you, you build a new integration, or a workflow, or a, an AI model, or a even, we have a platform as a service Mongols, where you build with low code applications. So you can take it to end to end where you you train models in AI, us suppose as an API. You can build your own app on top of it with low code and then, you know, give it to your business users. Very, very simple and in the cloud. You know, in the browser and you can do every customer can do it. So that's very important for us. We work from the beginning with this model to give you know, the tools to everybody, not only an elite of people that can do and then you know, there is the rest of the people that cannot do it. Every new computer science engineer that comes out gets you know, AI out of the box. When I did computer science, Yeah, I got some AI, you know, but it was not really like today. So every everybody can program AI now. And we want to give this tools to every developer and not just went to an elite. >> Yeah. And the workflow prediction model that you've been talking about. If you want to come join us down there, we've actually got a model that we're working on for that exact use case. >> Oh, cool. >> Yeah. So yeah. Giving the ability for those business users, as you say to... it's almost like lowering the barrier to entry to a lot of this AI technology. It's not devaluing or anything, data science, because we've got those advanced tool sets, to where if you want to do something in our studio, bring it over into the Coleman AI platform. You certainly can, we're not devaluing that. But you know, what, if we want to start and take little bites off and you want to give this in the hands of the business users, we've got a great solution for that. >> So this is all the cool stuff. This is stuff that business users care about? I mean, do they... My question is, do people care about what's under the covers? I mean, are they asking you or what's the database? And how does this work? How does that work? Or they just really want to focus on that functionality that they're getting in the business impact? >> Yeah, with the advent of the cloud, you know, people, just those questions like we sh... you know, operating system database, which technology you use? it just went away, right? So people just want to know, the functionality and the value. You know, maybe there are companies that I have more, you know, an IT architects and they want to know, more, you know, that's what they want to go down into the details, then you go into the architecture of the OS, of the application, we integrate with AWS. So we do that as well. We, you know, we talk to customers about it. But most of them, they just want to know, okay, "how can I use this platform to make my business better," right. So it runs the cloud suit, but I now I can connect to other cloud services, I can connect to the other application, I can build my own app and bring it in. So they want that business value immediately. And that's why we built this Infor OS, so that they can run the cloud suite and add business value. >> You guys at last year's analyst meeting, gave a little glimpse of some of the architecture and it was very useful, actually, analysts love that kind of stuff. I didn't get the invite this year, maybe something the some smarmy questions I ask. (laughs) But I found that actually quite impressive in terms of the tech behind it and the RND that you guys are doing there. But ultimately, it comes down to what products you can build and what business impact that has, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think where we're heading with this, we really don't have many limitations for what we're seeing right now. We're built in a way to where we can apply to every single industry, every single cloud suite. We have the unique, you know, possibility to where we can go through all these different industries and create these sort of value. So we've got a very unique future ahead of us. >> So. Yeah, So how much better or can you give us an idea of a road map a little bit about what you think Coleman can go? >> Yeah so, we're starting to play in the image recognition space a little bit. Maybe looking at how we can utilize things like drone technology and do inspection reports, those sort of things. It's maybe and at least my opinion, I think others kind of express the same, it's maybe the least developed area and we want to make sure we have something that works for customers the way that they're going to see value immediately. But also we're starting look at edge AI. So how can.... not necessarily just an IoT, but how can we how can we build something in the cloud? How can we create a model, then deploy that for our onprem customers who aren't quite ready, so that they can get that AI experience as well, and that predictive insight. >> It's dvallante@Siliconangle.com Is that right? Your email for the invitation >> David.valante... >> (laughs) to make sure... so what will exchange information later. >> We'll invite you (laughs) >> I'm sure this is not your territory. (laughs) >> Its on me. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Its been a pleasure. Thank you for the time we appreciate that. Back with more here from Washington DC right after this. You're watching theCUBE.

Published Date : Sep 26 2018

SUMMARY :

brought to you by Inforum. We are in the nation's capital we had some time to shine out there. and the technology innovation So it is not everyday we get I mean what are you hearing So we have business impact they want. and so we feel we have come to the conclusion I don't know what it is? Right? to extract (laughs)...you know insights... Then you got to have cloud to scale it. So that's actually the power that we do. and that the bottom layer, What's the function that it does So if you look at services because if you think about digital... I considered that what's called a product. and how we have to package things. So you know Andy Jassy AWS always talks about We are now at the level we have a platform The Magic Quadrant is now becoming outdated, Exactly. So some some application can be in the optimize AWS, you know, So we do a lot of AWS, It's interesting, Charles said in the keynote yesterday, all the highly computational things that we have to do, So how do you do that, when you're dealing with So we really want to be able to, you know, So I want to pick up on something you said about citizens, Yeah, yeah. Somebody does, by the way. I always press the approval button, right? that you have today. and then, you know, give it to your business users. And the workflow prediction model to where if you want to do something in our studio, I mean, are they asking you or what's the database? of the application, we integrate with AWS. and the RND that you guys are doing there. We have the unique, you know, So how much better or can you give us an idea of a road map and we want to make sure we have something that works Your email for the invitation (laughs) to make sure... I'm sure this is not your territory. Thank you for the time we appreciate that.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :

ENTITIES

EntityCategoryConfidence
Massimo CapocciaPERSON

0.99+

Dave VellantePERSON

0.99+

CharlesPERSON

0.99+

AWSORGANIZATION

0.99+

RickPERSON

0.99+

$300QUANTITY

0.99+

Rick RiderPERSON

0.99+

Washington DCLOCATION

0.99+

MicrosoftORGANIZATION

0.99+

yesterdayDATE

0.99+

dvallante@Siliconangle.comOTHER

0.99+

two peopleQUANTITY

0.99+

firstQUANTITY

0.99+

15 stove pipesQUANTITY

0.99+

FacebookORGANIZATION

0.99+

Andy JassyPERSON

0.99+

GartnerORGANIZATION

0.99+

todayDATE

0.99+

NetflixORGANIZATION

0.99+

David.valantePERSON

0.98+

John WallsPERSON

0.98+

ColemanPERSON

0.98+

Info OSORGANIZATION

0.98+

InforumORGANIZATION

0.97+

bothQUANTITY

0.97+

last yearDATE

0.97+

this yearDATE

0.97+

each oneQUANTITY

0.96+

threeQUANTITY

0.96+

one domainQUANTITY

0.96+

Infor OSTITLE

0.96+

singleQUANTITY

0.96+

one locationQUANTITY

0.95+

next decadeDATE

0.95+

oneQUANTITY

0.95+

one thingQUANTITY

0.95+

InforORGANIZATION

0.94+

Inforum 2018EVENT

0.93+

ColemanORGANIZATION

0.92+

S3TITLE

0.9+

SomaPERSON

0.9+

CubeCOMMERCIAL_ITEM

0.89+

single placeQUANTITY

0.89+

DCLOCATION

0.87+

InforOSORGANIZATION

0.86+

2018DATE

0.82+

Inforum DC 2018EVENT

0.81+

InforTITLE

0.78+

single cloud suiteQUANTITY

0.77+

thousandsQUANTITY

0.77+

one MagicQUANTITY

0.76+

this morningDATE

0.76+

single industryQUANTITY

0.72+

MongolsORGANIZATION

0.71+

first issueQUANTITY

0.7+

yearsQUANTITY

0.7+

onPremORGANIZATION

0.66+

SagemakerTITLE

0.63+

Charles Phillips, Infor | Inforum DC 2018


 

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Good afternoon, and welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're at Inforum 2018, here live on theCUBE, John Walls with Dave Vellante, and it's a pleasure now to welcome the CEO of Infor, Charles Phillips with us. Charles, good to see ya! >> Good to see you guys again, another year. It's great, it's great. >> Yeah, I tell ya, you are a man of demand aren't you? I mean, tell me about the week so far for you, how it's gone, and just your overall thoughts about the show? >> Yeah, it's been a fun Inforum for 2018 here. Great attendance, and a lot of energy level, and the common feedback we get is you guys just keep innovating and bringing new things, this is great, and that's why they come, they want to see what we're working on and kind of dream the art of the possible. We know what you, what we think you get a couple years ago, but if we don't have someone pushing us and painting a picture of what we could be doing, and we just think we might be missing it, so we want to hear it first hand. So that's what the conference is about, and hopefully they got that. >> Well, certainly thematically, human potential, you talk about that, you see that on the keynote stage, that's been a very consistent theme with our guests here, we've heard that a lot, you hear it down on the show floor. Talk about the theme if you would, a little bit, in terms of it's development, where that came from, and in how you think that's being expressed here this week. >> Well, we're one of the few companies that build mission critical operational systems, be it manufacturing or hospital operations, but we're also in HCM in a big way. And so we were talking to kind of both sides of the house, for some applications you're talking to the line of business manager, but for HCM you're talking to the CHRO, and rarely were those two people talking, and we saw obvious synergies. Don't you want to know how your people are doing, how to allocate people, and how they're performing, how they're changing the outcomes on a manufacturing floor or in a hospital, and a lot of HR directors weren't thinking like that because they think of HR, and they have their own world, they go to HR conferences and that's it. And the manufacturing guys are the same thing, and so we're trying to bring these two worlds together and say "Actually, you're in the same business, it's the same goals, and you actually could help each other a lot." And so by focusing on putting the employee at the center of all these applications and mapping all these operational processes to HR data, it's a different way of thinking about the role of HR. They can actually help drive the business, not just be an administrative function, and so it's resonating with a lot of the CHROs we met with, 'cause they want a seat at the table, they want to be more strategic, and this is a way for them to do that and at the same time the operational people want to know how their people are doing, want to develop talent, and want to know what are the tools out there I could be doing differently, and how am I doing, and which employees are working the best So, I think we can bring both sides together. >> So I first met Infor through AWS, at re:Invent, Pam Murphy came on, and we were like Infor? Back then it was like 2012, 2013 was kind of Infor who? And then we were invited to New Orleans, and then started to learn more about your micro-vertical strategy and a little bit about the platform, it was somewhat opaque to me. And now, fast forward last year and this year it's really starting to come in to view. The OS, the platform vision, the Birst acquisition, and of course Coleman, and I'm a sucker for platform plays especially when there's real R&D behind it that's actually having a business impact. So I wonder if you could talk about that piece of the strategy, I love the stack, was that sort of always your vision and now you're getting aggressive in it, did it sort of come together serendipitously, how'd we get here? >> Having our own stack and a platform was always the vision, but it's a lot harder to do than it sounds like, and it takes time. And so, when we arrived almost eight years ago, there were different applications, all had their own separate stacks and would say "This is not going to work." So, we need, just to be able to scale, to be able to serve multiple industries with different products, we can't have every development organization building their stack as well. So we set about taking that away from the development groups we're going to do this as a shared service, but it takes time, and as we build it you will adopt components of it. So what's changed is we've built out the entire stack, so, starting with ION, with integration, then we added document management, workflow, analytics, now AI and a lot of other services, Mongoose, platform as a service, on and on and on, in collaboration, those things took time, they're all on a single platform, federated security, single siloed across it all, and now it makes the developers job who's developing apps so much simpler. So they have Infor OS for the immediate platform, for cloud services they have AWS, I don't have to worry about any of those things anymore, just go and develop industry functionality. So, it's come together nicely, but the fact that we had the time to do it and the money to do it, and we weren't public, and we told our investors "This is the only way this is going to scale, this is the future, and it'll pay out later, you just got to trust us." And now that we've gotten there, they're seeing the synergy and go "Okay, now we see why you did that." >> So, Michael Dell's been on theCUBE many times, he used to talk about the 90 day shot clock, we obviously see what he's done in terms of transforming; but I want to talk about your business a little bit, because you've had that patient capital, I mean you're a quasi-public company in the sense that you do report so we can see the numbers on the income statement, but the income statement doesn't really tell the whole story It's about three billion in revenue, several hundred billion dollars on the balance sheet, but if you look at the SaaS component of it it looks rather small, maybe about 25% of the business, but from a booking standpoint I'm sure it's much, much larger than that. So how should we interpret the income statement in terms of the momentum in your business, where is all the action? >> So as a percentage of our sales, it's the highest of any of our competitors, so, about 70% of our new sales are on SaaS, we have about a $700 million SaaS business, so it's growing. There's nothing we can do about the maintenance piece of it, if it's related to perpetual, so if you take that out, it's a big percentage of our business. And over time the maintenance will turn into SaaS, so that's one of our big opportunities to look at that maintenance space and say "Move those over to cloud customers." and that's usually a financially lucrative thing for us to do, because we do even more for them, because they usually add on four or five other products when they move, they replace these third party products and so we get a bigger suite of products if they decide to move to the cloud. So that's part of the strategy, that's what UpgradeX is, let's move you from on-premise, so that maintenance revenue will turn into SaaS revenue, but bigger SaaS revenue over time. >> So let me make sure I understand, so it's not the classic case where you see a lot of software companies that are going from a perpetual model to a ratable model, you're goin' from a maintenance model which is ratable to a ratable model which is SaaS, but there's cohorts sales which increase the top line, is that correct? >> Exactly. So usually, because of what we do, we're doing something mission critical. So if you're going to take that, then you should do ACM financials, all the other things around it. So why would I move to core and leave the edge on-premise? So, almost by definition we have to do the whole suite. So when we do that it expands the deal, 'cause on-premise we may have been one vendor with 30 other ones existing, but the whole reason they want to get out of all of that is to move to the cloud and simplify. So we can't take all that with us, so we have to have the full suites, we've built that now. So now we can move them, but, it expands the size of the deal because we're replacing all these other products. >> Okay, and then some of the stats, just correct me if I don't get this right. Your SaaS business grown 50% faster than Oracle's, growing at a rate, I'd say 2X SAP's and a rate comparable to Workday, are those correct figures? >> Those are correct, and profitable. >> Oh, and profitable. >> Throw that in. (all laugh) >> Right, so okay. And then last year Koch Industries invested, so you kind of recap the company, you've made a big deal about that. One of the things that we've noted is you're seeing a tailwind there in terms of guys like Accenture and Capgemini, we've asked them "Do you guys service Koch Industries?" they said "Yep!" they helped us see the opportunity, and they said "Look, look for something substantive, we're not going to try to force you to do something, but we want you to take a look." So that's been helpful. Talk about that and maybe other things Koch has brought to the table? >> It's a, the relationship with the integrators is evolving, it probably was not a plus for us in the first four, five years. More recent years we've won enough deals where they had to say "Okay, we can't keep losin' these deals." And where they wanted to get engaged. Koch helped, because they had relationships and they wanted to run that business, that's why they're implementing our products globally, and so, they're a large customer for all of these guys, and one of the largest for Deloitte for instance, but what's really more-- that helped, but it was more the, what was happening in the market, the fact that we're in a Liberty Steel and replace SAP, or that we're in a Travis Perkins interview with SAP and Microsoft, so, if you're on the wrong side of those deals enough times your manager starts to ask you what's goin' on, and you got all these people on the bench here, okay, we train them for Infor if they're winning in that region, or in that industry. So, we just had to earn our way into it, our initial strategy was not one that, at least on the surface, looked like it was integrator-friendly because we were trying to take all those mods they like to do and put 'em in the product, and that's the whole thesis, let's the take the vertical industry features and let's put it in there once, I don't want everybody customizing my apps, we do that. And so now they've had to move up, okay we can do other things, configuration, changed management, there's AI, there's other things you can do, but you're not going to do that. So now that they've accepted that, there's a basis for us to work together, and, it just had to take time to get there. >> What can you tell us about where you want to go with this? I mean you've presided over public companies before, you know that business well, you were a rockstar analyst, is there an advantage to being a public company, is that something that you eventually want to do? >> I would say there are pluses and minuses, our board is evaluating that, that's going to be their call. The upside is, it would solve probably our biggest challenge which is brand recognition, almost instantly, because would be a top 10 tech IPO. It makes it a little easier to hire people because they can see public currency, they can value more quickly, and it gives you some acquisition currency; so those are the positives. But then you're on the 90 day cycle, and we're kind of on that anyway, 'cause we report publicly and we have publicly traded bonds. So for us it's, in some sense we have the worst of all worlds, right? We have the discipline of being a public company, and the scrutiny, without the capital, (laughs) and the branding, so. I think that's what everybody's evaluating. Every bank on Wall Street's visiting us telling us to go now, the window's great, you have the numbers. >> Oh, of course. (Dave and John laugh) >> And so, so we could do it, I just don't know what their decision's going to be. The advantages to being private as well, you have a little more flexibility obviously, and, we don't need the capital, we have plenty of capital coming from Koch and others who want to invest. >> Well, the flip side of that too, is you get to write your own narrative, right? >> Yeah. >> I mean, we're talkin' about the nuances of the income statement, the Street is obviously right now hooked on growth heroin, and if you got the transition in the base it doesn't become a tailwind, so, no rush from that standpoint. I want to pivot to the theme of this event, which is the human potential. My understanding is you sort of were instrumental in coming up with that. HCM this year got a big play on stage, where's that come from? >> Yeah, just as I talk to CEOs who are struggling to find talent, like I mentioned on stage 6.7 million jobs that are unfulfilled. It's not like we don't have people here, we have people here with their own skills, so, you're not going to fill those jobs any other way, we're not doing immigration to any degree and scaling more, that's been shut down. We have an aging population with the baby boomers, so the most logical thing that you would do is train people who are already here who want to work. And, let's take people who have jobs that they probably aren't thrilled about, and give them different skills so they can fill these 6.7 million jobs. So to do that, you have to make these applications easier to use, and I felt like we're probably in the best position to do it because we actually know what they do for a living, 'cause we wrote all those last features in those industries, we understand what they do. And if you're just doin' HR replication or financials, you actually have no idea what they do. So, we had to learn those jobs to automate those jobs, so we can find ways to use our HCM applications to better train people, professional development, coaching, take all these HR skills, and put them as part of the applications in the context of while you're working. >> We had Anne Benedict on just a little bit ago talking about really a test case that you can be for yourself. So how are you putting these things to practice yourself, and how are you working out maybe some kinks before you take them out to somebody else? And so, you can leverage your own success for your own success, and also learn from mistakes too I would think. >> We do. So we have this program called Infor at Infor, where everything we do, we want it to be on an Infor product, which was not the case when we arrived. Like a lot of companies, a mish mash of different things, and so we've implemented not only HR Financials of course, Birst, but the big innovation has really been talent science, that every employee we hire has to take that test, and all the executives have taken it as well. And what we've discovered is, is that, when people hire and go against the talent science recommendation, 68% of the time they end up being wrong. So it's better at judging people than people are sometimes, and you can't use it exclusively, but it'll tell you these are the things you should look into, some questions you might want to ask, here's how they rate on certain skillsets, they're very well meshed for this job, they look like they'd see their best performance in this area, but ask these questions. And so people don't know how to interview and how to think about this, and so, having a guide to go into an interview is actually pretty helpful. We hire much better people now by using that. >> So it's like StrengthsFinder in a way? >> No, it's different from that, this is AI, it's kind of Moneyball for business people. >> Well you're talking about that today, almost there. >> Yeah so it's 39 personality attributes, behavioral attributes we call them, so, empathy, resistance to authority, do you have the ambition or not, and depending on the job, you think all those things are good, depends on the job, so. For some jobs, it's actually better to have low ambition because, a lot of our customers who have low wage, fast food service jobs, people who have ambition are going to leave in four months, right? They're not going to stay, so, okay we're not going to be here long, at least know that going in, and know who wants to get promoted, and other people are fine with it. And so it depends on the mix of skills, just like I said, 39 attributes, and for that job role, you tune it to the people who like that job, they look like this. And, we've also found that it's 60% more diverse when you hire using science, because you don't know that when you're looking at the data, what they look like. >> It must've been super interesting getting those reports. You took it, obviously right? >> Yeah I took it. >> How'd you do? (laughs) >> Uhhh, nobody really likes their profile. (all laugh) >> I was going to say, I imagine I would be really defensive about this, oh I don't know. >> This can't be right! >> That is not me! I am not like that! (all laughing) >> Every person on our executive team said the same thing so. That's what it's for is to, you have certain perceptions even about yourself, and it calls it out, right? And there's no gaming the system because the questions have no right or wrong answer, it just puts you in scenarios that you answer what would you do, how do you feel about this? You're not clear what they're trying to get at, and you only have 27 minutes or 22 minutes to do the test. >> So you can't game it? >> You can't game it. >> Data doesn't lie! >> And we built the science, we know when someones trying to game it, they're taking to long on multiples, and changing their answers too much, so it's-- And we've now, I think we've tested some 200 million people over time, over years, so we have 20 years of data about people. >> That's, I mean, sounds unique, certainly unique of being infused into enterprise software, I've not seen anything like this from another enterprise software company. Can you confirm that, or? >> Yeah, so, we're the only ones that do this at scale, there's a few startups trying to do it, but they're trying to do it all facial recognition which is, we think pretty ridiculous, we're trying to get away from physical attributes not use that. So there's a company out there doing that, depending on your facial movements, but this is, we're eliciting responses about your personality in response to situations that we give you, and have a bunch of scientists that crunch the data and they basically shape it to the job role. And they test your best performance, and you get a DNA profile for your best performance for that job role, and then, that's what you're matching, and it's highly accurate. So we had a company on the Las Vegas Strip use it, because they have to hire in volume a lot, and essentially what they wanted to do was get better blackjack dealers. You need somebody that's good at math, good under pressure, not too emotive, don't give away anything; and so we did that, fine tuned the test, they call us back nine months later and said "We need you to change the test." We said "We did exactly what you wanted, what happened?" He said well, the winnings went up 30%, but everybody's leaving the hotel in 24 hours 'cause they lost all their money, so we don't need them to be that good. (all laugh) >> Dial it down a little bit. >> Which we did. And so that's part of the service is we fine tune it, you tell us what your goals are, and we'll tune to that. >> That's a great story. The other surprise for me this week has been the emphasis on robotic process automation, it's a space that we've kina looked at. And a lot of people are scared about software robots replacing humans, but if you talk to people who are using RPA, they love it. It's taking away these mundane tasks, I didn't realize that you guys had such capabilities there? >> Yeah, so we built that as part of a Coleman RPA platform, and not only can we automate and use RPA for ourselves, but we've built a whole development environment for our customers to build their own, 'cause we can't think of every process that they might want to automate, and we gave that platform to our partners as well, so. We don't want them doing database schema work anymore, and they used to get paid for that, there's other things you can do up the stack in AI, here's what we want you to focus on. So we had that meeting on Monday with the partners, and they all agreed that's what we're going to do. But there's tons of mundane things that people shouldn't be spending time on, and they can be much more productive, it makes them more loyal to the company, they're enjoying their job more, and they're thinking and innovating more. So I don't see it as replacing people, as making people better. And giving that engagement that I talked about during the keynote, they're engaged now, because they can do things that are more value adding now. >> So, back to New Orleans next year? That's the first Inforum that theCUBE was ever at was in N'Orleans, and, jazz, you like jazz, obviously, right? >> I like jazz, I met with the mayor when I was down there, Mitch Landrieu at the time, and he became a customer after that meeting, so the city of New Orleans runs on Infor software, it's another reason to go there; so thank you. >> You've get--nice. >> Yeah, thank you Mitch, so that worked well. And so as a thank you we're going back down there, they're a big customer now, and it's always fun, you know what I mean, you know. >> That's great. >> Just, before you go, you mention, I watched in the keynote this morning, Brooks Koepka. >> Yes. So you're working with him. I do a little bit of work on the golf side as well, so I was just intrigued because, he's not the, well he's not Tiger, right? >> Yeah. >> U.S. Open Champion, twice over. What was the attraction to him, and then can you play in the golf world a little bit, and with those brands, and is that an entry into that world? >> Well, we always like to bet on the scrappy guy, the next up and coming generation guy, and that's kind of our brand that's what we are, the Brooklyn Nets, someone who's not quite there yet, but they're moving up, that's kind of our scrappiness, that's why we like the whole Brooklyn image as well. And we started talkin' to him, like I said, before he won the U.S. Open, because he was ranking pretty high, moving up, but wasn't well known. A quite guy, very personable when you meet him, we thought he'd be good in front of clients, let's bet on his career, and we're going to work with him; and literally three weeks later he wins the U.S. Open, we go "Okay." (all laugh) >> Good grab! >> We'll take it! (laughs) So, we didn't even think it'd happen that quickly, and now he's a rockstar so. We were planning on hosting a CX event with him, and, we're not sure how many people are going to come, but when that happened, now, everybody RSVP'd right away of course. So now it's doing exactly what we wanted. >> Do you play golf? >> I don't play golf, I just started playing, 'cause we were doing these golf tournaments with customers over the last year, but I haven't had enough time to get out there yet. >> I'll bet Brooks would give you a lesson or two. (laughs) >> Yeah, he, a lot of people want to lesson from him. >> Charles thank you >> Alright, thank you guys, >> for the time, great show. >> Good to see ya again. See ya in New Orleans. >> Thank you, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Alright guys, see ya. >> Wonderful week here in Washington, D.C. Back with more live on theCUBE here from D.C. right after this. (bubbly music)

Published Date : Sep 26 2018

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by Infor. and it's a pleasure now to welcome the CEO of Infor, Good to see you guys again, another year. and the common feedback we get is and in how you think that's being expressed and you actually could help each other a lot." and we were like Infor? and as we build it you will adopt components of it. in the sense that you do report and so we get a bigger suite of products So we can't take all that with us, Okay, and then some of the stats, and profitable. Throw that in. but we want you to take a look." and you got all these people on the bench here, and it gives you some acquisition currency; (Dave and John laugh) so we could do it, and if you got the transition in the base so the most logical thing that you would do is and how are you working out maybe some kinks and you can't use it exclusively, it's kind of Moneyball for business people. and depending on the job, getting those reports. (all laugh) I was going to say, and you only have 27 minutes or 22 minutes to do the test. so we have 20 years of data about people. Can you confirm that, or? and have a bunch of scientists that crunch the data And so that's part of the service is we fine tune it, I didn't realize that you guys had such capabilities there? and we gave that platform to our partners as well, so. and he became a customer after that meeting, and it's always fun, you know what I mean, you know. Just, before you go, you mention, So you're working with him. and then can you and that's kind of our brand that's what we are, and now he's a rockstar so. 'cause we were doing these I'll bet Brooks would give you a lesson or two. a lot of people want to lesson from him. Good to see ya again. Back with more live on theCUBE

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :

ENTITIES

EntityCategoryConfidence
DavePERSON

0.99+

Dave VellantePERSON

0.99+

Koch IndustriesORGANIZATION

0.99+

DeloitteORGANIZATION

0.99+

MicrosoftORGANIZATION

0.99+

New OrleansLOCATION

0.99+

20 yearsQUANTITY

0.99+

Pam MurphyPERSON

0.99+

Mitch LandrieuPERSON

0.99+

MondayDATE

0.99+

MitchPERSON

0.99+

N'OrleansLOCATION

0.99+

CharlesPERSON

0.99+

Charles PhillipsPERSON

0.99+

OracleORGANIZATION

0.99+

90 dayQUANTITY

0.99+

60%QUANTITY

0.99+

Michael DellPERSON

0.99+

John WallsPERSON

0.99+

D.C.LOCATION

0.99+

JohnPERSON

0.99+

AccentureORGANIZATION

0.99+

50%QUANTITY

0.99+

Las Vegas StripLOCATION

0.99+

CapgeminiORGANIZATION

0.99+

27 minutesQUANTITY

0.99+

Anne BenedictPERSON

0.99+

68%QUANTITY

0.99+

fourQUANTITY

0.99+

2012DATE

0.99+

twoQUANTITY

0.99+

last yearDATE

0.99+

2013DATE

0.99+

22 minutesQUANTITY

0.99+

Washington, D.C.LOCATION

0.99+

2XQUANTITY

0.99+

Brooks KoepkaPERSON

0.99+

AWSORGANIZATION

0.99+

two peopleQUANTITY

0.99+

Brooklyn NetsORGANIZATION

0.99+

next yearDATE

0.99+

24 hoursQUANTITY

0.99+

this yearDATE

0.99+

39 attributesQUANTITY

0.99+

30%QUANTITY

0.99+

Liberty SteelORGANIZATION

0.99+

KochORGANIZATION

0.99+

6.7 million jobsQUANTITY

0.99+

U.S. OpenEVENT

0.99+

InforORGANIZATION

0.99+

firstQUANTITY

0.99+

oneQUANTITY

0.99+

three weeks laterDATE

0.98+

four monthsQUANTITY

0.98+

both sidesQUANTITY

0.98+

$700 millionQUANTITY

0.98+

SAPORGANIZATION

0.98+

about 70%QUANTITY

0.98+

this weekDATE

0.98+

about 25%QUANTITY

0.97+

HCMLOCATION

0.97+

twiceQUANTITY

0.97+

BrooksPERSON

0.97+

one vendorQUANTITY

0.97+

nine months laterDATE

0.97+

BrooklynLOCATION

0.97+

2018DATE

0.97+

200 million peopleQUANTITY

0.96+

Travis PerkinsPERSON

0.96+

Walter Washington Convention CenterLOCATION

0.96+

couple years agoDATE

0.95+

first fourQUANTITY

0.94+

five other productsQUANTITY

0.94+

aboutQUANTITY

0.94+

todayDATE

0.93+

about three billionQUANTITY

0.93+

DCLOCATION

0.93+

OneQUANTITY

0.93+

a lessonQUANTITY

0.93+

Soma Somasundaram, Infor | Inforum DC 2018


 

>> 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.

Published Date : Sep 26 2018

SUMMARY :

brought to you by Infor. and a lot of buzz, Why don't you go ahead and tell our audience And on the functional side, you know, and then you have to come all the way back, Our idea is that if you buy yeah, yeah. So what if you could create an acquisition, connection points that you have access to, you can go bring your own data, how fast you can get that to market, Our belief is that if you try to verticalize and how you expose data, but it gives you finer grain control. you need to be able to embrace that. if you run a non-Infor application, right, Is it just sort of an API-based framework, you know, you go to United Nations, But they spoke English yesterday. you know, the CTO-- We love to get into it. that you guys engineer in, your comments. individual instances that you have to update, So when you go you know, the security, then you have to work around it, right? You had to go ask them Why is it that you have to go to What is the capability that you have with RPA? That is a foundation of what you need who can, you know, is not technical, and when you say deploy, so, are great, thank you for great. and wish you success down the road here. I don't think you need it, Yes, you do.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS :

ENTITIES

EntityCategoryConfidence
Dave VellantePERSON

0.99+

CharlesPERSON

0.99+

AWSORGANIZATION

0.99+

SomaPERSON

0.99+

MichellePERSON

0.99+

John WallsPERSON

0.99+

two guysQUANTITY

0.99+

Washington DCLOCATION

0.99+

three guysQUANTITY

0.99+

Soma SomasundaramPERSON

0.99+

DCLOCATION

0.99+

last yearDATE

0.99+

two peopleQUANTITY

0.99+

three peopleQUANTITY

0.99+

FacebookORGANIZATION

0.99+

Infor OSTITLE

0.99+

yesterdayDATE

0.99+

JohnPERSON

0.99+

AlexaTITLE

0.99+

Infor GoTITLE

0.99+

20 different appsQUANTITY

0.99+

SalesforceTITLE

0.99+

OneQUANTITY

0.99+

one companyQUANTITY

0.99+

InforORGANIZATION

0.99+

one thingQUANTITY

0.99+

todayDATE

0.99+

two thingsQUANTITY

0.98+

IONORGANIZATION

0.98+

thousandsQUANTITY

0.98+

20 years agoDATE

0.98+

EnglishOTHER

0.98+

this weekDATE

0.98+

one wayQUANTITY

0.98+

oneQUANTITY

0.98+

FirstQUANTITY

0.97+

one placeQUANTITY

0.97+

eachQUANTITY

0.96+

this morningDATE

0.96+

singleQUANTITY

0.96+

InforTITLE

0.96+

DynamoDBTITLE

0.96+

BirstORGANIZATION

0.95+

ColemanPERSON

0.95+

one single farmQUANTITY

0.95+

one databaseQUANTITY

0.94+

bothQUANTITY

0.94+

one single applicationQUANTITY

0.93+

ifttt.comOTHER

0.91+

Inforum 2018EVENT

0.91+

ColemanTITLE

0.91+

IntelORGANIZATION

0.9+

Point number twoQUANTITY

0.9+

IONTITLE

0.9+