(fun, relaxing music) >> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center, in New York City, it's The Cube. Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Inforum 2017, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Stephan Scholl, he is the president of Infor. Thanks so much for joining us. >> My pleasure. >> For returning to The Cube My pleasure, yeah, three years in a row, I think, or four now, yeah. >> Indeed. >> Well, we skipped a year in-between. >> That's right! Three years. Anyway, it's good to be here. >> This has been a hugely successful conference. We're hearing so much about the growth and momentum of Infor. Can you unpack this a little bit for our viewers? >> Yeah, I mean... People always forget, we only started this aggressive Cloud journey literally three years ago. When we announced at Inforum in New Orleans that we were pivoting the company to Infor industry-based CloudSuites, everybody looked at us and said, "Well, that's an interesting pivot." "Why are you doing that?" Well, as I said yesterday, we really saw a market dynamic that you see retail just getting crushed by what Amazon was doing, and it was obvious, today, but then it wasn't so obvious, but that was going to happen everywhere, and so we really got aggressive on believing we could put together a very different approach to tackling enterprise software. Everybody is so fatigued from buying from our competitors traditional, perpetual software, and then you end up modifying the hell out of it, and then you end up spending a gazillion dollars, and it takes forever, and then if it does work, you're stuck on old technology already, and you never get to the next round of evolution. So we said why don't we build CloudSuites, take the last model industry functionality that we have, put it in a Cloud, make it easy for our customers to implement it, and then we'll run it for them. And then, by the way, when the newest innovation comes up, we'll upgrade them automatically. That's what Cloud's about. So, that's where we saw that transformation happening. So in three years, we went from two percent, as I said, to 55 plus percent of our revenue. And, by the way, we're not a small company. Nobody at our size and scale has ever done that in enterprise software. So what an accomplishment. >> So a lot of large companies, some that you used to work for, are really slow. And, you know what, lot of times that's okay, 'cause IT tends to be really slow, as you move to the Cloud, and move to the situation where, "Okay, guys, new release coming!" What are your customers saying about that, how are you managing that sort of pace of change, that flywheel of Amazon, and you're now innovating on and pushing to your climate? >> Well, they're excited. And, I'll tell you, I remember standing up in Frankfurt, Germany, 18 months ago for a keynote, and said the Cloud is coming, I almost got kicked out of Germany. (laughing) They said it's not going to happen in Germany, "No, we're an engineering pedigree," "We're going to be on premise." >> "You don't understand the German market!" >> "You don't understand our marketplace!" And, we're really close friends with Andy Jassy at AWS, the CEO. The AWS guys are unbelievable, and innovative, and we said, "You know, you guys got to build" "your next data center in Frankfurt." So they put hundreds of millions of dollars investment in, built a data center. What's the fastest growing data center in Europe, right now, for them? Frankfurt! The German market, for us, our pipeline is tenfold increase from what it was a year ago. So, it's working in Germany, and it's happening on a global basis, we have, I think yesterday 75 customers from Saudi, from Dubai, from all the Middle East. Cloud is a great equalizer. And don't underestimate... I'll take luck to our advantage anytime. The luck part is, there's fatigue out there, they're exhausted, they've spent so much money over the last 20, 30 years, and never reached the promise of what they were sold then, and so now, with all the digital disruption, I think of the business competitive challenges that they have to deal with. I mean, I don't care, you could be in Wichita, Kansas building up an e-commerce website, and compete with a company in Saudi tomorrow. The barest entry in manufacturing, retail, look at government agencies, we're doing nine-figure transformations in the Cloud with public sector agencies. Again, two years ago, they would've said never going to happen. >> Rebecca: Yet the government does spend that kind of... >> Mike Rogers, the CIO, was saying to us, "Look at all the technical debt" "that we've accumulated over the years," "and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse." "If we don't bite the bullet and move now," "it's just going to take that much longer." >> That's right. And they're leap-frogging. I mean, I'm so excited, government agencies! I mean, there's even some edicts in some places where Cloud-only. I mean, this whole Gold Coast opportunity, 40 plus different applications in Australia, all going into the Cloud to handle all the complexities they have around the commonwealth games that they're trying to deal with. I mean, just huge transformations on a global basis. >> At this conference, we're hearing about so many different companies, and, as you said, government agencies, municipalalities, transforming their business models, transforming their approaches. What are some of your favorite transformation stories? >> My favorite one that we're doing is Travis Perkins. John Carter, I think you guys maybe even interviewed him last year when he was here. CEO. Old, staid distribution business, and taking a whole new fresh approach. Undoing 40 to 50 different applications, taking his entire business, putting it online. He deals with contracts... So, they're the Home Depot of the UK market, and right now, if you drive up into that car port and you want to order something, it's manual! Sticky notes, phones, dumb terminals, I need five windows, I need five roofs, I need five pieces of wood. Everything is just a scurry. He wants to put it on, when you drive up next year, you're on an iPad, what would you like? Oh, by the way, you want to make a custom order on that window frame? You want to make green, yellow, red, you want to order different tiles of roof styling? Custom orders is the future! You, as a contractor, walking into that organization, want to make a custom order. That, today, is very complicated for a company like that to handle. So, the future is about undoing all that, embracing the custom order process, giving you a really unique, touchless buying process, where it's all on an iPad, it's all automated. You know what? Telling you here's your five new windows, here's a new frame want on it, and, by the way, you're going to get it in five days, and three hours, and 21 minutes. Deliver it to your door. And, by the way, these guys are huge. They're one of the biggest distribution companies in all of the United Kingdom, and so that's one of my favorite stories. >> Can we go over some of the metrics that you've been sharing. I know it's somewhat repetitive, but I'd like to get it on-record. There's 55%, 84, 88, over 1100, 3x, 60%, maybe start with the 60%. I think it's bookings grown, right? >> That's right, yeah. License sales growth last year alone. And, you know what, I looked at... You know, I see it, Paul always keeps me honest, but I think I can say it anyways, which is, I looked at everybody else. You look at the... I don't want you to mention any competitors' names, but you look at the top five competitors that we have, we grew faster than they did last year on sales of CloudSuite. >> Dave: Okay, so that's 60% bookings growth on Cloud. >> Correct. That's right. Yeah, I mean, when you think of our competitors, I saw 40s, I saw some 30s, I saw maybe 52 at the next one down. So, people don't think of us that way, so we were, at the enterprise scale, the fastest-growing Cloud company in the world. >> Okay, and then, 3x, that's 3x the number of customers who bought multiple products, is that correct? >> Correct. That's exactly right. So think about that transformation. They used to buy from us one product, feature-function rich, great, but now they're buying five products, eight products from us. So 3x increase, year over year, already happening. >> Okay, and then there was 1100 plus, is Go-Lives. >> People always ask us, "You're selling stuff." "Are they using it, is it working?" So you got to follow up with delivery, so we're spending a ton of money on certification, training, and ablement, look at the SI community, look at the... Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini, and Grand Thornton. Four of the major SIs in the world, that weren't here last year, are all here this year. Platinum sponsors. So, delivery on Go Lives, the SI community is embracing us, helping us, I mean, I can't do hundred million dollar transformations on my own with these customers. I need Accenture, I need Deloitte. Look at Koch! Koch's going to be a massive transformation for financials, human-capital management, and so I've got Accenture and Deloitte helping us, taking a hundred plus billion dollar company on those two systems. >> And then 84, 88, is number of... >> Live customers, I'm sorry, total customers that we have in the Cloud. >> Cloud customers, okay, not total customers. >> No, no, we have 90 thousand plus customers, and then 84, 85 hundred of them are Cloud-based customers. >> You got a ways to go, then, to convert some of those customers. >> Well, that's our opportunity, that's exactly right. >> And then 55% of revenue came from the Cloud, obviously driven by the Cloud bookings growth. >> That's right. Exactly. So, I mean, just the acceleration, I mean, as I said, when we started this thing in New Orleans, two or three percent. Now, tipping point, revenue, I mean, it's one thing to sell software, but to actually turn it into revenue? Nobody at an enterprise scale has done 2% to 55% at our size. Lots of companies in the hundred million dollar range, small companies, you know, if we were a stand-alone Cloud company, we'd be one of the largest Cloud companies in the world. >> So the narrative from Oracle, I wonder if you can comment on this, is that the core of enterprise apps has not moved to the Cloud, and we, Oracle, are the guys to move it there, 'cause we are the only ones with that end-to-end Cloud on prem to Cloud strategy. And most companies can't put core apps, enterprise apps in the Cloud, especially on Amazon. So, what do you say to that? >> Well, it's 'cause they don't have the applications to do that. Oracle doesn't have the application horsepower. They don't have industry-based application suites. If you think of what fusion is, it's a mishmash of all the applications that they bought. There's no industry capability. >> Dave: It's horizontal, is what you're saying. >> It's horizontal. Oracle is fighting a battle against Amazon, they declared war against AWS. I'm glad they're doing that, go ahead! I mean, I don't know how you're going to do that, but they want to fight the infrastructure game. For us, infrastructure is commoditized. We're fighting the business applications layer game, and so, when you look at SAP or Oracle or anybody else, they have never done what we've done in our heritage, which is take key critical mission functionality for aerospace and defense, or automotive, we have the last mile functionality. I mean, I have companies like Ferrari, on of the most complicated companies, we've talked about those guys for years, no modifications! BAE, over in the UK, building the F-35 fighter jets and the Typhoon war planes. It doesn't get any more complicated than building an F-35 fighter jet. No modifications in their software, that they have with us. You can only build Cloud-based solutions if you don't modify the software. Oracle doesn't have that. Never had it. They're not a manufacturing pedigreed organization. SAP's probably more analogous to that, but even for SAP, they only have one complete big product sect covering retail, distribution, finance, it's the same piece of software they send to a bank, that they send to a retailer, that they send to a manufacturer. We don't do that. That's been our core forever. >> So your dogma is no custom mods, because you're basically saying you can't succeed in the Cloud with custom mods. >> Yeah. I mean, we have an extensive ability platform to do some neat things if you need to do that, but generally speaking, otherwise it's just lipstick on the pig if you're running modified applications. That's called hosting, and that's what these guys are largely doing. >> You know, a lot of people count hosting as Cloud. >> That's the game they're playing, right? >> They throw everything in the Cloud kitchen sink. >> That's right. >> Okay. >> And as we've talked with you before, we've spent billions... We all are R&D's at the application layer. We do some work in the integration layer, and so on, but most of our money is spent in the last mile, which, Oracle and SAP, they're all focused on HANA and infrastructure, and system speed, and performance, and all the stuff that we view as absolutely being commoditized. >> But that's really attractive to the SIs, the fact that they don't go that last mile, so why is it that the SIs are suddenly sort of coming to Infor? >> Well, you know what, because they finally see there is a lot of revenue still on the line in terms of change management, business-process re-engineering. You take a company like Travis Perkins, change their entire model of doing business. There isn't just modification revenue, or integration revenue, there is huge dollars to be had on change management, taking the company to CEO John Carter by the hand, and saying, "Here's how you're going to transform" "your entire business process." That more than makes up in many cases high-value dollars than focused on changing a widget from green to yellow. >> And it's right in the wheelhouse of these big consultancies. >> And they're making good money on digital transformation, so what are the digital use cases? Look at Accenture, they're did a great job. I think 20 plus percent of their business now is all coming from digital. That didn't exist three, four years ago. >> Well, you have a lot of historical experience from your Oracle days of working with those large SIs, they were critical, but they were doing different type of work then, and is it your premise that a lot of that's going away and that's shifting toward. >> The voice of the customer is everything, and it may take time, you can snow a customer once, which we've already done in this industry of software. We told them buy generic-based software, Oracle or SAP, modify it with an SI, take five years, implement it for a hundred million dollars, get stuck on this platform, and if you're lucky, maybe upgrade in ten years. Whoever does that today, as a playbook, as a customer, and if an SI can sell that, I'm not buying that. You think any customers I know today are buying that vision? I don't think so. >> Dave: Right there with the outsourcing business. >> Another thing that's come out of this conference is attention to the Brooklyn Nets deal. Can you talk a little big about it, it's very cool. >> I love those guys. >> Dave: We're from Boston, we love the Brooklyn Nets, too. >> Rebecca: They can play us anytime. Every day. >> Dave: For those draft picks. >> Bread on those guys. You know what it is. And Shaun, the GM, the energy... I use that a lot with my own guys. Brooklyn grit. And they're willing to look and upturn every aspect of the game to be more competitive. And so, we're in there with our technology, looking at every facet, what are they eating? What's the EQ stuff? Emotional occlusion. How's that team collaboration coming together? And then mapping it to... They have the best 3-D cameras on the court, so put positioning, and how are they aligning to each other? Who's doing the front guard in terms of holding the next person back so they can have enough room to do a three-point shot. Where should the three-point shot come from? So, taking all the EQ stuff, the IQ stuff, the performance, the teamwork, putting it all into a recipe for success. These guys are, I'm going to predict it here, these guys are going to rock it next couple years as a team. >> But it's not just what goes on in the court, too, it's also about fan engagement, too. >> All that. Well, fair enough, I get all excited about just making them a much better team, but the whole fan experience, walking into a place knowing that if I get up now, the washroom line isn't 15 miles long, and at the cash line for a beer isn't going to take me 20 minutes, that I'm on my app, you actually have all the information and sensors in place to know that, hey, right now's a great time, aisle number four, queue number three, is a one-minute wait for a beer, go. Or have runners, everything's on your phone, they don't do enough service. So there's a huge revenue opportunity along with it, from a business point of view, but I would also say is a customer service element. How many times have we sat in a game and go, "I'm not getting up there." (laughing) Unless you're sitting in the VIP area, well, there's revenue to be had all over the place. >> Yeah, they're missing out on our beer money, yeah. >> It's ways for a stadium services, which are essentially a liquor distribution system. >> Exactly right. But to do that, you got to connect point of sales systems, you got to connect a lot of components, centers in the bathroom, I mean you got to do a lot of work, so we're going to create the fan experience of the future with them. And preferences, the fact that they that when you walk in past the door with your app and if you have Brooklyn Nets app, that we know who your favorite player is, and you get a little text that says, Hey, you know what, 10% discount on the next shirt from your favorite player. Things like that. Making a personal connection with you about what you like is going to change the game. And that's happening everywhere. In retail... Everybody wants to have a one-to-one relationship. You want to order your Nike shoes online with a green lace and a red lace on the right, Nike allows you to do that. You want to order a shirt that they'll make for you with the different emblems on it and different technology to it, those are things they're doing, too. So, a very one-to-one relationship. >> Well, it's data, it's more than data, it's insights, and you guys are, everybody's a data company, but you're really becoming a data and insight-oriented company. Did you kind of stumble into that, or is this part of the grand plan six years ago, or, how'd you get here? >> Listen, this whole... I mean, to do Cloud-based solutions by industry is not just to solve for applications going from infrastructure on-premise to off-premise. What does it allow you to do? Well, if you're in AWS, I can run ten thousand core products... I can run a report in ten minutes with AWS that would take you a week, around sales information, customer information. Look at all the Netflix content. You log in on Netflix, "Suggestions for You". It's actually pretty accurate, isn't it? >> Scarily accurate, sometimes, yes. >> It's pretty smart what goes into the algorithm that looks at your past. Unfortunately, I log into my kid's section, and it has my name on it and I get all these wonderful recommendations for kids. But that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about. Customers need that. It's about real-time, it's not looking backwards anymore, it's about real-time decisioning, and analytics, and artificial intelligence, AI is the future, for sure. >> So more, more on the future, this is really fun, listening to you talk, because you are the president, and you have a great view of what's going on. What will we be talking about next year, at this time. Well, it won't be quite this time, it will be September, but what do you think? >> I think what you're going to see is massive global organizations up on stage, like the ones I mentioned, Travis Perkins, a Safeway, a Gold Coast, a Hertz. Hertz is under attack as a company. The entry point into the rental car business was very very hard. Who's going to go buy 800 thousand cars and get in the rental business, open ten thousand centers? You don't need to do that anymore today! >> Dave: Software! >> It's called software, the application business, so their business model is under attack. We're feverishly working with their CEO and their executive team and their board on redefining the future of Hertz. So, you're going to see here, next year, the conversation with a company like Hertz rebounding and growing and being successful, and... The best defense is a good offense, so they're on the offensive! They're going to use their size, their scale. You look at the retailers, I mean, I love the TAL story, and they may make one out of every six shirts. Amazon puts the same shirt online that they sell for $39.99, TAL's trying to sell for $89.99. They're saying enough of that. They built these beautiful analyzers, sensors, where you walk into this little room, and they do a sensor of a hundred different parts of your body, So they're going to get the perfect shirt for you. So, it's an experience center. So you walk into this little center, name's escaping me now, but they're going to take all the measurements, like a professional Italian tailor would do, you walk in, it's all automatic, you come out of there, they know all the components of your body, which is a good thing and a bad thing, sometimes, right, (laughing) they'll know it all, and then you go to this beautiful rack and you're going to pick what color do you want. Do you want a different color? So everything is moving to custom, and you'll pay more for that. Wouldn't you pay for a customized shirt that fits your body perfectly, rather than an off-the-rack kind of shirt at $89.99? That's how you compete with the generic-based e-commerce plays that are out there. That use case of TAL is going to happen in every facet. DSW, the DSW ones, these experience centers, the shoeless aisles, that whole experience. You walking in as... The most loyal women shoppers are DSW with their applications, right. >> Rebecca: (laughs) Yes, yes. >> And how many times have you tried a shoe on that doesn't fit properly, or it's not the one you want, or they don't have your size, or you want to make some configurations to it. You got one, too! >> Ashley came by and gave me this, 'cause I love DSW. >> I mean, they're what, one of the biggest shoe companies in the world not standing still, and Ashley is transforming, they went live on financials in like 90 days in the Cloud? Which for them, that kind of innovation happening that fast is unbelievable. So next year, the whole customer experience side is going to be revolutionary for these kinds of exciting organizations. So, rather than cowering from this digital transformation, they're embracing it. We're going to be the engine of digital transformation for them. I get so excited to have major corporations completely disrupting themselves to change their market for themselves moving forward. >> What is the Koch investment meant to you guys, can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, obviously, we hear two billion dollars, and blah, blah, blah, but can you go a little deeper for us? >> I mean, forget all the money stuff, for a minute, just the fact that we're part of a company that is, went from 40 million when Charles Koch started, taking over from his family, and went to 100 plus billion. Think about that innovation. Think about the horsepower, the culture, the aggressiveness, the tenacity, the will to win. We already had that. To combine that with their sheer size and scale is something that is exciting for me, one. Two is they view technology as the next big chapter for them. I mean, again, not resting on your laurels, I'm already 100 billion, they want to grow to 150, 200 billion, and they see technology as the root to getting there. Automating their plants, connecting all their components of their employees, gain the right employees to the right place, so workforce management, all the HR stuff that we're doing on transformation, the financials, getting a global consolidated view across 100 billion dollar business on our systems. That's transformation! That's big, big business for us, and what a great reference to have! A guy like Steve Fellmeier up yesterday, he'll be up here next year talking about how he's using us to transform their business. There's not many 100 billion dollar companies around, right, so what a great reference point for us to have them as a customer, and as a proved point of success. >> Well, we'll look forward to that in September, and seeing you back here next year, too. >> Look forward to it. >> Stephan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, appreciate it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, that is it for us and The Cube at Inforum 2017. See you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City It's theCube covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Ballante. We're joined by Mike Rodgers. He is the CSIO of Pilot Flying J. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Pilot Flying J and your relationship with Inforum. >> So Pilot Flying J is a travel center. We cater to basically over the road truckers and we do have a big gas business too. We operate about 700 locations. Most of them are owned fully by Pilot Flying J. Some of them are dealers where they have a relationship with us. They're in our network but we don't know them. So we run the majority of the locations and we own about 40% of the overall road diesel market. >> Rebecca: In the US and Canada? >> In the US and Canada. >> Okay and talk about your relationship with Inforum. >> So our relationship with Inforum really goes back to Lawson. I've been with the company for about two years. We run Lawson. David Clo-thy will tell you probably 25 years. The company has very rapidly. Started off as a small little Tennessee company. Well now it's a rather large company and we felt we knew we had to make a change relative to our human capital management and our financial systems is because we basically outgrew it. And we like to write a lot of things so we wrote a lot of applications out of our desperate sylo. And of course it's a lot of technical debt that goes along with them. So when I start with the company. We started on valuation process and picked for as the partner to replace all of our financial systems, and all of our human capital management systems. >> And so you migrating from traditional legacy lawson to the cloud suite. >> Pretty much, I would characterize it as a migration but we had very little in the vein of human capital management. And what we did have, we wrote ourselves. For example, we wrote our own applicant tracking system, which we'll of course have to integrate into lawson. So we have an integration layer that we have to support there and that's just one. There was a slide put up this morning that showed that we're going to eliminate 26 systems that we either bought as the best of breed type of application or we wrote ourselves. >> So how painful is that? Is that why you-- >> It's extremely painful. >> They brought you in for this task and you obviously knew this coming in or just-- >> Oh I knew this coming in. >> Dave: No surprise. >> No surprise and by the way, pilot is no different than a lot of other retailers in other companies out there. We've got a lot of technical there and I will tell you the more I see about Inforum. The more I think we made the right decision. I really like the cloud strategy. I'd like the integration associated with all the different functions specifically within the HCM suite. It's not a roll up like some of the other guys have rolled up. They bought but whether it's PeopleSoft or whatever and they many talk about it being integrated, bit it's not as integrated as the Inforum suite. >> So if I may, sorry. We want to stay on the migrations for a second because it's non-trivial and people. The conundrum of migrations is nobody wants to do them because it's just such a heavy lift. But the longer you wait, the more technical debt you accrue. >> I use to say you have to get off the treadmill. You have to stop and say we're not going to keep digging ourself in this ditch and it's going to be painful. It's going to be expensive. It's going to be disruptive and I use to say the (indistinct speaking) usually get fired. That really is, I might say that laughingly but-- >> Dave: You got a got attitude about-- >> It's hard, okay. It's a hard thing not just for the IT guys. It's a hard thing for the organization with respect to change management. >> So incredible amount of planning obviously. You knew your freezing code. >> Pretty much because why would we continue to develop something. I wouldn't say we were 100% frozen. Things come out especially in HR where there's a regulation thing. >> Dave: Compliance, right. >> Right compliance and you got to do it so we got pretty good at saying we're not going to, we're going to wait for Inforum. And we've got a lot of it implemented. We're continuing. We got a nice plan. An iterative plan, we're not trying to blow the ocean and convert everything all at once. Very good engagement from the business. We have a lot of business partners here with us. Like the IT representation at this conference. It's the smallest compared to the business. >> So I would think a key there though is because when you freeze code. It slows your business down, but then when you actually go to the new platform. You want to be able to move faster and leap frog your competition. >> I would argue that really, because we really didn't have much. It really hasn't slow much down. Where we had to do something from a compliance perspective, we've done it. But it hasn't really slowed us down. The leap frog that we're going to do when we implement the whole cloud suite is going to be enormous. >> Sorry about. >> I wanted you to step back a little bit and tell our viewers about some of the specific HCM challenges you have and what you, talk about the pain, I guess is what I want you to describe. >> We run travel service. We're open 365 days a year, 24/7. They never close. They're all on food operations. >> Rebecca: Of the three quick services food operations. >> It could be up to three. If we don't have three in every stores someone said that. We may have one in every store plus a deli operation that we run ourselves and we actually create the food. Whether it's pizza, meatloaf whatever the truck drivers really want with respect to our food offering. They want something different, more variety. So yeah, it's a very complex business. It's hard and we're very spread out throughout the country. We're not necessarily in a big cities like New York. you're not going to see a pilot in New York City. You're going to see a pilot or a flying J on major interstates throughout the country. So there were spread out. So connecting with our team members has been a challenge for us. And our owner Jimmy Haslam will tell you that we probably have not any give himself a vibe. And we are connecting with the team member so we're doing a lot to facilitate that connection. We'd actually partner with the Disney Institute to help us with that. And we've actually called Inforum for project connect. So it's going to provide that connection platform to those team members that are spread throughout the country and Canada for that matter. That we don't get to see that very often, if ever. >> We're hearing a lot at the keynote retail has been highlighted a lot and Pilot J is a form of retail in that sense. And talking about how important it is for the customer experience. The trucker themselves who come in to apply at Pilot Flying J. >> Our strategy is focused on making it a great place to work. In other words, doing the right things for our team member and the investment at Inforum is really going to provide that platform. The other part is making it a great place to shop, and we want our customer to come back. Okay we sell a commodity, let's face it. We sell diesel. You can buy it down the road. We want the experience when they come into our store. We want to take care of our guest like nobody else takes care of them. We got a truck driver. There was an article written in New York Times but you don't throw away people. These guys, you got it, you're wearing it. Your tie, your shirt, whatever came on a truck, and these guys, they're great people. I've talked to a million of them. We want to be the place where they come that feels like home and we want to make a better day for the truck or the driver. It's a tough job. They work hard. They're waking their families. When they come into a pilot. It should feel like somewhat of an oasis. >> Right so, it's super clean I understand. >> Yeah, we try to make them clean. Remember If you're a truck driver and you're away for week's on end. You're going to shower at our locations and so the showers are cleaned and maintained after every shower. Nobody gets in a dirty shower. The rest it's challenging. We have 3000 people come through our doors every day at every location so it's challenging to keep the rest rooms in particular clean. But the showers are cleaned before anybody gets in them. >> And you own the real estate or you lease it? >> We own. >> Dave: Really. >> I'm sure we lease some of this. I've got a question for Dave. We own most of our-- >> But your in the real estate business too. >> Oh yeah. We're definitely in the real estate business. >> What about the data? How is the way in which you use data evolving? >> It's evolving very rapidly and we are a data rich company especially with respect to the professional driver which is the majority of our profitable business. They scan their loyalty card whenever they come. We have a 92% swipe rate and that's because they use those points to buy food, buy showers. >> Rebecca: They're rewarded. >> They're rewarded and it's lucrative to them. They're managing a business so they use that as currency. So that data provides us with the ability to solve. We needed utility along the customer journey. For example, we may know when a guy needs a shower and we may have a fuel buying advantage at a certain location. Offer them a free shower if he fuels at location X because it's beneficial for him and us. Okay we're going to give him a free shower or a free slice of pizza if we feel we have an advantage with respect to purchasing petroleum. >> You're building loyalty. >> Right and builds loyalty so that's on the customer side. >> Rebecca: That's the nudge they need to walk in-- >> To be able to use our digital platforms, our digital properties to take the data and drive behavior, and loyalty. It's really about loyalty. We want to give good things to our loyal customers, take good care of them and solve the problems they have. 'Cause they'll come back. And Jimmy says we want them to come back. He says it and we do things that are going to solve the problem they have. They're going to come back because it's the least friction. >> Are you using data for the logistics in any way, for these truckers in other ways? >> Yeah, that's not Inforum, however well for the truckers. We're using logistics with respect to how we procure petroleum. And I'm probably not going to get into a lot of that because we feel it's a competitive thing there with respect to how we do it. And we are investing a good bit of money into how we procure and manage how we distribute petroleum to our various locations. >> That's a data lever. You got advantage better than-- >> That's where a lot of data reach and we can use data very effectively. >> So data literally is oil. We had a guest on. >> Well data is abundant insights aren't necessarily so that's where you're making money. You've mentioned before Mike that you said you are more confident after you go through this migration, but Inforum was the right decision. What gives you that confidence? Can you double click on that? >> Yeah, it's a couple of things. Number one, and we talked about the technical debt right. So lifting everything to the cloud give me a unique opportunity to eliminate the technical debt 'cause we're not going to write it. We're going to stay current on the latest release of the software. Whereas if you looked around here, everybody will tell you they're behind releases, releases, releases on enterprise software that they've purchased from somebody else that's not in the cloud. So number one elimination of technical debt and staying current on the existing platforms. You really can't customize it. You can customize it within the tool so with the customization or configuration or extensibility carries along as they operate the software. That's the biggest events and I think being in the cloud. I was showing some data to my boss the other day regarding how our infrastructure investment has gone up. Really been able to manage the actual investment with the number of servers, VMware and all that we're running has grown exponentially. That's 'cause we hadn't retire anything. We're going to, with Inforum we're retire 26 platforms. They're going away. They'll be out of the infrastructure and it will be in the cloud. I don't have to manage anymore. >> You're getting rid of stuff, wow. >> Mike: Getting rid of it. >> GRS recall, that never happens in IT. >> I took personal responsibility for the decommissioning aspect of the project. >> I'm going to ask you another IT question is that latest release because you're in the cloud and you're multi-tenet, you have to go essentially into the next release. Does that create down stream problems for you. How do you plan for that? >> Well we're new into it, okay. We're working with Inforum on that and it's perfect now but they get it. We got to be careful when we make the release so we can be prepared for it. So far there have been upgrades and it's been nerve racking. A new release of code that we hadn't really tested or whatever but I think we'll get that route resolved. I said it's new, we got to become efficient in how that happens. We need a little bit of prior notice. >> Dave: Forced agile. >> Yeah, forced agile. Here it comes. (laughing) >> There's a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence here at Inforum. Where would you say Pilot Flying J is with regard to using artificial intelligence as part of your workforce. Giving your workers access to it and also more tools to make the right decision at the right time. >> I think it's at the stage now where it's really cool and it's somewhat of a buzz thing. AI when machine learning. I think it's going to be very relevant and probably not the too distant future. It's not on my immediate road map to worry about artificial intelligence. We thought about doing a project with IBM on fuel procurement and pricing with Lawson. It's just really not quite ready yet. What we can develop is deep insights with the data we have to make better decisions, and put power in the hands of our pricing team or our logistics team to make really good decisions. I think that's for us. Let's get that perfected and then we talked about the voice recognition that we heard yesterday. That I think is imminent and I think it's important for us and it's going to be on our road map because as a truck driver. I'm driving and if I can have the ability to ask questions of our app and purvey information back to that driver, without him having to touch his phone. There's a value of that. Most that has to be architected through the right type of data. How we structure our data to be able to access via natural speech but it is something that is on our road map. >> How large is your IT organization? Roughly. >> In number of people? >> Dave: Yeah. We have about 250 people in our IT organization but we do have a significant use of partners. >> And they're distributed or? >> No, they're in Tennessee. And for the notes popping now we use offshore resources with certain integration partners. We have a couple primary integration partners that we're using. >> So reason I'm asking so as you move to this cloud sass platform. How are you thinking about protecting your data and is it changing. >> It's a good question. And all of a sudden, for awhile there I think we do a great as securing it. We invested a significant amount of money protecting our data. I think I'd be naive to say that we could do a better job than Amazon web services. >> Dave: I would agree, no offense. >> And I think one of the gentleman was speaking yesterday said the same thing. And one of my guys looked at me says that's what we've been saying. I think there's always a risk. Security is a big deal especially with what's happened with one-acry and the subsequent problem. There's going to be more. I think that Amazon could be on top of it. I think together we can do a good job on security. It doesn't worry me anymore than it worries me everyday with respect to my own infrastructure. And it does worry me just not anymore. >> Great, well Mike, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a really enlightening conversation. >> Okay, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Ballante. We'll have more from Inforum in a little bit. (uptempo piano music)

(soothing music) >> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. (energetic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Debbie Krupitzer, she is the vice president at Capgemini based in San Francisco. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> It's your first time on theCUBE, so we're going to-- >> It is, I'm excited! >> It's going to be great. >> Great. >> It's going to be great. So, Capgemini has had a longstanding relationship with Infor but this year, things got a little more serious. So-- >> Debbie: It did! >> So tell us, give us a status update. >> I think we both saw the writing on the wall, which is around, my space is digital manufacturing, that's where I play, and they see it to. Right, so we see such a great opportunity around connected factory and enterprise asset management, and all these really good things that are happening in the space, and so it sort of naturally came together. So we've always worked with them, but we really saw an opportunity for this year to say, hey, this is an investment piece, we both have a lot of energy, a lot of passion around it, let's go make this happen. And so it's been super fun, lots of fun this week. >> AI has been a really big theme at this conference with the introduction of Coleman. Can you tell us a little bit about where Capgemini is putting its resources when it comes to artificial intelligence? >> Absolutely, I mean, we know it's the future. We know it's where it's at. And you know, I had a quote from Elon Musk, which was saying AI, they're taking over the world, robots are going to take over the world in less than about 45 years. I don't know if that's so much true, but what we are really focused on is the business value of AI, not in the sort of trend, or what's the hype of AI. Where can you practically use it? So for us, artificial intelligence could be consumer feedback, or it could be around machines, it could be where are we getting machines to talk to us, to tell us what's wrong? We see a ton of opportunity around this, and it's really exciting for us, but always with a pragmatic what's going to make us money, what's going to save us money, and our customers, that's what we're always focused on. >> So it's the business value. >> Always the business value. The technology hype is just the technology hype, and I think that's what we really love about this conference is that there's a practicality about it. So there's not this sort of, hey it's trendy, it's cool, let's just go do it. There's a lot of thought behind it, there's a lot of thought behind what we want to do, what we want to achieve, and what we want to invest in. And we see this as a big investment. >> So let's talk about people, process, and technology. On theCUBE, everybody always says technology's the easy part, and I think it's generally true. I think technology's generally well understood, there's a lot of open source stuff, pretty much everybody has access to generally the same technology, it's how they apply it, the processes they put behind it, and the people that really make the difference. Okay, so when you think about digital manufacturing, help us understand it, it's surely not my wheelhouse. You bring in the IT and the whole OT thing, you're bringing the IT and the operations technology worlds together, and those are worlds that have never really collided, so wonder if you could talk about that a little bit-- >> Debbie: I would love to. >> Some of the challenges that brings? >> Oh, and there's a lot! Right, so we call it the IT OT Convergence. So there's actually a name for it. So that's Operational Technology and Informational Technology, and you're right, the plant has always been its own kingdom. So whenever you think of manufacturing, these plants are like we are the kings, we do it the way we want, and they never really wanted IT involvement. But what we're finding is that the CFOs, the people who are spending the money, have already seen the value of IT in terms of Cloud, cost savings, enterprise, infrastructure. How do you apply those to the plant to get the savings, and how do you replicate it? So what we're finding is that there's always again, there's a cost factor, right? So they're going is there a way for us to leverage technologies across multiple plants where we can get those savings, versus plants just going and buying whatever they want. And that' what we're seeing as the big change. Now, you're always going to get a shift, 'cause our plant guys and girls, they're used to doing it the way they want. But the thing that we see is that we're not coming in and totally putting robots to replace these jobs. What we're coming in is making their jobs easier. We're making it more efficient. We're seeing ways to save them money. And so the plants get incented when they have outcomes where they save money, so they're really pretty interested in doing this too. >> So give us some examples of a robot working along side of someone on a factory floor. >> So, you know it's funny, but I'd say 80% of the companies we work with don't have robots. Robots are sort of a sexy cool thing that everybody thinks is out there, and they are out there and they're really cool, but normally with the robots its already highly processed, it's a highly structured environment, usually around high tech or the car companies. I'll tell you what's more fun for me, when they don't have anything, where it's still paper-based. That's more fun, because what you're doing is you're going in and showing them how you can add a sensor to a machine to give you information you've never had before. How can this tell us how to do something differently? Is there a process issue? And when you talked about technology always being the easy part, it really is. When we go into a factory, it's normally a people challenge, that's operator, whether the operator's not doing something correctly, or in the right sequence. It's process, is there a process challenge? The technology is normally the easy part. So for me, I'm that person who likes the really immature factory, 'cause that to me is where you make the most change. Somebody's already got robots, you're already doing cool stuff. I'm probably not going to show you too much. It's the ones where they have that ah-ha moment, where they go wow. >> And we've been hearing this, that a lot of this stuff is change management. So how, from Capgemini perspective, how do you approach these challenges? >> You want to get always executive buy-in, right? So it's when it's coming from the top, I think that always is really valuable. But for us, we're plant floor people. I mean, I say you got to go talk to these folks and make them understand why you're doing it and what you're doing. Because there's always fear, right? Fear of anything, fear it's going to take your job, or fear you're not going to have a job, and what we're saying is it's a reallocation. The fact is this, in our space we've got an aging workforce. And aging workforce's going away. And the Millennials don't want to work a factory floor. And the reason they don't want to work a factory floor, it's dirty or they don't think it's the kind of work they want to do. We're trying to modernize that. Use an iPad, get IoT, get technology. You're not working the plant floor, you're working a dashboard. You're looking at data, you're driving data decisions, and so we call it From Shop Floor to Top Floor. How can we drive that so our Millennials, the ones who really do want to be the guys to take, and girls, to be taking these jobs, how can we make it more exciting for them, and we think there's good opportunity for that. >> So it really is all about the data, and when you think about the factory floor, a lot of analog data. And when you talk about process, a lot of process that's changing as a result of that analog to digital. So could you talk about the data, the data architecture that you're seeing and what the discussion is around data, data value, and how to get the value, how to monetize data, not necessarily by selling data directly but how it contributes to revenue generation or cost cutting? >> Well, we say data is the new oil, but I always tell my clients it's new oil, but it's not refined oil, and you've got to refine it. And refining the oil or refining the data is finding the business value out of that data. And you're right, there's a lot of data out there. The questions we get from the manufacturers are, what data is valuable, what is not valuable, what do I need, what do I not need, what can I aggregate up? I think the most interesting thing, and I love stories, is that when you look at a line, you've got machine number one to machine number 10. And before they would never know that something that was happening on machine number one, even a small configuration or change in a widget was actually impacting machine number 10. They never had that before. Now with that data, we're taking the data off of those singular machines, we're putting it up into the Cloud, we're aggregating it, we're able to see these anomalies and go, wow, that's the reason why. We never had that before. So you'd have engineers that would go, it must be machine number 10 or it must be machine number nine, or we don't really know what's going on. Now we're able to trace that; that's great. >> So I wonder if you could share with us any insights you have around discussions going on around IP, and data ownership? Because imagine, hypothetically for example, you've got some kind of programmable logic controller, and the PLC manufacturer is collecting data because they're trying to predict the maintenance, or whatever it is, and then of course the factory is the whole system and they're collecting data. So who owns that data-- >> Debbie: Oh that's a good question. >> And what's that conversation? >> Well, I'm no lawyer and so I'm not going to get into it. So I think what you'd find is that it depends. And that's a consultant answer, but I'm going to say it depends. If you're talking about the machine data, you have bought machines that are from a manufacturer. The manufacturers would love to have that machine data, 'cause they want to know what's going on with their machines. You want to know what's going on with the machine on the floor, very specific use case, which is what's happening in my space. The manufacturers want to know what's going on in a general way, how do we make our product better, how our are customers using it? In my mind, a plant shouldn't mind about that. A manufacturer wants to get that data to make better product, faster to market, make it cheaper, easier to buy, great, take it. I think where you get challenges is when there's outcomes that are coming out of data that people are leveraging to resell as business models. I think that's where people go, but that's our proprietary customer information about how we do a specific process, or how we do something. I think that's where people get a little iffy. And I don't really see that happening so much. So much, right, and I get everybody is really scared about the Cloud. I think the interesting thing is they'll say, well we don't want all of our data, our proprietary data in the Cloud 'cause it's not secure, and what I want to tell 'em, it's more secure in the Cloud than it is at your plant. >> So that's, I'm less concerned about the security of the Cloud, maybe it's different and you got to do some extra work to figure it out. I'm more concerned with our clients around the other thing you were talking about. I'll ask you specifically. If I'm using some kind of AI and I'm developing a model using machine learning and I'm training that model, maybe it's my data, but the model, my data's informing that model. How do I know that that model is not, somehow that IP of mine is not going to end up at my competitors, and is that going into discussions and contracts and agreements? >> Absolutely it is, and I think what you'll find is a lot of vendors that are out there that are dealing with AI and data are having to set clauses up that say you will not use this data to feed into any of your algorithms, into your IP. Like do not take my data. 'Cause everyone thinks, what we do is special, and some of it may be, do not take that and learn from us. That's very specific in clauses and contracts that we're seeing. >> Is it kind of like the honor system, or is there, is there a digital way to track that? >> Yeah, I think what's getting interesting is we get the data, like the companies aren't dumb. They're hiring their own data scientists, they're not letting us go to external parties. They're saying we're going to hire our own data scientists, and we'll start segmenting the data for you. They're very clever, you know, business people are in business because they know how to make money. They're not dumb. So what they're doing is getting a whole new set of roles. They're hiring data scientists. They're hiring data architects. They're hiring people in that understand the data structures so that they can keep track of what's valuable and what's not, don't worry about it. So, I think that's a smart thing to do. Because it used to be pretty rogue. I mean, five years ago, people would be like, well I don't care if you take the data off my machine. I think people have gotten a lot more clever, and also seeing that some of the vendors are repurposing some of this data for their own profit. Nobody wants that, don't take my stuff and use it to profit yourself. >> And you were talking about earlier, just the idea of what's valuable data and what'd not valuable data, and we find we are in this deluge of data. And we don't even really know, you can't say for certain, that data is not valuable, so don't worry about it. >> Exactly, and I think that's the challenge we get is that everybody thinks it's like a pile of money. Like, that's money, don't get rid of that money. >> Rebecca: It's oil! >> Oil, don't get rid of that, right? But what we find is you're getting so much data, some of the data is really not as valuable. And I'll give an example. An on-off switch telling me the motor is running on a machine is not valuable, it doesn't matter. It matters to that company because they need to know that the machine is working, so what we want to do is segment data, and we want to be able to give the business value, or have a hypothesis around what that data is bringing us. And sometimes, I'll tell you, a lot of times a hypothesis from my business users is wrong. So they'll say, what we think of A and B is super valuable, and then we'll go in and like, actually it's not A and B. It's E, E is actually the data stream that actually has the most value for you, and this is why. And so that to me is a really fun part, 'cause they have to have that moment where they go, oh, well we were wrong about that. It wasn't, I say, you're not wrong, it's just different. So I think having that data and then understanding what you're holding on the edge, what you're putting on Cloud, what you're putting on print, what you're able to share just makes people smarter about what they've got. >> So the accounting industry doesn't have standards as to how to value data on a balance sheet. We know that. But are there off-balance sheet discussions going on that you're having with your clients in terms of helping them understand the value of their data, quantifying that value? Everybody talks about the data is the new oil, you got to be a data-driven company and all this commentary, but how do you turn that into actionable, tangible results? >> That's the hard part, right? So that's the meat of the problem. And I think what we do is we really have to deep dive with our clients to understand what's the business model, or what do they think is going on? Because we've had lots of byproduct data that's come off of certain things that they had, and we were like, this is actually a more interesting tangent here, which is a byproduct of that data that you've got. Have you guys thought about selling that? So we'll come in and come up with business models, and so Capgemini has got, we've got Cap Consulting, we have these great acquisitions that we've just made where they'll come in and we've got people who do that. Who say, this is a new business model, have you thought of a resale, or this is something that's very valuable. And we'll go in and deep dive, a lot of times it's just discovery. We don't know either. So we'll go in and say, okay, this looks interesting, have you thought about this, and just new ways, it's just new business models. >> Do you see organizations and are you helping organizations actually apply maybe conventional financial measures, whether it's NPV or enterprise value, and are they beginning to track that, and what can you share with us? >> It's so funny you said that 'cause I just, when I just was coming here and I had a lead, I had a hot lead but I had to leave and come and do this interview, and he was asking me, and I said, the one thing we do is value map your processes and your data. And it was a thing that intrigued him. He was like, how do you do that? How are you doing that? I'm like, well, what we're doing is actually, we take all of your data from a historical standpoint, and we can see what's going on historically. Now the interesting part is how do you go forward with that? And so what we're finding is that you look at this data and you say what's the value mapping in terms of where you make money? And that's different for every company, and so we work with our customers. And so literally what I do is plot here's this process, there might be 15 processes that are going on. Here's the data outcome of that process. Now you talk to me about the value in terms of where you guys make the most money. >> You know, that's interesting, because data has unique value for different processes, obviously, so you have to understand it's not fungible like a dollar bill. And so that's what you can do is share this video with your hot prospect. (laughter) >> Debbie: Exactly! >> Maybe start a deeper conversation. >> I did, I told him, I have to go but I'll be back, so hopefully he's still warm over there. But I think people don't realize that the value mapping that you do is really a standard value, like you staid, standard financial models, the net present value, all those things, ROI, all those things we've always traditionally done on every project we do the same exact thing with this. For around digital manufacturing, because what we want to do is optimize. We want to optimize on what's going to save you the most money or make you the most money. And it's really that simple. Does it save you money, does it make you money. >> So you're applying sort of conventional measures to data, mapping that to processes, and then driving business outcomes, and then quantifying that over a lifecycle. >> You got it, that's exactly it. So you gave away my secret, so now you're going to start a technology firm. >> So that's high level, sounds good, but it's not trivial to do that, you need expertise, you need the main expertise. >> You do, and every manufacturer is different, right? So I work in discrete and process manufacturing, very different, very different processes, very different ways. Process manufacturing has a little bit more complexity, not that discrete doesn't, but it's interesting because what we do is find different things for different industries too, right? Now, there's some comparables, like food and pharma. Food processing, pharma is very similar, and people don't realize that, but it's very similar. And so we're always making comparisons. Pharma's a little bit more regulated, I think that might scare people, right, 'cause they want their food to be really, it is regulated, but maybe not as regulated as your drugs. And so what we find is the hypothesis or use cases that we can leverage and repurpose across industries. And I can't tell you how many times I've been in an industry and I just had one, and it was automotive, and I gave them a consumer packaging use case where they looked at me like I was crazy. And they said, I don't get it. And I connected the dots for 'em. And I said, do you see where if you've got this in consumer packaging, what they're looking at the quality of the packaging from start to finish, and I gave them the, you know, I won't go into the details. But they had this, they just went, oh yeah. And so I think what we're finding is industries that used to be like, if you don't know automotive, if you don't know mining, you don't know consumer packaging-- >> Dave: So true. >> You don't know us, you don't know us. >> And that's changed. >> And that's changed. So what they're seeing is they're going, you know what, 'cause they're seeing like the Amazons, they're seeing these companies, you know Amazon just bought Whole Foods. What? And they didn't buy Whole Foods for the grocery, they bought them for the data. And so I say like, guys, think of this in a different way. You've got to look at other industries, and so we're getting that more and more. We'll bring them out to have discussions about innovation or what's new, cool technology, and I bring it from every sector. Now, most of the time they'll go, show me how that's applicable? And I'll show 'em, and they go, wow. We get it. >> That's a great observation. Because digital means data, and data means you can traverse industries in new ways, so I love that CPG example. You would think, what? But you're getting people to rethink. >> You really are, and they're seeing, they're like, you know, they've got to reinvent themselves. Companies are having to reinvent themselves to this digital age, and they're scared. And they're saying, we sell a commodity, what can we do differently? How are we going to survive? I don't want to be the Kodak, I don't want to be the Blockbuster, I don't want to be that company. And so we're constantly pushing our product, companies that go what are you doing different, how are you going to the next level, is it data, is it services? >> Dave: What business are you in? (laughter) Right, I mean. >> Exactly. >> Well everyone's a software company. >> It's causing people to rethink that, I mean it sort of, we're back to the what business are you really in question. Like we were twenty years ago. >> It really is, it just cycles, right? And I say everything cycles around, we're doing the same thing, we're just repackaging, call it something else. So we all do the same thing over and over. >> Well, but there are some differences. >> There are, of course, more technology, better technology, cheaper technology. I think is what I'm finding is that the price of sensors and the price of technology is going down, that it's becoming more affordable. So, what I used to hear from the manufacturers is like, well I can't afford that, we can't do that. 'Cause there're very lean margins in manufacturing, I mean there's a lot going on. And we're being able to show them, hey, it's not a ton of investment, this isn't like a 20 million dollar ERP. Small increments of money that show you how to get the save. >> Well, 20 years ago, you were purpose-building specific technology stacks for your customers, and today you're leveraging. Whether it's Cloud, a security layer, a data layer, you pick it and you're building on top of this digital matrix. And really focused on the business models, more so than the technology. >> It is, and that's what we're seeing. And I say that's why, to get back to the first question about OT IT Convergence, that's what my CFOs see. They go, we get it. We get it, now let's apply it to the plant, so let's go see how we can scale this. 'Cause you're talking anywhere from companies having 20 plants to 200 plants, that's a lot. And they want to see how they can repeat in scale, and so that's what we love about it. It's turning into a business conversation. It's not a technology conversation, which I love. >> Debbie, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you! >> You made it! >> I did it, yay! I got it, thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more Inforum just after this. (rippling music) (rippling music)

>> 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 digital music) >> Announcer: Live, from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome to day two of theCube's live coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City at the Javits Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-hosts, Dave Vellante, and Jim Kobielus, who is the lead analyst at Wikibon for AI. So we're here in day two, fellas. We just heard the keynote. Any thoughts on what your expectations are for today, Jim, and what you're hoping to uncover, or at least get more insight on what we learned already in day one? >> I'd like to have Infor unpack a bit more of the Coleman announcement. I wrote a blog last night that I urge our listeners to check out on wikibon.com. There's a number of unanswered issues in terms of their strategy going forward to incorporate Coleman AI and their technology. You know, I suspect that Infor, like most companies, is working out that strategy as they go along, piece by piece, they've got a good framework then. We have Duncan Angove on right after this segment. Dave and I and you, we'll grill Duncan on that and much more, but that in particular. You know, I mean, AI is great. AI is everybody's secret sauce, now. There's a lot of substance behind what they're doing at Infor that sets them apart from their competitors in the ERP space. I want to go deeper there. >> So, yeah, so I'm looking at the blog right now. But what are the particular questions that you have regarding Coleman, in terms of how it's going to work? >> Yeah, well, first of all, I want to know, do they intend to incorporate Coleman AI in their premises-based software offerings? You know, for, I'm sure the vast majority of their customers want to know when, if ever, they're going to get access to Coleman, number one. Number two is, when are they going to complete the process of incorporating Coleman in their CloudSuite portfolio, which is vast and detailed? And then, really number three, are they going to do all the R&D themselves? I mean, they've got AWS as a major partner. AWS has significant intellectual property in AI. Will they call on others to work with them on co-developing these capabilities? You know, those are, like, the high-level things that I want to get out of today. >> Rebecca: Okay, okay. >> Well, so a couple things. So, I mean, the keynote today was okay. It wasn't, like, mind-blowing. We had customer appreciation, which was great. Alexis, who is from Foot Locker, cube alum was up there, and B of A got customer of the year. I met those guys last night at one of the customer appreciation dinners, so that was kind of cool. They all got plaques, or you know, that's nice, little trophies. I heard a lot about design thinking, and they shared some screen shots, essentially, of this new UI, started talking about AI is the new UI. It was very reminiscent of the conversation that we had in May at the ServiceNow Knowledge conference, where they're bringing consumer-like experience to the enterprise. It's always been something that ServiceNow has focused on, and certainly, Charles Phillips and Hook and Loop have been focused on that. The difference is, quite frankly, that ServiceNow showed an actual demo, got a lot of claps as a result. Infor said this is ready to be tested and downloaded, but they didn't show any demo. So that was sort of like, hmm. >> Jim: They haven't shown any demos. >> Rebecca: Yeah. >> Is it really baked out? Steve Lucas was up there. He killed it, very high energy guy. You know, again, another cube alum. He's been in our studio, and he's an awesome dude. >> Jim: He's awesome. >> And I thought he did a really good job. >> From Marketo. >> Talking about, you know, the whole engagement economy, you know, we think it's going a little bit beyond engagement to more action, and systems of an action, I think, is a term you guys use. >> Systems of agency or enablement, yeah. Bringing more of the IoT into it and robotics and so forth, yeah. >> And then DSW was up there. I said yesterday, "I love DSW." I tweeted out that, you know, the CIO had a picture, Ashlee had a picture of DSW, and I said, "Okay, when the girls and I go to DSW, "I break left, they go middle-right, "we meet at the checkout to negotiate "what actually goes home," so that was good. It was kind of fun. And then a lot of talk about digital transformation. Marc Scibelli was talking about that, and IoT and AI and data. So that's sort of, you know, kind of a summary there. As you know, Rebecca, I've been kind of trying to make the math work on the $2-plus billion investment from Koch. >> Rebecca: Yes, this is your-- >> And the messaging that Infor is putting forth is this is a source of new capital for us, but I'm-- >> Rebecca: You're skeptical. >> You know, as a private company, they have the right not to divulge everything, and they're not on a 90-day shot clock. Charles Phillips, I think, said yesterday, "We're on a 10-year shot clock." I said, "Okay." I think what happened is, so I found, I scanned 10-Qs, and I've been doing so for the last couple of days. There is virtually no information about how much, exactly, of the cash went in and what they're doing with it. And so, I suspect, but there are references to Golden Gate Capital and some of the management team taking some money off the table. Cool, that's good. I'm just, it's unclear to me that there's any debt being retired. I think there is none. And it's unclear to me how much cash there is for the business, so the only reference I was able to find, believe it or not, was on Wikipedia, and it says, "Citation still needed," okay? And the number here, and the math works, is $2.68 billion for 66.6% of the company, and a valuation of $10 billion, which Charles Phillips told us off-camera yesterday, it was $10.5 billion. So you can actually make the math work if you take that $10 billion and subtract off the $6 billion in debt. Then the numbers work, and they get five out of 11 board seats, so they've got about 45% or 49%, I think, is the actual number, you know, voting control of the company. So here's the question. What's next? And now, a couple billion for Koch is nothing. It's like the money in my pocket, I mean, it's really-- >> Rebecca: Right, right, right, the empty, yeah, exactly. >> And I suspect what happened is, 'cause it always says "$2 billion plus." So in squinting through this, my guess is, this is a pure guess, we'll try to confirm this, is that what happened is, Koch provided the additional funding to buy Birst recently. That upped their share to 66%, and maybe that's how Koch is going to operate going forward. When they see opportunities to help invest, they're going to do that. Now, one might say, "Well, that's going to further dilute "the existing Infor shareholders," but who cares, as long as the valuation goes up? And that's the new model of private equity. The old model of private equity is suck as much cash out of the company as possible and leave the carcass for somebody else to deal with. The new model of private equity is to invest selectively, use, essentially, what is a zero-interest loan, that $6 billion debt is like free money for Infor, pay down that debt over time with the cashflow of the company, and then raise the valuation of the company, and then at some point, have some kind of public market exit, and everybody's happy and makes a ton of dough. So, I think that's the new private equity play, and I think it's quite brilliant, actually, but there's not a lot of information. So a lot of this, have to be careful, is speculation on my part. >> Right, right. >> Well, the thing is, will the Coleman plan, initiative raise the valuation of the company in the long term if it's, you know, an attrition war in ERP, and they've got SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, all of whom have deep pockets, deeper than Infor, investing heavily in this stuff? Will Coleman be a net-net, just table stays? >> Well, so I think again, there's a couple ways in the tech business, as you guys know, to make money, and one is to invest in R&D and translate that R&D into commercial products. Some companies are really good at that, some companies aren't so good at that. The other way to make money is to do acquisitions and tuck-ins, and many, many companies have built value doing that, certainly Oracle, certainly IBM has, EMC back in the day, with its VMware acquisition, hit probably the biggest home run ever, and Infor has done a very good job of M&A, and I think, clearly, has raised the value of the company. And the other way is to resell technologies and generate cash and keep your costs low. I think a software company like Infor has the opportunity to innovate, to do tuck-in acquisitions, and to drive software marginal economics, so I think, on paper, that's all good, if, to answer your question, they can differentiate. And their differentiation is the way in which they're embedding AI into their deep, vertical, last-mile approach, and that is unique in the software business. Now, the other big question you have is beautiful UIs, and it sounds really great and looks really great, well, when you talk to the customers, they say, "Yeah, it's a little tough to implement sometimes," so it's still ERP, and ERP is complicated, alright? So, you know, it's not like Infor is shielded from some of the complexities of Oracle and SAP. It might look prettier, they might be moving a little faster in certain areas, they might, they clearly have some differentiation. At the end of the day, it's still complicated enterprise software. >> Right, exactly, and we heard that over and over again from the people, from Infor themselves, and also from customers, is that it isn't seamless. It's complicated, it involves a lot of change management initiatives, people have to be on board, and that's not always easy. >> Well, and that's why I'm encouraged, that to see some of the larger SIs, you know, you see Grant Thornton, Capgemini, I think Accenture's here, Deloitte-- >> Rebecca: We're having Capgemini later on the program. >> Deloitte's coming on as well. And so, those guys, even though I always joke they love to eat at the trough and do big, complex things, but, this is maybe not as lucrative as some of the other businesses, but it's clearly a company with momentum, and some tailwind that, in the context of digital transformations and AI, the big SIs and some of the smaller SIs, you know, like Avaap, that we had on yesterday, can do pretty well and actually help companies and customers add value. >> And with a fellow like Charles Phillips at the helm, I mean, he is just an impressive person who, as you have pointed out multiple times, is a real visionary when it comes to this stuff. >> Yeah, except when he's shooting hoops. He's not impressive on the hoop court, no. >> No? Oh! (laughing) >> I tweeted out last night, "He's got Obama's physique, "but not his hoop game." >> Oh! (laughing) >> So don't hate me for saying that, Charles. But yes, I think he's, first of all, he's a software industry guru. I think he, you know, single-handedly changed, I shouldn't say that, single-handedly, but he catalyzed the major change in the software business when Oracle went on its acquisition spree, and he architected that whole thing. It was interesting to hear his comments yesterday about what he sees. He said, "You'll see a lot more tech industry "CEOs running non-tech-industry companies "because they're all becoming SAS companies." >> If they have been so invested in understanding the vertical, they really get it. You can see someone who worked on a retail vertical here going in and being the CEO of Target or Walmart or something. >> Yes, I thought that was a pretty interesting comment from somebody who's got some chops in that business, and again, very impressive, I mean, the acquisitions that this company has done and continues to do. You and I both like the Birst acquisition. It's modern-day BI, it's not sort of just viz, and I don't mean to deposition Clik and Tableau, they've done a great job, you know, but it's not, it doesn't solve all your enterprise-grade, BI sort of problems. And, you know, you talk to the Cognos customer base, as great of an acquisition as that was for IBM, that is a big, chewy, heavy lift that IBM is trying to inject Watson and Watson Analytics. I mean, you know, you used to work at IBM, Jim. And they're doing a pretty good job of that, improving the UI, but it's still big, chunky, Cognos BI. Build cubes, wait for results. >> Yeah. So in many ways, the Birst acquisition for Infor and their portfolio is a bit like the thematics that IBM's been putting out on HTAP, you know, injecting analytics into transactional processing to make them more agile, and so forth. What I like about the Birst acquisition, vis-a-vis Coleman and where Infor is going, is that the Birst acquisition gives them a really good team, the people who really know analytics and how to drive it into transactional environments such as this. They've got, I mean, ostensibly, a deep fund of capital to fund the Coleman development going forward. Plus, they've got a really strong plan. I think there's potential strong differentiators for Infor, far more comprehensive in their plan to incorporate AI across their portfolio than SAP or Oracle or Microsoft have put out there in public, so I think they're in a good position for growth and innovation. >> Well, we have a lot of great guests coming up today. As you said, Duncan Angove is going to be on, up next. So, I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante and Jim Kobielus, we will have more from Inforum just after this. (digital music) (pensive electronic music)

>> Voiceover: 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 am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Terry Wise. He is the Vice President of Alliances for AWS. Thanks so much for coming on the program again. >> It's great to be here, yeah, thanks. >> So we are now a few years into this relationship with Infor. Where are we? Put things in perspective for us. >> Oh it's a great question. I think in some respects, this is arguably the most mature and strategic relationship we have. We've been working with Infor for, I've been at Amazon now nine years, and a better part of my nine years, we've been working with Infor, you know. In the early days it was awesome, before Infor bought the company. And, they've always done a great job of pushing us to be more enterprise-centric, more innovative in our platform and services. So it's very mature from that perspective. But I'd say, also at the same time, we're just entering a whole new days. We'd like to call it Day One at Amazon. If you look at some of the things that Charles and the team announced today with Coleman, and some of the new functionality and the growth of the cloud, I mean, we really are still at the early stages of this relationship, which is exciting. >> You know what's interesting to me Terry is, you know, Andy always talks about the fly wheel. He was, sort of, the first to use that terminology. And I was sitting in the endless meeting yesterday, and Infor was going through its architecture. And I just saw a lot of fly wheel in there. I mean, there is DynamoDB in there. I certainly saw S3. I think there was Kinesis, in terms of time series stuff. I think I saw Redshift in there. And so I wonder if you could talk about how this company, specifically, but generally, how people are leveraging net fly wheel of innovation to drive value for their customers. >> Yeah. And again, I think this goes back to the relationship we've had with Infor for so many years. Cloud is not just about cheap computing storage. It's really about platform and innovation that comes from that platform. And, you know, and partners and customers, like Infor, that have been with us a while, and they've got the skillsets internally, they've got great vision for how they want to take their customers with application functionality. They're really ripe to be able to take advantage of all the innovative platform services we build. Kinesis, Lambda for serverless computing. We're talking about some neat things around Edge. You heard Charles and Duncan today talk about Lex and some of the AI capabilities we have that are underpinning Coleman and some other new offerings. So they really are, kind of, the poster child for adopting our new services and driving innovation on top of our platform for their customer base. >> So where, if you can, look into your crystal ball a little bit. Where will we be a year from now, three years from now, with these technologies? >> So if I look out a year, I think, you know, rapid global expansion. You know, we're long past in many respects, sort of the, the early questions around cloud. Is it secure? Is it cost-effective? Is it robust and reliable? We're really past that if I look out across the globe. And now it's a question of how can we help enterprises adapt faster. And that's really, probably, the single biggest question I get from enterprise customers is, "This is great. Help me move quickly." And I think one of the neat things about the Infor relationship is, because they've packaged all of this innovation, into a set of business applications, they're actually helping customers move to the cloud quite a bit faster, and get that great value prop of cost efficiency, security, innovation, et cetera. Looking out three years, I think Duncan and the team did a very nice job today talking about the interaction ad user experience of how you're going to engage with business software moving forward. It's going to be very voice-driven. It's going to be predictive in nature so it's actually going to tell you what you need to think about versus going to a terminal or even a mobile device. So much left to do in that space. But I really do think, you know, three years from now, machine-learning won't be a buzz word, nor will artificial intelligence. It'll just be a bigger part of our daily lives. >> We were talking to Chip Coyle a little bit about trying to debunk some of the myths in cloud, specifically Amazon cloud. And I mentioned Oracle, saying that core enterprise apps really aren't going to the cloud, that's why you need Oracle. And they've got a strategy to do that, you've seen it. But then you going to see Infor, 55% of their business is in your cloud. They look like core enterprise apps. So is it, my question is, help us debunk that myth. But is it narrowly confined to companies like Infor, or are there examples of others? I mean, certainly there are companies, you guys have unbelievable logo chart. But when you peel back the onion, many of those apps are cloud-native or emerging apps. Those core of enterprise apps, we're seeing it from Infor. I wonder if you can add some color to that and are there other examples? >> Absolutely, I mean, I think there's others in the market that may be uncomfortable with the change that's happening with cloud, and therefore might be incented to try to slow that down. But I will say, the vast majority of all software companies we're engaging with are moving mission-critical enterprise apps to AWS. Some built natively in SaaS, like Infor is done. Others that are enabling, certifying their applications, SAP is another good example. You can kind of go across the stack, Adobe, AutoDesk, Siemens PLM, for product lifecycle management. And if you think about, you know, that's putting companies' core IP, the product development into the cloud to take advantage of all this agility, scale, cost-savings, et cetera. So it's been happening for a long time. Di-so is another great one, very innovative but somewhat conservative french company. They were very early on in the journey with us. And again, that's, you know, IP used to design airplanes, the things we fly around it. So it's been happening for a long time. It's accelerating. And I would say the other trend we're seeing is the companies out there that are resisting, we're hearing more and more from customers that, "Hey, that company is not helping move me to the future. Can you help me find an alternative?" So there's this big movement for enterprises to actually migrate out of legacy platforms, whether that's hardware or software, and move in to the cloud-native platforms, which are the future. >> So we see, we've been talking on The Cube for years about this whole digital transformation and how it's going to allow companies to play in different industries. Amazon, obviously. Retailer just purchased Whole Foods, getting into grocery. It's a content company. So Walmart said, "Alright, we're not going to put our stuff "in the Amazon cloud." Netflix obviously does. How do you deal with that? The obvious competitive fears of some of the customers that you have for AWS? How do you message that? And what do you tell the world? >> Sure, the first thing is, I mean, AWS, while it is part of Amazon.com, we are a separate operating group. And we've been that way since the beginning. So yeah, Amazon is a customer, just like Netflix or Nordstrom, or any of the other, you know, millions that we serve. Now a very hard customer and a very good customer. And they help drive our innovation road map. But we don't treat them any differently than we do, Netflix or the others. And part of that has to do with how we protect and secure the information that those companies put on AWS. So there's some companies out there, the one you just mentioned, that's still may be a bit uncomfortable, for whatever reasons, competitive reasons, putting information or having third parties put information related to their business on AWS. Yeah, I think that's unfortunate, I think. And it also talks about two different philosophies. We take very much a customer-centric view of the business. What's best for the customer. And if one of our partners has a better capability, we've got plenty of partners that have similar products to what we offer, but if it's the better product for the customer, we're more than happy to support that. Whereas others out there take a very competitive focus to the market. Where it's, they're watching what their competitors are doing. They're trying to head them off at the pass, or copy what their competitors are doing. In the long term, I don't think that's a fantastic strategy 'coz you're never really innovating on behalf of the customer. You're never giving them the best solution. You're actually preventing them from getting something that could be beneficial to that customer. And we just don't believe that's a long-term great business strategy for our customers and for ourselves. >> We recently saw the announcement of Amazon purchasing Whole Foods. Can you talk a little bit about this for our viewers. And talk about where, how you see the future of grocery and retail, where it's going. >> Sure, so we've announced our intention to purchase Whole Foods. It has not happenned. There's still some work to do there. But I think, you know, anytime we look at, you know, how we're going to expand, either organically or through acquisition, it's about, what are the synergies between our existing business, what the customers are looking for, and how can we create a better experience for that customer. How can we do it at scale? How can we innovate around that model? And then, you know, how can we make that a great long-term experience for the customer that ultimately drives the success and growth of our business, but also the partners that we bring in, whether again through acquisition or through third party partnership. This is kind of a, you look at this as a natural move as we look at what our customers are telling us, "Hey make it easier for us to purchase groceries and "household items." You know, and do it in a hybrid way, both, you know, combination of online and more from the physical presence. >> Terry I wonder if you could talk about, we mentioned the Edge before. And as you build out your partner strategy and the partner ecosystem. Talk more about the Edge, where it fits. Analytics at the Edge, and Amazon being the cloud, so what's your point of view on what happens at the Edge, what moves back to the cloud, the expense of moving things back to the cloud. What's your thought on that whole thing? >> Well, there's so many use cases for Edge computing. I mean, take the mining industry. You're putting huge trucks in the middle of nowhere that may have limited or very expensive connectivity. And they're capturing all kinds of, you know, information, during the natural operation of that machine. And it just makes sense that you want some level of data processing, storage, and analytics to happen on that machine. It could be a cruise ship, it could be a naval vessel, it could be an airplane. There's, you know, lots and lots of different applications there. But by doing some of that processing at the Edge, you're actually limiting the amount of data you have to send back to the central cloud. But of course, if you want to take full advantage of the analytics, you actually have to match that data with all the historical data and other real-time data that's resided in the cloud to get the result you're looking for. So it really becomes, you know, kind of this hybrid computing model. So some of it is efficiency around how much data you're sending back and forth. Some of it is just efficiency around processing, the point of data capture. Some due to connectivity reasons. Some due to other. It really is kind of this interesting new extension of hybrid cloud, if you will. We're very excited about it. >> You've made some moves in that area. I mean, Snowball was, I think, you know, one of the first. And there are other sort of Edge, what I would consider Edge-like devices or solutions. How dogmatic are you about everything living in the cloud? I mean, those are steps. Should we expect, you know, increasingly extending the reach of the cloud or is it just really going to all, your world come back to the AWS clouds? >> Yeah, yeah. It'll certainly be an extension of the cloud. That's already been happening. I mean, if you look at hybrid cloud. I think we've always been a supporter of hybrid cloud if you look at our roadmap going back many, many years with virtual private cloud, with Direct Connect, with some of the newer capabilities like Snowball, and, of course, Greengrass, our Edge capabilities. We're really extending the reach out to be much more of a hybrid store. 'Coz we recognize that not all the data today exist in the cloud or AWS in the future, you know. We think most applications will run in the cloud because the value proposition is so strong across so many different dimensions. But today, there's plenty of other places we have to connect to, again to capture the data. Now, I do think the vast majority of the data that we're capturing will be either pre-processed or sent natively into AWS to create a massive data leg so that you can start to drive these innovative machine-learning and artificial intelligence applications. The predictive analytics, the algorithms. They just don't work if you don't, they don't work effectively if you don't have massive amounts of data and you continuously refresh that data so that the algorithms can continue to learn. >> I want to double click on something you said about the value. To capture most of the value, your belief is that it's going to be in the cloud, one cloud. And others obviously have different view for a variety of different reasons. I buy the cost argument. You didn't make that argument, I'm making it. The marginal cost of having a single cloud. You know, standard, how much an A it is, superior. I'll grant that. What else is there though? Is it speed? Is it innovation? Is it standardization across the base? >> The single biggest value that I hear from customers today, but they love it, they love the cheap hosting fees, the efficiency part of it, but it really is the speed and agility. It's certainly the security model as well. I would say that most, almost every organization now that we talk to, once we've had the chance to educate them, if they haven't already done so themselves, has determined that the cloud-computing security model is much more effective than they could deliver on their own. We can just invest more. We can experiment more. We can have have multiple certifications across different industries, which every customer gets to take advantage of. But I would just come back, it's the ability to move quickly whether it's moving into new market. I was just in Europe, we were talking about it. It's so volatile there right now on so many dimensions with Brexit and some of the nationalistic politics things that are happening. Potentially the opening up more of the Middle East with the sovereign wealth funds comin' into play. There's just so much opportunity that enterprises need to be able to move quickly. And if they have to go stand up a data center somewhere else, or they can't deploy the software quickly, they're at a competitive disadvantage. So the single biggest driver from what I hear from customers and what I'm seeing is agility. >> Yeah, okay, so just to clarify, I said, cost not price. But we can debate that some other time. (Terry laughs) You just came back from Europe. You mentioned Brexit. What about things like GDPR which has taken effect but the penalties go in effect May of 18. Obviously that puts a lot of pressure on the cloud provider, as well as your customers. What are you hearing in Europe? And generally and specifically GDPR. >> Yeah, I mean, I would say the regulatory environment everywhere, but specifically in Europe, continues to evolve and it's fairly fluid. We've spent many years working with the various different regulatory bodies. The Article 29 Working Party. That's actually been crafting a lot of this legislation. So we're heavily influencing, because, if you step back, people said you couldn't do cloud, but they didn't explicitly say you could. (Rebecca and Dave laugh) So, customers are meant to, "How do I interpret this?" And some, you know, like, if I look at Nel, and I look at Societe Generale, and I look at BMW, and some of, you know, our forward-leaning European customers, Siemens is another great one, who was one of the original companies to put PII in the cloud. Here's a big German company putting PII in AWS a number of years ago. So we figured out how to get, not get around, but interpret the regulations, and then also ensure that we've got the features and capabilities to make sure that they comply with those regulations. So the full audit trail, the ability to encrypt data, the ability to make sure that data storage and localization is complying with, whether it's a country-level regulation or an industry-level regulation. So we continue to spend a lot of time and effort, monitoring and influencing that. And then building the services to make sure our customers fully comply. >> Well, you've always done well with permutations and complexity and automating that, so it's going to be fun to watch. >> Rebecca: It will indeed. >> Great. >> Terry thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun talking to you. >> Yeah, great, thanks, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Inforum just after this. (upbeat music)

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

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

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's the theCUBE, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. (bright electronic music) >> We are back with theCUBE's coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Barig Siraj and Nasser Bayram. They are both of the Zahid Group, out of Saudi Arabia. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Good to be here, thank you for having us. >> So I want you to start out by just explaining to our viewers a little bit about what Zahid Group and Zahid Tractor, what you do. >> We are a large group based in Saudi Arabia. We're very diversified. We are mainly in heavy equipment, capital equipment business. We are the importer of Caterpillar machinery and Volvo trucks, Renault trucks, and many other products. More than 40 franchises. We have locations in more than 40 locations, or branches, more than 40 locations for their area, and we have about 4,000 employees, and we mainly focus on providing sales and after-sales services in the kingdom, with a big focus on after-sales. We pride ourselves to be the second to none when it comes down to after-sales services, and we strongly believe in technology and in digital transformation that is sweeping the world of business, and thus far, we embarked on this journey five years ago. >> So what does that digital transformation mean for your business, and generally, and then specifically for IT. Maybe you can start, Nasser. >> Well, first, we have to agree. The business model has changed. There are new business models that has disrupted every single industry landscape out there, and you have to be ready to change and accept that transformation, otherwise, you'll be left behind. The digital transformation takes you beyond managing an organization introducing an IT platform or technology. You have to change the way you think and your readiness to be able to manage where the future is going. If we look, we just attended this session, 52% of Fortune 500 companies in year 2000 no longer exist. They went out of business. In 2015, 55% of Fortune 500 companies lost money. There was no economic crisis or downfall. It simply missed the boat, or they did not, they were not very innovative in their digital strategy or thinking ahead, allowing their industry to be disrupted by people like Uber, Amazon, Alibaba, Souq, an other new entrants with very great innovative ideas and technologies. The old business model of cutting cost or restructuring an organization no longer works. You need to think differently and act differently, and hence, digital transformation becomes critical for your organization, and implementing an ERP platform, standardizing rationalization of your ERP platform, if you have more than one, like in our case, we have more than one, you have to have one standardized platform, one standardized processes, business processes, so that we have one source of data in order to be ready for the future where you can mine that data, have it be by analytics or business intelligence, in order to be able to better serve your customers and learning on about their behavior, about their trends, and how you can better position production services for them in the future to buy, and for you to remain profitable. >> So Barig, okay so now, that's, what Nasser just described, I'm inferring, is much more real-time, much faster, and more data. Your ability to analyze that data wherever it is, how do you, and the processes and people behind that as we talked about technology's the easy part even though some technology's even more complicated than ever. So what does that mean for the IT organization? >> Well for IT organization, we had, and we still have a legacy application built over 30 years. Now, and there we could not reap the benefits of the data mining, the standardization, even that just from AI capabilities on top of that. We cannot reap that until we have that standardized ERP Platform across all our companies. So basically, that's the tall order that was put on our plate, and what we have done, we started the journey. We're partly through it. We went live with two of our companies. We still have three more to go, and we've done it with lesser volume, allowing us to learn and therefore, once we reach our biggest volume company, we would have learned as an organization, not just applying the technology that even the personnel, the change management, the resistant pockets have to deal with all of that. >> Can you give an example of what you've learned along the way, becoming, as we said, it is so much about change management, and it's about getting people over this fear of change. Can you give an example of what you've learned, of what you're doing differently for the companies that have yet to have the rollout? >> The biggest learning experience we had, we just went live with one of our companies, called EJAR, which is a rental company. The success there of the learning, the success is a learning experience. We have a long journey for to go live with five companies, and this is the first one to go live. What we learned by doing that company first is the challenges of change management, how to support on live, challenge of data migration, data cleansing, readiness of the organization, not simply from change management perspective, but also from IT, legal, readiness of your documentation, the contracts, et cetera. It's a vast learning curve to overcome, and we're very happy that we took the strategic decision to go live once more company, so that we gain that experience, and that is the real success we got out of this project now. Now we better we feel we are in better position for the new companies to go forward with, when we go live, we learn so much about change management, where we failed and where we succeeded, we learn better about our readiness, whether it is Zahid Tractor, or Infor, or our IT, our infrastructure, our training program, our after go-live support, the war room was set up to support the go-live, and go in production. We've been two month in production. We're still having some challenges, but nothing that, there are no showstoppers, however, more and more every day, we learn more and more, and we are better positioned to go live with a bing bang on the big company. >> Nasser, as the executive in sort of leading this transformation, do you look for and demand new metrics, new types of KPIs that you want to see? >> Well, definitely, you do the whole thing because of the new metrics. The new metrics have to have built into it, not simply the traditional KPIs of your GPs and revenue and discount and so on, you need to look at customer behavior, customer analytics, pricing positioning, where you are going forward. In the old days, everybody would sit down around the table, say, "Hey, we're number one, okay?" That doesn't hold water anymore. You're number one in what? It's about number one in responding to customer requirements on that customer behavior. Today, with Amazon.com, many retail businesses are challenged, they're going out of business. How do you stop that business model? You can't. So how do you compete? You can. To do that, you have to have the right data in place, the right organization in place, and the right mindset to be able to lead your organization to compete in the new market space. >> Can you give our viewers some examples of the kind of data that you are deriving, in terms of this business analytics, in terms of understanding and deepening your understanding of customer behavior, and what customers want, and how it's changing, how you approach your customers and what you do for them. >> I'll give you a comparison. When we have a legacy systems, what you do at end of day, you extract your data, you transform it and you load it up to your data mart or data warehouse, and then you run your report, and if you're lucky, you have savvy users who can create their own reports on the fly, but with the way we're going with an integrated ERP solution and one standardized platform, we do hope we have the right analytics in place, and business intelligence in place, that we give our management the right data to make decisions, ready to make decisions. Not filtered data, not reports designed, and that takes me straight into your question on IT and ability to IT to deliver. There is no way for any IT organization to cope with the changes. Nowadays, when Amazon went live recently with Whole Food, it took them three to six, three to four months to deal with legal, to deal with retail, with pricing, with the announcement, the whole nine yards of marketing. How did they have their IT ready? That's a challenge. How can you do that in four to six month? That is the challenge in the future. If you don't have the right platform to do that, you will never be able to compete, and data analytics are critical for you to respond or predict the behavior of customer, so before a customer comes next time to the counter, you already have certain statistics that tell you what that person is ready for, and that takes you straight also into IoT. Your products, or our products now, are connected to the Internet. If you don't have IoT in place, connected to your back end, and your analytics, you won't be able to compete, and that would be the differentiator in the future. Those who could do that versus those who will continue to follow the old brick and mortar business model, restructuring and cost-cutting and whatnot. >> So your instrumenting your heavy equipment in the field, presumably, and that's, you're well down the road with that. That changes the data model, it changes the analytics model so I wonder if you could describe that a little bit. I mean, obviously you're processing data at the edge. How much data stays at the edge versus comes back to your central location, maybe you could add some color to that whole equation. >> Well the devices that are put on the machines, there are several ways of putting. The older models, you have, actually the PSSR has to actually go with his laptop, hook it up, suck the data, and bring it back for analytics. The newer models are more, are sending it to, directly to us, and enabling our, what I call tower, to do equipment monitoring, and be able to anticipate, we call up the customer and saying, "By the way." Actually tell the salesmen to call up the customer and saying, "You need to bring your machine in "because it's, you might face a failure "in so amount of time." So improving the customer side, that is, that is that part, but coming back to the organization change issue, we went from a legacy application that the branch managers waited until the end of the month to get the truth, to now being able to, seeing the performance on a daily basis, because they're seeing the truth because everything is connected, whereas before, whatever they did, they don't, their piece of the puzzle, they have a lot missing, and they, information that they waited until it show, send them back there, a report. >> And none of this takes place in the public cloud, is that right? >> No, it does, to add to that, the data is stored in the cloud. Customers have access to it, along with our SOS lab, which is oil sampling lab. They have access to the data to see what is happening, like predictive analysis of their machine performance, and as a result of analyzing the oil, plus any data collected from these machines. We do have cloud implementation. We just went live with our treasury management system. It is on the cloud, and it was our first deployment on the cloud, though the implementation of Infor today is still on-premise. Long-term, down the road, we may be looking at the cloud. >> I got to ask you, we hear Infor messaging about microspecialization, that last mile, all the hard stuff that nobody else wants to do. Is that something that you take advantage of in your industry, or is it? >> I'll give you an example. We utilize the implementation accelerator from Infor for the rental, and it's 77% of our processes map directly into that, so we, that enabled us, that, to have EJAR, which is a rental company, go much smoother. Now, we're working with Infor to enhance their equipment implementation accelerator, and it will be partly the same ratio, around 70% of the processes that we're going to go live with, are the standard processes in the product, out of the box, for the equipment rental, for the equipment business space. >> Our objective is to reduce customization as much as possible, go out of the box, or native, out of the box, as much as possible, but you have to accept the fact, depending on your business environment and some localization requirement, you have to do some customization. However we do have a governance in place, to make sure it's to the minimal. Otherwise, long-term, you'll be challenged with release management and change management and so on, and when you speak of the cloud, if you ever elect to go to the cloud, you can kiss customization goodbye. (Dave laughs) You have to be ready to adopt and adapt. >> And how about your security regime, as a result of the edge and IoT and now, cloud, how is that evolving? >> That's close to my heart. (laughs) >> Yeah, I'll bet, and probably the board's. >> Actually, well, (laughs) actually, interesting enough, many organization, like ourselves included, we invested so much money in building firewalls and security systems to protect what's behind the wall. Now with the cloud, well your most important data is no longer behind the wall. >> Rebecca: It's right there. >> It's outside the wall, so you have to have some kind of a hybrid security system, and you really have to pick the right partner who is hosting your cloud application, leasing your cloud application to you, so the challenge or the perspective of security, cybersecurity, changes drastically and totally, and your understanding of it has to change, otherwise, you just stay behind your own wall and guess what? You can end up locking yourself behind the wall, and you're going to miss the boat, but this does not mean that you'll let down your guard. You have to maintain your security awareness, you have to maintain your security diligence, and you should not underestimate the threats out there, because even if you are on the cloud, the biggest threat nowadays is through phishing. That's what we call the human firewall. Relegating the right awareness, the right education to your organization from within, to understand the threats and the danger of such a threat, otherwise, your password, that's how you access the cloud, you'll end up be compromised and guess what? So will be your data. >> Yes, so, Barig, Nasser, thank you so much for joining us. It's been great to have you on the program. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Nasser: Thank you for hosting us, thank you. >> See you guys again, great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Inforum after this. 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(upbeat synthesized music) >> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Inforum 2017 here at the Javits Center in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Christina Van Houten, she is in Infor SVP of industry and solution strategy, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I want to start out by just asking what you do at Infor and how you fit in. >> So we sit in between the people who make products and the people who sell products and we start with really understanding the market, what is needed for a particular industry, even for a particular role, and we work with our customers, we work with prospects, we work with our executives to understand the innovation initiatives they want to do and we drive road maps and then we work with our development teams very closely to develop and release their products and create everything that's needed for customers to buy and deploy and operate them from there. So it's fairly broad, things that we do. >> Right, it's not a small portfolio. >> Yeah, and what's really great about what we get to do is we're really at the nexus of the engineering teams, the marketing teams, sales, and our services organizations as well as our partners as well. >> One of the things we were talking about before the cameras were rolling was this idea of adjacent innovation, and this is something that the CEO Charles Phillips talked about at last year's summit. And I know you've written several white papers about it. Explain this to our viewers, what is adjacent innovation? >> So many of us are familiar with it, I think Charles used the example of the Venetian glass community, which obviously dates back several thousand years, but this idea that if you put several people together that had certain skillsets, it would spawn new ideas that were related but different and you see that all the time in things like government, investments in space, with dehydrated food and cell phones and all these things, geo-spacial stuff, things that we use every day. And Infor had this ecosystem of products that had been acquired over time when I started six years ago and it was just this really rich opportunity to look at all the teams and what they had built. Some of the things were redundant, some were really distinct and applied to one business but really had relevance in another industry. And because we're so disparately located around the world and it's seemingly disparate technology stacks and all those kinds of things, we had to really be deliberate about the way that we facilitated engagement and how we brought those teams together, how we were going to figure out how to integrate the products and ideas, the user experience, and so we started doing things where we would hold end to end, sun up til sun down, demonstrations of our products and had people talk about what they did and how they took advantage of certain capabilities. We're now in, we call them innovation summits, we've now just done our seventh. We do them twice a year and we set out with a very specific goal in each of them. And the last one we did, we evolved to almost doing like an Iron Chef version of solutions so we'll say okay, here's this core horizontal platform, and we want to industry-ize it for these five industries, and actually in one case it was seven. And to be honest with you guys, I was really afraid we were going to show up and people weren't going to have figured it out. And we were blown away by what people were capable of and they took one ingredient, it was one application that they had to use across the board but then they combined it with other ingredients, layered in all kinds of domain, built out some really unique functionality, and you ended up with seven completely, what looked like completely different solutions off a lot of the same four ingredients. >> The power of the crowd, crowd sourcing ideas and insights. >> The other thing that we realized, I think we've even created our own internal magic quadrant out of these events, so it's fun to use peer pressure. And some people just show up, the preparation, weeks in advance, because there's no tougher audience than your peers but we had a lot of fun with it, people really show up and have some amazing things, it's a great opportunity for other teams to learn from them, and it's become a hallmark of our culture, and I get lots of notes after, personal notes from different people in our development organization and I think it's a way for us to really feel connected, it's a way for people to feel like they stay up to speed and then it's a way for people to get recognized for doing really neat things and driving our business forward. What's also interesting is we've been able through that to take advantage of certain teams and almost turn them into consultants for other teams and say alright, you can do a discreet engagement with this team, this team in Colorado's going to do an engagement with this team in Sweden, and because they really figured out how to do this thing and we know that they'll be able to get them live on the same capability in a fraction of the time than if they were pursuing it on their own. >> So Christina, you're not an engineer by trade, you're not a software developer. But you basically run product management for this very vast portfolio, do you speak geek? (laughing) >> That's a good question for my team. I think over time, when I graduated as a theology and government major and I wanted to do economic development, public policy, I never ever imagined that I would be working, I just turned 50, in technology. But I've had over two decades of working in software and I've absolutely loved my career and it's unfolded in a way I couldn't imagine. I think part of the thing is that it's really, within our teams, no one has the ability to do everything, and so there are super technical people, there are amazing bright domain people from different industries, and then I think what I bring is the ability to see connections and to bring people together and ideas together and see where we could take something that maybe other parts of our organization add value in more of a deeper way. So there's an opportunity for me to bring those together, and it's nice to be able to have that role here because otherwise we wouldn't be able to capitalize on all the capabilities that we have. >> So you dabble in geek, you speak just enough geek. >> Just enough, mile wide and inch deep, yeah. >> So in terms of what you're looking for, in a previous interview you talked about the athlete factor as something that you want to see in potential recruits and it's the certain scrappiness. Can you talk a little bit about that? >> Yeah, I see that people can have three areas of strength, there's three legs to the stool, and one is domain in a particular product industry, one is domain in this role, and then the third is just this ability to be really entrepreneurial and go above and beyond and not draw strict boundaries around what your role is and what your day is going to be like and what your job is. And I think more and more we've enabled to really attract that kind of person and in some cases, maybe evolve people to really see things that way and really I think one of the things that our executive team is really focused on from the beginning is act like an owner and I think that's the nice thing about this role in a technology company is you are basically a team of small business owners that comprise one big company and so our teams really act that way. Their passion for their products, their sense of commitment to our customers, and the quality, and the pride that they have on how things have evolved is really very inspiring to me. And some of the people on my team are new and young and have been infused in the last couple years. Some are people who have been with the company for 20 years and I think that mix has really made for a very optimal, talk about portfolio optimization in investments, and I think there's a really good analog there for portfolios of people working on teams and getting that right chemistry and that right mix. >> Can you describe the strategy component of your title and your role? Is it primarily product strategy or development? >> Yeah, it's, first and foremost it's actually more global market strategy so once we've decided what markets we're in, you can imagine that the number of intersections that exist between geo and vertical alone, and then you layer in product. And so we start with well where should Infor be doing business, what's our legacy presence been, what is our established customer base need, and then where our market's going within that. And then we layer in products on top of that and so we really, that view of our business globally but in those increments really helps us be very focused on where our investment is, not just from a product engineering standpoint but in all of the other things that surround that that enable us to do business well. So whether it's cloud infrastructure or feet on the street to do training for our deployments. So that's the strategy piece of it. That then evolves into the product strategy around well what are we going to, there's a million things that people want and so there's a real discipline around figuring out how to whittle it down and tine those capabilities in a way that really delivers something amazing and give people what they want and balance across lots of different stakeholders and constituents. >> So when it comes to giving people what they want, how does Infor think about the customer experience? And what are you doing to optimize that? >> So there's a whole bunch of things actually in the last year that we took on. And it's not that we weren't doing it before but we felt like okay, we've had such a focus on our products and evolving feature function, but we know that we could do a better job of being good to do business with, I guess. And not just in the way the product works, but the entire process from how do you first engage with a product when you might be interested in it, what happens when you actually close the transaction, then the deployment and then operating it. So we deconstructed all of that and then looked at all the places where we could inject technology to make that experience better, and then also change our processes. And so one of the biggest things we've been working on in the last year is something that a lot of companies have but usually it's edge applications so something we call test drive try and buys, and what's interesting is the initial use case for it was hey, Charles said, we need to make our products easier for people to just go and see. What's the latest, how does it work-- >> Take it for a spin. >> Yeah. And not just new prospects, but our customers. They're trying to decide how they're going to evolve, and so we are just launching, we're calling them Test Drives, they'll be on Infor.com, and it will be core ERP as well as things as CRM and EAM and some of the edge apps. And what's really neat about the way we've done it, they're stocked with all kinds of data, we thought about the world based business processes, we have this entire experience when you log in that highlights the things that you can do in it and walks people through. And the reason I mention this is because even though the initial use case was for this engagement experience presale, the discipline around building those has also created an entirely different experience around deployment and also post go live because we are delivering a much more complete solution and that has really driven our experience too because if you're thinking through somebody coming in who doesn't know anything about the product and they need to know what to do and how to sign on and how to execute all the key business process flows, so those standard configurations that we've built out are something that is really driving excellence in our testing and all kinds of things. The other big initiative we've had is online help doesn't seem very sexy, but it really is core to the user experience and a lot of our customers were coming to us saying I would upgrade in a second but I need to know that my users are going to be happy, that they're going to know what to do as soon as we turn this on and so we realized that we needed a more consumer grade experience around the entire tool tips and embedded videos and those kinds of things. So those are part of our Test Drives and part of our standard configurations as well. >> So as you think about, I know we're tight on time, but going forward, when you look at your block diagrams of XI for the architecture, there's a lot of AWS in there, obviously, and that's a platform that you don't have to worry about the plumbing, well somebody does have to worry about the connections, but from a product standpoint, where do you look at it? Just give us a little glimpse of the road map, just subjectively, as to where you see it going. >> Yeah, so what's been really amazing for me over the last six months is our tech stack just moved, finally got to the cloud and multi tenant and it's increased dramatically in its set of capabilities. And so we've had this time, it's sort of like, I know people use the house analogy, building a house, but it is that point where you have phases and a rebuild process where a lot is going on but you don't necessarily see it. And we're finally at that point since the start of this calendar year where our ability to just have an idea and then go execute it and prototype it is mind boggling. We finally hit that delight factor, both I think for our customers and us internally where I've just said, like in our latest innovations, I'm like hey could we go and build this blah blah blah thing, and within a day, somebody had an environment up and was building it out. The tool set that we have available to our teams and to our customers to extend their platform in an easy way, are really, really exciting and really a lot of people are going to be seeing it for the first time here in a lot of cases. >> Well great, thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Christine, it was a pleasure having you on the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Inforum in a bit. (upbeat electronic music) (bright synthesized music)

(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: 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. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Martine Cadet. She is the Infor Vice President and head of the Education Alliance Program. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Martine: Thank you for having me. >> So let's start out by talking about what the Education Alliance Program is and how it came about, it's not very old. >> No, it's not old. Actually, we'll be three years in September. The Education Alliance Program came about, oh gosh, it was an idea that Charles Phillips, our CEO had a while back, he was looking about, how do we actually get more talents within Infor. How do we get people to even know, quite frankly, who Infor is, and drive some more market awareness. How do we make sure people are excited about our products and solutions long term, right. So, the future customers, the future partners, hopefully the future employees as well. So, through that what we started to do was, he created this position and luckily I was hired into the role. And we've built this program where we partner with colleges, universities, as well as nonprofit organizations. We invest in them to invest in their students. So, essentially the same products and solutions and technologies that our customers here are basically learning about and paying for, we train students on. So, through their professors they learn hands on immersive technologies that businesses run on each and every single day and then hopefully they'll get excited and they'll want to come to work for Infor, one of our customers or one of our partners. And actually, they can actually, probably work for any IT company or any company in general because ERP is so pervasive. >> So, have you seen, you said this started a few years ago. >> Martine: Yes. >> Are you seeing results yes? >> Yes, we are starting to see results. We are actually really, really excited. So, we've hired I believe 24 students at Infor. Our partners are starting to hire students as well. In fact, we had somebody hire one of the graduates just last week and we had our first talent fair on Sunday, which was exceedingly well attended, so there's been a ton of excitement. We have, I believe there are about 12 partners who are in our formal Partner In Education Program where we actually bring the partners in, they engage in the classroom and the training and have hands on experiences with the students themselves. And the students get to shadow them in real life situations. So, things like consulting, which are pretty hard. I mean in IT part of what we are challenged with is SAP and Oracle and Infor, we all seem to hire from the same talent pool and the folks basically go from company to company to company. >> Hundred people, 99 seats. >> Yes, thank you. And what you see is customers want somebody who's got 20 years of deep industry expertise and so we get it. But you need an opportunity to actually start building that industry expertise so what we've been doing is actually creating that pathway for the students to be able to do that and our partners and our customers are actually much more open to that then they were before. So, we're starting to see that pipeline truly grow. By the September of this year, I believe we'll have close to a hundred students who've taken our first series of implementation consulting courses at QNE, which we launched this winter. So, that's one of the biggest things that we've done. As well as we've got our Center of Excellence that we've also opened up at City University of New York. So, we've got a practical experience course, we've got students who are also going very deep around analytics and just kind of building from there. And I think the last time we had spoken last year, I think we had about 16 or less institutions. We've grown to 33 institutions worldwide. We have eight, I believe in Amia, seven in the APAC area and they represent over 400 colleges and universities. So, it's been, it's been really exciting. >> So Martine, can you frame the parameters of the type of candidates that you are recruiting? How do you find them, what are the requirements? >> It's a combination. So, it can be anywhere from a business student who's actually possibly thinking of being in finance who hasn't even thought about a career in IT or technology. But those are the ones with a business mindset that we actually want to get interested because they will make amazing consultants over time. To somebody who's transitioning from roles, right, so maybe they've worked for a couple years in an industry and they've decided, you know, "I really don't want to do the marketing piece," or, "I'm burnt out on the finance piece "and I want to do something different." We have them in our continuing education courses as well. And they bring a very different view to that course. Because they're now learning those practical skills for being either a consultant or a sales person or or whatever they've actually decided to go about and do. And our employers actually get way excited about them as well because they are able to think not just as a technologist or not just as a business person, but within that kind of gray area which is where the industry is going, you have to know a little of all of it in order to be supremely effective. Especially on this consulting side. >> So, big theme, AI at the show, the hard question, median income in 1999 United States was $55,000 dollars, it's now around $50,000 dollars. Man versus machine, right. Now humans have always been replaced by machines, but it's the first time, really in history, that it's cognitive functions that are being replaced. Thoughts, I mean many people believe, I think they're correct, that education is the answer to that gap. Education, creativity, the combinations of those things are what will help solve that problem. Your thoughts on just that topic in general and what role education plays. >> I think what we're doing around AI is so exciting and it's just amazing to work at a company, one, that has named AI Coleman after the women who were in Hidden Figures, but from an education perspective I think you're spot on. I think the only way that we can actually continue to compete as a nation is if we make sure that we fix the education problem and I'm really excited to work for an organization where we're taking a very active role in doing that. So, by changing the model of having people just sit in a classroom learning something where there's really no context for how it's being used in business and it's more about what's being taught today for the roles that are today. What we're trying to do is imbed this kind of thought, leadership into the classroom, open the students' perspectives on what's possible and get them ready to be thoughtful about, okay, how do we embrace technology? How do you think it differently? How do you become agile? Because a lot of the jobs that are here today weren't here when I graduated, right so, how do we change the idea of what we go to school for and what we get educated on that we are actually producing people who are able to be thoughtful and to merge and to find different ways to use technology to come up with different pathways that have not been thought about before. We've never thought that way, right? >> And to evolve as the jobs change. So, we're preparing people for jobs that don't exist yet and they need to versatile in their own approach to how-- >> And excited about it, right? Not be fearful. >> And not fearful. >> Exactly, not be fearful, yeah. >> Well I wanted to congratulate you too because you were recently honored by Network Journal as one of the 25 most influential black women in business. Congratulations! >> Thank you. >> What does that mean to you especially when you think about young black women coming up in business, in technology, and in other industries, at a time where, there's questions about really how much opportunity... >> It's surreal, it was exceedingly humbling. It's on the backs of an amazing team. Who has done a lot of work, I've got some really great people behind me that I push really hard and I am very grateful for. I also have an exceedingly strong family. Who, when I was getting the award I made the comment that I don't feel like I've achieved anything that my parents have achieved, my parents are physicians. They came from Haiti, they came to the U.S. to give us better opportunities and they've done that. And that's what drives me, and in terms of people of color, we've got such a long way to go, but we've come so far. And I just wish that when you look at the history of the U.S. and the world, slavery was not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, and every time the U.S. takes two steps forward, sometimes you take a step back and it might feel like we're taking a step back right now, but if you stay focused on moving forward we will get there. And we will get further because doors are opening and people are doing amazing things and we need to do, I think, a better job when we are in positions where we are more visible in making sure we open doors for other people and not being apologetic about doing so. Because I think there's coded language sometimes that you hear about on, "Well, I can't have a diverse pipeline," "Oh, that means I'm lowering standards," that's bull, quite frankly. There are plenty of people looking for opportunities perhaps they don't fit the profiles that have always put in place, but when we talk about technology and careers the one thing we've talked about and we know is things are ever evolving and changing, and there is no one set profile or standard. So you might find that this kid who's actually been out there doing very different things in the community and just showing themselves as a leadership person in that community is the person that you need in your org. But because we're not having sometimes those conversations across our very safe ponds and we kind of stay with the same people a lot of times, it makes it hard to make those connections. But if we just start talking to each other a little bit more and the ones of us who are actually in these roles be unapologetic about making sure we're having those conversations and opening up doors, I think things will continue to move forward. >> So, what is your advice to companies in technology and in other industries about getting those people, who as you say, do not quite fit the profile, the standard profile of what they think they're looking for but that do add new perspectives and new ideas and new insights into companies. I mean, what would your advice be to employers? Do they need to start an Education Alliance Program? Is that the beginning? >> That can be part of it, but they just, they need to stop being corporate and stop being political. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. Change is hard, and you can do all of the right things, but if a hiring manager is still going to hire everybody who looks just like them then it's not going to change. And I don't think people do it all the time thoughtfully. It just kind of happens. You have to make the change, it has to come from the top. It also has to come from within the ranks. You have to have the tough conversations. It has to be an embedded part of what companies say they actually value and then they actually have to back it up. 'Cause lot of times people talk about it, but it doesn't come with the, "Okay, well I'm going to give you the approvals." Or, "I'm going to mandate that, yes, "when you have 20 open positions "that you actually have a diverse pipeline." Not a, "I'm going to set aside X number of seats "for one type of person," but you should at least interview a diverse pipeline. Perhaps you'll be surprised in what you see come out. We don't thoughtfully, in general, do that, and I think that's one of the key areas companies can be thoughtful about, and then the other thing is actually looking for talent outside of the same five schools or the same five places that people go to. It's getting out of your comfort zone. >> Can we tell the story, just to get it on record, of Coleman and how it was named, how it was announced this morning? Because not everybody in our audience was watching. >> Okay, so I hope I do it justice. (laughs) I was one of the people in the audience, but essentially for the folks who hopefully have seen Hidden Figures the movie, and it was about the women who were monumental, fundamental, the reason why we were able to make it to the moon. So, when we were having issues and we weren't sure if we had all our calculations in place and they were really thinking, okay, can we do this? Are we going to not be the first ones to get there? Our astronaut said, "Okay, I need this woman. "I need Miss Coleman to actually check these calculations. "If she says these are right, then we're good. "If not, I'm not going." >> Goosebumps, Martine. >> Right? That was amazing, that was amazing. And our CEO had the foresight, the idea, and the chutzpah I should say, (laughs) to decide, okay, when we're thinking about AI and we're thinking about visionaries, we're thinking about what we need to quantum leap what's happening in technology, we're thinking about having that level of insight and intelligence, that is who he wanted to name the product after, and I was telling my team, you know, I was tearing up, like, I'm so proud to work in an organization where our CEO would stand up unapologetically and say, this is how I'm going to name my product and this will be, you know, go down for quite some time. And the family was there which was so cool. And we had a standing applause, the first standing applause in the room. So it was amazing. >> Well it's not often you get a standing ovation at a tech conference. >> At a product announcement. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So I want to also just quickly talk about, piggy back off of this, and that is the culture of Infor. And you know, the things that we keep hearing about. It's a culture of learning, a culture of education, a culture that really starts at the top of bringing in different perspectives and also understanding the importance of, yes, of naming a new product after this black woman who toiled in obscurity and really was a hero of getting us to the moon, how do you create that culture? I mean and how to do you kind of keep it going? >> I think it comes down to leadership. I think it comes down to people you hire. It has to be every level of the organization. I think Charles does set the tone by doing things like this as well as other things like having an Education Alliance Program, quite frankly. And the way our program is scheduled we don't look just to the Harvards or the Princetons. We're looking to partner with community colleges that have amazing talent that possibly did not have the same access, but they still have the same possibility. So I think doing all of that is how you create the culture. Then making sure it is embedded in the people that you continue to bring into the organization and giving them the time and the freedom to have these sorts of conversations and embed it into the work that they do. So we've got creative people, like Hook and Loop, that in itself, so cool. How many IT companies said, oh, you know what, I'm going to bring over some artists, I'm going to bring over some film producers, that's the kind of thinking that gets you to diversity. >> Great, Martine thanks so much. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much. Thank you guys so much for the time, I appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Inforum after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube! Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to 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)

(upbeat synthesized music) >> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of Inforum, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Pam Murphy, she is the Infor COO, thanks so much for coming on the program-- >> Thank you for having us, thank you. >> So you're hosting for the third time, a special session devoted to WIN, the Women's Infor Network. Tell us a little bit about this session and who are the guests and what we can expect. >> Yes, absolutely, so as you said, it's our third year hosting it. It's a very popular session, it's the only non product session of the entire conference and open to everybody, men and women. We always have a fantastic lineup of speakers and this year is no different. So the way we work it is we do a combination of TED Talks and panel sessions so we've got Tan Lee, who's the founder of Emotiv brain augmentation technology. And then we've got Reshma Saujani who's the founder of Girls Who Code. She's done great stuff in terms of pioneering STEM and getting girls to code. So she's going to talk us through her work, if you will, in training so many girls to code and how she wants girls to adopt, and behaviors she wants them to exhibit in this industry. And then we've got what will be I'm sure a lively panel with Ambassador Susan Rice and Farah Pandith and we're going to be talking about the government's ability to manage the terrorism that we're seeing today and we're going to be talking counter terrorism, we're going to be talking about what lessons are we learning from what's going on in Europe and what is the role in technology in helping curb terrorism. So that's going to be an exciting and interesting session. And then we're going to have Dr. Jill Biden come in and hopefully lighten up the session and talk about resilience and leadership today, so very exciting, very much looking forward to it. It's 11 AM tomorrow morning in the Special Events Hall, and hopefully it will be good if not better than the last two years. >> Rebecca: And we're going to have many of those guests on our program >> Yes. >> after that too. So why, what is the purpose of it? It sounds like a great session and it's going to be enlightening and exciting to hear all those women talk, but what is your goal in gathering this group of women? >> I guess I should go back to the founding of WIN. So I started WIN probably over four or five years ago at this point and its purpose was to just galvanize and bring women together, allow forum in which they could mentor each other and where we could work on the advancement of women within the organization. It's something that as I traveled through the offices, people have been asking me a lot to create that forum, create that environment and so we've got hundreds of WIN chapters around the globe with thousands of women participating. So we have very regular sessions and we talk about topics that are relevant to women and also just about advancing their careers and given that at a forum we have so many thousands and thousands of not only our own Infor WIN members but also customers, we just thought it was a great opportunity to have one of our sessions at Inforum and invite inspiring female speakers to come and talk to us about their experiences, how they got to be where they are, the challenges that they met along the way. So what's interesting is that the only WIN or female aspect of the session is the fact that every speaker on stage is female. Outside of that, that's where the relevance ends in the sense that it really is talking to topics that is applicable to everyone. So that's why it is just a topic and an audience that appeals to everybody, men, female, old, and young. >> So these sessions are always interesting and inspiring. What kind of impact have they had? Can you share with us any results? >> Absolutely, so we have, first of all they're very inspirational for everybody attending and I've had customers, not only our own employees, but I've had customers reach out to me and say that they were inspired by a story and it caused them to take action and change in their life. And before they may have felt something but they heard from somebody else saying that how they overcame it and it caused them to honestly take change within their own lives and their own organizations. So for customers, partners, whoever's attending, it just, to hear from someone else, you often have the perception with these speakers that they have this fantastic upbringing, fantastic education, they're successful because it's a function of that. Well actually that's not often the case. People have had a hard upbringing or they've met a lot of challenges around the way and it's how they overcame those challenges and the resilience that they brought into the mix is what inspires people. So really that's what I would say people get out of it, and often spawning from that, we often end up as well tailoring programs or development techniques which we feel would be of benefit to folks beyond that. So one of our speakers last year prompted a big thought about diversity and how we should be dealing with ways in which we may be dismissive of certain topics or abrasive to people, so it's thought provoking and it inspires action, which is obviously what we want to get out of it. >> We funded a nonprofit initiative last year in partner with another journalism outfit, The GroundTruth, to study women in tech and we presented at the, we had The Cube at the Grace Hopper Conference and some of the things that came out of that, I wanted to comment, chief data officers actually have a disproportionately higher percentage of women, maybe it's 'cause it's such a thankless job and they're (laughing) wiling to take it on. And then we found cyber bullying had a very negative effect on the participation of women in tech which is about 17% of the women. And then of course the salary disparity, one of the areas that we found was most egregious was Cambridge, Mass, now this is supposed to be a progressive, relatively liberal area. >> Our hometown. >> And it was huge, our hometown, very high disparity of low participation of women in tech. Any thoughts on that data and what kind of progress you'd like to see us make as an industry? >> I'm hopeful of the fact that the next generation will look back on where technology is now from the perspective of the low representation of women and that whole diversity factor and look on it as being a non-issue. I'm hopeful in the sense that, I don't think it's going to be as pronounced as we have it now. I think we're doing a far better job of going out to colleges, to institutions, and enabling girls and providing girls with coding courses. So I'm hoping it's not going to be a longterm issue for us. From our perspective, to your point, we look at the various line of businesses and functions within our organization and we see where is the disparity arising and where do we need to focus? And so interestingly enough, if you look at G&A functions or if you look at marketing functions, it's 50/50, right, in terms of representation, but there's definitely certain functions where either the nature of what they're doing or if it's a high travel related function, meaning you're away for long periods of time, there are certainly the areas I think which don't have as equal distribution in terms of men, and for those really, we've been working on creating programs to ease those burdens that may be had, or else promote them positively where it literally is an unconscious bias, if you will. It's a long topic, for sure, that I could go on about for a long period of time but I just think it's constant, looking at unconscious biases, it's looking at ways in which we feel that there's fairness, if you will, into the equation. And a lot of the time I honestly feel that it's not conscious, if you will, and it therefore just needs to be looked at specifically at ways and means in which that could be addressed or tackled. >> So as a successful woman in technology, COO at a major technology company, what advice do you have for that young woman who wants to get into technology but is dispirited by the headlines and by what appears to be a very macho culture where there is vast salary discrepancies? >> Yeah, it's unfortunate that that has come out all too much more frequently and with volume in the last six months for the companies that we're aware of. But I would say, I personally haven't experienced that, and I'm personally of the view that, by the way, I never meant to end up in this industry, so I look back and think how on Earth did I actually get here, but I think you have to be willing to take risks and you have to be wiling to dismiss a lot of what you hear and look on the fact that there is a lot of very successful women, even within Infor. Since we started WIN, we have had a huge increase in the amount of SVPs and VPs within our organization. I think it's something like a 60% increase in terms of who we have. There is so much more women in very, very senior roles now than we've ever had before, so I'm hopeful that it is changing. I hope that some recent coverage and recent events have not, will not create a longterm impact, but I think people just need to look and see with the tech industry booming, with the way in which people are being compensated, that it's a good industry in which you can be very successful and do great things. >> Dave: And cloud helps. >> Yeah. >> It does. >> Yeah. >> There are far more women at application oriented shows than there are infrastructure oriented, 'cause hardware guys are hardware guys. I don't know why, like mechanics, other than Mona Lisa Vito, mostly hardware people. But let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the global alliances. You are running that initiative here. These are folks that we haven't typically seen at Inforum but they're coming out of the wood works, what's going on, what's driving that? >> Yeah first of all we have a fantastic base of existing partners who had great successes in implementing Infor applications for their customers and so but with the growth that we've been seeing, honestly, in our business, over the last number of years, we just need to have more and more delivery capacity to create more choice for our customers as to who they can go to to implement our software. And if you think about the move to the cloud and if you think about digitalization and the fact that every customer is becoming more consumed and obsessed with technology because it's changing their businesses so fundamentally, they do want the option and the choice of having the large global system integrators, digital integrators, that they can go to do massive transformation work and business process re-engineering and program management and change management. And so for us it was important to form good reliances with the Deloittes, the Accentures, the Caps, and the Grant Thorntons in order to provide that larger ecosystem of transformational services that we can offer to our customers. So it's great, they're all platinum sponsors here at Inforum this year and there's over a hundred very senior executives and managing directors from those four. And we're just very excited about the extent and pace to which they're building out Infor practices, so it's great. >> I have to ask you, so don't hate me for saying this, but those guys love to pig out on big complicated ERP implementations that take two and three years. Is that world just going away and it's moving toward more of a digital transformation and a whole new line of thinking and that's why there's a good fit with Infor or is it something else? >> I think they understand and know that the older days of a company spending $100 million on an ERP implementation are gone, that's really not acceptable anymore. It's absolutely not our strategy, as you know from being here at the conference, our strategy is around creating industry specific end to end suites which don't require modifications and which are purpose built for the cloud. And so that is very clear to them and they understand that and are embracing the concept because they realize that cloud is an enabler, it's just another deployment method, but fundamentally it's about helping the customers take advantage of that technology and transform their businesses and to do that, it requires a lot more than software. And so they're changing, our industry is changing. Steve talked to the point of the stage today that the cost of technology is becoming very low and that therefore the permeation of technology in everything we do is going to be so prevalent. So it's understood and for them, it's more about helping our customers get to that digital age and being able to transform their businesses to cope with the changing technology. >> Are you satisfied with the pace? >> Pace of? >> Of the change, of getting people to the cloud. Do you feel there is, is the momentum there? >> Well we've seen huge growth in our sector. We have completely tipped the balances. I would have said, obviously it's been coming, it's like Salesforce.com and companies who basically do certain applications in the cloud and for us, we're different because we have complete end to end suites in the cloud, mission critical applications. And so our business has grown enormously over the course of the last three years and I think now it's mainstream, if you will. And so we're very pleased and happy. We have a lot of customers who have made, obviously we have over 8,400 customers now already there. And the pace is increasing. And it's just a continuous effort for the customers who haven't gone already, helping them understand what they need to do to get there, and that's what we've been doing in spades for the last couple of years. >> Great, well Pam Murphy, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> We really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vallente, we will have more from The Cube's coverage of Inforum 2017 just after this. 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