(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)