(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way. >> Welcome back to Miami. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. This is Day two of the mon 2019 3 cubes. Third year at V mon, We did New Orleans. We did Chicago last year. Course here at the Fountain Blue in Miami. Great venue for an event like this. I'm Dave a lot. It was my co host, Peter Burroughs. Abba Dabbas. Eye is Adi is here. He's the head of a Charles Russell speech. Liza London based law firm. How about great. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thankyou. So you tell us about this judge. Interesting name. Charles Russell. Speech lease. It was a merger of two firms, Right. Tell us how it all came about. >> Back in 2,014 Charles, loss of species performed for a merger between two different companies. Charles docile and speaks Lee Burcham from a 90 perspective. That was very interesting for the two departments coming together s So we have a limited time period where we had to merge these two companies Two different systems different data centers, different data sets. So it was formed by emerging back in 2,014 for five years on way here today >> that we see this a lot, you know, Emanate goes down. The acquiring company of this sounds like it was a merger. You know, they sort of battle. Okay, who's going toe? Really? Which framework is going to win? Because I'm sure had that conversation. But so to take us through that merger, what it entailed what? What the scenario looked like and how you plan for it. Sure. >> So I was part of the Charles. Also legacy Charles Russell team on, then obviously speaks about. Some had their own team as well. So initially, when we first found out about the merger, it was essential for the two teams to get together to work out. Okay, What systems? You have free mail. What systems you have for document management system playing trump cards. Which is who's got the best system and which way do we wantto move forward? A little. >> Ah, >> so but being a law firm, most law firms around the world and in the UK especially used the same types of software so essentially that from that perspective it was It was it was quite simple. But then way had to work out. How do we How do we go forward with this? Because two different headquarters in the London area. Which office do we move into? Sort of logistics around that. Can we fit in pre merger? It was six. Charles Lawson had sickle. Roughly 600 people, especially birds, had roughly 500 people. So pretty comparable. Yeah, yeah. So working out space logistics was was an issues >> making that even even more complicated, right? Yeah. >> One of the things that's interesting about a law firm, like versus a traditional manufacturer or AW financial services firm that has a lot of very fast right writing systems and have to scale on those lines is a law firms feature very complex dogs, very complex in from out of files, a lot of files that are written. But at the same time, you have to be repurposed to a lot of different work flows very sensitive to external contingent regulatory change. And so you have all of that happening, especially, I mean, two years ago from now on MySpace steak, and it was you're getting into brexit stuff, too, so that also had to be a source of uncertainty. So how has it been combining external regulatory issues the way that technology is being used in law firms and some of the new work clothes that you guys trying to support? And then adding, On top of that, the complexity of bringing these two firm GPR >> GPO itself was It was a year old project for us on. Obviously, we've got offices. The Middle East, but obviously is in the Far East on DH in Central Europe has well, so data logistics or where it sits, is an issue for us as well. So GDP, ours being a big project for us in terms of the merger itself. It was it was very, very difficult for the two I T departments to come together on actually work out. How how do we go to one unified systems? Essentially one doctor man, just in one email system. All of that took a lot of plan in law project management on essentially within the legal press itself. We got doubted in the time frames that we had that we can achieve it on within. I think It was 18 month period. We had merged order, different systems and various offices because speech the Bertram and Time is what I had. Offices in Zurich and Geneva were to merge with different offices together as well. So it was. It was a big, big task for the i T department on the firm itself. >> They're very tight migration deadlines. And and as you started to approach those deadlines you had to worry about, Okay, When we're going to cut over, how do we avoid downtime? How do we make sure that we don't? You know, I have bad data, data, corruption and the like. So how did you plan for that? And how did it go? >> So wait, we're here. C'mon on DH. Veen was It was it was a big part of our migration process. So where we had two different parts of the business Different storage systems, Different actualization system's way used to mean a CZ. The middleman basically, to my great data, from one day to center to another, using swink it. So where there was a large amount of terabytes and terabytes, amount of data way had swing kit available to us using team were able to be to be essentially a love the environments into the swing care and then bring them over to the other side of the business. And vain was essentially part on on top of that, making sure that the data that we were coming that will bring in a cross is true and not corrupt on DH, that using some of their technology is sure backups and stuff like that really, really was essential to, you know, do migration going well >> And was was Wien installed and both organizations at the time? Or was that something that you had to sort of redeploy? >> And yeah, So Legacy Charles also had way was actually myself going back probably eight years ago. Version For a time, I think team had 20,000 customers. So to here >> there were version 10 now 33 150 >> 1,001,000, 4,000 month. >> That makes me proud that we invested in vain when we did good car. So yeah, it was It was a good call from us, and essentially three other side of the business did not have. But then we just wait. Expanded our Venus State to look at both sides and then bring him across on. And then, ever since then, we've grown our vamos state across the world, across all of officers. So >> So how did you do that? So that was that was another migration that had to occur. And did you? You kind of do those simultaneously. Did you do the theme of migration first, and then bring the two systems together? >> Do you seem to do Stouffer special sauce in the migration? >> Yeah. So Veen was essentially a tool that we used to my great data sensors from one data center to another using their backup technology using their replication technology, we were able to replicate all of one side's virtual machines to the other. And then that gave us that gave us the flexibility as well. When when we had the limited down time periods that we've had, they give us the flexibility to actually Circe the business is during these particular ours. We're not gonna be able to You're not gonna have access to these systems because we're going to bring up systems from point A to point B. So veen was essential to them if >> you had to do it over again. If he had a mulligan, what would you have done differently? What what advice might you give to somebody who's trying to go through a similar migration? >> I would say Give your partners and lawyers more realistic time. Pray the time frame that we would get. >> Or don't let them give you an unrealistic time for him. >> Exactly. Yeah, so says ensured that the amount of work it's it's not just day to itself. You know, we're talking network and we're talking security. We're talking, you know, to to similar sized companies coming together. We were very, very limited time frame, consolidating all of their systems into one which is essential for the two parts of the business to collaborate together because, you know, way could have taken our time. We could have got to take this free four years a CE, far as we're concerned. But the fact that we did do it in such a quick time for him and that business to parts of the business from Day one can collaborate much better with each other. So >> we talked a lot about digital business transformation and you know, our approach or our observations on the digital business transformations, the process by which you altar and change your firm to re institutionalize the work. Change your game. Tomato Grover. All governments model as you use data as an asset, so that's affecting every firm everywhere. How's it affecting a law firm and you know your law from specifically on? How is that going to change your stance in your approach to data protection >> Data is incredibly important to unlawful. A zit is to most most organizations, but in terms of, you know, one of one of the things that's quite important in terms of law firms. We work with the financial institutions, so we held information by that. We hold personal data way hold all times of information. Charles Oscar speech leads works with Aware is of law apart from Kunal. So the areas of law that they worked with his vast in terms of the amount of data that we hold and essentially I mean, for us data is the most important thing that runs the firm and having visibility tow our data. How do we How do we work that data? How do we then market based on the data that we have? How do we market ourselves from that data. You know, there might be one area the business that's dealing with a family issue, family law. But then, you know that that could correspond with the litigation issue. You know, how do we work that data? To be to be an advancing to our businesses is extremely important. For >> what? What do you think of the announcements this week? I'm kind of curious. I was liketo ask the practitioners of what they think about. You know what was announced. You had, uh, well, you had the ve made $1,000,000,000. That's kind of fun and cool, but But you had the with the program, which was kind of interesting. The whole ap I look the beam availability orchestrator, where they're really talking about recovering from backups as a host that needed to recover from, you know, a replicated instance. You know, some of the automated testing stuff was kind of interesting. They talked about dynamic documentation, things you saw this week that you'll actually go back and say, Hey, I can apply that to solve a problem. Sure. >> So, essentially, I think I've been a really good question is very relevant to us many of not just ourselves law firm but many of the other law firms around the world are now looking at cloud based services now for us. I mean, this was a big thing five years ago way you know, everyone was talking about public clouds. Us. We're now we're now looking clouds and where basically, we've bean pushed by the vendors themselves to go towards cloudlike Citrix, for example. Their licensing model was based around their services. So is Microsoft in Mike's off? You don't you don't really have, you know, exchange anymore. Within premises you have off 365 A lot of the SAS applications are moving toward the cloud on DH. What wrote me? I had to say doing the keynote in regards to act, too. And how team are trying to be the visionaries in terms of look at that cloud is their next big thing for the next 10 years, offering often a crucial and for businesses like ours who have limited exposure to cloud technologies limited understanding, essentially having a tool that could migrate from one cloud to another. It's fantastic, you know, we've offered, you know I've spoken to, obviously are United directors around the other law firms where I wanted to have gone to the public cloud. But they don't know how to come back in and having a tall that essentially gives you that flexibility to bring it back in house to go form a ws to zoo. Or if there's a particular assess application, for example, that piers better with a W s. But you've got your other application that piers with that particular application is your Why would you want to have in the door? You'll probably want to move into a W eso for us, I think. What? The message coming out of'em on this year has bean really, really helpful for us. >> So So when you started with theme, they had it said 20,000 custom You like the 20001st customer on DIT was coincided with the virtual ization, you know, craze. Do you feel like the team knowing what you know about them, you have a lot of experience with them Consort of Replicate that success in this town intendant and in Act two, >> I think when I first looked at them, Wow, this is really, really simple. It's a bit like an iPhone. You know you given iPhone to your grandmother or to your children, and they have to play with it. And I see the beam as an intuitive piece of software that easy fighting professionals to get on with it, as their slogan said a few years ago. It just works. It does just work. Wear were great advocates of him. It's worked wonders for us. We've acquired smaller businesses using we've managed companies using and when I see you know, when you go to the sessions and you see the intelligence behind their thinking, I think going back to your question I think Wei si oui, si, vamos a strategic partner for us when we see their vision and we believe in their vision, and I think what they're doing in terms of what they working on next few years, I think we're well favor there, and I think, you know, essentially, that's where the most of their business is going to come from, >> where you sit down with, you know, rat mayor over over vodka and he says, Tell me the one thing I could do to make your life you know, easier, better you can't say cut prices s a hellhole. But what would you advise him to >> make my life better >> other than Jim instead of >> yeah, eyes that >> would make you crazy. >> So in terms of a zoo, a technology, >> your business relationship or something, she'd like to see them do that would. I >> think in terms of mergers and acquiring companies, seen license rentals will be a good thing. I know, I know. They give you a valuation license keys, and that's something that you can use. So, for example, if we were to acquire a company that has hundreds of servers and PM's having license rentals for a period of time, able >> to spin it up and spin it down actually allowed >> Exactly. Yeah, that would be an advantage. I think in terms of what you know what they're doing in the marketplace, and a lot of law firms use him. I feel I can't do any more than they are doing now. And in all the years that we've used to be my fingers on eight years now, but we've only had one serious problem, and the way they got that problem, you know the way, the way they communicated to reverse the way they a lot of different teams across the the Europe and the US go involved. I think, you know, in terms of service, in terms of software, in terms of what they what they do for us. I don't think there's anything more to add. Teoh. Right? Maia's vision. >> That's great for their custom of it. Well, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube is not heavy. Really? Thank you very much. You're welcome to keep it right there, buddy Peter, and I'll be back with our next guests right after this short break. We're live from Miami at the front of Blue Hotel. You're watching the Cube from Vienna on 2019 right back.

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering Google cloud next 19 taught to you by Google cloud and its ecosystem partners hello everyone welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco the Moscone Center for the Google clouds conference is called Google next 2019 I'm Chevrolet my costume in omim de Ville ante is also here doing interviews our next guest is probably Bob who's the VP of product and design for server lists at Google probably great to see you thanks for coming on thank you for having me so you'd be a you're the VP of Product you got the keys to the kingdom on the roadmap you're seeing all the announcements obviously server lists cloud run was announced cloud code was mentioned on stage that's going to come out tomorrow so code build run this is DevOps this is actually happening yeah you know what super exciting is that we've we're finally solving the problem for customers and taking a customer centric view of this I'll start off with a little bit of the journey we took to get here right as we were talking to customers they kept coming back to three things that they wanted from us the first thing they wanted was agility they understand that you know cloud could give them great cost savings but they also wanted to be able to move faster and innovate right the second bit they wanted was having the flexibility to be hybrid and multi-cloud super important especially to our largest customers and then the third piece was they've really struggled with his journey to cloud and they wanted our partnership to make it a much more seamless and non-deceptive journey so as we talk to them about these three things right we came back to the drawing board and said hey what are the products that we can build to make their journey to be more cloud native and more agile much more seamless and future-proofed that much better right so we came back to the drawing board and came up with three products that you talked about this now the first was we looked at developers and their journeys and we said look they're building in traditional ideas like IntelliJ or vs code optimized for local development right and they're not writing a lick of Yama they're right for kubernetes and we said okay how can we take those environments and help those development teams build cloud native apps really really easily so really just turbocharging their cloud native development so bill cloud code which extends their local ids and lets them deploy to remote clusters so they can get full debugging full deployment building its integrated in the cloud build and they get the full kubernetes a development environment right in place so cloud build was released earlier you got enhancements of that so news the hard news here is enhancements to cloud build cloud code as new announce here yeah cloud run announced today that's right so this is the new this is the new hard news that's right so bottom line what does it mean for a developer so like I didn't enterprise so I'm a cio I'm a site C so I'm gonna be putting all my eggs in the cloud basket I've still gonna run the on Prem day is gonna be critical to my strategy it's this early day set up time or are you guys thinking it's more about the setup or more the life cycle of CI CD pipelining all the way to application deployment a great question John so I think where we are in this journey is that enterprises have started off with something that's the most basic cloud ready workloads that have been lifted and shifted we now see the next wave of workloads this is the 80% of workloads that are still on premise we see them start to get cloud ready and cloud native and the way that their enterprises are gonna do that is by building on top of the standards we've created like kubernetes and sto and key native and what cloud cold and build and run and of course Anthes that we talked off this morning as well these are great managed solutions from Google fully managed solutions from Google that let you get cloud native fast all right Polly wonder if you can help us you know spin through I see a disconnect in the market so you know Google showed great leadership in the container space and of course kubernetes we came out of Google and when I look at like cloud run okay it's helping to connect that and Kay native to kubernetes in service when I talk to a lot of the developers and service it's not the infrastructure moving up the stack it's they didn't want to even think about it it's right built in the cloud that's right I focus on the application I don't even think about that so I've got this big gap as to you know on premises forget it I don't never want to touch it or think about it and you know the one of the reasons you know there's the term server list would put it to the side but now if I need one is this environment I don't want to think about it and we know hybrid is a reality but there's this big disconnect as to what kind of developer are you or you a DevOps person that came from an infrastructure background or are you just building apps today yeah yeah yeah we're definitely seeing that from our customers right so one thing that we hear all the time is developers don't want to just not think about infrastructure they actually want the managed service and the platform they're building on to think about the infrastructure and optimize it for them so it's not this program will infrastructure it it's cloud run programming the infrastructure for you so you don't have to do it and I think increasingly you're gonna see products like cloud run and anthos and cloud code let developers focus just on code because that's what they want to do right I don't ever seen a developer say I really want to write a Yama file or I want to set up more configuration parameters right so I think we're gonna get to the place where you have developers being able to focus on cold and all of the rest of this being taken care of by platforms like code and run and anthos automation becomes key I mean Jennifer Lynn's demo I thought was very game-changing because she made the comment developers can focus on their code and agility not access permissions and all the configuration management that goes on under the you guys gonna provide that in an automatic programmable way we're gonna believe he is and she kind of teased out service missions so service missions kind of point in the future which is app developers are gonna still need to be aware of maybe not aware of what cloud run how to manage those sirs as they come stand up and get pulled down dynamically yeah how do you view that because this has become a gonna become complex is that gonna be automated is that where cloud run comes in you expand on this whole impact of service meshes because that's the next level that's right that's right so if you think about key native it's built on kubernetes and it forms the kind of triad with sto as well right and what a product like cloud run does is it lets you not have to think about that because at the end of the day we don't want developers to have to think about K native what cloud run is it takes care of the K native portability and compatibility for you and all you do is focus on the code itself right so ultimately we want developers to focus on their applications but I will say this right we do care about another important constituent which is all of those folks who've already got an apps built out there can those workloads be serviced as well and that's part of the problem we're trying to solve it that's an operational thing all right so let's take a step back here so server list actually fanfare has been great we're seeing a lot of traction people are enamored by it because functions as a service has been very compelling whether it's retail managing you know that spiked loads and becomes we see some some use cases where it's like you know really an amazing thing where is it limiting what is the next level growth for server list where do you see you mention workloads and we see people deploying functions and being happy with it are there limitations with serverless how does it go to the next level can you take a minute to describe the current state of server lists and what's coming around the corner now so great question the first thing I'll say is that there's a ton of developers who come up to us every day and tell us cloud functions is awesome right and they really like functions as a service they like the event-driven approach to it they like the service full approach but several is provides love the programming model that's great but there's an another large contingent of developers who tell us look this is super constraining for what I want to do I don't get to choose the libraries I want you're forcing me into a particular programming model can you give me more flexibility and what they see every day is the flexibility that containers provide especially on kubernetes right and what we've tried to do with cloud run is try to bridge those worlds where you get all of the flexibility that you want right that you get with containers but then combine it with what what you really want with the operational model which is service right so you pay only for what you use and of course you get the agility of service as well now one thing that we've noticed heard some great stories about this is a customer of ours Veolia which is one of the early adopters of cloud run and they've been partnering with us we thank them for it they are running a complex workload you talked about retail what Veolia does is they're large French multinational they do energy water and environmental services these are things that need to be highly reliable very complex and these are workloads that have existed for ages right and what viola is doing is using cloud run to run that complex workload but in a service in a service full way running in a service fashion all right take a minute explain what's a complex workload for your definition what is a simple workload because guys again we love functions Stu and I always talk about how great it is but what's that what's the D mark line when when does something become complex by your standards where you guys are addressing they could think describe the characteristics of a complex workload so the first thing is does the workload require flexibility right meaning are their custom workloads sometimes even legacies C++ or C applications do they need to pull that functionality in as well right do they need to pull random artifacts from across the enterprise to combine it and sometimes these are things that have been built over 20 years ago they're really critical mission critical pieces of software that need to be able to trigger and run right and can we actually take that flexibility but also combine in with a highly reliable environment right so were close like New Orleans there is no downtime right they need to be up 24 by 7 for 365 days of the year right so that flexibility plus that level of reliability is what we look at when we look at complexes so you're getting into complex systems where you got some code may be written in a mainframe COBOL in C++ we mentioned that was my jamm what kind of old dating myself but that was state-of-the-art back in the 90s so I'm running an agile job maybe of standing up cloud native but I need a use software and data from a system that's where is that where the container piece comes that ku burning it on either kubernetes but cloud run also supports docker so let's say you're running it in a docker container all you need is a docker container image and we can host that workload on program yeah Polly help us understand where where Google kind of what what's the same one what's different compared to the other service offerings out there just what I've heard feedback the last year or two is you know the great thing about server list is it's really easy to get started I've talked to marketing people that have no coding background that you know can get off and running it but doing complex mission-critical stuff yeah like we understand you know there is no magic wand NIT no silver bullet to make it easy but you know what do you see as Google's role in in this broader marketplace and you know where does open-source fit into that too yeah yeah so first I'll start off by saying there's a whole host of functions that are running on cloud functions which are relatively lightweight simple targeted event-driven functions those work great where we see us really making a difference for our customers is in two ways the first is get these more complex workloads that are currently running in a container whether it's a docker container our and or on gke for that matter and bring the agility of service to those workloads so it's the first thing it's something that we think is very unique because combining containers with serverless the second bit really is the open approach we've taken right built on top of K native key native as you know has a number of partners so one of the cool demos that you'll see during during Google Cloud next is you'll see a workload being shifted from cloud run on gke to the IBM cloud IBM is one of our partners 4k native without a single line of code and that flexibility is something that I think customers really decided talk about the business pen and some of the benefits at the business level in a developer level at the operations level can you hit those three points yeah of serverless silikal server less on those three sectors what's the benefits yep so we talked about the benefits for developers for developers it's simply about agility focus on your own code don't worry about Gamal don't worry about ki native you don't have to worry about any of that we'll take care of it for you the second benefit that I'll talk about is again this is just a benefit for the CIO which is hey we're gonna give you the flexibility and the openness so you can have portability of your workloads across whatever and why are you environment you want whether it's on tram or in a cloud whether it's Google or another cloud that's the second benefit the third bit is all of the operational benefits of service one of the things you'll see us do and continue to commit to do is we'll bill you to the hundredth of a millisecond right and so you'll continue to get that with all of the resiliency you expect of Google infrastructure security also pretty much baked in as well security is big then there's a fully managed offering from Google and so you'll get security compliance policies all Big Data of course we watched the keynote and we watch every word from Koreans giving Diane green a little tip of the hat which was nice signal a lot of class a great respect for that but jennifer lynn said something i want to get your reaction to she was kind of talking about her thing doing a great demo he changing and when she said this would allow you to negotiate better contracts okay that might have been a slip of the tongue your reaction that that implied to me I took that and say whoa that means leverage shifts to the customer your thoughts and that kind of maybe a slip of the tongue but if you're saying that I couldn't have options and choice yes Janice pardon this is what customers want and at Google what we're focused on is giving customers what they want and one of the things that customers are worried about today is lock-in and especially in the server this area because the current offerings are so proprietary customers are worried about it because they want server lists for all the benefits offers that we talked about here but they do want that flexibility and that's what we negotiate actually we know Oracle is very strict on their cloud this is going to give customers the choice is the saying that's whoa you want a license renewal yeah that's what you're getting out here so Polly you talked about choice and flexibility you know kubernetes gives some of that concern with serverless is if I look at a sure if I look at AWS if I look at Kay native you know those three aren't the same I talked there there's a small start-up called trigger mesh that's getting Kay native to work with AWS lambda but do you see a future is there you know I've talked to the CMC F I've looked at some of the various pieces that you know serverless isn't just something that I'm baked into a cloud yeah look I think we've seen extraordinary momentum around Kay native it's very similar to what we had seen when in the early days of kubernetes this huge amount of ecosystem interest and so we'll see continued innovation where you'll see work load portability come to service and I'm confident in that because of all of the momentum we were seeing around Canada so we're committed at Google to K native and its success so you'll see us continue to innovate yeah talk about open source open source becomes a very strategic part you can Shin kubernetes which you guys were the that have the DNA the founding fathers of kubernetes now teams on the team went to vmware someone have Microsoft some stay within Google containers certainly we see what you guys have done when four against four J but open source still this fear of open source I mean I don't mean it in a way that it's going to be inhibited and primitive but support making sure s LA's work latency microservice is going to be involved you mentioned k- yeah so as open source accelerates the time then value for the code that also triggers this op side of the serviceability and reliability and support what's your thoughts on that how are you guys how do you see the industry supporting that that critical piece of the puzzle yeah could not be more critical right for customers to be able to adopt this because the number one thing that we need to do for customers is give them a managed offering that lets them not have to worry about security lets them not have to worry about compliance lets them not have to worry about policies or identity etc right bake all of that into the managed service and then the second operational bit is which is as important this goes to what Thomas talked about at the very end of his keynote which is the open source announcement is we want to make it simple for customers to adopt it will be supported by Google and the partner you'll get unified billing unified support and one person to call when you have a problem yeah Polly we're at an interesting point in open source today because they're they want to get your opinion as a product person and your relationship with open source because you know there's a certain cloud out there it's they're gonna give you open source as a managed service but you have some of the companies that are making like open source databases changing their policies to try to fight against just being you know taken over by somehow the big players how does Google react to that yeah for us the approach is all about partnership because we think together we can better serve customers needs and best serve them and so our approach has always been about partnership so whether it's kubernetes or key native or the larger manage store manager open source offerings that we talked about earlier in the keynote we want to bring all of these together so we can serve customers so you're gonna see us continue to like support the open source equals because we believe that innovation is absolutely critical to helping our customers really start innovated in be agile final question I know we're tight on time I want to get this in because you know I see a lot of positive I've come out of the show there's been some critical analysis around you've got to build up salespeople and all the field stuff which is you guys are well aware of but one of the things that was kind of teased out in the open source announcement was the role of Google having their own ecosystem Asli the C & C has been a big tailwind for Google you guys been a big part of that ecosystem as a cloud commercial provider and with these kinds of server list you're going to have an ecosystem starting to develop kind of a thousand flowers blooming pun intended so how do you see that in your area because this is going to be super important partnering ecosystem support yeah which is you know developer traction distribution of software integration opportunities that's why in monetization all kind of come together your thoughts huge hugely critical for us and that's something that we've been focused on we have a rich ecosystem of partners for service we're gonna continue to build it out across all of the different pieces you need one of the things we didn't talk much about was our entire operational stack monitoring logging all of those pieces right we need to bring all of those together along with all of our partners we have a big partnership with the likes of data dog right number of others so we're gonna continue to partner with the entire ecosystem so we can go solve the problems that they have are you guys gonna show them the white space where they can play is gonna be part of the strategy yeah so it's gonna be across the board you'll see us continue to support the key native ecosystem tremendously and like lean into that and we're already excited to see all the different offerings that are exist on key native same thing with kubernetes we're gonna continue to like press hard we've got on the operational side we've got an offering called open census it's got lots of traction again just open monitoring of applications so we're gonna continue to do that across the board yeah probably great to have you on vice president of product and design got the keys to the kingdom right here he's the who's running the show for the server list really the key part of how kubernetes really intersects old and new to create the next generation applications thanks for joining us and sharing the insight I'm Jeff forest do many men here live coverage Google next more coverage after this short break

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

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, welcome to the nation's capital, a rain soaked Washington DC. We're here for Inforum 18, Dave Vellante, John Walls We're in the Walter Washington Convention Center. The fourth time, theCUBE has been at an Infor show and getting bigger and better than ever, David. >> That's right John. This is, let's see, the first one was in New Orleans several years ago. Then Infor skipped a year, and then did Javits couple years in a row. That's sort of the headquarters of where Infor is, very close to the Javits Center. And Charles Phillips, of course, lives in New York City. And this year they decided to come to the nation's capital. I mean, Infor is an interesting company. About $3billion in revenue, essentially it is a private equity roll up. From Golden Gate and others, that really the roots of it are in Lawson Softwares. Some of you may remember Lawson Softwares, the enterprise software company. And then Charles Phillips came on, and of course he was the architect of Oracle's M and A. Probably spent $30 plus billion for Larry Ellison, remaking Oracle. Completely transforming Oracle, brought some of that expertise to Infor in this private equity play, this roll up. And then bought many, many software companies, rolled them up together and really started to compete, using a different model. So, Infor's sort of expertise, if you will is around so called Micro verticals, so they cover a lot of different industries, hospitality industries, they got also manufacturing, ERP, >> Retail financial >> Retail financial, health care, and then they also have horizontal applications like Human Capital management. Their differentiation, is several fold. One major point is they go after what they call the last mile. So they call this micro verticals. So the last mile functionality that would normally have to be customized, Infor does that work for you. Now, the advantage of that is two fold. One is you don't have to do a bunch of custom mods all that hard work is done. The second is, another part of the differentiation is cloud. So they chose, several years ago to go with AWS cloud to put their SaaS on the cloud. Charles Phillips said 'hey when we were an on-prem software company, we didn't manage our own servers for our customers. Or manage customer servers, we didn't do that. So why would we do it in the cloud? We don't want to compete with Google and Microsoft and Amazon in terms of scale, so were going to put our software on the Amazon cloud.' So that's another point of differentiation, the reason that is so important in the context of custom mods, is if you're rolling out new upgrades on a periodic basis, and you hear this a lot from Servicenow customers, for example another cloud software company. You can't do custom mods and then take advantage of the new releases. Because you're going to be way behind. Okay, so you have to have that hard work done so that you can avoid those custom modification. And that is something Infor has been very proud of. So as I say, $3billion company. Last year they took a $2billion investment from Koch industries. Now that investment, largely went to recapitalising the company, the private equity guys probably took some money off the table as did the four, what I call the four horsemen. They were the four, sort of new founders of Infor including Charles Phillips, Pam Murphey who is still there and then two others Duncan Angove and Stephan who have left the company, so they have got some succession planning now. We saw a different, two new faces up on stage Soma and we're going to have some other folks on that we'll introduce you to. But so, now we're entering a new phase and it's the phase of what Charles Phillip's coined 'Human Potentials'. So big focus this year on human capital management, we heard that. Big focus on AI, they talked a lot about robotic process automation. I just had a meeting, last night at the airport in DCA with the head of marketing at an RPA company, UiPath, they are smoking hot, they just raised 225 million they have gone from 2 million to 200 million over night. And that space is exploding, it was interesting to hear Charles Phillips talk a lot today about Robotic process automation, RPA. Which is essentially software >> Break that down for me. >> So RPA is software robots and software robots are used to automate mundane tasks. Having machines do very specific tasks and you are seeing this a lot in financial services and a lot of back office automation. It's not physical robots moving around, it's basically software based processes that machines can do. Repetitive processes, that machines can do better. Machines don't get tired, so they can do these repetitive tasks, take that away those mundane tasks away from humans. You heard a lot of conversation about that today. You also heard a little competitive fire. So Oracle is now taking ads out against Infor, we've seen that. All the cabs here, many of the cabs have Oracle branding on them. So Oracle is paying attention to Infor. >> And they're right down the road here too, by the way. You know, I mean, Western Virginia not far so this is their backyard. >> Well congratulations Infor, Oracle is paying attention to you that means, must mean you're hurting them We've seen this before with others, I mean we certainly saw it, you know in past days with IBM, we see it extensively with Workday. We've seen some kind of, tit for tat with SalesForce, even though SalesForce is one of Oracles largest customers. So that's been kind of fun, fun to watch. And now Infor, so Infor clearly is doing some damage, to the traditional guys. Oracle, SAP, Workday maybe not so much Workday is growing like crazy, but Infor claims it is growing SaaS revenue 50% faster than Oracle's SaaS revenue. It's growing double the rate of SAP, and growing as fast almost as Workday, is kind of what it claims. And so, this whole enterprise resource planning, HCM, vertical market software, horizontal software the market is always been hot. It's a huge, huge market. Many, many, tens of billions, it's probably a hundred billion dollar TAM. And the big, big whales are of course Oracle and SAP, and then of course, SalesForce and you've seen the emergence of companies like ServiceNow which has quite a bit of different strategy but with Oracle, with Infor's sort of Oracle heritage a lot of people in the company came from Oracle so they know where the skeletons are buried they know how to compete, they have relationships with the customers. And they're offering some differentiation, as they say with those Micro verticals, the last mile, and the pure cloud model. Now, if you look at the income statement you'll see the SaaS portion of the business only represents about 25% of the revenues but remember, that's a ratable model. So you're only recognizing revenue as you're, as the months go on, so you're billing sort of monthly if you will, or recognizing monthly. And so, as a result that skews and dampens the effects of the SaaS software, I think from a booking stand point is probably much higher, proportion of bookings I would guess closer to 50% as they said they took $2billion last year from Koch industries. That $2billion dollars didn't really hit the balance sheets, they get about $330million on the balance sheet. And they've a lot of debt, because they you know did you know, it was a private equity you know leverage deal. They did a lot of acquisitions, so they've probably got about $5.7billions of what they call net debt, which presumably is debt after cash. So I would guess close to $6billion in debt. They're a quasi, they're not a public company they're a private company, but they act in many ways like a public company, I would suspect within the next couple of years here, if this kind of growth continues that you'll see an IPO, from Infor. Although, presumably Koch industries, we heard Koch on stage today, they said they've made $15billion in investments in technology companies. $2billion, this has to be one of their largest. And, but that's patient capital. They get the benefit of the cash flow, they can probably take dividends if they want to do that. And if they're smart, and they invest and they can take market share from Oracle and SAP and others, and gain share in the market space, they can do an IPO. They're revenues are $3billion, their valuation, they implied a valuation based on the Koch industries investment is $15billion. So if they can take that $15billion to $30billion 20 to 30 billion, there's going to be a nice return. >> You know I thought, what's interesting about Koch too they talked about this, it's certainly as you talked about 2billion right. They put the money in, but they're also, it's a symbiotic relationship, in that that Koch is using it's organization as a test lab. For a lot of products and services, that Infor is producing. And allowing them to refine that under the Koch umbrella before they take it out to the market place. So that's pretty true, I feel like seems to makes sense. You have a company that has 60,000 world wide employees, you're in dozens of countries, you've a chance to let them take their products to scale, in maybe a somewhat more friendlier, controlled environment before you take it out to the marketplace. That seems to make a lot of sense. >> Yeah, we heard the CIO of Koch industries today and I talked to him last year, and we were talking about some of the technical debt that they had, again going back to those custom modifications that I was talking about earlier. They were in this terrible virtuous cycle almost a negative virtuous cycle where they had so many custom mods that they couldn't make changes. So the applications were becoming voxalised, so they were becoming non competitive and that is the last thing that a line of business wants to hear, is 'hey we can't make the changes, right IT says no, we can't touch the code, it's working or changes take too long. They take months or sometimes years, to get to a major release and so as a result Koch was looking for ways to simplify its application portfolio and its application infrastructure. The other thing that Koch industries has brought is, you might notice on the show floor here, you see Accenture, you see Deloitte, you're seeing Grant Thornton, now these guys weren't really going after, or going hard after the Infor base before. I think, a company like Koch industries does a lot of business with these SIs and so I think Koch has introduced the SIs to the Infor opportunity and maybe nudged them a little bit and say 'hey as a big you know supplier to us, we're a big customer of yours we want you to pay attention to that opportunity and in earnest go look at ways to partner with Infor. And that's happened, my intelligence suggests there are many multi million dollar deals that are being capitalized by these big SIs and they do a ton of business with SAP and Oracle. So that's another positive in the tail wind that Koch industries, I think it's brought to the table. >> Alright, you mention human potential which is the real overarching theme of the show here this week. Again, we're here in Washington DC. I was just listening to Van Jones from CNN. One of their anchors and political contributor talking about that as his personal mantra but certainly that intersects with what Infor is talking about in terms of unlocking human potential and using technology to do that. Share a little light from Charles Phillip's perspective the key note address that he gave, in terms of how do they view human potential and unlocking it with the use of their services? >> Well we're going to have Charles Phillip's on so we'll certainly ask him that but Charles Phillip's is a guy with a lot of potential. And that he is realizing that potential >> Lot of track record too >> Exactly, this is an individual with a military background, he became I don't know if you know the story but he became a highly successful Wall Street analyst. He wrote the seminal piece in the 90s that said the software industry, is too many software players and is going to consolidate. Larry Ellison, prior to reading that used to denigrate competitors for writing cheques not code. Meaning, his competitors were acquiring companies instead of innovating. Well then, he went on a spending spree probably 30, 35 million dollars in acquisitions orchestrated by Charles Phillips. And they totally remade Oracle starting with a soft hostile takeover. And then now you see Oracle, obviously this Saas powerhouse with many many companies that were bought in. Charles Phillips left Oracle, became the CEO of Infor and we heard today, architected an entirely new strategy with a stack, they call this thing the Stack. I'll just go through this briefly, I wrote about it last year, in the WikiBon blog. They've got the Infor platform, the Infor OS and then it goes all the way up to AI, the last mile software, the cloud. They have this thing called GT nexus, which is a supply chain network and that where their IoT play fits. Then they bought a company last year called Birst, to do BI and analytics, and then on top of that is Coleman. So they've got this stack that they are basically infusing into their applications, and I will answer your question. Essentially what they want to do is, use automation and artificial intelligence to essentially coach people, worker, as they're doing their jobs. So we heard today, that there are more openings than there are unemployed >> Employees, yeah. >> And productivity is going down. So Infor, Charles Phillips wants to attack that problem through software and automation. How do you do that? Well, if you could use artificial intelligence to monitor people's KPIs, they didn't use those terms but that is essentially what they are doing. And then provide feedback on outcomes, 'hey you could have done it differently. You could have done it more quickly. The outcome could have been better if.' Also, analyzing other factors like the relationship for example, using data to analyze the relationship between say tenure or were you recently promoted or turn over on the productivity of for instance stores, retail stores for example. And so, you're seeing an infusion of AI and software and automation in to the entire application portfolio to unlock the human potential. That's one part of it, the other part of it is Charles Phillips is big on diversity, big on women in business, and so that's another angle that I am sure we are going to hear more about this week. >> I thought it was interesting too any time a show comes to Washington there is a reason. And it's generally federal sector based, policy based. There's a regulatory undertone of some kind. And it was addressed somewhat on the key note stage here this morning. But the idea, the notion was that federal regulation and federal mandates, whatever, can't keep up the pace. They just can't, and it really is up to the tech sector because it works on a much different time frame, right? I mean, changes are made by the minute, whereas policy gets shaped by the year. You know, up on the hill here, not far about 3 miles 2 miles from here. So, the tech sector's responsibility in that regard in terms of being more diverse, of having more inclusivity, of looking at environmental considerations. All these things, and of unleashing human potential. And not at making a government do that. Not letting a regulation do that. That certainly plays in the Infor's thinking as well, I would think? >> Yes, so first of all we were down here at the AWS public sector event in June. And there were ten thousand people here. So AWS has a huge presence here. Infor and AWS are big time partners. And remember the CIA was the first deal, the first cloud deal, that AWS did, they won. IBM contested it, the judge eviscerated IBM in his ruling. Basically saying they were gaming the system. They were purposely misinterpreting the RFP. Amazon won hands down, it was a huge victory for Amazon. Forced IBM to go out and capitulate and purchase Softlayer for $2billion. I believe that only helps a company like Infor who has decided to be all public cloud, with AWS and drafting off AWS' deep ties to various government agencies, in the GovCloud. So for instance, AWS was first with fedramp. First with a lot of different certifications and security hurdles. And so Infor can just draft off of that. The CIA, again a big account, we heard the CIA talk in June about how security on the worst day of cloud is better than its client server applications on their best day. And so, I suspect Infor is doing business with the CIA although that's not come out publicly. But I would think that there is an advantage Infor has because of that AWS relationship. And that makes DC all the much more important for them. Well, we are at Inforum 18, we have a full 2 days of scheduling for you. Great guest coming up here on theCUBE. I am with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls We'll continue here on theCUBE live from DC right after this break.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live. We were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier your host with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg. Welcome to theCUBE. You are the Director of Product Management Converged Infrastructure Group at NetApp. >> Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. >> One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean I've wrote stories back when Tom Georges was the CEO when Amazon just came on the scene. NetApp has been really into the cloud and from the customer's standpoint but now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now startin' to be mindful. >> Absolutely. >> Of how to maximize the scale and with All Flash kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? >> So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp, is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco and in that we have got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for Healthcare which is in FlexPod we've been doing horizontal application so far which are like the data bases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical our application, the first one we're looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for Healthcare. That's the first piece that we are addressing. >> What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod's been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it because Cisco's CEO was onstage today talking about Cisco's value proposition, about the old ways now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool, new things going on with FlexPod. >> Correct, so the All Flash FAS, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year as customers keep wanting to improve their infrastructure with better latencies and better performance the All Flash FAS has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double-digit growth over the last five quarters consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about, the managed private cloud on FlexPod. >> Yeah, Arun, I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So I think back to when Cisco launched UCS it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. NetApp with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins is talking about onstage, how do I modernize, how do I get you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from you know, a good virtualized platform to this is, I think you said managed private cloud, FlexPod in Cisco. >> Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on I need a VM, small, medium, large, and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket, then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure, then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure's working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some DSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized and therefore these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as a managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds, a cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. >> Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live you guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? >> So we, all these solutions we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that what we do is there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies agree. >> So it's tightly integrated. >> It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned, the marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team. That's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer he knows that both Cisco and NetApp teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it all. >> Yeah, over in one of the other areas that's been talked about this show we talk about modernization. You talk about things like microservices. >> Yes. >> Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? >> Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads, the cloud-native workloads or the type two native. Type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with a Cisco cloud center platform, which is the quicker acquisition. And we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we are dealing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team the ACI fabric is very important to them. So that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on Healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco, as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. >> Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So say you've got a customer, obviously you guys have a lot of customers together with Cisco, they're doing some complex things with the technology, but for the customer out there that has not yet kinda went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? 'Cause a lot of storage guys are lookin' at All Flash, so check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they gotta integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and say the competition? >> So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos, but the advantage of taking a converged infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore is reduces their deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. >> So they got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. >> Yes. >> Okay, great, now I'm gonna ask you another question. This comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. >> Yes. >> So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are custom to verticals. But with cloud one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that, because these verticals, they gotta get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? >> Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep their data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions. And the security of their data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second pieces are analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insight you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability all in their control so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for health care what it does is when you have All Flash FAS it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. [Interviewer] - Yeah. >> Plus the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up so I can give an example on that too. >> Well before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big megatrend. It's not really kinda talked much about but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPs, the performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. >> Correct. >> So it's just you've gotta have table stakes of great, fast storage. >> Yes. >> But it's gotta be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? >> Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One I can name the customer. So they'll come at our booth tomorrow, in a minute here. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with they need a hospital, fast. And they decided on FlexPod because within three months with the wire one's architecture and application they could scale their whole IT data center for health care. So that has helped them tremendously to get it up and running. Second is with the All Flash FAS they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. >> Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job. In following NetApps recent success lately, as always, NetApp's always goin' the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show? So I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ah-ha? >> So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level within 10 base networking, its data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing, where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution we can provide the subscription base through the managed private cloud through our managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we have come up with this solution which matches both these trends of Cisco as well as NetApp. >> And the number of connected devices going up every day. >> Yes. >> More network connections, more geo domains, it's complicated. >> It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. >> Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp at Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, we're here in New Orleans in the state of Louisiana, and to help Keith Townsend and myself, Stu Miniman, wrap up we're glad to have one more customer. We have the great state of Louisiana here with us, we have Michael Allison, who's the Chief Technology Officer. We also have Derek Williams, who's the Director of Data Center Operations. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so I think we all know what the state of Louisiana is, hopefully most people can find it on a map, it's a nice easy shape to remember from my kids and the like. But, Michael, why don't we start with you? Talk to us first about kind of the purview of your group, your organization, and some of the kind of biggest challenges you've been facing in recent times. Sure, we are part of the Office of Technology Services, which is a consolidated IT organization for the state of Louisiana. We were organized about four years ago. Actually four years ago this July. And that brought in the 16 Federated IT groups into one large organization. And we have the purview of the executive branch, which includes those typical agencies like Children and Family Services, Motor Vehicles, Public Safety, Health and Hospitals, Labor, etc. >> And Derek, you've got the data center operations, so give us a little bit of a scope. We heard how many organizations in there, but what do you all have to get your arms around? >> Sure, so we had, you know, there's often a joke that we make that if they've ever made it we own one of each. So we had a little bit of every type of technology. So what we've really been getting our arms around is trying to standardize technologies, get a standard stack going, an enterprise level thing. And really what we're trying to do is become a service provider to those customers where we have standard lines of service and set enterprise level platforms that we migrate everybody onto. So do you actually have your own data centers? Your own hosting facilities? What's kind of the real estate look like? >> Absolutely, so we have, the state has two primary data centers that we utilize, and then we also use a number of cloud services as well as some third-party providers for offsite services. >> So obviously just like every other state in the union, you guys have plenty of money. >> Always. >> Way too many employees and just no challenges. Let's talk about what are the challenges? You know, coming together, bringing that many organizations together, there's challenges right off the bat. What are some of the challenges as you guys look to provide services to the great people of Louisiana? >> Well as Derek kind of eluded to, technology debt is deep. We have services that are aging at about 40 years old, that are our tier one services. And they were built in silos many, many years ago. So being able to do the application or actualization, being able to identify those services, then when we actually shift to the cultural side, actually bringing 16 different IT organizations into one, having all those individuals now work together instead of apart. And not in silos. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had over the last few years is really breaking down those cultural barriers and really coming together as one organization. >> Yeah I totally agree with that. The cultural aspect has been the biggest piece for us. Really getting in there and saying, you know a lot of small and medium size IT shops could get away without necessarily having the proper governance, structures in place, and a lot of people wore a lot of hats. So now we're about 800 strong in the Office of Technology Services, and that means people are very aligned to what they do operationally. And so that's been a big shift and kind of that cultural shift has really been where we've had to focus on to make that align properly to the business needs. >> Mike, what was the reason that led you down the path towards Nutanix? Maybe set us up with a little bit of the problem statement? We heard some of the heterogeneous nature and standardization which seems to fit into a theme we've heard lots of times with Nutanix. But was there a specific use case or what led you towards that path? Well, about four years ago the Department of Health and Hospitals really had a case where they needed to modernize their Medicaid services, eligibility and enrollment. CMS really challenged them to build an infrastructure that was in line with their MIDAS standards. There was modular, COTS, configuration over customization. Federal government no longer wants to build monolithic systems that don't integrate and are just big silos. So what we did was we gravitated to that project. We went to CMS and said, hey why don't we take what you're asking us to build and build it in a way that we can expand throughout the enterprise to not only affect the Department of Health but also Children of Family Services, and be able to expand it to Department of Corrections, etc. That was our use case, and having an anchor tenent with the Department of Health that has a partner with CMS really became the lynch pin in this journey. That was our first real big win. >> Okay how did you hear first about Nutanix? Was there a bake off you went through? >> It was, yes, very similar. It was the RP process took a year or so and we were actually going down the road of procuring some V blocks, and right before the Christmas vacations our Deputy CIO says hey, why don't you go look to see if there's other solutions that are out there? Challenge Derek, myself, and some others to really expand the horizons. Say, if we're going to kind of do this greenfield, what else is out there? And right before he got on his Christmas cruise he dropped that on our lap and about a month later we were going down the Dell Nutanix route. And to be honest it was very contentious, and it actually took a call from Michael Dell who I sent to voicemail twice before I realized who it was, but you know, those are the kind of decisions and the buy in from Dell executives that really allowed us to comfortably make this decision and move forward. >> So technology doesn't exactly move fast in any government because, you know, people process technology and especially in the government, people and process, as you guys have deployed Nutanix throughout your environment, what are some of the wins and what are some of the challenges? >> That's a funny point because we talk about this a lot. The fact that our choice was really between something like VBlock, which was an established player that had been for a long time, and something a little more bleeding edge. And part of the hesitancy to move to something like Nutanix was the idea that hey, we have a lot of restricted data, CJIS, HIPAA, all those kind of things across the board, RS1075 comes into play, and there was hesitancy to move to something new, but one of the things that we said exactly was we are not as agile as private sector. The procurement process, all the things that we have to do, put us a little further out. So it did come into play that when we look at that timeline the stuff that's bleeding edge now, by the time we have it out there in production it's probably going to be mainstream. So we had to hedge our bets a little. And you know, we really had to do our homework. Nutanix was, you know, kind of head and shoulders above a lot of what we looked at, and I had resiliency to it at first, so credit to the Deputy CIO, he made the right call, we came around on it, it's been awesome ever since you know, one of the driving things for us too was getting out there and really looking at the business case and talking to the customers. One of the huge things we kept hearing over and over was the HA aspect of it. You know, we need the high availability, we need the high availability. The other interesting thing that we have from the cost perspective is we are a cost recovery agency now that we're consolidated. So what you use you get charged for, you get a bill every month just like a commercial provider. You know, use this many servers, this much storage, you get that invoice for it. So we needed a way that we could have an environment that's scaled kind of at a linear cost that we could just kind of add these nodes to without having to go buy a new environment and have this huge kind of CAPX expenditure. And so at the end of the day it lived up to the hype and we went with Nutanix and we haven't regretted it, so. >> How are the vendors doing overall, helping you move to that really OP-X model, you said, love to hear what you're doing with cloud overall. Nutanix is talking about it. Dell's obviously talking about that. How are the vendors doing in general? And we'd love to hear specifically Dell Nutanix. >> We've had the luxury of having exceptionally good business partners. The example I'd like to give is, about four months into this project we realized that we were treated Nutanix as a traditional three-tier architecture. We were sending a lot of traffic more south. When we did the analysis we asked the question, a little cattywampus, it was how do we straighten this out? And so we posed a question on a Tuesday about how do we fix this, how do we drive the network back into the fabric? By Thursday we were on a phone call with VMWare. By the following Monday we had two engineers on site with a local partner with NSX Ninja. And we spent the next two months, with about different iterations of how to re-engineer the solution and really look at the full software-defined data center, not just software-defined storage and compute. It is really how do we then evolve this entire solution building upon Nutanix and then layering upon on top of that the VMWare solutions that kind of took us to that next level. >> Yeah and I think the key term in there is business partner. You know, it sounds a little corny to say, but we don't look at them as just vendors anymore. When we choose a technology or direction or an architecture, that is the direction we go for the entire state for that consolidated IT model. So, we don't just need a vendor. We need someone that has a vested interest in seeing us succeed with the technology, and that's what we've gotten out of Nutanix, out of Dell, and they've been willing to, you know, if there's an issue, they put the experts on site, it's not just we'll get some people on a call. They're going to be there next week, we're going to work with you guys and make it work. And it's been absolutely key in making this whole thing go. >> And as a CTO one of the challenges that we have is, as Derek has executed his cloud vision, is how do we take that and use it as an enabler, an accelerant to how we look at our service design, service architecture, how do we cloud optimize this? So as we're talking about CICD and all these little buzzwords that are out there, is how can we use this infrastructure to be that platform that kind of drives that from kind of a grass root, foundation up, whereas sometimes it's more of a pop down approach, we're taking somewhat of an opposite. And now we're in that position where we can now answer the question of now what, what do we do with it now? >> So sounds like you guys are a mixed VMWare, Nutanix hardware, I mean software, Dell hardware shop, foundation you've built the software-defined data center foundation, something that we've looked at for the past 10 years in IT to try and achieve, which is a precursor, or the foundation, to cloud. Nutanix has made a lot of cloud announcements. How does Nutanix's cloud announcements, your partnership with Dell match with what you guys plan when it comes to cloud? >> That's a perfect lead in for us. So you're absolutely right. We have had an active thought in our head that we need to move toward SDDC, software-defined data center is what we wanted to be at. Now that we've achieved it the next step for us is to say hey, whether it's an AWS or whomever, an Azure type thing, they are essentially an SDDC as well. How do we move workloads seamlessly up and down in a secure fashion? So the way we architected things in our SDDC, we have a lot of customers. We can't have lateral movement. So everything's microsegmentation across the board. What we've been pursuing is a way to move VM workloads essentially seamlessly up to the cloud and back down and have those microsegmentation rules follow whether it goes up or back down. That's kind of the zen state for us. It's been an interesting conference for us, because we've seen some competitors to that model. Some of the things Nutanix is rolling out, we're going to have to go back and take a very serious look at on that roadmap to see how it plays out. But, suddenly multicloud, if we can get to that state we don't care what cloud it's in. We don't have to learn separate stacks for different providers. That is a huge gap for us right now. We have highly available environment between two data centers where we run two setups active active that are load balanced. So the piece we're missing now is really an offsite DR that has that complete integration. So the idea that we could see a hurricane out in the golf, and 36, 48 hours away, and know that we might be having some issues. Being able to shift workloads up to the cloud, that's perfect for us. And you know, then cost comes into play. All that kind of stuff that we might have savings, economy of scale, all plays in perfectly for us. So we are super excited about where that's going and some of the technologies coming up are going to be things we're going to be evaluating very carefully over the next year. >> At the end of the day it's all about our constituents. We have to take data, turn it into information that they can consume at the pace that they want to. Whether it be traditional compute in a desktop or mobile or anywhere in between. It was our job to make sure that these services are available and usable when they need it, especially in the time of a disaster or just in day-to-day life. So that's the challenge that we have when delivering services to our citizens and constituents. >> All right, well Mike and Derek, really appreciate you sharing us the journey you've been on, how you're helping the citizens here in the great state of Louisiana. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching our program. It's been a great two days here. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our programming. Thanks Nutanix and the whole crew here, and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it theCUBE. Covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host Keith Townsend. And while this is the North America show, we've seen the expansion of it, we actually have two guests coming in from the Asia-Pacific region. Happy to welcome Rod Lappin. Rod, SVP with Lenovo, thank you so much for joining us all the way from Singapore. >> Yep, absolutely, great to be here. >> Stu: And we have Deepu George, who's the Senior Director with Capgemini Group IT, in from Bangalore Thank you also for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so Deepu, let's start with you. We always love conferences like this. We get to talk to the users. Tell us a little bit about your group inside Capgemini, some of the challenges that your IT team's been tackling. >> Yes. So I'm part of the group IT, responsible for handling all the data centers, group data centers within Capgemini, and we are responsible for delivering data sorting services and processing services, et cetera. So, one of the key ideas we started last year was DC modernization and consolidation. And one of the key strategies we were looking at was hybrid cloud and extra DC stack, completed as revision stack, support for that and plus, you know, automation. So these were the three areas where, which was a key strategic areas for that data center modernization and consolidation. And when we looked at the various options available, one thing stood out from the Nutanix side was, I mean it checked all the boxes and they had a very good roadmap on certain areas which were not available at this particular point of time. So then we chose, okay let us have a PoC done, we did a PoC along with Lenovo and it was successful. And then we went ahead with this relationship with Nutanix. >> Great, Rod just want to bring you in here, we've been talking about really the growth and expansion of Netanix, one of the big pieces is the OEM. Lenovo have been hearing good growth rates. Give us a little bit of a customer viewpoint, what you've been seeing. Nutanix in general and the Lenovo HX specifically. >> Yeah I think obviously Stuart, the very exciting thing is Nutanix is the leader in the industry, right, and with them Lenovo this last year, we grew about 197%, year-on-year. So it makes us their fastest-growing partner. And in the North American channel environment, for example, you're at 280% actually, so we're growing very, very rapidly with them, and there's real reasons. Customers are seeing the value obviously in the solution, the consolidation of the data center footprint, and obviously as customers are being pushed more, as Deepu just mentioned, to the hybrid cloud, or what we're calling really the multi-cloud these days, right, because customers are really looking at and choosing their cloud solutions based more on the workloads and what they're actually trying to do longer-term. You know I think we're best positioned to do that with Nutanix, it's a great solution, I think Capgemini's really one of our great global, strategic global systems, integrated partners, that's taken a choice to run with Lenovo and Nutanix. It's been a great HX solution for us. >> So Rod, before we get too deep, let's ask a basic question. Lenovo, tier one server provider. You guys consistently in one of the leadership positions, and in number of units shipped, obviously you guys have the chops to field a similar solution. Why partner with Nutanix? >> Yeah I think Nutanix, firstly from a software perspective I think that's definitely where we're seeing, you know, if you jump back sort of 10, 15 years, that three-tiered architecture was where everyone was going, SAN and all that sort of stuff. Now when you're seeing the solutions that Nutanix and the hyper-converged market is growing so rapidly at, you're really seeing customers recognize that they get a lot more value out of the software suite, data center consolidation, data center footprint consolidation, and really the ability to manage on-prem and off-prem workloads seamlessly, you know with the prism solution and we integrate that with our Xclarity offering, our management suite, and as a result, it's a real match made in heaven. It's actually doing really well. >> So Deepu? >> I'll talk to that, if you look at software-defined, and that is a key area where we are going right now. Most of the organizations for this data consolidation, they are looking at software-defined, and when you look at the network stack, you have SDNs and all these things, so when you have Nutanix with an NCI, with the complete SD stack, it all ties up together. It's pretty easy for us to, you know, completely scale out the data centers. It's flexibility we have with software-defined and it's a good match, it's a good fit. >> Deepu can you walk us through a little bit of the application side of what you're doing? What did you start with? What have you rolled out? What haven't you touched yet? >> Yeah so once we started our PoC, once we know that data centers, so what we did was, we had our first data center consolidation exercise, modernization exercise, which just happened in Brazil. We had our own three data centers which we wanted to consolidate into one as part of our consolidation and modernize strategy. So we had a mix of upload there, we had basic things, we had normal applications, we had VMs running, we had physical nodes running. And what we did was we consolidated, moving into a single data center on 10 nodes of Nutanix, and we closed down all the other data centers and it was a pretty good experience that we had. The support we received from Lenovo and Nutanix and most of this work was done completely from off-shore. So we had a couple of our engineers posted in Brazil for the coordination activities, but the physical work was completely done from off-shore interfaced our support engineers. So it was a pretty good exercise. We got very good support from Nutanix. We got very good support from Lenovo to get consolation done in the correct time. >> So Deepu, Capgemini has a pretty capable consulting firm, I'm sure you guys got plenty of advice internally as you set out to select the vendor. Let's talk about that selection process. How did that conversation initially go, where you guys kind of threw out Nutanix and Lenovo as potential solutions? >> So if you look at the commercialization world right, I mean it's already pretty much standard. So when we looked at the key modernization initiatives, I already talked about this with VC and stuff like that. We came out with a list of parameters that we wanted to look at, just so that there cannot be any compromise on that. And then what we are looking for in the future when we, so modernization cannot happen in a day or two. So it is a journey. So we have a two- to three-year window in which we wanted to consolidate all our data centers, modernize everything, so the Nutanix roadmap on the various automation, STDC, as to the complete hybrid cloud journey, was pretty strong. And we had the complete management commitment from Nutanix, that they will stick to this particular roadmap and these features will not be compromised in any way. So that is one of the key decisions for us to go with the Nutanix way. >> Well let's talk about performance. You guys have been Nutanix customers for a while, how has the roadmap matched with the promises? >> So from a performance point-of-view, so if you look at only the pure CIA performance, right, wherever you have a high-performance workload, we have an option to go with a complete full SDN stack, where the BIOS in not absolutely a challenge or anything there's a huge throughput available. So from a performance point-of-view, we don't think, that's not an issue as of now. Even for the traditional storage, performance has never been an issue but the actual issue is how do we make the complete software available? How do we make the completely controlled from the software point-of-view. So there is where we found that that the CI use of very good challenging, you know, what do you call, user complete flexibility in how you want to define your data centers. >> Actual performance performance, that's really great. But I meant from the promises Nutanix made from a roadmap thing. This feature will be available on what day, you know, three months from now, a year from now. Were they actually able to deliver based on your own internal roadmap, and the capability you needed? >> Let me put it now this way. So if you look at the kind of investment that we have been making, in Nutanix and Lenovo, so you can be pretty much assured that these promises are kept 'cause otherwise we would not be making that. So Brazil was just a start that we are just going ahead. We are just looking at different workloads now. We have already looked at exchangeable close, which is currently in January and getting installed now. We have looked at video close one of the largest in Capgemini, we have 42 nodes of Nutanix running for 410,000 medias. So based out of Bangalore and Mumbai. So if we just, the performance, if it was not met I don't think we would have expanded the way we have expanded. >> Changed decisions. I think really ultimately, as Deepu mentioned, they started off with a pilot, as you mentioned, obviously in Brazil, and he's ended up taking this globally, which has been a great success story for both of our organizations. >> Right, could you give some more color on the partnership? >> Yeah sure, so I think Capgemini's a great global systems integrator for us. Both to sell to, obviously, as well as sell through, and they're doing some pretty amazing things with their customers and I think one of the great things that we're seeing in this particular instance, as we mentioned, Nutanix, leader in the hyper-converged space, and Deepu's made a call on them, based on their performance, and their basic feature set in their suite. And then ultimately Lenovo, who's number one customer service, number one reliability, number one quality in industry on independence, so you put 'em together, we ended up having a great relationship from that point, and then it's built confidence inside Capgemini now, for us to be going out to their customers and driving this solution out into their customer base. So it's once again, a great outcome for both of our organizations. >> Lenovo's been a traditional partner for us, it's not that new to us, so one of the major reasons is that they want a global reach and we have global data centers, and we have got global footprints, and it's a pretty good time. >> Deepu, how are you measuring the relationship? Any success metrics, from either the application deployments or you know, how do you measure internally and share that with your teams? >> So we have timelines on our consolidation, modernization, et cetera, as long as that is met, together with Lenovo, Nutanix, we are very good. >> So I'd love to hear about day two operations. What are some of the benefits you've seen from a people, resource talent, have you seen resources freed up to do other projects? What are some of the interesting projects that you've done as a result of freeing up time? >> So currently we are progressing through this particular journey, so this year we have a huge focus on the automation piece of the data center. So we are in the beginning stages of getting automation, automation in the sense that the normal proactive activates, all are given. So we are not talking about that, we are talking about the repetitive task, which is less part of the data center and that we have started. So basically we are looking around for any virtually reduction in our ticket volumes, our, you know, the normal work which is being done by the normal engineers so that the can be freed up for these kind of modernization projects. So that's what we are looking at, so let's see how it goes. >> Deepu, one of the things that we're talking about at this show is beyond just the HCI, it's cloud, even edge, what kind of futures do you see for Capgemini in general, and maybe with Nutanix and Lenovo relationship. >> As I said in the beginning, hybrid cloud was one of the requirements for choosing the correct partner for our data center modernization. So currently as we are beginning this part of the journey so moving the data seamlessly into the cloud is one of the key requirements of Capgemini. From an applications standpoint, from a visibility standpoint, et cetera, so we will be looking at which applications easy target for moving into the cloud, and we will be doing that and we believe that Nutanix, hybrid cloud technology will be able to help us in achieving that. >> And I think Stu, that's a really good point because I think what Deepu's just describing is effectively what we see happening in the industry everywhere. You know, we go back 20 years in the industry, a few of us have been around that long, and we remember like a homogeneous environment, everyone would say, I'm this vendor shop, they've got network administrators patching servers, when we're getting hardware put on site and customers are doing all of the integration on site themselves. That's just what the industry did back then. Now, as we see workloads changing it's a little bit like cloud. Three years ago everyone was like, I'm going to be this cloud vendor. That's it, that's my cloud vendor solution, right. However now it's become really acquiring the workload infrastructure and the software suites in line with customers' specific workload requirements, and so now, instead of going after the one cloud provider, now you've got a cloud provider in marketing, you've got a cloud provider in ERP, you've got a cloud provider in IT. So that's why this whole multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, type scenario's really starting to proliferate throughout the customer base. And you really find that, as Deepu just mentioned, they're starting, customers are really looking for how do they manage cloud, multiple clouds in multiple ways, with different workloads, and they're really going out and looking and exploring, how to best address that and I thing once again the Nutanix-Lenovo solution's fantastic for that. I mean you're going to see that proliferate more and more in the industry over the next couple of years. >> So one of the, sorry Stu, one of the comments throughout the show has been, you know what, and this is not a pick on Nutanix or anyone else, I just, both of you guys are not from North America or Western Europe, is that the focus, a lot of vendor's focus has been on Western Europe and America, from a cloud perspective. How do you feel that Nutanix relationship from both a customer and as a partner, has been, on expanding capability beyond North American and Western Europe clouds? >> Rod: Why don't you go first, Deepu. >> Yeah, so if you look at, traditional Amazon Azure, so we have their clouds which are already available in India. So we have been checking that now, we have been looking at various options for the biggest workloads. But predominantly, our predominant workloads have been on the European and the North American cloud for lots of reasons, because if you look at Amazon or Azure, they're coming recently into the Asian footprint with (mumbles) if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, but I mean I think we will get there. >> So I think from our perspective, we break the world into five different geographies. So China, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America and South America. And when you look at our earnings this last quarter, I'm only about two weeks away from our next earnings so I can't say anything about Q1, but the Q4, calendar Q4, we grew about 17% year-on-year but we grew double-digit growth in every one of those geographies, consistently. So in Nutanix, with our HX solution, which is really what we're talking about today, my Asia-Pacific team is growing just as fast, if not actually a little bit faster, than my North America teams. So we see that this technology actually being a real world-wide phenomenon and it's really growing everywhere. Japan is fantastic, India's fantastic for me. Obviously Western Europe. Deepu's a great example, 'cause he's deploying this globally across all of the geographies and I think we're seeing a lot of our G2000 customers, really addressing that, that way. But we see a lot of local companies as well, driving it across the geographies. Asia-Pacific's a great example. >> So if you look at, again, from a CA Nutanix-Lenovo standpoint, we have been going evening everything out so we have recently done that on 16 nodes within Bangalore and Mumbai, so that's a pretty good story. >> Alright, well, Deepu George, thank you so much for joining us, Rod Lappin, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> Thanks Stu, thanks Keith. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we've got a full day of Day 2 coverage here of theCUBE and Nutanix .NEXT 2018, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. (bright music)

New Orleans Louisiana it that you covering dot next conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix welcome back to the cubes coverage here of Nutanix next 2018 here in New Orleans Louisiana the brass bands are going talking to lots of customers been a great event so far and for Keith Townsend and I'm Stu minimun we always love to be able to talk to customers each one of them has a different story different analysis different challenges they're facing happened to welcome Alex Walker who's the senior vice president of IT at IBC Bank out of Texas thanks so much for joining us thank you alright so you've actually been going to all the shows just like I have at this Keys first one who's been getting getting the inaugural visit here but first of all tell us about yourself a little bit of background what you run at the bank and just give us quick sketch of the bank oh let's start with the bank you know we're in our 51st year we are based in Laredo Texas and it's a community bank mostly and commercial right you know where we are 19th according to Forbes magazine best banks in the country so we went up from 46 to 19 this year Congrats and so great accomplishments for the bank itself it's a great operation we're in 88 cities in the in Texas and Oklahoma and about 13 billion in assets great and what's under your purview as the SPID okay so you an all IT for the bank I'm not this not the development side of it you know without the operations infrastructure yes okay 51 year old company finance going through a lot of changes before we get in to the tech just give us one or two some of those the stresses and strains that you're feeling is business well regulation is one right over the last several years the increasing regulation has caused a tremendous growth in our auditing Keith Kountz rates at Department and a lot of cost to the bank I started about three and a half years ago and the bank was looking at how do we prepare for a change right potentially hoping for some change in them in the regulatory climate and so forth but we needed to prepare for that and prepare for growth so we we need to take a look at our infrastructure of everything across the board yeah maybe could organizationally where does that pension for change come from what kind of air cover do you get from from News exercise what's of the staff underneath you know how do they take change well initially there was a lot of reluctance right people were in the status quo they're comfortable with what they had not necessarily happy with it but taking on change is it's difficult right so we looked at operational costs some of the basic things we had two data centers at the time literally a hundred and fifty yards apart from each other so we said we can do we can do more right the bank's motto is we do more and so we said how do we do more for the bank for their customers improve the quality of the services the uptime and so and and reduce its cost so it's your bank so change in a bank a lot of times means going from one store to reef vendor to another storage or a vendor and that's a big deal big set of conversations you know your your your you know it we are sitting at the 19th best bank and then the fourteenth you don't get there by turning over the table part called the table you your get you get there by being steady what made you guys actually consider something as revolutionary as HCI when it came to change well when we looked at the infrastructure that we had and you know it goes back to simon Sinek start with quiet right why are we doing this I asked I asked the my department when I first started who are our competitors and they gave us the names of all the local banks and so forth and the usual suspects the large banks and I said no they're not that's the bank's customers our competitors are AWS Rackspace Microsoft is your Google Cloud it's the these are the hosting companies we host applications for our customers we're shared services for our bank once we understand who we are then we have to take a different approach because now if we're competing with them it's no wonder that the bank is starting to branch out and do their own thing right some unit I'm getting contracts with the cloud providers or with other service providers because we're too far behind we're not cost-effective we're not competitive so it doesn't mean that we want to build massive data centers everywhere but we need to have the same level of services that they provide so from a validation perspective it you start to look at the cost of hyper-converged in general I'm sorry how long you guys have been a new tennis customer three years okay so from a cost perspective as you start to look at hyper-converged how did you even begin to compare it to your existing environment well I looked I looked at the the studies that are out there particular there was an IDC study done member on 2015 that said that customers of like size all different types of customers we're getting these these benefits I said wow if I could get those that'd be really cool right so I went to the board I went to my boss the CIO and I said I think we could get this this would be a really good but then again people said we never heard of mechanics what is this our applications aren't certified with Nutanix you know so let's talk about procurements and I said well let's just do a PLC and that's bringing this in and and we'll run VMware on it which is what we were certified at the time our applications and I said let's let's look at this infrastructure this we brought in the PLC but what we did is we took Nutanix and had them talk directly to my accounting the bank's accounting department right we all know we all work for accountants eventually and so we said if we can get them to agree that if we can get these then they're gonna be behind us from the are white and TCO models right so we went through and said what are we paying for this what are we paying for that what's the hyung going rates for this let's get some samples of if we ordered this and replace it we had eleven storage frames from seven different vendors or we couldn't move data around from one storage frame to another because we had over time acquired a lot of different frames and like most places never retired them right and so all that layer of complexity what we did is we said this on this PLC let's test this out okay cut to the chase we we got the we got the numbers we were then three or two 5% of everything that came out in that study and so we bought that that that equipment immediately placed our first order which was 12 notes still want to keep it constrained so one of food in the water but I said this is a technology I'm betting on five years we'll write it off in five years we can get rid of it and move on to the next thing what happened was we were getting so such good wins we actually completed in our five-year model we completed that in roughly around two years because the acceleration based upon the benefits that we got some of the requirements that we had for change within the organization replace all equipment and so forth we were able to to accelerate that not only that we just finished upgrading our D our site which was not part of that five-year plan and just completed that and so within three years we've now are our 97% on Nutanix and we just took delivery of 24 of the Robo nodes which we're going to put out in our branch operations that'll leave us with five servers that are not Nutanix other than our for AIX system yeah Alex can you tell us what what were the key metrics that you were looking at to measure success and you did some TCO studies you actually presented here at the conference what do you recommend to your peers as to how they should be able to evaluate rolling out something like this well for one and a big one was licensing right it's far more efficient what we got for example we got we were able to take our Fibre Channel switches running about quarter of a million plus each and and get rid of those would we when we look at it the bandwidth that that's taken on the servers it's writing data to storage going through this storage controller going into this the sand and coming back that delay was substantial so much so that when we moved all of our databases into Nutanix and eliminated that infrastructure we're running 66% faster than we did on current technology on a conventional architecture did what was the business response on this did it change anything in the business what did the users say well when they'd users Jobs ran far faster than they did before when we went back and said I don't need as many Microsoft sequel licenses as they did before for consolidation fewer cores the tremendous benefits our sequel developed our sequel management team for example it takes far less time to stand up servers do migrations things like that so what's the Delta between the prediction debrief their predicted ROI and the realized our ROI you guys realize your savings much quicker wolves worldwide little surprises well the surprises were we were conservative we didn't include any soft costs those are difficult to we missed it me Steve Kaplan are all are all I got a TCO guy for Nutanix go back and forth on the soft cost don't show weak soft cost show me where I can give the money back to my accountants who we all have to report to correct right yeah so what we found is the fact that we were conservative we were getting much better benefits so again when we look at the servers we bought too many cores right so now I this good problem now I can migrate more systems I did anticipate based upon that spin so the time the technology to the financial benefits the reduction and latency allows you to stop spending money on more cores that you didn't need less latency equals better performance better performance tools more dense newness Lourdes units means less money spent so we we actually shut down one of the data centers and migrated into a single data center and it's we're running somewhere around up third a little bit more than a third of that data center so the electrical expend is down in aggregate roughly around 40% so that's real money okay you mentioned that you're also using Nutanix for disaster recovery tell us what led to that that's a newer solution from Nutanix how that experience go we're using the note annex replication for that and when we our legacy was that some of them were taped and some of it was you know migrating data you know a typical older dr type of situation we're in our testing now and that's a little bit complex because we have to protect that dr site from production but we're mirroring the the systems exactly as they are in production so when you spin it up its life right so we have to build a barrier between those systems so if we take that even then taking that into account we can get it up in hours rather than and when we say hours like a couple of hours rather than the 22 12 to 24 hours that we were before and it's 10 systems not 4 systems so roughly about a hundred servers or so minimally all right Alex look forward a little bit tell us what's on your roadmap what kind of things you're doing and if there's intersections with titanic's there we're looking at VDI for example something that we now that we've reengineering our network as well that we're looking at doing that for branch operations and security right but looking forward into AI and and blockchain and which is going to be very disruptive for financial institutions okay you mentioned blockchain so definitely need to get get your take as to what can you share either personally or from the Bakke standpoint cryptocurrency of course will I and I do pay taxes on it but realistically I'm mining with you know for video carts it's it's not it's really understand from as a chief technologist I'm I really need to understand these things you don't make appendix fluster off on the side I did ask her I could have the old data center and the when we're doing I'm doing that really effectively to better understand that but I think what we're looking at it blockchain is tremendous opportunities for many improvements in security and loss prevention and other types of things within the financial side I'm seeing a lot of big financial institutions that are getting filing for patents on block chains and they're they're bringing it up in their ten cases potentially very disruptive and very expensive and some of them are saying specifically cryptocurrency and blockchain and some of them are saying new you know new competition in the market right so we take that to kind of mean that they're they're thinking about the same things we are so keep a eye on to the future especially when it comes to something like blockchain this relatively inefficient at processing transactions how does that impact your data center strategy you guys just went down from you know huge space reduced electrical power by 40% any considerations around kind of the blood blockchain at a commercial level of use within the bank and how it might impact your strategy we're a conservative bank so would we we're having discussions about what what does that mean right what it were do we think that's might come in and it's very early for us right we've been busy you know the datacenter moves and other types of things too so we're starting to look at that and have some a few conversations about what do we think it it is we're talking to some of our our business partners and say how might we cooperate with you guys to do excuse me to use some of this blockchain technology it's a it's a different way of doing it you know when in the past we might use relational databases like sequel server or something to do something some of this work where distributed ledger might be a far easier better way to do that so it's another tool I like to say that you know video didn't kill the radiostar right yeah there's more type of radio out there than there ever was so this is another tool that we have to look and say well how does this how do we utilize this what with the right technology for the right job and we're being very cautious about that all right well Alex Walker really appreciate you sharing all the updates on IBC Bank pleasure to catch up with you and look forward to seeing you more than ten echoes in the future for Keith Townsend Thomas do minimun more coverage here at Nutanix duck necks New Orleans thanks for watching the queue [Music]

>> Announcer: Live, from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost Keith Townsend, who is the CTO advisor, and this is the CTO segment. Happy to welcome back to the program, we have Binny Gill and Rajiv Mirani. Both of them are CTOs. Binny, you've got cloud services, and Rajiv, you have cloud platforms. Let's start there, when we talk about, you know, there was a survey when you registered for the event and said, what do you think of Nutanix as? Am I your server vendor, am I your HCI vendor, am I your cloud vendor, am I your mega, uber platform of everything? You've got platforms and services, help us understand a little bit how this fits and how you look at the portfolio, and we'll arm wrestle if you guys can't agree. >> Rajiv: That sounds good. >> Binny: Yeah, go ahead. >> You want to go ahead? So both of us obviously work very closely together, but broadly speaking, I look after the core stack, the storage, networking, hypervisor, including Prism, and then Binny looks more at the services we're building on top, Era, Calm, things like that, so Binny, can you explain that a bit? >> Given the breadth of the ambition that we have, right, I mean, it's good to focus on the two layers separately in some sense, build a platform that is capable of hosting a whole bunch of services. As you can see in what Amazon and others have evolved, they've spent a lot of time building platform, and if you think about it, even Nutanix, for the last seven, eight years, has done a really good job. And once you have a solid foundation, and building cloud requires some new capabilities as well, as Rajiv has said, networking and security on top, now you can start building services, and services themselves have a stack, right? Because there will be higher-level services that use some lower-level services and this. So that's, you know, that's a long journey ahead of us. >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great point, 'cause every time, it seems like we have, you know, oh, this next-generation thing, I'm not going to have to worry about the underlying thing. Virtualization's going to totally abstract it. We've spent a decade fixing the storage and networking challenges there. Containerization, once again, it's like the application done there. Serverless, of course, will take care of all this, but you know, everything underneath it, it still needs work. How do you balance and give us some of that, you know, what's the glue versus abstracting and going to developers? Maybe let's start with platform. >> Well, the platform's always going to be there, right, and as we look at things like containers, that's actually where things get messy. How do containers work with storage, is one of the bigger issues right now with Kubernetes and other frameworks. So we have to start with a platform, we build on top of that and hopefully abstract enough that, you know, the services themselves don't have to deal with the messiness of the platform. >> Yeah, if you look at how technology is evolving, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The platform used to be Linux, Windows, I mean, that's the operating system on which I build my applications, right? Now, the new platform is cloud. AWS is a platform, is an OS, and Azure is one OS, and how do you build applications that can run on these new, next-generation platforms? But the kind of problems to solve are still the same. I want to snapshot my application, back it up, I want to move my application one place to the other, I want to scale it out, scale it in. So the problems are identical to what we had, but it's just that solving it with the new tools that we have, Kubernetes, containers, and so on. >> Yeah, and sometimes birds just fly right through our studio. >> Yeah, I mean, we worry about bugs, and now we have birds flying in. >> So, Rajiv, talk to us about, you basically have two different types of cloud clusters. You have to serve Binny's organization, you also have to serve your external clients. Storage, network, compute, has to have APIs, has to have capabilities, basic capabilities that both your customers who want to build their own overlay, and then Nutanix services on top. Talk to me about, how do you make sure that you're building the best cloud platform to be consumed by cloud services, whether they're Nutanix cloud services or someone else's. >> I think, just comes out of the core principles that we have built the company around, right, that we will always build things around web-scale design, so it has to scale to very large deployments, it has to be completely distributed, it has to go through a certain amount of vetting, in terms of having APIs exposed. Nothing we do internally is through secret APIs, everything is public APIs, so you're pretty stringent on some of these things. And then of course, layering on the simplicity of Nutanix is another thing that we take very, very seriously, so when we do all that, nice patterns emerge. I think it lends itself to an elegance that the platform provides for the rest of the stack. >> So, then we get to a confusing abstraction, which is, you mentioned it earlier, containers. Who gets containers? Is that your organization, is that your organization? Is it a fundamental part of the foundation, or is it a cloud service? >> I think the trick is to not necessarily worry too much about the boundary here, because frankly, this is something that the industry is still figuring out, you know, what layer is this new Kubernetes thing at? And is it just at containers, but actually, now it's going into all the way, application provisioning, load balancing, distributed routing, all sorts of things, so that's, I mean, we work as a team essentially, and there's a whole bunch of engineers that are looking at the whole picture, it's always very important to look at the entire picture and then figure out what are the right layers to go solve the problem, and when you're looking at containers, the bigger problem that our customers are talking about is, how do you deal with the legacy plus the containers in one environment? Now, I have my application, it's a three-tier application. The database, I still want to run in a VM, right? But I want to start tasting this Kubernetes thing, so I want to go with my app, the web tier with containers, but it needs to be in one view, and that's what Calm demonstrated. Through Calm, you can orchestrate an application that's part VM, part containers with Kubernetes and help our customers transition. So which layer these things are, it's going to be an evolving answer. >> So Binny, I love that you started the conversation around Calm. Is Calm the first interaction that most customers will experience when it comes to Nutanix cloud services, or is there a different, one of the other services, the more likely first experience of cloud services versus the trivial compute, storage, network. >> Right, so the first cloud service that we have announced, that we'll deliver, is DR, right? I mean, that's the first one with Xi. Once DR is available, very quickly we'll add more services. Beam is another one that has to fold in to the Xi cloud services. When I say fold in, it essentially means you have the same identity, and you have the same billing mechanisms, and the same experience. You know, similar to when you go to a public cloud, you'll see, there's a host of services, and they're sort of equals, and you can pick whichever one you want to use. What we want to provide with Xi cloud services is that, the same experience, except that these services are now hybrid. You can have them on-prem, you can have it in the cloud. And our teams are building this hybrid view, some of which, the preview of it, what you already saw in the demo there, you saw availability zones on both sides, shown on one screen, now you'll see the service footprint on both sides, on one screen. >> Stu: Yeah, Rajiv-- >> From an experience point of view, I think, Calm will be how people who see this for the first time, that's going to be the center marketplace that we will have, that's where people will launch services from. >> Right, so when you, where's the portal for cloud services, and as I understand, Calm is that portal. >> Calm is a lot more than that, it'll have not just services but applications and workloads as well. But yes, the experience will start with Calm. >> When you talk about a hybrid cloud world in the platform, people are trying to understand what exactly lives where. When we hear kind of Xi, wonder if you might be able to give us kind of a compare-contrast of, say, that you look at VMware, and VMware and Amazon is kind of an easy one to understand, as it's relatively the same stack, just living in a different data center. >> So we're doing things a little bit differently. While we are building our own cloud data centers today, we're architecting it in a way that we're not tying it down to any single stack, that it has to be only a Nutanix-oriented stack. We absolutely intend to scale this out by partnering with service providers, with cloud vendors, and so on. You saw something in the keynote yesterday about running nested on GCP. You can imagine where that will go in the future, but the cloud's also on the radar. Much like we did with our HCI stack, we ship them Supermicro, but we're conscious of the fact that it's software that we can move anywhere. We are building Xi exactly the same. >> Yeah, and what I'd add is, while we are doing it in our own data centers right now, we are learning a lot, and as we are learning the things that are truly needed to make running a cloud easy, from an operational perspective, that allows us to build a product that is an honest product to give to our partners and service providers, say, now you go run it, and you won't be spending too much. For example, the experience that they've had with OpenStack, it cannot be repeated again, right? So that's what we want to do. >> So let's talk about the relationship with Google as a model going forward. Is that prototypical of what you're looking to do with other public cloud providers? And first, give us some color around that announcement, we have anyone on theCUBE talk about Xi and Google, and then kind of the strategy moving forward. >> A lot of the public cloud vendors are actually realizing that hybrid cloud is important, and as part of that, they're providing bare-metal services, and Google has its nested service, to enable others to bring their own stack, you know, virtualization stack, to run there. Amazon has done it VMware, Amazon has also announced their intention to gear bare-metal services. So we see a future where a lot of these public cloud vendors will offer bare metal, and that's where our Xi stack will run, and also giving customers choice to go from one cloud to the other seamlessly. Today, we know that Nutanix can move from public Xi cloud to on-prem and back, but once you have Xi cloud running on multiple cloud vendors and you can move between cloud vendors seamlessly as well. And that's a really compelling message for our customers. >> Great. One of the challenges for some of us watching is, you've got a pretty big portfolio now, and some of the things out in the future, it's like, okay, where does Nutanix fit, how do they have the right to participate in this? Wonder if you can talk a little bit about Era, and maybe Sherlock is a little bit further out. >> Era is about managing copies of your databases. Again, if you look at where a lot of cost is sunk in enterprises, running my database, a production database, for every single production database, there'll be maybe tens of test copies of it. What Era does is minimizes the cost of managing the copies, and also, it's thinly-provisioned copies. That's something that our customers have said that's a real pain point for them that nobody solves really well. So we decided to work on that, that's just a starting point of what we can do in this PaaS layer and also, helps us learn this space as well. We are reaching out to not the infrastructure admin, but actually to the database admin. It gives us a new audience to talk to as well. So from an audience perspective, we are broadening the scope, we are reaching closer to their lines of businesses and the decision-makers, which is good. Now, going to Sherlock-- >> Actually, if I could just, one quick followup on the database piece. Database migration's really hard. You know, talk to any customer and you say database migration, it's one of the things that strikes fear in them. Talk just for a second if you could about the expertise that your team has and why you believe you can really deliver that push-bus and simplicity that Nutanix is known for. >> Oh, so yeah, the team that's building Era are hardcore Oracle folks who have decades of experience doing those kind of hard problems, and they've come here with a mission, into Nutanix, that we are going to solve it. Using the Nutanix platform that we have built, there are so many things that can be done in a better way, and since we have a clean slate, we can start afresh and do it the right way. From our capability to do it in the right way, making it simple for our customers, we don't have a doubt. In fact, a lot of customers who have tested this in alpha, they have raving reviews on that, and they just want it as soon as possible. >> And on the database migration subject, we also have a group called SQL Xtract that we've been shipping for some time that helps you migrate your databases from existing three-tier or even hyperconverged stacks, onto Nutanix. So we have some expertise in the area already. >> So, a little bit on the, I heard the term copy data management. Is this mainly copy data management, or is this actually database migration to a new, to ability to move from one database to another one, or is it all of the above? >> So, it's doing management of copies, it's also allowing you to clone databases. So you can go to a snapshot and clone another one. Migration is not yet there, but it's a natural consequence of the capabilities that we have, because once you have snapshots, we have the capability of moving snapshots from one data center to the other using our DR capabilities. So that's on the roadmap. Further down the roadmap is database provisioning itself. If you want to provision a brand-new database, you can also do that, so these are the natural transitions of work, but what we wanted to do, just like what we did with Xi, start with the hardest, thorniest problem, and then work backwards into the simple things. >> Alright, so unfortunately, we're running short on time. Give us a closing word, I want, Rajiv and Binny, maybe you can talk a quick second about project Sherlock and give us some things that we should look for down the road from Nutanix. >> Yeah, so we believe that the world needs an enterprise cloud operating system. What that means is it can run on the private cloud, in the public cloud, and on the edge, and Sherlock comes there, I mean, it's taking our stack and creating a mini-PaaS version, as you saw in the demo, and running it at the edge in a way that all of your footprint appears like one dispersed cloud. And that's a pretty exciting space, and we think that is the key differentiator that we'll have going forward. >> Any final words, Rajiv? >> I think he covered quite a fair amount of ground, so yeah, thanks for having us on. >> Alright, well, it goes back to really that distributed architecture, the core. Appreciate having the conversation, the CTO roundtable, as it were. Binny, Rajiv, always a pleasure to catch up. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more here. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE. Covering .NExT's conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost Keith Townsend, and this is Nutanix .NEXT conference in New Orleans. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Vijay Luthra, who's the Senior Vice President, global head of technology infrastructure services at Northern Trust. Vijay, great note on the keynote this morning. A lot of cool technologies that you're digging into, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks for having me. >> All right, so luckily it's easy, Northern Trust, understand finance, but tell us a little bit about you know, your organization and kind of give us a high level, what are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing? >> Yep, yep, absolutely. So again, Northern Trust, a global financial services firm, primarily in the asset servicing, asset management, wealth management business. Again, 128 year history, built on some very sound principles around service, integrity, and expertise. Some of the challenges we're facing is around growth. The firm is growing. Revenues are growing at a very, very healthy pace, especially when you compare that to our peers and competitors. And the challenge, number one, is how do we scale the business while managing the overall operating expenses, right? So we want to create some leverage in the business and we want the growth to be healthy growth. So that's challenge number one, and we recently, our CEO recently launched a value for spend program where we grow let's make sure we're spending and we're getting the value for the spend. >> Yeah, Vijay, can you just sketch out for us, you talk about growth and scale. You know, how many locations, how many users, they're emanating that you have to like wrap into this stuff? >> Yeah absolutely, so Northern Trust, about 18,200 employees, I would say 50, 60 plus locations. I would say well distributed across the different regions between US, Asia PAC, and EMEA. Yeah, at high level those are kind of the how we're kind of geographically dispersed. >> Okay great, and cloud. What does that mean to your organization? How does that fit in your role and across the company? >> So cloud, we've been on the cloud journey for several years now. We had a very mature virtualization strategy, which transitioned well into our private cloud strategy. We have enough scale internally where we said if we built an efficient private cloud, which by the way, if you heard on the keynote, was built 100% on converged, hyperconverged technologies. We were actually in the forefront when we adopted these technologies back in 2013, 2014. The goal back then was how do we get efficiencies and scale from the private cloud by leveraging automation, you know converged stacks are highly reliable because, for example, the patching is a lot more well tested by the vendors. So on our journey to the cloud that was essentially the first phase, when we transitioned from virtualization to private clouds, and since then we've actually built more value added layers on top of that. Because the goal is not just to cater to traditional applications that leverage infrastructure as a service, but also to cater to some of the more contemporary cloud native applications that we're building or even some of the containerized workloads. So we've built on top of that with PaaS and KaaS and software-defined components like SDN, and we are closely measuring the outcomes and the benefits. >> So Vijay, let's talk a little bit about that initial investment and decision. Northern Trust, well known for being conservative amongst the most conservative of investment firms. I'm from Chicago so I have an affinity for Northern Trust in general. Back in 2013 there was not as simple to look back it's simple to look back now and say oh yeah, right choice. Easy decision. But 2013 OpenStack was, you know, all the rave, building clouds based on these open source and available technologies was kind of the way to go. What made you guys take a look at hyperconverged and say, you know what, we're going to buck the trend and we're going to go with hyperconverged. Not many of your peers made that choice. >> Yes, that's a great question. So at Northern Trust we are heavily focused on outcome-based investment decisions. So within technology infrastructure our mission is pretty straightforward, which is as we scale infrastructure, how do we continue to reduce total cost of ownership, improve time to market, improve client experience, which is a very essential part of our decision-making process, and while we're doing that, not to lose site of reliability, stability, security. So with that kind of as our guiding principles, as we make major investments we take them through these lenders, and Nutanix hit all of them. So it was fairly straightforward. And again, some of the benefits, as you probably heard on stage, were phenomenal. We were able to increase capacity without increasing staff. We were able to reduce some of our automation, sorry bill teams, significantly. Reliability, stability improved drastically. For example, our virtual desktop infrastructure, the number of incidents, client generated incidents, internal client generated incidents, went down by 80, 90%. So again, to answer your question, outcome driven, have key metrics and measures on what you expect the outcomes to be, and then partner with the right firms to make sure you get the outcomes. >> So as we look at the next phase, you know, infrastructure's a service, you guys seem to have that down, mature virtualization practice, you lay it on top of that infrastructures and service. Now we look into the next phase, KaaS, PaaS type solutions. What are some of the major decision points and what's guiding your decisions? >> So clearly on everybody, all head of infrastructures or any organizations' mind today is how do we build a hybrid cloud strategy that is safe, secure, does not lock you into a specific vendor. It's the right application, the right type of workload, and that's where we're focused on now. We've got a few applications. Nothing that's production client centric is in a public cloud from an IaaS perspective. But we think we've invested in the right components to allow us to now orchestrate safely and securely across multi clouds. So that's what we're focused on now. >> Can you talk a little bit more about containerization? What's the experience like been working with Nutanix for those type of solutions? >> Yeah, so we were early adapters of containers with partnering with Docker built on the Nutanix platform. We've been working with them since the last couple years, and more recently since they announced the Kubernetes integration, we are factoring that into the Docker environment. The goal with containerization is, again, back to kind of those guiding principles, right? Lower costs of ownership, improved time to market, reliability, stability, we see an opportunity to consolidate Linux Windows based workloads because of the efficiencies that containers bring, as well as extend devops like functionality to app teams that might not be looking to refactor in a cloud native PaaS like format. They could take advantage of containers to get a devops like experience. We're enhancing security as we move to containers. There are several things we're doing there. So point being, we're looking at it through kind of the same lenses. >> So you threw out a couple things. I heard devops in there. In your keynote one of the things that you talked about a team going from 45 people (mumbles) to something to 12. Maybe explain a little bit about ops in your company, what happened to all those other 33 people. >> Okay quick questions, two parts. On the infrastructure as a service side, a few years ago we had a build team, mostly contractor driven, where we would use them to build servers, deploy applications, extremely manual. With converged technologies and all the automation that we had deployed, that team is down to 14, 15 people. Because a lot of the work has gone away, and our goal is to continue to fine tune that. So that's infrastructure as a service. Devops wise what we did was we carved out a team of four or five of what Gartner calls versatilists, multiskilled, multidisciplinary resources, senior engineers that focused on building out our devops practice on top of our platform as a service, and that has gone extremely well. You know the team has very successfully onboarded hundreds of microservices as we rearchitect some of our applications. So Vijay, talk us about the decision and the capability of being able to take monolithic applications, that are not going to be refactored and going to containers, there's a lot of debate on whether or not that's worth the trouble. But beyond that debate, talk to us about the importance and the reliance on the capability that Nutanix will be bringing in with ACS 2.0, are you guys looking to deploy that or are you looking to manage Kubernetes and that capability of managing these traditional applications inside of Kubernetes? >> Yeah, so we're a few steps ahead of Nutanix. In one of my conversations with Sunil I was saying man I wish this feature was available six months ago. So we are watching that development very closely. We are very interested in it. But because we have an existing Docker footprint, that's what we're leveraging for Kubernetes for now. >> Great, can you speak about Nutanix, the relationship you have with them, and their ecosystem. Things like secondary storage, you know how do you look at Nutanix as a partner and what do you see the maturity of their ecosystem? Any solutions you'd want to highlight there? >> Yeah, I mean, clearly what Nutanix did to the primary storage market, there's an emerging market on the secondary storage side, and we're working with a couple different companies to help us in that space. But just the Nutanix ecosystem itself, just because we are a few steps ahead and we've got some Nutanix components, we've got some third party components as part of Nutanix, I think the fact that Nutanix is becoming a one-stop shop as you can see with some of the announcements today, from a total cost of ownership perspective it becomes very interesting for someone like myself to say if I took out a few vendors or focused on the Nutanix stack, what does that mean? At what point is it usable? When can we start migrating, and those are the types of things we're going to focus on now. >> So have you gotten into a situation, especially considering that you're at least six months or so ahead of Nutanix when it comes to container orchestration, has the infrastructure gotten in your way at all? Have they done anything, because Nutanix can be opinionated in how they manage infrastructure. As that opinionation, has that opinion rather, gotten in your way as you look to go down your KaaS route? >> No, so far I would say no. I think a lot of their tooling is very intuitive, very easy to use. The engineers, with very minimal training, in fact, some of our engineers that retrained themselves on Nutanix happened over such a small duration and had to do with how simple to use Nutanix stack was. >> One of the lines I love from your presentation, you said you run IP as a business. What advice do you give to your peers out there, learnings you've had, staying a little bit ahead of some of the general marketplace. >> Yeah, I think the key is, back to kind of my initial comment, how do you build scale with an infrastructure? Meaning, how do you take on more workloads, new technologies, while managing your operating expenses tightly? We have essentially done that extremely well over the last few years where we have added to capacity, absorbed a lot of growth, introduced a lot of new technologies while keeping a very close eye on operating expenses. So I would say, if anything, when you run IT as a business, you take into account not just all the net adds, you have a program to consider optimizations. For example, we use a technology that helps us reduce physical VMWare based footprint. It helps us optimize and says here's where you have some debt capacity. You, as leaders and somebody in my position, should be willing and able to take out costs as well while taking on new technologies, I would say that's the key. So you're saying you guys are running IT as a business. What have been some of the KPIs and showing success in that transformation? >> Okay, we closely watch our operating expenses and we measure that as a percentage of total company operating expenses, what percentage are we of that? We closely watch time to market. How soon are we providing environments to ab dev teams. We closely watch stability off the underlying platforms, op time of those platforms. So I think those have direct impact on our internal clients as well as end clients. And then as a business, who are your competitors? >> As Northern Trust? >> No as you run IT as a business? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I would say cloud providers are competitors. But to be honest I shouldn't say that. I mean in a new model I want the team to think about cloud as just another endpoint, and we need to be able to safely and securely deploy the right app in the right cloud kind of the end state that we want to be in. So I wouldn't say they're competitors. I think we as a firm, or any firm should get comfortable with being able to orchestrate and move the right workloads in the right data centers to say. >> All right, Vijay, want to give you the final word. You're out there looking at some of the new technologies. What's exciting you, what's on your wishlist from the vendor community, maybe you can share. Personally I'm very excited about AI in ops. I know people talk about AI in financial services and the other industries. But I think the application of machine learning and AI within data center operations is relevant. And there's many things we're doing in that space in terms of a client facing chatbot that integrates with Link. Or certain add-ons onto Splunk that help you with machine learning and analyzing logs. Or bots that help you classify tickets and put them in the right cues at the right time. So we're looking at how to take advantage of those. Again, to build scale, to lower cost ownership, improve experience, etc., etc., so again, I think that's something I'm personally very, very excited about. >> All right, well Vijay Luthra, really appreciate sharing your story. Great success and look forward to catching up with you-- >> All right thank you. >> In the future. For Keith Townsend I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from New Orleans Convention Center .NEXT, Nutanix's conference 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(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.

>> Narrator: Live from the Javits Center in New York City. It's the Cube, covering the Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are wrapping up the Cube's day two coverage of conference here in New York City at Inforum. My name is Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dan Barnhardt. He is the Infor Vice President of Communications. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yes, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here two days in a row. >> It's been a lot of fun. We've had a great time. So yeah, congratulations, it's been a hugely successful conference, a lot of buzz. Recap it for us, what's been most exciting for you? >> Sure, this was our second year having a forum in New York, which is our home town. I think it was a more exciting conference than last year. We unveiled some incredible development updates, led by Coleman, our AI offering, which is an incredible announcement for us, as well as Networked CloudSuites, which takes the functionality from our GT Nexus commerce network, and bakes it into our CloudSuites, the mission critical industry CloudSuites, that we offer on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Those were really exciting developments, as well as some other announcements we made with regard to product. And then, in addition to product, we had a lot of customer momentum that we shared. Last year, we had customers like Whole Foods and Travis Perkins up here. We continued the momentum with big enterprise customers making big bets on Infor, led by Koch Industries who invested more than two billion dollars this year at Infor, and are now modernizing their human resources and their financial operations with Infor CloudSuites. Moving to the cloud HR for 130,000 employees at Koch Industries which is an incredible achievement for the product, and for cloud HR. And, that's very exciting, as well as other companies like FootLocker, which were recognized with the Innovation Award for our Progress Makers Award. They're using talent science, data science to power their employees, not to power their employees, but to drive their employees towards greater productivity and greater happiness, because they've got the right people in the right fit for FootLocker, that's very exciting. And, of course, Bank of America, our Customer of the Year, which uses our HR solutions for their workforce, which obviously is exceptionally large. >> Yes, there was a great ceremony this morning, with a lot of recognition. So, let's talk a little bit more about Coleman, this was the big product announcement, really the first product in AI for Infor. Tell us a little bit about the building blocks. >> For certain. We have a couple of AI offerings now, like predictive hotel pricing, predictive demand and assortment planning in retail, but we have been building towards Coleman and what we consider the age of networked intelligence for multiple years. Since we architected Infor CloudSuite to run mission critical ERP in the cloud, we developed the capability of having data, mission critical data that really runs a business, your manufacturing, finance, distribution core functions, in the cloud on AWS, which gives us hyper-scale compute power to crunch incredible data. So, that really became possible once we moved CloudSuite in 2014. And then in 2015, we acquired GT Nexus, which is a commerce network that unites, that brings in the 80 percent of enterprise data that lies outside the four walls, among suppliers, and logistics providers, and banks. That unified that into the CloudSuite and brought that data in, and we're able to crunch that using the compute power of AWS. And then last year at Inforum, we announced the acquisition of Predictix, which is a predictive solutions for retail. And when building those, Predictix was making such groundbreaking development in the area of machine learning that they spun off a separate group called Logicblox, just to focus on machine learning. And Inforum vested heavily, we didn't talk a lot about Logicblox, but that was going to deliver a lot of the capabilities along with Amazon's developments with Lex and Alexa to enable Coleman to come to reality. So we were able then to acquire Birst. Birst is a BI program that takes, and harmonizes, the data that comes across CloudSuite and GT Nexus in a digestible form that with the machine learning power from Logicblox can power Coleman. So now we have AI that's pervasive underneath the application, making decisions, recommending advice so that people can maximize their potential at work, not have to do more menial tasks like search and gather, which McKenzie has shown can take 20 percent of your work week just looking for the information and gathering the information to make decisions. Now, you can say Coleman get me this information, and Coleman is able to return that information to you instantly, and let you make decisions, which is very, very exciting breakthrough. >> So there's a lot there. When you and I talked prior to the show, I was kind of looking for okay, what's going to be new and different, and one of the things you said was we're really going to have a focus on innovation. So, in previous Inforums it's really been about, to me anyway, we do a lot of really hard work. We're hearing a lot about acquisitions, certainly AI and Coleman, how those acquisitions come together with your, you know, what Duncan Angove calls the layer cake, you know the wedding cake stack, the strategy stack, I call it. So do you feel like you've achieved those objectives of messaging that innovation, and what's the reaction then from the customer base? >> Without a doubt. I wouldn't characterize anything that we said last year as not innovative, we announced H&L Digital, our digital transformation arm which is doing some incredible custom projects, like for the Brooklyn Nets, essentially money balling the NBA. Look forward to seeing that in next season a little bit, and then more in the season to come. Some big projects with Travis Perkins and with some other customers, care dot com, that were mentioned. But this year we're unveiling Coleman, which takes a lot of pieces, as Duncan said sort of the wedding cake, and puts them together. This has been a development for years. And now we're able to unveil it, and we've chosen to name it Coleman in honor of Katherine Coleman Johnson, one of the ladies whose life was told in the movie Hidden Figures, and she was a pioneer African-American woman in Stem, which is an important cause for us. You know, Infor years ago when we were in New Orleans unveiled the Infor Education Alliance program so that we can invest in increasing Stem education among young people, all young people with a particular focus on minorities and women to increase the ranks of underrepresented communities in the technology industry. So this, Coleman, not only pays honor to Katherine Johnson the person, but also to her mission to increase the number of people that are choosing careers in Stem, which as we have shown is the future of work for human beings. >> So talk a little bit more about Infor's commitment to increasing number to increasing, not only Stem education, but as you said increasing the number of women and minorities who go into Stem careers. >> Certainly. We, you know Pam Murphy who is our chief operating officer, this has been an incredibly important cause to her as well as Charles Phillips our CEO. We launched the Women's Infor Network, WIN, several years ago and that's had some incredible results in helping to increase the number of women at Infor. Many years ago, I think it was Google that first released their diversity report, and it drew a lot of attention to how many women and how many minorities are in technology. And they got a lot of heat, because it was about 30, 35 percent of their workforce was female, and then as other companies started rolling out their diversity report, it was a consistent number between 30 to 35 percent, and what we identified from that was not that women are not getting the jobs, it's that there aren't as many women pursuing careers in this type of field. >> Rebecca: Pipeline. >> Yes. So in order to do that, we need to provide an environment that nurtures some of the specific needs that women have, and that we're promoting education. So we formed the WIN program to do that first task, and this year on International Women's Day in early March, we were able to show some of the results that came from that, particularly in senior positions, SVP, VP, and director level positions at Infor. Some have risen 60 percent the number of women in those roles since we launched the Women's Infor Network just a couple of years ago. And then we launched the Education Alliance Program. We partnered with institutions, like CUNY the City University of New York, the New York Urban League, and universities now across the globe, we've got them in India, in Thailand and China, in South Korea to help increase the number of people who are pursuing careers in Stem. We've also sponsored PBS series and Girls Who Code, we have a hack-athon going on here at Inforum with a bunch of young people who are building, sort of, add-on apps and widgets that go to company Infor. We're investing a lot in the growth of Stem education, and the next generation. >> And by the way, those numbers that you mentioned for Google and others at around 30, 34 percent, that's much better than the industry average. They're doing quote, unquote well and still far below the 50 percent which is what you would think, you know, based on population it would be. So mainly the average is around, or the actual number's around 17 percent in the technology business, and then the other thing I would add is Amazon, I believe, was pretty forthcoming about its compensation, you know. >> Salesforce really started it, Marc Benioff. >> And they got a lot of heat for it, but it's transparency is really the starting point, right? >> It was clear really early for companies like Salesforce, and Amazon, and Google, and Infor that this was not something that we needed to create talking points about, we were going to need to effect real change. And that was going to take investment and time, and thankfully with leadership like Charles Phillips, our CEO, and Marc Benioff were making investments to help make sure that the next generation of every human, but particularly women and minorities that are underrepresented right now in technology, have those skills that will be needed in the years to come. >> Right, you have to start with a benchmark and then know where you're moving from. >> Absolutely, just like if you're starting a project to transform your business, where do you want to go and what are the steps that are going to help you get there? >> Speaking of transforming your business, this is another big trend, is digital transformation. So now that we are at nearing the end of day two of this conference, what are you hearing from customers about this jaunting, sometimes painful process that they must endure, but really they must endure it in order to stay alive and to thrive? >> Without a doubt. A disruption is happening in every industry that we're seeing, and customers across all of the industries that Infor serves, like manufacturing, healthcare, retail, distribution, they are thinking about how do we survive in the new economy, when everything is digital, when every company needs to be a technology company. And we are working with our customers to help first modernize their systems. You can't be held back by old technology, you need to move to the cloud to get the flexibility and the agility that can adapt to changing business conditions and disruptions. No longer do you have years to adapt to things, they're happening overnight, you must have flexible solutions to do that. So, we have a lot of customers. We just had a panel with Travis Perkins, and with Pilot Flying J, who was on the Cube earlier, talking about how their, and Cook Industries our primary investor now, talking about how they're re-architecting their IT infrastructure to give them that agility so they can start thinking about what sort of projects could open up new streams of revenue. How could we, you know, do something else that we never thought of, but now we have the capability to do digitally that could be the future of our business? And it's really exciting to have all the CIOs, and SVPs of technology, VPs of technology, that are here at Inforum talking about what they're doing, and how they're imagining their business. It's really incredible to get a peek at what they're doing. >> You know, we were talking to Debbie earlier. One of the interesting things that I, my takeaway is on the digital transformation, is you know, we always say digital is data and then what we talked about was the ability to traverse industry value change, not just vertically but horizontally. Amazon buying Whole Foods is a perfect example, Amazon's a content company, Apple's getting into financial services. I wonder if you could comment on your thoughts on because you're so deep into micro-verticals, and what Debbie said was well I gave a consumer package good example to a process manufacturing company. And they were like what are you talking about, and she said look, let me connect the dots and the light bulbs went off. And they said wow, we could take that CPG example and apply it, so I wonder when we talk about digital transformation, if you see or can foresee your advantage in micro-verticals as translating across those verticals. >> Without a doubt. We talk about it as adjacent innovation. And Charles points back to an example, way back from the creation of the niche in glass, and how that led to additional businesses and industries like eyeglasses and fire preparedness, and we look at it that way for certain. We dive very deep into key industries, but when we look at them holistically across and we say oh, this is happening within the retail industry, we can identify key functionality that might change the industry of disruption, not disruption, distribution. Might disrupt the distribution industry, and we can apply the lessons learned by having that industry specialization into other industries and help them realize a potential that they weren't aware of before, because we uncovered it in one place. That's happening an awful lot with what we do with retail and assortment planning and healthcare. We run 70 percent of the large hospitals in the US, and we're learning a lot from retail and how we might help hospitals move more quickly. When you are managing life and death situations, if you are planning assortment or inventory for those key supplies within a hospital, and you can make even small adjustments that can have huge impact on patient care, so that's one of the benefits of our industry-first strategy, and the adjacent innovation that we cultivate there. >> I know we're not even finished with Inforum 2017, but we must look ahead to 2018. Talk a little bit about what your goals for next year's conference are. >> For sure. You're correct, we're not finished yet with Inforum. I know everyone here is really excited about Bruno Mars who's entertaining tonight, but we are looking forward to next year's conference as well, we're already talking about some of the innovative things that we'll announce, and the customer journeys that are beginning now, which we'd like to unveil there. We are going to be moving the conference from New York, we're going to move to Washington DC in late-September, September 24th to 27th in Washington DC, which we're very excited about to let our customers, they come back every year to learn more. We had seven thousand people attending this year, we want to give them a little bit of a variety, while still making sure that they can reach, you know, with one stop from Europe and from Asia, cause customers are traveling from all over the world, but we're very excited to see the growth that would be shared. This year, for instance, if you look at the sponsors, we had our primary SI partner Avaap was platinum partner last year. In addition to Avaap this year, we were joined by Accenture, and Deloitte, Capgemini, Grant Thorton, all of whom have built Infor practices over the last 12 months because there's so much momentum over our solutions that that is a revenue opportunity for them that they want to take advantage of. >> And the momentum is just going to keep on going next year in September. So I'll see you in September. >> Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate you guys being here with us for the third year, second year in a row in New York. >> Indeed, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Inforum 2017 in a bit.

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