>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum DC 2018 brought to you by Infor. >> And good afternoon, or I guess at least Eastern Time, good afternoon. We're in Washington DC, theCUBE live here at Inforum '18. We're at the Washington D.C. Convention Center along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. It's a pleasure to welcome Nanzio Esposito who's a VP and Head of Experience at Infor and you can tell he's the coolest guy in the room right now. (all laughing) Yeah, Nanzio, good to see ya. Thanks for joining us, we appreciate that. >> Thank you, thank you for asking. >> So you had a, as part of your primary responsibility, the in-house creative agency. >> Yep. >> Hook and Loop. First off, let's just deal with design, from an approach standpoint. Why is that so important for Infor to have its own in-house agency? >> Well I mean, we have amazing capabilities, and a lot of, and those capabilities really differentiate us against our competitives that. But what ends up happening is that our end users essentially want to have a more enjoyable and more satisfying experience, through their work. So, the reason why design is extremely important to Infor is because, through design, we get to do things like provide efficiency through workflows. We get to do things like create a design system that helps to escale and empower and enable our development teams to pick up UX best practices and UI assets so that they can build quicker. Or open-sourcing those kind of capabilities to be able to empower our partners and our customers to build apps with kind of a standard code base. So, I would tell you that the reason why design is so important is because we look at things from a very macro view, strategically. Design is very holistic, it's problem-solving. And it's taking the best of some of design's key attributes of modernizing the UI, being able to apply design thinking to understand kind of what the business value needs to come out of the system or the solution that's put in play. And how that mutually creates a beneficial kind of delivery mechanism to each user as they're doing their work. And also looking at kind of just the raw, sheer amount of assets that we have from data and being able to find ways to essentially come up with solutions that businesses today really need. And it's a very competitive landscape. And what best to have a designer be able to try to solve some of your business application needs. >> And does it change depending upon the vertical in which you're working? So, I mean, those have to be considerations too, and the environment, right, from the mobile if you're going to be at the desktop, you're going to be on a laptop or? >> Yep, yep. >> On iPad or whatever. All that factors into that. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, it is interesting. I mean, part of Infor strategy has always been to, you know, have industry-focused cloud suites. And from a design perspective, for us, we do tend to see patterns. So, it depends on user roles, kind of access points, you talked about devices. So we see the use of device in, say, healthcare industry, very different, say, than to the use of a device in manufacturing. But mobile, is really starting to kind of blur those lines. And you brought up something that was part of our mobile strategy, internal that was kind of finished out in October of 2017. Which is essentially what we call mobility in context. So context is very important. Knowing situationally where a user is in a moment so that they can, from one moment, work with, say, some portal. And that portal may be a laptop to a, say, an iPhone or even just an Alexa device, and be able to understand where they are, allow them to continue on in that workflow and make sure that it's integrated, it's smooth and it's direct and to the point. So, that's what has kind of transpired through the evolution of Hook and Loop because design has evolved and it's bigger than just modernizing our user interfaces here at Infor. >> So when we first heard about Hook and Loop, it was through Infor. It was the early part of this decade. The mobile was only five or six years old. I mean, smart phones. >> Yeah. >> At the time. So in was early days, you guys were first, certainly, of all the major software company enterprises to focus on that. Now, subsequently, we hear you've always heard a lot about UI. >> M-hmm. >> And UX. Subsequently, much more recently we're hearing much more around design. You're seeing, you know, you go to conferences like Service Now and they're focusing on this stuff and you guys have always been there. What's the difference between UX, UI, and sort of design at the core? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it, sometimes the lines are blurred, right, and it depends on the industry and it depends on where you're speaking as far as when you say user experience design or if you say just design in general. So, I'm going to just take two steps back. The reason why I didn't go for head of design at Hook and Loop was just because design means, has a certain definition here at Infor. We are obviously an enterprise, it's very vast, it's extremely broad and at that point, each, say, of our major constituents, product management, it could be a product development, it could be a customer, they have different mental models on what design means. So, we wanted to go with something that's a little more elusive. Alright, so Head of Experience. But, essentially, now, through our evolution in our sixth year, we're really focused on product experience. So what that means is taking kind of all the learnings that we've had in the industry around modernizing UI, so that's essentially the way in which the solution manifests itself, how it looks, and the best of user experience. Essentially, what is the flow? What are the click states? How can we provide efficiency in form fields? But now you bring in A.I. and that obviously puts a different dimension on that process. But when it kind of all comes together, it's really just about making a strategic call on what the solution needs to be able to satisfy, all the different configurations in which it needs to account for, and then how to package that in a very lightweight manner. So, it's almost to the point that a company or a user doesn't need any instructional information on how to use it. And that's always been a goal at Hook and Loop. Through the six-year journey, strategically, even with some prior leadership, there was a very amazing strategic call to focus on a more mobile first initiative and mobile first, that brought forward kind of all the responsive web behaviors to our applications. So, that's great. Because that just essentially means that on any device, the application will conform, will render, to kind of provide the best usability that it can. As we're evolving, though, we're realizing that the future of work, and I mentioned this to the analysts yesterday, the future of work, which is now post-Millennial, and I know that sounds crazy 'cause I think we're all still seeing millennials in our workforce and trying to reconfigure, figure out what the company culture is, the purpose is, and how business solutions help to support that. But the article in the New York Times talked about iGen, and you know, the theme that Inforum here is all about human potential. Well, in the iGen generation, it's all about the personal aspects of the way in which they communicate, the way they do work, the way they have social gatherings. And I found it very profound because that essentially really supports what the vision of Hook and Loop is now in this era, which is the personal enterprise. And there's nothing more personal than the device that we choose on a daily level, which is the mobile device. So, at that point, it's extremely innate. And it definitely kind of personifies who we are in our digital world, our digital selves, and because it actually has all this tons of capability that's packed into it, what ends up happening is not about kind of the nine to five anymore, and I think you guys, and myself, we all know that. We're getting notifications and communication to, say, a loved one or some kind of social event that's going on and then getting pinged through some kind of communication or notification of work that we have jobs to do, there's things that have to get done. So, it moves from work-life balance to a work-life blend. And for our enterprise, and through kind of I think the investment that we've done with design, that allows us at Hook and Loop to really push the boundaries of user experience and think about the balance of all those to kind of give our customers always only exactly what the user needs right now. And that's been our new mantra, where we've kind of strategically pivoted, evolved, and been essentially looking at our principles and re-looking at our work, given all this investment in our capabilities. >> We heard this morning in the keynotes that you're basically infusing A.I. into your applications, in an effort to create better outcomes. Giving users advice as to how they maybe could have done things differently, maybe tracking some KPI's and giving feedback to the user, so that they can have better outcomes. How does A.I. from a design standpoint change the way in which you have to think about presenting data and information to the user? And not being intrusive, but being helpful? >> Yeah. I could probably talk about that for like the next two to five hours, but the reality is there's different versions or flavors of A.I. So, some of it could be more backend processes, like you alluded to and presenting, say, best potential outcomes that a user, or paths that a user can navigate or select or go down. One thing that we saw from a design perspective is the fact that you don't want to just present the recommendation. You don't want to lose the human factor. You have to establish trust with A.I. over time. So, in just saying, hey I got that or I got that done or here's the best KPI to use, you want to still have a system that can offer up why. And be able to kind of promote choice. A user doesn't want to feel, essentially, controlled. They want the system to be able to make them feel like they're in control. So, those are some nuances there. When it gets into kind of the more conversational aspects of A.I., you know, and I'm going well beyond kind of chat bots, having conversations and having it kind of leverage some of our CIR capabilities, find business objects and promote it, say through our GUI, conversations get intense. And why I say intense, it's some of the terminology we use at Hook and Loop. But that's just because utterances and variancing in the way in which we communicate, are complex. You might say, OK and I might say yeah. You might say I am on it and I might say, yo, I'm doin' that. And just through-- >> That's exactly right, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what David would say. (all laughing) >> I wasn't trying to say this or that. But they all mean the same thing, or in different contexts or whatever the inquiry was, we have to understand that kind of user intent and be able to map all those correlations. So, it's not so easy as just saying hey, we have A.I. and we'll put it into play. And from a design perspective, the last thing we want to do is ever alienate a user. So. >> A frustrated user. >> And frustrated user, exactly. So, just because you can doesn't mean you should and we really need to think strategically in a way in which we ultimately empower a user. So when I say user we're saying a name for customer's employee, or a new force customer customer. So it's a very interesting strategic place that we sit within Infora in our product development teams. >> Yeah, within user experience and best practices, so obviously there are some general trends or general concepts, what do you find out though amongst your clients and your user base maybe that offers additional insight or is giving you maybe a little sneak peak about something that you are uniquely discovering, if you can talk about that? >> Oh yeah, sure. I mean, I think as we evolved kind of our business model this year and our services, I think one of the things that we've learned over the years is that, like, we're no subject matter experts. Like at all. So it's kind of like, well, how do we get this information? How can we learn more? How can we provide or satisfy or create solutions that satisfy these certain pain points? So what we ended up doing is, ya know, I hear this from my team constantly, it's like who's the customer? Or who's the user? And we need personas. And we need to understand the journey maps. And we lose sight of some of the more internal mechanisms that we have that really kind of give us that information. So, we've, over the last few months, have gotten access to Infor Concierge, which is a tool that Infor created for our customers to be able to kind of understand what's new in the product. If they have any product enhancement requests, issues, that they would love to see, bugs, defects. They're finding that their Infor is working really well in creating kind of a two-way conversation. Well, what best to have design team, which, you know, product experience team, to be able to have access to all of that information. Be able to comb and sift through it. So, we're learning kind of what the customer and the user wants, but they're participating in that. So it's a really interesting orchestration or concert. And then on the flip side, we have a ton of subject matter experts. So, and that goes well beyond just our solution, industry solution, architects. This goes into like, our sales teams, or our solution consultants, or our channel partners. So, strategically over these last six to eight months, I think what we have uncovered is that we have a lot of support. And there's like ways for us to make decisions quicker and be able to test or have successes or failures in a very like small, confined box, so to speak. So that we make decisions that don't necessarily create massive ramifications in the enterprise but get us to kind of create value quicker in a more kind of sizeable chunk in deployment mechanism. So, I think the biggest thing that we've uncovered is the fact that, not only do we have a lot of talent but we have a lot of amazing, bright ideas. And that is why we moved from an in-house design agency to product experience because essentially Infor has grown and our team is everyone's becoming a designer. And that's you want. You want to go from a design organization which was the goal in 2012 to now in 2017, 2018 and where we're headed, to move from a design org to a design culture. And I think that's what is going to definitely going to get Infor to differentiate against its competitive landscape. >> 'Cause one of the problems with design is oftentimes the design, the ideal design, there's a gap between that and the actual functionality of the product. And then you end up with this kind of hybrid. Some of the design intent matches the outcome but then the functionality is sort of becomes roadmap. >> Yeah, and a lot of that was happening, I think 'cause we were going through an evolution. What we noticed is we need to move design closer to our product development teams in Hyderabad, Manila. You know, development is getting done all over the globe. So what we did was, we wanted to ensure that UX practitioners were, ya know, sitting side by side of our development teams so that in a moment's time they can have a conversation, quickly make a decision, and obviously just continue on their way. Another piece, though, is what is the right balance between having massive amounts of engineering capacity to, say, a designer that's in partnership with them? So we started practicing and growing our team to be less focused on some of the more baseline design capabilities and we brought in some really smart and talented engineers that understand design, find ways to translate it. And we're doing that kind of translation right now in building native mobile applications inside of Hook and Loop. And that gives us a mechanism to prove out our work, understand some of our decisions, get kind of the feasibility more done upfront so that when we make strategic calls or we want to scale from there, we start to minimize the gap between wouldn't this be amazing if it could render or do this, to, oh, God, we just did like, patchwork, or it was a quill that we created to get it done. We want to bridge that gap and get closer and closer to what the original concept or the idea was. >> So you announced one of those apps this week. >> Yeah, that was super exciting! >> If you want to talk about that. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I mean leveraging the best of human-centered design, I can't mention the customer's name given the NDA, but we did work with a very large consulting firm that had 18,000 users. And they're kind of road warriors. So, strategically working with our C suite, we were focusing on more agnostic solutions and then scale to more industry-focused solutions, so this is in expense management. But we needed something that was insanely high consumer grade. So really driven by usability. But offered more of the baseline utility. So leveraging the capabilities of XM, this was all kind of like the road warrior, I just need to capture my receipt, potentially build a queue, wait 'til my credit card feeds in these data points, my expenses, match these expenses, submit a report, and like can I just get back on my day 'cause we all hate doing that. So the app that we just released, it's available on Apple iTunes, the Apple Store, today. It's called Infor Expense. It acts as a companion to Infor Expense Management. We say companion because if you're an Infor Expense Management customer today, you have access to it. And it really is a mechanism to kind of promote the best of what Hook and Loop is trying to scale, continues to scale, inside of Infor. At the same time, it's a playground for us. It's a playground for us to test new capabilities, leverage capabilities that are on the device. You know, evolve our design patterns and our UI assets. So that we kind of always stay at the tip of the spear. And that's essentially where Hook and Loop sits for Infor from a product strategy perspective. >> Well if you make expense reports easy, I'm all for it. >> Me too, right? >> I got my parking ticket right here, we can start as soon as we're done. >> Alright, you want me to take a picture of that? (all laughing) >> Nunzio, thanks for the time. >> Awesome. >> Congratulations. I know you're moving into your second year, it'll be an exciting time for you I'm sure. >> Yeah, I'm excited. >> Keynote tomorrow, right? >> Yeah, I'm opening up day two. >> Just give us real quick, sneak peak, what are you going to talk about? >> Yeah, it's, I think it's really just all about design's evolution inside of Infor, really setting the stage that Hook and Loop went from an internal kind of creative agency and is really moving towards product experience. So that's product strategy, product thinking, how do we aggregate all of that capability, from a data and A.I. perspective, and then find deployment mechanisms that not only inspire our internal teams, but more importantly, inspire our customers in the market. >> Good deal. >> Thank you again for the time. Pleasure. >> Alright, thank you. >> See you tomorrow morning. Nunzio Esposito joining us from Infor. Back with more, we're at Inforum '18. We're live in Washington D.C. and you are watching theCUBE. (light upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C., it's theCube, covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back here on theCube, we are live at Inforum '18 in the nation's capital Washington D.C. Where these days there's never a dull moment and we'll just leave it at that. I'm with John Walls, Dave Vellante and Stuart Applebaum is joining us here. He's the EVP of North America Service Industries at Infor, and Stuart, thanks for joining us here. >> No, thank you, looking forward to it, you're right. >> You got your hands on a lot of pies, right. >> Yeah. >> The bank, you got a retail, you got healthcare, hospitality. >> Right. >> And you've had some wins in hospitality of late. First off, what's driving that? What do you think as being-- >> Yes, sure, well I mean whether you look at hospitality whether it's managed food service or hotels or restaurants a lot the technology that's out there is dated, right, and the technology is not upkeeping with the requirements and the demand for a really different customer service level. So, you take the look and feel of what we've been able to do as a company over the last 10 years and build up a lot of knowledge base and seniority around what it means to serve those markets, but then re-architect with new products, right. Cloud first approach type technology that really allows for us to deliver a, you know what I would say a much more better experience for the guest at a hotel, or at a front at a cash register at a restaurant, or in a managed food service environment in a hospital, right. All those environments are a lot of touches that go on and the more the technology is modern the better you can improve those technology and those interactions that go on. You also look at the idea that these guys trying to manage these, whether it's a hotel chain, or a company like Sodexo where they have managed food service entities all over. Business in industry, healthcare, it doesn't matter what you see, a cafeteria somewhere, there's high odds that it's either a company like Sodexo or another managed food service provider. The complexity of trying to maintain on premise solutions is just, is backbreaking for them. So for them to be able to now actually get to a level with a company like Infor who not only has the experience in the space, but also have invested into the next generation cloud based solutions, really allows us to kind of differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. And the marketplace has been pushing us for that as well. >> Are these typically, install based Infor customers that you're now moving to a cloud model? Is it, sort of new logos? I'm wondering if you could describe that dynamic? >> Yeah, I would tell you it's pretty mixed, right. Our customer base is fairly broad. We serve hotels for example, in over 100 countries and territories today. A lot of those customers came up through legacy applications much like we complete in a marketplace on. So we've done really great job of migrating those customers up into the cloud with the next generation technology. But what's also happened is, as you look at the area in which people serve the hotel space, a lot of them are really legacy applications that have been around for 20, 30 years, and while those companies have tried to encapsulate modern technology and move into some cloud level environment, only Infor has actually re-architect and built them from the ground up. So what we're finding is a lot of different style of companies and groups. One great example of this is Mandarin Oriental has begun to role out our company, or role out our products globally. So being able to take a brand that's as exclusive as that, that's so focused on "How do we make the guest, at the forefront of everything that we do to make them feel special?" Well, they couldn't do that with the technology that they have today, right. So in order to be able to make those differences and those changes in how they're going to service their guest, they have to move to a next generation technology. So we're seeing a lot of new logo business in that space. We're also seeing a lot of new logo space in the casino marketplace, right. You think about how massive and big these casinos are so most of these guys are very careful and concerned, just like our banking customers for example, in being able to move into the cloud, move to new technology, cause, can companies really scale? Can they bring that capability and put it in the cloud? Well we very much started to prove that with these large casinos to the point where we just recently announced about a year ago signing one of the largest, or second largest casino company in the world, and 40 hotels with over 50,000 hotel rooms, right. The idea to be able to take these kind of technologies at that scale and pace, is driving a lot of new logo new customer business being driven from our competition, which has not been able to keep pace with that kind of technology in the cloud. >> So what are the winning attributes? I'm hearing architecture, we heard this morning platform, we had Nunzio on, the design, the whole user experience. There's the cloud component. Are those the sort of key factors? What else? >> They're very much the key but it's how Infor OS which I think maybe people have talked a little about. We have this capability to create a model that allows for not only a free flow of communication and understanding between systems, whether it's for a hotel environment or a hospital environment so that information can be shared amongst systems and among resources to be able to collaborate and do something with that information. But equally as important, at the same time, we put all that information into a data lake. So that we can now use Birst and we can use Coleman, to really start to help people understand not only what does it look like or what's the interactions occurring at the hotel space, or might you want to tell this customer or say to this customer to, "Hey, we're going to give you this information up front instead of guessing what that might look like, or guessing what you might want to offer that client." It's a very different approach. >> Give me an idea, I mean specifically, you talk about Mandarin, we'll just use them as an example. >> Yup >> What are you helping them do better, that they couldn't do before? Because when I think of service, I think of Mandarin, they did things pretty well before. So what are you doing to help them improve their processes and what are they turning to you for future? >> Sure, well, I mean from a simplistic standpoint talk about how they're able to interact with you as a guest, right. If you're a Mandarin type of client you're probably very much a more affluent business traveler or a-- >> Dave Vellante >> Yeah, a Vellante example right. At the end of the day while you want all the level of service that you expect at that kind of property the amount of effort or work they have to do or you might have to do to make them understand what that is, is very taxing. And it's also very hard for you guys to interact and change that. By getting to, what we have, HMS, which is Infor's hotel property management system, allows them to really streamline not only understanding who you are, what your preferences are, how you like to interact with them, but then also be able to deliver that in a mode of interaction that you like. Whether it be through mobile, whether it be through text, whether it be through personal conference calls, or discussions or touchpoints. That kind of capability in their legacy systems took a whole bunch of manual intervention to make that happen. Now we're able to automate that, make that information realtime so it's not just a few people digging in to try to find this information to go back and try to make that guest fell like they understood it. It's every point, right, every contact that touches that customer who has access to our solutions, is fed that information realtime, which gives the customer a much different experience. At the same time, it allows you guys to interact in a much different experience. You may not want to talk to people you want to check in on your phone, show up at the hotel, go to your room, open your door. Well, legacy architectures and technologies with closed type of infrastructure don't allow for that open API capability. Versus our technologies allow it free flowing out of a cloud scenario, which is even a more complex thing, to give the ability for those hoteliers like Mandarin, to say "Hey, I'm going to give Vellante a unique experience that is exactly what he likes, with all the information that I know about him to be what I would consider the best way I can service Vellante. >> So self-service is an obvious one. I don't want to have to wait on the phone on hold to check out for example. Just give me a pad or something that I can just go boom. And there are numerous other examples, but you've got to get the user experience and the design right. Maybe talk about how you guys approach that. >> Yeah, well, you guys had a chance to meet with Nunzio on our Hook & Loop. Hook & Loop is very instrumental in what we do in the hospitality space as well, as well in the healthcare space. Anytime people are interacting, not only as an employee but as a guest, whether you're an invited guest you know from a doctor to get to a hospital to have some kind of treatment or acute care. Or if you're a hotel guest where you're coming to stay. There is some level of interaction that's going on that requires a very unique, specific kind of touchpoint between the two. And in that area and in that space, there's a lot of data and elements that go on that if you feed those and understand what those elements are, and start to really understand what it is that individuals require in terms of their personal care or their personal interaction or stay at a hotel, the more unique an experience and the better experience that they can have. >> Stuart we heard about the skills gap, the skills shortage this morning. How can Infor and it's software help close that gap? >> Right, well you can look at it in a couple different ways. If you look at it at the grassroots of some of the industries that we serve that we've talked about. Whether it's hospitality or retail, or even healthcare in some scenarios. Not talking about professionals in the healthcare industry, but people who are just working day to day operations. Simplifying the interaction on how they use the solutions that they do their jobs everyday, minimizes the training requirements and the skilled labor that has to go on that would occur in legacy solutions and architects. So being able to hire a front desk guest agent who's got a great personality who knows how to interact and talk to people but maybe has never used a hotel system before to be able to put them in front of that hotel system and act just like their phone or their iPad, it gives them the ability to be interactive and understand and be on board pretty quickly. So that's one side, is simplifying, working with Hook & Loop, designing, making sure the applications, the workflows make sense. So it simplifies the work effort and simplifies the ability for people who are maybe less skilled in a particular area to jump in really quickly with less training. The other side of it is trying to find the right resources. And, going through the process of having a skilled attribute level of understanding of what your successful people look like, we can help through our Talent Science solutions find similar type of people. That doesn't mean, now we'll get to the education enablement side of it, that doesn't mean day one, that maybe they have the exact training they have required but that we found that they are the perfect fit for the job. So if they are going to be interacting on an everyday basis with a guest for example, and they're a front desk manager, there's attributes around that are so critical important. Now, they may not understand all the facets of the job but once we find that right resource you bring them into the talent solution and then really start to understand where are their gaps, where are the training requirements, what are the certifications by the way, depending on if you're in a complex industry like manufacturing or healthcare where there are certifications and safety regulations you have to occur. How do you maintain all that into one spot and be able to identify and be able to give them and provide them the personal interaction on what is it that they need to maintain and grow in terms of their own abilities to be suitable for the next job or the job that they're being hired for, and how do they actively get the learning and the education, the e-learning that goes with it. So, we've been able to kind of formulate that into a comprehensive product set that we think is pretty much best of breed in the industry, right. So not only do we have a great learning management system, an unbelievable talent acquisition and science system, a fabulous way to hire, to promote, to retire structure on understanding employees, what their skills are and how to place them, but bringing all that together from a unified front, and then being able to standardize that into an experience that makes it a much more different approach from what you would traditionally have had in finding skilled labor in the workforce. >> In automation, in AI, it's now a layer on top of all this that you're bringing to the table with Coleman you started to role out some capabilities there. What's the reaction been of customers? Is there uncertainty? Is there fear? Is there doubt? Are they embracing it? What is the conversation like? >> Really instead of saying, it's better to think of it, it's not on top, right. This is the underpinnings of how we built our cloud suites. >> Injected into the-- >> So we've taken our cloud suites and everything we've opened from a technology perspective to inform every information and job that flows through, whether it's in personal intervention into a task or whether it's machine to machine, goes through that Infor OS. So all of that interaction and data whether it's from a person or from a machine gets captured so you can start to begin to build intelligence on top of that. Now, what that means is, wherever those interactions and communications occur, Coleman is sitting in there understanding and learning, sitting on top of our data lake to say, "You know what? This is a process that is repeated a hundred times a day, by 50 different people on a particular firm. Why don't we automate that process and why don't we make that known to the entity and then adjust our process to automate that so no one has to interact with it, right. So being able to have that as an underpinning, not an overlay, right, cause a lot of businesses will come in and say "Hey we'll provide analytics and BI over the top." That's great, analytics and BI on the top is pulling information out of all different kinds of sources trying to make sense of all that data trying to make sense of all those sources. Versus what we're trying to do is every interaction that occurs between systems, we're not trying to identify right at that point what makes sense to store somewhere and put somewhere, it all goes into our data lake, and then the machine learning starts to tell you, "Here's some things you should understand about the data and the interactions. >> We've heard the theme about human potential, unlocking that. So, how does that translate in your world, I mean in your mind? How do you apply that in terms of the industries that you're providing services for? >> Again it goes back to, it also goes to our focus on bringing a diverse workforce to the table. To improve our capabilities and improve the way we approach things. But, it's understanding individual attributes of people and how they may interact and work within a company is a starting point, right. So they may not have a particular skill, but they have a capability or an ability to learn or they may have a personal interaction that is far excessive than what normal people would come in to interview first like a job. Well being able to do these type of talent assessments and understand as a baseline where they are, all of a sudden you're getting a more broader pool of skilled resources for what you're looking for, right. And then even if that skilled resource happens to be from a different part of the country than what your typical hiring manager is, or they look different, or their education background is different, it strips that out, right. It is giving you the personal attributes of that individual. So that allow a broader pool to look at. Then from that pool, then we can start to say "Okay, well here's a great candidate pool of people that may be able to quickly be skilled into a job or into a role, and then start to place those people into those positions. And then as the life cycle of that employee goes on so do their attributes, right. So what made them who they are as other roles and jobs as they build their resume within the company, they still have those capabilities so as a role in a management place comes up that has a good fit for this persons individual skills and their personal attributes, they're a natural fit for moving up into the world. And that's how we kind of continue to get that engine rollin in terms of how do we bring more people in without a prescriptive, only a prescriptive model, right. This is a scientific model of what is going to be the right fit for an employee for Infor, right. Or an employee for one of our customers or another company. And that's where we start with bringing in that ability to broaden our workforce and identify people who could be successful, without necessarily saying "You didn't punch this type of button for the last 10 years so you're not qualified for the job." >> So I'm hearing a lot of differentiation and I'd love to hear it more in your words from an executive of Infor. Every company out there, every software company says "Yeah, we have AI too." I'm sure you hear it: "Oh company A B and C, they have their new AI platform, everybody's doing AI." When you're talking to customers, how do you differentiate what Infor is doing, not with just machine intelligence, but across the board, from the competition? >> Well I would tell you to start with, one is the comprehensive set of our solutions, right. So by being able to go into an industry and have a cloud suite that we formulated that has the capability to manage a very significant portion of their operations already integrated together, already with the last industry model functionality built into it. It gives us a leg up in our competition. So when we walk into a healthcare, or a hospital, and they have challenges with nurse scheduling, they have financials they need to look at, they have general HR that they have to look at, and by the way, they're also trying to look at "Are we going to be profitable? And how do we become profitable? All these different touchpoints are a nightmare for us." Well as Infor, what we present to our customers and brought together was: "Hey we have that capability to do all your nurse scheduling, your workforce planning, your time attendance. We can manage your facilities, your assets, your expensive cost structures there." We have the ability to have a very complex set of financials that may serve 15 different hospitals that might also have different infused levels of ownership or investment or management. Being able to come to the table with that as a comprehensive system, eliminates a lot of the guesswork. Now, again, once you have that in there, someone coming in and selling AI, or BI, they still would have to, if it wasn't us, to come in over the top and say, "Well, if it's all Infor, that's good. At least we can connect all Infor. But if it's got Epic or it's got Cerner, it's got whatever solution's sitting out there, well all of a sudden you're not only having to connect those points but you're having to connect all over the place versus the way we built it is that cloud suite, all those points of connection are already prebuilt, right. And they're already dumping it into the data lake. So that now all you have to do is take some ancillary pieces of data to pull into that perspective. And with capabilities of clinical integrations that we have, to be able to follow and track those things. And we just actually announced not too long ago TrueCost. TrueCost is the ability to really understand down to a procedure level what something may cost to perform at a particular hospital. And that is, you would think that wouldn't be that hard but you're talking about people, you're talking about equipment, you're talking about what kind of room? What equipment's in that room that creates a certain cost per hour to do a procedure? All those things come to play in determining exactly what is profitable and what's not. So being able to really understand the true cost of care, not only at the hospital level, but by the way, how do we take into account what happened before? How do we take post care into that? And then how do we start to do predictive analytics on that kind of capability? Well, since we have this cloud suite healthcare, for example, building around all of these different components where we track the resources, we understand the rooms and the cost. We understand the doctor cost, we understand the facilities cost. We understand the care and the time that it take to go under the care. We can now start to really take and give hospitals an idea of saying: "Hey, maybe if we approach this a little differently." Or even with Coleman now, maybe you approach it this way. You can start to do and provide that specific care in a different way that will lower your cost to care, not only for your hospital but for your patients, and then hence you become more profitable as an entity. >> It's a real business impact. And the alternative would be, you would have to what? Develop custom modifications, or bring in an ISV who's got deep expertise there. Bring in another system. >> You could have a combination of it, right. Some of our competition would have to bring in a different workforce management and scheduling system. They'd have to bring in a different time and attendance system. They would probably have to bring in a different analytical engine and underlying platform to work with it. They would have to bring in a different talent assessment or talent management type of solution. They would have to bring in a different supply chain and materials management system for a healthcare environment for example. I mean, the list can go on and on. Where we've went out and built and looked for, whether it was through acquisition, where we then brought these cloud based products into our cloud suite, or we identified gaps or areas that we needed to build from scratch. And we talk about, you know, people don't really think about it, but as a percent of revenue, we outspend our competition 5x, right. And we talk about how much we've spent in the last several years in R&D. We do that because we know that if we can build a platform in the next generation for healthcare, for hospitality, for retail, then we can really be the leaders in the marketplace. And I think that's what's going to really differentiate us from our competition who's trying to either come in with a point area, start to broaden it a little bit. We've already broadened it, we integrated it, we built it together and we underpin it with the ability to do artificial intelligence and analytics from the box, right. That's a very different approach. >> And keep it simple. >> Right >> For me, right? At the end of the day-- >> Yeah, make it easier for the users. >> Stu thanks for the time. >> No, this was great. I appreciate it. >> Thanks for the run down. Stuart Applebaum from Infor. Back with more here from Inforum '18. We are live in Washington D.C. And you're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

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