>>Welcome back to Los Angeles, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here on day three of the cubes, coverage of coop con and cloud native con north America, 21, Dave, we've had a lot of great conversations. The last three days it's been jam packed. Yes, it has been. And yes, it has been fantastic. And it's been live. Did we mention that it's inline live in Los Angeles and we're very pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. David Stephanie is here. The CEO of Trulio David. Welcome back. It's good to see you. >>Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. Isn't it great to be in person? Oh man. It's been a reunion. >>It hasn't been a reunion and they have Ubered been talking about these great little, have you seen these wristbands that they have? I actually asked >>For two, cause I'm a big hugger, so >>Excellent. So, so here we are day three of coupon. That's actually probably day five, our third day of coverage. I'm losing track to it's Friday. I know that, that I can tell you, you guys announced two dot five a couple of weeks ago. Tell us what's in that. What's exciting. Before we crack open Twilio, uh, choy. >>Sure, sure. Well, it's been exciting to be here. Look, the theme right of resiliency realize has been it's right up our wheelhouse, right? To signal that more people are getting into production type of environments. More people require data protection for cloud native applications, right? And, uh, there's two dot five releases. It is as an answer to what we're seeing in the market. It really is centered predominantly around, uh, ransomware protection. And uh, you know, for us, when we look at this, I I've done a lot of work in, in cybersecurity, my career. And we took a hard look about a year ago around this area. How do we do this? How do we participate? How do we protect and help people recover? Because recovery that's part of the security conversation. You can talk about all the other things, but recovery is just as important. And we look at, uh, everything from a zero trust architecture that we provide now to adhering, to NIST standards and framework that's everything from immutability. Uh, so you can't touch the backups now, right? Uh, th that's fine to encryption, right? We'll encrypt from the application all the way to that, to the storage repository. And we'll leverage Keem in that system. So it's kind of like Bitcoin, right? You need a key to get your coin. You as an end-user only have your key to your data alone. And that's it. So all these things become more and more important as we adopt more cloud native technology. And >>As the threat landscape changes dramatically. >>Oh yeah. I got to tell you right. Every time we, you, you publish an application into another cloud, it's a new vector, right? So now I'm living in a multi-cloud world where multiple applications in my data now lives, right? So people are trying to attack backups through, uh, consoles and the ministry of consoles to the actual back of themselves. So new vectors, new problems need new solutions. >>And you mentioned, you mentioned something, you, you, you asked the question, how do we participate? And we are here at KU con uh, w uh, cloud native foundation. So what about, what's your connection to the open source community and efforts there? How do you participate in that? >>Yeah, so it's a really great question because, you know, uh, we are a closed source solution that focuses all of our efforts on the open source community and protecting cloud native applications. Our roots have been protecting cloud native applications since 2013, 2014, and with a lot of very large logos. And, um, you know, through time there are open source projects that do emerge, you know, in this community. And for example, Valero is an open source data protection platform, um, for all of its goodness, as a, as a community-based project, they're also deficiencies, right? So Valero in itself is, uh, focuses only on label based applications. It doesn't really scale. It doesn't have a UI it's really CLI driven, which is good for some people and it's free. But you know, if you need to really talk about an enterprise grade platform, this is where we pick up, you know, we, in our last release, we gave you the ability to capture your Valero based backups. And now you want to be an adult with an enterprise caliber, you know, backup solution and continue to protect your environment and have compliance and governance needs all satisfied. That's where, that's where we really stand out. >>Well, when you're talking to customers in any industry, what are the things that you talk about in terms of relief, categorizing the key differentiators that really make Trulia stand out above the competition? >>Yeah. Cause there, there a bunch of, they're a bunch of great competitors out there. There's no doubt about it. A lot of the legacy folks that you do see perhaps on those show floor, they do tuck in Valero and under the, under the covers, they can check a box or you can set aside some customer needs some of the pure play people that, that we do see out there, great solutions too. But really where we shine is, you know, we are the most flexible agnostic solution that there is in this market. And we've had people like red hat and Susa and verandas, digital ocean and HPS morale. And the list goes on, certify, say, Trulio is the solution of choice. And now no matter where you are in this journey or who you're using, we have your back. So there's a lot of flexibility. There we are complete storage agnostic. >>We are cloud agnostic in going back to how you want to build our architecture application. People are in various phases in their, in their journey. A lot of times, many moons ago, you may have started with just a label based application. Then you have another department that has a new technique and they want to use helm, or you may be adopting open shift and you're using operators to us. It doesn't matter. You have peace of mind. So whether you have, you have to protect multiple departments or you as an end user, as one single tenant are using various techniques, we'll discover or protect and we can move forward. >>So if you looked at, if you look at it from a workload basis, um, and you look at your customers are the workloads that you're protecting. What's, what's the mix of what you think of as legacy virtualized things versus containerized things. And then, and then, and then the other kind of follow on to that is, um, are you seeing a lot of modernization and migration or are you seeing people leave the legacy things alone and then develop net new in sort of separate silos? >>Yeah. So that's a great question. And I, to tell you the answer varies, that's, that's the honest answer, right? You end up having, you may have a group or a CIO that says, look, your CTO says, we're moving to this new architecture. The water's great, bring your applications in. And so either it's, we're going to lift and shift an application and then start to break it apart over time and develop microservices, or we're gonna start net new. And it really does run, run the gambit. And so, you know, as we look at, for some of those people, they have peace of mind that they can bring their two on applications in and we can recover. And for some people that say, look, I'm going to start brand new, and these are gonna be stateless applications. Um, we've seen this story before, right? Our, our, uh, uh, I joke around, it's kinda like the movie Groundhog's day. >>Uh, you know, we, we started many moons ago within the OpenStack world and we started with stateless to stateful. Always, always, always finds a way, but for the stateless people, um, when you start thinking about security, I've had conversations with CSOs around the world who say, I'm going to publish a stainless application. What I'm concerned about things like drift, you know, what's happening in runtime may be completely different than what I intended. So now we give you the ability to capture that runtime state compare. The two things identify what's changed. If you don't like what you see, and you can take that point in time recovery into a sandbox and forensically take it apart. You know, one of our superpowers, if you will, is the, our point in time, backups are all in an open format. Everyone else has proprietary Schemos. So the benefit of an open format is you have the ability to leverage a lot of third party tooling. So take a point in time, run scanners across it. And it, God forbid Trulio goes away. You still have access and you can recreate a point in time. So when you start thinking about compliance, heavy environments, think about telcos, right? Or financial institutions. They have to keep things for 15 years, right? Technologies change, architectures change. You can't have that lock-in >>So we continue to thrive. And on that front, one of the marketing terms that we hear a lot, and I want to get your opinion on this as a feature proofing, how do you, what does, what does it mean to you and Trillium and how do you enable that for organizations, like you said, for the FSI is I have to keep data for 15 years and other industries that have to keep it for maybe even longer. >>I mean, right. The future proof, uh, you know, terminology, that's part of our mantra actually, when I talked about, you know, a superpower being as agnostic and flexible as can be right, as long as you adhere to standards, right? The standards that are out here, we have that agnostic play. And then again, not just capturing an applications, metadata data, but that open format, right? Giving you that open capability to unpack something. So you're not, there is no, there is no vendor lock-in with us at all. So all these things play a part into, into future-proofing yourself. And because we live and breathe cloud native applications, you know, it's not just Kubernetes right? Over the course of time, there'll be other things, right. You're going to see mixed workloads too. They're gonna be VM based in the cloud and container based in the cloud and server lists as well. But you, as long as you have that framework to continuously build off of it, that's, that's where we go. You know, uh, it shouldn't matter where your application lives, right? At the end of the day, we will protect the application and its data. It can live anywhere. So conversations around multi-cloud change, we start to think and talk across cloud, right? The ability to move your application, your data, wherever it, wherever it needs to be to. >>Well, you talked about recoverability and that is the whole point of backing up video. You have to be able to recover something that we've seen in the last 18, 19 months. Anyone can backup >>Data. >>That's right. That's right. If you can't recover it, or if you can't recover it in time. Yeah. We're talking like going on a business potential and we've seen the massive changes in the security landscape in the last 18, 19 months ransomware. I was looking at some, some cybersecurity data that showed that just in the first half of this calendar year, January one to June 30, 20, 21, ransomware was up nearly 11 X DDoS attacks are up. We've got this remote workforce. That's going to probably persist for a while. So the ability to recover data from not if we get hit by ransomware, but when we get hit by ransomware is >>When you're, you're absolutely right. And, and, and to your plate anyway. So anyone can back up anything. When you look at it, it's at its highest form. We talk about point time where you orchestration, right. Backup is a use case. Dr. Is a use case, right? How do you, reorchestrate something that's complex, right? The containers, these applications in the cloud native space, there are morphous, they're living things, right? The metadata is different from one day to the next, the data itself is different from when one day the net to the next. So that's, what's so great about Trillium. It's such an elegant solution. It allows your, reorchestrate a point in time when and where you need it. So yes. You have to be able to recover. Yes. It's not a matter of if, but when. Right. And that's why recovery is part of that security conversation. Um, you know, I I've seen insurance companies, right? They want to provide insurance for ransomware. Well, you're gonna have enough attacks where they don't want to provide that insurance anymore. It costs too much. The investment that you make with, with Trulio will save you so much more money down the road. Right. Uh, who's our product manager actually gave a talk about that yesterday and the economics were really interesting. >>Hmm. So how has the recovery methodology who participates in that changed over time? As, as we, you know, as we are in this world of developer operators who take on greater responsibility for infrastructure things. Yeah. Who's, who's responsible for backup and recovery today and how, how has that changed >>Everyone? Everyone's responsible. So, you know, we rewind however many years, right? And it used predominantly CIS admin that was in charge of backup administrator, but a ticket in your backup administrator, right. Cloud native space and application lifecycle management is a team sport. Security is a team sport. It's a holistic approach. Right? So when you think about the, the team that you put out on the field, whether your DevOps, your SRE dev sec ops it ops, you're all going to have a need for point in time, we orchestration for various things and the term may not be backup. Right? It's something else. And maybe for test dev purposes, maybe for forensic purposes, maybe for Dr. Right. So I say it's a team sport and security as a holistic thing that everyone has to get on board with >>The three orchestration is exactly the right way to talk about absolute these processes. It's not just recovery, you're rebuilding >>Yeah. A complex environment. It's always changing. >>That's one of the guarantees. It's always going to be changing >>That much. >>Can you give us a, leave us with a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Trulio delivers? >>Yeah. So it's interesting. I won't say who the customer is, but I'll tell you it's in the defense agency, it's a defense agency. Uh, they have developers all over the place. Uh, they need self-service capabilities for the tenants to mind their own backups. So you don't need to contact someone, right. They can build, they have one >>Dashboard, single pane of glass or truth to manage all their Corinthians applications. And it gives them that infrastructure to progress whether your dev ops or not your it ops, uh, this, this group has rolled it out across the nation and they're using in their work with very sensitive environments. So now we have they're back. And what are some of the big business outcomes that they're achieving already? >>The big business outcomes? Well, so operational efficiencies are definitely first and foremost, right? Empowering the end user with more tools, right? Because we've seen this shift left and people talking about dev ops, right. So how do I empower them to do more? So I see that operational efficiency, the recoverability aspect, God forbid, something goes wrong. How do you, how do you do that in the cost of that? Um, and then also, um, being native to the environment, the Trillium solution is built for Kubernetes. It is built on go. It is a Qubit stateless Kubernetes application. So you have to have seamless integration into these environments. And then going back to what I was saying before, knowing peace of mind, the credibility aspect, that it is blessed by, you know, red hat and suicide Mirandas and all these other, other folks in the field, um, that you can guarantee it's going to work >>Well, that helps to give your customers the confidence that there, and that confidence might sound trivial. It's not, especially when we're talking about security, it's not at all that, that's a, that's a big business outcome for you guys. When a customer says, I'm confident I have the right solution, we're going to be able to recover when things happen, we try, we fully trust in the solution that we're, >>And we'll bring more into production faster that helps everyone out here too. Right? It feels good. You have that credibility. You have that assurance that I can move faster and I can move into different clouds faster. And that's, we're gonna continue to put, we're gonna continue to push the envelope there. You know, coming a, as we look into, you know, going forward, we're going to come out with other capabilities. That's going to continue to differentiate ourselves from, from folks. Uh, we'll, we'll talk about in time, the ability to propagate data across multiple clouds simultaneously. So making RTOs look at the split seconds and minutes. And so I hope that we can have that conversation next time we were together, because it's really exciting. >>Any, any CTA that you want to give to the audience, any, any, uh, like upcoming or recent webinars that you think they would be really benefit from? >>I guess one thing I put out there is that, um, I understand that people need to continuously learn. There is a skillset hole in, in this market. We can, we understand that, you know, and people look to us as not just a vendor, but a partner. And a lot of the questions that we do get are how do I do this? Or how do I do that? Engage us, ask us to consume our product is really, really easy. You can download from the website or go to an, you know, red hats operator hub, or go to the marketplace over at Susa, and let's begin to begin and we're here to help. And so reach out, right? We want everyone to be successful. >>Awesome. trillium.io. David, thank you for joining us. This has been an exciting conversation. Good >>To see you all. >>Likewise. Good to see you in person take care. We look forward to the next time we see you when unpacking what other great things are going on on Trulia. We appreciate your >>Time. Thank you so much. Good to be here >>For David's fie and David Nicholson, the two Davids I'm going to sandwich. I'm Lisa Martin, you we're coming to you live from Los Angeles. This is Q con cloud native con north America, 2021. Stick around our next guest joins us momentarily.

(techno music) >> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to MIT CDOIQ. The CDO Information Quality Conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. This is our day two of our two day coverage. Jean Ross is here. She's the principle research scientist at MIT CISR, Jean good to see you again. >> Nice to be here! >> Welcome back. Okay, what do all these acronyms stand for, I forget. MIT CISR. >> CISR which we pronounce scissor, is the Center for Information Systems Research. It's a research center that's been at MIT since 1974, studying how big companies use technology effectively. >> So and, what's your role as a research scientist? >> As a research scientist, I work with both researchers and with company leaders to understand what's going on out there, and try to present some simple succinct ideas about how companies can generate greater value from information technology. >> Well, I guess not much has changed in information technology since 1974. (laughing) So let's fast forward to the big, hot trend, digital transformation, digital business. What's the difference between a business and a digital business? >> Right now, you're hoping there's no difference for you and your business. >> (chuckling) Yeah, for sure. >> The main thing about a digital business is it's being inspired by technology. So in the past, we would establish a strategy, and then we would check out technology and say, okay, how can technology make us more effective with that strategy? Today, and this has been driven a lot by start-ups, we have to stop and say, well wait a minute, what is technology making possible? Because if we're not thinking about it, there sure are a lot of students at MIT who are, and we're going to miss the boat. We're going to get Ubered if you will, somebody's going to think of a value proposition that we should be offering and aren't, and we'll be left in the dust. So, our digital businesses are those that are recognizing the opportunities that digital technologies make possible. >> Now, and what about data? In terms of the role of digital business, it seems like that's an underpinning of a digital business. Is it not? >> Yeah, the single biggest capability that digital technologies provide, is ubiquitous data that's readily accessible anytime. So when we think about being inspired by technology, we could reframe that as inspired by the availability of ubiquitous data that's readily accessible. >> Your premise about the difference between digitization and digital business is interesting. It's more than just a sematic debate. Do companies now, when companies talk about digital transformation these days, in fact, are most of them of thinking of digitization rather than really transformative business change? >> Yeah, this is so interesting to me. In 2006, we wrote a book that said, you need to become more agile, and you need to rely on information technology to get you there. And these are basic things like SAP and salesforce.com and things like that. Just making sure that your core processes are disciplined and reliable and predictable. We said this in 2006. What we didn't know is that we were explaining digitization, which is very effective use of technology in your underlying process. Today, when somebody says to me, we're going digital, I'm thinking about the new value propositions, the implications of the data, right? And they're often actually saying they're finally doing what we thought they should do in 2006. The problem is, in 2006, we said get going on this, it's a long journey. This could take you six, 10 years to accomplish. And then we gave examples of companies that took six to 10 years. LEGO, and USAA and really great companies. And now, companies are going, "Ah, you know, we really ought to do that". They don't have six to 10 years. They get this done now, or they're in trouble, and it's still a really big deal. >> So how realistic is it? I mean, you've got big established companies that have got all these information silos, as we've been hearing for the last two days, just pulling their information together, knowing what they've got is a huge challenge for them. Meanwhile, you're competing with born on the web, digitally native start-ups that don't have any of that legacy, is it really feasible for these companies to reinvent themselves in the way you're talking about? Or should they just be buying the companies that have already done it? >> Well good luck with buying, because what happens is that when a company starts up, they can do anything, but they can't do it to scale. So most of these start-ups are going to have to sell themselves because they don't know anything about scale. And the problem is, the companies that want to buy them up know about the scale of big global companies but they don't know how to do this seamlessly because they didn't do the basic digitization. They relied on basically, a lot of heroes in their company to pull of the scale. So now they have to rely more on technology than they did in the past, but they still have a leg up if you will, on the start-up that doesn't want to worry about the discipline of scaling up a good idea. They'd rather just go off and have another good idea, right? They're perpetual entrepreneurs if you will. So if we look at the start-ups, they're not really your concern. Your concern is the very well run company, that's been around, knows how to be inspired by technology and now says, "Oh I see what you're capable of doing, "or should be capable of doing. "I think I'll move into your space". So this, the Amazon's, and the USAA's and the LEGO's who say "We're good at what we do, "and we could be doing more". We're watching Schneider Electric, Phillips's, Ferovial. These are big ole companies who get digital, and they are going to start moving into a lot of people's territory. >> So let's take the example of those incumbents that you've used as examples of companies that are leaning into digital, and presumably doing a good job of it, they've got a lot of legacy debt, as you know people call it technical debt. The question I have is how they're using machine intelligence. So if you think about Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, they own horizontal technologies around machine intelligence. The incumbents that you mentioned, do not. Now do they close the gap? They're not going to build their own A.I. They're going to buy it, and then apply it. It's how they apply it that's going to be the difference. So do you agree with that premise, and where are they getting it, do they have the skill sets to do it, how are they closing that gap? >> They're definitely partnering. When you say they're not going to build any of it, that's actually not quite true. They're going to build a lot around the edges. They'll rely on partners like Microsoft and Google to provide some of the core, >> Yes, right. >> But they are bringing in their own experts to take it to the, basically to the customer level. How do I take, let me just take Schneider Electric for an example. They have gone from being an electrical equipment manufacturer, to a purveyor of energy management solutions. It's quite a different value proposition. To do that, they need a lot of intelligence. Some of it is data analytics of old, and some of it is just better representation on dashboards and things like that. But there is a layer of intelligence that is new, and it is absolutely essential to them by relying on partners and their own expertise in what they do for customers, and then co-creating a fair amount with customers, they can do things that other companies cannot. >> And they're developing a software presumably, a SAS revenue stream as part of that, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> How about the innovators dilemma though, the problem that these companies often have grown up, they're very big, they're very profitable, they see disruption coming, but they are unable to make the change, their shareholders won't let them make the change, they know what they have to do, but they're simply not able to do it, and then they become paralyzed. Is there a -- I mean, looking at some of the companies you just mentioned, how did they get over that mindset? >> This is real leadership from CEO's, who basically explain to their boards and to their investors, this is our future, we are... we're either going this direction or we're going down. And they sell it. It's brilliant salesmanship, and it's why when we go out to study great companies, we don't have that many to choose from. I mean, they are hard to find, right? So you are at such a competitive advantage right now. If you understand, if your own internal processes are cleaned up and you know how to rely on the E.R.P's and the C.R.M's, to get that done, and on the other hand, you're using the intelligence to provide value propositions, that new technologies and data make possible, that is an incredibly powerful combination, but you have to invest. You have to convince your boards and your investors that it's a good idea, you have to change your talent internally, and the biggest surprise is, you have to convince your customers that they want something from you that they never wanted before. So you got a lot of work to do to pull this off. >> Right now, in today's economy, the economy is sort of lifting all boats. But as we saw when the .com implosion happened in 2001, often these breakdown gives birth to great, new companies. Do you see that the next recession, which is inevitably coming, will be sort of the turning point for some of these companies that can't change? >> It's a really good question. I do expect that there are going to be companies that don't make it. And I think that they will fail at different rates based on their, not just the economy, but their industry, and what competitors do, and things like that. But I do think we're going to see some companies fail. We're going to see many other companies understand that they are too complex. They are simply too complex. They cannot do things end to end and seamlessly and present a great customer experience, because they're doing everything. So we're going to see some pretty dramatic changes, we're going to see failure, it's a fair assumption that when we see the economy crash, it's also going to contribute, but that's, it's not the whole story. >> But when the .com blew up, you had the internet guys that actually had a business model to make money, and the guys that didn't, the guys that didn't went away, and then you also had the incumbents that embrace the internet, so when we came out of that .com downturn, you had the survivors, who was Google and eBay, and obviously Amazon, and then you had incumbent companies who had online retailing, and e-tailing and e-commerce etc, who thrived. I would suspect you're going to see something similar, but I wonder what you guys think. The street today is rewarding growth. And we got another near record high today after the rate cut yesterday. And so, but companies that aren't making money are getting rewarded, 'cause they're growing. Well when the recession comes, those guys are going to get crushed. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> And you're going to have these other companies emerge, and you'll see the winners, are going to be those ones who have truly digitized, not just talking the talk, or transformed really, to use your definition. That's what I would expect. I don't know, what do you think about that? >> I totally agree. And, I mean, we look at industries like retail, and they have been fundamentally transformed. There's still lots of opportunities for innovation, and we're going to see some winners that have kind of struggled early but not given up, and they're kind of finding their footing. But we're losing some. We're losing a lot, right? I think the surprise is that we thought digital was going to replace what we did. We'd stop going to stores, we'd stop reading books, we wouldn't have newspapers anymore. And it hasn't done that. Its only added, it hasn't taken anything away. >> It could-- >> I don't think the newspaper industry has been unscathed by digital. >> No, nor has retail. >> Nor has retail, right. >> No, no no, not unscathed, but here's the big challenge. Is if I could substitute, If I could move from newspaper to online, I'm fine. You don't get to do that. You add online to what you've got, right? And I think this right now is the big challenge. Is that nothing's gone away, at least yet. So we have to sustain the business we are, so that it can feed the business we want to be. And we have to make that transition into new capabilities. I would argue that established companies need to become very binary, that there are people that do nothing but sustain and make better and better and better, who they are. While others, are creating the new reality. You see this in auto companies by the way. They're creating not just the autonomous automobiles, but the mobility services, the whole new value propositions, that will become a bigger and bigger part of their revenue stream, but right now are tiny. >> So, here's the scary thing to me. And again, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And I've been an outspoken critic of Liz Warren's attack on big tech. >> Absolutely. >> I just think if they're breaking the law, and they're really acting like monopolies, the D.O.J and F.T.C should do something, but to me, you don't just break up big tech because they're good capitalists. Having said that, one of the things that scares me is, when you see Apple getting into payment systems, Amazon getting into grocery and logistics. Digital allows you to do something that's never happened before which is, you can traverse industries. >> Yep. >> Yeah, absolutely >> You used to have this stack of industries, and if you were in that industry, you're stuck in healthcare, you're stuck in financial services or whatever it was. And today, digital allows you to traverse those. >> It absolutely does. And so in theory, Amazon and Apple and Facebook and Google, they can attack virtually any industry and they kind of are. >> Yeah they kind are. I would certainly not break up anything. I would really look hard though at acquisitions, because I think that's where some of this is coming from. They can stop the overwhelming growth, but I do think you're right. That you get these opportunities from digital that are just so much easier because they're basically sharing information and technology, not building buildings and equipment and all that kind of thing. But I think there all limits to all this. I do not fear these companies. I think there, we need some law, we need some regulations, they're fine. They are adding a lot of value and the great companies, I mean, you look at the Schneider's and the Phillips, yeah they fear what some of them can do, but they're looking forward to what they provide underneath. >> Doesn't Cloud change the equation here? I mean, when you think of something like Amazon getting into the payments business, or Google in the payments business, you know it used to be that the creating of global payments processing network, just going global was a huge barrier to entry. Now, you don't have nearly that same level of impediment right? I mean the cloud eliminates much of the traditional barrier. >> Yeah, but I'll tell you what limits it, is complexity. Every company we've studied gets a little over anxious and becomes too complex, and they cannot run themselves effectively anymore. It happens to everyone. I mean, remember when we were terrified about what Microsoft was going to become? But then it got competition because it's trying to do so many things, and somebody else is offering, Sales Force and others, something simpler. And this will happen to every company that gets overly ambitious. Something simpler will come along, and everybody will go "Oh thank goodness". Something simpler. >> Well with Microsoft, I would argue two things. One is the D.O.J put some handcuffs on them , and two, with Steve Ballmer, I wouldn't get his nose out of Windows, and then finally stuck on a (mumbles) (laughter) >> Well it's they had a platform shift. >> Well this is exactly it. They will make those kind of calls . >> Sure, and I think that talks to their legacy, that they won't end up like Digital Equipment Corp or Wang and D.G, who just ignored the future and held onto the past. But I think, a colleague of ours, David Moschella wrote a book, it's called "Seeing Digital". And his premise was we're moving from a world of remote cloud services, to one where you have to, to use your word, ubiquitous digital services that you can access upon which you can build your business and new business models. I mean, the simplest example is Waves, you mentioned Uber. They're using Cloud, they're using OAuth.in with Google, Facebook or LinkedIn and they've got a security layer, there's an A.I layer, there's all your BlockChain, mobile, cognitive, it's all these sets of services that are now ubiquitous on which you're building, so you're leveraging, he calls it the matrix, to the extent that these companies that you're studying, these incumbents can leverage that matrix, they should be fine. >> Yes. >> The part of the problem is, they say "No, we're going to invent everything ourselves, we're going to build it all ourselves". To use Andy Jassy's term, it's non-differentiated heavy lifting, slows them down, but there's no reason why they can't tap that matrix, >> Absolutely >> And take advantage of it. Where I do get scared is, the Facebooks, Apples, Googles, Amazons, they're matrix companies, their data is at their core, and they get this. It's not like they're putting data around the core, data is the core. So your thoughts on that? I mean, it looks like your slide about disruption, it's coming. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> No industry is safe. >> Yeah, well I'll go back to the complexity argument. We studied complexity at length, and complexity is a killer. And as we get too ambitious, and we're constantly looking for growth, we start doing things that create more and more tensions in our various lines of business, causes to create silos, that then we have to coordinate. I just think every single company that, no cloud is going to save us from this. It, complexity will kill us. And we have to keep reminding ourselves to limit that complexity, and we've just not seen the example of the company that got that right. Sooner or later, they just kind of chop them, you know, create problems for themselves. >> Well isn't that inherent though in growth? >> Absolutely! >> It's just like, big companies slow down. >> That's right. >> They can't make decisions as quickly. >> That's right. >> I haven't seen a big company yet that moves nimbly. >> Exactly, and that's the complexity thing-- >> Well wait a minute, what about AWS? They're a 40 billion dollar company. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah >> They're like the agile gorilla. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> I mean, I think they're breaking the rule, and my argument would be, because they have data at their core, and they've got that, its a bromide, but that common data model, that they can apply now to virtually any business. You know, we're been expecting, a lot of people have been expecting that growth to attenuate. I mean it hasn't yet, we'll see. But they're like a 40 billion dollar firm-- >> No that's a good example yeah. >> So we'll see. And Microsoft, is the other one. Microsoft is demonstrating double digit growth. For such a large company, it's astounding. I wonder, if the law of large numbers is being challenged, so. >> Yeah, well it's interesting. I do think that what now constitutes "so big" that you're really going to struggle with the complexity. I think that has definitely been elevated a lot. But I still think there will be a point at which human beings can't handle-- >> They're getting away. >> Whatever level of complexity we reach, yeah. >> Well sure, right because even though this great new, it's your point. Cloud technology, you know, there's going to be something better that comes along. Even, I think Jassy might have said, If we had to do it all over again, we would have built the whole thing on lambda functions >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah. >> Not on, you know so there you go. >> So maybe someone else does that-- >> Yeah, there you go. >> So now they've got their hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> You know maybe it'll take another ten years, but well Jean, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, >> it was great to have you. >> My pleasure! >> Appreciate you coming back. >> Really fun to talk. >> All right, keep right there everybody, Paul Gillin and Dave Villante, we'll be right back from MIT CDOIQ, you're watching theCUBE. (chuckles) (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube! Covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Inforum, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host, Dave Vilante. We are joined by Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here. Thank you guys for coming. >> So you're fresh off the keynote. A big deal. Thousands of people here at the Javits Center. What would you say is the most exciting to you about being here and what you really want us participants, attendees to come away with? >> Well, there's a lot of energy at the conference. And people can see the investments we've been making. All the innovation. And just the feedback we're getting is just keep doing what you're doing. You guys just really change the industry. The idea of a network commerce and a network ERP coming together is something new. They like the fact that we kind of find these new areas on our own. People are buzzing about Coleman, our new AI announcement, that platform as well. So it's been fun getting the feedback. >> So talk a little bit about Coleman. Talk about the naming of Coleman. >> Yeah, so it's named after Katherine Coleman Johnson, who is one of the early pioneers in NASA. She was a researcher mathematician there to calculate a lot of the orbital fractions that were needed for reentry. And John Glenn relied on her. And she's in the movie, Hidden Figures. And got to know that movie pretty well, because along with about 30 other African American executives, we raised enough money to send almost 30 thousand kids to see the movie for free. We screened it probably three months before it hit the theaters. And a lot of buzz. We didn't know a lot about it ourselves, so we learned a lot about them. So I was excited to say, if we're going to have an AI platform, why not name it after her? Such a pioneer. And it worked out. Her family was at the event and they were just blown away. And they're asking, can I get copies of everything? And taking pictures with us. So, I thought it was the highlight of the show. >> You know, I liked your first slide today and yesterday in the analysts meeting. It basically was your strategy in a nutshell. Micro verticals was sort of the starting point, the decision to go AWS cloud, The GT Nexus network component, burst analytics and then Coleman AI. Just fit together so nicely and it sounds great. And then you also said, look. Cloud and mobile and social, that's table stakes today. It's really sort of a new ball game. So my question is, you know, the slide's nice. It sounds great. How fully baked is it? >> Yeah, well, we're, I think we're, you know, we've had some time now. We're building the network. And so we've been working on figuring out the right integration points and where the value add was. And so, we're already able to kind of ship things like ASM directly to our ERP. And we showed in context where you can click on the order, an M3, for example, and see where it is on an ocean container. So we've already done a lot of that work. And there's only more to come. We want to, we didn't mention it today, but we want to attack the EDI market and commoditize that and have it be a free service. Because we already have a network. We can ship packets around it. Doesn't cost us anything. And we do that for some customers today. So we have more that we could have talked about that we didn't get to. So a lot of it's real today. >> We also heard at the analysts meeting, in great depth, and a little bit today, you had the CFO of Koch industries up there, made a large $2 billion plus investment. Koch is also a customer. And was a customer prior to the announcement of the investment. How did that all come about? Can you share that sort of story with us? >> Yeah, so we had a very successful project at Georgia Pacific. They brought us in because they were frustrated with SAP. It's too expensive, taking to long. We had the micro vertical reaches that could get going quickly. And we collaborated with them and added a few other things they wanted. So that went very well. And kind of, word travels when you come in under budget. (laughter) And one thing led to another. Made a trip to Wichita at their invite, and hit it off very well with Charles Koch. He understood what we did, he's an MIT grad, very technical. So, wasn't sure what I was kind of getting into. But once I started talking to him, he clearly understood everything else. And the more technical the conversation became, the more animated he got. So, clearly he's our kind of guy. We're product people. And so, we hit it off very well. >> And they're becoming a larger customer. You're getting deeper and deeper into that account. But there's an old saying, you know, God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. And so, you guys have emerged as this really viable alternative to SAP and Oracle. But how do you go from where they are to this cloud native platform that you guys have developed? >> Well, it'll be one of the largest global implementations ever. Of any financial project, of any HCM. 130,000 employees, which is great. So a project of that scale, that happens usually top down. When they're invested and ready to go. So they have four members on our board. And including the CFO, including the president of Georgia Pacific, and many other important executives. And so the guys who run the divisions, many of them are on our board and learning this stuff and excited. So they're actually pushing us right now. Which we think is great. We have a weekly cadence call with all these senior execs of all the projects to make sure here's where we are, are you getting what you need, are people responding. I mean, they are driving. These people know how to execute. And that's why they're $115 billion. It's great for us, great for them. They're pushing us. So I'm not too worried about that, given what I've seen so far. >> When you think about the long term strategy of Infor, you're now one of the most well-funded unicorns along with Uber and Air B&B. Where do you go? What do you sort of see as sort of the long term play here? >> Yeah, post world domination? (laughter) Then after that, we have other industries we want to get into. There's a few acquisitions we probably will consider. We want to expand our network. These networks grow up by vertical and by industry. There's a few other vertical we want to get into. But the list of things that we could build and what people are asking us to build is almost endless. You know? And they like the way we do these kind of digital transformation projects. There's lots of those out there. And so, we just want to make sure we have the ecosystem where we can implement. That's why it's so important to get a censure, Cap Jim and I, and Grant Thorton and Deloit, they're all taking training as we speak. Filling out their practices. Which we didn't have a year ago. So, that was our kind of constraint to scaling. We just couldn't take on so many projects. But now we can. >> I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the structure of the industry, the software industry specifically. I mean, you're fairly famous for having sort of predicted consolidation, and then orchestrating that consolidation. Mark Andreson's famous for saying software's eating the world. I think Bennioff said there's going to be more non tech companies that are SAS companies than tech companies. Do you expect we'll just see a sort of de-consolidation of software? Or maybe a bi frication? Where maybe some of the enterprise guys acquire, but there's all these burgeoning, blooming flowers of software companies emerging. What's your point of view on the software industry and its structure? >> I think you'll see more industrial companies wanting to own software. I think you'll see software executives running non software companies. Most companies think they have to get digital. And a lot of the board of directors recognize that and recognize they don't have the expertise to do that. And so a lot of software executives get asked to run non tech companies for that reason. Because you can learn retail faster than they can learn how to program. And if you've been building the applications for those verticals, you actually kind of know the vertical pretty well. So I think you'll see some of these domains over time where people have to become more technology fluent. And the way to do that is to bring in tech people. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you sort of as a follow up on that, you see Amazon buys Whole Foods and is getting into grocery, they're a content company. Apple's get the financial services. And you know it's because of digital. It allows you to sort of jump industry value chains. But for decades, people just stay within their own little value chain silo. Do you expect that to change as well? Where executives are able to traverse industries? >> I think so. Technology is causing that. There's enough disruption and fear where people are willing to consider something completely different than they were before. And that helps us, because usually we need someone to either take an action because they see an opportunity or because they're worried about getting disrupted. That's how these big projects get started. That's part of the reason why our growth is so good right now. >> Is that's what's driving it? Is it the fear of being left behind? >> It's probably equal amount of both. They see opportunity, I should be doing something, but I don't know what. So we have to tell them the what. Or, I'm worried about what everybody else is doing. I don't want to get Ubered out. And we tell them how not to be in that position. So we're getting an audience at senior levels that we couldn't before. Just because it's top of mind for everybody. >> How about, talk about MNA a little bit. And what you look for in an acquisition candidate. You have a platform, that's probably dogmatic about running on that platform. But talk a little but more about what you look for. >> We usually want next generation thinking in a technical platform that we don't have to completely rewrite. Because we don't to kind of pollute our architecture. If it's a modern architecture where we can graph it on to our information OS, as we call it, that's fine. So we don't buy things just for scale. And that was kind of early strategy for the company 10 or 15 years ago. We buy things because it's a specific value proposition for customers or fills a hole we think we need to fill. >> Okay. >> I would rather buy something that is small, maybe not much traction, not much revenue, but a great product. Because we have a huge distribution channel and we can grow it pretty quickly. We can fix all those other problems if the product is there. >> Well, the burst acquisition is very interesting because you saw the ascendancy we were talking about earlier, Rebecca. Saw the ascendancy of tableau, and Christian Chabeau, very articulate, would talk about the slow BI companies and really de positioning them. You're positioning is actually quite compelling. Not the old, takes forever to build a cube. And not the lightweight version of just a visualization. You're sort of the best of both worlds. Maybe unpack that a little bit. >> Yeah, that's the attractions we saw in Berson's. You need some of those enterprise features to understand fragmented and enterprise scale data. That's a hard problem. Having a nice desktop tool that can only handle a single table or gives you conflicting information so you can't have any semantic meaning across different data sources. It's nice to get answers quickly, but if they're wrong, that doesn't help you. So, we need somebody who could handle the back end. Our customers were asking us to do that. They want us to be the analytic layer, a system of record for analytics, because other companies don't want to do that. SAP or Oracle will say, just use all my stuff. I don't want to connect to anybody else. And we know that we have to coexist. And if we can build that analytic layer, we think that's strategic high ground. Let's own that. And if we can replace some of the underlying systems later, great. You know? >> I was just going to talk about, I was going to switch gears entirely and talk a little bit about politics. Before the cameras were rolling, you were on Obama's economic recovery board, which was led by Paul Volker. You've been to Washington, met with Trump, met with Pence. I'm curious about how you view the roll of business in advising government. In which directions to take, and the approach. >> I think it's increasingly important in a sense that, especially with the current administration, they should respect business opinion. Because he's a business guy. Secondly, so many of our institutions people don't trust any more. THey've kind of lost some of that credibility. I hope we can turn that around. But in the interim, we have to have other people who can fill in for some of that. And, especially tech companies. People want to know what tech companies think. And so, I think we almost have a duty to try to fill in some of that. And every part of the economy and the government has been effected by technology. They want to understand it. We can help them do that. >> And so many of your customers are in fact municipalities, and cities, and public school systems. >> That's a good point. We have 1500 state and local governments and federal customers. And that's a fast growing part of our business right now. And we're rooting a lot of federal agencies as we speak. Because they're going through an upgrade cycle as well. Something called Fed Round they have to get certified in. And they want to move to the cloud. And we're doing both of those with them. >> Now, you also talked about how you see technology executives perhaps moving into other industries. Do you see them also moving into public service? Do you see that as a possibility? >> That's going to take longer. That's probably later in their careers because of the economics of that. But every now and then, you'll see one do it, yeah. >> So, a question on cloud. It was almost by necessity, I would argue, that you gravitated toward AWS. Smart move. Others have said, you know, Oracle in particular, we're going to own the whole stack. We can make a lot of money owning the whole stack. If you had to do it again, would you pursue that same strategy, and why? >> Well, when we got there, the company was just trying to build a cloud business. We were doing it traditional. Trying to own data centers and, you know, doing data sharing. We could have done that and continued with that over time. But I just thought it wouldn't provide the elastic compute and the scale of data management that I thought was coming. We looked at all the platforms that we out there at the time. We met with Microsoft, IBM, you name it. And at the time, AWS was just so much further along in terms of services available, capabilities, entrepreneurial spirit, scale, it wasn't even close. In our minds, anyway. And so, they were great partners to work with. For us, it's been the right decision. They've helped us a lot. >> Yeah, and seeing your arc as maybe a question. But you're pretty technical. Maybe a better question for Duncan or Soma, but I'll ask you. Because you're more technical than I am. When you look at your architecture slides, there's a lot of Amazon in there. >> There is, yeah. >> There's like this dynamo dv, looks like some kineses, there's S3, there's all kinds of flywheel oriented tech. I wonder if you could sort of elaborate on that in terms of the impact that that has not only on you, but ultimately on your customers. >> Yeah, no. That was by design, by my direction. I wanted to take advantage of every single serviture we could on AWS. Because every time we do that, that's less work for my developers. I don't want them to worried about infrastructure. Just write the application and be an industry expert. So any time they come out with a new service, you name it. Whether it's Promethium, archiving, backup. We were one of the early customers of RedShip. We take advantage of it. Because it's cheaper for us to do it that way and we get the scale that we need. And we get it in multiple countries. So when any other strategy than that, we have to replicate things in multiple places and we have to figure out how to make it work on AWS. >> And I know we're limited on time, but if software's eating the world, software's going to eat the edge. So talk about your edge strategy. >> Well, it depends on what you mean by edge strategy. I think that software eating the world is true. Maybe it's helping the world, is a better way to put it. But almost every product that we see its inside of now. That's actually good for us, being the largest vendor for asset management. Every IOT company is coming to us because all that data is meaningless unless you can generate a work order or requisition and get something fixed, schedule someone to come. That's what we do. So all of that data needs to end up on a repository. That can effect the business process. And we own that business process. >> Well, something that we've said on the Cube since the early days of so-called big data is the practitioners of big data are the guys who are going to do well. It's not necessarily the guys selling big data infrastructure. And that's proven true. You guys never talked ever, I don't think, about big data. But you're a data company now, first. >> Yeah, and we've collected a lot more data than we ever thought we would. And so, now we've got to figure out how to use that. >> How to parse it, how to use it. >> Exactly. Which is why we added the next two layers of that stack. >> That will be next year's summit. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Next year's Inforum. Well, Charles Phillips, thanks so much for joining us. It was a pleasure. >> Great. Thanks you guys. >> See ya, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Valante, we will have more from the Cube's coverage of Inforum after this. (upbeat music)