>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Good afternoon and welcome back to Inforum 2018. Our coverage here on theCUBE as we start to wrap up our two days of coverage here at the show. We're in Washington, D.C. at the Walter Washington Convention Center, along with Dave Vellante, John Walls here. We're joined now by Mayumi Hiramatsu, who is the SVP of Cloud Operations Engineering and Security at Infor. Mayumi, how are you doing? >> Great to be here, thanks for coming. >> And a recent honoree by the way, Woman of the Year at the Women in IT Awards, so congratulations on that. (clapping) >> Awesome! >> Thank you. >> Very nice honor. >> Great. >> Tell us... big picture here, cloud strategy as far as Infor is concerned and why that separates you from the pack. What makes that stand out, you think, from your peers? >> I think there are a couple of things. One is that when I think of cloud, a lot of people will think about cloud as, it's a software running in the cloud, but it's more than that. It's about the solution and the capabilities that we're building on the cloud. And Infor is perfect, in that we're building enterprise software solutions. So if you look at Infor and compare us to the competition, we may have multiple of competition wrapped together in a solution. And that's really powerful, and you can only do that, really well, in the cloud because it's already built for that. It's integrated and the power of data is really amazing, because when you think about cloud, it's not just the software, it's the data, what you can do with it. And with the latest technologies around artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is so much insight we can give to our enterprise customers to make them successful in their business. So, I think of cloud as not only the technology, which I love, because I'm actually an engineer, but it's really the business transformation, digital transformation that the cloud enables, with the technologies like artificial intelligence, data analytics, data science, machine learning. There's just so much bolted on, that you can really only do in the cloud. >> Can you help us understand that competitive nuance? >> Yeah. >> I'm not sure I fully understand, 'cause others will say, well, we have cloud too. What's different between the way in which you provide solutions in the cloud and... pick a company. >> Yeah. >> Another company says, we have cloud, all of our SaaS is in the cloud. >> Right, so I think the first thing is, Infor's always focused on solutions, which means that our competition may have one of, let's say, a dozen things that we put together. So, if you're using our competition, they may have a cloud and some of them were born in the cloud, but then you have to figure out, how do I integrate it with the rest of the world? Because if you think about it, ERP. It's running your business. And it might be your HR and about your employees. It might be CRM and customer information. It could be supply chain and figuring out what parts I need to buy. It could be billing and figuring out how do I bill my customers. All these different solutions today, if you look at our competition, they may solve one, two, three different portions, but certainly not a dozen of these all together and then tailored towards the industry. So, we can pretty much bolt on and get started pretty quickly, if you think about, for example, healthcare. We already have a healthcare solution ready to go, so you don't have to figure out how do I put 12, 15 different software, glue it together and make it work? And maybe some of it is running in the cloud, maybe some of it is not running in the cloud, then the integration and making it work gets really complex. But ours is already pre-built, ready for that, whether it's healthcare, manufacturing, food & beverage, fashion. We have a lot of these already ready to go, so then you just have to customize it, as opposed to starting from scratch, figuring out how to integrate all these different software, making sure they work together and then harnessing the data, and then adding all these different, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that is so powerful today. You can't do that without the cloud and you certainly can't do it if you're trying to glue together different solutions. It's just really not easy. And I'll add one more thing, I was talking to a customer about this today, which I thought was brilliant. The other thing is security. Most people worry about security in the cloud and I run our security as well, the Chief Information Security Officer reports in to me and the whole security team does. And I can tell you, if you're combining 12, 15 different types of software and trying to have consistent security all across? Oh, that's a very difficult thing to do. But we've already figured it out. So all you have to do is buy the package, the solution, it' already working together. You already have security overlay on it. They have consistency in terms of how we manage the security, whether it's single sign-on and who has access, and making sure that that gets all the way through, all the way up to the data lake, where all of the data gets captured, all the way up to the artificial intelligence. So, if you think about security and how important that is, and how difficult it might be to do on one software, let alone a dozen software, the fact that we've already built that, is a big differentiator. >> So it's all there, and when you talked about, all you have to do is customize it, you're talking about, you're not talking about hardcore coding, you're talking about things like naming and setting it up. Is that right? >> Yeah, and-- >> Or are you talking about deeper levels of custom mods? >> In our multi-tenant cloud, we don't do mods, but instead, we have extensions. And extensibility is really important because now those are, again, essentially plug-and-play. We already built it for you, so it's so much easier than creating each piece of code every single time. Again, it's about, how do you make sure that you can integrate these very important sets of business processes together. Not only how quickly can you use it, how secure is it? And ensuring that you can actually focus on your business value, right, because trying to assemble all of this together and making it work, it's an enormous amount of work and I think, as an enterprise, you want to focus on actually giving customer value instead of trying to figure out, the mechanics underneath the hood. >> I mean, you certainly get the value of cloud software, right, and cloud ERP. Who doesn't? Like out of the industries that you're trying to, get in front of or whose attention you're trying to get. Where's the, if there's someone that's kicking and screaming a little bit, who might that be or what might that be? >> I don't think that there's a specific industry, if you will, I think some industries, in fact, and when I think about it, all industries are getting disrupted, right? If they don't, they're actually getting left behind. So, I think some industries feel it more, as in, they might be behind the curve. And I wouldn't necessarily say industry, maybe some of the companies in that industry. >> Companies within? >> Yeah, are waking up to it. I went to a Gartner Supply Chain Conference a couple years ago and they were talking about bimodal supply chain, right. You have the teams that are doing the old way and then companies that are doing the new way. And companies are literally going through this shift. And I had this interesting conversation that it's really not bimodal. Companies are essentially somewhere in that spectrum and what they need to do is figure out from point A to point B and how you make that transition. It's a huge transition. I would also say that there's a cultural element as well, and so one of the key things that, especially for companies that are moving from on-prem to cloud. As a provider, it's really important to realize it's a completely different business model. And it's not always talked about, again, a lot of times people think, oh well, you know, Infor, you just moved the software into AWS and you're calling it SaaS. It's more than that. Besides the capabilities, its a huge cultural shift that even Charles talked about on-stage, which is that, software companies you focus on the product, versus, as a SaaS, the last 'S', Software as a Service, you are focusing on the service. So, the analogy I use a lot is, maybe we were actually a food company, we'd build beautiful food, delicious food, nutritious food, maybe it was a rotisserie chicken, right? But now I switch to a restaurant. Food is only table stakes. And you know, restaurant reviews is about services, the ambiance, how quickly you respond, how clean it is, all these other elements matter. And if you think about Infor or any other company for that matter, that we're focused on product and software, to then becoming a SaaS service provider, it's a huge transformation for a company, and I can tell you we're going through that, right? Infor as an on-prem company moving to the SaaS, and there's so much focus now on customer experience, is because realizing that we're no longer a software company, we're a Software as a Service company. And there's a lot more we need to put in, in terms of making sure the customer experience is good. As our customers go through the same journey, they also need to realize, it's no longer about providing that product, but the experience that they're providing to the customers, and we see our customers actually going through that journey. Some might be harder to move within whatever industry, because maybe they have legacy product, legacy machines, right, to be able to lift and ship to quickly. But there's definitely a path, and if you think about some of these industries that's been around for a long time, they're definitely going through this transition, and in fact, I think they have to. >> So how did you set priorities in terms of, you come to that recognition that we're services, in the cloud. Luckily, you don't have to manage data centers, so you could take that off the table, so what were your priorities and where did you start, and what are you focused on now? >> One of the first things that I did was really pushing this cultural shift for the company, because a lot of people, some people may think, okay, it's software, I'm putting in the AWS, it's cloud. But all the other service elements, like that restaurant analogy, it wasn't mature in terms of where we needed to be and therefore you hear a lot about customer experience and customer success and a lot of these elements that we really have to put more emphasis on. But the other areas that I focused, so I came in, I focused on cloud operations, security, tooling, and architecture, that was the set that I was focused on. What I did was essentially transformation, right, it's People Process Technology in addition to culture, so culture we already talked about, the sense of urgency is very different as well. On-prem, maybe you don't have to respond in two seconds, but in cloud, you do, and so making sure that we had crisp KPIs, which are different than on-prem, making sure that processes were completely redefined. I've actually done benchmark with our competition to see that our SLAs and KPIs are either on par or better. I'm a big proponent of engineering and technology, so we built a lot of technology monitoring, tooling, so that we can do a lot more in terms of self-service and automation, that's really the only to scale, and execute consistently. Spent a lot of time over the last year, literally re-defining the identity of our jobs to how do we make sure we have the right skillset, and retraining some of the folks who may have a new identity and they need to learn new skills, to coming up with new tools and technologies that they can use, to changing our processes so we can up our SLA and make sure that we're either meeting or beating our customers' SLAs, complete transformation in the last year. >> You must be exhausted. (laughs) >> When do you sleep? >> I don't sleep much, but... >> You must not. >> So, new metrics, this is intriguing to me. Can you give us an example of sort of this, new KPIs as a result of this cloud, SaaS world? >> Yeah, for sure. I think every company has their own sort of core KPIs that are public, and cloud is usually uptime, right? If you have support, it could be how quickly you respond, we call it mean time to respond. Underneath the hood, I've created key KPIs for, what I call, critical cloud qualities. One is, of course, reliability, so that would be in addition to uptime, like 99.7%, which is two hours and 11 minutes by the way, per month downtime, so making sure that we're actually meeting that. >> Sorry, just to interrupt. >> Yeah. >> You're measuring from the application view right, not the green light on the server, is that fair? >> That's a great question, because that is exactly the evolution we want as well, so when I talk about the transformation at my organization, we were measuring the hardware first. We are now measuring, essentially, outages. So I don't care if the server's still running, but if the customers can't log in, it's an outage, right? But that's not something you can monitor by looking at a server because sometimes the server's up and running. But maybe a process went down. >> System's fine. >> Exactly. So that's the monitoring-- >> Okay, so slight adjustment in the typical metrics, sorry to interrupt, but please carry on. >> That was a perfect question. >> Okay. >> So KPIs, so underneath the hood, so here are some examples of metrics for availability. Mean time to detect, that's an internal metric, and my internal metric is five minutes, meaning, if you don't know we have an issue in five minutes, it's probably not automated and monitored, so we better hook up some additional monitoring as an example. Mean time to respond, that's a very public one, a lot of times, customers demand that, and if you look at competition, that is the only metric that's actually public, potentially even on a contract, right? So we have mean time to respond, we also have mean time to resolution, that's usually an internal metric. I'm sure competition has that as well, but making sure that we have that response right away, because it's one thing to respond, but if it's not resolved as quickly, it's not good. Other metrics when it comes to reliability, mean time to communicate. And this is really interesting. One of the things that I found was, we could be working on something but we're not telling the customers, so they're wondering if we're actually sleeping on the job, even though we're actually actively working in the background, right? >> Did they get the message, right? >> Right, so mean time to communicate, as an example of reliability metrics. So reliability is one of the core tenets. The other tenets? Performance, how quickly do you respond, right? And I always say that if performance is too long, it's equivalent of being down. Imagine if you're using Google and you put a search in, and it takes you three minutes to get a response time, you probably have left by then. So that performance, page load time, page response time, these response times actually matter. So we have actually metrics around that and we monitor and manage them. Security, we have a boatload of security KPIs, whether it's number of critical vulnerabilities, how quickly we respond to security incidents, a boatload of those as well, and then, last but not least, agility. So how quickly we can respond if we have to do a deployment. So what that means is, let's say, every software company has a bug, and let's say we actually had to quickly respond to that, can we do it within 24 hours if we needed to? Security is a perfect example. A mature company should be able to say, okay, there was a security alert that got to the industry, right? We should be able to quickly respond to that and apply a patch immediately and address it. A company that may not be so mature, it might take them months to go through thousands of machines. So I call that time to market, how quickly can we actually deploy something, and that's not just deploying it, but testing it and making sure it's not going to break anything and be able to test it and verify it. So these are examples of metrics-- >> Great examples. Are your SLAs... for a SaaS company, your SLAs presumably have to be more strict than you'll contractually agree to, but maybe not, then your typical SLA out of AWS or Google, or Microsoft Azure. Is that true? >> Yes. >> So you guys will commit contractually to these types of SLAs that you would expect in an enterprise, versus kind of the standard, off-the-shelf AWS SLA, and how do you reconcile the gap or do you have a different agreement with AWS? >> We do have a... The SLA is pretty much standard when it comes to AWS specifically, right? >> 'Cause they want-- >> Yeah. >> Homogeneity. >> Exactly. So I think the challenge is, every SaaS provider needs to architect around it and when you think about it, hardware failure rate is usually 4% industry-wide. You can expect the hardware will go down, right? >> Yep. >> Network goes down, various things go down. So then it's our job that sits on top of it, to make sure that we build it for reliability. Perhaps we actually have redundancy built-in, and we can actually go from one side to the other, we have that, for example. So if AWS goes down, and they do, all right? I ran data centers for many, many years, it happens. It's our job to make sure that we can fail over it, and not have that customer experience, so it's an overlay availability that we have to build-- >> You're architecting recovery into the system, I know we're tight on time, but I got to ask you, 'cause Pam couldn't make it today. You're part of the WIN, the Women Infor Network, I presume, right? >> Yes. >> So maybe we can just talk a little about that-- >> Yeah. >> It's a great topic. >> Women in technology, right? >> I got some of the best interviews at Infor shows with women, Deborah Norville came on, Naomi Tutu, Lara Logan. Just some awesome folks, but so-- >> So your thoughts, we know you're passionate about the role of women in technology, so how you feel about that, if you want, and Infor, what's being done, or what can be done about that? >> Great questions. So I'm a big proponent of women in technology. Partly because I went through my pain, right, I've always been a small percentage in terms of engineering role as female in technology. I'm also a board member of Girls in Tech, and I channel my energy that way as well as I try to mentor and help others, for example, mentoring engineering students at Berkeley. I'm a Berkeley alum. And I think it's really important that we get more women in technology and keep in them in technology, and candidly, our latest trend is actually going down. So the reason why I think it's important, besides making sure that everybody has a chance, and all those good reasons, we have statistics that actually show, the more diversity you have, the better your product is going to be, and the better it's actually going to hit your top line revenue. And over and over again, whether it's women in the board seat, or women executives, or women engineers, no matter where, by getting women's input into technology, you're actually representing 50% of the consumer base. >> The user base, right. >> Right and so, if we don't do that as a company, we're actually not going to be able to get the user base feedback and I think it's so really important, not only for the economy to have those wonderful workforce in the job, but also for the company products to actually reflect the user's needs and actually improve the revenue, right? So from that perspective, I think it's really important, I love the fact that at Infor, we do a couple of things when it comes to diversity. So one, is WIN, as you know, Women Infor Network. I think it's a fabulous program, and in fact, I get a lot of male colleagues saying they want to join WIN, and they do. My last session, there were actually women and men joining it, because it's really about leadership and how do we cultivate our next, next talented workforce to be successful. The other one is EAP, the Infor Education Alliance Program, so that not only looks at women, but just diversity, right, and bringing students into this workforce. I think it's a great way to help the economy, help the products, help the company. And at the end of the day, why not? >> You're awesome, super impressive and articulate, and really self-confident, and hopefully an inspiration for young women out there watching, so thank you so much, really appreciate it. >> And hope you get some sleep sometime too. (laughing) >> Thank you. >> Busy, busy schedule. All right, thank you. Thank you Mayumi. We're back with more here on theCUBE, you are watching us live in Washington, D.C., and we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum, DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are back this afternoon here in Washington, D.C., at the Walter Washington Convention Center. As we continue our coverage here of Inforum 2018 along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we now welcome Mr. Cormack Watters to the program today, EVP of Emea and APAC at Infor. Cormack, good to see you sir. >> Nice to be here. >> So, we're going to talk about Guinness, over in Ireland (chuckling). Cormack's from Dublin, so we had a little conversation. We're getting a primer here. >> It's actually the best conversation we should have, right? >> Right, we'll save that for the end. How about that? So, you're fairly new, right? About a year or so. >> Ten months or so, not that I'm counting it by the day >> No no no, always going forward, never backward. But a big plate you have, right, with EMEA and APAC? Different adoptions, different viewpoints, different perspectives... We've talked a lot really kind of focusing domestically here for the past couple of days. Your world's a little different than that though, right? >> It is. It is. And it's very good that you've actually recognized it because that's actually the biggest challenge that we have. To be a little bit humble about it, I think we've got world-class products and solutions. I actually fundamentally believe that. But we have lots of different languages, cultures, and localization requirements in the multiple Countries that we look after. So, it's great to have great products, but it needs to be in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Arabic, which most of them are. Customers realize that we are actually international and localized for many, many markets. But now we've become an intriguing option for them, if you're a multi-national business, with subsidiaries all over the world. So, it's good that Infor is big enough to do that. We need to do a better job of letting everybody know that we've done that, if that makes any sense. >> Sure. >> So what's happening in Europe? Europe's always pockets, there's no..I mean.. Yes, EU but there's really still no one Europe. What's going on? Obviously, we have Brexit hanging over our head. I felt like U.S. markets are maybe a little bit overheated in Europe has potential upside. >> Yeah >> And it seems like others seem to agree with that. What happening on the ground? Any specific, interesting areas? Is Southern Europe still a concern? Maybe you can give us an update? >> Yeah, so Brexit is quite a dominant conversation. I am from Ireland. I live in Dublin, but I'm working all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Far East. So, I don't get to be at home very often, except the weekends. London is really our regional headquarters from a European perspective, and Brexit is on everybody's mind. Interestingly, when you go outside the UK, Brexit is not such a big topic because... That's Europe. And they kind of go, "Well if you don't want to be here, then you don't need to be here." Right? So it's a little bit of that, and they're saying, "Well, we'd like for them to stay, but if they don't want to stay, well, don't wait around." But in the UK, it's causing a lot of uncertainty. And the UK's one of our biggest markets. It's a lot of uncertainty, and what would be best is if we just knew what was going to happen, and then we could deal with it. And actually, once we know what's going to happen, that's going to bring a degree of change. And change, from our industry perspective means there's going to be some requirements that emerge. So, we need to be ready to serve those, which is opportunity. But the uncertainty is just slowing down investment. So, we need that to be resolved. >> So, clarity obviously is a good thing obviously a good thing in any market. Are there any hotspots? >> Yeah, actually for us, we're doing, for us the Hotspots right now, we're doing incredibly well in Germany. Which, one of our lesser known competitors is a small Company called SAP. And they're headquartered in Germany. It's quite interesting to see that we're actually taking a lot of market there in Germany, which is fantastic. That's a little bit unexpected, but it's going very well right now. We're seeing a ton of activity in the Asia Pacific, I would say that region is probably our fastest growing in all of Infor. And consistently so for several quarters and maybe past a year at this point. So Asia Pacific, Germany, U.K., and then as it happens, we are doing very well in Southern Europe, which is a combination of countries really. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Hard to put it down to which particular Country is doing well, but there seems to be a general uplift in that region. Because they were hit the hardest, arguably, by the crash back in 2008. So they've definitely come out of that now. >> And when they come out, excuse me I'm sorry John, but, they come out, Cloud becomes more important to them, Right? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Anyone who's been delaying investment for years, can actually leapfrog what's been happening and jump straight to what you might call the future. So lots of Companies, lots of our Customers, are trying to simplify their Business. So Cloud is a great equalizer. We believe in your, what we call Last Mile of Functionality per industry. And that should make the projects shorter, more compact more predictable and the infrastructure worries go away, because that's our responsibility to the Customers. >> We definitely so that in the U.S., 2008-2009, CFO's came in said shift to the Cloud, because we want to shift Capx to Opx, and when we came out of the downturn, they said "wow this stuff works pretty well, double down on it" and then there were other business benefits that they wanted to accelerate, and so maybe Southern Europe was a little bit behind >> I think that may be the case right, and they are picking up. And what we're seeing are a lot of other advantages. Not to make this a sale's pitch, but, I am here so >> Go for it >> You've got a microphone >> I've got a microphone and I'm Irish, so I've got to talk right? What the Cloud is actually doing is, lots of Companies have put in big ERP over the years, the decades. And then they get stuck at various points and maybe years behind, because upgrades become painful and really want to avoid them. So what they're seeing is, if they can get onto the Cloud, they never need to upgrade again. Because it's always current, because we upgrade it every week, or every month and they're never falling behind. So they want to be ready to take advantage of the innovations that they know about and those that they don't even know about. So by keeping on the latest version, that opportunities open to them. Also, there's a big issue in Europe specifically about a thing called GDPR, which is data protection. Security. So we believe that we can do a better job of providing that, than any individual Company. Because we provide it for everybody, our resources can be deployed once and then deployed many times. Where as if you're an individual customer, you've got to have that speciality and put it in place. So GDPR is a genuine issue in Europe, because, the fines are absolutely huge if a Company is found to breach it. >> It's become a template for the globe now, California's started moving in that direction, GDPR has set the frame work. >> Well and just to follow up on that, and now you're dealing with a very different regulatory climate, then certainly here in the United States. And many U.S. Companies are finding that out, as we know. Overseas right now. So how do you deal with that in terms of, this kind of balkanized approach that you have, that you know that what's working here doesn't necessarily translate to overseas, and plus you have, you know, you're serving many masters and not just one or two. >> What's happening is the guys in our RND have done very well, is they understand the requirement of, in this instance, GDPR. They look at the other regulatory requirements, lets say in Australia, which is subtly different, but it is different, and they can take, well what do we have to do? What's the most extreme we have to achieve? And if we do that across our suite into our platform suite, the N4RS, that can then be applied to all the applications. And then becomes relevant to the U.S. So it's almost like some requirement across the seas, being deployed then becoming really relevant back here because over here you do need to be aware of the data protection, as well, it's just not as formalized yet. >> It's coming >> A Brewing issue right? >> What about Asia Pacific? So you have responsibility for Japan, and China, and the rest of the region. >> Right >> Which you are sort of re-distinct... >> Really are right? There are several sub regions in the one region. The team down there, as I say, arguably the most successful team in Infor right now, so Helen and the crew. So you see Australia, New Zealand then you see Southeast Asia, then you see China, Japan and so on. So different dynamics and different markets, some more mature than others, Japan is very developed by very specific. You do need very specialized local skills to succeed. Arguably Australia, New Zealand is not that similar from say some of the European Countries. Even though there are differences and I would never dream to tell an Australian or a New Zealander that they are the same as Europeans, cuz I get it. I smile when people say "you're from the U.K and you're not from Ireland?" I understand the differentiation. (laugher) And Southeast Asia, there's a ton of local custom, local language, local business practice that needs to be catered for. We seem to be doing okay down there. As I say, fastest growing market at scale. It's not like it's growing ridiculously fast but from a small base. It's as a big market already and growing the fastest. >> And China, what's that like? You have to partner up? >> Oh yeah >> To the JV in China? >> You have to partner up, there are several of the key growth markets that it's best to go in with partners. Customers like to see we've got a presence. So that they can touch and feel that Infor entity. We can't achieve the scale we need, and the growth we want fast enough without partnering. So we have to go with partners to get us the resources that we need. >> And in the Middle East, so my business partner, Co-Host, John Furrier, is on a Twenty Hour flight to Bahrain. The Cube Bahrain. Bahrain was the first Country in the Middle East to declare Cloud first. AWS is obviously part of that story, part of your story. So what's going on over there? Is it a growing market? Is it sort of something you're still cracking? >> No, no, again it's growing. We have several key markets down there, big in hospitality in that part of the world. Hotels, tourism obviously. Shopping, very interesting markets, and Healthcare, interestingly enough. I think arguably some of the worlds best Hospitals are in that region. Definitely the best funded Hospitals. >> Probably the most comfortable. (laughter) >> So again part of our stent is the number of industries we serve, so if you can put in our platform as it were, then you could have multiple of the industry flavors applied. Because what's interesting in that part of World, there seem to be a number of, I guess we call them conglomerates. So maybe family owned, or region owned, and they have just a different array of businesses all under the one ownership. So you would have a retailer that's also doing some tourism, that's also doing some manufacturing. So we can put our platform in, and then those industry flavors they can get one solution to cover it all. Which is a little bit unusual, and works for us. >> Your scope is enormous. I mean essentially you're the head of Non-U.S. I mean is that right? >> Yeah, and Latin America as well. >> That's part of it? That's not... >> Excluding the Americas. So there's Americas and then everything else, and you're everything else. >> I missed a meeting you see so they just gave it to me >> What you raised your hand at the wrong time? >> I wasn't there (laughter) >> So how do you organize to be successful? You obviously have to have strong people in the region. >> Right. So the key is people, right. We organize somewhat differently to over here. We've gone for a regional model, so I have six sub-regions, that I worry about. So four in Europe, the Nordic Countries. Scandinavian, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark. We call Western, which is Ireland, U.K. and the Benelux. Germany is Central and East, and then Southern is the Latin Country, Spain, Portugal, Greece and so. Then we've got the Middle East, and Africa, and then we got Asia Pacific. I've got six regional teams, all headed by a regional leader, and each of them are trying to be as self contained as they can. And where we see we've got an opportunity to move into something new, we've got one team working with me directly as an incubator. For example, we're driving a specific focus on Healthcare, in our part of the world, because it's very big over here. We haven't quite cracked the code over there. When we get some scale, then it'll move into the regions, but for now that's incubating under me. >> And, what about in Country? Do you have Country Managers? One in the U.K., one in France, one in Germany. >> We have what we call local leaders, right? So in some cases it could be a sales oriented individual, it could be consulting, others it could be the local HR guy. So that's more for us to make sure we're building a sense of community within Infor. Rather than it being more customer facing. We're still trying to make sure that there is a reasonably scarcity of senior skills. So regionalizing lets us deploy across several Countries, and that works with the customer base, but for employees we need local leaders to give them a sense of feeling home and attached. >> So the regions are kind of expertise centers if you will? >> Yes >> So I was going to ask about product expertise, where does that come from? It's not parachuted in from the U.S. I presume? >> No, we're pretty much self-sufficient actually, which is great. So from both what we call solution consulting, which is the product expertise, and then consulting which is the product deployment. And we're doing more and more of our deployments with Partners. As I say, we need to really rapidly embrace that partner ecosystem to give us the growth opportunity. RND, is all over the World. That's not under my direct control. So for a major suites, take for example, LN, happens to be headquartered out of Barneveld, in the Netherlands. From a Historic perspective, which is great. And Stockholm, which is also great. But a lot of the development resource room in Nila and in India. So we work closely with the guys, even though they don't actually report to me. >> And out of the whole area, the area of your responsibility what's the best growth opportunity? We all think of China, but that's been fits and starts for a lot of people. >> Yeah, yeah I think we've got multiple opportunities, you can look at it a few ways. You can look at it geographically, and you would say China. You can look at Eastern Europe, and you can look at Africa. There's a ton of opportunity in those regions, geographically. Interestingly we are also at a point where I think the Nordics, and we've got a very solid base Historically, and so on. But we probably haven't put enough focus on there in recent times, that the opportunities are really scaled in Nordics is really quite significant. And then they can look at it from a Product Perspective. So for example, we have, what we believe to be World Leading, and actually a Company called Gartner would equally agree with us. Enterprise Asset Management, EAM, that's a product suite that can fit across all of our industries. I think that could well be the significant growth area for us across the entire six regions. And it's a huge focus for us here at the conference actually. So we can do it by product, EAM, Healthcare, or by Region. I think Eastern Europe, China, and Africa, as well as the Nordics. >> And the other big opportunity is just share gains, market share gains, particularly in Europe, I would think, with your background. >> Yup. Completely, I mean, that's why I said, it's really interesting that we are winning market share in Germany. Who'd of thought that a few years ago? That's a big market, I mean, Germany, U.K., France, Italy. They're huge. Right, I mean U.K., is what, Sixty-Five Million People? It's a big economy, so we've got many of the worlds G7, in our backyard. So we just really need to double down on those, and give them the opportunities to grow that we need. >> And just back to Japan for a second. Japan has traction, it takes a long time to crack Japan. I know it first from personal experiences. >> Yeah, Okay, Interesting. >> Yeah you just got to go many many times and meet people. >> That's it, Right. And it's a different culture, of when you think they're saying yes and you think they're there, that's just yes to the next step. (laughter) >> Alright, so it does take time to get there. We've actually cracked it to some extent, that we've now got some solid referenceability, and some good wind. We need local leaders in Japan, to really crack the code there. >> And then once you're in, you're in. >> I think that once you've proven yourself, it's a lot of word of mouth and referencing. >> Well I hope you get home this weekend. Are you headed home? >> Yes! Actually I'm lucky enough. My Wife is originally from Chicago. So she and our Daughter have come over for the weekend, to go sight seeing in Washington. So that'll be fun. So we'll be going home on Sunday. >> Your adopted home for the weekend then. >> That's exactly right. >> Well we'll talk Guinness in just a bit. Thanks for the time though, we appreciate it. >> Thank you Gentlemen. >> Good to see you, Sir. Alright, back with more here from Inforum 2018, and you're watching Live, on theCube, here in D.C. (electronic music)

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

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us, the CEO of Avaap. Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon! >> Good to see you again! >> Absolutely, big pleasure, it was great talking to you for the last two years, and a pleasure to be back here. >> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap, I've read a little bit, I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language, what do the five letters represent? I mean how did you come up with the title? >> You know, that's the first question that gets asked, the two questions I get. >> Sorry to be cliche, but I'm just really curious! >> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?" and the other question is, "What is Avaap?" and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at Avaap, so, Agni, which is fire stands for passion, 'cause I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do; if you're passionate, you'll follow through and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation, sky is tied to goals, we're very ambitious. We've been able to have a rocket ship type of growth, so far, and we continue to aspire to do more. We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience, cause we like to be globally eco conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy, and the more there is transparency, the better there is organizational development. >> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions, and the relationship with Infor, walk us through that a little bit, of why you're here. >> Absolutely, so, we are Infor's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that, because we just came off the stage getting four awards with Infor this year. >> Congratulations! Fantastic. >> Yeah, thank you very much. They were overall partner of the year five years in a row. Our partnership with Infor, started five years ago, before that it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room, and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said "I want to do two things, I want to make software that is industry specific." And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said "We want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies. Cloud, mobile, big data." Right? So I had a great opportunity, and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the Infor basket, and just doing Infor. And that served us well of going from 20, at that point we were like 25 employees, to having over 450 today. >> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past is you got in early, and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in, so you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding? >> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead, so that actually, that's a question I got, is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't, because it's a validation of what's occurring in this eco system with the big system integrators coming in. And with a rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs, because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management, and we do what we do best, which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services. >> The deep, deep Infor, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? Infor's specialty is the last mile, micro-industry capabilities, and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep Infor expertise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So give us an example of, you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera. Where do you come in? where does Infor sort of, where does their micro services, or micro-function leave off, and where do you pick up? >> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example, in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christus Health, they are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60 thousand employees. They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, Supply Chain, Financial. Went through a large system selection process the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to Infor and Oracle as the two lenders that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on Infor as their vendor of choice, they did a services RFP, which we partnered with Deloitte, because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services, that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor, that we have within our healthcare team. So, we bridged and built an alliance, that, today is starting the project journey in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus, to make that project a success. >> In the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that Infor and Oracle had, were what? the coverage of the functionality across the suites, was it the cloud capabilities? What's the high level of that? >> So the one thing that I will tell you, is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable, so the way it's starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud, there's a lot of education already around single tenant, and multi-tenant, and they understand. So it starts with the cloud platform, that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform, and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant, as opposed to individually hosted for each customer. And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see what not a product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but their business processes, and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where Infor really came ahead at Christus. >> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean, Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?" I'm presuming the customer cares because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Verses okay, we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? >> Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts a customer to have to take their system down, and then bring it back up, and here it's done without the customer even finding out, so it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is a cost, which in today's world not as much, because hardware's become very cheap. But it's still conquered hardware that's sitting on the premise, as opposed to individually putting it out there, as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security, on multi-tenant capable software, it's more secure than your single tenant capability. >> And Avaap brings that to the table. So it's not, I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function, so yours is what? Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? >> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align, and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have a offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today, and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process, and post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare, is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR, you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR, and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other. And the systems need to be really integrated, to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that, so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in. >> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? >> Right. >> So what's goin on these days? You obviously, last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, there's some uncertainty around that, certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers, EMR is still you know, a big deal. What are the hot trends, what are the drivers, and how are you guys responding? >> ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market, so there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars, of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in a midst of what I think, is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry are on ERP platforms that we're seeing, there were 55 system selections done, just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years, we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. >> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead. >> So swap-- what's... the fundamental of that decision? >> So there are a lot of legacy providers, so the market is going to get consolidated, so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers, there's, if you count mid market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base. >> Very fragmented, isn't it? >> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright. >> So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform, officially said that they are stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional, individual health system that exist in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded, because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. >> Yeah I mean a lot of these, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini-computer era it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX, and we'll become a valuated re-seller, and healthcare was such a huge opportunity, and so under technologized, not a word but, and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated, now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right? >> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. >> Yeah, and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time, to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary, and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform, and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled, for the healthcare industry, specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today. >> Who does that last mile functionality, if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor, is it the SI, is it some other internal software developer? >> So, the software developers as Infor is, trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS, as an example come in, to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. >> You do that work, is that right? >> We do that work, absolutely. >> Okay, and then, how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their road map? Soma's got his ERD pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys, and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become advantageous for others? >> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product, that's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board, ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out. >> Well you could. >> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs >> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific, and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team, that allows us to see their road map and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP, for healthcare. So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point, manual, laborious, takes a business uses away. So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation, which has been in the field, we have, close to 100 customers using it, allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle, and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. >> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare, you have another interest inside of your business, with a little Beatles connection. So fill us in on that a little bit. >> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one, and I definitely want to talk on both of them, because those are important parts of our business, One is retail, we did get retail partner of the year award, and Stella McCartney, is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter, and has built a very reputable shoe company, that's a brand highly sought after, and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications, using cloud suite fashion, which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform. >> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right? >> That's cool, that is cool! >> Absolutely! >> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here, thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Congratulations on all the progress! >> It's always good to be here! >> It is full speed ahead. Good for you. Dhiraj Shah from Avaap >> Thank you! >> Back with more on theCUBE. We're at in Informen, Informer rather, (laughs) I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum! >> Inforum! >> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing) >> 2018, D.C. Did it again. >> Excellent! (bubbly music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington D.C., it's TheCUBE. Covering InForum, D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, good morning and welcome to day two here on theCUBE at Inforum 2018. We are in the nation's capital, the Walter Washington Convention Center, and thank goodness the sun's come out today. Everybody's got big smile and cheery faces, it's good to see. Dave Vellante, John Walls here. We're just on top of the show floor. You'll see a lot of activity a little bit later on in the day. And it's a pleasure to welcome our first guest of the day, Billy Southerland who's the CEO of IronRoad. Billy, good morning to you. >> Good morning, thank you guys for having me on. >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> How's the show been for you so far? >> It's been great. Yeah, it's been great. Outside of the fact that we got bumped from our hotel when we first showed up so (chuckles) No, but show's been fantastic, always great to network, learn what other folks have going on and yeah, been phenomenal. >> Tell us about IronRoad. What you do and why you're here. >> Yeah, so we're an HR and outsourcing company. And we've been doing HR and payroll since 1997. Company started really just with an idea. So as we have grown through the years, working with mostly small to medium size businesses, we had an opportunity with Infor just a couple years ago to partner with them on the payroll side of things. And so it's been a new opportunity for us, one that our team is incredibly excited about. Just great opportunity to partner with some phenomenal software and so yeah, that's-- >> So, services that you guys provide, so HR, payroll, you've got a portal, onboarding. Take us through that. Is that full suite of-- full complement of services? >> It is, yeah. So our typical client is a smaller to medium sized employer and we'll go in and so many of the things that they've got to do internally that have nothing to do with why they got into business, they can outsource to us. So, anything from the beginning to the end of an employee's life cycle is what we manage. You name it and we do it for them so that they can go and focus on what they do. >> So let me probe that a little bit. So if I have-- let's say I have an HR issue with an employee. Maybe they're a little older and I'm concerned that I am going through the right steps giving that employee the right guidance. I don't want to expose my company to any lawsuits or whatever. Can I call you up and say, hey, give me some guidance on how I should handle this from an HR perspective? What do I have to document? You would help me with that? >> David, that's the perfect example, right? And so the whole liability of being an employer is something that they can share with us, right? So, somebody that focuses on HR knows those laws and rules and regs. They can pick up the phone, they call us, they say, hey Billy, got an issue, can you come out? One of our folks will go out, consult with them, make sure that everything's documented, managed properly. And yeah, that's exactly what we would do. >> Okay, so with healthcare compliance, Obamacare, PTO policies. I'm a small company. I want to make sure that I'm not killing my cash flow with balance sheets stuff. I mean all that stuff, you can help with? >> You got it. Yeah, absolutely. You bring up healthcare. I don't know any employee, employer regardless of the size who's not dealing with that, right? So the whole ACA compliance with Obamacare has been a tremendous boom for our business because people are looking left and right, how do we deal with this? What do we do? It's so complex for them, they're looking for experts to manage it. >> I mean that's kind of the tip of the spear. That's why, particularly small, mid-size businesses, it's healthcare first because it's so expensive and it's so important to the employees, right? >> It is, yeah and I would say most folks that we deal with it's number two line item right after payroll, right? I mean they're dealing with healthcare and everybody's looking for answers. It's like, how do we do this? And the employees are asking the same question, right? And they're looking at the employers saying, give me a solution. There is no real solution outside of being able to maybe aggregate with some other smaller employers so we can go to the large healthcare companies that are out there and say, okay I tell you what, we got about 5,000 people here now. What do you think about our buying power at this point? >> You get some scale and then do the works. >> That's it, you just scale it, exactly right. >> Okay, 1997. Well, first of all, you're Cincinnati-based, I'll come back and talk about that. But 1997, just coming into the dot come boom, the state of software was, back then PeopleSoft was the gold standard. There was no cloud, really, you had these software companies doing, forget what they even called it now, but it was like software as a service pre-SAS. Kind of clunky software and now you fast-forward to today, you know, you're all cloud, you're agile but so how'd you get started? Take us through kind of the technology progression. >> Yeah, so the start was an interesting one. I wish we could tell you we had a great idea but it was a complete accident, right? We were trying to, I was trying to help out two different friends who were in two separate businesses. They both had done extremely well in their separate businesses. So they started what is now IronRoad and after about 12 months, both of them had done so well in their other businesses, they looked at each and said, they each thought the other one was going to be pulling the wagon, right? And so neither one of them wanted to do it. So one of the guys came to me and said, hey Billy, you want to buy 50% of this? And I said, well, what is it? And he explained it to me and I said, I love this concept, it's a great idea. And so I said, how much? He said, $8,000. (laughing) >> It's like a lawnmower. >> I bought half a lawnmower, right? >> Such a great idea, you sure you don't want to charge more? >> Yeah, I said, $8,000? But he had no clients, right? They had a little bit of software that they purchased to be able to do the payroll. So that's really where we started. So kind of caveman like you said, David. And so-- >> What's your client base now? What do you have? >> So we're using the Infor Cloud base. The human management capital system. >> As far as the number of organizations that you're serving. How have you grown the business? >> Pardon. Yeah, so you know really, it's just been good old-fashioned hard work for us. We've not made any purchases, no acquisitions. And so we got some amazing people that have a real passion about what we do and we do it really well. The differentiator between us and some of the big guys that are out there really is our people. Your people talk about that but our people are really focused on it. So you know-- and pretty soon, that reputation begins to spread. Like you said, we're in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently we're operating in 38 different states. So little bit at a time, year after year, we've been digging and digging and digging. In regards to the question you asked, David, right? So we start with the lawnmower and here we end up sitting with you guys talking about Infor and this cloud-based suite that we've been able to manage and bring in and so really exciting for somebody like us. >> So talk a little bit more about the CloudSuite, how you use it, how you use it to differentiate from the competition, you know why it's maybe better than some of the other alternatives you see? >> That's a great question. Because most our businesses' professional employer organization. Most of the PEO softwares are fairly limited in what they can offer the employers that they're working with. And so we vetted, we had Anka Kalp... Our CIO was vetting five different systems a couple years ago. And in the midst of vetting those five different systems, we were introduced to Infor, right? As we began to see what this software could do, we started getting really excited. You talk about a differentiator in the workplace, nobody else has it, right? And so we started learning more and more the human capital management system for us, we started thinking, man if we could take this to employees-- employers, that have anywhere between 500 and 5,000 employees, this is a real differentiator for us, right? And so nope, like I said, nobody else in the PEO space has this software and it's been a tremendous opportunity for us to take to the marketplace. >> So that's kind of your sweet spot, 500 to 5,000? So not under 100, right? True SMB is kind of not your sweet spot? >> Well, actually we'll go all the way down to 20 employees. But the 20 employer companies, the resources that they have internally to be able to integrate the systems is a little more challenging. But we get it done. And so anywhere between 20 and probably 5,000 employees are the typical employer that we're working with. >> So what kind of integration items does a customer have to think about, specifically? >> So by integration-- >> You said, small companies don't have the resources to do the integration so what has to be done to do that integration? >> Yeah, so it's a lot of lifting, right? I mean, there's lots of work to be able to establish the systems with the employers that we're taking, you know, the software to. Just a lot of hands on between IronRoad and the companies that we're dealing with so the smaller companies are really focused on, you know, going out and doing whatever it is whether they're contractor, doctor's office. So to be able to have a resource that can dedicate the time, to be able to activate the system and make it do what they want it to do is somewhat challenging for the smaller employers. >> But wouldn't they have to do that with any outsource HR provider? >> They would. They may not be able-- they probably are not taking the software to the depth of its utilization or potential utilization. So they're kind of doing without it. >> So the bigger guy's getting more business value out of your offer. >> There's no doubt about it or the smaller guys, it just takes a little bit longer to get 'em there. That's really the challenge. They both get the same value, just takes a little bit longer. >> 21 years you been doing this. So, you've obviously seen business change. >> Not that old, I don't know how that happened. >> Well, you started very young. (laughing) >> I'm glad you said that. I wondered why they skipped me with the makeup. I thank you guys. >> Don't need it. We do. (laughs) So you been 21 years. >> Yes. >> So you've seen business change, right? >> Yes. >> You've seen technology change, right? >> Oof, night and day. >> So where now? Where are the pain points now? Because it seems like, oh we've solved all these problems, right? Automation, things are much easier. Well, there's always a, yeah, but. So what's the but now for your folks? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us in our industry is getting the message out. When we look at PEOs in Ohio, for example, about 2% of the workforce is working with the PEO. Because they're so few of 'em out there doing it really well, getting that message out to the employer because once we get 'em, once they come in and they see, you know you said they got to do this if they're outsourcing HR anyhow. Once they become aware of what's available to them, they don't leave, right? >> So their pain's still the same. >> Pain's still the same. >> You're just trying to get out, to let them know, you can help. >> That's it, that's it. I think that's probably our biggest pain point is how do you get this message out and different parts of the country, obviously, you've got different attitudes towards or people move at different paces. In Ohio, there's still, I'm looking at David saying, what is PEO? I've never heard of it. I don't know if I trust you. And so overcoming that is probably our biggest obstacle. >> Billy, you talk a little bit about Infor, it's products. If I understand it correctly, you're both a consumer and essentially a reseller of the services, which means you're running on the Amazon Cloud so talk about your relationship there, why Infor, why the product, how does it compare? Because you probably evaluated everything. >> We did, yeah. Yeah, we did. You know, for us, like I said, we vetted five different companies that we were looking at. And when we had a chance to look at the Infor proposal, the differentiator for us not only was the software, from our perspective, far and above better than anything else that we were looking at. They provided us with an opportunity since we were purchasing the software to be able to provide an in-tenant solution for current clients that Infor has. So an Infor client that looks at the software and says, hey, I want this, and yet they're still outsourcing their payroll, now has the ability to buy the software and outsource the payroll to IronRoad. And so you're taking the best in class cloud suite services from a human capital management system to the marketplace. And partnering with a company like Infor that really is a dream come true for us. >> So what makes it best in class? I mean, you know, Oracle's got good software. You got SAP out there, Workday's the hot company. Why is Infor, you said, better? Why is it better? >> Yeah, I think for us, just the ease of the employer being able to utilize the system. You can have the best thing in the world and people are people are people are people, right? They got to be able to get on there and use the stuff. And so I think the ease of being able to just the user-friendly side of what Infor does. They certainly have every option you can imagine. The capability, the software is as good, if not better, than any. But the ability for people to pick it up quickly and be able to use and make it real for their small business, to me that's the key, right? >> Was the use of AWS Cloud a factor? >> Um... >> Was that kind of transparent to you? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not really. Yeah, yeah. >> Is there an aha moment when you're out there when you are pitching? And when you look up people and the processes they go through and they been doing it the same way for decades? So when you break through, how do you know you've broken through? What is it that you use to break through? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah and for them, once we're able to articulate what this system actually does, there is an aha moment. And it's almost disbelief. It's because there's so many years of doing it the old way, right? And then they look and see it's kind of like me looking at the software that your company's created that was phenomenal, right? They're looking at it and go, come on, really? It really does that? And it's, yeah, it really does that. (chuckles) And we can do this different and you can go sell more widgets, right? >> Showing Billy our video search software, so I appreciate that. >> Amazing! I mean, it's unbelievable. >> It is. >> Yeah, Star Trek. >> So I want to ask-- >> Baiting myself. >> We're all in the same boat. >> I want to ask you about the resources that are required for you to do integration with Infor. Actually, so outside funding, other than the $8,000 that you put in, have you guys raised outside funding? >> David, that was a lot of money at the time, man. >> Yeah, no doubt. >> (laughs) A lot of money. >> You could do a lot with $8,000, but you can't build a full software suite so have you taken outside capital, or? >> We haven't. >> So, self-funded. >> Yeah, we're self-funded and frankly, fortunately, we've been able to manage through it. This partnership with Infor for us is a big big step for us, right? But at this point, we've been able to manage that without any funding outside and... >> Okay so it's not like an intense engineering effort, right? You're turnkey-ing this stuff largely. So you put more of your effort on onboarding clients from what I understand, right? >> Right and working with other Infor partners. Bails, for example, was our implementation manager and so our folks working with Bails to make sure because we've got hundreds of clients that in lots of different industries that we've got to go out and roll this implementation out into, right? And so it's a little different than the typical Infor arrangement because they're so many different industries represented just through IronRoad. >> And you guys dog food this? They don't like when I say dog food. Do you drink your own champagne? So you're utilizing your-- >> Much better. (chuckles) >> You're utilizing the Infor software in-house, correct? >> We are, we are, yeah, yeah. If, you know, from an implementation standpoint, easy to do that, right? You have somebody like Bails and Cyndian that has helped us, phenomenal at what they do, great partners for Infor. But then we've got to turn around and take that out to hundreds of different employers. So scaling that is a bit of a challenge. And again, depending upon the amount of resources that the different clients have, which all changes depending upon their size. But it's been great, yeah. So far so good, thank you so much Yeah, appreciate it. >> Well, Billy thanks for your time. We do appreciate it and I assume at Cincinnati, that you might be one of those long-suffering Bengals fans. >> Hey, time out! Hey, two in one. >> I know. >> Two in one, Andy Dalton. We're not big Carolina fans right now. >> One in two here in New England. >> You guys are trouble. >> Well, we'll see after this week. >> The 40-something maybe hit the big Tom. >> Alright. That discussion to continue off the air. Billy Southerland, IronRoad CEO. >> Thank you guys so much, yeah, enjoyed it. >> We'll continue. We are live here in Washington D.C. at Inforum 2018. Back with more on theCUBE in just a bit. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Well, welcome back. We are here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us here as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 18. We're in Washington D.C., at the Walter Washington Convention Center. I'm John Walls, with Dave Vellante and we're joined now by Rahul Pathak, who is the G.M. at Amazon Athena and Amazon EMR. >> Hey there. Rahul, nice to see you, sir. >> Nice to see you as well. Thanks for having me. >> Thank you for being with us, um, now you spoke earlier, at the executive forum, and, um, wanted to talk to you about the title of the presentation. It was Datalinks and Analytics: the Coming Wave of Brilliance. Alright, so tell me about the title, but more about the talk, too. >> Sure. Uh, so the talk was really about a set of components and a set of transdriving data lake adoption and then how we partner with Infor to allow Infor to provide a data lake that's customized for their vertical lines of business to their customers. And I think part of the notion is that we're coming from a world where customers had to decide what data they could keep, because their systems were expensive. Now, moving to a world of data lakes where storage and analytics is a much lower cost and so customers don't have to make decisions about what data to throw away. They can keep it all and then decide what's valuable later. So we believe we're in this transition, an inflection point where you'll see a lot more insights possible, with a lot of novel types of analytics, much more so than we could do, uh, to this point. >> That's the brilliance. That's the brilliance of it. >> Right. >> Right? Opportunity to leverage... >> To do more. >> Like, that you never could before. >> Exactly. >> I'm sorry, Dave. >> No, no. That's okay. So, if you think about the phases of so called 'big data,' you know, the.... We went from, sort of, EDW to cheaper... >> (laughs) Sure. >> Data warehouses that were distributed, right? And this guy always joked that the ROI of a dupe was reduction of investment, and that's what it became. And as a result, a lot of the so-called data lakes just became stagnant, and so then you had a whole slew of companies that emerged trying to get, sort of, clean up the swamp, so to speak. Um, you guys provide services and tools, so you're like "Okay guys, here it is. We're going to make it easier for you." One of the challenges that Hadoop and big data generally had was the complexity, and so, what we noticed was the cloud guys--not just AWS, but in particular AWS really started to bring in tooling that simplified the effort around big data. >> Right. >> So fast-forward to today, and now we're at the point of trying to get insights-- data's plentiful,insights aren't. Um, bring us up to speed on Amazon's big data strategy, the status, what customers are doing. Where are we at in those waves? >> Uh, it's a big question, but yeah, absolutely. So... >> It's a John Furrier question. (laughter) So what we're seeing is this transition from sort of classic EDW to S3 based data lakes. S3's our Amazon storage service, and it's really been foundational for customers. And what customers are doing is they're bringing their data to S3 and open data formats. EDWs still have a role to play. And then we offer services that make it easy to catalog and transform the data in S3, as well as the data in customer databases and data warehouses, and then make that available for systems to drive insight. And, when I talk about that, what I mean is, we have the classic reporting and visualization use cases, but increasingly we're seeing a lot more real time event processing, and so we have services like Kinesis Analytics that makes it easy to run real time queries on data as it's moving. And then we're seeing the integration of machine learning into the stacks. Once you've got data in S3, it's available to all of these different analytic services simultaneously, and so now you're able to run your reporting, your real time processing, but also now use machine learning to make predictive analytics and decisions. And then I would say a fourth piece of this is there's really been, with machine learning and deep learning and embedding them in developer services, there's now been a way to get at data that was historically opaque. So, if you had an audio recording of a social support call, you can now put it through a service that will actually transcribe it, tell you the sentiment in the call and that becomes data that you can then track and measure and report against. So, there's been this real explosion in capability and flexibility. And what we've tried to do at AWS is provide managed services to customers, so that they can assemble sophisticated applications out of building blocks that make each of these components easier, and, that focus on being best of breed in their particular use case. >> And you're responsible for EMR, correct? >> Uh, so I own a few of these, EMR, Athena and Glue. And, uh, really these are... EMR's Open Source, Spark and Hadoop, um, with customized clusters that upbraid directly against S3 data lakes, so no need to load in HDFS, so you avoid that staleness point that you mentioned. And then, Athena is a serverless sequel NS3, so you can let any analyst log in, just get a sequel prompt and run a query. And then Glue is for cataloging the data in your data lake and databases, and for running transformations to get data from raw form into an efficient form for querying, typically. >> So, EMR is really the first service, if I recall, right? The sort of first big data service-- >> That's right. >> -that you offered, right? And, as you say, you really begin to simplify for customers, because the dupe complexity was just unwieldy, and the momentum is still there with EMR? Are people looking for alternatives? Sounds like it's still a linchpin of the strategy? >> No, absolutely. I mean, I think what we've seen is, um, customers bring data to S3, they will then use a service, like Redshift, for petabyte scale data warehousing, they'll use EMR for really arbitrary analytics, using opensource technologies, and then they'll use Athena for broad data lake query and access. So these things are all very much complimentary, uh, to each other. >> How do you define, just the concept of data lakes, uh, versus other approaches to clients? And trying to explain to them, you know, the value and the use for them, uh, I guess ultimately how they can best leverage it for their purposes? How do you walk them through that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, there's, um. You know, that starts from the principles around how data is changing. So before we used to have, typically, tabular data coming out of ERP systems, or CRM systems, going into data warehouses. Now we're seeing a lot more variety of data. So, you might have tweets, you might have JSON events, you might have log events, real time data. And these don't fit traditional... well into the traditional relational tabular model, ah, so what data lakes allow you to do is, you can actually keep both types of the data. You can keep your tabular data indirectly in your data lake and you can bring in these new types of data, the semi-structured or the unstructured data sets. And they can all live in the data lake. And the key is to catalog that all so you know what you have and then figure out how to get that catalog visible to the analytic layer. And so the value becomes you can actually now keep all your data. You don't have to make decisions about it a priori about what's going to be valuable or what format it's going to be useful in. And you don't have to throw away data, because it's expensive to store it in traditional systems. And this gives you the ability then to replay the past when you develop better ideas in the future about how to leverage that data. Ah, so there's a benefit to being able to store everything. And then I would say the third big benefit is around um, by placing data and data lakes in open data formats, whether that's CSV or JSON or a more efficient formats, that allows customers to take advantage of best of breed analytics technology at any point in time without having to replatform their data. So you get this technical agility that's really powerful for customers, because capabilities evolve over time, constantly, and so, being in a position to take advantage of them easily is a real competitive advantage for customers. >> I want to get to Infor, but this is so much fun, I have some other questions, because Amazon's such a force in this space. Um, when you think about things like Redshift, S3, Pedisys, DynamoDB...we're a customer, these are all tools we're using. Aurora. Um, the data pipeline starts to get very complex, and the great thing about AWS is I get, you know, API access to each of those and Primitive access. The drawback is, it starts to get complicated, my data pipeline gets elongated and I'm not sure whether I should run it on this service or that service until I get my bill at the end of the month. So, are there things you're doing to help... First of all, is that a valid concern of customers and what are you doing to help customers in that regard? >> Yeah, so, we do provide a lot of capability and I think our core idea is to provide the best tool for the job, with APIs to access them and combine them and compose them. So, what we're trying to do to help simplify this is A) build in more proscriptive guidance into our services about look, if you're trying to do x, here's the right way to do x, at least the right way to start with x and then we can evolve and adapt. Uh, we're also working hard with things like blogs and solution templates and cloud formation templates to automatically stand up environments, and then, the third piece is we're trying to bring in automation and machine learning to simplify the creation of these data pipelines. So, Glue for example. When you put data in S3, it will actually crawl it on your behalf and infer its structure and store that structure in a catalog and then once you've got a source table, and a destination table, you can point those out and Glue will then automatically generate a pipeline for you to go from A to B, that you can then edit or store in version control. So we're trying to make these capabilities easier to access and provide more guidance, so that you can actually get up and running more quickly, without giving up the power that comes from having the granular access. >> That's a great answer. Because the granularity's critical, because it allows you, as the market changes, it allows you... >> To adapt. To move fast, right? And so you don't want to give that up, but at the same time, you're bringing in complexity and you just, I think, answered it well, in terms of how you're trying to simplify that. The strategy's obviously worked very well. Okay, let's talk about Infor now. Here's a big ISP partner. They've got the engineering resources to deal with all this stuff, and they really seem to have taken advantage of it. We were talking earlier, that, I don't know if you heard Charles's keynote this morning, but he said, when we were an on prem software company, we didn't manage customer servers for them. Back then, the server was the server, uh software companies didn't care about the server infrastructure. Today it's different. It's like the cloud is giving Infor strategic advantage. The flywheel effect that you guys talk about spins off innovation that they can exploit in new ways. So talk about your relationship with Infor, and kind of the history of where it's come and where it's going. >> Sure. So, Infor's a great partner. We've been a partner for over four years, they're one of our first all-in partners, and we have a great working relationship with them. They're sophisticated. They understand our services well. And we collaborate on identifying ways that we can make our services better for their use cases. And what they've been able to do is take all of the years of industry and domain expertise that they've gained over time in their vertical segments, and with their customers, and bring that to bear by using the components that we provide in the cloud. So all these services that I mentioned, the global footprint, the security capabilities, the, um, all of the various compliance certifications that we offer act as accelerators for what Infor's trying to do, and then they're able to leverage their intellectual property and their relationships and experience they've built up over time to get this global footprint that they can deploy for their customers, that gets better over time as we add new capabilities, they can build that into the Infor platform, and then that rolls out to all of their customers much more quickly than it could before. >> And they seem to be really driving hard, I have not heard an enterprise software company talk so much about data, and how they're exploiting data, the way that I've heard Infor talk about it. So, data's obviously key, it's the lifeblood-- people say it's the new oil--I'm not sure that's the best analogy. I can only put oil in my house or my car, I can't put it in both. Data--I can do so many things with it, so, um... >> I suspect that analogy will evolve. >> I think it should. >> I'm already thinking about it now. >> You heard it here first in the Cube. >> You keep going, I'll come up with something >> Don't use that anymore. >> Scratch the oil. >> Okay, so, your perspectives on Infor, it's sort of use of data and what Amazon's role is in terms of facilitating that. >> So what we're providing is a platform, a set of services with powerful building blocks, that Infor can then combine into their applications that match the needs of their customers. And so what we're looking to do is give them a broad set of capabilities, that they can build into their offerings. So, CloudSuite is built entirely on us, and then Infor OS is a shared set of services and part of that is their data lake, which uses a number of our analytic services underneath. And so, what Infor's able to do for their customers is break down data silos within their customer organizations and provide a common way to think about data and machine learning and IoT applications across data in the data lake. And we view our role as really a supporting partner for them in providing a set of capabilities that they can then use to scale and grow and deploy their applications. >> I want to ask you about--I mean, security-- I've always been comfortable with cloud security, maybe I'm naive--but compliance is something that's interesting and something you said before... I think you said cataloging Glue allows you to essentially keep all the data, right? And my concern about that is, from a governance perspective, the legal counsel might say, "Well, I don't "want to keep all my data, if it's work in process, "I want to get rid of it "or if there's a smoking gun in there, "I want to get rid of it as soon as I can." Keep data as long as possible but no longer, to sort of paraphrase Einstein. So, what do you say to that? Do you have customers in the legal office that say, "Hey, we don't want to keep data forever, "and how can you help?" >> Yeah, so, just to refine the point on Glue. What Glue does is it gives you essentially a catalog, which is a map of all your data. Whether you choose to keep that data or not keep that data, that's a function of the application. So, absolutely >> Sure. Right. We have customers that say, "Look, here are my data sets for "whether it's new regulations, or I just don't want this "set of data to exist anymore, or this customer's no longer with us and we need to delete that," we provide all of those capabilities. So, our goal is to really give customers the set of features, functionality, and compliance certifications they need to express the enterprise security policies that they have, and ensure that they're complying with them. And, so, then if you have data sets that need to be deleted, we provide capabilities to do that. And then the other side of that is you want the audit capabilities, so we actually log every API access in the environment in a service called CloudTrail and then you can actually verify by going back and looking at CloudTrail that only the things that you wanted to have happen, actually did happen. >> So, you seem very relaxed. I have to ask you what life is like at Amazon, because when I was down at AWS's D.C. offices, and you walk in there, and there's this huge-- I don't know if you've seen it-- there's this giant graph of the services launched and announced, from 2006, when EC2 first came out, til today. And it's just this ridiculous set of services. I mean the line, the graph is amazing. So you're moving at this super, hyper pace. What's life like at AWS? >> You know, I've been there almost seven years. I love it. It's been fantastic. I was an entrepreneur and came out of startups before AWS, and when I joined, I found an environment where you can continue to be entrepreneurial and active on behalf of you customers, but you have the ability to have impact at a global scale. So it's been super fun. The pace is fast, but exhilarating. We're working on things we're excited about, and we're working on things that we believe matter, and make a difference to our customers. So, it's been really fun. >> Well, so you got--I mean, you're right at the heart of what I like to call the innovation sandwich. You've got data, tons of data, obviously, in the cloud. You're a leader and increasingly becoming sophisticated in machine intelligence. So you've got data, machine intelligence, or AI, applied to that data, and you've got cloud for scale, cloud for economics, cloud for innovation, you're able to attract startups--that's probably how you found AWS to begin with, right? >> That's right. >> All the startups, including ours, we want to be on AWS. That's where the developers want to be. And so, again, it's an overused word, but that flywheel of innovation occurs. And that to us is the innovation sandwich, it's not Moore's Law anymore, right? For decades this industry marched to the cadence of Moore's Law. Now it's a much more multi-dimensional matrix and it's exciting and sometimes scary. >> Yeah. No, I think you touched on a lot of great points. It's really fun. I mean, I think, for us, the core is, we want to put things together the customers want. We want to make them broadly available. We want to partner with our customers to understand what's working and what's not. We want to pass on efficiencies when we can and then that helps us speed up the cycle of learning. >> Well, Rahul, I actually was going to say, I think he's so relaxed because he's on theCUBE. >> Ah, could be. >> Right, that's it. We just like to do that with people. >> No, you're fantastic. >> Thanks for being with us. >> It's a pleasure. >> We appreciate the insights, and we certainly wish you well with the rest of the show here. >> Excellent. Thank you very much, it was great to be here. >> Thank you, sir. >> You're welcome. >> You're watching theCUBE. We are live here in Washington, D.C. at Inforum 18. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering Inforum D.C. 2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well, back here on theCUBE, we are at Inforum '18. We're in Washington, D.C. here in the Walter Washington Convention Center. Not far from the White House. It's about a mile that way, and Capitol Hill's about a mile that way, I think. I know we're right in here, but I know we are smack dab in the middle of it. Dave Vellante and John Walls and Kevin Curry, who's the SVP of the global public sector at Infor. Good to have you with us. Good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here. Thanks for your time. >> So public sector, you're in the heart of it here, and you were telling us before we went on the air that you've got more than 700 clients here at the show this week? >> We do, we do. It's the best attendance we've had yet for Inforum, and I joined about six and a half years ago. And we built this business pretty much from the ground up. So it's been a great experience, and now we're starting to get a lot of adoption within the government, across the government, from federal to state to locals. >> What's the process been like, especially across those three, because I assume they're all different? You know, local, state, federal, everybody has different pain points and there's different tolerances. >> They do, they do. I mean, there's different micro-verticals within each of those statements. As an example, if you look at local governments, it could be anything from transit agencies to K-12 schools, to public works, to police, to fire. They all have all different requirements. State's the same thing, whether it's Department of Transportation or Department of Health and Human Services. And then when you get the federal side of it, then it's from the intelligence community to Department of Defense, healthcare within Defense, like the VA and DoD and Defense agencies as well. So it's a pretty wide swatch of use cases and business cases that you need to be able to sell to. >> Charles said something interesting in the keynote today. I want to ask you about it. He said, "We made a strategic decision to go to the cloud. "We didn't want to compete with Google "and Amazon and Microsoft for CloudScale. "That didn't make any sense for us." And he said, "When we were an on-prem software vendor, "we weren't managing servers for our customers." Now what struck me there is if you look back at the software company back in the day, they really didn't care about the server, right? It was just sort of infrastructure. It was kind of irrelevant to them. The cloud feels different. It seems like a more strategic relationship with Amazon. You know, we talk about Teresa Carlson and what a force she is in the government. AWS in the GovCloud has been a huge force. They had a giant lead. So have you been able to draft off that or is it just another sort of infrastructure platform? >> No, they're a major strategic partnership there with AWS and NN4. At the company level, and especially for me, with the government, they've made the right investments at the right time, I mean, and they actually have cloud environments that are very specific to different segments of the government and to different geographies. So as an example, in the federal government they have an intelligence cloud called C2S, which we work with them on. There's a very large procurement out right now for the Department of Defense called Jedi, which Amazon's going after, as well as the other larger cloud providers, so we're obviously riding that horse with AWS. And also for local governments, and they've done all of the compliancy for the government, whether it be FedRAMP, whether it be CJIS for those departments that are worried about the justice type of requirements. And as you get outside of the U.S., they're putting clouds and we're a global company as well, putting clouds in all the right places. They have a G-Cloud offering in the U.K. and as we talked about earlier when we sat down, they're opening a cloud in the Middle East right now too, in Bahrain that I think traces on oil over there as we speak. >> Right, right. The first Middle East country to claim cloud first. But it just seems like there's a strategic advantage there. And even with the other cloud suppliers. I mean, you know, Google's got its niche, big niche, you know, Microsoft, with its software state, but it seems like Amazon, they talk about that flywheel effect, brings certain technologies that, you know, when you talk to Soma, you guys have been able to take advantage of. It just feels a lot different than the old traditional server manufacturer. Oh, it's a Unix box and there's no difference between vendor A, B and C. >> Absolutely correct. And for us, we've taken advantage of the tools that Amazon has and obviously, we're doing all the compliancy on our applications and they've got whole the infrastructure piece of it, so the two work very well together. >> And that has allowed you to focus on your knitting, if you will. >> Yes. >> The things that you do best, which is a micro-verticals, suite across the application portfolio, bringing AI to the equation, automation, we heard a lot about robotic process automation, which is probably a hot topic in the government. >> Yes. I mean, Charles famously, he may have had a quote. I'm sure you heard it. It's friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Great quote. >> You know, that's not a business we're in. We're a software company. >> Right. >> So the public sector, obviously a different animal than the private sector. Very different needs, different constituents, you got tax payers, you got all that. When you bring the technology into the public sector, what does that do for it or how does that have to be, I don't know, re-conformed or adapted? And ultimately, what's the payoff, right? What's the return on that investment? >> So it was actually pretty shocking how quickly the government has adopted and moved towards the cloud. Typically, they're laggards. Everything happens in the commercial market and then government's a little bit of a late adopter, right? But we're seeing them very quickly go to the cloud and there's a lot of reasons for that. One being, you have an aging workforce. Okay, so the baby boomers are all retiring so a lot of that intellectual knowledge is going out the door. Two, is there's some economies of scale to be realized by doing that because once you're in the cloud, I mean, it's up to the vendor who's maintaining it to maintain that for you. So, you know, the people behind the scenes, they have to do it. You know, when you upgrade your software to go from one release to the other, it's automatically done for you. I mean, so there's real cost savings to be had, you know, from a care and feeding perspective there as well. Also a lot of the, on the ERP side of the things, a lot of the systems that are out in the marketplace today that governments have bought, like the Oracles or the SAPs, a lot of these systems are at end-of-life and the companies are no longer supporting them. So it's a re-implementation for them. You know, and so now they're looking, okay, if we have to re-implement and we have to look at our new options, we're going to do it in a cloud. >> So when you've been around as long as I have, Kevin, >> Right. >> you've seen the pendulum swing. You don't have to agree so vehemently. (laughing) But from mainframe to client server and so you're back to the cloud, and now with IoT, it seems like the pendulum is swinging back to a distributed environment. So help us understand where IoT fits to the cloud and even your on-prem business. >> Okay, so like I say, cloud is a pretty broad topic, okay? We have multiple applications that would run in that environment. So when I look at IoT, I think of things like our asset management platform. We have a very strong enterprise asset management platform that runs in the cloud or runs on-prem. And if you think about infrastructure as an example, which government has a lot of, okay. Think about the ability to have sensors on different pieces of equipment and being able to read that information. Think about using drone technology, okay, to be able to do physical inspections under bridges, so you're not having people having to climb around underneath there. I mean, so being able to do live feeds of data and be able to streamline the way you do business and have that automatically captured within an application. So yes, that is one area where we see it. I mean, I think you're going to see more and more of robotics and artificial intelligence and all the things come into play. I think you heard a lot about that here and it's here. I mean, they were things we saw in movies before but now the technology's here today. >> Well, the other thing we heard this morning that Charles has always talked a lot about the data. You guys always talked about your data lake. I like to think of it as a data ocean. You think about all the data out of GT Nexus and, you know, your customers that are providing data to inform. The data model starts to really expand and you guys have seemed to really take advantage of that. Talk about the data, the importance of data, the importance of securing data to the government. >> Well, think about that. I mean, there's islands of information that governments have that if they were able to consolidate that data and put some intelligence into it, be able to make business decisions versus, you know, one system sitting over here, one system sitting over here and none of them ever communicating or talking to each other. You know, the ability to, You could do from anything from, just think about crime statistics, okay? The ability to deploy resources where the crime is and then as it moves, be able to further deploy resources. You know, New York, years ago, did things like that with CompStat when they were cleaning up Times Square and so forth. But just think of that as a concept, realtime being able to manage data. >> So you've got, here at the show, we were talking about earlier, 700 and some odd clients, 725. You've got the federal forum for the first time. Why now? And what are you getting out of that or what do you hope to get out of that at the end of the week? >> So the whole executive team and our board of directors have made significant investments in this marketplace because they understand that government is a very large beast, if you will, and there's a lot of opportunity for deployment of our solutions and there's a real need to solve problems for constituents here as well. So they've made very significant investments in things for security like FedRAMP, compliancy. You know, some companies are doing it on some of their solutions. We're doing it across the board on all the products that we take to the government marketplace. So we're invested in it. You've probably heard today, Charles talked about the fact that we're going to have a federal cloud suite, which we are. So that means federal financials, okay? Actually being able to solve all the problems for the federal government and comply to all their needs and all the things that are part of mandated accounting for the federal government. They made all the right investments and human capital management would be another area. If you think about, we've got an application called Talent Science. The ability to hire the right people for the right job and retain those people. Just think about, ICE is a good example. You heard that they have to hire thousands of people to deploy on the borders, right? How do you quickly ramp and hire these right people if you don't have the right tools to do it? >> You were quoted in TIME magazine, Marc Benioff's new publication, about America's crumbling infrastructure. What role do you see technology playing generally and specifically in for software and helping with that problem? >> So we do a lot today around infrastructure. As an example, we have a very strong presence in transit agencies here in the U.S. New York City runs us, amounts to about a trillion dollars worth of assets there. So anything moving in, out or around the city, so subways, buses, trains, tunnels, bridges, Metro-North, Long Island Rail Road. L.A. runs us, San Francisco runs us, Chicago runs us, Dallas runs us and many others. So we're managing all of that infrastructure. So you hear a lot about infrastructure bills coming out of the federal government. And they're right. I mean, a lot of these tunnel, a lot of these bridges and tunnels and even roadways were built back during World War II, right? And they're aged, you know, they are starting to crumble and there's going to be a lot of money spent to do that and when it comes to rebuilding those types of things, there's a lot of assets that are going to need to be managed, you know, to do that. So we think there's a real opportunity for software such as what we bring to the marketplace to help with that process. >> How about talent retention? I mean, obviously, as administrations come and go, you know, people move, but there's been a lot of brain drain. I mean, take the Patent Office, people in commercial industry stealing some of the best and brightest out of government. Can software play a role in helping better retain, train, you know, evolve growth paths and careers? >> Yes. I guess, in a couple different ways. I mean, number one, I think the applications of today versus the applications of yesterday have changed so much. I mean, you look at, you know, the applications you have on your mobile phone. The ability to have that look and feel, I mean, our kids today are going to go into the workforce and they won't settle for anything less. They're going to want to have that look and feel. They're going to want to have those intuitive type of applications that help them do their job. And that's the kind of offering we're bringing to the marketplace. Then from just actually bringing the right people and we have an application called Talent Science, as an example, where actually there's multiple different areas of your personality that it can determine and map it back to your top performers in your company. And determine the right people for the right job where they'll fit into that environment and then they would thrive hopefully. And it should increase retention on the staff. In government, we've actually sold it to Department of Health and Human Services for hiring case workers. Okay? Or to police departments for hiring of law enforcement. So there's a real opportunity to take those types of applications and do some pretty creative things. >> What's, I hate to say, the pain side of it. But dealing with the government obviously contracts is an issue, right? And a challenge sometimes maybe for you. I'm curious, in a quickly evolving space such as yours, how do you help them keep up with you and their regulatory oversight and whatever mandated restrictions they have? All those things, you know, that come with government. It just doesn't square up with what you do. >> It is, it's a very, again, to your point, it's a different, it's a different industry with different requirements. And everything here is very open and above board. It's open procurements. Everything is competitively bid. There are contractual vehicles that you competitively bid for that'll allow you to be able to do business a lot easier in the future. I mean, in the feds you have things like the GSA 70 Schedule. U.K., you have something called the G-Cloud contract. A lot of states have vehicles where you can bid for it, so all states and local can buy off of those contracts without having to go to a competitive offering. So there's ways that the business can get done without having to go through a lot. >> Every hoop and every, yeah, right. >> The major pain process. But then there's also competitive RFPs, which, you know, well, they'll put a bid out, it'll be very detailed. You have to answer 3,000 requirements. And then after that you'll end up going into an orals and a demo process and, you know, nine months later, they're going to pick a winner. (laughs lightly) Then you go through, but then you have to go through a very painful contract negotiation process. >> That's the process I was talking about. (laughing) Exactly what I was talking about, right. >> Right. >> Yeah, yeah. Well, Kevin, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. >> It's my pleasure. >> And it sounds impressive, right, with the turnout you had, so I'm sure you're very, very pleased with the response you've had here on the show for so far. >> I am and I thank you for your time and >> You bet. >> have a good show. >> Look forward to seeing you down the road. Alright, sir, thank you. Back with more here live on theCUBE. We're at Inforum '18 and we are in Washington, D.C. >> I'm quite sure they got me pinned up back here, but I can't-- (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington D.C, it's the Cube, covering inforum DC 2018 Brought to you by inforum. >> And welcome back to Washington D.C. I think you kind of guess where we are. [Mumbles] Over my shoulder there inforum 2018, along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls, we are live here at the Walter Washington convention center for this years show. We are joined by Martine Cadet, who is vice president of the educational arts program at Inform. Martine, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> And Jennifer Bucanan who is manger and head of the Inforum practice and CFO Solutions. Jennifer, good to see you. >> Thank You >> Let's talk about the program. Martine, ou can give us, first off, the inside scope of this. And then Jennifer you're on the other side of the fence. >> Right >> Because the very people, the individuals that Martine and her program are training, you're hiring. >> Absolutley. >> So I want to hear, first off lets talk about the program in general and then to you, Jennifer for about why. And what do you find really attractive about these people? >> Absolutley >> So the Education Alliance Program is 4 years old this year actually, so we're very excited about that. And what we really set out to do was build a talent pipeline that our company and our ecosystem of partners and customers can tap into. So there's been a lot of conversation about the fact that there's not enough talent to fill the positions that are in the industry. So we wanted to do something different where by we could actually grow that talent organically. So instead of going to the oricals and the SAP And having that revolving desk of okay we can leave this here and go to this competetor and work for them and be experienced. We need to find another way to be able to grow our talent so that as an organization, we can continue to be innovative and grow as we move forward. So EAP really kind of serves within that gap, but we do it a little differently than some of the other programs. We really focus on not just identifying talent, but really training them on the industry skill set. So what people `learn in school is amazing, but it is usually more theory. How do you take that theory and really apply it to what is really needed in the industry today, In a real job today? And that where the Education Alliance Program really kind of serves that niche. >> And generally speaking, the age group would be what? Of the trainees. >> The majority of the people that we train are more college age. So 18 all the way up to, I would say early 30's. So early in career talent is what we think about. >> Okay, are they in school? >> Some of, yeah. >> The majority of them right now are in school, but we also welcome people who are outside of school. We've kind of evolved our program where its not just partnerships with colleges and universities, but we train people who come from training organizations; like Yes We Code, and New York Urban League and things of that nature. And You're Up is another great partnership that we started having relationships with. So we do everything from the traditional integrate within a classroom setting, to more of a bootcamp model where talent gets trained over the course of a couple of months to meet this business needs that we have and are here now. >> Okay, and so Jennifer, then on the hiring side of this the advantage to you is what? >> Well for us, we are always looking for folks that coming out of school, whether it's a masters degree or a bachelors degree, that they have a little bit of a focus going into consulting and implementation services. There's a mix of skills that you look for. Some of it is that commitment to being a forthcoming service orientated person. Somebody with a little bit of perspective. And when we met the EAP students, that ambition just comes right out of those folks. And they have purpose in mind because they started to get a little bit of a taste of the real world of what they want to do. So they've got context and they've got direction and a lot of the folks that we've met with had some good accounting and finance knowledge, which we value. Plus they had the IT component, where traditionally if I just go to try to do some campus recruiting I might get one or the other, but it's hard to get both. >> So training that revolving door, that martine described which, there's still some of that going on, but you get a lot of viable knowledge. You know where the skeletons are buried. They can fast pass some of it. Trading that for excitement, diversity, maybe a different type of creativity. Certainly not as much well that's the way it's done in the enterprise. Right? Maybe discuss that a little bit. >> Yeah absolutley, the folks that, what we need coming in have that creative element and they're not just, ya know, crunching out and doing maybe the theory that you have mentioned. They've had a little bit of experience at a practical site of understanding how to apply technology and solve buisiness problems. Cause that experience that they go through in the EAP program is almost like a simulation and gives them a little taste of that. And when we talk about what we do and we introduce them to our business and try to look for a fit. They have a better understanding of what we are talking about and do. >> So Martine, in the 4 years since we've first met, what has changed? Has the scope, the goals expanded? What did you not forget that actually happened? >> Yeah Maybe you could share some of your experiences. >> Yeah, so in the four years we've gone deeper around world based training. So when we started, it was more around exposing students to different career opportunities, to what is EAP. I've been in the industry forever, but I was always more on the consumer side. So I didn't know what ERP was. [Laughing] Is this even professional? So helping students see the opportunities there, was kind of the initial focus and getting them to have kind of a toe in the water. We've gone much deeper this year, in particular going to role based training. So, what do you need? What skills encompanies you to be an amazing sales professional versus somebody who's going into the development space, or somebody who's going to manage kind of the cloud space, which is where our company is focused. So that's been one of the biggest evolutions in which we have done within EAP over the last couple years and were much more global than we were when we first started. So we are excited about that as well. And then in terms of things that surprised us. I think of of the areas that surprised us, it was a little bit harder to place students frankly, than we had initially had thought it would be. And so one of the ways that we've worked through that is we've worked with our talent science team, and they've been phenomenal at really helping identify fit. And so now we can have much richer conversations with the hiring managers around. Yes, I know that you would like an expereinced hire perhaps, but this is a reason why one of these more inexperienced hires is actually a great fit and will be your next superstar on you team. And on the flip side, we can have conversations with the talent around career opportunities that they might not have even thought about before. Cause now we've got kind of there fit for different roles. >> So were certainly seeing in many buisiness settings, that gut feel is being replaced by, you know, data and fact. When it comes to hiring people though, there's still that, well there's several things. There's gut feel, there's repor, there's biases, so are technologies like machines intelligence, and programs like this cutting through that? >> Yeah that's what we're trying to have happen. I mean it's hard, it's hard. Everyones trying to tackle these issues, but with technologies like talent signs, with having programs which address the feedback of well I don't know where to find a first talent. Well if you go to the same three schools that you always go to, that are by nature not diverse, then you're not going to find the diverse talent you are looking for. So if you can tap into a program where we go out of our way to make sure we're actually fishing in new ponds, and that we're bringing in amazing talent to the forefront that people can tap into. And we are really proud about that. >> Well, what's really key about that, and we were having this conversation earlier. Is that if you really want to bring diversity into your organization, you have to look beyond your inner circle. But it's a pain to do that, its time consuming. So what you've done, is you've fast passed that. Right? And give an opportunity for somebody to dive in. >> Yeah >> Yeah >> Sure, and some of those folks became part of our circle. Cause a year ago we met a wide group of the folks in the EAP program, and we were impressed by the broadness. Like I mentioned earlier, you've got some folks that are still sophomore, junior year that are just getting started. We've got relationships foudning with those folks. We have folks that are just getting ready to graduate, and we have folks that have been in the workplace, came back. So we've got a breath of experience, but folks from all over. And we were one of those folks who would go to the same school over and over. And you know, we would get good talent but, it's that breath, and that new perspective that comes in. And now that's our pipeline. We've got folks at different levels in their educational career that we stay in touch with. And a lot of the students reaching back to us is what helped us make connections for folks to bring on. >> So how do you find me? If I'm an interested student? >> Yeah >> Or how do I find you? >> Yeah >> If I am at a school. That's one question, and secondly once I'm in, is it like ROTC? Like I have a three year commitment after that? [Laughing] [Mumbling] >> You're invested in me. >> That's a great idea. [Laughing] >> A lot of resource time is being put into me, developing me, so what am I going to give you back? >> Yeah absolutely. >> Take on both of those if you would. >> Its more about finding the member institutions and then finding me the right talent within those organizations. Right? And so we do a lot of research and analysis on where we want to go. So we do want to make sure we are building pipelines that fit the busininesses needs first and foremost. So where do we have a majority of our offices? Where do our partners and customers have a majority of their offices? Where are the hiring needs and the types of roles? Then based on that we look for organizations that actually have core programs that align to that. And those are the ones that we want to have relationships with first and foremost. And then we seek out the talent. We actually have marketing communications people who are out there and promoting the courses and the partnerships that we have in the classroom to hopefully get the talent to actually apply to the class itself.. >> Alright so once I'm in. >> Once your in. >> You've got me. >> Yeah. >> I'm a junior, I'm studying, I'm doing my thing. >> Yeah. >> You're training me. Well I'm going to graduate in a year. So am I on the hook, or will you place me? >> We investin their training, and we also try to provide wrap around support services. So we've got people on the team who are beyond passionate and focused on making sure they've got the soft skills, who are also focused on making sure they are introduced to hiring managers within our ecosystem and within our organization who might be interested in talking to them. We set up kind of meet and greets as well, where we have events around that so placements important to us. We can't commit and guarantee a role per say, but we can open up opportunities perhaps the students didn't have before. And give them the training so that when they are compared against their peer, they can come out ahead. >> So having that Charles several times and interviewing him a number of times, this is, it certainly feels more than optics. What are the success metrics that you look at, and can you share some with us? >> Yeah, so we do look at how many people we actually trained and made it through the program. We look at how many people have been placed within Inforum as well as our ecosystem. We are looking to see how many students will actually pursue a path to certification, and go through the deeper training and learning. And then we look and see how many people are actually liking the program. Like what they're getting out of it. We'd love to see, I'd personally love to see in a couple years that people will have gone through EAP are now future customers, your future partners. You know, placement is one piece, but its also how are we influencing the industry as a whole? And for competitors, hiring EAP students, that actually goodness. Like we are trying to really change what is going on in the injustry perspective on how we grow and change talents. Because the way its working today doesn't work for everybody. So we've got to do something different. And the fact that Inforum has stepped up to actually grow it organically, I think is you know, a testimony to Charles. >> Great mindset, I mean you're not trying to just hang on and you're certainly embracing this. But if when an individual leaves, to whether even a competitor, there's some pride in that. Like hey we trained this individual and we're changing the industry. And you know, sometimes those things just have a way of coming back around. >> Yes, yeah, yes >> Absolutely >> So Jennifer, from the clients side if you will, how big could this program be for you? Like how helpful has it been, and how much more do you need it in order to meet these employee gaps? Cause as we've heard, the numbers aren't adding up right now. >> Right, right. So for us we've been having some conversations about how do we grow together on this? They've offered to say hey, CFO Solutions, would you like to be involved in some of the teaching opportunities? So we've been having dialouge about how that might be. And we've been talking about particular skill sets. You know, they start out with kind of a broad skill set and we work with a very specialized component of that. So we've been talking about the product mix that they involve in their program and bringing something more direct to what we're working with. So that's a big. >> Personalized learning. >> Yes. So its helping us kind of refine our pipeline because we know what's going to be coming out of it and we know that is is getting that slice of this US and the world if necessary right? It gives us a little assurity that we can get folks at different levels of their career. We can start talking to them now and we can start working with these guys on honing the skillset that they'll be coming in with. The soft skills piece that you had mentioned earlier was on of the real standout skills that we saw come out of this. All these folks, I can't overemphasize the driviness, the commitment they had, the communicating with me over a year period. And they're boldness, cause that's one of the main things that we need out of the folks that we bring and put in front of our clients. >> So this is all awesome, touchy feely stuff too, but at the end of the day, I've read that it has a buisiness impact. >> Absolutely, absolutley. >> So what's your experience been in terms of the bottom line? >> Well, so buiness impact wise, when we take a risk and bring somebody fresh out of school, and we bring him to a porject where you require very specialized skills, we need people that we can take a risk on, who will hit the ground running. So if I go and grab somebody from anywhere, I don't know what I'm going to get. I don't know if they're going to like their career. I don't know if they're going to understand what we are doing. And there's a lot of ramp up time, time before I can bill for that source, just to be practical. And when we bring in Eap students, I know they've had a taste of it, and they're ambitious and driven for it. And I can get them billable more quickly. And then I can be proud to have them out in front, because they can tell a story. A lot of this is a relationship business. I can have them come to a project kickoff and they can talk about what they've come from. And that they've had an involvement with Inforum, not just hey I'm fresh out of school. I don't know what I'm doing here. It's hey, I've been working with a product for a couple years. Even now and they hit the ground running just so much more quickly. >> So faster time to value. >> Yes, faster time to value. We've seen internally for the folks we've hired, that we've got one hundred percent voluntary retention rate. >> That's amazing. >> For early retention rate. For early career talent, four years into the program, where that's about 20% better than the rest of the talent that we have, right? So we're looking at retention, cause we know if you lose somebody, that's nine months of salary probably to replace them and to retrain somebody else. >> That's right, yes >> Absolutely >> Much easier to hang onto somebody than go find somebody new. >> Okay so you're getting the billing faster, higher quality, I heard. Which means better customer retention and less employee turnover. >> Less employee turnover. >> Which means lower cost. >> Absolutely. >> And on the recruiting side of things too, the development of trying to find talent, there's a lot of time invested and we're a firm that has a very lean operations team. A lot of us wear many hats. So one of my hats is my recruiting and development, and this just streamlines things for me and makes it so much easier. I don't have to spread myself thin trying to find folks. I know I've got kind of a pipeline and I've been sharing it with my other leadership in the other practices to kind of share that along the firm >> And to put it in context, I mean so for the trainings that are around rules and careers, were looking at getting the students to have 200 plus hours of training over bootcamp experience. Now, put that against somebody else who has zero right? You're getting to faster productivity, you're shaving off anywhere from 3 to 4 to 6 months of on boarding time by hiring somebody through this program. >> Yeah. >> And minimizing on boarding frustration which would help. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Sympathize with. >> Makes perfect sense. Great sounding program, we appreciate the insight today. Thanks for being with us. >> Martini- Yeah, thank you. >> And you're wearing many hats, you'll need a rain hat out there today. >> I will, I will. [Laughing] >> Congratulations. >> One more, yeah. Great program, thank you ladies. We're back with more on Live. The Cube is in Washington D.C at Inforum 2018.

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

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE, we're in Washington DC at the Walter Washington Convention Center, day one of .conf2017, Splunk's big get together here with some 7,000 plus attendees, 65 countries, and traveled something like some 30 million miles to get here? Incredible turn out, it really is impressive, and a great day we're having here on theCUBE. Which of course is the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. Joining me is Jeff Chancey, who is a managing director within Accenture Technology Ecosystem and Ventures. Jeff, good to see you here in Washington, welcome to town. >> Likewise, thank you very much. Excited to be here. >> Yeah, it's certainly been a great day, great first day, let's talk about your partnership, Accenture with Splunk, and what do you see the future for the partnership, how is it evolving? >> Well it's interesting you might ask that, it's probably the $64,000 question. The future of the partnership is indeed exciting. Let me kind of articulate what I mean by that. We Accenture, we're a large professional services firm, our competencies around Accenture Strategy, Accenture Consulting, Accenture Digital Technology Operations, and Accenture Security. What makes the partnership with Splunk so interesting and unique, and also very dynamic, is the fact that Splunk as a transformational data platform applies across the full spectrum of business that Accenture does. So if you can bring the power of an Accenture and our presence in the market, across all the different industry verticals, all the horizontals, and the power of a transformational data engine like Splunk together, you could say it should be a very exciting future indeed. Probably our biggest objective is to really help, in Accenture we call it rotating to the new. So rotating to new technology, and Splunk is definitely part of our agenda to rotate to the new. We are looking to help our clients become data and digital driven businesses, by leveraging the enormous volumes of data that keep exponentially getting generated every single day, through connected devices, applications, infrastructure, across the board, the Internet of Things, everything is now connected, and everything is spooling data. So, we know that our enterprise executive clients, they're all struggling with this challenge that says, "how do I not only, get value out of my data, how do I solve this challenge with the exponential generation of data, so that I don't just survive in the market, but I win?" This is really what we're after as a partnership is that step change transformational agenda, with our enterprise clients. >> So you have this budding partnership, you've talked about all these fantastic opportunities and great potentials and whatever, is it possible, can you focus on one thing that you're most excited about when it comes to the partnership? >> The one thing I would say we're most excited about right now is our security agenda. We all know where Splunk sits, in terms of the security market. Accenture Security, our very first joint market offering is the Cyberdefense Engine, formally known as, our Cyberdefense Platform. That joint market offering stands to be, really what credentializes the partnership between Accenture and Splunk in the market. Very exciting. Every customer needs to mitigate risk, they must protect their enterprises, they're breaches happening every single day, it's in the news, and Splunk is a powerful technology to help our clients protect their enterprises. So, what you want to do, with Accenture and Splunk is we want to help our clients take out cost, take out cost out of the back office, to drive up their profitability and drive down their cost to serve their customers, we want to help them protect their enterprise through security, and then we want to help them drive step change value for their customers and for them through Internet of Things, and business analytics, automating away the work, and driving that value in the market. >> You're talking about this vast array of services, that you could provide, we know about your relationship with Splunk, you've got hordes and hordes of machine data right, pouring in all the time, how are your clients putting all that together, how are -- maybe some of the innovative ways that they're pulling these various resources and sources together and putting them to use? >> What our clients and what we're observing with our clients, is, with their data, they're data tends to reside in multiple silos, within the enterprise. This is normal, this is natural. What we can help do with a powerful technology like Splunk, is aggregate that data across all the different silos and bring it together in a single view. That not only helps the operations staff, as we said before, protecting the enterprise through security, and driving that value through business analytics, real time digital marketing, using geolocation services, for example. One of our exciting offerings is in the retail industry vertical. We're leveraging the power of Splunk to understand through Point of Sale data what product is going out the door, in say, a store operations environment, and also what inventory is coming through the back door, and triangulating that with the real time rate at which product is leaving the shelves, being able to help those retail customers actually do real time order management and trigger those events in real time. because if you're a retail custoner, the last thing you want to do is have products not on the shelf that your customers want to buy, and in the case of a grocery store for example, you don't want to have, your fresh foods spoil before you have a chance to sell it. So if you can bring together the dynamics of what's going in and out of the store with customer loyalty programs and geolocations, you can actually real time target those customers when they're in the vicinity of your store, and say, "The broccoli, we're offering you a special. Come in right now -- >> (laughing) >> We'll give you 15% off of broccoli", because we know you're a customer that likes to buy a lot of broccoli. That's a really exciting -- >> Inventory's everything, right? Inventory control. In this case -- >> And really applying it to the entire supply chain, 'cause obviously, the inventory from the manufacturing side, the consumer goods and services side, has to be available, has to be in the warehouses and the distribution centers, so, optimizing that entire, call it material and product movement, from the raw material and the manufacturing all the way to the consumer. >> We've heard a line, I know you have, greater insight, greater value. How are you at Accenture and Splunk bringing that statement to life for me as your customer? >> Clearly, if we can bring the power of data transformation leveraging next generation technologies like Splunk, and I have to say, we as a partnership, we view Splunk as an emerging technology. Not emerging in the sense that it -- doesn't exist yet, I mean they've been around for over a decade now, but emerging onto the world stage to really help power the way businesses drive their business by leveraging all of that data. The secret sauce that Splunk has, is that ability to aggregate that data from multiple disparate sources, and to do that in real time. If we can drive greater insight into the customer's data, we can collectively drive greater value. Interestingly enough, the greater than sign, is a coincidence, it's part of both Splunk and Accenture's logos. >> Yeah right, you both have it working for you, don't you? You're known for vertical industry practices, is there one or a specific vertical that you can think of that maybe where you all have teamed up and that you're creating this interest or some kind of innovative solution that you're able to specifically develop and apply? >> I mentioned retail, and I mentioned security previously. An interesting area that we're getting into now, is in Health and Life Sciences, so healthcare. We want to be able to predict and prevent hospital Code Blue's before they happen. How much would you be able to do that? All of the devices, all the monitors that all the hospitals have, they're all from different manufacturers, they're all spooling data, and most of the hospital staff are using eyes on glass. To understand, we have a Code Blue, you've seen it in the movies, everybody's running to resuscitate and save the patient. What we want to be able to do leveraging Splunk is to apply machine learning and predictive analytics, to understand what the monitors tell us, that in 15 minutes this patient is likely to be a Code Blue, and how do we predict and prevent that from happening in the first place. I really can't think of anything better than figuring out how to leverage technology to save lives. >> Absolutely. Well, if I'm in need, I want you around, okay? (laughing) >> Okay, you got it. >> We got a deal. Jeff Chancey, from Accenture, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE, appreciate the time and wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much, appreciate it. >> You bet. We'll continue here, from .conf2017, we are live, in our nation's capital, Washington DC.

>> Narrator: Live from Washington DC, it's The Cube. Covering .conf2017, brought to you by Splunk. >> And welcome back to .conf2017 here on The Cube. We continue our coverage from the Walter Washington Convention Center. Dave Vellante, John Walls, if you're wondering where we are, I mean physically, the White House is about a mile that way, and the U.S. Capitol is about a mile that way. So we're kind of sandwiched between where it's all happening, Dave. >> Yeah, I mean this exhibit hall is about a mile that way and a mile that way. (laughing) >> Yeah, if you're hungry, leave now for lunch. It's going to be a bit of a hike. We're going to talk about analytics, obviously, at this show, but with Cisco's Altaf Karim, Senior Manager of service line and product lead, so a practice lead. So Altaf, thank you for being with us here. >> You're very welcome. >> Thanks for the time. Let's talk about the Cisco network optimization service, and obviously how that comes into play with analytics, what that's all about. I know that's certainly near and dear to your mission. >> Sure. So as you mentioned, Cisco's network optimization service, it's a consulting-based service offer that we provide to hundreds of customers globally, where we're actually providing some experts in the field of Cisco products. These consultants know Cisco products in and out. Our span reaches globally in many different industries, and what we do is we really work with our customers first, our consultants work with our customers first to identify what sort of business outcomes that they're trying to achieve. These could be related to things like high availability, performance, and then really work from there to understand what types of things need to happen from an assessment standpoint, or architecture, or deployment standpoint, that they can optimize to make the most use of their network. Some of the key benefits of Cisco optimization service are increased productivity for our customers, better user experience, as well as customers who have made an investment in IT. Our consultants are able to work with them and devise a strategy on faster time to value of that investment. So those are some of the key tenets of-- >> Mr. Vellante: So this is a for-pay service, correct? >> Yes. >> Okay, and it starts presumably with an assessment, where you got to get the right people in the room, and maybe you have some automated tooling to help me do discovery, and things like that, and you're maybe looking at machine data and so forth. Take us through the life-cycle of an engagement. Where does it start? How do we engage? How does one engage with you? Where does it start and where does it go? >> Yeah, sure. So, it all starts with our consultants working with our customers first, as I said, to understand what types of business objectives are they trying to accomplish. We then essentially backtrack from there, and understand what things in the network can we control. For example, high availability, process of change management, improved performance on their network, and essentially devise KPIs and metrics that essentially back into the business outcome that they're trying to accomplish. And of course, we have a whole slew of capabilities around analytics, that our consultants bring to the table to essentially become proactive, and help the customer achieve those business outcomes. >> So it might be a customer comes to you and says hey, I'm having problems with my network. It's down too much, it's not performing the way I want. I think it's change management related, you know it probably is, but I don't know where to start. So you bring a tiger team in, and then what? You use all kinds of tooling and other expertise to surface the problem? >> Yeah, sure. So, your question actually delves into what types of KPI can our consultants provide to our customers, to show them how their network is doing, right? And so there's a couple of different ways to do this. One is, you can take a look at what data is available to you, and start to sift through that. And that can be a very cumbersome process that is lengthy. You're really looking for that needle in the haystack to try to figure out what types of insights you can find to make an impact to the business outcome. Another way to approach it is the way we do it from a process standpoint, is inwards from the customer's business outcome. What exactly are we trying to impact? Is it network performance? Is it high availability? And then, our consultants will actually come up with metrics and KPIs based on intellectual capital that our service offer has, and essentially create custom applications based on Splunk, to essentially provide those insights and views and visibility into the network, back to the customer. >> So is it fair to say that Splunk would be the primary ITOM tool, if I can use that term? Splunk doesn't really talk about ITOM, I guess, directly, but to me it's ITOM, IT operations management, but that is the primary platform that you guys would use and deploy? >> I would say that's one of the primary components. Splunk plays a very, very strategic role in how our consultants interact with our customers. So if you think about the premise behind and the value proposition behind network optimization service, is our leading-edge and world-class expertise in networking. And that's what we're known for. And so now when you think about analytics, especially proactive and predictive, you really need the right mixture in ingredients of things to come together, to provide meaningful analytics back to customers. And really, if you think about a trifecta of domain expertise, data science, as well as an understanding of potentially open-source technologies and platforms. But in this case, we're actually strategically using Splunk to play the piece of that last bit. And so what that means is we have consultants who are world-class, leading experts in networking, but we're also training them and asking them to walk a little bit in the shoes of data analysts. And, if you think about an audience or a constituent that is highly technical, quantitative-minded, Splunk is a pretty easy platform for them to learn and start to make an impact by creating custom applications, KPIs, and metrics, for their own customers, that they can use to be proactive and be preemptive, and provide those insights back to the customer. So that's the role that Splunk plays in our service. How much of your business is sort of Aspirin versus vitamin? In other words, how much is it, I got a pain point, I need a tactical solution to that pain point, versus you know what? I'm thinking about re-architecting my network, east west problem, right? Help me think that through, how I sort of transition from my legacy network to a more modernized network. How much is each of those? >> I would say they both play a pretty significant fare. Depending on where the customer is in the life cycle and what they're trying to accomplish, we certainly have a healthy dosage of customers who we work with transactionally, to architect new networks, to deploy new technology, to help them realize their IT spend in a quicker way. But then, a very significant part of our business also is, what do you do on the day two? You can build all this great stuff, right? But if you don't optimize it for peak performance, if you don't optimize it for high availability, or if it's not keeping up with your evolving needs and standards, then you might get in trouble. You're not using the most out of your network. So that's a healthy business as well. >> You mentioned KPIs. What are you tracking? And, what data matters? How do you determine what's relevant, what's not? You know, big problems, or big challenges at least. >> Yeah. That's a very important question, right? And to me, coming from a services background, it's very much rooted in knowing what your domain is about, because as I mentioned before, if you start with all the plethora of data that's available to you, and start to sift through it, you may or may not find something, right? But, our consultants work with the customer and identify what are specific things that we care to monitor, and what are specific KPI that we want to essentially do trending on, or to identify patterns around, so that we can accomplish some sort of business outcome. So for example, if you care about network performance, you're looking at metrics about capacity or bandwidth, or QOS. If you care about customer experience, you're probably, from a wifi standpoint, looking at signal strengths, looking at disassociations, how often and how quickly customers can connect to wifi networks. So really, it depends on what the customer is looking for. And our approach is that we have solid expertise in a number of networking disciplines ranging from routing, switching, wireless, data center, and others. So we have analytic service offers that go deep into each of those technology areas, and we can figure out what KPI to monitor to best achieve that business outcome, but then we also can bring all of that back together and provide that holistic network perspective, and one of the key things that we want to look at, to make sure network is operating optimally. >> Does your practice bleed into the security vector at all? Is that an adjacent area, or is that sort of a main area? >> Yeah. I would say security is paramount for our customers. For the network optimization service, it's actually an adjacent area, but it's definitely something that we work to include into all of our consultative guidance and recommendations to our customers. >> To whom do you sell, I mean, typically? When you initiate an engagement, is it a head of network? Is it a CIO level? And who do you get involved in the sort of initial meeting, and throughout the lifecycle of the project? >> Yeah. That's a really good question, and I would say that it varies depending on what types of analytics that they're also looking for. So let me give you a couple of different examples. So one example is the IT director or IT manager, who is really looking for a tool or analytics, visibility, insights, into how pieces of their network are performing so that they can achieve high availability, increase in network performance, or can better process their change management. So that's one type of buyer. But the other type of buyer is also at the CIO level, which is increasingly also more interested in using analytics to figure out where they are, and benchmark themselves against how others in their industry, or their peers, may be doing. So we've actually started to begun a lot of interesting conversations there, where some of the analytics that we can provide to our customers who opt in, is really rooted around benchmarking how they're doing in different areas such as performance, their software feature, their software or hardware or feature diversity compared to others in their own industry, and really can identify along with our consultative guidance which areas are really important for them to pay attention to, because they're doing something potentially different than everyone else in their industry. >> How about this challenge of IT networks, they're organic, they're constantly changing. So are you coming in, fixing a problem, and then I got to call you back? Or are you teaching me how to fish? >> I would say we're doing a little bit of both. So there's definitely reactive and remediation portions of our service offer. Unfortunately, that happens more than you would like, because you don't think about what to fix until something actually goes wrong. But, one of our flagship service offers, the network optimization services, is all about proactive and optimizing an existing network, so you make sure you're never getting to a place where you end up having to remediate something. And it's not just about remediation or fixing something that's broken, it's really about fine-tuning a well-oiled machine, to make sure that you're getting the most out of your IT investment. >> Yeah, but what kind of a, you talk about machine learning here, capabilities, what do you have in that vein? >> Yeah, so that's a really good question. When we start talking about proactive, and the predictive aspects of our consulting as well as our analytics, machine learning plays a pretty significant role, and I can only expect the contribution that will make to increase exponentially over time. A perfect example, one example of how we use machine learning is actually the machine learning tool kit inside of Splunk. So, if you think about our main premise behind network optimization, is to provide consulting, and provide recommendations on how to optimize the network. But when you think about what a network is, and it's a living and a breathing thing, each network is different, right? No network is the same. So, what machine learning, and especially the machine learning toolkit from Splunk, allows us to do is for a specific customer, it actually allows us to create a baseline of normalcy. What is normal for hundreds and thousands of KPIs and variables, for that specific customer? I think if we asked a human to do that, they'd probably still be going on-- (imitates gunshot) exactly, right? And so, that's an example of how we use machine learning toolkit from Splunk, and not only identifying what is normal for that customer, but then we can use supervised learning to start to identify anomalies and trends and patterns, and really begin to enable our consultants with the data and foresight around what types of things are happening on that network, so that they can in turn be proactive, and be predictive and preemptive in their exchanges with the customer. >> And these services are done on a T&M basis, or a fixed fee, or both? >> They're done both ways. We're pretty flexible, and there's a whole slew of offers outside of what I just talked about, that are available as well. >> What's typical of people? It just depends, right? >> I would say for pinpoint specific things that need to get done, they're more transactional in nature. And then when you're looking for entire lifecycle in a suite of services to help you optimize and be proactive and predictive and preemptive, that's where we have a subscription-based offer that is our optimization offer. >> Okay, and then you guys will actually, well you'll do this mostly remotely, I presume, but you go on site periodically to just impress the flesh and feel-out the culture? >> Absolutely. When we actually start an engagement with a customer, it's quite common for us to go on site, work to get to know the customer, the players, the network, understand what the business outcomes are, make sure that we're devising our deliverables in a way that actually impacts some sort of outcome, and they're not just rooted in some networking measures that don't necessarily make any impact there, right? So that's really important to us. So we definitely go on site. But of course, one of the value propositions of our offer is our intellectual capital. And when we talk about some of the analytics applications that engineers are building for a specific customer, now talk about that happening across hundreds of customers and engineers, devising new ways to create insights and visibilities in their own customer, and the sharing that happens between the engineers, so that they can bring those learning back to their own customer. >> Well, the door's open for business at Cisco, and Altaf Karim, we appreciate your time sharing with us why and how, and what you're doing, and wish you all the best of luck down the road too. Thanks for being with us here, first time on The Cube, right? >> First time on The Cube. >> Alright. >> Thank you for having me. >> You are now an alum. Welcome to the club. >> Great. >> Alright, Altaf Karim, joining us here on The Cube. We'll continue live from Washington D.C., right after this. (electronic theme music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington DC, it's theCube. Covering .conf2017 Brought to you by splunk. >> Welcome back inside the Walter Washington Convention Center. We're at .conf2017 in Washington DC, the nations capital, it is alive and well and thriving. A little warm out there, almost 90 degrees. But hot topic inside here, Dave. >> There's a lot of heat in this city. (laughter) >> A lot of hot air. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> We'll just leave it at that. Politics aside, of course. Joining us is Ben Miller, who is Director of High Thoughput Screening at Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Ben, thanks for being with us here on theCube. We appreciate the time. First off, I have many questions. First off let's talk about the company, what you do, and then what high throughput screening means, and how that operation comes into play when you have this great nexus of biology and engineering that you've brought together. >> Recursion Pharmaceuticals is treating drug discovery as a facial recognition problem. We're applying machine-learning concepts to biological images to help detect what types of drugs can rescue what types of diseases. We're one of the few companies that is both generating and analyzing our own data. As the director of the high throughput screening group, what I do is generate images for our data science teams to analyze, and that means growing human cells up in massive quantities, perturbing them with different types of disease reagents that cause their morphology to change, and then photographing them in the presence of compounds and in the absence of compounds. So we can see which compounds cause these disease states to revert more to a normal state for the cell. >> Okay, HTS then ... Walk us through that if you would. >> HTS is a general term that's used in the pharmaceutical industry to denote a assay that is executed in very large scale and in parallel. We tend to work on the order of multiples of 384 experiments per plate. We're looking at hundreds of thousands of images per plate, and we're looking at hundreds of plates per week. So when we say high throughput, we mean 6-10 terabytes of data per day. >> Just extraordinary amounts of data. And the mission, as we understand it, you're looking at very rare genetic diseases, your goal is to find cures for these over the next 15-20 years. Up to 100 of them, so that's why you're going through this multiple examinations of vast amounts of data. Human data. >> Yeah, there's been a trend in the pharmaceutical industry over the last years, where the number of dollars spent per drug developed is increasing. And it now takes over one billion dollars to bring a drug to market. And every year it costs more to bring a drug to market. We believe we can change that by operating at a massively parallel scale and also analyzing image data at a truly deep level. Looking at thousands of different features per image, instead of just a single feature in the image. >> That business is just like this vicious cycle going on, and you guys are trying to break it. >> Yes, exactly. >> So what's the state of facial recognition been? I've had mixed reviews about it. Because I rave about it, I go, "Oh my God, "Facebook tagged me again, it must be really good." And then other's have told me, "Well it's not really "as reliable as you might think." What is your experience been? >> The only experience I've had with facial recognition has been like yours, on Facebook and things like that. What we're doing is looking more at cellular recognition. Being able to see differences in these cellular morphologies. I think there are some unique challenges when you're looking at images of thousands of cells, versus images of a single person's face. >> Okay, so you've taken that concept down to the cell level and it's highly accurate, presumably. >> It's highly reproducible is what I would say, yeah. >> So it takes some work to be accurate, and once you get it there you can reproduce that, is that right? How does the sequence work? >> Yes, so there are two parts to the coin. One is how consistently we can produce these images and then how consistently those images represent the disease state. My focus is on making the images as consistent as they can be, while realizing that the disease states are all unique. So from our perspective, we're looking at thousands of different features in each image, and figuring out how consistent those features are from image to image. >> So paint a picture of your data stack, if you will. Infrastructure on up to the apps, and where splunk fits in. >> Sure. So I guess you could say that our data stack actually begins at hospitals around the world where human cells are collected from various medical waste samples. We culture those up, perturb them with different reagents, add different potential drugs back to them, and then photograph them. So at the beginning of our stack we've got biological agents that are mixed together and then photographs are generated. Those photographs are actually .tif files, and we have thousands and thousands of them. They're all uploaded in to Amazon Web Services, their S3 system. We spin up a near infinite number of virtual computers to process all of that image data within a couple of hours. And then produce a result. This drug makes this disease model look more like healthy and doesn't have other side effects. We're really reducing those thousands of dimensions in our image down to two. How much does it look like a healthy cell, and how much does it just look different then it should. >> And where does splunk fit into that stack? >> All of those instruments that are generating that data are equipped with splunk forwarders. So splunk is pulling all of our operational data from the laboratory together, and marrying it up with the image analysis that comes from our proprietary data analysis system. So by looking at the data that we're generating, how many cells we're counting, how bright the intensity of the image is, comparing that back to which dispenser we used, how long the plates sat at room temperature, et cetera. We can figure out how to optimize our production process so that we get reliable data. >> It's essentially storing machine data in the splunk data store. And then do you have an image database for ...? >> Yeah. And the image database is incredibly large. I wouldn't even guess at the current size. >> Dave: And what is it? Is it something on Amazon, an Amazon service? >> Yeah. So right now all of our image data is stored on AWS. >> This is one of those interviews Dave that the subject matter kind of trumps the technology because I want to know how it works. But you need the technology obviously to drive it. So I'm trying to figure out, "Alright, so you're taking "human cells and you're taking snapshots in time, "and then looking at how they react "to certain perturbed actions." But how does that picture of maybe one person's cell reacting to a reagent to another person's ... How does your data analysis provide you with some insight because Dave's DNA is different from my DNA, different from everybody in this building, so ultimately how are you combing through all of that data to make sense of it. >> That's true. Everybody has a unique genetic fingerprint, but everybody is susceptible to the same sets of major diseases. By looking at these images, and really that's the billion dollar question, is how representative are these individual cellular images, how representative are they of the general human population? And the effects that we see at a cellular level, will they translate in to human populations? We're very close to clinical trials on several compounds, but that's when we will really find out how much proof there is in this concept. >> Okay. You can't really predict ... Do you have a timeframe or is just sort of, "Keep going, keep getting funding until you reach the answer?" Is it like survive until you thrive? >> I personally don't maintain that kind of timeline. My role is within the laboratory producing the data as quickly as we can. We do have a goal of treating 100 different diseases in the next 10 years. And it's really early days, we're about 2 1/2 years in to that goal. It seems like we're on track, but there's still a lot of work to be done between now and then. >> So it's all cloud, right? And then splunk is throughout that stack, as we talked about. How do you envision, or do you envision, using it differently? Are you trying to get more out of the splunk platform? What do you want to see from splunk? >> That's a good question. I think right now we're using really the rudimentary basic features of splunk. Their database-connect app and their Machine Learning Toolkit are both pretty foundational to the work that we do. But right now a lot of our data models are one time use. We do a particular analysis to find the root cause of a particular problem, we learn that, and that's the last time we use that model. Continuous implementation of data models is something that is high on my list to do. As well as just ingesting more and more data. We're still fairly siloed. Our temperature and humidity data is separate from our machine data, and bringing that all into splunk is on the list. >> Why are your models disposable? It sounds like it's not done on purpose, it's more of some kind of infrastructure barrier? >> We're really at the cutting edge of technology right now, and we're learning a lot of things that people haven't learned, that in retrospect are obvious. To figure out the true cause of a particular situation, a data model or a machine-learning model is really valuable, but once you know that key salient fact, you don't need to keep track of it over time. You don't need to know that when your tire pressure is low your car gets less miles to the gallon. >> David: You have the answer. >> Right. But there are a lot of problems like that in our field that have not been discovered yet. >> I inferred from your answer you do see the potential to have some kind of ongoing model evolution. For new use cases? >> In the extreme situation we have a set of hundreds of operational parameters that are going into producing this image of cells. And then we have thousands of cellular features that are extracted from that image. There's a machine-learning problem there. What are the optimal parameters to extract the optimal information? And that whole process could be automated to the point where we're using machine-learning to optimize our assay. To me that's the future of what we want to do. >> Were you with Recursion when they brought in splunk? >> Yeah. >> You were. Did you look at alternatives? Did you look at maybe rolling your own with open source? Is that even feasible? Wonder if you could talk about that. >> I had already been introduced to splunk at my previous job, and at that previous company, before I heard of splunk, I was starting to roll my own. I was writing a ton of Perl scripts, and all of these regular expressions, and searching network drives to pull log files together. And I thought that maybe there would be a good business model behind that. >> You were building splunk. (laughter) >> And then I found splunk, and those guys were so far ahead of things I was trying to do on my own in a lab. So for me it was a no-brainer. But for our software engineering team, they are really dedicated to open source platforms whenever possible. They evaluated the ELK Stack. Some of us had used Sumo Logic and things like that. But for me, splunk had the right license model and I could get off the ground really really rapidly with it. >> What about the license model was attractive to you? >> Unlimited users, and only paying for the data that we ingest. The ability to democratize that data, so that everybody in the lab can go in and view it and I don't have to worry about how many accounts I'm creating. That was really powerful. >> Dave: So you like the pricing model. >> Yeah. >> Some users have chirped about the pricing, I saw some Wall Street concerns about the pricing. The guys that we've talked to on theCube today have said, "They like the pricing model, that there's value there." And you're sort of confirming that. >> Ben: Yeah. >> You're not concerned about the exponential growth of you data causing your license fees to go through the roof >> In the laboratory, the image data that we're generating is exponentially growing, but the operational parameter data is more linearly growing. >> Dave: So it's under control basically. >> Yeah, for our needs it is. >> Dave: You're not paying for the images, you're paying for the meta data around that. >> Yeah. >> Well it's a fascinating proposition, it really is. Very eager to keep up with this, keep track, and see the progress. Good luck with that. Look for having you back on theCube to monitor that progress, alright Ben? >> Great. Very good, thank you so much. Ben Miller joining us from Salt Lake City, good to have you here. Back with more on theCube in just a bit. You're watching our live coverage of .conf2017. (upbeat innovative music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2017, brought to you by Splunk. >> Well, welcome back to .conf2017. Here we are at Splunk's annual get together, with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We are live in the Walter Washington Convention Center, in beautiful Washington D.C. I say that, proud to be a native. Actually raised here, lived here, fly the flag here. >> Wow. >> This is my place, Dave. >> Listen, I love this city. >> I do too. >> I love coming down here. Lots to do, my son's down here, so. >> But if we weren't here, where should we be, maybe on the deck of a Carnival cruise line ship right now? >> That would be good. >> I would like that. >> I would love to have theCUBE on the deck of a Carnival >> Maybe, maybe Ruel Waite can swing that. What do you think? Ruel Waite joins us. He is the manager of delivery and support for Carnival. And you got room for two on the next ship out of Miami? >> Listen, man, for you guys anything. >> I love that. Alright, you're hired. >> I can make it happen. >> Outstanding. Alright Ruel, thanks for being here with us. >> No problem. >> On theCUBE, glad to have you, and here at the show as well. Alright, so let's talk about first off, Splunk. What are you doing? Let's back up, in terms of what you do. Your core responsibilities and then we'll get into Splunk story after that. >> Yeah, so I manage the support operation for our ecommerce platform, as well as for the guest facing ship board application. So the ecommerce platforms is where you go and purchase your cabin on the web. You would also be able to purchase your show excursions, your spa treatments, as well. Or we have an e-retail site where if you have a friend who's sailing you can buy a bottle of champagne and have it in their room for when they get there. So all those purchasing perks now that we support on the ecommerce platform. And then the guest facing application, Shipboard, we're talking 'about the mobile application where guests chat and interact with each other or plan their day. We're talking about the Pixels application where guests are purchase their photos that they take throughout their cruise. And their some facial recognition stuff there as well. And the iTV that's in your room. So we have a separate, many different sort of applications that fit under that portfolio. >> Let's talk about the data. >> Yes. >> A lot of data that you just created. >> Right? >> Yup. >> What's the data pipeline look like, where does Splunk fit? >> We Splunk as much as we can and we're continuing to build that as we go. Our application logs are Splunk, everything we produce from the application. Also our performance metrics from our servers and our data and our network, and all those systems, we Splunk that because that's critical for us to triage issues that occurring. Because our operation is about monitoring what's happening, it's about resolving issues as quickly as possible, and it's about communicating to our business. So those three things are data essential to all of that. So we need to get as much as we can and we need to be able to get insights into it. >> Can you talk about where you started, you had mentioned off camera about four years ago, and how you've been able to inject automation into your processes and just take us through your journey. >> Yeah, so we started a few years ago with Splunk, and it was primarily a triage tool for us. So an incident would occur, we'd try to get it, and look at some logs, figure out what's going on. And as we've evolved it's become more of a proactive alerting tool for us, it's become a communication tool, a collaborative tool, for us. You know, we leverage things like the ITSI, right. That allows us to understand the base line behavior of our system. Once we base line that then we can understand the spikes, we can understand when things are changing, and that allows us to react and quickly identify things, defects in our system, things that are occurring, and resolve them. So once we kind of got our legs around okay, we get how to use Splunk to find stuff, now let's figure out how to get Splunk to tell us stuff. >> Okay. >> Right? And now once Splunk is telling us stuff, let's figure out how we tell the business that stuff. So that's kind of how we the journey we've had with Splunk. >> And Splunk's in that thread the whole way? >> The whole way. >> So from, >> The whole. >> So, ultimately then, right now what are you putting into practice that you didn't have available >> Yeah, sure. >> two, three years ago? >> Yeah sure, so one of the challenges we had was, with a typical ecommerce site you have several layers of the application, right. You have your web server, you have caching infrastructure, you have a database server, yet we have a mainframe reservation system as well. So there are several things involved with supporting all those different platforms. Now when we have an incident, it's sometimes challenging to, you know you get somebody on the phone, you're like hey what are you seeing over there on the mainframe side? Well I see this error occurring. Oh and the database side they're telling you okay, we're seeing some sort of timeout here, but we're not sure if it's related to the same thing you're talking about. And we didn't have a way to tie it together. But by using Splunk Transactions what we decided to do was we decided to log the session ID, the web servers session ID across all our layers, right, and push that through, and that allows us to tie those transactions together across those layers. And now when we have an incident we're able to, when we're talking to the mainframe we're saying hey guy, hey go look at this. And he say here's what I'm seeing. >> You can isolate it? >> We can isolate it, we can pull it together, and it's really helpful. >> So will you get to the point, or you were trying to get to the point, where you can automate the remediation? Or is that something you don't want to do 'cause you want humans involved? >> You know, automation is good. And whatever we can automate we try to do that. At this point we're not automating the resolution through Splunk at this time, but what we are doing is we are providing the on call, or the engineer that are responding with as much information as we can in order to have them quickly flip that switch. So if we have an alert that we know, hey this issue requires a recycle of an application pool, or some kind of other action like that, we can put that in our Splunk alert. And we say hey we're seeing this issue occur. That email and that text message that goes out actually tells the engineer that these are the suggested actions that you can take in order to quickly resolve this issue. >> Ruel, what are you hearing from the business side? What are the business drivers and how is that effecting what you're doing in IT generally, and specifically with data and Splunk? >> Okay so from business side we're looking at most bookings is the one of the major metrics that we look at. And our guest experience. So and on the web that means the site needs to be available, it needs to perform, and it needs to work. So what we really are trying to do with Splunk is understand those issues that are impacting our guests on the booking side. What that means is we need to know how well we're converting. And if we're looking at homepage performance, and we can now tell hey if our homepage loads in five seconds verses three seconds, there are how many fewer people make it to our payment page, which is huge for us. So that's something that we really try to hone in on. And it really helps us to collaborate with the business and understand, really, what is the revenue impact of these IT metrics that we're spitting out. >> But there could be other factors involved in that too, >> Yes. >> other variables, right? >> There are. >> You can't just you know this is, but you have enough of a track record the are a couple reasons to say okay, five seconds means this, we get a 30% conversion rate. We get three seconds, man, we got 'em hello, and, now we have a 50%, whatever. >> Yeah, but that is where, what I'm excited about at the conference is the machine learning capabilities that we've been hearing about. 'Cause that will allow us to then model how those different factors that go into when someone goes from the homepage to payment, you're totally right. There's several things that go into that. And what we want to be able to model, hey, on a normal day here's our guest behavior, whether we have a sale, how do our guests behavior differently, or on a Monday night at eight PM what is the behavioral trend. So it's all important to us. And getting the data behind it and being able to model that is going to be really key for us. >> Connect the dots for me on >> Yes. >> how you use machine learning, and how will that affect the business? You'll make different offers at different times, or? >> So what I mean is if I understand how guests behave I will know if I'm having an issue on the site. If there's something happening that's impacting their ability to book. 'Cause sometimes you do a release, you do your quality control, and then you go home, everything looks good. And sometimes hours later, sometimes days later unfortunately, something pops up that you introduced during that release. And understanding what that baseline is, right. So what Splunk has allowed us to do is say okay, here's what normal behavior is. And we're trying to grow this more, but what we've been using ITSI to say here's what that behavior really is. Based on what we kind of know are the metrics around booking. Here's what that behavior is. And we do a release and we see a spike, a change, and now we're able to say wait a minute, we never saw this error before. This error never existed in our system at any point. That was definitely something that was introduced right here in this release, we need to go ahead and resolve this as well. And sometimes you get some false positives there, if your development team is doing change the way they log a little bit you might get a spike. But that's cool because you get to go in immediately and figure out what those changes are, and you get a comfort level that you kind of understand how your system works. >> Let me ask you another question. You got some experience with Splunk. >> Yes. >> Obviously, you were just working with them. What, in your mind, is on their to do list? What do you want to see out of them? Doug, if I'm Doug. Tell me, where should I go, what should I do. >> What do I want Splunk to do. >> Any gripes, give me the good, the bad, and the ugly. >> For me, it's performance, performance, performance. I want to see my queries run as quickly as possible. I want to see things fast. I want to hit the button and it happens right away. Now obviously that's not going to, that's not realistic. But I like what some of the things that Splunk are doing. You look at the new metrics index that they've been talking about the last two days. So they've now isolated your time serious data and they're able to optimize the searches on time serious data seperate from your application logs. So, you know, your CPUs, your memory consumption, that data is not the same as your logging an error, or logging that a booking was created, or something like that. Those are kind of two different things. So they have kind of decoupled that and they're saying anything that's time serious I'm going to put it over here. And I'm going to optimize that query, and then you can handle your other logs separately. But the additional benefit of that is then you can take your time serious and you can look at a CPU spike and then you can take your event data and overlay it on top. And then you can see, hey wait a minute, this event is what caused that spike. So that's where the cool is. >> I think they call that mstats. Is that right, mstats? >> Yes, it's mstats, yes. >> How 'about the stuff that you saw this week in the keynotes, particularly today was the product stuff. A lot of security obviously. Anything that you've seen here at the show that excites you, that you really said alright, I got to have that, I got to learn more? >> Yeah, so the ITSI event analytics really seems like something's going to be cool for us. As I've said before, we utilize ITSI internally. So we put together a glass table that's shows us here are all the different components and the hierarchy of things. And when this goes red it effects these other layers. And it's really cool. But what they've added in is the ability to click a button and drill in to those components and then you have a view of hey, here are the events associated with that. That's really cool because now you're triaging in one place, now you get to the problem really quick. And you can emote directly into your Splunk queries. It really allows what we're looking for is just to resolve issues as quickly as possible. >> And you're describing, if I understand this correctly, you can visualize the dependencies, and you can take remedial action or identify, inform the business what to expect. >> Exactly. >> Be much more proactive, that's what people are talking about. >> Yeah, yeah. And we found that one of the surprising things we found with Splunk is that our business are users of Splunk as well, right. So it's always an IT tool, it's something that only the geeks are going to look at. And then all of a sudden you present a dashboard to a business user and they go ah. That's pretty, right. And then all of a sudden they want it more than you do. So that's what makes it great right, 'cause you can present the data however you want and you can put it in a way that different audiences can consume. And so it becomes a platform that goes across the organization, which is really, really cool. >> John: But your bottom line's all speed right? >> Yes, yeah. >> Take care of my problems faster, get my customer faster, deliver faster, come on Splunk. >> Come on, let's go. >> We want to go. >> Brings the weekend faster. >> Right, right. >> Get more sleep, get more sleep. >> Ruel, thanks for being with us. >> Oh. >> We appreciate that. >> And, we'll talk about the cruise. Leonard Nelson, our producer over here already said book him for a massage, the presidential suite. He wants one night, and then the champagne buffet please. >> It's done. >> Fast internet, though. >> Yeah. >> Fast internet, yeah. It's done. >> Alright. We're simple people, we don't need all that, but we'll talk later. >> Alright man, appreciate it, thank you. >> Thank you for being with us. Ruel Waite joining us from Carnival. Back with more from Splunk, .conf2017. 2015, where did that come from? 2017, it's been a long day. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's the Cube, covering .conf2017, brought to you by Splunk. (busy electronic music) >> Welcome back to the Washington Convention Center, the Walter Washington Convention Center, in our nation's capital as our coverage continues here of .conf2017. We're here at Splunk along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls, and kind of coming down the home stretch, Dave. There's just something about the crowd's lingering still, the show for, still has that good vibe to it, late second day, hasn't let off yet. >> Oh, no, remember, the show goes on through tomorrow. There's some event tonight, I think. I don't know, the band's here. >> Yeah, but-- >> Be hanging out, partying tonight. >> But you can tell the Splunkers are alive and well. We have Terry Ramos with us, who's going to join us for the next 15 minutes or so, the VP of Business Development of Palo Alto Networks. Terry, good to see you, sir. >> Good, really appreciate you having me here. >> You bet, you bet, thanks for joining us. You've got a partnership now, you've synced up with Splunk. >> Terry: Yes. >> Tell us a little bit about that. Then we'll get into the customer value after that. But first off, what's the partnership all about? >> Sure. We've actually been partners for about five years, really helping us solve some customer needs. We've got about several thousand customers who are actually using both products together to solve the needs I'll talk about in a minute. The partnership is really key to us. We've invested a ton of time, money, effort into it, we have executive level sponsorship all the way down to sales. In the field, we have reps working together to really position the solution to customers, both us and Splunk and then how we tie together. We're the number one downloaded app for Splunk by far that's a third party, so they have a couple that are more downloaded than us, but for third party, we've done that. We develop it all in house ourselves. For customers out there who think the app's great, I'll talk about the new version coming, I'd love any feedback on what should we do next, what are the next things we should do in the app, because we're really developing this and making this investment for customers to get the value out of it. >> What about the business update for Palo Alto Networks? I mean, can you give us the sort of quick rundown on what's going on in your world? >> Sure. I think most people know Palo Alto Networks has done pretty well. We just finished our FY '17, finished with about 42,500 customers. Revenue was, I think, 1.8 billion, approximately. We're still a very high growth company, and been growing the product set pretty well, from products next-gen firewall, all the attached subscriptions. Then we've got things like the Endpoint Traps now that's really doing well in the market, where customers need help on preventing exploits on the endpoint. That's been a growing market for us. >> It's the hottest space in the data center right now, and everybody wants to partner with you guys. Obviously, Splunk, you go to all the big shows, and they're touting their partnerships with Palo Alto. What do you attribute that sort of success to? >> Customers, truly. I run the partnerships for the company. If we do not have a customer who will be invested in the integration and the partnership, we don't do it. The number one thing we ask when somebody says, I want to partner with you, is, who's the customer, what's the use case, and why, right. Then if we can get good answers to that, then we go down the path of a partnership. Even then, though, we're still pretty selective. We've got 150 partners today that are technology partnerships. But we've got a limited number, Splunk's a big one, that we really invest heavily in, far more than the others, far more than just an API integration, the stuff of getting out to customers in the field the development of apps and integration, those things. >> Talk about, we laugh about Barney deals sometimes, I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. What differentiates that sort of Splunk level of partnership? Is it engineering resources? Is it deeper go to market? Maybe talk about that a little. >> Yeah, I hate Barney partnerships completely. If I do those, fire me, truthfully. I think the value that we've done with Splunk that we've really drawn out is, we've built this app, right, so BD has a team of developers on our team that writes the app for Splunk. We have spent four years developing this app. We were the first company to do adaptive response before it was called adaptive response. You see something in Splunk, you can actually take action back to a firewall to actually block something, quarantine something, anything like that. The app today is really focused on our products, right, through Endpoint, WildFire, things like that, right, so it's very product focused. We're actually putting in a lot of time and effort into a brand new app that we're developing that we're showing off now that we'll ship in about a month a half that's really focused on adversaries and incidents. We have something called the adversary score card where it'll show you, this is what's actually happening on my network, how far is this threat penetrating my network and my endpoints, is it being stopped, when is it being stopped. Then we've got an incident flow, too, that shows that level down to Traps prevented this, and here's how it prevented it. Then if we go back to the adversary score card, it ties into what part of the kill chain did we actually stop it at. For a CISO, when you come in and you say, there's a new outbreak, there's a new worm, there's a new threat that's happening, how do I know that I'm protected? Well, Splunk gives you great access to that data. What we've done is an app on top of it that's a single click. A SOC guy can say, here's where we're at, here's where we've blocked it. >> I guess I've been talking to a lot of folks here the last two days, and we've got a vendor right over here, we're talking, they have a little scorecard up, and they tell you about how certain intrusions are detected at certain intervals, 190 days to 300 and some odd days. Then I hear talk about a scorecard that tells you, hey, you've got this risk threat, and this is what's happened. I mean, I guess I'm having a hard time squaring that all up with, it sounds like a real time examination. But it's really not, because we're talking about maybe half a year or longer, in some cases, before a threat is detected. >> Yeah, so as a company, we've really focused on prevention. Prevent as much as you can. We have a product called WildFire, where we have tens of thousands of customers who actually share data with us, files and other things, files, URLs, other things. What we do is we run those through sandboxing, dynamic analysis, static analysis, all sorts of stuff, to identify if it's malicious. If it's malicious, we don't just start blocking that file, we also send down to the firewall all the things that it does. Does it connect to another website to download a different payload, does it connect to a C&C site, command and control site? What's that malware actually doing? We send that down to the customer, but we also send it to all of our customers. It may hit a target, right, the zero day hit one customer, but then we start really, how do we prevent this along the way, both in the network and at the endpoint? Yeah, there are a lot of people that talk about breaches long term, all that, what we're trying to make sure is we're preventing as much as we can and letting the SOC guys really focus on the things that they need to. A simple piece of malware, they shouldn't be having to look at that. That should be automatically stopped, prevented. But that advanced attack, they need to focus on that and what are they doing about it. >> The payloads have really evolved in the last decade. You mentioned zero day. Think about them, we didn't even know what it was in the early 2000s. I wonder if you could talk about how your business has evolved as the sophistication of the attackers has evolved from hacktivist to organized crime to nation state. >> Yeah, yeah. It has evolved a lot, and when you think about the company, 42,500 customers says a lot. We've been able to grow that out. When you talk about a product, something like WildFire that does this payload analysis, when we launched the product it was free. You'd get an update about every 24 hours, right. We moved it down to, I think it was four hours, then it was an hour, 20 minutes, and now it's about five minutes. In about five minutes, we do all that analysis and how do we stop it. Back to the question is, when you're talking about guys that are just using malware and running it over and over, that's one thing. But when you're talking about sophisticated nation states, that's where you've got to get this, prevent it as quickly as you possibly can. >> If we're talking about customer value, you've kind of touched on it a little bit, but ultimately, you said you've got some to deal with Splunk, some to deal with you, some are now dealing with both. End of the day, what does that mean to me, that you're bringing this extra arsenal in? How am I going to leverage that in my operations? What can I do with it better, I guess, down the road? >> Yeah, I think it really comes down to that, how quickly can you react, how do you know what to react to. I mean, it's as simple as that, I know it sounds super simple, but it is that. If I'm a SOC guy sitting in a SOC, looking at the threats that are happening on my network, what's happening on my endpoints, and being able to say, this one actually got through the firewall. It was a total zero day, we had never seen it before. But it landed at the endpoint, and it tried to run and we prevented it there. Now you can go and take action down to that endpoint and say, let's get it off the endpoint, the firewall's going to be updated in a few minutes anyway. But let's go really focus on that. It's the focus of, what do you need to worry about. >> Dave: Do you know what a zero day is? >> You've kind of, yeah, I mean, it's the movie, right? >> He's going, no, no, there was a movie because of the concept-- >> Because of the idea. >> David's note, there's been zero days of protection. But you can explain it better than I can. >> Yeah, zero day means it's a brand new attack, never seen before, whether it be-- >> Unique characteristics and traits in a new way that infiltrate, and something that's totally off from left field. >> When you think about it, those are hard to create. They take a lot of time and effort to go find the bugs in programs, right. If it's something in a Microsoft or an Oracle, that's a lot of effort, right, to go find that new way to do a buffer overflow or a heap spray or whatever it is. That's a lot of work, that's a lot of money. One of the things we focused on is, if we can prevent it faster, that money, that investment those people are making is out the window. We really, again, are going to focus on the high end, high fidelity stuff. >> The documentary called "Zero Days," but there was, I don't know how many zero day viruses inside of Stuxnet, like, I don't know, four or five. You maybe used to see, the antivirus guys would tell you, we maybe see one or two a year, and there were four or five inside of this code. >> Loaded into one invasion, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's the threat from within. I mean, one of the threats, if I recall correctly, was actually, they had to go in and steal some chip at some Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer, so they had to have a guy infiltrate, who knows, with a mop or something, stick a, had to break in, basically. These are, when you see a payload like that, you know it's a nation state, not just some hacktivist, right, or even organized crime doesn't necessarily have the resources for the most part, right? >> It's a big investment, it is. Zero days are a big investment, because you've got to figure it out, you may have to get hardware, you have to get the software. It's a lot of work to fund that. >> They're worth a lot of money on the black market. I mean, you can sell those things. >> That's why, if we make them unusable fairly quickly, it stops that investment. >> We were talking with Monte Mercer earlier, just talking about his comments this morning, keynotes about you could be successful defending, right. It's not all bets are off, we're hopeless here. But it still sounds as if, in your world, there are these inherent frustrations, because bad guys are really smart. All of a sudden, you've got a whole new way, a whole new world that you have to combat, just when you thought you had enough prophylactic activity going on in one place, boom, here you are now. Can you successfully defend? Do you feel like you have the tools to be that watch at the gate? >> I'd be a liar if I say you can prevent everything, right. It's just not possible. But what you've got to be able to prevent is everything that's known, and then take the unknown, make it known as quickly as possible, and start preventing that. That's the goal. If anybody out here is saying they prevent everything, it's just not true, it can't be true. But the faster you take that unknown and make it known and start preventing it, that's what you do. >> Well, and it's never just one thing in this world, right? Now there's much more emphasis being placed on response and predicting the probability of the severity and things of that nature. It really is an ecosystem, right. >> Terry: It is, that's what I do. >> Which is kind of back to what you do. How do you see this ecosystem evolving? What are your objectives? >> I think that from my standpoint, we'll continue to build out new partnerships for customers. We really focus on those ones that are important to customers. We recently did a lot with authentication partners, right, because that's another level of, if people are getting those credentials and using them then what are they doing with them, right? We did some new stuff in the product with a number of partners where we look at the credentials, and if they're leaving the network, going to an unknown site, that should never happen, right? Your corporate credentials should never go to some unknown site. That's a good example of how we build out new things for customers that weren't seen before with a partner. We don't do authentication, so we rely on partners to do that with us. As we continue to talk about partnership and BD, we're going to continue to focus on those things that really solve that need for our customer. >> Well, I don't know how you guys sleep at night, but I'm glad you do. >> Dave: No, we don't. What do you mean? I'm glad you don't. >> It's 24/7, that's for sure. >> Terry: Yes. >> Terry, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you very much. >> We appreciate the time, glad to have you on the Cube. The Cube will continue live from Washington, DC, we're at .conf2017. (busy electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE we continue our coverage of .conf2017 here at the Splunk event with about seven thousand plus Splunkers. Along with Dave Vellante, John Walls. I like that Splunkers. >> You a Splunker? >> Not sure I'd be qualified. >> I'm learning how. >> I'm not qualified. >> to be come one. >> I don't think. >> I think we're kind of in the cheap seats of Splukism right now. Certainly there's a definitely vibe and I think that there's this whole feeling of positivity amongst our community right, that is to get a sense of that here. >> Dave: Hot company, data centers booming. >> It's all happenin', so we are in the Walter Washington Convention Center day two of the convention. We're joined now by of Stephen Hunt who is the CIO of an organization called Team Rubicon. Stephen thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Good to have you Sir. >> Thank you for having me. >> And CTO too correct? >> And CTO. >> So first off let's talk about Team Rubicon. Veterans based organization, you team up with disaster emergency responders, first responders, to come in a crisis management times of disasters I'm sure extremely busy right now. Gave birth to this organization back in 2010 after the Haiti earthquakes. So tell us a little bit more about your mission and what you're doing now I assume you're up to your ears and all kinds of work, unfortunately. >> Yeah so our, just speaking to our mission, our purpose is to leverage the skills a military vets and first responders in disaster. The capacity and skills that vets bring after active duty in the in the services, is remarkable resource that we've learned to tap to help people in need around the world. This is one of our or this is our busiest time right now. You know we're responding in the greater Houston area in Florida, the Florida Keys, British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Turks and Caicos. And it's just it's incredible what we're able to do and in aiding people from the point of search and rescue to recovery and resilience, there's a broad spectrum of activities that are our people engage in to make that all happen and across a diversity of locations. It's been truly remarkable and challenging in ways that we never imagined right now. >> And I should add that you're a veteran yourself. Paratrooper, 82nd Airborne, a reservist, but also have an engineering background MIT Lincoln Laboratories for 20 some plus years. So you've got this interesting combination of experiences that have brought you into a company that is also a beneficiary of the Splunk for Good Program part of the Splunk pledge Program. So are you bring a pretty interesting portfolio to the job here Stephen. >> It's a bit unusual I do understand how a lot of the world works, not because I'm the smartest person in the room, I have a bit of a head start there's a lot of experience there and so bringing my engineering skills to the field, as well as to the business office and how we operate. And working with companies like Splunk, you know I can see, pretty quickly, what's hard, what's easy. I understand that Splunk needs our requirements in order to deliver product that's meaningful to us and our mission. So tying that all together it is a bit unusual for an NGO to have someone like me around. I got involved simply to help people. When they told me at some point are that we're going to build a business to help people, I said I don't come here to build a business. And it took me a little while to get oriented around the fact that as we expand the brand as we bring it around the globe, it takes a strong business model and a strong technical model in how we project humanitarian aid in austere settings. >> In order to scale right. >> So Tell us more about the organization how large is the organization, you know, where do you get the resources, how is it funded. >> So we're almost a 100% privately funded. So corporations, foundations, individual donors from across the country and across the world. We have about sixty thousand members and these are volunteers in and globally, so how in the world do you do that? Well, it turns out we grew up at about the same time the cloud industry grew up, we've been around seven years. And I would like to say that I'm some kind of genius and I said well we should follow the cloud, it was a judgment call and it was what we could manage. Today we have about thirty five to forty cloud software products that drive everything from donor management, volunteer management, how we deal with our beneficiaries, as well as our employees. And and it's not just about product in mission it's about protection and seeing through what's happening at the company at scale. We have about anywhere from eight hundred to 15 hundred people sign up to join, to become a part of Team Rubicon every week. >> Dave: Every week? >> And we couldn't do that without scale, without cloud technology it's been truly remarkable. >> And the volunteers or or all veterans, is that right? >> About 80, 75 to 80% military vets, first responders and others. >> Okay, so they just they make time to take time off from work, or whatever it is and go volunteer. They'll get permission from whom ever. Their employers, their wives and husbands. >> The payment that we provide is a renewed sense of purpose. When you know you take off the uniform there is a certain part of your identity that goes on the hanger and people don't see in you that's missing and we get that back. Through service and being around like minded individuals it's just amazing when we bring all of our people together and they align to work to this common mission. >> So in the in the take a recent examples in Florida and Houston are they predominantly people that are proximate to those areas? Are you are you having to fly people in, how does that all work? We literally have people coming in from all over the world. Generally, with the way we run operations to keep them cost effective as we look first within 450 miles of an affected area, and and bring in people in close proximity. If there is need greater than that, then we expand the scope of the distance if you will. Logistically, where we bring folks in. we're all the way now to bring in people from Australia, Norway, Canada, as well as the UK and working alongside each other seamlessly and that's really due to our standards and training. You can imagine when we scale it's not just the technology but it's how you use it, in the field, and in the business environment in the office. >> Are they responsible for figuring out where they sleep, where they eat, I mean how does that all work. >> Yeah, we set that up, in the early days we kind of took care of it ourselves, you know we reach into our own pockets and the small groups run around the planet and help people. It was kind of a club, now it's a whole different story. When we're bringing in 500 people a day, we need to know how they're fed, is this safety, security and protection, not just physically, but also emotionally. You want to make sure that we're really looking after people before, during and after they deploy and help people. So we put them up, and typically it's not the Ritz, you know might be a cot in a warehouse somewhere. But I've stayed at hotels with Team Rubicon members and maybe sometimes eight in the room. My old job Wasn't like that, all these guys are fighting to see who's going to sleep on the floor. I mean it's it's a really interesting you know. >> You have very different dynamic I'm sure. So you talk about these global operations expanding what four or five countries you mentioned with thoughts of one larger. I know communications are huge part of that you have a partnership now with a a prominent satellite firm you know in Inmarsat and how is that coming to benefit your operations and does Splunk come in the play with that global communications opportunity? >> Inmarsat and Splunk have been truly remarkable impacting and working toward greater impact in how we deliver aid around the globe. And make a couple of very clear points and deliver a metric here. We're running maybe 15 simultaneous operations distributed across all those areas I just discussed earlier. And historically, in all the time that I've been with Team Rubicon we've always had outages when it comes to communicating with our staff in these austere settings. You know we have to life safety is everything. That's the most important thing on my list, is the welfare of the people I'm looking after, and our employees, volunteers and our beneficiaries. When we can't communicate if something goes wrong it's a problem Inmarsat has set us up with communications gear in such a way that even though running all these operations at our most challenging time, I haven't had one complaint. About not being able to communicate. And what's Splunk is doing, is integrating with the Inmarsat backend to provide us the status of all of that equipment and and so from a perspective where are they all located, what is the status of the you know the data usage to make sure that somebody doesn't get arbitrarily shut off, you know that strategic view of what's happening across the globe. And this was something that we've negotiated or Inmarsat asked us to do, and Splunk is stepping up to take care of that for us so that we can ensure life safety and coordination happen seamlessly. Just one more point about this, if you could communicate with everyone everyday you're planning team isn't sitting idle wondering what it needs to do next. So this tertiary effect, is really driven our planning team to perform in a way that guides material and resources that I didn't really think about, But it's quite remarkable. >> So, you please, I thought you finished, I apologize. >> No, it's OK. >> I'm excited. >> It's fantastic. >> So the tech let's get into the tech side of this. You got SaaS apps, you got logistics, you got comms, you got analytics stuff, you got planning, you got collaboration and probably a hundred other things that I haven't mentioned. Maybe talk about you put your CTO hat on. >> Oh no, absolutely, so one of the things I say to our people, you know the technology is important but people are more important. And and so how we work with technology, its adoption as a CIO is critical. I need to say that when we're provided quality top tier software technologies to support education and training, as I mentioned, volunteer management, information management and security. And they were adopted naturally and they take off like a fire on a dry day, it means Splunk and other companies produced a great product. And we've seen this time and again with our ecosystem. So it's a general statement about the cloud technologies. Many companies have just done an exceptional job at building products that our people can work with. So I don't really complain too much about adoption across the board or struggle with it, I should say. So Google, Microsoft, Splunk, Cornerstone OnDemand, Salamander, Everbridge, Palantir. >> Be careful it's like naming the kids you're going to leave somebody out. So many of these great benefactors. >> Yeah, they're used to it but we work with all and our new COO came in, I apologize, I was CIO/CTO of Team Rubicon USA for about three years and I just moved over to Team Rubicon global to help orchestrate our global footprint. And we've set up licensing and a model for where instances of software are located to meet the legal regulatory framework for doing business internationally. And but the the COO of USA, and I'm so proud of what USA is doing right now, it's just blowing up. I mean what they're accomplishing as the largest Team Rubicon entity. But he looked at me, he said, Steve we got to get rid of some of these software products, and I said well, tell me what you don't want to do and I'll delete it, happy to. And instead the numbers gone up by 10 you know since that conversation. So there's some great challenges with and great opportunities, but as you know when your capacity increases, working with data and information your risk also goes up. So we work hard it impacting the behaviors of all of our people, it doesn't happen in a month or two months it takes years. So that everyone is security minded and making good decisions about how we work with information and data, you know whether it's a collective view provided by a product like Splunk which gives us this global view of information. You know if we have people working in a in a dangerous area and all of a sudden we know where all of our people are we just don't post that up on the open internet right. That's a bad idea just to give you a simple example. Down to the PII of our members and employees. And we're becoming very good at that. And for an NGO that's unusual and we're going to be driving an independent security audit fairly soon, to push it even further with the Board of Directors and executives, and so the business team can make decisions about how what we do technically based on you know liability in business model, right for how we work, but for me, the highest priority's protection of everyone. >> Well, it is a wonderful organization and we sincerely Dave and I both thank you for your service, present and future tense, for your service absolutely. Team Rubicon they will accept contributions, both time and treasure so visit the website Team Rubicon and see what you might be able to do to lend help to the cause, great cause that it is. Thank you Stephen. Back with more from .conf2017 here in DC, right after this.