>> 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)

>> Narrator: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to Madrid, Spain. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here at the conference center in Madrid covering HPE Discover 2017. This is HPE's European conference for years. We've been covering not only the US version of this show but also the European version. Frankfurt, Barcelona, London and now move to southern Europe and central Spain. I'm here with Peter Burris. My co-host for the next two days. >> Peter. >> Hi, Dave. >> Good to see you. Good to be here in Spain and we're going to be covering the, we've been covering the transformation of HPE under the guise of, the guidance of Meg Whitman for the last six years, of course it was announced recently that Meg is stepping down and Antonio Neri's going to take over so we're going to be reviewing that, we're going to be covering all the innovations that these guys are announcing, talking to customers and very importantly, something that you've been talking about is juxtaposing HPE as a long time enterprise company with a lot of customers. Juxtaposing that strategy with the other end of the spectrum this week at AWS reinvent Amazon obviously, growing very fast. Many of the decisions that Meg and her team made they are a direct result of the cloud effect and other things that we will be talking about. So, welcome. >> You bet. >> Thanks for coming on. >> No, I, Madrid's a wonderful city and this is a great place to be running the conference like this. It's one of the transformational cities in the world. >> So, let's start by looking at Meg's tenure. When she came on and she inherited a mess, everybody knew about the acquisition issues that they had with autonomy. So, she inherited that from Leo Apotheker and really kind of took one for the Silicon Valley team, really and set the time, look it's going to take us five years to transform this company. So, it started with an organizational, sort of, look and you know, took some time to get that right. To understand who her team leaders were going to be and they made some missteps and sort of had to shuffle the deckchairs a little bit. So, they did that. They had a public cloud misstep but eventually they got that right. And they decided that they would split the company in two, HP INC and HPE. At the time it was believed that HPE would be the growth engine, HP INC would be the cash flow engine, it hasn't totally worked out that way but one of the things that came out of that was a much better balance sheet. HPE's got about $5.8 billion in cash now. It's started to make those, some acquisitions. That we'll talk about but essentially Peter, it emerged from that split as a much more focused company. As I say, a better balance sheet, much smaller company, with a focus on essentially a lower margin business to be able to compete with the cloud and with essentially China. Your take on the last five or six years under Meg Whitman? >> Well, I think you summarized it pretty nicely. I guess I'd say a couple of things. The first thing is that I think it philosophically, HPE was one of those companies that believed it's size was its own virtue in the technology industry. >> Dave: Mhm. >> And while that's certainly true in certain domains, it's not necessarily true in all. The complexity and the interplay of technology, solutions, software, hardware is such that one of the places where you get the most leverage out of something like that is at the customer interface. Are you capable of pulling together all that's possible in the tech industry and present it to the customer in a form that the customer then can turn into value. So HP for a long time, just presumed its size was its own virtue. Focused on acquiring as much stuff as it possibly could to feed that and probably left the customer a little bit on the sideline and didn't really focus on the customer. I think that was probably Meg's first good move is to step back and say, let's not act as though size is its own virtue. Let's stop the acquisition, let's focus on what we have which is mainly this large portfolio of customers and refocus on the company on that. That's a good thing. So, I think the first thing that they was they went back to the simple observation that HP's always had, that we don't exist if we don't have, if we don't take care of our customers. Second thing I think that they did as you said, they, the Leo era was about, oh we're going to be a software company and I think they strongly pulled away from that. Where the idea was to just get as many software assets as possible and try to figure out how to weave them together. They pulled away from that although we agree that it's a misnomer that HP got out of the software business. Clearly, they got rid of a bunch of assets that they couldn't use. They've reinvested in other assets that are more true to their heritage. We're going to see some big announcements this week about that. >> And that's really focused on, you know, making infrastructure better, right? >> Exactly, and ultimately the, it's interesting that there's no question that AWS is crafting the new look of the computing industry but it's not a complete picture and it's not going to be a complete picture. There's going to be plenty of room for companies to move and some of those companies are easily going to be tens of billions of dollars in size and so, the vision that HP has, the direction HP seems to be going has the potential to be very complimentary to that other vision. As we like to say, the goal is for customers, is the COD experience where the data demands. And that we know that the data's going to be at the edge and we know that the data's going to be, a lot of it's going to be on premise. And so as a consequence of that, there will be a play for a strong; multiple strong companies who are focusing on delivering at the edge, great technology, great management capabilities, and delivering true private cloud into a company where they got to put their proprietary data assets. >> Okay, so what that really says is HPE and its competitors who sell on prem actually need to mimic to the extent that they can, that cloud experience. >> Yeah. >> So we're going to be unpacking that. I mean, HPE talks a lot about flexible capacity. We're going to try to unpack that to see how cloud like it really is. I mean it's not identical but it certainly gets to be much more of an opex versus a capex model. >> Peter: It's moving in that direction. >> As well as the ability to deploy quickly and let's cut to the chase, reduce non differentiated IT labor costs and that's something that we're going to unpack with some of the customers here who you know, maybe used to be in the business of provisioning infrastructure and tuning infrastructure. You know likely moving toward a role in digital business. >> Peter: Mhmm. >> So, you know just some of the financials, HPE, the new HPE is roughly a $30 billion company. You know, the stock's done okay since the split but it's still trading at less than $1 from evaluation standpoint, a revenue dollar. So, you know trading, it's evaluation is well under that $30 billion, probably in the low 20's. So there's a lot of upside, you know certainly a company like HPE, if it can show some growth which it eeked out, ya know, a constant currency about a 1% growth last quarter. If you take out the Tier 1 sever business that it's exiting, the growth is actually a little bit better and there are some bright spots. Certainly, Aruba has been growing like crazy and it's interesting Peter. HPE is going to put forth a new financial reporting structure, next quarter. So, they're going to eliminate the whole, 'member it was EG and it was networking, et cetera. They're going to bundle everything into much of the core business into hybrid IT, that's going to be their biggest business, server storage and core networking and services and they're going to have, essentially, The Edge is going to be it's second category. Which is going to comprise Aruba and edge services and all the wireless stuff and the third category interestingly is, financial services which has been growing like crazy. It grew about over 20% last quarter. So, HPE is now saying, okay this is the face that we're going to present to the street and they're going to try to present it as a growth company and certainly the largest business is going to be hybrid IT and then you got two growth businesses, The Edge and financial services which is really about creating that cloud experiences to a great degree through some financial engineering. >> Yeah and look that's smart because as we were talking about that the whole concept of where the scale is going to be in the future, is where Amazon is at putting all this stuff together and putting all these assets behind the wall so you get a service out of it or in the customer engagement side of things and the only way that HP is going to be successful at replicating or putting forward this notion of, what we call true private cloud that, where you do get the cloud experience but you get it on premise where your data requires, is by looking at things just in that way. Sources at the edge, finance that allows you to buy as you go and then great server technology that can run the workloads where they need to be run based on the availability of the data. >> So last thing I'll say. So, I asked the question five years ago. Can HPE, can HP get back to its roots? Remember the old logo, invent. I sort of tweeted out, I didn't think HP's strategy was to get there. I thought at the time that was sort of an imperative and I had a little discussion with somebody from HP on twitter where they suggested, hey there's a lot of innovation here and we've talked about the difference between innovation and invention and if you look at some of the acquisitions that HPE has made, SGI, SimpliVity, Nimble, some of the smaller acquisitions around, cloud technology partners. >> These are really focused acquisitions. >> Yeah, very focused tuck-ins and a lot of innovation there is I guess what I'd say and we're going to again, unpack that innovation, we had HP-- >> Peter: Lot of invention. >> Folks from labs coming on as well and we're going to talk about invention, innovation, we're going to talk about that all week. So, keep it right there everybody. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover Madrid. We'll be back right after this short break.