 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. Well, welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 2018. We are in D.C., nation's capital, kind of sandwiched between the Capitol Hill and the White House where there's never a dull moment D.C. of John Walls with Dave Vellante and we're joined by Chris Lilly, who is the National Managing Principal of Tech Solutions at Grant and Thornton. Chris, good to see you. Thanks for joining us. Good to see you, thank you. Yeah, so first off, let's just talk about the relationship Grant and Thornton and Infor. It's still fairly new. It's been about a year, year and a half of the making. It's been slightly over a year. Yeah, let's talk about how that began and then kind of a status update, where you are right now. Sure, well it began about a year ago around the time that Koch made an investment into Infor and Grant Thornton was looking at expanding our technology footprint, looking at other vendors who were providing solutions to the clients that we serve. We also saw that Infor has a very, very common client base with Grant Thornton and we spent a few days with Gardner, we spent a few days with Forrester, learned about their products, learned where they were. We're very impressed and decided to make a commitment to the relationship. It's been a terrific first year with Infor. I talked to one of the principals last year of Koch at PAL and he said to me that one of the benefits that we're going to bring to Infor is we have relationships with guys like Grant Thornton and we're not going to get them in a headlock but we're going to expose them to Infor and say, hey look, look for opportunities because we think they exist and that's what you found, right? 100%, so I mean to elaborate a little on the story we spent a few days with Koch out in Wichita understood what they saw in Infor and obviously we were aware of Infor and where their product base but what they had done with the product over the past four or five years, frankly, news to us and where they've taken the product, the investments they've made, the other products that they've acquired around their core, the kind of the edge products if you will, absolutely tremendous and decided to make that investment so it wasn't so much of an arm twist, it was some awareness that they created for us and we decided to jump in. What was your, I'll be, you know, your ah-ha that you said because you spent a little bit of time doing your due diligence and working again with the Koch folks so what was it that got your attention you think? I said, okay, there's really something here. I think what put us over the top is we brought our leadership team up to New York for a few days, spent a little bit of time with Charles Phillips who is incredibly impressive and can probably sell anything to anybody but we really spent time with their Hook and Loop folks and their developers and when we saw kind of the brainchild of Hook and Loop which I don't know if you're familiar with what they did here. The in-house agency. Yeah, the in-house agency and what they're doing to make the product more user friendly, to make it more engaging. When you look at the world that we live in right now, you know, I see a phone here, everything's easy to use and intuitive. Business applications are not. Now it's a lot harder issue we're dealing with but what they've done with the interface, what they've done with the usability kind of, that was our ah-ha moment. They showed us a couple other things that they have done for specific clients with their analytics tool set and how they've integrated that in some dashboarding and we were committed at that point. So talk about Grant Thornton's unique approach in terms of how you're applying in for with clients, what's hot, you know, any specific industries and trends that you're seeing. Sure. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to make sure that when we made the commitment we followed through on that commitment so we very narrowly focused our initial relationship within four. So our industry focus is healthcare, public sector. Our product focus is the cloud suite products along with the enterprise asset management product. By focusing on the enterprise asset management product that allows us to get into the asset intensive industries. So utilities, anything with large fleets, public sector munis that are managing infrastructure. So we made that commitment very narrowly so that we weren't trying to be too many things to too many people and we could really commit to them, make the investment that we needed to make. We obviously had a technology practice so we know how to do this work. And the way I think about technology practices today is they're really there to transform businesses, right? We used to spend a lot of time making technology work. Technology works. Now we've got to make sure that our clients step back from what they do today, leverage the best practice in the technology or the leading practice in the technology and transform their business around it. That's how we've approached the relationship within four. Well, it's interesting because we heard Charles, keynote day one, and he talked on theCUBE about the disparity between the number of jobs that are out there and the number of candidates that are qualified, so there's a disparity there. And then he showed productivity numbers. And I remember back in, I don't know what it was, the 80s or 90s, whatever it was, before the PC kicked in in a big way in terms of productivity impact, the spending was going through the roof, but you couldn't see it in the productivity and sort of seeing the same thing today, the tech market's booming, but the productivity numbers are relatively flat. So the promise is that, okay, we're going to have efficiencies out of cloud, all this data that we've been collecting for all this time, applying machine intelligence is going to drive, we've predicted productivity, the next sort of big wave. It's kind of your job to make that all happen. And so I'm guilty, I've been in this industry a long time. I've seen the waves from the Y2K to the ERPs to when we went to distributed internet. So I've seen all that and absolutely agree the productivity gains haven't been there, but I would say the foundation is now laid. So if you think about what we did during that timeframe, we got our clients on to a fairly common platform, somewhat consistent practices, right? They did a lot of custom work still, but we also cleaned up a lot of data. But what we did at that point is we did it in silos and enterprises don't run in silos. They have to run at the enterprise level. So we've got the foundation laid now. We're now to the next generation. The next generation says your basic transaction processing systems, use them as they come. Let's look at what's available to us. Let's look at the partner ecosystem that out there. Let's look at the connectivity that's out there. Let's look at how we can better engage our client base and better run our operations. And that's where I think we're going to start to see the productivity. And that's what INFOR is doing with their last mile functionality. They're taking the need to spend any customization away from the client. They're giving it to them. But they're letting us think about how to transform the business and drive value. Yeah, you talk about utilities, which is a unique animal to itself, right? That from the regulatory environment, from their various, their services, what they provide and the scale they provided at. How, where can INFOR come in and play in that space in terms of people being receptive to new ideas, being receptive to new mousetraps when, sometimes they're bound to by what they can and can't do? Right, that's a good question. So utility is an interesting industry, right? Everybody says utilities are behind, they are slow to adapt. But if you think about the utility and fundamentally what they do, they're one of the most complex, advanced engineering businesses that you can find in the world, right? From the generation to the distribution of power is a highly complex activity that they do extremely well. So they've made a ton of investment to make sure they keep doing that extremely well, deliver power safely. We got to renew the infrastructure so they got to spend money there. And that's where we see INFOR coming in. So if you think about what's out there right now, all the sensors that we can put into the generation of facilities, all the devices that we can use, we can use drones to look at the solar farms, figure out where the maintenance needs to be done. I think what you're going to see is INFOR product being adapted into how they operate the business, analytics being applied to how they manage their maintenance facility, which is critical in the utility, analytics being brought in to how they prepare for storms. If you think about the recovery, what we just went through in the South and 800,000 people out, relatively quick recovery there. Now it's painful and everybody's not back. I'm not saying it's easy, but the utilities down there used a lot of information to better position crews for recovery. So I think that's how you're going to see it on the operational side. On the customer side, you're going to see utilities do more and more what everybody else is doing. How do you want to interact with me? When do you want to interact with me? Where do you want to interact with me? Utilities will start putting all that out there and they are putting that out there. The websites are good. They're starting to go to mobility. So I think INFOR products will play across that entire space. Let me write about the utilities. I mean, the instrumentation of the homes through smart meters. I mean, what a transformation in the last 10 years. Five to 10 years even. And it's all about the data. It always comes back to data. Healthcare and public sector utilities as well. Highly regulated industries that you chose. By design, I presume. Talk about that in terms of Grant Thornton's wheelhouse. Yeah, and so we chose healthcare and public sector because we have good existing practices. Specific in healthcare space. We were doing a lot of Epic Cerner work which is their ERM systems that are out there. Lawson is by far the leading product in their ERP back office. So it made a natural fit for us to jump into that. Grant Thornton also has a very large public sector practice, both at the federal and state local level. So again, it gave us an avenue to get in, bring INFOR into some of our existing clients. But back to your point about being regulated environments. Grant Thornton is basically a public accounting firm. So we're used to dealing in regulatory environment. That's part of our culture. Quality is what we focus on as a firm. We understand how to interact with the regulators. Personally, I think things are moving so quickly that the regulators in some cases are still catching up. But the one piece of advice I would have to all of our clients out there that operate in the regulated world, rely on your partners, rely on your software provider, your internal audit, your external audit, your systems integrator to help you keep current with the regulatory changes. And on the tail of that is all the exposure on the cyber side. If you think about what's going on, you've mentioned in-home devices, smart meters, those are all access points. So we've got a really hardening access in the infrastructure to make sure that people aren't using those to gain control of these systems. The threat matrix is expanding. And then securing the data. Security in many ways is a do-over, right? In this new world. So, and just looking forward then, briefly, if you will, before we let you go. Where do you see the relationship going then? You've already, because you've established your verticals, you know where you're working, you know what's going on, what's next step thing? Because there's always something else down the road, right? Yeah, so in our industry, we've got some terrific competitors out there who have also engaged with NFOR. There's some other products out there. So I think what we need to focus on now, we've got the relationship. NFOR is an incredible company. They're incredibly collaborative. They're agile. We recently were working with a healthcare provider who was dealing with some of the personnel issues you were talking about, resource shortages. How do I optimize scheduling? Who do I need? Where do I need them? NFOR was all over. They brought in their chief nursing officer. She helped us think through how to better manage that, use their workforce management product. And so where we want to go with them is we want to innovate with them. We want to bring the innovation that we're applying, whether it's robotics in terms of bots, whether it's digital transformation, which are all buzzwords, and leverage all that. But the other thing I think we're starting to really get our arms around is the broader ecosystem. They're all cloud-enabled. There are a significant number of niche players out there that can bring us point solutions. You mentioned the data. The data's the key to all that, so we want to help them understand, architect that, use the technology to solve our client's business problems. And you know, these buzzwords are actually, there's substance behind them. I mean, every company is trying to get digital right. Yes. Every company has or should have a digital strategy is trying to figure out and sees pathways to maybe not monetizing data directly, but figuring out how data contributes to monetization. Software robots are real. They work. Right. You know, not perfect, chatbots aren't perfect, but they're getting better and better and better. You look at things like, you know, look at fraud detection, how far that's come, just in the last five or six years. So you pointed out earlier, Chris, the technology is there, it works. It's not a mystery anymore, right? I've been around a long time too, and technology used to be so mysterious, and nobody knew how it worked. The Wall Street analyst, it was like, well, what's, how's this tech work? Today, it's ubiquitous. Yes, I agree. So it's the process. It's the people, it's the collaboration, that's the hard part. I mean, you said it earlier, it's getting businesses to adopt what they do, right? To really focus on where they can add value and get the people to come along. Well, Chris, thank you. Yeah, thank you for the time. Appreciate the time, and enjoy the rest of the show, and again, we do thank you for the time here today. Okay, take care. Good deal. All right, back with more. We're here, you're watching theCUBE from Washington, DC.