 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. And welcome back to Inforum 18. We are live here in Washington D.C. as Infor has brought its show to our nation's capital. I'm John Walls along with Dave Vellante. It's now a pleasure to welcome the Vice President of Corporate Communications, Dan Barnhart. To theCUBE. Hey, Dan, good morning to you. Good morning to you. Good to see you again. Thanks for being with us. We were kidding before we got started about why you're here in Washington. We think it's for the weather, right? Because it's so nice. It's gorgeous. But there is a reason. I mean, you released a federal product today, had an announcement we'll get to in just a moment, but about coming to Washington. You've been in New York before, you've been in New Orleans. Why D.C., why now? Well, it's important for us to make sure that our customers can access the event. We've got more customers that came this year than came in previous years, certainly than last year. And it's important to be in a city where it's accessible for our customers, not just in the U.S., but also from Europe and Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Washington D.C.'s very accessible. We also are one of the largest suppliers to public sector organizations that's local, state, and federal governments. We've got a particular focus on federal government and FedRAMP compliance this year, which we achieved. And so we're here so that we can show off some of that new technology that you just mentioned. Yeah, what about the significance of that? Of reaching the compliance goal. And what does that mean to the business going forward? Well, it's yet another example of the benefits of our cloud strategy and working with AWS beginning in 2014. Info was the first large ISV to embrace a public cloud. And Amazon and Amazon Web Services in particular has been very helpful in achieving FedRAMP. They have a lot of federal customers. They've got a very large federal agency with three initials that is a customer and they require compliance with all of the federal regulations that continually change and the utmost security for customers. And we're able to offer that to our customers as well. Yeah, we were talking on the kickoff about that, how you guys can draft the AWS innovations and things like FedRAMP and other compliance. They were first, they were way ahead of everybody. You as an ISV, you don't have to worry about all that stuff. I mean, you still have to connect to it, but they do a lot of the heavy lifting. So that's cool. You got some other hard news. Well we also are able to focus on our products by doing that. We don't have to invest in proprietary cloud infrastructure or data centers or databases. We can focus on delivering innovation in our products and functionality that makes a difference for our customers. Their business is not, their customers don't care what infrastructure they're running on. They care how they're able to provide goods and services. So Info focuses just on delivering better goods and services for our customers. What Charles said at the keynote this morning, our strategy, we didn't want to compete with Google and Amazon and Microsoft for scale of cloud. That made no sense. It also made the point that when we were an on-prem, exclusively on-prem software company, we didn't go out and manage servers for our clients. So we don't want to do that. So be a big differentiator for sure from some of the other SaaS players. And it's paying off now in a way that our competitors are starting to come after us when they used to not want to acknowledge us. One of our larger competitors, on-premise legacy vendor, had an anti-Info ad on their homepage. They've got tabs outside of here. We're talking about that. Yeah, and Charles said, if you're, we welcome the competition here. If you'd like to see innovation in enterprise software, this is the place to be. Well, congratulations, right? Because when Oracle's coming at you, it means you succeeded. That's good. Other hard news that you guys have this week, you got true cost accounting and health care and some other things. Take us through those. Well, health care has been a major focus industry for us just along with government, which we mentioned. 70 plus percent of large hospitals in the United States are automated using an enforced software. And health care has been an industry that's gone through on a lot of disruption, obviously, for the last 10, 12 years with the Affordable Care Act and others. And we're trying to figure out, we as a society are trying to figure out how to deliver better care to patients. That's the goal for health care organizations. And to do that, they need to better understand what's the cost of care. So in for true cost, which we announced in January and have now delivered and have customers implementing, will help our customers understand better what is the cost of the care that they're giving so that they can give better care to their patients and allocate their resources in a way that will help more people heal better and feel better. We heard on the intro to the keynotes today, Turing, Edison and Coleman. It sounded like it was Charles' voiceover. I don't know if it was or not, but it was. He's got the smooth, malifluous voice. Last year, Coleman, Catherine Coleman Johnson, you named your AI offering, the platform after her. Give us the update where you're at today. You've got some other announcements around that as well. We do. It's a big announcement for Coleman here. We've got the GA of Coleman Digital Assistant, which enables humans to have, everyone to have an assistant at work with them to help automate certain functions, such as search and gather, which can take 20% of people's time just collecting the information to make a decision. But now, with Coleman Digital Assistant being live and customers implementing and going live on it right now, users are able to ask Coleman to fetch information and deliver not only the information, but predictions and smart intelligence that helps people make better decisions and be more productive. So we had a lot of conversation this morning about robotic process automation, which was really interesting. I mean, essentially, we're talking about software robots taking over mundane tasks for humans. Now, a lot of people like to talk about how, and we talk about this in theCUBE all the time, how, oh, the machines are taking away jobs, but in speaking to numerous customers about RPA, they're thrilled that they don't have to do these mundane tasks because it makes them more valuable. They're doing more interesting things and they're getting offers from others that are asking them to do this type of automation for their company. So they're more valuable to their existing company and outside company. So RPA, hot topic, you guys are leaning in hard. We definitely are. We definitely believe that there are jobs that there are functions that are better, can be better served by automation, particularly search and gather that we mentioned. There are multiple functions that will always be done by people. Human interaction is not going to change. So we are looking to have a digital assistant make productivity better. Productivity is a function of being able to do more or having more workers, and we'd like to do both with this. We'd like people to be more productive using artificial intelligence assistance and also a conversational user experience with software will make it easier and less intimidating for a lot of people to interact with technology at work. And we think that will also help people be able to be more productive in their jobs and have more people able to take more jobs that right now or in the past have required a level of technical expertise that you won't need when you can simply ask the computer to do something for you using your own conversational language. Two major data points, excuse me, that came out of the keynote this morning. One is that there are now more job openings than there are unemployed individuals. And productivity, even though the tech spending is booming, it doesn't show up in the productivity numbers. We saw this actually a couple of decades ago in the 90s and all of a sudden you saw this massive productivity boom. I've predicted that with automation and artificial intelligence, you're going to see something similar. It seems like Infor is on a mission, that human potential tagline on a mission to really drive that productivity and help close those gaps. We definitely are. Our tagline is designed for progress and we are looking to promote progress around the world and do what we can in order to help human progress. And the theme at Inforum is human potential and that's what we're looking to do here. We have seen a lot of productivity growth in people's personal lives. I don't know how to set a timer to cook anymore. I just ask Alexa to do it. But we haven't seen that in enterprise yet. So we are bringing consumer-grade technology that people have gotten used to in their everyday lives but they don't see at the office. We're bringing it to the office to help make them equally as productive as they are in their personal lives. Yeah, that's what I wanted to hit on. It actually was the theme of the show. We're talking about human potential and we've heard Van Jones talking about that from a personal mission statement, if I think that's the way he worded it. But what's the broad scope of that in terms of how you apply that thematically throughout the company? When you talk about human potential, because it's just not you, obviously you're trying to do that for your clients. You're trying to do that for the people they serve and do it for taxpayers, right, through the federal sector. But talk about that from the 30,000 foot level about human potential, unlocking that and how Infor totally is, I guess, trying to illustrate that or put that into place. Certainly, the first thing I would mention is our human capital management. Infor is a very large provider of HR software. There are others that are perhaps better known but Infor has many customers that are using our HR software but they're also using our software for other key functions. And by integrating those two things, we're able to help people be their best self at work because it's not just the HR management but the HR system knows what you're working on. They can help with professional development and talent management and align that to the business processes that the company has. We're also looking to engage workers. As you mentioned, there are a few more job openings than there are unemployed people that we believe seeking employment right now but they're not very engaged. So we're hoping to have technology and learning management help engage more workers. And then we'd also like to increase new business creation. One of the things that Charles mentioned that slowed down is the introduction of new businesses and small businesses. We believe one of the reasons for that is that there's so much business automation that goes on that in order to achieve that to be competitive requires so much capital investment that it makes it difficult to start a new business. But if we're able to automate a lot of that business automation, we're able to make it really easy through Infor Cloud Suite for new business starting. We feel like we'll be able to help entrepreneurs generate new businesses which will employ more people and offer more engaging and rewarding jobs and help fill some of those gaps that we have. We've talked a lot about AI. It's not just some magic thing that you throw at your business. It has to be operationalized in the likely way in which organizations are going to consume AI as it's going to be infused in applications. And it's exactly what your strategy is, isn't it? It is. The artificial intelligence is only going to be as smart as the amount of data that it can access and that it can analyze. It doesn't have a brain. It looks at data and learns from that data and where it tells you. And Infor has access to data that very few companies have, mission critical data, ERP data, manufacturing, distribution, core processes that we're able to put in the cloud and not just in the cloud, but in a multi-tenant cloud environment where it can be drawn from analytics, from our burst analytics engine, and then Coleman can make decisions based on that data, not only from within the enterprise, but across the network using our GT Nexus commerce network. Yeah, so we're hearing a lot about HCM, of course, at this show. Human potential fits into talent management, HCM. You guys have a very competitive product there. It's sort of a knife fight with some of the large SaaS players, but I was excited to see so much attention paid to HCM as a key part of your SaaS portfolio. Your thoughts? I do, I agree with you. And I think one of the differentiating points that we just mentioned was that Infor HCM also connects to Infor systems that automate core business processes. So it's not just about those business processes, but also knowing who the people are that work on them and helping companies navigate. So much time is wasted from what we would call tribal knowledge, employee getting up to speed or figuring out how to navigate inside an organization, particularly a large enterprise. And Infor HCM can help make that easier, but they can do that while attached to a business process so that everything can move faster and more efficiently for the customer. I wonder if you could comment, Dan, on this notion of best of breed versus a full suite. It seems like, so for decades there's been this argument of, well, the best of breed point products will sometimes win, but full suite, people want a single throat to choke and that integration. It seems like with your micro vertical strategy, you're trying to do both, be both best of breed and have a full suite across the application, enterprise application portfolio. Is that right? Do you feel like you guys are succeeding at that? Where do you think you fit in that whole spectrum? That is correct. And it's one of the things that we're able to do because of our cloud strategy is to offer the complete suite and the artificial intelligence that comes on top of it. In the past, when there wasn't artificial intelligence layer, there wasn't the machine learning that needed to draw from all of that data, best of breed individual applications would work. But now that we're trying to pull data together so that you can make more intelligent and actionable, you get actionable insights that let you make more intelligent decisions that requires an integrated suite. And that can be done now in a multi-tenant cloud environment that couldn't be done before. The other thing I would observe, we talked about this, John, is... I'd also really, really quick just add that I think that that's proving to be correct in the amount of growth that we're seeing. Info is significantly outgrowing from a revenue perspective. Oracle, more than 40% last year. More than double the rate of growth of SAP. And our growth rate for cloud applications is up there with Workday, which is setting the bar for cloud software companies. Sure, that's a great point. I mean, Workday has set the bar. And there's an example of what was essentially a narrow point product there to, of course, trying to get into other spaces. Of course, SAP and Oracle always have had a large suite. Your strategy has seemed to be working in terms of being a place where a customer can come in and access a lot of different functionality. The other thing that we heard today, a year in, is the Coke Industries investment. I was noticing that you see now see Accenture here, you see Grant Thornton, Deloitte. Capgemini. The Capgemini. These people are taking notice. I would imagine Coke Industries has a lot of business with those guys. And one of the gentlemen from Coke told me last year, he said, hey, we're going to expose these SIs to the Infor opportunity. And it seems like it's started to happen. I've heard that there's been several large deals that they've helped to catalyze. So it's great to see that presence here. Talk a little bit about the Coke Industries dynamic and what that's brought to the table. Well, the Coke relationship for Infor has been so helpful. First, obviously there's a large infusion of cash from the investment, it was $2.5 billion, one of the largest tech investments that was in an acquisition in history. And we're able to use that capital to increase more functionality. Not only that, but Infor has an industrial background. The majority of our customers are in manufacturing or distribution. Industries that Coke Industries is a big player in. So not only do we have a great partner, but we have a living lab in one of the world's best and most efficient companies with which to develop our software, implement our software, and test our software. And we've got a willing partner in Coke that can do that and provide a lot of that expertise. Yeah, I was telling Dave that, that's really struck me when I was listening to the keynote was that, yeah, it's this wonderful symbiotic relationship and they gave you money, that's nice, right? But you have an opportunity now to roll out services, products, experiment a little bit. See how it works within the Coke family, if you will, before you take it out further. And so you've got this great test lab at your disposal that you didn't have before. And like Infor Coke is a private company, so we don't feel the same pressure to provide quarterly return to shareholders that public companies do. So we're able to invest more of our revenue in development and R&D and ensuring that our products are going to deliver the best experience and the best functionality for our customers. Well, to me, the key for Infor A key is you've got a large install base and you're trying to get that install base that come to a more modern SaaS-like cloud-like platform. To do that, you've got to be relevant. So the stuff like Coleman, the burst acquisition, your micro verticals, those are all highly relevant. You know, your ability to eliminate custom mods because you go that last mile. Highly relevant to companies that have to place a bet. Now, when they have to move to this new world, others are going to try to grab them. So you've got to hang on to them. To me, relevance and showing a roadmap and showing an investment in things like R&D is critical, your thoughts? I agree with you. I think that's the reason that we're seeing those large global system integrators partner with Infor Now and develop practices at Accenture and Deloitte, Grand Thornton and Capgemini that will implement Infor Software at their customers. They're having the demand from the customers that they're working with, including up to the largest of enterprises for Infor Software just simply because we are able to automate processes and help them get to a level of automation that will let them compete in the digital era. There are companies all over our fearing that they're going to be disrupted by a digital native competitor or a digitally enabled competitor. And we're looking to help Infor customers become digitally enabled themselves and to be that disruptive competitor in their field. Well, Dan, we appreciate the time. Thank you very much. Good seeing you. Thanks for having us here. Yeah, thanks for coming back again. Overlooking the show floor. Got a great seat. So a lot of activity down there. And good luck with the rest of the show. Thank you very much. Dan Bernhardt from Infor. Back with more live on theCUBE here from Washington, DC at Inform 18.