 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. Well good afternoon and welcome back to Inforum 18. We are live in Washington DC, the nation's capital for this year's show and joining Dave Vellante and me is Corey Tollefson, who is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Retail at Infor. Corey, good to see you today, sir. Good to see you, good to be seen. Yeah, right, it is, under any circumstance, right? Absolutely. All right, so Retail, you talk about a world that's kind of upside down now, right? I mean, the brick and mortar guys are, they aren't brick and mortar anymore. So talk about the state of the industry, if you would, a little bit, let's move to the digital platform and how that's changing your work with it. It certainly was simple 20 years ago, manufacturers manufactured things, wholesale distributors distributed things and then retailers sold things, right? And so the whole business model's been disrupted, mainly because of the advent of the mobile phone and mobile device, but I said it last year, it feels like every day you wake up and it's very chaotic and there's a lot of disorder and I think it's an amazing opportunity for retailers to reinvent themselves into a modern 21st century retailer. So every day is a challenge, but we're working on it. So what's it like? I mean, every retailer I talk to has a sort of Amazon war room, they're trying to use their physical presence to drive online, they're really getting creative. Amazon continues to do super well. There are those who are predicting, you know, the end of retail stores because of AI, et cetera, what's your take? You're knee-deep in this business. Well, I feel there's, I mean, Amazon certainly is bringing a lot of downward pressure. It's the first digital, retail is the first industry to be digitally disrupted. It's happening in healthcare, it's happening in manufacturing, but retail brought on the initial wave, so to speak. What I'm seeing is a lot of the middle, I'd say the middle of the road retailers that don't have too much of an online presence, their legacy brands that maybe had their following 20 years ago, they're gonna get squeezed out because the middle in this group is gonna get squeezed out. The high-end brands that control their own brand image, they brand manufacture their own products, they also have their own retail stores, those are the companies that are uniquely qualified to compete and thrive against Amazon because last I looked, having stores and having an outlet for immediate gratification of getting products and services is a good thing. And the retailers that we're working with are combating that against pure plays like Amazon. But there's some consumer friction there, right? I mean, I mean, and it's generational. Oh yeah. So, I mean, how we shop is different than how our kids shop and they look at retail in a very different, through a very different prism than we do. So how do you address that in terms of, how do you help your clients address that through different segmentation of their audiences and addressing those unique problems? Well, even as a kid, I remember that the retail shopping was a destination shopping experience. So we'd load up the family truck and we'd go to a mall, spend the whole day, there'd be entertainment there, there'd be restaurants to eat at, we'd shop and then we'd come home. It was a destination. Try doing that when it's 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year on your phone, suddenly the social engagement with social media and Snapchat and Twitter and Facebook, Facebook's a little old for a lot of the younglings now, but the moral of the story is social media takes on everything and that's where the influence is and that whole shopping experience, it used to be, well, I'm just gonna get some product information and then I'm gonna go into the store. That's been completely disrupted as well. One other aspect of this is the whole concept of consumerism is disrupted. There's a lot of, you know, you look at a lot of the cool brands that are in other adjacent industries, whether it's Uber or Airbnb, they don't own any of their assets. Same things happening in retail. A lot of the new emerging brands are gonna have disruptive business models like you go into a store and they don't even have any inventory. It's all made to order, right? So there's a lot of disruption that's happening and we're working with a lot of brands to help. So talk about next big thing in retail, is that one of them? Is it sort of, I go into a store, is that what I want, send it to my house? What else? Well, I think one of the next big things that we're working on is the whole concept of machine learning. You know, I think you guys have heard about this before, but the whole technology singularity where it's the point in which there's no differentiation between work, engaging with a customer, or sorry, engaging with the human versus engaging with a computer. We're not that far away and it's a little bit scary. So I think we talked about it a couple years ago, but the whole concept of why would I need to interact with a human being for my shopping experience, I could just interact with a chatbot, for example. As long as I, the customer, gets the information I need to make an informed decision, I don't really feel weird talking to a computer anymore. Yeah, so that's that idea of systems of agency, right? Where the machine is taking action on behalf of the brand and the consumer either doesn't know or doesn't care. Right. That's right. So do you have customers that are sort of on the precipice of doing that? Yeah, we do. You know, in one of the areas, so I've talked about this before, machine learning based demand forecasting. So getting better at forecasting the right product, the right skew on a store by location basis. And what we do is we leverage a lot of the inherent capabilities of the internet. You know, a lot of companies talk about cloud as simply a cost reduction. We view cloud as taking advantage of the world's greatest supercomputer, which is the internet. And so that's one of the areas in which we've been using machine learning. So what's the, you say the company that middling or middle range, what are they to do now? Because they're kind of stuck, they have their challenges, but they have this legacy approach that they're kind of in a tough spot. Yeah, the die has been cast. I mean, and it's, you know, if I was in their shoes, a lot of these middle of the road retailers, I would look at finding ways to optimize what I have. So whether that's optimizing your inventory, optimizing your labor, that's another thing we talked about. Charles this morning mentioned the whole concept of unleashing, maximizing human behavior and unleashing human capital. For years, we've been on shows like this talking about products. Instead, it's about engaging your customer. Everybody's a customer. If you're in healthcare, you're a customer. In manufacturing distribution, you have customers. So to look at it more from a human element around store associates, I think there's a lot of middle of the road retailers that have an old iconic brand that could reinvent themselves with time and enough patience. How do you deal with the inevitable, like, so, well, first of all, how do your customers deploy your software? It's in the cloud. It's in the Amazon cloud, right? Well, three years ago, we made a fundamental decision that we were not going to be an on-premise company. So we are a cloud-only applications provider. The second decision point we made was, do we want to be sweet or best to breed? And when we say sweet, that was our decision. The third point was, how do you want it to be able to be deployed? So when I started off in this industry, which felt like yesterday, I feel like I'm super old now, but I started off as a software developer for a company called Retek out of Minneapolis. And I was doing batch forms and Oracle PL SQL and everything was tied to the database and the user experience was basically a graphical depiction of a database. And, but back in those days- Still is in a lot of apps. Yeah. In those days, it was pretty much all about developing that individual code. I kind of lost my train of thought on that. So the way you can deploy our assets is on a individualized basis. So you can deploy our demand forecasting engine, for example. You can deploy our allocation and replenishment engine. And when you tie it all together, you can have a suite. It doesn't need to be deployed like it used to be in the old days as we're as going, which is you have to deploy the whole data model to get all the information that you're looking for. So okay, so in retail, you've got the inevitable, oh well, I'm going to run this. In Amazon, they're my big competitor. They're disrupting me. How do you, what's the conversation like with customers? How do you guarantee we're protecting their data? You point to Netflix and say, hey, it's working for them. What do you- Well, I think, I mean, we're in for. We're a big company. It's on a case-by-case basis. Yes, we have a relationship with AWS and yes, they're a strategic partner for us. That doesn't preclude the fact that we work with Google, we work with Azure. We are cloud agnostic in retail. It hasn't been as big of an issue as a lot of industry critics and analysts have made it out to be. So if it were an issue, you could run it anywhere you want. Yeah, you just swap it out, yeah. All right, I'm going to change gears here. Now it's been on the stage today. Keynote Van Jones from CNN was talking about a YesWeCode organization he has an affiliation with and you've created this, well, launched an initiative, NextGen, right? First off, explain what that is, but then let's back up to the genesis of that because as we found out just a few moments before, it's a pretty interesting journey that you personally were involved in. Yeah, I know, I'm sure a lot of friends and family that know me well are going to be tired of hearing this story, but I'll give you the condensed version, which is- Take your time. Growing up in Minneapolis, I was a huge Prince fan, like most Minneapolis people are. And through serendipity, I've met Prince's brother and Prince's brother, pre-social, pre-internet, pre-mobile, put me on Prince's private guest list for parties at Paisley Park. And so here I am, I had a loving family. I can't believe my mom and dad will let me do this, but I'm 16, 17 years old, going to parties with Prince. And when I say parties, I mean, these were intimate parties. Maybe the most was 50 people in his house. Sometimes there's like five of us. And what happened at these parties where he would play new music if we danced and got up there and jammed with him, then he'd put it on an album. If it wasn't very good or if he felt like there wasn't a good, strong reaction, he put it in his vault. And so we were a test case, a Petri dish, so to speak, for his music. And I got to build a relationship with him as much as anyone that could. He was a very standoffish person, but a brilliant artist and a brilliant human being for that matter. I got to build that relationship and through that relationship, I met Van Jones. We hooked up again at one of Prince's memorials a couple of years ago after his death. And we looked at each other and we connected and I said, you know, I'm in the technology industry and he goes, we got to talk because there's some things related to Prince's legacy we should really talk about. Which ties us back to, yes, we code in the announcement we made today about Gen 1. For Gen 1, excuse me, that's the next one. Yeah, Gen 1, yeah, no worries. And the genesis of this was Prince, Rogers Nelson, and Van Jones had a conversation right after Trevon Martin was shot and killed. And a lot of people suspect the main reason was he looked suspect, because he had a hoodie on. And here's an African-American kid wearing a hoodie, they follow him and bad things happen, right? Van Jones asked Prince directly, he goes, you know, clearly that guy was racist. And Prince said, think again, maybe, maybe if that was a white kid in Silicon Valley wearing a hoodie, he'd be a dot com billionaire. But because we haven't produced enough people of color in CEO level positions in our tech industry, that's on us. Meaning we need to develop more of our own. And so this project means a lot to us because of the fact that we don't think diversity is just a check box that you have on your corporate mission statement. We think diversity can change the DNA of your company and it can influence better product solutions and services to our customers. So it's really important for us. And this is just the first step of a multi-eshelon, multi-year, multifaceted program that we want to take this and roll it out to the entire industry. I'd love for Salesforce and Oracle and SAP and Workday. I'd love for all of them to adopt the program similar to this. This isn't pride of ownership, it's the right thing to do. And putting brilliant kids and brilliant minds that maybe came from a bad circumstance, they all deserve a chance too. And it only makes all of us better. And I feel like a lot of great things have happened to me in my career and I feel like I have to give back. And if I can be a small part of this with Van, so be it. So that's a pretty thoughtful response by Princeton. You were saying earlier, Corey, it was sort of hard to get to know him. Was that typical of Princeton was the sort of introspective and maybe pensive and prescient in that way, or? Well, the piece that people don't understand about Princeton is that the whole story of his life is written in his music. And he's released over 2,000 songs and I'm sure the family and the estate might see this, but I've heard another couple thousand songs that have been unreleased and it's beautiful, brilliant music. And his whole life story is there. You just need to listen to the lyrics and listen to the music. So it was, I mean, you mentioned this story and I just thought, 17-year-old kid, I mean, I mean, with all due respect, you don't look like one of Princeton's friends, right? I mean, you're a Minnesota guy, he was different, just different. And I think, did you ever just think, what in the world am I doing here? I had that moment, I'll never forget that one moment. So it's probably the summer of 1995, Princeton was standing five feet from me. He had his right hand strumming his electric guitar. His left hand was playing lead keyboard lines on the keyboard. His right foot was controlling the pitch of the guitar. The left foot was controlling the pitch on the keys. And he was singing vocals and dancing. And I said to myself, I pinched myself and I said, this moment in time, if Amadeus Mozart was standing here, he would be blown away. Because there's nobody in the history of music that can write, produce all this great music, but also maintain that look, that image, and then the musicianship. He's a musician's musician. You know, we talk about Lenny Kravitz. I ran into Lenny Kravitz about 20 years ago sitting on Princeton's couch. He probably doesn't remember me, I'm pretty sure he doesn't. You'll find out tomorrow night. We'll find out tomorrow, but, I mean, the moral of the story is, he was a musician's musician. I'll never forget sitting on the couch. And this really soft spoken gal said to me, she was really nervous to perform tonight. And I'm like, don't worry, you got this. And it was an 18 year old Alicia Keys. And Prince, behind the scenes, had been cultivating and developing talent, whether it's Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Nora Jones. You know, these people, he helped develop behind the scenes, and no one really knew it. Well, his band members were always incredibly talented. I don't know if you ever saw Prince live. You saw him many times. But, man, as he would say, that band was tight. Yeah, that's right. Well, the program's a great legacy. It is. Certainly. And one that is certainly not apparent. But it's great to know the backstory, know the generation of that and what got going. And certainly, I think there's a lot of, it seems like a lot of emotional equity that you and the company have invested to make sure it's successful as well. We think that it was Prince's legacy, but we feel like he's passed the torch between Van, myself, and Charles. This really means a lot to us. So we want to take it to the next level. So we're pretty excited. Fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you. Thanks for sharing the story, too. I'm glad that it's wonderful. And I look forward to talking to Charles about it when we have him on tomorrow. All right, back with more. We are live here. TheCube is covering Inform 18 in Washington, DC.