 Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Corey Tillifson. He is the senior vice president and general manager for retail here at Infor. Thanks so much for returning to theCUBE. Happy to be here. Looking forward to this again. So this is launched about 18 months ago, so give our viewers a status update. Where are we? Well, it's been an amazing ride. So just 12 months ago, I think we talked about the initial prognosis of the business unit. You know, we just ended our fiscal year. We did about 77% year-over-year growth. We expanded into new markets like New Zealand and in Europe. We just opened up a brand new office in London and we're thrilled with the market reception of our solutions. So talk a little bit about the solutions that you're coming up with. I mean, retail, or actually, let's back up. Let's talk a little bit about the state of retail right now and what the retailers themselves are feeling and also the customer experience. Yeah, I mean, anybody that shops understands that retail is in a complete disorder, I'd say chaos and disorder right now. Do some shopping. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's a great point. So when you think of retail, think of post-World War II, where basically the premise for retailing was a anchored mall with knowledgeable shoppers, knowledgeable workers and associates that knew about their product. They're very product-centric and it was all about taking the car and the family and going to a destination and making it about your day. The reality is the e-commerce world has changed the business model so much that retail is centered around these iPhones and the smartphone that it's 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and that the power of the information has now shifted from the store associates to the actual consumers. So consumers and customers can walk into a retailer and have more knowledge, not only about the products that you're selling, but even your inventory levels. Looking online, being able to buy online, search online and come into the store and purchase something. Yeah, so, I mean, there was always an asymmetry pre-internet. The brands had all the power, they had all the information and then as you say, it's totally flipped. In many ways, digital transformation is about trying to create that balance of power again, back in the hands of the brand, right? Yeah, I mean, it's funny how, if you look at it over the last 20 years, at first it was the brand and the manufacturers had all the influence and then the whole concept of category management and allowances and things like that. In the 90s, the retailers started to have the influence. Now the reality is it's not even the retailers or the brands anymore, it's the customer. The customer and the consumer have all the influence in the world, which is making so much chaos and disorder around what's retail and the lines of blurred between what's a brand manufacturer and what's a retailer. So everyone's got their sort of, I got to compete with Amazon strategy. What are you seeing that's actually working? Well, what's happening in the industry, you may have heard that Amazon put an offer in on Whole Foods. I have heard about that. You may have heard about that. So what it does is it's basically validating our strategy two and a half years ago when we had the idea of putting together this retail team and what we've done since then around modern, beautiful applications that are fueled by science and analytics that have a beautiful user experience. All those types of technologies are codified over the last two years and best practices that we've created by using our relationships with Creighton Barrel and Whole Foods and DSW and Nordstrom as opposed to software that was written in the 1990s. So that's what we believe has been helping our progress so far. So you've worked with Macy's and Nordstrom and William Sonoma, DSW. What do you think customers want? I mean, you're talking about beautiful applications, user experience that is satisfying and easy. Well, it's funny when we talk about things like this. I mean, I just mentioned beautiful user experience because customers want to enjoy the shopping experience. Duncan mentioned it earlier on main stage around next generation applications that are almost headless. The next UI is AI, right? It's the UI that doesn't exist and that's where our applications are going as well. You know, it's about holding onto that data, that analytics, that science and presenting that in a format that's an offer to our customer's customer. Speaking of AI, you're really the first cloud suite that is going to be able to take full advantage of Coleman, the new product launched today. Tell our viewers a little bit more about how you anticipate using Coleman. Well, I could get into the whole Coleman, tell us to look up a promo. Coleman, tell us about this price change. There's all those different types of technologies. We're exposing all the data so anything can be accessible by Coleman around our analytics platform. And one thing that does differentiate us is we don't view our systems as silos. So our execution engine for core item merchandising and our omni-channel merchandising system and our advanced analytics and forecasting and planning replenishment system are built on one common stack. So it's common, whether it's analytics or execution, they're converged together. So it allows us to be able to take advantage of technologies like Coleman. So it was an article in the journal the other day talking about how Apple was actually behind in AI. We used the example of Siri, anybody who used Siri knows that maybe not quite as where we'd like it to be. And Google and Amazon have the data. And maybe that helps them sort of leap. What is your corpus of data? Obviously GT Nexus is part of that. You've got to have the data source. It's all about the data. I'll give you a real-world use case. So two years ago when we announced the Whole Foods project, one of the design principles that we definitely went forward with was the whole concept of no hierarchies, unlimited attributing, unlimited information around item. Because we want to take all that information and all that attributes associated with the item and we want to load it up into our machine learning solution. Very flat. We want to load that up into our advanced machine learning and our data platform into cloud. And we can make as many science recommendations against all that information that's aggregated. So that's one of our ways in which we differentiate as well. Okay. And then the other thing is when I look at your, we saw Soma was presenting to the analysts yesterday and putting up some architecture slides. And there was a lot of AWS in there. And it appears that you're heavily leveraging that Amazon sort of innovation flywheel. How does that affect your business? Well, it's a sticky wicked, right? I mean, what we've learned from working with Amazon as well as AWS is they're distinct organizations. And we spend a lot of time with AWS because they spend so much money, it's been a nuclear arms race over the last decade to see who could spend the most money to build the best infrastructure and plumbing. And there is a wall that segments the two from each other, but that doesn't preclude us from working with other clouds. There's other clouds that we can use from our customer. I mean, some of our customers have requirements around leveraging Microsoft or Google and we're happy to work with those clouds too. I want to talk a little bit about international expansion. You mentioned a new office in London and also a new one in New Zealand. London seems like an obvious destination. New Zealand, not as much. Can you just explain to our viewers a little bit about why those two places? Well, I think the first part of that is it's English speaking. It's a little bit easier with less translation requirements related to those markets. What we really like about London is it feels like they're catching our momentum that we had two years ago in North America and the reception we've had in London has been insane. And I wish I could be in a position to announce all the recent wins that we've had in Europe but there's going to be more to come as well in announcements. Okay, so what are you hearing here? A little over a year in, what are the customers here telling you? What they like, what they don't like, what they want? Well, I think what a lot of customers are asking for is they want to see acceleration or roadmap. They believe in concepts like Coleman that we mentioned this morning. They want to take advantage of that as quickly as possible. And for us, we can provide a prescriptive journey and it doesn't need to be a big bang where you have to deploy this huge monolithic system. I would love nothing more than to have all of your system, all of our customers and prospects take advantage of all of our systems but the reality is there's some legacy systems they don't want to touch. That's okay, that's fine. We can make SAP smarter by having the best analytics platform into retail on the planet, we believe. We can take advantage of that horizontal ERP that you're running by taking advantage of some of the burst functionality where we can come in and start taking information out of different disparate silos. So there's not just one way of digesting and experience with N4. So a lot of the ways in which companies are competing with Amazon is obviously with data, utilizing data in new ways, personalizing the experiences. You mentioned Europe, last year dropped a bomb called GDPR and the whole privacy piece and it goes in, the penalties going to effect May of 18. How are you rethinking privacy and data protection in this new era? You know, the irony on this question is two years ago, if you would have asked the same question, the onus would be on us to provide accessibility and provide proof that it's better to go with a cloud provider. The dialogue has shifted to the point where, you know, we talked about it earlier today, we've got hundreds of people that are working in cloud ops as opposed to our retailers that might have a handful that use it. So it's almost like the onus and the risk is on our retailers of not trusting a cloud provider for that service. It's true, I mean, Amazon absorbs a lot of that risk for GDPR. So then how do the retailers think about data protection? I mean, they don't just wash their hands and say, okay, Amazon will take care of it. Are they more sort of data protection brokers or strategists or? Well, I think it comes back to, there's some interesting behavior back in the mid-90s between a couple of retailers in Amazon and that's where a lot of the trepidation came from of working with them. I keep harping back to, there is a pretty distinct line between AWS and Amazon, and what we find is they don't even talk to each other. So if they're listening right now, that's probably, that's not a knock on them, that's actually congratulations that they are completely separate units, that we don't feel like there's any issues related to privacy or the biggest concern is in privacy. It's around having access to information around that skew and that item and that price point. They don't want Amazon to be able to see that price point and suddenly offer up a promo based on inside information. Okay, sure, and I buy that. I think Amazon is pretty reputable in terms of that brick wall between the two companies, but specifically I'm talking about personal information and how that's protected or just generally security, well I guess security again, the onus is on the cloud provider, but is that a board level discussion? Is that more of a wonk level discussion in IT? Over the last two years it's evolved to the point where it's not even, it's not even a discussion point anymore. Because of the cloud. Because of the cloud, the cloud adoption as well as the standards that AWS has put in place, it's almost like they've created the industry standard for to which others now compete with, so. When you're thinking about the future of retail, is there a piece of advice that you could give to retailers, they're listening now, they're watching theCUBE, retailers who are fearful of a digital transformation resistant to one or know that they have to transform in this way but just can't quite seem to get over the hump. Well every day I meet with a retailer and it's the same sentiment, they understand and appreciate that if they don't adopt they're dead. And it's really a grave situation and the reality is I think we're going to usher in a golden age of retailing. Because what's left behind is the old adage of let's just expand and create more store space and more shelf space and we'll just see our margins go higher and our revenues go higher. Those days are done, so they need to make the most they can out of the space that they have. And the reality is any single store is almost like a note on the network and I wanted to tell this story. So last night I was boarding a plane and I realized my shoes were not packed. It's because I didn't have them. I left them in London last week. And the reality is I'm not the best shopper when it comes to making these decisions. So I called my personal shopper at Nordstrom. She had all the information on me. She played it against her BI report on these are the types of trends, style, color, class. And she came back and said, Corey, I'm going to purchase these for you. And I said, great, I'll pick them up at your Nordstrom location in Manhattan. And she said, oops, it doesn't open until the spring. And I thought I was completely out of luck. And the reality is she said, don't worry about it. There's a distribution center not that far behind. We'll ship it directly to your hotel. And guess what? Lo and behold, this morning my shoes were there. That's the type of modern retailing that all the non-Amazon, non-Walmart.com retailers can do to be successful. But it's not headless. I mean, there was a human being involved. There was a human being there, but we're working on next generation apps, specifically with Nordstrom too, to help them create that experience so we can eliminate the heroics and make that embedded into a new modern platform. I love it. I love it, obviously. Okay, but wait, wait, wait. Why couldn't Amazon replicate that with its AI and geniuses and alphabets? It's the human interaction. I don't want to just necessarily interact with a bot on Amazon.com. I called my personal shopper live and said, this is what the situation is. Can you solve it for me? So then she took that back. She ran it through the calculations and came back and said, here's what you need and I'll ship it to you. Well, the other thing that I think about is the physical store. Like every time I buy sneakers on Amazon, they never fit. So, okay. So I want to go into DSW. I love DSW. We do too. It's like my favorite shoe store in the world. Of course, my girls love it too. So, but so there are many situations where you really actually want that physical look and feel and touch. And think about what you just said. So with DSW, most of their customers are avid shoe shoppers and they love shoes. The differentiation between DSW and Amazon is that I believe the numbers are pretty much 70% of North America's population is within five to 10 miles of a DSW. Think of that as competitive advantage. Being able to buy online, pick it up in the store after work. There's no delay in shipping. That's really why Amazon's trying to get into the retail space. Let's say it, let's hopefully we're just selling shoes. Oh yeah, are there going to be a drone to deliver it to me in a couple hours? Anyway, this is next year's forum. These are all the themes. That's going to be amazing to sit down with you and talk about this year after year. I know, at the golden age, it's soon to be upon us. Corey Tulliff, it's always a pleasure to sit down with you. Thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate it, thanks for coming up. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have our wrap just after this.