 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington DC, the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure to welcome Daraj Shah, in with us, the CEO of AVAP and Daraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon. Absolutely, big pleasure. It was great talking to you for the last few years and a pleasure to be back here. Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean, AVAP, I read a little bit, I mean, five letters of Sanskrit language. What are the five letters represent? I mean, how'd you come up with the title? You know, that's the first question that gets asked. Two questions, I guess. Sorry, you cliche, but I just, I'm curious. No, no, the two questions is, why did you start AVAP? And the other question is, what is AVAP? And it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at AVAP. Agni, which is fire, stands for passion, because I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do. If you're passionate, you'll follow through on and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation. Sky is tied to goals. We're very ambitious, you know, and we've been able to have like a rocket ship type of growth so far and we continue to aspire to do more. We have earth, which is tied to eco-conscious because we'd like to be globally eco-conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you know, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy and the more there's transparency, the better there is organizational development. That's you, well, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions and the relationship within for, I mean, walk us through that a little bit, you know, why you're here. Absolutely. So we're INFOR's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that because we just came off the stage getting four awards within for this year. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you very much. Partner, their overall partner of the year, five years in a row. Our partnership with INFOR started five years ago. Before that, it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said, I want to do two things. I want to make software that is industry specific. And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said, we want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies, cloud, mobile, big data, right? Saw a great opportunity and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the INFOR basket and just doing INFOR. And that served us well of going from 25, at that point we were like 25 employees to having over 450 today. Wow, and we've talked about this in the past. You got in early and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in. So you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that and why are you succeeding? You know, it's not necessarily always being ahead. So that actually that's a question I got is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini's here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't because it's a validation of what's occurring in this ecosystem with the big system integrators coming in. And with the rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIS because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management and we do what we do best, which is INFOR knowledge and consulting services. Deep, deep INFOR, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? INFOR's specialty is the last mile micro industry capabilities and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep INFOR expertise. Exactly. So give us an example of you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera, where do you come in? Where does their micro services or micro function leave off and where do you pick up? So yeah, I'll give you a real world example. In fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christos Health. They are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60,000 employees. They're looking for a transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, supply chain, financial. They went through a large system selection process. You know, the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, INFOR, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to INFOR and Oracle as the two vendors that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on INFOR as a vendor of choice, they did a services RFP which we partnered with Deloitte because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep INFOR knowledge around the solutions of INFOR that we have within our healthcare team. So we bridged and built an alliance that today is starting the project journey in INFOR, Deloitte, AVAP, Christus to make that project a success. And the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that INFOR and Oracle had were what? The coverage of the functionality across the suites. Was it the cloud capabilities? So I think that, you know, the one thing I'll tell you is the consumer, in this case, the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable. So the very starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud. There's a lot of education already around single tenant, multi-tenant. And they understand, so it starts with a cloud platform that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform? And are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant as opposed to individually hosted for each customer? And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, you know, within HCM, within supply chain, within financials to see what not at product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but they are business processes and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where INFOR really came ahead at Christmas. And the multi-tenant versus hosted, I mean, a lot of people say, well, why is a customer care? I'm presuming the customer care is because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Versus, okay, we got to freeze the code and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts the customer to have to take their system down and then bring it back up. And here it's done without the customer even finding out. So it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is the cost, which in today's world, not as much because hardware has become very cheap, but it's still clunkered hardware that's sitting on the premise as opposed to, individually putting it out there as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security on multi-tenant software. It's more secure than your single-tenant capability. And AVAP brings to the table, so it's not, I mean, Infor has the micro-vertical function. So yours is what, onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? Yeah, so it starts with helping them align and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have an offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process. And post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, AVAP also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR. You have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR. And there's like a wall where one doesn't talk to the other, and the systems need to be really integrated to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that. So that's one of the things that we're heavily investing in. Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? So what's going on these days? Obviously last wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act. There's some uncertainty around that. Certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers. EMR is still a big deal. What are the hot trends? What are the drivers and how are you guys responding? ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market. So there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in the midst of what I think is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry around ERP platforms that we're seeing. There were 55 system selections done just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. Wow, okay, please, go ahead. So swap, I mean, so, I mean, what's, what's, I guess the fundamental of that decision, what, where? So there are a lot of legacy providers. So the market's going to get consolidated. So we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Info, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers. There's, if you count mid-market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there as customer base. Very fragmented. Very fragmented. So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform. They have, they're officially said that they're stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Metatec on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional individual health system that exists in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. So. I mean, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini computer era. It was the old mantra was, let's buy a Vax. We'll become a value-added reseller and healthcare was such a huge opportunity. And so under technologized, not a word, but and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated and now they're just left with this fossilized mess. And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. Yeah. And Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary in kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform and making it multi-tenant cloud enabled, you know, for the healthcare industry specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched in our opinion in the field today. Who does that last mile functionality if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor? Is it the, is it the SI? Is it, you know, some other internal software developer? So the software developers as Infor is trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS as an example come in to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. You do that work. We do that work. Okay, and then how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their roadmap? I mean, you know. Soma's got his R&D, you know, pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in a week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become, you know. So Soma has spent $4 billion on product. That's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board ask for that kind of a budget. I'd be out. So. Well, you could. I could, yeah. Good laugh. Yeah. So we're realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team that allows us to see their roadmap and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry, you know, recognized platform and customized it for the ERP for healthcare. So the, you know, regression testing is one of the largest pain point. Manual laborious takes a business users away. So this tool called AVAP test automation which has been in the field. We have, you know, close to 100 customers using it allows us to automate that entire regression testing cycle and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. And you've got, we've talked about a lot about healthcare. Yeah. You have another interesting side of your business with a little Beatles connection. Yeah. So Phil, sit on that a little bit. Yeah. So two of the four awards we got one and definitely want to talk on both of them because those are important parts of a business. One is retail. We did get retail partner of the year award and Stella McCartney is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She saw McCartney's Paul McCartney's daughter and has built a very reputable shoe company that's a brand highly sought after. And we're working on modernizing their ERP applications using Cloud Suite fashion, which has the underlying technology based on M3 platform. She loves you. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Now we're absolutely. That's great. Well, Josh, thanks for being here. Thanks for sharing the story. Absolutely. Congratulations on all the progress. Look down there. Yeah, it's always good to be here. It is full speed ahead. Always. Good for you. Thank you. But back with more on theCUBE. We're at Informer, Informer rather. I didn't get it. Inform. I'll step in when you need me. 2018, DC. Did it again. Excellent.