 Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for Amazon Web Services, AWS Summit. It's a developer, business, training, conference. It's kind of like a baby conference off Amazon re-invent. The big mother of all shows every year. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, they strike the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Am. I'm joined by Coase, Jeff Frick, general manager of our CUBE operations. Filling in for Dave Vellante, who's traveling, watching not live on the mobile app. Dave, shout out to you. Our next guest is Pam Murphy, the chief operating officer in four. One of the largest software companies in the world. Top three or four. I think the numbers are for the leaderboard where you guys are at. Big announcement here at Amazon Web Services. Enterprise software applications on the cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me. It's fantastic to see the news and great to have you on. I know your time's very tight. So, Amazon has been criticized for, and by us, of course, we're big fans of Amazon customer, but disclosure, we're a customer. But we've also criticized them of not really being enterprise ready. And that's what everyone has been throwing, the fun, fear and certainty and doubt, creating a lot of dissonance around. Amazon's not ready for the prime time because IBM, Google, HP, list goes on and on on the competitors who woke up to the fact that Amazon's taking some serious but in the cloud business. So you guys come in and do a deal. This is going enterprise. So tell us, what's the big story of the announcement and how does that relate to the enterprise? So our announcement is about taking our very extensive broad suites with deep industry functionality. It's been a central part of our strategy for many years to build out these very complete solutions so that customers don't have to customize their applications and therefore everything upgrades easy. Take the whole suite, put it on the cloud, put it on Amazon. And Amazon has been a fantastic partner for us to date. They're global, which we are as well. We operate in over 150 offices globally. So we really needed a partner who was truly global in scale, who had that global network to rely on. That was flexible, that was agile. And it's been fantastic today. We have... And it's called Cloud Suite, right? That's called Cloud Suite, yes. Taking very complete suites for healthcare. We have a complete industry suite for hospitality, for aerospace and defense, for automotive, for public sector. Representing end-to-end business solutions for our customers so that they can operate their entire mission-critical applications on these suites and taking those and putting them into the cloud. So Jeff and I and Dave and Jeff, Kelly and our other analysts, we always talk about the horses on the track. In this case, we mentioned some of the competition, but I really want to talk more about the concepts. The game-changing shifts. Obviously, classification of business is something that's happening, right? People are moving to a SaaS mall. You're seeing the cloud doors around platformers of service. All that's inside baseball for the cloud business, but you're out talking to customers, your customers, your cloud suite. What are the key things that they need here and that they're looking for to be satisfied, have a software-to-service business that they could use to operate their business, but also their requirements for their customers, your customers' customers? What are the key things that they're looking for in this SaaS? In the SaaS world? From an infrastructure perspective, let me start there, there's so much change happening all of the time that it's hard to keep up. And I guess with going in the cloud, they don't need to worry about that anymore. That's no longer their problem. There's also discussions on CapEx versus OpEx. From a customer perspective, a lot of the time it's easier these days to get OpEx through rather than do expensive capital investments. They don't want to worry about upgrades. They want to make sure that they get the latest version of the applications all of the time. So for them, the cloud and SaaS and running their suites on the cloud, which they can do with us, means that we're responsible for running of the system in conjunction with Amazon, so they're freed up to literally run their businesses. So we worry about the technology, they can worry about their businesses. And they now understand and see that it's very secure these days, which is an issue that I guess happened in the old days where people were less comfortable about how secure their applications were in the cloud. We are seeing a huge level of interest for more customers to move to the cloud. You look at the analysts and they post these racing about how quickly applications are moving and often you'll see applications like human capital management and financials are faster in moving to the cloud rather than the traditional mission critical ERP applications. But we are seeing a phenomenal amount of interest from our customers in terms of moving mission critical applications to the cloud as well. So, you know, and it's borrowed pacing, I think what the analysts are seeing as being the transition to the cloud. And is a lot of it net new business or is it like grading existing kind of traditional application style into a cloud based application? It's both. So we're seeing a lot of net new interest in this area, but also, I mean, we've a huge base of 70,000 customers. You don't want to eat all your own. You've got a good revenue base there, right? Based on those traditional applications. But they are also now wanting to move to the cloud as well. So we created this program called UpgradeX. And it's a way of helping our customers who have on-premise deployments today move their applications to the cloud in as fast and effective a way as possible. You know, we've invested a lot in automation. You know, we can take these very complete and extensive suites that we've developed and provision them in the cloud and Amazon in less than 30 minutes compared to the weeks it would take to manually provision the same environment in a non-premise setting. Right, right. And we've implementation accelerators, industry specific, which get customers up and running fast on the required configuration. So for customers, the benefit is they can get up and running fast on the latest version of the applications without having to worry about the infrastructure and all these set up and configuration work to name them to get there. Well, then the other kind of classic issue, opportunity with the SAS model is the customizations, right? Yes. Because they do a lot of customizations. That's fine if it's on-prem, but then you do an upgrade and one of the customizations in the hiccups, you do a SAS application. You really can't do that many customizations because then you can't do a unified upgrade. So how has now moving a lot of your business or anticipating moving your business to the SAS model have changed your guys' delivery and ease of your being able to deliver the latest, greatest to your customers? And that's where we feel at Infor. We have a big differentiator because one of the core tenets of our strategy has been to focus on industry specific suites and microverticles. Our motto being we don't want to create a generic software code base, that is to be all things to all men. We'll focus on certain industries, certain microverticles and we will make sure that we build out the last mile of functionality so that customers don't have to customize their applications. So the beauty of our solution in these cloud suites is that when a customer moves to a cloud suite, the suite and the cloud, the functionality invariably is already there and the last 10% of it may be just configuration to enable them to get there. So the beauty of our strategy in pursuing that deep industry specific functionality means that customers invariably don't need to have to worry about customizations, which means it's always easier to upgrade and it's always easier to get on the latest release of the applications. I wonder just if you can talk briefly about the market dynamics pull versus push. How much of this is coming from your customers really saying you want a cloud solution versus you guys trying to get ahead of the curve and kind of seeing the future? And then within that, are there some industries that are just more rapid, more aggressive and making this move than others? Because you've got a nice kind of scan across industries. That's broad base, we do. So on the first point, we sell on-premise, we sell cloud today. Honestly, it really is based on the customer's needs and requirements. What the customer's motivations are, their capital restrictions, their operating constraints, their own IT infrastructure and resourcing. So from our perspective, a lot of it is around what's best for the customer at this point in time? So if the customer wants an on-premise solution, we'll give them on-premise. If the customer's ready for the crowd, we like to push them in that direction because we like the concept of taking away from them all of the hassle of worrying about security, worrying about upgrades, worrying about infrastructure. So on the first point, pull versus push, I would say that ultimately, for us, it's all about what's best for the customer. And then on the second point, so what's the second point? Are there any particular industries across that vast group that you service that are really more aggressive in trying to make this move to a cloud-based infrastructure? You know, I would say that I'd create a distinction between, I guess, applications like HCM and financials, which are more generic in nature, they're not industry-specific, and they've always traditionally been seen as being further easier to put in the cloud. You know, a lot of our competitors- Payroll, right, Payroll was the first one forever ago, and everyone forgets about ADP. Yeah, exactly. We're one of the few, if only companies, to offer the breadth of industry suites in the cloud that we're offering. But within the industries themselves, you know, I would say that it really is, interest is coming from across the board. We're seeing interest from defense customers who have to meet ITAR requirements, who've got strong compliance that they need to make, and our software delivers that in conjunction with Amazon as an infrastructure provider, to HIPAA in health care. So it really is across the board. I would not say that there's one which stands out more so than the other. We're seeing a lot of interest across all of the industries that we serve today. Cam, I want to ask you about the 70-30 rule, which always we've always, 70% money and time spent managing the business, 30% spent on innovating the business, and that's been the paradox for IT, getting out of that. You mentioned that's really the issue, right? And can you get that 70% flipped around, where 30% is on managing and operating, and 70% is innovating, which is driving business line objectives, top line growth. So where are we in that equation? So your announcement really kind of telegraphs that move of the satisfaction we talked about that, but okay, how are we going to get that 70% on innovation? And what makes that enterprise ready for that? Because the argument we're having on Twitter just now is it's not so much that Amazon's not enterprise ready. It's the enterprise aren't ready. Who's else? They're not Amazon ready. They're not Amazon ready. Or cloud ready. So the requirements for true enterprise cloud are still being baked out, and that's kind of the public secret that everyone's talking about. So I want to get your take on that. Where is it to do it? Is where's the traction? Where's the solid ground people are building today? From an enterprise vendor perspective? An enterprise from a vendor and your customers at our enterprises, they want cloud. Everyone kind of says, hey, I want cloud. It's kind of a demand for it. But what version of the cloud or what features are different? The compliance, all kinds of weirdness. Legacy vendors. Not going to just throw away and rip and replace. So this is migration. That's the conversation. So how ready is the enterprise for an Amazon model? And how ready is Amazon for those environments? I think very ready. We're seeing from our customers, we've got huge tier one mega customers who literally may choose to start by saying, you know what? I'm going to open a subsidiary in Singapore. I'm going to open up a plant in some country around the world. You know, I want your industry solution because it meets my end-to-end business requirements. Let me start there. Let me get a subsidiary up and running fully on SaaS. And once they're comfortable and confident that, you know, that is something that, you know, feasible that they can run their business on, they expand from there. There's other customers then that are far more aggressive in terms of wanting to go broader across their portfolio. We are very ready. We have a very solid, robust, extensive, integrated suite of applications that we deploy today for a customer on premise. And what we've spent a lot of time doing over the last 18 to 12, 24 months has been to, I guess, retool and re-architect those applications to make them run as cost effectively and as efficiently in the cloud as possible. And that's what our customers want. Do you think the structural changes are at structural barriers or is it just evolution, it's a matter of time? I think it's a matter of time. I think that it's moving, I think it's been noticeable in recent times that the pace of this is picking up a lot more than before. But I think we're certainly seeing an incredible amount of demand now from our customers that we were not seeing before. So I think it's picking up pace at a significant rate to what we were seeing in the past. Before Jeff gets that question, did you have any trademark problems with CloudSuite? I mean, that's a pretty nice name. I mean, did you have a trademark on that? We are, it was a challenge. Yes, it was a challenge for sure. And I could tell a lot of stories on that. That's worth a cue. We'll say that for you next time. Yeah, exactly. We'll look at those tonight and we have in drinks later. Exactly, exactly. Great name, love the name, great generic, good clean name, CloudSuite. Sorry, Jeff, that means it's not. So Pam, you've been in the industry for a while. You've been working for a long time before and for. I wonder if you can kind of take us up a level and then look at this kind of moment in IT history, because this just seems to be a whole lot of convergent things coming together on the infrastructure side, Cloud, big data, and kind of give us a little viewer perspective of what's unique about this particular moment. When we moved, I moved with Charles Phillips, our CEO at three and a half years to Infor along with two other executives. And when we came to Infor, what we wanted to really do was really be disruptive to enterprise software because we've seen for so long that there was just a lot of stabbing this in terms of, you know, even the look and feel of applications and how they were used. And so our strategy over the last three years has been to be really disrupting enterprise software and going out and doing those innovative and entrepreneurial things that really would make a difference to sort of change the landscape, if you will, of the last 20 years. I think currently we're at a critical point in juncture in enterprise software whereby you're either going to, you know, propel the next level or you're going to get left behind. And I think that's, you know, there's, I won't name some of the competition but there are some pretty big other SaaS ventures out there who are growing very substantially. And, you know, our view of who our competitors are now are very different to who they were a few years ago. So I think there's a lot of change happening at the moment. It's very exciting. For me, I think it's been, you know, the most exciting juncture that I've, you know, that in a long time, shall we say, with a lot of changes happening. And we want to stay at the forefront of all those changes and continue to be disruptive and really make a difference in the enterprise industry. Traditionally seen to be, you know, not as progressive as some of the consumer. Yes. So what's been some of the reactions to the announcement you've done today? So I'm not sure you talked to a lot of folks, press. Are people getting it? Yeah. What are some of the comments you've heard, surprises? Well, it's funny how Charles has commented, friends don't make friends, build data centers, it's being picked up all over the place. That's been picked up quite a bit. Kind of called BS on it a little bit, but I like the quote, I mean, you know, data centers were going to certainly change. But that brings up a good point. Let's talk about the data centers. So one of the things we, first of all, we love the quote, but, you know, data centers are certainly going to change. They're not going to be your grandfather's data centers the old days. It's going to be, it might look completely different. It might be more software driven, might be smaller footprint. What's your vision of the data center in context to the massively exploding cloud frameworks? You're still seeing some origination in the premise, on premise, what's your vision? Yeah, I think it's a timing issue. I mean, honestly speaking, I think we're in that phase now whereby there'll still be a need, you know, there'll still be a requirement that customers will have their IT organizations who want to have their on premise structure. I think it's a timing issue. I think at some point we will definitely get out of that. It's so hard, as you guys know in today's day and age to keep pace with the changes in technology and infrastructure that is happening all the time. They need to constantly refresh. It's a costly business. And unless you're somebody like Amazon who's in there can operate at scale and can take advantage of that, then it's going to be very hard to compete. I mean, the numbers, the data centers that are being amortized, the clock's going to expire on that. What the hell happens next? I know. You know what I'm saying? You just throw it all over the stand. That's the issue, right? You're always invested. But the refresh cycles is the interesting paradigm. It's not a rip and replace, but the refresh cycles are forcing that change, right? So, do you see the refresh cycles getting smaller and smaller? I mean, how do you see those cycles in the current day? The old days are years. Oh, now it's, yeah. Months? Months, yeah, pretty much. And that's why I think why, and that's the reason why we chose to go to AWS. We didn't want to have to worry about having to build up massive data centers. I mean, when you've got, for us, when we're operating in 150 countries around the globe and you've got customers who want to have their data close to them, you know, European customers do not want to have their data. Well, by law, they have to, right? Residing in the U.S. and continue that example throughout the world. And it's not only data privacy issues, it also has to do with issues and latency performance. So you've got to have that global coverage and that global infrastructure. And we thought, from our perspective, we're thinking we don't want to get into that game. It's costly to set up data centers all over the world to maintain this, continuously have to refresh the equipment. The compliance alone is a baggage that you don't want. I mean, why would you want to build that out? Absolutely, absolutely. So again, that was another core reason why we went with Amazon. And their global scale really matches the global scale in which we operate this company. Most people don't talk about that. They talk about it, it gets talked about, but it's not the sexy item. But if you're a chief operating officer, so you deal with this stuff, the operations side, like, damn, we've got to be in all these countries. I mean, that's a huge issue. Oh, completely. How big of an issue is it? Explain to the folks out there how complex it is to operate it as a multinational company. Oh, and I would say even now, I mean, now that we've taken, you know, we are running these cloud suites in the cloud, we're running the infrastructure on behalf of our customers as a chief operating officer. I am very attached and very involved in essentially how our applications run, how efficiently they run, the infrastructure in which we're running because we're carrying the cost now. We've got to make sure that we're as cost efficient as possible and we're keeping our costs as low as possible. So it really, so from my perspective, it's been a great way in which, you know, we can make sure that our applications are running as cost effectively as possible so that our on-premise customers also get the benefit of highly effective, flexible, efficient applications. So maybe the coin to tweet we should say is Amazon's global as a service from business model. I mean, you're taking advantage of a lot of their success international, right? Put print. Well, we have 70,000 customers around the globe, substantial amount of customers. You know, we obviously have sales and offices all over around the globe. So my point is that though, you know, their global footprint is very similar to ours. There's not that many infrastructure operators out there that have that extensive footprint like we have. So it's a pretty good amount. So we're almost out of time, but I want to ask a little bit of a different question because like we said at the beginning, Inforci is probably the biggest software company that a lot of people haven't heard of. You guys are private and Michael Dell just took his company back, right? So he's back private. Can you talk a little bit about why you guys are private? Are you going to stay private or you obviously worked at Oracle big public company. What are the positives, negatives, advantages of staying as a private company? Yeah, that comes up quite a lot. There's not that many $3 billion revenue companies that are still private, but being private gives us a huge amount of ability to be really entrepreneurial and to be really disruptive in terms of what we're doing. We have had tremendous growth over the course of the last two years, which is a testimony to the fact that our strategy is resonating with customers. So we're very happy with the growth we've been seeing. We are very financially stable. We generate very good EVTA all of the time. We have a very strong cash balance. So there is no stress or there is no urgency or need for us to go public. Our boards, our sponsors are obviously very financially well backed and they have a very long-term vision. But as always, we will keep an eye on the market conditions and we, you know, our board at some point will decide when is the right time for us to go public and at that point in time we'll be ready, but for now. Well, Pam, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I think you guys are a great example of Amazon's move to the enterprise, shepherding the big change from on-premise to the cloud, the carrying costs, these little things like carrying costs, costs of doing business do affect profitability and the cloud is a economic game changer. So congratulations on your success, congratulations on the feature launch today with Amazon. We are here inside theCUBE, live in San Francisco. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick here inside theCUBE at Amazon Web Services Summit.