 Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. We are wrapping up the CUBE's day two coverage of conference here in New York City at Inforum. My name is Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dan Bernhardt. He is the Inforur Vice President of Communications. Thanks so much for joining us. Yes, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here two days in the river. It's been a lot of fun. We've had a great time. So yeah, congratulations. It's been a hugely successful conference. A lot of buzz. Recap it for us. What's been most exciting for you? Sure, this was our second year having Inforum in New York, which is our hometown. I think it was a more exciting conference than last year. We unveiled some incredible development updates led by Coleman, our AI offering, which is an incredible announcement for us, as well as networked cloud suites, which takes the functionality from our GT Nexus commerce network and bakes it into our cloud suites, the mission critical industry cloud suites that we offer on the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Those were really exciting developments, as well as some other announcements we made with regard to product. And then in addition to product, we had a lot of customer momentum that we shared. Last year, we had customers like Whole Foods and Travis Perkins up here. We continued the momentum with big enterprise customers making big bets on Infor, led by Koch Industries, who invested more than $2 billion this year in Inforum and are now modernizing their human resources and their financial operations with Infor Cloud Suite. Moving to the cloud HR for 130,000 employees at Koch Industries, which is an incredible achievement for the product and for cloud HR. And that's very exciting, as well as other companies like Footlocker, which are recognized with the Innovation Award for our Progressmakers Award. They're using talent science, data science to power their employees at each, not to power their employees, but to drive their employees towards greater productivity and greater happiness because they've got the right people in the right fit for Footlocker. That's very exciting. And of course, Bank of America, our customer of the year, which uses our HR solutions for their workforce, which obviously is exceptionally large. Yeah, so it was a great ceremony this morning with a lot of recognition. So let's talk a little bit more about Coleman. This was the big product announcement, really the first product in AI for Infor. Tell us a little bit about the building blocks. For certain. We have a couple of AI offerings now, like predictive hotel pricing, predictive demand and assortment planning in retail. But we have been building towards Coleman and what we consider the age of networked intelligence for multiple years. Since we architected Infor Cloud Suite to run mission-critical ERP in the cloud, we developed the capability of having data, mission-critical data that really runs a business for manufacturing, finance, distribution, core functions in the cloud on AWS, which gives us hyperscale compute power to crunch incredible data. So that really became possible once we moved Cloud Suite in 2014. And then in 2015, we acquired GT Nexus, which is a commerce network that brings in the 80% of enterprise data that lies outside the four walls among suppliers and logistics providers and banks. That unified that into the cloud suite and brought that data in and we're able to crunch that using the compute power of AWS. And then last year at Infor and we announced the acquisition of Predictix, which is a predictive solutions for retail. And when building those Predictix was making such groundbreaking development in the area of machine learning, but they spun off a separate group called Logic Box just to focus on machine learning. And Infor invested heavily, we didn't talk a lot about Logic Box, but that was going to deliver a lot of the capabilities along with Amazon's developments with Lex and Alexa to enable Coleman to come to reality. So we were able then to acquire Burst a few months ago, versus a BI platform that takes and harmonizes the data that comes across cloud suite and GT Nexus in a digestible form that with the machine learning power from Logic Box can power Coleman. So now we have AI that's pervasive underneath the application making decisions, recommending advice so that people can maximize their potential at work, not have to do more menial tasks like search and gather, which McKinsey has shown can take 20% of your work week, just looking for the information and gathering the information to make decisions. Now you can say Coleman, get me this information. And Coleman is able to return that information to you instantly and let you make decisions, which is a very, very exciting breakthrough. So there's a lot there. When you and I talked prior to this show, I was kind of looking for, okay, what's going to be new and different. And one of the things you said was we're really going to have a focus on innovation. So in previous Inforums, it's really been about to me anyway. We do a lot of really hard work. And we're hearing a lot about acquisitions, certainly AI and Coleman, how those acquisitions come together with your, what Duncan Engel calls the layer cake, the wedding cake stack, the strategy stack, I call it. So do you feel like you've achieved those objectives of messaging that innovation and what's the reaction been from the customer base? Without a doubt. I wouldn't characterize anything that we said last year is not innovative. We announced H&L digital, our digital transformation arm, which is doing some incredible custom projects like for the Brooklyn Nets, essentially money balling the NBA. Look forward to seeing that in next season a little bit and then more in the season to come. Some big projects with Travis Perkins and with some other customers, care.com that were mentioned. But this year, we're unveiling Coleman, which takes a lot of pieces, as Duncan said, sort of the wedding cake and puts them together. This has been in development for years and now we're able to unveil it. And we've chosen to name it Coleman in honor of Catherine Coleman Johnson, one of the ladies whose life was told in the movie Hidden Figures. And she was a pioneer African-American woman in STEM, which is an important cause for us. In four years ago, when we were in New Orleans, unveiled the Infor Education Alliance program so that we can invest in increasing STEM education among young people. All young people with a particular focus on minorities and women to increase the ranks of underrepresented communities in the technology industry. So this Coleman not only pays honor to Catherine Johnson the person, but also to her mission to increase the number of people that are choosing careers in STEM, which as we have shown is the future of work for human beings. So talk a little bit more about enforced commitment to increasing numbers, to increasing not only STEM education, but as you said, increasing the number of women and minorities who go into STEM careers. Certainly, Pam Murphy, who's our chief operating officer, this has been an incredibly important cause to her, as well as Charles Phillips, our CEO. We launched the Women's Infor Network win several years ago, and that's had some incredible results in helping to increase the number of women at Infor. Many years ago, I think it was Google that first released their diversity report, and it drew a lot of attention to how many women and how many minorities are in technology. And they got a lot of heat, because it was about 30, 35% of their workforce was female. And then as other companies started rolling out their diversity report, it was a consistent number between 30 to 35%. And what we identified from that was not that women are not getting the jobs, it's that there aren't as many women pursuing careers in this type of field. Yes, so in order to do that, we need to provide an environment that nurtures some of the specific needs that women have, and that we're promoting education. So we formed the WIN program to do that first task, and this year on International Women's Day in early March, we were able to show some of the results that came from that, particularly in senior positions, SVP, VP, and director level positions at Infor. Some have risen 60% the number of women in those roles since we launched the Women's Infor Network just a couple of years ago. And then we launched the Education Alliance program, we've partnered with institutions like CUNY, the City University of New York, the New York Urban League, and universities now across the globe. We've got them in India, in Thailand, in China, in South Korea to help increase the number of people who are pursuing careers in STEM. We've also sponsored PBS series and Girls Who Code. We have a hackathon going on here at Inforum with a bunch of young people who are building sort of add-on apps and widgets that could accompany Infor. We're investing a lot in the growth of STEM education in the next generation. And by the way, those numbers that you mentioned for Google and others at around 30, 34%, that's much better than the industry average. So they're doing quote-unquote well and still far below the 50%, which is what you would think, based on population, it would be. So I mean, I think the average is around, or the actual number is around 17% in the technology business. And then the other thing I would add is Amazon, I believe, was pretty forthcoming about its compensation, you know. SalesForce really started it at Mark Benioff. And they got a lot of heat for it. But its transparency was really at the starting point, right? Exactly. It was clear really early for companies like SalesForce and Amazon and Google and Infor that this was not something that we needed to create talking points about. We were going to need to affect real change and that was going to take investment and time. And thankfully with leadership, like Charles Phillips, our CEO and Mark Benioff, we're making investments to help make sure that the next generation of every human, but particularly women and minorities that are underrepresented right now in technology have those skills that will be needed in the years to come. Right, you have to start with a benchmark and then know where you're moving from. Absolutely, just like if you're starting a project to transform your business, where do you want to go and what are the steps that are going to help you get there? Speaking of transforming your business, there's another big trend is digital transformation. So now that we are nearing the end of day two of this conference, what are you hearing from customers about this jaunting, sometimes painful process that they must endure, but really they must endure it in order to stay alive and to thrive? Without a doubt, disruption is happening in every industry that we're seeing and customers across all of the industries that Infor serves like manufacturing, healthcare, retail distribution. They are thinking about how do we survive in the new economy when everything is digital, when every company needs to be a technology company and we are working with our customers to help first modernize their systems. You can't be held back by old technology. You need to move to the cloud to get the flexibility and the agility that can adapt to changing business conditions and disruptions. No longer do you have years to adapt to things. They're happening overnight. You must have flexible solutions to do that. So we have a lot of customers. We just had a panel with Travis Perkins and with pilot flying Jay who was on the cube earlier talking about how their and Koch Industries are our primary investor now, talking about how they're re-architecting their IT infrastructure to give them that agility so they can start thinking about what sort of projects could open up new streams of revenue. How could we do something else that we never thought of but now we have the capability to do digitally that could be the future of our business and it's really exciting to have all the CIOs and SBPs of technology, VPs of technology that are here at Inforum talking about what they're doing and how they're imagining their business. It's really incredible to get a peek at what they're doing. You know, we were talking to Debbie earlier. One of the interesting things that my takeaways on the digital transformation is, you always say digital is data and then what we talked about was the ability to traverse industry value chains not just vertically but horizontally. Amazon buying Whole Foods is a perfect example. Amazon's a content company. Apple's getting into financial services. I wonder if you could comment on your thoughts on because you're so deep into micro verticals and what Debbie said was, well, I gave a consumer package good example to a process manufacturing company and they were like, what are you talking about? And then she said, look, let me connect the dots. And the light bulbs went off and they said, wow, we could take that CPG example and apply it. So I wonder when we talk about digital transformation, if you see or can foresee your advantage in micro verticals as translating across those verticals. Without a doubt, we talk about it as adjacent innovation. And Charles points back to an example way back from the creation of Venetian glass and how that led to additional businesses and industries like eyeglasses and fire preparedness. And we look at it that way for certain. We dive very deep into key industries but when we look at them holistically across and we say, oh, this is happening within the retail industry, we can identify key functionality that might make change the industry of disruption, I'm not disruption, distribution, might disrupt the distribution industry and we can apply the lessons learned by having that industry specialization into other industries and help them realize potential that they weren't aware of before because we uncovered it in one place. That's happening an awful lot with what we do with retail and assortment planning and healthcare. We run 70% of the large hospitals in the US and we're learning a lot from retail in how we might help hospitals move more quickly. When you are managing life and death situations, if you are planning assortment or inventory for those key supplies within a hospital and you can make even small adjustments that can have huge impact on patient care. So that's one of the benefits of our industry first strategy and the adjacent innovation that we cultivate there. I know we're not even finished in forum 2017, but we must look ahead to 2018. Talk a little bit about what your goals for next year's conference are. For sure, you're correct, we're not finished yet within forum, I know everyone here is really excited about Bruno Mars. Right, playing tonight. It was entertaining tonight, but we are looking forward to next year's conference as well. We're already talking about some of the innovative things that we'll announce and the customer journeys that are beginning now which we'd like to unveil there. We are going to be moving the conference from New York. We're going to move to Washington, D.C. in late September, September 24th to 27th in Washington, D.C., which we're very excited about to let our customers, they come back every year to learn more. We had 7,000 people attending this year. We want to give them a little bit of a variety while still making sure that they can reach with one stop from Europe and from Asia because customers are traveling from all over the world, but we're very excited to see the growth that will be shared this year. For instance, if you look at the sponsors, we had our primary SI partner, AVAP, was a platinum partner last year. In addition to AVAP this year, we were joined by Accenture and Deloitte, Capgemini, Grant Thornton, all of whom have built in four practices over the last 12 months because there's so much momentum over our solutions, but that is a revenue opportunity for them that they want to take advantage of. And the momentum is just going to keep on going. Next year in September, so I'll see you in September. Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate you guys being here with us for the third year and the second year row in New York and I look forward to it. Thank you, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Inforum 2017 in a bit.