 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. Well, we are back this afternoon here in Washington DC at the Wolfer Washington Convention Center. As we continue our coverage here of Inforum 2018, along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we now welcome Mr. Cormac Waters to the program today, EVP of EMEA and APAC at Infor. Cormac, good to see you, sir. Nice to be here. So we're going to talk about Guinness over in Ireland. Cormac, from Dublin, so we had a little conversation. We're getting a primer here. It's actually your best conversation we should have. We'll save that for the end. How about that? So you're fairly new, right? About a year or so. A little less, but 10 months or so. Okay, yeah. So not that I'm counting it by today, but it's 10 months or so. No, no, no, always going forward, never backward. But a big plate you have, right, with EMEA and APAC. Different adoptions, different viewpoints different perspectives. We've talked a lot about really kind of focus domestically here over the past couple of days. Your world's a little different than that though, right? It is, it is. I mean, and it's very good that you've actually recognized it, that because that's actually the biggest challenge that we have. We have, to be a little bit humble about it, I think we've got world-class products and solutions. I've actually fundamentally believed that. But we have lots of different languages, cultures, and localization requirements in the multiple countries that we look after. So it's great to have a great product, but it needs to be in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Arabic, which most of them are, right? So it's when customers realize that we are actually international and localized for many, many markets, that now we become an intriguing option for them if you're a multinational business with subsidiaries all over the world. So it's good that info is big enough to do that. We need to do a better job of letting everybody know that we've done that, if that makes any sense. Sure, yeah. So what's happening in Europe? Maybe we, you know, Europe's always pockets. There's no, I mean, yes, EU, but there's really still no one Europe. What's going on? Obviously we have Brexit hanging over our head. I felt like the US markets are maybe a little bit overheated and Europe has potential upside. And it seems like others seem to agree with that, but what's happening on the ground? Any specific interesting areas? Southern Europe's still a concern. Maybe you could give us an update. Yeah, so Brexit is quite a dominant conversation. So I am from Ireland. I live in Dublin, but I'm working all over Europe and the Middle East and Africa and the Far East. So I don't get to be at home very often except at weekends. London is really our regional headquarters from a European perspective. And Brexit is on everybody's mind. Interestingly, when you go outside the UK, Brexit is not such a big topic because that's Europe. And they're kind of going, well, they don't want to be here. They don't need to be here, right? So it's a little bit of that. And they're saying, well, we'd like them to stay, but if they don't want to stay, well, don't wait around. But in the UK, it's causing a lot of uncertainty. And the UK is one of our biggest markets. So a lot of uncertainty and what would be best is if we just knew what was going to happen and then we can deal with it. And actually, once we know what's going to happen, that's going to bring a degree of change and change from our industry perspective means there's going to be some requirements that emerge. So we need to be ready to serve those, which is opportunity, opportunity. But the uncertainty is just slowing down investment. So we need that to be resolved. So clarity is obviously a good thing in any market. Okay, are there any hotspots? I mean, is, you know, what's booming? Yeah, actually, we're doing, for us, the hotspots right now, we're doing incredibly well in Germany, which one of our lesser known competitors is a small company called SAP. And they're headquartered, obviously, in Germany. So it's quite interesting to see that we're actually taking a lot of market share in Germany, which is fantastic. That's a little bit unexpected, but it's going very well right now. And we're seeing a ton of activity in Asia-Pacific. I would say that region is probably our fastest growing in all of Info, and consistently so for several quarters and maybe past the year at this point. So Asia-Pacific, Germany, UK. And then as it happens, we are doing very well in Southern Europe, which is a combination of countries, really, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Hard to put it down to which particular country is doing well, but there seems to be a general uplift in that region, because they were hit the hardest, arguably, by the crash back in 2008. So they've definitely come out of that now. And when they come out, excuse me, I'm sorry, John, they come out, Cloud becomes more important to them, right? Yeah, absolutely. So anyone who's been delaying investment for multiple years can actually leapfrog what's been happening and jump straight to what you might call the future. So lots of companies, lots of our customers are now trying to simplify their business. So Cloud is a great equalizer. It says we believe in what we call last mile functionality per industry. And that should make the projects shorter, more compact, more predictable, and the infrastructure worries go away, because that's our responsibility as customers. We definitely saw that in the U.S. 2008, 2009, the CFOs came in and said shift to the Cloud because we want to shift CapEx to OpEx. And then when we came out of the downturn, they said, wow, this stuff actually works pretty well. Double down on it. And then there were other business benefits that they wanted to accelerate. And so maybe Southern Europe was a little bit behind in terms of that adoption. I think that might be the case, right? And what we're seeing is a lot of other advantages, I mean, not to make this a sales pitch, but I am here, so I'll try. Go for it. You've got a microphone. I've got a microphone and I'm Irish, so I have to talk. So what the Cloud is actually doing is, lots of companies have put in big ERP over the years, the decades. And then they get stuck at various points, and maybe years behind, because upgrades become painful and really want to avoid them. So what they're seeing is, if they can get onto the Cloud, they never need to upgrade again, because it's always current, because we upgrade it every week or every month, and they're never falling behind. So they want to be ready to take advantage of the innovations that they know about, and those that they don't even know about. So by keeping on the latest version, that opportunity's open to them. Also, there's a big issue in Europe, specifically about a thing called GDPR, which is data protection, security. So we believe that we can do a better job of providing that than any individual company, because we provide it for everybody, and therefore our resources can be applied once, and then deployed many times, whereas if you're an individual customer, you've got to have that speciality and put it in place. So GDPR is a genuine issue in Europe, because the fines are absolutely huge if a company is found to bridge it. It's become a template for the globe now. I mean, California's moving in that direction, and GDPR has set the framework, really. And just to follow up on that, yeah, because now you're doing a very different regulatory climate than certainly here in the United States, and many U.S. companies are finding that out, as we know, overseas right now. So how do you deal with that in terms of kind of this vulcanized approach that you have to have, that you know that what's working here doesn't necessarily translate to overseas, and plus you're serving many masters, and not just one or two. So what's happening, and what the guys in R&D have done very, very well, is they understand the requirement of, in this instance, GDPR. They look at the other regulatory requirements, let's say, in Australia, which is subtly different, but it is different, and they can take, well, what do we have to do? What's the most extreme we have to achieve? And if we do that across our suite into our platform suite, the Infor OS, that can then be applied to all the applications. And that becomes relevant to the U.S. So it's almost like some requirement across the seas being deployed and becoming very relevant back here, because over here, you do need to be aware of the data protection as well. It's just not as formalized yet, but it is a brewing issue, right? What about Asia-Pacific? So you got responsibility for Japan and China and the rest of the region, which are sort of three distinct... It really are, right? There's several subregions in the one region. And the team down there, as I say, arguably the most successful team in Infor right now. They're doing great. So Helen and the crew. So you see Australia, New Zealand, then you see Southeast Asia, and then you see China, Japan, and so on. So different dynamics in different markets, some more mature than others. Japan is very developed, but very specific, and you do need very specialized local skills to succeed. Arguably, Australia, New Zealand is not that dissimilar from, say, some of the European countries, even though there are differences, and I would never dream to tell an Australian or a New Zealander that they're the same as Europeans, because I get... I smile when people say you're from the UK and you're from Ireland, and so I understand the differentiation. And Southeast Asia, there's a ton of local custom, local language, local business practice that needs to be catered for. But we seem to be doing okay down there. It's, as I say, fastest growing market at scale. It's not like it's growing ridiculously fast but from a small base. It's a big market already and growing the fastest. In China, what's that like? You have to partner up, sort of JV in China? You have to partner up. I mean, there are several of the key growth markets that it's best to go in with partners. Customers like to see we've got a presence so that they can touch and feel the in for entity, but we can't achieve the skill we need and the growth we want fast enough without partnering. So we have to go with partners to give us the resources we need. And in the Middle East, so my business partner co-host John Furrier is on a 20 hour flight to Bahrain, the cube Bahrain. Bahrain was the first country in the Middle East to declare cloud first. AWS is obviously part of that story, the part of your story. So what's going on over there? Is it a growing market? Is it sort of something you're still cracking? No, no, again, it's growing. We have several key market standard. Big and hospitality in that part of the world. I mean hotels, tourism obviously, shopping, very, very interesting markets, and healthcare, interesting enough. I mean, I think arguably some of the world's best hospitals are in that region. Definitely the best funded hospitals. Which is probably the most comfortable. Probably the most comfortable. So again, part of our strength is the number of industries we serve. So if you can put in our platform as it were, then you can have multiple of the industry flavors applied. Because what's interesting in that part of the world, there seem to be a number of, I guess we call them conglomerates. So maybe family owned or region owned. And they have just a different array of businesses all under the one ownership. So you would have a retailer that's also doing some tourism, that's also doing some manufacturing. So if we can put our platform in, and then our industry flavors, they can get one solution to cover it all. Which is a little bit unusual and works for us. Your scope is enormous. I mean, essentially you're the head of non-U.S., right? I mean, exactly. Yeah, and Latin America as well. So that's part of it, that's not. Excluding the Americas. So there's Americas and then everything else, and you're everything else. I missed the meeting you see, so they just gave it to me. Or you raised your hand at the wrong time. I wasn't there. So how do you organize to be successful, right? You obviously have to have strong people in the region. So the key is people, right? So we organize somewhat differently to over here. So we've gone for a regional model. So I have six sub-regions that I worry about. So four in Europe, the Nordic countries, Scandinavia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark. We call Western, which is Ireland, UK, and the Benelux. Germany is central and east, and then Southern is the Latin country, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, and so on. And then we've got Middle East and Africa, and then we've got Asia Pacific. So I've got six regional teams, all headed by a regional leader. And each of them are trying to be as self-contained as they can. And where we see we've got an opportunity to move into something new, we bring in one team working with me directly as an incubator. For example, we're driving a specific focus on healthcare in our part of the world, because it's very big over here. We haven't quite cracked the code over there. When we get some scale, then it'll move into the regions. But for now, that's incubating under me. And what about in country? Do you have country managers in one in UK, one in France, one in Germany? We have what we call local leaders. So, and in some cases, there can be a sales oriented individual, others it can be consulting, others it can be the local HR guy. So that's more for us to make sure we're building a sense of community within in for, rather than it being more customer facing. So because we're still trying to make sure that there's a reasonably scarcity of senior skills. So regionalizing let us deploy across several countries. And that works with the customer base, but for employees, we need local leaders to give them a sense of feeling home and attached. So okay, so the regions are kind of expertise centers, if you will. So I was going to ask about product expertise. Where does that come from? Is that it's not parachuted in from the US, I presume? No, we have a, no, we're pretty much self-sufficient actually, which is great. So from both what we call solution consulting, which is the product expertise, and then consulting, which is the project deployment. And we're doing more and more of our deployments with partners. As I say, we need to really rapidly embrace that partner ecosystem to give us the growth opportunity. R&D is all over the world. So and that's not under my direct control. So for a major suites, take for example, LN, happens to be headquartered out of Barnabelle in the Netherlands from a historic perspective, which is great. M3, Stockholm, which is also great. But lots of the development resources are in Manila and in India, right? So we work closely with the guys, even though they don't actually report to me. And out of the whole area, the areas of your responsibility, what's the best growth opportunity? We all think about China, right? And that opportunity, but that's been fits and starts for a lot of people. Yeah, I think we've got multiple opportunities. There's looking at it in a few ways. You can look at geographically and USA-China. You could look at Eastern Europe and you could look at Africa. There's a ton of opportunity in those regions geographically. Interestingly, we're also at a point where I think the Nordics, we've got a very solid base historically and so on, but we haven't probably put enough focus on there in recent times that the opportunity to really scale the Nordics is quite significant. And then they can look at it from a product perspective. So for example, we have what we believe to be world-leading and actually, a company called Gartner would equally agree with us, Enterprise Asset Management, EAM. That's a product suite that can fit across all of our industries. And I think that could well be the significant growth area for us across the entire six regions. And it's a huge focus here at the conference actually. So we can do it by product, so EAM, healthcare, or by region. I think Eastern Europe, China and Africa, as well as the Nordics. One of the other big opportunities is just share gains. Market share gains, particularly in Europe, I would think, with your background and... Not completely, I mean, that's what I said. It's really interesting that we're actually winning market share in Germany, right? So who would have thought that a few years ago? So that's a big market. I mean, Germany, UK, France, Italy, they're huge, right? I mean, UK is what, 65 million people. It's a big economy. So we've got many of the world's G7 in our backyard. So we just need to really double down on those and give them the opportunities to grow that we need. And just back to Japan for a second. Japan has traction. I mean, it takes a long time to crack Japan. I know it from personal experiences, but yeah, you just got to go many, many times and meet people. That's it, right? And it's a different culture of when you think they're saying yes and you think you're there and that's just yes to the next step. All right, so it does take a while to get there. We have actually cracked it to some extent that we've now got some solid responsibility and some good wins. But we need local leaders in Japan to really crack the code there. And then once you're in, you're in. I think that once you become, you've proven yourself, then it's a lot of word of mouth and reference selling. So that's going to work for us. I hope you get home this weekend. Are you headed home? Yes, actually, but I'm lucky enough, my wife is originally from Chicago. So she and our daughter has come over for the weekend to go sightseeing in Washington. So that'll be fun. So we go home on Sunday. You're adopted home for the weekend. That's exactly right. We'll talk again in just a bit. Thanks for the time that we appreciate it. Thank you, gentlemen. Good to see you. Thank you, all right. Back with more here from Inform 2018 and you're watching live on theCUBE here in DC.