 Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum 2016, brought to you by Inforum. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. Welcome back to day two, everybody. Day two of the Inforum 2016 conference. We're here at the Javits Center. The deal architect is here, Vinnie Merchandani. George and I are really pleased to have Vinnie on. Vinnie, it's always great to see you. I'm the author of many, many books, The New Polymath, SAP Nation, The New Tech Elite. Congratulations, you're cranking these things out like crazy. It's always a pleasure. Good to see you. Same here, David. I seem to come here every time I have a new book. So thank you for having me and George. Great to see you again. And I just got to say on the title of the book of, I'm not sure if it was the most recent one, I'm a few behind, but the deal architect is, sounds like you co-authored it with Donald Trump. So it's going to be the best selling business book of all time. Even at the Bible. I don't want to touch that. Yeah, so tell us about the new book. What's the title? What's it about? What's the premise? Yeah, so Dave, it is called Silicon Collar. Sorry, Silicon? Collar. Collar, okay. My premise is, we're no longer blue collar, white collar, brown collar workers, we're all silicon collar workers because technology is becoming an integral part of our jobs. So the book has three themes. One is, I interviewed about 50 different organizations and I'll come back to that in a minute about how the nature of job is changing in their businesses, right? Very optimistic, I'll talk about that a little bit. The second part of the book is about all the pessimism around machines taking over jobs, you know, kind of the dystopian view of jobless futures. And the third is on, we keep blaming machines. Us humans have screwed up the labor economy quite a bit. So I analyzed the labor economy, some of the trillions in student debt, on the other hand, aging workers without enough pensions. There's a lot of issues with the labor economy that have nothing to do with machines. Us humans have done a great job screwing it up. But let me talk about the first part, the really exciting part of the book was, I interviewed everyone from the Golden State Warriors to how the job of the basketball player and the coaches changing with all the new data and all the new wearable skins they have and so on to BP on how they're using robotic crawlers in their rigs and drones in their remote pipeline monitoring to KPMG in terms of how the public accounting job is changing to an advertising agency here in New York on how digital is changing the nature of advertising to shop floor, I mean, they're 50, I touched on them. So every industry in doing the research. So Kevin Durant obviously has a silicon collar. I'm not coming to the Golden State Warriors. But Vinny, haven't machines always replaced humans, physical labor, you know, automation? What's new about that? So, you know, I call it the three days. If it's dull, dirty or dangerous a task, as a society we want that to be automated. We want workers to keep evolving into more creative, you know, more innovative stuff. That's been happening, like you say, for a long, long time. Problem is, some of us cling to those 3D jobs rather than saying, hey, this is going to be replaced. And, you know, so a little bit of a transition. What's the third D, dull, dirty and dangerous? Dangerous. Okay. The other thing is we, because the rate of technology is growing so fast, we've gotten into this very pessimistic mood that, oh my God, machine learning is evolving so quickly and drones are evolving so quickly, they're going to replace us all. And that's where I had to do my historical analysis. I went and looked at the grocery business. I looked at UPC courts. UPC courts were patented in 1952. They didn't get commercialized till 75. When they got commercialized, they didn't kill grocery jobs, they made inventory control better. So actually increase the number of skews and increase the number of grocery jobs. I went back and looked at the automobile industry, how that's evolved. Machines have been taken over and driving since 1958. Chrysler introduced cruise control in 1958. LiDAR has been available from Mitsubishi since 1992, right? DARPA had driverless cars competition in 2004. So they've been evolving for a while and what I find over and over again is we tend to react, oh my God, it's coming now. And it takes 15, 20, 50 years for automation to really dramatically impact jobs. So I know George, you want to jump in, but people would say, but Vinny, for the first time now, machines are replacing humans in cognitive tasks. And that's where you get a lot of the fear about people losing their jobs, whether it's dealing with the kiosk at the airline or billboards now are all automated. All these cognitive tasks are now being replaced. Self-driving cars you talk about. And they'll argue that there's this dumbbell effect of the middle class getting hollowed out. They're super wealthy, guys like us are doing really well. And then the guys doing low level jobs are doing okay and the middle's getting hollowed out. Why are you- Not all my research, sure. So what does your research show and why do you remain optimistic? Well, so let's take the cognitive part, right? AI, artificial intelligence and now machine learning, deep learning, whatever you want to call it, has been evolving since the Turing test in 1950. Every five years we come along and say, oh, machines are finally going to cross the Turing test. Now we're talking about Amazon Echo being finally there. It's not, it's not, right? So us technologists tend to hype up stuff a little bit sooner than we should. That's one. I have a chapter called Circuit Breakers to Over Automation. And one of the circuit breakers is technology hype cycle. We tend to over hype stuff. You know, Elon Musk says you should be able to summon a car from New York to California in two years. Well, it's not just a technology. He doesn't take into account that. Our lane markets are consistent. Our laws haven't evolved. It's going to take decades for that to be possible, right? So we tend to over hype. That's one. Second thing we don't factor is incumbent interests don't exactly roll over. The accounting firms, for example, that particular sector, they could have automated a long time ago. The business model is predicated on younger workers, pyramids and so on. They're not about to change just because automation makes sense, right? You've got bell curves of adoption, which, you know, if you look at, if you look at Jeffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, every one of us technologists focuses on crossing the chasm. But that's on the left side of the bell curve. The right side of the bell curve takes decades to evolve. So I've looked at a number of industries where the data that I've found is shocking because you look at e-books. You know, we would have said 30 years ago, everyone would be buying e-books. 70% of books are still physical. Manual transmission, manual transmission. 47% of the cars sold around the world are still manual transmission. Even though none of our kids know how to drive a standard. I was going to say some of us like them and special order them. So George, we're up against the clock. So jump in. We want to talk a little bit about the software business. I did, since Vinny is a, I think that the term is eminence grease, like a wise old man of the business. Hey, who are you calling gold? To say. So we go back to the era when, you know, PeopleSoft and SAP were the dial- Now you're showing your age. Yeah, I know. But the transition, so PeopleSoft got absorbed into the board. SAP started a rewrite for configurability by design that sort of conflicted with the need for cloud delivery and low cost. Then they did the in-memory database and now are doing a rewrite ground up. And they're starting apparently from the core of the financials and moving out. Why are they having difficulty? Well, can we talk about in-four first? Since we're here? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, sorry. There are three or four things that in-four is doing that is very different from the other ERP players, which I really like. One is, I've been saying for a while, ERP has been very, very manufacturing centric. There's a lot of other industries, utilities, services, banking, and so on, that have similar needs. So in-four is probably the most assertive in terms of verticalizing. If you look at, they have a retail offering, they have a healthcare offering, they have a hospitality offering. So it's good to see them lead into different verticals. The second thing they've done differently is, even though they're moving to the cloud, they made a very smart decision to say, why compete with Amazon for infrastructure? Why am I investing in infrastructure? Charles, a couple of years ago said, I heard him say, friends don't let friends build data centers, right? A third thing that- I guess he and Larry aren't good friends anymore. The third thing that in-four has done differently is, they're not afraid to invest in services. So they have a digital agency called Hook and Love Loop, they have a set of data scientists in Cambridge. They're not afraid to invest in data. A lot of other software vendors will go. Even though they have people, they tend to be a little wary about talking about it. In-four has been fairly open about saying, people are important in the overall equation. So- A little different than you're used to. Vinny, I'm sorry, the trains are backing up, we got to jump, but thanks so much for stopping by. Sharing with us your new book and congratulations. Thank you. And good luck with it. All right, always a pleasure. I'll keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guests right after this short break.