 Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Inforum. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Pam Murphy. She is the Inforur COO. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So you're hosting for the third time a special session devoted to when the women's Infor network. Tell us a little bit about this session and who are the guests and what we can expect. Yes, absolutely. So when we, as you said, it's our third year hosting it. It's a very popular session. It's the only non-product session of the entire conference and open to everybody, men and women. We always have a fantastic lineup of speakers and this year is no different. So the way we work it is we do a combination of TED Talks and panel sessions. So we've got Tonli, who's the founder of Emotiv, Brain Augmentation Technology, and then we've got Reshma Sujani, who's the founder of Girls Who Code. She's done great stuff in terms of pioneering STEM and getting girls to code. So she's going to talk us through her work, if you will, in training so many girls to code and how she wants girls to adopt and behavior she wants them to exhibit in this industry. And then we've got what will be, I'm sure, a lively panel with Ambassador Susan Rice and Farah Pandith. And we're going to be talking about the government's ability to manage, I guess, the terrorism that we're seeing today. And we're going to be talking counter-terrorism. We're going to be talking about what lessons are we learning from what's going on in Europe and what is the role in technology in helping curb terrorism. So that's going to be an exciting and interesting session. And then we're going to have Dr. Jill Biden come in and hopefully lighten up the session and talk about resilience and leadership today. So very exciting, very much looking forward to it. It's 11 a.m. tomorrow morning in the special events hall. And hopefully it will be good, if not better than the last two years. And we're going to have many of those guests on our program after that, too. So why, what is the purpose of it? I mean, it sounds like a great session and it's going to be enlightening and exciting to hear all those women talk. But what is your goal in gathering this group of women? Well, I guess I should go back to the founding of Wynn. So I started Wynn probably over four or five years ago at this point. And its purpose was to just galvanize and bring women together, allow a forum in which they could mentor each other and where we could work in the advancement of women within the organization. It's something that, I guess, as I travel through the offices, people have been asking me a lot to create that forum, create that environment. And so we've got hundreds of Wynn chapters around the globe with thousands of women participating. So we have very regular sessions and we talk about topics that are relevant to women and also just about advancing their careers. And given that, you know, at a forum, we have so many thousands and thousands of not only our own in for Wynn members, but also customers. We just thought it was a great opportunity to have one of our sessions at a forum and invite inspiring female speakers to come and talk to us about their experiences, how they got to be where they are, the challenges that they met along the way. So what's interesting is that the only Wynn or female aspect of the session is the fact that every speaker on stage is female. Outside of that, that's where, you know, the relevance ends in the sense that it really is talking to topics that is applicable to everyone. So that's why it is, you know, just a topic in an audience that appeals to everybody, you know, men, female, you know, old and young. So these sessions are always, you know, interesting and inspiring. What kind of impact have they had? Can you share with us any results? Absolutely. So we have, you know, first of all, very inspirational for everybody attending. And I've had customers, not only our own employees, but I've had customers reach out to me and say that they were inspired by a story and it caused them to take action and change in their life. And, you know, before they may have felt something, but they heard from somebody else saying how they overcame it. And it caused them to honestly take change within their own lives and their own organization. So, you know, for customers, partners, whoever's attending, it just, to hear from someone else, some, you know, you often have the perception with these speakers that they had this fantastic upbringing, fantastic education, they're successful because it's a function of that. Well, actually, that's not often the case. You know, people have had a hard upbringing or they've met a lot of challenges around the way and it's how they overcame those challenges and the resilience that they brought into the mix is what inspires people. So really, that's what I would say people, you know, get out of it. And, you know, often sparring from that, we often end up as well, you know, tailoring kind of programs or development techniques which, you know, we feel would be a benefit to folks, you know, beyond that. So, one of our speakers last year, you know, prompted a big thought about diversity and how we should be dealing with ways in which we may be dismissive of certain topics or abrasive to people. So, it's thought provoking and it inspires action which is obviously what we want to get out of it. We funded a non-profit initiative last year and partnered with another journalism outfit, The Ground Truth, to study women in tech and we presented at the, we had theCUBE at the Grace Hopper Conference and some of the things that came out of that, I wonder if you could comment. Chief data officers actually have a higher, disproportionately higher percentage of women. Maybe it's because it's such a thankless job that they're going to take it on. And then we found cyber bullying had a very negative effect on the participation of women in tech which is about 17% of the women and then of course the salary disparity. One of the areas that we found was most egregious was Cambridge Mass. Now this is supposed to be a progressive, relatively liberal area. And it was huge, our hometown, very high disparity of, you know, low participation of women in tech. Any thoughts on sort of that data and what kind of progress you'd like to see us make as an industry? I mean, I'm hopeful and I'm hopeful of the fact that the next generation will look back and wear technologies now from the perspective of the low representation of women than that whole diversity factor and look on it as being a non-issue. I'm hopeful in the sense that I don't think it's going to be as pronounced as we have it now. I think we're doing a far better job of going out to colleges, to institutions and enabling girls and providing girls with coding courses. So I'm kind of hoping it's not going to be, you know, a long-term issue for us. From our perspective, you know, we, you know, to your point, we look at the various line of businesses and functions within our organization. We see where is the disparity arising and where do we need to focus. And so interestingly enough, if you look at GNA functions or if you look at marketing functions, you know, it's 50-50, right, in terms of representation, but there's definitely certain functions where either the nature of what they're doing or if it's a high travel-related function, meaning you're away for long periods of time, they're certainly the areas, I think, which don't have as equal distribution in terms of men. And for those really, you know, we've been working on creating programs to ease those burdens that maybe had or else promote them positively where it literally is an unconscious bias, if you will. It's a long topic, you know, for sure, that, you know, I could go on about for a long period of time, but I just think it's constant, you know, looking at unconscious biases. It's looking at, you know, ways in which we feel that there's fairness, if you will, into the equation. And a lot of the time, I honestly feel that it's not conscious, if you will, and it therefore just needs to be, you know, looked at specifically at ways and means in which that could be addressed or tackled. So as a successful woman in technology, COO at a major technology company, what advice do you have for that young woman who wants to get into technology, but is dispirited by the headlines and by what appears to be a very macho culture where there is vast salinity and discrepancies? It's unfortunate that that has come out all too much more frequently and with volume in the last six months for the companies that we were aware of, but I would say, you know, I personally haven't experienced that, and I'm personally of the view that, by the way, I never meant to end up in this industry, so I look back and think, how on earth did I actually get here? But I think you have to be willing to take risks, and you have to be willing to, you know, dismiss a lot of what you hear, and look on the fact that there is a lot of very successful women, I mean, even within Infor, since we started Win, we have had a huge increase in the amount of SVPs and VPs within our organization. I think it's something like a 60% increase in terms of who we have. I mean, there is so much more, you know, women in very, very senior roles now than we've ever had before. So I'm hopeful that it is changing. I hope that some recent coverage and recent events have not, you know, will not create a long-term impact, but I think people just need to look and see, you know, with the tech industry booming, with the way in which people are being compensated, that it's a good industry in which you can be very successful and do great things. Well, and cloud helps. Yeah. It does. There are far more women at application-oriented shows than there are infrastructure-oriented shows. Hardware guys are hardware guys. You know, I don't know why, like mechanics, other than Mona Lisa Vito, or mostly hardware people, but let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the global alliances. You are running in that initiative here. These are folks that we haven't typically seen at Inforum, but they're kind of coming out of the woodworks. What's going on? What's driving that? Yeah, I mean, first of all, we have a fantastic base of existing partners who have, you know, had great successes in implementing Infor applications for their customers. And so, but with the growth that we've been seeing, honestly, in our business over the last number of years, we just need to have more and more delivery capacity to create more choice for our customers as to who they can go to to implement our software. And if you think about the move to the cloud, and if you think about digitalization and the fact that every customer is becoming more consumed and obsessed with technology because it's changing their businesses so fundamentally, they do want the option and the choice of having the large global system integrators, digital integrators that they can go to do massive transformation work and business process re-engineering and program management and change management. And so for us, it was important to form good reliances with the Deloites, the Accentures, the Caps and the Grand Hortons in order to provide that larger ecosystem of transformational services that we can offer to our customers. So it's great, they're all Platinum sponsors here at Inforum this year, and there's over 100 very senior executives and managing directors from those four. And we're just very excited about the extent and pace to which they're building out in for practices. So it's great. I have to ask you, so don't hate me for saying this, but those guys love to pig out on big complicated ERP implementations that take two and three years. Is that world just going away and it's moving toward more of a digital transformation and a whole new line of thinking and that's why there's a good fit within for or is it something else? I think they understand and know that the older days of a company spending $100 million on an ERP implementation are gone. That's really not acceptable anymore. It's absolutely not our strategy. I mean, as you know from being here at the conference our strategy is around creating industry specific end-to-end suites which don't require modifications and which are purpose-built for the cloud. So that is very clear to them and they understand that and are embracing the concept because they realize that cloud is an enabler. It's just another deployment method, but fundamentally it's about helping the customers take advantage of that technology and transform their businesses. And to do that, it requires a lot more than software. And so they're changing. Our industry is changing. Steve talked to the point on this stage today that the cost of technology is becoming very low and that therefore the permeation of technology and everything we do is going to be so prevalent. So it's understood and for them, it's more about helping our customers get to that digital age and being able to transform their businesses to cope with the changing technology. Are you satisfied with the pace? Of the change, of getting people to the cloud. I mean, do you feel there is the momentum there? Well, we've seen huge growth in our sector. I mean, we have completely tipped the balances. I would have said, I mean, there obviously has been companies like Salesforce.com and companies who basically do certain applications in the cloud. And for us, we're different because we have complete end-to-end suites in the cloud, mission-critical applications. And so our business has grown enormously over the course of the last three years. And I think now it's mainstream, if you will. And so we're very pleased and happy. We have a lot of customers who have made, obviously we have over 8,400 customers now already there and the pace is increasing. And it's just a continuous effort for the customers who haven't gone already helping them understand what they need to do to get there. And that's what we've been doing in space for the last couple of years. Great, well Pam Murphy, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's coverage of Inforum 2017, just after this.