 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. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Javits Center in New York City. This is theCUBE's production of Inforum 2016, Infor's user conference, about 14,000 people here. Quite a show. Infor does its user conferences every two years. The last time we covered Infor was in 2014 in the awesome city of New Orleans. And so they have this two-year cadence, and what they do is essentially bring back their customers every couple of years. They invest in new innovations and they've begun unveiling those. What we heard two years ago was this shift to the cloud and this notion of no custom modifications in the cloud, going the last mile, focusing on industry specificity, bringing in beautiful design. Infor purchased a company several years ago called Hook and Loop, a New York design firm. You're going to hear more about those folks today. And Infor is a collection of companies that's been around for quite some time, decade plus. Sort of a collection and roll-up of different companies, including the likes of Lawson Software and McCormick and Dodge and other legacy software companies, and what they've done is they've completely reinvented the company, shifting to SaaS, building on top of AWS, bringing in beautiful design, focusing on industry specificity, eliminating custom modifications. A whole new philosophy that Charles Phillips and his team has brought to Infor, I'm here with George Gilbert. George, you used to cover a lot of these companies back in the day as a securities analyst, and it's amazing to see this collection of companies coming together and now we just heard the keynotes this morning. Give us your take on what you heard. Well, at a top level, keying off what you were talking about, it's extremely rare in the software industry history for a financial buyer to take a bunch of software companies, roll them up, and then modernize and renovate them for growth. Generally, a financial buyer takes these software companies and essentially shuts down or puts R&D on life support and then basically milks the maintenance revenue to pay down the debt and make it a profitable transaction. But Charles has totally changed the playbook and from when he came in, he started renovating the platform. And the most interesting thing is, when he was at Oracle, they started renovating their platform for a migration to cloud in about 2003, 2004. And Charles came here at the end of two of... Which cloud wasn't even really a term back then, right? But on demand. But Charles came here essentially six years later and usually these middle tier companies have difficulty in matching the majors because they don't have the internal skills for that sort of rearchitecture. But what happened is the capabilities that platform providers like AWS and that software tools makers like Microsoft sort of lifted the mainstream developer, those at Law Center, McCormick and Dodge, so that they could build these new applications with the same skills that an Oracle had brought to bear starting seven years earlier. In other words, it was a benefit to start seven years later because they could get caught up quicker. So the challenge this company has obviously is moving that legacy install base, moving that customer install base to the new modern platform. One of the things they did that I think is smart and unique from a lot of the other SaaS companies is they said, we don't want to run the plumbing. We're going to run everything on top of AWS and the public cloud. Whereas if you look at some of the popular SaaS companies, clearly Oracle is trying to own the entire stack, you're certainly seeing that with Microsoft. You're seeing that obviously with companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow owning their own data centers. So it gives them agility. It gives them greater time to market speed, maybe not as much margin, but a lot less headaches and the ability to move much more quickly. This is about a $3 billion software company. George, we're talking about maybe mid to high 20s in EBITDA margin, non-gap changes when you. But with a fair amount of debt, largely funded by Golden Gate Capital, but to your point, unique in the sense that normally what private equity will do is they'll suck the company dry. That's not happening here. That was the model of CA and in fact, some people thought the model of Oracle as they bought all those legacy apps. It turned out to not be the case with Oracle. They're clearly investing on R&D. But you're seeing investment here. A lot of talk about pre-IPO, but no rush to get to IPO. Charles is in no rush. Clearly the management team is patient. There's patient capital. Everybody seems to be making money. And they're investing. And there's acquisition capital. And there's acquisition capital. GT Nexus, 675 million. And Predictix and Retail was a recent acquisition. So you're seeing a lot of discussion from Charles Phillips. We heard him on Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago talking about big data, talking about analytics. They announced today in for IoT, making another number of other announcements digital as a service. So Hook and Loop is a company that New York based firm that in for about several years ago exclusively for its internal purposes to make its software designs beautiful. Now they're pointing that to external customers providing digital as a service as part of this digital transformation. We heard Stefan talk about the president of Infor talk about the whole digital transformation Duncan and Gove as well. And so, yeah, I mean, pretty refreshing. I mean, a large contingent here much larger than I think last time maybe 50% larger than what we saw in New Orleans. And another factor that really surprised me in addition to the sort of energy level and the growth amounts that you're talking about in terms of people at the conference, their strategy for moving to the cloud is really kind of clever, which is the further back in the core of the applications that you go, the more rooted almost in concrete they are to where they've originally been deployed. So, what Chuck, Charles and the team are building is taking the first surface apps and putting them on the cloud. Those are at least sticky. And then so those might be the employee management, you know, part of human capital management. Your benefits admin or it might be the customer omni-channel experience. And then there's CRM and then there's ERP and then there's the industry specific stuff which is hardest to move. In other words, rather than a forklift move of the whole suite they're doing it in a very clever, prioritized way which again helps them catch up against someone like an SAP which said we're going to move all of ERP all at once starting from the back end since that's the most mission critical app. And you know, SAP has been doing this in fits and starts now for a decade. So taking in snackable bites, Info releases pretty significant financial detail for a private company, presumably that's because it's got some public debt so it has to devolve certain levels and it's sort of pre-IPO. But you're talking about a company that's growing close to 10% in overall revenues, it's licensed revenues and it's subscription revenues are growing much, much faster in the mid-20s. So as a private company they can sort of semi anyway write their own narrative. A lot of the companies you're seeing struggling to sort of shift to that cloud model. Obviously Oracle focuses on its great cloud business and it has to shine a light on the growth of cloud because the rest of the businesses sort of flatter and decline. Info can, like Michael Dell with Dell, no 90 day shot clock so it can write its own narrative. And that narrative by all accounts however seems pretty positive. We're going to unpack that with customers today. We've got a number of end customers coming on, in for executives, folks from Hook and Loop. And so this is Cube, we're here live, Silicon Angles flagship production in New York City. We'll be right back after this short break.