 Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. We are back with theCUBE's coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Bariq Seraj and Nasser Byram. They are both of the Zahid group out of Saudi Arabia. Thank you both so much for coming. Good to be here. Thank you for having us. So I want you to start out by just explaining to our viewers a little bit about what Zahid group and Zahid tractor, what you do. We are a large group based in Saudi Arabia. We're very diversified. We are mainly in the heavy equipment, capital equipment business. We are the importer of caterpillar machinery and Volvo trucks, the Note trucks, and many other products, more than 40 franchises. We have locations in more than 40 locations, or branches, more than 40 locations in Saudi Arabia. And we have about 4,000 employees. We mainly focus on providing sales and after sales services in the kingdom. We're the big focus on after sales. We pride ourselves to be the second to not only come down to after sales services. And we strongly believe in technology and in the digital transformation that is sweeping the world of business. And that's why we embarked on this journey five years ago. So what does that digital transformation mean for your business and then generally and then specifically for IT? Maybe you can start. Well, first we have to agree. The business model has changed. There are new business model that has disrupted every single industry landscape out there. And you have to be ready to change and accept that transformation. Otherwise you'll be left behind. The digital transformation takes you beyond managing an organization, introducing an IT platform or technology. You have to change the way you think and your readiness to be able to manage where the future is going. If we look, we just attended a session, 52% of Fortune 500 companies in year 2000 no longer exist, they went out of business. In 2015, 55% of Fortune 500 companies lost money. There was no economic crisis or downturn. They simply miss a boat. Or they were not very innovative in their digital strategy or thinking ahead, allowing their industry to be disrupted by people like Uber, Amazon, Alibaba, Sook and other new entrants with very great innovative ideas and technologies. The old business model of cutting costs or restructuring an organization no longer works. You need to think differently and act differently. And hence the digital transformation becomes critical for your organization and implementing an ERP platform, standardizing and rationalization of your ERP platforms. If you have more than one, like in our case we have more than one. You have to have one standardized platform, one standardized processes, business processes, so that you have one source of data in order to be ready for the future where you can mine that data, have it be by analytics or business intelligence in order to be able to better serve your customers in learning about their behavior, about their trends, and how you can better position products and services for them in the future to buy and for you to remain profitable. So Bar, okay, so now that's what NASA just described. I'm inferring is much more real time, much faster, more data. Your ability to analyze that data wherever it is, and the processes and people behind that, as we talked about, technology's the easy part, even though technology's even more complicated than ever. So what does that mean for the IT organization? Well for IT organization we had, and we still have a legacy application built over 30 years. Now, and we could not reap the benefits of the data mining, the standardization, even the artificial AI capabilities on top of that. We cannot reap that until we have that standardized ERP platform across all our companies. So basically that's the total order that was put on our plate. And what we have done, we started the journey where partly through it, we went live with two of our companies, we still have three more to go. And we've done it with lesser volume, allowing us to learn, and therefore, once we reach our biggest volume company, we would have learned as an organization, not just applying the technology, but even the personnel, the change management, the resistant pockets, how to deal with all of that. Can you give an example of what you've learned along the way, because I mean, as we said, it is so much about change management, and it's about getting people over this fear of change. Can you give an example of what you've learned and what you're doing differently for the companies that have yet to have the rollout? The biggest learning experience we had, we just went live with one of our companies called EJAR, which is a rental company. The success there, the success is the learning experience. We have a long journey to go live with five companies, and this is the first one to go live. What we learned by doing that company first is the challenges of change management, how to support the online challenge of data migration, data cleansing, readiness of the organization, not simply from change management perspective, but also from IT, legal, readiness of documentation, contracts, et cetera. It's a vast learning curve to overcome, and we're very happy that we took the strategic decision to go live with one small company so that we gained that experience, and that is the real success we got out of this project now. Now we feel we are in a better position for the new companies to go forward with when we go live, we learned so much about change management, where we failed and where we succeeded. We learned better about our readiness, whether it is Zaha Tractor, or M4, or our IT, our infrastructure, our training program, our after-go live support, the whole room was set up to support the go live, and go on production. We've been two months in production. We're still having some challenges, but nothing that are no-show stoppers. However, more and more every day we learn more and more, and we are in a better position to go live with the big bang on the big company. Now, sir, is the executive in sort of leading this transformation, do you look for and demand new metrics, new types of KPIs that you want to see? Well, definitely, you do the whole thing because of the new metrics, and the new metrics have to have built into it, not simply the traditional KPIs of your GPs and revenue and discount, and so on, need to look at customer behavior, customer analytics, pricing, positioning, where you are going forward. In the old days, everybody would sit down around the table and say, hey, we're number one, okay? That doesn't hold water anymore. You're number one and what? It's about number one, and responding to customer requirements and customer behavior. Today with Amazon.com, many retail businesses are challenged. They're going out of business. How do you stop that business model? You can't. So how do you compete? You can't. To do that, you have to have the right data in place, the right organization in place, and the right mindset, to be able to lead your organization to compete in the new market space. Can you give our viewers some examples of the kind of data that you are deriving in terms of this business analytics, in terms of understanding and deepening your understanding of customer behavior and what customers want, and how it's changing, how you approach your customers and what you do for them? I'll give you a comparison. When you have a legacy system, what you do at the end of the day, you extract your data, you transform it, and you load it up to your data mart or data warehouse, and then you run your report. And if you're lucky, you have savvy users who can create their own reports on the fly. But with the way we're going, with an integrated ERP solution and one standardized platform, we do hope we have the right analytics in place and business intelligence in place that we give our management the right data to make decisions, ready to make decisions. Not filtered data, not reports designed. And that takes me straight into your question on IT and ability to IT to deliver. There is no way for any IT organization to cope with the changes. Nowadays, when Amazon went live, recently with Whole Foods, it took them three to four months to deal with legal, to deal with retail, with pricing, with the announcement, the whole nine years of marketing, how did they have their IT ready? That's a challenge. How can you do that in four to six months? That is a challenge in the future. If you don't have the right platform to do that, you will never be able to compete. And data analytics are critical for you to respond or predict the behavior of your customer. So before a customer comes next time to the counter, you already have certain statistics that tell you what that person is ready for. And that takes you straight also into IoT. Your products or our products now are connected to the internet. If you don't have IoT in place, connected to your back end and your analytics, you won't be able to compete. And that would be the differentiator in the future. Those who could do that, versus those who will continue to follow the old brick and mortar business model, restructuring and cross-cutting and whatnot. So you're instrumenting your heavy equipment in the field. Oh yeah. Presumably. I mean that's you well down the road of that. That changes the data model. It changes the analytics model. So I wonder if you could describe that a little bit. I mean, are you, obviously you're processing data at the edge. How much data stays at the edge versus comes back to your central location. Maybe you could add some color to that whole equation. Well the devices that are put on the machines, there are several ways of putting the older models. You have actually the PSSR has to actually go with this laptop, hook it up, suck the data and bring it back for analytics. The newer models are sending it directly to us. And enabling our, what are called, power to do equipment monitoring. And be able to anticipate and call up the customer and saying, by the way, actually tell the salesman to call up the customer and saying, you need to bring their machine in because you might face a failure in a amount of time. So improving the customer side, that is that part. But on coming back to your organization change issue, we went from a legacy application that the branch managers waited until the end of the month to get the truth. To now being able to see the performance on a daily basis. Because they're seeing the truth because everything is connected. Whereas before whatever they did, they don't, the piece of the puzzle they have a lot of missing. And the information that they waited until they show sent them back their reports. None of this takes place in the public cloud, is that right? No, it does, to add to that. The data is stored in the cloud. Customers have access to it. Along with our SOS lab, which is the oil sampling lab, they have access to the data to see what is happening like predictive analysis of their machine performance. And as a result of analyzing the oil, plus any data collected from these machines. We do have cloud implementation. We just went live with our treasuring management system. It is on the cloud and it was our first deployment on the cloud, though the implementation of Info today is still on premise. Long term down the road, we may be looking at the cloud. I got to ask you, we hear the informed messaging about micro specialization that last mile, the hard stuff that nobody else wants to do. Is that something that you take advantage of in your industry, or is it? I'll give you an example. We utilized the implementation accelerator from Info for the rental. And it's 77% of our processes map directly into that. So that enabled us to have EJAR, which is our rental company, go much smoother. Now, we're working with Info to enhance their equipment implementation accelerator. And it'll be part of the same ratio, around 70% of the processes that we're going to go live with are the standard processes in the product out of the box. For the equipment, for the equipment business basis. Our objective is to reduce customization as much as possible and go out of the box, or native out of the box as much as possible. But you have to accept the fact, depending on your business environment and some localization requirement, you have to do some customization. However, we do have a governance in place to make sure it's to the minimal. Otherwise, long term, you'll be challenged with release management and change management and so on. And when you speak of the cloud, if you ever elect to go to the cloud, you can kiss customization goodbye. You have to be ready to adopt and adapt. And how about your security regime, as a result of the Edge and IoT and our cloud? How is that evolving? That's close to my heart. Yeah, I bet. And probably the boards. Actually, interesting enough, many organizations like ourselves included, we invested so much money in building firewalls and security systems to protect what's behind the wall. Now, with the cloud, your most important data is no longer behind the wall. It's outside the wall. So you have to have some kind of a hybrid security system and you really have to pick the right partner who is hosting your cloud application or leasing your cloud application to you because the challenge or the perspective of security, cybersecurity changes drastically and totally and your understanding of it has to change. Otherwise, you guys stay behind your own wall and guess what? You can end up locking yourself behind the wall and going to miss the boat. But this does not mean that you let down your guard. You have to maintain your security awareness. You have to maintain your security diligence and you should not underestimate the threats out there because even if you are on the cloud, the biggest threat to nowadays is through phishing. And that's what we call the human firewall. Religating the right awareness and right education to your organization from within to understand the threats and the danger of such a threat. Otherwise, your password, that's how you access the cloud, you'll either become compromised and guess what? So it will be your data. Okay, so Farig Nasir, thank you so much for joining us. It's been great to have you on the program. Our pleasure. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Inforum after this.