 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. Well, back here on theCUBE we are at Inforum 18, we're in Washington DC, here in the Walter Washington Convention Center, not far from the White House, it's about a mile that way, and Capitol Hill's about a mile that way, I think. I know we're right in here, but I know we are smack dab in the middle of it, Dave Vellante and John Walls, and Kevin Curry, who's the SVP of the Global Public Sector at Infor, good to have you with us. Great to be here, thanks for your time. So, public sector, you're in the heart of it here, and you were telling us before we went on the air that you've got more than 700 clients here at the show. We do, we do, it's the best attendance we've had yet for Inforum, and I joined about six and a half years ago, and we built this business pretty much from the ground up, so it's been a great experience, and now we're starting to get a lot of adoption within the government, across the government, from federal to state to locals. Yeah, what's that process been like, especially across those three, because I assume they're all different, local, state, federal, everybody has different pain points. They do, they do, and there's different micro verticals within each of those statements. As an example, if you look at local governments, it could be anything from transit agencies, to K-12 schools, to public works, and then to police, to fire, they all have all different requirements. States the same thing, whether it's Department of Transportation or Department of Health and Human Services, and then when you get to the federal side of it, then it's from the intelligence community to the Department of Defense, healthcare within the feds like the VA and DOD, and defense agencies as well, so it's a pretty wide swatch of use cases and business cases that you need to be able to sell to. Charles said something interesting in the keynote today, I want to ask you about it. He said, you know, we made a strategic decision to go to the cloud. We didn't want to compete with Google and Amazon and Microsoft for cloud scale. That didn't make any sense for us. And he said, when we were an on-prem software vendor, we weren't managing servers for our customers. Now, what struck me there is if you look back at the software company back in the day, they really didn't care about the server, right? It was just sort of infrastructure. It was kind of irrelevant to them. The cloud feels different. You've got, it seems like a more strategic relationship with Amazon. You know, we talk about Teresa Carlson and what a force she is in the government. AWS and the GovCloud has been a huge force. They had a giant lead. So have you been able to draft off that or is it just another sort of infrastructure? No, they're a major strategic partnership there with AWS and NFOR at the company level and especially for me with the government. They've made the right investments at the right time. I mean, and they've actually have cloud environments that are very specific to different segments of the government and to different geographies. So as an example, in the federal government, they have an intelligence cloud called C2S, okay, which we work with them on. There's a very large procurement out right now for the Department of Defense called JEDI, which Amazon's going after as well as the other larger cloud providers. So, you know, we're obviously riding that horse with AWS. And also for local governments and, you know, they've done all of the compliancy for the government. Will there be Fed ramp? Will there be seed just for, you know, for those departments that are worried about the justice type of requirements? And as you get outside of the US, you know, they're putting clouds and we're a global company as well, putting clouds in all the right places. They're a WG cloud offering, you know, in the UK. And as we talked about earlier, when we sat down there, they're opening a cloud in the Middle East right now to Embarharain. I think Teresa's on her way over there as we speak. Right, right. The first Middle East country to claim cloud first. But it just seems like there's a strategic advantage there. And even with the other cloud suppliers, I mean, you know, Google's got it's niche, big niche, you know, Microsoft with its software state. But it seems like Amazon with that, they talk about that flywheel effect brings certain technologies that, you know, when you talk to Soma, you guys have been able to take advantage of, it just feels a lot different than the old traditional server manufacturer. It's a Unix box and there's no difference between vendor A, B, and C. Absolutely correct. And you know, and for us, we've taken advantage of the tools that Amazon has. And obviously we're doing all the compliancy on our applications and they've got the whole infrastructure piece of it. So the two work very well together. And that has allowed you to focus on your knitting, if you will. Yes. Which is micro verticals, sweet, you know, across the application portfolio, bringing AI to the equation automation. We heard a lot about robotic process automation, which has probably a hot topic in the government. So, I mean, Charles famously, you may have had a quote that I'm sure you heard, friends don't let friends build data centers. So, you know, that's not a business that we're in, we're a software company. Right. So, in the public sector, obviously a different animal than the private sector. Very different needs, different constituents, you got taxpayers or you had all that. When you bring that technology into the public sector, what does that do for it? Or how does it have to be reconformed or adapted and ultimately what's the payoff, right? What's the return on that investment? So, it was actually pretty shocking how quickly the government has adopted and moved towards the cloud. With, you know, typically there are laggards, everything happens in the commercial market and then government's a bit of a late adopter, right? But we're seeing them very quickly go to the cloud and there's a lot of reasons for that. One being you have an agent workforce, okay? So, the baby boomers are all retiring. So, a lot of that intellectual knowledge is going out the door. Two is there's some economies of scale to be realized by doing that because once you're in the cloud, I mean, you know, it's up to the vendor who's maintaining it to maintain that for you. So, you know, the people behind the scenes have to do it. You know, when you upgrade your software to go from one release to the other, it's automatically done for you. I mean, so there's real cost savings to be had, you know, from a care and feeding perspective there as well. Also, a lot of the, on the ERP side of things, a lot of systems that are out in the marketplace. Today, that governments have bought like the Oracle's or the SAP's, a lot of these systems are at end of life and the companies are no longer supporting them. So, it's a re-implementation for them, you know? And so, now they're looking okay if we have to re-implement and we have to look at our new options, we're going to do it in the cloud. So, when you've been around as long as I am, Kevin, you've seen the pendulum swing. You don't have to agree so vehemently. But, you know, from mainframe to client server and then you sort of back to the cloud and now with IoT, seems like the pendulum is swinging back to a distributed environment. So, help us understand where IoT fits to the cloud and even, you know, your on-prem business. Okay, so, like I said, cloud is a pretty broad topic. Okay, we have multiple applications that would run in that environment. So, when I look at IoT, I think of things like our asset management platform, right? We have a very strong enterprise asset management platform that runs in the cloud or runs on-prem. And if you think about infrastructure as an example, which government has a lot of, okay, think about the ability to have sensors on different pieces of equipment and being able to read that information. Think about using drone technology, okay, to be able to do physical inspections under bridges so you're not having people having to climb around underneath there. I mean, so being able to do live feeds of data and be able to streamline the way you do business and have that automatically captured in an application. So, yes, that is one area where we see it. I mean, I think you're gonna see more and more of robotics and artificial intelligence and all the things come into play. I think you heard a lot about that here and it's here. I mean, there were things we saw in movies before but now the technology's here today. Well, the other thing we heard this morning and Charles has always talked a lot about the data. You guys talked about your data lake. I like to think of it as a data ocean. You think about all the data out of GT Nexus and your customers that are providing data to inform. The data model starts to really expand and you guys have seemed to really take advantage of that. Talk about the data, the importance of data, the importance of securing data to the government. Well, think about that. I mean, there's islands of information that governments have, okay, that if they were able to consolidate that data and put some intelligence into it, be able to make business decisions versus one system sitting over here, one system sitting over here and none of them ever communicating or talking to each other. The ability to, you can do it from anything from just think about crime statistics, okay? The ability to deploy resources where the crime is and then as it moves, be able to further deploy resources. New York years ago, things like that with Comstat when they were cleaning up Times Square and so forth, but just think of that as a concept for real time being able to manage data. So you've got, here at the show, we were talking about earlier 700-some-odd clients, 725, you've got the federal forum for the first time. Why now? And what are you getting out of that or what do you hope to get out of that at the end of the week? So the whole executive team and our board directors have made significant investments in this marketplace because they understand that government is a very large beast, if you will, and there's a lot of opportunity for deployment of our solutions and there's a real need to solve problems for constituents here as well. So they've made very significant investments in things like security, like FedRAMP, compliancy. Some companies are doing it on some of their solutions, we're doing it across the board on all the products that we take to the government marketplace. So we're invested in it. You've probably heard today, Charles talked about the fact that we're going to have a federal cloud suite, which we are, so that means federal financials, okay? Actually being able to solve all the problems for the federal government and comply to all the needs and all the things that are part of mandated accounting for the federal government. So they made all the right investments and human capital management would be another area. If you think about, we've got an application called talent science, the ability to hire the right people for the right job and retain those people. Just think about, you know, ICE is a good example. You have to hire thousands of people to deploy on the borders, right? How do you quickly ramp and hire all these right people if you don't have the right tools to do it? You were quoted in Time Magazine, Mark Benioff's new publication, about America's crumbling infrastructure. What role do you see technology playing generally and specifically in for software in helping with that problem? So we do a lot today around infrastructure. As an example, we have a very strong presence in transit agencies here in the U.S., New York City runs us, they manage about a trillion dollars with their assets there. So anything moving in, out, or around the city, so subways, buses, trains, tunnels, bridges, Metro North, Long Island Railroad, L.A. runs us, San Francisco runs us, Chicago runs us, Dallas runs us, and many others. So we're managing all that infrastructure. So you hear a lot about infrastructure bills coming out of the federal government and they're right. I mean, a lot of these bridges and tunnels and even roadways were built back in World War II, right? And they're aged, they are starting to crumble and there's going to be a lot of money spent through that and when it comes to rebuilding those types of things, there's a lot of assets that are going to need to be managed to do that. So we think it's a real opportunity for software, such as what we bring to the marketplace to help with that process. How about talent retention? I mean, obviously as administrations come and go, people move, but there's been a lot of brain drain and we take the patent office, people in commercial industry stealing some of the best and brightest out of government. Can software play a role in helping better retain, train, you know, evolve growth paths and careers? Yes, I guess in a couple of different ways. I mean, number one, I think the applications of today versus the applications of yesterday have changed so much. I mean, you look at the applications you have on your mobile phone, the ability to have that look and feel. I mean, our kids today are going to go into the workforce and they won't settle for anything less. They're going to want to have that look and feel. They're going to want to have those intuitive type of applications that help them do their job and that's the kind of offering we're bringing to the marketplace. And from just actually bringing the right people and we have an application called talent science as an example where actually there is multiple different areas of your personality that it can determine and map it back to your top performers in your company and determine the right people for the right job where they'll fit into that environment and they would thrive hopefully and it should increase retention on this type. So we've, in government, we've actually sold it to departments of health and human services for hiring case workers, okay, or police departments for hiring of law enforcement. So there's a real opportunity to take those types of applications and do some pretty creative things. What's the, I hate to say the pain side of it, but dealing with the government, obviously contracts is an issue, right? And a challenge sometimes, maybe for you. I'm curious in a quickly evolving space such as yours, how do you help them keep up with you and their regulatory oversight and the whatever mandate or restrictions they have, all those things here that come with government, it just doesn't square up with what you do. It is, it's a very, again, to your point, it's a different industry with different requirements and everything here is very open and above board. It's open procurements, everything is competitively bid. There are contractual vehicles that you competitively bid for that will allow you to be able to do business a lot easier in the future. I mean, in the feds, you know, you have things like GSA 70 schedule, UK have something called G Cloud contract, a lot of states have vehicles where you can bid for, so all states and locals can buy off of those contracts without having to go to competitive offering. So there's ways that the business can get done without having to go through a lot of the major pain process, but then there's also competitive RFPs, which, you know, they'll put a bit out, it'll be very detailed. You have to answer 3,000 requirements. And then after that, you'll end up going into an orals and a demo process and, you know, nine months later, they're going to pick a winner. Then you go through, but then you have to go through a very painful contract negotiation process. That's exactly what I was talking about, right? Right, yeah. Well, Kevin, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. Yeah, it's my pleasure. And it sounds impressive, right? With the turnout you had, so I'm sure you're very, very pleased with the response you've had here on the show for so far. I am, and I thank you for your time, and... You bet. Have a good show. Look forward to seeing you down the road. Thanks for coming. All right, sir, thank you. Back with more here, live on theCUBE, we're in forums, 18, and we are in Washington, D.C.