 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 New York City, everybody. This is theCUBE, and we're here live at Javits Center. Jim O'Olerton is here, he's the IT director of the Elzendorf Valley Municipal Water District from California. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So how do you like New York in July? Love New York. Anytime of the year. Anytime of the year, it's the one city you can come to, and yeah, good, bad, hot, doesn't matter. Hot, cold. It's just good to be here. Yep, it's always good to be here. So, tell us about your role at the Municipal Water District and what you guys do, what your mission is. It's not a profit. Right, yeah, we are a public utility governed by a five member publicly elected board. We provide water and wastewater services to consumers, a population of about 170,000 folks. And how big is the organization? We're 170 employees on average, yeah. So we have a mid-sized organization. Yeah, we're a mid-sized public utility. So what's happening with your run IT? What's happening with your IT? What's it like to paint a picture for us? So we're transitioning to many cloud solutions and the current one is we're migrating our on-premise Infor loss and system to the Infor cloud suite financials and supply management procurement. So we are an early adopter working with the early adopter team at Infor migrating to the new cloud-based products. So, I mean it's kind of a dumb question but I'm going to ask anyway, why? But actually, take us through the business case. Or was there a business case? It had to be, right? Yeah, there was a business case. No profit. We have some internal design changes on our general ledger design and we really couldn't accomplish that with the current solution that we have with the Infor loss and system. Part of the cloud suite financials product is this ability to leverage what they call user defined dimensions in your general ledger code block which is a big deal for us loss and customers. And so we had an organizational goal to redesign our GL which helped, was aligned with our goal of participating in the early adopter program with Infor for their cloud suite financials because we could do what we wanted to do with the new system. And Infor welcomed us as an early adopter because of our organizational goal of just not doing a straight migration of our setup. Instead, we're taking advantage of the great capabilities in the new ERP system. So the big part of the business case was related to that innovation and the value that it drives for the organization. How do you quantify that? Is it cost saved, obviously? It's going to be cost savings, staff, labor, primarily in labor, overtime, frustration, end user frustration, side systems, shadow systems that we'll be able to accomplish all of our reporting needs, all our different reporting requirements, being a public agency out of the box. That's how we envision it. So we've always known that IT is too labor intensive. But labor means jobs. And so when people say, oh, business case involved, IT labor savings, people get scared. Yeah, they do. However, since the mobile, cloud, social revolution, people, I think, are realizing, well, maybe there's other things I could do with that labor. I could shift that value up the stack to use that overused euphemism. Is that what you're doing? Yep, yeah, there's no staff affected by our cloud strategy at the utility. Staff is going to focus on automation and innovation with the tools that we have in our core business and leave the server administration and patching and all that stuff to the cloud ops team within four. So we're really embracing. It makes sense. It really makes sense. What are those higher level tasks and do they require more close collaboration with the business units? Sort of the ultimate end consumers of this? Or is there even a chance to put up solutions for the outside consumer, the sort of citizen consumer? Yeah, I mean, all the systems from InforWeUts are primarily for our staff. So we don't have any public-facing systems that are delivered by Infor, but we will focus staff resources in IT on instead of maintaining the system, but utilizing it and extending it, innovating it and automating additional processes for our organization. Helping simplifying people's jobs, ultimately. Are there, if you're out of the business of sort of making the trains run on time, can you do things? Or is it a priority to now make data from the operational systems more consumable? Yep, yep. Yeah, with the CloudSuite financials, the whole system really has a consumer-type experience that somebody, it would be familiar to somebody who has used a mobile app and they really shrink-wrapped, I still term the BI delivery with their data cubes and their dimensions. So, traditionally, you would have a real hardcore report writer, and we really don't need that functionality anymore because Infor is delivering to the finish line probably 90% of what we're going to need from a reporting standpoint. So you don't have to go through this sort of chasm of the app ends here and some business analysts and data engineers have to go in here to create visualization. Yep, yep, okay. Yeah, so since we're taking advantage of all the new functionality, we're going to have delivered dashboards that our finance and procurement staff can use out of the box instead of spending hundreds of hours designing dashboards, writing reports, and there's a lot of labor involved in those things. So, if I asked you why Infor, obviously you're a loss in customers, how do you why? We've invested quite a bit of money in loss in it. Your processes are sort of tied to that, but what's your commentary on Infor? Certainly two years ago, I don't know if you're at New Orleans, we were there, we heard the story. Interesting that they don't have a conference every year like most, so two years, now you're starting to see all the things they talked about two years ago hit. Of course, a lot of loss in customers at that event, this event. And at the time, the sentiment was, wow, we're kind of moving slowly, we're seeing. So what's the report card on how Infor has done in the last couple years? They've done it, they pulled it off, especially on the Global Ledger and the Procurement Suite. It's really a next generation ERP system for a loss in customer, your loss has been around forever, and they're very loyal, I've seen. But it really is, I mean, it's, what I've said to our end users is that the Cloud Suite financials is new, but familiar to a loss in user. They will see, it's a totally consumer friendly screen, but they will recognize it, because the developers just have kept it in mind this subliminal transition to the new system, so they are familiar with the new stuff. And what makes that quasi seamless? Is it the terminology? Is it just really well thought out? It's well thought out by the Infor folks that are doing the development. They've really captured all the best parts of loss and functionality, and really rolled them all into single screens with multiple tabs, instead of having to jump to 20 different forms in the old mainframe style system. It's really, it really brought it all together. And then leveraging the landmark stack has infinite capabilities for customization for a customer. It's really quite amazing for what we've seen so far. And we have our hands on it, so we're using it. I mean, it's, we have our Cloud instances, and we're using them on a daily basis. And a lot of mobile use cases, or not so much? There will be mobile use cases with BI, for sure. So that's a separate mobile app? Yeah, the Infor BI app, which connects to the Infor BI dashboards. And combined with sort of a responsive view of the world? Yeah, where are we? Where are we with water sales? How's our operating budget? What's our capital projects? Lots of, lots of questions we have that we really have to dig deep in customer reports currently to answer. You know, cause George and I, we're talking with George, we're just talking about how, a lot of times it's a bolt on feel or a toggle. You know, well, I can't do that here, so I'm going to switch back to the old, you know, way of doing things. And, but I really like the new look and feel, but I can't do half the stuff that I want to do. Right, right. Yeah, it really seems like a game changer for us. From what we've seen so far, like I said, we're about three and a half months into the project, but it's very promising. And our end users have really embraced it quite a bit. You said something interesting, which was that, you know, you're not a very large organization, so that most of the built-in processes work pretty well for you. But you also mentioned the landmark development tool, which is, makes it very easy for loss and developers and customer developers to actually customize the system. This is kind of a long question, but, you know, in the keynote, it was pointed out that you don't really customize cloud-based systems, you only configure them. Yeah, you configure them, right. But you said something different. You said we could customize power phrasing to our heart's contempt. Yeah. Can you expand on that? Well, I would say it's really configuring. It's not, it's no coding, it's configuring. It's usually their tool called the configuration console, which they're referring to at the keynote. It's really configuring the system how we want it. But it's very powerful. Give us some examples of that power. Adding a custom field with a drop-down, I mean, real basic things that you can do, that you couldn't do in lossing without a whole lot of coding and stuff. You can just add, you can customize the screens, you can move stuff around, you can rename them, and it's really, really simple. And it doesn't do any overlays, it's the real deal when you make the changes to the screen. You can always roll back to them as well. So, okay, so for instance, if you have a business process and you need to add something, it's easy to add, easy to name, it's something that will resonate. Right. And that's not considered, obviously, a custom modification, it's not a functional mod. Yeah, in the lossing world, that would be a custom modification where it's now a configuration within the landmark system, which is the power of the modern tech stack that they use in the cloud suite financials, which is common on modern tech stack type systems. And again, a lot of, we're all familiar with this from Google or any Salesforce users are going through the lightning process now. It's toggling between old and new. And a lot of times new looks good, doesn't have the functionality, you know, at least it's cut out a lot of the functionality, or sometimes it has some really cool functionality that's foreign to people. It sounds like Infor has done a good job of both giving new functionality and accommodating. Yeah, they've captured a lot of the stuff that people are used to that are familiar with and they've used very similar tech terminology and naming conventions and menu designs. It's modern, but familiar. It's new, but familiar to the team. And they bought this hook and loop, they bought this design firm and think, okay, that's pretty cool and pointed it internally. You're saying as a customer, you're seeing the results of that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Very intuitive. And you're also, we talked off camera using Mingle as a collaboration. How are you using that? How does it relate to what you're doing with SharePoint? So we're part of our project as the Mingle Enterprise system and we plan on using it for collaboration and news feeds and what people are working on. It's pretty comprehensive. You can follow what anybody's doing and it's very social, basically a social media platform for your internal business folks that work in the system. We're definitely exploring it. So what kind of cool project are you working on? Any cool tech thing you're looking at? We're updating our utility billing system as well and we're deploying smart meters to all of our customers in the next two years. Oh, is that all? Advanced metering, basically hourly radio read, so our customers can't notify the leaks and any issues at their proper date right away. We saw in for IoT at the keynotes this morning. Yeah. I mean, it's in that general umbrella. Yeah. Smart meters. The utility billing, I would assume has to roll out in conjunction with that because you're going to be measuring it far more often. Yep. And utility billing is usually a core core, probably about the most mission-critical app that a utility. How do you see that tying back into the newly flexible, customizable info back end? Yeah, we've already visualized our touch points between our new updated utility billing system and the Cloud Suite system. So basically the two touch points are the general ledger and the accounts payable for customer refunds and we've already got that mapped out in the new system of what we're going to do and it's going to work flawlessly. And I feel pretty confident about that, but yeah, it's going to work great. How do you see that? Wait, wait, wait. You've got to knock wood when you say that. You've got to knock wood. The IoT functionality, what's that going to enable customers to do that they couldn't do before? I mean, beyond just sort of fine grain pricing and how does that flow back? That flows back. That's also a cloud solution that we're using as well, another cloud solution and the customers will be notified of unusual water use over five hours, 24 hours. And usually we'll identify leaks and leaks, especially big leaks, translate to big bills. So our customers definitely want to know when they have something like that because leaks aren't always visible and we had a customer last week that had an $18,000 water bill because they had a leak from a sprinkler that ran for 30 days and he was in the military and it went down a little culverse. You couldn't even see it. So if we had our AMI system in place, he would have got a notification right away saying, hey, you're exceeding your monthly use in a day. So that would really help our customers as well. So we're trying to do other ways to really support our customers with online systems, with advanced metering technologies, online bill pay, paperless bills, as well as all the internal business stuff we do with Infor and our other enterprise systems. Easy place, lots of fun. How about Infor, Jim? I mean, it's a little early in the show, but what do you think so far? Anything you learned or things that you hope to learn? Yeah, I got several things I'm signed up for and I'm doing a presentation about our CloudSuite project tonight and I'm looking forward to that. But yeah, just here to learn, talk and meet with folks and learn about what's going on. There's a lot of, it's a really important time for especially the loss in customers with this transition to the CloudSuite financials is a big deal, so I'm happy to be a part of it and love learning about it. Excellent, well, we're flowing contents like the water flows in Southern California and throughout the world. Jim, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts with us. I enjoyed it. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back to New York City right after this brief report.