 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. Stefan Scholl is here as the president of Infor, CUBE alum, Stefan, great to see you again. Great to be here. Big week. Huge week, huge week. Coming off, let's see, a year and a half ago, we met you in New Orleans. Yep. Infor has grown substantially since then. Infor has grown, so good job at the keynote yesterday. How do you feel? I feel great. I mean, we got a message across. We had great attendance, full house, feedback from the tweets and from all the customer interviews and discussions with the press and the analysts. Resounding feedback and just, everybody's excited about the momentum that we created and everybody loved the customer stories. I loved the Phil Donahue action that you were doing. I was thinking, oh, he's prepping for the CUBE. That was really good, though. I mean, a lot of work goes into that. I mean, listen, you got a guy like John Carter from Travis Perkins flying from the UK, coming over here to just talk about the partnership he's created with us. I mean, largest building construction distributor in the UK, one of the biggest companies in the UK. Isn't that great? Yeah, that's awesome. Talking about part of it. Showing the commitment and Whole Foods, right. Great story. Awesome, Brent. So, I mean, take us back. You were like day one of the turnaround. Charles's team, George calls it, used to call it the misfit toys. They put it together and then. When it was a financial buyer. Right? And then everybody expected CA all over again. And then all of a sudden you see investment, acquisition, excitement, beautification. So take us back and take us through the five year journey. Six years almost now. Five and a half. Five and a half in July that, you know, we all arrived, the four of us. So Duncan, Pam, myself, and Charles arrived in December of 2010. So five and a half years. And we arrived the same day. It's not like we arrived within a week of each other. We arrived the same day in the office and then embarked on a five and a half year journey. And we knew speed was important. We knew product was the most important aspect of the company. So to your point around how do you get away from financial consolidation? You look at all the ingredients you have and we took the biggest weakness or perceived weakness of the company at the time and made it its biggest strength. And what is that? Taking all the individual ERPs and making them industry specific. The notion in the last 25 years, you only had two providers as everybody knows up until then that you had to go to for ERP solutions. And they were generic based software. And what did you have to do? Modify the software. And we all know, as I said yesterday on the main stage what modifications did to the business landscape. Inflexible, takes too much time, costs too much money, way too much risk. And then when you actually do get it in after all that time and money spent, you're stuck with the system that you can't upgrade because you modified it so much. So we knew then what we had was an ingredient based industry approach to the market. So we invested and doubled down on that. And we had great support from the management team as a whole from our Golden Gate and some of our key partners in this. We spent billions, I mean we spent $2.8 billion in this five and a half year period on the application layer, completing the industry suites. By the way, nobody's done that. Everybody else is so focused on what? Infrastructure. I mean infrastructure is becoming commoditized. And we said, yeah, we'll let that train go from our competitors and we'll double down on the app layer. And sure enough, what we're able to build out is complete industry solutions without modifications and thousands of customers have upgraded. And I'm talking major, major like Piper aircraft, 2,000 mods on the old stuff upgraded, zero mods. BAE, I mean the largest, one of the largest companies in the UK building F-35 fighter jets, Typhoon fighter jets. I mean complicated stuff, no mods. Ferrari, you know, the story we've talked about for four and a half years. Most complicated supply chain I've seen in the business upgrade with no mods to the newest systems. So that's one industry. Two is usability, hook and loop you guys saw all about that. We've invested a fortune in building out the largest design agency and enterprise software in the world four years ago. Everybody's talking about it now, but we did it four years ago. And then third, as you guys saw in New Orleans, now almost two years ago, we ripped off the Band-Aid and said, infrastructure is commoditized. We're going to take industry based software, easy to use software and run it on a flexible, agile, extensible architecture called what, the cloud? Architecture of the internet. And we bet big and we were debating between IBM, Microsoft on Azure, and we bet on AWS and we said we're going to go all in on AWS and we did that. So those are the three things that in five and a half years have allowed us to almost double the size of the company. We added 18,000 new customers, 7,000 in the cloud. I said yesterday on stage, 5% of our business was cloud three years ago, under three years, call it 26, 27 months ago. Last fiscal year ran was April 30th, 50% of our sales was in the cloud. So from five to 50 and our pipeline, biggest pipeline we've ever had in the history of the company, we've never been three plus billion anything in pipeline and we're way past that in licensed pipeline only. And a lot of has to do with the cloud. And investing in services, which is something else I want to talk about, but what's the line, friends don't let friends build data centers, you guys made that call. A lot of guys are saying, hey, we did a lot of money to be made in running data centers. We can own the hardware, we can suck out all that margin that EMC and all the hardware companies were getting. But that was a big decision early on. It kind of makes a lot of sense now, although it's still different than most SaaS companies. Well, everybody else got stuck in the old days, right? I mean, whether it's Salesforce or Workday or anybody else, they all have to build their own data centers. And when you think of the ability to grow your company, I mean, it costs hundreds of millions to build a data center. Salesforce just built their first data center in the UK. Just now, I mean, really after all these years, you're just starting now to build it out there and AWS is way ahead of you. I mean, they built one in Frankfurt that went live and the fastest growing AWS center in the world is Frankfurt. I did a keynote two years ago in Frankfurt. I almost got kicked out of the room when I said cloud is coming to you here in Germany with our customers. I said, not going to come. You don't understand the German market. Exactly, right? And what's happened? It's coming fast and furious in the European market with Frankfurt being a huge data center. Now who's next? Look at the Middle East. What's going on with the K-Cloud in Saudi? I mean, you're talking about billions of dollars of future opportunity where they're leapfrogging the notion of upgrading to on-premise systems that are going all to the cloud. And our partnership with AWS is so unique. SAP isn't ready, all they have on the S4 stuff is the financials piece. Oracle Fusion is nothing, there's no content in it. So we're the only ones that really have the ability to take mission critical apps to the cloud. So we're fighting the HCM battle and we're doing really well against Workday. We're doing really well on the Salesforce side with our customer experience platform. Everybody saw yesterday how complete that package is. So those are really good markets but don't forget what we're going at. We're going after the biggest market segment in the world and that's mission critical applications. Running a business in the cloud, nobody's doing that effectively today. Well, that's why AWS is so excited about you guys. That's really been the big challenge for them is bringing these mission critical apps to the cloud. They're doing it with you guys. I first met in for, Pam Murphy came on at AWS. Who? It's like four years ago. Yeah, and if you ask Jassy, Jassy would say after Netflix, one of the biggest customers overnight for these guys. I mean, that Travis Perkins deal. You know, John won't mind if I share it. We're talking hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of business. Hundreds of millions of dollars, 24,000 users in the cloud. We as in for went in and did the value proposition and the business process selling. Well, I turn around and give a nine figure check over to AWS as part of that partnership. Pretty nice, right? So, but in return, AWS is aggressive and spends hundreds, billions of dollars. And by the way, nobody has a share of wallet. The way AWS could to build out the next data centers in the Middle East, in Asia, in China. Nobody can compete with these guys. So it's a great, great partnership. Yeah, they're winning. There's no going, when you sit down with Jassy, you know, and the folks at AWS. Do you have that swim lane conversation like, look, go database. I see you guys invent Aurora, Redshift, DynamoDB. Beautiful, okay. But apps is a different swim lane. Yeah, for those good. Do they have those discussions? Listen, what they love about us is they know, by the way, we're the only ones who see this, because the two, our two biggest competitors are still stuck in selling Exadata and infrastructure, SAP is way deep into all this stuff. They're stuck. And so they're, but yet they're trying to build relationships with AWS and Jassy and go to markets. But there's this natural strife, you know, it's competitive. We've made it clear. And by the way, how funny is this five and a half years ago? You never would have said five and a half years ago and four is the safe technology stack decision. Today, we're the safe decision. We're agnostic, we're open standards. We've picked, I mean, we built our ION platform on open standards, HTML5, you know, the old Apache server, MQ series. Everything you look at in our architecture and technology and what we do is available in the open market. So if by the way, something else comes along, that is going to be great from HP or from IBM, we'll certify on that too, right? Big difference from our competition that are still stuck in the old days of selling infrastructure. Well, because they want to put the stuff on their own cloud. It's big dollars. Yeah, it's big dollars and they're going to, they want to load the factory out. You don't care about the infrastructure factory. You don't care about the plumbing. Exactly right. It's not where you're making money. That's how we win. And that's how we're beating our competition. I mean, Travis Perkins, you saw yesterday our Whole Foods or Triumph for all these great big brands. I mean, Gold Coast, the largest public sector cloud deal done in the world in Australia. They're hosts of the Commonwealth Games, chose us over everybody else because we truly have a cloud solution for them. And they saw nobody else have it, right? So pretty exciting stuff. Just looking back at the decision to try and own your infrastructure or outsource it. Yeah. One other perspective that SAP and Oracle provide, well, more SAP, Oracle's always wants to use its own stack, you know, for lower TCO and SAP because they want to have control over their platform. Did the lack of control over the direction of the AWS platform concern you at all for a roadmap point of view? You know, what I would tell you is in order for us to do this two years ago, we came to an agreement with AWS that says we're on the inside with them. This isn't, we're outside, we're a customer of theirs. We built our Infor Labs. So you saw Pam, that's when you saw Pam Murphy who ran Infor Labs for us. We put in tens and tens of millions of dollars. We put in a huge group of technicians and engineers and architects that work hand in hand. And we get in, call it in the ground floor with AWS. So we get all the insights, we give inputs, they take our advice. We're doing a lot of co-innovation and co-development with AWS. So you're like a strategic, you're a strategic ISV on their platform. 100%. So that's directly analogous to how Microsoft treated key platform. That's right, correct. So we're on the inside. If we were just on the outside and here's your framework and follow it, no. We have input into the framework. We have input into where the net, I mean, they built, if you asked Jassy, you would tell your Frankfurt, we pushed them over the end to say we should do it faster. The Saudi discussion, we're the lead on this Saudi transformation and they're willing to follow our lead. And by the way, bring their share of wallet and investment profile along with that as well. We had the Saudi customers on yesterday. We were asking them about the adoption of cloud and that part of the world. They said, look, technology is technology. It's the same everywhere. And that's so true. The world is flat from a technology standpoint. It's our, and that's why, when you saw, if you ever have a chance to meet Tariq Taman, our new leader for the Middle East. He's coming on, actually. Great, I mean, I took one of my best guys in the US and said, you're moving over to Dubai. And I said, why? The Middle East is ripe for growth because they all did the same thing we just talked about 20 years ago, bought one of the two big vendors, modified the hell out of it, and are now stuck, have huge cost challenges with depression and oil. They're all trying to become more efficient. So now they're going towards what's the next chapter look like? And they're all leapfrogging, not upgrading Oracle or SAP. They're going to market, and we've seen RFPs for cloud-only solutions in the Middle East. We're seeing it in India. I'm seeing it all over Asia, Australia. So when you think about our solution set, partner with AWS, the security issue. I mean, you've got major challenges with our competitors around running their solutions in terms of performance, in terms of stability, in terms of security. With AWS, all that falls by the wayside, and they're miles ahead of our competitors. Well, and we talked yesterday about this to those guys, and George and I have been talking about it for weeks. It used to be you had known processes, but the technology was mysterious. You needed, you know, SIs and techno geeks to come in and do it. Today, the technology is very well known. Yeah. It's cloud, it's social, it's secure, whatever it is, it's there. The processes are unknown because big data, IOT, digitization, those are new territories for people. So you need a platform that can be flexible, cheap, and open, as you're saying. I mean, the last thing you want is a software company, it's complex infrastructure. Right. You want to make it invisible. And think about the stuff we showed yesterday. I mean, that whole commerce cloud. I mean, that GTS piece converged. You can't run that stuff on premise. You can't run our IOT platform and the whole digital, I mean, think about running 9,000, standing up 9,000 core processors to get big data, to run your big data reports. There isn't a company in the world that can do that today, except for one, AWS. So even our competitors, forget whether they're going to catch up on data centers in different regions and solve the security issue. Now you're talking about what's the most important thing a big company wants? Access to information, connecting their entire supply chain, getting reports in advance of everything. That requires huge capability to run core processors that only AWS has access to. Well, what people are doing is they're cutting out the IT labor fat. It gives them no differentiation. And they're saying, let's point that at digital. Let's point it at IOT. Let's point it at data analytics. I mean, you see this in your customer base because there's no value in that. That IT labor of provisioning storage and compute. None. Exactly right, yeah. So do you see, it's difficult for customers to rip out SAP and Oracle, but it's easy for them to ring sense them and to add what are perhaps edge apps to you. Do you see that happening? Is that a part of your explicit strategy? Yeah, so here's the really cool thing that we did. And it actually goes back five years. So we started five and a half years ago. What's the first thing we did? I mean, I was all part of in the Oracle days building the middleware application suite. IBM already had theirs. And what was the challenge then? Networks were slow and storage was expensive. So you had to build a very complicated API architecture. But when we came in in 2010, the new paradigm was network screen and storage is cheap. So we built our eye on architecture on the open standards of the internet, send an XML file across. By the way, don't send just little bit widgets and pieces of it. Send the whole damn thing and send it every single time you make a change. So we built a really flexible middleware platform. So to your point, when somebody's looking to replace SAP, we do that a lot by the way, but you know what, leave SAP as corporate financials. We'll come in and help you on the manufacturing. We'll deploy in for in the plants. We'll deploy in for at your manufacturing sites at corporate. We'll do the EAM pieces. We'll do the CRN pieces. We'll do the HCN pieces. And as one customer told me a major telco in Mexico, well, so I closed my books on SAP but you really helped me run my business better. I'm okay with that for a while. Because you know, GL is GL is GL. If you consolidate in SAP, but I get everything else, the share of wallet in an account is pretty damn big. It's a great land and expand Trojan horse strategy, whatever you want to call it. But another key part of that is the beautification. We make beautiful software and, you know, we had Mark on hook and loop and we're trying to probe and we did I think successfully. How is it? Because anybody who's a Salesforce customer knows, oh, we're switching the lightning and it's like, whoa, and the experience is you have to go deep into the product teams and become an embedded thread. Connective tissue is what he called it of that product team. That's a cultural shift. Not a lot of software companies are making. And so, you know, to us, the key is now you're hooking them on the beautification of your software, their experience, the customer experience, the user experience. That's something that everybody talks about. It seems like your customer base is really absorbing. Well, and it wouldn't have been important if it's the same people using the software, the power users. So what's happening is they're realizing that I got to have a guy, I got to have a sales clerk who I just hired walking into my store at Travis Perkins or at Whole Foods or any other retailer. I got to give them an iPad and they got to service a customer. I can't send that person for a week to training. Oh, I got to get a guy in a manufacturing plant to tell me if I can actually source, you know, pick, pack and ship that product all electronically. I can't send that person to China to training. So you have to build easy to use software that's intuitive because you're connecting your entire supply chain, you're connecting all your employees, your suppliers, your customers. And if your software's ugly, I mean, you're dead. I got some heat on Twitter yesterday. I think it was your quote, the tyranny of the super user. I said, the goal is to decimate the tyranny of the super user. You're like, what do you mean? But look at the super user. Yeah, I'm like, look at the form screens of our competitors. I mean, they're still ugly today. You know, still today. Excites for a few. Yeah, I'm probably again in trouble for this, but even just even look at Fusion, the next gen of Oracle, it's still a forms based screen. I mean, that's not exciting. I think it's very hard. Like SAP, I think recently, if you took an inventory of all their screens, it's something like quarter of a million. And it's not like to have a tool that can auto generate something prettier. That's why sort of refreshing those, you know, as a decade long, you know, process. And it's one, it's one code based service in all industries in a forms based environment. I mean, it's just... Anyways, we're... We got to wrap. I'll give you the last word. Vision of the future. What do you see, what do you tell your customers as to your view of the world looking ahead? You know, it's, I mean, we believe that the business commerce network that applies to retail, to healthcare, to manufacturing, every company. I mean, getting our customers to take advantage of the digital disruption that's out there and using our global commerce network, using our suite based clouds that we have. I mean, there's nobody else doing what we're doing. And I think we can be, you know, two or three times the size of what we are today in the next three to four years. And we're going to do it, you know, with our customers on the digital side. Love it, a lot of momentum, a lot of innovation. Steph Ann, thanks very much for coming back to me. Thanks very much, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. This is in forum 2016. We'll be right back. Sometimes losing a valued employee.