 The transition from custom-made applications as we were used to, to the ERP platform as well. 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. We're back to wrap everybody. This is day one, end of day one coverage. George and I are going to break down what we heard today. So this is the second Inforum that we've done. It seems to be that Inforum is on a cadence of every two years. Last Inforum was in New Orleans, New Orleans, and it was a great event, good sort of launching pad, and now New York City, a much larger crowd. I think I said 14,000 before, I heard 8,000. Oh, that's big, a lot of people here. We're seeing the evolution of Inforum, a company that's been around for a long time, was kind of frankly struggling decade ago, trying to figure out where to go. Charles Phillips came in, he brought in a new team. They had done a roll up of Lawson software, McCormick and Dodge. I think Infinium's in there somewhere, a number of others, and then started to invest with some backing from Golden Gate Capital. Normally you see private equity companies, George, we were talking about this before, you know, suck money out of the company, take the cashflow out of the company, bleed it dry. That's not what's happening here. They're positioning it for an IPO, I suppose. Well, that's not getting a lot of play, not a lot of talk. There doesn't seem to be a big rush to do that. There seems to be more of a rush to transform the company, become relevant, compete in various segments, like retail, like manufacturing, you know, micro-segmentation of industries. We've heard a number of, sort of the wheel of industries and the micro-industries that these guys focus on. Going what Inforum calls the last mile of customization out of the box, so that you don't have to, as a customer, bring those modifications in. And it's, you know, we're talking about a $3 billion company, growing at a solid 10% a year, 9, 10%, but with licensing cloud revenues that are growing substantially faster in the mid-20s, throwing off cash, investing that cash in the business, making acquisitions, really going forward, particularly in retail, but other industries as well. Yeah, strong story, George. What's your take? Sort of just as positive as what you were saying, coming from another angle, though, the software or technical angle, where, you know, what they were doing, as you said, financially is unconventional, but sort of very, very compelling. What they're doing from a software architecture point of view is also unconventional and very, very compelling, which is traditionally when you buy a bunch of different software companies, it's very hard to stitch them together because they've been built in entirely different ways. It's like trying to knit together a bunch of different skyscrapers that you've bought. They're just architected differently. So what these, what Info has done is reconceived the applications around sort of what they call like a bullseye chart, where the inner core is the hardest part to change. And as you move away from that core to the edge, those are the parts that are easier to change. And so, whereas SAP and Oracle re-architected their applications, sort of forklift, big bang, you know, inside out all at once. And in fact, you know, it took Oracle like 10 years, and SAP restarted a couple times. Yeah, and SAP is essentially just starting over in the past year or so. So, Info is making incremental progress, starting with the user interface, starting with the next level in like CRM, then starting with say ERP, and then the industry specific engines in the back. And so, because these are all now deployable to the cloud, you can integrate each of these pieces. When they were all on customer premises, you had to support every version and every customization that every customer made. It was a mess, that was spaghetti code. Now when you do this incremental integration and you leave out for the end, the core hard to change engines, you make much faster progress. So, even if you have less skilled developers than an SAP or Oracle who are high end systems houses, you can get there faster. So, I think what they've done is something that we haven't seen in the application space. Yeah, and as well, you know, all cloud run on AWS, not trying to be the end-to-end solution provider in terms of owning the data center infrastructure. There's a lot of money to be made doing that, but Enforced said we don't want to do that, we want to focus, and then the other thing, I'd love to see in the ecosystem, I think, you know, it's young and immature, it needs to, you know, blossom, but they're putting effort into that. I'd love to see them take this Mongoose platform and open it up a little bit, but you know, our understanding is, I guess there's a reticence to do that, that it might, you know, weaken the story. I'm not sure I understand why, I need to think that through a little bit. I think we need to hear more about it. It seems to me that that would be a huge advantage and a lever and a multiplier, you know, a forced multiplier for the organization. So I'd like to see, I'd like to learn more about that, because I think that you're seeing so many great examples, well, at least some in the industry anyway. I think, you know, ServiceNow is an excellent example of a company that's got a platform that's very flexible, that can allow people to innovate and build on top of, and this is a company, ServiceNow, that talks about, all their customers talk about no modifications, no modifications, because coming out of the cloud, you really can't have a SaaS product with tons of mods. So, interesting day one, we heard about Infor IoT, which was kind of new, still a little bit unclear on exactly what that is and the details there. A lot of talk about digital transformation, you know, we're going to talk to Duncan and go off tomorrow about that. Big day tomorrow, Charles Phillips is coming on, all the execs, Stefan Scholl, who's the president, and really runs the go-to market, he's going to come on, we got customers coming on as well. Final thoughts, George? I think the last, the last guess we had had some of the most profoundly interesting things we heard. This is the company predictix that they bought to be the core of their new retail solution, and what he said has huge implications, not just for Infor, but for SAP and Oracle, which is customers can buy and implement the analytics solutions, the predictive analytics solutions, first, without upgrading their transaction systems. And that means just the way Amazon changed the entire economics of startups, now companies can change the economics of their IT investments, they don't have to replace with a new generation of their existing operational applications, they just bought the analytics on, and then it works fine whether you're using an old operational system or a new one. And one other thing, we've talked a lot as a consultancy as a research firm about all the intelligence going to the edge on IoT. Or much of it. Yeah, much of it. But what came out is that you are going to have a huge amount in the center because you look at data from all these different angles, and that's why when we heard from predictix that they're being designed to run on 10,000 cores for an hour or two hours or 10 hours, is something that gives them a huge advantage where a hybrid competitor who has to design for running on a 10 core machine or a 100 core machine can't match. So that, in other words, the predictix application can look at instead of just data points across a chronology, they can look at it x, y, z 10 different ways. And again, so major change in the economics and then this platform writing it for the cloud enables it to do things functionally that you can't do on-prem. Well too, I think differentiation is key, right? Because they're up against the likes of SAP and Oracle who as I said before, they'll basically co-opt all your messaging, steal that, and then look what Oracle's trying to do with Workday, you certainly see others doing Oracle in the cloud, SAP. Similarly, and so smaller companies like Info, they have to differentiate, they have to tell a different story. And so for instance, we heard from one of our guests talking about their human capital management story and some of the differences there. You're certainly hearing about this micro vertical industry differentiation, this notion of running everything in the cloud, so those are all good points. I think they got to do this event more than every other year, right? Because a key part of what Info has to do is keep getting the word out and this is a great way to get it out. So having a two year cadence on your big customer event, I think is missing a marketing opportunity. I mean, it's too good of an event. They should just keep growing it, put the pedal to the metal and go. So I'd like to see that, but generally strong messaging out of day one. We're going to hear more tomorrow, more announcements. George and I will be back. Check out crowdchat.net slash inform16. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news, siliconangle.tv. We'll have all the videos today chopped up. Check out at theCUBE for all the stuff. theCUBE gems, the tweets. Okay, this is theCUBE. We're signing off day one from Inform 2016. We'll see you tomorrow.