 Live from Washington D.C., if the Cube. Covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. Well, good afternoon, and welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at Inforum 2018. Live from Washington D.C., we're in the Washington Convention Center, centrally located, I got to tell you, the White House less than a mile that way, Capitol Hill's just right up the street as well. We're kind of caught in the middle. Bad spot to be these days. I hope you're not setting the tone for this. We'll leave that alone. I'd like to be in the middle personally. I'll take it from both sides. We're going to sit in the middle of the road, so it's a six inch y'all line, you get equally hard from both sides, so we... Bring it on. Let's stay away from Dave Vellante, John Walls, and Rod Johnson, who is the EVP of manufacturing, supply chain, and the GT Nexus Business Unit at Infor. Rod, good to see you, sir. Great to be here, thanks guys. You're okay with being in the middle? Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, independent thought. Yeah, right, right, I love it. In the middle of the road. So you're the new kid on the block, right? A lot of them, yeah. You've been here just at Infor for a few months now, assuming the EVP role, how's it been for you so far? Hey, it's been a breath of fresh air. It was 11 years with one of our competitors, the Oracle Corporation, and it's quite a breath of fresh air. Go with a company that's agile, innovative, much more customer centric. I think the timing is perfect for a company like Infor that's really growing up in these key industries and working with customers over decades, and now it's made this transition to the cloud. And now I think all the market's waking up, it's not just CRM or HR, they're looking at how do I take advantage of all this innovation, the clouds, the platform, and who's the companies that really understand our type of business, whether you're a distribution company or a food company or an A&D company. So it's a great time to be here. There's a lot of good energy, a lot of good innovation, a lot of good buzz from the customers about what we're doing. Necessity is the mother invention as the saying goes. I mean, you're right, the model of just having an install base that you can have locked in and just keep milking is very hard to do these days, unless some of the private equity guys have done it, that's clearly not the case here at Info. Oracle is successful at it, I think it's because they do spend a lot of money on R&D, but boy oh boy, that model, you can't just go and reinvent that, you're going to fail. And if you're trying to hold on to that model, maybe there are the exception that proves the rule, but you're going to be toast in the long run. So you see what Amazon's doing, you see what Microsoft completely pivoted away from that model, and Info's riding that wave. Right, right, hey, this is a business model, fundamental business model change. We can talk a lot about the technology, but transitioning from a product company that sells a license that sits on a maintenance base is a model that's no longer viable for what customers expect. They want a service provider that's delivering continuous innovation and service, and that's a big change. It's a big change to how we engage with our customers, how we support them, the service levels we're committing to. So I lived through a bunch of that stuff at Oracle, transitioning to cloud at a roll for the last six years, doing that both from sales in a global strategy role, and here we're trying to do it better, faster, and never lose sight of the customer. So you service the manufacturing sector. Yeah. There's still a lot of in-force business is that install base and that maintenance, and you are going to, you're in the process of transitioning those customers. That takes a lot of care, a lot of feeding, because anytime there's a transition, everybody wants a piece of that action. So how's that going? What's the conversation like, and why should they stay within for? Well, I mean, the conversation is, I mean, we really believe in a pragmatic business led path to the cloud. There's not going to be any force march, no technology agenda that's going to drive this. It's got to be driven by value. We've got to prevent and present a business case to them that makes sense, that makes them more productive, now allows them to better engage with their customers, delivers innovation to their supply chain. So that's what we're spending a lot of time talking about, is what's the case for change? What's the business case for change? I mean, all of the stuff about operating the cloud, the service levels, potential total cost, it's great, but at the end of the day, we deal with manufacturers. They're pretty down to earth. They know that they make their money building stuff and shipping stuff and servicing that product. So we got to be engaged at that level to show them how we help them do that better. And yeah, I think the excitement is growing, that they recognize that there is real net new business value, new innovation that can really help their business. So let's talk about that. I mean, force march is a powerful phrase and you certainly see that in the industry, thinking about supply chain and the opportunities to drive even more efficiencies out of the supply chain. Maybe through automation, we've heard a lot about RPA. Maybe even bring back some of that offshore manufacturer. That's certainly a conversation that's going on in your world, so talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so one of our diamonds in the Infor portfolio is a product called GT Nexus, which has been around for about 20 years. We have 65,000 companies around the world operating on a common network-based platform that provides supply chain visibility, supplies supply chain financial processing, connects brands to their manufacturers to provide all the visibility and control in that. So that's a powerful capability because you're right, it's an incredibly dynamic time with the change of trade wars, weather events that are ever increasing, the supply chain is a very hard thing to manage. So the asset is we've got a platform that enables companies to connect much deeper in their supply chain and use that information to make far better decisions on how they get their products to their customer at the right cost. So, and I see the supply chain market, I obviously think of this transition to cloud and waves. We had the first wave breaking was the sales, then the HR and the finance function. Operations and supply chains, the one that's cresting on the horizon. And keep that going, we've got our surfboards in the water, we've got great capability, and really, really excited about what we can do for our clients. You've got to ride the waves or you become driftwood. And how big is that wave, yeah. Hey, that's the biggest market, right? I mean, look at the size of the enterprise software spend. Core ERP, supply chain industry functionality is the big piece. It's probably two, it's probably buying HR, CRM, financials together, and it's not even as big as sort of the industry supply chain, manufacturing, procurement market, core ERP market. So, it's big, it's a big opportunity. But it requires a much more sophisticated response because you talk to our customers like, hey, we operate our plants 365 days a year, three shifts sometimes in peak seasons, we can't afford an environment that isn't pure mission critical, that doesn't step up to service levels. So, we're working really hard to address the mission critical system challenge, not just the benefits and payroll. So, there's certainly an opportunity with AI, with machine learning, certainly more analytics, bringing that to the manufacturing world. So, that's clearly fundamental to your strategies. Is that, in your view, the tipping point to get really this whole market moving? I think, I mean, I would agree with you. I mean, there's a sort of accumulation of digital capabilities. Certainly, mobility has sort of proved that it's important, but it's a little bit of a nice to have. Some of the innovations around user experiences is a really important but nice to have. I think that is the game changer. When you can use data as a weapon, a competitive weapon, that you can make decisions faster and how you discount your product or how you identify a shortage faster than someone else, that's where there's real money that comes out of that. What about blockchain? We've heard a lot about blockchain in the supply chain, cutting out the middleman. We haven't heard much here about it. It's not something that, we're going to ask Charles. Somebody said to me, once Charles gets on it, that, boom, the company's behind it. But, how real is that in manufacturing and supply chain specifically? Is it just way too early? You think there's potential there? Have you looked at it? Obviously, we've looked at it. We've worked on with customers on prototypes. There's a couple of areas, there's a lot of hype. As you guys know, you talk to a lot of this, a lot of hype in that space. It's certainly unproven in a lot of areas. We think in the area of supply chain financing, blockchain has a very, very powerful, where you have multi-parties. You've got suppliers and logistics companies and banks and all who need a piece of information. We need distributed capabilities around that. We think there's a big potential in some of that area. We're talking, we're working with some of the banks on that. We think in the area of getting deeper into the supply chain around sustainability and the ethical and traceability of the supply chain. When you're going down, we've got customers that in the peril business that are going down to the farms, they want to know exactly the lineage of all of their stuff that's going into their product that's ending up in a consumer. That's potentially a more efficient mechanism to have all these different entities collaborating on a distributed model. Especially when we talk about the GT Nexus Network, there's natural extensions to it. That it already is a common platform that is serving a wide variety of companies, logistics companies, manufacturers. So there's a lot of natural exit points from that integrated network to support a couple of these more extended processes that are a little bit more distributed. Yeah, so smart contracts, maybe fits there. And you talked about distributed a couple of times. What about IoT? The pendulum seems to be swinging now. Obviously cloud is hot, kind of re-centralization, but IoT is a whole new world. You got a lot of IT companies kind of pushing the IT model top-down into operations technology and we don't think that's the way it's going to work. The IoT guys are actually going to drive the standards and the trends, what are you saying? Well, I think, hey, the people that have the, that make the equipment, make the pipelines, hey, obviously they got a big stake in this. They understand how their equipment works, they know how to attach the sensors, they know how to translate the things going on in the machines into data. We're going to be taking that data and how do you connect it to a business process. That's something that they don't understand. They don't understand how a heat event could translate, can connect to a maintenance process and how do you deploy a technician with the right part to go in there so they can offer some proactive service. So I think there's going to be a very tight partnership where people coming from the equipment up or the asset up connect with the people that understand process, analytics and sort of execution. You talked about sustainability, they're just a moment ago. So obviously companies, what we know, their focus is changing in that regard, right? People are paying more attention and a lot of that's being customer driven too, right? At the same time too, in terms of distribution, in terms of manufacturing, customer expectations are changing too, right? We expect things on a much different timetable. So how are you helping your clients recognize all those things? Like you're thinking about tomorrow today and trying to get them to address that in terms of their technology plays down the road to meet these really fast changing demands. Yeah, I mean one of our really dominant industries is distribution. Probably three out of five distribution companies around the world run our software. So distribution is a space, sits typically between the manufacturing world and the consumer or the retail world is under tremendous pressure. While Amazon is inching into distribution-centric industry, so there's a lot of pressure from that, but there's also rising expectations that you have to do instantaneous fulfillment, that you have to provide complete visibility into where my order is, when am I going to get it? Because I don't want to carry this supply, you got to carry it. So we're seeing a big, big rejuvenation of that industry because the pressure is driving them to rethink e-commerce, to rethink the types of services they're providing to their companies that even in some cases they're sneaking into retail and having that type of experience because they need to compete in different ways. And I think that's always, the industry change is good for companies like us that have a lot of experience in the industry because we can help them. And they need a catalyst, right? They need a catalyst to go out and change and rethink how they operate. And it's created a pretty interesting opportunity. So I wonder, Rod, if you could talk a little bit about, I know you're only a few months in, but just your impressions of the differentiation and when you give us the bumper sticker pitch, why in for, how are you different? So I mean, three things, just net it out, three things. Industry, and we talk a lot about industry, we talk a lot about Last Mile, it's real. It's compelling to our customers. They're tired of having to finish the software for the vendor at their site. They want the provider to finish the software and take it to meet their unique needs. Two is I think, even though we're smaller than some of the big names out there, I think pound for pound we out-innovate almost every company. And I can talk very specifically, transitioning from a very, very large competitor when you actually look and get into the detail of what we've actually delivered around AI or what we've actually delivered around analytics or mobility, and I pound for pound, we fight way above our weight on that front and I think if you look at even what we've done on a hook and loop digital over the years, the types of proof points we have with customers are something that very few of our competitors could boast. So I think this digital overuse term, but the sort of understanding of how this new technology works and being able to translate that to our customers is huge and three is culture. I think we have a fast oriented culture that there's not a lot of levels. We can cut through the nonsense for our customers pretty quickly. We organize around our customers, we don't have 3,000 sales teams trying to sell them piece parts, so we can do the solution thing. And we're really working hard to differentiate on customer centricity. I made a comment yesterday at our executive forum that in general, service and enterprise software stinks. You wouldn't accept, if a retailer was treating you the way the average enterprise software, you wouldn't accept it, right? You'd go to somewhere else. We've had the benefit or we've had customers that have such big investments in us they have to deal with it. And we have an opportunity to fix that, to change that, to really reorganize and reorient our customer around the outcomes that matter to them. And it's so important, they're going to trust us. And it's really about trust. They're going to trust us to run their applications, our mission-christian critical applications in our cloud. And we need to really change the game on that front. And we're doing a lot of things structurally. For example, maybe someone talked about we're taking development, customer support and cloud operations, and integrating that into a common organization so there's no finger pointing. If something goes down, it's not well, it's the network, it's a bug, it's a knowledge issue, it's one team that's accountable for making sure that we resolve that issue rapidly. Same on the field side, so now we're organizing for manufacturing distribution, all the resources we need to both sell and service our customers, deliver for our customers in a common team. So there's accountability, I know both sides of our product side, product and cloud opposite side there's accountability and from a sort of customer engagement account management accountability. And then we got to do a lot of things around service and automation and better proactive, we're running their cloud, we should be able to tell them, hey, this isn't running optimally, we need to come in and do this change, I mean, that's where we need to get. That's what the industry needs to get and we want to get there first. Yeah. You're on the right path. And again, congratulations on the new position. Yeah, thank you. And we appreciate the time here today and wish you all the best. I appreciate what you guys do, I love your show and contact. Thank you, Ryan. No, we appreciate that, thank you sir. Back with more here on theCUBE, we are in Forum 2018, we're in Washington DC.