 Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dharaj Shah. He is the CEO of Avap. Thanks so much for joining us. You're a CUBE veteran, so welcome back, I should say. Absolutely, not a rookie anymore. Right, right, right. So Avap is a major strategic partner within Inforum. So just walk us, tell our viewers a little bit more about the relationship and where we are. Absolutely, Avap's been a partner with Inforum now for the last six years, and prior to that we're awesome. We've certainly come a long way. We started it 11 years ago as a single individual. Last year when we were here, we were here as a platinum sponsor, and the big announcement this year is we're a diamond sponsor, so it doesn't get larger. And at great stage presence, and one of the big announcements we had this year was GoLive with Inforum's new CloudSuite financial. The first customer to go live on that, Palos Health, was actually an Avap customer that we brought live in landlords. And they were mentioned in the keynote. Yes, Roger was on main stage, gave a great presentation, and what we centered our belief in is you have the enterprise software provider, which is Inforum in this case, you have the system integrator, which is Avap, and then you have the customer. For any successful outcome, you need all three of these to really partner and do well, and that's what was exhibited with Palos. I'm always interested in companies that place bets on an ecosystem and a leader of that ecosystem. It is somewhat obscure, certainly was six years ago. I mean, I saw this in the ServiceNow community, a hot company growing like crazy, and I saw early on companies like yours in their community said we're going to make a bet, and they've done very well, they've succeeded wildly, been acquired by Accenture and CSC, so maybe great things ahead in your future, but take us back to the decision to bet on Infor. What led to that decision? Absolutely, I mean, looking back is always great, right? Then you know the bets have paid off, but when you make them, it's not the same. Our business was prior to 2012, when we made this decision, was centered around Lawson, we had some staff augmentation business, and we had a MicroStrategy BI business. And in 2011, Infor acquired Lawson. And when Infor acquired Lawson, there was a huge amount of apprehension in the customer base, because everybody was thinking here comes the external team that's going to come and highlight the customer base. Yeah, and the private equity cash suck out. Yeah, so that's what they're going to do. I had the opportunity to listen to Charles and his executive team in one of their first meetings, and Charles was very clear in his vision. He said two things I want to focus on. One, build software that's easy to use, that's beautiful, and that's not upgraded every year. And the second thing was industry focus. Now six years ago, you look at the enterprise software platforms, SAP, Oracle, nobody had industry focus. It was the same piece of software, one size fits all. And Charles came in and said industry specific software. So we bought into that vision, and we said this is going to be a huge opportunity in the ecosystem, and fast forward six years. You know, we were about 20 people at that time as an entire company. We have 25 people here at Inforum. More people just attending, and 450 consultants globally now. You know, Charles Phillips is a real, is a true software visionary, because if you go back, you know, decade plus ago, if you were an industry specialist, you were a VAR. Yes. You know, and you weren't going to have a multi-billion dollar valuation. That was not a way to, you know, make the big dollars, right? And so, it is still was a sort of a somewhat risky bet. It definitely was, because it seems we were much smaller back then, but still to shut down those businesses over night, and I still have the letter that we wrote to our customers and our employees, and said, we believe in this. And that belief has really catapulted both our organizations. It's really helped Infor, and it's helped AVAP to kind of, and that's one of the lessons I learned as an entrepreneur. That wonderful things happen when you focus and build really strong partnerships. So that letter will someday be in a museum, I'm sure. Oh, I think we, from your mouth to God's ears. But let's talk about that, that easy to use, beautiful software that is transforming specific industries. Let's talk about retail. Yes, absolutely. So retail was a huge announcement last year, when they announced they're going to go after Infor as a company and build a new vertical. We invested alongside them as they are single largest partner to go and give support. What they were doing around retail is multiple things. Because prior to this, what Infor had was the ERP platform. Financials, human capital management. What they wanted to invest is rewrite the merchandising system, which is at the heart of a retailer not been done for the last 20 years. And they are rewriting and made an announcement with the best retailer Whole Foods. And that project kind of kicked off. The second piece they did was they filled in a gap with merchandise, financial planning, assortment planning by buying a company called Predictix. So AVAP kind of went ahead of it. And we started projects alongside them over the last year. And now we're independently going to market. So Payless, we just signed a contract to implement merchandise, financial planning for them. And then the final leg to this will be the point of sales, which will be Star Mount, which is another system that they acquired. And now the whole story on retail is coming in. Because as we hear, retail's really getting hurt. And there's a huge technology change happening in the marketplace. Well, and then now does GT Nexus fit into that as well in terms of compressing the, you know, if you're built to order kind of, somebody was given an example of a couch today, you know, you order a couch from some retail store and it takes 12 weeks to deliver. We've all been there. Does it fit into that equation? You know, it does because there's a whole shipping, receiving and the point of contacts through that, that kind of comes into the play there. And GT Nexus, as you saw on the stage today, the amount of traffic that's being used through GT Nexus, it's going to help a lot of the retailers from all they're receiving and mobile supply chain functionality. I mean, it's a real consumer frustration. You order something and you wait and you wait and you wait and you're excited and all of a sudden weeks later you get the notification, sorry, it's going to either be delayed or sorry, we can't deliver that. So that's just lost revenue. I mean, how many times does that happen? And when you go to a website, it's a different order. When you go to a mobile page, it's a different order. When you go into the store, it's a different order. So bringing all of that together for their single back office user experience is really what is going to transform the user experience to your point. So speaking about another industry or user experience, and this is more important than buying a couch, let's say your health. So this is another way in which in foreign AVAP are really transforming the way we shop for medical care. So give us an example of what you're doing. Absolutely, we're very passionate about healthcare. So healthcare is our largest vertical by size. So about 75% of our business is in healthcare. And Infor has a large presence, two thirds of the hospitals in the nation use Infor for their ERP software. You know, I'll give a simple example. We were talking retail earlier. When you go into a retail store and you want to buy a piece of clothing, you know what it's going to cost you to purchase that. And the store knows what their cost is for that. Cause everything's coming from a single system. In hospitals case, there are two key systems. We have EHR, which is the electronic medical system. And you have your ERP, which is your back office system. Your revenue comes from your EHR system, which is typically an Epic or a Cerner. And your cost information comes from your loss in system, which is 75% of the time Infor. They don't talk to each other. Now, the acquisition of BIRST gives a tremendous opportunity for us to connect the two systems together, bring that data forward so the hospital operators know at the time of admission and check out what was the revenue and what was the cost so they could do margin analysis. So that you can see how that benefits the hospital, but it also benefits the customer. In the end of the day, absolutely, because patient outcome is what's at the heart of all the changes that we're driving towards. And when there's a lot, you know, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars that hospitals are burning in inefficient systems right now. And if that's saved, where is that going to go? Towards better care. And that's where dollars need to be focused, not in holes that need to be plugged in technology. So DRes, explain where EVAP specifically adds value. Where do you pick up from the technology that Infor provides? Absolutely, so prior to a year ago, our focus was just on the Infor side of the platform with ERP. And a year ago, we acquired a company called Falcon Consulting, best in class, top category leader for Revenue Cycle to bring in epic expertise. So now we have both the EHR expertise and the ERP expertise. And in fact, this was our first foray outside of Infor. And we got permission from the Infor executive team because we saw as a strategic way to service the entire healthcare ecosystem. And that's really helped us get knowledge from both sides to now build the integration platform to service. And so is it the full life cycle of plan, design, implement, and manage? I mean, you start with strategy and? Yes, so we are starting with the Office of the CIO and the CFO and organizational readiness and talking about strategy consulting, vendor selection, ERP, and after once we get into the actual implementation cycle, that's where we do the implementation of the ERP or the EHR. Once implementation is done, the third piece of it will be optimization because most systems that implement are not optimized. They're on the same arcade system that were implemented many, many years ago. And then the final piece to that is continued support as technology is evolving so fast. You heard Charles speak about so many new technology. It's hard for customers to keep up. So we do outsource application managed service to help support their. So talk a little bit more about the whole micro vertical strategy. We're interested in, I mean, obviously it's real. Yes, absolutely. But what is the impact to you as a partner and your customers? You know, that was a new concept for us because we thought, okay, vertical, great. And then Charles came and said, no, no, vertical is not enough, it's micro vertical. So one of our businesses is manufacturing. So you take the business of process manufacturing, the process manufacturing for your brewer versus your baker versus, you know, your food distributor, very different. So we then started taking enforced product and started building applications in the presentation layer that are adapted for those industries. So Cloud Suite Food and Beverage has a variation. So Old Neighborhood Foods is one of our top customers. And they're one of the largest supplier of our pork in the Northeast. So how do the, everything that goes behind the making of the sausage and all the recipes, all of that is very different in a business than safe Albertsons that got a bakery that were implementing the same product. And you add that value? Is that right? Yes, that's a custom code that you write or? No, these are using enforced tools because enforced presentation layer tools that we use to build micro vertical specification, reporting analytics, all of those are driven for those industries. So you're composing the tooling. Correct. Essentially what you're doing. And so there's, is there any application development, any low code or is it all no code? Zero code on the application side because that's with being in the cloud, that's one of the controls that come in. So the systems of the 70s were all customized in the application layer. And then every time there was an upgrade, you would have to go through a huge exercise to retrofit them. All of that goes away because with the cloud you don't have control of the application layer. So all these tools that I'm talking about reside in the presentation layer. Okay, so there, do you run into situations though where you say, oh wow, it would be nice if I had this custom modification? And what happens in that situation? Go back to Infor and ask them for it or do you say to those guys, hey, can you extend your platform to give me a low code development capability or some kind of PAS layer that? That's a very good question. And that's a real world problem that our delivery team faces and we have to mature ourselves to. I would say a majority of the case, 80 to 90% of the case, we go back to the customer to have a conversation with them to adjust their process. Most eight out of 10 times, it's a customer that doesn't want to change the process. And that's why they want the software to fit that. And we've learned through the chain management mechanisms to have educated conversation with our customers because it's a lot more painful to change the software than to do that. In the two out of 10 cases, there are exceptions of building plugins or going to Infor. So one of the things with our partnership with Infor, we actually have a direct line with the product development team. And if there's a change the customer's requesting that others would benefit from, it quickly gets into their queue and then it's part of the product set. Well, that's interesting. That's a whole line of questioning now because you think about the old days of technology was the technology was so mysterious. But the process you knew. Yes. And today it's changing. The technology is pretty much de-missed about everybody has AI, right? But it's the process that becomes somewhat unknown. Think about IoT and the edge. These are all sort of wild west, you know. Most often overlooked cause for project failures is chain management and organizational readiness. And that's the part we lead in with to ensure organizations understand the investment they're making in ERP is not just getting a vendor to come in and do this plug and play, but to have their organization adapt to what the technology really is best suited for. It's great. Well, Dharaj, thank you so much for joining us here in theCUBE. It's been a fun conversation. Yeah. We're fortunate. Enlightening even today. Absolutely, I've always learned. All right, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. We'll have more from theCUBE at Inforum 2017 in a bit. Thank you. All right.