 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. Ajay Kumar is here, he's the Managing Director of HCL Technologies, Inforum Partner. Ajay, thanks for coming in theCUBE. Pleasure to be here. Congratulations, coming off the keynote this morning. You know, good crowd. Your second day crowd was still very solid, so. Absolutely fantastic. So, give us the update on HCL, what you guys are doing at Inforum. Sure, before I do that, a minor correction. I'm not the Managing Director at HCL, but I'm a Global Vice President. And, extremely excited to be here for a couple of reasons. Reason number one is, we have a very strategic partnership with Inforum, which is kind of a 360-degree partnership, which we call it. So, what we're excited about is not the opportunity which you're currently addressing, along with Inforum, to positively impact the end customers, but looking at creative years of creating new opportunities and to address that for the end customers. So, that's something which is the most exciting piece. So, I wonder if you could help us clarify something. When you think of the big ERP projects over the last decades or so, Oracle, SAP, and you think about the systems integrators. I often joke, they like to eat at the trough. So, they look for big, giant, chewy, complex opportunities. And then, here comes Inforum, with we're going to do cloud-only, we're going to simplify. It's kind of antithetical to what you would typically expect from a large systems integrator with deep expertise like yourself. How is it that you're able to thrive and partner and put so much emphasis and priority on Inforum? So, what I would say is the future of all enterprises, we do believe very sincerely in the Inforum management vision which is there. So, you talk about micro-vertical strategy being on the cloud, powered by data science behind it. Look at improving the user experience. I think that's where the enterprise are going to go. So, we are completely glued into that vision. So, that's one thing where we kind of, once you buy into vision, you sincerely believe into that this is where the future is going to be. We do believe there's a huge play for partners like us. Secondly, which is there is that if you look at it from Inforum's point of view, when a customer buying a piece of software solution from Inforum, it is not just a piece of code they're buying. This is to support their business critical applications. But over and above that, if you look at it, there's so many other pieces which are there in their ecosystem which this Inforum solution needs to integrate and work very, very smoothly with that. And that's where the role play of a partner like it still comes in, which is a global player. We are in 31 countries, 110,000 employees. So, all those things power when we put together and we combine it with some of the parameters I was talking earlier at the keynote session around digital, around IoT, and just the next generation of outsourcing. And if you combine all those figures together, I think that's where the 21st century enterprise are going to get created for tomorrow. Okay, so you're embracing that shift, not trying to hang on. They say protect the past from the future. You're not doing that. Okay, so let's talk about digital transformation. We go to a lot of these events. Everybody talks about digital transformation, increasingly here about IoT. Let's start with digital transformation. What are customers doing? What does it really mean to customers? How is HCL actually affecting change? So, I think if you look all around, digital is one of the pervasive factors which has kind of impacted all of us globally in a very, very big way. And all corporates kind of not untouched upon by that. What our point of view is there that if you look at digital as an enabling technology for your business, it can create a humongous effect with the next generation and the current generation which is there. So, I was quoting an example at your keynote, Manchester United, which is one of the leading sports franchisee club. They have 659 million fans globally for them. Now they wanted to create a digital experience for them and they wanted to ensure that they can bring into the digital ecosystem the different partners and everybody on board. And see if there are ways to monetize, improve the user experience for all these fans so that they are more and more glued into it. And that's what they'll expect. And that's going to completely transform their business because, and this is where the digital plays a key role in terms of helping organization really transform their business from where they are and where they want to be. Please. So, it actually sounds, we've given us a very compelling example. I want to make sure I understand if we can generalize from that. Do you start with the desired digital experience and then work back into the technology that needs to be, say, re-architected, renovated, and then the business processes that need to support those technologies? What's the process, relative to how we used to do ERP 15, 20 years ago? Right. I think the key is everything is business driven. So, if you look at the different business processes, look at what the vision of the organization is. How do they stand out into the market space? How do they want to compete? What markets they're serving? And if you put all those ecosystem together, you are able to kind of visualize a state for the organization where they want to be. And to enable that, all these technologies come into play. So, digitalization will play a role. It's not about just digital, but how does that digitalization strategy want to support those business parameters which the organization decided for themselves? And ensure that you have a better customer satisfaction and everything in which translates down to all your revenues, your margins, and more customer retention, growth, and everything. Are you seeing any particular, AJ, any particular adoption rates faster, slower by industry, any different trends? I mean, is it, you remember the Nicholas Negrapanti bits versus Adams? I mean, is it tracking in any way, shape, or form along those lines, or is it sort of ubiquitous across all industries? So obviously, there would be different verticals and their pace of adoption would be a little different. But the good thing is, all verticals are picking it up. That's first and foremost. Second is, if you want to look at leading indicators, there are some industries where, let's say media entertainment, healthcare, we have seen those actually picking it up very, very nicely and a very faster pace compared to some of the other verticals. Sorry. Oh, please. Go ahead. So that's the general comment in terms of, the good news is, just to reiterate the point, all the verticals are embracing this, even some of the kind of technology laggers which we used to kind of have a perception about certain verticals and micro verticals. Even those micro verticals have really picked up pace and looking at adopting, because they realize the potential it can unlock for them and create a positive impact for their business. So I'm listening to this, I'm trying to parse out whether the tail wags the dog or the dog wags the tail in the following way. So, 15, 20 years ago, management would come with a mandate because everyone else is doing it. I want an ERP system to standardize my processes. Turns out for the most part, it was just administrative processes except for manufacturers. Now, I'm trying to understand, do you, when you say you should start with the desired end state, this is the experience you want your customers to have, then there's a lot of change management that goes on behind the scenes, is that correct? And that would include some of the legacy apps that might have to be replaced or modified heavily? Absolutely, absolutely. So it's a culmination and a combination of several things which you said. In our perspective, I think the key is everybody in the organization needs to kind of get up to move towards that, because if you look at it, the way things are, people are used to on their personal lifestyle using digital in a very, very ongoing basis, on a daily basis, but when they come to work, it's a very different experience they get. Now, you combine that experience which you're creating for your end-up customers, unless you're able to create that same kind of experience which they're used to doing on a personal level at the work as well, you're not going to create a kind of differentiated kind of an experience for people. So if you put that together, come back to the organization which is trying to make the transformational change for themselves. I think while the vision may be set by the CEO or any top management executive, but extremely, extremely important that the middle management people on the ground buy into that. And a lot of times we have seen in different organizations that it's not the management which drives that, but these inputs come from the field, these come from middle management and flowing back to the top management and telling them, guys, this is the need of the hour for our business to transform and really created compelling propositions for our end customers. So I want to ask you, this is something I actually want to explore with Charles Phillips a little later. In our, I had a research, Peter Burris made this observation. It's a little bit of an academic observation and then John Furrier as well was talking about how back in the day, you had known processes that you were automating. You touched on that a little bit, but technology was unknown. And Charles was an analyst at Morgan Stanley. He said it was relatively easy because nobody really understood the technology that they were buying. So I just started writing about databases and things like that. Well, okay. So he had known processes, unknown technology, it was mysterious. Now with digital, IoT, big data, all these new trends, you have this non-linear consumption. Consumers are very well educated. The technology's pretty well known, but the business process is unknown. So how do you prepare for that? And how do you as a partner of your customers help them prepare for that? First of all, is the premise valid? And then how do you help them prepare? I think the premise is very valid. And anybody who wants to be into a service industry needs to have subject matter expertise into those areas. To put an example, for example, if you're servicing our healthcare customers and medical domain, we actually onboarded a lot of doctors as subject matter experts in our services. Now that's quite unheard of for technology company actually going that route. But the reason we did that was because that is where the understanding the domain comes in and that is where you can really create an incredible value for our end customer to cross over there. So subject matter expertise combined with technology really kind of deliver the desired exponential value. And then I want to also ask you about this lift and shift. Like what is that? How does it fit in with your strategy and what does it mean for customers? So it's a pretty interesting kind of a concept. The customer's journey to the cloud, walking to the cloud. Now you could look at, I am a customer and I'm ready to move to the cloud right away. But there could be a lot of customers who are not completely sure about their journey to the cloud and that's pretty obvious in terms of there will be so many questions. Is things going to be secure for me? How the performance going to be? How my users will adopt that? So a lot of questions will be there. And there are customers who might be on legacy platforms and for them to take an immediate call to move everything from a green screen or an old legacy platform to a cloud based structure might be a little tough for them. So the proposition from INFO and HCL onto that is saying that, hey, Mr. Customer, while you take time to make that call, we look at it into three parts. We call it lift. There'll be a run piece and then there'll be a shift piece. So during the lift piece, we pick up all the applications that are there and host it separately for you. And infrastructure and everything we provide by HCL. We look at all the consulting angle which comes over there along with INFO and HCL we'll provide to the customer. So now we lift the environment away from the premise. So you get from that concept that it's no longer on my premise and you're getting used to the next way. In the span of the runtime where we're running and supporting it for you, business as usual for you, we figured out all your concern areas which are there which are preventing you from making a call to move to the final cloud. And then we move that and the shift piece after running it for some time, address all the concerns that the customer potentially have and then make the shift to the cloud. And when you lift and run, does it matter where you run? Are you dogmatic about where you run? I don't think so, apart from some of the European kind of question marks which might be there in terms of where the country specific centers need to be there, the data needs to reside in a particular country. Apart from that, when you talk of cloud, doesn't matter. As long as the data is out of your premise, it could be anywhere, as long as you meet all the objectives which are there, being secure, safe, performance, and everything put together. And same answer specific with Infor software as well? Absolutely. Okay, because Infor is always talking about AWS, is that the preferred platform or is it? So what we have done during the lift piece it'll be predominantly on all your I-Cities, the mainframe customers which are there. And for that, we would be the partner of choice over there. And you talk about with AWS, the next generation platform that's already a predefined partnership between Infor and AWS on the next generation platform, the Cloud Suite. All right, George, time for one last question. Okay, so really quickly, if I'm unpacking what you said, the lift process takes what runs on dedicated infrastructure and you either put it in a colo or something that's shared infrastructure, but you do not use it in shared infrastructure until you can figure out all the dependencies. Correct. So can you isolate those and move it on to shared infrastructure? Partially, correction might be there. What you said is absolutely right. I think the other angle to this is what we're trying to create is we're trying to create a private cloud kind of network for Infor and its customers. Very, very different than a shared service network which is there. That takes care of not only the infrastructure but the pieces which come across our running, managing the show and supporting the customers on the maintenance piece of it. So it's a little different where against a public cloud you get a private cloud kind of a concept which is there dedicated for that and it takes care of a lot of the questions which potentially the customers may have in their mind as to how you want to address those scenarios for them. So we take care of that. That's clear. All right, Ajay Kumar, thanks very much for coming on, sharing HCL's innovations and congratulations on all your success. Thanks a lot. Once again, pleasure to be here. Thanks, Ajay. All right, cheers. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. George and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from Inforum 2016 in New York City. We'll be right back. It's colleges and universities.