 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. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor. Thanks so much for joining us. Oh, great to be here. Thank you guys for coming. So you're fresh off the keynote. Big deal, thousands of people here at the Javits Center. What would you say is sort of the big, what's most exciting to you about being here and what you really want participants, attendees to come away with? Well, there's a lot of energy at the conference and people can see the investments we've been making, all the innovation and just the feedback that we're getting is to keep doing what you're doing. You guys have really changed the industry. The idea of a network commerce and a network ERP coming together, something new, they like the fact that we kind of find these new areas on our own. People are buzzing about Coleman, our new AI announced with that platform as well. So it's been fun, getting the feedback. So talk a little bit about Coleman. It has a, talk about the naming of Coleman. Yeah, so it's named after Catherine Coleman Johnson, who was one of the early pioneers in NASA. She was a researcher, a mathematician there to calculate a lot of the orbital fractions that were needed for reentry. And John Glenn relied on her and she's in the movie Hidden Figures. And I got to know that movie pretty well because along with about 30 other African-American executives we raised the money to send almost 30,000 kids to see the movie for free. We screened it probably three months before it hit the theaters. And a lot of us, so we learned a lot of, we didn't know about it ourselves, so we learned a lot about them. And so I was excited to say, if we're going to have an AI platform, why not name it after her, such a pioneer? And so it worked out her family was at the event and they were just blown away and they're asking, can I get copies of everything and taking pictures with us? So I thought it was a highlight of the show. You know, I liked your first slide today and yesterday in the analyst meeting. It basically was your strategy in a nutshell. Yeah. Microverticles was sort of the starting point, the decision to go AWS cloud, the GT Nexus network component, first analytics and then Coleman AI. And it's just fit together so nicely and it sounds great. And then you also said that, look, cloud and mobile and social, that's table stakes today. It's really sort of a new ball game. So my question is, you know, the slide's nice. It sounds great. How fully baked is it? Yeah, well, we're, I think we're, you know, we've had some time now we've owned the network and so we've been working on figuring out the right integration points and where the value add was. And so we're already able to kind of ship things like ASNs directly to our ERP and we showed in context where you can click on the order and M3 for example and see where it is on an ocean container. So we've already done a lot of that work and there's only more to come. We want to, we didn't mention it today. We want to attack the EDI marketing, commoditize that and have it be a free service because we already have a network. We can ship back at the around the cost of anything and we do that for some customers today. So we have more that we could have talked about that we didn't get to. So a lot of it's real today. We also heard at the analyst meeting in great depth and a little bit today, you had the CFO of Coke Industries up there made a large $2 billion plus investment. Coke is also a customer. And was a customer prior to the announcement of the investment? How did that all come about? Can you share that sort of story with us? Yeah, so we had a very successful project we got Georgia Pacific. They brought us in they were frustrated with SAP. It's too expensive to take it too long. We had the micro vertical features they could get going quickly and we collaborated with them and added a few other things they wanted. So that went very well and kind of where it travels when you're coming under budget inside of Coke. And one thing led to another and made a trip to Wichita with their invite and hit it off very well with Charles Coke and he understood what we did. He's a MIT grad, very technical. So I wasn't sure, you know, kind of what I was getting into but once I started talking to him he clearly understood everything else and the more technical, you know, the conversation became the more animated he got. So I clearly he's kind of our kind of guy we're product people and so we hit it off very well. And they're becoming a larger customer. You're getting deeper and deeper into that account. But you know, there's an old saying God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. Yeah. And so, and you guys have emerged as this really viable alternative to SAP and Oracle but how do you go from, you know, where they are to this cloud native platform that you guys have developed? Well, it'll be one of the largest global implementations ever of any financial project of any HCM 130,000 employees which is great. So a project of that scale that happens usually top down when they're invested and ready to go. So they have four members on our board and it's including the CFO, including the president of Georgia Pacific and so many other important executives. And so the guys who run the divisions and many of them are on our board and learning this stuff and excited. So they're actually pushing us right now which we think it's great. We have a weekly cadence call with them with all these senior execs of all the projects. They should review where we are make sure you're getting what you need and people are responding. I mean, they are driving. These people know how to execute. And that's why they're $115 billion. So it's great for us. Great for them. They're pushing us. So I'm not too worried about that. I've given what I've seen so far. When you think about the long-term strategy of N4, you're now one of the most well-funded unicorns along with Uber and Airbnb. Where do you go? I mean, what do you sort of see as sort of the long-term play here? Yeah, post-war domination then after that. Okay, Eric, okay. We have other industries we want to get into that's a few acquisitions we probably will consider. We want to expand our network. These networks grew up by vertical and by industry. There's a few other verticals we want to get into. But the list of things that we could build and what people are asking us to build is almost endless. And they like the way we do these kind of digital transformation projects. There's lots of those out there. And so we just want to make sure we have the ecosystem where we can implement. So that's why it was so important to get a sensor and CAPGEM and I and Grant Thornton and Deloitte. And they're all taking training as we speak, building out their practices, which we didn't have a year ago. So that was our kind of constraint to scale. And we just couldn't take on so many projects. Now we can. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the structure of the industry, the software industry specifically. I mean, you're fairly famous for having sort of predicted consolidation and then orchestrating that consolidation. Mark Andreessen's famous for saying software's eating the world. I think Benioff said there's going to be more non-tech companies that are SaaS companies than tech companies. Do you expect we'll just see a sort of deconsolidation of software or maybe a bifurcation where maybe some of the enterprise guys acquire but there's all these burgeoning, blooming flowers of software companies emerging. What's your point of view on the software industry and its structure? I think you'll see more industrial companies wanting to own software. I think you'll see software executives running non-software companies. Most companies think they have to get digital and a lot of the board of directors recognize that and realize they don't have the expertise or domain to do that. So a lot of software executives get asked to run non-tech companies for that reason because you can learn retail faster than they can learn how to program. And if you've been building applications for those verticals, you actually kind of know the vertical pretty well. So I think you'll see some integration of some of these domains over time where people happen to become more technology and the way to do that is to bring in tech people. Any other thing I wanted to ask you sort of a follow-up on that? I mean, you see Amazon buys whole foods and is getting into grocery. They're a content company. Apple's into financial services and you know it's because the digital allows you to sort of jump industry value change. But for decades people just stay within their own little value chain silo. You see expect that to change as well where executives are able to traverse industries. I think so. Technology is causing that. It is enough disruption and fear where people are willing to consider something completely different than they were before. And that helps us because usually we need someone to either take an action because they see an opportunity or because they're worried about getting disrupted one of the other. That's how these big projects get started. And that's part of the reason why our growth is so good right now. And is that what's driving it? Is it the fear of being left behind? It was probably an equal amount of both. They see opportunity and I should be doing something but I don't know what. So we have to tell them the what. Or I'm worried about what everybody else is doing. I don't want to get Ubered out. And we can tell them how not to be in that position. And so we're getting an audience at senior levels that we couldn't before just because it's top of mind for everybody. How about talk about M&A a little bit and what you look for in an acquisition candidate. You have a platform that's probably dogmatic about it running on that platform. But talk a little bit more about what you look for. We usually want next generation thinking and a technical platform that we don't have to completely rewrite because we don't want to kind of pollute our architecture. If it's a modern architecture where we can graph it onto our info or assets we call it, that's fine. So we don't buy things just for scale. That was kind of an early strategy of the company 10 or 15 years ago. We buy things plus it's a specific value proposition for customers or it fills a hole that we think we need to fill. I would rather buy something that is small, maybe not much tracks and not much revenue but a great product. As we have a huge distribution channel we can grow it pretty quickly. We can fix all those other problems if the product is there. Well the burst acquisition I think is very interesting because you saw the ascendancy we were talking earlier, Rebecca, about. Saw the ascendancy of Tableau and Christian Chabot, very articulate, would talk about the slow BI companies and really depositioning them. Your positioning is actually quite compelling. Not the old takes forever to build a cube and not the lightweight version of just a visualization. You're sort of the best of both worlds. Maybe unpack that a little bit. Yeah, that's the attraction we saw in bursts. You need some of those enterprise features to understand fragmented and enterprise scale data. That's a hard problem. Having a nice desktop tool that can only handle a single table or gives you conflicting information because you can't have any semantic meaning across different data sources. It's nice to get answers quickly but if they're wrong that doesn't help you. So we need somebody who could handle the back end. Our customers were asking us to do that. They want us to be the analytic layer, a system of record for analytics because other companies don't want to do that. SAP or Oracle say just use all my stuff. I don't want to connect anybody else. And we know that we have to coexist and if we can build that analytic layer we think that's strategic high ground. Let's own that. And if we can replace some of the underlying systems later, great. Go ahead, Rebecca. I was going to talk about, I was going to switch gears entirely and talk a little bit about politics before the cameras were rolling. You were on Obama's economic recovery board which was led by Paul Volcker. You've been to Washington, met with Trump, met with Pence. I'm curious about how you view the role of business in advising government in which directions to take and the approach. I think it's increasingly important in a sense that, especially with the current administration they respect business opinion because he's a business guy. Secondly, so many of our institutions, people don't trust anymore. They've kind of lost some of that credibility. I hope we can turn that around, but in the interim we have to have other people who could fill in for some of that. And especially tech companies, people want to know what tech companies think. And so I think we almost have a duty to try to fill in some of that and every part of the economy and the government's been affected by technology. They want to understand it. So we can help them do that. And so many of your customers are in fact municipalities and cities and public school systems. That's a good point. We have 1500 state and local governments and federal customers and that's a fast growing part of our business right now. And we're rooting a lot of federal agencies as we speak because they're going through an upgrade cycle as well. Something called FedRound, they have to get certified. They want to move to the cloud and we're doing both of those with them. Ned, you also talked about how you see technology executives perhaps moving into other industries. Do you see them also moving into public service? Do you see that as a possibility? That's going to take longer. It's probably later in their careers because of the economics of that. But every now and then you'll see one do it, yeah. So question on cloud. It was almost by necessity, I would argue, that you sort of gravitated toward AWS smart move. Others have said, you know, Oracle in particular, we're going to own the whole stack and we can make a lot of money owning the whole stack. If you had to do it again, would you pursue that same strategy and why? Well, when we got there, the company was just starting, trying to build a cloud business. We were doing a traditional, trying to own data centers and kind of do data sharing. We could have done that and continue with that over time but I just thought it wouldn't provide the elastic compute and the scale of data management that I thought was coming. We looked at all the platforms that were out there at the time. We met with Microsoft IBM, you name it. And at the time, AWS was just so much further along in terms of services available, capabilities, entrepreneurial spirit, scale. It wasn't even close, you know, in our minds anyway. And so they were great partners to work with and for us, it's been the right decision and they've helped us a lot. Yeah, and seeing your arc as maybe a question, but you're pretty technical. Maybe a better question for Duncan or Zomo but I'll ask you because you're more technical than I am. When you look at your architecture slides, there's a lot of Amazon in there. There's DynamoDB, looks like some Kinesis, there's S3, there's all kinds of flywheel oriented tech. I wonder if you could sort of elaborate on that in terms of the impact that that has not only on you but ultimately on your customers. Yeah, I know that was by design, by my direction. I wanted to take advantage of every single service we could on AWS but every time we do that that's less work for my devout. I don't want them worried about infrastructure, just write the application, be an industry expert. So anytime they come up with a new service, you name it, whether it's Rabitian or archiving, backup, we're one of the early customers of Redshift, we take advantage of it because that's cheaper for us to do it that way and we get the scale that we need and we get it in multiple countries. So anything, other strategy than that, we have to replicate things in multiple places and we have to figure out how to make it work on AWS. And I know we're limited on time but if software's eating the world, software's going to eat the edge. So talk about your edge strategy. Well it depends on what you mean by edge strategy. I think the software eating the world is true. Maybe it's helping the world. It might be a better way to put it but almost every product that we see, it's inside of now and so that's actually good for us being the largest vendor for asset management. Every IoT company is coming to us because all that data is meaningless unless you can generate a workload or a requisition and get something fixed, schedule some order to come. That's what we do. So all of that data needs to end up in a repository that can affect the business process and we own that business process. Well something that we've said in theCUBE from the early days of so-called big data is the practitioners of big data are the guys who are going to really do well. It's not necessarily the guy selling big data infrastructure and that's proving true. I mean, guys never talk to ever I don't think about big data but you're a data company now first. Yeah, and we collected a lot more data than we ever thought we would and so now we got to figure out kind of how to use that. How to parse that, how to use it, exactly. So which is why we added the next two layers of that stack, right? That'll be next year or something. Yeah, exactly. Next year's the forum. Well Charles Phillips, thanks so much for joining us, it was a pleasure. Great, thanks guys, appreciate it. See you, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's coverage of the forum after this.