 Live from Washington D.C., if the Cube. Covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. Welcome back here on theCUBE. We are live at Inforum 18 in the nation's capital, Washington D.C., where these days, there's never a dull moment, and we'll just leave it at that. I'm with John Walls, Dave Vellante, and Stuart Appelbaum is joining us here. He's the EVP of North America Service Industries at Infor, and Stuart, thanks for joining us here. Oh, thank you, looking forward to it, and you're right. You got your hands on a lot of pies, right? You got a bank, and you got a retail, you got health care. Hospitality, and you've had some wins in hospitality of late. First off, what's driving that? What do you think is being the... Yes, sure, well, I mean, whether you look at hospitality, whether it's managed food service, or hotels, or restaurants, a lot of the technology that's been out there is dated, right? And the technology is not upkeeping with the requirements and the demand for a really different customer service level. So, you take the look and feel of what we've been able to do as a company over the last 10 years, and build up a lot of knowledge base and seniority around what it means to serve those markets, but then re-architect with new products, right? Cloud-first approach type technology that really allows for us to deliver a, what I would say, a much more better experience for the guest at a hotel, or at a front, at a cash register at a restaurant, or in a managed food service environment in a hospital, right? Those, all those environments are a lot of touches that go on, and the more the technology is modern, the better you can improve those technology and those interactions that go on. You also look at, you know, the idea that these guys trying to manage these, you know, whether it's a hotel chain, or a company like Sodexo, where they have managed food service entities all over, business and industry, health care, it doesn't matter what you see a cafeteria somewhere, there's a high odds that it's either a company like Sodexo another managed food service provider. The complexity of trying to maintain on-premise solutions is just, it's back-breaking for them. So for them to be able to now actually get to a level with a company like Info, who not only has the experience in the space, but also have invested into the next generation cloud-based solutions, really allows us to kind of differentiate ourselves in the marketplace, and the marketplace has been pushing us for that as well. So are these typically sort of install-based in-for customers that you're now moving to a cloud model? Is it sort of a new logo? So I wonder if you could describe that dynamic. Yeah, I would tell you it's pretty mixed, right? Our customer base is fairly broad. We serve hotels, for example, in over 100 countries and territories today. A lot of those customers came up through legacy applications, much like we compete in the marketplace on. So we've done a really great job of migrating those customers up into the cloud with the next generation technology. But what's also happened is as you look at the area in which people serve the hotel space, a lot of them are really legacy applications that have been around for 20, 30 years, and while those companies have tried to encapsulate modern technology and move it into some cloud-level environment, only Info is actually re-architected and built them from the ground up. So what we're finding is a lot of different style of companies and groups. One great example of this is Mandarin Oriental has begun to roll out our company or roll out our products globally. So being able to take a brand that's as exclusive as that that's so focused on how do we make the guest at the forefront of everything that we do to make them feel special? Well, they couldn't do that with the technology that they have today, right? So in order to be able to make those differences and those changes and how they're gonna service their guests, they have to move to a next generation technology. So we're seeing a lot of new logo business in that space. We're also seeing a lot of new logo space in the casino marketplace, right? You think about how massive and big these casinos are. So most of these guys have been very careful and concerned just like our banking customers, for example, in being able to move into the cloud, move to new technology, because can companies really scale? Can they bring that capability and put it in the cloud? Well, we very much started to prove that with these large casinos to the point where we just recently announced about a year ago signing one of the largest or second largest casino company in the world. And 40 hotels with over 50,000 hotel rooms, right? The idea to be able to take these kind of technologies at that scale and pace is driving a lot of new logo, new customer business being driven from our competition, right? Which has not been able to keep pace with that kind of technology in the cloud. So what are the winning attributes? I'm hearing architecture, we heard this morning, platform, we had Nunzio on the design, the whole user experience, there's the cloud component, those are the sort of key factors, what else? They're very much the key, but it's how in 4 OS, which I think maybe people have talked a little bit about, we have this capability to create a model that allows for not only a free flow of communication and understanding between systems, whether it's for a hotel environment or a hospital environment, so that information can be shared among systems and among resources to be able to collaborate and do something with that information. But equally as important at the same time, we put all that information into a data lake so that we can now use Burst and we can use Coleman to really start to help people understand not only what does it look like or what's the interactions occurring at the hotel space or what might you want to tell this customer or say to this customer to, hey, we're going to give you that information upfront instead of guessing what that might look like or maybe guessing what you might want to offer that client, it's a very different approach. Yeah, give me an idea, I mean specifically, you talk about Mandarin, we'll just use them as an example. Yep. What are you helping them do better that they couldn't do before? Because when I think of service, I think of Mandarin, they did things pretty well before. So what are you doing to help them improve their processes and what are they turning you for future? Sure, sure, well, I mean, from a simplistic standpoint, talk about how they're able to interact with you as a guest, right? If you're a Mandarin type of client, right? You're probably very much a more affluent business traveler or a... Dave Vellante. A Vellante example, right? And at the end of the day, while you want all the level of service that you expect at that kind of property, the amount of effort and work that they have to do or you might have to do to make them understand what that is, is very taxing, right? And it's also very hard for you guys to interact and change that. By getting to what we have HMS, which is Enforced Hotel Property Management System, allows them to really streamline not only understanding who you are, what your preferences are, how you like to interact with them, but then also be able to deliver that in the mode of interaction that you'd like, whether it be through mobile, whether it be through text, whether it be through personal conference calls or discussions or touch points, right? That kind of capability in their legacy systems took a whole bunch of manual intervention to make that happen. Now we're able to automate that, make that information real time, so it's not just a few people digging in to try to find this information to go back and try to make that guest feel like they understood it. It's every point, right? Every contact that touches that customer who has access to our solutions is fed that information real time, which gives the customer a much different experience, right? And at the same time, it allows you guys to interact in a much different experience. You may not want to talk to people, you want to check in on your phone, show up the hotel, go to your room, open your door. Well, legacy architectures and technologies with closed type of infrastructure don't allow for that open API capability versus our technologies allow it free flowing out of a cloud scenario, which is even a more complex thing, to give the ability for those hoteliers like Mandarin to say, hey, I'm going to give Valente a very unique experience that is exactly what he likes with all the information that I know about him to be what I would consider the best way I can service Valente. So self-service is an obvious one. I don't want to have to wait in the phone on a hold to check out, for example. Just give me a pad or something that I can just go boom. And there are numerous other examples, but you've got to get the user experience and the design right. Maybe talk about how you guys approach that. Yeah, well, so you guys had a chance to meet with Nunzio and our hook and loop. Hook and loop is very instrumental in what we do in the hospitality space as well, as well in the healthcare space. Any time people are interacting, not only as an employee, but as a guest, whether you're an invited guest from a doctor to get to a hospital to have some kind of treatment or acute care, or if you're a hotel guest where you're coming to stay, right? There is some level of interaction that's going on that requires a very unique, specific, kind of touch point between the two, right? And in that area and then in that space, right, there's a lot of data and elements that go on that if you feed those and understand what those elements are and start to really understand what it is that individuals require in terms of their personal care or their personal interaction or stay at a hotel, the more unique experience and the better experience that they can have. Stuart, we heard about the skills gap, skills shortage this morning. How can Infor and its software help close that gap? Right, well, it's really, you can look at it in a couple different ways, right? If you look at it at the grassroots of some of the industries that we serve that we've talked about, whether it's hospitality or retail or even in healthcare in some scenarios, not talking about professionals in the healthcare industry, but people that are just working day-to-day operations. Simplifying that the interaction on how they use the solutions that they do their jobs every day minimizes the training requirements and the skill labor that has to go on that would occur in legacy solutions and architects. So being able to hire a front guest agent who's got a great personality, who knows how to interact and talk to people, but maybe has never used a hotel system before to be able to put them in front of that hotel system and act just like their phone or their iPad, it gives them the ability to be interactive and understand and be on board pretty quickly. So that's one side is simplifying, working with Hook and Loop, designing, making sure the applications, the workflows make sense. So it simplifies the work effort and simplifies the ability for people who are maybe less skilled in a particular area to jump in really quickly with less training. The other side of it is actually trying to find the right resources, right? And going through the process of having a skilled attribute level of understanding of what your successful people look like, we can help through our talent science solutions find similar type of people. That doesn't mean, now we'll get to the education enablement side of it, that doesn't mean day one, that maybe they have the exact training that they have required, but we found that they are the perfect fit for the job. So if they are going to be interacting on an everyday basis with a guest, for example, and they're a front desk manager, there's attributes around that that are so critical important. Now they may not understand all the facets of the job, and then, but once we find that right resource, you bring them into the talent solution and then really start to understand where are their gaps? Where are the training requirements? What are the certifications by the way, depending on if you're in a complex industry like manufacturing or healthcare where there's certifications and safety regulations you have to occur, how do you maintain all that into one spot and be able to identify and be able to give them and provide them the personal interaction on what is it that they need to maintain and grow in terms of their own abilities to be suitable for the next job or the job that they're being hired for and how do they actively get the learning and the education, the e-learning that goes with it. So we've been able to kind of formulate that into a comprehensive product set that we think is pretty much best of breed in the industry, right? So not only do we have a great learning management system, an unbelievable talent acquisition and science system, a fabulous way to hire, to promote, to retire structure on understanding employees, what their skills are and how to place them, but bringing all that together from a unified front and then being able to standardize that into an experience that makes it a much more different approach from what you would traditionally have had in finding skilled labor and workforce. And automation and AI is it's now a layer on top of all this that you're bringing to the table with Coleman and you started to sort of roll out some capabilities there. What's the reaction been of customers? Is there uncertainty? Is there fear? Is there doubt? Are they embracing it? What's the conversation like? Yeah, and really, instead of saying it's better to think of it, it's not on top, right? This is the underpinnings of how we've built our cloud suites. Injected into the... So we've taken our cloud suites and everything that we've opened from a technology perspective to every information and job that flows through, whether it's a personal intervention into a task or if it's machine to machine goes through that in 4 OS. So all that interaction and data whether it's from a person or from a machine gets captured so you can start to begin to build intelligence on top of that. Now what that means is wherever those interactions and communications occur, Coleman is sitting in their understanding and learning sitting on top of our data like to say, you know what? This is a process that is repeated 100 times a day by 50 different people in a particular firm. Why don't we automate that process and why don't we make that known to the entity and then adjust our process to automate that so no one has to interact with it, right? So being able to have that as an underpinning, not an overlay, right? Because a lot of businesses will come in and say, hey, we'll provide analytics and BI over the top. That's great. Analytics and BI on the top is pulling information out of all different kinds of sources, trying to make sense of that data, trying to make sense of all those sources versus what we're trying to do is every interaction that occurs between systems, we're not trying to identify right at that point what makes sense to store somewhere and put somewhere. It all goes into our data lake and then the machine learning starts to tell you, here's some things you should understand about the data and the interactions. We've heard the theme about human potential, right? Unlocking that. So how does that translate in your world? I mean, in your mind, how do you apply that in terms of the industries that are produced? Right, well, again, it goes back to, and it also goes to our focus on bringing a diverse workforce to the table to improve our capabilities and improve the way we approach things. But it's understanding individual attributes of people, right? And how they may interact and work within a company is a starting point, right? So they may not have a particular skill, but they have a capability or an ability to learn or they may have a personal interaction that is far excessive than what normal people would come in to interview first like a job. Well, being able to do these type of talent assessments and understand as a baseline where they are, all of a sudden you're getting a more broader pool of skilled resources for what you're looking for, right? And then even if that skilled resource happens to be from a different part of the country than what your typical hiring manager is or they look different or their education background is different, it strips that out, right? It is giving you the personal attributes of that individual. So that allows a broader pool to look at. Then from that pool that we could start to say, okay, well here's a great candidate pool of people that may be able to quickly be skilled into a job or into a role and then start to place those people into those positions. And then as the lifecycle of that employee goes on, so do their attributes, right? So what made them who they are? As other roles and jobs, as they build their resume within the company, they still have those capabilities. So as a role and a management place comes up that has a good fit for this person's individual skills and their personal attributes, they're a natural fit for moving up into the world, right? And that's how we kind of continue to get that engine rolling in terms of how do we bring more people in without a prescriptive, only a prescriptive model, right? This is a scientific model of what is going to be the right fit for an employee for Infor, right? Or an employee for one of our customers or another company. And that's where we start with bringing in that that ability to broaden our workforce and identify people who could be successful without necessarily saying, you didn't punch this type of button for the last 10 years so you're not qualified for the job. So I'm hearing a lot of differentiation and I'd love to hear it more in your words from an executive of Infor. Every company out there, every software company, they say, yeah, we have AI, too. I'm sure you hear it. Oh, this company, A, B, and C, they have their new AI platform. Everybody's doing AI. When you talk to customers, how do you differentiate what Infor is doing not with just machine intelligence but across the board from the competition? Well, I will tell you to start with. One is the comprehensive set of our solutions, right? So by being able to go into an industry and have a cloud suite that we formulated that has the capability to manage a very significant portion of their operations already integrated together, already with the last industry model functionality built into it, it gives us a leg up in our competition. So when we walk into a healthcare or a hospital and they have challenges with nurse scheduling, they have financials they need to look at, they have general HR that they have to look at, and by the way, they're also trying to look at are we going to be profitable and how do we become profitable and all these different touch points are a nightmare for us. Well, as Infor, what we present to our customers and brought together was, hey, we have that capability to do all your nurse scheduling, your workforce planning, your time attendance. We can manage your facilities, your assets, your expensive cost structures there. We have the ability to have a very complex set of financials that may serve 15 different hospitals that might also have different infused levels of ownership or investment or management. Being able to come to the table with that as a comprehensive system eliminates a lot of the guesswork. Now, again, once you have that in there, someone coming in and selling AI or BI, they still would have to, if it wasn't us, have to come in over the top and say, well, if it's all Infor, that's good, at least we can connect all Infor. But if it's got Epic or it's got Cerner, it's got whatever solution's sitting out there, well, all of a sudden you're not only having to connect those points, but you're having to connect all over the place versus the way we built it is that Cloud Suite, all those points of connection are already pre-built, right? And they're already dumping it into the data light so that now all you have to do is take some ancillary pieces of data to pull into that perspective. And with capabilities of clinical integrations that we have to be able to follow and track those things, and we just actually announced not too long ago true cost. True cost is the ability to really understand down to a procedure level what something may cost to perform in a particular hospital. And that is, you would think that wouldn't be that hard, but you're talking about people, you're talking about equipment, you're talking about what kind of room, right? What equipment's in that room that creates a certain cost per hour to do a procedure? All those things come to play into determining exactly what is profitable and what's not. So being able to really understand the true cost of care, not only at the hospital level, but by the way, how do we take into account what happened before? How do we take post care into that? And then how do we start to do predictive analytics on that kind of capability? Well, since we have this Cloud Suite healthcare, for example, building around all these different components where we track the resources, we understand the rooms and the cost, we understand the doctor costs, we understand the facilities costs, we understand the care and the time that takes to go into the care, we can now start to really take and give hospitals an idea of saying, hey, maybe if we approach this a little differently, or even with Coleman now, maybe you approach it this way, you can start to do and provide that specific care in a different way that will lower your cost to care, not only for your hospital, but for your patients, and then hence you become more profitable as an entity. So real business impact in the alternative would be, you'd have to what, develop custom modifications or bring in an ISV who's got deep expertise there, bring in another system. You can have a combination of it, right? If some of our competition would have to bring in a different workforce management and scheduling system, they'd have to bring in a different time and attendant system, they would probably have to bring in a different analytical engine and underlying platform to work with it. They would have to bring in a different talent assessment or talent management type of solution. They would have to bring in a different supply chain and materials management system for the healthcare environment, for example. I mean, the list can go on and on where we've went out and built and looked for, whether it was through acquisition where we then brought these cloud-based products into our cloud suite, or we identified gaps or areas that we needed to build from scratch. And we talk about, people don't really think about it, as a percent of revenue, we outspent our competition, 5X, right? And we talk about how much we've spent the last several years in R&D. We do that because we know that if we can build the platform in the next generation for healthcare, for hospitality, for retail, then we can really be the leaders in the marketplace. And I think that's what's going to really differentiate us from our competition, who's trying to either come in with a point area, start to broaden it a little bit. We've already broadened it, we integrated it, we built it together and we underpin it with the ability to do artificial intelligence and analytics from the box, right? That's a very different approach. And keep it simple for me, right? Yeah, make it easier for the users, right? Yeah, exactly. Stu, thanks for the time. No, this was great, I appreciate it. Thanks for the rundown. You got it. That's Stuart Applebaum from N4. Back with more here from N4M18. We are live in Washington, DC, and you're watching theCUBE.