 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. We're here live at the Javits Center. Martine Cadet is here. She's the senior director of Infor's education alliances program. Martine, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So you're welcome. Infor's education alliance program. Well, it's essentially where Infor has brought me on to partner with colleges and universities on a global level. So what we do in layman's terms is we invest in their schools. We give them our software, our technologies. We provide mentorship and support so that they can integrate our technology into classrooms. So think back when you were in school. There was a lot of theory. We learned a lot of different things, but when you started your full-time job, how much of that can you say you could apply day one? Not much. So what we're hoping to do is kind of close that gap in what happens in the classroom versus what an industry needs, like a company like Infor, our customers or partners, when they hire talent. So do the students know the industry language? Do they understand how software really helps the company meet its business goals? All of that stuff is what we partner with our schools and colleges around. And we do that by providing our experts to actually work with those professors and teach and train them so they impart that knowledge onto the students. And they're actually using the software? Yeah. Because, I mean, I get it for like Apple, I get these Google devices, but the kids say, oh, I got some new ERP software today. You should see this new HCM software I got. How's it work? Yeah, that's a challenge. I actually, my background's at Microsoft and I did much of the same thing working on Office and everybody gets Office. ERP's much more complex, but it also makes it much more significant. So if you know that there is a student who wants one day to be a business executive or perhaps they want to run their business at some point, they're going to have to use ERP software in order to run their business effectively. Technology's becoming the backbone of every organization and ERP sits at the heart of that. So with programs like this, one of the reasons we do focus on colleges and universities as our primary is they get that. So we'll work with a business school or we'll work with the College of Engineering giving them our mongoose and our tech stack so that they can build some really interesting apps to solve perhaps their own local issues and their own local problems and learn. How do I actually rapidly create an application using an industry ERP software? Oh, I love this conversation. So we were just talking about mongoose as a platform. And can I give that to developers and allow them to do whatever they do with it? And so that's something that you're actually incubating at universities now. Absolutely, we're using that at PACE University, University of New York is using it as well. In fact, we have an announcement with them tomorrow that actually talks about what we're doing with mongoose and our tech platform. So a lot of schools have seen the value in it because the reality is when a student graduates and they get a job and they go into the engineering department or what have you, a company can't wait for months and months and months for that app to actually be built. So tools like mongoose really help fast track them getting to where they need to be from a business perspective. So take us back to Inform 14 when you launched the program. What was the catalyst for that? You know, take us on the journey through today. Okay, so this program we are benefited by having a CEO who believes in that vision and the value of what it is to partner with the college university. So this was essentially his idea. And so when we launched in September, I think we had been working on the program for about six to nine months at that point. I had been recently hired at November time period and we launched with five member institutions, which was pretty good in a pretty short timeframe. At that time, we had about 20 solutions that we were looking to have provided to schools. Fast forward to now, we've got 13 member institutions. We are global, we have one in China, we have one in Italy. We're looking to expand even more. And we've actually shrunken down the number of solutions we focus so that we can go much more broadly. But we've learned a ton in terms of what do schools need? What are students looking for? How do we do a better job of really closing that chasm of what is ERP? Because it is a pretty complex thing for a professor to get their mind around on. How is this a benefit to my school? So what do schools need and what are students looking for? I serve that up to them. So schools need to be able to provide to their students practical experience. So there are a lot of organizations out there that really focus on the theory. So research, big, wonderful questions that maybe might solve something in 10 to 15 years. But in a lot of ways, we need people who can actually graduate, pay for their college degrees, pay back their loans in five to 10 years. How do we help students who are competing with people who have experience, who have been in industry from quite some time, really also close that gap so that they can land not just a job, but a job that pays them well and enables them to move forward with their future. And so that's one of the things that we really do focus on. What are those key skills that a practical experience course can provide that augments what traditional education usually provides in the classroom? One of George's passions is data, big data. You hear about the data skills gap. Is there an angle there for in for? It's just data, data scientists. Talk about that a little bit. So we actually are in conversations with a school in the Northwest with our data scientists today. So we do have something that we call kind of a center of excellence. We've got industry projects we talk about where we would partner an in-force specialist or expert with a set of students who are working on these projects. And so we are in conversations right now with our data scientists to work with a set of PhD students on big, meaty, big data issues right now. So that doesn't involve a software endowment but it is along the same line where it's less about practical. How do we use these concepts within a business itself to advance what a business is looking to do? And they'll learn that in real time. So it's only been a couple of years but can you embed like a tracking chip on the students and see where they go and where they swim? We don't have a tracking chip yet but we are looking to make sure that we can track where they go over time. What we do know is we launched what? September 2014, from that point we've influenced over 1600 students, teachers and administrators in that timeframe. We've hired close to 130 scholar interns through this program. We've hired 24 students as well as entry level into in four. So we've been able to see some traction. We've seen students go from, I've worked on this stuff in the classroom to I've actually applied it in an internship to they've been hired within in four. And we've also started to see a move from first hiring in four to a transfer to another department in four. So we are beginning to see that traction and being able to create, okay, so what is the path and what are the learnings that come through that? So we can do a better job of helping other people follow. So tech companies have been sort of applying this concept for many, many, many, many decades. You used to do it at Microsoft. So what were some of the learnings and what has changed that requires you to do things differently? Yeah, so I would say there are a lot of learnings. It's smart for all companies to do this which is why you see every IT company has some kind of a program like this. But what we do that is fundamentally different is how we approach and how we partner with our organizations. We're not a one-size-fits-all by any stretch of the imagination. And to your point earlier, ERP's much harder. So what we can do is go much, much deeper with these organizations of the students. And what we do that's also differently is we have something called a skills marketplace that we're building. So we essentially serve as a matchmaker, if you will. And we take the students who have gotten trained on either one of these platforms or perhaps they've been an intern or they've gotten product certification or they've worked in a center of excellence which think of these as like six and nine month deep projects or multi-year. We actually match them with in-for-hiring managers as well as hopefully our customers and partners who are looking for talent. Most other organizations, I don't know of any who take it to that next level. So we go beyond, yes, we would like you to use our stuff. Every company would like you to use our products. But how do we also help you meet your end goal of actually landing in point and being truly successful? How do you decide who to work with? Can you be selective or is it more of a push push because everybody's trying to do this? It's a combination. So we do have our target list. There are certain schools that we actually would love to partner with and we go after pretty aggressively. Some schools come after us and it comes down, it's almost like a marriage. What's the right fix? What are they looking to do in their classroom? Because we do, it is a relationship. So our contracts typically are three years. We know the teachers that we work with. We mentor and sponsor them. They know who we are. So we want to look for people who want, are truly looking to have practical experiences in their classroom for their students. We are looking for people who are looking to partner with us and not just get the software and run. At the end of the day, we want to know what the impact is so that we can continue to be better and improve upon the program over time for other people as well. Following up on your talk about the path that students can take, it was actually remarkable to hear how you track them all the way through internship, hire, transfer. It sounds like you really mapped out something where it's not just train it and then sort of they fall off the conveyor. What about different roles that they might take in where you might say we need data scientists to help flesh out our sort of big data strategy that's just emerging? Or we want to strengthen the ISV pool. So we want to look for solution developers. How do you, do you go in with those sorts of goals? Absolutely, so I'm really glad you asked that because that's one of the things that we're doing this year that we weren't doing when we first launched the program. So we're in the process right now of developing these practical experience courses that are role and industry specific. So part of what you're also here about tomorrow is we're doing that with CUNY today. We're developing and what we did was we did some research, so I like research. I like knowing that I'm going to build a plan that actually meets the needs of what's out there. So we surveyed in four people as well as some of our customers and our partners and we identified that if we could build the right offerings that we could hire tens, sorry, thousands of students over the next three years. And we identified that most of that is within junior consultants, implementation consultants, and the sales communities. So we've actually started to build our offerings to what is a practical experience course if you want to be an implementation consultant or if you want to go into value engineering or hopefully in the future if you want to get into sales. And that's what we're starting to build today. Offer to the institutions. Wow, so, okay, so you kind of took us through the journey up until now. What should we be looking for going forward? Where do you want to take the program? So going forward, we want to land successfully these new programs that we have. I mean, they're literally going to launch this fall. And what we love is for our customers and partners as well as our in-for-hiring managers to hire. Because the program is only good if we actually meet the goal on the backend of, okay, you've invested in us, in-for, in training your students. Now we need to invest back in them and give them employment and make them successful. Any figures so far on gender diversity or expectations for that? Because we were hearing that, I think actually from Melinda Gates, I listened to her at a recent conference. She said that the percentage of women, I think it was either Stanford or nationwide, dropped from 37% to something in the teens, I think. Yeah, it's challenging. But if you look at the number of women who graduate from colleges, we're actually starting to outpace men in a lot of ways. The challenge is when you look within traditional STEM and science kind of fields, it's dropped. But within our program, since we do target schools like City of New York and PACE, in addition to Princeton who's worked with us as well, we are seeing less of that issue. We have a good number of women as well as a good number of minorities or what's traditionally been referred to as minorities in our program. You know, so this issue of STEM, my understanding, so we were on a call the other day with Esther Wojewski who is the, she runs the journalism program at Palo Alto High School. And she was in, we have a fellowship with the ground truth. We call it tech truth. It's our nonprofit. And we promote young journalists. We're training the next generation of journalists is our mission. And she said that there's no lack of women that are in STEM in universities. The issue is when they come out, they're not going into STEM jobs, which we want to understand why. So I didn't realize that. You know this, you're not a, so this is a fact or- I think part of the challenge is, and I think he also goes beyond women. A lot of students are in classes, but what you learn versus what happens in a day-to-day job are not necessarily the same thing. And so with these practical experience courses, not only will you get the theory, but you apply and you get to determine while you are in school, is this really the track I want to go down? My undergrad was in race relations sociology. I spent three months as, you know, in the field as a case manager. Wasn't necessarily where I was going to be. Left it quite shortly after that. So how do we truly help kids to understand what it is that they've actually picked early on so that they can make those changes? And I think from a STEM perspective, it's also for women the support. So you can train somebody and you can teach them all the core concepts, but is the industry as welcoming to women and people of color and just, you know, difference as it could be? Not always. So it depends where you are. If you look at kind of Silicon Valley, they have a much bigger gap than you see in other places. So I think that is also a real concern. Right. It was, it's interesting to hear you talk about this because in the trial that, you know, caught so much attention, one of the big issues was all the hiring managers or all the entities that could, you know, affect the balance. They would always say, there's no one in our pipeline. And you're the first organization I've really heard that seems to have programmatically done something to change that, not only for your pipeline, but for others. That's the goal. And I think our CEO, having a CEO who is passionate about that, as well as I've had some amazing managers and mentors add in for have been so supportive of it. So you have to have the right culture and environment in order to move forward with a program like that. And it is within our strategy on how we go after people. Well, Charles seems, I mean, it's not surprised that this was in part anyway, his idea. I could see him coming up with something like this, having a passion for it. How much have you been able to leverage his persona in developing relationships with universities? He knows everybody. So that, especially in the beginning was supremely helpful. He did provide a lot of the contacts and some connections and we've grown beyond that. So not all of the contacts and connections come through Charles as well, but he's also been a great support. So he's shown up when we needed him to show up. He's shown up when we didn't need him to show up just to show the support which has been phenomenal. But part of what we've been trying really hard to do in the last year is how do we also move the program where it's not just something our CEO is focused on but it becomes mainstream part of who we are at Infor. So this year for us is all about mainstreaming the program and showing how the program stands on its own which is why we're looking to grow to hopefully over 50 institutions in the next 18 months and then making huge investments. That's critical, Charles is an accelerant clearly and you in that role, you want to leverage that but you're right, it's not going to have sustainability if it's all about the CEO's passion. It's got to be the entire organization and the ecosystem. Want to be a true partnership from his vision to everybody embracing it and us as an organization doing it without thinking. It just needs to be part of our natural every day. Yeah. Awesome. Martin, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, sharing the journey, the story. Good luck and congratulations. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you both. All right, keep it right there, everybody will be back. To New York City, right after this brief break.