 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. Oh, good afternoon, and welcome back to Inforum 2018, our coverage here on theCUBE as we start to wrap up our two days of coverage here at the show in Washington DC at the Walter Washington Convention Center, along with Dave Vellante, John Wells here, and we're joined now by Mayumi Hiramatsu, who is the SVP of Cloud Operations, Engineering and Security at Infor. Mayumi, how are you doing? Great to be here, thanks for coming. And a recent honoree, by the way, Woman of the Year at the Women in IT Awards, so congratulations on that. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, very nice honor. Great. Tell us, you know, a big picture here, cloud strategy as far as Infor is concerned, and why that separates you from the pack? You know, what makes that stand out, you think, from your peers? I think there are a couple of things. One is that, when I think of cloud, a lot of people will think about cloud as it's a software running in the cloud, but it's more than that. It's about the solution and the capabilities that we're building in the cloud, and Infor is perfect in that we're building enterprise software solutions. So if you look at Infor and compare us to the competition, we may have multiple of competition wrapped together in a solution, and that's really powerful. And you can only do that really well in the cloud because it's already built for that. It's integrated, and the power of data is really amazing because when you think about cloud, it's not just the software, it's the data, what you can do with it, and with the latest technologies around artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is so much insight we can give to our enterprise customers to make them successful in their business. So I think of cloud as not only the technology, which I love because I'm actually an engineer, but it's really the business transformation, digital transformation that the cloud enables with the technologies like artificial intelligence, data analytics, data science, machine learning, there's just so much more bolted on that you can really only do in the cloud. Can you help us understand that competitive nuance? I'm not sure I fully understand, because others will say, well, we have cloud too. What's different between the way in which you provide solutions in a cloud and pick a company? Another company says, we have cloud, all our SaaS is in the cloud. Right, so I think the first thing is, Enforce always focus on solutions, which means that our competition may have one of, let's say a dozen things that we put together. So if you're using our competition, they may have a cloud, and some of them were born in the cloud, but then you have to figure out, well, how do I integrate it with the rest of the world? Because if you think about it, ERP, it's running your business, and it might be about your HR and about your employees, it might be CRM and customer information. It could be supply chain and figuring out what parts I need to buy. It could be billing and figuring out, how do I bill my customers? All these different solutions today, if you look at our competition, they may solve one, two, three different portions, but certainly not a dozen of these all together, and then tailor towards the industry. So we can pretty much bolt on and get started pretty quickly. If you think about, for example, healthcare, we already have a healthcare solution ready to go. So you don't have to figure out, how do I put 12, 15 different software, glue it together and make it work, and maybe some of it is running in the cloud, maybe some of it is not running in the cloud, then the integration and making it work gets really complex, but ours is already pre-built ready for that, whether it's healthcare, manufacturing, food and beverage, fashion. We have a lot of these already ready to go, so then you just have to customize it, as opposed to starting from scratch, figuring out how to integrate all these different software, making sure they work together, and then harnessing the data, and then adding all these different artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that is so powerful today. You can't do that without the cloud, and you certainly can't do it if you're trying to glue together different solutions. It's just really not easy. And I'll add one more thing. I was talking to a customer about this today, which I thought was brilliant. The other thing is security. Most people worry about security in the cloud, and I run our security as well. The Chief Information Security Officer reports in to me, and the whole security team does. And I can tell you, if you're combining 12, 15 different types of software, and trying to have consistent security all across, oh, that's a very difficult thing to do, but we've already figured it out. So all you have to do is buy the package, the solution, it's already working together. You already have security overlay on it. They have consistency in terms of how we manage the security, whether it's single sign-on and who has access, and making sure that that gets all the way through, all the way up to the data lake where all the data gets captured, all the way up to the artificial intelligence. So if you think about security and how important that is, and how difficult it might be to do on one software, let alone a dozen software, the fact that we've already built that is a big difference. So it's all there. And when you talked about, all you have to do is customize it, you're not talking about hardcore coding. You're talking about things like naming and setting it up. Is that right, or? Yeah. Or you're talking about deeper levels of custom mods. So in our multi-tenant cloud, we don't do mods, but instead we have extensions. And extensibility is really important because now those are, again, essentially plug and play. We already built it for you. So it's so much easier than creating each piece of code every single time. Again, it's about how do you make sure that you can integrate these very important sets of business processes together? Not only how quickly can you use it, how secure is it? And ensuring that you can actually focus on your business value, right? Because trying to assemble this together and making it work, it's an enormous amount of work. And I think as an enterprise, you want to focus on actually giving customer value instead of trying to figure out the mechanics underneath the hood. I mean, you certainly get the value of cloud software, right? And cloud ERP, who doesn't? Like the industries that you're trying to get in front of who's attention you're trying to get. Where's the, if there's someone that's kicking and screaming a little bit, who might that be or what might that be? I don't think that there's a specific industry, if you will. I think some industries, in fact, and when I think about it, all industries are getting disrupted, right? If they don't, they're actually getting left behind. So I think some industries feel it more as in they might be behind the curve. And I wouldn't necessarily say industry, maybe some of the companies in that industry yeah are waking up to it. I went to a Gartner supply chain conference a couple years ago, and they were talking about bimodal supply chain, right? You have the teams that are doing the old way and then companies that are doing the new way. And companies are literally going through the shift. And I had this interesting conversation that it's really not bimodal. Companies are essentially somewhere in that spectrum. And what they need to do is figure out from point A to point B in how you make that transition. It's a huge transition. I would also say that there's a cultural element as well. And so one of the key things that, especially for companies that are moving from on-prem to cloud, as a provider, it's really important to realize it's a completely different business model. And it's not always talked about. Again, a lot of times people think, oh, well, you know, and for, you just move the software into AWS and it's calling, you're calling it SAS. It's more than that. Besides the capabilities, it's a huge cultural shift that even Charles talked about on stage, which is that software companies, you focus on the product. Versus as a SAS, the last S software as a service, you're focusing on the service. So the analogy I use a lot is maybe we were actually a food company. We built beautiful food, delicious food, nutritious food. Maybe it was a rotisserie chicken, right? But now I've switched to a restaurant. Food is only table stakes. And you know, restaurant reviews is about services, the ambiance, you know, how quickly you respond, how clean it is. All these other elements matter. And if you think about N4 or any other company for that matter, that we're focused on product and software to then becoming a SAS service provider, it's a huge transformation for a company. And I can tell you, we're going through that, right? N4 as an on-prem company moving to the SAS and there's so much focus now on customer experience is because realizing that we're no longer a software company, we're a software as a service company. And there's a lot more we need to put in in terms of making sure the customer experience is good. As our customers go through the same journey, they also need to realize it's no longer about providing that product, but the experience that they're providing to the customers. And we see our customers actually going through that journey. Some, you know, might be harder to move within whatever industry because maybe they have legacy product, legacy machines, right? To be able to lift and ship too quickly, but there's definitely a path. And if you think about some of these industries that's been around for a long time, they're definitely going through this transition. And in fact, I think they have to. So how did you set priorities in terms of, you come to that recognition that we're services in the cloud, luckily you don't have to manage data centers so you could take that off your table. So what were your priorities and where did you start and what are you focused on now? Yeah, one of the first things that I did was really pushing this cultural shift for the company because a lot of people, you know, some people may think that, okay, it's software I'm putting in the AWS, it's cloud, but all the other service elements that, you know, like the restaurant analogy, it wasn't mature in terms of where we needed to be and therefore you hear a lot about customer experience and customer success and a lot of these elements that we really have to put more emphasis on. But the other areas that I focused, so I came in, I focused on cloud operation, security, tooling, and architecture, that was the set that I was focused on. What I did was essentially transformation, right? It's people, process, technology, in addition to culture. So culture we already talked about. The sense of urgency is very different as well, right? On-prem, maybe you don't have to respond in two seconds, but in cloud, you do. And so making sure that we had crisp KPIs, which are different than on-prem, making sure that processes were completely redefined. I've actually done benchmark with our competition to see that, you know, our SLAs and KPIs are either on par or better. I'm a big proponent of engineering and technology, so we built a lot of technology, monitoring, tooling, so that we can do a lot more in terms of self-service and automation, that's really the only way to scale and execute consistently. So spent a lot of time over the last year, literally redefining the identity of our jobs to how do we make sure we have the right skillset and retraining some of the folks who may have a new identity and they need to learn new skills to coming up with new tools and technologies that they can use to changing our processes so we can up our SLA and make sure that we're either meeting or beating our customers' SLAs. Complete transformation in the last year. You must be exhausted. When do you sleep? I don't sleep much, but... You must not. So new metrics is intriguing to me. So can you give us an example of the new KPIs as a result of this cloud world, SAS world? Yeah, for sure. I think every company has their own sort of core KPIs that are public. So in cloud, it's usually uptime, right? If you have support, it could be how quickly you respond. We call it mean time to respond. Underneath the hood, I've created key KPIs for what I call critical cloud qualities. One is, of course, reliability. So that would be, in addition to uptime, like 99.7%, which is two hours and 11 minutes, by the way, per month downtime. So making sure that we're actually meeting that. Sorry, just to interrupt. Yeah. You're measuring from the application view, right? Not the green light on the server. Is that fair? That's a great question, because that is exactly the evolution we went as well. So when I talk about the transformation in my organization, we were measuring the hardware first. We are now measuring essentially outages. So I don't care if the server's still running, but if the customers can't log in, it's an outage, right? But that's not something you can monitor by looking at a server, because sometimes the server's up and running, but maybe a process went down, exactly. So that's the monitoring evolution. So slight adjustment in the typical metrics. So I started to interrupt, but please carry on. That was a perfect question. Okay. So, KPIs, so underneath the hood, so here are some examples of metrics for availability. Mean time to detect, that's an internal metric, and my internal metric is five minutes. Meaning, if you don't know we have an issue in five minutes, it's probably not automated and monitored. So we better hook up some additional monitoring as an example. Mean time to respond, that's a very public one. A lot of times customers demand that, and if you look at competition, that is the only metric that's actually public, potentially even on a contract, right? So we have mean time to respond. We also have mean time to resolution. That's usually an internal metric. I'm sure competition has that as well, but making sure that we have that response right away, because it's one thing to respond, but if it's not resolved as quickly, it's not good. Other metrics, when it comes to reliability, mean time to communicate. And this is really interesting. One of the things that I found was, we could be working on something, but we're not telling the customers. So they're wondering if we're actually sleeping on the job, even though we're actually actively working on the background, right? Did they get the message, right? Right, yeah, so mean time to communicate, as an example of reliability metrics. So reliability is one of the core tenants. The other tenants, performance. How quickly do you respond, right? And I always say that if performance is too long, it's equivalent of being down. Imagine if you're using Google, and you put a search in, and it takes you three minutes to get a response time, you probably have left by then. So that performance, page load time, page response time, these response times actually matter. So we have actually metrics around that, and we monitor and manage them. Security, we have a boatload of security KPIs, whether it's a number of critical vulnerabilities, how quickly we respond to security incidents, a boatload of those as well. And then last but not least, agility. So how quickly we can respond if we have to do a deployment. So what that means is let's say, every company, every software company has a bug, right? And let's say we actually have to quickly respond to that. It's can we do it within 24 hours if we needed to? Security is a perfect example. A mature company should be able to say, okay, there was a security alert that got to the industry, right? We should be able to quickly respond to that and apply a patch immediately and address it. A company that may not be so mature, it might take them months to go through thousands of machines, right? So that's, I call that time to market. How quickly can we actually deploy something? And that's not just deploying it, but testing it and making sure it's not going to break anything and be able to test it and verify it. So these are examples of metrics that would contract. Great examples. Your SLAs, for a SaaS company, your SLAs presumably have to be more strict that you'll contractually agree to, but maybe not, then your typical SLA out of AWS or Google or Microsoft Azure. Is that true? And so you guys will commit contractually to these types of SLAs that you would expect in an enterprise versus kind of the standard off-the-shelf AWS SLA. And how do you reconcile the gap or do you have a different agreement with AWS? We do have a, the SLA is pretty much standard when it comes to AWS specifically, right? Right, because they want homogeneity. Exactly. So I think the challenge is every SaaS provider needs to architect around it. And when you think about it, a hardware failure rate is usually 4% industry-wide. You can expect the hardware will go down, right? Network goes down, various things go down. So then it's our job that sits on top of it to make sure that we build it for reliability. Perhaps we actually have redundancy built in and we can actually go from one side to the other. We have that, for example. So if AWS goes down, and they do, right? I ran data centers for many, many years, it happens. It's our job to make sure that we can fail over and not have that customer experience. So it's an overlay availability that we have to build. You're architecting recovery into the system. I know we're tight on time, but I got to ask you, because PAM couldn't make it today. So you're part of the women in foreign network, I presume, right? Yes. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, but you're talking about women and technology. I've had some of the best interviews at Infor shows with women. Debra Norville came on, Naomi Tutu, Lara Logan, I mean, just some awesome folks, but so. So your thoughts, yeah, I mean, we know you're passionate about the role of women in technology. And so how do you feel about that if you want? And Infor, what's being done or what can be done about that? Great question. So I'm a big performer of women in technology, partly because I went through my pain, right? I've always been the small percentage in terms of engineering role as female in technology. So I'm also a board member of Girls in Tech and I channel my energy that way, as well as I try to mentor and help others. For example, mentoring engineering students at Berkeley, I'm a Berkeley alum. And I think it's really important that we get more women in technology and keep them in technology. And candidly, our latest trend is actually going down. So the reason why I think it's important, besides making sure that everybody has a chance and all those good reasons, we have statistics that actually show the more diversity you have, the better your product is going to be and the better it's actually going to hit your top line revenue. And over and over again, whether it's women in the board seat or women executives or women engineers, no matter where, by getting women's input into technology, you're actually representing 50% of the consumer base. The user base, right, right. And so if we don't do that as a company, we're actually not going to be able to get the user base feedback. And I think it's so really important, not only for the economy to have those wonderful workforce in the job, but also for the company products to actually reflect the user's needs and actually improve the revenue, right? So from that perspective, I think it's really important. I love the fact that at M4, we do a couple of things when it comes to diversity. So one is WIN, as you know, Women M4 Network. I think it's a fabulous program. And in fact, I get a lot of male colleagues saying they want to join WIN and they do. My last session, there were actually women and men joining it because it's really about leadership and how do we cultivate our next talented workforce to be successful. The other one is EAP, that M4 Education Alliance program. So that not only looks at women, but just diversity, right? And bringing students into this workforce. I think it's a great way to help the economy, help the products, help the company. And at the end of the day, why not? You're awesome, but you're super impressive and articulate and really self-confident and hopefully an inspiration for young women out there watching. So thank you so much, really appreciate it. And I hope you get some sleep sometimes, too. All right. It's a busy, busy schedule. All right, thank you. Thank you, Miami. We're back with more here on theCUBE. You are watching us live and watching at DC and we'll be right back.