>> Live from Washington, D.C.,
it's theCUBE!
Covering Inforum D.C. 2018.
Brought to you by Infor.
>> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center,
we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course,
as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018.
Along with Dave Vellante,
I'm John Walls,
it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us,
the CEO of Avaap.
Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon!
>> Good to see you again!
>> Absolutely, big pleasure,
it was great talking to you for the last two years,
and a pleasure to be back here.
>> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap,
I've read a little bit,
I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language,
what do the five letters represent?
I mean how did you come up with the title?
>> You know, that's the first question that gets asked,
the two questions I get.
>> Sorry to be cliche,
but I'm just really curious!
>> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?"
and the other question is, "What is Avaap?"
and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit
and each of them are tied to a cultural value
that we hold at Avaap, so,
Agni, which is fire stands for passion,
'cause I'm a deep believer
of being very passionate in what you do;
if you're passionate,
you'll follow through and it won't feel like work.
Water is tied to innovation,
sky is tied to goals,
we're very ambitious.
We've been
able to have a rocket ship type of growth,
so far,
and we continue to aspire to do more.
We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience,
cause we like to be globally eco conscious
and genuine in what we're doing.
And then air, which is transparency.
I think we live in a world that,
you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy,
and the more there is transparency,
the better there is organizational development.
>> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown.
So services and solutions,
and the relationship with Infor,
walk us through that a little bit,
of why you're here.
>> Absolutely, so,
we are Infor's most decorated partner,
so I'd like to say that,
because we just came off the stage
getting four awards with Infor this year.
>> Congratulations! Fantastic.
>> Yeah, thank you very much.
They were overall partner of the year five years in a row.
Our partnership with Infor,
started five years ago,
before that it was with Lawson.
So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board,
I was in the back of the room,
and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012.
And he said "I want to do two things,
I want to make software that is industry specific."
And this is coming at a time
where everything was one size fits all.
And he said "We want to reinvent the software
that's driven for future technologies.
Cloud,
mobile,
big data." Right?
So I had a great opportunity,
and we made a momentous decision of
parking all our eggs in the Infor basket,
and just doing Infor.
And that served us well of going from 20,
at that point we were like 25 employees,
to having over 450 today.
>> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past
is you got in early,
and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in,
so you have to stay ahead of them.
How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding?
>> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead,
so that actually, that's a question I got,
is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here,
Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened?
We actually don't, because it's a validation
of what's occurring in this eco system
with the big system integrators coming in.
And with a rising tide,
all boats rise.
So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs,
because there's roles that they play
and we let them do a lot of business transformation,
change management, program management,
and we do what we do best,
which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services.
>> The deep, deep Infor,
that's kind of, it's ironic, right?
Infor's specialty is
the last mile,
micro-industry capabilities,
and that's really kind of how you specialize
is deep Infor expertise.
>> Exactly, yeah.
>> So give us an example of,
you go through
an engagement,
you got one of the big SIs
and they're going to do their big global thing,
business process change,
they really are global in scale, et cetera.
Where do you come in?
where does Infor sort of,
where does their micro services,
or micro-function leave off,
and where do you pick up?
>> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example,
in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning,
Christus Health,
they are
one of the largest health systems in the country,
60 hospitals,
close to 60 thousand employees.
They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite,
HCM, Supply Chain, Financial.
Went through a large system selection process
the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor,
kind of being in that race.
It was down selected to Infor and Oracle
as the two lenders that had
full capabilities that they were looking for.
And then once they made their decision
on Infor as their vendor of choice,
they did a services RFP,
which we partnered with Deloitte,
because the scope of that was, as I said earlier,
around business transformation services,
that we didn't have in our bag.
And Deloitte does not have
the 20 years of expertise,
the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor,
that we have within our healthcare team.
So, we bridged and built an alliance,
that, today is starting the project journey
in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus,
to make that project a success.
>> In the capabilities that you,
that they were looking for,
that you said that Infor and Oracle had,
were what?
the coverage of the functionality across the suites,
was it the cloud capabilities?
What's the high level of that?
>> So the one thing that I will tell you,
is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market,
if we talk about them,
is getting extremely knowledgeable,
so the way it's starting is around cloud.
So gone are the days,
I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud,
artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud,
there's a lot of education already around single tenant,
and multi-tenant, and they understand.
So it starts with the cloud platform,
that is the software provider
on a stable, secure cloud platform,
and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant,
as opposed to individually hosted for each customer.
And then they break it down into
the different buckets of the applications,
within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see
what not a product features.
So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality,
but their business processes, and best practices.
And that's really, in my opinion,
where Infor really came ahead at Christus.
>> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean,
Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?"
I'm presuming the customer cares
because when you do a software release,
it's just seamless, right?
Verses okay,
we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade,
it's more disruptive.
Is that why?
>> Yes, that's definitely a large portion
because over the period of time,
every time there is a manufactured change
on the software side, development chain,
you're adding code that impacts a customer to have
to take their system down, and then bring it back up,
and here it's done without the customer even finding out,
so it's a huge advantage.
The second advantage is a cost,
which in today's world not as much,
because hardware's become very cheap.
But it's still conquered hardware
that's sitting on the premise,
as opposed to
individually putting it out there,
as opposed to having one system that's scalable.
And then your third is security,
on multi-tenant capable software,
it's more secure than your single tenant capability.
>> And Avaap brings that to the table.
So it's not,
I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function,
so yours is what?
Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things?
>> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align,
and educate on the system selection on what it does.
So we have a offering called Align and Define that
allows customers to prepare for the cloud,
to take steps today,
and educate them on what needs to be done.
Once they do that,
then it's going through the implementation process,
and post-implementation is optimization.
So on the optimization side,
Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side.
So one of the big challenge in healthcare,
is a wall that exists between
the ERP and the EHR,
you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side,
and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR,
and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other.
And the systems need to be really integrated,
to be able to drive efficiency
and cost benefits for that,
so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in.
>> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right?
>> Right.
>> So what's goin on these days?
You obviously,
last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act,
there's some uncertainty around that,
certainly meaningful use
is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers,
EMR is still you know, a big deal.
What are the hot trends, what are the drivers,
and how are you guys responding?
>> ERP.
ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market,
so there's a lot of fatigue
with healthcare having gone through
meaningful use over the last decade
of spending hundreds of millions of dollars,
of putting in the EHR platforms.
So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR
has led to no real advancement on the ERP side.
And that's why we're in a midst of what I think,
is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry
are on ERP platforms that we're seeing,
there were 55 system selections done,
just in the last 12 months.
My personal view is that over the next three to five years,
we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap
or upgrade their ERP platforms.
>> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead.
>> So swap--
what's...
the fundamental of that decision?
>> So there are a lot of legacy providers,
so the market is going to get consolidated,
so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday,
but there is a lot of other providers,
there's, if you count mid market and up,
there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base.
>> Very fragmented, isn't it?
>> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright.
>> So there's McKesson as an example.
McKesson had a big ERP platform,
officially said that they are stopping development on it.
And that's going to create
a void that needs to be filled.
There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum
that serves these regional,
individual health system that exist in rural areas.
So those systems are, need to be upgraded,
because the rural systems of most of anywhere else
that have connectivity issues
need the cloud platforms to kind of go through.
>> Yeah I mean a lot of these,
a lot of these healthcare platforms were,
they were literally,
they were born in the mini-computer era
it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX,
and we'll become a valuated re-seller,
and healthcare was such a huge opportunity,
and so under technologized, not a word but,
and then over the years,
these systems just kept getting updated,
now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right?
>> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in
and that's really driving a lot of the change.
>> Yeah,
and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time,
to make the change.
I think Charles was very visionary,
and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform,
and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled,
for the healthcare industry, specifically written.
So the last mile functionality
that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has
is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today.
>> Who does that last mile functionality,
if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor,
is it the SI,
is it some other internal software developer?
>> So, the software developers as Infor is,
trying to build that as much in the software as they can.
But there's always extensions,
which is where tools from the Infor OS,
as an example come in,
to allow to build the extensions
that allow us to then have that capability.
>> You do that work, is that right?
>> We do that work, absolutely.
>> Okay, and then,
how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not
getting in the way of their road map?
Soma's got his ERD pipeline,
and you don't want to just do something
that he's going to do in week, a month or a year.
How do you communicate with those guys,
and how do you find the white space?
And then does it somehow get back into the platform
and become advantageous for others?
>> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product,
that's the budget his board gave.
I can't go in front of my board,
ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out.
>> Well you could.
>> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs
>> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do.
So the extensions we build are very specific,
and not necessarily product centric.
We have a good relationship
with the product development team,
that allows us to see their road map and make sure.
So an example I'll give you is test automation.
So we've built an automation framework using an industry
recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP,
for healthcare.
So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point,
manual, laborious, takes a business uses away.
So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation,
which has been in the field, we have,
close to 100 customers using it,
allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle,
and is an accelerator that condenses
the entire implementation life cycle.
>> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare,
you have another interest inside of your business,
with a little Beatles connection.
So fill us in on that a little bit.
>> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one,
and I definitely want to talk on both of them,
because those are important parts of our business,
One is retail,
we did get retail partner of the year award,
and Stella McCartney,
is our project that we're actively working on in UK.
She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter,
and has built a very reputable shoe company,
that's a brand highly sought after,
and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications,
using cloud suite fashion,
which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform.
>> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right?
>> That's cool, that is cool!
>> Absolutely!
>> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here,
thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely,
thank you very much.
>> Congratulations on all the progress!
>> It's always good to be here!
>> It is full speed ahead.
Good for you.
Dhiraj Shah from Avaap
>> Thank you!
>> Back with more on theCUBE.
We're at in Informen,
Informer rather, (laughs)
I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum!
>> Inforum!
>> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing)
>> 2018, D.C.
Did it again.
>> Excellent!
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