The hospitality industry covers many bases; whether it’s the hotel front desk checking in a guest or a restaurant checking in a dinner reservation, they all deal with how to best and most efficiently serve a customer. This industry is an area of special interest and strength for enterprise software company Infor Inc., illustrated by its acquisition last week of Vivonet Inc. in the point of sale and inventory management space.

Stewart Applbaum (pictured), executive vice president at Infor Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Inforum event in Washington, D.C. In addition to what hospitality clients are seeking in technology providers, they also discussed how Infor’s artificial intelligence solution is differentiated in the industry. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Walls: You’ve had some wins in hospitality of late. What’s driving that?

Applbaum: You look at hospitality — whether it’s managed food service or hotels or restaurants — a lot of the technology that’s out there is dated, and it is not keeping [up] with the requirements. [There is also a] demand for a [higher] customer service level. You take the look and feel of what we’ve been able to do as a company over the last 10 years, building up a lot of knowledge base and seniority around what it means to serve those markets, then re-architecting with new products [and] a cloud-first approach. That really allows us to deliver a much better experience for the guests at a hotel or at cash register [in] a restaurant or in a managed food service environment [or] in a hospital.

[For hospitality companies], the complexity of trying to maintain on-premise solutions is backbreaking. So for them to get to a level with a company like Infor, who not only has the experience in the space, but is also invested into the next-generation cloud-based solutions, [that] really allows us to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.

Vellante: What are the winning attributes? I’m hearing architecture; we heard this morning platform; the design; the whole user experience; there’s the cloud component. Are those the key factors?

Applbaum: They’re very much key, but [with] Infor OS, we have this capability to create a model that allows for a free flow of communication and understanding between systems, so that information can be shared among systems and resources [and used to] collaborate with that information.

At the same time, we put all that information into a data lake, so that we can now use Coleman AI to really start to help people understand not only what does [the information] look like or what [are] the interactions occurring at the hotel space.

Vellante: Every software company says, “Yeah, we have AI too.” 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?

Applbaum: One is the comprehensive set of our solutions. So by being able to go into an industry and have a cloud suite that we formulated that [can] manage a very significant portion of their operations, already integrated together, gives us a leg up in our competition. So when we walk into 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 they’re also trying to [see if they’re] going to be profitable. And how do [they] become profitable?

What we present to our customers [is the capability] to do all nurse scheduling, workforce planning, time attendance, facilities [management], your assets, your expensive cost structures. Being able to come to the table with that as a comprehensive system eliminates a lot of the guesswork.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Inforum event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Inforum 2018. Neither Infor Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE