Charles Phillips is the managing partner and cofounder at Recognize, a technology investment and transformation company. He is the former CEO and chairman of Infor, the third largest business software applications company in the world with ninety thousand customers in one hundred ninety countries and seventeen thousand employees.  During his nine-year tenure the company transformed into the first industry cloud company with over seventy million ERP subscribers on Amazon. Infor was sold to Koch Industries in 2020 for a $13 billion exit.

Prior to Infor, Phillips was president of Oracle Corporation and a member of its board of directors. During his eight-year tenure, the company tripled in size and market capitalization and successfully acquired seventy companies. Before Oracle, Phillips was a managing director in the technology group at Morgan Stanley and served on its board of directors and was an Institutional Investor All Star for ten consecutive years.

Phillips served as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps in the Second Battalion, Tenth Marines, at Camp Lejeune in a line of three generations of military service. Phillips holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the U.S. Air Force Academy, a J.D. from New York Law School, and an MBA from Hampton University and is a member of the Georgia State Bar Association.

Phillips serves on the boards of Paramount, American Express, the Apollo Theater. Phillips also served on President Obama’s Economic Recovery Board, led by former Federal Reserve President, Paul Volcker. He is also the co-founder and co-chairman of the Black Economic Alliance, a consortium of business leaders committed to economic growth in Black communities.