(upbeat music) >> When Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, it paid $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. Now I argued at the time that Oracle got one of the best deals in the history of enterprise tech, and I got a lot of grief for saying that because Sun had a declining business, it was losing money, and its revenue was under serious pressure as it tried to hang on for dear life. But Safra Catz understood that Oracle could pay Sun's lower profit and lagging businesses, like its low index 86 product lines, and even if Sun's revenue was cut in half, because Oracle has such a high revenue multiple as a software company, it could almost instantly generate $25 to $30 billion in shareholder value on paper. In addition, it was a catalyst for Oracle to initiate its highly differentiated engineering systems business, and was actually the precursor to Oracle's Cloud. Oracle saw that it could capture high margin dollars that used to go to partners like HP, it's original exit data partner, and get paid for the full stack across infrastructure, middleware, database, and application software, when eventually got really serious about cloud. Now there was also a major technology angle to this story. Remember Sun's tagline, "the network is the computer"? Well, they should have just called it cloud. Through the Sun acquisition. Oracle also got a couple of key technologies, Java, the number one programming language in the world, and MySQL, a key ingredient of the LAMP stack, that's Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, Perl or Python, on which the internet is basically built, and is used by many cloud services like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Flicker, Amazon, Aurora, and many other examples, including, by the way, Maria DB, which is a fork of MySQL created by MySQL's creator, basically in protest to Oracle's acquisition; the drama is Oscar worthy. It gets even better. In 2020, Oracle began introducing a new version of MySQL called MySQL HeatWave, and since late 2020 it's been in sort of a super cycle rolling, out three new releases in less than a year and a half in an attempt to expand its Tam and compete in new markets. Now we covered the release of MySQL Autopilot, which uses machine learning to automate management functions. And we also covered the bench marketing that Oracle produced against Snowflake, AWS, Azure, and Google. And Oracle's at it again with HeatWave, adding machine learning into its database capabilities, along with previously available integrations of OLAP and OLTP. This, of course, is in line with Oracle's converged database philosophy, which, as we've reported, is different from other cloud database providers, most notably Amazon, which takes the right tool for the right job approach and chooses database specialization over a one size fits all strategy. Now we've asked Oracle to come on theCUBE and explain these moves, and I'm pleased to welcome back Nipun Agarwal, who's the senior vice president for MySQL Database and HeatWave at Oracle. And today, in this video exclusive, we'll discuss machine learning, other new capabilities around elasticity and compression, and then any benchmark data that Nipun wants to share. Nipun's been a leading advocate of the HeatWave program. He's led engineering in that team for over 10 years, and he has over 185 patents in database technologies. Welcome back to the show Nipun. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. Very happy to be back. >> Yeah, now for those who may not have kept up with the news, maybe to kick things off you could give us an overview of what MySQL HeatWave actually is so that we're all on the same page. >> Sure, Dave, MySQL HeatWave is a fully managed MySQL database service from Oracle, and it has a builtin query accelerator called HeatWave, and that's the part which is unique. So with MySQL HeatWave, customers of MySQL get a single database which they can use for transactional processing, for analytics, and for mixed workloads because traditionally MySQL has been designed and optimized for transaction processing. So in the past, when customers had to run analytics with the MySQL based service, they would need to move the data out of MySQL into some other database for running analytics. So they would end up with two different databases and it would take some time to move the data out of MySQL into this other system. With MySQL HeatWave, we have solved this problem and customers now have a single MySQL database for all their applications, and they can get the good performance of analytics without any changes to their MySQL application. >> Now it's no secret that a lot of times, you know, queries are not, you know, most efficiently written, and critics of MySQL HeatWave will claim that this product is very memory and cluster intensive, it has a heavy footprint that adds to cost. How do you answer that, Nipun? >> Right, so for offering any database service in the cloud there are two dimensions, performance and cost, and we have been very cognizant of both of them. So it is indeed the case that HeatWave is a, in-memory query accelerator, which is why we get very good performance, but it is also the case that we have optimized HeatWave for commodity cloud services. So for instance, we use the least expensive compute. We use the least expensive storage. So what I would suggest is for the customers who kind of would like to know what is the price performance advantage of HeatWave compared to any database we have benchmark against, Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, HeatWave is significantly faster and significantly lower price on a multitude of workloads. So not only is it in-memory database and optimized for that, but we have also optimized it for commodity cloud services, which makes it much lower price than the competition. >> Well, at the end of the day, it's customers that sort of decide what the truth is. So to date, what's been the customer reaction? Are they moving from other clouds from on-prem environments? Both why, you know, what are you seeing? >> Right, so we are definitely a whole bunch of migrations of customers who are running MySQL on-premise to the cloud, to MySQL HeatWave. That's definitely happening. What is also very interesting is we are seeing that a very large percentage of customers, more than half the customers who are coming to MySQL HeatWave, are migrating from other clouds. We have a lot of migrations coming from AWS Aurora, migrations from RedShift, migrations from RDS MySQL, TerriData, SAP HANA, right. So we are seeing migrations from a whole bunch of other databases and other cloud services to MySQL HeatWave. And the main reason we are told why customers are migrating from other databases to MySQL HeatWave are lower cost, better performance, and no change to their application because many of these services, like AWS Aurora are ETL compatible with MySQL. So when customers try MySQL HeatWave, not only do they get better performance at a lower cost, but they find that they can migrate their application without any changes, and that's a big incentive for them. >> Great, thank you, Nipun. So can you give us some names? Are there some real world examples of these customers that have migrated to MySQL HeatWave that you can share? >> Oh, absolutely, I'll give you a few names. Stutor.com, this is an educational SaaS provider raised out of Brazil. They were using Google BigQuery, and when they migrated to MySQL HeatWave, they found a 300X, right, 300 times improvement in performance, and it lowered their cost by 85 (audio cut out). Another example is Neovera. They offer cybersecurity solutions and they were running their application on an on-premise version of MySQL when they migrated to MySQL HeatWave, their application improved in performance by 300 times and their cost reduced by 80%, right. So by going from on-premise to MySQL HeatWave, they reduced the cost by 80%, improved performance by 300 times. We are Glass, another customer based out of Brazil. They were running on AWS EC2, and when they migrated, within hours they found that there was a significant improvement, like, you know, over 5X improvement in database performance, and they were able to accommodate a very large virtual event, which had more than a million visitors. Another example, Genius Senority. They are a game designer in Japan, and when they moved to MySQL HeatWave, they found a 90 times percent improvement in performance. And there many, many more like a lot of migrations, again, from like, you know, Aurora, RedShift and many other databases as well. And consistently what we hear is (audio cut out) getting much better performance at a much lower cost without any change to their application. >> Great, thank you. You know, when I ask that question, a lot of times I get, "Well, I can't name the customer name," but I got to give Oracle credit, a lot of times you guys have at your fingertips. So you're not the only one, but it's somewhat rare in this industry. So, okay, so you got some good feedback from those customers that did migrate to MySQL HeatWave. What else did they tell you that they wanted? Did they, you know, kind of share a wishlist and some of the white space that you guys should be working on? What'd they tell you? >> Right, so as customers are moving more data into MySQL HeatWave, as they're consolidating more data into MySQL HeatWave, customers want to run other kinds of processing with this data. A very popular one is (audio cut out) So we have had multiple customers who told us that they wanted to run machine learning with data which is stored in MySQL HeatWave, and for that they have to extract the data out of MySQL (audio cut out). So that was the first feedback we got. Second thing is MySQL HeatWave is a highly scalable system. What that means is that as you add more nodes to a HeatWave cluster, the performance of the system improves almost linearly. But currently customers need to perform some manual steps to add most to a cluster or to reduce the cluster size. So that was other feedback we got that people wanted this thing to be automated. Third thing is that we have shown in the previous results, that HeatWave is significantly faster and significantly lower price compared to competitive services. So we got feedback from customers that can we trade off some performance to get even lower cost, and that's what we have looked at. And then finally, like we have some results on various data sizes with TPC-H. Customers wanted to see if we can offer some more data points as to how does HeatWave perform on other kinds of workloads. And that's what we've been working on for the several months. >> Okay, Nipun, we're going to get into some of that, but, so how did you go about addressing these requirements? >> Right, so the first thing is we are announcing support for in-database machine learning, meaning that customers who have their data inside MySQL HeatWave can now run training, inference, and prediction all inside the database without the data or the model ever having to leave the database. So that's how we address the first one. Second thing is we are offering support for real time elasticity, meaning that customers can scale up or scale down to any number of nodes. This requires no manual intervention on part of the user, and for the entire duration of the resize operation, the system is fully available. The third, in terms of the costs, we have double the amount of data that can be processed per node. So if you look at a HeatWave cluster, the size of the cluster determines the cost. So by doubling the amount of data that can be processed per node, we have effectively reduced the cluster size which is required for planning a given workload to have, which means it reduces the cost to the customer by half. And finally, we have also run the TPC-DS workload on HeatWave and compared it with other vendors. So now customers can have another data point in terms of the performance and the cost comparison of HeatWave with other services. >> All right, and I promise, I'm going to ask you about the benchmarks, but I want to come back and drill into these a bit. How is HeatWave ML different from competitive offerings? Take for instance, Redshift ML, for example. >> Sure, okay, so this is a good comparison. Let's start with, let's say RedShift ML, like there are some systems like, you know, Snowflake, which don't even offer any, like, processing of machine learning inside the database, and they expect customers to write a whole bunch of code, in say Python or Java, to do machine learning. RedShift ML does have integration with SQL. That's a good start. However, when customers of Redshift need to run machine learning, and they invoke Redshift ML, it makes a call to another service, SageMaker, right, where so the data needs to be exported to a different service. The model is generated, and the model is also outside RedShift. With HeatWave ML, the data resides always inside the MySQL database service. We are able to generate models. We are able to train the models, run inference, run explanations, all inside the MySQL HeatWave service. So the data, or the model, never have to leave the database, which means that both the data and the models can now be secured by the same access control mechanisms as the rest of the data. So that's the first part, that there is no need for any ETL. The second aspect is the automation. Training is a very important part of machine learning, right, and it impacts the quality of the predictions and such. So traditionally, customers would employ data scientists to influence the training process so that it's done right. And even in the case of Redshift ML, the users are expected to provide a lot of parameters to the training process. So the second thing which we have worked on with HeatWave ML is that it is fully automated. There is absolutely no user intervention required for training. Third is in terms of performance. So one of the things we are very, very sensitive to is performance because performance determines the eventual cost to the customer. So again, in some benchmarks, which we have published, and these are all available on GitHub, we are showing how HeatWave ML is 25 times faster than Redshift ML, and here's the kicker, at 1% of the cost. So four benefits, the data all remain secure inside the database service, it's fully automated, much faster, much lower cost than the competition. >> All right, thank you Nipun. Now, so there's a lot of talk these days about explainability and AI. You know, the system can very accurately tell you that it's a cat, you know, or for you Silicon Valley fans, it's a hot dog or not a hot dog, but they can't tell you how the system got there. So what is explainability, and why should people care about it? >> Right, so when we were talking to customers about what they would like from a machine learning based solution, one of the feedbacks we got is that enterprise is a little slow or averse to uptaking machine learning, because it seems to be, you know, like magic, right? And enterprises have the obligation to be able to explain, or to provide a answer to their customers as to why did the database make a certain choice. With a rule based solution it's simple, it's a rule based thing, and you know what the logic was. So the reason explanations are important is because customers want to know why did the system make a certain prediction? One of the important characteristics of HeatWave ML is that any model which is generated by HeatWave ML can be explained, and we can do both global explanations or model explanations as well as we can also do local explanations. So when the system makes a specific prediction using HeatWave ML, the user can find out why did the system make such a prediction? So for instance, if someone is being denied a loan, the user can figure out what were the attribute, what were the features which led to that decision? So this ensures, like, you know, fairness, and many of the times there is also like a need for regulatory compliance where users have a right to know. So we feel that explanations are very important for enterprise workload, and that's why every model which is generated by HeatWave ML can be explained. >> Now I got to give Snowflakes some props, you know, this whole idea of separating compute from storage, but also bringing the database to the cloud and driving elasticity. So that's been a key enabler and has solved a lot of problems, in particular the snake swallowing the basketball problem, as I often say. But what about elasticity and elasticity in real time? How is your version, and there's a lot of companies chasing this, how is your approach to an elastic cloud database service different from what others are promoting these days? >> Right, so a couple of characteristics. One is that we have now fully automated the process of elasticity, meaning that if a user wants to scale up or scale down, the only thing they need to specify is the eventual size of the cluster and the system completely takes care of it transparently. But then there are a few characteristics which are very unique. So for instance, we can scale up or scale down to any number of nodes. Whereas in the case of Snowflake, the number of nodes someone can scale up or scale down to are the powers of two. So if a user needs 70 CPUs, well, their choice is either 64 or 128. So by providing this flexibly with MySQL HeatWave, customers get a custom fit. So they can get a cluster which is optimized for their specific portal. So that's the first thing, flexibility of scaling up or down to any number of nodes. The second thing is that after the operation is completed, the system is fully balanced, meaning the data across the various nodes is fully balanced. That is not the case with many solutions. So for instance, in the case of Redshift, after the resize operation is done, the user is expected to manually balance the data, which can be very cumbersome. And the third aspect is that while the resize operation is going on, the HeatWave cluster is completely available for queries, for DMLS, for loading more data. That is, again, not the case with Redshift. Redshift, suppose the operation takes 10 to 15 minutes, during that window of time, the system is not available for writes, and for a big part of that chunk of time, the system is not even available for queries, which is very limiting. So the advantages we have are fully flexible, the system is in a balanced state, and the system is completely available for the entire duration operation. >> Yeah, I guess you got that hypergranularity, which, you know, sometimes they say, "Well, t-shirt sizes are good enough," but then I think of myself, some t-shirts fit me better than others, so. Okay, I saw on the announcement that you have this lower price point for customers. How did you actually achieve this? Could you give us some details around that please? >> Sure, so there are two things for announcing this service, which lower the cost for the customers. The first thing is that we have doubled the amount of data that can be processed by a HeatWave node. So if we have doubled the amount of data, which can be a process by a node, the cluster size which is required by customers reduces to half, and that's why the cost drops to half. The way we have managed to do this is by two things. One is support for Bloom filters, which reduces the amount of intermediate memory. And second is we compress the base data. So these are the two techniques we have used to process more data per node. The second way by which we are lowering the cost for the customers is by supporting pause and resume of HeatWave. And many times you find customers of like HeatWave and other services that they want to run some other queries or some other workloads for some duration of time, but then they don't need the cluster for a few hours. Now with the support for pause and resume, customers can pause the cluster and the HeatWave cluster instantaneously stops. And when they resume, not only do we fetch the data, in a very, like, you know, a quick pace from the object store, but we also preserve all the statistics, which are used by Autopilot. So both the data and the metadata are fetched, extremely fast from the object store. So with these two capabilities we feel that it'll drive down the cost to our customers even more. >> Got it, thank you. Okay, I promised I was going to get to the benchmarks. Let's have it. How do you compare with others but specifically cloud databases? I mean, and how do we know these benchmarks are real? My friends at EMC, they were back in the day, they were brilliant at doing benchmarks. They would produce these beautiful PowerPoints charts, but it was kind of opaque, but what do you say to that? >> Right, so there are multiple things I would say. The first thing is that this time we have published two benchmarks, one is for machine learning and other is for SQL analytics. All the benchmarks, including the scripts which we have used are available on GitHub. So we have full transparency, and we invite and encourage customers or other service providers to download the scripts, to download the benchmarks and see if they get any different results, right. So what we are seeing, we have published it for other people to try and validate. That's the first part. Now for machine learning, there hasn't been a precedence for enterprise benchmarks so we talk about aiding open data sets and we have published benchmarks for those, right? So both for classification, as well as for aggression, we have run the training times, and that's where we find that HeatWave MLS is 25 times faster than RedShift ML at one percent of the cost. So fully transparent, available. For SQL analytics, in the past we have shown comparisons with TPC-H. So we would show TPC-H across various databases, across various data sizes. This time we decided to use TPC-DS. the advantage of TPC-DS over TPC-H is that it has more number of queries, the queries are more complex, the schema is more complex, and there is a lot more data skew. So it represents a different class of workloads, and which is very interesting. So these are queries derived from the TPC-DS benchmark. So the numbers we have are published this time are for 10 terabyte TPC-DS, and we are comparing with all the four majors services, Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse. And in all the cases, HeatWave is significantly faster and significantly lower priced. Now one of the things I want to point out is that when we are doing the cost comparison with other vendors, we are being overly fair. For instance, the cost of HeatWave includes the cost of both the MySQL node as well as the HeatWave node, and with this setup, customers can run transaction processing analytics as well as machine learning. So the price captures all of it. Whereas with the other vendors, the comparison is only for the analytic queries, right? So if customers wanted to run RDP, you would need to add the cost of that database. Or if customers wanted to run machine learning, you would need to add the cost of that service. Furthermore, with the case of HeatWave, we are quoting pay as you go price, whereas for other vendors like, you know, RedShift, and like, you know, where applicable, we are quoting one year, fully paid upfront cost rate. So it's like, you know, very fair comparison. So in terms of the numbers though, price performance for TPC-DS, we are about 4.8 times better price performance compared to RedShift We are 14.4 times better price performance compared to Snowflake, 13 times better than Google BigQuery, and 15 times better than Synapse. So across the board, we are significantly faster and significantly lower price. And as I said, all of these scripts are available in GitHub for people to drive for themselves. >> Okay, all right, I get it. So I think what you're saying is, you could have said this is what it's going to cost for you to do both analytics and transaction processing on a competitive platform versus what it takes to do that on Oracle MySQL HeatWave, but you're not doing that. You're saying, let's take them head on in their sweet spot of analytics, or OLTP separately and you're saying you still beat them. Okay, so you got this one database service in your cloud that supports transactions and analytics and machine learning. How much do you estimate your saving companies with this integrated approach versus the alternative of kind of what I called upfront, the right tool for the right job, and admittedly having to ETL tools. How can you quantify that? >> Right, so, okay. The numbers I call it, right, at the end of the day in a cloud service price performance is the metric which gives a sense as to how much the customers are going to save. So for instance, for like a TPC-DS workload, if we are 14 times better price performance than Snowflake, it means that our cost is going to be 1/14th for what customers would pay for Snowflake. Now, in addition, in other costs, in terms of migrating the data, having to manage two different databases, having to pay for other service for like, you know, machine learning, that's all extra and that depends upon what tools customers are using or what other services they're using for transaction processing or for machine learning. But these numbers themselves, right, like they're very, very compelling. If we are 1/5th the cost of Redshift, right, or 1/14th of Snowflake, these numbers, like, themselves are very, very compelling. And that's the reason we are seeing so many of these migrations from these databases to MySQL HeatWave. >> Okay, great, thank you. Our last question, in the Q3 earnings call for fiscal 22, Larry Ellison said that "MySQL HeatWave is coming soon on AWS," and that caught a lot of people's attention. That's not like Oracle. I mean, people might say maybe that's an indication that you're not having success moving customers to OCI. So you got to go to other clouds, which by the way I applaud, but any comments on that? >> Yep, this is very much like Oracle. So if you look at one of the big reasons for success of the Oracle database and why Oracle database is the most popular database is because Oracle database runs on all the platforms, and that has been the case from day one. So very akin to that, the idea is that there's a lot of value in MySQL HeatWave, and we want to make sure that we can offer same value to the customers of MySQL running on any cloud, whether it's OCI, whether it's the AWS, or any other cloud. So this shows how confident we are in our offering, and we believe that in other clouds as well, customers will find significant advantage by having a single database, which is much faster and much lower price then what alternatives they currently have. So this shows how confident we are about our products and services. >> Well, that's great, I mean, obviously for you, you're in MySQL group. You love that, right? The more places you can run, the better it is for you, of course, and your customers. Okay, Nipun, we got to leave it there. As always it's great to have you on theCUBE, really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on and sharing the new innovations. Congratulations on all the progress you're making here. You're doing a great job. >> Thank you, Dave, and thank you for the opportunity. >> All right, and thank you for watching this CUBE conversation with Dave Vellante for theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this special edition of cube insights powered by ETR this is Dave Volante and we've been running these breaking analysis segments and it's timely because oracle last night announced earnings ahead of expectations they were expected to announce today a Friday but they announced early ostensibly because Co CEO Mark Hurd is taking a leave of absence for medical reasons so of course we we wish him the best hope everything's okay with him but but but that looks like they pre announced or announced ahead of schedule in order to get that out of the way and prepare for Oracle OpenWorld Larry Ellison and Safra Catz are going to be filling in during mark heards absence but so this is a breaking analysis on Oracle's earnings I would call this you know can expect more of the same so Alex if you kind of bring up the financial overview of Oracle we'll dig into it a little bit so Oracle is a company with around 40 billion dollars in annual revenue it's growing it you know single digit growth maybe you know 1% of the top line last quarter they've got a large market cap 187 billion dollars so they consistently trade in the four and a half to 5x revenue range and they've got an outstanding margin of operating margin of 42% is very high you know their software company and very very profitable software company that is a non-gaap margin their free cash flow is also very strong they throw off about 14 12 to 14 billion dollars annually in a trailing 12-month basis in free cash flow and the other thing about Oracle I made this point many many times in the cube is Oracle spends money on R&D they spend about fifteen percent of revenue on on R&D they've got a lot of cash they got you know over thirty five thirty six billion dollars in cash and short-term investments but they of course also have a some long term debt over 50 well over fifty billion dollars in long-term debt now that doesn't bother me some people point to that as a concern but if you look at Oracle's EBIT it's many many times greater than its interest payments I think you know 3x is kind of the benchmark they're an Oracle you know whose well well over that de miel 6 7x be bit relative to its interest payment so that's really not a concern of mine but definitely is interest on the debt is oftentimes its tax deductible and so it can be a good source of capital it's cheap cheap debt and of course Oracle's got to compete with some of the cloud suppliers building out more data centers they just had an announcement in that in that regard and so it needs capital even though it you know it can't spend nearly as much as Amazon Google and Microsoft not even close it would take Oracle years and years and years to spend what what Google does in four months but but nonetheless they need cash to compete in their business Oracle's got a shifting business mix from kind of lower margin hardware you know the remnants of the Sun business and and really shifting to a higher margin cloud services and support Oracle has really gone all-in on on cloud again even though it's really it's cloud is not competitive with the hyper scalars but it's sort of the Oracle cloud the redstack cloud but in that that business is growing it's around growing at around 4% from a constant currency standpoint this past quarter it's shifting Oracle's shifting toward an annual recurring revenue model and it's license business is declining and so you saw that last quarter declined around 6% and you're seeing a major shift from on-prem to cloud with Oracle ERP cloud ERP is where the action is for Oracle and I'll show you some data on that from from ETR it's really fusion fusion ERP and NetSuite they're growing it you know combined well over 30 percent last quarter and as I say they get the news here is Mark Hurd is going on a leave of absence we got Oracle OpenWorld coming up next week and you know they're going to be talking about what we call cloud 2.0 Larry Ellison I'm sure is gonna be talking about autonomous database there's gonna be I'm sure some Exadata announcements and I'll talk a little bit more about why that's important now I want to share with you some spending intentions from ETR we've been last couple of months we've been sharing enterprise technology research data we've partnered with them to do these breaking analysis and these cube insights ETR has a panel of about 4,500 CIOs IT practitioners and they go out quarterly and do spending intention surveys and I'm showing you data now from the july 2019 survey focused on spending intention intentions for the second half of 2019 you can see the number of survey respondents was 1068 out of that 4,500 panel what this slide shows is if you look in the left-hand side you can see the the the products or the categories of spend so there's on the reading top to bottom fusion Oracle Fusion NetSuite Oracle overall and an Oracle on Prem so these are the categories some of the categories that ETR captures and what we're showing here is is the calculation of net score and I'll share with you how net score is is calculated so if you look on the left hand side you'll see the dark red that is we're leaving the platform the light red is we're gonna spend less the gray is spending as flat the dark green is we're gonna spend more and the lime green is we're adding the platform so if you take the green minus the red you get net score so let's look down as I said fusion and NetSuite are where the action is for Oracle you see the net score here is 14% for fusion 12% for NetSuite Oracle itself is 7% and Oracle on-premise minus 4 these are not great scores we shared with you just recently snowflake and its net score snowflakes and net scores you know 81 percent we shared with you some data are around UI path that's also 80 percent plus net score these are much smaller companies but they're growing very very fast and I'll share some other scores from Oracle competitors in just a moment I also want to point out the shared accounts what the shared accounts are is the number of mentions that these platforms received in within that n of 1068 so you can see the fusion and NetSuite in a relatively small at 80 and 87 but still statistically significant Oracle itself very very large you know huge install base 1329 and then Oracle on Prem at 282 so there you have it I mean this is not barn burning this to me underscores that Oracle is losing share and now and I'll show you that in context in this next slide so again same kind of format with the the net score calculation but what I've done is compared Oracle to service now workday salesforce an SI p now look at service now service now is a net score 53% with a number of shared accounts of 358 so a very large sample inside of that 10 sec 1068 I'll show you some time series at a moment service now obviously very strong company they get a valuation now that's up actually higher than workday believe or not we've talked a lot about the the CEO transition and on and on and on and we've covered the service now shows for many years but some very strong very strong install both growing their Tam it's a into new markets and so you can see their and their workday as well extremely strong now Oracle will often you know give examples of how its beating workday I think in the earnings call yesterday Ellison talked about how they beat you know workday at McDonald's you know when you peel the onion and those things oftentimes it's one division or but who knows you know it's very possible that that you know Oracle swept the floor of workday but but regardless workday is growing much much faster than Oracle it's taking share from Oracle despite you know the examples that Oracle gives Salesforce as well same with Salesforce it's growing much much faster than Oracle if you look at ServiceNow workday and Salesforce even s ap look at sa pees net score 31% which frankly we consider neutral and it's not like sa pees you know burning the bar and I they're but much much stronger than Oracle 7% net score so again I say it's some sort of more of the same Oracle its earnings are kind of mad I mean it's throws off great cashflow it's got great earnings but there's no growth there and and as a result you know people are down in the stock a little bit today and that combined with the herd news and then the stock should be down based on the earnings announcements a little bit of a disappointment or of course Oracle focus is on on the profit and today people are rewarding growth that may change and I'll talk more about that in a moment but before I do that I want to show you a time series so this is the same competitor service network day sales force s AP and Oracle all the way back to January 2017 the January 2017 survey so you can see that ETR takes these surveys in January April July and October they're just now running the the October survey so we'll have some you know up-to-date results there but you can see the net score is what I just showed you 53% 52% 44% for those leaders those growth leaders very very strong these are the share gainers s ap holding at 31% you can see Oracle down in the single digits each of these companies is actually kind of holding serve if you will but again ServiceNow workday Salesforce growing much much faster than the market growing much much faster than that Oracle so let me summarize look so again mark hard leaving a leave of absence for medical reasons Ellison Larry Ellison and Safra Catz are filling in for heard I'm sure you're gonna hear some more talk about that at Oracle OpenWorld this week Oracle's losing share in the enterprise software space despite what they tell you that's the fact they are a company around around cash flow EPS and stock buybacks that's how they're keeping the stock up it's an effective technique everybody does it Oracle make stuck in acquisitions here and there I've been very aggressive over the years and it's going hard after cloud it's an Oracle cloud it's it's it really is around their database which the Oracle remains the leader for mission-critical Database Oracle has the best database for mission-critical but it's under attack in all those non mission-critical areas with whether it's Mongo we showed you the snowflake data the other day I mean there's this dozens and dozens of database competitors that are going after Oracle at in the periphery but they remain the core leader in mission-critical database fighting it out with with with Microsoft and IBM and and others but Oracle is by far and away the leader their exadata is the key to Oracle's lock spec in our opinion because Oracle's got a fight for you know for straight database they've got to fight all these other database competitors once a once a customer decides on Exadata Oracle's Gotham and so that's why Oracle is putting so much effort into exadata I'm sure at Oracle OpenWorld this week you're gonna hear a lot about exadata and autonomous and all kinds of stuff that they're doing at exadata and try to make it a an increasingly competitive platform Orgel also has a very strong apps business and that's really the linchpin to its it's cloud its cloud in our view is not even closely competitive with with the cloud infrastructure at Amazon Google and Microsoft and those companies spend much much more on capex they have you know a much greater infrastructure as a service Microsoft's in Microsoft's case got very strong software estate at applications business Google a massive scale so from a just a cloud infrastructure standpoint you know really Oracle is is playing catch-up just like IBM is and probably will never catch up or go over all again it's sort of a story of man more the same until the market sentiment shifts toward cash flow and earnings its stock is in my view is gonna trade inside a range I'm not a stock picker I don't make stock recommendations but I'm you know kind of a fundamental analysis and observer you know I just don't see that that stock breaking out there's really no growth story there and the markets rewarding growth now if and when the market does turn down let's say there's a recession people will reward companies like Oracle you have the cash who can you know do the buybacks or companies that pay dividends and so Oracle holding serve making a lot of right moves you know Larry Ellison is you know leading the ship obviously a very smart person don't bet against that individual fact is they're losing share but at the same time they're running a playbook that's working and it's working from the standpoint of EPs and cashflow and I think that story is going to continue so they have it that's our analysis thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time this is Dave wante with cube insights powered by ETR

>> Hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Wikibon Action Item. (electronic music) One of the most pressing strategic issues that businesses face is how to get more value out of their data, In our opinion that's the essence of a digital business transformation, is the using of data as an asset to improve your operations and take better advantage of market opportunities. The problem of data though, it's shareable, it's copyable, it's reusable. It's easy to create derivative value out of it. One of the biggest misnomers in the digital business world is the notion that data is the new fuel or the new oil. It's not, You can only use oil once. You can apply it to a purpose and not multiple purposes. Data you can apply to a lot of purposes, which is why you are able to get such interesting and increasing returns to that asset if you use it appropriately. Now, this becomes especially important for technology companies that are attempting to provide digital business technologies or services or other capabilities to their customers. In the consumer world, it started to reach a head. Questions about Facebook's reuse of a person's data through an ad based business model is now starting to lead people to question the degree to which the information asymmetry about what I'm giving and how they're using it is really worth the value that I get out of Facebook, is something that consumers and certainly governments are starting to talk about. it's also one of the bases for GDPR, which is going to start enforcing significant fines in the next month or so. In the B2B world that question is going to become especially acute. Why? Because as we try to add intelligence to the services and the products that we are utilizing within digital business, some of that requires a degree of, or some sort of relationship where some amount of data is passed to improve the models and machine learning and AI that are associated with that intelligence. Now, some companies have come out and said flat out they're not going to reuse a customer's data. IBM being a good example of that. When Ginni Rometty at IBM Think said, we're not going to reuse our customer's data. The question for the panel here is, is that going to be a part of a differentiating value proposition in the marketplace? Are we going to see circumstances in which companies keep products and services low by reusing a client's data and others sustaining their experience and sustaining a trust model say they won't. How is that going to play out in front of customers? So joining me today here in the studio, David Floyer. >> Hi there. >> And on the remote lines we have Neil Raden, Jim Kobielus, George Gilbert, and Ralph Finos. Hey, guys. >> All: Hey. >> All right so... Neil, let me start with you. You've been in the BI world as a user, as a consultant, for many, many number of years. Help us understand the relationship between data, assets, ownership, and strategy. >> Oh, God. Well, I don't know that I've been in the BI world. Anyway, as a consultant when we would do a project for a company, there were very clear lines of what belong to us and what belong to the client. They were paying us generously. They would allow us to come in to their company and do things that they needed and in return we treated them with respect. We wouldn't take their data. We wouldn't take their data models that we built, for example, and sell them to another company. That's just, as far as I'm concerned, that's just theft. So if I'm housing another company's data because I'm a cloud provider or some sort of application provider and I say well, you know, I can use this data too. To me the analogy is, I'm a warehousing company and independently I go into the warehouse and I say, you know, these guys aren't moving their inventory fast enough, I think I'll sell some of it. It just isn't right. >> I think it's a great point. Jim Kobielus. As we think about the role that data, machine learning play, training models, delivering new classes of services, we don't have a clean answer right now. So what's your thought on how this is likely to play out? >> I agree totally with Neil, first of all. If it's somebody else's data, you don't own it, therefore you can't sell and you can't monetize it, clearly. But where you have derivative assets, like machine learning models that are derivative from data, it's the same phenomena, it's the same issue at a higher level. You can build and train, or should, your machine learning models only from data that you have legal access to. You own or you have license and so forth. So as you're building these derivative assets, first and foremost, make sure as you're populating your data lake, to build and to do the training, that you have clear ownership over the data. So with GDPR and so forth, we have to be doubly triply vigilant to make sure that we're not using data that we don't have authorized ownership or access to. That is critically important. And so, I get kind of queasy when I hear some people say we use blockchain to make... the sharing of training data more distributed and federated or whatever. It's like wait a second. That doesn't solve the issues of ownership. That makes it even more problematic. If you get this massive blockchain of data coming from hither and yon, who owns what? How do you know? Do you dare build any models whatsoever from any of that data? That's a huge gray area that nobody's really addressed yet. >> Yeah well, it might mean that the blockchain has been poorly designed. I think that we talked in one of the previous Action Items about the role that blockchain design's going to play. But moving aside from the blockchain, so it seems as though we generally agree that data is owned by somebody typically and that the ownership of it, as Neil said, means that you can't intercept it at some point in time just because it is easily copied and then generate rents on it yourself. David Floyer, what does that mean from a ongoing systems design and development standpoint? How are we going to assure, as Jim said, not only that we know what data is ours but make sure that we have the right protection strategies, in a sense, in place to make sure that the data as it moves, we have some influence and control over it. >> Well, my starting point is that AI and AI infused products are fueled by data. You need that data, and Jim and Neil have already talked about that. In my opinion, the most effective way of improving a company's products, whatever the products are, from manufacturing, agriculture, financial services, is to use AI infused capabilities. That is likely to give you the best return on your money and businesses need to focus on their own products. That's the first place you are trying to protect from anybody coming in. Businesses own that data. They own the data about your products, in use by your customers, use that data to improve your products with AI infused function and use it before your competition eats your lunch. >> But let's build on that. So we're not saying that, for example, if you're a storage system supplier, since that's a relatively easy one. You've got very, very fast SSDs. Very, very fast NVMe over Fabric. Great technology. You can collect data about how that system is working but that doesn't give you rights to then also collect data about how the customer's using the system. >> There is a line which you need to make sure that you are covering. For example, Call Home on a product, any product, whose data is that? You need to make sure that you can use that data. You have some sort of agreement with the customer and that's a win-win because you're using that data to improve the product, prove things about it. But that's very, very clear that you should have a contractual relationship, as Jim and Neil were pointing out. You need the right to use that data. It can't come beyond the hand. But you must get it because if you don't get it, you won't be able to improve your products. >> Now, we're talking here about technology products which have often very concrete and obvious ownership and people who are specifically responsible for administering them. But when we start getting into the IoT domain or in other places where the device is infused with intelligence and it might be collecting data that's not directly associated with its purpose, just by virtue of the nature of sensors that are out there and the whole concept of digital twin introduces some tension in all this. George Gilbert. Take us through what's been happening with the overall suppliers of technology that are related to digital twin building, designing, etc. How are they securing or making promises committing to their customers that they will not cross this data boundary as they improve the quality of their twins? >> Well, as you quoted Ginni Rometty starting out, she's saying IBM, unlike its competitors, will not take advantage and leverage and monetize your data. But it's a little more subtle than that and digital twins are just sort of another manifestation of industry-specific sort of solution development that we've done for decades. The differences, as Jim and David have pointed out, that with machine learning, it's not so much code that's at the heart of these digital twins, it's the machine learning models and the data is what informs those models. Now... So you don't want all your secret sauce to go from Mercedes Benz to BMW but at the same time the economics of industry solutions means that you do want some of the repeatability that we've always gotten from industry solutions. You might have parts that are just company specific. And so in IBM's case, if you really parse what they're saying, they take what they learn in terms of the models from the data when they're working with BMW, and some of that is going to go into the industry specific models that they're going to use when they're working with Mercedes-Benz. If you really, really sort of peel the onion back and ask them, it's not the models, it's not the features of the models, but it's the coefficients that weight the features or variables in the models that they will keep segregated by customer. So in other words, you get some of the benefits, the economic benefits of reuse across customers with similar expertise but you don't actually get all of the secret sauce. >> Now, Ralph Finos-- >> And I agree with George here. I think that's an interesting topic. That's one of the important points. It's not kosher to monetize data that you don't own but conceivably if you can abstract from that data at some higher level, like George's describing, in terms of weights and coefficients and so forth, in a neural network that's derivative from the model. At some point in the abstraction, you should be able to monetize. I mean, it's like a paraphrase of some copyrighted material. A paraphrase, I'm not a lawyer, but you can, you can sell a paraphrase because it's your own original work that's based obviously on your reading of Moby Dick or whatever it is you're paraphrasing. >> Yeah, I think-- >> Jim I-- >> Peter: Go ahead, Neil. >> I agree with that but there's a line. There was a guy who worked at Capital One, this was about ten years ago, and he was their chief statistician or whatever. This was before we had words like machine learning and data science, it was called statistics and predictive analytics. He left the company and formed his own company and rewrote and recoded all of the algorithms he had for about 20 different predictive models. Formed a company and then licensed that stuff to Sybase and Teradata and whatnot. Now, the question I have is, did that cross the line or didn't it? These were algorithms actually developed inside Capital One. Did he have the right to use those, even if he wrote new computer code to make them run in databases? So it's more than just data, I think. It's a, well, it's a marketplace and I think that if you own something someone should not be able to take it and make money on it. But that doesn't mean you can't make an agreement with them to do that, and I think we're going to see a lot of that. IMSN gets data on prescription drugs and IRI and Nielsen gets scanner data and they pay for it and then they add value to it and they resell it. So I think that's really the issue is the use has to be understood by all the parties and the compensation has to be appropriate to the use. >> All right, so Ralph Finos. As a guy who looks at market models and handles a lot of the fundamentals for how we do our forecasting, look at this from the standpoint of how people are going to make money because clearly what we're talking about sounds like is the idea that any derivative use is embedded in algorithms. Seeing how those contracts get set up and I got a comment on that in a second, but the promise, a number of years ago, is that people are going to start selling data willy-nilly as a basis for their economic, a way of capturing value out of their economic activities or their business activities, hasn't matured yet generally. Do we see like this brand new data economy, where everybody's selling data to each other, being the way that this all plays out? >> Yeah, I'm having a hard time imagining this as a marketplace. I think we pointed at the manufacturing industries, technology industries, where some of this makes some sense. But I think from a practitioner perspective, you're looking for variables that are meaningful that are in a form you can actually use to make prediction. That you understand what the the history and the validity of that of that data is. And in a lot of cases there's a lot of garbage out there that you can't use. And the notion of paying for something that ultimately you look at and say, oh crap, it's not, this isn't really helping me, is going to be... maybe not an insurmountable barrier but it's going to create some obstacles in the market for adoption of this kind of thought process. We have to think about the utility of the data that feeds your models. >> Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot, like there's going to be a lot of legal questions raised and I recommend that people go look at a recent SiliconANGLE article written by Mike Wheatley and edited by our Editor In Chief Robert Hof about Microsoft letting technology partners own right to joint innovations. This is a quite a difference. This is quite a change for Microsoft who used to send you, if you sent an email with an idea to them, you'd often get an email back saying oh, just to let you know any correspondence we have here is the property of Microsoft. So there clearly is tension in the model about how we're going to utilize data and enable derivative use and how we're going to share, how we're going to appropriate value and share in the returns of that. I think this is going to be an absolutely central feature of business models, certainly in the digital business world for quite some time. The last thing I'll note and then I'll get to the Action Items, the last thing I'll mention here is that one of the biggest challenges in whenever we start talking about how we set up businesses and institutionalize the work that's done, is to look at the nature of the assets and the scope of the assets and in circumstances where the asset is used by two parties and it's generating a high degree of value, as measured by the transactions against those assets, there's always going to be a tendency for one party to try to take ownership of it. One party that's able to generate greater returns than the other, almost always makes move to try to take more control out of that asset and that's the basis of governance. And so everybody talks about data governance as though it's like something that you worry about with your backup and restore. Well, that's important but this notion of data governance increasingly is going to become a feature of strategy and boardroom conversations about what it really means to create data assets, sustain those data assets, get value out of them, and how we determine whether or not the right balance is being struck between the value that we're getting out of our data and third parties are getting out of our data, including customers. So with that, let's do a quick Action Item. David Floyer, I'm looking at you. Why don't we start here. David Floyer, Action Item. >> So my Action Item is for businesses, you should focus. Focus on data about your products in use by your customers, to improve, help improve the quality of your products and fuse AI into those products as one of the most efficient ways of adding value to it. And do that before your competition has a chance to come in and get data that will stop you from doing that. >> George Gilbert, Action Item. >> I guess mine would be that... in most cases you you want to embrace some amount of reuse because of the economics involved from your joint development with a solution provider. But if others are going to get some benefit from sort of reusing some of the intellectual property that informs models that you build, make sure you negotiate with your vendor that any upgrades to those models, whether they're digital twins or in other forms, that there's a canonical version that can come back and be an upgraded path for you as well. >> Jim Kobielus, Action Item. >> My Action Item is for businesses to regard your data as a product that you monetize yourself. Or if you are unable to monetize it yourself, if there is a partner, like a supplier or a customer who can monetize that data, then negotiate the terms of that monetization in your your relationship and be vigilant on that so you get a piece of that stream. Even if the bulk of the work is done by your partner. >> Neil Raden, Action Item. >> It's all based on transparency. Your data is your data. No one else can take it without your consent. That doesn't mean that you can't get involved in relationships where there's an agreement to do that. But the problem is most agreements, especially when you look at a business consumer, are so onerous that nobody reads them and nobody understands them. So the person providing the data has to have an unequivocal right to sell it to you and the person buying it has to really understand what the limits are that they can do with it. >> Ralph Finos, Action Item. You're muted Ralph. But it was brilliant, whatever it was. >> Well it was and I really can't say much more than that. (Peter laughs) But I think from a practitioner perspective and I understand that from a manufacturing perspective how the value could be there. But as a practitioner if you're fishing for data out there that someone has that might look like something you can use, chances are it's not. And you need to be real careful about spending money to get data that you're not really clear is going to help you. >> Great. All right, thanks very much team. So here's our Action Item conclusion for today. The whole concept of digital business is predicated in the idea of using data assets in a differential way to better serve your markets and improve your operations. It's your data. Increasingly, that is going to be the base for differentiation. And any weak undertaking to allow that data to get out has the potential that someone else can, through their data science and their capabilities, re-engineer much of what you regard as your differentiation. We've had conversations with leading data scientists who say that if someone were to sell customer data into a open marketplace, that it would take about four days for a great data scientist to re-engineer almost everything about your customer base. So as a consequence, we have to tread lightly here as we think about what it means to release data into the wild. Ultimately, the challenge there for any business will be: how do I establish the appropriate governance and protections, not just looking at the technology but rather looking at the overall notion of the data assets. If you don't understand how to monetize your data and nonetheless enter into a partnership with somebody else, by definition that partner is going to generate greater value out of your data than you are. There's significant information asymmetries here. So it's something that, every company must undertake an understanding of how to generate value out of their data. We don't think that there's going to be a general-purpose marketplace for sharing data in a lot of ways. This is going to be a heavily contracted arrangement but it doesn't mean that we should not take great steps or important steps right now to start doing a better job of instrumenting our products and services so that we can start collecting data about our products and services because the path forward is going to demonstrate that we're going to be able to improve, dramatically improve the quality of the goods and services we sell by reducing the assets specificities for our customers by making them more intelligent and more programmable. Finally, is this going to be a feature of a differentiated business relationship through trust? We're open to that. Personally, I'll speak for myself, I think it will. I think that there is going to be an important element, ultimately, of being able to demonstrate to a customer base, to a marketplace, that you take privacy, data ownership, and intellectual property control of data assets seriously and that you are very, very specific, very transparent, in how you're going to use those in derivative business transactions. All right. So once again, David Floyer, thank you very much here in the studio. On the phone: Neil Raden, Ralph Finos, Jim Kobielus, and George Gilbert. This has been another Wikibon Action Item. (electronic music)