>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (bright, lively music) >> Hello and welcome back to a CUBE coverage of Oracle's Modern Customer Conference here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, with my co-host this week, Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com, part of SiliconANGLE Media, and our next guest is Austin Miller, Product Marketing Director for Oracle Marketing Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE conversation. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> This coveted post-launch spot. >> Yeah, we have a lunch coma kicking in, but no, seriously, you have a really tough job because you're seeing the growth of the Platform Play, right, really robust horizontal platform, but how you got here through some really smart acquisitions but handled well, and integrated, we covered that last year. You guys are seeing some nice tailwinds with some momentum certainly around the expectations of what the customers want. >> Yeah, I think that one of the best things when we start thinking about, to your point, product integration, it's also the way that we are talking to our customers about how they can use the products together. It's not really enough just to have maybe one talk to another, but unless we prove out the use cases, you don't get the utilization, and I think this year what we've really seen is getting those use cases to actually start getting some traction in the field. >> So this integrated marketing idea seems to be the reality that everyone wants. >> Where are we on that progress bar, because this seems to be pretty much unanimous with customers, the question is how to get there, the journey, and the heroes that are going to drive and the theme of the conference. But the reality is this digital transformation is being forced for business change. >> Austin: Absolutely. >> And marketing is part of that digital fabric. >> I think that one of the most interesting things about this is if you look at kind of the history of when did the stacks start becoming actually part of the story, it was at a point where we didn't really necessarily even have the capabilities to do it. As a result many marketers who thought they were maybe buying into a stack approach got a little bit burned. I think now we are actually at that place where that value is not only something that they can see inherently and say "oh, I'd like all these applications to talk together," but it's actually feasible, it's something that they're going to be able to use, and they can be optimistic about, frankly. >> Where are they getting burned, you mentioned that, from buying into a full stack of software for a point solution, is that kind of what you meant? >> No, I think that in the marketing realm, when you're talking to marketers, it is very easy to think about all the horrible things that they have to deal with on a daily basis, all these problems. And the reality is that oftentimes you've had to have this conversation with them that says, you know, there are not going to be easy answers to hard problems. There are usually hard answers to hard problems. We can help alleviate some of that friction, especially when we start talking about data silos or things about interoperability, so being able to not just have integration, but pre-built function within these particular platforms, but realistically, it just wasn't something that we necessarily in the market in general were able to deliver on until somewhat recently. >> So, I am very happy that I heard you use the word "use cases," especially at a launch, because that's been one of the biggest challenges of both marketing technology when we think about big data, there's been such a focus on the technology, getting the technology right, and then the use cases and how it changed the way the business or the function did things, kind of either did or didn't happen. Talk about how a focus in use case is actually getting people to emphasize the outcomes, and how Oracle is helping people then turn that into technology decisions. >> This may sound almost counterintuitive, but in reality the way that use cases we see helping us the most is that it really helps spur about the organizational changes that we need in order to actually have some of this happen, 'cause it's very easy to say, "we have all this technology marketer and you should be using it all," but if you don't actually prove it out and how that's going to impact let's say the way that they're creating their marketing messages, on even a kind of not exciting basis, like how are you creating your emails, how are you creating your mobile messaging, how are you doing your website, and then start talking about those in actual use cases, it's very hard for people to organize their organizations around this kind of transformation. They need something tangible to hold onto. >> And the old way with putting things in buckets, >> Austin: Exactly. >> Right, so so hey we got one covered, move on to the next one ... >> Peter: Or by channels even. We got an email solution, or we got a web solution and as the customer moves amongst these different mechanisms, or engages differently with these mechanisms, the data then becomes, we've talked a lot about this, becomes the integration point, and that as you said affects a significant change on how folks think about organizing, but what do you think are going to be some of the big use cases if people are going to be ... you're providing advice and counsel to folks on the 2017. >> Yeah, so I think that talking about marketing-specific use cases is really important, especially when we start thinking about how am I using my first-party data that I may have within a particular channel. And I'm using that to contextually change the way I'm communicating to somebody on another channel. But if we kind of take that theme, and we think about let's not just expand it to marketing but let's really talk about customer experience, because as a customer, I go in-store, I go on email, I go on your mobile app, I don't view those as different things. That's just my experience with your brand. And even as we start getting to maybe some of the service things, am I calling a call center? The way that we're really thinking about marketing is not only bringing all this information across our traditional marketing channels, but how are we helping marketers drive organizational change beyond the traditional bounds of even their own marketing department into service, into sales, into on-store, because in reality that's where kind of the next step is. It's not just about, to your point, promotional emails. It's about how are we bringing this experience across the full spectrum. >> So it's really how is first-person data going to drive the role of marketer differently, the tasks of marketing as a consequence, and therefore how we institutionalize that work. >> Absolutely, and I think that you can see this in the investments that we've made in the ODC, Oracle Data Cloud. It's first step, let's start thinking about how we can start moving around on first-party data, that'll be a nice starting point, but then afterwards, how are we taking third-party data let's say from offline purchases, starting to incorporate that and that store's third-party data, 'cause then we really start getting to that simultaneously good experience or at least consistent experience across digital, across in-store, we start piecing together, but we really need to start at that baseline. >> A lot of people have been talking about the convergence of adtech and martech for years, and we had a CUBE alumni on our CUBE many years ago, when the Big Data movement started to happen, and he was a visionary, revolutionary kind of guy, Jeff Hammerbacher, the founder of Cloudera, who's now doing some pioneering work in New York City around science. He's since left Cloudera. But he said on theCUBE what really bothered him was some of the brightest minds in the industry were working on using data and put an ad in the right place. And he was being kind of critical of, use it for cooler things, but we look at what's happening on martech side, when you have customer experience, that same kind of principle of predictive thinking around how to use an asset can be applied to the customer journey, so now you bring up the question of A.I. If you broaden the scope of adtech and martech to say all things consumer, in any context, at any given time, you got to have an A.I. or machine learning approach to put the right thing at the right place at the right time that benefits the user >> Austin: It's not scalable. That's the reality of it. To you point, if you're going to start thinking about this across all these different channels, including advertising as well, the idea of being able to do these on a one-off basis, from a manual perspective, it's completely untenable, you're completely correct, but to that point, where you're talking about the best minds in the industry maybe dedicated to figuring out, "if I put a little target here, am I going to get somebody to click on that ad one time, or how am I placing it," that is very much the way that we were at the very beginning parts of marketing technology, where it was bash and blast messaging, how can we just kind of get the clicks and the engagement, and how do we send out >> John: spray and pray >> Exactly. And now I think that we are getting to a much more nuanced understanding of the way that we advertise because it's much more reliant on context, it's not just how can I get my stuff in front of somebody's eyeballs, it's how am I placing it when they're actually showing some sort of intention for maybe the products I already have. >> Adaptive intelligence is interesting to me because what that speaks to is, one, being adapted to a real time, not batch, spray and pray and the old methodology of database-driven things, no offense to the main database cache at Oracle, but it's a system of record, but now new systems of data are available, and that seems to be the key message here, that the customer experience is changing, multiple channels, that's omnichannel, there needs to be ... everyone's looking for the silver bullet. They think it's A.I., augmented intelligence or artificial intelligence. How do you see that product roadmap looking, because you're going to need to automate, you're going to need to use software differently to handle literally real time. >> Completely. I think that this is a really important distinction about the way that we view A.I. and how it factors into marketing technology and the way that I think a lot of people in the industry do. I think that once again this theme of there aren't easy answers to hard problems, it is very pleasant to think that I'm just going to have one product that's going to solve everything, from when I should send my next email, to if there's clean water in this particular area in a third-world country, and that's just something that maybe sounds nice, but it's not necessarily something that's actually tangible. The way that we view A.I. is it's something that's going to be embedded and actually built into each of these different functions so that we can do the mission-critical things on the actual practical level, and kind of make it real for marketers, make it something that's isn't just "oh, buy this and it will solve all your problems." >> So I'm going to ask you the question, the old adage, "Use the right tool for the right job, and if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail." A lot of people use email marketing that way, they're using it for notifications when in reality that's not the expectation of the consumer, some are building in a notification engine separate from email. All that stuff's kind of under the covers, in the weeds, but the bigger question to you is, I want to get your insight on this because you're talking to customers all the time, is as customers as you said need to change organizationally, they're essentially operationalizing this modern era of CX, customer experience, so it's a platform-based concept which pretty much everyone agrees on, but we're in the early innings of operationalizing this >> Austin: Oh yeah. >> So how do you see that evolving and what do you want customers to do to be set up properly if they're coming in for the first inning of their journey, or even if they're midstream with legacy stuff? >> I think that that's a really good perspective, because you don't want to necessarily force people to go through excruciating organizational change in preparation if we're in maybe the first inning, but it is really just about setting up the organization to adjust as realistically we get into the middle innings and into the later innings. And really the kind of beginning foundation of this is understanding that these arbitrary almost like tribal distinctions between who owns what channel, who's the email marketer, or who's the mobile person, they need to be broken down, and start thinking about things instead of these promotional blasts to your point, or even maybe reactionary notifications. How is this contributing to the number of times your brand is touching me in a day, or the way that I'm actually communicating, so I think that it's an interesting kind of perspective of how we were organizationally set up for that, but the short answer is that A.I. is going to fundamentally change the way that marketers are operating. It's not going to fundamentally change maybe everything that they're doing or it's not going to be replacing it. It's going to be a complementary role that they need to be ready to adjust to. >> So you are, you're in product, product management. >> Austin: Product marketing >> Product marketing. So you are at that interface between product and marketing, both moving more towards agile. How are you starting to use data differently and how would you advise folks like you in other businesses not selling software that might not have the same digital component today but might have a comparable digital component in the future, what would you tell them to do differently? >> So, I think that the first step is to actually have an honest assessment of what we have and what we don't have. I think that there's a lot of people who like to kind of close their eyes or maybe plug their ears and just sort of continue down the path of least resistance. >> Peter: Give me ... >> Oh, an honest assessment of what kind of data we do have today, what kind of data we might actually need, and then most importantly, is that actually feasible data to get. Because you can't >> you can wish it but you can't get it >> You can wave a magic wand and say these are the numbers that I need on this particular maybe interest level of these particular ... >> John: The fatal flaw is hoping that you're going to get data that you never get, or is ungettable. >> Or, this is really something that I think a lot, would resonate more with marketers is that we have now set up all these different points of interaction that are firehoses of data spraying it at me, I may be able to retroactively look at it and maybe garner some kind of insight, but there's just no real way for me to take that and make it actionable right away. It is a complete mess of data in a lot of these organizations. >> And that's where A.I. comes in. >> Austin: Absolutely. It's able to automate that, reaction ... >> Peter: Triage at a bare minimum. >> Correct >> So the first starts with data. What would be the second thing? >> So it's data, presume that you're going to need help on the triage and organizing that data. Is there a third thing? >> I would say that you're going down the right path with the steps there, but once again, we're all talking about these concepts that do require a great deal of specialization and a lot of actual understanding of the way we're dealing with data. So honest assessment is definitely that first part, but then do I have the actual people that I need in order to actually take action on this? Because it is a specialized kind of role that really hasn't traditionally been within marketing organizations. >> I know you guys have a big account-based, focus-account-based marketing, you know, doing all kinds of things, but I'm a person, I'm not a company, so that's a database saying "hey, what company do you work for?" And all the people who work for that company and their target list. I'm a person. I'm walking around, I've got a wearable, I might be doing a retail transaction, so the persona base seems to be the rage and seems to be the center and we heard from Mark Hurd's keynote, that's obviously his perspective and others as well so it's not like a secret, but how do you take it to the next level? An account base could help there too, but you need to organize around the person, and that seems to open up the identity question of okay, how do I know it's John? >> I think that goes beyond just personal taste, but into what does this person actually do at this company, because I can go in and give a headspinning presentation to maybe a C-level executive and say, "look at all this crazy stuff you can do," and meanwhile the guy who might be making the buying decision at the end of the table's looking at that and being like, "there's no way we can do that, we don't have the personnel to do that, there's no chance," and you have already dissension from the innards of the actual people who are making the buying decisions. The vision can't be so big that it resonates with no one. And you need to understand on a persona level what is actually resonated with them. 'Cause feasibility is a very important thing to our end user, and we need to actually incorporate that into our messaging, so it's not just so pie-in-the-sky visioning. >> I did a piece of research, sorry John, I did a piece of research a number of years ago that looked at the impact of selling mainly to the CIO. And if you sell successfully to the CIO, you can probably guarantee nine months additional time before the sale closes. >> Austin: Yeah. Because the CIO says "this is a great idea," and then everybody in the organization who's now responsible for doing it says "hold on, don't put this in my KPIs while I take a look at it and what it really means and blah blah blah. Don't make me responsible for this stuff." You just added nine months. >> Absolutely. I even have a very minute example for something that we rolled out. This was a great learning opportunity. Because we rolled out a feature called multi-variant testing. It's not important what exactly it is for the purposes of this, but basically it's the idea of you can take one email and eight versions of it, test it, and then send out the best one. Sounds great, right? I'm an executive, I'm like boy, I'm going to get every last ounce of revenue from my emails, I'm only going to send out the best content. If you don't pitch that right, the end user, all they hear is wait, the thing that I do one of, I have to create eight of now? Am I going to get to see my kids ever again? That's just the way you have to adjust ... >> And seven of 'em are going to be thrown away. I'm going to be called a failure. >> Exactly. So it's just not something that you can take for granted because marketers have a variety of different roles and a variety of firm responsibilities. >> And compound that with everything's going digital. >> Exactly. >> So (mumbles) Austin, great to have you on theCUBE. Spend the last minute though, I'd like you just to share for the last minute, what's the most important thing happening here at #ModernCX besides the simplicity of the messaging of modern era of customer expectations, experiences, all that's really awesome, but what should people know about that aren't here, watching. >> I'd just say that the one thing that at least resonates most with me, and this is once again coming from a product and sort of edging on marketing, is that the things that we've been talking about with not only A.I. but even just simple things like having systems that are communicating to each other, they're actually real and we're seeing that as real. You can actually see them working together in products and serving up experiences to customers that we're even doing now as part of the sales process and saying "hey, this is how you would actually do this," as opposed to just "here's our Chinese menu of different options. Pick what you want and then we can just kind of serve it up." Because I think that there's something that's very heartening to maybe marketers who have a little bit of, I don't know, doubt about whether or not this is real. It is real, it's here today, and we're able to execute on it. >> And that's the integration of a multi-product and technology solution. >> I would almost say that it's slightly different from that though, in terms of, it's not just integration of these pieces, it's integration that's pre-built, so we actually have it pre-built together and then we also have these tremendous, new, innovative features and functionality that are coming with those integrations. It's not just portability, it's actual use cases. >> Would you say that it's as real as the data? >> It's as real as the data. I think that that's ... >> If you have the data, then you can do what you need to do. >> That's a very, a very good point. >> Austin Miller, Product Marketing Director at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Thanks for sharing the data here on theCUBE where we're agile, agile marketing is the focus. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. More coverage from day one at Mandalay Bay for Oracle Modern Customer Experience show. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (bright, lively music)