>> Voiceover: theCUBE presents "On the Ground". (techno music) >> Welcome to a special, exclusive Cube, On The Ground here at Oracle's headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCube, here with Claude Robinson, Senior Director, Product Management, for conversion infrastructure. Claude, welcome to On The Ground, we are wrapping up a great day of interviews of thought leaders and experts here at Oracle, from Big Data Cloud Machine. All of this is kind of coming together under this converged infrastructure, software in the cloud, big data all kind of connecting in, what's your take on this? How do you wrap this up into a burrito? How do you wrap this thing up and put this together? >> Yeah, so, you know, as everybody said, Big Data is kind of one piece of a bigger puzzle. Customers are looking for a complete solution that they can plug in, and actually just spend time running their business versus going out and building solutions internally. So, you know the old model of going and picking a ton of pieces and vendors of the shelf, spending months putting it together, waiting six to nine months for someone to come back with data that you can analyze to run your business, that doesn't work anymore in today's world. >> We stuff stuff out there, open stack, We see SDN, we see all kinds of stuff in the Cloud, you got Amazon, there is definitely a do it yourself culture out there, certainly on the hardware side, people have been buying servers, buying storage. You guys provide this whole integrated solution, but you don't necessarily have to buy Oracle hardware, but you can run this on that, I mean, so, I mean. Do customers have to buy all of Oracle? What's the ideal configuration for this? >> So basically customers have a choice in terms of what they want to do. Again, the high level thing for the analytics pieces is they basically want to take that data, and make a business decision out of it. And we are giving them the options of doing that where they want, when they want and what platform they want within Oracle. So if they want to do public Cloud, they can. If they want to build their own private Cloud on premise, levering our technology, they can. If they want to go with the old model of a converged system on premise, they can. Again, we are letting them do that, and it's a system that is really easy. It works across all three areas, and it is basically just plug and play. >> One of the things that is interesting about this big data appliance that we were talking about earlier today, one thing I think is attractive about it is that it take the benefits of Oracle, if you are an Oracle customer over at Oracle Database, you know what you're talking about, you know what you have there. It's got value. But you don't have to buy Oracle, to connect to Hadoop. You can use open source if you have Spark or Hadoop, this is an extensionished strategy for Oracle. Give you, essentially, access to a bigger database business, that is free anyway. But the customers get value in that. Is that part of the value proposition that you guys see as well? I mean, because it is not necessarily Orale database, but you are enabling connection to a free software. You guys understand what is going on here? Why is this important? >> So customers today can go out and build their own, but again it is going to take 51 pieces and 100 steps. You know when we were little and we built models, that was great, but when you are running a multi billion dollar business, or a 50 million dollar business, you don't have time to do that. You want something that you can basically take, and plug in. And so, what we have doe is gone out and supported these open source, you know, configurations, that, you know, customers are using to run their business. And we are giving them powerful tools that Oracle builds that plugs into data, that makes that happen. >> So talk about the interviews we had this morning, up and down, so we had a diverse group of people, how would you describe the set of interviews that we had today from an expertise standpoint and subject matter. >> Yeah, so most of these folks are the thought leaders at Oracle and in the industry in Big Data. You saw things that were basically related to hardware. You saw discussions around trends that are happening with the internet of everything, or the internet of things. You saw folks talking about what is happening in terms of what customers want in terms of data labs, or data lakes. So you saw kind of a large representation of expertise within Oracle, speaking to the various pieces of Big Data. >> Converged infrastructure was a term that has been around for a while, but it certainly played out exactly when it first came out. People were like, oh, converged infrastructure, we're are seeing that same kind of converges happening at the data layer, do you guys see that tread connecting with customers, are customers getting it? That concept, we heard things like data lab, data factory. I mean there is almost a converged data infrastructure going on too. >> I think customers get, I think, the old model of converged infrastructure was, hey, lets simplify so of the hardware components. And there was a big piece missing, which was, what are you doing with that hardware? Where is the software pieces? I think the real converged infrastructure that Oracle is bringing to the table and that customers are seeing is the complete package. Its not only the hardware, but the entire software stack as well, because in the old model, if you have a converged infrastructure with hardware, what are you going to do with that? You need software components on top of that, so you are still kind of, you know, building your own with or others off the shelf, you don't have to do that. >> One of the things that people are saying in the marketplace, and, you know, we are also seeing on theCUBE with the Cube coverage, is Oracle is actually thinking about the hardware performance in context to the software of the database, primarily, and then up the stack. What's so important about that notion, of thinking about the performance of the hardware tied to the software, both Oracle and non Oracle? >> You know, I think you could look back at kind of the old mainframe days, if you could basically have a hardware systems and a software working together, and designed to work together, you have the best system, best of breed. I think, you know, because of missing technologies back then, we moved to this kind of open client model. We would kind of have hardware. We would put some third party software on there. You would try to configure it yourself to make it work. Most companies would actually prefer if that system arrived ready to go. So we are kind of, in some way, we are taking the best of both worlds, the best of the optimized system from the past, with the ability of that configuration, that methodology and technology that we have nowadays, and we built a system that basically provides you the best of breed. >> Claude, thanks so much for spending time with us today. I appreciate letting us come in and talk to all the experts here On The Ground here at Oracle Headquarters. >> Thank you, John. >> I'm John Furrier, here On The Ground, for exclusive coverage of Oracle, pre Oracle open world, and also getting all the thought leads around data, data capital, and all data management, on converged infrastructure. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (techno music)