(upbeat music) >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Live from the Bellagio, in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're here all day today and tomorrow. We're going to talk about process mining next. We've got two guests here. Mike Engel is here, intelligent automation and process intelligence leader at PWC. And Ryan McMahon, the SVP of growth at UiPath. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> So Ryan, I'm going to start with you. Talk to us about process mining. How does UiPath do it differently and what are some of the things being unveiled at this event? >> So look, I would tell you it's actually more than process mining and hopefully, not only you but others saw this this morning with Param. It's really about the full capabilities of that discovery suite. In which, obviously, process mining is part of. But it starts with task capture. So, going out and actually working with subject matter experts on a process. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, order to cash, digitally capturing that process or how they believe it should work or execute across one's environment. Right Mike? And then from there, actually validating or verifying with things or capabilities like process mining. Giving you a full digital x-ray of actually how that process is being executed in the enterprise. Showing you process bottlenecks. For things like accounts payable, showing you days outstanding, maverick buying, so you can actually pin point and do a few things. Fix your process, right? Where process should be fixed. Fix your application because it's probably not doing what you think it is, and then third, and where the value comes, is in our platform of which process mining is a capability, our PA platform. Really moving directly to automations, right? And then, having the ability with even task mining to drill into a specific bottleneck. Capturing keystrokes, clicks, and then moving to, with both of those, process mining and task mining, into Automation Hub, as part of our discovery platform as well. Being able to crowdsource, prioritize, all of those potential, if you will, just capabilities of automations, and saying, "Okay, let's go and prioritize these. These deliver to the greatest value," and executing across them. So, as much as it is about process mining, it's actually the whole entire discovery suite of capabilities that differentiates UiPath from other RPA vendors, as the only RPA vendor that delivers process mining, task mining and this discovery suite as part of our enterprise automation platform. >> Such a critical point, Ryan. I mean, it's multi-dimensional. It's not just one component. It's not just process mining or task mining, it's the combination that's really impactful. Agree with you a hundred percent. >> So, one of the things that people who watch our shows know, I'm like a broken record on this, the early days of RPA, I called it paving the cow path. And that was good because somebody knew the process, they just repeat it. But the problem was, the process wasn't necessarily the best process. As you just described. So, when you guys made the acquisition of ProcessGold, I said, "Okay, now I'm starting to connect the dots," and now a couple years on, we're starting to see that come together. This is what I think is most misunderstood about UiPath, and I wonder, from a practitioner's perspective, if you can sort of fill in some of those gaps. It's that, it's different from a point tool, it's different from a productivity tool. Like Power Automate, I'll just say it, that's running in Azure Cloud, that's cool or a vertically integrated part of some ERP Stack. This is a horizontal play that is end to end. Which is a bigger automation agenda, it's bold but it's potentially huge. $60 billion dollar TAM, I think that's understated. Maybe you could, from a practitioner's perspective, share with us the old way, >> Yeah. >> And kind of, the new way. >> Well obviously, we all made a lot of investments in this space, early on, to determine what should we be automating in the first place? We even went so far as, we have platforms that will transcribe these kind of surveys and discussions that we're having with our clients, right. But at the end of the day all we're learning is what they know about the process. What they as individuals know about the process. And that's problematic. Once we get into the next phase of actually developing something, we miss something, right? Because we're trying to do this rapidly. So, I think what we have now is really this opportunity to have data driven insights and our clients are really grabbing onto that idea, that it's good to have a sense of what they think they do but it's more important to have a sense of what they actually do. >> Are you seeing, in the last year in a half we've seen the acceleration of a lot of things, there's some silver linings but we've also seen the acceleration in automation as a mandate. Where is it? In terms of a priority, that you're seeing with customers, and are there any industries that you're seeing that are really leading the edge here? >> Well I do see it as a priority and of course, in the role that I have, obviously everybody I talk to, it's a priority for them. But I think it's kind of changing. People are understanding that it's not just a sense of, as Ryan was pointing out, it's not just a sense of getting an understanding of what we do today, it's really driving it to that next step of actually getting something impactful out the other end. Clients are starting to understand that. I like to categorize them, there's three types of clients, there's starters, there's stall-ers and those that want to scale. >> Right? So we're seeing a lot more on the other ends of this now, where clients are really getting started and they're getting a good sense that this is important for them because they know that identifying the opportunities in the first place is the most difficult part of automation. That's what's stalling the programs. Then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got these clients that are saying, "Hey, I want to do this really at scale, can you help us do that?" >> (Ryan) Right. >> And it's quite a challenge. >> How do I build a pipeline of automations? So I've had success in finance and accounting, fantastic. How do I take this to operations? How do I take this this to supply chain? How do I take this to HR? And when I do that, it all starts with, as Wendy Batchelder, Chief Data Officer at VMware, would say and as a customer, "It starts with data but more importantly, process." So focusing on process and where we can actually deliver automation. So it's not just about those insights, it's about moving from insights to actionable next steps. >> Right. >> And that is where we're seeing this convergence, if you will, take place. As we've seen it many times before. I mentioned I worked at Cisco in the past, we saw this with Voice Over IP converging on the network. We saw this at VMware, who I know you guys have spoken to multiple times. When a move from a hypervisor to including NSX with the network, to including cloud management and also VSAN for storage, and converging in software. We're seeing it too with process, really. Instead of kids and clipboards, as they used to call it, and many Six Sigma and Lean workshops, with whiteboards and sticky papers, to actually showing people within, really, days how a process is being executed within their organization. And then, suggesting here's where there's automation capabilities, go execute against them. >> So Ryan, this is why sometimes I scoff at the TAM analysis. I get you've got to do the TAM analysis, you've got to communicate to Wall Street. But basically what you do is you pull out IDC or Gartner data, which is very stovepipe, and you kind of say, "Okay we're in this market." It's the convergence of these markets. It's cloud, it's containers, it's IS, it's PaaS, it's Saas, it's blockchain, it's automation. They're all coming together to form this, it sound like a buzzword but this digital matrix, if you will. And it's how well you leverage that digital matrix, which defines your digital business. So, talk about the role that automation, generally, RPA specifically, process mining specifically, play in a digital business. >> Do you want to take that Mike or do you want me to take it? >> We can both do it? How about that? >> Yeah, perfect. >> So I'll start with it. I mean all this is about convergence at this point, right? There are a number of platform providers out there, including UiPath, that are kind of teaching us that. Often times led by the software vendors in terms of how we think of it but what we know is that there's no one solution. We went down the RPA path, lots of clients and got a lot of excitement and a lot of impact but if you really want to drive it broader, what clients are looking at now, is what is the ecosystem of tools that we need to have in place to make that happen? And from our perspective, it's got to start with really, process intelligence. >> What I would say too, if you look at digital transformation, it was usually driven from an application. Right? Really. And what I think customers found was that, "Hey," I'm going to name some folks here, "Put everything in SAP and we'll solve all your problems." Larry Ellison will tell you, "Put everything into Oracle and we'll solve all your problems." Salesforce, now, I'm a salesperson, I've never used an out of the box Salesforce dashboard in my life, to run my business because I want to run it the way I want to run it. Having said that though, they would say the same thing, "Put everything into our platform and we'll make sure that we can access it and you can use it everywhere and we'll solve all of your problems." I think what customers found is that that's not the case. So they said, "Okay, where are there other ways. Yes, I've got my application doing what it's doing, I've improved my process but hang on. There's things that are repeatable here that I can remove to actually focus on higher level orders." And that's where UiPath comes in. We've kind of had a bottom up swell but I would tell you that as we deliver ROI within days or weeks, versus potentially years and with a heavy, heavy investment up front. We're able to do it. We're able to then work with our partners like PWC, to then demonstrate with business process modeling, the ability to do it across all those, as I call, Silo's of excellence in an organization, to deliver true value, in a timeline, with integrated services from our partner, to execute and deliver on ROI. >> You mentioned some of the great software companies that have been created over the years. One you didn't mention but I want you to comment on it is Service Now. Because essentially McDermott's trying to create the platform of platforms. All about workflow and service management. They bought an RPA company, "Hey we got this too." But it's still a walled garden. It's still the same concept is put everything in here. My question is, how are you different? Yeah look, we're going to integrate with customers who want to integrate because we're an open platform and that's the right approach. We believe there will be some overlap and there'll be some choices to be made. Instead of that top down different approach, which may be a little bit heavy and a large investment up front, with varied results, as far as what that looks like, ours is really a bottoms up. I would tell you too, if you look at our community, which is a million and a half, I believe, strong now and growing, it's really about that practitioner and those people that have embraced it from the bottom up that really change how it gets implemented. And you don't have what I used to call the white blood cells, pushing back when you're trying to say, "Hey, let's take it from this finance and accounting to HR, to the supply chain, to the other sides of the organization," saying, "Hey look, be part of this," instead of, "No, you will do." >> Yeah, there's no, at least that I know of, there's no SAP or Salesforce freemium. You can't try it before you buy. And the entry price is way higher. I mean generally. I guess Salesforce not necessarily but I could taste automation for well under $100,000. I could get in for, I bet you most of your customers started at 25 of $50,000 departmental deployments. >> It's a bottoms up ground swell, that's exactly right. And it's really that approach. Which is much more like an Atlassian, I will tell you and it's really getting to the point where we obviously, and I'm saying this, I work at UiPath, we make really good software. And so, out of the box, it's getting easier and easier to use. It all integrates. Which makes it seamless. The reason people move to RPA first was because they got tired of bouncing between applications to do a task. Now we deliver this enterprise automation platform where you can go from process discovery to crowd sourcing and prioritizing your automations with your pipeline of automations, into Studio, into creating those automations, into testing them and back again, right? We give you the opportunity not to leave the platform and extract the most value out of our, what we call enterprise automation platform. Inclusive of process mining. Inclusive of testing and all those capabilities, document understanding, which is also mine, and it's fantastic. It's very differentiated from others that are out there. >> Well it's about having the right framework in place. >> That's it. From an automation perspective. I think that's a little bit different from what you would expect from the SAP's of the world. Mike, where are you seeing, in the large organizations that you work with, we think of what you describe as the automation pipeline, where are some of the key priorities that you're finding in large organizations? What's in that pipeline and in what order? >> It's interesting because every time we have a conversation whether it's internal or with our clients, we come up with another use case for this type of technology. Obviously, when we're having the initial conversations, what we're talking about is really automation. How do we stuff that pipe with automation. But you know, we have clients that are saying, "Hey listen, I'm trying to carve out of a parent company and what I need to do is document all of my processes in a meaningful way, that I can, at some point, take action on, so there's meaningful outcomes." Whether it be a shared services organization that's looking to outsource, all different types of use cases. So, prioritizing is, I think, it's about impact and the quickest way to impact seems to be automation. >> Is it fair to say, can I look at you UiPath as automation infrastructure? Is that okay or do you guys want to say, "Oh, we're an application." The reason I ask, so then you can answer, is if you look at the great infrastructure plays, they all had a role. The DBA, the CCIE from Cisco, the Cloud Architect, the VMware admin, you've been at all of them, Ryan. So, is there a role emerging here and if it's not plumbing or infrastructure, I know, okay that's cool but course correct me on the infrastructure comment and then, is there a role emerging? >> You know, I think the difference between UiPath and some of the infrastructure companies is, it used to take, Dave, years to give an ROI, really. You'd invest in infrastructure and it's like, if we build it they will come. In fact, we've seen this with Cloud, where we kind of started doing some of that on prem, right? We can do this but then you had Amazon, Azure and others kind of take it and say, "Look, we can do it better, faster and cheaper." It's that simple. So, I would say that we are an application and that we reference it as an enterprise automation platform. It's more than infrastructure. Now, are we going to, as I mentioned, integrate to an open platform, to other capabilities? Absolutely. I think, as you see with our investments and as we continue to build this out, starting in core RPA, buying ProcessGold and getting into our discovery suite of capabilities I covered, getting into, what I see next is, as you start launching many bots into your organization, you're touching multiple applications, so you got to test it. Any time you would launch an application you're going to test it before you go live, right? We see another convergence with testing and I know you had Garrett on and Matt, earlier, with testing, application testing, which has been a legacy, kind of dinosaur market, converging with RPA, where you can deliver automations to do it better, faster and cheaper. >> Thank you for that clarification but now Mike, is that role, I know roles are emerging in RPA and automation but is there, I mean, we're seeing centers of excellence pop up, is there an analogy there or sort of a similar- >> Yeah, I think the new role, if you will, it's not super new but it's really that sense of an automation solution architect. It's a whole different thing. We're talking about now more about recombinant innovation. >> Mike: Yeah. >> Than we are about build it from scratch. Because of the convergence of these low-code, no-code types of solutions. It's a different skill set. >> And we see it at PWC. You have somebody who is potentially a process expert but then also somebody who understands automations. It's the convergences of those two, as well, that's a different skill set. It really is. And it's actually bringing those together to get the most value. And we see this across multiple organizations. It starts with a COE. We've done great with our community, so we have that upswell going and then people are saying, "Hang on, I understand process but I also understand automations. let me put the two together," and that's where we get our true value. >> Bringing in the education and training. >> No question. >> That's a huge thing. >> The traditional components of it still need to exist but I think there are new roles that are emerging, for sure. >> It's a big cultural shift. >> Oh absolutely, yeah. >> How do you guys, how does PWC and UiPath, and maybe you each can answer this in the last minute or so, how do you help facilitate that cultural shift in a business that's growing at warp speed, in a market that is very tumultuous? How do you do that? >> Want to go first or I can go? >> I'll go ahead and go first. It's working with great partners like Mike because they see it and they're converging two different practices within their organization to actually bring this value to customers and also that executive relevance. But even on our side, when we're meeting with customers, just in general, we're actually talking about, how do we deal with, there's what? 13 and a half million job openings, I guess, right now and there's 8500 people that are unemployed, is the last number that I heard. We couldn't even fill all of those jobs if we wanted to. So it's like, okay, what is it that we could potentially automate so maybe we don't need all those jobs. And that's not a negative, it's just saying, we couldn't fill them anyway. So let's focus on where we can and where, there again, can extract the most value in working with our partners but create this new domain that's not networking or virtualization but it's actually, potentially, process and automation. It's testing and automation. It might even be security and automation. Which, I will tell you, is probably coming next, having come out of the security space. You know, I sit there and listen to all these threats and I see these people chasing, really, automated threats. It's like, guys a threat hunter that's really good goes through the same 15 steps that they would when they're chasing a false positive, as if a bot would do that for them. >> I mean, I've written about the productivity declines over the past several decades in western countries, it's not universal around the world and maybe we have a productivity boost because of Covid but it's like this perpetual workday now. That's not sustainable. So we're not going to be able to solve the worlds great problems. Whether it's climate change, diversity, massive deaths, on and on and on, unless we deal with that labor gap. >> That's right. >> And the only way to do that is automation. It's so clear to me that that's the answer. Part of the answer. >> It is part of the answer and I think, to your point Lisa, it's a cultural shift that's going to happen whether we want it to or not. When you think about people that are coming into the work force, it's an expectation now. So if you want to retain or you know, attract and retain the right people, you'd better be prepared for it as an organization. >> Yeah, remember the old, proficient in Word and Excel. Makes it almost trivial. It's trivial compared to that. I think if you don't have automation chops, going forward, it's going to be an issue. Hey, we have whatever, 5000 bots running at our company, how could you help? Huh? What's a bot? >> That's right. You're right. We see this too. I'll give you an example at Cisco. One of their financial analysts, junior starter, he says, "Part of our training program, is creating automations. Why? Because it's not just about finance anymore. It's about what can I automate in my role to actually focus on higher level orders and this for me, is just amazing." And you know, it's Rajiv Ramaswamy's son who's over there at Cisco now as a financial analyst. I was sitting on my couch on a Saturday, no kidding, right Dave? And I get a text from Rajiv, who's now CEO at Nutanix, and he says, "I can't believe I just created a bot." And I said, "I'm at the right place." Really. >> That's cool, I mean hey, you're right too. You want to work for Amazon, you got to know how to provision a EC2 instance or you don't get the job. >> Yeah. >> You got to train for that. And these are the types of skills that are expected- >> That's right. >> For the future. >> Awesome. Guys- >> I'm glad I'm older. >> Are you no longer proficient in Word is the question. >> Guys, thanks for joining us, talking about what you guys are doing together, how you're really facilitating this massive growth trajectory. It's great to be back in person and we look forward to hearing from some of your customers later today. >> Terrific. >> Great. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you guys. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, at UiPath FORWARD IV. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We've been covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting and really its rebirth. And I'm here with Chris Fox, who's the Group Vice President for Enterprise Cloud Architects and Chief Technologist for the North America Tech Cloud at Oracle. Chris, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> So I love this title. I mean years ago there was no such thing as a Cloud Architect, certainly there were Chief Technologists but so you are really-- Those are your peeps, is that right? >> That's right. That's right. That's really, my team and I, that's all we do. So our focus is really helping our customers take this journey from when they were on premise to really transforming with cloud. And when we think about cloud, really for us, it's a combination. It's our hybrid cloud which happens to be on premise and then of course the true public cloud like most people are familiar with. So, very exciting journey and frankly I've seen just a lot of success for our customers. >> interesting that you hear conversations like, "Oh every company is a software company" which by the way we believe. Everybody's got a some kind of SaaS offering, but it really used to be the application, heads within organizations that had a lot of the power, still do, but of course you have cloud native developers etc. And now you have this new role of Cloud Architects, they've got to align, essentially have to provide infrastructure and capabilities so that you can be agile from a development standpoint. I wonder if you can talk about that dynamic of how the roles have evolved in the last several years. >> Yeah, you know it's very interesting now because as Oracle we spend a lot of our time with those applications owners. As a leader in SaaS right now, SaaS ERP, HCM. You just start walking through the list, they're transforming their organizations. They're trying to make their lives, much more efficient, better for their employees or customers etc. On the other side of the spectrum, we have the cloud native development teams and they're looking at better ways to deploy, develop applications, roll out new features at scale, roll out new pipelines. But Dave, what I think we're seeing at Oracle though, because we're so connected with SaaS and then we're also connected with the traditional applications that have run the business for years, the legacy applications that have been servicing us for 20 years and then the cloud native developers. So what my team and I are constantly focused on now is things like digital transformation and really wiring up all three of these across. So if we think of like a customer outcome, like I want to have a package delivered to me from a retailer, that actual process flow could touch a brand new cloud native site from e-commerce. It could touch essentially, maybe a traditional application that used to be on prem that's now on the cloud and then it might even use some new SaaS application maybe for maybe a procurement process or delivery vehicle and scheduling. So what my team does, we actually connect all three. So, what I always mention to my team and all of our customers, we have to be able to service all three of those constituents and really think about process flows. So I take the cloud native developer, we help them become efficient. We take the person who's been running that traditional application and we help them become more efficient. And then we have the SaaS applications which are now rolling out new features on a quarterly basis and the whole new delivery model. But the real key is connecting all three of these into a business process flow that makes the customer's life much more efficient. >> So what you're saying is that these Cloud Architects and the sort of modern day Chief Technologists, they're multi tool players. It's not just about cloud, it's about connecting that cloud to, whether the system's on prem or other clouds. Is that right? >> It is. You know and one thing that we're seeing too Dave, is that we know it's multi cloud. So it could be Oracle's cloud, hopefully it's always Oracle's cloud, but we don't expect that. So as architects, we certainly have to take a look at what is it that we're trying to optimize? What's the outcome we're looking for? And then be able to work across these teams, and I think what makes it probably most fun and exciting, on one day in one morning, let's say, you could be talking to the cloud native developer team. Talking about Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, all the great technologies that help us roll out applications and features faster. Then you'll go to a traditional, maybe Oracle E-Business suite job. This is something that's been running on prem maybe for 20 years, and it's really still servicing the business. And then you have another team that maybe is rolling out a SaaS application from Oracle. And literally all three teams are connected by a process flow. So the question is, how do we optimize all three on behalf of either the customer, the employee, the supplier? And that's really the job for the Oracle Cloud Architect. Which I think, really good, that's different than the other cloud because for the most part, we actually do offer SaaS, we offer platform, we offer infrastructure and we offer the hybrid cloud on prem. So it's a common conversation. How do we optimize all these? >> So I want to get into this cloud conversation a little bit. You guys are used to this term last mover advantage. I got to ask you about it. How is being last an advantage? But let me start there. >> Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, so frankly speaking I think that-- So Oracle has been developing, what's interesting is our SaaS applications for many, many, many years, and where we began this journey is looking at SaaS. And then we started with platform. Right after that we started saying how do we augment SaaS? This OCI for us or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Gen 2 could be considered a last mover advantage. What does that mean? We join this cloud journey later than the others but because of our heritage, of the workloads we've been running, right? We've been running enterprise scale workloads for years, the cloud itself has been phenomenal, right? It's easier to use, pay for what you use, elastic etc. These are all phenomenal features, fell. And based on our enterprise heritage it wasn't delivering resilience at scale, even for like the traditional applications we've known on prem forever. People always say, "Chris we want to get out of the data center. "We're going zero data center." And I always say, "Well, how are you going to handle that back office stuff?" Right? The stuff that's really big, it's cranky, doesn't handle just, instances dying or things going away too easily. It needs predictable performance. It needs scale. It absolutely needs security and ultimately a lot of these applications truly have relied on an Oracle database. The Oracle database has it's own specific characteristics that it needs to run really well. So we actually looked at the cloud and we said, let's take the first generation clouds, which are doing great, but let's add the features that specifically, a lot of times, the Oracle workload needed in order to run very well and in a cost effective manner. So that's what we mean when we say, last mover advantage. We said, let's take the best of the clouds that are out there today. Let's look at the workloads that, frankly Oracle runs and has been running for years, what our customers needed and then let's build those features right into this next version of the cloud, we can service the enterprise. So our goal, honestly what's interesting is, even that first discussion we had about cloud native, and legacy applications, and also the new SaaS applications, we built a cloud that handles all three use cases, at scale resiliently in a very secure manner, and I don't know of any other cloud that's handling those three use cases, all in, we'll call it the same tendency for us at Oracle. >> Let's unpack that a little bit and get into, sort of, trying to understand the strategy and I want to frame it. So you were the last really to enter the cloud market, let's sort of agree on that. >> Chris: Yup. >> And you kind of built it from the ground up. And it's just too expensive now. The CapEx required to get into cloud is just astronomical. Now, even for a SaaS company, there's no sense. If you're a new SaaS company, you're going to run it in the cloud. Somebody else's cloud. There are some SaaS companies that of course run their own data centers but they're fewer and further between. But so, and I've also said that your advantage relative to the hyper scalers is that you've got this big SaaS estate and it somewhat insulates you, actually more than somewhat. Largely insulates you from the race to the bottom. On compute and storage, cost per bit kind of thing. But my question is, why was it was it important for Oracle, and is it important for Oracle and it's customers, that it had to participate in IaaS and PaaS and SaaS? Why not just the last two layers of that? What does that give you from a strategic advantage standpoint and what does that do for your customer? >> Yeah, great question. So the number one reason why we needed to have all three was that we have so many customers to today that are in a data center. They're running a lot of our workloads on premise and they absolutely are trying to find a better way to deliver a lower cost services to their customers. And, so, we couldn't just say let's just-- everyone needs to just become net new. Everyone just needs to ditch the old and go just to brand new alone. Too hard, too expensive at times. So we said, let's give us customers the ultimate amount of choice. So, let's even go back again to that developer conversation in SaaS. If you didn't have IaaS, we couldn't help customers achieve a zero data center strategy with their traditional application. We'll call it Peoplesoft, or JD Edwards or E-Business suite or even-- there's some massive applications that are running on the Oracle cloud right now that are custom applications built on the Oracle database. What they want is they said, "Give me the lowest ASP to get predictable performance IaaS" I'll run my app's tier on this. Number two, give me a platform service for database 'cause frankly, I don't really want to run your database, like, with all the manual effort, I want someone to automate, patching, scale up and down, and all these types of features like the pilot should have given us. And then number three, I do want SaaS over time. So we spend a lot of time with our customers, really saying, "how do I take this traditional application, run it on IaaS and PaaS?" And then number two, "let's modernize it at scale." Maybe I want to start peeling off functionality and running them as cloud native services right alongside, right? That's something again, that we're doing at scale, and other people are having a hard time running these traditional workloads on prem in the cloud. The second part is they say, "You know, I've got this legacy traditional ERP. Been servicing we well or maybe a supply chain system. Ultimately I want to get out of this. How do I get to SaaS?" And we say, "Okay, here's the way to do this. First, bring into the cloud, run it on IaaS and PaaS. And then selectively, I call it cloud slicing. Take a piece of functionality and put it into SaaS." For ERP, it might be something like start with GL, a new chart of accounts in ERP SaaS. And then slowly over a number of your journey as needed, adopt the next module. So this way, I mean, I'll just say this is the fun part of as an architect, our jobs, we're helping customers move to the cloud at scale, we're helping them do it at their rate, with whatever level of change they want. And when they're ready for SaaS, we're ready for them. And I would just say the other IaaS providers, here's the challenge we're seeing Dave, is that they're getting to the cloud, they're doing a little bit of modernization, but they want PaaS, they also want to ultimately get to SaaS, and frankly, those other clouds don't offer them. So they're kind of in this we're stuck on this lift and shift. But then we want to really move and modernize and go to SaaS. And I would say that's what Oracle is doing right now for enterprises. We're really helping them move these traditional workloads to the cloud IaaS and PaaS. And then number two, they're moving to SaaS when they're ready. And even when you get to SaaS, everyone says, "You know what, leave it as as vanilla as possible, but I want to make myself differentiated." In that case, again, IaaS and PaaS, coupled alongside a SaaS environment, you can build your specific differentiation. And then you leave the ERP pristine, so it can be upgraded constantly with no impact to your specific sidebar applications. So, I would say that the best clouds in the world, I mean, I think you're going to see a lot of the others are trying to, either SaaS providers trying to grow a PaaS, or maybe some of the IaaS players are trying to add SaaS. So, I think you're going to see this blending more and more because customers are asking for the flexibility For either or all three. But I will say that-- >> How can I get PaaS and SaaS-minus. >> Absolutely, I mean, what are you doing there? You're offering choice. There's not a question in my mind that Cisco is a huge customer of ours, they have a product that is one of their SaaS applications running Tetration on the Oracle Cloud. It actually doesn't run any Oracle. It's all cloud native applications. Natively built with a number of open source components. They run just IaaS. That's it, the Tetration product, and it runs fast. The Gen 2 cloud has a great architecture underneath it, flattened fast network. By far, for us, we feel like we really gotten into the guts of IaaS and made it run more efficiently. Other customers say, "I've got a huge Oracle footprint in the data center, help me get it out." So up to the cloud that they go, and they say I don't want just IaaS because that means I'm writing all the automation, like I have to manage all the patching. And this is where for us platform services really help because we give them the automation at scale, which allows their people to do other things, that may be more impactful for the business. >> I want to ask you about, the automation piece. And you guys have made the statement that your Gen 2 cloud is fundamentally different than how other clouds work, Gen 1 clouds. And the Gen 1 clouds which are evolving, the hyper scalars are evolving, but how is Oracle's Gen 2 cloud fundamentally different? >> Yeah. I think that one of the most basic elements of the cloud itself was that for us, we had to start with the security and the network. So if you imagine that those two components really, A, could dictate speed and performance, plus doing it in a secure fashion. The two things that you'll see an awful lot about for us, is that we've embedded not only security at every level. But we've even separated off what we call, every cloud, you have a number of compute instances and then you have storage, right? In the middle, you have a network. However, to become a cloud, and to offer the elastic scale and the multiple sharing of resources, you have to have something called a control plane. What we've done is we've actually extracted the control plane out into its own separate instance of a running machine. Other clouds actually have the control plane inside of there running compute cores. Now, what does that do? Well, the fact of the matter is, we assume that the control plane and the network should be completely separate from what you run on your cloud. So if you run a virtual machine, or if you run a bare metal instance, there's no Oracle software running on it. We actually don't trust customers, and we actually tell the customers don't trust us, either. So by separating out the control plane, and all the code that runs that environment off of the running machine, you get more cores meaning like you have-- There's no Oracle tax for running this environment. It's a separate conmputer for each one, the control plane. Number two, it's more secure. We actually don't have any running code on that machine, if you had a bare metal instance. So therefore, there's no way for one machine in the cloud to infect another machine if the control plane was compromised. The second part of the network, the guys who have been building this cloud, Don Johnson, a lot of the guys came from other clouds before and they said, "yYou know the one thing we have to do is make a we call it Flattened Fast Clause Network that really is never oversubscribed." So you'll constantly see and people always ask me same question, "Dave, why is the performance faster if its the same VM shape? "Like I don't understand why it's going faster, like high performance computing." And the reason again a lot of times is the network itself is that it's just not oversubscribed. It's constantly flowing all the data, there's no such thing as congestion on the network, which can happen. The last part, we actually added 52 terabytes of local storage to every one of those compute nodes. So therefore, there's a possibility you don't even have to traverse the network to do some really serious work on the local machine. So you add these together, the idea is make the network incredibly fast, separate out the control plane and run the software and security layer separate from the entire node where all the customers work is being done. Number three, give the customers more compute, by obviously having us offload it to a separate machine. And the last thing is put local storage and everything is what's called NVMe storage. Whether it's local or remote, everything's NVMe, though the IOPS we get are really off the charts. And again, it shows up in our benchmarks. >> Yeah, so you're getting, atomic access to memory. But in your control plane, you describe that control plane that's running. Sorry to geek out everybody. But I'm kind of curious, you know. You got me started, Chris. So that's control-- >> Yeah, that's good. >> the Oracle cloud or runs. Where's it live? >> It's essentially separated from the compute node. We actually have it in between, there's a compute node that all the work is done from the customer, could be on like a Kubernetes container or VM, whatever it might be. The control plane literally is separate. And it lives right next to the actual compute node the customer is using. So it's actually embedded on a SmartNIC, it's a completely different cores. It's a different chipset, different memory structure, everything. And it does two things. It helps us control what happens up in the customers compute nodes in VMs. And it also helps us virtualize the network down as well. So it literally, the control plane is separate and distinct. It's essentially a couple SmartNICS. >> And then how does Autonomous fit into this whole architecture? I'm speaking by the way for that description, I mean, it's nuanced, but it's important. I'm sure you having this conversation with a lot of cloud architects and chief technologists, they want to know this stuff, and they want to know how it works. And then, obviously, we'll talk about what the business impact is. But talk about Autonomous and where that fit. >> Yeah, so as Larry says that there are two products that really dictate the future of Oracle and our success with our customers. Number one is ERP-SaaS. The second one is Autonomous Database. So the Autonomous Database, what we've done is really taken a look at all the runtime operations of an Oracle database. So tuning, patching, securing all these different features, and what we've done is taken the best of the Oracle database, the best of something called Exadata which we run on the cloud, which really helps a lot of our customers. And then we've wrapped it with a set of automation and security tools to help it really manage itself, tune itself, patch itself, scale up and down, independent between compute and storage. So, why that's important though, is that really our goal is to help people run the Oracle database as they have for years but with far less effort, and then even not only far less effort, hopefully, a machine plus man, out of the equation we always talk about is man plus machine is greater than man alone. So being assisted by artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform those database operations, we should provide a better service to our customers with far less costs. >> Yeah, the greatest chess player in the world is a combination of man and machine, you know that? >> You know what? It makes sense. It makes sense because, there's a number of things that we can do as humans that are just too difficult to program. And then there are other things where machines are just phenomenal, right? I mean, there's no-- Think of Google Maps, you ask it wherever you want to go. And it'll tell you in a fraction of a second, not only the best route, but based on traffic from maybe the last couple of years. right now, we don't have autonomous cars, right, that are allowed to at least drive fully autonomous yet, it's coming. But in the meantime, a human could really work through a lot of different scenarios it was hard to find a way to do that in autonomous driving. So I do believe that it's going to be a great combination. Our hope and goal is that the people who have been running Oracle databases, how can we help them do it with far less effort and maybe spend more time on what the data can do for the organization, right? Improve customer experience, etc. Versus maybe like, how do I spin up a table? One of our customers is a huge consumer. They said, "our goal is how do we reduce the time to first table?" Meaning someone in the business just came up with an idea? How do I reduce the time to first table. For some of our customers, it can take months. I mean, if you were going to put in a new server, find a place in the data center, stand up a database, make the security controls, right and etc. With the autonomous database, I could spin one up right here, for us and, and we could start using it and it would be secure, which is utmost and paramount. It would scale up and down, meaning like just based on workload, as I load data into it, it would tune itself, it would help us with the idea of running more efficiently, which means less cores, which means also less cost. And then the constant security patches that may come up because of different threats or new features. It would do that potentially on its own if you allow it. Obviously some people want to watch you know what exactly it's going to do first. Do regression testing. But it's an exciting product because I've been working with the Oracle database for about 20 years now. And to see it run in this manner, it's just phenomenal. And I think that's the thing, a lot of the database teams have seen. Pretty amazing work. >> So I love this conversation. It's hardcore computer science, architecture, engineering. But now let's end with by up leveling this. We've been talking, a lot about Oracle Consulting. So let's talk about the business impact. So you go into customers, you talk to the cloud architects, the chief technologist, you pass that test. Now you got to deliver the business impact. Where does Oracle consulting fit with regard to that, and maybe you could talk about sort of where you guys want to take this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so, the cloud is great set of technologies, but where Oracle consulting is really helping us deliver is in the outcome. One of the things I think that's been fantastic working with the Oracle consulting team is that cloud is new. For a lot of customers who've been running these environments for a number of years, there's always some fear and a little bit of trepidation saying, "How do I learn this new cloud?" I mean, the workloads, we're talking about deeper, like tier zero, tier one, tier two, and all the way up to Dev and Test and DR, Oracle Consulting does really, a couple of things in particular, number one, they start with the end in mind. And number two, that they start to do is they really help implement these systems. And, there's a lot of different assurances that we have that we're going to get it done on time, and better be under budget, 'cause ultimately, again, that's something that's really paramount for us. And then the third part of it a lot of it a lot of times is run books, right? We actually don't want to just live at our customers environments. We want to help them understand how to run this new system. So training and change management. A lot of times Oracle Consulting is helping with run books. We usually will, after doing it the first time, we'll sit back and let the customer do it the next few times, and essentially help them through the process. And our goal at that point is to leave, only if the customer wants us to but ultimately, our goal is to implement it, get it to go live on time, and then help the customer learn this journey to the cloud. And without them, frankly, I think these systems are sometimes too complex and difficult to do on your own, maybe the first time especially because like I say, they're closing the books, they might be running your entire supply chain. They run your entire HR system or whatever they might be. Too important to leave to chance. So they really help us with helping the customer become live and become very competent and skilled, because they can do it themselves. >> But Chris, we've covered the gamut. We're talking about, architecture, went to NVMe. We're talking about the business impact, all of your automation, run books, loved it. Loved the conversation, but to leave it right there but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights, great stuff. >> Absolutely, thanks Dave, and thank you for having me on. >> All right, you're welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We are covering the Oracle North America Consulting transformation and its rebirth in this digital event. Keep it right there. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Jim Phillips, Cloud Architect, Mutual of Omaha. Roy Bacharach, Senior Principle Technology, Accenture. And Brian Bohan, Global Business Lead, AWS. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're talking about the transformation of the Contact Center but before we get started there, let's tell our viewers a little bit about Mutual of Omaha, your business, your target demographic and what you do. >> So Mutual of Omaha's a 109 year old insurance company. We have, our biggest market segments are in the senior health space and then, in the life space. So we service customers with a wide variety of needs, everything from Medicare supplement policies so we have like seasonal surges in business and things like that to people who are concerned about like, how do they, how do they prepare for their family for their life insurance needs and things like that. So, we've been around for quite a while. Predominantly, we'd been servicing our customer base through agents and as that shift occurs, right, we've been looking at how do we provide a much more finely focused view of the customer and emphasizing that within our contact centers with the recent creation of our service practice. >> So it was really just this idea of let's think about how to touch the customer in a different way. That that was really the business imperative toward this move. >> Right, so previously, we had, this all started in 2016 when we decided to take a focus on the customers, specifically from the service practice. So instead of service kind of being like an overhead associated with a product line, what we decided to do is we decided to really have something where the focus was on the end to end customer experience and how do we make that consistent across your interaction with Mutual of Omaha. That then lead us to reevaluate how we were doing our contacts centers and that's when we became involved with Roy and Accenture to look at what are our options to really kind of improve that experience for the customer. >> So when a customer like Mutual of Omaha comes to you Roy, with this business problem, what, how do you walk them through it and have them think about it? >> Okay, so we typically start at the top, you know, and understanding not only the business strategy but their current state of their technology architecture. And then, you try to work through the specific gaps, you know, gap analysis. What are they missing to get them there? With Mutual of Omaha, it was really they were being held back by their legacy on premise solution. You know, high levels of technical dept, huge complexity to support maintain and to make the changes. You know, so it was in that analysis we -- It was easy to see that the cloud was probably the best option for them. >> And did Amazon Connect immediately stand out? >> So even initially, when we were looking at options for this, Amazon Connect wasn't actually even on our list, so that was something that was brought to our attention during the sort of short-listing of candidates process. And then, you know, when we really looked at it, it just kind of blew our minds. So, you know, Roy had mentioned about taking a look at the gap analysis. So, as sort of as embarrassing or sad as this may seem, right, the decision to do something is a lot easier when there are a lot of gaps. We had a lot of gaps between what we could deliver with our current technology solution and then, what really the business strategy outcomes were wanting us to do. So, it did make a decision to look at completely sort of reinventing how we do the contact centers a lot easier position to consider. >> Bryan, in terms of the nuts and bolts of making Amazon Connect, can you give our viewers a little sense about really what is the infrastructure we're talking about here? >> So the interesting thing with Amazon Connect is it's really the call center platform capability that Amazon.com has been using for a number of years and that we decided to commercialize and externalize to customers like Mutual of Omaha. And so, like a lot things with AWS, what's nice about it is that it's you can start small. You can layer it in and it can integrate into some of the existing technologies and investments that you've made. It's not a rip and replace and then you can scale it as you see success and you can scale it up and down. So it's very economical as well. And so, it's an area we're really excited to see Mutual of Omaha really on the cutting edge there but we're seeing, with Accenture, a lot of momentum with this platform in insurance, financial services, even as CPG companies become more focused on delivering services, it's changing how they have to interact with customers so it's a great platform for that, a great starting place. >> So Amazon, a famously customer centric company. So what are the kinds of. You think, oh customers will love this but in fact, we were talking before the cameras were rolling, there was a little bit of resistance. >> So you have to think about like, how do you introduce this type of sort of radical change from what was traditionally just an exclusively a hands on service process that was, you know, agents and contact centers with an audience demographic that is not what you would think of as being like cutting edge in terms of technology adoption. But what we found through things like paying a lot of attention to our call flow development with Accenture. Paying lot of attention actually to our voice tuning and getting the voice of the customer to understand like what that voice tuning and how well that worked. We were able to actually get a more positive reception for the Connect solution that we even over like professionally recorded voice talent on it. So, you do have to address like all of the, all of the like customer touch points within the contact center and think about how do you manage the change within your audience demographic and how do you manage that adoption. But, you know, it's your customers, it's your agents. How do you make them comfortable with the solution? Right, because the, you know, customer can detect it, an agents uncomfortable with the solution that they're using. Right, how do you make this kind of like really seamless? So we took a, put a lot of emphasis on customer experience development as part of this. We didn't, we did not take any of our existing call flows and just put them in Connect. So all of our call flows were re-architected. >> What are some of the best practices that have emerged because he has just pointed out so many of the kind of challenges of implementing this new kind of approach and system with both clients and also the workforce itself. I mean, what would you say, what is sort of your advice in best practices that have emerged in terms of Mutual of Omaha's experience? >> You know, I think it's really start with the desired customer experience that you want. You know, so start with that customer experience and then with Amazon Connect, you know, likes Amazon Web Services, you can deliver that experience. So start there, throw out the legacy call flows, the legacy IVR scripts and start from scratch with the customer experience at the top of mind. And then you can get there. >> Yeah, I would second that. The, 'cause managing change internally organization, like if your focus is exclusively on what the customer experience is, that shortcuts a lot of arguments within the organization about what's the right thing to do because you know, everybody tends to kind of sub optimize for whatever their stakeholder perspective is. >> If your clearly focused on what the customer is looking for, that actually clarifies a lot what your internal conversations are. >> How do you three work together in terms of this tri-partnership? Accenture, AWS and Mutual of Omaha. How do you collaborate? >> Yeah, so I guess first from the partnership perspective, like I talked about, Connect and modernizing customer care, is a really big focus area for us as a partnership and a big investment area. So, we worked with Accenture and gotten their teams very much skilled up on the new platform and they have done a great job of integrating it into their existing practice. So now, when we come to a customer like Mutual of Omaha, we, you know, Accenture's got a very strong point of view, they've got technology skills behind it and they know how the solution can solve customer problems. So that's my job is to make sure that foundation is there and then, the team takes it from there really with the client. >> Yeah, I would say our experience with Amazon around this, is they're really very interested in the experience that we're having and how we can provide feedback around our particular use cases and understanding like what are the types of, what are the types of things that would make our stuff more successful. So because we work with a combination of health and life insurance products, things like HIPAA eligibility for services are a big deal for us and when you look at how the ecosystem is all tied together with Connect, that has really kind of, we've got a lot of attention and help from Amazon with regards to dealing with like HIPAA incompliance issues associated with how we put the solutions together and it's been really helpful for us. >> I want to talk about the role of empathy in this kind of technology, because as we know, we are dealing with really difficult times in peoples' lives. That they are in need of these kinds of products and services. So how do you make sure that the technology is taking that into account? >> Yeah, that's an excellent point. So we tend to think of financial services products as kind of sort of emotionally neutral or cold even, right? But when you're dealing with insurance, and a lot of times you're dealing with people who are calling and they're in a very emotional sort of situation. The, one of the things that is really good for that, that we hope to leverage much more in the future is being able to get the transcripts of the conversations out, so we can understand as part using that data that's coming from the interactions with the Lex bots and understanding that data as the customer works through the call flows to be able to look at how do we continue to improve these around how that customers responding to it, so that we can get to better customer experiences. Like, in often times, it's a very highly emotional situation. If you're dealing with like a life claims contact center, you're dealing with someone who's just recently experienced a loss of a loved one and as a result, peoples' patience is really low, they're really stressed, they're facing -- You know, our demographic is selling final expense policies and that means that people are facing a lot of financial uncertainty in addition to emotional distress. >> Right. >> Being able to take that information and use that to continually tune things for delightful customer outcomes is really important to us. >> So, what's next for Mutual of Omaha? >> So really, what's next for us is we're in the process of major migration of our contact center agents onto it. Once that is completed, that allows us to kind of get rid of some existing technology debt with our on premise telephony solution. And then we really start to get into kind of the good stuff. Right, so that's like integration with our customer portal, taking more advantage of what we want to do from a machine learning and AI perspective with regards to what we can get from the call data and the customer, the customer interaction. And really starting to kind of like make a huge jump in terms of what that customer experience can be. >> Great, I look forward to hearing more about it at next years Executive Summit. (laughing) >> Yeah, it would be great to be back. >> Great. >> Jim, Roy, Brian. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more from the AWS Executive Summit and theCUBE's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)