>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of the Datacloud summit, this is Dave Vellante, and we're seeing the emergence of a next generation workload in the cloud, more facile access, and governed sharing of data is accelerating time to insights and action. Alright, allow me to introduce our next guest. Aimee Irwin is here, she's the vice president of strategy for Experian, and Matt Glickman is VP of customer product strategy at Snowflake, with an emphasis on financial services, folks, welcome to theCUBE, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Hey so Aimee, obviously 2020's been pretty unique and crazy and challenging time for a lot of people, I don't know why, I've been checking my credit score a lot more for some reason on the app, I love the app, I had to lock it the other day, I locked my credit, somebody tried to do, and it worked, I was so happy, so thank you for that. So, we know Experian, but there's a ton of data behind what you do, I wonder if you could share kind of where you sit in the data space, and how you've seen organizations leverage data up to this point, and really if you could address some of the changes you're seeing as a result of the pandemic, that would be great. >> Sure, sure. Well, as you mentioned, Experian is best known as a credit bureau. I work in our marketing services business unit, and what we do is we really help brands leverage the power of data and technology to make the right marketing decisions, and better understand and connect with consumers. So we offer marketers products around data, identity, activation, measurement, we have a consumer-view data file that's based on offline PII and contains demographic interest, transaction data, and other attributes on about 300 million people in the US. And on the identity side we've always been known for our safe haven, or privacy-friendly matching, that allows marketers to connect their first party data to Experian or other third parties, but in today's world, with the growth in importance of digital advertising, and consumer behavior shifting to digital, Experian also is working to connect that offline data to the digital world, for a complete view of the customer. You mentioned COVID, we actually, we serve many different verticals, and what we're seeing from our clients during COVID is that there's a varying impact of the pandemic. The common theme is that those who have successfully pivoted their businesses to digital are doing much better, as we all know, COVID accelerated very strong trends to digital, both in e-commerce and in media-viewing habits. We work with a lot of retailers, retail is a tale of two cities, with big box and grocery growing, and apparel retail really struggling. We've helped our clients, leveraging our data to better understand the shifts in these consumer behaviors, and better psych-map their customers during this really challenging time. So think about, there's a group of customers that is still staying home, that is sheltered in place, there's a group of customers starting to significantly vary their consumer behavior, but is starting to venture out a little, and then there's a group of customers that's doing largely what they did before, in a somewhat modified fashion, so we're helping our clients segment those customers into groups to try and understand the right messaging and right offers for each of those groups, and we're also helping them with at-risk audiences. So that's more on the financial side, which of your customers are really struggling due to the pandemic, and how do you respond. >> That's awesome, thank you. You know, it's funny, I saw a twitter poll today asking if we measure our screen time, and I said, "oh my, no." So, Matt, let me ask you, you spent a ton of time in financial services, you really kind of cut your teeth there, and it's always been very data-oriented, you're seeing a lot of changes, tell us about how your customers are bringing it together, data, the skills, the people, obviously a big part of the equation, and applications to really put data at the center of the universe, what's new and different that these companies are getting out of the investments in data and skills? >> That's a great question, the acceleration that Aimee mentioned is real. We're seeing, particularly this year, but I think even in the past few years, the reluctance of customers to embrace the cloud is behind us, and now there's this massive acceleration to be able to go faster, and in some ways, the new entrants into this category have an advantage versus the companies that have been in this space, whether it's financial services or beyond, and in a lot of ways, they all are seeing the cloud and services like Snowflake as a way to not only catch up, but leapfrog your competitors, and really deliver a differentiated experience to your customers, to your business, internally or externally. And this past, however long this crisis has been going on, has really only accelerated that, because now there's a new demand to understand your customer better, your business better, with your traditional data sources, and also new, alternative data sources, and also being able to take a pulse. One of the things that we learned, which was an eye-opening experience, was as the crisis unfolded, one of our data partners decided to take the datasets about where the cases were happening from the Johns Hopkins, and World Health Organization, and put that on our platform, and it became a runaway hit. Thousands of our customers overnight were using this data to understand how their business was doing, versus how the crisis was unfolding in real time. And this has been a game-changer, and it's only scratching the surface of what now the world will be able to do when data is really at their fingertips, and you're not hindered by your legacy platforms. >> I wrote about that back in the early days of the pandemic when you guys did that, and talked about some of the changes that you guys enabled, and you know, you're right about cloud, in financial services cloud used to be an evil word, and now it's almost, it's become a mandate. Aimee, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about what your customers are having to work through in order to achieve some of these outcomes. I mean, you know, I'm interested in the starting point, I've been talking a lot, and writing a lot, and talking to practitioners about what I call the data life cycle, sometimes people call it the data pipeline, it's a complicated matter, but those customers and companies that can put data at the center and really treat that pipeline as the heart of their organization, if you will, are really succeeding. What are you seeing, and what really is the starting point, there? >> Yes, yeah, that's a good question, and as you mentioned, first party, I mean we start with first party data, right? First party data is critical to understanding consumers. And different verticals, different companies, different brands have varying levels of first party data. So a retailers going to have a lot more first party data, a financial services company, than say, an auto manufacturer. And while many marketers have that first party data, to really have a 360 view of the customer, they need third party data as well, and that's where Experian comes in, we help brands connect those disparate datasets, both first and third party data to better understand consumers, and create a single customer view, which has a number of applications. I think the last stat I heard was that there's about eight devices, on average, per person. I always joke that we're going to have these enormous, and that number's growing, we're going to have these enormous charging stations in our house, and I think we already do, because of all the different devices. And we seamlessly move from device to device, along our customer journey, and, if the brand doesn't understand who we are, it's much harder for the brand to connect with consumers and create a positive customer experience. And we cite that about 95 percent of companies, they are looking to achieve that single customer view, they recognize that they need that, and they've aligned various teams from e-commerce, to marketing, to sales, to at a minimum adjust their first party data, and then connect that data to better understand consumers. So, consumers can interact with a brand through a website, a mobile app, in-store visits, you know, by the phone, TV ads, et cetera, and a brand needs to use all of those touchpoints, often collected by different parts of the organization, and then add in that third party data to really understand the consumers. In terms of specific use cases, there's about three that come to mind. So first there's relevant advertising, and reaching the right customer, there's measurement, so being able to evaluate your advertising efforts, if you see an ad on, if I see an ad on my mobile, and then I buy by visiting a desktop website, understanding, or I get a direct mail piece, understanding that those interactions are all connected to the same person is critical for measurement. And then there's personalization, which includes improved customer experience amongst your own touchpoints with that consumer, personalized marketing communication, and then of course analytics, so those are the use cases we're seeing. >> Great, thank you Aimee. Now Matt, you can't really talk about data without talking about governance and compliance, and I remember back in 2006, when the federal rules of civil procedure went in, it was easy, the lawyers just said, "no, nobody can have access," but that's changed, and one of the things I like about what Snowflake's doing with the data cloud is it's really about democratizing access, but doing so in a way that gives people confidence that they only have access to the right data. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you're thinking about this topic, what you're doing to help customers navigate, which has traditionally been such a really challenging problem. >> Another great question, this is where I think the major disruption is happening. And what Aimee described, being able to join together first and third party datasets, being able to do this was always a challenge, because data had to be moved around, I had to ship my first party data to the other side, and the third party data had to be shipped to me, and being able to join those datasets together was problematic at best, and now with the focus on privacy and protecting PII, this is something that has to change, and the good news is, with the data cloud, data does not have to move. Data can stay where it belongs, Experian can keep its data, Experian's customers can hold onto their data, yet the data can be joined together on this universal, global platform that we call the data cloud. On top of that, and particularly with the regulations that are coming out that are going to prevent data from being collected on either a mobile device or as cookies on web browsers, new approaches, and we're seeing this a lot in our space, both in financials and media, is to set up these data clean rooms, where both sides can give access to one another, but not have to reveal any PII to do that join. This is going to be huge, now you actually can protect your customers' and your consumers' private identities, but still accomplish that join that Aimee mentioned, to be able to relate the cause and effect of these campaigns, and really understand the signals that these datasets are trying to say about one another, again without having to move data, without having to reveal PII, we're seeing this happening now, this is the next big thing, that we're going to see explode over the months and years to come. >> I totally agree, massive changes coming in public policy in this area, and we only have a few minutes left, and I wonder if for our audience members that are looking for some advice, what's the, Aimee, what's the one thing you'd recommend they start doing differently, or consider putting in place that's going to set them up for success over the next decade? >> Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think, I always say, first, harness all of your first party data across all touchpoints, get that first party data in one place and working together, second, connect that data with trusted third parties, and Matt suggested some ways to do that, and then third, always put the customer first, speak their language, where and when they want to be reached out to, and use the information you have to really create a better customer experience for your customers. >> Matt, what would you add to that? Bring us home, if you would. >> Applications. The idea that data, your data can now be pulled into your own business applications the same way that Netflix and Spotify are pulled into your consumer and lifestyle applications, again, without data moving, these personalized application experiences is what I encourage everyone to be thinking about from first principles. What would you do in your next app that you're going to build, if you had all your consumers, if the consumers had access to their data in the app, and not having to think about things from scratch, leverage the data cloud, leverage these service providers like Experian, and build the applications of tomorrow. >> I'm super excited when I talk to practitioners like yourselves, about the future of data, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a really a pleasure having you, and I hope we can continue this conversation in the future. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Alright, thank you for watching, keep it right there, we got great content, and tons of content coming at the Snowflake data cloud summit, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, keep it right there.

>> Good morning, everyone. My name is Sudip Datta. I head up product management for Infrastructure Management and Analytics at CA Technologies. Today I am going to talk about the key pillars for modern analytics and monitoring for hybrid cloud. So before we get started, let's set the context. Let's take a stock of where we are today. Today in terms of digital business, software is driving business. Software is the backbone, is the driving force for most of the business services. Whether you are a financial institution or a hospitality service or a health care service or even a restaurant service pizza, you are front-ended by software. And therefore the user experience is of paramount importance. Just to give you some factoids. Eighty-three percent of U.S. consumers say that the brand that, the frontal software portal is more important than the product itself. And the companies are reciprocating by putting a lot of emphasis on user experience, as you see in the second factoid. The third factoid, it's even more interesting that 53% of the users of a mobile app actually abandon the app if the app doesn't load within a specified time. So we all understand now the importance of user experience in today's business. So what's happening to the infrastructure underneath that's hosting these applications? The infrastructure itself is evolving, right? How? First of all, as we all know there is a huge movement, a huge shift towards cloud. Customers are adopting cloud for reasons of economy, agility and efficiency. And whether you are running on cloud or on prem, the architecture itself is getting more and more dynamic. On the server side we hear about server-less computing. More and more enterprises are adopting containers, could be Dockers or other containers. And on the networking side we see an adoption of software-defined networking. The logical overlay on top of the physical underlay is abstracting the network. While we see a huge shift, a movement towards cloud, it is also true that customers are also retaining some of their assets on prem, and that's why we talk about hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is a reality, and it's going to be a reality for the foreseeable future. Take for example a bank that has its systems of engagement on public cloud, and systems of records on prem deeply nested within their DNC. So the transaction, the end-to-end transaction has to traverse multiple clouds. Similarly we talk to customers who run their production tier one application on prem, while tier two and tier three desktop applications run on public cloud. So that's the reality. Multi-cloud dynamic environment is a reality of today. While that's a reality, they pose a serious challenge for IT operations. What are the challenges? Because of multiple clouds, because of assets spanning multiple data centers, multiple clouds, there are blind spots getting created. IT ops is often blindsided on things that are happening on the other side of the firewall. And as a result what's happening is they're late to react, and often they react to problems much later than their customers find it, and that's an embarrassment. The other thing that's happening is because of the dynamic nature of the cloud, things are ephemeral, things are dynamic, things come and go, assets come and go, IT ops is often in the business of keeping pace with these changes. They are reacting to these changes. They are trying to keep pace with these changes, and silo'd tools are not the way to go. They are trying to keep up with these changes, but they are failing in doing so. And as a result we see poor user experience, low productivity, capacity problems and delayed time to market. Now what's the solution? What is the solution to all these problems? So what we are recommending is a four-pronged solution, what we represent as four pillars. The first pillar is about dynamic policy-based configuration and discovery. The second one is unification of the monitoring and analytics. The third one is contextual intelligence, and the fourth one is integration and collaboration. Let's go through them one by one. First of all, in terms of dynamic policy-based configuration, why is it important? I was talking to a VP of IT last week, and he commented that the time to deploy the monitoring for an application is longer than the time to deploy the application itself, and that's a shame. That's a real shame because in today's world application needs to be monitored straight out of the box. This is compounded by the fact that once you deploy the application, the application today is dynamic, as I said, the cloud assets are dynamic. The topology changes, and monitoring tools need to keep pace with that changing topology. So we need automated discovery. We need API driven discovery, and we need policy-based monitoring for large scale standardization. And last but not the least, the policies need to be based on dynamic baselines. The age, the era of static thresholds is long over because static thresholds lead to false alerts, resulting in higher opics for IT, and IT personnel absolutely, absolutely want to move away from it. Unified monitoring and analytics. This morning I stumbled upon a Lincoln white paper which said 20 tools you need for your hybrid monitoring, and I was absolutely dumbfounded. Twenty tools? I mean, that's a conversation non-starter. So how do we rationalize the tools, minimize the silos, and bring them under single pane of glass, or at least minimal panes for glass for monitoring? So IT admins can have a coherent view of servers, storage, network and applications through a single pane of glass? And why is that important? It's important because it results in lesser blame game. Because of silo'd tools what happens is admins are often fighting with each other, blaming each other. Server admins think that it's a storage problem. The storage admin thinks it's a database problem, and they are pointing to each other, right? So the tools, the management tools should be a point of collaboration, not a point of contention. Talking about blame game, one area that often gets ignored is the area of fault management and monitoring. Why is it important? And I will give a specific example. Let's say you have 100 VMs, and all those VMs become unreachable as a result of router being down. The root cause of the problem therefore are not the VMs, but the router. So instead of generating 101 alarms, the management tool needs to be smart enough to generate one single alarm. And that's why fault management and root cause analysis is of paramount importance. It suppresses unnecessary noise and results in lesser blaming. Contextual intelligence. Now when we talk about the cloud administrator, the cloud admin, the cloud admin in the past were living in the cocoon of their hybrid infrastructure. They were managing the hybrid infrastructure, but in today's world to have an end-to-end visibility of the digital chain, they need to integrate with application performance management tools, APM, as well as what lies underneath, which is the network, so that they have an end-to-end visibility of what's happening in the whole digital chain. But that's not all. They also need what we call is the context of the application. I will give you a specific example. For example, if the server runs out of memory when a lot of end users log into the system, or run out of capacity when a particular marketing promotion is running, then the context really is the business that leads to a saturation in IT. So what you need is to capture all the data, whether they come from logs, whether they come from alarms, capacity events as well as business events, into a single analytics platform and perform analytics on top of it. And then augment it with machine learning and pattern recognition capabilities so that it will not only perform root cause analysis for what happened in the past, but you're also able to anticipate, predict and prevent future problems. The fourth pillar is collaboration and integration. IT ops in today's world doesn't and shouldn't run in a silo. IT ops need to interact with dev ops. Within dev ops developers need to interact with QA. Storage admins need to collaborate with server admins, database admins and various other admins. So the tools need to encourage and provide a platform for collaboration. Similarly IT tools, IT management tools should not run standalone. They need to integrate with other tools. For example, if you want monitoring straight out of the box, the monitoring needs to integrate with provisioning processes. The monitoring downstream needs to integrate with ticketing systems. So integration with other tools, whether third party or custom developed, whatever it is, it's very, very important. Having said that, having laid what the solution should be, what the prescription should be, how is CA Technologies gearing up for it? In CA we have the industry's most comprehensive, the richest portfolio of infrastructure management tools, which is capable of managing all forms of infrastructure, traditional, private cloud, public cloud. Just to give you an example, in private cloud we support the traditional VMs as well as hyper converged infrastructure like Nutanix. We support Docker and other forms of containers. In public cloud we support the monitoring of infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service. We support all the popular clouds, AWS, Azure, Office 365 on Azure, as well as Salesforce.com. In terms of network, out net ops tools manage the latest and greatest SDN and SD-WAN, the VMware SDN, the open stack SDN, in terms of SD-WAN Cisco, Viptella. If you are a hybrid cloud customer, then you are no longer blindsided on things that are happening on the cloud side because we integrate with tools like Ixia. And once we monitor all these tools, we provide value on top of it. First of all, we monitor not only performance, but also packet, flow, all the net ops attributes. Then on top of that we provide predictive insights and learning. And because of our presence in the application performance management space, we integrate with APM to provide application to infrastructure correlation. Finally our monitoring is integrally linked with our operational intelligence platform. So in CA we have an operational intelligence platform built around CA Jarvis technology, which is based on open source technology, Elastic Logstash and Kibana, supplemented by Hadoop and Spark. And what we are doing is we are ingesting data from our monitoring tools into this data lake to provide value added insights and intelligence. When we talk about big data we talk about the three Vs, the variety, the volume and the velocity of data. But there is a fourth V that we often ignore. That's the veracity of the data, the truthfulness of data. CA being a leader in monitoring space, we have been in the business of collecting and monitoring data for ages, and what we are doing is we are ingesting these data into the platform and provided value added analytics on top of it. If you can read the slide, it's also an open framework we have the APIs from for ingesting data from third-party sources as well. For example, if you have your business data, your business sentiment data, and if you want to correlate that with IT metrics, how your IT is keeping up with your business cycles, you can do that as well. Now some of the applications that we are building, and this product is in beta as you see, are correlation between the various events, IT events and business events, network events and server events. Contextual log analytics. The operative word is contextual. There are a plethora of tools in the market that perform log analytics, but log analytics in the context of a problem when you really need it is of paramount importance. Predictive capacity analytics. Again, capacity analytics is not only about trending, right? It's about what if analysis. What will happen to your infrastructure? Or can your infrastructure sustain the pressure if your business grows by 2X, for example? That kind of what if analysis we should be able to do. And finally machine learning, we are working on it. Out of box machine learning algorithm to make sure that problems are not only corrected after the fact, but we can predict problems. We can prevent the problems in future. So for those who may be listening to this might be wondering where do we start? If you are already a CA customer, you are familiar with CA tools, but if you're not, what's the starting point? So I would recommend the starting point is CA Unified Infrastructure Manager, which is the market leading tool for hybrid cloud management. And it's not a hollow claim that we are making, right? It has been testified, it has been blessed by customers and analysts alike. And you can see it was voted the cloud monitoring software of the year 2016 by a third party. And here are some of the customer experiences. NMSP, they were able to achieve 15% productivity improvement as a result of adopting UIM. A healthcare provider, their meantime to repair, MTTR, went down by 40% as a result of UIM. And a telecom provider, they had a faster adoption to cloud as a result of UIM, the reason being UIM gave them for the first time a single pane of glass to manage their on prem and cloud environments, which has been a detriment for them for adopting cloud. And once they were able to achieve that, they were able to switch onto cloud much, much faster. Finally, the infrastructure management capabilities that I talked about is now being delivered as a turnkey solution, as a SAS solution, which we call digital experience insights. And I strongly, strongly encourage you to try UIM via CA digital experience insights, and here is the URL. You can go and sign up for the trial. With that, thank you.

(bright music) >> "Supermetafragilisticexpialadotious." What's in a name? In an homage to the inimitable Charles Fitzgerald, we've chosen this title for today's session because of all the buzz surrounding "supercloud," a term that we introduced last year to signify a major architectural trend and shift that's occurring in the technology industry. Since that time, we've published numerous videos and articles on the topic, and on August 9th, kicked off "Supercloud22," an open industry event designed to advance the supercloud conversation, gathering input from more than 30 experienced technologists and business leaders in "The Cube" and broader technology community. We're talking about individuals like Benoit Dageville, Kit Colbert, Ali Ghodsi, Mohit Aron, David McJannet, and dozens of other experts. And today, we're pleased to welcome David Linthicum, who's a Chief Strategy Officer of Cloud Services at Deloitte Consulting. David is a technology visionary, a technical CTO. He's an author and a frequently sought after keynote speaker at high profile conferences like "VMware Explore" next week. David Linthicum, welcome back to "The Cube." Good to see you again. >> Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, so this topic of supercloud, what you call metacloud, has created a lot of interest. VMware calls it cross-cloud services, Snowflake calls it their data cloud, there's a lot of different names, but recently, you published a piece in "InfoWorld" where you said the following. "I really don't care what we call it, "and I really don't care if I put "my own buzzword into the mix. "However, this does not change the fact "that metacloud is perhaps the most important "architectural evolution occurring right now, "and we need to get this right out of the gate. "If we do that, who cares what it's named?" So very cool. And you also mentioned in a recent article that you don't like to put out new terms out in the wild without defining them. So what is a metacloud, or what we call supercloud? What's your definition? >> Yeah, and again, I don't care what people call it. The reality is it's the ability to have a layer of cross-cloud services. It sits above existing public cloud providers. So the idea here is that instead of building different security systems, different governance systems, different operational systems in each specific cloud provider, using whatever native features they provide, we're trying to do that in a cross-cloud way. So in other words, we're pushing out data integration, security, all these other things that we have to take care of as part of deploying a particular cloud provider. And in a multicloud scenario, we're building those in and between the clouds. And so we've been tracking this for about five years. We understood that multicloud is not necessarily about the particular public cloud providers, it's about things that you build in and between the clouds. >> Got it, okay. So I want to come back to that, to the definition, but I want to tie us to the so-called multicloud. You guys did a survey recently. We've said that multicloud was mostly a symptom of multi-vendor, Shadow Cloud, M&A, and only recently has become a strategic imperative. Now, Deloitte published a survey recently entitled "Closing the Cloud Strategy, Technology, Innovation Gap," and I'd like to explore that a little bit. And so in that survey, you showed data. What I liked about it is you went beyond what we all know, right? The old, "Our research shows that on average, "X number of clouds are used at an individual company." I mean, you had that too, but you really went deeper. You identified why companies are using multiple clouds, and you developed different categories of practitioners across 500 survey respondents. But the reasons were very clear for "why multicloud," as this becomes more strategic. Service choice scale, negotiating leverage, improved business resiliency, minimizing lock-in, interoperability of data, et cetera. So my question to you, David, is what's the problem supercloud or metacloud solves, and what's different from multicloud? >> That's a great question. The reality is that if we're... Well, supercloud or metacloud, whatever, is really something that exists above a multicloud, but I kind of view them as the same thing. It's an architectural pattern. We can name it anything. But the reality is that if we're moving to these multicloud environments, we're doing so to leverage best of breed things. In other words, best of breed technology to provide the innovators within the company to take the business to the next level, and we determine that in the survey. And so if we're looking at what a multicloud provides, it's the ability to provide different choices of different services or piece parts that allows us to build anything that we need to do. And so what we found in the survey and what we found in just practice in dealing with our clients is that ultimately, the value of cloud computing is going to be the innovation aspects. In other words, the ability to take the company to the next level from being more innovative and more disruptive in the marketplace that they're in. And the only way to do that, instead of basically leveraging the services of a particular walled garden of a single public cloud provider, is to cast a wider net and get out and leverage all kinds of services to make these happen. So if you think about that, that's basically how multicloud has evolved. In other words, it wasn't planned. They didn't say, "We're going to go do a multicloud." It was different developers and innovators in the company that went off and leveraged these cloud services, sometimes with the consent of IT leadership, sometimes not. And now we have these multitudes of different services that we're leveraging. And so many of these enterprises are going from 1000 to, say, 3000 services under management. That creates a complexity problem. We have a problem of heterogeneity, different platforms, different tools, different services, different AI technology, database technology, things like that. So the metacloud, or the supercloud, or whatever you want to call it, is the ability to deal with that complexity on the complexity's terms. And so instead of building all these various things that we have to do individually in each of the cloud providers, we're trying to do so within a cross-cloud service layer. We're trying to create this layer of technology, which removes us from dealing with the complexity of the underlying multicloud services and makes it manageable. Because right now, I think we're getting to a point of complexity we just can't operate it at the budgetary limits that we are right now. We can't keep the number of skills around, the number of operators around, to keep these things going. We're going to have to get creative in terms of how we manage these things, how we manage a multicloud. And that's where the supercloud, metacloud, whatever they want to call it, comes that. >> Yeah, and as John Furrier likes to say, in IT, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about simplifying, and you talked about the abstraction layer, and then it sounds like I'm inferring more. There's value that's added on top of that. And then you also said the hyperscalers are in a walled garden. So I've been asked, why aren't the hyperscalers superclouds? And I've said, essentially, they want to put your data into their cloud and keep it there. Now, that doesn't mean they won't eventually get into that. We've seen examples a little bit, Outposts, Anthos, Azure Arc, but the hyperscalers really aren't building superclouds or metaclouds, at least today, are they? >> No, they're not. And I always have the predictions for every major cloud conference that this is the conference that the hyperscaler is going to figure out some sort of a multicloud across-cloud strategy. In other words, building services that are able to operate across clouds. That really has never happened. It has happened in dribs and drabs, and you just mentioned a few examples of that, but the ability to own the space, to understand that we're not going to be the center of the universe in how people are going to leverage it, is going to be multiple things, including legacy systems and other cloud providers, and even industry clouds that are emerging these days, and SaaS providers, and all these things. So we're going to assist you in dealing with complexity, and we're going to provide the core services of being there. That hasn't happened yet. And they may be worried about conflicting their market, and the messaging is a bit different, even actively pushing back on the concept of multicloud, but the reality is the market's going to take them there. So in other words, if enough of their customers are asking for this and asking that they take the lead in building these cross-cloud technologies, even if they're participating in the stack and not being the stack, it's too compelling of a market that it's not going to drag a lot of the existing public cloud providers there. >> Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, David, because I never say never when it comes to a company like AWS, and we've seen how fast they move. And at the same time, they don't want to be commoditized. There's the layer underneath all this infrastructure, and they got this ecosystem that's adding all this tremendous value. But I want to ask you, what are the essential elements of supercloud, coming back to the definition, if you will, and what's different about metacloud, as you call it, from plain old SaaS or PaaS? What are the key elements there? >> Well, the key elements would be holistic management of all of the IT infrastructure. So even though it's sitting above a multicloud, I view metacloud, supercloud as the ability to also manage your existing legacy systems, your existing security stack, your existing network operations, basically everything that exists under the purview of IT. If you think about it, we're moving our infrastructure into the clouds, and we're probably going to hit a saturation point of about 70%. And really, if the supercloud, metacloud, which is going to be expensive to build for most of the enterprises, it needs to support these things holistically. So it needs to have all the services, that is going to be shareable across the different providers, and also existing legacy systems, and also edge computing, and IoT, and all these very diverse systems that we're building there right now. So if complexity is a core challenge to operate these things at scale and the ability to secure these things at scale, we have to have commonality in terms of security architecture and technology, commonality in terms of our directory services, commonality in terms of network operations, commonality in term of cloud operations, commonality in terms of FinOps. All these things should exist in some holistic cross-cloud layer that sits above all this complexity. And you pointed out something very profound. In other words, that is going to mean that we're hiding a lot of the existing cloud providers in terms of their interfaces and dashboards and things like that that we're dealing with today, their APIs. But the reality is that if we're able to manage these things at scale, the public cloud providers are going to benefit greatly from that. They're going to sell more services because people are going to find they're able to leverage them easier. And so in other words, if we're removing the complexity wall, which many in the industry are calling it right now, then suddenly we're moving from, say, the 25 to 30% migrated in the cloud, which most enterprises are today, to 50, 60, 70%. And we're able to do this at scale, and we're doing it at scale because we're providing some architectural optimization through the supercloud, metacloud layer. >> Okay, thanks for that. David, I just want to tap your CTO brain for a minute. At "Supercloud22," we came up with these three deployment models. Kit Colbert put forth the idea that one model would be your control planes running in one cloud, let's say AWS, but it interacts with and can manage and deploy on other clouds, the Kubernetes Cluster Management System. The second one, Mohit Aron from Cohesity laid out, where you instantiate the stack on different clouds and different cloud regions, and then you create a layer, a common interface across those. And then Snowflake was the third deployment model where it's a single global instance, it's one instantiation, and basically building out their own cloud across these regions. Help us parse through that. Do those seem like reasonable deployment models to you? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a distributed computing trick we've been doing, which is, in essence, an agent of the supercloud that's carrying out some of the cloud native functions on that particular cloud, but is, in essence, a slave to the metacloud, or the supercloud, whatever, that's able to run across the various cloud providers. In other words, when it wants to access a service, it may not go directly to that service. It goes directly to the control plane, and that control plane is responsible... Very much like Kubernetes and Docker works, that control plane is responsible for reaching out and leveraging those native services. I think that that's thinking that's a step in the right direction. I think these things unto themselves, at least initially, are going to be a very complex array of technology. Even though we're trying to remove complexity, the supercloud unto itself, in terms of the ability to build this thing that's able to operate at scale across-cloud, is going to be a collection of many different technologies that are interfacing with the public cloud providers in different ways. And so we can start putting these meta architectures together, and I certainly have written and spoke about this for years, but initially, this is going to be something that may escape the detail or the holistic nature of these meta architectures that people are floating around right now. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on this, because anytime I get a CTO brain, I like to... I'm not an engineer, but I've been around a long time, so I know a lot of buzzwords and have absorbed a lot over the years, but so you take those, the second two models, the Mohit instantiate on each cloud and each cloud region versus the Snowflake approach. I asked Benoit Dageville, "Does that mean if I'm in "an AWS east region and I want to do a query on Azure West, "I can do that without moving data?" And he said, "Yes and no." And the answer was really, "No, we actually take a subset of that data," so there's the latency problem. From those deployment model standpoints, what are the trade-offs that you see in terms of instantiating the stack on each individual cloud versus that single instance? Is there a benefit of the single instance for governance and security and simplicity, but a trade-off on latency, or am I overthinking this? >> Yeah, you hit it on the nose. The reality is that the trade-off is going to be latency and performance. If we get wiggy with the distributed nature, like the distributed data example you just provided, we have to basically separate the queries and communicate with the databases on each instance, and then reassemble the result set that goes back to the people who are recording it. And so we can do caching systems and things like that. But the reality is, if it's distributed system, we're going to have latency and bandwidth issues that are going to be limiting us. And also security issues, because if we're removing lots of information over the open internet, or even private circuits, that those are going to be attack vectors that hackers can leverage. You have to keep that in mind. We're trying to reduce those attack vectors. So it would be, in many instances, and I think we have to think about this, that we're going to keep the data in the same physical region for just that. So in other words, it's going to provide the best performance and also the most simplistic access to dealing with security. And so we're not, in essence, thinking about where the data's going, how it's moving across things, things like that. So the challenge is going to be is when you're dealing with a supercloud or metacloud is, when do you make those decisions? And I think, in many instances, even though we're leveraging multiple databases across multiple regions and multiple public cloud providers, and that's the idea of it, we're still going to localize the data for performance reasons. I mean, I just wrote a blog in "InfoWorld" a couple of months ago and talked about, people who are trying to distribute data across different public cloud providers for different reasons, distribute an application development system, things like that, you can do it. With enough time and money, you can do anything. I think the challenge is going to be operating that thing, and also providing a viable business return based on the application. And so why it may look like a good science experiment, and it's cool unto itself as an architect, the reality is the more pragmatic approach is going to be a leavitt in a single region on a single cloud. >> Very interesting. The other reason I like to talk to companies like Deloitte and experienced people like you is 'cause I can get... You're agnostic, right? I mean, you're technology agnostic, vendor agnostic. So I want to come back with another question, which is, how do you deal with what I call the lowest common denominator problem? What I mean by that is if one cloud has, let's say, a superior service... Let's take an example of Nitro and Graviton. AWS seems to be ahead on that, but let's say some other cloud isn't quite quite there yet, and you're building a supercloud or a metacloud. How do you rationalize that? Does it have to be like a caravan in the army where you slow down so all the slowest trucks can keep up, or are the ways to adjudicate that that are advantageous to hide that deficiency? >> Yeah, and that's a great thing about leveraging a supercloud or a metacloud is we're putting that management in a single layer. So as far as a user or even a developer on those systems, they shouldn't worry about the performance that may come back, because we're dealing with the... You hit the nail on the head with that one. The slowest component is the one that dictates performance. And so we have to have some sort of a performance management layer. We're also making dynamic decisions to move data, to move processing, from one server to the other to try to minimize the amount of latency that's coming from a single component. So the great thing about that is we're putting that volatility into a single domain, and it's making architectural decisions in terms of where something will run and where it's getting its data from, things are stored, things like that, based on the performance feedback that's coming back from the various cloud services that are under management. And so if you're running across clouds, it becomes even more interesting, because ultimately, you're going to make some architectural choices on the fly in terms of where that stuff runs based on the active dynamic performance that that public cloud provider is providing. So in other words, we may find that it automatically shut down a database service, say MySQL, on one cloud instance, and moved it to a MySQL instance on another public cloud provider because there was some sort of a performance issue that it couldn't work around. And by the way, it does so dynamically. Away from you making that decision, it's making that decision on your behalf. Again, this is a matter of abstraction, removing complexity, and dealing with complexity through abstraction and automation, and this is... That would be an example of fixing something with automation, self-healing. >> When you meet with some of the public cloud providers and they talk about on-prem private cloud, the general narrative from the hyperscalers is, "Well, that's not a cloud." Should on-prem be inclusive of supercloud, metacloud? >> Absolutely, I mean, and they're selling private cloud instances with the edge cloud that they're selling. The reality is that we're going to have to keep a certain amount of our infrastructure, including private clouds, on premise. It's something that's shrinking as a market share, and it's going to be tougher and tougher to justify as the public cloud providers become better and better at what they do, but we certainly have edge clouds now, and hyperscalers have examples of that where they run a instance of their public cloud infrastructure on premise on physical hardware and software. And the reality is, too, we have data centers and we have systems that just won't go away for another 20 or 30 years. They're just too sticky. They're uneconomically viable to move into the cloud. That's the core thing. It's not that we can't do it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn't do it, because there's not going to be an economic... There's not going to be an economic incentive of making that happen. So if we're going to create this meta layer or this infrastructure which is going to run across clouds, and everybody agrees on, that's what the supercloud is, we have to include the on-premise systems, including private clouds, including legacy systems. And by the way, include the rising number of IoT systems that are out there, and edge-based systems out there. So we're managing it using the same infrastructure into cloud services. So they have metadata systems and they have specialized services, and service finance and retail and things like doing risk analytics. So it gets them further down that path, but not necessarily giving them a SaaS application where they're forced into all of the business processes. We're giving you piece parts. So we'll give you 1000 different parts that are related to the finance industry. You can assemble anything you need, but the thing is, it's not going to be like building it from scratch. We're going to give you risk analytics, we're giving you the financial analytics, all these things that you can leverage within your applications how you want to leverage them. We'll maintain them. So in other words, you don't have to maintain 'em just like a cloud service. And suddenly, we can build applications in a couple of weeks that used to take a couple of months, in some cases, a couple of years. So that seems to be a large take of it moving forward. So get it up in the supercloud. Those become just other services that are under managed... That are under management on the supercloud, the metacloud. So we're able to take those services, abstract them, assemble them, use them in different applications. And the ability to manage where those services are originated versus where they're consumed is going to be managed by the supercloud layer, which, you're dealing with the governance, the service governance, the security systems, the directory systems, identity access management, things like that. They're going to get you further along down the pike, and that comes back as real value. If I'm able to build something in two weeks that used to take me two months, and I'm able to give my creators in the organization the ability to move faster, that's a real advantage. And suddenly, we are going to be valued by our digital footprint, our ability to do things in a creative and innovative way. And so organizations are able to move that fast, leveraging cloud computing for what it should be leveraged, as a true force multiplier for the business. They're going to win the game. They're going to get the most value. They're going to be around in 20 years, the others won't. >> David Linthicum, always love talking. You have a dangerous combination of business and technology expertise. Let's tease. "VMware Explore" next week, you're giving a keynote, if they're going to be there. Which day are you? >> Tuesday. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. >> All right, that's a big day. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. And David, please do stop by "The Cube." We're in Moscone West. Love to get you on and continue this conversation. I got 100 more questions for you. Really appreciate your time. >> I always love talking to people at "The Cube." Thank you very much. >> All right, and thanks for watching our ongoing coverage of "Supercloud22" on "The Cube," your leader in enterprise tech and emerging tech coverage. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE. Covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Dave Valante. We're covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting, specifically focused on really what is what I consider a rebirth from really staff augmentation to a much more strategic partner for customers. And with me to explore that a little bit is Sherry Lautenbach. She's the Senior Vice President of Cloud Key Accounts at Oracle. And we're also joined by Pat Mongovin who's a group VP for the North American Cloud Strategy, also at Oracle. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Yep, thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. So Sherry, you're out talking to customers a lot, and I'm curious as to what that conversation is like, specifically as it relates to consulting. Are you bringing Oracle Consulting now into the conversation? What's that conversation like? >> Absolutely, in fact every conversation we have relating to our Cloud strategy, Oracle Consulting is part and parcel to that. They are not staff augmentation, they are actually the digital transformation arm of what we do around Cloud. So it's been really interesting to see what they've been able to do in terms of changing the narrative of what we do at Oracle from just a software company to really transforming to a Cloud provider. >> Strategy, obviously a fundamental part of any customer interaction. But what are you seeing? What underscores customer strategies? What are the business drivers for them right now? What are the catalysts that are driving their technology spending decision? >> Yeah, it's a great question Dave. I think a lot of it depends upon, especially in the times that we're in now, depends upon the industry that they're in. But, most importantly what we're seeing is right now is durability. So we want to make sure that the customers have our Oracle customers and others have an opportunity to have disaster recovery, business continuity. In this stage right now it's less about expansion per say, unless they're in an industry that's uniquely in a position for that and more about durability of the overall strategy. So when we look at that durability we think about kind of two core missions. We think about sort of back office operations and continuity and then we think about transformational revenue generation, and so when we partner with those, yes we want to make sure that we have both of those concepts in mind. >> You know we have a lot of talk about in our community about Cloud first. I think Oracle has sort of put forth the gauntlet of look, we're leading now with Cloud. You both have Cloud in your title, but obviously being Cloud first is more than that. Sherry, I wonder if you could talk about your customer's and your Cloud journey and share with us and kind of convince us that you are Cloud first. >> Sure, no that's a great question and in fact I joined Oracle about eleven months ago. I was in the industry for about 25 years and I joined specifically because I believe in what Oracle is doing around this Cloud journey. We are in our second generation of Cloud capabilities, and that's purposeful. And we do that because we've realized that where Cloud started and where we are today are two totally different things. And so we have capabilities around security, viability, extensions with autonomous, that other Cloud providers just simply don't have. And we've built these from the ground up to ensure that we can run Oracle workloads, databases and applications far better than any other Cloud provider. So it's a super exciting time to be at Oracle and it's absolutely fascinating what our customers are doing to adopt our technology. >> I want to ask you a sort of similar question. How fundamental is Cloud to organization strategies. Obviously everybody has a Cloud strategy. But I'm specifically asking as it relates to mission-critical workloads because let's face it. That's been the hardest to move into the Cloud. So, when you're out talking to customers about their strategy, and obviously dovetailing into Oracle's strategy, how do you align you know those two views? >> Yeah, it's actually a really fascinating question. So first, I think I would respond in the following way. When I think about our portfolio, I don't necessarily say Cloud first, I say customer first. And I really want the customer to make a decision based upon a deployment model that makes sense for that particular customer. Whether it's a regulated industry or the public sector or any sort of compliance considerations. So Oracle is one of the very few enterprise class Cloud providers that has, obviously, on-premise capabilities as well. And so, 99% of the cases that we see, with the exception of some of the sort of startup S&B-type folks, that are bored in the Cloud, we're dealing with the hybrid Cloud model anyway. And so that's kind of the first order of priorities, what's right for the customer and let's make sure that we get the appropriate deployment model for that customer. In terms of enterprise, essentially the workloads that we have. Whether it's Cloud or on-prem, are enterprise workloads. And those are kind of separated into two brackets. One would be for mission, sort of the revenue generation side, and one would be mission critical, sort of the back office. So Oracle is historically tremendous at the back office side, running finance, running operations, running the supply chain. Doing those things that are mission-critical. On the core mission side that's really where we're starting to focus now which is getting out into the revenue generation, the mission of the entity, with things like high-performance compute, and making sure that we have an ability to support our customers on both sides of the spectrum. >> Sherry, why are customers wanting to put mission-critical workloads in the Cloud? Is it the same sort of Cloud agility and cost, etc. I mean why not just leave it on-prem and keep it protected and maybe spend a little bit more? What's the driver for moving mission-critical workloads into the Cloud? >> Well, I think it's dependent upon what the initiatives are in the company, right? Are they looking for cost reduction, are they looking for top-line growth, are they looking for different capabilities around security that the Cloud can provide? The great thing about what we do is, we have optimized all of our workloads, both our databases and our applications into our Cloud. So we're providing additional capabilities but we're also saving a lot of money. So, we say all the time that you know put us to the test. Let us quantify what we would look like in the Cloud with our workloads versus a competitor. And we will guarantee that we will save you a lot of money. So I think that a lot of it has to do with one, it starts with potentially cost reduction, but then they start seeing additional business value driven out of and back to Oracle Consulting. What Oracle Consulting provides in terms of the business value in the Cloud is transformative for our customers. >> Talk about how you lead in these customer conversations. >> Right, well normally our entry point of one understanding what the business drivers are, right? It has to be a business-led discussion. It really isn't a technology starter point, right? It really is around what business problems are you trying to solve, and how can we help you solve them. And because we know your environments, we know what databases are employed and where they're deployed. What Oracle applications you're leveraging to run your business. We can, I think, successfully position ourselves very competitively against other Cloud providers. And I think that is then something that has resonated incredibly well with our customers, and in fact our largest customers. >> Yeah, so it seems like Oracle could solve things of an important ingredient as part of that strategy 'cause again, if it was five years ago and was just staff augmentation, that's really not a compelling conversation to have with customers. But if you can come in with a mindset of strategic partner, you're bringing in Deloitte, we've been talking to some of their professionals about the elevate program with Oracle. That is a nice lever that you can take advantage of. >> Absolutely, and in fact we've seen that, that is a huge opportunity for us because one, the partnership with Deloitte is incredibly strategic. We also partner with other companies like Accenture and DXC and IBM candidly. And Oracle Consulting is incredibly flexible in terms of what kind of partnerships and alignment they have with our customers, and it's really based on what the customer's preference is. >> Not just about feature or function, speeds and feeds, maybe you can address that, and where does Oracle Consulting fit in that equation? >> We firmly believe that every customer is going to want to have a different option for what they'll do in the Cloud and based on the provider. So we, one, we've partnered with Microsoft and we actually can interconnect our Clouds together to provide that kind of flexibility to our customers and consulting is a key component of that. So we engage our customers and talk about our Microsoft integration, our partnership or the consulting is the arm that does that work for us. So we are seeing them come about in a much different way, in a way that's differentiated between other consulting you know staff augmentation firms. >> I want to end on growth, Pat. Maybe talk about I mean Cloud, Cloud is the growth business, you look at Oracle's business, everybody's business. As Cloud is growing, everything else is either hanging on or declining, so it's all about growth. How do you drive growth, what is Cloud's role in terms of the growth strategy, and maybe add some color to that narrative. >> From a product perspective, I think we're sort of a luxury of riches around the autonomous capability which we haven't talked about. So that's something that's incredibly unique to Oracle. The autonomous database and all the autonomous services that we're rolling out. And that autonomous gives back to what we talked about earlier around security, around performance, around scalability and all these things. So that ultimately we're positioning the capabilities of the future but we're positioning them today. So we're a market leader in this space. We're not only is the Oracle database as you pointed out the market leader. We're a market leader in ERP Cloud and a bunch of the SaaS areas. But this autonomous segment of the market is crucial for us and crucial to our growth. >> Yeah it really is an enabler. I've been saying that it's almost compulsory for Oracle to participate and compete in the Cloud because it gives you that automation and that scale but you're talking about also setting up some future advantages of being able to take advantage of data, the combination of data, AI, and Cloud is the new superpower within the industry. Sherry, I want to end on you. Eleven months in at Oracle, let's say things work out great. You're here two, three, four years down the road, you look back. What does success look like? >> Success looks like every one of our customers moving to the Oracle Cloud and seeing incredible business value from that, partnering with Oracle Consulting. That's what my success criteria is. >> Guys, well listen. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE where we've been tracking this transformation of Oracle Consulting and one of the things that's very clear as Oracle's obviously serious about Cloud but also serious about bringing in new talent and new skillsets, you're really not only transform Oracle but help transform your customers, so thank you for your time, really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much. >> Yep, you bet, thank you. >> All right, and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Valante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (bumper music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE. Covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Dave Valante. We're covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting, specifically focused on really what is what I consider a rebirth from really staff augmentation to a much more strategic partner for customers. And with me to explore that a little bit is Sherry Lautenbach. She's the Senior Vice President of Cloud Key Accounts at Oracle. And we're also joined by Pat Mongovin who's a group VP for the North American Cloud Strategy, also at Oracle. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Yep, thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. So Sherry, you're out talking to customers a lot, and I'm curious as to what that conversation is like, specifically as it relates to consulting. Are you bringing Oracle Consulting now into the conversation? What's that conversation like? >> Absolutely, in fact every conversation we have relating to our Cloud strategy, Oracle Consulting is part and parcel to that. They are not staff augmentation, they are actually the digital transformation arm of what we do around Cloud. So it's been really interesting to see what they've been able to do in terms of changing the narrative of what we do at Oracle from just a software company to really transforming to a Cloud provider. >> Strategy, obviously a fundamental part of any customer interaction. But what are you seeing? What underscores customer strategies? What are the business drivers for them right now? What are the catalysts that are driving their technology spending decision? >> Yeah, it's a great question Dave. I think a lot of it depends upon, especially in the times that we're in now, depends upon the industry that they're in. But, most importantly what we're seeing is right now is durability. So we want to make sure that the customers have our Oracle customers and others have an opportunity to have disaster recovery, business continuity. In this stage right now it's less about expansion per say, unless they're in an industry that's uniquely in a position for that and more about durability of the overall strategy. So when we look at that durability we think about kind of two core missions. We think about sort of back office operations and continuity and then we think about transformational revenue generation, and so when we partner with those, yes we want to make sure that we have both of those concepts in mind. >> You know we have a lot of talk about in our community about Cloud first. I think Oracle has sort of put forth the gauntlet of look, we're leading now with Cloud. You both have Cloud in your title, but obviously being Cloud first is more than that. Sherry, I wonder if you could talk about your customer's and your Cloud journey and share with us and kind of convince us that you are Cloud first. >> Sure, no that's a great question and in fact I joined Oracle about eleven months ago. I was in the industry for about 25 years and I joined specifically because I believe in what Oracle is doing around this Cloud journey. We are in our second generation of Cloud capabilities, and that's purposeful. And we do that because we've realized that where Cloud started and where we are today are two totally different things. And so we have capabilities around security, viability, extensions with autonomous, that other Cloud providers just simply don't have. And we've built these from the ground up to ensure that we can run Oracle workloads, databases and applications far better than any other Cloud provider. So it's a super exciting time to be at Oracle and it's absolutely fascinating what our customers are doing to adopt our technology. >> I want to ask you a sort of similar question. How fundamental is Cloud to organization strategies. Obviously everybody has a Cloud strategy. But I'm specifically asking as it relates to mission-critical workloads because let's face it. That's been the hardest to move into the Cloud. So, when you're out talking to customers about their strategy, and obviously dovetailing into Oracle's strategy, how do you align you know those two views? >> Yeah, it's actually a really fascinating question. So first, I think I would respond in the following way. When I think about our portfolio, I don't necessarily say Cloud first, I say customer first. And I really want the customer to make a decision based upon a deployment model that makes sense for that particular customer. Whether it's a regulated industry or the public sector or any sort of compliance considerations. So Oracle is one of the very few enterprise class Cloud providers that has, obviously, on-premise capabilities as well. And so, 99% of the cases that we see, with the exception of some of the sort of startup S&B-type folks, that are bored in the Cloud, we're dealing with the hybrid Cloud model anyway. And so that's kind of the first order of priorities, what's right for the customer and let's make sure that we get the appropriate deployment model for that customer. In terms of enterprise, essentially the workloads that we have. Whether it's Cloud or on-prem, are enterprise workloads. And those are kind of separated into two brackets. One would be for mission, sort of the revenue generation side, and one would be mission critical, sort of the back office. So Oracle is historically tremendous at the back office side, running finance, running operations, running the supply chain. Doing those things that are mission-critical. On the core mission side that's really where we're starting to focus now which is getting out into the revenue generation, the mission of the entity, with things like high-performance compute, and making sure that we have an ability to support our customers on both sides of the spectrum. >> Sherry, why are customers wanting to put mission-critical workloads in the Cloud? Is it the same sort of Cloud agility and cost, etc. I mean why not just leave it on-prem and keep it protected and maybe spend a little bit more? What's the driver for moving mission-critical workloads into the Cloud? >> Well, I think it's dependent upon what the initiatives are in the company, right? Are they looking for cost reduction, are they looking for top-line growth, are they looking for different capabilities around security that the Cloud can provide? The great thing about what we do is, we have optimized all of our workloads, both our databases and our applications into our Cloud. So we're providing additional capabilities but we're also saving a lot of money. So, we say all the time that you know put us to the test. Let us quantify what we would look like in the Cloud with our workloads versus a competitor. And we will guarantee that we will save you a lot of money. So I think that a lot of it has to do with one, it starts with potentially cost reduction, but then they start seeing additional business value driven out of and back to Oracle Consulting. What Oracle Consulting provides in terms of the business value in the Cloud is transformative for our customers. >> Talk about how you lead in these customer conversations. >> Right, well normally our entry point of one understanding what the business drivers are, right? It has to be a business-led discussion. It really isn't a technology starter point, right? It really is around what business problems are you trying to solve, and how can we help you solve them. And because we know your environments, we know what databases are employed and where they're deployed. What Oracle applications you're leveraging to run your business. We can, I think, successfully position ourselves very competitively against other Cloud providers. And I think that is then something that has resonated incredibly well with our customers, and in fact our largest customers. >> Yeah, so it seems like Oracle could solve things of an important ingredient as part of that strategy 'cause again, if it was five years ago and was just staff augmentation, that's really not a compelling conversation to have with customers. But if you can come in with a mindset of strategic partner, you're bringing in Deloitte, we've been talking to some of their professionals about the elevate program with Oracle. That is a nice lever that you can take advantage of. >> Absolutely, and in fact we've seen that, that is a huge opportunity for us because one, the partnership with Deloitte is incredibly strategic. We also partner with other companies like Accenture and DXC and IBM candidly. And Oracle Consulting is incredibly flexible in terms of what kind of partnerships and alignment they have with our customers, and it's really based on what the customer's preference is. >> Not just about feature or function, speeds and feeds, maybe you can address that, and where does Oracle Consulting fit in that equation? >> We firmly believe that every customer is going to want to have a different option for what they'll do in the Cloud and based on the provider. So we, one, we've partnered with Microsoft and we actually can interconnect our Clouds together to provide that kind of flexibility to our customers and consulting is a key component of that. So we engage our customers and talk about our Microsoft integration, our partnership or the consulting is the arm that does that work for us. So we are seeing them come about in a much different way, in a way that's differentiated between other consulting you know staff augmentation firms. >> I want to end on growth, Pat. Maybe talk about I mean Cloud, Cloud is the growth business, you look at Oracle's business, everybody's business. As Cloud is growing, everything else is either hanging on or declining, so it's all about growth. How do you drive growth, what is Cloud's role in terms of the growth strategy, and maybe add some color to that narrative. >> From a product perspective, I think we're sort of a luxury of riches around the autonomous capability which we haven't talked about. So that's something that's incredibly unique to Oracle. The autonomous database and all the autonomous services that we're rolling out. And that autonomous gives back to what we talked about earlier around security, around performance, around scalability and all these things. So that ultimately we're positioning the capabilities of the future but we're positioning them today. So we're a market leader in this space. We're not only is the Oracle database as you pointed out the market leader. We're a market leader in ERP Cloud and a bunch of the SaaS areas. But this autonomous segment of the market is crucial for us and crucial to our growth. >> Yeah it really is an enabler. I've been saying that it's almost compulsory for Oracle to participate and compete in the Cloud because it gives you that automation and that scale but you're talking about also setting up some future advantages of being able to take advantage of data, the combination of data, AI, and Cloud is the new superpower within the industry. Sherry, I want to end on you. Eleven months in at Oracle, let's say things work out great. You're here two, three, four years down the road, you look back. What does success look like? >> Success looks like every one of our customers moving to the Oracle Cloud and seeing incredible business value from that, partnering with Oracle Consulting. That's what my success criteria is. >> Guys, well listen. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE where we've been tracking this transformation of Oracle Consulting and one of the things that's very clear as Oracle's obviously serious about Cloud but also serious about bringing in new talent and new skillsets, you're really not only transform Oracle but help transform your customers, so thank you for your time, really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much. >> Yep, you bet, thank you. >> All right, and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Valante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (bumper music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment, we have Merim Becirovic he is the Managing Director of Accenture's Global Cloud Initiative. Matt Lancaster, Associate Director of Technology, Architecture, Science, and Miha Kralj, Managing Director of Cloud Strategy at Accenture, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for returning, I should say, Miha, you're a veteran. We're talking today about event-driven architecture. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of it, I need a definition, so what is event-driven architecture? >> Sure, so event-driven architecture, I think the simplest way to think about it is when we're doing complex series of transactions it's actually breaking it down into its constituent pieces and treating all of the segments of a transaction as separate events that can be reacted to as they happen. So if you're shopping and you're putting something in the cart, that's an event. If you're going to the next page, that's another event, if you're checking out, that's another event, right? And as opposed to treating those all as one step follows the other, right, a lot of times there are sequences and things that can happen in between there. If there's a next best offer or a product marketing interstitial that needs to be put in those things can be reacted to and composed much more simply than actually writing all the logic to put them in a big sequence. >> So on a high level I would say it's an architectural style, right, it's a style of putting systems together, which is an evolution of the most common styles that we used so far, and we went through several evolutions, about every decade we get a new and better architectural style, so a reactive event-driven style is just the one that is currently shaping to be the one that is going to replace the older architectural style called microservices. >> So why would an organization implement this event-driven architecture what kind of business challenges would the organization be looking to solve? >> Well if you want I'll start there, I mean just think so, you have a world where today I believe we're in the slowest time we're ever going to be from a technology perspective. >> Which is mind boggling. >> And what we saw this morning, right gentlemen, the amount of innovation that everyone is doing including AWS is going to be mind-numbing, so the question is going to be, how can we and what tools can we use to help us adapt for those capabilities in the future? So I think that's really one of the things is, Matt'll say I think it's easier than ever now, it was harder before but it's getting easier as the providers and everyone else is making their services more readily available for consumption. >> I think in a lot of ways as an industry, we're almost forced to move to this paradigm, whether we like it or not because I think everyone understands that every company has now become a software company once again, whether they like it or not and that means major changes to the organization model, the way people deliver. We need to be much more product-focused, and teams need to own their product and things like that, right, which is becoming the common business model that successful companies are operating around. If the architecture is still a traditional command and control architecture, two years later they're going to be back to that old work style, and frankly the market is going to punish them out of existence. So we need something where all of these wonderful, complex components that we saw in the sessions today can be decomposed into one team doing one thing with one set of components and they don't necessarily need to be aware of what all the other teams are doing because they just need to react to one another's events when they're interested in them. >> So the system, business systems always grow to the largest possible extent of what is still manageable and controllable, and using traditional architectures on top of this modern technology that allows us now to make way more complex systems, we already having clients that we see that the governance control and transparency is at its limit. So if we want to go beyond that barrier of complexity and not fear that suddenly systems will become chaotic, we need a new architectural style and we see already those limits happening, and that's why we already have an answer, we have an answer that is after microservice architecture which is reactive event-driven. >> Would you say that moving to this kind of architecture is difficult? >> It's a great question and I think it's gotten a bit easier. There's definitely some magic to actually taking a step back and decomposing the business systems and saying this component or this piece of the transaction or this piece of the organization fundamentally does this, these business events are what they really need to focus on and then make the components, functions, and systems actually emit and perform the business logic of those events and do more demand-driven design, then get into picking and choosing which, whether it's serverless functions or micro-nano-service some Kubernetes, the components allow us to cleanly separate and stream out events and react to each other but if we don't do that initial stuff on the business side, then it becomes really difficult to know who gets value where. >> I think the art of the possible in this space is very much anything can happen, and I think about things like we run a lot of our Cloud footprint, we're already 93% of the public Cloud for Accenture's IT, and I think about how we consume those things, what can we optimize, how can we do things differently, even on the concept of running infrastructure, if I have better event-driven capabilities, I can react more efficiently, I can really make a consumable service more utility service than I've ever had before, so I think that's one of the draws for me. >> When you say difficult, here is if developers that are writing code today and they already went through a couple of waves of reinventing themselves, if they already know that they need to do that again, then it's not difficult. For the developers that feel that they arrived and they already can code for the Cloud and that's it it's a difficult reinvention when they realize that although yes, their existing knowledge of procedural programming of traditional way of coding systems in the Cloud, they need to throw lots of that knowledge away and relearn how the systems are properly composed so they use Cloud the way that Cloud was intended to be used. >> And just to add to that a little bit, there's a lot of folks that will take a very traditional imperative programming paradigm and try to jam it into things like AWS Lambda and Kinesis streaming and what they end up with the end is sort of a tortured circus freak of an architecture. It doesn't help anyone and ultimately people spend six months and then get super discouraged on doing this stuff when they could have taken a step back and done it right the first time which I think is why it's important to understand that's only a few code composable components, the more layers you put in, the more complexity you're adding, the more you horizontally grow the better off you are. And if you're streaming events, you have functions that react to those events, microservices that react to those events and then gateways that can actually stream those out to interfaces, that's all you need. We don't need to overcomplicate this like we have every other generation of architecture. >> I'm trying to picture that tortured circus freak of an architecture, it's ugh, in terms of Accenture's own experience in this area I know that your company is already leveraging event-driven architecture. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about your own experience? >> So let's start with our clients first. We serve a very broad spectrum of clients. And luckily not everybody is at the forefront and also not everybody is at the tail-end, right. We have lots of clients in the high tech industry in communications and media where the needs for the leading edge is very clear, and we are focusing particularly when it comes to that latest innovation, event-driven included, particularly on those industries. We kind of belong in the front part of there, and that's why Merim and his organization is extremely versed in those modern styles. >> I think just to add to that a little bit, since I play in a slightly different space than you most of the time, I work with a lot of banks, insurance companies, capital markets, and the adoption that I see in those industries of this stuff is massive. The problem with most banks is that they've tried to change core banking systems now two or three times, they're still sitting on mainframe stuff that they built in the 70's and 80's and most of what they with payments and with different financial services and stuff they can't actually add that stuff to the speed and convenience that their customers are determining and so there's a lot of fintech startups that are disrupting that market. And if they don't change those core systems and they don't become more event-driven and we don't decouple, decompose and then eventually rebuild we're going to find folks really fall behind in the marketplace, and I think they realize that. The real magic of this is that we can, it's not a big bang three year transformation anymore, right we can build the core and then realize value within the first six months and then continually iterate and evolve and hollow out those legacy systems and eventually turn them off which is very opposed to the old way of saying we're going to do this three to five year transformation, after five years, you probably maybe kind of will realize some technology value. And to Merim's point earlier, no CEO is going to go in front of his board or her board and pitch a five year transformation, that's a really good way to get fired. >> Yeah even in our own internal environments one of the things we always think about is what are we trying first, what are we failing fast at, 'cause that's one of the key things for us and all of these capabilities and the other thing, what's happening with this space, Cloud, microservices, event-driven architectures, everything is enabling this powerful change of making for the first time I would say in a long time the network engineer, the app architect, the technical architect, the infrastructure engineer, every one of them working together to start to think about this, all of these things are happening in my environment, these events are happening, what should I do differently? How does this help me automate my capabilities? How do I react to things differently? How do I make sure that I'm catching my infrastructure before it fails, my application before it fails, there's many many levers that you could use in this space, and we're frankly trying all of them because I think the goal to me that helps is I want an automated IT experience that has less people managing it but more people reacting to the events and we're creating the world where this event-driven architecture you could say eventually is going to evolve into all this AI stuff, we're going to be the managers of AI in the future. The AI's going to run our infrastructure and I think that's the most fun part part about this. >> I think two additional points to that, I think it was very well said, one of the things the really excites me about this space is that it becomes very understand... The technology piece, the software piece becomes very understandable to the folks who understand the business side and the marketing side, et cetera. If what you're doing is just sending out events which are a piece of business functionality or marketing functionality or whatever it becomes explicable in plain English, you're reacting to one another's simple business events, and then all of those composed together can create the same value chain that before had to take six months and only a math PhD could understand. (laughing) >> It's approachable to much broader businesspeople, not just to arcane, unique eyes. >> Yeah and to the AI point I think one of the most disappointing things to me in our industry is that most of the AI projects have boiled down to a shitty chat bot that nobody actually likes to interact with. >> I know and this is the part we're missing, right. >> Because they can't actually do anything, when you finally get to a person they have none of the same knowledge, so if we democratize that information, it all gets streamed out to all interfaces all at once, and they can say okay, if you didn't get your room in time the system will go ahead and rectify that and it creates a great customer service experience instead of an IVR in text, which nobody likes. >> And I like the point, I think you hit on the point that's very near and dear for me is, as IT practitioners we've dealt a long time with the siloed ownership of data, this democratization of data is a very powerful tool I think that helps gets enabled by some of this event-driven capability because so many times people feel that oh, I own the data, I can't share this with you or I need to understand what you're doing with it, expose your data, give your teams a chance, give them the events, let them react because you don't know what you're going to create coming from it. >> Set your data free, we heard that this morning from Andy Jassy. >> There's very relatable examples of this, right, I mean how many of us have gotten off a flight, the gate has changed, it shows that on your mobile app, you walk up to the gate agent, you're in an unfamiliar airport, where do I go? And they say oh your gate hasn't changed, it's not updated on my screen. You go to the board in the airport, oh it's not updated here either, right. Then you go to the original gate, they say what are you doing here, you have five minutes to get over to the new gate, right? And then you book it all the way over there, you look at the defibrillators on the wall, you're thinking I'm really glad those are here. You get to the gate and they haven't even started boarding yet and you finally get the late boarding announcement, right? It's three bad customer services experience in one, and if all that data goes to all those interfaces all at once you have none of those bad experiences. >> Well if event-driven architecture can solve that problem, I'm all for it. >> You're in? >> Merim, Matt and Miha thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. - Absolutely, pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (digital music)

>> Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Joined, of course, by my esteemed co-host, Stu Miniman. We have one guest for this segment, Bernard Golden. He is the vice president of Cloud Strategy at Capital One. Thank you so much for coming on the show Bernard. >> Well, thank you so much for inviting me to be on. >> You are famous in the world of cloud. You're named by wired.com as one of the most ten influential people in cloud computing. I'd love to just ask you a very broad question to start, and that is where are we right now with the cloud? Where do you see, what are sort of the biggest issue, the biggest challenges that you see with companies adopting and embracing the cloud right now? >> Well, unlike a lot of people, I think we're still a lot earlier in cloud adoption than other people do, maybe. If it were a baseball game, I'd say, maybe, the pitcher's coming out for the top of the second inning. And I think the barriers tend to be two-fold. One is, for traditional enterprises, there's still a lot of, we have a lot of embedded, a lot of legacy, a lot of investment, sunk costs, how can we step away from that, should we step away from that? So you hear a lot of discussion around what's the right role, hybrid clouds, so forth, and so on. For companies like Capital One that have said, "we're going all in on cloud," and Capital One has announced it's going all in on public cloud. Then the challenge becomes how do I adopt the practices of the organizations around the frontier of cloud? Because you have to really adapt a whole range of things. It's not just ... a lot of people treat cloud computing as kind of like it's a data center at the end of a wire. I have my traditional practices, my traditional models, my traditional tools, my traditional cost models. All of those things have to change. And so, I think for companies like Capital One, and we certainly have faced those things I would say, but for those companies that make the break to say "yeah, we're going to go all out on cloud," then it's how do I restructure the entire way I do information technology? >> Yeah, and Bernard, I agree with a lot of what you were saying. You and I have had conversations about cloud over the years. I've read lots of what you've written. Amazon would agree it's still day one, right? >> It's their phrase. >> Microsoft, I want to get you, not as Capital One, but just as a watcher of the industry, I remember a few years back, Microsoft put out TV ads like "to the cloud." At least made me cringe when I saw some of it. When I look at Microsoft today, they play strongly in SAS, they've got public cloud, they've got all the virtualization in various business products for private cloud. So they play a lot of places, they have a lot of strengths, they understand application, they understand data, they're well positioned. They might not be number one in many of these areas, but a strong customer base. And they're doing good, but I'd like to see them do even more. I'm curious of your viewpoint. >> Well I guess what I'd say is, if you look at the universe or the aggregate of cloud providers, Gartner says there's three that really matter, up in the upper right-hand quadrant of the Magic Quadrant. And that's what I call AMG, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. If you look at Gartner, they've said these are the three that really have both a vision and the ability to execute. >> We believe Alibaba might be making its way in there at this point. >> You know, Alibaba's quite interesting. I've had some interactions with Alibaba, before I joined Capital One, and they're tremendously capable technically, they have huge ambition, so I wouldn't dismiss them or write them off. They don't have much presence in the U.S., at least Capital One is primarily a U.S.-based company. But also, because of the fact that Alibaba doesn't have much presence in U.S., and not that much in Europe, they tend to not be so present, but I would definitely follow them going forward, for sure. >> Sorry, I took you off track, talking about Microsoft's positioning in the marketplace. >> Well, so they're clearly one of the three players. I would say they've had a pretty dramatic turnaround from where they were, say, four or five years ago. You can track that, maybe, to their CEO. I think they're making a strong play in this space, and obviously are committed to it. >> I think Capital One is an adopter and pushing on many of the disruptive technologies. I remember the first Echo Dot that I got, it was actually a Capital One giveaway at a conference, I bumped into you at the Serverless conference. A lot of this show is talking about the business productivity, the applications. There's lots of Azure, but I haven't heard as much about Azure, there's some announcements around Kubernetes. I had a great conversation at the Serverless booth, but if you look at the cloud piece, I want to get your viewpoint as to how Microsoft's doing, where customers are. I know we're in, especially, Serverless' very early days. But get your viewpoints on how those fit into the overall position, and anything you could say about Capital One there would be great, too. Capital One, as I said, is all-in on public cloud computing. It's announced it's going to close all of its data centers. And, as I said, the second challenge that organizations face is really when they go all-in, they go "now I have to really adapt all my practices." So, Capital One is looking at things like containers, serverless, it sponsors the serverless conference, so it's very much engaged with those kinds of things. This conference, I mean, unlike AWS that basically says "all we do is AWS," Microsoft has a very broad range of products, and they have to represent all of them at their conference. So, it's certainly not an only-Azure conference, and that's to be expected. I've said in a number of the sessions, and it's part of my job, I have to track what's going on with all these providers. And so I've tracked what's gone on in the sessions. I've been pretty impressed with some of the stuff that Azure has put forward. But there's other sessions as well. And they have to cover all the rest of their stuff. >> As you said, Capital One is all-in on the public cloud, but it is a multi-cloud world. And a lot of companies are still sort of struggling to figure out "how do I make this work, where do I go?" Can you walk us through your decision process at Capital One, and then also maybe tease out some best practices about how other organizations should make decisions? >> Well, I can't say a ton about Capital One, and about how we've looked at it, other than what we publicly announced, which is "we're all in on public cloud." Our CIO has been up on stage at AWS, very strong adapter of AWS. What I would say, is that, for most organizations, there's sort of two factors you might think about in terms of looking at using multiple clouds. One is from a risk communication strategy. Do you want to have all your eggs in one basket? And that's probably for most enterprises it's not that much of a problem in the sense that they own something of everything, no matter what. You'll never find any enterprise that only uses one thing. In any technology place, and even if they do, then they buy another company that's on a different one. But, from a risk communication strategy you might want that, and then, you might also be looking at opportunistic deployment of workloads if you want to take advantage of superior functionality available from one cloud provider or another. So, do you really like the machine learning that comes out of Azure, well you might decide to put workloads based on that. Or if you like something about certain kinds of database offerings, you might look at that. If you want a certain breadth of services, you might look at AWS, so there's a criteria you have to establish about what you want to accomplish with your applications, or what you want to do around risk management. >> Great, Bernard, what other things have you been seeing at the conferences, what's exciting you? Any takeaways for people that haven't been at the show? Or any things you'd recommend people go poke at? >> As I said, I attended a number of sessions yesterday. I was pretty impressed with the Cosmos DB multi-master. I used to run engineering groups at a database company, and I'll tell you, there's a huge revolution going on in databases, from all the providers, and having some domain experience, there's stuff that gets announced and I go, "how do they that?" I mean, that's amazing. So that was pretty impressive. There were a couple of announcements around Express Route. One, they've announced the 100 Gig Connectivity, which is pretty amazing, I think. And the second thing, this didn't get a lot of coverage and all that, is they announced that basically, let's say you're a corporation with stuff in Argentina and Switzerland. You can basically put Express Route connections into the Microsoft fiber backbone and then just transit your data across their private fiber backbone, which is pretty, pretty interesting. So, I thought that was pretty interesting. I think the rest of it is slipping my mind at the moment. >> I tell you, that is fascinating, because I remember, I've been watching since when AWS came out it had Direct Connect. It was, well, this is really interesting, there's some use cases, but Amazon, Azure, and Google, all of those versions, just hearing massive adoption as people go to a hosting colo service provider, and that can get them, I have the stuff that I'm going to own, and then I'm going to have the stuff, the public cloud in it, physics still exist, but I'm going to get them closer with high band with low-latency connections, so it's a real game-changer as to how I build my applications, and build that ... The hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, which is something we've been kind of looking at as it's a challenging thing to do, over time. >> Yeah, it's interesting, because there was a time when the huge challenge was the skinny straw. If you had 100 megs, that was a pretty skinny straw. And now, that's really opened up a lot. And these direct connects are pretty good cross-connect performance. That was the pretty interesting era, I thought. >> Great, Bernard, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Thank you so much for inviting me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest but a company we've had on the program before. Brian Gregory is the director of Cloud Strategy and Engineering at Express Trips, I'm sorry, Express Scripts, and Express Scripts booth is actually right behind us on the stage. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you were giving us a little bit of background about, I believe it's been about three years you've been with the company. Why don't you share with our audience Express Scripts company that many of us have probably used, less likely that everybody knows who you are and your role there. >> Yeah, so my role today, again, is a Cloud Strategy Engineering director, but it's really focused on building out the next-gen platform, making infrastructure irrelevant, if you will, and making our developers go faster and making everything as streamless as possible. >> And Brian, just for our audience that doesn't know Express Scripts, give us, what's the brain of the company and what are you known for. >> We serve 85 million patients today, 3,000 contractor. We have, if you go look at what we do as a business, the pharmacy benefit management side, our goal is to basically make prescriptions safer, more affordable, for all of our patients. So if you think about what we're doing, that's really what we're doing, and we like to say pharmacy smarter. And for us, that's our major goal in everything we do. So my team, anybody's team, doesn't matter what you're doing in technology, that's your end goal, to deliver value to those patients and your clients and so that's what we focus on. >> Well, Brian, it's a good thing. IT's changing all the time, at least health care, nothing's been changing radically, changing all the time. So, bring us inside what you did when you came inside the company. Your role, as you said, infrastructure. Wanted to worry about that less, that's something we hear a lot. >> Right, and one thing I should clarify is that Express Scripts has always been a technology company. If you look at their grass roots and what they were built upon, in 30 years they grew to 100 billion dollar business, really by utilizing technology at the end of the day. When I came in, I was managing some infrastructure teams and database organizations and we decided that this was, the whole digital transformation, or cloud strategy, was a real thing, so my leadership asked me to take this on as an initiative, that was my background, that's where I came from, my grass roots, if you will, from Savs and Centurylink and that became a full-time role. It came to one point where you can't do both, this is taking off and it's being a real thing. Our main goal was to say, how are we going to step outside the box? We still have to run a 100 billion dollar organization. But we got to figure out what the new is, right, you're going to invent that next light bulb, and we've got to maintain the current one. And so, for us, we wanted a full-fledged platform. It wasn't about just spitting out BM's and delivering those, I think we'd had that covered. It was really about figuring out how we're going to figure out cloud, cloud in general. And then what about multi-cloud and how do we get a platform that could seamlessly integrate with all of those. >> And Brian, what was the underlying driver there in the business? Is it you needed to develop more software, you needed to move faster, what's the why, was it cost savings and things getting out of hand? >> Yeah, all of the above. I think specifically it's about delivering value, delivering value to patients as fast and seamless as possible. And so we wanted to figure that out. The old ways, if we all go back in our years of, there were days that I would get hardware and physically, I'm going to figure out how to put the drive so that they're getting more IO or whatever. Those projects have been solved, right, and if you look at companies 10 years ago, they were like, virtualization is scary, I can't do that, I have production workload. So the trend in the market is to keep moving up the stack, and so ultimately, that's where you end up focusing on. Where do we deliver value as an IT organization? That's not for us to go build a homebrewed system that does any of those things. You can go buy those things, integrate them and figure out how they can drive value in your business. So that's what we wanted to do, get a platform. The first goal we had was actually a really interesting story. We wanted to build a new mobile application that would allow consumers to go on and make a user experience much better than it had previously been. If you wanted to order prescriptions, you could go onto this app and say, not just, can I order that, but I can also see what the prices are at different places local to you, the distance to those, and then what would it take if you did a 90-day fill for our home-delivery program and you could sign up via that method. And that was really what we were going after, that end user experience to say, how do we change the experience for our consumers. Not necessarily the back-end stuff, the day-to-day batch processing that they don't really care about how that's done as long as it's done within the time threshold that that's supposed to be done. >> Brian, can you talk a little bit about the process of getting to where we are in terms of, you talked about trying to figure out cloud, and part of that is figuring out which platform to go with and then part of it is finding the people with the skills to, once you've decided on a direction, to help you figure it out. Can you talk just a little bit about maybe that learning journey for you, for Express Scripts? >> Sure, sure. Yeah, it's really interesting, 'cause when I talk, I feel like this was five years that I've been doing this specifically at Express Scripts, when really, it's 18 months that we've really stood up our internal hybrid cloud and got our platform installed. So, yeah, it's learning by doing but the nice thing about everything we're doing, and you hear this all the time, is that we can iterate, you can make changes. It's not like you have to wait three months and then you can't shift or can't course-correct. Learning, the team's been amazing, so I grabbed some people within, they got re-trained on this is the new stack. I also brought in some people that had previously worked with me that had some of the skill sets. Really, it's people that are curious in nature and want to learn. But then you go, that's a neat story, we can stand up a cloud or use an external one, you can stand up your pads. But at the end of the day, what do you do next, how do you start to engage developers? 'Cause when we opened the doors for business, it wasn't like we had everybody standing there waiting to get in. You had to convince them of, these are the features, not convince them, show them the features and the functionality and why it mattered to them. Why does it matter now, and then you go, okay, that's great, and you start to, I would say my team focuses probably 80% of their time on teaching people how to fish, hoping that the developers get better and the consuming of the platform, they help each other and we see a lot of that happening in our slack channels and hipchat and different things, communication tools where they're helping each other, so we're not even having to answer all the questions. But then you get the whole problem of, all right, well, now we've got release management we're going to start working with and that opens a whole new can and they're transforming as well and they're definitely changing their processes. But it gets hairy when you start looking at, well, we've got to keep the tourniquet over here 'cause we can't afford any disruption or outages for our patients. But these new guys, if they check all these boxes, they should be able to deploy whenever they feel like in the middle of the day and we should feel comfortable doing that because it's now micro-service, it's not some monolith thing that they don't understand. >> Brian, can you give us a little insight on the state of your application, so I think most people understand something like cloud foundry, oh, I wanted to build that new app, that's a great use case. How many applications have you moved over, do you have a percentage you measure? I heard the Liberty Mutual keynote was like, what percentage of workloads they have there, what percentage of people code, how fast they release code on this thing, what metrics do you use? >> Yeah, so I had this conversation last night. We don't have, I can tell you that we have over 1100 applications that have moved in 18 months, so I would tell you that, when it started out, we had specific goals of migrating existing lift and shift and refactoring and things like that. What we found was that there's all this net new coming in, not just what we're doing is blowing up within the company, but they're also doing that on the developer's side and they're doing a lot of new things so those new projects clearly migrate over or come in the door starting out with cloud-first strategy. Then you start to lift and shift, and you really have to start cherry-picking what makes sense. Some things you go, there's not really the value, there's no user experience behind this, it's literally just a monetary thing, maybe or maybe not. But you start taking the dollars that you're going to put towards migrating this, and then you're like, well, it's not really a win-win. So what we found was that allnet news coming this direction on the cloud foundry platform, and the workload that makes sense, and then we started cherry-picking things that we re-wrote in spring and they're slowly migrating. But today we're at 1100, we just hit 1100 apps, which is pretty good for 18 months. >> That's really impressive in 18 months. Any lessons learned there as to things you could do to move faster or mistakes that were made that you could tell your peers, hey, watch out for this? >> Yeah, I definitely have a lot of those but, at the same time, I feel like lessons learned are the best thing, the best thing we do is fail, literally, because then you learn something from it and you move forward. I think the one advice, some advice I would give to people is, don't get hung up on trying to be perfect. If there's a lift and shift opportunity and you only get 60 to 70% of the goodness of moving this thing, then just go ahead and do it, don't say, well, but it's not perfect, and we want to make this app completely different, 'cause that's where people get stuck on. I think once they realize they just try some things and then you can get over there and change it and make it perfect down the road. But some people are like, why would I move one to one, I should refactor this app and maybe have it multiple per one and those are great conversations but I think it keeps people, the old analysis paralysis conversation, and it's like, just try it, just go. I would say another good story we had is, we have an outcomes conference that we host, Express Scripts. We had, they were trying to come up with a new way to do basically a content management solution show a digital benefit guide, and they came in and they wanted to try one technology. Didn't work out, two weeks later they came back and were like, well, it doesn't deliver that, so we tried something else. And we tried four different things for this person and they got to where they wanted to be but the important part was that we could change on the fly. In the old days, it was like, you ordered hardware or you ordered BM's, you were stuck because he had dates to deliver and we basically, we can change things. If it doesn't work we'll try something else and you can move around and do things at scale where you couldn't before. >> It sounds like a set of outcomes that the business side, the executive side, leadership, can actually point to and recognize as helping transform the business. You're here at the conference, a sponsor of the conference, participating at the conference. And you're a pharmacy benefits company, so, that's an interesting position to be in. But it sounds like the business and management supports you and recognizes that this is helping move with velocity. >> Yes, so from the top down, we are a technology company at heart. This is what we do and the company has come a long way with, when I got there, the fact that we're here sponsoring it means a great deal to me because this is, after all, an open-source tech conference, which is amazing. It's nice to talk about, get some branding out there and talk about what we're doing so people know that, hey, there's a lot of really cool things happening. Maybe we recruit some people at the end of the day as a result, you never know. But yeah, it's really about just branding and then supporting the community and getting out the word of what we're doing and why it matters. >> Last question I have for you, Brian, is, a lot of discussion about multi-cloud and things like Kubernetes enable that. Can you share what public cloud or public cloud you use, how you look at that dynamic? >> Yeah, so we've got a few things in the works. So there's a few POC's happening, I would tell you that our internal cloud is where we have everything hosted today. We've built an internal hybrid cloud. >> So you have the data centers? >> Yeah, we have multiple data centers and we have our internal hybrid clouds built out. We are evaluating some external capabilities, we're also doing some partnerships, you can actually go read about. Our CIO just released a story about that. We're definitely looking for that, where's our burst-able capacity. With our data and with what we have going on, going external is a much different conversation than where my previous company, we're talking about Hippa compliance and a lot of different data issues that we've got to make sure we're protecting and our most important thing to do is protect that data from our patients. So there's no reason for us to go, we have to get out external at this point, but we do see that as an important part of our key going forward to say, this is part of our strategy, to say, we've got to get an external solution as well. >> Brian Gregory, always love the stories of how digital transformation are helping to impact everyone who uses prescriptions. I mean, no better way of helping people, so we'll be back with lots more coverage here of Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Thanks for watching The Cube. (techno music) >> I remember when I had such a fantastic batting practice, I walked by a couple of sports writers in that era.