(soft music) (soft music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas. This is the Cube. SiliconAngles flagship program. We got out to the events and extract the (mumbles). Been here two full days of wall to wall coverage. I'm John Furrier. My cohost Peter Burris. Peter really good to see Oracle really move from modern marketing experience, the old show name, to a cleaner broader canvas called Modern CX. Which is modern customer experience. And you startin to see the new management which took the baton from the old management. Kevin Akeroyd. Andrea Ward who did a lot of work. I mean they basically did a ton of acquisitions. We talked last year if you remember. Look they have a data opportunity and we spelled it right out there and said if they can leverage that data horizontally and then offer that vertical specialism with differentiation, they could have their cake and eat it too. Meaning the pillars of solutions in a digital fabric with data. That's what they did. They essentially did it. >> Yeah they did. And it's been, it was a. We came here hoping that that's what we would see and that's what we saw John. Oracle not only has access to a lot of data but a lot of that first person data that really differentiates the business. Information about your finances. Information about your customers. Information about orders. That's really, really crucial data. And it's not easy to get. And if you could build a a strategy for your customers that says let's find ways of bringing in new sources of data. Leveraging that data so that we can actually help you solve and serve your customers better. You got a powerful story. That's a great starting point. >> And one of the things that I would observe here is that this event, the top story was that Mark Hurd came down and talked to the customers in the keynote. And also made a cameo visit to the CMO, some which they had separately. But really kind of basically putting it transparently out there. Look we got all this technology. Why are we spending all of this technology and effort to get a one percent conversion rate on something that happens over here. Let's look at it differently. And I think the big story here is that Oracle puts the arc to the future. Which I think is a very relevant trajectory. Certainly directionally correct using data and then figuring out your process and implementing it. But really looking at it from a people perspective and saying if you can use the data, focus your energies on that data to get new things going. And not rely on the old so much. Make it better but bring in the new. >> I think that's the one thing that we need to see more from Oracle in all honesty. At shows, this show, and shows like this. Is that and we asked the question to a couple quests. What exactly is modern marketing? Technology can allow a company to do the wrong things faster and cheaper. And in some cases that's bad. In marketing that's awful. Because more of the wrong thing amplifies the problem. That's how you take down a brand. You can really annoy the hell out of your customers pretty quickly. >> Well I think you made that point interesting I thought. On that just to reiterate that, validate that, and amplify. Is that if you focus more on serving the business as a marketer versus now it's about the customer. Okay which is why I like the CX and I know you do too. You can create enterprise value through that new way. Versus hey look what team. I'm helping you out with some leads and whatever. Support, content. Marketing now owns the customer relationship. >> Well marketers talk about a persona all the time John. They say what's the persona? It's a stylized type of customer, and now with data we can make it increasingly specific. Which is very, very powerful. I think Oracle needs to do the same thing with the marketing function. What is that marketing function persona that Oracle is, it's self driving to. Driving it's customers to. And trying to lead the industry into. So I would personally like to see a little bit more about what will be the role of marketing in the future. What exactly is the modern. What exactly is modern marketing? What is the road map that Oracle has, not just for delivering the technology, but for that customer transformation that they talk about so much. It's clear that they have an idea. I'd like to see a little bit more public. Cause I think a lot of marketers need to know where they're going to end up. >> I was a bit skeptical coming in here today. I was a little nervous and skeptical. I like the team though, the people here. But I wasn't sure they were going to be able to pull this off as well as they did. I'd give them a solid letter grade of an A on this event. Not an A plus because I think there's some critical analysis that's worth addressing in my opinion. In my opinion Oracle's missing some things. It's not their fault. They're only going as fast as they can. Not to get into your perspective too, but here's my take. They don't know how to deal with video. That came up as technical issue. But Jay -- >> But nobody really does. >> But nobody really does. And that's just again because we're in the video business it jumped out at me. But Jay Baer was on. Who's hosted the CMO Summit. And he's out there too like us. Content is a big thing. And I haven't heard a lot about the content equation in the marketing mix. So if you look at the modern marketing mix, content is data. And content is instrumental as a payload for email marketing. And we're in the content business so we know a lot about the engagement side of it. So I just don't see a lot of the engagement conversations that are happening around content. Don't see that dots connecting. >> And I think you're right. I think you're right John. And part of the reason is, and again I think Oracle needs to do a better job at articulating what this means. From our perspective, it's my perspective but you agree with me. I'll put words in your mouth. Is that marketing has to be a source of value to customers. Well what do customers find valuable? They find information in easily digestible, consumable chunks as they go on their journey. What are those chunks? Those chunks, in fact, are content. So to tie this back and show how crucial this is. At the end of the day, consumers, businesses need to learn about your brand. Need to learn about next best action. All that other stuff. In consumable interesting, valuable chunks. And it ultimately ends up looking like content. So your absolutely right to talk about how this all comes together and show how, that content is the mechanism by which a lot of this value's actually going to be delivered. Is really crucial. >> And now to give the praise sandwich, as we say in positive coaching alliance, two positives and then the critical analysis in the middle. That's the praise sandwich. So to give them some praise around the criticism. I will say that Oracle validates for me, and this is why I think they got a good strategy. That there's no silver bullet in marketing. Okay there's no silver bullet. This product will get you more engagement. This will do that. They do show that data is going to be an instruble part of creating a series of collections of silver bullets. Of bullets if you will. To create that value. And I think that's the key. And then the second praise is, this is kind of nuance in their analysis. But the third party data support, is a big deal in my mind. I want to expand more on that. I want to learn more about it. Because when you have the first party data, which is very valuable, and access to more data sources. That becomes increasingly interesting. So the extensibility for getting content data or other data can come in through third party. I think that opens the door for Oracle to innovate on the area we gave the criticism on. So I think that's a positive trend. I think that's a good outlook on having the ability to get that third party data. >> Yeah but it's also going to be one of the places where Oracle is going to have to compete very, very aggressively with some other leaders who are a little bit more oriented towards content. At least some of their marketing clients are a little bit more content oriented. I'm comfortable Oracle will get there because let's face it. At the end of the day, marketing's always done a pretty good job of created, creative, using data to figure out what creative to use or create is nice. Very important. But what we're really talking about is customer experience. Will the customer get something out of every interaction? And while content's crucial to that the end result is ultimately, is the customer successful? And Oracle is showing a better play for that. So I'll give you, I like the way you did it on the grading. I'll give them a B plus. But I'm not disagreeing with you. I think we saw A talent here. We saw an A minus story. And they're a year in. So there's still some work that needs to be done, but it's clearly -- >> Why you weighted as a B plus >> I give them an A on vector. And where they're going. >> I would agree with that. >> And the feedback that we've gotten from the customers walking the show floor. There's a lot of excitement. A lot of positive energy. The other thing that I would say -- >> Oh the band. I'd give the band, the band was a B minus. (Peter laughs) Yeah that takes it. That's going to kill the curve. >> What was the band last night? >> I don't even remember. We missed the good one, I know that. We had dinner so we came late. It was a good band. It wasn't like, it wasn't like Maroon 5 or One Republic. Or Imagine Dragons or U2. >> Or one of the good ones. Sting. C minus. But the other thing that I think is really important is at least it pertains to modern customer experience. Is that they are, they are absolutely committed to the role the data's going to play. And we talked about that right at the front. But they are demonstrating a deep knowledge of how data and data integration and data flows are really going to impact the way their customers businesses operate. And I think that there were a couple of, I'll give a really high point and one that I want to hear more about in terms of the interviews we had. Great high point was one, we talked a lot about data science and how data science technologies are being productized. And that we heard, for example, that Oracle's commitment to it's marketplace is that they are going to insure that their customers can serve their customer's customers with any request within 130 milliseconds anywhere in the world. That's a very, very powerful statement that you can only really make if you're talking about having an end to end role over, or influence -- >> Like we commented, that's a good point. Like we commented that this end to end architecture is going to be fundamental. If you read the tea leaves and look at other things happening, like at Mobile World Congress. Intel I think is a bellwether on this with 5G. Cause they have to essentially create this overlay for connectivity as well as network transformation to do autonomous vehicles. To do smart cities. To smart homes. All these new technologies. It's an end to end IPR (mumbles). It's connected devices. So they're super smart to have this connected data theme which I think's relevant. But the other one, Ron Corbusier's talked about this evolution. And I find some of these, and I want to get your reaction to this statement. So Ron was kind of like, "oh it's an evolution. "We've seen this movie before." Okay great. But when you talk to Marta Feturichie, who was a customer from Royal Phillips. >> Peter: Great interview. >> She's head of CRM. Now she's doing some other stuff. So okay. What does CRM mean? So if you think evolution. What the customers are doing. Time Warner and Royal. It's interesting. Certain things are becoming critical infrastructure and other things are becoming more dynamic and fluid. So if you believe in evolution, these are layers of innovation. So stuff can be hardened as critical infrastructure, say like email marketing. So I think that what's happening here is you start to see some hardening of some critical infrastructure, aka marketing technology. MarTech (mumbles). Maybe some consolidation. AdTech kind of comes together. Certain things are going to be hardened and platformized. >> Let's take the word hardened and change it cause I know what you mean. Let's say it's codified. Now why is that, why is that little distinction a little bit interesting is because the more codified it gets, the more you can put software on it. The more you can put software on it the more you can automate it. And now we're introducing this whole notion of the adaptive intelligence. Where as we start to see marketing practices and processes become increasingly codified. What works, what doesn't work? What should we do more of? What should we do less of? Where should we be spending out time and innovating? Versus where should we just be doing it because it's a road activity at this point in time. That's where introducing this adaptive intelligence technology becomes really interesting. Because we can have the adaptive technology elements handle that deeply codified stuff where there really is not a lot of room for invention. And give the more interesting ongoing, customer engagement, customer experience -- >> Right on. And I think we should challenge Oracle post event and keep an eye on them on this adaptive intelligence app concept. Because that is something that they should ride to the sunset cause that is just a beautiful positioning. And if they can deliver the goods on that, they say they have it. We'll expand on that. That's going to give them the ability to churn out a ton of apps and leverage the data. But to the codified point you're making, here's my take. One of the things that I hear from customers in marketing all the time is a lot of stuff if oh yeah mobile first all that stuff. But still stuff's web presence based. So you got all these coded URL's. You got campaigns running ten ways from Sunday. DNS is not built to be adaptive and flexible. So it's okay to codify some of those systems. And say, "look we just don't tinker with these anymore." They're locked and loaded. You build on top of it. Codify it. And make that data the enabling technology from that. >> Peter: Without it become new inflexible (mumbles). >> Yeah I can't say, "Hey let's just tweak the hardened infrastructure "to run an AB test on a campaign." Or do something. No, no. You set this codified systems. You harden them. You put software on top of them. And you make it a subsystem that's hardened. And that's kind of what I mean. That's where the market will go because let's face it. The systems aren't that intelligent to handle a lot of marketing. >> Peter: They're still computers. >> They're still computers. People are running around just trying to fix some of this spaghetti code in marketing. And as the marketing department gets more IT power. Hey you own it. They're owning now. Be afraid what you wish for you might get it. So now they own the problem. So I think Oracle on the surfaces side has a huge opportunity to do what they did with Time Warner. Come into the market and saying, "Hey we got that for you." And that's what Hurd's kind of subtle message was on his keynote. Hey we're IT pros, but by the way you don't need to be in the IT business to do this. We fix your problems and roll out this -- >> We're going to talk to you in your language. And your language is modern customer experience. Which is one of the reasons why they've got to be more aggressive. And stating what they mean by that. >> And we have all the data in our data cloud. And all the first party data in our Oracle database. >> Right, right exactly right. >> That system of record becomes the crown jewel. Oracle has a lock spec on the table. You think it's a lock spec? >> Uh no. And that's exactly why I think they need to articulate where this is all going a little bit. They have to be a leader in defining what the future of marketing looks like so they can make it easier for people to move forward. >> Alright putting you on the spot. What do you think a modern marketing looks like? And organization. >> We talked about this and the answer that I gave, and I'll evolve it slightly, cause we had another great guest and I thought about it a little bit more is. A brand continuously and always delivers customer value. Always. And one of the -- >> Kind of cliche-ish. >> Kind of cliche-ish. >> Dig into it. >> But modern marketing is focused on delivering customer value. >> How? >> If they're deliver - well for example when the customer has a moment in a journey of uncertainty. Your brand is first is first to the table with that content that gets them excited. Gets them comfortable. >> Lot of progression. >> Makes them feel ready to move forward. That your, and well I'll make another point in a second. And I would even say that we might even think about a new definition of funnel. At the risk of bringing up that old artifact. Historical funnel went to the sale. Now we can actually start thinking about what's that funnel look like to customer success. >> Well there's two funnel dynamics that are changing. This is important, I think. This is going to be one of those moments where wow the Cube actually unpacked a major trend and I believe it to be true. The vertical funnel has collapsed. And now the success funnel is not >> Peter: It's not baked. >> Not big. It's decimated from this perspective of if the sale is the end game of the funnel, pop out that's over. Your point is kind of like venture funding for starter. That's when the start line begins. So here it's, okay we got a sale. But now we have instrumentation to take it all the way through the life cycle. >> And you know John. That's a great way of thinking about it. That many respects when you, when you introduce a customer to a new solution that has complex business implications that you are jointly together making an investment in something. And you both have to see it through. >> I mean sales guys put investment proposal on the -- >> That's exactly right. And so I think increasingly. So I would say modern marketing, modern marketing comes down to customer success. A prediction I'll make for next year is that this session is called, you know we'll call it the modern marketing modern customer experience show. But the theme is going to be customer success. >> Heres what I'm going to do. Here's what we're going to do this year Peter. We're going to, we will, based upon this conversation which we're riffing in real time as we analyze and summarize the event. We, I will make it my mission. And you're going to work with me on this as a directive. We're going to interview people, we're going to pick people that are truly modern marketing executives. >> Peter: That's great. >> We're going to define a simple algorithm that says this is what we think a modern marketing executive looks like. And we're going to interview them. We're going to do a story on them. And we're going to start to unpack because I think next year. We should be coming here saying, "we actually did our work on this." We figured out that a modern marketing organization and an executive behave and look this way. >> Right I think it's a great idea. So I'll give you one more thought. Cause I know you'll like this one too. Doug Kennedy. The partner. The conversation that we had. >> Very good. >> Talking about clearly a grade A executive. Seven weeks into the job. But that is going to be, you know for this whole thing to succeed he's got a lot of work in front of him. It's going to be very interesting to see how over the course of time this show and other Oracle shows evolve. >> I have a lot of partner experience. You do too. He's got a zillion years under his belt. He's a pro. He did not have any deer in the headlights look for seven weeks on the job. He's been there. He's done that. He knows the industry. He's seen the cycles of change. He's ridden waves of innovation up and down. And I think Oracle has a huge opportunity with his new program. And that is Oracle knows how to make money. Okay Oracle knows how to price things. They know how to execute on the sales side and go to market. And partners relationships are grounded in trust. And profitability. I would say profitability first and trust second. And it's kind of a virtuous circle. >> But John they've got to start getting grown in customer experience right? >> John: Yeah, yep. >> And that's not, it's doable but it's going to be a challenge. >> Well we talk about swim lanes with his interview, and I thought that was interesting. If you look at a center for instance, Deloy, PWC and all the different players. They're picking their swim lanes where their core competency is. And that's what he was basically saying. They're going to look for core competency. Now I think they're not there yet. The major SI's and potential partners. So he's going to have to put the spec out and put the bar there and say this is what we got to do. But you got to make the channel serve the customer. It has to be profitable. And it has to be relevant. And the only dangerous strategy I would say is the co-selling thing is always dicey. >> Especially if one has customer experience as a primary. >> It requires equilibrium in the ecosystem. >> You got it, you got it. >> It isn't there. >> And also it's a multi-partner go to market. It's not just one or two now. >> So he's going to have to really spread the love at the same time have hardened rules. Stick to his knitting on that one. Okay Peter final word. What do you, bottom line the show. Encapsulate the show into a bumper sticker. >> Well we heard Amazon released today. Google released today. Beat their numbers. Two companies that are trying to build an ecosystem from their core of the cloud. And the question is. Is Oracle who has customers with applications and with that first person data. Are they going to be able to cloudify, sorry for using that word, but are they going to be able to gain that trust that this new operating model they're really committed to for the future. Before Amazon and Google can create applications to their platform. Because Oracle has the end to end advantage right now. And in the world where digital's important. Speed's important. The fidelity of the data's important. The customer experience is important. That end to end has a window of opportunity. >> And I would also add two other companies reported, Microsoft and Intel and missed. So you have Amazon and Google. New guard, newer guard. Old guard Intel, Microsoft. Oracle is considered old guard even though they have some modernization going on from CX and the cloud. But Oracle is cloud a hundred percent in the cloud. Their SAP, for instance, is going multi-class. So the wild card in all this is, if the multi-cloud game evolves. >> Think end to end. End to end. Because that has advantages. When you're talking data, one of the things that Jack Brookwood said. He said, "you know why we can hit that 150 millisecond target?" >> Cause you don't have to move the data around. >> Cause sometimes we don't have to move the data around. >> This can be very interesting. And this going to be fun to watch and participate in. Of course the Cube will covering Oracle, well we'll be there again this year. We don't have the exacts specifics on that, but certainly if your interested in checking us out. Were siliconangle.com. Peter's research is at wikibon.com as well as SiliconANGLE on the front page. SiliconAngle.tv has all the videos. And well will be documenting and following the modern marketing experience with people and companies. And documenting that on the Cube and SiliconANGLE. So that's a wrap from day two at Oracle Modern CX. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience, 2017. Brought to you by, Oracle. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Peter Burris, and once again theCUBE is here at Oracle Modern Marketing... Modern Customer Experience, having a great series of conversations about the evolution of marketing, the role technology is playing, and especially important, the centerpiece that data now has within a overall orientation towards customer experience. Now one of the key features of that notion of customer experience is what's going on with service. And this is a great session, because we've got a representative from Oracle, but also a customer, as well. Welcome to Steve Fioretti, who's the VP of Product Management, Oracle Service Cloud and Heather Miksch, who's the Vice President of Field and Product Operations at Carbon. >> Thank you. >> Peter: Welcome to the (mumbles) >> Thanks. >> Glad to be here. >> So, Steve why don't we start with you. >> Steve: Sure. >> Oracle is here talking about how the cloud can help transform field and service operations. >> Steve: Right. >> How is it transforming it, what're the trends? >> Well, there's a lot of interesting trends that are affecting customer service, and I would, you talked about marketing and a lot of people say customer service is the new marketing. A lot of, a lot of interactions that people have with a company is in the customer service group and that really affects their impact on the brand. And there's a lot of things going on in the industry that are affecting customer service. There's new dynamic channels emerging, for example, people want to use Facebook Messenger, or WeChat, or WhatsApp as customer service channels to interact with their brand. It's much beyond just email, phone, chat, things like that. So, new channels are emerging and companies have to think about how do I integrate that into my customer service organization. Automation has really come into the fore. So, you know, in our personal lives we use Siri, and other V, you know, interactions we have with Alexa. So, those are coming into businesses to automate those, perhaps more simple, customer service processes. The internet of things is really taking off, where connected devices are allowing organizations to deliver predictive and proactive service. And on the automation front, they're even extending to where organizations are taking robotics and making robots agents in a retail store, for example. >> Are you talking about me? >> Wow it's Pepper. Hi, Pepper, what are...(Peter laughs) I didn't know you were here, that's awesome. So, Pepper, I'll ask you a question. What makes you a great Customer Service Agent? >> I'm smart, I'm connected, and I'm cool and, most importantly, I'm effective. (Steve laughs) >> And we replaced John Furrier with Pepper. >> Steve: Excellent.(Heather laughs) >> So, going to the next question about the, as we use robotics, as we use many of these things: we have to remember that these are not magic, they're really is no intelligence, in the classical sense, in them, they are still being driven to perform functions, take action, based on the availability of data that is coming off of customers. So talk a bit about the role the data, data integration, and some of these new tools: AI, or Adaptive Intelligence as you're calling it, are playing in ensuring that we can, enhance Customer Experience with new devices, and these new channels. >> You're absolutely right. I mean, if, you know, it's all about making the experience with a device like, like Pepper personalized and effective, and data, knowing what a consumer wants, what their preferences, and perhaps anticipating their preferences before, you know, they even know that; their past buying history, and taking all that, first-party data and third-party data, combining that with artificial intelligence, to deliver those personalized smart experiences is what's really happening. You heard a lot at this conference about Oracle's Adaptive Intelligence Initiative, and in the context of service, we're going to be building applications for things like account health, predictive field service, so, you know, you can predict ahead of time that a machine may, you know, may need service or break. And, you know, our customer here, Heather from Carbon is going to talk a lot about what they're doing with-- >> Well, so-- >> You know, smarts and the experience-- >> Got it, so how does this resonate with Carbon? >> Well, so, Carbon, is a, we manufacture an industrial 3D printer, and we have a process we call Digital Light Synthesis, which allows us to make photo-polymer materials that are robust enough to use in final production. So, our goal is to take customers from their design, of their part, straight into production, using the 3D printer as a means of production. And the reason why this is so exciting to Carbon, is our printer is actually an IOT device. It operates over the internet, and it operates through a browser. As a result, all types of data, from machine data from the printer, are flowing into our databases; as well as operational data, how long is the print taking, what type of resin is the customer using, how often are they printing, are they running into problems with their print? We've also built in a feedback system for the user, directly in the user interface, that flows directly through our channels into our databases, and it actually opens tickets in our Oracle Service Cloud for agents to contact the customers. The way we use this in a very practical standpoint, to give you one example, is for machine failures. The idea that we can monitor our printers in the field, and we can see if a part is having problems, and might fail, and we can actually proactively reach out to the customer and say, "We'd like to be there "in a couple weeks, change out this part. "It's not affecting your machine yet. "It's not affecting your prints." And, the customer is now able, instead of having unplanned downtime, which can be very difficult for a production environment, they now have planned downtime. This technology is nothing new. The example I like to use is, in the nuclear power industry, you don't wait until you have a core meltdown and then call your service engineer.(Steve laughs) Like, it's been around for for decades. >> Form has been around for a while. >> But what's new, is actually taking this technology and putting it in capital equipment, or putting it in devices like Peppper. I mean, she's also an IOT device; or even putting it into some of our wearables, or just other consumer products as well. And once you actually have this data coming through to the manufacturer of the device, it's really almost limitless what you can do with it. And, just in our short time of Carbon actually working on this problem, we have about 70% of our hardware failures are actually predictive. So that we're able to go out and repair the printer before the customer even realizes they have a problem. And some of the problems, we can actually fix before the customer knows anything, and we can fix them remotely from our offices in Redwood City. >> And it's interesting, theCUBE this week was also at the National Association of Broadcasters, in the NEB show, and we actually had an astronaut present over theCUBE. >> Yes, yes. >> One of the things that's interesting is there are 3D printers now on-- >> There are. >> Up on the Space Station. >> Yes, yes. >> So that you can print things a long ways away. That's one of the advantages, one of the great use cases of 3D printers >> Yes. >> Is that you can actually assemble, or you can create and assemble things, in very very, you know, unfriendly environments. >> Yes, yes. So, being able to schedule, and being able to plan that, is absolutely essential. >> Yes, yes and you can see, so for us, for 3D printers, some of the use cases that our customers are coming to us with, is they are companies, their own capital equipment manufacturers that have hundreds of thousands of spare parts, and they don't want to have to keep these inventories of massive spare parts. They want to have a design sent directly to a printer, maybe it's located in another country, closer to the point of use for that part, print out the part, and get it to the user faster. The idea is to actually move, one of the ideas, is to move manufacturing closer to the point of use. So that we're not spending all this time shipping products, you know, across the entire world, when we can actually be producing them much closer to the user. >> So that suggests, when we think about, again, the role of integration, the role of data, the idea of the Service Cloud; that there will be circumstances in which the part is printed and the capital equipment, Lessor, or the person who sold it, is on site to then put it in place, and assemble it. So now we're talking about multiple people operating very very quickly with a lot of new technology. >> Right. >> And, we now see why these types of devices and the need for that data sharing is so crucial. So, how is Oracle, in Oracle's vision of how service is going to be performed in the future, facilitating these types of interactions. >> So, I mean what we have to do is think about the technologies that are powering devices like robots, that are, providing technologies that are powering virtual assistants to automate customer interactions, to deliver technologies that help customers serve themselves. Another example is, more and more people, particularly younger generation, they don't want to phone. You've got a phone in home, they don't want to call you. They don't want to have anything to do with the phone. So, that's why things like messaging, self-service, going to a website and finding their own answer are critical. So, enabling and anticipating the data, the technologies, the way, the channels that people want to use, are all going to allow brands like Carbon and others to deliver great customer service for-- >> How are you using the Oracle Service Cloud, then, to facilitate many of these changes in your organization. >> So right now, what we have is for... We actually have a database we use for our big machine data. So, all the big machine data comes through, all the data coming off of our printers. And then we've integrated that database into Oracle Service Cloud; so then, instead of a customer having to phone up if they have a problem, we actually have, on our user interface, a little button, it just says "Request Help", that's all they need to do, and it's within the print job that they've been working on. All of that data about their print job: who the user is, what the company is, which printer they were using, how long was the print. Any specific information they want to say about the print, like why they're having trouble with it, it flows through into Oracle Service Cloud, and within the Oracle Service Cloud environment we can open up our big machine database, within that same environment, we can look at the actual print job. And then, we have an escalation tool we use for our engineering team. If we need to escalate, we can do that out of Service Cloud as well. And the idea is that there's very little manual entry of any other information. All of that is just flowing through, and everybody within the organization, whether it's the people that are first in front of the customer, or whether it's our engineers, have access to the exact same data. >> But is the system also then, through the escalation process, saying, well, we really got to get someone at the hardware level, or someone here, or someone at the design level. So you're flowing it to the right person. >> Yes, yes, absolutely. And the other fabulous thing about having these internet connected devices, is even when we do need to send somebody out on site to make a hardware fix, because of the diagnostic data we have from the device, we have, until now, 100% success rate in having the right part on-hand. Which is, if you've ever had much experience with capital equipment repairs, or even a repair of your dishwasher, sometimes the people don't have the right parts. We always have the right parts. >> That's too bad you couldn't >> So far, nothing-- >> print the part with the printer when it's down.(laughs) >> That's an interesting thing. We actually do have some parts within our printer that are printed on our printers, so its (laughs) it's pretty fun >> Can I talk about one other short example-- >> Of course. >> Of another customer that actually Heather's met here at the show, Denon & Marantz, so, they make all sorts of audio equipment, high-end audio equipment, and they've got a new brand of speakers, wireless speakers, called HEOS. And, when they first started, selling those to consumers they noticed, these are connected as well, they noticed that a number of them were having, a chip problem, remotely. People were calling in. So they went out, and they, they pinged, if you will, because they're connected, all of their consumer deployments, and they could tell that, you know, a small percentage of them are going to fail. They actually shipped speakers to those consumers before they even knew they had a problem, and they arranged to pick up the old ones, and you can imagine the value the customer, loyalty, and customer sat that that had. So that proactive predictive customer service example in the consumer world, and in a business world, really makes service that much-- >> Yeah. >> So, customer service, increasingly, is taking some degree of responsibility for ensuring that things operate within the threshold, as opposed to fixing things after they've broken. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Exactly. >> Heather: Yes, yeah. >> So how does that tie back into marketing and sales. So, at Carbon what is the, what is the way these feedback loops are being used to also inform marketing and selling. >> So, the interesting thing is that because we're also gathering operational data, we actually use the data coming off our printers for much more than just a service organization. In fact, our entire company is becoming more and more dependent on this printer data. So, for instance, our product group, when they're looking at bringing out a new feature they're actually looking at the data of the actual prints and the features that the customers are currently using, and deciding, do we need to augment this feature? Do we need to bring out another tool for our customers to use? And then looking at the printer data to make those decisions, and to prioritize what projects to work on because as you can imagine we've just got a ton of projects that we'd like to work on, and we need to make some priorities. The other thing that we're looking at is changing customer dynamics. Like we have, all of our customers are broken down into different industries, and we monitor the different printing behaviors, across industries, and we've been surprised. Like, there's certain industries that have grown faster than we would have expected, and because we've got this data that we look at every single day, we're looking at our customers' print data, we can actually make much faster corrections to either marketing campaigns, or sales strategies, or things like that, rather than waiting for a monthly roll-up or a quarterly roll-up or something like that. >> So who's the steward of data within Carbon? >> Who is the steward of data? We actually have a Director of Business Operations, his name is Chris Hutton. He actually works a lot with Oracle. He recently spoke at the Modern Finance Experience with Safra Catz, and I would say that if anyone's the steward of the data, he's probably the Grand Poobah of this data? But many of us have access to it. I mean, I can go into some of these databases and pull all the data I need. We don't really restrict it. >> But he's making sure that every, he's making sure that the data works for everybody in the organization. >> Yeah. Yeah, I'd say to some degree, yes. We also have our software engineers, making sure the printer data is actually-- >> Well, they're always... >> Heather, I think I would... >> Always behind the scenes. >> I think I would like the title Steward of Data. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> I think that's, I think I just found my new title. >> It's a little geeky.(laughs) >> Well it won't be long. Somebody's going to be called, and-- >> Exactly. One other quick example of how that feedback's happening between a customer service experience and let's say marketing, is, back to my Denon & Marantz example. They had another set of speakers, and they can tell, they often, the consumer will label the speaker, based upon, you know, this is the living room, this is the bedroom... And they had some failures on another brand of speakers, and they noticed a commonality, they were all labeled Bathroom. And, basically, they realized that their speakers... Some of these speakers couldn't handle the humidity that was happening in the bathroom; drove that back into product development, built a new series of speakers quickly for bathroom that were more waterproof, >> Yeah. >> Or, more moisture resistant, and created a new product extension that actually sells quite well. So, there's just a simple example of how that data flowed back into product development and marketing. >> So, Heather, you're not feeling like a fish out water here at a customer experience show with all of the-- >> Oh, no, of course not. No, I love this kind of stuff. >> What's exciting you about listening to, mainly marketers, but a lot of customer experience, too? >> I, you know people-- >> Talk about customer service >> That are in service, they get excited. I mean, fundamentally, there's all kinds of reasons for growing the business, and increasing revenue, and cutting costs, and all those things, but fundamentally, people are in service to help other people. Like, that's what gets us up in the morning. That's what makes us jump out of bed. So, the idea that there's all these companies doing these super-cool things, where you can, really, proactively be helping people instead of waiting till they're already in trouble. That's like, you've just burst through a barrier that's existed for millennia; the fact that we can actually start predicting problems. >> But that's also, we also talked a lot here on theCUBE this week about the role that talent's going to play. And, while I've never been in a hardcore customer service job, I know that people who have gone in, often got demoralized because they were always being yelled at because there was problem. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> And I had to believe it's attracting a new class of person because they can actually be participating, and anticipating, and solving problems >> Yes, yes, yes. Well, and I, it does take a certain type to be a customer, to be in front of customers all the time. We always say that the number one rule is you have to hire happy people to be put in that position, because (laughs) >> Peter: So, how about (Heather laughs) >> Actually, that was a very insightful question, because we were on a panel yesterday with an analyst, Denis Pombriant from the Beagle Research and he talked about, well, a couple of dynamics. One is, agents, the profile of the agents that you hire is changing. Because all the simple things are being solved online through self-service, and now that agent has to be a more gifted, even arguably, he called it a controller, a more aggressive agent that's going to be a problem-solver, able to collaborate with others. So, more empowered, and that's one thing, so I thought your question was really insightful. The nature of that agent is changing. And another thing that smart companies do, is they empower those agents. You know, not just with technology, but they give them the ability to, you know, the a brand of hotels, high-end hotels, I won't use the brand, but their agents are given a couple thousand dollars a day, and are empowered to use that to fix any issues. You know, somebody shows up and the room's booked, they don't drag them out of the hotel. (all laugh) They actually find them... Maybe they upgrade the room or they get them a meal if they have a problem so, empowering them also makes the agent feel much better about delivering customer service-- >> Alright, so Steve Fioretti, VP Product Management Oracle Service Cloud. Heather Miksch the Vice President of Field and Product Operations at Carbon, and Pepper from SoftBank. >> Yay! >> Thank you all for being a part of theCUBE here at the Oracle-- >> Thank you. >> Modern Customer Experience >> Thank you Peter. >> And talking about the role that service is now playing in driving customer experience and the role that the Cloud is playing in improving customer service. >> Steve: Great, awesome. >> We'll be back with a wrap-up in a few minutes, and in fact, John will magically reappear. Give us a few minutes and we'll be back with more from theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas for the CUBE's special coverage of Oracle's ModernCX, Modern Customer Experience, this is the Cube, I'm John Furrier, my cohost Peter Burris. Our next guest is Tony Nadalin. Tony Nadalin is the global vice president of the Global Consulting at Oracle for the marketing cloud. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. >> So you've got to implement this stuff, and we've heard a lot of AI magic and there's a lot of meat on the bone there. People are talking about there's a lot of real things happening. Certainly, Oracle's acquired some great technologies over the years, integrated it all together. The proof is in the pudding. When you roll it out, the results have to speak for themselves. >> Tony: Yes, absolutely. >> So share with us some of those activities. What's the score board look like? What's the results? >> I think what's really important, and Lewis spoke about this yesterday, it's people and product. The customers are buying visions. They're looking at creating and changing the customer experience. They're not just buying a piece of technology. They're buying a transformation. I think what's really important and what we do a lot in services, in all services, not just Oracle Marketing Cloud Services, but just healthy services, is when customers are implementing, they're not just implementing technology, they're not just plumbing the pipes. They are putting in changes. They're looking at the people, the process, the technology. We have a really good relationship with our customers and our partners and we're constantly looking at the complete set of services, the complete suite. From what I call transformational services, where we come in and try to understand what are you trying to change? How are you trying to change your customer experience? As a marketer, owning not only what you do, and how all the different channels are working together across all the different products that they are. They purchase Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai, Maxymiser, et cetera. >> So you're laying it all out, it's like you're sitting in a room, now I'm oversimplifying it, but it's not just rolling out stuff. You've got planning. >> Tony: You've got to plan it. >> Put the pieces together. >> You do, and it's a readiness. It's a readiness of the organization, you think about it, you've got within a marketing organization, you've got many teams coming together that have to be united around the brand, the consistency, how they're engaging with customers. But also, not only across like an acquisition team, or loyalty or an upsell and cross sell team, how does that, as we were looking at the products key notes, how does that then extend into the services engagement? How does it extend into the sales engagement? How are we making sure that everyone is using the same messaging, the same branding, leveraging each other? It's a real transformation at a people, process and technology level. So that when you're then implementing, you're implementing changes. And so we've got some great services and great partners that make sure that when the customers are going through that transformation, they're sort of going it fully readied. And our role, from a services perspective, is to ensure then, sort of define the transformation, define the strategy, like plan the plan, and then go execute the plan. And then putting in the plumbing, getting everyone readied. The analogy I used, I'm sure you've got kids, right? When we have toddlers, and you build the kid's first bikes. Your goal is to build that bike, put the training wheels on the bike, and ultimately sort of stand behind your child to a point that when you let them go, they're not going to graze their knees. Then from an ongoing basis, continue to stand behind them, then get ready to take the training wheels off. Then training wheels come off. Maybe at one point they may become BMX champions, right? But you're sort of behind them through the whole-- >> John: There's progression. >> Progression, exactly. >> With my kids, it's simply man to man, then zone defense. (laughter) >> But it's progression, right? A lot of customers, we have not only the onboarding and implementation services, but these ongoing services that are so key. Because obviously it's important to ensure that your customers are realizing. When I think of our services and the journey, there's the discovery, the transformation, and the strategy. That's like the discovery. But you've then got the realization. And then the optimization and the realization to me is that you're realizing that initial step. You're realizing the technology and you're realizing people and process. You're getting people stood up. Skills, people, organizations, technology, data. You're realizing it all so they can then take the next step. >> Alright, so what's the playbook? A lot of times, in my mind's eye, I can envision in a white board room, board room, laying it all out, putting the puzzle pieces together, and then rolling out implementation plan. But the world is going agile, not waterfall anymore, so it's a combination of battle mode, but also architectural thinking. So not just fashion, real architectural, foundational. >> Peter: Design thinking. >> Tony: Exactly, architectural. >> John: Design thinking. What's the playbook? What's the current state of the art in the current-- >> Well we have obviously product consultants, architects, solution consultants, content creators. It's the whole spectrum of where the customer needs to focus on. And I think-- >> John: So you assemble them based upon the engagement. >> Based upon the engagement and understanding, like what are the customer's strengths? Where are they now? Where are they trying to get to? There's some customers, you know, we have a whole range of services, and we have a whole range of customers. So there are some customers who are like, "We have our own teams today, "we want to augment our teams with your teams, "we want to have hybrid models." Or, "We have our own teams today, but not only have you got great people, but you've got great processes." So like, look at Maxymiser as an example. A lot of our Maxymiser customers, not only use our platform, but they use our people. They're not just buying our people, they're buying a sort of agile, Kanban, JavaScript development practices that are a different level of software development. It's not just the people that can code, it's the development practices. So it's that whole operational services where we bring to the table just a different degree of operational excellence. But we're also to go in to our customers that have their own teams and provide them also consulting perspective around how they can also sharpen their edge. If they want to sort of keep, you know. So whole spectrum of services. >> So let me see if I can throw something out there, in kind of like the center, the central thesis of what you do and how it's changed from what we used to do. Especially a company like Oracle, which has been a technology company at the vanguard of a lot of things. It used to be that customers had an idea of what they wanted to implement. They wanted to implement an accounting system. The processes are relatively known. What was unknown was the technology. How do, what do I buy? How do I configure? How do I set it up? How do I train? How do I make the software run? How do I fix? So it was known process, unknown technology. As a consequence, technology companies could largely say, yeah, that value is intrinsic to the product. So you buy the product, you've got it now. But as we move more towards a service world, as we move more toward engaging the customer world where the process is unknown, and the technology, like the cloud, becomes increasingly known. Now we're focused on more of an unknown process, known technology, and the value is in, does the customer actually use it. >> I think the value is actually in does the customer get value. I think there's a, I've managed customer success organizations and customer service organizations, and the one thing I see in SAS, is usage doesn't always equate to value. So I think as a services organization, it's important to understand the roadmap to value. Because a lot of times, I would say in commodity software, sort of the use of it by default in itself was enough. That you were moving to a software platform. I think SAS customers, especially marketers, are looking for transformation. They're looking for a transformation and a change in value. A change in value in the conversation they're having with the customer. A change in acquisition, loyalty, retention, a change in being relevant. As Joseph was saying this morning, being relevant with the customer, and that value is more than just implementing some technology. >> So it's focusing on ensuring that the customer is getting value utility out of whatever they purchase. >> Tony: Correct. >> Not just that they got what they purchased. So as we move into a world where we're embedding technology more and more complex, it's two things happen. One is, you have to become more familiar of the actual utilization. And what does it mean, and I think marketing cog helps that. What is marketing, how does it work? And second one, the historical norm has been, yeah, we're going to spend months and years building something, deploying something, but now we're trying to do it faster, and we can. So how is your organization starting to evolve its metrics? Is it focused on speed? Is it focused on, obviously value delivered, utilization. What are some of the things that you are guiding your people to focus on? >> Well I think, I very much take a outside-in view. So to me, if I look at why a customer is buying, and what do they want. Obviously most customers want fast time to value, as reduced effort, obviously, and little surprises. I think having a plan and being able to execute your plan. And this whole, as we were talking like one-to-many versus one-to-one. >> And timing too, no surprises and they want to execute. >> And time to value, right? And speed. And I think as we were talking, similar to as a marketer is trying to engage any customer and sort of going from that one-to-many to that one-to-you, what's important now for any organization, a services organization, any company, is to understand what does your business look like? Because why you bought from Oracle, whether you be in a certain vertical or a certain space, or a certain maturity as a customer, it's important that we have the play books, and we do, that say that if you're a customer of this size, of these products in this vertical, then we have the blueprints for success. They may not be absolutely perfect, but they're directional, that we can sort of put you on the fast path. That we've seen the potholes before, we've seen the bumps, we understand the nuances of your data, your systems, your people, your regulations. So that we can actually, we have a plan. And it's a plan that's relevant to you. It's not a generic plan. And I think that's the biggest thing where good companies show up then deliver solutions that they're not learning 100%. There's always going to be nuances and areas of gray that you work through, where the customer's just as much as vendors as they transform. We're not just swapping like for like, but when you transform, there's changes that occur on the customer side. There's new awarenesses of I didn't realize we did that. I didn't realize I want to change doing that. And I've actually changed maybe my whole thought. >> What's the change coming from this event? If you look at the show here, ModernCX, some really good directional positioning. The trajectory of where this is going, I believe is on a great path. Certainly directionally relevant, 100%. Some stuff will maybe shift in the marketplace. But for the most part, I'm really happy to see Oracle go down this road. But there's an impact factor to the customers, and the communities, and that's going to come to you, right? So what are you taking away from the show that's important for customers to understand as Oracle brings in adaptive intelligence? As more tightly coupled, highly cohesive elements come together? >> I think to me, it's transformation. Customers really do understand what are they trying to achieve as they transform? Not just by a piece of technology, but come into it understanding, okay, what are we trying to transform? And have we got like all change management? All transformational management? Have I got the right buy-in across the organization? As a marketer, if I'm trying to transform the organization, have I got the right stakeholders in the room with me? Am I trying to influence the right conversations? You look at the conversation yesterday with Netflix. The discussion, or Time-Warner, sorry. Around their transformation around data. That wasn't a single entity determining that. That was a company driven strategy. A company driven transformation. And I think to really change the customer experience, and control the brand of that across all touchpoints of the company, it requires transformation and it requires being realistic around also how long that journey takes. Depending on the complexity and size of the company. It requires investment of people, of energy, or resources and really understanding where is your customer today? Where is your competition? And to Mark's point, it's like the market is being won here, you're having to compete against your competition, you're having to be better than them, you're having to understand your competition just as much as you understand yourself, so you're leapfrogging. Because just as much as you're going after your competitors customers, your customers are coming up for your customers, right, your competitors are coming up for your customers. I think transformation and understanding how to engage the right services leaders, be it Oracle or any of our partners, to really transform your business is to me the biggest take away. The technology then, be it Chatbox or AI, I mean they augment, they help, they're going to be channels, but I think transformation is key. >> It's really not the technology, it's really what you're doing it with, at the end of the day. Tony, thanks for coming on the CUBE. We really appreciate it, and again, when the rubber hits the road, as Peter was saying earlier, it's going to be what happens with the product technologies for the outcomes. >> Tony: Absolutely. >> Thanks for sharing your insights here on the CUBE. Sharing the data, bringing it to you. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE with Peter Burris, more live coverage for the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from Oracle's ModernCX after this short break. (upbeat music) >> Narrator: Robert Herjavec >> Interviewer: People obviously know you from Shark Tank. But the Herjavec Group has been really laser focused on cyber security.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live, in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, this is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, Head of Research at siliconANGLE and wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jennifer Renaud, who's the CMO/Global Marketing Lead for Oracle Marketing Cloud. She's the brains behind this show, underneath Laura Ipsen, who was on yesterday, General Manager, SVP. Great to see you, Jennifer. >> Thanks, it's great to see you. >> John: Thanks for coming on, I know you're super busy, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, I'm really happy to be here. >> So we talked last year. You guys were new. Laura popped into the position, took over the helm at Oracle Marketing Cloud, you joined the team. It's been quite a transformation over the past year. A lot of great feedback on the show. I mean, the Markies was like the Golden Globes, was glammed up, and people screaming, you mentioned. And then now, the conversations in the hallways, certainly great feedback on the sessions, and people in there saying, "Hey, I'm getting great, qualified people walk through, having great conversations." What happened? Between last year and this year. Give us some insight into what was the big shift. >> The big shift? Well, we've had a big shift in our team. You know, during that time period. (both laughing) Which is really interesting. >> And as manifest by the show, a big shift in direction. >> Yeah, a big shift in direction. You know, two things I think, seriously, there was a big shift in the team, overall, you know, my marketing team, we've made a lot of changes, we're relooking at how we do the work that we do. Really looking at the stories that we tell. You know, there's been a lot of change in that, as well. And then, how we tell our stories together with the rest of our CX team. That's been really important. I spend a lot of time with the rest of my CX peers, you know, that are here also. >> It's interesting, we've been following Oracle, this is our eighth year covering Oracle as Oracle proper, and two years covering Marketing Cloud, with theCUBE, and it was interesting, we were observing that how you guys got here, or there, last year, a lot of great acquisitions and integrated pretty well. But the question was, man, if you can just put all this together. Which you guys were kind of smiling, smirking, but you were doing that, so you have now this cohesive story and platform. You still have pillars of solutions, but, yet integrated under one customer experience. Give us some insight into where that is, and what's next, and how that's going. >> So, the connection with the entire customer experience cloud? >> John: Yeah. >> You know, we've been sharing that message for a while. You know, across Oracle. And I think you probably heard it the first time at Open World, which is where I met you, this last year, and we made some announcements then, but we are continuing to drive that total experience, you know, for our customers to engage with their customers. And, you know, I think probably the best way to look at that, and we were just talking about this a few minutes ago, you know, when I was thinking back in marketing 25 years ago. I've been reminiscing a lot lately. And I was looking back at re-reading the one-to-one future. And at that time, they were really saying, you know, the great thing you can do is engage with a customer in a way where you're a learning organization. So every touchpoint has the right reaction. I might call it, maybe, the physics of marketing. You know, we're going to have the energy that goes with this, so, you know, if I talk to you, if my last engagement with you is a services conversation, then the next marketing message better be in reaction to the last services conversation. And I think now with the ability for us to connect everything that we do in customer experience, and be able to connect our data, and be able to connect our interactions, our transactions, we have the ability to have a really great experience for our customers as result of having this connection. >> And the Marketing Cloud has gotten some good props, too. But I want to ask you about the CMO summit that you guys had in parallel here at the Mandalay Bay, we didn't get a chance to cover it, we were busy doing interviews all day yesterday, but we heard some good feedback. Mark Hurd came in and laid down some, like, "We have all this technology, why are we getting a 1% conversion improvement?" Or, I mean, all that tech. So it makes you rethink about CMO roles. And I want to ask you specifically, what was the conversation like when marketers were trying to think of progressive ways to get modern? What were some of the conversations around where they turn things upside down, what are some of the conversations that the CMOs were having, and saying, look, we know the future's the certain direction, directionally correct data, what do I got to do? >> Yeah, well, it's interesting, we talked a lot about data. We talked a lot about hiring people who can govern data, integrate data, manage data. Several of the companies said, you know, we're in merger and acquisition all the time, and it's a huge issue for us, because a whole new data set comes in. And it may have the same customer touchpoints. You know, the same customers. And now we have to figure out how to match the IDs. And so they said it's a huge challenge for them, you know, to be able to merge all of that. >> It's a great marketing opportunity for you to go to startups saying, hey, if you want to get by the big company, and they're on Oracle, make sure you're on Oracle! >> Jennifer: Make sure to call us. >> But that's a good point. >> Peter: Extends the ecosystem. >> Jennifer: Yeah, exactly. >> But that, the whole system of record, this brings up the integration challenges of moving fast and integrating in data. >> Right, and one of the things that came out of that, which was fascinating, is, the question was asked, is IT doing that, or is business doing it? And, without fail, almost all the marketers said, we own this now. This is our thing. You know, it's the customer touchpoint, business has to own it. >> What percentage of that is ownership by the marketing folks? Because I would say that I see a similar pattern where the digital end-to-end life cycle, from beginning to moment of truth is owned by the marketer. >> Yeah, well, it's happening more and more all the time, of course. >> John: 50/50? 60/40? 70/30? >> I mean, in reality? >> Yeah, reality. Middle America, middle of the world, not Silicon Valley. >> Let's see, in reality, it's maybe 50/50, maybe. I mean, I think we have a long way to go. >> John: Well had the commerce folks on earlier, saying that, 'cause we interviewed her, two years ago at Open World, 50% now are on the cloud vs. on-prem. >> Jennifer: Right. >> On commerce cloud. That's pretty significant. >> Oh yeah, big move. But I think as far as, you know, going back to the question on managing the data, how many people, how this is happening, and who owns it yet? I think there's probably still tension across all the businesses on who owns it and how you do that. If you could drop that tension and say we really do want that customer experience, we are going to focus on the customer. >> But are seeing that, and it's an interesting point, are people battling for control of the process, or are people battling for the control of the data, or both? 'Cause there's a difference. >> I think they are controlling the data. I don't think they're controlling the process, and it would be really great if they got to just obsessing about the customer instead. 'Cause if you did that, then the question of process or owning the data would go away. 'Cause you would do what was right for your business. >> So how has that relationship been between, the crucial relationship between sales and marketing starting to evolve? 'Cause in many respects, marketing used to be in service to sales, especially in the B2B universe, and now what we've heard today, and what we agree with, is marketing needs to be put in service to the customer. You need to do valuable things for the customer, otherwise you're not going to get any business, and you're not going to get any data back. So how is the marketing/sales relationship evolving as both of you try to focus on the customer? >> Well, you know it's interesting. Of course I'm doing that in my own role. Not just watching what's happening with my customers, but in my own role, my relationship is evolving with our salespeople. And, you know, relooking at what happens with the lead? And when we get a lead, what kinds of customers are we doing this with, and how do we want to engage with our customers? And we're completely changing how we've been doing this. I think, in the past, and I think it's really easy for customers to follow the numbers. >> What changes are you guys making right now that you can talk about that would be notable business practice wise that has been based upon data? >> So right now, just reducing our numbers of leads. Making sure that they are the right ones, and match the sales models we have. >> You're still taking a lot of inquiries you're more than happy to have pour in. But you're doing a better job of qualifying. >> We have a lot of demand. Making sure the demand becomes the right lead and opportunity, I think is the most important piece of this. You know, it's interesting language. We call it MQL, a lead score lead that comes out of Eloqua. And, to me, that's not really a qualified lead. I feel like there needs to be human interaction for it to be qualified. So I think it's interesting that the industry, over time, has started calling it an MQL. To me, it's an ML. >> Is the funnel changing now? 'Cause now we also observed and had conversations here on theCUBE where, if there's now super omnichannels, not just omnichannel, but like, every channel's open. There's been a flattening of channels. So you can have anything could be a channel. The entry point to the cloud for you guys could be Marketing Cloud, it could be commerce, it could be something else. Either way, the market is involved. So there's so many channels out there, so what does that do for the funnel? Because, if you're using third party data, which you guys have announced here, with the first party data, that's a compelling, game-changing shift in thinking. So the vertical funnel to your point of, you know, what's at the top. >> There's no such thing as a vertical funnel anymore. I mean, it just doesn't exist that way. Really, if you think about how we are engaging with customers, or consumers, you know, all the time. We talk about the omnichannel world, just like you just said, you can't look at it and say, "I'm going to go out and target someone" and wait for that to come in. People are searching all the time. They're picking up their phone. We just released that CMO Club whitepaper today, you know, talking about mobility. I was laughing, because we said people look at their phones 150 times a day, and I thought, seriously, I do it 150 times an hour. I can't even imagine. >> You're the first CMO that I've ever met that has agreed with me on this one. You're awesome. All right, so the funnel is sideways, it's all over the place, it's everywhere. That brings up the data question. And I think I know where you're going with this, so I'm going to try to see if I can lead you on there. So if that premise is there, which I agree is true, 'cause we have a lot of data that we're putting out there. That's our engagement data with siliconANGLE and all of our assets. The question is, it's the data. So, if the funnel was built for a certain reason, to track things, but that's to get the data, now the data's everywhere, so this brings the question up: how do you find the right data? So is the data available? 'Cause you mentioned the customers are talking, they're doing things. >> Data's available. We have it all over, we just have to make sure we're aggregating it in the right way. So, you know, for us, we're using our DMP, we're connecting it to our third party data, which I think is a great way to do this. You can know more about your customers. In some cases, maybe more than they might know about themselves. We're learning a lot about them as a result. And I think, with that, as we talked about earlier, I want more data. I don't want less data. I want more data. I want to know more about-- >> That's counterintuitive to what most people think about it. >> Exactly, I think it's very counterintuitive. I'm really excited about IOT for that reason. I would love to be marketing to people in space and time. I want to know where you are and what you're doing so that the conversation and the dialogue I'm having with you is exactly relevant to what's happening at that moment. >> You might be an outlier, maybe, but because you work for Oracle, you got a big net. You walk on the tightrope, but you got a net called Oracle. A lot of marketers might not have that support. So you're data-driven, you want more data, bring on the data is what you're saying. >> Yeah. >> Which is good, 'cause you can make sense of it. How does a company get to that position where they would have the courage and confidence to say "bring it on, bring on the data"? What would they-- >> Find the right partnerships. I mean, you can get that data, you have your own first party data, you can get second party data with other groups. There's no reason why you can't go in and say, hey I want to partner with another business on this. Companies have loyalty programs. You can go and share, you know, anonymized data with another group like that and learn more about your potential customer base. There are ways to get at this. >> And you guys are opening up the data cloud to them. Is this a true statement? Oracle customers can get access to the data cloud? Which is all the data that you guys are providing, third party data? >> They can purchase the data. >> John: Well, they can subscribe to it. >> Yeah, they get it with purchasing DMP as well. Yeah, they can subscribe to the data. Yeah, any customer can get access to it. >> I have two questions about what you've said thus far. One was, I heard you say, I want to make sure I heard it, that it's an ML, it's not an MQL until it touches a person. Because that, at a conference where everybody's talking about AI and everyone's talking about automation, that is counterintuitive. Totally agree with you, but want to hear what you mean by that. >> Okay, so we'll distinguish what I think AI will do versus what happens when a lead comes out from Eloqua that's lead scored. So, when a lead is lead scored, you know, it's still human interaction right now that says how do I come up with a lead score? You know, so my team, we spend a lot of time, like, which metric should we be using to make sure we figure out, is truly a lead that should come out of Eloqua at this point. We spend a lot of time, and then we run the data, and we look at it and figure out what's going to be the right mix. >> So you're, in many respects, training Eloqua. Just in a very labor-intensive way. >> Jennifer: Yes, it is a labor-intensive way. >> John: That's a human-curated algorithm. >> It is a human-curated algorithm, yes, and we talk to all of our global teams, we look at absolutely every way we should do this, and then we start testing it and making sure that we get the right leads that are coming out of this. At the right rate. That matches the number of people that we have that can serve the leads, as well. Too many doesn't help us if I don't have enough salespeople. Too few doesn't help me if my salespeople are sitting there not doing anything. >> So the readiness is the knob you're turning. So that the flow of leads are popping out in capacity to fulfill them. >> Exactly, exactly. It's an interesting mix. You know, we've been doing the model that says more is better, more is better, more is better. And after while you say, you know, how are this many people going to service this x many times leads that come out of this? But lead scoring is still based on my less than perfect -- >> Peter: Discretionary observation on what this actually means. >> Jennifer: What this actually means, exactly. >> That's great, that's great-- >> So I still need a human to pick up the phone and call the person and say, you know, are you actually a perspective customer? Are you a student, or are you, you know. >> So you're using some of the inside to then validate and use your judgment, it can be very quick, and very simple, but it's a central feature of the whole process, and it's the ultimate data. It's the ultimate first person data. Did you talk to someone, are they there? That's great. Second question-- >> John: I'm not sure I agree-- >> Now we can go to the AI, I think, which is the other part of that question, which is the predictive analytics that's coming out of this now. So now we have predictive analytics are coming out of this, that are looking at this and saying, hey we can look at this a little differently and do a little more listening and see how people are really engaging. Do we have different search patterns? We're saying, do we see search patterns inside of a company that might say there really is a buying activity happening here? So, great way to look at it from a B2B perspective. Now that begins to change what's happening with the lead. >> So it sets priorities on who they should be calling. Do you still anticipate that that customer's going to get a phone call? >> Jennifer: Yes, yeah. >> Okay great, second question-- >> Hold on, I'm going to push back on that side. One little caveat I have. I agree with your statement, in the all-digital world, the users are self-serving, so you can imagine a scenario where there's no human involvement at all. I'm flying around the web, I'm surfing, I'm discovering, and I'm a person, and I'm into some marketplace, and I'm buying, I'm buying. No human touched me at all. I'm a qualified lead, but I get link-baited, or I get tracked into a discovery pattern that is completely digital. There's no human involvement in that. >> In a B2B sense, though, it's setting up the contract so someone can buy off a contract, for example. So the buying activity may be set up. >> John: Oh, you're talking about B2B? >> Yeah, B2B, always. >> Yeah, and B2C I think it's a totally different scenario. >> When was the last time you got a call from somebody at Amazon? >> John: Never. >> Yeah. So second question, and I think this a great point, it ties back to the conversation we had earlier about partners. The partner often is the weakest chain. Weakest link in the chain. In a world where digital is both informing the customer about what's good and what's bad, but also you're sharing data. You run the risk that that partner defines the quality of the entire chain. So you've got to start sharing more data, you got to start sharing. How is the role of data impacting and influencing the activity of bringing on, nurturing, measuring, ultimately managing, partnerships? >> I think you guys talked to Doug Kennedy yesterday. >> John: He's a pro. >> Yeah, he's fantastic. From a marketing standpoint, in the same way, we are going to continue to share with our partners. So if we're looking at the numbers of partners that we engage with. Could they be the weakest link? I would probably challenge you on that, I think our partners can be our strongest link in what we're doing, and are probably closer to our customers than we are, in marketing, by a long shot. So I count on my partners to bridge that gap that way, absolutely, but will we share data so we can absolutely have a better relationship, from a selling perspective? Yeah. >> First let me qualify, that when you have multiple partnerships involved, and typically a solution, a complex solution like the Marketing Cloud, what we're talking about, is going to have multiple partnerships involved. You may have three phenomenal partnerships, and one good partnership. But that one good partner could have an enormous influence over the three very good partners. That's what I mean. So the second thing is, what I'm talking about is, does Oracle compete, or does Oracle utilize its willingness to use data, especially through tooling like Marketing Cloud, and the customer experience cloud, as a way of making Oracle more attractive to partners? >> Yes, absolutely. We would absolutely want to do that. We haven't been doing a lot of it, but we are moving forward that way, absolutely. We want to have that engagement. Absolutely, we want to have that engagement with our partners. I think, especially in marketing, we don't want them to just buy technology. I mean, they need to buy the really great creativity that comes with our partners, as well. And so we have to share as much data as possible to create that great experience for our customers, through our partnerships. >> Jennifer, I want to thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you coming on, sharing the insight into your role as CMO from Oracle Marketing Cloud. Appreciate it. Just share what's up for next year. Will there be another, bigger Markies? What's on the agenda for in between this event and next year, what's the plans between event windows? What do you got going on, what's the plan? >> Okay, so, when the 12th annual Markies happens next year, roughly about this time. I think it's almost the same week. Which will be fantastic. In the meantime, we're going to do a lot of storytelling. You will hear a lot about the Markies nominees and Markies winners. We have some incredible stories to tell, it gives us a great opportunity, actually, to talk about the people. You know, for us, the heroes, that created all of these great stories for us. The technology. And how they were using the technology to really make all of this happen, and the partners that they were using. >> Yeah, Doug rolled out his new strategy to the partners, he's been seven weeks on the job, back to Oracle from Oracle in the old days. So he's a pro. >> Jennifer: Yeah, oh yeah, he's great. I worked with him at Microsoft. >> And integrating into the Oracle cloud, still part of the plan? >> Jennifer: Yes. >> Cool. >> Just staying connected with the rest of Oracle, absolutely, we are Oracle. >> We will keep track of the stories with you guys. So we'll be tracking them. >> We'll be telling them with you, all year. >> We'll be documenting them. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on the very successful event. >> Thank you very much. >> We're looking forward to hearing the data stories that you're using, and expanding on that next time. It's theCUBE live here at Las Vegas, at Mandalay Bay, for Oracle Modern CX show, #modernCX, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, more after this short break.

(energetic upbeat music) >> Host: Live from Las Vegas, it's The CUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX show, Modern Customer Experience. The Modern Marketing Experience converted into the Modern CX Show. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. My co-host Peter Burris. Day two of coverage. Our next guest is Catherine Blackmore, Global Vice President, Customer Success, Global Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Catherine, welcome back to The CUBE. Great to see you. >> Thank you so much for having me here. It's been an incredible week, just amazing. >> Last year we had a great conversation. Remember we had. >> Yes. >> It was one of those customer focused conversations. Because at the end of the day, the customers are the ones putting the products to use, solving their problems. You were on stage at the keynote. The theme here is journeys, and the heroes involved. What was the summary of the keynote? >> Sure. As you say, this theme has really been around heroic marketing moments. And in a way, I wanted to take our marketers and the audience to an experience and a time where I think a lot of folks can either remember or certainly relate where, what was the beginning of really one experience, which was Superman. If you think about heroism and a superhero, well, Superman will come to mind. But I think what was interesting about that is that it was created at a time where most folks were not doing well. It was actually during the Great Depression. And most folks wouldn't realize that Superman almost never came to be. It was an image, an icon, that was created by two teenage boys, Jerry Shuster and Joe Siegal. And what they did is they got audience. They understood, just as two teenage boys, my parents, my family, my community is just not doing well. And we see that folks are trying to escape reality. So we're going to come up with this hero of the people. And in doing so, what's interesting is, they really were bold, they were brave. They presented a new way to escape. And as a result, DC Comics took it up. And they launched, and they sold out every single copy. And I think it's just a really strong message about being able to think about creativity and being bold. Jerry and Joe were really the heroes of that story, which was around. My challenge to the audience is, who's your Superman? What is your creative idea that you need to get out there? Because in many ways, we need to keep moving forward. At the same time, though, balance running a business. >> It's interesting, you did mention Superman and they got passed over. And we do a lot of events in the industry, a lot of them are big data events. And it's one little insight could actually change a business, and most times, some people get passed over because they're not the decision maker or they may be lower in the organization or they may just be, not be knowing what to do. So the question on the Superman theme, I have to ask you, kind of put you on the spot here is, what is the kryptonite for the marketer, okay, because >> (laughing) Yes. >> there's a lot of obstacles in the way. >> Catherine: It is. >> And so people sometimes want to be Superman, but the kryptonite paralyzes them. >> Catherine: Yeah. >> Where's the paralysis? >> It's funny that you say that. I think I actually challenge folks to avoid the kryptonite. There was three things that we really talked about. Number one is, Modern Marketing Experience, it's just an incredible opportunity for folks to think ahead, dream big, be on the bleeding edge. But guess what, we're all going to go on flights, we're going to head home, and Monday morning's going to roll around and we're going to be stuck and running the business. And my inspiration and, really, challenge to the audience and to all of our marketers is how do we live Modern Marketing Experience everyday? How do we keep looking ahead and balance the business? And, really, those heroic marketers are able to do both. But it doesn't stop there. We talked a lot about this week, about talent. Do we have the right team? Kryptonite is not having the right people for today and tomorrow, and then in addition to that, you can't just have a team, you can't just have a vision, but what's your plan? Where actually having the right stakeholders engaged, the right sponsorship, that's certainly probably the ultimate kryptonite if you don't. >> The sponsorships are interesting because the people who actually will empower or have empathy for the users and empower their people and the team have to look for the yes's, not the no's. Right. And that's the theme that we see in the Cloud success stories is, they're looking for the yes. They're trying to get that yes. But they're challenging, but they're not saying no. That's going to shut it down. We've seen that in IT. IT's been a no-no, I was going to say no ops but in this digital transformation with the emphasis on speed, they have to get to the yes. So the question is, in your customer interactions, what are some of those use cases where getting to that yes, we could do this, What are some of the things, is it data availability? >> Catherine: Absolutely. >> Share some color on that. >> I think, So I actually had a wonderful time connecting with Marta Federici, she met with you earlier. And I love her story, because she really talks about the culture and placing the customer at the center of everything they're doing, to the extent that they're telling these stories about why are we doing this? We're trying to save lives, especially in healthcare. And just to have stories and images. And I know some companies do an amazing job of putting the customer up on the wall. When we talk to our customers about how do we actually advance a digital transformation plan? How do we actually align everyone towards this concept of a connected customer experience? It starts with thinking about everyone who touches the customer every day and inspiring them around how they can be part of being a customer centric organization. And that's really, that's really important. That's the formula, and that's what we see. Companies, that they can break through and have that customer conversation, it tends to align folks. >> Interesting. We were talking earlier, Mark Hurd's comment to both the CMO Summit that was happening in a separate part of the hotel here in the convention center, as well as his keynote. He was saying, look, we have all this technology. Why are we doing this one percent improvement? And he was basically saying, we have to get to a model where there's no data department anymore. There never was. >> That's right. >> And there shouldn't be. There shouldn't be, that department takes care of the data. That's kind of the old way of data warehousing. Everyone's a data department, and to your point, that's a liberating, and also enables opportunities. >> It does. We talked a lot. Actually, the CMO Summit that we had as well this week, a lot of our CMOs were talking about the democratization of data. And Elissa from Tableau, I think you also talked to. We talked about, how do you do that? And why, what are those use cases, where, Kristen O'Hara from Time Warner talked about it as well. And I think, that's where we have to go. And I think there's a lot of great examples on stage that I would like to think our marketers, and quite frankly, >> Which one's your favorite, favorite story? >> My favorite story. >> John: Your favorite story. >> Wow, that's really putting me on the spot. >> It's like picking your favorite child. I have four. I always say "well, they're good at this sport, or this kid's good in school." Is there? >> I guess one. >> John: Or ones that you want to highlight. >> Well one that I, because we talked about it today. And it was really a combination of team and plan. Just really highlighting on what Marta's driving. If you think about the challenges of a multinational >> Peter: Again, this is at Philips. >> John: Marta, yeah. >> Catherine: This is Philips, Royal Philips. So Marta, what she's really, her team has been trying to accomplish, both B to C and B to B, and it speaks to data, and it talks about obviously having CRM be kind of that central nervous system so that you can actually align your departments. But then, being able to think about team. They've done a lot of work, really making certain they have the team for today and the future. They're also leveraging partners, which is also key to success. And then, having a plan. We spent time with Royal Philips actually at headquarters a number of weeks ago and they are doing this transformation, this disruptive tour with all of their top folks across, around the world that running their different departments, to really have them up and them think differently which is aligning them around that culture of looking out to the future. >> Peter: Let's talk a bit about thinking differently. And I want to use you as an example. >> Catherine: Sure. >> So your title is Customer Success. Global Vice President, Global Customer Success. What does that mean? >> Sure. I know a lot of folks, I'd like to think that, that's just a household name right now in terms of Customer Success. But I realize it's still a little new and nascent. >> We've seen it elsewhere but it's still not crystal clear what it means. >> Sure, sure. So when I think of Customer Success, the shorter answer is, we help our customers be successful. But that, what does it really mean? And when I think about the evolution of what Customer Success, the department, the profession, the role, has really come to be, it's serving a very important piece of this Cloud story. Go back a decade when we were just getting started actually operationalizing SaaS and thinking about how to actually grow our businesses, we found that there just needed to be a different way of managing our customers and keeping customers, quite frankly. Cause as easy as it is to perhaps land a SaaS customer, and a Cloud customer, because it's easier to stand them up and it's easier for them to purchase, but then they can easily leave you too. And so what we found is, the sales organization, while, obviously understands the customer, they need to go after new customers. They need to grow share. And then in addition to that, in some organizations, there still are services to obviously help our customers be successful. And that's really important, but that is statement-of-work-based. There's a start and a stop and an end to that work. And then obviously there's support that is part of a services experience, but they tend to be queue-based, ticket-based, break-fix. And what we found in all of this is, who ultimately is going be the advocate of the customer? Who's going to help the customer achieve ROI business value and help them ensure that they are managing what they've purchased and getting value, but also looking out towards the future and helping them see what's around the corner. >> Catherine I want to ask the question. One of the themes in your keynote was live in the moment every day as a modern marketing executive, build your team for today and tomorrow, and plan for the future. You mentioned Marta, who was on yesterday, as well as Kristen O'Hara from Time Warner. But she made an interesting comment, because I was trying to dig into her a little bit, because Time Warner, everyone knows Time Warner. So, I was kind of curious. At the same time, it was a success story where there was no old way. It was only a new way, and she had a pilot. And she had enough rope to kind of get started, and do some pilots. So I was really curious in the journey that she had. And one thing she said was, it was a multi-year journey. >> Catherine: Yes. >> And some people just want it tomorrow. They want to go too fast. Talk through your experience with your customer success and this transformation for setting up the team, going on the transformational journey. Is there a clock? Is there a kind of order of magnitude time frame that you've seen, that works for most companies? >> Sure. And actually I want to bring in one more experience that I know folks had here at Modern Marketing, which was, also, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he actually talked about this very thing. I think a lot of folks related to that because what he's been doing in terms of building out this community and creating crowd-sourced, or I should say, I think he would want to say community-sourced content and creativity. It was about, you can't really think about going big. Like I'm not thinking about feature film. I'm thinking about short video clips, and then you build. And I think everyone, the audience, like okay I get that. And Kristen's saying, it took many little moments to get to the big moment. I think folks want to do it all, right at the very beginning. >> John: The Big Bang Theory, just add, >> Absolutely. >> Just add water, and instant Modern Marketing. >> It is, it is. >> John: And it's hard. >> And what we have found, and this is why the planning part is so important, because what you have to do, and it might not be the marketer. The marketer, that VP of Marketing, even that CMO may know, it's going to be a three year journey. But sometimes it's that CEO, Board of Director alignment that's really required to mark, this is the journey. This is what year one's going to look like. This is what we're going to accomplish year two. There may be some ups and downs through this, because we need to transform sales, we need to transform back in operations in terms of how we're going to retire old processes and do new. And in doing so, we're going to get to this end state. But you need all of your stakeholders to be engaged, otherwise you do get that pressure to go big because, you know what Mark was saying, I've got 18 months, we need to be able to show improvement right away. >> We were talking about CIOs on another show that I was doing with Peter. And I think Peter made the comment that the CIO's job sometimes doesn't last three years. So these transformations can't be three years. They got to get things going quicker, more parallel. So it sounds like you guys are sharing data here at the event among peers >> Catherine: Yes. >> around these expectations. Is there anything in terms of the playbook? >> Catherine: Yes. >> Is it parallel, a lot of AGILE going on? How do you get those little wins for that big moment? >> So I think this is where the, what I would call, the League of Justice. You got to call in that League of Justice. For all you Superman out there. Because in many ways you're really challenged with running the business, and I think that's the pressure all of us are under. But when you think about speeding up that journey, it really is engaging partners, engaging, Oracle Marketing Cloud, our success and services team. I know you're going to be talking to Tony a little bit about some of the things we're building but that's where we can really come in and help accelerate and really demonstrate business value along the way. >> Well one more question I had for you. On the show floor, I noticed, was a lot of great traffic. Did you guys do anything different this year compared to last year when we talked to make this show a little bit more fluid? Because it seems to me the hallway conversation has been all about the adaptive intelligence and data is in every conversation that we have right now. What have you guys done differently? Did it magically just come to you, (Catherine laughing) Say, we're going to have to tighten it up this year? What was the aha moment between last year and this year? It's like night and day. >> I would like to think that we are our first and best customer, because as we ourselves are delivering technology, we ourselves also have to live what we tell our customers to do every day. Look at the data, look at the feedback. Understand what customers are telling you. How can you help customers achieve value? And we think of this as an important moment for our partners and our companies, that are here spending money and spending time to be here, achieve value. What we've done is really create an experience where it's so much easier to have those conversations. Really understanding the flow of traffic, and how we can actually ensure people are able to experience our partners, get to know them, get to know other customers. A lot of folks, too, have been saying, love keynote, love these different breakout sessions, but I want to connect with other folks going through that same thing that I am, so I can get some gems, get some ideas that I can pick up. >> And peer review is key in that. They talk to each other. >> Exactly. That's right, that's right. And so we've really enabled that, the way that we've laid out the experience this year. And I know it's even going to be better next year. Cause I know we're going to collect a lot more data. >> Well last year we talked a lot about data being horizontally scalable. That's all people are talking about now, is making that data free. The question for you is, in the customer success journeys you've been involved, what's the progress bar of the customer in terms of, because we live in Silicon Valley. So oh yeah, data driven marketer! Everyone's that. Well, not really. People are now putting the training wheels on to get there. Where are we on the progress bar for that data driven marketer, where there's really, the empathy for the users is there. There's no on that doubts that. But there's the empowerment piece in the organization. Talk about that piece. Where are we in that truly data driven marketer? >> Oh, we're still early days. It was obvious in talking to our various CMO's. We were talking about talent and the change, and what the team and the landscape needs to look like to respond to certainly what we've experienced in technology over the last number of years and then even what was introduced today. That level of, I need to have more folks that really understand data on my team but I'll tell you, I think the thing that's really interesting though about what we've been driving around technology and specifically AI. I love what Steve said, by the way, which is if a company is presenting AI as magic, well the trick's on you. Because truly, it's not that easy. So I think the thing that we need to think about and we will work with our customers on is that there's certainly a need and you have to be data driven but at the same time, we want to be innovation ready and looking and helping our customers see the future to the extent that how we think about what we're introducing is very practical. There's ways that we can help our customers achieve success in understanding their audience in a way that is, I wouldn't say, it's just practical. We can help them with use cases, and the way the technology is helping them do that, I think we're going to see a lot of great results this year. >> AI is great, I love to promote AI hype because it just makes software more cooler and mainstream, but I always get asked the question, how do you evaluate whether something is BS in AI or real? And I go, well first of all, what is AI? It's a whole 'nother story. It is augmented intelligence, that's my definition of it. But I always say, "It's great sizzle. Look for the steak." So if someone says AI, you got to look on the grill, and see what's on there, because if they have substance, it's okay to put a little sizzle on it. So to me, I'm cool with that. Some people just say, oh we have an AI magical algorithm. Uh, it's just predictive analytics. >> Catherine: Yes. >> So that's not really AI. I mean, you could say you're using data. So how do you talk to customers when they say, "Hey, AI magic or real? How do I grok that?" How do I figure it out? >> I think it's an important advancement, but we can't be distracted by words we place on things that have probably been around for a little while. It's an important way to think about the technology, and I think even Steve mentioned it on stage. But I think we're helping customers be smarter and empowering them to be able to leverage data in an easier way, and that's what we have to do. Help them, and I know this is talked a lot, not take the human and the people factor out because that's still required, but we're going to help them be able to concentrate on what they do best, whether it's, I don't want to have to diminish my creative team by hiring a bunch of data scientists. We don't want that. We want to be able to help brands and companies still focus on really understanding customers. >> You know, AI may be almost as old as Superman. >> Catherine: (laughing) I think you're right. >> Yeah, because it all comes back to Turing's test of whether or not you can tell the difference between a machine and a human being, and that was the 1930s. >> Well, neural networks is a computer science. It's a great concept, but with compute and with data these things really become interesting now. >> Peter: It becomes possible. >> Yeah, and it's super fun. But it promotes nuanced things like machine learning and Internet Of Things. These are geeky under-the-hood stuff that most marketers are like, uh what? Yeah, a human wearing a gadget is an Internet of Things device. That's important data. So then if you look at it that way, AI can be just a way to kind of mentally think about it. >> That's right, that's right. >> I think that's cool for me, I can deal with that. Okay, final question, Catherine, for you. >> Catherine: Yes. >> What's the most important thing that you think folks should walk away from Modern CX this year? What would you share from this show, given that, on the keynote, CMO Summit, hallways, exhibits, breakouts, if there's a theme or a catalyst or one? >> Peter: What should they put in the trip report? >> It's all about the people. I think that, if I were to distill it down, you think about that word bubble chart, that's people. I think that's the biggest word that came out of this. As much as technology is important, it's going to enable us, it's going to enable our people, and it's going to put a lot of attention on our talent and our folks that are going to be able to take our customers to the next level. >> And then people are the ones that are generating the data too, that want experiences, to them. >> Catherine: That's right. >> It's a people centric culture. >> Catherine: It is. >> Catherine Blackmore here on site, The CUBE, at Modern CX's The CUBE, with more live coverage here from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, live after this short break. (electronic music)

(lively music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX conference, hashtag Modern CX. This is the CUBE. I'm John Furrier Silicone Angle. My cost, Peter Burch with us for two days. Our next guest is Ron Corbisier. Owner and CEO of Relationship One. Back again, from last year. It was one of my memorable interviews last year. Welcome back-- >> Ron: Thank you for having me. >> to the cube. We went down and dirty last year. I remember we were having a great conversation about ad tech. If you've taken that video, it's on YouTube and look at it, I guarantee you, it's going to play right into what happened this year. Again, we predicted it. We didn't say AI but we did say we're going to see data really driving. That's what Oracle ended up locking in on daily. >> Yeah, absolutely. Data is going to be the underlying conversation for the next few years. We spoke, a lot, last year about martech stack. Actually, martech and ad tech colliding, coming together. All of that is being fueled by the mass quantities of data that we have as sales and marketing folks out there, to leverage and how do you use it. It's never about, do I have enough data? A lot of times you feel you, almost, have too much. But it's, now how can you use it appropriately? >> We were talking, before we came on camera here about that dynamic of ad tech and marteh collision which we talked about last year. It's interesting. If you just say digital, end-to-end, as a fabric, then you can still talk about these pillars of solutions but they're not silos. If you look at the holistic data approach and say, hey, if we're going to have horizontally scalable data which we want, frictionless less than 150 milliseconds responses they want to promote. You can still do your pillars but be open to data sharing versus here's my silent stack. I do this, I do this, that's shifted and that's what Oracle's main news is here. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think what you're seeing, even in, not only Oracle, that organizational level, people are taking a more holistic view of data that they own and data that they can enrich with external information, right? How does that information, then, fuel all of these other areas within customer experience within the CX world? How do you use that to provide better service? How do you use that information to optimize your sales efforts and from a marketing standpoint, obviously, my background, it's how do we leverage that to optimize our spend, optimize our communication, our orchestration, all of those pieces. It all comes down to that common language of data that we have access to. >> Tell me about the real time aspect cause we teased on it last time and we did talk about how to leverage some of the advertising opportunities and the role of data in real time. That's been a message here from batch to real time. The consumer's in motion all the time depending upon their context. How does real time fit into this? >> Yeah, this is the evolution of what we're seeing in the technology, right? Historically, you've built a campaign. You've, maybe, created some type of journey or persona. You're building content around very specific elements within a life cycle structure. Life cycles are not linear any longer. They never really were but they're, definitely, not now and you have to adapt very quickly. Leverage technology, to say, one of my saying, communicating and what channel but in more in a real time thing. You have to look at what was the last thing that individual did, the activity, all of that. Historically, you haven't had that depth or degree of real time lists. It's been more of a structured candance. That doesn't exist, right? That's not going to exist going forward. That's where things like AI which I always hesitate to use that term because it's the buzz word now of today. But tools that are more of that augmentation of how we do things. Leveraging the power of technology. That's going to change how we orchestrate things and how we communicate. >> I'm just looking at your tweet here. I want to bring this up because you mentioned AI and we were talking about it. Thanks to all who stopped by my MME 17 Modern Marketing Experience 17. A little bit of a jab at the messaging that's cool like that. Session on artificial intelligence. Loved all the support from my fellow modern marketers. What do you mean by that? You make a bold statement. Did you have courage? Did you stand tall? Did you call out AI? What was the conversation there? >> Well I called out the silliness of the term AI. I picked on that the marketers but I picked on the term We, as marketers, I call them the squirell moments that, as marketers, we're on to the next thing. I reviewed the past eight some years of these conferences and what were the topics, right? There were some topics that were transformational topics like how does marketing automation or organizational change or those type of things. Those are things that stick with you. There is things that are more timely things. Like predictive scoring and their tactics. There more things that I use as a marketer or sales person. What I was picking on with AI is that it's the buzz word. It gets you funding. It gets you people in a room for a conference, that's great. But it doesn't do anything by itself. It's really an enabler. It's a pervasive thing that combines machine cycle and data but you have to teach it, you have to incorporate it into your applications. As marketers, ultimately, it's going to change our tool set to make it better. It's more poking fun at the term-- >> We always say AI. I've said it on the CUBE, AI's BS. Although, I'm a software guy. I love AI because it really promotes software that has been very nuance. So, IOT, machine learning, this is very geeky computer science stuff that's super cool. Anything that can take that mainstream in the software world, I'm a big fan of. That being said, I think the augmentation is the real message which is, you can use machine learning, you can use software, use some technical things, to make things better. You said it on our earlier segment this morning which is there's a variety of things that you can automate away. >> The thing that's, and you mentioned earlier, it's the ability that we now have the ability to collect an enormous amount of data, that's relevant and important. And we now have the technology to, actually, do something with that data. But we still have to apply it and there's a lot of change that has to happen. The way AI is different from other systems is that, historically, financial systems, software would deliver and answer. It was highly stylized. It was rarely, a clear correspondence with the real world. We closed the books. How much money did we make? There was an answer and it came from some data structures that were defined within the system. Now we're trying to bring in the real world and have these technologies focus on the real world. And they're giving ranges of possible options. That is new. It's good and it's useful but it does not take the requirement for discretion out of the system. That's why it's the augmentation. >> Ron and I were talking last year about this, Peter and I. I think you're getting a trajectory that, I've been saying for a while and this is developing in real time here on the CUBE and also some of our commentary is the role of software development and DevOps that we've seen in Cloud, is moving into the front lines of business. Meaning their techniques. You're seeing Agile, already, being talked about. You're seeing standing up campaigns. Language, you can go to the Cloud stack and say, building blocks, EC2, S3, Cooper Netties, containers, micro services and apply that to marketing because there's a lot of parallels going on to the characteristics of the infrastructure. Certainly critical infrastructure to enabling infrastructure. It's interesting that you're seeing marketers being more savvy and inadative. What's your thoughts on that, a reaction? >> Yeah, it's the evolution though. If you go back to, we as marketers have been using rules engines, we've been using tools like collaborative filtering. You go back to late 90's, early 2000's when we were building recommendation engines in simple. That's algorithmic stuff, right? No different than we're doing today with pricing rules and all that stuff. The difference it that you now have more power to do it. You have the ability to do it more real time and on the fly. You use far more data. More computing power and more data. Not only your data that you own but data that you leverage from third party to really understand people. You have a wider lens. Historically, you're making recommendations based on what you had in a cart or some other things that people have bought that also had that in the cart, that's different now, right? With this type of technology, this enabling kind of world, you an look at a lot more data points to give you that. The problem is that anything around AI requires a couple of things. It is a dumb system so AI. (laughs) >> Still a computer. >> It's still a computer. Everyone forgets that for it to work, it has to learn. I have some friends who have built marketing tools on top of Watson, for example. It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours for it to start doing something. You have to train it. You have to, not only, give it the data, you have to train it. >> Even the word learning and training is misleading in may respects. At the end of the day it's software but what is new is it's being applied in richer, more complex domains. The recommendation engine used to be just for recommendation. Now we're using those same models and we're combining them and applying them to richer more complex domains. Yet, ideally, the software's not getting more difficult to use. And I think what really makes this compelling, as a software engineer, is that we're doing all this more complexity but we're packing it and making it simpler. >> I think that's the point of where Oracle's going and why they don't call it AI. They're using it more the adaptive. Because they're thinking of it at the micro service level. They're thinking of how can they make these widgets of functionality to better the tools we have. To incorporate it into not make it so a jump forward in our tool set. It's just now, an augmented component of what we do today. >> It's, almost, a stack approach. You got foundational building blocks and at the top is high velocity, highly dynamic apps and you could argue, we were talking that the CMO's going to be an app shop, some day. This banks the question and I'd like to get both of you guys to weigh in on this. Because this is a question that I'd like to get on the record. What is modern marketing these days? Define modern marketing because what we're getting at here is, to your point of the evolution is we've seen this movie before. Is it a replatforming? Is it a building block approach? What is a modern marketer? What is a modern marketer mean? How do you execute that? >> I think it's quick and nimble and adaptive. The whole point of modern marketing is that you're always looking at how you can rethink, how you can optimize, how you can leverage technology to do things. It's not about replacing head count with a machine or a tool or a tech. It's really about how do you leverage that head count more effectively? How can you focus on optimization using those technologies. Modern marketing is, again, probably another buzz word but just like modern sales, modern commerce, all of that. It's really about how do you enable it with that stack do better. >> So, is it fashion or is it like hey, there's a modern marketer over there, look at what he or she is wearing. Or is it more technology based that's got some fundamental foundational shifts that are being worked on or both? >> It's leveraging technology and it's leveraging data more effectively and creatively. It's not being stuck with a prescriptive approach on campaign and orchestration and building. It still requires strategy and all of that but it's really how you approach it. >> So, how you think of it. What's your angle on this? >> That's a great question. And that's why I giggled about it. I think you gave a great answer. The three key precepts of Agile are, iterative, opportunistic and empirical and it's nimble quick and you change. But to me, I'll answer the question this way. Modern marketing focuses on delivering value to the customer not back into the business. It used to be that you would deliver into the business. He'd say, oh, we give you a whole bunch of new leads. We give you a whole bunch of this. If along the way, it created value for the customer, that's okay. But more often that not, it was annoying. As customer's can share their experience and share information about how (mumbles) engaged them, that's amplified. Annoying gets amplified. I think if you focus on are you creating value for the customer, you also end up with the derivative element that you're accelerating leads, they are in the process and where they are in the journey. The way I'd answer it. It's not distinct from yours but the idea of modern marketing focuses on creating value for the customer. The only way you, consisting do that is by being nimble and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. >> I agree, in the same thing though. A core tenant, if you will, of modern marketing is absolutely. It is the value proposition. It's also making sure you understand the impact of the value of proposition The velocity of the pipeline, the impact on revenue, all of those things right? Because it's all about that value which it has to be, from a customers perspective but you're not doing all of the other pieces. You're not going to justify the spend. You're not going to get all of those together. >> Let me see if I can thread the two points together. Cause what I'm seeing, by listening is, you mentioned, the main thing in my mind was the data. That's different right? You're saying okay, thing differently, talk to the customer and the value to the enterprise value is being created through a different mechanism versus just serving it. >> Not really, not really. The fundamental focus, historically, of marketing has been what are we doing for the business? What are we doing for sales? Now, if we focus on, now you say well no. We have to created value for the customer in every thing we do, then we get permission to do things differently. We get more data out of the customer because the trust is there. We're allowed to bias the customer to the next, best option. >> I'm trying to answer my questions. I can see your point. My point is this, the modern marketer is defined by doing it. The business practices it a little bit differently to achieve the same thing. >> By focusing or creating value they have to do things differently and now they can because technology allows them to do it. >> We saw Time Warner, they weren't using data prior. That's a little different. If you go outward to go in, it's a great value while doing the table stake stuff. >> It's changing strategically thinking different of how you do it. Creating that value proposition's very different and also being able to measure and optimize are you doing it correctly? Is it having impact on the business? Most of my customers are not for profits They, actually, have to show, bottom line an impact. All of that requires data and speed and velocity in which we have to run requires tech. >> They got gestures in the market with customers. They have that touch point. They can leverage that. >> Here's (mumbles) modern marketing is not speeding up and increasing the rate and lowering the cost of doing bad marketing. >> No, no, I mean that's exactly. >> It was marketers point. >> That's right. (laughing) You can spend a lot of money to do bad marketing. >> Let's double down on our bad marketing. Ron, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE again. Thanks for sharing the insights. It's always a pleasure to get down and dirty and peel back the onion on some of these things. Final question for you. What do you expect for the evolution for this next year. >> I think AI's going to be with us for awhile just because it's the new buzz word. We've got a couple cycles on that. >> John: It reminds me of Web 2.0, what is it? >> And that lasted for a few years as well. I think over the next year or so, we're going to see the benefits of that augmentation. We're going to, actually, see some of these micro services as people start fueling some of the tools that we already have. You're also going to see some of that further collision of ad tech and mertech. Cause everything's digital and the impact of what that means for us as marketers. >> I can't wait of the hashtag, marketing native. Cause Cloud Native is coming. Someone's going to make it up, I hope not. >> Peter: You did. >> Ron: You just did. >> Okay, Marketing Native. What does that mean? We'll do a whole segment on that. We'll get Ron to come in. Hey, thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Great to see you. I'm John Furrier. Peter Burris here inside the CUBE getting all the action. Straight from the data and sharing it with you. Thank you Ron, for coming on again twice in a row, two years in a row. This is the CUBE. We'll be back with more after this short break. (lively music) >> Narrator: Robert Herjavec. >> People, obviously, know you from Shark Tank. But the Herjavec group has been, really, laser folks in cyber security. >> Cause I, actually, helped bring a product called Check Point to Canada, firewalls, URI filtering, that kind of stuff. >> But you're also an entrepreneur? And you know the business. You've been in software, in the tech business. (mumbles) you get a lot of pitches as entertainment meets business. >> On our show, we're a bubble. We don't get to do a lot of tech.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back here. We're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, talk to the influencers, the experts, thought leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, anyone we can that has data we can share with you. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burr is my co-host for the two days here. Our next is Jay Baer from Convince and Convert, CUBE alumni, great guy, super influential, knows his marketing stuff, perfect guest to summarize and kind of package up what the hell Modern CX means here at the Oracle show. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Jay: Good to see you guys, welcome. >> So you were hosting the CMO Summit that was going on in parallel they had the Marquise Awards which is their awards dinner. >> 11th annual Marquise Awards it's like a thing. >> It's amazing, it looked like the Golden Globes. >> It was beautiful this year, it was like, legit. >> Peter: Is that the one with the O on the top? >> And they delivered an award with a drone. It was a great night. >> Awesome stuff. So give us the package, what's going on, tease out the story here. >> Yeah, I think the story is two-fold. One, Oracle's got an interesting take on the marketing software space because they really are trying to connect it between the overall customer service experience initiative, and then marketing as a piece of that. This event in particular, the Modern Customer Experience event has tracked almost full conferences for marketing, for customer service, for sales and for commerce. So all four of those are the verticals underneath this umbrella and that's a really unusual conference setup but I think it reflects where Oracle's head is at from a thought leadership standpoint. That like, look, maybe were going to get to a point where marketing and customer service really are kind of the same. Maybe we're going to get to the point where sales and marketing really are kind of the same. We're not there yet, by any stretch of the imagination. But I think we all feel that convergence coming. And my world the marketing side, CMO's are starting to get more and more responsibility inside organizations and so if that happens, maybe we do need to start to align the software as well. It's and interesting take on the market, and I think it's sort of prescient for where we're going to head. >> It's interesting you mention of all those different silos, or different departments or different functions in a digital end-to-end fabric experiences are all about the customer, it's one person, they're going to have different experiences at any given time on that life cycle, or product spectrum or solution spectrum. So the CMO has to take responsibility of that. >> Well, I feel like somebody has to be responsible for it. Mark Hurd said this in one of his remarks over the course of the show, the CEO of Oracle said look, there is no data department, everybody has to be responsible for data but somebody has to figure what the ins and the outs are and maybe that's the CMO, maybe it's the CXO, I don't think we've fully baked that cake yet. But we're going to have to get to the point where the single record of truth about the customer and their customer journey has to exist and somebody's got to figure out how to wire all those together. We're gettin' there. >> It's so funny, I was joking, not here on theCUBE, but in the hallways about the United Airlines snafu and I'm like, to me as a kind of a developer mindset software should have solved that problem. They never should have been overbooked to begin with. So if you think about just these things where the reality of a consumer at any given time is based upon their situation. I need customer support, I need this, I need that. So everyone's got to be customer ready with data. >> Talk about relevance, relevancy is the killer app, that's it, right. Relevancy is created by technology, and with people, people who actually know how to put that technology into practice in a way that the customers actually care about. So, one of the things that Mark said, he said look, here's the issue, it's not about data, nor is it about clout, it's not about any of that. It's about taking that data and creating understanding out of it. But he said a really interesting thing, he said what we have to do is push those understandings out to the front lines where somebody on the front lines can do something with it that actually benefits the customer. I think that's a really smart point because so often right now we're talking about, oh we've got these data stores, and we've got DMP's and we've got all these things. That's great but until that gets manifested at the front lines, who cares, you've just got a big pile of numbers. >> We had Katrina on from the commerce side, it's funny, she was making a retail comment look, they don't care about the tech, they don't care about blockchain and all the speed and feed, they have to do a transaction in the speak of the consumer. And the language of the customer is not technology. >> No they don't care, solve my problem right. Just solve my problem, and I don't care how you solve it, what sort of magic you have behind the scenes, if I want a sweater, I want this sweater, and I want it right now. >> OK, Jay, share with the audience watching right now and us conversation hallways you've had, that's always the best because you had a chance, I'll see ya on the big stage doing your hosting thing, but also you get approached a lot people bend your ear a lot, what's happening? >> You know what's been an interesting theme this week is we've made such great advances on the technology side and I think we're starting to bump up against okay well now we've got to make some organizational changes for that technology to actually flourish. Had a lot of conversations this week with influencers, with CMO's, with attendees about, I really want to do this I really want to sort of bring sales and marketing together or commerce and sales, et cetera. But our org chart doesn't support that. The way our company thinks, the way our people are aligned, does not support this convergence. So I think were it an inflection point where we're going to have to like break apart some silos, and not data silos, but operational, what is your job, who manages you and what is your bonus based on? There is a lot of legacy structures, especially at the enterprise that do not really facilitate. >> John: Agile. >> Cross-departmental circumstances that we're looking for. So a lot people are like, oh wow, we're going to have to do some robust organizational change and that ain't easy. Somebody's going to have to drive that. Your marketing practitioners, which is my world, they can't drive that. That's got to come from up here somewhere. >> And also people got to be ready for the change. No one likes change. But we were taking about this yesterday called Add the Agile process into development being applied to marketing, really smart. >> Oh, all the time so many marketing teams now are using Agile and daily Scrum and Stand-ups and all those kind of things as opposed to Waterfall which everybody's used forever I think it's fantastic. >> Yeah, and that's something that we're seeing and Roland Smart had to point, he had a book got a signed copy Peter and I, but this is interesting, if you of Agile, to your point, you just can't read the book you've got to have a commit to it, organizational impact is Agile. >> One of the things we had a CMO Summit, we had 125, 150 CMO's from all around the world and one of the things we talked about in that session yesterday was, jeeze, we need to start taking people or hiring people out of a software development world, people who have Agile experience and put them as PM's on a marketing team. Which is going to put that group of people have the Agile background in even greater demand. Because they won't just be doing tech roles for project management but also marketing project management and sort of teaching everybody how Agile works. I think it's really interesting. >> But they've been doing that for a while. I mean the Agile, Agile started in software development but moved broader than that when it went to the web. >> No question, but a lot of these CMO's do not have those type of skills on their team today. They're still using a Waterfall. >> Or they don't recognize that they have the skills. Because most of them will have responsibility for website, website development, so it's that they don't again, it goes back to. >> Web versus marketing. >> Yeah, they probably have it somewhere, they just don't appreciate it and elevate it. >> It's silo'd within the marketing team. >> It's silo'd within the marketing team. So there's going to be, these are the consequence of changes. We'll see the degree to which it really requires a whole bunch of organizational stuff. But at the end of the day, you're right, it's a very very important thing. What are some of the other things you see as long as we're talking about it, other than just organizational. >> Actual other sort of baseline skills. It wasn't that long ago that your social media teams and contact marketing teams, it was manifestly a written job you made things that were rooted in copy. Now we talked a lot about, you have to have like a full video team on your marketing org chart because the core of the realm now is video content and while companies are getting there it's still a struggle for a lot of them. Should we have our agency do this, should we get somebody else to do it, they're like now I got to have all these people, I got to have video editors and camera crew. >> It's expensive. >> Of course it is, yeah. Not everybody can be theCUBE. >> We'll they're tryin'. No, but I think video's been coming down to the camera level you see Facebook with VR and AR certainly the glam and the sex appeal to that. Then you got docker containers and software development apps, so I call that the app culture, you've got the glam, apps, and then you've got cloud. So those things are going on so are the marketing departments looking to fully integrate agency-like stuff in house or is the agency picking up that? What's your take on the landscape of video and some of these services? >> It depends on how real-time they're thinking about video. We're starting to Facebook Live in a public relations circumstance. You saw when Crayola announced the death of the blue crayon or whatever it was a few weeks ago. They did a press release on that, but the real impetus for that announcement was a Facebook Live video. Which puts Facebook and live video as your new PR apparatus. That's really interesting. So in those circumstances the question is do we do that with the agency, is it easier to do it in-house. I think ultimately my advice would be you have to have it in both places. You have to be able to do at least some things in-house you have to be able to turn it quickly and then maybe for things you have more a lead time, you bring in your agency. >> One of the things we're seeing and just commenting while we're on this great subject, it's our business as well, is content is hard. Good, original content is what we strive for as SiliconANGLE, wikibon and theCUBE is something that we're committed to serving the audience at the same time, we collaborate with marketers in this new, native way so that the challenge that I see, and I see in this marketing cloud, is content is a great piece of data. >> Content is data. >> Content is data. >> And it also helps you get more data because there is a lot of data exchanged. >> So a lot of companies I see that fail on the content marketing side, they don't punch it in the red zone. The ball's on the one yard line all they got to do is get it over the goal line, and that's good content, and they try to fake it. They don't have authentic content. >> Another way of saying that John. >> John: They blew it on the one yard line. >> Yeah, another way of saying that is the historically agencies have driven the notion of production value. They have driven the notion of production value, to make the content as expensive as possible because that's how they make their money. What we're talking about is when we introduce a CX orientation into this mix now we're talking about what does the customer need in context, how can video serve that need? It's going to lead to, potentially, a very very different set of production value. >> You bring up a good point, I want to get Jay's reaction on it because he sees a lot too. Context is everything so at the end of the day what is engaging, you can't buy engagement, it's got to be good. >> What serves the customer. >> John: And that is defined by the customer, there is nature of reality silver bullet there's no engagement bullet. >> Sometimes you can argue that the customer values a lower fidelity content execution because it has a greater perceived authenticity. >> You may not know this Jay, I'm going to promote us for a second. A piece of video that's highly produced in the technology industry generates attention for a minute and a half to a minute and 45 seconds. theCUBE can keep attention for 12 or 13 minutes, why? >> John: We have interesting people on. >> If we were a digital agency. >> I would say the hosts, obviously. >> The hosts, the conversation. >> It's back to relevancy. >> It informs the customer. And that's what, increasingly, these guys have to think about. So in may respects, we'll go back to your organization and I want to test you in this, is that in many respects that the CMO must heal thyself first. By starting to acknowledge that we have to focus on the customer, and not creative and not the agency, and rejigger things so that we can in fact focus on the customer and not the agency's needs for us to spend more. >> There was, one of the great conversations in the CMO Summit was this point that, look, with all this technology we have all the opportunities and darnit, all we're doing is finding other ways to send people a coupon. Like isn't there something else that we could use this technology for. And what if we just flip the script and said what do customers genuinely want? Which is knowable and certainly inferable today in a way that has never been historically why don't we use that data to give them what they want, when they want it, how they want it, instead of constantly trying to push them harder. >> Focus on value and not being annoying. >> I mean I wrote a while book about it. >> Well your key point there, is that you're going to infer and actually get signals that, we've never been there before. Chatter signals. >> But let's use them for good not evil I think is the subtext there. >> Yeah, don't jam a coupon down their throat. >> But as Mark says it's hard because CEO's are under tremendous pressure to raise top line in an environment that is not conducive to that. You're going to have to take share. The economy is not growing so fast that you can just show up and grow your company. CEO's have tons of pressure, they're then droppping that pressure on the CMO who then says you need to grow top line revenue. So the CMO says we've got all this technology I guess we'll just send out more offers we'll have a stronger call to action and as opposed to using this information, the inferences, the data, to be more customer focused. I think in some cases we're being less customer focused which, if anything is short-sighted and at worst is a cryin' shame. >> So the solution there is to use the data to craft relevant things at the right time to the right people. >> And it will work but it requires two things that a lot of organizations simply don't have. Time and courage, right. It requires time and courage to purposely push less hard. Because you know it will payoff eventually you've got to buy into that, and that ain't easy always. Sometimes it's not even your decision. >> What we don't want is we don't want to automate and accelerate bad practices. At the end of the day what CMO's are learning, this conversation came out yesterday is, jeeze maybe marketing really isn't that good. Maybe we have to learn ourselves from what this technology is telling us, what the data is telling us and start dramatically altering the way we think about marketing, the role that marketing plays. The techniques we use, the tactics we use, that will lead to organizational changes. I'm wondering, did you get a sense out of the session that they are in fact stepping back and saying we got to look in the mirror about some of this stuff. >> Absolutely, absolutely. I thought it was remarkable, considering who runs this company, Mark Hurd, came in and did a little Q&A at the CMO Summit and he said, And this is the guy who runs Oracle, who's puttin' this who thing together and is sellin' tons of marketing software and says look guys, I'm not even sure if what we're doing here is right because we've got all this technology we have been doing this for a long time, we've got all these smart people and still, what's our conversion rate, 1%? If we've got the greatest technology in the history of the world, we supposedly know all this about customer service and customer journey mapping and our conversion rate is still 1%. Maybe something identified fundamentally broken with how we think about marketing. I thought for somebody in that role to come in and just drop that on a group of CMO's, I was like whoa. >> I think he's right. >> Totally right. >> But to have a CEO of a company like this just walk in and say here's what I think. >> This is a question for you and I'll ask it by saying we try to observe progressive CMO's as a leading indicator to the comment you mentioned earlier, which is flip things upside down and see what happens. What are you seeing for those progressive CMO's that have the courage to say ya know what, we're going to flip things upside down and apply the technology and rethink it in a way that's different. What are they doing? >> One of the markers that we see on the consulting side of my business is CMO's who are thinking about retention first. Not only from a practical execution layer, but even from a strategic layer. Like, what if we just pulled back on the string here a little bit and just said how can we make sure that everyone who's already given us money, continues to give us money and moreso. And essentially really turn the marketing focus from a new customer model, to a customer retention and customer growth model, start there. Start with your current customers and then use those inisights gained and then do a better job with customer acquisition. As customer service and marketing start to converge, mostly because on online. Online customer service is very brand driven and more like marketing. As this two things are converging we're seeing smart CMO's say well what if we change the way we look at this and took care of our own first. Learn those lessons and then applied them outwardly. I think that's a real strong marking signal. >> It's a great starting point and it's almost risk free from a progressive standpoint. >> It's not always risk-free inside the organization. >> I mean it's harder to get new guinea pig customers to like see what works, but go to your existing customers and you have data to work with. >> But wouldn't you also say that the very nature of digital which is moving the value proposition from an intrinsic statement of the values in the product and caveat emptor, towards a utility orientation where the value's in the use of it, and we want to sustain use of it. We're moving more to a service to do that and digital helps us to do that. That the risk of taking your approach goes down because at the end of the day, when you're doing a service orientation you have to retain the customer because the customer has constantly got the opportunity to abandon you. >> Yes the ability to bail out is very very easy these days I completely agree. But what find is that it makes sense to us. It makes sense to us on theCUBE, but in the real world it's not. Not everybody's drinkin' that punch yet. >> John: And why? >> I don't know. >> Sounds like courage. >> It is definitely courage is one of 'em because you're essentially saying look, I've been taught to do marketing one way for 40 years or 20 years. >> Yeah, I'm going to lean on my email marketing all day long. >> Yeah, I'm going to keep pressing send. It's easy, there's almost no net cost. So there's that. And also just the pressure from above, I think. From the CEO to grow top line, net new customer revenue, I think that's certainly part of it. And some if it, I think we went back to earlier about org charting and skills and resources. There's a heck of a lot more people out there at every level of the marketing organization who are trained in customer acquisition moreso than customer retention. How many MBA's are there in customer retention are there? Zero. How many MBA's are there in marketing and sales? >> Lot of 'em at Amazon. >> A thousand? >> A lot of 'em at Apple. >> Yeah, but they were trained there. They didn't come in like that, so they trained them up. >> Jay, great to have you on theCUBE. Great insight as usual, and I think you're right on the money. I think the theme that I would just say for this show, and agree with you is that if you look at Oracle, you look at IBM, you look what Amazon is doing Microsoft in some way maybe a little bit, but those three, data's at the center of the value proposition. Oracle is clearly saying to the marketers, at least we want to say digital it's end to end if you use data, it's good for you. This is the new direction. If you think data-driven CMO, that seems to be the right strategy in my mind. >> The best quote in the CMO Summit, you guys need a CUBE bumper sticker that you can manufacture with this. Data is the new bacon. I was like, oh I love that, that's the best right. >> Who doesn't love bacon. Jay, great to see you. Real quick, what's up with you, give us a quick update on you're opportunities what you're going these days. >> Things are great, running around the country doing fantastic events just like you guys are. Working on a new content marketing master class for advanced marketers on how to take their content marketing strategy to the next level. That launches in a couple of weeks. Continue to do four or five podcasts a week, a new video show called Jay Today where I do little short snippets three minutes a day. JayToday.tv if you want to subscribe to that. >> Beautiful, Jay Baer, great on theCUBE great thought leader, great practitioner, and just a great sharer on the net, check him out. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burr here at Oracle Marketing CX more live coverage after this short break.

>> Host: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube! Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. (electronic music) Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX Show, Modern Customer Experience, this is the Cube, I'm John Furrier. My co-host, Peter Burris, two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Day two, my next guest is Katrina Gosek, Senior Director Commerce Product Strategy, (mumbles) Oracle upper world a few years ago, and Alistair Galbraith Sr, Director of CX, Customer Experience Innovation Lab with Oracle. Welcome to The Cube, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, welcome. >> So commerce is part of the story, it's just not marketing, there's transactions involved, there's R & D, there's a lot of technology. The show here is the common theme of just modernizing the customer experience, which is good, because it's the outcomes. But commerce is one of them. Give us the update, what's hot for you guys this week? >> Yeah, I think what's different this year, from any other year in the past is the pace of innovation is changing, because I think there's so much disruption in the commerce space, and particularly in retail and also B to B commerce. There's lots of new expectations from customers. I know we've been saying that for years, right? But I think the technologies now, that can enable some new experiences, have rapidly changed. Now it's completely fathomable to leverage AI to drive more high-end personalization or to leverage internet of things, to embed commerce more into everyday experience. >> John: Where's the innovation in retail? 'Cause retail's not a stranger to data. They've had data models going back, but certainly digital changes things, they're at the edge of the networks, so it's a little bit of internet of things meets consumer data, the data's huge if you can get the identity of the person. That seems to be the key conversation: how do you guys enable that to take advantage of the sea of data that you're providing form the data cloud, third party and first party data? >> Well I think there's a lot of fun approaches. Oracle has a technology called the Oracle ID Graph, which starts to merge a lot of identities across channels, so where customers are using data cloud, that can inform those micro interactions as they move between channels, and I think one of the trends we've been seeing this year that we're talking about as My Channel, is that customers no longer really complete one interaction or one transaction in one place. They might start on mobile, move to voice, move into a physical store, and we're trying to track that customer in all of those places, so a lot of our focus, and you see data cloud moves into AI, is enabling brands to move this data around more easily without needing to know everything about the customer themselves. >> John: Well that's the key for the experience of the customer, because they don't want to have to answer the same questions again if they're on a chat bot, and they've already been at a transaction. Knowing what someone's doing at any given time is good contextual data. >> Alistair: Yep. >> Well it's funny you say that, because when we talk to customers or end consumers, they're not thinking, "I need more artificial intelligence, "I need more data around my experience, "I need internet of things", they're thinking, "I want convenience, I want this to be fast and quick, "I want you to know me as a brand, "I don't want to have to re-enter everything. "If I'm talking to a customer service agent, "versus someone in the store, versus interacting online". So data's a huge part of that, the challenge is how do you make it consistent? >> John: Katrina has a great point: it's not the technology, it's about what they're trying to do. >> Katrina: Yeah, exactly, very much. >> Well the experience comes back to, in many respects, convenience, and, "I want you to sustain "the state of where I am in my journey for me". >> Katrina: Correct, yeah. >> Or at least not blow my state up. So it's interesting, the journey used to be a role or a context thing, and now we're adding physical location to it, as well as device. So go back to this notion of new experiences. 'Cause it's got to be more than, you can look at something on your phone and then transact on your phone. What are some of the new experiences on the horizon? 'Cause that is a lot to do with where you guys think digital technology's going to go. >> I think some of those experiences are micro-interactions, so that could be people are using voice shopping, but not for the entire purchase, just a re-order this thing, what's the status of this thing? And brands are also using the data that they're gathering to tweak and adjust those interactions. So we're seeing data coming from real world devices and IOT changing the expectation of the customer, as they, maybe, we showed some stories where people are re-ordering products using voice, and then when they shift between these channels, that micro piece of data is really changing that interaction. The other challenge we're seeing is the consistency of the interaction, you said yourself, not only it's the complexity of "what did I do?", but if I do something here and I do something here, I should get the same experience both times. >> So we're talking mostly at this point about the B to C, the consumer world. In many respects, some of the most interesting experiences, we can envisage in the B to B world, where a community of sellers is selling to a community of buyers, and the state that's really important is how does that buying community interact with each other? As they discover things and share information. So how do you see this notion of new experiences starting to manifest itself in the B to B world? >> Katrina: Yeah, it's interesting you say that, because I often, we work with both B to C and B to B clients, and I actually think B to B has always been more focused on personalization, because they do have so much information about their customers, contract data, a lot of information about the buyer, the companies, they've always done kind of online custom personalized catalogs. So I think there's a lot that B to C can learn from B to B about how to leverage that data to personalize experiences. >> John: And vice-versa too, it's interesting, to that point, the B to C is a leading indicator on the experience side, but B to B's got the blocking and tackling down, if they have the data. 'Cause having the data, you get the goods. Okay, so here's the question for you: with the consumers going to digital, you're seeing massive, we were reporting yesterday, here on The Cube and also on siliconhill.com, as well as Adage, not that we didn't predict this, but ad spend now on digital has surpassed TV for the first time. Which is an indicator, but the ad tech world's changing, because how people are engaging with the customer is changing, so the question is, what technology is going to help transition those ad dollars, from banner ads to older formats to something more compelling and using data? 'Cause you can imagine retail being less about click, buy, to sharing data. So the spend's going to only grow on advertising or reaching consumers. That conversion, that experience is going to have to move from direct response clicking, to more experience, what tech is out there? >> Well, I think the biggest challenge has always been tracking and personalizing for a unique interaction. Just the sheer volume of data that's coming in, it's just too hard to consume. So I think the blend of AI and AI with the ability to tweak, adjust, look at multi-variate tests, and change the interaction as it goes, that's going to really massively affect the journeys for retailers, and I think the big benefit as brands move to the cloud, the cost of innovation, the cost of trying something and failing is so much less, and the pace of innovation is so much faster, I think we're seeing people try new things with the data they've got. Find out what works and what doesn't. >> Here's a question for you guys. We're talking to Jess Cahill, when this came up yesterday as well, Peter brought this up as part of the big data action going on with the AI and whatnot. Batch to real time is a shift, and this is clear here in the show that the batch is there, but still an older, but real time data in motion consumers in motion are out there, so the real time is now the key. Can you comment on that? >> I think it goes back to what Alistair was saying earlier about those micro-moments. I think transacting in new and unexpected places, ways, I think that's the key, and that's actually a huge challenge for our customers, because you have to be able to use that data in real time, because that customer is standing there with their phone, or in front of Alexa, or a speaker. >> John: It's an opportunity. >> It's a huge opportunity, and I think those opportunities are everywhere now. In a couple of years be the refrigerator, if you're re-ordering groceries, leveraging the screen, so I think that's going to be the challenge, but I think we've got time to help our customers figure out how to leverage that in real time. I think staying nimble and agile is going to be key and failing fast, and I guess a more positive way to say this-- >> The Agile Marketer, I think we had Roland Smart on yesterday, he literally wrote the book. But this is interesting, if you have the data, you can do these kinds of things. So the question is, certainly your point about the refrigerator and all these different things is going to create the omni-channel nightmare. It's not going to be, certainly multi-multi-omni. It's going to be too many challenges to deal with. >> Alistair: I think we prefer to see it as the omni-channel dream, than the nightmare. (group laughs) >> So many channels, there's no more channels, right? >> Well I think that's where things like Marketing Cloud, things like Integration Cloud help orchestrate that omni-channel journey, so that to your point on marketing and ad-spend, being able to analyze whether a benefit or promotion I showed during one micro-interaction affected something somewhere else, is so challenging but so important when you're moving this ad spend around. And I think where orchestrating and joining these micro-moments together, it's really where we're focusing a lot of our investment at the moment. >> One of the big things that's happening in the industry today is we're starting to develop techniques, and approaches, methods, for conceptualizing how a real thing is turned into a digital representation. IBM calls and not to mention them, or GE, perhaps more of a customer ... (group laughs) Yeah, I just did. >> That's all right. >> This notion of a digital twin. Commerce succeeds, where online electronic commerce succeeds as we are more successful at representing goods and services digitally. What's the relationship between IOT and some of these techniques for manifesting things digitally? And commerce, because commerce can expand its portfolio, things it can cover, as more of these things can be successfully digitally represented? >> I think that's key, and that's actually one of the predictions that we talked about in our keynote is how do you represent new ways of representing the physical store, the physical space with customers, so for me, I think something that probably Back to the Future or Judy Jetson, like a few years ago, augmented reality, or virtual reality, I think now we're going to see that more. We're starting to see it more with furniture sales, for example, you're on your iPad at home, and you can put the couch you've chosen in the space, right there with you, and see if it fits, but you're in your home, you don't have to go to the furniture store, and kind of guess with your tape measure whether the couch fits or not. And I think that's applicable in B to B as well, as 3D CAD drawings, you can kind of see them in VR, or AR. >> Amazon just announced Look, yesterday, which is the selfie tool that allows you to see what you're wearing. >> I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the coming years. >> Well, in many respects, it also, going back to this, we asked the question earlier about B to B, B to C, and the ability to represent that community. We're going to start seeing more of a household approach, as to just a consumer approach, and I think you just mentioned a great one. When we are successfully, or when we are willing to start capturing more data about our physical house or what's going on inside, so that we can make more informed decisions, with others, about how we want to do things, has an enormous impact on the quality of the experience, and where people are going to go to make their purchases. >> Alistair: Definitely, and I think that as we try and merge those experiences between B to B and B to C, what we know about someone as a consumer also directly affects their buying decisions, as a B to B employee buying for their brand. And that just increases the sheer volume of data that people are trying to manage and test and orchestrate. I think we're seeing a shift not only in people being prepared to surrender some degree of privacy for a increased experience, but we're also seeing people trusting in that virtual experience being a reality when they buy. So people have a much higher trust level in AR, if I visualize a couch and then buy it, I've got a degree of faith that when it turns up, it'll be like the one I looked at. And I think that increased trust is really making virtual experiences, digital commerce, so much easier. >> I think that's an interesting point, we had CMO of Time Warner on yesterday, Kristen O'Hara, and she was, we asked her, "Oh yeah, these transformations", big use case, she's on stage, but I asked her, "How was it like the old way? "What would you do before Oracle?", she goes, "Well, there was no old way", they never did. The point is, she said, the point was we became a direct to consumer company, so B to B and B to C are completely merging. So now the B to B's have to be a B to C, inherently because of the direct connect to the consumer. Not saying that their business model's changing, just that's the way the consumer is impacting. >> Peter: Or is it data connection to a consumer? >> A data connection, and where there's gesture data, or interaction data coming in, so this makes, the B to Bs now have to bolt on more stuff, like loyalty, you mentioned loyalty, things of that nature. >> Yeah, if you're a B to B company, you're selling to other businesses, but who are the people on the other business? There are people who shop every day in consumer applications, so their expectations are, "I'm going to have a great personalized experience, "I'm going to be able to leverage the same tools "that I see in my consumer shopping experiences "for my B to B experience, why would it be different?" So I think that's something that B to B is really learning from B to C as well. >> True, but although there seems to be something of a counter-veiling trend, but an increasing number of people are now working at home. So in many respects, where we're going to, is we're talking about experience, not just being online. One of my little heroes, when I was actually trying to do development, a million years ago, was Christopher Alexander. The Timeless Way of Building, which was one of the basic texts that people use for a lot of this customer experience stuff, and the observation that he made was, you talk about spaces, you talk about people moving into spaces to do things in context. And increasingly, the spaces that we have to worry about are not just what's on the screen, but the physical space that people move in, and operate in, an the idea is, I'm going somewhere to do something, and I'm bringing physical space with me. So all of these, the ability to represent space, time and interests and wants and needs, are going to have an enormous impact on experience. Wouldn't you agree? >> Massively, and I think the challenge using that same approach is that people are co-existing in multiple spaces concurrently. They no longer do one thing at the same time. >> Peter: They may be in the same physical place, but have two different contexts associated with it. Like working my home office, I'm both a father, as well as an employee. >> Alistair: Yes. >> And those two sometimes conflict. (Katrina laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely, and you're a consumer and an employee, and as a father, you're potentially affecting the decisions that the rest of your household is making, as well as the decisions that your business is making, all in slightly different ways. But those two experiences with the B to B and B to C, overlap one another. >> Peter: In fact, switching contexts from consumer to father is one of the primary reasons why I lose where I am in the journey. So these are very powerful, and the ability to have the data and then go to your customers, and say, "We will be able to provide that end to end for you, "so that you can provide a consistent "and coherent experience for your customers" is really crucial. Is that kind of where you're taking us? >> Yeah, I mean we've always commerce isn't kind of a standalone little thing, it really connects and glues together so many other types of experiences, so it connects to marketing, it connects to service, you need all of that, to be able to make the experience work. So we're really focused on making sure that it's easy to connect those applications together, that its easy to manage them behind the scenes, and that it appears seamless to the customer on the front end. >> One other thought that I have is, and in many respects, increasingly, because we're going to be able to represent more things digitally, which means we'll be able to move more stuff through commerce platforms. This is where the CX is going to meet the customer road, is in the commerce platforms. Do you guys agree with that? You're going to measure things all over the place, but I'm just curious-- >> John: It's their products, yeah. >> What do you think? Is it going to be increasingly the basis for honest CX? >> Well we're already seeing it become the basis, so I wouldn't say it's a future thing, I think it's been a reality for quite some time, where commerce is the hub that kind of connects, in retail, the store to marketing experiences. >> John: It's bonafide data is what it is too. >> Yeah. >> That's good data. >> Katrina: It holds so much product information, transaction information, customer information, and it just connects and leverages. I don't know if you would agree? >> Alistair: I would agree completely, and I think you look at the fact that most companies ultimately are selling a product, so that's commerce, and I think the transition is that rather than going into the commerce site or the commerce space, you see a lot of brands over the last 12 months have got rid of their store.brand.com thing and just merged their commerce experience into everything else, you're always selling. And we've customers deploy commerce without the cart, but as a product and communication marketing model, to get this tracking data moving around. >> We were talking about Jack earlier, yesterday, Berkowitz, who was talking data, we were talking about data, good data, dirty data, clean data, and data quality in general. >> Katrina: It's a tough problem. >> In context to value, and he said a quote, he said, "Good data makes things happen, "great data makes amazing things happen". And to your point, retail, commerce data, you can't, it's undisputed, it's a transaction. It's a capture in time, and that can be used in context to help other data sets become more robust. >> Well, in many respects it's the most important first person data that you have in your business. >> Katrina: Yeah, and I think from an Oracle perspective, what we're doing with the adaptive intelligent applications for commerce, and for the other applications as well, and particular for commerce is combing that first hand information you have about your products and your customers as an online business, but then the immense amount of data that the data cloud has behind the scenes that augments and allows you to automatically personalize, when a customer comes to your storefront, because they're coming already with all the context that they have elsewhere out in the world, and you can combine that with your own data, and I think really enhance the experience. >> John: Yeah it's funny, we were joking yesterday, Oracle went to bed a software company, woke up a data company. >> Katrina: Yeah (laughs). >> So the data cloud is pretty impressive, what's happened there and what that's doing. >> Katrina: It's amazing, it's a huge differentiator for us. >> Huge differentiator. Okay, final word, I'd like both you guys to just quickly comment to end this segment, awesome segment on commerce and data, which we love. But your reaction to the show, what's the bottom line, what's exciting you this week? Share with the folks, each of you, a quick soundbite of what's happening here and the impact people should know about. >> Sure from a commerce perspective, this is the first year where we've got a 50/50 split in our customer base, so we're seeing a lot of our un-premise customers move to cloud, which is great, and we're really growing our commerce cloud customer base. I'm very excited about that. >> And you're trying to get 100% now, it's never going to be a hundred. >> Katrina: (laughs) Yeah, we need to work with customers and what's right for them, but yeah, it's very exciting right now. >> Alistair, your take? >> I think for me, it's just the sheer pace of innovation, we're seeing brands go from un-premised stories that would take 12, 15, 18 months to add new features, make changes to small nimble brands rolling out incredible innovative features in 12, 18 week time frames, and we're seeing more people having more discussions around the art of the possible. >> John: All right, Katrina, Alistair, great comment, great insight, great conversation about data and commerce, of course cloud, it's the marketing clouds, all cloud world, it's commerce cloud, it's data cloud, it's just the cloud (laughs). I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, move live coverage here from Las Vegas, Oracle Modern CX after this short break. (electronic music) >> Host: Robert--

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas! It's the CUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. >> Welcome back, and we are here live at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for Oracle's Modern CX. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle. This is the CUBE and my co-host, Peter Burris here for two days of wall-to-wall coverage, day two. Doug Kennedy, Vice President of Business Development and Partner Strategy of Oracle, former Oracle, left Oracle, went to NetSuite, now back at Oracle running partners... Great to have you on the CUBE. >> Yeah great to be here. >> Thanks for joining us. We were just talking before we rolled live about some of the history and some of the dynamics in the industry, and it's a very interesting time, because the partner landscape is becoming a critical linchpin for this digital transformation as the vendors get Cloud and the suppliers become "Cloudified" if you will. The roll of the partners is beyond strategic, it's actually technical. >> Well you've got to look at actually the expertise that you need to actually work with the customer. Always sit in the customer's seat and look back at the vendors and the partner eco-system to determine what they need to be successful. And candidly, we bring part of it as Oracle, partners bring the rest of it, whether it's industry expertise, vertical expertise, they deeply understand agencies, whatever that expertise is, we have to figure out the right partnership with them to go be successful together, and that's the trick, and that's why partners are so important right now. >> And what's the message and focus here at Modern CX? Obviously it's not just pillars of solutions, it's, you got a little bit of a unification, you have this Modern CX, who's got a platform (mumbles). What's the conversation like with partners here? >> So, the ones that I've been having this week... So I've been back all of seven weeks, so I'm rolling out a new partner strategy pretty quickly here, and I introduced it to several of our top partners here this week, and it really is to specialize and focus on the prioritization you can bring to our partnerships. That it's back to specialization. I roll everything back, I've done partnering for, good lord, a couple of decades now. The number one question is, How do we both be profitable? We're in partnerships actually each make money and win together. So back it up to that and look at how they specialize, and don't get too thin, don't get too wide, but look at what you're successful at doing as a partner, and for us to then figure out how to work together in that partnership to go win. So I've been amplifying that up with the partners this week. You'll fail if you're spread too thin and trying to be everything to everyone, and I'm pushing the partners to make sure they bring that to the forefront with us first, before we actually go engage the prospects and customers. So I'm kind of backing up again with a lot of these partners. >> So it's not a general purpose philosophy? >> Doug: Nope. >> It's really, find some swim lanes... Everyone's got a unique specialty, I mean PWC has got their thing, now Deloitte, Accenture, they all kind of have their swim lanes developing, but specialism, it seems to have much more domain expertise, now I was talking to Accenture CTO of analytics, Jean-Luc Chatelain, and they have tons of data scientists. They're coding away! Before they used to be project managers, now they got coders, so seeing that transformation, is that also a dynamic you're seeing? >> Yeah, definitely seeing that. If you look at our eco-system, we've got a little over a thousand partners right now that focus on OMC, the Marketing Cloud. They're ISV's, they're the old traditional SI's shifting into more manage services vein, and still doing implementations. Then you get the agencies, which is unique in and of itself because they're running on behalf of their customers. They understand the marketing industry deeply, so now they're taking our solutions and running on behalf of customers, but they're also a partner type. So it's determining which type you are, and some, by the way, are all three. So how do we work with them most effectively? Cause this is a co-sell model. >> And what's the plan? Can you give any details to the strategy? >> Well the strategy is, first of all, there is an ideal partner profile for each of those partner categories. And to replicate that, the programs we're putting in place, we want more of those that fit what I call the ideal partner profile, which comes, at the end of the day, they're going to be profitable, we're going to be profitable. But if you look at the agency model, you know, how do they actually have the reach in coverage with the customers that they currently actually service? How can we actually work with them to introduce our solutions into that product mix that they already use in their managed operations environment? How do we make sure we're bringing that to the forefront in a way that values the agency's business and then also values their customers? Right? So that's unique just 'cause we're in a sense dealing with two customers. We're dealing with the agencies as a partner who's running on behalf of their customers, but we have to have a solution that fits that equation. Think of it that way. >> But there's something else going on, I want to test you with this. >> Sure. >> That is, it used to be that the traditional partner model, you know, the on-premise orientated partnership model was that the partner was a channel partner, they might embed their software on top of the product, et cetera, but Oracle could be good, and the partner could be good. If Oracle's really good and the partner's okay, it still could work out. This more deeply integrated world where data is the asset, and how you flow it and the speed with which it flows, and the degree to which you can show that end to end coherence is going to determine winners or losers. That means that whoever is the weakest link is the weakest link for every, or sets the quality for everybody to a degree. How is that going to change the way you talk to partners? Because they're going to have to step up their game in a big way for Oracle to be able to step up the game. >> Right, now great question. So we have a co-selling model first of all, right? We have indirect in certain markets--Japan and some of the southeast Asia markets are indirect-- so we will rely on the partners to do most of the selling as well as the delivery and managed services. The rest of the world's co-sell. So with our co-sellers, half of the equation is our own people, so I'm doing a couple different things. First of all, on our side, we're defining roles and responsibities of co-selling and making sure that our own sales people know, not who to engage, how to engage the partner. Going back to the basics of how early you pull them in, do you have them do pre-sales? Do you do pre-sales? Who does the demos? Basically through the entire sales cycle, defining roles and responsibilities. And taking that same set of rules to the partners. So we actually have ground rules on how we want to engage through the sales cycle. The last, and this important point, the last thing you want is for the partner and our own sales rep to meet each other in the prospects lobby at the 11th hour of a sales cycle. We're trying to fix that, but more importantly you raised a really good point. What am I asking the partners to step up and do? We're just putting in place, depending on the partner type, six different criteria, there's also a seventh criteria, that I'm measuring our best partners by. It's around capability to execute locally on both pre-sales and technical implementations and operations. I'm looking at revenue, I'm looking at number of customer ads so you're not just out shooting elephants once a year, but you're also bringing in a volume with us. I'm looking at references. That's the proof in the pudding, that you're capable of maintaining that environment and you're helping your customers derive the most value out of the service and solution. And then the last one is really looking at are you in an industry in a vertical and can you bring that to the forefront effectively in co-selling. So I'm putting a bar out there that says, these are the criteria, you've got to get to over this bar to be one of the partners I take into my co-selling engine and promote you to my sales force. So extremely prescriptive on who we're going to co-sell with. >> So it's sales synergy, not conflict. >> Doug: Exactly. >> So you're trying to identify hand-in-glove kind of fit points. >> Doug: Defining how and who. >> Let me offer one other one and see if this resonates with you, make one other suggestion, is that especially for partners that are part of the Cloud mix, have you talked about end-to-end performance, end-to-end effectiveness, end-to-end efficiency, and start to benchmark some of these partners and say, you're doing okay, but we got other folks over here who (crosstalk). I mean the time of execution, the number of errors that are generated, all these other things, because we're now talking about an integration that is not just in the marketing function, not just in the selling function, not just in the service function, but in the execution. That that's where the customer's going to determine whether the partnership is working. Are you starting to look at some of those measures as well? >> Yes, so the back end of this, I'm now looking at a report that says where are we churning? Where are we actually having down sales, in other words the subscription's not renewd at the same level, and I'm correlating that report for the first time back to the associated partner. Then I could sit back down with them and say, look, we're correlating you to a certain percentage of churn, what do we need to do to fix this? Is it better education? Are you not focusing on the whole life cycle of the customer? So we'll be able to come back at that with the partners as well. We haven't done a very good job of that, candidly. It's kind of the front of the sale, move through, get 'em running and then once in a while we turn up to make sure they're delighted, and that they're renewing. You can't do that any more. >> The interesting thing that you're getting at is, I hate to say, eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne or whatever you want to call it. You guys are saying here, use data and change business practices. >> Doug: Exactly. Exactly. >> So you're going to look at the data and bring that in, but the data model is first, if I hear you correctly is, identify clearly your parameters for ideal partnership. >> Doug: Yup. >> On a profitable win/win scenario. >> Yup, who we're working with, and then define how we're working together so our field can effectively co-sell with them. >> Okay so what's the reaction? I mean, the agency I can see has a potential, a lot of moving parts there, so I think that's challenging in general, just agencies are different than more committed partners, (mumbles), I don't mean to put down the agency, but agencies have a lot of moving parts. >> Doug: Yeah. >> What has been the reaction from agencies and the other different types of partners? >> And this is literally this week for the past three days have been meeting with a lot of the top partners. >> John: Standing ovation? >> They're very pleased, they said we want this approach. 'cause candidly if I say, Look, here's why I'm going to bet on you and here's why I'm going to work with you, you can invest ahead of the curve. Most partners aren't going to invest ahead of the curve. They kind of look in the rear view mirror and go, Yeah I got a couple of deals last month, I'm going to maybe start adding capacity. I could say, Look we're committing to you in these regions in these areas and here's how we're working together. It gives them more confidence to start investing ahead of the curve with us. And that's the best, you don't want them lagging behind the demand. >> And what about the swim lanes we talked about, I call swim lanes, you said specialty? Because that seems to be on the partner, not saying, well you could bring a lot to the table and say, here's how we think you might be fit based on the parameters, but that's a transformation that the partners are going through. Are you being proactive in recommending? Are they coming to you? They seem to be kind of in swim lanes... >> If you leave it up to the partner, they'll come to you. And I swim in every lane and I do everything. In a past life, what I was able to do and I've done a little bit now we're going to finish this job, I was able to run transactions through D & B for the past three years of my partner system. And partners would say, I play in every industry and every vertical, and I'd bring data back and say, actually, no you don't. Here's where you focus. >> John: They hope to be in every vertical. >> Right, they want to, they want to, and that's how they fail, they spread themselves too thin. But we come back with the data to say, look, here's where your references are, here's where the majority of your revenue has come from. I'm going to promote you in these swim lanes. You can move into another swim lane over time, but let's focus here. And we've done that. We've actually, we're about 95% through this exercise over the past six weeks. I've taken some of the maps back to some of the partners to say, here's where we believe we're going to win with you. That's an exercise we're going to finish over the next couple of months, and it'll evolve over time, but those are going to be the swim lanes. I'm glad you use that, I use that privately. Which swim lanes are they in and how do I promote those to be the swim lanes my co-sellers are going to work with them on? And that's the way we work. By the way, it helps them with capacity too. If I'm missing somebody in a swim lane, I will first of all try to take somebody out of the lane and get 'em into an adjacent lane for capacity. They like that, instead of just bringing somebody new in. >> I mean I always say the partner business is pretty straight forward, it comes down to money right? What's in it for me, I want to make some cash. Profitability is really important. I think it's cool that you're being transparent about it, saying, hey we're in business to make money, let's just put that on the table. 'Cause, they're going to posture and, at the end of the day, it's what's in it for me? >> I still think that this notion of moving from a product orientation to a service orientation which Cloud describes means a churn, CX, those types of measures, at the end of the day if Oracle's going to win, it has to be able to demonstrate to the marketplace, our eco-system operates better than anybody else's eco-system. >> Doug: Right. >> And starting to bake some of those measures and bake some of those ways of thinking into the relationship so the partners are lifting their game up, it's going to be really crucially important. >> Well the eco-system thing is going to be tested by the fact that, at the end of the day, at least my experience in talking to customers and experience in dealing with the partners, is at the end of the day, the 11th hour sales conflict is ultimately the indicator of if it's working or not. If this conflict with the customer and trust, like, wait a minute, this guy's not going to deliver, that's an undertone that, if that sentiment's there, it's not working. If it's working, pass, shoot, score! Everyone's happy! Sales guy gets comped on the Oracle side, feeding more business to the partner, you know this is a relationship where it flows to the good partners. >> Right, that's why you don't deal with... all thousand can play in the eco-system, but you place your bets on the top ones and get that right, and that's where your growth is going to come from. >> John: It's gamification. >> Also, also, think of it another way is that, I'd rather give the next dollar to one of my top partners that fits my ideal partner profile and can drive growth with me, than to give it to the person on the tail end of the tail, because they can't turn that same dollar into more revenue together. The guys at the top of the pyramid are more capable of reinvesting in our business. >> And the emerging ones that have an ascention vision of sending up and to be a partner will see the cash being doled out and will align... >> And we're going to be transparent of where the bar is. You want to get there? Here's the things you've got to be able to do. >> Right, and how are you guys helping them with any kind of soft, this is to say, partners say, hey Oracle, thanks for the mentoring thanks for the clarity, I really want to be in the swim lane, and I'm willing to invest. What are you going to do for me? >> So the education and training for them... Some of them, as we look at their profile and how successful they are, we will grandfather them in to certain lanes as well. Like, this isn't, go off into a dark room and prove to me you're successful and pop your head up and I may like you. We're going to still look at that next trench of partners that want to get above that bar and work with them, because if we get them over the bar we'll be successful, we'll be more successful, so we have to help them through training and education and enablement as well to be able to do that, and some opportunities to participate in different marketing programs and campaigns. >> Well you're a pro. It's good to co-sell and it's challenging, and it's got a great, I like the formula. Seven days in... >> Doug: Seven weeks. >> Seven weeks in. What's your feedback on the show? Thoughts? >> No this is very good. It's good for a variety of reasons. Obviously the customer focus is extremely good. The other thing it does for our partners is it gives them a chance to network. Because a customer doesn't just buy one solution from one partner. Typically our sales involve three or four partners at times. It gives them a networking opportunity and I'm trying to aggregate those solutions together into more of a complete offering, and we're just one part of that equation. So these type of events help those partners network together and we drive some of that networking as well. >> Doug Kennedy. So next year when we're sitting on the CUBE at a location, maybe here, maybe somewhere else, what's success in your mind for one year out in terms of in your mind's eye, what do you want to see happening, envision happening for next year's event? >> Well a stake in the ground for our own eco-system is we've doubled the impact of our co-selling through our top line with partners. That's a pretty big challenge, but that's what I'm committing to. It's a big net that we're going to go after. But also here you're going to have a partner eco-system, to be blunt, they're more profitable. They're doing better. They actually want more. I would argue we're going to have more people attending here from my partner eco-system next year, hungry for more information and more opportunities to work together. That's success. >> You're going to grow it up top line and grow the eco-system. >> Yup, and other partners that are not part of that growth, wanting it. 'Cause if you make some poster children, the rest are going to want more of that. So we'll see more of a herd mentality start. >> Doug Kennedy in charge of Business Development and Partners here at Oracle on the CUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (dynamic music) >> John: Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live. Day two coverage of Oracle's Modern CX Modern Customer Experience #ModernCX. Also check out all the great coverage here on The Cube, but also on the web, a lot of great stories and one of the people behind all that is Des Cahill, who's joining Peter Burris and myself. Kicking off day two, Des, great to see you, Head of Customer Experience Evangelist, involved in a lot of the formation and really the simplification of the messaging across Cloud, so it's really one story. >> Yeah, absolutely, so John, Peter, great to be here. You know, I think the real story is about our customers and businesses that are going through transformation. So everything that we're doing at Oracle, in our CX organizations, helping these organizations make their digital business transformation and the reason they're going through this transformative process is to meet the demands of their customers. I'd say it's the era of the empowered customer. They're empowered by social, mobile, Cloud technologies and all of us in our daily lives can relate to the fact that over the last five, 10 years, the way that we buy, our journey as we buy products, as we do research, is completely different, than it used to be, right. >> Talk about the evolution, talk about the evolution of what's happening this week, because I think this is kind of a mark in time, at least from our observation, covering Oracle, this is our eighth year and certainly second year with the modern marketing experience now, >> Des: Yeah. >> the modern customer experience, where the feedback in the floor, and this is noteworthy, is that the quality is great, people at the booth are highly qualified, but it's simple. It's one fabric of messaging, one fabric of product. It feels like a platform, >> Yeah. >> and is that by design (laughs) or is that kind of the next step in the evolution of, >> Des: Yeah, John. >> Marketing Cloud meets Real Cloud and? >> Yeah, yeah, so absolutely John. I mean that, that is by design and again, to support our customers and their needs on this digital business transformation journey, it starts obviously with fantastic marketing, we've just got fantastic capabilities within our Marketing Cloud, but then that extends to Sales Cloud. If you generate leads in marketing and you're not handing them over to sales effectively or of a good sales automation engine and that goes on to commerce, CPQ, social, and service. And all of this, if we bring this back down to again, this notion of the empowered customer, if you're not providing those customers with connected experiences across marketing, sales, service, commerce, you're not... you're going to, you might lose those customers. I mean, we expect connected experiences across our whole journey. If I'm calling my cell phone provider, 'cause I got a problem, I don't, and I don't want to call one person, get transferred to another person and then go to the website to chat with someone, have a disconnected experience. I want them to, when I call, I want them to understand my history, my status as a customer, I'm spending 500 dollars a month on them, the problems I've had before. I want them to have context and to know me in that moment and as Mark Hertz says, it's like a moment of truth with my cell phone provider. Are they going to delight me and turn me into a customer advocate, or am I going to leave and go to another cell phone provider? >> Well let's talk just for a second, and I want to get your comments on this and how it relates specifically to what we're saying here. Digital has two enormous impacts. One, as you said, that a customer can take their research activities with them, on their cell phone. >> Yeah. They have learned, because of commerce and electronic commerce, they've learn to expect and demand a certain style of engagement >> Des: Right. >> and that's not going to change, so if you are not doing those things-- >> We like to say Amazon is the new benchmark, either B to C or B to B, it doesn't matter, right. >> It is a benchmark, at least on the commerce side, so it's, so that's one change, is that customers are empowered. The second big change though, is that increasingly, digital allows people to render products more as services and that's in many respects, what the Cloud's all about. >> Des: Right. >> How do you take an asset, that is a machine and render it as a service to someone? Well now we can actually use digital technologies to render things more as services. The combination of those two things are incredibly powerful, because customers, who now have the power to evaluate and change decisions all the time are now constantly making decisions, because it's a pay-as-you-go service world now. >> Des: Right. >> So how do those two things come together and inform the role, that marketing is going to play inside a business, 'cause increasingly, it seems to us that marketing is going to have to own that continuous, ongoing engagement and deliver that consistent value, so a customer does not leave, 'cause you have more opportunities to leave now. >> Well, I, so I think that's a good observation, Peter. I do think that marketers can play, and do play, a leading role in being the advocate for the customer within the brand, within the company and as a marketer myself, I think about not just the marketing function, but I think about, well, what is the experience, that that lead or that prospect going to have when I hand over to sales? And what is the experience that they are going to have, when I hand them over to service? And in my past roles as a CMO, the challenge I always faced was that I couldn't get information out of the sales automation system or out of the service automation system, so as a marketer, I couldn't optimize my marketing mix and I didn't have visibility on which opportunities I passed, which leads I passed over turned into the best opportunities, turned into the best deals, turned into the customers, that were most loyal, that got cross-sold and up-sold and were the happiest. So I think, going back to Oracle's strategy in all of this, it's about having a connected, end-to-end suite of Cloud applications, so that there's a consistent set of data, that is enabling these consistent, personalized, and immediate experiences. >> I think that's interesting and I want to just validate that, because I think, that is to me, the big sign that I think you guys are on the right track and executing and by the way, some of the things you're talking about used to be the holy grail, they're actually real now. >> Des: Right. >> The dynamic is the silos are a symptom of a digital-analog relationship. >> Des: Right. >> So when you have all digital, the moment of truth starts here, it's all digital. So in that paradigm, end-to-end wins. And at Mobile World Congress this year, one of the main themes when they talk about 5G, and all these things, that were going on, was you know, autonomous vehicles, (laughs) media entertainment, smart cities, a smart home, you know, talk to things. To your point, that's an end-to-end, so the entire world wants-- >> Des: Throw IoT in there. >> Throw IoT, >> Right. >> So again, these digital connections are all connected, so therefore, it is essentially an end-to-end opportunity. So whoever can optimize that end-to-end, while being open, while having access to the data, >> Des: Right. >> will be the winning formula. >> Des: Right. >> And that is something that we see and you obviously have that. >> And then the other piece is how do you actualize that data? Right, and I know you spoke with Jack Berkowitz about adaptive intelligent apps, it's, we're taking approach to artificial intelligence of saying, how can we bring to bear the power of machine learning, dynamic decision science, so that all this data, that's being collected and enabled by all these digital touch points, these digital signals, how do you take that data and how do you actualize that, 'cause the reality is, 80% of data that's collected today is dark, it's untouched, it's just collected, right. >> Well, here is the hard question for you, you know I am going to ask this, so I am going to ask it, here's the hard question. >> Des: Yeah. >> It really comes down to the data, and if you don't, you, connected networks and all that good stuff is great fabric, end-to-end. >> Des: Absolutely, yeah. >> This is certainly the future, it's the new normal, it's coming fast. >> Right. >> But at the end of the day, the conversation we've been having here is about the data. >> Des: Yes. >> What is your position with Oracle on connecting that data, 'cause that ultimately is what needs to flow. >> Des: Right. >> How does that work? Can you just take a minute to >> Sure, sure. >> to address that, how the data flows? >> Yeah, I think it starts with our end-to-end connected applications, that are able, that are connected with each other natively and are sharing that same data set. We obviously recognize that customers have mixed environments, so in those cases, we can certainly use our technologies to connect to their existing data stores, to synchronize with their existing systems, so it all starts with the cleanliness and quality of that baseline customer data. The second piece I'd say, is that we've made a lot of investments over the last five years in Oracle Data Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud is a set of anonymized, third party data. We've got 5 billion consumer IDs, we've got a billion business IDs. We've got a tremendous amount of data sources. We just announced a recent acquisition of a company called Moat, last week at our Oracle Data Cloud Summit in New York City. So we've made a tremendous investment in third party data, that can augment anonymized third party data, that can augment first party data, to allow people to have not just a connected view of the customer, but more of a comprehensive view and understanding of their customers, so that they can better talk to them and get them better experiences. >> That's the key there, that we're hearing with this intelligent, adaptive intelligent app kind of environment, >> Yeah, yeah. >> where machine learning. The third party data integrating within the first party data, that seems to be the key. Is that right, >> Absolutely. >> did I get that right? >> Yeah, well I would say there's a number of points, so I would say that, that, you know, you can think of the Oracle Data Cloud combining with the BlueKai DMP and being a great ad-tech business for us and a great solution for digital marketers in and of itself. What we've done with adaptive intelligent apps is that we've combined that third party data with decision science machine learning AI and we've coupled that with the Oracle Cloud infrastructure and the scale and power of that. So we're able to deliver real-time, adaptive learning and dynamic offers and content at 130 millisecond clips. So this is real-time interaction, so we are getting signals every time someone clicks, it's not a batch mode, one-off kind of thing. The third piece is that we have designed these, designed these apps to just embed natively, to plug into our existing CX applications. So if you're a marketer, you're a service professional, you're a sales professional, you can get value out of this day one. You've got a tremendous data set. You've got real-time, adaptive artificial intelligence and it plugs right into your existing apps. It's a win-win. Take your first party data, take your third party data, combine it together, put some decision science on there, some high bandwidth, incredible scale infrastructure and you're getting, you're starting to get to one-to-one marketing. You're freeing your marketing teams from being data analysts and segmenting and trying to get insight and you're letting the machine do that work and you're freeing up, you're freeing up your human capital to be thinking about higher-level tasks, about offers and merchandising and creative and campaigns and channels. >> Well, the way we think about it, Des, and I'll test you on this, is we think ultimately the machines are going to offer options. So they're going to do triage on a lot of this data >> Des: Right, right. >> and offer options to human decision-makers. Some of the discretions, we see three levels of interaction, >> Des: Yeah. >> Automated interaction, which, quite frankly, we're doing a lot of that today in finance systems. >> Des: Yes. >> But then we get to autonomous vehicles, highly deterministic networks, highly deterministic behaviors, >> Des: Right. >> that's what's going to be required in autonomy. No uncertainty. Where we have environmental uncertainty, i.e. that temperature's going to change or I, some IoT things are going to change, that's where we see the idea of turning the data and actuating it in the context of that environmental uncertainty. >> Des: Right. >> We think that this is all going to have an impact on the human side, what we call systems of augmentation, >> Des: Right. >> where the system's going to provide options to a human decision-maker, the discretion stays with the human decision-maker, culpability stays with the human decision-maker, >> Des: Right. >> but the quality of the options determine the value of the systems. >> So the augmentation is-- >> The augmentation's great. >> So let me give you a great example of that with AIA. So, take for example, you're a pro photographer and you got a big shoot the next day and your camera, your main camera you bought three months ago, it breaks. And you buy all your stuff at photog.com and you call 'em up and what could happen today? "Hi, what's your account number? "Who are you? "Wait, let me look you up, OK. "I'm sorry, I'm not authorized to get you a return." You know, boom, and the person's like, "I'm never going to buy from them again." Right, it's that moment of truth. Contrast that with a, 'cause the person making that decision, if it was the CEO getting that call, the CEO would be like, "We're going to get you a camera immediately." But that person that they're talking to is five levels down in a call center, Bismarck, North Dakota. If that person had AI, adaptive intelligent apps helping them out, then the AI would do the work in the background of analyzing the customer's lifetime value, their social reach, so their indirect lifetime value. It would look at their customer health, how many other services issues, that they have. It would look at, are there any warranty issues or known service failure issues on that camera and then it would look at a list of stores, that were within a five mile radius of that customer, that had those cameras in stock. And it would authorize an immediate pickup and you're on your way. It would just inform that person and enable them to make that decision. >> Even more than that, and this is a crucially important point, that we think people don't get when they talk about a lot of this stuff. These systems have to deliver not only data, but also authority. >> Exactly. The authority has to flow with the data. >> Des: Right. >> That's one of the advantages-- >> On both sides, by the way, on the identity and-- >> On both sides. >> And I think that employee wants that empowerment. >> Absolutely. >> No one wants to take a call and not make the customer happy, right. >> Peter: Absolutely, >> Yeah. >> because that's a challenge with some of the bolt-on approaches to some of these big applications, is that, yeah, >> Exactly. >> you can deliver a result, but then how is the result >> How is it manifested? >> integrated into the process >> Right. >> that defines and affords authority to actually make the decision? >> OK, so let's see, where are we on the progress bar then. because we had a great interview yesterday with the CMO from Time Warner. >> Yeah. >> OK, Kristen O'Hara, she was amazing. But basically, there was no old way of doing data, they were Time Warner, (laughs) they're old school media and they set up a project, you guys came in, Oracle came in, and essentially got them up and running, and it's changed their business practice overnight. >> Des: Right, right. >> So, and the other thing we heard yesterday was a lot of the stuff that was holy grail-like capabilities is actually being delivered. So give us a slice-and-dice what's shipping today, that's, that's hot and where's the work area that's road-mapped for Oracle? >> Sure, well-- >> And were you guys helping customers? >> Sure, I'll talk about a couple of examples, where we're helping customers. So, Denon and Marantz, high end audio company, brand's been around 100 years. The way music is delivered, is consumed, has changed radically in the last 20 years, changed radically in the last 10 years, changed even more radically in the last five years, so they've had to change their business model to keep up with that. They are embedding Oracle IoT Cloud into every product they sell, except their headphones, so all their speakers, all their AV receivers and they are using IoT data and Oracle Service Cloud to inform, not only service issues, like for example, they are, they're detecting failures pro-actively and they're shipping out new speakers, before they fail or they're pushing firmware to fix the problem, before it happens. They're not only using it to inform their service, they're using it to inform their R&D and their sales and marketing. Great example, they ship wireless speakers, HEOS wireless speakers, highly recommend 'em, I bought 'em for my kids for Christmas, they're the bomb. But customers were starting to... They were getting a lot of failures in these wireless speakers. They looked up the customer data, then they looked up the IoT data. They found that 80% of the speaker failures, the products were labeled Bathroom as location in the configuration of their home network setup and what they realized was that customers were listening to music in the bathroom, which is a use case they never thought of and the speakers weren't made to be water or humidity-proof, so they went to the R&D department, 14 months later, they ship a line of waterproof HEOS speakers. The second thing is they found people, who were labeling their speakers, Patio, they were using it on the patio, they didn't even have a rechargeable battery on it, so they came out with a line with a rechargeable battery on it. So they're not only using IoT data, for a machine maintenance function, >> John: 'cause they were behaving-- >> they're using IoT data to inform, inform R&D and they're also doing incredible marketing and sales activities. We had Don Freeman, the CMO of Denon on the main stage yesterday, talking about this great, great stuff they're doing. >> And what's the coolest thing this week, that you're looking at, you're proud of or excited about? >> I'm excited about a lot of stuff, John. This week is realized, you alluded to this week has been really, really fun, really great, a lot of buzz, obviously a lot of buzz around adaptive, intelligent apps and we've talked about that. But I would say also beyond a doubt, that intelligent apps for CX, we've introduced some great things in our Service Cloud, the capability to have a video chat, so Pella Windows was also on one of our panels today and they were talking about the ability for, to solve a service issue, the ability to show a video of what's going on, just increases the speed with which something can be diagnosed so much faster. We're integrating on the Service Cloud, we're integrating with WeChat and we're integrating with Facebook Messenger. Now, why would you do that? Well again, it comes back to this era of the empowered consumer. It's not enough that a company just has a website or an 0800 number that you can go to for support. Consumers are spending more time in social messaging apps, than they are on social messaging sites, so if the consumer wants to be served on Facebook Messenger, 'cause they spend their time on it, the brand has to meet them there. >> John: Yeah. >> The third thing would be the ability for the Marketing Cloud and Service and Sales Cloud, we've got chat bots, voice-driven, text-driven, AI-driven, so mobile assistant for the sales professionals, so you can input data on the road, "Hey, open an account, here's the data "for the transaction here what's going on." >> John: Yeah. >> Incredible, incredible stuff going on all over the stack. >> I think the thing, that excites me, is I look at the videos from last year and the theme was, "Man, you guys have "all these awesome acquisitions," >> Des: Right. >> "But you have this opportunity with the data," and you guys knew that and you guys tightened that together and doubled down on the data >> Des: Yeah, with banking, yeah-- >> and so I thought that was a great job and I like the messenging's clean, I think but more importantly is that in any sea change, you know, we joke about this, as we're kind of like historians and we've seen a lot of waves, >> Des: Right, for sure. >> and all these major waves, when the user's expectations shift, that's the opportunity. I think what you guys nailed here is that, and Peter alluded to it as well, is that the users are expecting things differently, completely differently. >> Let me share a stat with you. 50% of the companies that were in the Fortune 500 in the year 2000, are either out of business, acquired, gone, 50% and those companies, >> Dab or die. >> Blockbuster, Borders, did they stay relevant? >> John: Yeah. I think changing business practice based on data is what's happening, it's awesome. Des Cahill, here on The Cube. More live coverage, day two of Modern CX, Modern Customer Experience, #ModernCX. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, we'll be right back. (dynamic music)

(energetic music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back and we are here live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay Convention Center for Oracle's Modern C-EX, Modern Customer Experience Event. Part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, I am John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-host Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Adrian Chang, director of customer programs at Oracle Marketing Cloud, also emcee of the Markie and big part of that program. Congratulations on the success of the Markie's awards, which were given out last night. I read your blog post on the site this morning. >> Thank you >> Great to see you again and welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, always great to be here and I love Modern Customer Experience and that marketing is a part of it. >> It's really been a great transformation this year. The simplification of just now narrowing it down to one simple value president, Modern Customer Experience, which encapsulates a lot of stuff. Quickly review what that is and then let's talk about the Markies. >> Absolutely, so I start with the Markies and so we have a history of celebrating excellence in data-driven modern marketing. So, this program has grown tremendously over the past 11 years. When I look at the submissions, they're customers that are focusing on acquisition and loyalty retention. And they read these stories all the time and spend weeks preparing the submissions. So this event is all about how can we share our intent to have our customers have a good experience as part of Oracle and then how can we help them delight their customers in delivering experiences and create value at every touch point. >> One of the thing I really like about the change in the name from Modern Marketing Experience to Modern Customer Experience is you move from the process, the function, to the outcome and the result. So how are the Markies reflecting that this year? >> Absolutely. So if you think about where we started, again it was six categories celebrating excellence in B2B marketing and reaching folks behind a single device, their laptop computer. So cut to 2017, the customers' preferences, their activities are fluid. So great marketing requires you to use a series of channels to reach them everywhere. And so, marketers have to balance brand with action, and then also deliver on intent. So the Markies have had to evolve to think about the habits. So the account-based marketing team of the year was a new award that we gave out that really represented the intent. Are people actually doing this, we have tons of great stories. So we have to balance out a bit of the usage of the product and the technology and embracing the new strategies and what's current within the marketplace. >> So the future of marketing as it goes into data, that's been the theme here. All of our interviews, day one. And certainly the key notes, even Mark was giving a great specific example. Now data is at the heart of it. Adaptive intelligence is the theme. You can see the dots are connecting the convergence of where the Markies are showing traction are some pretty interesting use cases. Any notables you'd like to share that kind of highlight that data piece? >> Absolutely. So our winner for best email campaign was from Jetstar and they're an airline in Austraila. What's great is they have been able to find ways to-- so when you get an email about travel, sometimes you book at one particular point and your preferences and relationship with that airline may change. Your travel destinations may change. So the fact that they can optimize the information at the time of send, sending the weather, curing you to maybe upsell and look at other opportunities to have a pleasant experience, that's amazing. So Laura Ipsen spent some time talking about how we at Oracle are looking to evolve preferences, so going from one to many, to one to one, and the hallmark which is one to you. And I think the Jetstar campaign, they use Oracle responses as a perfect example of that. The first award that we gave out was to Covance for account-based team of the year and by doing, setting up an account-based marketing strategy, putting it in place, getting all the stakeholders in sales in place, getting the discipline on the content. They were able to increase their engagement with key accounts by a significant margin. And they were delighted to be among those that are partners to celebrate that achievement. >> Adrian, I want you to talk about, for the folks that are watching who aren't here, the buzz in the hallways, because the hallways is always a good conversation, certainly the lunch table as well. I'll include that technically at the hallway, but people sitting down. >> Absolutely. >> AI has been front and center, but it's not being painted over, white-washed, "Oh! AI! It's hot so let's jump on the bandwagon." There's some real tech involved. What has been the reaction from customers in used cases that you hear in the hallways? >> Customers are excited about it. I think for a lot of our customers had the opportunity to hear Mark Heard talk about it. Where he embraced and said, "If you think about AI at the core, it's computing done real fast to help people make really rich decisions about what to do next." And so, I think our customers are still grappling with all the technology and how to get value out of their core platforms, how do they deliver on their initial objective and then we have a subset of our most mature, most excited, who are starting to put those data plots together, and start getting more predictive and allow the machine to do the work for you. But in order for you to have, to even think about it, you've got to have great, you've got to fill the cup with great data. And I think people are still getting there so that the machine isn't biased and you don't make the wrong decision about how to treat your customers. >> So just notable trending tweets I wanted to share with you, and again, get your reactions, because this is speaking to the customer in used case. One was from a part from our digitizing panel, Mark wrote "According to digitize, if you're not looking to use chatbots and AI, you're going to be out of business hashtag MME17", a little bit of that, legacy there. And then hashtag Modern CX. And the other one is, "Netflix is a great example of a company creating content combined with powerful AI targeting programs." Little bit of sample of some of the things we're seeing. Chatbots. It's a new interface. It's a new way to use data. Netflix content, which modern marketers need content in this platform. Picking a Netflix approach. So, kind of begs a question. Chatbots? Netflix? Kind of modern. Email? Old? So how do you get a marketer to get you to use the reliability of hardened critical infrastructure, like email, not going away anytime soon but, it's going to be one dimension of Netflix. Content marketing. Binge watching. All this content out there. Netflix and chatbots interface. Your thoughts? >> So my thought is I am, so I was in the room when I watched the chatbot piece and I loved the fact of the, we could live in a world where we could have a fluid customer experience anywhere. You can ask a question. I also support our communities where you ask a question and know you're automatically going to get an answer to the algorithm. So that delivers on that one to you scenario. So I'm super excited about it. When I look at the Netflix example, even to get the information on what the recommendation engine should be, you still need a lot of data. And you still need to know what are the habits of your customers who even land on that decision tree. So I love the fact that folks are thinking Netflix and thinking content, but that chatbot thing, oh my goodness. When people start doing that I can't wait to see those customers that win those Markies. >> Peter: But they have to do it right. >> They have to do it right. >> One of the dangers that marketing always faces is the idea that it's all about collecting information, having the customer give something to me and not giving something valuable in return. >> Adrian: Absolutely >> And the challenge that I see with chatbots is, and I think you agree John, is are chatbots going to be used to further automate information collection at the expense of really presenting value. The new marketing, the Modern Customer Experience, has to be focused on are we delivering value with the customer at every single interaction, not is the customer doing more for us inside of marketing. What do you think about that? >> So I agree. Cause if we do not know that we are creating value and that we're not, that we're adding friction into the problem, you pour that into your algorithm, there's going to bias. And so then, you can't make a decision about how to feed information into the machine and not have the right information that says we don't have the right region, we don't understand the behavior across all products. You can't have bias in the model at all. It has to be complete for you to then look at your customer base holistically. >> Yeah, we don't want to better automate bad marketing practices. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> We want to use these technologies to continuously drive to use a famous person's parlance a more perfect union between this marketer and the buyer. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> John: Well you got a great article up on Martechseries, "This year has gone above and beyond, fully leverage and most innovative marketing technology to create customer centric campaigns that deliver outstanding results that Laurie has spent, Senior Vice President Chairman." Okay that's obviously marketing packaging for the quote, from PR, but what she's getting at is customer centric. Again this is the theme, multitude of technologies now in the platform. Very interesting. Are customers responding well to this platform and are they seeing the need to stand up thing quickly in these campaigns? >> Adrian: Absolutely. They are finding that there's more pressure to get interim value. They are absolutely buying into the platform message and we have quite a few customers who also were recognized for the use of multiple products and multiple partner related applications. And so we're actually seeing a nice trend in both. To do great marketing, part of the messaging, or part of Laura's talk track from today was people are freaked out about the data but if you find a way to harness it, you'll create experiences where you'll stop chasing the customers. They'll start chasing you cause you'll find the right way to have the conversation with them. >> And word of mouth gets around too. I'm going to ask you to pick your favorite child of the awards. Was there one that jumps out, without alienating all the winners. Is there one that you like? >> This is a really, really hard question for me. As you know I read all the submissions, I play a heavy role in writing the speech. So it's really hard. >> John: Here we go, the preamble, not picking one. Here we go! I don't like to pick my favorite child. No parent likes to do that. >> I don't like to pick my favorite child. This is a really, really hard thing. >> Okay, audience favorite? >> How are they different this year from last year? How about that? Or is there something general that shows, that kind of reinforces some of this customer experience or are you seeing a progress in how the Markies are evolving? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm happy to answer that one. And so for the first time since 2012, we brought back the dinner. And so having the Markies and our customer celebration, it shows our intent as Oracle Marketing Cloud, for our customers as well. That we love and want them to have a great week and want to celebrate their accomplishments and get other people to the winning circle. So being at a table and feeling that energy, getting that opportunity to sit with an executive or sit with a member of a team is a really, really great lift to then come to an event with over 4,000 people and feel warm and feel included. So I think that was an important part, that was a huge feel. I mentioned that we added a account-based team of the year award. Again, you couldn't be in B2B marketing and hide from account-based marketing. It's everywhere. We also delivered an overall customer experience award, so we had two customer-related awards and we created one category. I personally the videos, so our best video submission categories won where the viewers got to pick. And I would say the reaction of Juniper taking home two trophies last night, if I had to pick one, because that one had bit of a go to it. >> Peter: Juniper? >> Juniper Networks. >> Really? >> John: Two awards. >> They won two awards last night. I loved their reaction as well as the reaction of our folks from Brazil. You know, really, really great stories from their use of data. We also had Chris Diaz, our leader of the year, who not only led really strong customer experience transformations across marketing, sales, and service. >> This is the CMO of Time Warner? >> Uh no, that's Kristin. >> Kristi? >> Uh yeah, that's Kristin at Time Warner. I'm talking about Chris Diaz who is also driving sustainability efforts in Africa. It's really transformational. Huge, huge advocate of Oracle. As is the team at Kenya Airways. There's some really feel good moments. There are really exciting moments, you can feel it. People were hugging each other. People were laughing. People brought their own noise cannons and sparklers. >> Who doesn't love an awards show? When you're giving out great trophies? >> You know, we always get the comparison to the Oscars, and so this year it felt like the Golden Globes. >> So you handed out the wrong award. >> So you had a couple of times when the winner, when the wrong winner was >> We actually did not have that but we actually did joke about it. We embraced it. So Kayla Sullivan helped us with the awards distribution. And that was fun. The trophy itself is actually made by the same designer who makes the Emmy. And I believe I said that last year. But the feel was more like the Golden Globes. There was refreshments and opportunity to have there. >> John: It was well done. It looked great on photos. Big crowd. You had the jibs and all the cameras. Great camera angles. >> We had a drone do the delivery so we played with some new drone deliveries >> John: That's the next one up on Amazon delivering your packages by drone, you know, dropping in. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So we had one delivered via tweet and then we had one that was delivered via drone and so we covered all their risk management pieces in advance. And I'm just super happy that InVision, who partnered with us in hosting and producing the event, were able to get some of these things cleared. So our intent was let's be futuristic, let's be digital, let's be now. And they managed to incorporate that into the show for us. >> Well, Adrian. Congratulations on all the great work with the Markies and continued success. What's next next year? What do you guys look, I know, processing, you got to have a little fun now. Relax a little bit. But as you look forward to next year's Markies, you're watching, you've got your submission. It's kind of like the college admissions. You want to know who the judge is. Here he is. What are you looking for for next year? Have you though about it, any ideas? Random thoughts? >> Yeah, it's a great question. It takes us about seven months to actually plan. To sit down and actually plan our calendar from submission peer, the content. And so, we tend to create the categories that are aspirational. So we likely will figure out what's the best way to incorporate the trend. Get them out early to drive customers to get really excited about what's next. We're talking about AI now. What will we be talking about in six months? I'm looking forward to to hearing more customers share about the value their getting from Marketing Cloud, the new channels that they're using, how they've overcome barriers within their organizations to do new and great things. And really focus on taking these stories and telling them all year. >> And that's speed and empowerment. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Adrian Chang. Here in theCUBE back with Markies update with great commentary. Great to see you. Looking great, love the outfit. Lookin' good, as always. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> Peter: Took me a while to figure out what that was though The flower. What is that thing? From here it's like >> It's good. Looks good on you. Adrian Chang, here inside theCUBE bringing all the Markie action, all the great coverage. It's theCUBE. We'll have more live coverage after the short break. (energetic music)

(calm and uplifting music) (moves into soft and soothing music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (chill and calm electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for theCUBE's special coverage of Oracle's marketing clouds event called Modern CX for Modern Customer Experience. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, with Peter Burris, head of research at wikibon.com. This is our wrap up of day one. We've got day two coverage tomorrow. Peter, we saw some great news from Oracle on stage. I'll say modernizing their platform, the positioning, certainly, how they're packaging the offering of a platform with the focus of apps, with the additive concept of adaptive intelligence, which gives the notion of moving from batch to realtime, data in motion, and then a series of other enhancements going on. And the guests we talked to have been phenomenal, but what's coming out of this, at least in my mind, I would love to get your reaction to today, is data. Data is the key, and it's clear that Oracle is differentiating with their data. They have a database. They're now bringing their Cloud Suite concept to marketing and extending that out. Interesting. AI is in there, they got some chatbots, so some sizzle, but the steak is the data. So you got the sizzle and you got the steak. >> Well, we heard, you're absolutely right, John. We heard today a lot, and I think this is a terminology that we're going to hear more frequently, is this notion of first person data versus third person data. Where first person data is the data that's being generated by the business and the business's applications and third person data being data that's generated by kind of the noise that's happening in a lot of other people's first person data. And I think that's going to be one of the biggest challenges in the industry. And Oracle has an inside track on a lot of that first person data because a lot of people are big time Oracle customers for big time operational acts, applications that are today delivering big time revenue into the business. >> In the spirit of marketing speak at these events you hear things, "It's outcomes, digital transmissions. "It's all about the outcomes." Agreed, that's standard, we hear that. But here we're seeing something for the first time. You identified it in one of our interviews with Jack Horowitz, which had 150 milliseconds, it's a speeds and feeds game. So Oracle's premise, you pointed out, I'd like to get deeper on this, because this is about not moving the data around if you don't have to. >> Yeah, yeah. >> This is interesting. >> This is a centerpiece of Wikibon's research right now, is that if you start with a proposition that we increasingly through digital transformation are now talking about how we're going to use data to differentiate business, then we need to think about what does it mean to design business, design business activities, design customer promises around the availability of data or the desire to get more data. And data has a physical element. Moving data around takes time and it generates cost, and we have to be very, very careful about what that means, let alone some of the legal and privacy issues. So we think that there's two things that all businesses are going to have to think about, the relationship between data and time. Number one, Can I serve up the right response, the right business action, faster than my competitors, which is going to matter, and number two is can I refine and improve the quality of my models that I'm using to serve things up faster than my competitors. So it's a cycle time on what the customer needs right now, but it's also a strategic cycle time in how I improve the quality of the models that I'm using to run my business. >> What's also interesting is some things that, again that you're doing on the research side, that I think plays into the conversations and the content and conversations here at Oracle's Modern CX event is the notion of the business value of digital. And I think, and I want to get your reaction to this because this is some insight that I saw this morning through my interviews, is that there are jump in points for companies starting this transformation. Some are more advanced than others, some are at the beginning, some are in kindergarten, some are in college, some are graduated, and so on and so forth. But the key is, you're seeing an Agile mindset. That was a term that was here, we had the Agile Marketer, the author of The Agile Marketer, here on our-- Roland Smart, who wrote the book The Agile Marketer. But Agile can be applied because technology's now everywhere. But with data and now software, you now have the ability to not only instrument, but also get value models from existing and new applications. >> Well let's bring it back to the fundamental point that you made up front, because it's the right one. None of this changes if you don't recognize these new sources of data, typically and increasingly, the customer being a new source, and what we can do with it. So go back to this notion of Agile. Agile works when you are, as we talked about in the interview, when you have three things going on. First off, the business has to be empirical, it has to acknowledge that these new sources of information are useful. You have to be willing to iterate. Which means you have to sometimes recognize you're going to fail, and not kill people who fail as long as they do it quickly. And then you have to be opportunistic. When you find a new way of doing things, you got to go after it as hard as you possibly can. >> And verify it, understand it, and then double down on it. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, customer-centric and all the other stuff. But if you don't have those three things in place, you are not going to succeed in this new world. You have to be empirical, you have to be iterative, and you have to be opportunistic. Now take that, tie that back to some of the points that you were making. At the end of the day, we heard a lot of practitioners as well as a lot of Oracle executives, I don't want to say, be challenged to talk about the transformation or the transition, but sometimes they use different language. But when we push them, it all boiled down to, for the first time, our business acknowledged the value of data, and specifically customer data, in making better decisions. The roadmap always started with an acknowledgement of the role that data's going to play. >> And the pilots that we heard from Time Warner's CMO, Kristen O'Hara, pointed it out really brilliantly that she did pilots as a way to get started, but she had to show the proof. But not instant gratification, it was, "Okay, we'll give you some running room, "three feet and a cloud of dust, go see what happens. "Here's enough rope to hang yourself or be successful." But getting those proof points, to your point of iteration. You don't need to hit the home run right out of the gate. >> Absolutely not. In fact, typically you're not. But the idea is, you know, people talk about how frequently product launches fail. Products, you know, the old adage is it fails 80% of the time. We heard a couple of people talk about how other research firms have done research that suggests that 83 or 84% of leads are useless to salespeople. We're talking about very, very high failure rates here and just little changes, little improvements in the productivity of those activities, have enormous implications for the revenue that the business is able to generate and the cost that the business has to consume to generate those revenues. >> John: I want to get your reaction to-- Oh, go ahead, sorry. >> No, all I was going to say, it all starts with that fundamental observation that data is an asset that can be utilized differently within business. And that's what we believe is the essence of digital business. >> The other reaction I'd like to get your thoughts on is a word that we've been using on theCUBE that you had brought up here first in the conversation, empathy to users. And then we hear the word empowerment, they're calling about heroes is their theme, but it's really empowerment, right? Enabling people in the organization to leverage the data, identify new insights, be opportunistic as you said, and jump on these new ways of doing things. So that's a key piece. So with empathy for the users, which is the customer experience, and the empowerment for the people to make those things happen, you have the convergence of ad tech and mar-tech, marketing tech. Advertising tech and marketing tech, known as ad tech and mar-tech, coming together. One was very good at understanding collective intelligence for which best ad to serve where. Now the infrastructure's changing. Mar-tech is an ever-evolving and consolidating ecosystem, with winners and losers coming together and changing so the blender of ad tech and mar-tech is now becoming re-platformed for the enterprise. How does a practitioner who's looking at sources like Oracle and others grock this concept? Because they know about ads and that someone buys the ads, but also they have marketing systems in place and sales clouds. >> Well, I think, and again, it's this notion of hero and empowerment and enablement, all of them boil down to are we making our people better? And I think, in many respects, a way of thinking about this is the first thing we have to acknowledge is the data is really valuable. The second thing we have to acknowledge is that when we use data better, we make our people more successful. We make our people more valuable. We talk about the customer experience, well employee experience also matters because at the end of the day, those employees, and how we empower them and how we turn them into heroes, is going to have an enormous impact on the attitude that they take when they speak with customers, their facility at working with customers, the competency that they bring to the table, and the degree to which the customer sees them as a valuable resource. So in many respects, the way it all comes together is, we can look at all these systems, but are these systems, in fact, making the people that are really generating the value within the business more or less successful? And I think that's got to be a second touchstone that we have to keep coming back to. >> Some great interviews here this morning on day one. Got some great ones tomorrow, but two notables. I already mentioned the CMO, Kristen O'Hara, who was at Time Warner, great executive, made great change in how they're changing their business practices, as well as the financial outcome. But the other one was Jack Berkowitz. And we had an old school moment, we felt like a bunch of old dogs and historians, talking about the OSI, Open Systems Interconnect Model, seven layers of openness, of which it only went half way, stopped at TCPIP, but you can argue some other stuff was standardized. But, really, if you look at the historical perspective, it was really fun, because you can also learn, what you can learn about history as it relates to what's happening today. It's not always going to be the same, but you can learn from it. And that moment was this grocking of what happened with TCPIP as a standardization, coalescing moment. And it's not yet known in this industry what that will be. We sense it to be data. It's not clear yet how that's going to manifest itself. Or is it to you? >> Well here's what I'd say, John. I think you're right, kind of the history moment was geez, wasn't it interesting that TCPIP, the OSI stack, and they're related, they're not the same, obviously, but that it defined how a message, standards for moving messages around, now messages are data, but it's a specialized kind of a data. And then what we talked about is when we get to layer seven, it's going to be interesting to see what kind of standards are introduced, in other words, the presentation layer, or the application layer. What kind of standards are going to be introduced so that we can enfranchise multiple sources of cloud services together in new ways. Now Oracle appears to have an advantage here. Why? Because Oracle's one of those companies that can talk about end to end. And what Jack was saying, it goes back again to one of the first things we mentioned in this wrap, is that it's nice to have that end to end capability so you can look at it and say "When do we not have to move the data?" And a very powerful concept that Jack introduced is that Oracle's going to, you know, he threw the gauntlet down, and he said "We are going to help our customers "serve their customers within 150 milliseconds. "On a worldwide basis, "anywhere that customer is in the world, any device, "we're going to help our customers serve their customers "in 150 milliseconds." >> That means pulling data from any database, anywhere, first party, third party, all unified into one. >> But you can do it if and only if you don't have to move the data that much. And that's going to be one of the big challenges. Oracle's starting from an end to end perspective that may not be obviously cloud baked. Other people are starting with the cloud native perspective, but don't have that end to end capability. Who's going to win is going to be really interesting. And that 150 millisecond test is, I think, going to emerge as a crucial test in the industry about who's going to win. >> And we will be watching who will win because we're going to be covering it on SiliconANGLE.com and wikibon.com, which has got great research. Check out wikibon.com, it's subscription only. Join the membership there, it's really valuable data headed up by Peter. And, of course, theCUBE at siliconangle.tv is bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, Day one here at the Mandalay Bay at the Oracle Modern CX, #ModernCX. Tweet us @theCUBE. Glad to chat with you. Stay tuned for tomorrow. Thanks for watching. (chill and calm electronic music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec >> Interviewer: People obviously know you from Shark Tank but the Herjavec group has been--

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017 brought to you by Oracle. (energetic, bouncy music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, welcome back to our broadcast from Oracle Modern Customer Experience here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. We've had some great, great, great guests thus far talking about the keynotes, talking about how marketing is evolving, and very importantly talking about how customer experience is becoming a centerpiece of a lot of what businesses are trying to do with marketing playing a significant role. With that in mind, we got a great guest right now. Scott Creighton, is the Vice President of Oracle Customer Experience Industry Solutions. Welcome to theCUBE Scott. >> Thank you Peter. Great to be here. >> Scott, I'm going to pitch you hard first time out the door here, and that is we're seeing a lot of companies go through digital transformation, and everybody has their own definition of digital transformation. >> Scott: Exactly. >> There is always an element of how the channel is transforming, but we don't often talk about sales people and sales. Let's talk a little bit about how digital transformation is manifesting itself in sales organizations. >> Great, Peter you're dead on, so most of the customers we're working with today are going through some form of digital transformation. The primary reason for that is to really enhance the overall customer experience. Kind of as we talked about earlier, it started out as kind of a digital marketing transformation thing to get the right offers at the right time to the customers, and engage with them, and many different channels and devices. What I think customers are learning, and we're helping them with is you have to transform the whole company and especially the sales organization. The question is how does that affect the sales organization? Well the sales organization now has to be as fast, as easy to work with, and transform the processes and the way they interact with the customer through the different product offerings that are now digitized and prepackaged so the sales person now has to be much more of what I call a strategic advisor today, and to leverage the different promotions and things that are going on in marketing, and be aware of those to be able to offer that same interaction with the customer. It's a big change. >> I used to describe marketing, an old style of marketing is what I call offer, respond, fulfill. Where marketing would get together, figure out what the offers were. They'd put them out there. They'd see who responded, and then they'd turn to somebody to fulfill them. >> Scott: Right. >> In this digital world, where we can get more information from the customer, and we can get greater visibility into their requirements that we're moving to a need, match, engage model, where we're listening to the customer, and gathering what their needs are, and then matching so we we can engage more effectively in partnership. The sales person still has a crucial role in that matching process, right? >> Yes, absolutely. You're exactly right, so now when the sales rep gets that lead, that lead is a very rich lead today. You know what products they're looking at, you know what channels they've been involved in. They know what promotions they're looking for, so the customer doesn't want to start the conversation with what do you need, tell me about your business. They want to start it with I've already been evaluating different offers from different companies. You know that now, and what you basically start the conversation with, I saw you looking at this really cool widget we just offered you. Let me tell you how companies like you in your industry have leveraged and benefited from that. The conversation is very, very, different, and then what price point, what promotions, and match that to the customer. Then now we have a much more rich conversation with that customer experience. >> We're not going to ask sales people to become themselves data analysts. >> Scott: No. >> Presumably the software and the solutions are going down to present different options. >> Scott: Absolutely. What types of technologies, new ways of doing things will be necessary so the sales person can be presented with the right set of options so they match with the customer. >> Exactly. You know we've announce some new innovations here. One is around adaptive intelligence. Now rather than the sales rep having to think in their mind and really understand different price points and products, and the configurations, as they're talking to the customer, or they see that original lead come in and they start that conversation, adaptive intelligence is going to be able to give them here's what the best offer is. Here's a recommended step. Here's recommended customers that are like theirs that they could benefit from this product. The sales rep is way more effective now as a trusted advisor, versus being an administrator and trying to mix and match, and look at all the internal systems to figure out what to offer 'em. Based on what that customer has been looking at, and customers like them, what's the next best offer? What are additional add-ons and packages that get served up to the sales rep in the conversation with the customer, in the process flow, to have a much more effective sales effort with that customer. >> It sounds like the sales person's actually part of the process of configuring the solution, and not just hand holding him and walking that customer from expert, to expert, to expert, where the sales person's really almost a passive participant, but just making the introductions. Is that right? >> Yeah exactly, so they're in the process, they look like a trusted advisor, and on top that they don't have to keep all this stuff in their head, or look at spreadsheets, or product catalogs and stuff, the system is serving up the best products available for that customer, based on what their needs are. On top of that now we've also introduced some significant mobile enhancements with virtual assistant and those types of things that the sales rep now can say, what's the latest promotion, right? It'll come back and serve up the latest promotion rather than going through sending emails and phone calls, and calling different people trying to figure out what it is in process, so when they're having that conversation with the customer through the latest mobile technologies, a virtual assistants, and you know leveraging voice recognition. The world for the sales rep's completely changed now. As you're interacting with the customer, the best products, virtual assistant, all these different type technologies are coming together, all on a mobile device. We can sit down on an iPad like this, and have a very robust conversation, but real time meeting your needs in this great customer experience that we're having with the latest products, with the right price. The best part about all that is when you go to hit the order button, now we've got the perfect order for the customer as opposed to a lot of times they're somewhat disappointed. It wasn't quite right. The pricing wasn't right, and now we have a perfect order. The customer gets a perfect delivery of the right product and they're very satisfied. >> In an era in which everybody's concerned about automation taking away jobs, and a lot of folks and commentators saying oh yeah, digital's going to replace sales people. You're suggesting that sales people are going to get more valuable and be made more effective by digital. You're going to augment the sales person's ability to serve the customer. You're not going to replace it. >> No, I actually believe that what every sales person wants to be is a trusted advisor. Unfortunately in today's world, it's very manual in effort. There's a lot of data entry. They're looking a sales forecasts, but everything's on spreadsheets still in terms of pricing and product catalogs. All that becomes automated now. It allows me to be more effective with the customer rather taking quotes two days, three days, a week, I'm quoting real time because the system's serving up the best products at the best price. Now I can be a trusted advisor. I believe every sales rep wants to be a trusted advisor. Now this frees them up to do that while the system's serving up the next best step in sale cycle, the next recommended product, the recommended price, the bundling. We're automating the quoting and the discount approval processes. Those things used to take days, weeks, some cases months on very complex orders. Today we're doing that real time in front of the customer. I can be more effective. I can meet more customers faster, and I can be a true trusted advisor. >> Give me your view. Five years from now... Actually let's make it easier, two years from now. Let's say three years from now. How is the sales person going to be spending their time differently as an consequence of the support that these enabling technologies can provide. >> Sure, so real quick, how do they spend their time today? The way they spend their time today is typically on an iPad or a laptop, logging in, sifting through leads, taking a look at the lead information, cold calling customers. Trying to determine whether it's a qualified lead or not, and walking through a very manual sales opportunity process. Meanwhile they're going to a different system or spreadsheets to put the quote together, and all those systems are usually separate. Let's envision those all on the same platform today such as Oracle Sales Cloud where we have quoting systems, we have the sales processes, we have the analytic tools for sales managers to see better forecasting. Now we have adaptive intelligence. We're using virtual assistants, so literally those processes we just described can be on a smart device such as the iPhone, and I can do all that speaking through the phone saying, I'm with Peter. He's very interested in widget number three. We have a special promotion for that. What's the best price for him? How fast can I get it to him? Okay produce the quote, approve the quote, submit the quote. Now it's an order and we just did that in three minutes or less. >> It used to be for example now, talking about a sales manager. The sales manager used to talk about their A list sales people who were the ones that were willing to go into the system, willing to take a look a the leads, good at discerning which ones were good or bad, good at having that first cold call and turning it into something of value. Now we're not so much talking about A versus B sales people, the system is in fact handling a lot of that, making that more of a level playing field, the A versus B sales person is are you able to help solve the customer's problem faster by using all this content? Have I got that right. >> You're dead on because now we can have 100 people serving up through adaptive intelligence the right product, the next recommended step in the sales stage. What's the recommended collateral and things we need to get to the customer? Everyone gets that same technology, so we're all operating evenly there. Now it's what is your skill in being a trusted advisor, building that relationship. What's the long term relationship, and spending time there knowing everything else is going to be available to you and it's a long term relationship that you're going to be able to build. You're separating sales reps not based on do they know the work arounds within your company to get something done, which is a big problem, because now you need to be a 10 or 15 year veteran and then the new people have a hard time because they don't know the work arounds to get a quote approved, or get a contract done. This is all available now on the platform real time adaptive intelligence through mobile technology, virtual assistant, and everyone has access to that technology. Everyone's trained on that technology and now it's your A people are strategic advisors. >> If we think out over the course of the next couple years, the evolution of some of these digital technologies, the emerging role of the sales person, or how the sales person's going to do thing differently, tie it back to the relationship between sales and marketing. We're here at the Modern Customer Experience show, what is it that marketing folks are going to bring back to the sales people to get them excited about some of these changes, because it's not just marketing, it's got to be the whole engagement team working together. >> Yeah, you're exactly right. What we're getting from marketing now on the Oracle CX platform is very intelligent very rich leads now. They're scored, they're ranked, they're very targeted and now as a sales rep when I get that lead, think of the days of old. We've all been there. You get an email, and maybe a phone number. Today I'm getting a full digital footprint. Where is that customer, and what have they looked at. What have other customers like them, based on their geography, based on their industry would be a propensity to buy what? What I get today from marketing, the digital footprint of where they've been, where they've been looking and what they've been looking at, but I'm also going to get recommended product offers right then and there, so I can start the conversation saying, "Peter I saw you were on the website, you were looking at this product. Guess what, we've got a promotion for it. Do you have any questions about it? Yes, yes, no. Here's a couple really cool things. By the way we have our promotion today. If we add this to it, would that satisfy your needs? Can we go ahead and place this order for you? >> It takes a village to be successful with some of these complex products. Is Oracle actually also then putting a particular individual within a community that's buying some things in a B to B setup for example. Is Oracle also helping to pinpoint that person's role within the broader community within the buying company? Is that something that we're starting to see bought in. >> Absolutely, absolutely. We're using a lot of different capabilities within digital marketing to look at the LinkedIn profiles, to take a look at the social, to look at the different devices that they're on. I know what company he's in, what our relationship is with that company. LinkedIn's a new integration that we've announced here so I can use social capabilities to understand who the buyer is. What is his relationship within the company? Where have we sole in other parts of the company and all that information. >> Peter: Who they were. >> Who they were exactly, and then how do I pull that community together to be able to really narrow in on this one deal and sell this deal. >> You talked a the 15 year old Vet who now knows their way inside my company but it used to be all that, that 15 year old vet was so valued because they knew their around inside the other company. >> Scott: Exactly. >> Now technology's helping us identify how to navigate the complex buying environment a little bit more successfully. >> You're exactly right. I could be you know a brand new sales rep, and then now when I get this digital footprint, I'm also getting the hierarchy of the company, who this person is within that hierarchy, and where we sold within that company, and who those people are. Now I already know what that company relationship is and I may have never even walked in the halls of that company before. Now I can have a very intelligent interaction that says, Peter I saw you looking at this product. Guess what, your business unit in Japan, and so and so in Japan has already bought that product. He's given us a five out of five star rating. Did you know that? No I didn't know that. Okay, great here's his name. Let me introduce you to someone else within your company. >> Then you're happy to sell. >> Scott: Exactly. That's how it works. >> Scott Creighton. Great conversation. Scott Creighton, VP of Oracle Customer Experience Industry Solutions. Thank you very much for joining us in theCUBE today, and we'll be back momentarily with more great interviews from the Oracle Modern Customer Experience show here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. (energetic, bouncy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (techno music) >> Okay, welcome back, we're live here at the Mandalay Bay, this is theCUBE's coverage of Oracle's Modern Customer Experience event, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and my co-host Peter Burris, Chief Researcher at Wikibon.com, and our next guest is Nick Edouard, who's the President CM of LookBookHQ, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much-- >> I was talking hockey, so I'm all distracted, I'm ruined, I'm disappointed, good to see you, before we get into it, it's all intelligent content, some of the things that are going on on this platform. But take a minute to talk about what your company does so we have some context. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're a marketing technology company based in Toronto. We are a very big part of the Oracle Marketing App Cloud. And we kind of pick out where Oracle basically leaves off, where the Marketing Cloud stops. So a lot of what happens in the Marketing Cloud is focused on generating moments of attention and orchestrating that kind of buyer's journey. We're what happens in the destination side of the click. So we focus on the intelligent use of content. How do we deliver content? We think of every moment of attention as core to a marketer, that that really is their currency, the attention. We need to actually think that marketers, B2B marketers in particular, need to think a lot more like B2C, to think more like publishers. They're obsessed with attention. We shouldn't be satisfied with clicks or form fills. We need to actually be capitalizing on those moments of attention to make sure that if Bob is really my whitepaper, then I need to know that he's actually reading it. How do I then move him to the next best content asset, or give him a choice of content assets in session? So in essence what we do, what our company does, and we help companies like Thomson Reuters and ADP, in fact ADP is speaking on about half this afternoon, Polycom, Quintiles, whole host of big Eloqua customers. What we do is to help them take their content use model from something that looks and feels like Blockbuster, one size fits all, I don't know if actually Bob watched the video that he walked out of the shop with or the DVD, rather. And hence, why Blockbuster is RIP. And we take that and make it far more like Netflix. We make it far more on demand. >> Instrumented. >> Yeah, it's very much like-- >> This is interesting, the attention to impact is interesting, and you know, attention is essentially aided awareness, which is the Holy Grail in marketing, right? I mean, getting people to have some aid to a final destination or transaction of some sort. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, very much so. I mean in the B2B side, obviously a marketer's job is to generate high quality marketing qualified leads and the real emphasis is on the Q, qualified. But companies like SiriusDecisions report that 94% of marketing qualified leads don't close. And that's a damning statistic for a B2B marketer. And our whole hypothesis is, and we're proving this to our customers is the reason why that happens is they're not qualified. Bob might have clicked on an e-mail, he might have filled in a form, et cetera, but did he read the content? We need to get an MQL to engage with five, seven, ten pieces of content to become a high quality MQL. And if we're only doing that one piece of content every engagement, that's really hard to do. No wonder our sales stat was this low. >> Well, we also need to understand that there's a progression people go through as they learn. It's not just that we want them to click on nine pieces of content-- >> Absolutely. >> As much as we want to see a pattern. So they've read this content and there was a suggestion made or an option provided and they then took the option, which is an even stronger suggestion that they've absorbed it, they've internalized it, and they're now part of a journey. So how does, I really like the idea that we're on the delivery side of the click, so you're, you know, we got all the stuff that's happening on the presenting things, the options, and then you're ensuring that when they click, whatever is being delivered is the highest quality-- >> Yeah. >> In terms of driving that customer forward in the journey, have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. So if we take, if you take something which Eloqua's done a fantastic job, for example, of teaching their community of their customers about lead nurture and the typical nurture track looks and feels something like six emails over six weeks advertising content offer A, then content offer B, content offer C. And typically they're scheduled 10:00 a.m on a Thursday. Now this would be great, if we could get Bob and the other 12,000 people that we sent the email to to click on every single one of those emails. And the reality is, if I've got low, single-digit clickthrough rate, it's not going to happen. So what we do instead is, well, if they're engaging with A, why don't we give them B in the same session? While they're here, while we've done the hard work in getting their attention. And to your point, Peter, we're tracking that, and then we can start to make some really intelligent decisions going forward, as to, oh it worked, this is what resonated with Bob. This content asset's actually performed well. So we have two basic approaches to this. One is we let the marketer curate that experience, decide what A, B, C is et cetera. Or we actually use machine learning to auto-generate. If Bob arrives at A, what should B, C, and D et cetera be? So to that, it's very much like Netflix, where we kind of base our algorithm, it looks and feels very similar to Netflix's content discovery. That's great for anonymous or net new prospects in the top of your funnel, once you've figured out what they're actually interested in, then you can actually-- >> How does it work for you guys? Do you require registration, because content in these days has two flavors, free and gated. So there's always that dilemma, how much is free, you want some flow, tension, and then you go on conversion, gated, maybe premium content, how do you guys view that, is that part of or independent of what you do? >> No, it's a big part of what we do. And, one of the things, one of the capabilities that we have in our application is actually the ability to serve forms based on time and behavior. So, if they've engaged with three content assets, then maybe I actually want them to give me some more information or put up a hand. So we can make the form time-based, you can let them try before you buy, as it were, or you can hard gate it. We use Eloqua Forms in our application, so all that information flows as normal, as the work flows all get triggered, et cetera. It's very much up to the marketer how they want to use it, but one of the things, what we increasingly see amongst our customers, is the most successful do try to take the forms out of the way. Once we've got, once they are a member of our known database, how much more information do we really need them to volunteer, particularly with our ability to augment that contact record with other sources of data. Asking the marketer, I'm sorry, asking the prospect for it isn't always the most sensible thing to do. >> It's the free versus registration, but it's also new kinds of content. One of the things I like to say is software is content. Trying software, for example, is content. Or presenting an interactive experience that has a software element associated with it is a crucial part of gaging where people are. Are you able to start embedding your tooling directly into some of these more interactive elements and choose options within that interaction, or is it more options on static content? >> It could be both. So we are fundamentally content diagnostic. The best way to think about what we do is really as a very smart wrapper that goes around the content and then that can be embedded or it could be shared however you want, it could be used as a destination in its own right. So, sure if you want to kick something off with some former interactive content, absolutely. We also pull all different types of content together. So if your content is distributed or you want to use third party content, reviews, an expert in the space that's writing about something, and you pull that in and use that as a jumping off point. And what's really interesting is frequently it is the sequence of content that's the most interesting thing, not the behavior or engagement of a single asset. >> Right, and so part of the experience that sort of marketing is developing here translates into other disciplines within the business, for example, service. Come into respects, one of the things that you're presumably testing is is the prospect learning the right stuff that actually makes them more qualified. Well the same thing could be said for service, self-service. Is the person going through the right sequencing? Are you also seeing a demand for this kind of a product over on the service side and does that tie marketing back together? >> That's a great question. And one of the things that when we kind of officially launched our company in the application, three or four years ago now, we focused very much upon demand generation. Like we knew the problem that were helping themselves, but there are a handful of our customers, Cisco being one, actually, where actually at the moment, all they do is use us on the customer marketing side of things. How do I drive adoption, how do I drive cross-sell and upsell? I mean, all this is, we've got to remember that attention's what we're looking for and the way that we achieve that is using content as our primary asset as a marketer. The channels are important, the creative is important, but these really are content offers. Bob doesn't buy because he clicks on an email, Bob buys because he reads the stuff and watches the things. >> Peter: But it's attention and competence. >> Yeah. >> Right, so it's, Sy Syms used to say, I think it was Sy Syms, used to say that an informed customer is the best customer. You want a competent customer. >> Nick: Yeah. >> In many respects, the process of moving from the marketing qualified an MQL to an SQL it is, is that customer competent enough to actually engage with a sales person or somebody else to do something. >> That is spot on. So what we're seeing across our customer base is improvement in conversion rates from MQL to SAL for example. So McAfee, Intel Security, now McAfee again, they've seen a three times increase in the MQL to SAL conversion rates. Rockwell Automation has actually made a 300x return on their investment in us in nine months by passing higher qualified leads to the sales team. I think they generated $250 million in additional net-- >> Peter: Rockwell? >> Rockwell, yeah. ADP, that's doing our customer case study this afternoon, a 3x increase in marketing influence opportunities, and a 6x increase in closed won marketing opportunities. So more, but to your point here, better qualified. We know that these people are actually read our stuff, therefore the conversation is easier. They are actually generally qualified. Carrier's been proving that out by actually 2.4 times faster through the funnel to MQL, and then their ACP is 2.3 times higher. Why? Because they're not getting the pushback in the sale cycle because the prospect has self-educated and they see the value now. >> Nick, I want to get your thoughts on something that's involved in our, we're in a independent media company and we don't really have any ads on our site at all, but we have a sponsorship model, we have data. But it's interesting, I'm reading an Ad Age article right now that says for the first time ever, digital has surpassed TV. I mean, I can remember-- >> Wow. back in the days, it's always this little slice and it's getting bigger and bigger. But for the first time, desktop and mobile ad revenue surpasses TV for the first time, 22% upswing from the previous year. So, digital ads, some are calling it native advertisement, whatever the hell that means, is a key part of the attention cycle. So the role that a marketer needs to take with channels as important, and a lot of content marketers are failing these days that we talk to because they're not being authentic with their message and the users can smell-- >> Right. >> You know, non-relevant content. Some are clever and make it link-baitish and some are actually really super smart and actually do authentic content. But, so that's kind of progression. That's an evolution in the industry, but from a data standpoint, there are platforms out there, like SiliconANGLE and others, that have an opportunity for impression and attention in real time. How does your system, how does your clients, and how do people deal with that? Is there a way, is there mechanisms? >> So we have two large publisher customers that run multiple different properties and have very large communities they're looking to monetize and they're all part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, they use their tech stat, and we're helping them in two ways. Firstly, kind of from an advertising thing, like high value added, advertising solutions, for want of a better description. How do I help to monetize my community, not just pass to HP, if they're the advertiser, here's a list of names of people that filled in the form. Here's actually people that are engaging with your content. And it's a mix of our editorial and your content to tell a story. And then one of the things that we're starting to explore for them is actually far more on the native side of things, actually being embedded as... >> John: An asset? >> Essentially, as a native ad in its own right, which can kind of get launched. That's something which I'm keen to explore further. And at the heart of it is, it's probably an even bigger problem on the ad tech side that it is on the martech side, but people like Gary Vaynerchuk are starting to ask the ad tech industry, we need a dose of common sense here, was the marketing consumed? And that's something which I am fascinated with, we're starting to see that we can actually identify by channels. This channel might, well this particular display provide the SP may have generated, you say, oh I don't know, 1,000 clicks in the last 30 days. Did it do anything? Did my-- >> A lot of times valuable. >> Exactly. >> You know at the end of the day, to sustain attention, you have to be valuable. I think John, we're talking really about a continuum from impression to attention to competence. We want to work with competent buyers because it cuts down the time that we spend on it, it reduces the risk that we're wasting our time, and quite frankly, it's a lot easier to work with someone who's really engaged and wants to succeed with whatever we're offering. >> It's also, he mentioned the publisher angle, I was thinking also from the customer angle, because I'm a customer and a marketer, I'm going to be looking for mechanisms to go to. The publisher wants better monetization of their communities, so have you seen any patterns in the business that could be a use case for helping customers operationalize, and we had great success with our business in the sense of saying, hey, we're engaging users, so that's good, you should join in with us at the right time not, you know, try to do it six hours too late, right, it's like being late to the party, right. So that real time piece is really super important. >> For sure. We've actually just changed the way that we're integrating with Eloqua to speed that up. So now we've actually moved to using web hooks as part of the integration and using their map form processing capabilities. Because it's faster, it's more extensive, it's more scalable. It means we can get very rich in content engagement data into someone's hands faster and better. And, I think, what is it? 50% of people buy from the first person that shows up, so being able to do that is critically important. >> Member-based communities are getting a lot of trends, traction these days. Some call, you know, subscribers, buyer walls, but member-based. >> So something we're starting to look at is how do we actually start to auto-generate the content experience, yeah, around kind of key accounts or topics, et cetera. >> Fascinating conversation, Nick, appreciate it, coming on. >> Nick: My pleasure. >> LookBookHQ, check 'em out, doing intelligent content, scaling content, looking at data, congratulations on your success, look forward to following up with you on some of the native advertising solutions that we, me need, that you need and congratulations, Oracle's certainly taking advantage of it. >> See you next time. Cheers. >> Thanks for coming out. Be back with more live coverage, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube! Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (light, upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay. This is the Cube. Silicon Angle's flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris, Head of Research at Silicon Angle, Wikibon.com. And our next guest is Steve Krauss, Group Vice President of Product Management for Oracle Marketing Cloud. Great to see you again, welcome back to the cube. >> Thank you John. >> So a lot of great announcements today. I want to just jump into it. First of all, you've got a great job. You've got the product side. You've been busy this year, so congratulations. Some announcements I want to get your reaction to that we saw today. The Adaptive Intelligence, love that. I love how it speaks to the data in motion, real time needs of applications. >> Peter: 150 milliseconds >> 150 milliseconds boot shot. We got that on the queue, so it's on the record. It's going to be good, it's going to be good. And also the chat bot thing, which big fan of chat bots as an illustration of what's coming. Not so much as chat bots by themselves, but it does speak to the new user interactions, the new interfaces, new ways to notify and inform as part of that experience. This is some heavy tech, so I want, the first question is AI. Everyone seems to be washing thereselves. Oh, we've got A.I. >> Yeah, Yeah. >> Well that's just predictive analytics, that's been done before. >> Steve: M-Hmm. But Augmented Intelligence or Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks have been around for a while. What are you guys doing specifically on the product side? Because this is super exciting announcements, to make Adaptive Intelligence work, what's the key tech? >> Steve: Yeah, Well there's a couple things. In fact, I think often when people talk about AI, they want to go immediately to the algorithms and think that somehow that is the only secret sauce. And the reality is, you know, like a lot of things in the world of computing, you put bad data into one of these things and you get bad results out. You put good data, you get good results. You put better data, that's when things start getting really interesting. And so one of the neat things about the marketing version of Adaptive Intelligence is called Adaptive Intelligence Offers, is that it has the ability to not just take the data that the marketer has, but it can reach into something called the Oracle Data Cloud and get additional data to drive better signal into the AI algorithms to make them run better. So we're bringing a data advantage to the table, and then probably as you've heard from the AI apps people, there's already a heritage at Oracle for building these real time decisioning systems. And so you've got these algorithms that are real time, that can adapt every click, update themselves, make the models go better. If you've tracked data mining for a long time, data mining contests, honestly the winner in second place is usually a very small margin. We think really that data piece is going to be the thing that's going to be the biggest differentiator. Because there's a lot of smart people with really great adaptive algorithms. So we're bringing both to the table. >> John: Okay, data or algorithms, there's always been the chicken in the egg syndrome. >> Yeah. >> Is it algorithms or the data, data or algorithms? A lot of people are voting in the crowd, that conversation we're involved in, data trumps algorithms. >> Steve: I would vote that way as well. I think there's far greater variance in what you can do with data if you collect it in a smart way. And in the case of Oracle, we've assembled this massive data cloud. It's not something someone else can casually do. The reality is with a lot of the algorithms, Google's open sourcing a lot of tents are slow, and so we'll see. I mean, it's not like we are chumps with the algorithms. We take that stuff very seriously, but the data itself just make everything more better. >> John: But the right tool for the right job is the same premise, you articulate for algorithms. Pick your tool, pick your algorithm, but if you don't have the data, you're SOL anyway. >> Peter: As you've mentioned John, the algorithms have been around a long time. What's new is that we now have so many more data sources, so we have data for the first time. >> John: And massive compute. >> And now we have massive compute that can be set up easily, so we actually do something with it. I want to point out, I want to test ya on this, we had Jack Berkowitz on honorly which is the source the 150 millisecond. Jack noted that Oracle aspires to be able to have the right answer anywhere in the world inside 150 milliseconds. Which is an amazing, amazing vision, and for most people who think of the cloud, they think of data flying all over the place. >> Steve: Yeah. For you guys, Jack said something very interesting, and I want to, as a proof point, Jack said, "Yeah but sometimes you don't have to move the data." >> Steve: Yes. >> And one of the advantages that you guys have, I think, which is what I want to test you on, is that by having a relatively complete, installed set of capabilities, you have that primary person data-first person data, and there is an advantage to not having to move it. Could you just articulate that a little bit? What does that... >> John: Is that true? >> First of all, is that true, and what kind of possibilities does that open up for Oracle and Oracle customers if it is true? >> Steve: Well yeah, I think you are onto something. Oracle obviously has the long heritage of having many enterprises and government's data in Oracle systems already in the first place. And those investments have been made. And so when you start talking about, "Let's add to that, let's add applications like Adaptive Intelligence offers." Well instead of saying we have to do these massive data transfers it may well be the case at this point that that data is resident an Oracle data center in the first place, and of course Oracle owns its own data centers. These are all world wide, so there's a bunch of advantages to the Oracle scale here. And one of them is that we don't have to move the mountain. Right? The mountain is already in the Oracle database, and we can go and put these services next to it that allow an ease of integration. And John, we were talking about this before we started here. It matters to make this stuff work fast when its a year long project to see if maybe its going to fly. That's no longer a reasonable thing, and so agility matters. Having the data where you already need it is great. >> John: Well and also the trend is system of record database and mountains of corpuses of stuff that you can tap into which you are pointing out, but also, I believe that the winner of all this will use a term that's used in the cloud industry: Standing Up Apps. >> Steve: Uh-huh. And I think that one of the things that's very clear to me if you look at the SAS marketplace where it's, and I think Mark Hurd said this, "There is no past, it's a SAS." So, in infrastructure, so and you kind of see in the separation, you have to have stuff done in weeks-apps. And I mean literally, not months, weeks. >> Steve: Yeah. >> And I would argue that minutes become it. So with that as a backdrop, how do you look at microservices? Because now, if look at, out of the move the data, so I might want to compose something and send it somewhere else, and move an app to the edge of the network or have a retail lab or do something in email. So now I can compose an app from data here and then move it so that brings up orchestration, microservices, and some of these cloud native concepts. How do you guys deal with that? >> Steve: Yeah, well let me give you the marketing part of this in terms of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Because there are so many parts of Oracle, they have their own versions. For us, one of the big things we want is to have this concept called Orchestration that says if I'm a marketer, I should be able to reach my customer wherever he or she welcomes my messaging. These days, it no longer is just email. These are people who getting mobile messaging, they're potentially interacting with things like chat bots, it's become very fragmented. And so what Oracle wants to do is provide these Orchestration systems that allow apps plug in some that we build, but others that third parties build. So that as this complexity increases and there's more ways you can communicate, we can keep up with this in an agile way either ourselves or with others who do this really well. So that's one of the theories. >> John: It's the marketing cloud plus it's broader Oracle suite-cloud suite. >> Steve: Beautiful, yes. It's the Oracle Cloud suite which includes Oracle CX. It also includes something that we call the Oracle Marketing App Cloud, which is this third party ecosystem. Because we're Oracle, we have a lot of customers, we have hundreds of companies that say, "Yeah, I would love my stuff to get in the hands of Oracle's customer base." The way I'm going to do it is I'm going to make a turn key integration. So that when they buy it from me, they can just request turn it on for Oracle, and it will, again as you said, "Don't make it weeks, make it minutes." It's minutes when the integration is already done. >> So software business Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, still around one of the legends of the industry. Larry, if you're watching, you're still hanging around, taking names and kicking butt. Started off with shrink wrap software, then download on the internet, then you SAS, now you have SAS plus coming on. Which is smarter apps, smarter customer experience. So it begs the question on this next journey for customers, it's going to be really cloud all the way right. >> Steve: Yeah. >> So you're going to have to have this cloud component, you guys have a strategy there. Isn't Oracle moving away from, a smarter CX's data by the way, so Oracle's no longer a software company. You're a data company. >> Steve: M-hmm. >> Data is eating the world. Yeah no, software is eating the world, which Marc Andreessen wrote, now data is eating software. >> Steve: Uh-huh. How do you view that because some people say that software is never going to go away. But data is becoming much more of a front burner issue, vis-a-vis just like software was in software development. >> Steve: Sure, well I think some of this is just semantics as where software leave off and data begin. But a great example is the thing you talked about earlier, Adaptive Intelligence, where part of the power of this, what makes it different from what you can get elsewhere is that it comes with data included that is different data then is available from anyone else. And so, in fact, you know Oracle, when it made the big investment in the data cloud, people I think thought, "What are you doing, you just set up a vending machine for data? Is that what Oracle's going to be about?". And the answer there is no. I mean there is a good data business, but where it gets profound is when that strategic asset, all that data, all of the sudden enables new products like Adaptive Intelligence Offers to be fundamentally different than came before. >> John: It's an enabling technology. >> It can be absolutely, yes. >> John: Data is enabling. It brings to life apps and then offers new apps opportunities. That's what you said. >> Steve: Yes, and marking data very much is the fuel for the marketing engine. So you get richer fuel, you will get richer results. >> John: Alright, so we're getting down the weeds here, so bottom line, let's up level it up for the person that's watching and saying, "Hey, I got the message." >> Steve: Yeah. >> "Data is super important." >> Steve: Yeah. Bottom line, what is happening this week here in Modern CX that's important for the person that has to scratch their head, isn't inside the ropes in the industry? What's going off of their world? What should they be thinking about? How should they be planning their life moving forward in this new modern era of marketing? >> Steve: Yeah, so I think the big things announced this week definitely involves things like a new level of being able to do recommendations of offers and products using the Oracle Data Cloud. It involves conversational user interfaces such as the new chat bot's platform. And in the case of the marketing cloud, we've got a series of products that have come out that allow a greater degree of self service for both marketers as well as their stakeholders like sales people. So how does the sales person get the output of a marketing automation system? Sales people aren't necessarily known for assiduously going and looking for marketing assets. We've got some new things around, for example, content portals. We've got some new things around features that let people be more autonomous in getting their own work done rather than needing to go to some other system somewhere. >> John: Awesome. And the customer we had on this morning from Royal Philips, really was the head of CRM. So customer relationship management is not a new concept obviously, you guys have a big chunk of business there in the software side of it. But customer relationship management, that is marketing cloud now >> Steve: M-Hmm. >> and customer experiences. So you're starting to see that really go to the next level. What's the big take away for the person at home? Watching in their businesses as they go on their journeys. How should they be thinking about the customer relationship? >> Peter: Well, that's a big question. I think for a CRM oriented person who maybe started out in something like database marketing, where you had a list, and you somehow try to learn about people on the list, that world has gotten a lot bigger now. Where it used to be you learned about someone once they became your customer. These days, though various advertising technologies, you can learn about people you don't yet know, but you know of their existence. And you can start creating that relationship, hoping to draw them in maybe with ads to the point where they do self identify. So there's this whole front end to CRM that is showing up in ad tech with things like DMP's-Data Management Platforms, that solve the same problem, but do it in these whole other realms. >> John: And new channels. Adaptive Intelligence, I think, is an awesome position. Love that Adaptive Intelligence Apps, Apps being stood up on a platform. You guys have it. >> Steve: Yes. >> Where's the next level? Take us through, you run the product rode map. You know, share with the folks, what's on the road maps? What should they be expecting more from Oracle, where are you going to be doubling down, where's the work you filling the white spaces, and what should they expect of the next year? >> Steve: Sure. Well, at least in my key note this morning which again focused on marketing, we had four themes. One was intelligence, we already talked about that one quite a bit. Another is mobile, and that's not just mobile like chat bots, but it's actually mobilizing the experience of our customers' customers for the marketing. So example of this, we have a product called the Eloqua which lots of email can be sent. They have a new email designer that inherently builds responsively designed emails. So those are the ones you open up on your phone that look good, you open on the desktop they look good. That's how it all should work. Unfortunately, it's not for a lot of folks today. So just having that be part of the tooling, big deal. So that's the mobile part. We talked a bit about self service, that's theme number three. And the fourth theme is actually a bit of a sleeper, it's about taking another pass through some of the core technologies we already have that people use the most, and being able to find... >> John: Like what? >> Maximizer a test and targeting a personalization tool. Used by a lot of our customers, the fundamental thing you do inside maximizer is you live in a campaign designer. And it allows you to adjust various parts of a webpage for testing, targeting, and personalization. We've got an entirely new way to do that that's based on an analysis of what do people do when they use this and how can we shave off some number of clicks per session? How can we make it less error prone when people are deciding what to do? How can we make more performant? You talked about 150 milliseconds, how about if we just eliminate the save button altogether so that anything you do automatically saves in the background. You don't have to reload anything. That kind of stuff comes from watching people use the product and realizing, wow, they're in there all day long. If we can just make all of those things a little better, over a course of a year, that's huge. >> John: So basically, we're looking at the core jewels and the platform and making it simpler, reducing the steps to do things, just end up being more efficient in some of the proven tools. >> Steve: Exactly, and in the speech this morning, we said, "Hey look, we don't talk about this enough." >> John: That's not a sleeper that's good. >> The tendency is to come out here, and we all want to talk about everything that's new like AI and the people who are our actual customers. They're seeing pearls rain from the sky when all of the sudden something that took them 12 minutes to do at a time now takes eight, and they do that 2000 times a year. >> John: I always say it's a great business model by, you know, making things simpler, reducing the time to do things and steps >> Steve: Yeah >> and making things intuitive and easy to use. Which it sounds like you're doing, but now let's talk about the glamor side of it. Because I think AI and chat bots speaks to the future, what other glam do you see happening out there right now? Obviously, AI is hot right now. >> Steve: Yeah, I think the other glam at this point is a little more speculative at least as it applies to my area with marketing like Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and so on. There's also internet of things. Certainly that world is changing. There are more devices of various types that can talk to the network. We've got a customer, you may be familiar with it, a sleep number bed company, the ones that have the bed where you can pick your number. That's actually a connected device, and so there's some interesting things that can be done there with careful discretion about what data you're collecting. But when we started thinking about, incidentally, so many things that in the past used to be a inert objects are generating data. That can feed into various applications whether it's marketing or other areas. >> John: And more data's coming in, it's just not stopping. >> And it's great for Oracle because if Oracle is good at anything it's good at dealing with very large scale data. That's been the business for a long time, and the trend won't change. There will continue to be larger and larger scale data. >> Steve, final point, what's the theme of the show this year besides the messaging that you have? What do you seeing that's happening here that's evolving? What's the top story here? >> Steve: Well, you know we did a customer advisory board meeting here for the marketing cloud, and I think if I were going to ask the customers what their top story is, I think their top story is they themselves want to continue becoming more customer centric. Everybody talks about it. Well of course, we should be that way. But so many companies grew up doing things like focusing on the thing we're selling, they're being offer centric. And so organizationally changing, using the technologies like we have so they can create the kinds of experiences, we call them the connected customer experience that they themselves want to have. It's a bit challenge, and so their permissions are to say transform ourselves to be from the tech down to the organizational incentives, truly customer centric. >> John: Steve Krauss, Group Vice President of Product Management Oracle Marketing Cloud. Great to see you. Thanks for sharing the insight of the real road map and all the exciting stuff happening here and your clean up this morning, congratulations. I'm John Furrier and Peter Burris. More live coverage coming up here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas with the Cube after this short break. (live upbeat music)

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