(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)

(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--

>> Voiceover: Live, from Las Vegas, It's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (techno beats) >> Hello everyone, welcome to SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, with flagship programming, we go out to the events, and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, my cohost this week at Oracle Modern Customer Experience, in Las Vegas. A lot going on in Las Vegas, at the NAB Show, down the street where the Cube is, also we're here, for the second year in a row at the Oracle Modern Customer Experience, #ModernCX. Tweet at us @theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris. Kicking off two days of wall-to-wall coverage, we have some amazing guests. We have the top executives at Oracle Marketing Cloud, as well as some of their customers, as well as some other guests in the industry. Peter, we've been covering this marketing cloud kind of, as part of the bigger picture of the systems of engagement that is growing out of cloud infrastructure and big data. There's really a collision going on between accelerating applications with infrastructure, powered by the cloud, powered by hybrid cloud, and data's at the center of the value proposition, and literally is the key point in all this. So, I want to get your thoughts, and we talked about this last year, what's different from last year to this year, with Oracle Marketing Customer Experience, from your perspective? >> Well, I think there's three things that are different, John. The first thing that's different is that, the reality of how difficult it is to integrate technology into the marketing function is setting in, in a lot of marketers. So, we're not hearing anymore comments or promises about how marketing expenditure is going to exceed IT expenditures for technology. So, there's a reality set in about, what does it really mean to incorporate technology in the working market? The second thing that's happening is AI. We're going to hear a lot about AI, we're going to hear a lot about these new ways of taking big data and making them more useful to the business, and that's going to have an enormous impact on marketing, for a variety of different reasons. When you talk about next best action, predicting customer experience, prognosticating value propositions, all those other things, AI is going to have a role to play. How fast it gets adopted, we'll see, but we're going to hear a lot about it. >> John: It's interesting, we always talk on the cube here, if you follow the Cube you know, we always kind of, always pontificate on this notion of horizontally-scalable, and we talked about it last year, but there's an era of specialization, that you need to have vertically-oriented into some of these industries. But what's interesting, Pete, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because I was commenting last year at the show that, marketing was always a silo, and Oracle has had a integration strategy that's been kind of horizontal, and the trends in cloud computing and data is horizontal-scalability, with value propositions differentiate at the applications So, this begs the question, what does that mean for marketing in a digital business? If you go digital all the way, from the beginning of the journey to the moment of truth to the customer, sales or conversion, it's all digital, marketing's in every piece of the equation along the way, and that's what Mark Hurd was saying yesterday. >> Peter: Well, customer engagement's in every piece of the equation along the way and then the question is, is marketing going to evolve to become primary in customer engagement? It's not going to be just your direct sales force, customers are going to move amongst different channels. We've heard a lot about on the channel, so, to what role, to what degree will marketing become primary? And the third point I was going to make, John, is related to this, and that is, one of the big changes between this year and last year, is that Oracle has really thrown the tiller over, and tacked towards the cloud. And it's going to be interesting to see whether or not the cloud customer experience story, or the marketing cloud customer experience story, in the cloud, is lining up with the rest of Oracle's cloud story. >> John: It's as with, Don Clien, from our team, who last night in the hallway conversations here, in the Mandalay Bay with the convention, that the conference is happening, it's interesting, we were talking about the role of platforms, and you can't see in the news these days, anything from Facebook's relative to fake news, to some of the killings on Facebook Live, to YouTube and moderating comments, these emergence of platforms has been a very interesting dynamic, but at the end of the day, content needs to have an authentic piece to it. So, you now blending in a marketing and conversion, with customers, we're living in a content world. I'm wearing a wearable, my content is my interface to wherever I am in real time. My experience at the rental car dealership, or wherever I'm at, is going to be all about, the content is not some siloed, "Hey, hello, buy this." It's everything is content-driven. >> Well everything is value-driven, right? And the question is, is the content going to be valuable? And if there's a big, going back to that first point, what's the big issue about marketing? We thought that if we just through technology, we could automate the same ways that marketing is already, always done stuff, but the reality is marketing does a lot of stuff that is not valuable to customers. It may be valuable to the organization or their ways, but it's not valuable to customers. And often it's really annoying, and so marketing has to decide, if in fact they are going to take a primary role in engagement across channel over time, as customers move amongst organizations, then they're going to have to start dedicating themselves to creating content that's valuable to the customer, in the form that the customer needs, when the customer needs it, where the customer needs it. And that's a challenge. >> And the engagement piece is critical, I love that angle, but let's take it to the next level. Every example of marketing cloud or any kind of digital experience use case has data in it. It's data-driven. Even Mark Hurd, on his keynote, talked about his experience at the rental car place, that's data-driven. You got to know, that's the CEO of Oracle. So, this is again, the data is at the center of this. It's flowing through all the apps, and has to be available, has to be real time, this is fundamental. >> Peter: And digital assets are data as well, and applications, when you go back to what computer science says, applications themselves are data. So, increasingly, it's all data. Customers want to be engaged digitally. They want to be able to take their digital experience, whatever channel, the data has to follow them. You have to anticipate what data you're going to generate in the form of content. You have to be able to capture data without annoying them. So, in many respects, John, this all comes down, the challenge for marketing is, how do we capture data without being annoying? How do we provision data in a way that's valuable, so that we increase the view of the brand. >> John: I want to put you on the spot, because I know marketing's a lot of different components to it, but one of the things that everyone in the industry is talking about, is the role that salesforce.com has taken in its SaaS cloud platform, vis-a-vis an app, where you just put your contacts in, and you manage your relationships, and how that's grown and shifted over to being a SaaS platform. And here's the question I want to ask, and get your thoughts on, and just riff here in real time. Back in the old days, analog sales needed a system to provide automation for those sales guys. Boom. Salesforce.com is born. Marketing would provide email marketing and content, here's a package of content, if you're interested, click on it and we'll get you more information. Marketing department sends those leads to the analog sales team. The leads aren't good enough, the leads are crap. Glengarry, Glen Ross kind of thing going on there. Now that's shifted with the digital fabric, end to end, from initiation to moment of truth. Digital. That kind of goes away. So, sales cloud and marketing cloud are blurring, yes or no, what're your thoughts on the role of sales kind of thing, and the marketing piece? >> Well, it all comes down to, and again this is one of the precepts of the whole notion of customer experience, it all comes down to the customer is on a journey to solve a problem, to generate some utility out of the purchase that they're making, whether it's a product or service. They go through discovery process, they go through a buying process, they go through a utilization process. All of that requires engagement. And so the data, and they way you provision your resources, to that customer has to fit naturally in the way the customer does stuff. So one of the reasons why this is blurring is because customers themselves are demanding that they be treated digitally in some coherent manner. Now, institutionally and organizationally, there's still a lot of tensions, as you said, between sales and marketing, and it's not enough to just say we're going to do a marketing cloud because there's marketing budgets, and we're going to do a sales cloud, because the sales budgets, and a product cloud because of product budgets, etc. This has to come together. We have to render this coherently in front of customers, or in front of businesses because businesses have to render themselves coherently in front of customers as they go through their journey. >> Great observation, I would just add that this notion of a platform is an indicator of where the market's going. Certainly we're seeing in the mainstream some things are being tweaked, and Facebook admitted in the New York Times that they're working on it. They're going to work on these things. But let's bring that platform, if what you say is true, which I believe it is, everything has to come together, because it's not one or the other, there's not mutually exclusive. Now, sales guys had the data from the old days, but now it's all digital, so the question is, that shifts the scales, because in the old days, marketing was to provide value to the organization, the enterprise itself, the business value of the enterprise, and that comes from selling something. >> Peter: Right, right, right, right. >> John: And so, to your value point, which I think that this market shifts the value to the marketing team because they have a broader perspective in that journey. Or have more touch points in the engagement of the customer. >> Peter: And that's key. The question is can they be the orchestrator of a coherent and holistic engagement strategy with a customer. >> John: So, I'm a CIO, I'm looking at a complete replatforming. I think that's a better approach than trying to take Salesforce and make it work over here, and if you look at Salesforce, they've done a bunch of different acquisitions, not always kind of tightly coupled, a little bit of awkwardness here, chatter, all these components. Oracle's taking a different approach, they're saying we're going to integrate all this stuff, and you pick and choose. I think, if I'm a CIO, I might want to take a more holistic view from initiation, to moment of truth with the customer, and the lifecycle that journey. There's more marketing touch points in there, so I'm probably designed that way, your thoughts. >> Peter: Well, so, it's interesting John. The whole CRM industry went through an extremely challenging birth. One of the biggest challenges is that, as you said, we used to be analog. Sales people would go on a call, they'd write up a trip report, they'd hand it to and administrator, and the administrator would do the data entry, and we'd get it into the system someway. But the minute you start automating that, now the sales guys are doing data entry. And if you talk to sales organizations today, one of the biggest problems is how much time are my folks doing data entry, how much time are my folks generating content for customers, how much time are they doing all these other things, and not selling, and that's an issue. So, when we think about where this is going to go, at the end of the day, Salesforce has done the best job of presenting CRM to the marketplace, for a variety of different reasons. But it still is a let's capture sales activity kind of a platform. The question is, are we actually going to get to a platform that is truly able to provide coherent, holistic value at the moment that the customer wants it, and that includes delivery. And I think Oracle has an opportunity in all of this. It's to actually utilize their various clouds, to provide a way of engaging customers across the entire journey, because they can do the discovery piece, they can do the sales piece, and they can also do digital products, and digital capabilities anyway, the delivery piece. >> Well, Peter Burris from Wikibon.com, head of research over there. Check out some of the work they're doing with the digital, role of the digital business and assets, digital experiences, they're all assets, whether it's content, engagement, or an experience that someone has, it's all a data asset, it's a digital asset, and that needs to be harnessed and looked at holistically in a way. You got some great research over at Wikibon.com, check it out. I'm John Furrier, here for two days at Oracle Modern Customer Experience Show. Should be great, really cutting edge stuff, really as the world replatforms in the cloud, content and experiences will be fundamental, and data's at the center of it. We'll bring you all the coverage here. We'll be right back with more great coverage after this short break. (techno beats)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld. You are watching theCUBE here, live on day two, continuing coverage from the show this year. I'm Lisa Martin, my cohost is Stu Miniman, and we're very excited to welcome our next guest. First time on theCUBE is Scott Delandy. >> First time. >> Lisa: First time technology director at Dell EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thrilled to be here. >> We're thrilled to have you, and you have a couple of really interesting things that I want to kick off with. First off all, you played vodgeball. If you're not familiar, vodgeball is a really cool, starts on the Sunday right before VMworld, benefits Wounded Warriors, which is fantastic, but it's a serious game. I've played before, I was terrified for my life. What was your experience like this year? >> It's a great event and they've been doing it for the last several years, I mean, so it was my first time I was able to participate, but it basically is a lot of the partners and exhibitors here, they put a team together, and it's to support the Wounded Warrior Foundation, so it's a great charity and a great cause. But yeah, it was very intense, because when they asked me to play, I was like, "Dodgeball, vodgeball, how hard could it be, right? "You just pick up the ball "and you just throw it at somebody, right?" I had no idea that this is like a legit thing. There's referees, there's rules, there's strategy. I mean, it was intense. And, you know, we had fun. I think everybody had fun, but I will say there were, there were some teams that were very serious and very determined to do well. And they did. >> Nobody injured, I hope. >> Not that I recall. Oh, no, there was one injury, there was one injury. Somebody was going backwards and fell into somebody who was taking a picture and there was blood. Yeah, there was a little bit of blood. But hey, again, for a good cause, right? >> The people at VMworld, they're serious about whatever they're doing. >> Very serious. >> There you go. >> That's for sure. >> Something also that interests me about your background is you have a really interesting connection with an industry that people wouldn't think, oh, there's a similarity between wrestling, WWE, and Dell EMC. On the customer experience side, you've talked with John Cena, who I admire for what he does on TV. Tell us about the similarities that you and he discussed about the customer experience. >> Yeah, so it was last year. There's an event, it's actually a legit thing, called Customer Experience Day. And so, at Dell EMC, we had, you know, different events planned at the different locations, and there were speakers that came in. Matter of fact, if you were in the Santa Clara area, they had Matthew McConaughey, was the individual that they had come there. But we had John Cena, which I think we probably got a better deal out of that. But your point, it's like, what's the similarities, and I even asked him as we were getting ready to do the interview, I was chatting with him a bit, and I was like, "You probably have no idea what we do," and "Why are you here? "This is like completely different." And he was like, "Absolutely not, "I am so looking forward to this because "I'm going to talk to new people that "I've never talked to before. "What we do and what you do is very similar "because it really is about that customer experience "and making sure that people enjoy it, "you connect with those customers, "you connect with those users out there. "It's all about, you know, how the technology "on our side is getting consumed "and what our users are able to do, "but it's also the products that they're putting out there, "just from an entertainment perspective." And he got up there and he spoke for 20 minutes, and it was amazing. I mean, he just did such a great job. >> So, Scott, I actually worked with you at EMC, and you've been at EMC for just a few years. I still have to say, it's now Dell EMC, 'cause for some reason, LinkedIn says I worked for Dell EMC for 10 years. I worked for EMC Corporation. Those of us in Massachusetts, EMC had a profound impact on technology, but how long's it been now, you've been there? And tell us how you got to your current roles. >> With EMC and now Dell EMC, I just hit my 27th year, so going on 28 years now. Badge number 399, for anybody that's still keeping score. >> Lisa: You started as a child, right? >> I was 11 when I started. It was before they changed the child labor laws. But no, it's great. I mean, you think about how the company's changed and evolved in that period of time, and I think the thing that I've always loved and continued to love about the company and the organization is just how we continued to evolved, we continued to change, we continued to adapt to what's happening in the technology space because, you know, as you know, things are constantly moving, and I think that the difference over the last several years is that the rate of change has completely accelerated, with new ways to be able to deliver IT, new ways to basically consume the things that we've been developing for years. I come on the storage side of things, and just from a company perspective, the portfolio has expanded to include pretty much anything from a technology perspective. So it's really, really cool to be able to be a part of that. >> Okay, so, Scott, you know, there are many in the storage industry that have perspective, but I mean, you've been there since, like, I guess day one of Symmetrix. And Symmetrix, through DMX, through VMAX, it's still a product line, it's still going strong. You know, why is VMAX important in enterprise tech today? >> You know, you think about it, and it really is cool, and it's something that I work closely with throughout my career, but you think about examples of technology that have been available on the market for 30 or so years. I mean, I can only come up with two. If you can come up with one, let me know, but I think of mainframes, and I think of Symmetrix VMAX, right? And they're still a key part of technology because there's a tremendous amount of trust. The world's most mission-critical workloads run on those environments. It's a proven platform that still continues to be really, really, a core part of an IT infrastructure for many, many organizations. >> Yeah, it always resonated with me. You talk to anyone in that storage organization, and they've all ready Only the Paranoid Survive. So, you know, until microprocessor's going strong, you know, lots of discussion about where Moore's Law is going. But right, you know, I think back to the early days of things like SRDF, really changed what's going on. But now, I mean, you know, Flash is the discussion. We've just been talking to some of your peers about software-defined storage. What are some of those key customer conversations you're seeing these days out there in the market? >> I think, you know, from a modernization perspective, clearly Flash is becoming the predominant way people want to store their information, right? That's, you know, you think about Flash when it was initially introduced years and years ago, it provided a solution for high performance requirements. It was really, really fast, much faster than mechanical media at the time, but it was also really, really expensive, and I think what's changed is kind of two things. Number one, the media costs have come down pretty dramatically, right? But still more expensive than spinning drives. But the arrays themselves have also become much more efficient in terms of how they're able to take advantage of Flash. You think of things like data reduction technologies, compression, dedupe, fim provisioning, snapshots, all of these types of things, where we typically see about a four to one space efficiency. So if I've got 100 terabytes, I'm paying for that 100 terabytes of capacity, but through all of these technologies, I can make that look like 400 terabytes to the outside world. So that dramatically changes the cost curb and makes it way more efficient, way more affordable than what people have previously done with things like hybrid arrays or even spinning drives. So it's cool, and, you know, you think of what's happening in the future, there are different memory-based technologies, storage class memory technologies that are going to start to become available in the marketplace, and it'll be interesting to see architecturally how that's going to impact some of the things that are available in the marketplace today, so it's going to be very interesting, I think, in the next couple of years, as the technology continues to evolve, and you're able to do things from a performance density capacity perspective that, you know, today you're just kind of getting to sort of the tip of the iceberg in terms of some of the niche technologies that are out there. These are things that are going to become much, much more mainstream going forward. So, again, people often think that storage, snoreage, right? It's the boring stuff, right? The only time people care about storage is if something breaks, right? They just assume that it's going to work. But again, there's a lot of really cool things happening from an innovation, from a technology perspective, and again, being on the technology side and getting to work very closely with the engineering guys, and the product managers, and then being able to talk to customers and users and understand kind of what challenges they're facing today and where they see things going in the future. Again, it's a great opportunity because you get to see all of this stuff coming together. So, it continues to be fun. I don't know if I can do another 27 years, but I'm hoping to get at least a couple more good ones. >> You've got like another 30 before retirement age. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, I think you're right. I'll do the math on that. Maybe not quite 30, but I appreciate it anyway, Stu. >> So, speaking of innovation, Michael Dove was talking about that this morning, and I thought it was cool that he and Pat shared some laughs on, you know, now that the accommodation is done with Dell EMC and they own VMware, there's competitors that are now partners, et cetera. Can you talk to us, you talked about kind of talking with product groups. How are you facilitating innovation and integration, say, with the VMAX with VMware? How is that kind of going? >> So, VMware is definitely a big, obviously, partner for us. But they also, their customers, in the use cases that they have, fit in very well with our technology and our systems, specifically, I'll talk specifically around VMAX. You know, you look at some of the really large environments that are out there. I know customers that have 50,000 plus VMs running on a single storage system, right? And, you know, you think of just how massive that is, and you put 50,000 anything on one storage system, you know, you need to make sure that you've got the performance, you've got the scale, you've got the reliability, you've got the data services. Those are the things that people need to be able to do consolidation at that scale, and that's where certainly VMAX is kind of the technology that continues to be core for those types of workloads. But again, there's always new things that are coming up, and there's also, you know, a set of new challenges that users are always looking at. And again, Flash is a good example where, you know, you're starting to hit the limits in terms of what you can do with traditional mechanical media, but the Flash was still too expensive at the time. But again, taking advantage of that data reduction technology and building it into the system, and being able to do it in a way that doesn't compromise any of the data services, it doesn't impact performance, it doesn't change the reliability, or the availability of the applications and the workloads. I mean, that's what kind of users sort of expect from us, and that's what we deliver. >> I think you've still got 30 years in you just, you know, with this passion and excitement that you're talking about now. >> We'll see, we'll see. Well, maybe you guy will have me back next year and we can see where we are then. >> Well, we are so thankful to you for stopping by theCUBE for your first time. You're now part of theCUBE alumni. >> Awesome, I am so thrilled. >> I don't think we have John Cena on. We do have a few professional athletes. I've interviewed a couple of former Patriots, and the like. >> As I told John when I interviewed him, he may be bigger than me, but I have better hair, I think at least. >> By far, by far. Well, Scott Delandy, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing some of the innovations that you're doing, and we'll look forward to seeing you on theCUBE next time. >> Scott: Awesome, thank you. >> All right, and for Scott, my co-host Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching day two, live from VMworld 2017 from Las Vegas. Stick around, we will be right back.