>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. It's the CUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now here is your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Okay welcome back everyone we are here live in San Francisco for The Cube. This Silocon Angle Media's flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-CEO of Silicon Angle Media with Peter Burris, head of research for Silicon Angle Media. He's also the general manager of Wikibon Research. Check out wikibon dot com for all the latest research and cloud, big data infrastructure. And we're at Oracle OpenWorld 2016. I'm excited to have our next guest, Don Johnson, VP of engineering for product development for the Infrastructures as a Service for Oracle Cloud. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> John: Thanks for spending the time to come on. We really appreciate it. >> My pleasure. >> And obviously Oracle's cloud last year was obviously the announcement they're marching to the cloud. A big building block in this, was Infrastructure as a Service. They had the sass. They're taking names, kicking butt in there and they're transforming. Platform as a service developing nicely this year, showed some progress. But the upgrade if you will, or reboot or reset, however you want to call it, was fundamentally to introduce the new stuff with Infrastructures as a Service, to kind of round everything off. Give us the update. What's the key new news for Infrastructure as a Service and why is it important? >> Well a couple things. Let me start with the last part of your question, why is it important. So, very broadly, I would say, There's kind of two strata of cloud. There's cloud platform and there's everything that's up above, apps, sass, etc. Cloud platform I think is a big category. It's broad spectrum but it's IaaS and Paas and then there's lots of stuff that falls inside of there. Iaas is a fundamental and foundational building block and all of the characteristics, that everything up above, relies on or requires is basically enabled by infrastructure If you want to run at massive scale, if you want network connectivity between place A and place B if you want intrinsic security, that's all things that are foundational characteristics and you either have them or you don't based on whether infrastructure IaaS gives them to you. And so, for us, for Oracle, we're a cloud platform company. This is a foundational piece, and we're investing in this very aggressively and we're driving in a very innovative direction on this. So, >> You've been at Amazon since 2005, just recently joined Oracle on the engineering side and you know, infrastructure right now we're seeing is a cost and performance game. Drive the cost down as low as possible while preserving scale and performance, real critical. And almost hardening the top if you will, creating a hardened infrastructure so that you can enable dev-ops and some coolness around agility all that good stuff above, on top of the could. So what's the key things this year that you guys filled in terms of product? What was the key innovations and, on the development side, what was the key sprint for you guys? >> Well, so what we've been announcing at IaaS is really our next generation infrastructure, which is two-fold. It is the infrastructure itself, what are data centers and networks and virtual network looks like and then it's a new suite of products that we put on top of this, bare metal cloud services. And this is the fruit of a big kind of back to basics foundational exercise where we have gone and redesigned everything from the ground up. We've done it with a focus on a bunch of core, core criteria. Core things that we wanted to, that we wanted to capture and that we wanted to do better, better than have been done in the industry to date. And I would characterize those as two-fold. First, we are bringing along, all of the best characteristics of the cloud and why the cloud is compelling and what people, use it for, Self-service, pay for to use. It's elastic; it's easy to use. It's, there's low friction. It's high-scale, etc. But there's a number of things that for our core customer-base, actually are very challenging in moving to the cloud. And when I say our core customer-base, if you have a large existing, you know, if you're an enterprise and you have a large existing infrastructure and deployment, typically on premise, you have a lot of constraints and it's difficult to actually move into this new environment and take advantage of all that it has to offer. And there are, this applies to how your applications will run there, the assumptions that they make, your security and controls. And so we've identified a number of areas that we fundamentally wanted to do better than they've been done before. Security, reliability, governance, the ability to manage, if you're a large complex organization, you have a large complex footprint and deployment in the cloud, the ability to manage it. Performance, performance is a broad spectrum. Peak performance, raw performance, predictable performance in a particular price performance. You're talking about performance and cost. And sort of an adjunct to performance is the ability to harness modern technologies because if you look at where storage is going, non-volatile RAM and technologies like Intel Crosspoint. How can you actually enable customers to get access to that and use it and harness what it offers, very, very quickly. And most, most of all really, flexibility. Sort of the choice and what I mean by that is when you're a cloud provider you, you kind of pick a, you pick a certain level at which you implement and define and build your abstractions, and then, that has consequences in what choices you actually offer. So let me be a little bit more precise about this. A core thing that we did, sort of the keys, the special sauce in any cloud platform is the virtual network. And we made a fundamental choice that the way in which we're going to do virtual networks is to pull the virtualization into the network itself where we think it belongs. >> John: So no hypervisor? >> It's not in the hypervisor. And so, what that means is first it means we're able to like the, the requirement that we have of something that we can plug into our cloud, your cloud, your virtual network is, it has an ethernet port. This means that we put, we can put anything into a virtualized network. Our whole infrastructure, you know the presentation to the customers is everything runs in a virtual overlay. It's all virtual network. But we could put any class of resource in there. We could do bare metal. We could do an engineered system. We can, honestly, we can take an arbitrary middle box from you know, any third party vendor. This lets us give our customers bare metal. Giving our customers bare metal means we can, we can take, so we provide bare metal, compute with NVME drives. They are phenomenal. There is nothing, like we're literally giving you a server in the cloud with a, you know, provision in minutes paid by the hour. And you get, in our biggest shape, you get in excess of four million 4k read-high ops. Like this is phenomenal power. So really there is nothing that stands between us, between the technology and us giving it to you. >> So that was the key design criteria, then? >> That was the key design criteria and so this you know, in terms of sort of, flexibility and preserving choice, this means, you know, principle you can bring any OS. You can bring any hypervisor. If you have some old stuff that's difficult to move, you can't break up our hypervisor. >> So you let the performance, everyone kind of speak for themselves if you will. So, the customer can put anything on this thing >> Yeah. And these are phenomenally powerful boxes. >> Okay so now, how does that compare with Amazon and Azure because the number one question I get is, and let me see if you can put some color around this. Obviously Amazon had a different thing. You guys had a clean sheet of paper and you took smaller steps, computed storage and built services and scaled up there. Azure had, kind of backed into it with their existing business and there portals and all their services and then now are moving their customers on there. So, the number one question I get is, well what's different with the IaaS on Oracle vis-à-vis AWS and Microsoft Azure. How do you answer that question? Is there a distinct difference? Is there a design philosophy? Is it? >> Well, the design philosophy for Iaas is what I was just articulating. And in essence it, it looks and acts very, very similar from the perspective of the customer, the user experience at scale. As well as, it preserves choice and flexibility and is amenable. Basically it is it is much more friendly to the large enterprise or large business that is outside of the, often times and typically, outside of the sweet spot of what an infrastructure like say Amazon was originally designed for. So as a principle, we are trying to meet our customers where they're at. From, they want to migrate over some apps and do it cautiously and maybe not change too much about them. And not see that as a constraint or an obstacle to get to all of the, all of the promise and power of, running modern applications in high-scale, highly available. >> Look in many respects, in many respects, cloud is naturally a network-centric compute model. >> Don: Yes. >> By putting more, by not putting network virtualization above the network but putting it into the network, does that also at some point in time give you greater flexibility, the option to bring even more of, >> Don: Absolutely. >> core work that's gone down into the network? So that you can actually start liberating some of the power of a real network computing model. Others can't do that right now. So if you think about it, what kinds of applications might that make possible in the future? Thinking about IOT for example, the ability to use a network model to describe how work gets allocated within a cloud of services? >> Well, I think the, the network ultimately, what you need it to do, there's a few things you need it to do. You need to very reliably and quickly move bits from place a to place b. You need it to it to have the flexibility sort of, as a topology to be able to put things in. And you need it to preserve, privacy and plugability. So the fundamental thing that I see our virtual network supporting and enabling, is basically building up a fabric of services, and letting us say, so everyone runs in a private overlay. We want to make it easy for any provider, ourselves as well as any third party provider, to inject micro-services into your, into your private network. We want to make it easy to be able to bring over traditional security controls, where, you want to, set up bastions and set up taps and be able to introspect you know, do, you know traditional IDS, IPS. So, I see network virtualization really as an enabler of, you know it's providing a fabric that lets you, that gives you great flexibility in wiring things together. I hope that answered your questions. >> So final question for you, what's next? So what's on the, what's the priorities on the to-do list for you guys as you go down, a two point five, a two point one? As they say at Microsoft, never make it an odd, an even number, make it a, you know. Two point one or two point five or three point o. What's next? >> There's a ton of things. So we're building up data centers and new geographies. We're going big. We're going to add a ton of skews. We're going to make bigger things, smaller things, adding, a ton more features really all across the board. So I don't know that I see it as there's a two point five. There's going to a rapid pace. >> So more slew of announcement >> Very similar >> Don: Yes. >> to the cadence we've been seeing at Oracle and Amazon traditionally had started that trend. Larry couldn't even finish the keynote on Sunday because the announcement stream was so large >> No we have a, you'll see a constant string of releases on a, you know, a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. There's just a ton of stuff coming. We have a ton of features to add. We have a ton of interesting new services to add. >> So the pace is fast. You're running hard? >> Don: The pace is very fast. >> Well, congratulations and looking forward to following you guys and your success. Love the agile mindset. Love to see that cadence of shipping stuff, moving really, really fast and appreciate, >> Alright. >> you spending the time. >> Don: Thank you very much. >> Sharing your insights. The Cube live here at OpenWorld. You're watching The Cube. Back with more live coverage here in San Francisco after this short break. (softly intense techno music)

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

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. I think I just saw Don Johnson running by. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2019. This is day one of our wall-to-wall coverage. Ian McClarty is here. He's the president of PhoenixNAP, Ian thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So PhoenixNAP, service provider based in the southwest. Tell us more about the company. >> Yeah so we started on the Southwest, hence the name Phoenix, and NAP stands for network access point. So we focus on the connectivity side, on the telecom. But we really have moved more to infrastructure services, and that's been more of a world wide deployment. Last year we did about six global locations that were new to us, so today we're at about on 15 locations. >> So I always ask guys like you, you know, the Cloud was suppose to put you out of business, and then the Cloud has been this huge tail wind. >> Yeah. >> Why, what was it that everybody missed about the cloud and how have you able to exploit it? >> Yeah, so we come from a hosting background. So the Cloud has been around for us forever, right? Before it was termed Cloud, we believed in OpEx model for infrastructure services. That's what the Cloud is. Scalable, easy to absorb. So for us, what the Cloud did was make us mainstream. Because hosting was very boutique back in the day, back in the 90's. Now today we're a very mainstream brand, very mainstream products. So Cloud has really made our lives easier, actually. >> So it opened up everybody's eyes. >> Yeah. >> Sort of ... The guys like Amazon and Azure did a lot of market development for you. >> They did, a lot. And a lot of market development that we ourselves cannot do because we are smaller companies. >> Right. So talk a little bit about what your unique value proposition is, how you guys, you know, compete in the market place. Why PhoenixNAP? >> Why PhoenixNAP? So its really about the suite of infrastructure products. So our spectrum really starts with co-location on one end and it ends to bare metal dedicated Cloud systems. And then in between we have all the virtual station cloud platforms, more standard BMR deployments. So really its about our spectrum of services that we cover and we really are really good at that spectrum of services. So we have developed a lot of depth also around these different offerings. >> And your facilities, as you say you started in the Southwest, but where are you guys located? Are you? ... >> Yeah, so we're, So we own and operate out of Phoenix, Arizona, 120,000 square foot of facility. With the I-T usable space, um, and we have expanded now to other, with other partnerships with taking on large location spaces to basically seed our different locations and put us in point we are building those locations. Ashburn is one we are getting very close with actually. >> Uh-huh. So you're data centered guys right? I mean, you know - >> We're data, We're hosting guys that went into the data center business, and became infrastructure people. >> Okay, so it sort of evolved, this is act 3 for you >> Yes, this is act 3. >> We've been talking about act 2 all day. So how have you evolved your, you skillset, your customer base, talk about the evolution of the, of the company and where you see it going. >> Yeah so I mean, today we're focusing very much on mid-market enterprise, that's where our, and again, how do you define that? We define that by $50 to $500 million in revenue that's out definition of mid-market enterprise. So we're not going after the Fortune 500, and we're not going after S&B. And we have really tapped into the space. It's a very hard space for, for the, for the public clouds to, um, to act in today. >> So what's different? So obviously, the difference between mid and large enterprises is the mid-size guys, they're more generalists, they don't have, you know, all kinds of specialists, they don't have the resources, >> They do not. >> That the large guys do. But they're more advanced than the S. >> Yes. >> S and M are different, >> Yes, they are. >> Than the large. So what are the unique attributes of M that really uh, you try to focus on delivering? >> So M has budget, but M doesn't want to outsource. That's key. They know enough, but they don't have expertise. So what they're looking at, they're looking for supplemental I-T, and really what we focus on. >> So they don't want to outsource their strategic jewel, the family jewels, but they need help. >> They need supplemental help. And they don't want to go to consultants either. >> But M also wants to be L and I think that's the big issue, M wants to be L, typically M wants to be L, So they're looking for, they have budget, they have plans, >> Yeah. >> They want to scale, but they have to be very careful about how they invest to get there. >> And then like to (mumbles) still, they like (mumbles), infrastructure, they want to know you, they want to build a relationship. That's what I'm saying, it's very hard for the public clouds to tap into that space because of that. It had a lot of nuances. >> M wants to scale they want to act like a real business, >> Yes. >> They want, they want to know their suppliers, because they want to know if they're going to be able to go with them. >> (Ian) They want to have control over their suppliers as well. >> Exactly. But come back to that, because that becomes, that becomes more increasingly a services play. >> Yes. >> As M gets more experiences, these medium-size companies get more experience, they are starting to acknowledge and recognize the new classes of services that they need because they have that sophistication. So how is your business changing? And specifically thinking about what Veeam's doing here, to become more of a service-provider, of, at a higher level than just the underlying infrastructure. >> So I'll tell you what we're doing right now. On the surface-side, we're really focusing more on manage-infrastructure, right? That's the moniker we use. But what infrastructure means is really changing. So today we're (mumbles), right? What are we going to do have a managed (mumbles) stack, that is deliverable in an A-P-I model? That's our vision for the company. >> So, um, you're a platinum partner of Veeam, uh, can you talk a little bit about where they fit in your stack? I mean, you've got a whole security layer. >> (IAN) Yep. >> I think you were saying to us earlier that, you know, the data protection piece, the backup is sort of the last-- >> It's a lifeline. >> Resort, yeah. So describe that infrastructure and what you guys have built up. >> Yeah so when we started the company, we started at the edge, right? Plus folks on the (mumbles), those folks on network protection, let's start there, and let's work our way down. And so now then we've built a V-M-R stack that basically is, um, it's third-party audited, it follows compliance rules. When you go to the, um, (mumbles) it works on PCI, when you go to the PCI website you can see PheonixNAP listed as E-S-S provider there, and it abstractly outlines what we protect on the cloud side. So very clear in where we transferred on that side, so it's been layered for us, a layered approach of protecting services. But there will always be a breach, and you have to count on that. It's unfortunate, but it's a reality, right? And once you embrace that, you can build products around that, and so really V-M-R has become a very key part of that equation with both backup and recovery services, and then if there is a breach, then you need to be able to recover those services somewhere, so the (mumbles) recovery services for us is big. So it really fills that missing piece that we had in the equation. >> Yeah I mean you've made that point Peter, many times, is that the breach is inevitable, it's how you repsond to that breach that's really critical. >> Yes. >> And that's, I mean not brand-new thinking, but it's certainly over the last ten years has evolved, you know Peter-- >> (IAN) You've got to embrace it. >> People used to not talk about breaches, oh no, don't talk about it, now it's like at the board level, yeah we acknowledge that it's going to happen, and we're putting more and more resources into our response, is that sort of what you're seeing? >> Yes, that is exactly what I'm seeing. And this year alone fifteen-thousand breaches that were reported right? And again, who reports those breaches? It's not the S, not the M, it's the large enterprise that reports those breaches. So those numbers are even worse in the S and M market right? >> (DAVE) Right, right. >> Although the M guys have, are now getting large enough When-- >> They have to report. >> They have to start reporting. You're coming back to this notion, that, and it used to be that when there was a breach, it was always discussed in terms of hardware, it was discussed in terms of network. >> Yeah. >> But now it's data! >> It is. >> Because that's where the asset is, and that's where people after, >> Exactly. >> So again, coming back to that notion of higher-level services, backup used to be something that you kind of, checked off as you were leaving the customer's location, taken the order, has it become something that's increasingly one of the reasons why customers are bringing you in? >> I will tell you, the easiest way for us to (mumbles) another part where Veeam falls into our equation, is customer acquisition. Like Veeam to me is not the highest revenue, product, period, right? But from a customer acquisition perspective, it's the best product that we have. It's an easy conversation, because it is. Historically it's been a checkbox, but once the customer figures out, "hey, okay so I've got backups, now how do I recover these backups? How do I restore them? Where do I go?" that's where we can have a much more complex conversation with them. >> A lot of these M customers, to become L, are now realizing "I'm not going to get there, if I don't use data in ways that the L guys have hard time using it. So I need to focus on data assets, I need to focus on my digital transformation", which means it's essential that they start thinking about how data protection is going to operate within their business, because increasingly, they're becoming digital businesses. And data protection becomes digital business protection. Are you having those conversations? >> All the time. On day-to-day basis. That's the bulk of our conversations now, for new customer acquisition. >> (DAVE) Why Veeam? >> Yeah. >> You know a lot of companies out there, a lot of new startups entering the marketplace, you've got big wheels like, you know, Dell EMC, and some established companies like Veritas, IBM, you got the big blue blanket, why Veeam? >> Why Veeam for us? Well for us, part of it is culture, right? That was very critical for us. First, the technology piece, obviously solid, works right? The "it does work" moniker that was used, it's true right? And the simplicity of it, too. As a service provider, we know what to expect with Veeam, so we built a lot of competency around Veeam as a product line. Obviously we've played, we've used other products, but we always go back to Veeam. Because, again, it's evolving in a place that we like. We see where they're going for the recovery piece, right? The restoration piece. We like that as a vision piece also, that it's not talked about a lot. It's coming right? It's always the upcoming. But for us it's good to (mumbles) another vendor. The second that comes out, it's a (mumbles) vendor for us. So we like the vision of the company, we like where they're heading, we also like from a corporate culture perspective, what they're doing for channel-centric. For us it helps us mature as an organization tremendously. You know Ratmir hit the nail on the head when he said, "Not the best product wins in the market", right? You have to have, the company that has the best sales and marketing along with that as well. So for us you know, we have pretty decent sales. Marketing we're weaker on, and Veeam has really coached us along the way to make our marketing efforts even stronger. >> Yeah Veeam knows how to market! >> Yeah they do, they are marketing geniuses. And I love them for that, right? And I have a lot of respect towards them for that, so. >> Ian, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great to have you. >> You as well. >> All right keep it right there everybody, this is Peter Burris and Dave Vellante, we're live at Veeamon 2019 from Miami. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back. (poppy electro music)