(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud two where we're gathering a number of industry luminaries to discuss the future of cloud services. And we'll be focusing on various real world practitioners today, their challenges, their opportunities with an emphasis on data, self-service infrastructure and how organizations are evolving their data and cloud strategies to prepare for that next era of digital innovation. And we really believe that support for multiple cloud estates is a first step of any Supercloud. And in that regard Oracle surprise some folks with its Azure collaboration the Oracle database and exit database services. And to discuss the challenges of developing a mission critical Supercloud we welcome Juan Loaiza, who's the executive vice president of Mission Critical Database Technologies at Oracle. Juan, you're many time CUBE alums so welcome back to the show. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, and happy to be here with you. >> Yeah, thank you. So a lot of people felt that Oracle was resistant to multicloud strategies and preferred to really have everything run just on the Oracle cloud infrastructure, OCI and maybe that was a misperception maybe you guys were misunderstood or maybe you had to change your heart. Take us through the decision to support multiple cloud platforms >> Now we've supported multiple cloud platforms for many years, so I think that was probably a misperception. Oracle database, we partnered up with Amazon very early on in their cloud when they had kind of the the first cloud out there. And we had Oracle database running on their cloud. We have backup, we have a lot of stuff running. So, yeah, part of the philosophy of Oracle has always been we partner with every platform. We're very open we started with SQL and APIs. As we develop new technologies we push them into the SQL standard. So that's always been part of the ecosystem at Oracle. That's how we think we get an advantage by being more open. I think if we try to create this isolated little world it actually hurts us and hurts customers. So for us it's a win-win to be open across the clouds. >> So Supercloud is this concept that we put forth to describe a platform or some people think it's an architecture if you have an opinion, and I'd love to hear it but it provides a programmatically consistent set of services that hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. And so we look at the Oracle database service for Azure as fitting within this definition. In your view, is this accurate? >> Yeah, I would broaden it. I'd see a little bit more than that. We just think that services should be available from everywhere, right? So, I mean, it's a little bit like if you go back to the pre-internet world, there was things like AOL and CompuServe and those were kind of islands. And if you were on AOL, you really didn't have access to anything on CompuServe and vice versa. And the cloud world has evolved a little bit like that. And we just think that's the wrong model. They shouldn't these clouds are part of the world and they need to be interconnected like all the rest of the world. It's been a long time with telephones internet, everything, everything's interconnected. Everything should work seamlessly together. So that's how we believe if you're running in one cloud and you're running let's say an application, one cloud you want to use a service from another cloud should be completely simple to do that. It shouldn't be, I can only use what's in AOL or CompuServe or whatever else. It should not be isolated. >> Well, we got a long way to go before that Nirvana exists but one example is the Oracle database service with Azure. So what exactly does that service provide? I'm interested in how consistent the service experience is across clouds. Did you create a purpose-built PaaS layer to achieve this common experience? Or is it off the shelf Terraform? Is there unique value in the PaaS layer? Let's dig into some of those questions. I know I just threw six at you. >> Yeah, I mean, so what this is, is what we're trying to do is very simple. Which is, for example, starting with the Oracle database we want to make that seamless to use from anywhere you're running. Whether it's on-prem, on some other cloud, anywhere else you should be able to seamlessly use the Oracle database and it should look like the internet. There's no friction. There's not a lot of hoops you got to jump just because you're trying to use a database that isn't local to you. So it's pretty straightforward. And in terms of things like Azure, it's not easy to do because all these clouds have a lot of kind of very unique technologies. So what we've done is at Oracle is we've said, "Okay we're going to make Oracle database look exactly like if it was running on Azure." That means we'll use the Azure security systems, the identity management systems, the networking, there's things like monitoring and management. So we'll push all these technologies. For example, when we have monitoring event or we have alerts we'll push those into the Azure console. So as a user, it looks to you exactly as if that Oracle database was running inside Azure. Also, the networking is a big challenge across these clouds. So we've basically made that whole thing seamless. So we create the super high bandwidth network between Azure and Oracle. We make sure that's extremely low latency, under two milliseconds round trip. It's all within the local metro region. So it's very fast, very high bandwidth, very low latency. And we take care establishing the links and making sure that it's secure and all that kind of stuff. So at a high level, it looks to you like the database is--even the look and feel of the screens. It's the Azure colors, it's the Azure buttons it's the Azure layout of the screens so it looks like you're running there and we take care of all the technical details underlying that which there's a lot which has taken a lot of work to make it work seamlessly. >> In the magic of that abstraction. Juan, does it happen at the PaaS layer? Could you take us inside that a little bit? Is there intelligence in there that helps you deal with latency or are there any kind of purpose-built functions for this service? >> You could think of it as... I mean it happens at a lot of different layers. It happens at the identity management layer, it happens at the networking layer, it happens at the database layer, it happens at the monitoring layer, at the management layer. So all those things have been integrated. So it's not one thing that you just go and do. You have to integrate all these different services together. You can access files in Azure from the Oracle database. Again, that's completely seamless. You, it's just like if it was local to our cloud you get your Azure files in your kind of S3 equivalent. So yeah, the, it's not one thing. There's a whole lot of pieces to the ecosystem. And what we've done is we've worked on each piece separately to make sure that it's completely seamless and transparent so you don't have to think about it, it just works. >> So you kind of answered my next question which is one of the technical hurdles. It sounds like the technical hurdles are that integration across the entire stack. That's the sort of architecture that you've built. What was the catalyst for this service? >> Yeah, the catalyst is just fulfilling our vision of an open cloud world. It's really like I said, Oracle, from the very beginning has been believed in open standards. Customers should be able to have choice customers should be able to use whatever they want from wherever they want. And we saw that, you know in the new world of cloud that had broken down everybody had their own authentication system management system, monitoring system networking system, configuration system. And it became very difficult. There was a lot of friction to using services across cloud. So we said, "Well, okay we can fix that." It's work, it's significant amount of work but we know how to do it and let's just go do it and make it easy for customers. >> So given Oracle is really your main focus is on mission critical workloads. You talked about this low latency network, I mean but you still have physical distances, so how are you managing that latency? What's the experience been for customers across Azure and OCI? >> Yeah, so it, it's a good point. I mean, latency can be an issue. So the good thing about clouds is we have a lot of cloud data centers. We have dozens and dozens of cloud data centers around the world. And Azure has dozens and dozens of cloud data centers. And in most cases, they're in the same metro region because there's kind of natural metro regions within each country that you want to put your cloud data centers in. So most of our data centers are actually very close to the Azure data centers. There's the kind of northern Virginia, there's London, there's Tokyo I mean, there's natural places where everybody puts their data centers Seoul et cetera. And so that's the real key. So that allows us to put a very high bandwidth and low latency network. The real problems with latency come when you're trying to go along physical distance. If you're trying to connect, you know across the Pacific or you know across the country or something like that, then you can get in trouble with latency within the same metro region. It's extremely fast. It tends to be around one, you know the highest two millisecond that's roundtrip through all the routers and connections and gateways and everything else. With everything taken into consideration, what we guarantee is it's always less than two millisecond which is a very low latency time. So that tends to not be a problem because it's extremely low latency. >> I was going to ask you less than two milliseconds. So, earlier in the program we had Jack Greenfield who runs architecture for Walmart, and he was explaining what we call their Supercloud, and it's runs across Azure, GCP, and they're on-prem. They have this thing called the triplet model. So my question to you is, are you in situations where you guaranteeing that less than two milliseconds do you have situations where you're bringing, you know Exadata Cloud, a customer on-prem to achieve that? Or is this just across clouds? >> Yeah, in this case, we're talking public cloud data center to public cloud data center. >> Oh okay. >> So add your public cloud data center to Oracle Public Cloud data center. They're in the same metro region. We set up the connections, we do all the technology to make it seamless. And from a customer point of view they don't really see the network. Also, remember that SQL is actually designed to have very low bandwidth and latency requirements. So it is a language. So you don't go to the database and say do this one little thing for me. You send it a SQL statement that can actually access lots of data while in the database. So the real latency requirement of a SQL database is within the database. So I need to access all that data fast. So I need very fast access to storage very fast access across node. That's what exit data gives you. But you send one request and that request can do a huge amount of work and then return one answer. And that's kind of the design point of SQL. So SQL is inherently low bandwidth requirements, it was used back in the eighties when we used to have 10 megabit networks and the the biggest companies in the world ran back then. So right now we're talking over hundred hundreds of gigabits. So it's really not much of a challenge. When you're designed to run on 10 megabit to say, okay I'm going to give you 10,000 times what you were designed for it's really, it's a pretty low hurdle jump. >> What about the deployment models? How do you handle this? Is it a single global instance across clouds or do you sort of instantiate in each you got exudate in Azure and exudates in OCI? What's the deployment model look like? >> It's pretty straightforward. So customer decides where they want to run their application and database. So there's natural places where people go. If you're in Tokyo, you're going to choose the local Tokyo data centers for both, you know Microsoft and Oracle. If you're in London, you're going to do that. If you're in California you're going to choose maybe San Jose, something like that. So a customer just chooses. We both have data centers in that metro region. So they create their service on Azure and then they go to our console which looks just like an Azure console and say all right create me a database. And then we choose the closest Oracle data center which is generally a few miles away, and then it it all gets created. So from a customer point of view, it's very straightforward. >> I'm always in awe about how simple you make things sound. All right what about security? You talked a little bit before about identity access how you sort of abstracting the Azure capabilities away so that you've simplified it for your customers but are there any other specific security things that you need to do? How much did you have to abstract the underlying primitives of Azure or OCI to present that common experience to customers? >> Yeah, so there's really two big things. One is the identity management. Like my name is X on Azure and I have this set of privileges. Oracle has its own identity management system, right? So what we didn't want is that you have to kind of like bridge these things yourself. It's a giant pain to do that. So we actually what we call federate across these identity managements. So you put your credentials into Azure and then they automatically get to use the exact same credentials and identity in the Oracle cloud. So again, you don't have to think about it, it just works. And then the second part is that the whole bridging the network. So within a cloud you generally have virtual network that's private to your company. And so at Oracle, we bridge the private network that you created in, for example, Azure to the private network that we create for you in Oracle. So it is still a private network without you having to do a whole bunch of work. So it's just like if you were in your own data center other people can't get into your network. So it's secured at the network level, it's secured at the identity management, and encryption level. And again we did a lot of work to make that seamless for customers and they don't have to worry about it because we did the work. That's really as simple as it gets. >> That's what's Supercloud's supposed to be all about. Alright, we were talking earlier about sort of the misperception around multicloud, your view of Open I think, which is you run the Oracle database, wherever the customer wants to run it. So you got this database service across OCI and Azure customers today, they run Oracle database in AWS. You got heat wave, MySQL, heat wave that you announced on AWS, Google touts a bare metal offering where you can run Oracle on GCP. Do you see a day when you extend an OCI Azure like situation across multiple clouds? Would that bring benefits to customers or will the world of database generally remain largely fenced with maybe a few exceptions like what you're doing with OCI and Azure? I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on egress fees as maybe one of the reasons that there is a barrier to this happening and why maybe these stove pipes, exist today and in the future. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we're very open to working with everyone else out there. Like I said, we've always been, big believers in customers should have choice and you should be able to run wherever you want. So that's been kind of a founding principle of Oracle. We have the Azure, we did a partnership with them, we're open to doing other partnerships and you're going to see other things coming down the pipe on the topic of egress. Yeah, the large egress fees, it's pretty obvious what goes on with that. Various vendors like to have large egress fees because they want to keep things kind of locked into their cloud. So it's not a very customer friendly thing to do. And I think everybody recognizes that it's really trying to kind of course or put a lot of friction on moving data out of a particular cloud. And that's not what we do. We have very, very low egress fees. So we don't really do that and we don't think anybody else should do that. But I think customers at the end of the day, will win that battle. They're going to have to go back to their vendor and say, well I have choice in clouds and if you're going to impose these limits on me, maybe I'll make a different choice. So that's ultimately how these things get resolved. >> So do you think other cloud providers are going to take a page out of what you're doing with Azure and provide similar solutions? >> Yeah, well I think customers want, I mean, I've talked to a lot of customers, this is what they want, right? I mean, there's really no doubt no customer wants to be locked into a single ecosystem. There's nobody out there that wants that. And as the competition, when they start seeing an open ecosystem evolving they're going to be like, okay, I'd rather go there than the closed ecosystem, and that's going to put pressure on the closed ecosystems. So that's the nature of competition. That's what ultimately will tip the balance on these things. >> So Juan, even though you have this capability of distributing a workload across multiple clouds as in our Supercloud premise it's still something that's relatively new. It's a big decision that maybe many people might consider somewhat of a risk. So I'm curious who's driving the decisions for your initial customers? What do they want to get out of it? What's the decision point there? >> Yeah, I mean, this is generally driven by customers that want a specific technology in a cloud. I think the risk, I haven't seen a lot of people worry too much about the risk. Everybody involved in this is a very well known, very reputable firm. I mean, Oracle's been around for 40 years. We run most of the world's largest companies. I think customers understand we're not going to build a solution that's going to put their technology and their business at risk. And the same thing with Azure and others. So I don't see customers too worried about this is a risky move because it's really not. And you know, everybody understands networking at the end the day networking works. I mean, how does the internet work? It's a known quantity. It's not like it's some brand new invention. What we're really doing is breaking down the barriers to interconnecting things. Automating 'em, making 'em easy. So there's not a whole lot of risk here for customers. And like I said, every single customer in the world loves an open ecosystem. It's just not a question. If you go to a customer would you rather put your technology or your business to run on a closed ecosystem or an open system? It's kind of not even worth asking a question. It's a no-brainer. >> All right, so we got to go. My last question. What do you think of the term "Supercloud"? You think it'll stick? >> We'll see. There's a lot of terms out there and it's always fun to see which terms stick. It's a cool term. I like it, but the decision makers are actually the public, what sticks and what doesn't. It's very hard to predict. >> Yeah well, it's been a lot of fun having you on, Juan. Really appreciate your time and always good to see you. >> All right, Dave, thanks a lot. It's always fun to talk to you. >> You bet. All right, keep it right there. More Supercloud two content from theCUBE Community Dave Vellante for John Furrier. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>When Oracle acquired my SQL via the Sun acquisition, nobody really thought the company would put much effort into the platform preferring to focus all the wood behind its leading Oracle database, Arrow pun intended. But two years ago, Oracle surprised many folks by announcing my SQL Heatwave a new database as a service with a massively parallel hybrid Columbia in Mary Mary architecture that brings together transactional and analytic data in a single platform. Welcome to our latest database, power panel on the cube. My name is Dave Ante, and today we're gonna discuss Oracle's MySQL Heat Wave with a who's who of cloud database industry analysts. Holgar Mueller is with Constellation Research. Mark Stammer is the Dragon Slayer and Wikibon contributor. And Ron Westfall is with Fu Chim Research. Gentlemen, welcome back to the Cube. Always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. >>So we've had a number of of deep dive interviews on the Cube with Nip and Aggarwal. You guys know him? He's a senior vice president of MySQL, Heatwave Development at Oracle. I think you just saw him at Oracle Cloud World and he's come on to describe this is gonna, I'll call it a shock and awe feature additions to to heatwave. You know, the company's clearly putting r and d into the platform and I think at at cloud world we saw like the fifth major release since 2020 when they first announced MySQL heat wave. So just listing a few, they, they got, they taken, brought in analytics machine learning, they got autopilot for machine learning, which is automation onto the basic o l TP functionality of the database. And it's been interesting to watch Oracle's converge database strategy. We've contrasted that amongst ourselves. Love to get your thoughts on Amazon's get the right tool for the right job approach. >>Are they gonna have to change that? You know, Amazon's got the specialized databases, it's just, you know, the both companies are doing well. It just shows there are a lot of ways to, to skin a cat cuz you see some traction in the market in, in both approaches. So today we're gonna focus on the latest heat wave announcements and we're gonna talk about multi-cloud with a native MySQL heat wave implementation, which is available on aws MySQL heat wave for Azure via the Oracle Microsoft interconnect. This kind of cool hybrid action that they got going. Sometimes we call it super cloud. And then we're gonna dive into my SQL Heatwave Lake house, which allows users to process and query data across MyQ databases as heatwave databases, as well as object stores. So, and then we've got, heatwave has been announced on AWS and, and, and Azure, they're available now and Lake House I believe is in beta and I think it's coming out the second half of next year. So again, all of our guests are fresh off of Oracle Cloud world in Las Vegas. So they got the latest scoop. Guys, I'm done talking. Let's get into it. Mark, maybe you could start us off, what's your opinion of my SQL Heatwaves competitive position? When you think about what AWS is doing, you know, Google is, you know, we heard Google Cloud next recently, we heard about all their data innovations. You got, obviously Azure's got a big portfolio, snowflakes doing well in the market. What's your take? >>Well, first let's look at it from the point of view that AWS is the market leader in cloud and cloud services. They own somewhere between 30 to 50% depending on who you read of the market. And then you have Azure as number two and after that it falls off. There's gcp, Google Cloud platform, which is further way down the list and then Oracle and IBM and Alibaba. So when you look at AWS and you and Azure saying, hey, these are the market leaders in the cloud, then you start looking at it and saying, if I am going to provide a service that competes with the service they have, if I can make it available in their cloud, it means that I can be more competitive. And if I'm compelling and compelling means at least twice the performance or functionality or both at half the price, I should be able to gain market share. >>And that's what Oracle's done. They've taken a superior product in my SQL heat wave, which is faster, lower cost does more for a lot less at the end of the day and they make it available to the users of those clouds. You avoid this little thing called egress fees, you avoid the issue of having to migrate from one cloud to another and suddenly you have a very compelling offer. So I look at what Oracle's doing with MyQ and it feels like, I'm gonna use a word term, a flanking maneuver to their competition. They're offering a better service on their platforms. >>All right, so thank you for that. Holger, we've seen this sort of cadence, I sort of referenced it up front a little bit and they sat on MySQL for a decade, then all of a sudden we see this rush of announcements. Why did it take so long? And and more importantly is Oracle, are they developing the right features that cloud database customers are looking for in your view? >>Yeah, great question, but first of all, in your interview you said it's the edit analytics, right? Analytics is kind of like a marketing buzzword. Reports can be analytics, right? The interesting thing, which they did, the first thing they, they, they crossed the chasm between OTP and all up, right? In the same database, right? So major engineering feed very much what customers want and it's all about creating Bellevue for customers, which, which I think is the part why they go into the multi-cloud and why they add these capabilities. And they certainly with the AI capabilities, it's kind of like getting it into an autonomous field, self-driving field now with the lake cost capabilities and meeting customers where they are, like Mark has talked about the e risk costs in the cloud. So that that's a significant advantage, creating value for customers and that's what at the end of the day matters. >>And I believe strongly that long term it's gonna be ones who create better value for customers who will get more of their money From that perspective, why then take them so long? I think it's a great question. I think largely he mentioned the gentleman Nial, it's largely to who leads a product. I used to build products too, so maybe I'm a little fooling myself here, but that made the difference in my view, right? So since he's been charged, he's been building things faster than the rest of the competition, than my SQL space, which in hindsight we thought was a hot and smoking innovation phase. It kind of like was a little self complacent when it comes to the traditional borders of where, where people think, where things are separated between OTP and ola or as an example of adjacent support, right? Structured documents, whereas unstructured documents or databases and all of that has been collapsed and brought together for building a more powerful database for customers. >>So I mean it's certainly, you know, when, when Oracle talks about the competitors, you know, the competitors are in the, I always say they're, if the Oracle talks about you and knows you're doing well, so they talk a lot about aws, talk a little bit about Snowflake, you know, sort of Google, they have partnerships with Azure, but, but in, so I'm presuming that the response in MySQL heatwave was really in, in response to what they were seeing from those big competitors. But then you had Maria DB coming out, you know, the day that that Oracle acquired Sun and, and launching and going after the MySQL base. So it's, I'm, I'm interested and we'll talk about this later and what you guys think AWS and Google and Azure and Snowflake and how they're gonna respond. But, but before I do that, Ron, I want to ask you, you, you, you can get, you know, pretty technical and you've probably seen the benchmarks. >>I know you have Oracle makes a big deal out of it, publishes its benchmarks, makes some transparent on on GI GitHub. Larry Ellison talked about this in his keynote at Cloud World. What are the benchmarks show in general? I mean, when you, when you're new to the market, you gotta have a story like Mark was saying, you gotta be two x you know, the performance at half the cost or you better be or you're not gonna get any market share. So, and, and you know, oftentimes companies don't publish market benchmarks when they're leading. They do it when they, they need to gain share. So what do you make of the benchmarks? Have their, any results that were surprising to you? Have, you know, they been challenged by the competitors. Is it just a bunch of kind of desperate bench marketing to make some noise in the market or you know, are they real? What's your view? >>Well, from my perspective, I think they have the validity. And to your point, I believe that when it comes to competitor responses, that has not really happened. Nobody has like pulled down the information that's on GitHub and said, Oh, here are our price performance results. And they counter oracles. In fact, I think part of the reason why that hasn't happened is that there's the risk if Oracle's coming out and saying, Hey, we can deliver 17 times better query performance using our capabilities versus say, Snowflake when it comes to, you know, the Lakehouse platform and Snowflake turns around and says it's actually only 15 times better during performance, that's not exactly an effective maneuver. And so I think this is really to oracle's credit and I think it's refreshing because these differentiators are significant. We're not talking, you know, like 1.2% differences. We're talking 17 fold differences, we're talking six fold differences depending on, you know, where the spotlight is being shined and so forth. >>And so I think this is actually something that is actually too good to believe initially at first blush. If I'm a cloud database decision maker, I really have to prioritize this. I really would know, pay a lot more attention to this. And that's why I posed the question to Oracle and others like, okay, if these differentiators are so significant, why isn't the needle moving a bit more? And it's for, you know, some of the usual reasons. One is really deep discounting coming from, you know, the other players that's really kind of, you know, marketing 1 0 1, this is something you need to do when there's a real competitive threat to keep, you know, a customer in your own customer base. Plus there is the usual fear and uncertainty about moving from one platform to another. But I think, you know, the traction, the momentum is, is shifting an Oracle's favor. I think we saw that in the Q1 efforts, for example, where Oracle cloud grew 44% and that it generated, you know, 4.8 billion and revenue if I recall correctly. And so, so all these are demonstrating that's Oracle is making, I think many of the right moves, publishing these figures for anybody to look at from their own perspective is something that is, I think, good for the market and I think it's just gonna continue to pay dividends for Oracle down the horizon as you know, competition intens plots. So if I were in, >>Dave, can I, Dave, can I interject something and, and what Ron just said there? Yeah, please go ahead. A couple things here, one discounting, which is a common practice when you have a real threat, as Ron pointed out, isn't going to help much in this situation simply because you can't discount to the point where you improve your performance and the performance is a huge differentiator. You may be able to get your price down, but the problem that most of them have is they don't have an integrated product service. They don't have an integrated O L T P O L A P M L N data lake. Even if you cut out two of them, they don't have any of them integrated. They have multiple services that are required separate integration and that can't be overcome with discounting. And the, they, you have to pay for each one of these. And oh, by the way, as you grow, the discounts go away. So that's a, it's a minor important detail. >>So, so that's a TCO question mark, right? And I know you look at this a lot, if I had that kind of price performance advantage, I would be pounding tco, especially if I need two separate databases to do the job. That one can do, that's gonna be, the TCO numbers are gonna be off the chart or maybe down the chart, which you want. Have you looked at this and how does it compare with, you know, the big cloud guys, for example, >>I've looked at it in depth, in fact, I'm working on another TCO on this arena, but you can find it on Wiki bod in which I compared TCO for MySEQ Heat wave versus Aurora plus Redshift plus ML plus Blue. I've compared it against gcps services, Azure services, Snowflake with other services. And there's just no comparison. The, the TCO differences are huge. More importantly, thefor, the, the TCO per performance is huge. We're talking in some cases multiple orders of magnitude, but at least an order of magnitude difference. So discounting isn't gonna help you much at the end of the day, it's only going to lower your cost a little, but it doesn't improve the automation, it doesn't improve the performance, it doesn't improve the time to insight, it doesn't improve all those things that you want out of a database or multiple databases because you >>Can't discount yourself to a higher value proposition. >>So what about, I wonder ho if you could chime in on the developer angle. You, you followed that, that market. How do these innovations from heatwave, I think you used the term developer velocity. I've heard you used that before. Yeah, I mean, look, Oracle owns Java, okay, so it, it's, you know, most popular, you know, programming language in the world, blah, blah blah. But it does it have the, the minds and hearts of, of developers and does, where does heatwave fit into that equation? >>I think heatwave is gaining quickly mindshare on the developer side, right? It's not the traditional no sequel database which grew up, there's a traditional mistrust of oracles to developers to what was happening to open source when gets acquired. Like in the case of Oracle versus Java and where my sql, right? And, but we know it's not a good competitive strategy to, to bank on Oracle screwing up because it hasn't worked not on Java known my sequel, right? And for developers, it's, once you get to know a technology product and you can do more, it becomes kind of like a Swiss army knife and you can build more use case, you can build more powerful applications. That's super, super important because you don't have to get certified in multiple databases. You, you are fast at getting things done, you achieve fire, develop velocity, and the managers are happy because they don't have to license more things, send you to more trainings, have more risk of something not being delivered, right? >>So it's really the, we see the suite where this best of breed play happening here, which in general was happening before already with Oracle's flagship database. Whereas those Amazon as an example, right? And now the interesting thing is every step away Oracle was always a one database company that can be only one and they're now generally talking about heat web and that two database company with different market spaces, but same value proposition of integrating more things very, very quickly to have a universal database that I call, they call the converge database for all the needs of an enterprise to run certain application use cases. And that's what's attractive to developers. >>It's, it's ironic isn't it? I mean I, you know, the rumor was the TK Thomas Curian left Oracle cuz he wanted to put Oracle database on other clouds and other places. And maybe that was the rift. Maybe there was, I'm sure there was other things, but, but Oracle clearly is now trying to expand its Tam Ron with, with heatwave into aws, into Azure. How do you think Oracle's gonna do, you were at a cloud world, what was the sentiment from customers and the independent analyst? Is this just Oracle trying to screw with the competition, create a little diversion? Or is this, you know, serious business for Oracle? What do you think? >>No, I think it has lakes. I think it's definitely, again, attriting to Oracle's overall ability to differentiate not only my SQL heat wave, but its overall portfolio. And I think the fact that they do have the alliance with the Azure in place, that this is definitely demonstrating their commitment to meeting the multi-cloud needs of its customers as well as what we pointed to in terms of the fact that they're now offering, you know, MySQL capabilities within AWS natively and that it can now perform AWS's own offering. And I think this is all demonstrating that Oracle is, you know, not letting up, they're not resting on its laurels. That's clearly we are living in a multi-cloud world, so why not just make it more easy for customers to be able to use cloud databases according to their own specific, specific needs. And I think, you know, to holder's point, I think that definitely lines with being able to bring on more application developers to leverage these capabilities. >>I think one important announcement that's related to all this was the JSON relational duality capabilities where now it's a lot easier for application developers to use a language that they're very familiar with a JS O and not have to worry about going into relational databases to store their J S O N application coding. So this is, I think an example of the innovation that's enhancing the overall Oracle portfolio and certainly all the work with machine learning is definitely paying dividends as well. And as a result, I see Oracle continue to make these inroads that we pointed to. But I agree with Mark, you know, the short term discounting is just a stall tag. This is not denying the fact that Oracle is being able to not only deliver price performance differentiators that are dramatic, but also meeting a wide range of needs for customers out there that aren't just limited device performance consideration. >>Being able to support multi-cloud according to customer needs. Being able to reach out to the application developer community and address a very specific challenge that has plagued them for many years now. So bring it all together. Yeah, I see this as just enabling Oracles who ring true with customers. That the customers that were there were basically all of them, even though not all of them are going to be saying the same things, they're all basically saying positive feedback. And likewise, I think the analyst community is seeing this. It's always refreshing to be able to talk to customers directly and at Oracle cloud there was a litany of them and so this is just a difference maker as well as being able to talk to strategic partners. The nvidia, I think partnerships also testament to Oracle's ongoing ability to, you know, make the ecosystem more user friendly for the customers out there. >>Yeah, it's interesting when you get these all in one tools, you know, the Swiss Army knife, you expect that it's not able to be best of breed. That's the kind of surprising thing that I'm hearing about, about heatwave. I want to, I want to talk about Lake House because when I think of Lake House, I think data bricks, and to my knowledge data bricks hasn't been in the sites of Oracle yet. Maybe they're next, but, but Oracle claims that MySQL, heatwave, Lakehouse is a breakthrough in terms of capacity and performance. Mark, what are your thoughts on that? Can you double click on, on Lakehouse Oracle's claims for things like query performance and data loading? What does it mean for the market? Is Oracle really leading in, in the lake house competitive landscape? What are your thoughts? >>Well, but name in the game is what are the problems you're solving for the customer? More importantly, are those problems urgent or important? If they're urgent, customers wanna solve 'em. Now if they're important, they might get around to them. So you look at what they're doing with Lake House or previous to that machine learning or previous to that automation or previous to that O L A with O ltp and they're merging all this capability together. If you look at Snowflake or data bricks, they're tacking one problem. You look at MyQ heat wave, they're tacking multiple problems. So when you say, yeah, their queries are much better against the lake house in combination with other analytics in combination with O ltp and the fact that there are no ETLs. So you're getting all this done in real time. So it's, it's doing the query cross, cross everything in real time. >>You're solving multiple user and developer problems, you're increasing their ability to get insight faster, you're having shorter response times. So yeah, they really are solving urgent problems for customers. And by putting it where the customer lives, this is the brilliance of actually being multicloud. And I know I'm backing up here a second, but by making it work in AWS and Azure where people already live, where they already have applications, what they're saying is, we're bringing it to you. You don't have to come to us to get these, these benefits, this value overall, I think it's a brilliant strategy. I give Nip and Argo wallet a huge, huge kudos for what he's doing there. So yes, what they're doing with the lake house is going to put notice on data bricks and Snowflake and everyone else for that matter. Well >>Those are guys that whole ago you, you and I have talked about this. Those are, those are the guys that are doing sort of the best of breed. You know, they're really focused and they, you know, tend to do well at least out of the gate. Now you got Oracle's converged philosophy, obviously with Oracle database. We've seen that now it's kicking in gear with, with heatwave, you know, this whole thing of sweets versus best of breed. I mean the long term, you know, customers tend to migrate towards suite, but the new shiny toy tends to get the growth. How do you think this is gonna play out in cloud database? >>Well, it's the forever never ending story, right? And in software right suite, whereas best of breed and so far in the long run suites have always won, right? So, and sometimes they struggle again because the inherent problem of sweets is you build something larger, it has more complexity and that means your cycles to get everything working together to integrate the test that roll it out, certify whatever it is, takes you longer, right? And that's not the case. It's a fascinating part of what the effort around my SQL heat wave is that the team is out executing the previous best of breed data, bringing us something together. Now if they can maintain that pace, that's something to to, to be seen. But it, the strategy, like what Mark was saying, bring the software to the data is of course interesting and unique and totally an Oracle issue in the past, right? >>Yeah. But it had to be in your database on oci. And but at, that's an interesting part. The interesting thing on the Lake health side is, right, there's three key benefits of a lakehouse. The first one is better reporting analytics, bring more rich information together, like make the, the, the case for silicon angle, right? We want to see engagements for this video, we want to know what's happening. That's a mixed transactional video media use case, right? Typical Lakehouse use case. The next one is to build more rich applications, transactional applications which have video and these elements in there, which are the engaging one. And the third one, and that's where I'm a little critical and concerned, is it's really the base platform for artificial intelligence, right? To run deep learning to run things automatically because they have all the data in one place can create in one way. >>And that's where Oracle, I know that Ron talked about Invidia for a moment, but that's where Oracle doesn't have the strongest best story. Nonetheless, the two other main use cases of the lake house are very strong, very well only concern is four 50 terabyte sounds long. It's an arbitrary limitation. Yeah, sounds as big. So for the start, and it's the first word, they can make that bigger. You don't want your lake house to be limited and the terabyte sizes or any even petabyte size because you want to have the certainty. I can put everything in there that I think it might be relevant without knowing what questions to ask and query those questions. >>Yeah. And you know, in the early days of no schema on right, it just became a mess. But now technology has evolved to allow us to actually get more value out of that data. Data lake. Data swamp is, you know, not much more, more, more, more logical. But, and I want to get in, in a moment, I want to come back to how you think the competitors are gonna respond. Are they gonna have to sort of do a more of a converged approach? AWS in particular? But before I do, Ron, I want to ask you a question about autopilot because I heard Larry Ellison's keynote and he was talking about how, you know, most security issues are human errors with autonomy and autonomous database and things like autopilot. We take care of that. It's like autonomous vehicles, they're gonna be safer. And I went, well maybe, maybe someday. So Oracle really tries to emphasize this, that every time you see an announcement from Oracle, they talk about new, you know, autonomous capabilities. It, how legit is it? Do people care? What about, you know, what's new for heatwave Lakehouse? How much of a differentiator, Ron, do you really think autopilot is in this cloud database space? >>Yeah, I think it will definitely enhance the overall proposition. I don't think people are gonna buy, you know, lake house exclusively cause of autopilot capabilities, but when they look at the overall picture, I think it will be an added capability bonus to Oracle's benefit. And yeah, I think it's kind of one of these age old questions, how much do you automate and what is the bounce to strike? And I think we all understand with the automatic car, autonomous car analogy that there are limitations to being able to use that. However, I think it's a tool that basically every organization out there needs to at least have or at least evaluate because it goes to the point of it helps with ease of use, it helps make automation more balanced in terms of, you know, being able to test, all right, let's automate this process and see if it works well, then we can go on and switch on on autopilot for other processes. >>And then, you know, that allows, for example, the specialists to spend more time on business use cases versus, you know, manual maintenance of, of the cloud database and so forth. So I think that actually is a, a legitimate value proposition. I think it's just gonna be a case by case basis. Some organizations are gonna be more aggressive with putting automation throughout their processes throughout their organization. Others are gonna be more cautious. But it's gonna be, again, something that will help the overall Oracle proposition. And something that I think will be used with caution by many organizations, but other organizations are gonna like, hey, great, this is something that is really answering a real problem. And that is just easing the use of these databases, but also being able to better handle the automation capabilities and benefits that come with it without having, you know, a major screwup happened and the process of transitioning to more automated capabilities. >>Now, I didn't attend cloud world, it's just too many red eyes, you know, recently, so I passed. But one of the things I like to do at those events is talk to customers, you know, in the spirit of the truth, you know, they, you know, you'd have the hallway, you know, track and to talk to customers and they say, Hey, you know, here's the good, the bad and the ugly. So did you guys, did you talk to any customers my SQL Heatwave customers at, at cloud world? And and what did you learn? I don't know, Mark, did you, did you have any luck and, and having some, some private conversations? >>Yeah, I had quite a few private conversations. The one thing before I get to that, I want disagree with one point Ron made, I do believe there are customers out there buying the heat wave service, the MySEQ heat wave server service because of autopilot. Because autopilot is really revolutionary in many ways in the sense for the MySEQ developer in that it, it auto provisions, it auto parallel loads, IT auto data places it auto shape predictions. It can tell you what machine learning models are going to tell you, gonna give you your best results. And, and candidly, I've yet to meet a DBA who didn't wanna give up pedantic tasks that are pain in the kahoo, which they'd rather not do and if it's long as it was done right for them. So yes, I do think people are buying it because of autopilot and that's based on some of the conversations I had with customers at Oracle Cloud World. >>In fact, it was like, yeah, that's great, yeah, we get fantastic performance, but this really makes my life easier and I've yet to meet a DBA who didn't want to make their life easier. And it does. So yeah, I've talked to a few of them. They were excited. I asked them if they ran into any bugs, were there any difficulties in moving to it? And the answer was no. In both cases, it's interesting to note, my sequel is the most popular database on the planet. Well, some will argue that it's neck and neck with SQL Server, but if you add in Mariah DB and ProCon db, which are forks of MySQL, then yeah, by far and away it's the most popular. And as a result of that, everybody for the most part has typically a my sequel database somewhere in their organization. So this is a brilliant situation for anybody going after MyQ, but especially for heat wave. And the customers I talk to love it. I didn't find anybody complaining about it. And >>What about the migration? We talked about TCO earlier. Did your t does your TCO analysis include the migration cost or do you kind of conveniently leave that out or what? >>Well, when you look at migration costs, there are different kinds of migration costs. By the way, the worst job in the data center is the data migration manager. Forget it, no other job is as bad as that one. You get no attaboys for doing it. Right? And then when you screw up, oh boy. So in real terms, anything that can limit data migration is a good thing. And when you look at Data Lake, that limits data migration. So if you're already a MySEQ user, this is a pure MySQL as far as you're concerned. It's just a, a simple transition from one to the other. You may wanna make sure nothing broke and every you, all your tables are correct and your schema's, okay, but it's all the same. So it's a simple migration. So it's pretty much a non-event, right? When you migrate data from an O LTP to an O L A P, that's an ETL and that's gonna take time. >>But you don't have to do that with my SQL heat wave. So that's gone when you start talking about machine learning, again, you may have an etl, you may not, depending on the circumstances, but again, with my SQL heat wave, you don't, and you don't have duplicate storage, you don't have to copy it from one storage container to another to be able to be used in a different database, which by the way, ultimately adds much more cost than just the other service. So yeah, I looked at the migration and again, the users I talked to said it was a non-event. It was literally moving from one physical machine to another. If they had a new version of MySEQ running on something else and just wanted to migrate it over or just hook it up or just connect it to the data, it worked just fine. >>Okay, so every day it sounds like you guys feel, and we've certainly heard this, my colleague David Foyer, the semi-retired David Foyer was always very high on heatwave. So I think you knows got some real legitimacy here coming from a standing start, but I wanna talk about the competition, how they're likely to respond. I mean, if your AWS and you got heatwave is now in your cloud, so there's some good aspects of that. The database guys might not like that, but the infrastructure guys probably love it. Hey, more ways to sell, you know, EC two and graviton, but you're gonna, the database guys in AWS are gonna respond. They're gonna say, Hey, we got Redshift, we got aqua. What's your thoughts on, on not only how that's gonna resonate with customers, but I'm interested in what you guys think will a, I never say never about aws, you know, and are they gonna try to build, in your view a converged Oola and o LTP database? You know, Snowflake is taking an ecosystem approach. They've added in transactional capabilities to the portfolio so they're not standing still. What do you guys see in the competitive landscape in that regard going forward? Maybe Holger, you could start us off and anybody else who wants to can chime in, >>Happy to, you mentioned Snowflake last, we'll start there. I think Snowflake is imitating that strategy, right? That building out original data warehouse and the clouds tasking project to really proposition to have other data available there because AI is relevant for everybody. Ultimately people keep data in the cloud for ultimately running ai. So you see the same suite kind of like level strategy, it's gonna be a little harder because of the original positioning. How much would people know that you're doing other stuff? And I just, as a former developer manager of developers, I just don't see the speed at the moment happening at Snowflake to become really competitive to Oracle. On the flip side, putting my Oracle hat on for a moment back to you, Mark and Iran, right? What could Oracle still add? Because the, the big big things, right? The traditional chasms in the database world, they have built everything, right? >>So I, I really scratched my hat and gave Nipon a hard time at Cloud world say like, what could you be building? Destiny was very conservative. Let's get the Lakehouse thing done, it's gonna spring next year, right? And the AWS is really hard because AWS value proposition is these small innovation teams, right? That they build two pizza teams, which can be fit by two pizzas, not large teams, right? And you need suites to large teams to build these suites with lots of functionalities to make sure they work together. They're consistent, they have the same UX on the administration side, they can consume the same way, they have the same API registry, can't even stop going where the synergy comes to play over suite. So, so it's gonna be really, really hard for them to change that. But AWS super pragmatic. They're always by themselves that they'll listen to customers if they learn from customers suite as a proposition. I would not be surprised if AWS trying to bring things closer together, being morely together. >>Yeah. Well how about, can we talk about multicloud if, if, again, Oracle is very on on Oracle as you said before, but let's look forward, you know, half a year or a year. What do you think about Oracle's moves in, in multicloud in terms of what kind of penetration they're gonna have in the marketplace? You saw a lot of presentations at at cloud world, you know, we've looked pretty closely at the, the Microsoft Azure deal. I think that's really interesting. I've, I've called it a little bit of early days of a super cloud. What impact do you think this is gonna have on, on the marketplace? But, but both. And think about it within Oracle's customer base, I have no doubt they'll do great there. But what about beyond its existing install base? What do you guys think? >>Ryan, do you wanna jump on that? Go ahead. Go ahead Ryan. No, no, no, >>That's an excellent point. I think it aligns with what we've been talking about in terms of Lakehouse. I think Lake House will enable Oracle to pull more customers, more bicycle customers onto the Oracle platforms. And I think we're seeing all the signs pointing toward Oracle being able to make more inroads into the overall market. And that includes garnishing customers from the leaders in, in other words, because they are, you know, coming in as a innovator, a an alternative to, you know, the AWS proposition, the Google cloud proposition that they have less to lose and there's a result they can really drive the multi-cloud messaging to resonate with not only their existing customers, but also to be able to, to that question, Dave's posing actually garnish customers onto their platform. And, and that includes naturally my sequel but also OCI and so forth. So that's how I'm seeing this playing out. I think, you know, again, Oracle's reporting is indicating that, and I think what we saw, Oracle Cloud world is definitely validating the idea that Oracle can make more waves in the overall market in this regard. >>You know, I, I've floated this idea of Super cloud, it's kind of tongue in cheek, but, but there, I think there is some merit to it in terms of building on top of hyperscale infrastructure and abstracting some of the, that complexity. And one of the things that I'm most interested in is industry clouds and an Oracle acquisition of Cerner. I was struck by Larry Ellison's keynote, it was like, I don't know, an hour and a half and an hour and 15 minutes was focused on healthcare transformation. Well, >>So vertical, >>Right? And so, yeah, so you got Oracle's, you know, got some industry chops and you, and then you think about what they're building with, with not only oci, but then you got, you know, MyQ, you can now run in dedicated regions. You got ADB on on Exadata cloud to customer, you can put that OnPrem in in your data center and you look at what the other hyperscalers are, are doing. I I say other hyperscalers, I've always said Oracle's not really a hyperscaler, but they got a cloud so they're in the game. But you can't get, you know, big query OnPrem, you look at outposts, it's very limited in terms of, you know, the database support and again, that that will will evolve. But now you got Oracle's got, they announced Alloy, we can white label their cloud. So I'm interested in what you guys think about these moves, especially the industry cloud. We see, you know, Walmart is doing sort of their own cloud. You got Goldman Sachs doing a cloud. Do you, you guys, what do you think about that and what role does Oracle play? Any thoughts? >>Yeah, let me lemme jump on that for a moment. Now, especially with the MyQ, by making that available in multiple clouds, what they're doing is this follows the philosophy they've had the past with doing cloud, a customer taking the application and the data and putting it where the customer lives. If it's on premise, it's on premise. If it's in the cloud, it's in the cloud. By making the mice equal heat wave, essentially a plug compatible with any other mice equal as far as your, your database is concern and then giving you that integration with O L A P and ML and Data Lake and everything else, then what you've got is a compelling offering. You're making it easier for the customer to use. So I look the difference between MyQ and the Oracle database, MyQ is going to capture market more market share for them. >>You're not gonna find a lot of new users for the Oracle debate database. Yeah, there are always gonna be new users, don't get me wrong, but it's not gonna be a huge growth. Whereas my SQL heatwave is probably gonna be a major growth engine for Oracle going forward. Not just in their own cloud, but in AWS and in Azure and on premise over time that eventually it'll get there. It's not there now, but it will, they're doing the right thing on that basis. They're taking the services and when you talk about multicloud and making them available where the customer wants them, not forcing them to go where you want them, if that makes sense. And as far as where they're going in the future, I think they're gonna take a page outta what they've done with the Oracle database. They'll add things like JSON and XML and time series and spatial over time they'll make it a, a complete converged database like they did with the Oracle database. The difference being Oracle database will scale bigger and will have more transactions and be somewhat faster. And my SQL will be, for anyone who's not on the Oracle database, they're, they're not stupid, that's for sure. >>They've done Jason already. Right. But I give you that they could add graph and time series, right. Since eat with, Right, Right. Yeah, that's something absolutely right. That's, that's >>A sort of a logical move, right? >>Right. But that's, that's some kid ourselves, right? I mean has worked in Oracle's favor, right? 10 x 20 x, the amount of r and d, which is in the MyQ space, has been poured at trying to snatch workloads away from Oracle by starting with IBM 30 years ago, 20 years ago, Microsoft and, and, and, and didn't work, right? Database applications are extremely sticky when they run, you don't want to touch SIM and grow them, right? So that doesn't mean that heat phase is not an attractive offering, but it will be net new things, right? And what works in my SQL heat wave heat phases favor a little bit is it's not the massive enterprise applications which have like we the nails like, like you might be only running 30% or Oracle, but the connections and the interfaces into that is, is like 70, 80% of your enterprise. >>You take it out and it's like the spaghetti ball where you say, ah, no I really don't, don't want to do all that. Right? You don't, don't have that massive part with the equals heat phase sequel kind of like database which are more smaller tactical in comparison, but still I, I don't see them taking so much share. They will be growing because of a attractive value proposition quickly on the, the multi-cloud, right? I think it's not really multi-cloud. If you give people the chance to run your offering on different clouds, right? You can run it there. The multi-cloud advantages when the Uber offering comes out, which allows you to do things across those installations, right? I can migrate data, I can create data across something like Google has done with B query Omni, I can run predictive models or even make iron models in different place and distribute them, right? And Oracle is paving the road for that, but being available on these clouds. But the multi-cloud capability of database which knows I'm running on different clouds that is still yet to be built there. >>Yeah. And >>That the problem with >>That, that's the super cloud concept that I flowed and I I've always said kinda snowflake with a single global instance is sort of, you know, headed in that direction and maybe has a league. What's the issue with that mark? >>Yeah, the problem with the, with that version, the multi-cloud is clouds to charge egress fees. As long as they charge egress fees to move data between clouds, it's gonna make it very difficult to do a real multi-cloud implementation. Even Snowflake, which runs multi-cloud, has to pass out on the egress fees of their customer when data moves between clouds. And that's really expensive. I mean there, there is one customer I talked to who is beta testing for them, the MySQL heatwave and aws. The only reason they didn't want to do that until it was running on AWS is the egress fees were so great to move it to OCI that they couldn't afford it. Yeah. Egress fees are the big issue but, >>But Mark the, the point might be you might wanna root query and only get the results set back, right was much more tinier, which been the answer before for low latency between the class A problem, which we sometimes still have but mostly don't have. Right? And I think in general this with fees coming down based on the Oracle general E with fee move and it's very hard to justify those, right? But, but it's, it's not about moving data as a multi-cloud high value use case. It's about doing intelligent things with that data, right? Putting into other places, replicating it, what I'm saying the same thing what you said before, running remote queries on that, analyzing it, running AI on it, running AI models on that. That's the interesting thing. Cross administered in the same way. Taking things out, making sure compliance happens. Making sure when Ron says I don't want to be American anymore, I want to be in the European cloud that is gets migrated, right? So tho those are the interesting value use case which are really, really hard for enterprise to program hand by hand by developers and they would love to have out of the box and that's yet the innovation to come to, we have to come to see. But the first step to get there is that your software runs in multiple clouds and that's what Oracle's doing so well with my SQL >>Guys. Amazing. >>Go ahead. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>For example, >>Amazing amount of data knowledge and, and brain power in this market. Guys, I really want to thank you for coming on to the cube. Ron Holger. Mark, always a pleasure to have you on. Really appreciate your time. >>Well all the last names we're very happy for Romanic last and moderator. Thanks Dave for moderating us. All right, >>We'll see. We'll see you guys around. Safe travels to all and thank you for watching this power panel, The Truth About My SQL Heat Wave on the cube. Your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat jingle) >> The history of Exadata in the platform is really unique. And from my vantage point, it started earlier this century as a skunkworks inside of Oracle called Project Sage back when grid computing was the next big thing. Oracle saw that betting on standard hardware would put it on an industry curve that would rapidly evolve. Last April, for example, Oracle announced the availability of Exadata X9M in OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. One thing that hasn't been as well publicized is that Exadata on OCI is using AMD's EPYC processors in the database service. EPYC is not Eastern Pacific Yacht Club for all you sailing buffs, rather it stands for Extreme Performance Yield Computing, the enterprise grade version of AMD's Zen architecture which has been a linchpin of AMD's success in terms of penetrating enterprise markets. And to focus on the innovations that AMD and Oracle are bringing to market, we have with us today, Juan Loaiza, who's executive vice president of mission critical technologies at Oracle, and Mark Papermaster, who's the CTO and EVP of technology and engineering at AMD. Juan, welcome back to the show. Mark, great to have you on The Cube in your first appearance, thanks for coming on. Juan, let's start with you. You've been on The Cube a number of times, as I said, and you've talked about how Exadata is a top platform for Oracle database. We've covered that extensively. What's different and unique from your point of view about Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M on OCI? >> So as you know, Exadata, it's designed top down to be the best possible platform for database. It has a lot of unique capabilities, like we make extensive use of RDMA, smart storage. We take advantage of everything we can in the leading hardware platforms. X9M is our next generation platform and it does exactly that. We're always wanting to be, to get all the best that we can from the available hardware that our partners like AMD produce. And so that's what X9M in it is, it's faster, more capacity, lower latency, more iOS, pushing the limits of the hardware technology. So we don't want to be the limit, the software database software should not be the limit, it should be the actual physical limits of the hardware. That that's what X9M's all about. >> Why, Juan, AMD chips in X9M? >> We're introducing AMD chips. We think they provide outstanding performance, both for OTP and for analytic workloads. And it's really that simple, we just think the performance is outstanding in the product. >> Mark, your career is quite amazing. I could riff on history for hours but let's focus on the Oracle relationship. Mark, what are the relevant capabilities and key specs of the AMD chips that are used in Exadata X9M on Oracle's cloud? >> Well, thanks. It's really the basis of the great partnership that we have with Oracle on Exadata X9M and that is that the AMD technology uses our third generation of Zen processors. Zen was architected to really bring high performance back to X86, a very strong roadmap that we've executed on schedule to our commitments. And this third generation does all of that, it uses a seven nanometer CPU that is a core that was designed to really bring throughput, bring really high efficiency to computing and just deliver raw capabilities. And so for Exadata X9M, it's really leveraging all of that. It's really a balanced processor and it's implemented in a way to really optimize high performance. That is our whole focus of AMD. It's where we've reset the company focus on years ago. And again, great to see the super smart database team at Oracle really partner with us, understand those capabilities and it's been just great to partner with them to enable Oracle to really leverage the capabilities of the Zen processor. >> Yeah. It's been a pretty amazing 10 or 11 years for both companies. But Mark, how specifically are you working with Oracle at the engineering and product level and what does that mean for your joint customers in terms of what they can expect from the collaboration? >> Well, here's where the collaboration really comes to play. You think about a processor and I'll say, when Juan's team first looked at it, there's general benchmarks and the benchmarks are impressive but they're general benchmarks. And they showed the base processing capability but the partnership comes to bear when it means optimizing for the workloads that Exadata X9M is really delivering to the end customers. And that's where we dive down and as we learn from the Oracle team, we learn to understand where bottlenecks could be, where is there tuning that we could in fact really boost the performance above that baseline that you get in the generic benchmarks. And that's what the teams have done, so for instance, you look at optimizing latency to our DMA, you look at optimizing throughput on oil TP and database processing. When you go through the workloads and you take the traces and you break it down and you find the areas that are bottlenecking and then you can adjust, we have thousands of parameters that can be adjusted for a given workload. And that's the beauty of the partnership. So we have the expertise on the CPU engineering, Oracle Exadata team knows innately what the customers need to get the most out of their platform. And when the teams came together, we actually achieved anywhere from 20% to 50% gains on specific workloads, it is really exciting to see. >> Mark, last question for you is how do you see this relationship evolving in the future? Can you share a little roadmap for the audience? >> You bet. First off, given the deep partnership that we've had on Exadata X9M, it's really allowed us to inform our future design. So in our current third generation, EPYC is that is really what we call our epic server offerings. And it's a 7,003 third gen and Exadara X9M. So what about fourth gen? Well, fourth gen is well underway, ready for the future, but it incorporates learning that we've done in partnership with Oracle. It's going to have even more through capabilities, it's going to have expanded memory capabilities because there's a CXL connect express link that'll expand even more memory opportunities. And I could go on. So that's the beauty of a deep partnership as it enables us to really take that learning going forward. It pays forward and we're very excited to fold all of that into our future generations and provide even a better capabilities to Juan and his team moving forward. >> Yeah, you guys have been obviously very forthcoming. You have to be with Zen and EPYC. Juan, anything you'd like to add as closing comments? >> Yeah. I would say that in the processor market there's been a real acceleration in innovation in the last few years, there was a big move 10, 15 years ago when multicore processors came out. And then we were on that for a while and then things started stagnating, but in the last two or three years, AMD has been leading this, there's been a dramatic acceleration in innovation so it's very exciting to be part of this and customers are getting a big benefit from this. >> All right. Hey, thanks for coming back on The Cube today. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. Glad to be here. >> All right and thank you for watching this exclusive Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante from The Cube and we'll see you next time. (upbeat jingle)

[Music] the history of exadata in the platform is really unique and from my vantage point it started earlier this century as a skunk works inside of oracle called project sage back when grid computing was the next big thing oracle saw that betting on standard hardware would put it on an industry curve that would rapidly evolve and i remember the oracle hp database machine which was announced at oracle open world almost 15 years ago and then exadata kept evolving after the sun acquisition it became a platform that had tightly integrated hardware and software and today exadata it keeps evolving almost like a chameleon to address more workloads and reach new performance levels last april for example oracle announced the availability of exadata x9m in oci oracle cloud infrastructure and introduced the ability to run the autonomous database service or the exa data database service you know oracle often talks about they call it stock exchange performance level kind of no description needed and sort of related capabilities the company as we know is fond of putting out benchmarks and comparisons with previous generations of product and sometimes competitive products that underscore the progress that's being made with exadata such as 87 percent more iops with metrics for latency measured in microseconds mics instead of milliseconds and many other numbers that are industry-leading and compelling especially for mission-critical workloads one thing that hasn't been as well publicized is that exadata on oci is using amd's epyc processors in the database service epyc is not eastern pacific yacht club for all your sailing buffs rather it stands for extreme performance yield computing the enterprise grade version of amd's zen architecture which has been a linchpin of amd's success in terms of penetrating enterprise markets and to focus on the innovations that amd and oracle are bringing to market we have with us today juan loyza who's executive vice president of mission critical technologies at oracle and mark papermaster who's the cto and evp of technology and engineering at amd juan welcome back to the show mark great to have you on thecube and your first appearance thanks for coming on yep happy to be here thank you all right juan let's start with you you've been on thecube a number of times as i said and you've talked about how exadata is a top platform for oracle database we've covered that extensively what's different and unique from your point of view about exadata cloud infrastructure x9m on oci yeah so as you know exadata it's designed top down to be the best possible platform for database uh it has a lot of unique capabilities like we make extensive use of rdma smart storage we take advantage of you know everything we can in the leading uh hardware platforms and x9m is our next generation platform and it does exactly that we're always wanting to be to get all the best that we can from the available hardware that our partners like amd produce and so that's what x9 in it is it's faster more capacity lower latency more ios pushing the limits of the hardware technology so we don't want to be the limit the software the database software should not be the limit it should be uh the actual physical limits of the hardware and that that's what x9m is all about why won amd chips in x9m uh yeah so we're we're uh introducing uh amd chips we think they provide outstanding performance uh both for oltp and for analytic workloads and it's really that simple we just think that performance is outstanding in the product yeah mark your career is quite amazing i've been around long enough to remember the transition to cmos from emitter coupled logic in the mainframe era back when you were at ibm that was an epic technology call at the time i was of course steeped as an analyst at idc in the pc era and like like many witnessed the tectonic shift that apple's ipod and iphone caused and the timing of you joining amd is quite important in my view because it coincided with the year that pc volumes peaked and marked the beginning of what i call a stagflation period for x86 i could riff on history for hours but let's focus on the oracle relationship mark what are the relevant capabilities and key specs of the amd chips that are used in exadata x9m on oracle's cloud well thanks and and uh it's really uh the basis of i think the great partnership that we have with oracle on exadata x9m and that is that the amd technology uses our third generation of zen processors zen was you know architected to really bring high performance you know back to x86 a very very strong road map that we've executed you know on schedule to our commitments and this third generation does all of that it uses a seven nanometer cpu that is a you know core that was designed to really bring uh throughput uh bring you know really high uh efficiency uh to computing uh and just deliver raw capabilities and so uh for uh exadata x9m uh it's really leveraging all of that it's it's a uh implemented in up to 64 cores per socket it's got uh you know really anywhere from 128 to 168 pcie gen 4 io connectivity so you can you can really attach uh you know all of the uh the necessary uh infrastructure and and uh storage uh that's needed uh for exadata performance and also memory you have to feed the beast for those analytics and for the oltp that juan was talking about and so it does have eight lanes of memory for high performance ddr4 so it's really as a balanced processor and it's implemented in a way to really optimize uh high performance that that is our whole focus of uh amd it's where we've you know reset the company focus on years ago and uh again uh you know great to see uh you know the the super smart uh you know database team at oracle really a partner with us understand those capabilities and it's been just great to partner with them to uh you know to you know enable oracle to really leverage the capabilities of the zen processor yeah it's been a pretty amazing 10 or 11 years for both companies but mark how specifically are you working with oracle at the engineering and product level you know and what does that mean for your joint customers in terms of what they can expect from the collaboration well here's where the collaboration really comes to play you think about a processor and you know i'll say you know when one's team first looked at it there's general benchmarks and the benchmarks are impressive but they're general benchmarks and you know and they showed you know the i'll say the you know the base processing capability but the partnership comes to bear uh when it when it means optimizing for the workloads that exadata x9m is really delivering to the end customers and that's where we dive down and and as we uh learn from the oracle team we learned to understand where bottlenecks could be uh where is there tuning that we could in fact in fact really boost the performance above i'll say that baseline that you get in the generic benchmarks and that's what the teams have done so for instance you look at you know optimizing latency to rdma you look at just throughput optimizing throughput on otp and database processing when you go through the workloads and you take the traces and you break it down and you find the areas that are bottlenecking and then you can adjust we have you know thousands of parameters that can be adjusted for a given workload and that's again that's the beauty of the partnership so we have the expertise on the cpu engineering uh you know oracle exudated team knows innately what the customers need to get the most out of their platform and when the teams came together we actually achieved anywhere from 20 percent to 50 gains on specific workloads it's really exciting to see so okay so so i want to follow up on that is that different from the competition how are you driving customer value you mentioned some you know some some percentage improvements are you measuring primarily with with latency how do you look at that well uh you know we are differentiated with the uh in the number of factors we bring a higher core density we bring the highest core density certainly in x86 and and moreover what we've led the industry is how to scale those cores we have a very high performance fabric that connects those together so as as a customer needs more cores again we scale anywhere from 8 to 64 cores but what the trick is uh that is you add more cores you want the scale the scale to be as close to linear as possible and so that's a differentiation we have and we enable that again with that balanced computer of cpu io and memory that we design but the key is you know we pride ourselves at amd of being able to partner in a very deep fashion with our customers we listen very well i think that's uh what we've had the opportunity uh to do with uh juan and his team we appreciate that and and that is how we got the kind of performance benefits that i described earlier it's working together almost like one team and in bringing that best possible capability to the end customers great thank you for that one i want to come back to you can both the exadata database service and the autonomous database service can they take advantage of exadata cloud x9m capabilities that are in that platform yeah absolutely um you know autonomous is basically our self-driving version of the oracle database but fundamentally it is the same uh database course so both of them will take advantage of the tremendous performance that we're getting now you know when when mark takes about 64 cores that's for chip we have two chips you know it's a two socket server so it's 128 128-way processor and then from our point of view there's two threads so from the database point there's 200 it's a 256-way processor and so there's a lot of raw performance there and we've done a lot of work with the amd team to make sure that we deliver that to our customers for all the different kinds of workload including otp analytics but also including for our autonomous database so yes absolutely allah takes advantage of it now juan you know i can't let you go without asking about the competition i've written extensively about the big four hyperscale clouds specifically aws azure google and alibaba and i know that don't hate me sometimes it angers some of my friends at oracle ibm too that i don't include you in that list but but i see oracle specifically is different and really the cloud for the most demanding applications and and top performance databases and not the commodity cloud which of course that angers all my friends at those four companies so i'm ticking everybody off so how does exadata cloud infrastructure x9m compare to the likes of aws azure google and other database cloud services in terms of oltp and analytics value performance cost however you want to frame it yeah so our architecture is fundamentally different uh we've architected our database for the scale out environment so for example we've moved intelligence in the storage uh we've put uh remote direct memory access we put persistent memory into our product so we've done a lot of architectural changes that they haven't and you're starting to see a little bit of that like if you look at some of the things that amazon and google are doing they're starting to realize that hey if you're gonna achieve good results you really need to push some database uh processing into the storage so so they're taking baby steps toward that you know you know roughly 15 years after we we've had a product and again at some point they're gonna realize you really need rdma you really need you know more uh direct access to those capabilities so so they're slowly getting there but you know we're well ahead and what you know the way this is delivered is you know better availability better performance lower latency higher iops so and this is why our customers love our product and you know if you if you look at the global fortune 100 over 90 percent of them are running exit data today and even in the in our cloud uh you know over 60 of the global 100 are running exadata in the oracle cloud because of all the differentiated uh benefits that they get uh from the product uh so yeah we're we're well ahead in the in the database space mark last question for you is how do you see this relationship evolving in the future can you share a little road map for the audience you bet well first off you know given the deep partnership that we've had on exudate x9m uh it it's really allowed us to inform our future design so uh in our current uh third generation epic epyc is uh that is really uh what we call our epic server offerings and it's a 7003 third gen in and exudate x9m so what about fourth gen well fourth gen is well underway uh you know it and uh and uh you know ready to you know for the for the future but it incorporates learning uh that we've done in partnership with with oracle uh it's gonna have even more through capabilities it's gonna have expanded memory capabilities because there's a cxl connect express link that'll expand even more memory opportunities and i could go on so you know that's the beauty of a deep partnership as it enables us to really take that learning going forward it pays forward and we're very excited to to fold all of that into our future generations and provide even a better capabilities to one and his team moving forward yeah you guys have been obviously very forthcoming you have to be with with with zen and epic juan anything you'd like to add as closing comments yeah i would say that in the processor market there's been a real acceleration in innovation in the last few years um there was you know a big move 10 15 years ago when multi-core processors came out and then you know we were on that for a while and then things started staggering but in the last two or three years and amd has been leading this um there's been a dramatic uh acceleration in innovation in this space so it's very exciting to be part of this and and customers are getting a big benefit from this all right chance hey thanks for coming back in the cube today really appreciate your time thanks glad to be here all right thank you for watching this exclusive cube conversation this is dave vellante from thecube and we'll see you next time [Music]

>> Welcome back to Supercloud22, #Supercloud22. This is Dave Vellante. In 2019 Oracle and Microsoft announced a collaboration to bring interoperability between OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure Clouds. It was Oracle's initial foray into so-called multi-cloud and we're joined by Karan Batta, who's the Vice President for Product Management at OCI. And Kris Rice is the Vice President of Software Development at Oracle Database. And we're going to talk about how this technology's evolving and whether it fits our view of what we call supercloud. Welcome gentlemen, thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So you recently just last month announced the new service. It extends on the initial partnership with Microsoft Oracle interconnect with Azure, and you refer to this as a secure private link between the two clouds, it cross 11 regions around the world, under two milliseconds data transmission sounds pretty cool. It enables customers to run Microsoft applications against data stored in Oracle databases without any loss in efficiency or presumably performance. So we use this term supercloud to describe a service or sets of services built on hyper scale infrastructure that leverages the core primitives and APIs of an individual cloud platform, but abstracts that underlying complexity to create a continuous experience across more than one cloud. Is that what you've done? >> Absolutely. I think it starts at the top layer in terms of just making things very simple for the customer, right. I think at the end of the day we want to enable true workloads running across two different clouds where you're potentially running maybe the app layer in one and the database layer or the back in another. And the integration I think starts with, you know, making it ease of use. Right. So you can start with things like, okay can you log into your second or your third cloud with the first cloud provider's credentials? Can you make calls against another cloud using another cloud's APIs? Can you peer the networks together? Can you make it seamless? I think those are all the components that are sort of, they're kind of the ingredients to making a multi-cloud or supercloud experience successful. >> Oh, thank you for that, Karan. So I guess there's a question for Chris is I'm trying to understand what you're really solving for? What specific customer problems are you focused on? What's the service optimized for presumably it's database but maybe you could double click on that. >> Sure. So, I mean, of course it's database. So it's a super fast network so that we can split the workload across two different clouds leveraging the best from both, but above the networking, what we had to do do is we had to think about what a true multi-cloud or what you're calling supercloud experience would be it's more than just making the network bites flow. So what we did is we took a look as Karan hinted at right, is where is my identity? Where is my observability? How do I connect these things across how it feels native to that other cloud? >> So what kind of engineering do you have to do to make that work? It's not just plugging stuff together. Maybe you could explain a little bit more detail, the the resources that you had to bring to bear and the technology behind the architecture. >> Sure. I think, it starts with actually, what our goal was, right? Our goal was to actually provide customers with a fully managed experience. What that means is we had to basically create a brand new service. So, we have obviously an Azure like portal and an experience that allows customers to do this but under the covers, we actually have a fully managed service that manages the networking layer, the physical infrastructure, and it actually calls APIs on both sides of the fence. It actually manages your Azure resources, creates them but it also interacts with OCI at the same time. And under the covers this service actually takes Azure primitives as inputs. And then it sort of like essentially translates them to OCI action. So, we actually truly integrated this as a service that's essentially built as a PaaS layer on top of these two clouds. >> So, the customer doesn't really care or know maybe they know cuz they might be coming through, an Azure experience, but you can run work on either Azure and or OCI. And it's a common experience across those clouds. Is that correct? >> That's correct. So like you said, the customer does know that they know there is a relationship with both clouds but thanks to all the things we built there's this thing we invented we created called a multi-cloud control plane. This control plane does operate against both clouds at the same time to make it as seamless as possible so that maybe they don't notice, you know, the power of the interconnect is extremely fast networking, as fast as what we could see inside a single cloud. If you think about how big a data center might be from edge to edge in that cloud, going across the interconnect makes it so that that workload is not important that it's spanning two clouds anymore. >> So you say extremely fast networking. I remember I used to, I wrote a piece a long time ago. Larry Ellison loves InfiniBand. I presume we've moved on from them, but maybe not. What is that interconnect? >> Yeah, so it's funny you mentioned interconnect you know, my previous history comes from Edge PC where we actually inside OCI today, we've moved from Infinite Band as is part of Exadata's core to what we call Rocky V two. So that's just another RDMA network. We actually use it very successfully, not just for Exadata but we use it for our standard computers that we provide to high performance computing customers. >> And the multi-cloud control plane runs. Where does that live? Does it live on OCI? Does it live on Azure? Yes? >> So it does it lives on our side. Our side of the house as part of our Oracle OCI control plane. And it is the veneer that makes these two clouds possible so that we can wire them together. So it knows how to take those Azure primitives and the OCI primitives and wire them at the appropriate levels together. >> Now I want to talk about this PaaS layer. Part of supercloud, we said to actually make it work you're going to have to have a super PaaS. I know we're taking this this term a little far but it's still it's instructive in that, what we surmised was you're probably not going to just use off the shelf, plain old vanilla PaaS, you're actually going to have a purpose built PaaS to solve for the specific problem. So as an example, if you're solving for ultra low latency, which I think you're doing, you're probably no offense to my friends at Red Hat but you're probably not going to develop this on OpenShift, but tell us about that PaaS layer or what we call the super PaaS layer. >> Go ahead, Chris. >> Well, so you're right. We weren't going to build it out on OpenShift. So we have Oracle OCI, you know, the standard is Terraform. So the back end of everything we do is based around Terraform. Today, what we've done is we built that control plane and it will be API drivable, it'll be drivable from the UI and it will let people operate and create primitives across both sides. So you can, you mentioned developers, developers love automation, right, because it makes our lives easy. We will be able to automate a multi-cloud workload from ground up config is code these days. So we can config an entire multi-cloud experience from one place. >> So, double click Chris on that developer experience. What is that like? They're using the same tool set irrespective of, which cloud we're running on is, and it's specific to this service or is it more generic, across other Oracle services? >> There's two parts to that. So one is the, we've only onboarded a portion. So the database portfolio and other services will be coming into this multi-cloud. For the majority of Oracle cloud, the automation, the config layer is based on Terraform. So using Terraform, anyone can configure everything from a mid-tier to an Exadata, all the way soup to nuts from smallest thing possible to the largest. What we've not done yet is integrated truly with the Azure API, from command line drivable. That is coming in the future. It is on the roadmap, it is coming. Then they could get into one tool but right now they would have half their automation for the multi-cloud config on the Azure tool set and half on the OCI tool set. >> But we're not crazy saying from a roadmap standpoint that will provide some benefit to developers and is a reasonable direction for the industry generally but Oracle and Microsoft specifically. >> Absolutely. I'm a developer at heart. And so one of the things we want to make sure is that developers' lives are as easy as possible. >> And is there a metadata management layer or intelligence that you've built in to optimize for performance or low latency or cost across the respective clouds? >> Yeah, definitely. I think, latency's going to be an important factor. The service that we've initially built isn't going to serve, the sort of the tens of microseconds but most applications that are sort of in, running on top of the enterprise applications that are running on top of the database are in the several millisecond range. And we've actually done a lot of work on the networking pairing side to make sure that when we launch these resources across the two clouds we actually picked the right trial site. We picked the right region we pick the right availability zone or domain. So we actually do the due diligence under the cover so the customer doesn't have to do the trial and error and try to find the right latency range. And this is actually one of the big reasons why we only launch the service on the interconnect regions. Even though we have close to, I think close to 40 regions at this point in OCI, this service is only built for the regions that we have an interconnect relationship with Microsoft. >> Okay, so you started with Microsoft in 2019. You're going deeper now in that relationship, is there any reason that you couldn't, I mean technically what would you have to do to go to other clouds? You talked about understanding the primitives and leveraging the primitives of Azure. Presumably if you wanted to do this with AWS or Google or Alibaba, you would have to do similar engineering work, is that correct? Or does what you've developed just kind of poured over to any cloud? >> Yeah, that's absolutely correct Dave. I think Chris talked a lot about the multi-cloud control plane, right? That's essentially the control plane that goes and does stuff on other clouds. We would have to essentially go and build that level of integration into the other clouds. And I think, as we get more popularity and as more products come online through these services I think we'll listen to what customers want. Whether it's, maybe it's the other way around too, Dave maybe it's the fact that they want to use Oracle cloud but they want to use other complimentary services within Oracle cloud. So I think it can go both ways. I think, the market and the customer base will dictate that. >> Yeah. So if I understand that correctly, somebody from another cloud Google cloud could say, Hey we actually want to run this service on OCI cuz we want to expand our market. And if TK gets together with his old friends and figures that out but then we're just, hypothesizing here. But, like you said, it can go both ways. And then, and I have another question related to that. So, multi clouds. Okay, great. Supercloud. How about the Edge? Do you ever see a day where that becomes part of the equation? Certainly the near Edge would, you know, a Home Depot or Lowe's store or a bank, but what about the far Edge, the tiny Edge. Can you talk about the Edge and where that fits in your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think Edge is a interestingly, it's getting fuzzier and fuzzier day by day. I think, the term. Obviously every cloud has their own sort of philosophy in what Edge is, right. We have our own. It starts from, if you do want to do far Edge, we have devices like red devices, which is our ruggedized servers that talk back to our control plane in OCI. You could deploy those things unlike, into war zones and things like that underground. But then we also have things like clouded customer where customers can actually deploy components of our infrastructure like compute or Exadata into a facility where they only need that certain capability. And then a few years ago we launched, what's now called Dedicated Region. And that actually is a different take on Edge in some sense where you get the entire capability of our public commercial region, but within your facility. So imagine if a customer was to essentially point a finger on a commercial map and say, Hey, look, that region is just mine. Essentially that's the capability that we're providing to our customers, where if you have a white space if you have a facility, if you're exiting out of your data center space, you could essentially place an OCI region within your confines behind your firewall. And then you could interconnect that to a cloud provider if you wanted to, and get the same multi-cloud capability that you get in a commercial region. So we have all the spectrums of possibilities here. >> Guys, super interesting discussion. It's very clear to us that the next 10 years of cloud ain't going to be like the last 10. There's a whole new layer. Developing, data is a big key to that. We see industries getting involved. We obviously didn't get into the Oracle Cerner acquisitions. It's a little too early for that but we've actually predicted that companies like Cerner and you're seeing it with Goldman Sachs and Capital One they're actually building services on the cloud. So this is a really exciting new area and really appreciate you guys coming on the Supercloud22 event and sharing your insights. Thanks for your time. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay. Keep it right there. #Supercloud22. We'll be right back with more great content right after this short break. (lighthearted marimba music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud22, #Supercloud22, this is Dave Vellante. In 2019, Oracle and Microsoft announced a collaboration to bring interoperability between OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure clouds. It was Oracle's initial foray into so-called multi-cloud and we're joined by Karan Batta, who's the vice president for product management at OCI, and Kris Rice, is the vice president of software development at Oracle database. And we're going to talk about how this technology's evolving and whether it fits our view of what we call, Supercloud. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So you recently just last month announced the new service. It extends on the initial partnership with Microsoft Oracle Interconnect with Azure, and you refer to this as a secure private link between the two clouds across 11 regions around the world. Under two milliseconds data transmission, sounds pretty cool. It enables customers to run Microsoft applications against data stored in Oracle databases without any loss in efficiency or presumably performance. So we use this term Supercloud to describe a service or sets of services built on hyperscale infrastructure that leverages the core primitives and APIs of an individual cloud platform, but abstracts that underlying complexity to create a continuous experience across more than one cloud. Is that what you've done? >> Absolutely. I think, you know, it starts at the, you know, at the top layer in terms of, you know, just making things very simple for the customer, right. I think at the end of the day we want to enable true workloads running across two different clouds, where you're potentially running maybe the app layer in one and the database layer or the back in another, and the integration I think, starts with, you know, making it ease of use. Right? So you can start with things like, okay can you log into your second or your third cloud with the first cloud provider's credentials? Can you make calls against another cloud using another cloud's APIs? Can you peer the networks together? Can you make it seamless? I think those are all the components that are sort of, they're kind of the ingredients to making a multi-cloud or Supercloud experience successful. >> Oh, thank you for that, Karan. So, I guess as a question for Kris is trying to understand what you're really solving for, what specific customer problems are you focused on? What's the service optimized for presumably its database but maybe you could double click on that. >> Sure. So, I mean, of course it's database so it's a super fast network so that we can split the workload across two different clouds leveraging the best from both, but above the networking, what we had to do is we had to think about what a true multi-cloud or what you're calling Supercloud experience would be. It's more than just making the network bytes flow. So what we did is, we took a look as Karan hinted at, right? Is where is my identity? Where is my observability? How do I connect these things across how it feels native to that other cloud? >> So what kind of engineering do you have to do to make that work? It's not just plugging stuff together. Maybe you could explain in a little bit more detail, the resources that you had to bring to bear and the technology behind the architecture? >> Sure. >> I think, you know, it starts with actually, you know, what our goal was, right? Our goal was to actually provide customers with a fully managed experience. What that means is we had to basically create a brand new service. So, you know, we have obviously an Azure like portal and an experience that allows customers to do this but under the covers, we actually have a fully managed service that manages the networking layer that the physical infrastructure, and it actually calls APIs on both sides of the fence. It actually manages your Azure resources, creates them, but it also interacts with OCI at the same time. And under the covers this service actually takes Azure primitives as inputs, and then it sort of like essentially translates them to OCI action. So, so we actually truly integrated this as a service that's essentially built as a PaaS layer on top of these two clouds. >> So, so the customer doesn't really care, or know, maybe they know, coz they might be coming through, you know, an Azure experience, but you can run work on either Azure and or OCI, and it's a common experience across those clouds, is that correct? >> That's correct. So, like you said, the customer does know that they know there is a relationship with both clouds but thanks to all the things we built there's this thing we invented, we created called a multi-cloud control plane. This control plane does operate against both clouds at the same time to make it as seamless as possible so that maybe they don't notice, you know, the power of the interconnect is extremely fast networking, as fast as what we could see inside a single cloud, if you think about how big a data center might be from edge to edge in that cloud. Going across the interconnect makes it so that that workload is not important that it's spanning two clouds anymore. >> So you say extremely fast networking. I remember I used to, I wrote a piece a long time ago. Hey, Larry Ellison loves InfiniBand. I presume we've moved on from them, but maybe not. What is that interconnect? >> Yeah, so it's funny, you mentioned interconnect, you know, my previous history comes from HPC where we actually inside inside OCI today, we've moved from, you know, InfiniBand as its part of Exadata's core, to what we call RoCEv2. So that's just another RDMA network. We actually use it very successfully, not just for Exadata but we use it for our standard computers, you know, that we provide to, you know, high performance computing customers. >> And the multi-cloud control plane, runs... Where does that live? Does it live on OCI? Does it live on Azure? Yes? >> So it does. It lives on our side. >> Yeah. >> Our side of the house, and it is part of our Oracle OCI control plane. And it is the veneer that makes these two clouds possible so that we can wire them together. So it knows how to take those Azure primitives and the OCI primitives and wire them at the appropriate levels together. >> Now I want to talk about this PaaS layer. Part of Supercloud, we said, to actually make it work you're going to have to have a super PaaS. I know, we're taking this term a little far but it's still, it's instructive in that, what we, what we surmised was, you're probably not going to just use off the shelf, plain old vanilla PaaS, you're actually going to have a purpose built PaaS to solve for the specific problem. So, as an example, if you're solving for ultra low latency, which I think you're doing, you're probably, no offense to my friends at Red Hat, but you're probably not going to develop this on OpenShift, but tell us about that, that PaaS layer or what we call the super PaaS layer. >> Go ahead, Kris. >> Well, so you're right. We weren't going to build it out on OpenShift. So we have Oracle OCI, you know, the standard is Terraform. So the back end of everything we do is based around Terraform. Today, what we've done, is we built that control plane and it will be API drivable. It'll be drivable from the UI and it will let people operate and create primitives across both sides. So you can, you, you mentioned developers developers love automation, right? Because it makes our lives easy. We will be able to automate a multi-cloud workload, from ground up, Config is code these days. So we can Config an entire multi-cloud experience from one place. >> So, double click Kris on that developer experience, you know, what is that like? They're using the same tool set irrespective of, you know, which cloud we're running on is, is it and it's specific to this service or is it more generic across other Oracle services? >> There's two parts to that. So one is the, we've only onboarded a portion. So the database portfolio and other services will be coming into this multi-cloud. For the majority of Oracle cloud the automation, the Config layer is based on Terraform. So using Terraform, anyone can configure everything from a mid tier to an Exadata, all the way soup to nuts from smallest thing possible to the largest. What we've not done yet is is integrated truly with the Azure API, from command line drivable, that is coming in the future. It will be, it is on the roadmap. It is coming, then they could get into one tool but right now they would have half their automation for the multi-cloud Config on the Azure tool set and half on the OCI tool set. >> But we're not crazy saying from a roadmap standpoint that will provide some benefit to developers and is a reasonable direction for the industry generally but Oracle and, and, and Microsoft specifically? >> Absolutely. I'm a developer at heart. And so one of the things we want to make sure is that developers' lives are as easy as possible. >> And, and is there a Metadata management layer or intelligence that you've built in to optimize for performance or low latency or cost across the, the respective clouds? >> Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, latency's going to be an important factor. You know, the, the service that we've initially built isn't going to serve, you know, the sort of the tens of microseconds but most applications that are sort of in, you know, running on top of, the enterprise applications that are running on top of the database are in the several millisecond range. And we've actually done a lot of work on the networking pairing side to make sure that when we launch, when we launch these resources across the two clouds we actually pick the right trial site, we pick the right region, we pick the right availability zone or domain. So we actually do the due diligence under the cover, so the customer doesn't have to do the trial and error and try to find the right latency range, you know, and this is actually one of the big reasons why we only launched this service on the interconnect regions. Even though we have close to, I think, close to 40 regions at this point in OCI, this, this, this service is only built for the regions that we have an interconnect relationship with with Microsoft. >> Okay. So, so you've, you started with Microsoft in 2019 you're going deeper now in that relationship, is there is there any reason that you couldn't, I mean technically what would you have to do to go to other clouds? Would you just, you talked about understanding the primitives and leveraging the primitives of Azure. Presumably if you wanted to do this with AWS or Google or Alibaba, you would have to do similar engineering work, is that correct? Or does what you've developed just kind of pour it over to any cloud? >> Yeah, that's, that's absolutely correct, Dave, I think, you know, Kris talked a lot about kind of the multi-cloud control plane, right? That's essentially the, the, the control plane that goes and does stuff on other clouds. We would have to essentially go and build that level of integration into the other clouds. And I think, you know, as we get more popularity and as as more products come online through these services I think we'll listen to what customers want, whether it's you know, maybe it's the other way around too, Dave maybe it's the fact that they want to use Oracle cloud but they want to use other complimentary services within Oracle cloud. So I think it can go both ways. I think, you know, kind of the market and the customer base will dictate that. >> Yeah. So if I understand that correctly, somebody from another cloud Google cloud could say, "Hey, we actually want to run this service on OCI coz we want to expand our market and..." >> Right. >> And if TK gets together with his old friends and figures that out but we're just, you know, hypothesizing here, but but like you said, it can, can go both ways. And then, and I have another question related to that. So you multi-clouds. Okay, great. Supercloud. How about the edge? Do you ever see a day where that becomes part of the equation? Certainly the, the near edge would, you know, a a home Depot or a Lowe's store or a bank, but what about like the far edge, the tiny edge. Do, do you, can you talk about the edge and and where that fits in your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think edge is a interestingly, it's a, it's a it's getting fuzzier and fuzzier day by day. I think there's the term, you know, we, obviously every cloud has their own sort of philosophy in what edge is, right? We have our own, you know, it starts from, you know, if you if you do want to do far edge, you know, we have devices like red devices, which is our ruggedized servers that that talk back to our, our control plane in OCI you could deploy those things in like, you know, into war zones and things like that underground. But then we also have things like Cloud@Customer where customers can actually deploy components of our infrastructure, like Compute or Exadata into a facility where they only need that certain capability. And then a few years ago we launched, you know, what's now called Dedicated Region. And that actually is a, is a different take on edge in some sense where you get the entire capability of our public commercial region, but within your facility. So imagine if, if, if a customer was to essentially point to, you know, point to, point a finger on a commercial map and say, "Hey, look, that region is just mine." Essentially, that's the capability that we're providing to our customers, where if you have a white space if you have a facility if you're exiting out of your data center space you could essentially place an OCI region within your confines behind your firewall. And then you could interconnect that to a cloud provider if you wanted to. and get the same multi-cloud capability that you get in a commercial region. So we have all the spectrums of possibilities there. >> Guys, super interesting discussion. It's very clear to us that the next 10 years of cloud ain't going to be like the last 10. There's a whole new layer developing. Data is a big key to that. We see industries getting involved. We obviously didn't, didn't get into the Oracle Cerner acquisitions a little too early for that but we we've actually predicted that companies like Cerner and you've seen it with Goldman Sachs and Capital One, they're actually building services on the cloud. So this is a really exciting new area and I really appreciate you guys coming on the Supercloud22 event and sharing your insights. Thanks for your time. >> Thank very much. >> Thank very much. >> Okay. Keep it right there. #Supercloud22. We'll be right back with more great content right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Oracle is in the midst of an acceleration of its product cycles. It really has pushed new capabilities across its database, the database platforms, and of course the cloud in an effort to really maintain its position as the gold standard for cloud database. We've reported pretty extensively on Exadata, most recently the X9M that increased database IOPS and throughput. Organizations running mission critical OLTP, analytics and mix workloads tell us that they've seen meaningfully improved performance and lower costs, which you expect in a technology cycle. I often say if Oracle calls you out by name it's a compliment and it means you've succeeded. So just a couple of weeks ago, Oracle turned up the heat on MongoDB with a Mongo compatible API, in an effort to persuade developers to run applications in a autonomous database and on OCI, Oracle cloud infrastructure. There was a big emphasis by Oracle on acid compliance transactions and automatic scaling as well as access to multiple data types. This caught my attention because in the early days of no SQL, there was a lot of chatter from folks about not needing acid capability in the database anymore. Funny how that comes around. And anyway, you see Oracle investing, they spend money in R&D We've always said that`, they're protecting their moat. Now in social I've seen some criticisms like Oracle still is not adding enough new logos, and Oracle of course will dispute that and give you some examples. But to me what's most impressive is the big name customers that Oracle gets to talk in public. Deutsche Bank, Telephonic, Experian, FedEx, I mean dozens and dozens and dozens. I work with a lot of companies and the quality of the customers Oracle puts in front of analysts like myself is very very high. At the top of the list I would say. And they're big spending customers. And as we said many times when it comes to mission critical workloads, Oracle is the king. And one of the executives behind the success is a longtime Cube alum, Juan Loaiza who's executive vice president of mission critical technologies at Oracle. And we've invited him back on today to talk about some news and Oracle's latest developments and database, Juan welcome back to the show and thanks for coming on today and talking about today's announcement. >> I'm very happy to be here today with you. >> Okay, so what are you announcing and how does this help organizations particularly with those existing Exadata cloud at customer installations? >> Yeah, the big thing we're announcing is our very successful cloud at customer platform. We're extending the capabilities of our autonomous database running on it. And specifically we're allowing much smaller configurations so customers can start small and grow with our autonomous database on our cloud customer platform. >> So let's get into granularity a little bit and double click on this. Can you go over how customers, carve up VM clusters for different workloads? What's the tangible benefit to them? >> Yeah, so it's pretty straightforward. We deploy our Cloud@Customer system anywhere the customer wants it, let's say in their data center. And then through our cloud APIs and GUIs they can carve up into pieces into basically VMs. They can say, Hey, I want a VM with eight CPUs to do this, I want a VM with 20 CPUs to that, I want a 500 CPUVM to do something else. And that's what we call a VM cluster because in Cloud@Customer, it is a highly available environment. So you don't just get one VM, you get a cluster of highly available VMs. So you carve it up. You hand it out to different aspects of a company. You might have development on one, testing on another one, some production sales on one VM, marketing on a different VM. And then you run your databases in there and that's kind of how it works and it's all done completely through our GUI and it's very, very simple 'cause they use it the same cloud APIs and GUIs that we use in the public cloud. It is the same APIs and GUIs that we use in the public cloud. >> Yeah, I was going to say sounds like cloud. So what about prerequisites? What do customers have to do to take advantage of the new capabilities? Can they run it on an Exadata cloud a customer that they installed a couple years ago? Do they have to upgrade the hardware? What migration pain is involved? >> Yeah, there's no pain, so it's just, (coughs) excuse me. I can take their existing system, they get our free software update and they can just deploy autonomous database as a VM in their existing Exadata cloud system. >> Oh nice okay what's the bottom line dollars? Our audience are always interested in cutting costs. It's one of the reasons they're moving to the cloud for example. So how does autonomous database on VM clusters, on Exadata Cloud at Customer? How does it help cut their cost? >> Well, it's pretty straightforward. So previous to this a customer would have to have dedicated a system to either autonomous database or to non autonomous data. So you have to choose one together. So on a system by system basis, you chose I want this thing autonomous, or I don't want it autonomous. Now you carve in the VMs and say for this VM I want that autonomous for that VM I want to run a regular database managed database on there. So lets customers now start small with any size they want. They could start with two CPUs and run an autonomous database and that's all they pay for is the two CPUs that they use. >> Let's talk a little about traction. I mean, I remember we covered the original Exadata announcement quite a long time ago and it's obviously evolved and taken many forms. Look, it's hard to argue that it hasn't been a big success. It has for Oracle and your target customers. Does this announcement make Exadata cloud a customer more attractive for smaller companies. In other words, does it expand the team for ADB? And if so, how? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean our Exadata cloud platform is extremely successful. We have thousands of deployments, we have on our data platform we have about almost 90% of the global fortune 100 and thousands of smaller customers. In the cloud we have now up to 40% of the global 100 a hundred biggest companies in the world running on that. So it's been extremely successful platform and cloud a customer is super key. A lot of customers can't move their data to the public cloud. So we bring the public cloud to them with our cloud customer offering. And so that's the big customer is the fortune hundred but we have thousands of smaller customers also. And the nice thing about this offering is we can start with literally two CPUs. So we can be a very small customer and still run our autonomous data based on our cloud customer platform. >> Well, everybody cares about security and governance. I mean, especially the big guys, but the little guys that in many ways as well they want the capabilities of the large companies but they can't necessarily afford it. So I want to talk about security in particular governance and it's especially important for mission-critical apps. So how does this all change the security in governance paradigm? What do customers need to know there? >> Yeah, so the beauty of autonomous database which is the thing that we're talking about today is Oracle deals with all the security. So the OS, the hardware, firmware, VMs, the database itself all the interfaces to the VM, to the database all that is it's all done by Oracle. So, which is incredibly important because there's a constant stream of security alerts that are coming out and it's very difficult for customers to keep up with this stuff. I mean, it's hard for us and we have thousands of engineers. And so we take that whole burden away from customers. And you just don't have to think about it, we deal with it. So once you deploy an autonomous database it is always secure because anytime a security alert comes out, we will apply that and we do it in an online fashion also. So it's really, particularly for smaller customers it's even harder because to keep up with all the security that you you need a giant team of security experts and even the biggest customers struggle with that and a small customer's going to really struggle. There's just two, you have to look at the entire stack, all the different components switches, firmware, OS, VMs, database, everything. It's just very difficult to keep up. So we do it all and for small cut, they just can't do it. So really they really need to partner with a company like Oracle that has thousands of engineers that can keep up with this stuff. >> It's true what you say, even large customers this CSOs will tell you that lack of talent, lack of skill sets. They just don't have enough people and so even the big guys can't keep up. Okay, I want you to pitch me as though I'm a developer, which I'm not, but we got a lot of developers in our community. We'll be Cube con next month in Valencia, sell me on why a developer should lean into ADB on Exadata cloud as a customer? >> Yeah, it's very straightforward. So Oracle has the most advanced database in the industry and that's widely recognized by database analysts and experts in the field. Traditionally, it's been hard for a developer to use it because it's been hard to manage. It's been hard to set up, install, configure, patch, back up all that kind of stuff. Autonomous database does it all for you. So as a developer, you can just go into our console, click on creating a database. We ask you four questions, how big, how many CPUs how much storage and say, give your password. And within minutes you have a database. And at that point you can go crazy and just develop. And you don't have to worry about managing the database, patching the database, maintaining the security and the database backing up to all that stuff. You can instantly scale it. You can say, Hey, I want to grow it, you just click a button, take, grow it to much any size you want and you get all the mission critical capabilities. So it works for tiny databases but it is a stock exchange quality in terms of performance, availability, security it's a rock solid database that's super trivial. So what used to be a very complex thing is now completely trivial for a developer. So they get the best of both worlds, they get everything on the database side and it it's trivial for them to use. >> Wow, if you're doing all that stuff for 'em are they going to do on their weekends? Code? (chuckles) >> They should be developing their application and add value to their company that's kind of what they should focus on. And they can be looking at all sorts of new technologies like JSON and the database machine learning in the database graph in the database. So you can build very sophisticated applications because you don't have to worry about the database anymore. >> All right, let's talk about the competition. So it's always a topic I like to bring up with you. From a competitive perspective how is this latest and instantiation of Exadata cloud a customer X9M how's this different from running an AWS database service for instance on outpost, or let's say I want to run SQL server on Azure Stack or whatever Microsoft's calling it these days. Give us the competitive angle here. >> Yeah, there kind of is no real competition. So both Amazon and Microsoft have an at customer solution but they're very primitive. I mean, just to give you an example like Amazon doesn't run any of their premier database offerings at customers. So whether it's Aurora Redshift, doesn't run just plane does not run. It's not that it runs badly or it's got limited, just does not run. They can't run Oracle RDS on premise and same thing with Microsoft. They can't run Azure SQL, which is their premier database on their act customer platform. So that kind of tells you how limited that platform is when even their own premier offerings doesn't run on it. In contrast, we're running Exadata with our premier autonomous database. So it's our premier platform that's in use today by most of the biggest, banks, telecom to retailers et cetera in the world, thousands of smaller customers. So it's super mission critical, super proven with our premier cloud database, which is autonomous theory. So it couldn't be more black and white, this is a case where it's there really is no competition in the cloud of customer space on the database side. >> Okay, but let me follow up on that, Juan, if I may, so, okay. So it took you guys a while to get to the cloud, it's taken them a while to figure it on-prem. I mean, aren't they going to eventually sort of get there? What gives you confidence that you'll be able to to keep ahead? >> Well, there's two things, right? One is we've been doing this for a long time. I mean, that's what Oracle initially started as an on-prem and our Exadata platform has been available for over a decade. And we have a ton of experience on this. We run the biggest banks in the world already, it's not some hope for the future. This is what runs today. And our focus has always been a combination of cloud and on-prem their heart's not really in the on-prem stuff they really like. Amazon's really a public cloud only vendor and you can see from the result, it's not you can say, they can say whatever they want but you can see the results. Their outpost platform has been available for several years now and it still doesn't even run their own products. So you can kind of see how hard they're trying and how much they really care about this market. >> All right, boil it down if you just had a few things that you'd tell someone about why they should run ADB on Exadata cloud at customer, what would you say? >> It's pretty simple, which is it's the world's most sophisticated database made completely simple, that's it? So you get a stock exchange level database, you can start really small and grow and it's completely trivial to run because Oracle is automated everything within our autonomous data we use machine learning and a lot of automation to automate everything around the database. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. The best possible database starts as small as you want and is the simplest database in the world. >> So I probably should have asked you this while I was pushing the competitive question but this may be my last question, I promise. It's the age old debate It rages on, you got specialized databases kind of a right tool for the right job approach. That's clearly where Amazon is headed or what Oracle refers to is converge database. Oracle says its approach is more complete and "simpler." Take us through your thinking on this and the latest positioning so the audience can understand it a bit better. >> Yeah, so apps aren't what they used to business apps, data driven apps aren't what they used to be. They used to be kind of green screens where you just entered data. Now everyone's a very sophisticated app, they want to be have location, they want to have maps, they want to have graph in there. They want to have machine learning, they want machine learning built into the app. So they want JSON they want text, they want text search. So all these capabilities are what a modern app has to support. And so what Oracle's done is we provided a single solution that provides everything you need to build a modern app and it's all integrated together. It's all transactional. You have analytics built into the same thing. You have reporting built into the same thing. So it has everything you need to build a modern app. In contrast, what most of our competitors do is they give you these little solutions, say, okay here you do machine learning over here, you do analytics over there, you do JSON over here, you do spatial over here you do graph over there. And then it's left a developer to put an app together from all these pieces. So it's like getting the pieces of a card and having to assemble it yourself and then maintain it for the rest of your life, which is the even harder part. So one part upgrades, you got to test that. So of other piece upgrade or changes, you got to test that, you got to deal with all the security problems of all these different systems. You have to convert the data, you have to move the data back and forth it's extraordinarily complicated. Our converge database, the data sits in one place and all the algorithms come to the data. It's very simple, it is dramatically simpler. And then autonomous database is what makes managing it trivial. You don't really have to manage anything more because Oracle's automated the whole thing. >> So, Juan, we got a pretty good Cadence going here. I mean I really appreciate you coming on and giving us these little video exclusives. You can tell by again, that Cadence how frequently you guys are making new announcements. So that's great, congrats on yet another announcement. Thanks for coming back in the program appreciate it. >> Yeah, of course we invest heavily in data management. That's our core and we will continue to do that. I mean, we're investing billions of dollars a year and we intend to stay the leaders in this market. >> Great stuff and thank you for watching the Cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage, this is Dave Vellante we'll see you next time.

(bright music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to this CUBE video exclusive. This is Dave Vellante, and as I've said many times what people sometimes forget is Oracle's chairman is also its CTO, and he understands and appreciates the importance of engineering. It's the lifeblood of tech innovation, and Oracle continues to spend money on R and D. Over the past decade, the company has evolved its Exadata platform by investing in core infrastructure technology. For example, Oracle initially used InfiniBand, which in and of itself was a technical challenge to exploit for higher performance. That was an engineering innovation, and now it's moving to RoCE to try and deliver best of breed performance by today's standards. We've seen Oracle invest in machine intelligence for analytics. It's converged OLTB and mixed workloads. It's driving automation functions into its Exadata platform for things like indexing. The point is we've seen a consistent cadence of improvements with each generation of Exadata, and it's no secret that Oracle likes to brag about the results of its investments. At its heart, Oracle develops database software and databases have to run fast and be rock solid. So Oracle loves to throw around impressive numbers, like 27 million AKI ops, more than a terabyte per second for analytics scans, running it more than a terabyte per second. Look, Oracle's objective is to build the best database platform and convince its customers to run on Oracle, instead of doing it themselves or in some other cloud. And because the company owns the full stack, Oracle has a high degree of control over how to optimize the stack for its database. So this is how Oracle intends to compete with Exadata, Exadata Cloud@Customer and other products, like ZDLRA against AWS Outposts, Azure Arc and do it yourself solutions. And with me, to talk about Oracle's latest innovation with its Exadata X9M announcement is Juan Loaiza, who's the Executive Vice President of Mission Critical Database Technologies at Oracle. Juan, thanks for coming on theCUBE, always good to see you, man. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. It's great to be here. >> All right, let's get right into it and start with the news. Can you give us a quick overview of the X9M announcement today? >> Yeah, glad to. So, we've had Exadata on the market for a little over a dozen years, and every year, as you mentioned, we make it better and better. And so this year we're introducing our X9M family of products, and as usual, we're making it better. We're making it better across all the different dimensions for OLTP, for analytics, lower costs, higher IOPs, higher throughputs, more capacity, so it's better all around, and we're introducing a lot of new software features as well that make it easier to use, more manageable, more highly available, more options for customers, more isolation, more workload consolidation, so it's our usual better and better every year. We're already way ahead of the competition in pretty much every metric you can name, but we're not sitting back. We have the pedal to the metal and we're keeping it there. >> Okay, so as always, you announced some big numbers. You're referencing them. I did in my upfront narrative. You've claimed double to triple digit performance improvements. Tell us, what's the secret sauce that allows you to achieve that magnitude of performance gain? >> Yeah, there's a lot of secret sauce in Exadata. First of all, we have custom designed hardware, so we design the systems from the top down, so it's not a generic system. It's designed to run database with a specific and sole focus of running database, and so we have a lot of technologies in there. Persistent memory is a really big one that we've introduced that enables super low response times for OLTP. The RoCE, the remote RDMA over convergency ethernet with a hundred gigabit network is a big thing, offload to storage servers is a big thing. The columnar processing of the storage is a huge thing, so there's a lot of secret sauce, most of it is software and hardware related and interesting about it, it's very unique. So we've been introducing more and more technologies and actually advancing our lead by introducing very unique, very effective technologies, like the ones I mentioned, and we're continuing that with our X9 generation. >> So that persistent memory allows you to do a right directly, atomic right directly to memory, and then what, you update asynchronously to the backend at some point? Can you double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, so we use persistent memory as kind of the first tier of storage. And the thing about persistent memory is persistent. Unlike normal memory, it doesn't lose its contents when you lose power, so it's just as good as flash or traditional spinning disks in terms of storing data. And the integration that we do is we do what's called remote direct memory access, that means the hardware sends the new data directly into persistent memory and storage with no software, getting rid of all the software layers in between, and that's what enables us to achieve this extremely low latency. Once it's in persistent memory, it's stored. It's as good as being in flash or disc. So there's nothing else that we need to do. We do age things out of persistent memory to keep only hot data in there. That's one of the tricks that we do to make sure, because persistent memory is more expensive than flash or disc, so we tier it. So we age data in and out as it becomes hot, age it out as it becomes cold, but once it's in persistent memory, it's as good as being stored. It is stored. >> I love it. Flash is a slow tier now. So, (laughs) let's talk about what this-- >> Right, I mean persistent memory is about an order of magnitude faster. Flash is more than an order of magnitude faster than disk drive, so it is a new technology that provides big benefits, particularly for latency on OLTP. >> Great, thank you for that, okay, we'll get out of the plumbing. Let's talk about what this announcement means to customers. How does all this performance, and you got a lot of scale here, how does it translate into tangible results say, for a bank? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of ways. So, I mentioned performance is a big thing, always with Exadata. We're increasing the performance significantly for OLTP, analytics, so OLTP, 50, 60% performance improvements, analytics, 80% performance improvements in terms of costs, effectiveness, 30 to 60% improvement, so all of these things are big benefits. You know, one of the differences between a server product like Exadata and a consumer product is performance translates in the cost also. If I get a new smartphone that's faster, it doesn't actually reduce my costs, it just makes my experience a little better. But with a server product like Exadata, if I have 50% faster, I can translate that into I can serve 50% more users, 50% more workload, 50% more data, or I can buy a 50% smaller system to run the same workload. So, when we talk about performance, it also means lower costs, so if big customers of ours, like banks, telecoms, retailers, et cetera, they can take that performance and turn it into better response times. They can also take that performance and turn it into lower costs, and everybody loves both of those things, so both of those are big benefits for our customers. >> Got it, thank you. Now in a move that was maybe a little bit controversial, you stated flat out that you're not going to bother to compare Exadata cloud and customer performance against AWS Outposts and Azure Stack, rather you chose to compare to RDS, Redshift, Azure SQL. Why, why was that? >> Yeah, so our Exadata runs in the public cloud. We have Exadata that runs in Cloud@Customer, and we have Exadata that runs on Prem. And Azure and Azure Stack, they have something a little more similar to Cloud@Customer. They have where they take their cloud solutions and put them in the customer data center. So when we came out with our new X8, 9M Cloud@Customer, we looked at those technologies and honestly, we couldn't even come up with a good comparison with their equivalent, for example, AWS Outpost, because those products really just don't really run. For example, the two database products that Outposts promote or that Amazon promotes is Aurora for OLTP and Redshift for analytics. Well, those two can't even run at all on their Outposts product. So, it's kind of like beating up on a child or something. (laughs) It doesn't make sense. They're out of our weight class, so we're not even going to compare against them. So we compared what we run, both in public cloud and Cloud@Customer against their best product, which is the Redshifts and the Auroras in their public cloud, which is their most scalable available products. With their equivalent Cloud@Customer, not only does it not perform, it doesn't run at all. Their Premiere products don't run at all on those platforms. >> Okay, but RDS does, right? I think, and Redshift and Azure SQL, right, will run a their version, so you compare it against those. What were the results of the benchmarks when you did made those comparisons? >> Yeah, so compared against their public cloud or Cloud@Customer, we generally get results that are something like 50 times lower latency and close to a hundred times higher analytic throughput, so it's orders of magnitude. We're not talking 50%, we're talking 50 times, so compared to those products, there really is kind of, we're in a different league. It's kind of like they're the middle school little league and we're the professional team, so it's really dramatically different. It's not even in the same league. >> All right, now you also chose to compare the X9M performance against on-premises storage systems. Why and what were those results? >> Yeah, so with the on-premises, traditionally customers bought conventional storage and that kind of stuff, and those products have advanced quite a bit. And again, those aren't optimized. Those aren't designed to run database, but some customers have traditionally deployed those, you know, there's less and less these days, but we do get many times faster both on OLTP and analytic performance there, I mean, with analytics that can be up to 80 times faster, so again, dramatically better, but yeah, there's still a lot of on-premise systems, so we didn't want to ignore that fact and compare only to cloud products. >> So these are like to like in the sense that they're running the same level of database. You're not playing games in terms of the versioning, obviously, right? >> Actually, we're giving them a lot of the benefit. So we're taking their published numbers that aren't even running a database, and they use these low-level benchmarking tools to generate these numbers. So, we're comparing our full end-to-end database to storage numbers against their low-level IO tool that they've published in their data sheets, so again, we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but we're still orders of magnitude better. >> Okay, now another claim that caught our attention was you said that 87% of the Fortune 100 organizations run Exadata, and you're claiming many thousands of other organizations globally. Can you paint a picture of the ICP, the Ideal Customer Profile for Exadata? What's a typical customer look like, and why do they use Exadata, Juan? >> Yeah, so the ideal customer is pretty straightforward, customers that care about data. That's pretty much it. (Dave laughs) If you care about data, if you care about performance of data, if you care about availability of data, if you care about manageability, if you care about security, those are the customers that should be looking strongly at Exadata, and those are the customers that are adopting Exadata. That's why you mentioned 87% of the global Fortune 100 have already adopted Exadata. If you look at a lot of industries, for example, pretty much every major bank almost in the entire world is running Exadata, and they're running it for their mission critical workloads, things like financial trading, regulatory compliance, user interfaces, the stuff that really matters. But in addition to the biggest companies, we also have thousands of smaller companies that run it for the same reason, because their data matters to them, and it's frankly the best platform, which is why we get chosen by these very, very sophisticated customers over and over again, and why this product has grown to encompass most of the major corporations in the world and governments also. >> Now, I know Deutsche bank is a customer, and I guess now an engineering partner from the announcement that I saw earlier this summer. They're using Cloud@Customer, and they're collaborating on things like security, blockchain, machine intelligence, and my inference is Deutsch Bank is looking to build new products and services that are powered by your platforms. What can you tell us about that? Can you share any insights? Are they going to be using X9M, for example? >> Yes, Deutsche Bank is a partnership that we announced a few months ago. It's a major partnership. Deutsche Bank is one of the biggest banks in the world. They traditionally are an on-premises customer, and what they've announced is they're going to move almost the entire database estate to our Exadata Cloud@Customer platform, so they want to go with a cloud platform, but they're big enough that they want to run it in their own data center for certain regulatory reasons. And so, the announcement that we made with them is they're moving the vast bulk of their data estate to this platform, including their core banking, regulatory applications, so their most critical applications. So, obviously they've done a lot of testing. They've done a lot of trials and they have the confidence to make this major transition to a cloud model with the Exadata Cloud@Customer solution, and we're also working with them to enhance that product and to work in various other fields, like you mentioned, machine learning, blockchain, that kind of project also. So it's a big deal when one of the biggest, most conservative, best respected financial institution in the world says, "We're going all in on this product," that's a big deal. >> Now outside of banking, I know a number of years ago, I stumbled upon an installation or a series of installations that Samsung found out about them as a customer. I believe it's now public, but they've something like 300 Exadatas. So help us understand, is it common that customers are building these kinds of Exadata farms? Is this an outlier? >> Yeah, so we have many large customers that have dozens to hundreds of Exadatas, and it's pretty simple, they start with one or two, and then they see the benefits, themselves, and then it grows. And Samsung is probably the biggest, most successful and most respected electronics company in the world. They are a giant company. They have a lot of different sub units. They do their own manufacturing, so manufacturing's one of their most critical applications, but they have lots of other things they run their Exadata for. So we're very happy to have them as one of our major customers that run Exadata, and by the way, Exadata again, very huge in electronics, in manufacturing. It's not just banking and that kind of stuff. I mean, manufacturing is incredibly critical. If you're a company like Samsung, that's your bread and butter. If your factory stops working, you have huge problems. You can't produce products, and you will want to improve the quality. You want to improve the tracking. You want to improve the customer service, all that requires a huge amount of data. Customers like Samsung are generating terabytes and terabytes of data per day from their manufacturing system. They track every single piece, everything that happens, so again, big deal, they care about data. They care deeply about data. They're a huge Exadata customer. That's kind of the way it works. And they've used it for many years, and their use is growing and growing and growing, and now they're moving to the cloud model as well. >> All right, so we talked about some big customers and Juan, as you know, we've covered Exadata since its inception. We were there at the announcement. We've always stressed the fit in our research with mission critical workloads, which especially resonates with these big customers. My question is how does Exadata resonate with the smaller customer base? >> Yeah, so we talk a lot about the biggest customers, because honestly they have the most critical requirements. But, at some level they have worldwide requirements, so if one of the major financial institutions goes down, it's not just them that's affected, that reverberates through the entire world. There's many other customers that use Exadata. Maybe their application doesn't stop the world, but it stops them, so it's very important to them. And so one of the things that we've introduced in our Cloud@Customer and public cloud Exadata platforms is the ability for Oracle to manage all the infrastructure, which enables smaller customers that don't have as much IT sophistication to adopt these very mission critical technology, so that's one of the big advancements. Now, we've always had smaller customers, but now we're getting more and more. We're getting universities, governments, smaller businesses adopting Exadata, because the cloud model for adopting is dramatically simpler. Oracle does all the administration, all the low-level stuff. They don't have to get involved in it at all. They can just use the data. And, on top of that comes our autonomous database, which makes it even easier for smaller customers to adapt. So Exadata, which some people think of as a very high-end platform in this cloud model, and particularly with autonomous databases is very accessible and very useful for any size customer really. >> Yeah, by all accounts, I wouldn't debate Exadata has been a tremendous success. But you know, a lot of customers, they still prefer to roll their own, do it themselves, and when I talk to them and ask them, "Okay, why is that?" They feel it limits their reliance on a single vendor, and it gives them better ability to build what I call a horizontal infrastructure that can support say non-Oracle workloads, so what do you tell those customers? Why should those customers run Oracle database on Exadata instead of a DIY infrastructure? >> Yeah, so that debate has gone on for a lot of years. And actually, what I see, there's less and less of that debate these days. You know, initially customers, many customers, they were used to building their own. That's kind of what they did. They were pretty good at it. What we have shown customers, and when we talk about these major banks, those are the kinds of people that are really good at it. They have giant IT departments. If you look at a major bank in the world, they have tens of thousands of people in their IT departments. These are gigantic multi-billion dollar organizations, so they were pretty good at this kind of stuff. And what we've shown them is you can't build this yourself. There's so much software that we've written to integrate with the database that you just can't build yourself, it's not possible. It's kind of like trying to build your own smartphone. You really can't do it, the scale, the complexity of the problem. And now as the cloud model comes in, customers are realizing, hey, all this attention to building my own infrastructure, it's kind of last decade, last century. We need to move on to more of an as a service model, so we can focus on our business. Let enterprises that are specialized in infrastructure, like Oracle that are really, really good at it, take care of the low-level details, and let me focus on things that differentiate me as a business. It's not going to differentiate them to establish their own storage for database. That's not a differentiator, and they can't do it nearly as well as we can, and a lot of that is because we write a lot of special technology and software that they just can't do themselves, it's not possible. It's just like you can't build your own smartphone. It's just really not possible. >> Now, another area that we've covered extensively, we were there at the unveiling, as well is ZDLRA, Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance. We've always liked this product, especially for mission critical workloads, we're near zero data loss, where you can justify that. But while we always saw it as somewhat of a niche market, first of all, is that fair, and what's new with ZDLRA? >> Yeah ZDLRA has been in the market for a number of years. We have some of the biggest corporations in the world running on that, and one of the big benefits has been zero data loss, so again, if you care about data, you can't lose data. You can't restore to last night's backup if something happens. So if you're a bank, you can't restore everybody's data to last night. Suppose you made a deposit during the day. They're like, "Hey, sorry, Mr. Customer, your deposit, "well, we don't have any record of it anymore, "'cause we had to restore to last night's backup," you know, that doesn't work. It doesn't work for airlines. It doesn't work for manufacturing. That whole model is obsolete, so you need zero data loss, and that's why we introduced Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, and it's been very successful in the market. In addition to zero data loss, it actually provides much faster restore, much more reliable restores. It's more scalable, so it has a lot of advantages. With our X9M generation, we're introducing several new capabilities. First of all, it has higher capacity, so we can store more backups, keep data for longer. Another thing is we're actually dropping the price of the entry-level configuration of ZDLRA, so it makes it more affordable and more usable by smaller businesses, so that's a big deal. And then the other thing that we're hearing a lot about, and if you read the news at all, you hear a lot about ransomware. This is a major problem for the world, cyber criminals breaking into your network and taking the data ransom. And so we've introduced some, we call cyber vault capabilities in ZDLRA. They help address this ransomware issue that's kind of rampant throughout the world, so everybody's worried about that. There's now regulatory compliance for ransomware that particularly financial institutions have to conform to, and so we're introducing new capabilities in that area as well, which is a big deal. In addition, we now have the ability to have multiple ZDLRAs in a large enterprise, and if something happens to one, we automatically fail over backups to another. We can replicate across them, so it makes it, again, much more resilient with replication across different recovery appliances, so a lot of new improvements there as well. >> Now, is an air gap part of that solution for ransomware? >> No, air gap, you really can't have your back, if you're continuously streaming changes to it, you really can't have an air gap there, but you can protect the data. There's a number of technologies to protect the data. For example, one of the things that a cyber criminal wants to do is they want to take control of your data and then get rid of your backup, so you can't restore them. So as a simple example of one thing we're doing is we're saying, "Hey, once we have the data, "you can't delete it for a certain amount of days." So you might say, "For the 30 days, "I don't care who you are. "I don't care what privileges you have. "I don't care anything, I'm holding onto that data "for at least 30 days," so for example, a cyber criminal can't come in and say, "Hey, I'm going to get into the system "and delete that stuff or encrypt it," or something like that. So that's a simple example of one of the things that the cyber vault does. >> So, even as an administrator, I can't change that policy? >> That's right, that's one of the goals is doesn't matter what privileges you have, you can't change that policy. >> Does that eliminate the need for an air gap or would you not necessarily recommend, would you just have another layer of protection? What's your recommendation on that to customers? >> We always recommend multiple layers of protection, so for example, in our ZDLRA, we support, we offload tape backups directly from the appliance, so a great way to protect the data from any kind of thing is you put it on a tape, and guess what, once that tape drive is filed away, I don't care what cyber criminal you are, if you're remote, you can't access that data. So, we always promote multiple layers, multiple technologies to protect the data, and tape is a great way to do that. We can also now archive. In addition to tape, we can now archive to the public cloud, to our object storage servers. We can archive to what we call our ZFS appliance, which is a very low cost storage appliance, so there's a number of secondary archive copies that we offload and implement for customers. We make it very easy to do that. So, yeah, you want multiple layers of protection. >> Got it, okay, your tape is your ultimate air gap. ZDLRA is your low RPO device. You've got cloud kind of in the middle, maybe that's your cheap and deep solution, so you have some options. >> Juan: Yes. >> Okay, last question. Summarize the announcement, if you had to mention two or three takeaways from the X9M announcement for our audience today, what would you choose to share? >> I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's the new generation. It's significantly faster for OLTP, for analytics, significantly better consolidation, more cost-effective. That's the big picture. Also there's a lot of software enhancements to make it better, improve the management, make it more usable, make it better disaster recovery. I talked about some of these cyber vault capabilities, so it's improved across all the dimensions and not in small ways, in big ways. We're talking 50% improvement, 80% improvements. That's a big change, and also we're keeping the price the same, so when you get a 50 or 80% improvement, we're not increasing the price to match that, so you're getting much better value as well. And that's pretty much what it is. It's the same product, even better. >> Well, I love this cadence that we're on. We love having you on these video exclusives. We have a lot of Oracle customers in our community, so we appreciate you giving us the inside scope on these announcements. Always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. It's always fun to be with you, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube conversation. We're going to dig into some of the more specific and sometimes gory details of managing the nuances of database, database management systems. You know, it's a lot of fun to get it to the daily buzz of cloud and database competition and get a little snarky on Twitter, but there are a lot of mundane issues that you have to address to really do proper database sizing, capacity planning, and you know whether or not database consolidation makes sense. These are not trivial issues. And decades ago they spawned an entire role around the database administrator. They had to do the dirty work of database management so that users and customers would be satisfied. And while automation and cloud are changing that role, at the end of the day, somebody actually has to make the databases work in the cloud and make sure that the business doesn't feel any impact on the transition along the way. So on that note, we have with us Oracle senior director of product management for mission critical databases. He works in Juan Loaiza's group, Chris Craft, and Steve Zivanic whom we know well on the cube says this guy is the Jedi master when it comes to consolidating databases in the cloud. Nobody knows more on the face of the planet Earth. So we're really excited Chris, to have you inside the Cube. Welcome. >> Thanks, thanks Dave. >> That's a very humble thanks. So when it comes to running databases in the cloud can you explain the difference between sizing and capacity planning? Aren't they two sides of the same coin? >> Yeah, you know, they really are. It's like, you know sizing is really part of capacity to planning. It's really, I look at sizing as a one-time effort whereas capacity planning is more your ongoing. You perform sizing initially when the application is deployed. And then, then when you're changing platforms, like going from on-prem to the Cloud you're going to go through a sizing exercise 'cause you're looking at going to a new platform. That's more of a one-time effort, and then ongoing, you're looking at your capacity management over time. So yeah, they are very related so. >> Okay, thank you. So we're going to talk about database consolidation. A lot of people would say, look the cloud makes consolidating databases maybe not irrelevant, but maybe not the best strategy because I got all these different purpose-built databases. Why consolidate databases if they're already going to consolidate it in the cloud in one location? >> Yeah. So, so we're really talking about in in the cloud, you're running virtual machines but consolidation still applies on the virtual machines. So if you have a virtual machine that's dedicated to a database that database is that server, that virtual machine is going to be under utilized over time. So what we're doing with consolidation is running multiple databases within a virtual machine or what it, Oracle virtual cluster. We do everything on clusters. So multiple machines multiple databases within that will drive up the utilization and improve your cost structure. So it's a sizing it's it's absolutely critical on even in the cloud. >> Okay. But, but wouldn't it, I might say to that, wouldn't it be better to have each database have a dedicated VM? I mean, from a performance perspective, it doesn't try to make the database do too much affect performance. >> Yeah. It, so whenever, so we know historically that a database on a dedicated server back in the day that was a physical server, today it's a virtual machine. When you do that, your utilization will be in the range of 15 to 20%. And that's, you know very highly under utilized systems when you do that. So we don't need to isolate things onto dedicated virtual machines for a performance perspective. There are other ways that we can manage that we have resource management built into Oracle and the Oracle database. And then on Exadata we have an integrated IO resource management as well so we can deal with that different ways. >> Okay. So you're basically proposing that you're putting these databases onto a single VM and managing it accordingly. Is there additional details you can provide on that? >> So, you know, we don't put everything into you know, literally one, one VM. You want to have some isolation built in there, but see and take a more pragmatic approach. You know, like every single database in one VM that's the wrong way to go. Each database in a dedicated VM is also the other extreme, also the wrong way to go. So we're kind of right down the middle and be more pragmatic about it, and do some level of consolidation to drive up utilization. >> I remember when I first started following tech I was studying up on, you know kind of how disc drives work and so forth. And there was probably like I can't even remember what it was. It was like probably like 10 megabytes under an actuator. And people were saying, Oh my God, that's so much data. You, you got your blast radius is, is so big. You got to split that up. So it's the same concept, apply with availability. Some would say, there's a problem because you're consolidating all this data and you've got this blast radius that increases. How do you address that? >> And so, you know, redundancy. So we have redundancy at all levels. So if you look at a single, so we're talking about Exadata here, taught in an Exadata machine we can lose up to 24 disc drives out of 30. 30 machines with 36 disc drives, we can use 24 of those. So that'd be 12 per storage cell. You can lose two storage cells as 24 out of 36 drives so we can lose and keep on running. We can also, we also cluster, we also do clustering. So the database servers are clustered together for high availability. So we can take, we can suffer multiple simultaneous failures and keep on running without performance impact either. So it's, so recovery, we handle that in different ways. So it's, look at blast radius from a standpoint, you want some, some isolation for blast radius but we have physical failures is just not something that we're concerned with. >> Why do you deal with taking down a VM? Doesn't that normally mean there's going to be some kind of disruption? >> Oh, so you know, the, so Oracle database, you're talking about real application clusters on on Oracle database, on Exadata. We've got, we have a very fast detection of of failures and then resolution of the failure. So we're looking at a small blip in performance, you know we're looking at a few milliseconds to detect failure and then maybe up around three seconds to actually affect the failover. So the applications that are not getting disconnected, they continue operating in the, in that kind of condition. So that's kind of unique to the Exadata platform. And so, you know, in our cloud, we're running Exadata. We have this built in there. So we're, we're resilient to that type of failure, so. >> And sorry, you mentioned real application clusters. You're saying because you're running real application clusters that's how you're able to become more resilient? >> So yeah, so we have, so Oracle database real application clusters runs on top of a clustered virtual machines on Exadata. We have integration then optimizes the fail over times of that clustering. So it's, it's not the cluster same, it's the optimizations are only built into Exadata. So we have much much faster, much better tighter integration, so much more scalability because of that, that integration that we have. >> Can I run rack in other clouds? Can I put that into Amazon's cloud? >> So, so real application clusters requires two things. It's a, you require shared storage in a fast interconnect, a fast networking interconnecting. And those things just don't exist in the other clouds. We have those built into Exadata in our cloud. And we also, we also allow real application clusters in our relational database, our database cloud service offering as well. But it's, really the highest implementation of that is in Exadata. >> Well, of course I was tongue in cheek joking but this is, this is why, you know, I was listening to Arvind Krishna the other day in IBM Think. And he was saying only 25% of mission critical applications have moved into the cloud. I didn't think it's that high. I mean, but, but what you're doing is basically building a mission critical, you know, cloud or a cloud for mission critical databases. And that's, that's unique. I mean, I would expect other cloud vendors that eventually you know, are going to get there, but you're kind of starting with the hard stuff and working backwards. But, that is what I've always interpreted is unique to Oracle, but how does that affect cost? Isn't that more expensive? >> Actually, no. We're taking services that that start out at a very similar price point. And then we drive. So what we've seen from other customers that are running in like Amazon, for example, we see databases on dedicated virtual machines that run anywhere from 15 to 20% utilization. So what we do is, that low, low utilization, what we do is take that and triple that. So we run, so we run maybe 50% utilization. At that point we still have full redundancy, but we've now made the service one third of the cost. So we're starting at a third, we're starting at a very similar cost. And then we drive it to, you know three times a utilization. This is not crazy numbers. This is, you know, 50% is, is fine and retain the redundancy at that level as well. >> Got it, well so. >> What we've seen is about a third the cost. >> Really? Okay. Well, so, but, what about, like for instance, on AWS, couldn't I run this in a multi availability zone, running RDS or some other cloud database? >> So, so you can run a Multi-AZ environment like in in Amazon, for example, you can run locals. That's what we call local standby. If you do that, you're now instead of being one third, instead of being three times more expensive, you're now six times more expensive. Because that is another copy of the entire platform, the entire instance, the storage, everything on the other availability zone instead of being three times more, it's now six. >> Because you're essentially replicating everything in a brute force mode, right? >> Yeah. It's a data guard standby, local standby in another AZ, or what we call availability domain in our cloud. >> So let's maybe geek out a little bit. So, let's talk more about availability. You know, for years, I mean, I remember going back to reading about this stuff with tandem computers, you know, coincident failures. How are you dealing with those in today's modern world? >> So what we call simultaneous failures is, so we, we deal with that with redundancy in the system. So we have redundancy at all layers in the storage. Like I said earlier, we can take across, you know, two storage cells and each storage cell has a dozen drives. So that's 24 disc drives. That's eight flashcard failures simultaneously. And we keep on running no data loss, no loss of service. That's at the storage layer. We have multiple, multiple redundant networking switches at that, at the networking layer, the internal network. Then we go up into the database server. We then have redundancy across the nodes of a cluster. You have multiple virtual machines that comprise a virtual cluster. So it's at each and every level, we have redundancy. And then we drive the redundancy into the application using what's called application continuity. So the application connections have knowledge of the failure, failure modes of the database. They can follow to the surviving node, and continue operating. >> And you do this with math, you're doing some kind of magic bit slicing, or how do you do that? >> That, so that is that particular thing, application continuity, so technology that's been built into Oracle database since, since 12c, and that it's been around for quite a long time. And it allows the application to follow the rack cluster, any kind of issues with the rack cluster. We can drain connections off. It's very well-proven technology in, you know, prior to to proactive maintenance, we can drain connections over and then it will also handle a failure of a connection as well. And the application following that, yes. >> I learned from my old mainframe days and hanging around with David Floyer. It's always ask, what happens when something goes wrong and it's all about recovery. And you guys have the gold standard there. I mean, we've talked about this a lot. So you got Exadata. That's what is behind your Exadata cloud service, X8M I think you call it, and you've got autonomous database. I'm not great with model numbers, but, but talk about the way you can handle simultaneous failures. I mean, are there like triple redundancies that you've built in? >> Yeah. So everything what we do in our cloud is everything is triple redundancy by default. So we, you can suffer, that way we can suffer two failures and continue operating. So the, the other thing, so recovery, if you look at transaction recovery, when a failure occurs a transaction will flip that session, will flip to the machine that keeps running. It'll reposition all in the work that's in flight, any kind of inflight transactions, any in flight queries that are going on, reposition and continue operating. >> So you've essentially created like the old three site data centers, but you're in a single platform because you're synchronous. But, that same concept in a package. >> It's, you know, it's a lot of times you show a picture of an Exadata. It looks like a single box, but in the box there's some redundancy built in the box. And in fact, in the cloud it's actually across an entire aisle. So it's, we kind of obscure that a little bit, from your provisioning, you know, our database nodes and our storage cells and in the cloud but it's actually across an entire aisle of a dataset. >> Okay, and of course, that's within a synchronous location. Let's talk about disaster recovery, and what you're doing in that area, around Oracle Cloud What are my options there? What's different from other cloud providers we were talking earlier about, AZs, how are you different and what are you doing there? >> Yeah, so we, we talked earlier about the Multi-AZ deployment, what we call it availability domain, AD, so a little different terminology. But we can deploy another, another copy of the database into another availability domain, if you like. It's not often that you lose an entire AZ or AD, it's more, we're protecting from regional failures. So across another region. And that's where we look at, we really look at that as that technology, as a standby, as a data, disaster recovery solution not for HA. HA, we build HA into the machine itself. >> So you're saying, we were talking earlier about AZ, you're saying that's for HA versus DR. Is that, is that what you're contending? >> Yeah, like, you know again, pick on Amazon for a second here. Amazon uses a standby database. What we would normally use for disaster recovery, they're using that for availability. And you're looking at a few minutes of time to flip over to another AZ, whereas within an Exadata frame, we can flip over in milliseconds. We keep continue running. There is no loss of conductivity. And then we use the standby in another region for disaster. That's a true disaster solution. >> As opposed to incurring that penalty of latency, or whatever, to spin up the other resource. >> Right, right. >> Okay, so that's clear how kind of you guys address that, that challenge. Last question, maybe you could give us your take, again folks, coming out of Oracle's mouth, but what's the bottom line cost Delta based on your experience between your service and competitive services? I love these conversations because you're not afraid to talk about the competition, so bring it on. >> I've seen, so we've just based on what we've seen with customers deploying databases in Amazon, versus what, you know we've replaced that within, in our cloud service. We're seeing from just a list price perspective. Now, you know, we discount, I know Amazon discounts, but the only thing I can really speak to is list price perspective. It's about a third the cost. So we're talking about a more powerful platform, runs faster. We get these incredible, we haven't even talked about performance here. Talk about availability, performance where we're getting IO rates, IO latencies in the 19 microsecond range. Now with Exadata, that's going to be 50 times faster than what you get with these traditional cloud vendors. So much, much faster, and a third the cost. >> So talk about discounts, I mean, I know Oracle discounts, Oracle from list price, Oracle provides significant discounts. I'm not as familiar with your cloud pricing but I mean, Amazon's discounts are really in the form of like reserved instances. Is your pricing similar in that regard or different? I mean, if I'm just paying on demand, I'm paying through the nose. I presume it's same with you. If I, but if I buy in bulk getting a discount, is that what you mean by discount? Or is it more similar to the way you've traditionally discounted, you know large customers, the more you spend, the more you you get kind of thing. >> It's a, there's a discount structure. So it's, we don't have the same kind of lock-in like with reserved instance structure, but yeah, it's, there are discounts and that's going to be very customer specific. >> Right. >> So, but I think that the end result we're starting at, a three X differential on the price. >> But the reason I'm asking the question is that the stats you gave me are for list price, right? >> Yeah, yes, yeah. >> Okay, and sure, you're saying that at list price you're, you're less expensive. I, and again, my contention would be just by experiences that your discounts would be more aggressive traditionally in Oracle's traditional business. You know, I've done a lot of Oracle negotiation in my days. And if you're, you know, if you're a big customer you can get good deals. And again, I'm not as familiar with the cloud pricing, but still that's, that's good. If you're doing it on a list price basis, to me, that's a conservative statement if that makes any sense. >> Right, that's where it starts. We know that's where it's starting out. So I, you know, once you get into discounts, it's very customer specific. >> Right. >> We know the starting point is at three X differential. Before you do something in the Multi-AZ would be a six X differential, by the way, so. >> Yeah, okay. All right, Chris. Well, Hey, I appreciate you taking us through this, good stuff, and best of luck, good work. You know, you guys keep, I always say Oracle invest you guys spend a lot of money in RD and, and, you know you're quiet for a while in the cloud and all of a sudden you came out like you invented it. So good job! >> All right. >> All right, thanks. Thanks for coming on. All right. >> Thanks. >> Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for Cube conversations. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this exclusive Cube Conversation. We have the pleasure today to welcome, Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's good to see you. How you been, sir? >> Good, it's been a while since we last talked but I'm excited to be here, as always. >> It was during COVID though and so I hope to see you face to face soon. But so Wim, since the Barron's Article declared Oracle a Cloud giant, we've really been sort of paying attention and amping up our coverage of Oracle and asking a lot of questions like, is Oracle really a Cloud giant? And I'll say this, we've always stressed that Oracle invests in R&D and of course there's a lot of D in that equation. And over the past year, we've seen, of course the autonomous database is ramping up, especially notable on Exadata Cloud@Customer, we've covered that extensively. We covered the autonomous data warehouse announcement, the blockchain piece, which of course got me excited 'cause I get to talk about crypto with Juan. Roving Edge, which for everybody who might not be familiar with that, it's an edge cloud service, dedicated regions that you guys announced, which is a managed cloud region. And so it's clear, you guys are serious about cloud. These are all cloud first services using second gen OCI. So, Oracle's making some moves but the question is, what are customers doing? Are they buying this stuff? Are they leaning into these new deployment models for the databases? What can you tell us? >> You know, definitely. And I think, you know, the reason that we have so many different services is that not every customer is the same, right? One of the things that people don't necessarily realize, I guess, is in the early days of cloud lots of startups went there because they had no local infrastructure. It was easy for them to get started in something completely new. Our customers are mostly enterprise customers that have huge data centers in many cases, they have lots of real estate local. And when they think about cloud they're wondering how can we create an environment that doesn't cause us to have two ops teams and two ways of managing things. And so, they're trying to figure out exactly what it means to take their real estate and either move it wholesale to the cloud over a period of years, or they say, "Hey, some of these things need to be local maybe even for regulatory purposes." Or just because they want to keep some data locally within their own data centers but then they have to move other things remotely. And so, there's many different ways of solving the problem. And you can't just say, "Here's one cloud, this is where you go and that's it." So, we basically say, if you're on prem, we provide you with cloud services on-premises, like dedicated regions or Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and so forth so that you get the benefits of what we built for cloud and spend a lot of time on, but you can run them in your own data center or people say, "No, no, no. I want to get rid of my data centers, I do it remotely." Okay, then you do it in Oracle cloud directly. Or you have a hybrid model where you say, "Some stays local, some is remote." The nice thing is you get the exact same API, the exact same way of managing things, no matter how you deploy it. And that's a big differentiator. >> So, is it fair to say that you guys have, I think of it as a purpose built club, 'cause I talk to a lot of customers. I mean, take an insurance app like Claims, and customers tell me, "I'm not putting that into the public cloud." But you're making a case that it actually might make sense in your cloud because you can support those mission critical applications with the exact same experience, same API, same... I can get, you know, take Rack for instance, I can't get, you know, real application clusters in an Amazon cloud but presumably I can get them in your cloud. So, is it fair to say you have a purpose built cloud specifically for the most demanding applications? Is that a right way to look at it or not necessarily? >> Well, it's interesting. I think the thing to be careful of is, I guess, purpose built cloud might for some people mean, "Oh, you can only do things if it's Oracle centric." Right, and so I think that fundamentally, Oracle cloud provides a generic cloud. You can run anything you want, any application, any deployment model that you have. Whether you're an Oracle customer or not, we provide you with a full cloud service, right? However, given that we know and have known, obviously for a long time, how our products run best, when we designed OCI gen two, when we designed the networking stack, the storage layer and all that stuff, we made sure that it would be capable of running our more complex environments because our advantage is, Oracle customers have a place where they can run Oracle the best. Right, and so obviously the context of purpose-built fits that model, where yes, we've made some design choices that allow us to run Rack inside OCI and allow us to deploy Exadatas inside OCI which you cannot do in other clouds. So yes, it's purpose built in that sense but I would caution on the side of that it sometimes might imply that it's unique to Oracle products and I guess one way to look at it is if you can run Oracle, you can run everything else, right? Because it's such a complex suite of products that if you can run that then it it'll support any other (mumbling). >> Right. Right, it's like New York city. You make it there, you can make it anywhere. If I can run the most demanding mission critical applications, well, then I can run a web app for instance, okay. I got a question on tooling 'cause there's a lot of tooling, like sometimes it makes my eyes bleed when I look at all this stuff and doesn't... Square the circle for me, doesn't autonomous, an autonomous database like Autonomous Linux, for instance, doesn't it eliminate the need for all these management tools? >> You know, it does. It eliminates the need for the management at the lower level, right. So, with the autonomous Linux, what we offer and what we do is, we automatically patch the operating system for you and make sure it's secure from a security patching point of view. We eliminate the downtime, so when we do it then you don't have to restart applications. However, we don't know necessarily what the app is that is installed on top of it. You know, people can deploy their own applications, they can run third party applications, they can use it for development environments and so forth. So, there's sort of the core operating system layer and on the database side, you know, we take care of database patching and upgrades and storage management and all that stuff. So the same thing, if you run your own application inside the database, we can manage the database portion but we don't manage the application portion just like on the operating system. And so, there's still a management level that's required, no matter what, a level above that. And the other thing and I think this is what a lot of the stuff we're doing is based on is, you still have tons of stuff on-premises that needs full management. You have applications that you migrate that are not running Autonomous Linux, could be a Windows application that's running or it could be something on a different Linux distribution or you could still have some databases installed that you manage yourself, you don't want to use the autonomous or you're on a third-party. And so we want to make sure that we can address all of them with a single set of tools, right. >> Okay, so I wonder, can you give us just an overview, just briefly of the products that comprise into the cloud services, your management solution, what's in that portfolio? How should we think about it? >> Yeah, so it basically starts with Enterprise Manager on-premises, right? Which has been the tool that our Oracle database customers in particular have been using for many years and is widely used by our customer base. And so you have those customers, most of their real estate is on-premises and they can use enterprise management with local. They have it running and they don't want to change. They can keep doing that and we keep enhancing as you know, with newer versions of Enterprise Manager getting better. So, then there's the transition to cloud and so what we've been doing over the last several years is basically, looking at the things, well, one aspect is looking at things people, likes of Enterprise Manager and make sure that we provide similar functionality in Oracle cloud. So, we have Performance Hub for looking at how the database performance is working. We have APM for Application Performance Monitoring, we have Logging Analytics that looks at all the different log files and helps make sense of it for you. We have Database Management. So, a lot of the functionality that people like in Enterprise Manager mentioned the database that we've built into Oracle cloud, and, you know, a number of other things that are coming Operations Insights, to look at how databases are performing and how we can potentially do consolidation and stuff. So we've basically looked at what people have been using on-premises, how we can replicate that in Oracle cloud and then also, when you're in a cloud, how you can make make use of all the base services that a cloud vendor provides, telemetry, logging and so forth. And so, it's a broad portfolio and what it allows us to do with our customers is say, "Look, if you're predominantly on-prem, you want to stay there, keep using Enterprise Manager. If you're starting to move to Oracle cloud, you can first use EM, look at what's happening in the cloud and then switch over, start using all the management products we have in the cloud and let go of the Enterprise Manager instance on-premise. So you can gradually shift, you can start using more and more. Maybe you start with analytics first and then you start with insights and then you switch to database management. So there's a whole suite of possibilities. >> (indistinct) you mentioned APM, I've been watching that space, it's really evolved. I mean, you saw, you know, years ago, Splunk came out with sort of log analytics, maybe simplified that a little bit, now you're seeing some open source stuff come out. You're seeing a lot of startups come out, you saw Cisco made an acquisition with AppD and that whole space is transforming it seems that the future is all about that end to end visibility, simplifying the ability to remediate problems. And I'm thinking, okay, you just mentioned, you guys have a lot of these capabilities, you got Autonomous, is that sort of where you're headed with your capabilities? >> It definitely is and in fact, one of the... So, you know, APM allows you to say, "Hey, here's my web browser and it's making a connection to the database, to a middle tier" and it's hard for operations people in companies to say, hey, the end user calls and says, "You know, my order entry system is slow. Is it the browser? Is it the middle tier that they connect to? Is it the database that's overloaded in the backend?" And so, APM helps you with tracing, you know, what happens from where to where, where the delays are. Now, once you know where the delay is, you need to drill down on it. And then you need to go look at log files. And that's where the logging piece comes in. And what happens very often is that these log files are very difficult to read. You have networking log files and you have database log files and you have reslog files and you almost have to be an expert in all of these things. And so, then with Logging Analytics, we basically provide sort of an expert dashboard system on top of that, that allows us to say, "Hey! When you look at logging for the network stack, here are the most important errors that we could find." So you don't have to go and learn all the details of these things. And so, the real advantages of saying, "Hey, we have APM, we have Logging Analytics, we can tie the two together." Right, and so we can provide a solution that actually helps solve the problem, rather than, you need to use APM for one vendor, you need to use Logging Analytics from another vendor and you know, that doesn't necessarily work very well. >> Yeah and that's why you're seeing with like the ELK Stack it's cool, you're an open source guy, it's cool as an open source, but it's complicated to set up all that that brings. So, that's kind of a cool approach that you guys are taking. You mentioned Enterprise Manager, you just made a recent announcement, a new release. What's new in that new release? >> So Enterprise Manager 13.5 just got released. And so EM keeps improving, right? We've made a lot of changes over over the years and one of the things we've done in recent years is do more frequent updates sort of the cloud model frequent updates that are not just bug fixes but also introduce new functionality so people get more stuff more frequently rather than you know, once a year. And that's certainly been very attractive because it shows that it's a lively evolving product. And one of the main focus areas of course is cloud. And so a lot of work that happens in Enterprise Manager is hybrid cloud, which basically means I run Enterprise Manager and I have some stuff in Oracle cloud, I might have some other stuff in another cloud vendors environment and so we can actually see which databases are where and provide you with one consolidated view and one tool, right? And of course it supports Autonomous Database and Exadata in cloud servers and so forth. So you can from EM see both your databases on-premises and also how it's doing in in Oracle cloud as you potentially migrate things over. So that's one aspect. And then the other one is in terms of operations and automation. One of the things that we started doing again with Enterprise Manager in the last few years is making sure that everything has a REST API. So we try to make the experience with Enterprise Manager be very similar to how people work with a cloud service. Most folks now writing automation tools are used to calling REST APIs. EM in the early days didn't have REST APIs, now we're making sure everything works that way. And one of the advantages is that we can do extensibility without having to rewrite the product, that we just add the API clause in the agent and it makes it a lot easier to become part of the modern system. Another thing that we introduced last year but that we're evolving with more dashboards and so forth is the Grafana plugin. So even though Enterprise Manager provides lots of cool tools, a lot of cloud operations folks use a tool called Grafana. And so we provide a plugin that allows customers to have Grafana dashboards but the data actually comes out of Enterprise Manager. So that allows us to integrate EM into a more cloudy world in a cloud environment. I think the other important part is making sure that again, Enterprise Manager has sort of a cloud feel to it. So when you do patching and upgrades, it's near zero downtime which basically means that we do all the upgrades for you without having to bring EM down. Because even though it's a management tool, it's used for operations. So if there were downtime for patching Enterprise Manager for an hour, then for that hour, it's a blackout window for all the monitoring we do. And so we want to avoid that from happening, so now EM is upgrading, even though all the events are still happening and being processed, and then we do a very short switch. So that help our operations people to be more available. >> Yes. I mean, I've been talking about Automated Operations since, you know, lights out data centers since the eighties back in (laughs). I remember (indistinct) data center one-time lights out there were storage tech libraries in there and so... But there were a lot of unintended consequences around, you know, automated ops, and so people were sort of scared to go there, at least lean in too much but now with all this machine intelligence... So you're talking about ops automation, you mentioned the REST APIs, the Grafana plugins, the Cloud feel, is that what you're bringing to the table that's unique, is that unique to Oracle? >> Well, the integration with Oracle in that sense is unique. So one example is you mentioned the word migration, right? And so database migration tends to be something, you know, customers obviously take very serious. We go from one place, you have to move all your data to another place that runs in a slightly different environment. And so how do you know whether that migration is going to work? And you can't migrate a thousand databases manually, right? So automation, again, it's not just... Automation is not just to say, "Hey, I can do an upgrade of a system or I can make sure that nothing is done by hand when you patch something." It's more about having a huge fleet of servers and a huge fleet of databases. How can you move something from one place to another and automate that? And so with EM, you know, we start with sort of the prerequisite phase. So we're looking at the existing environment, how much memory does it need? How much storage does it use? Which version of the database does it have? How much data is there to move? Then on the target side, we see whether the target can actually run in that environment. Then we go and look at, you know, how do you want to migrate? Do you want to migrate everything from a sort of a physical model or do you want to migrate it from a logical model? Do you want to do it while your environment is still running so that you start backing up the data to the target database while your existing production system is still running? Then we do a short switch afterwards, or you say, "No, I want to bring my database down. I want to do the migrate and then bring it back up." So there's different deployment models that we can let our customers pick. And then when the migration is done, we have a ton of health checks that can validate whether the target database will run through basically the exact same way. And then you can say, "I want to migrate 10 databases or 50 databases" and it'll work, It's all automated out of the box. >> So you're saying, I mean, you've looked at the prevailing way you've done migrations, historically you'd have to freeze the code and then migrate, and it would take forever, it was a function of the number of lines of code you had. And then a lot of times, you know, people would say, "We're not going to freeze the code" and then they would almost go out of business trying to merge the two. You're saying in 2021, you can give customers the choice, you can migrate, you could change the, you know, refuel the plane while you're in midair? Is that essentially what you're saying? >> That's a good way of describing it, yeah. So your existing database is running and we can do a logical backup and restore. So while transactions are happening we're still migrating it over and then you can do a cutoff. It makes the transition a lot easier. But the other thing is that in the past, migrations would typically be two things. One is one database version to the next, more upgrades than migration. Then the second one is that old hardware or a different CPU architecture are moving to newer hardware in a new CPU architecture. Those were sort of the typical migrations that you had prior to Cloud. And from a CIS admin point of view or a DBA it was all something you could touch, that you could physically touch the boxes. When you move to cloud, it's this nebulous thing somewhere in a data center that you have no access to. And that by itself creates a barrier to a lot of admins and DBA's from saying, "Oh, it'll be okay." There's a lot of concern. And so by baking in all these tests and the prerequisites and all the dashboards to say, you know, "This is what you use. These are the features you use. We know that they're available on the other side so you can do the migration." It helps solve some of these problems and remove the barriers. >> Well that was just kind of same same vision when you guys came up with it. I don't know, quite a while ago now. And it took a while to get there with, you know, you had gen one and then gen two but that is, I think, unique to Oracle. I know maybe some others that are trying to do that as well, but you were really the first to do that and so... I want to switch topics to talk about security. It's hot topic. You guys, you know, like many companies really focused on security. Does Enterprise Manager bring any of that over? I mean, the prevailing way to do security often times is to do scripts and write, you know, custom security policy scripts are fragile, they break, what can you tell us about security? >> Yeah. So there's really two things, you know. One is, we obviously have our own best security practices. How we run a database inside Oracle for our own world, we've learned about that over the years. And so we sort of baked that knowledge into Enterprise Manager. So we can say, "Hey, if you install this way, we do the install and the configuration based on our best practice." That's one thing. The other one is there's STIG, there's PCI and they're ShipBob, those are the main ones. And so customers can do their own way. They can download the documentation and do it manually. But what we've done is, and we've done this for a long time, is basically bake those policies into Enterprise Manager. So you can say, "Here's my database this needs to be PCI compliant or it needs to be HIPAA compliant and you push a button and then we validate the policies in those documents or in those prescript described files. And we make sure that the database is combined to that. And so we take that manual work and all that stuff basically out of the picture, we say, "Push this button and we'll take care of it." >> Now, Wim, but just quick sidebar here, last time we talked, it was under a year ago. It was definitely during COVID and it's still during COVID. We talked about the state of the penguin. So I'm wondering, you know, what's the latest update for Linux, any Linux developments that we should be aware of? >> Linux, we're still working very hard on Autonomous Linux and that's something where we can really differentiate and solve a problem. Of course, one of the things to mention is that Enterprise Manager can can do HIPAA compliance on Oracle Linux as well. So the security practices are not just for the database it can also go down to the operating system. Anyway, so on the Autonomous Linux side, you know, management in an Oracle Cloud's OS management is evolving. We're spending a lot of time on integrating log capturing, and if something were to go wrong that we can analyze a log file on the fly and send you a notification saying, "Hey, you know there was this bug and here's the cause." And it was potentially a fix for it to Autonomous Linux and we're putting a lot of effort into that. And then also sort of IT/operation management where we can look at the different applications that are running. So you're running a web server on a Linux environment or you're running some Java processes, we can see what's running. We can say, "Hey, here's the CPU utilization over the past week or the past year." And then how is this evolving? Say, if something suddenly spikes we can say, "Well, that's normal, because every Monday morning at 10 o'clock there's a spike or this is abnormal." And then you can start drilling this down. And this comes back to overtime integration with whether it's APM or Logging Analytics, we can tie the dots, right? We can connect them, we can say, "Push this thing, then click on that link." We give you the information. So it's that integration with the entire cloud platform that's really happening now >> Integration, there's that theme again. I want to come back to migration and I think you did a good job of explaining how you sort of make that non-disruptive and you know, your customers, I think, you know, generally you're pushing you know, that experience which makes people more comfortable. But my question is, why do people want to migrate if it works and it's on prem, are they doing it just because they want to get out of the data center business? Or is it a better experience in the cloud? What can you tell us there? >> You know, it's a little bit of everything. You know, one is, of course the idea that data center maintenance costs are very high. The other one is that when you run your own data center, you know, we obviously have this problem but when you're a cloud vendor, you have these problems but we're in this business. But if you buy a server, then in three years that server basically is depreciated by new versions and they have to do migration stuff. And so one of the advantages with cloud is you push a button, you have a new version of the hardware, basically, right? So the refreshes happen on a regular basis. You don't have to go and recycle that yourself. Then the other part is the subscription model. It's a lot easier to pay for what you use rather than you have a data center whether it's used or not, you pay for it. So there's the cost advantages and predictability of what you need, you pay for, you can say, "Oh next year we need to get x more of EMs." And it's easier to scale that, right? We take care of dealing with capacity planning. You don't have to deal with capacity planning of hardware, we do that as the cloud vendor. So there's all these practical advantages you get from doing it remotely and that's really what the appeal is. >> Right. So, as it relates to Enterprise Manager, did you guys have to like tear down the code and rebuild it? Was it entire like redo? How did you achieve that? >> No, no, no. So, Enterprise Manager keeps evolving and you know, we changed the underlying technologies here and there, piecemeal, not sort of a wholesale replacement. And so in talking about five, there's a lot of new stuff but it's built on the existing EM core. And so we're just, you know, improving certain areas. One of the things is, stability is important for our customers, obviously. And so by picking things piecemeal, we replace one engine rather than the whole thing. It allows us to introduce change more slowly, right. And then it's well-tested as a unit and then when we go on to the next thing. And then the other one is I mentioned earlier, a lot of the automation and extensibility comes from REST APIs. And so instead of basically re-writing everything we just provide a REST endpoint and we make all the new features that we built automatically be REST enabled. So that makes it a lot easier for us to introduce new stuff. >> Got it. So if I want to poke around with this new version of Enterprise Manager, can I do that? Is there a place I can go, do I have to call a rep? How does that work? >> Yeah, so for information you can just go to oracle.com/enterprise manager. That's the website that has all the data. The other thing is if you're already playing with Oracle Cloud or you use Oracle Cloud, we have Enterprise Manager images in the marketplace. So if you have never used EM, you can go to Oracle Cloud, push a button in the marketplace and you get a full Enterprise Manager installation in a matter of minutes. And then you can just start using that as well. >> Awesome. Hey, I wanted to ask you about, you know, people forget that you guys are the stewards of MySQL and we've been looking at MySQL Database Cloud service with HeatWave Did you name that? And so I wonder if you could talk about what you're doing with regard to managing HeatWave environments? >> So, HeatWave is the MySQL option that helps with analytics, right? And it really accelerates MySQL usage by 100 x and in some cases more and it's transparent to the customer. So as a MySQL user, you connect with standard MySQL applications and APIs and SQL and everything. And the HeatWave part is all done within the MySQL server. The engine itself says, "Oh, this SQL query, we can offload to the backend HeatWave cluster," which then goes in memory operations and blazingly fast returns it to you. And so the nice thing is that it turns every single MySQL database into also a data warehouse without any change whatsoever in your application. So it's been widely popular and it's quite exciting. I didn't personally name it, HeatWave, that was not my decision, but it sounds very cool. >> That's very cool. >> Yeah, It's a very cool name. >> We love MySQL, we started our company on the lamp stack, so like many >> Oh? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah. That's great. So, yeah. And so with HeatWave or MySQL in general we're basically doing the same thing as we have done for the Oracle Database. So we're going to add more functionality in our database management tools to also look at HeatWave. So whether it's doing things like performance hub or generic database management and monitoring tools, we'll expand that in, you know, in the near future, in the future. >> That's great. Well, Wim, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back in "The Cube" and letting me ask all my Colombo questions. It was really a pleasure having you. (mumbling) >> It's good be here. Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. And thank you for watching, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In June of this year, Snowflake filed a confidential document suggesting that it would do an IPO. Now of course, everybody knows about it, found out about it and it had a $20 billion valuation. So, many in the community and the investment community and so forth are excited about this IPO. It could be the hottest one of the year, and we're getting a number of questions from investors and practitioners and the entire Wiki bond, ETR and CUBE community. So, welcome everybody. This is Dave Vellante. This is "CUBE Insights" powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to unpack five critical questions around Snowflake's IPO or pending IPO. And with me to discuss that is Erik Bradley. He's the Chief Engagement Strategists at ETR and he's also the Managing Director of VENN. Erik, thanks for coming on and great to see you as always. >> Great to see you too. Always enjoy being on the show. Thank you. >> Now for those of you don't know Erik, VENN is a roundtable that he hosts and he brings in CIOs, IT practitioners, CSOs, data experts and they have an open and frank conversation, but it's private to ETR clients. But they know who the individual is, what their role is, what their title is, et cetera and it's a kind of an ask me anything. And I participated in one of them this past week. Outstanding. And we're going to share with you some of that. But let's bring up the agenda slide if we can here. And these are really some of the questions that we're getting from investors and others in the community. There's really five areas that we want to address. The first is what's happening in this enterprise data warehouse marketplace? The second thing is kind of a one area. What about the legacy EDW players like Oracle and Teradata and Netezza? The third question we get a lot is can Snowflake compete with the big cloud players? Amazon, Google, Microsoft. I mean they're right there in the heart, in the thick of things there. And then what about that multi-cloud strategy? Is that viable? How much of a differentiator is that? And then we get a lot of questions on the TAM. Meaning the total available market. How big is that market? Does it justify the valuation for Snowflake? Now, Erik, you've been doing this now. You've run a couple VENNs, you've been following this, you've done some other work that you've done with Eagle Alpha. What's your, just your initial sort of takeaway from all this work that you've been doing. >> Yeah, sure. So my first take on Snowflake was about two and a half years ago. I actually hosted them for one of my VENN interviews and my initial thought was impressed. So impressed. They were talking at the time about their ability to kind of make ease of use of a multi-cloud strategy. At the time although I was impressed, I did not expect the growth and the hyper growth that we have seen now. But, looking at the company in its current iteration, I understand where the hype is coming from. I mean, it's 12 and a half billion private valuation in the last round. The least confidential IPO (laughs) anyone's ever seen (Dave laughs) with a 15 to $20 billion valuation coming out, which is more than Teradata, Margo and Cloudera combined. It's a great question. So obviously the success to this point is warranted, but we need to see what they're going to be able to do next. So I think the agenda you laid out is a great one and I'm looking forward to getting into some of those details. >> So let's start with what's happening in the marketplace and let's pull up a slide that I very much love to use. It's the classic X-Y. On the vertical axis here we show net score. And remember folks, net score is an indicator of spending momentum. ETR every quarter does like a clockwork survey where they're asking people, "Essentially are you spending more or less?" They subtract the less from the more and comes up with a net score. It's more complicated than, but like NPS, it's a very simple and reliable methodology. That's the vertical axis. And the horizontal axis is what's called market share. Market share is the pervasiveness within the data set. So it's calculated by the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the number of mentions within that sector. And what we're showing here is the EDW sector. And we've pulled out a few companies that I want to talk about. So the big three, obviously Microsoft, AWS and Google. And you can see Microsoft has a huge presence far to the right. AWS, very, very strong. A lot of Redshift in there. And then they're pretty high on the vertical axis. And then Google, not as much share, but very solid in that. Close to 60% net score. And then you can see above all of them from a vertical standpoint is Snowflake with a 77.5% net score. You can see them in the upper right there in the green. One of the highest Erik in the entire data set. So, let's start with some sort of initial comments on the big guys and Snowflakes. Your thoughts? >> Sure. Just first of all to comment on the data, what we're showing there is just the data warehousing sector, but Snowflake's actual net score is that high amongst the entire universe that we follow. Their data strength is unprecedented and we have forward-looking spending intention. So this bodes very well for them. Now, what you did say very accurately is there's a difference between their spending intentions on a net revenue level compared to AWS, Microsoft. There no one's saying that this is an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to actual revenue. So we have to be very cognizant of that. There is domination (laughs) quite frankly from AWS and from Azure. And Snowflake is a necessary component for them not only to help facilitate a multi-cloud, but look what's happening right now in the US Congress, right? We have these tech leaders being grilled on their actual dominance. And one of the main concerns they have is the amount of data that they're collecting. So I think the environment is right to have another player like this. I think Snowflake really has a lot of longevity and our data is supporting that. And the commentary that we hear from our end users, the people that take the survey are supporting that as well. >> Okay, and then let's stay on this X-Y slide for a moment. I want to just pull out a couple of other comments here, because one of the questions we're asking is Whither, the legacy EDW players. So we've got in here, IBM, Oracle, you can see Teradata and then Hortonworks and MapR. We're going to talk a little bit about Hortonworks 'cause it's now Cloudera. We're going to talk a little bit about Hadoop and some of the data lakes. So you can see there they don't have nearly the net score momentum. Oracle obviously has a huge install base and is investing quite frankly in R&D and do an Exadata and it has its own cloud. So, it's got a lock on it's customers and if it keeps investing and adding value, it's not going away. IBM with Netezza, there's really been some questions around their commitment to that base. And I know that a lot of the folks in the VENNs that we've talked to Erik have said, "Well, we're replacing Netezza." Frank Slootman has been very vocal about going after Teradata. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the Hadoop space. But, can you summarize for us your thoughts in your research and the commentary from your community, what's going on with the legacy guys? Are these guys cooked? Can they hang on? What's your take? >> Sure. We focus on this quite a bit actually. So, I'm going to talk about it from the data perspective first, and then we'll go into some of the commentary and the panel. You even joined one yesterday. You know that it was touched upon. But, first on the data side, what we're noticing and capturing is a widening bifurcation between these cloud native and the legacy on-prem. It is undeniable. There is nothing that you can really refute. The data is concrete and it is getting worse. That gap is getting wider and wider and wider. Now, the one thing I will say is, nobody's going to rip out their legacy applications tomorrow. It takes years and years. So when you look at Teradata, right? Their market cap's only 2 billion, 2.3 billion. How much revenue growth do they need to stay where they are? Not much, right? No one's expecting them to grow 20%, which is what you're seeing on the left side of that screen. So when you look at the legacy versus the cloud native, there is very clear direction of what's happening. The one thing I would note from the data perspective is if you switched from net score or adoptions and you went to flat spending, you suddenly see Oracle and Teradata move over to that left a little bit, because again what I'm trying to say is I don't think they're going to catch up. No, but also don't think they're going away tomorrow. That these have large install bases, they have relationships. Now to kind of get into what you were saying about each particular one, IBM, they shut down Netezza. They shut it down and then they brought it back to life. How does that make you feel if you're the head of data architecture or you're DevOps and you're trying to build an application for a large company? I'm not going back to that. There's absolutely no way. Teradata on the other hand is known to be incredibly stable. They are known to just not fail. If you need to kind of re-architect or you do a migration, they work. Teradata also has a lot of compliance built in. So if you're a financials, if you have a regulated business or industry, there's still some data sets that you're not going to move up to the cloud. Whether it's a PII compliance or financial reasons, some of that stuff is still going to live on-prem. So Teradata is still has a very good niche. And from what we're hearing from our panels, then this is a direct quote if you don't mind me looking off screen for one second. But this is a great one. Basically said, "Teradata is the only one from the legacy camp who is putting up a fight and not giving up." Basically from a CIO perspective, the rest of them aren't an option anymore. But Teradata is still fighting and that's great to hear. They have their own data as a service offering and listen, they're a small market cap compared to these other companies we're talking about. But, to summarize, the data is very clear. There is a widening bifurcation between the two camps. I do not think legacy will catch up. I think all net new workloads are moving to data as a service, moving to cloud native, moving to hosted, but there are still going to be some existing legacy on-prem applications that will be supported with these older databases. And of those, Oracle and Teradata are still viable options. >> I totally agree with you and my colleague David Floyd is actually quite high on Teradata Vantage because he really does believe that a key component, we're going to talk about the TAM in a minute, but a key component of the TAM he believes must include the on-premises workloads. And Frank Slootman has been very clear, "We're not doing on-prem, we're not doing this halfway house." And so that's an opportunity for companies like Teradata, certainly Oracle I would put it in that camp is putting up a fight. Vertica is another one. They're very small, but another one that's sort of battling it out from the old NPP world. But that's great. Let's go into some of the specifics. Let's bring up here some of the specific commentary that we've curated here from the roundtables. I'm going to go through these and then ask you to comment. The first one is just, I mean, people are obviously very excited about Snowflake. It's easy to use, the whole thing zero to Snowflake in 90 minutes, but Snowflake is synonymous with cloud-native data warehousing. There are no equals. We heard that a lot from your VENN panelist. >> We certainly did. There was even more euphoria around Snowflake than I expected when we started hosting these series of data warehousing panels. And this particular gentleman that said that happens to be the global head of data architecture for a fortune 100 financials company. And you mentioned earlier that we did a report alongside Eagle Alpha. And we noticed that among fortune 100 companies that are also using the big three public cloud companies, Snowflake is growing market share faster than anyone else. They are positioned in a way where even if you're aligned with Azure, even if you're aligned with AWS, if you're a large company, they are gaining share right now. So that particular gentleman's comments was very interesting. He also made a comment that said, "Snowflake is the person who championed the idea that data warehousing is not dead yet. Use that old monthly Python line and you're not dead yet." And back in the day where the Hadoop came along and the data lakes turned into a data swamp and everyone said, "We don't need warehousing anymore." Well, that turned out to be a head fake, right? Hadoop was an interesting technology, but it's a complex technology. And it ended up not really working the way people want it. I think Snowflake came in at that point at an opportune time and said, "No, data warehousing isn't dead. We just have to separate the compute from the storage layer and look at what I can do. That increases flexibility, security. It gives you that ability to run across multi-cloud." So honestly the commentary has been nothing but positive. We can get into some of the commentary about people thinking that there's competition catching up to what they do, but there is no doubt that right now Snowflake is the name when it comes to data as a service. >> The other thing we heard a lot was ETL is going to get completely disrupted, you sort of embedded ETL. You heard one panelist say, "Well, it's interesting to see that guys like Informatica are talking about how fast they can run inside a Snowflake." But Snowflake is making that easy. That data prep is sort of part of the package. And so that does not bode well for ETL vendors. >> It does not, right? So ETL is a legacy of on-prem databases and even when Hadoop came along, it still needed that extra layer to kind of work with the data. But this is really, really disrupting them. Now the Snowflake's credit, they partner well. All the ETL players are partnered with Snowflake, they're trying to play nice with them, but the writings on the wall as more and more of this application and workloads move to the cloud, you don't need the ETL layer. Now, obviously that's going to affect their talent and Informatica the most. We had a recent comment that said, this was a CIO who basically said, "The most telling thing about the ETL players right now is every time you speak to them, all they talk about is how they work in a Snowflake architecture." That's their only metric that they talk about right now. And he said, "That's very telling." That he basically used it as it's their existential identity to be part of Snowflake. If they're not, they don't exist anymore. So it was interesting to have sort of a philosophical comment brought up in one of my roundtables. But that's how important playing nice and finding a niche within this new data as a service is for ETL, but to be quite honest, they might be going the same way of, "Okay, let's figure out our niche on these still the on-prem workloads that are still there." I think over time we might see them maybe as an M&A possibility, whether it's Snowflake or one of these new up and comers, kind of bring them in and sort of take some of the technology that's useful and layer it in. But as a large market cap, solo existing niche, I just don't know how long ETL is for this world. >> Now, yeah. I mean, you're right that if it wasn't for the marketing, they're not fighting fashion. But >> No. >> really there're some challenges there. Now, there were some contrarians in the panel and they signaled some potential icebergs ahead. And I guarantee you're going to see this in Snowflake's Red Herring when we actually get it. Like we're going to see all the risks. One of the comments, I'll mention the two and then we can talk about it. "Their engineering advantage will fade over time." Essentially we're saying that people are going to copycat and we've seen that. And the other point is, "Hey, we might see some similar things that happened to Hadoop." The public cloud players giving away these offerings at zero cost. Essentially marginal cost of adding another service is near zero. So the cloud players will use their heft to compete. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, first of all one of the reasons I love doing panels, right? Because we had three gentlemen on this panel that all had nothing but wonderful things to say. But you always get one. And this particular person is a CTO of a well known online public travel agency. We'll put it that way. And he said, "I'm going to be the contrarian here. I have seven different technologies from private companies that do the same thing that I'm evaluating." So that's the pressure from behind, right? The technology, they're going to catch up. Right now Snowflake has the best engineering which interestingly enough they took a lot of that engineering from IBM and Teradata if you actually go back and look at it, which was brought up in our panel as well. He said, "However, the engineering will catch up. They always do." Now from the other side they're getting squeezed because the big cloud players just say, "Hey, we can do this too. I can bundle it with all the other services I'm giving you and I can squeeze your pay. Pretty much give it a waive at the cost." So I do think that there is a very valid concern. When you come out with a $20 billion IPO evaluation, you need to warrant that. And when you see competitive pressures from both sides, from private emerging technologies and from the more dominant public cloud players, you're going to get squeezed there a little bit. And if pricing gets squeezed, it's going to be very, very important for Snowflake to continue to innovate. That comment you brought up about possibly being the next Cloudera was certainly the best sound bite that I got. And I'm going to use it as Clickbait in future articles, because I think everyone who starts looking to buy a Snowflake stock and they see that, they're going to need to take a look. But I would take that with a grain of salt. I don't think that's happening anytime soon, but what that particular CTO was referring to was if you don't innovate, the technology itself will become commoditized. And he believes that this technology will become commoditized. So therefore Snowflake has to continue to innovate. They have to find other layers to bring in. Whether that's through their massive war chest of cash they're about to have and M&A, whether that's them buying analytics company, whether that's them buying an ETL layer, finding a way to provide more value as they move forward is going to be very important for them to justify this valuation going forward. >> And I want to comment on that. The Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapRs, Hadoop, et cetera. I mean, there are dramatic differences obviously. I mean, that whole space was so hard, very difficult to stand up. You needed science project guys and lab coats to do it. It was very services intensive. As well companies like Cloudera had to fund all these open source projects and it really squeezed their R&D. I think Snowflake is much more focused and you mentioned some of the background of their engineers, of course Oracle guys as well. However, you will see Amazon's going to trot out a ton of customers using their RA3 managed storage and their flash. I think it's the DC two piece. They have a ton of action in the marketplace because it's just so easy. It's interesting one of the comments, you asked this yesterday, was with regard to separating compute from storage, which of course it's Snowflakes they basically invented it, it was one of their climbs to fame. The comment was what AWS has done to separate compute from storage for Redshift is largely a bolt on. Which I thought that was an interesting comment. I've had some other comments. My friend George Gilbert said, "Hey, despite claims to the contrary, AWS still hasn't separated storage from compute. What they have is really primitive." We got to dig into that some more, but you're seeing some data points that suggest there's copycatting going on. May not be as functional, but at the same time, Erik, like I was saying good enough is maybe good enough in this space. >> Yeah, and especially with the enterprise, right? You see what Microsoft has done. Their technology is not as good as all the niche players, but it's good enough and I already have a Microsoft license. So, (laughs) you know why am I going to move off of it. But I want to get back to the comment you mentioned too about that particular gentleman who made that comment about RedShift, their separation is really more of a bolt on than a true offering. It's interesting because I know who these people are behind the scenes and he has a very strong relationship with AWS. So it was interesting to me that in the panel yesterday he said he switched from Redshift to Snowflake because of that and some other functionality issues. So there is no doubt from the end users that are buying this. And he's again a fortune 100 financial organization. Not the same one we mentioned. That's a different one. But again, a fortune 100 well known financials organization. He switched from AWS to Snowflake. So there is no doubt that right now they have the technological lead. And when you look at our ETR data platform, we have that adoption reasoning slide that you show. When you look at the number one reason that people are adopting Snowflake is their feature set of technological lead. They have that lead now. They have to maintain it. Now, another thing to bring up on this to think about is when you have large data sets like this, and as we're moving forward, you need to have machine learning capabilities layered into it, right? So they need to make sure that they're playing nicely with that. And now you could go open source with the Apache suite, but Google is doing so well with BigQuery and so well with their machine learning aspects. And although they don't speak enterprise well, they don't sell to the enterprise well, that's changing. I think they're somebody to really keep an eye on because their machine learning capabilities that are layered into the BigQuery are impressive. Now, of course, Microsoft Azure has Databricks. They're layering that in, but this is an area where I think you're going to see maybe what's next. You have to have machine learning capabilities out of the box if you're going to do data as a service. Right now Snowflake doesn't really have that. Some of the other ones do. So I had one of my guest panelist basically say to me, because of that, they ended up going with Google BigQuery because he was able to run a machine learning algorithm within hours of getting set up. Within hours. And he said that that kind of capability out of the box is what people are going to have to use going forward. So that's another thing we should dive into a little bit more. >> Let's get into that right now. Let's bring up the next slide which shows net score. Remember this is spending momentum across the major cloud players and plus Snowflake. So you've got Snowflake on the left, Google, AWS and Microsoft. And it's showing three survey timeframes last October, April 20, which is right in the middle of the pandemic. And then the most recent survey which has just taken place this month in July. And you can see Snowflake very, very high scores. Actually improving from the last October survey. Google, lower net scores, but still very strong. Want to come back to that and pick up on your comments. AWS dipping a little bit. I think what's happening here, we saw this yesterday with AWS's results. 30% growth. Awesome. Slight miss on the revenue side for AWS, but look, I mean massive. And they're so exposed to so many industries. So some of their industries have been pretty hard hit. Microsoft pretty interesting. A little softness there. But one of the things I wanted to pick up on Erik, when you're talking about Google and BigQuery and it's ML out of the box was what we heard from a lot of the VENN participants. There's no question about it that Google technically I would say is one of Snowflake's biggest competitors because it's cloud native. Remember >> Yep. >> AWS did a license one time. License deal with PowerShell and had a sort of refactor the thing to be cloud native. And of course we know what's happening with Microsoft. They basically were on-prem and then they put stuff in the cloud and then all the updates happen in the cloud. And then they pushed to on-prem. But they have that what Frank Slootman calls that halfway house, but BigQuery no question technically is very, very solid. But again, you see Snowflake right now anyway outpacing these guys in terms of momentum. >> Snowflake is out outpacing everyone (laughs) across our entire survey universe. It really is impressive to see. And one of the things that they have going for them is they can connect all three. It's that multi-cloud ability, right? That portability that they bring to you is such an important piece for today's modern CIO as data architects. They don't want vendor lock-in. They are afraid of vendor lock-in. And this ability to make their data portable and to do that with ease and the flexibility that they offer is a huge advantage right now. However, I think you're a hundred percent right. Google has been so focused on the engineering side and never really focusing on the enterprise sales side. That is why they're playing catch up. I think they can catch up. They're bringing in some really important enterprise salespeople with experience. They're starting to learn how to talk to enterprise, how to sell, how to support. And nobody can really doubt their engineering. How many open sources have they given us, right? They invented Kubernetes and the entire container space. No one's really going to compete with them on that side if they learn how to sell it and support it. Yeah, right now they're behind. They're a distant third. Don't get me wrong. From a pure hosted ability, AWS is number one. Microsoft is yours. Sometimes it looks like it's number one, but you have to recognize that a lot of that is because of simply they're hosted 365. It's a SAS app. It's not a true cloud type of infrastructure as a service. But Google is a distant third, but their technology is really, really great. And their ability to catch up is there. And like you said, in the panels we were hearing a lot about their machine learning capability is right out of the box. And that's where this is going. What's the point of having this huge data if you're not going to be supporting it on new application architecture. And all of those applications require machine learning. >> Awesome. So we're. And I totally agree with what you're saying about Google. They just don't have it figured out how to sell the enterprise yet. And a hundred percent AWS has the best cloud. I mean, hands down. But a very, very competitive market as we heard yesterday in front of Congress. Now we're on the point about, can Snowflake compete with the big cloud players? I want to show one more data point. So let's bring up, this is the same chart as we showed before, but it's new adoptions. And this is really telling. >> Yeah. >> You can see Snowflake with 34% in the yellow, new adoptions, down yes from previous surveys, but still significantly higher than the other players. Interesting to see Google showing momentum on new adoptions, AWS down on new adoptions. And again, exposed to a lot of industries that have been hard hit. And Microsoft actually quite low on new adoption. So this is very impressive for Snowflake. And I want to talk about the multi-cloud strategy now Erik. This came up a lot. The VENN participants who are sort of fans of Snowflake said three things: It was really the flexibility, the security which is really interesting to me. And a lot of that had to do with the flexibility. The ability to easily set up roles and not have to waste a lot of time wrangling. And then the third was multi-cloud. And that was really something that came through heavily in the VENN. Didn't it? >> It really did. And again, I think it just comes down to, I don't think you can ever overstate how afraid these guys are of vendor lock-in. They can't have it. They don't want it. And it's best practice to make sure your sensitive information is being kind of spread out a little bit. We all know that people don't trust Bezos. So if you're in certain industries, you're not going to use AWS at all, right? So yeah, this ability to have your data portability through multi-cloud is the number one reason I think people start looking at Snowflake. And to go to your point about the adoptions, it's very telling and it bodes well for them going forward. Most of the things that we're seeing right now are net new workloads. So let's go again back to the legacy side that we were talking about, the Teradatas, IBMs, Oracles. They still have the monolithic applications and the data that needs to support that, right? Like an old ERP type of thing. But anyone who's now building a new application, bringing something new to market, it's all net new workloads. There is no net new workload that is going to go to SAP or IBM. It's not going to happen. The net new workloads are going to the cloud. And that's why when you switch from net score to adoption, you see Snowflake really stand out because this is about new adoption for net new workloads. And that's really where they're driving everything. So I would just say that as this continues, as data as a service continues, I think Snowflake's only going to gain more and more share for all the reasons you stated. Now get back to your comment about security. I was shocked by that. I really was. I did not expect these guys to say, "Oh, no. Snowflake enterprise security not a concern." So two panels ago, a gentleman from a fortune 100 financials said, "Listen, it's very difficult to get us to sign off on something for security. Snowflake is past it, it is enterprise ready, and we are going full steam ahead." Once they got that go ahead, there was no turning back. We gave it to our DevOps guys, we gave it to everyone and said, "Run with it." So, when a company that's big, I believe their fortune rank is 28. (laughs) So when a company that big says, "Yeah, you've got the green light. That we were okay with the internal compliance aspect, we're okay with the security aspect, this gives us multi-cloud portability, this gives us flexibility, ease of use." Honestly there's a really long runway ahead for Snowflake. >> Yeah, so the big question I have around the multi-cloud piece and I totally and I've been on record saying, "Look, if you're going looking for an agnostic multi-cloud, you're probably not going to go with the cloud vendor." (laughs) But I've also said that I think multi-cloud to date anyway has largely been a symptom as opposed to a strategy, but that's changing. But to your point about lock-in and also I think people are maybe looking at doing things across clouds, but I think that certainly it expands Snowflake's TAM and we're going to talk about that because they support multiple clouds and they're going to be the best at that. That's a mandate for them. The question I have is how much of complex joining are you going to be doing across clouds? And is that something that is just going to be too latency intensive? Is that really Snowflake's expertise? You're really trying to build that data layer. You're probably going to maybe use some kind of Postgres database for that. >> Right. >> I don't know. I need to dig into that, but that would be an opportunity from a TAM standpoint. I just don't know how real that is. >> Yeah, unfortunately I'm going to just be honest with this one. I don't think I have great expertise there and I wouldn't want to lead anyone a wrong direction. But from what I've heard from some of my VENN interview subjects, this is happening. So the data portability needs to be agnostic to the cloud. I do think that when you're saying, are there going to be real complex kind of workloads and applications? Yes, the answer is yes. And I think a lot of that has to do with some of the container architecture as well, right? If I can just pull data from one spot, spin it up for as long as I need and then just get rid of that container, that ethereal layer of compute. It doesn't matter where the cloud lies. It really doesn't. I do think that multi-cloud is the way of the future. I know that the container workloads right now in the enterprise are still very small. I've heard people say like, "Yeah, I'm kicking the tires. We got 5%." That's going to grow. And if Snowflake can make themselves an integral part of that, then yes. I think that's one of those things where, I remember the guy said, "Snowflake has to continue to innovate. They have to find a way to grow this TAM." This is an area where they can do so. I think you're right about that, but as far as my expertise, on this one I'm going to be honest with you and say, I don't want to answer incorrectly. So you and I need to dig in a little bit on this one. >> Yeah, as it relates to question four, what's the viability of Snowflake's multi-cloud strategy? I'll say unquestionably supporting multiple clouds, very viable. Whether or not portability across clouds, multi-cloud joins, et cetera, TBD. So we'll keep digging into that. The last thing I want to focus on here is the last question, does Snowflake's TAM justify its $20 billion valuation? And you think about the data pipeline. You go from data acquisition to data prep. I mean, that really is where Snowflake shines. And then of course there's analysis. You've got to bring in EMI or AI and ML tools. That's not Snowflake's strength. And then you're obviously preparing that, serving that up to the business, visualization. So there's potential adjacencies that they could get into that they may or may not decide to. But so we put together this next chart which is kind of the TAM expansion opportunity. And I just want to briefly go through it. We published this stuff so you can go and look at all the fine print, but it's kind of starts with the data lake disruption. You called it data swamp before. The Hadoop no schema on, right? Basically the ROI of Hadoop became reduction of investment as my friend Abby Meadow would say. But so they're kind of disrupting that data lake which really was a failure. And then really going after that enterprise data warehouse which is kind of I have it here as a 10 billion. It's actually bigger than that. It's probably more like a $20 billion market. I'll update this slide. And then really what Snowflake is trying to do is be data as a service. A data layer across data stores, across clouds, really make it easy to ingest and prepare data and then serve the business with insights. And then ultimately this huge TAM around automated decision making, real-time analytics, automated business processes. I mean, that is potentially an enormous market. We got a couple of hundred billion. I mean, just huge. Your thoughts on their TAM? >> I agree. I'm not worried about their TAM and one of the reasons why as I mentioned before, they are coming out with a whole lot of cash. (laughs) This is going to be a red hot IPO. They are going to have a lot of money to spend. And look at their management team. Who is leading the way? A very successful, wise, intelligent, acquisitive type of CEO. I think there is going to be M&A activity, and I believe that M&A activity is going to be 100% for the mindset of growing their TAM. The entire world is moving to data as a service. So let's take as a backdrop. I'm going to go back to the panel we did yesterday. The first question we asked was, there was an understanding or a theory that when the virus pandemic hit, people wouldn't be taking on any sort of net new architecture. They're like, "Okay, I have Teradata, I have IBM. Let's just make sure the lights are on. Let's stick with it." Every single person I've asked, they're just now eight different experts, said to us, "Oh, no. Oh, no, no." There is the virus pandemic, the shift from work from home. Everything we're seeing right now has only accelerated and advanced our data as a service strategy in the cloud. We are building for scale, adopting cloud for data initiatives. So, across the board they have a great backdrop. So that's going to only continue, right? This is very new. We're in the early innings of this. So for their TAM, that's great because that's the core of what they do. Now on top of it you mentioned the type of things about, yeah, right now they don't have great machine learning. That could easily be acquired and built in. Right now they don't have an analytics layer. I for one would love to see these guys talk to Alteryx. Alteryx is red hot. We're seeing great data and great feedback on them. If they could do that business intelligence, that analytics layer on top of it, the entire suite as a service, I mean, come on. (laughs) Their TAM is expanding in my opinion. >> Yeah, your point about their leadership is right on. And I interviewed Frank Slootman right in the heart of the pandemic >> So impressed. >> and he said, "I'm investing in engineering almost sight unseen. More circumspect around sales." But I will caution people. That a lot of people I think see what Slootman did with ServiceNow. And he came into ServiceNow. I have to tell you. It was they didn't have their unit economics right, they didn't have their sales model and marketing model. He cleaned that up. Took it from 120 million to 1.2 billion and really did an amazing job. People are looking for a repeat here. This is a totally different situation. ServiceNow drove a truck through BMCs install base and with IT help desk and then created this brilliant TAM expansion. Let's learn and expand model. This is much different here. And Slootman also told me that he's a situational CEO. He doesn't have a playbook. And so that's what is most impressive and interesting about this. He's now up against the biggest competitors in the world: AWS, Google and Microsoft and dozens of other smaller startups that have raised a lot of money. Look at the company like Yellowbrick. They've raised I don't know $180 million. They've got a great team. Google, IBM, et cetera. So it's going to be really, really fun to watch. I'm super excited, Erik, but I'll tell you the data right now suggest they've got a great tailwind and if they can continue to execute, this is going to be really fun to watch. >> Yeah, certainly. I mean, when you come out and you are as impressive as Snowflake is, you get a target on your back. There's no doubt about it, right? So we said that they basically created the data as a service. That's going to invite competition. There's no doubt about it. And Yellowbrick is one that came up in the panel yesterday about one of our CIOs were doing a proof of concept with them. We had about seven others mentioned as well that are startups that are in this space. However, none of them despite their great valuation and their great funding are going to have the kind of money and the market lead that Slootman is going to have which Snowflake has as this comes out. And what we're seeing in Congress right now with some antitrust scrutiny around the large data that's being collected by AWS as your Google, I'm not going to bet against this guy either. Right now I think he's got a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of additional layers and because he can basically develop this as a suite service, I think there's a lot of great opportunity ahead for this company. >> Yeah, and I guarantee that he understands well that customer acquisition cost and the lifetime value of the customer, the retention rates. Those are all things that he and Mike Scarpelli, his CFO learned at ServiceNow. Not learned, perfected. (Erik laughs) Well Erik, really great conversation, awesome data. It's always a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much, my friend. I really appreciate it. >> I appreciate talking to you too. We'll do it again soon. And stay safe everyone out there. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody this episode of "CUBE Insights" powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by ORACLE Consulting. >> Back to theCUBE everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We've been covering the transformation of ORACLE Consulting, and really it's 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. You know, 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, you know, servicing us for 20 years, and then the cloud needed 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 eCommerce, 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 a new SaaS application, maybe, for maybe a permit 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 it's a 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. People always say, you know, 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, you know, instances dying or things going away too easily. It needs predictable performance, it needs scale, it absolutely needs security, and ultimately, you know, a lot of these applications truly have relied on an ORACLE database. The ORACLE database has its 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 which can service the enterprise. So, our goal, honestly, which is 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. >> My question is why was it important for ORACLE, and is it important for ORACLE and its customers, 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 who, today, 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 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, you know, 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 cost but yet predictable performance IaaS. I'll run my apps 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 menial effort. I want someone to automate patching, scale up and down, and all these types of features like the cloud 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. It's been servicing me 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 it to 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. We're helping customers move to the cloud at scale. We're helping 'em do it at their rate, with whatever level of change they want, and when they are ready for SaaS, we're ready for them. >> And how does autonomous fit into this whole architecture? Thank you, by the way, for that description. I mean, it's nuanced but it's important. I'm sure you're 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. >> 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, right, 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 computant storage. So, why that's important though is that it 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, you know, a machine plus man, kind 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 cost. Our hope and goal is that people 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 (breaks up). >> So, let's talk about the business impact. So, you go into customers, you talk to the cloud architects, the chief technologists, 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 where you guys want to take this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, 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, you know, 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, Dave, are like tier zero, tier one, tier two and, you know, all the way up to DEV and TEST and DR. ORACLE Consulting does really 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 times it's runbooks, right? We actually don't want to just live in our customers' environments. We want to help them understand how to run this new system, so in training and change management, a lot of times ORACLE Consulting is helping with runbooks. 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 'cause 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 confident and skilled 'cause they can do it themselves. >> Well Chris, we've covered the gamut. Loved the conversation. We'll have to leave it right there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Great stuff. >> Absolutely, thanks Dave, and thanks 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 of North America Consulting transformation and its rebirth in this digital event. Keep it right there, we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by ORACLE Consulting. >> Back to theCUBE everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We've been covering the transformation of ORACLE Consulting, and really it's 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. You know, 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, you know, servicing us for 20 years, and then the cloud needed 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 eCommerce, 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 a new SaaS application, maybe, for maybe a permit 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 it's a 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. People always say, you know, 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, you know, instances dying or things going away too easily. It needs predictable performance, it needs scale, it absolutely needs security, and ultimately, you know, a lot of these applications truly have relied on an ORACLE database. The ORACLE database has its 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 which can service the enterprise. So, our goal, honestly, which is 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. >> My question is why was it important for ORACLE, and is it important for ORACLE and its customers, 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 who, today, 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 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, you know, 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 cost but yet predictable performance IaaS. I'll run my apps 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 menial effort. I want someone to automate patching, scale up and down, and all these types of features like the cloud 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. It's been servicing me 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 it to 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. We're helping customers move to the cloud at scale. We're helping 'em do it at their rate, with whatever level of change they want, and when they are ready for SaaS, we're ready for them. >> And how does autonomous fit into this whole architecture? Thank you, by the way, for that description. I mean, it's nuanced but it's important. I'm sure you're 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. >> 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, right, 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 computant storage. So, why that's important though is that it 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, you know, a machine plus man, kind 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 cost. Our hope and goal is that people 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 (breaks up). >> So, let's talk about the business impact. So, you go into customers, you talk to the cloud architects, the chief technologists, 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 where you guys want to take this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, 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, you know, 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, Dave, are like tier zero, tier one, tier two and, you know, all the way up to DEV and TEST and DR. ORACLE Consulting does really 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 times it's runbooks, right? We actually don't want to just live in our customers' environments. We want to help them understand how to run this new system, so in training and change management, a lot of times ORACLE Consulting is helping with runbooks. 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 'cause 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 confident and skilled 'cause they can do it themselves. >> Well Chris, we've covered the gamut. Loved the conversation. We'll have to leave it right there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Great stuff. >> Absolutely, thanks Dave, and thanks 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 of North America Consulting transformation and its rebirth in this digital event. Keep it right there, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's the theCUBE, covering Empowering the Autonomous Enterprise, brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome to this special digital presentation, where we're tracking the rebirth of Oracle Consulting, and my name is Dave Vellante and we're here with Aaron Millstone who's the Senior Vice President of Oracle Consulting. Aaron thanks for coming on good to talk to you. >> Dave, appreciate you having me, and I like the introduction of the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. >> Well it really is. I mean you guys have gone from staff augmentation to being a much more of a strategic partner, and we're going to talk about that, but I want to start with this theme that you have about empowering the autonomous enterprise. Sounds good, you know, nice little marketing tagline, but give us what's behind that, put some meat on the bone. >> Sure, right, so what we define as the autonomous enterprise is really using artificial intelligence, using machine learning and using it to cognitively understand your actual data and process you're using for your enterprise, and then really embedding that into everything you're doing as a company, and using it to do both drive optimization of costs and increasing revenue. And I know that's a lot of kind of consultey speak, so we tend to think about, and we've been talking about in terms of what we call tri-modal IT, and this is probably the most exciting space that I've really thought through with my team as we've built up a new consulting business, you pointed out. But this is really about pivoting away from the systems of record and the systems of interaction, and really building up the systems of intelligence capabilities that we see all enterprises needing to invest in heavily, if they're not already investing there currently. >> Well I want to talk about a couple of things here. One is that notion of lowering cost or increasing revenue, and you're right, people say oh yeah that's consultant speak but a good consultant digs in and starts peeling the onion. Well how do you actually make money? Where are the inefficiencies in your business? And that's really what you're talking about, and that's what every business wants to know, right? That's the end game, but the how-to is really what separates the good consultants from the bad. >> Correct, correct. And again, we're on this journey now. You mentioned it right, I'm two years into Oracle Consulting. Myself, I spent 23 plus years at Accenture, where I was a Managing Director with them, and part of their North American leadership team. When I came over to Oracle Consulting, we did, we pivoted from what you call staff augmentation business to a basic set of offerings which were things that's you'd recognize, right, migration services of workloads to cloud, or integration of security work, or you know, even paths for SaaS augmentation that we would give, but pretty basic services. We're now pivoting again into two areas, infrastructure-led transformation, which is really our bold costs take-out play, as you just said, and sort of good consultants know how to do that. and really what that is, is we're going and looking at companies that still have traditional data centers or maybe they've got some things on clouds and some things still in traditional data centers, and we're coming in and we're saying there's a business case here, that looks at your total cost of ownership, and we think we can take out between 40 and 65% of your run-rate costs, and that's everything from facilities, fire suppression systems, through to the actual compute costs, through to the labor that's required to do the physical or hands-on activities in the data center, right. So we have that sort of capability, and we're pushing customers hard in that space at the moment, and then driving that into a secondary conversation which says and by the way, all these savings, you kind of have two choices, right. You can pocket the savings, obviously, or we would propose that you go into what we're calling the autonomous enterprise phase, and really building up your artificial intelligence machine learning capability with centralized capabilities, centralized data, versus letting every line of business, every department do it on their own. >> So let me ask you, so that makes sense, but why your cloud? You were sort of later entrants into cloud. So where does cloud fit into this? How do you respond when customers say, "Yeah but you guys were late coming to cloud"? >> Yeah we are definitely late coming to cloud. There's no two ways about it. I mean, what we've got is we have what we call a generation two cloud. And I jokingly tell customers that we have a late mover advantage, and that late mover advantage basically means that we've looked at what the first generation clouds have done, and quite frankly they're great at what they do, they're fierce competitors, they're tough to compete with, they've got a lot of mind share, but they fundamentally were about targeting consumers, who are targeting enterprise collaboration tools. So if you want cat videos, if you want to watch humorous videos that people have filmed and posted on social media, those are great clouds for that stuff, but if you want really mission-critical enterprise cloud workloads, that's were we come into play. And so when you start to look at really the key differentiators in our cloud, at least this is how I describe it to our customers right, so we look at sort of three layers. We have an autonomous capability, in both our operating system and our database. What that basically means is that we have machine learning and artificial intelligence that's driving the key administrative activities in our cloud. We then have then our Exadata platform. So Exadata for us is a secret weapon. We think that it is a core differentiator in our products. And so, Exadata, for those watching that don't necessarily know what it is, right, so Exadata emerged out of the Sun acquisition that Oracle did. It is purpose-built hardware that is engineered for our software products, specifically our databases, and now we've taken that concept and moved it into our cloud. And so customers can come in and take very intensive enterprise mission-critical workloads, run them straight in our cloud. And then, when we look at the last point, it's product security, where, again, we have total segmentation of our security layers from the customer workloads, right. So again, we've taken the concepts that first generation cloud providers have implemented, and they've scaled it globally so it's really tough for them to walk back from it, it's a huge investment. And we're, have gone into a generation two cloud and quite frankly, I think this is the frontier that everyone's racing to kind of crack. >> So we've got to wrap, but I wanted to close on sort of the, again we've talked about good consultants and good consultants have continuous improvement mindset. They got a north star that they never really get to and that keeps moving, because you've got to keep innovating, you've got to keep disrupting yourself. So maybe you could end by talking about some of the things you're watching, some of the milestones you want to hit, and some of that transformation that you want to keep going. How are you going to achieve that? >> Yeah we'll get some of it when we hit the Deloitte segment too right, but we're definitely, we've moved from, we've definitely moved from the staff augmentation to basic offerings. We're now beyond that. We're starting to sell the infrastructure-led transformation plays. What's exciting to me about that with our customers is, Oracle's a big complex enterprise, as you'd expect with a company that has a tremendous amount of technology. We're now bringing holistic approaches to our customers, saying "Let us help you optimize everything "and let's look at your data center". Let's not look at a narrow slice, let's not look at sysadmins and DBAs. We're looking at things comprehensively. So moving there has been a pretty big milestone for us to hit. We've started to get some good momentum with our customers. Our next milestone is really going to be taking that autonomous enterprise and blowing it out. We're in use case and incubation period right now with that, but again, we've got some, I would argue we have the best talent in the world right now that thinks about this stuff, and not just thinks about it from a computer technology standpoint, but thinks about how to actually to make it effective for the business. And so once we get some of those motions going, the use case for the autonomous enterprise, that's artificial intelligence driven. It should have a continuous pace of change, and it's going to start to evolve in areas that, quite frankly, we can't even predict yet, but we're excited to see where it leads. >> Well Aaron, thanks for spending some time with us. I am very excited to talk about that sort of collision course between your deep tech capabilities as Oracle as a product company, and the global SI, Deloitte, we're going to bring in those guys in a moment. So thanks very much for taking us through the transformation, and great job, good luck. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> All right, and thank you everybody for watching. Keep it right there, we'll be back with more coverage of Oracle's transformation right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. (gentle electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Everybody, welcome to this special digital presentation where we're tracking the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. And my name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Aaron Millstone who's the senior vice president of Oracle Consulting. Aaron, thanks for coming on, good to talk to you. >> Dave, appreciate you having me and I like the introduction of a rebirth of Oracle Consulting. >> Well, it really is I mean, you know, you guys have gone from staff augmentation to being much more of a strategic partner and we're going to talk about that. But I want to start with this theme that you have about empowering the autonomous enterprise. Sounds good, you know, nice little marketing tagline. But give us what's behind that, put some meat on the bone? >> Sure, so you know, what we define as autonomous enterprise is really using artificial intelligence, using machine learning and using it to cognitively understand your actual data and processes you're using for your enterprise. And then really embedding that into everything you're doing as a company, and using it to be both drive optimization and costs, and increasing revenue. And I know that's a lot of kind of consulting speak. So, we tend to think about what we've been talking about in terms of what we call tri-modal IT. This is probably the most exciting space that I've really thought through with my team, as we build up a new consulting business, you pull it out, but this is really about pivoting away from the systems of record and the systems of interaction, and really building up the systems of intelligence capabilities that we see all enterprises needing to invest in heavily, if they're not already investing there already. >> Well, I want to talk about a couple of things there. You know, one is that notion of lowering cost or increasing revenue and you're right people say, Oh, yeah, that's consultancy people, but a good consultant digs in and starts peeling the onion. Well, how do you actually make money? You know, where are the inefficiencies in your business? And that's really what you're talking about, and that's what every business wants to know, right? That's the end game, but the how to is really what separates the good consultants from the pack. >> Right right. And we're, you know, again, we're on this journey now, we've been, you mentioned it right. I'm two years into Oracle Consulting. Myself, I spent 23 plus years at Accenture, where I was a managing director with them and part of their North American leadership team. When I came over to Oracle consulting we did, we pivoted from what you called staff augmentation business to a basic set of offerings, which were things that you recognize right migration, services of workloads to cloud or integration or security work or even, step paths for SAS augmentation that we would do, but you know, pretty basic services. We're now pivoting again into sort of two areas infrastructure and transformation, which is really our bold costs take out play, as you just said, and sort of good consultants know how to do that. And really what that is, is we're going and looking at companies that still have traditional data centers, or maybe they've got some things on clouds, and something's still in traditional data centers. And we're coming in, and we're saying there's a business case here, that looks at your total cost of ownership. And we think we can take out between 40 and 65% of your run rate costs, and that's everything from, facilities, fire suppression systems, through to the actual compute cost, through to the labor that's required to do the physical hands on activities in the data center. So, we have that sort of capability and we're pushing customers hard in that space at the moment, and then driving that into a secondary conversation system and by the way, with all these savings, you kind of have to choices. You can pocket the savings, obviously or we would propose that you go into what we're calling the autonomous enterprise space, and really building up your artificial intelligence machine learning capability with centralized capabilities, centralized data, versus letting every line of business, every department do it on their own. >> Now, the other thing a good consultant does is they make the initiative self funding, and that's a win win you keep getting paid, the customer makes money, that's a good thing. But I like the idea, you're starting with the obvious business case of cost, and I think I heard you really attacking OPPEX, labor is obviously big component of that, but it's not just labor, and then you transition if they don't pocket the gain to a gain sharing going forward to look for new revenue. Did I get that I get that right? >> Yeah, you actually got that right. And actually, what I'll tell you too, is I think the labor piece, again, you know, I came from Accenture, Accenture is big outsourcing company, big technology consulting, big strategy consulting. You know, I went in for years and did pitches on outsourcing arrangements which were fundamentally lower cost bodies running in a more effective way. What we're finding or what I'm finding with customer conversations over the last two years at Oracle has been actually I think, data centers are not, there's nothing competitively advantageous about having a data center if you're a company, there is a lot of advantageous. There's an advantage to having cloud and what we're seeing is that companies that might have outsourced their data center are just the lowest cost provider are now considering insourcing or co-sourcing as they pivot the cloud. So the funny thing is actually labor savings is not the big driver of that 40 to 65%, that plays a role of course, that's how you get to the 65%. But even go into the 40% you can get there by insourcing your labor and bringing them in house and recognizing that the speed at which you can operate on your cloud gives you a competitive advantage. >> So this requires a whole new skill set for Oracle, you mentioned, you came in from Accenture where I talked to another number of other folks in Oracle's North America Consulting Operation that came from, brand name firms, we're going to be talking to Deloitte we have and will continue. So there I know, a big part of you talk about the skills transformation that you've affected inside of Oracle Consulting. >> Sure, yeah I mean, it started when I showed up. It was primarily a staff augmentation business in our commercial space in particular, you know, if you need a DBA, here's a DBA. If you need a SAS admin, here's a SAS admin. Here's the hourly rates and quite frankly, very, very talented group of people, very talented, but focused on doing, you know, sort of nuts and bolts level work, very deep work on the Oracle technology stack, but also weren't particularly cloud certified. So we started by focusing on getting the team certified in our cloud products, invested a ton of hours, thousands and thousands of hours in training. It takes you know, we're doing something like six months investment initially to get people up and certified on multiple cloud products that Oracle is selling. And then right from there, we started putting together our basic offerings, again moved from staff augmentation to saying, look, would you like to move a workload. To move a workload is going to cost a fixed price, whatever that is 100, $200,000 move away from rate card conversations with augmentation. And we shifted the commercial contracts that had payments based on outcomes so they don't move successfully, there's no payment. And so you know that was really the focus. >> I'm going to come back to this notion of gain sharing and particularly focus on the revenue side for a moment. You mentioned a what I'll call a buzzword tri-modal IT and a buzzword because Gartner kind of with bimodal IT popularized that concept. And I think part of the problem that people had with bimodal IT was kind of had the legacy systems of record and then you had all the new cool stuff, the big data and you know now AI and systems of engagement and so forth. And everybody wanted to go to the ladder and run away from the former. But now, if I understand tri-model IT, you're talking about bringing machine intelligence to both of those spheres such that people can stay current, stay relevant and add new value to their organization. >> Yeah, that's exactly it. And we're trying to bring it to both but we're trying to make it its own sphere, independent of the other two. So, again, as we looked at this consulting evolution, I didn't come over to Oracle and Oracle is not interested in us, creating a consulting business, that's a me too consulting business that kind of looks like whatever everyone else is doing. So the goal really was okay. So if we started with sort of staff augmentation, and you know, really Oracle's legacy, a system of record stuff, we sell big back office systems, we have mission critical databases. Like it's the clunky stuff that has to work, but really at the end of the day, that's our heritage, going over to the systems of interaction which is, where the bimodal IT really came in from Gartner. That's a pretty saturated place, so again, coming from the background, I had a consulting, I looked at all the eight design agencies that were out there that were all selling digital, and we looked at the digital sales tactics going on, we're like, well, that's pretty saturated, it's not really a smart place for us to go make a lot of headway into. And so we looked and said, well really, the next layer, the next evolution of IT is this third sphere systems of intelligence. And really, since Oracle is, our heritage is mission critical and data, fundamentally, the logical step for us was to go okay, systems intelligence are powered by data, and they serve artificial intelligence as the primary consumer. So again, our thought process was you have a system of record which is process centric and really geared towards the CFO or a head of HR, you have systems of interaction, which is really geared towards the users, it's trying to make business frictionless. Those users can be consumers, they can be employees, whomever. And then systems intelligence is around artificial intelligence is the primary consumer of it. I mean really pivoting to that, and then making that something that is pervasive and structurally place across both those other two spheres, really felt like where we should be differentiating. When I brought in the talent rate that we looked to bring in, we were getting kind of affirmation that, yeah, the best talent in the market was starting to see this trend and so we kind of knew we were onto something there. >> Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense, because as you as you point out, some of those new workloads, many of them are very consumer oriented, that's kind of you know, not your wheelhouse. I mean, that's your customers are, selling to consumers, but Oracle's B2B, hardcore data mission critical. But let me ask you, to that make sets, but by your cloud, you were sort of a later entrant into cloud. So where does cloud fit into this? How do you respond to when customers say, yeah, but you know, you guys were late on the cloud. >> Yeah, we are definitely late coming to cloud, like there's no two ways about it. I mean, what we've got is we have what we call a Generation 2 Cloud. And I jokingly tell customers that we have a late mover advantage. And that late mover advantage basically means that we've looked at what the first generation clouds have done. And quite frankly, they're great at what they do, they're fierce competitors, they're tough to compete with, they've got a lot of mindshare, but they fundamentally were about targeting consumers, or targeting enterprise collaboration tools, so if you want cat videos, if you want to watch humorous videos that people filmed and posted on social media, those are great clouds for that stuff. But if you want really mission critical enterprise cloud workloads, that's where we come into play. And so when you start to look at really the key differentiators in our cloud and through out, at least this is how I describe it to customers. So, we look at sort of three layers, we have an autonomous capability both on our operating system and our database. What that basically means is that we have machine learning and artificial intelligence that's driving the key, administrative activities in our cloud, we then have our Exadata platform. So Exadata for us is a secret weapon, we think that it is a differentiator in our products. And so, Exadata for those watching that doesn't know what it is, so Exadata emerged out of the Sun acquisition that Oracle did. It is purpose built hardware that is engineered for our software products, specifically our databases. And now we've taken that concept and moved it into our cloud and so customers can come in and take very intensive enterprise, mission critical workloads, run them straight in our cloud. And then, when we look at the last point, it's probably security where, again, we have total segmentation of our security layers from the customer workloads. So again, we've taken the concepts that first generation cloud providers have implemented, and they've scaled it globally. So it's really tough for them to walk back on it, it's a huge investment and we're now gone into a Generation 2 Cloud and quite frankly, I think that's what this is the frontier that everyone's racing to kind of grab. >> You know, we actually in our community, talk to a lot of Exadata customers and they get very intense, they do some really hardcore things with with Exadata. To me, the key to your cloud strategy, and specifically Exadata is you've got the same exact infrastructure, control plane, data plane, software, either on prem or in the cloud. So that's your same same narrative. But the real key, new key anyway is what autonomous, tell me if you agree with this. What autonomous gives you a scale, because as you say, you're related to cloud, you're not a hyper scalar in that sense, you're not selling just, race to the bottom infrastructure as a service. You're bringing applications and mission critical applications, so eponymous gives you the ability to scale and compete more effectively with some of those other, earlier movers. You buy that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So scaling and scaling in terms of, what has been historically human activities, when I say human activities, we're not replacing the humans, we're making some of the human activities that were highly repetitive way more efficient. So easy example I can give you is patching. Like security(mumbles) bases are very time consuming, I've talked to customers as recently as a couple weeks ago, that are three years behind on their patching. And when I look at that, it's you're like, why wouldn't you consider autonomous, they have their board of directors and their auditors are actually now demanding that they do something different about their patching problems. And they're talking about, man months, people months of trying to roll out this patching, and they're worried about breaking stuff, and they're worried about human error. Like when you look at something like autonomous, that patching would take place, pretty much instantaneous with no downtime. And we've seen it in our own cloud and our own services internally and we're able to patch, thousands and thousands of cores very, very quickly. >> So we got to wrap but I wanted to close on sort of the, I mean, again, we talked about good consultants and good consultants have continuous improvement mindset. They got a North star that they really never get through and that keeps moving because you got to keep innovating, you got to keep disrupting yourself, so maybe you could end by sort of talking about some of the things you're watching, some of the milestones you want to hit and some of that transformation that you want to keep going. How are you going to achieve that? >> Yeah, and it will skip some of it, when we hit the Deloitte segment too, but like we're definitely we've moved from, we've definitely move from the staff augmentation to basic offerings. We're now beyond that we're starting to sell the infrastructure lead transformation plays. What's exciting to me about that with our customers is, you know, Oracle's a big complex enterprise, as you'd expect with a company that has a tremendous amount of technology. We're now bringing holistic approaches to our customer say, let us help you optimize everything end to end, let's look at your data center, let's not look at a narrow slice, let's not look at just SAS admins and DBAs, we're looking at things comprehensively. So moving there has been a pretty big milestone for us to hit, we've started to get some good momentum with our customers. Our next milestone is really going to be taking that autonomous enterprise and blowing it out. We're in use case and incubation period right now with that, but again we've got some, I would argue we have the best talent in the world right now that thinks about this stuff and not just thinks about it from a pure technology standpoint, but thinks about how to actually make it effective for the business. And so once we get some of those motions going, like the use case for the autonomous enterprise that's artificial intelligence driven, it should have a continuous pace of change, and it's going to start to evolve in areas that you know, quite frankly, we can't even predict yet. But we're excited to see where it leads. >> Alright, thanks for spending some time with us. I am very excited to talk about that sort of collision course between your deep tech capabilities as Oracle as a product company and this, the Global SI, Deloitte, we're going to bring in those guys in a moment. So thanks very much for taking us through the transformation and great job, good luck. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> All right, and thank you, everybody for watching. Keep right there, we'll be back with more coverage of Oracle's transformation. Right after the short break, you're watching the CUBE. (upbeat music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this edition of the cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we're going to look at IBM's systems business and specifically the IBM system z and talk about the impact that it's going to have on IBM financials now Alex if you would kindly bring up the first slide so this is data from ETRS spending intention survey for the second half of 2019 they asked customers compared to the first half of 2019 what are you spending intentions on the second half of 2019 specifically for IBM so you can see the end here is 448 customers out of their panel of 45 hundred of which around 11 or 1,200 answered this question specifically cited that they were IBM customers what this data shows is 21% of the customer said we're gonna increase spend in the second half relative to the first half with IBM 52% said we're gonna stay flat 14% said they're gonna decrease you see 6% said we're gonna basically leave the IBM platform and 7% said we're gonna bring on IBM as new we're a new customer so if you take the people that are spending more and new and subtract out the leaving and the spending less you get a net score and you get a net score of 8% now we've been sharing with you this ETR data over the last several weeks and months 8% is not great IBM according to et are spending surveys are losing share relative to the overall market you know we've covered this pretty extensively we covered the red hat acquisition and talked about how that IBM intends to supercharge its its cloud business you know specifically with red hat I've said I've been on record saying this is largely a services play where they're gonna basically take red hat app as an application development platform and help there customers are modernize their systems from using their large services footprint to do that but so and I want to talk for a moment about the IBM business overall iBM is all about mission-critical work the IBM's II their high-end systems they're related database it's all about mission-critical work IBM shared some data with analysts recently where they talked about if you if you look at IBM Z by VM security business its database you know particularly db2 it's middleware it's application management services and its infrastructure and all that set a consulting work that goes around that add that up it accounts for 60% of IBM's revenue so this is why I want to spend some time talking about IBM Z I mean it's a kind of a boring but important topic it used to be the heart of IBM's business that used to drive you know entirely their their income statement but in fact today it's still very critical all those pieces that I mentioned account for 60% of that business so Z is critical for driving IBM's systems business and that gives air cover for IBM's business overall so Alex if you bring up the next slide what I've done is just pulled out some quarterly data of IBM's system's revenue overall and then juxtapose it against IBM's Z revenue this is growth this is just percent growth so the blue is IBM Z percent revenue growth relative to the previous year this is in constant currency by the way and as well it excludes the elimination of IBM's systems X business the Intel based business so it's normalized for that and then the orange is the overall systems growth so you can see that the blue grows virtually immediately after IBM announces a new system so for instance in January of 2013 IBM announced the z13 we were there with the cube to cover it we talked to a number of practitioners what big banks and big mainframe customers do and by the way 25 of the world's top 25 banks run on Z a huge proportion of retail giant's run on Z why because it is the system of record and the the top system of record along with Oracle in the world I'll talk more about that but you can see here Z 13 so we talk to a lot of practitioners at the January launch and they told me they buy this thing sight unseen because they know it's gonna drive revenue for them if they can get more power and more performance lower cost it drops right to their bottom line so you can see 2016 even though there was a kicker in there of the you know next generation not next generation but a kicker to the Z I didn't show it here but bad year in 2016 in terms of growth and you can see the blue is proportional to the orange it drags it down in here Z 14 is announced and you can see when the Z 14 was announced in July of 2017 just right after that boom big uptick in Z revenue and proportional systems revenue so you're on this sort of two-year cycle of Z announcements and you can see 2019 in the first half has not been great IBM just announced the Z 15 in September so we fully expect that in q4 you're gonna see that uptick so kinda wanted to share that with you next slide I want to make a couple of points about IBM systems business it's about an eight billion dollar business overall in terms of annual revenue it comprises Z power and storage says they say system Z drags a lot of software it drags a storage it drags services it's about a fifty three percent gross margin business the storage business is actually I think a quite a good gross margin business I think probably you know higher than power the server business is not you know the greatest gross margin I think mainframe is still pretty good IBM and Oracle dominate the business for systems of record Oracle with exadata and IBM with with Z now you might say hey Exadata is is growing and Z you know it's it's I just showed you this sort of fluctuation but overall it's sort of you know flattish maybe it can eke out a you know growth and it actually can show good growth in one year but if you normalize it over a couple of years it's pretty much a flat business or declining business so you might say well Oracle X is growing but that's because Oracle is replacing its entire hardware business and much of its you know related software business with Exadata all that would behind one arrow where as you know IBM has a more diversified portfolio and so that's kind of apples to oranges comparisons now the ETR data shows that the storage intention intentions for the second half of 2019 really flipped to positive territory servers were still negative but improving and so as I showed you in the previous slide I definitely would expect the system's business to have an uptick in q4 and and it's dragging storage with it IBM synchronized the the storage announcement the DSA thousand without not great with model numbers but the recent storage announcement with the mainframe announcement I'll make some more comments about that but you see it seems that IBM's trying to do a better job of synchronizing that iBM is also going to smooth out it's it's it's systems revenue I believe I mean it's right now it's very cyclical but I'll make some comments about that in a moment so IBM System z and Exadata are unique in that their IO is tightly integrated these are purpose-built systems and and the storage is in the IO or purpose-built for the systems of record so they're very very low latency give an example Oracle Exadata recent announcements at Oracle OpenWorld I think 18 microseconds latency IBM with its recent Z announcement I think is even lower I want to say 15 microseconds but don't hold me to that where is it if you compare that to traditional systems you're talking about maybe 200 microseconds in other words those systems that aren't purpose-built for systems of record with integrated i/o the i/o is hardwired with custom silicon and a-sixes so it's ultra ultra fast i/o which means you can push ten times the i/o through the system so very very high performance relative to what you saw in you know kind of previous generations why do I spend so much time talking about this because this is a harbinger for future systems developments talking you know within two to three years you're gonna see the mainstream systems with this type of low latency so you know you might also say well that means that the IBM and the X data business are in big trouble no these are these systems are not going to be replaced and not going to be migrated it's too risky it's too expensive we've talked about that a lot on the cube where it just doesn't make business sense for people to convert off the Z mainframe there's too much custom code they'd have to freeze that code for many many months maybe even longer they'd risk their business they can make much more money purchasing the next generation of system as long as the Z mainframe continues to add function which it's doing same thing with Oracle Exadata years ago IBM you know announced support for Linux obviously you know Red Hat is you know now another key piece of that they just in recent z15 announcement encryption everywhere they announced you know a hybrid cloud so basically bringing the Z to cloud a really strong security focus this cloud piece is interesting you know we talk a lot about cloud 2.0 bringing the Z in to this in the systems of record - cloud is something that IBM has said that it intends specifically to do that will begin to potentially smooth out I beams Z revenue you know it's ironic in the little in the late latter part of the 1980s kind of a financial game that IBM was playing they converted their rental base which was a monthly income stream to purchase when they did that it created the effect of showing up on the income statement and kind of hiding the trouble that IBM was really in when that transition ended IBM really tanked and that's when IBM got into big trouble the whole downsizing trend Gerstner came in they bought PwC and really transformed the company but the Z as the system of record or the old 3090 has has has lived on now we're seeing that dynamic come full circle where over time IBM can shift from a from a an upfront pay to a subscription which is as I say coming full circle it's gonna be interesting to see how that transition works the other point again the storage seems to be synchronizing its product cycles with Z at least at the high end and so this is likely to carry through to q4 we see from the ETR spending data that storage intentions are up I think the net score was was up 5% versus a negative from the previous quarter servers overall we're still down they don't have a question specific to Z but I would expect fully expected that q forward this year you're going to see a nice uptick in Z revenue and as it pointed out before with that 60% number this is going to provide another halo effect for ibm's overall business will it be enough to propel the stock you know probably not this stuff is factored in the the analysts understand these product cycles but it's something that I wanted to shine a light on because again it's it's one of these sort of important topics that not a lot of people talk about people kind of roll your eyes when you talk about the mainframe but the mainframe is here it's alive and well and you know what I call mainframe Oracle Exadata and IBM Z are really sort of the two companies that are prominent in that space and you know well they might compete to my earlier point you're really talking about each company having its own install base and as long as they keep investing in R&D and keep those product cycles coming I would expect that this business is gonna be healthy yet cyclical cyclical for a long long time this is Dave Volante for the cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time thanks for watching

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this special edition of cube insights powered by ETR this is Dave Volante and we've been running these breaking analysis segments and it's timely because oracle last night announced earnings ahead of expectations they were expected to announce today a Friday but they announced early ostensibly because Co CEO Mark Hurd is taking a leave of absence for medical reasons so of course we we wish him the best hope everything's okay with him but but but that looks like they pre announced or announced ahead of schedule in order to get that out of the way and prepare for Oracle OpenWorld Larry Ellison and Safra Catz are going to be filling in during mark heards absence but so this is a breaking analysis on Oracle's earnings I would call this you know can expect more of the same so Alex if you kind of bring up the financial overview of Oracle we'll dig into it a little bit so Oracle is a company with around 40 billion dollars in annual revenue it's growing it you know single digit growth maybe you know 1% of the top line last quarter they've got a large market cap 187 billion dollars so they consistently trade in the four and a half to 5x revenue range and they've got an outstanding margin of operating margin of 42% is very high you know their software company and very very profitable software company that is a non-gaap margin their free cash flow is also very strong they throw off about 14 12 to 14 billion dollars annually in a trailing 12-month basis in free cash flow and the other thing about Oracle I made this point many many times in the cube is Oracle spends money on R&D they spend about fifteen percent of revenue on on R&D they've got a lot of cash they got you know over thirty five thirty six billion dollars in cash and short-term investments but they of course also have a some long term debt over 50 well over fifty billion dollars in long-term debt now that doesn't bother me some people point to that as a concern but if you look at Oracle's EBIT it's many many times greater than its interest payments I think you know 3x is kind of the benchmark they're an Oracle you know whose well well over that de miel 6 7x be bit relative to its interest payment so that's really not a concern of mine but definitely is interest on the debt is oftentimes its tax deductible and so it can be a good source of capital it's cheap cheap debt and of course Oracle's got to compete with some of the cloud suppliers building out more data centers they just had an announcement in that in that regard and so it needs capital even though it you know it can't spend nearly as much as Amazon Google and Microsoft not even close it would take Oracle years and years and years to spend what what Google does in four months but but nonetheless they need cash to compete in their business Oracle's got a shifting business mix from kind of lower margin hardware you know the remnants of the Sun business and and really shifting to a higher margin cloud services and support Oracle has really gone all-in on on cloud again even though it's really it's cloud is not competitive with the hyper scalars but it's sort of the Oracle cloud the redstack cloud but in that that business is growing it's around growing at around 4% from a constant currency standpoint this past quarter it's shifting Oracle's shifting toward an annual recurring revenue model and it's license business is declining and so you saw that last quarter declined around 6% and you're seeing a major shift from on-prem to cloud with Oracle ERP cloud ERP is where the action is for Oracle and I'll show you some data on that from from ETR it's really fusion fusion ERP and NetSuite they're growing it you know combined well over 30 percent last quarter and as I say they get the news here is Mark Hurd is going on a leave of absence we got Oracle OpenWorld coming up next week and you know they're going to be talking about what we call cloud 2.0 Larry Ellison I'm sure is gonna be talking about autonomous database there's gonna be I'm sure some Exadata announcements and I'll talk a little bit more about why that's important now I want to share with you some spending intentions from ETR we've been last couple of months we've been sharing enterprise technology research data we've partnered with them to do these breaking analysis and these cube insights ETR has a panel of about 4,500 CIOs IT practitioners and they go out quarterly and do spending intention surveys and I'm showing you data now from the july 2019 survey focused on spending intention intentions for the second half of 2019 you can see the number of survey respondents was 1068 out of that 4,500 panel what this slide shows is if you look in the left-hand side you can see the the the products or the categories of spend so there's on the reading top to bottom fusion Oracle Fusion NetSuite Oracle overall and an Oracle on Prem so these are the categories some of the categories that ETR captures and what we're showing here is is the calculation of net score and I'll share with you how net score is is calculated so if you look on the left hand side you'll see the dark red that is we're leaving the platform the light red is we're gonna spend less the gray is spending as flat the dark green is we're gonna spend more and the lime green is we're adding the platform so if you take the green minus the red you get net score so let's look down as I said fusion and NetSuite are where the action is for Oracle you see the net score here is 14% for fusion 12% for NetSuite Oracle itself is 7% and Oracle on-premise minus 4 these are not great scores we shared with you just recently snowflake and its net score snowflakes and net scores you know 81 percent we shared with you some data are around UI path that's also 80 percent plus net score these are much smaller companies but they're growing very very fast and I'll share some other scores from Oracle competitors in just a moment I also want to point out the shared accounts what the shared accounts are is the number of mentions that these platforms received in within that n of 1068 so you can see the fusion and NetSuite in a relatively small at 80 and 87 but still statistically significant Oracle itself very very large you know huge install base 1329 and then Oracle on Prem at 282 so there you have it I mean this is not barn burning this to me underscores that Oracle is losing share and now and I'll show you that in context in this next slide so again same kind of format with the the net score calculation but what I've done is compared Oracle to service now workday salesforce an SI p now look at service now service now is a net score 53% with a number of shared accounts of 358 so a very large sample inside of that 10 sec 1068 I'll show you some time series at a moment service now obviously very strong company they get a valuation now that's up actually higher than workday believe or not we've talked a lot about the the CEO transition and on and on and on and we've covered the service now shows for many years but some very strong very strong install both growing their Tam it's a into new markets and so you can see their and their workday as well extremely strong now Oracle will often you know give examples of how its beating workday I think in the earnings call yesterday Ellison talked about how they beat you know workday at McDonald's you know when you peel the onion and those things oftentimes it's one division or but who knows you know it's very possible that that you know Oracle swept the floor of workday but but regardless workday is growing much much faster than Oracle it's taking share from Oracle despite you know the examples that Oracle gives Salesforce as well same with Salesforce it's growing much much faster than Oracle if you look at ServiceNow workday and Salesforce even s ap look at sa pees net score 31% which frankly we consider neutral and it's not like sa pees you know burning the bar and I they're but much much stronger than Oracle 7% net score so again I say it's some sort of more of the same Oracle its earnings are kind of mad I mean it's throws off great cashflow it's got great earnings but there's no growth there and and as a result you know people are down in the stock a little bit today and that combined with the herd news and then the stock should be down based on the earnings announcements a little bit of a disappointment or of course Oracle focus is on on the profit and today people are rewarding growth that may change and I'll talk more about that in a moment but before I do that I want to show you a time series so this is the same competitor service network day sales force s AP and Oracle all the way back to January 2017 the January 2017 survey so you can see that ETR takes these surveys in January April July and October they're just now running the the October survey so we'll have some you know up-to-date results there but you can see the net score is what I just showed you 53% 52% 44% for those leaders those growth leaders very very strong these are the share gainers s ap holding at 31% you can see Oracle down in the single digits each of these companies is actually kind of holding serve if you will but again ServiceNow workday Salesforce growing much much faster than the market growing much much faster than that Oracle so let me summarize look so again mark hard leaving a leave of absence for medical reasons Ellison Larry Ellison and Safra Catz are filling in for heard I'm sure you're gonna hear some more talk about that at Oracle OpenWorld this week Oracle's losing share in the enterprise software space despite what they tell you that's the fact they are a company around around cash flow EPS and stock buybacks that's how they're keeping the stock up it's an effective technique everybody does it Oracle make stuck in acquisitions here and there I've been very aggressive over the years and it's going hard after cloud it's an Oracle cloud it's it's it really is around their database which the Oracle remains the leader for mission-critical Database Oracle has the best database for mission-critical but it's under attack in all those non mission-critical areas with whether it's Mongo we showed you the snowflake data the other day I mean there's this dozens and dozens of database competitors that are going after Oracle at in the periphery but they remain the core leader in mission-critical database fighting it out with with with Microsoft and IBM and and others but Oracle is by far and away the leader their exadata is the key to Oracle's lock spec in our opinion because Oracle's got a fight for you know for straight database they've got to fight all these other database competitors once a once a customer decides on Exadata Oracle's Gotham and so that's why Oracle is putting so much effort into exadata I'm sure at Oracle OpenWorld this week you're gonna hear a lot about exadata and autonomous and all kinds of stuff that they're doing at exadata and try to make it a an increasingly competitive platform Orgel also has a very strong apps business and that's really the linchpin to its it's cloud its cloud in our view is not even closely competitive with with the cloud infrastructure at Amazon Google and Microsoft and those companies spend much much more on capex they have you know a much greater infrastructure as a service Microsoft's in Microsoft's case got very strong software estate at applications business Google a massive scale so from a just a cloud infrastructure standpoint you know really Oracle is is playing catch-up just like IBM is and probably will never catch up or go over all again it's sort of a story of man more the same until the market sentiment shifts toward cash flow and earnings its stock is in my view is gonna trade inside a range I'm not a stock picker I don't make stock recommendations but I'm you know kind of a fundamental analysis and observer you know I just don't see that that stock breaking out there's really no growth story there and the markets rewarding growth now if and when the market does turn down let's say there's a recession people will reward companies like Oracle you have the cash who can you know do the buybacks or companies that pay dividends and so Oracle holding serve making a lot of right moves you know Larry Ellison is you know leading the ship obviously a very smart person don't bet against that individual fact is they're losing share but at the same time they're running a playbook that's working and it's working from the standpoint of EPs and cashflow and I think that story is going to continue so they have it that's our analysis thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time this is Dave wante with cube insights powered by ETR