>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live here, day three of three days of coverage of theCUBE at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Paul Gillin and special guest on our day-three opening, Peter Burris, head of research of SiliconANGLE Media, general manager of wikibon.com research. Guys, good to see you on day three. We're goin' strong. I mean, I think I feel great, a lot of activity. So many story lines to talk about. Obviously the big one is the combination, not merger, I slipped yesterday, or acquisition, the combination of equals, Dell, EMC. Some will question did EMC acquire Dell or Dell acquire EMC? Certainly Michael Dell's still captain of the ship. But that's the top story. But a lot of product line conversations. Not a lot of overlap. Peter, you've been at all the analyst sessions. We had David Furrier on yesterday, teasing it up, but I'd like to get you, your perspective and reaction to your thoughts as you look at the giants in the industry. Michael Dell bought EMC for a record 60 billion plus. You've been around the block. You've seen many waves. You've analyzed many generations of the computer industry. What does this actually mean. Where are they, what's your thoughts and reaction? >> So John, I'll give you three different story lines here, right? The meta-picture, the good, and the what the hell's goin' on kind of picture. The first one, the meta-picture is, and SiliconANGLE said this, it was a really well written article, you might have even written it Paul, that there has never really been a successful mega-merger in the tech industry. And historically I think that's because, well here's the bottom line. This one may actually work. And it may actually work nicely. And the reason is is that most of the other mergers or combinations were companies with problems and companies that didn't have problems. Or companies with problems and companies with problems. And if you take a look at Dell and EMC, neither of them had problems. They weren't buying each other's problems. It was a nice combination and complimentary in that EMC had a great consumer business, great channel business, and had a pretty strong financial position. And EMC had a great enterprise business, great, you know-- >> Sales organizations. >> Great sales organization. And they had, they were strong in where the industry's going around how do you handle data and how do you handle storage. So it's got, what we're seeing here is everybody singing out of the same hymnal. I'm not seeing any tension. And that is an indication that this one may actually go well. I think it's a very, very good early sign. >> Paul, you and I were talking on the day one open and also, we kind of hit it a little bit yesterday with David Furrier, talking about this mega-merger. Compare and contrast that to HBE, which is been kind of, being de-positioned by some of the Dell executives. They don't actually call 'em out by name, but HP Enterprise is taking a different approach. They're taking a, you know, smaller is better approach. Obviously, Michael Dell has a complete different philosophy. We're still going to analyze that as well. We've got HPE Discover coming up as well. Thoughts on the compare and contrast, guys, reaction to the strategies of HPE, smaller, faster, as they say. Or Dell, bigger, more powerful. >> I think both are viable strategies. It's just a matter of if they can pull it off. I mean, HP, you talk about bad mergers, Peter, I mean you think of HP Compact, HP Autonomy, this is a company that has had a terrible track record of big mergers. Although they've had some successful ones certainly. >> By the Meg Whitman inherited those. >> Yes. >> Prior to Meg Whitman coming on board. >> Oh she was a board member for some of them. >> Okay, so she was at the table. Now, we don't know, okay but your thoughts, continue. >> But Dell, clearly going the other direction. They, I mean, they're building sort of an IBM-like model, the way IBM was in the '80s when it dominated every market that it played in. And it played at even more markets than Dell does now. So I think that the model makes sense. I think Peter's absolutely right, I'm not sensing any tension at this conference. There seems to be, the most important thing is there seems to be a lot of communication going on. The executives are spending a lot of time with each other and they're talking a lot to the people. And when you look back, and I live, and Peter, you remember the DEC, you know, the fiasco with DEC being purchased by Compaq. That was clearly a takeover. And that was Compaq came in, took over the company and didn't tell anybody anything. And the DEC people were living in the dark and it was clear that they had no value to the acquiring company. That, clearly, they're not making those mistakes here. >> For the younger, for the younger audience, DEC is Digital Equipment Corporation which was a behemoth winner in the micro, mini-computer era and then now defunct company. >> Except the one, one thing I'd add to that, Paul, is that, and this is why, it's why this first sign is so important. That they are seem to be, that executives here seem to be collaborating and working together. DEC had been one of those mini-computer companies dominated by an OEM business, which means you had a common set of components and then everybody was competing for customers with how you put those components together. So there was, it was a, it was a maelstrom of internal competition at DEC. When Compaq got ahold of DEC, that DEC sense of internal competition took over Compaq. And then when Compaq, when HP acquired Compaq, that maelstrom and internal competition took over HP. >> They didn't know what they were getting into. >> We used to call it the red-blue wars and it was ugly. And that's not happening here. That's a first sign. >> Yeah, I would agree Peter. I want to get your thoughts to all that. I would agree that this is, I've been tryin' to sniff out where the wind's blowin' on this for a year and to my knowledge, and my insight and sources, it's not going bad at all. It's going great. The numbers are performing, they're winning some deals, but let's compare to HP because I asked Mark Heard at their Oracle media event last week, cause they were touting number one in every market. So I said, "Well, there's a digital transformation "going on, a whole new way to do business "for the next 33 years, "not looking back at the past 33 years." Which metrics are you using? Everyone's claiming to be number one at something. So, the question is, maybe HP does have it right. Maybe their strategy will work. What are the, what are going to be those metrics for this next generation? If cloud becomes the connective tissue to data, value of data, and that apps are going to be very agile. Maybe this decentralized approach from HP might be a better strategy for the growth. Thoughts. >> Well, look, let's, so let's, I want to get back to the, what's good about what we're seeing and some other things that probably need to be worked on, but, but here's what I'd say, John. And this is what Wikibon believes. That customers is always going to be the most important metric. So, the first metric is, is HP gaining customers? Is HP losing customers? Is Dell gaining customers? Or is Dell losing customers? That's the number one most important metric. Always will be as far as I'm concerned. But the second one is, and this, and I'll pre-say something I'm going to talk about in a little bit. The second one is, I'll call it data under management. If we think about, if we think about this notion of data as an asset, data as a source of value, how much does HP, through it's customers, how much data does, does HP have under management? How much data does Dell/EMC have under management? And I think that's going to be an important way of thinking about the intensity of the relationships, which relationships are going to steer towards which types of environments. Is it going to be a procurement relationship or a real strategic relationship? By procurement, I mean, it's fundamentally focused on driving cost out of the deal. Strategic, I mean it's fundamentally focused by jointly creating value. So this notion of data under management, to me, is going to be something we're going to be talking about in five years. >> So, Bill Schmarzo, friend of both of ours, was, came by the set before we came on here and he's the dean of big data as coined by theCUBE but now he's takin' on it his own, like he's actually a dean now teaching big data. We are talking about some of the research that you're doing and taking a stand on, it's important, I want to put a plug in for the Wikibon research team that you're leading, is the business value of data. >> Peter: Oh absolutely. >> And that you're looking at data as a valuation mechanism, not an accounting, compliance thing. And this is something, I think, is way ahead of the curve. So props to you guys for puttin' the stake in the ground. To your point, the new metric might just be the valuation of how they use data, whether that's customer data, product services data, application development concepts to reconfiguring how they do business. >> And it's the reconfigure that's the smart, that's the absolutely right word. So, from our perspective John, the difference between a business and a digital business is a business uses data one way, a digital business uses data another way. A business uses data as an, something to just handle coordination and administration. >> Paul: Bookkeeping. >> Yeah, exactly. A digital business uses data as a strategic asset to differentiate how to engage to markets. That's where the industry's going, and that's what we want to talk about. >> And by the way, in previous business constructs or business books people have, might have read over the years certainly, you know, the Peter Druckers and so on, management consultants, never actually factored data into the value chains of-- >> Oh they did, they did, they did. They just didn't actually, so Drucker, for example did. >> John: Digital data? >> Oh, he talked about information and the role that information played. >> John: I stand corrected. >> Herbert Simon talked about this kind of stuff 50 years. Unfortunately it all got lost when we went through things like, jeez, you know, there was a very famous economist who said in the late 80s, "Information technology "shows up everywhere but in the productivity numbers." So, you old guys would-- >> I remember that, I remember that quote. >> So, the idea ultimately is we now have to get very discrete and very specific about what that means. And that's a challenge. But let's come back to, let's come back to at least what we think is really working here, if I may. >> John: Absolutely, go ahead. >> So the first thing is, at a more tactical level, number one is the Hyperconvert story is exciting. And it's starting to come together. And again, I'm not, we're not seeing tension between the folks that are selling servers and the folks that are doing Hyperconversion. Both are introducing new technology that are going to create new opportunities for customers, and they're not as, as, as your good friend Michael Dell said, a couple times over the past year, here in theCUBE, "We are not going to "artificially constrain any of our businesses." And, as Amazon said at re:Invent, "If you're going to do it at scale, "eventually you're going to put in hardware." And he wants to demonstrate that all this great software stuff that's happening, that ultimately Dell's going to be the leader at designing these new capabilities into the hardware and he wants to show how that's going to show up in all his product lines. >> That's a great point. I think the most interesting dynamic I've been seeing out of the interviews we've been doing the last two days is that the problem Dell has to struggle with now, and it'll be interesting to watch how they, how they figure this out, is all of their, used to be called the Federation, now they're called the Strategic Business Alliances I think. The, you know, the VMwares, the RSAs, the Pivotals, how are they going to make sense of those in the context of this bigger whole? On the one hand, they've got some competing priorities here. Dell has a very strong relationship with Microsoft, VMware is a competitor to Microsoft. So you got to figure out how to get those, how to make sense of those different alliances. Pivotal is potentially a competitor to Microsoft. >> Potentially? >> Well, Microsoft is in the pass business, yeah. >> No, it is yeah, it's going to compete. >> So you've got a, you've got some paradoxes here in the businesses that Dell has acquired. They really still, I sense they still haven't made sense of what they're going to do with them. >> Yeah, great point. I mean, first of all, you guys are pros and we have a historical view here of the collective intelligence of all of us old guys here. We've seen a lot of ways. But Rob Hof wrote an article on SiliconANGLE, our Editor-in-Chief Rob Hof, who's also an industry veteran and journalist himself. After the Oracle media event, and the headline reads, "In Oracle's Cloud Pitch to Enterprises, "an Echo of a Bygone Tech Era." And his point with this story is, I want to get your reaction to this, cause I think we're seeing a trend here, you guys are teasing out here. We're kind of going back down to the old tech days. You were the Editor-in-Chief of Computerworld back in the day with the mainframe world and then the minis. Seeing Marius Haas on here using words like "Single pain of glass." "One throat to choke." "End to end." We're almost seeing the bygone era coming back again where maybe they might have the rights to it. Certainly Oracle saying, "Hey, you know, "reorganize our sales force." So the question. Is the cloud the de-centralized mainframe. Is it now the new centralized, with edge, intelligent edge, is that, are we going back to the old ways, in a way, not fully but, unifying the sales forces. >> So, the computing industry-- >> Thoughts. >> Has been been on an inexorable march to greater utilization of public infrastructure. What an economist would say is we've always found ways to reduce asset specificities. I buy something, and I apply it to one purpose. I can't apply it to another purpose. Software changes that. Commodity pricing and hardware changes that. Public infrastructure changes that. So we're going to continue to see that inexorable march to the use of public infrastructure or somethin' that looks like public infrastructure. And that's going to continue. And the industry's always been very, very good at that. That does not mean, however, that we're going to have one supplier. So what we're seeing is a lot of FUD right now. Amazon FUD, Dell FUD, Oracle FUD. There is a real tension in the model and the real tension is, more than likely, the future is going to be composites of services operating on multiple different cloud-like instances, including on premise. And who's going to offer the best end-to-end control plane? >> Paul, I want to get your thoughts. Cause you remember goin' back to the days, IBM had SNA network stack, DEC had DECnet, we had, they had propietary stacks. Cloud, Azure stack, this stack, that. Are we seeing this again? Your thoughts. >> Well I think Peter's absolutely right but the variable, and you're right, we are seeing this again. We're seeing a trend of return to simplicity. Because what IT organizations have been wrestling with for the last 20 years is everything is just getting more complex. There's more vendors, there's more piece parts, and they've got to fit them all together, and it sucks. And so they want someone to simplify this. Now, cloud vendors simplify it on one level. But software-defined, on another level. We've been talking here about software defined storage, about software-defined networking, massive virtualization. And that's on an open source or at least an open API-based model. Which I think is the twist here. Are we going back to the days of IBM? Yeah. But IBM, But the IBM may actually be software-defined. >> Or five different companies that look like IBM. >> I know what you're saying Paul, and I'm not going to disagree with you. But here's the opposite-- >> But you disagree with him. >> No, no, but no I'm not going to, I'm going to put a slightly different spin on it. It used to be that the most valuable asset in an IT organization was the mainframe. And the entire organization was organized and the interactions with the business were organized and put in place to handle the value of that mainframe. We are not going back to a day where the IT organization, the way business uses IT is organized around the mainframe as an asset. Or even around the provision of infrastructure as an asset. We are going to start seeing organization and frameworks that are fundamentally built around this idea of data as an asset. And that is going to be a lot more complex with a lot more buyers and a lot more opportunities for differentiation creating value. So we will see more complexity in IT at the software and the use case level, less complexity at the infrastructure levels. >> Which is why machine learning and automation gets a lot of hype, but to Paul, I'm going to get your point and tie Peter's point together and introduce Jeff Bezos' comment last week on NDC. He mentioned that most things take 10 years to bake out in terms of getting things right. Ten year kind of horizon. Kind of an order of magnitude. But he says, "All these startups say they have "disruptive technology, it's not their technology that's "disruptive, it's what's the customer is disrupted." So we're talkin' about customers being disrupted. It's not some company having disruptive technologies. >> And disrupting. >> So are we saying that customers are being disrupted by reconfiguring their businesses, hence with the mainframe disrupted, a new way to do things, we're seeing clouded-data as a new way to do things. So, that's causing some reconfiguration and disruption, allows them to say, "Shit, just when I thought it was simple "it got more complex." >> But the disruptive element is the data as Peter says. >> I mean the machines are becoming, the machines are already a commodity. The, with open source, the platforms are a commodity. What's disruptive is how you use the data in different ways. And to your point Peter, yes, it's going to be a much more complex world. >> Peter: Much more. >> Because there's a lot more data and there's a lot more things we can do with data. >> And data can, that's exactly right. We can do so much more with data. So again, let's go back to the fundamental metric that at least I suggested. Who gets more customers? There are going to be more buyers of this stuff in five years than there are today. More buyers in the sense that within an organization, there's going to be more people involved in the decision and there's going to be more businesses. Because if this stuff actually works, the transaction costs are going to go down and you can then organize your businesses, institutionalize how you do work differently so you can have more partnerships. All that means that fundamentally, what we're talkin' about here is going to lead to greater complexity in business, greater opportunity therefore, but what I've always said, and I don't know if you've heard this Paul, but I know you have John, and I've said it on theCUBE. That the fundamental demarcation is that the first 50 years of this industry featured known process, unknown technology. And what do you we focus on? The technology. What's the next 50 years? Unknown process, known technology. What are we going to focus on? How to build that software, how to handle those data assets. What are we going to focus less attention on? The technology. What does everybody want to talk about at this show? >> The technology. >> Technology. That's a disconnect. So going to one of the things that we now have to think about from a DELL/EMC standpoint is where's the story about how Dell is going to appreciate the value of your data assets over time. We need more of that. >> And let me point out, you now, you didn't mention IBM but one company that is doing that well right now, they aren't getting the business benefit for it yet, is IBM. Where they are really taking, they are not technology, I mean they don't talk about power aid anymore. They talk about Watson, they talk about what you can do with analytics, they talk about a smarter planet. They haven't been able to turn this into a successful business yet but they're doing, I think, exactly what you're talking about. >> Well the product, they have some product challenges. I mean, so let's get back down to the customer thing. I like that angle. You got to have the customer, you got to have the products that customers will be buying. That's the value, exchange that customers will value and then hence by your service or product. Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger, when they did the Amazon deal, VMware. Jassy, Andy Jassy CEO of AWS said to me, "We are customer focused." So I believe that you're right on this 100%. Whoever can get the customers. And this is not about who's the better stack, if the customers like it, they're going to buy it. >> And very importantly, John, they are going to invest in it to make it valuable in their business. And that's what you want. You want to see your customers become a centerpiece of value-creation in your ecosystem. >> And I think Amazon Web Services proves that the dark horse could come out of nowhere and be the behemoth that they are because they served the customers. >> So that's the second thing that I'm missing at this show. And I know, I think I know why, is where is the additional details, even a little bit more, about VMware and AWS. Now, I know that they're going to wait for the VMware World, that's the story. >> They showed a little preview in the keynote, it's still baking out. >> Yeah, but it would be nice to have a little bit more. >> That's one of those tough relationships they need to manage, right? >> Yeah, exactly right. >> I mean VMware and IBM also have an alliance. They are allied with their foes now through the acquisition. The point about, about the value of data, you know, I think Amazon has done a good job of building platforms that are very flexible for customers to use but they abstract a lot of the underlying complexity. >> Alright, so with the data, I want to just double-down on that for a second and get your reaction, thoughts on, obviously, one of the themes here is IOT and we heard Michael Dell saying it's going to be centralized, pushed out to the edge, you got in research from Wikibon intellegent edge. You and David Floy and the rest of the team doing some real amazing work at Wikibon.com. Check it out, subscription required. What's the edge strategy? What does that actually mean for IT practitioners out there? It's, certainly we heard from Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of Dell said, "Most CIOs are conservative "and don't usually jump on these waves." They missed mobile, they missed some other waves. His mandate was, CIOs, don't miss the IOT wave. So what is the IOT, this edge of the network thing mean for a CIO. >> Well, the first thing is in hardcore circumstances, many CIOs aren't even involved in the edge. So if you take a look, if you go into where a lot of the edged domains are really crucial, you see a plant manager that's more responsible for what's going on in the edge than the CIO. The CIO is handling the corporate systems. The plant manager is handling what's actually happening at the edge. The operational technology stuff. So the first thing is we're going to see a slow circling of the IT and OT organizations about who's going to win-- >> OT meaning Operational Technology. >> Operational Technology. Just as we saw a slow circling back in the 1990s when TCPIP came in, and blew away DEC and blew away everybody, and started blowing away the TELECOM divisions, or TELECOM's functions within side large enterprises. >> So you think that IOT is going to be as disruptive as TCPIP was in standardizing in the network layer. >> Oh absolutely, absolutely. It's going to be, it's going to have an enormous impact because there's so many new sources. The data is going to have, how to think about it, and that was the second point I was going to make, John, is we do not currently have architectural standards in place for thinking about how this stuff is going to come together. And it's something that David Furrier and I and the Wikibon team are working on and I hope to come up with, I hope to come out with some research, actually probably next month, on what we call automation zones or data zones or probably edge zones. Which is, how do, just we think about security zones today, how do we think about edge zones. Where the edge zone is defined by a moment, an automation moment, cannot have data outside of that zone. And that needs to become an architectural principle where OT and IT can work together and say, "What data has to be in that zone? "I'll make sure my data gets there, "you make sure you're data gets there. "We'll figure out how control happens, "and that's how we drive this thing forward." >> Well, just to give you a prop here on theCUBE here is, Wikibon was right about Flash, they were right about Hyperconvergence and convergent infrastructure. Big bets early on that were kind of like, people were like, "What?" And certainly Vstand, ServiceStand although some people will disagree with this. >> They were right about the edge. >> Now you're right about, I think you're right on, way right on the edge and you're way right on value of data. >> Yeah. >> I think those are two stands that you're taking that will be-- >> And let's give great props to David Furrier who was a catalyst for thinking many of these things through. >> Alright Paul, final word from you. Obviously, you know, as a veteran, you've covered it all. Okay, what's your take? I mean, what's the, how's the wind blowing, what's your instinct tell you of what's happening. >> I think it's generally good, but it's hard to tell from conferences. As you know John, the reason most conferences are so boring is that there's no tension, there's no conflict. It's all good, it's all everybody's happy and everybody's doin' a great job. That's the very same thing that we're seeing here. >> Rah rah, Kool-aid injection. >> One thing I can't help notice is on the keynote, if you look at the keynote agenda for the three days, there's not a single customer on the, on the keynote agenda. Which I think is a problem. Or I don't think that says good things about where Dell is really focusing it's message right now. You want to have, at most big company conferences, there's lots and lots of customers who come up on stage. I think Dell is still thinking about, I mean it's a technology-focused company. They're thinking about technology integration right now. >> So speeds and feeds. >> Yeah, you hear a lot of speeds and feeds. >> Everybody wants to be the most important thing in the enterprise, and they still want hardware to be the most important thing. >> Well, I think I mean, I would agree with you 100%, but I just think, just, in this acquisition, I mean, sorry, merger of equals, they have a lot of herding cats going on right now. There's a lot of herding of portfolio and not a lot of overlap but I can see them kind of making room on the stage for that. But I do agree, I mean, customers do tell the best story. >> And in the long run, that's, as Peter said, that is what is going to make the difference. Are the customers happy? >> Guys, amazing exchange. Thanks so much, Peter, for comin' out and takin' some time out of your busy schedule to come on theCUBE and share your insight. The daily on-cue Paul, as always, we're havin' another three days. Third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. Great commentary, great analysis, more live coverage from day three of Dell/EMC World 2017. We'll be right back, stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break.

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for the Oracle Modern Customer Experience conference. This is theCUBE's special coverage. I'm John Furrier, joined with my co-host, Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Roland Smart, Vice President of Social and Community at Oracle and also the author of The Agile Marketer book, which we'll get into in a minute. He'll hold it up so you can make sure, it's also available on audio books, you can hold it up, go ahead. The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experiences into Your Competitive Advantage. Roland, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks so much for the invite. >> Great to have that book there because it sets the table for what we want to talk about which is we love cloud, we've been loving dev-ops since the cloud hit the scene years and years ago, but now that it's gone mainstream, it's going into marketing, you're seeing marketing cloud, it really opens up this notion of agile and changing things, modern platforms, the replatforming. We heard Mark Heard on the keynote, we've heard through our interviews. There's a replatforming going on in the enterprise across the board, and so it's super exciting. I know that you're also doing some cool stuff, modernization inside Oracle, employing Oracle cloud for Oracle, it's pretty comprehensive, so let's start there. What's your role at Oracle? It's kind broad, social and community, which is cutting edge and being operationalized in real time. What are you working on? >> Yeah, so, I've worn a couple different hats in my tenure at Oracle. I've been with the company for about four years. I was one of those marketers who came into the company through an acquisition of a social technology company, and so, I ended up landing in the corporate marketing group. I've, as I said, done a couple different things. I've led the Oracle Technology Network for a while, I was involved in establishing and upgrading our corporate social programs, but right now, I'm really focused on some modernization initiatives, and those are very connected to our inbound marketing practice. That means taking some of these amazing solutions that are part of the Oracle marketing cloud and implementing them for the corporate marketing group. The ones that are really core to my focus are, because it's an inbound marketing focus it's Compendium, which is our content publishing platform. Of course, we also integrate that with Eloqua for subscription and there are other adjacent technologies that we're going to use to improve the service, things like Maximizer, which will allow us to iterate and do testing and improve the service over time. And of course, integrating into all the other major parts of the corporate marketing stack, which includes a DMP and a customer experience database and all the rest. >> So, here at the show, you're seeing marketing cloud being broader defined because it's the customer on a digital life cycle, no analog, I mean, from inception to the moment of truth the experience is digital. It changes things a bit. What is your observation that you could point to as you look at these changes that're going on, tweaks here and radical changes there, what's the big shift, what's the digital value in that digital journey of a customer when it comes to marketing? I mean, it seems that marketing's involved in all touch points. >> It is, I mean, I think, sorry, I think you're talking a little bit about the fact that digital transformation is kind of dominating the marketer's consciousness at the moment. We're very, very focused on really transitioning the experiences that we deliver and to engage with customers and to a digital environment, and that means that there's two side of that. Of course, there's the technology side, but there's also the practices side. I think that a lot of the conversation to date has really been dominated by just an incredible proliferation of marketing technology, the Martech stack, right, is growing at an incredible pace. One of the things that I see, for example-- >> Peter: It's almost daunting, it's huge. >> Rolad: It is. >> It's growing and churning. >> And there's still much more proliferation in the Martech space than there is consolidation even with companies like Oracle acquiring just an incredible number of companies in a relatively short period of time. We've built this amazing stack, but still, there's a lot of venture dollars that are still chasing unmet needs. There are niches that aren't being met, and that says something about the overall maturity of the marketing stack, right. We're still fairly early days in that process, and the technology, what's interesting is that the technology piece in some ways is actually easier than the process change and the culture change that is associated with actually trying to be, develop a strong competency when it comes to these digital channels. I think there's an agile transformation that needs to take place as the digital transformation takes place, and that is really focused on that cultural change and the way that we work, so that we can get the most value out of these digital channels. One of the things that I would just add about an agile transformation, though, is that I think it is a little bit broader than just digital transformation in the sense that you can apply agile to analog channels as well, it's more of an approach or a philosophy, a way of working that happens to be the best practice when it comes to digital platforms, 'cause agile came out of the software development world. Agile's not new, agile really started over 15 years ago when the Agile Manifesto was written by some very, very smart software developers. In the last 15 years, it's become the dominant approach to software development, but beyond that, product management has adopted it, and it's a big part of what has led to the empowerment of product management leaders, I think, is the most influential leader at the most influential, or innovative companies in the world, right. I think marketers have an opportunity to take a page from that book as, of course, marketers are managing more software than ever before. And as we transition to a world in which we're moving away from this campaign-oriented mindset where there's a campaign that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and more towards a product, a program-oriented mindset where there's an ongoing service. >> It's an always-on environment. >> It's an always-on environment where we need to continually iterate and evolve that experience. >> And I think that is the key, I mean, your book you held up called The Agile Marketer, it really does make sense, and I truly believe this, and people who know me, I always rant on this, but I believe that agile and these principles that are well-founded in practice, certainly on the software development side, are moving into data and apps, and ultimately, content and marketing and all the stuff that's in the platform because it's the same trajectory, it's the same concepts. You're doing things that require speed, there's a user component, app component, there's technology involved, so there's a lot of moving parts with it, but it's all threading together. Is that what the book is touching on? Talk about the book. >> Yeah, it is. I mean, so we touched on some of the reasons why marketers are coming to agile. One of them is kind of a no-brainer, we're managing more software than ever before. I don't think anybody's going to argue about that. I think there are some second order things, though, that you touched on with your comments there that are worth calling out. Marketers, well first off, agile is really an approach or a philosophy, which is predicated on this idea that we're working in contexts where it's very difficult to predict the future. There's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of disruption, so the traditional methods that we've used, waterfall which is really, waterfall is based on our ability to predict the future. Create a perfect strategy that's going to unfold over a period of time, but I would challenge you to talk to any marketer here and ask them what marketing plan that they've developed that survived implementation more than three months. Marketers are working in this environment with this tremendous amount of change, so. >> Well, Peter and I were talking about the intro, about the role of data, and I'll give you a case in point is that when, to be agile and to be fast and be, I won't say command and control, but to use that metaphor is, the CEO or business leader, or even someone in the trenches, a hero, an innovator, says, "Wow, there's an opportunity to move the needle," innovate or whatever they see, 'cause some data insight, surfaces insight, and they go, "Wow, that changes everything. "Deploy X, Y, and Z," or "Tweak this." >> Let's do something small, validate if we're heading in the right direction quickly, and then, if we get a signal that says, hey, there's something that's working here, we'll invest more and iterate, and it really removes waste from the process of developing marketing programs. >> This is the thing, I think you're on to something with this, and this is what we talk about in the cloud wards. In cloud, we hear things like standing up servers, Horizontally scalable. In marketing it's stand up that campaign now, which you might have an hour notice. Imagine rolling up and standing up a multi-geography campaign in an hour. >> Roland: Right. >> That should be doable. >> Absolutely, and I think, so, going back to some of the second order things, one of the things that marketers are challenged to do is if we want to stand up a campaign, it's not just that the marketer's world is changing more quickly, right. Product management adopted agile because their world is moving very quickly, so if you have a situation where product management is deploying something on a monthly basis or even on a daily basis, marketing needs to work at that same pace. And so, agile can be a collaboration layer where because they speak the same language and share a similar process, they can stay in sync. When you do that, you can deliver experiences that kind of blur the boundary between what I would call traditional marketing and what we think of as product. This is a really interesting space, and I would say one of the most fun spaces where I've ever had the opportunity to work is when you can blur that boundary. And so, having agile means not just that we can deploy our own programs quickly and test them quickly and validate that we're heading in the right direction, but it means that we can do that in close collaboration with our product management peers. And really, that's where you get to incredible value. >> One of the reasons why it's diffused into product management as aggressively as it has is because increasingly the products are being rendered as services that have significant digital components to them. You mentioned the idea of philosophy, and it's kind of an interesting case to show how the agile philosophy has hopped from software development into products, it's now into marketing. My observation, I want to test this with you and see if you have anything to add is that the agile philosophy is founded on three core principles. One is that you have to be empirical. Two is that you have to be iterative. And three is that you have to be opportunistic. And you can add others, like you got to be people focused, and you got to recognize time-bound, et cetera, and all those types of things, but as you look at marketing, is marketing starting to adopt that notion of you got to be empirical, you got to be iterative, and you got to be opportunistic? You can't, you know, hold onto your babies, so to speak. Is that kind of what's at the base of some of this new philosophical changes, or are you seeing some other things as well? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you've definitely touched on some of the drivers. I think that there are, something that I would recommend people who, marketers who are interested in agile should check out a document called The Agile Marketing Manifesto, which interprets The Agile Manifesto for marketers, and like The Agile Manifesto, it has a set of values and a set of underlying principles. The three things that you called out relate pretty tightly to some of the values that are baked into The Agile Manifesto and The Agile Marketing Manifesto. I think one of the central ideas is that because we can't predict the future, we need to do, or we're operating in sort of a chaotic domain where we're in this domain with this unknown unknowns. We don't really know how people are going to react, we can't predict that well, and so, we need to get into this different modality or mindset where we say, you know what, instead of trying to build a perfect strategy, we're just going to do lots of small things. We're going to test things, we're going to validate that we're heading in the right direction or not. >> Peter: Test empirical. >> Yeah, that's all about the testing and validation with empirical data. >> Peter: The iterative. >> Yep, and then, you just keep iterating on that and zeroing in on product market fit or the value that the program-- >> Or the option seems best, which is the opportunistic, and there are others as well, but are marketers having a hard time doing that, or in your experience, do they start? >> It's a pretty significant, yeah, it's a very significant change. Most marketers are, grew up with or started their career with waterfall, and waterfall is still very dominant. If you were to look, for example, what is the, what in the context of, or in the parlance of crossing the chasm, where are we with agile marketing? >> I think we've crossed that. >> I think we're at a place where we see early adopters who are out there really proving value but the pragmatists in the marketplace, the people who adopt something because they're getting on the bandwagon, because their peer are doing it, it's not there yet. It's on their radar, but it's not there yet. What I see happening is that there's, we're just at the beginning of starting an ecosystem that is going to support taking agile more mainstream. What I mean is if you look at, for example, the biggest management consulting firms, the McKinseys, the Bains, they are now building out agile transformation practices that are coupled to their digital transformation practice that already exists and has existed for a while. If you look at the company's out there that do certification and training, folks who will come into your organization and train you on Scrum or Kanban, the two most popular agile methods, they have traditionally been focused on engineers and product managers. They are now starting to build offerings for business-oriented folks. We're starting to see agile sessions and tracks at conferences like this one. Obviously, people like me are writing books, and there are more books coming to market, so these are the signals that marketers, this is getting on marketers' radar and that they're transitioning. I think where you see the most traction for agile, there are certain silos within the marketing function where you see more traction with it. >> Peter: Social being a big one. >> Social being a big one. >> Because the data's available. >> Marketing automation being a really big one, 'cause fundamentally, it's about testing and validation, and these programs are always running, so you're constantly evaluating the performance of messages that you're sending out, and tweaking them and optimizing them. Solutions like the ones, we have a solution in the Oracle marketing cloud called Maximizer, which is just, it is fundamentally an enabler, an enabling technology to allow a marketer to be agile. We can do things in the context of our publishing platform where we can show multi-variant, we can run multi-variant tasks and show them to users and quickly validate what's working and what's not, and so, that's a very different way of working than I think marketers have traditionally adopted. We talked already about the fact that just bringing in the technology is actually, I think, easier than trying to drive the cultural change. The cultural change is really, really hard, and we're still at the beginning of that process, I think. >> And your final thoughts, I want to get to the final question here on this evolution, the progress bar, if you will, crossing the chasm. This is a sea change, so I think a lot of people, we live in the bubble in Silicon Valley, but middle of the industry, middle of America, they're still doing waterfall, which they need, in my opinion, need to move to agile, but because of the benefits of having a platform and enabling technologies and products, 'cause apps is where the action is, we agree. What is your big takeaway from this year in terms of this show and the impact of this platform, this enabling concept that you guys are pushing for? What's the most important thing folks should understand about agile, social, platform, modern customer experience? >> We talked a minute ago about the Martech ecosystem, and the fact that overall the ecosystem is still, there's immaturity for the overall ecosystem, but within that ecosystem there are some very mature solutions, and I think that particularly for enterprises that are using those more mature solutions, they are now transitioning from this period where they've been very focused on building that technology stack, and they're starting to think about how do we more dramatically make changes to the way that we work so that we can develop a stronger competency in digital, and I think that this connects to, if you were to ask me, connecting this back to modern marketing, at what point can a company sort of say, okay, we meaningfully positioned ourselves. >> We're modern, we're modernized. >> What is modern? >> What is modern, and so, >> That's a great question. >> from my perspective, I would connect it back to the role that the CMO plays or the marketing organization plays within the larger company. We talked a little bit about the fact that the product management leader has really been empowered over a long period of time in large part because they've adopted agile, and they're working in a different way. They are serving as the steward of innovation. The marketer has this aspiration to really serve as the steward of customer experience. Now today, we're at a place where most marketers, we're really in the best position to measure and understand the customer experience, but we have limited influence when it comes to changing those touch points. A lot of those touch points aren't under our direct purview. So, we need to get that influence. One way to get that influence is to share the process of the people who have control over those things, that means when we, again, we have agile, we can share process with project management, we can influence those touch points more, that is when the marketer can step up and truly serve as the steward of customer experience, that's when I would say that we've sort of reached the status of modern era. >> A modern era. I think you're on to something. I think the checkbox immediately is are you agile. That's a quick acid test, yes or no. I think that's so fundamental, but I think the user experience is really key, and you've seen the platforms become the enabler where the apps are just coming out, it's a tsunami of apps, and that's an okay thing, but the platform has to be stable. I think that's just an evolution of the role of software, from shrink wrap, from downloading on the internet, to web 2.0 to mobile to platform. >> I'd step back even one level before that, John, and say are you empirical? At the end of the day, is your culture ready to make changes based on what the data says? Because then it says you're going to go out and get the data, you're going to use the data, then you can-- >> And the data has to be good, data has to be legit. >> It has to be good. >> And not dirty. >> 'Cause if you are, then you can have that, we talked about this earlier, then you can have that conversation with the leader and empower the leader to actually lead change. >> Data orientation, customer orientation is a really, those are both critical values that are baked into agile. >> Absolutely. You have to test your organization on whether or not they're really able to do those things. If they are, then a lot of the other stuff that you're talking about falls, starts falling a little bit more naturally into place. >> Well, Roland, we need to follow up, certainly, back in Palo Alto in our studio. This has been really, I think, an important conversation that's worthy of more dialogue, what is a modern organization in this new era of computing where the expectations of the customers and the users and the consumers are at an all-time high? You're seeing the demand and the need for a platform that's truly enabling innovation and value. Certainly great conversation, thanks for joining us on theCUBE today. Sharing the insight as we stay agile, modern here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Be right back with more after this short break. (electronic keyboard music)

(upbeat music) [Narrator] Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas here at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern Customer Experience conference, their second year. This is the CUBE, Silicon ANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jack Berkowitz who's the Vice President of Products and Data Science at Oracle. Well, great to have you on the CUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot. >> Appreciate it. Love talking to the product guys, getting down and dirty on the products. So, AI is hot this year. It's everywhere. Everyone's got an AI in their product. What is the AI component in your product? >> Well, what we're working on is building truly adaptive experiences for people. So, we have a whole bunch of different techniques and technologies all of it comes together essentially to create a system that amplifies peoples capabilities. That's really the key thing. Two real important components. First of all, it's all about data. Everybody talks about it. Well, what we've put together is, in terms of consumers, is the largest collection of consumer data in the Oracle data cloud. So we take advantage of all that consumer data. We also have a lot of work going on with collecting business data, both Oracle originated data as well as partner data. We're bringing that all that together and it sets the context for the AI. Now on top of that we have not just the latest trends in terms of machine learning or neural networks or things like that, but we're borrowing concepts from advertising, borrowing concepts from hedge funds so that we can make a real-time system. It's all about real-time. >> You mentioned neural networks. A lot of stuff conceptually in computer science has been around literally for decades. What is, from your definition - obviously cloud creates a lot of data out there now, but what is AI these days? Because everyone now is seeing AI as a mainstream term. Even the word metadata, since Snowden's thing, is now a mainstream term. Who would have thought metadata and AI would be talked about at kitchen tables? >> Yeah. >> What is AI from your perspective? >> Yeah, from my perspective it's really about augmenting folks. It's really about helping people do things. So maybe we'll automate some very manual tasks out, right, that will free up people to have more time to do some other things. I don't think it's about replacing people. People are creative. We want to get people back to being creative and people are great at problem solving so let's get them that information. Let's get them aid so they can get back to it. >> And give them options. >> Give them options, exactly. Exactly. You know, if you can free up somebody from having to manipulate spreadsheets and all this other stuff so they can just get the answer and get on with things, people are happier. >> So Oracle is using first-person data and third-person data to build these capabilities, right? >> Jack: Yeah, exactly. >> How is that going to play out? How is Oracle going to go to a customer and say we will appropriately utilize this third-person data in a way that does not undermine your first-person rights or value proposition? >> That's a great question. So, privacy and respect has been sort of the principle we've been driving at here. So there's the mechanics of it. People can opt in. People can opt out. There's all the mechanics and the regulatory side of it but it's really about how do you use these things so that it doesn't feel creepy. How do you do this in a subtle way so that somebody accepts the fact that that's the case? And it's really about the benefit to the person as to whether or not they're willing to make that trade-off. A great example is Waze. Waze I use all the time to get around San Francisco traffic. You guys probably use it as well. Well, guess what? If you really think about it, Waze knows what time I leave the house in the morning, what time I come home. Uber knows that once a month I leave at 2:00 on a Sunday and come back a week later. So, as long as you think about that, I'm getting a benefit from Waze I'm happy to have that partnership with them in terms of my data and they respect it and so therefore it works. >> And that comes back to some of the broader concepts of modern customer experience. It is that quid pro quo that I'll take a little data from you to improve the service that I'm able to provide as measured by the increasing value customer experience that's provided. >> Yeah, that's right. I used to live in London and in London there's these stores where you can go in and that sales guy has been there for like twenty years and you just develop a relationship. He knows you. He knows your kids, and so sure enough, stationary store or whatever it is and he gives you that personal experience. That's a relationship that I've built. That really all we're trying to do with all of this. We're trying to create a situation where people can have relationships again. >> And he's prompted with history of knowing you, just give you a pleasant surprise or experience that makes you go wow. And that's data driven now. So how do you guys do that? Cause this is something that, you know, Mark Heard brought up in his keynote that every little experience in the world is a data touchpoint. >> Jack: Yeah. >> And digital, whatever you're doing, so how do you guys put that in motion for data because that means data's got to be freely available. >> Data's got to be freely available. One of the big things that we brought to bear with the Suite X is that the data is connected and the experiences are connected so really we're talking about adding that connected intelligence on top of that data. So, it's not just the data. In fact we talked about it last night. It's not just the data even from the CX systems from service, but even the feed of what inventory's going on in real-time. So I can tell somebody if something's broken, hey, tell you what. This store has it. You can go exchange it, in real-time. Instead of having to wait for a courier or things like that. So it is that data being connected and the fact that our third-party data, you know this consumer data, is actually connected as well. So we bring that in on the fly with the appropriate context so it just works. >> So one of the new things here is the adaptive intelligence positioning products. What is that and take a minute to explain the features of how that came to be and how it's different from the competition. >> Okay, great. So the products are very purposeful built apps that plug in and amplify Oracle cloud apps and you can actually put in a third-party capability if you happen to have it. So that's the capability and it's got the decision science and machine learning and the data. >> Peter: So give me an example of a product. >> So a product is adaptive intelligence offers which we were showing here. It gives product recommendations, gives promotions, gives content recommendations on websites but also in your email. If you go into the store you get the same stuff and we can then go and activate advertising campaigns to bring in more people based on those successful pick ups of products or promotions. Its a great example. Very constrained use case addressed? >> Peter: Fed by a lot of different data. >> Fed by a lot of different data. The reason why they're adaptive is because they happen in real-time. So this isn't a batch mode thing. We don't calculate it the day before. We don't calculate it a week before or every three hours. It's actually click by click for you, and for you, reacting and re-scoring and re-balancing. And so we can get a wisdom of the crowds going on and an individual reaction, click by click, interaction by interaction. >> This is an important point I think that's nuanced in the industry. You mentioned batch mode which talks about how things are processed and managed to real-time and the big data space is a huge transition whether you're looking at hadoop or in memory or at all the architectures out there from batch data lakes to data in motion they're calling it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So now you have this free flowing scalable data layers, if you will, every where, so being adaptive means what? Being ready? Being ... >> Being ready is the fundamental principle to getting to being adaptive. Being adaptive is just like this conversation. Being able to adjust, right? And not giving you the same exact answer seven times in a row because you asked me the same question. >> Or if it's in some talking point database you'd pull up from a FAQ. >> Peter: So it adapts to context. >> It's all about adapting to context. If the concepts change, then the system will adopt that context and adapt it's response. >> That's right. And we were showing last night, even in the interaction, as more context is given, the system can then pick that up and spin and then give you what you need? >> The Omni Channel is a term that's not new but certainly is amplified by this because now you have a world certainly with multiple clouds available to customers but also data is everywhere. Data is everywhere and channels are everywhere. >> Data is everywhere. And being adaptive also means customizing something at a point and time >> Exactly. and you might not know what it is up until seconds or near real-time or actually real-time. >> Real time, right? Real human time. 100 milliseconds. 150 milliseconds, anywhere in the world, is what we're striving for. >> And that means knowing that in some database somewhere you checked into a hotel, The Four Seasons, doing a little check in the hotel and now, oh, you left your house on Uber. Oh, you're the CEO of Oracle. You're in a rental car. I'm going to give you a different experience. >> Jack: Yeah. >> Knowing you're a travel warrior, executive. That's kind of what Mark Heard was trying to get to yesterday. >> Yeah, that's what he's getting to. So it's a bit of a journey, right? This is not a sprint. So there's been all this press and you think, oh my god, if I don't have ... It's a journey. It's a bit of a marathon, but these are the experiences that are happening. >> I want to pick up on 150 milliseconds is quite the design point. I mean human beings are not able to register information faster than about 80 milliseconds. >> Jack: Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about two brain cycles coming back to that. >> Jack: Yeah. >> I mean it's an analogy but it's not a bad one. >> Jack: No. >> 150 milliseconds anywhere in the world. That is a supreme design point. >> And it is what we're shooting for. Obviously there's things about networks and everything that have to be worked through but yeah, that responsiveness, but you're seeing that responsiveness at some of the big consumer sites. You see that type of responsiveness. That's what we want to get to. >> So at the risk of getting too technical here, how does multiple cloud integration or hopping change that equation? Is this one of the reasons it's going to drive customers to a tighter relationship with Oracle because it's going to be easier to provide the 150 millisecond response inside the Oracle fabric? >> Yeah, you nailed it. And I don't want to take too many shots at my competitors, but I'm going to. We don't have to move data. I don't have to move my data from me to AWS to some place else, right, Blue Mix, whatever it happens to be. And because we don't have to move data, we can get that speed. And because it's behind the fabric, as you put it, we can get that speed. We have the ability to scale the data centers. We have the data centers located where we need them. Now your recommendations, if you happen to be here today, they're here. They may transition to Sydney if you're in Australia to be able to give you that speed but that is the notion to have that seamless experience for you, even for travelers. >> That's a gauntlet. You just threw down a gauntlet. >> Jack: I did. Yeah. >> And that's what we're going to go compete against. Because what we're competing is on the experience for people. We're not competing on who's got the better algorithm. We're competing on that experience to people and everything about that. >> So that also brings up the point of third-party data because to have that speed certainly you have advantages in your architecture but humans don't care about Oracle and on which server. They care about what's going on on their phone, on their mobile. >> Jack: That's right. >> Okay, so the user, that requires some integration. So it won't be 100 percent Oracle. There's some third-party. What's the architecture, philosophy, guiding principles around integrating third-party data for you guys. Because it's certainly part of the system. It's part of the product, but I don't think it's ... >> So there's third=party data which could be from data partners or Oracle originated data through our Oracle data cloud or the 1500 licensed data partners there and there's also third-party systems. So for example if somebody had Magento Commerce and they wanted to include that into our capability. On the third party systems, we actually have built this around an API architecture or infrastructure using REST and it's basically a challenge I gave my PMs. I said look, I want you to test against the Oracle cloud system. I want you to test against the Oracle on-prem system and I want you to find the leading third-party system. I don't care if it's sales force or anybody else and I want you to test against that and so as long as people can map to the REST APIs that we have, they can have inter-operation with their systems. >> I mean the architectural philosophy is to decouple and make highly cohesive elements and you guys are a big part of that with Oracle as a component. >> Jack: That's right. >> But I'm still going to need to get stuff from other places and so API is a strategy and microservices are all going to be involved with that. >> Yeah, and actually we deployed a full microservice architecture so behind the scenes on that offers one, 19 microservices interplaying and operating. >> But the reality is this is going to be one of the biggest challenges that answers faces is that how we bridge, or how we gateway, cloud services from a lot of different providers is a non-trivial challenge. >> Jack: That's right. >> I remember back early on in my career when we had all these mini computer companies and each one had their own proprietary network on the shop floor for doing cell controllers or finance or whatever it might be and when customers wanted to bring those things together the mini computer companies said, yeah, put a bridge in place. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And along came TCPIP and Cisco and said forget that. Throw them all out. It wasn't the microprocessor that couldn't stick to those mini computer companies. It was TCPIP. The challenge that we face here is how are we going to do something similar because we're not going to bridge these things. The latency and the speed, and you hit the key point, where is the data, is going to have an enormous impact on this. >> That's right. And again, the investments we have been making with the CX Cloud Suite will allow us to do that. Allow us to take advantage with a whole bunch of data right away and the integration with the ODCs, so we couldn't probably have done this two or three years ago because we weren't ready. We're ready now. And now we can start to build it. We can start to take it now up to the next level. >> And to his point about the road map and TCPIP was interesting. We're all historians here. We're old enough to remember those days, but TCPIP standardized the OSI model which was a fantasy of seven layers of open standards if you remember. >> Jack: Seven layers, yep, whew. >> Peter: See we still talk about it. >> What layer are you on? >> But at the time, the proprietary was IBM and DEC owned the network stacks so that essentially leveled off there so the high-water mark was operating at TCPIP. Is there an equivalent analog to that in this world because IF you can almost take what he said and say take it to the cloud and say look at some point in this whatever stack you want to call it, if it is a stack, there has to be a moment of coalescing around something for everybody. And then a point of differentiation. >> So yeah, and again I'm just going to go back - and that's a great question by the way and it's - I'm like thinking this through as I say it, but I'm going to go right back to what I said. It's about people. So if I coalesce the information around that person, whether that person is a consumer or that person's a sales guy or that person's working on inventory management or better yet disaster relief, which is all those things put together. It's about them and about what they need. So if I get that central object around people, around companies then I have something that I can coalesce and share a semantic on. So the semantic is another old seven layer word. I didn't want to say it today but I can have ... >> Disruptive enabler. >> So then what you're saying is that we need a stack, and I use that word prohibitively, but we need a way of characterizing layer seven application so that we have ... >> Or horizontal >> Either way. But the idea is that we need to get more into how the data gets handled and not just how the message gets handled. >> Jack: That's right. >> OSI's always focused on how the message got handled. Now we're focused on how the data gets handled given that messaging substraight and that is going to be the big challenge for the industry. >> Jack: Yeah. >> Well, certainly Larry Ellis is going to love this conversation, OSI, TCPIP, going old school right here. >> Jack: Like you said, we're all old and yeah, that's what we grew up in. >> Yeah, but this is definitely ... >> Hey, today's computers and today's notions are built on the shoulders of giants. >> Well the enabling that's happening is so disruptive it's going to be a 20 or 30 year innovation window and we're just at the beginning. So the final question I have for you Jack is summarize for the folks watching. What is the exciting things about the AI and the adaptive intelligence announcements and products that you guys are showing here and how does that go forward into the future without revealing any kind of secrets on Oracle like you're a public company. What's the bottom line? What's the exciting thing they should know about? >> I think the exciting thing is that they're going to be able to take advantage of these technologies, these techniques, all this stuff, without having to hire a thousand data scientists in a seven month program or seven year program to take advantage of it. They're going to be able to get up and running very, very quickly. They can experiment with it to be able to make sure that it's doing the right thing. From a CX company, they can get back to doing what they do which is building great product, building great promotions, building a great customer service experience. They don't have to worry about gee, what's our seven year plan for building AI capabilities? That's pretty exciting. It lets them get back to doing what they do which is to compete on their products. >> And I think the messaging of this show is really good because you talk about empowerment, the hero. It's kind of gimmicky but the truth is what cloud has shown in the world is you can offload some of those mundane stuff and really focus on the task at hand, being creative or building solutions, or whatever you're doing. >> Yeah. Mark was talking about it. You have this much money to spend, what's my decision to spend it on. Spend it on competing with your products. >> All right, Jack Berkowitz live here inside the CUBE here at Oracle's Modern Customer Experience, talking about the products, the data science, AI's hot. Great products. Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Welcome to the CUBE and good job sharing some great insight and the data here. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Presenter: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Welcome back, everyone. We are here live in San Francisco, for three days of wall-to-wall coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2016. The big story, Oracle moving through the cloud. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My cohost this week, Peter Burris, head of Research at SiliconANGLE Media, General Manager of Wikibon Research. Our next guest is Ashish Mohindroo, who is the Vice President of Oracle Cloud on the good old market side. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks John, same here. >> John: We have a mutual friend from Prasada. (laughter) Say hello. >> Hi Prakash! >> John: Prakash! He's good. Okay, entrepreneurs are all moving to the cloud, obviously it's a green field for them. But Oracle is a big company, this is clearly the mandate, this isn't cloud washing. People are saying oh they're cloud washing, but not really, Oracle is putting the effort in, we've been watching and documenting it. Obviously some critical analysis that's due here and there but for the most part, the progression is good, they're moving to the cloud. Can you give us an update because SaaS business, everyone sees that, knows that, the Platform as a Service, last year, was the big push, a lot of progress, so give us a quick one minute overview of what's the update on PaaS, Platform as a Service, and what's different this year about Infrastructure as a Service. >> Definitely, well thanks John, I think you hit the nail on the head with the fact that Oracle is the biggest secret in the industry, being the biggest cloud company, right, the most exciting cloud company in the valley. What we've really done is if you look at our numbers, we just announced our Q1 earnings, our business SaaS and PaaS business grew about 77%. It's the fastest growing SaaS and PaaS growth rate in the industry, compared to any other vendor, including Amazon, including Microsoft, and if you compare that to the Q4 numbers, where we grew at 66%, that was again faster than Amazon and Microsoft. So the market is expanding and Oracle is the fastest growing business in there. In addition to that-- >> John: By revenue or by percentage growth? >> By percentage growth. So we're close to about a $4 billion run rate on SaaS and PaaS as of Q1 FY17. >> That's across all the different, as a service? >> It's primarily SaaS, PaaS infrastructure and overall cloud revenue for us. >> John: Okay, got it. >> A big chunk of that is attributed to SaaS and PaaS. Now I want to give you some other statistics in terms of the size of our cloud business. You know there are about 98 million plus daily active users on a cloud. In addition, we do about 50 billion plus transactions a day on Oracle Cloud, right, so the massive scale, but we are operating across 195 different countries and growing, we have 19 plus regional data centers, I mean expanding more into China and Middle East, so the growth and the pace and the expansion of the business is massive and we believe that this market is growing at such an unprecedented rate that Oracle is well positioned to take advantage of that and really provide and end-to-end offerings to our customers. >> Larry Ellison in his key note last night and Rob Hope, our Editor in Chief at SiliconANGLE, who runs our editorial, grabbed the head line, his quote was Amazon, talking to Amazon, Amazon, your lead is over. Okay, what does that mean? What does that mean? Saying that your lead is over in the sense that we're closing the gap or enjoy it while you have it, we're coming after you? >> A number of things. One is that we're really making new exciting announcements into the infrastructure of the service play market. So you're going to hear within the next couple of days in terms of new offerings. We today announced the fact that we expanded our infrastructure's service capabilities from virtualized environments to also bare metal, which is something that Amazon doesn't offer. And the advantage of that is that companies can now run more high performance applications on bare metal service, versus being bothered by having to share that capacity to compute space with other applications and other customers. The other big thing what Oracle is doing is providing an end-to-end offering. So if you think about it, right, Amazon started out being with a compute layer. They said look, if you want to spin up a server, and just have to compute capacity, storage capacity, great, you don't need to invest in that, you don't need to buy it on premise, you can go to us. What customers are really looking for is yes, you can spin up a server, then what do you do next? You got to be able to build an application, you got to be able to scale that application, monitor that application, integrate that application, run analytics on that, and then at some point, do an end-of-life. So you want to have a complete application life cycle and management so you need an integrated capabilities. Today if you look at the public cloud offerings, you got to piece that together for multiple vendors. Even in Amazon, they provide you the basic services, but then you have to go to their partners to kind of fill in those pieces, manage multiple contracts, worry about integration, Oracle is providing an end-to-end capability. So today we also announced 19 plus additional services on our PaaS layer, from databases to integration, to IOT, so we are really providing you everything you need to not only get your data center moving towards the cloud but also your application development, integration, and management capabilities, that have not been available in the market today from a single vendor. So Oracle, with Larry, what he was really claiming was the market is up for grabs, we are the only vendor providing everything from end-to-end and we are going to be aggressively competing in the core infrastructure space with our new expanded offerings. >> What do you think Oracle's biggest advantage is? >> Sorry? >> What do you think Oracle's biggest advantage in the cloud is? I mean, you talked about the size of it, what do you think, fundamentally, is going to set Oracle apart from everybody else in the cloud? >> So part of that is the comprehensive nature of our offerings. From IAS to PaaS to SaaS. There's no other vendor that has that breadth. Customers are looking for a single throat to choke, in some ways, or a single vendor to deal with for a majority of the services, so we have a big advantage there. The second is our application ecosystem. If you look at the number of customers we have, the size of our offerings from ERP to CRM, to ACM, you can see that we provide everything, there's an economy around that, so customers want to build extensions, they want to integrate through these applications, and they really want to drive their business to one primary vendor, so Oracle has that advantage. The other stuff as we look at the cloud environment today, only 6% of all workloads are running on public infrastructure. That's growing at about 50% year over year. Now, 90% plus of workloads are still relying on on-premise environments, where do you think those are running on? Those are primarily running on Oracle infrastructures, whether it's Oracle databases, Oracle metalware, or also on-premise Oracle applications. So we believe customers want to have the same enterprise-grade capabilities on the cloud, which we've been working on for 40 years, now we learn from that experience, we learned from what our competitors have done over the last ten years, we bring that together to our new cloud infrastructure, PaaS and SaaS offerings. So from a technology perspective, the breadth perspective, and the customer experience perspective, we believe Oracle has a tremendous advantage, which is kind of hard to close a gap for it in terms of other competitors. >> The declining revenue on licenses, and the earnings call was pointed out, some color was given by Mark Heard on that but the growth in cloud was higher than the decline in on-prem licenses. And then Larry came over the top and said well, Microsoft has been moving all their customers to the cloud, we really haven't moved our people over. And then Mark Heard said we're in the long game, I'm kind of playing at that I want to get to a question, which is interesting, the database is very sticky. You guys have an in to all of your applications so it seems to me that the core of the show here is talking about infrastructure as a service, seem to be table stays low cost, high performance, comodotize the IaaS, and then move your customers over. Is that the strategy, is that just the timing? Am I over-reading into this thing, is it a conspiracy theory? >> What it is actually is that customers want high-quality, high-performance capabilities in the cloud, right? They've been used to building their own data centers. There's a reason for that. They could choose the infrastructure that they wanted, the servers that they wanted, the stories they wanted, the compute capacity they really needed, and they want the same experience on the public cloud. But cost was a big factor. So if you look at Amazon, it's very easy to get started but as your application scales, the cost starts to ramp, accelerate really fast, and customers are very wary of that fact that is this really a cost benefit for me in the long run to move to Amazon. One example is a company like Dropbox. That was in the news that brought back the infrastructure from Amazon to in-house, right? Couple of things for that, one was they wanted a better infrastructure and secondly they wanted to lower the costs. With Oracle, what we are saying is cost is a big factor for you to move to the cloud. We're going to take that away. We're going to make sure that you're getting the best performance, the best infrastructure, at the lowest cost possible in the industry, then we're going to give you capabilities to brace moving to the cloud, to migrate to the cloud. You're not going to say only build cloud-native applications in the cloud, but how do you take all these critical business applications, the core infrastructure that you're running today, and be able to transition that to the cloud, so we have new capabilities that we're introducing and infrastructures to servers, called Ravello Cloud Service, for example, that can literally do a lift and shift of all your V-Ems, of virtualized environment workloads, to the cloud. You don't have to rewrite them, you don't have to reconfigure them, all it does is simply point and click and you got them moving there. Nobody in the industry has that native cability coming with us. So we understand the challenges that other companies are going through, and we're giving them the capabilities and a path to move there. On top of that, Oracle went through a similar transition, so we learned a lot from our own internal transition. We went from on-premise systems to actually moving our internal systems to the Oracle Cloud. So we understood the pain, the challenges, and the opportunities that provided us to get that and we bring that same experience back to our customers. >> And as my final question for you, if you could take a minute and explain kind of what you do at Oracle but mainly, what going on in the field. As you guys take this to the customers, what are some of the things you're working on, do you have any events coming up, what's your road map for activities, and how are customers are engaging with Oracle? >> Very good questions, so my responsibility is go to market for Oracle Cloud, so especially for IaaS and PaaS. What we're noticing with our customers is every single conversation that we engage in, any size customer, whether it's a Fortune 500 customer, mid-size, or even a small company, they're all interested in either building out new applications in the cloud, migrating to the cloud, or really retiring their entire data center, and then moving all the workloads into the cloud. So we are noticing the tremendous amount of interest. They're all figuring out strategies of how do you get there. A lot of interest in hybrid clouds. So customers are going to start with new applications, up their applications in the cloud, but they'll still want to retain, because of regulatory compliance, security purposes, some applications in-house, so they want to know how do you kind of built out these hybrid cloud capabilities where you can have the same business model of subscription, metered offerings, within their own data center, and at the same time have the same flexibility to move to the cloud. So for that, we got to introduce our Oracle Cloud machine, or cloud customer capabilities that gives them that option, the flexibility to decide and move at their own pace. >> John: So a lot of education. >> Sorry? >> So you're doing a lot of education. >> Tremendous amount of education, we're actually going to be doing about a 50 plus city roadshow with our Cloud Days and Cloud World, close to OpenWorld. We're doing a lot of virtual-- >> So Cloud World is going to continue, we did the Cloud World in DC with theCUBE there, that was great. You going to do more of those regionally? >> We're going to do a global tour starting in October. We're actually going to be covering AMIA, APAC, North America, and even Latin America and South America so we're going across the world, going to different countries, I think we're covering about 50 plus countries in those events and basically spreading the word out and engaging with every kind of customer to educate them on Oracle and also give them a-- >> So big tent events in regions and then city events, satellite events to hub and spoke off those kinds of activities. >> Absolutely, yes. And doing a lot on the virtual as well, online. >> Yeah. Any virtual reality, walk into an Oracle database with my headset, look at this scheme, it's all screwed up! >> Ashish: That will be the next time around, we aren't there yet for that one. >> Thanks so much for sharing your insight and good luck with your activities, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, thanks man. >> Alright, we are here live at Oracle OpenWorld and if you want to join the conversation, go to Twitter and check out the hashtag #thecube, go to siliconangle.com and check out the research at wikibon.com and of course, go to siliconangle.tv, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris live here in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2016. In fact, there's more after this short break. (techno music)