(lively music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer 22 formerly VMworld, Dave 12 years we've been covering VMware's annual conference. Going next level explores bigger theme, Multi-cloud another inflection point for VMware. And again at the center of it is the partners Zia Yusuf is here senior vice president strategic ecosystem and industry solutions. You're the, you're, you got the keys to the kingdom for VMware, welcome to theCube. >> It's a pleasure, I mean, you guys are a legend here. This is my first time here. So, it's a pleasure and excited to chat with you. >> Well, great to have you, every single year, since 2010 we've always had great commentary and discussion and sometimes contentious discussion around the role of partners. Visa V, VMware's value proposition, VMware dominant and the enterprise data center, everyone knows that. Dominant and hybrid was first there, everyone knows that. Now going to the next level, the customer stay, they stay with VMware, they don't really leave. They still got a great loyal base but now the enterprise is going NextGen cloud native. The partners are energized with the conversations we're hearing is huge. There's changes of roles is clarity on value proposition. Monetization is hoppin'. It's great stuff, what's going on? You're new, but you have a view of this before. Take us through your what's going on in the partner network, what's the state of the union? >> Yeah, I think, thanks for the question. I think maybe just step back a second right, the word partners is a big word. It covers all kinds of things. VMware has had a rich history of partnerships you know, mostly technology related partnerships. So much of our products depend on other partners, OEM partners, and so on. We've also had a rich history of our channel. So, as you look at different channel partners as you look at going through different parts of the segment SMB and so on, in a cloud context, based on what's happening we needed to take an integrated ecosystem approach. That's the word I use, right. And for me it's, it's a little bit like a spider's web. Like no single strand in the web is that strong but when you put it together thoughtfully in a very deliberate way. That's what an integrated ecosystem strategy. And so we've got our VCP partners, longstanding history that machine continues. We've got our channel partners and OEM partners that machinery continues obviously Dell strategic partner, significant business. The parts of the puzzle that I've been focusing on is five other different pieces. So first of course, is our hyper scale partnerships long history with AWS, very successful history. We have GCVE with GCP. We announced, I think three, four months ago that GCP was joining our VMware cloud universal and a big announcement yesterday about Microsoft doing the same. And hopefully we extend that. So, as we work with this hyper scaler six or seven of these partners, it's a, as you can imagine kind of a multidimensional chess game, if you will a little bit competitive mostly cooperative and stuff, right. The GSI is very exciting piece of it. The essentials that Deloitte, Deloitte announced a new business unit on VMware, ACL did the same. That energy level has really gone up. You see it at the show here as well. We recognize that these significant SI's play a huge role in the decision making process with customers. And we want to enable them to build significant VMware businesses. It's a different game from that perspective. Last thing I'm point out is, industry and verticals. Right I mean, this is not being necessarily an area because of the layer of the stack we've been in. Obviously Telco is an end to end business unit for us. We have products, we have a go to market on Telco, public sector to some degree because you need all these three letter agencies and the security and compliance. But as you look at financial services as you look at retail, as you look at healthcare we need to be aware of the workload we need especially on modern apps, especially on the edge. So we kind of doubling down on some of our vertical capabilities. So, all of those things are connected as well, right. The SI to the hyper scale partners in a vertical context. >> What's the biggest change that you've seen? Because we've observed some partners are leaning out as they change their business. And VMware has got new partners coming in, leaning in. So you got mentioned, Dave mentioned Telco and you got new use cases with edge and multi-cloud so you know, some people kind of maybe age out or change their strategy, some double down the core partner network, and then new ones come in. What's been the biggest change, if you can look at that holistically? >> Yeah, it's a great question, right? Because it's so multidimensional and there is no such thing as a GSI global system because they build products. Sometimes they act as a reseller, they're a solution provider. Also they provide services. So as their business model changes, we have to adjust how we engage with them. We can't put them in nice clean buckets. And that's what I'm doing with my colleagues here is how do we really enable them? And one of the things, I mean, I've done this type of stuff, I was at SAP for many years. We need to figure out how do we make them successful? Not just, this is what VMware wants you to do. We need to understand their business model and how do we fit into that? 'Cause if they grow, then we grow with that. And that is honestly a little, it's a subtle point, but it's a little bit of a nuanced. >> Yeah, it's very nuanced, but you have to nail that. You got to overlay. >> 100% >> The strategy where the enablement is technically or product wise, economics and conflict. (John laughing) >> And profitably, if they're profitably is important to us it's not just their growth. >> So Zia, I want to test the premise on you, something, John and I have been working on this notion of super cloud. And we did an event earlier this month, but one of the aspects that's kind of nuance and futuristic is if I'm a, let's say a financial services company and I'm going through a digital transformation I would be looking strategically at what, say Amazon did taking it's internal IT and then pointing at the world. I would say, I have data. I have tools, I have software, I have expertise that's really unique and could be value add. And I would be thinking, how do I monetize that, create my own cloud. And I'm actually just going to throw it into a public cloud to do that. I've got mainframes running, I've got Oracle stuff on Prem. I'm not going to shift that stuff into the cloud and maybe some of it, but I've got transaction systems and proprietary data. And a lot of it is running on VMware and I've got cloud stuff too. I would be looking at, okay, how do I build my own cloud and put my data, my tooling, my software in front of a new ecosystem, my own ecosystem that I can you know monetize. Are you seeing- >> Without spending the CapEx. >> Yeah, without having to build data centers? Right, exactly. I want to take advantage of the gift that the hyper scalers are given. Are you seeing any activity bubbling up in that regard? >> It's a really, it's a really interesting question. And I think the terminology that we've used around cloud smart kind of goes into that. So let me take what you said. >> Okay please, yeah. >> And frame it in a slightly different way. You can standardize on public clouds and everybody's using the same thing. You're using the same services, and so on. Theoretically that could lose some of your differentiation. Right, I mean, especially for financial services companies that have built so much of their you know, trading test down to the milli, milli, millisecond and how do they do that, and so on. So, I think you have something there right. So, as they look at their technology and software strategy, yes there's cost reduction aspects of it. There's refactoring aspects of it that hygiene that needs to be done as Rughu talked about from this cloud chaos to cloud smart, if you will but then how do you differentiate on the business processes? How do you differentiate that then down into the workloads? And I think that's where to use an old term. It takes a village, right, you've got the system integrator that's providing this stuff. You've got other strategy firms like the BCGs and McKinseys of the world that have huge influence now. Then you've got technology players that are coming into that. And I think the cloud smart approach is to do exactly what you're saying. It's not just the refactoring, it's not just movement to the cloud. How do you retain your competitive edge from the processes the models, the thinking that you've built up over many years. So, I don't know if it's super cloud or what that means, but that at the end of the day, this is about business processes. At the end of the day, this is about having a competitive edge in the market and I think you could do it. >> It's industry cloud, right? >> It's, that's a good way to put it. >> Yeah. >> I think Industry cloud is a good way. >> Why is there security cloud, Why isn't there an insurance cloud? Why's there a FinTech cloud? So I mean if you look at Goldman Sachs capital one. >> Right. >> There, CapEx is handled by AWS. Snowflake built their entire business on AWS. Didn't spend the dime on CapEx. Well, they spent a lot of operating expense for that CapEx and the fees, but still they became successful. And then the rest is history. So, I think people are seeing this idea of I'll ride that back on the CapEx of the hyper scalers and then use the tooling from the partner network and what's available. To then, cobble together in an architectural engineered way, distributed computing way, a new way to do things. Okay, so if you believe that, which we do, then you say, oh, it's on the balance sheet. So, what we've been hearing from companies is like, "Hey it's going to be on the balance sheet", I better have an income statement impact on the top line. So, you start to see behavior change at the customers not IT powering the business and the back office and terminals and some app. >> Crosscutting. >> It's like, no, no, no this is a digital business. So, the integration of balance sheet income statement on the economics is driving a lot of the behavior at the customers. So we see customers thinking this way and it's like we've never seen this level of business model refactoring as well as partner vendor selection, product technology mix at the same time. >> And VMware. >> At this level. >> Need the connective tissue between the hyper scalers in the ecosystem and actually provide those cross cloud connections. >> Yeah. >> You know, to the extent there's a business case there, that's what we're trying to of squint through. Is it going to be hybrid with on-prem in one cloud or is there an advantage of going cross clouds beyond just avoiding lock in you know, to take advantage of global infrastructure? >> So and then the next question is the Tam then bigger which means the partners are better? >> Yeah right. >> Participate in that. >> Yeah, I think, and we look at economics of this, right? I mean, there's a huge emphasis on cost, right. Cost, and I completely get that. I think, as I've talked to customers both now that I'm here but before advising a range of companies the innovation process, the time to impact is equally important all right as you compete. There's no point in just getting your cost down. If you're then getting beaten up in the market and you're not able to differentiate with new digital services. And this is where call it super cloud, call it industry cloud. We need to connect up to the business processes and the business impact and not just in my view the cost infrastructure piece of it. >> Yeah. And that we can't do on our own, we're not an apps company. So we're, you're not SAP, we're not Oracle, but we need to work with those players to make sure that their workloads are optimized in the right cloud in the right configuration. And that is a job to be done as opposed to just let's take it to town. >> And there's clearly a technology business case, especially if we're working with companies like VMware who's going to help me you know, simplify. >> Right. >> My move to the multi-cloud but there's also a business and economic impact in that. Even if it's not, if it could be simple as if I partner with Microsoft I'm going to do more business right if I'm one of these industry clouds. So I see that as another potential tailwind, it's really, it's like when Dreesen says all your companies are software companies, to me all companies are cloud companies, now increasingly. >> Look the difference between cloud and apps and then stuff, I mean like. >> Yeah, it's all. >> It's like you know there's used to be infrastructure and then apps company and so on. We need to deliver with our ecosystem partners and integrated solution and solution with a big S not just the technology solution but the broader, I mean look at the change management. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We talked about culture, I mean, if you don't get that piece right and the change management piece. >> Everything, yeah. >> You know the rest of it is history. >> Well and it's got to be delivered as a service, >> It has to be. >> Which is huge implications as to how you deal with change management. >> And this goes back to my kind of first comment is I really try and think of this by architecting the ecosystem. I don't like the word alliances. Right I mean, let's say kind of a one to one relationship. You know, let's do an agreement, let's go have dinner, but architecting the ecosystem the spiders web, who are the different players how can we compliment each other? And if it, Deloitte and a Microsoft want to do amazing business together related to VMware technology I want to encourage that. And so those third party Connections. >> You guys your contextualizing the ecosystem, basically. And I think from a customers standpoint that's a benefit to them, in my opinion in fact, Dave, remember at our supercloud.world event URL supercloud.world is the plug for the site. They can check it out. One of the comments from the cloudarati panel was we had a title this session called the innovators dilemma you know question mark you know . >> Best book ever written. >> Yeah, yeah. And so the, one of the panels said, it shouldn't be, we should change it to the integrators dilemma because what's happening is that integration is now standard table stakes and, but integrating the right things now matters, right? So, integration for integration sake isn't necessarily the end game anymore. >> And this is where. >> And this kind of where you're getting at with the spider's web is that integrating properly is a solution mindset. >> And look, I'm integrating also, you know have to bring in data from that perspective. Right, at the end of the day data being the new oil, if you will, the integration allows that data to flow to the right place at the right time to make the right decision. Now, we are not doing all of those pieces but we are certainly enabling that. And as you especially start looking at what we can do on the edge and what we can do in a retail store and a factory and so on those kinds of things come together. >> Okay, Zia take some time. We got a couple minutes left, only two minutes left, I want you to get some commentary directly to the audience around what specifically you're doubling down on. That's new that you're investing in on the partner network or your partner strategy. What is a steady state that's being nurtured and farmed or whatever word you want to use, but here's our core thing. Here's the area of improvement we're going to be in you know, cranking the handle on take us through that. >> Sure. >> I know you got OAM, got telco, got new things going on. >> Yeah so, maybe a couple of things right. >> lay it all out. >> First of all it has to be linked to VMware strategy. So as we transition on this journey to subscription saas ARR, we need to bring our ecosystem along to do that. That has business model implications that has implications on how we engage with them, how we define success how we value things. So that's an important journey. Secondly, is we need to do a better job of enabling our partners. Right, I mean, we have our partner connected. We do a pretty good job on the channel side. We need to do a better job on the GSIs is really understanding their business model, how they're engaging with their customers and provide them the technology the support, the financial resources, so that they can be successful. That's very important. Third is, to connect the dots on the ecosystem, right? I mean it's a, I've spent a lot of time in this event as well in joint meetings between system integrators and hyper scalers with our technology colleagues on Intel or NetApp or AMD. And these are companies that we have a rich history with. We're trying to connect, because that's how customers look at it. So, connecting the dots between the ecosystem super important to us, and then look, there's a change management journey within VMware. We also need to understand how we can engage with partners in a more productive, effective way. How do we scale this up? I believe, I think our leadership in Raghu and Sumit we are not going to succeed unless we have a profitable, engaged, passionate ecosystem around. >> Yeah I mean, they got to make money. They got to. >> Exactly. >> Be successful, have successful customers, their end customers your customers. Well, all good, question of where you're investing the most right now. If you had to put a kind of the pie chart together, I mean some of it's steady state like it's a machine, some of it's new like Telco for instance I mean here's. >> I think again, rich history on the channel side, we continue to invest there. Very valuable to go do that. I think some of these newer areas around the system integrators, especially the large ones, the Whipple's the HCLs, Deloittes essentials of the world, very important. The hyper scaler relationships directly leads into ARR. You saw the VMC cloud Universal will continue. >> We have Google on great props from Google. >> Yeah, We love it you guys. >> Yeah, and so look, I think we are not multi-cloud unless we go do this. Right I mean, Raghuram made a joke about this. We were single cloud and now we're multi-cloud, we want our customers to be able to procure these integrated solutions through VMware and our hyper scaler partners will continue to do that's when multi-cloud really become. And so the GTM motion, the discounting the commission structure all of that machinery is an important radio for me. >> Zia thank you so much for coming on theCube. I know you've been super busy. You got to go out and hit all the partners say hello, compressing you know, got to hit the pavement, say hello to everyone. >> It's been fantastic, the partners have too many, too many parties and so. (Interviewers laughing) But that's a fun part of my job, but appreciate your time. >> You got good stamina. >> Thanks Zia. >> So you got to have that in this game. Not about the faint of heart here at VMware. Zia thank you for coming on. >> Of course. >> This is the cube coverage, back after lunch. After the short break day two of three days of live coverage here in Moscone West on the street floor level of the event I'm John Furrier with Dave Alante. We'll be right back. (lively 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)