>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering, empowering the autonomous enterprise brought to you by Oracle consulting. >>Welcome back everybody to this special presentation of the cube where we're covering the rebirth of Oracle consulting is a digital event where we're going out, we're extracting the signal from the noise. We happen today to be in Chicago, which is obviously the center of the country. A lot of big customers here, a lot of consultants and consulting organizations here. A lot of expertise. Mike Owens is here as a group VP for cloud advisory and the general manager of Oracle elevate. Mike, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. So I can ask you elevate in your title, what is Oracle elevate? Yeah. Oracle elevate was actually announced Oracle OpenWorld last year and it's the partnership that we really had to actually take our scale to the next level. So we actually did it with a Deloitte consulting, so the goal is to actually take the capabilities of both organizations. >>Deloitte really has functional capabilities and expertise with an Oracle practice and obviously Oracle has Oracle technical expertise. The combination of the two really allows us to scale, provide sort of, I call the one plus one equals three effort for customers. Now you've got a decent timeline or observation over the past several years. I joined three years ago. Um, you were at some brand name companies. First of all, what attracted you to come to Oracle consulting? Yeah, absolutely. So Oracle was in the point where they were doing a lot of stuff around on-prem on premise software, right? The old ERP type stuff. They were doing cloud, they sort of had to have this sort of transformational moment. Um, I was asked to come in and Oracle consulting in the early days and say, Hey look, we're trying to transform the organization from on prem consulting over to cloud consulting. >>Come in and help us with this stuff that you've worked from your prior to cloud companies and help us really move the organization forward and look at things differently. So it's definitely been a journey over the last three years of taking it from really 85% of the 90% of our revenue around on-prem type of engagements to now actually splitting the organization being dedicated a hundred percent on cloud, which is just a huge transformation the last three years. What really, what's the underpinning of gen two cloud? Can you give us sort of the bumper sticker on that? Yeah, all of the underpinning the gen two cloud is really, if you look at the gen one, cloud was purely just an infrastructure layer. Gen two was really based on a segmenting security, which is a huge problem out in the marketplace, right? So we actually have a sort of a worldclass way that we take a segment security outside of the actual environment itself. >>It's completely segmented, which is awesome, right? But then the also when you actually move it forward, the capability of the entire thing is built on sort of the autonomous enterprise autonomous capabilities. Everything is sort of self healing, self funding or not, sorry, self healing and self-aware that continually moves it forward. So the goal with that is, is if you have something that takes mundane tasks back to that, you have people that are no longer doing those capabilities today. So the underpinning of that and what that allows you to do is actually take that business case and you reduce that because you're no longer having a bunch of people do things that are no value add. Those people can actually move on to do back to the innovation and doing those higher level components. So the, >>so the business case is really about, uh, I mean primarily I would imagine about labor costs, right? It labor costs were very labor intensive. We're doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add differentiation and value to the business. You're shifting that to other tasks, right? Yeah. And so the >>patients are really the overall cost of the infrastructure, what it takes to maintain the infrastructure. And that's broken up into kind of two components. One of it is typical power, physical location, a building, all those kinds of things. And then the people that do the automations that take care of that right at the lower level. The third level is as you continue to get, um, sort of, uh, process in automation going forward, the people capability that actually maintains the applications becomes easier because you can actually extend those capabilities out into the application. Then you require fewer people to actually do the typical day to day things, whether it's DBS, et cetera like that. So it kind of becomes a continuous stream. There's various elements of the business case. You could sort of start with just the pure infrastructure cost and then get some of the, um, process and automations going forward and then actually go that even further. >>Right? And then as organizations, as a CIO, one of the questions I always have is where do you want to end on this? And they say, well, what are you talking about? Right? It's really, you're, you're on it, you're on a journey, you're on a transformation. I go, this is the big boy, big girl conversation, right? Do you want to have an organization that actually, uh, is, stays the same from the head count standpoint? Are you trying to look to a partner to do the, where are you trying to get in your operating model? What is your company trying to get you to look at? Right? Because all those inflection points, it takes a different step in the cloud journey. So as an advisor, right, as a trusted advisor, I asked those herbs are half a dozen or so questions I would kind of walk your organization through on sort of a cloud strategy and I'll pick the path that kind of works with them. And if they want to go to a managed service provider at the end, we would actually prepare someone, either bring the partner in or have an associate department. We've heard it off too, but we put the right pieces in place to make sure that that business cake works >>well. That's interesting. That's a really important point because a lot of customers would say, I don't want to reduce head count. I want to, I'm starving for people. I want to retrain people. You know, some companies may want to say, Hey, okay, I got to reduce head count. It's a mandate. But, but most, at least in these boom times are saying, I want to shift. So by point to the business cases, if you're not going to cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. And so the, the example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive as is relevant, and I want to explain this is that, for example, very simple example. You're, you're, I'm inferring you're going to be able to compress the time to value. You're gonna reduce your, lower your break even, you know, accelerate the time to positive cash flow if you will. That's an example of a value component to the business and part of the business case. The people look at that and is that absolutely, absolutely. >>That's what it is. Definitely the business case and when he call it the, you know, when you get your rate of return, right. Um, the more that we can compress that. And I would say back to the conversation we had earlier about elevate and some of the partnerships we have Deloitte around that, a lot of that is to actually come up with enough capabilities that we can actually take the business case and actually reduce that and have special other things we can do for our customers. We're on financing and things like that to make it easier for them. Right. We have options to make customers and actually help that business case. Some of the business cases we've seen our entire it organization saving 30 plus percent or if you multiply that on a, you know, a large fortune 100 that may have a billion dollar budget, that's real money. >>Yeah. And okay, yes, no doubt. But then when you translate that into the business impact, like you talked about the it impact, but if you look at the business impact now it becomes telephone numbers. And actually CFOs oftentimes just don't even believe it. But it's true because if you can make the entire organization just, you know, a half a percentage point more productive and you got a hundred thousand employees, I mean that is, that overwhelms actually the it business case. >>Yeah. And that's where that back to the sort of the steps in the business case is on the business and application side is making those folks actually more productive in the business case and saving them and adding, you know, whether it's a financial services and you're getting, um, an application out to market that actually generates revenue. Right. So that's, it's sort of the trickle effect. So when I look at it, I definitely look at it from a, it all the way through business. I am a technically a business architect that does it pretty damn good. >>Yeah. And it enables that sort of business transformation. How do you, let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement. How are people thinking about that? Um, cause you're talking a lot about just sort of self-funding, um, and, and, and self progressing in a sort of an organic entity that you're describing. How are people I >>think about that? Yeah. And I would say they're kind of a little bit older map. Right. Um, but I would say that the goal is what we're trying to embed back to the operating model we want to really embed is, you know, sort of the concept of the cloud center of excellence in as part of that at the end you have to have a set of functionality to have folks that's constantly looking at the applications and or services of the different cloud providers. A capability you have across the board. Everyone's got a multicloud environment, right? How do they take those services they're probably already paying for anyways. And as the components get released, how can you continually put little pieces in there and do little micro releases. Quarterly are, sorry, weekly, you know, every month versus a big bang twice a year. Right? Those little automation pieces continually add innovation in smaller chunks. >>And that's really the goal of cloud computing. And you know, as you can actually break it up, it's no longer the big bang theory. Right. And I love that concept, embedding that, whether you actually have a partner with some of the stuff that we're doing that actually we embed what we call like a day two services that that's what it is to support them. But Austin constantly look for different ways to include capabilities that were just released to add value on an ongoing basis. You don't have to go, Hey, great, that capability came out. It will be on next year's release. No, it could be next week. It could be next month. Right. >>Well, so the outcomes should be you be dramatically lowering costs, really accelerating your time to value. It really is what you're describing and we've been talking about in terms of the autonomous, you know, enterprise. It's really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? >>It is. Absolutely right, and so when we use the term autonomous enterprise too, I love that because that's actually the term I've been using for a few years. Even before Larry started talking about the autonomous database, I talk about that environment of constantly look at an a cloud capability and everything that you can put from a machine earlier into AI under basically basically a bit let it run itself. The more that you can do that, the higher the value can you put those people off in a higher level tasks, right? That's been going on every provider for awhile. Oracle just has the capability now within the database that takes it to the next level, right? So we still are the only organization with that put that on top of our gen two cloud where all that is built in. Um, as part of it going forward, that's where we have the upper level really at the enterprise computing level, right? We can, we can work at all types of workload, but where we are niches is really those big enterprise workloads. Cause that's where we started from data enterprise. >>I didn't want to make it a technology discussion. But you said the only, only organization, you mean the only technology company with that autonomous database capabilities, is that correct, sir? Yes. Okay. So I know others sort of talk about it, but you know, Oracle I think talks about it more forcefully. We'll dig into that and uh, and report back. Mike, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Good stuff. Thank you very much. All right, and thank you for watching. We're right back with our next guest. You watching the cube. We're here in Chicago covering the rebirth of Oracle consulting. I'm Dave Volante. We'll be right back.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering empowering the autonomous enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >>Hello, everyone. And welcome to this Cube special presentation where we're covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. So this is a digital event where we're going around and identifying subject matter experts in different locations. We're currently here in Chicago, and I'm here with Stephanie Trunzo, who's the head of transformation and offerings at Oracle Consultants. Definitely. Great to see you >>again. Yeah. So Oracle Consulting. You know, you guys have been quiet lately. Yeah, >>well, we were quiet because I wasn't >>here yet. Yeah, exactly. >>Here to make some noise. So I love the way you said rebirth. I think it's really accurate. Oracle Consulting has been around for quite some time, but as you said, maybe not high on the radar and one of the things that we're learning And one of the reasons I'm here in this transformation role is to help us transform ourselves to better match the transformation that our clients are going >>through. So was there an >>internal transformation? Or is there an internal transformation taking place as well? And then you're sort of pointed to the marketplace. Maybe you could describe that. >>Absolutely. So we're undergoing our own transformation at the same time that we're helping our clients undergo their transformation. And so, for us what that looks like, it is things like a traditional services organization, which is kind of what Oracle Consulting had been in the past, was looking at the expertise that was necessary to drive clients business forward. But delivering it in what I would call a pretty traditional way, time of materials based kinds of contracting, determining the skills that were necessary, and and conversing with clients and feature function kinds of discussions. And our transformation is now about rebuilding the organization around offerings. And those offerings are things that we're doing to match the way that our clients are consuming. Let's say cloud technology. So if you might purchase of natural language processing service from a cloud platform, we want to also make sure that we're matching the humans to those technology services and enabling our clients to buy from us in a very similar way. >>We're also bringing in some new blood. Obviously, Oracle large organization, A lot of DNA there, but yourself you came from IBM, you got people coming in from AWS. You've got folks from Accenture and all over the place. So describe that and how that's affecting the culture of Oracle consulting. >>There's an influx of talent that is necessary to change the way that you think. And I believe that one of the reasons I myself came to join Oracle Consulting was I was excited about this new adventure. So when you're working in a certain style in a certain way, in a certain team for some amount of time, can maybe forget to get introspective and forget to look at what's right in front of you and the changes you need to make, so bringing in new talent from outside is as much a part of our transformation as the way that we're shaping our offerings is bringing in those new ideas, bringing in people who have you've been there, done it in other experiences so that they can infuse our thinking with some of what's going on >>in the market around us. How >>would you summarize the mission of Oracle Consulting? >>The mission of Oracle Consulting is extremely simple. It's dead simple. It's help our clients succeed on Oracle >>Cloud Technology, period >>because Oracle's, known as a product company, is still suffer products that generate most of your revenue. So and you've got your cloud, you've got things like Cloud a customer and exit data that's really driving you get. The Oracle database is certainly a huge application portfolio. How is Oracle consulting? Aligning with the products >>as a product company? Our goal is still to help our clients achieve miracles, right? And so Consulting is looking at our Oracle products that to make sure that we're always the deepest and the busted understanding so we can help leverage that technology to its fullest capacity for our clients, it's not just good enough to buy a tool. You have to know how to use it, right? And so our objective is to align with Oracle products. Make sure we know what's going to be hot off the press that we're driving from our client Experience is back into the product sets as well. So we're informing our product development of what's really happening out in the world with our clients implementations. >>My last question is, how you gonna define success when you look back, you know a couple years from now, what will success look like? >>Success to me will look like being the go to for any solution. That is an Oracle driven answer to our clients that Oracle Consulting is driving consumption in a way that is extremely valuable to the client because in the end, cloud consumption technology consumption in and of itself is not very interesting. It's when we're telling stories that our client stories on stage is because we've helped them achieve new business outcomes, things that >>weren't possible before. It's great to have >>you. Thank you so much for coming on, and it's good to have you at the helm. Bring credibility to Oracle Consulting and we'll be watching So >>awesome. Thank you. >>Thank you for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest.