>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Paolo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Hi everybody, welcome back. You're watching theCUBE. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is a very special digital event and we're really covering the transformation not only of the industry, but the transformation of Oracle Consulting and its rebirth. Mike Owens is here, Group VP of Cloud Advisory and GM of Oracle Elevate which is a partnership that Oracle announced last Open World with Deloitte. And Don Schmidt is here, who's a Managing Director at Deloitte. Gents, good to see ya, welcome. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> So Don, I want to start with you. Transformation, everybody talks about that. There's a lot of trends goin' on in the industry. What do you guys see as the big gestalt transformation that's going on? >> Yeah, I think there's an inflection point right now. Everybody's been saying they want to get out of their data centers, though leaps haven't really been taking place. They've been kind of moving in small bits. We're now at the point where large transformation at scale of getting out of your data centers is now here. So we are here to try to help our clients move faster. How can we do this more effectively, cost-efficiently, and get them out of these data centers so that they can move on with their day-to-day business? >> So data centers just not an efficient use of capital for your customers is what you're saying. >> No, no there's lots of ways to do this a lot faster, cheaper, and get onto innovation. Spend your money there, not on hardware, floor space, power, cooling. >> Two very well-known brands, you guys get together. So what was the sort of impetus to get together? How's it going? Give us the update on that front. >> Oracle has been really technology focused. It was really created by technologists. And back to the point of what we're trying to do with the Cloud when you're trying to do larger transformation, those aren't some of the skills that we have. We've been bringing in some of those skills in DNA, but if you look at it as why would you try to recreate the situation? Why would you not partner with an organization if it does large business transformation, like a Deloitte? And so the impetus of that is how do we take the technology with a business transformation, pull that together, and back to the one plus one equals three from a customer. That's what they really want. So how to we actually scale that and do really big things and get big outcomes for our customers? Our partnership is not about trying to take a bunch of customers and move a couple application workloads. Our job, what we're really chartered to do is really make huge transformational leaps for our customers using the combined capabilities of the two organizations. So it's a huge paradigm for us to kind of do this. >> And in our collaboration with the two organizations, just the opposite for what Mike just said. So Deloitte wasn't really big in big IT. Business-led transformation is kind of what Deloitte's been known for, along with our cyber practice and so we needed the deep skills of the technical experts. >> So you just described what I would think of as wave one and as you keep peeling, you got the applications, you got the business process, you might have reorganizations. That's really where you guys have expertise, right? >> There's a lot of things you have to sort through and that's where the combined alvic program really synergizes itself around the tools that we have. We both have tools will help make sure we get this right. Deloitte has a product called ATADATA, Oracle has a product called Soar, they marry together properly into this transformational journey to make sure we get the discovery done right and we get the migrations done right, as well. >> Take me through a typical engagement, typical, I know, in quotes, and then how long? Take me to the point at which you start to get business value. What do I got to do to get there? >> So we see two different spectrums on a transformation and it really aligns to what are your objectives. Do you just need to get out of the data center because you're on archaic, dying hardware? Or do you want to take your time and make a little bit more of a transformational journey? Or do you want to play somewhere in the middle of that spectrum? But in either one of those we'll come in and do a discovery conversation. We'll understand what's in your data center, understand what the age or the health of your data center is, help put the customers through a business case, a TCO, how fast or how slow the journey needs to be for them, create what we call wave groups of how fast and we're going to sequence those, over time, to get out of their data center. In parallel, we're going to be doing, as Mike was saying, around all the operational aspects. So while we're doing that discovery, we want to start standing up their Cloud center of excellence. Getting Cloud operations into the organization is a different skillset for IT to have. They're going to need to retrain themselves, retool themselves in the world of Cloud. So we kind of do that in parallel. And then what we want to do is when we start a project, we want to start with a little POC or small, little group of safe applications and we can proof out the model works, move those into the Cloud and then what we want to do is we want to scale that out at its large pace, get the IT savings, get the cost cuts out of the organization. >> Do you guys have specific plays or campaigns that I can do to get started? Maybe do a little test case? Any particular offerings that? >> It's all under the program of Elevate. We've got a couple of campaigns. So the biggest one we've been talking about is around the data center transformation, so that's kind of the first campaign that we're working on together. The next one is around moving JD Edwards specific applications to Oracle's Cloud. And then the third one is around our analytics offering that Deloitte has and how we're going to market to genera, put that in it, as well. Those are our three major campaigns. >> The JDE migration, so you've got what? Situations where people have just broken systems? >> Yeah, I would say it's more of a JDE modernization. So you have an organization, right? They may have a JD, a JDE or JD Edwards instance that's really, it's older. They may be on version nine or something like that. They don't want to go all the way to SaaS 'cause they can't simplify the business processes. They need to do that but they also want to take advantage of the higher level of capabilities of Cloud computing: IoT, mobile, et cetera. So as a modernization, one of the things we're doing is an approach it together. We work with customers, depending on where they're goin' and going, "Hey, great, you can actually modernize "by taking it up to this version of JDE "through an upgrade process," but that allows you then to move it over to Oracle Cloud infrastructure which allows you to tap into all those platform services, the IoT and stuff like that to take to the next level. Then you can actually do the higher level analytics that sits on top of that. So it's really a journey where the customer wants to get. There's a various, kind of four major phases that we can do, or entry points with a customer on the JDE modernization, we kind of work them through. So that's a skill of some of the capabilities that Deloitte has is a deep JDE and as well as Oracle Consulting, and we actually are going to market that together. Matter of fact, we're even at conferences together talking about our approaches, here and in our future. >> In the analytics campaign, so it seems to me a lot of companies don't have their data driven. They want to be data driven, but they're not there yet and so their data's in silos and so I would imagine that that's all about helping them understand where the data is, breaking down, busting down those silos, and then actually putting in sort of an analytics approach that drives them from data to insight. Is that fair? >> Yeah, fair. Yeah, it's not just doin' reporting and dashboards, it's actually having KPI driven insights into their information and their data within their organizations. And so Deloitte has some pre-configured applications for HR, finance, and supply chain. >> Guys, two powerhouses. Thanks so much for explaining in theCUBE and to our audience it. Appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. >> All right, thank you everybody for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Chicago. We'll be right back after this short break. (soft electronic music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering empowering the autonomous enterprise brought to you by >>Oracle Consulting. Everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We've been covering the transformation of Oracle consulting and really, it's rebirth. And I'm here with Chris Fox, who's the group vice president for Enterprise Cloud Architects and chief technologist for the North America Tech Cloud at Oracle. Chris, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thanks too great to be here, >>So I love this title. You know, years ago, this thing is a cloud architect. Certainly there were chief technologist, but so you really that's those are your peeps, Is that right? >>That's right. That's right. That's really in my team. And I That's all we dio. So our focus is really helping our customers take this journey from when they were on premise. You really transforming with cloud? And when we think about Cloud, really, for us, it's a combination. It's it's our hybrid cloud, which happens to be on premise. And then, of course, the true public cloud, like most people, are familiar with so very exciting journey and frankly, of seeing just a lot of success for our customers. You know what I think we're seeing at Oracle, though? Because we're so connected with SAS. And then we're also connected with the traditional applications that have run the business for years. The legacy applications that have been, you know, servicing us for 20 years and then the cloud native developers. So with my team and I are constantly focused on now is things like digital transformation and really wiring up all three of these across. So if we think of, like a customer outcome like I want to have a package delivered to me from a retailer that actual process flow could touch a brand new cognitive site of e commerce it could touch essentially maybe a traditional application that used to be on Prem that's now in the cloud. And then it might even use new SAS application, maybe for maybe Herman process or delivery vehicle and scheduling. So when my team does, we actually connect all three. So what? I was mentioned, too. In my team and all of our customers, we have field service, all three of those constituents. And if you think about process flows, so I take a cloud. Native developer we help them become efficient. We take the person use to run in a traditional application, and we help them become more efficient. And then we have the SAS applications, which are now rolling out new features on a quarterly basis and the whole new delivery model. But the real key is connecting all three of these into your business process flow. That makes the customers life much more vision. >>So I want to get into this cloud conversations that you guys are using this term last mover advantage. I asked you last I was being last, You know, an advantage. But let me start there. >>People always say, You know, of course, we want to get out of the data center. We're going zero data center and how we say, Well, how are you going to handle that back office stuff, right? The stuff that's really big Frankie, um, doesn't handle just, you know, instances dying or things going away too easily. It needs predictable performance in the scale. It absolutely needs security. And ultimately, you know, a lot of these applications truly have relied on Oracle database. The Oracle database has its own specific characteristics that it means to run really well. So we actually looked at the cloud and we said, Let's take the first generation clouds but you're doing great But let's add the features that specifically a lot of times the Oracle workload needed in order to run very well and in a cost effective manner. So that's what we mean when we say last mover advantage, We said, Let's take the best of the clouds that are out there today. Let's look at the workloads that, frankly, Oracle runs and has been running for years. What are customers needed? And then let's build those features right into this, uh, this next version of the cloud we service the Enterprise. So our goal, honestly, which is interesting is even that first discussion we had about cloud, native and legacy applications and also the new SAS applications. We built a cloud that handles all three use cases at scale resiliently in very secure manner, and I don't know of any other cloud that's handling those three use cases all in. We'll call it the same pendency process. Oracle >>Mike witnesses. Why was it important for Oracle? And is it important for Oracle on its customers that have to participate in IAS and Pass and SAS. Why not just the last two layers of that? Um What does that mean from a strategic advantage standpoint? What does that do for >>you? Yeah, great question. So the number one reason why we needed to have all three was that we have so many customers to today are in a data center. They're running a lot of our workloads on premise, and they absolutely are trying to find a better way to deliver lower cost services to their customers. And so we couldn't just say, Let's just everyone needs to just become net new. Everyone just needs to ditch the old and go just a brand new alone. Too hard, too expensive at times. So we said, You know, let's kill us customers the ultimate amount of choice. So let's even go back against that developer conversation and SAS Um, if you didn't have eyes, we couldn't help customers achieve a zero data center strategy with their traditional applications will call it PeopleSoft or JD Edwards, Revisit Suite or even. There's some massive applications that are running on the Oracle cloud right now that are custom applications built on the Oracle database. What they want is, they said, Give me the lowest. Possibly a predictable performance. I as I'll run my app steer on this number two. Give me a platform service for database because, frankly, I don't really want to run your database. Like with all the manual effort. I want someone automate, patching scale up and down and all these types of features like should have given us. And then number three. You know, I do want SAS over time. So we spend a lot of time with our customers really saying, How do I take this traditional application, Run it on eyes and has and the number two Let's modernize it at scale. Maybe I want to start peeling off functionality and running in the cloud Native services right alongside, right? That's something again that we're doing at scale. And other people are having a hard time running these traditional workloads on Prem in the cloud. The second part is they say, you know, I've got this legacy traditional your api been servicing we well, or maybe a supply chain system ultimately want to get out of this. How do I get to SAS? You say Okay, here's the way to do this. First bring into the cloud running on IAS and pass and then selectively, I call it cloud slicing. Take a piece of functionality and put it into SAS. We're helping customers move to the cloud at scale. We're helping them do it at their rate, with whatever level of change they want. And when they're ready for SAS, we're ready for them. >>How does autonomous fit into this whole architecture Wait for that? That that description? I mean, it's a it's nuanced, but it's important. I'm sure you haven't discussed this conversation with a lot of cloud architects and chief technologist. They want to know this stuff. They want to know how it works. Um, you know, we will talk about what the business impact is, but but yeah, it's not about autonomous and where that fits. >>So the autonomous database, what we've done is really big. And look at all the runtime operations of an Oracle database. So tuning, patching, sparing all these different features and what we've done is taken the best of the Oracle database the best of something called Exit Data right, which we run in the cloud which really helps a lot of our customers. And then we wrapped it with a set of automation and security tools to help it. Really, uh, managing self tune itself. Patch itself scale up and down, independent between compute and storage. So why that's important, though, is that it? Really? Our goal is to help people run the Oracle databases they have for years, but with far less effort and then even not letting far less effort. Hopefully, you know a machine. Last man out of the equation we always talk about is your man plus machine is greater than man alone, so being assisted by, um, artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform those database operations, we should provide a better service to our customers. Far less paths are hoping goal is that people have been running Oracle databases, you know, How can we help them do it with far less effort and maybe spend more time on what the data can do for the organization? Right? Improve customer experience at Centra versus maybe like Hana Way. How do I spin up the table? It >>so talk about the business impact. So you go into customers, you talk to the the cloud Architects, the chief technologist. You pass that test now, you got to deliver the business impact. We're is Oracle Consulting fit with regard to that? And maybe you could talk about that where you were You guys want to take this thing? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so you know, the cloud is a great set of technologies, but where Oracle Consulting is really helping us deliver is in, um, you know, one of the things I think that's been fantastic working with the Oracle consulting team is that, you know, Cloud is new for a lot of customers who've been running these environments for a number of years. There's always some fear and a little bit of trepidation saying, How do I learn this new cloud of the workloads? We're talking about David, like tier zero, tier one, tier two and all the way up to Dev and Test and, er, um, Oracle consulting. This really couple things in particular, Number one, they start with the end in mind, and number two that they start to do is they really help implement these systems. And, you know, there's a lot of different assurances that we have that we're going to get it done on time and better be under budget because ultimately, you know, again, that's a something is really paramount for us and then the third part of it. But sometimes a run book, right? We actually don't want to just live in our customer's environments. We want to help them understand how to run this new system. So training and change management. A lot of times, Oracle Consulting is helping with run books. We usually well, after doing it the first time. We'll sit back and say, Let the customer do in the next few times and essentially help them through the process. And our goal at that point is to leave only if the customer wants us to. But ultimately our goal is to implemented, get it to go live on time and then help the customer learn this journey to the cloud and without them. Frankly, uh, you know, I think these systems were sometimes too complex and difficult to do on your own. Maybe the first time, especially cause I could say they're closing the books. They might be running your entire supply chain. They run your entire HR system, whatever they might be, uh, too important, leading a chance. So they really help us with helping a customer become live and become very confident. Skilled. They could do themselves >>of the conversation. We have to leave it right there. But thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing your insights. Great stuff. >>Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. >>All right. You're welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. We are covering the oracle of North American Consulting. Transformation. And it's rebirth in this digital event. Keep it right there. 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. Welcome back, everybody, to this special presentation of the Cube. We're covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. It's a digital event. We're going out. We're extracting the signal from the noise we happened today to be in Chicago, which is obviously the center of the country. A lot of customers here, a lot of consultants and consulting organizations here. A lot of expertise. Mike Evans is here. He's the VP for cloud advisory and general manager of Oracle. Elevate, Mike. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >>Appreciate it. Good to be here. >>So you elevate in your title. What is Oracle Elevate it or >>elevate was actually announced or cold from world last year. It's the partnership that we really had to actually take our scale of the next levels who actually did it with Deloitte Consulting. So the goal is to actually take the capabilities of both organizations. Deloitte really has functional capabilities and expertise within Oracle practice, and obviously Oracle has Oracle technical expertise. That combination that to really allows us to scale provide sort of call. The one plus one equals three effort for customers. >>You've got a decent timeline or observation. Over the past several years you joined three years ago, you were brand name companies. First of all, what attracted you to come to Oracle Consultant? >>Absolutely. So Oracle was in the point where they were doing a lot of stuff around on prim on premise software, the old RP type stuff they were doing cloud. They sort of had to have this sort of transformational moment. I was asked to come in and consulting in the early days and say, Hey, look, we're trying to transform the organization for mantra consulting over to Cloud Consulting, coming to help us with this stuff that you've worked with 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 have taken it from early 85% of the 90% of our revenue around on Prem type of engagements to now actually splitting the organization being dedicated 100% in cloud, which is a huge transformation last >>three years. What really, what's the underpinning of Gen two Cloud. Can you give us the bumper sticker on that? >>Yeah, Well, the underpinning agenda to cloud is really if you look at the Gen One cloud was purely just infrastructure layer. Gen two is really based on a segmenting security, which is a huge problem out in the marketplace, right? So we actually have a sort of a world class way. We take segments security outside of the actual environment itself. It's completely segment, which is awesome, right? But then they also when you actually moving 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 are 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 without 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 no value add. Those people can actually move on to do back to the innovation and doing those higher level. >>So the business case is really about primarily, I would imagine about labor costs, right? I t 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 other tasks, right? >>Yeah, So the big components 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 of building all those kinds of things and then the people to do the automation that take care of that right at the lower level. The third level is, as you continue to sort of process and automation going forward, that people capability that actually maintains the applications becomes easier because you can actually extend those capabilities out into the application, then require fewer people actually do the typical day to day things. Whether it's DB is 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 process and automation is going forward and then actually go that even further, right? And then as organizations, a c i 01 of the questions I always have is where do you want to end on this? And they say, What are you talking about, right? It's really never done. You're on. If you're on a journey on a transformation, I go. This is the big boy Big girl conversation, right? Do you want to have an organization that actually, it stays the same from a head count standpoint? Are you trying to look to a partner to do that? Were you trying to get their operating model? What is your company trying to get you to look at, right? Because all those inflection points takes a different steps in the cloud journey. So as an advisor, as a trusted advisor, I asked those there was 1/2 a dozen or so questions. I would kind of walk through the organization through on sort of a cloud strategy, and I'll pick the path that kind of work with them. If they want to go to a manage service provider at the end, we would actually prepare someone, either bring the partner in or have associated partner. We've heard it off to, but we put the right pieces in place to make sure that that business case, >>that's interest. That's a really important point because a lot of customers would say, I don't want to reduce headcount. I want O. I'm starving for people. I want to train people Some companies may want to say Okay, I got to reduce headcount. It's a mandate, but most least in these boom times are saying I want to shift. So my point to the business cases, If you're not gonna cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. And the example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive is relevant. And I won't explain this. Is that, for example, very simple example. You're I'm inferring you're gonna be able to compress the time to value, reduce lower your break, even 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 that people look at that and >>really, that's what it is. Definitely the business case and when he called. 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 with 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 have special, other things we can do for our customers around 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 are entire i t organizations saving 30 plus percent. Well, if you multiply that on a, you know, a large fortune 100 that may have a $1,000,000,000 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 i t impact. But if you look at the business impact now, it becomes telephone numbers and actually see if it was often times just don't even believe it. But it's true, because if you can make the entire organization just, you know, 1/2 a percentage point more productive and 100,000 employees. I mean, that is that overwhelms. Actually, the i t 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 in saving them and adding, you know, whether it's a financial services, you're getting a new application out to market that actually generates revenue. Right? So that's sort of the trickle effect. When I look at it, I definitely look at it from a I see all the way through business. I'm a technically a business architect. That does. I t pretty damn good, >>Yeah, enables that sort of. Absolutely. How do you let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement? How are people thinking about that? Because you're talking a lot about just sort of self funding and and self progressing in a sort of organic entity that you're describing. How are people thinking about that? >>Yeah, I would say there's a little bit older map, right? But I would say that the goals what we're trying to embed back to the operating model we want to really embed is sort of a concept of a cloud center of excellence, and as part of that at the end, you have to have a set of functionality of folks that's constantly looking at the applications and or services of the different cloud providers that capability we have across the board. Everyone's got a multi cloud 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 aren't started weekly every month versus a big bang twice a year, right? Those little automation piece is 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? I love that concept in vetting that whether you actually have a partner with some of the stuff that we're doing that actually in bed, what we call like a date to services, that that's what it is, is to support them but 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 a next year's release. No, it could be next week, next month. >>So the outcome should be should 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 enterprise. It's really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? >>It is. Absolutely >>thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. Good stuff. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you for watching. Be right back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube? We're here in Chicago covering the reverse of Oracle Consulting. I'm Dave Volante. Right back.

>> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's the Cube, covering empowering the autonomous enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Everybody. Welcome back to this special digital presentation where we are tracking the transformation of Oracle Consulting. Aaron millstone is back, he's the senior vice president of Oracle Consulting. He's joined by Jeff Davis, who's the principal at Deloitte. He's the chief Commercial Officer for Oracle at Deloitte. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. We see a lot of these deals. Sometimes we call them Barney deals, you know, I love you, you love me, there's a press release and that's it. But so one of the things we look for okay, is their teeth behind this? So you guys have come up with with what you call elevate. What is elevate? How did it get started? And I have some follow up questions. >> Well, elevate, really got started when Aaron and I started to look at the assets that each of the firms possessed. On the Deloitte side as Aaron suggested, we have deep capabilities and a broad range of technologies, some of them competing technologies with Oracle. At the same time, we didn't have a great deal of depth in Oracle's technical products, Oracle Cloud infrastructure, and Oracle autonomous. Our bench was not as big as Aaron's. And Aaron also had access to Oracle development at a level that we didn't have access to. So we really found ourselves in a situation where we could put those two capabilities together, and we could offer something to our clients and the broad range of Oracle customers in the field. They had access to all of the Deloitte's capabilities which include great project management, great change management, real skill around the strategic aspects of cloud migration. And Aaron had tools and had resources trained and developed around the latest Oracle Technology, they'd always be a step ahead of any SI. So together, we felt this was really a differentiation for marketplace. >> One of the things we look forward there, is there any other integration? Are you doing co-engineering? In this case maybe not co-engineering, but are there tools that you're developing that you're taking to market that you're actually leveraging? Aaron, can you talk about that a little bit and convince us that's not just the sales play? >> Yeah, sure. And Jeff alluded to some of this earlier too, right. So we definitely each had our respective tooling, right on Deloitte investments and tools. One was called ATADATA that we've seen use quite a few times now. We've invested in something we called Oracle Soar. You know, our tools are, as you'd imagine, heavily Oracle focused it's about moving Oracle technology to Oracle Cloud, ATADATA and some of the tools that Deloitte invested in are focused more comprehensively on holistically it looking at everything in a data center and everything that's across data centers and starts to develop a set of facts around this stuff. But in both cases, we actually looked at these things. And we said, "You know what if you combine these together, "we get a very comprehensive view of what exactly "it is that we're looking at with a customer". So we can tell everything from the types of traffic we see in the network to the specific versions of stuff, we can start to identify whether there's risk associated with having things not past or out of supporter, but get a very comprehensive view that's based on facts. And so you know, we took those tools and we've combined them together so that we can go into a customer and give a complete end to end view from both an Oracle and Deloitte perspective and quite frankly, it doesn't matter whether Deloitte leads or whether Oracle leads we've developed these tools together we're going to market together and we've even got you know, the templates you'd expect consultancies to have, right? So when you look at business cases, we've got joined business case templates that we've created together and that we're using actively with customers, and therefore then we're refining them and improving them each time we do it. But you know, we're at a point now where our tools are combined, our templates are combined. And we even at this you know, we were even Jeff and I were on a call earlier, yesterday actually we even got a joint, a war room that's constantly engaging with different account teams making sure that we structurally approach things in a consistent way so that we're driving business value and using the tools appropriately. >> Aaron you and I have talked about you know, data centers and building data centers and investing. It's not just it's just not a good use of capital today. There's so many other things that organizations can do. You guys have identified data center consolidation as a call it a, you know, an initiative that you're seeing customers. I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. Is that kind of a starting point for conversations? >> Yeah, it's well it's definitely starting point right. So we call it a referred to as infrastructure lead transformation. And appetite, the appetite for that is certainly high. We were seeing an increased focus on you know, what do customers need to do to take not just a workload here and there but how do they get out of the data center business holes? So it's sort of it's a foregone conclusion, right? Like you just said, it's not really a question of should we invest in another data center? Or should we invest in up to in our data centers? The question has changed to let's move to cloud, how do we get there? And let's move in a big way. And that's, we're seeing that dialogue across all of our customers. And quit frankly, even for Oracle, it's been a learning curve for us, right? We started with an Oracle workload conversation, which is you want to move this Oracle workloads to Oracle's cloud, you want to move that Oracle workload over to cloud. And really what we're finding is it's a wholesale transformation of everything in a data center to one or more clouds right again, often, it's a multi cloud strategy and that's okay. And we you know, we were having more bigger conversations. The thing that has been really interesting as these conversations have evolved, and especially as we work with our partners at Deloitte, has been that, you know, we think that the combination of our cloud technology, the consulting services that Oracle consulting and Deloitte can bring to bear. And then Oracle's ability to finance the whole deal makes some very compelling conversations for customers, because you can walk in to a CIO to a CFO and say, Look on day one, you can actually have a lower spend than what you have today in your data center, and get a cloud transformation underway at the same time. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that business case. Is that generally what you're seeing where it starts is let's take some costs right out and then Aaron, you and I talked about maybe investing that in the future but is that really the starting point for the vast majority of customers? Let's cut some costs right away and get a payback immediately? >> So I'd like to share our perspective. Which is, you know, nobody spends money for the sake of spending money on technology, it's got to have meaningful business value. So the conversation starts with really renewable and a path to the cloud. But there's a natural opportunity for savings in consolidation that we take advantage. We're not simply shifting from your hardware to the cloud. We're actually modernizing, which will result in significant savings. But it also gives the business something that they don't have today had at a level of security and scalability and ability to run modern technology. Much faster, much better, and much more scalable. >> Jeff, can you give us a sense as to how far you're into this elevate journey, maybe thinking about a couple of customer sizer specifically or generically, kind of where you're at with them? How far along maybe even some examples that you feel are representative. >> Sure, you know, the relationship has been probably about six, close to seven months of maturity. In that time, we've had an opportunity to work on several key clients at scale. We've worked together in collaboration on one of the nation's largest retailers in the grocery business. We've worked collaboratively in aerospace and defense, and also in the hospitality industry. In these cases, what we're finding and one is each one is in a various stage of maturity. One is done, one is in midstream, and one is at the early stages. And current economic conditions we're driving a huge pipeline right now. I think our challenge right now is making sure that we identify those clients that can best take value, take advantage of our services and our joint offering to deal with that pipeline right now. What we're finding is that the savings are at least as we projected. In some cases, we're finding even more what people say they have and what people say they do isn't necessarily what you find when you get in there. And but almost every case, we're finding that there's unused equipment, unused capacity, that they currently have redundancy, low utilization of their current assets. We can go a long way in streamlining that. Plus, I can't emphasize enough that these days security is a major concern. And we're adding a layer of security that they could never achieve themselves with soft. >> How do you guys and how to customers want to approach the transaction is it a fixed fee? Is that a TNM? Is it a situation where you participate in some of the savings or the gain? How does the pricing work? >> I'll start off by saying, each deal is really custom built around what a customer really needs. What they're trying to get out of it. Right now as an example, Op-X is very important. So we're engineering deals in a way that helps customers deal with their financial challenges, especially around Op-X. There are other structures that we can put in place. We have the backing of Oracle finance, so we can be very innovative on deals. They can be when value is attained, they can be milestone based. There's just I think, a wide variety. I don't want to say unlimited, but a wide variety of different options that we can offer our clients in order to be able to deal with whatever financial challenge or opportunity they may be looking at. >> What does success look like? You know, when you sort of you know, just less than a year in, when you're two, three, four let's say five years in and you look back, what does success look like Aaron? >> So to me successful, success is going to look like we've gotten a number of these big transformation deals in play. It's in motion naturally between our organizations not necessarily driven entirely by Jeff and I going out and driving organizational behavior right away. It's more in our DNA. But more importantly, I think we've gone into, we've gone beyond the conversation of let's move workloads we've gone into conversations of let's really talk about how to reimagine your business on top of Oracle's cloud, and have an ongoing dialogue that looks at that transformation. Once we hit that point three, four or five years from now, right, that'll be a wild success Michael. >> Jeff final comment. Deloitte has been around for 175 years. This is our birthday this year and in that time, What we've learned is there's no substitute for impact and value added to our clients. In our perspective, what success looks like is client success. Find success means improved scalability of their operations. Securing their technology and their data at a substantially lower cost, so that they can focus on what their core business is, and focus less on technology, that success to Deloitte. >> Great, guys, thanks so much. Great session, we're not only witnessing the rebirth of Oracle consulting, but there's clearly a transformation going on. And it's cultural. Gentlemen, congratulations on your partnership. And thanks so much for coming in the cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for having us.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering empowering the autonomous enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >>Welcome back to the Cube, everybody. This is a special digital presentation sponsored by Oracle Consulting. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise and we're going to multiple locations to really try to understand better the rebirth of or consulting. Stephanie Trunzo is here. She's the head of transformation and offerings. North America. Stephanie, good to see >>you. Good to see you. >>Okay, so we talked about sort of the mission of Oracle Consulting. Now let's get into it and talk about what some of the customers we're seeing. There's this theme in the industry that Gartner brought about by motor. Like you guys are talking about Tri Motor like, Yeah. So what is that? All of the >>well, two wasn't good enough. >>So we had 1/3. >>So my model I t to speed I t The idea there is. A lot of modern enterprises are struggling with this challenge between the systems of record that they have that are have to be sources of truth. They're often slow to change. There's a lot of rigor around transfer, forming those systems of record. And then on the second side, on the bi model side, there are the systems of interaction or systems of engagement. They're sometimes called, and those systems are things like the applications where there's users, customers at the other end and they need to move at the speed of business. And so the idea of bi modal i t. And what a lot of our clients are struggling with currently is how do you serve both of those needs? At the same time, there's complications in the process is the tools and certainly in the budget. And at the same time, there's kind of looming out there This, you know, threat almost that if you aren't in ai ml data driven world yet, you're going to fall behind. And so our clients are struggling with the fact that they have not yet successfully addressed by motile I t but still have to figure out how to get into this ai space. So our third system hence try model I t is the systems of intelligence. >>The third piece obviously relates to machine intelligence Ai nml it seems like that type of capability would apply to both systems of record and systems of engagement. Is that is that how you're looking? >>Yes, and so the try motile i t concept is kind of three different systems and how they interlock and relate to one another. If you think about systems of record the currency, so to speak, for systems of record or processes. If you think about the currency for systems of interaction, it's the people. It's the users. It's the humans and the system. The currency for the system of intelligence is data to your point. So when you're talking about systems of intelligence, collecting and leveraging data from all three systems is going to be what fuels your system of intelligence going forward. >>And that's the common thread between all three, and it just seems to me that is ultimately the underpinning of modernization. I wonder what your customers how do they view and how do you view modernization? >>So the awesome thing about being at Oracle is data is our DNA. That's where Oracle started from. That's where we still are today is data underpins everything we dio all of the technology that we build is built on the understanding that it must be data driven. And so when we're looking at all three of those systems and you're looking at it from an Oracle perspective, data is at the heart of even systems of record of even systems of interaction, not only the systems of intelligence. When our clients are looking at modernization, they're trying to figure out a way to kind of leap frogged this story and get the whole way to a place where they're getting intelligence and insights out of their data. They're not just unlocking it. They're not just moving workloads in a lift and shift kind of model. They're doing it because they want to serve the ultimate outcome that they get smarter as a business >>club. Customers want to go from where they are today to some outcome, and I want to spend a $1,000,000,000 they don't want to disrupt their business. They have to make investments clearly. How do they get from point A to point B on that cloud journey? >>So we've built something called the Cloud Evolution Framework. That cloud evolution framework has several different phases and stages, and it's intended to be kind of a skeleton toe have that conversation with clients. Are you thinking about all of the things you need to consider to make a healthy decision that has a real road map behind it? To your point on budget? And this is part of the Tri Motility conversation is they're struggling. I've talked to so many CIOs who are struggling to figure out I right now I'm spending 90% of my spend is on maintenance of systems versus on innovation. So how do I shift that spending story to something that's actually going to move the needle on getting the business ahead? That's going to serve my stakeholders, who are the lines of business in a way that is not additive to my budget but actually a shift of the budget. And so we're looking at from a cloud perspective, helping our clients make that monetary shift. Make the shift of the budget where they're self financing their own innovation by getting smarter and faster on moving their workloads to the cloud. >>Because use this concept and others do as well of the autonomous enterprise, you have autonomous database drill into that get passed the buzzwords. What is the autonomous enterprise and what's Oracle's fit there? >>Yeah, I think one of the big misconceptions when people hear autonomous is that they think it means without people, and that's not right. So autonomous means that you're helping elevate all the parts of the system to their highest value, which means you don't need to worry about security patches. You don't need to worry about repairing things on the database. Those kinds of autonomous things is, is the technology helping heal and serve itself? That doesn't mean you don't need people anymore. What it means is two things you need the experts that can help make sure that you're optimizing the value you get out of the autonomous tooling. But it also means that the humans are now freed up to do different kinds of high value work. So an autonomous enterprise would be one where they're really sort of self actualized in the sense that their technology is feeding itself. It's getting smarter and they're getting insights out of that so that the people in their business are as valuable as they can be. Leveraging the insights from the technology, >>I can see how that trickles into I t. no question about it. You can get the autonomous I T organization trickle into the autonomous enterprise, and I know it's early days, but >>so these kinds of transformations, I believe, are fundamentally across the whole company. And this is true at Oracle as well we have. We have something called Oracle at Oracle, and it's about drinking our own champagne and applying our own technology in house. So it's not just in an I T organization capacity. It's across, you know, HR procurement, legal, every supporting function that you can imagine so that cultural change bleeds out across the entire body of the company. And I believe fully that if you're going after something like an AI mission or an autonomous enterprise, you know, state, which is an evolution that you need to involve everyone in the company in different roles. >>So what's that future state look like? >>I think the future state looks like, ah, place where you're not just getting incremental gains on business processes or task that already exist. Your fundamentally seeing shifts in the way the business runs itself as a result of the technology learning and getting smarter, and the people who were benefiting from that technology, changing the way they operate in the company as well. >>Try model. We watching Stephanie. Thanks so much. >>Absolutely Thanks. >>Thank you for watching you watching the Cube at the special digital presentation. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by ORACLE Consulting. >> Back to theCUBE everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We've been covering the transformation of ORACLE Consulting, and really it's rebirth, and I'm here with Chris Fox, who's the Group Vice President for Enterprise Cloud Architects and Chief Technologist for the North America Tech Cloud at ORACLE. Chris, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> So, I love this title. I mean, years ago, there was no such thing as a cloud architect. Certainly there were chief technologists, but so, you are really, those are your peeps, is that right? >> That's right, that's right. That's really my team and I, that's all we do. So, our focus is really helping our customers take this journey from when they were on-premise to really transforming with cloud, and when we think about cloud, really, for us, it's a combination. It's our hybrid cloud, which happens to be on-premise, and then, of course, the true public cloud, like most people are familiar with. So, very exciting journey and, frankly, I've seen just a lot of success for our customers. You know, Dave, what I think we're seeing at ORACLE though, because we're so connected with SaaS, and then we're also connected with the traditional applications that have run the business for years, the legacy applications that have been, you know, servicing us for 20 years, and then the cloud needed developers. So, what my team and I are constantly focused on now is things like digital transformation and really wiring up all three of these across. So, if we think of, like, a customer outcome like I want to have a package delivered to me from a retailer, that actual process flow could touch a brand new cloud-native site from eCommerce, it could touch, essentially, maybe a traditional application that used to be on-prem that's now on the cloud, and then it might even use a new SaaS application, maybe, for maybe a permit process or delivery vehicle and scheduling. So, what my team does, we actually connect all three. So, what I always mention to my team and all of our customers, we have to be able to service all three of those constituents and really think about process flows. So, I take the cloud-native developer, we help them become efficient. We take the person who's been running that traditional application and we help them become more efficient, and then we have the SaaS applications, which are now rolling out new features on a quarterly basis and it's a whole new delivery model, but the real key is connecting all three of these into a business process flow that makes the customer's life much more efficient. People always say, you know, Chris, we want to get out of the data center, we're going zero data center, and I always say, well, how are you going to handle that back office stuff? Right? The stuff that's really big, it's cranky, doesn't handle just, you know, instances dying or things going away too easily. It needs predictable performance, it needs scale, it absolutely needs security, and ultimately, you know, a lot of these applications truly have relied on an ORACLE database. The ORACLE database has its own specific characteristics that it needs to run really well. So, we actually looked at the cloud and we said, let's take the first generation clouds, which are doing great, but let's add the features that specifically, a lot of times, the ORACLE workload needed in order to run very well and in a cost effective manner. So, that's what we mean when we say last mover advantage. We said, let's take the best of the clouds that are out there today, let's look at the workloads that, frankly, ORACLE runs and has been running for years, what our customers needed, and then let's build those features right into this next version of the cloud which can service the enterprise. So, our goal, honestly, which is interesting, is even that first discussion we had about cloud-native and legacy applications and also the new SaaS applications, we built a cloud that handles all three use cases at scale, resiliently, in a very secure manner, and I don't know of any other cloud that's handling those three use cases all in, we'll call it the same tendency for us at ORACLE. >> My question is why was it important for ORACLE, and is it important for ORACLE and its customers, to participate in IaaS and PaaS and SaaS? Why not just the last two layers of that? What does that give you from a strategic advantage standpoint and what does that do for your customer? >> Yeah, great question. So, the number one reason why we needed to have all three was that we have so many customers who, today, are in a data center. They're running a lot of our workloads on-premise and they absolutely are trying to find a better way to deliver lower-cost services to their customers and so we couldn't just say, let's just, everyone needs to just become net new, everyone just needs to ditch the old and go just to brand-new alone. Too hard, too expensive, at times. So we said, you know, let's give us customers the ultimate amount of choice. So, let's even go back again to that developer conversation in SaaS. If you didn't have IaaS, we couldn't help customers achieve a zero data center strategy with their traditional application, we'll call it PeopleSoft or JD Edwards or E-Business Suite or even, there's some massive applications that are running on the ORACLE cloud right now that are custom applications built on the ORACLE database. What they want is they said, give me the lowest cost but yet predictable performance IaaS. I'll run my apps tier on this. Number two, give me a platform service for database, 'cause frankly, I don't really want to run your database, like, with all the menial effort. I want someone to automate patching, scale up and down, and all these types of features like the cloud should have given us. And then number three, I do want SaaS over time. So, we spend a lot of time with our customers really saying, how do I take this traditional application, run it on IaaS and PaaS, and then number two, let's modernize it at scale. Maybe I want to start peeling off functionality and running them as cloud-native services right alongside, right? That's something, again, that we're doing at scale and other people are having a hard time running these traditional workloads on-prem in the cloud. The second part is they say, you know, I've got this legacy traditional ERP. It's been servicing me well, or maybe a supply chain system. Ultimately I want to get out of this. How do I get to SaaS? And we say, okay, here's the way to do this. First, bring it to the cloud, run it on IaaS and PaaS, and then selectively, I call it cloud slicing, take a piece of functionality and put it into SaaS. We're helping customers move to the cloud at scale. We're helping 'em do it at their rate, with whatever level of change they want, and when they are ready for SaaS, we're ready for them. >> And how does autonomous fit into this whole architecture? Thank you, by the way, for that description. I mean, it's nuanced but it's important. I'm sure you're having this conversation with a lot of cloud architects and chief technologists. They want to know this stuff, and they want to know how it works. And then, obviously, we'll talk about what the business impact is, but talk about autonomous and where that fit. >> So, the autonomous database, what we've done is really taken a look at all the runtime operations of an ORACLE database, so tuning, patching, securing, all these different features, and what we've done is taken the best of the ORACLE database, the best of something called Exadata, right, which we run on the cloud, which really helps a lot of our customers, and then we've wrapped it with a set of automation and security tools to help it really manage itself, tune itself, patch itself, scale up and down independent between computant storage. So, why that's important though is that it really, our goal is to help people run the ORACLE database as they have for years but with far less effort, and then even not only far less effort, hopefully, you know, a machine plus man, kind of the equation we always talk about is man plus machine is greater than man alone. So, being assisted by artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform those database operations, we should provide a better service to our customers with far less cost. Our hope and goal is that people have been running ORACLE databases. How can we help them do it with far less effort, and maybe spend more time on what the data can do for the organization, right? Improve customer experience, etc. Versus maybe, like, how do I spin up (breaks up). >> So, let's talk about the business impact. So, you go into customers, you talk to the cloud architects, the chief technologists, you pass that test. Now you got to deliver the business impact. Where does ORACLE Consulting fit with regard to that? And maybe you could talk about where you guys want to take this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the cloud is great set of technologies, but where ORACLE Consulting is really helping us deliver is in the outcome. One of the things, I think, that's been fantastic working with the ORACLE Consulting team is that, you know, cloud is new. For a lot of customers who've been running these environments for a number of years, there's always some fear and a little bit of trepidation saying, how do I learn this new cloud? I mean, the workloads we're talking about, Dave, are like tier zero, tier one, tier two and, you know, all the way up to DEV and TEST and DR. ORACLE Consulting does really couple of things in particular. Number one, they start with the end in mind, and number two that they start to do, is they really help implement these systems and there's a lot of different assurances that we have that we're going to get it done on time and better be under budget, 'cause ultimately, again, that's something that's really paramount for us. And then the third part of it, a lot of times it's runbooks, right? We actually don't want to just live in our customers' environments. We want to help them understand how to run this new system, so in training and change management, a lot of times ORACLE Consulting is helping with runbooks. We usually will, after doing it the first time, we'll sit back and let the customer do it the next few times and essentially help them through the process, and our goal at that point is to leave. Only if the customer wants us to, but ultimately our goal is to implement it, get it to go live on time, and then help the customer learn this journey to the cloud. And without them, frankly, I think these systems are sometimes too complex and difficult to do on your own maybe the first time, especially 'cause like I say, they're closing the books. They might be running your entire supply chain. They run your entire HR system or whatever they might be. Too important to leave to chance. So, they really help us with helping the customer become live and become very confident and skilled 'cause they can do it themselves. >> Well Chris, we've covered the gamut. Loved the conversation. We'll have to leave it right there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Great stuff. >> Absolutely, thanks Dave, and thanks for having me on. >> All right, you're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We are covering the ORACLE of North America Consulting transformation and its rebirth in this digital event. Keep it right there, we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE. Covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Dave Valante. We're covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting, specifically focused on really what is what I consider a rebirth from really staff augmentation to a much more strategic partner for customers. And with me to explore that a little bit is Sherry Lautenbach. She's the Senior Vice President of Cloud Key Accounts at Oracle. And we're also joined by Pat Mongovin who's a group VP for the North American Cloud Strategy, also at Oracle. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Yep, thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. So Sherry, you're out talking to customers a lot, and I'm curious as to what that conversation is like, specifically as it relates to consulting. Are you bringing Oracle Consulting now into the conversation? What's that conversation like? >> Absolutely, in fact every conversation we have relating to our Cloud strategy, Oracle Consulting is part and parcel to that. They are not staff augmentation, they are actually the digital transformation arm of what we do around Cloud. So it's been really interesting to see what they've been able to do in terms of changing the narrative of what we do at Oracle from just a software company to really transforming to a Cloud provider. >> Strategy, obviously a fundamental part of any customer interaction. But what are you seeing? What underscores customer strategies? What are the business drivers for them right now? What are the catalysts that are driving their technology spending decision? >> Yeah, it's a great question Dave. I think a lot of it depends upon, especially in the times that we're in now, depends upon the industry that they're in. But, most importantly what we're seeing is right now is durability. So we want to make sure that the customers have our Oracle customers and others have an opportunity to have disaster recovery, business continuity. In this stage right now it's less about expansion per say, unless they're in an industry that's uniquely in a position for that and more about durability of the overall strategy. So when we look at that durability we think about kind of two core missions. We think about sort of back office operations and continuity and then we think about transformational revenue generation, and so when we partner with those, yes we want to make sure that we have both of those concepts in mind. >> You know we have a lot of talk about in our community about Cloud first. I think Oracle has sort of put forth the gauntlet of look, we're leading now with Cloud. You both have Cloud in your title, but obviously being Cloud first is more than that. Sherry, I wonder if you could talk about your customer's and your Cloud journey and share with us and kind of convince us that you are Cloud first. >> Sure, no that's a great question and in fact I joined Oracle about eleven months ago. I was in the industry for about 25 years and I joined specifically because I believe in what Oracle is doing around this Cloud journey. We are in our second generation of Cloud capabilities, and that's purposeful. And we do that because we've realized that where Cloud started and where we are today are two totally different things. And so we have capabilities around security, viability, extensions with autonomous, that other Cloud providers just simply don't have. And we've built these from the ground up to ensure that we can run Oracle workloads, databases and applications far better than any other Cloud provider. So it's a super exciting time to be at Oracle and it's absolutely fascinating what our customers are doing to adopt our technology. >> I want to ask you a sort of similar question. How fundamental is Cloud to organization strategies. Obviously everybody has a Cloud strategy. But I'm specifically asking as it relates to mission-critical workloads because let's face it. That's been the hardest to move into the Cloud. So, when you're out talking to customers about their strategy, and obviously dovetailing into Oracle's strategy, how do you align you know those two views? >> Yeah, it's actually a really fascinating question. So first, I think I would respond in the following way. When I think about our portfolio, I don't necessarily say Cloud first, I say customer first. And I really want the customer to make a decision based upon a deployment model that makes sense for that particular customer. Whether it's a regulated industry or the public sector or any sort of compliance considerations. So Oracle is one of the very few enterprise class Cloud providers that has, obviously, on-premise capabilities as well. And so, 99% of the cases that we see, with the exception of some of the sort of startup S&B-type folks, that are bored in the Cloud, we're dealing with the hybrid Cloud model anyway. And so that's kind of the first order of priorities, what's right for the customer and let's make sure that we get the appropriate deployment model for that customer. In terms of enterprise, essentially the workloads that we have. Whether it's Cloud or on-prem, are enterprise workloads. And those are kind of separated into two brackets. One would be for mission, sort of the revenue generation side, and one would be mission critical, sort of the back office. So Oracle is historically tremendous at the back office side, running finance, running operations, running the supply chain. Doing those things that are mission-critical. On the core mission side that's really where we're starting to focus now which is getting out into the revenue generation, the mission of the entity, with things like high-performance compute, and making sure that we have an ability to support our customers on both sides of the spectrum. >> Sherry, why are customers wanting to put mission-critical workloads in the Cloud? Is it the same sort of Cloud agility and cost, etc. I mean why not just leave it on-prem and keep it protected and maybe spend a little bit more? What's the driver for moving mission-critical workloads into the Cloud? >> Well, I think it's dependent upon what the initiatives are in the company, right? Are they looking for cost reduction, are they looking for top-line growth, are they looking for different capabilities around security that the Cloud can provide? The great thing about what we do is, we have optimized all of our workloads, both our databases and our applications into our Cloud. So we're providing additional capabilities but we're also saving a lot of money. So, we say all the time that you know put us to the test. Let us quantify what we would look like in the Cloud with our workloads versus a competitor. And we will guarantee that we will save you a lot of money. So I think that a lot of it has to do with one, it starts with potentially cost reduction, but then they start seeing additional business value driven out of and back to Oracle Consulting. What Oracle Consulting provides in terms of the business value in the Cloud is transformative for our customers. >> Talk about how you lead in these customer conversations. >> Right, well normally our entry point of one understanding what the business drivers are, right? It has to be a business-led discussion. It really isn't a technology starter point, right? It really is around what business problems are you trying to solve, and how can we help you solve them. And because we know your environments, we know what databases are employed and where they're deployed. What Oracle applications you're leveraging to run your business. We can, I think, successfully position ourselves very competitively against other Cloud providers. And I think that is then something that has resonated incredibly well with our customers, and in fact our largest customers. >> Yeah, so it seems like Oracle could solve things of an important ingredient as part of that strategy 'cause again, if it was five years ago and was just staff augmentation, that's really not a compelling conversation to have with customers. But if you can come in with a mindset of strategic partner, you're bringing in Deloitte, we've been talking to some of their professionals about the elevate program with Oracle. That is a nice lever that you can take advantage of. >> Absolutely, and in fact we've seen that, that is a huge opportunity for us because one, the partnership with Deloitte is incredibly strategic. We also partner with other companies like Accenture and DXC and IBM candidly. And Oracle Consulting is incredibly flexible in terms of what kind of partnerships and alignment they have with our customers, and it's really based on what the customer's preference is. >> Not just about feature or function, speeds and feeds, maybe you can address that, and where does Oracle Consulting fit in that equation? >> We firmly believe that every customer is going to want to have a different option for what they'll do in the Cloud and based on the provider. So we, one, we've partnered with Microsoft and we actually can interconnect our Clouds together to provide that kind of flexibility to our customers and consulting is a key component of that. So we engage our customers and talk about our Microsoft integration, our partnership or the consulting is the arm that does that work for us. So we are seeing them come about in a much different way, in a way that's differentiated between other consulting you know staff augmentation firms. >> I want to end on growth, Pat. Maybe talk about I mean Cloud, Cloud is the growth business, you look at Oracle's business, everybody's business. As Cloud is growing, everything else is either hanging on or declining, so it's all about growth. How do you drive growth, what is Cloud's role in terms of the growth strategy, and maybe add some color to that narrative. >> From a product perspective, I think we're sort of a luxury of riches around the autonomous capability which we haven't talked about. So that's something that's incredibly unique to Oracle. The autonomous database and all the autonomous services that we're rolling out. And that autonomous gives back to what we talked about earlier around security, around performance, around scalability and all these things. So that ultimately we're positioning the capabilities of the future but we're positioning them today. So we're a market leader in this space. We're not only is the Oracle database as you pointed out the market leader. We're a market leader in ERP Cloud and a bunch of the SaaS areas. But this autonomous segment of the market is crucial for us and crucial to our growth. >> Yeah it really is an enabler. I've been saying that it's almost compulsory for Oracle to participate and compete in the Cloud because it gives you that automation and that scale but you're talking about also setting up some future advantages of being able to take advantage of data, the combination of data, AI, and Cloud is the new superpower within the industry. Sherry, I want to end on you. Eleven months in at Oracle, let's say things work out great. You're here two, three, four years down the road, you look back. What does success look like? >> Success looks like every one of our customers moving to the Oracle Cloud and seeing incredible business value from that, partnering with Oracle Consulting. That's what my success criteria is. >> Guys, well listen. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE where we've been tracking this transformation of Oracle Consulting and one of the things that's very clear as Oracle's obviously serious about Cloud but also serious about bringing in new talent and new skillsets, you're really not only transform Oracle but help transform your customers, so thank you for your time, really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much. >> Yep, you bet, thank you. >> All right, and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Valante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (bumper music)

>>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.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by ORACLE Consulting. >> Back to theCUBE everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We've been covering the transformation of ORACLE Consulting, and really it's rebirth, and I'm here with Chris Fox, who's the Group Vice President for Enterprise Cloud Architects and Chief Technologist for the North America Tech Cloud at ORACLE. Chris, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> So, I love this title. I mean, years ago, there was no such thing as a cloud architect. Certainly there were chief technologists, but so, you are really, those are your peeps, is that right? >> That's right, that's right. That's really my team and I, that's all we do. So, our focus is really helping our customers take this journey from when they were on-premise to really transforming with cloud, and when we think about cloud, really, for us, it's a combination. It's our hybrid cloud, which happens to be on-premise, and then, of course, the true public cloud, like most people are familiar with. So, very exciting journey and, frankly, I've seen just a lot of success for our customers. You know, Dave, what I think we're seeing at ORACLE though, because we're so connected with SaaS, and then we're also connected with the traditional applications that have run the business for years, the legacy applications that have been, you know, servicing us for 20 years, and then the cloud needed developers. So, what my team and I are constantly focused on now is things like digital transformation and really wiring up all three of these across. So, if we think of, like, a customer outcome like I want to have a package delivered to me from a retailer, that actual process flow could touch a brand new cloud-native site from eCommerce, it could touch, essentially, maybe a traditional application that used to be on-prem that's now on the cloud, and then it might even use a new SaaS application, maybe, for maybe a permit process or delivery vehicle and scheduling. So, what my team does, we actually connect all three. So, what I always mention to my team and all of our customers, we have to be able to service all three of those constituents and really think about process flows. So, I take the cloud-native developer, we help them become efficient. We take the person who's been running that traditional application and we help them become more efficient, and then we have the SaaS applications, which are now rolling out new features on a quarterly basis and it's a whole new delivery model, but the real key is connecting all three of these into a business process flow that makes the customer's life much more efficient. People always say, you know, Chris, we want to get out of the data center, we're going zero data center, and I always say, well, how are you going to handle that back office stuff? Right? The stuff that's really big, it's cranky, doesn't handle just, you know, instances dying or things going away too easily. It needs predictable performance, it needs scale, it absolutely needs security, and ultimately, you know, a lot of these applications truly have relied on an ORACLE database. The ORACLE database has its own specific characteristics that it needs to run really well. So, we actually looked at the cloud and we said, let's take the first generation clouds, which are doing great, but let's add the features that specifically, a lot of times, the ORACLE workload needed in order to run very well and in a cost effective manner. So, that's what we mean when we say last mover advantage. We said, let's take the best of the clouds that are out there today, let's look at the workloads that, frankly, ORACLE runs and has been running for years, what our customers needed, and then let's build those features right into this next version of the cloud which can service the enterprise. So, our goal, honestly, which is interesting, is even that first discussion we had about cloud-native and legacy applications and also the new SaaS applications, we built a cloud that handles all three use cases at scale, resiliently, in a very secure manner, and I don't know of any other cloud that's handling those three use cases all in, we'll call it the same tendency for us at ORACLE. >> My question is why was it important for ORACLE, and is it important for ORACLE and its customers, to participate in IaaS and PaaS and SaaS? Why not just the last two layers of that? What does that give you from a strategic advantage standpoint and what does that do for your customer? >> Yeah, great question. So, the number one reason why we needed to have all three was that we have so many customers who, today, are in a data center. They're running a lot of our workloads on-premise and they absolutely are trying to find a better way to deliver lower-cost services to their customers and so we couldn't just say, let's just, everyone needs to just become net new, everyone just needs to ditch the old and go just to brand-new alone. Too hard, too expensive, at times. So we said, you know, let's give us customers the ultimate amount of choice. So, let's even go back again to that developer conversation in SaaS. If you didn't have IaaS, we couldn't help customers achieve a zero data center strategy with their traditional application, we'll call it PeopleSoft or JD Edwards or E-Business Suite or even, there's some massive applications that are running on the ORACLE cloud right now that are custom applications built on the ORACLE database. What they want is they said, give me the lowest cost but yet predictable performance IaaS. I'll run my apps tier on this. Number two, give me a platform service for database, 'cause frankly, I don't really want to run your database, like, with all the menial effort. I want someone to automate patching, scale up and down, and all these types of features like the cloud should have given us. And then number three, I do want SaaS over time. So, we spend a lot of time with our customers really saying, how do I take this traditional application, run it on IaaS and PaaS, and then number two, let's modernize it at scale. Maybe I want to start peeling off functionality and running them as cloud-native services right alongside, right? That's something, again, that we're doing at scale and other people are having a hard time running these traditional workloads on-prem in the cloud. The second part is they say, you know, I've got this legacy traditional ERP. It's been servicing me well, or maybe a supply chain system. Ultimately I want to get out of this. How do I get to SaaS? And we say, okay, here's the way to do this. First, bring it to the cloud, run it on IaaS and PaaS, and then selectively, I call it cloud slicing, take a piece of functionality and put it into SaaS. We're helping customers move to the cloud at scale. We're helping 'em do it at their rate, with whatever level of change they want, and when they are ready for SaaS, we're ready for them. >> And how does autonomous fit into this whole architecture? Thank you, by the way, for that description. I mean, it's nuanced but it's important. I'm sure you're having this conversation with a lot of cloud architects and chief technologists. They want to know this stuff, and they want to know how it works. And then, obviously, we'll talk about what the business impact is, but talk about autonomous and where that fit. >> So, the autonomous database, what we've done is really taken a look at all the runtime operations of an ORACLE database, so tuning, patching, securing, all these different features, and what we've done is taken the best of the ORACLE database, the best of something called Exadata, right, which we run on the cloud, which really helps a lot of our customers, and then we've wrapped it with a set of automation and security tools to help it really manage itself, tune itself, patch itself, scale up and down independent between computant storage. So, why that's important though is that it really, our goal is to help people run the ORACLE database as they have for years but with far less effort, and then even not only far less effort, hopefully, you know, a machine plus man, kind of the equation we always talk about is man plus machine is greater than man alone. So, being assisted by artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform those database operations, we should provide a better service to our customers with far less cost. Our hope and goal is that people have been running ORACLE databases. How can we help them do it with far less effort, and maybe spend more time on what the data can do for the organization, right? Improve customer experience, etc. Versus maybe, like, how do I spin up (breaks up). >> So, let's talk about the business impact. So, you go into customers, you talk to the cloud architects, the chief technologists, you pass that test. Now you got to deliver the business impact. Where does ORACLE Consulting fit with regard to that? And maybe you could talk about where you guys want to take this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the cloud is great set of technologies, but where ORACLE Consulting is really helping us deliver is in the outcome. One of the things, I think, that's been fantastic working with the ORACLE Consulting team is that, you know, cloud is new. For a lot of customers who've been running these environments for a number of years, there's always some fear and a little bit of trepidation saying, how do I learn this new cloud? I mean, the workloads we're talking about, Dave, are like tier zero, tier one, tier two and, you know, all the way up to DEV and TEST and DR. ORACLE Consulting does really couple of things in particular. Number one, they start with the end in mind, and number two that they start to do, is they really help implement these systems and there's a lot of different assurances that we have that we're going to get it done on time and better be under budget, 'cause ultimately, again, that's something that's really paramount for us. And then the third part of it, a lot of times it's runbooks, right? We actually don't want to just live in our customers' environments. We want to help them understand how to run this new system, so in training and change management, a lot of times ORACLE Consulting is helping with runbooks. We usually will, after doing it the first time, we'll sit back and let the customer do it the next few times and essentially help them through the process, and our goal at that point is to leave. Only if the customer wants us to, but ultimately our goal is to implement it, get it to go live on time, and then help the customer learn this journey to the cloud. And without them, frankly, I think these systems are sometimes too complex and difficult to do on your own maybe the first time, especially 'cause like I say, they're closing the books. They might be running your entire supply chain. They run your entire HR system or whatever they might be. Too important to leave to chance. So, they really help us with helping the customer become live and become very confident and skilled 'cause they can do it themselves. >> Well Chris, we've covered the gamut. Loved the conversation. We'll have to leave it right there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Great stuff. >> Absolutely, thanks Dave, and thanks for having me on. >> All right, you're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We are covering the ORACLE of North America Consulting transformation and its rebirth in this digital event. Keep it right there, we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE. Covering empowering the autonomous enterprise. Brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Dave Valante. We're covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting, specifically focused on really what is what I consider a rebirth from really staff augmentation to a much more strategic partner for customers. And with me to explore that a little bit is Sherry Lautenbach. She's the Senior Vice President of Cloud Key Accounts at Oracle. And we're also joined by Pat Mongovin who's a group VP for the North American Cloud Strategy, also at Oracle. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Yep, thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. So Sherry, you're out talking to customers a lot, and I'm curious as to what that conversation is like, specifically as it relates to consulting. Are you bringing Oracle Consulting now into the conversation? What's that conversation like? >> Absolutely, in fact every conversation we have relating to our Cloud strategy, Oracle Consulting is part and parcel to that. They are not staff augmentation, they are actually the digital transformation arm of what we do around Cloud. So it's been really interesting to see what they've been able to do in terms of changing the narrative of what we do at Oracle from just a software company to really transforming to a Cloud provider. >> Strategy, obviously a fundamental part of any customer interaction. But what are you seeing? What underscores customer strategies? What are the business drivers for them right now? What are the catalysts that are driving their technology spending decision? >> Yeah, it's a great question Dave. I think a lot of it depends upon, especially in the times that we're in now, depends upon the industry that they're in. But, most importantly what we're seeing is right now is durability. So we want to make sure that the customers have our Oracle customers and others have an opportunity to have disaster recovery, business continuity. In this stage right now it's less about expansion per say, unless they're in an industry that's uniquely in a position for that and more about durability of the overall strategy. So when we look at that durability we think about kind of two core missions. We think about sort of back office operations and continuity and then we think about transformational revenue generation, and so when we partner with those, yes we want to make sure that we have both of those concepts in mind. >> You know we have a lot of talk about in our community about Cloud first. I think Oracle has sort of put forth the gauntlet of look, we're leading now with Cloud. You both have Cloud in your title, but obviously being Cloud first is more than that. Sherry, I wonder if you could talk about your customer's and your Cloud journey and share with us and kind of convince us that you are Cloud first. >> Sure, no that's a great question and in fact I joined Oracle about eleven months ago. I was in the industry for about 25 years and I joined specifically because I believe in what Oracle is doing around this Cloud journey. We are in our second generation of Cloud capabilities, and that's purposeful. And we do that because we've realized that where Cloud started and where we are today are two totally different things. And so we have capabilities around security, viability, extensions with autonomous, that other Cloud providers just simply don't have. And we've built these from the ground up to ensure that we can run Oracle workloads, databases and applications far better than any other Cloud provider. So it's a super exciting time to be at Oracle and it's absolutely fascinating what our customers are doing to adopt our technology. >> I want to ask you a sort of similar question. How fundamental is Cloud to organization strategies. Obviously everybody has a Cloud strategy. But I'm specifically asking as it relates to mission-critical workloads because let's face it. That's been the hardest to move into the Cloud. So, when you're out talking to customers about their strategy, and obviously dovetailing into Oracle's strategy, how do you align you know those two views? >> Yeah, it's actually a really fascinating question. So first, I think I would respond in the following way. When I think about our portfolio, I don't necessarily say Cloud first, I say customer first. And I really want the customer to make a decision based upon a deployment model that makes sense for that particular customer. Whether it's a regulated industry or the public sector or any sort of compliance considerations. So Oracle is one of the very few enterprise class Cloud providers that has, obviously, on-premise capabilities as well. And so, 99% of the cases that we see, with the exception of some of the sort of startup S&B-type folks, that are bored in the Cloud, we're dealing with the hybrid Cloud model anyway. And so that's kind of the first order of priorities, what's right for the customer and let's make sure that we get the appropriate deployment model for that customer. In terms of enterprise, essentially the workloads that we have. Whether it's Cloud or on-prem, are enterprise workloads. And those are kind of separated into two brackets. One would be for mission, sort of the revenue generation side, and one would be mission critical, sort of the back office. So Oracle is historically tremendous at the back office side, running finance, running operations, running the supply chain. Doing those things that are mission-critical. On the core mission side that's really where we're starting to focus now which is getting out into the revenue generation, the mission of the entity, with things like high-performance compute, and making sure that we have an ability to support our customers on both sides of the spectrum. >> Sherry, why are customers wanting to put mission-critical workloads in the Cloud? Is it the same sort of Cloud agility and cost, etc. I mean why not just leave it on-prem and keep it protected and maybe spend a little bit more? What's the driver for moving mission-critical workloads into the Cloud? >> Well, I think it's dependent upon what the initiatives are in the company, right? Are they looking for cost reduction, are they looking for top-line growth, are they looking for different capabilities around security that the Cloud can provide? The great thing about what we do is, we have optimized all of our workloads, both our databases and our applications into our Cloud. So we're providing additional capabilities but we're also saving a lot of money. So, we say all the time that you know put us to the test. Let us quantify what we would look like in the Cloud with our workloads versus a competitor. And we will guarantee that we will save you a lot of money. So I think that a lot of it has to do with one, it starts with potentially cost reduction, but then they start seeing additional business value driven out of and back to Oracle Consulting. What Oracle Consulting provides in terms of the business value in the Cloud is transformative for our customers. >> Talk about how you lead in these customer conversations. >> Right, well normally our entry point of one understanding what the business drivers are, right? It has to be a business-led discussion. It really isn't a technology starter point, right? It really is around what business problems are you trying to solve, and how can we help you solve them. And because we know your environments, we know what databases are employed and where they're deployed. What Oracle applications you're leveraging to run your business. We can, I think, successfully position ourselves very competitively against other Cloud providers. And I think that is then something that has resonated incredibly well with our customers, and in fact our largest customers. >> Yeah, so it seems like Oracle could solve things of an important ingredient as part of that strategy 'cause again, if it was five years ago and was just staff augmentation, that's really not a compelling conversation to have with customers. But if you can come in with a mindset of strategic partner, you're bringing in Deloitte, we've been talking to some of their professionals about the elevate program with Oracle. That is a nice lever that you can take advantage of. >> Absolutely, and in fact we've seen that, that is a huge opportunity for us because one, the partnership with Deloitte is incredibly strategic. We also partner with other companies like Accenture and DXC and IBM candidly. And Oracle Consulting is incredibly flexible in terms of what kind of partnerships and alignment they have with our customers, and it's really based on what the customer's preference is. >> Not just about feature or function, speeds and feeds, maybe you can address that, and where does Oracle Consulting fit in that equation? >> We firmly believe that every customer is going to want to have a different option for what they'll do in the Cloud and based on the provider. So we, one, we've partnered with Microsoft and we actually can interconnect our Clouds together to provide that kind of flexibility to our customers and consulting is a key component of that. So we engage our customers and talk about our Microsoft integration, our partnership or the consulting is the arm that does that work for us. So we are seeing them come about in a much different way, in a way that's differentiated between other consulting you know staff augmentation firms. >> I want to end on growth, Pat. Maybe talk about I mean Cloud, Cloud is the growth business, you look at Oracle's business, everybody's business. As Cloud is growing, everything else is either hanging on or declining, so it's all about growth. How do you drive growth, what is Cloud's role in terms of the growth strategy, and maybe add some color to that narrative. >> From a product perspective, I think we're sort of a luxury of riches around the autonomous capability which we haven't talked about. So that's something that's incredibly unique to Oracle. The autonomous database and all the autonomous services that we're rolling out. And that autonomous gives back to what we talked about earlier around security, around performance, around scalability and all these things. So that ultimately we're positioning the capabilities of the future but we're positioning them today. So we're a market leader in this space. We're not only is the Oracle database as you pointed out the market leader. We're a market leader in ERP Cloud and a bunch of the SaaS areas. But this autonomous segment of the market is crucial for us and crucial to our growth. >> Yeah it really is an enabler. I've been saying that it's almost compulsory for Oracle to participate and compete in the Cloud because it gives you that automation and that scale but you're talking about also setting up some future advantages of being able to take advantage of data, the combination of data, AI, and Cloud is the new superpower within the industry. Sherry, I want to end on you. Eleven months in at Oracle, let's say things work out great. You're here two, three, four years down the road, you look back. What does success look like? >> Success looks like every one of our customers moving to the Oracle Cloud and seeing incredible business value from that, partnering with Oracle Consulting. That's what my success criteria is. >> Guys, well listen. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE where we've been tracking this transformation of Oracle Consulting and one of the things that's very clear as Oracle's obviously serious about Cloud but also serious about bringing in new talent and new skillsets, you're really not only transform Oracle but help transform your customers, so thank you for your time, really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much. >> Yep, you bet, thank you. >> All right, and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Valante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (bumper music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE covering, empowering the Autonomous Enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome back everybody to this special presentation of theCUBE where we're covering The Rebirth of Oracle Consulting. It's a digital event where we're going out, we're extracting the signal from the nose. 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, he's a group V.P. for cloud advisory and a general manager of Oracle Elevate. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hi, I appreciate it, I'm glad to be here. >> So I got to ask you, Elevate in your title, what is Oracle Elevate? >> Yeah, Oracle Elevate was actually announced Oracle Open World last year, and it's the partnership that we really had to actually take our scale the next level. So it's actually did it with 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, what 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 think you joined three years ago? >> Yeah. >> 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. The old ERP type stuff, they were doing cloud, they sort of had to had this sort of transformational moment. I was asked to come in on 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 the stuff that you've worked from your prior two 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. I've taken it from really 85 percent of, the 90 percent of our revenue around on-prem type of engagements to now actually split in the organization being dedicated 100 percent on Cloud, which is a huge transformation in the last three years. >> What really, what's the underpinning of Gen 2 cloud? Can you give us sort of the bumper sticker on that? >> Yeah, all about the underpinning the Gen 2 cloud is really, if you look at the gen 1 cloud was purely just an infrastructure layer. Gen 2 is really based on a segmenting security which is a huge problem out in the marketplace. >> Mm-hmm. >> So we actually have a sort of a world-class where we take segment security outside of the actual environment itself, it's completely segment which is awesome, right? But then they also, when you actually move it forward, the capability of the entire thing is built on sort of the Autonomous Enterprise or 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 it back to that innovation and doing those higher level components. >> So the business case is really about, I mean, primarily, I would imagine about labor cost, right? I.T., labor costs that we're very labor intensive, we're doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add differentiation of value to the business, you're shifting that to other tasks, right? >> Yeah, so the big components 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 at the lower level. The third level is, as you continue to sort of process and 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 require fewer people to actually do the typical day-to-day things whether it's DBAs, 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 process and automations going forward and then actually go that even further. 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? It is really-- >> Dave: We're never done! >> You're on a journey, you're on a transformation, I go, this is the big-boy, big-girl conversation. Do you want to have an organization that actually, it stays the same from a headcount standpoint? Are you trying to look to a partner to do the... Were 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 takes a different step in the cloud journey. So as the advisor, as the trusted advisor, I ask those 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, to 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 associated partner we put it off to. 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'm starving for people, I want to retrain people. You know, some companies may want to say, hey, okay, I got to reduced headcount, it's a mandate. But most, at least in these boom times are saying, I want to shift. So my point to the business case is, if you're not going to, you know, cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. >> Correct. >> The example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive is relevant. And I want to explain this, is that, for example, very simple example, I'm inferring you're going to be able to compress the time to value, you're going to reduce, lower your break even, you know, accelerate the time to positive cash flow, if you will. >> Absolutely. That's an example of a value component to the business, and part of the business case. Do people look at that and is that real? >> Absolutely, that's what it is. Definitely, the business case and when you call the... You know, when you get your rate of return, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> 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 with 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 around financing and things like that to make it easier for them. We have options to make customers and actually help that business case. Some of the business cases we've seen are entire I.T. organization saving 30 plus percent. Well, if you multiply that on a, you know, a large Fortune 100 that may have a billion dollar budget, that's real money. >> Okay, yes, no doubt. But then, when you translate that into the business impact, like you talked about the I.T. impact, but if you look at the business impact now it becomes telephone numbers. And actually the CFOs often times just don't even believe it, but it's true. >> Yes. >> Because if you can make the entire organization just you know, a half a percentage point more productive and you got 100,000 employees, I mean, that is, that overwhelms, actually, the I.T. business case. >> Yeah, and that's where back to 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 getting an application out to market that actually generates revenue. So that's, it's sort of the trickle effect. So when I look at it, I definitely look at it from a I.T. all the way through business. I am technically a business architect that does I.T. pretty damn good. >> Yeah, and I.T enables that sort of business transformation. >> Absolutely. >> How do you... Let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement. How are people thinking about that, 'cause you're talking a lot about just sort of self-funding, and self-progressing, sort of an organic entity that you're describing. How are people thinking about that? >> Yeah, I would say they're kind of a little bit all over the map. But I would say that the goal is what we're trying to embed back to the operating model, what we want to really embed is sort of a concept of the cloud set of excellence in as part of that at the end, you have to have a set of functionality of folks that's constantly looking at the applications and or services of the different cloud providers, their capabilities you have across the board, everyone's got to multicloud environment. 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? I'm sorry, weekly? You know, every month versus a big bang twice a year. Those little automation pieces continually add innovation in smaller chunks and that's really the goal of cloud computing, you know, is you can actually break it up, it's no longer the big bang theory. And I love that concept, embedding that, whether you actually have a partner with some of the stuff that we're doing that actually embed, what we call, like a day two services that that's what it is, it's to support them but us 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, they're great, that capability came out, it'll be on next year's release. No, it could be next week, it could be next month. >> Well, so the outcome should 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. Is really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? >> It is, absolutely. 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 looking at a cloud capability and everything that you can put from the machine earlier into A.I., under to basically let it run itself. The more that you can do that, the higher the value, and you can put those people off into higher level tasks. That's been going on every provider for a while. Oracle just has the capability now within the database that takes it to the next level. So we still are the only organization with that, put that on top of our Gen 2 cloud where all that is built in, as part of it going forward. That's where we have the upper level really at the enterprise computing level. We can work on 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 don't want to make it a technology discussion. We said they're the only organization, you mean the only technology company with that autonomous database capabilities, is that correct? >> Yes, sir, yes. >> Okay, so I know others sort of talk about it, but, you know, Oracle I think talks about it more forcefully? >> Yes. >> We'll dig into that and report back. Mike, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really, I appreciate it, good stuff. >> Anytime, thank you very much. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We're right back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE. We're here in Chicago covering, The Rebirth of Oracle Consulting. I'm Dave Vellante, we'll be right back.

>>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 to the cube everybody. This is a special digital presentation sponsored by Oracle consulting. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise and we're going to multiple locations to really try to understand better. The rebirth of Oracle consulting. Stephanie Trunzo is here. She's the head of transformation and offerings at Oracle consulting North America. Stephanie, good to see you. Good to see you. Okay, so we talked about sort of the mission of Oracle consulting. Now let's get into it and talk about what some of the customers are seeing. There's this theme in the industry that Gardner brought up about bi-modal it. You guys are talking about try mode lights, so what is that all about? >>Well, two wasn't good enough, so we had to add a third. So bi-modal it, two-speed it. The idea there is a lot of modern enterprises are struggling with this challenge between the systems of record that they have that are have to be sources of truth. They're often slow to change. Um, there's a lot of rigor around transfer forming those systems of record. And then on the second side, on the bi-modal side, there are the systems of interaction or systems of engagement they're sometimes called. And those systems are things like the applications where there's um, users, customers at the other end and they need to move at the speed of business. And so the idea of bi-modal it and what a lot of our clients are struggling with currently is how do you serve both of those needs at the same time, there's complications in the processes, the tools, and certainly in the budget. And at the same time there's kind of looming out there this, you know, threat almost that if you aren't in the AI ML data-driven world yet you're going to fall behind. And so our clients were struggling with the fact that they have not yet successfully addressed by modal it, but still have to figure out how to get into this AI space. So our third system, hence trimodal it is the systems of intelligence. >>This is the third piece that obviously relates to machine intelligence, AI. And ML. It seems like that type of capability would apply to both systems of record and systems of engagement. Is that, is that how you're doing? >>Yes. And so the tri modal it concept is kind of three different systems and how they interlock and relate to one another. If you think about systems of record, the currency, so to speak, for systems of record or processes. If you think about the currency for systems of interaction, it's the people, it's the users, it's the humans and the cysts. The currency for the system of intelligence is data. To your point. So when you're talking about systems of intelligence collecting and leveraging data from all three systems is going to be what fuels your system of intelligence going forward. >>And that's the common thread between all three. And it just seems to me that is ultimately the underpinning of I wonder what do your customers, how do they view and how do you view modernization? >>So the awesome thing about being at Oracle is data is our DNA. That's where Oracle started from. That's where we still are today is data underpins everything we do. All of the technology that we build is built on the understanding that it must be data driven. And so when we're looking at all three of those systems and you're looking at it from an Oracle perspective, data is at the heart of even systems of record, of even systems of interaction, not only the systems of intelligence. When our clients are looking at modernization, they're trying to figure out a way to kind of leapfrog this story and get the whole way to a place where they're getting intelligence and insights out of their data. They're not just unlocking it, they're not just moving workloads in a lift and shift kind of model. They're doing it because they want to serve the ultimate outcome that they get smarter as a business. >>Talk about cloud. Customers want to go from where they are today to some outcome, some endpoint, and they don't want to spend a zillion dollars and they don't want to disrupt their business. They're going to have to make investments clearly. How do they get from point a to point B on that cloud journey? >>So we've built something called the cloud evolution framework. That cloud evolution framework has several different phases and stages and it's intended to be a kind of a skeleton to have that conversation with clients. Um, are you thinking about all of the things you need to consider to make a healthy decision that has a real roadmap behind it? To your point on budget, and this is part of the tri modal it conversation is they're struggling. I've talked to so many CEOs who are struggling to figure out, I, right now I'm spending, you know, 90% of my spend is on maintenance of systems versus on innovation. So how do I shift that spending story to something that's actually gonna move the needle on getting the business ahead that's going to serve my stakeholders? Who are the lines of business in a way that is, um, not additive to my budget, but actually a shift of the budget. And so we're looking at, from a cloud perspective, helping our clients make that monetary shift, make the shift of the budget where they're self financing their own innovation by getting smarter and faster on moving their workloads. To the, >>you guys use this concept and others do as well of the autonomous enterprise. You have autonomous database. I wonder if we could drill into that path, get past the buzzwords. What is the autonomous enterprise and what's the Oracle's fit there? >>Yeah, I think one of the big misconceptions when people hear autonomous is that they think it means without people. And that's not right. So autonomous means that you're helping elevate all the parts of the system to their highest value, which means you don't need to worry about security patches. You don't need to worry about repairing things on the database. Um, those kinds of autonomous things is, is the technology helping heal and itself? That doesn't mean you don't need people anymore. What it means is two things. You need the experts that can help make sure that you're optimizing the value you get out of the autonomous tooling. But it also means that the humans are now freed up to do different kinds of high value work. So an autonomous enterprise would be one where they're really sort of self actualized in the sense that their technology is feeding itself. It's getting smarter and they're getting insights out of that so that the people in their business are as valuable as they can be. Leveraging the insights from the technical. >>So I can see how that trickles into it. No question about it. Can, can the autonomous it organization trickle into the autonomous enterprise? And I mean, I know it's sort of early days, but how do you see that? >>So the, these kinds of transformations I believe are fundamentally across the whole company. And this is true at Oracle as well. We have, um, we have something called Oracle at Oracle and it's about drinking our own champagne and applying our own technology in house. So it's not just in an it organization capacity, it's across, you know, HR, procurement, legal, every supporting function that you can imagine. Um, so that cultural change bleeds out across the entire body of the company. And I, I believe fully that if you're going after something like an AI mission or an autonomous enterprise, you know, state which is an evolution that you need to involve everyone in the company in different roles. >>So what's that future state look like? >>I think the future state looks like a place where you're not just getting, um, incremental gains on business processes or tasks that already exist. You're fundamentally, um, seeing shifts in the way the business runs itself as a result of the technology learning and getting smarter and the people who are benefiting from that technology changing the way they operate in the company as well. >>Trimodal it will be watching, right. Stephanie, thanks so much. It's great. Thank you for watching. You're watching the cube at the special digital presentation. We'll be right back right after this short break.

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

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah, >>already. Welcome back, Cube alum Dave Volante. We're covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting. Specifically focused on really, what is what I consider a rebirth from really staff augmentation to a much more strategic partner for customers and with me to explore that a little bit of Sherry Latin back. She is the senior vice president of Cloud Key accounts at Oracle, and we're also joined by Pat McGovern. Who's the group? EVP for the North American Cloud strategy. Also Oracle folks, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks >>for having us. >>You're welcome. So, Sheri, you're out talking to customers a lot. Um, I'm curious as to what that conversation is like specifically as it relates to consulting. I talked about the rebirth of Oracle consulting. You? Probably not, you know, earlier, years ago, leading with staff augmentation. That's not strategic. But are you bringing Oracle consulting now into the conversation? What's that conversation like? >>Absolutely. In fact, every conversation we have relating to our cloud strategy. Oracle consultants part and parcel to that they are not staff augmentation. They're actually the digital transformation arm of what we do around cloud. So it's been really interesting to see what they've been able to do in terms of changing the narrative of what we do it Oracle from just a software company to really transform into. I thought provider >>and Chris I'm interested in Sorry, pat. I'm interested in your title group. VP Cloud strategy. Right? So gravity, obviously a fundamental part of any customer interaction. But what are you seeing? What underscores customer strategies? What are the business drivers for them right now? One of the catalysts that are driving their their technology spending decisions? >>Yeah, it's a great question, and I think a lot of it depends upon, especially in the times that we're in now depends upon the industry that they're in. But, um, most importantly, what we're seeing is right now is durability. So we want to make sure that the customers of our Oracle customers and others have an opportunity to have disaster recovery business continuity. Um, in this stage, right now, it's less about expansion per se. Unless in an industry that's uniquely positioned for that more about durability, of the overall strategy that when we look at that, your ability, we think about kind of the core missions we think about, um so the back office operations and continuity and then we think about transformational revenue generation. And so when we partner with us, yes, we want to make sure that we have both of those concepts in mind. So >>I want to ask you both. Um, you know, it was a lot of we have a lot of talk about in our community about cloud first. Um, big oracle is sort of put forth the gauntlet of Look, we're we're leading now with cloud. You both have cloud in your title. But obviously being cloud first is is more than that sharing. What if you could talk about your customers and your cloud journey and share with us and convince us that you are cloud first? >>That's a great question. And in fact, I joined Oracle about 11 months ago, was in the industry for about 25 years and enjoying simply because I believe in what Oracle is doing around this journey. We're in our second generation of cloud capabilities, and that's purposeful. And we do that because we realized that where cloud started and where we are today, are two totally different things. And so we have capabilities around security viability extensions with autonomous that other cloud providers just simply don't have built these ground up to make sure that we can run Oracle for blitz databases and applications far better than any other cloud provider. So that's super exciting time you got Oracle, and it's absolutely fascinating what our customers are going to a doctor. Apology? >>Yes, so s so pat. I wanna ask you, Ah, sort of similar question. How fundamental is, uh, you know, Cloud to organizations, strategies, and obviously everybody is a cloud strategy. But I'm specifically asking as it relates to mission critical workloads because, let's face it, that's been the hardest to move into the cloud. So when you're out talking to customers about their strategy and obviously dovetailing at the Oracle strategy, how do you align those two views? >>Yeah, so it's actually really fascinating question. So first I think I would respond in the following away. When I think about our portfolio, I don't necessarily say cloud First, I say customer first, and I really want the customer to make a decision based upon a deployment model that makes sense for that. Think of the customer whether it's a regulated industry or the public sector or, you know, any sort of compliance considerations. So Oracle's one of the very few, uh, you know, enterprise Last Mile providers that has obviously on premise capabilities as well. And so 99% of the cases that we see, with the exception of some of the sort of startup S and B five folks that are born in the cloud, we're dealing with the hybrid cloud model anyway. And so that's the kind of the first order priorities what's right for the customer. And let's make sure that we get the appropriate I'm all for that customer in terms of enterprise essentially the workloads that we have, whether it's cloud or on Prem or enterprise workloads. And those were kind of separated into two buckets, one of the core mission of the revenue generation side. And what would be mission critical sort of the back office, the oracles historically tremendous at the back office side, running finance, running operations, running supply chain, you know, doing those things that are mission critical on the core mission side. That's really where we're starting to focus now, which is getting out into the revenue generation. The mission of the entity with things like high performance. Compute on making sure that we have an ability to support our customers on both sides of those. >>You got a follow up question on strategy. You talked about hybrid. And you know the hybrid. Clearly, riel, whatever the big buzzword today is multi cloud. My question is, is multi cloud the actual strategy of customers or is it actually just an outcome of multi vendor and and shadow I t. But what if you could address that? Yeah, >>So another great question. So I think if you're on one side of the fence, you call it a strategy on maybe risk mitigation on the other side of the fence, you could say, you know, I don't When people talk about multi cloud, they tend to say, Hey, you know that one of the big names that you hear, whether it's Oracle or aws, um you know Microsoft etcetera? Uh huh. But the reality is anybody who's running those are also running, you know, hundreds of father for SAS applications. Whether the department allowed sort of that shadow, I t. I think in part you call it a strategy. In part, you'd say it's just sort of propagation of cloud capabilities that have sprung up, Do you think? Based on, you know, security integration, performance considerations as well as sort of the general expansiveness of enterprise class capabilities? You probably see if you're niche players over time and you'll see kind of the broader bets happening around enterprise class capabilities. >>So, Sheri, you're relatively new to the oracle of just under a year. But you've been around the industry, and you know that the chairman of a horrible loves technology you love speeds and feeds and shares that Oracle Open World but and, you know or was a product company. But the conversation is changing. You kind of alluded to that before. It's not just about feature function speeds and feeds. Maybe you could address that. And where does Oracle consulting fit in that equation? >>Right, So it kind of detail of what Pat was just saying around the hybrid notion. We firmly believe that every customer is gonna wanna have different options for what they do in the cloud and based on the providers. So we want. We've partnered with Microsoft. We actually can interconnect are clouds together to provide that kind of flexibility to our customers. Yeah, it is a key component of that Azure customers and talk about. I'm going to stop integration. Our partnership or consultant is the arm that does that work for us. So we are seeing them come, come about in a much different way in a way that's different, you know? And other consulting, you know, staff augmentation firms. >>Well, that Microsoft is interesting to us. Uh, actually, a lot of people in the press might have put food. It saw that and said, Wow, this is This is pretty curious both from a strategy standpoint, but it really. But I think it's premature on Oracle. So you got the Number one database. Everybody knows Oracle's got the native get this hyper cloud partner now saying, Yeah, we can run. You're kind of seamlessly. I know that's an overused word, but what is the reaction been in the customer base? That deal? >>It's phenomenal. It's infinite, especially for a lot of our retailers that are being Microsoft Cloud companies. They're seeing that they can put their Microsoft applications in the Microsoft class. They can run the Oracle databases in the Oracle Cloud and Inter Operability is tremendous and they're not any sort of service as it relates to putting, you know, using a multi cloud strategy. And for us, we're seeing that as a differentiator for us in the market. >>So what's the strategy behind that? I want you to talk about that a little bit, because, I mean, you know, it was it was an interesting chess move by Oracle you got, you know, Amazon's out there doing their thing, and there's plenty of Oracle running on on AWS. But there's a lot of head bashing going on, and then you guys partner up with Microsoft that caught a lot of people off guard. Can you help us, You know, give us a little color on the strategy behind that? >>Yeah, so I think that there's a There's a technical component of the strategy which Sherry alluded to, but I also think that there's a cultural component of the strategy and so, you know, obviously Microsoft has been around for a long time. ESX has Oracle that they have a substantial on from this friend. But as much as any other company on the Lana, probably Microsoft has this hybrid strategy just like Oracle. And so, as we look at, you know, the partner ecosystem and what makes sense the partner and how can we diversify the workloads like Microsoft is one of those companies? That's just sort of, Ah, very vertical industry focused great portfolio products. I'm slightly differentiated in terms of the space that they would buy in versus an Oracle. As you pointed out, So, uh, cultural standpoint, I think it's quite a good fit for us to find, you know, as we look at partners to find a partner like Microsoft to work with an integrated workloads. It >>was kind of a judo move for both companies in my mind, because you see a lot of companies that are predominantly on Prem, just like Oracle has been historically saying with Microsoft and basically kind of going on to hybrid, obviously they want on Prem and multi Cloud, which is okay, we're going to span multiple clouds. But both Oracle Now and Microsoft, with its hybrid strategy, as I call it, a judo move because essentially you're doing things that maybe some of the other cloud providers can't do because of your own prim present. So you're turning what may have been perceived as a disadvantage, you know, a legacy business. You know, it's funny in our business legacies of >>a >>bad word, but but it's usually as good connotations. But turning that on Prem legacy into an advantage. Cherry. Is that a reasonable premise that I'm putting forth and you having conversations with customers in that regard? >>Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a very fair statement to make, because we do have again. I oversee the top 120 Oracle's and in that they have years and years of investment in Oracle databases in Oracle applications and for us agreeable by the capabilities to move that to your cloud. Integrate with other things such as Microsoft, you know, applications and whatnot is huge issue, and no other cloud provider can say that. So I do think that good to see that we are uniquely differentiated. >>I want to ask you about lock in because that's always the criticism of Oracle. I talked to a lot of work with customers in particular exit data. People say, Why would anybody buy exit data locks in what you by AWS and why would you buy any product. You, uh, disk drive a lock in. So So I want to ask you about that because my research shows that while there's a there's a segment of customers that are very much concerned about that, and that's a primary concern you lock in. It's actually a small percentage, maybe 10 15%. Most of the customers that I to talk to the Oracle world will say, Listen, I'm willing to risk that lock in If if If the business value overwhelms that And again I ask you, Is that is that something that is a viable conversation with your customers? Do you see the same thing? I mean, I see it as kind of a strong indication. If they kind of poo poo the lock in pieces, they look at the business value that I'm driving from my organization. I wonder if you could >>Yes. So I think value is the crux of the conversation. And if you look at sort of the legacy business, just put it that for a second. You know that what people would call legacy, uh, the US is a tremendous asset because we have 400,000 customers or so around the world. Those are folks that we're giving choice. You can run on Prem. You can run in the cloud. You can find an engineered systems or into the data box behind your firewall. You can run it as a data cloud at customer, which is behind your firewall, but leveraging Native Public Cloud services. Or you can run that same capability and exit out of service. So really again, that deployment model choice about what, folks? You how folks wanna consume their services in terms of lock in. I don't think it's so much lock in, as you point out, is value if a customer's deriving value from a given solution, especially in the cloud world, they're going to consume right, and if they're going to consume the probability and higher likelihood is that they'll expand as well. So I look it. I essentially look at consumption in the cloud world being value that's been realized, and once you have value that's been realized, it's critical conversation. I don't I don't view it is lock. In fact, there's a lot of fun, mobility and portability that can occur when you talk about hybrid cloud multi cloud environments. I view it much more is identifying the value and then executing against that value so that folks consume cloud services. >>Why, Cheri, why are customers wanting to put mission critical workloads in the cloud? Is it the same sort of cloud, agility and cost, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, why not just leave it on Prem and keep it protected and maybe spend a little bit more? What's the driver for moving mission Critical workloads? >>Well, I think it's it's dependent upon you know what? The initiatives are in the company right now. They're looking for cost reduction for top line growth, either looking for different capabilities around security that the cloud provides. The great thing about what we do is we have optimized all of our work lives but our database and our applications into our class of providing additional capabilities. But we're also seeing a lot more. So we, uh we say all the time you put us to the test, let us, you know, quantify what we would look like in the cloud with our workloads versus competitors, er and we will guarantee that will save you a lot of money. So I think that a lot of it has to do with one. It starts with potentially cost reduction, but then they start seeing additional business value driven out of and back to Oracle Consulting. What Oracle consultant provides in terms of business value in the cloud is transformative for our customers. >>Well, that this is valued to is a component of the business case that has to be risk mitigation. And, you know, if you just want to buy some object storage, you know, probably not gonna work is not going to be my first call. But if I have a mission critical set of workloads that are running on Oracle, I'm really going to think twice about migrating that, you know, somewhere else I'm either gonna leave it on, Prem, or I'm gonna look look hard that Oracle's same same approach. And we've done some research on this that the risk and cost of actually migrating to a new environment is is potentially really detrimental to companies. I wonder if you could talk about how that plays into your and customers strategies. >>Yeah, and I think, you know, is, um, reference in what? What Kerry said. So it depends on the choice of the customer, but what I would say is if a customer is driving a lot of value on premise, um, that might look something like exists ts and the cloud for D. R. So they're actually have a disaster recovery plan that's file based. I think Cloud is one of these sort of unicorn conversations. Everybody, everybody wants to have a cloud conversation. And so, making sure that that cloud of conversation in the context of the customer, um, is what's crucial for us. And so, you know, as you look at mission critical workloads, those are the workloads that we want. We want either core mission, our mission critical. It's just object storage or just something, you know, that people want to spin up and spin down. Yeah, that's interesting to Oracle, but for us, as a B two b, your B two b enterprise class, um, software company, we want to be in your core mission or in your back office, you know, helping you execute against that mission. >>So share here, going in with a stacked deck. I mean, you're not going in trying to go head to head with the hyper scale you going in saying, Look, this is our wheelhouse, and I think I'm hearing in your wheelhouse you'll take anybody on. But I wonder if you could sort of affirm that and maybe talk about how you lead in these customer conversations, >>right? Well, normally, our entry point is one. Understanding with business drivers are right. It has to be a business led recession. Really? Isn't a technology starting point right? It really is around what business problems we're trying to solve and how can we help you solve them? And because we know your environments, we know what data bases air deployed in. Other public. What is your lover? Dji to run your business? We can, I think, successfully position ourselves very, very competitively against other cloud providers. And I think that is something that resonated incredibly well with our customers and back. >>Yes, So it seems like Oracle Consulting is an important ingredient as part of that strategy, Cause again, If it was, you know, five years ago it was just stack staff augmentation. That's really not a compelling conversation to have with customers. But if you can come in with A with the mindset of strategic partner you're bringing in Deloitte, we've been talking to some of their professionals about the elevate program with with Oracle, that is, that's a nice lever that your you can take advantage of. >>Absolutely. And in fact, we've seen that that is a huge opportunity. For one, the partnership with Deloitte is incredibly strategic. We also partner with other companies like Accenture and DXC and IBM Candidly and Oracle is consulting is incredibly flexible in terms of what kind of partnerships and the line they have with our customers is really based. Yeah, >>I want to end on a growth path and maybe talk about everyone wants to weaken. Cloud Cloud is the growth business. You look at Oracle's business, you know everybody's business. This cloud is growing. Everything else is either hanging on or declining. So it's all about growth. How do you drive growth? What what is Cloud's role in terms of, you know, the growth strategy and maybe had some color to that narrative? >>Yeah, so from a from an execution standpoint, how we drive growth is we have a kind of a core part capability, its value volume, velocity burger. Those are very simplistic approach that we take in each of our line of businesses and then across each of the segments of the market size pass and I as an engineer systems as well. The values crucial If you're not, you're not selling with value and kind of positioning value at the up front part of it. You know, the customers may book, but it won't consume and don't consume. They're not going to renew. So ensuring that customers are realizing value from the process is essential. And then with volume and velocity, you know, our legacy business was much more kind of chunkier, so you could focus on big quarter ends or a big year end on. You had impending events through, you know, started compliance considerations or contract negotiations, etcetera. We have to be in a volume and velocity business in order to scale out and also the average transaction sizes. Historically, although it's growing for us, >>it >>is slightly lower than what a license on premise capability would be. As you'd expect, um, from, uh, from a product perspective, I think, you know, we were sort of a luxury of riches around the autonomous capabilities. If you haven't so that's something that's incredibly unique. Oracle. You know, the Economist database and all the economist services that we're rolling out and that Autonomous gets back to what we talked about earlier, around security, around performance, around scale, ability and all these things. Ultimately, we're positioning the capabilities of the future, but we're positioning them today. So we're a market leader in this space. You're not only is the Oracle database. As you pointed out, the market leader were market leaders here. If you found a bunch of the SAS areas, this eponymous segment of the market is crucial for us and crucial to our growth. >>Yeah, it really isn't enabling. What I've been saying. That you it's almost compulsory for Oracle to participate and compete in the cloud because it gives you that automation and that that scale. But you're talking about also setting up, you know, some future advantages of being able to take advantage of data. The combination of data ai and Cloud is the new superpower with within the industry. Sherry, I want O end on you. 11 months in an oracle. Let's say things work out great. You're here 234 years down the road. You look back. What does success look like? >>Success looks like everyone of our customers moving to the Oracle cloud and see incredible business value from that partnering with Oracle Consulting. That's what my successful curious >>guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube where we've been we've been tracking this transformation of Oracle consulting and one of the things that's very clear. There was Oracle's obviously serious about cloud, but also seriously about bringing in new talent and new skill sets really not only transform Oracle but help transform your customers. So thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. >>Thanks so much. >>You bet. Thank you. >>All right. Thank you. Everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. We'll see you next time. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah! >>Everybody, welcome back to the special digital presentation where we are tracking the transformation of Oracle consulting. And really, it's rebirth. Aaron Millstone is back. He's the senior vice president of consulting, joined by Jeff Davis. Who's ah, principal at Deloitte. He's the chief commercial officer for Oracle at Deloitte. Gentlemen, good to see you. Welcome. >>Thank you very much. >>Thanks for having me back. >>You're welcome, guys. Jeff, let me start with you. I've got the obvious question is why would Deloitte World Class? Yes, I well known why you partnering with Oracle Consultant? >>We're really It was a perfect match. The fact that we were looking to grow our oracle practice and really new and innovative ways around Oracle's cloud technology. Uh, in discussions with the oil, coal and specifically with Aaron Millstone, we discovered that we really had complementary capabilities and very little overlapping capabilities. So it was natural for us to find a way to work together. And specifically we found that there were strategic assets we had and there were tactical assets that Oracle had the mixture of two made a really unique and compelling value proposition for the customer base >>and Aaron. I mean, we've talked about the shift from from staff augmentation to much more strategic partnering with your customers. But you're not trying to compete with the big size of there's, there's it sounds like there's not a lot of overlap there. Where do you pick up and leave off for Deloitte? You describe that? >>Sure. I mean, we're You're right, right? We're not. We're not ever going to try to compete with the Deloitte. It's not our that's not in our DNA. It's not our intention. We exist to drive Oracle's to drive success for our customers on Oracle's cloud. That's that's our mantra. That's what we focus in on. So for us, right, we're deep technologists. We're We understand our cloud. We understand how cloud works within our various product suites that we migrate to the cloud. We understand how to manage it. We understand how to build paths extensions to it, but we don't have big program management. We don't understand non oracle components that well, you know, we've got some expertise here and there. But if we need to expand, you know, on Oracle solution to coexist with a Microsoft azure solution, we can't do that without going to a partner and as we bigger and the transformation that they're gonna have to change management and big, big transformation journey capabilities. Like again, That's not That's not expertise. >>Yeah, so Jeff will come back to you. So we see a lot of these deals. Sometimes we call them Barney deals. I love you. You love me. There's a press release, and that's it. But so one of the things we look for okay is their teeth behind this. You guys have come out with what you call elevate. What is elevate? How did it get started? And I have some follow up questions. >>Yeah, well, elevate really got started when Aaron and I started to look at the assets that each of the firms possessed on the Deloitte side, as Aaron suggested, We have deep capabilities and a broad range of technologies, some of them competing technologies with Oracle at the same time. Uh, we didn't have a great deal of depth in Oracle's technical products, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous. Our bench was not as big as Aaron's, and Aaron also had access to your local development at a level that we didn't have access to. So we really found ourselves in a situation where we could put those two capabilities together and we could offer something to our clients and a broad range of customers. Oracle customers in the field. They had access to all of the Lloyds capabilities, which includes great project management, great change management, real skill around the strategic aspects of cloud migration. And Aaron had tools on had resource is trained and developed around the late historical technology. They'd always be a step ahead of any s I So together we felt this was really a differentiation for marketplace, right, Erin? >>Yeah, absolutely right. And if I don't think I would add to it is that if you if you look at Deloitte approaches client conversation from, ah, business value perspective, you know, the work consulting teams tends to focus conversation. It tends to approach conversations with a focus on How do you want to do the technology? Um, both are helpful. But, you know, quite frankly, as we get into the bigger information in place, we need to lead with the Lloyd model of how do we How do we drive your business value and then begin from a technologist perspective, that's when we show up. So it really has been a very logical, very complimentary match. >>So you and I have talked about, you know, data centers and building data centers and investing. It's not just it's just not a good use of capital today. There's so many other things that organizations can do. You guys have identified data center. Consolidation is, is I'll call it Ah, you know, an initiative that you're seeing customers. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Is that kind of a starting point for conversations? >>Yeah, well, it's definitely starting point, right? So we call it a referred to his infrastructure led transformation, Um, and appetite. The appetite for that is certainly high. We were seeing an increased focus on um, you know what customers need to do to take not just a workload here and there. But how do they get out of the data center business full? So it's a foregone conclusion, right? Like you just said, it's not. It's not really a question of should we invest in another data center? Where should we invest in up to in their data centers? The question has changed to Let's move the cloud. How do we get there and let's move in a big way? And that's why we're seeing that dialogue across all of our customers. And we find even for Oracle, it's been a learning for us, right? We started with on Oracle workload conversation, which is, Do you want to move this work? Work loads of oracle? But you want to move that Oracle workload works. And really, what we're finding is it's a wholesale transformation of everything in the data center, too. One or more clouds, right again, often often it's a multi cloud strategy, and that's okay. And we, you know, we were having more bigger conversations. The thing that has been really interesting is these conversations have evolved, and especially as we work with our partners at Deloitte, has been that, you know, we think that the combination of our our cloud technology, the consulting services that Oracle Consulting and Deloitte can bring to bear and then Oracle's ability to finance the whole deal makes the very compelling conversations for customers because you can walk in to a CEO to a CFO and say, Look on day one, you can actually have a lower spend that what you have today in your data center and get a cop transformation underway at the same time. >>So I want to come back to that business case and member Jeff, before we do, I want to ask you. So we heard Erin, you know, talking about the catalyst. You know, that sort of infrastructure transformation. But you're in the outcomes business, right in both. The bush has been deployed especially so So what is that North Star that you're seeing with customers? You know, it's not about the tech. They're not starting there. Um, that will often tell you that's kind of the easy part. But then we see tech coming and going, and it's the It's the business process. That's the people issues lining everybody. So what are you seeing is so the outcomes. What's that conversation like with your customers? >>Yeah, well, really, this conversation starts with business leadership. Um, if you think about it, there's a strong value proposition in infrastructure renewal. It's not at the top of mind, but once you start to understand the value that's created, it does raise two ah, high priority. Now, our experiences that virtually every board is looking for the C suite toe have a cloud strategy of some kind. People recognize the value of cloud in, uh in many of our clients and many of Oracle's customers, so the boards are pressing the C suite for a cloud strategy. Among those things are the value that cloud brings, including virtually unlimited scalability. Is is being tested real time now with a lot of current events. So when you see the scalability when you know you need a cloud strategy of some kind, your business advisors impressing you, the value proposition starts well, how do we get there? And what does it take to be successful? Our perspective is that it's it's fair to believe that the cloud will reduce infrastructure. Spend significantly. It's a great opportunity for consolidation. It also adds a layer of security, resiliency and scalability that you simply couldn't do on your own. So it addresses a lot of business needs Aziz well as a number of technical needs that need to be addressed. >>So let's talk a little bit more about that business cases that generally what you're seeing, where it starts is let's take some costs right out, and then Aaron, you and I talked about maybe investing that in the future of it. But is that really the starting point for the vast majority of customers? Let's let's let's cut some costs right away and get a payback immediately. >>So I'd like to share our perspective, which is, you know, nobody spends money for the sake of spending money on technology. It's got to have meaningful business value. So the conversation starts with really renewal and a path to the cloud. But there's a natural opportunity for savings in consolidation that we take advantage. We're not simply shifting from your hardware to the cloud we're actually modernizing, which will result in significant savings. But it also gives the business something that they don't have today at a level of security and scalability and ability to run a modern technology much faster, much better. Ah, and much more scalable. >>So a lot of people might again I go back to these deals. I think of this as a sales play. One of the things we look for is there. Is there any other integration? Are you doing co engineering in this case, maybe not, co engineering But are there tools that you're developing that you're taking to market, that you're actually leveraging? Eric, can you talk about that a little bit? Convinces. That's not just the sales play. >>Yeah, sure. And Jeff alluded to some of this earlier, too, right? So we definitely each had our respective tool. Angry Deloitte's investments in tools, what was built out of data that we have seen used quite a few times now we've been investing in something we call the Oracle soar. You know, our tools are, as you'd imagine, heavily Oracle focus. It's about moving Oracle technology to Oracle Cloud out of data and some of the tools that Deloitte's invested in our focus more comprehensively on holistically, looking at everything in a data center and everything that's across data centers and start to develop a set of facts around this stuff. But in both cases, we actually looked at these things and we said, You know what? If you combine these together, we get a very comprehensive view of what exactly it is, but we're looking at with a customer so we can tell everything from the types of traffic we see in the network to the specific versions of stuff you start to identify whether there's risk associated with having things, not aster on a supporter and get a very conference of you that's based on facts. And so, you know, we took those tools. We combined them together so that we can go into a customer and give a complete end and view from both on Oracle and Delight Perspective. And quite frankly, it doesn't matter whether the Lloyd leads or whether Oracle leads. We've developed these tools together. We're going to market together. And we've even got you know, the templates you'd expect consultancies tohave, right? So when you look at business cases, we've got joint business case templates that we've created together and that we're using actively with customers and therefore then we're refining them, improving them each time we do it. But, you know, we're at a point now where our tools are combined, templates are combined, and we even at this, you know, we're even Jeff in our poll earlier yesterday actually even got a joint Ah, war room that's constantly engaging with different account teams and making sure that we structurally approach things in a consistent way so that we're driving business value and using the tools appropriately. >>You know, I think, um, migration risk is probably one of the most significant factors in a business case. I mean, many don't understand it, but those in I t. And certainly hopefully in the executive office do you understand it? It sounds like that's a part of your tooling, anyway is designed to mitigate that's significant migration risk. When you talk about that a little bit, >>yeah, so we, you know, we approach migration from, you know, we start with the conversation. I'm almost always some type of log of what? The list of applications, what versions of things running they've been maintained by some might department somewhere, right? Or the collective? It's in varying degrees of accuracy is what we find. We don't rely on that. We go in and our our tools, our combined tooling across oracle, Deloitte interrogate the systems. We come back with actual information from the actual systems themselves. And then we started the plan. And so the funny thing is, with the migration, you know, probably 80% of the effort. 90% of the effort is in the planning stages and making sure that we understand exactly what we're moving exactly. When again, we're not. We're not dealing with the edge applications. Typically, we're dealing with the mission critical applications that are supporting the heart of a supply chain or a finance operation. And you can't. You just can't afford the down time that maybe you could afford on something that might be a consumer facing or a little less mission. Critical. So, yeah, we start finding very early and interrogate aggressively with actual data. >>Jeff, can you give us a sense as to how far you're into this elevate journey? May be thinking about a couple of customers either specifically or generically gonna where you're at with them. How far along? Maybe even some examples that you feel are representative. >>Sure. Um, you know, the the relationship has been probably about six Ah, close to seven months of maturity. In that time, we've had an opportunity to work on several key clients at scale. Uh, we've worked together in collaboration with one of the nation's largest retailers in the grocery business. We've worked collaboratively in aerospace and defense and also in the hospitality industry. In these cases, what we're finding and one is each one is in the various stage of maturity. One is done, one is in midstream on one is at the early stages and current economic conditions or driving a huge pipeline. Right now, I think our challenge right now is making sure that we identify those clients that can best take a value, take advantage of our services and our joint offering to deal with that pipeline. Right now, what we're finding is that the savings are at least as we projected. In some cases, we're finding even more. What people say they have and what people say they do isn't necessarily what you find when you get in there. But almost every case we're finding that there's unused equipment, unused capacity that they currently have redundancy, low utilization of their current assets. We can go a long way and streamlining that. Plus, I can't emphasize enough that ah, these days security is a major concern and we're adding a layer of security that they could never achieve themselves with soft. >>How do you guys on how the customers wanna approach the transaction? Is it a Bixby is a T and M. Is it a situation where you participate in some of the some of the savings of the game. How does the pricing work? >>So we have Go >>ahead. Um, I'll start off by saying each deal is really custom built around what a customer really needs, what they're trying to get out of it right now. As an example, Op X is very important. So we're engineering deals in a way that helps customers deal with their financial challenges, especially around op Ex. There are other structures that we can put in place. We have the backing of Oracle Finance, so we can be very innovative on deals they could be. When value was attained. They could be milestone based. There's just, uh, I think, a wide variety I don't want to say unlimited, but a wide variety of different options that we can offer our clients in order to be able to deal with whatever financial challenge or opportunity that may be looking at >>perfect, perfect. And you want >>to add to that >>and everything looking at other than you know, the there are. There are always things that are discovered during a personal project, and so, you know, we we also we do factor and things that allow some flexibility. Right? So even if we have a fixed price deal will include a bucket of ours to deal with, you know, unanticipated changes or even innovation. It doesn't have to be, You know, contingency could be Hey, we want to go out and spend and invest some money on artificial intelligence machine learning analytics over in this space since we've already moved these applications. All right, so we're approaching it again from a very flexible standpoint, and we're just point right. We can we can custom craft. Ah, deal to match what? The clients. Best business outcome. Okay. >>Yeah, that makes sense. That client might see some adjacent opportunity that they want to pursue, and they want that to be covered in the agreement I'm gonna end. Um, if you start with you, Aaron and then Jeff go to you. How? What do you guys see? A success? What does success look like? You know, when you were, you know, just less than a year in when you're 234 let's say five years and you look back, What does success look like? >>So, to me, successful success is gonna look like we've gotten a number of these big transformation deals in play. It's in motion, naturally between our organizations, not necessarily driven entirely by Jeff and I going out and driving the organization behave the right way. It's more in our DNA. But more importantly, I think we've gone into We've gone beyond the conversation of Let's Move workloads. We've gone into conversations off. Let's really talk about how to reimagine your business on top of Oracle's cloud and have an ongoing dialogue that looks at that transformation. Once we hit that 0.345 years from now, right, that will be a wild success, Jeff. >>But really, it's been around for 135 years. This is our birthday, uh, this year and in that time, what we've learned is there's no substitute for impact and value added to our clients. In our perspective, what this would success looks like his client success find success means improved scalability of their operations, uh, securing their technology and their data at a substantially lower cost, so that they can focus on what their core businesses and focus less on technology. That success to deploy >>right guys, thanks so much. Great session We're not only witnessing the rebirth of Oracle Consulting, but there's clearly a transformation going on. And it's cultural. Gentlemen, congratulations on your partnership. And thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thank you so much >>for having us. >>You're welcome. Alright, Keep right there, everybody. We're back with our next guest covering Oracle Consulting North America. This is Dave Vellante with the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, >>yeah.

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

>>Yeah, yeah, >>yeah! >>Welcome back, everybody. To this special digital event coverage, the Cube is looking into the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. Janet George is here. She's group VP Autonomous for Advanced Analytics with machine learning and artificial intelligence at Oracle. And she's joined by Grant Gibson Group VP of growth and strategy at Oracle. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. Great. I want to start with you because you get strategy in your title like this. Start big picture. What is the strategy with Oracle specifically as it relates to autonomous and also consulting? >>Sure. So I think you know, Oracle has a deep legacy of strength and data and, uh uh, over the company's successful history. It's evolved what that is from steps along the way. And if you look at the modern enterprise Oracle client, I think there's no denying that we've entered the age of AI, that everyone knows that artificial intelligence and machine learning are a key to their success in the business marketplace going forward. And while generally it's acknowledged that it's a transformative technology and people know that they need to take advantage of it, it's the how that's really tricky and that most enterprises, in order to really get an enterprise level, are rely on AI investment. Need to engage in projects of significant scope, and going from realizing there's an opportunity of realizing there's a threat to mobilize yourself to capitalize on it is a daunting task or certainly one that's, you know, Anybody that's got any sort of legacy of success has built in processes as building systems has built in skill sets, and making that leap to be an autonomous enterprise is challenging for companies to wrap their heads around. So as part of the rebirth of Oracle Consulting, we've developed a practice around how to both manage the technology needs for that transformation as well as the human needs as well as the data science needs. >>So there's about five or six things that I want to follow up with you there. So this is a good conversation. Ever since I've been in the industry, we were talking about a sort of start stop start stop at the Ai Winter, and now it seems to be here is almost feel like the technology never lived up to its promise. If you didn't have the horsepower compute power data may be so we're here today. It feels like we are entering a new era. Why is that? And how will the technology perform this time? >>So for AI to perform it's very remind on the data we entered the age of Ai without having the right data for AI. So you can imagine that we just launched into Ai without our data being ready to be training sex for AI. So we started with B I data or we started the data that was already historically transformed. Formatted had logical structures, physical structures. This data was sort of trapped in many different tools. And then suddenly Ai comes along and we see Take this data, our historical data we haven't tested to see if this has labels in it. This has learning capability in it. Just trust the data to AI. And that's why we saw the initial wave of ai sort of failing because it was not ready to full ai ready for the generation of Ai, if you will. >>So, to me, this is I always say, this was the contribution that Hadoop left us, right? I mean, the dupe everybody was crazy. It turned into big data. Oracle was never that nuts about it is gonna watch, Setback and wash obviously participated, but it gathered all this data created Chief Data Lakes, which people always joke turns into data swamps. But the data is often times now within organizations least present. Now it's a matter of what? What what's The next step is >>basically about Hadoop did to the world of data. Was her dupe freed data from being stuck in tools it basically brought forth. This concept of a platform and platform is very essential because as we enter the age of AI and be entered, the better wide range of data. We can't have tools handling all of the state of the data needs to scale. The data needs to move, the data needs to grow. And so we need the concept of platforms so we can be elastic for the growth of the data, right, it can be distributed. It can grow based on the growth of the data, and it can learn from that data. So that is that's the reason why Hadoop sort of brought us into the platform board, >>right? A lot of that data ended up in the cloud. I always say, You know, for years we marched to the cadence of Moore's law. That was the innovation engine in this industry and fastest, you could get a chip in, you know, you get a little advantage, and then somebody would leapfrog. Today it's got all this data you apply machine intelligence and cloud gives you scale. It gives you agility of your customers. Are they taking advantage of the new innovation cocktail? First of all, do you buy that? How do you see them taking >>advantage of? Yeah, I think part of what James mentioned makes a lot of sense is that at the beginning, when you know you're taking the existing data in an enterprise and trying to do AI to it, you often get things that look a lot like what you already knew because you're dealing with your existing data set in your existing expertise. And part of I think the leap that clients are finding success with now is getting novel data types, and you're moving from, uh, zeros and ones of structured data, too. Image language, written language, spoken language. You're capturing different data sets in ways that prior tools never could. And so the classifications that come out of it, the insights that come out of it, the business process transformation comes out of it is different than what we would have understood under the structure data format. So I think it's that combination of really being able to push massive amounts of data through a cloud product to be able to process it at scale. That is what I think is the combination that takes it to the next plateau for sure. >>So you talked about sort of. We're entering a new era Age of a AI. You know, a lot of people, you know, kind of focus on the cloud is the current era, but it really does feel like we're moving beyond that. The language that we use today, I feel like it's going to change, and you just started to touch on some of it. Sensing, you know, there are senses and you know the visualization in the the auditory. So it's It's sort of this new experience that customers are seeing a lot of this machine intelligence behind. >>I call it the autonomous and a price right. The journey to be the autonomous enterprise. And then you're on this journey to be the autonomous enterprise you need. Really? The platform that can help you be cloud is that platform which can help you get to the autonomous journey. But the autonomous journey does not end with the cloud or doesn't end with the data lake. These are just infrastructures that are basic necessary necessities for being on that on that autonomous journey. But at the end, it's about how do you train and scale at, um, very large scale training that needs to happen on this platform for AI to be successful. And if you are an autonomous and price, then you have really figured out how to tap into AI and machine learning in a way that nobody else has to derive business value, if you will. So you've got the platform, you've got the data, and now you're actually tapping into the autonomous components ai and machine learning to derive business, intelligence and business value. >>So I want to get into a little bit of Oracle's role. But to do that I want to talk a little bit more about the industry. So if you think about the way that the industry seems to be restructuring around data. Historically, industries had their own stack value chain, and if you were in in in the finance industry, you were there for life. We had your own sales channel distribution, etcetera. But today you see companies traversing industries, which has never happened before. You know, you see apple getting into content and music, and there's so many examples are buying whole foods data is sort of the enabler. There you have a lot of organizations, your customers, that are incumbents that they don't wanna get disrupted your part big party roles to help them become that autonomous and press so they don't get disrupted. I wonder if you could maybe maybe comment on How are you doing? >>Yeah, I'll comment and then grant you China, you know. So when you think about banking, for example, highly regulated industry think about RG culture. These are highly regulated industries there. It was very difficult to destruct these industries. But now you look at an Amazon, right? And what is an Amazon or any other tech giants like Apple have? They have incredible amounts of data. They understand how people use for how they want to do banking. And so they've come up with Apple cash or Amazon pay, and these things are starting to eat into the market, right? So you would have never thought and Amazon could be a competition to a banking industry just because of regulations. But they're not hindered by the regulations because they're starting at a different level. And so they become an instant threat in an instant destructive to these highly regulated industries. That's what data does, right when you use data as your DNA for your business and you are sort of born in data or you figured out how to be autonomous. If you will capture value from that data in a very significant manner, then you can get into industries that are not traditionally your own industry. It can be like the food industry can be the cloud industry, the book industry, you know, different industries. So you know that that's what I see happening with the tech giants. >>So great, there's a really interesting point that the Gina is making that you mentioned. You started off with a couple of industries that are highly regulated, the harder to disrupt use, it got disrupted, publishing got disrupted. But you've got these regulated businesses. Defense or automotive actually hasn't been truly disrupted yet. Some Tesla, maybe a harbinger. And so you've got this spectrum of disruption. But is anybody safe from disruption? >>Kind of. I don't think anyone's ever say from it. It's It's changing evolution, right? That you whether it's, you know, swapping horseshoes for cars are TV for movies or Netflix are any sort of evolution of a business You're I wouldn't coast on any of them. And I think to the earlier question around the value that we can help bring the Oracle customers is that you know, we have a rich stack of applications, and I find that the space between the applications, the data that that spans more than one of them is a ripe playground for innovations that where the data already exists inside a company. But it's trapped from both a technology and a business perspective. Uh, and that's where I think really any company can take advantage of knowing it's data better and changing itself to take advantage of what's already there. >>Yet powerful people always throw the bromide out. The data is the new oil, and we've said. No data is far more valuable because you can use it in a lot of different places. Oil you can use once and it's follow the laws of scarcity data if you can unlock it. And so a lot of the incumbents they have built a business around, whatever a factory or a process and people, a lot of the trillion are starting us that have become billionaires. You know, I'm talking about Data's at the core. They're data companies. So So it seems like a big challenge for your incumbent customers. Clients is to put data at the core, be able to break down those silos. How do they do that? >>Grading down silos is really super critical for any business. It was okay to operate in a silo, for example. You would think that, Oh, you know, I could just be payroll and expense reports and it wouldn't matter matter if I get into vendor performance management or purchasing that can operate as a silo. But any movie of finding that there are tremendous insights between vendor performance management I expensive for these things are all connected, so you can't afford to have your data sits in silos. So grading down that silo actually gives the business very good performance, right? Insights that they didn't have before. So that's one way to go. But but another phenomena happens when you start to great down the silos, you start to recognize what data you don't have to take your business to the next level, right. That awareness will not happen when you're working with existing data so that a Venice comes into form when you great the silos and you start to figure out you need to go after a different set of data to get you to a new product creation. What would that look like? New test insights or new cap ex avoidance that that data is just you have to go through the iteration to be able to figure that out. >>It becomes it becomes a business problem, right? If you got a process now where you can identify 75% of the failures and you know the value of the other 25% of failures, that becomes a simple investment. How much money am I willing to invest to knock down some portion that 25% and it changes it from simply an I t problem or expense management problem to you know, the cash problem. >>But you still need a platform that has AP eyes that allows you to bring in those data sets that you don't have access to this enable an enabler. It's not the answer. It's not the outcome in and of itself, but it enables. And >>I always say, you can't have the best toilet if you're coming, doesn't work. You know what I mean? So you have to have your plumbing. Your plumbing has to be more modern. So you have to bring in modern infrastructure distributed computing that that you cannot. There's no compromise there, right? You have to have the right equal system for you to be able to be technologically advanced on a leader in that >>table. Stakes is what you're saying. And so this notion of the autonomous enterprise I would help me here cause I get kind of autonomous and automation coming into I t I t ops. I'm interested in how you see customers taking that beyond the technology organization into the enterprise. >>Yeah, this is this is such a great question, right? This is what I've been talking about all morning. Um, I think when AI is a technology problem, the company is that at a loss AI has to be a business problem. AI has to inform the business strategy. AI has to been companies. The successful companies that have done so. 90% of my investments are going towards state. We know that and most of it going towards AI. There's data out there about this, right? And so we look at what are these? 90 90% of the company's investments. Where are these going and whose doing this right? Who's not doing this right? One of the things we're seeing as results is that the companies that are doing it right have brought data into their business strategy. They've changed their business model, right? So it's not like making a better taxi, but coming up with a bow, right? So it's not like saying Okay, I'm going to have all these. I'm going to be the drug manufacturing company. I'm gonna put drugs out there in the market forces. I'm going to do connected help, right? And so how does data serve the business model of being connected? Help rather than being a drug company selling drugs to my customers, right? It's a completely different way of looking at it. And so now you guys informing drug discovery is not helping you just put more drugs to the market. Rather, it's helping you come up with new drugs that would help the process of connected games. There's a >>lot of discussion in the press about, you know, the ethics of AI, and how far should we take? A far. Can we take it from a technology standpoint, Long road map there? But how far should we take it? Do you feel as though of public policy will take care of that? A lot of that narrative is just kind of journalists looking for, You know, the negative story. Well, that's sort itself out. How much time do you spend with your customers talking about that and is what's Oracle's role there? I mean, Facebook says, Hey, the government should figure this out. What's your point? >>I think everybody has a role. It's a joint role, and none of us could give up our responsibilities as data scientists. We have heavy responsibility in this area on. We have heavy responsibility to advise the clients on the state area. Also, the data we come from the past has to change. That is inherently biased, right? And we tend to put data signs on biased data with the one dimensional view of the data. So we have to start looking at multiple dimensions of the data. It's got to start examining. I call it a responsible AI when you just simply take one variable or start to do machine learning with that because that's not that's not right. You have to examine the data. You got to understand how much biases in the data are you training a machine learning model with the bias? Is there diversity in the models? Is their diversity in the data? These are conversations we need to have. And we absolutely need policy around this because unless our lawmakers start to understand that we need the source of the data to change. And if we look at this, if we look at the source of the data and the source of the data is inherently biased or the source of the data has only a single representation, we're never going to change that downstream. AI is not going to help us. There so that has to change upstream. That's where the policy makers come into into play. The lawmakers come into play, but at the same time as we're building models, I think we have a responsibility to say can be triangle can be built with multiple models. Can we look at the results of these models? How are these feature's ranked? Are they ranked based on biases, sex, HP II, information? Are we taking the P I information out? Are we really looking at one variable? Somebody fell to pay their bill, but they just felt they they build because they were late, right? Voices that they don't have a bank account and be classified. Them is poor and having no bank account, you know what I mean? So all of this becomes part of response >>that humans are inherently biased, and so humans or building algorithms right there. So you say that through iteration, we can stamp out, the buyers >>can stamp out, or we can confront the bias. >>Let's make it transparent, >>make transparent. So I think that even if we can have the trust to be able to have the discussion on, is this data the right data that we're doing the analysis on On start the conversation day, we start to see the change. >>We'll wait so we could make it transparent. And I'm thinking a lot of AI is black box. Is that a problem? Is the black box you know, syndrome an issue or we actually >>is not a black box. We in Oracle, we're building our data science platform with an explicit feature called Explained Ability. Off the model on how the model came up with the features what features they picked. We can rearrange the features that the model picked, citing Explain ability is very important for ordinary people. Trust ai because we can't trust even even they designed This contrast ai right to a large extent. So for us to get to that level, where we can really trust what ai speaking in terms of a modern, we need to have explain ability. And I think a lot of the companies right now are starting to make that as part of their platform. >>So that's your promise. Toe clients is that your AI will be a that's not everybody's promised. I mean, there's a lot of black box and, you know, >>there is, if you go to open source and you start downloading, you'll get a lot of black boss. The other advantage to open source is sometimes you can just modify the black box. You know they can give you access, and you could modify the black box. But if you get companies that have released to open, source it somewhat of a black box, so you have to figure out the balance between you. Don't really worry too much about the black box. If you can see that the model has done a pretty good job as compared to other models, right if I take if I triangulate the results off the algorithm and the triangulation turns out to be reasonable, the accuracy on our values and the Matrix is show reasonable results. Then I don't really have to brief one model is to bias compared to another moderate. But I worry if if there's only one dimension to it. >>Well, ultimately much too much of the data scientists to make dismay, somebody in the business side is going to ask about cause I think this is what the model says. Why is it saying that? And you know, ethical reasons aside, you're gonna want to understand why the predictions are what they are, and certainly as you're going to examine those things as you look at the factors that are causing the predictions on the outcomes, I think there's any sort of business should be asking those responsibility questions of everything they do, ai included, for sure. >>So we're entering a new era. We kind of all agree on that. So I want to just throw a few questions out, have a little fun here, so feel free to answer in any order. So when do you think machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors? >>I think they already are making better diagnosis. And there's so much that I found out recently that most of the very complicated cancel surgeries are done by machines doctors to standing by and making sure that the machines are doing it well, right? And so I think the machines are taking over in some aspects. I wouldn't say all aspects. And then there's the bedside manners. You really need the human doctor and you need the comfort of talking to >>a CIO inside man. Okay, when >>do you >>think that driving and owning your own vehicle is going to be the exception rather than the rule >>that I think it's so far ahead. It's going to be very, very near future, you know, because if you've ever driven in an autonomous car, you'll find that after your initial reservations, you're going to feel a lot more safer in an autonomous car because it's it's got a vision that humans don't. It's got a communication mechanism that humans don't right. It's talking to all the fleets of cars. Richardson Sense of data. It's got a richer sense of vision. It's got a richer sense of ability to react when a kid jumps in front of the car where a human will be terrified, not able to make quick decisions, the car can right. But at the same time we're going to have we're gonna have some startup problems, right? We're going to see a I miss file in certain areas, and junk insurance companies are getting gearing themselves up for that because that's just but the data is showing us that we will have tremendously decreased death rates, right? That's a pretty good start to have AI driving up costs right >>believer. Well, as you're right, there's going to be some startup issues because this car, the vehicle has to decide. Teoh kill the person who jumped in front of me. Or do I kill the driver killing? It's overstating, but those are some of the stories >>and humans you don't. You don't question the judgment system for that. >>There's no you person >>that developed right. It's treated as a one off. But I think if you look back, you look back five years where we're way. You figure the pace of innovation and the speed and the gaps that we're closing now, where we're gonna be in five years, you have to figure it's I mean, I don't I have an eight year old son. My question. If he's ever gonna drive a car, yeah, >>How about retail? Do you think retail stores largely will disappear? >>I think retail. Will there be a customer service element to retail? But it will evolve from where it's at in a very, very high stakes, right, because now, with our if I did, you know we used to be invisible as we want. We still aren't invisible as you walk into a retail store, right, Even if you spend a lot of money in in retail. And you know now with buying patterns and knowing who the customer is and your profile is out there on the Web, you know, just getting a sense of who this person is, what their intent is walking into the store and doing doing responsible ai like bringing value to that intent right, not responsible. That will gain the trust. And as people gain the trust and then verify these, you're in the location. You're nearby. You normally by the sword suits on sale, you know, bring it all together. So I think there's a lot of connective tissue work that needs to happen. But that's all coming. It's coming together, >>not the value and what the what? The proposition of the customers. If it's simply there as a place where you go and buy, pick up something, you already know what you're going to get. That story doesn't add value. But if there's something in the human expertise and the shared felt, that experience of being in the store, that's that's where you'll see retailers differentiate themselves. I >>like, yeah, yeah, yeah, >>you mentioned Apple pay before you think traditional banks will lose control of payment systems, >>They're already losing control of payment systems, right? I mean, if you look at there was no reason for the banks to create Siri like assistance. They're all over right now, right? And we started with Alexa first. So you can see the banks are trying to be a lot more customized customer service, trying to be personalized, trying to really make it connect to them in a way that you have not connected to the bank before. The way we connected to the bank is you know, you knew the person at the bank for 20 years or since when you had your first bank account, right? That's how you connect with the banks. And then you go to a different branch, and then all of a sudden you're invisible, right? Nobody knows you. Nobody knows that you were 20 years with the bank. That's changing, right? They're keeping track of which location you're going to and trying to be a more personalized. So I think ai is is a forcing function in some ways to provide more value. If anything, >>we're definitely entering a new era. The age of of AI of the autonomous enterprise folks, thanks very much for great segment. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah. Pleasure. Thank you for having us. >>All right. And thank you and keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the Cube's coverage of the rebirth of Oracle consulting right back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> >> Welcome back everybody to this special presentation of theCUBE where we're covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. It's 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. He is the group VP for Cloud Advisory and the General Manager of Oracle Elevate. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> I appreciate it. Glad to be here. >> So I'm got to 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 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 the two really allows us to scale, provide sort of what 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 think you joined three years ago, 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 had this sort of transformational moment. I was asked to come in 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 two 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. I've taken it from nearly 85% of the 90% of our revenue around on-prem type of engagements, to now actually splitting the organization, being dedicated 100% on cloud, which is the huge transformation in the last three years. >> Yeah and so of course Oracle is a product company and your then CTO, Larry Ellison said, "We're going cloud first." And that happened during your tenure. You came in, I believe prior to that. What kind of effect did that have on the organization? I mean, we know from a product standpoint, but just culturally and just the mindset. >> Yeah, absolutely. It had a huge effect on the organization. They started splitting the organization to actually have be dedicated organizations, whether it's sales on product, whether it's support for product, pre sales support or our engineering and solutions architecture, and our consulting. So we've now split the organizations to primarily support those different lines of business, and what that allows us to do is actually focus that and put a lot of the stuff on cloud and moving the company a cloud first at this point. We still have a lot of organizations that do either on-prem type of work and things like that, they can't move over, that's supported, but you're going to see a larger shift of the cloud first, right? To actually move our customers and our organizations and back to what you hear a bunch of our executives talk about. We also actually use our own capabilities as well too. Whether it's AI or machine learning and the way we actually use it in our own HR systems. If I do my expense reporting, there's actually an AI bot that I can actually put stuff in there and automatically pulls it in. We actually take those capabilities and consume them ourselves because we have to believe in what we actually create as well. >> Your definition of cloud, of course, is different from the hyperscale cloud providers would say, "Hey, our cloud is hyperscale. "Put it in our cloud. "On-prem doesn't equal cloud." You guys don't buy into that obviously. Your definition is, it's the experience, wherever your data is, we're going to bring that cloud experience. Clarify that if you would. >> Yeah, I'll kind of give the Oracle version and what I've talked about for years for Oracle, or for cloud consultancy as a whole or cloud capabilities, right? So Oracle really looks at true enterprise capabilities. And it's kind of what I've been talking about for years publicly as well too. Cloud is really, when they say cloud, it's not just 100% in cloud, it's a combination that you pull from on-prem your systems and engagement. Your systems of record all get created together. Sometimes it's an ecosystem with another company, right? So the more connected we are, so cloud is really an enabler to sort of pull everything together, right? Oracle is really focused on a lot on the enterprise capabilities. Some of the other cloud providers do great on some of the systems of engagement, the smaller applications, what's sitting in someone's cell phone or hands all the time. Oracle is really around foundation of the database in data. So we start with that enterprise and come up versus creating that really snazzy application coming down to make it enterprise level. So we take at that approach. I look at cloud computing, and my definition is really different than most people and it's really around a way of doing business. And what I mean by that is, it's a business that's technology enabled specifically, right? So you have to change the way that you do business. The way that you engage with your customers, with their customers, right? The actual customer on the end line. Cloud capabilities really aren't changing your operating model, it's change the way that you organize, you govern. You can't just, if you take a great capability and move it forward, and then turn around and do it in the same way in process, that's where you lose the efficiency. If you talk about things like business case, where we see the technology itself as a standalone, will give 30% of that business case, changing the way that you operate and engage people, will actually give you the bigger benefit, right? So if you actually go forward and as we talked about a cloud transformation, not only is around changing the capabilities from the tool standpoint, it's your people and your skills and your operating model, right? So if you look at an operating model potentially has seven or eight dimensions depending on what organization you kind of talk to, right? Gartner or whatever. If you don't hit every single and understand the impacts of every portion of the operating model and make the change, you will not reap the benefits. >> And my litmus test is that experience has to be the same whether it's in your public cloud, whether it's on-prem, whether it's in a partner, multicloud, and that you guys actually came up with the notion of same, same. It took some time to actually deliver that, but do you feel like you're there now with customers that buy in and lean in? >> Yeah, absolutely. And so the concept of what I call your mess for less or picking it up and moving it over there, has no value. It could be the first step. So a cloud journey, it may give you incremental value, but it should be the first step in your journey. So if we talk about like cloud journeys, if you're going to say, no, it's the same, same, you're going to move it over there, that may give you back to the sort of the slope on the business case. That's going to give you an increment of that which should self fund then it to go okay, I'm going to take that, I'm going to decompose that. Okay, great. Now, I'm going to expand on that, I'm going to take that money to actually reinvest in automation, right? So if you move it over to infrastructure, right? Where are you going to get the automation, is really on the path's layer. All the services, the monitoring, the autonomous capabilities, all those kind of things, that's where you drive efficiency and scale. So you basically self fund with the infrastructure transformation with potentially, typical journey we see customers with right? As let's move it, let's use that funding to actually automate it, it gets more savings, we use that more for innovation. So it's kind of a continuous stream. You want to get to the point where you can actually have a continuous innovation stream. And what I mean by that is, you have a mechanism or a capability. If you look at our Gen 2 Cloud versus our Gen 1 Cloud. Gen 2 cloud actually can take advantage of all the capabilities that we have from the past layer through automation, right? And then as you do that, we actually want to have a continuous process where you constantly look for innovation and incrementally add pieces over time. It's no longer, it's a bing bing. It's just a continuous stream of innovation. >> So okay, so you've made the statement that the business case for Oracle Gen 2 Cloud is overwhelming. First of all, what really, what's the underpinning of Gen 2 Cloud? Can you give us sort of the bumper sticker on that? >> Yeah, well, the underpinning the Gen 2 Cloud is really, if you look at the Gen 1 Cloud was purely just an infrastructure layer. Gen 2 is really based on a segmenting security, which is a huge problem out in the marketplace, right Dave? So we actually have a sort of a world class way where we take this segments security outside of the actual environment itself. It's completely segmented. Which is awesome, right? But then they also, when you actually move it forward, the capability of the entire thing is built on sort of the autonomous enterprise or autonomous capabilities. Everything is sort of self healing, self funding, or no 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 business case is really about, I mean, primarily, I would imagine about labor cost, right? IT labor costs, we're very labor intensive, we're doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add differentiation of value to the business. You're shifting that to other tasks, right? >> Yeah. So the big components 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 sort of 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 DBAs, 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 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, "What are you talking about?" All right? (Dave chuckles) And it's really-- >> You're never done. >> 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, it stays the same from a headcount standpoint? Or are you trying to look to a partner to do the-- Where are you trying to get your operating model? What is your company trying to get you to look at, right? Because all those inflection points takes a different step in the cloud journey. So as an advisor, right? As a trusted adviser, I ask those a 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 associated partner we paired it off too, but we put the right pieces in place to make sure that that business case works. >> Well, that's interesting. That's a really important point because a lot of customers would say, "I don't want to reduce headcount. "I want to, I'm starving for people. "I want to retrain people." Some companies may want to say, "Hey, okay, "I got to reduce headcount. "It's a mandate." But most at least in these boom times are saying, "I want to shift." So my point to the business case is, if you're not going to cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. And so the example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive is relevant. And I want to explain this is that, for example, very simple example, I'm inferring, you're going to be able to compress the time to value, you're going to reduce, lower your breakeven, accelerate the time to positive cash flow, if you will. >> That's an example. >> Absolutely. >> Of a value component to the business and part of the business case. Do people at look is that real? >> Absolutely, that's what it is. Definitely in the business case and I want you to call it the, when you hit your rate of return, right? 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 with 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. Well, if you multiply that on a large fortune 100, that may have a billion dollar budget, that's real money. >> Yeah, but and-- Okay, yes, no doubt. But then, when you translate that into the business impact, 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, a half a percentage point more productive and you got 100,000 employees I mean, that overwhelms actually the IT business case. >> Sure. 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 whether it's a financial services and you're getting 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 I definitely look at it from a IT all the way through business. I am technically a business architect that does IT pretty damn good. >> Yeah and IT enables that sort of business. >> Absolutely. >> How do you, let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement, how are people thinking about that? Because you're talking a lot about just sort of self funding, and self progressing, sort of an organic entity that you're describing. How are people thinking about that? >> Yeah, I would say they're kind of a little bit over their map, right? 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, sort of the concept of the cloud center of excellence. And as part of that, at the end, you have to have a set of functionality of folks that's constantly looking at the applications and our services of the different cloud providers or capabilities you have across the board. Everyone's got a multicloud environment, right? How do they take those services? They're probably already paying for it anyways, and as the components get released, how can you continually put little pieces in there and do little micro releases quarterly or in sorry, weekly, 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 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 embed what we call like a day two services, that that's what it is. It's to support them, but also 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'll be on next year's release." No, it could be next week, next month, right? >> Well, so the outcome should 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 enterprise. It's really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? >> It is, absolutely, right? And so, when we use the term autonomous enterprise, I love that because that's actually a 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 a cloud capability and everything that you can put from a machine earlier into AI under to actually, basically let it run itself. The more that you can do that, the higher the value. And you put those people off in a higher level tasks, right? That's been going on every provider for a while. Oracle just has the capabilities 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 2 Cloud where all that is built in, as part of it going forward, that's where we have the upper level really at the enterprise computing level, right? We can work at all types of workload, but where we are niches, is really those big enterprise workloads, because that's where we started from data enterprise. >> I don't want to make it a technology discussion but said the only organization. You mean the only technology company with that autonomous database capabilities. Is that correct? >> Mike: Yes sir, yes. >> Okay, so I know I should have sort of talk about it, but Oracle I think talks about it more forcefully. We'll dig into that and report back. Mike, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. Good stuff. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE. We're here in Chicago covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. I'm Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (soft music)