>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live, in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, this is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, Head of Research at siliconANGLE and wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jennifer Renaud, who's the CMO/Global Marketing Lead for Oracle Marketing Cloud. She's the brains behind this show, underneath Laura Ipsen, who was on yesterday, General Manager, SVP. Great to see you, Jennifer. >> Thanks, it's great to see you. >> John: Thanks for coming on, I know you're super busy, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, I'm really happy to be here. >> So we talked last year. You guys were new. Laura popped into the position, took over the helm at Oracle Marketing Cloud, you joined the team. It's been quite a transformation over the past year. A lot of great feedback on the show. I mean, the Markies was like the Golden Globes, was glammed up, and people screaming, you mentioned. And then now, the conversations in the hallways, certainly great feedback on the sessions, and people in there saying, "Hey, I'm getting great, qualified people walk through, having great conversations." What happened? Between last year and this year. Give us some insight into what was the big shift. >> The big shift? Well, we've had a big shift in our team. You know, during that time period. (both laughing) Which is really interesting. >> And as manifest by the show, a big shift in direction. >> Yeah, a big shift in direction. You know, two things I think, seriously, there was a big shift in the team, overall, you know, my marketing team, we've made a lot of changes, we're relooking at how we do the work that we do. Really looking at the stories that we tell. You know, there's been a lot of change in that, as well. And then, how we tell our stories together with the rest of our CX team. That's been really important. I spend a lot of time with the rest of my CX peers, you know, that are here also. >> It's interesting, we've been following Oracle, this is our eighth year covering Oracle as Oracle proper, and two years covering Marketing Cloud, with theCUBE, and it was interesting, we were observing that how you guys got here, or there, last year, a lot of great acquisitions and integrated pretty well. But the question was, man, if you can just put all this together. Which you guys were kind of smiling, smirking, but you were doing that, so you have now this cohesive story and platform. You still have pillars of solutions, but, yet integrated under one customer experience. Give us some insight into where that is, and what's next, and how that's going. >> So, the connection with the entire customer experience cloud? >> John: Yeah. >> You know, we've been sharing that message for a while. You know, across Oracle. And I think you probably heard it the first time at Open World, which is where I met you, this last year, and we made some announcements then, but we are continuing to drive that total experience, you know, for our customers to engage with their customers. And, you know, I think probably the best way to look at that, and we were just talking about this a few minutes ago, you know, when I was thinking back in marketing 25 years ago. I've been reminiscing a lot lately. And I was looking back at re-reading the one-to-one future. And at that time, they were really saying, you know, the great thing you can do is engage with a customer in a way where you're a learning organization. So every touchpoint has the right reaction. I might call it, maybe, the physics of marketing. You know, we're going to have the energy that goes with this, so, you know, if I talk to you, if my last engagement with you is a services conversation, then the next marketing message better be in reaction to the last services conversation. And I think now with the ability for us to connect everything that we do in customer experience, and be able to connect our data, and be able to connect our interactions, our transactions, we have the ability to have a really great experience for our customers as result of having this connection. >> And the Marketing Cloud has gotten some good props, too. But I want to ask you about the CMO summit that you guys had in parallel here at the Mandalay Bay, we didn't get a chance to cover it, we were busy doing interviews all day yesterday, but we heard some good feedback. Mark Hurd came in and laid down some, like, "We have all this technology, why are we getting a 1% conversion improvement?" Or, I mean, all that tech. So it makes you rethink about CMO roles. And I want to ask you specifically, what was the conversation like when marketers were trying to think of progressive ways to get modern? What were some of the conversations around where they turn things upside down, what are some of the conversations that the CMOs were having, and saying, look, we know the future's the certain direction, directionally correct data, what do I got to do? >> Yeah, well, it's interesting, we talked a lot about data. We talked a lot about hiring people who can govern data, integrate data, manage data. Several of the companies said, you know, we're in merger and acquisition all the time, and it's a huge issue for us, because a whole new data set comes in. And it may have the same customer touchpoints. You know, the same customers. And now we have to figure out how to match the IDs. And so they said it's a huge challenge for them, you know, to be able to merge all of that. >> It's a great marketing opportunity for you to go to startups saying, hey, if you want to get by the big company, and they're on Oracle, make sure you're on Oracle! >> Jennifer: Make sure to call us. >> But that's a good point. >> Peter: Extends the ecosystem. >> Jennifer: Yeah, exactly. >> But that, the whole system of record, this brings up the integration challenges of moving fast and integrating in data. >> Right, and one of the things that came out of that, which was fascinating, is, the question was asked, is IT doing that, or is business doing it? And, without fail, almost all the marketers said, we own this now. This is our thing. You know, it's the customer touchpoint, business has to own it. >> What percentage of that is ownership by the marketing folks? Because I would say that I see a similar pattern where the digital end-to-end life cycle, from beginning to moment of truth is owned by the marketer. >> Yeah, well, it's happening more and more all the time, of course. >> John: 50/50? 60/40? 70/30? >> I mean, in reality? >> Yeah, reality. Middle America, middle of the world, not Silicon Valley. >> Let's see, in reality, it's maybe 50/50, maybe. I mean, I think we have a long way to go. >> John: Well had the commerce folks on earlier, saying that, 'cause we interviewed her, two years ago at Open World, 50% now are on the cloud vs. on-prem. >> Jennifer: Right. >> On commerce cloud. That's pretty significant. >> Oh yeah, big move. But I think as far as, you know, going back to the question on managing the data, how many people, how this is happening, and who owns it yet? I think there's probably still tension across all the businesses on who owns it and how you do that. If you could drop that tension and say we really do want that customer experience, we are going to focus on the customer. >> But are seeing that, and it's an interesting point, are people battling for control of the process, or are people battling for the control of the data, or both? 'Cause there's a difference. >> I think they are controlling the data. I don't think they're controlling the process, and it would be really great if they got to just obsessing about the customer instead. 'Cause if you did that, then the question of process or owning the data would go away. 'Cause you would do what was right for your business. >> So how has that relationship been between, the crucial relationship between sales and marketing starting to evolve? 'Cause in many respects, marketing used to be in service to sales, especially in the B2B universe, and now what we've heard today, and what we agree with, is marketing needs to be put in service to the customer. You need to do valuable things for the customer, otherwise you're not going to get any business, and you're not going to get any data back. So how is the marketing/sales relationship evolving as both of you try to focus on the customer? >> Well, you know it's interesting. Of course I'm doing that in my own role. Not just watching what's happening with my customers, but in my own role, my relationship is evolving with our salespeople. And, you know, relooking at what happens with the lead? And when we get a lead, what kinds of customers are we doing this with, and how do we want to engage with our customers? And we're completely changing how we've been doing this. I think, in the past, and I think it's really easy for customers to follow the numbers. >> What changes are you guys making right now that you can talk about that would be notable business practice wise that has been based upon data? >> So right now, just reducing our numbers of leads. Making sure that they are the right ones, and match the sales models we have. >> You're still taking a lot of inquiries you're more than happy to have pour in. But you're doing a better job of qualifying. >> We have a lot of demand. Making sure the demand becomes the right lead and opportunity, I think is the most important piece of this. You know, it's interesting language. We call it MQL, a lead score lead that comes out of Eloqua. And, to me, that's not really a qualified lead. I feel like there needs to be human interaction for it to be qualified. So I think it's interesting that the industry, over time, has started calling it an MQL. To me, it's an ML. >> Is the funnel changing now? 'Cause now we also observed and had conversations here on theCUBE where, if there's now super omnichannels, not just omnichannel, but like, every channel's open. There's been a flattening of channels. So you can have anything could be a channel. The entry point to the cloud for you guys could be Marketing Cloud, it could be commerce, it could be something else. Either way, the market is involved. So there's so many channels out there, so what does that do for the funnel? Because, if you're using third party data, which you guys have announced here, with the first party data, that's a compelling, game-changing shift in thinking. So the vertical funnel to your point of, you know, what's at the top. >> There's no such thing as a vertical funnel anymore. I mean, it just doesn't exist that way. Really, if you think about how we are engaging with customers, or consumers, you know, all the time. We talk about the omnichannel world, just like you just said, you can't look at it and say, "I'm going to go out and target someone" and wait for that to come in. People are searching all the time. They're picking up their phone. We just released that CMO Club whitepaper today, you know, talking about mobility. I was laughing, because we said people look at their phones 150 times a day, and I thought, seriously, I do it 150 times an hour. I can't even imagine. >> You're the first CMO that I've ever met that has agreed with me on this one. You're awesome. All right, so the funnel is sideways, it's all over the place, it's everywhere. That brings up the data question. And I think I know where you're going with this, so I'm going to try to see if I can lead you on there. So if that premise is there, which I agree is true, 'cause we have a lot of data that we're putting out there. That's our engagement data with siliconANGLE and all of our assets. The question is, it's the data. So, if the funnel was built for a certain reason, to track things, but that's to get the data, now the data's everywhere, so this brings the question up: how do you find the right data? So is the data available? 'Cause you mentioned the customers are talking, they're doing things. >> Data's available. We have it all over, we just have to make sure we're aggregating it in the right way. So, you know, for us, we're using our DMP, we're connecting it to our third party data, which I think is a great way to do this. You can know more about your customers. In some cases, maybe more than they might know about themselves. We're learning a lot about them as a result. And I think, with that, as we talked about earlier, I want more data. I don't want less data. I want more data. I want to know more about-- >> That's counterintuitive to what most people think about it. >> Exactly, I think it's very counterintuitive. I'm really excited about IOT for that reason. I would love to be marketing to people in space and time. I want to know where you are and what you're doing so that the conversation and the dialogue I'm having with you is exactly relevant to what's happening at that moment. >> You might be an outlier, maybe, but because you work for Oracle, you got a big net. You walk on the tightrope, but you got a net called Oracle. A lot of marketers might not have that support. So you're data-driven, you want more data, bring on the data is what you're saying. >> Yeah. >> Which is good, 'cause you can make sense of it. How does a company get to that position where they would have the courage and confidence to say "bring it on, bring on the data"? What would they-- >> Find the right partnerships. I mean, you can get that data, you have your own first party data, you can get second party data with other groups. There's no reason why you can't go in and say, hey I want to partner with another business on this. Companies have loyalty programs. You can go and share, you know, anonymized data with another group like that and learn more about your potential customer base. There are ways to get at this. >> And you guys are opening up the data cloud to them. Is this a true statement? Oracle customers can get access to the data cloud? Which is all the data that you guys are providing, third party data? >> They can purchase the data. >> John: Well, they can subscribe to it. >> Yeah, they get it with purchasing DMP as well. Yeah, they can subscribe to the data. Yeah, any customer can get access to it. >> I have two questions about what you've said thus far. One was, I heard you say, I want to make sure I heard it, that it's an ML, it's not an MQL until it touches a person. Because that, at a conference where everybody's talking about AI and everyone's talking about automation, that is counterintuitive. Totally agree with you, but want to hear what you mean by that. >> Okay, so we'll distinguish what I think AI will do versus what happens when a lead comes out from Eloqua that's lead scored. So, when a lead is lead scored, you know, it's still human interaction right now that says how do I come up with a lead score? You know, so my team, we spend a lot of time, like, which metric should we be using to make sure we figure out, is truly a lead that should come out of Eloqua at this point. We spend a lot of time, and then we run the data, and we look at it and figure out what's going to be the right mix. >> So you're, in many respects, training Eloqua. Just in a very labor-intensive way. >> Jennifer: Yes, it is a labor-intensive way. >> John: That's a human-curated algorithm. >> It is a human-curated algorithm, yes, and we talk to all of our global teams, we look at absolutely every way we should do this, and then we start testing it and making sure that we get the right leads that are coming out of this. At the right rate. That matches the number of people that we have that can serve the leads, as well. Too many doesn't help us if I don't have enough salespeople. Too few doesn't help me if my salespeople are sitting there not doing anything. >> So the readiness is the knob you're turning. So that the flow of leads are popping out in capacity to fulfill them. >> Exactly, exactly. It's an interesting mix. You know, we've been doing the model that says more is better, more is better, more is better. And after while you say, you know, how are this many people going to service this x many times leads that come out of this? But lead scoring is still based on my less than perfect -- >> Peter: Discretionary observation on what this actually means. >> Jennifer: What this actually means, exactly. >> That's great, that's great-- >> So I still need a human to pick up the phone and call the person and say, you know, are you actually a perspective customer? Are you a student, or are you, you know. >> So you're using some of the inside to then validate and use your judgment, it can be very quick, and very simple, but it's a central feature of the whole process, and it's the ultimate data. It's the ultimate first person data. Did you talk to someone, are they there? That's great. Second question-- >> John: I'm not sure I agree-- >> Now we can go to the AI, I think, which is the other part of that question, which is the predictive analytics that's coming out of this now. So now we have predictive analytics are coming out of this, that are looking at this and saying, hey we can look at this a little differently and do a little more listening and see how people are really engaging. Do we have different search patterns? We're saying, do we see search patterns inside of a company that might say there really is a buying activity happening here? So, great way to look at it from a B2B perspective. Now that begins to change what's happening with the lead. >> So it sets priorities on who they should be calling. Do you still anticipate that that customer's going to get a phone call? >> Jennifer: Yes, yeah. >> Okay great, second question-- >> Hold on, I'm going to push back on that side. One little caveat I have. I agree with your statement, in the all-digital world, the users are self-serving, so you can imagine a scenario where there's no human involvement at all. I'm flying around the web, I'm surfing, I'm discovering, and I'm a person, and I'm into some marketplace, and I'm buying, I'm buying. No human touched me at all. I'm a qualified lead, but I get link-baited, or I get tracked into a discovery pattern that is completely digital. There's no human involvement in that. >> In a B2B sense, though, it's setting up the contract so someone can buy off a contract, for example. So the buying activity may be set up. >> John: Oh, you're talking about B2B? >> Yeah, B2B, always. >> Yeah, and B2C I think it's a totally different scenario. >> When was the last time you got a call from somebody at Amazon? >> John: Never. >> Yeah. So second question, and I think this a great point, it ties back to the conversation we had earlier about partners. The partner often is the weakest chain. Weakest link in the chain. In a world where digital is both informing the customer about what's good and what's bad, but also you're sharing data. You run the risk that that partner defines the quality of the entire chain. So you've got to start sharing more data, you got to start sharing. How is the role of data impacting and influencing the activity of bringing on, nurturing, measuring, ultimately managing, partnerships? >> I think you guys talked to Doug Kennedy yesterday. >> John: He's a pro. >> Yeah, he's fantastic. From a marketing standpoint, in the same way, we are going to continue to share with our partners. So if we're looking at the numbers of partners that we engage with. Could they be the weakest link? I would probably challenge you on that, I think our partners can be our strongest link in what we're doing, and are probably closer to our customers than we are, in marketing, by a long shot. So I count on my partners to bridge that gap that way, absolutely, but will we share data so we can absolutely have a better relationship, from a selling perspective? Yeah. >> First let me qualify, that when you have multiple partnerships involved, and typically a solution, a complex solution like the Marketing Cloud, what we're talking about, is going to have multiple partnerships involved. You may have three phenomenal partnerships, and one good partnership. But that one good partner could have an enormous influence over the three very good partners. That's what I mean. So the second thing is, what I'm talking about is, does Oracle compete, or does Oracle utilize its willingness to use data, especially through tooling like Marketing Cloud, and the customer experience cloud, as a way of making Oracle more attractive to partners? >> Yes, absolutely. We would absolutely want to do that. We haven't been doing a lot of it, but we are moving forward that way, absolutely. We want to have that engagement. Absolutely, we want to have that engagement with our partners. I think, especially in marketing, we don't want them to just buy technology. I mean, they need to buy the really great creativity that comes with our partners, as well. And so we have to share as much data as possible to create that great experience for our customers, through our partnerships. >> Jennifer, I want to thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you coming on, sharing the insight into your role as CMO from Oracle Marketing Cloud. Appreciate it. Just share what's up for next year. Will there be another, bigger Markies? What's on the agenda for in between this event and next year, what's the plans between event windows? What do you got going on, what's the plan? >> Okay, so, when the 12th annual Markies happens next year, roughly about this time. I think it's almost the same week. Which will be fantastic. In the meantime, we're going to do a lot of storytelling. You will hear a lot about the Markies nominees and Markies winners. We have some incredible stories to tell, it gives us a great opportunity, actually, to talk about the people. You know, for us, the heroes, that created all of these great stories for us. The technology. And how they were using the technology to really make all of this happen, and the partners that they were using. >> Yeah, Doug rolled out his new strategy to the partners, he's been seven weeks on the job, back to Oracle from Oracle in the old days. So he's a pro. >> Jennifer: Yeah, oh yeah, he's great. I worked with him at Microsoft. >> And integrating into the Oracle cloud, still part of the plan? >> Jennifer: Yes. >> Cool. >> Just staying connected with the rest of Oracle, absolutely, we are Oracle. >> We will keep track of the stories with you guys. So we'll be tracking them. >> We'll be telling them with you, all year. >> We'll be documenting them. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on the very successful event. >> Thank you very much. >> We're looking forward to hearing the data stories that you're using, and expanding on that next time. It's theCUBE live here at Las Vegas, at Mandalay Bay, for Oracle Modern CX show, #modernCX, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, more after this short break.

(lively music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX conference, hashtag Modern CX. This is the CUBE. I'm John Furrier Silicone Angle. My cost, Peter Burch with us for two days. Our next guest is Ron Corbisier. Owner and CEO of Relationship One. Back again, from last year. It was one of my memorable interviews last year. Welcome back-- >> Ron: Thank you for having me. >> to the cube. We went down and dirty last year. I remember we were having a great conversation about ad tech. If you've taken that video, it's on YouTube and look at it, I guarantee you, it's going to play right into what happened this year. Again, we predicted it. We didn't say AI but we did say we're going to see data really driving. That's what Oracle ended up locking in on daily. >> Yeah, absolutely. Data is going to be the underlying conversation for the next few years. We spoke, a lot, last year about martech stack. Actually, martech and ad tech colliding, coming together. All of that is being fueled by the mass quantities of data that we have as sales and marketing folks out there, to leverage and how do you use it. It's never about, do I have enough data? A lot of times you feel you, almost, have too much. But it's, now how can you use it appropriately? >> We were talking, before we came on camera here about that dynamic of ad tech and marteh collision which we talked about last year. It's interesting. If you just say digital, end-to-end, as a fabric, then you can still talk about these pillars of solutions but they're not silos. If you look at the holistic data approach and say, hey, if we're going to have horizontally scalable data which we want, frictionless less than 150 milliseconds responses they want to promote. You can still do your pillars but be open to data sharing versus here's my silent stack. I do this, I do this, that's shifted and that's what Oracle's main news is here. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think what you're seeing, even in, not only Oracle, that organizational level, people are taking a more holistic view of data that they own and data that they can enrich with external information, right? How does that information, then, fuel all of these other areas within customer experience within the CX world? How do you use that to provide better service? How do you use that information to optimize your sales efforts and from a marketing standpoint, obviously, my background, it's how do we leverage that to optimize our spend, optimize our communication, our orchestration, all of those pieces. It all comes down to that common language of data that we have access to. >> Tell me about the real time aspect cause we teased on it last time and we did talk about how to leverage some of the advertising opportunities and the role of data in real time. That's been a message here from batch to real time. The consumer's in motion all the time depending upon their context. How does real time fit into this? >> Yeah, this is the evolution of what we're seeing in the technology, right? Historically, you've built a campaign. You've, maybe, created some type of journey or persona. You're building content around very specific elements within a life cycle structure. Life cycles are not linear any longer. They never really were but they're, definitely, not now and you have to adapt very quickly. Leverage technology, to say, one of my saying, communicating and what channel but in more in a real time thing. You have to look at what was the last thing that individual did, the activity, all of that. Historically, you haven't had that depth or degree of real time lists. It's been more of a structured candance. That doesn't exist, right? That's not going to exist going forward. That's where things like AI which I always hesitate to use that term because it's the buzz word now of today. But tools that are more of that augmentation of how we do things. Leveraging the power of technology. That's going to change how we orchestrate things and how we communicate. >> I'm just looking at your tweet here. I want to bring this up because you mentioned AI and we were talking about it. Thanks to all who stopped by my MME 17 Modern Marketing Experience 17. A little bit of a jab at the messaging that's cool like that. Session on artificial intelligence. Loved all the support from my fellow modern marketers. What do you mean by that? You make a bold statement. Did you have courage? Did you stand tall? Did you call out AI? What was the conversation there? >> Well I called out the silliness of the term AI. I picked on that the marketers but I picked on the term We, as marketers, I call them the squirell moments that, as marketers, we're on to the next thing. I reviewed the past eight some years of these conferences and what were the topics, right? There were some topics that were transformational topics like how does marketing automation or organizational change or those type of things. Those are things that stick with you. There is things that are more timely things. Like predictive scoring and their tactics. There more things that I use as a marketer or sales person. What I was picking on with AI is that it's the buzz word. It gets you funding. It gets you people in a room for a conference, that's great. But it doesn't do anything by itself. It's really an enabler. It's a pervasive thing that combines machine cycle and data but you have to teach it, you have to incorporate it into your applications. As marketers, ultimately, it's going to change our tool set to make it better. It's more poking fun at the term-- >> We always say AI. I've said it on the CUBE, AI's BS. Although, I'm a software guy. I love AI because it really promotes software that has been very nuance. So, IOT, machine learning, this is very geeky computer science stuff that's super cool. Anything that can take that mainstream in the software world, I'm a big fan of. That being said, I think the augmentation is the real message which is, you can use machine learning, you can use software, use some technical things, to make things better. You said it on our earlier segment this morning which is there's a variety of things that you can automate away. >> The thing that's, and you mentioned earlier, it's the ability that we now have the ability to collect an enormous amount of data, that's relevant and important. And we now have the technology to, actually, do something with that data. But we still have to apply it and there's a lot of change that has to happen. The way AI is different from other systems is that, historically, financial systems, software would deliver and answer. It was highly stylized. It was rarely, a clear correspondence with the real world. We closed the books. How much money did we make? There was an answer and it came from some data structures that were defined within the system. Now we're trying to bring in the real world and have these technologies focus on the real world. And they're giving ranges of possible options. That is new. It's good and it's useful but it does not take the requirement for discretion out of the system. That's why it's the augmentation. >> Ron and I were talking last year about this, Peter and I. I think you're getting a trajectory that, I've been saying for a while and this is developing in real time here on the CUBE and also some of our commentary is the role of software development and DevOps that we've seen in Cloud, is moving into the front lines of business. Meaning their techniques. You're seeing Agile, already, being talked about. You're seeing standing up campaigns. Language, you can go to the Cloud stack and say, building blocks, EC2, S3, Cooper Netties, containers, micro services and apply that to marketing because there's a lot of parallels going on to the characteristics of the infrastructure. Certainly critical infrastructure to enabling infrastructure. It's interesting that you're seeing marketers being more savvy and inadative. What's your thoughts on that, a reaction? >> Yeah, it's the evolution though. If you go back to, we as marketers have been using rules engines, we've been using tools like collaborative filtering. You go back to late 90's, early 2000's when we were building recommendation engines in simple. That's algorithmic stuff, right? No different than we're doing today with pricing rules and all that stuff. The difference it that you now have more power to do it. You have the ability to do it more real time and on the fly. You use far more data. More computing power and more data. Not only your data that you own but data that you leverage from third party to really understand people. You have a wider lens. Historically, you're making recommendations based on what you had in a cart or some other things that people have bought that also had that in the cart, that's different now, right? With this type of technology, this enabling kind of world, you an look at a lot more data points to give you that. The problem is that anything around AI requires a couple of things. It is a dumb system so AI. (laughs) >> Still a computer. >> It's still a computer. Everyone forgets that for it to work, it has to learn. I have some friends who have built marketing tools on top of Watson, for example. It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours for it to start doing something. You have to train it. You have to, not only, give it the data, you have to train it. >> Even the word learning and training is misleading in may respects. At the end of the day it's software but what is new is it's being applied in richer, more complex domains. The recommendation engine used to be just for recommendation. Now we're using those same models and we're combining them and applying them to richer more complex domains. Yet, ideally, the software's not getting more difficult to use. And I think what really makes this compelling, as a software engineer, is that we're doing all this more complexity but we're packing it and making it simpler. >> I think that's the point of where Oracle's going and why they don't call it AI. They're using it more the adaptive. Because they're thinking of it at the micro service level. They're thinking of how can they make these widgets of functionality to better the tools we have. To incorporate it into not make it so a jump forward in our tool set. It's just now, an augmented component of what we do today. >> It's, almost, a stack approach. You got foundational building blocks and at the top is high velocity, highly dynamic apps and you could argue, we were talking that the CMO's going to be an app shop, some day. This banks the question and I'd like to get both of you guys to weigh in on this. Because this is a question that I'd like to get on the record. What is modern marketing these days? Define modern marketing because what we're getting at here is, to your point of the evolution is we've seen this movie before. Is it a replatforming? Is it a building block approach? What is a modern marketer? What is a modern marketer mean? How do you execute that? >> I think it's quick and nimble and adaptive. The whole point of modern marketing is that you're always looking at how you can rethink, how you can optimize, how you can leverage technology to do things. It's not about replacing head count with a machine or a tool or a tech. It's really about how do you leverage that head count more effectively? How can you focus on optimization using those technologies. Modern marketing is, again, probably another buzz word but just like modern sales, modern commerce, all of that. It's really about how do you enable it with that stack do better. >> So, is it fashion or is it like hey, there's a modern marketer over there, look at what he or she is wearing. Or is it more technology based that's got some fundamental foundational shifts that are being worked on or both? >> It's leveraging technology and it's leveraging data more effectively and creatively. It's not being stuck with a prescriptive approach on campaign and orchestration and building. It still requires strategy and all of that but it's really how you approach it. >> So, how you think of it. What's your angle on this? >> That's a great question. And that's why I giggled about it. I think you gave a great answer. The three key precepts of Agile are, iterative, opportunistic and empirical and it's nimble quick and you change. But to me, I'll answer the question this way. Modern marketing focuses on delivering value to the customer not back into the business. It used to be that you would deliver into the business. He'd say, oh, we give you a whole bunch of new leads. We give you a whole bunch of this. If along the way, it created value for the customer, that's okay. But more often that not, it was annoying. As customer's can share their experience and share information about how (mumbles) engaged them, that's amplified. Annoying gets amplified. I think if you focus on are you creating value for the customer, you also end up with the derivative element that you're accelerating leads, they are in the process and where they are in the journey. The way I'd answer it. It's not distinct from yours but the idea of modern marketing focuses on creating value for the customer. The only way you, consisting do that is by being nimble and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. >> I agree, in the same thing though. A core tenant, if you will, of modern marketing is absolutely. It is the value proposition. It's also making sure you understand the impact of the value of proposition The velocity of the pipeline, the impact on revenue, all of those things right? Because it's all about that value which it has to be, from a customers perspective but you're not doing all of the other pieces. You're not going to justify the spend. You're not going to get all of those together. >> Let me see if I can thread the two points together. Cause what I'm seeing, by listening is, you mentioned, the main thing in my mind was the data. That's different right? You're saying okay, thing differently, talk to the customer and the value to the enterprise value is being created through a different mechanism versus just serving it. >> Not really, not really. The fundamental focus, historically, of marketing has been what are we doing for the business? What are we doing for sales? Now, if we focus on, now you say well no. We have to created value for the customer in every thing we do, then we get permission to do things differently. We get more data out of the customer because the trust is there. We're allowed to bias the customer to the next, best option. >> I'm trying to answer my questions. I can see your point. My point is this, the modern marketer is defined by doing it. The business practices it a little bit differently to achieve the same thing. >> By focusing or creating value they have to do things differently and now they can because technology allows them to do it. >> We saw Time Warner, they weren't using data prior. That's a little different. If you go outward to go in, it's a great value while doing the table stake stuff. >> It's changing strategically thinking different of how you do it. Creating that value proposition's very different and also being able to measure and optimize are you doing it correctly? Is it having impact on the business? Most of my customers are not for profits They, actually, have to show, bottom line an impact. All of that requires data and speed and velocity in which we have to run requires tech. >> They got gestures in the market with customers. They have that touch point. They can leverage that. >> Here's (mumbles) modern marketing is not speeding up and increasing the rate and lowering the cost of doing bad marketing. >> No, no, I mean that's exactly. >> It was marketers point. >> That's right. (laughing) You can spend a lot of money to do bad marketing. >> Let's double down on our bad marketing. Ron, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE again. Thanks for sharing the insights. It's always a pleasure to get down and dirty and peel back the onion on some of these things. Final question for you. What do you expect for the evolution for this next year. >> I think AI's going to be with us for awhile just because it's the new buzz word. We've got a couple cycles on that. >> John: It reminds me of Web 2.0, what is it? >> And that lasted for a few years as well. I think over the next year or so, we're going to see the benefits of that augmentation. We're going to, actually, see some of these micro services as people start fueling some of the tools that we already have. You're also going to see some of that further collision of ad tech and mertech. Cause everything's digital and the impact of what that means for us as marketers. >> I can't wait of the hashtag, marketing native. Cause Cloud Native is coming. Someone's going to make it up, I hope not. >> Peter: You did. >> Ron: You just did. >> Okay, Marketing Native. What does that mean? We'll do a whole segment on that. We'll get Ron to come in. Hey, thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Great to see you. I'm John Furrier. Peter Burris here inside the CUBE getting all the action. Straight from the data and sharing it with you. Thank you Ron, for coming on again twice in a row, two years in a row. This is the CUBE. We'll be back with more after this short break. (lively music) >> Narrator: Robert Herjavec. >> People, obviously, know you from Shark Tank. But the Herjavec group has been, really, laser folks in cyber security. >> Cause I, actually, helped bring a product called Check Point to Canada, firewalls, URI filtering, that kind of stuff. >> But you're also an entrepreneur? And you know the business. You've been in software, in the tech business. (mumbles) you get a lot of pitches as entertainment meets business. >> On our show, we're a bubble. We don't get to do a lot of tech.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back here. We're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, talk to the influencers, the experts, thought leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, anyone we can that has data we can share with you. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burr is my co-host for the two days here. Our next is Jay Baer from Convince and Convert, CUBE alumni, great guy, super influential, knows his marketing stuff, perfect guest to summarize and kind of package up what the hell Modern CX means here at the Oracle show. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Jay: Good to see you guys, welcome. >> So you were hosting the CMO Summit that was going on in parallel they had the Marquise Awards which is their awards dinner. >> 11th annual Marquise Awards it's like a thing. >> It's amazing, it looked like the Golden Globes. >> It was beautiful this year, it was like, legit. >> Peter: Is that the one with the O on the top? >> And they delivered an award with a drone. It was a great night. >> Awesome stuff. So give us the package, what's going on, tease out the story here. >> Yeah, I think the story is two-fold. One, Oracle's got an interesting take on the marketing software space because they really are trying to connect it between the overall customer service experience initiative, and then marketing as a piece of that. This event in particular, the Modern Customer Experience event has tracked almost full conferences for marketing, for customer service, for sales and for commerce. So all four of those are the verticals underneath this umbrella and that's a really unusual conference setup but I think it reflects where Oracle's head is at from a thought leadership standpoint. That like, look, maybe were going to get to a point where marketing and customer service really are kind of the same. Maybe we're going to get to the point where sales and marketing really are kind of the same. We're not there yet, by any stretch of the imagination. But I think we all feel that convergence coming. And my world the marketing side, CMO's are starting to get more and more responsibility inside organizations and so if that happens, maybe we do need to start to align the software as well. It's and interesting take on the market, and I think it's sort of prescient for where we're going to head. >> It's interesting you mention of all those different silos, or different departments or different functions in a digital end-to-end fabric experiences are all about the customer, it's one person, they're going to have different experiences at any given time on that life cycle, or product spectrum or solution spectrum. So the CMO has to take responsibility of that. >> Well, I feel like somebody has to be responsible for it. Mark Hurd said this in one of his remarks over the course of the show, the CEO of Oracle said look, there is no data department, everybody has to be responsible for data but somebody has to figure what the ins and the outs are and maybe that's the CMO, maybe it's the CXO, I don't think we've fully baked that cake yet. But we're going to have to get to the point where the single record of truth about the customer and their customer journey has to exist and somebody's got to figure out how to wire all those together. We're gettin' there. >> It's so funny, I was joking, not here on theCUBE, but in the hallways about the United Airlines snafu and I'm like, to me as a kind of a developer mindset software should have solved that problem. They never should have been overbooked to begin with. So if you think about just these things where the reality of a consumer at any given time is based upon their situation. I need customer support, I need this, I need that. So everyone's got to be customer ready with data. >> Talk about relevance, relevancy is the killer app, that's it, right. Relevancy is created by technology, and with people, people who actually know how to put that technology into practice in a way that the customers actually care about. So, one of the things that Mark said, he said look, here's the issue, it's not about data, nor is it about clout, it's not about any of that. It's about taking that data and creating understanding out of it. But he said a really interesting thing, he said what we have to do is push those understandings out to the front lines where somebody on the front lines can do something with it that actually benefits the customer. I think that's a really smart point because so often right now we're talking about, oh we've got these data stores, and we've got DMP's and we've got all these things. That's great but until that gets manifested at the front lines, who cares, you've just got a big pile of numbers. >> We had Katrina on from the commerce side, it's funny, she was making a retail comment look, they don't care about the tech, they don't care about blockchain and all the speed and feed, they have to do a transaction in the speak of the consumer. And the language of the customer is not technology. >> No they don't care, solve my problem right. Just solve my problem, and I don't care how you solve it, what sort of magic you have behind the scenes, if I want a sweater, I want this sweater, and I want it right now. >> OK, Jay, share with the audience watching right now and us conversation hallways you've had, that's always the best because you had a chance, I'll see ya on the big stage doing your hosting thing, but also you get approached a lot people bend your ear a lot, what's happening? >> You know what's been an interesting theme this week is we've made such great advances on the technology side and I think we're starting to bump up against okay well now we've got to make some organizational changes for that technology to actually flourish. Had a lot of conversations this week with influencers, with CMO's, with attendees about, I really want to do this I really want to sort of bring sales and marketing together or commerce and sales, et cetera. But our org chart doesn't support that. The way our company thinks, the way our people are aligned, does not support this convergence. So I think were it an inflection point where we're going to have to like break apart some silos, and not data silos, but operational, what is your job, who manages you and what is your bonus based on? There is a lot of legacy structures, especially at the enterprise that do not really facilitate. >> John: Agile. >> Cross-departmental circumstances that we're looking for. So a lot people are like, oh wow, we're going to have to do some robust organizational change and that ain't easy. Somebody's going to have to drive that. Your marketing practitioners, which is my world, they can't drive that. That's got to come from up here somewhere. >> And also people got to be ready for the change. No one likes change. But we were taking about this yesterday called Add the Agile process into development being applied to marketing, really smart. >> Oh, all the time so many marketing teams now are using Agile and daily Scrum and Stand-ups and all those kind of things as opposed to Waterfall which everybody's used forever I think it's fantastic. >> Yeah, and that's something that we're seeing and Roland Smart had to point, he had a book got a signed copy Peter and I, but this is interesting, if you of Agile, to your point, you just can't read the book you've got to have a commit to it, organizational impact is Agile. >> One of the things we had a CMO Summit, we had 125, 150 CMO's from all around the world and one of the things we talked about in that session yesterday was, jeeze, we need to start taking people or hiring people out of a software development world, people who have Agile experience and put them as PM's on a marketing team. Which is going to put that group of people have the Agile background in even greater demand. Because they won't just be doing tech roles for project management but also marketing project management and sort of teaching everybody how Agile works. I think it's really interesting. >> But they've been doing that for a while. I mean the Agile, Agile started in software development but moved broader than that when it went to the web. >> No question, but a lot of these CMO's do not have those type of skills on their team today. They're still using a Waterfall. >> Or they don't recognize that they have the skills. Because most of them will have responsibility for website, website development, so it's that they don't again, it goes back to. >> Web versus marketing. >> Yeah, they probably have it somewhere, they just don't appreciate it and elevate it. >> It's silo'd within the marketing team. >> It's silo'd within the marketing team. So there's going to be, these are the consequence of changes. We'll see the degree to which it really requires a whole bunch of organizational stuff. But at the end of the day, you're right, it's a very very important thing. What are some of the other things you see as long as we're talking about it, other than just organizational. >> Actual other sort of baseline skills. It wasn't that long ago that your social media teams and contact marketing teams, it was manifestly a written job you made things that were rooted in copy. Now we talked a lot about, you have to have like a full video team on your marketing org chart because the core of the realm now is video content and while companies are getting there it's still a struggle for a lot of them. Should we have our agency do this, should we get somebody else to do it, they're like now I got to have all these people, I got to have video editors and camera crew. >> It's expensive. >> Of course it is, yeah. Not everybody can be theCUBE. >> We'll they're tryin'. No, but I think video's been coming down to the camera level you see Facebook with VR and AR certainly the glam and the sex appeal to that. Then you got docker containers and software development apps, so I call that the app culture, you've got the glam, apps, and then you've got cloud. So those things are going on so are the marketing departments looking to fully integrate agency-like stuff in house or is the agency picking up that? What's your take on the landscape of video and some of these services? >> It depends on how real-time they're thinking about video. We're starting to Facebook Live in a public relations circumstance. You saw when Crayola announced the death of the blue crayon or whatever it was a few weeks ago. They did a press release on that, but the real impetus for that announcement was a Facebook Live video. Which puts Facebook and live video as your new PR apparatus. That's really interesting. So in those circumstances the question is do we do that with the agency, is it easier to do it in-house. I think ultimately my advice would be you have to have it in both places. You have to be able to do at least some things in-house you have to be able to turn it quickly and then maybe for things you have more a lead time, you bring in your agency. >> One of the things we're seeing and just commenting while we're on this great subject, it's our business as well, is content is hard. Good, original content is what we strive for as SiliconANGLE, wikibon and theCUBE is something that we're committed to serving the audience at the same time, we collaborate with marketers in this new, native way so that the challenge that I see, and I see in this marketing cloud, is content is a great piece of data. >> Content is data. >> Content is data. >> And it also helps you get more data because there is a lot of data exchanged. >> So a lot of companies I see that fail on the content marketing side, they don't punch it in the red zone. The ball's on the one yard line all they got to do is get it over the goal line, and that's good content, and they try to fake it. They don't have authentic content. >> Another way of saying that John. >> John: They blew it on the one yard line. >> Yeah, another way of saying that is the historically agencies have driven the notion of production value. They have driven the notion of production value, to make the content as expensive as possible because that's how they make their money. What we're talking about is when we introduce a CX orientation into this mix now we're talking about what does the customer need in context, how can video serve that need? It's going to lead to, potentially, a very very different set of production value. >> You bring up a good point, I want to get Jay's reaction on it because he sees a lot too. Context is everything so at the end of the day what is engaging, you can't buy engagement, it's got to be good. >> What serves the customer. >> John: And that is defined by the customer, there is nature of reality silver bullet there's no engagement bullet. >> Sometimes you can argue that the customer values a lower fidelity content execution because it has a greater perceived authenticity. >> You may not know this Jay, I'm going to promote us for a second. A piece of video that's highly produced in the technology industry generates attention for a minute and a half to a minute and 45 seconds. theCUBE can keep attention for 12 or 13 minutes, why? >> John: We have interesting people on. >> If we were a digital agency. >> I would say the hosts, obviously. >> The hosts, the conversation. >> It's back to relevancy. >> It informs the customer. And that's what, increasingly, these guys have to think about. So in may respects, we'll go back to your organization and I want to test you in this, is that in many respects that the CMO must heal thyself first. By starting to acknowledge that we have to focus on the customer, and not creative and not the agency, and rejigger things so that we can in fact focus on the customer and not the agency's needs for us to spend more. >> There was, one of the great conversations in the CMO Summit was this point that, look, with all this technology we have all the opportunities and darnit, all we're doing is finding other ways to send people a coupon. Like isn't there something else that we could use this technology for. And what if we just flip the script and said what do customers genuinely want? Which is knowable and certainly inferable today in a way that has never been historically why don't we use that data to give them what they want, when they want it, how they want it, instead of constantly trying to push them harder. >> Focus on value and not being annoying. >> I mean I wrote a while book about it. >> Well your key point there, is that you're going to infer and actually get signals that, we've never been there before. Chatter signals. >> But let's use them for good not evil I think is the subtext there. >> Yeah, don't jam a coupon down their throat. >> But as Mark says it's hard because CEO's are under tremendous pressure to raise top line in an environment that is not conducive to that. You're going to have to take share. The economy is not growing so fast that you can just show up and grow your company. CEO's have tons of pressure, they're then droppping that pressure on the CMO who then says you need to grow top line revenue. So the CMO says we've got all this technology I guess we'll just send out more offers we'll have a stronger call to action and as opposed to using this information, the inferences, the data, to be more customer focused. I think in some cases we're being less customer focused which, if anything is short-sighted and at worst is a cryin' shame. >> So the solution there is to use the data to craft relevant things at the right time to the right people. >> And it will work but it requires two things that a lot of organizations simply don't have. Time and courage, right. It requires time and courage to purposely push less hard. Because you know it will payoff eventually you've got to buy into that, and that ain't easy always. Sometimes it's not even your decision. >> What we don't want is we don't want to automate and accelerate bad practices. At the end of the day what CMO's are learning, this conversation came out yesterday is, jeeze maybe marketing really isn't that good. Maybe we have to learn ourselves from what this technology is telling us, what the data is telling us and start dramatically altering the way we think about marketing, the role that marketing plays. The techniques we use, the tactics we use, that will lead to organizational changes. I'm wondering, did you get a sense out of the session that they are in fact stepping back and saying we got to look in the mirror about some of this stuff. >> Absolutely, absolutely. I thought it was remarkable, considering who runs this company, Mark Hurd, came in and did a little Q&A at the CMO Summit and he said, And this is the guy who runs Oracle, who's puttin' this who thing together and is sellin' tons of marketing software and says look guys, I'm not even sure if what we're doing here is right because we've got all this technology we have been doing this for a long time, we've got all these smart people and still, what's our conversion rate, 1%? If we've got the greatest technology in the history of the world, we supposedly know all this about customer service and customer journey mapping and our conversion rate is still 1%. Maybe something identified fundamentally broken with how we think about marketing. I thought for somebody in that role to come in and just drop that on a group of CMO's, I was like whoa. >> I think he's right. >> Totally right. >> But to have a CEO of a company like this just walk in and say here's what I think. >> This is a question for you and I'll ask it by saying we try to observe progressive CMO's as a leading indicator to the comment you mentioned earlier, which is flip things upside down and see what happens. What are you seeing for those progressive CMO's that have the courage to say ya know what, we're going to flip things upside down and apply the technology and rethink it in a way that's different. What are they doing? >> One of the markers that we see on the consulting side of my business is CMO's who are thinking about retention first. Not only from a practical execution layer, but even from a strategic layer. Like, what if we just pulled back on the string here a little bit and just said how can we make sure that everyone who's already given us money, continues to give us money and moreso. And essentially really turn the marketing focus from a new customer model, to a customer retention and customer growth model, start there. Start with your current customers and then use those inisights gained and then do a better job with customer acquisition. As customer service and marketing start to converge, mostly because on online. Online customer service is very brand driven and more like marketing. As this two things are converging we're seeing smart CMO's say well what if we change the way we look at this and took care of our own first. Learn those lessons and then applied them outwardly. I think that's a real strong marking signal. >> It's a great starting point and it's almost risk free from a progressive standpoint. >> It's not always risk-free inside the organization. >> I mean it's harder to get new guinea pig customers to like see what works, but go to your existing customers and you have data to work with. >> But wouldn't you also say that the very nature of digital which is moving the value proposition from an intrinsic statement of the values in the product and caveat emptor, towards a utility orientation where the value's in the use of it, and we want to sustain use of it. We're moving more to a service to do that and digital helps us to do that. That the risk of taking your approach goes down because at the end of the day, when you're doing a service orientation you have to retain the customer because the customer has constantly got the opportunity to abandon you. >> Yes the ability to bail out is very very easy these days I completely agree. But what find is that it makes sense to us. It makes sense to us on theCUBE, but in the real world it's not. Not everybody's drinkin' that punch yet. >> John: And why? >> I don't know. >> Sounds like courage. >> It is definitely courage is one of 'em because you're essentially saying look, I've been taught to do marketing one way for 40 years or 20 years. >> Yeah, I'm going to lean on my email marketing all day long. >> Yeah, I'm going to keep pressing send. It's easy, there's almost no net cost. So there's that. And also just the pressure from above, I think. From the CEO to grow top line, net new customer revenue, I think that's certainly part of it. And some if it, I think we went back to earlier about org charting and skills and resources. There's a heck of a lot more people out there at every level of the marketing organization who are trained in customer acquisition moreso than customer retention. How many MBA's are there in customer retention are there? Zero. How many MBA's are there in marketing and sales? >> Lot of 'em at Amazon. >> A thousand? >> A lot of 'em at Apple. >> Yeah, but they were trained there. They didn't come in like that, so they trained them up. >> Jay, great to have you on theCUBE. Great insight as usual, and I think you're right on the money. I think the theme that I would just say for this show, and agree with you is that if you look at Oracle, you look at IBM, you look what Amazon is doing Microsoft in some way maybe a little bit, but those three, data's at the center of the value proposition. Oracle is clearly saying to the marketers, at least we want to say digital it's end to end if you use data, it's good for you. This is the new direction. If you think data-driven CMO, that seems to be the right strategy in my mind. >> The best quote in the CMO Summit, you guys need a CUBE bumper sticker that you can manufacture with this. Data is the new bacon. I was like, oh I love that, that's the best right. >> Who doesn't love bacon. Jay, great to see you. Real quick, what's up with you, give us a quick update on you're opportunities what you're going these days. >> Things are great, running around the country doing fantastic events just like you guys are. Working on a new content marketing master class for advanced marketers on how to take their content marketing strategy to the next level. That launches in a couple of weeks. Continue to do four or five podcasts a week, a new video show called Jay Today where I do little short snippets three minutes a day. JayToday.tv if you want to subscribe to that. >> Beautiful, Jay Baer, great on theCUBE great thought leader, great practitioner, and just a great sharer on the net, check him out. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burr here at Oracle Marketing CX more live coverage after this short break.

(calm and uplifting music) (moves into soft and soothing music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (chill and calm electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for theCUBE's special coverage of Oracle's marketing clouds event called Modern CX for Modern Customer Experience. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, with Peter Burris, head of research at wikibon.com. This is our wrap up of day one. We've got day two coverage tomorrow. Peter, we saw some great news from Oracle on stage. I'll say modernizing their platform, the positioning, certainly, how they're packaging the offering of a platform with the focus of apps, with the additive concept of adaptive intelligence, which gives the notion of moving from batch to realtime, data in motion, and then a series of other enhancements going on. And the guests we talked to have been phenomenal, but what's coming out of this, at least in my mind, I would love to get your reaction to today, is data. Data is the key, and it's clear that Oracle is differentiating with their data. They have a database. They're now bringing their Cloud Suite concept to marketing and extending that out. Interesting. AI is in there, they got some chatbots, so some sizzle, but the steak is the data. So you got the sizzle and you got the steak. >> Well, we heard, you're absolutely right, John. We heard today a lot, and I think this is a terminology that we're going to hear more frequently, is this notion of first person data versus third person data. Where first person data is the data that's being generated by the business and the business's applications and third person data being data that's generated by kind of the noise that's happening in a lot of other people's first person data. And I think that's going to be one of the biggest challenges in the industry. And Oracle has an inside track on a lot of that first person data because a lot of people are big time Oracle customers for big time operational acts, applications that are today delivering big time revenue into the business. >> In the spirit of marketing speak at these events you hear things, "It's outcomes, digital transmissions. "It's all about the outcomes." Agreed, that's standard, we hear that. But here we're seeing something for the first time. You identified it in one of our interviews with Jack Horowitz, which had 150 milliseconds, it's a speeds and feeds game. So Oracle's premise, you pointed out, I'd like to get deeper on this, because this is about not moving the data around if you don't have to. >> Yeah, yeah. >> This is interesting. >> This is a centerpiece of Wikibon's research right now, is that if you start with a proposition that we increasingly through digital transformation are now talking about how we're going to use data to differentiate business, then we need to think about what does it mean to design business, design business activities, design customer promises around the availability of data or the desire to get more data. And data has a physical element. Moving data around takes time and it generates cost, and we have to be very, very careful about what that means, let alone some of the legal and privacy issues. So we think that there's two things that all businesses are going to have to think about, the relationship between data and time. Number one, Can I serve up the right response, the right business action, faster than my competitors, which is going to matter, and number two is can I refine and improve the quality of my models that I'm using to serve things up faster than my competitors. So it's a cycle time on what the customer needs right now, but it's also a strategic cycle time in how I improve the quality of the models that I'm using to run my business. >> What's also interesting is some things that, again that you're doing on the research side, that I think plays into the conversations and the content and conversations here at Oracle's Modern CX event is the notion of the business value of digital. And I think, and I want to get your reaction to this because this is some insight that I saw this morning through my interviews, is that there are jump in points for companies starting this transformation. Some are more advanced than others, some are at the beginning, some are in kindergarten, some are in college, some are graduated, and so on and so forth. But the key is, you're seeing an Agile mindset. That was a term that was here, we had the Agile Marketer, the author of The Agile Marketer, here on our-- Roland Smart, who wrote the book The Agile Marketer. But Agile can be applied because technology's now everywhere. But with data and now software, you now have the ability to not only instrument, but also get value models from existing and new applications. >> Well let's bring it back to the fundamental point that you made up front, because it's the right one. None of this changes if you don't recognize these new sources of data, typically and increasingly, the customer being a new source, and what we can do with it. So go back to this notion of Agile. Agile works when you are, as we talked about in the interview, when you have three things going on. First off, the business has to be empirical, it has to acknowledge that these new sources of information are useful. You have to be willing to iterate. Which means you have to sometimes recognize you're going to fail, and not kill people who fail as long as they do it quickly. And then you have to be opportunistic. When you find a new way of doing things, you got to go after it as hard as you possibly can. >> And verify it, understand it, and then double down on it. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, customer-centric and all the other stuff. But if you don't have those three things in place, you are not going to succeed in this new world. You have to be empirical, you have to be iterative, and you have to be opportunistic. Now take that, tie that back to some of the points that you were making. At the end of the day, we heard a lot of practitioners as well as a lot of Oracle executives, I don't want to say, be challenged to talk about the transformation or the transition, but sometimes they use different language. But when we push them, it all boiled down to, for the first time, our business acknowledged the value of data, and specifically customer data, in making better decisions. The roadmap always started with an acknowledgement of the role that data's going to play. >> And the pilots that we heard from Time Warner's CMO, Kristen O'Hara, pointed it out really brilliantly that she did pilots as a way to get started, but she had to show the proof. But not instant gratification, it was, "Okay, we'll give you some running room, "three feet and a cloud of dust, go see what happens. "Here's enough rope to hang yourself or be successful." But getting those proof points, to your point of iteration. You don't need to hit the home run right out of the gate. >> Absolutely not. In fact, typically you're not. But the idea is, you know, people talk about how frequently product launches fail. Products, you know, the old adage is it fails 80% of the time. We heard a couple of people talk about how other research firms have done research that suggests that 83 or 84% of leads are useless to salespeople. We're talking about very, very high failure rates here and just little changes, little improvements in the productivity of those activities, have enormous implications for the revenue that the business is able to generate and the cost that the business has to consume to generate those revenues. >> John: I want to get your reaction to-- Oh, go ahead, sorry. >> No, all I was going to say, it all starts with that fundamental observation that data is an asset that can be utilized differently within business. And that's what we believe is the essence of digital business. >> The other reaction I'd like to get your thoughts on is a word that we've been using on theCUBE that you had brought up here first in the conversation, empathy to users. And then we hear the word empowerment, they're calling about heroes is their theme, but it's really empowerment, right? Enabling people in the organization to leverage the data, identify new insights, be opportunistic as you said, and jump on these new ways of doing things. So that's a key piece. So with empathy for the users, which is the customer experience, and the empowerment for the people to make those things happen, you have the convergence of ad tech and mar-tech, marketing tech. Advertising tech and marketing tech, known as ad tech and mar-tech, coming together. One was very good at understanding collective intelligence for which best ad to serve where. Now the infrastructure's changing. Mar-tech is an ever-evolving and consolidating ecosystem, with winners and losers coming together and changing so the blender of ad tech and mar-tech is now becoming re-platformed for the enterprise. How does a practitioner who's looking at sources like Oracle and others grock this concept? Because they know about ads and that someone buys the ads, but also they have marketing systems in place and sales clouds. >> Well, I think, and again, it's this notion of hero and empowerment and enablement, all of them boil down to are we making our people better? And I think, in many respects, a way of thinking about this is the first thing we have to acknowledge is the data is really valuable. The second thing we have to acknowledge is that when we use data better, we make our people more successful. We make our people more valuable. We talk about the customer experience, well employee experience also matters because at the end of the day, those employees, and how we empower them and how we turn them into heroes, is going to have an enormous impact on the attitude that they take when they speak with customers, their facility at working with customers, the competency that they bring to the table, and the degree to which the customer sees them as a valuable resource. So in many respects, the way it all comes together is, we can look at all these systems, but are these systems, in fact, making the people that are really generating the value within the business more or less successful? And I think that's got to be a second touchstone that we have to keep coming back to. >> Some great interviews here this morning on day one. Got some great ones tomorrow, but two notables. I already mentioned the CMO, Kristen O'Hara, who was at Time Warner, great executive, made great change in how they're changing their business practices, as well as the financial outcome. But the other one was Jack Berkowitz. And we had an old school moment, we felt like a bunch of old dogs and historians, talking about the OSI, Open Systems Interconnect Model, seven layers of openness, of which it only went half way, stopped at TCPIP, but you can argue some other stuff was standardized. But, really, if you look at the historical perspective, it was really fun, because you can also learn, what you can learn about history as it relates to what's happening today. It's not always going to be the same, but you can learn from it. And that moment was this grocking of what happened with TCPIP as a standardization, coalescing moment. And it's not yet known in this industry what that will be. We sense it to be data. It's not clear yet how that's going to manifest itself. Or is it to you? >> Well here's what I'd say, John. I think you're right, kind of the history moment was geez, wasn't it interesting that TCPIP, the OSI stack, and they're related, they're not the same, obviously, but that it defined how a message, standards for moving messages around, now messages are data, but it's a specialized kind of a data. And then what we talked about is when we get to layer seven, it's going to be interesting to see what kind of standards are introduced, in other words, the presentation layer, or the application layer. What kind of standards are going to be introduced so that we can enfranchise multiple sources of cloud services together in new ways. Now Oracle appears to have an advantage here. Why? Because Oracle's one of those companies that can talk about end to end. And what Jack was saying, it goes back again to one of the first things we mentioned in this wrap, is that it's nice to have that end to end capability so you can look at it and say "When do we not have to move the data?" And a very powerful concept that Jack introduced is that Oracle's going to, you know, he threw the gauntlet down, and he said "We are going to help our customers "serve their customers within 150 milliseconds. "On a worldwide basis, "anywhere that customer is in the world, any device, "we're going to help our customers serve their customers "in 150 milliseconds." >> That means pulling data from any database, anywhere, first party, third party, all unified into one. >> But you can do it if and only if you don't have to move the data that much. And that's going to be one of the big challenges. Oracle's starting from an end to end perspective that may not be obviously cloud baked. Other people are starting with the cloud native perspective, but don't have that end to end capability. Who's going to win is going to be really interesting. And that 150 millisecond test is, I think, going to emerge as a crucial test in the industry about who's going to win. >> And we will be watching who will win because we're going to be covering it on SiliconANGLE.com and wikibon.com, which has got great research. Check out wikibon.com, it's subscription only. Join the membership there, it's really valuable data headed up by Peter. And, of course, theCUBE at siliconangle.tv is bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, Day one here at the Mandalay Bay at the Oracle Modern CX, #ModernCX. Tweet us @theCUBE. Glad to chat with you. Stay tuned for tomorrow. Thanks for watching. (chill and calm electronic music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec >> Interviewer: People obviously know you from Shark Tank but the Herjavec group has been--

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017 brought to you by Oracle. (energetic, bouncy music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, welcome back to our broadcast from Oracle Modern Customer Experience here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. We've had some great, great, great guests thus far talking about the keynotes, talking about how marketing is evolving, and very importantly talking about how customer experience is becoming a centerpiece of a lot of what businesses are trying to do with marketing playing a significant role. With that in mind, we got a great guest right now. Scott Creighton, is the Vice President of Oracle Customer Experience Industry Solutions. Welcome to theCUBE Scott. >> Thank you Peter. Great to be here. >> Scott, I'm going to pitch you hard first time out the door here, and that is we're seeing a lot of companies go through digital transformation, and everybody has their own definition of digital transformation. >> Scott: Exactly. >> There is always an element of how the channel is transforming, but we don't often talk about sales people and sales. Let's talk a little bit about how digital transformation is manifesting itself in sales organizations. >> Great, Peter you're dead on, so most of the customers we're working with today are going through some form of digital transformation. The primary reason for that is to really enhance the overall customer experience. Kind of as we talked about earlier, it started out as kind of a digital marketing transformation thing to get the right offers at the right time to the customers, and engage with them, and many different channels and devices. What I think customers are learning, and we're helping them with is you have to transform the whole company and especially the sales organization. The question is how does that affect the sales organization? Well the sales organization now has to be as fast, as easy to work with, and transform the processes and the way they interact with the customer through the different product offerings that are now digitized and prepackaged so the sales person now has to be much more of what I call a strategic advisor today, and to leverage the different promotions and things that are going on in marketing, and be aware of those to be able to offer that same interaction with the customer. It's a big change. >> I used to describe marketing, an old style of marketing is what I call offer, respond, fulfill. Where marketing would get together, figure out what the offers were. They'd put them out there. They'd see who responded, and then they'd turn to somebody to fulfill them. >> Scott: Right. >> In this digital world, where we can get more information from the customer, and we can get greater visibility into their requirements that we're moving to a need, match, engage model, where we're listening to the customer, and gathering what their needs are, and then matching so we we can engage more effectively in partnership. The sales person still has a crucial role in that matching process, right? >> Yes, absolutely. You're exactly right, so now when the sales rep gets that lead, that lead is a very rich lead today. You know what products they're looking at, you know what channels they've been involved in. They know what promotions they're looking for, so the customer doesn't want to start the conversation with what do you need, tell me about your business. They want to start it with I've already been evaluating different offers from different companies. You know that now, and what you basically start the conversation with, I saw you looking at this really cool widget we just offered you. Let me tell you how companies like you in your industry have leveraged and benefited from that. The conversation is very, very, different, and then what price point, what promotions, and match that to the customer. Then now we have a much more rich conversation with that customer experience. >> We're not going to ask sales people to become themselves data analysts. >> Scott: No. >> Presumably the software and the solutions are going down to present different options. >> Scott: Absolutely. What types of technologies, new ways of doing things will be necessary so the sales person can be presented with the right set of options so they match with the customer. >> Exactly. You know we've announce some new innovations here. One is around adaptive intelligence. Now rather than the sales rep having to think in their mind and really understand different price points and products, and the configurations, as they're talking to the customer, or they see that original lead come in and they start that conversation, adaptive intelligence is going to be able to give them here's what the best offer is. Here's a recommended step. Here's recommended customers that are like theirs that they could benefit from this product. The sales rep is way more effective now as a trusted advisor, versus being an administrator and trying to mix and match, and look at all the internal systems to figure out what to offer 'em. Based on what that customer has been looking at, and customers like them, what's the next best offer? What are additional add-ons and packages that get served up to the sales rep in the conversation with the customer, in the process flow, to have a much more effective sales effort with that customer. >> It sounds like the sales person's actually part of the process of configuring the solution, and not just hand holding him and walking that customer from expert, to expert, to expert, where the sales person's really almost a passive participant, but just making the introductions. Is that right? >> Yeah exactly, so they're in the process, they look like a trusted advisor, and on top that they don't have to keep all this stuff in their head, or look at spreadsheets, or product catalogs and stuff, the system is serving up the best products available for that customer, based on what their needs are. On top of that now we've also introduced some significant mobile enhancements with virtual assistant and those types of things that the sales rep now can say, what's the latest promotion, right? It'll come back and serve up the latest promotion rather than going through sending emails and phone calls, and calling different people trying to figure out what it is in process, so when they're having that conversation with the customer through the latest mobile technologies, a virtual assistants, and you know leveraging voice recognition. The world for the sales rep's completely changed now. As you're interacting with the customer, the best products, virtual assistant, all these different type technologies are coming together, all on a mobile device. We can sit down on an iPad like this, and have a very robust conversation, but real time meeting your needs in this great customer experience that we're having with the latest products, with the right price. The best part about all that is when you go to hit the order button, now we've got the perfect order for the customer as opposed to a lot of times they're somewhat disappointed. It wasn't quite right. The pricing wasn't right, and now we have a perfect order. The customer gets a perfect delivery of the right product and they're very satisfied. >> In an era in which everybody's concerned about automation taking away jobs, and a lot of folks and commentators saying oh yeah, digital's going to replace sales people. You're suggesting that sales people are going to get more valuable and be made more effective by digital. You're going to augment the sales person's ability to serve the customer. You're not going to replace it. >> No, I actually believe that what every sales person wants to be is a trusted advisor. Unfortunately in today's world, it's very manual in effort. There's a lot of data entry. They're looking a sales forecasts, but everything's on spreadsheets still in terms of pricing and product catalogs. All that becomes automated now. It allows me to be more effective with the customer rather taking quotes two days, three days, a week, I'm quoting real time because the system's serving up the best products at the best price. Now I can be a trusted advisor. I believe every sales rep wants to be a trusted advisor. Now this frees them up to do that while the system's serving up the next best step in sale cycle, the next recommended product, the recommended price, the bundling. We're automating the quoting and the discount approval processes. Those things used to take days, weeks, some cases months on very complex orders. Today we're doing that real time in front of the customer. I can be more effective. I can meet more customers faster, and I can be a true trusted advisor. >> Give me your view. Five years from now... Actually let's make it easier, two years from now. Let's say three years from now. How is the sales person going to be spending their time differently as an consequence of the support that these enabling technologies can provide. >> Sure, so real quick, how do they spend their time today? The way they spend their time today is typically on an iPad or a laptop, logging in, sifting through leads, taking a look at the lead information, cold calling customers. Trying to determine whether it's a qualified lead or not, and walking through a very manual sales opportunity process. Meanwhile they're going to a different system or spreadsheets to put the quote together, and all those systems are usually separate. Let's envision those all on the same platform today such as Oracle Sales Cloud where we have quoting systems, we have the sales processes, we have the analytic tools for sales managers to see better forecasting. Now we have adaptive intelligence. We're using virtual assistants, so literally those processes we just described can be on a smart device such as the iPhone, and I can do all that speaking through the phone saying, I'm with Peter. He's very interested in widget number three. We have a special promotion for that. What's the best price for him? How fast can I get it to him? Okay produce the quote, approve the quote, submit the quote. Now it's an order and we just did that in three minutes or less. >> It used to be for example now, talking about a sales manager. The sales manager used to talk about their A list sales people who were the ones that were willing to go into the system, willing to take a look a the leads, good at discerning which ones were good or bad, good at having that first cold call and turning it into something of value. Now we're not so much talking about A versus B sales people, the system is in fact handling a lot of that, making that more of a level playing field, the A versus B sales person is are you able to help solve the customer's problem faster by using all this content? Have I got that right. >> You're dead on because now we can have 100 people serving up through adaptive intelligence the right product, the next recommended step in the sales stage. What's the recommended collateral and things we need to get to the customer? Everyone gets that same technology, so we're all operating evenly there. Now it's what is your skill in being a trusted advisor, building that relationship. What's the long term relationship, and spending time there knowing everything else is going to be available to you and it's a long term relationship that you're going to be able to build. You're separating sales reps not based on do they know the work arounds within your company to get something done, which is a big problem, because now you need to be a 10 or 15 year veteran and then the new people have a hard time because they don't know the work arounds to get a quote approved, or get a contract done. This is all available now on the platform real time adaptive intelligence through mobile technology, virtual assistant, and everyone has access to that technology. Everyone's trained on that technology and now it's your A people are strategic advisors. >> If we think out over the course of the next couple years, the evolution of some of these digital technologies, the emerging role of the sales person, or how the sales person's going to do thing differently, tie it back to the relationship between sales and marketing. We're here at the Modern Customer Experience show, what is it that marketing folks are going to bring back to the sales people to get them excited about some of these changes, because it's not just marketing, it's got to be the whole engagement team working together. >> Yeah, you're exactly right. What we're getting from marketing now on the Oracle CX platform is very intelligent very rich leads now. They're scored, they're ranked, they're very targeted and now as a sales rep when I get that lead, think of the days of old. We've all been there. You get an email, and maybe a phone number. Today I'm getting a full digital footprint. Where is that customer, and what have they looked at. What have other customers like them, based on their geography, based on their industry would be a propensity to buy what? What I get today from marketing, the digital footprint of where they've been, where they've been looking and what they've been looking at, but I'm also going to get recommended product offers right then and there, so I can start the conversation saying, "Peter I saw you were on the website, you were looking at this product. Guess what, we've got a promotion for it. Do you have any questions about it? Yes, yes, no. Here's a couple really cool things. By the way we have our promotion today. If we add this to it, would that satisfy your needs? Can we go ahead and place this order for you? >> It takes a village to be successful with some of these complex products. Is Oracle actually also then putting a particular individual within a community that's buying some things in a B to B setup for example. Is Oracle also helping to pinpoint that person's role within the broader community within the buying company? Is that something that we're starting to see bought in. >> Absolutely, absolutely. We're using a lot of different capabilities within digital marketing to look at the LinkedIn profiles, to take a look at the social, to look at the different devices that they're on. I know what company he's in, what our relationship is with that company. LinkedIn's a new integration that we've announced here so I can use social capabilities to understand who the buyer is. What is his relationship within the company? Where have we sole in other parts of the company and all that information. >> Peter: Who they were. >> Who they were exactly, and then how do I pull that community together to be able to really narrow in on this one deal and sell this deal. >> You talked a the 15 year old Vet who now knows their way inside my company but it used to be all that, that 15 year old vet was so valued because they knew their around inside the other company. >> Scott: Exactly. >> Now technology's helping us identify how to navigate the complex buying environment a little bit more successfully. >> You're exactly right. I could be you know a brand new sales rep, and then now when I get this digital footprint, I'm also getting the hierarchy of the company, who this person is within that hierarchy, and where we sold within that company, and who those people are. Now I already know what that company relationship is and I may have never even walked in the halls of that company before. Now I can have a very intelligent interaction that says, Peter I saw you looking at this product. Guess what, your business unit in Japan, and so and so in Japan has already bought that product. He's given us a five out of five star rating. Did you know that? No I didn't know that. Okay, great here's his name. Let me introduce you to someone else within your company. >> Then you're happy to sell. >> Scott: Exactly. That's how it works. >> Scott Creighton. Great conversation. Scott Creighton, VP of Oracle Customer Experience Industry Solutions. Thank you very much for joining us in theCUBE today, and we'll be back momentarily with more great interviews from the Oracle Modern Customer Experience show here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. (energetic, bouncy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (techno music) >> Okay, welcome back, we're live here at the Mandalay Bay, this is theCUBE's coverage of Oracle's Modern Customer Experience event, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and my co-host Peter Burris, Chief Researcher at Wikibon.com, and our next guest is Nick Edouard, who's the President CM of LookBookHQ, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much-- >> I was talking hockey, so I'm all distracted, I'm ruined, I'm disappointed, good to see you, before we get into it, it's all intelligent content, some of the things that are going on on this platform. But take a minute to talk about what your company does so we have some context. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're a marketing technology company based in Toronto. We are a very big part of the Oracle Marketing App Cloud. And we kind of pick out where Oracle basically leaves off, where the Marketing Cloud stops. So a lot of what happens in the Marketing Cloud is focused on generating moments of attention and orchestrating that kind of buyer's journey. We're what happens in the destination side of the click. So we focus on the intelligent use of content. How do we deliver content? We think of every moment of attention as core to a marketer, that that really is their currency, the attention. We need to actually think that marketers, B2B marketers in particular, need to think a lot more like B2C, to think more like publishers. They're obsessed with attention. We shouldn't be satisfied with clicks or form fills. We need to actually be capitalizing on those moments of attention to make sure that if Bob is really my whitepaper, then I need to know that he's actually reading it. How do I then move him to the next best content asset, or give him a choice of content assets in session? So in essence what we do, what our company does, and we help companies like Thomson Reuters and ADP, in fact ADP is speaking on about half this afternoon, Polycom, Quintiles, whole host of big Eloqua customers. What we do is to help them take their content use model from something that looks and feels like Blockbuster, one size fits all, I don't know if actually Bob watched the video that he walked out of the shop with or the DVD, rather. And hence, why Blockbuster is RIP. And we take that and make it far more like Netflix. We make it far more on demand. >> Instrumented. >> Yeah, it's very much like-- >> This is interesting, the attention to impact is interesting, and you know, attention is essentially aided awareness, which is the Holy Grail in marketing, right? I mean, getting people to have some aid to a final destination or transaction of some sort. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, very much so. I mean in the B2B side, obviously a marketer's job is to generate high quality marketing qualified leads and the real emphasis is on the Q, qualified. But companies like SiriusDecisions report that 94% of marketing qualified leads don't close. And that's a damning statistic for a B2B marketer. And our whole hypothesis is, and we're proving this to our customers is the reason why that happens is they're not qualified. Bob might have clicked on an e-mail, he might have filled in a form, et cetera, but did he read the content? We need to get an MQL to engage with five, seven, ten pieces of content to become a high quality MQL. And if we're only doing that one piece of content every engagement, that's really hard to do. No wonder our sales stat was this low. >> Well, we also need to understand that there's a progression people go through as they learn. It's not just that we want them to click on nine pieces of content-- >> Absolutely. >> As much as we want to see a pattern. So they've read this content and there was a suggestion made or an option provided and they then took the option, which is an even stronger suggestion that they've absorbed it, they've internalized it, and they're now part of a journey. So how does, I really like the idea that we're on the delivery side of the click, so you're, you know, we got all the stuff that's happening on the presenting things, the options, and then you're ensuring that when they click, whatever is being delivered is the highest quality-- >> Yeah. >> In terms of driving that customer forward in the journey, have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. So if we take, if you take something which Eloqua's done a fantastic job, for example, of teaching their community of their customers about lead nurture and the typical nurture track looks and feels something like six emails over six weeks advertising content offer A, then content offer B, content offer C. And typically they're scheduled 10:00 a.m on a Thursday. Now this would be great, if we could get Bob and the other 12,000 people that we sent the email to to click on every single one of those emails. And the reality is, if I've got low, single-digit clickthrough rate, it's not going to happen. So what we do instead is, well, if they're engaging with A, why don't we give them B in the same session? While they're here, while we've done the hard work in getting their attention. And to your point, Peter, we're tracking that, and then we can start to make some really intelligent decisions going forward, as to, oh it worked, this is what resonated with Bob. This content asset's actually performed well. So we have two basic approaches to this. One is we let the marketer curate that experience, decide what A, B, C is et cetera. Or we actually use machine learning to auto-generate. If Bob arrives at A, what should B, C, and D et cetera be? So to that, it's very much like Netflix, where we kind of base our algorithm, it looks and feels very similar to Netflix's content discovery. That's great for anonymous or net new prospects in the top of your funnel, once you've figured out what they're actually interested in, then you can actually-- >> How does it work for you guys? Do you require registration, because content in these days has two flavors, free and gated. So there's always that dilemma, how much is free, you want some flow, tension, and then you go on conversion, gated, maybe premium content, how do you guys view that, is that part of or independent of what you do? >> No, it's a big part of what we do. And, one of the things, one of the capabilities that we have in our application is actually the ability to serve forms based on time and behavior. So, if they've engaged with three content assets, then maybe I actually want them to give me some more information or put up a hand. So we can make the form time-based, you can let them try before you buy, as it were, or you can hard gate it. We use Eloqua Forms in our application, so all that information flows as normal, as the work flows all get triggered, et cetera. It's very much up to the marketer how they want to use it, but one of the things, what we increasingly see amongst our customers, is the most successful do try to take the forms out of the way. Once we've got, once they are a member of our known database, how much more information do we really need them to volunteer, particularly with our ability to augment that contact record with other sources of data. Asking the marketer, I'm sorry, asking the prospect for it isn't always the most sensible thing to do. >> It's the free versus registration, but it's also new kinds of content. One of the things I like to say is software is content. Trying software, for example, is content. Or presenting an interactive experience that has a software element associated with it is a crucial part of gaging where people are. Are you able to start embedding your tooling directly into some of these more interactive elements and choose options within that interaction, or is it more options on static content? >> It could be both. So we are fundamentally content diagnostic. The best way to think about what we do is really as a very smart wrapper that goes around the content and then that can be embedded or it could be shared however you want, it could be used as a destination in its own right. So, sure if you want to kick something off with some former interactive content, absolutely. We also pull all different types of content together. So if your content is distributed or you want to use third party content, reviews, an expert in the space that's writing about something, and you pull that in and use that as a jumping off point. And what's really interesting is frequently it is the sequence of content that's the most interesting thing, not the behavior or engagement of a single asset. >> Right, and so part of the experience that sort of marketing is developing here translates into other disciplines within the business, for example, service. Come into respects, one of the things that you're presumably testing is is the prospect learning the right stuff that actually makes them more qualified. Well the same thing could be said for service, self-service. Is the person going through the right sequencing? Are you also seeing a demand for this kind of a product over on the service side and does that tie marketing back together? >> That's a great question. And one of the things that when we kind of officially launched our company in the application, three or four years ago now, we focused very much upon demand generation. Like we knew the problem that were helping themselves, but there are a handful of our customers, Cisco being one, actually, where actually at the moment, all they do is use us on the customer marketing side of things. How do I drive adoption, how do I drive cross-sell and upsell? I mean, all this is, we've got to remember that attention's what we're looking for and the way that we achieve that is using content as our primary asset as a marketer. The channels are important, the creative is important, but these really are content offers. Bob doesn't buy because he clicks on an email, Bob buys because he reads the stuff and watches the things. >> Peter: But it's attention and competence. >> Yeah. >> Right, so it's, Sy Syms used to say, I think it was Sy Syms, used to say that an informed customer is the best customer. You want a competent customer. >> Nick: Yeah. >> In many respects, the process of moving from the marketing qualified an MQL to an SQL it is, is that customer competent enough to actually engage with a sales person or somebody else to do something. >> That is spot on. So what we're seeing across our customer base is improvement in conversion rates from MQL to SAL for example. So McAfee, Intel Security, now McAfee again, they've seen a three times increase in the MQL to SAL conversion rates. Rockwell Automation has actually made a 300x return on their investment in us in nine months by passing higher qualified leads to the sales team. I think they generated $250 million in additional net-- >> Peter: Rockwell? >> Rockwell, yeah. ADP, that's doing our customer case study this afternoon, a 3x increase in marketing influence opportunities, and a 6x increase in closed won marketing opportunities. So more, but to your point here, better qualified. We know that these people are actually read our stuff, therefore the conversation is easier. They are actually generally qualified. Carrier's been proving that out by actually 2.4 times faster through the funnel to MQL, and then their ACP is 2.3 times higher. Why? Because they're not getting the pushback in the sale cycle because the prospect has self-educated and they see the value now. >> Nick, I want to get your thoughts on something that's involved in our, we're in a independent media company and we don't really have any ads on our site at all, but we have a sponsorship model, we have data. But it's interesting, I'm reading an Ad Age article right now that says for the first time ever, digital has surpassed TV. I mean, I can remember-- >> Wow. back in the days, it's always this little slice and it's getting bigger and bigger. But for the first time, desktop and mobile ad revenue surpasses TV for the first time, 22% upswing from the previous year. So, digital ads, some are calling it native advertisement, whatever the hell that means, is a key part of the attention cycle. So the role that a marketer needs to take with channels as important, and a lot of content marketers are failing these days that we talk to because they're not being authentic with their message and the users can smell-- >> Right. >> You know, non-relevant content. Some are clever and make it link-baitish and some are actually really super smart and actually do authentic content. But, so that's kind of progression. That's an evolution in the industry, but from a data standpoint, there are platforms out there, like SiliconANGLE and others, that have an opportunity for impression and attention in real time. How does your system, how does your clients, and how do people deal with that? Is there a way, is there mechanisms? >> So we have two large publisher customers that run multiple different properties and have very large communities they're looking to monetize and they're all part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, they use their tech stat, and we're helping them in two ways. Firstly, kind of from an advertising thing, like high value added, advertising solutions, for want of a better description. How do I help to monetize my community, not just pass to HP, if they're the advertiser, here's a list of names of people that filled in the form. Here's actually people that are engaging with your content. And it's a mix of our editorial and your content to tell a story. And then one of the things that we're starting to explore for them is actually far more on the native side of things, actually being embedded as... >> John: An asset? >> Essentially, as a native ad in its own right, which can kind of get launched. That's something which I'm keen to explore further. And at the heart of it is, it's probably an even bigger problem on the ad tech side that it is on the martech side, but people like Gary Vaynerchuk are starting to ask the ad tech industry, we need a dose of common sense here, was the marketing consumed? And that's something which I am fascinated with, we're starting to see that we can actually identify by channels. This channel might, well this particular display provide the SP may have generated, you say, oh I don't know, 1,000 clicks in the last 30 days. Did it do anything? Did my-- >> A lot of times valuable. >> Exactly. >> You know at the end of the day, to sustain attention, you have to be valuable. I think John, we're talking really about a continuum from impression to attention to competence. We want to work with competent buyers because it cuts down the time that we spend on it, it reduces the risk that we're wasting our time, and quite frankly, it's a lot easier to work with someone who's really engaged and wants to succeed with whatever we're offering. >> It's also, he mentioned the publisher angle, I was thinking also from the customer angle, because I'm a customer and a marketer, I'm going to be looking for mechanisms to go to. The publisher wants better monetization of their communities, so have you seen any patterns in the business that could be a use case for helping customers operationalize, and we had great success with our business in the sense of saying, hey, we're engaging users, so that's good, you should join in with us at the right time not, you know, try to do it six hours too late, right, it's like being late to the party, right. So that real time piece is really super important. >> For sure. We've actually just changed the way that we're integrating with Eloqua to speed that up. So now we've actually moved to using web hooks as part of the integration and using their map form processing capabilities. Because it's faster, it's more extensive, it's more scalable. It means we can get very rich in content engagement data into someone's hands faster and better. And, I think, what is it? 50% of people buy from the first person that shows up, so being able to do that is critically important. >> Member-based communities are getting a lot of trends, traction these days. Some call, you know, subscribers, buyer walls, but member-based. >> So something we're starting to look at is how do we actually start to auto-generate the content experience, yeah, around kind of key accounts or topics, et cetera. >> Fascinating conversation, Nick, appreciate it, coming on. >> Nick: My pleasure. >> LookBookHQ, check 'em out, doing intelligent content, scaling content, looking at data, congratulations on your success, look forward to following up with you on some of the native advertising solutions that we, me need, that you need and congratulations, Oracle's certainly taking advantage of it. >> See you next time. Cheers. >> Thanks for coming out. Be back with more live coverage, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (bright, lively music) >> Hello and welcome back to a CUBE coverage of Oracle's Modern Customer Conference here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, with my co-host this week, Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com, part of SiliconANGLE Media, and our next guest is Austin Miller, Product Marketing Director for Oracle Marketing Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE conversation. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> This coveted post-launch spot. >> Yeah, we have a lunch coma kicking in, but no, seriously, you have a really tough job because you're seeing the growth of the Platform Play, right, really robust horizontal platform, but how you got here through some really smart acquisitions but handled well, and integrated, we covered that last year. You guys are seeing some nice tailwinds with some momentum certainly around the expectations of what the customers want. >> Yeah, I think that one of the best things when we start thinking about, to your point, product integration, it's also the way that we are talking to our customers about how they can use the products together. It's not really enough just to have maybe one talk to another, but unless we prove out the use cases, you don't get the utilization, and I think this year what we've really seen is getting those use cases to actually start getting some traction in the field. >> So this integrated marketing idea seems to be the reality that everyone wants. >> Where are we on that progress bar, because this seems to be pretty much unanimous with customers, the question is how to get there, the journey, and the heroes that are going to drive and the theme of the conference. But the reality is this digital transformation is being forced for business change. >> Austin: Absolutely. >> And marketing is part of that digital fabric. >> I think that one of the most interesting things about this is if you look at kind of the history of when did the stacks start becoming actually part of the story, it was at a point where we didn't really necessarily even have the capabilities to do it. As a result many marketers who thought they were maybe buying into a stack approach got a little bit burned. I think now we are actually at that place where that value is not only something that they can see inherently and say "oh, I'd like all these applications to talk together," but it's actually feasible, it's something that they're going to be able to use, and they can be optimistic about, frankly. >> Where are they getting burned, you mentioned that, from buying into a full stack of software for a point solution, is that kind of what you meant? >> No, I think that in the marketing realm, when you're talking to marketers, it is very easy to think about all the horrible things that they have to deal with on a daily basis, all these problems. And the reality is that oftentimes you've had to have this conversation with them that says, you know, there are not going to be easy answers to hard problems. There are usually hard answers to hard problems. We can help alleviate some of that friction, especially when we start talking about data silos or things about interoperability, so being able to not just have integration, but pre-built function within these particular platforms, but realistically, it just wasn't something that we necessarily in the market in general were able to deliver on until somewhat recently. >> So, I am very happy that I heard you use the word "use cases," especially at a launch, because that's been one of the biggest challenges of both marketing technology when we think about big data, there's been such a focus on the technology, getting the technology right, and then the use cases and how it changed the way the business or the function did things, kind of either did or didn't happen. Talk about how a focus in use case is actually getting people to emphasize the outcomes, and how Oracle is helping people then turn that into technology decisions. >> This may sound almost counterintuitive, but in reality the way that use cases we see helping us the most is that it really helps spur about the organizational changes that we need in order to actually have some of this happen, 'cause it's very easy to say, "we have all this technology marketer and you should be using it all," but if you don't actually prove it out and how that's going to impact let's say the way that they're creating their marketing messages, on even a kind of not exciting basis, like how are you creating your emails, how are you creating your mobile messaging, how are you doing your website, and then start talking about those in actual use cases, it's very hard for people to organize their organizations around this kind of transformation. They need something tangible to hold onto. >> And the old way with putting things in buckets, >> Austin: Exactly. >> Right, so so hey we got one covered, move on to the next one ... >> Peter: Or by channels even. We got an email solution, or we got a web solution and as the customer moves amongst these different mechanisms, or engages differently with these mechanisms, the data then becomes, we've talked a lot about this, becomes the integration point, and that as you said affects a significant change on how folks think about organizing, but what do you think are going to be some of the big use cases if people are going to be ... you're providing advice and counsel to folks on the 2017. >> Yeah, so I think that talking about marketing-specific use cases is really important, especially when we start thinking about how am I using my first-party data that I may have within a particular channel. And I'm using that to contextually change the way I'm communicating to somebody on another channel. But if we kind of take that theme, and we think about let's not just expand it to marketing but let's really talk about customer experience, because as a customer, I go in-store, I go on email, I go on your mobile app, I don't view those as different things. That's just my experience with your brand. And even as we start getting to maybe some of the service things, am I calling a call center? The way that we're really thinking about marketing is not only bringing all this information across our traditional marketing channels, but how are we helping marketers drive organizational change beyond the traditional bounds of even their own marketing department into service, into sales, into on-store, because in reality that's where kind of the next step is. It's not just about, to your point, promotional emails. It's about how are we bringing this experience across the full spectrum. >> So it's really how is first-person data going to drive the role of marketer differently, the tasks of marketing as a consequence, and therefore how we institutionalize that work. >> Absolutely, and I think that you can see this in the investments that we've made in the ODC, Oracle Data Cloud. It's first step, let's start thinking about how we can start moving around on first-party data, that'll be a nice starting point, but then afterwards, how are we taking third-party data let's say from offline purchases, starting to incorporate that and that store's third-party data, 'cause then we really start getting to that simultaneously good experience or at least consistent experience across digital, across in-store, we start piecing together, but we really need to start at that baseline. >> A lot of people have been talking about the convergence of adtech and martech for years, and we had a CUBE alumni on our CUBE many years ago, when the Big Data movement started to happen, and he was a visionary, revolutionary kind of guy, Jeff Hammerbacher, the founder of Cloudera, who's now doing some pioneering work in New York City around science. He's since left Cloudera. But he said on theCUBE what really bothered him was some of the brightest minds in the industry were working on using data and put an ad in the right place. And he was being kind of critical of, use it for cooler things, but we look at what's happening on martech side, when you have customer experience, that same kind of principle of predictive thinking around how to use an asset can be applied to the customer journey, so now you bring up the question of A.I. If you broaden the scope of adtech and martech to say all things consumer, in any context, at any given time, you got to have an A.I. or machine learning approach to put the right thing at the right place at the right time that benefits the user >> Austin: It's not scalable. That's the reality of it. To you point, if you're going to start thinking about this across all these different channels, including advertising as well, the idea of being able to do these on a one-off basis, from a manual perspective, it's completely untenable, you're completely correct, but to that point, where you're talking about the best minds in the industry maybe dedicated to figuring out, "if I put a little target here, am I going to get somebody to click on that ad one time, or how am I placing it," that is very much the way that we were at the very beginning parts of marketing technology, where it was bash and blast messaging, how can we just kind of get the clicks and the engagement, and how do we send out >> John: spray and pray >> Exactly. And now I think that we are getting to a much more nuanced understanding of the way that we advertise because it's much more reliant on context, it's not just how can I get my stuff in front of somebody's eyeballs, it's how am I placing it when they're actually showing some sort of intention for maybe the products I already have. >> Adaptive intelligence is interesting to me because what that speaks to is, one, being adapted to a real time, not batch, spray and pray and the old methodology of database-driven things, no offense to the main database cache at Oracle, but it's a system of record, but now new systems of data are available, and that seems to be the key message here, that the customer experience is changing, multiple channels, that's omnichannel, there needs to be ... everyone's looking for the silver bullet. They think it's A.I., augmented intelligence or artificial intelligence. How do you see that product roadmap looking, because you're going to need to automate, you're going to need to use software differently to handle literally real time. >> Completely. I think that this is a really important distinction about the way that we view A.I. and how it factors into marketing technology and the way that I think a lot of people in the industry do. I think that once again this theme of there aren't easy answers to hard problems, it is very pleasant to think that I'm just going to have one product that's going to solve everything, from when I should send my next email, to if there's clean water in this particular area in a third-world country, and that's just something that maybe sounds nice, but it's not necessarily something that's actually tangible. The way that we view A.I. is it's something that's going to be embedded and actually built into each of these different functions so that we can do the mission-critical things on the actual practical level, and kind of make it real for marketers, make it something that's isn't just "oh, buy this and it will solve all your problems." >> So I'm going to ask you the question, the old adage, "Use the right tool for the right job, and if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail." A lot of people use email marketing that way, they're using it for notifications when in reality that's not the expectation of the consumer, some are building in a notification engine separate from email. All that stuff's kind of under the covers, in the weeds, but the bigger question to you is, I want to get your insight on this because you're talking to customers all the time, is as customers as you said need to change organizationally, they're essentially operationalizing this modern era of CX, customer experience, so it's a platform-based concept which pretty much everyone agrees on, but we're in the early innings of operationalizing this >> Austin: Oh yeah. >> So how do you see that evolving and what do you want customers to do to be set up properly if they're coming in for the first inning of their journey, or even if they're midstream with legacy stuff? >> I think that that's a really good perspective, because you don't want to necessarily force people to go through excruciating organizational change in preparation if we're in maybe the first inning, but it is really just about setting up the organization to adjust as realistically we get into the middle innings and into the later innings. And really the kind of beginning foundation of this is understanding that these arbitrary almost like tribal distinctions between who owns what channel, who's the email marketer, or who's the mobile person, they need to be broken down, and start thinking about things instead of these promotional blasts to your point, or even maybe reactionary notifications. How is this contributing to the number of times your brand is touching me in a day, or the way that I'm actually communicating, so I think that it's an interesting kind of perspective of how we were organizationally set up for that, but the short answer is that A.I. is going to fundamentally change the way that marketers are operating. It's not going to fundamentally change maybe everything that they're doing or it's not going to be replacing it. It's going to be a complementary role that they need to be ready to adjust to. >> So you are, you're in product, product management. >> Austin: Product marketing >> Product marketing. So you are at that interface between product and marketing, both moving more towards agile. How are you starting to use data differently and how would you advise folks like you in other businesses not selling software that might not have the same digital component today but might have a comparable digital component in the future, what would you tell them to do differently? >> So, I think that the first step is to actually have an honest assessment of what we have and what we don't have. I think that there's a lot of people who like to kind of close their eyes or maybe plug their ears and just sort of continue down the path of least resistance. >> Peter: Give me ... >> Oh, an honest assessment of what kind of data we do have today, what kind of data we might actually need, and then most importantly, is that actually feasible data to get. Because you can't >> you can wish it but you can't get it >> You can wave a magic wand and say these are the numbers that I need on this particular maybe interest level of these particular ... >> John: The fatal flaw is hoping that you're going to get data that you never get, or is ungettable. >> Or, this is really something that I think a lot, would resonate more with marketers is that we have now set up all these different points of interaction that are firehoses of data spraying it at me, I may be able to retroactively look at it and maybe garner some kind of insight, but there's just no real way for me to take that and make it actionable right away. It is a complete mess of data in a lot of these organizations. >> And that's where A.I. comes in. >> Austin: Absolutely. It's able to automate that, reaction ... >> Peter: Triage at a bare minimum. >> Correct >> So the first starts with data. What would be the second thing? >> So it's data, presume that you're going to need help on the triage and organizing that data. Is there a third thing? >> I would say that you're going down the right path with the steps there, but once again, we're all talking about these concepts that do require a great deal of specialization and a lot of actual understanding of the way we're dealing with data. So honest assessment is definitely that first part, but then do I have the actual people that I need in order to actually take action on this? Because it is a specialized kind of role that really hasn't traditionally been within marketing organizations. >> I know you guys have a big account-based, focus-account-based marketing, you know, doing all kinds of things, but I'm a person, I'm not a company, so that's a database saying "hey, what company do you work for?" And all the people who work for that company and their target list. I'm a person. I'm walking around, I've got a wearable, I might be doing a retail transaction, so the persona base seems to be the rage and seems to be the center and we heard from Mark Hurd's keynote, that's obviously his perspective and others as well so it's not like a secret, but how do you take it to the next level? An account base could help there too, but you need to organize around the person, and that seems to open up the identity question of okay, how do I know it's John? >> I think that goes beyond just personal taste, but into what does this person actually do at this company, because I can go in and give a headspinning presentation to maybe a C-level executive and say, "look at all this crazy stuff you can do," and meanwhile the guy who might be making the buying decision at the end of the table's looking at that and being like, "there's no way we can do that, we don't have the personnel to do that, there's no chance," and you have already dissension from the innards of the actual people who are making the buying decisions. The vision can't be so big that it resonates with no one. And you need to understand on a persona level what is actually resonated with them. 'Cause feasibility is a very important thing to our end user, and we need to actually incorporate that into our messaging, so it's not just so pie-in-the-sky visioning. >> I did a piece of research, sorry John, I did a piece of research a number of years ago that looked at the impact of selling mainly to the CIO. And if you sell successfully to the CIO, you can probably guarantee nine months additional time before the sale closes. >> Austin: Yeah. Because the CIO says "this is a great idea," and then everybody in the organization who's now responsible for doing it says "hold on, don't put this in my KPIs while I take a look at it and what it really means and blah blah blah. Don't make me responsible for this stuff." You just added nine months. >> Absolutely. I even have a very minute example for something that we rolled out. This was a great learning opportunity. Because we rolled out a feature called multi-variant testing. It's not important what exactly it is for the purposes of this, but basically it's the idea of you can take one email and eight versions of it, test it, and then send out the best one. Sounds great, right? I'm an executive, I'm like boy, I'm going to get every last ounce of revenue from my emails, I'm only going to send out the best content. If you don't pitch that right, the end user, all they hear is wait, the thing that I do one of, I have to create eight of now? Am I going to get to see my kids ever again? That's just the way you have to adjust ... >> And seven of 'em are going to be thrown away. I'm going to be called a failure. >> Exactly. So it's just not something that you can take for granted because marketers have a variety of different roles and a variety of firm responsibilities. >> And compound that with everything's going digital. >> Exactly. >> So (mumbles) Austin, great to have you on theCUBE. Spend the last minute though, I'd like you just to share for the last minute, what's the most important thing happening here at #ModernCX besides the simplicity of the messaging of modern era of customer expectations, experiences, all that's really awesome, but what should people know about that aren't here, watching. >> I'd just say that the one thing that at least resonates most with me, and this is once again coming from a product and sort of edging on marketing, is that the things that we've been talking about with not only A.I. but even just simple things like having systems that are communicating to each other, they're actually real and we're seeing that as real. You can actually see them working together in products and serving up experiences to customers that we're even doing now as part of the sales process and saying "hey, this is how you would actually do this," as opposed to just "here's our Chinese menu of different options. Pick what you want and then we can just kind of serve it up." Because I think that there's something that's very heartening to maybe marketers who have a little bit of, I don't know, doubt about whether or not this is real. It is real, it's here today, and we're able to execute on it. >> And that's the integration of a multi-product and technology solution. >> I would almost say that it's slightly different from that though, in terms of, it's not just integration of these pieces, it's integration that's pre-built, so we actually have it pre-built together and then we also have these tremendous, new, innovative features and functionality that are coming with those integrations. It's not just portability, it's actual use cases. >> Would you say that it's as real as the data? >> It's as real as the data. I think that that's ... >> If you have the data, then you can do what you need to do. >> That's a very, a very good point. >> Austin Miller, Product Marketing Director at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Thanks for sharing the data here on theCUBE where we're agile, agile marketing is the focus. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. More coverage from day one at Mandalay Bay for Oracle Modern Customer Experience show. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (bright, lively music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Las Vegas, It's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (techno beats) >> Hello everyone, welcome to SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, with flagship programming, we go out to the events, and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, my cohost this week at Oracle Modern Customer Experience, in Las Vegas. A lot going on in Las Vegas, at the NAB Show, down the street where the Cube is, also we're here, for the second year in a row at the Oracle Modern Customer Experience, #ModernCX. Tweet at us @theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris. Kicking off two days of wall-to-wall coverage, we have some amazing guests. We have the top executives at Oracle Marketing Cloud, as well as some of their customers, as well as some other guests in the industry. Peter, we've been covering this marketing cloud kind of, as part of the bigger picture of the systems of engagement that is growing out of cloud infrastructure and big data. There's really a collision going on between accelerating applications with infrastructure, powered by the cloud, powered by hybrid cloud, and data's at the center of the value proposition, and literally is the key point in all this. So, I want to get your thoughts, and we talked about this last year, what's different from last year to this year, with Oracle Marketing Customer Experience, from your perspective? >> Well, I think there's three things that are different, John. The first thing that's different is that, the reality of how difficult it is to integrate technology into the marketing function is setting in, in a lot of marketers. So, we're not hearing anymore comments or promises about how marketing expenditure is going to exceed IT expenditures for technology. So, there's a reality set in about, what does it really mean to incorporate technology in the working market? The second thing that's happening is AI. We're going to hear a lot about AI, we're going to hear a lot about these new ways of taking big data and making them more useful to the business, and that's going to have an enormous impact on marketing, for a variety of different reasons. When you talk about next best action, predicting customer experience, prognosticating value propositions, all those other things, AI is going to have a role to play. How fast it gets adopted, we'll see, but we're going to hear a lot about it. >> John: It's interesting, we always talk on the cube here, if you follow the Cube you know, we always kind of, always pontificate on this notion of horizontally-scalable, and we talked about it last year, but there's an era of specialization, that you need to have vertically-oriented into some of these industries. But what's interesting, Pete, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because I was commenting last year at the show that, marketing was always a silo, and Oracle has had a integration strategy that's been kind of horizontal, and the trends in cloud computing and data is horizontal-scalability, with value propositions differentiate at the applications So, this begs the question, what does that mean for marketing in a digital business? If you go digital all the way, from the beginning of the journey to the moment of truth to the customer, sales or conversion, it's all digital, marketing's in every piece of the equation along the way, and that's what Mark Hurd was saying yesterday. >> Peter: Well, customer engagement's in every piece of the equation along the way and then the question is, is marketing going to evolve to become primary in customer engagement? It's not going to be just your direct sales force, customers are going to move amongst different channels. We've heard a lot about on the channel, so, to what role, to what degree will marketing become primary? And the third point I was going to make, John, is related to this, and that is, one of the big changes between this year and last year, is that Oracle has really thrown the tiller over, and tacked towards the cloud. And it's going to be interesting to see whether or not the cloud customer experience story, or the marketing cloud customer experience story, in the cloud, is lining up with the rest of Oracle's cloud story. >> John: It's as with, Don Clien, from our team, who last night in the hallway conversations here, in the Mandalay Bay with the convention, that the conference is happening, it's interesting, we were talking about the role of platforms, and you can't see in the news these days, anything from Facebook's relative to fake news, to some of the killings on Facebook Live, to YouTube and moderating comments, these emergence of platforms has been a very interesting dynamic, but at the end of the day, content needs to have an authentic piece to it. So, you now blending in a marketing and conversion, with customers, we're living in a content world. I'm wearing a wearable, my content is my interface to wherever I am in real time. My experience at the rental car dealership, or wherever I'm at, is going to be all about, the content is not some siloed, "Hey, hello, buy this." It's everything is content-driven. >> Well everything is value-driven, right? And the question is, is the content going to be valuable? And if there's a big, going back to that first point, what's the big issue about marketing? We thought that if we just through technology, we could automate the same ways that marketing is already, always done stuff, but the reality is marketing does a lot of stuff that is not valuable to customers. It may be valuable to the organization or their ways, but it's not valuable to customers. And often it's really annoying, and so marketing has to decide, if in fact they are going to take a primary role in engagement across channel over time, as customers move amongst organizations, then they're going to have to start dedicating themselves to creating content that's valuable to the customer, in the form that the customer needs, when the customer needs it, where the customer needs it. And that's a challenge. >> And the engagement piece is critical, I love that angle, but let's take it to the next level. Every example of marketing cloud or any kind of digital experience use case has data in it. It's data-driven. Even Mark Hurd, on his keynote, talked about his experience at the rental car place, that's data-driven. You got to know, that's the CEO of Oracle. So, this is again, the data is at the center of this. It's flowing through all the apps, and has to be available, has to be real time, this is fundamental. >> Peter: And digital assets are data as well, and applications, when you go back to what computer science says, applications themselves are data. So, increasingly, it's all data. Customers want to be engaged digitally. They want to be able to take their digital experience, whatever channel, the data has to follow them. You have to anticipate what data you're going to generate in the form of content. You have to be able to capture data without annoying them. So, in many respects, John, this all comes down, the challenge for marketing is, how do we capture data without being annoying? How do we provision data in a way that's valuable, so that we increase the view of the brand. >> John: I want to put you on the spot, because I know marketing's a lot of different components to it, but one of the things that everyone in the industry is talking about, is the role that salesforce.com has taken in its SaaS cloud platform, vis-a-vis an app, where you just put your contacts in, and you manage your relationships, and how that's grown and shifted over to being a SaaS platform. And here's the question I want to ask, and get your thoughts on, and just riff here in real time. Back in the old days, analog sales needed a system to provide automation for those sales guys. Boom. Salesforce.com is born. Marketing would provide email marketing and content, here's a package of content, if you're interested, click on it and we'll get you more information. Marketing department sends those leads to the analog sales team. The leads aren't good enough, the leads are crap. Glengarry, Glen Ross kind of thing going on there. Now that's shifted with the digital fabric, end to end, from initiation to moment of truth. Digital. That kind of goes away. So, sales cloud and marketing cloud are blurring, yes or no, what're your thoughts on the role of sales kind of thing, and the marketing piece? >> Well, it all comes down to, and again this is one of the precepts of the whole notion of customer experience, it all comes down to the customer is on a journey to solve a problem, to generate some utility out of the purchase that they're making, whether it's a product or service. They go through discovery process, they go through a buying process, they go through a utilization process. All of that requires engagement. And so the data, and they way you provision your resources, to that customer has to fit naturally in the way the customer does stuff. So one of the reasons why this is blurring is because customers themselves are demanding that they be treated digitally in some coherent manner. Now, institutionally and organizationally, there's still a lot of tensions, as you said, between sales and marketing, and it's not enough to just say we're going to do a marketing cloud because there's marketing budgets, and we're going to do a sales cloud, because the sales budgets, and a product cloud because of product budgets, etc. This has to come together. We have to render this coherently in front of customers, or in front of businesses because businesses have to render themselves coherently in front of customers as they go through their journey. >> Great observation, I would just add that this notion of a platform is an indicator of where the market's going. Certainly we're seeing in the mainstream some things are being tweaked, and Facebook admitted in the New York Times that they're working on it. They're going to work on these things. But let's bring that platform, if what you say is true, which I believe it is, everything has to come together, because it's not one or the other, there's not mutually exclusive. Now, sales guys had the data from the old days, but now it's all digital, so the question is, that shifts the scales, because in the old days, marketing was to provide value to the organization, the enterprise itself, the business value of the enterprise, and that comes from selling something. >> Peter: Right, right, right, right. >> John: And so, to your value point, which I think that this market shifts the value to the marketing team because they have a broader perspective in that journey. Or have more touch points in the engagement of the customer. >> Peter: And that's key. The question is can they be the orchestrator of a coherent and holistic engagement strategy with a customer. >> John: So, I'm a CIO, I'm looking at a complete replatforming. I think that's a better approach than trying to take Salesforce and make it work over here, and if you look at Salesforce, they've done a bunch of different acquisitions, not always kind of tightly coupled, a little bit of awkwardness here, chatter, all these components. Oracle's taking a different approach, they're saying we're going to integrate all this stuff, and you pick and choose. I think, if I'm a CIO, I might want to take a more holistic view from initiation, to moment of truth with the customer, and the lifecycle that journey. There's more marketing touch points in there, so I'm probably designed that way, your thoughts. >> Peter: Well, so, it's interesting John. The whole CRM industry went through an extremely challenging birth. One of the biggest challenges is that, as you said, we used to be analog. Sales people would go on a call, they'd write up a trip report, they'd hand it to and administrator, and the administrator would do the data entry, and we'd get it into the system someway. But the minute you start automating that, now the sales guys are doing data entry. And if you talk to sales organizations today, one of the biggest problems is how much time are my folks doing data entry, how much time are my folks generating content for customers, how much time are they doing all these other things, and not selling, and that's an issue. So, when we think about where this is going to go, at the end of the day, Salesforce has done the best job of presenting CRM to the marketplace, for a variety of different reasons. But it still is a let's capture sales activity kind of a platform. The question is, are we actually going to get to a platform that is truly able to provide coherent, holistic value at the moment that the customer wants it, and that includes delivery. And I think Oracle has an opportunity in all of this. It's to actually utilize their various clouds, to provide a way of engaging customers across the entire journey, because they can do the discovery piece, they can do the sales piece, and they can also do digital products, and digital capabilities anyway, the delivery piece. >> Well, Peter Burris from Wikibon.com, head of research over there. Check out some of the work they're doing with the digital, role of the digital business and assets, digital experiences, they're all assets, whether it's content, engagement, or an experience that someone has, it's all a data asset, it's a digital asset, and that needs to be harnessed and looked at holistically in a way. You got some great research over at Wikibon.com, check it out. I'm John Furrier, here for two days at Oracle Modern Customer Experience Show. Should be great, really cutting edge stuff, really as the world replatforms in the cloud, content and experiences will be fundamental, and data's at the center of it. We'll bring you all the coverage here. We'll be right back with more great coverage after this short break. (techno beats)

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

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

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle modern customer experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (electronic music fades away) Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern Customer Experience Conference. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris with theCUBE and our next guest is Brian Curran, Vice President of Strategy and Design with Oracle Cloud. Great to have you on theCUBE. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So you're a design and strategy person you've been the art and science of designing experiences. Not so much in the technology, Vasas Port, Vasas Server and yet innovation is the number one thing people talk about in the digital transformation certainly that's happening. But it's hard when you have all those Legacy stuff process, people, well that guy does that, that's his job over there and this guy runs it over there, so that's all coming together as we were talking about on our intro, Peter and I were talking about that. How do you get at the innovation when you engage with customers? When you walk in the door? >> It's funny. It's still a dirty word in companies innovation, right? I mean people are scared of it because the fancy word is innovation. The real word is change. And now you want to make changes in an organization and it's scary for people. And what I really do is I try to spend time with them trying to get them to understand that this is an art and a science. The science part is usually where you start first because I'm trying to get them to kind of go through the discipline of what it takes to do that. And it's really about getting the right people involved in that. And so I really try to spend my time saying look, let's find something really small to go work on, let's find a little problem that maybe you have and let me show you the art and science of getting from that understanding of the customer need all the way to hey I've got to wait to actually solve that will drive results for your business. >> It's interesting, the psychology of the customer is under a lot of stress, because as you said, it's a dirty word, innovation, because it means change but now it's interesting with Cloud you're seeing some of these technologies out there there's more pressure on top of that, it'speed they have to do it faster, so now you have a speed game going on and then agility and all these things people are seeing as use cases that okay, people are getting things right, but what do I do? And this is a lot of pressure for them. How does that add to the complication when you get to come in and say okay, we've got to change we've got to do it fast. You're roles might change. How do you take that? How do you walk through that? >> Well, first of all when you talk about the trends and the changes, what it's driving is these increased expectations so customers are dealing with an Amazon then they're coming back to another brand saying hey, how come you're experience is not like Amazon? So companies feel that pressure right now and they realize they can't wait six months, 12 months to go make the change, they've got to make it in six weeks or 12 weeks and so one of the things I'm a big believer is in rapid prototyping, get your point to a test where you can actually get it out in the market. So how do you frame something to really understand it in a couple days? How do you ideate in a couple days? How do you get everyone to understand what you're trying to do in a couple days and eventually get to a point where maybe five or six weeks, boy you're driving at that point. But the old days of going, hey, let's have a big strategy session and then we'll come through stuff in three to six months and nine months from now by then you're out of business. So we're really focused on trying to get people to understand it is about speed, it is about understanding and get to that point. >> But it comes back to the customer. Ultimately the design point is what experience do you want the customer to have with you. >> Correct. So in many respects the challenge is the customer does things and in a B2B setting they do things with a lot of other folks in their organization and they do things with the seller. In a B2C sense it's by themselves but they do things and they move through different context, what they do together. How do you help companies get focused on that singular element, it's what the customer is trying to do and how you want them to invite you to do it with them? >> To me, there's adjurity, right? There's a step-by-step process that the customer goes through in order to fulfill their need. And so it is about understanding that interaction that engagement and determining whether you're actually meeting the customer's need at that moment. Do you understand the context, do you understand the expectations, do you have all of the things that you need in order to understand that moment? But once you've chosen that moment, now what you're really focused on is the value equation. How do I fulfill that need in a way, drive that experience, that perception, that changes the customer's attitude so they think differently. That ultimately drives a different behavior from the customer that leads to a result that's different for the business. So businesses need to understand that value equation. Your job, number one job, is to fulfill customers needs. And I'm not talking about just the end need, but the need at every single moment along that life-cycle. And if you can understand and fulfill that need you can understand how to deliver results. Then it's just about plugging that formula in to get that done. >> So the question that I have for a lot of design folks, and it's kind of a big question but it ties back into some of the trends we're talking about. The Cloud, which is this thing that presumably allows companies to be in a lot of different places with at least a digital presence has been instrumental in presenting services to the communities to a lot of communities in new ways. >> Brian: Yes. >> To what degree do you think The Cloud and design thinking are reinforcing each other. By that I mean design thinking gets the business to focus on what's the value in use and The Cloud is presented as a service, not as a product. So is the design thinking The Cloud helping to move us from thinking about products to the services that they provide overall? >> Yeah, I would say design thinking first came out to actually drive product design but now it's starting to drive experiential design. The thing about The Cloud is that I can quickly go from rapid prototyping to putting it right in front of customers where before, using Legacy, armed premise capability, it would take me months to stand up something that I wanted to go do. So I think we're at the beautiful time for design, right? Is that all the disciplines around design the ability to really understand the customer to have that empathetic understanding to actually design experiences that are very relevant to that customer. But now to be able to actually take that experience and go multi-variant, AB tested immediately, not months from now but days from now and to get that learning, because part of great design thinking is not just the first generation, when I think design thinking I'm also thinking service design, lean, agile so I get the ability to take my minimal viable experience, not minimal viable product, get it in the market very quickly, get the learning from that, come back and make that iteration, put it back out on the market again So The Cloud allows you to do that on the fly where before you couldn't drive at that kind of speed. >> Talk about the commitment level, because that's a commit they have to make organizationally to iterate >> To fail? Well, to be ready for the iteration because you're throwing something out there that's also, I mean some people just got to get over, hey, the parachute will open. >> Brian: Yes. Kind of get over that fear and then once they're there they have to commit, they can't just leave it there. How do you walk through that with the customer because that to me, I think, is the trend that I see. Maybe it's different across different customers but the same organizational commitment. >> You've got to stop thinking about projects and you've got to start thinking about learning and engaging and so for me the process is really about going, hey, can I design something, can I actually test it very quickly, can I learn, and learn to me is fail. I mean I was involved in building the first Apple store. I will tell you the first Apple store was a complete failure (laughing) and it was the best learning that Apple could ever get in order to be able to use to build the next store, which was a much more successful piece. You have to build that in your DNA that says, if I'm fast then I can actually reduce my risk I can get to a point where I actually, be able to >> Yeah. learn very quickly and that I can go make that change come into place. >> That's great. I've got to ask you a question in terms of the customers because this is awesome you have a lot of experience with the customers. What's the pattern that emerges as you go out and look at the transformational heroes out there that are taking the transformation from the evolution of that? Is there a pattern that emerges, they kind of get nervous at first, then they snap in line here, and then things kind of happen. Can you share what you've seen as a pattern? >> So the pattern for innovators is usually they're just a little off-center and they have a little less fear than the rest of us about losing their job the next day and they're so passionate about what they want to do, they're willing to actually kind of push the envelope. What I find is that's the innovator. That's the guy. And by the way, usually not up high, usually down around the middle of the company. Now when they run into someone who will, on high also, is passionate about the change but not sure how to do it when the two of them come into combination, that innovator whose passionate, and that leader who understands they need to build that DNA, what I find is when those two come together, that is the pattern for success. So bottom's up, top's down innovation is really what works the best. I also find that the people who actually embrace discipline, embrace design thinking, embrace all of those aspects, but also have the arty kind of, hey, let's try some new things, let's be willing to kind of put our nose out there >> Yeah. I find the stodgy people who are not willing to make the change are the ones who actually just get stuck and we've seen those companies all go out of business, right? So the people who are willing to be leading-edge what's great is, though, if you see really great leaders, >> John: Yeah. they're also willing to be credible and authentic and get in front of audiences to say, "I designed this, it was a failure. >> Yeah. "I'm willing to actually now go do the next thing." And we see this from great leaders >> Yeah. from Starbucks on, that way I tried to do a bar in Starbucks and actually it didn't work, so we're going to go on to something else. >> Doesn't it also, I mean I agree with you totally, Brian having studied this a lot myself over the years. But it also means data. That you have to build measurement into everything >> Yes. Because the innovator doesn't get acknowledged or recognized by the leader if there isn't some data that >> Correct transmits message. You don't realize you're failing if you don't have data that alerts you early, before you double-down and triple-down, and quadruple-down on a bad idea. So how does the science of design thinking come into play here, because it's the designing-in, the measurements, the changes that become so crucial to actually moving us from just a good idea into something that actually manifests change. >> To me, the value equation is the first thing you work on, right? Which is the math. I need to understand the customer's needs and I need to understand the results that you're getting to. So I need to understand the attitudinal, the behavioral, the operational, the executional, all of those measurements so financial measurements, customer measurements, all those pieces. That data's crucial. I don't start, by the way, on any innovation projects until we have current-state understanding of that. The design is actually about how do I get that moving? How do I get that attitudinal, behavioral, operational, executional, financial movement by the design of what I'm doing. So data actually becomes more crucial. What's great too, about The Cloud, is that I actually have more access to data that I didn't have access to before and the data's in the hands of the innovator, not some other group I don't have to wait >> Right. a long time for analysis so I can literally go, here's our current state, let me go do A, B, multi-variant testing, wow, I got this change right here. Look at the pattern of behavior that I'm getting from customers. Now I say, okay, that's working, we will eventually get the results. And the fear for businesses in some cases, they need the financial result immediately, but now what we can say is actually, if you watch this track of behavior, you'll eventually get to the results. So if you're getting the behavioral change, you're actually >> With risk management to headed in the right direction. >> To your other point so there's also a piece of don't just jump to where's the ROI? >> Correct. (laughs) >> To, no, you're going to get there. >> Well we're talking about things like advocacy and retention and loyalty, well these are long-term behavioral things so you actually have to even go even further up and start measuring attitudinal, am I getting the movement for customers of how they talk about our brand and how they talk about engagement. That will eventually lead to the behaviors that I want, will eventually lead to results. So there is a leap of faith here >> Yes. that says if you understand the formula you should be able to actually drive the outcome by understanding the pieces across the formula. >> Well the good news is that by doing a better job of measurement, by having a discipline approach and think about design, how it leads innovation and getting leadership in place, you actually look at risk management as a way of thinking about what options am I going to buy in the future by failing now. >> Brian: Right. So I've learned something that says, well so now that group of options we're pairing-off. We still have this group of options. Let's pursue this group of options and when something didn't work, let's pair these options off >> Brian: Correct. And each time the risk of movement, of action goes down. >> Well the speed of it does too. >> Peter: Exactly. So time actually costs money, right? >> Right. And so if I can make quick bets, I can test them very quickly and I can determine what I should scale and what I should not scale. It's actually cheaper to de-risk that piece that way. >> Yeah, this is an interesting point you guys bring up the psychology and the DNA of the innovator. Whether it's the person in the trenches, who gets the data and makes the discovery and the innovation to the executive. But one area that we've seen is, and certainly this is always talked about at the conferences and stages, the No Manager. They're looking for ways to say no. >> Brian: Right. Then there's the guy who's looking to get to the yes. >> Brian: Yes. Take me through your experience on that, because you have to get to yes. >> Correct You have to find that person that's looking for yes. >> Correct. (laughs) In our process, by the way, we go from framing to ideating to share. And in share we believe that showcasing is really important. The ability to actually put your idea in front of someone the right way. But when people say, "No." They spell it N-O and I always spell it K-N-O-W, right? Most cases a leader is saying no because they don't actually have enough information. >> Yes. So if you framed, you really understand the customer and you've done a really good job of ideating, and you're really putting some proof of concepts together and getting them validated internally and externally and you've done the disciplined work >> John: Yeah. by the time you get to a decision, you should be able to give enough of that K-N-O-W >> Yeah to get that leader to move in the direction. >> John: Yeah, because they're looking for information, they're looking to learn. >> Peter: Which means you want an informed yes. >> Brian: Correct. Because if you don't get the informed yes, you're not getting the leader. You're really not getting the leader >> Brian: Correct. You're getting rubber-stamping >> But leaders ask great questions, right? >> and that's not what you want. >> Peter: That's right. >> And they're looking for other people to have the answers and they want to make sure that they went through the process, so when you bring me and ROI model, I want to say, well how did you put this together? How do you know that actually is going to get increased? And I back them up to well, wait a minute, here's the customer's attitude and here's the behavior and here's how I measured them. Okay, how do you know it's going to cost this much? I went through every activity, resource, partner, I've determined what I believe it's going to take. If you're doing the disciplined work, along with the artwork, you have a much better chance of actually getting things done. The other piece too, is that by the time you go to execute, even if you were wrong, you had so many measurements in place, that you're able to make those tweaks and iterations or decide to kill the innovation quick enough. So for leaders I'm saying don't make scale-decisions. Make test-decisions. Make very small, little bets, very quick, rapid prototyping and then make scale-decisions based-off of those tests. Now you've de-risked the whole process. >> Well you get clear visibility on what will the fly-wheel be for the scale, get the visibility on the metrics and unit economics or whatever >> Exactly. Alright, so final question since we have to wrap-up is what's the coolest thing that you've seen or been involved with of a customer? It could be an ah-ha moment, it could be you walked into a train wreck and you cleaned it up, or a big discovery or a big innovation. >> So I try not to share too many of the individual customers that I'm working with but I'll give you a story, it was in the Middle East, a customer that I'm working with, they were looking at, it's a communications company, they were looking at their bundling process of how do I sell wireless and broadband at the same time. So after going through the whole customer ethnography work and framing it, they realized that what they were doing is actually selling two silos that didn't make any sense. The customer just wanted connectivity. They didn't care whether it was broadband or wireless or anything, so they started thinking differently, which was maybe we should step back from this and actually stop trying to bundle or special-pricing based-off of the bundle, let's just sell connectivity. Let's just do away with the whole thought process, that it's actually two different things. >> John: And it worked? >> They're in the process of actually >> so they simplify it. going through that design. >> I thought you might say, "Well, here's how the American companies do it. Do it the exact opposite." (laughter) >> Yeah, because let's face it the process is not right but they actually got to the point, and by the way, we didn't come in with, okay, here's the idea that you should go do >> yeah they came to a conclusion that said, it's not unified billing, it's unified delivery of fulfilling the need. The customer's need is not broadband and wireless. The customer's need is connectivity. >> John: Yeah. If that's the need, we should be fulfilling that and not thinking about the duck below the water, whether that's broadband or this and that. >> That's a great point. A lot of companies just stay in their product lanes and say, "Buy the products." not what they want. >> Brian: Correct. >> Peter: Focus on the service. Alright. >> Brian: Correct. Alright, Brian Curran here inside theCUBE really laying-out some great insight into the design thinking, the role of the innovator, the role of organization. Congratulations on all your work, great insight here on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thanks for sharing the data, we learned a lot >> thanks for having me. We're going to iterate more with great interviews coming up from Oracle Modern Customer Experience after this short break. (electronic music)