>> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's the CUBE, covering Empowering the Autonomous Enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Everybody welcome back to the CUBE, I'm Dave Vellante. We're covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting specifically focused on really what is, what I consider a rebirth from really staff augmentation to a much more strategic partner for customers. And with me to explore that a little bit is Sherry Lautenbach. She's the Senior Vice President of Cloud Key Accounts at Oracle, and we're also joined by Pat Mungovan, who's a Group VP for the North American Cloud Strategy also at Oracle. Folks welcome to the CUBE, thanks for comin' on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Yeah, thanks for havin' us. >> You're welcome. So Sherry, you're out talkin' to customers a lot, and I'm curious as to what that conversation is like specifically as it relates to consulting. Are you bringing Oracle Consulting now into the conversation? What's that conversation like? >> Absolutely, in fact every conversation we have relating to our cloud strategy, Oracle Consulting is part and parcel to that. And they are not staff augmentation, they are actually the digital transformation arm of what we do around cloud. So it's been really interesting to see what they've been able to do in terms of changing the narrative of what we do at Oracle, from just a software company to really transforming to a cloud provider. >> Strategy, obviously a fundamental part of any customer interaction, but what are you seeing? What underscores customer strategies? What are the business drivers for them right now? What are the catalysts that are driving their technology spending decision? >> I think a lot of it depends upon, especially in the times that we're in now, depends upon the industry that they're in, but most importantly, what we're seeing is right now is durability. So we want to make sure that the customers have, you know our Oracle customers and others, have an opportunity to have a disaster recovery, business continuity. In this stage right now it's less about expansion per se, unless they're in an industry that's uniquely positioned for that, and more about durability of the overall strategy. So when we look at that durability, we think about kind of two core missions. We think about sort of back office operations and continuity, and then we think about transformational revenue generation, and so when we partner with OCS, we want to make sure that we have both of those concepts in mind. >> You know we have a lot of talk about, in our community, about cloud first, and I think Oracle has sort of put forth the gauntlet of look we're leading now with cloud. You both have cloud in your title, but obviously being cloud first is more than that. Sherry, I wonder if you could talk about your customers in your cloud journey and share with us and kind of convince us that you are cloud first. >> I joined Oracle about 11 months ago, was in the industry for about 25 years, and I joined specifically because I believe in what Oracle is doing around this cloud journey. We are in our second generation of cloud capabilities and that's purposeful. And we do that because we realize that where cloud started and where we are today are two totally different things, and so we have capabilities around security, viability, extensions with autonomous that other cloud providers just simply don't have. And we built these from the ground up to ensure that we can run Oracle workloads, databases, and applications far better than any other cloud provider. So it's a super exciting time to be at Oracle, and it's absolutely fascinating what our customers are doing to adopt our technology. >> Pat, I want to ask you a sort of similar question, how fundamental is cloud to organization strategies, obviously everybody has a cloud strategy, but I'm specifically asking as it relates to mission critical workloads because, let's face it, that's been the hardest to move into the cloud. So when you're out talking to customers about their strategy, and obviously dovetailing it to Oracle's strategy, how do you align those? >> So first I think I would respond in the following way. When I think about our portfolio, I don't necessarily say cloud first, I say customer first, and I really want the customer to make a decision based upon a deployment model that makes sense for that particular customer, whether it's a regulated industry, or the public sector, or you know any sort of compliance considerations. So Oracle is one of the very few enterprise-class cloud Providers that has obviously on-premise capabilities as well, and so 99% of the cases that we see, with the exception of some of the sort of startup S and B type folks that are born in the cloud, we're dealing with the hybrid cloud model anyway. And so that's kind of the first order of priority is what's right for the customer and let's make sure that we get the appropriate deployment model for that customer. In terms of enterprise, essentially the workloads that we have, whether it's cloud or on prem, are enterprise workloads, and those are kind of separated into two buckets. One would be core mission, sort of the revenue generation side, and one would be mission critical, sort of the back office side. So Oracle is historically tremendous at the back office side, you know, running finance, running operations, running the supply chain, you know, doing those things that are mission critical. On the core mission side, that's really where we're starting to focus now, which is getting out into the revenue generation, the mission of the entity, with things like high performance computing and making sure that we have an ability to support our customers on both sides of the spectrum. >> All right Sherry, why are customers wanting to put mission critical workloads in the cloud? Is it the same sort of cloud agility and cost, et cetera, et cetera? I mean, why not just leave it on prem and keep it protected and maybe spend a little bit more? What's the driver for moving mission critical workloads into the cloud? >> Well, I think it's dependent upon what the initiatives are in the company, right? If they're looking for cost reduction are the looking for top line growth, are they looking for different capabilities around security that the cloud can provide? The great thing about what we do is we have optimized all of our workloads, both our database and our applications, into our cloud, so we're providing additional capabilities, but we're also saving a lot of money. So we say all the time that, you know, put us to the test, let us quantify what we would look like in the cloud with our workloads versus a competitor, and we will guarantee that we'll save you a lot of money. So I think that a lot of it has to do with one, it starts with essentially cost reduction but then they start seeing additional business value driven out of and back to Oracle Consulting. What Oracle Consulting provides in terms of the business value in the cloud is transformative for our customers. >> Talk about kind of how you lead in these customer conversations. >> Right, well normally our entry point is one, understanding what the business drivers are, right. It has to be a business led discussion. It really isn't a technology starter point, right? It really is around what business problems are you trying to solve and how can we help you solve them? And because we know your environments, we know what databases are deployed and where they're deployed, what Oracle applications you're leveraging to run your business, we can, I think, successfully position ourselves very, very competitively against other cloud providers. And I think that has been something that has resonated incredibly well with our customers and in fact, our largest customer. >> Yeah, so it seems like Oracle Consulting is an important ingredient as part of that strategy 'cause again, if it was, you know, five years ago, and it was just staff augmentation that's really not a compelling conversation to have with customers. But if you can come in with a mindset of strategic partner, you're bringing in Deloitte, we've been talking to some of their professionals about the Elevate Program with Oracle, that's a nice lever that you're, you can take advantage of. >> Absolutely, and in fact, we've seen that that is a huge opportunity for us because one, the partnership with Deloitte is incredibly strategic. But we also partner with other companies like Accenture and DXC and IBM candidly, and Oracle, Oracle Consulting is incredibly flexible in terms of what kind of partnerships and alignment they have with our customers and it's really based on what the customer preference is. >> It's not just about, you know, feature, function, speeds and feeds, maybe you could address that. And where does Oracle Consulting fit in that equation? >> We firmly believe that every customer is going to want to have a different option for what they do in the cloud and based on the provider. So we one, we've partnered with Microsoft, and we actually can interconnect our clouds together to provide that kind of flexibility to our customers, and Oracle Consulting is a key component of that. To engage our customers and talk about our Microsoft integration, our partnership, Oracle Consulting is the arm that does that work for us. So we are seeing them come up, come about in a much different way, and in a way that's differentiated between other consulting staff augmentation firms. >> I want to end on growth Pat, and maybe talk about everyone wants cloud, Cloud is the growth business. You look at Oracle's business, you know, everybody's business, this cloud is growing. Everything else is either hanging on or declining, so it's all about growth. How do you drive growth? What is cloud's role in terms of the growth strategy? And maybe add some color to that narrative. >> From a product perspective, I think we're sort of a luxury of riches around the autonomous capabilities with the (mumbles). So that's something that's incredibly unique to Oracle, you know, the autonomous database and all the autonomous services that we're rolling out. And that autonomous gets back to what we talked about earlier around security, around performance, around scalability and all these things so that ultimately we're positioning the capabilities of the future, but we're positioning them today. So we're a market leader in this space, you know, not only is the Oracle database, as you pointed out, the market leader, we're market leader in ERP Cloud and a bunch of the SAS series. But this autonomous segment of the market is crucial for us and crucial to our growth. >> Yeah, it really is an enabler, and what I've been saying is that it's almost compulsory for Oracle to participate and compete in the cloud because it gives you that automation and that scale. But you're talking about also setting up, you know, some future advantages of being able to take advantage of data, the combination of data, AI, and cloud is the new superpower within the industry. Sherry, I want to end on you. 11 months in at Oracle, let's say things work out great, you're here two, three, four years down the road, you look back, what does success look like? >> Success looks like every one of our customers moving to the Oracle cloud and seeing incredible business value from that partnering with Oracle Consulting. That's what my success criteria is. >> Guys, well listen, thanks for so much for coming on the CUBE where we've been tracking this transformation of Oracle Consulting. And one of the things that's very clear, is Oracle is obviously serious about cloud, but also seriously about bringing in new talent and new skill sets to really not only transform Oracle but help transform your customers. So thank you for your time, I really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much. >> Yep you bet, thank you. >> All right and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time.