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