>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought-leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. We're really excited to have Wim Coekaerts in, he is the senior vice-president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's great to have you on, and, you know I often say I wish we were face-to-face but if we were you'd have to cut off my tie, cause developers and ties just don't go together. >> No, I know, and this is my normal outfit, so this is me wherever I go. Hi again, good to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. So, of course, you know a lot of people are confused about Oracle, and open-source, they say "Oracle? Open-source? What is that all about?" But I think you're misunderstood. People don't, first of all, realize you as the leader of the software-development community inside of Oracle, I mean, you've been involved in Linux since the early 90s. But you guys have a lot of committers, you do a lot. I want to talk about that. What is up with Oracle, and open-source? >> Ah, well, it's a broad question. So, you know, a couple of things. One is, we have many different areas within the company that are dealing with open-source. So we have the cloud team doing a lot of stuff around cloud SDKs and support for different languages like Python and Go, and of course Java and so forth, so they do a lot around ensuring that the Oracle ecosystem is integrated in the open-source tools that customers use, or developers use, Terraform companies and so forth. And then you have the Java team, and so forth. Java is open-source and then the Graal project, GraalVM which is a polyglot compiler that can run Java, and Python, and Javascript and so forth together in one. VM do really cool optimizations, that's an open-source project, also on GitHub. There's of course MySQL, which is along with Java, they're probably the two most popular and widely used open-source projects out there. There's VirtualBox which is of course also a very popular project that's open-source. There's all the work we do around Linux. And I think one of the things is that, when you have so many different areas, doing things that are for that area, then as a developer or as a customer, you typically just deal with that group. And what you see is, oh you're talking to the Java developers, so you know what's going on around Java. The Java developers might not necessarily say, "Oh well we also do MySQL, and we do Linux and VirtualBox and so forth," and so you get a rather myopic, narrow view of the larger company. When you add all these things up, and there will be one big slide that says "This is Oracle, these are all these open source projects," and there's multiple ways. One is, we have projects that we've open-sourced and all the code came from us and we made it publicly available, we're the main contributor and we get contributions back. There are other projects where we contribute to third-party in terms of enhancing things, like I said with the Cloud Team, and then in general something like Linux where we're part of an external project and we participate in development of that project at large. And so there's these three different ways, when you count up all the developers that we have that deal with open-source on a daily basis. And in terms of contributions, in terms of bug fixes, testing, and so forth, it's thousands, literally, full-time paid developers. And of course, all the projects are all either on GitHub or similar sites that are very popular. So yeah, I think the misunderstood is probably a lack of knowledge of the breadth of what we do. And, you know, our primary goal is to provide services and products to customers, and so the open-source part is sort of embedded in a development methodology. But that's not something we sell or market separately, we just work with customers and products and services, and so in some cases it's not well-understood. >> Yeah. Well, we're talking of course, we're talking about the state of the penguin, I think it's important for people to understand, Oracle got into the Linux game in the 90s, maybe the latter part of the 90s and Oracle, of course, wants to make Linux-- wants to make Oracle, it's applications and database run better on Linux, but as you're pointing out, your Linux distro, full support, end-to-end, thousands of people in your open-source community, and the contributions that you make to Linux, many if not most, they go upstream, everybody can benefit from those, but of course you want an Oracle distro that is going to make Oracle stuff run better, that's always kind of been the Oracle way. >> Well, so, yes, two things though. One is, so everything we do is upstream. So we have no Linux patches that are not contributed upstream; There's no proprietary code in Oracle Linux at all, it's all completely open, publicly available: the source code, the change log, all the commits, it's fully open and public, which sometimes is not well-understood, but it's completely open. And, everything we do in terms of feature development or functionality or bug fixes goes upstream to the Linux kernel mail-list. It's actually, it's the only way to be able to manage a Linux distribution and be a Linux vendor is to live in that eco-system. Otherwise, the cost of maintaining your own fork, so to speak, is very high and it doesn't really solve the problem. Now, the functionality we work on obviously is focused on making Oracle products run better, making Oracle Cloud run better, and so forth. However, again, what's important to understand, though, is an Oracle database is a program running on an operating system. It does IO, it does networking, it deals with memory management, lots of processing. So, for the most part, the things that we work on to improve that helps everyone out, right? It helps every other database run better, or helps every other language run better. So none of these changes are specific to Oracle, they're just things that we found doing performance benchmarks and testing and so forth, where we say "Hey, if Linux did the following, it would make boot-up faster. Now boot-up has nothing to do with the database. But our customers run on 1-terabyte, 4-terabyte, 8-terabyte systems, and so booting up, and Linux starting up, and cleaning up memory takes a long time. So we want to reduce that from an availability point of view. So here, we're now talking about just enterprise for you. So there's this broad set of things we work on that definitely help us, but they're actually really completely generic and help everyone out. >> Yeah, that's great. So I wanted to kind of get that out of the way and help our audience understand that. So let's get into it a little bit; What are you seeing, what's going on in IT, pick your observation space and your vision of what you see happening out there. >> Well, you know, it's very interesting, it's sort of, there's two... there's sort of two worlds, right, there's the cloud world and the move to cloud, and there's the on-premises world, where people run their systems on their own. And, one of the things that we've learned is, when you talk about machine-learning, obviously, is something that's very popular these days, and automation. And so in order to rely on machine-learning well, and have algorithms that are very effective, you need lots of data. And so being a cloud vendor, and having Linux in our cloud on tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of servers, or more, allows us to have a view of how an operating system works across an incredibly large scale. So we get lots of data. And so for us to figure out which algorithms work well in terms of how can we do network optimizations, how can we discover anomalies on the storage site, and deal with it and so forth, we can do that at scale. And what's interesting is, how do we then bring that on-prem? Well, if we can get the data and the learning done, the training done, in our cloud directly, then when we provide that service also for people running Oracle Linux on premises then that will work. The alternative is to have point solutions where you provide something to a customer, and he needs to learn something from small amounts of data. That doesn't work so well. So I think having both worlds, on-prem and cloud directly, allows us to kind of benefit from that. And I think that's important, because lots of customers are interested in going to cloud. Many of the enterprises have not yet. You know, they're starting, but there's still a huge on-premises space that's important. And so by being able to get them familiar with how these things work at scale, autonomy is again important, right, Autonomous Database is incredibly popular and so forth, that allows us to then say, "Here, try these things out here, it's a service. We can show you the benefits right away," and then as that improves we bring that, to a certain extent, on-premises as well. And then they can have it in both places. And that, I think, is something, again, that's relatively unique but also very important, is that we want to provide services and products that act similarly on-premises as well as in cloud, because at some point when people move we want to make that transition seamless. And what you have today for the most part is one world that's on-prem, and then the cloud world is completely different. And that is a big barrier of moving, and so we want to reduce that, we can run the same operating system local as well as cloud, you can the same functionality, and then that helps transition people over much easier. >> Yeah, well Oracle actually was one of the -- I think Oracle was the first company to actually market same-same, you actually used that term. Others put forth that concept, but Oracle was the first to announce products like Cloud at Customer, that were same-same, now it took some time to actually get it perfected, and get it to market, but the point is, and we've written about this, is Oracle, because of the ascendancy of cloud, flipped and has a cloud-first mentality, and you just kind of referenced that, you just said, "And you can bring that to on-prem." So I wonder if you could talk about that cloud-first mentality, and the impact on hybrid. >> So yeah, I think the cloud-first part is of course in cloud we work on services moreso than products that we deliver. And there's a number of things that are happening. So one is that we obviously continue to provide products to customers, you can download Oracle Linux, you can download the database and what not, you can install it on your own, you can do the traditional way of working. Then in the cloud-world, what typically happens is "Oh, I use a database service. I'm not installing anything, I push a button and I get an IP address and a SQL that connects extremely quickly to the database." And we take care of everything underneath that is on this database. Now, in order to do that, you need a whole infrastructure in place, you need log-in agents, you need a back-end that captures all that stuff, you need monitoring tools, you need all the automation scripts for bringing the service up and monitor it. And so, that takes a lot of time to do right, and we learn a lot by doing this. And so the cloud-first part of these services means that we get to experience this ourselves with direct access to everything. Now taking that service with all of the additional features like autonomy, and bringing that to an on-premises world, we have to make sure we can package that so that all these pieces around it go along with it. And that takes a little bit more time, so we can do everything at the same time. And so what we've done with Autonomous Database is we created everything in Oracle Cloud, we have the whole system running really well, and then we've been able to sort of package that and shrink it into something that can be installed on-premises, but then connected into Oracle Cloud again. And so that way we can get all the telemetry over the metric, and that allows us to scale. Because part of providing a cloud service that runs on-prem in the customer environment is that we need to be able to remotely manage that similar to how that runs in our own cloud. Right, otherwise it doesn't scale. And so that takes a little bit of time, but we've done all that work, and now with Cloud at Customer Database that's really in place. >> Yeah, you really want to have that same cloud experience, whether with on-prem, in the public cloud, hybrid, et cetera. So, I want to explore a little bit more who is using Oracle Linux, and what's the driver for using it. Can you describe maybe some of the types of customers and why they buy? >> Sure, so we started this fourteen years ago, in 2006, October 25th, 2006. I remember that day very well; Penguins on stage and a big launch for Oracle Linux in San Francisco Moscone Center. So, look, the initial driver for Oracle Linux was to ensure that Oracle database customers or Oracle product customers had a good operating system experience, and the ability to be able to handle critical issues when that occurs, because typically a database runs the company's critical data: the most essential stuff that a company has is typically in a database, an Oracle database. And so when that thing has issues with the operating system, you don't want just to talk to multiple vendors and have finger-pointing, and having to explain to an operating system vendor how the database works. In the Unix world, we had a good relationship with the OS vendors, and the hardware vendors, they were the same. And they knew our products really well, and in the Linux world, that was very different. The OS vendor basically did not want to understand or learn anything about the products living on top. And so while to a certain extent that makes sense, it's an enterprise world where time is of the essence, and downtime needs to be limited absolutely. We can't have these arguments and such. And that was the driver, initially, for doing Oracle Linux. It was to ensure there was a Linux distribution really backed by us, that we could fix, that we could fully support. That was completely the original intent. And so the early customer base was database customers. Database and middleware. Mostly database. But that has then evolved quickly, and so what happened was, people say "Look, I have a thousand servers, a hundred run Oracle, so we'll run Oracle Linux on those hundred, and we'll run something else on those other nine-hundred." Now after a year or so, they realize that our support is really good; We fix all these issues, and so then they're like "Why are we having two Linux distributions? This thing works really well, it runs any application, it's fully compatible, so we'll do a thousand with Oracle Linux." And so the early days, the first few years, was definitely Oracle Database as the core driver, and then it sort of expanded to the rest of the estate. And over the years, we've added lots of features and functionality, like Ksplice, and so forth. We have an attractive pricing model for running on servers, and so now lots of our customers have a very small Oracle percentage running and many other things running. So it's really become a all-or-nothing play in the Linux space, and we're well-known now, so it's actually very good. >> You just mentioned Ksplice. We've been talking about cloud, and on-prem, and hybrid. Let's talk about security, because security really is a differentiator, particularly if you're going to start to put stuff in the cloud. Talk about Ksplice specifically, but generally security and your policy there. >> So, "Security first" is sort of what you hear us say and do, in everything we do. The database obviously security, on the Linux site security matters. Ksplice as a technology is there to do critical bug-fixing and make sure that we can apply security vulnerability fixes without affecting the customer, and not have downtime. And if you look at most of the cases or many of the cases where you have security vulnerabilities and exploits, it tends to be because systems were not patched. Why were they not patched? Well not that our customer doesn't understand that it's important, but it's a whole train of events that needs to happen. You have to, you get notified that there's a security issue in your operating system or application. Then, well, an application typically means it's a multi-layered setup. So if you have to bring your database server down, then you first have to coordinate with the application users to bring the app server down, cause that talks to the database. So to patch one system, you basically have to bring down the whole application stack. You have to negotiate with the DBAs, you have to negotiate with the app admins, you have to negotiate with the user. It takes weeks to do that and find time. Well during that time, you're vulnerable. So the only way, really, to address security in a scalable and reducing that window of time is to do it without affecting the customer. And so Casewise is something that, it's a company we acquired in 2009, and have since evolved in terms of capabilities, and so it allows us to patch the Linux terminal without downtime. We lock the kernel for 8 microseconds. It's literally no downtime. You don't have to bring down applications, the user doesn't see it, there's no hang, there's no delay. And so by doing that, you can run a Linux operating system, or gLinux, and you can be fully patched on a system that hasn't rebooted for 3 years. You don't even know it. And so by doing that type of stuff, it makes customers more secure, and it avoids them-- It saves them a lot of money in terms of dealing with project management and so forth, but it really keeps them secure. And so we do that for the Linux kernel, we do that for some of the libraries on top that are critical like OpenSSL and 2 LVC, and, you know one example-- I can give you two examples. So one example is, Heartbleed was this bug in OpenSSL a number of years ago. And so everyone had to patch their SSH server. And that meant, basically, systems around the world had to reboot. Like a whole IT reboot across the world. With Ksplice today, if Heartbleed were to happen tomorrow, we would be able to patch this online for all the Oracle Linux customers without any downtime. No reboots, no restarting of applications, everything keeps running. The amount of money saved would be massive, and also, of course, the headache. Another example is, and this was in Oracle Cloud, when some of these CPU bugs that happened a few years ago that were rather damaging on the cloud side, where you could basically see memory potentially of other CPUs running, the cloud is incredibly critical. We were basically able to basically patch our entire cloud in four hours. And the customer didn't know, right, a hundred and twenty million patches, or something, that we applied within four hours, all online, without any downtime. And so that technology has been really helpful, both for us to run our cloud, but the exact same patches and same fixes go to customers on-premises as well. But this comes back to the whole, what we do in cloud we also do for customer. And I think that's a unique thing that we have at Oracle which is quite fascinating. The operating system we run for our customers, the operating system that's the host part of VMs, is the exact same binary and source code that we make available, just to be clear, the exact same binaries are the ones that you run as a customer on-premises. So if you run Oracle Linux with KVM, you run VMs, you're actually running the exact same stuff as we run underneath our customer's stuff. Nobody else does that, everyone else has a black box. So I think that helps a little bit with transparency as well. >> Yeah, and that homogeneity just creates an environment, you're talking about that sort of security mindset, it's critical, you're not just bolting it on, it's part of the culture. But you started your career, and then of course you were a Linux person when you came to Oracle, but then I think you spent some time in database, back in the day when there were serious database wars going on, before Oracle became the king of database. So now you've got, obviously, this great portfolio, and a lot of really sharp software developers; What should we expect going forward, from Oracle? What should we look for? >> You know, I was talking to some, I was welcoming some interns to the company, for their summer internship yesterday, and one of the things I mentioned to them was that -- so cloud obviously gives us a lot of opportunities, but there's a number of things. One is, we have such a breadth of applications and software and hardware together. We have the servers, we have the storage, we have the operating systems, we have the database layer and so forth, and we have the cloud side, and one of the great opportunities, and I think we've shown a lot of this happening with the ability to create something like Autonomous Database, is to combine all these things. Right, we have such a broad portfolio of really cool technology that by itself is okay, but if you combine the things it really becomes awesome. You cannot create autonomous database without having autonomous learning. You cannot create those two and make them really safe without also controlling the firmware on the hardware and so forth. So by being able to combine all these layers, and by having a really great relationship across the teams within the company, that opens up a lot of opportunities to do stuff really quickly. And having the scale for that. I think that has been, for the last few years, a really great thing, but I can see that being one of the advantages that we have going forward. We have Oracle Fusion Applications, which is incredibly popular, and has great growth, and then we have that running on Oracle Cloud, that talks to Oracle Autonomous Database, so we bring all these pieces together. And no other SaaS vendor can do that, because they don't have these other pieces. They have one area, we have all of them. And so that's the exciting part for me, it's not so much about making my own world better, and having Linux be better, and Casewise and so forth, which is important, but that becoming part of the bigger picture. And that's the exciting part. >> Well, Oracle's always invested in RND, we've made that point many, many times. Whether it's database, you know Fusion was a painful but worthy effort, the whole public cloud piece, obviously many acquisitions, but the investments that you've made in open-source as well, Wim, you're a great spokesperson, and a great representative of the open-source community generally, and then Oracle specifically, so thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the state of the penguin, and best of luck. >> You're welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Alright, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (cheerful music).

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought-leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. We're really excited to have Wim Coekaerts in, he is the senior vice-president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's great to have you on, and, you know I often say I wish we were face-to-face but if we were you'd have to cut off my tie, cause developers and ties just don't go together. >> No, I know, and this is my normal outfit, so this is me wherever I go. Hi again, good to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. So, of course, you know a lot of people are confused about Oracle, and open-source, they say "Oracle? Open-source? What is that all about?" But I think you're misunderstood. People don't, first of all, realize you as the leader of the software-development community inside of Oracle, I mean, you've been involved in Linux since the early 90s. But you guys have a lot of committers, you do a lot. I want to talk about that. What is up with Oracle, and open-source? >> Ah, well, it's a broad question. So, you know, a couple of things. One is, we have many different areas within the company that are dealing with open-source. So we have the cloud team doing a lot of stuff around cloud SDKs and support for different languages like Python and Go, and of course Java and so forth, so they do a lot around ensuring that the Oracle ecosystem is integrated in the open-source tools that customers use, or developers use, Terraform companies and so forth. And then you have the Java team, and so forth. Java is open-source and then the Graal project, GraalVM which is a polyglot compiler that can run Java, and Python, and Javascript and so forth together in one. VM do really cool optimizations, that's an open-source project, also on GitHub. There's of course MySQL, which is along with Java, they're probably the two most popular and widely used open-source projects out there. There's VirtualBox which is of course also a very popular project that's open-source. There's all the work we do around Linux. And I think one of the things is that, when you have so many different areas, doing things that are for that area, then as a developer or as a customer, you typically just deal with that group. And what you see is, oh you're talking to the Java developers, so you know what's going on around Java. The Java developers might not necessarily say, "Oh well we also do MySQL, and we do Linux and VirtualBox and so forth," and so you get a rather myopic, narrow view of the larger company. When you add all these things up, and there will be one big slide that says "This is Oracle, these are all these open source projects," and there's multiple ways. One is, we have projects that we've open-sourced and all the code came from us and we made it publicly available, we're the main contributor and we get contributions back. There are other projects where we contribute to third-party in terms of enhancing things, like I said with the Cloud Team, and then in general something like Linux where we're part of an external project and we participate in development of that project at large. And so there's these three different ways, when you count up all the developers that we have that deal with open-source on a daily basis. And in terms of contributions, in terms of bug fixes, testing, and so forth, it's thousands, literally, full-time paid developers. And of course, all the projects are all either on GitHub or similar sites that are very popular. So yeah, I think the misunderstood is probably a lack of knowledge of the breadth of what we do. And, you know, our primary goal is to provide services and products to customers, and so the open-source part is sort of embedded in a development methodology. But that's not something we sell or market separately, we just work with customers and products and services, and so in some cases it's not well-understood. >> Yeah. Well, we're talking of course, we're talking about the state of the penguin, I think it's important for people to understand, Oracle got into the Linux game in the 90s, maybe the latter part of the 90s and Oracle, of course, wants to make Linux-- wants to make Oracle, it's applications and database run better on Linux, but as you're pointing out, your Linux distro, full support, end-to-end, thousands of people in your open-source community, and the contributions that you make to Linux, many if not most, they go upstream, everybody can benefit from those, but of course you want an Oracle distro that is going to make Oracle stuff run better, that's always kind of been the Oracle way. >> Well, so, yes, two things though. One is, so everything we do is upstream. So we have no Linux patches that are not contributed upstream; There's no proprietary code in Oracle Linux at all, it's all completely open, publicly available: the source code, the change log, all the commits, it's fully open and public, which sometimes is not well-understood, but it's completely open. And, everything we do in terms of feature development or functionality or bug fixes goes upstream to the Linux kernel mail-list. It's actually, it's the only way to be able to manage a Linux distribution and be a Linux vendor is to live in that eco-system. Otherwise, the cost of maintaining your own fork, so to speak, is very high and it doesn't really solve the problem. Now, the functionality we work on obviously is focused on making Oracle products run better, making Oracle Cloud run better, and so forth. However, again, what's important to understand, though, is an Oracle database is a program running on an operating system. It does IO, it does networking, it deals with memory management, lots of processing. So, for the most part, the things that we work on to improve that helps everyone out, right? It helps every other database run better, or helps every other language run better. So none of these changes are specific to Oracle, they're just things that we found doing performance benchmarks and testing and so forth, where we say "Hey, if Linux did the following, it would make boot-up faster. Now boot-up has nothing to do with the database. But our customers run on 1-terabyte, 4-terabyte, 8-terabyte systems, and so booting up, and Linux starting up, and cleaning up memory takes a long time. So we want to reduce that from an availability point of view. So here, we're now talking about just enterprise for you. So there's this broad set of things we work on that definitely help us, but they're actually really completely generic and help everyone out. >> Yeah, that's great. So I wanted to kind of get that out of the way and help our audience understand that. So let's get into it a little bit; What are you seeing, what's going on in IT, pick your observation space and your vision of what you see happening out there. >> Well, you know, it's very interesting, it's sort of, there's two... there's sort of two worlds, right, there's the cloud world and the move to cloud, and there's the on-premises world, where people run their systems on their own. And, one of the things that we've learned is, when you talk about machine-learning, obviously, is something that's very popular these days, and automation. And so in order to rely on machine-learning well, and have algorithms that are very effective, you need lots of data. And so being a cloud vendor, and having Linux in our cloud on tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of servers, or more, allows us to have a view of how an operating system works across an incredibly large scale. So we get lots of data. And so for us to figure out which algorithms work well in terms of how can we do network optimizations, how can we discover anomalies on the storage site, and deal with it and so forth, we can do that at scale. And what's interesting is, how do we then bring that on-prem? Well, if we can get the data and the learning done, the training done, in our cloud directly, then when we provide that service also for people running Oracle Linux on premises then that will work. The alternative is to have point solutions where you provide something to a customer, and he needs to learn something from small amounts of data. That doesn't work so well. So I think having both worlds, on-prem and cloud directly, allows us to kind of benefit from that. And I think that's important, because lots of customers are interested in going to cloud. Many of the enterprises have not yet. You know, they're starting, but there's still a huge on-premises space that's important. And so by being able to get them familiar with how these things work at scale, autonomy is again important, right, Autonomous Database is incredibly popular and so forth, that allows us to then say, "Here, try these things out here, it's a service. We can show you the benefits right away," and then as that improves we bring that, to a certain extent, on-premises as well. And then they can have it in both places. And that, I think, is something, again, that's relatively unique but also very important, is that we want to provide services and products that act similarly on-premises as well as in cloud, because at some point when people move we want to make that transition seamless. And what you have today for the most part is one world that's on-prem, and then the cloud world is completely different. And that is a big barrier of moving, and so we want to reduce that, we can run the same operating system local as well as cloud, you can the same functionality, and then that helps transition people over much easier. >> Yeah, well Oracle actually was one of the -- I think Oracle was the first company to actually market same-same, you actually used that term. Others put forth that concept, but Oracle was the first to announce products like Cloud at Customer, that were same-same, now it took some time to actually get it perfected, and get it to market, but the point is, and we've written about this, is Oracle, because of the ascendancy of cloud, flipped and has a cloud-first mentality, and you just kind of referenced that, you just said, "And you can bring that to on-prem." So I wonder if you could talk about that cloud-first mentality, and the impact on hybrid. >> So yeah, I think the cloud-first part is of course in cloud we work on services moreso than products that we deliver. And there's a number of things that are happening. So one is that we obviously continue to provide products to customers, you can download Oracle Linux, you can download the database and what not, you can install it on your own, you can do the traditional way of working. Then in the cloud-world, what typically happens is "Oh, I use a database service. I'm not installing anything, I push a button and I get an IP address and a SQL that connects extremely quickly to the database." And we take care of everything underneath that is on this database. Now, in order to do that, you need a whole infrastructure in place, you need log-in agents, you need a back-end that captures all that stuff, you need monitoring tools, you need all the automation scripts for bringing the service up and monitor it. And so, that takes a lot of time to do right, and we learn a lot by doing this. And so the cloud-first part of these services means that we get to experience this ourselves with direct access to everything. Now taking that service with all of the additional features like autonomy, and bringing that to an on-premises world, we have to make sure we can package that so that all these pieces around it go along with it. And that takes a little bit more time, so we can do everything at the same time. And so what we've done with Autonomous Database is we created everything in Oracle Cloud, we have the whole system running really well, and then we've been able to sort of package that and shrink it into something that can be installed on-premises, but then connected into Oracle Cloud again. And so that way we can get all the telemetry over the metric, and that allows us to scale. Because part of providing a cloud service that runs on-prem in the customer environment is that we need to be able to remotely manage that similar to how that runs in our own cloud. Right, otherwise it doesn't scale. And so that takes a little bit of time, but we've done all that work, and now with Cloud at Customer Database that's really in place. >> Yeah, you really want to have that same cloud experience, whether with on-prem, in the public cloud, hybrid, et cetera. So, I want to explore a little bit more who is using Oracle Linux, and what's the driver for using it. Can you describe maybe some of the types of customers and why they buy? >> Sure, so we started this fourteen years ago, in 2006, October 25th, 2006. I remember that day very well; Penguins on stage and a big launch for Oracle Linux in San Francisco Moscone Center. So, look, the initial driver for Oracle Linux was to ensure that Oracle database customers or Oracle product customers had a good operating system experience, and the ability to be able to handle critical issues when that occurs, because typically a database runs the company's critical data: the most essential stuff that a company has is typically in a database, an Oracle database. And so when that thing has issues with the operating system, you don't want just to talk to multiple vendors and have finger-pointing, and having to explain to an operating system vendor how the database works. In the Unix world, we had a good relationship with the OS vendors, and the hardware vendors, they were the same. And they knew our products really well, and in the Linux world, that was very different. The OS vendor basically did not want to understand or learn anything about the products living on top. And so while to a certain extent that makes sense, it's an enterprise world where time is of the essence, and downtime needs to be limited absolutely. We can't have these arguments and such. And that was the driver, initially, for doing Oracle Linux. It was to ensure there was a Linux distribution really backed by us, that we could fix, that we could fully support. That was completely the original intent. And so the early customer base was database customers. Database and middleware. Mostly database. But that has then evolved quickly, and so what happened was, people say "Look, I have a thousand servers, a hundred run Oracle, so we'll run Oracle Linux on those hundred, and we'll run something else on those other nine-hundred." Now after a year or so, they realize that our support is really good; We fix all these issues, and so then they're like "Why are we having two Linux distributions? This thing works really well, it runs any application, it's fully compatible, so we'll do a thousand with Oracle Linux." And so the early days, the first few years, was definitely Oracle Database as the core driver, and then it sort of expanded to the rest of the estate. And over the years, we've added lots of features and functionality, like Ksplice, and so forth. We have an attractive pricing model for running on servers, and so now lots of our customers have a very small Oracle percentage running and many other things running. So it's really become a all-or-nothing play in the Linux space, and we're well-known now, so it's actually very good. >> You just mentioned Ksplice. We've been talking about cloud, and on-prem, and hybrid. Let's talk about security, because security really is a differentiator, particularly if you're going to start to put stuff in the cloud. Talk about Ksplice specifically, but generally security and your policy there. >> So, "Security first" is sort of what you hear us say and do, in everything we do. The database obviously security, on the Linux site security matters. Ksplice as a technology is there to do critical bug-fixing and make sure that we can apply security vulnerability fixes without affecting the customer, and not have downtime. And if you look at most of the cases or many of the cases where you have security vulnerabilities and exploits, it tends to be because systems were not patched. Why were they not patched? Well not that our customer doesn't understand that it's important, but it's a whole train of events that needs to happen. You have to, you get notified that there's a security issue in your operating system or application. Then, well, an application typically means it's a multi-layered setup. So if you have to bring your database server down, then you first have to coordinate with the application users to bring the app server down, cause that talks to the database. So to patch one system, you basically have to bring down the whole application stack. You have to negotiate with the DBAs, you have to negotiate with the app admins, you have to negotiate with the user. It takes weeks to do that and find time. Well during that time, you're vulnerable. So the only way, really, to address security in a scalable and reducing that window of time is to do it without affecting the customer. And so Casewise is something that, it's a company we acquired in 2009, and have since evolved in terms of capabilities, and so it allows us to patch the Linux terminal without downtime. We lock the kernel for 8 microseconds. It's literally no downtime. You don't have to bring down applications, the user doesn't see it, there's no hang, there's no delay. And so by doing that, you can run a Linux operating system, or gLinux, and you can be fully patched on a system that hasn't rebooted for 3 years. You don't even know it. And so by doing that type of stuff, it makes customers more secure, and it avoids them-- It saves them a lot of money in terms of dealing with project management and so forth, but it really keeps them secure. And so we do that for the Linux kernel, we do that for some of the libraries on top that are critical like OpenSSL and 2 LVC, and, you know one example-- I can give you two examples. So one example is, Heartbleed was this bug in OpenSSL a number of years ago. And so everyone had to patch their SSH server. And that meant, basically, systems around the world had to reboot. Like a whole IT reboot across the world. With Ksplice today, if Heartbleed were to happen tomorrow, we would be able to patch this online for all the Oracle Linux customers without any downtime. No reboots, no restarting of applications, everything keeps running. The amount of money saved would be massive, and also, of course, the headache. Another example is, and this was in Oracle Cloud, when some of these CPU bugs that happened a few years ago that were rather damaging on the cloud side, where you could basically see memory potentially of other CPUs running, the cloud is incredibly critical. We were basically able to basically patch our entire cloud in four hours. And the customer didn't know, right, a hundred and twenty million patches, or something, that we applied within four hours, all online, without any downtime. And so that technology has been really helpful, both for us to run our cloud, but the exact same patches and same fixes go to customers on-premises as well. But this comes back to the whole, what we do in cloud we also do for customer. And I think that's a unique thing that we have at Oracle which is quite fascinating. The operating system we run for our customers, the operating system that's the host part of VMs, is the exact same binary and source code that we make available, just to be clear, the exact same binaries are the ones that you run as a customer on-premises. So if you run Oracle Linux with KVM, you run VMs, you're actually running the exact same stuff as we run underneath our customer's stuff. Nobody else does that, everyone else has a black box. So I think that helps a little bit with transparency as well. >> Yeah, and that homogeneity just creates an environment, you're talking about that sort of security mindset, it's critical, you're not just bolting it on, it's part of the culture. But you started your career, and then of course you were a Linux person when you came to Oracle, but then I think you spent some time in database, back in the day when there were serious database wars going on, before Oracle became the king of database. So now you've got, obviously, this great portfolio, and a lot of really sharp software developers; What should we expect going forward, from Oracle? What should we look for? >> You know, I was talking to some, I was welcoming some interns to the company, for their summer internship yesterday, and one of the things I mentioned to them was that -- so cloud obviously gives us a lot of opportunities, but there's a number of things. One is, we have such a breadth of applications and software and hardware together. We have the servers, we have the storage, we have the operating systems, we have the database layer and so forth, and we have the cloud side, and one of the great opportunities, and I think we've shown a lot of this happening with the ability to create something like Autonomous Database, is to combine all these things. Right, we have such a broad portfolio of really cool technology that by itself is okay, but if you combine the things it really becomes awesome. You cannot create autonomous database without having autonomous learning. You cannot create those two and make them really safe without also controlling the firmware on the hardware and so forth. So by being able to combine all these layers, and by having a really great relationship across the teams within the company, that opens up a lot of opportunities to do stuff really quickly. And having the scale for that. I think that has been, for the last few years, a really great thing, but I can see that being one of the advantages that we have going forward. We have Oracle Fusion Applications, which is incredibly popular, and has great girth, and then we have that running on Oracle Cloud, that talks to Oracle Autonomous Database, so we bring all these pieces together. And no other SaaS vendor can do that, because they don't have these other pieces. They have one area, we have all of them. And so that's the exciting part for me, it's not so much about making my own world better, and having Linux be better, and Casewise and so forth, which is important, but that becoming part of the bigger picture. And that's the exciting part. >> Well, Oracle's always invested in RND, we've made that point many, many times. Whether it's database, you know Fusion was a painful but worthy effort, the whole public cloud piece, obviously many acquisitions, but the investments that you've made in open-source as well, Wim, you're a great spokesperson, and a great representative of the open-source community generally, and then Oracle specifically, so thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the state of the penguin, and best of luck. >> You're welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Alright, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (cheerful music).

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this Cube Conversation. Really excited to have Wim Coekaerts and he is the senior vice president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's great to have you on. And you know what I often say I wish we were face to face but if we were you'd have to cut off my tie 'cause developers and ties just don't go together. >> No, I know, and this is my normal outfit so this is me, wherever I go. Hi again, good to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. So of course, you know a lot of people are confused about Oracle and open source. They say, Oracle, open source? What is that all about? But I think you misunderstood. People don't first of all realize you as the leader of the software development community inside of Oracle, I mean, you've been involved in Linux since the early '90s but you guys have a lot of committers. You do a lot, I want to talk about that. What is up with Oracle and open source? >> Well, it's a broad question. So you know, a couple of things. One is we have many different areas within the company that are dealing with open source, right? So we have the cloud team doing a lot of stuff around the cloud SDKs and support for different languages like Python and go and of course Java and so forth. So they do a lot around ensuring that the Oracle ecosystem is integrated in the open source tools that customers use, or developers use Terraform, so on and so forth. And then you have the Java team, and so of course Java is open source. And then, the Graal project, GraalVM, which is a polyglot compiler that run Java and Python and JavaScript and so forth together in one VM, do really cool optimizations, that's an open source project. Also on GitHub, there's of course MySQL which is along with Java, they're probably the two most popular and widely used open source projects out there. There's VirtualBox which is of course also a very popular project that's open sources is all the work we do around Linux. And I think one of the things is that when you have so many different areas doing things that are for that area, then as a developer or as a customer, you typically just deal with that group and what you see is, oh, you're talking to the Java developers so you know what's going on around Java. The Java developers might not necessarily say, oh, and we also do MySQL and we do Linux and VirtualBox and so forth. And so you get sort of a rather myopic narrow view of the larger company. When you add all these things up and there would be one big slide that says, "This is Oracle, these are all these open source projects there". And there's multiple ways, right? One is we have projects that we've opened sourced and all the code came from us and we made it publicly available. We are the main distributor and we get contributions back. There are other projects where we contribute to third party in terms of enhancing things, like a separate the cloud team. And then in general, something like Linux where, you know, we're part of an external project and we participate in the development of that project at large. And so there's these three different ways when you count up all the developers that we have that deal with open source on a daily basis and in terms of contributions, in terms of both Pyxis testing and so forth, it's thousands, literally, full time developers. And of course all the projects is on GitHub or similar sites that are very popular. So yeah, I think the misunderstood is probably a lack of knowledge of the breadth of what we do. And our primary goal is to provide services and products to customers. And so the open source part is sort of embedded in the development methodology, but that's not something we sell or market separately. We just work with customers and products and services. And so in some cases it's not well understood. >> Yeah, well, we're talking, of course we're talking about the state of the Penguin. I think it's part of what people understand. I mean, Oracle got into the Linux game, in the '90s, maybe the latter part of the '90s and Oracle of course wants to make Linux, wants to make Oracle its applications and database run better on Linux. But as you're pointing out you're Linux distro, full support, end-to-end, thousands of people in your open source community and the contributions that you make to Linux, many if not most, they go upstream, everybody can benefit from those. But of course you want an Oracle distro that is going to make Oracle stuff run better. That's always kind of been the Oracle way. >> Well, so yes, two things. The one is that, so everything we do is upstream. So we have no Linux patches that are not contributed upstream. There's no proprietary code in Oracle Linux at all. It's all completely open, publicly available. The source code, the change log, all the commits, everything. It's fully open and public, which sometimes is not well understood, but it's completely open. And everything we do in terms of feature development or functionality or bug fixes goes upstream to the Linux kernel mailers. It's actually, it's the only way to be able to manage a Linux distribution and be a Linux vendor is to live in that ecosystem. Otherwise, the cost of maintaining your own forks so to speak is very high and it doesn't really solve problems. Now the functionality we worked on obviously is focused on making Oracle products run better, making Oracle cloud run better and so forth. However, again, what's important to understand though is an Oracle database is a program running on an operating system that does IO, it does networking, it does memory, it deals with memory management, lots of processes. So for the most part, the things we work on to improve that, helps everyone out, right? It helps every other database run better or it helps every other language run better. So none of these changes are specific to Oracle. They're just things that we found doing performance benchmarks and testing and so forth. But we say, "Hey, if Linux did the following, it would make boot up fast." Now boot up has nothing to do with the database. But if our customers run on one terabyte, four terabyte, eight terabyte systems, and so booting up and Linux starting up and cleaning up memory takes a long time. So we want to reduce that from an availability point of view. So here we're now talking about just enterprise, right? And so there's this broad set of things we work on that definitely help us, but they're actually really completely generic and help everyone customer. >> Yeah, that's great, good. So I wanted to kind of get that out of the way and help our audience understand it. So let's get into it a little bit. What are you seeing, what's going on in IT? Pick your observation space and your vision of what you see happening out there? >> Well it's very interesting. There's sort of two worlds, right? There's the cloud world and move to cloud and there's the on-premise world where people run their systems on their own. And one of the things that we've learned is, when you talk about machine learning obviously is something that's very popular these days and automation. And so in order to rely on machine learning well and have algorithms that are very effective, you need lots of data. And so being a cloud vendor and having Linux in our cloud on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of servers or more allows us to have a view of how an operating system works across incredibly large scale. So we get lots of data and so for us to figure out which algorithms work well in terms of, how can we do network customizations, how can we discover anomalies on the storage side and deal with it and so forth, we can do that at scale. And what's interesting is how do we then bring that to on-prem? Well, if we can get the data and the learning done the training done in our cloud directly, then when we provide that service also to people running Oracle Linux on-premises, then that will work. The alternative is to have point solutions where you provide something to a customer and he needs to learn something from small amounts of data. That doesn't work so well. So I think having both worlds on-prem and cloud directly allows us to kind of benefit from that. And I think that's important because lots of customers are interested in going to cloud. Many of the enterprises have not yet, you know, they're starting, but there's still a huge on-premises space that's important. And so by being able to get them familiar with how these things work at scale, autonomy is again important, right? Autonomous database is incredibly popular and so forth. That allows us to then say, "Here, try these things out here. "It's a service, we can show you the benefits right away". And then as that improves, we bring that on to a certain extent on-premise as well and then they can have it in both places. And that I think is something, again, that's relatively unique but also very important is that we want to create an... we want to provide services and products that act similarly on-premises as well as the cloud. Because at some point when people move, we want to make that transition seamless. And what you have today for the most part is one world that's on-prem and then the cloud world is completely different and that is a big barrier of moving. And so we want to reduce that. You can run the same operating system local as well as cloud, you can get the same banality and then that helps transition people over much easier. >> Yeah, well, Oracle actually was one of the... I think but Oracle was the first company to actually market same-same, you actually use that term. Others put forth that concept, but Oracle was the first to announce products like cloud to customer that was same-same now it took some time to actually get it perfective and get it to market. But the point is, and we've written about this is that Oracle, because of the ascendancy of cloud flipped and has a cloud first mentality and you just kind of referenced that you just said, "And you can bring that to on-prem". So I wonder if you could talk about that cloud first mentality and the impact on hype? >> So yeah, I think the clouds first part is of course in cloud we work on services more so than products that we deliver and there's a number of things that are happening. So one is we obviously continue to provide products across you can download Oracle Linux, you can download the database in web blog, you can install it on your own, right? You can do to the traditional way of working. Then in a cloud world, what typically happens is, oh, I use a database service. I'm not installing anything. I push a button and I get an IP address and a SQL, and a connect string and connect to a database. And we take care of everything underneath the database. Now, in order to do that, you need to hold infrastructure in place, right? You need lugging agents, you need a backend that captures all that stuff, you need monitoring tools, you need all the automation scripts for bringing this service up and monitor it. And so that takes a lot of time to do, right? And we learned a lot by doing this. And so the cloud first part of the services means that we get to experience this ourselves with direct access to everything. Now taking that service with all of the additional features like autonomy and bringing that to an on-premises world, we have to make sure we can package that so that all these pieces around it go along with it. And that takes a little bit more time, so we can't do everything at the same time. And so what we've done with autonomous database is we created everything in Oracle cloud, you have the whole system running really well. And then we've been able to sort of package that and shrink it into something that can be installed on-premises but then connected into Oracle cloud again. And so that way we can get all the telemetry, all the metrics, and that allows us to scale because part of providing a cloud service that runs on-prem in the customer environment is that we need to be able to remotely manage that, similar to how we manage something that runs in their own cloud, right? Otherwise it doesn't scale. And so that takes a little bit of time, but we've done all that work and now we've got our customer database that that's really in place. >> Yeah, you really want to have that same cloud experience, whether it's on-prem, in the public cloud, hybrid, et cetera. So I want to explore a little bit more. Who is using Oracle Linux and what's the driver for using it? Can you describe maybe some of the types of customers and why they buy? >> Sure, so we started 14 years ago, right? 2006, October 25th, 2006 (giggles). I remember that day very well. Penguin's on stage and a big launch for Linux in San Francisco Moscone Center. So look, the initial driver for Oracle Linux was to ensure that Oracle database customers or Oracle product customers had a good operating system experience, right? And the ability to be able to handle critical issues when that occurs because typically a database runs the company's critical data. The most essential stuff that a company has is typically in a database, in Oracle database. And so when that thing has issues with the operating system, you don't want just to talk to multiple vendors and have finger pointing and having to explain to an operating system vendor how the database works. In the Unix world, we had a glitch relationship with the OS vendors and the hardware vendors. They were the same. And they knew our products really well, and in the Linux world that was very different. The OS vendor basically did not want to understand or learn anything about products living on top. And so, while, to a certain extent, that makes sense. It's an enterprise world where time is of the essence and downtime needs to be limited absolutely. We can't have these arguments and such. And so that was the driver initially for doing Oracle. So it was to ensure there was a Linux distribution really backed by us that we could fix and we could fully support, right? That was completely the original intent. And so the early customer base was database customers. Database and middleware, mostly database. So but that has then evolved quickly, and so, (clears throat) sorry. What happened was, people would say, "Look, have a thousand servers, a hundred run Oracle, "so we'll run Oracle Linux on those hundred "and we run, something else on those other 900." Now after a year or so, they realized that our support was really good. We fixed all these issues and so then they're like, "Why are we having two Linux distributions? "This thing works really well. "It's runs any application, it's fully compatible. "So we'll just go a thousand with Oracle Linux". And so the early days, the first few years was definitely Oracle database as the core driver and then it sort of expanded to the rest of the estate. And over the years (clears throat), we've added lots of features and functionality, like Ksplice and so forth. We have an attractive pricing model for running on servers. And so now lots of our customers have a very small Oracle percentage running and many other things running. So it's really become a all or nothing play in the Linux space and we're well known now, so it's been actually very good. >> You just mentioned Ksplice. I mean, we've been talking about cloud and on-prem and hybrid and let's talk about security because security really is a differentiator but particularly if you're going to start to put stuff into the cloud. Talk about Ksplice specifically, but generally security and your policy there. >> So security first is sort of what you hear us say and do in everything we do, right? The database obviously security on the Linux side, security matters, Ksplice as the technology is there to do critical bug fixing and make sure that we can apply security vulnerability fixes without affecting the customer and not have downtime, right? And if you look at, most of the cases or many of the cases where you have security vulnerabilities and exploits, it tends to be because systems were not patched. Why were they not patched? Well, not that a customer doesn't understand that it's important, but it's a whole train of events that needed to happen. You have to get notified that there's a security issue in your operating system or application. Then, well, an application typically means it's a multi-tiered set up. So if you have to bring your database server down, then you first have to coordinate with the application users to bring the app server down because that talks to the database. So to patch one system, you basically have to bring down all application stacks. You have to negotiate with the DBAs, you have to negotiate with the app admins, you have to negotiate with the user. It takes weeks to do that and find time. Well, during that time you're vulnerable. So the only way really to address security in a scalable way and reducing that window of time is to do it without effecting the customer, right? And so Ksplice is something that... It's a company we acquired in 2009 and have since evolved in terms of capabilities. And so it allows us to patch the Linux kernel without downtime, right? We lock the kernel for a microsecond, so it's literally no downtime. You don't have to bring down applications. The user doesn't see it. There's no hang, there's no delay. And so by doing that, you can run the Linux operating system, Oracle Linux, and you can be fully patched on a system that hasn't rebooted for three years and you don't even know it. And so by doing that type of stuff, it makes customers more secure and it avoids them... It saves them a lot of money in terms of dealing with project management and so forth, but it really keeps them secure. And so we do that for the Linux kernel. We do that for some of the libraries on up that are critical, like OpenSSL and glibc and one example, I can give you two examples. So one example is Heartbleed was this bug in OpenSSL a number of years ago and so everyone had to patch their SSH server. And that meant basically, systems around the world had to reboot, like a whole active reboot across the world. With the Ksplice today if Heartbleed were to happen tomorrow, we would be able to patch this online for all the Oracle Linux customers without any downtime. No reboots, no restarting of applications, everything keeps running. The amount of money saved would be massive, right? And also of course, the headache. Another example is, (clears throat) and this was an Oracle cloud when some of these CPU bugs that happened a few years ago that were rather damaging on the cloud side, right? Where you could basically see memory of potentially of other machines running that the cloud it's incredibly critical. We were basically able to patch our entire cloud in four hours and the customer didn't know, right? 120 million patches or something that we applied within four hours all online without any down time. And so that technology has been really helpful both for us to run our cloud, but the exact same patches and same fixes go to customers on-premises as well. But this comes back to the whole what we do in cloud, we also do for customer, and I think that's a unique thing that we have at Oracle, which is quite fascinating, right? The operating system we run for our customers, the operating system that's the host for the VM is the exact same binary and source code that we make available, just to be clear. The exact same binaries are the ones that you run as a customer on premises. So you run Oracle Linux with KVM, you run VMs, you're actually running the same stuff as we do for our... That we run underneath our customer stuff. Nobody else does that. Everyone else has a black box. So I think that helps a little bit with transparency as well. >> Yeah, and that homogeneity just creates an environment you're talking about sort of the security mindset is critical. You're not just bolting it on, it's part of the culture. Look, you were, you know, started your career, and then of course you were a Linux person when you came to Oracle, but then I think you've spent some time in the database back in the day when there were some serious database wars going on before Oracle, became the king of database. So now you've got obviously this great portfolio and a lot of really sharp software developers. What should we expect going forward from Oracle? What should we look for? >> I was welcoming some interns to the company, (clears throat) for their summer internship yesterday. And one of the things that I, (clears throat) I'm sorry. One of the things I mentioned to them, was that one of the... So cloud obviously gives us a lot of opportunities, but there's a number of things. One is we have such a breadth of applications and software and hardware together, right? We have the servers, we have the storage, we have the operating systems, we have the database layer and so forth, and we have the cloud side. And one of the great opportunities and I think we've shown a lot of this happening with the ability to create something like autonomous database is to combine all these things, right? We have such a broad portfolio of really cool technology that by itself is okay, but if you combine the things, it really becomes awesome, right? You cannot create autonomous database without having autonomous Linux, right? You cannot create those two and make them really safe without also controlling the firmware on the hardware and so forth. So by being able to combine all these layers and by having a really great relationship across the teams within the company, that opens up a lot of opportunities to do stuff really quickly and having the scale for that. I think that has been for the last few years a really great thing but I can see that being one of the advantages that we have going forward, right? We have Oracle Fusion Applications, which is incredibly popular and has great growth. And then we have that running on Oracle cloud that talks to our autonomous database. So we bring all these pieces together and no other SaaS vendor can do that because they don't have these other pieces. They have one area, we have all of them. And so that's the exciting part for me is basic... It's not so much about making my own world better and having Linux be better and Ksplice and so forth, which is important, but that becoming part of the bigger picture. And that's the exciting part. >> Well, Oracle has always invested in R&D. We've made that point many many times, whether it's database, fusion was a painful but worthy (giggles) effort. The whole public cloud piece, obviously many acquisitions but the investments that you've made in open source as well. Wim, you're a great spokesperson and a great representative of the open source community generally, and an Oracle specifically. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the state of the Penguin. The best of luck. >> You're welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

(funky music) >> Live from San Francisco, it's theCube, covering RSA Conference 2019 brought to you by Forescout. >> Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the RSA Conference at downtown San Francisco Moscone Center, they finally finished the remodel. We're excited to be in the Forescout booth, we've never been in the Forescout booth before, psyched that they invited us in. But we've got an old time CUBE alumni and a special company in my heart, was my very first CUBE event ever was Splunk.conf 2012. >> I did not know that Jeff. >> Yeah so we're live. We have Doug Merritt on he's a CEO of Splunk. Doug great to see you. >> Thanks Jeff, good to see you again also. >> Yeah so we've been doing Splunk.conf since 2012. >> The early days. The Cosmo Hotel and it was pouring rain that week. >> That was the third year. >> Probably the third year? >> Second year, yeah long time ago, it's grown. >> 2012 wasn't that big but this is a crazy show. You've been coming here for a while. Security is such an important part of the Splunk value proposition, just general impressions of RSA as you've been here for a couple of days. >> Yeah, it's amazing to see how the show has grown over the years, security's gone from this, kind of backwater thing that a few weird people did in the corner, that only understood the cyber landscape, to something that boards care about now. And that, obviously has helped with this show, I don't know what the attendee numbers are like, but tens of thousands of people. >> Oh yeah. >> You can't walk down a hallway without bumping into 10 brand new companies that were launched in the past year, and the security space and make the biggest challenge people that I have, and I think that other people have is, how do you tell different, where's the wheat from the chaff? What is really important in security and how do you tell different companies and different trends apart, so you can actually focus on what matters? >> Right, I just feel for the seed-sows, right, I mean, you guys have a big ecosystem at .conf, but those are all kind of complimentary things around the core Splunk solution. This is, you've got co-opetition, competition, how does somebody navigate so many options? 'Cause at the end of the day you don't have unlimited resources, you don't have unlimited people to try to figure all these pieces of the puzzle out. >> Yeah, and the CSOs have got a really tough job, the average CSO has got well over a hundred different vendors you're dealing with, and with Splunk what we're very focused on, and where I think we add value is that we become, if done right, we become the abstraction layer that creates a brain and nervous system that allows all those different products, and all of them have got unique capabilities. When you think about the complexity of all the networking, all the compute, all the storage, all the end point landscapes that's only getting worse for the cloud, because now there's more services with more varieties across more cloud vendors. How do you get visibility on that? >> Right, right. >> And you need products at those different junctures, 'cause protect and prevent and defend is still an important function for CSOs, but when we know that you can't prevent everything. >> Right. >> And things will go wrong, how do you know that, that is actually occurring? And what the splunk value prop is, we are the, we don't have as much of a point of view on any one product, we aggregate data from all the products, which is why so many people are partners, and then help companies with both raw investigations, given that if something goes wrong with our schema less data structure, but then also with effective monitoring and analytics that's correlating data across those tens, hundreds or thousands of different technologies. So you can get a better feel for what are the patterns that make sense to pay attention to. >> I think you just gave me like 10 questions to ask just in that answer, you covered it all. 'Cause the other thing, you know, there's also IoT now and OT and all these connected devices so, you know the end points, the surface area, the throughput is only going up by orders of magnitude. >> Without a doubt. >> It's crazy. >> I saw some stats the other day that, globally at this point there's, I may get these off by one digit, but lets say there's 80,000 servers that are the backbone of the entire internet. There's already over 11 billion connected devices, going back to that IoT theme. So the ramifications at the edge and what that means are so profound and companies like Forescout, as a key partner of Splunk's, help make sure that you're aware of; what are all the different elements that are ever hitting my network in a way. And what do they look like and what, what should I be doing, as different things pop on and pop off and, again, we're trying to be the interpretation and brain layer for that, so that they are more and more intelligent to the actions they're taking, given their depth of domain, their deep knowledge of what a camera should look like, or what a windows PC should look like or what a firewall should look like given the configurations that are important to that company. >> Before we turned on the cameras you made an interesting comment. We used to talk about schema on read versus schema on write, that was the big, kind of big data theme, and you guys are sitting on a huge data flow, but you had a really kind of different take, because you never really know, even with schema on read it seems you know what the schema is but in today's changing environment you're not really sure what it is you're going to be looking for next right? And that can evolve and change over time, so you guys have kind of modified that approach a little bit. >> Yeah, I think we are this year you'll see us really reemphasizing that core of Splunk. That the reason you'd have an investigative lake, and I don't think most people know what a schema is period, much less read or write so my new terminology is hey you need a very thorough investigative lake. Going back to the discussion we were having, with so much surface area, so many network devices, so many servers, so many end points, what tool do you have that's reading in data from all of those, and they all are going to have crazy formats. The logs around those are not manageable. To say you can manage logs and centralize. Centralized logs I get, manage those words don't work together. >> Right. Logs are chaotic by nature, you're not going to manage them, you're not going to force every developer and every device to adhere to a certain data structure so it can neatly fit into your structured database. >> Right. >> It is too chaotic, but more importantly, even if you could you're going to miss a point, which is, once you structure data, you're limited with the types of questions you can ask, which means you had to visualize what the questions would be in the first place. In this chaotic environment you don't know what the questions going to be. The dynamics are changing way to quickly, so the investigative lake is truly, our index is not schematized in any way, so you can ask a million questions once versus a schematized data store where it is; I ask one question >> A million times. a million times. And that's super efficient for that, but, the uniqueness of Splunk is, the investigative lake is the fabric of what we do, and where I think our customers, almost have forgotten about Splunk is, read all that data in. I know we've got a volume based licensing model that we're working on customers, were working to solve that for you, that's not the, I'm not trying to get data in so that we can charge more, I'm trying to get data in so that everybody has got the capacity to investigate, 'cause we cannot fail in answering what, why, when, where, how, and stuff'll go wrong, if you can't answer that, man you're in big trouble. And then on top of that let's make sure you've got right monitoring capability, the right predictive analytics capability; and now with tools like Phantom, and we bought a company called victorOps, which is a beautiful collaboration tool, let's make sure you've got the right automation and action frameworks so that you can actually leverage peoples skills across the investigative, monitoring and analytical data stores that at Splunk we help with all four of those. >> Right, right, again, you touch on a lot of good stuff. We could go for hours but we don't have you all day. But I want to follow up on a couple of things, because one of the things that we hear over and over and over is the time to even know that you've been breached. The time to know that you have a problem, and again, by having all that data there you can now start adjusting your questions based on that way you now know. But I think what's even more kind of intriguing to me is, as nation states have become more active, as we've seen the politicalization of a lot of things, you know, what is valuable today is a much varied, much more varied answer than just tapping into a bank account or trying to steal credit card numbers. So it really supports, kind of this notion that you're saying, which you don't have a clue what the question is that you're going to need to ask tomorrow. So how do you make sure you're in a position, when you find out what the question is, that you can ask it? >> And that's the design architecture I like about splunk as a company is that our orientation is, if you're dealing with a world of chaos, allow that chaos to exist and then find the needles in the haystack, the meaning from that chaos, and then when you find the meaning, now you know that a monitor is worthwhile, because you've validated root cause and it exists. And when your monitor is kicked a few times, and you know it's legit, build a predictive routine, because you now know it's worth trying to predict, because you've seen this thing trip a number of times, which inverts the way that most people, that all of us were taught. Which is start with the end in mind, because garbage in equals garbage out, so be really thoughtful in what you want and then you can structure everything, it's like well, that's not the way the world works. What if the question we asked 15 years ago was, what if you couldn't start with the end in mind, what would you have to do? Well you'd have to have a schema less storage vehicle and a language that allows you to ask any question you want and get structure on the question, but then you still need a structure. So you're going to structure them one way or the other, how do you make sure you've got high quality structure, and in our dynamic landscape that's always going to change. >> Right, well the good news is 2020 next year so we'll all know everything right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> We'll have the hindsight. So the last thing before I let you go is really to talk about automation, and just the quantity and volume and throughput of these systems. Again, one, escalating, just 'cause it's always escalating, but two, now adding this whole connected devices and IoT, and this whole world of operational technology devices, you just, you can't buy your way out of it, you can't hire your way out of it, you have to have an increasing level of automation. So how are you kind of seeing that future evolve over the next couple of years? >> I've been meeting with a lot of customers obviously this week, and one of them said, the interesting part about where we are now is, you can't unsee what you've seen. And where we were five years ago, as most people in security and IT; which are natively digitized, they still didn't know how to wrap there arms around the data. So they just didn't see it, they were like the ostrich. Now with tools like Splunk they can actually see the data, but now, what do I do with it? When I've got a billion potential events per day, how do I deal with that? And even if I could find enough manpower, the skills are going to be changing at such a constant basis, so I think this security, orchestration, automation, response; SOAR, area and we were fortunate enough to form a great relationship with phantom a couple of years ago and add them to the Splunk fold, exactly a year ago, as, I think, the best of the SOAR vendors, but it's a brand new category. Because companies have not yet had that unseeing moment of, holy cow, what do I do, how do I even deal with this amount of information? And adding in automation, intelligent automation, dynamic automation, with the right orchestration layer is an absolute imperative for these shops going forward, and when I look at a combination of phantom and their competitors there's still less then a thousand companies in a sea of a million plus corporate entities, globally, that have licensed these products. So we're at the very beginning of this portion of the wave. But there's no way that companies will be able to be successful without beginning to understand what that means, and wrapping their minds around how to use it. What we're so excited about with Splunk, is traversing investigate, monitor, analyze and automate up and down continuously, we think is the key to getting the best value from this really, really diverse and chaotic landscape and then having phantom as part of the fold helps a lot, because you can get signal on, did I do the right automation? Did It actually achieve the goal that my brain told me to do, or not? And if not, what do I adjust in the brain? Do I go after different data, do I structure the data a different way? But that up and down the chain of check and balance, am I doing the right stuff is something that-- >> And do it continuously. >> It's got to be continuous. >> It's got to be continuous. So we're sitting in the Forescout booth, so talk about how Forescout plays. I mean you guys have been sitting on those (mumbles), really fundamental core date, they're really kind of been opening up a whole different set of data, so how is that kind of working out? >> Yeah, so I'm really thankful for the relationship, mostly because they're a great company and I love their CEO, but mostly, if you go customer back, it's a very important relationship. Which is the proliferation of devices, developments continues to grow, and most companies aren't even aware of the number of devices that exist in their sphere, much less how they should look, and then what vulnerabilities might exist because of changes in those devices. So the information flow of, here's what's in the eco-sphere of a customer into Splunk is really helpful, and then the correlation that Splunk drives, so that Forescout gets even more intelligent on what corrective actions to what type of actions period do I take across this sea of devices is a really important and beneficial relationship for our customers. >> Excellent, so I'll give you the last word, little plug for Splunk.conf coming up in October. >> Yeah, I'm really excited about conf, excited to have you guys there again. We've been on a really intense innovation march for the past few years. This last conf we introduced 20 products at conf, which was a record. We're trying to keep the same pace for conf 2019 and I hope that everyone gets a chance to come, because we're going to both be, moving forward those products that we talked about, but, I think really surprising people, with some of the directions that were taking, the investigate, monitor, analyze and act capabilities both as a platform and for security IT and our other key buy-in centers. >> Alright, well we'll see you there Doug, thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> Great seeing you. >> He's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're in the Forescout booth at RSA Conference 2019, thanks for watching we'll see ya next time. >> Thank you. (electronic music)