>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>> Narrator: From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE. Presenting, The People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here at Mayfield Fund, on Sand Hill Road and Menlo Park. As part of Mayfield's People First Network, co-creation with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE and Mayfield. Next guest, Beth Devin, Managing Director of Innovation Network and Emerging Technologies at Citi Ventures. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Hey, thanks for coming in. We're here for the Mayfield fiftieth anniversary, where they're featuring luminaries like yourself, and we're talking about conversations around how the world's changing and the opportunities and the challenges can be met, and how you can share some of your best practices. Talk about what your role is at Citi Ventures and what your focus is. >> Sure, sure, and boy howdy, has it been changing. It's hard to keep up with. I've been at Citi Ventures about two years and one of the reasons I joined was to stand up an Emerging Technology practice. Citi Ventures does a lot of work in corporate venture investing. We tend to be strategic investors, for start up companies that are aligned with the strategy of Citi, as well as our client. We serve probably, eighty percent of the Fortune Five Hundred companies in the world. But we also are a really important part of the innovation ecosystem at Citi. Which is looking at how to drive culture change, broaden mindset, and really, enlist our employees to be part of the innovation process. So, we have an internal incubator, we have a Shark Tank-like process we call Discover Ten X. And what I really bring to the table with my team is monitoring, and learning about, and digesting technology that's not quite ready for commercialization but we think it might be disruptive in a good or challenging way for the bank or our clients. We try to educate and provide content that's helpful to our executives, and just the employee body at large. >> I want to get into a LinkedIn post you wrote, called the Tech Whisperer, which I love. >> Thank you. >> You're there to identify new things to help people understand what that is. But that's not what you've done. You've actually implemented technology. So, on the other side of the coin, in your career. Tell us about some of the things you've done in your career, because you've been a practitioner. >> Beth: Yeah. >> and now you're identifying trends and technologies, before you were on the other side of the table. >> That's right, and sometimes I'll tell you, I have that itch. I miss the operator role, sometimes. Yeah, you know, I feel so fortunate I sort of stumbled on computer science early when I was going to school. And, the first, I'd say twenty years of my career, were working in enterprise I.T, which at that time I couldn't even have made that distinction, like why do you have to say enterprise I.T. I was a software developer, and I was then a DBA, and I even did assembler language programing. So way back when, I think I was so fortunate to fall in to software engineering. It's like problem solving, or puzzle making, and you with your own brain and sort of typing can figure out these problems. Then over the years I became more of a manager and a leader, and sort of about a reputation for being somebody you could put on any hard problem and I'd figure a way out. You know tell me where we're trying to go it looks knotty, like not a fun project, and I would tackle that. And then I'd say, I had some experience working in lots of different industries. Which really gave me an appreciation, for you know, at the end of the day, we can all debate the role that technology plays in companies. But industries, whether it's health care or media, or financial services. There's a lot of the same challenges that we have. So I worked at Turner Broadcasting before it was acquired, you know by Time Warner and AOL. And I learned about media. And then I had a fantastic time working at Charles Schwab. That was my first big Financial Services role when it came back to the bay area. I worked at Art.Com, it was a need converse company, the first company I worked at where I was in charge of all the technology. We had no brick and mortar, and if the technology wasn't working, we weren't earning revenue, in fact, not only that, we were really making customers angry. I also had a role at a start up, where I was the third person to join the company, and we had a great CEO who had a vision, but it was on paper. And we hadn't really figured out how to build this. I was very proud to assemble a team, get an office, and have a product launch in a year. >> So you're a builder, you're a doer, an assembler, key coding, hexadecimal cord dumps back in the day. >> Way back when. We didn't even have monitors. I'll tell ya, it was a long time ago. >> Glory days, huh? Back when we didn't have shoes on. You know, technology. But what a change. >> Huge change. >> The variety of backgrounds you have, The LinkedIn, the Charles Schwab, I think was during the growth years. >> And the downturn, so we got both sides. >> Both sides of that coin, but again, the technologies were evolving. >> Yes. >> To serve that kind of high frequency customer base. >> Beth: That's right. >> With databases changing, internet getting faster. >> It has. >> Jeff: More people getting online. >> We were early adopters, I'll tell you. I still will tell people, Charles Schwab is one of the best experiences I have, even though at the end I was part of the layoff process. I was there almost seven years, and I watched, we had crazy times in the internet boom. Going in 98, 99, 2000, I can't even tell you some of the experiences we had. And we weren't a digital native. But we were one of the first companies to put trading online, and to build APIs so our customers could self service, and they could do that all online. We did mobile trading. I remember we had to test our software on like twenty different phone sets. Today, it's actually, so much easier. >> It's only three. Or two. Or one. Depending on how you look at it. >> That's right. We couldn't even test on all the phone sets that were out then. But that was such a great experience, and I still, that Schwab network, is still people I'm in touch with today. And we all sort of sprinkled out to different places. I think, I dunno, there's just something special about that company in terms of what we learned, and what we were able to accomplish. >> You have a fantastic background. Again the waves of innovation you have lived through, been apart of, tackling hard problems, taking it head on. Great ethos, great management discipline. Now more than ever, it seems to be needed, because we're living in an age of massive change. Cause you have the databases are changing, the networks changing, the coding paradigms changing. Dev ops, you've got the role of data. Obviously, mobile clearly is proliferated. And now the business models are evolving. Now you got business model action, technical changes, cultural people changes. All of those theaters are exploding with opportunity, but also challenges. What's your take on that as you look at that world? >> You know, I'm a change junkie, I think. I love when things are changing, when organizations are changing, when companies are coming apart and coming together. So for me, I feel like, I've been again, so fortunate I'm in the perfect place. But, one of the things that I really prided myself on early in my career, is being what I call the bridge, or the, the translator between the different lines of business folks that I work with. Whether it was head of marketing, or somebody in a sales or customer relationship, or service organization, and the technology teams I built and led. And I think I've had a natural curiosity about what makes a business tick, and not so much over indexing on the technology itself. So technology is going to come and go, there's going to be different flavors. But actually, how to really take advantage of that technology, to better engage your customers, which as you said, their needs and their demands are changing, their expectations are so high. They really set the pace now. Who would have though that ten years ago we'd live in an environment where industries and businesses are changing because consumers have sort of set the bar on the way we all want to interact, engage, communicate, buy, pay. So there's this huge impact on organizations, and you know, I have a lot of empathy for large established enterprises that are challenged to make it through this transformation, this change, that somehow, they have to make. And I always try to pay attention on which companies have done it. And I call out Microsoft as an example. I can still remember several years ago, being at a conference. I think it was Jeffrey Moore who was speaking, and he had on one slide... Here's all the companies in technology that have had really large success. Leading up to the internet boom days, there would be a recipe for the four companies that would come together. I think it was Sun, Oracle, and Microsoft. And then he said, and now here's the companies of today. And most young people coming out of college, or getting computer science degrees won't use any of these old technology companies. But Microsoft proved us all wrong, but they did it, focused on people, culture, being willing to say where they screwed up, and where they're not going to focus anymore, and part ways with those parts of their business. And really focus on who are their customers, what are their customer needs. I think there's something to be learned from those changes they made. And I think back to the Tech Whisperer, there's no excuse for an executive today, not to at least understand the fundamentals of technology. So many decisions have to be made around investment, capital, hiring, investment in your people. That without that understanding, you're sort of operating blind. >> And this is the thing that I think I love, and was impressed by that Tech Whisperer article. You know, a play on the Horse Whisperer, the movie. You're kind of whispering in the ears of leaders who won't admit that they're scared. But they're all scared! They're all scared. And so they need to get, maybe it's cognitive dissonance around decision making, or they might not trust their lead. Or they don't know what they're talking about So this certainly is there, I would agree with that. But there's dynamics at play, and I want to get your thoughts on this. I think this plays into the Tech Whisperer. The trend we're seeing is the old days was the engineers are out coding away, hey they're out there coding away, look at them coding away. Now with Cloud they're in the front lines. They're getting closer to the customer, the apps are in charge. They're dictating to the infrastructure what can be done. With data almost every solution can be customized. There's no more general purpose. These are the things we talk about, but this changes the personnel equation. Now you got engineering and product people talking to sales and marketing people, business people. >> And customers. >> They tend not to, they traditionally weren't going well. Now they have to work well, engineers want to work with the customers. This is kind of a new business practice, and now I'm a scared executive. Beth, what do I do? What's your thoughts on that dynamic? >> You know, I'm not sure I would have had insight in that if I hadn't had the oppurtunity to work at this little start up, which we were a digital native. And it was the first time I worked in an environment where we did true extreme programming, pair programming, we had really strong product leads, and engineers. So we didn't have project managers, business analysts, a lot of things that I think enterprise I.T tends to have. Because the folks, historically, at an enterprise, the folks that are specifying the need, the business need, are folks in the lines of business. And they're not product managers, and even product managers, I say in banking for example, they aren't software product managers. And so that change, if you really do want to embrace these new methods and dev ops, and a lot of the automation that's available to engineering and software development organizations today, you really do have to make that change. Otherwise it's just going to be a clumsy version of what you use to do, with a new name on it. The other thing though that I would say, is I don't want to discount for large enterprises is partnerships with start up companies or other tech partners. You don't need to build everything. There's so much great technology out there. You brought up the Cloud. Look at how rich these Cloud stacks are getting. You know, it's not just now, can you provision me some compute, and some storage, and help me connect to the internet. There's some pretty sophisticated capabilities in there around A.I and machine learning, and data management, and analysis. So, I think overtime, we'll see richer and richer Cloud stacks, that enables you know, every company to benefit from the technology and innovation that's going on right now. >> Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Search, has always said whenever I've interviewed him, he always talks publicly now about it is, two pizza teams, and automate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In tech we all know what that is, the boring, mundane, patching, provisioning, ugh. And deploying more creative research. Okay so, I believe that. I'm a big believer of that philosophy. But it opens up the role, the question of the roles of the people. That lonely DBA, that you once were, I did some DBA work myself. System admins, storage administrator, these were roles, network administrator, the sacred God of the network, they ran everything. They're evolving to be much more coding oriented, software driven changes. >> It's a huge change. And you know, one thing that I think is sad, is I run into folks often that are, I'll just say, technology professionals, just say, you know, we're at large. Who are out of work. You know, who sort of hang their head, they're not valued, or maybe there's some ageism involved, or they get marked as, oh that's old school, they're not going to change. So, I really do believe we're at a point, where there's not enough resources out there. And so how we invest in talent that's available today, and help people through this change, not everybody is going to make it. It starts with you, knowing yourself, and how open-minded you are. Are you willing to learn, are you willing to put some effort forth, and sort of figuring out some of these new operating models. Because that's just essential if you want to be part of the future. And I'll tell you, it's hard, and it's exhausting. So I don't say this lightly, I just think. You know about my career, how many changes and twists and turns their have been. Sometimes you're just like, okay I'm ready, I'm ready to just go hiking. (Beth laughs) >> It can be, there's a lot of institutional baggage, associated with the role you had, I've heard that before. Old guard, old school, we don't do that, you're way too old for that, we need more women so lets get women in. So there's like a big dynamic around that. And I want to get your thoughts on it because you mentioned ageism, and also women in tech has also grown. There's a need for that. So there's more opportunities now than ever. I mean you go to the cyber security job boards, there are more jobs for cyber security experts than any. >> Oh, I'll tell you, yesterday, we held an event at our office, in partnership with some different start ups. Because that's one of the things you do when you're in a corporate venture group, and it was all on the future of authentication. So it was really targeted at an audience of information security professionals and chief information security officers. And it was twenty men and one woman. And I thought, wow, you know I'm use to that from having been a CIO that a lot of the infrastructure roles in particular, like as you were saying, the rack and stack, the storage management, the network folks, just tend to be more male dominant, than I think the product managers, designers, even software engineers to some extent. But here you know, how many times can you go online and see how many openings there are for that type of role. So I personally, am not pursuing that type of role, so I don't know what all the steps would need to be, to get educated, to get certified, but boy is there a need. And that needs not going to go away. As more, if everything is digitized and everything is online. Then security is going to be a constant concern and sort of dynamic space. >> Well, we interview a lot of women in tech, great to have you on, you're a great leader. We also interview a lot of people that are older. I totally believe that there's an ageism issue out there. I've seen it first hand, maybe because I'm over fifty. And also women in tech, there's more coming but not enough. The numbers speak for themselves. There's also an opportunity, if you look at the leveling up. I talked to a person who was a network engineer, kind of the same thing as him, hanging his head down. And I said, do you realize that networking paradigm is very similar to how cyber works. So a lot of the old is coming back. So if you look at what was in the computer science programs in the eighties. It was a systems thinking. The systems thinking is coming back. So I see that as a great opportunity. But also the aperture of the field of computer science is changing. So it's not, there are some areas that frankly, women are better than men at in my opinion. In my opinion, might get some crap for that. But the point, I do believe that. And there are different roles. So I think it's not just, there's so much more here. >> Oh, that's what I try to tell people. It's not just coding, right. There's so many different types of roles. And unfortunately I think we don't market ourselves well. So I encourage everyone out there that knows somebody. (Beth laughs) Who's looking-- >> If someone was provisioned Sun micro-systems, or mini computers, or workstations, probably has a systems background that could be a Cloud administrator or a Cloud architect. Same concepts. So I want to get your thoughts on women in tech since you're here. What's your thoughts on the industry, how's it going, things you advise, other folks, men and women, that they could do differently. Any good signs? What's your thoughts in general? >> Yeah so, first of all, I'm just a big advocate for women in general. Young girls, and, young women, just getting into the work force, and always have been. Have to say again, very fortunate early in my career working for companies like a phone company, and Schwab, we had so many amazing female leaders. And I don't even think we had a program, it was just sort of part of the DNA of the company. And it's really only in the last couple of years I really seen we have a big problem. Whether it's reading about some of the cultures of some of the big tech companies, or even spending more time in the valley. I think there's no one answer, it's multifaceted. It's education, it's families, it's you know, each one of us could make a difference in how we hire, sort of checking in what our unintended biases are, I know at Citi right now, there's a huge program around diversity and inclusion. Gender, and otherwise. And one of the ways I think it's going to be impactful. They've set targets that I know are controversial, but it holds people accountable, to make decisions and invest in developing people, and making sure there's a pipeline of talent that can step up into even bigger roles with a more diverse leadership team. It will take time though, it will take time. >> But mind shares are critical. >> It absolutely is. Self-awareness, community awareness, very much so. >> What can men do differently, it's always about women in tech, but what can we, what can men do? >> I think it's a great question. I would say, women can do this too. I hate when I see a group together, and it's all women working on the women issue. Shame on us, for not inviting men into the organization. And then I think it's similar to the Tech Whisperer. Don't be nervous, don't be worried, just step in. Because, you know, men are fathers, men are leaders, men are colleagues. They're brothers, they're uncles. We have to work on this together. >> I had a great guest, and friend, I was interviewing. And she was amazing, and she said, John, it's not diversity and inclusion, it's inclusion and diversity. It's I-N-D not D-I. First of all, I've never heard of it, what's D-N-I? My point exactly. Inclusion is not just the diversity piece, inclusion first is inclusive in general, diversity is different. So people tend to blend them. >> Yes they do. >> Or even forget the inclusion part. >> Final question, since you're a change junkie, which I love that phrase, I'm kind of one myself. Change junkies are always chasing that next wave, and you love waves. Pat Gelsinger at VMWare, wave junkie, always love talking with him. And he's a great wave spotter, he sees them early. There's a big set of waves coming in now, pretty clear. Cloud has done it's thing. It's only going to change and get bigger, hybrid, private, multi Cloud. Data, AI, twenty year cycle coming. What waves are you most excited about? What's out there? What waves are obvious, what waves aren't, that you see? >> Yeah, oh, that's a tough one. Cause we try to track what those waves are. I think one of the things that I'm seeing is that as we all get, and I don't just mean people, I mean things. Everything is connected, and everything has some kind of smarts, some kind of small CPU senser. There's no way that our existing, sort of network, infrastructure and the way we connect and talk can support all of that. So I think we're going to see some kind of discontinuous change, where new models are going to, are going to absolutely be required cause we'll sort of hit the limit of how much traffic can go over the internet, and how many devices can we manage. How much automation can the people and an enterprise sort of oversee and monitor, and secure and protect. That's the thing that I feel like it's a tsunami about to hit us. And it's going to be one of these perfect storms. And luckily, I think there is innovation going on around 5G and edge computing, and different ways to think about securing the enterprise. That will help. But it couldn't come soon enough. >> And model also meaning not just technical business. >> Absolutely. Machine the machine. Like who's identity is on there that's taken an action on your behalf, or the companies behalf. You know, we see that already with RPA, these software robots. Who's making sure that they're doing what they're suppose to do. And they're so easy to create, now you have thousands of them. In my mind, it's just more software to manage. >> And a great contrary to Carl Eschenbach, former VMware CEO now at Sequoia, he's on the board of UIPath, they're on the front page of Forbes today, talking about bots. >> Yes, yes, yes, I've heard them speak. >> This is an issue, like is there a verification. Is there a fake bots coming. If there's fake news, fake bots are probably going to come too. >> Absolutely they will. >> This is a reality. >> And we're putting them in the hands of non-engineers to build these bots. Which there's good and bad, right. >> Regulation and policy are two different things, and they could work together. This is going to be a seminal issue for our industry. Is understanding the societal impact, tech for good. Shaping the technologies. This is what a Tech Whisperer has to do. You have a tough job ahead of you. >> But I love it. >> Jeff: Beth thank you for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Jeff Furrier for the People First Network here at Sand Hill Road at Mayfield as part of theCUBE and SiliconANGLE's co-creation with Mayfield Fund, thans for watching.

live from Washington DC if the queue covering in forum DC 2018 brought to you by in for and welcome back here on the cube inform 2018 we're live in Washington DC continuing our day to coverage here on the cube along with de Ville on tape I'm John Wallace it's now a pleasure as well to welcome Eric Noren to the cube is the managing director of the CFO and enterprise value consulting at Accenture good morning Eric Harry a good morning to see you guys glad to have you with us we appreciate the time yeah let's talk about first the relationship assurance your and in for I know you've had you've been elsewhere right doing some other things with other folks and have kind of migrated back into the in four fold what led to that and what kind of successes are you having well so we're very excited about the partnership with with in for this is kind of like the really the second year for us right now as we go into the second year the first year was really driven from the partnership and the work that we do at Koch Industries and that that client experience kind of led us into a variety of different paths of partnership with with in for we've been doing work with with in for products for many years but we just our alliances just kind of blossomed in this past year into a variety of different areas focusing on the cloud suite financials focusing on GT Nexus in the supply chain space and now we're getting more and more excited about bursts and we're also getting very excited about the the whole the way the infor OS platform is just blossoming and and being tailored to a variety different industries and you've got you've got three offerings right if I remember right that you're taking out that you're taking to your client base as we speak once you give us a rundown of what you're up to well in our practice we have in our CFO and enterprise value practice we have an offering that's all around digital finance that's one of our biggest areas and that's really all just about the intersection of platform technology and how it enables the next generation of the finance function for the CFO so that we cloud that could also include things like you know automation and artificial intelligence applied to the finance function we see in our recent research here that CFO role as pivoting really not to be not really as focused on the books and records and being the controllers right but the CFOs role is now becoming more focused on being the digital steward the value architect of the enterprise and so the core of Finance is being digitized so that the transaction handling can be done more in an automated and efficient way and then freeing up the talent to focus on analytics and value-add and that really allows the CFO to focus more on driving insights into the business driving growth and what we call enterprise value so I totally agree the role of the CFO is transforming quite dramatically you know long gone in my view anyway are the days of CFO equals bean-counter this is a little there's a controller for that and no bean counter by the way is not a pejorative I run a business and I'm happy when people are counting those beans but it's not the CFO's role they're really transforming you see some Rockstar CFOs certainly in the tech industry like Scarpelli Tom sweet to just name a couple right reporting still matters compliance still matters but the CFO is taking a much more strategic role I'm really interested in this this this digitization of finance double-click on that yeah what does that specifically mean maybe you could give us some examples well I think that a couple things one is cloud right also I would say one thing is how transaction handling is moving from paper into all aspects of touchless transaction handling one is that harnessing the data to for transaction so it's touchless between vendors and customers and how that just flows through the system in a more digital way less paper more digital more touchless integration more automation right and then with that platform enabling things like artificial intelligence or machine learning being applied to these patterns of transaction handling so it can do the compliance checking in the reconciliation and so that the accountants right are enabling these algorithms to check things and don't have to do it themselves right but then there's also this whole context of of digital sort of process automation that that yields new ways of working you know new ways of looking at efficiency in terms of how and where the work is done right there was a view of like shared services and how we enable a digital operating model where there is there's work that can be done you know in with business unit intimacy and then there's work that can be done from other locations but then enabled by digital technology that's common and standardized right in a common platform that's also scalable and flexible and so putting all those things together is what we call digital finance I love this conversation and Accenture is like the best of the best you guys gets deep industry expertise and domain expertise I'm interested in Eric and in what the organizational structure looks like because when we talk about digital you're talking about data yeah and when you talking about data you're talking about monetization in some way shape or form not people I think got confused in the early days of big data so we can sell our data and more importantly as how data contributes to the monetization of the company sure and and how you can harness that and invest in that and that's really where the CFO comes in but he or she is not an expert at at digital not an X not a chief data officer or chief digital officer but they are an enabler they got to understand the strategy they got to pay for the strategy and maybe help course-correct it so what are you seeing is the right organizational regime to take advantage of digital well I think it first off it's integrated and it's and it's and it's focused on integration and collaboration for sure I think that there's a role where finance has the the business acumen and the insights to find out where the the story of enterprise value where it is now where it could be relative to the drivers of the business and but what's going on in the industry or the adjacent industries they can take advantage of so it's really all about you know a partnership between you know let's say finance right and let's say bringing in new talent and skills like data scientists and all those kind of you know digital skills and integrating it into finance so that it could be more accessible and then and then translate it into opportunities for for the business units so so a couple examples could be just one just getting a when we say monetization I think there's two things one is cost reduction where could you just use data to just understand the business in all aspects of where costs and how they're behaving and just being farm Warp know precise about where there are opportunities to reduce costs increase your bottom line right and that that in of those is value then there's the other side on you know revenue up left where there could be optimization of pricing optimization of your discounting strategy all those things that get into maintaining and improving your revenue without any additional cost of goods sold correct cost of sales right exactly that's a great example rights right your your operating structures it stays the same they're getting more leverage out of that that's writing and then there's other things where there's adjacent opportunities in to just gain market share right just to say well where there's opportunities with and really what we want to say is that by applying all this intelligence it's focused on really the theme is focused on customer experiences like what are the customer experiences that could be enabled with digital digital technologies in a seamless touchless way that are just differentiating the company you know in the market customers are and I think the world is changing its disrupting so the ways in which customers are interacting with businesses are expecting these kind of digital experiences very much inspired by a lot of the digital native companies they're out there in the market so the traditional companies that don't have those experience need to catch up and invest in these kind of customer experiences give me an example I mean how about expectations and and so let's say for example if you're a telco alright and you've got experiences that are about paying your bill or experiences have to do with services that you need by going to a call center all right now maybe you can have you know the traditional route of talking to someone or maybe there's a way you can go between the information and the channels that you have between your telephone your the mobile app between the website being able to talk to someone and having chat bots and the mix and how you coordinate all those different experiences so that that the customer can come in and get their questions answered in a very efficient way in some cases the the chat BOTS and the kind of sophistication that they can have to to to address the customers question right on the spot in a very timely way helps them just say I got my question solved and I'm happy with that experience right same thing with having information about I'm getting a you know service supply to my home how do I know that I'm having that same certainty of the service supply to the home much like the certainty that consumers are experiencing kind of like when they get an uber and they're like hey I know that the car is only five minutes away and it's coming and I have that certainty of an experience now that's being applied to other kind of customer experience it's a lot of situation I'm there at three things so first was saved money you know example RP a jerk something to help you drop money to the bottom line just cutting out mundane tasks yeah the top the top line operating leverage and that's around analytics may be optimizing pricing was the example you gave now the third I'll call Tam expansion which is which is really gaining share you leveraging your digital strategy to maybe try to be an incumbent disruptor just disrupt before you get disrupted now that last one has more risk associated with it because there are there are additional cost you've got other cost of goods sold you go to market cost but the reward could be you know huge these are the conversations is a great great proxy for the conversations that are going on with your clients yeah absolutely and I think that look you know there's the the market is going through changes constant disruption is coming in different forms whether it be through technology or other kind of industry integrations and you know they're different in the different we I specialize and more the communications me in technology industry alright and so those those are where I spend most of my time and and what's going on in communications right now and what's going on with communications and media is a quite interesting time on how content and distribution of content is changing and the way that the next generation of consumers are going to think about you know consuming media and how advertising is distributed we're going through a tremendous transformation in that space and all the companies are kind of racing to to be have that advantage of how they connect with the consumers at scale in a seamless connected way so that they have that that that ability to continue to serve them in new and innovative ways so let's talk about them so you said comms and media are we talking telecoms yeah okay and then tech industry is in IT technical yeah I mean tech suppliers tech suppliers yes girls just go and and companies like novo those kind of companies that are in that those guys are pretty forward-thinking in terms of technology adoption oh absolutely okay the telco business is really interesting right now though absolutely hardened infrastructures they get over the top suppliers coming in the cost per per bit is going down but they can't charge more you know this you know very well yeah they're going through some really radical transformation at the same time they have a huge opportunity with content yes you see and people make some moves yes absolutely about what's going on in that business a little bit more well you know there was the recent you know Comcast just an acquisition of sky is quite Norway we got 18 t going through the Time Warner thing and then you have so that's a Content play that I think is just frees up some opportunities for for companies like Comcast and AT&T you know to start really servicing their customers and a new profound way you know to be able to say it could be you know content that is suited to different demographics and to get those consumers at scale not only to keep them you know comfortable with the and and very delighted if you will with the kind of wireless service and flexibility they have with that but then to be able to see all the range of content that it could be consuming all of which is coming back to those companies as data as the consumers are watching all this content and having better control visibility of all the different patterns that they're seeing in the use of this content so they can then in turn shape different kinds of programming and shape different kinds of advertising programs that are tailored to those demographics and there's an it there's an underlying infrastructure transformation that's going on so it's something as basic as you know things like network function virtualization not to get too geeky out here but I'm trying to to make their their infrastructure more agile so they can compete with the OTT suppliers and they're trying to vertically integrate as content yes Rogers absolutely in this whole next wave of 5g is is a huge thing that's gonna come to us and that's that's a big disruption that's just starting and will happen in the next three to five years that will level be coming due so everybody's trying to get digital right yeah yeah yo that you talk to but do you do you when you go beneath that to the organization it's harder to get people you know to actually move do you get do you see a sense of complacency of people saying well you know not we're doing pretty well in our industry or I'll be retired before this all happens I mean how do you compel well I think that I mean that does exist in certain industries and certain types of companies you know I think that's the whole point about talent right and I think when we come back and look at talent is really when we think about change not only is the technology changing but the the talent that's available not only in the finance function but in all parts of an enterprise the the the the next generation of folks that are going into the workforce are just coming from a different place in terms of how they use technology in their lifestyle but how they want to apply to their as a customer but then how they want to do it as an employee and so for when we have that conversation about well what is the future going to look like a lot of it will come down to well what does digital mean as an experience for your consumer and your customer but also what does it mean for the talent and and we believe that look talent is a critical asset in every and every company it's the biggest asset that we have in a center right so how do we inspire and have folks have been enabled to use digital technologies to have that entrepreneurial you know sort of platform to use these digitally native tools that's really the key and I think that any kind of you know CFO that's like thinking about betting on the future that talent is very much a part of that stories it's definitely about technology is very important it's an enabler it's a platform however it's the talent that will be using the platform to take those info sites and drive growth in the wild card is data all right that's the new oh yeah absolutely I mean when a variable in the equation yeah this data putting data at the sort of score of your organization and having the talent that knows how they'll exploit your day that's right and I think it's like when I think about talent there's I mean there's different specializations right but I think the talent is really about the collaboration you see people who are able to work with other different cross functions and say well how do we how do we build and find this together how do we discover where the opportunity the insight is together right and you know there's you know there's differences between you know stuff which I said like the you know things that are known and we just optimized what we have and then there's going into the new areas right that I haven't been discovered yet and I think that the thing about the the the talent that's curious you know we like the way to think about like okay curious about what could be or what's out there and using data not as a as a hurdle but harnessing the power of data to go into these areas and start exploring and using all those different tools to explore where could we go and one of the things it's doing is it's not about you know we talked about analytics and some of the tools that are out there it's not about necessarily precision in this moment it's about direction of where you can go and exploring and continuing to find the facts that support investment it's your point I mean the the tools and the tech aren't the hard part it's the it's the unknown it's the people right you know the processes around that right getting everybody on the same page to collaborate it's like old dogs new tricks I mean I mean so yeah never simplifying but you you are trying to bring new tricks yeah to folks and there's a generational awareness that you're the difference between the people they have coming up and where they said that's right and we think that look you know by bringing the fresh new talent in to the organization that and of itself has has the team operating and working differently because not only they have new tools but there's new a new way of talent being integrated you know new talent and experienced talent you know seeing how these things come together to wither with a mandate again on superior business outcomes like let's go after these prizes it's worth it to get this right to make these investments because if we get it right there's an opportunity to grow revenue to grow to grow profitably to gain market share right so there's a there's a it's hard okay there's culture change and change this is normal okay digital transformation is not an easy thing to do all companies go through you know different things but it's worth it in the end yeah and it enforced talked a lot at this show about new new ways to work what I call new ways to and I think there's some substance there yeah absolutely Eric thank you and for the record we are always open to new tricks we do like new tricks okay good it'd be good to have you with us okay my pleasure guys Norman ceinture back with more on the key we're live here in Washington DC [Music]

(soft music) (soft music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas. This is the Cube. SiliconAngles flagship program. We got out to the events and extract the (mumbles). Been here two full days of wall to wall coverage. I'm John Furrier. My cohost Peter Burris. Peter really good to see Oracle really move from modern marketing experience, the old show name, to a cleaner broader canvas called Modern CX. Which is modern customer experience. And you startin to see the new management which took the baton from the old management. Kevin Akeroyd. Andrea Ward who did a lot of work. I mean they basically did a ton of acquisitions. We talked last year if you remember. Look they have a data opportunity and we spelled it right out there and said if they can leverage that data horizontally and then offer that vertical specialism with differentiation, they could have their cake and eat it too. Meaning the pillars of solutions in a digital fabric with data. That's what they did. They essentially did it. >> Yeah they did. And it's been, it was a. We came here hoping that that's what we would see and that's what we saw John. Oracle not only has access to a lot of data but a lot of that first person data that really differentiates the business. Information about your finances. Information about your customers. Information about orders. That's really, really crucial data. And it's not easy to get. And if you could build a a strategy for your customers that says let's find ways of bringing in new sources of data. Leveraging that data so that we can actually help you solve and serve your customers better. You got a powerful story. That's a great starting point. >> And one of the things that I would observe here is that this event, the top story was that Mark Hurd came down and talked to the customers in the keynote. And also made a cameo visit to the CMO, some which they had separately. But really kind of basically putting it transparently out there. Look we got all this technology. Why are we spending all of this technology and effort to get a one percent conversion rate on something that happens over here. Let's look at it differently. And I think the big story here is that Oracle puts the arc to the future. Which I think is a very relevant trajectory. Certainly directionally correct using data and then figuring out your process and implementing it. But really looking at it from a people perspective and saying if you can use the data, focus your energies on that data to get new things going. And not rely on the old so much. Make it better but bring in the new. >> I think that's the one thing that we need to see more from Oracle in all honesty. At shows, this show, and shows like this. Is that and we asked the question to a couple quests. What exactly is modern marketing? Technology can allow a company to do the wrong things faster and cheaper. And in some cases that's bad. In marketing that's awful. Because more of the wrong thing amplifies the problem. That's how you take down a brand. You can really annoy the hell out of your customers pretty quickly. >> Well I think you made that point interesting I thought. On that just to reiterate that, validate that, and amplify. Is that if you focus more on serving the business as a marketer versus now it's about the customer. Okay which is why I like the CX and I know you do too. You can create enterprise value through that new way. Versus hey look what team. I'm helping you out with some leads and whatever. Support, content. Marketing now owns the customer relationship. >> Well marketers talk about a persona all the time John. They say what's the persona? It's a stylized type of customer, and now with data we can make it increasingly specific. Which is very, very powerful. I think Oracle needs to do the same thing with the marketing function. What is that marketing function persona that Oracle is, it's self driving to. Driving it's customers to. And trying to lead the industry into. So I would personally like to see a little bit more about what will be the role of marketing in the future. What exactly is the modern. What exactly is modern marketing? What is the road map that Oracle has, not just for delivering the technology, but for that customer transformation that they talk about so much. It's clear that they have an idea. I'd like to see a little bit more public. Cause I think a lot of marketers need to know where they're going to end up. >> I was a bit skeptical coming in here today. I was a little nervous and skeptical. I like the team though, the people here. But I wasn't sure they were going to be able to pull this off as well as they did. I'd give them a solid letter grade of an A on this event. Not an A plus because I think there's some critical analysis that's worth addressing in my opinion. In my opinion Oracle's missing some things. It's not their fault. They're only going as fast as they can. Not to get into your perspective too, but here's my take. They don't know how to deal with video. That came up as technical issue. But Jay -- >> But nobody really does. >> But nobody really does. And that's just again because we're in the video business it jumped out at me. But Jay Baer was on. Who's hosted the CMO Summit. And he's out there too like us. Content is a big thing. And I haven't heard a lot about the content equation in the marketing mix. So if you look at the modern marketing mix, content is data. And content is instrumental as a payload for email marketing. And we're in the content business so we know a lot about the engagement side of it. So I just don't see a lot of the engagement conversations that are happening around content. Don't see that dots connecting. >> And I think you're right. I think you're right John. And part of the reason is, and again I think Oracle needs to do a better job at articulating what this means. From our perspective, it's my perspective but you agree with me. I'll put words in your mouth. Is that marketing has to be a source of value to customers. Well what do customers find valuable? They find information in easily digestible, consumable chunks as they go on their journey. What are those chunks? Those chunks, in fact, are content. So to tie this back and show how crucial this is. At the end of the day, consumers, businesses need to learn about your brand. Need to learn about next best action. All that other stuff. In consumable interesting, valuable chunks. And it ultimately ends up looking like content. So your absolutely right to talk about how this all comes together and show how, that content is the mechanism by which a lot of this value's actually going to be delivered. Is really crucial. >> And now to give the praise sandwich, as we say in positive coaching alliance, two positives and then the critical analysis in the middle. That's the praise sandwich. So to give them some praise around the criticism. I will say that Oracle validates for me, and this is why I think they got a good strategy. That there's no silver bullet in marketing. Okay there's no silver bullet. This product will get you more engagement. This will do that. They do show that data is going to be an instruble part of creating a series of collections of silver bullets. Of bullets if you will. To create that value. And I think that's the key. And then the second praise is, this is kind of nuance in their analysis. But the third party data support, is a big deal in my mind. I want to expand more on that. I want to learn more about it. Because when you have the first party data, which is very valuable, and access to more data sources. That becomes increasingly interesting. So the extensibility for getting content data or other data can come in through third party. I think that opens the door for Oracle to innovate on the area we gave the criticism on. So I think that's a positive trend. I think that's a good outlook on having the ability to get that third party data. >> Yeah but it's also going to be one of the places where Oracle is going to have to compete very, very aggressively with some other leaders who are a little bit more oriented towards content. At least some of their marketing clients are a little bit more content oriented. I'm comfortable Oracle will get there because let's face it. At the end of the day, marketing's always done a pretty good job of created, creative, using data to figure out what creative to use or create is nice. Very important. But what we're really talking about is customer experience. Will the customer get something out of every interaction? And while content's crucial to that the end result is ultimately, is the customer successful? And Oracle is showing a better play for that. So I'll give you, I like the way you did it on the grading. I'll give them a B plus. But I'm not disagreeing with you. I think we saw A talent here. We saw an A minus story. And they're a year in. So there's still some work that needs to be done, but it's clearly -- >> Why you weighted as a B plus >> I give them an A on vector. And where they're going. >> I would agree with that. >> And the feedback that we've gotten from the customers walking the show floor. There's a lot of excitement. A lot of positive energy. The other thing that I would say -- >> Oh the band. I'd give the band, the band was a B minus. (Peter laughs) Yeah that takes it. That's going to kill the curve. >> What was the band last night? >> I don't even remember. We missed the good one, I know that. We had dinner so we came late. It was a good band. It wasn't like, it wasn't like Maroon 5 or One Republic. Or Imagine Dragons or U2. >> Or one of the good ones. Sting. C minus. But the other thing that I think is really important is at least it pertains to modern customer experience. Is that they are, they are absolutely committed to the role the data's going to play. And we talked about that right at the front. But they are demonstrating a deep knowledge of how data and data integration and data flows are really going to impact the way their customers businesses operate. And I think that there were a couple of, I'll give a really high point and one that I want to hear more about in terms of the interviews we had. Great high point was one, we talked a lot about data science and how data science technologies are being productized. And that we heard, for example, that Oracle's commitment to it's marketplace is that they are going to insure that their customers can serve their customer's customers with any request within 130 milliseconds anywhere in the world. That's a very, very powerful statement that you can only really make if you're talking about having an end to end role over, or influence -- >> Like we commented, that's a good point. Like we commented that this end to end architecture is going to be fundamental. If you read the tea leaves and look at other things happening, like at Mobile World Congress. Intel I think is a bellwether on this with 5G. Cause they have to essentially create this overlay for connectivity as well as network transformation to do autonomous vehicles. To do smart cities. To smart homes. All these new technologies. It's an end to end IPR (mumbles). It's connected devices. So they're super smart to have this connected data theme which I think's relevant. But the other one, Ron Corbusier's talked about this evolution. And I find some of these, and I want to get your reaction to this statement. So Ron was kind of like, "oh it's an evolution. "We've seen this movie before." Okay great. But when you talk to Marta Feturichie, who was a customer from Royal Phillips. >> Peter: Great interview. >> She's head of CRM. Now she's doing some other stuff. So okay. What does CRM mean? So if you think evolution. What the customers are doing. Time Warner and Royal. It's interesting. Certain things are becoming critical infrastructure and other things are becoming more dynamic and fluid. So if you believe in evolution, these are layers of innovation. So stuff can be hardened as critical infrastructure, say like email marketing. So I think that what's happening here is you start to see some hardening of some critical infrastructure, aka marketing technology. MarTech (mumbles). Maybe some consolidation. AdTech kind of comes together. Certain things are going to be hardened and platformized. >> Let's take the word hardened and change it cause I know what you mean. Let's say it's codified. Now why is that, why is that little distinction a little bit interesting is because the more codified it gets, the more you can put software on it. The more you can put software on it the more you can automate it. And now we're introducing this whole notion of the adaptive intelligence. Where as we start to see marketing practices and processes become increasingly codified. What works, what doesn't work? What should we do more of? What should we do less of? Where should we be spending out time and innovating? Versus where should we just be doing it because it's a road activity at this point in time. That's where introducing this adaptive intelligence technology becomes really interesting. Because we can have the adaptive technology elements handle that deeply codified stuff where there really is not a lot of room for invention. And give the more interesting ongoing, customer engagement, customer experience -- >> Right on. And I think we should challenge Oracle post event and keep an eye on them on this adaptive intelligence app concept. Because that is something that they should ride to the sunset cause that is just a beautiful positioning. And if they can deliver the goods on that, they say they have it. We'll expand on that. That's going to give them the ability to churn out a ton of apps and leverage the data. But to the codified point you're making, here's my take. One of the things that I hear from customers in marketing all the time is a lot of stuff if oh yeah mobile first all that stuff. But still stuff's web presence based. So you got all these coded URL's. You got campaigns running ten ways from Sunday. DNS is not built to be adaptive and flexible. So it's okay to codify some of those systems. And say, "look we just don't tinker with these anymore." They're locked and loaded. You build on top of it. Codify it. And make that data the enabling technology from that. >> Peter: Without it become new inflexible (mumbles). >> Yeah I can't say, "Hey let's just tweak the hardened infrastructure "to run an AB test on a campaign." Or do something. No, no. You set this codified systems. You harden them. You put software on top of them. And you make it a subsystem that's hardened. And that's kind of what I mean. That's where the market will go because let's face it. The systems aren't that intelligent to handle a lot of marketing. >> Peter: They're still computers. >> They're still computers. People are running around just trying to fix some of this spaghetti code in marketing. And as the marketing department gets more IT power. Hey you own it. They're owning now. Be afraid what you wish for you might get it. So now they own the problem. So I think Oracle on the surfaces side has a huge opportunity to do what they did with Time Warner. Come into the market and saying, "Hey we got that for you." And that's what Hurd's kind of subtle message was on his keynote. Hey we're IT pros, but by the way you don't need to be in the IT business to do this. We fix your problems and roll out this -- >> We're going to talk to you in your language. And your language is modern customer experience. Which is one of the reasons why they've got to be more aggressive. And stating what they mean by that. >> And we have all the data in our data cloud. And all the first party data in our Oracle database. >> Right, right exactly right. >> That system of record becomes the crown jewel. Oracle has a lock spec on the table. You think it's a lock spec? >> Uh no. And that's exactly why I think they need to articulate where this is all going a little bit. They have to be a leader in defining what the future of marketing looks like so they can make it easier for people to move forward. >> Alright putting you on the spot. What do you think a modern marketing looks like? And organization. >> We talked about this and the answer that I gave, and I'll evolve it slightly, cause we had another great guest and I thought about it a little bit more is. A brand continuously and always delivers customer value. Always. And one of the -- >> Kind of cliche-ish. >> Kind of cliche-ish. >> Dig into it. >> But modern marketing is focused on delivering customer value. >> How? >> If they're deliver - well for example when the customer has a moment in a journey of uncertainty. Your brand is first is first to the table with that content that gets them excited. Gets them comfortable. >> Lot of progression. >> Makes them feel ready to move forward. That your, and well I'll make another point in a second. And I would even say that we might even think about a new definition of funnel. At the risk of bringing up that old artifact. Historical funnel went to the sale. Now we can actually start thinking about what's that funnel look like to customer success. >> Well there's two funnel dynamics that are changing. This is important, I think. This is going to be one of those moments where wow the Cube actually unpacked a major trend and I believe it to be true. The vertical funnel has collapsed. And now the success funnel is not >> Peter: It's not baked. >> Not big. It's decimated from this perspective of if the sale is the end game of the funnel, pop out that's over. Your point is kind of like venture funding for starter. That's when the start line begins. So here it's, okay we got a sale. But now we have instrumentation to take it all the way through the life cycle. >> And you know John. That's a great way of thinking about it. That many respects when you, when you introduce a customer to a new solution that has complex business implications that you are jointly together making an investment in something. And you both have to see it through. >> I mean sales guys put investment proposal on the -- >> That's exactly right. And so I think increasingly. So I would say modern marketing, modern marketing comes down to customer success. A prediction I'll make for next year is that this session is called, you know we'll call it the modern marketing modern customer experience show. But the theme is going to be customer success. >> Heres what I'm going to do. Here's what we're going to do this year Peter. We're going to, we will, based upon this conversation which we're riffing in real time as we analyze and summarize the event. We, I will make it my mission. And you're going to work with me on this as a directive. We're going to interview people, we're going to pick people that are truly modern marketing executives. >> Peter: That's great. >> We're going to define a simple algorithm that says this is what we think a modern marketing executive looks like. And we're going to interview them. We're going to do a story on them. And we're going to start to unpack because I think next year. We should be coming here saying, "we actually did our work on this." We figured out that a modern marketing organization and an executive behave and look this way. >> Right I think it's a great idea. So I'll give you one more thought. Cause I know you'll like this one too. Doug Kennedy. The partner. The conversation that we had. >> Very good. >> Talking about clearly a grade A executive. Seven weeks into the job. But that is going to be, you know for this whole thing to succeed he's got a lot of work in front of him. It's going to be very interesting to see how over the course of time this show and other Oracle shows evolve. >> I have a lot of partner experience. You do too. He's got a zillion years under his belt. He's a pro. He did not have any deer in the headlights look for seven weeks on the job. He's been there. He's done that. He knows the industry. He's seen the cycles of change. He's ridden waves of innovation up and down. And I think Oracle has a huge opportunity with his new program. And that is Oracle knows how to make money. Okay Oracle knows how to price things. They know how to execute on the sales side and go to market. And partners relationships are grounded in trust. And profitability. I would say profitability first and trust second. And it's kind of a virtuous circle. >> But John they've got to start getting grown in customer experience right? >> John: Yeah, yep. >> And that's not, it's doable but it's going to be a challenge. >> Well we talk about swim lanes with his interview, and I thought that was interesting. If you look at a center for instance, Deloy, PWC and all the different players. They're picking their swim lanes where their core competency is. And that's what he was basically saying. They're going to look for core competency. Now I think they're not there yet. The major SI's and potential partners. So he's going to have to put the spec out and put the bar there and say this is what we got to do. But you got to make the channel serve the customer. It has to be profitable. And it has to be relevant. And the only dangerous strategy I would say is the co-selling thing is always dicey. >> Especially if one has customer experience as a primary. >> It requires equilibrium in the ecosystem. >> You got it, you got it. >> It isn't there. >> And also it's a multi-partner go to market. It's not just one or two now. >> So he's going to have to really spread the love at the same time have hardened rules. Stick to his knitting on that one. Okay Peter final word. What do you, bottom line the show. Encapsulate the show into a bumper sticker. >> Well we heard Amazon released today. Google released today. Beat their numbers. Two companies that are trying to build an ecosystem from their core of the cloud. And the question is. Is Oracle who has customers with applications and with that first person data. Are they going to be able to cloudify, sorry for using that word, but are they going to be able to gain that trust that this new operating model they're really committed to for the future. Before Amazon and Google can create applications to their platform. Because Oracle has the end to end advantage right now. And in the world where digital's important. Speed's important. The fidelity of the data's important. The customer experience is important. That end to end has a window of opportunity. >> And I would also add two other companies reported, Microsoft and Intel and missed. So you have Amazon and Google. New guard, newer guard. Old guard Intel, Microsoft. Oracle is considered old guard even though they have some modernization going on from CX and the cloud. But Oracle is cloud a hundred percent in the cloud. Their SAP, for instance, is going multi-class. So the wild card in all this is, if the multi-cloud game evolves. >> Think end to end. End to end. Because that has advantages. When you're talking data, one of the things that Jack Brookwood said. He said, "you know why we can hit that 150 millisecond target?" >> Cause you don't have to move the data around. >> Cause sometimes we don't have to move the data around. >> This can be very interesting. And this going to be fun to watch and participate in. Of course the Cube will covering Oracle, well we'll be there again this year. We don't have the exacts specifics on that, but certainly if your interested in checking us out. Were siliconangle.com. Peter's research is at wikibon.com as well as SiliconANGLE on the front page. SiliconAngle.tv has all the videos. And well will be documenting and following the modern marketing experience with people and companies. And documenting that on the Cube and SiliconANGLE. So that's a wrap from day two at Oracle Modern CX. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas for the CUBE's special coverage of Oracle's ModernCX, Modern Customer Experience, this is the Cube, I'm John Furrier, my cohost Peter Burris. Our next guest is Tony Nadalin. Tony Nadalin is the global vice president of the Global Consulting at Oracle for the marketing cloud. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. >> So you've got to implement this stuff, and we've heard a lot of AI magic and there's a lot of meat on the bone there. People are talking about there's a lot of real things happening. Certainly, Oracle's acquired some great technologies over the years, integrated it all together. The proof is in the pudding. When you roll it out, the results have to speak for themselves. >> Tony: Yes, absolutely. >> So share with us some of those activities. What's the score board look like? What's the results? >> I think what's really important, and Lewis spoke about this yesterday, it's people and product. The customers are buying visions. They're looking at creating and changing the customer experience. They're not just buying a piece of technology. They're buying a transformation. I think what's really important and what we do a lot in services, in all services, not just Oracle Marketing Cloud Services, but just healthy services, is when customers are implementing, they're not just implementing technology, they're not just plumbing the pipes. They are putting in changes. They're looking at the people, the process, the technology. We have a really good relationship with our customers and our partners and we're constantly looking at the complete set of services, the complete suite. From what I call transformational services, where we come in and try to understand what are you trying to change? How are you trying to change your customer experience? As a marketer, owning not only what you do, and how all the different channels are working together across all the different products that they are. They purchase Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai, Maxymiser, et cetera. >> So you're laying it all out, it's like you're sitting in a room, now I'm oversimplifying it, but it's not just rolling out stuff. You've got planning. >> Tony: You've got to plan it. >> Put the pieces together. >> You do, and it's a readiness. It's a readiness of the organization, you think about it, you've got within a marketing organization, you've got many teams coming together that have to be united around the brand, the consistency, how they're engaging with customers. But also, not only across like an acquisition team, or loyalty or an upsell and cross sell team, how does that, as we were looking at the products key notes, how does that then extend into the services engagement? How does it extend into the sales engagement? How are we making sure that everyone is using the same messaging, the same branding, leveraging each other? It's a real transformation at a people, process and technology level. So that when you're then implementing, you're implementing changes. And so we've got some great services and great partners that make sure that when the customers are going through that transformation, they're sort of going it fully readied. And our role, from a services perspective, is to ensure then, sort of define the transformation, define the strategy, like plan the plan, and then go execute the plan. And then putting in the plumbing, getting everyone readied. The analogy I used, I'm sure you've got kids, right? When we have toddlers, and you build the kid's first bikes. Your goal is to build that bike, put the training wheels on the bike, and ultimately sort of stand behind your child to a point that when you let them go, they're not going to graze their knees. Then from an ongoing basis, continue to stand behind them, then get ready to take the training wheels off. Then training wheels come off. Maybe at one point they may become BMX champions, right? But you're sort of behind them through the whole-- >> John: There's progression. >> Progression, exactly. >> With my kids, it's simply man to man, then zone defense. (laughter) >> But it's progression, right? A lot of customers, we have not only the onboarding and implementation services, but these ongoing services that are so key. Because obviously it's important to ensure that your customers are realizing. When I think of our services and the journey, there's the discovery, the transformation, and the strategy. That's like the discovery. But you've then got the realization. And then the optimization and the realization to me is that you're realizing that initial step. You're realizing the technology and you're realizing people and process. You're getting people stood up. Skills, people, organizations, technology, data. You're realizing it all so they can then take the next step. >> Alright, so what's the playbook? A lot of times, in my mind's eye, I can envision in a white board room, board room, laying it all out, putting the puzzle pieces together, and then rolling out implementation plan. But the world is going agile, not waterfall anymore, so it's a combination of battle mode, but also architectural thinking. So not just fashion, real architectural, foundational. >> Peter: Design thinking. >> Tony: Exactly, architectural. >> John: Design thinking. What's the playbook? What's the current state of the art in the current-- >> Well we have obviously product consultants, architects, solution consultants, content creators. It's the whole spectrum of where the customer needs to focus on. And I think-- >> John: So you assemble them based upon the engagement. >> Based upon the engagement and understanding, like what are the customer's strengths? Where are they now? Where are they trying to get to? There's some customers, you know, we have a whole range of services, and we have a whole range of customers. So there are some customers who are like, "We have our own teams today, "we want to augment our teams with your teams, "we want to have hybrid models." Or, "We have our own teams today, but not only have you got great people, but you've got great processes." So like, look at Maxymiser as an example. A lot of our Maxymiser customers, not only use our platform, but they use our people. They're not just buying our people, they're buying a sort of agile, Kanban, JavaScript development practices that are a different level of software development. It's not just the people that can code, it's the development practices. So it's that whole operational services where we bring to the table just a different degree of operational excellence. But we're also to go in to our customers that have their own teams and provide them also consulting perspective around how they can also sharpen their edge. If they want to sort of keep, you know. So whole spectrum of services. >> So let me see if I can throw something out there, in kind of like the center, the central thesis of what you do and how it's changed from what we used to do. Especially a company like Oracle, which has been a technology company at the vanguard of a lot of things. It used to be that customers had an idea of what they wanted to implement. They wanted to implement an accounting system. The processes are relatively known. What was unknown was the technology. How do, what do I buy? How do I configure? How do I set it up? How do I train? How do I make the software run? How do I fix? So it was known process, unknown technology. As a consequence, technology companies could largely say, yeah, that value is intrinsic to the product. So you buy the product, you've got it now. But as we move more towards a service world, as we move more toward engaging the customer world where the process is unknown, and the technology, like the cloud, becomes increasingly known. Now we're focused on more of an unknown process, known technology, and the value is in, does the customer actually use it. >> I think the value is actually in does the customer get value. I think there's a, I've managed customer success organizations and customer service organizations, and the one thing I see in SAS, is usage doesn't always equate to value. So I think as a services organization, it's important to understand the roadmap to value. Because a lot of times, I would say in commodity software, sort of the use of it by default in itself was enough. That you were moving to a software platform. I think SAS customers, especially marketers, are looking for transformation. They're looking for a transformation and a change in value. A change in value in the conversation they're having with the customer. A change in acquisition, loyalty, retention, a change in being relevant. As Joseph was saying this morning, being relevant with the customer, and that value is more than just implementing some technology. >> So it's focusing on ensuring that the customer is getting value utility out of whatever they purchase. >> Tony: Correct. >> Not just that they got what they purchased. So as we move into a world where we're embedding technology more and more complex, it's two things happen. One is, you have to become more familiar of the actual utilization. And what does it mean, and I think marketing cog helps that. What is marketing, how does it work? And second one, the historical norm has been, yeah, we're going to spend months and years building something, deploying something, but now we're trying to do it faster, and we can. So how is your organization starting to evolve its metrics? Is it focused on speed? Is it focused on, obviously value delivered, utilization. What are some of the things that you are guiding your people to focus on? >> Well I think, I very much take a outside-in view. So to me, if I look at why a customer is buying, and what do they want. Obviously most customers want fast time to value, as reduced effort, obviously, and little surprises. I think having a plan and being able to execute your plan. And this whole, as we were talking like one-to-many versus one-to-one. >> And timing too, no surprises and they want to execute. >> And time to value, right? And speed. And I think as we were talking, similar to as a marketer is trying to engage any customer and sort of going from that one-to-many to that one-to-you, what's important now for any organization, a services organization, any company, is to understand what does your business look like? Because why you bought from Oracle, whether you be in a certain vertical or a certain space, or a certain maturity as a customer, it's important that we have the play books, and we do, that say that if you're a customer of this size, of these products in this vertical, then we have the blueprints for success. They may not be absolutely perfect, but they're directional, that we can sort of put you on the fast path. That we've seen the potholes before, we've seen the bumps, we understand the nuances of your data, your systems, your people, your regulations. So that we can actually, we have a plan. And it's a plan that's relevant to you. It's not a generic plan. And I think that's the biggest thing where good companies show up then deliver solutions that they're not learning 100%. There's always going to be nuances and areas of gray that you work through, where the customer's just as much as vendors as they transform. We're not just swapping like for like, but when you transform, there's changes that occur on the customer side. There's new awarenesses of I didn't realize we did that. I didn't realize I want to change doing that. And I've actually changed maybe my whole thought. >> What's the change coming from this event? If you look at the show here, ModernCX, some really good directional positioning. The trajectory of where this is going, I believe is on a great path. Certainly directionally relevant, 100%. Some stuff will maybe shift in the marketplace. But for the most part, I'm really happy to see Oracle go down this road. But there's an impact factor to the customers, and the communities, and that's going to come to you, right? So what are you taking away from the show that's important for customers to understand as Oracle brings in adaptive intelligence? As more tightly coupled, highly cohesive elements come together? >> I think to me, it's transformation. Customers really do understand what are they trying to achieve as they transform? Not just by a piece of technology, but come into it understanding, okay, what are we trying to transform? And have we got like all change management? All transformational management? Have I got the right buy-in across the organization? As a marketer, if I'm trying to transform the organization, have I got the right stakeholders in the room with me? Am I trying to influence the right conversations? You look at the conversation yesterday with Netflix. The discussion, or Time-Warner, sorry. Around their transformation around data. That wasn't a single entity determining that. That was a company driven strategy. A company driven transformation. And I think to really change the customer experience, and control the brand of that across all touchpoints of the company, it requires transformation and it requires being realistic around also how long that journey takes. Depending on the complexity and size of the company. It requires investment of people, of energy, or resources and really understanding where is your customer today? Where is your competition? And to Mark's point, it's like the market is being won here, you're having to compete against your competition, you're having to be better than them, you're having to understand your competition just as much as you understand yourself, so you're leapfrogging. Because just as much as you're going after your competitors customers, your customers are coming up for your customers, right, your competitors are coming up for your customers. I think transformation and understanding how to engage the right services leaders, be it Oracle or any of our partners, to really transform your business is to me the biggest take away. The technology then, be it Chatbox or AI, I mean they augment, they help, they're going to be channels, but I think transformation is key. >> It's really not the technology, it's really what you're doing it with, at the end of the day. Tony, thanks for coming on the CUBE. We really appreciate it, and again, when the rubber hits the road, as Peter was saying earlier, it's going to be what happens with the product technologies for the outcomes. >> Tony: Absolutely. >> Thanks for sharing your insights here on the CUBE. Sharing the data, bringing it to you. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE with Peter Burris, more live coverage for the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from Oracle's ModernCX after this short break. (upbeat music) >> Narrator: Robert Herjavec >> Interviewer: People obviously know you from Shark Tank. But the Herjavec Group has been really laser focused on cyber security.

(energetic upbeat music) >> Host: Live from Las Vegas, it's The CUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX show, Modern Customer Experience. The Modern Marketing Experience converted into the Modern CX Show. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. My co-host Peter Burris. Day two of coverage. Our next guest is Catherine Blackmore, Global Vice President, Customer Success, Global Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Catherine, welcome back to The CUBE. Great to see you. >> Thank you so much for having me here. It's been an incredible week, just amazing. >> Last year we had a great conversation. Remember we had. >> Yes. >> It was one of those customer focused conversations. Because at the end of the day, the customers are the ones putting the products to use, solving their problems. You were on stage at the keynote. The theme here is journeys, and the heroes involved. What was the summary of the keynote? >> Sure. As you say, this theme has really been around heroic marketing moments. And in a way, I wanted to take our marketers and the audience to an experience and a time where I think a lot of folks can either remember or certainly relate where, what was the beginning of really one experience, which was Superman. If you think about heroism and a superhero, well, Superman will come to mind. But I think what was interesting about that is that it was created at a time where most folks were not doing well. It was actually during the Great Depression. And most folks wouldn't realize that Superman almost never came to be. It was an image, an icon, that was created by two teenage boys, Jerry Shuster and Joe Siegal. And what they did is they got audience. They understood, just as two teenage boys, my parents, my family, my community is just not doing well. And we see that folks are trying to escape reality. So we're going to come up with this hero of the people. And in doing so, what's interesting is, they really were bold, they were brave. They presented a new way to escape. And as a result, DC Comics took it up. And they launched, and they sold out every single copy. And I think it's just a really strong message about being able to think about creativity and being bold. Jerry and Joe were really the heroes of that story, which was around. My challenge to the audience is, who's your Superman? What is your creative idea that you need to get out there? Because in many ways, we need to keep moving forward. At the same time, though, balance running a business. >> It's interesting, you did mention Superman and they got passed over. And we do a lot of events in the industry, a lot of them are big data events. And it's one little insight could actually change a business, and most times, some people get passed over because they're not the decision maker or they may be lower in the organization or they may just be, not be knowing what to do. So the question on the Superman theme, I have to ask you, kind of put you on the spot here is, what is the kryptonite for the marketer, okay, because >> (laughing) Yes. >> there's a lot of obstacles in the way. >> Catherine: It is. >> And so people sometimes want to be Superman, but the kryptonite paralyzes them. >> Catherine: Yeah. >> Where's the paralysis? >> It's funny that you say that. I think I actually challenge folks to avoid the kryptonite. There was three things that we really talked about. Number one is, Modern Marketing Experience, it's just an incredible opportunity for folks to think ahead, dream big, be on the bleeding edge. But guess what, we're all going to go on flights, we're going to head home, and Monday morning's going to roll around and we're going to be stuck and running the business. And my inspiration and, really, challenge to the audience and to all of our marketers is how do we live Modern Marketing Experience everyday? How do we keep looking ahead and balance the business? And, really, those heroic marketers are able to do both. But it doesn't stop there. We talked a lot about this week, about talent. Do we have the right team? Kryptonite is not having the right people for today and tomorrow, and then in addition to that, you can't just have a team, you can't just have a vision, but what's your plan? Where actually having the right stakeholders engaged, the right sponsorship, that's certainly probably the ultimate kryptonite if you don't. >> The sponsorships are interesting because the people who actually will empower or have empathy for the users and empower their people and the team have to look for the yes's, not the no's. Right. And that's the theme that we see in the Cloud success stories is, they're looking for the yes. They're trying to get that yes. But they're challenging, but they're not saying no. That's going to shut it down. We've seen that in IT. IT's been a no-no, I was going to say no ops but in this digital transformation with the emphasis on speed, they have to get to the yes. So the question is, in your customer interactions, what are some of those use cases where getting to that yes, we could do this, What are some of the things, is it data availability? >> Catherine: Absolutely. >> Share some color on that. >> I think, So I actually had a wonderful time connecting with Marta Federici, she met with you earlier. And I love her story, because she really talks about the culture and placing the customer at the center of everything they're doing, to the extent that they're telling these stories about why are we doing this? We're trying to save lives, especially in healthcare. And just to have stories and images. And I know some companies do an amazing job of putting the customer up on the wall. When we talk to our customers about how do we actually advance a digital transformation plan? How do we actually align everyone towards this concept of a connected customer experience? It starts with thinking about everyone who touches the customer every day and inspiring them around how they can be part of being a customer centric organization. And that's really, that's really important. That's the formula, and that's what we see. Companies, that they can break through and have that customer conversation, it tends to align folks. >> Interesting. We were talking earlier, Mark Hurd's comment to both the CMO Summit that was happening in a separate part of the hotel here in the convention center, as well as his keynote. He was saying, look, we have all this technology. Why are we doing this one percent improvement? And he was basically saying, we have to get to a model where there's no data department anymore. There never was. >> That's right. >> And there shouldn't be. There shouldn't be, that department takes care of the data. That's kind of the old way of data warehousing. Everyone's a data department, and to your point, that's a liberating, and also enables opportunities. >> It does. We talked a lot. Actually, the CMO Summit that we had as well this week, a lot of our CMOs were talking about the democratization of data. And Elissa from Tableau, I think you also talked to. We talked about, how do you do that? And why, what are those use cases, where, Kristen O'Hara from Time Warner talked about it as well. And I think, that's where we have to go. And I think there's a lot of great examples on stage that I would like to think our marketers, and quite frankly, >> Which one's your favorite, favorite story? >> My favorite story. >> John: Your favorite story. >> Wow, that's really putting me on the spot. >> It's like picking your favorite child. I have four. I always say "well, they're good at this sport, or this kid's good in school." Is there? >> I guess one. >> John: Or ones that you want to highlight. >> Well one that I, because we talked about it today. And it was really a combination of team and plan. Just really highlighting on what Marta's driving. If you think about the challenges of a multinational >> Peter: Again, this is at Philips. >> John: Marta, yeah. >> Catherine: This is Philips, Royal Philips. So Marta, what she's really, her team has been trying to accomplish, both B to C and B to B, and it speaks to data, and it talks about obviously having CRM be kind of that central nervous system so that you can actually align your departments. But then, being able to think about team. They've done a lot of work, really making certain they have the team for today and the future. They're also leveraging partners, which is also key to success. And then, having a plan. We spent time with Royal Philips actually at headquarters a number of weeks ago and they are doing this transformation, this disruptive tour with all of their top folks across, around the world that running their different departments, to really have them up and them think differently which is aligning them around that culture of looking out to the future. >> Peter: Let's talk a bit about thinking differently. And I want to use you as an example. >> Catherine: Sure. >> So your title is Customer Success. Global Vice President, Global Customer Success. What does that mean? >> Sure. I know a lot of folks, I'd like to think that, that's just a household name right now in terms of Customer Success. But I realize it's still a little new and nascent. >> We've seen it elsewhere but it's still not crystal clear what it means. >> Sure, sure. So when I think of Customer Success, the shorter answer is, we help our customers be successful. But that, what does it really mean? And when I think about the evolution of what Customer Success, the department, the profession, the role, has really come to be, it's serving a very important piece of this Cloud story. Go back a decade when we were just getting started actually operationalizing SaaS and thinking about how to actually grow our businesses, we found that there just needed to be a different way of managing our customers and keeping customers, quite frankly. Cause as easy as it is to perhaps land a SaaS customer, and a Cloud customer, because it's easier to stand them up and it's easier for them to purchase, but then they can easily leave you too. And so what we found is, the sales organization, while, obviously understands the customer, they need to go after new customers. They need to grow share. And then in addition to that, in some organizations, there still are services to obviously help our customers be successful. And that's really important, but that is statement-of-work-based. There's a start and a stop and an end to that work. And then obviously there's support that is part of a services experience, but they tend to be queue-based, ticket-based, break-fix. And what we found in all of this is, who ultimately is going be the advocate of the customer? Who's going to help the customer achieve ROI business value and help them ensure that they are managing what they've purchased and getting value, but also looking out towards the future and helping them see what's around the corner. >> Catherine I want to ask the question. One of the themes in your keynote was live in the moment every day as a modern marketing executive, build your team for today and tomorrow, and plan for the future. You mentioned Marta, who was on yesterday, as well as Kristen O'Hara from Time Warner. But she made an interesting comment, because I was trying to dig into her a little bit, because Time Warner, everyone knows Time Warner. So, I was kind of curious. At the same time, it was a success story where there was no old way. It was only a new way, and she had a pilot. And she had enough rope to kind of get started, and do some pilots. So I was really curious in the journey that she had. And one thing she said was, it was a multi-year journey. >> Catherine: Yes. >> And some people just want it tomorrow. They want to go too fast. Talk through your experience with your customer success and this transformation for setting up the team, going on the transformational journey. Is there a clock? Is there a kind of order of magnitude time frame that you've seen, that works for most companies? >> Sure. And actually I want to bring in one more experience that I know folks had here at Modern Marketing, which was, also, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he actually talked about this very thing. I think a lot of folks related to that because what he's been doing in terms of building out this community and creating crowd-sourced, or I should say, I think he would want to say community-sourced content and creativity. It was about, you can't really think about going big. Like I'm not thinking about feature film. I'm thinking about short video clips, and then you build. And I think everyone, the audience, like okay I get that. And Kristen's saying, it took many little moments to get to the big moment. I think folks want to do it all, right at the very beginning. >> John: The Big Bang Theory, just add, >> Absolutely. >> Just add water, and instant Modern Marketing. >> It is, it is. >> John: And it's hard. >> And what we have found, and this is why the planning part is so important, because what you have to do, and it might not be the marketer. The marketer, that VP of Marketing, even that CMO may know, it's going to be a three year journey. But sometimes it's that CEO, Board of Director alignment that's really required to mark, this is the journey. This is what year one's going to look like. This is what we're going to accomplish year two. There may be some ups and downs through this, because we need to transform sales, we need to transform back in operations in terms of how we're going to retire old processes and do new. And in doing so, we're going to get to this end state. But you need all of your stakeholders to be engaged, otherwise you do get that pressure to go big because, you know what Mark was saying, I've got 18 months, we need to be able to show improvement right away. >> We were talking about CIOs on another show that I was doing with Peter. And I think Peter made the comment that the CIO's job sometimes doesn't last three years. So these transformations can't be three years. They got to get things going quicker, more parallel. So it sounds like you guys are sharing data here at the event among peers >> Catherine: Yes. >> around these expectations. Is there anything in terms of the playbook? >> Catherine: Yes. >> Is it parallel, a lot of AGILE going on? How do you get those little wins for that big moment? >> So I think this is where the, what I would call, the League of Justice. You got to call in that League of Justice. For all you Superman out there. Because in many ways you're really challenged with running the business, and I think that's the pressure all of us are under. But when you think about speeding up that journey, it really is engaging partners, engaging, Oracle Marketing Cloud, our success and services team. I know you're going to be talking to Tony a little bit about some of the things we're building but that's where we can really come in and help accelerate and really demonstrate business value along the way. >> Well one more question I had for you. On the show floor, I noticed, was a lot of great traffic. Did you guys do anything different this year compared to last year when we talked to make this show a little bit more fluid? Because it seems to me the hallway conversation has been all about the adaptive intelligence and data is in every conversation that we have right now. What have you guys done differently? Did it magically just come to you, (Catherine laughing) Say, we're going to have to tighten it up this year? What was the aha moment between last year and this year? It's like night and day. >> I would like to think that we are our first and best customer, because as we ourselves are delivering technology, we ourselves also have to live what we tell our customers to do every day. Look at the data, look at the feedback. Understand what customers are telling you. How can you help customers achieve value? And we think of this as an important moment for our partners and our companies, that are here spending money and spending time to be here, achieve value. What we've done is really create an experience where it's so much easier to have those conversations. Really understanding the flow of traffic, and how we can actually ensure people are able to experience our partners, get to know them, get to know other customers. A lot of folks, too, have been saying, love keynote, love these different breakout sessions, but I want to connect with other folks going through that same thing that I am, so I can get some gems, get some ideas that I can pick up. >> And peer review is key in that. They talk to each other. >> Exactly. That's right, that's right. And so we've really enabled that, the way that we've laid out the experience this year. And I know it's even going to be better next year. Cause I know we're going to collect a lot more data. >> Well last year we talked a lot about data being horizontally scalable. That's all people are talking about now, is making that data free. The question for you is, in the customer success journeys you've been involved, what's the progress bar of the customer in terms of, because we live in Silicon Valley. So oh yeah, data driven marketer! Everyone's that. Well, not really. People are now putting the training wheels on to get there. Where are we on the progress bar for that data driven marketer, where there's really, the empathy for the users is there. There's no on that doubts that. But there's the empowerment piece in the organization. Talk about that piece. Where are we in that truly data driven marketer? >> Oh, we're still early days. It was obvious in talking to our various CMO's. We were talking about talent and the change, and what the team and the landscape needs to look like to respond to certainly what we've experienced in technology over the last number of years and then even what was introduced today. That level of, I need to have more folks that really understand data on my team but I'll tell you, I think the thing that's really interesting though about what we've been driving around technology and specifically AI. I love what Steve said, by the way, which is if a company is presenting AI as magic, well the trick's on you. Because truly, it's not that easy. So I think the thing that we need to think about and we will work with our customers on is that there's certainly a need and you have to be data driven but at the same time, we want to be innovation ready and looking and helping our customers see the future to the extent that how we think about what we're introducing is very practical. There's ways that we can help our customers achieve success in understanding their audience in a way that is, I wouldn't say, it's just practical. We can help them with use cases, and the way the technology is helping them do that, I think we're going to see a lot of great results this year. >> AI is great, I love to promote AI hype because it just makes software more cooler and mainstream, but I always get asked the question, how do you evaluate whether something is BS in AI or real? And I go, well first of all, what is AI? It's a whole 'nother story. It is augmented intelligence, that's my definition of it. But I always say, "It's great sizzle. Look for the steak." So if someone says AI, you got to look on the grill, and see what's on there, because if they have substance, it's okay to put a little sizzle on it. So to me, I'm cool with that. Some people just say, oh we have an AI magical algorithm. Uh, it's just predictive analytics. >> Catherine: Yes. >> So that's not really AI. I mean, you could say you're using data. So how do you talk to customers when they say, "Hey, AI magic or real? How do I grok that?" How do I figure it out? >> I think it's an important advancement, but we can't be distracted by words we place on things that have probably been around for a little while. It's an important way to think about the technology, and I think even Steve mentioned it on stage. But I think we're helping customers be smarter and empowering them to be able to leverage data in an easier way, and that's what we have to do. Help them, and I know this is talked a lot, not take the human and the people factor out because that's still required, but we're going to help them be able to concentrate on what they do best, whether it's, I don't want to have to diminish my creative team by hiring a bunch of data scientists. We don't want that. We want to be able to help brands and companies still focus on really understanding customers. >> You know, AI may be almost as old as Superman. >> Catherine: (laughing) I think you're right. >> Yeah, because it all comes back to Turing's test of whether or not you can tell the difference between a machine and a human being, and that was the 1930s. >> Well, neural networks is a computer science. It's a great concept, but with compute and with data these things really become interesting now. >> Peter: It becomes possible. >> Yeah, and it's super fun. But it promotes nuanced things like machine learning and Internet Of Things. These are geeky under-the-hood stuff that most marketers are like, uh what? Yeah, a human wearing a gadget is an Internet of Things device. That's important data. So then if you look at it that way, AI can be just a way to kind of mentally think about it. >> That's right, that's right. >> I think that's cool for me, I can deal with that. Okay, final question, Catherine, for you. >> Catherine: Yes. >> What's the most important thing that you think folks should walk away from Modern CX this year? What would you share from this show, given that, on the keynote, CMO Summit, hallways, exhibits, breakouts, if there's a theme or a catalyst or one? >> Peter: What should they put in the trip report? >> It's all about the people. I think that, if I were to distill it down, you think about that word bubble chart, that's people. I think that's the biggest word that came out of this. As much as technology is important, it's going to enable us, it's going to enable our people, and it's going to put a lot of attention on our talent and our folks that are going to be able to take our customers to the next level. >> And then people are the ones that are generating the data too, that want experiences, to them. >> Catherine: That's right. >> It's a people centric culture. >> Catherine: It is. >> Catherine Blackmore here on site, The CUBE, at Modern CX's The CUBE, with more live coverage here from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, live after this short break. (electronic music)

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

>> Host: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube! Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. (electronic music) Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX Show, Modern Customer Experience, this is the Cube, I'm John Furrier. My co-host, Peter Burris, two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Day two, my next guest is Katrina Gosek, Senior Director Commerce Product Strategy, (mumbles) Oracle upper world a few years ago, and Alistair Galbraith Sr, Director of CX, Customer Experience Innovation Lab with Oracle. Welcome to The Cube, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, welcome. >> So commerce is part of the story, it's just not marketing, there's transactions involved, there's R & D, there's a lot of technology. The show here is the common theme of just modernizing the customer experience, which is good, because it's the outcomes. But commerce is one of them. Give us the update, what's hot for you guys this week? >> Yeah, I think what's different this year, from any other year in the past is the pace of innovation is changing, because I think there's so much disruption in the commerce space, and particularly in retail and also B to B commerce. There's lots of new expectations from customers. I know we've been saying that for years, right? But I think the technologies now, that can enable some new experiences, have rapidly changed. Now it's completely fathomable to leverage AI to drive more high-end personalization or to leverage internet of things, to embed commerce more into everyday experience. >> John: Where's the innovation in retail? 'Cause retail's not a stranger to data. They've had data models going back, but certainly digital changes things, they're at the edge of the networks, so it's a little bit of internet of things meets consumer data, the data's huge if you can get the identity of the person. That seems to be the key conversation: how do you guys enable that to take advantage of the sea of data that you're providing form the data cloud, third party and first party data? >> Well I think there's a lot of fun approaches. Oracle has a technology called the Oracle ID Graph, which starts to merge a lot of identities across channels, so where customers are using data cloud, that can inform those micro interactions as they move between channels, and I think one of the trends we've been seeing this year that we're talking about as My Channel, is that customers no longer really complete one interaction or one transaction in one place. They might start on mobile, move to voice, move into a physical store, and we're trying to track that customer in all of those places, so a lot of our focus, and you see data cloud moves into AI, is enabling brands to move this data around more easily without needing to know everything about the customer themselves. >> John: Well that's the key for the experience of the customer, because they don't want to have to answer the same questions again if they're on a chat bot, and they've already been at a transaction. Knowing what someone's doing at any given time is good contextual data. >> Alistair: Yep. >> Well it's funny you say that, because when we talk to customers or end consumers, they're not thinking, "I need more artificial intelligence, "I need more data around my experience, "I need internet of things", they're thinking, "I want convenience, I want this to be fast and quick, "I want you to know me as a brand, "I don't want to have to re-enter everything. "If I'm talking to a customer service agent, "versus someone in the store, versus interacting online". So data's a huge part of that, the challenge is how do you make it consistent? >> John: Katrina has a great point: it's not the technology, it's about what they're trying to do. >> Katrina: Yeah, exactly, very much. >> Well the experience comes back to, in many respects, convenience, and, "I want you to sustain "the state of where I am in my journey for me". >> Katrina: Correct, yeah. >> Or at least not blow my state up. So it's interesting, the journey used to be a role or a context thing, and now we're adding physical location to it, as well as device. So go back to this notion of new experiences. 'Cause it's got to be more than, you can look at something on your phone and then transact on your phone. What are some of the new experiences on the horizon? 'Cause that is a lot to do with where you guys think digital technology's going to go. >> I think some of those experiences are micro-interactions, so that could be people are using voice shopping, but not for the entire purchase, just a re-order this thing, what's the status of this thing? And brands are also using the data that they're gathering to tweak and adjust those interactions. So we're seeing data coming from real world devices and IOT changing the expectation of the customer, as they, maybe, we showed some stories where people are re-ordering products using voice, and then when they shift between these channels, that micro piece of data is really changing that interaction. The other challenge we're seeing is the consistency of the interaction, you said yourself, not only it's the complexity of "what did I do?", but if I do something here and I do something here, I should get the same experience both times. >> So we're talking mostly at this point about the B to C, the consumer world. In many respects, some of the most interesting experiences, we can envisage in the B to B world, where a community of sellers is selling to a community of buyers, and the state that's really important is how does that buying community interact with each other? As they discover things and share information. So how do you see this notion of new experiences starting to manifest itself in the B to B world? >> Katrina: Yeah, it's interesting you say that, because I often, we work with both B to C and B to B clients, and I actually think B to B has always been more focused on personalization, because they do have so much information about their customers, contract data, a lot of information about the buyer, the companies, they've always done kind of online custom personalized catalogs. So I think there's a lot that B to C can learn from B to B about how to leverage that data to personalize experiences. >> John: And vice-versa too, it's interesting, to that point, the B to C is a leading indicator on the experience side, but B to B's got the blocking and tackling down, if they have the data. 'Cause having the data, you get the goods. Okay, so here's the question for you: with the consumers going to digital, you're seeing massive, we were reporting yesterday, here on The Cube and also on siliconhill.com, as well as Adage, not that we didn't predict this, but ad spend now on digital has surpassed TV for the first time. Which is an indicator, but the ad tech world's changing, because how people are engaging with the customer is changing, so the question is, what technology is going to help transition those ad dollars, from banner ads to older formats to something more compelling and using data? 'Cause you can imagine retail being less about click, buy, to sharing data. So the spend's going to only grow on advertising or reaching consumers. That conversion, that experience is going to have to move from direct response clicking, to more experience, what tech is out there? >> Well, I think the biggest challenge has always been tracking and personalizing for a unique interaction. Just the sheer volume of data that's coming in, it's just too hard to consume. So I think the blend of AI and AI with the ability to tweak, adjust, look at multi-variate tests, and change the interaction as it goes, that's going to really massively affect the journeys for retailers, and I think the big benefit as brands move to the cloud, the cost of innovation, the cost of trying something and failing is so much less, and the pace of innovation is so much faster, I think we're seeing people try new things with the data they've got. Find out what works and what doesn't. >> Here's a question for you guys. We're talking to Jess Cahill, when this came up yesterday as well, Peter brought this up as part of the big data action going on with the AI and whatnot. Batch to real time is a shift, and this is clear here in the show that the batch is there, but still an older, but real time data in motion consumers in motion are out there, so the real time is now the key. Can you comment on that? >> I think it goes back to what Alistair was saying earlier about those micro-moments. I think transacting in new and unexpected places, ways, I think that's the key, and that's actually a huge challenge for our customers, because you have to be able to use that data in real time, because that customer is standing there with their phone, or in front of Alexa, or a speaker. >> John: It's an opportunity. >> It's a huge opportunity, and I think those opportunities are everywhere now. In a couple of years be the refrigerator, if you're re-ordering groceries, leveraging the screen, so I think that's going to be the challenge, but I think we've got time to help our customers figure out how to leverage that in real time. I think staying nimble and agile is going to be key and failing fast, and I guess a more positive way to say this-- >> The Agile Marketer, I think we had Roland Smart on yesterday, he literally wrote the book. But this is interesting, if you have the data, you can do these kinds of things. So the question is, certainly your point about the refrigerator and all these different things is going to create the omni-channel nightmare. It's not going to be, certainly multi-multi-omni. It's going to be too many challenges to deal with. >> Alistair: I think we prefer to see it as the omni-channel dream, than the nightmare. (group laughs) >> So many channels, there's no more channels, right? >> Well I think that's where things like Marketing Cloud, things like Integration Cloud help orchestrate that omni-channel journey, so that to your point on marketing and ad-spend, being able to analyze whether a benefit or promotion I showed during one micro-interaction affected something somewhere else, is so challenging but so important when you're moving this ad spend around. And I think where orchestrating and joining these micro-moments together, it's really where we're focusing a lot of our investment at the moment. >> One of the big things that's happening in the industry today is we're starting to develop techniques, and approaches, methods, for conceptualizing how a real thing is turned into a digital representation. IBM calls and not to mention them, or GE, perhaps more of a customer ... (group laughs) Yeah, I just did. >> That's all right. >> This notion of a digital twin. Commerce succeeds, where online electronic commerce succeeds as we are more successful at representing goods and services digitally. What's the relationship between IOT and some of these techniques for manifesting things digitally? And commerce, because commerce can expand its portfolio, things it can cover, as more of these things can be successfully digitally represented? >> I think that's key, and that's actually one of the predictions that we talked about in our keynote is how do you represent new ways of representing the physical store, the physical space with customers, so for me, I think something that probably Back to the Future or Judy Jetson, like a few years ago, augmented reality, or virtual reality, I think now we're going to see that more. We're starting to see it more with furniture sales, for example, you're on your iPad at home, and you can put the couch you've chosen in the space, right there with you, and see if it fits, but you're in your home, you don't have to go to the furniture store, and kind of guess with your tape measure whether the couch fits or not. And I think that's applicable in B to B as well, as 3D CAD drawings, you can kind of see them in VR, or AR. >> Amazon just announced Look, yesterday, which is the selfie tool that allows you to see what you're wearing. >> I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the coming years. >> Well, in many respects, it also, going back to this, we asked the question earlier about B to B, B to C, and the ability to represent that community. We're going to start seeing more of a household approach, as to just a consumer approach, and I think you just mentioned a great one. When we are successfully, or when we are willing to start capturing more data about our physical house or what's going on inside, so that we can make more informed decisions, with others, about how we want to do things, has an enormous impact on the quality of the experience, and where people are going to go to make their purchases. >> Alistair: Definitely, and I think that as we try and merge those experiences between B to B and B to C, what we know about someone as a consumer also directly affects their buying decisions, as a B to B employee buying for their brand. And that just increases the sheer volume of data that people are trying to manage and test and orchestrate. I think we're seeing a shift not only in people being prepared to surrender some degree of privacy for a increased experience, but we're also seeing people trusting in that virtual experience being a reality when they buy. So people have a much higher trust level in AR, if I visualize a couch and then buy it, I've got a degree of faith that when it turns up, it'll be like the one I looked at. And I think that increased trust is really making virtual experiences, digital commerce, so much easier. >> I think that's an interesting point, we had CMO of Time Warner on yesterday, Kristen O'Hara, and she was, we asked her, "Oh yeah, these transformations", big use case, she's on stage, but I asked her, "How was it like the old way? "What would you do before Oracle?", she goes, "Well, there was no old way", they never did. The point is, she said, the point was we became a direct to consumer company, so B to B and B to C are completely merging. So now the B to B's have to be a B to C, inherently because of the direct connect to the consumer. Not saying that their business model's changing, just that's the way the consumer is impacting. >> Peter: Or is it data connection to a consumer? >> A data connection, and where there's gesture data, or interaction data coming in, so this makes, the B to Bs now have to bolt on more stuff, like loyalty, you mentioned loyalty, things of that nature. >> Yeah, if you're a B to B company, you're selling to other businesses, but who are the people on the other business? There are people who shop every day in consumer applications, so their expectations are, "I'm going to have a great personalized experience, "I'm going to be able to leverage the same tools "that I see in my consumer shopping experiences "for my B to B experience, why would it be different?" So I think that's something that B to B is really learning from B to C as well. >> True, but although there seems to be something of a counter-veiling trend, but an increasing number of people are now working at home. So in many respects, where we're going to, is we're talking about experience, not just being online. One of my little heroes, when I was actually trying to do development, a million years ago, was Christopher Alexander. The Timeless Way of Building, which was one of the basic texts that people use for a lot of this customer experience stuff, and the observation that he made was, you talk about spaces, you talk about people moving into spaces to do things in context. And increasingly, the spaces that we have to worry about are not just what's on the screen, but the physical space that people move in, and operate in, an the idea is, I'm going somewhere to do something, and I'm bringing physical space with me. So all of these, the ability to represent space, time and interests and wants and needs, are going to have an enormous impact on experience. Wouldn't you agree? >> Massively, and I think the challenge using that same approach is that people are co-existing in multiple spaces concurrently. They no longer do one thing at the same time. >> Peter: They may be in the same physical place, but have two different contexts associated with it. Like working my home office, I'm both a father, as well as an employee. >> Alistair: Yes. >> And those two sometimes conflict. (Katrina laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely, and you're a consumer and an employee, and as a father, you're potentially affecting the decisions that the rest of your household is making, as well as the decisions that your business is making, all in slightly different ways. But those two experiences with the B to B and B to C, overlap one another. >> Peter: In fact, switching contexts from consumer to father is one of the primary reasons why I lose where I am in the journey. So these are very powerful, and the ability to have the data and then go to your customers, and say, "We will be able to provide that end to end for you, "so that you can provide a consistent "and coherent experience for your customers" is really crucial. Is that kind of where you're taking us? >> Yeah, I mean we've always commerce isn't kind of a standalone little thing, it really connects and glues together so many other types of experiences, so it connects to marketing, it connects to service, you need all of that, to be able to make the experience work. So we're really focused on making sure that it's easy to connect those applications together, that its easy to manage them behind the scenes, and that it appears seamless to the customer on the front end. >> One other thought that I have is, and in many respects, increasingly, because we're going to be able to represent more things digitally, which means we'll be able to move more stuff through commerce platforms. This is where the CX is going to meet the customer road, is in the commerce platforms. Do you guys agree with that? You're going to measure things all over the place, but I'm just curious-- >> John: It's their products, yeah. >> What do you think? Is it going to be increasingly the basis for honest CX? >> Well we're already seeing it become the basis, so I wouldn't say it's a future thing, I think it's been a reality for quite some time, where commerce is the hub that kind of connects, in retail, the store to marketing experiences. >> John: It's bonafide data is what it is too. >> Yeah. >> That's good data. >> Katrina: It holds so much product information, transaction information, customer information, and it just connects and leverages. I don't know if you would agree? >> Alistair: I would agree completely, and I think you look at the fact that most companies ultimately are selling a product, so that's commerce, and I think the transition is that rather than going into the commerce site or the commerce space, you see a lot of brands over the last 12 months have got rid of their store.brand.com thing and just merged their commerce experience into everything else, you're always selling. And we've customers deploy commerce without the cart, but as a product and communication marketing model, to get this tracking data moving around. >> We were talking about Jack earlier, yesterday, Berkowitz, who was talking data, we were talking about data, good data, dirty data, clean data, and data quality in general. >> Katrina: It's a tough problem. >> In context to value, and he said a quote, he said, "Good data makes things happen, "great data makes amazing things happen". And to your point, retail, commerce data, you can't, it's undisputed, it's a transaction. It's a capture in time, and that can be used in context to help other data sets become more robust. >> Well, in many respects it's the most important first person data that you have in your business. >> Katrina: Yeah, and I think from an Oracle perspective, what we're doing with the adaptive intelligent applications for commerce, and for the other applications as well, and particular for commerce is combing that first hand information you have about your products and your customers as an online business, but then the immense amount of data that the data cloud has behind the scenes that augments and allows you to automatically personalize, when a customer comes to your storefront, because they're coming already with all the context that they have elsewhere out in the world, and you can combine that with your own data, and I think really enhance the experience. >> John: Yeah it's funny, we were joking yesterday, Oracle went to bed a software company, woke up a data company. >> Katrina: Yeah (laughs). >> So the data cloud is pretty impressive, what's happened there and what that's doing. >> Katrina: It's amazing, it's a huge differentiator for us. >> Huge differentiator. Okay, final word, I'd like both you guys to just quickly comment to end this segment, awesome segment on commerce and data, which we love. But your reaction to the show, what's the bottom line, what's exciting you this week? Share with the folks, each of you, a quick soundbite of what's happening here and the impact people should know about. >> Sure from a commerce perspective, this is the first year where we've got a 50/50 split in our customer base, so we're seeing a lot of our un-premise customers move to cloud, which is great, and we're really growing our commerce cloud customer base. I'm very excited about that. >> And you're trying to get 100% now, it's never going to be a hundred. >> Katrina: (laughs) Yeah, we need to work with customers and what's right for them, but yeah, it's very exciting right now. >> Alistair, your take? >> I think for me, it's just the sheer pace of innovation, we're seeing brands go from un-premised stories that would take 12, 15, 18 months to add new features, make changes to small nimble brands rolling out incredible innovative features in 12, 18 week time frames, and we're seeing more people having more discussions around the art of the possible. >> John: All right, Katrina, Alistair, great comment, great insight, great conversation about data and commerce, of course cloud, it's the marketing clouds, all cloud world, it's commerce cloud, it's data cloud, it's just the cloud (laughs). I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, move live coverage here from Las Vegas, Oracle Modern CX after this short break. (electronic music) >> Host: Robert--

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (dynamic music) >> John: Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live. Day two coverage of Oracle's Modern CX Modern Customer Experience #ModernCX. Also check out all the great coverage here on The Cube, but also on the web, a lot of great stories and one of the people behind all that is Des Cahill, who's joining Peter Burris and myself. Kicking off day two, Des, great to see you, Head of Customer Experience Evangelist, involved in a lot of the formation and really the simplification of the messaging across Cloud, so it's really one story. >> Yeah, absolutely, so John, Peter, great to be here. You know, I think the real story is about our customers and businesses that are going through transformation. So everything that we're doing at Oracle, in our CX organizations, helping these organizations make their digital business transformation and the reason they're going through this transformative process is to meet the demands of their customers. I'd say it's the era of the empowered customer. They're empowered by social, mobile, Cloud technologies and all of us in our daily lives can relate to the fact that over the last five, 10 years, the way that we buy, our journey as we buy products, as we do research, is completely different, than it used to be, right. >> Talk about the evolution, talk about the evolution of what's happening this week, because I think this is kind of a mark in time, at least from our observation, covering Oracle, this is our eighth year and certainly second year with the modern marketing experience now, >> Des: Yeah. >> the modern customer experience, where the feedback in the floor, and this is noteworthy, is that the quality is great, people at the booth are highly qualified, but it's simple. It's one fabric of messaging, one fabric of product. It feels like a platform, >> Yeah. >> and is that by design (laughs) or is that kind of the next step in the evolution of, >> Des: Yeah, John. >> Marketing Cloud meets Real Cloud and? >> Yeah, yeah, so absolutely John. I mean that, that is by design and again, to support our customers and their needs on this digital business transformation journey, it starts obviously with fantastic marketing, we've just got fantastic capabilities within our Marketing Cloud, but then that extends to Sales Cloud. If you generate leads in marketing and you're not handing them over to sales effectively or of a good sales automation engine and that goes on to commerce, CPQ, social, and service. And all of this, if we bring this back down to again, this notion of the empowered customer, if you're not providing those customers with connected experiences across marketing, sales, service, commerce, you're not... you're going to, you might lose those customers. I mean, we expect connected experiences across our whole journey. If I'm calling my cell phone provider, 'cause I got a problem, I don't, and I don't want to call one person, get transferred to another person and then go to the website to chat with someone, have a disconnected experience. I want them to, when I call, I want them to understand my history, my status as a customer, I'm spending 500 dollars a month on them, the problems I've had before. I want them to have context and to know me in that moment and as Mark Hertz says, it's like a moment of truth with my cell phone provider. Are they going to delight me and turn me into a customer advocate, or am I going to leave and go to another cell phone provider? >> Well let's talk just for a second, and I want to get your comments on this and how it relates specifically to what we're saying here. Digital has two enormous impacts. One, as you said, that a customer can take their research activities with them, on their cell phone. >> Yeah. They have learned, because of commerce and electronic commerce, they've learn to expect and demand a certain style of engagement >> Des: Right. >> and that's not going to change, so if you are not doing those things-- >> We like to say Amazon is the new benchmark, either B to C or B to B, it doesn't matter, right. >> It is a benchmark, at least on the commerce side, so it's, so that's one change, is that customers are empowered. The second big change though, is that increasingly, digital allows people to render products more as services and that's in many respects, what the Cloud's all about. >> Des: Right. >> How do you take an asset, that is a machine and render it as a service to someone? Well now we can actually use digital technologies to render things more as services. The combination of those two things are incredibly powerful, because customers, who now have the power to evaluate and change decisions all the time are now constantly making decisions, because it's a pay-as-you-go service world now. >> Des: Right. >> So how do those two things come together and inform the role, that marketing is going to play inside a business, 'cause increasingly, it seems to us that marketing is going to have to own that continuous, ongoing engagement and deliver that consistent value, so a customer does not leave, 'cause you have more opportunities to leave now. >> Well, I, so I think that's a good observation, Peter. I do think that marketers can play, and do play, a leading role in being the advocate for the customer within the brand, within the company and as a marketer myself, I think about not just the marketing function, but I think about, well, what is the experience, that that lead or that prospect going to have when I hand over to sales? And what is the experience that they are going to have, when I hand them over to service? And in my past roles as a CMO, the challenge I always faced was that I couldn't get information out of the sales automation system or out of the service automation system, so as a marketer, I couldn't optimize my marketing mix and I didn't have visibility on which opportunities I passed, which leads I passed over turned into the best opportunities, turned into the best deals, turned into the customers, that were most loyal, that got cross-sold and up-sold and were the happiest. So I think, going back to Oracle's strategy in all of this, it's about having a connected, end-to-end suite of Cloud applications, so that there's a consistent set of data, that is enabling these consistent, personalized, and immediate experiences. >> I think that's interesting and I want to just validate that, because I think, that is to me, the big sign that I think you guys are on the right track and executing and by the way, some of the things you're talking about used to be the holy grail, they're actually real now. >> Des: Right. >> The dynamic is the silos are a symptom of a digital-analog relationship. >> Des: Right. >> So when you have all digital, the moment of truth starts here, it's all digital. So in that paradigm, end-to-end wins. And at Mobile World Congress this year, one of the main themes when they talk about 5G, and all these things, that were going on, was you know, autonomous vehicles, (laughs) media entertainment, smart cities, a smart home, you know, talk to things. To your point, that's an end-to-end, so the entire world wants-- >> Des: Throw IoT in there. >> Throw IoT, >> Right. >> So again, these digital connections are all connected, so therefore, it is essentially an end-to-end opportunity. So whoever can optimize that end-to-end, while being open, while having access to the data, >> Des: Right. >> will be the winning formula. >> Des: Right. >> And that is something that we see and you obviously have that. >> And then the other piece is how do you actualize that data? Right, and I know you spoke with Jack Berkowitz about adaptive intelligent apps, it's, we're taking approach to artificial intelligence of saying, how can we bring to bear the power of machine learning, dynamic decision science, so that all this data, that's being collected and enabled by all these digital touch points, these digital signals, how do you take that data and how do you actualize that, 'cause the reality is, 80% of data that's collected today is dark, it's untouched, it's just collected, right. >> Well, here is the hard question for you, you know I am going to ask this, so I am going to ask it, here's the hard question. >> Des: Yeah. >> It really comes down to the data, and if you don't, you, connected networks and all that good stuff is great fabric, end-to-end. >> Des: Absolutely, yeah. >> This is certainly the future, it's the new normal, it's coming fast. >> Right. >> But at the end of the day, the conversation we've been having here is about the data. >> Des: Yes. >> What is your position with Oracle on connecting that data, 'cause that ultimately is what needs to flow. >> Des: Right. >> How does that work? Can you just take a minute to >> Sure, sure. >> to address that, how the data flows? >> Yeah, I think it starts with our end-to-end connected applications, that are able, that are connected with each other natively and are sharing that same data set. We obviously recognize that customers have mixed environments, so in those cases, we can certainly use our technologies to connect to their existing data stores, to synchronize with their existing systems, so it all starts with the cleanliness and quality of that baseline customer data. The second piece I'd say, is that we've made a lot of investments over the last five years in Oracle Data Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud is a set of anonymized, third party data. We've got 5 billion consumer IDs, we've got a billion business IDs. We've got a tremendous amount of data sources. We just announced a recent acquisition of a company called Moat, last week at our Oracle Data Cloud Summit in New York City. So we've made a tremendous investment in third party data, that can augment anonymized third party data, that can augment first party data, to allow people to have not just a connected view of the customer, but more of a comprehensive view and understanding of their customers, so that they can better talk to them and get them better experiences. >> That's the key there, that we're hearing with this intelligent, adaptive intelligent app kind of environment, >> Yeah, yeah. >> where machine learning. The third party data integrating within the first party data, that seems to be the key. Is that right, >> Absolutely. >> did I get that right? >> Yeah, well I would say there's a number of points, so I would say that, that, you know, you can think of the Oracle Data Cloud combining with the BlueKai DMP and being a great ad-tech business for us and a great solution for digital marketers in and of itself. What we've done with adaptive intelligent apps is that we've combined that third party data with decision science machine learning AI and we've coupled that with the Oracle Cloud infrastructure and the scale and power of that. So we're able to deliver real-time, adaptive learning and dynamic offers and content at 130 millisecond clips. So this is real-time interaction, so we are getting signals every time someone clicks, it's not a batch mode, one-off kind of thing. The third piece is that we have designed these, designed these apps to just embed natively, to plug into our existing CX applications. So if you're a marketer, you're a service professional, you're a sales professional, you can get value out of this day one. You've got a tremendous data set. You've got real-time, adaptive artificial intelligence and it plugs right into your existing apps. It's a win-win. Take your first party data, take your third party data, combine it together, put some decision science on there, some high bandwidth, incredible scale infrastructure and you're getting, you're starting to get to one-to-one marketing. You're freeing your marketing teams from being data analysts and segmenting and trying to get insight and you're letting the machine do that work and you're freeing up, you're freeing up your human capital to be thinking about higher-level tasks, about offers and merchandising and creative and campaigns and channels. >> Well, the way we think about it, Des, and I'll test you on this, is we think ultimately the machines are going to offer options. So they're going to do triage on a lot of this data >> Des: Right, right. >> and offer options to human decision-makers. Some of the discretions, we see three levels of interaction, >> Des: Yeah. >> Automated interaction, which, quite frankly, we're doing a lot of that today in finance systems. >> Des: Yes. >> But then we get to autonomous vehicles, highly deterministic networks, highly deterministic behaviors, >> Des: Right. >> that's what's going to be required in autonomy. No uncertainty. Where we have environmental uncertainty, i.e. that temperature's going to change or I, some IoT things are going to change, that's where we see the idea of turning the data and actuating it in the context of that environmental uncertainty. >> Des: Right. >> We think that this is all going to have an impact on the human side, what we call systems of augmentation, >> Des: Right. >> where the system's going to provide options to a human decision-maker, the discretion stays with the human decision-maker, culpability stays with the human decision-maker, >> Des: Right. >> but the quality of the options determine the value of the systems. >> So the augmentation is-- >> The augmentation's great. >> So let me give you a great example of that with AIA. So, take for example, you're a pro photographer and you got a big shoot the next day and your camera, your main camera you bought three months ago, it breaks. And you buy all your stuff at photog.com and you call 'em up and what could happen today? "Hi, what's your account number? "Who are you? "Wait, let me look you up, OK. "I'm sorry, I'm not authorized to get you a return." You know, boom, and the person's like, "I'm never going to buy from them again." Right, it's that moment of truth. Contrast that with a, 'cause the person making that decision, if it was the CEO getting that call, the CEO would be like, "We're going to get you a camera immediately." But that person that they're talking to is five levels down in a call center, Bismarck, North Dakota. If that person had AI, adaptive intelligent apps helping them out, then the AI would do the work in the background of analyzing the customer's lifetime value, their social reach, so their indirect lifetime value. It would look at their customer health, how many other services issues, that they have. It would look at, are there any warranty issues or known service failure issues on that camera and then it would look at a list of stores, that were within a five mile radius of that customer, that had those cameras in stock. And it would authorize an immediate pickup and you're on your way. It would just inform that person and enable them to make that decision. >> Even more than that, and this is a crucially important point, that we think people don't get when they talk about a lot of this stuff. These systems have to deliver not only data, but also authority. >> Exactly. The authority has to flow with the data. >> Des: Right. >> That's one of the advantages-- >> On both sides, by the way, on the identity and-- >> On both sides. >> And I think that employee wants that empowerment. >> Absolutely. >> No one wants to take a call and not make the customer happy, right. >> Peter: Absolutely, >> Yeah. >> because that's a challenge with some of the bolt-on approaches to some of these big applications, is that, yeah, >> Exactly. >> you can deliver a result, but then how is the result >> How is it manifested? >> integrated into the process >> Right. >> that defines and affords authority to actually make the decision? >> OK, so let's see, where are we on the progress bar then. because we had a great interview yesterday with the CMO from Time Warner. >> Yeah. >> OK, Kristen O'Hara, she was amazing. But basically, there was no old way of doing data, they were Time Warner, (laughs) they're old school media and they set up a project, you guys came in, Oracle came in, and essentially got them up and running, and it's changed their business practice overnight. >> Des: Right, right. >> So, and the other thing we heard yesterday was a lot of the stuff that was holy grail-like capabilities is actually being delivered. So give us a slice-and-dice what's shipping today, that's, that's hot and where's the work area that's road-mapped for Oracle? >> Sure, well-- >> And were you guys helping customers? >> Sure, I'll talk about a couple of examples, where we're helping customers. So, Denon and Marantz, high end audio company, brand's been around 100 years. The way music is delivered, is consumed, has changed radically in the last 20 years, changed radically in the last 10 years, changed even more radically in the last five years, so they've had to change their business model to keep up with that. They are embedding Oracle IoT Cloud into every product they sell, except their headphones, so all their speakers, all their AV receivers and they are using IoT data and Oracle Service Cloud to inform, not only service issues, like for example, they are, they're detecting failures pro-actively and they're shipping out new speakers, before they fail or they're pushing firmware to fix the problem, before it happens. They're not only using it to inform their service, they're using it to inform their R&D and their sales and marketing. Great example, they ship wireless speakers, HEOS wireless speakers, highly recommend 'em, I bought 'em for my kids for Christmas, they're the bomb. But customers were starting to... They were getting a lot of failures in these wireless speakers. They looked up the customer data, then they looked up the IoT data. They found that 80% of the speaker failures, the products were labeled Bathroom as location in the configuration of their home network setup and what they realized was that customers were listening to music in the bathroom, which is a use case they never thought of and the speakers weren't made to be water or humidity-proof, so they went to the R&D department, 14 months later, they ship a line of waterproof HEOS speakers. The second thing is they found people, who were labeling their speakers, Patio, they were using it on the patio, they didn't even have a rechargeable battery on it, so they came out with a line with a rechargeable battery on it. So they're not only using IoT data, for a machine maintenance function, >> John: 'cause they were behaving-- >> they're using IoT data to inform, inform R&D and they're also doing incredible marketing and sales activities. We had Don Freeman, the CMO of Denon on the main stage yesterday, talking about this great, great stuff they're doing. >> And what's the coolest thing this week, that you're looking at, you're proud of or excited about? >> I'm excited about a lot of stuff, John. This week is realized, you alluded to this week has been really, really fun, really great, a lot of buzz, obviously a lot of buzz around adaptive, intelligent apps and we've talked about that. But I would say also beyond a doubt, that intelligent apps for CX, we've introduced some great things in our Service Cloud, the capability to have a video chat, so Pella Windows was also on one of our panels today and they were talking about the ability for, to solve a service issue, the ability to show a video of what's going on, just increases the speed with which something can be diagnosed so much faster. We're integrating on the Service Cloud, we're integrating with WeChat and we're integrating with Facebook Messenger. Now, why would you do that? Well again, it comes back to this era of the empowered consumer. It's not enough that a company just has a website or an 0800 number that you can go to for support. Consumers are spending more time in social messaging apps, than they are on social messaging sites, so if the consumer wants to be served on Facebook Messenger, 'cause they spend their time on it, the brand has to meet them there. >> John: Yeah. >> The third thing would be the ability for the Marketing Cloud and Service and Sales Cloud, we've got chat bots, voice-driven, text-driven, AI-driven, so mobile assistant for the sales professionals, so you can input data on the road, "Hey, open an account, here's the data "for the transaction here what's going on." >> John: Yeah. >> Incredible, incredible stuff going on all over the stack. >> I think the thing, that excites me, is I look at the videos from last year and the theme was, "Man, you guys have "all these awesome acquisitions," >> Des: Right. >> "But you have this opportunity with the data," and you guys knew that and you guys tightened that together and doubled down on the data >> Des: Yeah, with banking, yeah-- >> and so I thought that was a great job and I like the messenging's clean, I think but more importantly is that in any sea change, you know, we joke about this, as we're kind of like historians and we've seen a lot of waves, >> Des: Right, for sure. >> and all these major waves, when the user's expectations shift, that's the opportunity. I think what you guys nailed here is that, and Peter alluded to it as well, is that the users are expecting things differently, completely differently. >> Let me share a stat with you. 50% of the companies that were in the Fortune 500 in the year 2000, are either out of business, acquired, gone, 50% and those companies, >> Dab or die. >> Blockbuster, Borders, did they stay relevant? >> John: Yeah. I think changing business practice based on data is what's happening, it's awesome. Des Cahill, here on The Cube. More live coverage, day two of Modern CX, Modern Customer Experience, #ModernCX. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, we'll be right back. (dynamic music)

(energetic music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back and we are here live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay Convention Center for Oracle's Modern C-EX, Modern Customer Experience Event. Part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, I am John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-host Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Adrian Chang, director of customer programs at Oracle Marketing Cloud, also emcee of the Markie and big part of that program. Congratulations on the success of the Markie's awards, which were given out last night. I read your blog post on the site this morning. >> Thank you >> Great to see you again and welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, always great to be here and I love Modern Customer Experience and that marketing is a part of it. >> It's really been a great transformation this year. The simplification of just now narrowing it down to one simple value president, Modern Customer Experience, which encapsulates a lot of stuff. Quickly review what that is and then let's talk about the Markies. >> Absolutely, so I start with the Markies and so we have a history of celebrating excellence in data-driven modern marketing. So, this program has grown tremendously over the past 11 years. When I look at the submissions, they're customers that are focusing on acquisition and loyalty retention. And they read these stories all the time and spend weeks preparing the submissions. So this event is all about how can we share our intent to have our customers have a good experience as part of Oracle and then how can we help them delight their customers in delivering experiences and create value at every touch point. >> One of the thing I really like about the change in the name from Modern Marketing Experience to Modern Customer Experience is you move from the process, the function, to the outcome and the result. So how are the Markies reflecting that this year? >> Absolutely. So if you think about where we started, again it was six categories celebrating excellence in B2B marketing and reaching folks behind a single device, their laptop computer. So cut to 2017, the customers' preferences, their activities are fluid. So great marketing requires you to use a series of channels to reach them everywhere. And so, marketers have to balance brand with action, and then also deliver on intent. So the Markies have had to evolve to think about the habits. So the account-based marketing team of the year was a new award that we gave out that really represented the intent. Are people actually doing this, we have tons of great stories. So we have to balance out a bit of the usage of the product and the technology and embracing the new strategies and what's current within the marketplace. >> So the future of marketing as it goes into data, that's been the theme here. All of our interviews, day one. And certainly the key notes, even Mark was giving a great specific example. Now data is at the heart of it. Adaptive intelligence is the theme. You can see the dots are connecting the convergence of where the Markies are showing traction are some pretty interesting use cases. Any notables you'd like to share that kind of highlight that data piece? >> Absolutely. So our winner for best email campaign was from Jetstar and they're an airline in Austraila. What's great is they have been able to find ways to-- so when you get an email about travel, sometimes you book at one particular point and your preferences and relationship with that airline may change. Your travel destinations may change. So the fact that they can optimize the information at the time of send, sending the weather, curing you to maybe upsell and look at other opportunities to have a pleasant experience, that's amazing. So Laura Ipsen spent some time talking about how we at Oracle are looking to evolve preferences, so going from one to many, to one to one, and the hallmark which is one to you. And I think the Jetstar campaign, they use Oracle responses as a perfect example of that. The first award that we gave out was to Covance for account-based team of the year and by doing, setting up an account-based marketing strategy, putting it in place, getting all the stakeholders in sales in place, getting the discipline on the content. They were able to increase their engagement with key accounts by a significant margin. And they were delighted to be among those that are partners to celebrate that achievement. >> Adrian, I want you to talk about, for the folks that are watching who aren't here, the buzz in the hallways, because the hallways is always a good conversation, certainly the lunch table as well. I'll include that technically at the hallway, but people sitting down. >> Absolutely. >> AI has been front and center, but it's not being painted over, white-washed, "Oh! AI! It's hot so let's jump on the bandwagon." There's some real tech involved. What has been the reaction from customers in used cases that you hear in the hallways? >> Customers are excited about it. I think for a lot of our customers had the opportunity to hear Mark Heard talk about it. Where he embraced and said, "If you think about AI at the core, it's computing done real fast to help people make really rich decisions about what to do next." And so, I think our customers are still grappling with all the technology and how to get value out of their core platforms, how do they deliver on their initial objective and then we have a subset of our most mature, most excited, who are starting to put those data plots together, and start getting more predictive and allow the machine to do the work for you. But in order for you to have, to even think about it, you've got to have great, you've got to fill the cup with great data. And I think people are still getting there so that the machine isn't biased and you don't make the wrong decision about how to treat your customers. >> So just notable trending tweets I wanted to share with you, and again, get your reactions, because this is speaking to the customer in used case. One was from a part from our digitizing panel, Mark wrote "According to digitize, if you're not looking to use chatbots and AI, you're going to be out of business hashtag MME17", a little bit of that, legacy there. And then hashtag Modern CX. And the other one is, "Netflix is a great example of a company creating content combined with powerful AI targeting programs." Little bit of sample of some of the things we're seeing. Chatbots. It's a new interface. It's a new way to use data. Netflix content, which modern marketers need content in this platform. Picking a Netflix approach. So, kind of begs a question. Chatbots? Netflix? Kind of modern. Email? Old? So how do you get a marketer to get you to use the reliability of hardened critical infrastructure, like email, not going away anytime soon but, it's going to be one dimension of Netflix. Content marketing. Binge watching. All this content out there. Netflix and chatbots interface. Your thoughts? >> So my thought is I am, so I was in the room when I watched the chatbot piece and I loved the fact of the, we could live in a world where we could have a fluid customer experience anywhere. You can ask a question. I also support our communities where you ask a question and know you're automatically going to get an answer to the algorithm. So that delivers on that one to you scenario. So I'm super excited about it. When I look at the Netflix example, even to get the information on what the recommendation engine should be, you still need a lot of data. And you still need to know what are the habits of your customers who even land on that decision tree. So I love the fact that folks are thinking Netflix and thinking content, but that chatbot thing, oh my goodness. When people start doing that I can't wait to see those customers that win those Markies. >> Peter: But they have to do it right. >> They have to do it right. >> One of the dangers that marketing always faces is the idea that it's all about collecting information, having the customer give something to me and not giving something valuable in return. >> Adrian: Absolutely >> And the challenge that I see with chatbots is, and I think you agree John, is are chatbots going to be used to further automate information collection at the expense of really presenting value. The new marketing, the Modern Customer Experience, has to be focused on are we delivering value with the customer at every single interaction, not is the customer doing more for us inside of marketing. What do you think about that? >> So I agree. Cause if we do not know that we are creating value and that we're not, that we're adding friction into the problem, you pour that into your algorithm, there's going to bias. And so then, you can't make a decision about how to feed information into the machine and not have the right information that says we don't have the right region, we don't understand the behavior across all products. You can't have bias in the model at all. It has to be complete for you to then look at your customer base holistically. >> Yeah, we don't want to better automate bad marketing practices. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> We want to use these technologies to continuously drive to use a famous person's parlance a more perfect union between this marketer and the buyer. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> John: Well you got a great article up on Martechseries, "This year has gone above and beyond, fully leverage and most innovative marketing technology to create customer centric campaigns that deliver outstanding results that Laurie has spent, Senior Vice President Chairman." Okay that's obviously marketing packaging for the quote, from PR, but what she's getting at is customer centric. Again this is the theme, multitude of technologies now in the platform. Very interesting. Are customers responding well to this platform and are they seeing the need to stand up thing quickly in these campaigns? >> Adrian: Absolutely. They are finding that there's more pressure to get interim value. They are absolutely buying into the platform message and we have quite a few customers who also were recognized for the use of multiple products and multiple partner related applications. And so we're actually seeing a nice trend in both. To do great marketing, part of the messaging, or part of Laura's talk track from today was people are freaked out about the data but if you find a way to harness it, you'll create experiences where you'll stop chasing the customers. They'll start chasing you cause you'll find the right way to have the conversation with them. >> And word of mouth gets around too. I'm going to ask you to pick your favorite child of the awards. Was there one that jumps out, without alienating all the winners. Is there one that you like? >> This is a really, really hard question for me. As you know I read all the submissions, I play a heavy role in writing the speech. So it's really hard. >> John: Here we go, the preamble, not picking one. Here we go! I don't like to pick my favorite child. No parent likes to do that. >> I don't like to pick my favorite child. This is a really, really hard thing. >> Okay, audience favorite? >> How are they different this year from last year? How about that? Or is there something general that shows, that kind of reinforces some of this customer experience or are you seeing a progress in how the Markies are evolving? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm happy to answer that one. And so for the first time since 2012, we brought back the dinner. And so having the Markies and our customer celebration, it shows our intent as Oracle Marketing Cloud, for our customers as well. That we love and want them to have a great week and want to celebrate their accomplishments and get other people to the winning circle. So being at a table and feeling that energy, getting that opportunity to sit with an executive or sit with a member of a team is a really, really great lift to then come to an event with over 4,000 people and feel warm and feel included. So I think that was an important part, that was a huge feel. I mentioned that we added a account-based team of the year award. Again, you couldn't be in B2B marketing and hide from account-based marketing. It's everywhere. We also delivered an overall customer experience award, so we had two customer-related awards and we created one category. I personally the videos, so our best video submission categories won where the viewers got to pick. And I would say the reaction of Juniper taking home two trophies last night, if I had to pick one, because that one had bit of a go to it. >> Peter: Juniper? >> Juniper Networks. >> Really? >> John: Two awards. >> They won two awards last night. I loved their reaction as well as the reaction of our folks from Brazil. You know, really, really great stories from their use of data. We also had Chris Diaz, our leader of the year, who not only led really strong customer experience transformations across marketing, sales, and service. >> This is the CMO of Time Warner? >> Uh no, that's Kristin. >> Kristi? >> Uh yeah, that's Kristin at Time Warner. I'm talking about Chris Diaz who is also driving sustainability efforts in Africa. It's really transformational. Huge, huge advocate of Oracle. As is the team at Kenya Airways. There's some really feel good moments. There are really exciting moments, you can feel it. People were hugging each other. People were laughing. People brought their own noise cannons and sparklers. >> Who doesn't love an awards show? When you're giving out great trophies? >> You know, we always get the comparison to the Oscars, and so this year it felt like the Golden Globes. >> So you handed out the wrong award. >> So you had a couple of times when the winner, when the wrong winner was >> We actually did not have that but we actually did joke about it. We embraced it. So Kayla Sullivan helped us with the awards distribution. And that was fun. The trophy itself is actually made by the same designer who makes the Emmy. And I believe I said that last year. But the feel was more like the Golden Globes. There was refreshments and opportunity to have there. >> John: It was well done. It looked great on photos. Big crowd. You had the jibs and all the cameras. Great camera angles. >> We had a drone do the delivery so we played with some new drone deliveries >> John: That's the next one up on Amazon delivering your packages by drone, you know, dropping in. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So we had one delivered via tweet and then we had one that was delivered via drone and so we covered all their risk management pieces in advance. And I'm just super happy that InVision, who partnered with us in hosting and producing the event, were able to get some of these things cleared. So our intent was let's be futuristic, let's be digital, let's be now. And they managed to incorporate that into the show for us. >> Well, Adrian. Congratulations on all the great work with the Markies and continued success. What's next next year? What do you guys look, I know, processing, you got to have a little fun now. Relax a little bit. But as you look forward to next year's Markies, you're watching, you've got your submission. It's kind of like the college admissions. You want to know who the judge is. Here he is. What are you looking for for next year? Have you though about it, any ideas? Random thoughts? >> Yeah, it's a great question. It takes us about seven months to actually plan. To sit down and actually plan our calendar from submission peer, the content. And so, we tend to create the categories that are aspirational. So we likely will figure out what's the best way to incorporate the trend. Get them out early to drive customers to get really excited about what's next. We're talking about AI now. What will we be talking about in six months? I'm looking forward to to hearing more customers share about the value their getting from Marketing Cloud, the new channels that they're using, how they've overcome barriers within their organizations to do new and great things. And really focus on taking these stories and telling them all year. >> And that's speed and empowerment. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Adrian Chang. Here in theCUBE back with Markies update with great commentary. Great to see you. Looking great, love the outfit. Lookin' good, as always. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> Peter: Took me a while to figure out what that was though The flower. What is that thing? From here it's like >> It's good. Looks good on you. Adrian Chang, here inside theCUBE bringing all the Markie action, all the great coverage. It's theCUBE. We'll have more live coverage after the short break. (energetic music)

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

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay. Welcome back. And we're live here in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE. This is our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, with Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE's wikibon.com team. Our next guest is Marta Federici, who's with Royal Philips, who, head of CRM. So CRM, Customer Relationship Management. The old way to do things, now transitioning to modern customer experience. Welcome to theCUBE. You look fabulous. >> Thank you. >> John: Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for inviting me, pleasure to be here. >> Great to have you on. Because you know, one of the things that we're really focused on with our research that Peter's doing, is the practitioners. How they're thinking about executing the customer experience. And on our reporting side, we're seeing huge reports that these platforms are providing great value. But at the edge, the customers' expectations are higher than the value that the platforms are delivering. >> Marta: Yeah. >> We're seeing with fake news, we're seeing it all over the place. People want authentic experiences, relevant to them. This is the whole purpose. >> Marta: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. >> It's the people factor. >> Marta: Yeah. (laughs) >> That's what you're going to be on stage tomorrow morning. >> Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Yeah, indeed. So, I would say to be authentic, to be genuine toward your customers, you always need to be relevant to them, you need to listen, you need to learn. You need to know what they need. You need to be ahead of what can they possibly do. You need to start. You need to focus on the insides. You have to really connect all the dots. I think one of the biggest challenges that we have as a company, but I think can be a shared challenge with many other companies across the globe, is that sometimes you not always have the opportunity to break the silence within a large organization. And work really horizontally. And this is something that we really strive to do. Especially when we have specific projects, or innovation-related project, innovation-driven technology project as well. So we try to build a multifunctional team that really can work hand-in-hand, together, to deliver the higher ROI, the better results, the best customer engagement. And be always relevant when it's needed for our customers, for our consumers, and even for our patients, by the way. >> So let's talk about your team then, and how your team fits within Royal Philips. Describe how you've constituted it, how you've put it together, and how it connects into some of the other functions necessary to drive customer experience. >> Yeah, so by the way, I'm very proud of my team, I would say as a start. We, I mean, I build this team in the past three years. And my team is composed in a particular way. I have a portion of the team that is focusing on business-to-consumer CRM, a portion of the team on business-to-business CRM, and then I have, I would say, two layers in between. One is about CRM technology that spans across both domains. And one is about insights. I would say all of them work together. And I really like the fact that, also, the business-to-consumer and the business-to-business team, they can enrich each other. Sharing challenges and really learning from one another. When I think about my, I would say, my product owner, actually we work very, very closely through his team, with the IT department on one end. Because also we own. >> This is the technology person. >> Exactly. The technology side of the story, I would say. Because we own, for example, the market information tooling, Eloqua, that we leverage for any additional campaign management activity on both B2C and B2B. As well as the identity system, et cetera. And, on the other hand, through the insight team, we also work very, very much closely together with enterprise information management teams. So any team who works with databases, with reporting, with advanced analytics, and predictive analytics. So through them and through the more business side of my team, we can build quite nice stories for our experts. >> So you got a B2B practice, a B2C practice, supported by technology and analytics. >> Technology and insights. Exactly, exactly. That's the structure of the team. >> How did you build the team? I mean, talk a little bit about, we talked about the customer journey and CRM and related technologies needing to intercept and serve customers as they seek their solutions and the value propositions that they want to build. How did this play out at Philips? How did it, where did it start, how did it evolve over time to get to where you are? And obviously at some point and time we're going to ask ya, "And where do you think it's going to go?" >> (laughs) Sure. >> But how has it gotten to where it is? >> Sure. I would say, when I started, I had a white, a blank page, a totally blank page. And I started hiring some experts in key areas. Actually, the first expert I hired, where on the technology side. Because we were supposed to, to deploy Eloqua first, for the first time, on a global level. So that was the first piece of the puzzle, together with the insights team, and also with some key expert in terms of B2C and B2B business domains. So then I started realizing, Okay, but this structure needs to make some sense. They need support, they need help. We enable as a, I would say, CRM, a corporate team, any countries across the globe, and any businesses, B2C or B2B. So we deal with a lot of stakeholders. We have multiple stakeholders, and we run and manage multiple projects at the same time. So let's say I started then figure it out, Okay, what are the talents that I need on a business perspective to really make sure that we design the right journeys, that we build the right campaigns, that we can interpret the data properly? So piece by piece I started really filling out all the boxes that I had in my mind. And now, I think this organization is really working. So the team is very motivated, very committed, very passionate. And in the past month, actually also recently, we deliver quite some best practices. So yeah, award-winning best practices. >> Marta, talk about the learnings. You're in a transformation, and CRM certainly is important as you move and transform into the modern era of relationship management with customers. What is the learnings that you have taken away that you can share with folks that are either on a different part of the journey path than you are, or just anything that you would like to share, that would be helpful. >> Yeah, yeah. So when I think about, also what Laura Ipsen, for example, talked about this morning, the marketing heroes. I think, technology is very-- >> Now, Laura Ipsen is the, runs all the modern marketing products that you're holding. >> Yes, exactly. >> She's the head honcho. She's the head honcho, as they say. (laughs) >> SVP of Oracle Marketing Cloud. So when I listen to her, this morning, she was talking about those marketing evils. Also, while talking to Time Warner CMO, and I think in order to start, and to succeed in any transformation, any additional transformation that you want to carry forward with, you really need the right talents, with the right attitudes, with the right skills, with the right mindset, by the way. And I think on one end technology can really help you, can really be a game-changer, a key enabler, but without the right people on your company's side, and also on your vendor's side, that work together with you on a daily basis, you can not achieve great results. >> And what about the partners? You know, Oracle obviously has a good team. We've been following them now for multiple years. It's our eighth year covering Oracle. We've seen the transformation within Oracle. But also they have partners too. I mean, do you interface with them? And what's your advice for folks that are trying to sort their partnership component out with the vendor? >> Yeah, let's say one particularity of my team and what we do everyday, is that we work daily with Oracle and we also like to embrace any other partners that they suggest us to work with. For example, in a recent campaign we beat a huge Black Friday best practice for our North American market and we also scale it globally, achieving great results, and we partnered up on one end with Oracle. Strategic services, expert services, but also with Return Path. Which is one of their, also, I would say, preferred partners. To make of this campaign something really, really good and to ensure a very good broadcasting performance. On the other hand, we also partnered with some of their additional partners that can be related to some apps specifically or some talents that they have internally. And no matter if it's about consultancy, strategy, technical expert. So, yeah, we're pretty much open, very open-minded. And very, I would say we embrace any inputs, any good inputs. Also because, on one end, what is important for us is to share the challenge that we have with our vendors, with our partners, and of course asking for help. But at the same time, we like to onboard them. To make them understood about what's the real challenge. How do we feel about it? We need to have a common sense of purpose. If we really want to, I mean, to take a project to the next level and make it a success. >> So you implement these tools, and put these relationships in place, the productivity and the effectiveness of marketing goes up. >> Marta: Yep. >> How is, therefore, the role of marketing starting to change within Philips as a basis of these new competencies and these new capabilities that, presumably, the rest of the organization finds valuable? >> Let's say, Philips has a great mission. So, we-- >> And one that's transforming, has gone through a lot of change over the last few years. >> Marta: Exactly. >> Pretty successfully, you might add. >> Exactly, exactly. We are a health technology company. We employ 70,000 people across the globe, across a hundred countries. Our mission is to improve people life. Through meaningful innovation that matters to our consumers and to our customers. So I would say this is a huge challenge. We say that we would like to improve three billions people life by 2025. It's a huge mission. And how are we going to do that? Through innovation, through one-on-one customer relationships. So, and this is where, I mean, we also recently, we started focusing more and more on our customer, we started being truly obsessed. No matter if we talk about consumers on B2C domain, or if we talk about customer. So customer obsession is really at the core of any of our marketing activity right now. And it will be even more. By the way, in the past six-to-nine months, we also had the opportunity to have CRM, as well as our, I would say, shop capabilities, becoming core marketing capabilities. Of course this come with a lot of pressure, a lot of, I would say, attention, also-- >> Some sleepless nights. >> Exactly, exactly. But it is quite exciting. And we also would like to continue to invest on our connected proposition. So we also build products, which are connected to apps, and what's the best way to engage? CRM. So what's the best tactics, or strategy, or how can we build a consistent and long-lasting engagement that delivers the higher results and the higher ROI? So that's, I mean, CRM can be really a game-changer there. >> So Philips is quite legendary. And perhaps because of it's Dutch heritage, 'cause the Dutch had to engage a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds and a lot of places to make their businesses great. And Philips is quite legendary at being responsive to and responsible, responsive to and responsible to a lot of different people on a global basis. How are some of those cultural values being amplified inside Philips as you bring more of this customer obsession to bear? >> Yeah. Yeah. So let's say, Philips is at quarter in the Netherlands. And in the Netherlands, I would say, Dutch people are always ready to listen. You need to always find a sort of consensus before you can move forward with any strategy, or with any project or program. You always listen also to any inputs. Because you want to really make sure that your idea, on one hand, is agreed, on the other hand, is re-analyzed into the least of the details. So what we do is is really try to understand all perspectives, because any point of view can enrich an initial idea that you have. And I would say our business is also so diverse. If you look at all the business units that we have, and sometimes can be difficult to understand Philips as a whole, but in the end every single of our business units really incorporate together to the greater goal of innovation that matters in improving people lives. So you will find this through any of our stories, any of the products that we deliver, that we build, also together with our customers. So I would say, Philips is, has many, but also, can be also be just one at same time. >> It's transforming, as GE says, you know, they went to bed an industrial company one night and woke up a software analytics company. >> Marta: (laughs) Yeah. >> That's really what's happening. >> Exactly. And, you know what, we are also focusing on delivering services and delivering information. Because what we also strive to do, is to work within the health continuum from prevention, to diagnosis, to care, also home care. And this is what we are really aiming to do, at this stage, also, establishing a connection in between a consumer that can also be a patient on the other side, and delivering the right information to the hospital to take care of them. So in this health continuum story it's really a game-changer, I think, within, I would say, a health tech industry. >> And having the data is critical. Marta, final question for you. Take a minute to share what's exciting here at this event. Why is the modern customer experience show this year so important? There's a big buzz around this platform. There's a big buzz about the early days we're in with modern customer experience being thought differently with AI and seeing this beginning trajectory. What should people get excited about? What's the most important thing in your mind? >> I think the first thing I noticed while coming here, okay, first of all, this year the event is a new vibe. I think this event is even more inspiring than the past edition that I have been to. And I think the fact that they renamed also the event into Modern Customer Experience instead of Modern Marketing Event is really a signal that something is changing. Also on Oracle side. And this is what I notice at the first sight and in the end, when yesterday, during Mark Hurd, I would say, keynote, opening keynote, he mentioned the artificial intelligence, I was pretty pleased to see this focus through their, I would say, app environment. Where if you looked at the services that this app is going to be linked to, you won't see the marketing cloud anymore. You see the CX. So it's all about the CX in the end. And this is, in the end, the core. >> They're bringing it together. >> Marta: Yeah, they're bringing it together. >> Well, the technology is the marketing cloud, the outcome is the CX. >> Marta: Yeah. Exactly. So and I think they are going to focus more and more on that. Also, I mean, technology-wise it doesn't make sense to have silos anymore. >> Yeah, what does this mean for you? How does, when you see that, what's the impact to your world? >> I can be only happy. Because we are always challenged to look at the CX, to start with the CX, to produce an even more announced one. So if I look at the opportunity this can bring to us, I can only be very, very positive. Also the focus on AI is truly important. The focus on data, also this morning, Laura Ipsen was talking a lot about the importance of insight and data and how this is going to be a game-changer. And also this morning with Mark Hurd at breakfast, he mentioned data is the new currency. No way. We were also discussing a bit, Okay, third party data, who are the biggest player? And he said, of course, Facebook and Google. (laughs) Of course. But still, the value that every company should build along is owning his own data. Every company should really care to build an extremely good database to start with. Because anyone can have access to third-party data, but this is, can be just an easy escape, easy or fast. >> So you feel-- >> It's first-person data that's going to determine your differentiation. >> Marta: That is the game-changer, for sure. >> And you're excited by the, by Mark Hurd's comments this morning at breakfast. >> Definitely. (laughs) >> He's been on theCUBE, oddly enough. >> Which means he's now excited too. (laughter) >> Mark, if you're watching, we need you back on theCUBE, he's good. He gets the marketplace, he understands the pulse. But he's also a data-driven guy. >> Yeah, pretty much. >> You know, he's old school like us, but Marta, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Marta Federici, Head of CRM. Thank you so much, for sharing your perspective and insight and data with us. >> Thank you, thank you. >> This is theCUBE, I'm John with Peter Burris. We'll be back with more from Oracle Modern Customer Experience after this short break. (electronic music)