>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference here in Atalanta, Georgia. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. It is late in the day here, the reception is about to start, the drinks are flowing, but we are still interviewing guests, and we've got a great panel right now. Joining us is Scott Helmer. He is the Senior Vice President at the Aviation and Business Defense Unit at IFS, and Henry Canaday, who is a contributing editor at Aviation Week. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> I wonder if you could walk our viewers a little bit through the idea, where does aviation and defense sit within the IFS business strategy? >> I'm happy to answer that. I think our new CEO of IFS, Darren Roos, has been very clear that there are three things that IFS will be best at. Number one, we will be best at mid-market ERP in those vertical markets that we care about. We will be number one in field service management. And we will be number one in maintenance management solutions in aviation and defense. So aviation and defense is one of the pillars on which IFS's strategy is currently based, and we have formed a global business unit inside of IFS that is specifically responsible, it's a 300 person strong team that is responsible for distributing a comprehensive portfolio of A and D solutions to the A and D market globally. >> What are the some of the biggest challenges that you're setting out to solve for your customers? >> Also a good question. We address the full range of management solution capability across A and D. So whether you're an operator in commercial or defense sector, or whether you're an inservice support provider, we provide solutions and support, all of your MRO capabilities, some of your performance-based logistics requirements, some of your supply chain requirements. Basically leveraging the core processes that IFS is differentiated around. Those being manufacturing, asset and service management, supply chain and project management. >> What's special about aviation and defense that's not been marketed or service delivery, which captures a lot of industry verticals, but the fact that you guys got carved out as a separate vertical, what are some of those unique challenges? >> What is chiefly unique about aviation and defense is the overall complexity in the marketplace. You're talking about very very complex capital intense of mobile assets, where managing the maintenance obligations in order to maintain the availability of the aircraft is under the scrutiny of compliance and is required to be done efficiently, without compromising safety. >> Not to mention the fact, your assets are flying all over the world, so they might not necessarily be able just to roll into the maintenance yard at the end of a bad day. >> And they're large and expensive, that's for sure. >> (laughs) Large and expensive. >> Henry, you've been covering the aviation industry for more than 20 years now. What do you see as the biggest trends, biggest concerns that a company like IFS is trying to grapple with right now, in terms of servicing its clients? >> Well the interesting thing about the airline industry is that it technically in many areas it's extremely advanced and very fast moving industry. In selling tickets, the industry has been going through a continual IT revolution for the last 20 years. Things like giving you notices about when your planes arrive and stuff like that. Very fast moving, changing all the time. But this is stuff, it's just money. There's no safety involved, so they can take chances, if they get it 99% right, they make enough money, they can solve the one percent errors. The problem with maintenance is it's messy, it's complex as Scott says. It's also safety critical. They can't screw it up one tenth of one percent of the time. They've been very, very cautious and very, very slow, and they look sluggish and stagnant on the maintenance side. But fortunately, now, especially the U.S. airlines are making some good money, so there's actually an opportunity for companies like IFS to come in here and really reform the maintenance program. >> We cover a lot of autonomous vehicle shows. Autonomous vehicles are coming. Obviously, a big element of autonomous vehicles will ultimately be safety. One of the things that comes up over and over again, if you look at the number of accidents, the fatalities that happen on our streets, compared to what happens in aviation, if a week on the streets happened at a week in the aviation industry, the planes would be shut down. >> Scott: There'd be no aviation. >> The threshold that you guys have to achieve in terms of safety is second to none. I don't know if there's anything even close, especially in terms of volume of people, and then, oh by the way, everyone globally is getting richer, so the amount of passenger flow. I don't know if you can speak to that in terms of the growth of passenger miles, I imagine is the metric, continues to explode. >> You've had basically 18 straight years without a fatal crash by a major American airline. That's unheard of, that's unheard of. We used to have one crash a year up till around 2000. Every time somebody annoys me with customer service in an airline, I think of this, they're doing the important stuff right, so I don't care. (laughs) >> Very well. >> Right. >> And, then do you think the efficiency, right? At least here domestically, I always think of Southwest, 'cause they were the first ones that really had fast turns, and they raced to the gate, they raced back out of the gate, in terms of really trying to get the maximum efficiency out of those assets. The pressure there, in translating to the other airlines is pretty significant to make sure you're really getting a high ROI. >> That's absolutely right. Again one of the levels of complexity that we were discussing. Certainly airlines are being forced to finally introduce some change into their maintenance operations, as the increasingly complex assets are part of the re-fleeting, as that faster traffic continues to grow. It's about both achieving greater efficiency in maintenance operations, not only without compromising safety, but ensuring the availability of that asset. Because revenue dollars still matter greatly, and those assets are your revenue producing assets that an airline has. >> Can you describe your approach in terms of of how you work together with your clients, the airlines, in terms of developing new products and new features. >> One of the unique characteristics about aviation and defense is not only the size of the client, but the length and duration of the relationships. So, we have a long and rich history, both at IFS and through the acquired MXI technologies, of working with our partners in their programs over the very long term. As much as we have domain expertise and a sizable team of domain experts inside of our business, we're able to recognize our partners that are visionaries in the industry, and we have established multiple levels of collaboration to involve them in the shaping of solution capability to support their businesses going forward. We are just launching today two new planning applications that were not only being launched with American Airlines and LATAM Airlines respectively, but were co-developed with subject matter experts at each. So they're tremendously valuable inputs into shaping our vision of what solutions are going to best drive business value for our customers over a very long relationship horizon. >> So, what have you unpack at MXI acquisition, what did that give you that you didn't have before and what's the total solution now? >> Certainly, I joined IFS through the MXI acquisition. I was previously it's Chief Operating Officer. MXI was focused on best of breed MRO capability for both defense and service port providers, as well as commercial airlines. In combining with IFS, that had a rich history in A and D, we now have the most comprehensive solution portfolio available on the market today. We are the only vendor that can provide best of breed capability, integrated into an end to end enterprise landscape, and we've got the team of subject matter experts or domain experts that are capable of delivering that value, not just the product, but the solution to the customers across all the segments of A and D. >> Just to be clear, your defense is more than aviation. I saw a military truck over on the expo hall, so it's assets beyond just airplanes when it comes to defense. >> Correct, we support on the defense side of things. We support multiple platforms, whether they're fighter jets, whether they're cargo carriers, whether they tanks, whether they're ships, we support for the operators, the offset optimization, performance based logistics, security, et cetera. For the in-service port providers, we similarly support supply chain requirements, MRO requirements, et cetera. >> Henry, as you look forward, you've been covering this space for a while, what are some big, new things coming down the road in the aviation industry that we should be looking for, 'cause we haven't seen a lot of big things from the outside looking in. I guess we had the next generation fighter planes, and then we had obviously the A380 and the 787 on the commercial side. What's new and coming that you're excited about? >> Well, technology changes slowly in commercial aviation, because of the safety aspect. The big, new things are the new aircraft, the 787 and the A350. They are really new generation aircraft, lot more composites, plastics if you will. They're using that instead of aluminum. The other things that's happening is additive manufacturing, this whole printing parts. That's real big, and I've been telling everybody the new Boeing 787 has two printed parts, one made by GE, $120 billion a year. The other made by a company called Norsk Titanium, with 140 people coming out of Norway, which is not exactly the center of innovation in aerospace programs. >> Jeff: With a printed part, like a 3D printed part? >> Yeah a printed part. Those are the two big changes in the aircraft. I mean, customers aren't going to see it, but these planes are now made largely of plastics and the metal parts are going to be more and more printed. Much more efficient way, lighter aircraft, less fuel use, more efficient, less environmental effects, etc. That's a big deal. More important than a huge airplane. >> Right, well I can imagine, we hear about the impacts of 3D printing. I haven't really seen it yet, but this vision where your ability to print parts on demand will have significant impacts on supply chains and inventory and huge, huge impacts down the road. >> And the airline industry is the most demanding. They've go to go through really massive proofs of concept and proof of materials, and it's starting to happen. >> Henry, what would you say is the most important area that IFS should focus on. If they can solve one problem in the airline industry, what do you think it should be? >> Availability would be one. Just aircraft availability, that's what. The airlines are concerned about two things. Dollar cost per flight hour to maintain and what they call a technical dispatch reliability. They want to get that plane launched 99.99% of the time. Get rid of the unpredictive maintenance problems. Schedule everything, make it quick, I want to get the planes off on time. >> It's amazing that unscheduled maintenance, regardless of industry, still continues to be such a bug-a-boo to productivity and profitability. It's one of these things that just has huge impact. >> I would completely agree with Henry. I think asset availability is the number one focus for commercial operators. Our focus has certainly been around trying to remove the impacts of unscheduled maintenance. One of the applications that we launched today allows you to react very, very quickly to unplanned or unscheduled maintenance events, and to do some what-if modeling, so that you can implement the best plan for your fleet, in order to maximize the availability of that asset. Not just in terms of bolstering or producing a better plan. We're attempting to do that even with line planning, where we're adjusting the traditional planning perimeters away from what must be done to what should be done in order to maximize the availability of that aircraft. Of course, as Henry said, everybody's focused on faster, tighter turnaround times. All of our software is designed to try and drive tighter turnaround times and greater efficiency. >> What percentage is scheduled versus predictive versus prescriptive? Maintenance. >> I think it varies by airline. The great majority of maintenance is scheduled, I mean, there's no doubt about that. They put these aircraft down for a week or a month. It's a massive amount of money. It's not the amount of maintenance, it's when unscheduled maintenance happens, it really throws things off. It may only be one or two percent of the maintenance tasks are unscheduled, but that's what throws the aircraft off the schedule. That's what leaves passengers sitting in the departure lounges, ticked off. Not getting there till the next day or the next week, whenever, so it's a very, very small percentage, these unscheduled maintenance events, but it's crucial to the airlines' economics. >> Exactly. Crucial to our itineraries, as well, as the economics. Exactly. >> Making sure that the airlines continue to do what they do best, which is get us from place A to place B. >> Precisely. Well, Scott Henry, thank you so much, it's been a really fun conversation. >> I enjoyed being here, thank you. >> Jeff: Thank you. >> Thanks, Henry. >> Thanks. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference just after this. (digital music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents "On the Ground." (light techno music) >> Hello there and welcome to SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, On the Ground, here at Oracle's Headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, and I'm here with Neil Mendelson, the Vice President of Product Management for the Big Data Team at Oracle. Welcome to On the Ground, thanks for having us here, at Headquarters. >> Good to be here. >> So big data, obviously a big focus of Oracle OpenWorld, is right around the corner but in general, big data breadth of products from Oracle, has been around for awhile. What's your take on this? Because Oracle is doing very well with this new Cloud storing. My interview with Mark Hurd, 100% of the code has been cloudified. Big data now is a big part of the Cloud dynamic. What are some of the things that you're seeing out in the marketplace around big data, and where does Oracle fit? >> Well, you know, when this whole big data thing started years ago, I mean Hadoop just hit its 10th anniversary, right? Everybody was talking about throwing everything out that they had and there was no reason for SQL anymore and you're just going to throw a bunch of stuff together yourself and put it together and off you go, right? And now I think people have realized that to get the real value out of these new technologies, it's not a question of just the new technologies alone, but how do you integrate those with your existing estates. >> So Oracle obviously is a big database business, you know, I mean Tom Curry, with "Hey the database, take your swim lane", but what's interesting is with Hadoop and some of these other ecosystems, what customers are looking for is to not just use Oracle database but to use whatever they might see as a feature of some use case. >> Neil: Absolutely. >> Hadoop for batch. So you guys have been connecting these systems, so could you just quickly explain for a minute how you guys look at this choice factor from a customer standpoint because there's a role for Hadoop, but Hadoop isn't going to take over the whole world as we see in the ecosystem. What's your role, vis-a-vis the database choice? >> Yeah, so we very much believe when Oracle started, it was all about Database, and it was all about SQL. And we believe now that the new normal is really one that includes both Hadoop, NoSQL, and Relational, right? SQL is of course still a factor, but so are the ability to interface, in via rest interfaces and scripting languages. So for us, it's really a big tent, and we've been taking what we had done previously in Database and really extending that to Data Management over Hadoop and NoSQL. >> We had a great chat at Oracle OpenWorld last year, and you talked about your history at Oracle before you did you run with start-ups. You've seen this movie go on early days with data warehousing, so I got to ask you, big data's not new to Oracle, obviously the database business has been thriving and changing with the Cloud around the corner and certainly here on the doorstep but could you explain Oracle's Database, I mean, big data product offerings? >> Sure. >> What was the first product? Take us through the lineage of where it is, because you guys have products. >> We do. >> And a slew of stuff is coming, I can imagine, I'm sure you can't share much about that but talk about the lineage right now. >> Okay, so we started about three years ago on the Hadoop side by making an appliance made for Hadoop and then in the future, which followed on with Spark. And that appliance has been doing well on the marketplace for a number of years and we've obviously continued to enhance that. We then took what we perfected on premises and we moved that up to the Cloud, so we have a big data cloud service for customers that offer them high-performance access to Hadoop and Spark and without necessarily the need to actually manage security and all the things with it. At OpenWorld, we'll be making a series of announcements, we'll be creating yet another big data Cloud service. This one will be fully managed, fully elastic for customers who only want to take advantage of a Hadoop or Sparks service, as an example, and don't want to deal with the ability to specifically tweak the environment, right? We also announced a little while ago, our family of Cloud Machines, right? So you'll see, a, the first Cloud Machine is one that provides Oracle IaaS and PaaS services and then we'll add to the family. >> John: That's shipping already, though. >> That's shipping already, right? And then we'll add to the family, an Exadata Cloud Machine and a big data Cloud Machine and the Cloud Machines are really kind of a cool concept. They're cool because for a lot of customers from a regulatory point of view or otherwise, they're just not ready for the public Cloud, but everybody wants to take advantage of what the Cloud provides. So how do you do that behind your firewall, right? How do you provide IT as a service? So what Oracle has done essentially, is to package up its Cloud services and able to deliver that to customers behind the firewall and they get the exact same technology that they have on the public Cloud, they build to one architecture and then deploy it wherever they choose. They get the advantages of the Cloud, it's a subscription service, right, but they can deal with but they can adhere to whatever data sovereignty or issues that they might have. >> So let's get to that regulatory dynamic in a second but I just want to back up, so Big Data Appliance, B-D-A you guys call it, Big Data Appliance, that's been out. Big data service... >> Neil: Cloud service started about a year ago. >> Done a year, that's out there. Those laces that connect Appliance that's on-pem with the Cloud. >> Neil: Right. >> And then now you have the cloud machine series of enhancements coming in Oracle Openworld. >> Right, as well as a fully elastic, fully managed cloud service that will add to the mix as well >> Okay, so let's get down, so that's going to bring us fully cloud-enabled. >> Yep. >> Cloud on-premise, >> Both. >> All that kind of dynamic flexibility and an option for cloud configurations and depressuring. Okay, back to the regulatory thing. So what's the big deal about that, because you mentioned that most companies we talk to love the cloud, they love the economics, but there's a lot of fund and fear internally amongst their own team about getting sued, losing data, you know, certain industries that they might have to play, is that a fact and can you explain that for someone and what's important about that. >> Yeah I mean, for some customers it's a real concern, right, and the world is dynamically shifting, I mean, look at what happened a few months ago with you know the Brexit, right, I mean all of a sudden it was OK to have, you know, the data as long as it was in the EU, well the EU is now shifting, so where does the data go, right? So from a regulatory point of view we haven't fully settled in terms of where customer data can be held, exactly how its treated, and you know those things are evolving. So for a number of companies, they want the advantages of the cloud but they don't necessarily want it on the public cloud and that's why we're offering these new cloud machines because they can essentially have their cake and eat it too. >> So interesting, the dynamic then is is that this whole regulatory thing is a moving train. >> Right. >> Relative to the whole global landscape. >> Right. >> Who knows what's going to happen with China and other things, right? >> Right and I think that's what's really terrific is that our history is, of course, were a company that's been around for a while so we started on premises and we moved up to the cloud and our customers are ones that are going to have, kind of, this hybrid kind of a system, right. Other companies started much later and their cloud only and you know while that's great for companies that want the public cloud. What do you do if you're in a regulatory environment that isn't ready to boot public cloud? Now you have to have two architectures, one for on-premises and one for cloud and then how do you deal with a moving landscape where a year from now things that are on premises can move to the cloud and other things that are in the cloud may have to move to back on premises, right? How do you deal with that dynamic going forward and not get stuck. >> So, is it fair to say that Oracle is a big data player in the cloud and on-premise? >> Absolutely, and not just for data management. I think that you know while we started at that core, that's our heritage, we've so much built out our portfolio, we have big data products in the data integration space, in the machine learning space, we have big data products that connect up with our IoT strategy, with data visualization, we've really blossomed as the marketplace has matured bringing additional technology for customers to utilize. >> Okay, so let's get down to the reality and get into the weeds with customer deployments. How do you guys compare vis-a-vis the competition now you got the on-prem with the BDA, Big Data Appliance with the cloud service, cloud machines to create some provisioning, flexibility on whether architectures the customers may choose. >> Yeah. For whatever reason that they would have. >> Okay. How does that compare to the competition? >> On the on-premises side, if we start there, there was a recent Forrester Wave that looked at various Hadoop appliances and we took the number one category or the number one position across all the three categories that they looked at, they looked at the strategy, they looked at the market presence and they looked at the capability of what we offered and we ended up number one in that space. On the cloud side, of course, we're maturing in terms of that offering as well but you know we're really the only company out there that can offer the same architecture both on cloud and on-premises, where you don't necessarily have to go all in on one or the other, and for many companies that's exactly what they're, you know, what they need right. They can't necessarily go all in one way or the other. >> So I got to ask you kind of a, put your Oracle historian tech historian hat on as well as your Oracle executive hat on and talk about some of the technologies that have come and gone over the years and how does that relate to some of the things that are hyped up now? I mean certainly Hadoop, what's supposed to be this new industry, it's going to disrupt the database and Oracle's going to be put out of business and this is how people are going to store stuff, MapReduce. Now people are saying, why even have Hadoop in the cloud when you got object store. So, things come and go, I'm not saying Hadoop is going to come and go but it's good for batch but so, what's your comments on it can you point to industry technology, say okay, that's going to be a feature of something else, that's a real deal? What are some of the things that you look at that you can say... >> So you know we're seeing exactly as you described, a few years ago you go to a conference and it was all about MapReduce. Right now, a seminar in MapReduce, nobody goes, right. Everybody's going to Spark, right, and there's already things that potentially will replace Spark, things like Flink, and we're going to see that continual change and a lot of what we focused on is to be able to provide some level of abstraction between the customers architecture and these moving technology. So, I'll give an example. Our data integration technology, historically that was, you know, you're able to visually describe a set of transformations and then we generated code in SQL or PL/SQL. Now we generate code, not only in SQL and PL/SQL but we generate that same code in Spark. If tomorrow Spark gets replaced with Flink or something else, we simply replace the code generator underneath and all of what the customers built gets preserved and moved into the future. I think a lot of people are now becoming concerned that as they take advantage of open source really really at the very low levels they have the potential to essentially get stuck in a technology which has essentially become obsoleted, right? >> Yeah. >> As any new technology evolves we move from people who just code, right, with all the lower level stuff up to a set of tools and you know we talk to companies now that have huge amounts of now legacy MapReduce code, right, you think only a few years ago... >> It's kinds like cobalt. >> Neil: Yeah. (John laughing) >> Neil: So... >> I's going to be around but not really pervasive. >> Right. So how can you take advantage of these technologies, without necessarily having to get stuck to any one of them. >> So, I'm going to ask you the philosophical question, so Oracle database business has been the star over the years since the founding but even now it seems to me that the role of the database becomes even more important as you connect subsystems, call it, Hadoop, Spark, whatever technology's going to evolve as a feature of an integrated system, if you will, software-based and or engineered system coming together. So that seems to be obvious that you can connect in an open way and give customers choice but that's kind of different from the old Oracle. I have a database everything runs on Oracle, Oracle on Oracle's grade, certainly it runs well but what's the philosophy internally obviously the database team's sitting there it must be like, wow big data is an opportunity for Oracle. >> That's right. Or do they go, no the database business is different. How do you guys talk about that internally and then how do customers take away from that dynamic between the database crown jewel and the opening it up and being more big data driven? >> I think it's ironic because, externally, when you talk to people, they just assume that we're going to be like "Oh my god this is a threat" and we're going to just double down on what we're doing on the database side and we're just going to hunker down and I don't know try to hide, right? But that's exactly the opposite of what we're really been doing internally. We really have embraced these technologies of Hadoop and Spark and NoSQL, and we're essentially seeing data management evolve, that is the new normal. So rather than looking at, not only what we might have said, we did say when we introduced Oracle in the data warehousing market back in '95, We said "Put all your data in the Oracle database." We're not saying that anymore because there are reasons to put data in Hadoop, there are reasons to put data in graph databases, in NoSQL databases, we need to be able to provide those choice while still integrating that data management platform as one integrated entity. >> Would you say then it was fair to say that, from a customer standpoint, by having that open approach gives more faster access to different data types in real time? >> Absolutely. >> John: Then isn't that the core value proposition of big data. >> Yeah, again when the Hadoop new craze first started it was all about unload and put everything in this one store and for a lot of companies today, they still are faced with the this conundrum which says, in order to analyze data, I have to put it all in one place. So that means that you have to move your operational data into one place, you have to move your data warehousing stuff into one place, but then at the same time you mentioned real time. How do you get into the business of moving data from Place A to Place B on a constant basis while still being able to offer real-time access and real-time analytics? The answer is you can't. >> And the value of the data, the data capital, as we've been talking about, McGee bond is an IoT piece of data from a turbine could have really big relevance to the system of record in another database and that has to be exposed and integrated quickly to surface some insight about the quality of that... >> It's the thing that gives you context, right. Today what's going on is that we are getting all access to all these rich data sources and rich data types that we didn't have before, whether that's text information or information coming off sensors and alike, and the relevance of that information is, when we combined it together with the corporate information, the stuff that we have in our existing systems to really reap the true benefit. How do you know, when you get a log file the log file doesn't have anything about the customer in it, the log file just has a, a number associating itself to a customer. You have to tie that together with the customer profile which data which might not exist in Hadoop, maybe it's in a NoSQL store. >> And certainly the Open Source is booming with Oracle. You guys are actively involved in all the different open source ecosystems. >> Sure, we drive a number of open source projects whether it's MySQL or Java or, the list goes on and on. Many people don't think of, you know, they're not even aware that Oracle's behind my MySQL. As an example, right, I mean, I remember talking to my son recently he says, "Do you know anything about MySQL" and I'm like well a little bit. And then as we're talking and were looking through his code, finally I say, "You know this is Ooracle product," He's like no it's not. You know cause... >> It's too cool to be Oracle. >> That's right. That's not a bad thing, right. >> Yeah. I mean the reality of it is, is that you know we've invested a whole lot of time and energy in these technologies and we're really looking to commercialize them to mainstream them, to make them less scary for more people to be able to get value from. Well your son's example's a great illustration of the new Oracle that's out there now this whole new philosophy. Final, give you the last word real quick, for folks watching, what's one thing you'd want to share with them that they may or may not know about Oracle and it's big data strategy? >> Give us a look. Right, I mean I think that when you think of big data and you think of these new technologies, you may not think of Oracle, right. You may think of the new companies that you're more familiar with in the light. The reality of is, is that Oracle has an extraordinarily rich portfolio of technology and services on the cloud as well as like cloud machines. So give us a look, I think you'll be surprised at how open we are, how much of the open source technology we've embedded in our products and how fast were essentially evolving into, what is the new normal. >> Neil thanks so much for spending the with me here On the Ground. I'm john Furrier, you're watching exclusive "On the Ground" coverage here at Oracle Headquarters. Thanks for watching. >> Neil: Thank you.