 Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE headquarters at Palo Alto, California for a special CUBE conversation. I'm the host of theCUBE here with my special guest, Monica Kumar, Vice President of Oracle Cloud Platform. Monica, thanks for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. So Oracle Cloud has got some great stuff going on. One of the things I'm most intrigued about, I've heard a lot about, is this autonomous database. I have a lot of questions, want to dig into it and really unpack that. So first take a minute to explain what is the autonomous database? You know, before I do that, John, can I ask you a question? Sure. You use a smartphone, right? Yeah. Do you know what happens every minute of when we use a smartphone and use the internet? How much data gets generated? No. Okay, I'm going to tell you. All right, good. 16 million text messages happen every single minute. About four million Google searches. We're talking four million YouTube videos watched. About a million Facebook pages are open and half a million tweets. Now think about the impact of all this data in just one minute, right? Somebody somewhere is finding this data useful and can actually extract some value out of it. Now, you might have heard this also, that in the last two years, world's 90% of data has actually been created and it's doubling every two years. So my kid's LTE bill, that's why they're watching Netflix. That's why they're paying all this extra payment. This is a real world. I mean, I can imagine my iPhone, you've got multiple apps on there, a lot of power being used, but that's just one piece. Like when I'm buying with Apple Pay or I'm doing things around, there's a lot of mobility involved. What's the value of all this? Well, see, there's also a lot of devices, right? I mean, we talk about IoT. By the year 2021 or in about the next five years, there'll be 50 billion devices that will be collecting data, analyzing data, sharing data. So what we're talking about is the sheer volume of the data that's being generated. And ultimately, every organization is trying to figure out how to extract insights from this data, how to make it better, how to make the businesses run better because of those insights, right? Where they create new revenue streams, maybe optimize for efficiency, deliver better customer services. So that is the problem that we are dealing with today is how do we get more value out of that data? So how does it all work? I mean, autonomous driving, I see cars around, Uber's been trying to do it. Other people have fleets, cars all over the place. Autonomous database. I mean, it sounds like it's self-driving, which implies that sort of cloud is all about automation. How does the tech work? What's going on under the hood? Yeah, so let me explain it to you. I mean, this is where Oracle comes in, right? We've been in the data and information business for over four decades. This is what we've done. We've actually been solving the hard problem for our customers when it comes to data management and using data. And now with this new whole deluge of more and more data, who better than Oracle to solve this problem? And one of the more important ways in which we can solve this problem is by automation, is by the use of machine learning. So that's where we are moving as a company, is you're moving to adopt and embed more and more machine learning across our entire cloud portfolio. And one of the biggest things we are doing is what you're talking about, autonomous database, which is exactly that. It's combining machine learning with the decades and decades of the database optimizations that we've been putting out in the industry. It's the power of that combination which has culminated into what we call autonomous database today. Is the autonomous database on-premises and cloud or both? How does that work? Yes, Oracle's always been about choice. So definitely it's both. And I'll explain to you the cloud offering. In fact, you alluded to self-driving cars. It's very similar to that. So there are three core attributes of autonomous database. It's self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing. And let me explain to you what I mean by each of those, right? So self-driving is really the database provisioning itself, upgrading itself, patching, tuning, monitoring, backing up. All of the functions that are very manual today are all done by autonomous database itself. So that's the self-driving part. Self-securing, applying all of the security patches by itself so the user doesn't have to worry about it. And self-repairing is really focused on maximizing uptime productivity. So today we offer with autonomous 99.995% uptime, which means 2.5 minutes of downtime or less per month, per month. And which includes, by the way, both planned and unplanned downtime. So that's what autonomous database is. It's using the power of machine learning to automate all of the manual tasks that a human being is doing, which is really not of high value, which is really very administrative type of work. So I can see some of the time things are great for customers. What are the benefits that customers have in terms of having this? Obviously automation takes away a lot of the free time. Makes free time, but what specific benefits do you guys see coming out of this for customers? Yeah, absolutely. I think for businesses it's all about outcome, right? So there are three major benefits of autonomous. The first one is reducing cost, right? It's making sure that the administrative time, so I'll give you an example. We now with autonomous can cut off the administrative time by 80% the cost of administering a database. So that's real hard savings for the customer and they can then take that and put into something else that's most strategic to them. It's about reducing risk, right? The risk of breaches, which could cause reputational damage to companies, which could cause, you know, shareholder value loss. So the fact that we are reducing risk with autonomous technology is another big benefit. And the third and the most important one is really innovation, the time to innovation, time to insights, more productivity for the customer. So those three in my opinion are the top three benefits. You know, being agile, having flexibility that clouds really brings that scale out mentality, that serverless, we hear things like that in the industry. It's certainly very relevant and machine learning makes that automation happen, love that message. The question I would have for you is, okay, in my mind I'm trying to think, okay, how would I buy this? How do I use it? What are some of the offerings that you guys have? Is it turnkey box? Is it software? How do you roll this out to customers? How do they consume it? Take us through the offering itself. Sure, today we offer autonomous in our cloud in two different offerings. One is autonomous data warehouse which is purely for analytics. So you can actually create new data warehouses or data mods to get insights from your data. The second one is transaction processing. It's autonomous transaction processing which can be used to develop applications, to deploy applications, high performance workloads, machine critical workloads in the cloud. So those are the two ways we can do. In fact, we have many customers who are using our technology today in our cloud. But like I said, this is also going to be available in on-premises as well. That's awesome. So when you get into like the customer examples, who's using this now? Is it shipping? What's the status of it? I mean, this gets a lot of attention. The press article is great. We covered it on SiliconANGLE. What are the customer examples? Absolutely, so of course it's shipping and it's the first and only self-driving database in the industry. We have many, many customers for the last few months who are using it. I'll give you a few examples. We have a major enterprise car rental company who's using it and they were able to cut down their time to provision databases from two weeks to eight minutes. Now, what does that mean? That means they can now roll out projects faster and improve their customer services and offers they are making to customers. We have another customer who's in the shipping and oil industry and they've cut down their time to querying complex data sets from 20 minutes to a few seconds. Again, which means they can get access to insights much faster to make decisions. And they've also eliminated downtime from patching because everything is done online. Patching is done automatically on a database while it's running online. And then we have another customer who's a managed service provider. They're not able to provision their customers 10 times faster. So that means they can grow their business, they can provision more customers. Their current customers can be happier because they're supporting them better and faster. What are some of the comments they might say? Just to kind of go off tangent for a second here, but I mean, they go, wow, this is amazing. What's some of the feedback you're getting? What are they saying? What are some of the anecdotal comments? Share some color around that. Sure, I mean, one of the big comments is, wow, this, me, I'm a DBA. I thought this is gonna take my job away, but actually to the contrary, it's making my job easier. DBAs are now realizing they can actually manage many more databases efficiently in the same time that they were doing before. And secondly, they don't have to be involved in manual drudgery tasks. You know, they can now offload all of that to autonomous database and they can now focus on more strategic tasks. They can become a partner to the business. They can focus on application life cycle management on data security, on data architectures. So that's the one reaction we're getting is like, wow, I didn't realize how much of my time I was spending doing maintenance stuff which really adds no value to the organization. So customers are seeing a lot of productivity gains. I think the second thing is the speed of innovation. You know, the fact that it would take them, you know, three months, six months to deploy new projects and now they can do it quickly within a few minutes is actually unbelievable to them. This is a real good point. I want to get just one more double down on that real quick because one of the things we're seeing is across all the events we go to, that message of the fear of, oh my God, I'm going to lose my job or I'm going to be automated away. Actually isn't true. They get re-deployed in other easier jobs. So it's not always easier, but all the mundane tasks get automated. That's a good thing. The security thing about the patching and self-updating, that's amazing. But the skill gaps is a huge problem in CIO's face is that they need more people. And cloud architects are the number one demand job. So I mean, this must be really refreshing to hear that when you say, hey, you were doing a DBA job before, something else, now you're a cloud architect. Are you seeing the cloud architect role become important? And if so, what are they doing? What's the role of a cloud architect and how does this fit into that? Yeah, I think the way we describe it, I think it's close to cloud architect, but think about it from administering data or managing databases to actually using databases to mine insights. It's a different mindset. So you're becoming a data professional from a data administrator, right? So as opposed to having a job of managing a database, that's not important. What's important is you use the database to get insights and make your business smarter. And so now we are working with, for example, our DBA stakeholders, which have been part of our Oracle family for four decades, to help them re-skill to new ways of thinking, to becoming data professionals, to becoming data architects. And like I said, focusing on things like data life cycle management, how do you work with application developers? How do you work with lines of businesses? When your line of business comes to you and says, hey, I want a database stack deployed for XYZ, the ability for them to say, of course I can give it to you in minutes as opposed to saying, oh, you'll have to wait two months. Imagine that. Yeah, they're helping people. They're also more important. They're powerful. Right, right. Okay, Oracle Open World is happening. And so one of the conversations we're hearing, and certainly this is consistent throughout the industry, is the role of security. So, you know, I put my skeptic hat on like, okay, Monica, tell me the truth. Is it really self-updating the security patches? You know, what about the phishing attacks? There's a real paranoia on the security. Take me through the security while you guys are comfortable with the security. What's the big message and what's the big feature of why it's so secure? Right, but before I do that, let me paint a picture for you. We all know the opportunity that comes with cloud, right? It presents huge opportunities to organizations. But with every opportunity, there comes a challenge that needs to be solved. And like you said, security is a big challenge. We are talking about massive scale of security breaches happening in the industry, right? We are talking about bad guys having access to very sophisticated technologies to wage this war against us, to organizations to get access to core data. And we are talking about the number of security issues that are happening, multiplying and compounding. And I'll give you some data points. There are 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs that are open in the next couple of years. We don't have enough people to fill those jobs. Even if we did, I mean, we can't keep pace with the amount of security threats and challenges that we need to navigate and address. And by the way, that's a data problem, by the way, too. That's a data problem. Back to your data is the central value proposition. Exactly. And also the other point I want to give you, which is equally important is, of all the breaches that have happened, 85% actually had a fix available, and yet it wasn't applied and the breach happened. So again, we're talking about human beings who are very busy. The human error on the patch side is huge. Spear fishing and also patches of the two number one areas of security. But also people are busy, right? You kind of say, okay, I'm going to do this later. I have so many other 10 things to take care of first, and I'm going to apply this patch later. Now what happens is that's why we need to throw automation and machine learning at this problem. I don't think we can solve it by throwing just more and more human manpower on it, right? We need to combine the power of human and machine to tackle the security problem. And that's what we're doing with autonomous database. Not only can we predict a breach before it happens, we can actually fix it before it becomes an issue. And that's what I'm talking about with the whole self-securing notion. And that's the power of autonomous database. A few oracle open worlds will go Larry Ellison said on the stage, I'll never forget this. I actually, I'd love the line. I know people kind of gave him some heat for it, but he said security should always be on. Off is the exception. Has that cultural, has that view permeated through Oracle? Oh, Oracle was built on that view, right? I mean, we have, if you look again at our history and our customer base, we are supporting the largest and the biggest governments in the world. We support from federal governments to state governments to public sector to every organization who cares deeply about security. And it's not just a government issue. It's every organization has to, you know, safeguard the data of their customers. I mean, that's the law, right? So every single organization cares about it. Oracle was built on that. That's the foundation that we are built on. So for us, security is very important. That's the first design principle of our data management and all of our technology solutions. Well, you guys are in the middle of all the cloud action for sure. We're covering you guys. It's great to have you on theCUBE. Monica, thanks for coming and sharing your story. Where can people find out more information on the Autonomous Database, this awesome new product? Well, it's going to be all over Oracle.com. So I'd say go there at first. And from there, you can navigate to a lot of great content on Autonomous Database. We have customer studies, we have free trials. So you can take us for a spin. It's like driving or like a self-driving car, self-driving database. It's a Tesla. It's like, yeah, it's like the Tesla of databases, exactly. Monica, thanks for coming. I'm John Furrier for CUBE Conversation. We are in Palo Alto at our headquarters. I'm John Furrier of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.