 The Cube presents On The Ground. Hello everyone, welcome to a special Cube presentation of Oracle On The Ground here at their headquarters in Redwood City. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube. I'm here with Karen Sigmund with The Oracle. Great to see you again. Give us an overview of what we're doing here of this program. What's the update with Oracle with big data and cloud? It's pretty exciting. You know, we've been continuing to innovate, as you know. We've been expanding our portfolio and the big focus is on choice. So with the big data appliance and the big data now taking that to the cloud at customer strategy, we're able to now give customers choice of doing their big data analytics on-premise in the cloud or as a cloud service behind their firewall. It's a huge innovation, a whole new change to the way you can do things for our customers. So I want the operational impact to customers for this because on-premise obviously is key. Cloud economics are right there but getting something operational has been a big problem for many people with big data. How does the Oracle Solutions innovate and help solve that problem? Well, I think that's the whole value proposition around what we've done with the big data appliance. What we heard from a lot of our customers is they can go build their own and they can put it all together but then they have to maintain it, they have to manage it, they have to make sure that everything, all the software that they put together is going to work together and they're going to be able to keep it up to date. We actually eliminate all the steps, a vast majority of the steps it takes to bring it up online. So we can bring the time to value for doing your data analytics down to days instead of weeks. What do you say to customers that come to you, Oracle customers and potentially new customers? Hey, I have Oracle database or I'm considering Oracle database but I have to use Hadoop. I want to use Hadoop and some of these open source technologies. Can I do that? Of course you can. Oracle is absolutely all about choice. It's the ability for you to be able to use both Oracle and non-Oracle source data in a single appliance and do your analytics against that. That's the value of the big data appliance. What about cloud? The cloud machine, how does that fit into this? Yeah, it's all again, it's about making sure a lot of customers have different ways that they want to do business. They're worried about data sovereignty issues. They can't take it to the cloud but they want the ability and the agility that goes with a cloud story, the ability to just access the service and run it. What we're doing with the big data cloud machine is we're actually allowing customers to take that cloud service and access it just behind their firewall. So it's the same as if you're logging in to our public cloud, you just log into it in your own data center. Karen, so you've been traveling around the globe talking to customers. What are the main things that you're seeing bubbling up from the different conversations from all around the world, top three things you're hearing from customers? I think it's a couple of things. One, they don't want to spend their time becoming IT experts anymore. And so the value of an appliance like technology or a cloud service, either one, is exactly what they're looking for because they want to simplify their IT infrastructure. They want to focus on the things that matter most which is the applications that drive the business. So that's number one. Number two is they're worried about cost. And so they would like to have cost be specific and more transparent. So they want to make sure that whatever they're spending, they can actually allocate back to the business units that's coming from the IT side. So having cloud-based models actually helps quite a bit with cost transparency. And I think the third thing is that overall, they want to make sure that they can get things done faster. And so the idea of having cloud services gives them that agility that they need. And I know you only asked for three, but I would say the fourth thing is they're looking for choice. They really want to understand, they want to make sure that if they choose one model that they're going to be able to flip and they're not going to be locked in. And what Oracle's done with this is given them the capability to either deploy on Oracle, work with Oracle and non-Oracle data, and you can do it on a cloud or you can do it on-prem, it's all up to you. We sat down with Dave Donatelli for an exclusive interview and then publishing it on Forbes and then SiliconANGLE. And he talked about how the traditional infrastructure, mainly storage and server vendors, really weren't positioned for success. So I want to ask you a year now into the Oracle real push and growth of infrastructure products, engineered systems and other things powering all the software and the database and all the good stuff with Big Data Cloud. What's changed over the past years? What can you point to has been the big, the needle moving? Was it been performance? Has it been hardware, number of units, integration? What's your view on where has the needle move for the infrastructure engineered systems? I think the big thing is that we've really filled out the portfolio. We've made sure that whether you're choosing to do a build your own solution or go for the fastest time to value with an appliance like technology or you're trying to get the maximal capabilities out of our systems, our engineered systems, we've actually built out our portfolio so that you can do all of that on-prem or in the cloud or on your premise with the cloud service. We've made sure that whether it's database workloads, application workloads or analytics workloads that we have a complete portfolio solutions that give you that choice. And that's quite different than anything I see in the market. Karen, thanks so much for spending time with us on the ground. Appreciate it. Thanks. I'm John Furrier. We are on the ground here at Oracle's headquarters. Thanks for watching.