 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE, covering empowering the autonomous enterprise, brought to you by Oracle Consulting. Welcome back everybody to this special presentation of theCUBE, where we're covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. It's a digital event where we're going out, we're extracting the signal from the noise we have, and today to be in Chicago, which is obviously the center of the country, a lot of big customers here, a lot of consultants and consulting organizations here, a lot of expertise. Mike Owens is here as a Group VP for Cloud Advisory and a general manager of Oracle Elevate. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I appreciate it, I'm glad to be here. So I can ask you, Elevate in your title, what is Oracle Elevate? Yeah, Oracle Elevate was actually announced to Oracle OpenWorld last year, and it's the partnership that we really had to actually take our scale to the next level. So we actually did it with Deloitte Consulting. So the goal is to actually take the capabilities of both organizations. Deloitte really has functional capabilities and expertise with an Oracle practice, and obviously Oracle has Oracle technical expertise. The combination of the two really allows us to scale, provides what I call the one plus one equals three effort for customers. Now you've got a decent timeline or observation over the past several years, I think you joined three years ago, you were at some brand name companies. First of all, what attracted you to come to Oracle Consulting? Yeah, absolutely. So Oracle was in the point where they were doing a lot of stuff around on-premise software, right? The old ERP type stuff, they were doing cloud, they sort of had to have this sort of transformational moment. I was asked to come in and Oracle Consulting in the early days and say, hey look, we're trying to transform the organization from on-prem consulting over to cloud consulting. Come in and help us with this stuff that you've worked from your prior to cloud companies and help us really move the organization forward and look at things differently. So it's definitely been a journey over the last three years of taking it from really 85% to 90% of our revenue around on-prem type of engagements so now actually splitting the organization and being dedicated 100% on cloud, which is just a huge transformation the last three years. What really, what's the underpinning of Gen2 cloud? Can you give us sort of the bumper sticker on that? Yeah, well the underpinning of Gen2 cloud is really, if you look at the Gen1 cloud it was purely just an infrastructure layer. Gen2 is really based on a segmenting security which is a huge problem out in the marketplace, right? So we actually have a sort of a world-class way we take a segment security outside of the actual environment itself. It's completely segmented, which is awesome, right? But then the also when you actually move it forward the capability of the entire thing is built on sort of the autonomous enterprise or autonomous capabilities. Everything is sort of self-healing, self-funding, or not sorry, self-healing and self-aware that continually moves it forward. So the goal with that is is if you have something that takes mundane tasks back to that you have people that are no longer doing those capabilities today. So the underpinning of that and what that allows you to do is actually take that business case and you reduce that because you're no longer having a bunch of people do things that are no value at. Those people can actually move on to do back to that innovation and doing those higher level components. So the business case is really about, I mean, primarily I would imagine about labor cost, right? IT labor cost, we're very labor intensive. We're doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add differentiation and value to the business. You're shifting that to other tasks, right? Yeah, so the big components are really the overall cost of the infrastructure, what it takes to maintain the infrastructure and that's broken up into kind of two components. One of it is typical power, physical location of building, all those kinds of things and then the people that do the automations that take care of that, right? At the lower level. The third level is as you continue to get sort of process and automation going forward, the people capability that actually maintains the applications becomes easier because you can actually extend those capabilities out into the application. Then you require fewer people to actually do the typical day to day things whether it's DBAs, et cetera like that. So it kind of becomes a continuous stream. There's various elements of the business case. You could sort of start with just the pure infrastructure cost and then get some of the process and automations going forward and then actually go that even further, right? And then as organizations as a CIO, one of the questions I always have is where do you want to end on this? And they say, well, what are you talking about? All right? It's really, I'm like. We're never done. You're on a journey, you're on a transformation. I go, this is the big boy, big girl conversation, right? Do you want to have an organization that actually is stays the same from the headcount standpoint? Are you trying to look to a partner to do the, were you trying to get in your operating model? What is your company trying to get you to look at, right? Because all those inflection points takes a different step in the cloud journey. So as an advisor, as a trusted advisor, I asked those are half a dozen or so questions. I would kind of walk your organization through on sort of the cloud strategy and I'll pick the path that kind of works with them. And if they want to go to a managed service provider at the end, we would actually prepare someone either bring the partner in or have an associated partner we had put it off to, but we put the right pieces in place to make sure that that business cake works. Well, that's interesting. That's a really important point because a lot of customers would say, I don't want to reduce headcount. I want to, I'm starving for people. I want to train people. You know, some companies may want to say, hey, okay, I got to reduce headcount. It's a mandate, but most, at least in these boom times are saying, I want to shift. So my point to the business case is if you're not going to cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. And so the example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive is relevant. And I want to explain this is that for example, very simple example, I'm inferring, you're going to be able to compress the time to value. You're going to reduce, lower your break even, you know, accelerate the time to positive cash flow, if you will. That's an example of a value component to the business and part of the business case. Do people look at that and is that real? Absolutely. That's what it is. Definitely in the business case, and when you get your rate of return, right? The more that we can compress that, and I would say back to the conversation we had earlier about Elevate and some of the partnerships we have with Deloitte around that, a lot of that is to actually come up with enough capabilities that we can actually take the business case and actually reduce that and have special other things we can do for our customers around financing and things like that to make it easier for them, right? We have options to make customers and actually help that business case. Some of the business cases we've seen are entire IT organizations saving 30 plus percent. Well, if you multiply that on a large Fortune 100 that may have a billion dollar budget, that's real money. Yeah, and okay, yes, no doubt, but then when you translate that into the business impact, like you're talking about the IT impact, but if you look at the business impact now it becomes telephone numbers. And actually CFOs oftentimes just don't even believe it, but it's true. Because if you can make the entire organization just a half a percentage point more productive and you get 100,000 employees, I mean that overwhelms actually the IT business case. Yeah, and that's where that, back to the steps in the business case is on the business and application side is making those folks actually more productive in the business case and saving them and adding whether it's a financial services and you're getting an application out to market that actually generates revenue, right? So it's sort of the trickle effect. So when I look at it, I definitely look at it from an IT all the way through business. I am a technically a business architect that does IT pretty damn good. Yeah, and IT enables that sort of business transformation. How do you, let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement. How are people thinking about that? Because you're talking a lot about just sort of self-funding and self-progressing, sort of an organic entity that you're describing. How are people thinking about that? Yeah, and I would say they're kind of a little bit older map, right? But I would say that the goal is what we're trying to embed back to the operating model we wanna really embed is sort of the concept of the cloud set of excellence. And as part of that, at the end, you have to have a set of functionality of folks that's constantly looking at the applications and or services of the different cloud providers that capability you have across the board. Everyone's got a multi-cloud environment, right? How do they take those services? They're probably already paying for it anyways. And as the components get released, how can you continually put little pieces in there and do little micro releases quarterly, or sorry, weekly, you know, every month versus a big bang twice a year, right? Those little automation pieces continually add innovation in smaller chunks. And that's really the goal of cloud computing, and you know, as you can actually break it up, it's no longer the big bang theory, right? And I love that concept, embedding that, whether you actually have a partner with some of the stuff that we're doing that actually embed what we call like a day two services that that's what it is, is to support them, but constantly look for different ways to include capabilities that were just released to add value on an ongoing basis. You don't have to go, hey, great, that capability came out, it'll be a next year's release. No, it could be next week, it could be next month, right? Well, so the outcome should be, you should be dramatically lowering costs, really accelerating your time to value. It really is what you're describing, and we've been talking about in terms of the autonomous enterprise, it's really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? It is, absolutely. Like, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, good stuff. Everything, thank you very much. All right, and thank you for watching, but right back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE, we're here in Chicago covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. I'm Dave Vellante, we're right back.