 Hello everyone, and welcome to this exclusive CUBE conversation. We have the pleasure today to welcome Wim Kokert, Senior Vice President of Software Development at Oracle. Wim, it's good to see you. How you been, sir? Good, it's been a while since we last talked, but I'm excited to be here as always. It was during COVID though, and so I'm hoping to see you face to face soon. But so, Wim, since the Barron's article declared Oracle a cloud giant, we've really been sort of paying attention and amping up our coverage of Oracle and asking a lot of questions. Like, is Oracle really a cloud giant? And I'll say this, we've always stressed that Oracle invests in R&D, and of course there's a lot of D in that equation. And over the past year, we've seen, of course, an autonomous database is ramping up, especially notable on exadata cloud of customer. We've covered that extensively. We covered the autonomous data warehouse announcement, the blockchain piece, which of course got me excited because I get to talk about crypto with Juan, roving edge, which for everybody, you might not be familiar with that. It's an edge cloud service, dedicated regions that you guys announced, which is a managed cloud region. And so it's clear you guys are serious about cloud. These are all cloud first services using second gen OCI. So, Oracle's making some moves, but the question is, what are customers doing? Are they buying this stuff? Are they leaning into these new deployment models for the databases? What can you tell us? You know, definitely. And I think, you know, the reason that we have so many different services that not every customer is the same, right? One of the things that people don't necessarily realize, I guess, is in the early days of cloud, lots of startups went there because they had no local infrastructure. It was easy for them to get started in something completely new. Our customers are mostly enterprise customers that have huge data centers. In many cases, they have lots of real estate local. And when they think about cloud, they're wondering how can we create an environment that doesn't cause us to have two upstreams and two ways of managing things. And so they're trying to figure out exactly what it means to take their real estate and either move it whole sale to the cloud over a period of years, or they say, hey, some of these things need to be local for maybe even for regulatory purposes, or just because they want to keep some data locally within their own data centers, but then they have to move other things remotely. And so there's many different ways of solving the problem. And you can just say, here's one cloud, this is where you go and that's it. So we basically say, if you're on-prem, we provide you with cloud services, on-premises like dedicated regions or Oracle Exadata Cloud at customer and so forth so that you get the benefits of what we build for cloud and spend a lot of time on. But you can run them in your own data center or people say, no, no, no, I want to get rid of my data centers, I want to do it remotely. Okay, then you do it in Oracle Cloud directly. So, or you have a hybrid model where you say some states local, some is remote. The nice thing is you get the exact same API, the exact same way of managing things, no matter how you deploy it. And that's a big differentiator. So is it fair to say that you guys have, I think of it as a purpose built cloud because I talk to a lot of customers, I mean, I take an insurance app like claims. And customers tell me, I'll put that into the public cloud. But you're making a case that it actually might make sense in your cloud because you can support those mission critical applications with the exact same experience. Same API, same, I can get, take RAC for instance, I can't get real application clusters in an Amazon cloud, but presumably I can get them in your cloud. Is it fair to say you have a purpose built cloud specifically for the most demanding applications? Is that a right way to look at it or not necessarily? Well, it's interesting. I think the thing to be careful of is I guess purpose built cloud might, for some people mean, oh, you can only do things if it's Oracle Centric, right? And so I think that fundamentally, Oracle cloud provides a generic cloud. You can run anything you want, any application, any deployment model that you have. Whether you're an Oracle customer or not, we provide you with a full cloud service, right? However, given that we know and have known obviously for a long time how our products run best, when we designed OCI Gen2, when we designed the networking standard storage layer and all that stuff, we made sure that it would be capable of running our more complex environments because our advantage is Oracle customers have a place where they can run Oracle the best, right? And so obviously the context of purpose built fits that model where we've made some design choices that allow us to run rack inside OCI and allow us to deploy exadata inside OCI, which you cannot do in other clouds. So yes, it's purpose built in that sense, but I would caution on the side of that it sometimes might imply that it's unique to Oracle products. And I guess one way to look at it is if you can run Oracle, you can run everything else, right? Because it's such a complex suite of products that if you can run that then it'll support any other deployment. Right, right, it's like New York City. You make it there, you can make it anywhere. If I could run the most demanding mission critical applications, well, then I could run a web app, for instance. Okay, I got a question on tooling. There's a lot of tooling. I sometimes makes my eyes bleed when I look at all this stuff. And doesn't square their circle for me. Doesn't autonomous and autonomous database like autonomous Linux, for instance, doesn't it eliminate the need for all these management tools? You know, it does, it eliminates the need for the management at the lower level, right? So with autonomous Linux, what we offer and what we do is we automatically patch the operating system for you and make sure it's secure from a security patching point. If you eliminate the downtime, so when we do it, then you don't have to restart applications. However, we don't know necessarily what the app is that is installed on top of it. People can deploy their own applications. They can run third party applications. They can use it for development environments and so forth. So there's sort of the core operating system layer. And on the database side, we take care of database patching and upgrades and storage management and all that stuff. So the same thing. If you run your own application inside the database, we can manage the database portion. We don't manage the application portion, just like on the operating system. And so there's still a management level that's required no matter what, a level above that. And there's the other thing, and I think this is what, you know, what a lot of the stuff we're doing is based on is you still have tons of stuff on premises that needs full management. You have applications that you migrate that are not running autonomous Linux could be a Windows application that's running, or it could be something on a different distribution, or you could still have some databases installed that you manage yourself. You don't want to use autonomous or you run a third party. And so we want to make sure that we can address all of them with a single set of tools, right? Okay, so I wonder, can you give us just an overview just briefly of the products that comprise and the cloud services, your management solution? What's in that portfolio? How should we think about it? Yeah, so it kind of, it basically starts with enterprise manager on premises, right? Which has been the tool that our Oracle database customers in particular have been using for many years and is widely used by our customer base. And so you have those customers, most of their real estate is on premises and they can use enterprise management to do local. They have it running and they don't want to change. They can keep doing that and we keep enhancing as you know with newer versions of enterprise management better. So then there's the transition to cloud. And so what we've been doing over the last several years is basically looking at the things, well, one aspect is looking at things people like of enterprise manager and make sure that we provide similar functionality in Oracle cloud. So we have performance hub for looking at how the database performance is working. We have APM for application performance monitoring. We have logging analytics that looks at all the different log files and helps make sense of it for you. We have database management. So a lot of the functionality that people like in enterprise management mention the database that we've built into Oracle cloud and a number of other things that are coming up for agents insights to look at how databases are performing and how we can potentially do consolidation and stuff. So we've basically looked at what people have been using on premises, how we can replicate that in Oracle cloud. And then also when you're in a cloud, how you can make use of all the base services that a cloud provider provides, telemetry, logging and so forth. And so it's a broad portfolio. And what it allows us to do with our customers is say, look, if you're predominantly on-prem, you want to stay there, keep using enterprise manager. If you're starting to boost Oracle cloud, you can first use EM, look at what's happening in the cloud and then switch over, start using all the management products we have in the cloud and let go of the enterprise manager instance on premises. So you can gradually shift. You can start using more and more. Maybe you start with analytics first and then you start with insights and then you switch to database management. So there's a whole suite of possibilities. I've been, you know, you mentioned APM. I've been watching that space. It's really evolved. I mean, you saw, you know, years ago, Splunk came out with sort of log analytics, maybe simplified that a little bit. Now you're seeing some open source stuff come out. You're seeing a lot of startups come out. Cisco made an acquisition with APD and that whole space is transforming. It seems that the future is all about that end-to-end visibility, simplifying the ability to remediate problems. And I think, I'm thinking, okay, you just mentioned, you guys have a lot of these capabilities. You got autonomous. Is that sort of where you're headed with your capabilities? It definitely is. And in fact, one of the, so, you know, APM allows you to say, hey, here's my web browser and it's making a connection to the database through a middle tier. And it's hard to, it's hard for operations people in companies to say, hey, the end user calls and says, you know, my order entry system is slow. Is it the browser? Is it the middle tier that they connect to? Is it the database that's overloaded in the backend? And so APM helps you with tracing, you know, what happens from where to where, where the delays are. Now, once you know where the delay is, you need to drill down on it. And then you need to go look at log files. And that's where the logging piece comes in. And what happens very often is that these log files are very, very difficult to read. Like you have networking log files and you have database log files and you have the web log files. You almost have to be an expert in all of these things. And so then with logging analytics, we basically provide sort of an expert dashboard system on top of that that allows us to say, hey, when you look at logging for the network stack, here are the most important errors that we could find. So you don't have to go in and learn all the details of these things. And so the real advantage is of saying, hey, we have APM, we have logging analytics, we can tie the two together. Right? And so we can provide a solution that actually helps solve the problem rather than you need to use APM for one vendor, you need to use logging analytics from another vendor and that doesn't necessarily work very well. Yeah. And that's what you're seeing with like the elk stack. It's cool. You're an open source guy. It's cool as an open source, but it's complicated to set up all that that brings. So that's kind of a cool approach that you guys are taking. You mentioned enterprise manager. You just made a recent announcement, a new release. What's new in that new release? So enterprise manager 13.5 just got released. And so EM keeps improving, right? We've made a lot of changes over the years and one of the things we've done in recent years is do more frequent updates, sort of the cloud model frequent updates that are not just bug fixes, but also introduce new functionality so people get more stuff more frequently rather than once a year. And that's certainly been very attractive because it shows that it's a lively evolving product. And one of the main focus areas of course is cloud. And so a lot of work that happens in enterprise manager is hybrid cloud, which basically means I run enterprise manager and I have some stuff in Oracle cloud and might have some other stuff than other cloud vendors environment. And so we can actually see which databases are where and provide you with one consolidated view and one tool, right? And of course it supports autonomous database and exadata in cloud service and so forth. So you can from EM see both your databases on premises and also how it's doing in Oracle cloud as you potentially migrate things over. So that's one aspect. Then the other one is in terms of operations and automation. One of the things that we started doing again with enterprise manager in the last few years is making sure that everything is a REST API. So we try to make the experience of enterprise manager be very similar to have people work with a cloud service. Most folks now writing automation tools are used to call in REST APIs. EM in the early days didn't have REST APIs. Now we're making sure everything works that way. And one of the advantages is that we can do extensibility without having to rewrite problem. That we just add the API calls in the agent and it makes it a lot easier to become part of the modern system. Another thing that we introduced last year but that we're evolving with more dashboard and so forth is the Grafana plugin. So even the enterprise manager provides lots of cool tools. A lot of cloud operations folks use a tool called Grafana. And so we provide a plugin that allows customers to have Grafana dashboards where the data actually comes out of enterprise manager. So that allows us to integrate EM into a more cloudy world in a cloud environment. And then I think the other important part is making sure that again, enterprise manager has sort of a cloud feel to it. So when you do patching and upgrades, it's basically, it's near zero downtime. It basically means that we do all the upgrades for you without having to bring EM down. Because even though it's a management tool, it's used for operations. So if there were downtime for patching enterprise manager for an hour, then for that hour, it's a blackout window for all the monitoring we do. And so we want to avoid that from happening. So now EM is upgrading even though all the events are still happening and being processed. And then we do a very short switch. So that helps our operations people to be more available. Yes, I mean, I've been talking about automated operations since, you know, lights out data center since the 80s back in, I remember toward a data center one time lights out there were storage tech libraries in there. And so, but there were a lot of unintended consequences around, you know, automated ops. And so people were sort of scared to go there at least lean in too much, but now with all this machine intelligence. So you're talking about ops automation. You mentioned the rest API's, the Grafana plugins, the cloud feel, is that what you're bringing to the table that's unique? Is that unique to Oracle? Well, the integration with Oracle in that sense is unique. So one example is, you mentioned the word migration, right? And so database migration tends to be something, you know, customers obviously take very serious. We go from one place, you have to move all your data to another place that runs in a slightly different environment. And so how do you know whether that migration is going to work? And you can't migrate 1000 databases manually, right? So automation, again, it's not just automation. It's not just to say, hey, I can do an upgrade of a system or I can make sure that nothing is done by hand when you patch something. It's more about having a huge fleet of servers and a huge fleet of databases. How can you move something from one place to another and automate that? And so with EM, you know, we start with sort of the prerequisite phase. So we look at the existing environment, how much memory it doesn't need, how much storage does it use, which version of the database does it have, how much data is there to move. Then on the target side, we see whether the target can actually run that environment. Then we go and look at, you know, how do you want to migrate? Do you want to migrate everything from a sort of a physical model? Or do you want to migrate it from a logical model? Do you want to do it while your environment is still running? So that you start backing up the data to the target database while your existing production system is still running. And we do a short switch afterwards, or you say, no, I want to bring my database down. I want to do the migrate and then bring it back up. So there's these different deployment models that we can ladder customers pick. And then when the migration is done, we have a lot of health checks that can validate whether the target database will run through basically the exact same way. And then you can say, I want to migrate 10 databases or 50 databases, and it will work. It's all automated out of the box. So you're saying, I mean, you look at the prevailing way you've done migrations. Historically, you'd have to freeze the code and then migrate and take forever. It was a function of the number of lines of code you had. And then a lot of times people would say, well, I'm not going to freeze the code. And then they would almost go out of business trying to merge the two. You're saying you can, in 2021, you can give customers the choice. You can migrate, you could change the, refuel the plane while you're in midair. Is that essentially what you're saying? That's a good way of describing it. Yeah, so your existing database is running and we can do a logical backup and restore. So while transactions are happening, we're still migrating it over. And then you can do a cutoff. So it makes the transition a lot easier. But the other thing is that in the past, migrations would typically be two things. One is one database version to the next. More upgrades than migration. And the second one is have old hardware or a different CPU architecture and moving to newer hardware in the new CPU architecture. Those were sort of the typical migrations that you had prior to cloud. And from a sys-atman point of view or a DBA, it was all something you could touch. You could physically touch the boxes. When you move to cloud, it's this nebulous thing somewhere in a data center that you have no access to. And that by itself creates a barrier to a lot of admins and DBAs from saying, oh, it'll be okay. There's a lot of concern. And so by baking in all these tests and the prerequisites and all the dashboards to say, this is what you use. These are the features you use. We know that they're available on the other side so you can do the migration. It helps solve some of these problems and removes the barriers. Well, that was just kind of same, same vision when you guys came up with it, I don't know, quite a while ago now. And it took a while to get there with, you know, get gen one and then gen two. But that is, I think, unique to Oracle. Maybe some others are trying to do that as well. But you were really the first to do that. And so I want to switch topics, talk about security. It's hot topic. You guys, you know, are like many companies really focused on security. Does enterprise manager bring any of that over? I mean, a prevailing way to do security oftentimes is to do scripts and write, you know, custom security policy scripts are fragile, they break. What can you tell us about security? Yeah, so there's really two things. You know, one is we obviously have our own best security practices, how we run a database inside Oracle for our own world. We've learned about that over the years. And so we sort of bake that knowledge into enterprise manager. So we can say, hey, if you install this way, we do the install and the configuration based on our best practices. That's one thing. The other one is there's TIG, there's PCI, and there's HIPAA. Those are the main ones. And so customers can do their own way. They can download the documentation and do it manually. But what we've done is, and we've done this for a long time, is basically bake those policies into enterprise manager. So you can say, here's my database, this needs to be PCI compliant, or it needs to be HIPAA compliant, and you push a button. And then we validate the policies in those documents or in those prescribed files, and we make sure that the database is compliant to that. And so we take that manual work and all that stuff basically out of the picture. We say, push this button and we'll take care of it. Now, Wim, but just a quick sidebar here. Last time we talked, it was under a year ago. It was definitely during COVID, and it's still during COVID. We talked about the state of the penguin. So I'm wondering, what's the latest update for Linux, any Linux developments that we should be aware of? Linux, we're still working very hard on autonomous Linux. And that's something where we can really differentiate and solve a problem. Of course, one of the things to mention is that enterprise manager can do HIPAA compliance on Oracle Linux as well. So the security practices are not just for the database, it can also go down to the operating system. Anyways, so on the autonomous Linux side, management in Oracle Cloud's OS management is evolving. We're spending a lot of time on integrating log capturing and if something worked to go wrong that we can analyze a log file on the fly and send you a notification saying, hey, there was this bug and here's the cause and here's potentially a fix for it to autonomous Linux. So we're putting a lot of effort into that. And then also sort of IT slash operation management where we can look at the different applications that are running. You're running a web server on a Linux environment or you're running some Java processes. We can see what's running. We can say, hey, here's a CPU utilization over the past week or the past year. And then how is this evolving? Say if something suddenly spikes, you can say, well, that's normal because every Monday morning at 10 o'clock, there's a spike or this is abnormal and then you can start drilling this down. And this comes back to over time integration with whether it's APM or logging analytics, we can tie all the dots, right? We can connect them, you can say, push this thing, then click on that link and we give you the information. So it's that integration with the entire cloud platform that's really happening now. Integration, there's that theme again. I want to come back to migration. I mean, I think you did a good job of explaining how you sort of make that non-disruptive and your customers I think are generally, you're pushing that experience which makes people more comfortable. But my question is why do people want to migrate? If it works and it's on-prem, are they doing it just because they want to get out of the data center business or is it a better experience in the cloud? What can you tell us there? You know, it's a little bit of everything. You know, one is of course the idea that data center maintenance costs are very high. The other one is that when you run your own data center, you know, we have, we obviously have this problem when you're a cloud vendor, you have these problems but we're in business. But if you buy a server then in three years that server basically is depreciated. You buy new versions and have to do migration stuff. And so one of the advantages with cloud is you push a button you have a new version of the hardware basically, right? So the refreshes happen on a regular basis. You don't have to go and recycle that yourself. And then the other part is the subscription model. It's a lot easier to pay for what you use rather than you have a data center whether it's used or not, you pay for it. So there's the cost advantages of the unpredictability of what you need to pay for. You can say, oh, next year we need to get X more VMs and it's easier to scale that, right? We take care of dealing with capacity planning. You don't have to deal with capacity planning of hardware. We do that at the cloud vendor. So there's all these practical advantages you get from doing it remotely. And that's really what the appeal is. Right. So as it relates to enterprise manager, did you guys have to like tear down the code and rebuild it? Was it entire like redo? How did you achieve that? No, so enterprise manager keeps evolving and we changed the underlying technologies here and there at piecemeal, not sort of a wholesale replacement. And so in 13.5, there's a lot of new stuff but it's built on the existing EM core. And so we're just improving certain areas. One of the things is stability is important for our customers, obviously. And so by picking things piecemeal, we replace one engine rather than the whole thing. It allows us to introduce change more slowly, right? And it's well tested as a unit. And then we go on to the next thing. And then the other one, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the automation and extensibility comes from REST APIs. And so instead of basically rewriting everything, just provide a REST endpoint and we make all the new features that we built automatically, we REST enabled. So that makes it a lot easier for us to introduce it. Got it. So if I want to poke around with this new version of enterprise manager, can I do that? Is there a place I can go? Do I have to call a rep? How does that work? Yeah, so for information, you can just go to oracle.com slash enterprise manager. That's the website that has all the data. The other thing is if you're already playing with Oracle Cloud or you use Oracle Cloud, we have enterprise manager images in the marketplace. So if you have never used EM, you can go to Oracle Cloud, push a button in the marketplace and you get a full enterprise manager installation in a matter of minutes. And then you can just start using it. As well. Awesome. Hey, I wanted to ask you about, you know, people forget, you guys are stewards of MySQL and we've been looking at that MySQL database cloud service with Heatwave. Did you name that? And so I wonder if you could talk about what you're doing with regard to managing Heatwave environments. So yeah, so Heatwave was the MySQL option that helps with analytics, right? And it really accelerates MySQL usage by, you know, 100X and in some cases more and it's transparent to the customer. So as a MySQL user, you connect with standard MySQL applications and APIs and SQL and everything. And the Heatwave part is all done within the MySQL server, the engine itself says, oh, this SQL query we can offload to the backend Heatwave cluster which then does in-memory operations and blazingly fast returns it to you. And so the nice thing is that it turns every single MySQL database into also a data warehouse without any change whatsoever on your application. So it's been widely popular and it's quite exciting. I didn't personally name it Heatwave. That was not my decision, but it sounds very cool. That's very good. Yeah, it's a very cool name. Well, we love MySQL. We started our company on the LAMP stack, so like many. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. So yeah, and so with Heatwave or MySQL in general, we're basically doing the same thing as we have done for the Oracle database. So we're going to add more functionality in our database management tools to also look at Heatwave. So whether it's doing things like performance hub or generic database management and monitoring tools we'll expand that in the near future in the future. That's great. Well, Wim, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back in the cube and letting me ask all my Colombo questions. It was really a pleasure having you. You're welcome. Always good to be here. Thank you so much. You're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.