 Live from the Oracle Conference Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering the Oracle Cloud Lunch, brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Redwood Shores, everybody. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon, and we're here. This is the pregame for Larry Ellison's big announcement, big cloud announcement today, particularly around about pass, but also infrastructures of service and softwares of service. Jill Von Berg is here. She's the vice president of IT at Calix, and she's joined by Ravi Gade, who is the senior director of IT. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much for coming on. Thank you. So Calix Networks, Internet Company. You guys are born digital. We're talking off camera. But Jill, set it up for us. Tell us a little bit about the elevator pitch around Calix. Calix is a leader in the US, in internet access equipment, systems, services. We are expanding rapidly. We're going global. And we have all of the challenges that come with that expansion. And we are also, like Oracle, a software as a service provider. So a big challenge is scaling, right? Growing. Most definitely. And Ravi, you're responsible for the IT infrastructure and the apps and making it all work. Is that right? Yeah, so I'm a leader, basically leading the enterprise applications. So we basically support the internal customers as well as the external customers. Okay, and so maybe talk about your environment a little bit. What are the big goals that you sort of set for your team? Maybe start there. Yeah, well, let's look at our environment. I would say, like every tech company, we have a heterogeneous environment. We've been in business for over 10 years. So we have a plan that has been going for 10 years. So you have one of everything. Actually, no, not quite. We've been pretty disciplined like that. But none of us have ever had the beauty of a white piece of paper and build everything at once on it. So it has built over the years. We are an Oracle shop and we also are a Salesforce shop and a little bit of a lot of other stuff too. So certainly from my perspective, when I came on board, which is now four or five years ago, part of the goal was to create a forward-looking vision, a big piece of which is the cloud strategy. And Ravi has been absolute key to helping us actually actualize that vision. So people talk about transformation. This is your transformation, baby. Is that right? You could look at it as our transformation, baby. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, and so part of that when you came in was cloud. I mean, five years ago, it looked like the IT was going to become a utility. It's clearly becoming a utility. So what does that mean for you, Ravi? So, I mean, for IT, we have our own challenges. But our challenges are really aligned with the business challenges we have. We as a Calyx, we compete in a global market where we normally, most often than rare, we compete with somebody even bigger than what we do today. So when we're competing with bigger companies and all, we should come up with the products, more innovative products, as well as most efficient and effective way of putting the products out there for the customers, right? Those are our business challenges, but it comes to the IT. We have our own IT challenges. For example, if you're looking at the cloud solutions, we have a multiple middle way tools in Calyx today, which is very challenging for us to maintain because there's no single platform that we could leverage and then utilize across the board. With ICS being a solution for Calyx, we strongly believe that we are one step away from integrating and consolidating all of our integration tools into one platform. So Joe, when you came in and started this project, why cloud, I mean, it's sort of an obvious statement, but you could end up actually spending more renting versus owning, but you're choosing to go that direction, why? It seems like a no-brainer to me, and the no-brainer is economies of scale. There is no way, theoretically and realistically, that a company can look at the same functionality and do it one time versus a company that's doing it for everybody. So a cloud just seems like the economies of scale are an obvious one. And when we look at actually down to the tactical layer at the return on that investment, it is always paid off to go for the cloud. And we tell our customers that, Calyx customers, looking at us as a cloud provider, just in the same way as we look at our technology vendors. And that's because of speed, I presume, right? Well, it's multiple layers. It is, speed is certainly a piece of it, and I'll come back to that. But if I look at me trying to implement on-premise solutions versus one company providing a single cloud for everybody, a single cloud, meaning a single service for everybody, there has to be an economy of scale there. And there's economies of scale all the way through from whether it's the security or the storage or the multiple layers, it has to be there. Now, I'll come back to what you said about the speed to deployment. The speed to deployment, again, it feels a little bit like a no-brainer versus my creating a solution on-prem. It's already there for me to pick up. And the ICS solution, most especially, was designed for that piece of the speed to deployment. Okay, and you're an Oracle Shop, but also a Salesforce Shop as well. And you're integrating Salesforce with Oracle. Is that right? Can you talk about that project a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So we are integrating the, we've got multiple projects going on today. We are integrating our Salesforce with Oracle, and we are also integrating the Salesforce with one of our customer-facing system. What we are doing with ICS, we are leveraging the existing adapters, Salesforce adapter, as well as REST and SOAP protocol adapters, and we are building this secure rapid integrations, which used to be days and weeks, now it became like an hours because this ICS cloud solution provides a user-interactive option, which is basically easy to play with, use existing skills to leverage and build integrations. So basically, go to market time, we drastically reduce it with ICS. So ICS, by the way, is the integration cloud service. Oracle integration cloud service. Right, so those of you who don't know, okay, and so the objective, specifically with Salesforce, can you talk about that a little bit? So with the project we are implementing right now, which is a customer experience project, we need to replicate and also build an ad hoc as well as asynchronous processing interfaces, where we could pull the customer's accounts and also the prospects from Salesforce to the customer experience system, where we could leverage this customer experience for the website. What we are doing today is basically, we use this customer experience system and we go interact with Salesforce and we validate, for example, best example, customer entitlements. If somebody trying to download our digital software, they need to go and validate their entitlements, which what we are using ICS for the validation part and the actual data is sitting in Salesforce. So Jill, what's the outcome that you envision out of all this? What's the business value that you see, watching the US Open yesterday, the golfers, the caddy would say, okay, envision it. What do you envision the outcome? I'm not sure about that analogy, but my vision, we can fast forward just over a year maybe. And we have, as I described, that highly heterogeneous environment. We should be at the point where any data that we need in any system is available to that system. And it really comes down to this, what looks like a centralized integration, but of course isn't centralized, it really is those multiple interfaces that are integrated. But really the key will be any data, any system is available. Part of that vision, as we mentioned earlier there, is it should be in the cloud. And I was just thinking earlier about the sort of reputation around the cloud here of, it feels soft and fuzzy because we chose to call it a cloud. I prefer to call it a safe. So I'm looking at this as we put our data somewhere that's safe, we're using an integration platform that is safe and that's our vision for the future. But it's a virtual safe, right? It's a virtual safe, yes, it's a software defined virtual safe. Yeah, great, okay, but then because the data lives where it lives. The data has gravity, it's heavy. You don't want to move data, right? I mean, explain why you don't want to move data. So I mean, data moving data to the multiple systems is very expensive. You know, it's not only redundant to have the data in multiple systems, it's costing us a lot of money in terms of storage, network bandwidth, transferring data, all that stuff. And time. Time, exactly. So having this in the cloud and accessible and shareable to all the systems from the single location is a huge cost savings, okay? And down the road when you're trying to upgrade something, it's very easy to upgrade with the cloud solutions. So it's really fitting into what we call is a CalXIT strategy, basically. Our CalXIT strategy is just move everything from what we have on on-premises to the cloud, just like what we do in CalX today. So that's our strategy, basically. So it's a lot of times when a new executive comes in, new brand vision, a lot of excitement. She brings a lot of energy and then you get into it and you say, okay, we have to slow down. It doesn't feel like that was the case here. No, no, no, no. You were as excited, even more momentum. I mean, talk about that a little bit. I think it's acceleration. We're not looking at just a constant velocity. We're looking at acceleration. Ravi mentioned earlier the technical innovation and continual innovation. We're in a company that is continually innovating. So as an IT department, we cannot sit there and continually improve. Continually improve sounds like something that takes years and years. So we really are constantly on the edge of innovation. And for this reason, we're looking for partners that are also on that edge with us. But yes, the customer base is not waiting for us to continually improve. So we have to keep up with them. So why Oracle? I mean, you're an Oracle shop. Obviously, that's one reason. But what do you like, what don't you like? Give us the good, the bad, the ugly. Oracle has been a really solid partner for us. As a small company or a mid-sized company, we look for partners that have that thought leadership, that have that knowledge base that we can leverage. And we're looking to Oracle across the board within Oracle to bring us ideas to our company. And so I think we've been very successful in partnering with them. We're early adopters of the ICS platform. And so really, that's a big piece of the Oracle, the reason that we're here at Oracle. Anything, Ravi, you do differently if you had to do it over again? Yeah, so I mean, I think what we are looking for is, like you know, as Jill said, it's a solid partner who could come up with a product that does everything for us. Our number one challenge today, we have multiple tools. There are some of them are application dependent, some of them are platform dependent. But we're choosing ICS, we're eliminating the application dependency, platform dependency, and it's able to do everything we are looking for in CalX. And that's a solution we are looking for. Basically, we want to consolidate an integrated platform, looking for a consolidated integrated platform, regardless of the application or the platform. And ICS is really meeting our needs right now. Okay, but it's not all there today, right? I mean, you still got a lot of work to do. You're not done yet. So what's on your to-do list? What's on Oracle's to-do list? Yeah, so what we are planning to do immediately is we're going to add a SOA cloud to the ICS. That's going to be complimenting what we are trying to do. And in addition to that, you know, as a part of 2016 roadmap, we are looking at Oracle ERP cloud. Additionally, we are looking at a BSES cloud and also OTBI clouds. So that's our roadmap looking like next two years. We're going cloud. We are not cloud, we are advocates of cloud. All right, we'll have to leave it there, folks. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Another happy customer. Thank you. I really appreciate your time. All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest. Right after this, this is theCUBE. We're live from Oracle HQ. We'll be right back.