 The Cube presents On the Ground. Hello and welcome. I'm Peter Burris with SiliconANGLE Media, Wikibon, and we're here today doing an On the Ground, very important On the Ground, at Oracle's headquarters. This segment we're talking to Bagatin Anani, who is the Group Vice President of Product Development in Oracle's IOT organization. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you, Peter. Now we've got a lot to talk about because IOT is obviously at the forefront of many people's minds. It's one of the major initiatives happening in business, although a lot of business people tell us that when somebody starts throwing IOT concepts at them, they're not quite sure exactly what the parameters or what it means. So let's start here. A lot of hype about IOT. What does it mean to Oracle and Oracle's customers? Yes, so there is definitely a lot of buzz about IOT and it is affecting a lot of industries whether it be manufacturing, transportation, home automation, fleet management. And we expect around 50 billion devices to be connected in the next two to three years. And even the devices already connected today are generating over five zettabytes of data. And very little of that is actually there. Zettabytes. Exactly. So zettabytes is megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes. Xabytes and zettabytes. A lot of data. A lot of data. And very little of that is being actually used. And if you look, talk to any analysts, it's they project somewhere between a one to five trillion dollar market, right? But numbers aside, there is real business value here. I mean, some companies are looking at IOT to improve operational efficiencies. Others want to use IOT to improve the customer experience or create sort of new business models and new revenue streams. So there are clear opportunities here and that's what's attracting a lot of these organizations to do IOT. Now, as a company tries to do something as complex as introducing new business model, they're going to need a lot of new technology as well as a lot of new good ideas. So what is Oracle's approach to engaging customers in this marketplace? So if many of our customers are going through these digital transformation or industry 4.0 initiatives, if you will. And there's some common patterns emerging when it comes to IOT. Things like machine safety, productive maintenance, production reliability, worker productivity, supply chain optimization. And all of these need extensions to existing applications or new types of applications. So Oracle's approach to IOT is to provide IOT enabled smart applications for things like manufacturing, fleet management, asset monitoring, equipment prognostics, things like that. But that's much more than Oracle's currently providing right now. Exactly. So tell us a little bit about how this IOT ecosystem, which is very broad, very complex, touches a lot of different parts of business, is embracing Oracle and how Oracle's trying to set up this appropriate partnerships so that customers can in fact get a complete solution. Sure. If you look at companies embarking on a journey to IOT, we see them go through sort of multiple phases. They start with just connecting their assets. So they have assets sitting on the field, not connected to the business systems. They start connecting them so that they can get real-time visibility into the assets and they can react more quickly to any problems that occur. So now they've reduced the time to react to any issues. That gives them sort of immediate ROI, but soon after they want to move to more of a proactive monitoring. So they're collecting information from all these assets and they want to do predictive analytics and reduce unplanned downtime and predict failures before they actually happen. Once they do that, then they want to transition to using IOT data into their core business processes, whether it be back office, supply chain processes, ERP process, or customer-facing processes like CRM, where they start to use IOT data to provide differentiated experiences. And the IOT offerings that we provide essentially help them go through this journey from connected assets all the way to service excellence. So when we're talking about connected assets, we're talking about the machinery, as well as the other resources, at least that are either handling or running operations, but also handling customer engagement. Now this suggests that there's going to be an intimate relationship between the technologies that are collecting all this data, sensing all this data, transmitting all this data, and the systems that are actually responsible for turning these feeds into something that is recognizable by the business as capable of generating a decision. Tell us a little bit about the relationship as you see it between IOT and big data. So recently we released an IOT cloud service and the main difference in our approach to IOT versus many of the other vendors is we look at it from the applications out, as you said, from the business out, right? We want to take the insights from these devices, the data coming and make that actionable within your enterprise business processes, right? So the goal of IOT cloud service is to actually bridge this gap between the operational technology and the IT world. And we do this by providing out-of-the-box applications as well as platform components. I talked about applications like asset monitoring earlier. So there we have out-of-the-box app that helps you answer questions like how are my assets being used? What is their health? Do they need to be serviced? You look at equipment monitoring, it's about how are my systems doing on the factory floor? Collect data from them constantly so that I can decide which ones to service in the next maintenance window, right? Now I'm collecting all this data. This has to be backed by sort of platform components and our platform components fall in sort of these three broad categories, right? Connect, analyze, integrate. So the connect part is where you bring the device, onboard the devices and provide bi-directional connectivity to them. So we have this concept called device virtualization which really simplifies how you interact with these devices and provides a software representation of those devices in the cloud. So now any application interacting with it doesn't need to know the gateways and the protocols that are used. On the analyze side, there are two types of analysis. There is real-time analysis which is done on the event stream and then there's big data analysis that's done where you combine the real-time stream along with contextual data setting in your data lakes or your ERP systems and then you apply addictive algorithms on top of it. We have a bunch of capabilities here. We provide business user-friendly interfaces to model these event processing functions and we also provide built-in algorithms using our big data services for things like equipment efficiency, remaining useful life, things like that, right? So big data and IoT are quite related. If you look at the big data techniques like Spark, Hadoop or some of these services, the type of data they operate on, data with high velocity, high volume, high variety, IoT data has all of the same characteristics of that big data, right? Now, once you have analyzed this data, you also want to integrate it with your backend systems and that's where we provide out-of-the-box connectivity with our SaaS apps as well as our e-business suite and our JD Edwards applications which are commonly used by enterprise customers. You have the connectivity piece, you have the analytics and you have the integration. You use these capabilities along with some of our other past services like our business intelligence cloud service or our mobile cloud service to build your IoT application. So you mentioned that these tools are easy to use. You also mentioned the distinction between IT and OT. This combination of IoT and big data analytics is touching a lot of different parts of the business. You have to be able to talk to operational technology people, IT people, you have to be able to talk to developers, you have to be increasingly be able to talk to business people. Historically, this all comes together when developers are engaged to create value out of all these piece parts. Talk a little bit about how Oracle is bringing greater support to that developer community to bring this all together and turn it into value for a corporation. So let's take an example here, right? Let's take the manufacturing example and then I'll talk about the manufacturing and then talk about some of the challenges that and how we enable that for the developer community. In manufacturing world, when you're doing these IoT kind of solutions, there's a common analysis done called the 5M analysis. Man, machine, method, material, measurements. Now if you look at man, method, materials, all of this information is sitting in your ERP system or your databases where you have who operated on the system, what training did they receive, what techniques did they use, what raw material was used, who was a supplier. You look at machine and measurements, this is raw data coming from the equipment, IoT data and measurements is around the tests that were done on the system. You need to combine both of these to create a real predictive analytic solution for manufacturing, right? Now today, a lot of this has to be done using sophisticated sort of data scientists and you need sophisticated developers who can operate on these various big data components whether it be Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, all of these. What we are doing at Oracle is trying to provide sort of tools and frameworks that abstract away some of that and are targeted towards the citizen developer or the business user. You don't need to have sophisticated data scientists, right? We have tools such as Big Data Discovery, Big Data Prep and other tools such as machine learning which make it easy to build these kind of models. Now, if you are a developer who wants to write all of this from scratch, even then when you're dealing with different types of structured and unstructured stored, you need an abstraction layer that simplifies how you interact with this, how you query it and so we are providing SQL like interfaces that they were already familiar with. So whether it's a structured store or unstructured store and whether it doesn't matter which native query interface it supports, you provide a standardized layer so that they can easily operate with the data. Now, even that takes a long time to build an IoT solution. So that's where the out-of-the-box applications come in and by providing these out-of-the-box applications for specific use cases around asset monitoring, equipment prognostics, supply chain, we are really trying to reduce the time it takes for you to deploy an IoT solution because these applications already have those built-in algorithms. All you're doing is configuring them, providing some parameters but you don't need to write the algorithm. You take your industrial gateways, connect the devices and you're ready to go. So do you think that there's gonna be new applications utilizing some of these new methods or models or is it going to be just an extension of a lot of the traditional, more operational, financial oriented applications that are in place? It's a combination. So when it comes to things like existing maintenance applications or existing service applications, the interfaces of them used to be manual where someone will get a call and they will enter an order into the system or a work order. With IoT, those are being extended to have new channels. So for example, in our service cloud, we have added a new channel with IoT. So now the equipment itself reports a problem and when the service technician gets a work order, they already know which part has gone bad. So the whole manual step is taken away. There are other areas where companies are trying to transition to this product as a service model, right? And so those need new ways of monetizing new types of applications where you're capturing utilization. There you will need some new application. So it is a combination of the two. Now you mentioned earlier the 5M model, men, materials, machines, measurement, and method. Just to give you, to date myself, the first class on technology I took talked about the 4M plus I model. It was men, materials, machines, money and information. So it didn't have method. But let's come back to at least what we think at Wikibon SiliconANGLE is still the most important piece, men or people, the individuals. We're talking about IoT here, but presumably we're going to also start bringing in those crucial interfaces so that people become a more engaged feature of how these loops are working between sensing and analyzing and creating models and then enacting something in the marketplace. Tell us a little bit about how Oracle sees the role that people are going to play in these transitions that we're talking about. So if you look at the service industry, if you will, right? I mean, I gave you the example of automatically creating a worker, but with IoT-enabled devices, it is transitioning to more of a self-service model or an assisted service model, where now people have much more information available to them at the fingertips when they are actually looking at problems, whether it be some part that has failed or a customer just reported an issue. Now you can interact with these devices remotely, and so now you have significantly reduced the time to actually act on any problems and overall improve the customer experience, right? There is the people part in sort of creating those models and providing sort of information to enrich those models, because a data scientist can get all the information from the devices and create the models, but you also need the experts who know how these systems are supposed to behave, how they were designed, how they behave under certain environment conditions. You take that into account along with the real data that you're getting and that's where you can predict how this particular equipment will behave in the field, right? So Oracle OpenWorld is just around the corner. One quick idea, what are you looking for from an Oracle IoT perspective? From an Oracle IoT perspective, one of the things we were really looking forward to is the applications that we are launching as well as many other applications within Oracle who have now embedded IoT within their offerings. So to make those applications smarter and you hear a lot about that at OpenWorld. And that is one of the key tests of adoption is how fast that happens. Bhagat Nanani, thank you very much for being here, Group Vice President or IoT Product Development at Oracle. Again, Peter Burris from theCUBE, thank you very much. Thank you, Peter.