 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's the Cube, covering Oracle Open World 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Brian Grace Lee. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Oracle Open World on Howard Street. This is the Cube, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the event and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, my co-host, Brian Grace Lee. We keep on analyst. Our next guest is Tim Shetler, Vice President of Product Manager for Oracle Database, joining us today. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. I'll see Database as Oracle's core product. You'll oversee the team. That includes Exadata, a variety of other things in memory and a bunch of other great stuff in the cloud. Congratulations, big center stage. Exadata's hot product. Exadata has been doing extremely well since its introduction, in which year was it introduced? 2008, the very first engineered system. Here at Oracle Open World. Here at Open World. Okay, so what news do you have for us today? Let's get to the news real quick on Exadata. Probably the most important news is the release last week of the Exadata cloud service. So it's Exadata database machine hosted in the Oracle public cloud, basically available under subscription model. All the things that we talk about relative to the Exadata technologies and all the technologies in the Oracle database, including all of the options for the Oracle database are all part of this service. So it's really the first time in a public cloud that customers have been able to get access to high-end first-class systems as opposed to commodity systems. So when you think about customers getting ready to move important assets, important databases into the public cloud, they're going to be a little hesitant to move it into a kind of commodity generic platform. But with the Exadata cloud service, now they can do that and not worry about losing performance or security. As everyone's been anticipating, cloud is a huge focus this year at the show. What cloud capabilities, also the shipping Exadata is one, what are the things that you guys talking about here at the show relative to the cloud capabilities? Obviously integrated cloud applications, platform services, headlining, where it's great message and we're seeing it all over the street here. What is the key capabilities you guys are talking about this week? Well, of course we've got a big platform of applications, our softwares of service offering. It keeps expanding all the time. So you hear a lot about that at the show. We've been building out the infrastructure as a service offering, both the database and the application development services. And you'll hear more about that as well. And so we're just aggressively moving all of the assets that you can get on premise into the Oracle public cloud and integrating them so that you can create a hybrid cloud with your on premise assets as well. So you're going to hear a lot about that. One of the really exciting engineered systems, actually the newest engineered system that really fits well into the cloud, isn't available in the public cloud yet, but certainly will be in the future is our zero data loss recovery appliance, which is our consolidated platform for all your Oracle database backups and data protection, right? So when you think about a public cloud where you could have hundreds of thousands of Oracle databases hosted, it'd be great to have something like that as a place where they can all be backed up, all be protected in the same way. And so that's a product that came out a year ago and has been doing extraordinarily well as a data protection offering for our biggest customers, the ones that have dozens or hundreds of databases. Data protection is huge. Obviously every enterprise wants to have that capability. We're either the cloud, there's a little fear for customers, we're putting their data in the cloud. So they want to simplify that, they want to make it secure. What are some of the things that you guys are working on to make that happen? Obviously it's not ready yet, but that's going to be a big shift. And that's going to be an engineered system requirement for the cloud. Because the customer wants seamless data movement. Yeah. What are some of the things that you guys are working on in that area? Well, of course security is important, right? So one of the things about an engineered system like Exadata is just built to be as secure as possible, right? So the fact that we have put our engineered systems into the cloud as the standard or default platform almost, really sets what we do apart from a lot of the other cloud, all engineered systems, Exadata in particular, is really designed for high availability as well. Everything is redundant, there's no single point of failure. So all the things that I think give people pause to move assets into the cloud are already covered in the engineered systems portfolio. And we're just going to be moving all of them into the cloud over time. What people probably don't know is all of our SaaS applications today run on either Exadata or Exologic engineered systems today. So we've been running hundreds of engineered systems in our public cloud for a couple of years now. I always said the engineered system was one of those things where customers were either going to love it or not love it. And one of those things, certainly they love it. And it was a good call. I mean, product-wise, product-market fit, as they call it, it really worked well. I mean, people want high-performance, high-functioning product. They actually don't care what format takes as long as it works, right? So Exadata is one of those use cases where it's been doing extremely, really well. It has, yeah. It's anniversary again since 2008 when we announced the Oracle Open World. So I've got to ask you, what is really the most exciting things that you've seen with Exadata because that you're proud of, that you can look back and say, hey, you know, we really knocked it out of the park and what are some of the things that you're most excited about about the evolution of Exadata? One of the things that really stands out is how much the technology has increased in power and capacity over that generation, the seven generations. We release a new version of Exadata every year, every 12 to 14 months, right? And we take the latest processors, we take the latest disks, the latest flash, et cetera. Some years that means we quadruple the amount of storage capacity or double the amount of flash or increase the processing power by 50%, right? And if you add that up over seven years, you see, you know, 16 times more capacity, eight times more processor power, those kinds of things. The prices basically stayed the same throughout that whole duration. And that's just Moore's law giving us the ability to offer much more capacity and performance without an increase in price. So I'm really happy to see that we've been able to do that. And people now have responded by consolidating entire data centers of servers and Oracle databases on a pair of Exadata systems, for example, saving a lot, a lot of money. You mentioned Hybrid Cloud a few minutes ago. You were talking about, you know, with the new cloud offerings, what's driving your customers to want to talk about it? Is it a different economic model for Exadata and the cloud? Is it I want to get out of the data center business? What's, talk about what they're trying to do in that space? Yeah, I think certainly the economic model is attractive. The ability to have most of your assets rented, you know, have it be an OPEX instead of a CAPEX part of your financial statements, right? I think the fact that all the infrastructure now is owned and managed, or at least managed by Oracle, and they don't have to worry about that. They just worry about their databases or their applications, right? I think the message that companies that are in other businesses shouldn't be so invested in IT that it takes over kind of too much of their attention, right? So they want to, you know, offshore outbound all that stuff as much as possible. And so I think it's a combination of those things. Finally, creating enough critical mass that they're saying, okay, it's time to move, right? And a lot of it is who else is moving, right? And I just read something the other day where I think the majority of people asked about security said, yeah, we think that probably putting our stuff in a public cloud is going to make it more secure than in our own data center because who's got a bigger stake in security than the public cloud providers? Yeah, and hybrid cloud brings up a good point that we see all the time at different CUBE events we go to. And that is that customers and industry vendors also acknowledge, yeah, private on-premise public cloud. And last year, Larry was up there saying, hey, we got both. Dave Donatelli interviewed him and he's like, if you don't have a public cloud and you're in the box business, you're toast, basically, what he said. That's not may not be a direct quote, but to that point, that's what he's saying. Hybrid brings up an engineered model where there's no real hybrid cloud products. You can't put a skew on a hybrid cloud. Most customers are engineering hybrid cloud. So the question is, is engineered systems basically engineered cloud? I mean, how does customers look at that? Because integrated cloud, you could say engineered systems are part component of a hybrid cloud. Is there an engineered cloud product in the future? Or do you think that way? You guys talk about it in that context? Well, there actually is a management tool or enterprise manager tool. Just came out with a new release designed for the hybrid cloud. So it allows you to monitor and manage your assets, databases, what have you, whether they're on-premise or in the cloud and it understands all the security issues, et cetera, of the cloud, right? So it sort of brings those worlds together. So when you think about it, that's probably where you want to think about a real hybrid cloud offering. But other than that, Exadata was actually designed with a cloud-first architecture back in 2008. It's a scale-out model, right? Which is really well-fitting for the cloud. And when you can have the exact same engineered system in the public cloud that you have on-premise, it's no brainer to connect them together, put DR in the cloud, put test dev in the cloud, for example. So if I get this right, horizontally scalable with Exadata plus vertically integrated solutions, like, say, for big data, is kind of the holy grail, if you will, for customers. Because they need a little bit of both, don't they? There's no one-trick pony here, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really just about how do you bridge the fact that there's a network between your data center and the public cloud, right? How do you make sure that's fast and secure? That's really the only challenge, right? Those are problems that certainly will get resolved over time better and better and better. And now we can resolve them with specific technologies that connect together across both of those domains. Tim, one big trend that we're seeing, I'll see, is the in-memory. Looking at the big data space, for instance, you're seeing Hadoop as a big data lake, you stored all on Hadoop, we've seen that. There's always a new, shiny new toy when it comes to the industry. One of them is in-memory databases. So what is your in-memory database adoption look like? Are people gravitating to us? Can anybody read a cloud? You'd say, okay, if software is going to be the killer feature, in-memory is a nice feature there. What is the update there? Yeah, well, the database in-memory option to the database came out just a little over a year ago. At this point, it is the most successful in terms of sales option to the database in the history of the Oracle database. So that tells you that it certainly is appealing to folks. When we design this product, our goals are really to make it transparent in terms of the existing Oracle applications. So any application that runs on the Oracle database can utilize our database in-memory option and get the analytics speed up, et cetera, without doing any changes at all, right? Which has really made the adoption much quicker than you would if you were moving to a brand new kind of database model. It's a great compliment to Exadata. Exadata is all about storage optimization primarily. Database in-memory is all about doing the same thing, but in the memory side. So when you think about it, it sort of completes Exadata. So no surprise, we've got a lot of Exadata customers that have invested now in the database in-memory option. Obviously, you aren't the only ones to do in-memory, your competition, some of your big competition has been talked about in-memory. What's the competitive marketplace look like? Why are customers choosing Oracle in-memory versus others, or what's the path for them to get to using in-memory? Because obviously the speed's compelling, the economics are compelling, but what's the competitive landscape look like? Well, yeah, you're right. All the major database players have an in-memory database offering, right? And there's differences between all of them, but the biggest difference is that we're the only product that our install base can move to without making any changes, right? And as you know, once people have a database in their environment, they don't easily move to another database, right? There's always some pain to do that, right? So people would rather not do that. So I think what makes it very attractive is we've got tens of thousands of high-end Oracle database customers that are able to move their key applications or add new applications that want to do real-time analytics without really any effort at all. And no other database vendor can say that about their in-memory database. There's always little gotchas, things that don't work quite the same, et cetera. How much do you see that, I'm sorry, right? Obviously when in-memory came along, the folks that were in the storage business sort of went, uh-oh, we're no longer that action. How much do you see, because you're also in the hardware business, how much is that disrupting the kind of hardware economics or the storage economics as well? Just our customers adopting this faster than you expected, how much is it affecting the storage piece? Yeah, so clearly there's a lot more memory available on systems today than there used to be, right? And there's also a lot of flash now. It's pretty standard to have flash only or flash with disk, right? And so the storage hierarchy is moving toward memory pretty aggressively. So we're just kind of, everybody's kind of following that trend, right? Now, we're still talking about a few terabytes of memory versus, you know, hundreds of terabytes or even petabyte of disk for the same price, roughly, right? So we think that, you know, there's always going to be an economic desire to have a storage hierarchy that's more than just memory or more than just memory and flash. And so we've built in, at least in Exadata, we've built in automatic movement of the data based on activity to the right place, right? In an upcoming release of Exadata, we're actually going to extend the in-memory formats down to our flash formats. So effectively you can have a much bigger in-memory database without having to have all that DRAM to hold it all. This is going to have a big impact on the peers and the EMCs and all the guys trying to do all-flash storage arrays because the need to, where you can access the data is going to be moving closer to the database. I mean, engineered systems is what customers want. They want to have the price point for performance and they don't want to have the cost of ownership. That's what we're seeing on that as well. So it's like, okay, hey, it's a mix and match model. You know, right tool for the job. But I'm a pure play storage vendor and I have my customers cobble together an in-memory. That's cost. There's people involved. We're going to write that software. Yeah, and people are really where the expense is, right? So we're trying to take the people part out of the equation as much as possible. Yeah, I was saying on the intro that Steve Jobs took the next operations which basically BSD Linux and made it the Mac and they've never had a virus since. Well, maybe they haven't, no one knows it, but it wasn't like Windows where it was completely open. Engineered systems has that same mindset right now where you can bolt in Unix with the Sun stuff. You got Exadata, you have some hardened systems. I mean, that takes away a lot of problems with the customers. Can you elaborate on that thesis? Because that seems to be what customers are resonating to say, hey, I don't care where the hardened top is, it's only got some choice, but I have performance. That's where I'm going. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the whole concept of engineered systems from Oracle's perspective, almost every engineered system is built around a specific workload, database or applications or analytics or big data, right? So when you can find what you want to build that platform for, then you don't have to worry about all these other test cases, right? You can streamline the technologies, the sizes of them, you know exactly what to test for. It gives you the ability to put optimizations in the entire stack because we own all the technologies that make it ideal for that particular workload, right? The competitors are pretty much general purpose integrated systems, right? They don't call them engineered systems, but it's the same thing. It's a packaging of different technologies together, right? But because they're designed as a general purpose server, they don't do anything particularly well. They do everything OK, right? And so we've taken the opposite approach and said, you know, we want to do what this platform is designed to do better than any other platform can. And if you have multiple engineered systems targeting your different workloads, you're going to get the most optimal, most cost-effective data center or cloud operation possible. I want to get to the question about which database customers that are here, what searches they can go to in a second. That's the question I want to bring up the competition that Brian brought up. I'm really surprised how aggressive Amazon's been against Oracle on the database side. They're basically saying, we're going to give you free tools. They make it sound so easy. I want to give you a chance to respond for customers who are saying, hey, and they're quoting the 1,000 customers now, or coming Oracle customers now. I don't know what that part that we have done to do diligence on that, but obviously they're basically saying, oh, it's really easy to move from Oracle to Amazon. Is it? And two, how do you guys respond to that? Because that's obviously, I've never heard them be so direct on Oracle before. Right. Well, you know, they've got a big footprint, obviously. And to expand and grow, they've got to get into other people's footprints, which is not easy to do. We don't see our customers aggressively moving to somebody else's cloud right now. I think the challenge for all the public cloud is when are customers going to start trusting the public cloud for their key assets? Even Amazon was admitting in the last conference that it's just not a lot of big enterprise customers moving all of their assets into the public cloud. There's a lot of test and dev. There's a lot of experimentation. New projects maybe go into the cloud because you can spin them up quickly, right? Well, economics would be one. Larry announced in his keynote at Redwood Shorts a few months ago that they're cheaper than Glacier in terms of cold storage. So I'm sure that there'll be a response from Larry on this. But how hard is it? I mean, if you have an alternative public cloud, why would a customer go to Amazon? Would there be any reason? You know, there may be. The public cloud is sort of an equalizer in one sense, if everybody is managing the infrastructure, which includes, say, databases and hardware and all that kind of stuff, well, then that's not a place where you can distinguish yourself usually. Like I said, the thing that we're doing though is we're putting first class platforms as our infrastructure, right? So when you look at companies saying, okay, I want to get out of the data center business and put all of my assets into the public cloud. But I'm really concerned that my tier one databases, for example, are unprotected or exposed, right? We can allay those concerns because we've got engineered systems in the public cloud. The Wikibon community has been discussing this because there's always a proof-of-concept model. Always early adopters will be tire tickers that might try something, but ultimately, production workloads are what kind of where the rubber hits the road on the cloud. Have you had a sort of last question? If you had a large customer, you know, Fortune 500 who said, hey, we want to go all in. Are you guys ready to deal with that migration to run it all the time? Or do you feel like for a while everybody's going to want to kind of be hybrid? Yeah. We actually believe that a hybrid cloud is going to exist maybe forever, right? For a lot of companies, right? But because it's going to just be easy to do, right? You may have a few key databases. You say, look, I just feel better if those are always on my domain, right? And so who cares, right? Really, seriously, as long as they can connect easily and they're secure, et cetera, right? But we have, like I said, last week we released the Exadata Cloud Service, right? We had a lineup of Fortune 500 companies waiting to use it, right? So they're all now provisioning their systems and it's all key production database. That's Exadata Cloud Service, right? Exadata Cloud Service, yeah. That's shipping, okay. Yeah, I'm sure those are a huge line to get into that party. Okay, final question. For your database customers that are watching and or will see the highlight of this video, what sessions are available here for them that you're excited about that they should go to? Can you share some insight? Well, I think the two key sessions are what's new and what's coming in Exadata, which is tomorrow at 5.15 in Moscone South 103. That's Juan Louisa who runs our development organization. It's always a packed house. Tuesday at the exact same time, the exact same room is what's new and what's coming with database and memory. Also Juan Louisa, right? So if you go to two technology sessions you want to know about the key technologies for the database, those are two really good ones, obviously. Tim, I really appreciate you spending the time out of your super busy schedule to join us here on theCUBE, here on Howard Street. Final, final question. For the folks watching, obviously database is a transformational market. Kind of the end of client server era is moving to the integrated cloud era now. We're seeing that in a whole new shift in real time. The numbers are off the charts. So what's the guiding principle inside Oracle? When you go to your development product management teams who are building out the business use cases, talking to engineers, what's the guiding philosophy inside Oracle? What's the mandate? What's the marching orders? Share, are you taking that hill? What hill are you taking? Share some color internally on some of your marching orders for your team. Do everything you can to hide the complexity, right? Because when people think cloud, they think less complex, right? They think lower costs, they think more flexibility. I want to get in and get out if I have a project that only lasts three months, for example, right? So making sure that our technology is usable in that context and the way they expect it to be is really the key thing, right? So with our legacy of on premise, customers love our technology because they can get access to all the details, right? In the cloud, we're the ones that have access to all the details. We're going to be doing the DevOps and managing all that stuff. They just want it to be easy and cost effective. Tim Shetler, VP of product management at the database, including exadata, amongst others. Great stuff. 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