 From Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Cloud World. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Washington DC for Oracle Cloud World, special presentations of theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Aaron Delos Ray, Senior Director, Oracle Technology Services Practitioner at Cognizant. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. So I'll see Oracle, big moves, putting the meat on the bone with cloud. Again, early days, we're starting to see materialized. Before we get into some of those conversations, give us a quick update on your journey with Oracle, what you guys are doing, and share a little bit of info on what you guys are doing. Great, thanks, John. So Cognizant and Oracle's relationship goes back almost 15 years. We're a massive user of their platform to run our business itself. We run PeopleSoft and Oracle Technology and our day-to-day business. We use all the engineered systems, exadata, exologic, and all the rest of the appliances to run our worldwide business. So, and then from a partner perspective, we're a top partner where we work with all of Oracle's GBUs, all the IBUs. We go to market, we develop products, we have a co-development relationship. So, it's a very advanced and sophisticated and complex interlock that we have with Oracle. And the announcement here is the cloud machine, you've got the cloud at customer. How's that going in your mind as you see that developing in the market? What's the customer orientation towards that? How do you guys advise customers? What's your take on that? You're a customer, you're a partner, you're also delivering value to your customers. So what's your customer's customers going to be doing? Absolutely, so we're obviously leveraging the products ourselves, both internally and from a practices perspective. Our clients see Oracle's position from a cloud standpoint as really creating the industrial cloud, which is really key because the ability to bring together the platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and obviously the application side as a service all under one roof. And now being able to run on a public cloud machine really is a capability that doesn't exist in the industry. So Aaron, I like to look at your businesses. You help your customers make money. That's really what you do. You look at business process, re-engineering, you look at the ERP wave. Your customers made a lot of money as a result of those things. They saved money, they got more efficient, ERP was game changing. Where are customers making money today and how are you aligning to that activity? So Cognizant has what we call our digital 2020 strategy which is how to create our digital as a service capability across the enterprise. And it's a worldwide campaign. And we're retooling all of our practices to in essence be a worldwide leader in that. And so Oracle, obviously their products completely aligned with that strategy. And so we see legacy modernization around digital as a service is really the game changer for large global enterprises, the Global 500, the Fortune 2000, because they have an enormous amount of legacy investment and intellectual property that's baked into their existing platforms. It's unrealistic to rewrite these from scratch and more importantly, it's unnecessary because of Oracle's products as an example. So when you talk about that, I mean everybody's talking about digitization, every customer's trying to digitize their assets. What does that mean? Obviously data is involved. Transaction systems still exist. They have now systems of engagement, et cetera, extending it to data, big data. Talk about what that means to customers and how they're turning that into a business capability. So if you look at the modern enterprise, we really structured ourselves in the modern world around these thousands to millions of transactions. Now we're in the billions of transactions and people have compressed the time scale where they want real-time transaction systems. And so what we see is when you combine the scale of real-time transactions with the kind of security and stability and resiliency that you need, you add all the geographical implications of being able to work across all the different geographies to become a global entity. Companies now have to reimagine their own digital enterprise as really a complete, not just ecosystem, but an operating DNA of themselves globally. How does cloud fit into that whole piece of it? Is this a fundamental piece of the infrastructure? Is it more than that? I mean, cloud, in the original cloud days, it was really structured as compute capability. And then it's expanded to specialized applications. But now it's moving to platform reimagining. And then I would argue now we're into the, what I call the dev cloud phase, where you're gonna be doing your development on the cloud and you're gonna be doing your whole development life cycle on the cloud. So we had SDLCs, we're gonna have really CDLCs long term. It'll be a cloud development life cycle, which will become a radical new way to engage business digitally. Because you're not gonna have the turnaround cycles of weeks, months, and years to take key applications live because these applications are buried in your business, they have to get out to your customer and even your customer might need to leverage them to their customers or partners. So it's a completely new way to imagine the enterprise. And that's totally disrupting the market too, the old days cloud. And then you see market-shared numbers, Amazon, Microsoft, there's Google, Google's having an event as well this week. People let customers have to put things in buckets. But then you get the software industry, as you talked about, traditionally has trajectory. Now you got cloud life cycle development, which is speed gain. Developers are the center of the value proposition, they're driving the boat, they're the engine of the speed. So I want to get your take on that. What do customers need to do to prepare? Because the impact to them is significant. Speed to delivery, certainly changes a lot of the architecture, dev, and then delivery of the apps. What do they have to do today to position themselves and get a toe in the water or jump into the deep end of the pool, if you will? What do they need to do? To be honest, they have to reimagine all their business operating processes and IT together as how to create a digital architecture of one. Not separate IT strategies, separate business strategies, separate technology-driven approaches, and separate business-driven approaches, but one singular approach. Because you're not really going to imagine business processes in the future where digital isn't the heart of it. And IT really isn't going to be providing a lot of value if the business isn't central to their complete digital enterprise. So it's really about clenching together, it's about creating this new type of cloud business analyst or business developer. So we have dev ops. I would argue we're also going to have business dev type people, biz dev type roles, and not in a traditional doing business development, but being a business analyst and a developer at the same time. So do they just jump into a room and say, hey, we've got to reimagine. Do they have a pow wow? Do they redo the architecture? Do they reorganize? Do they assign new roles? It sounds super complicated. So I mean that's one of the advantages working at Cognizant is that being a leader in this and reimagining ourselves first, we're taking all those lessons learned and applying them into our capabilities. We in essence have all of our practices lined up with this digital 2020 strategy that we have. So everyone's practice has to have the capabilities, the service offerings, the workshops so that as clients engage us, we bring a complete playbook to the table and really what we're able to do is guide a client through this journey. And it's a journey. And these journeys can't be five, 10, 20 years because that doesn't make any sense in the modern world. These journeys need to be more bite-sized the way we consume everything else today. What's surprised you right now? What's the big surprise for you that you either saw or didn't see in terms of new roles that are developing? You mentioned cloud business analyst. Can you give an example of we say, wow, that's a new role. This person is going to be driving it instrumental. Is there a new role? Is there a shift in position power inside the enterprise? I would say that all those key roles where the business, the liaison and the analyst and the developers are conjoined together into singular roles now. In the old enterprise, they were very divided up. There was a lot of gates, which obviously took an enormous amount of time in the development life cycle for clients which took many months and many cases years and you'd have change in strategy going on while people are trying to develop. And so they were always behind the curve. Now you're seeing a compression now and that's a very unique capability. And when you're looking at the under 30 developer culture, the expectations they have are to be highly engaged in the business. And when you're looking at business people, they want to be engaged in the digital technology. They don't look at it as a separate component. So that digital in 2020 is Cognizant's True North and cloud is a means to that end. It's not the end. And I think of something like the Oracle Cloud Machine. What it does is it enables people to bring a cloud-like experience on-prem. So they can cut costs. Maybe they can't go to cloud for whatever reason. So talk about that piece of it of the transformation but more importantly, the deeper business integration, whether that's by vertical industry or other business integration. So if you look at the large enterprise environments, financial services, healthcare, public sector, they have a certain regulatory environment they're in. And the traditional cloud computing approach, which is basically shoving capacity and not taking any risks, really hasn't worked. It's worked to move third, fourth, fifth priority workloads, but it hasn't gone to the central key workloads. Or test dev, great test dev, right? I mean sandbox, great. But you're not moving your billion transaction system level of engagements to the cloud. The cloud machine on-prem for the largest several thousand financial service, healthcare, public sector clients allow them to have that control and also meet the regulatory obligations and the security. And at the same time, move all their workloads that fit to the cloud simultaneously. So allows them to have that digital 2020 strategy and at the same time maintain the stability that's required that most clouds put at risk. So to date, they've really created cloud silos, right? They'll create doing maybe some public cloud and then do some stuff on-prem. Do you see that changing? Certainly within the Oracle footprint that can change. Do you see that expanding outside of that traditional Oracle? Yeah, we've been always talking about the hybrid cloud and it was really more because clients didn't want to put things on public clouds and so there was an offer to create a private cloud from everybody. Yeah, I can't imagine. I use both. Exactly. I got a public cloud over here and I got a private cloud over here that you shall never meet. And more importantly, the talent wouldn't meet and that was the real challenge. And the operational model. The operational model, the DevOps. So it created this added layer of complexity and in a lot of ways it didn't ship enough of the workloads. So you were really adding a third level of IT. Now with Oracle Public Cloud Machine, you can really at scale, ship enormous volumes of workloads. If you can imagine, if you have several thousand Oracle databases, you can move hundreds of those a quarter. If you have thousands of Java servers or tens of thousands, if you're in the financial industry, you can move hundreds or thousands of those a quarter. So it gives you enormous capacity to move to the cloud. And the truth is if you can't get those transaction middleware engines and those database engines over to the cloud so then you can get to the real hard work, then most clients are going to be stuck just moving tactical compute workloads. Great insight, as usual, excellent analysis. Great cube gems, a lot of great highlights. You laid it all out, fantastic. Great to see you again. I'll give you the final word here, live here in DC. What's the vibe of the show? People watching who aren't here. What's the update? What's the progress bar for Oracle? You have a unique position as a customer and partner and also helping customers. What's the status of the Oracle Cloud mission? I mean, this is really one of the more exciting events I've been to in years in the Oracle space because it's all of the cloud capability brought together into one roof at Oracle and it's fully engaged. Meaning it's not any vaporware or hyperware, it's actual deliverable technology today, place orders, implement. And I believe this is a catalyst for what I call the 90 day cloud. It's you have to create this internal initiative to get past any inertia to say we're going to individual pieces every 90 days. Roadblock, go to the next 90 day cloud and keep on firing. In the spirit of the Golden State War is undefeated at home. A lot of three pointers being thrown in the cloud game right now. Couldn't resist the 90 day clock. You're on the shot clock, IT. No more silos. Great to have you on theCUBE. We'll be right back with more live coverage of this short break. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.