 Okay, welcome back everyone, this is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We've got the advanced instructor from The Noise. I'm John Furrier, Joe with Dave Vellante here for just a conversation, Dave, about what's going on in Oracle Open World, day one of three days of live coverage here in San Francisco. What's your take, Dave? Well, first of all, John, I miss you. I had Furrier withdrawals here, so welcome back. First segment we've done together all day. I was out at Santa Barbara last night and checking out the scene down there, made it back. Not going to miss an Oracle Open World for the world. I love Oracle Open World because it's like Isla Vista in Santa Barbara, except it's tech people, going crazy over the technology. So, Moscone is draped in red, John. It's a little different than a few weeks ago at the M World. No, I mean, it's always great because Oracle has the muscle, Dave, as you know. We always talk about every year, Oracle's, transitioning from that telco role of extracting value from the ecosystem. Oracle's making moves. Larry Ellison really is a gamer. He wants to make his mark on the industry. He sees himself as the heir apparent to Steve Jobs in the historic Hall of Fame of tech industry. And he's here to win, it's a game to him. And I think you're seeing Oracle just in the past four years since we've been covering them. Being kind of a, this is a throwaway game for them to like really being in the game. They're making the announcements. They're heavy in cloud. They're making a faster, more relevant, timely announcements. Again, they're a monster. They're in there with huge accounts, huge dollars. And a rounding number on their sales spreadsheet would take a company public these days. So, you know, those startups are doing well. Oracle still has the muscle and they have huge clients. And it's fun to watch. And I think, you know, you asked me my take before, and we're hearing a consistent story from Oracle. It's software engineered with hardware. It's vertical integration. It's trying to develop best of breed. It's spending on R&D. Now they've basically co-opted the big data theme. We know, we hear a lot about their cloud. So, you know, it's fun to criticize Oracle, right? They charge a lot. They, you know, co-opt industry terms and act like they invented it on and on and on. But here's the deal. They spend a lot of money on R&D. Allison's like a startup CEO. I mean, he's that engaged. I was just at the session talking to some executives in the infrastructure business. And they're telling me, Larry's calling me every week. Wants to know the update on the new product announcement. When it's coming, when it's ready, you know, Oracle's the same way. So these guys are intense focus on, as you said, winning. So it's all about winning. It's a zero-sum game to Oracle. I mean, it's a chessboard for Larry. And I think, you know, one of the things we're seeing some news here, we had our guys at the press conference, Mark, heard, made an announcement about the human capital management software. You know, it's classic Oracle, swiping at the competition. Workday has been booming of late. And, you know, they're under pressure, you know. And, you know, Workday, obviously the people soft guys have a huge chip on their shoulder. They're winning. They're doing well. And Oracle's not happy about it. So I mean, obviously they're going to be moving very, very aggressive against that. And then just in all fronts, the chessboard of conversion infrastructure, the sun acquisition, really the ultimate cherry on top for Oracle relative to their future positioning. They are betting the ranch on an Apple-like strategy where containing the hardware, focusing on the software, and bundling in the hardware to the software as a fully enclosed system, purpose-filled, hardening it out is ultimately their big bet, Dave. And I'm telling you, it will work for some companies and that lock-in is a small price to pay for the functionality if they can deliver. Well, and I think they, I think Oracle can deliver. You know, the question is, as we were talking about with Ray Wang, can they deliver both on the promise of integrated systems? I have no doubt Oracle can do that because they're spending a lot of money on it. They've got good technology people. They've got good technology. And so eventually they're going to make that integration play work and they already are making that work. The big question I have, John, is can they innovate and be best of breed at each layer of the stack? That's something that's really hard to do. Guys like EMC and Cisco and VMware have chosen to partner to do that. That's always been IBM's big challenge, right? I mean, what's IBM number one at? What product is IBM number one at? Besides mainframes? It's hard to come up with one. Okay, then same question for Oracle. What product is Oracle number one at besides database? That's Oracle's challenge, you know? Can they be best in storage? Can they be best in servers? Can they be best in applications? They would argue they're best in applications. But I think big data is a big challenge here. We heard inside theCUBE here day one that people don't want to pay licenses for data that's not being used. And there's a big issue around how data works and how people are using their computing environment. It's not a monolithic environment anymore relative to the database. There's new unstructured environments. Most of the data is not stored in relational databases. Why should I pay an Oracle license there? I got virtualization, I got scale out open source. These are new environments that are putting great pressure on Oracle. And if you look at Mark Hurd and how he reports to the street, all he talks about is our revenue licenses are up X percent relative to the market. Well, if the market's declining and you're up, what does that mean? Maybe it's shifting to another area. So Dave, this is a concern that I have about Oracle is their core business metrics might not be on the right numbers. Yes, software's growing relative to what? A declining market or a shifting market? Those are the open questions we will find out. This is Wicked Oracle. Well, I think that, well, here's something I want to share with you. So we did some research in Wikibon. 50% of the customers that we talked to in the Wikibon community said they're willing to risk lock-in to get integration and function. So, and only 15% said we're dogmatic about open source. Now, over time, that open source crowd, as you well know, is going to build up the capabilities. But 15% is the toehold for the startup crowd. Oracle's working on that fat middle. And that's really where they do well. Let's talk about the dogma. The dogma for IT enterprise is simply this, contract negotiations. All it's a posturing for contract negotiations. Almost every single CIO I talked to and we've talked to Dave have either told us publicly and privately, hey, at the end of the day, I care about the cost structure of the environment and two, if there's a hardened top on lock-in, it doesn't, it's irrelevant. And the example that we've always used on theCUBE is the Intel microprocessor. Do you really care about the proprietary software involved in an Intel processor? No, it just gets the job done and it enables other things. That's the key question that we're looking at right now in the computer industry, is where is that hardened environment where the encapsulation of the complexity has been taken away to the point where it's absolutely functional. That is ultimately going to be the key and I think that's going to have to enable the data fabric layer and then top of the stack with applications. I think that's a VMware strategy is a good one. I think Oracle can pull that off. They could be the Intel of this cloud era. Well, the other big battle is the organizational battle because Oracle obviously sells the DBAs and application heads and everybody else in the hardware business sells to infrastructure people. And let's face it, the DBAs and the application heads have all the juice in the marketplace. So those guys are driving the buying decisions. Now, as companies like VMware become more strategic, they can maybe get some access to those individuals, but still Oracle and SAP own that. All you do is go to SAP Sapphire, you come to Oracle Open World, a lot of suits, you go to EMC World and you're seeing a lot of infrastructure people. So that's a big battle that people are taking on. But if I'm a customer, I would absolutely have some alternative infrastructure around. I wouldn't go just all red stack. There might be some situations where I want to do that. I guess the point I'm making is a lot of the application heads don't care if they spend more on infrastructure. They don't care if they get locked in because they care about how fast the application runs, how easy it is to deploy, how agile it is, what their service experience is like. That's what they care about. I think ultimately it's going to come down an ability to be flexible and have the application support. So Oracle obviously will have the ability in most of their companies to do that. The question is, do they have the right product mix? And I think given the customer's choice that's what we've seen with OpenStack in particular. If you look at OpenStack, what that's done is given this choice to the enterprises to do whatever they want. Relative to having a private and public and hybrid cloud environment. And that's ultimately going to help with the kind of the choice option. So I mean that's kind of what we've heard here. Yeah, in Oracle's portfolio, Oracle's got one of everything. We heard you were in the car so you didn't hear Thomas Currian this morning, but I mean you would have thought they were invented big data. I mean it was Hadoop connectors in memory databases. You're talking about no sequel, key value stores. We got it all. And they do actually have a lot of that, right? So the portfolio is very robust. They can tick the boxes. They can play that functionality game with anybody. And the real advantages, they talk to the CIO. Now over here you've got the, I'll call it the Mark Endresing crowd, right? None of my startups buy Oracle, right? So it's those guys, it's the open source crowd that ultimately is going to get leverage in the marketplace. And John, you and I have talked about this in theCUBE a lot. Ultimately long-term open source wins. Gary Bloom was on theCUBE earlier, CEO of now CEO, President of MarkLogic. Dave, he's been at I think 17 years at Oracle and insane amount of years. He's been there from the beginning. He goes back to Veritas as well. You know, he had an interesting point. He said that in MarkLogic, they have a half a DBA for 10 DBAs that are on staff for Oracle. That's a nine and a half labor pool reduction in cost. And here granted, some of those guys might retire, kind of like mainframe guys in the old days, but like still, you don't know about a massive amount of reshifting of resources. I want to get your take on the data economy type role. I mean, the data economy, we're talking about new economics. What's your take on, I mean, that ratios is really the kind of magnitude we're seeing relative to big data. So here's my take on that, is I think that rightly so the startups are doing what Larry always does. He compares his state of the art to somebody else's N minus two. And that's what the startups are doing, right? There's a lot of legacy Oracle environments very easy to go in and say, okay, I can reduce your operating expense. Here's the challenge, Oracle knows this and they see that threat. So what Oracle's trying to do is cut that, to whatever degree it can cut that and close that gap and then have the CIOs bet on Oracle because they're quote unquote, less risky, right? Nobody ever get fired for bringing on IBM. So the game that they have to play, I heard Gary say, we have a five year lead on the competition. So it's like Fusion IO and EMC, right? EMC had a four year lead on EMC. We had Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE. He said, hey, we're behind. But we're going to catch up. How did they catch up? They went out and they bought a company. Now I haven't caught up yet. But they went out and bought a company. They started investing R&D, but they're closing that gap. And so that's the game that they play. Okay, we're here inside theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE.com's coverage of theCUBE. Stay with us. We're going to be going to come back with Jeff Kelly. Dave, next we have any more guests coming in. We're done. This is a wrap for the day. Okay, we'll be back tomorrow on Tuesday. Stay here. SiliconANGLE, we're going to secure our flagship program. Day one wrap up here at Oracle Open World. Yes, so tomorrow, Mike Olson's coming on. We've got a bunch of guys coming on from EMC. EMC has 80,000 Oracle customers. Oracle itself says it has 40,000 hardware customers. So that's going to be an interesting- We want to have a special thanks out to QLogic for letting us stay in their booth again fourth consecutive year. The legacy, SiliconANGLE and CNBC are broadcasting live here at Oracle Open World. This is day one coverage. We'll be back tomorrow with the keynote in the middle of the afternoon. All day coverage starting at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning here in theCUBE. Stay with us and see you tomorrow.