 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Oracle OpenWorld. We are on Howard Street where they shut down San Francisco with the big stage in the Oracle Studios. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder. I was looking at it, I'm John with Stu Miniman, chief analyst at Wikibon for the infrastructure team. Our next guest is Chuck Hollis, SVP of Converged Infrastructure at Oracle, former VM, where former EMC for years, friend of theCUBE, you know, many times, CUBE alumni, first time as an Oracle employee, got the New Jersey on Oracle, number 12, Tom Brady. Number 12, free to see. So huge opportunity for Oracle in the Converged Infrastructure business. I mean, exadata is blowing doors. So that's one, we've seen the numbers and it's still kind of the best kept secret. People try not to give it as much publicity because it's just, it's crushing. It comes in and kills it, yeah. It's killing everything, right? We've seen the performance benchmarks. But now they've got the engineered systems. Huge opportunity to take territory. Yep, absolutely, share that, share that insight. You know, I've been in the infrastructure business forever, so has Stu. And we see this kind of commoditization of everything that's going on. Unless you can line up around what's important in the IT environment, we believe the Oracle database is very important. The applications have run about it. So what you've seen is our ability over the years to engineer an entire stack and delivery mechanism from the database all the way down through the chip, the operating system, through the storage, et cetera, et cetera. And I think both our customers and our partners are looking for optimization. They're not looking for generic solutions. You know, if we captured even half of the IT footprint that sits behind the Oracle database, we could sell five, six times as much infrastructure probably in the next few years. So very exciting times. Especially given everything else that's going on in the industry, right? So comment on the Dell EMC. You wrote a blog post, pretty controversial, because you have a lot of friends at EMC. You certainly spent a lot of years working at EMC. You know, inside the beast of EMC, you've been inside the belly, as they say, great company, great brand, you know, the founders, you get interested. I don't know if I really want to comment on Dell and EMC specifically, but I guess if you step back a bit, Stu, you've been in the infrastructure business forever. Horizontal technology vendors are getting compressed. We saw the server guys have to strip out all their margin, get very competitive. Storage guys, it doesn't matter which storage guy it is, they're going down the rat hole the same way. I don't think the hypervisor guys are much farther behind. I think Cisco has a pretty defensible franchise, but unless you optimize behind something important, you're just parts and pieces out there in the industry. So I look at the Dell EMC as kind of the inevitable. You basically have two horizontal technology vendors who think they can compete through size. We'll see, nine months, right, before the deal closes. Another nine months before they probably figure it out. What we've noticed is that customers crave certainty about the future. They want to know what they're investing in now, it's going to pay off three years, five years, seven years from now. It's very hard for these horizontal infrastructure vendors who are undifferentiated to create any sort of certainty about where they're going in the future. Yeah, so I mean, Chuck, you know, it's interesting to say some of the things you say there because absolutely some of these people, they don't own the applications and there's value that you can add. Wikibon says the further up the stack you go, it's really exponentially how much value you can add because what's the role of infrastructure? The role of infrastructure is to support the app, what the app do, the app supports the business. So we see a lot of companies, you know, I heard a lot of keynotes here, it's about the business outcomes and you know, you and I have been talking about this for years and years and years. This is completely antithetical thinking to traditional infrastructure guys. If you're an infrastructure guy, you've picked your favorite, picked your hypervisor, your server, your storage, et cetera, et cetera. You'd like to standardize as much as you can. Argument is different. The value of the information, the value of the application is so important. You really ought to consider an optimized stack for this part of your business. And it's, I think it's got merit, but it's not exactly popular thinking when you go walking into an infrastructure crowd. Yeah, so you know, I've gotten to walk the show floors here, Chuck. I mean, there's broad ecosystem here. I see a lot of storage companies. As a matter of fact, a lot of them would agree with you. It's building systems and you know, there's trade-offs there. So, you know, many people would say, okay, the Oracle stack is the great red stack. But customers, that's one of my applications and therefore I want something that, it's going to be great for my, you know, database, but it's also going to handle the variety of my environments. Of course, virtualization has done a lot for those kind of environments. What's your response to that? You know, enterprise apps are not all created equally. You know, what I do for VDI is probably has less business value than what I do for most critical database applications. And you know, sometimes I think IT infrastructure thinking has kind of lost the thread trying to standardize across everything. Maybe all applications are created equal. Some are more equal than others. And if you go ask the business people what matters to them, they'll look at, hey, it's these applications, these data sets, et cetera, et cetera. I'll give you an example. I'm now working with customers that are doing cloud native applications, mobile applications. Ask them, where do you keep the credit card numbers? Where do you keep your customer information? It lives typically in an Oracle database. So, not only does the Oracle database have a great story for the applications we know and love, but even the new ones that are being built are also tying back into the database. You know, our hope is that we can go to the infrastructure community and say, hey, there's a better way of doing things for this most critical part of your enterprise. So I want to get your perspective. You know, I've been in IT and depressants for almost 30 years now, looking at the industries you've seen the waves, and to the client server. I mean, the Dell EMC thing, to me, the water should have been just, it marks the end of an era. Certainly it's a line in the sand. It's just like a flashpoint. Okay, yeah, that's it. Before the depression, you know, after the depression, that kind of thing. So obviously things are happening. I agree with you with some things happening, but what's interesting about Oracle on the show, I want to get your thoughts on this, and compare it vis-a-vis to the landscape, is that it's not a rip-and-replay situation. It's additive to the overall functionality, meaning, yeah, things may get compressed, but what's actually happening is that nothing's actually going away as critical infrastructure. There's new stuff just being added on top. So, can you share your thoughts on that? The way I see it is, you know, you kind of do the best in time. I agree with that. I do a little bit. Okay, I don't. Light way of saying it. Let's debate that. Certainly the total, I agree with you that the total amount of stuff that IT has to do increases over time. That much I agree with. But those critical applications, they seem to reach out more, they do more. I don't know about adding more stuff. I think people are looking for a cleaner architecture that's optimized behind them. Not only on the data center, but also in the Oracle Cloud as well. One of the things I've come to appreciate, and we've both been talking about Cloud, till we're tired, blue in the face, one of the things that I've appreciated about the Oracle Cloud is that it can deliver a precisely compatible technology and operational experience with what we sell in the data center. And we all know what the challenge is when the cloud consumption is in the data center. It's different. The cloud is different. Operates different. It secures differently. It manages differently. The fact we can go to a customer and say, hey guys, here's this optimized technology stack that secures, protects, optimizes, you know, your most important investment. Choice of consumption options? That's actually, you know, quite a competitive advantage these days. Maybe I may say another way. So then tell me what the critical infrastructure is then. If you want to get behind, say, a database, the Oracle database isn't going away. No, that's critical. All the data shows growing, growing, growing. That's critical infrastructure. So you have critical infrastructure. That's being compressed. I would agree with you. Compressed how? What do you mean? Stuff that's not as critical. I can rebuild. I can consolidate. You see Exadata take some share there, right? So, okay, the ask being workloads. But the developer market's also exploding on top. The ISV market, huge opportunity. Absolutely, absolutely. You can't replace critical infrastructure. Marketing, cloud, guys, same thing. They've got funnel, you've got URL, you've got code. That's the web. That's what people use, the lingua franca, URL, whatnot. But the new stuff, social data. So the trend we're trying to tease out is, all that's happening, the new stuff is the modern cloud native stuff. So I still got to do the new stuff. Yeah, but so much of that new stuff, absolutely correct. So much of that new stuff has to tie to the old stuff. No one gets to start over again. At least for most companies. Yeah, so Chuck, you brought up some of the cloud stuff. You know, I think back, I think the first time I heard the public cloud term was in a blog post that you wrote. Yeah, right. So when we don't want to get into definitional discussions, but exadata in the cloud, when I think about cloud, I think about distributed architectures. I think about, there's APIs and there's services that can be added. How does that kind of mesh? You know, you and I have talked about cloud many times and it's not only a consumption model, it's an operational model, that's agile. And what I like about exadata in the other engineered systems is that you get to a cloud operational model. You can do that in your data center. You can do that by a consumption option. You can do it with a combination of both. Now, I will say that if I went to cloud building 101, it's like you can comprise of totally different ingredients. But that's the value of having an engineered system is that you really don't focus so much on the ingredients, you focus on the value that it brings. I think most enterprise IT leaders today have to have an answer for cloud. And they especially are looking for an answer for the most critical applications that you've talked about. So many of the public cloud options, just, you know, they're not really cutting it in people's eyes to say, hey, I'm going to put my ERP or I'm going to put my CRM system, you know, on a cloud I don't know, I don't trust. The preference is to have choices in consumption. And it's kind of a unique offer. It just takes a little while to appreciate it. Is it a winner take all or winner take most cloud market in your opinion? I think there's going to be a big cloud market with many players. Oracle is very focused on the applications people use to run their business. And, you know, to the extent that people invest in Oracle technology, Oracle database, I think they got the inside track. So, Chuck, another thing I've always loved reading from you is kind of the organizational dynamics. The storage admin, we've said, you know, hey, if your job's creating loans, we need to get rid of that. What's happening vis-a-vis, you know, the DBA is, how does that fit into the whole mix of it? What do you see as kind of, you know, who runs the future? You and I were both in the infrastructure business and we realized that the virtualization administrator was gaining power, right? And why was that? They looked over all the resources. They looked over compute. They looked over stores. They looked over network. I would argue that, to your point, it's moving farther up the stack. DBA actually owns the physical, the logical asset that has all the information. They could be very articulate about performance. They could be very articulate about protection, security, availability, all those disciplines. And when I look at what we're doing with engineered systems, in many ways we're kind of empowering the DBA, if you will, to have a more direct say in the infrastructure and how it's operated beneath it. Value keeps climbing up the stack, year after year. And I think this is an example of it. Comment on Larry's keynote about the security thing, because that's a game changer. John Fallow was on. Great commentary. And Crypt has been around since 2005. He's like, we've had this before. Finally, we got to bring it out. Red meat, man. Let's talk about security. Let's bring it out. And so that was cool. How does that story hang together? Brian Gracie's rolling his eyes like, okay, does that mean application drills aren't going to deploy security? So obviously the Nirvana would be end to end, move it down the slope and magic happens. Yeah, we should take on this. Okay, so all the data shows that it's war out there. And when you guys talk to IT leadership like I do, it's a war and perhaps we're not winning as much as we want to. These guys are after the database. That's where the critical information is. So I guess my view these days is, let's start with the database and securing the infrastructure around the database. So we're recommending three things that people do. One is reduce the surface threat. You go to a lot of these enterprises that got databases scattered everywhere. Very hard to secure, very hard to encrypt, very hard to get policy to work well. Permissions, credentials, consolidate. And we think we have the technology to help them do it. Second to your point, encrypt universally. Encryption's been around for decades. People use it selectively because there's- Because overhead. Mainly overhead. There's either performance penalty or there's an operational point. All right, new technology, turn it on, leave it on, use it all the time. And the third we're starting to notice is hardening your infrastructure. The data comes back from Verizon and other folks that study this thing. The vast majority of penetrations were people in process failures. The technology was there. Somebody forgot to turn on encryption. Somebody forgot to check the credentials. Somebody, somebody, somebody. Human error. Human error. Patches that would have been out for months and years that weren't applied. So we're working with our customers to create this notion of an information fortress that says, keep the bad guys out. And this is interesting because if you look at the spending patterns around security, you ask IT leaders, where do you feel most exposed? They'll say, the database. If you ask them where you're spending all of your money, they'll say, the network. So there's kind of a weird alignment. The perimeter's gone. Stop spending on the perimeter. Assume they're in. Yeah, assume they're in. And I look at the database and the infrastructure. It resides in this kind of the final best line of defense against an information breach. I love the story into encryption. I think it's on run. I think it is. Turn it on, leave it on. I love that message. I think it's on run. Most powerful security technology known to man. So Chuck, just don't lose the keys. Yeah. Because they're in the vault. They're a real bad day. It's in the vault. Out here in the valley, there's this meme going along that software is just eating the universe. What's the title of hardware these days? I think that's a really good question. No, actually, you haven't seen the live Spark M7 announcement, but it's out there in the press already. This is the first microprocessor that Oracle has designed internally. You remember the Sun acquisition was what, like five years ago? Takes about five years to build a chip. So this is the first microprocessor where the Oracle software guys and database guys worked with the Sun guys to actually build a chip. And you see the result. 32 encryption engines. The ability to take software functions and put it in silicon for SQL acceleration. Memory compressed, decompressed. You see a lot of cool software stuff now landing in silicon. I call it the world's first big data chip. It's architected for pros and reasons. I mean, a lot of the intergeeks are geeking out on this thing because it really is the first converged kind of chip model, right? I mean, we're converging software with Dartware. So what is it? Well, I love Intel. It's something different, right? Which is kind of neat. Well, Intel's here, so we're in there. There's some commodity stuff out there. I like Oracle sells a lot of Intel product, too. So, you know. So, but why isn't that lock-in then, Chuck? If you're gonna say, this is what I've got. You know, our customers want portability. They want to be able to offer choices. Well, here's the good news. Well, here's the good news. Are we locked at the Intel? I don't know. I mean. Oracle database runs on anything. You pick it, Oracle database runs on it. And if you ask somebody, where is the value? You know, it's the Oracle database and all the apps in case they run it. You want to run that on a Linux PC? Great. You want to run that on a Spark super cluster? Great. The database moves very nice. Do I care what's in the iPhone? I want the experience. It's the ultimate lock-in. I mean, this is lock-in. Do I care? They're making their own chips. People who've been in the IT industry like to have plan B. They like to have plan B. For you, that would be an Android. That's my iPhone. You know, I didn't know this, but 50% of malware is on the iPhone. It's not just Android. Oh, really? I didn't know that. It's almost a 50-50 split on malware. You shouldn't have like a Spark chip in here doing universal encryption and to end. Chuck Hollis, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Got great color, your great color commentator now at Oracle as a Senior Vice President of Converged Infrastructure. Thanks for sharing your information. Live here in San Francisco on Howard Street, streets are shut down. This is theCUBE powered by SiliconANGLE Media at SiliconANGLE.com, Wikibon.com Research at SiliconANGLE.tv. Go to SiliconANGLE.tv for all the videos. Go to crowdpages.co slash O-O-W-15. We have all the videos there. We have highlighted features, crowd conversations, the trending hashtags. What's trending in the crowd? Of course, all the data's there. That's the aggregated page. We'll be right back with more after this short break.