 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman joined with my co-host, Brian Gracely. We're with wikibon.com. Wikibon, we always love when we get to talk with the practitioners. Company was founded on allowing IT people to share with their peers. So nothing better than having a CIO on the program and happy to welcome back to the program. John Matelsky, CEO of DeKalb County, Georgia. John, welcome back to the program. Thank you, I was glad to be back. All right, so it's been a little bit since you've been on, you haven't been on this year. Well, what's new in your world? Kind of top of mind issues, you know, the biggest items. Well, budgets aren't increasing. Matter of fact, they're still shrinking, unfortunately. So we just need to be very, very responsible with our citizens' tax dollars. And so we're really very, very careful about all the different technologies that we deploy. Internet of Things, of course, is something that's near and dear to my heart. It's got a lot of value to our citizens and constituents. So those are some of the things that we're looking at. And then of course our Oracle ecosystem. I mean, we're here at Oracle Open World and our Oracle ecosystem, we've been doing a number of upgrades to a variety of our different Oracle solutions. And so we're really focused on that. All right, so John, you know, attending a lot of shows, there's always, you know, a good focus on public sector. So can you give us kind of an insight, you know, specifically at Oracle Open World, kind of any special things they're doing for you folks, or I don't know if there's other shows you go to, but what's kind of as a government person, how do they cater to your needs? Sure, well, I don't know so much about catering. I mean, the reality is even though I'm public sector, I don't want to just focus on public sector. I'm actually here to learn about the product roadmap and those kinds of things as it relates to public sector. But I want to be networking with other folks on other industries to find out, do lessons learned, best practices, those kinds of things. And with all the different variety of sessions that they have, whether it's Oracle specific, whether it's user specific, user driven, or whether it's vendors, there's just so much good stuff to learn here. And so for me, it's really not about catering. Although I will tell you, they've got a lot of great sessions related to public sector, how, you know, public sector budgeting and how to leverage ERP, the different varieties of ERP within the public sector. But again, for me, it's more about the networking and just learning across all of the different segments. Yeah, well, I love that because, you know, you learn sometimes, absolutely, somebody who's got a similar job to you will tell you something, but somebody, if you've got a big problem, you want to kind of talk to other people out there. Any kind of key nuggets that you've learned so far this week? Any sessions that were particularly, you know, illuminating to you? Well, Cloud's not dead. I don't know, I thought it was dead, but apparently not. No, but seriously, I mean, everything that we're moving into the cloud, actually, DeKalb County is progressive and we are making a lot of moves to the cloud. Every request for proposal or RFP that we put together, we're looking at how we can leverage cost savings, total cost of ownership, return on investment, and the cloud is really where it's at. So we're looking more focused on public cloud, maybe a little bit of hybrid cloud, but at the end of the day, everything that we're doing from an Oracle perspective as well, we're learning a lot of good nuggets about what the direction is, what the roadmap is for the different product lines, and you know, cloud is where it's at. Can you paint for us a little bit of a picture of kind of your cloud deployment, what applications are going there, how long you've been using it, what that kind of hybrid portfolio looks like? Sure, so the first thing that we moved to Cloud, we were on a 13 year old exchange email system. So we moved that into the Microsoft Cloud, so we're running Office 365 in the cloud. As we look at our permitting and planning solution, that's actually in for, we're a Hanson customer, we're moving that, we're in the process right now moving that into the cloud. And then from an Oracle perspective, we run E-business suite, we run PeopleSoft, Hyperion, we just got a whole bunch of stuff, and the things that we're looking at right now is moving our procurement modules into the cloud. We're also evaluating for upcoming early part of next year, going to HCM cloud, and then the last one is we're looking at the CRM, the customer relationship management module, and moving that into the cloud as well. So as we leveraged Oracle, they have a really good thing called an insight program, it's part of your maintenance and licensing. They come in and help facilitate an evaluation of how you're leveraging the different Oracle technologies and make recommendations. And as we looked at what the cost would be to do things on premise, as opposed to moving it into the cloud, again, from a total cost of ownership and return on investment, it just makes more sense to move those things into the cloud. Of course, the big concern is always security, but as I have told my board of commissioners, companies like Cisco and Microsoft and Oracle, they spend more on security probably in a day than we could budget in multiple years. So the key there is just making sure you have good service level agreements and contractual arrangements to protect yourselves, your data, your applications. Yeah, so you're just outside the Atlanta area. Atlanta's a fascinating city. One of the largest airports in the world, huge sports and entertainment mecca around the Southeast. You've got a bunch of Fortune 500 companies. Talk about, as a planner for the city, you can't plan a month in advance. You're talking about building roads and talk about the sort of government and business partnerships that have to happen for you to be able to be successful. Absolutely, we're on three to five year budget cycles and that's real challenging in the technology environment because technology doesn't just change year to year, I mean month to month where the things are changing. So it's a really difficult task trying to do that but having partners in the community, such as Cisco and then the Microsofts and all the other partners that we work with, they are really, truly mission critical partner vendors and working with them to understand what is the three to five year roadmap for the product lines and the solution sets and but more importantly and partnering with companies like Cisco, they are part of the community. They actually, it's not just about coming in and selling me a product or selling me a solution that could actually help drive value, it's really about giving of the company, working with us, giving back to the community. So those types of relationships are really key. As a matter of fact, Cisco partnered with both the Cap County and my previous job, Gwinnett County, as we looked at how we can drive innovation into our organization. We do a lot of things well but you know, we want to look at companies like Cisco who invest tons and tons of money into research and development and into driving solutions that will benefit their customers. We want to work with them to see how can Dicap County enhance their delivery of services through technology, through automation and working with companies like Cisco, it's really a win-win for our citizens and constituents. Yeah, I noticed you're wearing a wearable, you've obviously got a mobile device, you said you've got a passion around IoT. Absolutely. Give us a sense of what you guys are thinking about to help your citizens using IoT technologies. Yeah, I mean the internet of things is, you know, we're what, three, four, five years in already and I think the public sector is probably one of the slower sectors to go just because there's a lot of investments that need to be made in the technology but the beauty of it, and again, partnering with Cisco and others is you can build public-private partnerships to do a lot of these things. So some of the things that we're evaluating right now with Cisco and then with AT&T and Sprint and some of the other vendors is looking at how we might be able to provide lighting and cameras. And, you know, a lot of people worry about cameras and, oh, big brother, it's not about that. What it is, it's about being able to monitor traffic patterns and then be able to control the traffic lights if we have, you know, bottlenecks and those kinds of things. It's about being able to provide a higher level of public safety to our citizens and constituents. So we're looking at some of those things. We're looking at potentially doing metering on water meters to help facilitate an understanding of, a better understanding of both citizens and business use of some of our different utilities. So everything that, or your parking meters, parking's another great example. You know, as people come into Decatur or DeKalb County, it's gonna be a wonderful thing to know where that they can drive to find available parking. You know, parking is always a challenge and being able to have smart parking in our community is something that all of our constituents and stakeholders can really have value from. So everything we want to do is to drive value for our citizens and stakeholders and partnering with Cisco and AT&T and those companies is really very valuable. Yeah, so I love the discussion. We talk about, people think about government and it was like, oh, well it's tight on budget and it's, you know, not getting stuff done, but you know, you talk about some innovative things. How are you, you know, you talked about a couple of partnerships, but you know, with the budget constraints, how do you partner with industry? How do you partner with communities to be able to, you know, do some of these transformational things? I mean, you know, the future, in fact, the future was supposed to be this year. So, you know, how do you help deliver and give vision on that when you have some of the constraints of budgets and three to five year plans? Yeah, so we go through our normal budget process and again, we do annual budgeting, but we look at three to five year budgets. So as we're putting those together, we work with all of our vendor partners to try to find out exactly, how might we be able to partner with you over the coming year and years? So we will sit down and prioritize all of the different types of technology that we're looking to leverage, looking to deploy, whether it's for internal government use or as we try to deploy out to our citizens and stakeholders. And then we sit down at the table and find out, okay, from a public-private partnership, how can we work with you? How could we provide you some advertisement? How could you provide us some technology? And we work through some of those within the confines of appropriate procurement parameters, of course, but to build out kind of models. And it's not always about, you know, Cisco or any of these other companies just saying, here to Cap County, here's some money, let's roll up this technology. It's more about, let's look at the return on investment, the total cost of ownership, working with the modeling to say that, you know, if you invest $300,000 today, that money is going to save you $350,000 within 18 months. So we may be the only one spending money, but at the end we're still going to have a return on that investment. And it's about hard dollars as well as soft dollars. And that's all got to be part of the overall budgeting process. Yeah, so a lot of what you're talking about is transformation, change, change is a constant. We see from a lot of companies, you know, enterprise, you know, commercial companies who are saying, as I'm changing, communications just as important as the technology, how much do you find you've got to have your government leaders communicating out to their constituents saying, this is what your investments are for, this is the benefits that you're getting. How much do they want to hear that back from your groups? Communications is key. You know, you see a lot of governments fail because they've got a lot of great ideas, but they can't sell it to their constituents. And so that's also some of the things that we try to do is anytime we're looking at driving a new technology, a driving a new project, we try to get citizen and business involvement. And it's one thing for us to be out there touting the technology and maybe having some others from the business community, but actually being able to get citizens involved in the process for them to understand what the value is and then to be able to take that to their peers, that's really, really critical. So everything that we do, whether it's technology or economic development or those kinds of things, that communication component is critical because at the end of the day, you are spending taxpayer dollars. And taxpayers typically want to focus things that make their environment more safe. So public safety is usually where the money is. They're like, well, how is technology going to make me safer? And there's a lot of different cases that do, but the other thing is to be able to understand how you can drive, even outside of the public safety realm, value back to the citizens and constituents. And that being able to communicate that message is very, very critical. How much do you see, that area has a huge education, Georgia Tech, huge technology space, lots of great universities. How much do you partner with those types of communities as well, as well as just the technology vendors? We do partner a great deal with them. As a matter of fact, we are working right now with Emory University, trying to set up an incubator, both in the health industry and education. Those are, especially in DeKalb County with Emory University and Emory Hospital, and then you mentioned Georgia Tech, Georgia State's there, University of Georgia's right nearby. So leveraging and really having collaboration and cooperation, and then looking at K-12 as well, with the school system. I mean, our future are those children and those youth that are coming up right now from K-12 who will then go into college and then become part of the working community. We are partnering with them as well. And so it's really across the board. Education is such a key thing and making sure that we're bringing up the youngsters and those kinds of things and educating them and getting them involved in technology, getting them involved in the community, and getting them involved in government. We look at the elections and how many people are voting and how many people are involved. It's such a small segment. If we can draw people in and work with them, I mean, we want to continue building the community and the community needs to help build itself as well. Yeah, that's fantastic. John, you're doing a good job working with a lot of the companies out here. I'm sure you're pushing them for certain things. Can you share? Where's the whites face in the industry? What opportunities? What can the vendors either be building better or doing more to be able to help you and your peers with what you need to do? Yeah, I really think the biggest challenge for government is driving innovation. Most of the people look at government as, let's just keep the lights on. And I think the reality is we need to look at how we can leverage the taxpayer dollars to drive innovation and bring greater value. It's not to me about keeping the lights on and keeping the computers on. That's a given. We've got to look at how we can work with the community, with the vendors to really bring new solutions that will add value. So, partnering with Cisco and the AT&T's and the Googles of the world, Google is bringing in their Google fiber into our community. Unfortunately, they're only working with our cities and not the county yet. So, we're trying to work with Google to look at it holistically and talk to the county as well. But leveraging these types of technologies and the internet of things in a very short period of time is going to turn into the internet of everywhere. And basically what that means is, we're all going to be interconnected and it's not just going to be about the pieces of things that are collecting data. It's about how we are all connected within the community. And so, I think as we work with partners such as Cisco, those are the types of things that we need to be doing is focusing on how we drive innovation, how we enable the citizens and the businesses to get involved in that and to partner with us and then to be out there vocalizing. These are the types of things that we want from our government, from our businesses, and as citizens, we also want to contribute. All right, so you talk to so many CIOs out there. As you said, they're trying to keep the lights on. I mean, especially if you talk public sector, you might have infrastructure that, I'm just struggling to be able to keep the maintenance on. What advice do you give your peers? How do you stay positive? You're very positive, you're driving innovation. What kind of advice can you give as to how you can kind of move forward and be able to drive towards some of these things? Yeah, my advice would be don't fear innovation. All too often when that word first came up three, four years ago, it's kind of a driving course. People are automatically equating money and innovation. It's like, the only way you can innovate is by throwing a lots of money at it, and that's not it. You need to look at business processes, how you can create efficiencies within your organization by maybe doing some realignment of processes. Your technology is only going to be as good as the business processes. So you could have the best technology in the world. If you haven't fixed your processes, it's going to be the old adage, garbage in, garbage out. You're just going to be able to do things badly more quickly. So I think really, as we're looking at kind of that white space you mentioned, it's don't fear innovation. Look at how you can be a leader in the community, how you can partner with vendors and other folks within your community, and be at the forefront of technology. Look at some of the folks that are leading innovators and figure out how they do it. Network, communicate, communicate, communicate. I mean, that's the beauty of Oracle Open World. That's the beauty of other conferences like this. We can get together. We can network. We can learn and learn from each other. In all honesty, as much as I learned from Oracle and from Cisco and from others, I learn even more from the networking that I do during the four or four and a half days that I'm out here. Last question I have for you. Talk a little bit about the tech community down there in the Atlanta region. We go to lots of events all over the world. And here at San Francisco, too often they say, Silicon Valley's where all the innovation, all the startups happen. What's happening down in your neck of the world? So that's one of the things that I personally have charged myself with and within the Atlanta metropolitan area trying to work with the CIOs and the governments down there. We really want to drive the Atlanta area to be the Silicon Valley of the Southeast. So we are focusing heavily on working with partners in the community, looking again at how we can drive innovation, looking at how we can work with the various industries to drive that innovation and to leverage technology to come in and evaluate how we're doing business and networking with the folks from Silicon Valley, from the Northeast. I mean, it doesn't really matter locationally where you're at, but we are all working together to try to figure out what are those types of things that we can do to really make the Atlanta metropolitan area, the Silicon Valley, the Southeast. And I think we've done a lot of great things. Obviously, we've got a good partnership as well, maybe not obviously, but we communicate with the Charlotte, Mecklenburg area as well. They are a very, very strong technology presence as well. So from my standpoint, it's not even so much about the Atlanta area, although that's near and dear to my heart, but really working together with all of the different agencies in the Southeast to try to figure out how can we drive technology. We want to bring business, we want to bring technology more of it down to the Southeast area and to Atlanta. And I think that over the last few years, we're seeing a lot of migration, mostly from the North, not from the West, but we're seeing a lot of folks doing relocation, bringing their technology businesses into the Southeast. And if we can continue to do that, I think in the upcoming years, not too long from now, we will see Atlanta as a major hub for technology. All right, well, John Matelsky, CIO of DeKalb County, Georgia, really appreciate you sharing. Always excited, really great to chat with you on that. So we'll be right back with lots more coverage here from Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE, thanks for watching.