 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Oracle's modern marketing experience. Brought to you by Oracle. Now here's your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live for day two of coverage, SiliconANGLES theCUBE. This is our flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, I'm with Jeff Frick, my co-host, our next guest is Steve Krause, Group Vice President of Product Management, Oracle Marketing Cloud. Steve, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. So day two, yesterday we had all day coverage. Really the theme was integration. We had Kevin on, GM, SVP, Oracle Marketing Cloud. Really kind of highlighting, getting down for real here now, getting it real, keeping it real. Not a lot of vaporware, not a lot of slideshow, promises, really delivering on the mission he put forth with the team, which was, hey, portfolio of products, have a data layer underneath that that traverses across horizontally scalable. Really, we think is a great vision. So I want to get your thoughts, you're on the product side, and have had a lot of experience with data cloud content. What is the product conversation going on internally right now? Because it is a complete transitional market right now. You have this whole old way, which is kind of current state of the art, email marketing, linear based progression, form capture, destination driven, sales person driven type transactions. Moving to an omnidirectional, multiple data, social data, all kinds of new touch points with the customer, non-linear consumption, content marketing, this is now the new way. What are some of the product conversations, and what are you guys focused on? Well, the product conversations are about how do we make it real. Everybody can see the end point, no one disagrees with the right message for the right customer at the right time. The issue is here to there, how do you get there? And so you talked about the fact that this is now an omnichannel world. People are interacting with brands, wherever they choose, that could be in social channels, it could be through some sort of mobile device, it could be on their traditional desktop. The sad reality of companies is they've grown up serving each of those channels in a siloed way. And so what you've got are a bunch of teams each doing their own thing. What everybody agrees is you aren't gonna get the right message at the right time to the right person if there's no coordination among those various teams. So we call that orchestration. That's one of the benefits of having a marketing cloud is the marketing cloud can bring the solutions together and make them talk, just like your organization should. I love that orchestration. And if you add the word automation, you have a DevOps-like concept. Yes, you do. And this is really what modern marketing is moving into this era of automation, abstracting away complexities. Because CMOs don't want to be in IT. Now they'll have an IT, they'll be a digital chief data officer, chief data officer, all these new things that are kind of on the customer. Because they're under pressure to serve their customers. So your customer's customer at the end of the day is the endpoint, which is the edge of the network. So how do you guys look at this concept of modern marketing? And specifically, do you look at it from like a stack perspective? Do you take that DevOps approach? You could argue that you take a stack approach. Is that how you look at it? I mean, you got a lot of different acquisitions in there, a lot of things kind of coming together. How do you view that stack in modern marketing? Well, so I think one way we like to view it is in terms of how our customer, the marketer sees it, you mentioned the CMO. Most CMOs of larger enterprises, at some point in the past couple of years, have woken up one morning and realized that everything that they've bought in the past, it all made sense at the time incrementally. They started off with an email solution and maybe they got a web analytics solution, then social came along and they got social listening. But one morning they woke up and they had 14 or 19 of these solutions. And they felt like the homeowner who's trying to build a house by having a relationship with every last wire cutter, door framer, window puller. No one builds a house like that. There's this thing called a foreman. And so where people have come is I need a foreman on my job site called marketing technology. And that's where platforms come in and that's where a stack comes in rather than individual pieces. So I think what we do is we start with what's the customer need? What is the CMO need? They do need a foreman on the job site. That means a platform. It also means simply somebody to take responsibility for success. And Oracle's very good at that being such a large company, so many customers. So Steve, you mentioned this is on the channel and you need to break down the silos of how you went to market before. And everyone agrees on the destination. But how do you get started? You don't want to build just another silo of a new thing that's where you want to go because you do need it integrated. So what are you seeing people as great, all the keynotes, Clorox, Western Digital. Old line companies that have been around a long time. And as I think it was Eric said, they got a lot of baked in processes they've been doing a long time. How do they get started on this journey? What are the kind of easy wins that you guys see kind of consistently within your customer base to help them move down the road? Sure. Well, I think there's two parallel paths. One path is simply getting the technology in there that isn't premised on working in a silo. A lot of technology, that's what it was built to do. It's not considered to work with something else. That is the benefit of going with something like Oracle. It's premised on the idea of it all works together. So when you bring in on the B2B side, an Oracle Eloqua, or on the B2C side, an Oracle Responses, what you're saying is my first premise is that stuff needs to work together. Even if I later need to layer in the other pieces. So that's on one side, that's procuring technology. The other side is my organization. You can go and have the tools, but if the organization itself isn't orchestrated, if there isn't someone's job to say this needs to work together, it won't work together. So we try to encourage those parallel paths. You have to be willing to not just write a check and think it's going to solve itself. You have to have organizational change as well. I had a chance to sit down with Mark Hurd in January for a one-on-one conversation. I pressed him pretty hard on the integration piece. And this is something that you bring up working together. It implies integration and seamless integration. And he was forthright. He's like, no, no, no. We are absolutely looking at single code base on-premise in the cloud and fully integrated. You guys have talked a lot about that here. Integration is the new table stakes. It's also a competitive advantage. If you look at like the startups, venture-back startups, we talked a minute ago yesterday, I saw a few others here today. It's hard to compete when you don't have that integration power. So I want you to talk about what's going on with the integration one on the core platform on the product side. And two, how do you guys enable an ecosystem partner to play well in there and thrive, not feel beholden to the big red Oracle? I mean, so that's kind of what is kind of seems to be the critical success factor right now. Have a platform, obviously Oracle has some advantages there, but enabling the ecosystem is really, really important. How do you guys do that? Well, you're right. So there are two facets to this. The first facet are what is the critical pieces necessary for the platform itself? And I think most people would agree there are certain things that make sense to centralize like, oh, your customer data, your ability to orchestrate that data, it's hard to do those things that are about coordination with a bunch of distributed systems. That said, Oracle is never going to have an answer to every possible marketing question. In fact, anybody who's seen these industry logo diagrams with thousands and thousands of companies, there's a lot of good stuff going on out there. So we have a platform, it has several critical pieces. They talk to each other and the platform is open for all those other hundreds or even thousands of companies to come in and plug in. And in fact, around us here, you've got the best evidence of it. You've got these folks who are app cloud partners, that's what we call the integration framework, where a mint ago can come in and say, guess what? You can use mint ago from within Oracle Eloqua. So it's really a two tier system. We do believe a platform makes sense. You need a foundation for the house, but that does not mean that you have to buy every last furnishing in the house from us. You should go and buy this stuff. And that's a focus for you guys. That innovative companies are doing. That's a focus for you guys. Absolutely. Talk about the data cloud, because we hear about that. Is that a central way to look at it? Obviously Oracle has a database. Great position, competitively in the market. Gives you guys a unique perspective across the board. Does that make the integration easier? And how does the data cloud fit vis-a-vis, say the database, or is it seamlessly tied together? And is that the kind of the central point? Is that what you're talking about? Well, so go back to the marketing stakeholder here. CMO, whoever's doing that. I think everybody understands that in the new world of marketing, which is very data driven, data is the fuel for the marketing engine. You put better fuel in the engine, the engine's going to run better. And so Oracle, really, all the way up to Larry, came to the conclusion of that's part of this equation. It's not enough in marketing to simply give someone a system that stores data, or a system that orchestrates individuals through marketing journeys. You need to say, marketer, on top of that, I'm gonna make sure that you can manage and access the best data possible, because that's your fuel. I want you to have the richest fuel. Part of that is just having great technology to help people manage their own data. But there's this whole other piece, and John, you've referred to it, it's the Oracle Data Cloud, which is how can I have the easiest and most comprehensive access to data that I don't own but I can use? And so we gave some examples of that the other day. We have an integration that involves the Oracle Maximizer property with the Oracle DMP, Data Management Platform, that itself talks to the Data Cloud. And what you're able to do there is, if someone comes to your website, you've never seen them ever before, no relationship. Instead of just saying, well, I don't know what to do, let's just give them what everybody else sees, you can actually ask the Data Cloud, do you know this person? And then if they do, they can say, hey, that's a backpacker. Great, show them the backpack, don't show them the least common denominator. So that's a great example of one experience is just the same for everybody, least common denominator. The other experience is tailored for you, the difference is you're using Oracle Data to make that decision. Hold on, Jeff, Jeff wants to ask a question, but I want to get one more in. So talk to the professional out there who's a digital architect or a doer, building out a horizontally scalable, they have all this app pressure to build more apps, obviously abstract away the complexity and compare what you've learned. Go back, rewind the clock, okay, to when Oracle had the mishmash. A lot of acquisitions coming in, you guys made some decisions on the stack where the data layer is, and you made some good calls, obviously data is moving across different apps, but yet make those apps stand alone on themselves, whether it's B2C or B2B, which essentially implies some sort of standardization, but yet some vertical prepackaged differentiation for the apps. That's a problem that a lot of practitioners are having today in the enterprise. What could you share that you guys have learned internally as you've transformed that would help that person figure out what to do? Because they have the same challenges, they have a mishmash of stuff, some data silos. What's the playbook? Well, you know, one of the most basic parts of the playbook, and it's been not necessarily executed on well all the way back into the days of data warehousing where there were a lot of failed projects, is work backwards from what you're going to do with all of this. Sometimes there's the, I just want to go and put it in the world's biggest system and we'll figure that out later, what we're going to do. That's a hard thing. A much easier thing is to start with the use case, especially those that have the most impact on the business, to say, all right, what we need to do here is make sure that our experience on our properties for converting prospects into customers, for let's say hotels, and I'm doing all sorts of advertising, I'm trying to bring in new customers, on my hotel chain, let's make sure that that is a far more friction-free process than the past and has a higher conversion rate. What do we need to do that? What information systems do we need? And then work backwards from those experiences. Obviously you will need a coherent profile database, you'll need identity management, but the point is it's focused on an end result. Often people go wrong by having no reference to what they're going to do with this technology and as a result, they do build a solution that is capable of doing anything in theory, but nothing in practice. I'd love to get your perspective with your customers, as they sit and watch some of these big macro trends change the way people expect to interact with technology. With mobile, obviously, first of mobile, first experience is going to the primary way that people engage with brands, and then the cloud, and how cloud really is a cloud-centric philosophy, enables you to do so much more, both with integration of different applications, as well as leveraging the horsepower that's on the mobile phone at the source and at the edge to do things very different, and I assume that that's a little bit ahead of most of the marketers as they make their transformation to be modern marketers. Yeah, well I'll tell you the thing that marketers are realizing now about mobile, and it's not so much about the technology, but it's about what the availability of this computing power in people's pockets has done to their behavior. More and more people are consuming media and they're interacting with brands in a very incremental way. So just think about how you use your own mobile device. You've got a minute waiting in line, you look at the weather, you're doing something else, you have a couple minutes, you're checking Facebook updates. The marketing equivalent of that is more and more people are not showing up at your store, they're not making a concerted effort to spend half an hour to learn about you. They're literally, they heard from someone, they saw a tweet, what's this? They look, in that moment you have the chance to either earn an X step and create engagement or that's it, the moment went by and the term moment has become very big for this micro moment. It's the fact that the mobile world has fragmented our attention into smaller and smaller bits that says, marketer, you can't wait for someone to give you half an hour. You have to go and take that small opening and turn it into something where you can earn a greater relationship and that's where having the data, like being able to know this is a backpacker, right when I see them the first time, you can't wait for them to say, hey, let me fill in a long form to tell you what I want. That world is changing simply from the fact that we now have available to us this device that lets us do and see anything at any time and we do it often just in between moments. So we have a couple of minutes left, I want to get your thoughts on the product roadmap. I know I see a public company, you can't share a lot of details around that but can you give a little bit of a taste, show a little bit of leg on where the product roadmap short, midterm, longterm, what are some of the guiding principles that you guys have, what can we expect to see on the product management side? Yeah, well the guiding principles we have for sure with the Oracle Marketing Cloud as a whole is to say, number one, for marketing we want to take several core products, bring them together as a platform, make them better together. So that is the core, what are we doing with the Oracle Marketing Cloud? You can see that we've covered orchestration, we've covered the ability to connect data together, we have optimization in there. You're going to see us continue down that general path and make the platform stronger. At the same time, all of that pursuit of marketing and modern marketing shouldn't have to stop at the organizational boundary called marketing, it should really apply to any customer interaction. If that happens with sales, if that happens with service, if that happens with commerce and so profiles, orchestration, optimization, it can't just stop because it's no longer marketing and Oracle has a larger view on that, you might have talked to Mark, heard about this, it's called CX, customer experience and so the integrations within the Oracle Marketing Cloud, those are a good thing. The integrations with third parties to the App Cloud, those are a good thing. Ultimately it gets into the bigger picture of integration with the total customer experience. And that's where- It's a holistic view, I mean you look down at Oracle engineered systems. All the way up to CX and everything in between is an opportunity. And that's where Oracle is the logical provider here. We go back to the form and on the job site, who already has those solutions in sales, commerce, service and marketing we do, where is the vision? The vision is to say what marketing is doing now, everyone will be doing and we want it all to connect together. Oracle, Oracle's getting bigger and bigger as always and making the big pivots. Congratulations on the success. We look forward to seeing more product announcements. Steve Kraus, Group Vice President, Product Manager at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Hopefully we can stand up stuff very easy. Data integration, this is the future of modern marketing at theCUBE. We'll be right back more, you're watching theCUBE.