 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Welcome back everyone, we're live in Las Vegas here at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern Customer Experience Conference. Our second year, this is theCUBE Silicon Angles flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jack Berkowitz, who's the Vice President of Products and Data Science at Oracle. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Love talking to the product guys, get down and dirty on the product. So AI is hot this year, it's everywhere. Everyone's got an AI in their product. What is the AI component in your product? Well, what we're working on is building truly adaptive experiences for people. So we have a whole bunch of different techniques and technologies, all of it comes together essentially to create a system that amplifies people's capabilities, right? That's really the key thing. Two real important components. First of all, it's all about data, right? Everybody talks about it. What we've put together is in terms of consumer, it's the largest collection of consumer data in the Oracle data cloud. So we take advantage of all that consumer data. We also have a lot of work going on with collecting business data, both Oracle originated data as well as partner data. We're bringing that all together, it sets the context for the AI. Now on top of that, we have not just the latest trends in terms of machine learning or neural networks, things like that, but we're borrowing concepts from advertising, borrowing concepts from hedge funds, you know, so that we can make a real-time system. So it's all about real-time work. You mentioned neural networks. A lot of stuff conceptually in computer science have been around literally for decades. What is, and from your definition, obviously cloud creates a lot of compute and a lot of data out there now. But what is AI these days? Because everyone now is seeing AI as a mainstream term. Even the word metadata since Snowden's thing is now a mainstream term. Who would have thought metadata and AI would be talked about at kitchen tables? What is AI from your perspective? Yeah, from my perspective, it's really about augmenting folks, right? It's really about helping people do things, right? So maybe we'll automate some very manual tasks out, right? That'll free up people to have more time to do some other things. I don't think it's about replacing people, right? People are creative. We want to get people back to being creative and people are great at problem solving. So let's get them that information. Let's get them the aid so they get back to it. And get them options. Give them options, exactly, exactly. You know, if you can free up somebody from having to manipulate spreadsheets and all this other stuff so they can just get the answer and get on with things, people are happier. So Oracle's using first person data and third person data to build these capabilities, right? Yeah, exactly. How is that going to play out? How is Oracle going to go to customer and say we will appropriately utilize this third person data in a way that does not undermine your first person rights or value proposition? That's a great question, right? So privacy and respect has been sort of the principle that we've been driving at here. So there's mechanics of it, right? People can opt in, people can opt out. There's all the mechanics in the regulatory side of it. But it's really about how do you use these things so that it doesn't feel creepy, right? How do you do this in a subtle way so that somebody accepts the fact that that's the case? And it's really about the benefit to the person as to whether or not they're willing to make that trade off. A great example is Waze, right? Waze I use all the time to get around San Francisco traffic. You guys probably use it as well. Well guess what, if you really think about it, Waze knows what time I leave the house in the morning, what time I come home, right? Uber knows that every once a month I leave it two o'clock on a Sunday and come back a week later, right? So, you know, as long as you think about that I'm getting a benefit from Waze, I'm happy to have that partnership with them in terms of my data, right? And they respect it, and so therefore it works. And that comes back to some of the broader concept of modern customer experience. It is that quid pro quo that I'll take a little data from you to improve the service that I'm able to provide as measured by the increasing value of the customer experience that's provided. Yeah, that's right. You know, if you think, I used to live in London, right? And in London there's these stores where you can go in and that sales guy's been there for like 20 years and you just felt the relationship. He knows you, he knows your kids, and so sure enough, you go in, stationary store, whatever it is, he gives you that personal experience. That's a relationship that I've built. That's really all we're trying to do with all of this, right? We're trying to create a situation where people can have relationships again, right? And he's prompted with history of knowing you to just give you a pleasant surprise or experience that makes you go, wow. And that's data-driven now. So how do you guys do that? Because this is something that Mark Hurd brought up in his keynote, that every little experience in the world is a data touch point. And digital, whatever you're doing. So how do you guys put that in motion for data? Because that means data's got to be freely available. Data's got to be freely available. One of the big things that we've brought to bear with the CX suite is that the data is connected and the experiences are connected. So really we're talking about adding that connected intelligence on top of that data, right? So it's not just the data, in fact we talked about it last night. It's not just the data even from the CX systems, from service, but even the feed of what inventory is going on in real time. So they can tell somebody if something's broken, hey, tell you what, this store has it, you can go exchange it in real time, right? Instead of having to wait for a courier or things like that. So it is that data being connected and the fact that our third party data, this consumer data is actually connected as well. So we bring that in on the fly with the appropriate context. And so it just works, right? Well, one of the new things here is the adaptive intelligence positioning product. What is that? And take a minute to explain the features of how that came to be and how it's different from the competition. Okay, great. So the products are very purposeful built apps that plug in and amplify Oracle Cloud apps and you can actually put in a third party capability if you happen to have it. So that's the capability and it's got the decision science, the machine learning and the data. So give us an example of a product. So a product is adaptive intelligent offers which we were showing here, right? It gives product recommendations, gives promotions, gives content recommendations on websites, but also in your email, if you go into the store, you get the same stuff and we can then go and activate advertising campaigns to bring in more people based on those successful pickups of products or promotions. That's a great example. Very constrained use case, right? Addressed. Fed by a lot of different data. Fed by a lot of different data. The reason why they're adaptive is because they happen in real time. So this isn't a batch mode thing. We don't calculate it the day before. We don't calculate it a week before or every three hours. It's actually click by click for you and for you, reacting and re-scoring and rebalancing. And so we can get a wisdom of the crowds going on and an individual reaction. Click by click, interaction by interaction. This is an important point, I think, that's nuance in the industry. You mentioned batch mode, which talks about how things are processed and managed to real time. And the big data space is a huge transition. What are you looking at? Hadoop or in memory and all the architectures out there from batch data lakes to data in motion, they're calling it. Yeah, exactly. And so now you have this free flowing, horizontally scalable data layers, if you will, everywhere. And so being adaptive means what? Being ready, being... Being ready is the fundamental principle to get to being adaptive. Being adaptive is just like this conversation, being able to adjust, right? And then not giving you the same exact answer seven times in a row, because you asked me the same question. Or it's in some talking point database that you pull up from an FAQ. So it adapts to context. As the context changes. It's all about adapting to context. And then the system will adopt that context and adapt its response. That's right. And we were showing last night, even in the interaction, as more context is given, the system can then pick that up and spin, right? And then give you what you need. And Omni-Channel is a term that's not new, but certainly is amplified by this. Because now you have a world where, certainly multiple clouds available to customers, but also data's everywhere. Data's everywhere and you're in around. And channels are everywhere and being adaptive also means customizing something at a point in time. And you might not know what it is up in those seconds or near real-time, or actually real-time. Real-time, right? Real, real human time. 100 milliseconds, 150 milliseconds, anywhere in the world is what we're striving for. And that means knowing that in some database somewhere, you checked into a hotel the four seasons. Joe will check them. I in hotel. And now, oh, you left your house on Uber. Oh, you're the CEO of Oracle. You're in a rental car. I'm going to give you a different experience. Knowing you're a travel warrior, executive. That's kind of what Mark Currie was trying to get to yesterday. Yeah, that's what he's getting to. So it's a bit of a journey, right? This is not a sprint, right? So there's been all this press, you know? And you think, oh my God, if I don't have a bike, it's a journey, it's a bit of a marathon, right? But these are the experiences that are going to happen. I want to pick up on 150 milliseconds is quite the design point. I mean, human beings are not able to register information faster than about 80. That's right. So you're talking about two brain cycles, coming back to them. Not, I mean, it's an analogy, but it's not a bad one. No. 150 milliseconds anywhere in the world, that is a supreme design point. And it is what we're shooting for. Obviously, you know, there's things about networks, everything that have to be worked through. But yeah, that responsiveness, but you're seeing that response from some of the big consumer sites, right? You see that type of responsiveness. That's what we want to get to. So at the risk of getting too technical here, how does multiple cloud integration or hopping change that equation? Is this one of the reasons it's going to drive customers to a tighter relationship with Oracle? Because it's going to be easier to provide that 150 second response inside the Oracle fabric? Yeah, you nailed it, right? And I don't want to take too many shots at my competitors, but I'm going to, right? We don't have to move data, right? I don't have to move my data from me to AWS to someplace else, right? Bluemix, whatever it happens to be, right? And because we don't have to move data, we can get that speed, right? And because it's behind the fabric, as you put it, we can get that speed. We have the ability to scale the data centers. We have the data centers located where we need them, right? Now, your recommendations, if you happen to be here today, they're here, they may transition to, you know, Sydney, if you're in Australia, right? To be able to give you that speed, but that is the notion, right? To be able to have that seamless experience for you, even for travelers. That's a gauntlet. You just threw down a gauntlet. I did. Yeah. And that's what we're going to go compete against, right? Because what we're competing is on the experience for people. We're not competing on who's got the better algorithm, right? We're competing on that experience to people and everything about that. So that also brings up the point of third party data because have that speed, certainly you have advantages. In your architecture, but humans don't care about Oracle and on which servers are, they care about what's going on on their phone. That's right. If they're mobile. Okay, so the user that requires some integration. So that won't be a hundred percent Oracle, there's some third party. What's the architecture, philosophy, guiding principles around integrating third party data for you guys? Because it's certainly part of the system, it's part of the product, but. Yeah, okay, so there's third party data which could be from data partners or Oracle originated data through our Oracle data cloud or the 1500 licensed data partners there. And then there's also third party systems, right? So for example, if somebody had Magento commerce and they wanted to include that into our capability. On the third party systems, we actually have built this around an API architecture or infrastructure using REST. And it's basically a challenge I gave my PMs. I said, look, I want you to test against the Oracle cloud system. I want you to test against the Oracle on-prem system. And I want you to find the leading third party system. I don't care if it's Salesforce or anybody else. And I want you to test against that. And so as long as people can map to the REST APIs that we have, they can have inter-operation with their systems. I mean, the architectural philosophy is to decouple and make highly cohesive elements. And you guys are a big part of that with Oracle as a component. But I'm still going to need to get stuff from other places. And so API is a strategy. And microservices are all going to be playing ball with that? Yeah, and actually we deployed a full microservice architecture. So behind the scenes, on that offers one, 19 microservices interplaying and operating. But the reality is this is going to be one of the biggest challenges that the industry faces is that how we bridge or how we gateway cloud services from a lot of different providers is a non-trivial challenge. That's right. I remember back in early on in my career when we had all these many computer companies and each one had their own proprietary network on the shop floor for doing cell controllers or finance, whatever else it might be. And when customers wanted to bring those things together, the many computer companies said, yeah, put a bridge in place. Yeah, exactly. And along came TCPIP and Cisco and said, forget that, throw them all out. It wasn't the microprocessor that killed those many computer companies, it was TCPIP. The challenge that we face here is how are we going to do something similar? Because we're not going to bridge these things. The latency and the speed, and you hit the key point, where is the data is going to have an enormous impact on all of us? Yeah, that's right. And again, the investments that we've been making with the CX Cloud Suite allow us to do that, right? Allow us to take advantage with a whole bunch of data right away. And the integration with the ODC, so we couldn't have probably done this two or three years ago because we weren't ready, right? We're ready now. And now we can start to build it, we can start to take it down up to the next level. And to this point about the roadmap and TCPIP, it was interesting, we were all historians here, we're all enough to remember those days, but TCPIP standardized the OSI model, which was a fantasy of seven layers of open standards, if you remember. Of course, we're fantasy, we still talk about it. Well, I mean, no, but- What layer are you on? But at the time the proprietary was IBM and DEC owned the network stack, so that essentially leveled off there, so the high watermark was interoperating at TCPIP. Is there an equivalent analog to that in this world? Because if you can almost take what he said and say, and take it to the cloud and say, look it, at some point in this whatever stack you want to call it, even if it's a stack, there has to be a moment of coalescing around something for everybody, and then a point for differentiation. So again, I'm just going to go right back, that's a great question by the way, and it's like thinking this through as I say, but I'm just going to go right back to what I said, it's about people, right? So if I coalesce the information around that person, whether that person's a consumer, whether that person's a sales guy, whether that person's working on inventory management or better yet disaster relief, which is all of those things put together, right? It's about them and what they need. And so if I get that central object around people, around companies, right? Then I have something that I can coalesce and share a semantic on, right? So the semantic's another old seven layer word. I didn't want to say it today, but I can have a share meaning. It's a disruptive enabler. Yeah. That's what you're saying is that we need a stack, and I use that word prohibitively, but we need a way of characterizing layer seven application so that we have either way. But the idea is that we need to get more into how the data gets handled and not just how the message gets handled. That's right. OSI was focused on how the message got handled. Now we're focused on how the data gets handled given that messaging substrate. And that is going to be the big challenge for the industry. Yeah. Well, certainly Larry Ellis is going to love this conversation. OSI, TCP, IP, going old school. You said we're all old and yeah, that's what we grew up in. Yeah, but this is definitely. Today's computers and today's notions are built on the shoulders of giants. Well, the enabler that's happening is so disruptive. It is as disruptive. It's going to be a 20 year, 30 year innovation window. And I mean, we're just at the beginning. So the final question I have for you, Jack, is summarize for the folks watching, what is the exciting things about the AI and the adaptive intelligence announcements and products that you guys are showing here and how does that go forward to the future without revealing any kind of secrets on oracles like your public company? What's the bottom line? What's the exciting thing that they should know about? I think the exciting thing is that, is that they're going to be able to take advantage of these technologies, these techniques, all this stuff, without having to hire a thousand data scientists in a seven month program or a seven year program to take advantage of it. They're going to be able to get up and running very, very quickly. They can experiment with it to be able to make sure that it's doing the right thing. From a CX company, they can get back to doing what they do, which is building great product, building great promotions, building a great customer service experience. They don't have to worry about, gee, what's our seven year plan for building AI capabilities? That's pretty exciting, right? It lets them get back to doing what they do, which is to compete on their products. And I think the messaging of this show is really good because you're talking about empowerment, the hero. Yeah, it's kind of gimmicky, but the truth is, what cloud has shown in the world is, you can offload some of those mundane stuff and really focus on the task at hand, being creative or building solutions or whatever you're doing. Yeah, Mark was talking about it. This much money to spend. What's my decision to spend it on, right? Spend it on competing again with your products. Yeah. All right, Jack Berwitz, live here inside theCUBE, here at Oracle's Modern Customer Experience, talking about the products, the data science, AI is hot, great products. Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Welcome to theCUBE and good job sharing some great insight and the data here. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be right back with more after this short break.