 Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. We're here for a CUBE conversation in Palo Alto, and my guest here is Marshall Choi, Senior Director of Systems Solutions with Oracle. Welcome to the CUBE conversation. Thanks, John. Oracle, obviously, is a huge player in the enterprise and building business solutions for years. Legendary, Larry Allison, CEO. We love covering Oracle. Certainly, Oracle Open World shuts down San Francisco. And the customer you have are huge. And optimized solutions is the big trend. So my first question I want to ask you is, what is going on in the marketplace around Oracle's engineered solutions, the optimized solutions? What are you seeing as the big market trends? Come in some of the more specific solutions later. Right. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the macro trends focus around the usual suspects, right? Social, mobile, analytics, cloud, big data. As we see customers moving in those directions, clearly, as we get a little more granular things are focused on, how do we get information flowing? How do we get information flowing faster? How do we get better meaning out of this? And with regard to the solutions, customers are really just looking to accelerate their business and get to market faster is what we're seeing. As I talked to customers across a broad range of industries and geographies as well. Talk about the application and systems collision that's happening. It's happening for some time. Obviously, some people call it convergence. Some people call it consumerization. We're seeing a lot of things in cloud for DevOps. What is that macro trend of those, the collision between the applications and the systems? And then how does Oracle fit into that equation? Well, we're seeing a blurring of the lines between those layers in the stack. And it's becoming a single system in many instances, right? And if I look at what we're doing at Oracle, specifically on the engineering side, we've got some very unique capabilities in that we've got ownership and control of that whole stack of IP. So from an optimized solutions perspective, puts us in a really good position to actually optimize at the layer of the stack where we can actually deliver the best efficiencies for our customers. And that can be in a number of forms, whether that be better performance, better availability, better security, better manageability. All trying to save them costs reduce their risk and gain their efficiencies as well. Coming up on Oracle Open World this year, I think this will be our fourth year at Oracle Open World. We always go there. We always like to look at the transformation of Oracle itself. Obviously, big fans of the company. I see Larry Ellison, a legend in Silicon Valley, still at the helm. And as other Titans are kind of retiring, he's still the leader there. We love it. It's dramatic. It's got the flair. And sometimes we're super critical of Oracle. But when you look at what Oracle has done, you guys pull a rabbit out of your hat every year. And we kind of joke that way. It's not necessarily pulling a rabbit, like you're changing the strategy. Nothing's really changed. You guys, how do you build on technology? So I got to ask you about things like Cloud. You guys talk about it the next year. It's delivered. And so it's like, you guys hear from the customers, you deliver what people want. And that's been great. So I got to ask you about the role of Amazon has done in the enterprise. Amazon has become a lot like Oracle-like, fully integrated stacks. That's kind of happening. So that kind of speaks to a direction of which you guys have a solution. And recently we were at the Open Compute Summit. We're just talking about people making their own hardware. So in essence, isn't this what Oracle's been doing? I mean, this is the iPhone model. This is what Apple's been putting forth. So this combination of hardware and software coming together like the Open Compute Summit, OpenStack and the Enterprise for Cloud and Amazon, how does all these trends relate specifically to Oracle? And how do you talk to your customers about that? Yeah, it's a good question. And basically we're talking about different procurement models, different financing models and such. And when it comes down to it with regard to Oracle, strategically, we've got the technologies and the products that can play in any of these spaces. So you can ingest your Oracle IP in a number of forms, whether that be in the cloud, in a private cloud scenario, or as a combination of both public and private in the hybrid scenario. So as workloads move back and forth between those different models, we're there to support our customers with whatever their business decisions are at the time. How do you guys keep up with that trend? Because in essence, one of the tweets we had on one of our crowd chats was with the commoditization of components, the commoditization of hardware, with the commoditization of software and devices, how do we actually make any money? So this obviously brings up the margin pressure. You're in an area where you're optimizing the solutions on Oracle, as they say, Oracle on Oracle software on hardware that integrate solution. It's going to put margin pressure. So how do you guys look at that from a perspective? Are you going to shift the value to the app side? Do apps ever get commoditized? I mean, some will argue applications if it has a value will be paid for. So again, Oracle, as you integrate that in, how do you look at that from a margin business pricing perspective? Yeah, I mean it's all about providing end user or customer value. And there are certain parts of the market where the margins are razor thin and it's a gunfight at the low end, for example, in the compute space. While we're happy to sell systems in that space, we feel we can add significantly better value in something like an Oracle Optimized Solution for eBusiness Suite, which is our flagship ERP platform. So it's an aggregation of not only components from a hardware and software perspective, but the culmination of thousands of hours of testing across both hardware and software. And by testing, I don't just mean functional testing. We're talking about nightly fault injection testing, bi-weekly patch regression testing, across the entire solution to enable our customers to have a very low risk deployment, save money, and get to market significantly faster. You know, a lot of people are criticizing the whole purpose built approach of what they call red stack at the time. And now you guys looking like geniuses doing that as everyone else tries to copy. You guys have huge install base customers. So it's not like you're rolling out proof of concepts. You have huge businesses that are running on business software that has been Oracle from database now fully stacked. How has the sun component accelerated that? Talk about some of the dynamics around, obviously sun microsystems, huge hardware approach. And a lot of the sun guys are still there, John Fowler and I'll come up with you, they're all there. And so how does the software guys and the sun guys work together? And talk about the kind of things that happen at Oracle from a best of breeze standpoint. What does that generate? What does that enable from an app standpoint? Yeah, it's a great question. Sun as one of the newer assets of the Oracle portfolio has provided us with a significant opportunity to again provide greater value to our customers. The typical industry arrangement of competing and cooperating industry partners, ISVs and ISVs, can provide a much less optimal solution. We can certainly add significantly more value to the overall solution by combining those hardware and software properties. Now, you mentioned best of breed. We're absolutely still focused on building the best of breed individual components in both hardware and software. The benefit of that because we work as a single engineering team across both software and hardware organizations, we can leverage that IP and those learnings across the organization and build full stack solutions. Our engineered systems from a product standpoint are probably the best example of that. Things like Exadata and the Oracle Supercluster, which are very much representations of the re-architecture and the re-engineering of how you would do database that provide orders of magnitude, better performance and efficiency. And what's been some of the feedback from the customers as you guys do that? I mean, it's a different approach, but at the end of the day, it's the same wine in a different bottle, right? As they say, especially the computing and solutions stuff to run on a variety of different elements. So although you may change the configuration of what's been the feedback from the customers on, well received, where you guys think you need to do better talking about the customer reaction. Well, the customer reaction has been very strong. I mean, we have thousands of systems, of engineered systems, thousands of optimized solutions deployed globally in all different industries and all different selling territories and geographies. You know, these are open systems. So just as easily as you can migrate on to them, you can migrate off of them should you choose to. Most customers are choosing to stay as opposed to migrating off and having a more expensive, less efficient solution. Talk about, to use the expression, sharpening the saw. Where does Oracle need to sharpen the saw? What do you need to sharpen the saw and continue to innovate on an area that you guys focus on from a customer standpoint? Is there an area you can constantly improving on that you hear feedback on or areas you think you need to do better? Sure. You know, for, you know, in the recent past, one of the areas we've concentrated on significantly and made some great progress on has been in the compute side with our Spark microprocessor. So, you know, as Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle, we were in a position of lagging in the industry. Since then, we've come forward with several microprocessor projects, which has effectively brought Oracle to the top of the race relative to the competition in the server category for best performance and price performance. We're quite pleased with that. So, Marshall, I got to ask you, as we were talking before, we came onto the CUBE conversation about, you know, you grew up in Silicon Valley and you've seen the computer revolution and its full swing of variety of cycles. We have both at that age where we've kind of seen that. So, I got to ask you, given where Oracle is today and where they've come from, what's your take on how they translate to the cloud and big data? Because the cloud is the main framing and the big system in the sky and big data is just middleware, some say, right? They want to oversimplify it, but really important trends, obviously change the economic landscape, which we talked about briefly about, but how does Oracle translate to the cloud and big data? Well, you know, at the end of the day, this is all about data and making meaningful use of data. And, you know, Oracle as the database company, we feel that we are primarily positioned to add value for customers in that space, especially as we extend the capabilities in things like analytics and unstructured data acquisition and categorization. The sky's the limit and we think we'll be there for a long time. What's your take on the technology industry? I mean, back in the day, you know, when you had Larry and the competitors, I remember them all giving up their speeches and talking about what the vision was for their growing companies, but you have maturity now, you have open source, you have a lot of consumer companies, but now enterprise is hot. So what's your take of Silicon Valley, the technology ecosystem? What's your personal take? That Oracle's official position, but, you know, you've seen it. What's your take? Well, you know, I think, you know, the whole phenomenon of BYOD or bring your own devices, you know, has significantly changed the landscape of IT and data centers in recent history. And, you know, as the new devices and wearable computing come into fashion and, you know, no pun intended there, but, you know, we're going to see, you know, even greater demands on the infrastructure. You know, my kids, for example, think that waiting two seconds for a response is far too long, whereas, you know, in our generation at that age, it was, you know, a week or so, right? So the attention span of the end users and the need for real-time analytics and data are only going to increase over time. And, you know, 20, 30 years from now, who knows, you know, what the future holds, but it's getting interesting. My co-host is theCUBE Dave Vellante. Oh, and I always talk about, you know, the different approaches to computing, but the market is changing so fast that the build-outs and the growth strategies are such that if it solves a problem, we'll take it, right? Certainly, cloud gives you more flexibility. So with that, what are you seeing with your customers? What are the key agility pain points do you guys see happening out there for them, and what do you guys do to solve those problems? Yeah, you know, I mean, our customers are, you know, they're looking to keep pace with their competition and with, you know, what's going on in the rest of the world and the economy, right? And so it's really how do I get a jumpstart on everybody else? How do I get there faster? That's the thing I hear constantly when I talk to customers. How do I get up and running faster? How do I deploy services faster? Bottom line, how do I generate that revenue faster, and how do I add value to the business faster? So we got to ask you a final question on this CUBE conversation. Talk about what's next for Oracle Optimized Solutions as this collision of innovation happens between applications, hardware and software coming together that purpose-built systems, integrated engineering. What's next? What's the next mile marker for integrated solutions from a business and technology standpoint? Well, you know, as we look at the current portfolio of optimized solutions that cover, you know, a wide range of specific areas like ERP and HCM and CRM and such, you know, we're obviously seeing a great convergence and aggregation of these types of business workflows. So, you know, the integration points between those systems and the ancillary systems that connect them is really what we're looking at in terms of the next stage of growth and optimized solutions and, you know, managing the entire lifecycle of those solutions. Marshall Choi here for CUBE Conversations. This is John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California, part of Silicon Valley with CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching. We good?