 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE, covering, empowering the autonomous enterprise, brought to you by Oracle Consulting. Welcome to the special digital presentation where we're tracking the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. And my name is Dave Vellante and we're here with Aaron Milstone, who's the Senior Vice President of Oracle Consulting. Aaron, thanks for coming on, good to talk to you. Dave, appreciate you having me and I like the introduction of the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. Well, it really is. I mean, you guys have gone from staff augmentation to being much more of a strategic partner and we're going to talk about that. But I want to start with this theme that you have about empowering the autonomous enterprise. Sounds good, nice little marketing tagline, but give us what's behind that, put some meat on the bone. Sure, right? So, what we define as the autonomous enterprise is really using artificial intelligence, using machine learning and using it to cognitively understand your actual data and processes you're using for your enterprise and then, you know, really embedding that into everything you're doing as a company and using it to both drive optimization and costs and increasing revenue. And I know that's a lot of kind of consultee speak. So, you know, we tend to think about and we've been talking about in terms of what we call Trimodal IT. And it's, this is probably the most exciting space that I've really thought through with my team as we build up a new consulting business you pointed out. But this is really about pivoting away from, you know, the systems of record and the systems of interaction and really building up the systems of intelligence capabilities that we see all enterprises needing to invest in heavily if they're not already investing there currently. Well, I want to talk about a couple of things there. You know, one is that notion of lowering cost and increasing revenue and you're right. People say, oh yeah, that's consulting speak but the good consultant digs in and starts feeling the onion. Well, how do you actually make money? You know, where are the inefficiencies in your business? And that's really what you're talking about. And that's what every business wants to know, right? Is not, that's the end game, but the how to is really what separates the good consultants from the pack. Correct, correct. And we're, you know, again, we're on this journey now. We've been, you know, you mentioned it, right? I'm two years into Oracle Consulting. Myself, I spent 23 plus years at Accenture where I was a managing director with them in part of their North America leadership team. When I came over to Oracle Consulting, we did, we pivoted from what you called staff augmentation business to a basic set of offerings which were things that you'd recognize, right? Migration services of workloads to cloud or integration or security work even has for SaaS augmentation that we would do. But, you know, pretty basic services. We're now pivoting again into sort of two areas, infrastructure-led transformation which is really our bold costs takeout play, as you just said, and sort of good consultants know how to do that. And really what that is is we're going and looking at companies that still have traditional data centers or maybe they've got some things on clouds and some things still in traditional data centers. And we're coming in and we're saying there's a business case here that looks at your total cost of ownership. And we think we can take out between 40 and 65% of your run rate costs. And that's everything from, you know, facilities, fire suppression systems through to the actual compute costs, through to the labor that's required to, you know, do the physical hands-on activities in the data center, right? So, you know, we have that sort of capability and we're pushing customers hard in that space at the moment. And then driving that into a secondary conversation system, by the way, with all these savings, you kind of have two choices, right? You can pocket the savings, obviously, or we would propose that you go into what we're calling the autonomous enterprise space and really building up your artificial intelligence, machine learning capability with centralized capabilities, centralized data versus letting every, you know, line of business, every department do it on their own. So let me, but let me ask you, so that makes sense, but while you're cloud, you were sort of a later entrance into cloud. So where does cloud fit into this? How do you respond to when customers say, yeah, but, you know, you guys were late coming to cloud? Yeah, we are definitely late coming to cloud, right? There's no two ways about it. I mean, what we've got is we have what we call a generation two cloud. And, you know, I jokingly tell customers that we have a late mover advantage. And that late mover advantage basically means that we've looked at what the first generation clouds have done. And quite frankly, they're great at what they do, right? They're fierce competitors, they're tough to compete with. They've got a lot of mind share, but they fundamentally were about targeting consumers or targeting enterprise collaboration tools, right? So if you want cat videos, if you want to watch, you know, humorous videos that people filmed and posted on social media, those are great clouds for that stuff. But if you want really mission critical, enterprise cloud workloads, right? That's where we come into play. And so when you start to look at really the, the key differentiators in our cloud and, you know, throughout, at least this is how I describe it to customers, right? So, you know, we look at sort of three layers. We have an autonomous capability both in our operating system and our database. What that basically means is that we have machine learning and artificial intelligence that's driving the key, you know, administrative activities in our cloud. We then have our Exadata platform. So Exadata for us is a secret weapon, right? We think that it is a differentiator in our products. And so, you know, Exadata for those of you, for those watching that don't know what it is, right? So Exadata emerged out of the sun acquisition that Oracle did. It is purpose-built hardware that is engineered for our software products, specifically our databases. And now we've taken that concept and moved it into our cloud. And so, you know, customers can come in and take very intensive enterprise, mission-critical workloads, run them straight in our cloud. And then, you know, when we look at the last point, it's probably security, where again, we have total segmentation of our security layers from the customer workloads, right? So again, we've taken the concepts that first-generation cloud providers have implemented and they've scaled it globally. So it's really tough for them to walk back on it. It's a huge investment. And we're now gone into a generation two cloud. And quite frankly, that's, I think that's where this is the frontier that, you know, everyone's racing to kind of crack. So we got a wrap, but I wanted to close on sort of the, I mean, again, we're talking about good consultants and good consultants have continuous improvement mindset. They got a North Star that they really never get to and that keeps moving because you got to keep innovating. You got to keep disrupting yourself. So maybe you could end by sort of talking about some of the things you're watching, some of the milestones you want to hit and some of that transformation that you want to keep going. How are you going to achieve that? Yeah, and it will get some of it when we hit the Deloitte segment too, right? But like we're definitely, we've moved from, we've definitely moved from, you know, the staff augmentation to offering, to basic offerings. We're now beyond that, we're starting to sell the infrastructure led transformation plays. What's exciting to me about that with our customers is, you know, Oracle is a big complex enterprise, as you'd expect with, you know, a company that has a tremendous amount of technology. We're now bringing holistic approaches to our customers. Say, let us help you optimize everything end to end. Let's look at your data center. Let's not look at a narrow slice. Let's not look at just CIS admins and DBAs. We're looking at things comprehensively. So moving there has been a pretty big milestone for us to hit and we've started to get some, some good momentum with our customers. Our next milestone is really going to be taking that autonomous enterprise and blowing it out. We're in use case and incubation period right now with that, but again, we've got some, I would argue we have the best talent of the world right now that thinks about this stuff and not just things about it from a pure technology standpoint, but things about how to actually make it effective for the business. And so once we get some of those motions going, right? The use case for the autonomous enterprise, that's artificial intelligence driven, right? It should have a continuous pace of change. And it's going to start to evolve in areas that, you know, quite frankly, we can't even predict yet, but we're excited to see where it leads. Well, thanks for spending some time with us. I am very excited to talk about that sort of collision course between your deep tech capabilities as Oracle as a product company and this, the global SI Deloitte, we're going to bring in those guys in a moment. But so thanks very much for taking us through the transformation and great job. Good luck. Thank you, appreciate it. All right, and thank you everybody for watching, keep it right there. We'll be back with more coverage of Oracle's transformation right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.