 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for theCUBE's special coverage of Oracle's modern CX, modern customer experience. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. My co is Peter Burris, our next guest is Tony Nadolin, who's Tony Nadolin's the global vice president of global consulting at Oracle for the marketing cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you. Tony, so you got to implement this stuff and we've heard a lot of AI magic and there's a lot of meat on the bone there and people are talking about, there's a lot of real things happening. Certainly Oracle's acquired some great technologies over the years, integrated it all together. The proof is in the pudding, you roll it out, the results have to speak for themselves. Yeah, absolutely. So share with us some of those activities. What's the scoreboard look like? What's the results? Yeah, so I mean, I think what's really important and Laura spoke about this yesterday, it's people and product and the customers are buying visions. They're looking at creating and changing the customer experience. They're not just buying a piece of technology. They're buying a transformation. I think what's really important and what we do a lot in services is, and all services, not just, I would say Oracle marketing cloud services, but just healthy services, is when customers are implementing, they're not just implementing technology, they're not just plumbing the pipes. They are putting in changes, they're looking at the people, their process, their technology. So we have a really good relationship with our customers and our partners, and we're constantly looking at the complete set of services, the complete suite. So from what I call transformational services, where we come in and try and understand, what are you trying to change? How are you trying to change your customer experience? And as a marketer, owning not only what you do and how all the different channels are working together across all the different products that they are, you know, they've purchased between Eloquera, Sponsors, Blue, Chi, Maximizer, et cetera. But... So that's like a white, you're laying it all out. It's in a room, I'm not more simplifying, but it's not just rolling out stuff. You got a planning, put the pieces together. You do, and it's a readiness, right? It's a readiness of the organization. It's not, you think about it, you've got within a marketing organization, you've got many teams coming together. They have to be united around the brand, the consistency, how they're engaging with customers. But also, you know, not only across, like either an acquisition team or a loyalty team or an upsell and cross-sell team, but how does that, as we were looking at the product key, how does that then extend into the services engagement? How does it extend into the sales engagement? How are we making sure that everyone is using the same messaging, the same branding, leveraging each other? So it's a real transformation at a people process and technology level, so that when you're then implementing, you're implementing changes, you know. And so we've got some great services and great partners that make sure that when the customers are going for that transformation, they're sort of going at fully sort of ready. And, you know, our role from a services perspective is to ensure then sort of define the transformation, define the strategy, like plan the plan, and then go execute the plan and then, you know, putting in the plumbing, getting it on ready, you know. The analogy I use, I'm sure we've got kids, right, we have toddlers and you build the kids' first bikes, right? And your goal is to build that bike, put the training wheels on the bike, and ultimately sort of stand behind your child to a point that when you let them go, they're not going to graze their knees, right? And then, from an ongoing basis, you know, continue to stand behind them, then get ready to take the training wheels off, right? And then the training wheels cannot come off. And then, yeah, maybe one point, they may become BMX champions, right? But you're sort of behind them. There's a whole journey. Progression, exactly. I mean, with my kids, it's simply man-to-man and then zone defense, right? You know what they're young. But it's progression, right? And a lot of customers, you know, we have not only like the onboarding and implementation services, but these ongoing services that are so key, right? Because obviously, you know, it's important to ensure that your customers are, say, realizing, right? I think about services and the journey, there's the discovery, the transformation and the strategy, that's like the discovery, but you then got the realization and then the optimization. And the realization to me is you're realizing that initial step, right? You're realizing the technology and you're realizing people and process. You're getting people stood up. Skills, you know, people, organizations, technology, data, you're realizing it all so they can then take the next step. So what's the playbook? So a lot of times, I mean, in my mind's eye, I can envision, you know, in a whiteboard room, boardroom, laying it all out, putting the puzzle pieces together and then rolling out an implementation plan. But the world is going agile, it's not waterfall anymore, so it's a combination of, you know, battle mode, but also architectural thinking. So not just fashion, real architectural foundation or design thinking. Design thinking, what's the playbook? What's the current state of the art in the current? Well we have, you know, we have obviously, you know, product consultants, architects, solution consultants, content, creative, it's the whole spectrum of where the customer needs to focus on. And I think, So you assemble them based upon the engagement? Based upon the engagement and understanding like, what are the customer strengths? Where are they now? Where are they trying to get to? There's some customers, you know, we have a whole range of services, we have a whole range of customers. And so there are some customers where like, look, we have our own teams today, we want to augment our teams with your teams, or we want to have hybrid models, or we have our own teams today, but you know, you've got great, not only have you got great people, but you've got great processes, so like, look at Maximizer as an example, right? So, you know, a lot of our Maximizer customers not only use our platform, but they use our people, but they're not just buying our people, they're buying our sort of Agile, Kanban, JavaScript, you know, development practices that are, you know, a different level of software development. It's not just the people that can code, it's the development practices, right? So it's that whole, like, operational services where we bring to the table just a different degree of operational excellence. But we're also able to go into our customers that have their own teams and provide them also consulting perspective around how they can also sharpen their edge if they want to sort of keep, you know, so whole spectrum of services. So let me see if I can, let me see if I can throw something out there and kind of like the center, the central thesis of what you do and how it's changed from what we used to do. Especially a company like Oracle, which has been a technology company at the vanguard of a lot of things. It used to be that customers had an idea of what they wanted to implement. They wanted to implement an accounting system. The processes are relatively known. What was unknown was technology. How do I, what do I buy? How do I configure? How do I set it up? How do I train? How do I make the software run? How do I fix? So it was known process, unknown technology. As a consequence, technology companies could largely say, yeah, the value is intrinsic to the product. So you buy the product, you got it now. But as we move more to a service world, as we move more toward engaging the customer world where the process is unknown, and the technology, like the cloud, becomes increasingly known, now we're focused on more of an unknown process, known technology, and the values in, does the customer actually use it? I think the value is actually in does the customer get value? I think there's a, I've managed customer success organizations and customer service organizations. And the one thing I see in SAS is usage doesn't always equate to value. So I think as a services organization, it's important to understand the roadmap to value. Because a lot of times, I would say in commodity software, sort of the use of it by default in itself was enough. Like you were moving to a software platform. I think SAS customers, typically especially marketers, are looking for transformation. They're looking for a transformation and a change in value. A change in value in the conversation they're having with a customer. A change in acquisition, loyalty, retention. A change in being relevant, as Joseph was saying this morning. It's like being relevant with the customer. And that value is more than just implementing some technology. So it's focusing on ensuring that the customer is getting value, utility out of whatever they purchase, not just that they got what they purchased. Exactly, exactly. So as we move into a world where we're embedding technology more and more complex, it's two things happen. One is, you have to become more familiar of the actual utilization. Yes. What does it mean? I think that Marketing Cloud helps that. What is marketing? How does it work? And second one, the historical norm has been, yeah, we're going to spend months and years building something, deploying something, but now we're trying to do it faster and we can't. So how is your organization starting to evolve its metrics, is it focused on speed, is it focused on obviously value delivered, utilization? What are some of the things that you are guiding your people to focus on? Well, I think I very much take an outside interview. So to me, if I look at why a customer is buying and what do they want, obviously most customers want fast time to value as reduced effort, obviously, and little surprises. I think having a plan and being an executor plan, and this whole, as we were talking, like one-to-many versus one-to-one. They're timing you, no surprises, and they want to execute. Right, and time to value, right? It's speed. I think, as we were talking, similar to as a marketer who is trying to engage any customer and sort of going from that one-to-many to that one-to-you, what's important now for any organization, a services organization, any company is, is to understand what does your business look like? Because why you bought from Oracle, whether you'd be in a certain vertical or a certain space, or a certain maturity as a customer, it's important that we have the playbooks, and we do, that say, if you're a customer of this size, of these products, in this vertical, then we have the blueprints for success. They may not be absolutely perfect, but they're directional, that we can sort of put you on the fast path that we've seen the potholes before. We've seen the bumps. We understand the nuances of your data, your systems, your people, your regulations, so that we can actually not, we have a plan, and it's a plan that's relevant to you. It's not a generic plan. And I think that's the biggest thing where good companies show up and deliver solutions, that they're not learning sort of 100% on them. There's always going to be nuances and areas of gray that you work through, where the customers just as much as vendors as they transform, we're not just swapping like for like, but when you transform, there's changes that occur on the customer side. There's new awarenesses of, I didn't realize we wanted, we did that, or I didn't realize I want to change doing that, and I've actually changed maybe my whole thought. What's the change coming from this event? If you look at the show here, Modern CS, some really good directional positioning, the trajectory of where this is going, I believe it's on a great path, certainly directionally irrelevant, 100%. Some stuff will maybe shift in the marketplace, but for the most part, I'm very happy to see Oracle go down this road. But there's an impact factor to the customers and the communities, and that's going to come to you. So what are you taking away from the show that's important for customers to understand as Oracle brings in adaptive intelligence, as more tightly coupled, highly cohesive elements come together? I think, I go back to this, I think to me it's transformation. I think customers really need to understand what are they trying to achieve as they transform. And not just by a piece of technology, but come into it understanding, okay, what are we trying to transform? And have we got, like all change management, all transformational management, have I got the right buy-in across the organization? As a marketer, if I'm trying to transform the organization, have I got the right stakeholders in the room with me? Am I trying to influence the right conversations? You look at the conversation yesterday with Netflix and the discussion or Time Warner, sorry, around their transformation around data. That wasn't a single entity determining that. That was a company-driven strategy, a company-driven transformation. And I think to really change the customer experience and control the brand of that across all touch points of the company. It requires transformation and it requires being realistic around also how long that journey takes, depending on the complexity and size of the company. It requires investment of people, of energy, of resources, and really understanding where is your customer today? Where is your competition? And to Mark's point, it's like the market is being one here, not through, you're having to compete against your competition. You're having to be better than them. You're having to understand your competition just as much as you understand yourself. So you're leapfrogging because just as much as you're going after your competitors' customers, your customers are coming after your customers, right? Your competitors are coming after your customers. So I think transformation and understanding how to engage the right services leaders, be it Oracle or any of our partners, to really transform your businesses to me the biggest takeaway. The technology then, be it chat bots or AI, I mean they augment, they help, they're going to be channels but I think transformation. It's really not a technology, it's really what you're doing. It is, it really is, it really is. Tony, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. And again, when the rubber hits the road, as Peter was saying earlier, it's going to be on what happens with the product technologies for the outcomes. Absolutely. Thanks for sharing your insights here on theCUBE. Sharing the data, bringing it to you. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE with Peter Burris. 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