 Well, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE Founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We are here in our Palo Alto studios for CUBE Conversation with Jurgen Genlinder, who's the Senior Vice President of Oracle SAS. Jurgen, great to see you again. Thanks for coming and appreciate the time. Senior Vice President of ERP, SAS, you're handling all the business aspects of the Oracle Cloud. That's correct. And you know, that's happening. What's the big story right now? Well, here at Open World, it's a little bit like kid in a candy store. I mean, to your point, I do think it's fantastic that we can showcase our innovation capacity. What we have really done, and you're gonna see, most of those announcements are around how we pervasively infuse emerging technology into our product lines. So not just a sidecar concept, but productizing our use cases where customers can reap an immediate business benefit as of day one. So allow me maybe to plow through some of those. There is a lot of it, what's happening, and one of the big ones is certainly around Cloud ERP. It's a huge investment for us. We'd like to think it's the most strategic SAS investment you will ever do. From that perspective, we're very committed to make sure that the emerging technology is applied for business impact. What I mean with that is take examples such as intelligent payments. So imagine you have a cash surplus all of a sudden, which is a great position to be in, but how do you allocate it to strategically cultivate supplier relationships based off in the moment data, based on machine learning suggestions? Think about the change that we're seeing out there in terms of business models. I mean, product as a service is a completely different model in which companies need to operate. So this entire motion of shipping transactionally into going into a service provider model is huge for a lot of companies oftentimes they have multiple business models to cater to. So a big announcement this open world is subscription management, which is a unique offering where we have really plowed together the combined strengths of our customer experience cloud to handle seamlessly the customer facing interactions, so sales service marketing type of pieces, but teamed up with our ERP offering to really have all of the billing, the renewal cycles, the revenue recognition seamlessly solved in one offering. So big announcement for us this year. So on the subscription management, is that for the ERP or is that Oracle cross all Oracle portfolio products or specifically ERP? It's both actually, it spans the customer experience piece, but is also natively embedded into the Oracle ERP cloud to have it as seamless experience because we don't think that you can solve subscription management in isolation. Oftentimes you feel vendors who does it on the customer experience side, but then you still need to have the backend features to make sure that you can deliver on the promise that you do understand the customer intimately, that you could do effective up cross-selling, handle the renewal cycles, constantly tap into the customer sentiment to see if they're happy and just see them grow. So we'd like to think it's really a combined effort between what we have as customer experience and the ERP side. I mean, this brings up a great point because I think you're pitting on the major trend that's happening around Oracle Open World, certainly in the industry right now, and that is integrating a lot of different functions. I mean, ERP, everyone who knows ERP, who's lived through the days, it's really critical software. It powers the business, it's not going anywhere. What people are concerned about is how do I extend the capability of the data that I have and cross-connect it so that it's seamless? So I want to just go a little slow on the subscriber management thing. So what you're saying is you have created subscriber management so that the customer can manage their piece of their business without mangling or changing or tweaking, or take me through that. How would they roll that out? What's the use case of that specifically? Give an example. I think this is an important point. I think you hit on the key point, which is data. I mean, what Oracle always has been synonymous with is owning, managing and securing the world's data. We'd like to live on that heritage for a while because we think it's fundamentally differentiating if you want to bring those emerging technologies to life for outcomes. Since we're covering all lines of businesses in the cloud and are ready to go today, it brings us into a very unique position to really stitch together data points very elegantly across a unified data platform, right? Where data travels seamlessly because if you think about a subscription business, there's so many aspects that goes into that. Think about collecting sensory data based on IoT. Well, a lot of databases are out there. You have multiple databases you're hitting. Oh, absolutely. So we want to make sure that obviously any data that we're collecting about the usage of a given product allows us to fine tune the business model for subscription. If we have the customer or if the company made a decision to go into a subscription model, it's huge from a revenue recognition perspective. How do you report that out? It has to do with how do you service the customer constantly, predict and anticipate the very next move for up and cross-selling type of mechanism. So it's a big movement. Customer intimacy used to be a CX problem. Now it's an integrated data problem. And it's interesting because when I broke into the business when I was graduating from college, the word data processing was a department. When you guys are in the database business, data processing now is a core competency that's not limited to one siloed system or one abstract system like ERP or CX. It's managed everything. So you have to do data processing because that's the value. So if that's the case and more data is coming to the marketplace, you need machine learning, you need to have the tools. So I got to ask you Oracle Open World, you guys are doing some announcements around AI. What's the impact to AI in particular or managing whether it's symbolic systems, which is a little bit different in AI. Reasoning is a thing, processing and reasoning around the data. You need AI for that. So what are you guys announcing around ERP at Oracle Cloud and AI? So it's fundamentally that to your point, I had the pleasure of implementing ERP system on the customer side, on the SI side, I had problems or challenges in my business career to bring them to life on the software development side, but fundamentals have stayed the same. You need to have data consistency and as a complete view of the business. Now to your point, I'd like to think the machine learning and emerging technologies at large provide a new canvas on how you can create and look at every single business process as we know it. So you see us talk for example about intelligent process automation in the ERP context. What that means is if you take a typical company, about 85% is spent on keeping the lights on, closing the books, doing all of the in-hyphen mundane but necessary stuff, and 15 to 20% is typically dedicated towards innovation of new business model, serving customers with new business model or just being the change agent that typically the finance function wants to be. I mean there's a reason for example why Kraft Heinz had a CFO, perhaps still has a CSO who's 29 years old. They're not hired necessarily for the seniority, they're hired for the change ability. The cultural change is both business culture and there's also tech culture. We know the tech culture is cloud native, agile, data at the center of the value proposition. But now culture rules is about expectations. I need it fast, I need it relevant. I mean. It's a commitment. It's a hard problem to solve too as well on both business skills gap and also technical. I mean to your point, I mean, kid in a candy store is like the best way I can describe it. I think every single business process and in the 90s we had this big theme of business process re-engineering, you know that. I'd like it comes back on steroids right now because you can simply look at every single business process once again and see where the human element and the machine or a robotic element can simply provide superior outcomes. Think about use cases of detecting fraudulent spend more easily like machines are simply better at that. We have to admit that. If we can liberate the human potential at large and tap into the ingenuity by liberating them from the mundane and shifting it towards value at that's huge. So our commitment of infusing machine learning and AI constantly in every single business process and learning from your decision like John if you have the same workflow and you approved it 99 times the system should start taking a hint. It doesn't mean hard coding and rewiring the work flow. The system automatically should learn from your behavior. So this is what we talk about intelligent process automation. It also extends into what we call intelligent performance management where our enterprise performance management cloud is already very sophisticated in analytical capabilities, but now it's taken it to the next level of prediction, learning, anticipating, constantly and suggesting actionable results. So a lot of things and chatbots for expenses the entire communication with the system that's just branded in a way where I say when is the last time you had an intelligent conversation with your ERP system? A lot of people would say never. Well, I think people want to love to get more value out of the data and certainly the work that ERP systems have done as foundational mechanisms or plumbing or infrastructure and software is critical data is in there, right? So, but the interesting topic that's becoming apparent in Oracle you guys live this and you know at your other career at SAP client server had a great growth when heterogeneous networks started to appear. So heterogeneous is a word that's not just a customer problem it's an Oracle opportunity as well because you have to be heterogeneous in and of yourself. Absolutely. And that's the data is the bridge between all that. So now you have heterogeneity around all your internal systems so it's not just here's your Oracle go buy some ERP and deploy it in the customer's heterogeneous environment. You got to have a heterogeneous integration in Oracle into a cloud environment for the customer makes it more complex but the data becomes the key asset. Data is the key asset and this is why we took decisive steps about a decade ago to really rewrite from scratch for the cloud. So we're really not trying to get away with hosting our legacy into the cloud because I think it's a fundamentally strong flawed strategy, right? So we also learn from what I call typical SAS 1.0 patterns where certain vendors tackle one business problem in isolation but then it's upon the customer once again to stitch it painfully together with all of the risk it has like security risks, data silos that you're so desperately trying to run away from come back on steroids in the age of multi-cloud, right? So it's oftentimes what we're seeing is that tactical cloud adoption in our customer prospect conversations give way to more strategic longevity type of SAS consideration and this is where we think we have a great story to tell by having everything in the cloud, every line of business re-architected for the cloud but then of course the entire stack depth to support it so of course we want to make sure that everything that comes out of Oracle works best stitch together but by all means it's really that we acknowledge that customers have heterogeneous environments so we're open to connect, extend any type of starting point a customer might have. So one of the things I've been impressed with Oracle on the previous announcements is your affinity towards the emerging tech. You guys aren't afraid to run at a new environment and Larry Ellis is classic a little bit. Larry will wait until he sees clear visibility then he'll run hard at it and it's been fun to watch and because you've got a big business you've got millions of customers and you're modernizing in real time but the big change that's on the market is the blockchain. You guys got some announcements happening around here at Oracle over the night. That's correct. And you made an announcement earlier what new things are coming out with blockchain? Yes. Blockchain actually is a database model. It's a little bit decentralized but it has great use cases. Low hanging use case independent of all the hype and uncertainty around cryptocurrency but certainly blockchain is an enabling technology. Will it impact your world? What new things are you announcing here? For me that's likely the most fundamentally disruptive technology heading our way to your points a little bit at the infancy compared to other emerging technologies but the profoundness of change with this new trust fabric is just massive for every single business process as we know it. So when we discuss with customers it's really that we try to give our customers a head start for immediate business impact meaning we're shipping applications productized use cases. So the announcements this week are really around intelligent track and trace making sure that at any given point in time you know exactly where in the supply chain your product is, what are the handover points all documented seamlessly. You see announcement around what we call the intelligent cold chain. Big topic for some pharmaceutical companies for example of food and beverage to have refrigerated products where you need to prove that they never surpass the temperature threshold for example in the supply chain. Document that via supply, via blockchain. We have what we call warranty and usage as a use case just simplifying the settlements the claim processes for any type of things here. So we have multiple more that are in the labs right now take an HCM use case for example where every one of us had some educational experience right and we want to make sure that the hiring process becomes as effective. Did you go to the school you said you went to? You know, that's a supply chain you know your journey in life is a value chain. I mean the first universities are actually posting the certificates on blockchain so that you have this immutable record and the entire vetting of credentials in the hiring process which is so cost intensive, time intensive could be shaved off seamlessly. Well I'll say one of the things I'm personally passionate about and really our video business is that one of the big problems that's going to be coming very fast is deep fakes tampering with video. So one of the things that we're thinking about is how to put our videos on the blockchain to look at whether it's been tampered or not. Absolutely. Because you know you can take this video and make a huge say something because this is a legit problem what's verified. Again, this is a verification about it and people want to know did the produce come from that certain lot? So production, certainly manufacturing operations is QA issues. This is real, these are real world examples. This is not like some pie in the sky hyped up tulip craze. It's not real. You mentioned that we actually have an innovation panel on Tuesday afternoon where we have for example one of the largest food manufacturers in the world building on our blockchain cloud services those type of use cases. It's just amazing what we're seeing in terms of the impact emerging technologies can have and quite frankly business impact we're going to see out of that. I think I personally think and I'd love to get your reaction to this because it's something that we talk a lot on the QL out and is to get feedback on is that you're going to have to explain yourself and have verification because there's a lot of black box processes that have to be unexposed because people want to know the transparency of how things move through the system whether it's fruit, whether it's videos, whether it's someone's resume or credentials, reputation, these are new ways that used to be explained by algorithms. So now the black box is going to be opened up. This is an opportunity. It's also a threat to a lot of people. So do you agree with that idea that there'll be soon things will be explained and be able to be inspected eventually? Transparency is huge. And as to your point, I don't think you can hide a lot of things going forward anymore. So everything becomes more transparent but with enabling technologies such as blockchain, for example, they also become immutable and the dispute to your ability to alter the information flow becomes less. So it's both very enlightening in terms of having transparency, speeding up business processes and to your point also understanding the origin where something originated. We have a lot lineage, for example, as another blockchain application. A lot lineage. You mean like production lots? Production lots, for example, in provenance, right? To really understand the genealogy. Give me an example of that. Understand the genealogy as to where, for example, certain parts of your supply chain really come from. Do they come from countries, for example, where you shouldn't be doing business with, right? So it's all those type of things where you can always prove. Like maybe the Chinese put a chip on a board and puts it in an Amazon Apple data center. That's a supply chain concern. Totally. I mean, wouldn't you love to know where that motherboard is? These are real world examples. It went through the press the last couple of weeks. Definitely, as it's a real concern. Although AWS and Apple vehemently denied, strain was the objective to the claim. I refuted, I checked it out, I think with the boomer got the story wrong, but we know that there is hacking going on, no doubt. But again, this is an example of as things are moving around a lot, whether they're workloads or manufacturing, this is a data problem. It all comes down to data. I mean, data is the ultimate weapon in this age that we're in right now. And the company that can help you best to have as much data, meaning first party generated data, but then also complement it with, for example, Oracle Data Cloud, right? Really privacy compliant third party data points to have this contextual demographic geolocation type of context to really delight customer experience and compliment your own insight is massive and we'd like to think we have a great story to tell, not only in being to manage this data, but also to secure this data because data security is massive. I mean, I have been the personal victim of the Equifax hack. So since then I take it very much seriously. I mean, not that I think- Are you allowed credit card fraud on that? I mean, I got whacked on. To be honest, I mean, the impact was less than I expected it, but it's still scary to see as to how fast your privacy can be compromised, right? So you definitely want to make sure that security privacy be hacked, some advice. If you want to be hacked, just tell people you own a lot of Bitcoin. You'll be hacked in a heartbeat. But this is the culture. I mean, let's get back down to this core issue because Larry Ellison said a couple of Oracle open worlds ago that security should be always on. And this is a fundamental concern. So, as you guys look at bringing this customer experience together, bringing the unity of the data together, I mean, there's a lot of Oracle products out there. You got ERP, you got HCM, you got CX, you got data cloud, all these things are out there, right? So, bottom line, the SaaS cloud for Oracle, what is the, what's the mission? Simplify it for us. What, if I'm a customer, I got a lot of Oracle, I have some Oracle, maybe I want more or less, or I don't know, bottom line, I mean, what's the value proposition for Oracle Cloud's SaaS solutions? In a nutshell, it's about future proving the business of our customers. I'd like to think that cloud is in hyphen the inevitable destination for us to serve the customers in our prospect base at large to help them just be ahead of the curve in either driving innovation, taking advantage of data points, to turn it into competitive advantage, and having this quick ability on a quarterly basis to surface this innovation, but don't leave the customer alone with standalone innovation platforms, sidecar concepts by making sure we have a holistic architectural approach to surfacing in the context of the business when you need it and making sure, so for us, it's really the fundamental way how we can better serve our customer base and our prospect base, and we'd like to think that the decisiveness of the architecture we've chosen about a decade ago brings us a lot of advantages right now where customers are realizing tactical cloud adoption with just one LOB is short-lived potentially. So they're looking at holistic cloud suites and we have everything in the cloud, plus we have the architectural depth to really surface and actually tackle any business problem right now, not as a promise in a couple of years. And now, so I'll keep you on the road, Matt, give us some extensibility. All right, personal question, Jurgen, what are you personally excited about right now? Honestly, you've seen a lot of ways of innovation, we're at SAP, now you're at Oracle, you've seen the client server wave, you're now on the cloud wave, what are you personally excited about this next modern infrastructure and software environment as it starts to evolve, that big wave is coming, what's most exciting for you? For me, it's really the possibility to rethink about every single business process as we know it. It's so fundamental, those technologies, machine learning, constantly learning from your decision that the experience at large, how you interact with the system, we're so conditioned in consumer life that you ask a question, you get this instant gratification of a response. This is exactly the type of experience we're going to see in enterprise systems as well, so I do think that demographics, the requirements into an ERP system, an enterprise system at large have changed, and we're excited about the ability to serve that up now on a quarterly basis with speed and also customer response of course, because SAS for us is a fantastic opportunity to get instant feedback, we can do A-B testing, we can immediately see as to what's used, what's not used, right? So for us as a vendor, I think we have to be on our toes because I mean there's no hiding in SAS, right? And either you deliver or you don't, it's instant. So this lack time of shipping innovation, safeguarding our customers, and I think we have a great story to tell also for customers who have invested with us already in the past with on-premise investments, how we can shepherd them into the cloud era at the most predictable type of timeframe, cost everything. You mentioned one word which was key, unity, which one of the announcements I forgot to tell, customer experience unity. In the past, I think what we have seen on the customer experience side is oftentimes that vendors have taken an approach where you had sales, service, marketing, commerce, oftentimes, siloed. CX Unity is really our fundamental commitment to making sure that the data management of every single dynamic touch point we have with a customer is constantly live up to. But do your point, I think Oracle has a fantastic set of cards to deal with customers to help them in any starting point of their journey right now, not in the future, no real architecture needed, we can take that right now to them. I think Oracle has a great opportunity with the data play, obviously databases, not a foreign concept, the word database, data processing, real time. I mean, I think the integrates, you guys have a good opportunity and great to see you. And thanks for spending your time on theCUBE, you appreciate it, thank you for the conversation. Yirgit Lindner who's the Senior Vice President of Oracle SaaS Cloud here in the studio in Palo Alto. A lot's going on around Oracle Open World happening. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.