 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here at day three of Oracle OpenWorld, day two technically, but day zero Sunday. We don't catch the days. It's going to be another day tomorrow. It's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, we're winding down day three here. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGEL, my co-host Jeff Frick, GM of theCUBE, and I'm with Sugith Ab Abraham, group VP in strategy and operations for Asia Pacific and Oracle. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. We were talking before we came on live here that you grew up in the valley. Now you're living in Asia. Tell us where you're living and how did it all happen? Tell us your story. Yeah, so I started with Oracle in 97. I actually switched out of the automotive industry, spent two years figured out this is where I wanted to be. Decided I needed to build a little bit more of a business background and went back to business school. And it's interesting, about 25 to 30% of my class is international, a good chunk of it from Asia. And what I noticed was whether you were, whether they were Asian-American or international students from Asia, there seemed to be this compelling desire to return. And I had grown up going back to India where my roots are from. And then when I came back to Oracle after school, I had a chance to visit China in 2003 and was just absolutely blown away. I did not. It's blown away as in like, wasn't what you thought, bigger than you thought. And what was it? Bigger, more modern. You're expecting rural China, people walking around in carts? Well, I had this impression that it was, certainly I didn't imagine it would be where it is today or where it was at that point. It's even further today. And I could just see the pace of things moving, buildings and construction. It just, you could feel the vibe. And I knew that I needed to get out here and about six months later, I was there. As I moved out and 11 years later, I still, yeah, 2004 or now, 2015. And what's it like right now? I mean, I haven't been to China, I've been to Hong Kong. I hear cranes everywhere. It's packed, still growing. What's it like there now? Yeah, it's a love-hate relationship with the cranes. You know, your favorite, you see your favorite store there on the corner and about a year later, it's gone because the rates, the rents, all that stuff is going up day by day because new ideas, new businesses, the economy is growing and it's just forcing so much change. There are a lot of cranes, a lot of modernization happening, just amazing. And talk about the tech industry specifically because we're a little bit spoiled. We live here in Silicon Valley, we kind of have a bit of a bias because we're sitting in the middle of it. But as you were saying before, we're offline. On air, there's a lot going on across the plate. There is, you know, just a couple of examples. I can leave the house today with a single cash payment cart. I do, I can eat with it. I can pay my parking with it. I can do just about anything with it. That may be my idea or the only things I need and that's been around for years. The infrastructure, I think at one point they were saying, Hong Kong had the fastest internet in the world, the consumer internet was one gig speed. So it's a lot more advanced than you'd imagine. It's not true across every economy, but and those economies that are maturing and developing and investing are making a lot of progress too. But you know, if I look at something, an organization like Uber, it's not that they couldn't have launched Uber. The day they came out in the US, they could have. But the choice in my mind was as similar as do we launch in New York or San Francisco. It was a market choice, but not because the infrastructure wasn't there and a lot of the big economies. Before we get into some of the digital conversations with Oracle, where should I visit when I go there? Sorry to say that. Where should I visit? What cities? What would you recommend? Yeah, first of all, I'd recommend, I'd recommend you spend two months there. I've, you know, in a lot of ways that's a lot of the reasons I moved out there as well is to be able to spend some time traveling around. Did I survive two months without speaking English? Absolutely, absolutely. Hong Kong, of course, I have to say, it's my favorite city, that's where I live. That's crazy, right? Singapore's fantastic. Wouldn't be right without seeing, you know, Delhi, Bombay, you know, other parts of India, Rajasthan. Awesome. Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney. Talk about the digital disruption now in APAC because that region's exploding. Well India's obviously exploding, seeing gray. I mean, in HyperDev, we have an office there. You know, the engineering culture's growing and it's significant. And the wages are increasing, but there's still rural parts that still are now getting internet. And then obviously in China, the numbers are off the charts. You got Hong Kong, you got, you know, all that turf over there is a growth opportunity. And Oracle, how are they doing there? And is it a growth market for them? And how are they figuring it out? Are you working on that? Tell us about your job and day in the life and what you're working on. Yeah, yeah, so I have a fun role, you know, the team that I'm part of gets to figure out who Oracle is going to be three years ahead, how we're going to structure ourselves, how we look out at the future, what's our strategy to get into these markets. Absolutely Asia in general is a fantastic place to be. It's a fantastic time to be there. And you're right. I mean, what I've seen in the last 11 years particularly is seeing increasing levels of maturity. So you start to hear about initiatives like Digital India. This is a whole concept of the government investing in doing G to C, the government, the citizen services G to B. So when we talk about things like police modernization, we talk about citizen services, the government is absolutely pushing these initiatives. And that education, all of these things, getting out to the emerging cities, being able to enable local banking, mobile-based banking, all of these things are benefiting from the fact that this massive investment is pushing in there. At the same time, you look at China. China's got a whole internet plus strategy happening. And the government wants to... Internet plus, what does that mean? So that's essentially extending the internet infrastructure to all of the emerging cities in the same way that they had extended the railway line, which is obviously increased the logistical capabilities of China to all sorts of levels. And it's helping, it's pushing. You see some of these emerging cities having the same GDPs as some of the biggest cities in the U.S. So massive investment in the infrastructure, which is actually propelling a lot of growth, a lot of infrastructure investment. There's also the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is essentially a joining of several of the economies in Asia to form a central bank to be able to fund infrastructure development. That's also going to help promote more and more government spend, more infrastructure investment, ultimately a drive towards the cloud. So there is a lot of drive. Trying to sell us to move to Asia, but come on, I'm like, damn, America sucks right now, I'm going to go to Asia. Taxes are lower. Taxes are lower. But it's not all great, right? Because I know that the government pushing Australia was getting a lot of pushback on the government funded internet to the broad broad. It became kind of a political football, if I recall, a year or so ago. Yeah, I mean, look, there are always going to be some issues back and forth, right? And not only that, I mean, to be honest, there are also political issues that break out in terms of coups, military coups that happen. I mean, you have all sorts of unpredictable things that can sometimes happen in some of these economies. But it's just part of the cycle of maturing and changing and development. You will even see issues like data sovereignty come up as an area of concern, right? As we start pushing to the cloud and people think about things like encryption and capabilities like that, that's going to be more and more important. So that was a data sovereignty, that's a huge issue because it kind of works in two ways. One is where the data lives, I can't move around, I got in Germany as a poster child in Western Europe, but there's just more issues than that. There's also national security issues that some countries won't let people in the country bring encryption in and out because they're afraid. And we saw that with blackberries, blackberry had great encryption and I just like, whoa, US people can't come into our country and have encryption. So is that how much of an issue is that? Is that more dogmas? That's just geopolitical posturing. How legit is that? Well, look, I think the point there is that we can certainly address it. That's the most important thing, absolutely. I mean, for sure we can address it. I think the concerns are real in terms of, look, if you're an organization and you have, you know, you have people in sensitive types of roles, you don't want their IDs being proliferated out and getting into the wrong hands. They don't put their lives at risk, their family's lives at risk. And that goes without saying in terms of whether that information gets in the hands of people within that country or outside of that country. Those are legitimate concerns. I mean, I certainly, I'm pretty sensitive about my information. I wouldn't want to getting out to too many hands. I can only imagine what that means at the government level if you're in any way involved in security or national protection. How's the cloud momentum in APEC? Very good. We are, our customers are a lot of them are already there. They're moving very quickly. They're still in the yard. They got all these tools. Cloud's probably native to them. Yes, yes, well, you know, you're seeing a lot of innovation because in some ways, some of these economies, some of the more emerging economies, they're not going to have the black and white TV face. They're going to go right to color television. They're going to move right to the cloud, you know, overnight and be able to do more advanced things in education, more advanced things in terms of citizen services than you see in some of the mature countries. At the same time, you see economies like Australia, which are absolutely full throttle towards the cloud. They're looking at their retail segments. They're looking at every single segment. It's a great story about national pharmacies in Australia and how they've completely built a different relationship around their customers using the cloud. We are live here in Oracle Overworld on Howard Street. We've got the World Series playing behind us. It's going to be the biggest sports bar in San Francisco tonight. I think they've got the Warriors home opener going on. We've already started breaking out a few of the bars, so. You're in San Francisco. Come join us down here on Howard Street. We are live here. It's theCUBE, our flagship program. We're going to listen to the catcher's mitt in my right ear, but every pitch I can hear. A couple of final questions. Recruiting in APAC. I mean, lay out a great gauge there. The young people must be intrigued. My daughter's in the freshman high school. She's taken Chinese, she's taken Mandarin. There's Mandarin Immersion programs in Palo Alto. People are looking to be international right out of the box. I mean, it's global culture. The digital natives, as we call them, they're global. Yeah, and we want them. How you're recruiting people. Let me maybe step back a second and talk about why. So, if seeing what's happened is with our portfolio has grown immensely. You take that and you look at the fact that we were aggressively going after several segments in Asia, mid-market, the large end. The cloud is essentially a democratized entry into, for all of these customers to be able to get into it. So, we have been looking. We just got off of a massive campaign where we actually brought on a thousand new salespeople. Very amazing from millennials. We have this team, Brad Decad. So, we brought in a large group of millennials, a large group of seasoned folks, and we needed their help. We needed their help to get out to the market. We've put out a new employee life cycle to help them essentially learn from the best and get some structure experience and really build a career around sales, if that's what they're interested in doing. So, we're always hiring, we're growing. And there's a huge amount of opportunities. All right, so what do you guys do in Oracle Open World? What customers are here? What's the activities? Obviously, it's a global conference, you're here. We've talked to the Latin American folks as well. IDC analysts telling us what's going on there. What's going on for Open World for you? Well, this is an important event for us, you know. We obviously, a lot of our customers come here to really get the full injection of Oracle because sometimes when you're further from the mothership, it's hard to get the full feeling of the full impact of it. When our customers come here, they can get a lot more of their questions answered. A lot more comprehensive than simply because of the amount of information, the access to some of our senior executives, it's just, it's unparalleled. And we get them here, they get around some of their own peers, they share information, what they're looking at, understanding where each of them are going in terms of direction. It's a wonderful sharing event, wonderful networking event, but in terms of the information, yeah, that we've got our customers here. So, gee, thanks for spending the time and sharing this information. Welcome home, back home for a short stint. I'm sure you come back to the mothership all the time. Where are you actually living now? Hong Kong? In Hong Kong, I am, yeah. And you like Hong Kong? I do, I do. I have two kids and my wife are there, so it's a great place to be. Great to speak with you. We got tech athletes from all over the world that come on theCUBE. It's the ESPN of tech, we call it. This is powered by SiliconANGLE Media, SiliconANGLE.com, Swinna.tv, Wikibon.com, Reach, which is all part of the SiliconANGLE team. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, instruct the siblings, I'm John Furrier. With Jeff Rick, we'll be back with more after this short break.