 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle's modern marketing experience. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, your host, John Furrier. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm trying with Ron Coperser, CEO, Relationship One, and Ryan Bumev, the GVP of App Cloud at Oracle Marketing. You also do industry marketing from what I heard, you know, about a variety of other things. Yeah, it's a mobile marketing. We're going to do that as well. Yeah, mobile's hot. Mobile first, video first. That's right. So let's talk about Relationship One, your partner of Oracle, App Cloud. We were on earlier talking about the ecosystem. And I want to kind of bring that, we talked about it earlier, but I want to kind of put it back on the table and expand on it, is that people want to know, what's it like to work with Oracle? How do I work with Oracle? How do I win with Oracle? Because Oracle brings a lot to the table. And in the way you're building the ecosystem, it's an interesting way for people with either point solutions or access to customers and value to plug into a pre-existing platform, that's rising tide floats all boats kind of scenario. It's not like a total onboarding, everyone's a partner, it's pretty selective, people are vetted and evaluated. You guys passed that test, what's it like to work with Oracle? Yeah, the partner structure has kind of changed over time too, right? So when we started, we were working with some of the pieces of the Marketing Club pre-acquisition of Oracle. That was a very different world and then with the acquisition, a little bit of time going, what's going to happen? How is this going to work? And honestly what we've seen since the time of the initial acquisition to today, there's been a massive change and focus on making it a far more partner friendly environment. We are both a system integrator kind of partner, so we implement across the entire Marketing Cloud all of the pieces and help people once they've purchased and implemented, use it, get the most out of it around best practices, but we also focus heavily on the extendability of the platform, which is another big piece that we continue to see evolve and Oracle's done a great job of kind of allowing us kind of builders, app club builders if you will. So the partner program is probably one of the better ones that we've experienced and it's continued to grow. That's the big thing, it's a partnership too. Peter Barris, who is my co-host yesterday, had to fly out of town for research keynote he was giving, he heads up our research and he's the term digital doers or digital builders. And this is what's going on. So you guys, you did a keynote on leveling up your marketing technology strategy. So I want to talk about that because the technology piece is critical. The CMOs that we talked to, certainly Clorox was like, look, we love tech. Tech's great, but I got a job to do. I have customers. I still got to do my job. So technology for technology's sake isn't always the case, but it's an enabler now and it's causing new entrance and new brands to win and take advantage of the value that's shifting. Talk about that, if you can. Where's that value shifting to? What are some of the things that are taking place that won't get anyone into trouble? Like, if you buy too much technology, you die from indigestion, but if you play it right. Right. Talk about that. You know, that was kind of part of my conversation earlier was this mass amount of technology that's in a marketer's toolkit. Just incredible amounts of tools. The problem is that the vast majority of them are closed. They're not open. They don't connect. They're very siloed. And really, when you're talking about investing in a technology platform, our tech ad technology platform, you have to focus on interconnecting of those systems together. You have to focus on being open. You have to think of the total cost of ownership, not just these little point solutions anymore. So I think that's the big change, right? Because if you really want to get return on investment, you have to have an overall strategy to what's the core of the platform, and you happen to have a strategy of how are you going to extend that platform into those little, those different solutions that are unique for your orchestration, unique for your business, things that'll again, enhance your overall campaign and marketing strategy, but they have to plug and play very easily. Brian, I want to get your take on this, because you mentioned something on our last segment about, you've seen this movie before in technology. Yeah, we have. And mark tech, ad tech, you mentioned ad tech, so we'll bring it up. I remember those days, early days, they called it interactive, you know, put up websites. Right. Now, I'm old enough to remember those days, search marketing, oh my God, I can, PPC, CPA, CPC, destination oriented, okay, very cool, very relevant, someone types a keyword, that's intent, they type something, metadata, shift to a site, you own the data. But I want to get back to the technology piece, because everything's looking different now. It looks like the cloud, it looks like a technology map, not mark tech or ad tech. Some of the things that are creeping up, personalization, recommendation engines, that's big data, that's real time in memory, data science, the new themes categorically have nothing to do with ad tech anymore. They come back, kind of circle back around technology, hence Oracle, so you're taking a big play here in the marketing cloud. Yeah, definitely. Do you guys see that? What's your take on that? How would you riff on that? Because you could argue that internet of things is wearable, that's a personal device. That's not a mark tech problem, is it? Or is it an IoT problem? Yeah, I think the definition is changing and it will continue to change. I mean, if we look back to the ERP times for a moment, right, I did ERP early in my career, we started by building a general ledger. And we sold a general ledger, and people bought a general ledger. Now, that doesn't solve a company's problems, but it solved a key problem. And then people said, well, that's great, but we need an accounts payable module. Okay, we'll work on that. And we need a receivable module, and all of a sudden we got ERP, it wasn't called ERP then, but now it's ERP. Marketing automation and then marketing clouds is really a similar thing, right? We started with marketing automation, B2B. There was B2C as well, right? And now it's grown because the customer needs have grown. And now the customer needs are growing much quicker with all this data, right? Things have changed, but yet it's the same game. It's the same story. It's the same on the delivery side of the ERP. So I remember those days I worked at HP back in the day, and the delivery times, the big six accounting firms were all doing all the deployments, and they made a zillion cars on that. But the deployment cycles were years. So now- You don't have years in marketing now. So now let's talk about some of the delivery challenges now. What does that look like? It's not necessarily agency-driven per se, not like the ad agency or even some other boutiques. It's looking for a different kind of integrator, if you will. I'm going to say the word integrator, but I don't know what else to call it, but the delivery looks the same. I mean, shorter cycles, I mean, iterations. I mean, comment on that delivery aspect of it because it's complicated. You've got data science. You've got now, multiple data flows. You've got database issues. You've got app developers. And you're doing it while people are still doing things. They're still marketing. Marketing doesn't shut down, which is because you implement tools and technologies to enable that, right? So- Talk about the delivery. Yeah, so on the delivery side, I mean, it's really about, again, stepping back and having an overall strategy of what are those tools that you need and what are the data structures you're going to need to support those tools? If you put in a layer of technology to go across multiple channels or to connect different systems together, it does no good unless you have a strategy of the information that you're using to run those systems, right? So implementing market, and this is, I think, a little bit where traditional agencies are trying to figure out their legs, too, because this is not content and creative and it's not content strategy or marketing strategy. This is the bigger kind of view of what do I need to do in order to enable those strategies? It's a chicken and the egg. What comes first, you know, the platform, then you go up market to media. You go down market from media, creative to platform. It's interesting, no one really kind of has an answer on that. But it surely is integrated. That's, I think, the biggest difference from an agency perspective, right? It's no longer I'm going to create the brand and the voice of the brand and a logo and a tagline and think I'm done with marketing, right? Put it out there and see what happens. Yeah, I mean, that was once upon a time, especially, you know, with television, that was a big component of it. Well, that's important still, but there's so many more marketing activities that go on and all of that has to be integrated into a centralized strategy. It does. And not all companies, agencies, whatever, are getting there, maybe at the speed they want. It's hard to change. But what we see in the successful companies that we're working with and partners is that the agencies or the system integrators do have a full service capability. They can do everything from brand and voice all the way down to technical integration and business intelligence and the gnarly stuff that goes under for enterprise customers, the gnarly stuff, the data movement that has to occur for marketers to be successful. Those are really the partners we're seeing with a lot of success. And there's a difference too, between going from historically and traditionally channel-based strategies to touch-based strategies, right? So everything today, there's no boundaries between channels anymore. There's not, I'm everywhere. I touch everything, I get everything. You have to have a touch strategy, not a channel strategy. And there's no, the other thing is that I hate the term digital marketing because everything's digital. So all marketing is digital. Well, the progressions are always digital because we were just talking about that last time, the analog sales leads pick up, so all that kind of stuff stops at, it doesn't go all the way to digital. But analog sales is data that you're using in a digital fashion too, though. I mean, everything is digital at some point in the life cycle. That's the big thing, yeah. So I want to ask you a question. I'll bring up an example. I was talking to a customer, I won't say their name, big retailer, and they said, we have a problem. I got a nap, building a retail app. The old days, we used to dial up the retail app kind of the ERP data. Oh, there's a nap for that. You call up retail, oh, you're going to have point of sale. We go bring it into a mini computer or a distributed network. We have databases, boom, you're done. Integration, delivery, write the big checks done. Now, they're like, that's not a problem. They have apps, so they're going to have a higher developer. But their problem that they have is a data problem. It's actually a DevOps problem. It's not an app problem, so the application development focus is about, okay, I have an environment, I have customers that touch it. Okay, I got to build that. Okay, cool, we're going to build that. But I got to think about other things. What's the playbook for companies that are in this boat? This is a common example in many industries. There, I have my app focus, but I got to start thinking about other things. I got to think about the data. I got to think about the database. Is it unstructured? Oh, is it gesture data from the mobile app? I got to put that into unstructured data. I don't know how to write a schema for that yet. Or do I put it into my account base system with demand base? And how are you going to connect it on there? It's a nightmare. So there's no playbook out there. Where do they get the playbook? What's the playbook? There's a couple of things that let me talk maybe functionally and if you want to talk technically a little bit on this one, but I mean, I look at it through the lens of mobile. It's a great way to look at it, right? So marketing's been doing all this great marketing stuff and they know that mobile is a channel or a touch point. But a lot of times the person that's actually building that maybe mobile app for a B2C situation is actually an IT or in a different business unit. And so there's somebody over in the corner writing an Android app to do some things. And then there's a marketing team that's trying to market to their known customers and anonymous users that they want to get known, right? And of course the goal is to get some type of transaction. And what's really starting to happen now is that those mobile developers aren't living in their dev-only silos any longer. They're integrating much more with a marketing organization and that's really a key to success because to your point, they have to have understand where the data flows, right? They can't build another siloed system and then later on go, oh, how do I get this data back and forth? When in fact that's one of the most important channels there is. So your advice is think about the data flows prior to building the app. That's right and I wouldn't actually have those mobile developers sitting in dev only. I would build a model in such a way that they seem part of the marketing team too. Because honestly that mobile app is for marketing purposes. So let's leave it there. Let's have it built there and designed there because really that is really one of the major applications especially moving forward given how strategic mobile is. Yeah, you have to have a data strategy. You start with a data strategy which informs the apps that you're building and the content that you're building. You have to have a strategy around how you're going to access it, the type of information you're going to collect and how you're going to connect it all together. How do you take systems that are seemingly disparate but they're not. They actually all have to intertwine and interconnect. And so a big piece of that is how are you sharing information in IDs and tying anonymous data with known data. That starts with a strategy. It doesn't start with the afterthought of the app. So how would you engage that customer? You would probably be a direct engagement. It's not, there's no real easy playbook. You have to come in, do some work on that. I mean, there's some rules of engagement though. I mean, the general rules are you have to look at the type of data that you own. You have to look at the quality of that data and understand its current structure. You have to understand whether or not you've got stuff in structured or unstructured. And it's unstructured used to be a terrible thing but it's not as much because there's tools and technologies for us to mine unstructured data more effectively than we have even a couple years ago and use it more in real time fashion. But you have to first start by looking at what you have, how can you tie it together if you can. And the other big piece is how do you need to enrich it in order to make it link together, right? So you're no longer relying on just your data, your data, second-party data, third-party data and all of that coming together and intermingling. That's where the power is. That's that and you have to have a strategy around that before you really have, I think robust personalized orchestration of any campaigns. Ron, in the remaining time that we have, I would like you to just share your story with the audience because one, you have a creative background and now with relationship one, you guys are doing stuff really compelling integration work. Obviously part of the Oracle. What are you guys doing? Share some stats on the company successes, what you guys are doing for the business, how you're winning and how do companies engage with you? Yeah, so we're a little bit different in the market like I said earlier because we're both a systems integrator on Oracle Marketing Club. We're also a big builder of apps on top of that platform and focus heavily on that. And we're also exclusive to Oracle Marketing Cloud. So that's where we put our investment and we made that kind of decision for you. We're all in with Oracle and we're kind of the only full-stack one out there meaning that we touch all of those different pieces. So I'm betting on it, I better be there. Don't let it down, Ryan, it's on you. So we continue, again, we're based here in US but we actually have people all over and that's been a big thing is our growth has really been around kind of servicing multinational organizations around the globe and dealing kind of with as they kind of evolve in what is their marketing technology strategy and specifically around Oracle, how to use it more effectively. So we work with customers in high tech, Cisco and Dell and Lenovo and those companies to manufacturing, 3M and the like, kind of a broad mix of organizations. And really a big thing for them is again, they've got an investment in, they're building an investment in that technology platform. How do you get the most out of it? So most of our day is really about kind of impacting or increasing the overall return that they've been putting into that. So exclusive to Oracle, why Oracle? What made you kind of settle on that? Was it the breadth? Was it the partnership? Was it the opportunity, financial opportunity, all of the above? What was the key reason? Yeah, I think two pieces. One, we're a little legacy because we started with Eloqua, right? And then we kind of rolled into it. But we made the decision on staying with Oracle in the Oracle marketing cloud because it to, from a strategy perspective, it's the most comprehensive, where it's going and the technologies and tools that it's focusing on around all the different pieces as far more impactful and beneficial to marketers than I think the other solutions out there. And our world is really about being deep and wide in that stack, in that platform. So that's the reason, ultimately, we focused on. And since then, again, everything we do is around making people successful and inspiring success for customers on OMC. Ryan, a lot of pressure. He's basing his business on you. That's right. And that's what we like that, right? That's what a partnership is about. Yeah, absolutely. Because we're also basing our business on our partners, right? Because again, like we've talked about before, we can't do this on our own. We will never write every piece of code, every feature, function, a customer needs, right? We won't be able to do all the deployment services that a customer ever needs. So we're also about in our business and our partners to say, hey, let's go together arm in arm and let's go make our customers wildly happy. We just came back from Dublin from the Hadoop Summit event in Europe and the whole big data ecosystem, which is Hadoop now evolving, Oracle plays in there with the big data machine coming out soon. It's about community. It is. The ecosystem is really a critical piece for you guys. Yeah, I call it family. So I'll go a little more intimate than that because it is family. Because they're betting their business on us and we're betting our business on them. You got to treat them right. Otherwise, they can always go somewhere else. And we also like to have lots of fun with our family. Absolutely. So that's also key, but it is a family and we treat it that way. It's important. And it's bi-directional too. That's the nice thing. We share information there, share information. What we see in the field informs the product as well and it's completely bi-directional. A lot of people throw the partner word around like here and there. Really walking the talk really. You can see it in the one tech integration and then cash. I mean, you're making money together. Everyone's happy, right? That's right. Okay, thanks so much. Really appreciate the insights. Thanks for sharing your experiences. Go ahead and throw back the old days of ERP and interactive and the web. This is theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE here, live in Las Vegas for Oracle's modern marketing experience. You're watching theCUBE.