 Welcome to the conversation here inside theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, part of our ongoing cloud, conquering the cloud coverage. And of course, we have the RSA conference happening in San Francisco and we'll be covering it wall to wall. Our next guest to get a reaction to what's happening in the cloud is Vikas Anon, who's the Vice President of Product Management at Oracle. And also the cloud side. So really not on the market side, really on the development side. Yes, welcome to theCUBE conversation. Thank you, John. I'm really excited to be here. We've been following that. We've, this is our eighth season with theCUBE, so you know we've been at every Oracle open world for eight. This will be our eighth year coming up. It's been interesting to watch the transformation of Oracle, it's almost that Larry Ellison moment where he knew the cloud was there that next year came out. It was all about cloud. And since then it's been absolutely pretty much all cloud. This year is pretty obvious that it's end to end cloud on-prem and public cloud, all Oracle. But yet there's also new non-Oracle opportunities you guys are getting called cloud native. Where is the product development areas on? Because right now it's certainly in the backdrop with security and RSA going on. You're seeing the surface area for vectors, attacks that are, there's no more perimeter. You have cloud now, breaks that perimeter of concept. What are you guys working on? What's the top things? John, that's actually a great segue into the area that I operate in, right? Like you just said, cloud is spanning the hybrid, right? You're basically running SaaS applications for your business and you obviously have to go and communicate back with on-premise applications as well as integrate with an ecosystem of devices and social and other things, right? So the cloud is spanning, the vector is spanned from the public applications with SaaS to cloud native applications that people use to build engagement models with microservices. And of course, all of this needs to go back to something which you might be already running as a customer on-premise as a hybrid. So I run product management at Oracle for one of the hottest areas, which is the integration space, right? I own integration, process, and API management from a product portfolio perspective. And we have a significant investment in this area. Given that Oracle is one of the largest SaaS companies out there, integration is key to enable these applications to be able to deliver the value to our customers. And we are focused on three things. To simplify the hard, which is integration is a hard problem. So do what we can to simplify that for our customers so that they can use that for innovation and accelerate the value to the business. Oracle, certainly you guys have certainly a great database position. I've always said it's the mother of all lock-ins and I think that's really with the opportunity. But database isn't just Oracle, now you have other databases. So integration I can see is a big part of kind of Oracle moving out of your core swim lane into database areas that are not necessarily Oracle or Oracle other databases. So the question is, the DevOps movement has kind of proven that it's probably easier to sling APIs around than build full functional stacks. So the integration becomes really more of a competitive opportunity for folks who are in IT and or developers because if you can have a core software stack, then the advantage is not to build it at scale because scale is the real challenge, it's the integration and slinging APIs around. So, okay, how do you make that into reality? Okay, because that conceptually people get that is leverage day with APIs and connecting the data from different data sources, certainly need system of record, system of engagement, system of AI or cognitive or whatever people call it. But at the end of the day, this is an architectural concept. So people in systems management or any kind of operating system background can get this. How do you deploy it for the common IT enterprise? So, you know, from what we've tried to do for our customers is really, first of all, when you look at the area of integration, integration spans APIs, integration spans the classical integration needs of business which used to be files or real-time integration. And of course, this ecosystem includes it's a pretty complex world out there, right? There are 2,300 plus SaaS applications. A lot of them are non-oracle. So it's also about interoperating with other SaaS products. Other APIs, the same way as we do for Oracle. So what we've done for our customers is really deliver the service with a SaaS-like experience where Oracle manages it. So we manage the DevOps of delivering the service as a SaaS-like experience. We patch it for our customers. Customers consume it to build integrations. And customers can discover APIs for Oracle applications through our API catalog as well as the integration portfolio. Now, tying it back to third-party, of course, you need rich connectivity. So we have really rich cloud adapters to talk to Salesforce, NetSuite, applications which really are in ERP space or CRM space, some of them Oracle and some of them non-Oracle, right? So we have that as a part of our portfolio. API, APIs is really interesting because a lot of times, APIs were built bottom-up which meant that they were not designed for the experience that you were looking to deliver. And people today are continually using APIs for four things, one of four things, right? Either to create a net new business model, so net new revenue opportunity, for example, delivering a new mobile application which exposes your IP, right? Number two is to deliver more customer satisfaction and experience as an engagement. Number three is for operational efficiencies. Number four is to communicate with the partner ecosystem. So when you look at APIs, the proliferation is out there, a lot of APIs. It's manifested into this net new requirement of API management, but more importantly, to design APIs right, the API-first strategy which is really key to the success of an API management strategy. So the organic growth of APIs really points to the value of APIs as you point out, but the diverse use cases that have been developing kind of a situational. So the management of APIs has been kind of situational. Absolutely. So now as you move beyond that, where's that new hardening? I mean, is there any best practices that you see for folks that say, hey, you know what? Okay, we've done some bottoms-up APIs. It's been great efficiency. We've gotten more from less, more functionality, more business model, more integration. Okay, but bottom-wise, the core of my strategy is how we're going to share data. Now you're talking about connectors being key, you know, passing of parameters, between multiple systems that maybe, certainly with an Oracle, I can see you guys doing well there, but not on Oracle. Yes. How does that play out? So there are, again, you bring a great point again. I mean, the APIs with bottom-up always helped with the reuse of the API, but it was not always a business benefit. It might have been an IT benefit, right? So the top-down approach is becoming more prominent. And this is where we've done a very interesting acquisition. We've acquired a startup in this space, company called Aperee, aperee.io, which is available for developers for free. You know, you can log in and get an account there, which really- This one was announced in January that you guys are now closing. Absolutely. Okay. And this is really focused on the concept of API design and governance to manage the API proliferation and sprawl that you have within the enterprise, right? And, of course, everybody has, you know, from an API strategy perspective, security, management, and analytics is a part of the strategy. The part which is missed out is design and governance. So- Well, I mean, certainly API is being a bottom-up thing. And like open source always gets better over time. As we all know, the security holes are potentially a red blind spot for IT, right? So, or any enterprise. So the auditing, there's that governance thing. Is that what we're, you're referring to more of the stability side of it? So it's basically, you know, when you look at, let's take an example. You design a car first, right? You don't design a car just because you like a tire or you like an engine, right? It's primarily, you get the design first right and then you put the infrastructure in place. So similarly with the APIs, it's becoming more like you get the right API design and definition. You quickly prototype, right? Just like a car, you design your prototype, right? You quickly prototype the API. You run mock testing and see the end results before you get into the implementation, which really changes the game plan of how you deal with APIs going forward. And that's something which we bridge in with the API acquisition into the Oracle API management strategy. So if a customer asked you, let's just say that, I asked Ms. Avery this on theCUBE as well and he had a great answer. But I want to kind of refresh it now as we get more, as the evolution of the industry continues to go at a rapid pace. Our only security is a big one. Mark, already we talked about encryption and a big way, certainly John Fowler's encryption. The chip thing is certainly might be a really big deal too. But if a customer asked you, because tell me about like what's the core guiding principle that you guys are taking at Oracle? Because I need to cross to the bridge, cross that bridge to the cloud and I don't want anything to break. But yet I want the headroom of all this new functionality. What does Oracle do? What is the core tenants of your design and your product development? How would you respond to that? You know, from our strategy perspectives and since I'm, you know, we're talking about API manager, let me just focus on this and apply the Oracle tenants here, right? Obviously number one is to deliver a secure environment for customers to be managed, to be able to manage and expose their APIs, whether they run it on the Oracle cloud or on their in their data center. So security is a very important tenant over there. The ability to use the cloud for productivity and innovation with APIs. So high productivity is a part of the tenant that we are offering as a part of our cloud services. And then of course hybrid. So you should be able to run your APIs, whether it's an Oracle cloud, whether it's on premise or anywhere else. So with our API strategy as an example, we're really focused on delivering a true hybrid experience. It doesn't matter where your gateways are, whether it's on premise, on Oracle cloud or third party cloud, you're able to manage it seamlessly from the Oracle cloud environment and able to expose it in a secure way to your end consumers as well as your partners. I asked Mark, heard this question. I'll ask you, and I know he's the CEO, so he had a good answer. He can see, he could answer it. But this comes up a lot and you guys have the ability to run Oracle on Amazon. Andy Jassy has been very vocal recently. He was in on Geekwire, saw that last week, criticizing Oracle, kind of calling Oracle the old way, the old guard. He used the word old guard. How do you respond to that? How does, I mean, you guys are doing some pretty cutting edge stuff with APIs. As Amazon's, you know, got the lead right now on the public cloud. But your version of public cloud is near, maybe not be different, but how do you answer, how do you answer that charge at Oracle's the old guard? You know, it's interesting. You should have been at the developer week conference that we presented at yesterday. You know, me and I met and a few of my colleagues from Oracle product management were out there on stage. We would have loved it. We didn't get an invite. We'd make sure we're invited. We would have loved to have been there. We presented this whole story board where we actually demoed live a use case where you would be able to buy tickets to a warrior game through a chatbot. And it was built upon a modern IT architecture on the Oracle stack. Right from API design to the backend microservice running on cloud containers where developers have a choice to bring their own favorite tools. Maven, you know, Git, Docker images with the container class. So this is your integration story. This is back to your... With microservices, which is basically app development. And then a bot, which was exposing it for the consumer experience. So the modern tools that the developers of today are looking for with APIs, with microservices, with artificial intelligence, right? Are enabled and available on the cloud in a modern infrastructure enabled... So this is the new development phenomenon. I've been saying this for years. I'm an OS guy with my computer science degrees and operating systems as well as databases. But, I mean, back then databases weren't really that big of a deal. But yeah, but now they are. So like it thought to be a database guy, but it's a composable, it's a system integration kind of concept. If you think about the old system integration world that Oracle really rode the back on the growth on was the big six accounting firms and the big global integrators. Now that's the developer. The single developer can simply integrate and compose, I won't say object oriented, but that kind of concept of saying, hey, I'm going to reuse this. And they need some solid stability. So I think the game is changing. And I think Amazon certainly has shown a great lead and we're big fans of what they're doing. But as the enterprise gets more complex, the question that we're looking at is, what does the new modern developer look like in a global operating environment called the internet? Your thoughts, final question, what's that? Do you agree with that premise that it's a composable world out there and that this is a design reinvention of what design architecture looks like and the building blocks are going to be recast in different ways? Do you believe that or give any opinion? I absolutely believe in that. I think the essence of today's app development is speed. Speed to build, speed to deploy, speed to continuously integrate, speed to value to business. And for that, the building blocks really have evolved to be microservices, APIs, bots, and of course integration kind of binds all of this together. Sounds like an operating system to me. It sounds like, yeah, it does. It is, the role of the integrator is right, high up there to bind all these modern architecture components together, but it is truly a composable framework of applications and productivity is key in each of these areas. We're looking forward to hearing more about the, when you close this acquisition, more on the integration. And next time you guys have a development week or with Amit and the team, let us know. We'd be happy to come down and at least get some footage. Really, really important here. You guys are doing a lot of work. People see Oracle. They know Oracle. And you guys got a lot of development going. It's important that we keep track of that. Thanks for sharing in this CUBE conversation. Thanks. Thank you for having us. I'm John Furrier, Live at Silicon Valley. This is for RSA this week. We're here at the CUBE conversation with Oracle. We'll be right back with more. Thanks for watching.