 live from the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. It's theCUBE, at the Next Generation Engineered Systems Launch Event. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley at the Oracle headquarters, winding down the big launch from Larry Ellison, the entire team here, talking about engineered systems. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. It's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events, expect the signal and noise. Our next guest is Mohammed Afshar, VP of Product Management, Exologic. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Well, Exologic is one of your products, but VP of Product Management means you run things and you figure out what's going to go in the product. So features, the list you cut, you keep stuff. So first we got to ask you on today's announcement, what was the key highlights for you guys? What would you guys, how are you guys involved? What was the key product features? And how are you guys integrated into Larry's talk? So in a couple of key ways, I think the first thing is obviously Larry talked about Exologic as a hardware platform, right? And we have a release today, which we announced today called the Exologic Elastic Cloud X5-2. And that is the next generation of a hardware platform which have a number of upgrades on the hardware side. So things like having more cores and actually we share the same compute nodes now, server architecture is exadata from the perspective of how many cores we have. And also we upgraded the RAM. So it's a lot quicker, right? And a number of other hardware upgrades. So there's kind of the hardware- All the elastic configurations that they talked about. Yeah, and that's something that is in addition to the basic hardware configurations as well, which Exologic will also benefit from in the future, which is the ability to add individual servers. All right, so let's do a little Exo101. So give us the quick segmentation. Exadata, Exologic, break down real high level and we can talk about the integration pieces. Sure, absolutely. So Exadata I think is one mentioned is really designed to run database workloads, right? And as such it does an extremely good job of running your Oracle database, right? For a number of use cases. Now, many of our customers legitimately ask, hey, I've got Exadata and I've got an OLTP application, right? And the OLTP application consists of a database and a mid-tier. What should I be running the mid-tier on to get great performance, great price performance, ease of setup, ease of manageability, right? And Exologic is the answer to that for the middle tier and Java. And then of course we have a number of other engineering systems such as Exolytics, which Neil Menderson was in charge of that he was talking about a little bit earlier. So the middle way really is an integration point. So if I'm going to run OLTP for instance, and I want to use Exadata, you guys are the pipe to other resources, could be other vendors, right? Absolutely, so we actually do a few things. So the first thing is let's take an example like an e-commerce application. So we have many customers running e-commerce apps with Exadata and Exologic. So one of the things that we have is a standard architecture where you have your e-commerce app running on web logic server, which is a Java container. And you need connectivity to third-party sources, right? Maybe you have fulfillment done by somebody else, so you want to figure out what the delivery times look like. So we have a number of other middleware components that then go out from Exologic, such as the SOA suite, and connect with all of your external systems in order to be able to fulfill. So not only can we pull data directly from Exadata, but also we can pull data directly from many other places. Okay, so I got to ask the next question that comes to Dianna jump right in. So software-led product team, or hardware-led, you guys, how do you guys fit into that? Because Exadata, obviously software-led Oracle Heritage, Son is the new kid on the block five years now, growing up fast, same thing with you guys and the engineering teams work together like the Exadata and hardware teams. Yeah, absolutely. We work very closely with the hardware team. So every time we have iterations of a hardware or software platform, we have a very close liaison with them in terms of what we're building and how we need to be able to support it from a hardware perspective. So one of the things Larry Ellison talked about earlier today was really the vision around providing Oracle Cloud on-premise, right? And that kind of workload has very specific shapes in terms of the kind of workload that you need to support, the kind of IO that you need to support. And you really need to have a very balanced system for that kind of workload, which is one of the reasons why Oracle has workload-specific systems. I have to ask you, you, Mojhab, have a lot of experience with heavy lifts. So you're CTO of Fusion Middleware, for example. That initiative was epic in terms of Oracle's unacquisition strategy, had to make all the stuff work together. What's the heavy lift today and how is it different? I mean again, back then it was making stuff work together. Now you're sort of on a different mission. I wonder if you could sort of describe it just a little bit. So I think the mission we're on at the moment is really around one primary goal, which was articulated earlier today, which is really around providing the Oracle Cloud services to customers, who, for example, for geographical restrictions, for data privacy restrictions, or frankly because they want to run their production workload on-premise, want to have a solution, for example, by which they run their production systems on-site and they leverage our public cloud together with those in a coherent architecture. And there's a lot of heavy lifting because we're obviously building two stacks concurrently, right? So you've got to make sure these are coordinated and they work very, very well together and that they cross-pollinate across the board. So really the heavy lifting is ensuring that you can advance two parallel lines and at the same time make a cohesive story. We could talk about that a little bit because Amazon, obviously, the 2006 were the last cloud services. And people point out the homogeneity of Amazon or Google or Facebook and the advantage that that brings. Others are trying to go to market. Take VMware, for example, with an ecosystem approach and they've got so much diversity in that ecosystem, it makes it very hard. You have an advantage in theory, anyway, I want to poke at that a little bit in terms of being able to essentially enforce homogeneity. I mean, you're doing it all within your red stack. But you're describing these sort of two parallel paths. Where is the dissonance in those two parallel paths and how do you manage that? So I think that there's key things. So I think just to be clear in terms of the kind of services we're actually providing. So we're providing the one example is the platform as a service capabilities, right? Which really sits on top of the elastic compute and the elastic store, right? What does that actually mean? It means providing a Java runtime, Java cloud service. It means providing integration services. So for example, if I want to take a purchase order, manipulate it and push it into a financial system, having an integration capability where people can build those custom integration. It's about having a process cloud service. So there are a number of these cloud services that are being built in parallel, right? And we're building these services in parallel. The real key thing to making sure that we can deliver on our vision is to have common infrastructure across both. So in other words, you can't take one of them after it's been built and then retrofit it because the cycle times for cloud based services are so short that by the time you actually manage to do that, you have the next version of the other thing coming out. So you really got to make sure you actually have essentially a coherent architecture where you have the same thing on both ends on the public cloud side and on the private cloud side. And that is the only way to have the ability to deliver these kind of services in a tandem. In your strategies to essentially enable that integration. I'll provide services that people can take and do that integration. And the past piece is interesting. We've been watching that, you're seeing guys like Pivotal come out and Cloud Foundry. You've kind of got SAS minus with Salesforce. You've got infrastructures of service plus with Amazon. What's, Oracle seems to have a very clean strategy. Infrastructure service, platform as a service, software as a service. You report on it every quarter. How are you different than sort of the other parts of the world? How do you see that past? Absolutely business shaping. So I think one of the most important things to realize is that our goal was to provide continuity for customers. So if you think I'm an existing web logic customer of which there are tens of thousands in the world. The thing that those customers of our stars is really a mechanism to provide the same set of skills that they have on premise and to take those. And for us to provide a cloud service so they can actually reuse those skills and reuse that investment and reuse that intellectual property on the cloud. So for us, we've taken a very pragmatic approach that enables our customers to truly deliver on the vision of hybrid cloud. Because at the end of the day, what customers are interested in is their application and having their application and having it running on premise and having, for example, testing and development in the cloud, for example, as one of the valid architectures. And really for that reason, we've taken a very methodical approach at having the same software infrastructure on both sides, whether it's the Java side, which is the Java cloud service, whether it's the integration side and the SOA side, et cetera. So I think the key thing to realize is that where other vendors have built custom stacks essentially for their past services, right? They don't provide an on premise answer for customers, right? And what we've really done is to provide not only a on premise answer, but also continuity from where they stand today. Mohamed, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. I know we're running down there, breaking down the set here, but I'll give you the final word here. I really let you give your perspective. What is the future of middleware? And you've got Excelogic doing some great things. You've got, you're not talking about heavily today, but Solaris and the Sun, it's busting their muscles. They're growing up and they're actually delivering some value in the integrated approach, engineering teams. How is this going to change? How does that Solaris, Sun, Mojo bring the middleware to a whole new level? It was cloud and these new transformations. So I think one of the things is, if you look at it, first of all, middleware, right? We're, as an organization, we're really focused on the key areas of investment, which is cloud and taking all of these middleware services and past services and really extending them and evolving them and making them available in the cloud. And I mentioned integration, I mentioned process, I mentioned Java. So really that's kind of a core thrust. And obviously we support not only the cloud use case, mobility is really kind of married with cloud and also use cases such as internet of things. Insofar as a question around kind of the collaboration, so we talked a little bit about the collaboration on the hardware side, but one of the things we do, for example, if you look at the networking technology within Excelogic, there's a technology called Exibus, right? And that is the basis for the performance game. And that's really built in conjunction with the networking team from Sun to deliver value together to customers. Mohamed, thanks so much for joining the queue. Really appreciate you spending the time here. We're live here, wrapping up the Oracle event. We'll be right back after the short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is the queue.