 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle's modern marketing experience. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for the modern marketing experience oracles show. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Our two guests next are Ryan Boome of GVP Oracle and Peter Isaacson, the CMO of DemandBase. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, man. So, you know, I'll say DemandBase, you guys are in the data, marketing cloud, it's all about the stack now, a change, a sea change in the marketing, moving into technology, certainly cloud. It feels a lot like DevOps. It feels a lot like where it's like agile, you know, iteration, fast, real time. Data's at the center of it is the conversation and that's what everyone's talking about and then integrating everything. So, what is the state of this modern, Mark and Ryan, you have a view there, the app's out there, it has to be differentiated. We also got to be working with other apps. Yeah, they surely do. But I think one great place to start is just talk about the change of the role of marketers in an organization and then why does the cloud matter? Why does what we're doing at Oracle Marketing Cloud Matter and why do our partners matter so much? I mean, I think the biggest thing, the biggest difference, so I'm a B2B marketing guy, that was my background and the biggest thing that's really changed is that the marketer has a seat at the table and they haven't always had a seat at the table, unfortunately. They haven't had a seat with the CFO, with the CEO, with the CIO at that same level driving strategy for the organization. You know, in many cases it was, hey, get more leads, your job is get more leads or your job is to build a nice brand or make some pretty pictures, right? I mean, I don't want to minimize a lot of the great work that marketers have done to date, but they haven't had that seat and now they do have a seat at the table. And when we talk about, what does that mean for an enterprise company? It means that we can provide a stack that allows them to meet their functional needs now and grow into the future. So it's not just Oracle Marketing Cloud as the stack because we are a very deep and broad stack of functionality, but when we say Oracle Marketing Cloud that inherently includes our partners because our strategy is a partner ecosystem and Oracle Marketing Cloud together. That's how we solve customer needs today. Maybe it's a single app solution, right? But tomorrow it's not going to be a single app solution. They're going to have more data coming in. They want to integrate with their data warehouse. They have other applications, right? So start now and we can grow with you. And when I say again, we, it's we, it's Oracle and our partners grow with you. So that's a big change. It used to be that marketing automation was kind of siloed. Exactly. And that email tied to it, but now all this nonlinear data opportunities, interactions is out there. That's right. So is that part of the dynamic too? It is, it is. And that's why buying for a stack solution where you have everything from a DMP to manage all of that data all the way through execution, right? That's why you, that's why it's great for customers to have that full solution. Because if you just buy a point solution, how are you going to handle the data? Because there's not a data tool for that, a DMP or a data management platform. You just going to hook up to another data warehouse? That's probably not going to solve your problem, right? And so the data is a big part of it. So is the seat at the table both driven by the relevance of the value proposition of down marketing's taking with the apps and or is it the data or both? I mean, cause now you're integrate, you're talking about integration, that's a big deal. Well, I think it's driven actually by business impact and the business impact that marketers are beginning to have across the company. And so much of that is being driven by technology, right? There's been so much innovation and so much great technology that's been introduced over the past three, four, five years. And they're not just fancy toys, they're actually fundamentally changing how marketers can actually represent their brand, get their value proposition out to customers that are going to matter most and actually drive business impact. And I think it's, I think it's that ability to drive business impact that is giving marketers that seat at the table. Because when you're just focused on click through rates and MQLs and website visits, things like that, no CEO or CFO wants to hear about it, right? Day warehouse query, basically it's stuff's going on. Yeah, but once you can actually say, you know what? And marketing contributed this amount to our business. We help this type of close rate. We actually drove this amount of bookings. Then people want to listen, then people are really interested. I'll just go down on that, give it an example because we had the Clorox CMO on, who's also on the stage, who loves technology, thinks that we're in a great time, but he's also like, look at the work, their workflows have to change. So how they work is ultimately what they care about, right? They care about their customer, right? So having technology for technology's sake isn't really his focus. He's like, hey, I got a lot of stuff promised to me. That was one issue. But even with tech, if it's not integrated how he works, it kind of sits and gets dusty. So can you give an example of where that impact's happening and where this new impact is? Sure. I mean, one example is just within demand-based. So we take an account-based approach to all of our marketing and account-based marketing is actually something that's very hot right now and demand-based is really the leader in it. But our account-based approach means our target accounts are responsible for 80% of our pipeline. And marketing is actually driving 80% of our pipeline as well. Fantastic. When we're responsible for that much of what's happening on the business, that, again, getting back to the seat at the table, that has a fundamental impact on whether we're making our number each quarter. So you bring up a good point. I want to talk about that for a second because I know that's your business and I was just talking with Louis Monahan before we came on, you saw that. We're talking about this account-based. You say it's hot, but also I'd also say that I'm hearing that it's not so hot in certain contexts. And I'll give you an example. I want to get your comments on this. There's a real trend towards persona-based. So in the old email days, a lot of companies have over-indexed on who you work for, not who you are. So what's happening is that that old email form-based capture destination passed to an analog sales process now is going on digitally. So when people are presented, you know, hey, you know, registration, they want to know who you are first, then the account. So accounts important, I would agree. But now the dynamic's changing where it's not, hey, who do you work for, first question? Yeah. They want to get the one-on-one with the persona. So you have the, I'm kind of talking out loud here, but like persona-based is one objective makes total sense. Account-based, you want to organize it in a way to provide value. Share the insight into what's the difference between those two. Is there conflict? If you don't mind, I'll throw something out and then you add onto it. I think what's interesting is now through technology and you don't actually have to ask what company are you from. Before they fill out the form, we can identify what company you're from. And then not just what company you're from, but how big your company is and what industry you're in, what the location is, what the sub-industry. So you can actually get all of that data even before they raise their hand, fill out a form, select the contact me, which is, again, a fundamental change in how you're- So you're enabling more persona-based interactions because you're automating the account? I would say what's interesting is that I think a lot of marketers about five or six years ago got very hung up on personas. And what I would say is if all you've got to go on is a persona, then you don't have a lot to go on. Persona's been very helpful in helping the company say, this is our type of buyer, this is our type of customer, but they're not, but personas by themselves don't help you actually reach and turn out. And also the definition of personas has been kind of polluted, right? It's been polluted, that survives, whatever you want to call it. Peter's totally right about that, right? I mean, best practices you do both. They don't fight each other, right? They're both great. Knowing your account, the account, fantastic, right? Because you now know something about them because it worked for another account. But then when you start to look at the title, but what is that persona? What is the content you want to deliver to that title or persona? What is their buying habits, all those things? A good marketer will do both. They need to look at the account and they need to look at the buyer. They're not usually exclusive either. No, not at all. They're not blended data model at the end of the day, right? No, absolutely. The more data you can get via tech, like say IP addresses, like you guys do that, I know you guys do that, right? So that's a great way to say, hey, why even ask the question? That's good user experience. That's right. Then you could maybe focus on something else. That's right. Okay, so this again brings up more of the complexity questions. So the other thing I heard from Kevin Alcoray yesterday and certainly on the keynotes was the big Mar-Tech map. Everyone loves the map. Zillion vendors out there. How the hell does a CMO make sense of all that? I mean, it's a night, I mean, half of them might even be out of bits like the Web 2.0 map in the old days. Like most of them are going to be gone or merged in or relevant. Well, what we're trying to solve for is a CMO doesn't have to worry about that map. I mean, it's complex, right? It is complex. And you know, as a technologist, one would look at that map and it's like boiling the ocean, let alone a marketing person's like, what is all this stuff? I'm just trying to get to know my customer better. I'm just trying to sell a product, right? But with the marketing cloud, we're trying to take that away somewhat so that the market doesn't have to worry about it. Because my team's job in the Oracle marketing app cloud is to partner with the leaders in each one of those categories, bring them into our ecosystem, help them build really tight UI based integrations so the marketer now can say, hey, we love Oracle marketing cloud, but we have maybe this functionality that's beyond what you do out of the box and we can provide two, three, four recommendations of partners that do that. So now the marketer doesn't have to go look at this complex thing and go, what are these words because I don't care about your categorization. I'm just trying to do something simple and we're trying to simplify that so we can provide a much easier buy. I'm a big fan of the Oracle marketing cloud because I'm 2014 I wrote an article on Forbes about this. It really has to be like a cloud, right? It has to be truly cloud. But interesting, you guys bought a lot of technologies and what's interesting is that the data layer now is the horizontally scalable component. So I want to ask you guys a question because you've worked with Oracle, you're at Oracle, so I want to ask you the question. First of all, I love that architecture. I think that's a winning formula across the breadth of the portfolio. But all the practitioners I talked to out there right now are struggling with this one concept. Do I highly differentiate my app because with big data and the apps, there's domain expertise specific to the app, there's functionality specific to the app, yet I don't want to get caught into a data silo, right? So I got to balance the pre-packaged app functionality and differentiation with a much more horizontally scalable data model. So how do you talk to those folks that are scratching their head, the digital builders out there right now saying, I got to do that. I got a lot of mishmash going on, I got an email thing over here, I got, they have the map problem internally. So how should they think about their problem? Well, do you want to take that since you are one of those kind of? Yeah, I mean. Does Oracle fit nicely into that with the new marketing cloud? Well, so I might take a different spin on this, but again, when more and more marketers are taking an account-based view of the world, the advantage you're taking in account-based view of the world is that you actually can identify specific accounts and then track those accounts from the very beginning of the journey, advertising, awareness, attraction, all the way through to your CRM system and pipeline and closed revenue. I think what we just announced with Oracle and Kevin in the Oracle Marketing Cloud, account-based marketing automation actually takes that idea of integrating your data and making it more useful to the marketer, to the next level within a marketing automation system. So in the past. You're federating the account concept across datasets basically. Exactly. And just making it so much more useful for Oracle Eloqua customers to actually use what is really the central nervous system of all their marketing activities, right? Oracle Eloqua and actually use that to push out account-based campaigns and nurture campaigns. But it's using consistent data across each aspect of your funnel. Yeah, and I think when we have a good partner integration like this, that's not just a UI integration. There is that data layer integration. And we share data back and forth as part of those integrations. So the marketer can go to one spot and still choose the segment that they want to target as an example. They don't have to go to yet to another tool or another data warehouse to get all of that stuff. And so that's part of our strategy as well as still make it easy for the marketer, right? It's one tool to them. It's one product. It adds tremendous value. And we don't, we purposely try to stop this islands of data problem that we've had for years and years. We're not trying to recreate that one. We're trying to simplify that. Well, that's been a big problem. The silo data is really problematic and a lot of redundancies on a lot of things. Certainly, account-based is a really critical field on all of this. But I also think that getting back to the kind of the 4,000 companies and the confusion and how difficult it is. You know, that's another example of how just through the partnership that Demandbase and Oracle Marketing Cloud have developed, we're making it so much easier for Oracle Marketing Cloud customers to actually say, you know what, I don't have to worry about 4,000 because the core pieces of my stack from Oracle are actually integrating into something that I'm going to use to target accounts like Demandbase and it's just simplifying that decision-making process. Well, I'm glad you're here. Yesterday, I had a chance to interview the founders, the founder, CTO and President Mintego that I wanted to get the VC-backed perspective because the question that comes up on the Oracle side is, this is a question for you, Peter, is the ecosystem, is it real? Certainly Salesforce, you know, flaunts their ecosystem around like it's the, you know, the app exchange as the be all end all. You guys, as Kevin pointed out, yes they have 900 integrated partners. So I got to ask you, what's it like to be an ecosystem partner because as you have the breadth of functionality, as you have some of the database technologies, whether it's engineered systems, through the database and through a data layer, what does Oracle bring to you as an ecosystem partner? Because a lot of people watch us saying, maybe I should join the ecosystem of Oracle. What's the experience like? They help you get deals, you're making money with them. I mean, are they all Oracle all the time? What's it like to work with them? Yeah, so it's a great question. I mean, I think it's interesting because you can set a goal and say, you know what, we want to expand the ecosystem. We want to get, you know, 2000 or 4000 or whatever a number is partners out there. But if you don't pay attention to the actual execution of that, if you don't actually integrate from a technology, from a marketing, everything else, then all of those are just meaningless numbers. And I just can't speak highly enough for Ryan and the Oracle Marketing App Cloud team on how passionate they've been, how responsive they've been, how much they've just leaned into our kind-based marketing automation product launch. True partners. True partners. I mean, there is a ton of complexity launching a product under the best circumstances. Partnering with a company as big as Oracle and the Oracle Marketing Cloud, you get a little worried, like, how is this going to go? Is this just going to create- They bring some functionality to the table too. They bring a lot of heavy lifting to the- But without question that, but I would also say just shockingly nimble in how quickly they've been able to just work with us, develop a marketing plan, organize their team and just actually help us get this product out the door in a really meaningful way that is, like, literally from hour one of the launch is driving new business course. Talk about your strategy. I mean, my perspective just looking from the outside in is that it's not like it's a cattle car or people just jumping in the sponsorships. You pick and choose and it's neat. I mean, you're not totally picky, but I mean, you pick the right partners. It's not like it's a clown car of partnerships. I mean, it's like- That's right. We try to keep away from the clown car. I like that, yeah. Oh, the relevance. You look good. You look for white spaces. You bet, you bet. So we really have a depth-and-breath model, right? There are partners that want to integrate with Oracle Marketing Cloud. That we might have a newer technology. They might not have market share, but yet they have something that's innovative. We have a low-touch process for them to come in and get integrated with the system. But we also spend a lot of time identifying, recruiting, managing, loving on, if you will. Our partners that are actually, we have a lot of combined customers together. Because that's really the starting point, right? If the man base has some great customers, we have some great customers together. The first better together story is always working with a great customer together. So we look for those types of partners. And we look just like, you're asking about loyalty, right? We look for people that are also going to be loyal to us. I would prefer that the partner spends most of their energy and development dollars and go to market dollars with Oracle Marketing Cloud than somebody else. And so we look for those types of partners. And you truly bring them into the fold. We do truly bring them into the fold. Okay, so I got to talk to Tim Brown earlier. He was pretty cool. He's a maximizer to Oracle. And he had an interesting comment, and I want to get your thoughts on this, Peter, because a lot of these venture-backed stars, sometimes self-finance, can't make it alone. And there's a line where you've got to say, well, maximizer was kicking ass. So obviously, and he said, we saw a point where, you know, we were a point solution. And it was just natural fit to be acquired by Oracle. Same kind of business decision on the partner side, because you got to balance capabilities versus going alone, but you're still independent. So you're not yet bought into the fold, which is always possible, but you have to balance that. Can you share how you think about that? Yeah, I mean, the first thing you got to do is you got to focus on your business and kind of pleasing your customers, delivering the innovation that they want to see. Once you reach a certain size, which we are, we've been able to partner with some of the bigger companies like an Oracle Marketing Cloud that actually extend our platform, extend our solution set. For us, it's really just a matter of keeping your head down. And Oracle always gets the move before they buy, right? I got to try and get you to say they're going to buy you, right? No, no, no. You're not smiling. That's up to them, but the price is going to be pretty high. So anyway, for us, it's just kind of heads down. We got to make our own business successful, which we've been doing really well. I sat down with Mark Perth for a one-on-one interview in January, and I put it right to him, and he was not shy. He, they make, Oracle makes M&A decisions. They'll organically grow, and they'll do M&A. So they have no problem writing big, fat checks, but they buy different kinds of companies. IBM buys tuck-unders, Oracle buys scale. So, you know, always a different kind of criteria there. Final thoughts on the ecosystem slash landscape, looking forward, old-way, new-way, what are some of the things that jump out at you that you look at as veterans and say, hey, there's certain things that we can pretty much put the stake in the ground saying, that's definitely happening. You got to bet that as a premise. And given that, what is some scenarios that you guys see happening in modern marketing over the next couple years? Yeah, so, that's a good question. I haven't really thought that one through before. I think, though, I think there are some table stakes, right? There are some table stakes in marketing. You need a good orchestration platform, whether you're B2B or B2C, you need a great orchestration platform. I think the other thing that's table stakes right now, or it's emerging to become table stakes, is the importance of mobility or mobile marketing. You know, we're in the United States, and other maybe Western countries, we're used to marketing, right? Email, so we went through the internet stage, and then email showed up, and we went through all of that, and then mobile showed up. There's a lot of parts in the world they didn't get the internet. They went from not much to a mobile phone with carrier connection. And so they missed that whole phase, and there's a lot of countries like this, and we're doing extremely well in those countries where it's a mobile-first marketing. But I think it's a matter of time, and it's not going to take very long, where mobile-first is also here in North America. Facebook announced their earnings yesterday, 15 billion in the quarter in cash, just on mobile. That's significant. Now that's ad-based, but if you bring the one-to-one experience down to mobile, it can be pretty interesting compelling. That's right, and I think that companies that aren't investing in mobile, and maybe are resting on their laurels in email, I think there might be a route away coming rather quickly, so that one's moving fast. I think another table stakes right now is the importance of data like you talked about. You know, it doesn't make sense to me at all as a marketer why I would buy a point solution that didn't have rich integration capabilities and a great data platform underneath it. I just don't understand why you would do that. There's just no logic to that. Data is so important, and to be able to do something with that data and the analytics on that data to target more customers or more accounts using that data. I've heard some reasons why people do that, and they're quite frankly just legacy financial, I got to write it off, kind of things. It's not nothing to do with the tech. I bought this data warehouse with this product, and I spent boatload of capital on it, and I just can't kill it tomorrow. So that they're in that kind of slow phase out on the versus they. But as they're looking at a new platform, whether it's newer replacement, that's got to be part of the selection criteria, right? Is that data management platform, it has to be there. The lack of point solution is not a great story, and the lack of interoperability is another thing. I mean, interoperability and open platform is table stakes. Because no one vendor will ever solve every functional need, and a customer doesn't want to get to a point with a platform and go, oh, I can't do what my business requires because there's no way to integrate, there's no extensibility. That opens the key, that's why I asked the ecosystem questions. Most people are like, oh, Oracle, they want to control everything. Well, not really, you got 900 partners integrated, it's pretty damn good. That's right, that's right. Ryan, Peter, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Really appreciate it, thanks for your time. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back with more after this short break.