 Live from the Oracle Conference Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering the Oracle Cloud Launch. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Redwood Shores, California, the Oracle headquarters for special presentation pre-game segments prior to the Larry Ellison keynote here for the special cloud announcements as theCUBE Silicon Angles flagship program. We're going to go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of Silicon Angle, my co-host Dave Vellante, founder of wikibon.com research. Our next guest is Xavier, senior vice president of integrated products, welcome to theCUBE. So a lot of folks are going to be rolling in the press industry analysts about Larry's announcement. Pass and cloud certainly has been a big battleground of innovation. First question is what is the integration challenge for customers right now? Because everyone sees the cloud as a resource pool. Getting there outside of non-mission critical stuff is you can do some test and dev and some public cloud, leverage the cloud. What are the key things that they need to think about? So the reality is a lot of our customers of course and many customers you see which are not even Oracle customers have a broad investment in on-premise products. And they have a huge amount of assets which are running on-premise. And they're also starting to use a lot of SaaS applications which are in the cloud. So the big challenge for a lot of them is how do you connect all those on-premise assets to the ones which are running in the cloud and make it seamlessly done. And also use a tooling and kind of a solution which makes it easy to kind of do the mapping of different application endpoints, make it very easily available to them and have not just do up where you have to do a lot of programming, but also a lot of line of business users, a lot of analysts who can connect that very easily. So the hybrid ability to do hybrid integration becomes a very, very important thing. So on-prem middleware has been a big part of the success of Oracle, your specialty. Having pure play cloud is not necessarily a good answer. As Dave always says, the word stove pipes comes to mind or silos, however you look at it. But how does the middleware software work in this cloud environment? Could you tease that out a bit? Sure, the middleware always has been kind of the core element in terms of how you run your application, business logic, right? And today a lot of the applications underneath the covers is middleware is running the business logic for those applications to be performant, secured, connected, as well as be able to kind of do a lot of business processes around it. And the same elements and same kind of functionality is required in the cloud now. So if you want to run this in the cloud, you want to have a similar platform, which is available as a whole cloud integrated system for customers to use this in the cloud as well. How hard is it? I mean, it sounds super easy. I mean, I used to be a computer science major, haven't coded in a while, but I could just write some middleware, no problem. Hackathon weekend, super easy, right? I mean- I wish it was. Explain the complexities, because it really is not trivial. So if pretty much everything which you do underneath the application needs to be kind of managed and reused, right? So you want to be able to provide the framework for building the application. You want to be provided the engine on which the business logic runs. You want to be able to have the performant engine, which of course can scale to millions of users, especially when you go to the web or go to the cloud, be able to run it 24 by seven and make it highly available. So the complexity is really the building out of core platform, which can scale all these things, right? And make it secured. So you require a lot of good computer scientists. You require people who have really done a lot of server back encoding. So it's not really, you can hack your way out of this, right? We have been investing in the middleware space for the last 15 years. If you look at the success we've had is because we have very highly available, performant, secured and manageable system, where the customers or anybody who's writing the business application, they don't have to do a lot of the underlying technology work. They can focus on the business logic and kind of abstract out all the different things which we provide for them out of the box. What are the key abstraction points that you guys can share? I mean that for customers who are, aren't really keeping score on a day-to-day basis. What are the key abstraction points that you guys are abstracting away? Because if you can abstract away complexity, that's a good business model. Of course. So the big thing we do is of course, if you look at the Java application server, right? Which is really a system on which you write your business logic on. So we take away all the things you need to do for scalability, clustering, for high availability, for doing things in terms of security, all the different standards which are coming out, all the different Java technologies which are coming out, all the different tooling, different application languages which are coming out. So the application developer doesn't have to worry about all that stuff. And they just need to write to an API. And we take care of all the underlying changes which might be emerging, a lot of the newer trends which are coming in. So if you're adding mobility, for example, if you're adding technologies around IoT, you're adding technologies around, say, big data. All those things are really encapsulated in the platform to make it very easy for application developer to not have to deal with it themselves. So was that, a decade ago, you guys made a big investment in SOA. And the whole discussion was around component software and reusability. And the idea was simplification and to a certain extent, scale. You're talking about a whole different ball game now. What's changed? What's different? What's the key set of ingredients that enables you to enter this modern world? So no doubt, so SOA, for example, and as you mentioned, we kind of solved this idea of making integration easy because everybody used to do point-to-point integration once upon a time. Or you used to hire a lot of system integrators to come and wire those applications together and then when something endpoint changed, you had to rewrite them. So SOA abstracted that out and made it very, very easy for customers to do that now. So that problem has been solved. The part which has not been solved and what we have kind of done with this announcement we're making is really make it easy for customers to seamlessly migrate the workloads from on-premise to the cloud and vice versa. So you're not kind of tied to one way of doing your application deployment and make it very, very flexible. So any code you write, be it on-prem or be in the cloud, is portable. You don't have to rewrite it every time just because you change your mind in terms of where you want to deploy it. You can start with DevTest, for example, in the cloud and then move your workload back on-premise for production. So that requires a lot more innovation and a lot more investment in the core platform to make it easy and abstract it out for the customers. So I want to forget to unpack that a little bit. You talked about that. You started the conversation with that is the big problem that customers have that going from on-premise, they want to be able to move it to the cloud. Why? What's the motivation there? Is it cost? Is it speed? Agility? I mean, talk about those things. All of those things. And the big thing which a lot of customers have is that for application developer or a programmer they don't want to wait for IT to give them a system to be able to provision. It usually takes them three, four weeks to buy hardware, procure the software licenses, be able to provision them, configure them. So you lose a lot of productive time. So one is to agility to go to the cloud where I can get an environment, I can get a Java instance or integration instance in less than five minutes once I sign up is one, right? Second thing is the ability to kind of be flexible in terms of your adoption of it. So I can do subscription based month to month. I use it and I pay for it that time. If I don't use it, I can unsubscribe. So that also is second thing which is really makes it easy for developers to do DevTest very quickly, right? Third thing is to be able to now get more capacity on demand. Instead of having to go take some capacity out of your production system for doing DevTest I can now put that away into cloud for example and then use it when I need to and then go back to my production system if I want to. So instead of procuring more and more hardware every time and not using it to the capacity I need to I can now do this in the cloud. So test Dev obviously the killer app here, use case, right? But it's the lowest hanging fruit though. And it is, but is that sort of the tip of the spear? Is that the foothold? And then where does it go from there, do you think? Well, no, no doubt. I think people start with that just so they can understand what they're getting into. But the issue, what we're seeing is use cases now there's more and more is that they're starting to use it for production systems now or scalability for on demand kind of thing. So it's really test Dev is the starting point because that's why you start writing programs. But we've seen also a lot of customers who move or migrate the workload production systems onto the cloud. And they're going to start adding any time they need more capacity, it'll run in the cloud. That came up in the last segment I want to just ask you because when Steve was on top of vertically integrated vertically scale is a nice feature in Oracle and the benefits are starting to prove out. And people was, oh vertical is not the way because horizontally scalable was the beginning of the whole open source movement around commodity hardware. And that was what kind of got the cloud stars early Amazon runs on commodity hardware. They make their own PCs and that says commodities can be. But horizontally scalable is this new ethos of DevOps. How does a customer get the benefits of horizontally scalable and vertically integrated at the same time? Because it's not mutually exclusive anymore it appears to be. Do you agree that they're not mutually exclusive? And if so, how does the horizontal scale play in? Yes, I think you definitely need to have the ability in a data center and in a system like a big cloud platform to be able to scale both ways. So when you do vertical integration you definitely get the benefits of really tightly coupling all the different systems, right? So getting better performance, better scalability, better security, all those kind of elements. And then the system has to be able to scale to millions and millions of users as you need to. And that's really where what we have done with our investment in our data centers, in our software, in some of the optimizations we have done allows you to do that without customers having to deal with it themselves. They don't need to know that. They don't need to worry about it. We make sure that the horizontal scale. This is the abstraction you were talking about earlier. Yes, yes. What's the hottest area? If you had to kind of like look at the customer environment, what's some of the hottest things that you see happening? Today, I mean, if you look at the three things which we've seen more and more, right? And the platform as a service, for example, one is integration, right? Integrating your on-prem to cloud and cloud to cloud, right? So how do you integrate all those multiple applications together, multiple systems together, be it devices, whatever it is, right? It's one. Second thing we've seen a lot of interest in terms of modernizing legacy applications and adding mobile capabilities. So how do I now take all the existing applications, all the users want to use it on a mobile platform? How do mobile enable them without having to rewrite those existing applications, without having to maintain multiple code lines because you have multiple device types. You have multiple OSs. You have iOS, Android, all the other ones. How do, as a developer, not have to deal with variations in device types, different OSs, and be able to do that very quickly? But that's your API entry into the platform. Yes, it's API entry as well as be able to provide something like mobile back into the service, right? So that I can take my legacy application, modernize them very, very easily. You can deliver those services, right? And without maintaining multiple code lines. Third thing is process automation. So now that you are cutting across multiple SaaS apps, multiple on-premise apps, how do you do a workflow which connects all them together? All those dependencies. All the dependencies and the business logic together, right? So as a business analyst, I can connect that easily through, again, a very nice platform as a service called process cloud service. And that cloud to cloud piece, what you meant by that is integration SaaS to SaaS? Yes, yes. So if you look at the SaaS, if more and more customers nowadays have probably asked 30 plus or 40 plus SaaS applications, they're not even aware of. Each of them are very siloed sometimes. So it's very functionally divided. Sometimes. We try to give them the full broad picture here on our side, but the idea is that how do you connect them together so that I can have application, business logic working across those things without having to, again, do all those point-to-point integration. That's the integration cloud service really does that for you. Amit, great to have you on the queue. I really appreciate you sharing the insight. So I got to ask the question around extracting the signal from the noise is kind of our tagline. There's a ton of noise in cloud. The blue mix for IBM, you've got Amazon out there, and they're all kind of like moving really fast and kind of filling their product holes to, and or in Amazon's case, shifted the enterprise. Blue mix is catching up and you've got cloud foundry out there, you've got open source. With all that stuff out there, it's certainly confusing customers. It's got their attention. No doubt, yes. No doubt cloud is the way to go. How do you tease that out for the customer? How do you break it down? What is the signal vis-a-vis the competition? Yeah, I think, as you said, I think there's a lot of interest in this space and a lot of vendors who are trying to provide a cloud platform for developers to build their applications on. The difference for us is really what we're seeing is one thing is to have ability to have the same platform which is broad and deep, which is well integrated with our SaaS application offerings as well as able to kind of add capacity on demand as you need to. The differentiation we see from our side is really ours is very standard-based, completely on Java, versus if you look at a vendor like Salesforce.com with the force.com platform, you have to learn Apex, their proprietary language. Second thing you have to worry about that there's no way to now bring that on-prem. So if you ever want to build an application on force.com, if you want to run it on-prem, you have to rewrite the whole platform again on-prem. There's no other way to do it. I mean, I've called Salesforce, what Cisco did in the 90s, all these acquisitions, cobbled together all these disparate parts is frustrating for customers. I mean, Salesforce has a lot of different components. Well, but so, but there is integration obviously with the Salesforce apps, but you pointed out some of the limitations. Now let's talk about Amazon. Amazon, I call Amazon infrastructure as a service, plus, is still versus SaaS minus. So what are you seeing there in terms of your competitive advantage? So Amazon is very, I mean, they have a great story in that infrastructure service and they've been offering that for many years. The part they're missing today is really a full-blown platform. Like if you're looking at integration cloud service, what we offer, mobile cloud service. If you look at what we do with process cloud service, the breadth in terms of the middleware capabilities, which we have on a platform, is really lacking on Amazon, it's one. Second thing, again, it's a very cloud-only solution. I can't bring any assets I've built on it to on-prem. So they have a million, I mean, we have a lot of use cases coming up with most of our customers who want to run some of the systems on-prem. How do you do that? I have a one-way trip to the cloud. I mean, there's no question about that, but can I run your pass in Amazon? We can run a lot of our products on Amazon. Today we allow you to run and deploy the database or our web logic server or a lot of our products. You can't run the whole integrated and optimized platform on Amazon. So it's the integration, Sikhi. Now what about something like, you hear a lot, you've got these IBM events here, a lot about Bluemix. You see Bluemix in the marketplace and where your thoughts are? I mean, Bluemix is really late to the game as one. I mean, they try to rebrand themselves. They used to have a whole cloud offering based on WebSphere. Now they try to do something with Bluemix. It's kind of a modern WebSphere. But it's not compatible. So it's not compatible. I can't take the WebSphere code, which I've written for many years and run on Bluemix. I have to rewrite a lot of the stuff. So now take us to the Oracle analog there. So Oracle today, if I build any application of WebLogic, which is our Java container, I can instantly deploy that on our Java cloud service on Oracle Pass without having to rewrite a single line of code. And if I start for the cloud, if I want to run on WebLogic on Trump, again, I don't have to rewrite a single line of code. So it's a big, big difference because all the investments I've made as a customer don't have to be thrown away just because I'm moving to the cloud. So what's your message to developers? Maybe you could talk about that whole developer angle. Yeah, to us, I mean, I think we have been working with developers for many, many years with the middleware platform. I mean, today we have millions of them who use Java. And our core goal is to really provide them a full-blown, broad and deep platform as a service offering where they can write their application on it. They can integrate different applications with it and be able to manage it very easily and have a low cost of ownership and a very quick agile system for them. So Java is your open play. A lot of people criticize Oracle. Oracle's closed and new counters. Java. We completely Java compatible. I mean, any Java-based application you built works on a pass. And we continue supporting that and continue investing in that. So one of the things that comes up, speaking of developers, is the real-time aspect of it. You're seeing obviously Java as standard. And a lot of folks, how are they all their analytic stuff with Java? So it's, you know, whether you're old school like us and or the young guys are still using Java up and down. We're seeing that, no problem. But new stuff like Node, AngularJS, this is more of the real-time languages. How did you guys look at that, Mark? How are you guys embracing that DevOps kind of like the new languages? Yes, you'll hear some of these things today. It's a good question in terms of like, we do believe that customers have different, or developers have different language requirements for different kind of things they're doing. Java is a core engine underneath the covers. But if you look at Node.js, for example, or Ruby. So we have services, the polyglot kind of services to allow you to run and build applications of multiple languages. And we support that in our platform as a service offering as well. So, okay, so you embrace that. So I want to ask you about Cloud Foundry because that seems to be what they're trying to differentiate on. Do you see them in the marketplace at all? Do we see them somewhat? I think that the idea, the concept of that we have multiple vendors trying to come together and not being able to agree is kind of the confusing part there right now. But the issue with Cloud Foundry is again, it's a very limited platform. It provides you a good runtime. But a lot of the breadth around business process management, mobile services, BBLU integration between different applications doesn't exist in there. That's your big advantage is the integration of the applications. But what I'm hearing in the Cloud Foundry marketing is choice, but you're saying whether it's Node, Ruby, you're offering a similar choice. Similar choice, exactly. So we always talk about lock-in and this is coming up on the crowd check. So I want to ask you a specific lock-in versus choice. And it's always a debate on the queue. We always talk, first of all, lock-in is competitive advantage home run. You can get a lock-in that's not always good for customers, but choice is what customers want. That's kind of table stakes. That's kind of what we see. But lock-in, the new lock-in or the new differentiation, if you will, is scale and value. What is that piece for you guys? What is that differentiation that will give you the new lock-in as open choice but yet real value? What's the key thing? Yeah, I think as you said, I mean, definitely want to give choice to the customers where they can, if they don't like to use a platform they want to move somewhere else. It's again, very much standard based. So you don't have to really lock yourself in this. But we do provide the ability and the scalability in terms of having this vertically integrated stack, which is very, very scalable, which is completely standard based, right? And that's really, for us, a big differentiation versus anybody else. So I think if you want to look at that as a lock-in, because you're going to be happy with it, sure, we would like to use that as the way to tell you that this is the right platform to build on. I mean, I love Dave, I love the lock-in. And when I had the business school, no one said, hey, create a business and create, give your competitors more advantage to commoditize your business. But Amazon's the mother of all lock-ins. That's why it's such an attractive business model to me. Well, it's easy to get in, but lock-in is going away. I mean, if you look at open source, you look at the lock-in as a quote, no choice. Was the older definition people would look at. But lock-in is a choice. Lock-in with choice is called competitive advantage, right? Value privacy. So again, this is what's happening. The new normal is the software model with open has changed and now with cloud, certainly anyone can start an apps business, but can they scale across business process? This is what you're saying. Yeah, and if they used to some of this, because most of the people who have been building applications used to this platform, like our middleware, for example, has been around for many years. We have more than 150,000 customers that use it globally, right? So they are familiar with it. So it's very easy for them to move to a similar platform in the cloud without, again, have to learn something completely from scratch. And that just saves you time, money, and kind of gives you some confidence. Plus, everybody in the global 2000 runs Oracle. Database, man, that's, you know, you can run a different database if you want, but people choose not to. And it works well. It's trusting. So I got to ask one final question coming from the crowd chat. We have Werner Griff, who asked the question, what regions can expect Oracle Cloud Datacenter in the future? Maybe we'll have a point question that might not be in your wheelhouse, but it brings up the question of regions. Multi-cloud, multi-regions, certainly in disaster recovery seems to be a big, under the cover's details, whether it's Hurricane Sandy in New York City, which decimated some big banks. What does that look like from your perspective on integration? So we have a very, very well thought out and already executed a strategy for doing rollout around the globe, right? So you'll hear some of these things in Thomas Curry and his presentation today, later in the day, where he talks about the data centers we have invested in, how many we have globally, and we keep on adding more and more capacity in pretty much every region you can think of. So today we are present in North America, we present in Europe, we present in Asia, and we present in Latin America. And we keep on adding more and more centers in pretty much most of the key cities and areas we need to. Miss, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We're pre-gaming the big Oracle announcement. Larry Ellis is going to come on stage all the topics that is laying out, the big cloud announcement on momentum, new stuff, new services. So stay tuned, it's theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.