 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Brian Grace Lee. Welcome back to Oracle Open World 2015. We're here in San Francisco, 60,000 people. We're down here in the solution area. A lot of energy here on day four, day three, depending on how you're counting. Really excited to have John McCable, Michael Blackburn from Cisco, the solutions and solutions architecture team. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. So, you know, we've been talking all week about converged infrastructure, architectures, you know, all the different things that not only the UCS team is doing, but what you're doing with your ecosystems, you guys are really the secret sauce behind that. Talk about, you know, just talk about the program overall in terms of how Cisco thinks about solutions and what the outcome of those solutions look like. Well, so from a perspective of an architecture perspective, what we'd like to do is we'd like to give the customer one of the really, really best experience that they can have when dealing with a vendor that is going to eventually, hopefully, be in their data center. We pay a lot of attention to the details of what the customer brings to us, exactly what it is that they're trying to run on the hardware, whether it's an Oracle application or it's a database or whatever it may be. And then we also want to pay an awful lot of attention to how much money they're going to spend on a licensing perspective as well. How much they're going to have to pay Oracle is usually that particular piece of the puzzle is a whole lot more expensive than any piece of hardware that I can put into the solution. So we have something that's called a right sizing. We'll gather the data from the customers, we'll bring it in, we'll analyze that particular amount of data, and then we'll come up with a solution that is not only going to meet their performance needs, but it's also going to meet the licensing needs that they have from Oracle. In a lot of cases, especially when we're doing risk migrations, we can actually remove some of the licensing costs within the solution for the customer. So this week, obviously, tons of talk about the Oracle applications, application stack, but the reality is, customers have much more than that, whether it's around virtualization and other types of applications. Talk about the breadth you have in your team, the types of solutions that you cover, just so people get a sense of how much, how many things are you guys thinking about? What are you trying to engineer into those solutions? Well, so it's kind of two-fold, right? So our hardware pieces of it, we partner with a lot of different companies to create these stacks. So there's VCE, there's EMC, there's Hitachi, there's NetApp with the Flex Pods, there's Nimble with the smart stacks. That's all the hardware pieces of it. On the application side of it, what we're able to do with those pieces of hardware and those converged infrastructures is we're able to run more than just an Oracle database or an Oracle application. We can do both. We can do an Oracle database and an application within the same infrastructure, within the same stack. We can also run your SQL server database. We can run your exchange. We can run any other type of application that the customer might have in their closet or on their floor or in their shop that they need to run within the same infrastructure. So they don't need a separate appliance for each one of these things. They can do it all within the same infrastructure. Right, now, John, you're on the product management side. In the day, it used to be the IBM Red Book was kind of the Bible for a lot of things going on. The Cisco CBD is really right up there in terms of kind of authenticity for people. They know if they're following those CBDs. How do you think about that as a product manager? A lot of times people think about Cisco as hardware and software company, but CBDs are just as much about really being products these days. They're guiding customers to great outcomes. Yeah, CBDs really are. I mean, we spend over 2,000 man hours typically per CBD. We bring the system into the lab. We test it out. We document a level of performance. And then some customers have that document and they try to duplicate that in their own data center. If they can't get the same level of performance, we work with them to ensure they get that same level of performance. So one of the things that we look at at Cisco is when we invest in a CBD, we look at trying to solve specific customer challenges, specific use cases. We first came to market with UCS five and a half years ago. We were always testing these very large configurations. And customers were telling us that's great, but we need to have solutions documented that are more for small, medium business type customers. And that's actually been very advantageous for us. In fact, recently JD Edwards came to us and said, hey, can you document a integrated infrastructure that really fits our target market, which is between 1,000 and 3,000 concurrent users? And so the nimble smart stack solution that we debuted the JD Edwards Summit in February this year really fits that particular use case. And so as we've brought that into the marketplace, customers have really adopted it and we've seen some pretty good results. And customers really appreciate the fact we're looking at different size of opportunities, not just the largest ones that we possibly can put together in the lab. Now dive into that a little bit. You said, yeah, we bring some stuff into the lab, we test it. I mean, give people a sense of how big are the labs? How extensive are the tests? Because this isn't just sort of doing some ping tests and validating a few little things. These are very extensive. So that's a work. It really is. It's like 2,000 man hours in total. So when we bring in the system, obviously we rack the whole system up. We're documenting everything that's part of that system. All the firmware levels, the OS levels, any patches we put on, the Oracle code, if there's any patches, the Oracle code, exactly where we got those patches from. Then we put through a series of tests. And some of the initial tests are just making sure that the system obviously is functioning correctly. It's getting low performance. Then we ramp up workload. And so we may ramp up one to four blades, say in an Oracle rack environment. We may load on typical workloads like Oracle Swingbench and ramp up the transactions. We're trying to see if there's any break points. We'll then inject faults into the system and make sure the system reacts the way we expect it to. We'll inject Oracle patches when those faults happen. Again, to document what happens in the system environment so that when the customer has the system, they can see that we've been there, done that, we can address their concerns. So they know when they install it, it's going to warn right the first time, give them the performance and be a very solid solution that they can start running transactions on almost immediately. Yeah, you both talked about, you spend a lot of time with customers, talking to customers, whether those are in executive briefings out at their site. Talk about a lot of times when you're building a standalone product, you're thinking optimized for that problem. You guys have to think about how to work across many projects. Talk about how you take that customer feedback, get it back into the product teams and how they're having to think about it, working together better. Well, I mean, one of the things that we do is, on the architecture team, so the data center architecture team that I'm part of, is twice a year, we all come out, so we're scattered all over the United States and beyond. And twice a year, we have a team meeting just out here in San Jose at our main campus, where we meet one-on-one with the engineers and the business units for all the different products. And during that process, what we're able to do is we're able to be very, very candid with the business unit about what we're seeing. So every six months, we're, at least, every six month basis, we're giving direct feedback from the field, which is coming from our customers, going, look, this is what our customers are wanting, this is what they're looking for inside these particular products, or even if we don't have a product yet out, this is what they're looking for, how can we build this? And what that does is that allows the business unit to give us their ideas. We give them our ideas, and then we can sit there and have an intelligent conversation about what makes sense. Do we need to continue doing things that we're doing as we're doing today, or do we need to focus on some other things? And so we have that particular component that is across the board. Now then on the Oracle-specific side, every year we have our Oracle customer forum where we actually bring the customers in to meet the same people that we're doing this on a every six month basis with our team. So that gives our Oracle customers the chance to do this exact same procedure directly with our business unit. And it seems to be very successful and customers are really liking this particular format because they can give their exact opinion directly to the people who matter. Right, and I know we've talked to a number of the partners, the storage partners, they love the program. They get not only the community reach with Cisco, obviously with sales, but they love the engineering process. I mean, they really sort of come in and go, you guys give them a standard model to test with, you give them a standard model to document what comes out of it. They love the program, they're seeing tangible results. Talk about, you guys obviously, you get feedback from the business unit, so you know what they're thinking about. You see what customers, what sort of future looking things are you starting to hear percolate that you're beginning to sort of work on or go explore? Well I think, what customers are thinking about right now is they're hearing a lot about clouds and it's always in pain in terms of public clouds. Most customers aren't ready to jump right to a public cloud for their whole workload. They've got data and they're in the industry, they can't move their data off site. So what they're looking at is private cloud type of environments. How can I deliver my Oracle solutions to my internal customers more rapidly? How can I charge back to those individual business units within the company for the time they use within the data center to help cautiousify it? So they're asking us for tools, services to help them set up a private cloud environment. And then as you look to down the road, perhaps another year, how do you start looking at how can I leverage some of the public cloud environments to do certain things, such as setting up 20, 40 different test databases so they can test new versions, new patches and so forth in a public cloud environment, burst out, use those system resources and when the testing's done, blow away those databases and implement the right solution internally in their place of business. So those are some of the challenges that they're bringing to us today. I'd like to interject a little bit on that too. What we're seeing, especially with our larger customers, is they're taking their, you know, their mode one out, you know, the Oracle databases and applications, their SQL servers and all that stuff. And instead of developing on that and looking to the future with those, they're kind of putting those into a maintenance mode. So you know, they're doing what they need to in order to keep the core businesses running and make sure that the core business is happy. But now they're taking their tests and their dev teams and they're turning them around and they're making them look forward now. So they're looking at that next step. They're looking at that next move into the cloud or wherever it is that they may think that their future may be. And maybe they're developing a whole new, brand new set of apps to use in ways that the business has never thought about using before. Gotcha, gotcha. So you've obviously got a very deep technical team, lots of skill set, but customers essentially expect you guys to be leading edge, right? How do your team keep up with new things? I mean, automations out there, you talked about cloud, we've got software defined architectures. How does your team try and keep up with, you know, having to be kind of on that cutting edge all the time? Well, I mean, we're here, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, that's one of the ways that we do it, you know? Wherever your focus may be, you know, you go to the trade shows, you talk to the experts, you listen to your customers, okay? Because your customers are going to bring to you the things that the industry is talking about, whether they're ready for it or not, they're bringing it to you, right? And as those customers continue to bring the same story, the same story, especially in a short amount of time, you know that you've either missed the boat or you better get moving or you should have already been moving, one of the three, right? So, you know, what we like to do is, you know, I think everything that I've talked about so far with talking to the customers from the field perspective, allowing the customer's access to our engineering teams and stuff like that, that's given them that direct feedback of what they expect the future to look like. And so that helps us direct what our future is going to look like here at Cisco. Yeah, and I've always found your teams are very type A personalities, they want to go learn things, I mean, they're out front, and they're a little bit like the Navy SEALs, there is sort of a, there is no failure, it's we're going to take on big problems, we're going to go do those things. You've got a new CEO, right? John Chambers there for a long time was very supportive of the solution space. Chuck Robbins, one of the first things he said was, we've got to go even faster, right? He's really pushing you, give us a sense of how that trickles down to your organization, what sense of how you go faster is are you trying to take, you know, incorporate in your work? Yeah, you're right. Chuck has taken over as our CEO. John Chambers in fact was key noted at this conference back in 2011. You know, with Chuck and what he's set down is we've got to be moving faster, it really transpires into making good priority choices and making sure we'll work on the right solutions that can deliver the most bang for the buck. It's looking at the new technologies and how we can integrate them. So we come up with our proof points, we're not looking at just from a data center group perspective, we're pulling in products and services such as ACI, the Cisco public cloud environment into our solutions. And so we started looking at, okay, we're going to set up a database. Now, how can you utilize inter-cloud fabric from Cisco to be able to move workloads to and from public clouds in a secure manner? And so it's about pulling in more of those solutions that we can then bring out to the customers and solve more customer challenges. That's really how we're going to try to increase the velocity of getting solutions into customers' hands as quickly as possible. Right, and it looks like there's no slowing down to the acquisitions. I think he's been part of six or seven acquisitions here in the last even six months. That was always part of the Cisco DNA. You guys have been doing essentially integrated solutions, engineered solutions for a long time. I mean, that's been the core of it. How rewarding is it to start to see some of the other vendors go, well, that's the way to do it. And you guys kind of go, we've been doing it that way. We've got customers that are successful doing it that way. There's got to be a certain amount of, you know, kind of pride in seeing that happen, that trend happen. It really is, you're right. Because we've been doing integrated solutions really since we launched UCS back in 2009 with FlexPod and VBlock initially. And it is gratifying, because we thought that this would be the way to solve a total solution for the customer. Because too often vendors thought, oh, I'll just deliver the server and let the customer figure out the storage elements. And we said, no, you need to figure out all the elements to a total solution. And now it's really a way that everyone is kind of adopting our mindset in this regard. Really, I think validates the leading edge thinking that we've brought to the table and brought to the data center environment in Oracle, Microsoft, and other types of solutions as well. Yeah, so this week is obviously, there's lots of talk about the RedStack end-to-end Oracle. What do you guys talk to your customers about that, you know, whether it's on a FlexPod, a VBlock, any of the stacks with Oracle, what are the advantages of having maybe a little more flexibility in their solutions? But there's a lot of advantages for the flexibility. And what's really funny is the RedStack's changed. Because the RedStack used to be just all software. You know, before Larry bought Sun, and now it's a combination of server and, or excuse me, it's software, servers, and networking and storage. It's all combined, right, for them. So now that has kind of migrated to what a RedStack is. The thing that I'm seeing today is that, you know, the customers who are long-term Oracle customers, the last time they did their updates with Oracle, because Oracle updates happen very slowly, the RedStack was a different thing than it is now, right? It was all software, but now it's software and hardware. And so what happens when they call Oracle, Oracle comes in and they say, look, we're going to talk to you about not only your software, but also your hardware. And so what that, it's kind of changed the way customers are looking at things from a perspective of that stack. And so they come to us and they go, look, this is what Oracle says that we need. How can we do this with you guys, as an example? And so, you know, we'd like to focus on what the customer's looking for, and not necessarily what we have on the truck, okay? Because we are very flexible. I do have the ability to put about 21 different Intel part numbers in my B200 M4 series server, some of which are frequency or core optimized that are designed with Oracle licensing aspects in mind. And I can do a whole lot more work for core than let's say, you know, the standard E52699 that we have in our stack, but also is the only processor that Oracle offers and a lot of their Exadata, Exologic stacks and things like that. So, you know, we like to give them that flexibility of choosing different processors so that they maybe can do a full feature at Hypervisor instead of just using Hypervisor as a licensing mechanism. You know, we talk to them about, you know, running multiple workloads on the solution instead of just Oracle workloads. We talk to them about, okay, you can run OVM, you can run VMware, you can have a choice there as well. And then, you know, who is your storage vendor of choice? You know, we really, you know, we partner with a lot. So, you know, we typically are able to cover the whole blanket here, you know, with the customer as far as a solution and make it very flexible for them through that process. Yeah, yeah. So, we've talked about CVDs. They're a fantastic set of work. But at the end of the day, it's a set of documents. Give me a sense of what are your partners then doing to implement them? How are they, what have you seen evolve in terms of how they implement a CVD, how they keep it, you know, the customer systems in sync with what you guys are doing? Because, you know, the implementation pieces is huge and there's lots of different ways to do that. Yeah. Oftentimes, our customers will take the initial CVD, they'll prove it in their own lab themselves, and then as systems evolve over time, we'll actually find our partners, we'll actually take out, you know, the older model blades that we usually did the CVD on, they'll put in like the new B200M4 blade into the system, run the same test and be able to document that as part of their value add that they provide to customers. So, they can go to a customer and say, look, we can provide you the Cisco hardware, the storage, we've actually refreshed the work that was done on the previous testing and now we can provide a full implementation services to our customers, we can do a full set of training, so that's part of the value add that our business partners bring to the customers. It's the type of value add that our customers are really looking for. Yeah, so you're seeing your partners evolve, just like you talked about going from, you know, large systems to small, medium and large to, you know, they're evolving because customer demands are changing as well. Exactly, exactly. And that CVD is taking the customer's IT department and it's changing the way they do things. Because it's introducing that service profile to the mix where before they used to be very reactive. So when there was a problem, then they had to get the storage team and the networking team and the server team and the DBAs all together and they had to coordinate all that in order for that change to happen. In the case of a failure, we're now with the CVD teaches them how to do the service profiles where that team gets together ahead of time and they create the templates and things so that when that failure happens, just one of those guys needs to go push a button, move the profile and they're off and running. So it changes the way that they do business. Now, I think that's a great thing to sort of wrap up on. You guys are making it simpler. You're helping your customers. This journey, this transformation is hard. You're making it simpler. John, Michael, thank you so much for being on theCUBE. We're going to wrap up with that. We're going to be here all day at Oracle Open World 2015. You can watch all the videos on SiliconANGLE.tv. You can get all the Wikibon research at wikibon.com. Thanks for watching. Stick around for the next video. Thank you.