 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-sponsored, Oracle. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley at the Oracle headquarters for the special Larry Ellison presentation coming up at one o'clock here for a big Oracle announcement. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. I'm the host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Dennis McCormick, Deputy Director of the City of San Francisco. Obviously, the City of San Francisco is in the news these days across the board. Hot startup environment. Huge population explosion in terms of urban activity. Uber's started in San Francisco. Dennis, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me today. You know, I just was getting a story about Uber now doing more business than the taxi cabs combined. But that really highlights, I know it's a top story, but it really highlights San Francisco's role and the diversity of San Francisco over the years has been very open, very transparent, but really it's a hotbed right now for technology. The parking issues, the challenges. You run the backbone. What's going on? What's the scene like right now for you guys running the tech in the San Francisco? So as you said, you know, we run the city's financials and HR systems. That's not cutting edge, right? It's not the Uber's the disruptive nature of it. What we need to do is every day come in and make sure that we're getting payroll cut, making sure that all of our transactions are posting correctly. There's nothing really sexy there. So our biggest challenge to be quite frank is how do we hire in this environment where you have a programmer or infrastructure engineer, they have a job offer from Google, they have a job offer from Uber. I mean, this is the real reality that we live in. So that's something that we're trying to... I hope I have salary requirements too, by the way. They do. Salary and equity, right? So how do we compete with that? One of those tools that we think that we can really start to use in the future is, okay, let's get people running on their latest and greatest hardware. Let's give them those new challenges. Let's let them know that they're on the cutting edge. You know, we don't want to be in the mainframe business anymore. We don't want to just be supporting access databases. We need to be able to bring in engineers who can support our systems that are running on the latest and greatest. Just generally living in San Francisco now, it's a strange place. It's changed a lot. I've been there for 10 years now. You see the Uber buses coming in all the time. You see the Google buses. It's a different world. What's the guiding principles now? Talk about, like, division. Because obviously, you know, you see the mayor and it's very progressive. They know they have channels, certainly in the housing stuff that's being talked about. But just from a vision standpoint, do you have a direction? Do you have a guiding, even a hill to take? Or is there a philosophy? The biggest direction, you know, working in the controller's office is a financially secure city. So what does that mean? You know, right now, if you're walking around the city, you're going to see cranes going up everywhere. You see all these new businesses coming in. We don't expect this to last forever. So we want to be prudent about the way that we spend the tax dollars that we're getting in right now to get the biggest bang for our buck for the next future downturn. It's a cyclical world San Francisco is. So when there's a boom, there's also going to be a bust. So we're trying to prepare for that. And then really the biggest challenge is housing. So we've been working a lot with the mayor's office to see how do we solve that question of what is affordable housing? How can we provide that to the workers and the residents of the city? So you guys sit in the war room saying, okay, you kind of got to hold the Ford, if you will, hold the city and make sure it's secure. But you want to be, you know, future four. You want to have a vision. And obviously big data is coming into play. But cloud, can you talk about, I mean, you guys sit there and say, oh, we got to go to the cloud or hey, cloud's not an option. What are some of the conversations you have around that? And also, you know, you're an Oracle customer. So you have their stuff. Yeah. They're talking cloud. What's your vision? Do you see cloud in your future? Everybody's talking cloud, right? I'm not even convinced that everybody knows what cloud means right now. And so cloud means different things to different people. So when we look at the cloud, when we look at our financial data, all of our financial data is, it's transparent, it's for the public. So you can go and you can put a sunshine request in at any time and get all of that financial data. So we have less security risks there. When we're talking about HR, we're maintaining private confidential information for public safety and other city workers. We have a very low tolerance for risk there. So would we want to move to the cloud with that information? Probably not. But we're also looking to see how can we leverage the cloud around those core services to take advantage of some of the flexibility the cloud allows. So online recruiting might be a good example of moving to the cloud to a demand-based model. The entire financial systems, that might be a way that we could move forward with it. But we've made the real strategic decision to say, with core HR data, it's just too much risk right now for ourselves and our stakeholders, including the unions, the attorneys, to really sign off on that. Well, there's a lot of things you'd have to actually get done. You mentioned the budget issues and also personnel challenges. Higher in some killer node, JS integrated stack engineer in the cloud, you know, between whether there's some sort of Amazon or Combo. Security, huge issue. How do you guys look at the security piece? Because with all that sensitive information, I'm sure the hackers look at San Francisco as a prize. Say, let's hack this system. Yeah, I mean, we always see the data on how many hacks or attacks are always going on at any one time. And it's disconcerting to say the least, but we're very confident in the network security that we have in place. We're confident in the encryption that we have on our core databases. So we don't really, it doesn't keep us up at night, but we're definitely very proactive about it. Applying like the patches, making sure that we're ahead of the game in terms of the technology. But it's something that it's always a background risk. And the conversation really has always been around, are we better off managing our risk in-house on-prem, or are we better off transferring that risk to a third party? How would we be able to do that with moving into the cloud? So we've looked at how some other public sector organizations have handled that, and we've really just made the decision that our current status quo is better, and it affords us better protections than moving into the cloud. So Dennis, at the end of the last decade, you know, the entire systems business started moving toward this notion of what Oracle calls engineered systems, other call it integrated, converged, what do you want to call it? And Oracle did, in fairness, start it, or was it Oracle as sort of an HP originally? And then of course the sun acquisition changed that relationship pretty dramatically. But so talk about your environment, what you're doing with those so-called engineered systems, and maybe take us back to the decision point. Sure, so about two years ago now, we were faced with the challenge that everybody's faced with. Aging infrastructure, we were running about 50 IBM Blade servers, we needed to replace those. So what we did is we went through the classic procurement analysis. We looked at cloud very quickly, as I already said, that was not really going to be a viable option for us. We looked at simply replacing the IBM Blade servers with the latest generation. We looked at a full UCS model, and we looked at a hybrid UCS IBM Blade model, and then we also looked at the engineered systems. So we ended up going with the engineered systems. Biggest differentiators there were really the one-throw-to-choke model, which is something that really did work for us. We didn't want to go breath best and breathe. We didn't want to be struggling with all these different vendor support models and testing and retesting. We wanted one system to be able to really move over to, and then the scalability aspect of it. Having the commonality of the language would allow us to hire staff more easily. So if all of our engineers are speaking the same language and they're all being trained up on the same platform, it allows us to overcome our biggest challenge, really, which is hiring. How do you hire people if you need them to support one type of storage here, one type of server there, one type of network connection there? It's a lot more difficult. We thought by consolidating the platform, bringing that all in, we could make hiring a lot easier. So that was another one of our big challenges. And we also wanted to make sure that when we moved the data centers, so in addition to replatforming, we moved data centers. We needed to get robust disaster recovery business continuity in place. We didn't have that before. We live in San Francisco, home of earthquakes. So we know it's coming. It's only a question of when. So what we wanted to be able to do is create a platform that allowed us to have real, robust disaster recovery in place. So by using the engineered systems and active data guard, we've been able to prove that out. So obviously attacking the labor component. And then you mentioned the one throat to choke. It's interesting because when VCE came out, that was the whole concept was one throat to choke. IBM has its version of integrated systems. Why did you feel that the exadata systems and Oracle were more of one throat? Well, because we're running Oracle database with Oracle HCM on top of it. And then now we're running the Oracle hardware. So we really have been able to cut down on the amount of time that it takes to troubleshoot an issue. Before, even if it is IBM hardware, then well, oh, is it Oracle software? Is it the Oracle application? All of that is really gone now. You know, you put in that my Oracle support ticket, turnaround time is really, it's been awesome. We've been working with the engineers at Oracle. We get some webinars going, we get the problem tackled, and we're moving full. So true full stack is really. True full stack, it's all the way through. And that's really the biggest, one of the biggest differentiators between the Oracle engineered systems running Oracle hardware, running Oracle software that we couldn't get without. And I mean, I asked the lock-in question, right? Because that's the one thing that people get is concerned about. How did you sort of address that internally? Did it come up in the procurement process? So we're afraid of sort of, you know, lock-in and getting gouged. That definitely came in. And one of our thoughts on that was it was a shotgun wedding to begin with. But we're here and let's make the best of it. So there was definitely, that voice was heard at the table, but the thought was, we're already so far into this. If we go farther, we might expect to see some benefits. And by and large, we have. We've seen those benefits in terms of our ability to better troubleshoot the application. We haven't had any downtime. So the fact that we only have one vendor as opposed to two or three, we saw it as a net positive. So you've got Exadata and an Exologic? Correct, we have, the original purchase that we made of the engineered systems was a quarter rack Exadata and Exologic in our primary data center. And a quarter rack Exadata and Exologic at our disaster recovery dev test data center. Since then we've doubled that footprint. And we're also bringing on identity management. So. Okay, and so what are you using each for? What do you do with Exadata? What do you do with Exologic? Running on Exologic is the HCM layer. So that's where we have, I think we're up to about 35 different environments right now, all in support of our HCM and e-learning, e-performance, or the whole self-service suite. So we have that all hosted up there. And on the Exadata, you know, we're just running the database layer. We're connecting the two data centers with active data guards. We're having that real-time replication. When prior to going live in June of 2014, we had to show to our stakeholders that we had business continuity in place. So nice little story here is when we tested our financial systems running on a mainframe, in order to be able to test that disaster recovery ability took probably 500 man hours to get in there to test it all out. We were able to do the same thing on the engineered systems in about $8. So we were able to cut the replication, be able to show to our stakeholders, okay, we can deal with that. We can deal with an earthquake. We can deal with being able to run our systems out of the other data. You do a failover and failback in the test. Correct. And did you do that previously or did you sort of test it? We've never been able to do it before, right. So that's another just big benefit of the simplification of the hardware. Okay, and this is an asynchronous distance? Yeah, it is asynchronous because we're around 100 miles apart. We wanted to be in a different geological zone. So we made the choice to not go active-active. We went asynchronous. And you talked about, you alluded to benefits. Can you double click on that a little bit and maybe give us some, have you begun to quantify them or even subjectively? The biggest benefit that we've really seen is our ability to support more environments. So in the past, our businesses always wanted different environments to do testing of whatever. We could not provide that for them. The turnaround time to be able to bring a server online, provision that, procure it, could be three months, lots of man hours there. Now we can do it within a day. So if we have a compelling business reason to say, okay, we need a new environment to be able to test out this functionality for our end users, we can turn that around like that. That has been the biggest win. That really changes the whole paradigm when we're now able as the backbone system to be able to provide to our end users the functionality that they want and demand. And to be honest, there's the expectation that everything is click on the button. We know that's not the case, but to our businesses, they think that it's just that simple and we want to come as close to meeting that expectation as possible. And you couldn't do it before because you didn't have enough people or the infrastructure was too inflexible or accommodated. So we were already tapped out on our infrastructure. So if we wanted to expand that there was, within the physical infrastructure, there was an ability to do that. So we have to go through the whole public procurement process to buy something. So that's where we're talking months. Okay, so the experience overall has been pretty good. It's only six, seven, whatever months, but what kinds of things do you want to see Oracle do going forward? What could they improve? So one of the biggest challenges that we run into on the exologic layer specifically is just the ease of use of the provisioning software. We're also a VM shop. So we're very familiar with a lot of the work that VM has done in terms of provisioning and creating and destroying servers. That additional flexibility there in terms of how we allocate servers in the clouds, that would be something that we'd love to see come out of Oracle. That's really, in all honesty, our biggest gripe right now. But otherwise everything has really been as advertised and we're pretty happy with the product. How are you guys looking at the internet of things or mobile aspect for your user base? Obviously the edge of the network is changing. Any comments and how you guys see that evolving? For us, for our core users, what we want to do is be able to provide all 30,000 of our employees the ability to, this sounds pretty simple, but we're unable to get there to check their paycheck from their phone from anywhere in the world. So that's something that we're working on rolling out identity management in order to be able to have that secure single sign-on experience all the way through. That will be a big win for us. We're also in the business of getting rid of paper. That's a small thing, but the Ceding County is very serious about that. So by using the functionality provided by the engineered systems, we're able to increase our user count in a way that we never could before so we can expand outward. We're also looking at bringing on more e-performance, e-learning applications so that the users, our 30,000 city employees, can actually use the product to create more professional development content. We could load that up there for them. We could use it for additional reviews. Let the employees really see the challenges that their managers are trying to solve for, get those 360 reviews going on. And then down the line, the Ceding County has an entire goal of making public services more transparent. You've been at the City of San Francisco for how long? Almost five years. What keeps you there? I like doing the work that when you step back and you look at it, we have a large community of 800,000 people in the city. We have to keep the lights on on. For all of them, our job in the controller's office is to make sure those people can go out there and do their jobs. So we're really in the business of giving them their tools so that they're not worried about their back office support so they can go out there and do the public safety work, do the cleaning of the parks, be the attendance at the mall. I mean, that's really what we're about. Still a Red Sox fan or a Giants fan? Definitely Red Sox fan. It's not hard to be a Giants fan. Different league, A's, that's a whole other story. Notified loyalty, notified loyalty. It's still great. And now about the Niners and Patriots, same thing? Yeah, hoping the Patriots are able to get it done in two weeks. And then the Niners, good luck with their new coach. Dennis, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate City of San Francisco's great place and it's been that way for the history. And being ready for an earthquake is a big deal and having that capability now with Oracle, I think that's a big ah-ha and having all that transparency for the citizens is also great. And we are here live bringing the data to you here at theCUBE live in Silicon Valley at Oracle's headquarters. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.