 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Java is the world's most popular programming language and it remains the leading application development platform. But what's the status of Java? What are customers doing? And very importantly, what is Oracle's and the community's strategy with respect to Java? Welcome everybody to this Java power panel on theCUBE. I'm your host, Dave Vellante. Manish Gupta is here, he's the vice president of global marketing at Java for Oracle. Donald Smith is also on the panel and he's the senior director of product management at Oracle and we're joined by David Floyer, who's the CTO of Wikibon Research and has done a number of research activities on this very topic. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you. Thank you. Manish, I want to start with you. Can you help us understand really, why don't we dig into Oracle's strategy with respect to Java, the technology, the licensing, the support, how has that evolved over time? Take us through that. Dave, with 51 billion JBMs deployed worldwide, Java has truly cemented its position as the language of innovation in the technology world. There's no question about that. In fact, I like to say it's really the language of empowerment given the impact that has had numerous applications ranging from the Mars rover to genomics and everything in between. As Oracle acquired son over 10 years ago, it's really kept in front of mind two aspects of what we want to do with the technology in the platform. The first one was to ensure there was broad accessibility to the technology in the platform for anybody that wanted to benefit from it. And the second one was to ensure that the ecosystem remains vibrant and thriving throughout the years. And I kind of managed to do both. And on the point of these two objectives were really three pillars of our strategy. The first one was around trust, ensuring that the openness and transparency of the technology was, as was before, continued to be the case going forward. The second element of that within the trust pillar was to ensure that as enterprises invested in the technology their investment was protected. It was not you invest any lose over a period of time backward compatibility, interoperability, certifications were all foundational to the platform itself, to the features, to the innovation moving forward. And more recently, as we have rethought through the support, the licensing and the overall structure for pricing that we have ensured that element of the trust comes along in those dimensions as well. So the launch of the Java subscription came along with Be as You Go model. It's a transparent pricing structure and discount structure published on the website. So you can go and see what it will cost for the desktop, for the servers or cloud department. So those were the things that made kind of the first pillar happen. The second one was innovation. Over the last 25 years, Java has stood the test of time. It has delivered the needs of today while preparing for the future. And that remains the case. It is not something that has sort of focused on the fad of the day and the hot thing for the day. But really more important that it is prepared to deal with the mission critical, massive scale deployments that can run for years, for decades in some cases. And keeping that in mind, Oracle has continued to put more and more technology into the open source world with every release that comes out. You can see 80 plus percent of the contributions come from Oracle. So that's the second pillar around innovation. And the third piece of the strategy has been around predictivity. Ensuring that Java, the technology and platform perform as advertised. And that goes into the feature releases. It goes into the release process. It goes into the fact that you work broadly within the open JDK environment for developing and executing the roadmap. From a CIO standpoint, it's important to know that the technology you're using to develop your applications has talent around. And if you're going to develop something on Java, you'll find the right Java engineers to do the job. That is not a question. And so that's part of predictivity. And finally, again, with the change in the six months release cadence that came about three years ago with the release of Java 10, we've really made sure that it's not, a bunch of things come about. You don't know when they're going to be released, but you know, like clockwork, you'll have a new Java release every six months. And that's been the case every March and September, since Java 10, you've had a new release of Java with certain features that come up. And we just launched Java 15. So trust, innovation, predictivity have really been the three pillars on which we've executed the strategy for Java. Excellent, thank you for that intro. And we're going to get into it now. I'm glad you mentioned the Sun Acquisition. I said at the time that Java was the linchpin of that acquisition. Many people, of course, we looked at the integration piece with the hardware, but it was really Java and the capabilities that it brings. And of course, a lot of Oracle software written in Java, not the least of which is Fusion. But now let's get into the components of this. And I want to talk a little bit about the methodology of this, and I'm going to call on you, David Floria, but essentially my understanding is that Wikibon went through and David, you led this, you did a technical deep dive, which you always do, did a number of in-depth interviews with Java customers. And then, of course, you also did a web survey, and then you built from that data an economic model. So you could try to understand the sort of dimensions of the financials, if you will. So what were your key findings there? So the key findings were that Java was in a good state that people were happy with the Java. The second key finding is that the business case itself for using the Oracle services, the subscription services was good. It didn't mean to say that that was for every company the right way to do it, but there was a very good return on that. And the third area was that there was a degree of confidence that the new way of doing things, the six-month cycle as opposed to the three-year cycle, was overall a benefit to the rate of change, the ability for them to introduce new features, quicker. Okay, well, I mean, and I've read that research, and to me, my takeaways were, I saw the continued relevance of Java, which is kind of goes without saying, but a lot of times it gets lost in the headlines. That subscription piece is key. We're going to get into some of the economics as to how that affects customers and it saves you money. And the other piece was the roadmap becoming more transparent. And I want to dig into that a little bit, but before we do, let's get into that innovation component. Manish mentioned that several times, but Don, I want to go to you guys. We have a slide on the various components of the innovation if you would bring this up. And Don, I wonder if you could talk to this and give us some examples, if you would. Yeah, sure. So we were the number one development platform for the last 25 years. We want to be the number one development platform for the next 25 years. And in order to do that, we have to be constantly innovating and constantly innovating not only the business side in terms of the subscription and the support offerings and commercial features like Manish was talking about, but also the platform in general. And so the way we like to talk about innovation is we break it down by these pillars that you can see on the slide. And so the first pillar is continuous improvements to the language. So this is watching developers trying to write the same piece of code over and over again and us asking, can we make you more efficient? Can we give you more language features that reduce the amount of boilerplate that you have to write? The second pillar is a project that we just announced a few months ago called Layden. And the idea with Layden is addressing the long-term pain points of Java slow startup time and time to peak performance. So if you go back 10 years ago, everybody knows about Java as an enterprise platform, Java EE application servers, they all had the notion of being very long lived. And so Java at that time would be optimized towards long lived application startup and performance where if it took a little while to get there, it didn't matter as long as when it got there, it was super fast. So we're trying to get that peak performance faster in the world of microservices. In a similar vein with Project Loom, we're looking at making concurrency simple again, looking at how developers are doing more reactive style programming and realizing that the threading model needs to be rethought from the ground up. That project is looking really, really good. Then we have Project Panama. Project Panama is all about making it easier to connect Java with native libraries. Valhalla is all about improving, there's a couple of benefits, but it's all about improving memory density and being able to access and iterate and operate over primitive data types at super fast speeds by better optimizing how that information is stored in memory. And then the other pillar, the final pillar that we have been working on from an innovation perspective is ZGC. We introduced a new garbage collector technology a few years ago, G1GC, a generational garbage collector. With the eye towards making garbage collection in Java pausless. So again, if you go back in time and look at the history of Java, memory management is awesome, but there's always that cost and risk of a garbage collection cycle taking a bit of time away from a critical application. And ZGC is all about getting rid of that. So lots of innovation, lots of different pillars going on right now. Awesome, I'm impressed. There's something after Valhalla. I thought that was Nirvana. But now, and these are all open source projects, right? And you guys obviously provide committers. There are other people in the open source world who provide that, is that correct Don? Yeah, that's correct. We have about 80% of the contributions in OpenJDK. We are the stewards of OpenJDK and lead the project. Most of the pillars I talked about here are Oracle folks working on that. Awesome. Okay, let's get into some of the data. David, I want to come back to you and talk about some of the survey results. Guys, if you bring up that next slide. David, why do people upgrade? What are the drivers? It's really talks to the large companies and what's different from the small company or mid-sized companies. What are the takeaways here? Also, this is interesting. And as you might expect, large enterprises are very concerned about application stability. Whereas mid-sized enterprises are much more concerned about the performance, making sure that the performance is good. They are both concerned about reliable performance and security. But it's interesting that from a regulation point of view, mid-sized companies really want to make sure that they are obeying the regulations, that they are meeting those. Whereas large organizations usually have their own security and regulation functions looking very hard at these things. So that looking less to the platform to provide those than their own people. Yeah, I think you're right. I think the mid-sized organizations don't have as many people running around taking care of security and it's harder for them to keep up with the edicts of the organization. So they want to stay more current. Don, I wonder if you can add anything to this data from an innovation standpoint. Yeah, well, and from a product management standpoint, I mean, what we see here is when you look at just going from Fortune 500 to Global 2000, you see things that are important to want are less so than the other. You can extrapolate that all the way down to a small company or a startup. And that's why providing the most flexibility in terms of an offering to allow people to decide what, when, where and how they're going to upgrade their software. So they can do it when they want and on their own terms. You can see that that becomes really important. And also making sure that we're providing innovation in a broad way so that it'll appeal both to the enterprise and again, extrapolating that forward down to even very small startups. You know, David, the other thing that struck me in the data, if we bring up that other piece is the upgrade strategy. And there was a stark difference between large enterprises and mid-sized organizations. Talk to this data, if you would. Yes, this is again, a pretty stark difference between them. And when you're looking at large enterprises, they really want stability and they don't want to upgrade so often. Whereas mid-sized enterprises are much more willing to both upgrade on a regular cadence and really have a much more up-to-date have always have the latest software. They're driving smaller applications but they're much more agile about their approach to it. Again, emphasizing what Don was saying about the smaller enterprises wanting a different strategy and a different way of doing things on large enterprises. So Manish, this says to me that you got it right from a strategy standpoint. I mean, any color you can add here? Yeah, you know, it's very intuitive that whether you're a large organization, a mid-sized enterprise or a small business, right? You face competitive pressures, your dynamics are unique. What you're able to do with the resources, what you desire to do at the pace that is appropriate for your environment are really unique to you. And to try to force one model across any one size or across any set of dynamics is just not appropriate. So we've always felt that giving the enterprises and the organizations the ability to move at the pace of their business is the right approach. And so when we designed the Oracle Java ASC subscription, we truly have that front and center in our thought process and that structure seems to be working well. David, well, I like about the way you do research is you actually build an economic model. A lot of these business value projects, and I know this well, having been in the business a long time, they'll go out to ask the customer what they got and then the customer says, well, I got 111% ROI and boom, that's what it is. You actually construct an economic model. You bring in rules of thumb. It allows you to do what ifs. You can test that model and calibrate it against the real world. So I commend you on that. You've done a lot of hard work there, but bottom line it for us. I mean, let's bring up the economics. I mean, that's what people ultimately want to know. Does this save me money? What's the bottom line here? Yeah. Yes, that's a very important question. And the way we go about it is to ask the questions so that we can extract from those questions how much effort it took, for example, to upgrade things, how much effort it took for important applications and not so important applications. So we have a very detailed model driven by the survey itself. And in the back of the research, I'm a great believer that you should be able to follow exactly what the research said, what the survey said and how it was applied to the model. So, and what we focused on was what was the return of using the Java subscription service or taking an upgrade every six months. Those were the two ways that we looked at it. And for large enterprises, the four-year cost for the enterprise was $11 million for taking the additional subscription service. And this was well, well covered. The payback is within a year, well, well covered by the lower costs of managing in a large systems and environment. And we found a very similar result on those mid-sized services. There it was $3 million. And again, they got that back within a year in terms of payback. But that's one alternative. There is another alternative that it may be worthwhile, the extra money, if you really want to be up to date or if you want to drive a much more aggressive strategy for your organization. So these are huge numbers. I mean, you're talking about 30% savings on average for large and mid-sized enterprises in the percentage terms, but the absolute dollars are actually enormous. So, large companies here, we're talking about $20 billion enterprises with 500 or more Java applications. Mid-sized, you're talking about a couple, two, $3 billion companies. Manisha, what are you seeing in the customer base in terms of the economics? Yeah, any time an organization is looking at an offering and a solution, they want to make sure it's giving them the value. And we all know that the priorities the businesses have, they want to focus on that. Managing the Java estate is important, but is it the thing where they want to invest the dollars? And if they are investing the dollars, are they getting the return? We find that if you can give the enterprises an ability where they can see the return, the cost is right for them. And if you can mirror that and you can map it also with reduced risk, then you've got the right formula. And with the subscription, they're able to not only see the cost savings that the model indicates clearly, but they're also able to reduce the risk in terms of security protection and other things. So it's a really, really good combination for the enterprises. Great, thank you. I wonder, Manish, if you could bring us home here and just kind of summarize from your thoughts, everything you've heard today, what are the key takeaways? You know, Java has been around for 25 years. And we certainly believe it's really positioned well for what's required today. And perhaps more importantly, what is needed for the next decade and for the next 25 years. Having now served thousands of customers with the Java subscription, it's clear that it is meeting the needs of Fortune 10 organizations all the way down to a five-person development house, for example. What we're hearing from across the board is, you know, really Java has been the go-to platform and it continues to be the go-to platform for mission critical development and deployment. However, the complexity as the Java estate becomes large when you've got tens to hundreds, in some case over a thousand applications running across your enterprise, that complexity can be daunting. And the Java subscription is really serving the needs in three ways. One, it's getting them the best in class support from Oracle, which is a steward of Java, the company that is delivering over 80% of innovation with every single release. The second thing, they're getting the business flexibility so they can move at the pace that works for them. And third piece is, as the business model has indicated, that they're getting it at a lower cost while having lower risk. So the combination of these things is the reason why we're seeing very high renewal rates, why we're seeing thousands of organizations take it over. And I want to work on that by kind of saying one final thing, that you can count on Oracle to be the transparent, to be the right steward for both technology innovation, as well as to ensuring the support for the vast ecosystem, whether it's libraries, frameworks, user groups, educational services, and so on. So Java is here, has been here for the enterprise, large and small, and it's ready for the next generation as well. Great, thank you for that. One more question, what's the call to action? If I'm a mid-sized company or a large company, I've made investments in Java, what should I do next? I would say take a look at the Oracle subscription. It will reduce your rates, it will save your cost, and it will give you a lower risk parameter for your organization. Great, nice and crisp, I like it. If you guys don't object, I'm going to give you my summary. I've been taking notes this whole time, and so we've explored two options. Customers can do it yourself or go with the subscription on a regular cadence. It's very clear to me that Java remains relevant as we set up top, it's the world's most popular programming language, we know about all that. The ecosystem is really moving fast, of course, with the stewardship of Oracle, cloud, microservices, the development of modern applications. I think the directional changes that Manish, you guys and Don and Oracle have made were really the right call, the research that David, you did, shows that it's serving customers better, it lowers cost, it's cutting down risk, particularly for the mid-sized companies that maybe don't have the security infrastructure and the talent to go chase those problems. And I love the roadmap piece, the more transparent roadmap really is going to give the industry and the community much more confidence to invest and move forward. So guys, thanks very much for coming on this CUBE Java Power Panel, it was great to have you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.