 And now, host John Furrier and Dave Vellante on theCUBE. Okay, we're back at Oracle Open World. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tv, and this is theCUBE, our flagship telecaster. We go out to the most important tech events and talk to the smartest people we can find, thought leaders, executives, analysts, just to extract the signal from the noise and share that with you. A lot of exciting things happening. We're live in San Francisco, California for Oracle Open World 2011, and Oracle is the 800-pound gorilla in the enterprise space. So much is happening over the past few days. Larry Ellison's keynote on Sunday, Mark Benioff just was rejected as to do a keynote here at Oracle just yesterday, and then he just did an un-keynote, as I called it, in a hotel, very gorilla marketing, and a lot of fun. And one of the things that I'm excited about with theCUBE is how we can go out, undrusted, and talk to people, and get commentary, and share that insight with you. And my guest right now is Jim Lundy, who's the CEO of Aragon Research, and Jim was the former Gartner analyst, and Gartner a big, huge analyst firm in the enterprise and consumer space over the years. Jim started the social practice at Gartner, has since gone on his own, is continuing to provide that same analysis direct to people and customers, that he can provide that same insight that he did at Gartner, but now doing it on his own. The world is changing. Jim, thanks for coming inside theCUBE. Hey, John, great to be here, and it's been a fantastic week here at Oracle World. I think this is, I've been to nine of the 11, but you mentioned relative to the un-conference this week. Three years ago, when I went to Dreamforce, I was the only Gartner guy that went because they couldn't get anybody to go, because it was boring. And then this year, they kind of rocked it. So the whole social mobile, the whole shift to the E2.0, the rise of the knowledge worker, I figured that there had to be a better way, so that's one of the reasons I went out and started Aragon Research. You know, Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon, is a pioneer analyst who left IDC to start Wikibon, open source analyst community. Ray Wang was on early with Constellation, you got Aragon Research. You know, the older school analyst firms out there are still doing their thing, but the world's a real time market now, and a lot of that analysis needs to be faster. You mentioned you were first to go to these conferences, and the speed of analysis in the web has changed, and your specialty in social over the years, let's talk about that, because Oracle is a big monster. They're not a real pioneer. They don't lead, they tend to follow and dominate, because they're huge and have a great market power. Here at Oracle Open World, we're hearing Oracle talk about big data as their core theme last year was cloud. Now it's big data, and big data inherently has a social element to it. So a couple of questions I have for you. What's your take on Oracle this year, around how they're evolving, and since you've been to 9 of the 11, you've seen the classic Oracle positioning over the years, now they're going completely proprietary, vertically integrated. Sun is now integrated into the portfolio. It's exa everything. Larry Allison, clearly a competitive person. What's your take on where we're at with Oracle right now, and what's happening in San Francisco right now? So yeah, the area and workplace that we're covering, which is Portals Content Collaborative Social, a couple of years ago, it was so bad that we stopped covering collaboration, because they couldn't give us any references. So one of the things they did this year is great was to talk to two customers. So I got to meet with the vice president of IT and talk about it, but I think they've grown up through some acquisitions on content management, so they bought Stellan a few years ago. They've kind of merged into the 11G, and they're growing. I think they're going to start getting more aggressive. There's going to be some announcement today, by the way, on social. So this is actually their entry back into collaboration. What are you expecting them to talk about? So they've got, with all the web center stuff, the portal is matured, so they've basically got the portal-based foundation. They've got content management. They want to add a social layer because they've got all the apps. And our take is there's a social layer that's creeping in. Everybody wants to do it. There's going to be social fatigue. So how many different social feeds are you going to have in an enterprise? They're not a fast follower. So the question is, how long will it take? What are they going to announce, first of all? I kind of codenamed it Son of Beehive, because a couple years ago they announced this Beehive went around and talked to all the application teams at Oracle. They said, we're not using Beehive, we're using Web Center. So Web Center's kind of like the focus, the center of the universe, where they bring portal and content. We'll have to wait and see what they do with social. Skeptical is probably the word because they've just kind of, I mean, they've kind of blown it. I will say though that the Stellan team kind of came in and took over. So a lot of the ex-Stellan executives have kind of added a level of maturity and consistency. And so far from the customers, the couple that I've talked to, they're using it. And the question is, can they really grow it? They say they're focused on new business. Let's take a step back and let's discuss some of the horses on the track in this world of collaboration enterprise 2.0 or these big computer companies that have evolved from software hardware, hybrids, et cetera, we'll see Oracle now turning into hardware and software. But you've got Oracle, you have SAP, you have Salesforce.com, you have an ecosystem of startups out there like Jive and Yammer and everyone else are doing some things out there. But for the most part, let's just stick with SAP and Oracle. And we'll talk about Benioff in a second. But at Sapphire, their messaging at SAP was really right on. They talked about mobile, talked about HANA in-memory analytics, really good messaging. Ray Wang was talking about some of the product disappointments that they have to get their act together on. Oracle now, in that same boat where they got the in-memory, they got the X analytics and collaboration. So where are we with these big guys? And compare and contrast Oracle SAP and who's got the best social DNA or collaborative? Because at the end of the day it's about productivity, right? So just give us your take on that. So I think the thing is, is you've got these super titans that have big maintenance in Solbase. They're making lots of money, they want to grow, they want to extend it. I have to say that the same amount of skepticism I just expressed about Oracle probably would be the same thing with SAP. Now, this is for this way, I've talked to hundreds of SAP customers over the years and they said basically we're not really looking at SAP for collaboration. So that's generally where you start getting into more of the Microsofts and even the Googles. And so the question is, when you look at the sales force of those companies, what are they going to sell? And in many cases a sales force can kill a product. I don't think that with some of the stream work stuff that you're really seeing it jump off the shelves. So put aside that they have it. Who's really buying it? Well, the uptake will ultimately determine the score of the game. But analytics has been a big part of trying to backdoor into collaboration, because analytics, it's more of the ivory tower and more of the, run your business at real time speed, as they say. So the question is, what did your take on the analytics playing? And two, what have been the inhibitors to social? So in the analytics, so you look at the traditional BI, which is hey, I'm going to give you dashboards, I got a data warehouse, all that sort of stuff. And then I think the other thing when you weave in the social thing was what about social analytics? And I think a lot of the BI firms are still, you know, SAP does have some very interesting stuff there. It's healthy on the price point side. So a lot of the social firms today are just getting started in people analytics. You know, who are your followers and all that? Not just how many connections you have, but what are they doing? How are they influencing you and things like that? That's a whole new category. And a lot of the people are still trying to figure that out. On the social thing, I guess the thing I would say is it's still early days. You got Jive, you've got IBM, you've got Microsoft, if you throw in a little NewsGator, because usually it's SharePoint with NewsGator. You'll see what Cisco's going to do. And if Cisco's out there, you've got 50 other firms, most of which are probably not going to make it. Has social or enterprise 2.0? I mean, we'll kind of use that thing to change me, but when we say social and the enterprise, it's really about, you know, the enterprise 2.0 story, which is about collaboration, making people more productive, right? Productivity. You know, YouTube, Facebook has been criticized, and Zingosly is the poster child for the time-wasting mentality. And a lot of companies block these sites, so now they're going to actually roll out social and collaboration inside a company. It's not that easy, so just tease out critical success paths that a company needs to do to kind of really put in real collaboration. And if you can, compare and contrast what's changed from just three, four years ago to like now. Well, a couple years ago, I used to show a diagram which was three circles, which was the enterprise social, externally facing social, social communities, and social media. And it was kind of like, okay, it's all one big happy family, which you've heard from some vendors say, oh, we'll merge Facebook in, you can bring the profile information in. The world has gotten nasty in the last three years, and you know the great hack of Google. You know, the guy that ran the password control system at Google was hacked because his Facebook, you know, he was penetrated via Facebook instant messaging. So our take is that Facebook for enterprise use is not a good thing. It's that, unless you're the marketing CMO and all that. Sales, CRM, yeah, you might want to import profile information, but for most enterprises, I've talked to a lot of CIOs, they are blocking it. Now our take is there's three approaches. You can ignore it. Most people are ignoring it today. You can block it, government, defense. There's a new way, which is application firewalls, where you can actually manage it, so you can make it read-only. You can still let your employees see what their kids are doing, and that's what the parents are mainly using it for. But on the success factors in the enterprise, one of the things that we've seen is, if you don't feed content into a community, it dies. So sharing a little bit of content, rating content, which is kind of like, it gets into the, you know, will SharePoint really grow up? And you know, because it's a content source, will that be one of the things down the road? But over the years, one of the things, in fact, you know, you look at activity feeds versus email, one of the notes where you have that's coming out that says, will social networks replace email? And our take is it won't, but email will change. So really, to be honest with you, a lot of the CIOs I've talked with, they say, are we going to fail with our social network? And my question is, what's your use case? Most of them don't have one. So when you don't have a use case, you end up with what I call the wiki graveyard. So you build it, everybody came and then it died. Yeah, it's like a bad night club. You know, you invest all this money, and you have a little party, opening night, and all of a sudden, it's like dead. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the whole dynamic, and those are great points, by the way. And I just came from the salesforce.com on Keynote. They talk a lot about chatter and social, and let's just take the use case. And I think I would agree with you that the use cases are kind of unclear. Mainly people don't know what the use cases are. And a lot of times, like the big data, they've never had a situation to analyze before. So let's just take the simple example of the workforce. The makeup of the workforce has changed. Consumerization of IT is driving a lot of this consumerization trend, but companies have talent sales organizations. They have marketing people. What do you say to the young guys coming in? So people who are hiring right out of college, 23, 24-year-old kids, younger workforce coming in, they're nearly not used to blocking and tackling, let's just say, like telemarketing. Here's an email blast. This is old tools. They're on Twitter. They have certain capabilities. They've read RSS feeds. They're very savvy with blogs. They have good communities. They have reach into peers and networks. So inherently, the social DNA of the new workforce is changing. I'm old enough to know where email was text-based. Now it's all better. But for us, email's great. But for younger kids, like, okay, email's there. I communicate on email, but I got to wear a headset. I got to call people on the phone. Will you buy my product? I mean, that affects the lead gen. That affects the business. I got to enter that into Salesforce. Well, so I had to. To me, even an example, Salesforce is irrelevant. So in that case, it's like, oh, Salesforce. What a pain in the ass that is. So, okay, so. Well, you know, the interesting thing is, so, you know, I've got teenagers, but I had an intern last summer, right? And I was walking around and he was kind of looking and he kind of looked stunned. I said, what's the matter? He's like, well, everybody's sitting there, they're just reading email. I said, and I said, you're not comfortable with that. He said, and he never used Outlook. He had never used Outlook. So I said, you'll be more comfortable posting on the wall. He goes, well, could you communicate with me that way? Because we had a social network. I said, sure. So that was the way we communicated was I would post on his wall and he would reply back. But the. This is a real dynamic though. This is not, this is just, this is the new generation. But, you know, even talking with people here, you know, some of the analyst relations people, they said, look, I can't even get my all pair to respond an email after text. So it's a texting generation. It's a wall posting generation. I do think, you know, the interesting thing is as mobile comes more online, I met actually at some recent events, some startups where they can basically have a touch space UI on top of things like Salesforce so that a young gun slinger that just has to do touch-based stuff. But I do think that we're entering a big, big shift and usability. You agree that the younger generation has awkwardness to the old ways, right? They've totally rejected. In fact, my kids have said, Dad, I don't know how could I ever work that way? Just sitting there doing email. So let's take it up a notch in terms of the analysis. Okay, so we have that. That's cool. Okay, we've been talking about on SiliconANGLE the whole user experience generation and there's a lot of messaging from the big guys. Oh yeah, it's one of the user experience, mobile. Mobile's exploded. The iPhone, now the iPad has set up this user interface dynamic at the edge of the network. The user, the consumer of IT. And so they have access and they want a certain user experience. So one of the things I liked about the Salesforce.com message was the Haruku message, which was, hey, application development is going to be a really big part of IT. You mentioned earlier that one of the approaches is application firewalls. So what are the developer communities like within these enterprises? How is that changing some of the U2.0 transitions from the initial U2.0 positionings to the reality that now Facebook, Twitter, mobile is much more pervasive? Are you seeing anything on the developer side? Obviously Haruku is a great example of using cloud and boot up applications. How real is the enterprise with developers? So that's one of the biggest issues facing IT executives, which is how are we going to retool our workforce? The Haruku, I thought the demo they gave where you can now submit a real Java app. So there's no recompile, it's a native Java app and that made life for developers a lot easier. But you get into U2.0, you get into are you going to write that app for the iPad in Objective-C? Can they write in Objective-C? And a lot of them cannot. So the biggest thing which I think that came out relative to why is Facebook using force.com as far as developers speed. And the biggest thing for mobile apps is speed. Besides the assumed UI and it's got to be easy, it's got to be super fast. So some of these apps, I even go around and I touch them and see, I start counting. How many seconds does it take for the app to launch? To make the connection to the platform? If it's taken more than five or six seconds, I walk away. Yeah, yeah. So what are the big companies that you see that you like in terms of this space of enterprise, social, and is big data part of that? What are the new things that you're tracking that you could share with the folks out here? So one of the things I think is there's a, I think we're at a point of inflection in technology where there's the haves and they have nots. The haves which are, I've got all these customers, I've got the big maintenance revenue, I'm a super Titan, and well I just waited out. And so a lot of them, Oracle, Microsoft, they're going to try to wait out the C2.0 Wave and say, look, I'll wait till they fail, I'll buy that what's left, and I'll dominate. And the question is, is there enough innovation and enough independence and lack of exit strategy? So will all the VCs that are funding all these startups, is the exit strategy to sell to Oracle or to remain somewhat independent? And the good news is for some of the past platforms, so you've got Force, you've got Azure, which Apple's going to use a little bit of, you've got Amazon out there, and all the startups basically can't afford to develop their own cloud infrastructure. And to be honest with you, any startup that says, oh, we have a cloud is pretty much lying because they barely have hosted. So the question is, as these new ecosystems evolve, a lot of them will have enough revenue, living off of Salesforce, living off of Oracle, look at the event here, all these partners, they're part of the ecosystem. I think the big question is, for people like Microsoft, are they going to get it? To be able to move fast enough to keep up with this? And the question for Oracle is, is Oracle going to make, really make a true shift to cloud? Let's talk about Mark Benioff right now. So he obviously has, was rejected on the keynote. He has a Carrilla press conference slash un-keynote at the St. Regis SiliconANGLE's break, broke that news we were at Front Row, he streamed it live. I got an interview with Mark. He's talking about Facebook, and that they've run Oracle General Ledger, but really not strategic, kind of a dig at Oracle in the sense that, we've always called Oracle, like they're in these big companies as like plumbing. They've run the water, and no one really thinks about it when they get the water, only when things break. And that he was saying Facebook's value is not related to Oracle in any way than some of the administrative things that they keep the trains running all the time. So Benioff is retooling Salesforce. So Salesforce has gone from, and they were cloud before cloud was cloud, but then had to retool, we do their code base, which was disclosed by him at a conference. And now they got the chatter, they got an investment box.net, clearly moving in this direction to target this new workforce, to make salesforce.com modern. What do you think about Benioff's personality, his mojo, and his chances for success with Salesforce? Well, you know, it's interesting, if you compare and contrast this year, 2011, with even two years ago, 2009, all right? He still had Neil Young there. I mean, but this year they cut him off. Two things, one is, the app portfolio they have at Salesforce is dramatically larger. Two years ago, they didn't have a lot to talk about. Has the Salesforce app really changed that much? I don't think it has, they've added chatter. Chatter is not bad, it's still early days. They don't have all the elements of a collaboration suite. But when I went around and even tried to get a demo of chatter at Dreamforce, it was so mobbed, you could not get a demo. And it was all the IT people trying to figure out how these activity streams for these different apps that they were using relative to whether it's sales, whether it's tele sales, how could I make the feed specific to those? So they were kind of drinking the Kool-Aid, but I do think that Mark represents the new generation of CEO. He's the only one that I know that actively tweets. He does respond to Twitter, direct messages. He does email with you. And he's admitted that sometimes he gets kicked out of offices because they said, we're not ready for you. But I do think he represents a new generation where, and by the way, I would probably put John Chambers in that category. John doesn't tweet, but John will reply to you in email. And... I've never sent him an email. Maybe I should see if he replies. Yeah, maybe a little slow, but it's, you know, I mean, I've sent him emails and he's responded, but I do think that this fascination of it's not the ivory tower, right? It's in a connected world, you know, you respond, you're involved. And I think that a lot of executives aren't ready for what Mark represents. And they're kind of in shock. So I... It's a little early. I mean, he's certainly a pioneer. And he's pioneering, he's plowing the fields in social, he's asked his bravados, fantastic. But there's still problems in social, noise, signal, noise. And there's their willingness to pay. I mean, a lot, I mean, they turned on chatter. And if you buy Salesforce, they'll turn on chatter for you. So not a lot of people are really paying a lot of money. And that's one of the big things, which is what should I pay for? What's the value? And I think the entry level approach is let's turn it on and then we'll add some real value like analytics. The analytics is really what people are going to start paying for when they start realizing all their high potential candidates are the ones that are the most active and they're the ones that are probably the best chance of leaving. I think that's a brilliant strategy to seed the market with chatter, let it develop. And I think if he doubles down on the developer side with Heruku, then you got a real story there. Because I think you really made a good point about the app firewall, but that kind of also scales into other areas like app development functionally can hit these points in the network as they use cases get validated. And that's what we're seeing is that not all the use cases have been validated. So, you know, that's why you get hired. Well, the customer, I mean, the idea of connecting beyond the firewall, which has always been the biggest thing is, how do you connect people safely and securely? And again, so now the networks are protected, but they're coming in and attacking the user. So it's not going to, it's the age old problem, except for the one big thing, which is it's not a nice world. So the fact that the Chinese now have basically declared they have a blue army and they're attacking companies, that's what basically is starting to keep people up at night. So now you have new security firms popping up that are doing like monitoring of advanced persistent threats and things like that. It's not a nice world. And, you know, social's going to be out there and continue. The one thing I would say though, is you talk to a lot of firms that maybe aren't doing CRM, and they'll basically say, well, you know what, if you're outside of Salesforce or Siebel, that's just CRM and, you know, that's just part of the organization. What about the rest of it? And, you know, the use cases are still emerging, but engineers love to do social networking. It's a way to get projects going faster. They like wikis, structured wikis. But it's still very early days. A lot of people are not comfortable doing anything but email. But guess what? Their kids are dragging them into it. We are Jim Lundi, analyst and CEO of Oregon Research, formerly of Gardner, ran the social practice there, grew that, went out on his own, he's doing direct with clients. So final question is two things. One, tell the folks out there about your firm and the work that you do. And then two, some of the things that you advise companies that are kicking the tires, obviously the line for chatter is an indicator that social is hot, some engineering things to figure out, activity streams, et cetera, you mentioned. So just end the interview on what you're actually doing as a firm. And two, the key things that you're seeing that are the hot areas to start working on right now that have the most demand and solutions for. So a lot of the stuff we talked about in our short discussion, John, was a lot of the questions that people were asking. So, you know, we started Aragon basically is we provide premium research that people pay a subscription for and phone and on-site advisories. So it's a, you know, we basically say we are trusted advisories. Now, a lot of people haven't really ever worked with firms like that. They just like to look at things like Magic Quadrants. So we're doing a lot of the things that Gardner and Forrest are doing, but we're doing it leaner. We're doing a little higher quality. We like to say we're twice the value of Gardner at half the cost. So, you know, a lot of times when people are working with us, they're trying to figure out what should we do about social? We've got all these legacy things. How do we integrate it? And so those are some of the things that we have the discussions on. And what are the key areas that are the most hot right now that on the broad client base and customers out there that you talked to where that you're engaging with them that are really active, active areas that'd be a good lesson for other folks out there? Well, so, you know, for example, I mean, you know, the idea of our Salesforce is going to use tablets and we need to find tools that will work with the tablet. So, you know, firms like Boxer, you know, coming up Salesforce is coming up. You know, how do we manage the app ecosystem? So basically trying to navigate that a little bit. How do we do knowledge transfer to workers relative to the workplace and what's the role of video? But I think the big hot one that you say is coming up over and over again is they're struggling to say, what do we do about this mobile revolution? And the users are bringing the devices in and they're really struggling. It's not about the hardware. It's about navigating that and figuring it out. And by the way, their biggest supplier, Microsoft, is a year away with Windows 8. And that's put them in a real, real tough jam. Okay, we're inside theCUBE with Jim Lundy, the CEO of Aragon Research and industry analyst out there talking to the top firms, making the social happen. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com for continuous coverage of Oracle Open World in San Francisco, California. We're live broadcasting for three days, eight hours a day. Go to SiliconANGLE.com. You'll find all the breaking news. We broke the story about Oracle and Benioff and Salesforce. We're breaking stories left and right. Alice Williams, Quinn Finley, Kristen Nicole, the entire team out there doing work and the folks at Wikibon doing the research. We had Ray Wang on and Jim Lundy here, the industry analyst. So thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more from Oracle Open World 2011.