 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angles theCUBE with Flagship Program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris, my co-host this week at Oracle Modern Customer Experience in Las Vegas. Lot going on in Las Vegas at the NAB show down the street where theCUBE is. Also we're here for the second year in a row with Oracle Modern Customer Experience. Hashtag modern CX tweeted us at theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris. Kicking off two days of wall-to-wall coverage. We have some amazing guests. We have the top executives at Oracle Marketing Cloud as well as some of their customers, as well as some other guests in the industry. Peter, we've been covering this marketing cloud kind of as part of the bigger picture of the systems of engagement that's growing out of cloud infrastructure and big data is really a collision going on between accelerating applications with infrastructure powered by the cloud, powered by hybrid cloud and data is at the center of the value proposition and literally is the key point in all this. So I want to get your thoughts and we talked about this last year. What's different from last year to this year with Oracle Marketing Customer Experience from your perspective? Well, I think there's three things that are different, John. The first thing that's different is that the reality of how difficult it is to integrate technology into the marketing function is setting in a lot of marketers. So we're not hearing any more comments or promises about how marketing expenditure is going to exceed IT expenditure for technology. So there's a reality set in about what it does it really mean to incorporate technology in the work of marketing. I think the second thing that's happening is AI. We're going to hear a lot about AI. We're going to hear a lot about these new ways of taking big data and making them more useful to the business. And that's going to have an enormous impact on marketing for a variety of different reasons. When we talk about next best action, predicting customer experience, prognosticating value propositions, all those other things, AI is going to have a role to play. How fast it gets adopted, we'll see, but we're going to hear a lot about it. It's interesting. We always talk on theCUBE here, you follow theCUBE, you know we always kind of always pontificate on this notion of horizontally scalable. And we talked about it last year, but there's an era of specialization that you need to have vertically oriented into some of these industries. But what's interesting, Peter, and I want to get your thoughts on this because I was commenting last year at the show that marketing was always a silo. And Oracle had a integration strategy that's been kind of horizontal. And the trends in cloud computing and data is horizontal scalability with value propositions differentiated at the application. So this begs the question, what does that mean for marketing in a digital business? If you go digital all the way from the beginning of the journey to the moment of truth to the customer, sales or conversion, it's all digital, marketing's in every piece of the equation along the way. And that's what Mark Hurd was saying yesterday. Well, customer engagements in every piece of the equation along the way. And then the question is, is marketing going to evolve to become primary in customer engagement? It's not going to be just your direct sales force. Customers are going to move amongst different channels. We've heard a lot about on the channel. So to what degree will marketing become primary? And the third point I was going to make, John, is related to this. And that is, one of the big changes between this year and last year is that Oracle has really thrown the tiller over and tacked towards the cloud. And it's going to be interesting to see whether or not the cloud customer experience story or the marketing customer experience story in the cloud is lining up with the rest of Oracle's cloud story. It's just as with Don Klein from our team last night in the hallway conversations here in the Mandalay Bay with the convention as the conference is happening. It's interesting. We were talking about the role of platforms and yet you can't see in the news these days anything from Facebook's relative to fake news and some of the killings on Facebook Live to YouTube and moderating comments. These emergence of platforms has been a very interesting dynamic. But at the end of the day, content needs to have an authentic piece to it. So you're now blending in a marketing and conversion with customers. We're living in a content world. If I'm wearing a wearable, my content is my interface to wherever I am in real time. My experience at the rental car dealership or wherever I'm at is going to be all about the content is not some siloed, hey, hello, buy this. It's everything's content driven. Well, everything's value driven, right? And the question is, is the content going to be valuable? And if there's a big, going back to that first point, what's the big issue about marketing? We thought that if we just through technology we could automate the same ways the marketing has already done or always done stuff. But the reality is marketing does a lot of stuff that is not valuable to customers. It may be valuable to the organization in other ways, but it's not valuable to customers. And often it's really annoying. And so marketing has to decide if in fact they are going to take a primary role in engagement across channel over time as customers move amongst organizations, then they're going to have to start dedicating themselves to creating content that's valuable to the customer in the form the customer needs it, when the customer needs it, where the customer needs it. And that's a challenge. And the engagement piece is critical. I love that angle, but let's take it to the next level. Every example of marketing cloud or any kind of digital experience use case has data in it. It's data driven. I mean Mark heard on his keynote talked about his experience at the rental car place. That's data driven. You got to know that's the CEO of Oracle. So this is again, the data is at the center of this. It's flowing through all the apps and has to be available, has to be real time. This is fundamental. And digital assets are data as well and applications, when you go back to what computer science says, applications themselves are data. So increasingly it's all data. Customers want to be engaged digitally. They want to be able to take their digital experience, whatever channel, the data has to follow them. You have to anticipate what data you're going to generate in the form of content. You have to be able to capture data without annoying them. So in many respects, John, this all comes down. The challenge for marketing is, how do we capture data without being annoying? How do we provision data in a way that's valuable so that we increase the view of the brand? I want to put you in the spot because I know marketing has a lot of different components to it. But one of the things that everyone in the industry is talking about is the role that Salesforce.com has taken in its SaaS cloud platform, VisaV, an app where you just put your contacts in and you manage your relationships and how that's grown and shifted over to being a SaaS platform. And here's the question I want to ask and get your thoughts on and just riff here in real time. Back in the old days, analog sales needed a system to provide automation for those sales guys. Boom, salesforce.com is born, okay? Marketing would provide email marketing and content. Here's a package of content. If you're interested, click on it and we'll get you more information. Marketing department sends those leads to the analog sales team. The leads aren't good enough. The leads are crap. Glen Gary, Glen Ross kind of thing going on there. Because now that's shifted with the digital fabric end to end from initiation to moment of truth, digital. That kind of goes away. And so sales cloud and marketing cloud are blurring. Yes or no? Were your thoughts on the role of a sales kind of thing in the marketing piece? Well, it all comes down to, and again, this is one of the precepts of the whole notion of customer experience. It all comes down to the customers on a journey to solve a problem, to generate some utility out of a purchase that they're making. Whether it's a product or a service. They go through a discovery process. They go through a buying process. They go through a utilization process. All of that requires engagement. And so the data and the way you provision your resources to that customer has to fit naturally in the way the customer does stuff. So one of the reasons why this is blurring is because customers themselves are demanding that they be treated digitally in some coherent manner. Now, institutionally and organizationally, there's still a lot of tension, as you said, between sales and marketing. And it's not enough to just say, we're going to do a marketing cloud because there's marketing budgets. And we're going to do a sales cloud because the sales budget's on a product cloud because the product budget's et cetera. This has to come together. We have to render this coherently in front of customers or in front of businesses because businesses have to render themselves coherently in front of customers as they go through their journey. Great observation. I would just add that this notion of a platform is an indicator of where the market's going. Certainly we're seeing in the mainstream some things that are being tweaked and Facebook admitted in the New York Times that they're working on it. They're going to work on these things. But let's bring that platform, if what you say is true, which I believe it is, everything has to come together because it's not one or the other. It's not mutually exclusive. Now sales guys had the data from the old days, but now it's all digital. So the question is, that shifts the scale because in the old days, marketing was to provide value to the organization, the enterprise itself. The business value of the enterprise and that comes from selling something. Right, right, right, right. So to your value point, I think that this market shifts the value to the marketing team because they have a broader perspective in that journey. Or have more touch points in the engagement of the customer. The question is, can they be the orchestrator of a coherent and holistic engagement strategy with the customer? So I'm a CIO, I'm looking at a complete replatforming. I think that's a better approach than trying to take Salesforce and make it work over here. And if you look at Salesforce, they've done a bunch of different acquisitions, not always kind of tightly coupled and a little bit of awkwardness here, chatter, all these components. Oracle's taking a different approach to saying we're going to integrate all this stuff and you pick and choose. I think if I'm a CIO, I might want to take a more holistic view from initiation to moment of truth with the customer and the life cycle that journey. There's more marketing touch points in there so I'm probably designed that way. Your thoughts. So it's interesting, John. The whole CRM industry went through an extremely challenging birth. One of the biggest challenges is that we, as you said, it used to be analog. Sales people would go on a call, they'd write up a trip report, they'd hand it to an administrator and the administrator would do the data entry and we'd get into the system some way. The minute you start automating that, now the sales guys are doing data entry. And if you talk to sales organizations today, one of the biggest problems is how much time are my folks doing data entry? How much time are my folks generating content for customers? How much time are they doing all these other things and not selling? And that's an issue. So when we think about where this is going to go, at the end of the day, Salesforce has done the best job of presenting CRM to the marketplace for a variety of different reasons. But it still is a let's capture sales activity kind of a platform. The question is, are we actually going to get to a platform that is truly able to provide coherent holistic value at the moment that the customer wants it? And that includes delivery. And I think Oracle has an opportunity in all of this. It's to actually utilize their various clouds to provide a way of engaging customers across the entire journey. Because they can do the discovery piece, they can do the sales piece, and they can also do for digital products and digital capabilities anyway, the delivery piece. Well, Peter Burris from wikibon.com, the head of research over there, check out some of the work they're doing with the digital role of the digital business and assets, digital experiences. They're all assets. Whether it's content engagement or an experience that someone has, it's all a data asset. It's a digital asset. And that needs to be harnessed and looked at holistically in a way. You got some great research over at wikibon.com. Check it out. I'm John Furrier here for two days at Oracle Modern Customer Experience Show. Should be great. Really cutting-edge stuff, and really as the world re-platforms in the cloud. Content and experiences will be fundamental and data's at the center of it. We'll bring you all the coverage here. We'll be right back with more great coverage after this short break.