 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com and this is Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from San Francisco. We're on the exhibition floor here in Moscone South and excited to have on the program. I've got a returning guest, and Nathan Biggs, the CEO of House of Bricks, and I have a new guest on theCUBE for the first time, Jim Ogborn, who's the VP of Client Services for House of Bricks. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Stu. Pleasure to be here. All right, so Oracle OpenWorld, I mean, you know, from an infrastructure standpoint, we always say it's really about the application. Well, there's no place that we talk about this more than, you know, Oracle Open, maybe SAP Sapphire and I guess IBM Insights is a lot about application too, but we're talking about the database, we're talking about Oracle and you guys at House of Bricks really did some cutting edge work about virtualizing Oracle. You know, Oracle for years, you know, fought this, the field fought it, and in just our last interview with EMC, they said, you know, virtualizing Oracle is really mainstream today. So Nathan, maybe start with you. You know, what are you seeing from customers? What's the top of mind issue? And, you know, is virtualizing Oracle mainstream now or does the field not fight anymore? It's been an interesting evolution over the years that we've been doing Oracle virtualization, especially mission-critical, business-critical, Oracle-based systems on VMware. When we started out almost 10 years ago doing this, it was, the concerns were about performance. The concern was about support. The concern was about licensing. Well, performance is not so much a concern anymore. People have gotten to the point where they say, you know what, Oracle on VMware performs really well. I don't lose any performance when I virtualize. And then support, people got comfortable that Oracle support statement that they've published was sufficient for the things that they were doing. And so the Oracle support statement, which says that all Oracle technologies are supported on VMware, became sufficient for the customers. Now what we're facing is licensing, and that's kind of the last hurdle that people are facing. But Jason's comment was absolutely true. In the United States, we're seeing that virtualization of Oracle databases and applications is pretty much standard operation now. There are some hurdles left to cross, but it's pretty standard. I was just in Mexico City a couple of weeks ago, and it's not the same story down there. And I was in Canada, I've been on the phone with people in South Korea, in Saudi Arabia, and in other parts of the world that they're not as far along that adoption curve with virtualizing Oracle. So they still have some of those concerns that we thought we had addressed a while ago. Nathan, I'm curious. Are there others that do what House of Brick does? I mean, when you started, you were like the guys. You're the only ones doing it. I'm just curious, if it's grown, have others popped up to help with this journey? Yeah, when we took our first e-business suite live on VMware in production in 2006, it was a big deal, and we were the only ones doing it. VMware wasn't even talking about doing it. I'd love to tell you that we're the only ones still, but there are some others out there that do it. We like to feel like we're pretty unique and we're pretty widespread and global in our approach to Oracle virtualization and cloud computing. So we feel like we're still in that leadership position, even though there are others who also provide services similar to what we do. All right, so Jim, I want to bring you to the conversation here. What are the conversations you're having with customers? You know, what are some of the big concerns? How are you guys helping them along with their journey and their adoption of technologies? Well, Stu, when I started at House of Bricks several years ago, customers were, at that point, we had just virtualized that first Oracle e-business suite stack. And customers were asking us, can you do this? Will it perform? Is it legal? It was considered bleeding edge at that time. And now we've moved beyond that to, as we start to see that Oracle on VMware technology crossing the chasm, what I'm seeing is that customers are moving past the proof of concept, the pilot approach. And we're seeing Fortune 10, 20 customers that are saying, okay, how do I virtualize a thousand Oracle database servers? And what we're finding is that the tooling and the methodology is very different from what we were seeing a few years ago when we had those innovators and the early adopters. And so it's really entering that enterprise phase. All right, and when you talk about kind of the value to the customer, we were talking off camera a little bit about is it licensing costs? Is it agility? What are some of the kind of the top line benefits customers, why virtualize Oracle? If it, hopefully it's not a pain, is it just about virtualizing everything? Or, you know, what is kind of the return on? Well, there's a lot of different factors to it. And one of the things that we're seeing is that for a lot of our customers, they've virtualized 80 or 90% of their data center. And the last thing that they've left off to the side is that enterprise Oracle database platform. And so for the people that are in the infrastructure management, one of the things that's really important to them is they've got a snowflake now. And they really, for the sake of managing their data center, they need Oracle to start to look like the rest of their data center. All right, so Nathan, big discussion here at the show this week is Oracle's cloud. The enterprise cloud, you know, it's interesting for a few of us that have been at the show for a few years to see the position of the cloud. You know, where does cloud fit in the conversations that you're having with customers today? Cloud is an almost ubiquitous concept that people are talking about. It's the thing that everybody talks about and that nobody seems to have really figured out yet from a customer perspective. Now, if you talk to Oracle, if you talk to Amazon, you talk to Google, they think they figured out the cloud. But what we're seeing, and just, you know, by way of reminder, we're focused on that business critical system. For those business critical systems, our customers have not shown that they're ready to put that into a public cloud yet. They want to hang on to that system. They want to hang on to that data. They need to wrap their arms around those cages and be sure that they have control. And so while some of them are experimenting with some public clouds, most of them are bringing cloud concepts in-house. They're setting up private clouds. They're setting up infrastructures where they can take advantage of elasticity of on-demand computing and things like that. And so that's where we think VMware really has an advantage is that they provide that great agility with the workload to be able to deploy it in different ways and to have that workload be nimble. The disadvantage of VMware when it comes to a public cloud is that VMware-based workloads don't have a place to live in the public cloud where Oracle needs to be licensed. Because Oracle is only licensed for their own cloud for Amazon and for Microsoft Azure. And so the VMware cloud, the EMC hybrid cloud doesn't have that ability to license by the slice. And that is proving to be a, because most of our customers now have virtualized on VMware, those Oracle workloads, it would be a big deal for them to un-virtualize, to go to one of those compatible clouds where Oracle licensing by the slice is. And so that hurdle needs to be overcome one way or another either by figuring out a way that people can license in the public cloud for their VMware-virtualized workloads running Oracle, or people are going to migrate to one of the compatible Oracle-licensed compatible clouds. Yeah, it's interesting you can bring this. The vendors like Oracle, like Microsoft, they've got real levers with their licensing. AWS came out with dedicated hosts and they were like, well, there are certain companies that have legacy light sensing and we want you to be able to use that even though you should change your licensing. The thing is I reflect on this, I look at what Microsoft's doing, they're not necessarily changing their licensing, but you look at the Oracle productivity suite and say, we've been deploying infrastructure for years, and Microsoft's saying, well, it's okay to go do cloud, come use our cloud. We've got Azure, it's awesome, and go make that move. Look at Oracle now and say, of course, come use cloud, use our cloud. So you kind of have this dichotomy of, we've got our license to accept this way, but if you'd like to do cloud, come do our cloud. So do we think this is going to free it up so that customers can have flexibility? Can I go to service riders? Can I go to some of the big public clouds over time? Or do companies like Microsoft and Oracle just have such power and stickiness with customers that they can dictate the terms that people will work with them? I think that the customers are going to end up dictating what happens. I do. There are so many cloud offerings right now, and I think that the customer's voice is going to be heard. That ultimately what the customer wants, the customer will be able to do. And I think that licensing is right now one of the biggest hurdles to the cloud. The cloud is not technology. Getting to the cloud is not a technology proposition. Technology is part of it, but it's also a business consideration. It's a lifestyle change. If people want to go to the cloud, they need to look at their operations, their organizational structure, that's how they do silos. They need to look at all of that and figure out how do I need to change to be a cloud compatible organization? Not just what technology do I need to install? And so the cloud is much bigger than most people are talking about it. And when we start to figure out all of the dynamics, all of the components of what the cloud means, then we'll be able to start having meaningful conversations about how to get people there. You bring up a great point. That operational shift is one of the real challenges that we see. And I guess the question I have for you, Jim, if you want to take it or if it makes sense, Nathan. Is there value in the customer in running these kind of operations? When you talk about certain pieces of my infrastructure, if somebody else could go run this, it's not like it's going to impact my business. As long as I get the service I need, security, I understand my data, kind of the whole GRC effort, but it's not my business's job to run email. It's like some of us use email in the cloud and some of us have owned their email. That's one that shifts. When it comes to the database, how much is it that I just need to make sure I really control my data and how much do I need to operationalize and run it? What's the value of the customer? What do you see and can they make that jump? Well, you know, you threw out some things that are around security and part of what we're seeing is that the customers may be ready, but the technology may just not be quite there. That combination, we see a lot of things converging, but it just may not quite be there yet. But a lot of them, we like to say that the biggest challenges we run into, they're not technical, they're political, they're people related, they're organizational. Nathan, what are you seeing on it? Well, yeah, I think that the promise of being able to divest of things that maybe are not critical to your company, so letting somebody else manage for you something that is more of a road operation, something that is not specific to you. I heard, Mark heard this morning talk about how do only what's critical for your company. Build what is a competitive advantage for you and let somebody else do the rest. At House of Brick, we have a managed service offering and so that's what we do is we help customers offload some of those operations that maybe they don't need to worry about. We can bring the power of a team to take care of it and then they focus on what's critical or what's competitive for them. So I definitely think that's where we're going. I think that we have a ways to go to figure out what that model looks like, but I definitely think as we go there that the business agility will be tremendous. Yeah, I think you bring a great point. Cloud is not yet a utility. I don't just plug in and get every service I want and it would be great to be able to buy it by the drink for some things I can do that, other things I can't. David Fleuer, my CTO at Wikibon has said that really the database and it's particularly the Oracle applications is probably the stickiest application out there in the marketplace. We hear people talk about database migration. There's more modern databases out there. What do you hear from the customers? Kind of the good, the bad, or do they feel that they're kind of, they love their database or they stuck on their database or would they like to move off of it? In a short, it's a spectrum. Here's the dynamic that we're seeing and I'll just be frank with you. Customers love Oracle technology. Oracle really produces amazing technology and software, but to be frank, customers don't love sometimes the way that Oracle treats them and so they feel like they're being a little bit pressured in certain ways and so they're conflicted, the customers are conflicted. They love the technology, it's a sticky technology, but they feel like, they don't like the way that they feel like they're being treated and so for that reason only they're evaluating, some of them are evaluating other options. It's not a mainstream discussion yet. It's innovators at the most, but that's what customers are saying. Yeah, and also what we're seeing is that customers have invested so much in that Oracle technology and especially when they've got either custom applications or they've heavily customized their applications, that's just a core of what they're doing and it's very, very difficult to move away from that without just losing a ton of investment and intellectual capital. So as you're talking to customers, Jim, what are the things they're asking for? How can the vendor community move things forward and make customers' lives easier? We see still a lot of customers, I said Oracle and VMware is crossing the chasm, but we're seeing a lot of customers that are still looking for that help around mentoring and best practices and then we're also seeing a lot of customers whereas they're moving towards a database as a service, they're saying we need to operationalize this and again, customers that are dealing with deploying thousands of Oracle databases on VMware, the level of rigor and the level of risk for them really goes up a lot. So we find ourselves doing a lot of work around helping them mitigate that risk, helping them standardize and build that out. Anything you want to add on that, Nathan? Well, yeah, so kind of going back to the organizational discussion, Oracle is doing a fantastic job addressing a certain segment of the companies that we work with and so when you look at the database team within our customers that are using Oracle, they're getting a lot of advantage of some of the enterprise manager and other tools that Oracle's providing but the rest of the organization feels left out. The team that provisions the virtual machines feels left out, the business team sometimes feels left out and so what happens is we're addressing one segment or one silo within a company but we need to help the whole company achieve the advantage of what we're talking about. The whole promise of the cloud and all of that encompasses, we need the whole company to get the benefit from that, not just the database team, not just the application team and so as we are able to spread that out and help companies reorganize or re-figure how they do their business, as Jim said, re-operationalize, then everybody's going to be able to take advantage of some of these concepts. All right, so Nathan, I want to give you the final word. When you look at Oracle Open World 2015, what are some of the key takeaways you're expecting and it gives the final word to your thoughts on the show so far? Well, as we've seen from Larry and from Mark this morning, the cloud is definitely the hot topic and so cloud computing is something that everybody's talking about and I think that that's a good thing. I think the promise of the cloud, the benefits and the advantages that we're talking about with the flexibility, with the elasticity, with the on-demand resources, with the as-as-service concepts, those are all good things, the way that we need to go but to get there, it's more than just a technology play. We need to consider the whole organization, we need to consider how these lifestyle changes need to happen in order for the cloud to really be successful and so that's what we're looking forward to as we move forward. All right, well Nathan and Jim, thank you so much for joining us on the program here. Really appreciate the insight you're doing and congratulations on all the progress that you made on this. Remember to check out siliconangle.com where not only do we write up all the videos that we're doing here on theCUBE but all the latest in the general technology, consumer space, enterprise technology and everything going on there. We'll be right back here with lots more coverage of Oracle Open World 2015. Thank you for watching theCUBE, we'll be right back.