 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco on Oracle OpenWorld's Howard Street where they shut the streets down in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld's 60,000 people. This is the special CUBE presentation, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, exclusive coverage of Oracle OpenWorld, Karen Sigmund, VP of Platform Business Group of Oracle, and Mike Rivett, associate partner and global head of engineering at CSC. Great to have you on theCUBE. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. Great to have you, Karen. Good to see you. I know you're a big fan behind the scenes. Now on the big stage. But you've been a real big supporter of theCUBE. Appreciate that. Thank you very much. But you guys have some big news today. Exit your power program. I want to talk about that immediately because that's going to be a real competitive strike, certainly against IBM, right? So talk about the program. What it really is, is we've been, as you probably know, we've converted a lot of customers over the last couple of years from other systems to our Exadata platform. And as part of that, thousands of these migrations, we've had a lot of them where IBM Power. And what we decided to do is that put together kind of the best practices. We had such great results. These customers had such great results with the Exit program. Or when we converted them, then we went ahead and created an actual program. And so what we're doing is now is we're offering a free proof of concept database migration for anybody that wants to move from their IBM Power 7 over to an Exadata platform. What's the role of Intel in this? I know Intel is involved. Can you share what's with Intel? Well, we work with them on, we've been good partners with Intel for years. And we work on a lot of programs together. But this one in particular, we're just jointly funding these database migrations for our clients. And why would a customer move? Give it the reasons why. Why would they move over? Well, you know, we've, the ones that have, first off, they get great results. All right, we already have a number of examples of that. But we're also hearing a lot of customers voice some concerns, frankly, about what's happening with IBM and their divestiture of their hardware business. I mean, between the X86 server business to the chip business to, you know, to some of their own points in their own earnings reports about their strategic plan around hardware. And what specific customer examples can you share? One I would say would be Polte Group. It's one that Mark showed yesterday up on the stage. And it was kind of a really cool example because what they did is they, their financial, their financial systems improved over 15X by doing that. On top of that, they reduced their batch window by, I'm not their batch window, they reduced their monthly close by 33%. So they were able to actually increase the amount of, shorten their time to close by 33%. And they reduced their cost by 40%. So it was a really good result. Mike, your practice at CFC is to migrate folks over. Can you talk about that in some specific examples? Yeah, we've got a number of customers now that we've moved over onto engineer systems and we migrate them across the globe. I can't go into any specific customer details. I'll give you anecdotal evidence. I mean, we've moved them across very rapidly. There's one going on in the U.S. at the moment where it started in around September time. It's due to finish just after Christmas. We got stuck in the Christmas freeze period. Otherwise, we'd have done it in about three months. So these are migrations that we're doing repeatedly. It's fast. Yeah, absolutely, yes. And compared to the old, we just had Deloitte on there like, oh my God, this is 24 months plus in the old days. Yeah. 10 years ago, five years ago. Now, you're talking about months, three months. We're talking about months. We try and do all of the months inside 12 months. 12 months is a long migration for us. Most of them are six months, 69 months for big ones, three to six months for the smaller ones. But we're able to prove these migrations in, I mean, days and sometimes even a week or two. So talk about the major performance and operational advantages from the customers. I mean, what are they seeing? We see significant advantages for our customers. You see much shorter batch times, much shorter backup windows and restore windows when you need them, need to do them. Database cloning significantly improves. And that leads to the whole improvement around DevOps with great development and testing environments much, much faster through the capabilities of the platform. And then you see secondary benefits. The end users are now using a platform that is much more performance. And what we see is that people start to do things, especially in the analytics space, they'll start to do queries that they didn't previously consider was possible. In fact, they weren't possible, but the benefits that the system brings allows them to be more creative in the types of analysis that they do and therefore more productive and allow organizations to move into new markets and try new things. Karen, take me through the life of a POC, an example, because that's a real world example. So taking through the mindset, how it gets going, is it tire kicking, is it more poking, is it more serious, let's get this going. Take us through a couple of different use cases and examples. Well, it depends on the customer, but let's just say a typical situation would be, they'd call us, they'd say, hey, we're interested. Our sales rep would go out and say, does this make sense? They'd evaluate the workload and say, does it make sense to be on an engineered system? We needed to do that analysis. Then we'd plan it out. What's the right timing for the customer to do it? We'd pick a database that would make sense for us to do a sample migration, and then we'd either do it on their premises. We'd bring in an exit data and do it there, or we'd do it in one of our solution centers. We have a number of solution centers where the customer can bring the data to, and we'll do the data migration there. Or one of our partners, like CSE, would actually go out and do that migration for the customer in their location or on the customer's prem. So then we'd do that very shortly, and then at the end of that, we'd do a report for the customer that says, look, you've gotten these kind of results exactly out of this database. It's already migrated. And we give them a full plan that says this is what it's going to take for you to migrate the rest. So they walk away with a road map. So who qualifies? I mean, is it... Someone wakes up one morning and says, hey, you know, I'm going to do a migration, or is there some motivation and someone gets a fire lit under their butt or is it more of a business mandate? And how does the customer know when it's a good time? Well, I think it's a couple of things. One, they have to start... Are they having issues? Are they looking to do an upgrade? Are they sitting on a Power 7 and trying to make a decision about what they're going to do next? Are they starting to have issues where they got to do a capacity increase in the environment they've got? I mean, what... There could be any number of a compelling events that would drive a customer to make the size of the time to change. So essentially, I was at a Cube coverage of IBM's event when they announced Power 8 and O-Power and all these other things. It was also the same time they got out of the X86 business with Intel. Yeah. So I kind of find it ironic that this is kind of like coming together like this. So is that part of it? I mean, is this more of an alternative to Oracle with Cisco? I mean, Intel involved? I mean, how much is Intel involved? No, Intel's very involved. The more you guys tap them to come in. No, Intel's very involved. I mean, if you watch the Intel Keynote here at Open World, you see a lot of customers have a direct relationship with Intel and they talk to their customers all the time. But no, this is really being driven more through the Oracle relationship with our customers. We're driving it. Intel is supporting us in the background and we're out driving it together with the customers. What's the biggest thing you've learned with this program? What thing jumps out at you that hits you right hard and says, okay, wow, this is working. Give us some examples. Well, I guess how quickly the results are, the fact that we have a backlog of customers already and we haven't even launched the official program. And we literally... That's a good problem to have. Yeah, it's not bad. How about the deployment side? You guys are partnering as well. I mean, you have customers. You guys are partnering with your customers. Engineered systems are pretty in demand. I mean, could you share some insight into, you know, to level of customer involvement with engineered systems, specifically this program and just in general, this notion of engineered systems is really hot right now. Engineered systems is a concept that certainly gather momentum. And to be honest, I talk more about the vertical integrated system because that's a concept that everyone's really familiar with. It's something that everyone's talking about. It's the move from the build yourself to the pre-built. And there's some really good reasons for doing that. It's organizations want to focus on the business that they do. They don't want to be S.I. shops. They don't want to spend all their time patching and maintaining systems. So an engineered system gives you all those benefits. But the Oracle one adds the engineering changes as well. So you get all the engineering enhancements as well. And that allows us to be much denser in our consolidation. So when we move databases onto an engineered system, the core count reduces significantly. The floor space count. So the environmental savings are enormous. And so there's any number of reasons why organizations are really keen to move onto these platforms. It's interesting we've been doing the Cube. It's our sixth Oracle open world. As you know, Karen, we do a lot of different events. Four or five years ago, when Dave and I were talking about purpose-built boxes, people were poo-pooing this whole engineered systems thing. You remember those days? It's like, oh, are you kidding me? That was going to buy a box of Oracle. It's going to be vertically integrated. But if you look at that, I mean, they were wrong on that. We would say, hey, you know what? And our argument on the Cube was, as Paul Moritz would say, he was at VMware at the time, was the world's shifting. And then where's the hard and top? No one really cares. If it was, it works in this choice. So versus the lock-in, which is everyone was like, oh, lock-in. No one wants to know. But it turns out customers actually want a engineered system because they just want power functionality, but yet they want the openness. You guys see that dynamic? Yeah, I was going to say, I was just going to say, I think the one thing we see repeatedly is that so many customers have done, do it yourself, build your own projects. And they've taken longer than they expected. They're out of budget. They don't need the business requirements. They don't need the SLAs. You know, with the engineered systems, it's really, it's a product. It's not a project. Yeah. But that's the difference. You plug it in right away and get value out of it. That's right. Well, and also the pressure from the customer, I'd like to get your thoughts on this, is that they're also building out in other areas. So they don't really want to waste time doing stuff that's already been done. Yeah, and the market seems to be the issue. Well, the marketplace is changing so much over the last few years. And in fact, in the last 12 months, we're seeing fantastic acceleration in things getting to market. Organizations can no longer, no longer have the luxury to spend months building their own environments. They need to put something on the ground, turn it on and have it available tomorrow. And it's the engineered systems that are allowing them to do that. We were talking with Emmitt earlier, Lavery, who's the senior vice president of the cloud and love having the product guys on because it's fun to get to dive deep into the weeds. And Brian Grace, the wikibond.com, was saying, hey, you know, there's always conflict between agility and security. And that's always been at odds with each other because, hey, let's go fast. Let's break stuff. Well, you don't break stuff. It's, you know, security. But now with the engineered systems, some of the things around this end-to-end stuff, it brings a whole other dimension. Oh, yeah. So can you comment on what you've learned and with this program and some of the customers you talked to around offering agility at the same time not breaking things? Well, I think that's, I think a couple of things. One is when you look at our Exadata platform, if a customer does take advantage of this program and migrate off of Power 7 over to an Exadata platform as an example, they have the option now to run that in the cloud. They have the option to run it on-prem. They can use one single pane of glass to manage both environments. So it's not just migrating it from one platform to another. It's migrating it from a platform to something that's going to have life across both the cloud and on-premises. How about CSC? What do you guys see in this cloud? Because obviously you guys have evolved and this digital transformation is happening. Yeah, yeah. Just thought, signing totally on what the customer's mindset is right now. What is the current state of the customer? The current state of the customer. I've been presenting a few events around here this week and we're seeing a significant shift in the customers wanting to move towards digital or to cloud, in fact. And what you find is, and as was said earlier on today in the keynote, was not everything's going to go to cloud. Something's going to stay on-prem. So the challenge is, how do we span the two? Although Mark Hurts said 100% of test and devs is going to be in the cloud. That was test and dev, yeah. 20, 25. 20, 25. Yeah, and 20% was going to stay on-prem for production as well. So you've always got to do that, stitching the two environments together. I would agree. Now, one of the things that's really important here, and it's something that we've been working very closely with Oracle on, is how to bridge this hybrid. Because when you move to cloud, developing on a platform that's the same as what you're doing on-prem is really, really important. And some of the initiatives that have been announced this week are around the engineer systems available as platformers and servers in the cloud. So this single plan of glass that allows us to move workload seamlessly between public and private cloud is really important to us. Hybrid, that's where the hybrid actually happens. That's what the hybrid is. Yesterday we coined the term, engineered clouds. If Oracle, you want to use that, feel free to contact my copyright attorney. We'll get the slicing fee in place. But no, that's what hybrid is. Hybrid is not a product. Can I use that? Yeah. Talk to my lawyer. No, seriously, engineered systems really take us into the engineered cloud, right? Hybrid is an engine. There's no SKU. There's no hybrid product. It's an outcome of on-prem or private to public. Absolutely. And that in between. That's what Larry's basically putting out there. You would agree with that? Absolutely. And none of that we're seeing customers doing it. There's a major customer in the UK we're just doing some work with. And it started as a wholly and solely private cloud conversation. And this is Christmas time. And it's already moved into a, how can we accelerate the adoption of SAS? And the way we're doing it is by being able to stitch the public and the private cloud together and using a common platform and a common framework. So we're seeing a massive acceleration. And what's the motivation? Sean Price is on earlier. Great interview. New guy here on the blog here at Oracle. Talk about the pressure. It's really coming from the OPEX-CAPEX equation. Is that a primary motivation? The primary or one of them? It's primary motivation. And it was in the keynote earlier on today. Budgets are dropping dramatically. And it was going to do more. And so it's a move from CAPEX to OPEX. Do more with less. Do more with less. It's been my chief for like two decades. But cloud lets you do it. While I was talking about it on the presentation today that I was doing, it's utility computing. It's about metered servicing. So you pay for the database consumption at the point of use. You don't buy the asset up front and then run it down. You just pay for the service as and when you need it. Karen, you're an industry vet. We always have these conversations. What do you think about this whole engineered purpose-built box solution now that's been validated in the era of open source? You have the combination of open source, which is horizontally scalable. That's commodity hardware. Vertically integrated solutions. They're not usually exclusive in the cloud world and on-prem world. You know, I mean, open, first off, we support open stack and we open a number of open standards, industry standards on all of our solutions. There's no question about that. I mean, look at what we've just announced with art. We have a Linux new open stack that we've just launched and we have Solaris on the M7. We just launched with a tremendous amount of open capability. But if you look at where the industry has moved from and where it's going to, we've had this issue where they've had we've gone from these purpose-built solutions to best of breed technologies. Now we're going back to purpose-built. The difference is in this iteration is the purpose-built has to work with the cloud and on-prem. That's number one. And open standards. And open standards. And it has to be able to, you have to be able to unplug. So one of the values of the way we've built our engineered systems is that while you get benefit from the full stack and the integration of everything in between, you still go running on something else if you choose. It's not like we're not locking you in. It's a huge advantage for customers. It's also giving some more horsepower to the whole analytics business. That's right. Which is really booming. And this actually rises the tide, if you will, for analytics. Yeah. As an example, our big data appliance runs on-prem or in the cloud exactly the same solution. Same opportunity. It's interesting. Dave Vellante and I were commenting at a Hadoop summit last year and recently at Strata Hadoop at Hadoop World that you're finally seeing the cloud come into maturity from a client perspective, it's kind of helped lift up the analytics market. It's been kind of a lull for about two years in the Hadoop ecosystem, certainly in analytics as the data warehouse market's shifting because analytics needs power, right? And now with security and more cores and more everything else with M7 and whatnot and super clusters, you got all that. So I got to ask you, Mike, because you're in the trenches. You're in front lines. You're also a geek like all of us. We're all like geek buffs. We like to look under the hood of the cars if you will, the engines of the systems. What is getting you excited right now if you open the hood, you know, the stuff that gets strapped away from the customer? What's exciting you on the hood? That's a really good question. The rate of advancement is astonishing. There are things we can do today that we can only dream about yesterday. The chip design advances, the stuff they're putting down onto the silicon, the fact that the network advances, I mean, I was watching the Intel one about the memory advances. I mean, it's just a fascinating advance to be able to do that level of density. That's going to transform the industry again. And what is it, only 18 months away before that becomes actually available? I mean, if you think about it, back in the old days and we were growing up when you were writing, when I was writing code, you had the right software to account for the lack of memory and you used disk, which was abundant. Now it's the other way around. You have more memory and less disk. You have more memory. So it's a software paradigm shift on how to write code, right? I used to do bit stacking because you couldn't afford the use of an int to do a flag. So you used a bit offset to do your flags. So yeah, I'm showing my age a bit there. We all know 64K, man. That was like making it all work. Memory is just so abundant now. And you're just doing everything in memory. So disk is so old hap. My friend worked on the original Apple stuff. He's like, we would fight over bytes and Ks just in the OS. But now we're talking about a lot in memory. What does that mean? Share some color because a lot of you who aren't in the know inside the ropes, if you will. What is that going to open up from an innovation standpoint? All the in-memory innovations. By with the software on silicon. So what we're really seeing and what customers are getting really excited about is we're calling it data enrichment. You might think of it as a big data 2.0 if you like. But what we now have the ability to do is to move massive amounts of data into a single data source in memory and do data joins that were previously impossible to do. We can do analytics on data in memory that were previously just because of network bandwidths and various other limitations were impossible to do those weeks. We can do in seconds what we used to do in weeks. We had a pre-throwback Thursday conversation with John Fowler about mainframes. And the thing that we were talking about is now it's not just single-threaded apps. It's multi-thread over hundreds of cores in memory. It's pretty mind-blowing. It's absolutely mind-blowing. If you look at what we're doing with Exadata, for instance, and the thing that's really unique about it is the fact that we've got the database, engineers also designing the hardware. So when you think about the in-memory conversation you're talking about, it's the whole idea that we can take our Exadata platform based on Intel and actually integrate those two things together and build a platform for the clients. As we end this segment, Karen, I want you to share some of your personal insight around how powerful and how solid the momentum and traction is with Exadata. I mean, it doesn't get a lot of fanfare. I mean, it does in the geek circles, but give us some anecdotal data around just how successful it's been. It's been kind of ridiculous. There's thousands of customers, all of the top financial institutions, you name the industry, and they're running Exadata. I don't have the exact numbers, but I think it's 70% of all the major platforms out there run Oracle Database. A lot of those customers are migrating over to Exadata because they get the benefit of running that database. They're also re-architecting around Exadata. It's like a sports team. You build around your best player, right? I mean, you build your offense around kind of your best performer. I've heard some medieval things that they were doing. Exadata, some of these banks in New York, like, what, Fiber Channel? Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Don't tell anyone. I'm like, okay. You look at the sum of the numbers. Exadata by itself brings huge benefits to our customers, but when you combine Exadata with the other purpose built systems, customers see huge benefits. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing that awesome insight. Did you know we have podcasting now on theCUBE? Go to siliconangle.tv and check out our podcast. We have Women Wednesday featured. Also, our guest of the week, decided by the crowd on our editors, gets a featured podcast. And of course, go check out all of our videos at crowdpages.co slash oow15. All the content from this event here in theCUBE and what's happening in the conversation is at that site. It's our new social cloud. Check it out. We'll be right back more here on Howard Street for more CUBE coverage after this short break. Thank you.