 Hi, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching The Cube. Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016, brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. We are here live in San Francisco for Oracle 2016, Oracle OpenWorld 2016, this is The Cube. SiliconANGLE's flagship program, we go out to the events to extract the signal from the noise. Day three of coverage, I'm John Furrier, the co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media. Here with my co-host, we have Peter Burris, head of research with SiliconANGLE Media, and also general manager of our Wikibon research team. Our next guest is Des Cahill, who's the head CX evangelist for Oracle Product Development. Welcome to The Cube, good to see you. Thank you John, thank you Peter, great to be here. We go way back, you've got very entrepreneurial roots, but also you've got a lot of experience in CMO, you've been a CMO, you've seen a lot of the industry cycles going back to the computer and piece per computer industry. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Now we are living in a whole other inflection point. I want to get your thoughts because CX, consumer experience, really is at the heart of all the action now. And it's beyond the whole mobile thing, we all see that mobile first, we get that. But now CX into all aspects of data, conducted systems, what's the current view right now of CX, what's your thoughts? Well John, customer experience, CX, I would redefine it. I would say CX is customer expectation. Customer expectations have been redefined, mobile, iPhone, Android, the power of technology that we have in our pockets. The experiences we have as a consumer every day with Gmail, with Facebook, that ease of use and that power that we're used to, we expect that in our B2B transactions. We expect the company to know us, we expect them to know us in the store, online. And when we call the 800 number, when we have a web chat, we expect them to know us and we expect it to be a consistent experience. And anything less than that is unacceptable to us because we are used to this fantastic technology empowerment that we've become that's become part of our culture and our society. And in many respects that reflects consumer preference because consumers have been gaining, I mean, let's put it this way, the flows of information in the industry used to be broadcast from the seller, not just technology industry, but from the seller out to the consumer. That was the flow of information. Today because of digital technologies, mobile, kiosk, web, et cetera, the flows of information are between consumers and back. We're rewiring the social graph in both B2C and B2B. That means we actually have greater visibility into what consumers want from both their statements but also their actual declaration through their actions. How does CX and data come together? That's a great question, Peter. So data is at the heart of great customer experience. And it begins with unifying data. So when we talk to our customers, many of them are looking at breaking down the silos that exist between their departments. You may have a CRM system on the marketing side, a CRM system on the sales side, a CRM system in the service side, but those systems aren't talking to each other. And what's often happened is that these companies have gone into the cloud, I'll call it a first generation cloud effort, and the head of marketing has driven a purchase of a marketing automation system, the head of sales has driven a purchase of a sales automation system, but those may be quote-unquote best-of-breed systems, but they're not necessarily talking to each other. So at Oracle with our CX Cloud Suite, we're delivering an end-to-end set of applications that natively talk to each other and talk to your existing systems. And by talking to each other, you're able to share the data and the consumer experiences that happen all throughout the life cycle, unify that data, and then understand your customer better so that you can give them a better experience. Now is Oracle providing an instrumentation in the applications that allow for these data flows to come together and provide for the instructions that actually enact the changes in behaviors? Yeah, so that's another great question. So there's multiple levels to it. Number one, Customer Master Data Hub is a product that we offer that brings together data, synchronizes it, and then pushes it out so that everybody in the organization is operating off the same set of understanding about John and his transactions with the company and why he spends a lot of money and we need to treat him as a premier customer. Number two, we have the Oracle Data Cloud. So an organization is dealing with their first-party data. So the bank knows a certain amount about John based on his checking account and savings account and his mortgage that he has with the bank. If you are bringing in second-party or third-party data, you're able to augment that picture and understand that John is into green causes, he's into hiking in the outdoors, he's got three children and he's got a kid in college and another one who's about to go. So if the bank can augment their view of John and understand John better, they can start to make better offers and better products for John to meet his needs. So the Data Cloud provides a set of rich third-party data that our customers can use to get a better understanding of their customers. And then the final piece is something that we announced here at OpenWorld which is Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps and it takes the power of the Data Cloud combines that with machine learning so not only does the wealth manager understand more about John but with Oracle's technology we can actually power a set of offers to that wealth manager or to that bank teller or sales representative or service representative. So John is getting the best possible offer or action representing his needs as a consumer and the offerings that the company has. So this is great, this really ties into all the threaded conversations we've had here in theCUBE, whether it's ERP supply chain and financial services software, every little point vertical or old siloed models now completely changing and the one pattern is data sharing. So we heard from the supply chain where people are sharing in retailer and other company are sharing information around what's on social media and what they see each other and then using it together. How does a company create an innovation strategy around kind of a new behavior like that? And one do you agree with that data sharing is now part of that and then is there a way to do it? I mean is there a step that they can take? How do you get there? What's the first few steps? I mean you got to crawl before you can walk, before you can run. Right, right. How does a company build an innovation strategy with CX with the notion that to pull off what you just said, I got to share. I want to get there. Right. So first of all, absolutely John agree with the notion of data as at the core of this, data sharing, data augmentation, second-party data sharing from your partners, third-party data from products like the Oracle Data Cloud. In terms of how does a company take the first steps toward committing to unifying data and providing better customer experience, I think that is a board level, sea level, cultural commitment to customer experience. And I began my technology career at Apple and I joined Apple after Steve Jobs had left. The last thing I did at Apple was cover a press conference where we announced the acquisition of Nex and Steve Jobs coming back as an advisor. But my point there being the whole time I was at Apple for eight and a half years the customer experience was in the DNA. It was baked in the culture. Product documentation was incredibly important. The out-of-the-box experience was important. Style, font, color were all important because it was baked in DNA from the founder. So the C-suite has to recognize that if they are not adopting customer experience as a core value in the company that they are going to become a laggard in the market and these rising customer expectations that we talked about earlier are going to make them again a laggard in the market. So where do they take their first steps? Assuming that commitment is there and we are seeing like I'll cite the Gartner 2015 CEO Technology Survey, their latest survey, they ask CEOs around the globe what are your top technology commitments investments for the next five years? Number one, customer experience management. Number two, digital marketing. So CEOs are getting it. How do they get there? They've got to start by doing journey mapping and looking at their key customer touch points, not from an inside out view but from an outside in view. If I'm a customer and I go to your business and I buy a product from you, is someone telling me that I need a service contract? Is someone telling me that I need an add-on product? Is the partner saying the same language as the sales guy that I bought from? So you need to think outside to have buy-in, get it in the culture and you need to empower your employees to make these changes and journey mapping is a great tool that we use at Oracle with our customers to identify problematic customer experience areas and how to improve. But journey mapping also provides, I'm going to go with this notion of design. Journey mapping also provides at a fundamental level how you think about designing and experience. We started in the software world. The whole concept of persona started in the software world where a lot of different development teams had to nonetheless sustain a common view of who they were developing for and it got moved into marketing when the web became a crucial mechanism for marketing. So when we think about design, we now think about designing and experience. We're going to be able to develop a business to design better channels to all the way up to the business. How is customer experience actually informing strategy and even business design? Well I mean the ultimate example would be Uber. Right? That is the ultimate case to me of customer experience defining business design. We went from going out on the street on a rainy day in Manhattan and you know waving our hands out and getting soaked and you know not getting a cab. Fist of coughs with somebody else. Fist of coughs basically. Hope we would win. Sharp elbows. And we went to mobile device tap tap. Great. No fuss. No muss. Predictability. Don't worry about it. Spreep paid. Spence is taking care of it. Great. So to me that was re-engineering a business model, the taxi industry, based on customer experience and look at the result. And if you're in the transportation industry you got to be worried about getting Uber. If you're in the hotel industry you've got Airbnb coming at you. So companies today if they are not re-engineering their customer processes with customer experience leading the design from an outside in view. Not an inside out view. And by the way data is critical in both those examples and all these new examples. They're using the data as an asset into the value proposition and the apps value proposition. Speed. GPS. Taking advantage of the phone and capabilities of the native environment. Absolutely. Absolutely. Predictability. How soon am I going to get there? It's all built in. So the companies that are not taking advantage or utilizing CX as a fundamental philosophy in their design approach and their business model are going to be the laggards in the market. How do you advise customers and people in the industry on this outside in because this is a phenomenon. The data sharing combination is a big trend. Obviously the cloud is already enabling all this. So you have CX. Think about the design first. I believe that. But you really have a notion. You have to believe outside in. And you have to believe in the data value proposition. And the variable of data and how that interplays. The sharing of that data. How do you advise people to convince management or convince their partner, convince their management of the notion of outside in and how do you convince the partners to data share? I mean, people are running up against a brick wall. They don't believe in it. They got to drink the Kool-Aid, whatever metaphor. How do you advise clients to communicate? Yeah. So the customers and prospects that I talk with generally aren't needing convincing of the importance of customer experience. It's not a question of is it important? It's more a question of how do I do it? It's a question of where am I in my journey? Am I still completely 100% on premise and I'm struggling to get to the cloud? Is it my front office is in the cloud but I chose these best of breed and they don't talk to each other and I need a more integrated approach. And then it's what is my industry and what are the digital disruptors? I talked about Uber or Airbnb. I call them digital disruptors. So what are the digital disruptors doing in my industry? How can I learn from that? And what are the leaders in my industry doing in terms of customer experience? So I think companies know they need to do this. The question is how are they going to phase it in and how are they going to approach it? And a big approach that we're taking within Oracle CX is taking an industry centric approach because the approach that a hospitality company might take is very different than a banking company. A high-tech or industrial manufacturer is very different than, say, telecommunications. So we're trying to create help our companies help our customers envision what digital transformation and what leading-edge practices look like for their industry and then we're providing them out-of-the-box industry-based CX solutions that accelerate their time onto the cloud and accelerate their time to value. Yes, thanks so much for taking the time to get to see you again. I think it's a huge opportunity. I think that this area we continue to talk about it where they call the marketing cloud, cloud. It's a convergence of all software where the data, any data could be. Absolutely. Great opportunity. CX is certainly important. Any events coming up? Anything you want to share with the audience? Last 30 seconds. Sure. We've got modern CX at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. It'll be the week of April 24th and that's our big Oracle CX event. We've got marketing, commerce, sales, service, social. It's all there. It's a great event and I encourage anyone who's interested in CX to come there and hear the dialogue about CX and how to create digital transformation within your organization. And a lot of new things coming down the pike certainly in terms of new functionality. Yeah, we'll make some new announcements, a lot of exciting products we've announced here. We'll be talking to customers like we are here, there, and sharing their stories, which is the richest way to tell the story. Yes, Kay, you're laying it down on the CX customer experience, customer expectation. There is a new expectation that the consumers have and if companies don't get on board, they give their vetoes, as we would say in the Cube. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break. You're watching The Cube.