 The Cube presents On the Ground. Welcome to Silicon Angles, The Cube On the Ground here at Oracle's headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the host of The Cube. I'm here with Neil Mendelsohn, the Vice President of Product Management for the Big Data team at Oracle. Welcome to On the Ground. Thanks for having us here at the headquarters. So Big Data, obviously a big focus. Oracle Local & Rural is right around the corner, but in general, the Big Data breadth of products from Oracle has been around for a while. What's your take on this? Because Oracle is doing very well with this new cloud story. When I interviewed Mark Herd, 100% of the code has been cloudified. Big Data now is a big part of the cloud dynamic. What are some of the things that you're seeing out in the marketplace around Big Data and what does Oracle fit? Well, when this whole Big Data thing started years ago, I mean, Hadoop just hit its 10th anniversary, right? Everybody was talking about throwing everything out that they had and there was no reason for Sequel anymore and you're just going to throw a bunch of stuff together yourself and put it together and off you go, right? And now I think people have realized that to get the real value out of these new technologies, it's not a question of just the new technologies alone, but how do you integrate those with your existing estates? So Oracle, obviously it's a big database business, you know, I mean, Tom Curry, well, hey, the database, take your swim lane. But what's interesting is with Hadoop and some of these other ecosystems, what customers are looking for is to not just use Oracle databases, but to use whatever they might see as a feature of some use case. Hadoop for batch. So you guys have been connecting these systems. So can you just quickly explain for a minute how you guys look at this choice factor from a customer standpoint? Because there's a role for Hadoop, but Hadoop isn't going to take over the whole world as we see in the ecosystem. What's your role vis-a-vis the database choice? Yeah, so we very much believe, you know, when Oracle started, it was all about database and it was all about Sequel. And we believe now that the new normal is really one that includes both Hadoop, no Sequel and relational, right? Sequel is of course still a factor, but so are the ability to interface in via REST interfaces and scripting languages. So for us, you know, it's really a big tent. And we've been taking what we had done previously in database and really extending that to data management over Hadoop and no Sequel. We had a great chat at Oracle Open World last year and you told me about your history at Oracle before you did your run with startups. You've seen this movie go on early days with data warehousing. So I got to ask you, big data is not new to Oracle. Obviously the database business has been thriving and changing with the cloud around the corner and certainly here on the doorstep. But could you explain Oracle's database, I mean, a big data product offering? Sure. What was the first product? Take us through the lineage of where it is because you guys have product. We do. And a slew of stuff is coming. I can imagine, I'm sure you can't share much about that, but talk about the lineage right now. So we started about three years ago on the Hadoop side by making an appliance made for Hadoop and then in the future, which followed on with Spark. And that appliance has been doing well in the marketplace for a number of years. And we've obviously continued to enhance that. We then took what we perfected on-premises and we moved that up to the cloud. So we have a big data cloud service for customers that offer them high performance, access to Hadoop and Spark, and without then necessarily the need to actually manage security and all the things with it. At Open World, we'll be making a series of announcements. We'll be creating yet another big data cloud service. This one will be fully managed, fully elastic for customers who only want to take advantage of a Hadoop or Spark service as an example and don't want to deal with the ability to specifically tweak the environment. We also announced a little while ago our family of cloud machines. So you'll see a, the first cloud machine is one that provides Oracle, IAS and past services and then we'll add to the family- That's shipping already though. That's shipping already. And then we'll add to the family an exadata cloud machine and a big data cloud machine. And the cloud machines are really kind of a cool concept. They're cool because for a lot of customers from a regulatory point of view or otherwise they're just not ready for the public cloud but everybody wants to take advantage of what the cloud provides. So how do you do that behind your firewall? How do you provide IT as a service? So what Oracle has done essentially is to package up its cloud services and able to deliver that to customers behind the firewall and they get the exact same technology that they have on the public cloud. They build to one architecture and then deploy it wherever they choose. They get the advantages of the cloud. It's a subscription service, right? But they can deal with, but they can adhere to whatever data sovereignty or issues that they might have. So let's get to that regulatory dynamic in a second but I want to just back up. So big data appliance, VDA, you guys call big data appliance, that's been out. Big data service. Cloud service, cloud, about a year ago. About a year, that's out there. Those are basically connect appliance that's on-prem with the cloud. And then now you have the cloud machine series of enhancements coming at Oracle Open World. Right, as well as a fully-managed cloud service that will add to the mix as well. Okay, so let's get down, so that's going to bring us fully cloud enabled, cloud on-premise, all that kind of dynamic flexibility and option for configuration and provisioning. Okay, back to the regulatory thing. So what's the big deal about that? Because you mentioned that. Most companies we talk to love the cloud. They love the economics but there's a lot of fud and fear internally amongst their own team about getting sued, losing data, certain industries that they might have to play. Is that a factor? Can you explain that for someone? That's important. Yeah, I mean, for some customers, it's a real concern, right? And the world is dynamically shifting. I mean, look at what happened a few months ago with the Brexit, right? I mean, all of a sudden it was okay to have the data as long as it was in the EU. Well, the EU is now shifting. So where does the data go, right? So from a regulatory point of view, we haven't fully settled, right? In terms of where customers, where customer data can be held, exactly how it's treated and those things are evolving. So for a number of companies, they want the advantages of the cloud but they don't necessarily want it on a public cloud, right? And that's why we're offering these new cloud machines because they can essentially have their cake and eat it too. So interesting, the dynamic advantage is that this whole regulatory thing is a moving train relative to the whole global landscape. Who knows what's going to happen with China and other things, right? Right, and I think that's what's really terrific is that, our history is, of course, we're a company that's been around for a while so we started on premises and we moved up to the cloud and our customers are ones that are going to have kind of this hybrid kind of a system, right? Other companies started much later and they're cloud-only. And while that's great for companies that want the public cloud, what do you do if you're in a regulatory environment that isn't ready to be public cloud? Now you have to have two architectures, one for on-premises and one for cloud. And then how do you deal with a moving landscape where a year from now, things that are on-premises can move to the cloud and other things that are in the cloud may have to move to back on-premises, right? How do you deal with that dynamic going forward and not get stuck? So is it fair to say that Oracle is a big data player in the cloud and on-premise? Absolutely, right? And not just for data management. I think that while we started at that core, that's our heritage. We've so much built out our portfolio, right? We have big data products in the data integration space and the machine learning space. We have big data products that connect up with our IoT strategy, with data visualization. We've really blossomed as the marketplace has matured, bringing additional technology for customers to utilize. Okay, so let's get down to the reality and get into the weeds with customer deployments. How do you guys compare vis-a-vis the competition? Now you've got the on-prem with the BDA, big data appliance with cloud service, cloud machines to create some provisioning, flexibility on other architectures that customers may choose for whatever reason that they would have. How does that compare to the competition? Well, on the on-premise side, if we start there, there was a recent forester wave that looked at various Hadoop appliances and we took the number one category or the number one position across all the three categories that they looked at. They looked at the strategy, they looked at the market presence and they looked at the capability of what we offered. And we ended up number one in that space. On the cloud side, of course, we're maturing in terms of that offering as well, but we're really the only company out there that can offer the same architecture, both on cloud and on-premises, where you don't necessarily have to go all in on one or the other. And for many companies, that's exactly what they need. They can't necessarily go all in one way or the other. So I got to ask you kind of put your historical, historian, tech historian hat on, as well as your Oracle executive hat on and talk about some of the technologies that have come and gone over the years and how does that relate to some of the things that are hyped up now? I mean, certainly Hadoop was supposed to be in this new industry, it's going to disrupt the database and Oracle's going to be put out of business and this is how people are going to store stuff. MapReduce, now people are saying, why even have Hadoop in the cloud when you got an object store? So, you know, things come and go. I'm not saying Hadoop is going to come and go, but it's good for batch. So what's your comments on that? Can you point to industry, technology, okay, that's going to be a feature of something else that's a real deal. What are some of the things that you look at that you can say? So, you know, we're seeing exactly as you described, a few years ago, you go to a conference and it was all about MapReduce, right? Now, a seminar on MapReduce, nobody goes, right? Everybody's going to Spark, right? And there's already things that potentially replace Spark, things like Flink, and we're going to see that continual change and a lot of what we focused on is to be able to provide some level of abstraction between the customer's architecture and these moving technologies. So I'll give an example. Our data integration technology, right? Historically, that was, you know, you're able to visually describe a set of transformations and then we generated code in SQL or PL SQL. Now, we generate code not only in SQL and PL SQL, but we generate that same code in Spark, right? If tomorrow, Spark gets replaced with Flink or something else, right? We simply replace the code generator underneath and all of what the customer's built gets preserved and moved into the future. I think a lot of people are now becoming concerned that as they take advantage of open source really, really at the very low levels, they have the potential to essentially get stuck, right? In a technology which has essentially become obsolete, right? As any new technology evolves, we move from people who just code, right? With all the lower-level stuff up to a set of tools. And, you know, we talk to companies now that have huge amounts of now legacy map-reduced code, right? You think only a few years ago- Kind of like COBOL. Yeah. So, it's going to be around, but not really pervasive. Right, so how can you, you know, take advantage of these technologies, right? Without necessarily having to get stuck to any one of them. So, we're going to answer the philosophical question. Obviously Oracle and database business has been the star over the years, since the founding. But even now, it seems to me that the role of the database becomes even more important as you connect subsystems, call it Hadoop, Spark, whatever technology's going to evolve, as a feature of an integrated system, if you will, software-based and or engineered system coming together. So, that seems to be obvious, that you can connect in an open way and give customers choice. But that's kind of different from the old Oracle. I have a database, everything runs on Oracle. Oracle on Oracle is great, certainly it runs well. But what's the philosophy internally? Obviously the database team sitting there, must be like, wow, big data is an opportunity for Oracle. That's right. Or do they go, no, the database business is different. How do you guys talk about that internally? And how do customers take away from that dynamic between the database crown jewel and the opening it up and being more big data-driven? I think it's ironic because externally, when you talk to people, they just assume that we're going to be like, oh my God, this is a threat and we're going to just, you know, double down on what we're doing on the database side and you know, we're just going to hunker down and I don't know, try to hide, right? But that's exactly the opposite of what we've really been doing internally, right? We really have embraced these technologies of Hadoop and Spark and NoSQL. And we're essentially seeing data management evolve, right? That is the new normal. So rather than looking at, you know, as we might, not only we might have said, we did say when we introduced Oracle in the data warehousing market back in 95, we said, put all your data in the Oracle database. We're not saying that anymore, right? Because there are reasons to put data in Hadoop. There are reasons to put data in graph databases and NoSQL databases. We need to be able to provide those choice, right? While still integrating that data management platform as one integrated entity. Would you say then it was fair to say that from a customer standpoint, by having that open approach gives more faster access to different data types in real time? Absolutely. Then isn't that the core value proposition of big data? Yeah, I mean, you know, again, when the Hadoop craze first started, it was all about, you know, unload and put everything in this one store. And for a lot of companies today, they still are faced with this conundrum which says in order to analyze data, I have to put it all in one place. So that means that you have to move your operational data, you know, into the one place. You have to move your data warehousing stuff into one place, right? But then at the same time, you mentioned real time. How do you get in the business of moving data from place A to place B on a constant basis while still being able to offer real time access and real time analytics? The answer is you can't. And the value of the data, the data capital as we've been talking about at Wikibon is an IoT piece of data from a turbine could have really big relevance to the system of record in another database and that has to be exposed and integrated quickly to surface some insight about the quality of the data. It's the thing that gives you context, right? Today what's going on is that we are getting all access to all these rich data sources and rich data types that we didn't have before, whether that's, you know, text information or information coming off sensors and the like. And the relevance of that information is when we combined it together with the corporate information, right? The stuff that we have in our existing systems to really reap the true benefit, right? How do you know, you know, when you get a log file, the log file doesn't have anything about the customer in it. The log file just has a, you know, a number associating itself to a customer. You have to tie that together with the customer profile, which data which might not exist in Hadoop, maybe it's in a NoSQL store. And certainly the open source is booming with Oracle. You guys are actively involved in all the different open source ecosystems. Sure, you know, we, you know, drive a number of open source projects, whether it's, you know, MySQL or Java or, you know, the list goes on and on. Many people don't think of, you know, they're not even aware that Oracle's behind MySQL as an example, right? I mean, I remember talking to my son recently and he says, you know, do you know anything about MySQL? You know, and I'm like, well, a little bit, right? And then as we're talking and we're, you know, looking through his code, finally say, you know, you know, this is Oracle product. He's like, no, it's not. Right? You know, because- It's too cool to be Oracle. That's right. That's not a bad thing, right? I mean, the reality of it is, is that, you know, we've invested a whole lot of time and energy in these technologies and we're really looking to commercialize them, to mainstream them, to make them less scary for more people to be able to get value from. Well, your son's examples are great in the illustration of the new Oracle that's out there now, this whole new philosophy. Finally, I'll give you the last word real quick. For folks watching, what's one thing you'd want to share with them that they may or may not know about Oracle and its big data strategy? Give us a look, right? I mean, I think that, you know, when you think of big data and you think of these new technologies, you may not think of Oracle, right? You may think of the new companies that you're more familiar with in a light. The reality of it is that Oracle has an extraordinarily rich portfolio of technology and services on the cloud, as well as, you know, like cloud machines. So give us a look. I think you'll be surprised at how open we are, how much of the open source technology we've embedded in our products and how fast we're essentially evolving into, you know, what is the new normal. Neal, thanks so much for spending the time with me here on the ground. I'm John Furrier, you're watching exclusive on the ground covers here at Oracle headquarters. Thanks for watching. Thank you.