 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE, covering empowering the autonomous enterprise, brought to you by Oracle Consulting. Back to theCUBE everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We've been covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting, and really it's rebirth. And I'm here with Chris Fox, who's the Group Vice President for Enterprise Cloud Architects and Chief Technologist for the North America Tech Cloud at Oracle. Chris, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks Dave, glad to be here. So I love this title. I mean, years ago there was no such thing as a cloud architect. Certainly there were chief technologists, but so you are really, those are your peeps. Is that right? That's right, that's right. That's really my team and I, that's all we do. So our focus is really helping our customers take this journey from when they were on-premise to really transforming with cloud. And when we think about cloud, really for us, it's a combination. It's our hybrid cloud, which happens to be on-premise. And then of course the true public cloud, like most people are familiar with. So very exciting journey, and frankly I've seen just a lot of success for our customers. You know Dave, what I think we're seeing at Oracle though, because we're so connected with SaaS, and then we're also connected with the traditional applications that have run the business for years, the legacy applications that have been servicing us for 20 years, and then the cloud-native developers. So what my team and I are constantly focused on now is things like digital transformation and really wiring up all three of these across. So if we think of like a customer outcome, like I want to have a package delivered to me from a retailer, that actual process flow could touch a brand new cloud-native site from e-commerce, it could touch essentially maybe a traditional application that used to be on-prem that's now in the cloud, and then it might even use a new SaaS application maybe for maybe a procurement process or delivery vehicle and scheduling. So what my team does, we actually connect all three. So what I always mention to my team and all of our customers, we have to be able to service all three of those constituents and really think about process flows. So I take the cloud-native developer, we help them become efficient. We take the person who's been running that traditional application and we help them become more efficient. And then we have the SaaS applications which are now rolling out new features on a quarterly basis and it's a whole new delivery model, but the real key is connecting all three of these into a business process flow that makes the customer's life much more efficient. So I want to get into this cloud conversation a little bit. You guys are using this term last mover advantage. I'm going to ask you about it, I can be last. I was being last, an advantage, but let me start there. People always say, you know, Chris we want to get out of the data center. We're going zero data center. And I always say, well, how are you going to handle that back office stuff, right? The stuff that's really big, it's cranky, doesn't handle just, you know, instances dying or things going away too easily. It needs predictable performance. It needs scale. It absolutely needs security. And ultimately, you know, a lot of these applications truly have relied on an Oracle database. The Oracle database has its own specific characteristics that it needs to run really well. So we actually looked at the cloud and we said, let's take the first generation clouds, which are doing great, but let's add the features that specifically, a lot of times the Oracle workload needed in order to run very well and in a cost effective manner. So that's what we mean when we say last mover advantage, we said, let's take the best of the clouds that are out there today. Let's look at the workloads that frankly, Oracle runs and has been running for years, what our customers needed. And then let's build those features right into this next version of the cloud with the service, the enterprise. So our goal, honestly, which is interesting is even that first discussion we had about cloud native and legacy applications, and also the new SaaS applications, we built a cloud that handles all three use cases at scale, resiliently and in a very secure manner. And I don't know of any other cloud that's handling those three use cases all in, we'll call it the same tendency for us at Oracle. My question is, why was it important for Oracle and is it important for Oracle and its customers to participate in IaaS and pass and SaaS? Why not just the last two layers of that? What does that give you from a strategic advantage standpoint and what does that do for your customers? Yeah, great question. So the number one reason why we needed to have all three was that we have so many customers to today are in a data center, they're running a lot of our workloads on premise and they absolutely are trying to find a better way to deliver lower cost services to their customers. And so we couldn't just say, let's just, everyone needs to just become net new. Everyone just needs to ditch the old and go just to brand new alone. Too hard, too expensive at times. So we said, let's give us customers the ultimate amount of choice. So let's even go back again to that developer conversation in SaaS. If you didn't have IaaS, we couldn't help customers achieve a zero data center strategy with their traditional application. We'll call it PeopleSoft or JD Edwards or E-Business Suite or even there's some massive applications that are running on the Oracle Cloud right now that are custom applications built on the Oracle database. What they want is they said, give me the lowest cost but yet predictable performance IaaS. I'll run my apps tier on this. Number two, give me a platform service for database because frankly, I don't really want to run your database like with all the manual effort. I want someone to automate patching scale up and down and all these types of features like the cloud should have given us. And then number three, I do want SaaS over time. So we spend a lot of time with our customers really saying, how do I take this traditional application run it on IaaS and PaaS? And then number two, let's modernize it at scale. Maybe I want to start peeling off functionality and running them as cloud native services right alongside, right? That's something again that we're doing at scale and other people are having a hard time running these traditional workloads on prem in the cloud. The second part is they say, you know, I've got this legacy traditional ERP been servicing me well, or maybe a supply chain system. Ultimately, I want to get out of this. How do I get to SaaS? We say, okay, here's the way to do this. First, bring it to the cloud, run it on IaaS and PaaS. And then selectively, I call it cloud slicing. Take a piece of functionality and put it into SaaS. We're helping customers move to the cloud at scale. We're helping them do it at their rate with whatever level of change they want. And when they're ready for SaaS, we're ready for them. And how does autonomous fit into this whole architecture? I mean, take it by the way for that description. I mean, it's nuanced, but it's important. I'm sure you're having this custom, this conversation with a lot of cloud architects and chief technologists, they want to know this stuff. They want to know how it works. And then we'll talk about what the business impact is, but talk about autonomous and where that's been. So the autonomous database, what we've done is really taking a look at all the runtime operations of an Oracle database. So tuning, patching, securing all these different features. And what we've done is taking the best of the Oracle database, the best of something called Exadata, right? Which we run in the cloud, which really helps a lot of our customers. And then we've wrapped it with a set of automation and security tools to help it really manage itself, tune itself, patch itself, scale up and down, independent between compute and storage. So why that's important though, is that it really, our goal is to help people run the Oracle database as they have for years, but with far less effort. And then even not only far less effort, hopefully a machine plus man, kind of the equation we always talk about is, man plus machine is greater than man alone. So being assisted by artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform those database operations, we should provide a better service to our customers with far less cost. Our hope and goal is that the people who've been running Oracle databases, how can we help them do it with far less effort? And maybe spend more time on what the data can do for the organization, right? Improve customer experience, et cetera. Versus maybe like, how do I, how do I spin up a table? So let's talk about the business impact. So you go into customers, you talk to the cloud architects, the chief technologists, you pass that test, now you got to deliver the business impact. Where does Oracle consulting fit with regard to that? And maybe you could talk about where you guys want to take this thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so the cloud is a great set of technologies, but where Oracle consulting is really helping us deliver is in the outcome. One of the things I think that's been fantastic working with the Oracle consulting team is that, cloud is new for a lot of customers who've been running these environments for a number of years. There's always some fear and a little bit of trepidation saying, how do I learn this new cloud? I mean, the workloads we're talking about Dave are like tier zero, tier one, tier two, and all the way up to Dev and test and DR. Oracle consulting does really a couple of things in particular. Number one, they start with the end in mind. And number two, that they start to do is they really help implement these systems. And there's a lot of different assurances that we have that we're going to get it done on time and better be under budget, because ultimately, again, it's something that's really paramount for us. And then the third part of it, a lot of times it's runbooks, right? You actually don't want to just live at our customer's environments. We want to help them understand how to run this new system. So training and change management. A lot of times Oracle consulting is helping with runbooks. We usually will after doing it the first time, we'll sit back and let the customer do it the next few times and essentially help them through the process. And our goal at that point is to leave. Only if the customer wants us to, but ultimately our goal is to implement it, get it to go live on time and then help the customer learn this journey to the cloud. And without them, frankly, I think these systems are sometimes too complex and difficult to do on your own, maybe the first time, especially because I could say they're closing the books, they might be running your entire supply chain, they run your entire HR system, whatever they might be. Too important to leave the chance. So they really help us with helping the customer become live and become very confident and skilled so they can do it themselves. I love the conversation. We'll have to leave it right there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights, great stuff. Absolutely, thanks Dave, thank you for having me on. All right, you're welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We are covering the Oracle North American Consulting Transformation and its rebirth in this digital event. Keep it right there, we'll be right back.