 from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube, covering Oracle Open World 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Brian Grace Lee. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. Brian Grace Lee, our cloud analyst at Silicon Angle Media's Wikibon Research. Our next guest is introducing the executive vice president of Fusion Middleware Development and Oracle. Great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. We love software because one, we're software geeks, but also more importantly, cloud has changed the game on software DevOps. We talk on theCUBE all the time. Brian is a cloud analyst breaking down the competition, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service. All kind of melding together now. And one area that we've always been fascinated with is what is the middleware in this environment? John Fallon was saying, well, it's kind of like a mainframe, but not really a mainframe in the cloud. You get on-prem, you have all these kind of mainframe-like high-performance features in engineered systems. You got encryption now end-to-end. I mean, essentially a whole new distributed mainframe, if you will. But we all want to know what does the middleware look like? Is there a standard middleware architecture? Is it pick your own middleware? Open source with Java? It's not quite the same. So first question, what is the middleware equation from your standpoint? How would you define it? So let's start to think about what are the personas which a customer deals with the platform? Frankly, they have four personas. There's a developer, there's an integrator, there is the business analyst, deriving intelligence from the data, and there's the line of business user as well. We see all four of these personas interacting directly with middleware in the cloud. That's what we call platform as a service. The fact though is, I think we can do a lot better in taking our story out to the world. Most customers associate Paz from Oracle as basically database in the cloud or perhaps Java in the cloud. We have far more. It's actually integration in the cloud. It's identity management in the cloud. It is process cloud service, which is BPM in the cloud. It is sites cloud service, it's documents in the cloud, it's data visualization in the cloud, BI in the cloud, far richer than what you would see in any other competitor out there. Oracle by far has the broadest and deepest definition of what platform means, and that's what middleware is about. And so just to kind of bring that perspective for me is that okay, there's no general purpose software platform anymore, because workloads are driving everything, right? So you take engineered systems, great success by Oracle. People were poo-pooing that five years ago, you know, like, oh, you know, purpose-built boxes are passe. Turns out that was a bad, bad angle. It turns out people want integrated solutions. But now the integrated stack is in the cloud and it's driven by the workload. And there's a variety of work, the zillion workloads. That's right, that's right. So that's the key point. So what is your view of integrated cloud from a standpoint of middleware? Because now you're saying to yourself, okay, I want to run on-prem, I want to run in a public cloud, I want to run the same software for my workload, but now I have horizontally scalable and vertically integrated software that's on a per workload basis. That's a challenge. So let's understand first of all, there's two dimensions to this. First is to do with the kind of workload, right? You might have a Java, J2E workload, that's Java cloud service, instantly scalable, instantly installed. Very easy to manage, very easy to patch. We do it for you. The next one would be, perhaps you have a .NET workload. Well, we have infrastructure as a service for that. You can just bring a .NET workload over here. What if you're not programming in Java at all? Perhaps there's JavaScript and you're programming in Node.js. Node.js in the cloud. There is a movement out there where our customers are programming in microservices, in the microservices-based architecture. And they just want to run on Java SE. So we have a Java SE service with containers built in. So you can run your microservices loads over here as well. In fact, that is one of the coolest things that we've done. All of this, and this is one dimension, the second dimension is all of this is available either in the public cloud or on the private cloud, which would be an appliance that you install behind the firewall at the customer's data center as well. When you look at it, not only, I mean, we're a huge number of customers that are here and we contrast that a little bit. We go to some of the open source events. You go to the Apache events, you go to Velocity and some of those. A lot of them are building sort of platforms on their own. I mean, there's a ton of things they can use, Kubernetes and Mesos and scheduling algorithms and applications, platforms as a service. Do you guys feel like you need to go off and get that next generation of developer, the ones that are building the cool Silicon Valley companies or do you feel like the money in the market is still in around Java and the services you just talked about? For the honest answer is we do need both. We have an existing large customer base that is very loyal and very much engaged with our existing products that are now moving to the cloud. Having said that, we're not sitting still. We see an opportunity in building a microservices platform that is over and above these scheduling packages, perhaps like Mesos or Kubernetes, okay? Grapping your own, it's simply not value added up anymore. And once you take that microservices platform and have it integrated all the way up from the infrastructure layer all with it to the platform and software the service layer, the integrated value of that is what nobody has. That's what Oracle's strength has always been and continue to be. That's interesting. Let's talk about that. That is what customers want. We've seen Amazon's success driven by that pure dynamic. Now, great infrastructure as a service, pure play developer, I get that. Now you get in the enterprise, it's complicated. And so I got to ask you this question because the theme that's coming up in our CUBE events we've done in the past year and a half, say two years is it sounds great on paper to pick the shiny new toy out there, but the cost of ownership involved in coding. And when I say coding, I mean, I got to write new code, okay? It's a big deal. And this seems to be way too much to do from a software perspective already. Like you mentioned microservices, containers, things of that nature are enabling faster development. So there's a big theme developing called, I don't want to waste myself coding on something. Is that a big driver of how you guys are your value proposition? Because if you have an integrated stack, things like version control, things that are preexisting software can be leveraged. How big of a deal is that, if any, or what does that mean? So let's take the, I think the question is, I can break it onto two dimensions as well. One is to do is to make the life of the developer easier. So writing your own, having your own git repository, for example, or integrating that with a continuous integration pipeline, for example, or Hudson or Jenkins job, creating the scheduling mechanism that actually creates the Docker containers. All of that can be done on the Oracle Public Cloud. But there's another aspect to this though, is that when you do this, the integration and providing a tool, for example, that would take about 80% of the job away from the developers all the way down to what we call a citizen developer and make the job very easy for them, is a major direction from our side. So when I look out in the future, 70 to 80% of what it takes to extend the SaaS application should be done in a tool. And then if you extend it, you extend it using REST-based service and it's been exposed in the past there as well. So both dimensions are very important. So we're going to ask the competitive, hard question. It's uncomfortable, but bring it your best, bring it on, differentiates versus the competition. A lot of people going after Oracle, they're building their own database. You've been doing that for years. Okay, it's okay, I get the easy answer for that. You've been doing it for a long time. Salesforce, Salesforce, IQ, Adobe, and Amazon, all entering the database space. What's your answer to these guys? What do you say to your customers? Hey, you know, John, you come lately, hey, congratulations, welcome to the game. What's your response to the competition? Welcome to the game. I think we've been at it for a long time. Our, we feel very confident of our offerings in the marketplace, both on-premise and in the cloud. We continue to invest in very specific options on our on-prem products that are far, far differentiated. If you look at the offerings out there, they have size limitations. They have scalability limitations. We've been at this for the enterprise scale for a long, long time. There's no doubt in our mind that we'll be successful here. You know, one of the things having a computer science for you, then getting an MBA, and you learned some buzzwords. So the buzzword I learned in business school was diseconomies of scale. So when you try to match a trajectory, say Oracle, say I'm a competitor, I'd say, hey, I'm going to, hey, good job on a copy of you, so I come out with all the features as diseconomies of scale. And that's important for customers. I want you to point out, where is the holes in the competition? If you had to poke a hole, hit that one little straw that breaks the camel's back. Where is the diseconomies of scale that those guys are going to be exposed for? Because ultimately they can cover the messaging, they can have some products out there, but they're not going to have the trajectory and experience that Oracle has. How do you poke a hole in the competition? So let me segment the competition into multiple parts, though. One set of competition are the guys that are infrastructure up, right? You have Amazon, for example. You see the start of the infrastructure, they're trying to move into the platform. Then there's the guys that actually move from software to service down, where they have an application, like a CRM application, and they produce a platform that used to extend this application and a little bit more, right? Both have big holes in them. If you look at the SaaS down, it's primarily designed to extend only one application. It's not designed for generalized load. Hell, in a complete multi-tenor environment, you can't even VPN into your load, into your environment, right? If you really wanted to do enterprise-class deployment of your custom application, very hard to do it in these custom, how should I say, extension of SaaS platform provider. Now go from infrastructure up. I think the hole there is, frankly, they're a mile wide and an inch deep. When you take each one of these offerings and ask the question, what does it take to do a scalable cluster across multiple data centers and to keep it up and patch it over time, the total cost of ownership of what we provide from a platform perspective is bar none the best in the marketplace. When you see it from both perspectives, we actually have the most powerful platform out there. We're obviously seeing mobile, internet of things. I mean, we're seeing entire companies built where that's their business, right? Uber is an example, Airbnb, and a lot of these internet of things platforms. What has to change in the middleware space because they're not built like three tier applications. They're not built like traditional enterprise. What changes in your world and can you extend the existing platform do you have to build a completely different middleware platform to address that? In fact, I don't think we have to build a completely new internet platform. We actually are releasing an IoT cloud service. That kind of joke with my own team that we said there is no IoT market. There's an IoT applications market. So when we're going about the IoT platform, we actually impact eating our own dog food, right? There's a gateway part of this, which is integration to the end devices. There's a cloud service part of it. There's an identity management part of it, securing the devices as they communicate over. There's a translation integration part of it. All of this is ICS, the guts of innovation cloud service built into it. And then there's real time and batch intelligence on top of this. All of this, if you look at how we're using our own platform for IoT, it's very exciting. And here's the kicker. We have thousands of customers who are already our on-premise apps customer that are doing manufacturing ERP. All of them are looking for a way to monitor and derive intelligence from these devices not suddenly start speaking. That's how we're approaching the market for IoT. It's almost the same problem the way you laid out the competition. IoT, you're either infrastructure or you're an app and you're kind of stuck between those two points. I would agree with you. I think there's an IoT app market only. The platform's called distributed computing. Welcome to Edge of the network. Now people and things are now the Edge of the network. But what's inside that IoT app is complexity and processing, is business intelligence, is integration, perhaps some custom coding. What does that look like? That looks like a platform. Yeah, developers with analytics. It's fun chatting with your love, the range that we can hit on. So I'm going to push the envelope a little bit. Let's talk about IoT at the edge of the network. Forget IoT, just talk about the edge of the network. Humans and machines are now the data sources. So that's going to change some of the dynamics like identity, security. We talked about end-end security. What's your vision on that? Because this is going to bring up a whole other level of computer science, new cloud architects, potentially new applications, potentially new tweaks in the infrastructure, orchestration, automation. Because there's a lot of data. How do you parse through zillions and zillions and zillions of data coming in? You get e-machine learning. So again, back to the computer science side of it. What's your vision? In fact, I'm actually doing an entire session on this in an open world. There's three parts to this. One is a tool set that you produce for the data scientist that are able to parse through millions and millions of rows. By the way, nobody can do a query on the entire dataset. You have to do sampling. And to provide an infrastructure that sits on top of Hadoop, map reduce, or Spark, with data sitting on top of HDFS, it makes a visual face of that for the data scientist. Very cool thing. Now you're taken to the data factory part. How do you get the datasets ready and curated that get loaded into these, into these what they're called data lakes? We've taken our ODI, Oracle Data Integration infrastructure that is now directly produces the transformation logic using Uzi, using Pig, using Spark. So it's sitting natively inside the cluster. When you actually bring these two things together and marry it with perhaps datasets that's sitting outside of the big data infrastructure in the database and doing distributed queries across them. This is a big data SQL product. Nobody has the breadth of what we do. This is how you make sense of the millions of rows of data coming through. We're getting the wrap up here. I still want to stop because it's so awesome. The data visualization obviously is there. Sampling, it's hard. I mean, you can't make a mistake and you got to be precise. That's going to be really difficult. So all of this is horsepower. At the end of the day, throw more compute at it. Potentially seems to be the answer or moving compute around. I mean intelligent compute. I think it's not just throw more compute and be intelligent about it. Let me, let's take the million row example, right? It's not just about sampling in batch. It's sampling in an iterative way. If you have a large dataset, the business user should be able to sample the dataset, divide some, perhaps intelligence from it, see some problems in the data, run a job to fix it, re-sample the information and keep iterating. That's how you make sense of it. And you got to visualize it for really a new set of use. I mean, if you're visualizing for a first responder, for example, they're not a computer science person, right? They're not a hedge fund manager that looks at trends. You're, you know, to a hospital worker, they're not a computer science person. You've got to think about visualization differently, I would think. I invite you to come, you know, see our demos for Big Data Discovery, which is a product that we launched last year. This year, we're launching a Big Data Discovery cloud service for that. That's exactly that, right? In normal business users, just looking at datasets, trying to figure out intelligence. In fact, there's another service called Data Visualization Cloud Service, which you will see our CEO using personally. All right, Interd, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I know we're getting the wrap here. I asked one more question to end the segment. A little bit more of a forward-looking community-conoriented question, help benefit society. You guys are building a platform. I see you're enabling new apps. I mean, not just Oracle apps. If you take your thesis forward, it's just not just Oracle. It's everything, right? So open source and new things. That begs the question, startups. If you are an entrepreneur and you're in your 20s again, knowing what you know now, okay? Great, it's a lot easier now. No offense, no offense, young guys. It's a lot easier now to do a startup. But being successful is critical. What should they work on? What are the white spaces for startups in the new Oracle, in this new integrated cloud era? Client service behind desk, we're moving on to a whole other modern computing era of software. What do you do if you're a startup as an entrepreneur? So here, I'll give you some certain dimensions to think about, right? If I was in my 20s today, I would launch something, one, in data analytics. And data analytics to do specifically with very key business problems. Let's take point-of-sale data or interaction data for IoT, in manufacturing, specific to discrete manufacturing. The amount of opportunity that exists to better society and to actually divide real business value and change people's lives is just immense. Oracle kind of started that way, it's a database. That's right, you know? Only one thing. 30 years ago, that's one dimension that I would take a look at. The second dimension is the face of how development is done is changing forever. You know, when you take a look at even MISOs and Kubernetes, right? The amount of tooling that is written around these infrastructure tools to get something ready, it's just insane. There is a giant opportunity in the middle to produce a platform. I see an opportunity very similar to what we saw in the mid-90s with an application server. There is an opportunity here. And it is saying executive vice president of Oracle, Fusion, middleware, and among other things, great guests from theCUBE. Thanks for sharing that data and insight and sharing your insight with others, appreciate it. Go to silkenagle.tv, you know we have podcasting now. Go to crowdchat.net slash O-O-W-15, our new engagement container built on the cloud. Join the conversation, we'll be right back more with theCUBE here on Howard Street for Oracle Open World after this short break.