 Live from Washington, DC. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle Cloud World. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Washington, DC. This is theCUBE's special presentation of Oracle Cloud World. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal of noise. Our next guest is Melanie Posey, a research vice president at IDC, analyst on stage in the keynote. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for inviting me, glad to be here. See you again. The Oracle's pumping themselves up. They've got Oracle Cloud Machine, Oracle Cloud at customer program. Not a lot on the hallways, a lot of security conversations which I didn't really hear much in the keynote, but it's really about Oracle Cloud Machine running on-prem, game code based in the cloud. How real is that? Where are they on the progress bar on this program? Because they're not getting the credit in the press and market share. Amazon, I'll see number one, Microsoft number two, Google, we're in sales forces and that, so where is Oracle in the cloud right now? Oracle on the cloud is on the hybrid part of cloud. So if you think about AWS, of course, they're a game changer. They're the first big public cloud. They started in, what, 2006? So a lot of the attention and a lot of the market shares are about just that public cloud piece of things, but where Oracle takes it is they have public cloud, they have on-premise, they have the cloud machine appliance now, so it's more of an all-encompassing IT, diversified IT approach to things, whereas Amazon, public cloud, that's all you can do. Pure play, public. Where is the Oracle Cloud Machine fit in the positioning map? Is it kind of a hybrid, as you said? Is it just a hybrid? Is there other things going on there? Share your thoughts on the positioning of Oracle Cloud Machine. You can put it in a couple of, you can use it in a couple of different ways. I mean, it could be just a standalone, private cloud appliance that nothing that goes on inside that cloud machine is ever going to leave your enterprise data center. You could use it that way, but that would kind of be a waste because it's the same software stack that is in the cloud. So say you're an enterprise and you have an application that your customers in North America love, all of a sudden, boom, your customers in Asia-Pacific can't get enough of it. Do you deploy infrastructure in a data center in Asia-Pacific or do you take that application, push it up to the cloud and make it available to customers in another region that way? It gives you that speed, agility, flexibility, all the goodness of cloud. What's the progress bar look like? Obviously early days, Oracle's all in. It's one of those inflection points where they got all the company working towards the cloud, heard, was clear on that when I interviewed him a couple of months ago. Where are they in your mind on the progress? There's certain early days, that's what they're claiming. But you're seeing some deals. Are they really making it? Is there some bundling going on? How do you make sense of all the progress and can you share your thoughts on where they are? I think they're just from Thomas' presentation today, that some of that was news to me because I don't really cover the SaaS space as much as some of my colleagues do, that so many of these, not just categories of applications are available in the cloud, but different modules and different pieces of that application. So I would say Oracle on the software as a service side, they've made a lot of progress. Why? Because it's all about survival, right? You've got Salesforce out there in the cloud, you have your own CRM, you need to compete with them on the same basis, but at the same time, you can give Oracle, can give its customers something that FSDC can't get their customers, which is the ability to run it on-prem as well. And I think- That's a differentiator. It's definitely a differentiator. So instead of being in a disadvantage because you're not all in, in the cloud. You're doing some kind of off-premise cloud. And now today with the Oracle Cloud Machine, you're seeing Oracle try to replicate that experience on-prem. But it's different. It's like, we've never really seen anything like this before. So how in your view should customers be thinking about this system from the standpoint of their operational model, the pricing models, not exactly cloud, it's very cloud-like. What are the considerations that they should have in terms of adopting this? Should they adopt this? What does it mean to them? Well, I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of different types of companies, right? For some companies, they're very focused on keeping their data on-prem under their own control. But at the same time, you make that data available to applications outside of the enterprise. So this is one way to participate in the cloud without moving all of your data and all of your systems to the cloud. That you have kind of a data warehouse maybe inside your enterprise and your front-facing application is maybe running on a public cloud and it can call back, phone home to the mothership, it's the cloud appliance in the data center to get the data it needs without having to move the data. The application goes to get the data rather than the data having to move to the cloud itself. Okay, using the same operational model. So we're sort of talking off camera. We all know the story of Amazon, $8 billion growing at 70% a year, 20, whatever, 8% operating profits, very good story. Oracle today is trying to sort of create a new category essentially of cloud with this Oracle cloud machine. Is it game over? Because Amazon's so successful, I think I know the answer, why not? Why is it not game over? How are organizations, vendor, technology companies competing with Amazon? And again, what does it mean for customers? Right, I think at the end of the day when you're in a competitive situation with a very dominant, incumbent competitor, the worst thing you can do is try to beat them at their own game. You know, what you do is you create your own game and you beat them at that. So what a lot of companies like Oracle are doing is leveraging the enterprise customer base they've built up over the years. Maybe trying to compete with AWS on the same basis, Oracle is doing something different. It's giving customers the ability to use cloud for the right workloads at the right time. You're not being required to fit into this one-size-fits-all long-chosen model. Defensive move around Oracle's real estate or is it an offensive move or a combination? It's a combination, I'd say. I mean, I'd say at the end of the day what it really is is an evolution of a traditional business model where Oracle's software licenses can do it on-prem, you can do it on the cloud. It's the digital transformation of Oracle in the sense of moving to the next level is meeting customers' expectations on how they want to consume your product. Melanie, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Final word, what's the vibe of the show for the folks that aren't here that are watching live? What's the vibe here? Sure, so there's a lot of buzz because I think there are still a lot of people who don't realize how much Oracle is actually doing in the cloud because it's not necessarily front page, AWS types of things and yeah, I think that there's a lot of realization that there's more to the cloud than there is to the cloud. There's some meat on the bone here. It's not just sizzle, it's got the steak. Oracle Cloud World here inside theCUBE, we're breaking it down. IDC analysts breaking down all the action. We'll be right back with more live coverage in DC, Cloud World and Oracle after this short break.