 Live from the Oracle Conference Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering the Oracle Cloud Lunch brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. Welcome to our special presentation at Oracle's Cloud Announcement. This is our pre-gaming session. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante with wikibon.org. We're here to break down the Oracle Cloud Announcement. Our first guest is Steve Dehebs, SVP of Pass BI EMP of Business Group. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So the room is empty right now in a few minutes it's going to be packed with the press, top press corps and customers and partners. Larry Ellison's keynote. I'll say you guys got a big announcement. We don't want to reveal too much but the platform of cloud certainly is legit in terms of the mind of the customer. Now with an Oracle, the earnings we're out, you're seeing huge growth. Yes. Larry Ellison's putting cloud into everything in the cloud. Oracle is all in on cloud. Give us a quick update from your perspective what's happening. Yeah, I think as you'd said if you saw from the earnings release there's a great amount of momentum around cloud. Not only from a bookings perspective but when you look at the growth rates compare when you look at the number of customers ratting you know over 1400 customers just in platform services alone compared to 400 just last quarter. So we're seeing tremendous adoption for the cloud and today what's really exciting is in addition we're going to continue to show that commitment we've made where we're going to roll out a suite of new services that both Larry and then Thomas Curian are going to talk about. We're also going to see some of the products in action as well. So the Oracle's growth is attracting a lot of talent. You're new to Oracle. I am. So talk about why Oracle they're pulling back a lot of talent certainly ex-Oracle folks we've interviewed in the past but you're seeing a renaissance of folks who are really seasoned professionals coming back to Oracle. Why? What's the attraction? For me I mean probably the big reason I came back was actually to be on theCUBE. So I just want to put that right now. So that was sort of part of the deal. But you know to be honest it's what you said I've been in the valley born and raised been here for 22 plus years in terms of tech. I actually remember growing up in the area where there wasn't an Oracle there used to be this theme park with animals running around all over the place and I actually watched those Oracle buildings go up. You know and I watched what incredible company Oracle's become and I do believe in why I joined because I believe our best days are still ahead of us. I've been fortunate enough to touch every single part of the Oracle stack. I've been in networking, I've been in storage, I've been in compute, security, mobility, cloud and I think you know those pieces separate are interesting but at the end of the day that aggregation is really important and that's what Oracle uniquely provides. I mean we have the entire stack we seamlessly integrate them and so from an end user's perspective they're much greater than the sum of the parts. The solutions that we can offer are incredible and then also got to step back and look at what that customer's journey is. You know we talk about premise versus cloud and the answer is it's both. You know it's not an either or discussion and you know we can seamlessly bridge people from one to the other where we're uniquely differentiated is everything, all the technology, all the skill sets people have learned on premise to operate our equipment to run applications are the same things in the cloud and that's where I think we have competitive differentiation as well which I'd love to talk to you about but that's our opportunity. Companies made a major investment understanding where the market's going and so that's why I was excited to come here. So Steve a lot of people might say okay well the cloud, yes it's early days it's still a small portion of the $2 trillion business but everybody's doing cloud now Oracle's coming in making a lot of noise you get a lot of marketing power are you late to cloud? What's really, where's the substance of your cloud? Can you sort of convince us that this is not just cloud washing? Yeah, no I agree that that's actually a good point and I think what you probably saw it open world in terms of the announcements we made and I think proof's gonna be in the pudding today when you see the continued commitment and the amount of services that were rolling out and this doesn't happen overnight so when you look at competitors and they talk cloud you might get a filibuster and some hand waving but at the end of the day this has been decades in development I mean this is a vision the team has had for quite some time and so this isn't overnight success this is understanding the customer's needs and doing it the right way not just popping something in the cloud that doesn't work with your legacy equipment for instance Microsoft SQL server premise doesn't work with Microsoft SQL server and cloud so Oracle's been very thoughtful 70 plus billions of dollars worth of investment over a decade's worth of work in order to get us here and what I will say just one of the when you look at Oracle it's about four decades old now so if you think about every single major transition that's happened in technology mainframe, to client server, to internet, to mobile, to cloud I mean Oracle's been there to help transition people to connect information to applications people to their data and that's what we're still doing today and so I think that was the approach we took for over 35 years we've been about the same thing we've led customers through transitions now it's cloud and whatever's next So you summarized it or you touched on it can you summarize the sort of cloud Oracle cloud strategy for us? Yeah, absolutely I think it's a very comprehensive strategy that looks at all pieces because at the end of the day you're gonna need choice you're gonna, you know, whether that's and so if you look at the layers of the stack we have everything from infrastructure as a service so Amazon kind of does good there but you have to have that piece as well as platforms as a service so that full operating environment upon which you can develop apps run your workloads, what have you and then at the top level those applications as well the SaaS applications and so all of those in aggregate that full stack working together is really where we differentiate ourselves and why we still back and said holistically, what's the right you know, pieces we need to deliver in order to best support our customers? Steve, I want to ask you about the customer environment you mentioned obviously the trend towards the growth, 1400 plus new customers last quarter in cloud but Amazon certainly changed the game and you're seeing what Amazon has shown on the cloud integrated stack is critical Oracle has made an investment we've talked about this in theCUBE you know, six years ago when we first started going to Oracle Open World with theCUBE was Larry's engineered system was really telegraphing that kind of trend you know, he wanted to be the iPhone of the data centers was a quote I think he made but that's kind of playing that investment was kind of really looking at more the hardware but now go fast forward to cloud with Amazon kind of telegraphing the way customers want to consume what is it about Oracle's integrated approach that you find the most relevant for customers? Yeah, I think that's right I mean, I think if you saw us pioneering that approach on premise so think about taking that same vision and applying it to cloud so again, I mean, if you look at what we have we take it a step further it's not just an integrated stack but then it's the platform as a service the security, the mobility, the BI all the applications we layer on top from a CRM perspective from a marketing perspective from an HR perspective so think about what you have to do today I could go and I can get my workday here my sales force here my marketo here you know, I can go you know, and it's just this how do you manage that? I can go get some compute and service from Amazon and I have to tie that into my premise-based applications and at some point, you know that becomes a pretty difficult task and so to think about how you could step back have a fully integrated stack a full engineered system in the cloud and I'm sort of glad you set that up because stay tuned we'll have some news there as well where we leverage that technology in the cloud you know, that's something I don't think anybody else can say Yeah, I always, Dave and I always talk about like sports analogies and NASCAR is kind of the one we use where the cars are jockeying and then someone slingshots out in front Oracle's kind of been behind the pack now in the middle of the pack now looks like you guys are going to be leading but at the end of the game it's all about the apps so the engine of innovation what do you call engineered systems or what not all customers care about it I got to power the apps and I'm trying to abstract away the infrastructure seems to be the big trend so how are you guys seeing the customer environment because new apps is one moving existing apps, workloads and then integration so those are kind of three major areas we see in our research around that what, how does it, does it hit all three? What's that all about? It absolutely does you know, so I mean I think that's the exciting thing I do agree it's all about apps at the end of the day it's been a big part of my career in apps so infrastructure is good but at the end of the day you know how to support it you got to have a nice engine in there you have a nice engine but you're right and I do think look at our stack I mean we have the new apps you know that covers sort of everything you need from a customer experience to the run the business ERP your HR systems your sales your marketing systems you know Oracle has all of that and we can offer that to any segment of the market so that's really exciting think about those enterprise apps that people develop today you know there might be these legacy apps that have a long tail that people have built for their finance their transportation their healthcare whatever these apps might be how do you bring those forward and mobilize them how do you bring those forward and leverage the cloud while still securing them and then how do you tie them into these new applications because at the end of the day you need some tie and that's something we can uniquely do so we have a platform that allows you to bring applications forward to the cloud and mobilize them we have a platform that allows you to take new apps and extend their capabilities and integrate them and manage them across premise and hybrid and so I think that's perfectly stated and when you really take a good look at the Oracle offering you know why we're so differentiated and why I think we offer choice and can you uniquely guide customers through this journey so you guys aren't afraid to talk about the competition so let's talk about the competition you mentioned Microsoft Nuance with SQL Server the two biggies on the app side Workday and Salesforce came up a lot came up on the earnings call and we made a big point about being much, much larger than Workday and then not bigger than Salesforce but growing significantly faster and basically laying down the gauntlet saying we will be larger talk about the competition and where you fit and why you're a better option for customers Great, well I think it goes to the prior discussion I mean some of these things are one off so you know if I'm a Salesforce customer and I'm looking at developing apps okay first of all Salesforce doesn't have our premise solutions so right there what do I do with that entire investment I made in legacy apps how do I bring that forward and I have a proprietary platform and people will develop applications on it but those are gonna be things that are probably tightly binded to the Salesforce platform and not at the end of the day might be enterprise applications that customers use to run their business so I think that's differentiated and again from a Workday perspective if you can get the same things from us with everything else you might need I think that's why we're winning you know you saw it in the momentum you saw it in the amount of customers we're adding the growth rates compared to both and you're right you know we did 858 million all in this year on SaaS and pass 400 plus million of that was in Q4 alone when you look at the momentum you know we're targeting doing another 1.5 to 2 billion next year so the growth rates I think speak for themselves the customer adoption speaks for themselves later on in the cube and I'll be hosting a panel later you're gonna hear from customers who have chosen to adopt the Oracle solutions and I know you guys are gonna get into the why and so I think that's where we're different than the competitors and I'm also hearing that you Larry talked about with the push of a button you could take your on-premises app and bring it to the cloud I mean first of all well so that's sort of the clear message to customers and the differentiation is it really that simple? Yeah you know it's actually interesting stay tuned today because you will see demonstrations of that as well databases, storage you know how do we manage integration how do we create and move workloads and that's where we're differentiated at the end of the day you want a single pane of glass that you can manage all your environments and that's what ultimately what we're trying to get to and that's what Oracle's delivering and then we can uniquely do that because we don't have okay I'm Amazon and Salesforce I don't have anything on premise right? I'm Microsoft, my premise and my cloud are different so now when you base both sections on the same technology the same software I can more easily migrate so you're just focusing on creating the tools that can move them from one place to the other and back And we're seeing that all over the place people the migration of the cloud is definitely happening but it's not happening overnight it will eventually all be cloud in our opinion but you know we see customers saying hey I don't want to risk too much because the cloud's not fully baked out in their minds at least so I got to ask you about your personal background how that ties to some of the Oracle things you were talking about here you had mentioned prior to coming on camera that you had a variety of different jobs over the years from 10 base team, Ethernet all the way up to through stores you've touched a lot of components in the stack what is it about the integrated approach that customers should focus on what should they look at as they evaluate in this whole noise of cloud these days big data certainly a big part of that analytics is driving a big part of it storage it's all the touch points are all there but integration is a huge discussion so as a CXO out there what should they look at from your experience and how do you talk to that what's the bottom No it's a great question and I think it goes back to a little bit of what we talked about and actually this is like near and dear to my heart so yeah born and raised in Bay Area I'm actually the son of a CIO so my dad managed this and I you know so you were pulling cables as a kid I was pulling cables I was doing like internships at Acer like for summer believe it or not so yeah that was actually what I was pulling cables other kids got to go to baseball camp I was pulling cat 40 I was pulling cat cables that's a great but you know I mean if you think about again these heterogeneous environments we have all these different pieces I have my storage here I have my compute here I'm trying to virtualize this environment I have these different apps that don't tie so I mean ultimately the vision of cloud is to aggregate and simplify everything and I think we've done that with the engineering services on premise and we can offer that in cloud so think about having to facilitate the management as well as the business change across all of that versus just having this integrated stack so if I want storage I can have it if I want to drop my applications on top of the storage and the compute I have it and infrastructure layer I can do that versus having to shift over I can tie the applications into that platform environment so I think that's where we actually differentiate What about the hidden cost quakes that always comes up you know the shark, fan, tip of the iceberg whatever metaphors used in IT though there's always that hidden cost what does cloud offer economically that minimizes those hidden costs? Yeah, well it's actually interesting you'll see some very interesting compares to the competition today where you know you have let's say the cost of procuring it in the first place you go from you know kind of a traditional CAPEX to OPEX where you have the cost saved in provision where we'll show you know 95 discrete steps to provision the database versus five clicks in the cloud you know so what do I do with that bandwidth you know I can put it on doing what matters the most serving my customers when you look at an environment okay Amazon might save you on the infrastructure cost but then you still have the cost of the software you still have the cost of the ongoing maintenance you go to Oracle and we can uniquely handle that for you right so you don't need we can do the database management for you we can do the maintenance for you if I'm with somebody else you're not quite going to get that and so I think you Oracle uniquely can actually address some of the cost savings compared to others so the economics are interesting because from a customer standpoint you might spend more on renting over a 10 year period yet customers seem willing to do that can you talk about that dynamic and what are people actually doing the film your cloud business is growing at a meteoric rate are they sort of unplugging on premises and moving to the cloud is it really more of a hybrid approach and today are they aware that they might actually spend more over say a decade and are they willing to do that and why yeah I think yes so there are a couple parts there there are a lot of questions in there yeah there are a lot of I'll try to make sure it's all of them then we'll go back to my summer internships yeah you know it's I think it's some of everything you know there's workloads that they have on you know premise today that they think might make sense if I look at test dev environments you know is it easier to sort of you know go provision equipment a database and offer that up to somebody internally or five clicks I have a fully you know set up development environment and the benefits of that when you think of speed to market you know time to market transformation do these guys want to be spending their time managing databases or do they want to do what they do best and it's serve their customers develop differentiated applications whatever it is that they do to serve their customers we can take a lot off so they can focus on that so I think we see some of both we see hybrid where there's certain workloads they'll move there might be certain data sets they might want to move to infrastructure there's applications that they want to move to cloud but it doesn't mean they can shut down the apps they have on premise right now so we can come in and help bridge that and then yeah to your point over time that could migrate more to cloud I think different customers are going to be in different parts of that journey over a long period of time so for us it's like you want premise we got that you want cloud we got that you know you want to be able to seamlessly manage across both and how that based on the same technology we can do that as well I don't think anybody else can tell that story we got a question from the crowd chat in here if you're watching go to crowdchat.net slash Oracle pass B-A-S-S so what's the question from the crowd what's unique about Oracle you can move from private to public cloud and back no lock and can you comment yeah on that comment I think it's a little bit of what we talked about before so when you start with having the same technology in both premise and cloud it allows you to do very interesting things again when you look at our competitors that don't have something to push back to if they don't have premise or what they have on premise is different what they have on cloud then you can't quite do that but if you start with that start with that fundamental foundational basis of the same technology on premise and cloud then it really comes down to the work we need to do to be able to seamlessly migrate workloads migrate data you know create new instances in the cloud or move them back if you want to have them on so migrations is a big deal right so one migrations migrations you so new apps you still can get the benefits of cloud for clean sheet of paper or green field apps if you will right yeah so what's the consequence if I'm the versus the competition if they don't have on-prem what are some of the consequences for the customer one thing how do you migrate your entire legacy install base move to Amazon your infrastructure I mean unless you plan on just sort of like shutting down the lights you know yeah but there's nuances in there I mean I just say you said move to Amazon okay but that's what's true by the way but to get there to get from A to B takes a lot of resources you got to you know you got to staff up you got to have expertise yeah I know I asked why I asked the question I wanted him to answer push the button push the button right it is I want to push on that push the button you can go to Amazon for some infrastructure but then when you really want to look at platform databases when you want to look at apps you need to actually run your business you can move to them and then find out oh how do I move back because this does not have the full integrated suite I need to run my business so I actually don't expect anybody to do that and you know you'll hear from CIOs today I mean I do think it's going to be a hybrid approach I think it's going to be a phased approach over time if there's a customer that was born yesterday and wants to be all cloud we have those solutions you can offer them as well well that's why we use the NASCAR example of all the cars are in the pack they're all kind of relative and the thing that's interesting is Amazon has proven the shadow IT is really not shadow IT it's R&D we've seen customers say hey we've kind of endorsed shadow IT letting people do test and dev in Amazon or other clouds yeah to validate economics and some of the flexibility options so I'm cool with the shadow IT I think that's a good innovation but the question I want to ask you is relative to your growth last quarter in the performance what's the hottest services that your customers are buying what is the what is the one thing is there one thing or is it a few things what's the hot I mean it's multiple things I mean I will say the database as a service has been growing really well for us and if you look at Java is an app development platform and having that run in the cloud now and how quickly you can get to having that provisioned and starting to do the work I mean obviously you know migrating our install base of database and Java users to the cloud is you know something that you know we take pretty seriously and it's something that we have the right offer to do so there's been a lot of focus there as well as expanding our reach with NetNU I mean you know we were aggressively going out there competing head to head you know with the the likes of all the SAS players out there and to your point we're seeing success there we can really preach the crowd chat soon our job in the queue will just be reading questions off the crowd chat so thanks to Phil Dunn out there his question from Phil is what happens if you're not happy with Amazon after you migrate how do you move off yeah come to Oracle and we'll help you contact your local rep but you guys got to have some sort of plan and competitive strategy for how to move customers off I mean absolutely I mean we understand this isn't sort of a clean sheet and there have been some customers that have made that decision and have found themselves in a place where they need help to get off it we can do that you can hear from customers today who've made choices to go with some of our competitors for CRM like Salesforce found it didn't meet their needs and scale and are you know driving a path towards us so we understand that and so when you think of migration when you think about bridging people forward helping them you know transform and transition it might not just be from premise it could be that they have some cloud instantiations that we need to help them bring forward as well so what's going to happen today without kind of revealing but just teasing out what's happening with Larry Ellis' keynote here why is this announcement so they've got the press corps lined up here with special tables we got analysts in here top industry folks are here yeah we got the cube we got the cube in the house the cube's in the house Larry's here what's the big positioning from your stand what's the big message happening here why is this such an important event it's a really important event for us I think you're going to hear a few things one you know Larry is going to talk about the momentum we're seeing in cloud so we'll get a lot of details around that and why we're winning you know from an economics perspective from a provisioning perspective from a completeness of offering perspective you're going to hear a lot about that you're going to hear a host of new services so it really demonstrates our continued commitment you mentioned about sort of cloud whitewashed I mean when you see these services that are rolling out and when you see them demonstrated by Thomas and his team you're going to understand the amount of work that went into that and the real solutions that we're bringing to market and problems we're helping to solve so you're going to see a lot of that and then I'm really excited to be hosting a customer panel later we're going to have the likes of Avaya and Accenture and JDS Uniface and PharmaVite these guys who are not only the role of IT and how cloud cloud enables that and why they decided to partner with Oracle see if I want to get your perspective the last couple of minutes we have left with you is just on data there's no data cloud in the announcement yet but the data is everywhere now so we were just at the Hadoop Summit talking about how the analytics market BI in particular and real time is changing the game on how people are getting insights out of the data and obviously you need an engine to power that so how do you look at that market that's driven enterprise which everyone wants to be what is the role of data because we were speculating on the Cuba the analytics market has kind of been sideways a little bit waiting for a lift and we think the cloud is that engine so it's DevOps and the cloud seems to be the perfect fit for powering the next generation analytics do you agree can you comment I agree 100% it's funny you sort of said earlier it's all about the apps but at the end of the day the data powers a lot of this as well so I get that actual intelligence from the data is really important and what I like about Oracle and I'm familiar with a lot of these folks out there is to really have that integrated stack so first of all how do I aggregate all the information from all these disparate sources whether it's Hadoop, whether it's Oracle all these different pieces so first I have to be able to collect it and then I have to have the tools that mine it give me the visualization, allow me to interpret it plot it however I like and then I have to be able to access to that information and Oracle provides that full stack so I could go to Tableau for this piece or I could go to IBM for this piece or I could come to a single vendor that can give me from top to bottom starting from bottoms up how do I collect that information and ultimately how do I analyze and get the insights out of it so it's critical you'll actually hear some exciting announcements I think you're trying to trick me into maybe like saying something I shouldn't that's a strategy which is clear then you've got to have essentially one of everything and you also have the best of breed so that requires a lot of R&D investment it does and a lot of effort it does and I'll tell you what coming in about, when we said probably just a little over a hundred days in and to see the level of commitment from this engineering team I mean it's mind boggling what they've delivered what you're going to hear them deliver today and what I know they continue to plan to deliver so that commitment is there the investment is there we understand it's not just about the suite but you can't have a suite where it's not best and breed across the board you guys are committing to best of breed not just the convenience of the suite it's not just about filling holes at the end of the day we compete individually so we need to be best of breed on a particular point but then we'll also compete with the fully integrated suite so we have to do both well thank you, shout out to you great questions and commentary of course I think he's an Oracle employee looks like an ex son 18 years at son but he brings up a good point about the commoditization in public cloud and you know Dave actually was first on record years ago saying this whole race to zero was complete B.S. and Amazon was being the poster child to race to zero but yet they're going to do ten billion potentially this year look at that race to see what's going on with the sales right there so as your Amazon all on price pressure so quickly comment on the pricing game and where's the differentiation I actually think you're going to hear some very exciting news on that so Phil might be like a teen us up for the good discussion that he's going to have today I think at the end of the day we have to be price competitive I also think you're going to see areas where we can lead in pricing out there and one of the benefits again you go to the sort of Oracle being vertically integrated into the silicon right so there's some very interesting things that we can do to be competitive with folks out there from infrastructure as a service perspective and you'll hear news about that and I think and then again it's like how do you drive value up the stack I mean platform as a service we know Amazon is trying to get into that space to increase margins you know then how do you look at a software as a service offering with multiple multi-pillar applications to drop on top so we believe customers need infrastructure will be there to help provide whatever they need but we can also you know drive value by moving them up the stack Steve we're getting tight on time thanks so much for your insights you know vertically integrated cool but we're going to drill into horizontally scalable which is the DevOps ethos as well but doing both is going to be very key congratulations we'll hear more here's the Cube here live in Redwood Shores California for the Oracle Cloud Launch we'll be right back with more pre-gaming Larry Ellison's keynote after this short break