 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco on Howard Street. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. Our next guest is part of the marketing cloud team at Oracle, Kevin Akeroy, GM and SVP of Oracle Marketing Cloud, and Andrea Ward, Vice President of Marketing Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. We're live, so we're live. We'll be pumping up some social content before you even come off here. This is socially activated innovation. This is the new era of the cloud marketing. And I want to ask you, because I wrote an article on contributing to Forbes as well. Oracle could win the marketing cloud game, but the thesis was to be more like Amazon Web Services. Customers want to stand and stop ups as fast. Existing funnel information's out there, but now they got Omni-Channel, all these tools are out there, all these platforms are available. People are trying to make sense of it right now. So what's your take on it? How do you explain to customers and all this change? Don't change your critical infrastructure. Monals, URLs, webpages, but the engagement's happening all over the place. What do you guys talk to customers about? So the nice thing is even though it sounds really complicated and it sounds like a lot of things have changed, actually they really haven't. We're after the same things, right? We're after the same metrics. It's about customer experience, customer engagement, driving results from customers. The problem is is the tools and the things have just fragmented, right? So now when customers have 25 different channels, they've got three browsers and seven devices and 18 social channels and seven emails and the explosion of channels has really made it interesting. But really, this is a simplification story, not a complication story. Marketers used to have to deal with all the data, all the content, all the media, all the applications, all that stuff was scattered all over the enterprise and a marketing department might be using 30 or 40 different tools. Really what this has done is pulled all of that together into one platform, integrated very, very well. So the marketers can spend two thirds of their time that used to be spent managing all those disparate systems, data and content. Now they're working with one enterprise class solution and all those calories are going towards driving revenue and driving customer experience. Instead of managing all that spaghetti in the background with 30 or 40 different marketing applications. So it's actually a lot simpler. It just doesn't sound that way. Andrew, I want to get your take on this. What I've broken the business back in the late 80s, early 90s, direct mail was through customer engagement and the web came along. The web was a beautiful thing, sell service, hello to hello to web pages, email marketing, Google AdWords, pay for click, coded URLs. You can build systems of engagement and intelligence and records around that. But now that's not the place people, people run away from registration pages. It's like kryptonite for today's engaging consumer. How do you build on top of that? And that's the question I get the most when customers talk to me about social data, social infrastructure. What, how do you make it easy to not throw away what works and hey, webinars and email marketing still work? It's not the sexiest, not in every channel. But how do you extend that out? Is it a database issue? Is it a tooling issue? Is it a developer issue? All of the above? How do you sort through this? Yeah, I mean, I would say it's about three parts to that. And first of all, if you're really going to know your customer, you need to figure out how can you connect the data. So every time you have an engagement across any one of those channels, you're getting data and you're not going to want to have to ask your customer the same question every time it goes through a different channel. So being able to connect the data is number one. The second thing is having an automated, automation or orchestration platform that helps you connect your engagement across all of them. And then the last thing I would say is something that lets you test, lets you target, lets you continually improve the customer experience. And I think those three things added to what you already have is what's really going to make the difference for a marketer. When I hear orchestration, automation, I think of DevOps, I think of cloud. So DevOps is now coming to marketing, but they're not full stack developers. But also customers don't want the agency approach. It's like, hey, I build a microsite, it takes a long time to provision it. They want instant, instant ability to put something out into a channel, a piece of content marketing. Content marketing is now the bait, if you will, to engage with customers. From retail to B2B, to consumer. What are you guys seeing as the number one driver for that? And what is holding customers back from the key channels of operationalizing this new marketing cloud concept? Well, content marketing, for me, the biggest thing is now that marketers know they can't just engage through one channel, right? They can't just talk to their customers through mobile or social or through email. So they've got to create great content across all of them. So if you start multiplying the stories that you want to tell across all those different channels, the content issue becomes overwhelming. But there are tools to help them with that as well. How to leverage content that they're already making in different places in their company. They can tag what's working, what's not working. So I think that's generally the thing with the content marketing. And I think on the overall what's holding them back, it really is, and I hate to say this, but we talked to thousands of customers a year it's themselves, they're not organized to operationalize, right? They've got a VP of community and a VP of media, and a VP of ads, and a VP of search, and a VP of video, and a VP of TV, and a VP of direct mail, and a VP of email, and a VP of loyalty, and a VP of offline, and a VP of online. They have got scattered databases, scattered tools and media, they've got scattered KPIs, scattered databases. It's a business process, it's a change management, it's a governance management. They've got to decide to organize all of that around the customer instead of the 17 different silos. And those run deep, right? This is my data, this is my mobile channel. You guys can do what you want to, with social or video or display or email, I only own mobile, right? We've got to help the customers actually break out of the organizational and the governance silos, then the operationalization will happen, and the good news is, is now the data and the tech have come together, now the customers are just kind of get their business processes, the organization, and their own organizational hybrids out of the way to capitalize on what the tech vendors, ourselves included, have actually put together. That's an amazing point, there's two things I hear there, if you get this right, it's the data, open it up, don't hoard it. That's right. And that could be a whole show, we could do data hoarders, I don't know all those customers, storage wars and data hoarders, we're going to go to cable soon. So open up the data, and also the operational discipline to actually take old processes and kind of re-craft them, re-wire them together, not throw them away, because there's some real good critical infrastructure out there in marketing, emails and other things. Just don't do them in 17 silos and treat the customer in those silos because the customer wants to be treated one way, consistently across all the channels across the whole life cycle. They don't want to be treated one way in acquisition in another way in loyalty, one way in mobile, one way in video, in one way in email, right? So they don't want that experience. So we used to talk about the pipe dream of 360 degree review with the customer, you know, he smoked the piece, but yeah, someday we'll get there, it's kind of like John Fowler with encryption on the chip, you know, we're joking, it's been done before, this has kind of been done before, but never in a way now that we're seeing, and that's really the goal is to get that 360 degree view and the personas of the users and the consumers, because now with big data, it's the first time in the history of marketing in the world, you can actually measure everything. So that notion of 50% of my spend is wasted, I just don't know which 50%, the old ad tagline is now gone, that's dead, you can actually measure it. So that's kind of a mind blowing concept for marketers, is it that they don't know what to do is that the operational, how do you go in there and say, help me, what do I do? What do you say? Well, I mean with digital, the thing about that too is all that has to happen in real time, right? Customer expectation now, they really think that you should know them every single minute, so it's not only about delivering a great experience, but delivering to the expectations of customers, and so being able to collect that data and be able to react on it based on what you know about them, how they're acting at the time is really critical. So the internet of things is a hot topic, and people are thinking, so with mobile, we're seeing a huge focus on this notion of a new data source is out on the edge of the network, and that's the actual user. The retail, they're seeing great explosion opportunities from Apple Pay to just wearables. How is that factoring, is that too far out for the customer? Are they just trying to make sense of it today? I think that's right, and that's the other, when all we had to worry about was the call center, the point of sale, maybe the catalog, right? 360 degrees was pretty easy. Then we got web, and then we got email, a whole bunch of digital identified data sources, and now you've got, boy, you've got cookies, you've got multiple browsers and multiple social handles, and now you've got all of this anonymous data, and the customer is interacting with us in 17 or 18 different ways, half of them identified, half of them anonymous. We coined identity, we even have productized it, right? You've read about our identity graph, and it comes with, nope, if you don't know that those cookies are Andrea, and that search activity is Andrea, and that video activity is Andrea, and that credit card spend, and that offline store traffic, and that point of sale, it starts with one identity, and if you don't have that identity, you don't have a 360 degree, and now, as people are catching up to all the digital channels, we're going to layer on wearables, and IoT, and connected devices, there's going to be an arms race, right? But the commitment to have centralized customer data in one place, identity in one place, married with the activation applications that you can use that data to go drive customer experience, that's the shift that the customer has to make, and then they can play catch up with all the data sources as they explore. It's great to have you guys on the cube, I was actually looking forward to this interview because we are data geeks at Silicon Angle, we're very data driven, we have built our own software, our own listening engines, our own platforms, and I'm really impressed with the portfolio, you guys are massive, just read a few here, marketing to business, full portfolio, marketing to consumers, content marketing, social marketing, data management platform, all that already done, and then now we're here in cloud, right? So you guys have been on the front end of the Oracle Cloud movement, certainly on the marketing side. So two questions, one, congratulations. First question is, how has the new company-wide transformation affected you guys? Certainly, probably a little bit more of a spring in your step limit, probably more support from the mothership, and two, the M&A activity has been really phenomenal. You guys have done a good job with acquisition. So how has the company-wide commitment to cloud helped you guys, and what's going on with the M&A organic and inorganic growth? You want to take the first one? I'll take the second one. Sure, I mean, yeah, absolutely. The Oracle focus on the cloud has just put wind in our sails, and I think it really also demonstrates to our customers that we're serious about this space. So, you know, we've really, all of the acquisitions have come together, and there's a lot of benefit of being a part of Oracle, certainly the global scale, definitely the global relationships we have with customers, and now with Oracle really getting behind the cloud, it's just, it's making us feel like that we're in the right place, for sure. You made some good acquisitions, growth strategy clearly organic, and inorganic. That's right. Talk about that. Yeah, so it has been a great, the ability to actually go execute on this M&A strategy has been fantastic as it's gone from Oracle and I've been being in the business in 2013 to quite frankly, leading the category in 2015. So it took a lot of M&A, I think a couple of things. Obviously we didn't go by the number four or five player, right? We buy the absolute leader in each category we buy, although that's expensive, it's been very, very critical. But they got pipeline, they have, you can see the creative revenue. That's right, and it's not just the best platform, it's the best culture, right? The best people, the best attitude, the best, I'm a customer-centric organization because these leading cloud companies have had to be that, right? Which is built, because culture and attitude is every bit as much as the tech platform. I think that's number two. People don't give that as much credit as it deserves because it's the people too, and the culture is not just the tech. And then third is the wake up call that if all we do is go on this great buying spree, but we do not become as world-class at integration, real integration, not PowerPoint demo integration, but real integration that delivers, right, time, speed, efficiency, and power to our customer, then we'll just be guilty of being the same old tech, you know, tech buyer who buys them all and sits on the shelf. Real integration is going to be as important as the caliber of the assets that we've acquired, and we've made the commitment to lead the market, this market, marketing, ad tech, customer data, in integration by space, not just by the best asset, so when you put them together. So integration in terms of products, people, and also technology and data, right? Because if we put a data management platform, social, mobile, married with orchestration, married with analytics, all of a sudden what we can hand our customer is one plus one plus one equals 10, you know, not three, and that's a very meaningful difference to a CMO who's trying to simplify and bite all of these challenges. They don't want to have to do the integration for us. They need us to do it for them, so they can actually make their lives easier and their business more effective. Yeah, and actually, I mean, I think the way that we've been able to innovate is, first of all, bring new capabilities to the products that we've acquired. We've been able to innovate and stitching them together to create, you know, new, you know, better together stories, and then there's a lot that Oracle has done for the marketer historically that we can also bring into the fold. So there's really three ways that we're able to innovate in the cloud, in the marketing cloud that's giving us a leg up on our competition. It's so funny, like I said, we have our own stuff. We're very gate-adjusted, so we're very much obviously into the content business, so, you know, we've devoid a lot of content out there. So I have to ask you a question, kind of philosophical one, get your thoughts on is that the funnel is now critical infrastructure. I've seen startups come and go, we're like, oh, we're going to do this in the funnel, but it's really hard to replace a pre-existing now critical infrastructure. You can't just come in and say, hey, I'm going to whip out this awesome system for tracking cookies, coded URLs, affiliate and or other things goes on and on. But instead, with social, this new form of engagement, the top of the funnel is seeing a horizontally scalable interaction and engagement dataset that is kind of independent of the funnel. You guys are doing anything in that area because that's something that we're seeing with our content, our content marketing and content, things that we do is that we don't have to drive you into the funnel so fast. They can opt in socially into the funnel. How do you guys talk to that story? We do see that, right? And we've made between social listening, social engagement service publishing, we've made three material social acquisitions to capitalize on exactly what you just articulated. And we believe in all of that. I will say this though, and Andrea, feel free to correct me if you disagree with what I'm about to say, but as powerful as it is, it is when you marry that social signal with the other things, right? So for instance, I tweeted, hey, my lease is just about up. If I catch a social signal and that I marry it with, well, that person's also configuring a leaf on Nissan and a Volt on Chevy and he went to Kelly Blue Book or Edmunds three times this week. And I look at the offline data and I know from Paul, he's got a priest in the garage and sure enough, the lease ends up, when you take social and contextualize it with all of the data sources, you get back to use your vernacular that 360 degree and the real time nature of that social really puts an injection into that more holistic platform but we don't think that using social in and of itself makes all the sense in the world. It ought to be an important one but it ought to be one of the data feeds that you put in that 360 view. There's no use to exclusive data feed in this new world. That's right. And not only that, so in addition to working with Kevin on the marketing cloud, I have a marketing team that's going through a similar transformation that a lot of our customers are going through. And one of the things that we instigated two years ago is we made social as a part of every single one of our cross-channel campaigns. So we were hearing a lot from our customers, they were having a hard time quantifying the value but as soon as we made that a part of the way we engage with our customers, a third of our new contacts were coming across a number of our campaigns were coming from social. So social was as much of a contributing to revenue as integrated marketing, integrated cloud, integrated stack, DevOps, it's all kind of coming together. Sometimes it's just a forcing question of saying we're going to do this every single time and then learn from that and grow. And now we're seeing social contribute more and more to bringing into demand in ways that we never thought we could have before. We're a big B2B marketer, right? That's right. I think it's our number three lead source now, right? Yeah. Number three pipeline source and an extremely large marketing organization. So social is for real. You guys hit a really good point because it's not a mutually exclusive situation. Integrated stack, Amazon like, stand something up quick, that's a DevOps ethos, open data because data works together. You get that signal extraction, machine learning, other technologies, interesting stuff. But social is not a silo. It's not a silver bullet. Hey, I'm going to get my attention, look at Buzz, marketing, PR department. It's a trust relationship. So I got a call just this week from a big times TMO for a big multinational. John, John, I get these phone calls all the time, you know? We are there doing this, all this Twitter stuff and all that social and I'm really nervous. I'm like, what are they doing? I'm like, that's bad. We're creating a tension with no payload behind it. So what I said to them was I said, this is a risk for you and here's what I said. If there's no trust relationship on the conversion of the attention, you will lose that customer. Meaning it's not at the streak or running down the street, which everyone will look at. It's got to be an authoritative conversion. That's your point about integration. So I want you to explain, how does that work with software? Because that sounds so easy. Oh, win the trust of the consumer. But how do you win that interaction and get them into an engagement where you can deliver that content? So I think our entire strategy and premise that we put to work with some of the best brands, both B2B brands and B2C brands in the world now. So we're starting to think it's working and we know what we're talking about because it's driving huge results for our customers is get all the data in one place and the identity, right? Then you know everything she's doing. You're not relying on the old school, right? Number one, number two, if all you do is put that over here in a silo in some data container, whether it's a DMP or a data warehouse, if it's not living here in real time in the cloud in the orchestration layer that says, oh, well, here's what you ought to do with that. So if you saw, heard, and seen this, I'm not gonna wait for two weeks until we spit the next campaign out in the next campaign calendar, right? If she's saying this, this and this, I better know that in real time and I better have an orchestration engine that says, well, if she does that, then talk to her in this way in this channel and that better be actually natively integrated in the end mile delivery in all these digital execution channels, be they push, be they social, be they web, be they email, be they mobile application. When you take the data and you seamlessly make it integrated that way so that if I hear signal, I can act on it in real time and because I've paid attention, I know which channels to give it to her in rather than waste the impressions and direct mail and email when she only responds to mobile and social or vice versa. By putting, it's pretty basic. You put those things together, then you've got something that is really powerful. And Andrea, it's the best of both worlds because the biggest successes in digital has been using contextual and behavioral data in the right ways. That seems to be the success for them. Do you agree? Oh, absolutely. I mean, understand what we call our customer's digital body language is core to our customers being successful. And then the one thing I just wanted to add what Kevin said is, again, that data is a foundation for really knowing your customer and then no matter what channel you're in, it really is about great, useful content and being able to deliver that at the right time in a way that is- At the right place, at the right time, to the right person. In real time to- That's right. Asynchronously they want it to be. That's right. That's right. And really now with the tools that we're putting together, that sort of engagement is really something that marketers I think always wanted to do and now they're able to do it. It's early days too. You guys have a right, I love your strategy. I think you guys have a great strategy on this because it is a cloud kind of ethos. Move fast, stand up stuff quick. Shouldn't take three weeks to load out a program. You got to get into the funnel which is critical infrastructure. Still have to harvest that plumbing. Which is the database and all the connectors and all the things that go on. At the same time provide a great user experience. That's right. That to me is fundamental. You guys are really on the right track. It's not about campaigns and transactions only. Those will come right if you're doing the right customer experience, right? Consistently campaign results will come as a result of it. Well we're psyched that you're helping us join the conversation here on theCUBE. Of course we're tracking all the conversation because we like to know what people are talking about so we can share some content to those crowd spots out there. Final to wrap up the interview. I want to give you guys a chance to talk about what's happening here at Oracle Open. We're all for you guys. Big news, announcements, activities. Yeah, so we have a couple of announcements. First of all we have a bunch of customers presenting on our behalf here which we're very excited about. And I think that's very important because marketers and IT are starting to have more conversations and we're seeing a lot of those conversations take shape here. So it's been really fun to see that. But yeah, we have a few announcement. One of the interesting things with customer experience and what we haven't talked about is marketers' role not only in generating new business but maintaining loyalty. And one of the things that we're announcing here is a new integration with the service cloud where being able to know what your customer service status is is core to being able to communicate with them. Also very excited that Maximizer is here with us. It's our latest acquisition and they are helping our customers do better testing, targeting, optimizing customer experience across device. So it's been really fun to see them engaging with customers and tell their stories. Any platform, any device, it's all about the data. It's all about the data. I think what's most exciting, a joke. Two Oracle open worlds ago, there was 10 marketers here. 10 IT people that cared about marketing, right? Now there's a couple thousand marketers and there's 25,000 IT professionals whose number one priority is to figure out how to support this customer experience and this digital transformation initiative is going on inside. There's already absolutely no big data. No question about it. That's exactly right. And this is no longer a little point solution game. This has gone up the way HCM, the way CRM, the way ERP. Now marketing has gone enterprise, mission critical platform. So the CIO is every bit is involved in this as the CMO is it, there's no more shadow IT, right? So I think that's the other cool thing too is one, we've got thousands of marketers here instead of dozens. And two, we've got dozens of thousands of IT guys who kind of are looking at this as their number one priority on how to actually drive revenue inside the business as chief innovation officers, not just chief information officers. I think that's the most exciting thing is how relevant, how fast this has become in a big relatively historical tech show like this, right? Now it's a line of business shows. It's not just an IT show. And we could do a whole other hour on data ROI. I mean, we haven't even gone through the ROI question yet. You gotta have the data. That's right. And you gotta tell the stories, you gotta tell the marketing. Guys, thanks so much for sharing the information. And the insights here on theCUBE, internet of things, people have things too. That's the marketing cloud, right? So we are at the marketing cloud of Oracle. Obviously the cloud is a big focus through the doing it for years. Great successful portfolio. Congratulations. It's theCUBE extracting the signal from the noise here at Oracle Open World with the marketing cloud team leadership. We'll be right back with more after this short break.