 Okay, we're back. John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv, Inside Oracle Open World, 2011, San Francisco, California. You just saw the clip that I made with my social cam of Billy Bean, signing books. Billy Bean, the famous general manager of the Oakland A's, who perfected what has now become known as rotisserie or big data-driven or data-driven competitive advantage by using data to make the Oakland A's a competitive franchise from the seller to competitive. Obviously, there's movie, Brad Pitt out in the theaters, Great Flick, Great Book, Michael Lewis wrote that book, and it's really data, a great example of big data. I'm here with Dave Vellante, no stranger to big data. He's an expert in big data, runs an analyst for wikibon.org. Dave, Billy Bean, probably the best marketing angle of the Oracle Open World by NetApp. Brilliant, clever, and brilliant. Timing with the movie, great trend connect, as we say, by NetApp. And my big thing about it is, one, I'm a big sports fan, that Billy Bean, to me, highlights the future of our industry in that inside every company, no matter what size or what kind of company, there's a Billy Bean in there waiting to be unleashed. So, to me, very competitive in marketing, Billy Bean signing books, Moneyball, great marketing angle by NetApp, and really shows the world, Dave, what NetApp, how they're thinking about it. I think it's clever, and it is. I mean, you and I are talking about analytics all week, and what do you think about that? I agree, first of all, it was the best marketing I've seen in Open World so far, and despite Oracle's ex-Mega jam down your throat, the second thing, John, great job going over there with Socialcam, you got Billy Bean, you made some commentary, and I think you also got some other guests, didn't you? Yeah, so I saw the CEO, Tom George, there, and I really wanted to talk to him because I wanted to find out if this was really just a gimmick, a parlor trick, or really part of the philosophy of NetApp. So, let's hear what Tom Georgian said. He's the CEO of NetApp. When I asked him about why Billy Bean was in the booth, I'll see a brilliant move. Here's my conversation with Tom Georgian, the CEO of NetApp, a CUBE alumni who's been in the CUBE before. So, can we go to that clip? Billy Bean, Moneyball, Brad Pitt. There he is, we have sound on that. Billy Bean, doesn't he epitomize big data? I mean, making his company competitive, and isn't there a Billy Bean in every company out there? Well, I think that's entirely the rationale that we're looking for here. I think that's the theme, is that he basically, the story of his book is how we use data, and use data in a unique way to actually identify who's going to succeed and who wasn't, delaying them to build a team without spending as much money as the Yankees or the big name teams. So, for him, the idea of utilizing data to create competitive advantage is what we're trying to accomplish with big data. And he was just a baseball guy who knew his stuff, but he wasn't a real geek stat guy, but he used big data techniques, and that's really the power of analytics. Isn't it these days? Absolutely, I think knowing more about your business, whether it be about your players or about the opposition, and using that to your advantage is how he created Advantage for the A's that built a very, very successful franchise. You guys have been great company, great successful Silicon Valley success story, now recently going into Hadoop, looking at new ways of doing this unstructured data. That's the future of analytics. Congratulations, and great marketing, getting money ball in there. It's good to see long line around the corner. People are really excited by that. Congratulations. That's great. Hopefully they buy something. Okay, and if you got time, come by the Cube or around the corner if you want to come by any time. Love to have you, but great to catch up with you. Thanks. No, no, no. I kind of love Georgians. So, you know, you saw the smile on his face. Obviously, he's really happy with money ball guy in this booth, Billy Bean, big data example. And the thing about that is that he talked about competitive advantage, and like I said, like I said, Dave, and I guess I coined the term because I don't think anyone else said it, but there's a Billy Bean in every company. And that's the power of analytics. And specifically, if you look at NetApp, the reason why I think this is a brilliant booth in my NetApp is they're getting their butt handed to them in the marketplace when it has come to the new emerging stuff like Hadoop. I've talked with Val at Storage Networking World. They recognize it. They've lost some accounts and some sales to the Hadoop movement, and now have pivoted and expanded their product portfolio to actually go in aggressively in the instruction market. They recognize that the CEO clearly says that they are going in that direction. And big data is about using data so anyone can change the face of their company in real time. An analyst, it doesn't have to be a geek or a programmer or a DBA. Quite frankly, I think the DBA job title will go away. The analyst role becomes more critical. Well, I think, as we've talked about many times, that data is the new source of competitive advantage, certainly in the technology business, but I think in all businesses, as we first heard on theCUBE from Abhi Mehta when he was at B of A, it's game changing. Talked about how they used to do sampling where many companies did this. Most of all companies did this. They would take samples of statistics and analyze them. And Abhi talked about taking the entire data set and running that analysis and finding things that they never find before in near real time, taking it from six weeks down to six minutes. So the Billy Bean example is fabulous especially for theCUBE because we love sports analogies. The Oakland A's have been an extremely competitive team for a number of years. They've competed with teams like the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees with a payroll that's one-tenth. And they've done it with analytics, crunching all kinds of historical data and finding the value. They've really popularized things like on base percentage and all these arcane statistics that people used to never pay attention to or didn't even know about. And the thing too that he was looked at and the movie plays this up more dramatically than the book, he was looked at as kind of a wildcard. Like what the hell is he thinking to do using this data? Why would he care about someone who draws more walks? Or just on base percentage, slugging percentage, pitching, all this stuff, all the stats which we now know we live in a fantasy, baseball, fantasy football, all these rotisserie, fun online sports are going on. This is the data world. And the point is companies today might look at someone saying, hey, what are you thinking? Why are you going this route? And that's what analytics does. And we are seeing Hadoop and analytics and obviously Oracles pumping up Exa Analytics which is the big story here. And that is truly going to be the game changer. SAP recognized it at Sapphire and it's just total game changer. It's really fun to watch. One of my favorite money ball stories from the book was the A's had Jason Giambi and Giambi was huge, right? I mean, very, very effective player, MVP. And what happens is they can't afford to keep them so he goes to the Yankees, of course, paying them a ton of money. And everybody said, oh, well, the A's are screwed. Now they're going to just go downhill. Well, what happened is the next year they were even more competitive and they replaced them with basically some no-name first baseman who was tremendous. Euclis. No, it wasn't Euclis. It was a guy who used to play for the Red Sox journeyman. But anyway, I'll think of it. And the A's became even more competitive and there are dozens and dozens of examples like that where by using data, they found untapped value. And like you said, every organization has a Billy Bean. Well, I think sports is a great analogy and, you know, Dave, we follow the industry here. We used a horse metaphor. Horses were on the track, the Triple Crown with Intel in our last segment around data center. Who are the main horses do you see in this marketplace? When I say marketplace, I mean the industry, not just the Oracle and the storage cloud, but like let's expand the focus to all vendors, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, HP, IBM, you name it, up and down. Who are the big horses? What are the big races that are being run? Well, I do think the probably the most significant trend that we've seen in a long time is the consumerization of IT. John, you've talked about it a lot. I've called it the Google effect. So I just don't think you can have an answer to that question without starting with the big disruptors, it's Google, it's Facebook, it's Zynga, it's those companies that are doing a lot of the things that we talked about in the high performance data segment, doing all those scale up, those new applications, those big data applications, that's where all the innovation is, that's where a lot of the action is. And fundamentally, they're driving simplicity into the traditional data center. The data center, the enterprise guys that we follow, John, are following those companies. They're way, way behind in terms of that innovation. Now, they've got this legacy install base to deal with, but companies like IBM and EMC and VMware and Microsoft and Intel and Cisco, they've got a major challenge in front of them is how do they maintain their margins? How do they move their customer base from where they are today to this new world? How do they do so and compete in this new cloud area? Well, the way they do it is they use their cashboards, they buy companies where they have white space and they're, frankly, they're smarter than their predecessors. What do I mean by that? Guys like Bill Gates and Andy Grove killed digital, Prime, Wang, DG, Apollo, these were once great companies. Arguably as great as some of the companies, Sun Microsystems, some of the companies that we're talking about today. These new leaders have seen it before and they are, look at Michael Dell, the way he's completely transformed his company. I think their legacies are going to be defined by the degree to which their companies can survive these waves of transition. So Dave, let's just kind of bring it together here. Big date is obviously one of the top stores, if not the top store here at Oracle Open World, San Francisco, California with a cube and they're shutting the streets down. I mean, just tell the folks out there the kind of scene that we're experiencing here. Starting with Sunday night, the keynote up through right now, what's it like, how massive, what's the vibe, and what's the key things being discussed? Well, you come into Oracle Open World and it's somewhat suffocating, I have to say. Having been here, this is not my second year in a row, but having been here for other events like VMworld, which is very open and it's big and it's exciting, but Oracle Open World is huge. Howard Street is blocked off. You try to take a cab over here, they don't let you park in front of Moscone, they send you around the corner, no, no, only buses, they're yelling at the cab drivers and you got to walk almost as far as you would have had to from the hotel. So it's a very different environment, very controlled environment and that theme carries through the entire show, I have to say. It's a culture of Oracle, theme controlled, angry, people piss off all the time. No, no, seriously. They don't mess around, we've talked a number of times. Let's talk about the content. I mean, let's talk about Oracle's core announcements, obviously speeds and feeds with their performance, exadata, their core product, that's a horse that they're riding, isn't it? I think if you're a customer of Oracle, this content resonates really well with you. Hey, I'm a DBA, I'm a control freak, because if I lose the data, I lose my job, my company gets screwed. You're a control freak or the DBA is a control freak? Well, I'm a control freak too, as you know. But I'm very much, I guess, like a DBA. I want to do the backup myself, I want to control things and I want to make sure that I'm protecting my company and protecting my area because that's ultimately what's possible. We heard from David Flynn who's competing in an environment where there's scale issues. You got Facebook, you got Apple, you got Google, these companies all buying Fusion IO and they're not under one vendor. No, and I think that's the other point that we heard, a big theme that we heard is that outside of that Oracle DBA, there's a big world of heterogeneity. I don't know any shop that I walk into that's an all X shop where X is the vendor. There might be one or two out there, but it's very rare. So you live in a sea of heterogeneity and that's, I think, frankly, Oracle's Achilles' heel. I think that the Oracle's just walking away from a large market saying, hey, we only want to sell Oracle, that's the IP we want to go after. Well, at some point, you're going to close ranks and box yourself in. I don't know what that point is, it might be a decade from now. Well, we said last year that Oracle's a utility company. They provide a lot of running water inside these companies and not necessarily is the core technology provider for a lot of these big companies who have multi-vendor environments and that seems to be more of the trend, less of the trend, but yet Oracle is promoting the buy it here. We are vertically integrating. Well, the one thing I am impressed about, impressed about a lot of things about Oracle, but they do spend money on R&D. We heard Sam Palmasano last year say, I don't worry about HP, they don't spend on R&D. I worry about Oracle and he's smart to worry about Oracle because Oracle does spend on R&D. They don't just make vapor announcements. I mean, they might pre-announce to freeze the market, but they deliver and they deliver because they spend money on R&D. Ellison loves technology. He's a geek at heart. So I'm on Yahoo News and I typed in Oracle OpenWorld in yahoo.com because Yahoo has a great search engine, mainly because we are in the index for Yahoo News. Google has not yet indexed, Mark and I work on that, so Google people better get their act together. Anyway, I typed in Oracle OpenWorld, Dave, just into yahoo to get a feel for some of the news, Silicon Angles up there leading the effort, but mainly it's about Exadata, okay? It's about the shitspa of the big data. It's about the land grab of Oracle. Do you find that consistent with the industry, the press? Consistent in terms of people recognizing that? Yes, I think that people get Oracle. I mean, it's taken them a couple of years, right? Everybody was sort of questioning the sun acquisition. What's Oracle doing? They're going to spin off sun. They're going to keep Java. You know, Ellison has made it very, very clear. They want to get out of the Commodity X86 business. They want to sell their own IP, period. They basically want to own the footprint and drive margins. They've stated, Saffricats has stated, she wants to get operating margins back to 42%. That's pre-sun acquisition margins, operating margins. If Oracle does that, and by the way, I think it will, that is a phenomenal, phenomenal accomplishment in a two to two and a half year period. Tremendous, I mean, think about that for a second. That says that they took a company that was trading at about 70 cents on the revenue dollar and transitioned that successfully to a company. They've already done, they've already succeeded in my mind, but to a company that gets four times revenue from a market value standpoint. That's driving tremendous value for your shareholders and that's frankly what Oracle's all about. Obviously, the big message here in Oracle is the hardware talk. I mean, they're all talking about hardware. I mean, the software company, Oracle, is a software company. So why the hardware focus, Dave? Well, I think it's a big opportunity for Oracle. They really never competed in the hardware market before and now they do and it's a good margin business. You know, you see companies like EMC and IBM sell a lot of hardware and make a lot of money and Oracle is really smart. Oracle said, you know what? We don't want to be in the commodity hardware business. We want to be in the high value, high margin business. How are we going to do that? We are going to integrate the hardware and software together, engineer it together, market the crap out of it and execute and keep investing and stay up with the competition and they've done that. So as we reported yesterday, Mark Hurd gave a keynote and his big conversation, because he's the one has to execute in the Larry Ellison keynote he actually pointed down on, Mark has to make the sales happen. So Mark Hurd's main point was collaborations front and center and basically they're going cloud and on-premises, very much an SAP war between Mark Hurd and Oracle and they want to have more flexibility in their offerings. That's a key focus for Oracle and then they're seeing a whole bunch of competition and they recognize that. So those are the core things we heard from Mark Hurd. Obviously they're trying to play the collaboration and analytics message on cloud and on-demand and on-premise and obviously the competition. So I think Hurd has to execute this machinery and ultimately drive sales for Oracle. Well as we've talked about here, Oracle, Ellison in particular for years talked about his competitors writing checks, not code and then he did the flip. He really flip flopped on that smartly and went out and bought, I mean Oracle was basically getting its butt kicked in applications. Buy companies like PeopleSoft. What they do, they go and buy companies like PeopleSoft. They're buying technology set in such a property. They're going to buy what they need. So that's key. So PeopleSoft and Siebel and... All right, so we're looking at the picture you're looking at right now is Mark Hurd and basically he's really the newer cloud offerings. He claims is not as strong as Oracle. So that's obviously the big thing that's a sales focus and the new cloud offerings, the cloud based offerings have older code bases than their on-demand business line. So that's one thing. This is, he's talking about the competition. And he's saying the scale of operations is really, really, really big for Oracle. That's a big advantage. Other competitors don't have that vertical specialty Oracle's got and Oracle's got the mature code base. So for them, that's a big thing. The exa branding was a big part of his conversation. Exadata, exologic, exoanalytics, exolytics, which is analytics, that's their core. They are going to propose to offer all kinds of flexibility with one code base to all their customers. That's their number one fundamental thing that Oracle wants to do. That's their value proposition. That's their shtick, one code base of across exadata, exologic and now exolytics. You know, I was in the keynote yesterday. I was not impressed with Herd's keynote. He really didn't say anything. He just sort of introduced people and maybe that was, you know, the agreed upon approach. I would have liked to have heard more from Mark Herd and Safra. But, you know, again, they're putting forth whom they put forth. We're going to hear from Larry tomorrow. It's always, I think, entertaining. Ray Wang says we're going to get more of the same exa boring marketing puke. We'll see. I'm hoping that, you know, Larry takes, even expecting Larry's going to take off the gloves and like he did last year, talk about, you know, some of the competition. Yeah, so Larry's keynote tomorrow afternoon will be really the fun one to watch. We'll be carrying that live here on SiliconANGLE.tv. So stay tuned and Mark, I think we do have some clips. Do we have clips of Michael Dell? Yeah, let's go to a two minute highlight of Michael Dell and then Dave and I will come back and wrap up day two. Day two at Oracle Open World San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm here with Dave Vellante from wikibon.org and let's take a look at Michael Dell and we'll be right back. Dell has changed a lot during the past nine years and our industry has certainly changed a lot too. Think about what's happening with mobile and cloud and there's some differences in the details and how they work and where we're at. One of the things that hasn't changed is what we care about instead of having a lot of selection software right up front. We have this philosophical change where the idea is how it happens and how we interact with it is changing pretty dramatically. The interactive installers, cloud is enabling an even big change and that is that the line between business and IT is simply disappearing. Dell is not a PC company. Dell is an end-to-end solutions company that understands that the endpoint is a huge part of the solution. Servers are part, storage are part, network is part, security services, a client are all integral parts of the solution. Wherever information is delivered, wherever data is mined, insights are derived, value is created, it happens at the nexus between human and machine. That is where computing really is, that's where the magic is. The more embedded technology becomes, the more value it delivers to our customers and I'm immensely proud of the change that Dell is driving and staying ahead of the pack around these new opportunities. Yes, technology is changing, but how we use it to create value is changing even more and Dell is absolutely right at the center of that evolution driving it forward and it's that drive that we believe is what will help you and your organizations realize your potential and that is what the new Dell is all about.