 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas, the Mendeley Bay. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE's flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLEwikiBond.com. And our next guest is Steve Krause, Group Vice President of Product Management for Oracle Marketing Cloud. Great to see you again, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, John. So a lot of great announcements today. I want to just jump into it. First of all, you've got a great job. You've got the product side. So, you know, you've been busy this year. So congratulations. Some announcements I want to get your reaction to that we saw today. The adaptive intelligence, love that. I love how it speaks to the data in motion, real-time needs of applications. And also- 150 milliseconds moonshot. We got that on theCUBE, that's on the record. It's going to be good. It's going to be good. And also the chatbot thing, I'm a big fan of chatbots as an illustration of what's coming, not so much in chatbots by themselves, but it does speak to that new user interactions, new interfaces, new ways to notify and inform as part of that experience. This is some heavy tech. So I want, the first question is, AI. Everyone seems to be washing their stuff. Oh, we got AI. Yeah, yeah. Well that's just predictive analytics that's been done before. But augmented intelligence or artificial intelligence that neural networks have been around for a while, what are you guys doing specifically on the product side? Because this is super exciting announcement. Yeah. To make adaptive intelligence work, what's the key tech? Yeah, well there's a couple things. In fact, I think often when people talk about AI, they want to go immediately to the algorithms and think that somehow that is the only secret sauce. And the reality is, like a lot of things in the world in computing, you put bad data into one of these things and you get bad results out. You put good data, you get good results, and you put better data. That's when things start getting really interesting. And so one of the neat things about the marketing version of adaptive intelligence, it's called adaptive intelligent offers, is that it has the ability to not just take the data that the marketer has, but it can reach into something called the Oracle Data Cloud and get additional data to drive better signal into the AI algorithms to make them run better. So we're bringing a data advantage to the table. And then probably as you've heard from the AI apps people, there's already a heritage at Oracle for building these real-time decisioning systems. And so you've got these algorithms that are real-time, they can adapt every click, update themselves, make the models go better. If you've tracked data mining for a long time, data mining contests, honestly the winner in second place is usually a very small margin. We think really that data piece is going to be the thing that is the biggest differentiator because there's a lot of smart people with really great adaptive algorithms. So we're bringing both to the table. Yeah, data or algorithms, there's always been the chicken and the egg syndrome. Is it algorithms or the data? Data or algorithms? And a lot of people are voting in the crowd that conversation that we're involved in, data trumps algorithms. I would vote that way as well. I think there's far greater variance in what you can do with data if you collect it in a smart way. And in the case of Oracle, we've assembled this massive data cloud. It's not something someone else can casually do. The reality is with a lot of the algorithms, Google's open sourcing a lot of TensorFlow. And so we'll see. I mean, it's not like we are chumps with the algorithms. We take that stuff very seriously, but the data itself just makes everything look better. But the right tool for the right job is the same premise you articulate for algorithms. Pick your tool, pick your algorithm. But if you don't have the data, you're at so well anyway. Well, as you mentioned, John, the algorithms have been around a long time. What's new is that we now have so many more data sources. So we have data for the first time. And massive compute. And now we have massive compute that can be set up easily, so we can actually do something with it. I want to point out, and I want to test you on this, we had Jack Berkowitz on earlier, which is the source of the 150 millisecond. Jack noted that Oracle aspires to be able to have the right answer anywhere in the world inside of 150 milliseconds. That is, which is an amazing, amazing vision. And for most people who think of the cloud, they think of data flying all over the place. Yeah. For you guys, Jack said something very interesting, and I want to, is a proof point. Jack said, yeah, but sometimes you don't have to move the data. Yes. And one of the advantages that you guys have, I think, and this is the one I want to test you on, is that by having this relatively complete installed set of capabilities, you have that primary person data. That is true. That first person data. And there is an advantage to not having to move it. Could you just articulate that a little bit? What does that, what kind of- Is that true? First of all, is it true? Yeah. And what kind of possibilities does that open up for Oracle? Yeah. For Oracle customers, if it is true. Well, yeah, I think you are onto something. Oracle obviously has the long heritage of having many enterprises and government's data in Oracle systems already in the first place. And those investments have been made. And so when you start talking about, let's add to that. Let's add applications like adaptive intelligent offers. Well, instead of saying we have to do these massive data transfers, it may well be the case at this point that that data is resident in an Oracle data system, data center in the first place. And of course, Oracle owns its own data centers. These are all worldwide. So there's a bunch of advantages to the Oracle scale here. And one of them is this idea, we don't have to move the mountain, right? The mountain is already in this Oracle database and we can go and put these services next to it that allow an ease of integration. And John, we were talking about this before we started here. It matters to make this stuff work fast when it's a year-long project to see if maybe it's going to fly. That's no longer a reasonable thing. And so agility matters, having the data where you already need it is great. Well, and also the trend is system of record database and mountains of corpus of stuff that you can tap into, which you're pointing out. But also I believe that the winner of all this will use a term that's used in the cloud industry, standing up apps. And I think one of the things that's very clear to me if you look at the SaaS marketplace and I think Mark Hurd said this, there is no PaaS, it's a SaaS, it's an infrastructure, so you've kind of seen the separation. You have to have stuff done in weeks, apps, I mean literally not months, weeks. And I would argue that minutes become it. So with that as a backdrop, how do you look at microservices? Because now if you look at, I don't have to move the data, Simon might want to compose something and send it somewhere else and move an app to the edge of the network or have a retail app or do something in email. So now I can compose an app from data here and then move it. So that brings up orchestration, microservices and some of these cloud native concepts. How do you guys deal with that? Yeah, well let me give you the marketing part of this in terms of the Oracle marketing cloud because there's so many parts of Oracle they have their own versions. For us, one of the big things we want is to have this concept called orchestration that says if I'm a marketer, I should be able to reach my customer wherever he or she welcomes my messaging and these days it no longer is just email. These are people who are getting mobile messaging, they're potentially interacting with things like chatbots. It's become very fragmented and so what Oracle wants to do is provide these orchestration systems that allow apps to plug in some that we build but others that third parties build so that as this complexity increases and there's more ways you can communicate, we can keep up with this in an agile way either ourselves or with others who do this really well. So that's one of the theories. So for it's the marketing cloud plus it's the broader Oracle Suite. Beautiful, yes. It's the Oracle Cloud Suite which includes Oracle CX. It also includes something that we call the Oracle Marketing App Cloud which is this third party ecosystem. Because we're Oracle, we have a lot of customers, we've got hundreds of companies that say yeah, I would love my stuff to get in the hands of Oracle's customer base. The way I'm going to do it is I'm going to make a turnkey integration so that when they buy for me they can just request turn it on for Oracle and it will, again, as you said, don't make it weeks, make it minutes. It's minutes when the integration is already done. So software business, Larry Ellison, obviously the founder of Oracle, still around one of the legends in the industry. Larry, if you're watching, you know, you're still hanging around, taking names and kicking butt. Started out as shrinkwrap software, then you download on the internet, then you have SaaS, then you have SaaS Plus coming on which is smarter apps, smarter customer experience. So it begs the question on this next journey for customers. It's going to be really cloud all the way, right? So you're going to have to have this cloud component. You guys have a strategy there. Isn't Oracle moving away from, and a smarter CX is data, by the way. So Oracle's no longer a software company. You're a data company. Data is eating the world. All right, no, software is eating the world, which Mark Andreessen wrote, now data is eating software. So how do you view that? Because some people say, well, software is never going to go away, but data is becoming much more of a front burner issue, vis-a-vis, just like software was in software development. Sure, well, I think some of this is just semantics as where does software leave off and data begin? But a great example is the thing you talked about earlier, adaptive intelligence, where part of the power of this, what makes it different from what you can get elsewhere is that it comes with data included that is different data than is available from anyone else. And so in fact, Oracle, when it made the big investment in the data cloud, people, I think, thought, what are you doing? You're just setting up a vending machine for data? Is that what Oracle's going to be about? And the answer there is no. I mean, there is a good data business, but where it gets profound is when that strategic asset, all that data, all of a sudden enables new products like adaptive intelligent offers to be fundamentally different from anything that came before. It's an enabling technology. It can be, absolutely. Data is enabling. It brings to life apps and then offers new apps, opportunities. Yes, and in marketing, data very much is the fuel for the marketing engine. So you get richer fuel, you will get richer results. All right, so we're getting down the weeds here. So bottom line, let's up level it up for the person that's watching and saying, hey, okay, I got the message. Data is super important. Bottom line, what's happening this week here at Modern CX that's important for the person that has the scratcher head that isn't inside the ropes in the industry? What's going on for their world? What should they be thinking about? How should they be planning their life moving forward in this new modern era of marketing? Yeah, so I think the big things announced this week definitely involve things like a new level of being able to do recommendations of offers and products using the Oracle Data Cloud. It involves conversational user interfaces such as the new chat box platform. And in the case of the marketing cloud, we've got a series of products that have come out that allow a greater degree of self-service for both marketers as well as their stakeholders like salespeople. So how does a salesperson get the output of a marketing automation system? Salespeople aren't necessarily known for assiduously going and looking for marketing assets. We've got some new things around, for example, content portals. We've got some new things around features that let people be more autonomous in getting their own work done rather than needing to go to some other system somewhere. Awesome. And the customer we had on this morning from Royal Philips really was the head of CRM. So customer relationship management's not a new concept. Obviously, you guys have a big chunk of business there on the software side of it. But customer relationship management, that is marketing cloud now. Customer experiences. So you start to see that really go to the next level. What's the big takeaway for the person at home watching in their business? As they're going on their journeys, how should they be thinking about the customer relationship? Well, that's a big question. I think for a CRM-oriented person who maybe started out in something like database marketing where you had a list and then you somehow tried to learn about people on the list, that world has gotten a lot bigger now where it used to be, you only learned about someone once they became your customer. These days, through various advertising technologies, you can learn about people you don't yet know, but you know of their existence. And you can start creating that relationship, hoping to draw them in maybe with ads to the point where they do self-identify. And so there's this whole front end to CRM that is showing up in ad tech with things like DMPs, data management platforms, that solve the same problem, but do it in these whole other realms. And new channels. Yeah. I think it's an awesome position. I love that adaptive intelligence apps and apps being stood up on a platform, you guys have it. Yes. Where's the next level? Take us through, you run the product roadmap, share with the folks, what's on the roadmap, what should they be expecting more from Oracle? Where are you going to be doubling down? Where's the work you're filling in the white spaces and what should they expect over the next year? Sure. Well, at least in my keynote this morning, which again, at folks done marketing, we had four themes. One was intelligence. We already talked about that one quite a bit. Another is mobile. And that's not just mobile-like chatbots, but it's actually mobilizing the experience of our customers' customers for the marketing. So example of this, we have a product called Eloqua in which lots of emails can be sent. They have a new email designer that inherently builds responsibly designed emails. So those are the ones that you open up in your phone. They look good. You open on the desktop. They look good. That's how it all should work. Unfortunately, it's not for a lot of folks today. So just having that be part of the tooling, big deal. So that's the mobile part. We talked a little about self-service. That's theme number three. And the fourth theme is actually a bit of a sleeper. It's about taking another pass through some of the core technologies we already have that people use the most and being able to find Maximizer, a test and targeting and personalization tool used by a lot of our customers. The fundamental thing you do inside Maximizer is you live in a campaign designer and it allows you to adjust various parts of a webpage for testing, targeting, and personalization. We've got an entirely new way to do that that's based on an analysis of what do people do when they use this and how can we shave off some number of clicks per session? How can we make it less error prone when people are deciding what to do? How can we make it more performant? You talked about 150 milliseconds. How about if we just eliminate the save button altogether so that anything you do automatically saves in the background? You don't have to reload anything. That kind of stuff comes from watching people use the product and realizing, wow, they're in there all day long. If we can just make all of those things a little better over a course of a year, that's huge. So basically looking at the core jewels in the platform, making it simpler, reducing the steps to do things. Exactly. Just being more efficient in some of the proven tools. Exactly, and in the speech this morning, we said, hey, look, we don't talk about this enough. That's not asleep, but that's good. The tendency is to come out here and we all want to talk about everything that's new, like AI and the people who are our actual customers. They're seeing pearls raining from the sky when all of a sudden something that took them 12 minutes to do at a time now takes eight and they do that 2,000 times a year. I always say it's a great business model by making things simpler, reducing the time it takes to do things and steps and making things intuitive and easy to use, which sounds like you're doing. But let's talk about the glamor side of it because I think AI and Chatbot speaks to the future. What other glam do you see happening out there right now? Obviously AI is hot right now. Yeah, I think the other glam at this point is a little more speculative, at least as it applies to my area with marketing, like augmented reality, virtual reality and so on. There's also internet of things. Certainly that world is changing. There are more devices of various types that can talk to the network. We've got a customer, you may be familiar with it, it's a sleep number bed company, the ones that have the bed where you can pick your number. That's actually a connected device and so there's some interesting things that can be done there with careful discretion about what data you're collecting. But when we start thinking about, incidentally, so many things that in the past used to be inert objects now are generating data, that can feed into various applications, whether it's marketing or other areas. And more data's coming in, it's just not stopping. And it's great for Oracle because if Oracle's good at anything, it's good at dealing with very large-scale data. That's been the business for a long time and the trend won't change. There will continue to be larger and larger-scale data. Steve, final point. What's the theme of the show this year, besides the messaging that you have? What are you seeing that's happening here that's evolving? What's the top story here? Well, you know, we did a customer advisory board meeting here for the marketing cloud and I think if I were to ask the customers what their top story is, I think their top story is they themselves want to continue becoming more customer-centric. Everybody talks about it like, well, of course. We should be that way, but so many companies grew up doing things like focusing on the thing we're selling. They're being offer-centric and so organizationally changing, using the technologies like what we have so they can create the kinds of experiences, we call them the connected customer experience that they themselves want to have. It's a big challenge and so their missions are to say transform myself to be from the tech down to the organizational incentives truly customer-centric. Steve Kraus, Group Vice President of Product Management Oracle Marketing Cloud. Great to see you. Thanks for sharing the insight and the real roadmap and all the exciting stuff happening here and you're keen out this morning. Congratulations. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burst. More live coverage coming up here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas with theCUBE after this short break.