 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 Launch. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Redwood source for the pre-event commentary conversation. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Fari Ibrahimi, SVP and CIO, Avaya, welcome to theCUBE. Pleasure to be here. So big organization, a lot of dynamic stuff happening. CIO, you have a lot going on. So, talking about transformation is a big thing that you're familiar with. So, tell us about your history, what you've been up to lately. What is the holistic view of the landscape that you're in now? Avaya is a software and solutions company that when I joined as a global CIO, I was asked to transform how the business gets transacted and make it a digital company, make it secure. I realized that we have a lot of customers and the customers are serviced by a 20,000 strong partner community. So, our PRM solution, partner relationship management solution is really important to make sure that it works well and so we can deliver the solutions that customers are looking for. Of course, another thing we needed to do was to leverage our own solutions. We have cloud solutions, engagement solutions, team and customer solutions and integrate all of that into a seamless sort of experience for customers and partners. We love always interviewing the CIO, especially other big companies, because you have to use your own stuff too. They call it dog fooding, whatever the phrase is and around the parts of the country, drink your own champagne. That's the challenge, because you have to be state of the art, bleeding edge and at the same time, not skip a beat on the business when it's that big. What was some of the, take us through some color around some of the things that you had to deal with from the big strategic standpoint and then some of the tactical execution. So, let me start with security. I think one of the biggest and most important activities a CIO has to go through is to make sure everything is secure. So, that's one of our top programs. Dealing with customers, it starts with going from generating a lead to an opportunity, to a code, goes a few times with customers, you give them different codes. It turns into an order, orders needs to be fulfilled, it needs to be provisioned, it needs to be configured. Eventually, they use the service, you build a customer and you need to service them. Support them after that. That's a big continue. So, Across a huge customer base. Across a huge customer base, which includes partners by the way, each one of the steps I described may have some partners in it that we work with. So, which means you have lots of systems that are in the middle of all of that continue. So, part of my challenge was, how do you go from beginning to the end? And so, there are on-premise systems, we have some cloud solutions and we wanted to do more on the cloud because we are in the cloud, we want to be cloud native, we want to be mobile first. One of our big initiatives to be cloud first. So, leveraging all of that was the big challenge that we had to do tactically, for example, we have RPRM solution was based on a cloud solution. But, since the functionality wasn't in it when we started seven or eight years ago, when we got it, we had written millions of lines of code, it's still in the cloud, but it's millions of lines of code that are all custom needs to be maintained, there's a lot of risk, there's a lot of cost. So, we have to take the cost of course out, but you have to connect the whole continuum at the same time. So, those are some of the issues I had to deal with, not to mention the whole infrastructure that had to be upgraded and so on. So, you're specifically trying to streamline your partner management system. Correct. That's the objective at my level, how are you doing that and what role is Oracle playing? So, Oracle played multiple roles here. First of all, Oracle was willing to work with us to map out our requirements and see what we need, work with us and our system integrator emphasis, so we can do that. That was number one. Number two was that to look at the roadmap that Oracle provided to its customer for its cloud service and offer to include many of our requirements in that roadmap with a very specific delivery time. So, from a CIU perspective, that's great because I can now eliminate about 80% of the customizations we had built over the years. And then focus... 80%? 80%. And then focus on... That brings a smile to your face, right? Yes, thank God. Just think about the cost that saved the amount of resources I don't have to spend. And then I can focus on value out on the pieces and leveraging integrations between our own products, the other 20%. And we use Oracle brought in the idea of Oracle Java Cloud that I can use to build our solution and connect the dots as well as integration cloud services. So we can actually integrate with other solutions we have. As I mentioned, for example, in Managing Lease, we use Oracle Marking Cloud Lelequa. So connect that to our opportunities with our CRM, connect to Oracle Sales Cloud, and then our own internal system we built called OneSource. And then eventually with our ERP, which is SAP, and Siebel, which we use for service. All of that could be integrated as part of an overall cloud solution. And basically it acts more like a fusion middleware in the cloud. So we use fusion middleware inside on premises, use it similarly in the cloud. But it's very easy to do and it solves a big problem of integration across the different cloud. In Infosys they're doing the heavy integration lifting or what's their role? Yes, so Infosys is our integration partner and implementing some of the functions. We also have our own resources. There's a close partnership between Infosys, Oracle, and us to deliver the end-to-end solution. Okay, and then sort of, what's the outcome that you want to see? Let's think about a couple of years down the road. So the outcome is that we eliminate, as I said, 80% of the customizations. These are all custom apps in the cloud. Ah, sorry, that's the objective. That's objective. So a few years from now, when we finish, we have what I call a partner engagement management, where we engage partners, we engage our customers in an end-to-end life cycle of the customer from beginning when the lead is generated all of it through service. And that's where I expect it to be. And we expect to reduce our cost by about 30%. That's consistent. 30%. That's consistent with a lot of customers we talk to. In fact, I'll make a bold prediction that at some day, Oracle will announce an engagement cloud product. So, since they're doing in cloud on everything. I wonder if I could back to the economics. So you're going to cut overall cost by 30%, even though if I do the math on the back of an app, I may spend more on renting IT than I did if I owned IT. But you're going to cut other costs. Is that right? Does your math say the same thing? That's correct. But remember, when you have lots of apps on the cloud already and your own apps, the cost is already high. So what we are doing is to reduce the cost of multiple apps that are different on different cloud. You bring it all together in one place. It's a lower cost to begin with. And remember, the cost is not just that. It's the integration and maintenance of all the different things. Because remember, we have these mobile devices that are small screen. They don't want to go from app to app, you know, website to website to find information. You want to be in one place to give that seamless end user experience. There's a tremendous amount of integration. And that's where a lot of the cost is. So we think this could reduce the cost. Plus, I don't have to write lots of code because the integration cloud service allows me to basically draw up the integration and interaction and I can just eliminate lots of code in the middle. So you're taking cost out of your business. Oracle actually could make more money long term as an example the vendor could. So who loses? Now what happens to the employees? You take them and you re-platform them? You re-skill them? We want our employees to be focused on our customers in all reality and honesty. Instead of them trying to respond to lots of phone calls, you know, voicemails, you know, read emails. And then, you know, you've seen these emails that people use as a workflow engine. So it's like, you know, 200 lines because 10 people responding. You have to read the whole thing to figure out what's going on. With the integration, we free up their time to actually serve the customer. And the customer could be a partner who's serving our end customers, could be our own direct customers. Have you seen any examples of this so far? Or is it, I mean, as I know it's early, but is there early indications that this is happening, this productivity boost that you're applying? Yeah, I mean, what we've seen is that in areas where we've deployed our engagement solutions, customers and our own employees spend 20, 30, 40% of their time on serving the customer more rather than responding to, you know, emails and phone calls and so on. So we've got a few minutes left. I want to ask about developers. End user productivity experience, you check that box off, feel good about that. Business use, that's the insights, orders and life cycle. Developers, what's your strategy for developers? You get the transformation going on. Cloud is big, DevOps is big, not a skill set that's widely available, but more people are becoming trained. You get data science out there. There's a ton of new skill sets. How are you looking at the development piece? And how does that integrate and where's the line between non-developer and developer in your mind as CIM? Well, I think DevOps is here, it's real. I think that's what we use to be able to invest our time in terms of having developers learn the latest technologies and live in the crowd and build the integrations rather than worrying about, oh, my server is not available, and how much memory it had, and diagnosing the whole array from the bottom of the stack on a server and storage all the way up to the application. I want them to spend more of their time in the applications. So by having a standard platform like Java, they can learn that, they can work across the different platforms. So we are spending most of our time training them to be optimal. That's a good use of time to have developers working on actually the analytics on the app side where the value creation is. So that's where the value is shifting to the apps. Correct. Yeah, well that was our debate on race to zero, Jave, it's not, it's maybe a race to zero at the infrastructure level, you want to eliminate that, abstract that away. Move that up to the top. So apps are going to be the real future, it's going to be mobile enabled world, and people want to use these apps in a very simple way, few clicks, actually information delivered to them, rather than them searching for information. Great, and real time real quick, is that part of the equation right now, or near real time, or near near real time sufficient enough in your business? Yeah, I think near real time, I think would be a true statement. I wouldn't say we are completely real time yet, because we still have integrations to make as part of this implementation I was talking about, but that's our goal to get near real time and eventually real time, but that's going to take some time. Final comment for the folks out there, or CIOs, and there's a lot of folks online watching, they love, we love global CIOs on theCUBE, because it's just so much fun to talk about what's actually going on at the edge of the network, and which is your environment. What advice would you give folks out there who are trying to get around the transformation question, they're trying to get their mind around it, then their arms around it, and then ultimately have a plan and then operationalize some of the key things that'll be a lever for cost reductions and more top line revenue? My advice is that to look end to end first, put the customer, your end user at the center of your thinking, and build processes all around it. So you need something like a process cloud to be able to connect all the processes. Leverage partners that can give you standards, standard interfaces. You want partners that can help you deliver quick so you can quickly go through a DevOps model, and don't be afraid to fail. Small failures are okay, as long as you can move quickly forward. If you're going to play with a knife, don't put it near your jugular vein, that's what I always tell my kids. Now, when we make these mistakes, you know, this is the new model. Thank you so much for sharing your insight. Global CIO here on theCUBE, we'll be right back with more. Pre-gaming Oracle Larry Ellison Cloud Platform Announcement, we'll be right back after this short break.