 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE, covering, empowering the autonomous enterprise, brought to you by Oracle Consulting. Everybody, welcome back to this special digital presentation where we are tracking the transformation of Oracle Consulting. Aaron Milstone is back, he's the senior vice president of Oracle Consulting. He's joined by Jeff Davis, who's the principal at Deloitte. He's a chief commercial officer for Oracle at Deloitte. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. We see a lot of these deals. Sometimes we call them Barney deals. You know, I love you, you love me, there's a press release and that's it. But so one of the things we look for, okay, is there a teeth behind this? Now you guys have come out with what you call Elevate. What is Elevate? How did it get started? Then I have some follow up questions. Well, Elevate really got started when Aaron and I started to look at the assets that each of the firms possessed. On the Deloitte side, as Aaron suggested, we have deep capabilities and a broad range of technologies, some of them competing technologies with Oracle. At the same time, we didn't have a great deal of depth in Oracle's technical products, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous. Our bench was not as big as Aaron's. And Aaron also had access to Oracle Development at a level that we didn't have access to. So we really found ourselves in a situation where we could put those two capabilities together and we could offer something to our clients and the broad range of Oracle customers in the field. They had access to all of Deloitte's capabilities, which include great project management, great change management, real skill around the strategic aspects of cloud migration. And Aaron had tools and had resources trained and developed around the latest Oracle technology. They'd always be a step ahead of any SI. So together we felt this was really a differentiation for the marketplace. One of the things we look for is there, is there any other integration? Are you doing co-engineering? In this case, maybe not co-engineering, but are there tools that you're developing that you're taking to market that you're actually leveraging? Aaron, can you talk about that a little bit and convince us it's not just the sales play? Yeah, sure. And Jeff alluded to some of this earlier too, right? So we definitely, each had our respective tooling, right? Deloitte's invested in some tools, one of them's called Adadata that we've seen used quite a few times now. We've invested in something we call the Oracle SOAR. Our tools are, as you'd imagine, heavily Oracle focused. It's about moving Oracle technology to Oracle Cloud. Adadata and some of the tools that Deloitte's invested in are focused more comprehensively on holistically at looking at everything in a data center and everything that's across data centers and starts to develop a set of facts around this stuff. But in both cases, we actually looked at these things and we said, you know what? If you combine these together, we get a very comprehensive view of what exactly it is that we're looking at with the customer. So we can tell everything from the types of traffic we see in the network to the specific versions of stuff. We can start to identify whether there's risk associated with having things not passed or out of support or, but get a very comprehensive view that's based on facts. And so, you know, we took those tools and we've combined them together so that we can go into a customer and give a complete end to end view from both an Oracle and Deloitte perspective. And quite frankly, it doesn't matter whether Deloitte leads or whether Oracle leads, we've developed these tools together. We're going to market together. And we've even got, you know, the templates you'd expect consultancies to have, right? So when you look at business cases, we've got joint business case templates that we've created together and that we're using actively with customers and therefore then we're refining them and improving them each time we do it. But, you know, we're at a point now where our tools are combined, our templates are combined. And we even at this, you know, we were even, Jeff and I were on a call earlier yesterday actually, we even got a joint war room that's constantly engaging with different account teams and making sure that we structurally approach things in a consistent way so that we're driving business value and using the tools appropriately. So Aaron, you and I have talked about, you know, data centers and building data centers and investing. It's not just, it's just not a good use of capital today. There are so many other things that organizations can do. You guys have identified data center consolidation as I'll call it an initiative that you're seeing customers. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Is that kind of a starting point for conversations? Yeah, well, it's definitely a starting point, right? So we call it or refer to as infrastructure-led transformation and the appetite for that is certainly high. We're seeing an increased focus on, you know, what do customers need to do to take not just a workload here and there, but how do they get out of the data center businessful? So it's a foregone conclusion, right? Like you just said, it's not really a question of should we invest in another data center or should we invest in up tooling our data centers? The question has changed to let's move to cloud, how do we get there and let's move in a big way. And we're seeing that dialogue across all of our customers and quite frankly, even for Oracle, it's been a learning curve for us, right? We started with an Oracle workload conversation which is do you want to move this Oracle workload to Oracle's cloud? Do you want to move that Oracle workload to Oracle's cloud? And really what we're finding is it's a wholesale transformation of everything in a data center to one or more clouds, right? Again, often known to multi-cloud strategy and that's okay. And we're having more bigger conversations. The thing that has been really interesting is these conversations have evolved and especially as we work with our partners at Deloitte has been that, you know, we think that the combination of our cloud technology, the consulting services that Oracle consulting and Deloitte can bring to bear and then Oracle's ability to finance the whole deal makes some very compelling conversations for customers because you can walk in to a CIO, to a CFO and say, look, on day one, you can actually have a lower spend than what you have today in your data center and get a cloud transformation underway at the same time. Let's talk a little bit more about that business case. Is that generally what you're seeing where it starts is let's take some cost right out and then Aaron, you and I talked about maybe investing that in the future, but is that really the starting point for the vast majority of customers? Let's cut some cost right away and get a payback immediately. So I'd like to share our perspective, which is, you know, nobody spends money for the sake of spending money on technology. It's got to have meaningful business value. So the conversation starts with really renewal in a path to the cloud, but there's a natural opportunity for savings and consolidation that we take advantage. We're not simply shifting from your hardware to the cloud. We're actually modernizing, which will result in significant savings, but it also gives the business something that they don't have today at a level of security and scalability, an ability to run modern technology much faster, much better and much more scalable. Jeff, can you give us a sense as to how far you're into this elevate journey, maybe thinking about a couple of customers either specifically or generically, kind of where you're at with them, how far along maybe even some examples that you feel are representative? Sure, you know, the relationship has been probably about six, close to seven months of maturity. In that time, we've had an opportunity to work on several key clients at scale. We've worked together in collaboration on one of the nation's largest retailers in the grocery business. We've worked collaboratively in aerospace and defense and also in the hospitality industry. In these cases, what we're finding, and each one is in a various stage of maturity. One is done, one is in midstream, and one is at the early stages. And current economic conditions are driving a huge pipeline right now. I think our challenge right now is making sure that we identify those clients that can best take advantage of our services and our joint offering to deal with that pipeline right now. What we're finding is that the savings are at least as we projected. In some cases, we're finding even more. What people say they have and what people say they do isn't necessarily what you find when you get in there. But almost every case, we're finding that there's unused equipment, unused capacity that they currently have, redundancy, low utilization of their current assets. We can go a long way in streamlining that. Plus I can't emphasize enough that these days security is a major concern. And we're adding a layer of security that they could never achieve themselves with the saw. How do you guys and how do customers want to approach the transaction? Is it a fixed fee? Is it a TNM? Is it a situation where you participate in some of the savings or the gain? How does the pricing work? I'll start off by saying each deal is really custom built around what a customer really needs, what they're trying to get out of it. Right now, as an example, OPEX is very important. So we're engineering deals in a way that helps customers deal with their financial challenges, especially around OPEX. There are other structures that we can put in place. We have the backing of Oracle Finance so we can be very innovative on deals. They can be when value is attained, they can be milestone based. There's just, I think, a wide variety. I don't want to say unlimited, but a wide variety of different options that we can offer our clients in order to be able to deal with whatever financial challenge or opportunity that they may be looking at. What does success look like? So we're just less than a year in. When you're two, three, four, let's say five years in and you look back, what does success look like, Eric? So to me, success is going to look like we've gotten a number of these big transformation deals in play. It's in motion naturally between our organizations, not necessarily driven entirely by Jeff and I going out and driving the organization to behave the right way. It's more in our DNA. But more importantly, I think we've gone into, we've gone beyond the conversation of let's move workloads. We've gone into conversations of, let's really talk about how to reimagine your business on top of Oracle's cloud and have an ongoing dialogue that looks at that transformation. Once we hit that point, three, four, five years from now, right? That'll be a wild success in my book. Yeah, final question. You've always been around for 175 years. This is our birthday this year. And in that time, what we've learned is there's no substitute for impact and value added to our clients. In our perspective, what success looks like is client success. Client success means improved scalability of their operations, securing their technology and their data at a substantially lower cost so that they can focus on what their core business is and focus less on technology. That's success to Deloitte. Great. Guys, thanks so much. Great session. We're not only witnessing the rebirth of Oracle Consulting, but there's clearly a transformation going on and it's cultural. Gentlemen, congratulations on your partnership. And thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.