 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Brian Grace Lee. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Howard Street in San Francisco for exclusive coverage of Oracle OpenWorld. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm showing with my co is Brian Grace Lee, our analyst, cloudanalystatwookiebond.com research. Our next guest is Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Applications Development, Oracle. And mainly HCM, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thank you. Thanks for coming on. We love talking to the product guys because it's exciting we get the down and dirty in the product data. For sure, yes. So, certainly the cloud, you get thousands of customers on HCM. ERP's got thousands of customers. And you got CRM, everything's going in the cloud. So you got core applications are now ported on the cloud which can run full 100% cloud or on-prem or both. Yep, hybrid all the way. They get that right? Yep. So how hard was that? And what's the reality today? How many customers? What's the uptake? Where's the traction? I'll talk mostly about HCM. HCM traction has been great. We have 5,000 customers in the cloud, 1,000 of them plus core HR. Many of them running core HR on talent management. We have big customers like UBX and UBS and Xerox and Siemens. And so it's not just small, mid-sized companies moving. It's large, big, global, multi-nationals companies moving to the cloud. So it's fun and it's exciting. How much of the digital disrupts? We just had Ray Wang on from Constellation Research. He wrote the book at Harvard Business School which we have a copy a year. Obviously that's been now mainstream. It was kind of like rhetoric early on, seed in the base, early adopters jumping off. But now digital disruption truly affects the HR piece of HCM. People are online everywhere. Social media is crazy. Yeah, I think, so we talk about digital disruption in HCM. The way I look at it is what consumers are experiencing in the consumer world. You look at Uber and Lyft, Lyft is a customer. You look at being able to, on your mobile device, being able to get a ride share service. They use proximity services. You're used to experiences on Amazon being able to have the power of the social community, give feedback on products, telling you, should you buy them, shouldn't you buy them? We've tried to take those same concepts and put them in HCM. So in HCM we have a social network that's built into the product. Every single HR object is socially aware, so it's pretty cool. We've built new types of applications for the cloud. We've built something called work-life applications. So we have wellness and competitions and reputation management. So things that we've learned from the consumer world, we've built them into our applications. Talk about the evolution of HR. This is really important because we see stories about this is the best place to work. Amazon was recently in the news as that New York Times article, people, it's a real hard place to work as New York Times reported. The old days of get a performance review, you put it in the file, that was the systems of record. Then you got in terms of engagement, now systems of intelligence, machine learning, all these new technologies. Where is this all converging in to bring the modern HR systems into this new cloud era? Because that's just really the new data sources all over the place. We have a ton of data that we capture about people in our systems and now we're using that information just like we do in the consumer world. So if you think about the consumer world today, you go buy a shirt or a tie online and let's say you don't finish that transaction. You are now, if you go anywhere, an hour later you go on the internet and that ad follows you around. It's personal to you, right? They're gonna try to continue to sell you those pants and that shirt for the next 24 to 30 days, right? We've taken that same concept of personalization and put that into our system. So navigation now learns where you've been, where you want to go and it can predict and make the ability to navigate through our systems personalized to the individual. So we've taken concepts that we've seen in the consumer world and applied them to HR. Yeah, so. Oh, that was not too much retargeting. Sometimes I could backfire the retargeting stuff. Yeah, I got you. So it's like, I go to a website, I didn't want to buy that Hilton vacation and I keep on seeing Hilton ads. But that's an example of bad use of predictive analytics. I mean, it learns over time. It's actually, it can be bad, but I can tell you that it's personalized to you. We have your IP address, we're finding you and we're making offers to you. That same type of personalization can be really good, right? We can recommend the next place that you might want to go in the application. Or opportunities. Or opportunities in the application. We can recommend what next job you might want to get based on other people in your role and your skill set. It's good for the managers too because they want to also not get in trouble by not having that extended opportunity and path for whether it's women in technology or anybody. We can make recommendations to the manager now based on the big data that we have in our systems, our HR systems, about who could potentially leave the organization, who could it treat. So it's these types of things that we can do now with the technology that we have that we could never do in the past. Yeah, so lots of companies know SaaS applications because it's, I never wanted to buy that system in the first place. I'm going to go SaaS first off. What drives a company, a big company? You know, UBS, you talked about some of the other ones. What drives them to want to go SaaS when they've got it established? And then how much are they saving? What are you seeing for customers saving money in the cloud? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of them enter into it from a cost of ownership perspective. First, they want to get away from the four or five year big spike in cost to upgrade all their customizations to the next release in the on-premise world. So what SaaS gives you is the ability to always stay current. So everybody's on the latest release. They get the new capabilities continuing to stream in. So a consistent cost of ownership tends to be a lower cost of ownership because they don't have to maintain the operating system, the hardware, you know, the database. We do all of that for them. So that cost is out of the equation. And then they get more features more quickly. So we have two releases a year. So they're getting new capabilities coming very, very fast. That makes their user community happier because they're getting new things that are constantly being delivered. I want to talk about work-life applications, something that's been kicked around on stage here. And also your Oracle Learning Cloud. Which, by the way, I will admit when I saw it on Kino, I'm like, oh, awesome. I'm going to talk about machine learning. It's not machine learning, but it's learning, learning. Talk about this dynamic, because we just talked about big data a minute ago. Yep. So learning, learning, real learning. Real learning. So what we've done, so the number one place we go to learn today is YouTube, right? If you need to, you know, your screen breaks on your iPhone 6, you go to YouTube to figure out how to fix it. You want to learn how to solve a Rubik's Cube, you go to YouTube. But the power of YouTube is really about learning from a best practice practitioner. Somebody you don't know, somebody that's not on your social network. We brought that same power in our next generation learning product and delivered it within the enterprise. Now anybody can offer a training course and share it amongst the community. And now you can rate that training course, you can give feedback on it, and it can be prescribed or intelligently pushed to people based on their role or what they want to learn. But so we've taken that concept of what YouTube delivered in the consumer world and we've applied it to the enterprise. So for the first time, we're delivering that same YouTube experience in the enterprise. So is that mentioned not in your social graph? But that's also an opportunity to have both social graph and non-social graph, meaning interest graph. So you got an interest graph with the topic. Yeah, but then it also might make sense for social graph. Are you doing both? We're doing absolutely both. So we have two concepts. One, we look at about 100 different data points of the employee, what role you're in, how long you've been in that role. Do you have any open requisitions in our recruiting application? And then we can prescribe specific learning content based on what we have in our library. So it's really cool. We can make it very personalized to you. We also keep track of a social graph. We have something called reputation management. And what we track is how you collaborate with different people within the organization. So are you an expert? Are you sharing content? Are you participating in competitions? Do you have development goals that are shared? So we can collect this information and create a reputation for you as an individual. And we can use that when we prescribe jobs to you or when we prescribe learning content to you. So we're changing how HR, we're collecting different types of information, both socially and intelligently. How do you think about millennials? They think about work differently. They want feedback differently. What do you happen to do in your product to sort of deal with the millennial chips that are going on? I don't think of it as a millennial problem. I think it as a digital problem, meaning how digitally literate are you? So if you think about what happened in the consumer world, Amazon brought transactions online. That was like, you know, wave one, wave two, they enriched those processes with social, mobile and big data. And now wave three, they're moving to a much more transformational digital experience. We've taken that same concept in the enterprise. So our first wave of cloud applications were mobile, social and big data enabled. Now we're moving to one-to-one personalization, recommendations, rich media. You see video throughout our system. So we're taking the lead from what's happening in the consumer world and applying that in our HR system. I got to say, really impressed. That's a really great strategy, as a guiding principle to take the, this is the consumerization of IT finally happening. So kudos to you guys for doing that. I do want to ask you a question about, I want to get your personal take and also your Oracle take on this. UX and user UI's are huge right now. You mentioned mobile, social. The consumption and the persona-based identity, interest graph, all this stuff is converging in on real personalization. And UX is critical. What's the current state of the art and what's the continuum of innovation that you see on UX and UI? Let me take it a little bit different of an angle. In HR, we talk about engagement. It's engaging the people in your enterprise, right? It's how they want to come to work. They're excited. They're excited to work with people around them. So we took a different approach. We have a great UX. User experience is fantastic. You look at our apps, it's beautiful. You saw Larry demonstrate our products on stage, fantastic. But what we did was we invented a new category of HR applications called work life. So what we did in work life, we built engagement solutions. We built a wellness application. So now you can be productive and healthy. We built a competitions application so you can now engage with your other employees or people that you work with and compete with them to make it a fun engaging environment. So we changed the game in HR and delivered something that nobody else is doing called work life. Are you gonna give Fitbits out with these applications? We have. So at our last user conference, we gave Fitbits out to everybody and it had a walking competition amongst all the people in our last HCM world. So when you know I'm stressed out, I can get a massage. I can get like a day off. Boss will say, hey, John, you're working too hard. Heart beats running low. I got to meet with Larry in two minutes. That's why. No, I mean, but this is where we're going. Internet of things. Internet of things wearables so we can track your steps. We can make it part of our wellness program. We can make you more healthy and more productive at work. Those are the types of things that change how HR applications look and feel and that's what we're delivering in our HCM box. So being cool and relevant is the nirvana in product design, okay? Oracle, probably when you pull the general non-Oracle customer base, don't say, hey Oracle, man, they're a cool company. This is a cool product. How do you keep the edge up? I mean, what's the vibe? What's the marching orders to the team? Obviously being on top of current events and smarts, table stakes. But how do you move the cool needle forward even more? You know, I mean, I think we learned. So for me personally, I learn from my kids. I see what my kids are doing. I have young ones. I mean, I- The Snapchat app or the HCM? Snapchat, they use everything. I will tell you, the whole learning concept came from my eight-year-old. My eight-year-old, when he goes and wants to learn how to get to the next level in the Activision Game, he goes to YouTube. And who he learns from is the best practice practitioner. And that best practice practitioner is not someone that worked at Activision, that Bill Skylanders. It's a nine-year-old who just completed that level that he has just gone and learned from. And those are the concepts that I bring into the enterprise. So I asked my team to go think about what's happening in consumer world and bring that back. It's really looking at the user expectation. The end of the day, what you were talking about, and I have the same four kids, same way, it's like, the way they're interfacing with technology is that it's Khan Academy, it's YouTube. I got to configure my router. They go to YouTube. I mean, this is the thing, this is just what's available to them. The whole reputation management came about if you look at the people that are popular on the internet, they built up a reputation, right? They have followers. That's what the next generation wants to do. So when you talk about millennials, they think about how many views I'm going to get, how many page hits am I going to get? Those are the people that we need to cater to. So we say we're building a reputation solution. It is for that next generation that knows how important it is to collaborate and build a reputation outside of your own social network. The opportunity for companies as we wrap here is not only to make, if it's already a good place to work, what if it's not a good place to work? They might need to get that data and they could actually make these engaging apps a better place. So you kind of, it's not just for great companies. You say companies are in trouble. Good to great. Yeah, for companies that are good, that want to be great. It's compliance issues too. There's all kinds of regulations. Like, did you give this person the opportunity? Is it the age discrimination? There's a lot of stuff that HR needs to think about from a compliance standpoint. Absolutely, compliance is critical. I'm talking about some of the cool and different and new age things that we're doing because we can. Boring important stuff is gonna be a lot solid. We still focus on payroll, ACA is still huge. We still focus on all the compliance, all the compliance reporting that needs to get done. All of that bread and butter is still topical and large areas of investments for us. Chris, final question. Developers, as we wrap here, opportunity for developers. Can you share insight into what you guys are thinking and I'm a developer. I'm gonna be one of you all over this. I might build the best time work leave application. Can I? Our cloud platform goes beyond just what we deliver in SaaS. We have platform as a service. We have infrastructures as a service. So for a developer, we have a set of services. You can go on our platform as a service and build a specific industry application for banking or for healthcare. You do enable that. And we do enable that and you can integrate back. So SaaS stays pure. You're upgraded every release, no customizations. And if you need to build out something special, we have the capability in our cloud to do that. We might have a record for the most cube gems in one segment. Chris, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Fantastic. Cube gems are highlights that we take in real time and pump them out on the web so you can consume them during the live. And I just actually tweeted one while you were here live. So go to Siliconangle.tv and check it out. Go to theCUBE, Twitter handle, check out theCUBE gems. Chris, thanks for sharing that data and that insight here on theCUBE. It was fun, thank you guys. Thanks, we'll be right back more from Howard Street after this short break. And our pre game breakdown commentary for the Larry Ellison keynote coming up shortly. Stay tuned, we'll be right back with the pre-keenout analysis commentary and just overall conversations here in theCUBE. We'll be right back.