 Thanks for watching theCUBE. Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016, brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Come back, everyone. We are live here at Oracle OpenWorld 2016 in San Francisco on the show floor. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events. Next track, the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host. Peter Burris, our next two guests are from the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Always a fascinating conversation. Of course, we were at the MME Modern Marketing Experience in Las Vegas. A lot of great videos we got out of that. But Lori Ipsons, the new Vice President, GM of Oracle Marketing came from Industry Solutions, now running the team. Steve Kraus, Group Vice President, Product Manager at Oracle, CUBE alumni. Good to see you again. Laura, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Appreciate it. So, you know our hot spot. We were talking before we came on live. Peter and I love the marketing cloud because it really is much more than marketing or the data involved. In marketing, now as part of this digital transformation fabric that's happening where the data is part of it and engaging with customers is really the key asset all companies have. It's not just about getting the leads and getting the forms and getting the sales. That's important, but it's also trickling through the organization. So, welcome to theCUBE. Give us the update. Since MME, you're now in charge. Congratulations. Thank you. What's it like there? What's your first impressions? Well, listen, it's fantastic. And in a company that's all data-driven, data's not just part of marketing. It's driving the future of modern marketing. And so, what I was excited about coming from an industry solutions group and an architect for use cases and adding value, looking at what, I know Steve's built a lot of this, looking at the architecture of our OMC stack. It's really exciting to see how marketers can use these new tools beyond a transaction, but to deliver a new model of engagement with customers for the whole customer lifecycle. And we're just getting started. So, give us a quick overview of the marketing cloud and how it fits now because it's a moving train in capabilities. You're seeing, certainly here at Oracle OpenWorld, the cloud is a big part of it. So, you know, I'm having a cloud capabilities. But you have a lot of acquisitions you guys have done as a group. They all fitting in nicely. And then there's also potentially the organic plan. Give us the update on where the group's at, strategy, how it's all fitting into Oracle OpenWorld. Well, Steve and I will tag team into this. But, you know, what's exciting is that we move very quickly to acquire a number of companies, almost $5 billion in acquisition. But to put that together from an engineering standpoint, which is what Steve does, to showcase the whole value, to lead with Oracle Marketing Cloud, I think we've made enormous progress. We still work to make sure that we have the integration with our people so that we're selling the whole stack. And I think what makes it super exciting is that when you look at this and you combine it with the power of the Oracle Data Cloud, we're just taking it up to the next level. Steve, does this impact you at all with the whole database announcements and all the infrastructures of service? More, I mean, more power. It's like Star Trek, Scotty and the Engine Room, more power. I mean, you're getting more horsepower, certainly. But does it impact your business and how you guys tie it all together? It does. We actually run a number of our systems on Oracle Infrastructure, of course. And that's even some of the companies brought in. They were already Oracle shops, for example, Responses ran on Java Infrastructure, ran on the Oracle database. So being able to come to Oracle and let them roll some exadata into our data center, our customers love that. I think at this show, maybe the announcements that are most interesting to our customers are some of the new applications that other parts of Oracle have created that talk well with the Oracle Marketing Cloud. So an example, there is a new set of applications around chatbots. There's a new set of applications around adaptive intelligent offers and actions. Our customers love that kind of stuff. It's part of their road map, so we want to be more intelligent. We want to be more adaptive. What can you do? And rather than us having to invent this all from scratch, we see these other parts of Oracle building these applications, and then we plug into them. So those are good announcements. And the machine learning stuff, you're seeing that out there too. Machine learning, AI. This is the predictive data science meets marketing, right? I mean, this is kind of the new paradigm. Is that kind of the top point of all this? That is, that is. These other groups have reasons to build these technologies that span marketing, supply chain, HR. We can come in and make it sing for marketing. And that's what Oracle has a great combination of deep technology expertise to do the algorithms. We have a data cloud to bring in the data. And then you have these groups that can say, now let me be best practice at applying it to marketing. So the marketing function of a lot of organizations is in certain respects not unlike IT, in that it's a shared service function. A lot of different groups lay a lot of claims on marketing, expect it yesterday. And it's also like IT, it's in the midst of significant change right now. Marketing, you just mentioned data science. Marketing practices are evolving. The relationships between marketers and their suppliers, their service companies, their digital agencies. A lot of transition. How does marketing cloud point the way to the way that marketing should be done? Because I think one of the first things that a marketing needs, the marketer needs to understand is not that I'm adopting a whole bunch of technology, I'm actually adopting practices that are going to make me more effective. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, and I think it is about, I mean every marketer, almost every marketer will say that their role is changing. They're taking more ownership and responsibility. They're accountable not just for launching campaigns and number of impressions, but the complete marketing ROI up to the CFO, to the CEO, and to the board of directors. And I think with what we're doing with marketing cloud and creating this open integrated platform, there's going to be more participation. There's a whole lot more data coming in, whether it's their first party date or third party, but it's sorting through that and creating value for the whole company. Because like many companies, everyone wants to be a marketing or in sales. And I think that's what we're doing to complete the staff. And as we do that and add the participation, we see that marketing is a lot closer to the sales organization. They also have to have a strong partnership with IT. And I think that's one of the trends that I hear from the CMOs that I'm talking about. Why is that? There's almost 4,000 MARTEC applications out there, nearly 26 billion in the market. They're gobbling this stuff up. They're making sense and being sensible about it and spending with a goal across their lines of business is really what they're needing to achieve now. And as they wake up and they look at this whole, what they've created, they want to simplify it. They want to make sure that they're getting the ROI. And they're looking to their IT organization to help them respond to some of the challenges that they have to make sure that they're using data the right way and also securing it, which is a huge value that we bring from Oracle. Sure. And the other thing about it, and this is, you know, every piece of software, whether it's on-premise or in the cloud, suggests a certain way that a group of people should work. Historically, sales has been, we're going to have a customer. So we're engaging, marketing's putting out collateral, marketing's running the campaigns. It's like IT, in many respects. They're the project managers, the campaign managers. Does the marketing cloud look at marketing and say, you know what, someone has to take responsibility for engagement and enable salespeople to be more successful or enable partner channels to be more successful or enable products to get the information that they need. Do you see the marketing cloud or marketing and therefore the marketing cloud being that facilitator of data flow and data-oriented services within a business to match the customer to the capability of the business? They're kind of the direction you see it going. And I'll start, because I think, you know, products are tools and they deliver value, but our marketing cloud and our platform is all about enablement. And it's about that false lifecycle of a customer and it's about having the accountability and the KPIs. And I think, you know, that's where the power of what we bring to it and the data, you know, whether that's with ODC, the Oracle Marketing Cloud connecting into the whole CXV gives us quite a differentiation as you look at who owns this and who participates in it as well. So I think it comes down to the distinction between marketing versus everything else and that distinction is starting to fall away in the sense that marketing more and more is about being able to deliver the right customer experience based on that customer's context, their intentions, their past data record. And it turns out that why would anybody want that to stop at the organizational boundary called marketing? It doesn't make sense. It turns out that marketing has been first in many organizations to do things like create these profiles to be able to do targeting, personalization, but just picture it. After learning all this about your customer, what he or she wants, what the next right thing to do for them is, are you going to forget that when the customer makes a service call because it's not technically in the marketing organization? Of course, you're not going to do that. The same thing applies across sales, commerce, anything that's customer facing. Well, your point is the siloed approach, like say, service call, for instance, might be out of the marketing cloud. That's an important piece of data to have available in the marketing cloud to know that interaction. Is that what you're getting at there? Vice versa as well. So what I'm saying is the dichotomy between marketing and everything else is falling away and it's all turning into the customer. What is the best way we can organize our company and our technology around serving the customer's need in the moment? So could we call it the engagement cloud? We could, although there is a product by that very name already. We've got to be careful with Oracle. The namespace already is kind of crowded. It's its own challenge. My question, I see a lot from talking to customers, your customers and people in the marketing cloud who recognize that, okay, our purview now has to expand down into IT and then out more to the customer. Certainly that's a data-driven mindset and also operational efficiencies. So the number one question I get is, we've done all this work. We've been stockpiling all these apps and CX cloud and I bought all this stuff. I bought response at BlueKai, another third party and now a new shiny new toy comes in from a startup and says we solve your problem. We are the best at X. The customer says, someone sells me another platform I'm going to shoot myself. I mean, that's the frustration level of the operationalizing of technology. So what do you guys see on that? Because the customer wants to get to the finish line. They want to do the right thing, but the operationalizing of the new tech, kind of, they get in their way, they bought something else. How do you guys sort through that conversation? How do you talk to customers about that? Well, I mean, I know Steve will sort through this from technology, but the CMOs that I've talked to are waking up saying, I have all this stuff. I'm trying to make sense of it. Help me simplify, help me resist the urge to buy more and to use and leverage what I already have and to simplify it. So that's really the message that I'm hearing from the customers right now. Why? Because as marketing spends more on IT than I hope it's to anybody else in the future and some companies already, they're saying I've got to have common metrics in ROI and I think that's what the other stakeholders are doing as well. And what's the role of the agency in this? Because the agency used to provide some critical services, certainly creative, but they seem to be kind of falling short on the deep, deep technical development. Meaning, yeah, microsite, I wouldn't call that a development, but I would say that might be a user interface. But not necessarily an app, for instance, where that might have to come in-house. Sure. And I mean, I think it depends on the agency and the engagement that they have with their customers. Certainly, many of them are moving in to digitize what they do as well. But we see this convergence of MarTech and AdTech. And so I think we'll see a level of disruption of who actually succeeds and will their business model succeed on how much do we get paid for leads or are they coming in from the creative side? So I think a lot of this is going to get disrupted in a minute with cloud and with the surges of data and making sense of it and prioritizing it. So we're excited to see the full opposition of that feature. Operationalizing, what's your thoughts? Operationalizing. How many databases does someone have? A zillion? I mean, they could have a lot of data if it's subtracted away. I mean, this is an issue. Here's the metaphor we use. Today, an enterprise marketer is like someone trying to get a house built without a form. They are dealing directly with every last wire cutter, pipe puller, window hanger, and no one builds a house that way, but that's the way it's evolved. And so you're right. The next thing they need to deal with is very painful. And so that's why they're migrating to a model where they go work with an oracle as the foreman and say, hey, wait a minute, that doesn't mean I don't get to work with anyone else. It means the other people work through Oracle to make sure their stuff works with the platform. And then I also get all sorts of stuff with the platform. So I think from a practical point of view, that is how people are approaching the operationalization. They're saying, let's have someone at the center who I can hold responsible, and then everyone else, talk to them. So let me make sure I got something. So really it's, but I think you're, at the end of the day, the role of the marketer is to put the customer at the center. Yes, absolutely. The engagement activities at the center and then find tools that make that possible. One of the challenges the marketers historically had is that the PR agency says PR is most important. Here's the metrics you focus on. They have been connected. But by doing this in a unified way, by bringing all of our suppliers in so that we can keep the customer at the center, presumably the CMO, not only has better visibility on all the activities, but also all the spending that's going on and the returns to the getting from an engagement standpoint. Correct? Yeah, I think that's correct. There's a technical side to it too, and that the central system does some things that by definition, those around the center, the central system does some things that by definition, those around the edges can't do. So as an example, orchestrating across the channels. Well, okay, at the silos, each have a channel in them. Well, something does need to cross them. That's an orchestration system. Same thing with the unified profile. Everybody's got their own little views of the customer. How do we go and connect those together? So I think that's another natural role that Oracle plays, coordinating and connecting data, actions, the things that ultimately, if you're organizing around the customer, they've got to be coherent. So I think it's a question. The rage is account-based marketing. I've heard that at MME. And then now the trend also is persona because there's some targeting to the individual level now, certainly with the internet. You can go down to the persona level. Are they mutually exclusive? I mean, how does that play out? Do they work? How does a marketer sort that out? I got investment account-based marketing. But now the persona is the new rage. It feels like in some ways what's old is new again. I don't know if this is such a big innovation, but I think what it really is, is that the technology is caught up to what everybody wants to do, which is not just to sell an assilo into one person at organization, but to understand the whole account and to understand who's buying what, when, what are they looking at? We can bring data in a powerful way together. It embraces persona at the same time. So I wouldn't say it's exclusive, but I think the rage is we have tools and platforms that can do more to drive account-based marketing so that we structure and we can sell at different levels within an account at different times. I like your analogy of the form and also that implies architecture. You have to have an architect scope out the building. It's true. Then you're going to do a take-off on what you need and then you execute. Great, so you guys, thanks for sharing the insight. Quickly give us an update on what's going on for the year. Obviously you have your own shows. Get a quick plug-in for what's going on with marketing cloud, business-wise, what you guys have coming up, where can people find you? You do the incredible marketing experience shows which I think are kind of a mini or a global world for marketing embraces. What's the plans? Let's give us the update. Well, it's exciting. We're going to be at ad week next week, certainly. We have a number of events coming out. We'll still have our MME event working in conjunction with the cloud world events as well in Las Vegas. So, a lot of activities and more announcements that I think you guys are going to see. So you guys will be part of the cloud world. Yes, we will. Regional shows. Yeah, because when you think about it, the compelling reason is we're connected to our whole CXW. We're connected to the whole TechNap stack. We'll have an MME within, but that's going to be exciting for us to really cross-pollinate and have the relationships and our customers coming together from the marketing and IT side as well. Well, Peter and I both are very excited about the prospect of how data and digitizing business is going to change the fabric of certainly what we call things, whether it's marketing cloud, but data's at the center of it and the customer. So you guys have a lot of work ahead and certainly a lot of opportunity. Congratulations. Thank you. Thanks for having me here. Live in San Francisco to our global world, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris. You're watching theCUBE.