 Live from Las Vegas, it's the queue. Covering Oracle's modern marketing experience. Brought to you by Oracle. Now here's your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. So, digital transformation, we've been here and for years and years and years, it's coming, it's coming. Peter and I were talking earlier, the time is now for ROI, we talked to Vic from the agency side, they're under pressure. Show me the beef, where's the meat on the bone? What is happening? I need to see the data, I need to see results. At the end of the day, that's kind of like the bloom is off the road on all the hype. It's ROI, it's data. What's your thoughts? Can you share your thoughts on that perspective? I'm excited about, there's probably 1,000 things at this modern marketing experience. Haven't been at the helm here for three years that I'm excited about. If you had me zero down to a couple of them though, gents, one of them is what you just talked about. It's here now, right? When we started this journey a couple years ago, it was about, oh, this is the art of the possible. This is what might happen sometime in the future, right? This is what we're going to enable and make theoretically possible and it's going to do all this great stuff for you, right? But it was pretty much an idea. And to have a pretty big idea, pretty transformative idea, that's going to translate into structural competitive advantage for these customers that do it well. And to have that be a conversation about what's coming three years ago, to have Fortune 50 CPG and Fortune 50 retail and Fortune 50 financial services and Fortune 50 tech companies join us here and have their chief marketing officers not talk about what they're thinking about doing, what they're going to do in the future, but how they're transforming their companies and their earnings per share and their customer experience and customer relationships right now, real, because they've actually implemented this stuff and they've taken it from the theoretical. They've taken all this data, content, media, applications, acquisition, et cetera. They've put it all together and they're fundamentally changing their companies and it's an exciting time because it's not theoretical anymore. It's actually happening. It's going down for real, as they say. My kids love that song, going down for real. So the real story, so I want to get drilled down into that. So let's feel that back. So I was not super critical, but I kind of pointed out what everyone's talking about, which is Oracle has acquired their way and I asked Mark her directly in January, there's organic innovation and there's inorganic. So there's a lot of M&A in your portfolio and the question is, how do you integrate all this stuff? And then you guys made an interesting bet and we flesh this out at Oracle Open World, the data becomes a very critical component. So can you share the payback you're getting from the data, the bet you made on making data universally shareable? We need to talk about that. And two, making it all integrate because no one wants more work, right? Especially CMOs, they're not IT. Nor do they aspire to be. And quite frankly, CIO is sick of supporting and very fragmented, undisciplined, potpourri of crap for the CMO too. So both sides are actually happy about this. A couple of things there. One, Oracle Marketing Cloud is 100% made of acquisition as you know, not just part, right? So we've had a very aggressive acquisition agenda. We set out to buy very, very best of breed companies, right? Certain companies have a philosophy, I'm just going to pick up an asset, right? It'll be a capability, I'm going to go that way. We decided to actually go by the market leader in every single functional major category picked up. Number two, all the tech giants, not just Oracle, have been relatively guilty of this the last several decades. So I'm going to buy all these great toys. I'm not going to do any integration, right? The data, the workflow, the UI, the analytic level. And I'm going to try to convince the customer that just because I now own all these companies, that's integration value. And you should buy for me instead of somebody else instead of actually being really, really committed at all of those levels to true integration. And as you saw today, right on stage, that's been one of the hallmarks of what we've done here is not just acquiring best of breed, but being religious and committed to shipping very, very quickly within year one, real, real integration that provides real values. So for the folks watching who didn't see the keynote, just drill down and quickly explain that integration piece, because that's a big message today. What's going on, give us the quick update on integration, the meat on the bone, what's happening now, what's the highlight. And we, Oracle Marketing Cloud is comprised of some very, very important what here to for have been relatively siloed, right? Web optimization and AB testing has been its own thing. E-commerce has been its own thing. Marketing automation has been its own thing. The DMP has been its own thing. Ad tech has been its own thing. We not only have to continue to innovate and scale and be best of breed in every one of those silos, we got to say when you put one plus one plus one together, voila, 10 happens, right? And there's immense value unlocked because we put the two together in an intelligent way. And that has been the theme, right? I'm not just today, but over the last couple of years, today we made a huge deal about it because we announced very meaningful, not PowerPoint, not looks good into demo, but very real, it's in there when you log on to the product, benefit. And what that really means is in addition to being a world class in each one of these independent core competencies, we've been talking about, you know what, this is going to turn into this marketing operating system or this one control panel, this one reference stack for the digital CMO and guess what? It's not science fiction anymore with the integrations that we announced that are very real, right? And are making this seamless application interface flow from workflow to workflow, process to process, silo to silo, having it all there for real, not PowerPoint, is changing the lives of the CMOs that are actually investing. And so those demos were shipping product or shipping? No, those are live product. Yeah, all this stuff is actually real. One of the things you notice about Oracle, we tend to, certain companies like to talk about stuff, they'll ship five years from now. Certain companies like to talk about stuff that they're going to ship five quarters from now. We tend to not talk about it until it's actually live. Oracle executes, Oracle might not be first to the game. In this case, they'll use the M&A muscle and or inorganic, which we've seen in the middleware area. Certain Koreans grew also now with Donatelli on the other side, you see a lot of that execution. When they move, they move fast and heard clearly saying to us and we heard him this morning, you know, we're a cloud company all the way in all cloud. And so real integration is the theme there. Not pretend integration, not talk about it, actually do it because the value creation for the CMO, if we do it well, is immense. I'd like to elaborate a little bit more. Integration within all of these best of breed companies be it the data companies, the DMPs, the market automation, the army channel. Integration of all these incredible asset pool inside Oracle Marketing Cloud, that's a big deal. You'll notice here, right, we have got the other legs of the customer experience, because as in big an effort it is to tie the entire world of marketing and ad tech together, then if you actually tie that to Salesforce automation, you tie it to commerce, you tie it to service automation, you tie it to some of the other things, that all of a sudden becomes yet another integration benefit across more of the customer experience value chain. That's the second definition of integration and that's an Oracle wide thing, not just an Oracle marketing cloud thing that is delivering value to the marketplace. And then third, part of being a cloud leader is what you own and how well you integrate it. The other part of the cloud leader is being the most open, interoperable ecosystem hub. And as you guys know, we've got over 900 media, data and application partners now that actually are real integrated, not PowerPoint. Not integrated. Integrated into the actual, we're the hub and over 900 innovative data media and application partners. So again, the customer can have the benefits of this foundational reference stack and all the benefits of cutting edge innovation with hundreds and hundreds of partners and we think integration means all three. Well, compare that, because it's your competitor, let's say Salesforce in this case, might say, oh, we got a zillion integrated people too. How does that compare? Is it apples and oranges? Because they will claim that they have a robust ecosystem. I mean, they had a big acquisition with exact target and then they've been kind of mute since. I mean, we haven't seen much and they've been a heavily acquired company. Some will say that they're integrating, it's kind of clunky too, but they can claim the integrated partners. I would never say that. No, I've heard, no, that's legit. Other people would, though. Other people, no, but they also would say they have a huge ecosystem. So how do you compare your ecosystems, say, Salesforce? Yeah, they do, and they were brilliant, right? They started AppExchange last decade and I still think that's one of the reasons they were so successful is because they committed to being an ecosystem. I think there's a lot of difference, I'll point to two. One is that that ecosystem revolves around Salesforce automation, right? Very little of that actually revolves around marketing and ad tech. We are that 100% revolving around marketing. So when I say 900 partners, I'm not talking about what orbits around CRM, I'm talking about what orbits around us as a marketing and ad tech stack. Huge difference, number one. So broader. Yeah, and with marketing in the middle, not with Salesforce automation. Well, I think what you're saying is that the customer ends up in the middle of yours, the salesperson ends up in the middle of this. You said it very well. Yeah, and then number two, for anybody that understands the life of a CMO, it can't just be applications, right? Which is what that other ecosystem is, it's just apps. Ours is apps, it's media, because so much of that budget actually is real-time, optimized, programmatic media budget. So it has to be all of the major media, via video, via display, via social, et cetera, and it's hundreds of data partners. And if you expand the definition of ecosystem to data, media, and applications, centered around marketing, not CRM, that's why this is so different. I love this concept of digital CMO stack because we look at this all the time, we can have vertically-oriented solutions, like say responses and whatnot, but then there has to be some sort of commoditized horizontally-integrated component, say a data layer, for instance. So love that, I completely buy that, I think it's a home run, that's a great strategy, stay on that track. But I got to ask you about this shift in the industry, because there's business model innovation going on too. There's business model realities of your customers' customers, and they're moving from, as I wrote to my notes here, commerce today is destination-oriented, go to a landing page, put up a form, or sales person-oriented, here's the sales guy. So they're over-indexed on form capture, and then it goes to some analog sales process. The progression now is shifting to pure digital. It is. Non-linear consumption, all these kind of forces at play here. That's kind of a mind bender for the customer. How are you guys addressing that? One, you agree with that, and then what are you doing in that future state that we're living in? Yeah, one I agree with it, and I would add one more thing to the kind of previous state is just because you can hit the customer 110 times a year with campaigns because it's so cheap does not mean you should, right? And campaign, campaign, campaign, campaign, transaction, transaction, so shifting. You know what? If I actually form non-linear relationships that are interactive and value-added, instead of just taste revenue, you know what's going to happen? Reven is going to go faster, right? If I actually chase conversations, whether it's a B2C e-commerce customer, a B2B direct sales customer, I pursue value-added conversations in context, not just campaigns, guess what? Campaigns are going to be more effective, so it is a big mind shift. And then so much of that just comes from, I call it kind of going from manual to automated to predictive. If you commit to the data layer, and all of a sudden you're catching every possible meaningful piece of data, you then actually have the technology chomps to marry that at the identity layer. Hey, that's Kevin, those cookies are Kevin, that social handles Kevin, that mobile ID is Kevin. It's not the company you work for, that's persona-based, and you notice we talked about account-based marketing, it's both now. It's not just persona and company, and that's a powerful combination. I wish we could, another time, we'll spend a half an hour on that, because that's a big deal. But tying all that at the identity level, then having the signal itself go tell the orchestration engines, oh, the customer just told me this, this, and this, what should we go do in real time? And across all the things, that is, call it what you want, automated, programmatic, data-driven, response-driven, more real-time. By allowing that to happen, instead of manual people doing manual sales calls or manual campaigns, and hitting me as many times as I can, because it's cheap enough to do it, that's kind of driving some of this fundamental change. So a lot of this comes back to the idea that ultimately marketing has to be valuable to the customer. Correct, yeah. And customers buy products, but they also buy products based on their knowledge and experience of them, which means channel becomes an increasingly important part of the value proposition. So as you look forward, if you put the customer at the center of your stack, it's serving up the data, not only about the right product, but also about the right channel to work with. That's right. And the right way to engage. How do you see marketing taking on a broader role within businesses at combining those multiple things so that the customer consistently is having the most valuable experience. Yeah, boy, that's a complex topic. If you dummy it down to kind of the, I think there's three ways you can really simplify that. One of them is context, right? Simple, but right? Hey, if the customer's pissed off, don't send them the 30% off coupon. Right, know that they're pissed, right? Or if the customer needs education or comparisons. Don't send them to the call center. That's exactly right. So literally context, how am I going to actually take what I know and put everything I put from what's offers, you know, reviews, service calls, whatever, make sure it's context. Number one, number two is channel or device. People use those simultaneously, but those customers are out there in 17 different channels or devices all the time. Don't rely on them coming to the one you hope they come to and optimize for. You got to go get them in a seamless, you know, well orchestrated fashion. And number three is actually time, right? Everybody's consumer now, where there's my consumer that spends seven figures on enterprise software, or a B2C t-shirt company that has 20 seconds to get the deal before their competitors does. Timing is everything. And if you can actually make those decisioning, offer up the right context and the right channel and do it fast, right, at the right time, you can, if you did those three things, you're going to deliver on that concept. You just talked about pretty well. Yeah, we're talking about context, community, and capability. Where context is, what is the customer trying to do, community is, who are they trying to do it with, and will they do it with you? And then capability is, how do you serve up the appropriate set of capabilities so the customer gets what they need? It's a good way to put that. And again, if you notice a driving theme here, we don't think we're selling tech. I mean, we are. What we're selling is an ablement. All technology is, is an enablement for the customer. In this case, the customer is the CMO and all the people that work for him or her, they have got a massive challenge to go pull this off. And it's not just tech, by the way, it's process and change management and behavior and politics and governance. And they've got a whole bunch of other stuff. Tech is just the enabler, but if we deliver it that way so that it's use case, vertical, and purpose built to go enable what they're trying to do, it takes the conversation away from selling software and it turns it into a technology enablement platform. Kevin, my final question to get your thoughts on this vision is, Google, Facebook can win the impression-based ad model. We talked about that earlier, but in the one-to-one experience, the brand's got to control their own destiny there. So the question is, you mentioned identification. How does a brand manage this? Because now the customer's progression is digital is off property, on property, referring to their .com or their website, which is critical infrastructure. It's a funnel. So all these URL, the technology involved and yet engagements happening on other properties. How do you get customers to get that ID when no one wants to go their website anymore? Yeah. Unless it's for like some sort of metrics. Boy, we think that is incredibly important. And again, I'm going to answer that in a couple of ways instead of just one, but I think it's worth it to opine. They're facing a couple of things. The power of the closed garden, right? Do I really want to optimize for the Google closed garden and that ID and then have to do it again for the Facebook garden and that ID and again for the Apple garden and that ID and the Amazon garden and that ID and the Twitter garden and that ID. I got to manage across and optimize my dollars and my customer experience across all of the closed gardens. They don't care about optimization. They care about sucking more of your media dollars into their closed garden, right? They're not going to help with this whole optimization thing. They're going to optimize the stack. That's exactly right. Then you've got all your own media. You've got own social, you've got own mobile. You've got own websites. You've got own e-commerce. You've got own call chat, et cetera. You've got all your own and you got this worldwide open mobile social web. But guess what? People spend a ton of time not on your property or the closed gardens but out here, right? And if you can't from a data and more importantly an identity, right? If you are capturing the identity across all of that and you're the one optimizing the customer experience and the money spent to go deliver that customer experience across all three of those. That's why what we're doing is kind of needed. I'm going to use a corny analogy but the industry needs this Switzerland that at the data, the identity and the optimization layer, it can't be beholden to any of those three. You've got to go across all three. You've got to enable that for brands in a way that gives them the signaling they need for the progressions that they need. And then what to go do about it? Across all of those channels, yeah. Hopefully the state that matters that we're talking about is the state of the customer. That's right. Okay, final question, final, final questions. And it does mean organizing around the customer. That's exactly right. For the folks watching, what's the vibe of the show this year? For the folks who didn't make it here? So the keynote's online. We streamed on silkenangle.com. What's the vibe of the show? What's the hallway conversation? What's the, what's going on? It's, it's, it's, you know, it's the biggest. So it's the biggest we've ever had. If you heard me yesterday, 30 countries is the most global we've ever had. It's the most diverse, right? All the solution sets. It's not just this or this or this now. It's covering everything. We got over 60 customers doing courses for us, right? We're not doing the one training. They're peer group who are already excellent practitioners are the ones actually leading the charge, which is, that's phenomenal, right? That doesn't happen very often. So that's pretty good that just it's more successful and more relevant. 2,200 people don't show up and fly from 30 countries. If this isn't pretty relevant and pretty important, you don't take a week out of your busy schedule and come here. That's number one. Number two, that comment I made at the beginning, people are so psyched because they're hearing about real stuff being done by real peers and real brands. They can even do something. They can literally leave and learn from partner, my, my peer one, peer two, peer three. I picked up actual knowledge of stuff that's not PowerPoint or Oracle as ideas, but actually stuff that's going on in real practitioner land. Number three is the, there's actually real results tied to it. So now, not only do they understand how to actually go do this, they can translate all this marketing ad tech speak into CFO speak and CEO speak saying, hey, if I make these investments and do these transformational things, these are the kind of business results that are earnings per share changing that we should expect if we make similar investments. And, you know, they need that because once we get ourselves and the CMO on the same side of the table, we still got to go into the CIO to shift calories, the CFO to shift dollars, and the CEO to shift strategy to go support what we want to do together. And they're getting that in spades this year, which is really, really exciting. It's not just Oracle either. You have Deloitte up there. You got Mint2Go, independent companies out there doing cool stuff. So building an Oracle. It's real. It's the new Oracle. It's happening, right? Like you said, it's going down for real. Going down for real. It's not PowerPoint anymore. It's not futures. It's actually going on. And people are excited about that. The space is going to explode and a lot of changes come. I'm sure we're going to see this thing grow in multiple directions. A lot of touch points, a lot of omni-channel growth, opportunities, so to speak. This is theCUBE. Going down for real here with Kevin Eckeroid's GM, Senior Vice President of Oracle Market Cloud. We'll be right back with more live coverage. SiliconANGLE is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Peter Burris will be right back after this short. Always a pleasure, guys. Thank you. Yup.