 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Oracle Open World 15 here in Moscone South in the middle of the exhibition hall. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Happy to have back on the program John McCable who's the senior product manager with Oracle Solutions at Cisco. How do you on the program last year? Welcome back. Thank you, appreciate it. All right, so John, you know, what's an Oracle Solutions guy doing in a place like this? We actually have a lot of Oracle Solutions that we test and prove on Cisco UCS, our server platform. And so we're here today talking to customers, explaining what the solutions are, hearing their challenges and problems, addressing their concerns and having a little fun along the way. All right, excellent. Yeah, you've actually been on the other side of this wall, given some of the presentation. Tell me, what's the vibe? What are you getting from the customers? What's kind of top of mind? What are they asking about and kind of the big challenges and opportunities for them? Well, you know, a lot of customers are looking at database performance, right? They're anticipating moving to 12C probably next year. And so they're looking for people who've been there, tested it, done that, have got the best practices written and developed. They're always interested in performance. And so the latest proof points that we've announced at the show this year around SPEC JBB 2015 has been top of mind for them. We've got 38 world record benchmarks with Oracle Code more than anybody else. And the other thing they're asking about is cloud. You know, cloud architecture, cloud computing, what does it really mean to them? Even while they're not maybe wanting to jump to the full cloud implementation right away in a public cloud environment, they're looking at use cases. What, how can they utilize the cloud to be able to solve some of their challenges but not take their data and put it into a full cloud environment yet? All right, let's help for our users unpack that a little. So you mentioned 12C. Most people don't understand how much work goes into, you know, of course we know Oracle's got to do their coding. But when that kind of comes over to Cisco, how long have you guys been working on that? What goes into making sure that it works? You can take advantage of features. And you know, what does Cisco offer that you know is kind of going to be important to customers when it comes to that 12C upgrade? What's going to be important to customers is the fact that we've taken the Oracle 12C code, we've done a Cisco validated design with it. And what that really means is we put over 2,000 man hours in to do full testing, not just that the code runs on UCS, we also inject a lot of faults into the system, into patches and so forth to try to trip the system up and make sure the system recovers appropriately, provides the level of performance and we document this in the Cisco validated design. So when customers run those types of configurations, they know it's going to run right the first time, that full certification information then we provide to Oracle, they review, they bless it. So Oracle support teams are fully aware of the certification and this is the third time we've done the certification of unified fabric with Oracle database. We did 10G, 11G and now 12C and customers have been overjoyed with the fact that when the database runs our systems, it runs correctly, provides high performance and so it really solves a lot of their initial headaches when they move to a new version of the database. You know, what'd they do with the numbers? The 12C, is that supposed to be cloud related now? That C for cloud is what Oracle's come up with, yes. Yeah, so, you talked about cloud also. Where's your customer's mindset on cloud and how do they look at Oracle when it comes to cloud? They heard Oracle's messaging here, Oracle's saying, they're building the enterprise cloud in the place where Oracle could live, what's Cisco saying and what do you hear from the customers? Well, talking to customers, really what we're talking about is the fact that while you want to look at a cloud environment, how it can help you. A lot of customers are looking at use cases like test and dev, right? They need to maybe have set up 40, 50 different copies of their database so they can test different firmware, different versions of the OS, that type of thing and so they're using a public cloud environment, such as Oracle, such as other clouds like Cisco cloud to be able to set up those test dev cases, do the testing up in the public cloud environment and then take the image they want to use back and run it on-prem. And so that's one of the key use cases that they've been talking to us about and seeing that we can provide them that type of assistance to help them implement that. All right, so John, one of the things we've been talking to your peers here at the show is kind of the ecosystem that Cisco has and in many cases the stacks that they're building. From an Oracle solution standpoint, can you talk to really kind of the storage partnerships, the broader solutions, what Cisco brings and maybe you can give us a couple examples of some of the partners you're doing stuff with. Sure, happy to. So really what we have is integrated infrastructures. We provide the UCS elements of our blades form factor typically with the fabric interconnects and then we mirror that with the storage products from the ecosystem, right? We've done a lot of work in the past with NetApp around FlexPod and in fact here at the show we are introducing a new Cisco Valde design we did with Oracle 12C on Clustered On Tap, the latest version so it's really beneficial for NetApp customers. We've done a lot of work in the past with EMC with Vblock and this year we're really doing a lot of work with Nimble Storage. One of the things that kind of led us in that direction was the fact that we had Oracle JD Edwards had actually come to us and said that in December of next year there's going to be new FASB regulations that are going to come into the industry. That's going to force a lot of the ERP vendors to have to provide patches or four version upgrades to be able to accommodate these FASB regulations and so JD Edwards was looking for different types of solutions that they could be able to talk to their customers about. So we sat down with Nimble and we came up with SmartStack, which is Nimble's CS300 storage with Cisco UCS. We announced it at the JD Edwards Summit back in February and at that summit they had 668 partners and they all heard about the solution, they all took a vote and they gave Cisco and Nimble a reward for having the top solution at that particular event. So that's pretty good validation of the work that we've done with Nimble for JD Edwards customers. Yeah, that's, you know, because of good proof points as you said, kind of not just, you know, there's the hard work to get it done and then, you know, well, how much adopted? How many people are buying it? Do you see more and more customers buying the integrated stack solutions? Definitely, yeah, we're seeing a huge increase in people buying the integrated infrastructures. The reason for it really is that people are looking for total solutions, right? They don't want to buy just a server, they want the full storage, they want the best practices defined, then we know that someone has been there and done that before and we can show that with our white papers and Cisco Validated Designs and people can install it, it reduces a lot of risk for them and provides them the level of performance they're really looking for. So, John, I know Oracle's a partner and you do plenty with Oracle, but when you talk about building the integrated solutions, I mean, Oracle has their full stack, you know, from Silicon all the way up to, you know, the application itself, one of the kind of key differentiators you hear from, you know, the people that Cisco partners with on the storage side is, you know, the Oracle RedStack is good for the Oracle applications, but it doesn't do the rest of the applications. Is that still kind of a fair comparison that, you know, I've got, you know, infrastructure that, you know, is great for Oracle, it can also do lots of other workloads. If you work with Cisco and its partners versus, you know, Oracle is, you know, they can do other applications, but where they're really showing their best performance and their best skill set is when it's a full RedStack. Yeah, really, with Cisco UCS and our storage partners, it's a type of solution that's really good for all workloads. We can do Oracle extremely well, obviously, when we get the proof points to prove it, but customers aren't running just Oracle. They're running Microsoft, they're running SAP, they're running other types of workloads and oftentimes we find customers want to run multiple hypervisors onto the solution itself because they might use, say, VMWare to consolidate lots of different images, but they want to use Oracle VM to consolidate the Oracle database images so they can set up hard partitions that help to reduce their Oracle licensing costs as a result of doing that. And so the multiple hypervisors solutions is what really helps separate Cisco UCS apart from everybody else in the market. All right, so what about from a performance standpoint? You know, I'm going to go talk to some Oracle people on converged infrastructure, and they're going to tell me, you know, Oracle, best performance, bar none. What kind of data do you have? What kind of tests do you do? Do you have any proof points you can share from a performance standpoint? Sure, well, as I said, we've got 38 world record benchmarks in the history of Cisco UCS. This year we've done some new results around PeopleSoft. We just did the spec result I mentioned earlier. We've had 14 eBusiness Suite benchmarks, so we got the leading performance for all Intel vendors. We've done performance benchmarks with JD Edwards, with Siebel. In fact, Oracle actually approached us a couple years ago, and we did a TPC result with them. And so as much as people talk about performance, and Oracle obviously talks about performance, there's not a single benchmark out there where Exadata has competed against UCS on the benchmark itself. And so we think we provide leading performance and we, you know, set the results and see if the competition can beat us. Excellent. What are some of the other big issues? Security has been a big discussion this week. How important is that when you talk about building the UCS Oracle solution? Well, security is always very important to customers, right? And that's why when we designed UCS, we designed it around our Nexus technology. And what that really means for a customer, for one example, is that if you send data packets between nodes in an Oracle Rack cluster, you can't have data packet loss. The package simply doesn't arrive. By incorporating Nexus technology, we've proven that all the data packets are going to go to all nodes in Oracle Rack cluster. And so all the CPU cycles that you're going to use to drive the workload, are actually driving Oracle's workload, not resending those transactions again. And we've got the data points to prove it. Miracom did an independent third party study comparing Cisco UCS to some of our competition. And where the competition had data packet loss, we had zero data packet loss. And that's one of the key differences that I think separates us from the competition. All right, so I'm curious. We were talking before about 12C and that migration. How fast are customers adopting this? How much is their push for it? Traditionally, we have too often that it's all right. How many N minus whatever's customers are running? So what do we expect to see? It's the rollout of 12C. How long will this take? It will take a while because you're right. Customers tend to be risk adverse. If you look at the install base, my own estimate says that probably 30 to 40% of the customers are still running Oracle Database 10G. Another 50% are probably running 11G or two. And then there's a handful that are running 12C right now. I think when we're sitting here a year from now, we're going to see a lot more customers have been moving to 12C because at that point, it'll have more longevity in the field. And more people are going to feel it's a safe database to move to. They'll understand some of the new features of 12C, such as the in-memory capability and what that might mean to them. And so I think we're going to see a lot more customers, a lot more use cases, about 12C sitting here a year from now. I think for the majority install base to move up to 12C, it's probably looking at a couple of years, maybe two to three years at least. Yeah, great. You mentioned in-memory. I mean, I've been a product manager previously at times in my career, and it was always you look at this roadmap and you're like, all right, what's the customer pulling for and what are we trying to push at them? And you need some of those key triggers. You mentioned in-memory, there are some other things. Is licensing more advantageous? Is there anything else that is going to kind of help move customers along at a reasonable pace? You know, licensing itself, I don't think it's going to move customers along because the in-memory capability, the container data dictionary, those are layered products that you simply license, right? And so I think what customers are struggling with a little bit right now is trying to understand how much benefit do they get from those new technologies? Will their own environment benefit from having their data set up in a column format that the in-memory capability gives you? And what's the challenge of implementing that, right? Of course, you get them on stage. It sounds very cool. It can happen just like that. Well, database administrators have been around for a while. They know it doesn't happen just like that. And so how do you test for something like that before you put into the full implementations another set of questions they have. So they're looking for people who have some experience in that area. They're willing to talk to other customers at user group meetings, such as IOUG and so forth, understand their experiences, what the issues they've had so they can hopefully have a better implementation in the future. These capabilities are going to take another year or two before people really start migrating to those people. All right, so does Cisco have any services to try to help customers go through that process of the upgrade? Any kind of training you're doing to help or does Oracle drive a lot of that? We do. We have Cisco Advanced Services that has done an excellent job of providing customers with a feel good of being able to move to new versions of database. We can sit down with customers and we can first talk about what does a migration really mean? We can architect the major steps for them and then we can help them with either each step in that process or do the entire full process. In fact, a couple years ago EMC was making a migration off old risk architecture to Cisco UCS. Advanced services went in and we architected the entire migration for them and literally moved those databases over the course of a weekend to the latest version of the Oracle database and the long story short is they saved over $7 million replacing their risk architecture with Cisco UCS. And so we've got professionals that have been there, done that and can make customers feel really good about moving to the latest version. So John, there's been some discussion at the show. You know, there's a lot of change going on. So we're seeing Oracle making some changes. This is, you know, I think, you've been coming to this show for many years. 15 years. 15 years, I mean, this is not the Oracle of even five years ago. Right. So tell us, you know, when you think about Oracle, you know, how are they doing? You know, what has changed? You know, where are we today when it comes to Oracle? I think, you know, it used to be you come to a show like this and you talk just strictly about the database. Database performance availability. Now with Oracle, we talk about database, but it's also applications. It's about different delivery models with the cloud. Customers will want to talk about setting up their own private cloud environment and delivering those services to the customers in a more rapid manner, being able to then cost out each department's use of the infrastructure within their ID department and charge back to those departments as a way to help pay for the implementation of the new products and services. And so it really is a much broader use cases that you're seeing today than what you saw even five years ago. And you're right, the industry has changed. I mean, there are some vendors that aren't at the show anymore. You've got some that are been moving to private. You've got some that have been moving in different directions. And so it really is a different show now from what it was even five years ago. All right, so John, I want to give you the final word. If, you know, we come and hear you on the stage. Yeah. You know, talking at Oracle Open World 2016. You know, what do you think there's some of the top items that we're going to be talking about? I think we'll be talking about some new performance around Oracle Database 12C. I think we'll be talking about unified fabric. We'll be talking about service profiles and how we can move those workloads around quickly and easily to different servers within the UCS architecture so we can match the workload to the resources to meet spikes in performance. And we'll be talking about probably another few thousand more customers running on UCS. We've got 46,500 customers right now. I think we'll have a few more by this time next year. All right, well, John McCable with the Oracle solutions inside of Cisco. Appreciate you sharing us with the updates. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.