 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle's modern marketing experience. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back. And we are here live in Las Vegas for Oracle's modern marketing experience. Part of their marketing cloud. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick. Next guest is Tim Brown, global vice president of product development, Oracle Marketing Cloud. Former CEO of Maximizer, acquired last September. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So what's it like to be acquired by Oracle? People always want to know because Oracle writes big fat checks when they buy, they buy big. Yeah, yeah. So you guys are up and running. Well, take us through that. What was it like? So it's not one big bang, of course. There's a sequence of stages you go through and look, you get huge power from the platform Oracle brings you. And we were 400 people. We had lightweight processes where you can operate on a fleet of foot basis. If you're going to do that at the scale OMC is now, you have to have more processes and regimented systems in place. So you have to just get used to that process. But it's been a blast. It's been fantastic. And Oracle does buy at scale companies. They don't really buy tuck-unders. Like IBM does more traditionally. They buy tuck-unders, bring them in, blue wash them and they create them. Did you guys work with Oracle before? Sure. Relationships, they see you in action, they get a feel for it, some of the numbers. We were pretty well-known in the industry. We won the last Forrester Wave in our industry in Q3 last year. So top right in that, which kind of got us noticed. But we had been working quite closely with quite a few clients of OMC already. So it was a very warm introduction. And for us, the timing was a conscious decision. The whole world of marketing is moving from point solutions to coordinated marketing campaigns, cross-channel, based on common customer data. We couldn't do that as a point solution. We built the most powerful platform to optimize the customer experience. But we didn't have those elements. So bringing in the orchestration capabilities of responses in Eloqua, coupled with the data layer that BlueKai and DataLogix and ODC bring in, it's a killer combination. That's an interesting topic, because Oracle talks a lot about having an integrated solution. So the fact that you could now add those components within your own subset application and get that much more value is a pretty powerful story. No, exactly. Look, our platform combines A-B testing, multivariate testing, automated customer insights. DataMind, segments, and personalization. Those things get completely dependent on the quality of data you have about customers. And to generate a really fulfilling customer experience these days, you can't just do it on one channel. So we built our business on web and app, and we're very good at doing that. What about SMS? What about email? They all have to be consistent. So the timing from both sides, I think, was great. And Kevin made a great comment yesterday. They made the investment decision architecturally to make the data layer that horizontally scalable piece, which solves a lot of problems on this point solution. And you guys, as you mentioned, made a good call to go, see the writing on the wall, if you will. So you get more power with Oracle. Talk about where you guys now fit in, and just share with the audience, kind of jumped ahead, where Maximizer fits in, vis-a-vis the portfolio of what's out there. Is it just B to C? Is there B to B? Is it just A-B testing? Has the role change you mentioned? You know, these other blue-kai and these other products? Where does it all fit in? OK. That's quite a big question. Let me attempt to make to address it. Correct me if I go off track. So look, the technologies, we set ourselves up to a one-stop shop. Everything you need to deliver a fantastic, engaging customer experience online. If you do that, you get loyalty, you get very high-value customers, you get revenue profit. So we've built, from the ground up, everything from the simplest to most complex technologies that you need to do it. So everything you may be testing through to the most automated, advanced one-to-one personalization, where we're looking at your customer profile, we're looking at the context you're in. You know, if you're on a travel site, are you in a business mode or are you in a family mode to produce, to get the granular personalization you need to make a great compelling experience? So that, we bring this entire layer. We set it basically across the top of the RMC stack. Now, for us to deliver great experiences, we need two other things. We need the next layer down on the stack. We need the orchestration. Because we need to be, no, it's no good having a fantastic experience on your mobile phone. And then it's completely out of sync with the email messages you're getting. So that orchestration, we need that to deliver a great experience. And then under the bottom of the stack is the data layer. And so we are just, we're a kind of a very lightweight layer that sits across the top of the stack. We can be deployed with one line of code, literally one line of code and you can use us to do everything I've spoken about. And we can exploit and make actionable this wealth of customer data and be part of the orchestrated campaigns that you've heard this so many times, I'm sure. But in RMC, it's the core belief that you need this 360 review of our campaigns. Is that- So you were up and down the stack, so you don't necessarily need, is there other parts of the portfolio that you work well with? Is it a combination of things? What specifically do customers deploy? So our customer base is, it's mid large enterprise, quite a few fortune 500, across typically B2C classic segments. So, you know, be retail, finance, travel, media, and actually, rather appropriately, gaming and gambling. Given our location. So, they're the sets we work in. So there's a huge overlapping customer base with every other part of the RMC stack. We've got loads of common customers. We, if you look at the way we're integrating, and you heard an announcement yesterday, and we've already integrated some areas, and I can talk about them in a bit more detail, maybe, if that's of interest. But the integration is, I mean, the very first thing we did, the day after it was announced, was start thinking about integrations, and there's some very obvious ones. So, in no particular order, I guess the announcement yesterday was that we're bringing a web capability to responses. So, responses campaigns now, when you're in program, and you're working out your various interactions, you want to coordinate. There's now a box there that says web, or mobile app, and we are powering that. More than that, we're bringing ability to actually- You're adjusting to the form factor, the experience side, or web. Sure, we can operate in both channels. We can optimize the experiences of both channels, and so we're providing that, so filling in the gap there for responses, and secondly, we're bringing ability to work out, okay, you want to orchestrate this campaign with the aim of converting more mid-tier loyalty customers to top tier, okay? Well, is it working? So, you've got these theories about, oh, we're hitting them this email over this time, and then hit them on the web with this and caught, but what's actually working here online? So, that testing capability is very powerful to work out and actually prove what the uplifts are, and to do a continuous learning process. So, that first integration responses announced yesterday really, really exciting. What will come on next from the responses is bringing our technologies to bear an email. So, we were point solution. We did not have any email capabilities. Of course, RMC has vast email capabilities. What we can bring to email, and actually, so we can bring this open time personalization. So, when you open the email that's been come out from a response to system, it will take into account time of day, geo, weather, a lot of different factors to say, okay, what should the content that email look like? How should it be structured? What's the layout? So, we can do that in real time. There are two obvious integrations that are happening here and now. Following on from that will be Aliqua. Very, very similar integrations, but just with a slightly more vast two, obviously B to B situations, and probably with B to C. The second one, integration, which is already up and running, I think Steve alluded to this in his keynote yesterday, which maybe caught people by surprise a bit, was we are already integrated with what was BlueKai, our Oracle DNP. So, what that means is, I've spoken earlier about the need, the better, our personalization is better and better the deeper and deeper customer information we have, data we have. Well, if you're a prospect landing on a travel site, that travel site doesn't know much about you, because the only data we have is from, it's much deeper for existing customers, okay? The DNP's perfect. So, that will bring you, what are they in market for? Are they in market for a beach holiday or a trekking holiday? So, we have that information available now, we can target and personalize the experiences that we deliver, dependent on that DNP data. So, that's a fantastic, easy, obvious use case. So, Tim, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the exchange of value for data, that now is getting more and more, kind of headlines with Google Maps and this and that, where the more data you provide them, the better service they can give, but before it was kind of like a free thing. You didn't necessarily know that it was a value exchange and of course it's a value exchange. When you're trying to build all this data around the customer to get the context and the personalization, what are some best practices that you see that really expedite and kind of accelerate that process so that at the end of the day, you can actually provide a more contextual, better experience. So, you've hit on the key barrier. People have been talking about personalization for years. Actually doing it in real life has proven hard. One of the reasons is, bizarrely, the more data you have, the harder it is to personalize the online experience. The reason is that you've got to take decisions in a very short period of time. I mean, milliseconds, blink of an eye, you've got to change the experience. If you have a vast amount of data, how are you going to do that? What data is actually predictive or not? So, I mentioned it on our platform, we have automated data mining. The reason is that we are trying to extract from a vast amount of data feeds that we have, what are the two or three or 10 key attributes that helped me work out what you want when you land on a website or what type of payment process or cart process we should use for you compared with someone else. So, that distillation of all of this data into a few predictive attributes that can be used is critical and without that, we spend an awful lot of time in that process. It's a core part of the platform. That is so counterintuitive, that's great insight, because you would presume the more the better, right? The more the easier, of course, I have. Human brain is only that big, we can't, so you need, if you're going to hypothesize that I think this bit of information might be useful to offer a differentiated experience or offer to one person compared with another, you can only deal with a certain range of data. So, the first thing is make the problem manageable. Use the technology we have to make the problem understandable and manageable. And to your point, if I'm on a travel site and I'm booking a business trip versus a family trip, I'm at a completely different state of mind and the influencing factors that are going to help drive my decision are probably totally different. Right, so that's a great example because unfortunately, you're not going to tell us what sort of mode you're in. So we have to deduce. You're very lucky. We're going to land up, but we can't even do other land or anything. That's all business, too. Well, data quality is a huge problem. You mentioned data is the fuel for the engine, marketing engine, and you get dirty data. Talk about managing the problem. This comes down to what we call pre-cognitive. Cognitive computing is the term that's been kicked around, social business, marketing, automation, all this now is being automated. If you have too much data, you don't get the scope. So you've got to have more intelligence about the data or clean data. How do you solve that problem? That's really kind of challenging. Well, so in the example we were just talking about, you're not going to tell me you're a business traveler. But one of the attributes we have about you is how many people are you booking? When you went on the search engine, how many people were on a trip? What was the timing of the trip? How is it compared to your past purchases? You can actually, with one or two attributes, you can quite accurately predict that you're a business mode, not family mode. Well, Google has all that information. If you have Gmail, I search Southwest, and I guess my flight's right at the top of search results. That's pretty interesting. They have all the data. So we're doing a very similar thing, just on a client by client. So identity becomes a big part of it. So here's what we talked about. And again, this is kind of like the open question. Everyone's fighting for that identity. This notion of federated identity seems to be kind of in this platform war situation. You got Facebook, 1.6 billion people on the platform. That's just Facebook, not including WhatsApp or Instagram. That's a walled garden. Google's a walled garden. Again, you have everything else out there. So obviously advertising will go to those platforms because that's where impression-based stuff will be or engaging the watering hole of users. But when you're out in the wild, the open web, everything's up for grabs. That's where the one-to-one gets interesting. Yes. How do you guys view that world if we move to this kind of personalization paradigm that you guys have pioneered now, Oracle's scaling up. It's really about what's going on in the wild for the user, off property or off whatever they want to call the term, not just within these platforms. I mean, that's a challenge. How do you manage that identification? Sure. Open ID, other things? Yeah, well, so it depends on what you're trying to achieve, but from a lot of the work we do, we don't need anonymous information from your, say, your web browsing, okay? We've got CRM information on you. We've got a whole lot of information from Oracle Data Cloud. We've got a vast amount of information that we can use to work out what experience we should offer you if you're a high-value customer compared with a low-value. We don't need all the rest of it. When you're dealing with prospects on the site, you've never seen them before, that's when you're in the regime then where you want to try and distill as much information as you can about a person from all these vast clouds of data around. And that's where BlueKai really plays a very important role, because they do the same as us. They take this vast amount of browsing data from, I think, two billion or something, visitors, and condense it down into useful attributes. What are they in market for? How long have they been market for? Where are they? That, you have to process all this data or you'll get nowhere. Tim, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Really appreciate it. Final question, I'll give you the final word here. What is the future of personalization in this world? What's it going to look like? What's it going to look like? Yeah, it's okay, give me wrong, future question. Give me someone right. There's no wrong answer. We've got customers that are pretty close to actually. So, look, I can tell you what the ultimate test is. You don't really care what's happening behind the scenes. When you go on the website, or someone's website, does it feel like they understand your need and that they're taking sensible logical decisions that are helping you do the job you want to succeed and are they then helping you to discover what else is available to you? That's the feeling you want. That's what, and- Yeah, is it relevant? Do they find what they're looking for and do they get the end result? Yeah, that's- Transaction. Yeah, it doesn't matter how we get there, but that's what we have to get to. Well, I love that you said it was a feeling too because the other thing I always talk about, right, or whether it's magical or creepy, right? And if it's a good feeling, then that's on the magical side. It doesn't have to be creepy at all. Right, right, no, because if it's done well, then it won't be creepy at all. Don't even know what's happening. Yeah, that's beautiful. Tim Brown, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate the time, sharing your insights about personalization. As theCUBE, we'll be right back with more live coverage here in Las Vegas into the short break. Thanks so much. Pleasure.