 Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube. Covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. I've been to San Francisco for Oracle Open World 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media is the Cube. It's a flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media with my co-host Peter Burris, head of research for SiliconANGLE Media and also the general manager of Wikibon Research. Our next guest, Cube alumni, Mitt Xavier, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle's cloud platform. Heavily involved in the platform as a service. All the action is as well as in the cloud platform. Mitt, great to see you. Welcome back. Yeah, thank you. Always pleasure to be here. A lot of buzz. We're on day three of wall to wall live coverage. We got you at the end. So we get the luxury of one getting your opinion, but also to look at the show. So first, as day three kicks in, the big party tonight with Sting the concert, but then the workshops tomorrow pretty much ends tonight for the most part. What's your takeaway from the show? What's your vibe this year on what are you seeing? What's popped up at you at the show this year? A lot of things. I think the one thing is there's a lot of maturity in terms of adoption with the cloud, right? So we've seen a lot of customers I speak to nowadays are talking about next broader implementations, adding more and more capabilities into their services. No more just trying to try out things. There's a lot of production workloads been moving to the cloud. So very, very interesting conversations. And also I'm seeing a lot of different kind of customers. Typically, of course, Oracle been in a very large enterprise software player used to have very large companies as the folks I used to meet on a regular basis. Over the last couple of years, I'm noticing a lot of smaller companies who are probably a lot of times have to look up who they are, but they are doing very interesting projects and they're coming here and talking to us. So I'm also seeing a very different audience I'm speaking to than I used to before. We had Dave Donatelli on early executive advice for one of the main leaders now on the go-to market for cloud and all the convergent infrastructure. And it's very clear to his standpoint, he's overtly saying it, putting the stake in the ground that if you run Oracle on Oracle hardware, it will be unequivocally the fastest and it's an unfair advantage and they got to lap the field is what he said. Okay, same for platform as a service. You guys have some success now under your belt this year from last. But it's not clear that Oracle has won the developer's hearts and minds in the enterprise and winning the developers in general. Amazon has that up their sleeve right now, but yet you guys have ton of open source stuff. So platform as a service really is going to come down to integration and developers. Yes. What's your guys' strategy there and how do you see that playing out because you need to fortify that middleware, that integration, that's APIs. That's a developer centric DevOps way. What's your strategy? A lot of things. One thing that you see from our platform as a service we have been from the day one building it on an open standard technology which is again end to end, very broad and deep functionality. And we had a lot of history building out a platform and we have thousands and thousands of customers who successfully deployed that. So our strategy going forward and what you see some of the announcements recently as well as some of the use cases you might have heard from our customers are customers who are really trying to solve a broader platform requirement. Not just trying to build an application but be able to integrate them, be able to make sure they have ability to take the data from it and be able to do analysis with it in real time as well as batch and be able to publish that information whenever they choose to and then work that in conjunction with any infrastructure as well as with any services, software as a service in terms of applications. So this plays very well with our software as a service customers. They need a platform extension. So that's the developers we go after. We go to developers who are really also building brand new applications and need a platform which is open standard based and which is broad and deep and well integrated. So that's really what we're seeing a lot of success from. So Amazon no doubt has success on the infrastructure side where customers who just want to outsource and move their hardware, of course they're now starting to move up in the platform space as well but they're very limited set of things which they still offer versus we've been doing this space for many, many years and now we've been able to provide the similar kind of breadth which used to have on-prem in the cloud. Cloud natively built with the right kind of APIs, right kind of interfaces but at a higher level services. So it's not very granular where you have to go and compose 15 different services together and build your application. I provide you as a customer to a customer a very ease of use and much more solution centric platform and that's really I think the differentiation we have there. So less moving parts on the composability if you will. No, we can do as granular as you want but we also have composed it in a way that this is like, if we're looking at integration for example, right? What are the different kind of patterns you need in integration? You might want to be able to do it through a file. You might be able to do a B2B EDI based integration. You might do it through a process. You might do it through a messaging. You might do a data integration. So we provide you integration cloud versus saying, you know, that 20 services go at it and then tomorrow you might not still understand what to use, what not to use. Customers can consume what they like in the integration cloud and pay as they go in terms of what's functionally they pick up. But as a developer, I don't have to go waste my time to figure out and learn this different tools, different stuff and figure out how to make all these things work together. So the pallet is becoming more enterprise friendly. Sure. And then on top of that, you're also providing a set of capabilities in the past platform that makes it, that kind of replicates the experience that developers have enjoyed certainly in the open source and the other world by making easy to find stuff, discover stuff and then exploit and use stuff through the variety of different services. So as you look forward, how are the, how are developers going to change the way that they spend their time? Moving from code, moving from composition, where, as we move forward, where will developers be spending more of their time? I think over time, they should be spending time just writing either the code or kind of extending the application to have. They shouldn't have to worry about DevOps. They shouldn't have to worry about all the underlying technologies required to build that application. They shouldn't have to worry about all the testing and the QA, which should be all part of the development lifecycle, which we provide automated in the functionality. So developers either they should worry about what language I want to use or what platform I want, what kind of framework I like and who I'm trying to cater to and what my user interface should be. And beyond that, all the other things should be provided from the platform in terms of automation, in terms of simplicity, backup recovery, patching, upgrade, all that stuff should be automated as part of the platform provider. And that's a service we provide as part of our platform as well. So the developers can focus on writing the application and we make sure that we give you the choice where you can pick languages you want, you can pick the standards you want, open source and all the different things you might want to pick from or something we provide as well. But we give you that choice, it's not one or the other and tomorrow if you want to move somewhere else, we'll make sure you can do that because we are not locked into a one way of doing things. So I know Oracle is very focused, it's historically been very focused on the professional developer, but business people, well, development is starting to happen elsewhere in the organization, not just in the professional developer community. So what used to be like building a spreadsheet now has implications for some of the core digital assets that the business might run. How do you anticipate the definition of the developer evolving, the role of the developer, being able to provide these services to folks who historically might not have been developer, have them also be relevant and at the same time collaborate with those pros? No, a very interesting point you raised because I think it more and more, this idea of citizen developers, no code developers or no code developers, whatever term you want to use in the industry, there's many, many of them who want to be able to do quick and easy way of building their functional requirements and deliver that without having to call an IT, somebody to code it for you or having to learn anything to code. And we have really made sure in a platform as a service we offer, there's a lot of ease of use and quick drag and drop kind of tooling. We have a composer, we recently announced a visual code project which is based on application builder, composer kind of a service where you can drag and drop and create a very simple, easy to use application without having to write any code. Similarly in integration side, we do the same thing, we provide recipe-based integration where if an event happens in one application, I want to move that information to another application. As a developer, I don't have to write any single line of code, we provide the recipe or you can build your own recipe. And I've shown it to my 13-year-old daughter. She was impressed, she did something from her Instagram to Twitter by just using this application on a mobile phone. It's similar, that's the kind of people we're going after from the line of business and business analyst who don't want to write code but they have a business requirement and how can make it easy and simple to use. So we're doing a lot of that work as well and that's a very important part of our development community. I mean, talk about the competition. I mean, obviously Amazon Web Services is clearly up there. We're kind of like thinking that it's more of a red herring at the way it's talked about because you have certainly the fundamentals with your install base and you guys really haven't started really moving your install base over yet. When that comes, I'm sure the Wall Street's going to love that but you have some time, some building blocks are being built out but how do you guys have that conversation with customers with AWS and Microsoft specifically or even Google? How do you guys differentiate and where will you differentiate in the past layer going forward? I think many things, right? One thing is of course our customers want to make sure they can preserve the investment while they move to the cloud. So we want to provide a platform which is hybrid in a way that they can take some of the information they can run some of the things on premise while they transition some of the workloads or move their applications to the cloud very easily without having to rewrite many of the stuff or retest everything. So that's something services we provide. We've created a lot of tooling around that to make it easy for them to do it and the differentiation we provide to them is that one, we will protect your investment. Second, the tools are very easy to use out of the box and third thing we do is to really make it compatible. We have commercial terms as well which makes it easy for them to take their workloads and move that without having to keep on reinvesting a lot of the cost they've already put in place. One of the things that's not being hyped up at the show that certainly is popping out as is integration and data sharing. We talked to the marketing cloud folks, we talked to the finance cloud folks, we talked to the retail supply, hospitality folks. Those once traditional vertical apps still need big data to be differentiated at the domain level. We have machine learning and AI and whether it's an IoT impact or not the same thing. But they also need to have access to other databases from other databases. Some retail, I need to know if someone bought something over here. So how do you balance the horizontal play with still maintaining the integrity of the app level? It seems like the past is the battle ground for this architecturally. Yes, yes, no, I think you're right. I mean, if you look at typically every application customers we talk to nowadays, they have many data sources and data targets and systems which are underneath the covers very, very heterogeneous. And when we build a platform, we want to make sure that it is a heterogeneous support, right? So I can write from any database. That's built into the design. Into the design and it's already supported today. I can write from Oracle, DB2, SQL server, Hadoop, NoSQL into again similar kind of backends. Again, Oracle or non-Oracle, we don't care really. We want to be able to support your infrastructure the way you have invested in and be able to move the data. So when the application should be agnostic of in terms of what you're using underneath the covers and the platform extract that out for you. So we have products and services. Today we have offering in the cloud for something called big data preparation, right? Which allows you to take data sources from any kind of sensors, spreadsheets, databases, process that, do the data wrangling, prepare that information and write it into a big data lake. Could be running Hadoop. Could be running Oracle database in the data warehouse. Could be running on Amazon if they want to, right? And we don't really care that. So your strategy is to offer services on top of the core functional building blocks. At the same time, differentiating on abstracting away the component level complexity. No doubt, yes. I think we want to make it as simple as possible. There are things which we want to expose. We want to provide APIs for anybody who wants to really play around with things. We want to provide them also low level capabilities that they want to get into that level. But we do also abstract it out for like, as you talked about, developers who don't want to have to learn everything every time, new capabilities, and we provide that abstraction. Do you see tooling? Obviously tooling drives a lot of innovation. Do you see certain toolings becoming standard, not being abstracted away? Could you comment on, share some color on what tooling will always be around? I think the tooling, what I've noticed over time and I think it's probably going to remain the same. Every developer has a favorite tool. And we want to give them the choice to pick their favorite. I don't think so they should be, from the tooling perspective, we have to make sure we can support every kind of programmer or developer in terms of how they want to write the code. As long as I can provide an interface to it, an API, or some kind of abstraction, and then the developer can go at it. I was a developer and I had my favorite tool, and I still use VI. Yeah, he said we'll say, I'm a VI guy, Emax world will go crazy. It's okay, I mean, why do you do that? Did you see that VI got an upgrade after like how many years, 35 years? Was it? It's still amazing, right? And people use it and that's fine. We're going to get into the VI, Emax war. I meant, final question, just I'll get a wrap up here. Thanks so much for spending the time to share the insights. We have a whole segment on VI versus editors. But the plans going forward, can you share any insight in the priorities, what you're looking at from a product, and PNL perspective, obviously the revenue growth, you want to drive more of that, but what are some of the fundamental priorities for you? Any events you're doing, where are you investing your development and marketing dollars? A few things, right? You probably heard some of the things we're doing for helping developers learn how to use a platform, right? So we're doing a lot of training and code samples, as well as developer centric content globally. So that is one. Second thing you'll hear about is the ability to kind of run our platform, both on-premise and in the cloud, right? So where the customers can choose where they want to run it. Be able to run it on the data center of the choice, as well as they can get the benefit of running in the public cloud, depending on the regulatory requirements, whatever it is. So you can see evolution of that, where all of the platform we have in the public cloud also available to customers to choose. The flexibility is a big, big important part for a lot of enterprise customers. So they're getting to choose that. You're going to continue to do that. 100%. I think it's very, very important that they should not be tied into one, and they should be able to move away if they choose to, not be locked into one way of doing things, right? And third thing we're doing is we're really bringing together a lot of our infrastructure, platform, and the software as a service offerings, very close and close together as an integrated platform cloud, right? Which makes it very easy for customers to consume what they want, but don't have to keep on making it all work together themselves. So integrate at will, whatever they want to compose. Yes. So that way at least we'll see a lot of functionality. You heard a lot of this week. We can't keep up with the amount of announcements we made, and you'll see something going on. I'll rephrase the question. So first of all, great answer, but I was looking for something else. How about next year when we interview you, looking back, what would you view as a successful year for your group? I think the success for us and the way I measure it is continued customer adoption and use cases evolution, right? So today we have around 10,000 plus customers. I would expect by next year we are growing at a very, very rapid rate, another 4, 5,000 customers more who are doing interesting use cases and going live with it. Great. That's a big success. Customers are ultimately... Keeping them happy and as long as I deliver the right things, they will be happy. You know, I always say, look at the scoreboard in sports and that's ultimately the differentiation. So that's going to be the benchmark. The KPI is the number of customers, happy customers. I'm sure Mark Hurd will have that on our next earnings report. This is theCUBE bringing you Amit Zayri's commentary, also analysis of Oracle Open World with more after this short break. We're going to wrap up live here at Oracle Open World 2016. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burr as you watch on theCUBE.