 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. San Francisco, for Oracle Open World, this is Silicon Angles theCUBE, it's our flagship program. Where we go out to the events and extract the symphonoids with the number one live broadcasting at tech events. Here also CNBC and Bloomberg, a little bake-off. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Peter Burris. Our next guest is Yazdala, who's the head of HCM Cloud in Asia Pacific, otherwise known as APAC, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, guys. So thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it, because one of the things that we always talk about is the global landscape of IT and the globalization now is certainly impacting many things. On the cloud side, it's highly impactful. Regions, availability zones, things of that nature become part of a new infrastructure being developed. But APAC, in particular, China is the big elephant in the room there, is that the dynamics are different. High adoption of mobile, high adoption of cloud native, means the whole on-prem thing is not so much legacy, it's really growing differently. This teases out the global trend around what users want. They want content, they want stuff in format that they're used to, in this case, mobile. Can you share, take a minute to share the context of what HCM does, and how do you take HCM and make it mobile and cloud native? So I think that you touched on a bunch of really good things there and Asia Pacific, and when we're sitting here in the US we don't realize sometimes how massive it is and how diverse the cultures are. We have six separate regions in Asia Pacific, and you've got China up in the North, you've got India in the Southwest, they couldn't be more different. The, I think a couple of interesting things. One, HCM as a concept is relatively new in Asia Pacific, even amongst large companies, and so the idea that they've got to provide a separate set of services, software solution for their employees. Large companies will get it, especially the multinationals, but some of the regional players have never really thought about why they need to move from Excel to something that's more regimented. The other piece of it is that technology-wise, and almost all of those markets, the populations have leapfrogged, right? That's why their mobile is so much more advanced than ours because they didn't have an interim period. They went straight from landline to smart feature phones to smart phones. High speed internet too, big boom. Absolutely, I live in Singapore, I only am accustomed to 4G, like that's my norm. And I come to San Francisco a few times a year, and I'm, I hate it, I hate it, right? My signal drops roughly. So they're way ahead of the game in that regard. What's also interesting is because of that leapfrog effect, if you look at cloud adoption overall for us in APAC, more than half of our new customers are new. They've either never used Oracle before, in some cases they've never used enterprise software before, and they're going straight to the cloud. So they don't have a legacy issue of having to migrate from an on-premise environment to cloud, they're going straight from whatever their in-house system was to whatever's the most modern thing that we can offer, right? So that's a huge piece of it. The other piece that you touched on, which is a huge focus for us, is the concept of employee experience. CMOs have known this forever, that customer experience is paramount. If I could provide you a strong experience as a customer, you're more likely to buy. Employers, especially in Asia, are just kind of coming onto this, that if I could provide my employees with a really good work experience, they'll stay. They'll be more engaged, they'll be more productive. I'll make more money as a business as a result. And they'll be better to their customers. And they'll be better to their customers. Those are all statistically true, right? It's like 68% better customer service if you have engaged employees. So they're just kind of coming into that. There's cultural issues that have prevented them from really adopting that in the past. And so having the ability to look at technology to enable that, right? If you've got a platform that is your people platform, forget about human capital management, something that all your people use, and that you can use to help your people drive a new culture and new behavior. That idea is new to them, but that's what's really taking off. It's also kind of new to everybody in many respects. We've talked about it for years, but it never has quite matured the way we hoped it might. It still looks a lot like HR. Are you an employee? What benefits do you have? As opposed to we're really developing our people here strategically. Now, one of the things that Oracle is starting to do, and John and I were talking about this in the initial segment, is the idea that while Oracle's cloud announcements talking about bare metal, it's really its relationship with its customers through applications that are probably going to be a significant advantage in this whole evolution of the industry. Oracle's starting to bring people on board who understand those horizontal functions and use them as a vehicle for reaching out to specific classes of customers. Talk to us about it. That's a great point. And actually, I'm an example of that, right? So I've been with Oracle for about a year now. I don't come from big enterprise software as a background. I've been working in the HR domain for 20 years, always in HR services, but I think what Oracle is doing more and more, and I'm not the only example of this, is to find people and leaders who can come into the organization and be transformative, not just on the product perspective, but in the way we go to market. How do we talk to our customers? How do we stop selling technology to tech people and start selling people management to the HR leadership? How do we sell the employee experience to the people who are responsible for providing a strong employee experience in their companies? So that's a key piece of it. And you know, the other piece is volume-wise. You don't realize in a consumer world we're used to huge numbers now, right? I think Facebook has 1. something billion users per month and WhatsApp the same thing. Instagram the same thing. In an enterprise software world, especially at Oracle, we don't have billions of users, but I'll give you an example in Oracle HCM Cloud globally, we have 15 million employees of our clients using and interacting with our platform every day, right? And a crazy number, if I can give a big one, because everything that we do has a social and collaboration tool built into it, we are transacting I think 2.8 trillion social transactions per day on our platform. 2.8 trillion per day. 2.8 trillion. So think about that, because social and collaboration is built into every aspect of our cloud apps, every time you want to take an action, it's always going to be easier, just like in your normal life, to share it as a message, right? Rather than enter a document into someone's personnel file, you just add a quick note and you can do it from your mobile phone. So, and that's what's changing the behavior. It brings up the user experience and brings up another aspect called developers, right? So, one, social brings that organic data set, which was traditionally a top-down software model. That's right. Right, so okay, reports come in, evaluations, whatever, classic forms, a database. Now you have all kinds of new data coming in. That combined with the fact that developers are now part of it, where new features can be developed. We saw Larry Ellison doing the chat bot on stage. Again, it's kind of a sexy demo, he did business cards, I made a joke on Twitter, oh, who needs business cards? The world finds you these days, but people got a laugh out of that, but the point is that's one random example of someone could build the best how to get new business cards apps on the planet, and that might not come from Oracle. So, how do you guys enable this developer in HCM to be extensible? So, I'll give you an example, right? The challenge for us product-wise is how do we keep up with the same pace of change that we see in consumer technology, right? This is always going to be a challenge, but it's a goal for us. So, I'll give you an example. If we know that your phone has a million features on it that allow you to have a camera take pictures, also enter data, also save, also access the internet, right? Then when you come back from this conference, why shouldn't you be able to scan your receipts into an expense system with your phone? And why shouldn't it use optical character resolution to then immediately import all the data from that receipt, right? That, our product does that today. So, this is an example of us trying to keep up with consumer technology. To your point, how do we take that further? And in APAC, where we have 25 plus countries that we're working in, how do we then localize it to the individual markets? And that's where we want our partners and our developers to step up, right? So that they can start creating templates that can be used for multiple clients, not just for one. You see that as core of the strategy. Absolutely, it's one of the strong elements of the strategy, because if there's a solution to a problem that we have in Thailand and one of our partners has solved it, that's a template that they should be able to load up to the Oracle Store, the Oracle App Store. So localization, can't ask the localization question without being in Europe. You got to know that Europe, Asia, Pacific, how do you guys deal with that? Because China's China and you have other growing areas, like you mentioned Thailand, it's loading, it's mobile. So there's a few key things that are intrinsic for us. One is language, obviously. And so from a language perspective, our mission is to have as many languages as possible. We grow as our customer base grows, right? So we don't have every language in the world yet, but as we get to critical mass in certain markets, that's definitely becomes part of the roadmap. The second piece is regulatory. So we need to be abreast and in line with all of the data sovereignty laws and rules. We have to be in line with all the HR practices and regulations, they vary dramatically by country in Europe and Asia Pacific. And so that's also key to our development cycle. We're never going to release something that's not in line with the market where we play. Talk about the kind of scale customers get, because one of the benefits of cloud is that you have the same software that could run for a mom and pop, small, medium-sized business and large enterprise. Yet you guys have a nice ratchet, I will say. I guess that's a word to use. Way to variably charge for more usage, but ultimately the benefits of the customer is what, the same software? That's what Mark Herd was talking about this morning, which is that on its own, cloud being cheaper is an excellent reason to move to the cloud, but that's not even the most important part of it. Because it's a subscription-based service, because we charge per user per month, because we ramp, we grow as our clients grow. We have, in Hong Kong, one of the world's largest banks is using some of our tools. At the same time, using the same tools is a textile manufacturer, a clothing manufacturer in Bangladesh that makes our t-shirts for sale in America, right? Using the exact same product. So if a banker is making a million dollars a year in Hong Kong or London, is using the same product that someone who works at a sewing machine all day long, to me, that's democratization of the solution. They're paying a similar price point, they're getting the same product. They may not use it to the same robust effect, but that's their choice. Final question, what could customers outside of Asia Pacific learn from some of the trends in Asia Pacific? That would translate. I mean, obviously cloud native is a trend you're seeing here. Again, Peter and I were talking about it with Matt Eastwood. The customers have to change how fast they can change will be a function of getting out of their own way, if you will. But if you could take a data point away from the Asia Pacific success, is there things you could point out that? Absolutely. So in North America, we love to talk about mobile first. Oh, we've got a mobile first design philosophy or companies will talk about how they're only going to build an app. They're not even going to build the desktop version. In APAC, that phrase doesn't exist. Everything is mobile first. People don't own desktops. It's a tablet and phone environment. I've seen a 14-year-old girl in a food court holding like an iPad mini up to her ear, because that's her phone. The behaviors are completely different. They're living in some sort of futuristic world of 4G everywhere, even underground. And I use a seven-inch screen as my telephone. Everything in Asia is about mobile first. And WeChat is a huge driver of that. It's something that we don't even talk about in the US. WeChat is, if they could get away with it in the US, they would do it. Foursquare and Messenger and WhatsApp and YouTube and Econ platform and everything, Tinder rolled into one as one app. And it is the de facto platform, especially in the Chinese speaking world, that everyone's using. If you aren't adapted to that, adapted to that, we integrate well with WeChat. You're missing the boat. Some of the things we talk about on theCUBE all the time, it seems, sometimes things seem weird now. Like people holding an iPad up to take a video at a theater or a movie or a concert. But now, can you imagine how weird it will get with virtual reality? We're gonna be walking around with headsets. People are gonna be walking around looking like this. We're already seeing that with Facebook 360. Yeah, and with all the drone stuff, a lot of companies getting started around the self-driving cars, what you can bump into. So we might be walking around like Darth Vader, you know, NASA on. I mean, is that, is any of that going on in Asia right now? The virtual reality stuff kicking up pretty strong? So we are seeing a lot of adoption of, just anecdotally, I can tell you, living in Singapore, I've seen people flying drones in morning, noon, and night. Pokemon Go is epidemic, as they say. But, you know, bringing it back to HR, Pokemon Go is a great example of this, right? We were just talking about this at an event a few weeks ago. You're right, walking around mindlessly looking down at our screen is becoming a new normal, unfortunately, I think there's some safety concerns there. But, put it in an HR context. If your first day of work, maybe you work at a bring-your-own-device company, maybe you don't, they slide a phone over to you and they say, open the app. They'll see you in four hours, your onboarding begins now, and you pick it up. And now you're in a Pokemon Go environment, but instead of catching all those weird animals, you're trying to find your next meeting, right? And so you've got an interactive 3D map of your office and it says, now go find the benefits guy. Now go find the person who's going to be your onboarding buddy. It's like conference space. Go chase the surge for the conference room. Just opened up. Exactly, exactly. I mean, but this is the new software model. This is not a top-down driven. It's really thinking about the user experience at the center of it. For us, a huge push is what can we learn from consumer marketing? What can we learn from consumer and customer experience and bring that to the employee experience? Because their expectation is to have at work what they have at home. All right, final, final question. What is the biggest change in HCM that people aren't talking about that's on the horizon or happening now? It is on the horizon. We are starting to implement pieces of it, but I think health and wellness is a key piece. And I think especially in a health cost market like the U.S., where every company wants to reduce their healthcare costs, it'll become huge eventually. But in APAC, where I think adoption is usually a little bit earlier, if somebody wears a Fitbit and somebody uses an HR platform, we integrate with Fitbit, by the way. I don't think it's too far in the future. I also don't think it's far-fetched, even though it sounds big brother. For an HR department to say to its banker, hey, you give a call and say, hey, your pulse is 152, we checked your calendar. We know you've got a $2 million deal at three o'clock. Locks. And we want you to calm down. Take a happy pill. But then you take it a step further and you say, so what we've done is we contacted your manager. I've also got the nutritionist on the phone and she has the inventory of your pantry. She's going to recommend what raisins and nuts you need to eat in order to chill. We've got a visualization coach on the other line who's going to bring you to your happy place. And then your manager's going to give you a call and by the way, you're going to crush it at three o'clock. Totally agree with you. In fact, that's one of the reasons why we call, we talk about the internet of things and people. That's right. Where, in many respects, virtual reality becomes an actuator for turning insights from ACM and other things into advice and recommendations and specific guidance for people because at the end of the day, value is still created by people. And you know, everybody has a tendency to look at something like that that sounds dystopic and say, oh, that's the advent of the Borg. That's not what's going to happen. It's always more gradual than that. People are starting to wear smartwatches. They're starting to wear FitBits. We're starting to integrate. All these things will happen gradually and we'll be comfortable with it in a weird way. Yeah, it's great conversation. Peter, that's great to get that research agenda item out that we're doing really relevant to this conversation. It's about the people. It's why we love theCUBE. Interviewing with the best people. Thanks for sharing this great insight about ACM and Asia Pacific. My pleasure. It's nice to meet you guys. At this CUBE live here in Oracle of World in San Francisco on the show floor. Biggest booth in the area. That's the CUBE. We'll be right back with more of this short break.