 Oracle is in the midst of an acceleration of its product cycles. It really has pushed new capabilities across its database, the database platforms, and of course the cloud in an effort to really maintain its position as the gold standard for cloud database. We've reported pretty extensively on Exadata, most recently the X9M that increased database IOPS and throughput, organizations running mission critical OLTP analytics and mixed workloads tell us that they've seen meaningfully improved performance and lower costs, which you expect in a technology cycle. I often say, if Oracle calls you out by name, it's a compliment and it means you've succeeded. So just a couple of weeks ago, Oracle turned up the heat on MongoDB with a Mongo Compatible API in an effort to persuade developers to run applications in autonomous database and on OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. There was a big emphasis by Oracle on acid compliance, transactions, and automatic scaling, as well as access to multiple data types. This caught my attention because in the early days of NoSQL, there was a lot of chatter from folks about not needing acid capabilities in the database anymore, funny how that comes around. At any rate, you see Oracle investing, they spend money in R&D, we've always said that they're protecting their moat. Now in social, I've seen some criticisms, like Oracle still is not adding enough new logos and Oracle of course will dispute that and give you some examples. But to me, what's most impressive is the big name customers that Oracle gets to talk in public, Deutsche Bank, Telefonica, Experian, FedEx, I mean dozens and dozens and dozens. I work with a lot of companies and the quality of the customers Oracle puts in front of analysts like myself is very, very high at the top of the list I would say and they're big spending customers. And as we said many times when it comes to mission critical workloads, Oracle is the king. And one of the executives behind this success is a longtime CUBE alum, Juan Loiza, who's executive vice president of mission critical technologies at Oracle and we've invited him back on today to talk about some news and Oracle's latest developments and database. Juan, welcome back to the show and thanks for coming on today and talking about today's announcement. I'm very happy to be here today with you. Okay, so what are you announcing and how does this help organizations particularly with those existing Exadata Cloud at customer installations? Yeah, the big thing we're announcing is our very successful cloud at customer platform. We're extending the capabilities of our autonomous database running on it and specifically we're allowing much smaller configurations so customers can start small and grow with our autonomous database on our cloud at customer platform. So let's get into granularity a little bit and double click on this. Can you go over how customers carve up VM clusters for different workloads? What's the tangible benefit to them? Yeah, so it's pretty straightforward. We deploy our cloud at customer system anywhere the customer wants it, let's say in their data center and then through our cloud APIs and GUIs they can carve it up into pieces into basically VMs. They can say, hey, I wanna VM with eight CPUs to do this. I wanna VM with 20 CPUs to that. I wanna 500 CPU VM to do something else. And that's what we call a VM cluster because in cloud at customer it is a highly available environment. So you don't just get one VM, you get a cluster of highly available VMs. So you carve it up, you hand it out to different aspects of a company. You might have development on one, testing on another one, some production sales on one VM, marketing on a different VM. And then you run your databases in there and that's kind of how it works. And it's all done completely through our GUI and it's very, very simple because they use it the same cloud APIs and GUIs that we use in the public cloud. It is the same APIs and GUIs that we use in the public cloud. Yeah, I was going to say, sounds like cloud. So what about prerequisites? What do customers have to do to take advantage of the new capabilities? Can they run it on an exadata cloud, customer that they installed a couple of years ago? Do they have to upgrade the hardware? What migration pain is involved? Yeah, there's no pain. So it's just, excuse me, it can take their existing system. They get our free software update and they can just deploy autonomous database as a VM in their existing exadata cloud system. Nice, okay. What's the bottom line to hollers? Our audience are always interested in cutting costs. It's one of the reasons they're moving to the cloud, for example. So how does autonomous database on VM clusters, on exadata cloud, a customer, how does it help cut their costs? Well, it's pretty straightforward. So previous to this customer would have to dedicated a system to either autonomous database or to non-autonomous. So you have to choose one together. So on a system by system basis, you chose, I want this thing autonomous or I don't want it autonomous. Now you can carve it into VMs and say, for this VM, I want that autonomous. For that VM, I want to run a regular database, managed database on there. So it lets customers now start small with any size they want. They could start with two CPUs and run an autonomous database. And that's all they pay for is the two CPUs that they use. Let's talk a little bit about traction. I mean, I remember we covered the original exadata announcement quite a long time ago and it's obviously evolved and taken many forms. Look, it's hard to argue that it hasn't been a big success. It has for Oracle and your target customers. Does this announcement make exadata cloud a customer more attractive for smaller companies? In other words, does it expand the TAM for ADB? And if so, how? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, our exadata cloud platform is extremely successful. We have thousands of deployments. We have on our exadata platform, we have about almost 90% of the global Fortune 100 and thousands of smaller customers. In the cloud, we have now up to 40% of the global 100, 100 biggest companies in the world running on that. So it's been extremely successful platform. And clouded customer is super key. A lot of customers can't move their data to the public cloud. So we bring the public cloud to them with our clouded customer offering. And so that's the big customer is the Fortune 100, but we have thousands of smaller customers also. And the nice thing about this offering is we can start with literally two CPUs. So it can be a very small customer and still run our autonomous database on our clouded customer platform now. Well, everybody cares about security and governance. I mean, especially the big guys, but the little guys in many ways as well, they want the capabilities of the large companies, but they can't necessarily afford it. So I want to talk about security in particular governance. And it's especially important for mission critical apps. So how does this all change the security and governance paradigm? What do customers need to know there? Yeah, so the beauty of autonomous database, which is the thing that we're talking about today is Oracle deals with all the security. So the OS, the hardware, firmware, VMs, the database itself, all the interfaces to the VM, to the database, all that is it's all done by Oracle. So, which is incredibly important because there's a constant stream of security alerts that are coming out. And it's very difficult for customers to keep up with this stuff. I mean, it's hard for us and we have thousands of engineers. And so we take that whole burden away from the customers and you just don't have to think about it. We deal with it. So once you deploy an autonomous database, it is always secure because anytime a security alert comes out, we will apply that. And we do it in an online fashion also. So it's really, particularly for smaller customers, it's even harder because to keep up with all the security, you need a giant team of security experts. And even the biggest customers struggle with that and a small customer is going to really struggle. There's just two, you have to look at the entire stack, all the different components, switches, firmware, OS, VMs, database, everything. It's just very difficult to keep up. So we do it all. And for a small customer, they just can't do it. So really they didn't really need to partner with a company like Oracle that has thousands of engineers that can keep up with this stuff. It's true what you say, even large customers, CISOs will tell you that lack of talent, lack of skill sets, they just don't have enough people. And so even the big guys can't keep up. Okay, I want you to pitch me as though I'm a developer, which I'm not. But we got a lot of developers in our community. We'll be at KubeCon next month in Valencia. Sell me on why a developer should lean into ADB on Exadata Cloud customer. Yeah, it's very straightforward. So Oracle has the most advanced database in the industry. And that's widely recognized by, you know, database analysts and experts in the field. Traditionally, it's been hard for a developer to use it because it's been hard to manage. It's been hard to set up, install, configure, patch, backup, all that kind of stuff. Autonomous database does it all for you. So as a developer, you can just go into our console, click on create me a database. We ask you four questions, how big, you know, how many CPUs, how big, how much storage? And say, give me your password. And within minutes, you have a database. And at that point, you can go crazy and just develop. And you don't have to worry about managing the database, patching the database, maintaining the security and the database, backing up to all that stuff. You can instantly scale it. You can say, hey, I want to grow it. You just click a button to grow it to much, you know, any size you want. And you get all the mission critical capability. So it works for tiny little databases, but it is a stock exchange quality in terms of performance, availability, security. It's a rock solid database that's super trivial. So what used to be a very complex thing is now completely trivial for a developer. So they get the best of both worlds. They get everything on the database side, and it's trivial for them to use. Well, if you're doing all that stuff, what are they going to do in their weekends? Code? That's how it works. Well, they should be developing their application and add value to their company. That's kind of what they should be working on. And they can be looking at all sorts of new technologies like JSON in the database, machine learning in the database, and graph in the database. So you can build very sophisticated applications because you don't have to worry about the database anymore. All right, let's talk about the competition. So it's always a topic I'd like to bring up with you. From a competitive perspective, how is this latest instantiation of Exadata, Cloud of Customer, X9M? How's this different from running an AWS database service? For instance, on Outpost, or let's say I want to run SQL Server on Azure Stack or whatever Microsoft's calling it these days. Give us the competitive angle here. Yeah, so there kind of is no real competition. So both Amazon and Microsoft have an app customer solution, but they're very primitive. I mean, just to give you an example, like Amazon doesn't run any of their premier database offerings in their app customer. So whether it's Aurora, Redshift doesn't run, just plain does not run. It's not that it runs badly or it's got limited, just does not run. They can't run Oracle RDS on premise. And same thing with Microsoft. They can't run Azure SQL, which is their premier database on their app customer platform. So that kind of tells you how limited that platform is when even their own premier offerings doesn't run on it. In contrast, we're running Exadata with our premier autonomous database. So it's our premier platform that's in use today by most of the biggest banks, telecoms, retailers, et cetera in the world, thousands of smaller customers. So it's super mission critical, super proven with our premier cloud database, which is autonomous database. So it couldn't be more black and white. This is a case where there really is no competition in the cloud of a customer space on the database side. Okay, but let me follow up on that one, if I may. So, okay, so it took you guys a while to get to the cloud. It's taken them a while to figure it on-prem. I mean, aren't they going to eventually sort of get there? What gives you confidence that you'll be able to keep ahead? Well, there's two things, right? One is we've been doing this for a long time. I mean, that's what Oracle initially started as an on-prem and our Exadata platform has been available for over a decade. And we have a ton of experience on this. We run the biggest banks in the world already. It's not some hope for the future. This is what runs today. And our focus has always been a combination of cloud and on-prem. Their heart's not really in the on-prem stuff. Like Amazon's really a public cloud-only vendor. And you can see from the result, they can say whatever they want, but you can see in the results. Their outpost platform has been available for several years now and it still doesn't even run their own products. So you can kind of see how hard they're trying and how much they really care about this market. All right, boil it down if you were. If you just had a few things that you'd tell someone about why they should run ADB on Exadata Cloud at customer, what would you say? I mean, it's pretty simple, which is it's the world's most sophisticated database made completely simple. That's it. So you get a stock exchange level database. You can start really small and grow and it's completely trivial to run because Oracle has automated everything within our autonomous data. So we use machine learning and a lot of automation to automate everything around the database. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. The best possible database starts as small as you want and is the simplest database in the world. So I probably should have asked you this while I was pushing the competitive question, but this may be my last question, I promise. It's the age old debate, it ranges on. You got specialized databases, kind of a right tool for the right job approach that's clearly where Amazon is headed or what Oracle refers to as converged database. Oracle says its approach is more complete and simpler. Take us through your thinking on this and the latest positioning so the audience can understand it a bit better. Yeah, so apps aren't what they used to, business apps, data-driven apps aren't what they used to be. They used to be kind of green screens where you just entered data. Now everyone's a very sophisticated app. They want to have location, they want to have maps, they want to have graph in there. They want to have machine learning. They want machine learning built into the app. So they want JSON, they want text, they want text search. So all these capabilities are what a modern app has to support. And so what Oracle has done is we've provided a single solution that provides everything you need to build a modern app. And it's all integrated together. It's all transactional. You have analytics built into the same thing. You have reporting built into the same thing. So it has everything you need to build a modern app. In contrast, what most of our competitors do is they give you these little solutions. Say, OK, here's you do machine learning over here. You do analytics over there. You do JSON over here. You do spatial over here. You do graph over there. And then it's left to developer to put an app together from all these pieces. So it's like getting the pieces of a car and having to assemble it yourself and then maintain it for the rest of your life, which is the even harder part. So one part upgrades, you've got to test that. Some other piece upgrades or changes, you've got to test that. You've got to deal with all the security problems of all these different systems. You have to convert the data. You have to move the data back and forth. It's extraordinarily complicated. Our converged database, the data sits in one place and all the algorithms come to the data. It's very simple. It's dramatically simpler. And then autonomous database is what makes managing it trivial. You don't really have to manage anything more because Oracle's automated the whole thing. So we've got a pretty good cadence going here. I mean, I really appreciate you coming on and give us these little video exclusives. You can tell by, again, that cadence how frequently you guys are making new announcements. So that's great. Congrats on yet another announcement. Thanks for coming back in the program. Appreciate it. Yeah, of course we invest heavily in data management. That's our core and we will continue to do that. I mean, we're investing billions of dollars a year and we intend to stay the leaders in this market. Great stuff. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.