 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX Conference, hashtag Modern CX, it's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, SiliconANGLE, my co-host Peter Birch for the two days. Our next guest is Ron Corbett, sir owner and CEO of Relationship One. Back again from last year and it was one of my memorable interviews last year. Welcome back. Thank you for having me. To theCUBE, we went down in dirty last year. I remember we were having a great conversation about ad tech and essentially if you take that videos on YouTube and look at it, I guarantee you it's going to play right into what happened this year. So again, we predicted it. We didn't say AI, but we did say we're going to see data really driving and that's what Oracle ended up locking in on data. Yeah, absolutely. I mean data is going to be the underlying conversation for the next few years, right? So we spoke a lot last year about MarTech stack and actually MarTech and ad tech kind of colliding coming together. And all of that is being fueled by the mass quantities of data that we have as sales and marketing folks out there to leverage and how do you use it? It's never about, do I have enough data? A lot of times you feel you almost have too much but now how can you use it appropriately? We were talking before we came on camera here about that dynamic of ad tech and MarTech collision we were talking about last year. It's interesting, if you just say digital end to end as a fabric, then you can still talk about these pillars of solutions, but they're not silos. If you look at the holistic data approach and say, hey, if we're going to have horizontally scalable data which we want frictionless, less than 150 milliseconds responses they want to promote, you can still do your pillars, but be open to data sharing. Versus, here's my siloed stack, I do this, I do this, that's shifted and that's what Oracle's main news is here. Yeah, absolutely, so I think what you're seeing, even in not only Oracle, but at an organizational level, people are kind of taking a more holistic view of data that they own and data that they can enrich with external information, right? And how does that information then fuel all of these other areas within customer experience, right? So within the CX world. So how do you use that to provide better service? How do you do that? Use that information to optimize your sales efforts and from a marketing standpoint, obviously, my background is how do we leverage that to optimize our spend, optimize our communication, our orchestration, all of those pieces that all comes down to that common language of data that we have access to? So about the real time aspect, because we teased on it last time, we did talk about how to leverage some of the advertising opportunities and the role of data in real time. That's been a message here from batch to real time. So the consumer's in motion all the time depending upon their context. Yeah, well, this is kind of the evolution of what we're seeing in the technology, right? Because historically you've built a campaign, you've maybe created some type of journey or persona, you're building content around very specific elements within a life cycle structure. Life cycles are not linear any longer, they never really were, but they're definitely not now. And you have to adapt very quickly. You have to kind of, you know, yet leverage technology to say, what am I saying, communicating in what channel, but in more in a real time thing, right? You have to look at what was the last thing that individual did, the activity, all of that. Historically you haven't had that depth or degree of real time list, you know? It's been more kind of structured cadence. That doesn't exist, right? That's not going to exist going forward. And that's where things like AI, which I always hesitate to use that term because it's kind of the buzzword now of today, but tools that are more of that, you know, augmentation of how we do things, right? Leveraging the power of technology. That's going to change how we orchestrate things and how we communicate. So I'm just looking at your tweet here. I want to bring this up because you mentioned AI and we were talking about it. Thanks to all who stopped by my MME17, Modern Marketing Experience 17, little bit of a jab at the messaging. That's cool like that. Session on artificial intelligence. Loved all the support from my fellow modern marketers. What do you mean by that? Would you make a bold statement? Did you stand, did you have courage? Did you stand tall? Did you call out AI? What was the conversation there? Well, I called out kind of the silliness of the term AI. So I picked on that the marketers, but I picked on the term. So we as marketers, I call them the squirrel moments that the marketers were always kind of onto the next thing, right? And I did, I kind of reviewed the past eight, some years of these conferences and what were the topics, right? There were some topics that were transformational topics, you know, like how does marketing automation or organizational change or those type of things, right? Those are things that kind of stick with you. And then there are things that are more like timely things like predictive scoring and all of that. They're tactics. They're more things that I use as a marketer or salesperson. What I was picking on with AI is that it's the buzzword. It gets you funding. It gets you people in a room for a conference. That's great. But it doesn't do anything by itself. It's really an enabler. It's a pervasive thing that combines machine cycle and data. But you have to teach it. You have to, you know, incorporate it into your applications. And as marketers, ultimately, it's going to change our tool set to make it better. So it's more of kind of poking fun at the term. Yeah, yeah. And kind of- Well, we always say AI. I mean, I've said it on the QAIs, BS. Although I love a software guy. I love AI because it really promotes software that has been very nuanced. So IoT, machine learning. This is very geeky computer science stuff that's super cool. So anything that can take that mainstream in the software world, I'm a big fan of. That being said, I think the augmentation is the real message, which is, you can use machine learning. You can use software. Use some tactical things to make things better. You said it in our earlier segment this morning, which is there's a variety of things that you can automate away. Well, the thing that's, and you mentioned earlier, it's the ability that we now have the ability to collect an enormous amount of data that's relevant and important. And we now have the technology to actually do something with that data, but we still have to apply it. And there's a lot of change in this to happen. So the way AI is different from other systems is that historically systems, financial systems, software would deliver an answer. And it was highly stylized. And it was rarely a clear correspondence with the real world. So we closed the books. How much money did we make? There was an answer and it came from a set of data structures that were defined within the system. Now we're trying to bring in the real world and have these technologies focus on the real world and they're giving ranges of possible options. And that is kind of new. And it's good and it's useful, but it does not take the discretionary, the requirement for discretion out of the system. And that's why it's the augmentation. Well, Ron and I were talking last year about this, Peter, and I think you're getting at a trajectory that I've been saying for a while and this is kind of developing in real time here in theCUBE and also some of our commentary is the role of software development and DevOps that we've seen in cloud is moving into the front lines of business, meaning just there's techniques. You're seeing agile already kind of being talked about. You're seeing standing up campaigns. So language, I mean, you can almost go to the cloud stack and say building blocks, EC2, S3, Kubernetes, containers, microservices and apply that to marketing because there's a lot of parallels going on to the characteristics of the infrastructure, certainly critical infrastructure to new enabling infrastructure. So it's interesting that you're seeing marketers becoming more savvy and being kind of inundated. What's your thoughts on that reaction? Yeah, it's the evolution though. I mean, if you go back to, we as marketers have been using rules engines. We've been using tools like collaborative filtering. You go back to late 90s, early 2000s, right? When we were building recommendation engines and simple, that's algorithmic kind of stuff, right? No different than we're doing today with pricing rules and all that stuff. The difference is that you now have more power to do it. You have the ability to do it more real time and on the fly, you use far more data, right? Yeah, more computing car and more data, not only your data that you own, but data that you leverage from third party to really understand people. And you have a wider lens, right? Historically, you're making recommendations based on what you had in the cart or some other things that people had bought that also had that in the cart. That's different now, right? With this type of technology, this enabling kind of world, you can look at a lot more data points to kind of give you that. Peter and I was gonna say, the problem is that anything around AI requires a couple things, right? It requires, it is a dumb system. So AI- It's still a computer. It's still a computer. So everyone forgets that for it to work, it has to learn, right? So I have some friends who have built marketing tools on top of Watson, for example. It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours for it to actually start doing something, right? You have to train it. You have to know- But even the word learning and training is misleading in many respects. So, but because at the end of the day, it's software, but what is new is that it's being applied in richer, more complex domains. The recommendation engine used to be just for recommendation. Now we're using those same models and we're combining them and applying them to richer, more complex domains. Yet, ideally, the software's not getting more difficult to use. And I think what really makes this compelling is a software engineer, is that we're doing all this more complexity, but we're packaging it and making it simpler. I think that's the point of where Oracle's going and why they don't call it AI, right? They're using it more kind of at the micro- Adaptive, right? Because they're thinking of it at kind of the microservice level, right? They're thinking of like, how can we make these widgets of functionality to better the tools we have, right, to incorporate it into, to not make it so, you know, a jump forward in our tool set. It's just now an augmented component of what we do today. And it's almost a stack approach. We've got foundational building blocks and at the top is highly high-velocity, highly dynamic apps and you could argue we were talking that, you know, the CMO's going to be an app shop, essentially someday, but this begs the question and I'd like to get your response, both of you guys to weigh in on this, because this is kind of a question that I'd like to get on the record is, what is modern marketing these days? Define modern marketing because what we're getting at here is, to your point of the evolution, is we've seen this movie before, okay? Is it a replatforming? Is it a building block approach? What is a modern marketer? What does modern marketing mean? How do you execute that? Yeah, I think it's quick and nimble and adaptive. I mean, the whole point of modern marketing is that you're always kind of looking at how you can rethink, how you can optimize, how you can leverage technology to do things. It's not about, you know, replacing headcount, right? With a machine or a tool or tech. It's really about how do you leverage that headcount more effectively? How can you focus on optimization using those technologies? So modern marketing is, again, probably another buzzword, but just like modern sales, modern commerce, all of that. But it's really about how do you enable it with that stack to do better? So is it fashion or is it like, hey, there's a modern marketer over there. Look what she's wearing, here she's wearing. Or is it more technology-based that's got some fundamental foundational shifts that are being worked on or both? It's leveraging technology and it's leveraging data more effectively and creatively, right? And it's not being stuck with a prescriptive approach on campaign and orchestration and building, right? You know, it still requires strategy and all of that, but it's really how you approach it. So how you think it is. What's your angle? You know, that's a great question and I was, and that's why I giggled about it. I think you gave a great answer, you know. And, you know, many of the precepts of, the three key precepts of Avgel are iterative, optimistic, and empirical and it's nimble, quick, and, you know, you change. But to me, I'll answer the question this way. Modern marketing focuses on delivering value as opposed to the customer. To the customer, not back into the business. Now, it used to be that you would deliver into the business, you'd say, oh, we give you a whole bunch of new leads, we give you a whole bunch of this. And if along the way it created value for the customer, that's okay. But more often than not, it was annoying. And as customers can share their experience and share information about how they, how a brand engaged them, that gets amplified. Annoying gets amplified. And I think if you focus on, are you creating value for the customer, you also end up with a derivative element that you're accelerating leads. You have more visibility in where they are in the process and where they are in the journey. So I guess the way I'd answer it, it's not distinct from yours, but the idea of modern marketing focuses on creating value for the customer and the only way you consistently do that by being nimble and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I agree in the same thing, though, that a core tenant, if you will, of modern marketing is not only, absolutely, it is the value proposition. It's also making sure you understand the impact of the value proposition, right? The velocity to the pipeline, the impact on revenue, all of those things, right? And because if you're just, you know, if it's all about that value, which it has to be, right, from a customer perspective, but you're not doing all of the other pieces, you're not going to justify the spend, you're not going to get, you know, all of those pieces of- Let me see if I can thread the two points together, because what I'm seeing by listening is, you mentioned that, the main thing in my mind was the data, that's different, right? You're saying, okay, think differently, talk to the customer, and the value to the enterprise value is being created through a different mechanism versus just serving. Not really, not really. The fundamental focus historically of marketing has been what are we doing for the business? What are we doing for sales? We're getting- MQL. What's that? Now if we focus on, now if you say, well no, we have to create value for the customer in everything we do, then we get permission to do things differently. We get more data out of the customer because the trust is there. The customer is, we're allowed to bias the customer to the next best one. So I'm trying to answer my question, so I see that, your point. My point is this, the modern marketer is defined by doing it, the business practices it a little bit differently to achieve the same thing. By focusing on creating value, they have to do things differently and now they can- I mean, we saw a time earlier, they weren't using data prior. That's a little different. If you go outward to co-in to create value while doing the table stakes stuff. It's changing, strategically thinking different of how you do it, right? Creating that value proposition is very different and also being able to measure and optimize, are you doing it correctly? Is it having impact on the business, right? Most of my customers are not for profits, right? They actually have to show the final line, right? And impact, so, and all of that requires data and the speed and velocity in which we have to run requires tech, right? And they have to get gestures in the market with customers, they have that touch point, they can leverage that. But here's where I think we agree, modern marketing is not speeding up and increasing the rate and lowering the cost of doing bad marketing. No, no, I mean, that's kind of exact. And that's- Marker's point. Right, you can spend a lot of money to do bad marketing, that's, you know- Let's double down on our bad marketing. Exactly. Ron, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. Thanks for sharing the insights. It's always a pleasure to get down and dirty and peel back the onion on some of these things. Final question for you, what do you expect for the evolution for this next year? No, man, I think AI is going to be with us for a while, you know, just because it's the new buzzword. So we've got a couple of cycles on that. We've got- It reminds me of Web 2.0, what is it? Well, and then that lasted for a few years as well. I think over the next year, so we're actually going to see the benefits of that augmentation, right? We're going to actually see some of these microservices if you will start fueling some of the tools that we already have. You're also going to see kind of that further collision of ad tech and martech, right? Because everything's digital and the impact of what that means for us as marketers. I can't wait for the hashtag marketing native because cloud native is coming and that someone's going to make it up. I hope not. You did. You just did. Okay, marketing native, what does that mean? We'll do a whole segment on that. We'll get Ron to come in. Hey, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris here and I really keep getting all the action. Extracting the data and sharing it with you. Ron, thanks to Ron for coming on again, twice in a row, two years in a row. This is theCUBE. We'll be back with more after this short break. Hirshavek. People obviously know you from Shark Tank, but the Hirshavek group has been really laser focused on cyber security. So I actually helped to bring a product called Checkpoint to Canada, firewalls, URL filtering, that kind of stuff. But you're also an entrepreneur, right? And you know the business. You've been in software, you detect business. I'm struck that you get a lot of pitches as entertainment meets business. On our show, we're a bubble. We don't do a lot of tech. We're a bubble.