 The Cube presents On The Ground. Welcome to a special, exclusive Cube On The Ground here at Oracle's headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the host of The Cube. We're at Claude Robinson, Senior Director, Product Management for Converged Infrastructure. Claude, welcome to On The Ground. We're wrapping up a great day of interviews of thought leaders and experts here at Oracle from Big Data Cloud Machine. All this is kind of coming together under this Converged Infrastructure, software in the cloud, Big Data all kind of connecting in. What's your take on this? How do you wrap this up into a burrito? How do you wrap this thing up and put this together? Yeah, so as everybody said, Big Data is kind of one piece of a bigger puzzle. Customers are looking for a complete solution that they can plug in and actually just spend time running their business versus going out and building solutions internally. So the old model of going and picking a ton of pieces and vendors off the shelf, spending months putting it together, waiting six to nine months for someone to come back with data that you can analyze to run your business, that doesn't work anymore in today's world. And then we see stuff out there, OpenStack, we see SDN, we see all kinds of stuff in the cloud, you got Amazon. There's definitely a do-it-yourself culture out there. Certainly on the hardware side, people have been buying servers, buying storage. You guys provide this whole integrated solution, but you don't necessarily have to buy Oracle hardware, but you can run this on that. I mean, do customers have to buy all of Oracle? What's the ideal configuration for us? No, so basically customers have choice in terms of what they want to do. Again, the high level thing for the analytics pieces, they want to basically take that data and make a business decision out of it. And we're giving them the option of doing that where they want, when they want, and on what platform they want within Oracle. So if they want to do public cloud, they can't. They want to build their own private cloud on premise, leveraging our technology, they can. If they want to go with the old model of a converged system on premise, they can't. Again, we're letting them do that and say, system that's real easy, it works across all three areas and it's basically just plug and play. One of the things that's interesting about this big data appliance that we were talking about earlier today, and one of the things I think is attractive about it is that it takes the benefits of Oracle if you're an Oracle customer in Oracle database, you know what you're talking about, you know what you have there. It's got value, but you don't have to buy Oracle to connect to Hadoop. You can use open source if you have Spark or Hadoop. This is an extension strategy for Oracle, gives you essentially access to a bigger database business that's free anyway, but the customers get value in that. Is that part of the value proposition that you guys see as well? I mean, because it's not necessarily Oracle database, but you're enabling a connection to a free software. You guys understand what's going on here. Why is this important? So customers today can go out and build their own, but again, it's going to take 51 pieces and 100 steps and when we were little, we built models, that was great, but when you're running a multi-billion dollar business or a $50 million business, you don't have time to do that. You want something that you can basically take and plug in, and so what we've done is gone out in support of these open source configurations that customers are using to run their business and we're giving them the powerful tools that Oracle builds that plugs into data to make that happen. So talk about the interviews we had this morning, up and down. So we had a diverse group of people. How would you describe the set of interviews that we had today from an expertise standpoint and subject matter? Yeah, so most of these folks are the thought leaders at Oracle and in the industry around big data. You saw things that were basically related to hardware. You saw discussions around trends that are happening with the internet of everything or the internet of things. You saw folks talking about what's happening and what customers want in terms of data labs or data lakes. So you saw kind of a large representation of expertise within Oracle speaking to the various pieces of big data. Converged infrastructure was a term that's been around for a while, but it certainly played out exactly when it first came out, people were like, oh, converged infrastructure. We're seeing that same kind of convergence happening at the data layer. Is that, do you guys see that thread connecting with customers? Are customers getting at that concept? And we heard things like data lab, data factory. I mean, there's almost a converged data infrastructure going on too. I think customers get, I think the old model of converged infrastructure was, hey, let's simplify some of the hardware components. And there was a big piece missing, which was, what are you doing with that hardware? Is the software pieces? I think the real converged infrastructure that Oracle is bringing to the table and what customers are saying is, it's a complete package. It's not only the hardware, but it's the entire software stack as well. Because in the old model, if you have a converged infrastructure with hardware, what are you going to do with that? You need software components on top of that. So you're still kind of, you know, building your own with VMware or others off the shelf. Now you don't have to do that. One of the things that people are saying in the marketplace, and you know, we're seeing also on theCUBE with theCUBE coverage is, Oracle is actually thinking about the hardware performance in context to the software, the database primarily, and then up the stack. What's so important about that notion of thinking about the performance of the hardware tied to the software, both Oracle and non-Oracle? You know, I think if you look back at kind of the old mainframe days, if you could basically have a hardware system and a software working together and designed to work together, you have the best system, best of breed. I think, you know, because there were missing technologies back then, we moved to this kind of open client model, we would kind of have hardware, you would put some third-party software on there and you would try to configure it yourself to make it work. You know, most companies would actually prefer if that system arrived ready to go. So we're kind of, in some ways, we're taking the best of both roles, the best of the optimized system from the past with the ability of, you know, that configuration methodology and technology that we have nowadays, both a system that basically provides you the best of breed. Claude, thanks so much for spending the time with us today and appreciate letting us come in and talk to all the experts here on the ground near an Oracle headquarters. Thank you, John. I'm John Furrier here on the ground for exclusive coverage of Oracle, pre-Oracle Open World and also getting all the thought we use around data, data capital and all data management on convergent infrastructure. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.