 Live from the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, it's The Cube at Oracle Open World 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor Cisco Systems with support from NetApp. And now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. You are watching The Cube here live in San Francisco on the ground, on the floor, inside the Cisco booth, and also inside the CubeLogic, where we have two Cubes running today. This is SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program at The Cube. We're out through the events. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, Joe Jeff Frick, co-host and GM of The Cube. And we are excited to have our special guest here, Dan Hutchins, the CTO with CSC, great consulting firm, changing the game, building your own clouds. Welcome to The Cube. Thanks very much, John. We really appreciate it. So a couple of things we want to do is we want to one get your perspective of our new product out of the crowd chat venture we're in public beta with. You're one of our early adopter power users using it. But also this trend that Larry Ellison teased out on his keynote, that you could tell he was reading the script and it's not yet big, but certainly very relevant, the marketing cloud. You're seeing a transformation in human capital management, which is traditionally ERP and all that, CRM stuff, to this whole new crowdsource front end. And he's listening to kind of like hand wave, like Twitter and that stuff. So you can see they're not really ready. But he mentioned listening. And this is the computer science innovation happening in the cloud. So I want to get your take on this new kind of engagement philosophy and culture that's changing. What's your take on that? You know, we're seeing it too. One of the biggest things that we're seeing is that fundamentally, people have lives outside of work. And they have lives at work that are external. We're talking off a lot about what we call the outside end enterprise, which is really a recognition that the value chain within the enterprise has fundamentally changed. It used to be that you had everything that you needed inside of your corporate boundary. But in this new world, the transfer cost now is much lower from outside providers than inside providers. If you ever tried to do, you're not in a big company, but I got a bill the other day for $30,000 for a little bit of graphics work on a presentation. I'm like, really? And what we're recognizing is that that same internal transfer cost is playing out externally. And social media is certainly one of those areas in which, you know, by harnessing social media, we're able to reach far more people, both people who are employees, but also people who are customers and people who are, we want to be customers or want to be employees and engage them in conversations and use that to determine whether or not those people are really the right fit for the model that we're trying to move forward. So you mentioned that the graphics format, that's the data, right? The data is formatted in a way that caused, in that case, $30,000, which shows them beautifully. I mean, it sure was really probably amazing looking. But in the new channels, data is data. Data is the key value proposition. So sometimes it's not so much how it's presented, but it's actually the data itself. So what you're getting at here is with crowd sourcing and crowd spotting and crowd chatting, you can go out and get that done. There's an honesty in crowds, right? And there are people who are willing to be more open and honest externally, right? One of the things that we've done is that as we've undertaken our transformation, we have a lot of technical resources inside of CSE, right? We have about 46,000 technologists inside the company globally, right? With a huge basis of them, 22, 23,000 in India, for example. And we've had to overcome a lot of elements because it's really easy to project a message out in kind of the read only web, which is kind of, you know, here's Dan is talking, you know, figure up on the web. And here's what I have to say. It's totally different when it's unscripted and normalized and where people feel that the real truth is coming out externally. And there's just an honesty that comes with your external being willing to say and have conversations externally. Well, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. And I want to get your take for our crowd chat product out there for the folks out there, Dan's an early adopter power user of our crowd chat engagement container, engagement cloud, whatever you want to call it, since you have the tool that we built and spun out of separate company to engage the crowd instrumented, created transcript on the hashtag. So first, tell the folks, are you happy with it? What's your experience like? You know, we love it. We use it about once a month. I'm running a technology transformation stream. So like many things, we're planning six different work streams that are all like moving in the same at the same time to try to get towards objectives. And one of the problems that we've had is that with this very large number of people that are participating, and with the time zone challenges, it's really hard to have meetings that fit everyone's needs. And so yeah, we rotate around the clock. But the other thing that we pick up is the natural transcript of conversation. Because in in the transformational working groups, what's happening is that we're having we're bringing meaningful requirements together. We're making decisions based upon those requirements. We're constantly agile about amending those. And so using the crowd chat function allows us to engage many more people in the conversation, which hopefully means if you're gathering requirements from a lot more customers or employees, you're gathering the right requirements, you're able to focus. You have the transcript. So you actually have the record of all that. And then as you begin to move forward by doing it transparently as well, the engagement factor is much higher downstream as well. Yeah, and the hashtag gives you a built in advertising kind of navigation button where you can clip. Have you guys found that you've gotten people from LinkedIn because Twitter chats are just Twitter, but the idea was to have this multiple network overlay. Have you had success with that? Absolutely. I mean, you know, we've gone a couple dimensions on this. So we typically start out our transformation streams doing an update. That update we're normally now doing on Google Plus, right on Google Hangouts, because that's one of the best ways. And then and then simulcasting on YouTube. And so we're kind of briefing the world on what we're doing. And then we're dropping back into the discussion. Right. Is it right? Is it wrong? Have we thought about X? Have we thought about why? And we're doing that across LinkedIn participants and and Twitter participants, given our population, right, we have a lot of people that are on LinkedIn, they tend to be more senior in their careers. And and and and to some extent, the more technically savvy are on Twitter, but having the bridge between the two worlds is actually really important for us. So I think I'm impressed with I want to get your comment on this that there's a lot of passive listening tools out there and you can always get all that data. But what you guys are doing is you're actively, you're investing in active conversations that you're you're harnessing. And then you got the not only the data for everyone to consume asynchronously, but that you get the data science behind it. So I got to ask you, is that going to be you going to do more of that? And two, do you think our business model of freemium and the paid data science is a good strategy? So so yeah, I think the data science is where the money is, right? The the collaboration tool is a means to an end, just like, you know, I expect everyone to give away sensors in order to pick up the back end telemetry. And I think that that's an important piece of the value proposition. For us, what's important is the engagement models, right? Anytime you're trying to affect change, what you're trying to figure out is who are the influencers? And so by being able to see who's engaged around what, where their sweet spots are, how they're engaging, who they're also engaging with, what their social network looks like, you begin to kind of peel back the onion on this, and you begin to recognize that that big data is incredibly rich that we can begin to harvest. What are some of the feedback you've got internally, people like, I don't know how to use it, the things like a Ferrari, they learned how to drive it, and then did it get going, do people like it? What's your general takeaway? So, you know, I see, I see a fairly standard approach, especially for people who aren't kind of social natives. And that approach is, well, I'm going to go and sign up for an account so that I can join. And I join and I kind of watch. And I might ask one question, or I might vote for people. And but, but then what happens if I think about it, and they get more comfortable, and maybe they talk to their kids, I don't know what happens. The next time around, right, they're a little bit more engaged. And the next time around, they're even more engaged. And so what's happening is we're watching the engagement metrics come up with key contributors. And one of the big challenges that I've been pushing is look, every employee is responsible for their own career. And, and so having something that you want to say in the marketplace is incredibly important and convincing people that this is a suitable forum, right, that in which it's really safe for them to go out and have an opinion, even if it conflicts with me or the executive management is incredibly important. And we have support all the way up and down our executive ranks for that. So Dan, I just want to follow up on that. That's a huge thing, right? So before people were inhibited by, you know, what's corporate, corporate marketing going to say, I got to run everything past them. It's all going to be scrubbed and tested and checked, which I think is really part of this presentation mode, as opposed to conversational mode, because I'm going to have this nice PowerPoint or PDF. I'm going to show it and maybe I'll take some questions at the end. How to, A, you as a company be willing to accept people maybe having slightly differences of opinion or just saying something stupid and then be really encouraging kind of mid-level people that, hey, your insight is appreciated and we're willing to let you take the risk to make that contribution, because we think the benefits outweigh the negative. It's a great question. It's tough, you know, being a global company, right? We have different different societies, you know, Northern Europe is different than Eastern Europe is different than France is different in the UK than different from the East Coast is different from the West Coast, just the social and social norms are just different and how they expect to interact with their employer and the relative power of a manager or not is still a hard thing for anyone to manage. But the most important thing is we sit here and talk to employees as being fully empowered no matter where they are, whether at the top of the company or at the bottom of the company and there needs to be a corporate imperative that transparency is to be expected, right? And then asking a question, right, so long as it's in good taste, right, is appropriate, and that quite honestly, in that same notion of empowerment, you know, you have to take control of what's appropriate and not within the form in which you're participating. If you know that it's open, which they all are for us, then you need to be a little bit more careful. And sometimes we do have sidebars and that's allowed too. So we're we're we're not being thoracocratic in any way on this work. We're just trying to say, look, be responsible. Yeah, you mentioned also you mentioned also that prior to what we're going on, you mentioned that your public opinion is more is the truth. And there's a lot of sidebar private conversations. That's a huge cultural leap. I want you to expand on that and share the audience, your perspective there, and how that's been received internally. And two, what have been some of the dynamics when you're out in the crowd? And I'm talking about in the crowd, not about like, not as a crowd chat, but like when you're out in the open with us, hangouts or crowd chat, not necessarily in some forum app, like a chatter app on Salesforce, or something that's in a predefined system, right, out in the wild, representing in public. What's the dynamic there? The dynamics is certainly interesting, right? I mean, you know, I still, I would bet that two percent of my tweet traffic is private, right? It's DM, not public, right? And that's okay for me. But what I've really noticed is that people tend to trust me when I am willing to say something externally. And this goes for our partners, right? Like Oracle and EMC and Cisco and our other partners, right? If I'm willing to say something in public, then it's probably the truth, because I've said it externally and so I'm now accountable for it. And accountability really comes down to everything. Versus if I say it behind closed doors, there's a well-known culture of pocket vetoes, or I didn't say that, he said, she said, and accountability's lost. And I think what all of our employees are looking for is that transparent, accountable leadership. And that's really what I'm trying to bring forward, because if you really want a team to come together and be cohesive, you have to have that transparency as a team. You have to understand motivations and you have to be willing to put yourself out there. And if you do that, other people will do the same. And what you find is then an open culture where people question things and we know what happens with open cultures, right? They're right far more than they're wrong. I mean, crowd sourcing is total step. Yeah. And you also get the data sourcing on the content piece of the act. And the also interesting dynamic is this reason our conversation check about mobile infrastructure with virtual workforces by flushing people out of these common spaces, these public spaces that are essentially virtual, but yet public. An interesting dynamic is they have it's self governed. This is the classic self governing model of, Oh, boy, I can't say something stupid or throw a haymaker at someone unless I want to be prepared to defend it, right? Or take it in the shorts. But that's that's leadership, right? That's accountability leadership, right? Is that I need to set an example, which is that, you know, I'm going to have points of view. I'm going to put them out there for debate. And I need to be prepared, right to to deal with the consequences of that. And that's okay. If I sat here and said, you know what? Flash doesn't matter in this new world in which, you know, we have append only data. Well, then by golly, you know, then take it to me. I'm not going to say that to you because I think it's wrong. But you know, the fact that matter, you have a point to bend it out and take it out of context. Yeah, absolutely they will. And that's the problem, right? And here the context is public. And so someone else is going to call them out. This is what we don't do enough in data science is this notion of peer review, right? We learned about all these benefits of pure oriented programming, right? And we kind of said, ah, you know, but but now what about peer review on data science? Yeah, right? So if that gets done publicly now, funny, Jeff was there and we created the crowd captain title, which I basically invented because I needed another Twitter handle. But now we have a top vote. Top vote is the crowd captain. So what's interesting is that brought up a peer mechanic game mechanic with peers that said the votes themselves, you can actually have a captain of the conversation. So if you think about it, you can be a captain of a conversation and be authoritative and be a leader and you can be a follower of a conversation and be a participant or just be consumer. So you can get a variety of personas. So I think one of the things that I'm super excited about, I think you're really doing a great job. I appreciate you have the testimonial inside is that it's the persona at the individual level that changes in context to the situation. Absolutely. The behaviors change in context to the forum that they're in. Well, what's really interesting means that to play on that, right? Well, we're looking for me. Look at platforms like Smarterer, right? We're in this position in which we're really trying to gauge the expertise of employees against specific topics, whatever those are. And it's important to understand who your leaders are in key areas. For people who are more junior in the organization, it gives them the opportunity to be much bigger than they are in certain areas that may be more valuable to the company in the future. And here you're going to be able to attract the progression of people. You know, and these are important. This is the cloud score thing really kind of screwed it all over because the cloud scores about who's the best blogger or the most active. When in reality, the most authoritative person from our data we're seeing across all the chances, like you mentioned, there's a pattern. They're lurking, and then they might jump in, get their feet wet, but it's the person that might not have the highest cloud score rating is actually the one with the most quote cloud in any given vertical, right? Because just because they tweeted a few times doesn't make them less authority. When you go through the microsegmentation, right? Because just saying, Hey, you know, it's about cloud or it's about big data, right? It's like total washing. What you want to know is like, who's my HDFS, you know, high availability master, right? Who's the one who jumps in and eats apart, you know, NetApp or EMC when they make claims about HDFS performance, right? Now, all of a sudden, like, I know who that person is. And that's incredibly valuable when you get into the micro segmentation that's certainly now possible. Use the deep analytics. So final segment on this and we'll move on to the next one for the folks out there shared them in your opinion, whether it's an investor or a potential customer crowd chat, what they should why they should use it, use the freemium and or adopt the crowd chat model. I think it really comes down to it's really a open platform of engagement and you need the platform of engagement in order to capture the information, but you're not using the engagement platform in an unmanaged way. The really important thing is to have a goal in mind and to kind of judge your position against that goal requires the analytics. So for me, being a goal oriented person, I want to know what the analytics are and how I'm closing in on my goal. And so I need the engagement platform to collect the data, i.e. that's my sensor, right? But the really important data is actually in the big data store behind it that I'm using to actually find the right kind of operational tweaking of my model to get me to that goal faster. Appreciate Dan. Now let's talk about Oracle because Larry kind of talks about big data. It's we bundle it in with everything. He said that as Kino yesterday. We include it into the system. Look, he includes big data. Okay. Well, that's cool. Big data is everywhere. You're great. Harnessing data everywhere. Whether it's marketing cloud or human capital management or whatever system, you're seeing kind of the stuff that you've been working on at CSC around orchestration of the cloud as a key enabler. So what you're talking about the trend that kind of teased out by Oracle, but is really more broader across the board, which is a consumption model is changing for the customer. I have diverse infrastructure and systems. Yep. I have new software architecture coming in on top of it. What does that mean for a customer? And you guys work with a lot of top customers, explain to them kind of what the bottom line is. Obviously, it's not always, it's not a one Oracle shop. It's not a one SAP shop. There's not a one EMC shop. Yeah. There's right everything. What does this all mean for orchestrating it, managing it, all those things that you guys are building out? Well, you know, we're kind of moving in the same model as cloud chat around how we actually operate and manage diverse hybrid clouds, you know, complex infrastructure. Because, you know, one of the biggest problems an integrator has always had is how do I actually, how do I actually integrate the control plane, right? In such a way that I can deal with the natural diversity in the landscape? Or how do I actually reason over complex log chains? Because I've got operational logs flying in through my cyber side. I've got them coming in through my infrastructure side. I've got app logs coming in. I've got my service mesh logs that are logging my hybrid cloud apparatus. And so we're using big data really, really aggressively, but we're having to really perform a tap on the data. So existing systems like... What do you mean putting a tap on the data? So what I'm finding in big data is that they're really a fairly standard set of enterprise integration patterns that we've been talking about for years, right? And they're about 25 integration patterns. And there are really two key strategies. The net is that we're creating service chains. You know, you're kind of putting a collector and then a transformer and then a processor and then an enricher and then a linker and then a, you know, and you begin to link up these things. And ETLs, right, are a traditional way that we used to kind of build these, but they tended to be fairly static and they tended to be kind of batch oriented. And not flexible. And inflexible. But, you know, in application design patterns, as we move from gang of forward and now enterprise integration patterns, there's this element of a tap and a tap is basically what the government does on your telephone lines, okay? Which is I listen in. And I don't just collect summary data like call detail records that there might be a value to a system manager, but instead I actually include packet data because I may actually find deep insight in the packet data that's flowing across some of which may be having problems coming across the line for whatever reason. And by doing that across multiple system boundaries and then putting our analytics on top of that big data platform, we're able to find brand new insights about systems, why they aren't working, how much they really cost to operate, which systems are actually integrated that we didn't know were integrated. All of these questions have been really, really hard questions. And I think that big data is a part of everything. And by the way, the security holes are like Swiss cheese. I mean, seriously, there's a lot of security issues. I mean, Jeff, we were talking earlier about people using the HVAC system coming in, getting admin rights. And once they get in, this perimeter-based security breach, it's over. It's done, right? Micro segmentation is the way that we have to go. Everything's going to have a new firewall on each compartmentalized piece of the application. We're going to, you know, move forward with every application being hybridizable so that I can literally take an application and move it around clouds in order to change its surface area. Because like a virus, right, it's looking for a binding site. And if I can move that binding site around a lot in the infrastructure, maybe I can deal with an obfuscation and get away from someone trying to breach me. They're everywhere. But the bigger thing is actually knowing how these different pieces are built and then being able to use query across how they're built. Right? Most people had heartbleed problems. Now they have, you know, bath shell shock problems. Right? But heartbleed was really hard. What did most companies do? They took, you know, all their integrator, all their administrators and they put them onto keyboards to log into systems to figure out if they had the open SSH package. And I'm like, that is the craziest thing I've ever seen. That's the first force. They've never got it. But, you know, if on install, every package had registered itself in a big data store and now I literally run a query and say, which systems are running open SSH? And I go one, two, three, seven and nine. And then I say, well, you know, what bundle were all those built from? Oh, it's bundles one and bundles three. So I'm now going to go in version bundles one and bundle three. Re-release, that patches automatically. I'm able to change the dynamic from days, right, to minutes. Yeah. And by the way, days to minutes on the window, but also the damage, the consequences to the infrastructure and cost is, I mean, you can't even quantify it's massive. So that's a speed game. Yep. So the second thing I want to ask you is, DevOps creates a lot of new engineering opportunities, which is good and bad, but I look at it. One is, is that developers are now coming in-house and in-house. So I want to get your perspective on this. Yep. Are you seeing the same trend we're seeing with enterprises onboarding in-house developers? Sure. Where it used to be CSC used to handle a lot of the development for the customers. Now, we want to see developers in-house, those are app developers, iPhone, putting stuff on, native stuff, maybe some native app, but basically mostly, you know, stateless applications through APIs. Yep. So that's a trend. Do you see that trend? And how do they do that? Because most enterprises haven't hired in-house developers since the mainframe days. Yeah. So it's kind of a mixed bag. So I want to say yes, I see more architectural control being brought back in-house, but I still see the town economy being pretty strong. And so I am seeing a lot of, you know, small targeted consultancies begin to come in with targeted skills to focus in. So it's forcing us to rethink our portfolio. It's not just about having a big infrastructure business. It's about having a big infrastructure business with, you know, 42 specialties within it, which I can literally point to the person and say they're the best in X and have that be really valuable to customers. I think customers still aren't set up for the most part to be double deep with their business. Right, to be deep technology experts, but also deep business experts. Right, DevOps is all about bringing the business and technology together. And most CIOs are not well, not really well vested in that digital leadership boundary that we're beginning to see attached. So- Yeah, and you need speed, so you mentioned the speed issue with the heart beam and the shell shop. So what are you guys doing? You guys becoming more of a provider for enabling them to do that? What's your- I think there's a piece of ecosystem builder that's in this, much like yourself, which is to say that having a trusted DevOps catalog that is full of componentry, that we have a known set of regulated entities that are accessing and contributing to with strong version control begins to create the basis of a next generation app store for the enterprise. This comes down to our blueprints. Service mesh, our agility platform has the notion of giving developers proven blueprints to start with. Now, not every developer is going to go, oh yeah, I want to start with a blueprint. I've seen this reuse game like over and over before. But what we do know is that there is a challenge still between getting something from development into production in a regulated enterprise. Right? Because there are policies and regulations that you have to conform. And so what we're seeing in our large- Especially global. Global is huge, right? Basel 4, it is incredibly cumbersome. And so what I need to do is create blueprints that have already been pre-approved through those regulations. And now as someone, as a developer goes in, I give some of the more powerful developers the right to override. But when they override, they declare what they're overriding. So now I don't have to go and check the whole thing. Now just check exactly what they changed. And that gives me even more agility. And so for me, it's going to be all about building up these blueprints for our enterprise customers and establishing an ecosystem so as our enterprises start building their own blueprints, I'm able to share them. Because that's a value economy in which there is really a transfer of value. And how do the vendors play in that? Obviously, the engineer systems of the Oracle says, you just gave the, you just gave your theater session presentation. Yep. What is the rule? Obviously, even C's had some success with V-Block. Yep. What's your take on this? Are they going to be actively involved? And... Well, you know, I think, you know, as software reach the world, right, infrastructure gets dumber. And I think engineered systems will still be very valuable. What we've done is we've decided to take a step forward in the economy, right? Which is to say, it used to be that we used to be the ones who felt that it was our charter to build engineered systems, whether it be a VCE or an Oracle engineered system. I think that's a mistake. Both those companies are putting billions of dollars into massively integrated portfolios. What I need to do is take a step forward and say, how do you use those? Right? How do you target those? How do you actually use the best of what those provided? By the way, that ecosystem doesn't end there. Right? I'm talking about Amazon. I'm talking about Azure. I'm talking about Rackspace. Right? In terms of my cloud portfolio, and all of these are competing for enterprise workloads. What I want to be is the best person to say the needs of your software are best met by this provider. Okay, so true or false? General purpose computing is dead. False. Okay. So, is general computing? There is general computing. Okay. What is still left that's called infrastructure as a service? It probably is. You know, let's go back. No, you bring up a good point. Back to the dark ages. Utility services. You need commodities that you can benchmark. But you also need to make sure that the commodities come forward and declare what they're best at. Right? Because everyone can be treated as a commodity, but some can also be best at other things. Yeah, so commodity would be fried. Larry brought this up. Pricing based. Yep. Cheap and available. A lot of competition. Yep. Be best. Red ocean. And then on top of that, that's where the differentiation comes in. Absolutely. And our goal, right, is to allow developers to make use of the differentiation, but to understand why they're locked in to that differentiated function, especially when it's sole source. So we do see our customers looking for increased contestability of infrastructure. And that really means figuring out what that new commodity model begins to look like. And then how to recommend and deploy the specialism in the right tool for the right job kind of thing. So you're not a hammer looking for a nail. At a minimum, what starts to happen is that all those decisions become visible. And for me, just to that point about transparency, visibility is what the CIO is looking for. They're tired of the pocket deals with partners that then get something that gets wired in. So I'm now in a proprietary platform in which I don't have which I'm sub scale for skill over time. And then so that's and the other point you made earlier I thought was worth capturing is using big data to capture in so you can identify the systems that may or may not be exposed to whatever exploitation, threat of reach. Right. Or even being able to reason on who's pricing tends to be trending in what dimension across the broad ecosystem. And so if I'm trying to make a forward plan in IT, a lot of people say, Hey, I've got a capital refresh in two years. I got to set the budget now. What should I set that budget at? Now, all of a sudden, once we begin to pick up that longitudinal record, I'm going to be able to pick up some real data that can be shared across our ecosystem around what systems in what geographies are trending towards what ratios? Well, you guys are way ahead of the curve. I got to say, CSC compared to the other firms out there are well ahead on the ethos of data driven. Congratulations. Really appreciate it. I'm not just saying that because you're a crowd-checked customer. I'm just saying is that big data from security to process improvement is changing. You guys are well ahead. Dan, thanks for coming over to you. My pleasure. Thanks, John. Dan Hutchins, CTO at CSC really changing the game, helping people figure out the future of this modern infrastructure, modern IT, modern cloud. You know what to call it. It's disruptive. It's changing the game. Of course, increasing profits and lowering costs. The Cube, we'll be right back after this short break live in San Francisco at Oracle Open World 2014. I'm John Furrier with Jeff for Who Will Be Right Back.