 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015. Brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Oracle OpenWorld for exclusive coverage on Howard Street where they shut the streets down in San Francisco for 60,000 attendees at Oracle OpenWorld. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm John Vellante, founder of Wikibon.com Research. Our next guest is Katrina Gossick, Director of Product Management at Oracle, Oracle Commerce with Chris Jutz, the Vice President of Development at Oracle. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, welcome. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. We just had one of your customers on. She called herself a small fish in her perception of Oracle with the commerce cloud, but yet that is the benefit of the cloud. There are no fish size discrimination. All businesses can use the cloud. I mean that obviously is the cloud. So great use case. Talk about that. I mean this is not, Oracle could be perceived. Oh yeah, we saw the big iron, big database for the large companies doing all this workflows. But now you have a small business that's growing and you guys are helping them with their business. That's just the technology. You're making connections with them. Yes, so one fun thing about Oracle is that working in the commerce industry, we serve some of the biggest brands in the world. But with our new cloud product, which was just released in June, we've been able to capture an entire new market segment. Businesses like Elaine Turner, we just heard from Carrie Leader. We're really helping them stay agile and kind of from the local market that they serve in Texas, really expand their audience globally, internationally hopefully eventually and really grow their brand to new audiences. We're really excited about that. What's the specific solution set that you guys are offering? Because again, we heard from her that she was so happy with the experience. But moreover she was early on with the program with Oracle team. I'm sure you're getting your requirements both on the business side and the technology side. So during that process this past year, what were those requirements? You guys are out in the field, listening to customers, what requirements are coming in and what's the table stakes and what's the minimum viable product that you guys are offering today and how does that extend out? Yeah, absolutely. So right now with Commerce Cloud, we're working with our very early customers, very closely with product management, product development, product strategy, really learning from them and their teams about what they need in the product, kind of how big their teams are, how they're using the product and additionally working with partners in Oracle, like CPQ Cloud to grow the product more into B2B as well. Yeah, and could you talk about that a little bit? Talk about when people start really thinking about automating that whole configure price quote process and where you guys met. So my focus with Oracle is on configure price quotes. So we actually, this product's about 15 years old at Oracle acquired it a couple of years ago. When we started the company, we were kind of lucky that we made the decision early on to make it a pure cloud based product which was kind of a lucky call in 2000 when we did that. But to your point, To build your own cloud. Yeah, so we created a cloud and then jumped in, yeah. But we, you know, we obviously started in kind of the small to mid market space and now we have a lot of Fortune 500 customers, you know, a Siemens, a GE for example that run a lot of installs of CPQ Cloud and what CPQ is really focused on is helping our customers sell more and sell faster. That's what we say. So we make their sales reps very productive to pull their products out to their customers, especially if they have really complex products that have complex pricing, lots of options. It's very difficult to get an accurate quote quickly to your customer. You want to do it quickly so you can win the business and that's what CPQ Cloud does. It manages all those complex rules and calculations to do that. And what's interesting about the commerce cloud piece is now folks have used CPQ in a direct sales and a distribution model. Now they're taking those same configuration models, they're putting them inside of commerce cloud and now going direct to the end customer. So they're taking virtually all the costs out of the transaction and that's what we're super excited about. So how's it working guys, go back 15 years but it's like I've done these things before and they're very complicated. There are so many permutations and as you say rules. So what do you have? A set of rules engines and a configurable software that allows me to build my own model or can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, definitely. So there's several pieces to CPQ. So there's a rules engine, a configuration engine that allows you to model really complex relationships often mathematically based. There's a workflow engine because a lot of these deals need to get approved from the VPS sales or legal. There's a document engine that allows you to build contracts, proposals. You know, manager has to get involved sometimes. Right, exactly. And then there's a whole financial calculation engine because oftentimes with these products, even if you're quoting, let's say a million dollars CT scanner to a hospital, the product configuration is complicated but the commercial aspects of that deal are sometimes even more complicated because they might lease it. They might do 50% up front. They might do 50% after a runoff in the hospital. And then there's custom discounting, ad hoc discounting. So all those things have to be modeled. And often the commercial aspects of the deal are harder than actually getting the product configuration right. So Katrina, it was great listening to Carrie. I mean, I didn't realize she's a 20 person company. She told us off camera. Really 20 person company? Yeah. And she says, yeah, we were surprised that Oracle was so responsive to us. But so talk about, I mean, your customers are all trying to compete with, you know, Amazon. And so everybody has an Amazon strategy, Amazon war room. And you're at the heart of that from a technology perspective. Can you talk about the trends in e-commerce and how you're enabling customers to compete? Yeah, absolutely. I think for customers like Elaine Turner, we just heard from Carrie Leader, I think their strategy is as a local business really to get more market share. And for them, other than putting stores up in every city in the US, which gets really expensive, online is a great strategy for them. And they need to compete against companies like Amazon. And as we take the product up market more into big retail and into B2B clients, we're gonna see that competitive force a lot. And I think the things that differentiate us against companies like Amazon is the fact that we can host the product in the cloud, but also provide market leading tools and merchandising capabilities, a fully responsive site that customers can really differentiate and build their own brand around their commerce experience. So talk about, do you guys have a marketplace and is that part of the core strategy? We integrate with marketplaces, but customers can leverage our product to become a marketplace, essentially. For themselves, but there's no Oracle marketplace yet. The key word, yeah, I can almost connect the dots. But that's interesting because her point was you guys came in and helped her, but more of you went to all of her customers and suppliers, have different use cases. So you guys are helping people connect and build marketplaces. She comes from an interesting space because she is a retailer and a brand, so they're leveraging the digital site to become kind of a bigger presence in the nation's eyes, I guess, kind of introduced to new markets, but they're also using it to sell online. So they're both a brand and a retailer, so they kind of walk both ends of the spectrum. So what they use the website for is also to market to their own resellers as well, to take the Elaine Turner brand and resell it in their own stores. And I mean, her story is not that uncommon, right? You've got a small company or even a large company that really doesn't quite have it right yet and they want to double the conversion rate. I mean, something as simple as that as an objective, but how does Oracle, and she literally said, well, we're relying on Oracle to help us do that. How does Oracle do that? Take us through sort of the capabilities that you provide and how that translates into that business objective. Sure, so as I mentioned earlier on, Commerce Cloud is kind of based on our core enterprise product, so it's got all of the knowledge from a decade and a half of engineering, product management built into it, all the merchandising capabilities, promotions capabilities, catalog management capabilities, transaction capabilities, kind of built into a cloud package. So we've taken that core engine code and kind of built a Rust API layer around it. So we manage the plumbing, if you will, and manage, make sure the performance is up to modern standards, make sure that the tools are easy for customers to use, and then the customers can make the site their own, really, all the customization is done on the front end. So Elaine Turner can look different from the other brands we have showcased this year at Open World Rock Creek, which is an apparel retailer for sporting goods, or Hollander, which is a betting company. So every site looks different. So end-to-end capabilities, you provide that and then I can customize it. Now, what's the relationship between CPQ and e-commerce? How tightly integrated are they? And talk about that a little bit. Go ahead. So we have a standard integration package to run between the two products. So it's literally, if you purchase Oracle Commerce and CPQ, you can turn that integration on. And for customers that are doing e-commerce but have products that are configured or lightly configured, they then, basically, we run inside of that commerce platform, utilizing the shopping cart that Oracle Commerce has in there. One of the things about the cloud that we love, and we've been covering the cloud since cloud was clouded years ago, is the standing stuff up fast. Pre-packaged software back in the day, when I was growing up, you buy a software package, you load it up and it's good to go, and then you do your thing. Cloud is the same way but faster, highly accelerated, easy to stand up. So one of the things that your customers have said to us here, Kerry said, was the integration was huge. So from an integration standpoint, obviously the theme of the show, integrated cloud, that really is going to be the sweet spot. So getting updates to the software, having integration is a key part. Can you give some insight into what goes on in the Oracle development world and how you guys look at that integration? Because we are living in an API economy. They want to push a real-time experience to their customer base, but they don't want to be a full-stack development shop. They don't want to build their own platform. And that's what makes these products difficult to develop. And that's one of the things that Oracle manages very, very well is that common integration bus or process form. Because, and that's the big benefit of sort of buying a lot of Oracle products, is they do fit together very nicely. You know, your total cost of ownership goes down with everyone you accumulate because you're not managing middleware, you're not worrying about an upgrade, breaking an integration process because Oracle owns that. We own that for our customers and that's a big part of the value proposition. But what makes cloud apps so difficult to develop well is because you want to keep everyone on the same code base but you want to let them personalize it on their schedule. And then at the same time, after they personalize it, you want it to be able to upgrade seamlessly. And that's what makes these products really difficult to develop. And that's where Oracle's very good at that. Let's talk about large scale because actually cloud has to be large scale as well because that's a big thing. So you got to have a large scale, high-performance thing system. And they're a smaller retailer and designer so they might not be the big fish in terms of volume but you might have huge retailers. So how are you guys scaling up the platform on the cloud? What are the scale concerns? What features do you have? How do you alleviate that concern of the flash mobbing? You know, the shopping, you know, Thanksgiving weekend or Christmas kind of phenomenon. Yeah, so from the commerce perspective, as I mentioned, the platform itself is built on the enterprise code. So we're not worried about scaling to- It's backward compatible. Exactly, so we've got- Or forward compatible to more functionality. Exactly, so you know, it's battle tested. We're not worried about transaction volumes or size of the product catalog or integrations. So essentially small retailers are taking advantage of that kind of enterprise grade platform in the cloud right now. And they pay for it when they use it. So this is the key cloud differentiator that people are kind of getting now mainstream which is, hey, here's an enterprise package for enterprise grade, but if you're SMB, small business and only using any price for that, but as they become Macy's or something, they'll pay more. Kind of a catalog engine that you can take advantage of, right? And what we're doing is growing the tooling over time. So over time, bigger retailers can take advantage of the same promotions, merchandising capabilities, catalog management capabilities for that end-to-end kind of commerce solution. The other thing that she talked about was this notion of customization, which you mentioned, which is what they want to do. They want to standardization, think it'll have benefits, but also do some customization. She teased out the developer angle. So what is that opportunity? And how would you guys talk to the market about that and to customers? Hey, you can hire developers, here's how the interface, and what are some of the specifics on, hey, I love the platform. I'm the stand-ups in commerce cloud. Thanks, and I got some other actual Oracle all over the place if I want it and grow, but I'm going to hire a developer team now to come in and bolt on a user experience tailored to my business. Yeah, I mean, I actually discourage our customers from hiring purely developers to manage the products. What we really, when our customers ask us, what kind of a person should I have to maintain CPQ? I tell them, it should be somebody that knows the business and is fairly analytical, and not necessarily a developer. I mean, obviously developers can do it and they're successful, but these generations of products, we like to try to avoid the word customization, we say configuration. So basically behind the scenes, you're flipping all these switches and buttons and adding diagrams and things like that to get the software to react the way you want. And that's more of a highly analytical persona to do that versus somebody like a developer. That's an interesting distinction because customization is oftentimes a bad word these days because it just gets you, locks you into this. It's not even possible. Cement's not even an option. So, yeah, yeah. On the core code, but on the UX stuff, I mean, they might have a website, right? Yeah, in the front end on the commerce side, every site can look completely different. Elaine Turner looks different from Rock Creek, looks different from Live Comfortably. So we can't manage the plumbing. So the tools and the transaction pieces and the catalog, but all the customers on the UI side can make the product really different. So let's take an example. Do you have a chat component or like a chat application? Through the service cloud. Okay, so they got to go there again. What if they want to build their own chat system? Using GoJS or something? The Oracle, the cloud apps marketplace that we have allows, we partner as Oracle with companies like PowerReviews who's here this week or other application vendors that enhance the product. And it's easy to integrate on the front end. So you can add all those capabilities through the cloud apps marketplace. You use your reviews, videos. So you are developer friendly through the developer program, not necessarily coming in retrofitting commerce engine. We give them pieces of real estate in the app that they can, if they really want to develop like a chat feature, they can put it in there, but it's contained and it's not something you have to use and that way it's fully upgraded. Yeah, you're not going to have mangled the source code. The developer profile is completely different. And you mentioned responsive earlier and I'm on Elaine Turner and it's beautiful responsive design. I love it. What about mobile apps? And what about mobile in general? It's interesting, that's a good question. Yesterday, during our forester did a session with us and talked about some key trends in commerce and mobile is no longer the nice to have, it's the key table stakes. I think we're moving towards mobile being 50% of transactions now and all of our customers honestly are moving towards responsive because it's easier, it's faster, any device can handle it. No one has to download an app. Single code base. Single code base, right. So we've seen the market. Web responses, just to clarify for the audience, web responses versus native HTML5 and or Android iOS apps. Yeah, I mean, we still do have customers who are very brand focused who do do native apps for specific kind of loyalty programs, but the trend is moving more towards responsive. I mean, sure, there are use cases for native apps, right? I mean, I like the fact. If you know your requirements. If I'm on an airline, like I like my JetBlue app because it knows me, okay. But in retail, you know, I think I just love the fact that it's responsive. Anywhere, anytime. It's so much more convenient than having to download the app. I mean, it really is apple-free. All the data we're seeing is on mobile apps, native apps, really it's a one shot deal. Users aren't going to come back for another app if you miss your target. So you've got to really be locked in 100% on the use case. I mean, there are some brands like... Which is hard to do. Who favor mobile app because it's a very specific use case for their customers and the customers who use apps tend to be more loyal or spend more money sometimes. But responsive is the universal kind of way to go. So that's your strategy is really to target the larger part of the market and put the innovation there as opposed to forking it with... 100%. We didn't have a choice with CPQ because often our configuration models are just too complicated. So you had to go that approach. We still have to do server-side processing but we make it look like it's a native app for the users. And mobile is something our customers have been doing for a long time. And what's interesting with mobile is a direct sales force is now using an iPad or a Surface device as like an interactive selling tool. So if I'm going to quote you, let's say a high-end copier with dozens of options, I'll just sit down with you and show you my iPad and we'll pick the options together. So it's become an interactive selling plan. Well, you'll hand it to me. So you go ahead, you pick. And in some cases they hand it to them and they give you a signature right there and close it. Well, we were riffing with your customer carry earlier that the holograms are coming in retail, all kinds of new... Yeah, I don't know. Cutting it just after that. Racial reality, drones. Who knows what's coming next, right? The basics is what we take care of. Oculus Rift could be fantastic. You like that, handbag? Turn over this selection over here. I'm going to imagine some great use cases there. So it's super exciting. But let's take that to the next level. Okay, e-commerce. I'm not going to say old term, but it's been around e-business back on the web days. Web response, totally good critical infrastructure. I got that. But now social business is now kind of the next wave. We're starting to see early days where the operationalizing of social data and you talked about some of the parts of the service cloud, the marketing cloud. This is a big part of it. So the persona, all the identities in the database. So as you move into social business, how is the social commerce piece been there? Can you guys just give some insight into the roadmap, the direction, what's shipping, what's available? If I say, hey, I love it. I want a hardened e-commerce infrastructure, which is the critical infrastructure. But now a new layer of social commerce is existing. What do you guys have to offer? Share some insight. So from an Oracle perspective, commerce cloud can easily integrate with our social cloud for things like shopping on Facebook or we're moving towards working with partners to create buy buttons for the key social networks, like Twitter or Pinterest, so that customers can buy from those applications as well. But then also integration partners like Power Reviews to do native user reviews on the commerce sites as well. So there are a couple of different angles. Is that a different group, a different product within Oracle? Power Reviews is actually a partner of ours, a technology partner of ours. They do user reviews, ratings and reviews. But social cloud, social commerce is not a product within your- Social cloud is part of the CX suite at Oracle. Okay, well guys, thanks for sharing any final thoughts on Oracle Open World. What's the week been like for you guys? Share some insight into what's been going on here at Oracle Open World. Well, this is kind of our Super Bowl, I guess you would say. So it's been, it's always a busy week, but it's a lot of fun. It's the best part of it is a lot of our customers are here and we get to spend a lot of time with our customers and that helps us stay close to them to make the products even better. Any major insights and revelations this week? Well, what's interesting, we had a lot of new customers come this year and they seem to be going live very quickly. So we had a substantial manufacturer pitch yesterday. I can't remember if I can announce their name or not, but they went live in three months. Their equipment produces everything from cars to cell phones. So it's a sign. Final thoughts? Yeah, it's been great because we launched Commerce Cloud in June and we've already got two live customers on the floor at the customer marketplace in Moscone. So we're really excited to see the momentum and great customers like Elaine Turner showcasing their products and helping them grow their business. Well, congratulations, standing stuff easy and doing the commerce, scaling it up, getting stuff up quick. This is theCUBE. We are live in Oracle Open World. Go to siliconangle.tv for all the videos and go check out our new crowd page. We agree, all the social data from our platform, all the videos are loaded on crowdpages.co-o-w-15. If you want to see what's trending, what the conversation is and see the videos are all up there right now. Go to crowdpages.co-o-w-15. We'll be right back with more CUBE coverage of Oracle Open World after this short break.