 live from the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. It's theCUBE, at the Next Generation Engineered Systems Launch Event. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here for a final wrap up of the Oracle Launch Event. We've been here since 10 a.m., going through and Larry Ellison's keynote at one, theCUBE, crowd chat, the whole team's been here, really getting down and dirty Dave on all the announcements. An interesting event, a launch event. Let's break it down. I think the key to success here is Larry Ellison made this happen. Yes. Very intimate event, small venue. Good. What's your ring? What's the scale? One to 10. You're a solid seven or eight, and this is good. I think my impression is John, that the event underscores that hardware is now software led, number one. Number two, to survive in this business, you've got to spend money on R&D and you've got to get that R&D into a product pipeline. And not every company can do that. I'll cite three companies in the sort of hardware, software led, even cloud business. First two, EMC and Amazon. What do they do? They announce their products rapidly. EMC's mega launches. And they actually ship them. Amazon, and they translate their R&D into products. Oracle is now on a very similar vector with its sort of integrated systems business. So you look around here, you see all these products. They love appliances here. And so you're seeing different appliances for different use cases, different workloads. Sales guys getting those in their bag. They position them with customers. You've now got this momentum behind them. This is a company that is driving R&D into product pipeline. And that translates into revenue, into profits, and into market cap. I think Dave, one of the things that impresses me about this is that we've been covering Oracle at Oracle over the world now five years, right? So we've seen the transformation. And you know, we saw them when the wind was kind of shifting. You know, to use the sailing analogy since Larry's a big sailor, the calmness and the shifting of the wind, I think made them realize that we better be on the right tack here, Oracle. And I think Larry sees that as a gamer himself, he knows what's going on. And so we saw that shift. It was almost that awkwardness that one year was silent. Larry was kind of like, you know, polished, but it just wasn't like hitting hard. And then all of a sudden, it's as if an awakening happened. That next year, 2011, you saw Oracle 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, the cadence of turnaround. It's as if he lost the America's Cup and wanted to win it back. And those two years, he saw it just chip away at it. And that's the sun, that's the sun years. And I think you've seen a different swagger with Oracle since then. And I think, you know, we've got the Neil Mendelson, he's coming back, and they're attracting talent back. So, you know, I used to be critical of Oracle. You know, hey, they've got the extracting the rent. They had a good business, I mean, a great business model. But they're innovating, this innovation, this kind of engineering culture. The question is, can this swagger translate to execution? Well, and I think that, I mean, it's the extracting the rent is fair. The Oracle's continues to extract. They have value. They extract rents from the value. But what's new today is we're going to be the low priced, you know, low cost leader. And which I think is a no brainer strategy because they're going to make it up on software, layering software on top of that. And so, I don't know, I think that again, generally you're seeing, the fruits of the R&D labor are very, very difficult. You saw this at HP when Mark Hurd was there. You know, he was criticized by a lot of outsiders. He did a great job from Wall Street's perspective, but he was criticized for squeezing R&D. You're seeing now HP fight back through that. EMC's a company that's always done a nice balance of R&D and acquisitions. Oracle obviously spends a lot of money on R&D. Look at Fusion Apps. It was a huge, you know, nine year project and it does tons of acquisitions as well. IBM is a company that's been challenged to do this, to take R&D money. IBM spends a ton on R&D, but to get it into product. Look at its, look at IBM's storage business, for example, it lacks a pipeline so they're having to sort of retool that entire business. And so, even though IBM's very good at acquisitions. So, but Oracle is, you know, hitting all cylinders. You and I are very competitive people. We both love sports. Larry, also a very competitive person. If you look at him, right, and he always mentions this story, I knew Steve Jobs, and he brings in Mark Hurd, who was a very competitive person. He's a gamer himself, great operator. You know, Larry talks about his relationship with Steve Jobs back when he was alive. And if you look at those two guys, I think it's interesting, both competitive. And what I like about this event is, I just like going to Oracle events because having Larry Ellison at his age, you know, making jokes about his eyesight, doing what he's doing to win, right? He's playing to win, and Jobs did that, right? And winning was defined not by money. It was defined by certain other outcomes. Great products resulting in sales and happy customers, right? So, love that, I love that mindset. He is a senior CEO in industry. And he's playing to win. What don't you like about that? There is a net worth leaderboard, but you got to love that. No, of course he's got a leaderboard. And you got to love that about guys like Michael Dell as well. Larry, like you say, self-deprecating jokes about his eyesight. But he's engaged, and you see that from all of senior management. Oracle's able to attract really good people. You look at Saffra on the finance and M&A side. Hurd is, by all accounts, one of the best sort of customer facing executives in the business. Obviously, Oracle's attracting, we heard John Fowler say a big part of his job. But do you agree that he's playing to win? Oh, there's no question about it. I mean, he's... You think he might have taken a little hiatus a couple of years in there? Well, you know... I don't know. I mean, I don't see, I mean, he's energetic. He looks good. I think he's playing to win. He's engaged. Yeah, he's playing to win. I mean, defined playing to win, to me, as Fowler said, I thought said this best, we're trying to build best-to-breed products all along the stack. Now you can debate whether or not we're best-to-breed. I would say that OVM is not best-to-breed. VMware is best-to-breed. But okay, we're going to invest and we're going to do things to bundle it in, hide some of that complexity. But we want to be the best at every layer of the stack. That's our goal when we hire engineers. That's what we're trying to do. I think that's attractive to people. It's a good goal. Now, who doesn't want to do that? What companies, of course IBM wants to do that, EMC wants to do that, Microsoft wants to do that, but Oracle has a unique strategy in that full-stack approach that nobody else is taking. I think Oracle's business is pumping. I think they've got a great M&A budget. I think the leadership is engaged. I think the product strategy is very sound. I think going into engineered systems, but realizing that the cloud is happening is critical. So it's going to be interesting to watch. And I think they've got a great R&D focus that's clear and they spend the money. They are a buyer of startups. So if I'm a VC and I'm a startup, you've got to look at Oracle as a purchaser, a potential customer. And ultimately we heard from Mike Workman today commenting on pure systems, pure storage, and saying, hey, you know, they got to go public. No one's going to buy them. Everyone's been bought. So you have to figure out if a startup, if the bets are all made, you better get public or make money. Well, and it appears that Oracle's strategy is to subsidize the engineered system strategy with software. Is that sustainable is the question. I think it is. I think it's imminently sustainable because people keep buying Oracle software. They keep spending money on R&D. If Oracle were turning off the R&D spigot in order to juice profits, I would be really concerned. But it's like Fala said, people get rewarded for inventing new stuff and creating things. And Oracle's going to do that. And Larry Ellison knows the paranoia of kind of an Andy Grove mindset, which is, you know, you can't rest on your laurels and Silicon Valley around the world. And certainly the China market we've mentioned earlier is huge opportunity, but also a threat. If you don't invent the future, you're going to be out of luck. So I've said this a number of times. I think Sun is the number one and number two and number three acquisition in the history of the industry. VMware is obviously the greatest acquisition in the history of the enterprise. I'm talking enterprise IT business. Nevermind for a second, you know, Microsoft acquiring whatever PowerPoint, et cetera. But enterprise IT, number one was VMware. I would even say number two probably could be Sun. Sun is buying for number two. I would put IBM's acquisition of PWC up there as well because it completely transformed IBM under Gershner. But Sun is right up there. And I've been criticized for saying that. I said that early on, I started to understand what Larry and Oracle were trying to do. And now you're seeing it pay off in a, I think a pretty substantial amount. Anyone who's been around that generation of Sun knows the value. And they were getting hammered. And the culturally they were just, they needed a buyer, the White Knight. Larry Ellison was the White Knight for Sun. Sun's DNA is innovation-based. We talked to John Fowler about the resurgence of systems programming. I mean, software-led, software-defined data center, software-defined stuff is not mutually exclusive with hardware. That absolutely is very clear with this announcement. And certainly this integration middle layer platform is stabilizing. Big data is going to transcend all the different platforms. Marketing cloud, exadata. Where a database can go, that's where the middleware will play. And that's certainly not just one market. So I'm pretty impressed, Dave. I think it's always good to see Larry Ellison in person and Oracle's announcements. Yeah. And then again, this stuff is translating into dollars. Oracle's a cash flow machine. It's an operating profit machine. It's driving huge valuation multiples on top of revenue and EBIT. And that is a strategic weapon for this company, which I've been saying for a long, long time. They can make acquisitions in a way that can be very effective. And what they did with Sun, to me, is amazing. They paid 50 cents on the revenue dollar. They brought them in. They had $13 billion of revenue. That revenue shrank. But they maintained enough revenue so that it translated, we wrote about this on Forbes, into a $25 to $35 billion market value. So they paid seven. They returned $30 billion to investors. I mean, financially, it's been a huge, huge win for Oracle. I can't tell you how many people four or five years ago said, Volante, you're out of your mind saying that you just don't understand. Okay. Well, Dave, great show today. Really awesome. And I want to thank Oracle, and Oracle's team, and the social media team, and Marius, Paul, Julian, and all the people we know at Oracle. It's been great to have you support us, allowing us to come and broadcast at your event. Great wall-to-wall coverage. Thank you to the SiliconANGLE Wikibon Cube team. Guys, thanks. And thanks for everyone watching. This is theCUBE. We go out to the events. Extract a suit from the noise, Dave. Great show. And look for theCUBE next time. We'll be out and about. Tomorrow we got a cube on the ground. We'll be at Ford and a bunch of other events. So stay tuned. Go to siliconangle.tv. This is theCUBE signing out from Oracle, live in Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier with Dave Alon. Good night.