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>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas,
it's theCUBE.
Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017.
Brought to you by Oracle.
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>> Hey, welcome back everyone.
We are live here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas
for theCUBE's special coverage of Oracle's
marketing clouds event called Modern CX
for Modern Customer Experience.
I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE,
with Peter Burris, head of research at wikibon.com.
This is our wrap up of day one.
We've got day two coverage tomorrow.
Peter, we saw some great news from Oracle on stage.
I'll say modernizing their platform,
the positioning, certainly,
how they're packaging the offering of a platform
with the focus of apps,
with the additive concept of adaptive intelligence,
which gives the notion of moving from batch to realtime,
data in motion,
and then a series of other enhancements going on.
And the guests we talked to have been phenomenal,
but what's coming out of this, at least in my mind,
I would love to get your reaction to today,
is data.
Data is the key,
and it's clear that Oracle
is differentiating with their data.
They have a database.
They're now bringing their Cloud Suite concept to marketing
and extending that out.
Interesting.
AI is in there,
they got some chatbots,
so some sizzle,
but the steak is the data.
So you got the sizzle and you got the steak.
>> Well, we heard,
you're absolutely right, John.
We heard today a lot,
and I think this is a terminology
that we're going to hear more frequently,
is this notion of first person data
versus third person data.
Where first person data is the data that's being
generated by the business and the business's applications
and third person data being data that's generated by
kind of the noise that's happening
in a lot of other people's first person data.
And I think that's going to be
one of the biggest challenges in the industry.
And Oracle has an inside track
on a lot of that first person data
because a lot of people are big time Oracle customers
for big time operational acts,
applications that are today delivering big time revenue
into the business.
>> In the spirit of marketing speak at these events
you hear things, "It's outcomes, digital transmissions.
"It's all about the outcomes."
Agreed, that's standard, we hear that.
But here we're seeing something for the first time.
You identified it in one of our interviews
with Jack Horowitz, which had 150 milliseconds,
it's a speeds and feeds game.
So Oracle's premise, you pointed out,
I'd like to get deeper on this,
because this is about not moving the data around
if you don't have to. >> Yeah, yeah.
>> This is interesting.
>> This is a centerpiece of Wikibon's research right now,
is that if you start with a proposition that
we increasingly through digital transformation
are now talking about how we're going to use data
to differentiate business,
then we need to think about
what does it mean to design business,
design business activities,
design customer promises around the availability of data
or the desire to get more data.
And data has a physical element.
Moving data around takes time and it generates cost,
and we have to be very, very careful about what that means,
let alone some of the legal and privacy issues.
So we think that there's two things
that all businesses are going to have to think about,
the relationship between data and time.
Number one, Can I serve up the right response,
the right business action, faster than my competitors,
which is going to matter,
and number two is
can I refine and improve the quality of my models
that I'm using to serve things up
faster than my competitors.
So it's a cycle time on what the customer needs right now,
but it's also a strategic cycle time in how I improve
the quality of the models that I'm using to run my business.
>> What's also interesting is some things that,
again that you're doing on the research side,
that I think plays into the conversations and the content
and conversations here at Oracle's Modern CX event
is the notion of the business value of digital.
And I think,
and I want to get your reaction to this
because this is some insight that I saw this morning
through my interviews,
is that there are jump in points
for companies starting this transformation.
Some are more advanced than others,
some are at the beginning, some are in kindergarten,
some are in college, some are graduated,
and so on and so forth.
But the key is, you're seeing an Agile mindset.
That was a term that was here,
we had the Agile Marketer,
the author of The Agile Marketer, here on our--
Roland Smart, who wrote the book The Agile Marketer.
But Agile can be applied
because technology's now everywhere.
But with data and now software,
you now have the ability to not only instrument,
but also get value models
from existing and new applications.
>> Well let's bring it back to the fundamental point
that you made up front, because it's the right one.
None of this changes if you don't recognize
these new sources of data, typically and increasingly,
the customer being a new source,
and what we can do with it.
So go back to this notion of Agile.
Agile works when you are,
as we talked about in the interview,
when you have three things going on.
First off, the business has to be empirical,
it has to acknowledge that these new sources of information
are useful.
You have to be willing to iterate.
Which means you have to sometimes recognize
you're going to fail,
and not kill people who fail
as long as they do it quickly.
And then you have to be opportunistic.
When you find a new way of doing things,
you got to go after it as hard as you possibly can.
>> And verify it, understand it,
and then double down on it. >> Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, customer-centric and all the other stuff.
But if you don't have those three things in place,
you are not going to succeed in this new world.
You have to be empirical, you have to be iterative,
and you have to be opportunistic.
Now take that,
tie that back to some of the points that you were making.
At the end of the day,
we heard a lot of practitioners
as well as a lot of Oracle executives,
I don't want to say,
be challenged to talk about the transformation
or the transition,
but sometimes they use different language.
But when we push them, it all boiled down to,
for the first time,
our business acknowledged the value of data,
and specifically customer data,
in making better decisions.
The roadmap always started with an acknowledgement
of the role that data's going to play.
>> And the pilots that we heard from Time Warner's CMO,
Kristen O'Hara,
pointed it out really brilliantly
that she did pilots as a way to get started,
but she had to show the proof.
But not instant gratification, it was,
"Okay, we'll give you some running room,
"three feet and a cloud of dust, go see what happens.
"Here's enough rope to hang yourself or be successful."
But getting those proof points, to your point of iteration.
You don't need to hit the home run right out of the gate.
>> Absolutely not.
In fact, typically you're not.
But the idea is, you know,
people talk about how frequently product launches fail.
Products, you know,
the old adage is it fails 80% of the time.
We heard a couple of people talk about
how other research firms have done research that suggests
that 83 or 84% of leads are useless to salespeople.
We're talking about very, very high failure rates here
and just little changes,
little improvements in the productivity of those activities,
have enormous implications for the revenue
that the business is able to generate
and the cost that the business has to consume
to generate those revenues.
>> John: I want to get your reaction to--
Oh, go ahead, sorry.
>> No, all I was going to say,
it all starts with that fundamental observation
that data is an asset
that can be utilized differently within business.
And that's what we believe
is the essence of digital business.
>> The other reaction I'd like to get your thoughts on
is a word that we've been using on theCUBE
that you had brought up here first in the conversation,
empathy to users.
And then we hear the word empowerment,
they're calling about heroes is their theme,
but it's really empowerment, right?
Enabling people in the organization to leverage the data,
identify new insights, be opportunistic as you said,
and jump on these new ways of doing things.
So that's a key piece.
So with empathy for the users,
which is the customer experience,
and the empowerment for the people
to make those things happen,
you have the convergence of ad tech and mar-tech,
marketing tech.
Advertising tech and marketing tech,
known as ad tech and mar-tech,
coming together.
One was very good at understanding collective intelligence
for which best ad to serve where.
Now the infrastructure's changing.
Mar-tech is an ever-evolving and consolidating ecosystem,
with winners and losers coming together
and changing so the blender of ad tech and mar-tech
is now becoming re-platformed for the enterprise.
How does a practitioner
who's looking at sources like Oracle and others
grock this concept?
Because they know about ads and that someone buys the ads,
but also they have marketing systems in place
and sales clouds.
>> Well, I think, and again,
it's this notion of hero and empowerment and enablement,
all of them boil down to are we making our people better?
And I think, in many respects,
a way of thinking about this
is the first thing we have to acknowledge
is the data is really valuable.
The second thing we have to acknowledge is that
when we use data better, we make our people more successful.
We make our people more valuable.
We talk about the customer experience,
well employee experience also matters
because at the end of the day, those employees,
and how we empower them and how we turn them into heroes,
is going to have an enormous impact
on the attitude that they take
when they speak with customers,
their facility at working with customers,
the competency that they bring to the table,
and the degree to which the customer sees them
as a valuable resource.
So in many respects, the way it all comes together is,
we can look at all these systems,
but are these systems, in fact,
making the people that are
really generating the value within the business
more or less successful?
And I think that's got to be a second touchstone
that we have to keep coming back to.
>> Some great interviews here this morning on day one.
Got some great ones tomorrow, but two notables.
I already mentioned the CMO, Kristen O'Hara,
who was at Time Warner, great executive,
made great change
in how they're changing their business practices,
as well as the financial outcome.
But the other one was Jack Berkowitz.
And we had an old school moment,
we felt like a bunch of old dogs and historians,
talking about the OSI, Open Systems Interconnect Model,
seven layers of openness, of which it only went half way,
stopped at TCPIP,
but you can argue some other stuff was standardized.
But, really, if you look at the historical perspective,
it was really fun, because you can also learn,
what you can learn about history
as it relates to what's happening today.
It's not always going to be the same,
but you can learn from it.
And that moment was this grocking of what happened
with TCPIP as a standardization,
coalescing moment.
And it's not yet known in this industry what that will be.
We sense it to be data.
It's not clear yet how that's going to manifest itself.
Or is it to you?
>> Well here's what I'd say, John.
I think you're right,
kind of the history moment was
geez, wasn't it interesting that TCPIP, the OSI stack,
and they're related, they're not the same, obviously,
but that it defined how a message,
standards for moving messages around,
now messages are data,
but it's a specialized kind of a data.
And then what we talked about is when we get to layer seven,
it's going to be interesting to see
what kind of standards are introduced,
in other words, the presentation layer,
or the application layer.
What kind of standards are going to be introduced
so that we can enfranchise multiple sources
of cloud services together in new ways.
Now Oracle appears to have an advantage here. Why?
Because Oracle's one of those companies
that can talk about end to end.
And what Jack was saying,
it goes back again to one of the first things
we mentioned in this wrap,
is that it's nice to have that end to end capability
so you can look at it and say
"When do we not have to move the data?"
And a very powerful concept that Jack introduced
is that Oracle's going to,
you know, he threw the gauntlet down,
and he said "We are going to help our customers
"serve their customers within 150 milliseconds.
"On a worldwide basis,
"anywhere that customer is in the world, any device,
"we're going to help our customers serve their customers
"in 150 milliseconds." >> That means pulling data
from any database, anywhere,
first party, third party, all unified into one.
>> But you can do it if and only if
you don't have to move the data that much.
And that's going to be one of the big challenges.
Oracle's starting from an end to end perspective
that may not be obviously cloud baked.
Other people are starting with the cloud native perspective,
but don't have that end to end capability.
Who's going to win is going to be really interesting.
And that 150 millisecond test
is, I think,
going to emerge as a crucial test in the industry
about who's going to win.
>> And we will be watching who will win
because we're going to be covering it on SiliconANGLE.com
and wikibon.com, which has got great research.
Check out wikibon.com, it's subscription only.
Join the membership there,
it's really valuable data headed up by Peter.
And, of course,
theCUBE at siliconangle.tv is bringing you all the action.
I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris,
Day one here at the Mandalay Bay
at the Oracle Modern CX, #ModernCX.
Tweet us @theCUBE.
Glad to chat with you.
Stay tuned for tomorrow.
Thanks for watching.
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