>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's TheCUBE!
Covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016.
Brought to you by Oracle.
Now, here's your hosts John Furrier and Peter Burris.
>> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here live
in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2016.
This is SiliconANGLE Media's TheCUBE.
It's our flagship program, we go out to the events
and extract the signals and noise.
I'm John Furrier, the co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media.
My co-host, Peter Burris, head of research for SiliconANGLE
Media and also the General Manager of Wikibon Research.
Our next guest, CUBE alumni Amit Zavery,
Senior Vice President and General Manager
of Oracle' Cloud Platform, heavily involved in the platform
as a service, where all the action is,
as well as the cloud platform.
Amit, great to see you, welcome back.
>> Yeah, thank you. It's always a pleasure to be here.
>> A lot of buzz, we're on day three of wall-to-wall
live coverage, we got you at the end, so we have the luxury
of one, getting your opinion, but also to look at the shows.
So first, as day three kicks in,
the big party today with Sting and the concert,
but then the workshops tomorrow, pretty much ends tonight
for the most part.
What's your takeaway from the show?
What's your vibe this year, what are you seeing,
what's popped up at you at the show this year?
>> A lot of things, I think one thing is there's
a lot of maturity into adoption of the cloud, right,
so we're seeing a lot of customers I speak to nowadays
are talking about next, broader implementations,
adding more and more capabilities into their services,
no more just trying to try out things,
a lot of production workloads been moving to the cloud.
So very, very interesting conversations.
And also I'm seeing a lot of different kinds of customers,
typically, of course Oracle being in the very large
enterprise software player, used to have large companies
as the couple of folks I used to meet on a regular basis.
Over the last couple of years, I'm noticing a lot of
smaller companies who are probably, a lot of times
I have to look up who they are, but they are doing
very interesting projects, and they are coming here
and talking to us.
So I'm also seeing a very different audience I'm speaking to
than I used to before.
>> We had Dave Donatelli on earlier, Executive Vice President
one of the main leaders now on the go-to market for cloud
and all the converged infrastructure,
and it's very clear to his standpoint,
he's overtly saying it, putting the stake in the ground
that if you run Oracle on Oracle hardware,
it will be unequivocally the fastest,
and it's an unfair advantage, and they've got to
lap the field is what he said.
Okay. Same for Platform as a Service,
you guys have some success now under your belt
this year from last. >> Yes.
>> But it's not clear that Oracle has won the developers'
hearts and minds in the enterprise,
and winning the developers in general,
Amazon has had that up their sleeve right now,
but yet, you guys have a ton of open source stuff.
So Platform as a Service is really going to come down to
integration and developers. >> Yes.
>> What's you guys' strategy there,
and how do you see that playing out,
because you need to fortify that middleware,
that integration, that's APIs,
that's a developer-centric DevOps way.
What's your strategy?
>> A lot of things.
The one thing which you see from our Platform as a Service,
we have been from the day one building it on
an Open Standards technology, which is again
end-to-end very broad and deep functionality.
And we had a lot of history building out a platform,
and we have thousands and thousands of customers
who successfully deployed that.
So our strategy going forward
and what you see some of the announcements recently,
as well as some of the use cases you might have heard
from our customers, are customers who are really trying
to install a broader platform requirement,
not just trying to build an application,
but be able to integrate them, be able to make sure
they have ability to kind of take the data from it
and be able to do analysis with it in real time
as well as batch, and be able to publish that information
whenever they choose to, and then work that in conjunction
with any infrastructure as well as with any services,
Software as a Service, systems applications.
So this plays very well with our
Software as a Service customers,
they need a platform extension, so that's the developers
we go after, we go to developers who are really
also building brand new applications
and need a platform which is Open Standard-based,
and which is broad and deep and well-integrated.
So that's really what we are seeing a lot of success from.
So Amazon no doubt has success on the infrastructure side,
but we have customers in just one cloud source to move
the hardware, of course then allowing them to move up
in the platform space as well, but they have very limited
set of things which they still offer.
We've been doing this space for many, many years,
and now we may be able to provide
the similar kind of breadth, which is to have on prem
in the cloud, cloud natively built, with the right kind
of APIs, right kind of interfaces,
but a little higher-level services,
so it's not very granular where you have to go
and compose 15 different services together
and build your application.
I provide you as a customer, to a customer
a very ease of use, and much more solution-centric platform.
And that's really the differentiation we have there.
>> So less moving parts
on the composability, if you will.
>> No we can do as granular as you want, but
we also have composed in a way which is like
okay, if we are looking at integration, for example, right,
what are different kind of patterns you need in integration?
You might want to be able to it to a file,
you might be able to do it B2B, EDI basic integration,
you might be able to do it through a process,
you might do it through a messaging,
might do a data integration.
So we provide you integration cloud, versus saying
that 20 services go at it,
and then tomorrow you might not still understand
what to use, what not to use.
Customers can consume what they like
in the integration cloud, and pay as they go
in terms of what functionality they pick up.
But as a developer, I don't have to go waste my time
to figure out and learn the different tools,
different stuff, and figure out how to make
all these things work together.
>> So the palette is becoming more enterprise-friendly.
>> Sure.
>> And on top of that, you're also providing
a set of capabilities in the past platform
that kind of replicates the experience developers
have enjoyed certainly in the open source
and the other world by making it easier to find stuff,
to discover stuff, and then exploit and use stuff
through the variety of different services.
So as you look forward, how are developers
going to change the way they spend their time?
Moving from code, moving from composition.
As we move forward, where will developers
be spending more of their time?
>> I think that over time, they should be
spending time just writing either the code,
or kind of extending the application they have.
They shouldn't have to worry about DevOps,
they shouldn't have to worry about
all the underlying technologies required
to build an application.
They shouldn't have to worry about all the testing
and the QA, which should be all part of
the development life cycle, which we provide
automated in the functionality.
So developers, they should worry about
what language they want to use, or what platform they want,
what kind of framework I like,
and who I'm trying to cater to,
and what my user interface should be.
And beyond that, all other things should be provided
from the platform in terms of automation,
in terms of simplicity, backup recovery, patching,
upgrade, all that stuff should be automated
as part of the platform provider.
And that's a service we provide
as part of our platform as well so that developers
can focus on writing that application.
And we make sure that we give you the choice,
where you can pick languages you want,
you can pick the standards you want.
Open source and all the different things
you might want to pick from,
or something we have provided as well.
But we give you that choice, it's not one or the other,
and tomorrow if you want to move somewhere else,
we'll make sure you can do that,
because we are not locked into one way of doing things.
>> So I know Oracle is historically very focused
on professional development, but business people,
well development is starting to happen elsewhere
in the organization, >> Amit: Yes.
>> not just in the professional developer community.
So what used to be like building a spreadsheet,
now has implications for some of the core digital assets
that the business might run.
How do you anticipate the definition
of the developer evolving?
The role of the developer, being able to provide
these services to folks who historically
might not have been developer, have them also be relevant,
and at the same time collaborate with those pros.
>> No, that's a very interesting point you raise,
because I think more and more
this idea of citizen developer, no code developers,
a low code developer, whatever you want to use in industry.
Many, many of them who want to be able to do quick
and easy web building, their functional requirements
and deliver that without having having to call an IT
somebody to code it for you,
or having to learn anything to code.
And we have really made sure in a Platform as a Service
we offer, there's lot of ease of use
and quick drag-and-drop kind of tooling,
we recently announced a visual code project,
which is based on our application builder,
composer kind of a service where you can drag and drop
and create a very simple, easy to use application
without having to write any code.
Similarly, the integration side we do the same thing.
We provide recipe-based integration,
where if an event happens in one application
I want to move that information to another application.
As a developer I don't have a right
to any single line of code.
We provide the recipe or you can build your own recipe.
I've shown it to my 13-year-old daughter.
She was impressed, she did something from Instagram
to Twitter by just using this application on a mobile phone.
So similar, that's the kind of people we're going after
from the line of business and business analyst,
who don't want to write code but they have
a business requirement and how can I make it easy
and simple to use.
So we're doing a lot of that work as well,
and that's a very important part
of our development community.
>> Amit, talk about the competition, I mean obviously
Amazon web services is clearly up there.
We're kind of like thinking that it's more of a red herring
the way it's talked about, because you have certainly
the fundamentals with stall base,
and you guys haven't really started
moving your stall base over yet.
When that comes, I'm sure that Wall Street's
going to love that, but you have some time,
some building blocks are being built out,
but how do you guys have that conversation with customers,
with AWS and Microsoft specifically, or even Google.
How do you guys differentiate
and where will you differentiate in
the pass layer going forward?
>> I think many things.
One thing is of course our customers want to make sure
they can preserve their investment
while they move to the cloud.
So we want to provide a platform which is hybrid
in a way that they can take some of the information,
they can run some of the things on premise,
while they transition some of their workloads
or move their applications to the cloud very easily
without having to rewrite many of the step
or retest anything. So that's something.
Services we provide, we've created
a lot of tooling around that to make it easy
for them to do it.
And the differentiation we provide to them is that,
one, we will protect your investment.
Second, the tools that are easy to use are out of the box.
And third thing we do is to really make it compatible.
We have commercial terms as well,
which makes it easy for them take their work loads
and move that without having to keep on reinvesting
lot of the cost they put in place.
>> One of the things that's not being hyped up at the show
that's certainly popping out at us is integration
and data sharing.
We talked to the marketing cloud folks,
we talked to the financial cloud folks,
we talked to the retail, hospitality folks.
Those once-traditional vertical apps still need big data
to be differentiated at the domain level,
machine learning and AI, and whether it's an IOT impact
or not, same thing, but they also need to have access
to other databases from other databases.
>> Sure, sure.
>> Retail, I didn't know if someone bought something
over here, so how do you balance the horizontal play
with still maintaining the integrity of the app level.
>> Amit: Yeah.
>> Seems like the past is the battleground
for this architecturally.
>> Yes, yes. No, I think you're right.
I mean, if you look at typically every application
customers we talk to nowadays, they have many data sources
and data targets, systems underneath the covers,
very very heterogeneous.
And when we build our platform, we wanted to make sure
that it is a heterogeneous support.
Alright, so I can write from any database.
>> John: That's built into the design.
>> Into the design and it's already supported today.
I can write from Oracle, DB2, Sequel Server, Hadoop,
No Sequel, into again similar kind of back ends.
Again Oracle or non-Oracle, we don't care really.
We want to be able to support your infrastructure,
the way you have invested in, and be able to move the data.
So when the application should be gnostic of
in terms of what you're using underneath the covers.
And the platform extracts that out for you.
So we have products and services.
Today we have offering in the cloud something we call
big data preparation, right, which allows you to take
data sources from any kind of sensors, spreadsheets,
databases, process that, do the data wrangling,
prepare that information and write it into
a big data lake, could be running Hadoop,
could be running Oracle database or the data warehouse,
could be running Amazon if they want to,
and we don't really care then.
>> So you're strategies offer services,
>> Yes.
>> On top of the core functional building blocks.
At the same time, differentiating on extracting away
component-level complexity.
>> Yes. No doubt. Yes. And then we want to make it
as simple as possible.
There are things which we want to expose,
we want to provide APIs for anybody who wants
to really play around with things.
We want to provide them also low-level capabilities
if they want to get into that level,
but we do also extract it out for, as you were talking
about developers, we don't want to have to learn everything
every time new capabilities and we provide that abstraction.
>> Do you see tooling drives a lot of innovation.
Do you see certain toolings becoming standard,
not being abstracted away?
Could you comment on that and share some color
on what tooling will always be around.
>> I think the tooling, what I've noticed over time
and I think it's probably good to remain the same,
every developer has a favorite tool,
and we want to give them the choice to pick
their favorite tool.
I don't think that they should be,
from the tooling perspective we have to make sure
we can support every kind of program or developer
in terms of how they want to write their code.
As long as I can provide the interface to it, an API,
or some kind of abstraction, and then the developer
can go at it.
I was a developer and I had my favorite tool,
and I still use VI.
>> Some will say I'm a VI guy, EMAX, world will go crazy.
>> It's okay! >> John: Did you see that VI
got an upgrade after how many years, 35 years.
>> Amit: It's still amazing, right, I mean people use it
and that's fine.
(laughs)
>> We may get into the VI EMAX war.
Amit, final question, just we've got to wrap up here.
Thanks so much fitting the time to share the insights.
We'd be able to do a whole segment on VI versus editors.
>> Peter: Please.
>> The plans going forward, can you share any insight
in the priorities, what you're looking at
from a product and P and L perspective,
obviously the revenue growth, you want to drive more of that,
but what are some of the fundamental priorities for you,
any adventure doing, where you investing your development
and marketing dollars?
>> A few things, right, so I think one is
you probably heard some of the things we're doing
for helping developers learn how to use a platform, right,
so we're doing a lot of training and code samples,
as well as developer-centric content globally.
So that is one.
Second thing you'll hear about us, the ability to kind of
run our platform both on premise and in the cloud,
so we have the customers can choose
where they want to run it, be able to run it on their
data center of choice, as well as they can get the benefit
of running in the public cloud.
Depending on regulation requirements, whatever it is.
So you see evolution of that, but all of the platform
we have in the public cloud also,
we let the customer to choose.
The flexibility's the big, big important part
for a lot of enterprise customers,
so they're getting to choose.
>> John: You're going to continue to do that.
>> 100 percent. I think it's very very important
that they should not be tied into one,
and they should be able to move away if they choose to,
not be locked into one way of doing things.
And third thing we're doing is
we're really bringing together lot of infrastructure,
platform, and Software as a Service offerings.
Very close and close together as
an integrated platform cloud, right, which makes it
very easy for customers to consume what they want,
but don't have to keep on
making it all work together themselves.
>> So integrate at will, however they want to compose.
>> Yes, so that way at least we'll see lot of functionality,
you heard a lot of this this week, we can't keep up
with the amount of announcements we've made,
and you'll see
>> I'll rephrase the question, so first of all great answer
but I was looking for something else.
How about next year when we interview you,
looking back, what would you view as a successful year
for your group?
>> I think the success for us and the way I measure it
is continue customer adoption and use cases evolution right.
So today we have around 10,000 plus customers.
I would expect by next year we are growing at
a very very rapid rate and that another
four or five thousand customers more
who are doing interesting use cases and going live with it.
>> John: Great.
>> That a big success.
>> Customers ultimately.
>> Keeping them happy and as long as I deliver
the right things, they will be happy.
>> I always say look at the scoreboard in sports,
and that's ultimately the differentiation,
so that's going to be the benchmark.
The KPI is the number of customers, happy customers.
>> Yes.
>> I'm sure Mark Hurdle will have that
on his next earnings report.
This is TheCUBE bringing you Amit Zavery's commentary,
also analysis of Oracle OpenWorld.
With more after this short break, we're going to wrap up.
Live, here at Oracle OpenWorld 2016.
I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris,
you're watching TheCUBE.
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