>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube.
Covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016.
Brought to you by Oracle.
Now here's your host,
John Furrier and Peter Burris.
>> Hey, welcome back everyone, day two
of wall-to-wall coverage live broadcast on the internet,
this is SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube.
It's our flagship program, we go out to the events
and extract the signal from the noise, I'm John Furrier
co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media, joined with Peter Burris
head of research of SiliconANGLE Media, as well as
the general manager of WikiBon research.
Peter, we did twelve interviews yesterday,
we got a line up today.
And we've got a great range of content,
great editorial commentary, great guests from Oracle Exec.
We asked them the tough questions,
we also have some great sponsored spots for our supporters.
But really, it's about putting out that content I think.
Yesterday, we're starting to see,
and we're going to some guests today around philanthropy.
Oracle is doing a lot of work in philanthropy
and we're going to get some great women in tech content,
something that Oracle has a great presence in.
But, the big story, Day 2, is Thomas Kurian was on stage.
He was not on stage for Sunday night's
Larry Ellison keynote with, sorry, with Intel
and so he had a personal issue and had to mail in the video.
There was speculation on whether he would be here,
but Kurian is the guy, he's the product guy
he's running the engineering,
running the product development.
So we expected to hear huge announcements today.
Kind of not much, I mean, as expected,
infrastructure's a service, we heard about
containus which was pre-announced by Larry,
basically announces everything.
But, not a lot of big game changing news,
but a lot of the blocking and tackling
a lot of the ground game for Oracle's
march to the cloud.
Really emphasizing on the speed of standing up a data center
with the browser and API's, anyone can stand up to.
All the capabilities of Oracle with standing up
a virtual data center with all the isolation
at the network level,
giving that customer choice but bridge to the future.
Again, this was expected.
But this is a key part of Oracle's strategy.
They need to lock down the infrastructure.
To make PaaS work well and SaaS,
they got to make it work well.
So, not a lot of surprises,
as expected, infrastructures of service.
>> Well let's be honest about
what Oracle's biggest threat is,
what the biggest threat to Oracle.
They've got this enormous presence
in the applications business, we talked about yesterday,
the apps business is sticky.
When companies embed their applications,
or embed an application into their business,
they reconfigure the entire organization around it.
It's hard to rip that out.
They are clearly number one, and have been for a long time,
in the database marketplace, and it's not hard
to pop a database out.
It is hard to pop a database out
>> John: It's very sticky
>> It's very very sticky,
so hardware?
It's getting a little bit easier, but the possibility
that the infrastructure starts to become more public
in nature, starts to move up into the database space
and Oracle clearly wants to ensure that it doesn't
encounter longer term problems with the bottom eroding.
So it needs to sustain that presence and infrastructure
and continue to give people an option,
should they want to tie infrastructure directly,
or continue to tie infrastructure directly
to the database in the application.
>> And we pressed Juan Loaiza yesterday,
senior vice president on the development side,
lead database guru, laid out his vision
of how he sees the key elements of data center
and he said it simply.
Our number one priority at Oracle
is to move workloads from on-prem to the cloud
seamlessly back and forth...
>> Peter: To our cloud.
(laughing)
>> So we'll say cloud for now but
that's ultimately what the customers want.
They want to be able to move to the cloud,
ultimately have all that benefits
of the operating model and the agility
but moving it back and forth, again,
to Oracle, it's the Oracle Cloud.
So on Oracle and Oracle,
job one is to make it really frickin' awesome.
Fast, low-cost, and the infrastructure aside,
put pressure on the Amazon choice
but yet keep that there.
So that's clear.
But I want to ask you...
>> Well let me pick up on that,
maybe this is what you're going to ask me.
Many years ago, I had a lot of experiences
working with CIO's over the years.
Many years ago I was in a staff meeting of a CIO,
she was looking out across her team,
and she had a way of starting the conversation
with every single one of her direct reports.
Head of development, head of security,
head of infrastructure, and she routinely
would start the question just to reinforce
what she wanted folks to focus on.
And every staff meeting she had,
she started the conversation with the head
of infrastructure with,
so infrastructure's doing no harm this week.
And in many respects,
that's becoming the message of Oracle.
Infrastructure's going to do no harm,
we're going to make sure that on premise, you're covered.
Cloud, you're covered.
Hybrid, you're covered.
We want to make sure that infrastructure's not
a huge part of the conversation so you can
stay focused on the upper levels.
>> Yeah, that's a great point.
Some people call it hardening the infrastructure,
Paul Maritz in 2010 at VMWorld,
talked about this hardened top and he talked about
Intel processors, and saying hey,
you know, Intel has a hard top and no one looks
under the chip, it's totally hardened,
it's proprietary code that makes stuff go fast.
So I think Oracle has that same kind of mojo going on
with the engineered systems and you're seeing
that stuff kind of trying to harden the top so that
the infrastructure doesn't do any damage.
And that brings up the point though about what I'm seeing.
And Oracle, I would love to get your comments here,
and your take,
I mean, look at the industry over the years,
the competitive strategy is protect and fortify
your core crown jewel.
It's been the database.
The database powers the application
so the application certainly, a lot of revenue,
but the database has been this sacred cow for Oracle.
And you've been seeing it, and although
they haven't been overt about it, protecting the database,
keeping it in the swim lane, keeping it here,
letting things develop on the side,
and ultimately it was all about the database.
This show, it's interesting, you're starting to see
that swim lane expand.
You're starting to see Oracle recognize the fact that
hey it's okay to be the system of record, and it's actually
quite sticky to be the systems of record
in a high performance database environment,
but yet yielding territory, or turf, to other databases.
That's interesting because that takes
the monolithic siloed mentality off the table.
Question is, do you see it that way?
And if so, does Oracle have to adjust
its competitive strategy?
>> John, I think, first off,
most importantly you're absolutely right
Oracle, the product that is named Oracle,
is the Oracle RDBMS.
When people twenty years ago talked about Oracle,
that's what they were talking about.
Oracle has been a database company, it's its roots.
It's some of the great conversation we had yesterday
were with the database people.
I don't think that's going to change.
I think that they're trying to extend it out
and one of the ways they're looking at doing that is
they're recognizing that as we look forward
the next couple of years, this increasingly,
it's going to be, and we talked about this a lot yesterday,
how does, not only the data in the Oracle database manager
become increasingly relevant to other applications
and other use cases in the business.
But also, how do the skills associated with that
database manager become more relevant and more useful
to the business, as new types of data,
new types of applications, and new types
of business models start to become
even more relevant to the industry.
So I think what Oracle...
>> Like data value?
>> Like data value, the value of data, how development,
we talked yesterday about, maybe it was after
one of the conversations, about we're now entering
into this world of big data and we still don't know
what I call, the body plans for business models are.
We're in this notion where we don't know if
it's going to look like a fish,
or it's going to look like a mollusk,
or it's going to look like something else.
We know that it's not going to look like what the RDBMS
world looks like.
>> It's kind of like, what's your spirit animal in cloud.
We don't know yet.
>> We don't know yet, so Oracle has to be flexible
as their customers have to be flexible, and not presume
that it's going to look exactly like it did ten years ago.
>> This game is not even started.
>> There you go, and I think that's the key thing, John.
I think that they're finally acknowledging that the new
world is not going to look exactly like the old world.
They have to be flexible, they have to facilitate
their customers to be flexible so that they can
rearrange things in response to new develops
and innovation in the industry.
>> You know I was talking to some of the people at Oracle
yesterday, after the Century event folks,
and what's coming down to is the industry is kind of
spinning towards, we call the tech athlete,
the smart people.
So what's interesting is Oracle has always kind of kept
their smartest brains behind the firewall.
It's always been kind of competitive advantage
to always serve customers on all that lock-in and
competitive advantage drive revenue,
they're highly profitable but now you're starting to see
the battle between like Amazon web services and Oracle.
Couple observations from my standpoint.
One, they're putting their best technical people out front.
Okay, clearly talent matters, organic growth matters,
certainly the MNA thing is always going on.
Amazon always puts their technical people out.
So, observation, companies are putting
their best technical people out there on the front lines.
We're going to compete on our people.
Two, the announcement volume, velocity, here at OpenWorld,
probably is the most I've seen of all
Oracle OpenWorld in seven years.
Very similar to AWS re:Invent.
There are so many announcements that are coming
out of re:Invent this year, I think it's going
to be more than last year, but even last year,
it was raining, it was a tornado of announcements.
It's hard to cover.
In the tech press, talking to some of the folks yesterday,
Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNBC guys,
it's like their heads are exploding.
Because this is so much to cover.
All the stuff's coming at the customer.
And to me, that's an observation that you say,
okay, what does it mean?
>> Well, so let's talk about two great points tossed.
Let's talk about the first one, or one of,
on the Tube yesterday we talked,
somebody said, you know, you mentioned who is
someone at Oracle saying who is the industry's
best CEO?
Larry Ellison, okay, Larry Ellison's 70 years old.
Larry Ellison is not going to be the CTO of Oracle forever.
So number one, we're starting to see some of that
talent start to emerge and start to become more out front
because it has to.
Number two, very importantly, John,
talent creates and attracts talent.
And I think the more that Oracle puts its talent
out front in this period of significant disruption,
that they are going to be more likely
to attract other talent to Oracle.
>> And that's what impacts the MNA game, too.
>> You betcha.
>> How to integrate in.
>> We talked about what's happening amongst VCs
in the Valley yesterday.
And who are going to be the entrepreneurs?
We're going to hear about Oracle.
Is Oracle going to be more aggressive at developing
some of those newly inventors and maybe not having them
institutionally be part of Oracle?
>> Reggie Bradford yesterday talked specifically
about that MNA.
Again, talent brings talent organically and inorganically.
>> So putting those guys out in front is going
to make Oracle a more attractive place
as we go through this disruptive process.
But I think the other thing that you mentioned
is a really crucial point.
At the end of the day, Oracle is introducing
a lot of stuff, and as much as I've also ever seen.
But it's coherent.
One of the things that's really interesting
about this conference or these sets of announcements
is that they're covering everything,
but it's one of the most coherent sets of announcements
I've ever seen from Oracle.
It's not a whole bunch of product piece parts.
>> John: It's not fluffy.
>> It's not fluffy and it's not piece parts.
It's cloud.
We are bringing all this stuff, and we're driving it
into the cloud.
2017's going to be a huge year, because Oracle's,
as you said yesterday, is putting everybody on alert.
We're going to get really serious about this.
>> And we have Oracle's keynote with Larry Ellison,
you're going to watch it at three or one o'clock.
And then we come back on the Cube for our analysis
at 3:30.
>> Peter: Pacific.
>> Pacific time, we're going to go into great detail
on the keynote, but one point we can't cover on here
on the interest, we've got to go to our next segment
is, and this is where you can expand on this,
you mentioned business models.
The developer is critical in the business model
and the data.
Data and developer, those two things we will really,
really unpack at 3:30.
Of course we'll analyze the heck out of Larry Ellison's
keynote, because again, everyone's up front.
Call to arms, this is not a false alarm for Oracle.
It is battle stations.
And we are going to see which company's got the best
technical people out front.
Where's the meat on the bone for the products?
Of course, we've got it on the Cube.
>> 2017 is going to be a year where leadership matters
in the tech industry.
>> Peter Buriss laying it down, I'm John Furrier.
The Cube, all-day coverage, day two of three days.
12 videos yesterday, live broadcast again today.
We'll keep pumping it out there, that's what we do.
This is the Cube, we'll be right back, day two,
Oracle OpenWorld live in San Francisco.
We'll be right back.
(upbeat instrumental music)