Live from the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California, it's The Cube, at the Next Generation Engineered Systems launch event. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at the Oracle headquarters for the big launch that Arielson gave a one o'clock with winding it down, kind of post game, post analysis coverage of The Cube, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the seeds of the noise. I'm John Furrier, Michael's Dave Vellante, and next is Aaron DeGelos-Reyes from Cognizant. Welcome to The Cube, appreciate it. Thank you very much. So you're a customer of Oracle, so we're going to get down and dirty. So what's it like? Tell us what's going on. Where's the good, bad, and the ugly? So, I mean, what's really exciting about Oracle right now is that they're putting a new generation of products together, they're converged solutions, they're cloud, and all their applications. And they're putting it all together into one single compute and architecture. So companies, big companies, can basically integrate very fast and scale their business in a very agile way. That's really this huge differentiation. And as a customer and as a partner and as a big implementation partner for over 10 years, we've experienced that. You know, one of the things Dave and I were doing preparing for this event, we always like to look at the production meeting. We go back to the Larry Ellison cloud rant on Churchill Club, which is always fun to watch. But he really wasn't really anti-cloud, but he said some interesting things there, which is, yeah, it's tributary computing, they have to run on things, I get that. But he said integration. So even back then, the vision was to collapse the integration points because of the general purpose kind of sprawl and get that down. Is that kind of how you see it as well? I mean, you see that, is that a benefit? Absolutely. And talk about what that means integrating into the system. So when you look at any of the global 500, they have an enormous amount of infrastructure inventory spread across over 20 years, maybe dozens of data centers and every geography. And consolidating those systems down and integrating them and then being able to align them to the business and actually have all that work for real is really what Oracle's been able to do. And we've experienced that as a company ourselves internally and obviously for our customers. And we were talking earlier on Twitter and Grouch had about some of the comments is that, yeah, people say they have bodies to do that, but ultimately you can redeploy them to something else, you integrate them in because there's an operational cost involved with the build your own. If you build your own cobble together, there's going to be an operational cost. In some cases, double Matty's, which from IDC said over a lifecycle of an application, operation costs double. Yes. So this is, that solves that. We had that same experience where we were on a very big IBM P-Series footprint, hundreds of servers, and we consolidated down to under 10 exa machines worldwide to allow us to basically gain the same computing power, but also run our business more effectively and scale our business. And we've grown our business almost 100X in the last 15 years in terms of the size of our business. So I wonder if we can, I want to get to that sort of case start, but can we back up a little bit and talk about your role at Cognizant, the group you're in, maybe even tell people a little bit about Cognizant. I mean, we've had you guys in the queue before, but start with the business. Sure, so Cognizant is a tier one global integrator. We work primarily with Fortune 2000, global 5000 companies. We do soup to nuts, IT services. We have a multi-shore global delivery model, which gives us a lot of flexibility and agility with our clients. And then within Cognizant, I work in the Oracle practice. And within that role, over 10 years ago, I started the first project that was our journey down the path of all the Oracle technology, PeopleSoft, et cetera, which we've implemented company-wide. We run the majority over three quarters of all our business processes or run on this platform. It's central to our system of record to allow Cognizant to scale the way we've scaled and we have over 200,000 employees. We're in over 100 countries. And like I said, we've scaled the business over 100X in the last 15 years, organically. Huge PeopleSoft shop. Absolutely. It's been well known. And can you take us back to the sort of project around the Xs? You said you talked about IBM P-Series. When was this? So, well, we started with the P-Series back in 2003, 2004. And then by 2009 and 10, we started reaching the end of its life and its architecture. And we were gonna go through a whole new IBM acquisition cycle. And in reality, not get much different in terms of the ability to run. And at the same time, the demand on the business is we were gonna double again. And we're already being stressed. We're already balanced. We're trying to mix our workloads together. We were running into a lot of operational pressure.  They can't be an impediment. So we started with Exologic almost three years ago. And we took 70 servers down to less than half a rack of Exologic in production. And we actually rolled out production before non-production. And we did it in 90 days from the first call to Oracle to being live all throughout the QA process. So that clearly informed us and our leadership of the power that was behind these systems. And then within a year we went to Exadata. And then we rounded out the platform with additional pieces which have basically built a converged platform for Cognizant. And like I said, we've reduced our infrastructure by almost 90% in terms of raw servers. And then our administration we've reduced by over half. So you started with Exologic, kind of the middle tier, if you will. Yes, we kind of did it exactly the way most don't. But what it did provide, because remember when we run, at that point, over 40 modules of PeopleSoft. So playing around with that backend database is not probably where you want to start. Whereas the middle tier, which is the same Java runtime across all of PeopleSoft, is actually a very logical place. And in a weird way, production actually was very logical because it all had to be highly uniform. So we kind of picked the sweet spot and it worked. And we obviously tested it end to end and we proved it out. And we actually overbought even what we needed at the time. So think about what we did. We run timesheets at that point for over 130,000 people on a third of a rack of Exologic. At the same time we were doing HR, financials, CRM, all the other learning, all the other platforms of PeopleSoft on a third of a rack. And then you brought in Exadata. And then you gave some business metrics, benefits. Can you repeat those? Sure, so I mean, just on the server consolidation side, I mean, we reduced our end to end server footprint, which non-production, production, DR, all those pieces, by basically 90% of the physical number of servers. And then the amount of administrators we had went down by over a half. And then more importantly, the ability to scale our business dynamically went up. So if we want to roll out a learning program at the same time we're doing timesheets, or doing billing, or payroll, we can do that. So the business case, big part of it, obviously was labor cost went way down and the agility and scale of the business was enabled. It was enabled. A lot of customers look at sort of the labor cost savings as soft, you know? Because, well, can we really deploy them?  Sometimes companies do lay people off. How did you guys handle that? Well, so obviously having a fairly large PeopleSoft practice, over 2,000, now almost 3,000, and a very large Oracle practice, it allowed actually, for all that other half, to rotate and allow their careers to really take off, because they didn't just work an internal corporate project. So remove the glass. Healing. In its own way, because they were working on an absolutely strategic project. But that didn't necessarily mirror where, as a PeopleSoft professional, where they wanted to get to. So now they could, and now that allowed us to create this because it's a smaller, more dynamic, more integrated team, it actually makes it a choice project now, because obviously working on engineered systems in PeopleSoft is a very rare skill set in the marketplace. So we converted very administrative, low-level tasks into a very unique skill set. And so now they are moving to our top clients, helping them go through some of these journeys. Okay, so. It's fairly powerful. And so what's next on the sort of roadmap for you guys, and what are you looking for from Oracle? What's on their to-do list? Yeah, so I mean, one thing clearly is going to be further integration of these platforms. All the technology, middleware pieces, with the engineered systems, with the ERP. So really in the beginning, this was about getting all the engineered systems up and coexisting with what was already there for applications and the existing technology. Now it's about truly synthesizing them together so that you can have one true-run platform. And forget about having executives involved in the decisions. You don't need your general management involved in the decisions. You now have a much more workload push button like, and then integrating into cloud, Oracle's cloud and other clouds becomes central so that we can develop a dynamic strategy. So when we expand in Eastern Europe or expand in Africa or expand in other geographies, we don't have to put a thick footprint in place. We could put a phase one, which might be a cloud footprint to get off the ground first year and then integrate into the normal business and have all of that application and logic seamlessly tie back into the business. I mean, very much like what Larry Ellison said, which was you can go from the converge platforms to the cloud and the cloud back to the converge platforms and actually do this. I mean, this isn't marketing. It's really actually- It's real, and you did it, and you had to do it. And the third of the rack is pretty impressive because you're talking about the shrinkage of the hardware, but the performance games are- To be honest, one of the key things that people need to understand, I mean, it sometimes gets lost in the technology discussion, is how that actually happened. And it happened because, and I'll simplify it, is in essence, in the traditional Blade, VM, et cetera world, you're limited by how big your JVM can be, your Java virtual machine, and how many you can have in a compute node. And in the Oracle world, that can be five or 10 gigs instead of one, and you can have five or 10 or 20 of them. So that means I could take one compute node on the exologic we had three years ago, forget the one you're gonna get now in two weeks, and be able to put maybe 50 WebLogic servers on it. How many of those do I really need? Four, 10 for the whole enterprise, compared to 200 Blade servers, and then the management and everything else.  So you're impressed? Absolutely. All right, Aaron, we really appreciate you coming on and talking to us on the queue. We're getting ready to break down. They want to move the chairs. Thank you, we stay until they pull the plug. Exactly. This is the queue bringing you the data. One in pure time, right? There we go. We learned to skip those, it's really crazy. This is the queue, we'll be right back after the short break for wrap up here at the Oracle headquarters. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. Thank you very much.