Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco on Howard Street where they're shutting the city down for 60,000 people for Oracle OpenWorld. This is SiliconANGLE.tv, the CUBE's exclusive coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. I'm John Furrier with my co-host for the week. It's Stu Miniman from wikibond.com and Brian Gracey from wikibond.com. The analysts, our analyst team here, guys, we're going to break down and wrap up. Is this called day two or day one? It's our second day, but it might be the official first day. I don't know, but all I know is that the day is over. We're going to wrap it all up. Mark Hurd had the keynote with a phenomenal bunch of guests coming in here. It's all about the cloud. We had the marketing cloud team just prior to the wrap here. They're bringing DevOps to marketing. From marketing to systems management and monitoring, it's all Oracle, it's all cloud, all the time, Stu, what's your take? So, John, first of all, of course, Oracle's good at making everybody talk about what they're saying. They come out strong and they make bold statements, like, you know, the future, there's only going to be two clouds and we're all looking at it a little bit sideways and being like, I don't know, you know, Amazon sure felt we're real a couple of weeks ago when we were all there, Microsoft's making moves, you know, IBM, of course, has a huge portfolio. So, you know, Oracle is a player in the cloud. Of course, they've got, you know, probably the stickiest application out there in the industry. Their customers love Oracle, something I've been hearing at the show a lot, but they'd always love how Oracle treats them or, you know, sometimes you have to separate a little bit some of the marketing bravado with the reality of what's going on. Brian, a lot of marketing bravado, the messaging is tight, they all have their notes, but it's really perfect, actually environment, the cloud for Oracle customers. So, if you're an Oracle customer, you're in good shape, Oracle's going to take you to the future, they got the partnership bear hug going on, they've seen all that, public messaging, but if you are a true multi-vendor shop and you want multi-cloud, what's the reality here? Well, you know, I think we asked that question of Oracle over and over again. The response we got was, there is no other cloud, there is no other reason for anybody else to look at the cloud, but I think the reality is customers, customers don't want to be locked in. The idea of one cloud going back to one mainframe isn't totally appealing to customers. It will be for Oracle applications, but I think as we look at IoT, as we look at Microsoft applications, we look at cloud foundry, what they're doing in that whole space, I think we're going to see multiple clouds, whether that's three or five or eight, we'll see, but look, I don't think customers are 100% bought into the one cloud message yet. So, let's walk through some of the things that we did here today, obviously the numbers, right? Mark heard, very adamant, we already paid the investment in, multi-year journey, call it fusion, maybe the retrofitting fusion, but really cross-platform, so they made the investment, they have a good pipeline of customers, they're really pushing it hard, they're showing some numbers. Is Oracle the Rodney Danger Field of the cloud? Will they get their respect? I think they will, I think they will. I don't know if that's the best analogy. I think Oracle just hasn't marketed before now. I mean, this is the first year it's been real cloud. Last year, Larry talked about it, there wasn't a whole lot behind it. The one comment that we heard today that I think was rang pretty true was, some of their partners said, there's real product this year, there's real things we can be systems integrators around, so I think we'll hear the reality. I don't think you're going to hear the new developers talking about Oracle Cloud, you never hear them talking about using Oracle products in terms of the open source crowd, but for Oracle Enterprise Developers, yeah, it's a good fit. Stu, we talked with Amit, Xavier earlier, Senior Vice President, we've talked to him before, great guest, so super knowledgeable, Senior Vice President on the product side, so he's on the engineering side. These guys are savvy, they kind of know what they're doing, but again, they're Oracle specific, his message was clear, they will be best at integration, meaning getting people onto the cloud. If the business metric are on the sales motion side is cloud, we've heard that from their top sales guy today, they're going to move people to the cloud, so they're going to be pretty myopic on Oracle, but yet they're playing the open mess. We heard Docker yesterday, how do you make sense of it? And by the way, he did mention that storage is kind of going away, so it highlights your whole point about end of storage as we know it. How do you make sense of the Oracle integration, vis-a-vis the reality of the market? Yeah, so John, great points there. First of all, Oracle for years has really controlled the environment through their licensing, they've got it really an iron grip on how things are deployed, and we heard AWS when they released dedicated hosts, they said, well, some companies are a little bit outdated with how they do their licensing, it's basically pointing out how Microsoft does licensing and Oracle does licensing. Well, if you look at what Microsoft and Oracle are doing, they're saying, sure you can come to the cloud, but you're going to come to our cloud, and the licensing is going to be on our terms. I think that there's a couple of things. One is, if you're comfortable with those applications, you want to stay with them, you know you're going to be safe in those environments, but for me, it also proves to customers it's kind of leading the way and saying, hey, it's safe to go play in the cloud, it's safe to go do those environments, and therefore, people that can provide alternatives are going to make some headway. Oracle's a real tough one because, of course, making any migration is really difficult, even though, so it's good to see Oracle, all the effort they've put in making that code, and Enterprise Cloud has promised for those customers in those environments, the thing I would say is that, for most of the other applications, I don't know why many customers would consider moving more into the red stack when they kind of really want to have that environment just kind of stay there. Brian, I want to get your take on Sean Price, I was very impressed with him, he's the new guy on the block, Senior Vice President of the Oracle Cloud, he reports to Mark Hurd, so he's on the go-to-market side. We're going to see Dave Donatelli on Wednesday, he's another leader reporting to Mark Hurd. Mark Hurd's got a great talent team, he's very impressive, he said one thing, I want to give you the thoughts on, Oracle has to disrupt themselves, and he said, when I interviewed for the job, I wanted to know from the Senior Leadership Team, is Oracle prepared to disrupt themselves? If you are, I want to come work here. And he said, yes, we are, so your take on that, great mojo, for sure. He did talk about the sales motion, some specifics, but that really is the key for Oracle, they need to disrupt themselves for their own customer base and position themselves for the future with open technologies. Well, I think, you know, part of it's open technologies, I think we're still need to be convinced that they're actually open, but I think the thing that he hit on, which was key, and we've seen failures in other companies trying to do this is, they're changing their sales model, if you don't change your sales model, your sales rep's going to come in and say, keep buying Cat-Bax, keep being on-prem, don't change the status quo. He comes from SuccessFaskers, he understands the SaaS business model, he understands it very well. That's the kind of leadership you need, somebody who's not saying, I just want this job because it's a promotion, they're saying, I've got the experience to do that stuff. He's definitely an up and comer, and he's definitely somebody that's going to drive that change. I liked him as well, and he also is not hiding behind the, is Oracle using their tactics to get customers into the cloud numbers? And he's like, absolutely not, and the numbers were pretty impressive, but he was very transparent about this pricing change. They're going to change how they do business. Well, I think they're changing how they do sales. I want to see them be transparent on their price. I'll put it this way, I can't go to oracle.com slash cloud or Oracle cloud and see pricing like I can see AWS. They've got to get to that level of transparency. Well, if they're going to change their sales motion, certainly the tactics have to be on the pricing side, which basically, I don't think they've released their prices, so I think that's something that's not out there. If it's out there, it's all kind of under the covers right now. Right, right, well, and that rubs, contrary to him saying, I've got 70 million active users, you know, I started to know you active users, not even know what the pricing is, come on now. So something doesn't give there. Stu, we talked with some other folks, we brought up Microsoft Azure, a little bit of an uncomfortable moment there, we brought up Cloud Foundry. How does Cloud Foundry compete in this marketplace? Guys, thoughts here. Yeah, so I'm not sure on Cloud Foundry, what I could tell you is from an open stack standpoint, though, Oracle, it made some announcements around open stack, and my understanding is that open stack is really behind the scenes as to how their software as a service works. So, you know, as Brian said, we're not fully convinced as to how much Oracle's giving back to the community, but they're engaged. As we said many times, you know, what they're doing with Linux, with open stack, they're leveraging those technologies. On some ways, it reminds you a little bit about what Amazon's doing is, you know, that there's some openness behind the scenes. Andy Jassy, when we talked to him this year, said that, you know, Amazon is giving back, and I think we're hearing Oracle say some of, you know, kind of the openness message, but we still need to be convinced. They're not as open as, you know, even a Microsoft is or some of the other players. Guys, we've got a full day tomorrow. We've got Wednesday, obviously, up until 1.30, we're in the wall-to-wall coverage here on silkenangle.tv, theCube, and obviously, Wikibon, you've got some great research out there, wikibon.com, check that out. I want to just get your thoughts today as we wrap this down for today. Main takeaways that you've heard and synthesized out from all the conversation, that signal that's out there, not just for the Oracle, outside of Oracle. I mean, with IBM Insights going on, you have all these different events, you guys are down at the Cisco UCS booth talking more on the networking side. What is the general sentiment from your takeaway today on the overall Oracle story? Does it hang together? Is it gonna, is it flying out in the real world? And what's your take on it? Brian, we'll start with you. For me, the big thing is, I think they've got a great portfolio around SaaS. You know, I think HCM, ERP, CRM, I think they're gonna be great around the SaaS space. I think that whole idea of I can help migrate you like to like is gonna work very well. I'm gonna be very interested to see how well the Paz and infrastructure is a service play because that doesn't come from a place of strength for them. It comes from a place of, you know, having to make transformations. Transformations are hard. Like you said, Amazon won the first game, we're now in the second game. That's what I'm gonna want to see a year from now, six months from now. How are you winning beyond SaaS? Man, I love the marketing cloud messaging.  And they're doing it right. Great leadership there. I think that's it. And it was interesting that the GM of the marketing cloud basically used words like automation industry. He agreed. He thinks it's a DevOps-like culture now in marketing. So he likes obviously the things that we're doing and some of the things on social. So that was impressive. Again, I love geeking out on the whole super cluster things too. Have you heard any feedback on the John Fowler interview and some of the Silicon on Chip? That's game changer. What's the, is it like people kind of like yawning? Are they happy about it? No, John, it is really interesting. Because first of all, the sun acquisition looks like the fruit is being borne out of that. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. Security down on the chip level. Actually, some of the other vendors that I've talked to were like, absolutely. There needs to be that marrying of hardware and software to do it right. It's not all a software world. It's around something I wrote a few years ago talking about really hyper-optimizing an environment and what Oracle's doing with their full stack, both what they'll put into the customer environment and in their enterprise cloud, I think is something that proves that environment. It's not all about just commoditization and everything becomes simple. That integration is a lot of work and Oracle puts investment there. One of the things I look at is the amount of investment that goes into these environments. If you talk about from a public cloud standpoint, we said it's not a couple of billion, it's tens of billions of dollars if you truly want to be a global cloud provider. And I don't hear Oracle saying that they don't want to be in the AWS model. They want to be the cloud for the workloads and the environments where it makes sense. And of course, where they're going to make money. So they're definitely not cutting prices and showing prices like we saw Amazon, Google and Microsoft doing over the last couple of years. So Oracle plays a different game. It is pretty common for a vendor to claim victory and leadership in the game that they're playing. It's our jobs to help lay out and understand what the customers are actually doing and where the leaders are. And Oracle's really interesting to watch. All right, guys, to your take on Intel, Herd and Crashnik was up on stage yesterday. They want the power. They want the power of business from IBM. That was interesting. I want to give you thoughts on that. Also, some other trending news here that's going on is that it's still early. I think that's obviously all over the web. In general, people think they've got a good position. I mean, it's formidable. People are generally saying, I think to me, the takeaway is, wow, they're actually have a good beachhead right now. They have a good position and still needs execution, but predictions of marker over the top hold 2025. Come on.  He had his huge speech, the cloud isn't real. You know, it wasn't really sure. I think you walk away from this week of your Oracle customer and you say, yeah, I think they know what they're doing. I think they have a plan. We'll see how fast they can expand it and we'll see how fast I can migrate to it.  Flare talks about all the time, moving data, changing databases is hard. It's not as simple as clicking a button. So, but the framework is there. It's a good place for them to be. I remember four years ago specifically because I thought that Dave, and it was like Dave, it's like the eye of the hurricane. It's calm, there's no wind. The ecosystem felt listless. His keynote felt like the same slice in the past three, four years. And you can almost see it in Larry's eye, like, you know, the deer and the headlights, right? Smoke coming out of his ears like, damn, I need to make a move. And since that open world, it's just been, the energy every year just is just like, he must have gone back to the headquarters and said, we are changing direction and we're gonna move fast. And I gotta say, I'm super impressed. I've been excited. I was like a naysayer back doing, hi Oracle, hi, ho-hum. I gotta say, they've done an extremely good job of getting in the game with power, leveraging their existing install base, their core assets, database, NERP. And using that, a sacrifice to go take a bigger position. I think that's their play, in my opinion. To me, it's gonna be interesting, not just from Oracle's perspective, but you look at all the other vendors, they can HP and the new Dell EMC and so forth. They're all kind of saying, you don't need to rush to the cloud because they don't have a play there. You can keep upgrading, keep upgrading. And it'll see, Oracle I think is gonna start dictating the pace at which people start moving things off-premise or into the cloud and that's gonna impact these other vendors being able to do upgrades and so forth. It's gonna impact their business. Well, the one thing that I really wish we had more time-ups, I really wanted to dig into cost of goods sold, some of the pipeline from the sales motions is Mark Herd, it's not on the schedule, so Mark Herd will not be on the queue in this trip. Hopefully, maybe there's an opening we can get him in, try and see if we can pull him in. But love to have Mark Herd, he's up on the keynote today. On an anchor desk, he looked comfortable up there. I mean, he could look comfortable here in the queue, don't you think? Absolutely. Let's do? Absolutely. Of course, you're gonna say no. Of course, yes. Guys, thanks so much, too. Brian, great job today, thanks to the crew. Wrap up for day two here live on Howard Street. I'm gonna call it a wrap here for day two in the queue. We'll see you tomorrow for day three of coverage Tuesday all day and then Wednesday till 1.30. Go to siliconangle.com for all the blog posts, reference point for tech innovation. Go to wikibond.com and check out the free research. If you want to subscribe to The Cutting Edge, bleeding edge research from the analyst there, go there.  Guests of the week and go to youtube.com, so you're still getting it for all the videos. Thanks for watching, we'll see you tomorrow.


I'm really optimistic and excited about 2024 because it'll be my family's first full year on the ground in Wellington. And we have a number of projects in the works that will allow me to work and collaborate with a whole bunch of cool Kiwi and Maori creators. And that's basically what I've been setting out to do for the last three or four years. So I'm excited to get these things going and eventually share them with the world. So this is gonna be a great year for me personally and professionally.


UC Berkeley students are shooting for the stars. Literally. Undergraduate students from all different majors are competing in a nationwide NASA challenge that could give them the chance to work with renowned engineers and astronauts and send their experimental design to space from NASA headquarters. Representing Berkeley as the competitor for Challenge 1. And we have a very capable team. And I have no doubt that we're going to win this competition and just represent Berkeley as one of the winners for NASA's MicroGNX Challenge. Our bears designed the Berkeley Autonomous Emergency Responder, which locates and navigates to distress calls emitted from an astronaut in the middle of an open ocean. The goal? To significantly increase the likelihood of a safe recovery during emergency situations. It's also been great seeing how my team leaders have managed to keep all of us together, even though everything is virtual. I know it must have been really hard, but they were really good at telling us what they wanted from us. The team plans to take advantage of campus labs and other resources to test their designs. We will be working with multiple manufacturing labs throughout campus. So hopefully they'll allow us to build some of our parts through them. I will be reaching out to our aquatics director at Berkeley, seeing if it would be possible to test our vehicle at some of our facilities on campus. The final phase of the competition involves going to NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas and working closely with the acclaimed faculty. And working in the neutral-pointy lab to test our drone. That should be a life-changing experience. All of the team members share the genuine and altruistic goal to help astronauts while making significant contributions to scientific advancement. This is sort of something that isn't a competition, more of it is just a group of people working together to create new technology to benefit hopefully NASA, hopefully to develop technology. The team started a GoFundMe to raise money for their project because their budget lies completely on sponsored funds. Reporting for CalTV News, I'm Nikki Rosenblum.


In my last video about avocados, I described the anti-inflammatory effects and cholesterol and triglyceride lowering effects. But what about that video I did years ago about the chromosome-damaging effects in a Petri dish? That all goes back to 1975 when a pesticide naturally produced by the avocado tree was discovered. I thought to explain why lactating livestock suffered mammary gland damage nibbling on the leaves. The toxin was named person, also found to be damaging to the heart, which is why you should never feed avocado to your pet birds. But hey, if it attacks mammary cells in animals, might it attack breast cancer cells in humans? It did seem to have the same kind of cell cytoskeleton clumping effect in vitro that chemotherapy can have, demonstrating potent cell growth stopping and killing effects of the novel plant toxin among various lines of human breast cancer cells. So they're thinking about how it might one day be used as chemo itself. But here I am thinking, holy guacamole, Batman! Please tell me it doesn't have toxic effects on normal cells, too. In 2010, we got an answer. An evaluation of the genotoxicity, the toxicity to our chromosomes of avocado extracts on human white blood cells in a petri dish. Normally, less than 10% of our dividing cells have any chromosome abnormalities, but drip some avocado fruit extracts on them and up to half come out defective in some way. They conclude that there's something in avocado fruit that can potentially induce significant genomic instability and some genetic damage in human white blood cells in a petri dish. If the same effect occurs in actual people, it could, for example, result in transforming cells into cancer. That's a big if, though. These were blood cells. You don't inject guac into the vein. For anything to get into our bloodstream, it first has to survive our stomach acid, get absorbed through our intestines, and then sneak past our liver's detoxification enzyme. And indeed, a person may be affected, changed by acidic conditions. And so, given all the differences between what happens in a petri dish and a person, it's essential to carry out further studies before making a final remark about its toxicity. Okay, but what do you do before these studies come out? I was concerned enough. I provisionally moved it from a stuff-your-face green light food to a moderate-year intake yellow light food until we knew more to err on the side of caution. Even if a person was utterly destroyed by stomach acid, what about oral cancer? At high enough concentrations, avocado extract can harm the growth of the kinds of cells that line our mouths. Yeah, but this is in a petri dish, where the avocado is coming in direct contact with the cells.  But it harms oral cancer cells even more.  Those red dots are the mitochondria, the power plants of the cells fueling cancer growth extinguished by the avocado extract. But since it does this more to cancerous than normal cells, they end up concluding avocados may end up preventing cancer. What about the esophagus, which lies between the mouth and the stomach? They similarly found that an avocado fruit extract appeared to inhibit cancer cell growth more than normal cell growth when it came to colon cancer cells, or esophageal cancer cells. But rather than comparing the effects to normal colon and esophagus cells, they compared to a type of blood cell, which again has limited relevance in a petri dish study of something you eat. This study was pretty exciting, though. It looked at p-cressol, which is a uremic toxin, may also be toxic to the liver, has been found associated with autism, and it comes from eating high-protein diets, whereas if you eat more plant-based diet, the only source of prebiotics like fiber and resistance starch, your levels go down. See, fermentation of carbohydrates in the colon, like fiber, is considered beneficial, whereas fermentation of protein, which is called putrefaction, is considered detrimental. So you switch people to a high-protein diet, and within days the excess protein putrefying in their gut leads to an increase in ammonia, as well as p-cressol. In fact, a doubling of levels within a week. But might phytonutrient-rich plant foods like apples, cranberries, grapes, or avocados protect the cells lining our colon from the deleterious effects of p-cressol, in terms of cell viability, mitochondrial function, and epithelial integrity, meaning protection against gut leakiness? Here's that data on barrier function integrity, damaged by p-cressol, but rescued by all the cranberry, avocado, grape, and apple extracts, though mitochondrial function was only approved by the cranberries and avocados, and they're also the only ones that appeared to prevent the deleterious effect of p-cressol on colon cell viability. But bottom line, avocados appearing to have beneficial effects on colon lining cells, so that's a good sign. Okay, but enough of these in vitro studies already. Yes, an avocado extract can inhibit cancer cell growth in a petri dish, but unless you're doing some unspeakable things to that avocado, like guacamole-width benefits, there's no way that the avocado is going to come in direct contact with your prostate cells, so what does this study mean? That's why I was so excited to see this study, the first to actually look for a link between avocado consumption, actual human beings eating avocados, and prostate cancer. So do avocado eaters have more cancer risk, or less cancer risk? We'll find out right now. Men who ate the most avocado, more than about a third of an avocado a day, reduced their risk of prostate cancer, in fact less than half the odds. So with the data on improved artery function, lower cholesterol, and if anything in association with decreased cancer risk, I'd suggest moving it back into the green zone.