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Ross Brown Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
Embark on a transformative journey with us, as we invite Oracle’s own Ross Brown to illuminate the trailblazing path Oracle Cloud is carving in the tech world. In this condensed power session, we strip down 30 years of partnership mastery to reveal the core of Oracle’s disruptive cloud strategies. Prepare to have the curtain lifted on Oracle’s cloud innovations that are challenging the status quo and setting new standards for security, efficiency, and partnership synergy. This is not just a conversation—it’s a masterclass in industry evolution with one of the greats. Tune in to redefine what you thought possible in cloud computing.
About Ross Brown
Ross Brown North American Ecosystem Lead, Oracle Cloud
With a distinguished three-decade career in tech partnerships, Ross Brown now spearheads Oracle Cloud’s North American ecosystem, driving growth and innovation. His expertise, gained from leading roles at VMware and Microsoft, is pivotal to Oracle’s strategic collaborations and cloud solutions.
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What You’ll Learn?
- Oracle Cloud’s rapid growth and partnerships.0:00
- Rethinking cloud computing strategies.5:00
- Cloud computing issues and solutions.10:00
- Cloud security and network architecture.14:03
- OCI’s unique features and benefits.18:01
- Moving Oracle apps to cloud and partnering with GSI/regional SI.22:32
- Oracle’s cloud strategy and partnerships.27:44
- AG1 SponsorshipMessage 31:34
- Solving industry problems with technology partnerships.32:57
- Cloud computing, AI, and ego in the tech industry.36:08
- Cloud computing and partnerships.42:06
- Partnering with Microsoft for cloud services.45:11
- AI adoption and partner ecosystems in tech industry.51:26
- Partner recruitment and skill development in various industries.54:38
- Career development and technology.57:23
- Dinner party guests including business leaders and philanthropists.1:03:58
- Entrepreneurship, business growth, and innovation.1:06:37
Celebrating Over 200 Episodes
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Ultimate Partner recently celebrated its inaugural event, an exceptional milestone met with extraordinary feedback. We achieved an impressive satisfaction score of 4.85 out of 5, and I’m thrilled to share that every attendee surveyed expressed their intention to join us for our next event.
For those who couldn’t make it worry not! We’re excited to bring you a curated selection of outstanding content from our sessions, all conveniently accessible under one roof. To ensure you don’t miss out on these insights, I encourage you to visit the Ultimate Partner website and subscribe to our newsletter. Stay tuned – there’s a lot more to come from The Ultimate Partner, and we can’t wait to share it with you.
Why Ultimate Partner?
Over six years ago, I embarked on a mission to empower partners struggling to navigate the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Ultimate Partner, an extraordinary media, events, and advisory company dedicated to transforming your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering Ecosystem Led Growth.
Having witnessed the industry from multiple perspectives – leading a $4.6 billion Ecosystem at Microsoft, spearheading partnerships for a billion-dollar company, and hosting 200 episodes of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering®, I’ve gained invaluable insights and crafted a manifesto of principles to guide your success.
In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead.
Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?”
If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace Ecosystem Led Growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise.
A Word from AG1
Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cloud, build, oracle, oci, partner, run, customer, microsoft, company, business, people, talk, aws, ai, platform, solve, oracle cloud, network, put, big
SPEAKERS
Ross Brown, Announcer, Vince Menzione
Vince Menzione 00:00
Are you curious about why Oracle Cloud is rapidly gaining ground against giants like AWS, Microsoft and Google? Have you ever wondered what goes into building a successful technology ecosystem? And want to hear from someone who’s done it multiple times? And are you interested in the recent groundbreaking collaboration between Oracle and Microsoft, and want to know why this is a game changer for the industry, then you’ve come to the right place. This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione. Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host, and today I will Ross Brandt leads North American ecosystems at Oracle Cloud. And if you’ve been following the tech space, you know that Oracle Cloud has become the fourth hyperscale, showing remarkable growth and innovation. Ross is at the forefront of this exciting journey. And today he’ll share his insights not just about Oracle Cloud, but about the evolving landscape of Technology Partnerships. This episode is a masterclass from one of the leaders in this ecosystem space. And I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming Ross Brown.
Ross Brown 01:34
Ross, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, fans. Glad to be here. I’m so excited to welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering you lead North America ecosystem for Oracle Cloud. And I’m so excited for this discussion today. Thanks Good to be here, really excited to have an opportunity to chat about how the cloud is evolving the channel and the channel is evolving the cloud, such a great topic for our listeners, and you and I had the opportunity to be at Microsoft at the same time. But for our listeners that may have been under a rock maybe for the last decade and a half, I was hoping you can introduce it. I was hoping you could introduce us to you and your role at or Sure. So I’ve been an Oracle for about three and a half years, you know, my job when I came in was part of the dev organization in the outbound Product Management Group. Because as we’ll talk about the way Oracle Cloud infrastructure was created was as a separate business isolated from the rest of Oracle. And that’s prevent cross contamination between trying to build a cloud of the future and the behaviors of store Oracle. So I was brought into the dev org. And then about 18 months in the dev org moved over to leading product marketing about six months into moving product marketing. And then once we got everything launched in sort of got a complete cloud out there. And we’re passing Google in terms of breadth of services, I’ve moved over to kind of my historic exec role, which is running partnerships for the cloud infrastructure side. Now, yeah, that’s been a lot of fun. coming into work, but and being the partner guy is a jarring experience. But it’s been great. Yeah, you know, you and I had a little bit of a discussion about Oracle and partner, right? We will get dive in a little bit there with your experiences, maybe from the outside with Oracle. So to give a little context of why we’re sort of joking about this, I spent 30 years in partner executive roles. Prior to Oracle, I led worldwide partners and alliances at VMware. And prior to that, when Vince and I worked together, I was responsible for Microsoft’s global partner strategy and led the Azure and Office 365 partner teams as well as the transition in our incentives programs at Microsoft from sort of license based to consumption based and trying to lead that transition towards clouds are built not bought. Prior to being at Microsoft, I was CEO of a security company in Southern California that discovered 30% Of all the flaws in Microsoft products, which was always an awkward part of coming into Microsoft. And then prior to that I was at a partner called a company called Citrix Systems out of Fort Lauderdale where I built the first deal registration program in the industry. And I worked at IBM and Tech Data, and I managed to reseller and migrate prior to that. So I’ve been in the industry for 30 years, always on the partner side. But now, in a cloud context, partnering is a very different context. So that’s kind of why I’ve come to Oracle, you know, let’s start with Oracle Cloud, right? And the work that’s going on there, there’s quite a bit of enthusiasm and growth, right? You’re being coined the fourth hyper scalar, our friend, Bob Evans, from acceleration economy is tracking the cloud wars and is really bullish on the work that Oracle is doing from a growth perspective. But you were laid out of the gate, and we talked about this, like when you came on board, it was just starting it up. Right. And, you know, Larry made some comments maybe a decade or so ago about the cloud and we can we can come back to, but why are you playing fast catch up now, to the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud. This is gonna take a minute to unpack but it’s a really good story. Alright, so if you go back to 2006, and I had hair back then it was fun. I had a little bit bigger back to 2006. AWS was just starting up as a way for then to monetize the massive spare compute cycles they had for their e commerce engine. And they you know, Microsoft quickly followed with red dog in 2008. It launched his Azure in really late 2009. And at that time, you really what was happening is you had, you know, Microsoft had built Global Foundation service that was running Xbox Live and being in office 365. And starting to run dynamics. And, you know, Google had built Googleplex, which was a scale out really massively horizontal cloud native environment for running things like MapReduce, and, you know, for search, and then YouTube and a bunch of other applications that are really very scale horizontal stuff. And then Microsoft, and Google sort of was following what AWS had done, which was find a way to monetize their spare compute. And if you think about that, that was an architecture that existed for one purpose, either ecommerce or YouTube or, but makes a horizontal cloud native type activities being turned into an engine that you could time slice and share with others and stuff like that, which is brilliant, right? It’s a really a profound breakthrough in sort of it strategies and stuff. But when we followed in sort of 2012, and started building a cloud, we just mirrored what everyone else was doing, including, by the way, IBM Cloud and K five from Fujitsu and everybody else, which was commodity computers, organized in racks with Hub and Spoke topology networks at the top and really clever software, running containers and server lists and things like that. But, you know, it suffered from two sins, like with two fatal flaws that we just realized one was, we weren’t building it on top of something that already had been paid for, we were having to actually pay for all these computers. So the economics were horrible, like, you’re never going to make that work against a Googleplex, who can monetize search at such a high margin, that the cloud basically is free from an infrastructure, it’s all just value add on top of it until you start specializing what you need. And so what that was number one capital sin, which was it was going to cost a ton of money to lose, right? That was sort of a good thing. And two, we couldn’t run our own stuff. Like our own environments, were struggling to run inside our cloud. And we can make Exadata run. It’s an engineered appliance. And you can certainly put that in the cloud fabric and make it run but running things like real app like the RAC our application clustering capabilities, that was really hard to do. It just wasn’t performing well. So it Larian 2014, sort of stepped back and started a skunkworks project, which I really liked. His approach to this was he, he’s been a fixture in our industry, and the Sydney is a pioneer, it’s so many things, to be self aware enough to step back and go, Hey, I want to do something new. But to do it new, I really have to do it new blank slate, like the tabula rasa approach of I can’t build on the strength I have, I have to build on just some assets like capital and things like that. So we hired Don Johnson, Clay McCormack, and pretty Vinson out of AWS here in Seattle, and gave them sort of a mandate with the mandate was, number one, go build a business and answer the question of knowing now as senior AWS architects 15 years or 10 years into the cloud, knowing what you know, now, what would you do different? Like if you could start all over with unlimited budget a blank piece of paper, and you weren’t building it as an environment that was on top of an E commerce something or weren’t building it the way GCP did on top of Google flex, but you could purpose build whatever you want it? How would you do different both technically and business wise? What would you change? And second, do it on your own, you have unlimited budget, but please, you build your own HR, build your own, you know, supply chain, build all that stuff, but don’t let Oracle influence or somehow constrain your thinking of here’s how Oracle does it right. So that’s kind of why people have this surprise thing of like, you know, Oracle went from having this third rate, you know, bad cloud reputation, all of a sudden, you’re winning these, you know, tiktoks, and zooms, and Ubers, and a bunch of others that are just scaling up, like adapt, and cohere, and Mosaic and all these AI companies are flocking to us. And they’re kind of like why? Well, it’s because we had the ability to do with three years what took AWS and GCP 10, because we had Larry’s funding, and his ability to go hire at 500 engineers in Seattle, to go build a literally a skunkworks project of unbelievable engineering talent to rethink the cloud. Now the challenge is, you’ve got it, you’ve built it, but nobody knows about it. Now you’ve got to figure out how to activate all the broad partners and figure out how to go out and tell the world you know, there are other ways to build clouds. And sometimes when you actually rethink about the hardware layer and say, what have we engineered the hardware to be a better cloud, I have to remind everybody this thing, Bob Evans got run away. But we bought son in 2010. We have all these massive high performance engineers who have been building Exadata and clustered systems to run our own applications at high performance that we turn them loose on this stuff with these cloud engineers, and the two of them got together and started engineering whole different architectures to deliver the cloud. I’ll describe some of it in a little bit. But that’s kind of the premise behind it is you know, they went down this path of blank piece of paper, knowing what you know now what Do you do different, they did some amazingly different things,
Vince Menzione 10:02
which, you know, strikes me thinking back to this time, like it felt like Oracle went dark on the cloud. And that’s exactly what you described is what happened behind the scenes, the skunkworks project, right?
Ross Brown 10:14
I mean, field still had targets to go sell stuff. But largely, you know, the motivation wasn’t there, because the success wasn’t there. And salespeople build on success, you know, you can’t ask the world’s most effective enterprise sales force to go fail year after year. Like, that’s demotivating. Right, you can’t do that. And so the imperative imperative was not you dummies, go sell a bad product, the the imperative was build a better product, and then, you know, figure out how to activate. So we focused on database and license and still we’re selling cloud, but it was rough times for the field. Now, you know, they have this platform where you know, the number one reaction we get from customers, and this is the warning, I’ll tell partners, because a lot of partners are unaware of OCI. And in many cases, we’re working in an Oracle practice inside of a large partner, not the cloud practice. And the common practice gets surprised because their customer hears from another partner or somebody else about what OCI is. And their general reaction is, why didn’t I know about this? Why wasn’t I told and I have to always remind people, we just finished it. You’re not late. It’s not like it’s been out there for 10 years, like literally, like we passed Google in 2021. In terms of the Gartner scorecard, and we’re just continuing to scale even better now. So it’s very new. And I want to give everyone permission to not be like, I should know about it. Well, no, now it’s time to learn about it. But it’s very new. It’s very different. Let’s
Vince Menzione 11:34
double click here, right? For those of us that don’t know, right, what differentiates Oracle Cloud from the other guys?
Ross Brown 11:42
Well, first, let’s talk about what’s wrong with the cloud. And then we can talk about how you fix it. Let’s dig in. And the reason I say this is because this is just how the cloud operates. And one of the most clever things, and I hate to use this phrasing this way. But the most clever thing is the three hyperscalers convinced the world, the way they work is the way the cloud works. And so when you come and say no, you can do things a different way that actually is better. You can arguments of well, that’s not the cloud, are you sure it is, it’s all automated. It’s all scaled services and stuff like that. So I’ll describe what’s wrong with the current cloud. The problem with the current cloud is a network topology problem, combined with a control plane problem. And I’ll explain what I mean by a network topology problem is the noisy neighbor. Right? I lose you. Okay, let’s try it. Yeah. So the noisy neighbor problem, which is, you know, if you’re in an AWS server and your muse, bad example, you’re in a container based application running on that server, and then some shard of a database on a related server, that same rack is running a recommendation engine for, you know, the Netflix service, okay, when new episodes of Stranger Things hits huge amounts of packets coming out that thing, it’s going to create network latency that slows down your application. So what do you do you build things in containers, you build stateless databases, so you don’t have to maintain a stateful connection, you don’t have to have that, you know, performance dependent on latency, you build cloud apps performance independent of latency, right? Well, there, you’re trading off a huge amount of efficiency when you do that. So I’m just going to give a very simple example of this how often a CPU core is sitting waiting for data before it can progress where it’s thread is, in essence, waiting on a packet to come back. And collisions can sometimes be 20 30% of the network traffic, which means for every dollar and compute you’re spending in the cloud, you might be burning 20 to 25 cents in wasted compute cycles, that are inefficient because of an inefficient network. Okay, well, that gets offensive. And also by the way, the more successful the cloud provider gets, the more they oversubscribed, their network, which also ends up creating more idols compute cycles that aren’t being productively used, but are waiting on the network. So they have their own positive, negative self reinforcing economics here, which is we make more money, the more congested the network is, right? perverse economics are everywhere in the cloud, you’re gonna learn there’s all sorts of negative incentives and stuff that just are weird. Alright, so what did we do? We did a couple of things. One, we built a control plane, that’s an off box GPU, so our control plane doesn’t run on the same hardware as client tenancy. So what does that do? Well, it does four things when it gives us bare metal as a service. Like I can provision an entire server because my control plane can issue firmware and refresh it and doing this 9001 scrub on it, boot drives and all that other sort of stuff that you need to do and do it in a completely touchless way. No humans involved in the provisioning no humans involved in the reclamation, but that’s trying to get to the bare metal, which is a really core concept for us to do some stuff later. But it also means a couple of really key security things. One, I’m not running on the same hardware as the client as a result, it privilege escalation within a client VM can’t bridge to the control plane and get access to other clients. There’s a hardware gap between the client hardware running in this off box can data processing unit that’s managing the control playing. And so that non shared hardware gives me some security in terms of that. But it also gives me the ability to be the only cloud to give the customer encryption keys and tell them you own your own keys. There’s no shared keys in OCI. And so unlike other clouds, where they have to be able to see into the hardware, because the control plane is running there, I don’t have to. So I can actually give people full encryption to their tenancies, and they own it. And I don’t need to peek into it, which is very secure. I mean, that’s generally it. But here’s the big one, all the logging and observability data that’s coming up that control plane is occurring on a different network segment than the neck network traffic and the tenant. Right. So now I’ve taken this massive firehose of observability data and logging data and pointed it elsewhere. It’s no longer on the same segment as the client. But let’s talk about network segments here for a second. Okay, the next part, it gets technical. And you know, for the folks that are involved in alliances in marketing, I’m going to tell you, the easiest way to absorb what I’m going to talk about next, is to go read just the summary paragraphs of the Wikipedia articles for a couple of terms. It really does a great job of breaking it down in layman’s terms in a way that makes sense. But I know this is gonna sound technically dense, don’t let it scare you. It’s really important. So I have to give that warning because I get lots of people in my own team or partner managers. When I started telling him this there, I used to see their eyes go, That’s outstanding. That’s like no, really kind of important because, you know, we’re not a joke all the time. We’re not working for Kimberly Clark, or Rubbermaid. We’re not selling, you know, diapers and trash cans, we’re selling the most advanced tech platform on the planet. So some of the core features you should know. Alright, so what did we do, we built a different type of network, we did something that’s not common, but not unusual. And then something that’s really unusual, the common, the unusual, but not terribly unusual thing is we built a different topology. So instead of a top of rack switch that acts like a switch for things in the rack and a router for east west traffic, we built a folded leaf and spine network topology, which if you go talk to somebody who’s a Cisco engineer, they’ll tell you that is the way you should design a network because it creates what’s called a slow, non blocking network. And that’s c l o s, named after Charles called mathematician. non blocking network basically means you can create a new connection between systems without disrupting an existing connection. That’s a non blocking networks, the way phone systems work, you know, when the operator connects one, you know, connect phone to another connection, that’s a dedicated line between those two, and she can connect another connection to another connection, it has nothing to do with that other connection. That’s in essence, what a non blocking network does in a packet based network. But that’s only the answer, right? That’s part of it. We also and this is the part by the way, we’re pretty FinCEN as a genius. And I’ll say this in every public forum, I can, he built a virtualization device. It’s a hardware based virtualization device on the RJ 45 ports that allows us to virtualize traffic at the data frame layer, meaning instead of operating at TCP IP at the protocol layer, like every other cloud, we’re able to operate at the signal layer, which means there’s no collisions between your workload and any other tenant or control plane on OCI. As a result, there’s no latency inside your network. And as a result, you can run bare metal, and you can run stateful databases in real time. And you can run with this next part. Okay, so that’s clever, right? We did this non blocking network, no latency, all this other stuff, bare metal, off box control plane, great networks, where they just, they just went over the top, they decided to put remote direct memory access over converged Ethernet backplanes, which allow any processor in a rack and Intel or AMD or Nvidia GPU rec, it allows any one of those processors to access the memory or GPUs in any other server on that rack, without going through the CPU bus, they can go directly to it, which allows us to cluster you know, 400 processors in a single cluster and petabytes of memory into a single cluster. So now you’ve got an environment that on a hardware level can run, you know, bare metal can run, you know, non blocking high performance networking can do GPU clusters at scale, can do you know anything having to do with DB two clusters, or Oracle Application clusters or, you know, VMware clusters, or any of those things where you need bare metal cluster together, we can do it natively as a service. And so that opens up like an incredible amount of throughput. But the most interesting thing is, because I’m not blocking, I’m not losing 20 to 30% of my compute to the network, as a result, application, take less resources, you need less VMs, you need less bare metal, things are more efficient, and then ends up being naturally much more cheaper. So we ended up not only being much faster, but a lot less expensive than other clouds to operate it but there’s other little stuff that’ll get on the business side, but just unpack the technology. That’s kind of a key thing. The little coda to it is that RDMA capability that we built, we built a version of that for our in video racks, that has a second folded leaf and spine overlay network on just the GPUs, which gives us the ability uniquely to do you know, theoretically 32,768 A one Hundreds are each one hundreds in a single cluster, and do it with 1600 bisection bandwidth across the entire thing. So the point of which is we’ve built this monster that can absolutely outperform anything else on the planet, and every single major AI company with except for the ones that have done first party deals like anthropic and, you know, open AI, and folks that are being built on other clouds, we have over 32 of the AI companies that are worth more than 250 million in private equity or VC value are building on OCI. And so that’s kind of a when you build something different. We have this weird environment where we go into enterprises, and they’re like, oh, no, we’re locked into Azure. We’re doing ACI with AWS, that’s our cloud. We’re single cloud, we’re doing that. How’s it going? Well, you know, it’s rough and hard to get some of these legacy stuff to work. But we’re doing mainframes and that stuff. And then you walk into an Uber and you show them, we built this thing in the cloud centric guys look at it go. Well, that’s amazing. We’re going there immediately, let’s fast as we can, right? So this dichotomy where we built something that folks are on the bow wave of technology, and building the most advanced cloud services and most advanced generative AI platforms just adopting us like crazy. And that’s what I’m trying to tell partners is like, this massive opportunity to be the first person to tell an enterprise customer about what OCI is, and how differentiated as I know, I’ve talked a lot, and I’ll pause for a second. But the business side of this thing is the crazier part, I’ll just hit a highlights our egress costs are 90%, lower compared to every other cloud, we don’t charge for security or observability tools, they’re all free. They’re built into the cost. Because we only have enterprise customers who don’t have startups, like no one’s going to run an enterprise class application without a managed NAT gateway or firewall or without observability on so we just made all that stuff free managed. Kubernetes is free. I mean, most customers have a 50% reduction in their cloud costs and a jump in performance when they move over to us. So that’s the high level. So
Vince Menzione 21:49
massive speed, massive efficiency and much lower cost.
Ross Brown 21:54
Yeah, I mean, there’s too much to unpack that’s but it’s things like, every other cloud kind of starts there egress fees at 10 gigabytes, we’re 90% lower, but we don’t start charging until 10 terabytes, there’s no cost to move things between availability zones, and our cloud because we own the network. So moving stuff, between five, it’s all free. So it’s just if you thought about if you’re designing a cloud over with the notion that the world’s going to be multi cloud, even if you’re the only iOS platform they’re using, they’re going to use SAS platform, because they’re gonna have other people running stuff. So data has to move, you can’t build it with the notion of this, you know, my cloud, everybody stay out, and I own your data. It just doesn’t make any sense anymore. Anyway, that’s what we do. That’s why I came here.
Vince Menzione 22:34
So yeah. And so let’s click in on, you know, how do you get a how do you get clients? How do you get partners onboard? How do you build your ecosystem strategy? So you alluded to a little bit of this Ross, right, because I know for a fact that Google, one of Google’s big blockers has been getting the technologists on board, right, getting into that third cloud. So what are you doing differently now?
Ross Brown 22:55
So a couple of things, there’s kind of three modes that we operate in. So if you think about like, the state, the customer might be, there’s kind of the dog bites man like this never makes headlines, but it’s moving the Oracle estate on to OCI. Alright, so we’re moving our exit data. We’re moving our custom apps, removing all the app X stuff, we’ve done all third party apps and all that stuff. Great. Your EBS and ERP systems aren’t stuck to fusion, our SaaS platform wonderfully, you’ve done it, nobody gets headlines on that. That’s and they kind of want to set out this is kind of the customer thing, where you’ve got somebody who’s the CTO or CIO or technologist head of DevOps, who’s made a hard bet, we’re going to GCP we’re going all in on Thomas’s promises, or we’re going up here to Azure or whatever. And for good reasons. I mean, those I’m not denigrating those other clients, they do a good job at the things they do in cloud native and some of the services they have, but they can’t do what we do. We’re just differentiating, and that’s the nature of clouds right now is it’s not there for hyperscalers. It’s there are four different clouds that are currently devolving into different direction. And it becomes important to think about what do you want from each one of us, not which one’s best? That’s kind of a false narrative. It’s starting to become really interesting leads to our Satya adularia conversation we’re having a moment. Yeah,
Vince Menzione 24:03
we’re gonna dig in there in a minute. That’s sort of the elephant in the room, we got to unpack on that.
Ross Brown 24:09
You know, for us, this sort of first case is actually a trap. Like when I saw the Let’s Move the Oracle apps to OCI, what ends up happening is, I’ve got the CTO who’s like, we’re going all the way to GCP or everything on Azure. And then over here is like, Yeah, what about us over here in the ERP land, and us over here in epic, where we’re running an EMR that’s very stateful and all those things, maybe this cloud thing can’t do everything because you told us this will take 12 months, and we’re a month 18 We still don’t have a go live date. You know, all these sorts of my theory up here that I’ve banked. My career on has this Inconvenient Truth of stateful database applications that don’t work really well and are sometimes really impossible to rewrite. And so the minute I moved those to OCI, I’ve taken away the pain. Now it’s like, of course, Oracle built a specialized cloud that’s really good at running Oracle and that’s all it’s good for. And so they get this thing in their head of like, that’s all it’s there for is running Oracle apps and they never connect the fact that to run our stuff, we had to build something that can run really performance applications really well, which means we also run cloud native really well, we run serverless really well and much more efficient stuff. So that doesn’t click in that first one, right? I haven’t typically an Oracle partner in there doing stuff moving. The next state is where we go. And we work with a partner, typically a regional si or a GSI. And we sit down, we do this on an industry basis, like we don’t do this as horizontal, like, Let’s go sell a thing. Like, let’s go sell GoldenGate data replication, and let’s go sell a database. It’s what solve a problem. And that’s kind of a really big ethos of like, constantly telling salespeople and everybody involved, like, you’re going to show up to a customer meeting, show up and solve a problem, because that’s the only ever gonna sell a cloud as solve a problem. Whether that’s giving them a way of thinking about the problem that leads them to a technical solution, or actually architecting a technical solution. Those are both valuable roles, but don’t show up and tell them how good you are, show up and solve a problem. So we do that with partners, we sit down with our GSI. And regionals, we say all right now, let’s think about retail as an example. And so because we’re all organized in the industry sales team, so I get my Retail Cloud engineer, note, not salespeople, my Retail Cloud engineer, my partner, cloud engineer, from my team, and somebody from Accenture, Deloitte, or IBM, or you Pam or whoever we get together with them, we say all right, now let’s think about all the retail customers you have and what problems they have, that they’re struggling to solve with their current cloud provider, regardless of who that is. And inevitably, it comes down to stuff they’re still buying Dell and HPE gear for because they can’t take it to the cloud, or things that need to run in a regulated environment and can’t go to the public region and all those sorts of things, you know, things that require deep integration into their retail transaction systems that are running in micros our platform. Great, let’s build an ML system that looks and does predictive assortment planning for what should go into which retail store for the postseason. So we come up with these five or six things, right. The important criteria for them is they have to meet three conditions. Number one, they have to solve a real problem for the customer. No contrived problems, no, like Did you know security problems from you might know, like, if that’s not already on the customer’s list of stuff I got to solve, it doesn’t qualify. So real problems, have real budgets, hypothetical problems have hypothetical budgets. So real problem, the second thing we want to do is want to solve a problem for the partner, which is a net new project, not a cannibalization of existing work. So if they’re in the middle of an 18 month application modernization for a particular app, and we know it would run better and OCI, we shut up, we go and focus on the thing that customer can’t solve, that creates net new work for the partner doesn’t blow up their 18 month migration project and turn it into a six week bare metal bare metal conversion. Like I mean, we can do that. But that’s not good for the partner. And lastly, and this is the most important is it must position OCI in an absolutely non Oracle context, it really can’t be, you know, here’s Golden Gate replicating your exit data system for Dr. Right? Okay, that’s just more dog bites, man. Once we do that, and we do that the customer has an aha moment, we get certified as a general use Cloud. And then our strategy is alright, for each customer. That’s really key, which to be clear globally, there’s like 3000 of them that really matter to Oracle at a deep level, like they’re really important to us. We just go in by industry and say alright, financial services, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bank of America, who are the partners, that customer is choosing to do work, because those are the builders that like, the fact that I’ve got, I’m in there and AWS is in there, which cloud are they going to build on? Well, there’s some weight based on the value of our cloud and the economics and the overall deal and stuff like that. But a big part of it is Accenture says, No, this is going to run better and OCI. Hey, we went it. So at that point, it becomes our job is to pitch work for partners. And now think about how profoundly different that is from working from 10 years ago. In order for us to drive consumption our cloud, we have to form pitch and close work for our partners to succeed. Yeah,
Vince Menzione 28:54
it’s foreign foreign language from the Oracle right, right now,
Ross Brown 28:58
to be clear, not universally spoken, it’s like still a cultural transformation. But what’s happening is the 75 or so Cloud leaders across the 4000 or so 4600 people in North America who are driving 80 plus percent of our revenue are all doing that, and winning at scale. And the ones who are kind of like, I’m still thinking about suing my customer, they’re just not working out. And so this transition towards show up and do something valuable, solve something, build something with a partner. It’s a profound shift, but it’s kind of in keeping with Oracle’s engineering history of building profoundly different and accelerated and performance solutions, which is really all Exadata and ERP. And those things
Vince Menzione 29:36
are and everything you’re saying strikes of high performance, right? So you’re talking financial services, right? You’re talking where millisecond matter in terms of transactional data in terms of grading and so on.
Ross Brown 29:47
Right? You need a credit response in 60 milliseconds. Yeah.
Vince Menzione 29:50
And what about health care? I think you did you talk about epic. I thought you were you mentioned epic here. I was thinking about some of them
Ross Brown 29:58
are competitive with Cerner. We acquired but you know, they’re like one of the things we always want to convey is, I’ll tell you that here’s a little aha, this is not a secret, by the way, I wish it it was a secret that it would seem like things that people have to go tell people because it’s compelling and stuff like that, because it’s secret. This is actually a public reference. And it’s just surprising to people. The largest SAP instance running in a public cloud is running on OCI. It’s Loblaws out of Canada, large retailer, large retail, and they have a massive SAP footprint and they’re not going to Hana. They’ve made the decision that they like running, the way they’re going to run until they make a decision to do whatever they’re going to do in the future. But they needed a public cloud to close out a data center. And so we talked about OCI as being an enterprise app environment for every enterprise key platform, not just Oracle estate. So you hear me use examples talking about epic and SAP and talking about, you know, sasinstitute large data warehouses and stuff because it’s really important for folks to know that we don’t get into this is so important for you know, internal inside of Oracle is a big transformation of we don’t get to litigate people’s past. The decisions they’ve made, they’ve made the investments they’ve made an IBM they’ve made an IBM the investments, they’ve made an Informatica they made Informatica. So what do we do we do a partnership with Informatica and Mary’s their data governance tools with our data management tools into a single cloud solution. We do deals with Red Hat and OpenShift to make sure their platforms are certified on OCI so that IBM consulting can scale their own software on our platform without worrying about, there’s some competitive oil and gas platform from Oracle or whatnot. So this notion of working well with competitors is absolutely critical to our success.
Vince Menzione 31:34
I’m so excited to announce our continued partnership with ag one. Many of you know, I made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being over six years ago, I found athletic greens, and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional basis supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D. And five free ag one travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vince M. That’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vince M. Check it out. I want to dive in a little bit on the Larry thing. But I really would like to double click with you on how you organize for success. Right with your partners. I thought I heard regional national si GSI advisory as a main focus and catalyst for success. Is that how you’re going to market across the verticals that you discussed?
Ross Brown 33:00
Not really let me talk about this way. So if you thought of this as a pivot table, the primary high order filter is industry, who’s active in what industry and stuff. So for me, like and I’ll just illustrate using our friends at Accenture because they’re a really good partner for us. Right? We have an Oracle practices run by Samia Turriff. She’s an amazing leader does a great job. She’s got folks in North America like Brian Kolinsky and Nish Patel who worked with us amazingly good people right inside the Oracle practice that’s still separate than their cloud first practice, which is where cloud engineers are that are working with AWS and GCP and all that stuff. Okay, that’s kind of think of it as vendor land, like, who manages which vendor? And how do we interact with them stuff. But then there’s, you know, 17 different micro industries that have their own practices around retail and life sciences different than healthcare. Those are the ones we really engage with. So we drive relationships to drive connections between that customer facing, I own a business problem that can be solved with technology, combined with our team in terms of I understand how technology can solve problems. And together they come and then we work with the delivery team. We’re deeply aligned with the Oracle practice around Oracle estate and around deals and what we’re doing there. But you have to think of it as in a lot of cases industry is the main lens, and it’s supported and backed up by you know, tech practices. You understand our tech, but we don’t go in with we’ve got Golden Gate, what problems can we solve, we go in with, you know, this is a great one with Deloitte. We have this company, it’s an oil and gas. And they have a particular challenge, which is they run a lot of oil rigs in Oklahoma and North Dakota in places that, frankly don’t have cell coverage. And nobody’s stringing wires out there to run a Wi Fi hotspot. And they need to figure out like how can we do anomaly detection in real time with machine learning on these rigs? Because when a 70,000 pound hydraulic wrench goes the rigs down for two weeks, and I might have lost two people in the in the accident. And so we put a thing called roving edge, which is a cloud delivered me up I went and put a VM an object store. So this is my boot VM, you put a pin in it to the address, and it runs out and it gets shipped to whatever location you put the pin in, it boots up without needing to hop on over to the cloud. And it begins running a thing called M set to multistate estimation technique to, which is an anomaly detection routine that Oracle has. And so now we’re doing 7000, or something like 2700 sensors or something on this rig are being processed in real time by a cloud delivered appliance that’s completely disconnected as a way to solve it. That’s what I mean by solve a problem no other cloud can solve. Now all of a sudden, this energy companies like what else can Oracle do? Because they thought about an oil and gas problem? Not? How do I land this tech? How do I solve a problem on a remote rig? Right? That’s where we engage with partners about so when we do that, that first order bit of solve industry problems, everything else self organizes, it’s like, oh, you’re an MSP. Okay, so you’re gonna run this when we’re done solving it? Okay, great. You’re a CSP, you’re gonna manage the contract? Fantastic. Let’s go that way. But it’s still solution first. Now, how are we going to transact? So
Vince Menzione 36:01
industry solution? I’ll say industry customer solution. First, right? Sort of in that order? How do you think about the soul? Because you know, the others come at the whole world of ISVs. Right? They come out and say we want every ISV on our platform, willing to do co selling with how do you think about that ISV ecosystem? Or does it even matter?
Ross Brown 36:22
It does, it matters a lot, but I’m also recognizing that the ISPs will follow their customers inclinations, the ISPs rarely leave their customers inclinations, meaning if I’m a certain platform, and I’m only available on Azure, because I’m a dotnet heavy application like Nin Tex or it’s a great example A they built a SharePoint accelerator, great company. They only exist on Azure, if I want to use that text, I’m using Azure, that’s it done. There’s very few captive, big Venn diagram, there’s very few ISVs that are generally relevant to enterprise that are also single cloud. Now, there are many that are three hyperscalers, and not OCI, like snowflake, data, bricks and go through all those folks. But that’s okay. I mean, I can’t emphasize this enough, like, the argument over where an application sets is less relevant than where the data sets. And the data set is more relevant as it relates to future uses and generative AI, then it matters to the application right now. So do I need to aggregate all this sort of applications and stuff? No, I need to be able to provide data services at the point, the customer needs them to be able to give them the platform that they consolidate all of the view they have of the world into one architecture. And then architecture for us is OCI. And it’s Oracle database and exa data services and autonomous and all these things we’ve got going on it right. So this leads into what are Sarah, what are Larry and sati? Up to? Yeah, let’s
Vince Menzione 37:43
get in there. Well, this is what the whole you talked about the data. So let’s go over there. Right. So it’s about two plus weeks. But by the time this airs is probably almost a month. But you know, Larry Ellison flies to Redmond for the first time. By the way, I think he said he’d never been to Renton. And before sits down with Satya. Alisa Taylor interviews them right. And so she airborne pat this epic moment. And Did hell freezes over what happened? Well, first
Ross Brown 38:08
off, the press does a better job of driving these story arcs about, you know, contention between companies and stuff like that. And the reality is, customers rule this stuff. Like if you go and sit down with Citibank or Goldman Sachs, they will tell you, they don’t care at all about this, you know, CEO egos and which company is doing what and those sorts of things, it doesn’t matter. If they want you to work together, if you’re gonna work together. That’s how it’s gonna go. So the reality is, clouds are diverging. And if you think about a couple of things, right. And this is I’m gonna say, now, I’m gonna go into my opinion here on a lot of this, but it’s informed by, you know, looking at what we do, and talking with ourselves and talking with Microsoft. But, you know, largely, you think about where do you want to invest in the future? Like, where are you gonna put your money? Well, okay, so you’ve got a lot of customers out there who want to move their core applications to Azure. Why? Because they’re dotnet heavy shop, they’ve got big investments in SharePoint, they’ve done a lot around Power BI, they’ve invested in the toolset. If you think about break that down, that’s really an M 365 customer with a back end, right? That’s not a I’m a global banking system running a systemically important bank, most of those are still running their own data centers. They’re not running in the public cloud. Okay, so how do you deal with those, those those become really hard ones, right? So what’s really valuable in the long running take about the economics of at $30 a month for AI copilot as an added in 365. The economics of the margin of that are astounding, when you roll out like it two and a half percent of their installed base and 365. You’re like a trillion dollar put implied valuation improvement to there. There’s market cap. So what does it take to run that? Well, it takes a massive cloud infrastructure. How much of that do you want dedicated to running legacy apps at scale, versus building this future thing that’s gonna monetize productivity? forever. Like, I’m sad the I’m going to be sitting there going, one of these things is going to submit me into like the way the world works for the rest of the next decade or so at a minimum, right? And one of these is going to solve a CIOs problem. Like, like, Okay, now go well, and
Vince Menzione 40:17
he spent practical you talk about ego, he puts the ego down, right? I mean, he,
Ross Brown 40:21
I think, look, I’m gonna tell you, the cloud has been an ego deflating thing for a lot of folks, in the sense that it’s hard to win. Like, it’s hard to win. And you want to step back. And if you’re a guy who likes winning the way Larry does, you step back and think hard. By the way, Larry smart, very easy to get in trouble for this one. But the smartest person I’ve worked with at Oracle is claiming gorrik, he was the VP of cloud, he is strategic. He is intelligent, and he’s company’s customer empathetic, the dude is fantastic. And I can’t think of a better leader for this company to have running this stuff. So enough, you know, saluting the boss that the guy really like, he walked into a strategy meeting and once asked a question, which I think I’ll just digress here for a second. Then we’ll talk about Larry and Satya, he walks into a strategy meeting when I was in the outbound Product Manager marketing stuff. And he says, do you think 195 sovereign countries are going to let three Americans in two Chinese guys control access to the world’s IP systems? When you phrase it that way? Of course not. And he’s like, the world doesn’t need a fourth cloud, the world needs hundreds of more clouds in order to solve that problem. And that led him down the path towards alloy, which is where we build cloud regions that are operated by partners and are differentiated, they build in third party services. Think of it as like the way Dell makes servers that then companies turn into SAS offerings, we make entire cloud platforms that companies turn into their own offerings and, you know, can run as a telephone company in a foreign country can run it as a sovereign cloud for their government to you know, Pan institutions like the EU can run one across, we’re doing that we have one in Spain, and one in Frankfurt, that’s a sovereign cloud, that’s all run by the EU as a one way only data goes in, nothing can be exfiltrated out of the EU type environments. But that notion of thinking through like, What Does the world really need? Not how do we win? What does the world really need to do we really think we’re serving the world and we just create another hyperscale. Or do we need to create a fabric that allows every partner out there who has material footprint for these enterprise customers to deliver and create their own cloud. Now, if I told you 10 years ago, I got in a time machine and went back to 2013, when I’m at Microsoft, or we’re getting Azure changes done, and all that other stuff that in the future, not only would Oracle have the best cloud, but they would have the most partners centric cloud strategy of anybody out there, I would have punched you pushed you back in the time machine and said, Go back and expand go look a little longer, right? Anyway, so that, that leads to things like if you’re gonna go down that path, which is we’re building clouds for other people. And we’re doing that with around the world with different companies we’re not doing in the US yet, because we’ve got some very big nuts to crack here in the US first, but if you if you start going that path of we build clouds for other people, it’s not that far of a leap to say we should put a miniature OCI region inside Azure data centers, and make Oracle Data Services and Oracle application services available to companies that have made a commitment to Azure and really need the stateful database need that bare metal performance need the capabilities that OCI can bring, but not expensive, move everything out of Azure move whatever. Plus, if I bought a $20 million Mac deal, and I’ve got these credits are gonna roll off, I want to wait and burn them down, that’s actually productive. And if I’m gonna go pitch now, this is where we go back to the business side, if I’m gonna go ask a sales team to go ask customers to open a PO for several hundreds of millions of dollars to get access to open AI, I better be on the right side of the value curve and stuff. I’ve sold it in the past. And so there is a huge how we solve problems fast for these customers together, how do we get them to a point where we’ve solved their legacy issues, their past is done. Now let’s start building generative AI services for that let’s start building the future. And that’s something that you’re gonna see largely isn’t a toss up of which cloud do I choose? It’s which LLM system Am I using and which ones have the right features. And then all the sudden data movement between clouds becomes imperative, right? So the relationship between us and Microsoft makes a ton of sense. When you look at where we’re both going. Like Microsoft’s going down a path around personal productivity and making people in the illusion Oh, there we go. down a path of making people more productive. It’s been in their core mission. If you look about, you know, their unlimited potential work they’ve done and everything, their whole way of being is been, how do you unlock the human? Right? How do you make it better? If you look at Oracle’s whole way of being it’s how do you make the world work better? Not individuals, the world? How do you make the systems that run things more efficient? How do you build intelligence into those processes? How do you reduce the effort of labor that’s required for the world to be a fair a better place for economics to work for healthcare to work for other things? So we’re not at cross purposes, we’re at very different goals in time. So what are companies are trying to do that when you start looking at that it’s sort of saying, well, the opportunity to collaborate is got way more upside to be partners than, you know, fighting over a nickel of old database revenue. Right? Absolutely.
Vince Menzione 45:11
So how are you organizing from a business perspective, and we’ve got the technological perspective, government from a business perspective, I mean, a Microsoft salesperson going in and trying to sell this is going to require some chops, right, so who’s going to cover that?
Ross Brown 45:27
They’re not really going to sell it, they’re gonna call us and we’re gonna get together like we had a love fest. So Steven Boyle, and Marvin and a bunch of other folks are down there with us meeting with partners and talking with them. Because I got it. I can’t let this go without talking about because it’s so important people understand. There’s a there’s a book by Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy called a last chance to
Vince Menzione 45:46
see a last chance to see okay, we’re gonna write this down, talks about endangered species.
Ross Brown 45:51
It’s one of his nonfiction books, but it’s very finely written, it’s really well done. But it talks about him going and visiting endangered species as a last chance to see them before they disappear. And he talks about New Zealand. And he gives this sort of notion about and sets the tone for this bird that’s endangered called the Kakapo, which he lays out like this New Zealand paradise, where the Kakapo is like this flightless bird that sits in mountain hills and stuff, and makes this loud booming sound for miles as its mating call, which all of a sudden, Captain Cook shows up with dogs and boars and things like that. And all of a sudden, those dogs realized, the dinner just announces where it is. And it’s delicious. And they go and eat it, right. And so, I use this as a metaphor that Oracle has been like New Zealand, we’ve in the self contained ecosystem, right? We, we think about it, we walk in with our four core applications that run all your regulated systems, ERP, HCM supply chain, customer experience, we deliver that on an engineered appliance called Exadata. Running our database, running our operating system, running our Java Development Language, running a whole bunch of data tools built by us, I mean, it’s all integrated and delivered by OCS and then run by a partner afterwards and stuff. At this very narrow New Zealand like partner ecosystem, most of my partners only do Oracle, like wrap your head around. That’s all they do, is 100%. And they make a huge, great living, just running Oracle environments for customers and helping them sort out how to upgrade their exit data environments and getting the replication and they’re deep experts in this stuff. Like they know this stuff. There’s no dabblers in my channel. Now all of a sudden, every Azure partner out there says there’s a path to solve this enterprise. And it doesn’t mean we have to rewrite this thing. Because, frankly, that ain’t going well. We could just put it on the OCI regional, it goes live, hey, does anybody here know anything about Oracle, and all of a sudden it becomes like, I need an exit date expert. So the partner is partnering with partner is going to be huge between us because I’ve got this non competitive set of partners that all they do is Oracle, and all of a sudden they have this partner that can work with that all they do is Azure, and they understand Microsoft really well. So there’s really natural alignment there that we’re trying to take advantage of, of, how do you connect them together as quickly as possible, get them to understand each other’s value, be able to subcontract now from a commercial term standpoint, this they could not have made this easier. It’ll be a private offer inside of Microsoft’s marketplace. You’ll redeem credits, it’ll redeem for UC credits that will be deployable against the OCI instance,
Vince Menzione 48:15
salespeople will get credit. And you mentioned Steven Boyle, who is now leading the Kindle relationship at Microsoft, the former IBM organization that has now Kindle so there’s there’s synergies there, right, bringing those units together and selling together. Yep. And I see probably be doing more of those. You mentioned Accenture, and we can go across the GSIs that are managed by both organizations. I
Ross Brown 48:37
just broadly say I kind of have three partner motions of spinning plates in that thing, and in a reflects this, this is the longer conversation I mentioned before we got on camera, this change, right? So I have four types of backup, not three, four types of partners. I have my deep Oracle, you know, love guy was like the intensity and centroid student networks, they just they drive our business, the backbones of it. And they they’re just great partners are deep Oracle deeply invested profitable, like they it’s a good business to be in right. Then I’ve got, you know, kind of the legacy generalists who are kind of still in the reselling contracts mode, kind of in the godson cloud services, not sure we’re going to be when we grow up. They’re struggling a lot to deal with this transition that I see in the marketplace between kind of this horizontal layers of organization that partners organizing, like if you think about typical apartment, say, Well, I got a Dell, titanium Black, who also is a Cisco Gold partner and an EMC partner and I help customers refactor their network and I help them with storage refresh, and I help them with their five year server refresh. Well, why don’t I just do I’d find myself in terms of vendors, and in terms of horizontal layers of acquisition and supply chain, where you might have great technical skills and going from the Cisco seven KV to the nine KV switch. But the cloud isn’t organized that way. It’s now every cloud gets its own stack from core compute and storage all the way up to observability. And you have to prescribe the whole thing, which kind of means your bench for any given reasonably sized partner is at a minimum 500 people, otherwise you don’t have enough depth of discipline to be able to do it. So then I look at these partners who have like 1.2 billion in bookings and stuff like that, and 200 people on their bench and I’m like, You guys are still doing wrench turning, you’re doing install the rack, you’re not doing run the app the whole horizontal. So this movement from horizontal layers to vertical areas, all the incentives change and moves from, go drive a storage refresh to I need to drive workloads and workload that workload and workload and that becomes about continuous delivery of value and continuous building of consumption value that you’re driving. That’s so different than the winner take all follow the sales rep, because in our sales model, our sales reps are going in and convincing the customer on us OCI, and by the way, by Oracle dollars, the same way you buy Mac credits, nobody gets paid until you actually start using them. So let’s start building something, right? Anyway. So the stuff with Microsoft we’re really excited about because it opens up for us an opportunity to solve customer problems that are rooted in history, because the opportunity for us across our industry units across the vertical market apps across our Sass platform across OCI is really about how do you scale more efficiency into the application by using intelligence, whether that’s data to your intelligence or AI or ml services or whatever? That’s where we’re going? Yeah, no,
Vince Menzione 51:27
this is good. This is good. And we could, you’re right, we could go three hours. I’m gonna keep us on because we’ve got a lot to unpack. And you know what, Ross? I think I’m gonna have you back for sure. So we’re gonna, maybe we’ll even do a whole series on OCI I think more be a lot of fun to do. But like, I want to dig in like, okay, as you’re you have a partner ecosystem, you’ve got people managing that partner ecosystem, you’re obviously you have, you have some partners that are massively successful. Right,
Ross Brown 51:53
I started seeing the report types, I would have just closed them the last two real quick. The one is the GSI. Right, the massive organizations and stuff. But this last one is the folks that are living in AI, and ML is their turf like, quantify, win. And those are fascinating partners. Man, the work we’re doing with them is like one of my favorite things. A cloud recently was being in a roundtable around AI, where we had quantify who’s got 4000 People are all data scientists. And they’re building their own generative large language models on that, because they can foundation models and training. And then penguin who has built the hardware environments. And then also the large language models. And in AI is for guys like meta in the same room with partners that are trying to figure out how to, you know, get eight GPUs and a large language model to start doing something. But just the, the awareness of you cannot move fast enough to really understand the data architectures and what’s going on in these things because it is going to move and I made this prediction of the conference, I just will jump to this point, which is right now, if if you go and you spend time on Twitter, or you look at Reddit and things like that, you see a lot of social media in the tech community is around developer communities, getting developers together getting DevOps folks together talking about orchestration or something that’s truly a real big thing right now. And I made this prediction within five years, prompt engineering communities among business leaders will dwarf what’s going on in developer communities. Teaching business people how to get AI to do valuable things for them is a new PageMaker. And it just like, you know, when PageMaker came out, and unlocked a whole bunch of creativity, including a whole bunch of really badly published church bulletins, you’re gonna have the same thing where a whole bunch of really badly created AI is going to be out there, not productive. And the folks who really understand this stuff are going to be scaling. And so I love these conversations, we have these new types of partners, who are just living this every day with the most advanced companies on the planet, and just the gap is jarring. And just partners realizing like I cannot do this fast enough. I cannot. This is not a Hey, guy as this weekend, why don’t you read up on the new Cisco stuff, this is take everybody out of the field for a month and put them through intensive training right now.
Vince Menzione 53:57
And infusing AI into every business application, every application whatsoever consumer business application, right,
Ross Brown 54:03
it’s getting every single business user out there will be a developer of AI services, because the services will be so easy to develop. I’m telling you, you’ll not write code, you’ll go into it. And you’ll tell a prompt what you’re looking for. And after about 12 versions of Okay, remember that last thing, but let’s change it this way. Now do this now. Can you add this to it and filter this out? Oh, I’ve got a workflow application that moves across six different systems that’s coming really fast. And I think one of the things partners have to realize is the wrench training business is rapidly going to become around how you put ideas to work. That’s hard.
Vince Menzione 54:38
So as you organize your team are you doing so we can go into the like what makes a great partner you’ve you’ve you’ve basically double clicked on most of that. But are you doing practice building? Are you doing rolling? You’re doing both like what is happening in your organization, right, the classic BDMS and the classic sellers.
Ross Brown 54:57
So I’m sort of pivoting I keep telling people Clouds are built, not bought, unless you can talk the language of others, it’s very hard to succeed here. So a lot of people learning fast and really responding well. And I’ll tell you like, I don’t need them to be engineers, I don’t need them to code, I need them to understand what the individual services do and how they solve problems. And that’s a big leap, if what you’ve been doing is channel transactions. So I have a lot of patients, and we’re going through training and workshops and stuff to raise everybody’s skill set around that. So that’s one second recruit like Oracle got very comfortable with, we have this installed base plus captive customers. And so when we have a new partner, it’s really at the expense of another partner, because it’s a zero sum game of installed managed services. So how much am I actually trying to get new partners versus getting my existing partners to get bigger now I’ve got this infinite platform of wonderful value, and I can’t get enough partners fast enough. So everybody in my team is learning to go out and pitch partners not on, here’s our policies and our incentives. But here’s the business value of working with us. And here’s why we’re really a good investment in that thing. So that’s new muscle, and then learning the language of industry of really starting to specialize and get deeper in there. And Vince, you’ve got a really good audience. So I’m going to ask to put an ad out real quick. I’ve opened roles right now that I’m looking for. And my ideal candidate is I need a partner Sales Lead for each industry, who’s going to work with the SVP of sales for that industry, and helping them define for that given industry? Who are the go to partners? What are we doing in each account? What’s the partner strategy in each account really owning that process? The ideal candidate who’s got 10 plus years in an ISV? Or a GSI? Where they focused on that practice? They should their peers within the industry should be able to pick up the phone and call your competitors and know them,
Vince Menzione 56:39
and what industry specifically are you looking for? We’re gonna blast this out.
Ross Brown 56:44
Okay, so, government, I’ve already got covered, I’ve got a team of 30 covering government sled and all that stuff. So that’s well covered. Randy’s got a fantastic org there. healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and healthcare. By the way, as life sciences embedded, eventually, we’ll go to sub industries and split some stuff out, like banking split out
Vince Menzione 57:01
of Life Sciences, specifically, as opposed to payer provider,
Ross Brown 57:05
we do both together right now, over time, that’ll like, my goal with these folks is eventually they’ll have an industry partner team under them, that they’ll hire and divide stuff, right. So healthcare, banking, and financial services, manufacturing oil and gas, retail, telecom it and media.
Vince Menzione 57:23
And hospitality is last, it strikes me that media would be a big one as well.
Ross Brown 57:27
Oh, well, I see, telco and media are a big one for us. Media, because our while our network efficiency plus the cost of our networking, we get guys like Kaltura, and zoom and eight by eight and folks like that, that do lots of digital media. But there’s something particular about our ARM platform being flat linear scaling, like you get all 80 cores working on media encoding. This is technical, but this is kind of fun for the technical folks out there. Like we’re the only cloud that doesn’t force you to use a specific VM instance size. Like when you come to OCI one of the things as different as you, you basically create a VM by saying, Do I want arm versus AMD versus Intel and how many cores and how much memory why we get so many media companies as they figured out they can come here and say I want 80 cores of memory. But I only need two gigs per core to do h 234 encoding and I can stream stuff. It’s very CPU intensive, doesn’t take much memory. So why pay for all the memory they’re not using. So they end up with these extremely low memory high media and they just love it. So we end up getting a footprint there. We run a lot of phone companies like the OSS BSS, and the mobile packet core, all that stuff is Oracle tech. So the infrastructure right phone companies have a big footprint with, its the IT guys we struggle with? Like they sort of think their own stuff is good. Yeah,
Vince Menzione 58:45
I get you loud and clear. So I’m gonna pivot. We’re gonna pivot away from the business, though, I am going to ask you one more question for our listeners. But I’d love to pivot. As you might be aware, I spent a lot of time on the career development. I spent my time at Microsoft, I did early career development work, and a lot of our listeners are earlier in Korea. So I would love for you to share, like, was there a pivot? Was there a spark that got you on this journey, this amazing career that you’ve had? Ross, I know you started off in the early days of the channel, you were like 10 or 15, when you got started 30 years ago, but what was it that got you to this point? And you’re
Ross Brown 59:22
so I was just having this conversation with somebody. It was kind of career discussions and stuff. Because they’re like, you know, if you look at your career, you’ve like executed a plan really well. You started out as a developer, and then you became a partner, then you were a distributor. And then you went to work for a big giant mothership company like IBM where you learned some global stuff. And then you went to work for this smaller company that you helped turn around and you built deal, REG and then you use that to become a pivot to be a CEO. And then he went to this massive global transformation, Microsoft. And I have to tell people, there’s no plan. There’s no plan. There’s no plan what there is, and this is kind of Only if there’s a secret anything, is there’s an insatiable desire to do something interesting. And to do something hard and fun. I like problem solving. And for me, and this is kind of, okay, this is gonna get really directive here for a second. There’s two things that have driven my career if there’s anything behind it. One is trying to find a problem where the technology is solved, but the go to market is all screwed up. Like so think about Citrix when I went to work there and technology is fantastic. But they had messed up their channel program to create an advantage for their Platnumz that allowed them to cannibalize everybody else. So go fix that we built deal read all of a sudden best product out there for VDI combined with fantastic economic incentives, think goes like this. Okay, same thing with Microsoft, I came to Microsoft in 2008 stock had fallen to $15 a share, we were going into a global economic crisis, great time to load up on basically RSUs and go figure out how to launch this cloud thing. And by the way, that’s no guarantee of success, Microsoft could have failed at that just as much as succeeded. And the case with VMware, it was hey, 85% of our revenues are tied in vSphere. We’ve got three other products that account for less than 15% We need to go build a channel that’s actually Multi Product, you can solve that the valuation on the company goes up. So between V sand V realized and NSX V center V realizes and attached to vSphere V realized the NSX is its own thing. So go build a channel around NSX and see if you can scale that. Now. Those two things have two things in common one, they’re interesting. It’s really clever technology. And you’ve got to like technology, by the way, if anyone’s taking a job out there because they think they’re gonna make money. And not because the technology is really cool and you want to tell people about it, you’re gonna fail. Like never do money do it because you really love what this thing does. And it could be really cool. So my inner nerd at all the time is after like, this stuff is really clever, like what Martine casado didn’t necessarily became an SX IS brilliant with clay, McCormack, and Pradeep and Don, and Bev and other folks, that OCI have done is really profoundly and just incredible. So you got to love what you’re doing, you got to go after that. But there’s a second part to it, which is not just be part of that transformation of celebrity tech. Now go do clever go to market. But it’s also recognize that the only predictable wealth creation event in the tech industry is a turnaround, not an IPO. Not an acquisition of a startup. But a company that has a track record of succeeding the installed base of customers that screwed up their proposition with customers, if you can go fix that, go fix their relationship with partners go fix their relationship with customers, because, hey, the engineers did something really useful and clever, and wonderful. And you can connect those dots. You watch stock prices go from 15 to 85. And from $5 at Citrix to $49. And stuff like that end it becomes a good way to make a living. So, you know, do I advocate people stick with one place and be loyal and climb the corporate ladder? Yes, if there’s a chain of products there and projects that fit that criteria of being interesting, compelling and you know, worth investing your time and energy in but throw yourself into the hard problems that are shaped at the way you can solve them. Like, as I’ve told people, many, many times, the best channel program in the world cannot save shitty code. Click bad products are going to be bad products. But there’s a lot of bad go to markets with really good products tied to them that open up opportunities to go after those. That’s my advice.
Vince Menzione 1:03:15
I love it. So insatiably curious, right, and I got that loud and clear,
Ross Brown 1:03:19
right? It turned around, that’s the other one in turn around motivated,
Vince Menzione 1:03:22
right? And be passionate about the technology or supporting like the bought in like, don’t just go to a company for a paycheck.
Ross Brown 1:03:29
By the way, you also have to love it when partners make money. Like I love it. Like after we did deal Reg, I had partners coming to me going like I was trying to figure out how to get out of this. Now I’m trying to figure out where I’m putting the vacation home. Wonderful.
Vince Menzione 1:03:41
I love it. I love it. So what an incredible journey you’ve had. And now I understand why you’re where you are right? Because you you are basically building this new thing, right? And when I can’t call Oracle a turnaround, but maybe from a cloud perspective, it is
Ross Brown 1:03:55
it’s enough for people to discover new value that we’ve not shown them. That’s a turnaround of a form.
Vince Menzione 1:03:59
So I have to ask you, this is like my favorite question I asked every guest right. So you are hosting a dinner party, you can host the center party anywhere in the world. Maybe you’ll even come back down to Florida where you grew up and hosted here, but you can invite any three guests from the present or the past to this amazing dinner party. Whom would you invite and why? Okay,
Ross Brown 1:04:19
and am I also telling you where this dinner is? Absolutely. Okay. So during the pandemic, my wife and I took some time well, right as the pandemic was starting, we took some time before and then started doing some investing in some hospitality businesses. So I’m a proud investor in a restaurant in Woodinville Washington called heritage. I had the opportunity to take one of my ideal dinner guests to before they passed away and he loved it. So my three dinner guests. This is gonna be might get a little emotional here. This is a hard topic for me. My three dinner guests are my father, my grandfather and my great grandfather. Now, I have to explain. None of them are related. So I mean, you My adopted dad adopted me when I was basically 18 months old after he married my mom and has been my dad my entire life he passed away about four years ago, right about two years after we open the restaurant. I’ll start with the oldest one. First, my great grandfather is my mother’s grandfather. He was the CFO at DuPont corporation before it when the munitions contract in World War One, and he at DuPont into the chemical transformation to become a chemical powerhouses, the CFO there, but his bigger thing was he appeared to Pont’s, he convinced Pierre du Pont to put both their money together and go to a leveraged buyout of General Motors. And they took over General Motors and my great grandfather created GM AC, he built the Empire State Building, conceived and financed the entire thing was chairman of the Democratic National Party in 1928. And was a an incredibly innovative investor who did incredibly good work around both developing you know, a lot of the southwest of the United States and Chile and in places like that as a minor, but also embedding in like technology investments around you know, how do you scale GM has 10,000 employees and the invention of the PBX things like that?
Vince Menzione 1:06:07
What is his name?
Ross Brown 1:06:08
He has a Wikipedia article, if you want to look him up, he’s John Jacob Raskob. Ah, yes, I know his name. Absolutely. He also created a large Catholic charity foundation my family still actively involved in, which is where most of the money went was into charity, which then lead to my grandfather, which was my mother’s father. So not this great grandfather. This is his son in law. He was an Olympian sailor, sailed in the 1928 Olympics, absolutely, unbelievably good business person. He and his brother cornered the market in the Central Valley in 1840s. As a wholesale grocery distributor, they sold their business. And then this is where I get my fascination with channels, distribution businesses, basically distribution, and they understand the mechanics. So after they sold the business in the Coachella Valley, and both of them made several 10s of millions of dollars, they relocated to the East Coast. And you know, both got involved in different investments. My uncle was one of the early investors in Broadway plays like cats and things like that made a ton of money doing that stuff, because he has actually picked good plays instead of bad ones. But my grandfather got involved in Tiffany’s, and he was put on the board of Tiffany’s to help them figure out how do you capitalize on the popularity of the Truman Capote movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and go from being this iconic New York Main Street brand, to being truly on every Main Street as a brand. And so the expansion of Tiffany’s and kind of his insight kind of his version of invent something new was changing Tiffany’s from a collection of in house designers to a house of branded designers like Elsa Peretti, and other folks that they signed to be designers to be able to have enough volume of product to be able to fill every main street in every major US city with a Tiffany’s brand. So that notion of how do you scale a business and go into distribution, that conversation, I want to have a conversation with my great grandfather about the financial models he put in place like GMHC, there was no such thing as consumer credit. The biggest bottleneck to Jim’s growth is nobody could afford to get a car because no banks were loaning money against cars, you had to pay cash for it. And the notion that the asset itself was collateral you could repossess was such a big insight. He invented consumer credit for all intensive purposes, don’t have that conversation. Want to talk to my granddad about you know how he scaled out Tiffany’s and thought about the experience of how do you get a New York experience in Chicago? Okay, that’s not too hard. How do you do that in LA? That’s harder. How do you do that Dallas, and how you get really hard? Like, how do you really convey that experience, right? That conversation want to have it my dad, I learned everything I know about sales from him. He was a stockbroker and financial services, leasing agent and stuff like that, but also one of the best bond Vons and best people to have at a dinner party I’ve ever seen in my life.
Vince Menzione 1:08:44
What a wonderful group. Ross, and I know of your great grandfather, because I lived in Wilmington, Delaware area for about 25 years. Yeah. So I lived in the heart of the DuPont Valley. And, yeah, probably it passed by where they lived at one point or another. So just fascinating. And the Empire State Building was just up there a couple years ago. And I remember reading a story. So this is just fascinating. So what a great conversation what a great an amazing guest you’ve been, we’re going to release this as a single episode, because I think just think the conversation, we just can’t break this up. And I’m inviting you back again, we have to do another had to bring you back maybe even on stage at some point. But you know, for our listeners, we’ve got this whole partner ecosystem and world out there. Two questions, right. If organizations want to work with you and your team, how did they do so? And then how do you think they should optimize for their success during what I’m calling this the time of tectonic shifts?
Ross Brown 1:09:38
So gage with me and my team is super easy. My email is ross.brown@oracle.com. So drop me a note. If you want to get together and go direct to somebody on the team, it could pick it up. Alternatively, if you were interested in what I was talking about on the OCI differences, if you go to my LinkedIn page, there is a public post that as a nine page white paper that I wrote, so it’s not somebody from marketing, actually me that I use As a pre brief for partners before we get together so that their technical teams can read about what’s different in a narrative format that’s easy to absorb and stuff. So if you want to see those, by all means go there. The second part in terms of how to plan success, these tectonic shifts, there’s a short version of it, there’s a long version of the short version of it is very directive, which is show up and do something valuable. Stop telling people that you’re going to someday do something valuable. Like if you sign the video, then I’ll do something valuable, like clouds are experiential. And they’re problem solving platforms and machines solve the problem, like solve a small problem, but get permission to solve big problems, but go in and reasonably price but don’t swing for the ankles on every single pitch to every customer. Like think of it not as and this is the, the biggest thing I try to get across to people, it gets to behavioral stuff, and not like the technology and stuff. But stop thinking like this is a winner take all giant, I got to close the big deal, steak dinner type sale, this is a every day I show up and do something of value and they consume more. And as a result that consumption drives incentives that consumption drives billable hours for my team, but show up and do something valuable. And you will find a path to value that I can’t begin to describe it. It’s like you’re suddenly going like my business was falling apart and the customers are all moving to the cloud. They’re no longer letting me colo stuff for them. And I can’t figure out how to sell Dell equipment anymore. I don’t know where the margins gone on selling, you know, storage devices and I don’t know what to do. Go to your customers and stop telling them what you have. And start asking them what they need. And I guarantee you, it’ll be verbs, not nouns, it’ll be things they need done, not things they need to buy. So listen to the verbs and go show up and do the verb things with them. Do something valuable. But that’s the shift is stop thinking and things start thinking and verbs. But what actions do you need to do for your customer to succeed?
Vince Menzione 1:11:47
Ross, you’ve been an amazing guest. I want to thank you for your time today. You’re generous. I know how busy you are. You’re generous amount of time. And thank you for being an amazing guest on Ultimate Guide to partner. No worries. Thanks,
Ross Brown 1:11:59
Vince. Appreciate the time.
Announcer 1:12:03 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partner. We’ll catch you next time on The ultimate guide to partnering