January 14, 2014 – theCUBE Conversation with Harish Venkat of Oracle.

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How do customers feel about the big red stack?

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What are Oracle customers saying out in field about the big red stack? Harish Venkat, Senior Director of Business Development, Oracle, visited the SiliconANGLE office in Palo Alto, CA to discuss this topic with theCUBE host, John Furrier, in the newly minted show, theCUBE Conversations.

One common theme according to Venkat is that Oracle customers are putting their customers at the center, customer experience and operational efficiency are absolutely critical. Venkat cited the airline industry in which most competitors have essentially the same fleet of airlines with the differentiating factor being customer experience.

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• Case study

“Each airline has multiple touchpoints, whether it be online, mobile app, airport employee or a service agent you call over the phone. You want a consistent experience that is going to differentiate you from the competitors and IT becomes very important. You talk about mobile, social and big data all of these technologies give you insight with data,” Venkat said in regards to how companies are using IT to influence customer experience.

One of the important aspects of Oracle customer experience is the ability to run Oracle on Oracle. Venkat noted that the fact that Oracle’s engineered systems is prebuilt and that the customer does not have to worry about building their own as Oracle’s is already pretested and ready to operate. One aspect of Oracle engineered systems is it’s flexibility across many verticals. Again Venkat brought up the airline industry as an example for the systems flexibility, citing that airlines want to understand key parameters in passenger booking speed, loading factors, crew scheduling and different mandates around carbon tax.

“We want them to have a solution, from IT, that will allow them to have a macro-view of what’s going on in their business and address all the key points of interest,” Venkat said.

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• Demand for flexibility

Before Venkat left Furrier asked him about what CIOs are looking for in their vendors, citing flexibility as the most desired quality according to his conversations with CIOs in Silicon Valley. To that, Venkat said “the flexibility aspect of it [Oracle engineered systems] is great because it’s the same reference architecture. Customers can decide they want to have an in-house deployment now, but maybe two years from now they want to move it to the cloud. You can do that transparently.” In essence, flexibility is indeed key.