Build the Future of Business with Oracle Cloud Applications

[CHEERFUL MUSIC] STEVE MIRANDA: Hello, everyone and welcome to Oracle Eyes. My name is Steve Miranda, and I'm the Executive Vise President responsible for the application business at Oracle. Today we're going to talk about the future of business. We're going to talk about how we all can pivot forward taking the lessons we've learned for the last 12 months and how to apply those lessons going forward.

We're going to hear from several of our customers who are talking about how they've chosen Oracle as their partner and the cloud journey they've been on. And finally, you're going to get the latest on all this product lines around innovations which we can help you to transform your businesses and take advantage of change. So what have we learned from the last 12 months? Clearly working from home has been the number one factor in many businesses across all industry sizes and shapes. And what we've learned is that now you can do business just about anywhere. Health and safety, while always in front of mind, has become really critical in terms of health and safety processes for the enterprise, for your employees, and for dealing with your customers. And as always, reskilling of employees to deal with these new processes, both work from home capabilities, health and safety, and the cascading effects in both of those have had.

But in addition to the way we work, the product lines have had different areas of focus, starting with the supply chain, really with the focus on resiliency and agility. With a more sophisticated risk management necessary, so you can change from a solely just-in-time mentality to a just-in-case mentality as well, to be able to adapt to ever changing global conditions. In finance, in some ways, all the things which were important before continue to be important, but with heightened pressure, the ability to have rapid information to make business decisions and adapt to change, automating the close process, having better scenario-based planning, having better predictive modeling and cash forecasting to make the best financial decisions in a rapidly-changing environment. In customer experience, we've all lived through this as customers ourselves, really accelerated the digital customer experience.

And we've found really that customer-centric brands win. Customers expect to be understood, expect real time information, and expect to be able to deal with you in digital ways more than ever before. And finally we've seen different industries affected very differently by the pandemic, in some cases, putting increased pressure on industries to grow very rapidly, either the service constituents or really to help us battle this pandemic globally.

Or other industries have had to transform the way they work because of unclear forecast or unclear way of having to deal with customers or suppliers, changing their business model to deal with the new global reality. So to go through this a little bit more, I'm going to speak to one of our existing customers and talk about how they've really adapted during this time over the last 12 months with COVID and how they've actually changed our business process and used Oracle Cloud to thrive and deliver success to their business and their customers. So now it's my pleasure to introduce Karen Nelson. Karen is the senior vice president of HRIS and compensation Marriott International. Karen, many in the audience, including myself, are probably very familiar and loyal customers of Marriott.

But we may not be familiar with the size and scale of your operations and your role within Marriott. Could you maybe educate the audience a little bit more about Marriott International and your role? KAREN NELSON: I lead the design, development, and delivery of our Global HR technology and services infrastructure for managed and franchised associates. And with an extraordinary team, I led our Oracle HCM implementation, which went live on December 26th, 2020.

So Marriott is the largest hospitality company in the world, with over 7,600 hotels in over 130 countries. And we have 30 brands in our portfolio. And one of the things that I think makes us extraordinarily special is our take-care culture. It's our global commitment to ensure that our associates are afforded opportunities to develop skills, to build meaningful relationships, and to have a positive and sustainable impact on the world. And the way that we do that, frequently, is through the use of technology.

STEVE MIRANDA: Now with such a large portfolio, and global portfolio, going through the global pandemic and shelter in place, obviously, for hospitality industry, especially there's been some real challenges. Maybe, could you educate us on how you've had to rethink the business and operations in light of the COVID crisis? KAREN NELSON: Absolutely. So as you mentioned, the impact of the pandemic on the hospitality industry and Marriott in particular has been unprecedented.

So we had to very quickly pivot to worrying about our associates and our guests and sourcing cleaning supplies-- probably like so many in the audience today-- in a very short amount of time. With our associates, we have hundreds of thousands of employees around the world who wear a Marriott name badge. And it was our goal to retain as many of them as possible, despite the realities of the COVID pandemic.

Thankfully today we have over 95% of our hotels that are open again ready to receive guests. And we are just continuing to be optimistic about the impact of the vaccine on the future of travel. STEVE MIRANDA: That's great news for everybody, I think, to have so many high percentage of the hotels back open. Why was this the right time to move to Oracle HCM Cloud, replacing several legacy systems? KAREN NELSON: We actually began our implementation journey in the spring of 2018.

And at that time, we were faced with legacy systems that were nearing the end of life. And just we were developing this acute knowledge that we knew that our platforms that we had in place were just not going to meet the long-term demands of our global workforce and their expectations. And so we chose Oracle to proceed with because we knew that there was a flexibility and capability in the platform that would really serve us well as we were seeking to engage our associates.

Combine that with the synergies that we felt that we would see with our financial systems and then just confidence in the partnership that Oracle and Marriott working together, that we would be able to overcome any challenges. So we knew our implementation was going to be aggressive. We were going to be launching all modules, big bang globally, within a 20-month timeframe.

And we could not have predicted the impact of the pandemic on our implementation. So we basically, like so many things in the world, came to a screeching halt. The project was put on hold for about four months.

And we were actually within 100 days of going live when we shut down the project. And then when we returned about four months later, we had smaller teams. And we were completely virtual. So when we launched on December 26th, 2020, we had over 700 people that were sitting around the world in their homes with their kids and their dogs helping to support us.

And frankly I'm not sure I've ever spent that much time in my dining room as I have preparing for this go live. STEVE MIRANDA: No, I can imagine. To give the audience some perspective, you called it aggressive. But I would call it aggressive and impressive. So Karen's outlined the size and scale of Marriott. What she didn't cover as they are now live in Core HR, payroll, absences, performance and compensation, learning, recruiting, incentive comp, and platform as a service for some extensions, and again, globally throughout Marriott International.

So it's quite impressive. Now with that impressive project, early days, but what have the results been so far? And what are your expectations down the road? KAREN NELSON: So far we've had just tremendous feedback from our associates. We launched with 15 languages so that we could engage our global workforce. And for many of them, this was the first time that they were actually able to interact with our human resources tools and programs. So really strong, positive response.

We did launch, as you mentioned, with platform as a service. And to date our hotel discount program, which is our most beloved benefit, just in two months, we've had over 650,000 hotel discount forms printed, which is that little green shoot of hope that we are going to start to see the travel industry come back. We have high self-service utilization in the United States for our managers and our associates. And now that we have a platform that's in language, we're really looking forward to expanding that capability outside of the US, so that our associates globally can seek opportunities, learn new skills, and that their managers can also engage with them in a different way to build that talent for them. So it'll be self-service.

We're going to be looking towards our annual performance cycle, incentive comp cycles, and then hopefully-- we're starting to already plan for that-- trying to find that unicorn, which is a Global Payroll. STEVE MIRANDA: Again, Karen, thank you very much for your time today. And thanks for sharing all the information on your journey with the audience. And we can't wait to get back to Marriott in one of your over 7,600 properties around the world.

So just thanks again for your great work. And thanks for your time today sharing it with everybody. KAREN NELSON: Thank you. We look forward to welcoming you. So thank you again.

STEVE MIRANDA: So it's always great to hear from our customers. But now let's take a look at how you might be able to apply those lessons learned into improving your businesses and some of the common traits that we see across our cloud customers. First, is all cloud customers have built agile organizations. And they really are based on continuous innovation and continuous process improvement.

This is what allows our customers to take our quarterly updates with new features and new technology and improve their business process based on that delivery of feature functions in the Oracle Cloud. Next, having AI much more at the center-- artificial intelligence or machine learning. In an ever-rapid-changing environment and ever-more-complex environment, it gets harder and harder for human beings to predict the future or to detect hidden patterns. By using the computer algorithms and artificial intelligence powered by machine learning, we're able to get better predictions and recommendations to help you drive business change. And finally, different industries have different challenges and different requirements. So on top of our base horizontal applications, we've built out a set of industry-specific capabilities.

Now let's take a look at some of our customers. We are quite proud that over the last 12 months, we've actually seen an increased pace of go-lives with our cloud applications. And our customers have really use this time to put themselves in the best position of growth going forward. The following is just a look at some of the customers who've gone live with the cloud over the last 12 months and really a great source of pride for our entire organization. [MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: Business as usual is a thing of the past.

At Oracle our guide is the future. And we are proud of our customers who are pioneering the future with us. We are committed to delivering continuous innovation to them, so that they remain focused on their customers. Across industries, more organizations than ever before are going live on Oracle Cloud applications.

NARRATOR: Health care providers have adopted payroll and benefits systems that eliminate unnecessary paperwork in order to focus on patient-centered quality care. NARRATOR: Grocery and retail chains have created greater workplace flexibility for essential workers. NARRATOR: Financial services firms have placed new emphasis on customer convenience. Hospitality has experienced countless challenges. And now up to the minute financial insight guides recovery efforts. NARRATOR: Together with our customers, we are creating new ways of doing business.

In finance, companies are automating entire operations, so the strategic insight always drives the bottom line. NARRATOR: In human resources, some of the largest employers have implemented new solutions in order to develop flexible and skilled workforces. NARRATOR: And manufacturing and logistics teams are rethinking supply chains to make them more responsive and more resilient. NARRATOR: In customer experience, real-time data is being used to power every customer interaction.

NARRATOR: We salute our customers who've invested in the cloud in order to focus on the future. To our customers, we say-- [MUSIC PLAYING] STEVE MIRANDA: So it's always great to see that customer success in the go lives. And as I said, it's just a tremendous source of pride for our entire organization. And all of those customers have really built agile organizations. They've chosen continuous innovation, which enables our organizations to not only modify business process, but to run a next generation technology through the Oracle Cloud. Now let's take a look at really what differentiates Oracle and what it's like to partner with Oracle through our cloud applications.

And our five driving tenets, first, we have the most complete cloud available in the market. From ERP and EPM applications, HCM applications, manufacturing and supply chain, and customer experience completely integrated and built on a single technology platform. Second, we're the only vendor that is both a SaaS application vendor and a best-in-class technology vendor. And we bring those technologies to you in feature functions, but also an underlying core capability. Next, we have the fastest innovation, delivering hundreds of features across every product area, every quarter, to all of our customers.

And we've built the most modern user experience, not only the traditional HTML UI, but the brand new conversational UI enabled through the digital assistant. And underlying everything we do is a customer-first mindset, making sure that our success is our customers' success. [MUSIC PLAYING] So now let's spend a little time drilling into the key area of our five driving tenets and our customer-first mindset. And for this section, I've invited Maz Songerwala, who heads our customer service excellence team to join us today. Welcome, Maz.

MAZ SONGERWALA: Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me. STEVE MIRANDA: So, Maz, you've been with us now at Oracle about a year and a half, 18 months, have a lot of background in terms of service excellence, now managing support, CSMs, really a collection in the development organization-- unified org. But tell us what brought you to Oracle. MAZ SONGERWALA: Customer expectations have fundamentally shifted.

Customers are asking for and needing our help on their journey from the moment they make a decision on a solution to how they get value. So this has many implications within a company, implications on development in how they build the product for adoption and usability, operations for how they drive predictive mitigation on issues that pop up, support in how they become much more proactive and provide a more continuous engagement model, and customer success, which is really focused on how is the customer getting value. The fact that Oracle brought all of these functions together within one function, aligned on core metrics and goals, so there is a common north star, was huge. I just couldn't pass up the opportunity. STEVE MIRANDA: Now we talk a lot about the speed of change, the speed of change technology-wise, speed of change from business process, and you're trying to set the bar-- really set the standard for customer service across the industry. Tell us how are we helping customers stay ahead of that change and anticipate and prepare for the disruption that we know is coming? MAZ SONGERWALA: I think it's important to take a step back and first start with, how should we be designing service excellence? what? Are the designing principles? And to do that, we have to put ourselves into our customers' shoes.

If you're the customer, and you're in this application, don't make me leave the screen or application if there's a simple thing that I need to do. If you do have to leave that screen or application, surface useful content quickly and easily, meaning have self-service content which allows me to answer this question. If I do have to talk to somebody at Oracle, get me to the right person as fast as possible and shield me from all of the ways you actually will manage the issue behind the scenes. And then for that continuity of experience, which is moving away from that transactional model, which is helping with what other things I should be considering once you've solved my problem or addressed my issue. So how we thought about this is to really think strategically in the following way. Can we deliver a digital first, followed by high value people-based interaction mindset? What does digital first mean.

It means that the product is getting better and better at helping the customer not only use the product in the right way, but recommend other areas they should be focusing. Now this could be within the product or the digital assets around the product. Think your health or our community as examples. It could be in automation that didn't exist before that exists now.

As an example, we've got automation built out, where we start looking for indications around what the customer is seeing in their environment, so that we can flag issues before the customer sees them and proactively reach out. Then when we start looking at performance or operational issues, this notion of technical support, how do we evolve that to be true DevSecOps, meaning we deliver by using monitoring and telemetry to proactive outreach, to proactive and predictive mitigation. Examples of this include business process monitoring. When you're running payroll, or you're actually closing your books, we've got automation now behind the scenes, which monitors that client's environment and automatically triggers alerts and/or severity one tickets to the right teams if any issues are seen. And then finally that success mindset, where we can take a conversation with the client, not just about what they're using, but also are they using it to recommend the best practice? How are others in the industry using this? What other things should you be considering to get more value out of the product? So this strategic mindset actually is a confluence of a number of different teams coming together, development for that digital-first approach, our operations and support teams for our tech support becoming DevSecOps, and our success teams around the world to help our customers on that overall journey. Now I have a question for you, Steve.

One of the things that our customers really are looking for help on is, how do I get started in the cloud? Can you talk to us a little bit about the Oracle Soar offering that we launched a few years ago? STEVE MIRANDA: Sure. So Soar was an offering of utilities and business practice that our consulting organization can give a customer a prepackaged view of how we get them to the Oracle Cloud, either the whole-- all the parts-- or in particular product line or product area at a time. And now where we've evolved that is to you not only have it for Oracle products, but you have it for any third party because those same utilities, the same process to move the cloud is really part of Soar package.

And in addition to that, we've shared the best practices and we've shared the utilities to our other implementation partners. So our implementation partners will offer their flavor of Soar, if you will, to best help our customers today, from JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and E-Business Suite, and also non-Oracle customers move to Oracle Cloud for that customer centricity benefits that you just talked about. MAZ SONGERWALA: Excellent.

Thanks, Steve. STEVE MIRANDA: Great. Thank you, Maz. [MUSIC PLAYING] So that was a great overview and our focus on customer centricity. Now let's talk about another key component of our offering to our customers, which is the completeness of Suite.

And to help us describe what are the business value and benefits of having a complete suite, I'm joined now with the executive vice president of our customer experience and data cloud development, Rob Tarkoff. Welcome, Rob. ROB TARKOFF: Thanks, Steve.

Good to be here. STEVE MIRANDA: Great to have you. ROB TARKOFF: So, Steve, you've talked a lot about Oracle as the most complete cloud application suite for our customers. Maybe you can describe to the audience a little bit about what that means and the benefits of this front-to-back office business process on one unified platform. STEVE MIRANDA: Sure. First, what it means.

So it means we have the most complete suite available in the cloud today. But what it really means in terms of business value is you have one representation because these just aren't different products that we've built. They're products we've built together.

One representation of the person, whether that's an employee, an employee also happens to be a manager, also happens to be a salesperson. Whether that means a part, which you may use internally or sell, employees have cost centers, parts have costs to them and financials, so it eliminates all integration and gives you one single source of truth to more efficiently, but more importantly, more accurately manage your business in a fast way. So when we talk about completeness of suite, that's really our business value, no integration necessary and the single source of truth to make better business decisions.

Now I know, Rob, you deal a lot with our front office customers, especially. But they're really connecting front to backoffice a ton. And can you give us some examples about what are the business processes-- when we talk about spanning end to end, what are common use cases that our customers see and use? ROB TARKOFF: Sure. One thing we're seeing all the time now is companies who want to change their financial model to a subscription or recurring revenue model. The idea of moving away from transactional to renting or subscription-based businesses is a common thing, and particularly in asset-intensive industries or capital-intensive industries, where instead of selling an entire system, you just might want to rent the usage of that over a period of time. And as you know with a subscription, there's the front-end process of actually configuring the subscription, tying it to a contract, figuring out exactly what the terms of that are, but you also have to link that to your backend financial system.

So revenue recognition and those processes are done correctly. And a lot of vendors in the space, unfortunately, don't have that complete end-to-end, front-to-back office flow to make subscriptions really be successful. The second area that we're seeing it a lot is in what we call service logistics. So the idea that technicians are oftentimes being sent out, particularly in COVID, to be very efficient in a touchless, contactless process. So they want to make sure that not only are the techs dispatched properly and routed to the right place, but is the part and inventory available? Do they actually have what they need to make the job successful and have a higher level of customer experience? A third area that we're seeing a lot in asset-intensive industries is project-driven supply chain.

So you're seeing a lot of projects where being able to link project management to the financial elements to the supply chain system is really important. You can think of 5G today, when large telcos are doing new network upgrades, making sure that each of those projects are able to be linked to all the financial elements to make sure that the project is carried out successfully. And the last area we're seeing and a lot is companies are now moving away oftentimes from having only their own sales forces and distributing a lot more through a two-tier partner networks and channel networks. And so in those cases, you need both a partner relationship management capability on the front end to deal registration and making sure that you have the right views for all your partners in terms of what they can see in their forecast to whatever backend policies you need, credit, settlement, appropriate discount rates. So that's another example of something that seems like only a front end process has to be deeply connected to the back end in order to do it successfully. STEVE MIRANDA: That's great.

I think just basic business problems, which happen-- you don't think of them as front office problems or back office problems or business flows. And so you need that connective tissue of the complete suite. And those are some examples of the type of business solutions we bring to our customers with the only complete suite on the cloud today.

Thanks a lot, Rob. ROB TARKOFF: Great. Thanks.

Hello, everyone. I'm Rob Tarkoff, head of the advertising and CX business at Oracle. And I'd like to welcome Andy Nallappan, who's the CTO and head of software business operations at Broadcom. Welcome, Andy. Can you start by telling everyone what you do at Broadcom and maybe a little bit about Broadcom as a company and your journey up to today? ANDY NALLAPPAN: Thank you, Rob. Broadcom is a global high tech semiconductor and a infrastructure software company with the revenue of $25 billion.

Our semiconductor components are part of our hardware customers' critical supply chain, enabling them to produce their flagship products which connects the world. And our infrastructure software solutions enable our software customers to manage their mission-critical business operations, while our security solutions protect their operations' IP and assets. About me, I used to be the global CIO of Broadcom until late last year. Then I became the CTO of the newly-formed Infrastructure Software Business Group. Rob, as you know, Broadcom had been growing over the years through acquisitions. And part of this journey, we've been transforming into a hardware, software, and service-oriented company.

ROB TARKOFF: What has this acquisition process meant for the technology systems that support your business? ANDY NALLAPPAN: We have a clear vision and strategy. Part of that vision and strategy is to integrate all these companies into a common culture process and technology and platform. For that, first we need the people, the strong stakeholders at the table to make the tough decisions during the initial phase of the integrations. Integration is a great opportunity to not only simplify the business processes and also to eliminate all this inefficiencies accumulated over the decades in the acquired companies order. And the last but not least is the technology platform. And we wanted a platform.

We look at the platform, which can not only accommodate our hardware and software business, but also it can connect and give you true end-to-end processes. And it also enable us to master the data, like our customers and pricing and products. ROB TARKOFF: And we both know, Andy, that that process is not easy. What benefits have you seen now that you've implemented your front and back office systems all on one unified Oracle architecture? ANDY NALLAPPAN: Rob, let me ask this from a few different perspectives. Let's take first customer perspective [INAUDIBLE]..

As we have grown over the years, we've become a large company with 23 divisions across the hardware and software and thousands of products order. And there's a lot of customer synergies between the acquisitions order. But we wanted to make sure that our customers see as as one company with a one-system process and the one team to engage. So it's very critical for us to make it easier for our customers to do business with. And also, it enables our sales and support team, providing a 360-degree view of the customers and enabling them to have a much more effective way to engage with our customers and support them better. From a Broadcom perspective, our culture is in a data-driven, decision-making culture.

So it's important that we provide a single source of truth to our leaders, enabling that faster decision making and better decision making there. And also for our end users, we want to make sure that it is a frictionless experience and with increased user options, with end-to-end processes. And last but not least, is the [INAUDIBLE] integration synergies order. Now [INAUDIBLE] using the total cost of ownership and improving the operating margin.

ROB TARKOFF: That's great. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what led you to the decision to choose Oracle over some of our competitors in the space? ANDY NALLAPPAN: Sure. Now as noted, the application technology has evolved over the years to become a front office, middle office, and back office.

But for me and for us, there's only one office. We wanted to have one office. So these applications and platforms, which can really come out all this front office and back office and provide one end-to-end seamless experience to our customers and our users [INAUDIBLE].. So it is more than CRM and CPQ. It is the whole ecosystem.

So it was a much easier decision for us to choose Oracle because that gave us this end-to-end experience. And also it aligned with our culture, which is basically faster, better, cheaper. Faster integrations and better experience for our customers, and better decision making for executives, and lower total cost of ownership, accommodating the growth with economy of scale.

And our integrations are time-driven indications. It has a lot of challenges there. And Oracle has come forward to meet the challenges there.

And they partnered with there to make it successful and provide the cost savings through the licenses and maintenance there. So it was basically a cultural alignment, our vision alignment, our technology was end-to-end, enabling our end-to-end process there. So that's why we chose Oracle. And we've been really happy. ROB TARKOFF: Andy, I'm so glad that you feel this way about your Oracle choice.

I hope this continues to be true for years to come. And I'm really glad that we had this chance to connect on all the success Broadcom is having in implementing a unified front-to-back office solution on the Oracle platform. Thanks very much. STEVE MIRANDA: So we've covered the completeness of Suite. And we've covered the customer-centric approach. Now let's dive into a few other differentiators.

When we talk about best technology, there's some things you see, which is us enabling technology through features in the application, machine learning, the Digital Assistant being notable examples. And those are pervasive throughout the application. But equally as important, there's technology you don't see. Over the last year, we've updated every one of our customers' data centers to the newest Gen2 data center, giving them brand new networking, brand new storage, the fastest technology available, and the most secure technology available. We've updated the underlying Oracle database to the latest and greatest of the database technologies. And all the other technology components getting not only security updates, but feature function updates, to enable our customers to have the fastest, most secure, and most robust technology to run their applications.

So what used to be a notion of technical debt, which is where you had to take care of these things, are all taken care of for you, just part of your normal updates in the Oracle SaaS applications. In addition to technology, we bring you the most modern user experience. What we've done is we've really improved the look and feel of our HTML or web interface.

We've enabled it to be mobile responsive, so that you have the same look and feel depending on which form factor you work in, whether it be a large screen browser, a tablet size, and scaling down to a phone size. But we didn't stop there. We've also rethought what user experience should be and really eliminated the UI entirely in using conversational UI or Digital Assistant. So just in the same way that you could talk to Siri or an Alexa and get everything you need to know about the world around you, now you can use the Oracle Digital Assistant and get transactions and information from your enterprise system, using just your voice. And then we have the fastest innovation.

And this is where we bring together quarterly updates of hundreds of features across each and every product area, hundreds in financials, HCM, CX, supply chain, and manufacturing. So to shift gears and to drill into the different product areas and the highlights of those hundreds of features, let's go pillar by pillar. To start us off, Catherine You, who's our Vise President of ERP Development, will go through the highlights of the financials and ERP quarterly updates. [MUSIC PLAYING] CATHERINE YOU: Customer success is our success.

I'd like to welcome new customers to our vibrant 7,500 plus customer community. We are humble that house brands like FedEx, Kroger, Lyft, and Vanguard trust Oracle Cloud ERP to support their finance and operations and define the future of work. Over the last 12 months, we have introduced over 1,700 new features.

And they're being adopted rapidly, even as users continue to work remotely and distribute it. We continue to listen to our customers deeply and understand their challenges broadly as we implement new ideas, quarterly in a consumable manner. I'd like to highlight three key innovations today, touchless operations, continuous forecasting, and conversational experience. Touchless operations is key to financial close acceleration. Now having the ability to be able to orchestrate the entire close process in the cloud, touchless, whether data are coming from external sources or subledgers into GL, into core consolidation, and into [INAUDIBLE] reporting, this ensures that everyone has a crisp view of the close progression. Secondly, continuous forecasting, where integrated ERP and EPM solution enable financial accounting actual string into predictive models continuously, higher frequency, machine-generated predictions can complement human consensus and help you move quicker and faster as business assumptions shift and change.

Lastly, conversational experience, where employees self services, like submitting expense reports and project time cards are made effortlessly inside Digital Assistant. Oracle Digital Assistant may also give you finance visibility into account reconciliations that might need your attention or close activities requiring timely approvals. In summary, we have invested in the future of finance vision and AI technologies for quite some time. And there are more innovations to come. Our customers already experience these benefits.

And we believe these innovations are crucial to help finance teams, free up resources, and be able to shift from operational focus to becoming more strategic to support their CFOs leading company-wide digital transformation success. Now I'd like to show you a vision demo, where we take inspiration from augmented reality and combine Oracle Cloud and business analytics to illustrate a virtual collaborative workspace. [MUSIC PLAYING] At Oracle, we continuously monitor new technologies and apply them to deliver exciting finance and operational experiences.

I'd like to show you a feature, where your ERP data and business analytics are available virtually anywhere. In this demo, I'm a general manager focusing on the last week of the quarter. It's crunch time for everybody.

Sound familiar? Oracle Digital Assistant just pushed me an alert about a customer, Unity Hotels, requesting a credit extension in order to sign a $10 million deal this quarter. It's urgent. But I need more information to decide. Instead of opening my laptop, I put on my AR glasses to see my sales dashboard. Check this out. Hey Oracle, show my forecast and prediction.

Bam. Because Oracle runs both my front and back office operations, I have secure access to real-time forecasts, including sales actuals and revenue production projecting out the remaining quarter. I'm a general manager out of fitness equipment company. With data in my line of sight, I can easily visualize the problem area.

We are below the plan by about 9%. To make sense of all this, I need to understand all the [INAUDIBLE] deals. Hey Oracle, show my deal progression. The chart on my right is my top 10 deals of the quarter in three dimension. Without the Unity deal, it's going to be a challenge to hit this quarter's target.

I see a report annotation from finance. Let me see if I can catch my finance manager, Martin, who is collaborating with the Unity Hotel's accounting. Hey Oracle, Zoom Martin. Hi, Martin. How are you? I'm calling about the Unity deal. What's your thought on this? MARTIN: I think it's fine.

We've done some work on this. First let me tell you about Unity Hotels. They're a long-term customer that always pays promptly, 98% on time. Social insights indicate they're expanding. Overall the company health is good. And their Fitch rating just increased to AA.

Overall it looks like a pretty safe bet. CATHERINE YOU: OK. I understand the numbers and the risk. What credit limit do you propose? MARTIN: So Unity needs $9 million. But they're asking for a credit of $10 million. Let me show you the risk scenarios I've modeled.

If we reduce that credit down to $9 million, it doesn't change much for us from a risk perspective. They decrease from a potential impact to 4.8% of next quarter's revenue down to 4.4%. And renegotiating with Unity Hotels doesn't make much sense since it will only delay getting the deal signed. We should approve at $9.8 million.

CATHERINE YOU: OK. That's lock it in for this quarter. And let's keep an eye on the customer's expansion. MARTIN: OK. I'm going to let you go, so I can work on it. Thanks for reaching out.

Bye. CATHERINE YOU: Bye, Martin. Now as you can see, my virtual workspace is updated real time.

The sales projection is up. The revenue forecast is also up. We're back on target. I hope you enjoyed that preview of where we're taking ERP and the finance applications. You saw a really powerful combination of analytics across the enterprise. Machine learning, and AI-driven forecast, and virtual collaboration all together can drive real outcome fast.

Now imagine what you can do to transform your business by having access to such innovative cloud technologies. [MUSIC PLAYING] RICK JEWELL: Hi. My name is Rick Jewell. And I run supply-chain applications here at Oracle. I think we all know how much COVID-19 has had an impact on businesses all around the world.

But when it comes to supply chain, the pandemic has really accelerated trends that were already well underway. So it's now the time for you to get serious about investing in, replatforming, transforming, and evolving your supply chain. Now the fact is that Oracle has made a huge investment. We are the only company in the world that has a native cloud solution for supply chain.

We have over 3,000 customers and growing. We've had over 150 customers go live on our solutions just in the past three months. And we continue to add upwards of 200 new capabilities and features every quarter, every release.

We've already entered into the process manufacturing industry. We've provided project-driven supply chain capabilities, already provided a service logistics and depot repair capability that tightly integrates with our field service and Engagement Cloud, so one thing I'd like to say to everyone is stay tuned for an announcement of a supply chain live event. So we look forward to seeing you there. Thank you very much.

[MUSIC PLAYING] CHRIS LEONE: Hello. My name is Chris Leone, senior vice president of application development here at Oracle, representing our Human Capital Management Cloud. And I'm excited to tell you that our HCM Cloud is now one of the leading deployed HR systems globally. And we have our customers to thank, who have been driving us to deliver more innovation into our platform to help them meet their day-to-day business challenges. Now when we talk about customer success, we just had 1.7 million employees go live on our HCM system in January of this year, across all industries.

In health care alone, we had eight different customers go live, customers like North Well Health, Atrium Health, Indiana University Health. Those health care customers represent and are caring for 26 million Americans annually, which is just a staggering number. But we also have customers in hospitality, like Marriott Corporation, and in security services, like Securitas. So our customer momentum and customer success has just been incredible. Now why are customers choosing our HCM Cloud? Because it has the most capabilities delivered on a single integrated platform.

It has the most mobile capabilities. And for the third year in a row, we've been ranked number one and Gartner's critical capabilities quadrant for large enterprises. But we're not stopping there. We're not resting on our laurels. In our spring update, this is our biggest innovation release ever.

We're delivering a full skills platform across our HR suite that is built on our artificial intelligence engine. We're delivering an end-to-end employee experience platform to allow you to extend processes and workflows to all systems within your enterprise. We're delivering new capabilities around diversity, equity, and inclusion, because that's a boardroom topic now.

And we're delivering new enhancements for cybersecurity to help protect stay-at-home workers from fraud. So join me on April 13th for our HCM summit to hear about all these cool new innovations that we're delivering. Now is the time to move to the cloud and have all of this innovation at your fingertips. So pivot forward. Become more agile.

And always make work more human. See you in April. [MUSIC PLAYING] HOLLY SIMMONS: Hello, everyone. I'm Holly Simmons. And I lead product strategy for our Oracle marketing solutions. You heard about the innervations for ERP supply chain and HCM.

Now I'm going to take you through the innervations for Oracle advertising and customer experience. Our goal is to enable you to deliver personalized real-time experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. We help you do that in three ways. First, we help you to understand your customer by leveraging data. Second, we help you improve customer satisfaction and employee productivity with AI and automation. And third, we help you innovate with our industry expertise and by connecting the front and the back office.

On the marketing front, we have a connected suite that personalizes customer experiences at scale. In fact, we helped our customer send over 8.8 billion messages over Black Friday, Cyber Monday week. Some of our most recent innovations add real time decisioning and next best offers for customers and new integrations for micro-segmentation and targeting.

With Oracle advertising, we provide solutions that safeguard and scale advertising campaigns. We categorize over 2.5 trillion URLs per week to find the right environments for our clients to advertise. Our Moat solution helps companies protect their advertising investments. And Moat's new innovations in measurement and detection helped Oracle to identify the largest CTB fraud scheme ever, stream scam. On the service front, changes in the economy have put a massive strain on service organizations, which is why Oracle is addressing this by delivering vibrant digital service automation experiences, including digital assistants and a reimagined agent experience with the new Redwood design.

Our digital technologies handled over 8 billion customer service transactions over the week of US Thanksgiving last year. On the sales side, Oracle's on a journey to help sellers sell better with automation, intelligence, and conversational UIs. The sales workspace helps sellers manage complex quotes and proposals or take quick actions on opportunities.

And sellers can leverage this conversational functionality on desktop, mobile, or on Office 365. Now I've only mentioned a few innovations today. And there are many more.

To learn more about how our advertising CX solutions can help you to improve the experience across the entire customer lifecycle, visit oracle.com. Thank you. STEVE MIRANDA: Thank you, Catherine, Rick, Chris, and Holly, for sharing all the exciting product updates and what's to come for our customers. Now let's hear from another customer I spoke to earlier about the journey they've had with cloud and the benefits they are seeing.

So now it's my great pleasure to welcome John Bendl. John is the principal fund CFO and chief accounting officer at Vanguard. Now Vanguard's a marquee name in the financial services industry and globally. So I imagine many of you are either customers of theirs or are very familiar with their services. But John, welcome to the audience. And welcome to Oracle Live.

Maybe you can get the background both on yourself and just some things about Vanguard that the audience may not be aware. JOHN BENDL: Great. Thanks, Steve. It's a pleasure to be here today. So my name is John Bendl.

I'm the chief accounting officer and fund CFO at Vanguard. So my responsibilities include our corporate finance functions, which includes our business technology teams, our accounting operations and controllers group, our financial reporting teams, along with treasury and payroll. And then on the fund side, I oversee a similar set of teams, including fund accounting, fund reporting, and our fund treasury team.

Vanguard, as probably a lot of you know, is the second largest asset manager in the world. We manage over 7 trillion assets under management. And that includes all different asset classes, equity, fixed income, different geographies, and strategies. We also have different businesses beyond the asset management core of the firm, including financial advice, 401 record keeping services, we operate in over 20 countries around the world, and we have 17,000 crew. We call our employees group, the nautical theme of Vanguard. And in addition, we have about 30 million clients or customers that we serve each and every day with a primary focus on the retail investor.

And a big thank you to those in the audience that are listening that are clients of Vanguard. STEVE MIRANDA: Those are some amazing numbers, 30 million customers and 7 trillion in assets managed. Now the financial services market gets hit in many different dimensions by COVID and a global pandemic.

How is Vanguard-- to keep up with your nautical theme, how's Vanguard weathered this storm, major disruption? JOHN BENDL: That's a great question, Steve. And it really has been a unique and challenging year. I think it's been a testament to the teams at Vanguard. We've maintained operational resiliency and operational excellence through the COVID pandemic, with 95%-plus of our workforce operating remotely. We also have a business model that has benefited from the diversification that I talked about earlier. So we've been very fortunate, from a business model perspective, that our diversification on an asset class perspective with products and services we offer our clients, as well as geographies that we serve have really helped our company continue to perform exceptionally well through the crisis that we've gone through.

Vanguard has been a company that's always embraced innovation, technologically-savvy firm-- it's very important in the industry we operate in, in asset management, where technology and how we serve our clients is really important. And we really started the journey to Oracle Cloud a little bit before the pandemic hit, probably about two or three months prior. And really, as we thought about the pandemic and the remote work environment, we wanted to keep the pedal down on the implementation of Oracle. And really, the Oracle team helped us do that. And we really didn't miss a beat.

We moved to a remote work environment and elevated our ERP PM solutions for our FP&A teams in the summer of 2020. We elevated our ERP platform shortly thereafter and continue to elevate our procurement modules. So we didn't take the foot off the gas even with the pandemic. And the Oracle team really helped us get there through this challenging environment we're dealing with.

STEVE MIRANDA: We talk a lot in this session about how finance and CFOs are moving to the cloud. What was part of your decision, as far as the why did you decide to move the operations part to the cloud? JOHN BENDL: And we've been on a journey for a number of years now, Steve. One of our firm-wide strategies is really to move to modern architecture in the cloud. So that's a broad Vanguard-wide strategy. And moving to Oracle Cloud was a natural extension of that strategy because running our business in the cloud has a lot of benefits over on-prem data centers. There's resiliency, that is much better for the cloud environment, including Oracle Cloud availability.

And when you just think about the cost aspects of running on-prem data centers versus the cloud, it's a much more important consideration for us and one of the real reasons we went on the journey. STEVE MIRANDA: So that's interesting. So you've already touched on cost, resiliency, but now that you're live on cloud-- or cloud ERP with Oracle-- what are some of the business results you're seeing? Or really what are some of the enablers that the Oracle Cloud service is allowing you to do from a business perspective? JOHN BENDL: We had a highly-customized on-prem solution that hadn't been updated in a number of years because it was highly customized.

It was expensive to upgrade. We were many years behind on both the upgrades and how we looked at our on-prem solutions. So we took this is a chance to step back and look at, what are the best practices? Because we thought not only would adopting the Oracle Cloud technology drive a lot of efficiency and effectiveness, but it would also help us with our business process changes that we wanted to make. So we really took a philosophy that we're going to have no customizations out of the box, use the best practices that the Oracle Cloud platform had to offer-- we did a lot of diligence on that, talked, to a lot of customers that really had successfully gone through an Oracle implementation, and the benefits of that have been huge.

We've seen it in a number of ways. One, just thinking about productivity. We used to think about our EP close, it would take a half a day. When we run the cycle in Oracle, it takes minutes. When we think about the transparency of information in the Oracle Cloud platform, that really end-to-end solution-- when you look at it from planning EPM all the way through to ERP and procurement-- the ability to see the data and to look at that across all the finance functions, and even have self-service capabilities for our business has been really powerful.

And then I would also say when you think about some of the procurement modules, we used to get requests to approve different invoices or work orders, and it would take multiple clicks in and out of different systems. It's a one-click stop. It's so much more efficient for many users across Vanguard that need to interact with procurement but maybe don't need to interact with the core EPM or ERP platforms, where we've also seen a lot of benefits on the efficiency front. STEVE MIRANDA: That's amazing because I think of Vanguard as a very forward-looking technology-savvy company to begin with.

But it's amazing when you get into a lot of the little details, especially of close, the benefits of taking a look and modernizing process. So it's great to partner with you on that. Now one other thing that you mentioned was the benefits of the end-to-end solution, or what we say running the business in the same fully-integrated cloud platform. What benefits do expect from that, the accessibility in the one place for all the data that you have? JOHN BENDL: Clearly we've seen it help with enhanced decision making. I think when you have that access to the data end-to-end, you're able to make better decisions in a more rapid fashion.

When the data is fragmented, you're dealing with a lot of manual intervention, a lot of manual processes. When you have it all in one integrated platform, the visibility that the FP&A community has and the accounting community has into the data can just help them serve the business partners and help accelerate that journey in order to improve our goals and objectives. So it really has benefited us immensely. STEVE MIRANDA: Having access and quick decisions make major impact. So that's great to hear that benefit. John, it's really been an honor to be really just part of the cloud journey with Vanguard.

What we talk a lot about is we're just solely focused on trying to improve that customer experience and change it to be much more of a service company. How would you evaluate how are we doing on that? How would you describe your relationship with Oracle? And what do you expect next for our future together? JOHN BENDL: First I'd like to say just a big thank you to the Oracle team. Oracle has been a terrific business partner every step of the way. One thing we did, which has really helped, we had Oracle leaders embedded in our governance process. It's important to have a good governance process as you implement an ERP EPM procurement solution like this.

And have an Oracle set on our governance committee really helped us accelerate the process. And they were actively engaged in trying to help us think about things we might not have considered on our own. Second, I think the community that Oracle has of users-- more and more people are migrating to the cloud platform. There's a really rich user community that's very willing and open to share.

And then that helps Oracle with feedback on the product roadmap. And Oracle genuinely wants that feedback on how to make the product roadmap the best it can be for their client base. STEVE MIRANDA: John, again, I can't thank you enough for the time. You brought a smile to my face with so many things, as far as implementing and being able to reduce your close time and be able to get better information. But more importantly, some of the advice or some of the lessons learned, just sharing with the audience, I can't thank you enough.

It's been extremely valuable, I think, for all in the audience. And we really appreciate your time. Thank you very much, John. JOHN BENDL: Yeah, thank you, Steve, for having me. It's been a pleasure. STEVE MIRANDA: So we've covered quite a lot today.

We covered the big differentiators of the Oracle applications. We have the most complete suite of applications in the cloud. We've combine this with the best technology. Combining those really has enabled us to have the fastest innovation, both of technology and application feature functions. And we've added on top the most modern consumer grade user interface. And most importantly, we put the customer success at the center of everything we do.

And you've heard this not just from Oracle, but you've heard it from our customers directly. And there are many other customers out there speaking about their success. So now is the time. We invite you to really pivot forward to define your future. Partner with Oracle.

So we can help you deliver business success today and in the future. Thank you for your time.

2021-03-28 14:51

Other news