Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:00:00]:
I think at the end of the day, a lot of companies and most customers are customers first, and they imbibe that. But the way I kinda think about it is, yes, one is putting customers first and serving them really, really well, and that’s part of the DNA and the culture. I’m not questioning that. My point more is around, are you fundamentally pivoting and building products and offering capabilities that meets their needs in the way that they actually think that they want the need met?

Karissa Breen [00:00:43]:
Joining me today is Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, more commonly known as OCI. And today, we’re discussing Oracle’s approach to the cloud. So, Mahesh, thanks for joining, and welcome.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:00:55]:
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be meeting you today.

Karissa Breen [00:00:58]:
Okay. So Mahesh, I wanna start with, I’m aware that you, as in yourself, were quite pivotal in 2016 around the launch of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. So maybe talk to me a little bit more about this. Like, what is Pivotal sort of look like? What’s your experience?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:01:14]:
Look. I think, you know, I was one of the early members and then sort of joined Oracle back in 2016. You know, we were trying to think a little bit more about what would it take to build a 2nd generation cloud. Right? Because before before my time here at Oracle, I was at Azure. I was one of the early members there as well, building out Azure infrastructure. So for me, it was more about how do we think about kinda taking this to the next level. And so, you know, I was lucky enough to one of the few people that joined Oracle in 2016, and, you know, we had some fundamental principles around saying, hey. You know, we got to build a cloud that actually has security built in, and it should be always on.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:01:51]:
We said we want to have a set of services that actually meets our customers where they are when it comes to enterprise customers. Now what what I mean by that is even today, if you take a step back and look at how much of the cloud, you know, cloud is actually fully adopted, and those numbers are still low. For any industry that’s about, you know, 10, 15 years in, if you see the adoption numbers less than 50%, you go, why? And that’s usually because the products are not meeting the customer needs. And so I got the opportunity with Oracle to actually think about how do we build a cloud that serves enterprise customers, gives them the security, focus on mission critical apps. You know, for me, Pivotal is a lot more about kind of leveraging the strengths of what we learned, leveraging the strengths of the company around data, and kind of driving it forward to build what we call as a second generation cloud.

Interviewing Professional [00:02:39]:
Okay. So there’s a couple of things in there I wanna explore. You said build a cloud that has security built in. Now go go back to 2016 for a moment. What was sort of going through your mind or the team’s mind when you’re sort of building this out? And then sort of further to that, what does that sort of mean from your perspective or Oracle’s perspective?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:02:56]:
First thing that we said was, look, in the cloud, everybody just was offering virtual machines at that point in time. And we said, why why does a cloud only offer a virtual machine? Why can’t it offer bare metal computers? And you go and think about bare metal computers, it it actually goes back to how do you isolate yourself, which is which is the cloud provider, away from the customer, but but still give them full access to a bare metal computer? And that required tremendous amount of innovation that we did did around our network offload technology, the security around the network offload technology. Right? So that that’s sort of an example of what we meant by security built in. Not only that. Right? We I’ll take another example to articulate. Every single product or service that we built, we said, we’re gonna only offer security or capability or features that would meet our bar. So you take an object storage service, for example, we just decided we’re never gonna offer an object storage service that offers buckets that has to be served on HTTP. We said everything and anything on our cloud.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:03:57]:
Only we served on HTTPS. So if you rekinda think about a fundamental principle we wrote down on a paper, and it just became a security tenant in everything that we build at Oracle. So those are just a couple examples in how we do it. And, security built in is sort about, you know, part of couple of different things. 1 is it’s about the processes and everything that you do around that, like meeting the bar in terms of security. And second is really around your product thinking and how you evolve and do. So when you think about this notion of network offload technology for our computers where all of the cloud and all of our services, including customers’ stuff runs, when we say built in, every single piece of infrastructure that we land follows the same identical principle about this network offload technology. We don’t create computers or offer anything to our customers that doesn’t actually have these capabilities in it.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:04:49]:
Right? And then I talked about processes. Any product or feature or capability that goes through, we really spend a ton of time reviewing the designs, the products, the capabilities that we offer to our customers to meet that security standard that we set for ourselves and ensure that our customers, even if they do accidental choices on our cloud, don’t end up exposing themselves to risks that they would they’d probably be worried about. Right? So it’s it’s more about how we think about our cloud, and second, how we build security into the cloud. And and the bare metal cloud computers as an example.

Interviewing Professional [00:05:23]:
So what do you mean by accidental choices? What does that what what does that mean?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:05:26]:
You know, a good way to articulate that is usually examples. If you think about, you know, a lot of, you know, press around security issues or mistakes or things like that, it fundamentally boils down to customers doing a lot of misconfigurations and how they use the cloud. Right? And one of the things that we we told ourselves is, like, we gotta reduce the surface area of a customer making a bad choice on our cloud. I’ll take an example. And you think about, you know, you getting an account on a cloud. There’s a lot of regions where Oracle Cloud Infrastructure operates. As a customer, we make it easy for them to say, you cannot accidentally replicate the data that you place. Say, for example, your European customer, accidentally replicate the data to another country that you’re not supposed to and violate some of the data sovereignty principles.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:06:13]:
Right? Those are things that are very hard for a customer to, like, make misconfigurations on. That’s one example. The second thing that we said was, hey. If I’m a customer and you have offered me all of these capabilities and APIs and experience to develop on top of you, How do you how are you as a cloud provider gonna help make it easy for me to not make these mistakes? So we thought about a couple of products in this area. 1 is called CloudGuard, and then that is called as a maximum security zone. CloudGuard is this concept where you just have to add a single click of a button. It is constantly watching all the changes for your account in your tenancy, and it is telling you if you’re making any accidental misconfigurations pretty fast. That is a reactive partial, but it does all of that so you don’t make any mistakes.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:06:59]:
And it brings Oracle’s 100 of, you know, decades of experience of things that could go wrong, and it actually has 100 of recipes that’s constantly being running in your account. 2nd is really this concept of a zone where you just can’t make a mistake. So we have this idea of a maximum security zone when you build your applications in it. It may be a little harder, but it ensures that you don’t make a mistake in it. Example, you try to create an object storage bucket and you try to, you know, have some, you know, important backups for your database or whatever, and you try to put it in the public, the cloud will not allow you to put that, you know, the that object storage bucket on a public Internet. It’ll just not it’s just not possible. So we thought a lot about how do you build these capabilities on into our cloud, and those are two examples of products that are also available in our cloud the customers can turn on at 0 cost, both of those features are available for for free of cost.

Interviewing Professional [00:07:52]:
Okay. This is interesting. So I just wanna zoom out for a second. Let’s talk about cloud in general or cloud providers in general. What do you think people get confused about when it comes to the cloud? Because I’ve spoken to people and other cloud providers at, you know, similar level to yourself. They sort of say the same sort of thing around that misconfiguration, and people just think, well, I set up an account. I don’t have to do anything after that. But I wanna hear your thoughts on what you’ve seen with your experience.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:08:17]:
When you think about sort of security, security at the end of the day is sort of a shared responsibility model. Right? At the end of the day, the customer has responsibility for doing certain things. And and from our perspective, like, the cloud has an important role to play to to make sure that we do everything with all of the experience that we have to bring the best to bear, to make sure that the customers are successful. So what I have observed is usually when you don’t have sort of the big barrier or sort of the developers who work in this cloud for a really long time. Right? They’re really trying to, like, hit a project deadline or something and then just kinda moving really fast to deliver on a project, which is good for the business, but at the same time, you know, there’s some mistakes that end up happening because it’s it’s not done on a ill will, but more about not knowing enough. Right? So partially when I talked about Oracle Cloud Guard or maximum security zones or these capabilities that are inbuilt into the cloud, it’s really making it easy for a developer who’s building on the cloud to, like, make not make those bad choices. So what I would say is my observation with customers is they’re trying to do the right thing and, you know, get stuff done and and, you know, leverage the advantage the cloud brings to them. But more so, the time, agility, speed, with the lack of experience and the difficulty that exists in other clouds kinda make it hard for them to kinda solve the problem and not also make mistakes.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:09:35]:
And Oracle Cloud aims at kinda attacking that problem in 2 different ways.

Interviewing Professional [00:09:39]:
Okay. I wanna focus now on because as we’ve sort of mentioned throughout the interview, we’re quite pivotal person in, you know, OCI. So maybe what have you sort of learned since this journey? So, you know, 2016 was around 8 years ago, so you’ve obviously seen a lot of change in development and evolution. So maybe talk us through that. What are the things that you’ve learned? And then probably my second question to that would be, what do you think then moving forward? What are some of your learnings that you’ll take then moving forward into, you know, 2025 and beyond?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:10:11]:
I think one of the things that I personally learned was I mean, this is gonna be sound very philosophical, but, you know, I kinda I think people matter. Right? So my number one priority has actually always been working with a great bunch of people and kinda having a culture about, like, doing doing good work. You know? So that’s definitely one. But going beyond that, I think we’ve learned a lot about how to fundamentally hold what I consider to be a consistent bar so to offer customers a a tremendous experience in a very short period of time. Right? So one of the advantages that we have is sort of, you know, we can we started a little late, so we learned a lot from what other clouds did wrong. But one of the disadvantages also, you still started late. So but for us, kinda taking the lessons, using that as an advantage, and seeing if that actually allows us to accelerate 100 of cloud services, you know, deploying over 70 plus regions in the cloud, like, in around the world. I think we’ve learned a lot about how to be fast, how to actually offer all of those features, but still not compromise on quality.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:11:16]:
So for me, I think I’ve always struggled with, like, hey. How do you get so much done in such a short period of time? And I think we’ve learned quite a few things about how do you maintain this bar while still keeping up the pace. Right? So that’s definitely one. The second thing that I’d say I would have probably learned more is that I think I’ve I’ve learned a lot more as we engage to understand, hey. You know, even though the clouds have been around for 10, 15 years, when I talk to customers, they still have complaints. So what I’ve learned a lot is to appreciate sort of the fundamental challenges that still exist with the clouds. And and, obviously, that gives us an advantage in terms of, like, hey. Still, there are unmet problems in the cloud.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:11:55]:
And so I’m I’m always learning from our customers about how we can do a better job of meeting all of their needs as we look ahead.

Interviewing Professional [00:12:02]:
Okay. There’s a couple of things which is interesting that you said in there. Now I went to, Oracle Cloudwell tour in Singapore. I interviewed your CIO, Jay Evans, and that was one of the questions I asked. So, like, you know, Oracle or OCI started late. So you mentioned before, because you, you know, had a late start, it gave OCI the opportunity to see what the other cloud sorta did wrong. So what would you say generally speaking, what would you say? What was your observation about where they went wrong perhaps?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:12:31]:
At the end of the day, all the clouds are successful. So from in terms of revenue and others, but but I think there’s some learnings in there. 1st, for me, it it has a lot to do with all the clouds experiment in terms of products or features or capabilities, if you will, in terms of, like, launching new things to see how customers can adopt. Right? They are all of them have a perspective in terms of how they wanna actually simplify the customer challenge. But when you do that for a while, right, and and there’s nothing wrong in what they attempted, but it’s, hey. You know, would I have launched service x to solve problem y? And was that enough adoption? They probably had a had a first start, so they had to make a bunch of attempts. But then they also know, hey. Those products never took off.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:13:12]:
You know, 3 years later, customers are not probably happy about it or the adoption has not gone well. So the advantage that I talk about is really about they tried on a lot of different ideas that gave them sort of, like, an indication of what customers really want, and that allowed us to focus on things that we did not see we did not want their customers said we do not like that. Right? So that allowed us to not experiment on things that customers don’t want. So it simplified the problem area that we were gonna tackle. So that’s definitely one. The second advantage is we did not have what I consider to be sort of the the weight of the legacy. Right? Because at any point in time, you know, there’s latest and the greatest hardware innovation, latest and the greatest network offload technologies that were always available at our hands. And so for us, that was a significant advantage.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:13:57]:
So I don’t think they went wrong, but it is more when you go first, you’re obviously gonna experiment a lot more, and you have tons of results from those experiments that we took as lessons. And we also have the advantage of latest hardware technologies and innovations. We married the 2 to play to our advantage.

Interviewing Professional [00:14:14]:
Okay. I’m curious to know, with your experience now, obviously, you know, you’ve just mentioned, like, sort of later to the game, if you had to pick a position, would you say it’s more optimal to be first mover’s advantage? To be like, okay, we’ll move first? Or would you say in OCI’s position, later to the game actually is a better position to be in? If you had to choose, which one did you choose and why?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:14:37]:
Look. I think first mover’s advantage always has an advantage. Right? Yes. You get a you get you get time, obviously, to play and experiment. A first mover is great, but but I also believe the market is so large from the way I think about it. So there’s there’s room for a lot of different players, and as you can see, our infrastructure is growing pretty well as well. And so what is obvious is at the end of the day, if the market is not fully captured, 1st smallest advantage could go either way. Right? So the what is more important is how effectively are we serving the customers and how much more market demand exists, and are you still best positioned to, like, serve that market? So for me, 1st mode advantage is great.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:15:17]:
I pick that. But, really, 1st mode advantage not play to the, you know, to to to the success of actually capturing most of the market demand is not really for smoothest advantage. So, you know, you could go either way.

Interviewing Professional [00:15:30]:
So you mentioned before, effectively serve the customer. What does that look like? Because I feel like, you know, every every company says, oh, we effectively serve our customers. But what does this mean from your point of view in your position?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:15:42]:
Yeah. Look. I think at the end of the day, all of you know, a lot of companies and most customers are customers first and, you know, they imbibe that. But the way I kinda think about it is, yes, one is putting customers first and serving them really, really well, and that’s part of the DNA and the culture. I’m not questioning that. My point more is around, are you fundamentally pivoting and building products and offering capabilities that meets their needs in the way that they actually think that they want to meet them? Right? I’m just gonna take a good example on, you know, our philosophy around everything everywhere. Right? We had we had this idea back in 2016 that, hey. You know, we do not want ever our customers to think about how to build their applications, you know, differently in Europe versus US.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:16:26]:
We we said all the capabilities that we build at launch will always be available in every single region Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is going to be in. So we call this everything everywhere, which means it’s available. That’s one example of how we kinda take an approach of putting customers first, but we we take the burden away from them. 2nd is our concept of dedicated regions or, you know, alloy or others where we said, look, less than 30% of the market is needs is actually met in 15 years. Clearly, there is a need for the remainder 70%. Why are they not moving? What is driving that problem? And and that kinda drove us to come up with innovation around this notion of dedicated clouds or dedicated regions that we can actually give to customers, and we can deploy them in their on premises data centers right next to the servers where they’re actually, like, literally running their existing applications. And second, we also understand the market needs are, like, evolving around data sovereignty, more data privacy, and and a lot of these enterprise customers face the difficulty around moving these applications over into the cloud because it is a big barrier for them, rearchitecting. Right? When I say customers first, one, it’s about DNA and making sure all their needs are met in terms of how they’re using our services.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:17:42]:
The second is really pivoting your strategy, you know, our strategy to go to places and solve problems that nobody else has attempted. Right? So for me, that’s putting customers first.

Interviewing Professional [00:17:53]:
Okay. So, Mahesh, I’m really curious to know just from your point of view. Now I have asked Jay Evans this question, and you’ve sort of touched on it, but maybe we can get into this a bit more because I think this is really important. Now I wanna know why a big player like Oracle, who has a $385,000,000,000 market cap, wasn’t as fast in the market and the cloud arena. It’s only you guys don’t have the money and all those types of things. I’m just I’m really curious because we’ve sort of articulated, you’re quite a pivotal person, want to get into this because I think people in this space are asking these questions. So, I think it’s an opportunity now to say this was the reason why, which sort of maybe sets the scene for people for people out there that I’m speaking to.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:18:31]:
If you think about, like, Oracle kind of making an attempt at the cloud or or building the cloud, we’ve been in this business for a long time. Right? But I think partially but you have to understand, Oracle is actually an entire end to end business from an enterprise perspective. Right? What I mean by that is we have a thriving data business. We are, a huge SaaS business. Right? So from from serving our customers, there are a lot of different businesses that Oracle is actually in the midst of, and we’ve actually had a cloud on the bottom. But I think it’s more around how do you take it to the next level? So for me, I don’t know if I would, class categorize this as, hey. You know, Oracle did not make an attempt. Oracle has made did make an attempt, but I think it’s more about how do we actually continue to drive that and kinda get the market traction at the right time.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:19:19]:
You know, sometimes it’s, you know, how does the market see us over time rather than, hey. Did you make an attempt or not? So for me, I think Oracle’s got a thriving data business, SaaS business, and SaaS actually ran on cloud, just so you know. Right? And the SaaS business was around even before, like, OCS started taking off. Right? So we we’ve made attempts at cloud, but I think the market recognition came in much later.

Interviewing Professional [00:19:41]:
Yes. And you’re right. And I think, you know, people that I speak to in this space all over the world, like, they do complement OCR, and I think it’s just perhaps the market hasn’t quite understood that in any I I think it’s important why you’re here today is to really share that fidelity, a little bit more about the capability. So I wanna follow this a little bit more. If you could change the one thing about OCI, like, what would it be? Because I know you obviously sound like quite a reflective person and you you’ve you’ve got a lot of experience in in the game. So I’m curious to sort of see, like, is there anything that you sit back in line and go, oh, you know, perhaps I should have done that differently?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:20:16]:
Every leader at any point in their time, if they actually tell you that they don’t want they they probably would have done things differently, they’re probably lying. What I can tell you is this. My fundamental philosophy on, you know, just general problem approach is, like, you are always collecting as much data as possible to make the best decision possible at that point in time. And usually, you know, 6 months later, you can go, well, I have this other piece of data. I should have done this. Right? So but you don’t have hindsight 2020. Generally, you’ll you’re making the best decision. The second, more importantly for me is don’t make a decision when you don’t have to.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:20:46]:
So those are some fundamental principles. Now in terms of OCI, my personal perspective is that more than, you know, thinking about sort of changing a few things, I think we’ve got, you know, a sort of perspective in how we treat customers and how we think about tackling the market and their needs a little differently and how we execute against it. What I would probably be more focused on, and it’s actually, you know, what I focus on every day, is about how we don’t lose the superpowers that we built over time that as we go and grow as a massive business. Right? So that’s that’s been my big focus. So the thing that I wouldn’t change is an easier question for me to answer on changing one thing.

Interviewing Professional [00:21:25]:
You said before, don’t make a decision when you don’t have to. What do you mean by that?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:21:30]:
There are decisions that we make generally, right, which are one way door decisions. What I mean by one way door decisions is you’re you’re probably driving a lot of money or capital into making a project investment or, you know, big bet for launching a capability or whatever. And when you make that at a time when you don’t actually have to drive that capital, but you can actually, like, make inch towards driving that capital instead of, like, going all in. That for me is sort of thinking about that as a one way door decision versus a two way door decision. A two way door decision is like, look, we can take a call, but we have sufficient room and time to pivot or change or change our strategy without actually paying a lot of opportunity costs. So so a one way door decision is something that I think of as, you know, sort of like you don’t have to drive a decision. You think you’d spend a ton of time doing critical thinking before you enter that door. Right? That’s a different way to articulate the same problem.

Interviewing Professional [00:22:20]:
Yeah. That’s interesting. Would you say that people just make a decision instead of let’s see your point around the door analogy, like, perhaps they just do the one way door. Like, they’re not sort of thinking sort of on all angles. Is what were your thoughts then on that? Yeah.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:22:35]:
Not necessarily. I think it it for me, it’s more about, you know, kind of spending the time thinking about what kind of decision I’m making, if you will. Alright? So, you know, like, trying to say, hey. You know, look. There are a few decisions that I take on a daily basis or a weekly basis or whatever. Just kind of recognizing what decision type you’re taking is important. Right? That’s where if you spend that time because not always are you taking a lot of one way to decisions. Sometimes it’s very few.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:23:00]:
So it’s just recognizing those few pivotal moments when you’re doing that decision. Just recognizing it and saying, hey. How do I get more data? How do I think more about more? How do I put the business or our customers first in making the right choice for them? Right? And that that is what I mean. But usually, you know, most decisions are, you know, are places where you can pivot and learn. So, you know, the one way door decisions don’t come often, but it is something that is important to recognize as you’re making a decision. So I

Interviewing Professional [00:23:25]:
wanna sort of understand a little bit more. As I mentioned, like, I’ve spoken to a number of different cloud players out there. What do you think rattles people about the cloud? Now I asked that question because, you know, I’m speaking to certain people, like, whether they’re outside of IT, etcetera. They seem to have all these questions about the cloud, and it seems to really get to them. So from your point of view in speaking to customers day to day, is there anything that sort of stands out when I ask that question?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:23:52]:
If you if you roll back the clock, you know, what probably is, 10, 12 years ago, if you will. Right? I think there was a lot of questions about, like, hey. What is the cloud? Why should I move to the cloud? Is it actually cloud is actually gonna what value does it gonna add for what I do today? Right? So I think there were a lot of questions, you know, I would say even about 7, 8 years ago. But I think as we move ahead, it’s it’s obvious and clear that the value that cloud brings in terms of bringing the latest and the greatest technology, giving you the pay of pay for use. Actually, you know, to some extent, you know, some things that people don’t recognize that that the security levels of what you do in the cloud is generally higher. The the challenges that customers still run into though is this concept around control. Right? And and and when I talk about data sovereignty, right, it’s just an example of control. Right? Hey.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:24:41]:
How do we make sure that, you know, if I’m a government and I’m running on the cloud, like, how do I make sure that all the citizens data that I actually have are extremely business critical information or HPI? How do I keep that in a place where it’s actually, you know, inside the same country that I’m supposed to to meet our privacy laws? So what I would say is I don’t think cloud is a question anymore, but the forms of cloud and control is probably what people are asking more about as they understand. And, you know, look, the geopolitical situation, data sovereignty is continuing to evolve. And, you know, I think this is where Oracle spends a ton of time thinking about, hey. We understand data. We understand what customers mean when they actually, like, run our data products on their own premises. So it gives us an advantage to peek into their eyes and say, hey. What what are you worried about? What and and that that is what I hear more. It’s a lot more about control and less more about the cloud.

Interviewing Professional [00:25:35]:
So what do you think is the next version of the cloud? What do you see that’s sort of coming up on the horizon? Yes. With OSO, but just cloud in general, where do you think we’re sort of heading as an industry?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:25:44]:
Over time, I do expect more and more things, more and more decisions or, like, software or hardware, whatever it is that enables what I consider to be, like, mankind or apps are going to be happening closer to where people are. Right? What that means is, hey. You know, expecting to have, you know, say, 70 or a 100 regions from, you know, Oracle Cloud or, you know, similar numbers from other clouds, it’s it’s not a lot of numbers when you think about the number of cities and the people in the globe. And so I do expect more of the edge and more things happening in sort of like a decentralized way, which which actually has multiple smaller installations of the cloud. I do believe that is going to be a reality, both from a sovereignty perspective or just purely from, like, hey, how we expect our our end customers to interact with the servers and the applications that we’re doing. So I do expect the cloud’s going to be more and more places and more more cities than I think what we know today.

Interviewing Professional [00:26:41]:
So I sort of switch gears now and talk a little bit more about your team. So I’m I’m I’m aware that you and your team are devoted to constructing a distributed cloud infrastructure that offers customers a comprehensive high performance cloud computing environment. So maybe talk us through this and what this looks like.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:27:00]:
It fundamentally boils down to what I consider to be our region deployment models. Right? And and, essentially, kinda tailor making like, still offering all the capabilities, but meeting the stringent requirements of all of these different types of customers. Customers. Right? So, you know, what you have is we have a hyperscale public cloud, and, we have a ton of customers growing using that. That’s definitely, you know, something that we compete with all of the other major cloud providers in in parallel. But then you go to, hey. You know, we have government clouds that are very focused at serving different government needs, be it for, you know, various different certifications, you know, various different security processes. So we obviously have that.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:27:38]:
Then we have this idea that, hey. You know, we we have countries that are sovereign or EU for that matter. So we have an EU sovereign cloud that actually has operational model that’s completely operated by EU sovereign employees. So that’s a different model. We have dedicated regions where you have customers like Vodafone or NRI in Japan who are who are essentially saying, hey. Look. I would like to have my own set of regions whereas the only customer is me and here’s sort of, like, how I want them distributed globally. And we have large customers who are making those choices.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:28:10]:
Then you have, you know, we have partners. Right? If you look at, you know, many different partners, I mean, NRI is one of them. We have other partners in various part like, we have partner in Italy. All of these are partners who are saying, look. In my country, I want to essentially sort of, like, be a primary technology service provider where we can actually take Oracle Cloud, but we want to be the person that is actually, you know, managing the cloud and, you know, selling the cloud to our end customers and actually making them move their apps onto the cloud. So if you really think about, you know, how OCI is built with sort of the right fundamental principles and a really small footprint, like extremely large footprints, we’re able to cater to these markets based on what our customers want. Be it an enterprise customer, be it a government customer, be it sovereign customers, be it partners who are wanting to be cloud providers. OCI is enabling all of that while still being a major hyperscale cloud provider.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:29:04]:
Right? And then that’s the advantage when you think about this distributed cloud strategy that we got and what we’re doing.

Interviewing Professional [00:29:09]:
So what do you think happens from from here? What’s sort of your plan? What’s your strategy? I know we’re sort of halfway through 2024. What can people sort of expect, from OCI now moving forward?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:29:21]:
I’ll talk about things that are public. What customers can actually expect is, you know, we’re we’re continuing to grow globally, you know, with more and more customers, and, you know, they should expect our OCI being available in a lot more places and, definitely expect a ton of innovation that they’ve expected that they’ve seen from us over the last 8 years.

Interviewing Professional [00:29:42]:
So when you’re saying growing globally, we’re trying to understand, what sort of your approach to sort of cloud adoption for OCI over sort of competitors? Like, what what’s sort of your your plan for that?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:29:53]:
If you take a step back and think about the the example that I talked about, Oracle Alloy, which is where partners operate our cloud and they actually end up serving in customers, you know, as as more and more partners come in, right, with all of these different countries across the globe, you know, that gives us an opportunity to expand. So that’s definitely one. And, you know, probably heard about our a multi cloud sort of announcements and partnerships that we have with Microsoft and Google right now. And so we expect to serve more of those customers with all of our significantly differentiated data products where mission critical customers depend on Oracle. Those products are starting to be available at Oracle database at Azure or Oracle database at Google Cloud. So you’re gonna see a lot of that. I think there’s a tremendous market, demand for AI infrastructure, and we’re continuing to differentiate, you know, quite a bit on that so people you know, customers can see ton of innovation coming over in that space. And, you know, lastly, everybody talks about generative AI and, you know, there’s a lot of exciting cool technology work that’s happening there.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:30:53]:
And for us, it’s, you know, we’re embedding, you know, generative AI on all the proper use cases that adds value throughout our stack. Right? Be it our internal processes, be it on the cloud, be it making it available to our external customers, you know, integrating that into, you know, our Oracle health products, making it available as part of our SaaS. So a ton of innovation that we’ve done and we’ve worked on is now also being infused across our entire stack and product. So, you know, globally, we’re gonna grow. Mean, our Oracle allied partners, we’re gonna grow with them. You know, we’re we’re doing multi cloud partnerships. AI infrastructure market is growing. So, you know, a lot of lot of that work is what our adoption globally looks like.

Interviewing Professional [00:31:32]:
Just talk to me quickly a little bit more about AI infrastructure. What does that mean? What does that sort of what does that look like as well?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:31:40]:
Look. The way you know, what I think of as AI infrastructure is fundamentally sort of the GPU infrastructure that we actually build and join with our partners like NVIDIA, and also a ton of innovation around the networking technologies that allows extremely large language models that are the innovation that’s happening in the industry be trained on the cloud. Right? And so we’re doing ton of work on that. Not only that, we’re also doing, quite a bit of work, in making it easy for our dedicated region cloud customer or all of those different customers who have dedicated regions to also get access to GPUs in their own environments, small and large, and actually also leverage our generative AI technologies to, train their own custom models. Right? So when I talk about AI infrastructure, it’s it’s making those technologies available, fundamental innovation on networking, and lastly, providing them with the high performance storage that is required to run some of these AI workloads. So that’s a lot of the work that we do. And when I talk about infrastructure, that’s what I mean.

Interviewing Professional [00:32:47]:
High performance storage. Talk to me a little bit more about what that means then as well.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:32:52]:
When you think about storage needs for an AI workload. Right? So in traditional terms, you know, people have leveraged file storage, right, to actually, like you know, if you if you think about training a a large language model based on all of Internet state, you know, the the web data or, you know, you look at some of the next generation models working on video or text or pictures, those all require tremendous amount of storage. And all of these large GPU clusters that are trying to, like, train themselves on these models require high frequency access to the storage as they’re calculating these mathematic equations and, you know, storing all of the intermediate results. You need a storage platform that actually serves this at the performance scale for what are these tremendously large GPU clusters. And so, you know, offering up storage platform that solves this need is is is what I mean by high performance storage.

Interviewing Professional [00:33:39]:
And I asked that question because I feel like storage is one of those things in my experience of interviewing people. It just feels like it just gets relegated a little bit. Like, people forget about it. Perhaps it’s not as interesting as other things. So would you would you would you agree with that sort of statement as well?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:33:52]:
You know, I think all of the the the storage experts and industry experts and the people in my organization will will feel sad to hear about that. But but I think I would say it’s more of storage is sort of a given in in many people’s minds. Right? That, you know, hey. You know, the innovation is actually done or, you know, peep this is what you can expect. But but the way I kinda think about it is there’s tons of innovation happening in the industry around storage and next generation drives. There is tons of innovation happening around sort of tiering and layering of storage or AI workloads. So there’s there’s lots of innovation that’s happening, but I think it’s sort of a given at the point that, you know, people expect storage to work, so they don’t talk a lot about it. Right? But I but I I don’t think that is true because I think the amount of innovation that we do, like, for example, one of the ways in which we built our block storage platform, we’re the only cloud that offers performance SLAs because we’re very proud of how we thought about it, how we built it.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:34:51]:
We not only, you know, give customers availability SLAs, but we also guarantee them an IOPS per gigabyte sort of SLA. Right? So there’s lots of innovation that’s happening, but it’s sort of not, like, front and center like AI. But I think there’s cool work happening, in my opinion.

Interviewing Professional [00:35:06]:
So, Mahesh, do you have any sort of closing comments or final thoughts you’d like to leave our audience with today?

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:35:11]:
Well, first, thank you for the opportunity to talk to you. I’m super excited, and I’m glad I we made it here. I think there are 4 hyperscale providers, and Oracle’s one of them. And my ask of customers is definitely look at Oracle Cloud as you’re thinking about assessing your needs. And there’s always cutting edge innovation and and work that is happening in our space. And I’ll just say, hey. You know, just take a look. Spin up a free tier account.

Mahesh Thiagarajan [00:35:38]:
It’s always free. You can play with Oracle Cloud without spending a dime. And and there’s ways to get started very easily.