In The Arena by TechArena - Charting a Long Range Strategy with Oracle’s Bev Crair

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

TechArena' host Allyson Klein chats with Oracle executive Bev Crair on how she’s tackling long term strategic planning for OCI to get ahead of where the market and customers travel and how this approach informs Oracle business.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name's Alison Klein, and today I'm delighted to invite back Bev Krier from Oracle. Welcome back to the program, Bev. It's your second time on the show. Oh, that's scary. So, Bev, you got a new job since the last time we talked, and today's episode is themed around looking around corners.

And I'm going to have you explain your role at Oracle and why that's the theme today. So one of the things that we're finding at OCI is that we are growing really, really fast. And our rate of growth is actually accelerating. And we're super good at handling and solving customer challenges and customer issues in the moment, right? We've got a good handle on where we're going in the next year or two years and how to solve those problems. But one of the things that I noticed was that, and I saw this when we were dealing with some of the supply chain issues

and the capacity challenges that we've had in the last couple of years is that we weren't looking far enough out um and we weren't looking around corners for what was going to affect us coming in from the outside and so when i was talking with clay about it i said you know we've got we've got a good handle on what we're doing internally and what's going to limit our growth internally. But I don't think that we're, we're looking enough at, um, how do we look externally? How do we actually examine the externalities and the challenges that are happening in the broader environment, um, so that we can have a good handle on what might slow our growth down coming at us from the outside.

So we're not looking around corners. And that's kind of what I was thinking about was we're not actually peering far enough ahead into the future to say this is going to be a problem. And then go figure out how much of an impact it might be in terms of slowing our growth down and what should we be doing about it. So my suggestion and my recommendation was, let me go set something up that would allow us to do that. You know, while you were talking, I was reflecting back on our joint time at a large silicon provider. And, you know, the fact that in silicon, you have to look so far ahead because it's a multi-year development pipeline. And even then, I think that there's been trends that silicon providers have missed. And we see

different things happening in the industry now, you know, generative AI and its arrival on the scene kind of comes to mind of, wow, that technology came at us fast. And it's really changing the dynamics. This is a really cool charter. When you look at the entire world landscape, there are so many things that you could be looking at. How do you prioritize where you focus and what are the things that you and your team are looking at today that will define, you know, tomorrow's cloud landscape? So, you know, in the silicon world, we were kind of required to look five years down the road, even 10 years down the road, because

the equipment had to be manufactured in order to test the next generation of silicon, right? And so that was kind of a standard practice, right? You couldn't really be successful in the long term if you didn't do that. But in the software world, particularly in the cloud world, we're so used to act now and iterate. We're so used to innovating in small steps, right, that we don't have that kind of long-term view. It's not built into the way you do stuff. And I think that some of the things that we need to think about are things like energy utilization. So I'll give you an example.

Energy utilization and sustainability. So when you look at the impact, global impact of data centers, the share of CO2 emissions just caused by data centers looks to be almost three and a half percent. Now, that seems like a small number, but it's actually not, right? It's larger than aviation, it's larger than shipping, it's larger than rice cultivation, right? It's actually a sizable impact. And so if we're thinking about climate change, if we're thinking about how is the impact of climate change going to have an effect on our ability to grow as fast as we're going to grow, we actually have to be paying attention to the questions of sustainability. We have to figure out how to use less power, how to use, how to

contribute less CO2 to the atmosphere. And so some of the issues that I'm looking at are questions of resilience, questions of sustainability, questions of energy utilization, and the long-term growth. How do we actually shrink our footprint but still provide the capability and the scale to our customers that they require in order to continue moving forward. That was at Ampere's event recently, and they were talking about Oracle Database on Ampere. And that was an interesting announcement. But the more interesting part for me was the focus on sustainability and really looking at ways to drive down energy consumption in the data center. You know, I've spent a lot of time

in this space and, you know, in green computing when green computing was a thing, dating back to then. And I think that one of the things that gets missed in this conversation is we can, there's a couple that I would love to talk to you about. We talk about energy efficiency of hardware, but are we writing code from a sustainable perspective? You know, are we getting to idle as quickly as we can? And I'd love your perspective on that. And then are we using our infrastructure in ways that will drive more efficiency into our broader environments so that that three and a half percent is a wise

three and a half percent investment in, you know, broader sustainability across the world. And I'm wondering if you're looking at that vector as well. Not, I would have to say not yet um and and and i think the reason for that is more along the lines of um trying to get my hands around what would have the biggest impact um and the biggest bang for our buck and less about oh we should be going in this particular direction right um the the data here is so widespread it's actually hard to get your hands around um and it's going to take time and energy so part of what part of what i've been doing is more along the lines of what are the vectors we should be looking at and then finding the right people both inside and outside oracle and oci to say you know let's go let's go look along this vector right um rather than rather than

actually coming to a very specific recommendation right um and so yes i do believe that there are things that we could and should be doing from a software perspective, even just in simply measuring things, right, and managing things, and then enabling the software itself to spin up, spin down, or quiesce in ways that are more effective, right? But, but I personally am not actually at the point where I can actually say, this is, you know, A, what we should be doing, or B, what we should be doing. When you look at sustainability, that is obviously something that's on top of mind. We're going through the hottest summer in our history. And I think that, you know, the awareness across the tech landscape is growing with the changes in our macro environment. I also think that there's a lot of technologies that are developing really quickly. We talked about generative AI, the use of edge, you know, there's other technologies that may, you know, be applicable to how we solve some of these large

challenges in our environment. What are the other areas that you and your team are focusing on beyond sustainability? And do they each offer the complexity that you just described? I think some of the other things that we're looking at are things like as we are cloud efforts, the footprint that's required to actually instantiate an OCI environment, an OCI data center is shrinking over time. We actually reduced that footprint by a third in the last year after reducing it by about 50% the year before. And so what it instantiated data center is much, much smaller than it used to be. As that shrinks, the question of its resiliency grows, right? Because you're depending upon a smaller number of systems. And so how do we actually ensure that resiliency and how do we

actually ensure that we instantiate these data centers in places that make the most sense? So it's partly associated with sustainability, but it's also partly associated with the geopolitical environment, right? You know, what are the security risks? What are the regulatory challenges? What are the, you know, do we actually have a business entity in a location? As our customers come to us and ask us, oh, gee, I'd really like to put a dedicated... How we go evaluate those environments and make sure that we are taking into account all of the ways in which we can do business in those environments. So working on expanding our evaluation criteria and looking a little bit more long range. And then being able to give ourselves an indice, a dex, right, of applicability for our customers and how that's actually going to enable them to continue to have these dedicated regions or have these sovereign clouds. That is quite a complex topic and one that can be fast moving. You mentioned supply chain at the top

of the interview too. And I think that there's intersect between, you know, where can you do business and where are you sourcing supply? How do you manage taking a look at that landscape and making sure that your teams are staying up to date across both of those vectors in terms of as a buyer and a seller? And, you know, what did we learn from the supply chain challenges during the pandemic that could apply for that broader purview? There were a couple of things I think that we ended up doing and working with Oracle's broader supply chain team during the pandemic that have shifted the way that we do supply chain, if you will.

We're certainly applying a lot more automation than we used to. We're also doing a lot more multi-sourcing or dual sourcing of elements and we're looking very carefully at anything that is unique and ensuring that it's unique for a really good reason of that work happens with Oracle's amazing hardware

development team as well as the supply chain team so they're a lot more closely integrated together than they have been in the past and I know that they've got a bunch of work going on in that organization to go drive and continue to drive the work that needs to get done. So I am much less concerned about that area of challenges for the long term than I used to be, Because we've applied a lot of the lessons learned and instantiate them. What is it like when you're integrating

this looking around corners mentality? What is it like to sit in a leadership team where sometimes there's conflict between that long-term purview and maybe a shorter term customer demand? And how do you set up the culture where you can mitigate through those things? So part of what I'm trying to do with this particular team is in some sense, is set it up as a service organization to the rest of the leadership team. We've gone out to find who's got the data, who's got the macroeconomic data, who's actually

providing effective tools for us to go do a bespoke, hey Bev, can you go find out about X? Because I'm a little bit worried about it. And then working with the leadership team to go figure out what's in the back of their mind, because they know way more about their business on a day-to-day basis than I ever will. Right. And so it's, it's not it, you know, I'm not going to go to them and say, Hey, I discovered this and you need to pay attention to it. Unless it's actually based on something that they've come to me or a question. they've so part of the work that I'm doing is working with the rest of the leadership team to say, what are the things that you haven't had the chance to have somebody go look at? Right. Here's the mechanisms that we have. You know, we use Porter's model. We use,

we use a PESL model, which is a, um, um, which is just a kind of way to talk about externality. Here's the data that we have available. What can I go look into for you to either eliminate a concern that you have or give you the data that allows you to actually say, this is a problem we need to deal with. And so that I think is the way in which you balance that short-term, long-term challenge. You told me that this is a passion for you. When you look at the transformation that you're driving, when do you know you're going to be successful? And what do you think is going to be the benefit to the broader organization? I think success looks like a really a service team, right? A team that can can get instantiate.

This isn't this isn't a team of experts. It's a team of kind of breadth players, if you will, who can go attack of a focused space and provide a response. So success looks like us being asked, hey, would you go look at this for us? And us coming back and saying, yes, it's a problem or no, it's not a problem. And here's why. When you look at where the industry is going and you see technologies that I described, edge computing, AI, changes in networking topologies, etc. How did those enter your sphere? And what are the ones of generative AI and all of the kind of bias based systems over time, that worries me a little bit. And I think it's something that we need to go pay attention to and go figure out, you know, how fast is this going to grow? And how fast is this really going to push the envelope on power utilization and space utilization? Those are two areas of questions that worry me. I think the other place where I have concerns is how do you actually help people articulate what their concerns are that are kind of bubbling in the back of their head?

Because the faster you can get those concerns out onto the table, the more effective you can be in actually identifying whether or not it's right and i know i mean this is a problem for me it's like how do you actually articulate this kind of thing that's bubbling in the back of your head you just let it sit there for a while and bubble until you can you know until you spit it out of your mouth like there are people that are really good at that but there are people that it takes a while like me it takes it just takes a while for me to get it so how do i help them um the way that you describe the generative ai challenge whether it's the generative ai challenge or whether it's something else right that they're they're like concerned about but they don't know whether or

not they need to be concerned about right because the faster you can give a leader an opportunity to say no it's not a problem or yes it is a problem right the faster they can give a leader an opportunity to say, no, it's not a problem, or yes, it is a problem, right? The faster they can get to that effective decision point, the more effective they can be as a leader. Does that make sense? Right? So how do I give them the space to actually have that thought? You know, the way that you just talked about that is you're delving into the nebulous space of very squishy, I have feelings,, you know, what feels like a GPU arms race to enable a technology that we're still grappling with what it actually represents in terms of change. And, you know, haven't really thought through what could be the impact of broad proliferation of biased human thought that generative AI is then propagating. Do you think that there's an opportunity there to steer that?

Or do you feel like we're going to live through something? Well, I don't think it's an either or. And my answer is, unfortunately, I really don't think it's an either or. Because there are thoughtful people who are already considering these questions right and you can see that in the conversation you know if you look back 30 40 years now 30 years now right to the beginnings of the internet right we at at the time saw the internet as the opportunity to democratize access to information, right? But I don't think that at the time we really understood what that would turn out to be,

right? And so I think that there were thoughtful conversations then about what that would look like and what it would turn out to be and how it would impact me. You know, one of my earliest, one of my earliest, when I was in university, I started a company with friends on how do you use computers to teach? Because that was actually my earliest, like, interest in computing was, how does this impact education? How does this impact how we communicate? How does this impact how kids, how people learn? I think we're at a technological inflection point similar to the creation of the internet with generative AI. And so there are thoughtful people thinking about this and

talking about this. And I still don't think we understand and or can predict, frankly, how it's going to affect how we live, work and play. I can't wait to see how all of this rolls out, Bev. I think that you've introduced a lot of thoughts that I'm going to be thinking about all day. And I hope the audience has enjoyed the conversation too. One final question for you. When you look out at the landscape, you know, you and I have both been in the tech sector for a long time. What excites you the most about what you're studying in terms of an opportunity to really help shape the broader environment and society for good? I think what excites me the most is what I see happening with the groups of folks who are

actually getting into computing now, right? Who are bringing with them a lifetime spent with this technology and a set of attitudes and approaches that say not just, Hey, we can be innovative and we can do things differently, but also, hey, I have a responsibility to my fellow human beings in not just being innovative, but being responsibly innovative, right? that I'm going to bring to the table and focus. And the generations of people coming into computing now, kind of the broad spectrum of computing, have ideas and approaches that include a sense of community that we as individuals four years ago perhaps didn't quite have in the same way right so they're being much more thoughtful and much more i don't want to say

much more responsible but they are they are differently responsible and they have a set of concerns about the climate about connection connection, about community, that they are bringing more into their daily work than I think we did 40 years ago, right? And that I'm super excited about, right? Thanks so much for being on today, Bev. That was really a wonderful way to end this episode. And I think you're right. One final note for you, if folks want to connect with you, where can they find you online?

So LinkedIn is, you know, a great place, of course. I'm the only Bev Crair that I've ever seen online. So if you do a search for Bev Crair, that's the way to find me. But LinkedIn is probably the best place. Super. Thanks so much for being on today. All right. Thanks, Allison.

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