Hi, everyone. This is John Pocknell with product marketing at Quest. We're here at Oracle OpenWorld 2019. And I'm joined here today by Venkat Rajaji. He's VP of product management. I'm going to talk about what we've seen at Oracle OpenWorld. What challenges we're hearing about.
So Venkat, first of all, you've had several conversations with customers while you've been here, right? What sort of things are you hearing in terms of what their challenges are?
Yeah, we've had quite a few great conversations with customers here at Oracle OpenWorld. Every year, it's kind of really exciting to be here when you see all these customers. They come by. They say, I use Toad. I love Toad. I live everyday by Toad. So really great stuff that's been coming up in the conversations that we've been having with customers.
One of the things in particular that we've been seeing, which not surprising kind of aligns with what we've been doing from a product strategy perspective, specifically around sensitive data protection. So we've been having conversations with customers around how are they dealing with sensitive data? How are they dealing with compliance and regulation associated with their sensitive data?
What are they doing? Who owns that process? And how does that impact the database administrator, the database team? And what's the implication associated with that? And we're finding very interestingly that it is often owned. And the policy is determined by the security organization. But the controls, the management, still, the database administration team is actually accountable for it, right?
And so it's a really interesting opportunity that I think we see for us and for those customers to provide a capability that allows them to identify sensitive data across all of their Oracle databases and be able to do something about it from either encryption, a masking, a redaction perspective, running an audit policy, what have you.
So that's something that's been coming up quite a bit. The other thing despite it being Oracle OpenWorld, not surprisingly, we are getting a lot of customer conversations around different platforms, cross platform. I need to monitor both Oracle SQL Server. But I'm also dealing with MySQL, of course, an Oracle database, Postgres, other things as well.
So a lot of conversations involving monitoring, in particular, cross platform querying, and data prep. So data point conversations are happening around that as well. So really interesting sensitive data. I would say open source proliferation of database platforms, we're seeing more and more of that as well. Here at the customers, even though they are Oracle DBAs, the tried and true Oracle DBAs, the reality of the market is hitting.
All right, sounds like a bunch of multiple different challenges that Quest can help them with, right?
Certainly.
So let's talk about Oracle's autonomous database and cloud services. What do you sort of hearing? Do you think there's opportunities there for us? And how do you think autonomous databases impact the DBA?
Yeah, so you're seeing a lot of autonomous stuff, in general, coming from Oracle. So I know Larry mentioned in the keynote yesterday talking around autonomous Linux patching in as well. They're obviously moving big into autonomous databases with Oracle, Oracle databases. And I think they introduced a new Free Tier for the Oracle database, as well, if I'm not mistaken.
It's an interesting question and an interesting ethic as well. It brings up conversations and questions around one is control. To what extent do you maintain control of your applications? Do you maintain control of your infrastructure if you go completely autonomous?
Is there something that you sacrifice as it relates to losing that control of through an autonomous database? And how much control are you willing to give up as part of an autonomous database just kind of given the history and how much you want to have involvement in the management and administration of the database?
So that's one question that comes into play. I think the second question is, which I think is far bigger and really begs the question of what is the implication of the autonomous database as it relates to the industry and the headcount, the employee and the workforce, right?
At what point does an autonomous database put in perspective the role of the database administrator? Do we still need database administrators? It calls into question that. And I think there's certainly a lot of questions that companies have to ask themselves about autonomous databases.
And A, what's the implication from a control perspective on their application and their infrastructure, as well as what is the implication from a workforce perspective? And do we still believe that we need database administrators? Me personally, I am of the opinion that we definitely do.
I don't think that an autonomous database can do things necessarily around identifying sensitive data without configuration rules, right? I don't necessarily think it is a best practice to autonomously monitor, autonomously self-regulate, autonomously patch, and autonomously deploy to production without proper testing, proper controls.
And one of the things I think autonomous database is causing the question is this notion of what I'll call what is utopian? What is ideal versus what is the reality of the configuration of the database that you have today, right? And is ideal the right thing to do for your existing application or database configuration? Does that create more problems when you lose control?
Yes, because actually when Oracle announced autonomous database a few years back, I mean, that was one of the things that was mentioned was the fact that this shouldn't do away with the DBA. This should actually enable DBAs to do more things that they weren't able to do before--
Sure, right. Yeah, right, absolutely. So in theory--
In theory.
To what extent, I don't know. But, yeah, it's an interesting question. Honestly from the Quest perspective, I have not seen a lot of our customers deploying autonomous database yet. That may
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