Last week I attended Oracle’s Industry Connect even in New York City. Having never been before, I did not know what to expect. The content, it turns out, was very impressive.

Cross-industry shows can be tough to pull off. Do I really need to know what’s going on in the world of natural gas and electricity providers? But while many other events struggle with the format, I have to say: Oracle stuck the landing. I got the deep dives into where the company is taking its retail future that I wanted to hear, retail case studies that were alarmingly forthright, an off-the-record conversation with one of the world’s largest retailers over lunch about how it’s investing in blockchain technology to help with food recalls, and then, once on each day, a chance to hear the thoughts of the company’s Global Business Unit leaders about how one industry’s learning might help another. It was fascinating.

If asked to sum the overall theme into one word, no doubt that word would be “cloud. ” At last year’s Netsuite Suiteworld event Oracle CEO Mark Hurd stopped by to make sure the audience knew he was betting the farm on it. I recall him saying something to the effect of “If you’re not moving to the cloud you’re going to die ” – the words aren’t exact, but the point is in there. Hurd was scheduled to address the entirety of the New York audience last week where I imagined he’d deliver similar messaging, but at the last minute had to return to the west coast. So instead, Bob Weiler, the company’s EVP overseeing all business units, hosted an impromptu and nuanced conversation with the lead of each unit: retail, communications, retail and hospitality, financial services and insurance, utilities, health sciences, and cloud services. Yes, that’s correct: cloud services now pulls the same weight as financial services.

The company estimates that roughly 15% of its customers have so far moved to the cloud. It also sees the most interesting things happening right now as happening well beyond that cloud’s edge. “How do we integrate AI, machine learning and deep learning? ” asked the retail and hospitality lead. “Because they’re going to become the fabric of the product. You won’t have to ask ‘How do I apply AI or AR into my retail applications?’, because it’s just going to be there. ” Later, when asked about Amazon’s increasing impact, Webster brought lessons for retailers learned from the hospitality sector. Retailers, he said, faced with the fact that they need to do more than just sell something, should be looking to hotels and restaurants for inspiration: for ways to make a connection with the consumer.

At the same time, hotels desperately need to take lessons from retailers on forecasting and planning. For example, did you know that 40% of all food put out at hotel buffets gets thrown away? That is nothing short of criminal, and to quote Webster, “So now we’re using retail buying technologies to help them be less wasteful. ” And the interesting little cross-industry tidbits kept coming throughout the session. In fact, the five-year-old in me lit up when the conversation turned to exoskeleton technologies being used to help humans better operate heavy equipment at commercial construction sites, but we can save that for another time.

As it relates to retail-specific content, Gap hosted a session in which they walked through the steps they went through getting their Intermix sub-brand running on Oracle. With 38 fashion apparel stores, headquartered in NYC (to Gap’s SF), and running disparate best-of-breed technologies, the company was in essence “living on an island. ” Today it is running merchandising in the cloud, with 88 people trained to use a UI they’d never seen before. The company attributes its success in part to extensive pre-project personnel planning. Throughout the entire process, they forced themselves to adhere to cross-country face- to-face meetings once a month, and video conference calls every week. Their biggest fears going in? Latency. And while they have mitigated it as best as possible, the company’s Senior Director of Enterprise Systems said the remedy has really been a change in mindset: “We’re learning how to ‘think cloud’, ” he said. It will be interesting to see how it plays out when the retailer extends to scale, namely at its Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Gap brands. “All of these need to be doing more unified things. “

Perhaps the most fascinating thing I saw at the show came in two parts: Eduardo Smanietto, the Senior Supply Chan Director at a vertically integrated Brazilian shoe retailer shared his company’s story both as part of a panel on Tuesday (with fellow retailers Orvis and Walt Disney), and as a standalone presentation on Wednesday afternoon. If you haven’t heard of his company, Paqueta, neither had I (or any of the other analysts I talked to about it). But Paqueta manufacturers 65,000 pairs of shoes every day, and then sell those, alongside major name brands, at any of its 402 stores in Brazil, flying under 4 different banners. The company has 16,000 employees and has been around for 80 years. It’s a big deal in Brazil.

While he got to share a little bit of his story during the panel, it wasn’t until his full presentation, entitled “Defeating Crisis, ” that the audience got a sense for exactly how much we take a stable economy for granted. For example, in 2009, the Economist magazine featured a cover that read “Brazil Takes Off. ” In 2013, it ran another cover story, this time titled “Has Brazil Blown It? ” The economic swings have been beyond nothing short of wild. And when Smanietto prepared his presentation a few weeks before the Oracle event, the company had plans to be operating 1,000 stores by the year 2020. However, when the country’s president was arrested the following week on corruption charges, the uncertainty that fell on an already staggering Brazil drastically altered Paqueta’s plans. In one week those estimates had gone from 1,000 stores two years from now down to 500 – at best. The volatile nature of the shoe market right now in Brazil cannot be overstated.

When Paqueta began with Oracle in 2014 the company had 10 different legacy systems in play. Their biggest challenge? “Everyone was fighting everyone at every step, ” said Smanietto. “Logistics was fighting the buyers and the buyers were fighting the finance people. ”

And the buyers’ problems didn’t stop there. “Fashion used to change every 4-5 months, ” he said. “Now it’s every month. And buyers used to be the key to this, but they operate on emotion, and they always buy too much of what they don’t need as a result. For us, buying is now 90% technical and 10%. It used be just the opposite. In fact, our buyers used to love to show their Excel spreadheseets when they made a good decision. But they literally wouldn’t show them whenever they made a mistake. ” Now, 4 years later, Smanietto didn’t mince words, “If it weren’t for Oracle we would definitely be dead. “

It should go without saying, I’m glad I attended. I’ve never had much interaction with the company and its culture always seemed something of an enigma to me. However, the Industry Connect event definitely helped me understand this giant a little bit better, and over the course of the two days, it became clear to me that the company truly doesn’t view itself as one thing. The spat of acquisitions it has been on since the mid 2000’s (38, so far) relegates Oracle to playing the role of facilitator to the innovators it takes in. In Weiler’s own word: “We live in constant paranoia of disruptive technologies. You have to. But when you look the technology innovation at a giant company like ours, it’s coming from tiny companies. They can’t grow anymore – and that’s when they become an acquisition target. Then we need someone to turn the dial. Because it’s almost harder to fold in in a small company than a large one. The 38 companies that make up the giant Oracle Global Business Unit were mostly small companies. ” He concluded, “We’ve actually had customers of small companies ask us to buy the small tech company, because the customer is completely locked in to but the vendor just can’t grow. “

Like I said, I’m glad I went. And it will be interesting to see who they buy next.