(upbeat music) >> (Narrator) From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. Soon we'll be back in person in real life, but this year again it's a virtual conference. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube for more cube coverage. We've got a great guest here, Debbie Vavangas, Global Garage Lead for IBM Services. Global Garage, great program. Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we've covered the Garage a lot on theCUBE in the past, and a success, everyone loves the Garage. Things are born in the Garage, entrepreneurship, innovation, has been kind of categorically known for, kind of, the Garage startup. >> Absolutely. >> But also, it's become known for, really, agility, which has been a cloud phenomenon, DevOps. Now we're seeing dev SecOps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So, I've got to ask you, how is Garage doing with the pandemic? Obviously, I can almost imagine people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online? What's going on with the Garage? How has your transformation journey been with COVID? >> Well, John, COVID has been the leveler for us all, right? There isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to And that includes our clients. And I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM Garage, because it is so digitally native, when the COVID pandemic has struck around the world every single one of our Garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail, without a single days lost productivity. And that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredibly time-sensitive journey. And so, we've seen as a result of COVID actually there are a huge acceleration in Garages, for two reasons. So, number one, from a virtualization perspective, actually it's much easier when everybodies together in the same space. So everybody's together virtually in the same space, and we've seen, you know, acceleration in our velocity, in our collaboration, because everybody is really learning how to work in that same space. But two, because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our client's needs to make decisions fast, know not guess, really be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff, the Garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise, you know, we've gone from in 2019 to just a few hundred garages, to finishing 2020 with over two and a half thousand garages. And it being embedded across services and with the goal of being the primary way our clients experience it. So COVID has been a big accelerator. >> Sorry, Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that, I missed that. >> Sure, sure. >> I did a double take on the numbers. (Debbie laughs) >> So then, we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages, and we finished 2020 with just over two and a half thousand. So, we've had a huge growth, and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're serving with our clients, and how we're collaborating with our clients, and the topics we're unpacking that has really broadened. >> Yeah, I mean I covered, and we've reported on the Garage on theCUBE and also on www.siliconangle.com in the past things and through your news coverage, but that's amazing growth. I got to believe the tailwind from COVID and just the energy around it has energized you. I want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, what we've reported on in the past has been about design thinking, human-centered design, all of those beautiful things that come with cloud-scale, right? You know, you're moving faster, you're innovating, and so that's been kind of there. But what you're getting at with this growth is, and with COVID has proven, and again, we've been pointing this out, you're seeing the pattern, it's clear. Companies are either retrenching, okay, which is refactoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out of COVID with a growth strategy, and you're seeing other companies build net new innovations. So, they're building new capabilities, because COVID's shown them, kind of pulled back the curtain if you will on where the action is. So, this means there's two threads going on. You've got, "Okay, I've got to transform my business, and I got to refactor', or 'Hey, we got net new business models'. These are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? >> And I think that my comment on it is that is the sweet spot that Garage comes into its own, right? You mentioned lots of things in there. You talked about design thinking, and agility, and, you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time, and Garage of course is synonymous with those. Of course, Garage uses the best design thinking, and AGILE practices, and all of those things that absolutely call to what we do. DevOps, even through down to DesignOps. You know, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is. But, I think what is really happening now is that innovation being something separate is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes, and your business outcomes. Regardless of whether that is in refactoring and modernizing your existing estate, or diversifying, creating new ecosystems, new platforms, new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your core business. I mean, it's a well known fact, John, right? Like 75% of transformation programs fail to deliver an impact to the business performance, right? And in the same period of time there's been huge cuts in innovation funding, and that's because for the same reason, because they don't deliver the impact to the business performance. And that's why Garage is unique, because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? We're using user research, through design thinking of course, using agile to deliver it at speed, and all of those other things. But, it's focused on value, on benefits realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation, rather than it being something separate. >> Debbie, I saw you gave a talk called 'Innovation is Dead'. Obviously, that's a provocative title, that's an attention-getter. Tell me what you mean by that. Because it seems to be a setup. >> I mean, if the innovation is dead, >> Of course. was it with a question mark? Were you, kind of, trying to highlight that innovation is transformation? >> So, the full title was 'Innovation is dead and transformation is pointless'. And, of course, it's meant to be an eye-catching title so people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But, the reality is I mean it most sincerely, it's back to that stat. 75% of these transformation programs fail to deliver the impact, and I speculate that that is for a few reasons. Because, the idea itself wasn't a good one, or wasn't at the right time. Because, you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like, and therefore just being able to create that path. And, in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic. And it's those three things, that I think amongst the whole myriad of others, that are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what Garage does, is it breaks that. By putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise, and by using data-driven value orchestration, that means that we don't guess where the value to be gained is, we know. It's no longer chucking ideas at the wall to see what sticks, it's meaningful research. This is my favorite quote from my dear friend, Courtney Noll, who says, "It's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack, it's using your research in order to de-risk your investment, and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes." And so, if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree, I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. >> Yeah, exactly. And, you know, of course we're on the writing side, we love titles like, 'Innovation is dead, long live innovation'. So, it's classic, you know, to get your attention. >> Exactly, exactly. And of course, what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity. >> Totally. >> There's no longer relevance for a company to make sure they achieve their business outcomes. >> Well, this is what I wanted to just double-click on that with you on is that you look at transformation. You guys are essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the Garage philosophy, if I get that right. >> Yep >> And it's interesting, and we've experienced this here with theCUBE, we're theCUBE virtual, we're not at IBM Think, there is no physical game day like some of us normally do. >> Well, as you can see, I'm at my house. (Debbie laughs) And so, I was talking to a CEO and I said, "Hey, you guys are doing really, really good. We had to pivot with the cube", and he goes, "You guys did a good pivot yourself". He goes, "No, John, we did not pivot. We actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension, so, technically, we're going to bring that business back when COVID has gone and come back to real life, so it's technically not a pivot, we're not pivoting our business, we've created new functionality." Through the innovations that they were doing. So, this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. Share your thoughts on that. >> To me, it's about people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so, be really clear on what you're doing, and why. And the outcomes can be really broad, so instead of saying, "We're all going to implement a new ERP, or build a new mobile app". That's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is, "What we're trying to achieve is a 10 percent growth in net promoter score in China, right? In this group." Or whatever it is we were trying to achieve, right? Or, "We want to make a 25% reduction in our operating cost base by simplifying our estate". Whatever those outcomes are, that's the starting point, and then driving that to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value, and fast, right? Garage delivers three to five times faster than other models and at a reduced delivery cost, and so it's all about that speed. Speed of decision, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills, and speed to outcomes. >> Well, Debbie, you did a great job, love what you're doing, and Garage has got a great model. Congratulations on the growth, love this intersection, or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation, and vice versa, this interplay going on there. >> Exactly. >> I think COVID has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the garage, what's going on. How many practitioners do you guys have there now at IBM? You've got growth, are you adding more people in? Obviously, Virtual First, COVID, is there still centers of design? Take us through what's going on at Garage. >> Certainly, so like, I think I mentioned it right up front. Our goal is to make IBM Garage the primary way our clients experience us. We've proven in that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get a really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so, in order for us to deliver on that promise we have to be enabled across IBM to deliver to it, right? So, over the last 18 months or so we've had a whole range of training programs in Enable, we've had a whole badging and certification program, we have all the skills, and the pathways, and the career pathways to find. But Garage is for everybody, right? And so, it isn't about creating a select group that can do this across IBM. This is about making all of services capable. So, in 2020 we trained over 28,000 people, in all the different skills that are needed, from selling, to execution, to QA, to user research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our Garage Skills Academy, which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So, you know, we've got hundreds of thousands. >> And talk about the footprint on the global side, because, again, not to bring up global, but global is what is in your title. >> Yep. >> Companies need to be global, because now with virtual workforces you're seeing much more tapped creativity and ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? >> Well, so it's global in two perspectives, right? So, number one, we have Garages all around the world, right? It isn't just the market of, you know, our most developed nations in Americas and Europe, it is everywhere, we see it in all emerging markets. From Latin America, through to all parts of eastern Europe, which are really beginning to come into their own. So, we see all these different Garages at different scales and opportunities. So, definitely global from that image. But, what virtualization has also enabled is truly global teams. Because, it's really easy to go, "Oh, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert, and I need an AI expert, and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is." And you can quickly gather them around the virtual table, you know, faster than you can in a physical table. But, we still leverage the global communities with those physical. >> It's an expert network. You have an expert network there at IBM. >> We have a huge network, yeah. And both within IBM, and of course a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work with. >> Well, Debbie, I'm really excited. Congratulations on the growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate in a social construct. >> Absolutely. >> It's a great program, thanks for sharing. >> My pleasure, it's been great to be here, thank you. >> Okay, IBM's Global Garage Lead, Debbie Vavangas, who's here on theCUBE with IBM Services. A phenomenon, it's a social construct that's helping companies with digital transformation. Intersecting, with innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> (lively music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got an alumni joining me and a brand new guest to the CUBE please welcome Paul Papas, the Global Managing Partner, for IBM Global Business Services, this is transformation services. Paul, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thanks Lisa great to be here with you today. And Dominique Dubois is here as well. She is the Global Strategy and Offerings Leader in business transformation services or BTS at IBM. Dominique, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, great to be here. So, we're going to be talking about accelerating business transformation with intelligent workflows. We're going to break through all that, but Paul we're going to start with you. Since we last got together with IBM, a lot has changed so much transformation, so much acceleration of transformation. Talk to me from your perspective, how have you seen the way that businesses running change and what some of the changes in the future are going to be? >> Well, you hit on two key words there Lisa and thanks so much for that question. Two key words that you hit on were change and acceleration. And that's exactly what we see. We were seeing this before the pandemic and if anything, with the pandemic did when things started started kind of spreading around the world late or early last year, around January, February timeframe we saw that word acceleration really take hold. Every one of our clients were looking for new ways to accelerate the change that they had already planned to adapt to this new, this new normal or this new abnormal, depending on how you view it. In fact, we did a study recently, an IBV study that's our Institute of Business Value and found that six out of 10 organizations were accelerating all of their transformation initiatives they had already planned. And that's exactly what we're seeing happening right now in all parts of the world and across all industries. This acceleration to transform. >> So, one of the things that we've talked about for years, Paul, before the pandemic was even a thing, is that there was a lot of perceived technical barriers in terms of like the tech maturity for organizations and employees being opposed to change. People obviously it can be a challenge. They're used to doing things the way they are. But as you just said, in that IBV survey, nearly 60% of businesses say we have to accelerate our transformation due to COVID, probably initially to survive and then thrive. Talk to me about some of those, those barriers that were there a little over a year ago and how businesses 60 plus percent of them have moved those out of the way. >> You know at IBM we've got a 109 year history of being a technology innovation company. And the rate of pace of technical change is always increasing. It's something that we love and that we're comfortable with. But the rate and pace of change is always unsettling. And there's always a human element for change. And the human element is always the rate, the rate setter in terms of the amount of change that you can have in an organization. Our former chairman Ginni Rometty, used to say that growth and comfort cannot co-exist. And it's so true because changing is uncomfortable. It's unsettling. It can be, it can be nerve-racking. It can instill fear and fear can be paralyzing in terms of driving change. And what we also see is there's a disconnect, a lot of times and that IBV study that I was referring to before, we saw results coming back where 78% of executives feel that they have provided the training and enablement to help their employees transform to new required skills and new ways of working but only half of the people surveyed felt the same way. Similarly, we saw a disconnect in terms of companies feeling that they're providing the right level of health and wellness support during the pandemic. And only half of the employees responded back they feel that they're getting that level of support. So, the people change aspect of doing a transformation or adapting to new circumstances is always the most critical component and always the hardest component. And when we talk about helping our clients do that in IBM that's our service as organization. That's the organization that Dominique Dubois is representing here today. I'm responsible for business transformation services within our organization. We help our clients adapt using new technologies, transforming the way they work, but also addressing the people change elements that could be so difficult and hitting them head on so that they can make sure that they can survive and thrive in a meaningful and lasting way in this new world. >> One of the hardest things is that cultural transformation regardless of a pandemic. So, I can't imagine I'd love to get one more thing, Paul from you before we head over to Dominique. IBM is on 109 year old organization. Talk to me about the IBM pledge. This is something that came up last year, huge organization massive changes last year, not just the work from home that the mental concerns and issues that people had. What did IBM do like as a grassroots effort that went viral? >> Yeah, so, it's really great. So, when the pandemic started, we all have to shift it, We all have to shift to working from home. And as you mentioned, IBM's 109 year old company, we have over 300,000 employees working in 170 countries. So, we had to move this entire workforce. It's 370,000 humans to working in a new way that many of which have never done before. And when we started experiencing, the minute we did that, within a few weeks, my team and I were talking Dominique is on my team and we were having conversations where we were feeling really exhausted. Just a few weeks into this and it was because we were constantly on Webex, we were constantly connected and we're all used to working really hard. We travel a lot, we're always with our clients. So, it wasn't that, you have a team that is adapting to like working more hours or longer hours, but this was fundamentally different. And we saw that with schools shutting down and lock downs happening in different of the world the home life balance was getting immediately difficult to impossible to deal with. We have people that are taking care of elderly parents, people that are homeschooling children, other personal life situations that everyone had to navigate in the middle of a pandemic locked at home with different restrictions on when you can go out and get things done. So, we got together as a group and we just started talking about how can we help? How can we help make life just a little bit easier for all of our people? And we started writing down some things that we would, we would commit to doing with each other. How we would address each other. And when that gave birth to was what we call the IBM Work From Home Pledge. And it's a set of principles, all grounded in the belief that, if we act this way, we might just be able to make life just a little bit easier for each other and it's grounded in empathy. And there are parts of the Plex that are pledging to be kind. Recognizing that in this new digital world that we're showing up on camera inside of everyone's home. We're guests in each other's homes. So, let's make sure that we act appropriately as guests at each other's home. So, if children run into the frame during the middle of a meeting or dog started barking during the middle of a meeting, just roll with it. Don't call out attention to it. Don't make people feel self-conscious about it. Pledged the support so your fellow IBM by making time for personal needs. So, if someone has to, do homeschooling in the middle of the day, like Dominique's got triplets she's got to do homeschooling in the middle of the day. Block that time off and we will respect that time on your calendar. And just work around it and just deal with it. There are other things like respecting that camera ready time. As someone who's now been on camera every day it feels like for the last 14 months we want to respect the time that people when they have their cameras off. And not pressure them to put their cameras on saying things like, Hey, I can't see you. There's no reason to add more pressure to everyone's life, if someone's camera's off, it's all for a reason. And then other things like pledging to checking on each other, pledging to set boundaries and tend to our own self-care. So, we published that as a group, we just again and we put it on a Slack channel. So it's kind of our communication method inside the company. It was just intended to be for my organization but it started going viral and tens of thousands of IBM members started taking, started taking the pledge and ultimately caught the attention of our CEO and he loved it, shared it with his leadership team, which I'm a part of. And then also then went on LinkedIn and publicly took the pledge as well. Which then also got more excitement and interaction with other companies as well. So, grassroots effort all grounded in showing empathy and helping to make life just a little bit easier for everyone. >> So important, I'm going to look that up and I'm going to tell you as a person who speaks with many tech companies a week. A lot of businesses could take a lead from that and it gets really important and we are inviting each other into our homes and I see you're a big Broadway fan I'll have to ask you that after we wrap (giggles) Dominique I don't know how you're doing any of this with triplets. I only have two dogs (Dominique laughs) but I'd love to know this sense of urgency, that is everywhere you're living it. Paul talked about it with respect to the acceleration of transformation. How from your lens is IBM and IBM helping customers address the urgency, the need to pivot, the need to accelerate, the need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation actually getting it done? >> Right, thanks Lisa, so true our clients are really needing to and ready to move with haste. That that sense of urgency can be felt I think across every country, every market, every industry. And so we're really helping our clients accelerate their digital transformations and we do that through something that we call intelligent workflows. And so workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done. But intelligent workflows are how we infuse; predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility, end to end across a workflow. So, pulling those processes together so they're not solid anymore and infusing. So, simply put we bring intelligent workflows to our clients and it fundamentally reinvents how they're getting work done from a digital perspective, from a predictive perspective, from a transparency perspective. And I think what really stands apart when we deliver this with our clients in partnership with our clients is how it not only delivers value to the bottom line, to the top line it also actually delivers greater value to their employees, to the customers, to the partner to their broader ecosystem. And intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements. The first is around better utilizing data. So, aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data, and then using that insight not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage. So we talked about AI, automation, IOT, blockchain, all of these technologies require vast amounts of data. And what we're able to bring both on the internal and external source from a data perspective really underpins what these emerging technologies can do. And then the third area is skills. Our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients deep, deep expertise, partner expertise, expertise from the ecosystem at large and pulling all of that together, is how we're really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations because we're helping them shift, from a set of siloed static processes to an end-to-end workflow. We're helping them make fewer predictions based on the past historical data and actually taking more real-time action with real time insights. So, it really is a fundamental shift and how your work is getting done to really being able to provide that emerging technologies, data, deep skills-based end to end workflow. >> That word fundamental has such gravity. and I know we say data has gravity being fundamental in such an incredibly dynamic time is really challenging but I was looking through some of the notes that you guys provided me with. And in terms of what you just talked about, Dominique versus making a change to a silo, the benefits and making changes to a spectrum of integrated processes the values can be huge. In fact, I was reading that changing a single process like billing, for example might deliver up to 20% improved results. But integrating across multiple processes, like billing, collections, organizations can achieve double that up to 40%. And then there's more taking the intelligent workflow across all lead to cash. This was huge. Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from that. So that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make. >> Right, I mean, it really is when we see it really is about unlocking exponential value. So, when you think about crossing end to end workflow but also, really enhancing what clients are doing and what companies are doing today with those exponential technologies from kind of single use the automation POC here and AI application POC here, actually integrating those technologies together and applying them at scale. When I think intelligent workflows I think acceleration. I think exponential value. But I also really think about at scale. Because it's really the ability to apply these technologies the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value. >> So let's go over Paul, in the last few minutes that we have here I want to talk about IBM garage and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Talk to me a little bit about what IBM garage is. I know it's not IBM garage band and I know it's been around since before the pandemic but help us understand what that is and how it's delivering value to customers. >> Well, first I'm going to be the first to invite you to join the IBM garage band, Lisa so we'd love to have you >> I'm in. no musical experience required... >> I like to sing, all right I mean (laughs) We're ready, we're ready for. So, let me talk to you about IBM garage and I do want to key on two words that Dominique was mentioning speed and scale. Because that's what our clients are really looking for when they're doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale, but do that with speed. And that really becomes the critical issue. As Dominique mentioned, there's a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that's kind of like a throw away piece of work that maybe proves a point or just proves a point. But even if it does prove the point at that point you'd have to restart a new, to try to get something that you could actually scale either in the production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization. And that's where IBM garage comes in. It's all a way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then cooperate, innovating at scale. So, we use methods like design thinking inside of IBM we've trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. We use technologies like neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what's amazing for me is that, the cause of the way we were, we were doing work with clients in a garage with using IBM garage in a garage environment before the pandemic. And one of our clients Frito-Lay of North America, is an example where we've helped them innovate at scale and speed using IBM garage over a long period of time. And when the pandemic hit, we in fact were running 11 garages across 11 different workflow areas for them the pandemic hit and everyone was sent home. So, we all instantly overnight had to work from home together with relay. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the garage method to working in a virtual world. To being able to run that same type of innovation and then use that innovation at scale in a virtual world, we did that overnight. And since that time which happened, that happened back in March of last year throughout the pandemic, we've run over 1500 different garage engagements with all of our clients all around the world in a virtual, in a virtual environment. It's just an incredible way, like I said to help our clients innovate at scale. >> That's fantastic, go ahead Dominique. >> Oh, sorry, was just said it's a great example, we partnered with FlightSafety International, they train pilots. And I think a great example of that speed and scale right is in less than 12 weeks due to the garage methodology and the partnership with FlightSafety, we created with them and launched an adaptive learning solution. So, a platform as well as a complete change to their training workflow such that they had personalized kind of real-time next best training for how they train their pilots for simulators. So, reducing their cycle time but also improving the training that their pilots get, which as people who normally travel, it's really important to us and everyone else. So, just a really good example, less than 12 weeks start to start to finish. >> Right, talk about acceleration. Paul, last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left I know this is an ecosystem effort of IBM, it's ecosystem partners, it's Alliance partners. How are you helping align right partner with the right customer, the right use case? >> Yeah, it's great. And our CEO Arvind Krishna has really ushered in this era where we are all about the open ecosystem here at IBM and working with our ecosystem partners. In our services business we have partnerships with all the major, all the major technology players. We have a 45 year relationship with SAP. We've done more SAP S 400 implementations than anyone in the world. We've got the longest standing consulting relationship with Salesforce, we've got a unique relationship with Adobe, they're only services and technology partner in the ecosystem. And we just recently won three, procedures Partner Awards, with them and most recently we announced a partnership with Celonis which is an incredible process execution software company, process mining software company that's going to help us transform intelligent workflows in an accelerated way, embedded in our garage environment. So, ecosystem is critical to our success but more importantly, it's critical to our client success. We know that no one alone has the answers and no one alone can help anyone change. So, with this open ecosystem approach that we take and global business services and our business transformation services organization, we're able to make sure that we bring our clients the best of everyone's capabilities. Whether it's our technology, partners, our services IBM's own technology capabilities, all in the mix, all orchestrated in service to our client's needs all with the goal of driving superior business outcomes for them. >> And helping those customers in any industry to accelerate their business transformation with those intelligent workloads and a very dynamic time. This is a topic we could keep talking about unfortunately, we are out of time but thank you both for stopping by and sharing with me what's going on with respect to intelligent workflows. How the incremental exponential value it's helping organizations to deliver and all the work that IBM is doing to enable its customers to be thrivers of tomorrow. We appreciate talking to you >> Paul: Thanks Lisa. >> Dominique: Thank you >> For Paul Papas and Dominique Dubois I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think the digital event experience. (gentle music)

(lively music) >> From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got an alumni joining me and a brand new guest to the CUBE please welcome Paul Papas, the Global Managing Partner, for IBM Global Business Services, this is transformation services. Paul, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thanks Lisa great to be here with you today. And Dominique Dubois is here as well. She is the Global Strategy and Offerings Leader in business transformation services or BTS at IBM. Dominique, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, great to be here. So, we're going to be talking about accelerating business transformation with intelligent workflows. We're going to break through all that, but Paul we're going to start with you. Since we last got together with IBM, a lot has changed so much transformation, so much acceleration of transformation. Talk to me from your perspective, how have you seen the way that businesses running change and what some of the changes in the future are going to be? >> Well, you hit on two key words there Lisa and thanks so much for that question. Two key words that you hit on were change and acceleration. And that's exactly what we see. We were seeing this before the pandemic and if anything, with the pandemic did when things started started kind of spreading around the world late or early last year, around January, February timeframe we saw that word acceleration really take hold. Every one of our clients were looking for new ways to accelerate the change that they had already planned to adapt to this new, this new normal or this new abnormal, depending on how you view it. In fact, we did a study recently, an IBV study that's our Institute of Business Value and found that six out of 10 organizations were accelerating all of their transformation initiatives they had already planned. And that's exactly what we're seeing happening right now in all parts of the world and across all industries. This acceleration to transform. >> So, one of the things that we've talked about for years, Paul, before the pandemic was even a thing, is that there was a lot of perceived technical barriers in terms of like the tech maturity for organizations and employees being opposed to change. People obviously it can be a challenge. They're used to doing things the way they are. But as you just said, in that IBV survey, nearly 60% of businesses say we have to accelerate our transformation due to COVID, probably initially to survive and then thrive. Talk to me about some of those, those barriers that were there a little over a year ago and how businesses 60 plus percent of them have moved those out of the way. >> You know at IBM we've got 109 year history of being a technology innovation company. And the rate of pace of technical change is always increasing. It's something that we love and that we're comfortable with. But the rate and pace of change is always unsettling. And there's always a human element for change. And the human element is always the rate, the rate setter in terms of the amount of change that you can have in an organization. Our former chairman Ginni Rometty, used to say that growth and comfort cannot co-exist. And it's so true because changing is uncomfortable. It's unsettling. It can be, it can be nerve-racking. It can instill fear and fear can be paralyzing in terms of driving change. And what we also see is there's a disconnect, a lot of times and that IBV study that I was referring to before, we saw results coming back where 78% of executives feel that they have provided the training and enablement to help their employees transform to new required skills and new ways of working but only half of the people surveyed felt the same way. Similarly, we saw a disconnect in terms of companies feeling that they're providing the right level of health and wellness support during the pandemic. And only half of the employees responded back they feel that they're getting that level of support. So, the people change aspect of may doing a transformation or adapting to new circumstances is always the most critical component and always the hardest component. And when we talk about helping our clients do that in IBM that's our service as organization. That's the organization that Dominique Dubois are representing here today. I'm responsible for business transformation services within our organization. We help our clients adapt using new technologies, transforming the way they work, but also addressing the people change elements that could be so difficult and hitting them head on so that they can make sure that they can survive and thrive in a meaningful and lasting way in this new world. >> One of the hardest things is that cultural transformation regardless of a pandemic. So, I can't imagine I'd love to get one more thing, Paul from you before we head over to Dominique. IBM is on 109 year old organization. Talk to me about the IBM pledge. This is something that came up last year, huge organization massive changes last year, not just the work from home that the mental concerns and issues that people had. What did IBM do like as a grassroots effort that went viral? >> Yeah, so, it's really great. So, when the pandemic started, we all have to shift it, We all have to shift to working from home. And as you mentioned, IBM's 109 year old company, we have over 300,000 employees working in 170 countries. So, we had to move this entire workforce. It's 370,000 humans to working in a new way that many of which have never done before. And when we started experiencing, the minute we did that, within a few weeks, my team and I were talking Dominique is on my team and we were having conversations where we were feeling really exhausted. Just a few weeks into this and it was because we were constantly on Webex, we were constantly connected and we're all used to working really hard. We travel a lot, we're always with our clients. So, it wasn't that, you have a team that is adapting to like working more hours or longer hours, but this was fundamentally different. And we saw that with schools shutting down and lock downs happening in different of the world the home life balance was getting immediately difficult to impossible to deal with. We have people that are taking care of elderly parents, people that are homeschooling children, other personal life situations that everyone had to navigate in the middle of a pandemic locked at home with different restrictions on when you can go out and get things done. So, we got together as a group and we just started talking about how can we help? How can we help make life just a little bit easier for all of our people? And we started writing down some things that we would, we would commit to doing with each other. How we would address each other. And when that gave birth to was what we call the IBM Work From Home Pledge. And it's a set of principles, all grounded in the belief that, if we act this way, we might just be able to make life just a little bit easier for each other and it's grounded in empathy. And there are parts of the Plex that are pledging to be kind. Recognizing that in this new digital world that we're showing up on camera inside of everyone's home. We're guests in each other's homes. So, let's make sure that we act appropriately as guests at each other's home. So, if children run into the frame during the middle of a meeting or dog started barking during the middle of a meeting, just roll with it. Don't call out attention to it. Don't make people feel self-conscious about it. Pledged the support so your fellow IBM by making time for personal needs. So, if someone has to, do homeschooling in the middle of the day, like Dominique's got triplets she's got to do homeschooling in the middle of the day. Block that time off and we will respect that time on your calendar. And just work around it and just deal with it. There are other things like respecting that camera ready time. As someone who's now been on camera every day it feels like for the last 14 months we want to respect the time that people when they have their cameras off. And not pressure them to put their cameras on saying things like, Hey, I can't see you. There's no reason to add more pressure to everyone's life, if someone's camera's off, it's all for a reason. And then other things like pledging to checking on each other, pledging to set boundaries and tend to our own self-care. So, we published that as a group, we just again and we put it on a Slack channel. So it's kind of our communication method inside the company. It was just intended to be for my organization but it started going viral and tens of thousands of IBM members started taking, started taking the pledge and ultimately caught the attention of our CEO and he loved it, shared it with his leadership team, which I'm a part of. And then also then went on LinkedIn and publicly took the pledge as well. Which then also got more excitement and interaction with other companies as well. So, grassroots effort all grounded in showing empathy and helping to make life just a little bit easier for everyone. >> So important, I'm going to look that up and I'm going to tell you as a person who speaks with many tech companies a week. A lot of businesses could take a lead from that and it gets really important and we are inviting each other into our homes and I see you're a big Broadway fan I'll have to ask you that after we wrap (giggles) Dominique I don't know how you're doing any of this with triplets. I only have two dogs (Dominique laughs) but I'd love to know this sense of urgency, that is everywhere you're living it. Paul talked about it with respect to the acceleration of transformation. How from your lens is IBM and IBM helping customers address the urgency, the need to pivot, the need to accelerate, the need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation actually getting it done? >> Right, thanks Lisa, so true our clients are really needing to and ready to move with haste. That that sense of urgency can be felt I think across every country, every market, every industry. And so we're really helping our clients accelerate their digital transformations and we do that through something that we call intelligent workflows. And so workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done. But intelligent workflows are how we infuse; predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility, end to end across a workflow. So, pulling those processes together so they're not solid anymore and infusing. So, simply put we bring intelligent workflows to our clients and it fundamentally reinvents how they're getting work done from a digital perspective, from a predictive perspective, from a transparency perspective. And I think what really stands apart when we deliver this with our clients in partnership with our clients is how it not only delivers value to the bottom line, to the top line it also actually delivers greater value to their employees, to the customers, to the partner to their broader ecosystem. And intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements. The first is around better utilizing data. So, aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data, and then using that insight not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage. So we talked about AI, automation, IOT, blockchain, all of these technologies require vast amounts of data. And what we're able to bring both on the internal and external source from a data perspective really underpins what these emerging technologies can do. And then the third area is skills. Our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients deep, deep expertise, partner expertise, expertise from the ecosystem at large and pulling all of that together, is how we're really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations because we're helping them shift, from a set of siloed static processes to an end-to-end workflow. We're helping them make fewer predictions based on the past historical data and actually taking more real-time action with real time insights. So, it really is a fundamental shift and how your work is getting done to really being able to provide that emerging technologies, data, deep skills-based end to end workflow. >> That word fundamental has such gravity. and I know we say data has gravity being fundamental in such an incredibly dynamic time is really challenging but I was looking through some of the notes that you guys provided me with. And in terms of what you just talked about, Dominique versus making a change to a silo, the benefits and making changes to a spectrum of integrated processes the values can be huge. In fact, I was reading that changing a single process like billing, for example might deliver up to 20% improved results. But integrating across multiple processes, like billing, collections, organizations can achieve double that up to 40%. And then there's more taking the intelligent workflow across all lead to cash. This was huge. Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from that. So that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make. >> Right, I mean, it really is when we see it really is about unlocking exponential value. So, when you think about crossing end to end workflow but also, really enhancing what clients are doing and what companies are doing today with those exponential technologies from kind of single use the automation POC here and AI application POC here, actually integrating those technologies together and applying them at scale. When I think intelligent workflows I think acceleration. I think exponential value. But I also really think about at scale. Because it's really the ability to apply these technologies the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value. >> So let's go over Paul, in the last few minutes that we have here I want to talk about IBM garage and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Talk to me a little bit about what IBM garage is. I know it's not IBM garage band and I know it's been around since before the pandemic but help us understand what that is and how it's delivering value to customers. >> Well, first I'm going to be the first to invite you to join the IBM garage band, Lisa so we'd love to have you >> I'm in. no musical experience required... >> I like to sing, all right I mean (laughs) We're ready, we're ready for. So, let me talk to you about IBM garage and I do want to key on two words that Dominique was mentioning speed and scale. Because that's what our clients are really looking for when they're doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale, but do that with speed. And that really becomes the critical issue. As Dominique mentioned, there's a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that's kind of like a throw away piece of work that maybe proves a point or just proves a point. But even if it does prove the point at that point you'd have to restart a new, to try to get something that you could actually scale either in the production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization. And that's where IBM garage comes in. It's all a way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then cooperate, innovating at scale. So, we use methods like design thinking inside of IBM we've trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. We use technologies like neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what's amazing for me is that, the cause of the way we were, we were doing work with clients in a garage with using IBM garage in a garage environment before the pandemic. And one of our clients Frito-Lay of North America, is an example where we've helped them innovate at scale and speed using IBM garage over a long period of time. And when the pandemic hit, we in fact were running 11 garages across 11 different workflow areas for them the pandemic hit and everyone was sent home. So, we all instantly overnight had to work from home together with relay. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the garage method to working in a virtual world. To being able to run that same type of innovation and then use that innovation at scale in a virtual world, we did that overnight. And since that time which happened, that happened back in March of last year throughout the pandemic, we've run over 1500 different garage engagements with all of our clients all around the world in a virtual, in a virtual environment. It's just an incredible way, like I said to help our clients innovate at scale. >> That's fantastic, go ahead Dominique. >> Oh, sorry, was just said it's a great example, we partnered with FlightSafety International, they train pilots. And I think a great example of that speed and scale right is in less than 12 weeks due to the garage methodology and the partnership with FlightSafety, we created with them and launched an adaptive learning solution. So, a platform as well as a complete change to their training workflow such that they had personalized kind of real-time next best training for how they train their pilots for simulators. So, reducing their cycle time but also improving the training that their pilots get, which as people who normally travel, it's really important to us and everyone else. So, just a really good example, less than 12 weeks start to start to finish. >> Right, talk about acceleration. Paul, last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left I know this is an ecosystem effort of IBM, it's ecosystem partners, it's Alliance partners. How are you helping align right partner with the right customer, the right use case? >> Yeah, it's great. And our CEO Arvind Krishna has really ushered in this era where we are all about the open ecosystem here at IBM and working with our ecosystem partners. In our services business we have partnerships with all the major, all the major technology players. We have a 45 year relationship with SAP. We've done more SAP S 400 implementations than anyone in the world. We've got the longest standing consulting relationship with Salesforce, we've got a unique relationship with Adobe, they're only services and technology partner in the ecosystem. And we just recently won three, procedures Partner Awards, with them and most recently we announced a partnership with Celonis which is an incredible process execution software company, process mining software company that's going to help us transform intelligent workflows in an accelerated way, embedded in our garage environment. So, ecosystem is critical to our success but more importantly, it's critical to our client success. We know that no one alone has the answers and no one alone can help anyone change. So, with this open ecosystem approach that we take and global business services and our business transformation services organization, we're able to make sure that we bring our clients the best of everyone's capabilities. Whether it's our technology, partners, our services IBM's own technology capabilities, all in the mix, all orchestrated in service to our client's needs all with the goal of driving superior business outcomes for them. >> And helping those customers in any industry to accelerate their business transformation with those intelligent workloads and a very dynamic time. This is a topic we could keep talking about unfortunately, we are out of time but thank you both for stopping by and sharing with me what's going on with respect to intelligent workflows. How the incremental exponential value it's helping organizations to deliver and all the work that IBM is doing to enable its customers to be thrivers of tomorrow. We appreciate talking to you >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you >> For Paul Papas and Dominique Dubois I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think the digital event experience. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe, it's the >>Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2020 >>one brought to you >>by IBM. Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual soon we'll be back in person in real life. But this year again it's a virtual conference. I'm john for your host of the cube for more cube coverage. You got a great guest here Debbie Viviendas Global garage lead for IBM Services Global garage great program. Ah Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me. >>So we've covered the garage a lot on the cube in the past and the success, Everyone loves the garage things are born in the garage, entrepreneurship innovation has been kind of categorically known for kind of the garage start up um but also it's become um known for really agile agility and which has been a cloud phenomenon, devops and now we're seeing Deb sec apps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So I gotta ask you, how is garage doing with the pandemic? I was I can almost imagine people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online. What's going on with the garage? How has your transformation journey been with Covid? >>Well, don't I mean it's Covid has been the level of for us. All right, there isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to Yeah, and that includes our clients and I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM garage because it is so digitally native. When the covid pandemic has struck around the world, every single one of our garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail without a single days lost productivity. And that I mean that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredible time sensitive journey. And so we've seen as a result of Covid actually there are a huge acceleration in garages from two reasons. The number one from a virtualization perspective. Actually it's much easier when everybody's together in the same space, everybody's together virtually in the same space. And we've seen acceleration in our velocity and our collaboration because everybody is really learning how to work in that century. But to because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our client's needs to make decisions fast. No, not guess really, be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff, the garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise. We've gone from 2019 to just a few 100 garages to finishing 2020 with over 2.5 1000 garages and being embedded across services and the goal of being the primary way our clients experiencing COVID has been a big accelerator. >>Sorry Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that. I missed that. >>Sure. Sure. So we finished >>training on the numbers. >>Yeah. So that we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages and we finished 2020 with just over 2.5 1000. So we've had a huge growth in the in the rain and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're what we're serving with our clients and how we're collaborating with our clients and the topics were unpacking. That is is really broadened. >>Yeah. I mean I I covered and we've reported on the garage on the Cuban also in silicon angle dot com. And the past thinks and through your your news coverage. That's amazing growth. Um I gotta believe the tailwind from Covid and just the energy around it has energized. You wanna get your thoughts on that because you know what we've reported the past, it's been about design, thinking human centered design, all those beautiful things that come with cloud, cloud scale, right? You know, you're moving faster, you're innovating. Um and so that's been kind of there, but what you're getting at with this growth is with and what Covid has proven. And again, we've been pointing this out, you're seeing the pattern, It's clear companies are either retrenching okay. Which is re factoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out to cope with a growth strategy and you're seeing other companies um build net new innovations so they're building new capabilities because Covid shown them kind of pulled back the curtain if you will on where the action is. So this means there's two threads going on. You got okay, I got to transform my business and I gotta re factor and then, or hey, we got net new business models, these are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? >>Uh, and I think that my comment on is that is the sweet spot that garage comes into its own right. You mentioned lots of things in that, you talked about design thinking and agility and you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time and garage of course is synonymous with those of course, you know, it's Gap uses the best design thinking and agile practices and all of those things that absolutely core to what we do, devops, even through down to design up, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is, but I think what is really happening now is the innovation, you know, being something separate. It is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes and your business outcomes regardless of whether that is in re factoring and modernizing your existing estate or diversifying creating new ecosystems and new platforms and new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your, To your core business. I mean it's a well known fact John right, like 75 of transformation programmes failed to deliver an impact on the business performance. Right? And in the same period of time there's been huge cuts in innovation funding and that's because for the same reason because they don't deliver the impact of the business performance and that's why garage is unique because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? But using user research through design thinking of course using agile to deliver it at speed and all of those other things, but it's focused on value, on benefits, realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation rather than it being something separate. >>Debbie, I saw you gave a talk uh called Innovation Is Dead. Um obviously that's a provocative title. That's an attention getter. Um tell me what you mean by that because it seems to be a setup. I mean many mentions dead. Was it with a question mark? What you're kind of trying to highlight that innovation is transformation? Or were you trying >>to do the full title? The full title was Innovation is Dead and transformation is pointless. And of course, it's meant to be an eye catching title. So people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But But the reality is I mean that most sincerely it's back to that step, 75 of these transformation programmes failed to deliver the impact. And I and I speculate that that is for a few reasons because the idea itself wasn't a good one or wasn't at the right time because you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like and therefore him just be able to create that path. And in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic and it's those three things, I think amongst the whole myriad of others are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what garage does is it breaks this by putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise and by using data driven value orchestration. That means that we don't no, we don't guess where the value to be gained is. We know it's no longer checking ideas at the wall to see what sticks it's meaningful research. It's not searching. This is my favorite quote from my dear friend Courtney, know, who says it's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack. It's using your research in order to de risk your investment and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes. So if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree. I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. >>Exactly. Of course, we're on the writing side. We love titles like innovation is dead long live innovation, so that's classic. Get your attention. But I think >>Exactly, and of course what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity, >>totally. >>There is no longer relevant for company to make sure they achieve their business >>outcome. Well, this is what I wanted to just double click on that with you on is that you look at transformation, you guys essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the garage philosophy if I get that right. Um, and, and, and it's interesting I had, and we've experienced here with the cube where the cube virtual, we're not at IBM think there is no physical game day, like >>my house. >>And, and so I was talking to a Ceo and he said, I said, hey you guys are doing really, really good. You know, we had to pivot with the cube and he goes, you guys did a good pivot yourself because no, john we did not pivot, we actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension. So technically we're going to bring that business back when Covid is gone and we come back to real life. So it's technically not a pivot. We're not pivoting our business. We've created new functionality through the innovations that they were doing. So this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. This is like depends proven what's your share your thoughts on that? >>Well, it's just to me it's about people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so being really clear on what you're doing and why and the outcomes can be really broad that, you know, so instead of saying, you know, we're all going to implement the new E. R. P. Or build a new mobile app. That's that's that's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is what we're trying to achieve is a 10% growth in net promoter score in china, Right in this group or whatever it is we were trying to achieve right, we want to make a 25 reduction in our operating cost base by simplifying our estate whatever those outcomes are. I mean that's the starting point and then driving that use to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value and fast right garage delivers 3-5 times faster than other models and reduced delivery costs. And so it's all about that speed, speed of decision, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills and speed to outcomes. >>You got a great job, love what you're doing in Karaj got a great model, congratulations on the growth. Love this intersection or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation advice versus interplay going on there I think has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the garage. What's going on? How many practitioners you guys have there now at IBM? Um, you've got growth. Are you adding more people in? I'll see virtual first. Covid. Is there still centers of design take us through what's going on at garage? >>Certainly. So I think I mentioned it right up front. Right. So our goal is to make IBM guards the primary way our clients experiences. We've proven that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so in order for us to deliver on that promise, we have to be unable to cross IBM to deliver to it. Right? So over the last 18 months or so we've had a whole range of training programs and enable we have a whole badging and certification program. We have all the skills and the pathways and the career pathways to find. But garages for everybody. Right? And so it isn't about creating a selected group that can do this across IBM, this is about making all of services capable. So in 2020 we we trained over 28,000 people right? In in all the different skills that are needed from selling to execution to QA to use a research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our garage skills academy which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So we will, you've got to >>talk about the footprint of the global side because again, not to bring up global, but global is what yours in your title companies need to be global because now with virtual workforce is you're seeing much more tapped creativity and execution ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? >>Well, so garages as in its global in two perspectives. Right, So number one, we have garages all around the world. Right? It isn't it isn't just the market of you are most developed nations in the Americas and europe. It is everywhere. We see it in all emerging markets, from latin America through to you all parts of eastern europe which are really beginning to come into their own. So we see all these different garages of different different scales and opportunity. So definitely global from that image. But what what what virtualization has also enabled these truly global teams because it's really easy to go, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert and I need an Ai expert and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is and you can quickly gather them around the virtual table faster than you can in a physical table. But we still leverage the global community >>for the network. You have an expert network there at IBM. >>You have a huge network. Yeah. And both both within IBM and of course a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work >>with. Debbie. I'm really excited. Congratulations. Growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate. It is a social construct. It's a great program. Thanks for sharing >>my pleasure. It's been great to be here. Thank >>you. Okay, IBM's global garage. Lee Debbie Vegas who's here on the queue with IBM services, a phenomenon. This is social construct is helping companies with digital transformation intersecting with innovation. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Interconnect 2017 everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Russ Kennedy is here. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy and Customer Success at IBM. Russ, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> So Russ, of course, you and I have known each other for years. >> Yes. >> From the Cleversafe. You guys came in from the Cleversafe acquisition-- >> Right. >> A phenomenal move for you guys. Great exit, awesome move for IBM. >> Yep. >> So we're now well over a year in. >> Umm-hmm. >> So the integration, you've been long past Blue Washing (laughing) you're now in, and you're integrating with other services. >> Right. >> You're embedded in the cloud, still selling on prem-- >> Right. >> Hybrid messaging, so give us the update. What's happening at Interconnect? >> Sure, well, thanks for having me on. >> Dave: You're welcome! >> It's great to see you again. And you're absolutely right. Things have been moving very rapidly since the acquisition. It's about 15 months since we've been part of IBM now. And we still have a very robust on prem business that was our heritage in the Cleversafe days, but now that we're part of IBM we're well entrenched in the cloud. We've got cloud services, object storage services in the cloud, and a variety of different flavors there. We announced a couple of new things this week that I think are very exciting for clients. I'm sure we'll get into that as we go through this discussion. And we have a hybrid combination, so if clients want to have some of their data on prem, some of their data in the cloud, we offer that hybridity as well. And I think that's very exciting for enterprises that are looking to figure out where their workloads run best, and be able to have that flexibility to move things back and forth if they need to. >> We were talking off-camera, I remember I was saying to you, Cleversafe was one of Wicky-Bon's first clients-- >> Umm-hmm. >> Back when we were tiny-- >> Umm-hmm. >> And you guys were just getting started and-- >> Right. >> I remember we were working with you guys, and sort of talking about some positioning and things like that, and I remember saying, Look, it's going to cloud! >> Russ: Right, right, right. >> It's all going there. And at the time, it was like, you guys were saying, Yeah, we think so, too, but it's just not here yet (laughing). >> Right. >> (laughing) And we're a small startup you got-- >> Yeah. >> And so, you have the conviction of belief that it's going to happen, but at the same time you have to survive-- >> Sure, sure! >> And you got investors and it's... >> Yep. >> But the growth of unstructured data and then all of a sudden the combination of that, plus cloud happened. And then boom that was a huge tailwind. >> Right. >> Talk about that. >> Right, right, no, you're exactly right. In the early days it was very, very difficult to get people to understand the value of object storage and understand the value of cloud. And we were out there pioneering discussions around this concept, but we knew that the wave was going to happen. The growth of unstructured data was already obvious. You had music services, you had video services, everything going online. People wanting to distribute information and share information, and so you knew that the wave was coming. It took a little bit longer than I think everybody thought. I think certainly success in other public cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft kind of helped drove that as well. But we were certainly there with leading technology, and as soon as people started to realize the benefits of object storage for storing large, unstructured data objects, it just took off. >> Well, you know, too, the cloud progression was really interesting. >> Umm-hmm. >> You're right. Amazon sort of popularized it. >> Yep. >> And then the downturn in 2007, 2008, caused a lot of CFOs to say, Hey, let's try this cloud thing. >> Exactly. >> And then they came out of it-- >> Russ: Exactly, yep. >> And said, Hey, this cloud thing's actually really cool. >> Russ: Umm-hmm, umm-hmm. >> Now, let's operationalize it (laughing). >> Right. >> And go mainstream. And so, and now you've got this big discussion going on around data value, right. >> Russ: Of course. >> Everybody's talking about the value of data and what it means-- >> Russ: Sure, sure. >> And moving conversations up the stack away from sort of bit slicing and-- >> Right, right (laughing). >> Object stores-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> And ups the data value. >> You're exactly right. >> What are you seeing here? >> I think that's another new interesting area that we're getting into. It's the value of information, and I think what's driven that is the tools and the technologies that are now available to analyze data in variety of formats, right. The whole analysis and analytics capability that exist in the marketplace today is giving organizations a reason to take a look at their data, and to leverage their data, and to use their data, to drive business outcomes, to be more competitive, to be more agile, to be more flexible. So they're using the information. They have tools now that can give them insight into all kinds of things, their own data, external sources of data, new data that's being generated through applications and those kinds of things. All that can come together and analysis can go on top of it, to give people really quick insights into how to drive their business. And I think that's the really exciting part about being part of IBM's cloud because IBM has all those tools. >> We've been having conversations now for... It's well over several months and going into years-- >> Umm-hmm. >> Where the CIO's not so much thinking about storage, and certainly not worried about the media. >> Right. >> But definitely talking about what services can I tap to enhance the value of my data? >> Sure. >> How do I monetize, not necessarily data itself, but how does data contribute to the monetization of my company? >> Umm-hmm. >> And you guys fit into that. >> Sure. >> So maybe talk about that a little bit-- >> Sure, well, we talked to clients all the time about the value of the data, regardless of what industry you're in, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, all of those types of organizations have information and it's information that can help them be more productive. It can help them be more agile. It can help them win in the marketplace. All they need to do is open it up and use it, leverage it, analyze it, look at it, look at it from a variety of different sources, and it can help them do a lot of things more efficiently, so we talked to clients all the time about the value of data. Storage is certainly something that makes that value realizable, and it's the interfaces between applications and tools that make the data usable. And we open that up to clients with our storage system very easily, whether it's on prem or it's in the cloud, and that's what they like. Now, we heard David Kenny on stage the other day-- >> Umm-hmm. >> He announced IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex-- >> Yes. >> And he said, We do have a marketing department, and yes, they did come up with that name. (laughing) A funny tongue-in-cheek moment. >> Yes, yes. >> But talk about Flex. What is it? And why is it relevant? >> So a lot of clients that we've engaged with recently have talked about... They love the cloud model. They certainly love the simplicity and the ease of growth and those kinds of things that cloud gives them. But they're a little confused about the pricing and they're worrying about whether they're paying too much for the workload that they have in the cloud. So we designed Flex as a way to look at storing data. First of all, it's a very low cost entry point for storing the data. And then it's designed for data where the workload may be unpredictable. It may be cold for some period of time, and then it may become very active for a period of time, and then go back to being cold again. What Flex does is it ensures that you don't overpay when you actually utilize that data, when it's very active, very hot, maybe you're running some sort of analytics against that data. Maybe it's some sort of cognitive recognition analytics process that you're running against the data. It makes it very usable, but yet, you're not paying too much to access that data. So Flex is designed for those kinds of uneven, varied workloads, or workloads where it's very cold for some period of time and very hot. Traditional tiers are designed for hot workloads, mid-level workloads, and very cold workloads. Flex actually covers the whole gamut, and it ensures that you're not paying too much for storing and using your data. >> So that's a problem that people have because-- >> Umm-hmm. >> They don't really understand how to optimize cost-- >> Right, right. >> If they don't understand their workloads. >> Right. >> They get the cloud bill at the end of the month. They go, Whoa-- >> Yep, exactly. >> What just happened? >> Exactly. >> It's complicated for people, there's a lot of times it's different APIs for different services. >> Russ: Sure, sure. >> So talk a little bit more about how customers... How you see customers deploying that and what it's going to mean to... >> Sure. >> What's the business impact? >> Yeah, no it's a great question. So Flex, first of all, you only have to remember four numbers. There's a number to store the data, a cost to store the data, a cost to retrieve the data, a cost for what we call Class A Operations, which are write operations and then Class B, which are read operations. Four numbers you have to remember. You know that you're not going to pay over a certain amount, regardless of how often you use the data, so it's very simple for people to understand. It's one set of numbers. It doesn't matter what the workload is. You know you're not going to be overcharged for that workload. >> You set a threshold. >> Exactly, you set a cap, you set a threshold. >> Yeah. >> And you're not going to pay over that amount, so it's very simple for them to utilize. Then, so they start to use it, and let's say that over a six-month period of time they start to understand their workload, and they know it's a very active workload. They can then change that data into maybe our standard tier, and actually even save more money because it's consistent, it's predictable when it's active, they'll actually lower their cost. And we're very open with clients about that because we want to take away that complexity of using the storage, and certainly the complexity of billing, like you talked about. And give clients a very easy transition into the cloud, and make sure that they can use it and leverage it the way they need to be more productive. >> So the key to that is transparency. >> Russ: Yes, absolutely. >> And control. And that's an elastic sort of dial-up, dial-down-- >> Absolutely. >> As you need it. >> Russ: Very, very much so. Yes, definitely. >> I wanted to ask you, so we've been obviously watching... IBM made the SoftLayer acquisition, it was like, Okay, we're going to buy this bare metal hosting company. >> Umm-hmm. >> And then they bring in Bluemix, and then they start bringing in applications. >> Yes, yes. >> And then all of a sudden it's like, IBM does what IBM does (laughing), and boom! Now, you've got this machine going. >> Yes. >> And so, several acquisitions that are relevant here, Aspera. >> Yes. >> Clearleap. >> Yes. >> UStream fits there because we know Ustream because we broadcast on UStream-- >> Russ: Yes, yes, uh-huh. >> And, of course, Cleversafe. >> Umm-hmm. >> Are you beginning to leverage those acquisitions and potentially others through Bluemix-- >> Yes. >> To create services and new value for clients? >> Yeah, so we're fully integrated with all those technologies, right, the object storage system through our APIs. Every single one of those technologies can leverage and utilize the storage system underneath. I'll give you an example, Aspera, as you mentioned, a very, prominent product in the marketplace. I think just about every company in media and entertainment and certainly any company that's dealing with unstructured data objects knows and uses Aspera. They have a service now in the cloud where you can actually move data very rapidly over their protocol, into the cloud, and then store it in the object storage system. That's easy, that's simple. That makes it easy to start to leverage cloud. UStream the same way, Clearleap the same way. All of this comes together in Bluemix. Bluemix is the glue, so to speak, so if you're developing new applications you have all of the Bluemix tools that you can use, and then you got all these technologies that are integrated, including the object storage system, which is the foundation, everything's going to... All the data's going to reside in an object storage system. That makes it all usable for clients, very simple, very easy. They have a whole portfolio of things that they can do. And it's all tied together through APIs. It's very, very nice-- >> And has that opened up when you're small startup... (laughing) You don't have all these resources-- >> Right. >> How has it opened up new opportunities for you guys? >> So we see a lot of new startups coming on board, and taking advantage of the storage system-- >> Right. >> And all the different services that sit on top. Many companies today are born on the cloud, or they're new applications that are being born on the cloud, and so, they have access to, not only infrastructure, like you said within Bluemix, they also have access to other services, video services, high-speed data transfer services, object storage services. So they're able to take advantage of all those different services, build applications very quickly. Another thing that's interesting about IBM, they have this concept, you may have heard of it, this Bluemix Garage concept-- >> Dave: Yeah, I have. >> Which is a rapid deployment, rapid application development, using design thinking and agile methodologies, to quickly develop a minimum viable product that now uses object storage as part of the services, right. So as a new client, you can come in, sit in the Bluemix Garage, work on the application, and have some really rapid prototyping going on, and leverage the storage system underneath. And that gets you started, gets you going. I can see a lot of new applications coming to market through that same-- >> So they're like seven garages, is that right around the world? >> Russ: Yes, yes. Yeah, they're around the world. And so, I didn't realize... So Cleversafe's a fundamental part of that, in the object storage. >> It is now. And we just announced it this week at Interconnect, but it is now. >> So what does that mean? So I go in and I can... It's basically a set of... Sets of best practices-- >> Correct, correct. >> And accelerance and-- >> Right. And obviously in the cloud world, you need a place to place your data, right. So the integration with Cloud Object Storage, Cleversafe now called Cloud Object Storage is now all part of that, so it's integrated into the app dev that's going on in those garages. And we're excited about that because I think we'll see a lot of new technologies coming through that methodology, and certainly ones that leverage our storage technology, for sure. >> What's it been like to go from relatively small Illinois-based startup. (laughing) And now you're in IBM. >> Right. >> What was the integration like (laughing)? Are you on the rocket ship now? You were kind of on it before, but now it's like, steep part of the S-curve-- >> Sure. >> With all these global resources. Describe that. >> Well, I think the biggest part that's happened to us as an organization is exposure to a number of different accounts that we as a small company may not have had access to, certainly in certain industries, IBM's in every part of the world, in every industry, and that exposure from IBM's go to market has been very, very exciting for us. And certainly, global now, right. As Cleversafe, we were only in North America and Europe, for example, and now we're all over the world, or had the chance to be all over the world, so that's been really exciting. And then on top of that the whole integration into the cloud, right, because IBM's cloud business unity is the one that drove the acquisition of Cleversafe because they wanted the technology in the cloud. And now that we're there, we can offer storage services, object storage services as a foundation to anyone all over the world. And I think that's really exciting, and it's the exposure to all kinds of different businesses that's been exciting since we've been part of-- >> Yeah, and the speed at which you can get to that object store as a service as opposed to-- >> Absolutely. >> As opposed to saying, Okay, knocking on-- >> Yes. >> All the cloud doors, (laughing) And, hey, do you want to buy my cloud? And like, Well, you know we got our own, or whatever it is. >> Right, right. >> And now it's just boom global-- >> It's shortened that sale cycle tremendously, right. People are up and running in a few days now, or even a few hours, whereas before it may take months or, even quarters, to get started. You can get started now just by going to the portal, signing up for object storage services, starting to write data into the cloud, starting to leverage these other services that we walked about. It's very simple-- >> And the commentorial effects of what we were talking about before with, like Aspera and UStream, and so fourth-- >> Russ: Umm-hmm, umm-hmm. >> Give you the ability to add even new services. IBM 's always been very good at-- >> Yes. >> Acquisitions. >> Yes. >> We forget that sometimes IBM... (laughing) >> Acquisitions are always hard-- >> Yeah. >> But we've been fortunate we've had a lot of support and a lot help in getting integrated into the various businesses, And I think it's been a good journey. >> So what should we look for? What kind of milestones? Can you show a little leg on futures (laughing)? What should we be paying attention to? >> Well, we're going to continue to do what clients are asking us to do. We're going to develop features and functions, both on prem and in the cloud. We're going to integrate with a lot of different technologies, both IBM technologies and other company technologies. You may have seen our announcements with NetApp and VERITAS this week. >> Yeah. >> So we're going to continue to expand our integration with other technologies that exist in the marketplace because that's what clients want. They want solutions. They want end-to-end solutions, both on on prem and in the cloud. So we're focused on that. We're going to continue to do that. We'll certainly integrate with other IBM services as they come to market in the cloud. That's a really exciting thing, so we're going to continue to focus on driving success for our clients. And that's exciting. >> Oh! Russ, belated congratulations on the acquisition, and going through the integration. I'm really happy for you guys, and excited for your future. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Alright, keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Interconnect 2017. Be right back! (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is IBM's Cloud show and, now, data show. This is theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Meg Swanson, VP of Marketing for Bluemix, the whole kit and caboodle, SoftLayer of Bluemix. Now you get to watch some data platform, IOT. The Cloud's growing up. How you doing? Good to see you again. >> It's good. Good to see you guys. Every time we get together, it's just huge growth. Every time, every month to month. Under Bluemix, we've pulled together infrastructure. The area that was called SoftLayer. And because we had developers that absolutely you need a provision down to bare metal servers, all the way up to applications. So we pulled the infrastructure together with the developer services, together with our VMware partnership, all in a single console. Continuing to work on, with clients, on just having a unified experience. That's why we have it under the Bluemix brand. >> You knew us when we were just getting theCUBE started. We knew you when you were kicking off the developer program, with Bluemix, was announced here in theCUBE. Seems like 10 dog years ago, which is about 50 years, no, that was, what, four years ago now? Are you four years in? >> I think so. Yeah, 'cause I remember running from the Hakkasan club, we had just ended a virtual reality session, and I had to run, and then I sat down, and we started immediately talking about Bluemix 'cause we just launched it. >> So here's the update. You guys have been making a lot of progress, and we've been watching you. It's been fantastic, 'cause you really had to run fast and get this stuff built out, 'cause Cloud Native, it wasn't called Cloud Native back then, it was just called Cloud. But, essentially, it was the Cloud Native vision. Services, microservices, APIs, things, we've talked about that. What's the progress? Give us the update and the status, and where are you? >> Yeah, obviously just massive growth in services and our partners. When you look at, we had Twitter up with us today, we've had continual growth in the technology partners that we bring to bear, and then also definitely Cloud Native. But then also helping clients that have existing workloads and how to migrate. So, massive partnerships with VMware. We also just announced partnership with Intel HyTrust on secure cloud optimization. When we first met, we talked so much about you're going to win this with an ecosystem. And the coolest thing is seeing that pay off every day with the number of partners that we've been so blessed to have coming to us and working together with us to build out this ecosystem for our clients. >> And what's the differentiator, because what's happening now is you're starting to see the clear line of sight from the big cloud players. You have you guys, you have Oracle, you see Microsoft, you see SAP, you all got the version of the cloud. And it's not a winner-take-all market, it's a multi-cloud world, as we're seeing. Certainly open-source is driving that. How do you guys differentiate, and is it the same message? What's new in terms of IBM's differentiators? What's the key message? >> That we're absolutely staying core to the reason we went into this business. We are looking at, what are the challenges that our clients are looking to solve? How do we build out the right solutions for them? And look at the technologies they're using today, and not have them just forklift everything to a public cloud, but walk with them every step of the way. It's absolutely been about uncovering the partnerships between on-premises and the Cloud, how you make that seamless, how you make those migrations in minutes versus hours and days. The growth that we've seen is around helping clients get to that journey faster, or, if they're not meant to go fully public Cloud, that's okay, too. We've been absolutely expanding our data centers, making sure we have everything lined up from a compliance standpoint. Because country to country, we have so many regulations that we need to make sure we're protecting our clients in. >> I want to ask you, and David Kenny referenced it a little bit today, talked about we built this for the enterprise, it didn't stem out of a retailer or a search. I don't know who he was talking about, but Martin Schroeter, on the IBM earnings call, said something that I want to get your comment on, and if we can unpack a little bit. He said, "Importantly, we've designed Watson "on the IBM Cloud to allow our clients "to retain control of their data and their insights, "rather than using client data "to educate a central knowledge graph." That's a nuance, but it's a really big statement. And what's behind that, if I can infer, is use the data to inform the model, but we're not going to take your data IP and give it to your competitors. Can you explain that a little bit, and what the philosophy is there? >> Yeah, absolutely. That is a core tenet of what we do. It's all about clients will bring their data to us to learn, to go to school, but then it goes home. We don't keep client data, that's critical to us that everything is completely within the client's infrastructure, within their data privacy and protection. We are simply applying our cognitive, artificial intelligence machine learning to help them advance faster. It's not about taking their insights in learning and fueling them into our Cloud to then resell to other teams. That, absolutely, it's great that you bring up that very nuanced point, but that's really important. In today's day and age, your data is your lifeblood as a company, and you have to trust where it's going, you have to know where it's going, and you have to trust that those machine learnings aren't going to be helping other clients that are possibly on the same cloud. >> Is it your contention that others don't make that promise, or you don't know, or you're just making that promise? >> We're making that promise. It's our contention that the data is the client's data. You look at the partnerships that we've made throughout Cloud, throughout Watson, it's really companies that have come to us to solve problems. You look at the healthcare industry, you look at all these partnerships that we have. Everything that we've built out on the IBM Cloud and within Watson has been to help advance client cases. You rarely see us launching something that's completely unique to IBM that hasn't been built together with a client, with a partner. Versus, there are other companies out there in this market where they're constantly providing infrastructure to run their own business, maybe their own retail store, and their own search engine. And they will continue to do that, and they absolutely should, but at the end of the day, when you're a client, what do you want to do? Are you trying to build somebody else's business, or do you want someone who's going to be all in on your business and helping you advance everything that you need to do. >> Well, it seems like the market has glombed on to public data plus automation. But you're trying to solve a harder problem. Explain that. >> When you look at the clients that we're working with and the data that we're working with, it's not just information that's out there to work in a sandbox environment and it's available to anyone, baseball statistics or something that's just out there in the wild. Every client engagement we're in, this is their critical data. You look at financial services. We just launched the great financial services solutions for developers. You look at those areas, and, oh my word, you cannot share that data, yet those clients, you look at the work we're doing with H&R Block, you have to look at, that is absolutely proprietary data, but how do we send in cognitive to help us learn, to help teach it, help teach them alongside, for the H&R Block example, the tax advisor. So we're helping them make their business better. It's not as if we ingested all of the tax data to then run a tax solution service from IBM. It's a nuance, but it's an important nuance of how we run this company. >> So seven years ago, I met this guy, and he said, the 2010 John, you said, "Data is the new development kit." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" But now we see this persona of data scientist and data engineer and the developer persona evolving. How are you redefining the developer? >> Yeah, it's a great point, because we see cognitive artificial intelligence machine learning development in developers really emerging strong as a career path. We see data scientists, especially where as you're building out any application, any solution, data is at the core. So, you had it 10 years ago, right? (laughs) >> (mumbles) But I did pitch it to Dave when I first met him in 2010. No, but this is the premise, right? Back then, web infrastructure, web scale guys were doing their own stuff. The data needs to be programmable. We've been riffing on this concept, and I want to get your thoughts on this. What DevOps was for infrastructurous code, we see a vision in our research at Wikibon that data as code, meaning developers just want to program and get data. They don't want to deal with all the under-the-hood production, complicated stuff like datasets, the databases. Maybe the wrangling could be done by another process. There's all this production heavy lifting that goes on. And then there's the creativity and coolness of building apps. So now you have those worlds starting to stabilize a bit. Your thoughts and commentary on that vision? >> Yeah, that's absolutely where it has been heading and is continuing to head. And as you look at all the platforms that developers get to work in right now. So you have augmented reality, virtual reality are not just being segmented off into a gaming environment, but it's absolutely mainstream. So you see where developers absolutely are looking for. What is a low-code environment for? I'd say more the productivity. How do I make this app more productive? But when it comes to innovation, that's where you see, that's where the data scientist is emerging more and more every day in a role. You see those cognitive developers emerging more and more because that's where you want to spend all your time. My developers have spent the weekend, came back on Monday, and I said, "What'd you do?" "I wrote this whole Getting Started guide "for this Watson cognitive service." "That's not your job." "Yeah, but it's fun." >> Yeah, they're geeking out on the weekends, having some beer and doing some hackathons. >> It's so exciting to see. That's where, that innovation side, that's where we're seeing, absolutely, the growth. One of the partnerships that we announced earlier today is around our investment in just that training and learning. With Galvanize. >> What was the number? How much? >> 10 million dollars. >> Evangelizing and getting, soften the ground up, getting people trained on cognitive AI. >> Yeah, so it's really about making an impactful investment in the work that we started, actually a couple years ago when we were talking, we started building out these Garages. The concept was, we have startup companies, we starting partnering with Galvanize, who has an incredible footprint across the globe. And when you look at what they were building, we started embedding our developers in those offices, calling them Garages because that is your workshop. That's where you bring in companies that want to start building applications quickly. And you saw a number of the clients we had on stage today consistently, started in the Garage, started in the Garage, started in the Garage. >> Yeah, we had one just on theCUBE earlier. >> Yeah, exactly, so they start with us in the Garage. And then we wanted to make sure we're continuing to fuel that environment because it's been so successful for our clients. We're pouring into Galvanize and companies in training, and making sure these areas that are really in their pioneering stages, like artificial intelligence, cognitive, machine learning. >> On that point, you bring up startups and Garage, two-prong question. We're putting together, I'm putting together an enterprise-readiness matrix. So you have startups who are building on the Cloud, who want to sell to the enterprise. And then you have enterprises themselves who are adopting Hybrid Cloud or a combination of public, private. What does enterprise-readiness mean to you guys? 'Cause you guys have a lot of experience. Google next, they said, "We're enterprising." They're really not. They're not ready yet, but they're going that way. You guys are there. What is enterprise-readiness? >> Yeah, and I see a lot of companies have ambitions to do that, which is what we need them to do. 'Cause as you mentioned, it's a multi-cloud environment for clients, and so we need clouds to be enterprise-ready. And that really comes down to security, compliance, scalability, multiple zones. It comes down to making sure you don't have just five developers that can work on something, but how do you scale that to 500? How do you scale that to 500,000? You've got these companies that you have to be able to ensure that developers can immediately interact with each other. You need to make sure that you've got the right compliance by that country, the data leaving that country. And it's why you see such a focus from us on industry. Because enterprise-grade is one thing. Understanding an industry top to bottom, when it comes to cloud compliance is a whole other level. And that's where we're at. >> It's really hard. Most people oversimplify Cloud, but it's extremely difficult. >> It is, 'cause it's not just announcing a healthcare practice for Cloud doesn't mean you just put everybody in lab coats and send out new digital material. It is you have to make sure you've got partnerships with the right companies, you understand all the compliance regulations, and you've built everything and designed it for them. And then you've brought in all the partner services that they need, and you've built that in a private and a public cloud environment. And that's what we've done in healthcare, that's what we're doing in finance, you see all the work we're doing with Blockchain. We are just going industry by industry and making sure that when a company comes to us in an industry like retail, or you saw American Airlines on stage with us today. We're so proud to be working with them. And looking at everything that they need to cover, from regulation, uptime, maintenance, and ensuring that we know and understand that industry and can help, guide, and work alongside of them. >> In healthcare and financial services, the number of permutations are mind-boggling. So, what are you doing? You're pointing Watson to help solve those problems, and you're codifying that and automating that and running that on the Cloud? >> That's a part of it. A part of it is absolutely learning. The whole data comes to school with us to learn, and then it goes back home. That's absolutely part of it, is the cognitive learning. The other part of it is ensuring you understand the infrastructure. What are the on-premises, servers that that industry has? How many transactions per second, per nanosecond, are happening? What's the uptime around that? How do you make sure that what points you're exposing? What's the security baked into all of that? So, it's absolutely, cognitive is a massive part of it, but it is walking all the way through every part of their IT environment. >> Well, Meg, thanks for spending the time and coming on theCUBE and giving us the update. We'll certainly see you out in the field as we cover more and more developer events. We're going to be doing most, if not all, of the Linux foundation stuff. Working a lot with Intel and a bunch of other folks that you're partnering with. So, we'll see you guys out at all the events. DockerCon, you name it, they're all there. >> We'll be there, too, right with them. >> Microservices, we didn't even get to Kubernetes, we could have another session on containers and microservices. Meg Swanson, here inside theCUBE, Vice President of Bluemix Marketing. It's theCUBE, with more coverage after this short break. Stay with us, more coverage from Las Vegas. (techno music)