>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to intermittently sunny San Francisco, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at day four at IBM Think. My name is Dave Vellante. I am here with Stu Miniman. John Furrier is also here. Wall to wall coverage Stu. The second Think, first big show really of the year at Moscone. The new Moscone, Armando Ortiz is here. He is the vice president and partner from Mobile & Extended Reality Leader at IBM iX. An interesting part of IBM that you may not know about. Armando, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell us a little bit about iX. >> So IBM iX is a part of IBM services. We focus on user experiences, whether it's a consumer experience or an employee experience. And the we look at user experience it really kind of sticks together and allow you to unlock the value of all the technology investments that companies are making. >> So, you guys are not making headsets, or are you? >> No we don't make hardware, we just put hardware to work. >> So talk a little bit about the sort of state of whether its augmented reality or extended reality. Lay out the terminology for us if you would. >> Sure, sure. As part of the role I have I lead our mobile practice as well as the extended reality practice and this kind of all related together. We use the term extended reality to kind of encompass all of the different technologies along that spectrum from augmented reality to mixed reality to virtual reality. Of course there are a lot of technologies whether it's the glasses on your face like the wearables or it's in your hand as a lot of mobile platforms today like Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore allow you to have AR experienced within your mobile apps. >> Yeah, I wonder if you can expand a little bit on that? We're all ready for the role out of 5G and that's going, holds the promise at least for a lot more band width and a lot more applications and that's one of the lynch pins we understand kind of make your world more of a reality. When do we see that role out? What devices are going to happen? You got a preview of the next iPhone for us? >> I certainly don't have a preview of the next iPhone, even though I do lead the Apple partnership for us in North America, the Apple IBM partnership. When you look at 5G, obviously some of the use cases for extended reality in enterprise are around field services and 5G will have an amazing impact on the ability. Not only because of the band width but also the low latency that you have for 5G. So we're excited to see that role out in the different markets around the world and you know the pilots and things that are starting this year. There are going to be a lot of great devices and I think for handsets all the way to the wearables. It'll really allow us to put more use cases on these devices. >> Can you walk us through some of those use cases? Any specific customer examples you have that may make our audience understand a little bit more what's really available today. Sure, I mean in the XR space or in the extended reality space there's a lot that we learned through what we've done in mobile for years. I mean, even our Apple partnership for the past five years and things we've done across the 16 industries we work on. But the initial sort of wave one use cases that we're really seeing today kind of follow along these categories of work related use cases that are like in field services, training related use cases that go all the way from virtual reality immersive training like teaching someone how to do something in a dangerous situation where you want to simulate that. All the way to on the job sort of training and step-by-step guidance that you can get with AR. Step one attach the cable here. Step two, check this over here. Those kind of use cases and then into use cases related to shopping and retail. If you look at what augmented reality is going to do for shopping and retail allow people to assess sort of fit and purpose of something they want to buy. Does it fit in my home? Does it fit in my life? And then also even in the stores as people in retail sort of navigate a store they can use AR to help understand. Add all that metadata to the in store experience that we're gotten used to in our online experiences. And the last broad category we sort of call it share ideas or sharing of ideas, which kind of expands the game from collaboration to even having AR brochures and augmented realty tools to help people understand a product or a service that you're offering. Imagine that we can just kind of expand a piece of equipment here on the table, walk through it and help understand how that piece of equipment is going to help your business. >> You're giving me flashbacks. I remember IBM had a huge initiative in like Second Life and it was like come build an island and we're going to do recruiting and things like that. So, tell us why this generation is, going to be better for business and not have everyone put some money in and have it stolen by you know. >> Not as goofy. >> It's funny you should ask that, the Second Life topic actually came up with someone I was speaking to yesterday. It's come up before. I think there is a significant difference between what Second Life was trying to be and what extended reality is going to be and it already is. I mean when you look at extended reality today, I think one important thing to think about this is not future tech, this is not some sort of dream of sort of Ready Player One type of situation. But more, it's looking at real enterprise use cases that are already driving a value; time savings on inspections, productivity enhancements for people assembling, consistency and increase safety. All the key performance indicators and value drivers we have for mobile. So there's a real path to business value and the uses are much clearer than it might have been in the days of Second Life. >> Less mistakes, less rework. Armando, what kind of infrastructure would a consumer need? You gave the example of retail for instance, what kind of infrastructure would I need? Am I just, is it just my mobile home? Am I going to wear headsets, what does that look like? >> So when we talk about extended reality, we tend to keep one foot in today and one foot in the future cause its changing so fast. When you talk about retail there is a sale associate side of things that might be helping you decide an automotive. Maybe you're looking at configuring a car right in front of you or in a retail store maybe you're looking to look at a piece of furniture or something that's not on the show room floor. Now those experiences can start today with tablets and iPhones and other devices. But we see also as well devices that people be wearing wearables that are available today and that trend moving that glass kind of from your hand to your face is going to be something that is really going to be accelerated. >> So, this is maybe how a piece of clothing will fit or what a couch might look like in a particular room, is that right? >> Yeah. >> And you would envision that people will purchase this infrastructure for a variety of uses. Not only to see how things look but maybe there's gaming. So it's a multi-use kind of environment or not necessarily? Is it more specialized to use it? >> No absolutely, it's important, it's a good thing that you brought up sort of gaming as well. Because, obviously we all know that gaming has been kind of at the fore front for virtual reality but when you look at gaming and entertainment those are also going to include many use cases. When we look at the enterprise side we're kind of focused on those other wave one use cases. But I also expect in the sort of share ideas category I spoke of marketing and sales activities will also include AR experienced to help people understand the product or service that you're positioning. >> What's the state of adoption? We always joke about google glass. Remember the movie The Jerk with the Opti-Grab and the guy was cross-eyed? So that didn't take off but what's the state of hardware and hardware adoption today? >> So I think what's unique about this technology and what's happening now, the technology we already all have in our hands on our mobile phones is already there and that's where you're going to see it happen first. I think the numbers by next year are like 3.4 billion phones will have an AR capability so the technology is already with us. The next sort of technology set that we're talking about is getting to the wearables and of course we see things today in the VR space that's much more available in the consumer side, things like the oculus go. In the enterprise space you also have headsets from many manufacturers that maybe grew up doing things in the military that are now more commercially available. Things like someone trying to repair something that needs to be hand free. We're seeing those technologies readily available in the enterprise. >> Tell about how AI fits into this new world? >> That's a great question. If you think about it its really kind of a really great combination. You take XR, extended reality, so whether its AR or VR and you add AI to it you can kind of give AI the ability to kind of enter the 3D space. So as you think about AI solutions that we had in the mobile world where you might be using AI to solve a problem, diagnose a problem, visual diagnostics, acoustic detection AI can kind of give sort of super powers to an employee. At the same time we see that the experiences that we have in the extended reality space get really enhanced because you now have the ability to democratize expertize with AI. You take all of the expertize of your organization and that one technician whose only been there for 10 days now has the power of your entire collective knowledge. >> What about privacy? Anytime you hear some of these and I think about you can have wearables out there, there is concern about you know with facial recognition is going to be everywhere my privacy is going to be invaded. What's IBM positioning? Where does that fit in this whole environment? >> Of course we take privacy very seriously. When we talk about our AI and Watson you know your data is your data. If you look at some of the things, I mean, you'll make decisions, enterprises will make decisions on the same way they do with mobile devices. Is it okay to have a camera in this environment? And if I do have a camera in this environment, what's my cloud strategy and where am I going to host this data to make sure that I have not just privacy but also IP concerns, considered? All of the same things we've learned in the mobile world are going to apply to this and it'll get even a little more important as you think of the different types of sensors that are required to make these experiences happen. >> I wonder if you could help us understand about the pre-requisites to do things like technician actually trouble shooting a problem. Many of us have seen, we put on the glasses you walk around a show floor and you look at a new system or something and its really very cool. You can look inside and inspect the different layers. What has to be done, I'm inferring from what you're saying that a technician would be able to inspect live, real time a device and identify problems on that device. So what has be done? It has to be instrumented? It has to have cameras installed? What does the infrastructure build out look like? >> Sure, when you look at. Lets take the technician scenario for a moment and unpack that. When you look at that there are a couple of things that are already happening like a lot of major pieces of equipment are instrumented. So you have the internet of things data, sort of the data streams coming off of that. How do you make that available to that technician in the moment, sort of the vital signs of that piece of equipment that you might be operating on? So, having all that information like temperature and all the things from an IOT perspective, that's one angle of it. The other side of it really is when you think of failure of equipment usually at some point there's a situation that technician may not have encountered before but maybe someone else has. Maybe you've already had a bunch of closed tickets on that three years ago. So having all that information available and using cognitive processing to kind of navigate that unstructured data, that will let you navigate that. Voice will be part of this interface as well. I think voice is an important part because you're going to be hands free and you're going to be having a dialogue with Watson, let's say to help diagnose a problem. >> How about healthcare? It's not something we've really talked about a lot. Just in terms of applications, whether its for the operating room of the future, remote guidance from doctor, training. Do you see those kind of use cases emerging? >> Yeah absolutely, all the way from training through execution of surgery and other things. This is where the 5G topic really comes into play because low latency is really required if you're talking about surgery and things like that. >> Give me a few minutes. >> You get that round trip of that signal going back and forth. I think when you think about the VR side of things for training is immensely powerful. The AR side for during execution of procedures will also be powerful as well and it comes back to that general theme od democratizing expertize. One expert that's physically on this part of the world can serve many people that need their services around the world. >> It sounds like there are a lot of uncertainties in terms of how this is going to evolve. First of all od the a fair statement? Given that, not withstanding that can you give us a sense of expectations for how it will evolve and the adoption levels that you expect over the next two to five years. >> Five years is a long horizon for this technology. >> Too long, too long perhaps so what's more fair, 18 months? >> Lets talk more immediate. I think when you look at, there may be some uncertainty in terms of which use cases will drive the most value but there are already many use cases that companies are probably sharing information out. Like some companies, especially inspection use cases, you know there is a company that published 96% savings on time because really you are using AR to document. Okay inspect this point, this point, this point, this point. Assembly use cases, diagnostics with AI and AR are working together. All of these are already happening, so what I think is going to happen is enterprises are going to be able to more and more easily justify the spend to make these investments because the RY is rapid. Just like the RY in mobile was rapid for enterprise, the RY in XR will be extremely rapid. >> Armando for people who didn't come to IBM Think, give them a little taste of what they missed from an iX stand point. Some of the conversations that you've been having. >> Yeah, when we look at, I mean iX across the IBM Think we've had a lot of conversations and a lot of sessions around how experience is really driving the business value and also around marketing technologies and marketing services and all of the things that relate to experience on the consumer side and the employee side. We're really enjoyed some great show casing of our client stories and the works we've done. Everything from mobile to commerce to marketing platforms to sales floors across everything we do in the IBM services part that we're in. >> How long has this been around? >> IBM iX? >> Yeah. >> IBM iX has been a part of IBM originally since the 96 Olympics in Atlanta. I've been with IBM about 25 years and this space is kind of like really evolved in terms of the position of user experience and design. IBM has become really a design focused company and you look at enterprise design thinking in everything we do so this is really a part of our business that's really become focal point as companies start thinking more about design. >> Wow, it's been a long time but it's certainly not mature but it's a revenue generating business obviously. >> Yeah and a very high growth part of the company. >> Awesome, well Armando thanks so much for sharing this part of IBM that's not well known. Really exciting futures and I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate being here. >> Alright, keep it right there everyone. Stu and I will be back. Day four, IBM Think, we're at Moscone. Stop by, we're at Moscone North. I'm Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman and John Furrier is here. We'll be right back, you're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Fransisco, it's theCUBE covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference live here in San Fransisco, California, Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE media and co-host here at theCUBE's exclusive coverage with Maribel Lopez, Founder and Principle Analyst at Lopez Research, good friend of theCUBE, Cube albumni. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> We see each other all the time at the industry events, usually enterprise and some cloud events. We've been seeing each other a lot at these, kind of consumer events. >> Yeah. >> Sounds like the consumerization of IT is happening. >> Big crossover. Yeah, I don't believe there is any consumer or enterprise, there's just degrees of, you know, how much security, how much management ya get, right? It's got to be a good consumer device to be used by anyone. >> What are some of the analyst reports you guys are putting out now? Obviously, you've been covering apps, to kind of set that up. As you know, we always talk in the past about IoT, >> Maribel: Yeah. >> The intelligent edge, cloud, and the role of app developers that are coming into the enterprise. Every CIO has got a mandate. More app development. Devops. Devops. It's hard. How is this helping? >> You know, I've previously come at this from the concept of mobile enablement in the enterprise, right? And now, it just seems like we're just looking at new applications, new experiences that cross boundaries, right? Is it at your home? Is it in a hotel? Is it on your corporate campus, right? I think the role of the app developer is changing to be more encompassing. I think the big news in all the shows we go to now is like AI and machine learning. That term is just everywhere. It's the IoT of 2017, right? Last year was IoT; this year it's AI and machine learning. So we're seeing a lot of that for the app dev community. >> And now you start to see Augmented Reality, also known as AR, in this space of Samsung and Apple and these new app developers. Augmented Reality core, obviously from a development standpoint, big news here at the Samsung conference. The other big news is ARCore and ARKit, ARKit is the IOT piece. [Maribel] - Mhm. >> So we've been seeing a lot of slowdown in Iot. For instance, everyone is kicking the tires on Iot, but it's industrial Iot that's getting the traction. >> Yeah, I think industrial IoT is getting the traction because they've been at it for years, right? It was M2M before that. If you look at what is happening in consumer IoT, it's still an absolute disaster. So, I think the big news of the day, for Samsung, I mean, obviously, we just talked about how AI was in there, we talked about how ARVR was in there. But, what we didn't talk about is the fact that now we're looking at the SmartThings Cloud. And this is the attempt to say, listen, we've got many different clouds; how do we unify clouds as Samsung? And then, also, how do we let other people participate in the cloud? 'Cause the real challenge is, everybody has their fiefdom right now. >> John: Yeah. >> You know, you're in the Apple fiefdom, you're in the Google fiefdom, you're in the Alexa Amazon fiefdom. How do we get to a point where I can just use my stuff? >> Yeah, this is classic breaking down the silos in the world we talk about in the enterprise. >> Yeah. >> And that's been like a two generation initiative. But you look at the guest I just had on theCUBE, Mary Min and Greg Harris before that. They're a different culture. They don't really give a crap about plumbing. >> Maribel: (laughs) No, no. >> They're producing AR games. they've got security challenges. So their development challenges are very DevOps native. They didn't sign up for DevOps, they just are DevOps cloud native. So, that world is one, then you got the IT guys going, wait a minute, I got to support this new edge device. >> Right. I've got to manage it, I've got to secure it. >> Those worlds are coming together. >> Maribel: Yes, absolutely. >> Your thoughts on Samsung's opportunity; are they poised, do they care about IT; IT care about Samsung? >> You know, Samsung's a big company, right? So it really depends on what division of Samsung you're looking at, whether or not they care about IT. What I would say though, is that they're trying to make moves that will can across the board now, right? Trying to make a cloud that can be secure for your consumer things, but can also be upleveled if you want to make it an enterprise of things cloud as well, right? The AI concept is really about just creating usability. And, I think when we think of DevOps, what we think about is creating better application experiences that can know you, that can respond to you. And this is the whole... we talked about Big Data a few years ago, remember everything was Big Data, right? Well Big Data is now machine learning and AI, which is the natural evolution of it. So, I'm starting to see a lot of things that can be used across Samsung. So, I do think in that regard, they're well positioned. They've got a lot of technology in the home. They've got a lot of presence for the enterprise mobile camp. The IoT camp, I think is a wild card for everybody right now. >> What do you think about Samsung's chances with the cloud they have? Because they sprinkle a little bit of cloud in there. >> Maribel: Yeah. >> They didn't talk about data at all, which I was surprised. They kind of inherently... I mean it's a privacy issue; a security thing. But I love the presentation about the kitchen. >> Maribel: Oh yeah, that was great. >> Because the kitchen is where... >> The family hub for the home, right? >> The family hub, that's where everyone hangs out at the parties, right? Everyone ends up in the kitchen. But it kind of highlights this consumerization trend. They kind of sprinkled cloud, but I'm not seeing cloud... I'm not seeing, like, we're bringing compute to you. So, is that just native for Samsung? Is it a missed opportunity? Are they strong there? What's your thoughts? >> I think you actually started with this whole dialogue of well, does anybody really care about what the background technology is, right? So I think we're definitely a little lighter on the terms and more about what the use cases were. Like, why do you use this? They have semiconductors, they have a cloud, they have security, they have devices. They've got a lot of things, so it's really not about the technology as much as it used to be, right? What I think some of the differences might be is a cloud for what? >> Yeah. >> And they are actually taking the approach of we've got a cloud for things and we know what these things are. So I think they're well positioned in that regard because they will have a specific cloud that's not just a generic cloud. >> I think they want to own the interface. To me, my take away, squithing through the hype is they want to own the interface edge. If you contrast say Samsung to say Alibaba group, which we were just covering them in China, compare them to Amazon, you'll see a contrast in strategies. Obviously, Amazon is just blowing everyone away on a massive scale. And they're not even in China. So, if they were actually in China the numbers would be off the charts. >> Maribel: Yeah, be a different thing, yeah. >> But, lets take Alibaba, for instance, and Samsung. Alibaba's an eCommerce company. But they don't want to be known as an eCommerce company. They're heavily invested in data. That's front and center of their message. Smart cities, they're talking about. They have a big cloud that they're pumping out, so that's much different, for them, they don't have an edge device, ya know? >> Yeah, well.. >> Samsung does, but we don't hear cloud, smart cities. We hear family hubs, smart TV, Bixby. >> But it is an experience world, right? And I think that's been the problem with technology adoption to date. You can't figure out how to use it, right? So the next big evolution of technology isn't necessarily about creating a new thing. It's about being able to use a thing. I think Enjon actually made a great comment when he said we use about 10% of the functionality in our cell phone. Why is that? You don't even know it's there. You don't know how to find it, you don't know how to turn it on and off. Like how do you just simplify what we have today? And if they can do that, that was, or used to be, the hallmark of Apple right? >> John: Right. >> And now people are like, well, even Apple products are kind of of complex compared to what they used to be. So how do we get this back to we can use the stuff that we already have built. >> You're nailing it, Maribel. I totally agree with you 100% because if you look at the big waves of innovation: web 1.0 '90's. Mid '90's, '95. Web 2.0 and then now Blockchain and cloud. >> Absolutely. >> All the winners simplified things, reduced the steps it takes to do something and made it easy to use. >> Yeah. >> That's the magical formula. >> Frictionless. >> FYI, entrepreneurs, simplify, make it easy to use and reduce the steps it takes to find stuff; to do stuff. >> Absolutely. >> That's the magical formula. Okay, so, with that in mind, critical analysis of Samsung and a positive analysis of Samsung, then. What did they do right here and what can they work on? >> Okay, so what they did right: I think they are finally trying to pull together all the different versions of Samsung and allow you to have a couple of things, Bixby and cloud, to go across devices; that's right. What I think they still need to work on is there's still boundaries there. It's not exactly clear like where things start, where things end. And they're a little cryptic on the details right now. >> John: You mean under the hood. >> Under hood, I mean I think devs are here to figure out what's going on. How do I make this happen? So there better be some real serious deep dives in these dev sessions so that they know exactly, when they leave, what they can build with Samsung. And how does it work with non-Samsung things. That's still a huge wild card. >> And obviously, cloud, multi-cloud enterprises, you need infrastructure. >> Yeah. >> I mean, smart cities, smart homes, you need plumbing. You need to have compute power, you need some storage. I'm not hearing any of that here. >> No, I don't think that that was a tone that they were trying to take. I think they've been looking much more high level at, if you're a developer, what experiences could you have. I'd also like to see more about how to help monetization. If you go to IO, you go to WWDC, there's always these big slides about how are we going to make money as developers by using this platform. And so that's something we need to see a little more of. >> I got my Samsung smaller phone. I'm going to have to get the Galaxy, the big one, looking good. The screens are great, the cameras are great. >> The Note 8 is really great. It's a good device. >> They're the one with the pen, that's on the Note. Okay, Maribel, thanks for coming on. Appreciate you sharing your analysis. Quick update, what are you doing now? What are you up to? What are they key research pillars? >> Yeah, everybody's trying to figure out what machine learning and AI mean for them. And then, what are the real use case behind IoT. So, we talked a lot about industrial Iots's, right? Anything else? Is there Iot for GENbiz? We'll have to find out. >> Maribel Lopez, been on theCUBE so many times, she's practically an analyst on theCUBE here. Great to have you come on, really appreciate your insight. Check her out, Lopez Research, the best in the business. Been covering the span of enterprise to IT, to consumerization. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action live here at Moscone West. Exclusive coverage of Samsung Developers Conference. Bringing Augmented reality, virtual reality, all this new user interface to the masses. >> Maribel: All the reality. Everywhere. >> All the reality. This is theCUBE, data reality here on theCUBE, a new TV show. Thanks for watching.