>>from >>around the globe. It's the cube with >>Digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021 virtual. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here with two great guests. Andrew cowards. GM Software defined networking at IBM and Caroline chappelle Research director, cloud and platform services at analysis mason folks. Thanks for coming on Caroline. Good to see you Andrew. Thanks for coming on. Uh, thank you. >>Welcome. Nice to >>begin. So >>software defined networking love it suffered to find data center suffered to find cloud. All that has been pointing to what is now a reality which is hybrid cloud and the edge and soon to be multi cloud. This kind of makes networking again at the center pieces has been this way for now at least for five hardcore years at the center of the value proposition and discussion and certainly networking is super relevant. Why is networking now more important than ever for IBM? >>Well, to your point, I think networking is weaved into pretty much everything we touch from red hot limits to analytics, machine learning tools, security card services and so on. And the networking business is changing very radically. At the moment we're going through a massive shit um, not just the cloud, but the desegregation of networking products that you know, you think of being very tight and integrated are actually being separated into their constituent parts, distribution of applications and data across multiple clouds, ensuring that the products really have industry leading capabilities so that networking is weaved into into what they do. Um, the other thing is, you know, this is kind of scary numbers, right? But there's now over 15 billion um, network capable devices out there with general compute capabilities. So I don't mean like really dumb things but things that are now we call smart, like a smart car, a medical center that's that's got application, even your fridge now has general compute capabilities and all of those are expected to connect into public or private cloud and so how they connect where data moves across that really on critical concern to to everything that we had IBM do. >>So I have to ask you love the word radical change, gets my attention for certain for certain um what specifically are you referring to in radical change? Because I mean I would mean I've pretty radical. The COVID has hit everybody and I think everyone woke up and never thought 100 of the workforce would be working remotely. So you know, there is radical kind of macro conditions. What specifically though about networking, would you say is radical? How is that impact enterprise >>Well, right. I think it's about how computers is shifting and how network has to follow. Um We've been speaking with lots of enterprise accounts customers and um you know, through covid and over the last year we've seen that the ongoing migration into not just one cloud, but many clouds. Um and you think that enterprises can stop saying to clouds is enough going to be here on the other there, That's not happening. There is no limit to the number of clouds that um each enterprises going into and it's not a coordinated decisions. So the radical list of this is that the network guys, the cloud architects are being left to pick up the pieces um and their job now is to kind of join together applications and data that might be spread in three or four different locations. Um and and that's really, really challenging and nobody's thinking about things like latency connectivity, um data portability when when these decisions are made. Um It's kind of like the business units are allowed to make their own decisions here. But the corporate itself then has to figure out how all this stuff works and that's creating a lot of headaches >>Carolina. If you can chime in on this because this is kind of like what we're hearing, what's your thoughts? Because I mean the platform shifting five years ago, so go move to the cloud lift and shift now. The conversation is hyper focused on cloud integration at scale with kind of the features that enterprise really need. That's that's the confusion. What's your take on all this radical change? >>Well, I'd like to talk about another aspect of the sort of radical change here, which I think is part of the story, which is the radical change for the network itself. So the network itself is, as Andrew said, becoming desegregated into hardware and software and really becoming a software application, if you think about it that runs on the cloud itself, and that means you can distribute the network in a very different way than you could in the past. And what that's really affecting is who can provide a network, how they can provide it and what services, what network services they can provide. And I think that is changing the decision points for operate for enterprises. They're being, they're being faced with a very big choice about who do they, who do they, who will provide their connectivity services, will it be an SD one and then who's not necessarily a traditional operator? Will it be a will it be a sassy player that's basically just operating out of the cloud? And if you look at the services themselves, I mean there's there's the opportunity for enterprises to build really kind of rich bespoke connectivity on demand and in in a in a way that they've never had before. Uh and I think that choice is obviously wonderful in one sense, but in another sense it's pretty scary and as and you said it's not these decisions are not being taken particularly in a coordinated way. You know, you'll have your traditional network guys often very embedded with the lines of business and then you'll have the I. T. Guys all going to the cloud and these two parts of an enterprise don't necessarily even talk to each other in terms of how they're procuring their network services. So a lot of choice, a lot of moving parts, a lot of change and I think that's that's contributing to the situation we're finding ourselves in. >>So you first great insight, I want to just double down on that one point around radical change because what you just laid out is kind of the institutional lock in or the way they've been operating things before, you mentioned lines of business being embedded with the network guys. So you have radical change, So that's a disruption. So what's the disruption look like from your perspective, because now you've got more choice, but this has been operationalized, one of the best practices. This is news that net new. How do I do security? This is all now new questions. So I gotta ask you what's the disruption and what's it mean for the enterprise networks over the next couple of years going forward? >>Well, I think that there are a lot of disruptions, but I think one of the uh and ones that I haven't even mentioned, so I think a lot of things are going to go, for example, I think that the idea of the network is being something fixed, persistent with fixed persistent connections um is changing. So a lot of enterprises I've talked to have said that uh corporate networks of course they will need corporate networks with fixed VPNS between locations because they've got an awful lot of legacy they've got to support, but a lot of the new stuff that's coming along, a lot of the IOT driven stuff, a lot of the changes around the edge and an operation operational process automation and that kind of thing will actually be be more on demand. We'll ask for on demand connectivity. A lot of it is uh it will the applications themselves run on the cloud and not just on one cloud, but as Andrew said on many, many distributed clouds. So you've got to think about zero trust security because you are basically spinning up these connections on demand, a lot of mobile will come in five G, we know is going to be very important to operators in in the future. So I think enterprises have got to deal with those data, that data and security and all their best practices have got to shift to a much more dynamic uh, connectivity world where they've got a playoff, what's deterministic and what's, what's a network that's just going to be on demand there when they need it and shut down when they don't. >>That's a great point. Andrew. I want you to weigh in on the IBM impact because what we just heard was application driven, that's devops, that's program ability, that's what we had hoped. Now you got Deb sec. Ops, all this is now the requirements. What's the bet on IBM side? You gotta gotta make it happen. You gotta bring the customers a solution and make it, make it scale and be responsive to those, you know, new dynamically flexible agile networks. >>Well, that's right. So, so the better is that these applications that are being split up there in containerized and they're being separated into these clouds and connecting those is what we as IBM has has to do. And so kind of an example of that kind of looking in the medical world, right? You think of an application that would today monitor a patient, uh what's going on with our patients in all of the senses and so on. Well, the way we see it, the monitor itself, uh that might be monitoring temperature and heart rate etcetera. That what actually happens on that device might change moment to moment depending on the patient's condition. That's one part of the application, another part of the application. They live in private data center, a third part of that application. They live in the cloud. And depending on what's going on with that patient and what's going on with the war and everything else, those things may shift and move around. So where does that data? Where's that data allowed to move to and from? And what are the boundary points for that? How is the the, the reliability resiliency of that system guaranteed across many disparate parts of what's going on there, All of those things end up being a very vertically integrated solution. But fundamentally, we've got a very different way. A new ways of being able to react dynamically to both the network, the application and ultimately, the unusual patient in this case is uh use case and that and that's what is the vanishing of the outcome, if you like, from moving to this new world. >>So, what are the implications, then, of the changes? These are massive changes for the better? Um We're seeing that kind of innovation come from this transformational change. Um Hybrid, Cloud and Edge is coming. You mentioned Caroline talked about that too. What do you guys think about the implications and how enterprises specifically can prepare for these changes? >>Okay, well, I I can pick that up. I think uh what enterprises uh looking for at the moment is how do they get a holistic view of everything that's underneath them? I mean, I think the cloud providers individually are abstracting away as much of the network as they possibly can. They want it to appear to developers just as some kind of plumbing. Um and it's very easy now for enterprises to through a P. I. S. You know, we've got a very api driven world so it's very easy to say okay I want this service and I'm just going to go through the A. P. I. And connect to it. And that's why you get to the situation of multiple multiple clouds. Now you've got, you've got this situation where you've got some, some companies are talking about needing 50-10,000 uh micro data centers, broom closet data centers if you like to support some of the things that they want to do, like telemetry to pick up telemetry from rental cars, for example. So what they really need is to look at all that connectivity just as plumbing, just as we don't worry about how electricity is being delivered to us, that's kind of how they want to do connectivity. So I think they want that view, they want that, okay, I want to treat my network as one virtual thing no matter how many different points of plumbing there are underneath. And it's getting to that point that I think they've really got to think about and plan for how do we get that view, what's going to provide us with that holistic way and we can put a policy into the into our plumbing and it it proliferates across all our applications and so on. I think that's a very difficult thing to achieve at the moment but it's certainly the way enterprises need to start thinking about things >>and you know when Caroline's talking I can't help but kind of throwback to my days of the telephone closet, you know back in the analog switches but we're talking about a footprint radical footprint change to you. You need plumbing. I'll see that's a network, it's distributed. We just talked about that the top of this interview now you have the plumbing, you've got the footprint of data center could be in a closet A. K. A. You know a couple devices powering an edge and the edge could be big small medium extra large. Right? I mean it's all now radically changed. This is reality now. What's your take on these implications and how do people prepare? >>Well that's right. It's really the computers generalist and it's everywhere and yes it's in the closet but it's also in your fridge is also a new medical sensor and what loads and what runs on that is it's very intertwined with the network and the lament if you like. That. The network architects the architects have today is that they feel like they've lost control um They feel like lost control of exactly what different business groups are doing. How these applications are playing out and shout out to them I guess for them is really that they need to be involved in the very early um date of how these services is supposed to look just the latest implications. The data where the data is supposed to live, where it's allowed to move to. All of those are deeply regulated and deeply control and so making sure that that's aligned with how these applications will actually live and work uh on the basis of something that has to be thought about now um and planned for so that we can we can get to the there and then not trip up along the way. And if it's bad enough now with all the different clouds it's going to be much worse when when everything can run a different workload on a minute by minute basis. Right? That's what that's that's the the world we have to find. >>Okay. Andrew Caroline. Thank you for your insight. Really appreciate it coming on the cube. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. >>Thanks very much. Okay. >>Okay. This is the Cube coverage of IBM think 2021 um, John for your host. Thanks for watching. >>Mm.