(melodious music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're a virtual this year. But we'll be in real life soon, right around the corner, as we come out of COVID. We got a great guest, a CUBE alumni, Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow VP, CTO for IBM automation. Jerry, great to see you. Been on since almost since the early days of theCUBE. Good to see you >> Yeah, John. Thrilled to be back again. Thank you. >> What I love about our conversations, one is you're super technical. You've got patents under your belt. You're on the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You're constantly riding the wave. And also you're a creator of a great podcast called "The Art of Automation", which is the subject of this discussion. As automation becomes central in cloud operations and Hybrid Cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry. So great to see you. First give us a little background for the folks that may not know you, about your history with IBM and who you are. >> Yeah. So thanks John. So I'm Jerry Cuomo. I've been with IBM for about three decades and I started my career at IBM research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet. And I've been incredibly fortunate as you mentioned, to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades, internet software, middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of WebSphere software. I recently helped launch the IBM blockchain initiative and now all about AI powered automation. Which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI in graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, really enjoying the topic. >> It's funny you mentioned AI in graduate school. I was really kind of into AI when I was an undergraduate and get a master's degree in Computer Science. I kind of went the MBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the eighties during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you got this confluence of computer science and engineering AKA now DevOps, DevSecOps, coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts. Whether it's AI and systems and computer science and engineering into automation. Could you share your view on this? Because you're in a unique position, you've been there done that, now you're on the cutting edge. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely John. And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new. That literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era, right? So automation has been around and in its simplest form, automation whether it was back then, whether it was in the eighties or today it's about applying technology that uses technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us, humans. But now what we're seeing is AI coming into the picture and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, automation is this two-step dance of both eliminating repetitive mundane tasks that help reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time, but also helps. It's not about taking jobs away at that point, it's a sentence of two-step dance. That's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills. And to use automation, to help augment our skills. And we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with AI, automation is evolving with technology. >> And it's interesting too, as a student of the history of the computer industry, as you are and now a creator with your podcast, which we'll get to in a second. You're starting to see the intersection of these concerts and not bespoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation, digital transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts, they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone, but they work better together. Transformation. And it is the innovation, innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skillset into higher integrated areas. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, right on there. When you talk about transformation, jeez, look around us. The pandemic has made, transformation and specifically digital transformation, the default. So everything is digital. Whether it's ordering a pizza, visiting a doctor through telemedicine, or this zoom WebEx based workplace that we live in. But picture a telemedicine environment, talking about transformation and going digital. With 10 X more users, they can't hire 10 X more support staff. And think about it. I forgot my password, does this work on my version of the Apple iPhone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks are lit up, right? So as they scale digitally, automation is the relief that that comes into play, which is just in time. So the digital transformation needs automation. And John, I think about it like this, businesses like cars have become computers. So they're programmable. So automation software just like in the cars, it makes the car self-driving. I think about the Tesla model three, which I recently test drove. So with this digital acceleration, digital opens the door for automation. And now we can muse about self-driving business. We can muse about maybe that's step one, right? That's the remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot. So it doesn't need us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate. Digital is the peanut butter automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. >> Yeah. That's a really interesting insight. And I was just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self-driving business you're implying, you said the business is a computer. So if you just think about that mind blowing concept for a second. If it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So, okay. Let's go in the old days you had a windows machine and you had office, which was a system software, applications software construct. If you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red Hat and IBM will kind of come working together. Kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hat could, because they're not breaking system company. So if Hybrid Cloud is the system, edge, hybrid, then you got the application suite is all software for the business. >> That's right. That's right. And if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands for, it's Hybrid Cloud and think Red Hat as kind of the core element of that with OpenShift and AI. And both of those really matter in terms of automation and maybe I'll come back to the Hybrid Cloud or Red Hat thing in a second, but let's just talk about Watson and AI, which is the application. You mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. AI could help scale automation. And the trick is, is that automation sometimes gets stuck. It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured. So there's a lot of structured data in your organization. With that, we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data, unstructured, noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what AI can start to do, AI and its subordinates, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. We can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward. So that's the AI part. You mentioned Red Hat and, and Hybrid Cloud Park. Well, think about it this way, when you shop, how many stores do you... You don't just shop in one store, right? You go to specialty stores to pick up that special catsup, I don't know or mustard. (audio cuts) In one store and maybe do shopping in another store. Customers using clouds John, aren't very different. They have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads in Google, involving search and AI related to search. And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things. From that perspective, that's a view of hybrid. Customers today, take that shopping analogy. They're going to be using Salesforce or Servicenow, IBM cloud, they have a private cloud. So when you think about automating that world, it's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud. The Hybrid Cloud is a reality. And how do you make sense of that? Because when an average customer has five clouds, how do you deal with five things? How do you make it easy, normalize? And that's what Red hat really does. >> It's interesting. I'll just share with you though. When I interviewed Arvin, who is now the CEO of IBM when he was at Red Hat summit 2019 in San Francisco. Before he made the acquisition, I was peppering him with questions. Like, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves cloud. So he was smiling. He just wanted to say it, he wanted to just say it. And I think Red hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the OS of the middleware, which is now software which is software defined business. And this kind of is the talk of your views. Now you have a podcast called "Art of Automation". We want to get that in there, for the folks watching. Search for the podcast, "Art of Automation". This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories, from this phenomena. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? >> Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customer. So we're hearing from customers that AI and automation is where they're investing in 2021. For all the reasons we briefly mentioned, and IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made AI powered automation a priority. But John, in the pursuit of making it a priority, I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion, and their stories. And I said, we can't keep this to ourselves. We can't keep this locked away. We have to share it. We have to let it out. So basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then, we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside. Starting with customers. We had Klaus Jensen who is the CIO of Memorial Clones Kettering Hospital to talk about automation in healthcare. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them, about automation is not going to take the place of doctors. But automation will help better read x-rays and look at those shades of gray on the x-ray and interpret it much better than we can. And be able to ingest all of the up-to-date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment. So the two working together are better than any individual. Carol Polson recently joined me to talk, and she's the CIO for Cooperators, to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories too. So John, with that, a bunch of IBM, great IBM fellows like Rama Akkiraju, who is one of Forbes top 20 women in AI research. Talking about AI ops. And also Ruchir Puri talking, and Ruchir has been working on Watson since jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching AI to code and all the modern programming languages. And really automating application modernization and the like. Four keyed episodes in, we have those under our belt. About 6,000 downloads so far. So it's coming along pretty well. Thanks for asking, John. >> The key is you're a content creator now, as well as a fellow. And this is the democratization, as we say direct to audience, share those stories. Also here, I think you released an ebook. Tell us a little quickly about that. We've got one minute left, give a quick plug for the ebook. >> The book echoes the podcast. Chapters relate to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts. And I really suggest you go out and check it out. >> All right, Jerry Cuomo. IBM fellow VP, CTO, IBM automation. Also a content creator, podcast "Art of Automation." Jerry, we're going to list it out on our Silicon angle and our cube sites, gets you some extra love on that. Love the podcast, love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. Thank you so much for having me again, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Here for IBM Think 2021. Thanks for watching.

>>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 a year host of the cube. We're virtual this year in real life. Soon, right around the corner as we come out of code, we've got a great guest cube alumni jerry, cuomo IBM fellow V P C T O for IBM automation jerry, Great to see you uh nonsense got almost since the early days of the cube. Good to see you, >>john thrilled to be back again. Thank you >>what I love about our conversations. One is your super technical, you've got patents under your belt during the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You constantly riding the wave and also your creator of a great podcast called the art of automation, which is the subject of this discussion as automation becomes central in cloud operations and hybrid cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry so great to see you. Uh First team is a little background for the folks that may not know you about your history with IBM and who you are. >>Yeah, so thanks john, So I'm I'm jerry Carrillo, I've been with IBM for about three decades and I started my career at IBM research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet and I've been incredibly fortunate, as you mentioned to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades. Internet software middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of web sphere software, uh I recently helped launch the IBM Blockchain initiative and now all about aI powered automation, which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI and graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, you know, really you know, enjoying the topic. >>You know, these funny, you mentioned aI in graduate school, I was really kind of into a I when I was an undergraduate and get a masters degree in computer science, I kind of went the NBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the eighties during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you've got this confluence of computer science and engineering A. K A. Now devops sec cops coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts, whether it's A I and systems and computer science and engineering into the automation. Could you share your view on this because you're in a unique position, you've been there, done that now. You're on the cutting edge with your thoughts. >>Yeah, absolutely, john And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new, literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era. Right? So automation has been around and and in the simplest form automation, whether it was back then, um whether it was in the 80s or today, it's about applying technology and that that performs, that uses like technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us humans. Right? So, but now what we're seeing is a I coming into the picture and and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, you know, automation is this two step dance of both eliminating repetitive, mundane tasks. That helped reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time but also helps. It's not about taking jobs away at that point, as I said, it's a two step dance, that's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills right? And and to use automation to help augment our skills and we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with a I automation is evolving with technology >>and it's interesting to its you know, as a student of the history of the computer industry as you are and now a creator with your podcast which we'll get to in a second, you're starting to see the intersection of these concepts are not bespoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation. Digital, transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone but they work better together transformation. And is the innovation innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skill set into higher integrated areas. Can you share >>your john Yeah no right on there when you talk about transformation, jeez look around us, the pandemic has made transformation and specifically digital transformation the default so everything is digital. You know whether it's ordering a pizza, you know visiting a doctor through telemedicine or or this zoom webex based workplace that we live in. But picture of telemedicine environment right? Talking about transformation and going digital With 10 x more users. They can't hire 10 x more support staff and think about it I forgot my password. Um Does does this work on my version of the Apple iphone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks or lit up? Right. So uh as they scale digitally automation is the relief that that comes into play which is which is just in time. Right? So the digital transformation needs automation and john I think about it like this um businesses like cars are have become computers right? So they are programmable. So automation software just like in the cars it makes you know the car self driving? I think about the Tesla model three which I recently test drove. Um so with this digital acceleration digital opens the door for automation And now we can use about a self driving business. We can use about uh maybe that's step one, right? That's the um remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot so it doesn't eat us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate Digital is the peanut butter, automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. >>You know, that's a really, that's a really interesting insight and I will just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self driving business, you're implying, you said the computer, the business is a computer. So if you just just think about that mind blowing concept for a second, if it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So, Okay, let's go in the old days at a Windows machine and you had office, which is a system software, applications, software construct. Okay, If you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red hat and IBM kind of come working together. Kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hackett because they're not bring system company. So if hybrid cloud is the system mm hybrid, then you got the applications suite is all software for the That's >>right. That's right. And if you, you know, if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands words, hybrid cloud and and think red hat as as, you know, kind of the core element of that with open shift in a I right. And both of those really matter in terms of automation and maybe I'll come back to the hybrid cloud and red hat thing in a second. Let's just talk about you know Watson and Ai, you know, which is the application and you mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. You know a I could help scale automation. And the trick is is that ai automation sometimes gets stuck right? It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured. Right? So there's a lot of structured data in your organization and it it with that we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data unstructured noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what a I can start to do a I. And its subordinates, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. We can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward. Right? So that's that's the way I part you mentioned Red hat and and hybrid cloud part. We'll think about it this way. When you shop, how many stores do you don't just shop in one store? Right. You you go to specialty stores to pick up that special uh ketchup, I don't know or must store and maybe do shopping another store, customers using clouds john aren't very different. You know, they have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads and google involving search and a I related to search, right? And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things. Right? So from that perspective, that's a view of hybrid, you know, customers today, you know, take that shopping analogy, they're going to be using sales force or service Now, IBM cloud, they have a private cloud, right? So, when you think about automating that world, All right. It's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud, right? So the hybrid cloud is a reality. Um and how do you make sense of a high of that? Right, Because when when an average customer has five clouds, How do you deal with five things? Right. How do you make it easy normalize? And that's what red hat really >>does. It's interesting. I just just share with you the and I interviewed Arvin um who is now the ceo of IBM when he was at Red Hat some in 2019 in SAn Francisco before he made the acquisition here that I was, I was peppered with questions like you know, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves clouds. So so he was smiling, he just wanted to say it, I wanted to just say it and I think Red Hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the Os >>yes of the middle >>where which is now software which is software to find business. And this kind of is the talk of your, your your views. Now you have a podcast called Art of automation. Want to get that in there for the folks watching uh search for the podcast, Art of automation. This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories from this phenomenon. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? >>Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customers. So we're hearing from customers that Ai and automation is where they're investing in 2021. Um for all the reasons we briefly mentioned and and IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made a I powered automation of priority but john in the pursuit of making it a priority. I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion and their stories. And I said we can't keep this to ourselves, we can't keep this locked away, we have to share it, we have to let it out. So, so basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside, starting with customers, we had claus Jensen who is the ceo of memorial clones Kettering hospital to talk about automation and health care. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them about. Automation is not going to take the place of doctors, but automation will help better read um x rays and look at those shades of gray on the X ray and interpret it much better than we can and be able to ingest all of the up to date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment. Right. So the two working together or better than any individual carol Poulsen recently joined me to talk and she's the C. I. O. For cooperators to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories to uh so john with that a bunch of IBM great IBM fellows like Rama Agra jew, who is one of Forbes top 20 women in AI research, talking about Ai ops and also Russia near pori talking and Russia has been working on Watson since jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching ai to code and all the modern programming languages and really automating application modernization and the like uh, 14 episodes in we have those under our belt, About 6000 downloads so far. So it's it's coming along pretty well. Thanks. >>Thanks for being done. Yeah. The key is your your content creator now as well as a fellow and this is the democratization, as we say, direct to audience, share those stories also here. And thank you released an e book. Tell us a little quickly about that. We've got one minute left, give a quick plug. >>The book echoes the podcast chapters relate to the, to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available um, and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts and uh I really, you know, suggest you go out and check it out. >>Alright, jerry, cuomo IBM fellow VPC T IBM automation um also a content creator podcast, art of automation, jerry. We're gonna lift it listed on our silicon angle and our cube sites. Get you some extra love on that. Love the podcast. Love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much for having me again, john >>Okay. I'm John Fryer with the Cube here for IBM think 2021. Thanks for watching.