>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we are live here at the Mandalay Bay for exclusive CUBE three-day coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante for all three days, we're on day three, winding down, great show, our next guest is Justin Youngblood, VP of Hybrid Cloud Management with IBM, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Great to have you on, because a lot of the talk, obviously, cloud, we could blockchain, but a lot of under-the-hood production workload stuff still needs to manage with all this stuff. You guys had an announcement on day one on the cloud automation management. Big part of the keynote, so it was kind of a primetime spot. Can you share us, well, why'd you get that great slot, how did you get the great slot, and what's the impact? >> Well, it really all starts with what's happening in the market, and the team's been working hard inside of IBM, we announced IBM Cloud Automation Manager, it was elevated to a tier-one offering, very strategic space for IBM in multi-cloud management. What we know is, every enterprise is now moving towards multi-cloud environments, cloud adoption is well into its maturity, and really, it's 71% of enterprises have three or more clouds, and they need to manage those clouds with a common management platform, and that's what cloud-- >> And it's big paying point too, it's one of those non-sexy items like blockchain, it's like, AI and blockchain took the headlines, but a lot of the blocking and tackling is going on in hybrid right now, so you see that orchestration piece between multi-cloud, little things like latency, security, workload migration, this is what you guys are doing, bringing the IT operations to a modern level, is that kind of the main thing? >> That's exactly right, and there're really two entry points to this, because on the one hand, it is that IT team, when you think of the modern enterprise, every modern enterprise is trying to move faster, trying to get applications out faster, trying to better engage with their customers, essentially trying to digitally transform, be the disruptor instead of the disrupted, and often, they'll look at their IT team and say, "You're not keeping up, you're too slow," so this is an automation and orchestration tool that allows the IT teams to rapidly deploy applications and infrastructure to the line of business and to their devops teams. >> Well, that's the thing, you got developers, not just IT, you got developers and the line of business who have a financial stakeholder, the top line revenue, to make it happen, and you got the movement to true private cloud happening. What's different now for you guys with automation? What's the key unique thing in this announcement that makes it go to the next level? >> Several things there, but no solution is complete from IBM these days without cognitive, and so bringing in those cognitive services and insights to analyze and help optimize the performance of workloads on any cloud environment, and also really to provide an advisor role, prescriptive guidance and recommendations on where to place workloads to optimize performance, cost, compliance right within company policy and security and regulatory environments. >> So we had Mohammed Farooq on earlier, and he was talking about cloud brokerage services, and I wonder, as you enter this market, if you're starting to see different KPIs emerge, the traditional IT operations KPIs, okay, the light on the server's on, it's uptime, planned downtime, unplanned downtime, percentage of my backups that fail, whatever it is, are there new KPIs emerging as people become cloud brokers? >> Yeah, absolutely, and Mohammed's a good friend, we're both Austenites, right, in the same building. >> Dave: Another Austenite! Austin's dominating theCUBE this week! >> We talk regularly, and really, we see a nice synergy because the cloud brokerage tool, which is brokering across the application readiness assessments of putting workloads onto the cloud and then planning and cost analysis and so on, and then the orchestration of actually deploying those workloads, so there's a nice synergy, and then, really, the third leg of the stool in my mind then plays into service management, and having the integration across all those pieces is really important, so being both cloud agnostic for multi-cloud environments, but then also having an open API, an ecosystem that you can enable and plug in with existing tools. >> Now, there was a period of time where IT was almost afraid of automation, but then this cloud thing sweeps over them, are we past that now? >> We are past that, and it's a great point, because sometimes, IT can be afraid of automation, 'cause they can think, "That's threatening my job." But we've got client success stories where we're running our cloud orchestration and hybrid cloud management solutions at massive scale, literally saving dozens of full-time equivalent hours, and what we're finding is these enterprisers saying, "Finally! "Now I can get to the innovation "and the transformative projects "that are on the strategic agenda "rather than working within manual IT processes," so it's really been a win-win. >> And when you talk about that average stat, the average enterprise has, you said three clouds? >> Three or more clouds, 71% of enterprises have three or more clouds. >> Are you excluding SaaS in that number? 'Cause-- >> Excluding SaaS, because you think about-- >> Dave: Alright, so that's infrastructure clouds, right? >> Absolutely, private clouds, public clouds, and a lot of departmental clouds or shadow IT where different cloud services are being consumed even if the IT team may not be managing it. >> So that brings the question, then, where does SaaS play, if I'm a cloud broker, and I've got these corporate edicts, and I've got these KPIs around running the business and transforming the business. How do I apply those edicts to SaaS, and can you help me do that? Is that futures, or is that just sort of a separate island? >> Yeah, it's a little bit futures right now, many times with the cloud management platforms in particular, these tools are used to automate the deployment of the infrastructure, and what's unique in our solution is the full stack application and even the day two operations, but the SaaS applications are tending to come in through a slightly different channel now, over time, I think what we're going to see is all applications, whether they're delivered by the IT team, or from the cloud, need to come into a common-- >> And should CIOs be worried about that? Because each SaaS provider has different infrastructure, some of the different availability profiles, different definitions, different SLAs, that's a whole 'nother problem area to be attacked, I guess. >> No, it is a concern, just the application sprawl, infrastructure sprawls, cloud sprawl, and this is why I think any time we're entering into a new industry, we're going to see that expanse and then back to a convergence, and honestly, I presented with Dave Bartoletti from Forrester this week, and a lot of his insights and things that he writes about and what I spoke about, and what my team did in our sessions was the need for a common management platform because of that sprawl, it's reining in the chaos. >> What are some of your favorite examples, customer case, the early wins? >> Yeah, so a great case study is that Swiss Re, large global insurance company, 60 global offices, this is a company that uses our cloud orchestrator solution with business process manager, their environment includes WebSphere, but also Microsoft Active Directory, ServiceNow, Puppet, et cetera. When they came and used our solution to, really, to automate the deployment of applications to put applications and IT as a service into a self-service catalog for their line of business and development users, at the end of the day, they have automated 45,000 processes executed each month, and literally dozens of offerings into the service catalog now. >> So the IT service management business has been evolving very rapidly, cloud has impacted that, the on-premise ratios are going to probably shift a little bit, but not radically, but then again, the use cases for public cloud are going to be dependent upon the workload, so that's kind of well-defined and discussed. The question I have for you is, from a customer standpoint, the number one competition we're having, and we're seeing, digitally at least, on Twitter and theCUBE is, what does enterprise readiness mean? So I'm an enterprise, and I want to go to the cloud. I have to then evaluate which cloud is best for which workload, but then I also have to put it through the prism of readiness, their table stakes, do they have the table stakes? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Google's got some great machine learning, but the SLAs might not match up, or Amazon's got some great Kinesis for analytics, but I can't run my other thing on that. That's comes up a readiness problem. >> It is a readiness, and I would say, there is no single cloud that is purpose-built for all workloads, and a lot of the messages you heard here at InterConnect this week, even from Ginni Rometty herself, where IBM has the enterprise-ready cloud, and a lot of data points to back that up, including every enterprise that's going to be cognitive, and the way we think about that is cloud and cognitive are two sides of the same coin, a famous quote also from Ginni. But now we're getting into trusted networks and Hyperledger and blockchain, I don't want to get too far offtrack, but it's some-- >> But they'll all bent the change on the disruption side, on the innovation side, and honestly impact some of the blocking and tackling table stakes. >> The blocking and tackling, so that gets down to some of the regulatory concerns and other pieces, which is why we've invested now to have 51 data centers around the world, because of data locality and security concerns that companies have, so there's a lot-- >> Well, I love her line, she's the best, I got to say, very memorable, enterprise strong, made me think of the whole Boston strong thing instilled in my head, 'cause, being from that area. Enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core, those are the three pillars, you can unpack that in every different way, so you guys have to bring that into your offering, so I get the enterprise strong. Data first, how are you guys using the cognitive piece, specifically, in this? Data first, is that an architectural thing? And then where's the cognitive piece fit in? >> Yeah, perfect, so as we architected this solution, it was really important to us to put cognitive at the core. And really, two use cases, primarily, the first is around, as companies go deploying their applications and workloads on the cloud, every application is going to have its downtimes, its slowdowns, its outages, and that impacts end user experience, that's why it matters, it can impact revenue or NPS scores for the company. So the first is a cognitive operations capability, and you can think of that analytics moving from log analytics to quickly pinpoint the root cause of issues, up through predictive analytics to prevent an outage or an issue before it impacts your end users, ultimately into the cognitive domain, which is a true machine learning, and the capabilities that we're working on on our labs now, and that we demonstrated this week at InterConnect, we actually have a chat ops interface for the IT operator to come and interact with a cognitive system that's part of Cloud Automation Manager, and get prescriptive guidance and confidence levels-- >> Going to be a voice-activated Watson, basically, in the future. "Hey, move to cloud nine!" >> So that's the differentiation, right, if I were to push you on that, it's trust, everybody's going to say they have cloud, but like you said, it's a multi-cloud world, and it's the cognitive piece, is that right? It's really the trust and the cognitive piece. >> The cognitive piece is absolutely the number one piece of differentiation that no one has. >> Because a lot of big enterprise hardware and software companies are going to say, "You trust us," people do trust us, that's how they got to be multi billion dollar companies, but talk a little bit more about the differentiation with respect to cognitive. >> Yeah, so that's one aspect of it, and that's just cognitive operations management, and even that is that one level of value. Where I think there's additional value is getting into really letting Watson, and cognitive services, become an advisor to your business, so imagine your smartest IT operator in the business, if Watson can learn from that person, Sally or Jeff, whoever it is, learn from that, and help every IT operator in your business always make the best decision as smart as the smartest subject matter expert is in IT operations, and so this is the learning aspect of cognitive, and in that advisor role now, all of a sudden, a cognitive chat ops interface can begin to provide prescriptive guidance when there's an outage. Or imagine an application or workload going down, and Watson taking automatic action to redeploy the workload on a different cloud that has not been impacted, no interruption of service to the end user, and then come back and say, now let's pinpoint the root cause of the problem and fix that, but I've already address the main point, so-- >> And what's key about that is it's a learning machine model, so you have the domain expertise of the specific use cases, it's not trying to use some sort of vocabulary and map that on through an infrastructure environment or software environment. >> Very plain language, natural language understanding, and it's really, really powerful capability. >> Alright, so the question is, how do customers get access to this, Bluemix storage, is there IBM.com, what's the vehicles for getting this in the hands of customers? >> The easiest way is at IBM.biz/tryibmCAM, so if you go there, it'll take you right into our Bluemix service, and customers can get started right away, we have a free addition that allows customers to get started with the-- >> I know this is a tough personal question, but I'll ask anyway, no one likes to pick who their favorite child is, but what's most exciting about the product from your standpoint, looking at the success of the announcement, obviously, primetime on the keynote, congratulations, but what's the one thing that you get most excited about the product? >> Yeah, the most exciting thing is, it's all about the application. It's all about the application and digital transformation, so, certainly, the cognitive piece, and we've talked about that, but I want to highlight one other thing, which is, we in IBM are providing pre-built automation content from the infrastructure up through full-stack applications and getting into the day two operations, the monitoring, the backup, et cetera, we can orchestrate that end-to-end, unlike anyone in the industry. >> End-to-end is the key word. This is now big part of the architecture. End-to-end cross vendor. >> Exactly. >> And opensource. >> Yep. >> That's kind of the big-- >> Dave: That's what you call automation packs? >> These are the cloud automation packs, exactly, in the past, we called them patterns, we're moving to an open-pattern technology base, and we call 'em cloud automation packs. And I'll just say more about that, we're going to make them available in a marketplace, in the IBM cloud marketplace so clients can come, learn about, discover, try, and buy these automation-- >> Alright, so here's the hard question for you. Well, might be easy for you, hard for me, but as you go end-to-end, which is totally the right way, I believe, that's what everyone wants, end-to-end, but you're crossing horizontal and vertical specialty across multiple vendors, and new things coming, so now 5G comes enables autonomous vehicles, now you got smart cities, now you got Watson trying to learn new environments that I've never seen before in IT. How do you guys prepare for that, what are you guys doing to get out in front of that next wave? >> Yeah, so in the past, I think a lot of applications, and even management tools have been built as monolithic applications. With the Cloud Automation Manager, we built it from the ground up, it's cloud-native, microservices-based, just like a lot of applications out there in the enterprise are bring run, that allows us to be much more composable and flexible than we've ever been in the past, and we augment that with a set of open APIs to integrate with clients' existing tools, you heard me mention the example of integrating with ServiceNow, of course, we can integrate with UrbanCode or other devops tools, APM and monitoring tools, et cetera. >> That's the key, integration is the new table stake. >> That is the new table stake. >> Justin Youngblood, thanks for coming on theCUBE, great, congratulations on the success of your launch, and good luck with the adoption, and we'll see ya out in the marketplace, thanks for coming on theCUBE, Justin, the VP of Cloud Management inside theCUBE, more cloud action, more data action, more predictive content here on theCUBE, more great interviews coming, stay with us, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back.