[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM hi I'm Stu Minuteman and this is the cubes coverage of IBM think 2020 the digital experience we talked to IBM executives their partners and their customers really thrilled to welcome back one of our cube alumni he has a new role since the last time he was on the cube at an event Jim white Hersey is now the president of IBM of course former CEO of Red Hat Jim pleasure to see you thanks so much for joining us hey it's great to be back hope you're doing well we are all trying to stay safe we miss seeing you and the team in person had a great digital event with the Red Hat team last week for summit of course I love you know either going to San Francisco or my backyard here in Boston from it but the thing we've been saying is we are now together even when we're apart so so many changes going on of course the global pandemic impacting everyone and the keynote you and the other IBM executive talking about you know really how it's helping IBM solidify what they believe their their decisions are and the technology direction so you know not a big vivid or change but Jim really want to get your feedback as to what advice you have for your customers where should they be investing worst they be slowing down how should they be thinking about their IP spend in today's world yeah so first off you know our hybrid cloud strategy which IBM and you know Red Hat now combined have been on for quite a long time has been all about flexibility resilience in an unknown future I think there were ever a time where having flexibility is important it's now so you know we have had clients saying hey I can use the cloud because all of a sudden with work at home I have huge increases in demand we find others that say wow I was using the cloud but I have a reduction in absolute demand so I want to pull those workloads back I'm gonna run premises say the marginal dollars so you have people kind of doing very different things than we thought we would be doing this month and going forward through the year and so having an architecture that's built for change it's certainly hybrid cloud architectures a part of that is I think being born out here as people are trying to understand new ways of working and certainly with IBM you know with some of the technologies we have around AI with helping various industries as they're all volumes increased as people are you know changing tickets or have more questions and our ability to help people scale up AI to address those so they're not trying to add people in a very difficult time you know just broadly you know our platforms run some of the most mission critical systems so keeping those systems up going and being resilient and with thousands of things CEOs and CIOs have to worry about you know knowing that you have a partner that's gonna keep your most important systems up and running are all things that we do every day and I think that value shows through even more right now yeah absolutely we've been hearing plenty of reports customers as they you know might have been thinking about how fast they move or how do they leverage cloud pods an important piece of what they need to be doing how does the combination of IBM and Red Hat differentiate from some of the other cloud offerings both cloud Nai across the industry today yeah sure well let me start off with cloud and then I'll talk about how AI complements and accelerates that that strategy so what's different about what IBM is doing is we have a vision that the best architecture is a choice full horizontal architecture where you can run your application anywhere but it's not just about running it now you know clouds are now becoming internet themselves a source of innovation via various api's with functionality behind those so in order to consume innovation learn ever it might come from you have to have flexibility to be able to move your work and so IBM is unique in saying hey we're not just a cloud provider we're actually providing a platform that runs across any of the major cloud providers and so we make that real by having the Red Hat platform OpenShift is a core part of what we do I think secondly as having the platform's great but it's all about having the platform so you can consume innovation to deliver business value and iBM has injected that with a whole series of capabilities whether that's being able to pull data and information out of you know existing workloads to the whole AI portfolio to help people really build a cognitive Enterprise and inject intelligence and AI into business processes so they can build you know a different intelligent kind of AI infused set of business processes or in our new businesses so the combination of a horizontal platform going to run anywhere with the ability whether it's with software or with services capability to add on top we can now help you leverage that we can help you take that Ferrari he built out for a drive to help you build new sources of value right one of the big discussion points this week has been edge computing a lot of discussion it's you know much earlier in the adoption and maturation of the ecosystems compared to what we were talking about for cloud so what's important with edge how our BM and RedHat going to extend what they've been doing to edge type of deployment well edge becomes an extension of the data center you know I think there was a period of time when we thought about computers as individual things and now we've had this idea of a data center is where computing happens and then they're you know thin devices like phones or whatever kind of out in the ether the tether back but you know as the Internet of Things continues to expand as the ability of computing technology towards the edge you know continues to grow with technology advances as 5g continues to expand out and you know abroad the ability to have use cases of computing at the edge just increase it increases so whether that's autonomous driving is an obvious major use case where they'll be massive amounts of you that you can't handle the latency of taking all that compute back to the data center to you know how you're making sure the paint finish that a factory is putting on a you know a piece of metal is being done you know correctly and optimally and environmentally efficiently all those things are far sensing at the edge and computing at the edge to be economic but here's the issue you don't want to have to develop a whole new infrastructure of software and you'll be able to do that a whole different set of developers with different skill sets and different rules on different infrastructure so what we're doing with this platform I talked about when I said this platform runs everywhere it's not just that it runs on the major public clouds or in your data center or bare metal or virtualized it runs all the way out to the edge now as soon as you get out to the edge you have a whole new set of management challenges because the types of applications are different how they temper hether back are different so we are working with large enterprises and with telcos not only on Bhaiji rollout but also edge infrastructure and the management tooling to be able to have an application run in the factory in an effective efficient safe way but then be able to be tethered all the way back to bringing data back for analytics in the data center so we've made some really exciting announcements on what we're doing with both industrial enterprise customers on edge computing and then how we're working with telcos to bring that to life because a lot of that obviously gets integrated back into the core telco infrastructure so this idea of edge computing and mobile edge computing are critical to the future of you know of computing but importantly they're critical to the future of how enterprises are going to operate that value going forward and so you know we've taken a real leadership position around that given that we have the core infrastructure but we also understand you know our clients and you know industry verticals and business processes so we could kind of come at it from both angles and really bring that value quickly to our all right and Jim what's the role of open source there you know one of the bigger points that was talked about at Summit last week was the I believe it's the advanced cluster management for cloud and it was some IBM people and some IBM technology came in to Red Hat and they've opened forced it we're just talking about edge computing and telecommunications service providers I remember talking with you and the team you know back at OpenStack summits with network functions fertilization open source was a big piece of it so where does open play in these ecosystem discussions well I should say this is one of the really exciting things about the the marriage of Red Hat and IBM is in Red Hat has deep capability and open source and delivering open source platforms and has been doing that for two decades now in IBM's always been a large participant in open source but has never really delivered platforms right it's always infused open source components in other kind of solutions and so by bringing the two together we can truly leverage the power of open source to help enterprises and telcos consume open source at scale to really be able to take advantage of this massive innovation is happening and so in particular you know we're seeing in telco exactly what we saw happened in the data center which is people did have these vertical stacks and the data center it was the unix's you know of the past where applications were tied to the operating systems tied to the hardware the same thing exists in telco infrastructure now and the telcos understand this idea the value of a horizontal platform so how do you have a commodity yet infrastructure underneath so hardware with an open source infrastructure so people can feel confident they're not locked into one vendor so also can feel confident that they can drive feature set that they need into these platforms and so the idea that open kind of almost think of it as Oh Linux but for data centers are now Linux for a 5g which is a combination of OpenStack on the virtualized side OpenShift brunetti ECM containers from a container of perspective be able to bring that to telcos and 5g rollouts allows them to separate the in functionality which sits in an application whether that's a virtualized application or a container and be able to confidently be able to run that on open infrastructure is something that open-source is doing today in telco and the same way it disrupted you know traditional data center infrastructure over the last couple decades and then IBM can both bring that with services capability as well as a whole set of value-added services kind of further up the stack which makes the open source infrastructure usable you know in a manageable cost-effective way today and so that's why we're so excited about especially what we could do with edge because we're bringing the same disruption we brought to the data center 20 years ago and we can do it in a safe secure reliable and manageable way all right well Jim thank you so much for the updates congratulations on all the accomplishments of the Red Hat team last week and the IBM team this week great thank you it's great to be back and I look forward to seeing you again live in the not-too-distant future absolutely until we're back in person the cube bringing you IBM think the digital experience on Stu minimun and as always thank you for watching the queue [Music] you