>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> John: Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with two great guests, Andrew Coward's the GM, Software Defined Networking at IBM and Caroline Chappel. Research Director, Cloud and Platform Services at Analysys Mason. Folks, thanks for coming on. Caroline, good to see you. Andrew, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> You're welcome, it's nice to be here. >> Thank you. >> So software defined networking, love it. Software-defined data center, software defined cloud, all that has been pointing to what is now a reality which is hybrid cloud and the Edge, and soon to be multicloud. This kind of makes networking, again, at the centerpiece. This has been this way for now, at least for five hardcore years, at the center of the value proposition 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 Hat Linux for its analytics, machine learning tools, security, cloud services, and so on. And the networking business is changing very radically at the moment. We're going through kind of massive shift. Not just to 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 what they do. The other thing is the scary numbers, right? But now, there's like 15 billion network-capable devices out there with general computing capabilities. And 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 got applications that even your fridge now, has general compute capabilities. And all of those are expected to connect into the public or private cloud. And so how they connect, where data moves across that really on critical concern to everything that we at IBM do. >> So I have to ask you, I love the word radical change. It gets my attention for certain. What specifically are you referring to in radical change? Because, I mean, I would, I mean, I'm pretty radical that 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 and how does that impact the enterprise? >> Well, right. I think it's about how compute is shifting and how network has to follow. You know, we've been speaking a lot of enterprise accounts and customers. And, you know, it's through COVID and over the last year, we've seen that the ongoing migration into, not just one cloud but many clouds. But we need to think the enterprise you can stop and say, two clouds is enough to be here and to be able to do that. That's not happening. There is no limit to the number of clouds that each enterprise is going into and it's not a coordinated decision, so the radicalism is that the network guys, the cloud architects are being left to pick up the pieces and their job now is to kind of join together applications and data that might be spread in three or four different locations. And that's really, really challenging. And nobody's thinking about things like latency or connectivity, data accountability when these decisions are made. And it is kind of like the business units are allowed to make their own decisions to get it, but corporate itself then has to figure out how all this stuff works. And that's creating a lot of headaches. >> Caroline, If you could chime in on this, because this is kind of like what we're hearing. What's your thoughts? Because I mean, the platform shifting. I mean, five years ago. Oh, 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 the confusion. What's your take on all this radical change? >> Well, I'd like to, to talk about another aspect of the 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, you know 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, what services, what network services they can provide. And I think that is changing the decision points for operators, for enterprises. They're being faced with a very big choice about who do they, who will provide their connectivity services? Will it be an SD-WAN vendor? Who's not necessarily a traditional operator? Would it be a SaSS-y player that's basically just operating after the cloud. And if you look at the services themselves, there's the opportunity for enterprises to build really kind of rich, bespoke connectivity on demand and in a way that they've never had before. And I think that choice is obviously wonderful in one sense, but in another sense, it's pretty scary. And, and as Andrew 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 IT 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 lot of choice, a lot of moving parts, a lot of change. And I think that's contributing to the situation we're finding ourselves in. >> So. First of all, 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 it's hasn't been operationalized. What are the best practices? This is net new. Is it net new? How do I do security? This is all now new questions. So I got to 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 ones that I haven't even mentioned. So I think, you know a lot of things are going to go, for example, I think that the idea of the network as being something fixed, persistent with fixed persistent connections is changing. So a lot of the enterprises I've talked to have said that their corporate networks, of course, they will need corporate networks with fixed VPNs between locations. Yeah, 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 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 more on demand. We'll ask for on demand connectivity. A lot of it is 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 5g. We know is going to be very important to operators in the future. So I think enterprises have got to deal with those data and security and all their best practices. We've got to shift to a much more dynamic, you know connectivity world, where they've got us to the playoffs. You know, what's the terministic on 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 dev ops. That's programmability. That's what we had hoped. Now you've got DevSecOps, all this is now the requirements. What's the bet on IBM side.? You got to make it happen. You got to bring the customers a solution and make it scale and be responsive to those you know, new, dynamically, flexible agile networks. >> Well, that's right. So the bet is that, you know that these applications that are being spent out there in containerize and they're being separated into these clouds and connecting those is what we as IBM have to have to do. And so kind of an example of that, kind of looking at the medical world, right? You think of an application that would today, monitor a patient. What's going on with that patient and all of the senses and so on. Well, the way we see it, the monitor itself, there might be monitoring temperature and heart rate etc. That what actually happens on that device might change moments depending on the patient's condition. That's one part of the application. Another part of that application may live in private data center. A third part of that application may live in the cloud. And depending on what's going on with that patient and what's going on with the ward and everything else. Those things may shift and move around. So, where does that data? Where's that data allowed to move to inform of what are the boundary points for that? How is the reliability, resiliency of our system guaranteed, but 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, new ways of being able to react, dynamically. To both the network, the application and ultimately the unusual patient in this case and that's what kind of is the advantage of the outcome if you like for moving to this new world. >> So what are the implications then of the changes? These are massive changes for the better We're seeing that kind of innovation come from this transformational quick change. 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 can pick that up. I think what enterprises are 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. And it's very easy now for enterprises to through API is you know, we've got a very API different world so it's very easy to say, okay I want this service and I'm just going to go through their API and connect to it. And that's why you get to the situation of multiple, multiple clouds. Now you've got this situation where you've got some companies are talking about needing 50 to 10,000 micro data centers, room closet data centers if you like ,to support some of the things that they want to do, like telemetry ,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 a plan for. You know, how do we get that to you? What's going to provide us with that holistic way that we can put a policy into our plumbing. And it proliferates across, you know 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. >> Andrew, you know, when Caroline's talking, I can't help but kind of throw back to my days of the telephone closet. You know, back in the analog switches. But no, we're talking about a footprint. Radical footprint change too. You know, you need plumbing. Obviously that's a network. It's distributed. We just talked about that at the top of this interview. Now you have the plumbing, you got the footprint and data center could be in a closet, AKA, you know a couple of 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 computer's generalized and it's everywhere and yes, it's in the closet. But as I say, it's also in your fridge, it's also in your medical censor and what loads and what runs on that is it's very intertwined with the network. And the lament, if you like, that network architects, the card architects have today is that they feel like they've lost control. They feel they've 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 from a very early date on how these services are supposed to look. Just the latency of the patients, the data and where the data's supposed to live, where it's allowed to move to. All of those are deeply regulated and deeply controlled. And so making sure that that's aligned with how these applications will actually live and work. Even on a regular basis, sooner there has to be thought about now. An unplanned for so that we can get to the there and not trip up along the way. And then if it's bad enough now with all the different clouds, it's going to be much worse when everything can run a different workload on a minute by minute basis. Right. But that's cool. That's the world we have to find for. >> Okay. Andrew. Caroline. Thank you for your insight. Really appreciated coming on theCUBE. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you >> Okay. This is the cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (cheerful music playing)