(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody you're watching theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson this morning. Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system. (Dave laughing) >> Thought it was something fake. >> But it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile and Naga Chakravarthy is the Chief Digital Officer at iOpex. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> Next, so John, (commentator booming) so okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that S0 let's just give him a second here. >> (Commentator) Three different tracks >> I think it's pretty loud. Probably coming through. Usually we don't get that. >> It's live. >> But, it is live. So John, we, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title's, Director of product and technology. Obviously you're here 'cause you have an affinity to automation. But talk about your role and how automation fits into it. >> Sure. Well, I'm the director of product and technology and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So I'm here to learn about, from these experts and all these leaders within the UiPath and from our vendors as well. >> Okay. Now tell us about iOpex. So kind of an interesting name. Where'd that come from? I think cloud. When I think opex, but, get rid of my cap. Where's the name come from and what do you guys do? >> Actually we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the whole team comes from a service background and then I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, you know the dependency on people was also increasing. And we thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, you know, I would say iOpex is currently at 3.0 and if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me from operation excellence that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. >> So the market just went right, right to you guys you were ahead of the game. And then, wow, now, >> I have to brag that we fortunately named it Opex, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. >> Got it. >> So, so John, where did, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did, was it the, was it the, the merger? Take us through that. >> Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOpex. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. Proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-mobile enterprise. Not having any experience within automation as we had discussed before usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners iOpex being main critical partner in that evolution. And so iOpex came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green is that, you know, we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shoutouts here. Giao Duong, John Lowe and our CIO Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOpex, UiPath to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, I'll wait. >> Wait. No, it's okay. So you went, you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program, where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOpex to get that in place. And once we have that in place I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program. That's incredible. And we're a large company and we'll, I mean we're just starting so it's going to be fun. >> So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroot effort and then the COE comes later? How do you typically recommend approaching it? >> I think the fact that we started very small there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we are solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation, right? And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process, entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So, which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to have, when you have to have evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified let's say if you have to go to different departments it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments' problem statements and how when you, when you navigate it you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit. And when it comes to benefit, right? You need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem. So somebody internally within T-Mobile we were able to use very nice, you know John's team, you know, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation. And slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggyback and scale it bigger. >> So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyper scale cloud providers or automation platforms from UiPath, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else there are organizations like iOpex and you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, >> Yeah. >> How does that business model from an iOpex perspective work do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it a, is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of, okay now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, in the, from a business perspective, iOpex wants to do as much as it can a value for T-mobile because that's what, that's the business they're in. But, so tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, So I'll say real fast that, yeah iOpex is actually part of the T-mobile team. They are embedded. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> We work with them daily. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> Right. They had the expertise they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure there. >> Absolutely. Let me add one more point to it. See if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile I would say it's a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you there was a natural way to get embedded, you know as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So, which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. >> Vellante: I got a lot of questions. >> John: Yeah. >> John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. >> Yes. >> What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding, >> Yep. >> And maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I, if you could, Cause a lot of people ask me well how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative line of business? >> So those executives were from the IT team. >> Vellante: Okay. For sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and you know a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have, you know, Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. >> How do you choose, I got so many questions I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? >> I think it's a combination, right? One fundamentally guiding principle that we always look at is let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that gets executed in the systems of record, in the form of workflow. And there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath, you will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere. But you also have to look at why is this clutter happening, and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together. And that's when you'll start deciding, hey this is repetitive in nature, this is going to scale, this is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard and that scorecard naturally drives the, you know decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? >> So I was going to ask you how you visualize it. You visualize it through, I guess, understanding of the organization, anecdotal comments, research digging, peeling the onion, and then you do some kind of scorecard like approach and say, okay these are the high, high opportunity areas. Okay. So combination. Got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before, big organizations that I know they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio the applications have dependencies on each other. And then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications. Any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? >> So we actually have a change management team and we make sure that before we go forward with anything it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with iOpex, with our development teams on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? >> Yeah. So when it comes to change management, right? Well, John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is the proactive thing that we end up doing is right when a bot goes live, there is a life support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamentally core principle for that entire support to work good is you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails. Right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record the data format, is it changing or the bot logic is failed? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons. And that kind of compliments the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay fair enough, this systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way the change becomes a smoother process. >> And how quickly can you diagnose that? Is it hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? >> So, >> Vellante: Depends. >> It's a very subjective question. Right. If we know the pattern early then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, you know, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you know, you need to basically look at how the business is going to going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. >> So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. >> Please. >> As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that in general? What differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? >> I think, it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with Orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in process mining, task capture, made it up chain, a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skillset? So a platform will try to look at what is that, you know I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise? I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture. And that's the kind of platform that, you know anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. >> So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? You know, is there an all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? >> John: Yeah, so we are enterprise license. >> You are? Okay. >> So, and iOpex helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, you know, and and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of 'em. It's a large company. So I'm, '23 is going to be huge for us. >> Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. Good luck in the future. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> All right. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson UiPath FORWARD5. The bots are running around Dave. We're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at FORWARD. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier. We're on the ground with theCUBE. In theCUBE studio today we have a live audience on break but I had a chance to meet with the Chief Digital Officer of Hybrid Cloud, Janine Snead, who's just appointed. She's here in set on theCUBE. Great to see you at IBM Think. >> Hi, great to see you. Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on. I'm super excited. When I interviewed Bob Lord last year, Chief Digital Officer, you know we love digital on theCUBE so we get really excited. We're like great, that's awesome. Now IBM's got more Chief Digital Officers being appointed >> Janine: That's right. >> You're the first Chief Digital Officer in a business unit. That's awesome, congratulations. >> Thank you. Yeah we're excited about it. We know and we believe that the future is really in the hands of the web. And we know that customers are engaging with us differently. They want much more of a self service. They want to experience the products without always I'll say a person interacting with them. And we know that from a product perspective there's things that we need to do to make our offerings much more digitally consumable. So we're taking this very seriously. And we put an organization in place Digital within Hybrid Cloud, that truly focuses on the time from a customer goes out and actually does a search, all the way through the buyer journey to the time they get to the product. >> John: You know I've been a student of IBM I actually worked at IBM as a co-op back in my early days. IBM has always been on the leading edge of marketing. And you guys are looking at socially you looked at social in an early way, digital in an early way, but now with the cloud you can actually engage customers digitally. So I've got to ask you, you know, how are you going to do that? >> Janine: Yeah >> John: Because you've got to remember websites are now the fabric of all this that's 30 year old tech stack. You've got cloud now, you've got APIs with the synchronous software packages. You've got blockchain. All these new things. So what's the vision as you guys go out and start putting stakes in the ground for a digital strategy. How are you guys doing it, can you share the vision? >> Yeah, I think it starts with using our own technology. So within the Hybrid Cloud organization, we have a lot of software and we're putting that software out on the cloud. We want customers to engage with us digitally through a technical experience. So we're taking our products, putting product demos, we're putting POTs, we're putting even proof of concept secure in the cloud, guided demos where they can come and experience these offerings without ever engaging with us. Now of course once they're ready they can engage with us but this is truly about a low touch, self service way for customers to engage with our products. >> Now a lot of people, and we talk about this all the time, but the general sentiment online now is you have the kind of crazies out there you've seen that on Reddit, fake news, weaponizing content. Then you have the other side of the spectrum where people are like, I don't want to be sold to. I'm discovering, I want to learn. >> Janine: Yes. >> John: I'm in communities. I know you guys address that. I want you to just clarify, because there's a model now where people just want to be ingratiated in. You know, kick the tires. Which by the way, kicking tires right now is much different than it was years ago because you have APIs. You have SARS source code. You have credits for cloud. >> Janine: That's right. >> What is the digital motion there? I mean obviously it's a light touch. >> Yeah >> But is it still an IBM.com? >> It is. So we're still on IBM.com properties. And we're nurturing with the ecosystem and the communities to also go where they are, but bring them back to the IBM.com properties and engage with them when they're ready. You know, we've done the research. We know that 70% of b2b buyers learn about your products and your services without ever talking to you. So we want to be where those users are and eventually that will be back on our property but we also want to find them where they are. >> You know, one of the things we were talking about before you came on camera here, We've been doing theCUBE for seven years or so plus six shows now to one show. But the thought leadership on theCUBE has always been powerful. And that's seemed to be a great way to get into communities. And IBM's got a lot of thought leaders. So I'm sure you have a plan for thought leaders. You have IBM Fellows. You've got R&D. You've got a lot of content opportunities. >> We do. We've got a lot of partners. So here at this conference we've been talking to a lot of our partners who want to be a part of this experience. We've got great solutions and all of our solutions a lot of them are delivered with partners. And so it's working the community. It's working the ecosystem. And it's doing this together with partners to allow them to contribute and allow customers to come and consume solutions. In much of a use case way, of course you can have product by product by products, but how do you essentially deliver solutions based on use cases. >> So I'll ask you a personal question. How did you get here? Was it like hey, I want to do the digital job, was it an itch that you were scratching, did Bob Lord lure you into the job? (Janine laughs) Did he recruit you? I mean -- >> No, it's -- >> How did you get it? >> It's a great question >> Because this is a great opportunity. >> It is. I'm a product person by training. And I spent the last 18 months in sales. And I enjoyed every minute of that and listening and understanding how our sellers want to consume. Short, snackable type of learning and training and watching what was going on with the digital ecosystem I thought it was a great way to really mix my skills that I have within product with what I just learned from my sales role. And I did nine months in marketing. So I felt like it was kind of a mixture. And we have a huge opportunity here. So the opportunity presented itself. >> Sales always has a my favorite sales expression is people love to buy from people that they like. How are you going to make IBM likable digitally? Is there a strategy there? >> Oh, it's simple. (John laughs) It is so dead simple. It's about the user experience. When users come, you have to give them the best experience possible because you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. So I want to basically set the bar. And we're an MVP right now with a lot of the stuff that we're doing out. >> You mean software and tools and stuff? >> Yeah, no, well, our experience right now so when you come and you experience our tools I'm sorry, our demos and our proof of technologies and our tutorials out on our site it's MVP. We're 45 days old. But it's about the user experience. And so we've been serving users here that are coming to try our stuff. >> So the Digital Technical Engagement, that's the DTE? >> Janine: DTE, yep. >> That's the one that's 45 days? >> That's the one that's 45 days old. >> The IBM site's not 45 days old. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But this new program. So take a minute to explain what the DTE, the Digital Technical Engagement program is. What was the guiding principles behind it >> Yeah >> What's some of the deign objectives is there any new cool tech under the covers? Share a little bit of color on that. >> Sure, sure. Happy to. So back in the fourth quarter of last year we took a look and we said, how are customers consuming? How are we engaging? How are we showing up? And what do we need to do to shift to become more agile and lighten the way that we showed up. And so we really gathered a few smart creatives from the CIO's office, from IBM design, from product and from marketing and we said guys, we're going to run an experiment. We want to set up a site off of IBM.com a page off of IBM.com and it's very simple. Keep it so clean. Keep the user experience clean. Take something like IBM Cloud Private. Give me three product demos. Give me one guided demo where in 10 minutes a client can get through IBM Cloud Private without getting stuck and then give them a way to try it for two weeks. Just experiment. Well, in 90 days we've had 10,500 users try that guided demo and our NPS is 56. >> What does NPS mean? - Net Promoter Score >> That's what I figured, okay. >> So it's about experimentation. And so in this world that we're going into we want to experiment. And so from there, what happened, that proved to be successful. We now have an organization of about 60 people within digital technical engagement deep product experts, but we also have a platform team to drive that experience. >> So there's some real value there. I mean, a lot of people look at website and digital technologies as ad tech, you know, and there's a lot of bad press out there now with Facebook where a lot of people are looking at Facebook as content that got weaponized for fake news and the ad tech has a bad track record of fill out a form, they're going to sell me something. How are you going to change that perception? >> That's a great question. So a lot of the folks that we're working with right now say you have to capture user information capture user information. And for me, I don't want to be bothered. So I'm kind of looking at this maybe a little bit too selfishly saying I want to demo without giving you my information. We have our product demos and our guided demos, we don't collect any information from the user. When you are going to reserve our software for two weeks, up to a month, we do collect some information about you. >> John: You got to. >> We have to. >> At some point. >> So we're keeping it very low touch because we know that's how users want to engage. >> You don't want to gate the hell out of it. >> No, we don't want to gate the hell out of it. We want to keep it just, let them explore without being all over them. Right? >> Talk about the new IBM. You know, one of the things that's transforming right now that I'm impressed with is IBM's constantly reinventing themself. I was impressed with Ginni's keynote. The way she talks about data in the middle, blockchain on one side and AI on the other. I call it the innovation sandwich. >> Janine: Yeah >> How are you applying that vision to digital? I mean not yet obviously, you're only at the beginning. >> Right But that vision is pretty solid. And she brought up Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law. >> That's right. >> Moore's Law is making things faster, smaller, cheaper. >> Right >> Component wise and speed. >> Yes >> Metcalfe's Law is about network effect and the future of digital is either going to be token economics or blockchain with programatic tooling that gives users great experiences. So how do you tie that together? Maybe it's too early to ask, but-- >> No, no. It's simple. I'm a consumer of this stuff. I'm using the cloud. I'm using the IBM Design Thinking because I brought in three designers from Phil Gilbert's group. Right? I'm embedded in the digital organization basically, regardless of where I sit. So we are adopting best practices that come from IBM's big chief digital office. >> So you get to use your own tools, that's one of the things she said. >> Yeah and we'll embed, we'll get there. Right? >> Yeah >> Well actually, we already are doing, we embedded chat. So we've got Watson Chat running on our SPSS statistics page So it's about the cloud, it's about user experience. It's about applying digital practices from Bob Lord's organization and then it's about Watson. >> I was having a great Twitter thread with a bunch of people that were on Twitter just ranting on the weekend a couple weekends ago about digital transformation. Tom Peters actually jumped in, the famous Tom Peters who wrote the books there, a management consultant, about digital transformation. I love digital transformation, it's overused, but it's legit. People are transforming. So the question was, how do you do it successfully? And all the canned answers came out. Well, you need commitment from the top. You've got to have this and that. And I said look, bottom line, if people don't have the expertise, and if they don't know what they're doing, they can't transform. So it begs the question for skills gap. A lot of people are learning, so there's a learning environment. It's not just sales. Proficiency, getting the product buying. There's a community thirst for learning. How is that incorporated in, if any? >> I think I have a little bit of a different hurdle. The people that we're working with are learning. They're out in the communities they're engaging. I think one of the things that we have to continue to do is continue to show the value of digital transformation. Remember, IBM is a big company. I'm not a ten person startup. Right? We're a bigger organization so what we have to do is show why digital is important back in with our product teams. I think for the most part our marketing teams get it. Because you have to make trade offs. Am I going to invest in this feature in the product or am I going to put in something like eCommerce so you can subscribe and buy. >> Priorities. But you're a product person, so it's all about the trade offs. >> Yeah, it's all about the trade offs, right? So the skills are part of it but some of it is just education on why this is so critical. And then the last thing is passion. You have to bring the skills, the education and then that passionate team that really believes that they can get this done. >> Okay so given that, let's go back to some of the comments I made about the people who we were talking about on Twitter >> Janine: Sure >> Commitment from the top. IBM commitment at the top is there? What are they saying, what's the marching orders? >> The marching orders is we got to go and we're not moving fast enough. Speed, speed, speed, right? So we got to move fast. >> So in an interview with Bob Lord, one of the things we talked about was interesting. He's like I like to just get stuff done. I think he might have used another word. Maybe it was off camera he said that. IBM's got a lot of process. How do you take the old IBM process and make it work for you rather than having digital work for the process? >> Yeah >> It's a lot of internal things but no need to give away too much but it's a management challenge. How do you cut through it? >> I think from a process perspective, these are conversations and you have to explain why. If you could go in and explain why you need to do something differently, then people will listen. I'd like to give an example, okay? I had 26 days to get five products out the door. I formed a team January 2nd. By January 26th, I had to be live. Now I worked with my marketing team and I said I will get into your buyer journey, but I have to launch my Digital Technical Engagement site and my products. They understood. So I went live. Now, will I back back into the process? Sure I will. >> John: But you had good alignment. >> But yeah, we have to move fast, right? So it's explaining why and having mature conversations and then people that really believe in digital they'll support you. >> Great conversation. I'm looking forward to chatting more with you. We're at theCUBE. But I want to ask you one final question before we break. What's your objective? What's the roadmap for you, what's your top priorities? Are you hiring? Who're you looking for? What kind of product priorities, what's the sales priorities? What's your to-do list? >> I think let's start with the customer. So the customer priority is to deliver the best experience possible as they engage with IBM digitally. And that's all about the user experience. From a talent perspective, it's all about diversity, inclusion, and people that come with different skills from technology, to growth hacking, to marketing, and to engineering. And some people that think differently. We want people that, no idea is a bad idea, just come and bring great ideas. >> Well, diversity and inclusion, first of all, half of the users are women. And you also have to have an understanding of the use cases. >> Yeah >> It's not just men using software. >> Yeah, that's right. >> It's a huge deal. >> That's right, that's right. >> Alright well, Janine, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations on the new role. Janine Sneed, Chief Digital Officer from IBM Hybrid Cloud. First IBM Chief Digital Officer in a business unit. I also today have Bob Lord and a lot of other folks doing digital but great to see the digital momentum. >> Thank you. >> It's not just a selling apparatus. It's all about value for users. It's theCUBE bringing you the value here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE we're in San Francisco at the Minds and Machines conference.  Three thousand people the fifth year of the show. Really everything about GE all the players from GE are here but are really being driven by the digital and the digitization of what was a bunch of stuff and still a bunch of stuff. But now we're digitizing it all. Yeah I'm really excited to get this bill saw you what nine months ago six months ago Timeflies to the Chief Digital Officer of chief power. Welcome. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. Thanks for being here. >> Absolutely. So just first impressions of this event. Pretty amazing. >> Yes it's gotten really bad. Right and I I remember stories of people telling me that hey this is the fifth one we're doing the first one we almost had like pull people to come here. Now we are like figure out how do we get to a bigger location because this is getting mainstream. Everybody is looking at how does digital help their business. Because in the industrial sector productivity had slowed down right over the last four or five years. It had become only 25 percent of what it used to be. So the biggest lever for productivity efficiency and creating new value is through digital transformation. It's not just automation. It's about creating new value new revenue from digital assets and that's why you see the excitement across all of the industries here. What's interesting you came from the I.T. world. >> Yeah there's already kind of been the digital transformation in the I.T. world that a lot of the I.T. stuff has now been Olek been turned into electronic assets right. You have no paper but that that can't happen in the OT world right. We still got generator just for gadget engines. You still got physical things but it's still a digital transformation. So how are those things kind of meshing together. Yeah so you know having worked in software all my career in Silicon Valley you write like you think about Cambridge with a belief that every business every industry will be reimagined with software. We've seen it in retail and music and entertainment and travel but there the software our aid the world. Yes software is going to aid the world but here software is transforming the world too because the physical assets matter. But all of the machines that we make for example in power we make machines that power the world more than one third of the world's electricity comes from a machine. Right. So all of these machines generate electrons but they also generate a lot of data more than you know two terabytes of data a day from a power plant can be generated. That's more data and more consumers will generate across an entire year old social media. So this data matters we can learn a lot from this data and make these machines efficient more productive and kind of like a 360 sexiest word for some of the industrialist is no unplanned downtime right. Element breakdowns which turns into massive productivity and value for our customers. The thing I think that would surprise most people Jeff talked about it in his keynote yesterday is that there has not been the kind of the long traditional productivity gains in the industrial machines themselves and you think wow they've been around for a long time. I would think they would be pretty pretty efficient. But in fact there's still these huge inefficiency opportunities to take advantage of with software which is why there's this huge kind of value creation opportunity. Absolutely. So now also think where the cycle time of innovation. Right. All of these are mechanical machines right. We know with advances in materials science and engineering and you know brilliant manufacturing we can get more out of the physical asset but that requires a big upgrade cycle. What if we agreed to the machine with software and that's really what we did in our businesses across power right where we called them edge applications where it's about improving the flexibility of a machine or they 50 of them. All of these are modeled and algorithms and the way to think about it is all these machines in fact outside we have a giant machine that powers this entire event. And you can see the digital twin version of that machine right here on the screen. All that is is a virtual representation of that machine from the physical world where we have all the thermal models the Trancy models the heat models the performance models all connected. But now we can run the simulation in real time all of the operation data and apply algorithms to get more performance out. A great example as we just launched one of the world's most efficient most flexible gas turbine a giant turbine called H.A.. >> But with the additional software we were able to improve the efficiency it's now the Guinness World Record holder as the most efficient flexible power plant in the world. That was then a brand new unit that was developed with the benefit of software or was that really applying a Software to our approach that was a brand new unit. But overlaid with software was able to eke out more efficiency as well. But we're doing this an older power plants as well. In fact a great story is we had a customer and Italy called A2A their multi utility company in Italy. They have a power plant and Cuba also in northern Italy. They had shut it down because it was no longer competitive to operate that power plant in the modern world where there was so much renewables. Because you got to compete in a market called ancillary services meaning you need to be able to quickly ramp up power when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine bright and shouted down right away. You can't do that with giant power plants. What we did was we completely model that's how plant and software and digital trend we show them that this actually can be competitive. So with the addition of software we were able to reopen a power plant that was mothballed and jobs were reinstated and the Paul plan is actually flexible in the open competitive ancillary services market. So all of this is possible because of software we're able to breathe new life into big giant heavy machines. So just a year in the power space I'm just tired. You know we've seen kind of in the US. No the nukes are being turned turned off. >> I grew up in Portland got trojan on the Columbia River we could take field trips with the smoke come out the cooling tower. We've got the rise of renewables are really really really going crazy. He's got this crazy dynamics and the price of oil. How's that played. How are you guys helping kind of deal with this multimodal. It's interesting here that oil and gas is still its own separate group. I'm like they got it like we want to be part of the renewables and didn't just become energy and not renewables oil and gas nuclear etc.. So you know that's a great question the industry is oil and gas has lots of other things and downstream stream and so on. And but at least across all of the electricity businesses we're coming together. And we call this the electricity Value Network. Think about where we used to think about a value chain where the Greens got generated and they traveled to the consumer. It was a linear model. And we know from Silicon Valley when digital anchors industries they all become network model. Right. Right. So we're calling this the electricity Value Network. And the interesting thing is our customers have different mix of fuel. And every part of the geography in the world in North America is still a good mix. Renewables is on the rise in California. We're going to have 50 percent power from renewables by 2030. But you still have to balance and optimize the mix of power from gas and nuclear and other sources of fuel and hydro and steam and so on. Right. And in Europe it's our abundance of renewables. >> They're struggling to integrate them into the great abundance of renewables or abundant capacity right. Renewables are growing and so they have to integrate them better in China and India for example still coal and steam is the big source of power because that's the fuel they have. They don't have as much gas. So the mix of fuel will change the world. The beauty of software as we can help optimize the mix. In the past we always talked about renewables as a silver bullet or gas silver bullet. Now we're saying software is a silver bullet regardless of what the mix of fuel we can optimize the generation of electrons and we're seeing this entire industry of electricity being transformer and digital and we call that the electricity Value Network. It's crazy interesting times so big show any big announcements happening here at the show yeah we know lots of big announcements one of the biggest ones is we're just dying day big enterprise wide digital transformation and relationship with Exelon Exelon is the largest utility in North America and they so are 10 million customers but they also generate a lot of power over 35000 megawatts of cross nuclear wind solar hydro gas and you know a year and a half ago we started a journey with them on understanding what the value of vigilance. There is such a believer and we learned a lot working with them as well and now they're deploying our Predix platform the industrial platform and APM which is our asset command and software and our food speed of operations optimization business optimization and cyber across the entire enterprise. >> So it's a big strategic agreement with them and where we're allowed to tell people is that you know a year and a half ago we were talking about what would happen if a wind farm went digital or a power plant. When you don't right now we're talking about what happens an entire utility goes digital or an entire industry of electricity goes digital and leaders like Exelon have the opportunity to create that tipping point in the industry. It does feel like this is the moment I think digital transformation of the electricity industry went real and this is it I presume not everything that they own is jii equipment no software is agnostic. Right. Right so this is really a software deal with their existing infrastructure that probably has a blend of G gear and who knows what other year that are generating. This is no different than how we in Silicon Valley would think about a enterprise software deal. It is the Enterprise subscription deal for them except it's to our cloud and our edge solutions and it's every machine right every single asset whether it's a giant gas turbine or a small little pump every machine has some sense or we will sense the rise or does the environment but all that data is being put into Predix. We will build digital twins of their entire power plants and give them more new insight and help them you know eliminate unplanned downtime and reduce operational costs citing times. We've got to get on buses to get those batteries done right till we get stored where we can we can connect them and optimize them as well. Right. Absolutely. >> I look forward to catching up six months from now and see where you guys are going out fast Bill and you and the team have grown you know from from a little bit of these kind of software skunkworks out there. Yeah I know many people are in San Ramon now. Now I think we're about a hundred people I think we're diversifying I think and it's a great challenge. So when we get the Adsit camping on the horizon. Oh and Sarah will be there. You can hit me up on Twitter again as well if you're interested in working in meaningful purposeful things like energy and the coolest things and software super. All right good. Thanks for stopping by. All right. Thank you. You have been asking us belum Jeffrey. You're watching the queue. We'll be back with our next segment after this short break.