>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. Brought to you by Actifio. >> Here we are in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE at the special, at Data Driven '19, Actifio's user event. Happy to bring on a CUBE alum who's a partner of Actifio, Phil Buckellew, who's General Manager of IBM Cloud Object Storage. Phil, thanks for coming back. >> Great, great to be here Stu. >> All right, so object storage. Why don't you give us first just kind of an encapsulation of kind of the state of your business today. >> Sure, object storage is really an extremely important business for the industry today because really it's a new way accessing data, it's been around obviously for a decade or so but really, it's increasingly important because it's a way to cost-effectively store a lot of data, to really to be able to get access to that data in new and exciting ways, and with the growth in the volume of data, of particularly unstructured data, like 103 zettabytes by 2023 I think I heard from the IDC guys, that really kind of shows how important being able to handle that volume of data really is. >> So Phil, I go back, think about 12 years ago, all the technologists in this space were like, "The future of storage is object," and I was working at one of the big storage companies and I'm like, "Well we've been doing block and file," and there was this big gap out there, and kind of quietly object's taken over the world because underneath a lot of the cloud services there, object's there, so IBM made a big acquisition in this space. Talk about, you know, customers that I talk to it's not like they come out and say, "Oh jeez, I'm buying object storage, "I'm thinking about object storage." They've got use cases and services that they're using that happen to have object underneath. Is that what you hear from your users? >> Yeah, there's a couple of different buying groups that exist in the object storage market today. The historic market is really super large volumes. I mean, we're unique in that IBM acquired the Cleversafe company back in 2015 and that technology is technology we've expanded upon and it really, it's great because it can go to exabyte scale and beyond and that's really important for certain use cases. So some customers that have high volumes of videos and other unstructured data, that is really a super good fit for those clients. Additionally, clients that really have the need for highly resilient, because the other thing that's important the way that we built our object storage is to be able to have a lot of resiliency, to be able to run across multiple data centers, to be able to use erasure coding to ensure the data's protected, that's really a large part of the value, and because you can do that at scale without having downtime when you upgrade, those are really a lot of core benefits of object storage. >> Right, that resiliency is kind of built into the way we do it and that was something that was just kind of a mind shift as opposed to, okay I've got to have this enterprise mindset with an HA configuration and everything with N plus whatever version of it. Object's going to give you some of that built-in. The other thing I always found really interesting is storing data is okay, there's some value there, but how do I gain leverage out of the data? And there's the metadata underneath that helps. You talk about video, you talk about all these kinds there. If I don't understand what I've got and how I'd leverage it, it's not nearly as valuable for me, and that's something, you know really that one of the key topics of this show is, how do I become data driven, is the show, and that I have to believe is something critically important to your customers. >> Absolutely, and really object storage is the foundation for modern cloud-native data lakes, if you will, because it's cost-effective enough you can drop any kind of storage in there and then you can really get value from those assets wherever you are, and wherever you're accessing the data. We've taken the same technology that was the exabyte scale on-premise technology, and we've put it in the IBM public cloud, and so that really allows us to be able to deliver against all kinds of use cases with the data sets that clients want, and there's a lot of great innovation that's happening especially on the cloud side. We've got the ability to query that data, any kind of rectangular data with standard ANSI SQL statements, and that just really allows clients to unlock the potential of those data sets, so really good innovation going on in that space to unlock the value of the data that you put inside of object storage. >> All right, Phil let's make the connection. Actifio's here, IBM OEM's the solution. So, talk about the partnership and what customers are looking for when they're looking at their IPs. Sure, so, quite a ways prior to the partnership our object storage team partnered up with the Actifio team at a large financial services customer that recognized the growth in the volume of the data that they had, that had some unique use cases like cyber resiliency. They get attacked with ransomware attacks, they needed to have a standard way to have those data sets and those databases running in a resilient way against object storage that can still be mounted and used, effectively immediately, in case of ransomware attacks, and so that plus a lot of other traditional backup use cases is what drew the IBM Cloud Object Storage team and the Actifio team together. Successful deployments at large customers are really where we got our traction. And with that we also really began to notice the uptick in clients that wanted to use, they wanted to do test data management, they wanted, they needed to be able to have DevOps team that needed to spin up a replica of this database or that database very fast, and, you know, what we found was the combination of the Actifio product, which we've OEM'd as IBM Virtual Data Pipeline, allows us to run those virtual databases extremely cost-effectively backed by object storage, versus needing to make full replicas on really expensive block storage that takes a long time. >> Well yeah, we'd actually done research on this a number of years ago. Copies are great, but how do I leverage that right? From the developer team it's, I want to have something that mirrors what I have in production, not just some test data, so the more I can replicate that, the better. Phil, please, go ahead. >> There's some really important parts of that whole story, of being able to get that data flow right, to be able to go do point-in-time recoveries of those databases so that the data is accurate, but also being able to mask out that PII or sensitive information, credit card data or others that you really shouldn't be exposing to your testers and DevOps people. Being able to have the kind of-- (Phil laughs) >> Yeah, yeah, shouldn't because, you know, there's laws and lawsuits and security and all these things we have. >> Good, good, absolutely. >> So, Phil, we're talking a lot about data, you've actually got some new data to share with us, a recent survey that was done, should we share some of your data with us? >> Yeah, we did some, we did a, the ESG guys actually worked with us to build out a piece of research that looked at what would it cost to take a 50 terabyte Oracle 12c database and effectively spin up five copies the way you traditionally would so that different test teams can hammer away against that data set. And we compared that to running the VDP offering with our Cloud Object Storage solution. You know, distances apart, we had one where the source database is in Dallas and the destination database is in Washington, D.C. over a 10 gigabyte link, and we were able to show that you could set up five replicas of the database in like 90 minutes, compared with the two weeks that it would take to do full replication, because you were going against object storage, which runs about 2.3 cents per gigabyte per month, versus block storage fully loaded, which runs about 58 cents per gigabyte per month. The economics would blow away. And the fact that you could even do queries, because object storage is interesting. Yes, if you're using, if you have microsecond response times for small queries you got to run some of that content on block storage, but for traditional queries, we look at, like, really big queries that would run against 600 rows, and we were half the time that you would need on traditional block storage. So, for those DevOps use cases where you're doing that test in development you can have mass data, five different copies, and you can actually point back in time because really, the Actifio technology is really super in that it can go do point-in-time, it was able to store the right kind of data so the developers can get the most recent current copies of the data. All in, it was like 80% less than what you would have paid doing it the traditional way. >> Okay, so Phil, you started talking a little bit about some of the cloud pieces, you know, Actifio in the last year launched their first SaaS offering Actifio GO. How much of these solutions are for the cloud versus on-premises these days? >> Absolutely, so one of the benefits of using a virtual data approach is being able to leverage cloud economics 'cause a lot of clients they want to do, you know, they want to be able to do the test in dev which has ups and downs and peaks and valleys when you need to use those resources, the cloud is really an ideal way to do those types of workloads. And so, the integration work that we've done with the Actifio team around VDP allows you to replicate or have virtual copies of those databases in the cloud where you want to do your testing, or we can do it in traditional on-prem object storage environments. Really, whatever makes most sense for the client is where we can stand up those environments. >> The other thing I wonder if you could expand on a little bit more, you talked about, like, cloud-native deployment and what's happening there. How does that tie into this discussion? >> Well, obviously modern architectures and ways of Agile, ways of building things, cloud-native with microservices, those are all extremely important, but you've got to be able to access the data, and it's that core data that no matter how much you do with putting Kubernetes around all of your existing applications you've still got to be able to access that core data, often systems record data, which is sitting on these standard databases of record, and so being able to have the VDP technology, be able to replicate those, stand those up like in our public cloud right next to all of our Kubernetes service and all the other technologies, it gives you the kind of full stack that you need to go do that dev in test, or run production workloads if you prefer from a public cloud environment, without having all of the burdens of running the data centers and maintaining things on your own. >> Okay, so Phil, everybody here for this two day event are going to get a nice, you know, jolt of where Actifio fits. You know, lots of orange here at the show. Give us the final word of what does it mean with orange and blue coming together. >> Well absolutely, we think this is going to be great for our clients. We've got, you know, tons of interested clients in this space because they see the value of being able to take what Actifio's done, to be able to virtualize that data, combine it with some of the technologies we've got for object storage or even block storage, to be able to serve up those environments in a super cost-effective way, all underlined by one of our core values at IBM, which is really trust and being responsible. And so, we often say that there's no AI, which all of this data leads up to, without information architecture and that's really where we specialize, is providing that governance, all the masking, all of the things that you need to feel confident that the data you've got is in the right hands, being used the right way, to be able to give you maximum advantage for your business, so we're super excited about the partnership. >> Phil, definitely a theme we heard at IBM Think, there is no AI without the IA, so, Phil Buckellew, thanks so much for joining us, sharing all the updates on what IBM is doing here with Actifio. >> Great, great to be here. >> All right, and we'll be back with more coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts at Actifio Data Driven 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. Nearing the end of day two. Lots of topics going on, my goodness. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host, Dave Vellante. And we're excited to have Ed Walsh, General Manager of IBM Storage, back on theCUBE. Welcome back. >> Thank you very much, it's nice to be back. >> Yeah, so two really strong quarters of IBM Storage revenue growth. >> Ed: Shh, don't let that get out. (laughs) It'd make my job too easy. But thank you for noticing. >> You didn't bring your crystal ball for the third quarter? >> But I do appreciate it. We do like to quietly just do it. But thank you. >> All right. So, what are some of the big trends? What's coming down the pike for you at IBM? >> I think if you look at, one the reason we're doing so well is, I think, the innovation we're driving the market now which will take you into the future. But also, just how we're approaching clients is kind of resonating. And it does play into future trends. And we can talk about especially on the show floor. But I think clients are just challenged right now with all the complexity innovation. We could talk about it until the nth degree or bring in dev ops environment. But it's the complexity of IT, and all the change they're dealing with. In fact, if anything, because all the competition like the Uber my Business coming into my industry and disrupting me. But we find all of our customers are on the heels a little bit in technology. Instead they need to kind of lean in. And so the trend that we're seeing is people trying to simultaneously modernize their traditional application environment, which is how do you free up your people and time through automation and agility so that you can move those people and resource and start transforming the business on higher value type of thing? So we see that consistently. So you see a lot of API type of automation tools. That just frees up the current team to do other things. You'll see that in our portfolio. One of our big themes is to modernize the traditional application environment. It's what we do on true private cloud, allow you to have all the capabilities of public cloud in a hybrid cloud environment. So, bring everything you do in the public cloud on prem. It's the same automation capabilities, same dev ops tools, and use it on prem. And then go to the cloud when you need to in hybrid cloud. That's all about automation, API temp automation, it's all about freeing up your team. So, what kills the team as far as the automation around dev ops or test dev? Also, things just like backup protection. So, how do you backup your environment? It can be just a complete manual task that really doesn't add a lot of value. Or if you use a new technology and innovate, you can actually use it to drive newer innovations, and drive new use case for that secondary storage. So, we see those trends happening. That's where I would say our clients kind of responding to the innovation we're bringing to market. And that's where you see us growing above market. >> Dave: You know I want to pick up on the growth and talk about you're clearly gaining share. The numbers were high single digits, right? >> Ed: Yeah, 7% in key one, 8% with growing margins. So, expanding margins. That's dramatically over market. And the market's growing at low to mid-single digits? >> 1%. >> Dave: Yeah, okay. Basically, flat. >> Ed: Yep. >> So, that's significant gains. But one could say, okay, if IBM has been losing share and sort of hitting off the bottom and now it's gaining share, we'll see if you can sustain that. But I'm more interested in the attributes of a leader in the storage business. I'm just listing them here. Certainly, you've got to be relevant. I want to come back to that. You got to have a complete portfolio. You got to have strong product cycles. You got to have a great go-to-market, strong leadership, and maybe a little bit of luck. I don't know. I'm probably missing some things there. Not a bad list. >> Ed: Yeah. So, relevance. I want to go back, I said to Eric when he was on, that interview that you did with Peter Burris at our studio. And you were talking about digital transformation and data and storage being an active element. It seemed like a very relevant conversation for the C-suite. >> Ed: Sure. >> And as Eric was pointing out, C-level executives don't like to talk about storage cause it's just a cost. >> Ed: Right, right. >> So, you've got the relevance piece going for you cause you're IBM. >> Ed: Sure. >> Talk about some of those other ones. Complete portfolio, end of product cycles have been very important in the past. And IBM hasn't had that as an advantage but it seems like you brought that to IBM and others. So, talk about that a little bit, that cadence. >> So I've talked about coming here 12 months ago, it was to really bring innovation and drive growth for division. I had the hypothesis, and we talked about this, so, I think clients are challenged. They're looking for a partner to help them out. And I think where IBM's unique, which gets to your question, one, we have the right vision. How do you talk cloud and cognitive? How do you leverage your data? Whatever metaphor you use to get more out of your data, leverage it for decisions, that's what we do both in hybrid cloud and public clouds. But we also help people through these multiple eras, and IBM's very unique. Very few of our competitors actually say they can go through multiple eras. IBM's been through every era in compute, and we calmly go through it. And clients give us credit for that. You mentioned the broad portfolio. When I first started here, people said, "You're portfolio's board." And I kind of say, if you really want to be meaningful, and help people modernize, get from where they are to where they need to get to, you need a broad portfolio to do exactly that. And IBM has the broadest portfolio in the industry for storage. And then, last but not least, which is innovation, I actually think my secret weapon is, not because I'm the storage company, but if I could ever get the rest of IBM, all the innovation, all the capabilities from Watson or analytics and cloud into my portfolio, all of a sudden now I kind of distanced myself from other storage. In fact, I would say it's a big boy or big girl environment where you need to actually, it's not about the next array, which I'll provide, it's actually how do you actually help people get from here to there. And a single product company just can't do that. Although, it's easier to market, it's the complexity. I think it is the innovation. In each segment we're in, we're either number one or number two in all the segments. So, number two in overall storage, number one in software, number one in software-defined, number two in data protection, number one in analytics. Each one of those is highly competitive and you need to drive innovation. And what we do is, we leverage not only our development expense or developers, but we have probably the only company in storage left that has primary research. So, we have our classic IBM research doing fundamental what's going to be next, and that's what we're bringing to market. >> So, what have you learned, second time around at IBM, what have you learned about your ability to leverage those other pieces of IBM? Cause every general manager talks about all the great things at IBM, but few have been able to bring that in. I remember when IBM bought Storwize, I was so frustrated. It was like two years before you took this secret weapon. You know, put it in! Do it! Ship it! And it took too long. What have you learned about how to leverage those innovations? >> So, I think the power of IBM is you do have, I've said a couple times, I'm honored to be the one they chose to help drive this transformation of storage. But also, I'm kind of blown away by the team. So, in very short order, we relaunched an entire new portfolio. We refreshed the entire portfolio, hardware and software, late last year. That's where you're seeing the growth. We're also launching new product that are really hitting this innovation. We're also, as you said how do we leverage research, is think about what we're just doing on flash. So, everyone's talking about NVMe. Well, because we're already doing primary research we already have NVMe capabilities. So NVMe is a way to do an IO, and you're cutting through the IO path. And your latencies go down in order of magnitude. So everything's faster. >> Dave: Eliminating all that over head of the scuzzy stack of just the simplify the-- >> So, we already have that in all our storage products. And also we've just did it in the mainframe. So, we have the ability to do mainframe storage. It does 12 microseconds access time. Which if you think about it that's NVMe performance. But that's exactly what we're bringing from research into our product line. You'll see more, so we'll bring in Watson. So the one thing my predecessors, how do you bring Watson in everything you do? Cognition or AI should be in your product's hardware/software on prem, in the cloud as a service. How about how you do services support? You call, chatbot should be able to help you out. Do an analytics on the different data patterns. So, that's exactly what we're doing. And all that's really from either research or from IBM Greater. I'll give you one just a tactical thing. People are trying to back up to the cloud. It's just hard. How do you get all that data through a little straw. Well, I can either re-architect Spectrum Protect, which we did a lot of re-architect. We just announced a big part here today. But instead, I just leveraged a product called Aspera. IBM had this company they acquired called Aspera that does a lot of, basically, file transfer to the cloud. By doing an API integration in 30 days, my Spectrum Protect clients now do 10 times faster back up to the cloud. That's a good example of just leveraging the Greater IBM. And it was just literally asset sitting there. But how do I bring it to bear for the benefits of my clients? >> So, how did that happen? That was really, if I recall, a cloud acquisition to be more competitive with AWS. And same thing with the Cleversafe acquisition, really fit into that portfolio, round out the Bluemix Cloud. How did you go about leveraging that? Was it just knocking on a colleague's door or was it as simple as picking up a phone call? Or did you have to get people in a headlock and give them a noogie? >> So, I think it's more collaborative than that. I think the the past there were maybe sharp elbows. But I think this is more collaborative. The cloud and the AI team inside IBM is wildly collaborative with me because I bring capabilities that I can bring to them as far as what we can do around storage. So, I think that collaboration's working. It's probably me more helping them out initially to make sure I'm building that bridge, but then it's reciprocated. It's very easy. And the key thing is also being able to understand all that capability from research, and actually try to bring it into offering management team. So getting my offering management team to be more open. to be outside-in. Outside-in from the industry but also from outside-in from the rest of IBM in. And if I leverage these pieces, all of a sudden my portfolio and all of my development expense just gets multiplied. It's a force multiplier that I'm bringing in. And that's where the clients are really responding to it. >> Dave: That's great. >> Lisa: Eric Kurzog >> talked about that, the outside-in, as did Steve. So, it sounds like quite a cultural shift has happened. shift probably isn't a strong enough word, within IBM. You talk about, and everyone has talked about, this message of clients want simplicity. So, as a GM how are you simplifying this cross-function collaboration? What are like the top three things you'd recommend to other GM's to bring the simplicity that clients want internal to be able to get to market faster and iterate. >> So one, you have to look for what's in the industry. The other thing is really listen to clients. The clients will talk about simplicity but then it's the nuances, so really the details of what they mean by that. We use NPS, Net Promoter Score. But we actually get feedback on every service call or inside our own offerings. So you actually get the feedback but more importantly you actually get detailed feedback of what they want to change. So one, you can listen to that. You bring the outside in. That's directly from the clients. We use the term feedback's a gift. Sometimes it's not... But we respond within 24 hours to each and every one of those customers, and that gets you into a nice circle of feedback. The other thing is bring in the right team. So, on my team of about 50% of them has changed. So I brought in basically professional storage team from the inside and outside of IBM so that we can actually have our own outside-in inside. And then really, you need to align your organization to be what the clients need to see. For instance I did a reorganization as far as how I did offering management and go to market that they were aligned. So, instead of being product line driven, what people are purchasing. So people are doing distributed storage. That should be one offering management line, one owner instead of maybe three or four. Cause I have three different, four product lines. And that allows you to simplify what happens in the market. So if you can align your organization to what you actually need to leverage that's pretty easy. >> Lisa: Fantastic. >> Dave: So, I got to ask you. >> So, you're a unique executive. I call you a five tool player. >> Okay. >> You've technical chops. >> A lot of people don't know that about you. I do. You can go toe to toe, which probably scares the crap out of a lot of guys that work for you. You've got financial acumen. >> Ed: Sure. >> You've got a really strong network. You're a visionary and you can inspire people both with that vision but you can also push them. >> Ed: Oh, thanks. >> Hard. >> You know, I've seen that. And that's kind of your reputation, and people have a great deal of respect. So, you've got that sort of perspective. I want to get your perspective on what's happening in the world of VMware, generally in data protection specifically. >> Ed: Okay, sure. >> You've had a lot of experience in that area. You were the CEO of Avamar. You sold that company. Spectrum Protect is a big focus of your business today. What's your sense as to what's happening here? Why is data protection exploding so much? I've been asking this question all week. And I'm still not sure I understand why. Maybe this is a cloud effect. But what's your take on it? >> So, you mentioned simplicity. It fits into the modernizing, how do you free up your people from all these manual tasks? I would say backup is one of those crazy manual tasks that's more of an insurance policy. And then recovery was always a very big challenge. So, what you're seeing is new technologies come out that not only solve all the manual processes. So, what we did in Spectrum Protect is really dramatically simplify what you do, you set up an SLA and it literally self-monitors and keeps track and literally backs up to SLA, and recoveries are instantaneous. That used to be hours of work, every single day by someone. And recoveries would take days or hours days. Could be a long time. And now you're easily be able to come up and running. But also now you have the secondary storage which is a cost. What else can I do with that which has always been the dream. Now what you have is scale architecture's maybe all flash. And what you're doing on prem in the cloud, you have an image copy of everything in your environment for recovery purposes, availability. What else would you do with it? One, you want to make it easy, so the ease thing. SLA management for recovery. So you can do instant availability for if there is an outage. But all of a sudden what else would you do with it? Now what you're able to do, with orchestration, you're able to take that secondary copy, it's instantaneously mountable or bootable copies. All of a sudden you can take a snapshot of that. You can do data masking of that. Now you have this gold copy you can use for test dev or dev ops. It could also be the way that you gather on premises and you get a data copy into the cloud. And backup is a very good way to keep a history of data on a day to day basis or a couple times a day. So now you actually have an index of how your environment is changing over time, that you can use for analytics for other things. So, what's really happening is, it's going from a cost center that used to be a manual headache to everyone. And you're taking the exact same requirement. You have to do that anyway. And know you're making an asset and also you're freeing up your team for doing it. So I think you're going to see a huge investment. In fact, I would say probably the number one area people are investing. But it's past dedupe. So Avamar was the last, well dedupe was the last thing that really changed backup recovery because it was just you can't be moving all that data. Just change the amount of data you're moving so you can do it faster easier. You know, check. But now it's more about the agility. In a secret way, your backup's now the best way to feed test dev. Or the best way to feed dev ops. It's the best way to feed a cloud, if done correctly. So that's what we now suspect in Protect Plus. Literally, just do a backup and we can give you all these other use cases by leveraging the same investment. If you're trying to modernize, and free up your team, and get more for what you already have to do, it's probably the biggest low hanging fruit for clients. >> Yeah, so I mean I think that's the answer. Backup has been historically been crappy insurance that's not cloud-like. The industry's demanding, the customers are demanding a change. >> And then also, how do you do dev ops and test dev, and use production data in a data mass format. You don't want to do that in your primary. You want to take a copy. Backup does that. And you want to use that data. So, it actually solves another area of agility for the same dollars. >> Wow, fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insight. And we'll look for those next quarter results. And hope that trend >> We'll be back. keeps going-- >> We like them. >> Outstanding. Well, for Ed Walsh and my co-host Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the CUBE's continuing coverage of day two from VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back with the show wrap. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the wrap-up of IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier. My co-host this week, my partner in crime, co-CEO, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media Inc. with myself, Dave Vellante. Dave, it's been a great week. I just feel like I have been Watsonized and Blockchained and cloud all week. As we wrap up InterConnect, I want to get your thoughts on IBM, the cloud business, the big data marketplace, some of the things that we're seeing at the 100 of events we go to. We've got our events coming up, we're going to be in Munich next month, we got DockerCon, but a lot of developer events coming up, but in general, we get to see the landscape, in some cases, that others don't see. Let's talk about that, so before we get into the landscape, let's about IBM, IBM's prospects. This show, just quick stat, almost double the online traffic we're seeing on IBMGO than World of Watson, which was the biggest show we've ever done with theCUBE that we've seen. So, an interest, it's a data point. Unpack the data, you can see that there's a lot of global interest in what IBM is doing right now with the cloud and with Watson, and certainly with Blockchain you add another disruptive enabler potentially to what will either be a brilliant IBM strategy or a complete crash and burn. I think this is an IBM go big or go home moment with Ginni Rometty. I love her messaging, I love her three pillars, enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core. That is solid messaging, all three pillars. To me, it's clear. IBM is at a reinvention moment, it's all coming together, but it's a go big or go home moment for them. >> Well, you know, John, I mean, Ginni when she took over, sorry, she was running strategy before she became CEO, I mean, IBM had a choice, they could go double down on infrastructure and go knock it out with Dell and EMC and HP, or they could go up the value chain. And my ongoing joke is Dell bought EMC, IBM buys some other company, and that to me underscores the differentiation in thinking. Oracle, I think, is a little different, but Oracle and IBM are somewhat similar, I think you'd agree, in that they've got a big SaaS portfolio, they're trying to vertically integrate, they're trying to drive high value margin businesses. The difference is IBM's much more services oriented than, say, an Oracle, and that's still, as I say, a big challenge for IBM. But I'm more, I'm a bull on IBM. >> Why is that? >> I think the strategy is, number one, they're relevant. We talked for years about how we weren't that excited about Microsoft because they weren't relevant. Satya Nadella came in, all of a sudden, they're relevant again. I think IBM is highly relevant in the minds of CEOs, CIOs, CCOs, CDOs, all the C-suite, IBM is super relevant there, just as are Accenture and Ernie Young and all the big SIs. But IBM's got tons of products beneath it, number one. Number two, despite the fact that, you called it out several years ago, they bought software for 2.4 billion, it was a bare metal hosting company, alright, but IBM's turning that into >> Bluemix. >> a cloud business with Bluemix, right. And they're building, bringing in acquisitions like Cleversafe, like Aspera, like Ustream, and others, where they're bringing services that are differentiated. You can only get Watson on IBM's cloud, you can only get IBM's Blockchain on IBM's cloud, so they're bringing in value-added services, and there's only one place you can get them, and I think that's a viable strategy that's going to throw off a lot of cash, and it's going to lead to success. >> And by the way, they're also continuing to invest in open source. So, again, that's-- >> That's the other piece. I wanted to talk to you, and this is your wheelhouse. IBM's open source mojo is not just lip service, alright. They have deep-rooted DNA in open source and their strategy around it, and they've proven that they can monetize open source. What's their model, I mean, explain the model because I think it's instructive. >> I mean, open source, there's a lot of different models. Red Hat-- >> For IBM, I mean. >> IBM's model of open source is very clear. If you look at what they've done with just Blockchain as a great example, they have mobilized their company, and they did it with Bluemix as well with the cloud, once they said, "We want to get in the cloud game," once, "We want to do Blockchain," they go open source at the core, then they get their entire brain trust workin' on it. It's not just a hand wave, some division, they're kind of reorganizing on the fly, they're kind of agile organization, which some may read as chaotic, but to me, I think that's just good management practice in this day and age. They get an open source project, and they drive that home, and they have people contributing and giving that to the community, and then adding value on top and differentiating. It's just classic 101, create some value, and create some differentiation with your products, and by the way, if you don't want to use our products, build your own, or hey, use the open source code. That's pretty much an over-simplified version of open source. >> But Blockchain's a great example of this, right? So, they see the leverage in open source project, they put all these resources in, and they say, okay, now let's build our product on top of that, let's get the open source community leverage and this is, let me ask you this, does IBM, so several years ago when IBM announced Bluemix, you were pretty critical. >> John: I was very critical. >> IBM has to win the developer audience or it's cooked in this game. >> That's what I said. >> How is it done, how would you grade them? >> I think they're doing very well. I think IBM is, again, to use your word, they're not putting lip service in it. So, I was joking with Meg Swanson last night, I saw Adam Gunther when they interviewed on theCUBE, and I was critical. I didn't say that their cloud was bad, I was just saying it's just not as, just got a lot of work to do, Amazon's kickin' ass, which we now know that happened, right. But they've done well. They've done well, they've ran hard, they've gone the table stakes on the enterprise. I still think they got some more work to do, we can analyze, I'm putting out my cloud ratings matrix, I'm going to put IBM on that list, I have Google and Amazon done. I'm going to add Microsoft Azure and IBM onto the mix in the comparison matrix. But IBM has done good with the developers. They've just invested 10 million in this announcement, and they're ramping up. I wouldn't say they're throwing just money at it, they got people, so I would give them, I'd give them a B-plus, A-minus score because they're hustlin', they're doing it. Are they totally blowing it out of the water? No, I don't think they're pushing hard enough there. I think they could give it some more gas, I think they could do more with it, personally thinking. But you know, Dr. Angel Diaz was on earlier today. They're going at their own pace. >> But you agree they're in the game. >> Oh, totally. >> Making good progress. >> They're totally, IBM is totally in the cloud game, and they don't get a lot of credit for it. Either does Oracle, by the way. Somehow, people seem to talk about Azure and Google. Google is so far behind, in my opinion, they're not even close. I think it's Amazon, Azure, IBM and Oracle and Google all kind of in that-- >> Juxtapose Oracle's developer cred, even though it owns Java, with IBM's. How would you compare the two? >> Very similar, I think. Different approaches, but again, to your point, IBM's relevant, Oracle's relevant. We had this question about VMware when they did the deal with AWS. They have customers and they have cash, so they're not going anywhere. It's not like IBM's a sinking ship. It's not like Oracle's a sinking ship. Now, that being said, there's a huge shift in the business, and I would say in that scenario, Google is in a very good position, so I've been very critical on Google only because they're trying to be acting like they're an enterprise flag. They're not, I mean, Google's got great tech, TensorFlow, machine learning. Google has great cloud tech, but in that game, they're up in the number one, two spot. But in the enterprise side, they're not close. They're workin' on that. So, that's my critique of Google. Microsoft has got the DNA for the enterprise, so Microsoft and Oracle to me are more similar than comparing IBM and Oracle. I'd say IBM is a lot more like Google and Amazon, kind of in-between, but Oracle and Microsoft look the same to me. Big install base, highly differentiated, stacks aren't perfect, but it looks good on paper, and they're gettin' business. And Oracle's earnings, by the way, were very explosive due to the cloud growth. >> Another question I like to ask sometimes is, okay, what would you have done differently if you had a choice? Like when Gerstner was running IBM, he chose to consolidate the company, essentially, not consolidate, but focus on services, one throat to choke, single-faced IBM. Great customer service and build the services business, buy-in, PWC, et cetera, that was the key. What could you have done differently that could've said, well-- >> John: For IBM? >> Yeah, at the time, you could have said, "We're spin out different product groups. "We're going to be the best at microprocessors, "or disk drives, or database, or software." >> I think IBM moved too slow. >> That's a historical example. Given what IBM's doing today, what would you have done differently if you were Ginni Rometty five or six years ago? >> I would've done what they're doing now three years ago. We were, when we started working with them with CUBE, IOD events, and Pulse. >> Dave: Information on Demand. >> You had a lot of silence. I think, if I had to go back and get a mulligan, if I was Ginni Rometty, I would've moved faster. >> Dave: Done that faster. >> Hindsight's 20-20 on that, but it wasn't that clear. But again, it's the big aircraft carrier, it can only move so fast. I think what they're doing now is good strategy, and they're price strong, data force, cognitive to the core is a good strategy. Now, cognitive is words for AI, and that's their word, cognitive 'cause of Watson, but essentially, machine learning and AI is going to be a big pillar there, and then, the data first is more of an architectural component that's very good. But in general, Dave, the cloud is, this is what's going on in my find. It's so obvious to me. The big data marketplace that was we defined by Cloudera and Hadoop and Hortonworks just never panned out. It morphed into a bigger picture, and so, Hadoop is part of, now, a bigger ecosystem. Cloud was growing very fast. Those two worlds are coming together and growing very rapidly independent with big data, with machine learning, AI, and IOT. They're coming together. The intersection of the big data and the cloud. >> Cloud-mapping data. That was Yuri Burton from 2005. >> But it's coming together really fast, and the IOT is the real business driver. I know there's not a lot of stuff shipping yet in the sim stuff out there, but merging IOT into IT into business process and into developer mindset, whether it's an Indiegogo up to full-on developers is the accelerant that's going to fuel the AI value. To me, that's the intersection point of big data and cloud, and that is the home run, that's the holy grail, and that's going to be disrupting some preexisting decisions by big vendors who made bets, and I'm talkin' about bets made in the past five years, not like bets made 20 years ago or 10 years ago. I think the IOT is going to really shape the game. The other thing I worry about now, in my opinion, is a lot of AI-washing. People say, "Oh, AI." You see people on the stage, "Oh, we did this with AI." There's no AI, it's augmented intelligence, which is basically predictive analytics. You know, true AI is not yet here, it's a little bit hyped up, not that I mind that. I think that the machine learning is the real meat on the bone right now, I think that's the core enabler. Machine learning is by far the most important trend in the computer science world today as it relates to integrating that capability into cloud native, microservices, and overall application. >> I agree, I mean, AI is still a heavy lift, but to me, the key, I go back to something you were saying, is developers. That's the lever that's going to give you the ability to move large mountains. If you don't have that developer community, and you don't have open source chops, you're going to struggle a little bit. You're going to be either in a swim lane like Oracle with its database and its red stack, and maybe you can break out of that, but I'm not sure it wants to. Or you're going to be stuck in infrastructure lane. >> Yeah, but the developers are driving all the action right now. My point about machine learning, if you look at the shows just recently, and certainly we have the history of the past year, machine learning is the sexiest trend in every show. Last show was Google Next, machine learning with TensorFlow, both open source. Machine learning's not new, it's just now accelerating the developer. The developers want to move faster, and I think things like machine learning, things like cognitive that IBM puts out there, are great catalysts. That's going to be a big thing we're going to watch, obviously, we have a big developer community at SiliconANGLE, so something to watch. >> What's next? We've got a chief data scientist summit next week in Silicon Valley, we're going to be at the-- >> Let's look at my Friday show this week. Every Friday I do the Silicon Valley Friday show with me and guests, we got that goin' on, so always check that out on soundcloud.com/johnfurrier, or check out my Facebook feed, facebook.com/johnfurrier. But in terms of CUBE events, we've got DataWorks in Munich on April 2nd, DockerCon in Austin, Oracle Marketing Sum Experience, Red Hat, Dell EMC World, Service Now, Open Stack, Big Data in London. >> It's going to be a busy spring. >> Lot of stuff going on. Great stuff. >> Deb, we'll see you in July. >> In bumper sticker, Dave, this show, encapsulate your thoughts. >> Well, I think it's all about cloud, data, and cognitive coming together in a way that allows business value and differentiation through the end customer. That's what this show is about to me. It's not about infrastructure, cloud and infrastructure, that's kind of table stakes. It's all about differentiation up the stack, creating, enabling new business models. >> My encapsulation is the enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core message that Ginni said, that translates into IBM's shoring up their base products and putting an innovation strategy around Blockchain and soon to be cognitive computing at a whole 'nother level, and I think they're going to have a real innovation strategy and continue to use what they did with Watson, the winning formula. Put something out there that's a guiding principle and draft the company behind it. I think that, to me, is my big walk away, and I think Blockchain will potentially level, has game-changing capabilities, and if that plays out like Watson's playing out, then IBM could be in great shape on both shoring up the base in cloud and their business and having an innovation strategy that extends them out. That to me is the reason why I'm bullish on them. So, great show, Dave Vellante. Thanks to the guys, thanks for everyone watching. That's it for us here in theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante wrapping up IBM InterConnect 2017. Thanks for watching, stay with us, and follow us at theCUBE on Twitter and siliconangle.tv on the web. Thanks for watching. (electronic keyboard music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Interconnect 2017 everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Russ Kennedy is here. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy and Customer Success at IBM. Russ, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> So Russ, of course, you and I have known each other for years. >> Yes. >> From the Cleversafe. You guys came in from the Cleversafe acquisition-- >> Right. >> A phenomenal move for you guys. Great exit, awesome move for IBM. >> Yep. >> So we're now well over a year in. >> Umm-hmm. >> So the integration, you've been long past Blue Washing (laughing) you're now in, and you're integrating with other services. >> Right. >> You're embedded in the cloud, still selling on prem-- >> Right. >> Hybrid messaging, so give us the update. What's happening at Interconnect? >> Sure, well, thanks for having me on. >> Dave: You're welcome! >> It's great to see you again. And you're absolutely right. Things have been moving very rapidly since the acquisition. It's about 15 months since we've been part of IBM now. And we still have a very robust on prem business that was our heritage in the Cleversafe days, but now that we're part of IBM we're well entrenched in the cloud. We've got cloud services, object storage services in the cloud, and a variety of different flavors there. We announced a couple of new things this week that I think are very exciting for clients. I'm sure we'll get into that as we go through this discussion. And we have a hybrid combination, so if clients want to have some of their data on prem, some of their data in the cloud, we offer that hybridity as well. And I think that's very exciting for enterprises that are looking to figure out where their workloads run best, and be able to have that flexibility to move things back and forth if they need to. >> We were talking off-camera, I remember I was saying to you, Cleversafe was one of Wicky-Bon's first clients-- >> Umm-hmm. >> Back when we were tiny-- >> Umm-hmm. >> And you guys were just getting started and-- >> Right. >> I remember we were working with you guys, and sort of talking about some positioning and things like that, and I remember saying, Look, it's going to cloud! >> Russ: Right, right, right. >> It's all going there. And at the time, it was like, you guys were saying, Yeah, we think so, too, but it's just not here yet (laughing). >> Right. >> (laughing) And we're a small startup you got-- >> Yeah. >> And so, you have the conviction of belief that it's going to happen, but at the same time you have to survive-- >> Sure, sure! >> And you got investors and it's... >> Yep. >> But the growth of unstructured data and then all of a sudden the combination of that, plus cloud happened. And then boom that was a huge tailwind. >> Right. >> Talk about that. >> Right, right, no, you're exactly right. In the early days it was very, very difficult to get people to understand the value of object storage and understand the value of cloud. And we were out there pioneering discussions around this concept, but we knew that the wave was going to happen. The growth of unstructured data was already obvious. You had music services, you had video services, everything going online. People wanting to distribute information and share information, and so you knew that the wave was coming. It took a little bit longer than I think everybody thought. I think certainly success in other public cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft kind of helped drove that as well. But we were certainly there with leading technology, and as soon as people started to realize the benefits of object storage for storing large, unstructured data objects, it just took off. >> Well, you know, too, the cloud progression was really interesting. >> Umm-hmm. >> You're right. Amazon sort of popularized it. >> Yep. >> And then the downturn in 2007, 2008, caused a lot of CFOs to say, Hey, let's try this cloud thing. >> Exactly. >> And then they came out of it-- >> Russ: Exactly, yep. >> And said, Hey, this cloud thing's actually really cool. >> Russ: Umm-hmm, umm-hmm. >> Now, let's operationalize it (laughing). >> Right. >> And go mainstream. And so, and now you've got this big discussion going on around data value, right. >> Russ: Of course. >> Everybody's talking about the value of data and what it means-- >> Russ: Sure, sure. >> And moving conversations up the stack away from sort of bit slicing and-- >> Right, right (laughing). >> Object stores-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> And ups the data value. >> You're exactly right. >> What are you seeing here? >> I think that's another new interesting area that we're getting into. It's the value of information, and I think what's driven that is the tools and the technologies that are now available to analyze data in variety of formats, right. The whole analysis and analytics capability that exist in the marketplace today is giving organizations a reason to take a look at their data, and to leverage their data, and to use their data, to drive business outcomes, to be more competitive, to be more agile, to be more flexible. So they're using the information. They have tools now that can give them insight into all kinds of things, their own data, external sources of data, new data that's being generated through applications and those kinds of things. All that can come together and analysis can go on top of it, to give people really quick insights into how to drive their business. And I think that's the really exciting part about being part of IBM's cloud because IBM has all those tools. >> We've been having conversations now for... It's well over several months and going into years-- >> Umm-hmm. >> Where the CIO's not so much thinking about storage, and certainly not worried about the media. >> Right. >> But definitely talking about what services can I tap to enhance the value of my data? >> Sure. >> How do I monetize, not necessarily data itself, but how does data contribute to the monetization of my company? >> Umm-hmm. >> And you guys fit into that. >> Sure. >> So maybe talk about that a little bit-- >> Sure, well, we talked to clients all the time about the value of the data, regardless of what industry you're in, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, all of those types of organizations have information and it's information that can help them be more productive. It can help them be more agile. It can help them win in the marketplace. All they need to do is open it up and use it, leverage it, analyze it, look at it, look at it from a variety of different sources, and it can help them do a lot of things more efficiently, so we talked to clients all the time about the value of data. Storage is certainly something that makes that value realizable, and it's the interfaces between applications and tools that make the data usable. And we open that up to clients with our storage system very easily, whether it's on prem or it's in the cloud, and that's what they like. Now, we heard David Kenny on stage the other day-- >> Umm-hmm. >> He announced IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex-- >> Yes. >> And he said, We do have a marketing department, and yes, they did come up with that name. (laughing) A funny tongue-in-cheek moment. >> Yes, yes. >> But talk about Flex. What is it? And why is it relevant? >> So a lot of clients that we've engaged with recently have talked about... They love the cloud model. They certainly love the simplicity and the ease of growth and those kinds of things that cloud gives them. But they're a little confused about the pricing and they're worrying about whether they're paying too much for the workload that they have in the cloud. So we designed Flex as a way to look at storing data. First of all, it's a very low cost entry point for storing the data. And then it's designed for data where the workload may be unpredictable. It may be cold for some period of time, and then it may become very active for a period of time, and then go back to being cold again. What Flex does is it ensures that you don't overpay when you actually utilize that data, when it's very active, very hot, maybe you're running some sort of analytics against that data. Maybe it's some sort of cognitive recognition analytics process that you're running against the data. It makes it very usable, but yet, you're not paying too much to access that data. So Flex is designed for those kinds of uneven, varied workloads, or workloads where it's very cold for some period of time and very hot. Traditional tiers are designed for hot workloads, mid-level workloads, and very cold workloads. Flex actually covers the whole gamut, and it ensures that you're not paying too much for storing and using your data. >> So that's a problem that people have because-- >> Umm-hmm. >> They don't really understand how to optimize cost-- >> Right, right. >> If they don't understand their workloads. >> Right. >> They get the cloud bill at the end of the month. They go, Whoa-- >> Yep, exactly. >> What just happened? >> Exactly. >> It's complicated for people, there's a lot of times it's different APIs for different services. >> Russ: Sure, sure. >> So talk a little bit more about how customers... How you see customers deploying that and what it's going to mean to... >> Sure. >> What's the business impact? >> Yeah, no it's a great question. So Flex, first of all, you only have to remember four numbers. There's a number to store the data, a cost to store the data, a cost to retrieve the data, a cost for what we call Class A Operations, which are write operations and then Class B, which are read operations. Four numbers you have to remember. You know that you're not going to pay over a certain amount, regardless of how often you use the data, so it's very simple for people to understand. It's one set of numbers. It doesn't matter what the workload is. You know you're not going to be overcharged for that workload. >> You set a threshold. >> Exactly, you set a cap, you set a threshold. >> Yeah. >> And you're not going to pay over that amount, so it's very simple for them to utilize. Then, so they start to use it, and let's say that over a six-month period of time they start to understand their workload, and they know it's a very active workload. They can then change that data into maybe our standard tier, and actually even save more money because it's consistent, it's predictable when it's active, they'll actually lower their cost. And we're very open with clients about that because we want to take away that complexity of using the storage, and certainly the complexity of billing, like you talked about. And give clients a very easy transition into the cloud, and make sure that they can use it and leverage it the way they need to be more productive. >> So the key to that is transparency. >> Russ: Yes, absolutely. >> And control. And that's an elastic sort of dial-up, dial-down-- >> Absolutely. >> As you need it. >> Russ: Very, very much so. Yes, definitely. >> I wanted to ask you, so we've been obviously watching... IBM made the SoftLayer acquisition, it was like, Okay, we're going to buy this bare metal hosting company. >> Umm-hmm. >> And then they bring in Bluemix, and then they start bringing in applications. >> Yes, yes. >> And then all of a sudden it's like, IBM does what IBM does (laughing), and boom! Now, you've got this machine going. >> Yes. >> And so, several acquisitions that are relevant here, Aspera. >> Yes. >> Clearleap. >> Yes. >> UStream fits there because we know Ustream because we broadcast on UStream-- >> Russ: Yes, yes, uh-huh. >> And, of course, Cleversafe. >> Umm-hmm. >> Are you beginning to leverage those acquisitions and potentially others through Bluemix-- >> Yes. >> To create services and new value for clients? >> Yeah, so we're fully integrated with all those technologies, right, the object storage system through our APIs. Every single one of those technologies can leverage and utilize the storage system underneath. I'll give you an example, Aspera, as you mentioned, a very, prominent product in the marketplace. I think just about every company in media and entertainment and certainly any company that's dealing with unstructured data objects knows and uses Aspera. They have a service now in the cloud where you can actually move data very rapidly over their protocol, into the cloud, and then store it in the object storage system. That's easy, that's simple. That makes it easy to start to leverage cloud. UStream the same way, Clearleap the same way. All of this comes together in Bluemix. Bluemix is the glue, so to speak, so if you're developing new applications you have all of the Bluemix tools that you can use, and then you got all these technologies that are integrated, including the object storage system, which is the foundation, everything's going to... All the data's going to reside in an object storage system. That makes it all usable for clients, very simple, very easy. They have a whole portfolio of things that they can do. And it's all tied together through APIs. It's very, very nice-- >> And has that opened up when you're small startup... (laughing) You don't have all these resources-- >> Right. >> How has it opened up new opportunities for you guys? >> So we see a lot of new startups coming on board, and taking advantage of the storage system-- >> Right. >> And all the different services that sit on top. Many companies today are born on the cloud, or they're new applications that are being born on the cloud, and so, they have access to, not only infrastructure, like you said within Bluemix, they also have access to other services, video services, high-speed data transfer services, object storage services. So they're able to take advantage of all those different services, build applications very quickly. Another thing that's interesting about IBM, they have this concept, you may have heard of it, this Bluemix Garage concept-- >> Dave: Yeah, I have. >> Which is a rapid deployment, rapid application development, using design thinking and agile methodologies, to quickly develop a minimum viable product that now uses object storage as part of the services, right. So as a new client, you can come in, sit in the Bluemix Garage, work on the application, and have some really rapid prototyping going on, and leverage the storage system underneath. And that gets you started, gets you going. I can see a lot of new applications coming to market through that same-- >> So they're like seven garages, is that right around the world? >> Russ: Yes, yes. Yeah, they're around the world. And so, I didn't realize... So Cleversafe's a fundamental part of that, in the object storage. >> It is now. And we just announced it this week at Interconnect, but it is now. >> So what does that mean? So I go in and I can... It's basically a set of... Sets of best practices-- >> Correct, correct. >> And accelerance and-- >> Right. And obviously in the cloud world, you need a place to place your data, right. So the integration with Cloud Object Storage, Cleversafe now called Cloud Object Storage is now all part of that, so it's integrated into the app dev that's going on in those garages. And we're excited about that because I think we'll see a lot of new technologies coming through that methodology, and certainly ones that leverage our storage technology, for sure. >> What's it been like to go from relatively small Illinois-based startup. (laughing) And now you're in IBM. >> Right. >> What was the integration like (laughing)? Are you on the rocket ship now? You were kind of on it before, but now it's like, steep part of the S-curve-- >> Sure. >> With all these global resources. Describe that. >> Well, I think the biggest part that's happened to us as an organization is exposure to a number of different accounts that we as a small company may not have had access to, certainly in certain industries, IBM's in every part of the world, in every industry, and that exposure from IBM's go to market has been very, very exciting for us. And certainly, global now, right. As Cleversafe, we were only in North America and Europe, for example, and now we're all over the world, or had the chance to be all over the world, so that's been really exciting. And then on top of that the whole integration into the cloud, right, because IBM's cloud business unity is the one that drove the acquisition of Cleversafe because they wanted the technology in the cloud. And now that we're there, we can offer storage services, object storage services as a foundation to anyone all over the world. And I think that's really exciting, and it's the exposure to all kinds of different businesses that's been exciting since we've been part of-- >> Yeah, and the speed at which you can get to that object store as a service as opposed to-- >> Absolutely. >> As opposed to saying, Okay, knocking on-- >> Yes. >> All the cloud doors, (laughing) And, hey, do you want to buy my cloud? And like, Well, you know we got our own, or whatever it is. >> Right, right. >> And now it's just boom global-- >> It's shortened that sale cycle tremendously, right. People are up and running in a few days now, or even a few hours, whereas before it may take months or, even quarters, to get started. You can get started now just by going to the portal, signing up for object storage services, starting to write data into the cloud, starting to leverage these other services that we walked about. It's very simple-- >> And the commentorial effects of what we were talking about before with, like Aspera and UStream, and so fourth-- >> Russ: Umm-hmm, umm-hmm. >> Give you the ability to add even new services. IBM 's always been very good at-- >> Yes. >> Acquisitions. >> Yes. >> We forget that sometimes IBM... (laughing) >> Acquisitions are always hard-- >> Yeah. >> But we've been fortunate we've had a lot of support and a lot help in getting integrated into the various businesses, And I think it's been a good journey. >> So what should we look for? What kind of milestones? Can you show a little leg on futures (laughing)? What should we be paying attention to? >> Well, we're going to continue to do what clients are asking us to do. We're going to develop features and functions, both on prem and in the cloud. We're going to integrate with a lot of different technologies, both IBM technologies and other company technologies. You may have seen our announcements with NetApp and VERITAS this week. >> Yeah. >> So we're going to continue to expand our integration with other technologies that exist in the marketplace because that's what clients want. They want solutions. They want end-to-end solutions, both on on prem and in the cloud. So we're focused on that. We're going to continue to do that. We'll certainly integrate with other IBM services as they come to market in the cloud. That's a really exciting thing, so we're going to continue to focus on driving success for our clients. And that's exciting. >> Oh! Russ, belated congratulations on the acquisition, and going through the integration. I'm really happy for you guys, and excited for your future. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Alright, keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Interconnect 2017. Be right back! (electronic music)