>> (soft music) >> Presenter: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm your host, John furry with theCUBE. Our next guest Manish Chawla who's the industry general manager of energy, resources and manufacturing, a great guest to break down this next generation of infrastructure modern applications and changing the business in the super important areas he's regulated verticals. Manish, it's great to see you. Thank you for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you John. Good to meet you. >> You know, this is the area where I've been saying for years the cloud brings great scale horizontally scalable data, but at the end of the day, AI and automation really has to be specialized in the verticals. In this we're going to see the action the ecosystems for connecting. This is a big deal here I think this year, transformation is the innovation, innovation at scale. This seems to be the underlying theme that we've been reporting on. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see this Fourth Industrial Revolution as you say, coming about. Can you define for us what that means? And when you say that, what does it mean for customers? >> Yeah, sure, sure. So, you know, in sort of simple terms all the technologies that we see around us, whether it's AI we talk about AI, we talk about 5G, we talk about Edge Cloud Robotics. So the application of those to the physical world in some sense in the industrial world is what we define as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Essentially, it's the convergence between the humans, the physical aspect, like the machines and the cyber either digital aspects, bringing that together. So companies can unlock the value from the terabytes and petabytes of data that our connected world is now able to produce. >> How does the IOT world come in? We've been again, I did a panel I think two years ago called you know the industrial IOT Armageddon. And it was really kind of pointing. It was kind of provocative title, but the point was you know, the industrial connections are all devices now and they're connected to the network security super important. This industrial revolution includes this new edge. >> It's got to be smarter and intelligent. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, absolutely. It is about the edge. It's about devices. It's about delivering capturing the data from the umpteen devices. You know, we've recently heard about the chip shortage which gives you an idea that there is so much utilization of compute power everywhere in the world. And the world is becoming very software defined. So whether it's software defined machines software defined products, the washing machines that we use at home, the cars we use home, everything is gradually becoming, not gradually I'd say rapidly becoming intelligent. And so that edge or IOT is the foundation stone of everything we're talking about. >> Well, you mentioned software on a chip SOC that's a huge mega wave coming. That's going to bring so much more compute into smaller form factors which leads me to my next question, which kind of, I'm kind of answering for myself but I'm not a manufacturing company but why should they care about this trend from a business perspective besides the obvious new connection points? What's really in it for them? >> Yeah. So big topic right now is this topic of resilience, right? So that's one aspect. This, the pandemic has taught us that resilience is a core objective. The second objective, which is front and center of all CEOs or CEOs is out-performance. And so what we're seeing is out-performance are investing in technology for many goals, right? So it's either sustainability which is a big topic these days, and a huge priority. It's about efficiency. It's about productivity. It's also now more and more about delivering a much stronger customer experience, right? Making your products easier to use much easily consumable as well. So if you, when you pull it all together it's an end to end thinking about using data to drive those objectives of out-performance as well as resilience. >> What's the progress being made so far on the manufacturing industry on this front? I mean, is it moving faster or you mentioned accelerating but where is the progress bar right now? >> So I think as we came into 2020, I would have described it as we were starting to enter the chapter two where companies were moving from experimentation to really thinking of scaling this. And what we found is the pandemic really caused a big focus on these, as Winston Churchill has been attributed the quote "Never waste a good crisis." A lot of CEOs, a lot of executives and leadership really put their energy into accelerating digital transformation. I think we really, two thirds have been able to accelerate their digital transformation. So the good news is, you know companies don't have to be convinced about this anymore. They're really, their focus is on where should I start? Where should I focus? And what should I do next? Right, is really the focus. And they are investing in sort of two types of technologies is the way we see it. What I would call foundational technologies because there's a recognition that to apply the differentiating technologies like AI and capturing and taking value of the data you need a strong architectural foundation. So whether it's cybersecurity, it's what we call ITOT integration connecting the devices back to the mothership. And it's also applying cloud but cloud in this context is not about typically what we think as public cloud or a central spot. It's really bringing cloud-like technologies also to the edge or to the plant or to the device itself whether it's a mobile device or a physical device. And that foundation is that recognition that you've got to have the foundation that you can build your capabilities on top. Whether it's for customers or clients or colleagues. >> That's a great insight on the architecture. I think that's a successful playbook. It sounds so easy. I do agree with you. I think people have said this is a standard now hybrid cloud, the edge pretty clear visibility on the architecture of what to do or what needs to be done, how to do it, all other story. So I have to ask you, we hear of these barriers. There's always blockers. I think COVID's released some of those relieved some of those blockers because people have to force their way into the transformation but what are those barriers that are stopping the acceleration for customers to achieve the benefits that they need to see? >> Yeah. So I think one or one key barrier is a recognition that most of our plants or manufacturing facilities or supply chains really run in a brownfield manner. I, there's so many machines so many facilities that have been built over decades. So there's a proliferation of different ages of devices, machines, et cetera. So making sure that there is a focus on laying out a foundation, that's a key barrier. There is also a concern that, you know the companies have around cybersecurity. The more you connect the more you increase the attack surface. And we know that that hacks and so on are, are a dominant issue now whether it's for ransomware or for other malicious reasons. And so modernizing the foundation and making sure you're doing it in a secure way those are the key concerns that executives have. And then another key barrier I see is making sure that you have a key, key core objective and not making too many different varied experimentation beds. So keeping a focus on what's the core use case of benefit you're after and then what's the foundation to make sure that you're going after it. Like I said, whether it's quality or productivity or such like. >> So the keys to success, if I get this right is you have the right framework for this as you say, industry 4.0 you got to understand the collaborative dynamics and then have an ecosystem. >> Yeah. Can you unpack those three things? Because take me through that. You got to the framework, the collaboration and the ecosystem. What does that mean specifically? >> So the way I take the simplest way to think of it is the amount of work and effort that all companies have to put in, is so great in front of them. The opportunities are so great as well that nobody can hire all the smart people that are needed to achieve the goals. Everybody has their own specific I would say focus and capabilities they bring to bear. So the collaboration between manufacturers the collaboration between operational technology companies like the Siemens, ABB, Schlumberger, et cetera and IT technology companies like ourselves that three-part collaboration is sort of the heart of what I see as ecosystems coming together. The other dimensionality of ecosystems is also looking at it from a supply chain or a value chain perspective cause how something becomes more intelligent or smarter or more effective is also being able to work across the supply chain or value chain. So those are our key focus areas make sure we are collaborating across value chains and supply chains, as well as collaborating with manufacturers and OT, operational technology companies to be able to bring these digital capabilities with the right capabilities of operational technology companies into the manufacturers. >> If I asked you, how are you doing that? What specifically would you say? I mean, how are you collaborating? What's some examples give some examples of this enaction. >> Certainly. So we recently announced over the last say, nine months or so three strategic, very transformative partnerships. The first one I'll share with you is with Schlumberger. Schlumberger is the world's largest oil field services company. And now also the world's largest distill technology company for the oil and gas industry. So we've collaborated with them to bring hybrid cloud to the digital platform so they now can deploy their capabilities to any customer regardless of whether they want it in country or on a public cloud. Another example is we've established a data platform with Schlumberger for the oil and gas industry, to be able to bring again that data platform to any location around the world. The advantage of hybrid, the advantage of AI. With EVB, what we've done is we've taken our smart sync IT security connected with their products and capabilities for operational systems. And now are delivering an end to end solution that you can get cyber alerts or issues coming from manufacturing systems dry down to right up to an IT command center where you're seeing all the events and alerts so that they can be acted upon right away. So that's a great example of collaborating with IT from a security point of view. The third one is industrial IOT with Siemens and we've partnered with Siemens to deliver the MindSphere private cloud edition. Delivered on our red hat hybrid cloud. So this is an example where we are able to take our horizontal technologies, apply it with their verticals smarts and deep industry context put our services capabilities on top of it so they can deliver their innovations anywhere >> Manish is such an expert on this such a great leader on this area and I have to ask you you know, you've been in this mode of evangelizing and leading teams and building solutions around digital re platforming or whatever you want to call it, renovations. >> Manish: Right >> What's the big deal now, if you had to, I mean, it seems like it's all coming together with red hat under the covers, you get distributed networks with the Edge. It's all kind of coming together now for the verticals because you got the best of both worlds. Programmable scalable infrastructure with modern software applications on top. I mean, you've been even in the industry for many many waves, why is this wave so big and important? >> So I think there is no longer the big reason why it's important is I think there's no reason why companies have to be convinced now that the clarity is there that this needs to happen so that's one. The second is, I think there's a high degree of expectation among consumers, among employees and among customers as well, that everything that we touch will be intelligent. So these technologies really unlock the value unlock the value, and they can be deployed at scale that's really, I think what we're seeing as the focus now. And being able to deliver the innovation anywhere whether someone wants it at the Edge next to a machine that's operating, or be able to look at how a manufacturing facility or different product portfolio is doing in the boardroom. It's all available. And so that shop floor, the top floor connection is what everybody's aiming for but we also now call it Edge to enterprise. >> And everything works better, the employees are happy people are happy, stakeholders are happy. Manish great insight. Thank you for sharing here on theCUBE for Think 2021. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Absolutely thanks John for having me. >> Okay. I'm John Furry host theCUBE for IBM Think 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's The Cube on the ground at Serverlessconf. Brought to you by SilliconANGLE Media. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with The Cube, and we're here are Serverlessconf in Hell's Kitchen New York City, really happy to welcome to the program, another one of the keynote speakers. Ben Kehoe, who's the Cloud Robotics research scientist at iRobot. >> Yeah. >> Ben, great to see you. >> Great to see you too. >> All right, so tell us a little bit about how you got involved with Serverless. >> Yeah, I mean it all started, I was a grad student in robotics, and I started thinking about, you know, we have all these robotics algorithms. And as the cloud can enable robots to do more and better things, how do we help turn those robotics algorithms into web services. And I didn't get very far in that, right towards the end of my PHD, and then that was 2014, LAMBDA was released, and it was like hey, that looks like it does the kind of thing that I was thinking about that we needed. So then I joined iRobot, and we were developing a cloud solution, a cloud application for our connected robots and apps, and to help us scale that to stay lean. Serverless was the right choice, and we've been doing that since 2015. >> Yeah, so Ben, what is it about Serverless that made it a fit for this? You know, I think about, doesn't their responsiveness, performance, latency if I have to go >> Yeah. >> up to the cloud and back like that way. I think some of this needs to kind of live locally. And some that goes there, maybe you can just briefly tease through some of those dynamics for us. >> Yeah, when you're talking about robots, you definitely have to keep things local. You want a robot to be responsive to its environment. You want, that even if its cloud connection disappears, that it can still accomplish all of its tasks. So it's always a mix of keeping it as a timeless robot that is enabled to do better things through the cloud, in terms of additional computational power, or accessing libraries of information to help it understand its world better. And of course, when one robot learns something, all robots can benefit from that experience. >> Excellent, so this is the first step for Skynet is what you're saying, right? >> Could be. >> All right, bring us in a little bit. Your keynote, what were you looking to share? You know, some of the key points. >> Yeah, I think in the talks that I've given at Serverlessconf, they tend to be as much as I am enthusiastic about Serverless, fully bodying, I try and pull us back a little bit to say, "What are we still missing? "What's not here yet? "Where do we need to go?" And so I had some frowny face emoji in my talk about event driven programming, event driven Serverless, and Serverless without event driven programming. Now we're still, you know, we have areas to improve in each one of those. And then that transitioned really into, "How do we start bringing in people who "are just starting into Serverless?" Larger organizations, more traditional architectures, and people who are experienced with that, and understand traditional architectures well. How do we get them on board with Serverless? And so that starts with just the gateway drug, which is infrastructure automation at the edges of their application, taking scripts that they run from developer machines with Cron jobs, and moving those into a function that's triggered by some cloud event. And then from there, starting to bring them over in terms of you can reduce your costs by eliminating idle resources. You can start to simplify and strengthen by refactoring some of that. And then once you really get them thinking about, "Oh, this is really working for the things "that we're doing." New features will start to be developed. Serverless native or event driven native. And then sort of at the end of the talk, the key is that because Serverless architectures look different from traditional architectures, there's something called Conway's law that says, "The design of your application will follow "the communication patterns in your organization." >> Stu: Right. >> And so you have to sort of flip that around to say, "Well if our design is changing, then we have "to make our organization change as well." >> Right, does that mean we're going to have, micro-employees you know? Instead of micro services we have, you know, employees that we hire them, and then we fire them pretty quick when we don't need them, or? >> I hope not. >> Yeah. >> I hope not. >> (crosstalk) that that's the part time, the uber's >> Yes. >> nation of the workforce. >> Yes. That would be, I think an inefficient way of going about it. >> Yeah. >> But I think we do need to reset expectations around what we have control over, and what we don't, because when you're on a traditional architecture with servers, you can reach in and fix problems that you have. And recognizing that when you're running on functions as a service platform, and using managed services, that when the provider has some sort of incident, you're out of control of that. It's a very uncomfortable place to be of not being in control of your own destiny, even though when you look at the big picture, that's going to happen less often, then if you were doing it yourself. >> Stu: Yeah. >> And so that's making sure that the mindset inside the organization, and the way that people communicate, is appropriately tuned to that sort of new paradigm. >> Okay, yeah. Ben, some of those frowny faces, what are things that the community is working on that you're hopeful for? What are some of the areas that we need for the maturation of this space? >> Yeah, I think something that I talked about previously that's coming around, is monitoring. So there's much more tools out there to monitor the infrastructure to know what's going on inside these functions and these managed services. And there's now some security analysis tools that are coming out, that some of these people are present here. And that was a big aspect that I've harped on for a long time of... We have a lot of mature traditional tools, that will do network analysis of your servers. Well it's like, "I don't have any servers." And those vendors then say, "Well, we can't help you." And there's static code analysis vendors who say we look at your whole application, and the flows inside it. And we say, well most of my application exists outside of code that I've written. I just write little bits, that glue it together in the way that my business works. And they say, "Oh, well we can't help you." >> Yeah. It reminds me, I think you know for so many years, people were really excited about how they could build their infrastructure. >> Yeah. >> And now they look to environments, well I can get out of that. So it caught my eye. You know, you put out on twitter, said "Maybe we need to have, you know, my next talk will be, "Work dumber not harder." Maybe explain that a little bit. >> Yeah, so I think, >> Yeah. >> I've been thinking about, you know, with some of the talks here about how it's not building it yourself. That in some ways, there's not invented here syndrome. And we kind of want to go a little bit down the road of invented here syndrome, of if you're building something that is not business logic, you're probably ideally thinking, "Maybe I shouldn't be doing this." So turning it into, I don't want to have to be clever in setting up my architecture, because being clever and like writing, it's always interesting to do, right? When you're developing, you're solving a computer science problem. But often that mean you're not delivering business value. And so, in Paul Johnson's talk, he was talking about the kind of people he looks like. What the kind of people he looks for, look like. >> Yeah. >> And he was saying, you know, "It's people "who want to get stuff out the door. "And who think about good enough." And I think that's really the thing of, how do we, when the people you hire are people who just want to ship features, they're going to say, "I can pull together services to do that "without having to actually solve any hard problems." And that means that you're delivering value, and you're operating more in your business space then in a technology space." >> All right, Ben I want to give you the final word. >> Thank you. >> You know, only 460 people here, which is good growth for the show, but a lot of people out there that are still learning about Serverless, what tips do you give them? You know, first steps to get involved, get involved with the community, (mumbles) some early wins they can have? >> I think there's a couple of things. There is training out there, there's blogs. There's twitter. Ask questions. You know, ping me on twitter if you wonder about something. And there's a Serverless slack that's very active, and if you ask basically anybody, the link is floating around. >> All right, well Ben Kehoe, thanks so much. Great to meet you, and thanks for sharing in this community. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> And our community, I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat, exciting music bumper)