(dramatic music) >> Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at IBM Think 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're in San Francisco this year at the newly rejuved Moscone Center. Welcoming to theCUBE for the first time, Jozef de Vries, Director of IBM Cloud Databases. Jozef, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you very much, great to be here, great to be here. >> So as we were talking before we went live, this is, I was asking what you're excited about for this year's IBM Think. >> Yeah. >> Only the second annual IBM Think. >> Right. >> This big merger of a number of shows. >> Sure, you're right. >> Day minus one, team minus one, >> Yeah. >> everything really kicks off tomorrow. Talk to us about some of the things that you're working on. You've been at IBM for a long time. >> Mmm hmm. >> But cloud managed databases, let's talk value there for the customers. >> Yeah, definitely. Cloud managed databases really, at its core, it's about simplifying adoption of cloud provided services and reducing the capital expense that comes along with developing applications. Fundamentally what we're trying to do is abstract the overhead that is associated with running your own systems. Whether it's the infrastructure management, whether it's the network management, whether it's the configuration and deployment of you databases. Our collection of services really is about streamlining time to value of accessing and building against your databases. So we are really focused on is allowing the developer to focus on their business critical applications, their objectives, and really what they're paid for. They're paid to build applications, not paid to maintain systems. When we talk about the CIO office, the CTO office, they are looking at cost, they're looking at ways to reduce overall expenditures. And what we're able to provide with cloud managed databases is the ability not to have to staff an IT team, not to have to maintain and pay for infrastructure, not have to procure licenses, what have you, everything that goes into standing up the managing those systems yourself, we provide that and we provide the consumption based methods. So you basically pay for what you use, and we have various ways in which you can interact with your databases and the charges that are associated with that. But it really is again about alleviating all of that overhead and that expense that is associated with running systems yourself. >> 15 years ago, you're back to, before you started with IBM, >> Yeah. >> There was obviously IBM DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, >> SQL Server. >> I guess MySQL is around >> Mm hmm. >> back then, LabStack was building out the internet. But databases are pretty boring >> Yeah. >> back then. And then all of a sudden, it exploded. >> Right. >> And the NoSQL movement happened in a huge way. >> Mm hmm. >> Coincided with the big data movement. What happened? >> Yeah, I think as we saw the space of this technology evolve, and a variety of different kind of use cases cropping up. The development community kind of respond to that. And really what we try to do with our portfolio is provide that variety of database technology solutions. To me, not any number of different use cases. And we like to think about it broken down into two categories. Your primary data stores. This is where your applications are writing and reading the data that has been stored. And then particularly to your point, this is where we call the auxiliary data services, for example. These are your in memory caches, your message brokers, your search index, what have you. There is a plethora of different database technologies out there today that plug into any number of different use cases and application developers are attempting to fill. And more often than not, they're using more than one database at a time. And really what we're trying to do at IBM with our cloud managed database offering is provide a variety of those data services and database technologies to meet a variety of those use cases, whether they're mixing and matching, or different kind of applications workloads or what have you. We'd like to provide our customers with the choices that are out there today in the community at large. >> So many choices. >> Yeah. >> Am I hearing that its kind of horses for courses? I mean, you get things like, even niches like Cumulo with fine grain security. >> Yeah. >> Or Couchbase, obviously. >> Mm hmm. This one scales. And then this one is easy to use. You take Mongo, for text, really easy to use >> Yeah exactly. >> Sort of different specialized use cases. How do you squint through, and how does IBM match the right characteristics with the right technology? >> It's really, it's two-pronged. It's about understanding the user base. Understanding and listening to your customers. And really internalizing what are the use cases that they are looking to fulfill? It's also being in tune with the database technology in the market today. It's understanding where there are trends. Understanding where there are new use cases cropping up. And it's about building a deep enough engineering operations team where we can quickly spin up these new offerings. And again provide that technology to our end customers. And it's about working with our customers as well. And understanding the use cases and then sometimes making recommendations on what database technology or combination of databases would be best suited for their objectives. >> I'm curious. One of the things that you mentioned in terms of what the developer's day-to-day job should be, is this almost IBM's approach to aligning with the developer role and enabling it in new ways? >> It is really about, I think, having sympathy in delivering on solutions in regards that is simply for the pains that they had otherwise endured 10, 15 years ago. When the notion of cloud managed anything really wasn't a thing yet. Or was just starting to emerge. IBM in houses runs their own systems for years and years obviously and the folks on my team, they have come from other companies, they know that the pain, what pain is involved in trying to run services. So like I said it's a little bit out of sympathy, it's a bit out of knowing what your users need in a cloud managed service. Whether again it's security, or availability, or redundancy, you name it. It's about coming around to the other side of the table and I sat where you once sat. And we know what you need out of your data services. So trusting us to provide that for you. >> How are the requirements different? Things like recovery and resiliency. Do I need asset compliance in this new world? May be you could. >> Yeah. It's funny, that's a good question in that we don't necessarily deal so much with database specific requirements. Again as I mention we try to provide a variety of different database technologies. And by and large the users are going to know what they need, what combinations that they will need. And we'll work with them if they're navigating their way through it. Really what we see more the requirements these days are around the management characteristics. As you cited, are they highly available? Are they backed up? What's your disaster recovery policy? What security policies do you have in place? what compliance, so on and so forth. It's really about presenting the overall package of that managed solution. Not so much, whether the database is going to be high available verses consistent replication or what have you. I mean that's in there, and it's part of what we engage with our customers about, but also what we'd like to put a lot of emphasis is on providing those recognized database technologies so that there is a community behind and there's opportunity for the users to understand what it is that they need beyond just what we can sell them. It's really about selling the value proposition of again, the management characteristics of the services. >> So who do you see as the competition? Obviously the other big, the two big cloud providers, AWS and Azure. >> Yep. >> You're competing with them. >> Definitely. >> Quality of offerings. May be talk about how you fit. >> And Google's another one. Or Oracle is another emerging one. Even Alibaba is catching up quite a bit. It really feels like a neck-to-neck race in our day after day. The way we try to approach our portfolio is focusing on deep, broad and secure. Deep being that there're a core set of database technologies. We're building the database itself. Db2, Cloudant which is based off of Couchbase. Excuse me, CouchDB. And then broad. Again as I've been mentioning, having a variety of different database technologies. And they're secure across the board. Whether it's secure in how we run the systems, secure on how we certify them through external compliance certifications. Or secure in how we integrate with security based tooling that our users can take advantage of. Regarding our competitors, it really is one week it may be a new big data at scale type of database technology. Another day it may be, or another week it might be deeper integrations into the platform. It might be new open source database technologies. It might be a new proprietary database technology. But we're, it's a constant, like I say, race to who got the most robust portfolio. >> Developers are like teenagers. They're fickle. >> Yeah, that too, that too. We got to be quick in order to respond to those demands. >> In this age of hybrid multi-cloud, where the average company has five plus private cloud, public cloud, through inertia, through acquisition, et cetera. Where's IBM's advantage there as companies are, I think we heard a stat the other day, Dave, that in 2018, 80% of the companies migrated data and apps from public cloud. In terms of this reality that companies live in this multi-cloud, where is IBM's advantage there? And where does your approach to cloud managed services really differentiate IBM's capabilities? >> Really there's, for the last couple of years, a tremendous amount of investment on building on the Kubernetes open source platform. And even in particular to our cloud managed database services, we have been developing and have been recently releasing a number of different databases that run on a platform that we've developed against Kubernetes. It's a platform that allows us to orchestrate deployments, deletions of databases, backups, high availability, platform level integrations, all, a number of different things. What that has allowed us to do when concerning a hybrid type of strategy is it makes our platform more portable. So Kubernetes is something that can run on the cloud. It can run in a private cloud. It can run on premise. And this platform we're developing is something that can be deployed, which we do today for private, public cloud consumption, which can also be packaged up and deploy into a private cloud type environment. And ultimately it's portable and it's leveraging of that Kubernetes technology itself. So we're not hamstringing ourselves to purely public cloud type services, or only private cloud type services. We want to have something that is abstracted enough that again it can move around to these different kind of environments. >> How important is open source and how important is it for you to commit to the different open source projects? There are so many, >> Yeah. >> And you have limited resources. So how do you manage that? >> Open source is really critical both in what we're building and what we're also offering. As we've talked about our users out there, they know what they often want or sometimes we nudge them to the right or to the left, but generally speaking it's around all the open source technologies and whatever may be trending for that current month is often times what we're getting requested for. It could be a Postgres. It could be a RabbitMQ. It could be ElasticSearch. What have you. And really we put a lot of emphasis on embracing the open source community, providing those database technologies to our customers. And then it allows our customers to benefit from the community at large too. We don't become again the sole provider of education and information about that technology. We're able to expose the whole community to our customers and they're able to take advantage of that. >> I hear a lot of complaints sometimes, particularly from folks that might list themselves in a marketplace for one cloud or another, that they feel like the primary cloud vendor might be nudging the customer into their proprietary database. What's IBM's position on that? Is that fair? Is that overblown? >> We obviously have proprietary tech, particularly the Db2. And that's something we're continue investing in. It's what we view as one of our strategic top priority database technologies. We are very active developers in the Couch community as well. I wouldn't consider that proprietary, but again back to the point of-- >> CouchDB. You're as the steward of CouchDB. >> Exactly. >> Right. >> Right, exactly. But again, firm believers in open source. We want to give those opportunities to our customers to avoid those vendor lock-in type situations. We actually have quite a lot of interests from our EU customer base. And by and large EU policies are around anti-trust and what have you. They tend to gravitate towards open source technology because they know it's again portable. They can be used in Postgres by IBM one month and if they no longer are satisfied with that, they can take their Postgres workloads and move them into another cloud provider. Ideally they're coming from the other cloud providers onto IBM. >> Well I should be actually more specific, in fairness, Dynamo's often cited. I supposed Google's Spanner although that's sort of a more of a niche, >> Mm hmm. >> specialized database. If I understand it correctly, Db2, that's a hard core transaction >> Sure. >> system. You're not going to confused that with, I don't think, anyway CouchDB. Although, who knows? May be there are some use cases there. But it sounds like you're not nudging them to your proprietary, certainly Db2 is proprietary. CouchDB is one of many options that you offer. >> Certainly Db2 is one of our core products for our database portfolio. And we do want to push our customers to Db2 where-- >> If it makes sense. >> Exactly, where it makes sense. And where there's demand for it. If it doesn't make sense so there's not demand we will offer up any number of the other databases that we also offer. >> Excellent, here's our last question.As >> Sure. >> As IBM Think the 2nd annual kicks off really tomorrow. For this developer audience that you were talking about a lot in our conversation, what are some of the exciting things that they're going to you? Any sort of obviously not breaking news, but >> Mmm hmm. >> Where would you advise the developer community, who's attending IBM Think to go to learn more about cloud managed databases? And how they can really become far more efficient to do their jobs better. >> Sure. Databases are hard, plain and simple. They are particularly hard to run, and developers who are not necessarily database admins, they're not database operators, that they want to focus on building the applications, are going to want to find solutions that alleviate that overhead of running those systems themselves. So to your question we've got sessions all throughout the week where we're talking about our Cloudant offerings and the future of where we're going with that. We've got a couple of different sessions around our IBM cloud database portfolio. This is a lot of the open source database technology we're running. We have demos in the solution center and Db2's strided all around the conference as well. So there's lots of different sessions focused on talking the value proposition of IBM's cloud managed database portfolio across the board. >> A lot of opportunities for learning. Well, Jozef de Vries, Thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCube this afternoon. >> Thank you very much, it was great. And for Dave Vallente, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube, live from IBM Think 2019. Day 1 stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

I won't mind that either live from San Francisco it's the queue covering Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat and welcome back to the cube we're here live in San Francisco on day two of our coverage of red hat summit 2018 I'm John Troyer I'm here with Larry soccer Larry is the hi Larry weõll area the global lead for infrastructure growth and strategy at Accenture that's great though and welcome as a first timer to the cube you remember the Cuban member the cube alums Ozzy awesome so one of the themes here that we've noticed here on day two of the conference is the reality of hybrid cloud multi-cloud the demos up on stage have been real production workloads from real companies at a global scale and the the theme it's been a lot about open shift open and an open ship and that as a bridge for the right with the rest of Red Hat's stack so Accenture and global si you know work with very big companies very complicated problems and enabling them hybrid cloud is that important for you and your customers absolutely Accenture actually got out very aggressively about four or five years of work go with our cloud first strategy and it was very public centric you know how do we you know how do you start to take advantage of the innovation of the hyper scalers the AWS as the answer is to really start to innovate drive drive agile application development and get out there very quickly however if you take a look at our clients you know they're typically large complex global 2000 companies and for variety of reasons whether it's regulatory reasons gxb compliance if you go to the pharmaceutical industry HIPAA for health care you know PCI they they've really you know they continue to invest in their data centers I mean other reasons toko clouds an interesting one it's a proximity thing it's the thing that actually connects the the public providers and and if he's getting built on that performance you know if you know I start to look with sa P driving a terabyte Hana you know where do you start to deploy that so you know and then even investment say a lot of our clients have significant investments in their data centers and infrastructure so what we've been doing over the last probably six to eight months is really taking a look at a lot of the innovation that we saw from those hyper scalars and bringing it to the to the data center and really trying to create industrialized private clouds with the same kind of standardization that you haven't you know in the world of Amazon and as you're in a you know same automation the cloud operating model and really start to do that not just in the datacenter a private cloud but also the rest of infrastructure and ultimately our clients are going to end up with with hybrid environment so we're you know we've been using our extension cloud platform to integrate you know the public providers now in the person and the private side you know with open shifts the you know the VMware's of the world and even back into the legacy infrastructure well that's that's fascinating and also I think really grounded in reality I mean that the tech industry there's you know we all there's all these pendulums and hype cycles and a few years ago it's right right we we were talking a lot about public there was a lot of innovation and it and maybe it's taken a few years for the private stack and the hybrid stack to catch up to give you that advantage in terms of agility and in terms of speed to market speed to production can you talk a little bit about maybe what that relationship with with openshift you say you you're seeing we saw a like I said we've seen a lot of open ship in production are you saying that as well yeah yeah we did we definitely are I mean you know we have a lot of our clients who they're looking ok hey I this look I want to start getting to more service architectures I want to start adopting the new technologies agile development you know start to really embrace DevOps at the same time it's you know either for data gravity or for compliance reasons there's certain applications they just can't move into the public environments ASAP say you know has been challenging to do it particularly as we start to get HANA so you know they've been starting to look and say ok well open ship becomes a very attractive alternative to start developing applications that I can then you know right in a private environment as well as bring up into Amazon and as yours so a few years ago for better or worse one of the terms people were using was lift and shift right and people were taking their you know or legacy that there's a lot of years of battle-tested infrastructure and do you just hoist it into the cloud do I have to rewrite it can i containerize it I mean what are people doing and how are you going back to the scale of our clients you know a lot our plants will have anywhere from two thousand to over twenty thousand workloads and applications so the the notion of lift and shift or or modernization it's not a binary problem so what we actually did was we took our app modernization practice which is part about technology business we coupled it with our infrastructure migration teams as a part of our Accenture Operations Group and we created an integrated cloud factory and then we actually took we had two different two sets of tools we combined them into one accelerate toolkit and and what that does is it allows us to do the upfront application portfolio assessment we figure out the dispositions of the applications you know what what needs to stay together you know we determine which ones need to be refactored or remediated or modernized and that's our technology organization and then for those that we need to just migrate or so you know a few minor changes we then had you know do all the planning the migrations of that and we're able to do this at you know at scale with the factory leveraging a combination of onshore and offshore and these tools to do all the automation and do the you know the wave planning keeping dependencies and moving data around and and we're able to do you know anywhere at one climb we doing over 1200 workloads a month that's amazing I mean that the scale and the speed that time-to-market even in the demos here on stage has been actually pretty pretty surprising to me because it means that it's real as our people shift as people are shifting their portfolios into a hybrid stance some workloads here some workloads in a multi cloud can you talk a little bit about how you're approaching multi cloud and now you're approaching maybe the multi cloud over time well you know I mean we made a big bet on our Accenture cloud platform so which which is really a cmp started very public focused you know how do I provision and manage optimize my workloads across the public providers we've now started to integrate in the private side much more aggressively we're always doing it at our clients but it was a very custom one-off as we start to industrialize and standardize on the private side it now gives a seamless hybrid cloud management we're actually extending that to go to legacy we've still got a number of clients like insurance companies where they've got significant business logic trapped in their mainframes and our app modernization guys are starting to wrap those with micro services starting to do front-end development in OpenShift it's example and get closer to the users for you know for better customer experience much more agile delivery while still maintaining that frame and and what we find is as you've got these distributed applications based on micro services you now need to manage across that hybrid environment and it's it's public it's private but it's also legacy infrastructure yeah and that's got to be complicated one of the other themes of this show probably coming out of Red Hat's own culture of openness and a we had a great I love the the keynote this morning talking about well you know planning is great but you know eventually the plan is going to hit the battlefield and you've got to be adaptive and you've got to be agile so when you are talking with the CIO and when you're talking with these leads of business and their IT leads you know what are some of the things that you're preparing them with and what are maybe some of the signals that they're up there ready to do this versus maybe not ready to do this yeah you know very good question what's interesting is when I talk to most of our of the CIOs I think they've got a pretty good handle on the technologies I mean it's and not to trivialize it's not simple technology but I think most have focused a lot of their energy on that I think their biggest challenges are the culture and and the operating model so you know if you look thinking well how the hyper scalars do it I mean firstly standardize which I think that's you know these CIOs are typically do want you know they they're not driving standard t-shirt sizes they don't have that discipline to have a standardized service catalog what you need to audit traditionally the enterprise everything most custom everything was bespoke exactly so it's not in their DNA to go to that Christian you know standardization and I mean think about the hyper scalars I mean a well Amazon innovates an incredible pace they still have a discrete set of services and if you can automate and do real cloud operating model you really need to have that level of standardization the whole operate the business and operational transformation is very difficult you know it's interesting now the apps guys have typically done a reasonably good job I mean getting out there and using agile development you know they're embedded in the be used doing their sprints etcetera still some work to be done for the infrastructure guys you know if you if you start to take a look at it you could have an app team doing - you know two-week sprints they're ready to drop code all of a sudden have to wait 12 weeks for the infrastructure to catch up so we've been spending a lot of time looking at how do we enable software to find infrastructure how do we start to even do you know infrastructure is code with similar Sprint's and embedded into the be used groans etc talyn's a huge issue I mean they are all struggling it's very hard to get people with native cloud skills you know it sorts them in the market so most of our clients are really struggling I mean it's good for us as an integrator and bring me how to bring those skills but but they too need to develop those skills as well and that all in some way solves over itself over time as standardization happens right yeah as kubernetes becomes more ubiquitous you will have more people trained up in kubernetes same thing with some of the infrastructure layer maybe can you drill down maybe a little bit more into the infrastructure and how are you helping so do you say the infrastructure folks become more agile you know at some point you've got mainframes they're not moving so you kind of have to wall them off with some agile layers we'd be big proponents of software-defined infrastructure or I think VMware has actually done a pretty good job getting the market up to speed on software-defined data centers so how do you how do you first use virtualization techniques like you know if you think about VMware is NSX or Cisco's ACI part how do you deploy those two to provide the vehicle to do the automation and then grit you know severe you know just very intense automation now if I have to standardize first but then I start to automate so whether it's V you know VMware would be realize it's you know ansible so I mean we've seen red have to do some great work around ansible and doing that automation we use chef in our in our central cloud platform but but it but really starting to drive that similar type standardization and automation but but you have to chain change how you operate to do that and I think that's where a lot of people struggle so they you know they may have automation projects acceptor but they they haven't really fundamentally shifted how they do it so at one of our clients a life sciences client we actually were doing we were implemented a software-defined datacenter we had service now as as the the front end portal you know V realized automation integrated with a GXP compliance system and we just kept iterating through in two-week Sprint's we would incremental II deliver a you know first minimal Viable Product and compute and storage then up to t-shirts we got into you know more database-as-a-service eventually even as being able to spend up s a PE basis instances and we were able to leverage a lot of the automation including the network which is oftentimes a long pole in order to accomplish that right alright so starting with bite-sized pieces and exactly incrementally improvement and that's the great thing about agile right I mean it and to put the problems and the apps guys have known it for a while as infrastructure guys with a little new so we've actually taken out Accenture DevOps platform and we've created an infrastructure exclude plugin you know that uses github and jerry' to now deliver drop releases of infrastructure as good well that's great I mean you mentioned a lot of different tools and platforms here a lot of them open source right we're here at Red Hat summit I think one of the again one of the signals of this week they were you know announcement with Microsoft announcement with IBM you know very serious and you all have been working with them very serious enterprise ready ecosystem here do you get any pushback about the open source nature of some of these things you know less and less and a number of years ago there was clearly you know because of particularly licensing an tabria Enterprise great applications I think that you know I think people become much more comfortable with open source I mean what when it one thing I often look at is Kafka and you looking at me I see so much Kafka getting deployed right now it's you know open source model it's you know I'm seeing it used in so many different uses you know you pet use cases and development and so I think I think a lot of and thanks to Red Hat I you know give them credit for bringing open source to mainstream and to the enterprise market I'm putting you know licensing around it so I think no I don't see the same kind of pushback anymore and I think the walls changed it's kind of the bearable right it's either both at the cloud layer and then at the infrastructure layer in the automation everything like that you know maybe talk a little bit more about some of a Accenture what I would I would have been gathering here right there's a bunch of open source tools you're using but you have your own tool sets too right and and and the eccentric cloud can you talk a little bit so the extension cloud platform is I mean we do use a lot of third-party technologies we're not gonna go reinvent the wheel we're gonna pull in the best of products that we can me and it says and we started off I mean it's been out there for about five years you know to be you know we have an orchestration platform that's built into it we do use a lot of shaft to do you know the provisioning of the environments have a but you know and we keep evolving it we've changed out building optimization engines and now are very focused on how do we push it into the private world so that brings in new tools and capabilities to do that automation so so as we continue to push that the the next big step that we're focused on is the application and infrastructure management so one of the emerging problems is we start to see micro services get adopted and you're gonna get applications that might have a front-end running service and Amazon you know with lambda you know distributed private cloud with a CouchDB you know data right yeah and then a mainframe reservation system so this is one of our you know one of our clients has that environment how do you manage and troubleshoot across that environment so the ability to first look at what I'll call the application or service topology you know up in the tools like I just saw dynaTrace presentation app DS of the world but then go you know the east-west apology then mapping north south into virtualized and physical infrastructure and this to me is gonna be one of our you know more difficult challenges because that at the you know at the same time you've got that complexity it's getting more complicated you know I think containers become much more dynamic you software-defined networking it becomes a lot harder to sexualize and troubleshoot that so we starting to look at the assurance or service management side and really start to innovate you know more there yeah that's that's amazing and I think that's going to become more and more necessary right we you know with big companies global you know distributed all over the world distributed on multiple platforms with private with private components all these services mixed together with a service bus you know you know when that blows up it's gonna blow up spectacular exactly and we've all been on those calls with 50 people that we can't afford to do you know and it's everybody I'm a network guy everyone points at us I really do want the tooling and instrumentation I mean the other big change that's interesting is the operator is gonna change I mean I think there's two major elements to that it's obviously you know DevOps you know development and operations getting cut you know much tighter together asre is a great example that and I think we you know if I look at DevOps right now I feel it's still very dev centric I mean we've grade on CI CD pipelines not quite as good on the op side I think we've got some room to to change there oh there's a lot of there's a lot of growth and journey and I love that the community like we can all learn together and I think open source and all these pieces are a big piece of it but I look at on the infrastructure side in the infrastructure operation side one things we're looking at now is how do we transform both our clients operators and our own operators when we do the outsourcing so how do we take them from what was traditionally eyes on glass looking at consoles and now write the next you know data ingestion scripts the the analytic algorithms of visualizations you know write the next automations to streamline something and over time tune the AI engines as we start to adopt AI to particularly around performance optimization you know how do we start to incorporate that absolutely I think yeah we're all facing that I mean it sounds like I really enjoyed learning about how all everything that Accenture is bringing to the table on this enterprise journey to the cloud Larry thanks for joining us Larry said Larry soccer Global lead for infrastructure growth and strategy at Accenture thanks for being on the deck enjoy it I think we are here we're just wrapping up here we are live here for two days at Red Hat summit in San Francisco we're closing up our second day we'll be joining you in the morning tomorrow as we finish off the conference that's all what you can always count here live on the cube