>> Live from Times Square in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering IBM's Change the Game, Winning with AI, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation. We're here at the Western Hotel and the theater district covering IBM's announcements. They've got an analyst meeting today, partner event. They've got a big event tonight. IBM.com/winwithAI, go to that website, if you're in town register. You can watch the webcast online. You'll see this very cool play of Vince Lombardy, one of his famous plays. It's kind of a power sweep right which is a great way to talk about sort of winning and with X's and O's. So anyway, Daniel Hernandez is here the vice president of IBM analytics, long time Cube along. It's great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure Dave. >> So we've talked a number of times. We talked earlier this year. Give us the update on momentum in your business. You guys are doing really well, we see this in the quadrants and the waves, but your perspective. >> Data science and AI, so when we last talked we were just introducing something called IBM Club Private for data. The basic idea is anybody that wants to do data science, data engineering or building apps with data anywhere, we're going to give them a single integrated platform to get that done. It's going to be the most efficient, best way to do those jobs to be done. We introduced it, it's been a resounding success. Been rolling that out with clients, that's been a whole lot of fun. >> So we talked a little bit with Rob Thomas about some of the news that you guys have, but this is really your wheelhouse so I'm going to drill down into each of these. Let's say we had Rob Beerden on yesterday on our program and he talked a lot about the IBM Red Hat and Hortonworks relationship. Certainly they talked about it on their earnings call and there seems to be clear momentum in the marketplace. But give us your perspective on that announcement. What exactly is it all about? I mean it started kind of back in the ODPI days and it's really evolved into something that now customers are taking advantage of. >> You go back to June last year, we entered into a relationship with Hortonworks where the basic primacy, was customers care about data and any data driven initiative was going to require data science. We had to do a better job bringing these eco systems, one focused on kind of Hadoop, the other one on classic enterprise analytical and operational data together. We did that last year. The other element of that was we're going to bring our data science and machine learning tools and run times to where the data is including Hadoop. That's been a resounding success. The next step up is how do we proliferate that single integrated stack everywhere including private Cloud or preferred Clouds like Open Shift. So there was two elements of the announcement. We did the hybrid Cloud architecture initiative which is taking the Hadoop data stack and bringing it to containers and Kubernetes. That's a big deal for people that want to run the infrastructure with Cloud characteristics. And the other was we're going to bring that whole stack onto Open Shift. So on IBM's side, with IBM Cloud Private for data we are driving certification of that entire stack on OpenShift so any customer that's betting on OpenShift as their Cloud infrastructure can benefit from that and the single integrated data stack. It's a pretty big deal. >> So OpenShift is really interesting because OpenShift was kind of quiet for awhile. It was quiest if you will. And then containers come on the scene and OpenShift has just exploded. What are your perspectives on that and what's IBM's angle on OpenShift? >> Containers of Kubernetes basically allow you to get Cloud characteristics everywhere. It used to be locked in to kind of the public Cloud or SCP providers that were offering as a service whether PAS OR IAS and Docker and Kubernetes are making the same underline technology that enabled elasticity, pay as you go models available anywhere including your own data center. So I think it explains why OpenShift, why IBM Cloud Private, why IBM Club Private for data just got on there. >> I mean the Core OS move by Red Hat was genius. They picked that up for the song in our view anyway and it's really helped explode that. And in this world, everybody's talking about Kubernetes. I mean we're here at a big data conference all week. It used to be Hadoop world. Everybody's talking about containers, Kubernetes and Multi cloud. Those are kind of the hot trends. I presume you've seen the same thing. >> 100 percent. There's not a single client that I know, and I spend the majority of my time with clients that are running their workloads in a single stack. And so what do you do? If data is an imperative for you, you better run your data analytic stack wherever you need to and that means Multi cloud by definition. So you've got a choice. You can say, I can port that workload to every distinct programming model and data stack or you can have a data stack everywhere including Multi clouds and Open Shift in this case. >> So thinking about the three companies, so Hortonworks obviously had duped distro specialists, open source, brings that end to end sort of data management from you know Edge, or Clouds on Prim. Red Hat doing a lot of the sort of hardcore infrastructure layer. IBM bringing in the analytics and really empowering people to get insights out of data. Is that the right way to think about that triangle? >> 100 percent and you know with the Hortonworks and IBM data stacks, we've got our common services, particularly you're on open meta data which means wherever your data is, you're going to know about it and you're going to be able to control it. Privacy, security, data discovery reasons, that's a pretty big deal. >> Yeah and as the Cloud, well obviously the Cloud whether it's on Prim or in the public Cloud expands now to the Edge, you've also got this concept of data virtualization. We've talked about this in the past. You guys have made some announcements there. But let's put a double click on that a little bit. What's it all about? >> Data virtualization been going on for a long time. It's basic intent is to help you access data through whatever tools, no matter where the data is. Traditional approaches of data virtualization are pretty limiting. So they work relatively well when you've got small data sets but when you've got highly fragmented data, which is the case in virtually every enterprise that exists a lot of the undermined technology for data virtualization breaks down. Data coming through a single headnote. Ultimately that becomes the critical issue. So you can't take advantage of data virtualization technologies largely because of that when you've got wide scale deployments. We've been incubating technology under this project codename query plex, it was a code name that we used internally and that we were working with Beta clients on and testing it out, validating it technically and it was pretty clear that this is a game changing method for data virtualization that allows you to drive the benefits of accessing your data wherever it is, pushing down queries where the data is and getting benefits of that through highly fragmented data landscape. And so what we've done is take that extremely innovated next generation data virtualization technology include it in our data platform called IBM Club Private for Data, and made it a critical feature inside of that. >> I like that term, query plex, it reminds me of the global sisplex. I go back to the days when actually viewing sort of distributed global systems was very, very challenging and IBM sort of solved that problem. Okay, so what's the secret sauce though of query plex and data virtualization? How does it all work? What's the tech behind it? >> So technically, instead of data coming and getting funneled through one node. If you ever think of your data as kind of a graph of computational data nodes. What query plex does is take advantage of that computational mesh to do queries and analytics. So instead of bringing all the data and funneling it through one of the nodes, and depending on the computational horsepower of that node and all the data being able to get to it, this just federates it out. It distributes out that workload so it's some magic behind the scenes but relatively simple technique. Low computing aggregate, it's probably going to be higher than whatever you can put into that single node. >> And how do customers access these services? How long does it take? >> It would look like a standard query interface to them. So this is all magic behind the scenes. >> Okay and they get this capability as part of what? IBM's >> IBM's Club Private for Data. It's going to be a feature, so this project query plex, is introduced as next generation data virtualization technology which just becomes a part of IBM Club Private for Data. >> Okay and then the other announcement that we talked to Rob, I'd like to understand a little bit more behind it. Actually before we get there, can we talk about the business impact of query plex and data virtualization? Thinking about it, it dramatically simplifies the processes that I have to go through to get data. But more importantly, it helps me get a handle on my data so I can apply machine intelligence. It seems like the innovation sandwich if you will. Data plus AI and then Cloud models for scale and simplicity and that's what's going to drive innovation. So talk about the business impact that people are excited about with regard to query plex. >> Better economics, so in order for you to access your data, you don't have to do ETO in this particular case. So data at rest getting consumed because of this online technology. Two performance, so because of the way this works you're actually going to get faster response times. Three, you're going to be able to query more data simply because this technology allows you to access all your data in a fragmented way without having to consolidate it. >> Okay, so it eliminates steps, right, and gets you time to value and gives you a bigger corporate of data that you can the analyze and drive inside. >> 100 percent. >> Okay, let's talk about stack overflow. You know, Rob took us through a little bit about what that's, what's going on there but why stack overflow, you're targeting developers? Talk to me more about that. >> So stack overflow, 50 million active developers each month on that community. You're a developer and you want to know something, you have to go to stack overflow. You think about data science and AI as disciplines. The idea that that is only dermained to AI and data scientists is very limiting idea. In order for you to actually apply artificial intelligence for whatever your use case is instead of a business it's going to require multiple individuals working together to get that particular outcome done including developers. So instead of having a distinct community for AI that's focused on AI machine developers, why not bring the artificial intelligence community to where the developers already are, which is stack overflow. So, if you go to AI.stackexchange.com, it's going to be the place for you to go to get all your answers to any question around artificial intelligence and of course IBM is going to be there in the community helping out. >> So it's AI.stackexchange.com. You know, it's interesting Daniel that, I mean to talk about digital transformation talking about data. John Furrier said something awhile back about the dots. This is like five or six years ago. He said data is the new development kit and now you guys are essentially targeting developers around AI, obviously a data centric. People trying to put data at the core of the organization. You see that that's a winning strategy. What do you think about that? >> 100 percent, I mean we're the data company instead of IBM, so you're probably asking the wrong guy if you think >> You're biased. (laughing) >> Yeah possibly, but I'm acknowledged. The data over opinions. >> Alright, tell us about tonight what we can expect? I was referencing the Vince Lombardy play here. You know, what's behind that? What are we going to see tonight? >> We were joking a little bit about the old school power eye formation, but that obviously works for your, you're a New England fan aren't you? >> I am actually, if you saw the games this weekend Pat's were in the power eye for quite a bit of the game which I know upset a lot of people. But it works. >> Yeah, maybe we should of used it as a Dallas Cowboy team. But anyways, it's going to be an amazing night. So we're going to have a bunch of clients talking about what they're doing with AI. And so if you're interested in learning what's happening in the industry, kind of perfect event to get it. We're going to do some expert analysis. It will be a little bit of fun breaking down what those customers did to be successful and maybe some tips and tricks that will help you along your way. >> Great, it's right up the street on the west side highway, probably about a mile from the Javis Center people that are at Strata. We've been running programs all week. One of the themes that we talked about, we had an event Tuesday night. We had a bunch of people coming in. There was people from financial services, we had folks from New York State, the city of New York. It was a great meet up and we had a whole conversation got going and one of the things that we talked about and I'd love to get your thoughts and kind of know where you're headed here, but big data to do all that talk and people ask, is that, now at AI, the conversation has moved to AI, is it same wine, new bottle, or is there something substantive here? The consensus was, there's substantive innovation going on. Your thoughts about where that innovation is coming from and what the potential is for clients? >> So if you're going to implement AI for let's say customer care for instance, you're going to be three wrongs griefs. You need data, you need algorithms, you need compute. With a lot of different structure to relate down to capture data wasn't captured until the traditional data systems anchored by Hadoop and big data movement. We landed, we created a data and computational grid for that data today. With all the advancements going on in algorithms particularly in Open Source, you now have, you can build a neuro networks, you can do Cisco machine learning in any language that you want. And bringing those together are exactly the combination that you need to implement any AI system. You already have data and computational grids here. You've got algorithms bringing them together solving some problem that matters to a customer is like the natural next step. >> And despite the skills gap, the skill gaps that we talked about, you're seeing a lot of knowledge transfer from a lot of expertise getting out there into the wild when you follow people like Kirk Born on Twitter you'll see that he'll post like the 20 different models for deep learning and people are starting to share that information. And then that skills gap is closing. Maybe not as fast as some people like but it seems like the industry is paying attention to this and really driving hard to work toward it 'cause it's real. >> Yeah I agree. You're going to have Seth Dulpren, I think it's Niagara, one of our clients. What I like about them is the, in general there's two skill issues. There's one, where does data science and AI help us solve problems that matter in business? That's really a, trying to build a treasure map of potential problems you can solve with a stack. And Seth and Niagara are going to give you a really good basis for the kinds of problems that we can solve. I don't think there's enough of that going on. There's a lot of commentary communication actually work underway in the technical skill problem. You know, how do I actually build these models to do. But there's not enough in how do I, now that I solved that problem, how do we marry it to problems that matter? So the skills gap, you know, we're doing our part with our data science lead team which Seth opens which is telling a customer, pick a hard problem, give us some data, give us some domain experts. We're going to be in the AI and ML experts and we're going to see what happens. So the skill problem is very serious but I don't think it's most people are not having the right conversations about it necessarily. They understand intuitively there's a tech problem but that tech not linked to a business problem matters nothing. >> Yeah it's not insurmountable, I'm glad you mentioned that. We're going to be talking to Niagara Bottling and how they use the data science elite team as an accelerant, to kind of close that gap. And I'm really interested in the knowledge transfer that occurred and of course the one thing about IBM and companies like IBM is you get not only technical skills but you get deep industry expertise as well. Daniel, always great to see you. Love talking about the offerings and going deep. So good luck tonight. We'll see you there and thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellanti. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)