>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, >>Everybody welcome back to IBM. Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of this event. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, but doing that virtually for the better part of a 14 months. Now we're going to get deeper into application modernization. Marie ASHRAE is here. She's the director of marketing at mainline information systems and David burrows. Burrows is an account executive at mainline folks. Welcome to the cube. Great to have you on today. >>Thank you. Nice to be here >>To start with with mainline. Uh, people might not be familiar with, with mainline, but you've transformed over the past five years. I wonder if you could describe that for our audience? >>Yes, we have. Indeed. We have, um, mainline, um, you know, it's a 30 plus year company and, um, and for 30 odd years we had really been focused a lot in hardware, right? Hardware reselling. That's what the market needed. That's what we did a lot of. But then in the past, I would say five to eight years, maybe even 10 years, we started on this transformation project, um, for the business where we started transforming ourselves into really systems integrators versus just hardware reseller. So now we can go to a client and we can say, Hey, now what are you struggling with? Right? What are your business challenges? And then from there, we can integrate a solution that might be hardware. It might be software, it might be some services, it could be managed services. It could be staffing services, um, could be a number of different things and put all that together and then deliver a complete solution that helps them with their, their business requirements. Okay, >>David, that, that must've been an interesting transition because what Marie just described is it used to be every opportunity was a nail and whatever box you were selling was the hammer. And, and that, that has changed dramatically. Of course. So you, you, I wonder what that discussion was like with, with, with clients. You must have heard that early on and said, Oh, this cloud thing is happening. The world is changing. We've got to change too. I wonder if you could chime in on that transformation. >>Yes. That's our, uh, as our clients have been changing, what we've been doing is, uh, you know, making sure that we fully understand what's available not only in the marketplace, but the competition and what, what each industry segment, for example, baking versus insurance versus a utility maybe facing, uh, during this this time. And so, you know, being able to transform as a, as an accounting dedicated, we've been able to, uh, indicate and so provide solutions as Marie indicated. Um, the large focus over the last five years has been networking and security as we move, uh, more compute to the edge, close to the edge. Security has been predominant. Uh, and so, you know, hardware is really almost commoditized through and through and with the exception of, you know, IBM, Z and, and power. Uh, and so, you know, we've had to really, uh, sellers, you know, focus on what customers are dealing with and how they transition. Uh, and as we, uh, you know, through COVID, it's actually been a bigger challenge, a bigger focus on security. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later in more detail >>Let's, let's, let's do that now. So, so Marie, maybe at a high level, you could talk about those challenges that your clients are facing. And then we can sort of double click on how that was exacerbated by, by COVID. And I'm really interested in your perspectives on sort of the post isolation economy and how those challenges are going to shift, but, but maybe, maybe kick us off at the high level if you could. >>Sure. So, um, so, you know, people, companies were moving toward, um, uh, th the whole digital transformation, right? Probably for the past three to four years, we started seeing more and more that's constantly, everybody sees those buzz words all the time. Um, so clients were shifting in that direction and we were shifting to try to satisfy them with their needs with those solutions, but then came COVID and all of a sudden, right. What people were, were planning on doing for the next, let's say five years. I mean, most of the iOS were saying, yeah, we're going to get there in five years. Well, that had to happen. Right. It had to have brakes went on and it had to happen instantaneously. So that put a big change in focus, a big change in direction for not only our clients. Right. But for our own folks, folks like David, who are trying to service these clients with having to bring them these solutions that we're going to solve their digital business needs, um, today and not five years from now. >>Yeah. So David let's, let's talk about that. I mean, what Marie just described, I call it the forced March to digital, because as Maria, as you were saying, people were on a digital transformation, but there was a little bit of complacency and okay, we'll get there. We're really busy doing some other stuff. And then all of a sudden you've probably seen the meme of the COVID wrecking ball coming, coming into the building, the office building and saying, you know, well, we're doing fine. And all of a sudden, boom, the forest COVID comes in. So, so, so, so how did that affect your clients and how did you respond? I mean, they're asking for VDI and get me some laptops, I need end point security. And so how did that affect the, the application modernization efforts and David, maybe you could comment on that. >>So I, I think for, for me, the biggest challenge was all business, the competition within business to survive COVID, uh, you know, they had to put on first thing was how do we get our, our customer, uh, supported correctly and how do we get our workers supportive, working at home? So the very first thing we did over the initial six months was most companies had to transform immediately within the first 30 to 90 days to allow their workforce to work from home. Uh, that happened throughout my, my customer base, uh, both in Southern California, uh, was customers really focused on, uh, how do we business process, how do we compete in this marketplace and get return on investment speed, you know, time to value or what we invest in these, uh, COVID times so that we can compete with other, uh, businesses that are trying to stay alive, uh, through this transition. And, and now, you know, we're seeing on, uh, on the backend, uh, you know, that time, the value in terms of investment is even more important because some businesses have been significantly impacted from not only cashflow, uh, but you know, certainly in terms of profitability during this time >>Makes sense. And so I'm read, so we were talking earlier about the, sort of the initial path to digital transformation, and I wonder if that's gotta be course corrected. I would think we were forced in to compress, you know, the digital reality, uh, and, and I guess in a way that's good. Uh, but in a way it was, we probably made a lot of mistakes. It was a bit of a Petri dish. So now as we begin to knock on exit COVID, you would think those, those imperatives, uh, adjust and they start to become aligned. What's your take on that, especially as it relates to application and infrastructure modernization. >>Um, so I would agree with that. I think that there's definitely has to be a little bit of a, of a real alignment happening. And I know recently I read that, um, 20, 21 is expected to be a very, um, large year in it spend because all of those, um, initiatives that CEOs and others were going after pre COVID kind of got put on hold, right. So they could then go focus on all of those digital needs that were needed, like, you know, the CDI, you know, work at home, all the security stuff for that. So I think we're going to see, I'm thinking, we're going to see a shift again now, and maybe businesses are going to go back and try to pick up where they were, uh, prior to COVID and now start working on more of really of the application modernization, um, initiatives that were in mind. And I know we wanted to talk about that as well, because David's been working on quite a bit of application modernization with, um, a few of his clients, um, as we're seeing again, businesses change. Um, and, and I don't know that all of that changes because of COVID. I think all of that change was for their competitiveness, um, to get there anyway. So I think that's going to start, as you said before, Dave, I think it's going to start now having to >>Kind of rethink, >>It reminds me of traffic on the David, if you've ever been to driving in, in London when it's slingshots, right. It's that's what's COVID was like Murray you're absolutely right. Last year it spend was down four to 5% this year. I mean, our prediction is going to be in the six to 7% range, which, which kind of aligns with where Gartner and IDC are based on our surveys. But, you know, back in, in April, like I think the 16th of April, it was a headline in the wall street journal that the China grew 18% GDP in the quarter. So it's very hard to predict, but, but it's coming back, you know, we, we can see that David and so, so spending is really gonna accelerate. There's probably some pent-up demand for that application modernization. Maybe it's been a little bit, uh, neglected as we've done, as Maria was saying. And you were saying the work from home. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the modernization aspects and maybe I'm really interested in the things that you guys deliver in your portfolio with IBM. >>Sure. Uh, so what I have customers in multiple phases within this, uh, current digital transformation, their customer, uh, moving everything to next gen, uh, development, which is, uh, only containerized code, uh, being able to, you know, swiftly go through their development tests, uh, and, uh, hybrid cloud environments where they're, um, they haven't made an investment yet, but they're sampling what it might be like to, uh, change into that world. And then there are customers are still in the, uh, typical environment, uh, the traditional environment, and are looking at what the solutions, as far as packages are available for them moving forward. So they can kind of skip over, uh, any kind of development and being able to, uh, leverage, uh, what I call them next, gen development or next gen systems, uh, immediately, as you know, you asked, you know, what are the, what are the systems that are available? IBM's cloud pack, uh, solution set. It provides a portfolio of capabilities, uh, both in the application, suite, database, suite security. Uh, I have customers today leveraging that. Uh, and, and so that is one of the first pieces, uh, that, that customers I see who are on the leading edge, or are also kind of trailing, are looking at, uh, these cloud packs to be able to, uh, uh, go time to market and time to value, uh, quickly. >>Yeah. So when I look at your portfolio, I just sort of scan the web. Uh, David just mentioned Marie cloud pack. I mean, we're talking software here. You guys do have a lot of expertise in ZZ Linux power, you mentioned is not a commodity. And it's one of the few pieces of hardware that, and Z they're not a commodity storage. I would think business resiliency fits in there beyond disaster recovery, your red hat, we're talking, you know, things like open OpenShift and Ansible for automation. So these are, these are not your grandfather's main line. These are toolkits are a piece of, you know, parts of the tool bag that you bring to bear to focus on on client outcomes and solutions is, am I getting that right? >>Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, and again, right, that goes back to the original opening comment about how we've transformed as a business, right. To become, uh, an integrator, um, putting all of these different pieces together. I mean, I know that, um, something that, that David recently had worked on, Oh my goodness. If you would have looked at the list of pieces of elements to that solution, um, it was really quite incredible between, um, open source stuff, you know, and a bunch of IBM stuff. Um, yes, it was some storage and yeah, there was some power, um, yes, there was red hat. Right. But then there was other stuff there was VMware. Um, there was, um, some things that, um, I can't even remember now all the names to all the components, but it was, it was a laundry list. Right. And so that's where though mainline stepped in and put the pieces together, uh, for the customer so that the customer then can get done what they needed to get done, which was, which was really solve their business problem, which was trying to become more competitive in their market space. >>Okay, David, so when Maria was sustained was basically, my takeaways is as a system integrator, you've got all these piece parts with these technologies, you've got virtualization, you've got automation, you've got containers and so forth. Uh, and yes, there's there's hardware, but there's this integration that has to occur. And your job is to abstract that complexity, that underlying complexity away so that the customers can focus on the outcome. Maybe you could talk about that and how you do that. >>Sure. I'll give you a good example of a recent customer that we work with who was, uh, basically, I mean, we consider an enterprise data platform that, that, uh, was going to rework their entire data warehouse into something that had governance surrounding it, uh, where they could validate all the data that was coming into their warehouse. And so we underpinned that, uh, with an infrastructure of power, uh, we're running, uh, obviously IBM, uh, uh, pack for data, uh, with DB two warehouse. Uh, we use a combination of that with, uh, Cloudera data flow through IBM, uh, with the streaming and, uh, the governance, uh, IBM governance catalog piece, which is, uh, lots of knowledge catalog. So, uh, we've been able to take not only what their base requirements were, but all the microservices that are packaged in with cloud pack, uh, all running on OpenShift, uh, which was a great acquisition that IBM did last year. And, uh, then, uh, they also required other microservices outside, uh, to support that environment and paint a picture for >>Us as to what the future looks like. Uh, it's, it's much different than the past 30 years, uh, and bring us home please >>Or so, um, I think the future for us is to continue to, um, to find all of the solutions, um, that will, that will help our customers, um, you know, get to their next steps. Right. And, and there's a lot, as you know, there's lots of solutions out there. There's lots of new companies that are popping up all the time. Um, you know, inherently, you know, mainline is an IBM partner. We've been an IBM partner for 30 plus years since our inception. And that's the base of our business is, is IBM. But, but there are other requirements that are needed by, by businesses, by our customers. And that's where we, we reach out and partner up. We probably have gone my goodness, 200 plus partnerships with various companies, various technology companies that we can then, um, lean on and pull in those ancillary solutions, um, to, to, to complete that, that solution for the customer. >>So I think we're going to continue going down that path. We're going to continue making sure that we're partnered with the, um, the, the leading technology companies. So we can build that IBM solution for our customer and, and bolt on the other pieces that are needed. Uh, we're going to continue to grow and enhance our services business because we've got quite a large services business, whether it's implementation services, uh, we do managed services. We have staffing services. I think you're going to see if we're still going to continue to, to grow that business, because that is a piece where companies, you know, they don't want to worry about running all of that stuff, right. They want to know that their system's going to be running 24 seven. And if there is a bump or a burp or something happens, Hey, they could pick up the phone, they can call mainline. We can help them get things corrected. So I think we're going to still see a lot of that going on as well, um, within our, our, our offerings. >>Excellent. Well, congratulations for making it through that. Not a whole lot, not, not every, uh, hardware seller reseller made it through and you guys transformed. It's a, it's an inspiring story. Maria, David, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're really welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante in our continuous coverage and the cube of IBM think 20, 21. Keep it right there.

>> From around the globe, it's the cube, with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of this event. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise but doing that virtually for the better part of a 14 months now, we're going to get deeper into application modernization. Marie Ashway is here. She's the director of marketing at Mainline Information Systems and David burrows. Burrows is an account executive at Mainline folks. Welcome to the cube, great to have you on today. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. >> Marie, I want to start with, with Mainline. A lot of people might not be familiar with Mainline but you've transformed over the past five years. I wonder if you could describe that for our audience? >> Yes, we have, indeed we have, Mainline, you know is a 30 plus year company and, and for 30 odd years we had really been focused a lot in hardware, right? Hardware reselling. That's what the market needed. That's what we did a lot of. But then in the past I would say five to eight years, maybe even 10 years we started on this transformation project for the business where we started transforming ourselves into really systems integrators versus just hardware reseller. So now we can go to a client and we can say, Hey now what are you struggling with? Right? What are your business challenges? And then from there we can integrate a solution that might be hardware. It might be software, it might be some services it could be managed services. It could be staffing services could be a number of different things and put all that together and then deliver a complete solution that helps them with their, their business requirements. >> Well, David, that that must've been an interesting transition because what Marie just described as it used to be every opportunity was a nail and whatever box you were selling was the hammer. And that, that has changed dramatically. Of course. So you, you, I wonder what that discussion was like with, with, with clients. You must have heard that early on and said, Uh-Oh this cloud thing is happening. The world is changing. We've got to change too. I wonder if you could chime in on that transformation. >> Yes. That's our, as our clients have been changing what we've been doing is, you know, making sure that we fully understand what's available, not only in the marketplace, but the competition. What, what each industry segment, for example, banking versus insurance versus a utility maybe facing during this this time. And so, you know, being able to transform as a as an accounting dedicated, we've been able to indicate. And so provide solutions as Marie indicated, the large focus over the last five years has been networking and security. As we move more compute to the edge, close to the edge security has been predominant. And so, you know, hardware is really almost commoditized through and through and with the exception of, you know IBM, Z and, and power. And so, you know, we've had to really sellers, you know focus on what customers are dealing with and how they transition. And as we, you know, through COVID, it's actually been a bigger challenge, a bigger focus on security. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later in more detail >> Let's, let's, let's do that now. So, so Marie, maybe at a high level, you could talk about those challenges that your clients are facing. And then we can sort of double click on how that was exacerbated by, by COVID. And I'm really interested in your perspectives on sort of the post isolation economy and how those challenges are going to shift, but, but maybe maybe kick us off at the high level if you could. >> Sure. So, so, you know, people, companies were moving toward the the whole digital transformation, right? Probably for the past three to four years we started seeing more and more that constantly everybody sees those buzzwords all the time. So clients were shifting in that direction and we were shifting to try to satisfy them with their needs with those solutions but then came COVID and all of a sudden, right. What people were, were planning on doing for the next, let's say five years. I mean, most of the CEO's were saying, yeah we're going to get there in five years. Well, that had to happen. Right. It had to have brakes went on and it had to happen instantaneously. So that put a big change in focus a big change in direction for not only our clients. Right. But for our own folks, folks like David who are trying to service these clients with having to bring them these solutions that we're going to solve their digital business needs today and not five years from now. >> Yeah. So David let's, let's talk about that. I mean, what Marie just described I call it the forced march to digital, because as Marie as you were saying, people were on a digital transformation but there was a little bit of complacency and okay, we'll get there. We're really busy doing some other stuff. And then all of a sudden you've probably seen the meme of the COVID wrecking ball coming, coming into the building the office building and saying, you know, you know, well we're doing fine and all of a sudden, boom the forced COVID comes in. So, so, so so how did that affect your clients and how did you respond? I mean, they're asking for VDI and get me some laptops, I need end point security. And so how did that affect the the application modernization efforts and David maybe you could comment on that. >> So I, I think for, for me, the biggest challenge was all business, the competition within business to survive COVID, you know, they had to put on first thing was how do we get our, our customer supported correctly? And how do we get our workers supported working at home? So the very first thing we did over the initial six months was most companies had to transform immediately within the first 30 to 90 days to allow their workforce to work from home. That happened throughout my, my customer base, both in Southern California, was customers really focused on how do we do business process? How do we compete in this marketplace and get return on investment speed, you know, time to value or what we invest in these COVID times so that we can compete with other businesses that are trying to stay alive through this transition. And, and now, you know, we're seeing on the, on the back end you know, that time, the value in terms of investment is even more important because some businesses have been significantly impacted from knowing cashflow, but you know, certainly in terms of profitability during this time. >> Makes sense. And so, Marie, so we were talking earlier about the sort of the initial path to digital transformation. And I wonder if that's got to be course corrected. I would think we were forced in to compress, you know the digital reality and, and I guess in a way that's good but in a way it was, we probably made a lot of mistakes. It was a bit of a Petri dish. So now as we begin to ,knock on, exit COVID you would think those those imperatives adjust and they start to become aligned. What's your take on that, especially as it relates to application and infrastructure modernization. >> So I would agree with that. I think that there's definitely has to be a little bit of a of a realignment happening. And I know recently I read that 2021 is expected to be a very large year in IT spend because all of those initiatives that CEOs and others were going after pre COVID kind of got put on hold, right. So they could then go focus on all of those digital means that were needed. Like, you know, the CDI, you know, work at home all the security stuff for that. So I think we're going to see, I'm thinking, we're going to see a shift again now, and maybe businesses are going to go back and try to pick up where they were prior to COVID and now start working on more of really of the application modernization initiatives that were in mind. And I know we wanted to talk about that as well because David's been working on quite a bit of application modernization with a few of his clients as we're seeing again, businesses change. And, and I don't know that all of that changes because of COVID. I think all of that change was for their competitiveness, to get there anyway. So I think that's going to start, as you said before, David I think it's going to start now having to kind of rethink up >> It reminds me of traffic on the M four David have you ever been to driving in in London when it's slingshots? Right? It's that's what's COVID was like Marie, you're absolutely right. Last year IT spend was down 4 to 5% this year. I mean, our prediction is it's going to be in the 6 to 7% range, which, which, which kind of aligns with where Gartner and IDC are based on our surveys. But, you know, back in, in April like I think the 16th of April it was a headline of wall street journal that the China grew 18% GDP in the quarter. So it's very hard to predict, but, but it's coming back you know, we can see that David and so so spending is really going to accelerate. There's probably some pent-up demand for that application modernization. Maybe it's been a little bit neglected as we've done as Maria was saying. And you were saying that work from home. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the modernization aspects and maybe I'm really interested in the things that you guys deliver in your portfolio with IBM. >> Sure. So what I have customers in multiple phases within this current digital transformation there are customers moving everything to the next gen development which is a fully containerized code. Being able to, you know swiftly go through their development tests and hybrid cloud environments where they're they haven't made an investment yet but they're sampling what it might be like to change into that world. And then there are customers are still in the typical environment, the traditional environment and are looking at what the solutions as far as packages are available for them moving forward. So they can kind of skip over any kind of development and being able to leverage what I call next gen development or next gen systems immediately as you know, you ask, you know, what are the what are the systems that are available? IBM's cloud pack solution set. It provides a portfolio of capabilities both in the application suite, database suite, security. I have customers today leveraging that. And, and so that is one of the first pieces that that customers I see who are on the leading edge or are also kind of trailing, are looking at these cloud bags to be able to go time to market and time to value quickly. >> Yeah. So when I look at your portfolio I just sort of scan the web. David just mentioned Marie, cloud pack. I mean, we're talking software here. You guys do have a lot of expertise in Z, Z Linux, Power. You mentioned is not a commodity. And it's one of the few pieces of hardware that and Z they're not a commodity. Storage, I would think business resiliency fits in there beyond disaster recovery. You Red Hat, we're talking, you know, things like open open shift and Ansible for automation. So these are, these are not your grandfather's main line. These are toolkits are a piece of, you know, parts of the tool bag that you bring to bear to focus on on client outcomes and solutions is am I getting that right? >> Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, right, that goes back to the original opening comment about how we've transformed as a business, right. To become an integrator putting all of these different pieces together. I mean, I know that something that that David recently had worked on, Oh my goodness. If you would have looked at the list of pieces of elements to that solution, it was really quite incredible between open source stuff, you know and a bunch of IBM stuff. Yes. It was some storage and yeah, there was some power. Yes. There was Red Hat. Right. But then there was other stuff, there was VMware there was some things that I can't even remember now all the names to all the components, but it was it was a laundry list. Right. And so that's where though Mainline stepped in and put the pieces together for the customer so that the customer then can get done what they needed to get done, which was which was really solve their business problem which was trying to become more competitive in their market space. >> Okay, David, so when Marie was just staying was basically my takeaway is, is this a system integrator? You've got all these piece parts with these technologies you've got virtualization, you've got automation you've got containers and so forth. And yes, there's there's hardware but there's this integration that has to occur. And your job is to abstract that complexity that underlying complexity away so that the customers can focus on the outcome. Maybe you could talk about that and how you do that. >> Sure. I'll, I'll give you a good example of a recent customer that we work with, who was basically implying, we consider an enterprise data platform that, that was going to rework their entire data warehouse into something that had governance surrounding it where they could validate all the data that was coming into their warehouse. And so we underpinned that with an infrastructure of power. We're running, obviously IBM pack for data with DB two warehouse. We use a combination of that with five-year data flow through IBM with the streaming and the governance IBM governance catalog piece, which is lots of knowledge catalog. So we've been able to take not only what their base requirements were, but all the microservices that are packaged in with cloud pack, all running on open shift which was a great acquisition that IBM did last year. And then they also required other microservices outside to support that environment >> Paint a picture for us as to what the future looks like. It's, it's much different than the past 30 years and bring us home, please. >> Sure. So I think the future for us is to continue to to find all of the solutions that will that will help our customers, you know get to their next steps. Right. And, and there's a lot, as you know did this lots of solutions out there. There's lots of new companies that are popping up all the time. You know, inherently, you know, Mainline is an IBM partner. We've been an IBM partner for 30 plus years since our inception. And that's the base of our business is, is IBM. But, but there are other requirements that are needed by by businesses, by our customers. And that's where we, we reach out and partner up. We probably have gone my goodness 200 plus partnerships with various companies various technology companies that we can then lean on and pull in those ancillary solutions to, to to complete that, that solution for the customer. So I think we're going to continue going down that path. We're going to continue making sure that we're partnered with the, the, the leading technology companies. So we can build that IBM solution for our customer and and bolt on the other pieces that are needed. We're going to continue to grow and enhance our services business because we've got quite a large services business whether it's implementation services, we do manage services we have staffing services. I think you're going to see we're still going to continue to, to grow that business because that is a piece where companies, you know they don't want to worry about running all of that stuff, right. They want to know that their system's going to be running 24 seven. And if there is a bump or a burp or something happens, Hey they could pick up the phone, they can call Mainline. We can help them get things corrected. So I think we're going to still see a lot of that going on as well within our, our, our offerings. >> Excellent. Well, congratulations for making it through that. Not a whole lot, not not every hardware seller reseller made it through and you guys transformed. It's a, it's an inspiring story. Marie, David, thanks so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> You're really welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante in our continuous coverage and the cube of IBM think 2021. Keep it right there.