>> Live from Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Summit, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to the IBM CDO Summit and theCUBE's live coverage, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Paul Gillin. We have Joe Selle joining us. He is the Cognitive Solution Lead at IBM. And Thomas Ward, Supply Chain Cloud Strategist at IBM. Thank you so much for coming on the show! >> Thank you! >> Our pleasure. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, Tom, I want to start with you. You are the author of Risk Insights. Tell our viewers a little bit about Risk Insights. >> So Risk Insights is a AI application. We've been working on it for a couple years. What's really neat about it, it's the coolest project I've ever worked on. And it really gets a massive amount of data from the weather company, so we're one of the biggest consumers of data from the weather company. We take that and we'd visualize who's at risk from things like hurricanes, earthquakes, things like IBM sites and locations or suppliers. And we basically notify them in advance when those events are going to impact them and it ties to both our data center operations activity as well as our supply chain operations. >> So you reduce your risk, your supply chain risk, by being able to proactively detect potential outages. >> Yeah, exactly. So we know in some cases two or three days in advance who's in harm's way and we're already looking up and trying to mitigate those risks if we need to, it's going to be a real serious event. So Hurricane Michael, Hurricane Florence, we were right on top of it and said we got to worry about these suppliers, these data center locations, and we're already working on that in advance. >> That's very cool. So, I mean, how are clients and customers, there's got to be, as you said, it's the coolest project you've ever worked on? >> Yeah. So right now, we use it within IBM right? And we use it to monitor some of IBM's client locations, and in the future we're actually, there was something called the Call for Code that happened recently within IBM, this project was a semifinalist for that. So we're now working with some non-profit groups to see how they could also avail of it, looking at things like hospitals and airports and those types of things as well. >> What other AI projects are you running? >> Go ahead. >> I can answer that one. I just wanted to say one thing about Risk Insights, which didn't come out from Tom's description, which is that one of the other really neat things about it is that it provides alerts, smart alerts out to supply chain planners. And the alert will go to a supply chain planner if there's an intersection of a supplier of IBM and a path of a hurricane. If the hurricane is vectored to go over that supplier, the supply chain planner that is responsible for those parts will get some forewarning to either start to look for another supplier, or make some contingency plans. And the other nice thing about it is that it launches what we call a Resolution Room. And the Resolution Room is a virtual meeting place where people all over the globe who are somehow impacted by this event can collaborate, share documents, and have a persistent place to resolve this issue. And then, after that's all done, we capture all the data from that issue and the resolution and we put that into a body of knowledge, and we mine that knowledge for a playbook the next time a similar event comes along. So it's a full-- >> It becomes machine learning. >> It's a machine learning-- >> Sort of data source. >> It's a full soup to nuts solution that gets smarter over time. >> So you should be able to measure benefits, you should have measurable benefits by now, right? What are you seeing, fewer disruptions? >> Yes, so in Risk Insights, we know that out of a thousand of events that occurred, there were 25 in the last year that were really the ones we needed to identify and mitigate against. And out of those we know there have been circumstances where, in the past IBM's had millions of dollars of losses. By being more proactive, we're really minimizing that amount. >> That's incredible. So you were going to talk about other kinds of AI that you run. >> Right, so Tom gave an overview of Risk Insights, and we tied it to supply chain and to monitoring the uptime of our customer data centers and things like that. But our portfolio of AI is quite broad. It really covers most of the middle and back and front office functions of IBM. So we have things in the sales domain, the finance domain, the HR domain, you name it. One of the ones that's particularly interesting to me of late is in the finance domain, monitoring accounts receivable and DSO, day sales outstanding. So a company like IBM, with multiple billions of dollars of revenue, to make a change of even one day of day sales outstanding, provides gigantic benefit to the bottom line. So we have been integrating disparate databases across the business units and geographies of IBM, pulling that customer and accounts receivable data into one place, where our CFO can look at an integrated approach towards our accounts receivable and we know where the problems are, and we're going to use AI and other advanced analytic techniques to determine what's the best treatment for that AI, for those customers who are at risk because of our predictive models, of not making their payments on time or some sort of financial risk. So we can integrate a lot of external unstructured data with our own structured data around customers, around accounts, and pull together a story around AR that we've never been able to pull before. That's very impactful. >> So speaking of unstructured data, I understand that data lakes are part of your AI platform. How so? >> For example, for Risk Insights, we're monitoring hundreds of trusted news sources at any given time. So we know, not just where the event is, what locations are at risk, but also what's being reported about it. We monitor Twitter reports about it, we monitor trusted news sources like CNN or MSNBC, or on a global basis, so it gives our risk analyst not just a view of where the event is, where it's located, but also what's being said, how severe it is, how big are those tidal waves, how big was the storm surge, how many people were affected. By applying some of the machine learning insights to these, now we can say, well if there are couple hundred thousand people without power then it's very likely there is going to be multimillions of dollars of impact as a result. So we're now able to correlate those news reports with the magnitude of impact and potential financial impact to the businesses that we're supporting. >> So the idea being that IBM is saying, look what we've done for our own business (laughs), imagine what we could do for you. As Inderpal has said, it's really using IBM as its own test case and trying to figure this all out and learning as it goes and he said, we're going to make some mistakes, we've already made some mistakes but we're figuring it out so you don't have to make those mistakes. >> Yeah that's right. I mean, if you think about the long history of this, we've been investing in AI, really, since, depending on how you look at it, since the days of the 90's, when we were doing Deep Blue and we were trying to beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Then we did another big huge push on the Jeopardy program, where we we innovated around natural language understanding and speed and scale of processing and probability correctness of answers. And then we kind of carry that right through to the current day where we're now proliferating AI across all of the functions of IBM. And there, then, connecting to your comment, Inderpal's comment this morning was around let's just use all of that for the benefit of other companies. It's not always an exact fit, it's never an exact fit, but there are a lot of pieces that can be replicated and borrowed, either people, process or technology, from our experience, that would help to accelerate other companies down the same path. >> One of the questions around AI though is, can you trust it? The insights that it derives, are they trustworthy? >> I'll give a quick answer to that, and then Tom, it's probably something you want to chime in on. There's a lot of danger in AI, and it needs to be monitored closely. There's bias that can creep into the datasets because the datasets are being enhanced with cognitive techniques. There's bias that can creep into the algorithms and any kind of learning model can start to spin on its own axis and go in its own direction and if you're not watching and monitoring and auditing, then it could be starting to deliver you crazy answers. Then the other part is, you need to build the trust of the users, because who wants to take an answer that's coming out of a black box? We've launched several AI projects where the answer just comes out naked, if you will, just sitting right there and there's no context around it and the users never like that. So we've understood now that you have to put the context, the underlying calculations, and the assessment of our own probability of being correct in there. So those are some of the things you can do to get over that. But Tom, do you have anything to add to that? >> I'll just give an example. When we were early in analyzing Twitter tweets about a major storm, what we've read about was, oh, some celebrity's dog was in danger, like uh. (Rebecca laughs) This isn't very helpful insight. >> I'm going to guess, I probably know the celebrity's dog that was in danger. (laughs) >> (laughs) actually stop saying that. So we learned how to filter those things out and say what are the meaningful keywords that we need to extract from and really then can draw conclusions from. >> So is Kardashian a meaningful word, (all laughing) I guess that's the question. >> Trending! (all laughing) >> Trending now! >> I want to follow up on that because as an AI developer, what responsibility do developers have to show their work, to document how their models have worked? >> Yes, so all of our information that we provided the users all draws back to, here's the original source, here's where the information was taken from so we can draw back on that. And that's an important part of having a cognitive data, cognitive enterprise data platform where all this information is stored 'cause then we can refer to that and go deeper as well and we can analyze it further after the fact, right? You can't always respond in the moment, but once you have those records, that's how you can learn from it for the next time around. >> I understand that building test models in some cases, particularly in deep learning is very difficult to build reliable test models. Is that true, and what progress is being made there? >> In our case, we're into the machine learning dimension yet, we're not all the way into deep learning in the project that I'm involved with right now. But one reason we're not there is 'cause you need to have huge, huge, vast amounts of robust data and that trusted dataset from which to work. So we aspire towards and we're heading towards deep learning. We're not quite there yet, but we've started with machine learning insights and we'll progress from there. >> And one of the interesting things about this AI movement overall is that it's filled with very energetic people that's kind of a hacker mindset to the whole thing. So people are grabbing and running with code, they're using a lot of open source, there's a lot of integration of the black box from here, from there in the other place, which all adds to the risk of the output. So that comes back to the original point which is that you have to monitor, you have to make sure that you're comfortable with it. You can't just let it run on its own course without really testing it to see whether you agree with the output. >> So what other best practices, there's the monitoring, but at the same time you do that hacker culture, that's not all bad. You want people who are energized by it and you are trying new things and experimenting. So how do you make sure you let them have, sort of enough rein but not free rein? >> I would say, what comes to mind is, start with the business problem that's a real problem. Don't make this an experimental data thing. Start with the business problem. Develop a POC, a proof of concept. Small, and here's where the hackers come in. They're going to help you get it up and running in six weeks as opposed to six months. And then once you're at the end of that six-week period, maybe you design one more six-week iteration and then you know enough to start scaling it and you scale it big so you've harnessed the hackers, the energy, the speed, but you're also testing, making sure that it's accurate and then you're scaling it. >> Excellent. Well thank you Tom and Joe, I really appreciate it. It's great to have you on the show. >> Thank you! >> Thank you, Rebecca, for the spot. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillin, we will have more from the IBM CDO summit just after this. (light music)

>> [Narrator] Live from New York, it's theCube, covering Machine Learning Everywhere. Build your ladder to AI, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back here to New York City as we continue at IBM's Machine Learning Everywhere, build your ladder to AI, along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. It is now a great honor of ours to have I think probably and arguably the greatest chess player of all time, Garry Kasparov now joins us. He's currently the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, political activist in Russia as well some time ago. Thank you for joining us, we really appreciate the time, sir. >> Thank you for inviting me. >> We've been looking forward to this. Let's just, if you would, set the stage for us. Artificial Intelligence obviously quite a hot topic. The maybe not conflict, the complementary nature of human intelligence. There are people on both sides of the camp. But you see them as being very complementary to one another. >> I think that's natural development in this industry that will bring together humans and machines. Because this collaboration will produce the best results. Our abilities are complementary. The humans will bring creativity and intuition and other typical human qualities like human judgment and strategic vision while machines will add calculation, memory, and many other abilities that they have been acquiring quickly. >> So there's room for both, right? >> Yes, I think it's inevitable because no machine will ever reach 100% perfection. Machines will be coming closer and closer, 90%, 92, 94, 95. But there's still room for humans because at the end of the day even with this massive power you have guide it. You have to evaluate the results and at the end of the day the machine will never understand when it reaches the territory of diminishing returns. It's very important for humans actually to identify. So what is the task? I think it's a mistake that is made by many pundits that they automatically transfer the machine's expertise for the closed systems into the open-ended systems. Because in every closed system, whether it's the game of chess, the game of gall, video games like daughter, or anything else where humans already define the parameters of the problem, machines will perform phenomenally. But if it's an open-ended system then machine will never identify what is the sort of the right question to be asked. >> Don't hate me for this question, but it's been reported, now I don't know if it's true or not, that at one point you said that you would never lose to a machine. My question is how capable can we make machines? First of all, is that true? Did you maybe underestimate the power of computers? How capable to you think we can actually make machines? >> Look, in the 80s when the question was asked I was much more optimistic because we saw very little at that time from machines that could make me, world champion at the time, worry about machines' capability of defeating me in the real chess game. I underestimated the pace it was developing. I could see something was happening, was cooking, but I thought it would take longer for machines to catch up. As I said in my talk here is that we should simply recognize the fact that everything we do while knowing how we do that, machines will do better. Any particular task that human perform, machine will eventually surpass us. >> What I love about your story, I was telling you off-camera about when we had Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee on, you're the opposite of Samuel P. Langley to me. You know who Samuel P. Langley is? >> No, please. >> Samuel P. Langley, do you know who Samuel P. Langley is? He was the gentleman that, you guys will love this, that the government paid. I think it was $50,000 at the time, to create a flying machine. But the Wright Brothers beat him to it, so what did Samuel P. Langley do after the Wright Brothers succeeded? He quit. But after you lost to the machine you said you know what? I can beat the machine with other humans, and created what is now the best chess player in the world, is my understanding. It's not a machine, but it's a combination of machines and humans. Is that accurate? >> Yes, in chess actually, we could demonstrate how the collaboration can work. Now in many areas people rely on the lessons that have been revealed, learned from what I call advanced chess. That in this team, human plus machine, the most important element of success is not the strengths of the human expert. It's not the speed of the machine, but it's a process. It's an interface, so how you actually make them work together. In the future I think that will be the key of success because we have very powerful machine, those AIs, intelligent algorithms. All of them will require very special treatment. That's why also I use this analogy with the right fuel for Ferrari. We will have expert operators, I call them the shepherds, that will have to know exactly what are the requirements of this machine or that machine, or that group of algorithms to guarantee that we'll be able by our human input to compensate for their deficiencies. Not the other way around. >> What let you to that response? Was it your competitiveness? Was it your vision of machines and humans working together? >> I thought I could last longer as the undefeated world champion. Ironically, 1997 when you just look at the game and the quality of the game and try to evaluate the Deep Blue real strengths, I think I was objective, I was stronger. Because today you can analyze these games with much more powerful computers. I mean any chess app on your laptop. I mean you cannot really compare with Deep Blue. That's natural progress. But as I said, it's not about solving the game, it's not about objective strengths. It's about your ability to actually perform at the board. I just realized while we could compete with machines for few more years, and that's great, it did take place. I played two more matches in 2003 with German program. Not as publicized as IBM match. Both ended as a tie and I think they were probably stronger than Deep Blue, but I knew it would just be over, maybe a decade. How can we make chess relevant? For me it was very natural. I could see this immense power of calculations, brute force. On the other side I could see us having qualities that machines will never acquire. How about bringing together and using chess as a laboratory to find the most productive ways for human-machine collaboration? >> What was the difference in, I guess, processing power basically, or processing capabilities? You played the match, this is 1997. You played the match on standard time controls which allow you or a player a certain amount of time. How much time did Deep Blue, did the machine take? Or did it take its full time to make considerations as opposed to what you exercised? >> Well it's the standard time control. I think you should explain to your audience at that time it was seven hours game. It's what we call classical chess. We have rapid chess that is under one hour. Then you have blitz chess which is five to ten minutes. That was a normal time control. It's worth mentioning that other computers they were beating human players, myself included, in blitz chess. In the very fast chess. We still thought that more time was more time we could have sort of a bigger comfort zone just to contemplate the machine's plans and actually to create real problems that machine would not be able to solve. Again, more time helps humans but at the end of the day it's still about your ability not to crack under pressure because there's so many things that could take you off your balance, and machine doesn't care about it. At the end of the day machine has a steady hand, and steady hand wins. >> Emotion doesn't come into play. >> It's not about apps and strength, but it's about guaranteeing that it will play at a certain level for the entire game. While human game maybe at one point it could go a bit higher. But at the end of the day when you look at average it's still lower. I played many world championship matches and I analyze the games, games played at the highest level. I can tell you that even the best games played by humans at the highest level, they include not necessarily big mistakes, but inaccuracies that are irrelevant when humans facing humans because I make a mistake, tiny mistake, then I can expect you to return the favor. Against the machine it's just that's it. Humans cannot play at the same level throughout the whole game. The concentration, the vigilance are now required when humans face humans. Psychologically when you have a strong machine, machine's good enough to play with a steady hand, the game's over. >> I want to point out too, just so we get the record straight for people who might not be intimately familiar with your record, you were ranked number one in the world from 1986 to 2005 for all but three months. Three months, that's three decades. >> Two decades. >> Well 80s, 90s, and naughts, I'll give you that. (laughing) That's unheard of, that's phenomenal. >> Just going back to your previous question about why I just look for some new form of chess. It's one of the key lessons I learned from my childhood thanks to my mother who spent her live just helping me to become who I am, who I was after my father died when I was seven. It's about always trying to make the difference. It's not just about winning, it's about making a difference. It led me to kind of a new motto in my professional life. That is it's all about my own quality of the game. As long as I'm challenging my own excellence I will never be short of opponents. For me the defeat was just a kick, a push. So let's come up with something new. Let's find a new challenge. Let's find a way to turn this defeat, the lessons from this defeat into something more practical. >> Love it, I mean I think in your book I think, was it John Henry, the famous example. (all men speaking at once) >> He won, but he lost. >> Motivation wasn't competition, it was advancing society and creativity, so I love it. Another thing I just want, a quick aside, you mentioned performing under pressure. I think it was in the 1980s, it might have been in the opening of your book. You talked about playing multiple computers. >> [Garry] Yeah, in 1985. >> In 1985 and you were winning all of them. There was one close match, but the computer's name was Kasparov and you said I've got to beat this one because people will think that it's rigged or I'm getting paid to do this. So well done. >> It's I always mention this exhibition I played in 1985 against 32 chess-playing computers because it's not the importance of this event was not just I won all the games, but nobody was surprised. I have to admit that the fact that I could win all the games against these 32 chess-playing computers they're only chess-playing machine so they did nothing else. Probably boosted my confidence that I would never be defeated even by more powerful machines. >> Well I love it, that's why I asked the question how far can we take machines? We don't know, like you said. >> Why should we bother? I see so many new challenges that we will be able to take and challenges that we abandoned like space exploration or deep ocean exploration because they were too risky. We couldn't actually calculate all the odds. Great, now we have AI. It's all about increasing our risk because we could actually measure against this phenomenal power of AI that will help us to find the right pass. >> I want to follow up on some other commentary. Brynjolfsson and McAfee basically put forth the premise, look machines have always replaced humans. But this is the first time in history that they have replaced humans in the terms of cognitive tasks. They also posited look, there's no question that it's affecting jobs. But they put forth the prescription which I think as an optimist you would agree with, that it's about finding new opportunities. It's about bringing creativity in, complementing the machines and creating new value. As an optimist, I presume you would agree with that. >> Absolutely, I'm always saying jobs do not disappear, they evolve. It's an inevitable part of the technological progress. We come up with new ideas and every disruptive technology destroys some industries but creates new jobs. So basically we see jobs shifting from one industry to another. Like from agriculture, manufacture, from manufacture to other sectors, cognitive tasks. But now there will be something else. I think the market will change, the job market will change quite dramatically. Again I believe that we will have to look for riskier jobs. We will have to start doing things that we abandoned 30, 40 years ago because we thought they were too risky. >> Back to the book you were talking about, deep thinking or machine learning, or machine intelligence ends and human intelligence begins, you talked about courage. We need fail safes in place, but you also need that human element of courage like you said, to accept risk and take risk. >> Now it probably will be easier, but also as I said the machine's wheel will force a lot of talent actually to move into other areas that were not as attractive because there were other opportunities. There's so many what I call raw cognitive tasks that are still financially attractive. I hope and I will close many loops. We'll see talent moving into areas where we just have to open new horizons. I think it's very important just to remember it's the technological progress especially when you're talking about disruptive technology. It's more about unintended consequences. The fly to the moon was just psychologically it's important, the Space Race, the Cold War. But it was about also GPS, about so many side effects that in the 60s were not yet appreciated but eventually created the world we have now. I don't know what the consequences of us flying to Mars. Maybe something will happen, one of the asteroids will just find sort of a new substance that will replace fossil fuel. What I know, it will happen because when you look at the human history there's all this great exploration. They ended up with unintended consequences as the main result. Not what was originally planned as the number one goal. >> We've been talking about where innovation comes from today. It's a combination of a by-product out there. A combination of data plus being able to apply artificial intelligence. And of course there's cloud economics as well. Essentially, well is that reasonable? I think about something you said, I believe, in the past that you didn't have the advantage of seeing Deep Blue's moves, but it had the advantage of studying your moves. You didn't have all the data, it had the data. How does data fit into the future? >> Data is vital, data is fuel. That's why I think we need to find some of the most effective ways of collaboration between humans and machines. Machines can mine the data. For instance, it's a breakthrough in instantly mining data and human language. Now we could see even more effective tools to help us to mine the data. But at the end of the day it's why are we doing that? What's the purpose? What does matter to us, so why do we want to mine this data? Why do we want to do here and not there? It seems at first sight that the human responsibilities are shrinking. I think it's the opposite. We don't have to move too much but by the tiny shift, just you know percentage of a degree of an angle could actually make huge difference when this bullet reaches the target. The same with AI. More power actually offers opportunities to start just making tiny adjustments that could have massive consequences. >> Open up a big, that's why you like augmented intelligence. >> I think artificial is sci-fi. >> What's artificial about it, I don't understand. >> Artificial, it's an easy sell because it's sci-fi. But augmented is what it is because our intelligent machines are making us smarter. Same way as the technology in the past made us stronger and faster. >> It's not artificial horsepower. >> It's created from something. >> Exactly, it's created from something. Even if the machines can adjust their own code, fine. It still will be confined within the parameters of the tasks. They cannot go beyond that because again they can only answer questions. They can only give you answers. We provide the questions so it's very important to recognize that it is we will be in the leading role. That's why I use the term shepherds. >> How do you spend your time these days? You're obviously writing, you're speaking. >> Writing, speaking, traveling around the world because I have to show up at many conferences. The AI now is a very hot topic. Also as you mentioned I'm the Chairman of Human Rights Foundation. My responsibilities to help people who are just dissidents around the world who are fighting for their principles and for freedom. Our organization runs the largest dissident gathering in the world. It's called the Freedom Forum. We have the tenth anniversary, tenth event this May. >> It has been a pleasure. Garry Kasparov, live on theCube. Back with more from New York City right after this. (lively instrumental music)

>> Narrator: Live from New York, it's the Cube. Covering Machine Learning Everywhere: Build Your Ladder to AI. Brought to you by IBM. >> And welcome back here to New York City. We're at IBM's Machine Learning Everywhere: Build Your Ladder to AI, along with Dave Vellante, John Walls, and we're now joined by Sam Lightstone, who is an IBM fellow in analytics. And Sam, good morning. Thanks for joining us here once again on the Cube. >> Yeah, thanks a lot. Great to be back. >> Yeah, great. Yeah, good to have you here on kind of a moldy New York day here in late February. So we're talking, obviously data is the new norm, is what certainly, have heard a lot about here today and of late here from IBM. Talk to me about, in your terms, of just when you look at data and evolution and to where it's now become so central to what every enterprise is doing and must do. I mean, how do you do it? Give me a 30,000-foot level right now from your prism. >> Sure, I mean, from a super, if you just stand back, like way far back, and look at what data means to us today, it's really the thing that is separating companies one from the other. How much data do they have and can they make excellent use of it to achieve competitive advantage? And so many companies today are about data and only data. I mean, I'll give you some like really striking, disruptive examples of companies that are tremendously successful household names and it's all about the data. So the world's largest transportation company, or personal taxi, can't call it taxi, but (laughs) but, you know, Uber-- >> Yeah, right. >> Owns no cars, right? The world's largest accommodation company, Airbnb, owns no hotels, right? The world's largest distributor of motion pictures owns no movie theaters. So these companies are disrupting because they're focused on data, not on the material stuff. Material stuff is important, obviously. Somebody needs to own a car, somebody needs to own a way to view a motion picture, and so on. But data is what differentiates companies more than anything else today. And can they tap into the data, can they make sense of it for competitive advantage? And that's not only true for companies that are, you know, cloud companies. That's true for every company, whether you're a bricks and mortars organization or not. Now, one level of that data is to simply look at the data and ask questions of the data, the kinds of data that you already have in your mind. Generating reports, understanding who your customers are, and so on. That's sort of a fundamental level. But the deeper level, the exciting transformation that's going on right now, is the transformation from reporting and what we'll call business intelligence, the ability to take those reports and that insight on data and to visualize it in the way that human beings can understand it, and go much deeper into machine learning and AI, cognitive computing where we can start to learn from this data and learn at the pace of machines, and to drill into the data in a way that a human being cannot because we can't look at bajillions of bytes of data on our own, but machines can do that and they're very good at doing that. So it is a huge, that's one level. The other level is, there's so much more data now than there ever was because there's so many more devices that are now collecting data. And all of us, you know, every one of our phones is collecting data right now. Your cars are collecting data. I think there's something like 60 sensors on every car that rolls of the manufacturing line today. 60. So it's just a wild time and a very exciting time because there's so much untapped potential. And that's what we're here about today, you know. Machine learning, tapping into that unbelievable potential that's there in that data. >> So you're absolutely right on. I mean the data is foundational, or must be foundational in order to succeed in this sort of data-driven world. But it's not necessarily the center of the universe for a lot of companies. I mean, it is for the big data, you know, guys that we all know. You know, the top market cap companies. But so many organizations, they're sort of, human expertise is at the center of their universe, and data is sort of, oh yeah, bolt on, and like you say, reporting. >> Right. >> So how do they deal with that? Do they get one big giant DB2 instance and stuff all the data in there, and infuse it with MI? Is that even practical? How do they solve this problem? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And there's, again, there's a multi-layered answer to that. But let me start with the most, you know, one of the big changes, one of the massive shifts that's been going on over the last decade is the shift to cloud. And people think of the shift to cloud as, well, I don't have to own the server. Someone else will own the server. That's actually not the right way to look at it. I mean, that is one element of cloud computing, but it's not, for me, the most transformative. The big thing about the cloud is the introduction of fully-managed services. It's not just you don't own the server. You don't have to install, configure, or tune anything. Now that's directly related to the topic that you just raised, because people have expertise, domains of expertise in their business. Maybe you're a manufacturer and you have expertise in manufacturing. If you're a bank, you have expertise in banking. You may not be a high-tech expert. You may not have deep skills in tech. So one of the great elements of the cloud is that now you can use these fully managed services and you don't have to be a database expert anymore. You don't have to be an expert in tuning SQL or JSON, or yadda yadda. Someone else takes care of that for you, and that's the elegance of a fully managed service, not just that someone else has got the hardware, but they're taking care of all the complexity. And that's huge. The other thing that I would say is, you know, the companies that are really like the big data houses, they got lots of data, they've spent the last 20 years working so hard to converge their data into larger and larger data lakes. And some have been more successful than others. But everybody has found that that's quite hard to do. Data is coming in many places, in many different repositories, and trying to consolidate, you know, rip the data out, constantly ripping it out and replicating into some data lake where you, or data warehouse where you can do your analytics, is complicated. And it means in some ways you're multiplying your costs because you have the data in its original location and now you're copying it into yet another location. You've got to pay for that, too. So you're multiplying costs. So one of the things I'm very excited about at IBM is we've been working on this new technology that we've now branded it as IBM Queryplex. And that gives us the ability to query data across all of these myriad sources as if they are in one place. As if they are a single consolidated data lake, and make it all look like (snaps) one repository. And not only to the application appear as one repository, but actually tap into the processing power of every one of those data sources. So if you have 1,000 of them, we'll bring to bear the power 1,000 data sources and all that computing and all that memory on these analytics problems. >> Well, give me an example why that matters, of what would be a real-world application of that. >> Oh, sure, so there, you know, there's a couple of examples. I'll give you two extremes, two different extremes. One extreme would be what I'll call enterprise, enterprise data consolidation or virtualization, where you're a large institution and you have several of these repositories. Maybe you got some IBM repositories like DB2. Maybe you've got a little bit of Oracle and a little bit of SQL Server. Maybe you've got some open source stuff like Postgres or MySQL. You got a bunch of these and different departments use different things, and it develops over decades and to some extent you can't even control it, (laughs) right? And now you just want to get analytics on that. You just, what's this data telling me? And as long as all that data is sitting in these, you know, dozens or hundreds of different repositories, you can't tell, unless you copy it all out into a big data lake, which is expensive and complicated. So Queryplex will solve that problem. >> So it's sort of a virtual data store. >> Yeah, and one of the terms, many different terms that are used, but one of the terms that's used in the industry is data virtualization. So that would be a suitable terminology here as well. To make all that data in hundreds, thousands, even millions of possible data sources, appear as one thing, it has to tap into the processing power of all of them at once. Now, that's one extreme. Let's take another extreme, which is even more extreme, which is the IoT scenario, Internet of Things, right? Internet of Things. Imagine you've, have devices, you know, shipping containers and smart meters on buildings. You could literally have 100,000 of these or a million of these things. They're usually small; they don't usually have a lot of data on them. But they can store, usually, couple of months of data. And what's fascinating about that is that most analytics today are really on the most recent you know, 48 hours or four weeks, maybe. And that time is getting shorter and shorter, because people are doing analytics more regularly and they're interested in, just tell me what's going on recently. >> I got to geek out here, for a second. >> Please, well thanks for the warning. (laughs) >> And I know you know things, but I'm not a, I'm not a technical person, but I've been a molt. I've been around a long time. A lot of questions on data virtualization, but let me start with Queryplex. The name is really interesting to me. When I, and you're a database expert, so I'm going to tap your expertise. When I read the Google Spanner paper, I called up my colleague David Floyer, who's an ex-IBM, I said, "This is like global Sysplex. "It's a global distributed thing," And he goes, "Yeah, kind of." And I got very excited. And then my eyes started bleeding when I read the paper, but the name, Queryplex, is it a play on Sysplex? Is there-- >> It's actually, there's a long story. I don't think I can say the story on-air, but we, suffice it to say we wanted to get a name that was legally usable and also descriptive. >> Dave: Okay. >> And we went through literally hundreds and hundreds of permutations of words and we finally landed on Queryplex. But, you know, you mentioned Google Spanner. I probably should spend a moment to differentiate how what we're doing is-- >> Great, if you would. >> A different kind of thing. You know, on Google Spanner, you put data into Google Spanner. With Queryplex, you don't put data into it. >> Dave: Don't have to move it. >> You don't have to move it. You leave it where it is. You can have your data in DB2, you can have it in Oracle, you can have it in a flat file, you can have an Excel spreadsheet, and you know, think about that. An Excel spreadsheet, a collection of text files, comma delimited text files, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Netezza, all these things suddenly appear as one database. So that's the transformation. It's not about we'll take your data and copy it into our system, this is about leave your data where it is, and we're going to tap into your (snaps) existing systems for you and help you see them in a unified way. So it's a very different paradigm than what others have done. Part of the reason why we're so excited about it is we're, as far as we know, nobody else is really doing anything quite like this. >> And is that what gets people to the 21st century, basically, is that they have all these legacy systems and yet the conversion is much simpler, much more economical for them? >> Yeah, exactly. It's economical, it's fast. (snaps) You can deploy this in, you know, a very small amount of time. And we're here today talking about machine learning and it's a very good segue to point out in order to get to high-quality AI, you need to have a really strong foundation of an information architecture. And for the industry to show up, as some have done over the past decade, and keep telling people to re-architect their data infrastructure, keep modifying their databases and creating new databases and data lakes and warehouses, you know, it's just not realistic. And so we want to provide a different path. A path that says we're going to make it possible for you to have superb machine learning, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, and you don't have to rebuild your information architecture. We're going to make it possible for you to leverage what you have and do something special. >> This is exciting. I wasn't aware of this capability. And we were talking earlier about the cloud and the managed service component of that as a major driver of lowering cost and complexity. There's another factor here, which is, we talked about moving data-- >> Right. >> And that's one of the most expensive components of any infrastructure. If I got to move data and the transmission costs and the latency, it's virtually impossible. Speed of light's still up. I know you guys are working on speed of light, but (Sam laughs) you'll eventually get there. >> Right. >> Maybe. But the other thing about cloud economics, and this relates to sort of Queryplex. There's this API economy. You've got virtually zero marginal costs. When you were talking, I was writing these down. You got global scale, it's never down, you've got this network effect working for you. Are you able to, are the standards there? Are you able to replicate those sort of cloud economics the APIs, the standards, that scale, even though you're not in control of this, there's not a single point of control? Can you explain sort of how that magic works? >> Yeah, well I think the API economy is for real and it's very important for us. And it's very important that, you know, we talk about API standards. There's a beautiful quote I once heard. The beautiful thing about standards is there's so many to choose from. (All laugh) And the reality is that, you know, you have standards that are official standards, and then you have the de facto standards because something just catches on and nobody blessed it. It just got popular. So that's a big part of what we're doing at IBM is being at the forefront of adopting the standards that matter. We made a big, a big investment in being Spark compatible, and, in fact, even with Queryplex. You can issue Spark SQL against Queryplex even though it's not a Spark engine, per se, but we make it look and feel like it can be Spark SQL. Another critical point here, when we talk about the API economy, and the speed of light, and movement to the cloud, and these topics you just raised, the friction of the Internet is an unbelievable friction. (John laughs) It's unbelievable. I mean, you know, when you go and watch a movie over the Internet, your home connection is just barely keeping up. I mean, you're pushing it, man. So a gigabyte, you know, a gigabyte an hour or something like that, right? Okay, and if you're a big company, maybe you have a fatter pipe. But not a lot fatter. I mean, not orders of, you're talking incredible friction. And what that means is that it is difficult for people, for companies, to en masse, move everything to the cloud. It's just not happening overnight. And, again, in the interest of doing the best possible service to our customers, that's why we've made it a fundamental element of our strategy in IBM to be a hybrid, what we call hybrid data management company, so that the APIs that we use on the cloud, they are compatible with the APIs that we use on premises. And whether that's software or private cloud. You've got software, you've got private cloud, you've got public cloud. And our APIs are going to be consistent across, and applications that you code for one will run on the other. And you can, that makes it a lot easier to migrate at your leisure when you're ready. >> Makes a lot of sense. That way you can bring cloud economics and the cloud operating model to your data, wherever the data exists. Listening to you speak, Sam, it reminds me, do you remember when Bob Metcalfe who I used to work with at IDG, predicted the collapse of the Internet? He predicted that year after year after year, in speech after speech, that it was so fragile, and you're bringing back that point of, guys, it's still, you know, a lot of friction. So that's very interesting, (laughs) as an architect. >> You think Bob's going to be happy that you brought up that he predicted the Internet was going to be its own demise? (Sam laughs) >> Well, he did it in-- >> I'm just saying. >> I'm staying out of it, man. >> He did it as a lightning rod. >> As a talking-- >> To get the industry to respond, and he had a big enough voice so he could do that. >> That it worked, right. But so I want to get back to Queryplex and the secret sauce. Somehow you're creating this data virtualization capability. What's the secret sauce behind it? >> Yeah, so I think, we're not the first to try, by the way. Actually this problem-- >> Hard problem. >> Of all these data sources all over the place, you try to make them look like one thing. People have been trying to figure out how to do that since like the '70s, okay, so, but-- >> Dave: Really hasn't worked. >> And it hasn't worked. And really, the reason why it hasn't worked is that there's been two fundamental strategies. One strategy is, you have a central coordinator that tries to speak to each of these data sources. So I've got, let's say, 10,000 data sources. I want to have one coordinator tap into each of them and have a dialogue. And what happens is that that coordinator, a server, an agent somewhere, becomes a network bottleneck. You were talking about the friction of the Internet. This is a great example of friction. One coordinator trying to speak to, you know, and collaborators becomes a point of friction. And it also becomes a point of friction not only in the Internet, but also in the computation, because he ends up doing too much of the work. There's too many things that cannot be done at the, at these edge repositories, aggregations, and joins, and so on. So all the aggregations and joins get done by this one sucker who can't keep up. >> Dave: The queue. >> Yeah, so there's a big queue, right. So that's one strategy that didn't work. The other strategy that people tried was sort of an end squared topology where every data source tries to speak to every other data source. And that doesn't scale as well. So what we've done in Queryplex is something that we think is unique and much more organic where we try to organize the universe or constellation of these data sources so that every data source speaks to a small number of peers but not a large number of peers. And that way no single source is a bottleneck, either in network or in computation. That's one trick. And the second trick is we've designed algorithms that can truly be distributed. So you can do joins in a distributed manner. You can do aggregation in a distributed manner. These are things, you know, when I say aggregation, I'm talking about simple things like a sum or an average or a median. These are super popular in, in analytic queries. Everybody wants to do a sum or an average or a median, right? But in the past, those things were hard to do in a distributed manner, getting all the participants in this universe to do some small incremental piece of the computation. So it's really these two things. Number one, this organic, dynamically forming constellation of devices. Dynamically forming a way that is latency aware. So if I'm a, if I represent a data source that's joining this universe or constellation, I'm going to try to find peers who I have a fast connection with. If all the universe of peers were out there, I'll try to find ones that are fast. And the second is having algorithms that we can all collaborate on. Those two things change the game. >> We're getting the two minute sign, and this is fascinating stuff. But so, how do you deal with the data consistency problem? You hear about eventual consistency and people using atomic clocks and-- Right, so Queryplex, you know, there's a reason we call it Queryplex not Dataplex. Queryplex is really a read-only operation. >> Dave: Oh, there you go. >> You've got all these-- >> Problem solved. (laughs) >> Problem solved. You've got all these data sources. They're already doing their, they already have data's coming in how it's coming in. >> Dave: Simple and brilliant. >> Right, and we're not changing any of that. All we're saying is, if you want to query them as one, you can query them as one. I should say a few words about the machine learning that we're doing here at the conference. We've talked about the importance of an information architecture and how that lays a foundation for machine learning. But one of the things that we're showing and demonstrating at the conference today, or at the showcase today, is how we're actually putting machine learning into the database. Create databases that learn and improve over time, learn from experience. In 1952, Arthur Samuel was a researcher at IBM who first, had one of the most fundamental breakthroughs in machine learning when he created a machine learning algorithm that will play checkers. And he programmed this checker playing game of his so it would learn over time. And then he had a great idea. He programmed it so it would play itself, thousands and thousands and thousands of times over, so it would actually learn from its own mistakes. And, you know, the evolution since then. Deep Blue playing chess and so on. The Watson Jeopardy game. We've seen tremendous potential in machine learning. We're putting into the database so databases can be smarter, faster, more consistent, and really just out of the box (snaps) performing. >> I'm glad you brought that up. I was going to ask you, because the legend Steve Mills once said to me, I had asked him a question about in-memory databases. He said ever databases have been around, in-memory databases have been around. But ML-infused databases are new. >> Sam: That's right, something totally new. >> Dave: Yeah, great. >> Well, you mentioned Deep Blue. Looking forward to having Garry Kasparov on a little bit later on here. And I know he's speaking as well. But fascinating stuff that you've covered here, Sam. We appreciate the time here. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> And wish you continued success, as well. >> Thank you very much. >> Sam Lightstone, IBM fellow joining us here live on the Cube. We're back with more here from New York City right after this. (electronic music)

>> This is George Gilbert, we're on the ground at Demandbase, the B2B CRM company, based on AI, one of uh, a very special company that's got some really unique technology. We have the privilege to be with Seth Myers today, Senior Data Scientist and resident wizard, and who's going to take us on a journey through some of the technology Demandbase is built on, and some of the technology coming down the road. So Seth, welcome. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> So, we talked earlier with Aman Naimat, Senior VP of Technology, and we talked about some of the functionality in Demandbase, and how it's very flexible, and reactive, and adaptive in helping guide, or react to a customer's journey, through the buying process. Tell us about what that journey might look like, how it's different, and the touchpoints, and the participants, and then how your technology rationalizes that, because we know, old CRM packages were really just lists of contact points. So this is something very different. How's it work? >> Yeah, absolutely, so at the highest level, each customer's going to be different, each customer's going to make decisions and look at different marketing collateral, and respond to different marketing collateral in different ways, you know, as the companies get bigger, and their products they're offering become more sophisticated, that's certainly the case, and also, sales cycles take a long time. You're engaged with an opportunity over many months, and so there's a lot of touchpoints, there's a lot of planning that has to be done, so that actually offers a huge opportunity to be solved with AI, especially in light of recent developments in this thing called reinforcement learning. So reinforcement learning is basically machine learning that can think strategically, they can actually plan ahead in a series of decisions, and it's actually technology behind AlphaGo which is the Google technology that beat the best Go players in the world. And what we basically do is we say, "Okay, if we understand "you're a customer, we understand the company you work at, "we understand the things they've been researching elsewhere "on third party sites, then we can actually start to predict "about content they will be likely to engage with." But more importantly, we can start to predict content they're more likely to engage with next, and after that, and after that, and after that, and so what our technology does is it looks at all possible paths that your potential customer can take, all the different content you could ever suggest to them, all the different routes they will take, and it looks at ones that they're likely to follow, but also ones they're likely to turn them into an opportunity. And so we basically, in the same way Google Maps considers all possible routes to get you from your office to home, we do the same, and we choose the one that's most likely to convert the opportunity, the same way Google chooses the quickest road home. >> Okay, this is really, that's a great example, because people can picture that, but how do you, how do you know what's the best path, is it based on learning from previous journeys from customers? >> Yes. >> And then, if you make a wrong guess, you sort of penalize the engine and say, "Pick the next best, "what you thought was the next best path." >> Absolutely, so the way, the nuts and bolts of how it works is we start working with our clients, and they have all this data of different customers, and how they've engaged with different pieces of content throughout their journey, and so the machine learning model, what it's really doing at any moment in time, given any customer in any stage of the opportunity that they find themselves in, it says, what piece of content are they likely to engage with next, and that's based on historical training data, if you will. And then once we make that decision on a step-by-step basis, then we kind of extrapolate, and we basically say, "Okay, if we showed them this page, or if they engage with "this material, what would that do, what situation would "we find them in at the next step, and then what would "we recommend from there, and then from there, "and then from there," and so it's really kind of learning the right move to make at each time, and then extrapolating that all the way to the opportunity being closed. >> The picture that's in my mind is like, the Deep Blue, I think it was chess, where it would map out all the potential moves. >> Very similar, yeah. >> To the end game. >> Very similar idea. >> So, what about if you're trying to engage with a customer across different channels, and it's not just web content? How is that done? >> Well, that's something that we're very excited about, and that's something that we're currently really starting to devote resources to. Right now, we already have a product live that's focused on web content specifically, but yeah, we're working on kind of a multi-channel type solution, and we're all pretty excited about it. >> Okay so, obviously you can't talk too much about it. Can you tell us what channels that might touch? >> I might have to play my cards a little close to my chest on this one, but I'll just say we're excited. >> Alright. Well I guess that means I'll have to come back. >> Please, please. >> So, um, tell us about the personalized conversations. Is the conversation just another way of saying, this is how we're personalizing the journey? Or is there more to it than that? >> Yeah, it really is about personalizing the journey, right? Like you know, a lot of our clients now have a lot of sophisticated marketing collateral, and a lot of time and energy has gone into developing content that different people find engaging, that kind of positions products towards pain points, and all that stuff, and so really there's so much low-hanging fruit by just organizing and leveraging all of this material, and actually forming the conversation through a series of journeys through that material. >> Okay, so, Aman was telling us earlier that we have so many sort of algorithms, they're all open source, or they're all published, and they're only as good as the data you can apply them to. So, tell us, where do companies, startups, you know, not the Googles, Microsofts, Amazons, where do they get their proprietary information? Is it that you have algorithms that now are so advanced that you can refine raw information into proprietary information that others don't have? >> Really I think it comes down to, our competitive advantage I think is largely in the source of our data, and so, yes, you can build more and more sophisticated algorithms, but again, you're starting with a public data set, you'll be able to derive some insights, but there will always be a path to those datasets for, say, a competitor. For example, we're currently tracking about 700 billion web interactions a year, and then we're also able to attribute those web interactions to companies, meaning the employees at those companies involved in those web interactions, and so that's able to give us an insight that no amount of public data or processing would ever really be able to achieve. >> How do you, Aman started to talk to us about how, like there were DNS, reverse DNS registries. >> Reverse IP lookups, yes. >> Yeah, so how are those, if they're individuals within companies, and then the companies themselves, how do you identify them reliably? >> Right, so reverse IP lookup is, we've been doing this for years now, and so we've kind of developed a multi-source solution, so reverse IP lookups is a big one. Also machine learning, you can look at traffic coming from an IP address, and you can start to make some very informed decisions about what the IP address is actually doing, who they are, and so if you're looking at, at the account level, which is what we're tracking at, there's a lot of information to be gleaned from that kind of information. >> Sort of the way, and this may be a weird-sounding analogy, but the way a virus or some piece of malware has a signature in terms of its behavior, you find signatures in terms of users associated with an IP address. >> And we certainly don't de-anonymize individual users, but if we're looking at things at the account level, then you know, the bigger the data, the more signal you can infer, and so if we're looking at a company-wide usage of an IP address, then you can start to make some very educated guesses as to who that company is, the things that they're researching, what they're in market for, that type of thing. >> And how do you find out, if they're not coming to your site, and they're not coming to one of your customer's sites, how do you find out what they're touching? >> Right, I mean, I can't really go into too much detail, but a lot of it comes from working with publishers, and a lot of this data is just raw, and it's only because we can identify the companies behind these IP addresses, that we're able to actually turn these web interactions into insights about specific companies. >> George: Sort of like how advertisers or publishers would track visitors across many, many sites, by having agreements. >> Yes. Along those lines, yeah. >> Okay. So, tell us a little more about natural language processing, I think where most people have assumed or have become familiar with it is with the B2C capabilities, with the big internet giants, where they're trying to understand all language. You have a more well-scoped problem, tell us how that changes your approach. >> So a lot of really exciting things are happening in natural language processing in general, and the research, and right now in general, it's being measured against this yardstick of, can it understand languages as good as a human can, obviously we're not there yet, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can't derive a lot of meaningful insights from it, and the way we're able to do that is, instead of trying to understand all of human language, let's understand very specific language associated with the things that we're trying to learn. So obviously we're a B2B marketing company, so it's very important to us to understand what companies are investing in other companies, what companies are buying from other companies, what companies are suing other companies, and so if we said, okay, we only want to be able to infer a competitive relationship between two businesses in an actual document, that becomes a much more solvable and manageable problem, as opposed to, let's understand all of human language. And so we actually started off with these kind of open source solutions, with some of these proprietary solutions that we paid for, and they didn't work because their scope was this broad, and so we said, okay, we can do better by just focusing in on the types of insights we're trying to learn, and then work backwards from them. >> So tell us, how much of the algorithms that we would call building blocks for what you're doing, and others, how much of those are all published or open source, and then how much is your secret sauce? Because we talk about data being a key part of the secret sauce, what about the algorithms? >> I mean yeah, you can treat the algorithms as tools, but you know, a bag of tools a product does not make, right? So our secret sauce becomes how we use these tools, how we deploy them, and the datasets we put them again. So as mentioned before, we're not trying to understand all of human language, actually the exact opposite. So we actually have a single machine learning algorithm that all it does is it learns to recognize when Amazon, the company, is being mentioned in a document. So if you see the word Amazon, is it talking about the river, is it talking about the company? So we have a classifier that all it does is it fires whenever Amazon is being mentioned in a document. And that's a much easier problem to solve than understanding, than Siri basically. >> Okay. I still get rather irritated with Siri. So let's talk about, um, broadly this topic that sort of everyone lays claim to as their great higher calling, which is democratizing machine learning and AI, and opening it up to a much greater audience. Help set some context, just the way you did by saying, "Hey, if we narrow the scope of a problem, "it's easier to solve." What are some of the different approaches people are taking to that problem, and what are their sweet spots? >> Right, so the the talk of the data science community, talking machinery right now, is some of the work that's coming out of DeepMind, which is a subsidiary of Google, they just built AlphaGo, which solved the strategy game that we thought we were decades away from actually solving, and their approach of restricting the problem to a game, with well-defined rules, with a limited scope, I think that's how they're able to propel the field forward so significantly. They started off by playing Atari games, then they moved to long term strategy games, and now they're doing video games, like video strategy games, and I think the idea of, again, narrowing the scope to well-defined rules and well-defined limited settings is how they're actually able to advance the field. >> Let me ask just about playing the video games. I can't remember Star... >> Starcraft. >> Starcraft. Would you call that, like, where the video game is a model, and you're training a model against that other model, so it's almost like they're interacting with each other. >> Right, so it really comes down, you can think of it as pulling levers, so you have a very complex machine, and there's certain levers you can pull, and the machine will respond in different ways. If you're trying to, for example, build a robot that can walk amongst a factory and pick out boxes, like how you move each joint, what you look around, all the different things you can see and sense, those are all levers to pull, and that gets very complicated very quickly, but if you narrow it down to, okay, there's certain places on the screen I can click, there's certain things I can do, there's certain inputs I can provide in the video game, you basically limit the number of levers, and then optimizing and learning how to work those levers is a much more scoped and reasonable problem, as opposed to learn everything all at once. >> Okay, that's interesting, now, let me switch gears a little bit. We've done a lot of work at WikiBound about IOT and increasingly edge-based intelligence, because you can't go back to the cloud for your analytics for everything, but one of the things that's becoming apparent is, it's not just the training that might go on in a cloud, but there might be simulations, and then the sort of low-latency response is based on a model that's at the edge. Help elaborate where that applies and how that works. >> Well in general, when you're working with machine learning, in almost every situation, training the model is, that's really the data-intensive process that requires a lot of extensive computation, and that's something that makes sense to have localized in a single location which you can leverage resources and you can optimize it. Then you can say, alright, now that I have this model that understands the problem that's trained, it becomes a much simpler endeavor to basically put that as close to the device as possible. And so that really is how they're able to say, okay, let's take this really complicated billion-parameter neural network that took days and weeks to train, and let's actually derive insights at the level, right at the device level. Recent technology though, like I mentioned deep learning, that in itself, just the actual deploying the technology creates new challenges as well, to the point that actually Google invented a new type of chip to just run... >> The tensor processing. >> Yeah, the TPU. The tensor processing unit, just to handle what is now a machine learning algorithm so sophisticated that even deploying it after it's been trained is still a challenge. >> Is there a difference in the hardware that you need for training vs. inferencing? >> So they initially deployed the TPU just for the sake of inference. In general, the way it actually works is that, when you're building a neural network, there is a type of mathematical operation to do a whole bunch, and it's based on the idea of working with matrices and it's like that, that's still absolutely the case with training as well as inference, where actually, querying the model, but so if you can solve that one mathematical operation, then you can deploy it everywhere. >> Okay. So, one of our CTOs was talking about how, in his view, what's going to happen in the cloud is richer and richer simulations, and as you say, the querying the model, getting an answer in realtime or near realtime, is out on the edge. What exactly is the role of the simulation? Is that just a model that understands time, and not just time, but many multiple parameters that it's playing with? >> Right, so simulations are particularly important in taking us back to reinforcement learning, where you basically have many decisions to make before you actually see some sort of desirable or undesirable outcome, and so, for example, the way AlphaGo trained itself is basically by running simulations of the game being played against itself, and really what that simulations are doing is allowing the artificial intelligence to explore the entire possibilities of all games. >> Sort of like WarGames, if you remember that movie. >> Yes, with uh... >> Matthew Broderick, and it actually showed all the war game scenarios on the screen, and then figured out, you couldn't really win. >> Right, yes, it's a similar idea where they, for example in Go, there's more board configurations than there are atoms in the observable universe, and so the way Deep Blue won chess is basically, more or less explore the vast majority of chess moves, that's really not the same option, you can't really play that same strategy with AlphaGo, and so, this constant simulation is how they explore the meaningful game configurations that it needed to win. >> So in other words, they were scoped down, so the problem space was smaller. >> Right, and in fact, basically one of the reasons, like AlphaGo was really kind of two different artificial intelligences working together, one that decided which solutions to explore, like which possibilities it should pursue more, and which ones not to, to ignore, and then the second piece was, okay, given the certain board configuration, what's the likely outcome? And so those two working in concert, one that narrows and focuses, and one that comes up with the answer, given that focus, is how it was actually able to work so well. >> Okay. Seth, on that note, that was a very, very enlightening 20 minutes. >> Okay. I'm glad to hear that. >> We'll have to come back and get an update from you soon. >> Alright, absolutely. >> This is George Gilbert, I'm with Seth Myers, Senior Data Scientist at Demandbase, a company I expect we'll be hearing a lot more about, and we're on the ground, and we'll be back shortly.

>> Hello, Wikibon community, and welcome to our 2017 predictions for the technology industry. We're very excited to be able to do this, today. This is one of the first times that Wikibon has undertaken something like this. I've been here since about April, 2016, and it's certainly the first time that I've been part of a gathering like this, with so many members of the Wikibon community. Today I'm joined with, or joined by, Dave Vellante, who's our co-CEO. So I'm the Chief Research Officer, here, and you can see me there on the left, that you can see this is from our being on TheCube at big data, New York City, this past September, and there's Dave on the right-hand side. Dave, you want to say hi? >> Dave: Hi everybody; welcome. >> So, there's a few things that we're going to do, here. The first thing I want to note is that we've got a couple of relatively simple webinar housekeeping issues. The first thing to note is everyone is muted. There is a Q&A option. You can hit the tab and a window will pop up and you can ask questions there. So if you hear anything that requires an answer, something we haven't covered or you'd like to hear again, by all means, hit that window, ask the question, and we'll do our best to get back to you. If you're a Wikibon customer, we'll follow up with you shortly after the call to make sure you get your question answered. If, however, you want to chat with your other members of the community, or with either Dave or myself, you want to comment, then there's also a chat option. On some of the toolbars, it's listed under the More button. So if you go to the More button, and you want to chat, you can probably find that there. Finally, we're also recording the webinar, and we will turn this into a Wikibon deliverable for the overall community. So, very excited to be doing this. Now, Dave, one of the things that we note on this slide is that we have TheCube in the lower left-hand corner. Why don't you take us through a little bit about who we are and what we're doing? >> Okay, great; thanks, Peter. So I think many of you or most of you know that SiliconANGLE Media Inc is sort of the umbrella company, and underneath SiliconAngle, we have three brands: the Wikibon research brand, which was started in the 2007 time frame. It's a community of IT practitioners. TheCube is, some people call it the ESPN of tech. We'll do 100 events this year, and we extensively use TheCUBE as a data-gathering mechanism and a way to communicate to our community. We've got some big shows coming up, pretty much every week, but of course we've got Amazon Reinvent coming up, and we'll be in London with HPE Discover. And so, we cover the world and cover technology, particularly in the enterprise, and then there's the SiliconANGLE publishing team, headed up by Rob Hoaf. It was founded by my co-CEO John Ferrier, and Rob Hoaf, former Business Week, is now leading that team. So those are the three main brands. We've got a new website coming out this month, on SiliconANGLE, so really excited about that and just thank the community for all your feedback and participation, so Peter, back to you. >> Thank you, Dave, so what you're going to hear today is what the analyst team here at Wikibon has pulled together for what we regard as some of the most interesting things that we think are going to happen over the next two years. Wikibon has been known for looking at disruptive technologies, and so while the focus, from a practical standpoint, in 2017, we do go further out. What is the overarching theme? Well, the overarching theme of our research and our conversations with the community is very simple. It's: put more data to work. The industry has developed incredible tools to gather data, to do analysis on data, to have applications use data and store data. I could go on with that list. But the data tends to be quite segmented and quite siloed to a particular application, a particular group, or a particular other activity. And the goal of digital business, in very simple terms, is to find ways to turn that data into an asset, so that it can be applied to other forms of work. That data could include customer data, operational data, financial data, virtually any data that we can imagine. And the number of sources that we're going to have over the next few years are going to be astronomical. Now, what we want to do is we want to find ways so that data can be freed up, almost like energy, in a physical sense, to dramatically improve the quality of the work that a firm produces. Whether it's from an engagement standpoint, or a customer experience standpoint, or actual operations, and increasingly automation. So that's the underlying theme. And as we go through all of these predictions, that theme will come out, and we'll reinforce that message during the course of the session. So, how are we going to do this? The first thing we're going to do is we're going to have six predictions that focus in 2017. Those six predictions are going to answer crucial questions that we're getting from the community. The first one is: what's driving system architecture? Are there new use cases, new applications, new considerations that are going to influence not only how technology companies create the systems and the storage and the networking and the database, and the middleware and the applications, but also how users are going to evolve the way they think about investing? The second one is: do micro-processor options matter? Through 20 years now, we've pretty much focused on one, limited class of micro-processor, the X386, er, the X86 architecture. But will these new workloads drive opportunities or options for new micro-processors? Do we have to worry about that? Thirdly, all this data has to be stored somewhere. Are we going to continue to store it, limited only on HDDs, or are other technologies going to come into vogue? Fourthly, in the 2017 time frame, we see the cloud, a lot's happening, professional developers have flocked to it, enterprises are starting to move to it in a big way, what does it mean to code in the cloud? What kinds of challenges are we going to face? Are they technological? Are they organizational, institutional? Are they sourcing? Related to that, obviously, is Amazon's had enormous momentum over the past few years. Do we expect that to continue? Is everybody else going to be continuing to play catch-up? And the last question for 2017 that we think is going to be very important is this notion of big data complexity. Big data has promised big things, and quite frankly has, except in some limited cases, been a little bit underwhelming. As some would argue, this last election showed. Now, we're going to move, after those six predictions, to 2022, where we'll have three predictions that we're going to focus on. One is: what is the new IT mandate? Is there a new IT mandate? Is it going to be the same old, same old, or is IT going to be asked to do new things? Secondly, when we think about Internet of Things, and we think about Augmented Reality or virtual reality, or some of these other new ways of engaging people, is that going to draw out new classes of applications? And then finally, after years of investing heavily in mobile applications, in mobile websites, and any number of other things, and thinking that there was this tight linkage where mobile equaled digital engagement, we're starting to see that maybe that's breaking, and we have to ask the question: is that all there is to digital engagement, or is there something else on the horizon that we're going to have to do? The last prediction, in 2027, we're going to take a stab here and say: will we all work for AI? So, these are the questions that we hear frequently from our clients, from our community. These are the predictions we're going to attend to and address. If you have others, let us know. If there's other things that you want us to focus on, let us know, but here's where we're starting. Alright. So let's start with 2017. What's driving system architecture? Our prediction for 2017 regarding this is very simple. The IoT edge use cases begin shaping decisions in system and application architecture. Now, the right-hand side, if you look at that chart, you can see a very, very important result of the piece of research that David Foyer recently did. And it shows IoT edge options, three-year costs. From left to right, moving all the data into the cloud over a normal data communications, telecommunications circuit, in the middle, moving that data into a central location, namely using cellular network technologies, which have different performance and security attributes, and then finally, keeping 95 percent of the data at the edge, processing it locally. We can see that the costs are overwhelming, favoring being smarter by how we design these applications and keeping more of that data local. And in fact, we think that so long as data and communications costs remain what they are, that there's going to be an irrevokeable pressure to alter key application architectures and ways of thinking to keep more of that crossing at the edge. The first point to note, here, is it means that data doesn't tend to move to the center as much as many are predicting, but rather, the cloud moves to the edge. The reason for that is that data movement isn't free. That means we're going to have even more distributed, highly autonomous apps, so none of those have to be managed in ways that sustain the firm's behavior in a branded, consistent way. And very importantly, because these apps are going to be distributed and autonomous, close to the data, it ultimately means that there's going to be a lot of operational technology players that impact the key decisions, here, that we're going to see made as we think about the new technologies that are going to be built by vendors and in the application architectures that are going to be deployed by users. >> So, Peter, let me just add to that. I think the key takeaway there is, as you mentioned, and I just don't want it to get lost, is 95 percent of the data, we're predicting, will stay at the edge. That's a much larger figure than I've seen from other firms or other commentary, and that's substantial, that's significant, it says it's not going to move. It's probably going to sit on flash, and the analytics will be done at the edge, as opposed to this sort of first bar, being cloud only. That 95 percent figure has been debated. It's somewhat controversial, but that's where we are today. Just wanted to point that out. >> Yeah, that's a great point, Dave. And the one thing to note, here, that's very important, is that this is partly driven by the cost of telecommunications or data communications, but there also are physical realities that have to be addressed. So, physics, the round trip times because of the speed of light, the need for greater autonomy and automation on the edge, OT and the decisions and the characteristics there, all of these will contribute strongly to this notion of the edge is increasingly going to drive application architectures and new technologies. So what's going to power those technologies? What's going to be behind those technologies? Let's start by looking at the CPUs. Do micro-processor options matter? Well, our prediction is that evolution in workloads, the edge, big data, which we would just, for now, put AI and machine learning, and cognitive underneath many of those big data things, almost as application forms, creates an opening for new micro-processor technologies, which are going to start grabbing market share from x86 servers in the next few years. Two to three percent next year, in 2017. And we can see a scenario where that number grows to double digits in the next three or four years, easily. Now, these micro-processors are going to come from multiple sources, but the factors driving this are, first off, the unbelievable explosion in devices served. That it's just going to require more processing power all over the place, and the processing power has to become much more cost-effective and much more tuned specifically to serving those types of devices. Data volumes and data complexity is another reason. Consumer economics is clearly driving a lot of these factors, has been for years, and it's going to continue to do so. But we will see new, ARM-based processors and other, and GPUs for big data apps, which have the advantage of being also supported in many of the consumer applications out there, driving this new trend. Now, the other two factors. Moore's Law is not out of room. We don't want to suggest that, but it's not the factor that it used to be. We can't presume that we're going to get double the performance out of a single class of technology every year or so, and that's going to remove any and all other types of micro-processor sets. So there's just not as much headroom. There's going to be an opportunity now to drive at these new workloads with more specialized technology. And the final one is: the legacy software issue's never going to go away; it's a big issue, it's going to remain a big issue. But, these new workloads are going to create so much new value in digital business settings, we believe, that it will moderate the degree to which legacy software keeps a hold on the server marketplace. So, we expect a lot of ARM-based servers that are lower cost, tuned and specialized, supporting different types of apps. A lot of significant opportunity for GPUs for big data apps, which do a great job running those kinds of graph-based data models. And a lot of room, still, for RISC in pre-packaged HCI solutions. Which we call: single managed entities. Others call: appliances. So we see a lot of room for new micro-processors in the marketplace over the next few years. >> I guess I'll add to that, and I'll be brief, just in the interest of time, the industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for, as we know, many, many decades, and that's been the fundamental source of innovation. We see the innovation curve shifting and changing to become combinatorial, a combination of technologies. Peter mentioned GPU, certainly visualization's in there. AI, machine learning, deep learning, graph databases, combining to be the fundamental driver of innovation, going forward, so the answer here is: yes, they matter. Workloads are obviously the key. >> Great, Dave. So let's go to the next one. We talked about CPUs, well now, let's talk about HDDs. And more broadly, storage. So the prediction is that anything in a data center that physically moves gets less useful and loses share of wallet. Now, clearly that includes tape, but now it's starting to include HDDs. In our overall enterprise systems, storage systems revenue forecast, which is going to be published very, very shortly, we've identified that we think that the revenue attributable to HDD-based enterprise storage systems is going to drop over the next few years, while flash-based enterprise storage system revenue rises dramatically. Now, we're talking about storage system revenue here, Dave. We're not just talking about the HDDs, themselves. The HDD market starts, continues to grow, perhaps not as fast, partly because, even as the performance side of the HDD market starts to fade a bit, replaced by flash, that bulk, volume part of the HDD marketplace starts to substitute for tape. So, why is this happening? One of the main reasons it's happening is because the storage revenue, the storage systems revenue is very strongly influenced by software. And those software revenues are being bundled into the flash-based systems. Now, there's a couple reasons for this. First off, as we've predicted for quite some time, we do see a flash-only data center option on the horizon. It's coming well into focus. Number two is that, the good news is flash-based products are starting to come down and also are in sight of HDD-based products at the performance level. But very importantly, and here's one of the key notions of the value of data, and finding new ways to increase the use of data: flash, our research shows, offers superior business value, too, precisely because you can make so many copies of it and have a single set of data serve so many different applications and so many users, at scales that just aren't possible with traditional, HDD-based enterprise storage systems. Now, this applies to labor, too, Dave, doesn't it? >> Yeah, so a couple of points here. Yes, labor being one of those, sort of, areas that Peter's talking about are, ah, in jeopardy. We see about $200 billion over the next 10 years shifting from what we often refer to as non-differentiated IT labor, in provisioning and networking configuration and laying cable, et cetera, shifting from where it is today in services and/or on-prem IT labor, to vendor R&D or the cloud. So that's a very important point. I think I just wanted to add some color to what you were talking about before when you talked about HDD revenue continuing to grow, I think you were talking about, specifically, in the enterprise, in this storage systems view. And the other thing I want to add is, Peter, referenced sort of the business value of flash, as you, many of you know, David Floyer and Wikibon predicted, very early on, the impact that flash would have on spinning disk, and not only because of cost related to compression and de-duplication, but also this notion that Peter's talking about, of data sharing. The ability of development organizations to use the same data and minimize the number of copies. Now, the thing to watch, here, and kind of the wildcard is the hyperscale model. Hyperscalers, as we know, are consuming many, many, you know, exabytes and petabytes of data. They do things differently than is done in the enterprise, so that's something that we're watching very closely in terms of that model, that model being the hyperscale model, how it mimics or how it doesn't mimic what traditionally has occurred in the enterprise and how that will affect adoption of both flash and spinning disk. But as Peter said, we'll be releasing this data very shortly, and you'll be able to dig into it with is. >> And very importantly, Dave, in response to one of the comments in the chat, we're not talking about duplication of data everywhere, we're talking about the ability to provide logical and effective copies to single-data sources, so that, just because you can just drive a lot more throughput. So, that's the HDD. Now, let's turn to some of this notion of coding the cloud. What are we going to do with code in the cloud? Well our prediction is that the new cloud development stack, which is centered on containers and APIs, matures rapidly, but institutional habits in development constrain change. Now, why do we say that? I want to draw your attention to the graphic on the right-hand side. Now, this is what we think the mature, or the maturing cloud development stack looks like. As you can see, it's a lot of notions of containers, a lot of notions of other types of technologies. We'll see APIs interspersed throughout here as a primary way of getting to some of these container-based applications, services, microservices, et cetera, but this same, exact chart could be mapped back to SOA from 10 years ago, and even from some of the distributed computing environments that were put forward 20 years ago. The challenge here is that a sizable percentage, and we're estimating about 80 percent of in-house development, is still set up to work the old way. And so long as development organizations are structured to build monolithic apps or take care of monolithic apps, they will tend to create monolithic apps, with whatever technology's available to them. So, while we see these stacks becoming more vogue and more in use, we may not see, in 2017, shops being able to take full advantage of them. Precisely because the institutional work forms are going to change more slowly. Now, big data will partly contravene these habits. Why? Because big data is going to require quite different development approaches, because of the complexity associated of analytic pipelines, building analytic pipelines, managing data, figuring out how to move things from here to there, et cetera; there's some very, very complex data movement that takes place within big data applications. And some of these new application services, like Cognitive, et cetera, will require some new ways of thinking about how to do development. So, there will be a contravening force here, which we'll get to, shortly, but the last one is: ultimately, we think time-to-value metrics are going to be key. As KPI's move from project cost and taking care of the money, et cetera, and move more towards speed, as Agile starts to assert itself, as organizations start to, not only, build part of the development organization around Agile, but also Agile starts bleeding into other management locations, like even finance, then we'll start to see these new technologies really start asserting themselves and having a big impact. >> So, I would add to that, this notion of the iron triangle being these embedded processes, which as we all know, people, processes, and technology, people and process are the hardest to change, I'm interested, Peter, in your thoughts on, you hear a lot about Waterfall versus Agile; how will organizations, sort of, how will that affect organizations, in terms of their ability to adopt some of these, you know, new methodologies like Agile and Scrum? >> Well, the thing we're saying is the technology's going to happen fast, the Agile processes are being well-adopted, and are being used, certainly, in development, but I have had lots of conversations with CIOs, for example, over the last year and a half, two years ago, where they observed that they're having a very difficult time with reconciling the impedance mismatch between Agile development and non-Agile budgeting. And so, a lot of that still has to be worked out, and it's going to be tied back to how we think about the value of data, to be sure, but ultimately, again, it comes back to this notion of people, Dave, if the organization is not set up to fully take advantage of these new classes of technologies, if they're set up to deliver and maintain more monolithic applications, then that's what's going to tend to get built, and that's what's going to get, and that's what the organization is going to tend to have, and that's going to undermine some of the new value propositions that these technologies put forward. Well, what about the cloud? What kind of momentum does Amazon have? And our prediction for 2017 is that Amazon's going to have yet another banner year, but customers are going to start demanding a simplicity reset. Now, TheCUBE is going to be at Amazon Reinvent with John Ferrier and Steve Minnamon are going to be up there, I believe, Dave, and we're very excited. There's a lot of buzz happening about Reinvent. So follow us up there, through TheCUBE at Reinvent. But what I've done on the right-hand side is sent you a piece of Wikibon research. What we did is we wrote up, and we did an analysis of all of the AWS cases put forward, on their website, about how people are using AWS, and there's well over 650, or at least there were when we looked at it, and we looked at about two-thirds of them, and here's what we came up with. Somewhere in the vicinity of 80 percent, or so, of those cases are tied back to firms that we might regard as professional software delivery organizations. Whether they're stash or business services or games, provided games, or social networks. There's a smaller piece of the pie that's dedicated to traditional enterprise-type class of customers. But that's a growing and important piece, and we're not diminishing it at all, but the broad array of this pie chart, folks are relatively able to hire the people and apply the skills and devote the time necessary to learn some of the more complex, 75-plus Amazon services that are now available. The other part of the marketplace, the part that's moving into Amazon, the promise of Amazon is that it's simple, it's straightforward, and it is. Certainly more so than other options, but we anticipate that there will have to be a new type of, and Amazon's going to have to work even harder to simplify it, as it tries to attract more of that enterprise crowd. It's true that the flexibility of Amazon is certainly spawning complexity. We expect to see new tools, in fact, there are new tools on the market from companies like Appfield, for example, for handling and managing AWS billing and services, and that is, our CIOs are telling us, they're actually very helpful and very powerful in helping to manage those relationships, but the big issue here is that other folks, like VM Ware, have done research to suggest that the average shop has two to three big cloud relationships. That makes a lot of sense to us. As we start adding hybrid cloud into this and the complexities of inter-cloud communication and inter-cloud orchestration starts to become very real, that's going to even add more complexity, overall. >> So I'd add to that, just in terms of Amazon momentum, obviously those of you who follow what I read, you know, have been covering this for quite some time, but to me, the marginal economics of Amazon's model continue to be increasingly attractive. You can see it in the operating profits. Amazon's gap, operating profits, are in the mid-20s. 25, 26 percent. Just to give you a sense, EMC, who's an incredibly profitable company, its gap operating profits are in the teens. Amazon's non-gap operating profits are into 30 percent, so it's an incredibly profitable company. The more it grows, the more profitable it gets. Having said that, I think we agree with what Peter's saying in terms of complexity; think about API creep in Amazon. And different proprietary APIs for each of the data services, whether it's Kinesis or EC2 or S3 or Dynamo DB or EMR, et cetera, so the data complexity and the complexity of the data pipeline is growing, and I think that opens the door for the on-prem folks to at least mimic the public cloud experience to a great degree; as great a degree as possible. And you're seeing people, certainly, companies do that in their marketing, and starting to do that in the solutions that they're delivering. So by no means are we saying Amazon takes over the world, despite, you know, the momentum. There's a window open for those that can mimic, to the large extent, the public cloud capabilities. >> Yeah, very important point there. And as we said earlier, we do expect to see the cloud move closer to the edge, and that includes on-prem, in a managed way, as opposed to presuming that everything ends up in the cloud. Physics has something to say about that, as do some of the costs of data movement. Alright, so we've got one more 2017 prediction, and you can probably guess what it is. We've spent a lot of years and have a pretty significant place in spin big data, and we've been pretty aggressive about publishing what we think is going to happen in big data, or what is happening in big data, over the last year or so. One of the reasons why we think Amazon's momentum is going to increase is precisely because we think it's going to become a bigger target for big data. Why? Because big data complexity is a serious concern in many organizations today. Now, it's a serious concern because the spoke nature of the tools that are out there, many of which are individually extremely good, means that shops are spending an enormous amount of time just managing the underlying technology, and not as much time as they need to learning about how to solve big data problems, doing a great job of piloting applications, demonstrating to the business the financial returns are there. So as a result of this bespoked big data tool aggregates, we get multi-source, and we need to cobble it together from a lot of different technology sources, a lot of uncoordinated software and hardware updates that dramatically drive up the cost of on-prem administration. A lot of conflicting commitments, both from the business as well as from the suppliers, and very, very complex contracts. And as a result of that, we think that that's been one of the primary reasons why there's been so many pilot failures and why big data has not taken off the way that it probably should have. We think, however, that in 2017, we're going to see, and here's our prediction, we're going to see failure rates for big data pilots drop by 50 percent, as big vendors, IBM, Microsoft, AWS, and Google, amongst the chief ones, and we'll see if Oracle gets into that list, bring pre-packaged, problem-based analytic pipelines to market. And that's what we mean by this concept, here, of big data, single-managed entities. The idea that we can pull together, a company can pull together, or that it can pull together all the various elements necessary to provide the underlying infrastructure so that a shop can focus more time making sure that they understand the use-case, they understand how to go get the data necessary to serve that use-case, and understand how to pilot and deploy the application, because the underlying hardware and system software is pre-packaged and used. Now, we think that these, the SMEs, that are going to be most successful will be ones that are not predicated only on more proprietary software, but utilize a lot of open-source software. The ones that we see that are most successful today are in fact combining the pre-packaging of technology with the availability, or access, to the enormous value that the open-source market continues to build as it constructs new tools and delivers them out to big data applications. Ultimately, you've seen this before, or you've heard this before, from us: time-to-value becomes the focus. Similar to development, and we think that's one of the convergences that we have, here. We think that big data apps, or app patterns, will start to solidify. George Gilbert's done some leading-edge research on what some of those application patterns are going to be, and how those application patterns are going to drive analytic pipeline decisions, and very important, the process of building out the business capabilities necessary to build out the repeatable big data services to the business. Now, very importantly, some of these app patterns are going to be, are going to look like machine learning, cognitive AI, in many respects, all of these are part of this use-case to app trend that we see. So, we think that big data's kind of an umbrella for all of those different technology classes. It's going to be a lot of marketing done that tries to differentiate machine learning, cognitive AI. Technically, there are some differences, but from our perspective, they're all part of the effort of trying to ensure that we can pull together the technology in a more simple way so that it can be applied to complex business problems more easily. One more point I'll note, Dave, is that, and you adjust that world a lot, so I'd love to get your comments on this, but one of the more successful single-managed entities out there is, in fact, Watson from IBM, and it's actually a set of services and not just a device that you buy. >> Yeah, so a couple comments, there. One is that you can see the complexity in the market data, and we've been covering big data markets for a long time now, and there were two things that stood out when we started covering this. One is that software, as a percentage of the total revenue, is much lower than you would expect, in most markets. And that's because of the open-source contribution and the, you know, the multi-year collapse that we've seen in infrastructure software pricing. Largely due to open-source and cloud. The other piece of that is professional services, which have dominated spending within big data, because of the complexity. I think you're right, when you look at what happened at World of Watson and, you know, what IBM's trying to do, and others, in your prediction, there, are putting together a full, end-to-end data pipeline to do, you know, ingest and data wrangling and collaboration between data scientists, data engineers, and application developers and data quality people, and then bringing in the analytics piece. And essentially, you know, what many companies have done, and IBM included, they've cobbled together sets of tools and they've sort of layered on a way to interact with those tools, so the integration has still been slow in coming, but that's where the market is headed, so that we actually can build commercial, off the shelf applications. There's been a lack of those applications. I remember, probably four years ago, Mike Olsen at a (unintelligible) predicted: this will be the year of the big data app. And it still has not happened, so, and until it does, that complexity is going to reign. >> Yeah, and so it, again, as we said earlier, we anticipate that the big data, the need for developers to become more a part of the big data ecosystem, and the need for developers to get more value out of some of the other new cloud stacks are going to come together and will reinforce each other over the course of the next 24 to 36 months. So those were our 2017 predictions. Now let's take a look at our 2022 predictions, and we've got three. The first one is we do think a new IT mandate's on the horizon. Consistent with all these trends we've talked about, the idea of new ways of thinking about infrastructure and application architecture, based on the realities of the edge, new ways of thinking about how application developers need to participate in the value equation activities of big data, new ways of organizing to try to take greater advantage of the new processes, new technologies for development. We think, very strongly, that IT organizations will organize work to generate greater value from data assets by engineering proximity of applications and data. What do we mean by that? Well, proximity can mean physical proximity, but it also is something that we mean in terms of governance, tool similarity, infrastructure commonality, we think that over the next four to five years, we'll see a lot of effort to try to increase the proximity of not only data assets from a data standpoint, or the raw data, but also understanding from an infrastructure, governance skillset, et cetera, standpoint. So that we can actually do a better job of, again, generating more work out of our data by finding new and interesting ways of weaving together systems of records, big analytics, IOT, and a lot of other new application forms we see on the horizon, including one that I'll talk about in a second. Data value becomes a hot topic. We're going to have to do a better job, as a community, of talking about how data is valuable. How it creates (unintelligible) in the business, how it has to be applied, or has to be thought of as a source of value, in building out those systems. We talked earlier about the notion of people, process, and technology, well, we have to add to that: data. Data needs to be an asset that gets consumed as we think about how business changes. So data value's going to become a hot topic, and it's something we're focused on, as to what it means. We think, as Dave mentioned earlier, it's going to catalyze a true private cloud solutions for legacy applications. Now, I know Dave, you're going to want to talk about, in a second, what this might need. For example, things like the Amazon, VM Ware recent announcement. But it also means that strategic sourcing becomes reality. The idea of just going after the cheapest solution, or cost-optimized solution, which, don't get me wrong, don't get us wrong, is not going to go away, but it means that increasingly we're going to focus on new sourcing arrangements that facilitate creating greater proximity for those crucial aspects that make our shop run. >> Okay, so a couple of thoughts there, Peter. You know, there's a lot of talk, a couple years ago, and it's slowly beginning to happen, of bringing transaction and analytic systems together. What that oftentimes means is somebody takes their mainframe for the transactions and sticks it in finneban pipe into an exodata. I don't think that's what everybody envisioned when you started to sort of discuss that mean. So that's sort of happening slowly. But it's something that we're watching. This notion of data value, and shifting from, really a process economy to a data, or an insight, economy is something that's also occurring. You're seeing the emergence of the chief data officer. And our research shows that there are five things a chief data officer must do to really get started. The first is to understand data value, and how data contributes to the monetization of their company. So not monetizing the data, per se, and I think that's a mistake that a lot of people made, early on, is trying to figure out how to sell their data, but it's really to understand how data contributes to value for your organization. The second piece is how to access that data, who gets access to that data, and what data sources you have. And the third is the quality and trust of that data. And those are sequential things that our research shows a chief data officer has to do. And then the other, sort of parallel items, are relationship with the line of business and re-skilling. And those are complicated issues for most organizations to undertake, and something that's going to take, you know, many, many years to play out. The vast majorities of customers that we talk to say their data-driven, but aren't necessarily data-driven. >> Right, so, the one other thing I wanted to mention, Dave, is that we did some research, for example, on the VM Ware, Amazon relationship, and the reason why we were positive on it is quite simple. That it provides a path for VM Ware's customers, with their legacy applications running under VM Ware, to move those applications and the data associated with those applications, if they choose to, closer to some of the new, big data applications that are showing up in Amazon. So there's an example of this notion of making it more proximate, making applications and data more proximate, based on physics, based on governance, based on overall tooling and skilling, and we anticipate that that's going to become a new design center for a lot of shops over the course of the next few years. Now, coming to this notion of a new design center, the next thing we want to note is that, IoT, the Internet of Things, plus augmented reality, is going to have an impact on the marketplace. We got very excited about IoT, simply by thinking about the things, but our perspective is, increasingly, we have to recognize that people are going to always be a major feature, and perhaps the greatest value-creating feature, of systems. And augmented reality is going to emerge as a crucial actuator for the Internet of Things, and people. And that's kind of what we mean, is that augmented reality becomes an actuator for people. As will Chat Box and other types of technologies. Now, an actuator in an IoT sense is the devices or set of capabilities that take the results of models and actually turn that into a real-world behavior. So, if we think about this virtuous cycle that we have on the right-hand side, the internet, these are the three capabilities that we think people or firms are going to have to build out. They're going to have to build out an Internet of Things and People that are capable of capturing data, and turning analogue data into digital data, so that it can be moved into these big data applications. Again, with machine learning and AI and cognitive, sort of being part of that or underneath that umbrella, so that, then, we can build more models, more insights, more software that then translates into what we're calling systems of enaction. Or systems of "enaction", not "inaction". Systems of enaction. Businesses still serve customers, and these systems of enaction are going to generate real-world outcomes from these models and insights, and these real-world outcomes will certainly be associated with things, but they will also be associated with human being and people. And as a consequence of this, this we think is so powerful and is going to be so important over the course of the next five years that we anticipate that we will see a new set of disciplines focused on social discovery. Historically, in this industry, we've been very focused on turning insights or discovery about physics into hardware. Well, over the next few years, and Dave mentioned moving from the process to some new economy, we're going to see an enormous investment in understanding the social dynamics of how people work together and turn that into software. Not just how accountants do things, but how customers and enterprises come together to make markets happen, and through that social discovery, create these systems of enaction so that businesses can successfully, can successfully attend to and deliver the promises and the, ah, and the predictions that they're making through their other parts of their big data applications. >> So, Peter, you've pointed out many times that the big change, relative to processes, and historically, in the IT business, we've known what the processes are. The technology was sort of unknown, and mysterious. That's flipped. It's now, really the process is the unknown piece. That's the mysterious part. The technology is pretty well-understood. I think, as it relates to what you're talking about here with IoT and AR, what people tell us, the practitioners that are struggling with this, first of all, there's so much analogue data that people are trying to digitize, the other piece is there's a limited budget that folks have, and they're trying to figure out, alright, do I spend it on getting more data, and will that improve my data, increase my observation space? Or do I spend it on better models, and improving my models and iterating? And that's a trade-off that people have to make, and of course the answer is "both", but how those funds are allocated is something that organizations are really trying to better understand. There's a lot of trial and error going on. Because obviously, more data, in theory anyway, means you can make better decisions. But it's that iteration of that model, that trial and error and constant improvement, and both of those take significant resources. And budgets are still tight. >> Very true, Dave, and in fact, George Gilbert's research with the community is starting to demonstrate that more of the value's going to come from the models, as opposed to the raw data. We need the raw data to get to the models, but more of the value's going to come from the models. So that's where we think more people are going to focus their time and attention. Because the value will be in the insights and the models. But to go back to your point: where do you put your money? Well, you got to run these pilots, you got to keep up with your competitors, you got to serve customers better, so you're going to have to build all these models, sometimes in a bespoked way. But George is publishing an enormous amount of research right now that's very valuable to a lot of our community members that really shows how that pipeline, how those analytic pipelines or the capabilities associated with those analytic pipelines are starting to become better understood. So that we can actually start getting experience and generating efficiencies or generating a scale out of those analytic pipelines. And that's going to be a major feature underlying this basic trend. Now, this notion of people is really crucial, because as we think about the move to the Internet of Things and People, we have to ask ourselves: has digital engagement really, fully considered what it means to engage people throughout their customer journey? And the answer is: no, it hasn't. We believe that by 2022, IT will be given greater responsibility for management of demand chains. Working to unify customer journey designs and operations across all engagement functions. And by engagement functions, we mean marketing, sales, we mean product, we mean service, we mean fulfillment. That doesn't mean that they all report to IT. Don't mean that, at all. But it means that IT is going to have to, again, find ways to apply data from all these different sources so that it can, in fact, simplify and unify and bring together consistent design and operations so that all these functions can be successful and support reorganization if necessary, because the underlying systems provide that degree of unity and focus on customer success. Now, this is in strong opposition to the prediction made a few years ago, that marketing was going to emerge as the be-all and end-all, that's going to spend more than IT. That was silly, it hasn't happened, and you'd have to redefine marketing very aggressively to see that actually happening. But, when we think about this notion of putting more data to work, the first thing we note, and this is what all the digital natives have shown us, the data can transform a product into a service. That is the basis for a lot of the new business models we're talking about, a lot of these digital native business models and successes that they've had, and we think it's going to be a primary feature of the IT mandate to help business understand how data, more data can be put to work, transforming products into services. It also means, at a tactical level, that mobile applications have been way too focused on solving the seller's problems. We want to caution folks, don't presume that because your mobile application has gotten lost in some online store somewhere that that means that digital engagement's a failure. No, it means that you have to focus digital engagement on providing value throughout the customer journey, and not just from the problem to the solution, where the transaction for money takes place. Too much mobile applications, or too many mobile applications have been focused, in a limited way, on the marketers' problem within the business, of trying to generate, trying to generate awareness and demand. And it has to be, mobile has to be applied in a coherent and comprehensive way, across the entire journey. And ultimately, I hate to say this, but we think collaboration's going to make a comeback. But collaboration to serve customers. So the business can collaborate better inside, but in support of serving the customers. Major, major feature of what we think is going to happen over the course of the next couple years. >> I think the key point there is we all, there's many mobile apps that we love, and utilize, but there are a lot that are not so great. And the point that we've made to the community, quite often, is that it used to be that the brands had all the power, they had all the information, there was an asymmetry of information, the customer, the consumer didn't really know much about pricing. The web, obviously, has leveled that playing field and what many brands are trying to do is recreate that asymmetry and maybe got over their skis a little bit, before providing value to the customers. And I think your point is that, to the extent that you can provide value to that customer, that information advantage will come back to you. But you can't start with that information advantage. >> Great point, Dave. But it also means that we need to, that IT needs to look at the entire journey and see transactions and the discover, evaluate, buy, apply, use and fix throughout this entire journey and find ways of designing systems that provide value to customers at all times and in all places. So the demand chain notion, which historically has been focused on trying to optimize the value that the buyer gets in the buy process, at a cost-effective way, that notion of demand chain has to be applied to the entire engagement lifecycle. Alright, so that's 2022. Let's take a crack at our big prediction for 2027. And it's at, ah, it's on a lot of people's minds. Will we all work for AI? There've been a lot of studies done, over the course of the past year, year and a half, that have been kind of suggested that 47 percent of jobs are going to go away, for example. And that's not, that's not the only high end. Actually, folks have suggested much more, over the next 10, 15 years. Now, if you take a look at the right-hand side, you see a robot thinker. Now, you may not know this, but when The Thinker was actually first, when Rodan first constructed The Thinker, what he was envisioning was actually someone looking down into the seven levels of Hell as described by Dante. And I think that a lot of people would agree that the notion of no work is a Hell for a lot of people. We don't think that that's going to happen in the same way that most folks do. We believe that AI technology advances will far outpace the social advances. Some tasks will be totally replaced, but most jobs will only be partially replaced. We have to draw a clear distinction between the idea that a job performs only this or that task, as opposed to a job or an individual, an employee, as part of a complex community that ensures that a business is capable of serving customers. It doesn't mean we're not going to see more automation, but automation is going to focus mostly on replacing tasks. And to the degree that that task sets a particular job is replaced, then those jobs will be replaced. But ultimately, there's going to be a lot of social friction that gates how fast this happens. One of the key reasons for the social friction is something in behavioral economics that's known as loss avoidance. People are more afraid of losing something than they are of gaining something. And, whether it's a union or whether it's regulations or any number of other factors, that's going to gate the rate at which this notion that AI crushes employment occurs. AI will tend to compliment, not substitute for labor. And that's been a feature of technology for years. It doesn't, again, mean that some tasks and some task sets, sort of those in line with jobs, aren't replaced; there will be people put out of work as a consequence of this. But for the most part, we will see AI tend to compliment, not fully substitute for most jobs. Now this creates, also, a new design consideration. Historically, as technologists, we've looked at what can be done with technology, and we've asked: can we do it? And if the answer is "yes", we tend to go off and do it. And now, we need to start asking ourselves: should we do it? And this is not just a moral imperative. This has other implications, as well. So, for example, the remarkably bad impact that a lot of automated call centers have had on customer service from a customer experience standpoint. This has to become one of the features of how we think about bringing together, in these systems of enaction, all the different functions that are responsible for serving a customer. Asking ourselves: well, we can do it, from a technical standpoint, but should we do it from a customer experience, from a community relations, and even from a, ah, from a cultural imperative standpoint, as we move forward? >> Okay, I'll be brief, because we're wrapping up here, but first of all, machines have always replaced humans. When, largely with physical tasks, now we're seeing that occur with cognitive tasks. People are concerned, as Peter said. The middle class is obviously under fire. The median income in the United States has dropped from $55,000 in 1999 to just above $50,000 today. So, something's going on, and clearly you can look around and see whether it's an an airport with kiosks or billboards, electronic machines and cognitive functions are replacing human functions. Having said that, we're sanguine, because the, the story I'll tell is that the greatest chess player in the world is not a machine. When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, what Gary Kasparov did is he started a competition to collaborate with other, you know, human chess players with machines, to beat the machine, and they succeeded at that, so this, again, I come back to this combination of technologies. Combinatorial technologies are really what's going to drive the innovation curve over the next, we think, 20 to 50 years. So, it's something that is far out there, in terms of our predictions, but it's also something that is relevant to the society, and obviously the technology industry. So thank you, everybody. >> So, we have one more slide, and it's Conclusions Slide, so let me hit these really quick, and before I do so, let me note that George, our big data analyst is George Gilbert. George Gilbert: G-I-L-B-E-R-T. Alright, so, very quickly, tech architecture question, we think edge IoT is going to have a major effect in how we think about architecture of the future. Micro-processor options? Yup, new micro-processor options are going to have an impact in the marketplace. Whither HDDs? For the performance side of storage, flash is coming on strong. Code in the cloud? Yes, the technologies are great, but development has to change its habits. Amazon momentum? Absolutely going to continue. Big data complexity? It's bad and we have to find ways to make it simpler so that we can focus more on the outcomes and the results, as opposed to the infrastructure and the tooling. 2022, new IT mandate? Drive the value of that data. Get more value out of your data. The Internet of Things and People is going to become the proper way of thinking about how these new systems of enaction work, and we anticipate that demand chain management is going to be crucial to extending the idea of digital engagement. Will we all work for AI? Dave just mentioned, as we said, there's going to be dislocation, there's going to be tasks that are replaced, but not by 2027. Alright, so thank you very much for your time, today. Here is how you can contact Dave and myself. We will be publishing this, the slides and this broadcast. Wikibon's going to deliver three coordinated predictions talks over the course of the next two days, so look for that. Go up to SiliconANGLE, we're up there a fair amount. Follow us on Twitter, and we want to thank you very much for staying with us during the course of this session. Have a great day.