>> From York Town Heights, New York, it's theCUBE covering IBM Cloud Analyst Summit, brought to you by IBM. (techy music) >> Hi, welcome back, I'm Peter Burris of theCUBE, and we're having conversations here at the IBM Innovation Day at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab in York Town Heights, New York. We've got a great conversation. Don Bolia is the general manager of cloud developer services at IBM, welcome to theCUBE, Don. >> Thank you very much. >> Or should I say welcome back to theCUBE? >> (chuckling) Yes, thank you. >> So, Don, we were talking with one of your colleagues, Hillery Hunter, who's the CTO-- >> Mm-hm. >> Of here at the cloud infrastructure team, and about the fact that everybody's talking about the rate of growth of data, and nobody's really discussing the rate of growth of software, which is perhaps even more important, ultimately, to business. What is that rate of growth look like, and how is it related to the role of cloud? >> Yeah, so it's a great question. I mean, with my role as kind of owner of our platform services from the cloud perspective, one of the things we've noticed over the last probably five or 10 years is just a massive rate and pace change with respect to iteration on the software development cycle. So, they started with mobile, I would say, and then has moved to cloud since then, where you know, the expectation is everything is updating all the time, you know, everyday, all times of the day. Within our own Kubernetes and container service, as an example, we push over 500 updates a week to that software stack on behalf of our customers, and so I think there's a rate and pace of how things are changing from that perspective, but then there's also the fact that everybody's leveraging those services to then build the next generation of software. So, in our case we have a set of base services that I provide for things like containers that then the Watson team, for example, uses to build their microservices, which are then, you know, realized as machine learning and other types of services that they provide. So, you see the stacking of software, if you will, from you know, the high iteration rate at the bottom all the way to the next level and the next level, and the ability to unlock value now is something that happens in, you know, hours in some cases, or a couple of days, whereas before just provisioning the software would've taken months, and so we're really seeing just a whole change in the way people can develop things and how quickly they can get to the end result. >> Now, we're here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, and downstairs is this wall of all IBM fellows, and one of them E.F. Codd, the famous originator of database and the role that SQL played, et cetera-- >> Mm-hm. >> In relational database technology. He wrote a seminal paper back in the early 1970s about how the notion of developer was going to evolve over time, and he might've been a little aggressive in thinking that we were going to end up with these citizens developers than we actually happened, but we are seeing the role of developer changing, and we are seeing new classes of professionals become more developer-like. >> Mm-hm. >> How is that relationship changing the way that we think of developer services that you serve? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think, first of all, software is sort of invading almost every single industry, and so, you know, people have got to have some amount of those skills to be able to function in kind of the optimal way for whatever industry they're in. So, what we're seeing is that as we've built more and more foundational services, the act of actually creating something new is more about stitching together, composing, orchestrating a set of things, as opposed to really building from scratch everything from the ground up, and you know, things like our Watson services are a great example, right? The ability to tap into something like that with a couple lines of code in an hour, as opposed to what would've taken, you know, months, years, whatever, and even really, frankly, been out of the reach of most developers to begin with is now something you can have somebody come in and do, you know, with a fairly low level of skill and get a good result on the outside. >> So, we've got more demand for code as we move to digital business, more people participating in that process, cloud also enables paths, a lot of new classes of tools that are going to increase the productivity-- >> Yep. >> Including automated code generation. How is the process, how is that tool set evolving, especially as it pertains to the cloud? >> Yeah, so I think one of the mantras of cloud is automation, and in order to standardize and automate, that's really how you get to the kind of scale that we would see in, say, a public cloud like the IBM cloud. So, it really is kind of a fundamental premise of anything you do has to be something that you automate, and so we've seen a whole class of tools, to your points, really start to emerge, which allow people to get that kind of, you know, automated capability. So, nobody thinks of, for example, creating a, you know, a build pipeline these days without using a set of tools. You know, often they're opensource tools, and there's a lot of choice within that whole spectrum of tools, and we support a bunch of different varieties, but you would never think today of having a build process that isn't totally automated, right, that can't be instantly recreated. Even the whole process of how you deploy code in a cloud these days is sort of an assumption that you can destroy that and restart at any point, and in order to do that, you really need the automation behind that, so I think it's a base premise now. I don't think you can really be at the velocity that people are expecting out of software without having a totally automated process to go through that. >> So, any digital business strategy presumes that data's an asset, and things that are related to data are assets, including software in many... Well, software is data when you come right down to it. >> Mm-hm. >> And we want to exploit that data and generate new sources of value out of that data, and that's one of the predicates of digital business, but at the same time we also want to protect those attributes of data-- >> Mm-hm. >> That are our IP, our enterprise's distinction. As we move forward with software, how do we reconcile that tension between more openness and generating a community that's capable of improving things, while at the same time ensuring that we've got good control over our IP where it actually does create a business differentiation? >> Now, that's right, and you're right, data's king. So, you know, the software can do, you know, a set of things, but most of the time it's operating on a set of that data, and that data's where the true value that you can unlock comes from. Our policy, from an IBM perspective, has always been that, you know, your data is yours, and to your point, this IP that you may want to protect, and we try to give you the tools to do that, and so a lot of our philosophy, within the cloud in particular, is around things like Bring Your Own Key, where you have control of the keys that encrypt that data that's in the cloud. In fact, we would like to be totally out of that loop, quite frankly, and have it be something that is controlled by our clients, and that they can, you know, get the value they're looking for, and so we'll never have a situation where one of our services is, you know, using or acting on data that is really, you know, not ours to use, and so that's been a fundamental premise of the cloud as we go forward, and again, we continue to provide a set of tools that really let you manage that, and to your point, you know, not everything gets managed at the same level. Some things are highly protected, and therefore have, you know, layers and layers of security policy around them, and there's other examples where, you know, you're relatively able to make that open through a set of APIs, for example, and let everybody have access it. From our perspective, though, that's really a client choice, and so for us it's about giving the right tools so that they can do the job they need to do. >> February 2019, San Francisco, IBM's taking over San Francisco with the IBM THINK show. What types of conversations are you looking forward to having with customers? What excites you about the 2019 version? >> Yeah, so I mean it's a great venue. It is absolutely, you know, something that I look forward to every year. I know my team looks forward to it, as well. I mean, the amount of interaction we get with clients... I mean, it's really all about the client stories, so you know, what are they able to do, in my case, with our cloud services. What can I learn about what they've done, and how, you know, can we then leverage that to make our services better, and so, you know, to me it's all about, you know, what you can learn from others, and it's a great form to be able to do that and there's a lot of great things that, you know, you can dive deep on. You get access to a lot of the IBM technical experts, so I have all of my, you know, fellows and distinguished engineers there, you know, on hand, and just great conversations. There's always great insights that you get from it, highly recommend it. >> Don Bolia, IBM general manager of cloud developer services, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Once again, we'll be back from IBM Innovation Day here at Thomas J. Watson Research Center in York Town Heights, talk to you soon. (techy music)