>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, guys and gals, good to see you. It's theCUBE live in Barcelona at MWC23. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante on day one of four days of wall to wall CUBE coverage. Dave, today is ecosystem day. We've had some great conversations about why the open ecosystem is so important and some of the key players in it. >> Well and I'm in search of disruptors, so I'm looking for, okay, who are the network operators that are going to actually lean into the future and drive it and challenge the existing incumbents. We'll talk about that today. >> And we're going to be talking about that next. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Satish Iyer is here, the Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you. >> Richard Leitao is with us as well, the Vice President of National Development at DISH Network. Welcome. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, lots of, this is day one, the theme is velocity. I feel like the day has gone by so quickly. But Dell and DISH have partnered together on a multi-year initiative to build your nationwide cloud-native 5G network that's going to cover a lot of the US. Talk a little bit about that partnership, we'll get both of your perspectives. Richard, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So thank you again for having me. So DISH had the opportunity of, of going through this experience, of innovating once more. For the ones that know DISH, DISH is a company that was founded in 1980 by an innovator, a disruptor. Of course, in the course of the next 40 years, we had the opportunities of even disrupting ourselves. We launched our first satellite TV service. We then launched the first streaming, video streaming platform, disrupting our own satellite business. And since 2008, we have been acquiring Spectrum and, you know, Spectrum, the most valuable asset of a wireless operator. We felt that this was the right opportunity, having 5G , having O-RAN, and we decided to go full in in a greenfield project building national network, 5G O-RAN cloud-based network, one of a kind network in in the US and, and most of all, using O-RAN, it's very important to us, what, what it can bring and it can bring to DISH but to the entire ecosystem of, of this sector in the US. >> Satish, talk a little bit about the partnership from Dell's perspective and some of the unique advantages that Dell is delivering to DISH. >> Oh absolutely. Again, like Richard was saying, I mean the telecom network is being desegregated as we speak. You know, companies like DISH and everybody else is looking at what are the best-in-class technologies we can bring to the table. I would like to say that, you know, the cloud is coming to the telco world, right? A lot of us have seen the tremendous transformation in the cloud world in the last few years. Now, you know, DISH is a big enterprise company. As you know, you know, we are pretty strong within the cloud space and enterprise space. So what we try to work with DISH is Dell, is to bring to DISH is, you know, that notion of cloud scale and the cloud ecosystem into telecom, right? By means best-in-class infrastructure products, best-in-class software products, to allow somebody like DISH to innovate and incre, you know, basically expand and build their O-RAN network. So it's absolutely important for us as we build and get into the telecom space to work with somebody like DISH who's also disrupting as a carrier in that space. >> So it's early days for Open RAN but you've decided, "okay, we're all in". >> Yeah. >> Right? So (chuckling) you burn the bridge, as they say, "go for it". (Lisa chuckles) So when you talk to most people, they say, "okay, it's, it's, it's, it's immature." It's got to be able to get to the levels of, of the, the the hardened stack reliability. But of course it brings the advantage of flexibility and speed. Are you optimizing for one or the other right now? How are you dealing with that balance? >> Well, it, it's, it's not mature in the sense that most of operators that think about it, they have a legacy network. And in order to go full in on the O-RAN side, they need to scrap a lot of things that they have and honestly, they don't want, and it doesn't make sense. So being a greenfield operator, give us that advantage. Give us the advantage and, and desegregation, it's all about chip sets, boxes and software and the chip sets part and what I like the most in desegregation is the time of innovation. The time that we can use new chip sets coming into the market, the size of the boxes that we are using. Obviously our footprint onsite is much smaller than traditional carriers or proprietary systems. So all of that Dell has been critical in supporting us. Supporting us having the best chip sets, having the smallest footprint and, you know, the software, the cycle of innovation is much faster than in proprietary systems. So ma-, it's maturing. I'm glad to say that probably two years ago here O-RAN was more like a, a pilot type of technology. It is not, we are live, we are live for more than 30 million customers in the US and, you know, the performance levels are very similar to traditional networks. >> So you don't just buy a nationwide cloud-native 5G network out of the box, you got to- >> No, you don't. >> You got to build it. So I'm curious as to what Dell's role is in that, in that build out. >> Right? >> How and how, I'm really curious how to, how you would grade Dell but we'll get there. >> Yeah, I mean, look, yes, you don't. So I think the, the, the first and foremost is again, as, as we, Dell, comes into the telco space, one of the things we have to look at is to understand what makes Dell better in the enterprise space, right? It is the best-in-class infrastructure. It is the software ties together. As you talk about desegregated networks, it's important to understand lot of these piece parts have to still be touched together, right? So I think the integration and integration aspects becomes really key which is really Dell is very good at. So one of the things we are working really closely with DISH Tech, you know Richard was alluding to, is bringing all, not just bringing all the software and hardware assets together, but how do you continuously innovate and keep fixing things faster, right? So in the old days, traditional ways, you have a software stack, it takes you 18 months, 20 months to actually get an upgrade done. Here we have continuously CI/CD pipelines where if you want to a change done within, within a week's or within a few days, where we can actually go and test and make sure these things work. So I think a lot of the best enterprise software practices, cloud practices, combined with whatever needs for telco, actually is what makes it very unique. >> I, I saw that this started out as an FCC compliance initiative that turned into a partnership, obviously a very successful one. Richard, talk about what DISH saw in Dell that really made it the right choice, knowing you have choices, you have options. >> You know, we saw the capability to execute, but we also saw the capability to innovate. From an execution level, at the end of the day, like we were talking, we started the project in the middle of COVID, and we had the first mandate to cover 20% of the US population by June, 2022. And now we have a second one, 70% of US population by June 2023. At the beginning of the project, it was all about availability of materials, logistics, how to distribute, how to transport material. So Dell has a world-class supply chain, we felt that working with Dell through all these challenges made things easier. So from an execution perspective, whenever you need to build a network and you, you are building thousands of sites, you need to have materials, you need to distribute them and you need to install them. Dell helped us across the board. Our expectations obviously will change. We have a network, we want to cooperate with Dell in many other areas. We want to, you know, leverage on Dell ability to reach the enterprise market, to have private 5G offers. So hopefully this collaboration will endure in time and, and, you know, will change and evolve in time. >> And it's a big bet. I mean, it's not like a single, it's not like a little transaction that you guys are doing. I feel like, you know Michael Dell and Eric Carlson had dinner and they said, "okay, we're going to, we're going to partner up and this is going to be a multi-decade partnership. You had to be transparent, "Hey, we're new at this, even though we're really good at enterprise tech and so you're going to, obviously if you take a chance on us, here's what we promise you." >> Absolutely. >> And vice versa, you guys had to say, "all right, hey, we're willing to roll the dice because we're trying to change the world." So what was that dynamic like? I mean, how did, I'm curious as to this has to be a lot of different levels, engineering, senior management, board level discussions. >> You know, we felt a huge buy-in from Dell on the Open RAN concept. >> Right. >> Yeah, okay. >> And, you know, edge computing and, and the ability to get us the best product and evolve the best product, Intel is is critical in all these offerings. Intel has a great relationship with Dell. Dell helped us. Dell sponsored the DISH program and some of these suppliers, So it was definitely good to have their support and the buy-in on the O-RAN concept. We felt it from day one and we felt secure on that. >> Yeah, I mean, I, to add to that, I mean, you know DISH was very instrumental in driving, dictating and executing to our roadmap, right? They're one of the key, I mean, since they are out there and they're really turning in a way, it's important that a customer who's actually at the out front of innovation, helps us drive our own roadmap. So to Richard's point, a lot of our product roadmaps, in terms of what have you built and all that, was based on what DISH thinks as going to be market-based requirements. They also helped us a lot in the integration aspects. Like I said, one of the things about open desegregation of these networks is there is a lot of integration because, you know, there is, it's not a one, one monolithic pipe smokestack anymore. You are picking up best-in-class pieces, bits and pieces and tying it together. And it's important to understand when you tie it together things will go wrong, right? So there is a lot of learnings from an integration standpoint. Supportability, deployment, one of the things Richard talked about was supply chain, you know. Other Dell's ability to, lot of these deployments, a lot of these configs in the factory, right, in the second part. So especially a lot of these partnerships started during COVID time and as you all know, you know what we went through two years ago. So we had to make sure that lot of these things are done in one place and a factory, and not done in the field because we couldn't do a lot of these things. So there's a lot of, lot of experimentation, lot of, lot, lot of innovation on that. >> So it's 2030, what's this look like? What's the vision if we can work backwards from there? Well, a, a great network coverage to the entire country, bringing new services to enterprises, to verticals, bringing value add to customers and, you know, technology cycles, they are lasting much less than they were. I cannot even say what will happen in three years. 2030, I mean, I know, I know somebody has a vision for 2030. That's another thing. (everyone laughs) >> A lot of it is "build it and they will come", right? >> Yeah. >> I mean it really is right? You put that network in place and then innovation happens on top. That's the best thing. >> Yeah. And look and and I think the biggest people think about Open RAN in terms of cost, which, you know, you, you have some things in cost that you appreciate in Open RAN. The footprint, the the possibility to diversify suppliers and and have more competition. But for me, Open RAN is about innovation and cycles of innovation. I used to work for Nokia, I used to work for Alcatel. I knew from the generation of an idea to an execution and having a feature delivered to a certain customer, it, it took months. We want innovation to take weeks. We are innovating at the speed, speed of the cloud. We are cooperating with new players, players on the cloud and, and we expect things to happen much faster than they traditionally happen on the telecom sector. >> Move fast and break things. >> Well, we also expect that speed- >> Break and fix. (everyone laughs) >> Yeah, thank you for that. >> But speaking of speed, your customers expect that, right? They expect the service to be up 24/7. They expect to be able to access whatever content they want, whenever they want from wherever they are. So comment, Richard, in our last few minutes here of, of how the, the Dell partnership is helping DISH to really deliver the excellent customer experience that your customers just expect that you're going to deliver. >> Well by setting up the system, number one, we are leveraging on a number of services. And I mentioned the supply chain, but in reality Dell made much more than that for our 20% milestone and is supporting our 70% milestone by installing, testing, verifying most of our data center equipment. We found that this offering from Dell was really addressing some of our needs because, you know, we, we believe they know a lot in this area and they, they can provide the best advice and the best speed to market in, in terms of having this equipment. Because we are working on a time clock, we need to have this done as soon as possible. You know for the future, I hope that they can help us in driving more services. I hope they can bring all the infrastructure that we need to offer to our customers. And, you know, we keep committed to O-RAN. O-RAN is really important. We are not compromising that. And I think the future is bright for both of us. >> Yeah, and Dell learns from the experience. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> There's got to be a catalyst for expanding your roadmap and vision in telecom. >> Yeah, I mean, like you said, I mean, you asked a 2030 question and I think that, you know, know six, seven years from now I think people should look at what DISH and Dell and say they were the trailblazers of make, bringing Open RAN to the market and making 5G a reality. I mean, you talk about 5G, but every 5G is on a different stages. I do think that this combination, this partnership has the best chance to be the first ones to actually have a truly Open RAN network to be successful in commercial. >> Awesome guys. Trailblazers, Dell and DISH. Well, we look forward to watching this story unfold. Thank you- >> Thank you. >> for joining Dave and me on the program today talking about what you're doing together. We appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you, bye. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Barcelona at MWC23. We'll be back after a short break, so we'll see you soon.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBEs live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer. I'm John Furrier with my host, Dave Vellante. Two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. This is day two. We got a great guest, Scott Baker, CMO at IBM, VP of Infrastructure at IBM. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, good to see you guys as well. It's always a pleasure. >> ()Good time last night at your event? >> Great time last night. >> It was really well-attended. IBM always has the best food so that was good and great props, magicians, and it was really a lot of fun, comedians. Good job. >> Yeah, I'm really glad you came on. One of the things we were chatting, before we came on camera was, how much changed. We've been covering IBM storage days, back on the Edge days, and they had the event. Storage is the center of all the conversations, cyber security- >> ()Right? >> ... But it's not just pure cyber. It's still important there. And just data and the role of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and data and security are the two hottest areas, that I won't say unresolved, but are resolving themselves. And people are talking. It's the most highly discussed topics. >> Right. >> ()Those two areas. And it's just all on storage. >> Yeah, it sure does. And in fact, what I would even go so far as to say is, people are beginning to realize the importance that storage plays, as the data custodian for the organization. Right? Certainly you have humans that are involved in setting strategies, but ultimately whatever those policies are that get applied, have to be applied to a device that must act as a responsible custodian for the data it holds. >> So what's your role at IBM and the infrastructure team? Storage is one only one of the areas. >> ()Right. >> You're here at VMware Explore. What's going on here with IBM? Take us through what you're doing there at IBM, and then here at VMware. What's the conversations? >> Sure thing. I have the distinct pleasure to run both product marketing and strategy for our storage line. That's my primary focus, but I also have responsibility for the mainframe software, so the Z System line, as well as our Power server line, and our technical support organization, or at least the services side of our technical support organization. >> And one of the things that's going on here, lot of noise going on- >> Is that a bird flying around? >> Yeah >> We got fire trucks. What's changed? 'Cause right now with VMware, you're seeing what they're doing. They got the Platform, Under the Hood, Developer focus. It's still an OPS game. What's the relationship with VMware? What are you guys talking about here? What are some of the conversations you're having here in San Francisco? >> Right. Well, IBM has been a partner with VMware for at least the last 20 years. And VMware does, I think, a really good job about trying to create a working space for everyone to be an equal partner with them. It can be challenging too, if you want to sort of throw out your unique value to a customer. So one of the things that we've really been working on is, how do we partner much stronger? When we look at the customers that we support today, what they're looking for isn't just a solid product. They're looking for a solid ecosystem partnership. So we really lean in on that 20 years of partnership experience that we have with IBM. So one of the things that we announced was actually being one of the first VMware partners to bring both a technical innovation delivery mechanism, as well as technical services, alongside VMware technologies. I would say that was one of the first things that we really leaned in on, as we looked out at what customers are expecting from us. >> So I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about the industry. I've been following IBM since the early 1980s. It's trained in the mainframe market, and so we've seen, a lot of things you see come back to the mainframe, but we won't go there. But prior to Arvind coming on, it seemed like, okay, storage, infrastructure, yeah it's good business, and we'll let it throw off some margin. That's fine. But it's all about services and software. Okay, great. With Arvind, and obviously Red Hat, the whole focus shift to hybrid. We were talking, I think yesterday, about okay, where did we first hear hybrid? Obviously we heard that a lot from VMware. I heard it actually first, early on anyway, from IBM, talking hybrid. Some of the storage guys at the time. Okay, so now all of a sudden there's the realization that to make hybrid work, you need software and hardware working together. >> () Right. So it's now a much more fundamental part of the conversation. So when you look out, Scott, at the trends you're seeing in the market, when you talk to customers, what are you seeing and how is that informing your strategy, and how are you bringing together all the pieces? >> That's a really awesome question because it always depends on who, within the organization, you're speaking to. When you're inside the data center, when you're talking to the architects and the administrators, they understand the value in the necessity for a hybrid-cloud architecture. Something that's consistent. On The Edge, On-Prem, in the cloud. Something that allows them to expand the level of control that they have, without having to specialize on equipment and having to redo things as you move from one medium to the next. As you go upstack in that conversation, what I find really interesting is how leaders are beginning to realize that private cloud or on-prem, multi cloud, super cloud, whatever you call it, whatever's in the middle, those are just deployment mechanisms. What they're coming to understand is it's the applications and the data that's hybrid. And so what they're looking for IBM to deliver, and something that we've really invested in on the infrastructure side is, how do we create bidirectional application mobility? Making it easy for organizations, whether they're using containers, virtual machines, just bare metal, how do they move that data back and forth as they need to, and not just back and forth from on-prem to the cloud, but effectively, how do they go from cloud to cloud? >> Yeah. One of the things I noticed is your pin, says I love AI, with the I next to IBM and get all these (indistinct) in there. AI, remember the quote from IBM is, "You can't have AI without IA." Information architect. >> () Right. >> () Rob Thomas. >> Rob Thomas (indistinct) the sound bites. But that brings up the point about machine learning and some of these things that are coming down the like, how is your area devolving the smarts and the brains around leveraging the AI in the systems itself? We're hearing more and more softwares being coded into the hardware. You see Silicon advances. All this is kind of, not changing it, but bringing back the urgency of, hardware matters. >> That's right. >> () At the same time, it's still software too. >> That's right. So let's connect a couple of dots here. We talked a little bit about the importance of cyber resiliency, and let's talk about a little bit on how we use AI in that matter. So, if you look at the direct flash modules that are in the market today, or the SSDs that are in the market today, just standard-capacity drives. If you look at the flash core modules that IBM produces, we actually treat that as a computational storage offering, where you store the data, but it's got intelligence built into the processor, to offload some of the responsibilities of the controller head. The ability to do compression, single (indistinct), deduplication, you name it. But what if you can apply AI at the controller level, so that signals that are being derived by the flash core module itself, that look anomalous, can be handed up to an intelligence to say, "Hey, I'm all of a sudden getting encrypted rights from a host that I've never gotten encrypted rights for. Maybe this could be a problem." And then imagine if you connect that inferencing engine to the rest of the IBM portfolio, "Hey, Qradar. Hey IBM Guardian. What's going on on the network? Can we see some correlation here?" So what you're going to see IBM infrastructure continue to do is invest heavily into entropy and the ability to measure IO characteristics with respect to anomalous behavior and be able to report against that. And the trick here, because the array technically doesn't know if it's under attack or if the host just decided to turn on encryption, the trick here is using the IBM product relationships, and ecosystem relationships, to do correlation of data to determine what's actually happening, to reduce your false positives. >> And have that pattern of data too. It's all access to data too. Big time. >> That's right. >> And that innovation comes out of IBM R&D? Does it come out of the product group? Is it IBM research that then trickles its way in? Is it the storage innovation? Where's that come from? Where's that bubble up? That partnership? >> Well, I got to tell you, it doesn't take very long in this industry before your counterpart, your competitor, has a similar feature. Right? So we're always looking for, what's the next leg? What's the next advancement that we can make? We knew going into this process, that we had plenty of computational power that was untapped on the FPGA, the processor running on the flash core module. Right? So we thought, okay, well, what should we do next? And we thought, "Hey, why not just set this thing up to start watching IO patterns, do calculations, do trending, and report that back?" And what's great about what you brought up too, John, is that it doesn't stay on the box. We push that upstack through the AIOPS architecture. So if you're using Turbonomic, and you want to look applications stack down, to know if you've got threat potential, or your attack surface is open, you can make some changes there. If you want to look at it across your infrastructure landscape with a storage insight, you could do that. But our goal here is to begin to make the machine smarter and aware of impacts on the data, not just on the data they hold onto, but usage, to move it into the appropriate tier, different write activities or read activities or delete activities that could indicate malicious efforts that are underway, and then begin to start making more autonomous, how about managed autonomous responses? I don't want to turn this into a, oh, it's smart, just turn it on and walk away and it's good. I don't know that we'll ever get there just yet, but the important thing here is, what we're looking at is, how do we continually safeguard and protect that data? And how do we drive features in the box that remove more and more of the day to day responsibility from the administrative staff, who are technically hired really, to service and solve for bigger problems in the enterprise, not to be a specialist and have to manage one box at a time. >> Dave mentioned Arvind coming on, the new CEO of IBM, and the Red Hat acquisition and that change, I'd like to get your personal perspective, or industry perspective, so take your IBM-hat off for a second and put the Scott-experience-in-the-industry hat on, the transformation at the customer level right now is more robust, to use that word. I don't want to say chaotic, but it is chaotic. They say chaos in the cloud here at VM, a big part of their messaging, but it's changing the business model, how things are consumed. You're seeing new business models emerge. So IBM has this lot of storage old systems, you're transforming, the company's transforming. Customers are also transforming, so that's going to change how people market products. >> () Right. >> For example, we know that developers and DevOps love self-service. Why? Because they don't want to install it. Let me go faster. And they want to get rid of it, doesn't work. Storage is infrastructure and still software, so how do you see, in your mind's eye, with all your experience, the vision of how to market products that are super important, that are infrastructure products, that have to be put into play, for really new architectures that are going to transform businesses? It's not as easy as saying, "Oh, we're going to go to market and sell something." The old way. >> () Right. >> This shifting happening is, I don't think there's an answer yet, but I want to get your perspective on that. Customers want to hear the storage message, but it might not be speeds and fees. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's solutions. Maybe it's security. There's multiple touch points now, that you're dealing with at IBM for the customer, without becoming just a storage thing or just- >> () Right. >> ... or just hardware. I mean, hardware does matter, but what's- >> Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, and I think what complicates that too is, if you look at the buying centers around a purchase decision, that's expanded as well, and so as you engage with a customer, you have to be sensitive to the message that you're telling, so that it touches the needs or the desires of the people that are all sitting around the table. Generally what we like to do when we step in and we engage, isn't so much to talk about the product. At some point, maybe later in the engagements, the importance of speeds, feeds, interconnectivity, et cetera, those do come up. Those are a part of the final decision, but early on it's really about outcomes. What outcomes are you delivering? This idea of being able to deliver, if you use the term zero trust or cyber-resilient storage capability as a part of a broader security architecture that you're putting into place, to help that organization, that certainly comes up. We also hear conversations with customers about, or requests from customers about, how do the parts of IBM themselves work together? Right? And I think a lot of that, again, continues to speak to what kind of outcome are you going to give to me? Here's a challenge that I have. How are you helping me overcome it? And that's a combination of IBM hardware, software, and the services side, where we really have an opportunity to stand out. But the thing that I would tell you, that's probably most important is, the engagement that we have up and down the stack in the market perspective, always starts with, what's the outcome that you're going to deliver for me? And then that drags with it the story that would be specific to the gear. >> Okay, so let's say I'm a customer, and I'm buying it to zero trust architecture, but it's going to be somewhat of a long term plan, but I have a tactical need. I'm really nervous about Ransomware, and I don't feel as though I'm prepared, and I want an outcome that protects me. What are you seeing? Are you seeing any patterns? I know it's going to vary, but are you seeing any patterns, in terms of best practice to protect me? >> Man, the first thing that we wanted to do at IBM is divorce ourselves from the company as we thought through this. And what I mean by that is, we wanted to do what's right, on day zero, for the customer. So we set back using the experience that we've been able to amass, going through various recovery operations, and helping customers get through a Ransomware attack. And we realized, "Hey. What we should offer is a free cyber resilience assessment." So we like to, from the storage side, we'd like to look at what we offer to the customer as following the NIST framework. And most vendors will really lean in hard on the response and the recovery side of that, as you should. But that means that there's four other steps that need to be addressed, and that free cyber-resilience assessment, it's a consultative engagement that we offer. What we're really looking at doing is helping you assess how vulnerable you are, how big is that attack surface? And coming out of that, we're going to give you a Vendor Agnostic Report that says here's your situation, here's your grade or your level of risk and vulnerability, and then here's a prioritized roadmap of where we would recommend that you go off and start solving to close up whatever the gaps or the risks are. Now you could say, "Hey, thanks, IBM. I appreciate that. I'm good with my storage vendor today. I'm going to go off and use it." Now, we may not get some kind of commission check. We may not sell the box. But what I do know is that you're going to walk away knowing the risks that you're in, and we're going to give you the recommendations to get started on closing those up. And that helps me sleep at night. >> That's a nice freebie. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it really is, 'cause you guys got deep expertise in that area. So take advantage of that. >> Scott, great to have you on. Thanks for spending time out of your busy day. Final question, put a plug in for your group. What are you communicating to customers? Share with the audience here. You're here at VMware Explorer, the new rebranded- >> () Right? >> ... multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, steady state. There are three levels of transformation, virtualization, hybrid cloud, DevOps, now- >> Right? >> ... multi-cloud, so they're in chapter three of their journey- >> That's right. >> Really innovative company, like IBM, so put the plugin. What's going on in your world? Take a minute to explain what you want. >> Right on. So here we are at VMware Explorer, really excited to be here. We're showcasing two aspects of the IBM portfolio, all of the releases and announcements that we're making around the IBM cloud. In fact, you should come check out the product demonstration for the IBM Cloud Satellite. And I don't think they've coined it this, but I like to call it the VMware edition, because it has all of the VMware services and tools built into it, to make it easier to move your workloads around. We certainly have the infrastructure side on the storage, talking about how we can help organizations, not only accelerate their deployments in, let's say Tanzu or Containers, but even how we help them transform the application stack that's running on top of their virtualized environment in the most consistent and secure way possible. >> Multiple years of relationships with VMware. IBM, VMware together. Congratulations. >> () That's right. >> () Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, thanks (indistinct). Thank you very much. >> A lot more live coverage here at Moscone west. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. Two more days of wall-to-wall coverage continuing here. Stay tuned. (soothing music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon re Mars two days of coverage, we're getting down to wrapping up day one. I'm John furrier host of the cube space is a big topic here. You got machine learning, you got automation, robotics, all spells Mars. The two great guests here to really get into the whole geo scene. What's going on with the data. We've got Marcus Norren business development and geo data. Sogeti part of cap Gemini group, and Yoki well kissed portfolio lead data and AI with Sogeti part of cap, Gemini gentlemen, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Thanks >>For having us. >>Let me so coming all the way from Sweden to check out the scene here and get into the weeds and the show. A lot of great technology being space is the top line here, but software drives it. Um, you got robotics. Lot of satellite, you got the aerospace industry colliding with hardcore industrial. I say IOT, robotics, one, whatever you want, but space kind of highlights the IOT opportunity. There is no edge in space, right? So the edge, the intelligent edge, a lot going on in space. And satellite's one of 'em you guys are in the middle of that. What are you guys working on? What's the, the focus here for cap gem and I Sogeti part of cap >>Gemini. I would say we focus a lot of creating business value, real business value for our clients, with the satellites available, actually a free available satellite images, working five years now with this, uh, solutioning and, uh, mostly invitation management and forestry. That's our main focus. >>So what's the product value you guys are offering. >>We basically, for now the, the most value we created is working with a forest client to find park Beal infests, uh, in spruce forest. It's a big problem in European union and, uh, Northern region Sweden, where we live now with the climate change, it's getting warmer, the bark beetle bases warm more times during the summer, which makes it spread exponentially. Uh, so we help with the satellite images to get with data science and AI to find these infestations in time when they are small, before it's spread. >>So satellite imagery combined with data, this is the intersection of the data piece, the geo data, right? >>Yeah. You can say that you have, uh, a lot of open satellite data, uh, and uh, you want to analyze that, that you also need to know what you're looking for and you need data to understand in our case, a certain type of damage. So we have large data sets that we have to sort of clean and train ML models from to try to run that on that open data, to detect these models. And, and when we're saying satellite data and open data, it's basically one pixel is 10 by 10 meters. So it's not that you will see the trees, but we're looking at the spectral information in the image and finding patterns. So we can actually detect attacks that are like four or five trees, big, uh, using that type. And we can do that throughout the season so we can see how you start seeing one, two attacks and it's just growing. And then you have this big area of just damage. So >>How, how long does that take? Give me some scope to scale because it sounds easy. Oh, the satellites are looking down on us. It's not, it's a lot of data there. What's the complexity. What are the challenges that you guys are overcoming scope to scale? >>It's so much complexity in this first, you have clouds, so it's, uh, open data set, you download it and you figure out here, we have a satellite scene, which is cloudy. We need to have some analytics doing that, taking that image away basically, or the section of the image with it cloudy. Then we have a cloud free image. We can't see anything because it's blurry. It's too low resolution. So we need to stack them on top of each other. And then we have the next problem to correlate them. So they are pixel perfect overlapping. Yeah. So we can compare them in time. And then they have the histogram adjustment to make them like, uh, the sensitivity is the same on all the images, because you have solar storms, you have shady clouds, which, uh, could be used still that image. So we need to compare that. Then we have the ground proof data coming from, uh, a harvester. For instance, we got 200,000 data points from the harvester real data points where they had found bark Beal trees, and they pulled them down. The GPS is drifting 50 meters. So you have an uncertainty where the actually harvest it was. And then we had the crane on 20 meters. So, you know, the GPS is on the home actually of the home actual machine and the crane were somewhere. So you don't really know you have this uncertainty, >>It's a data integration problem. Yeah. Massive, >>A lot of, of, uh, interesting, uh, things to adjust for. And then you could combine this into one deep learning model and build. >>But on top of that, I don't know if you said that, but you also get the data in the winter and you have the problem during the summer. So we actually have to move back in time to find the problem, label the data, and then we can start identifying. >>So once you get all that heavy lifting done or, or write the code, or I don't know if something's going on there, you get the layering, the pixel X see all the, how complex that is when the deep learning takes over. What happens next? Is it scale? Is it is all the heavy lifting up front? Is the work done front or yeah. Is its scale on the back end? >>So first the coding is heavy work, right? To gets hands on and try different things. Figure out in math, how to work with this uncertainty and get everything sold. Then you put it into a deep learning model to train that it actually run for 10 days before it was accurate, or first, first ation, it wasn't accurate enough. So we scrap that, did some changes. Then we run it again for 10 days. Then we have a model which we could use and interfere new images. Like every day, pretty quickly, every day it comes a new image. We run it. We have a new outcome and we could deliver that to clients. >>Yeah. I can almost imagine. I mean, the, the cloud computing comes in handy here. Oh yeah. So take me through the benefits because it sounds like the old, the old expression, the juice is not worth the squeeze here. It is. It's worth the squeeze. If you can get it right. Because the alternative is what more expensive gear, different windows, just more expensive monolithic solutions. Right? >>Think about the data here. So it's satellite scene. Every satellite scene is hundred by a hundred kilometers. That pretty much right. And then you need a lot of these satellite scene over multiple years to combine it. So if you should do this over the whole Northern Europe, over the whole globe, it's a lot of data just to store that it's a problem. You, you cannot do it on prem and then you should compute it with deep learning models. It's a hard problem >>If you don't have, so you guys got a lot going on. So, so talk about spaghetti, part of cap, Gemini, explain that relationship, cuz you're here at a show that, you know, you got, I can see the CAPI angle. This is like a little division. Is it a group? Are you guys like lone wolves? Like, what's it like, is this dedicated purpose built focus around aerospace? >>No, it's actually SOI was the, the name of the CAPI company from the beginning. And they relaunched the brand, uh, 2001, I think roughly 10, 20 years ago. So we actually celebrate some anniversary now. Uh, and it's a brand which is more local close to clients out in different cities. And we also tech companies, we are very close to the new technology, trying things out. And this is a perfect example of this. It was a crazy ID five years ago, 2017. And we started to bring in some clients explore, really? Open-minded see, can we do something on these satellite data? And then we took it step by step together of our clients. Yeah. And it's a small team where like 12 >>People. Yeah. And you guys are doing business development. So you have to go out there and identify the kinds of problems that match the scope of the scale. >>So what we're doing is we interact with our clients, do some simple workshops or something and try to identify like the really valuable problems like this Bruce Park people that that's one of those. Yep. And then we have to sort of look at, do we think we can do something? Is it realistic? And we will not be able to answer that to 100% because then there's no innovation in this at all. But we say, well, we think we can do it. This will be a hard problem, but we do think we can do it. And then we basically just go for it. And this one we did in 11 to 12 weeks, a tightly focused team, uh, and just went at it, uh, super slim process and got the job done and uh, the >>Results. Well, it's interesting. You have a lot of use cases. We gotta go down, do that face to face belly to belly, you know, body to body sales, BI dev scoping out, have workshops. Now this market here, Remar, they're all basically saying a call to arms more money's coming in. The problems are putting on the table. The workshop could be a lunch meeting, right. I mean, because Artis and there's a big set of problems to tackle. Yes. So I mean, I'm just oversimplifying, but that being said, there's a lot going on opportunity wise here. Yeah. That's not as slow maybe as the, the biz dev at, you know, coming in, this is a huge demand. It will be >>Explode. >>What's your take on the demand here, the problems that need to be solved and what you guys are gonna bring to bear for the problem. >>So now we have been focus mainly in vegetation management and forestry, but vegetation management can be applicable in utility as well. And we actually went there first had some struggle because it's quite detailed information that's needed. So we backed out a bit into vegetation in forestry again, but still it's a lot of application in, in, uh, utility and vegetation management in utility. Then we have a whole sustainability angle think about auditing of, uh, rogue harvesting or carbon offsetting in the future, even biodiversity, offsetting that could be used. >>And, and just to point out and give it a little extra context, all the keynotes, talk about space as a global climate solution, potentially the discoveries and or also the imagery they're gonna get. So you kind of got, you know, top down, bottoms up. If you wanna look at the world's bottom and space, kind of coming together, this is gonna open up new kinds of opportunities for you guys. What's the conversation like when you, when this is going on, you're like, oh yeah, let's go in. Like, what are you guys gonna do? What's the plan, uh, gonna hang around and ride that wave. >>I think it's all boils down to finding that use case that need to be sold because now we understand the satellite scene, they are there. We could, there is so many new satellites coming up already available. They can come up the cloud platform, AWS, it's great. We have all the capabilities needed. We have AI and ML models needed data science skills. Now it's finding the use cases together with clients and actually deliver on them one by >>One. It's interesting. I'd like to get your reaction to this Marcus two as well. What you guys are kind of, you have a lot bigger and, and, and bigger than some of the startups out there, but a startup world, they find their niches and they, the workflows become the intellectual property. So this, your techniques of layering almost see is an advantage out there. What's your guys view of that on intellectual property of the future, uh, open source is gonna run all the software. We know that. So software's no going open source scale and integration. And then new kinds of ways are new methods. I won't say for just patents, but like just for intellectual property, defen differentiation. How do you guys see this? As you look at this new frontier of intellectual property? >>That's, it's a difficult question. I think it's, uh, there's a lot of potential. If you look at open innovation and how you can build some IP, which you can out license, and some you utilize yourself, then you can build like a layer business model on top. So you can find different channels. Some markets we will not go for. Maybe some of our models actually could be used by others where we won't go. Uh, so we want to build some IP, but I think we also want to be able to release some of the things we do >>Open >>Works. Yeah. Because it's also builds presence. It it's >>Community. >>Yeah, exactly. Because this, this problem is really hard because it's a global thing. And, and it's imagine if, if you have a couple of million acres of forest and you just don't go out walking and trying to check what's going on because it's, you know, >>That's manuals hard. Yeah. It's impossible. >>So you need this to scale. Uh, and, and it's a hard problem. So I think you need to build a community. Yeah. Because this is, it's a living organism that we're trying to monitor. If you talk about visitation of forest, it's, it's changing throughout the year. So if you look at spring and then you look at summer and you look at winter, it's completely different. What you see. Yeah. Yeah. So >>It's, it's interesting. And so, you know, I wonder if, you know, you see some of these crowdsourcing models around participation, you know, small little help, but that doesn't solve the big puzzle. Um, but you have open source concepts. Uh, we had Anna on earlier, she's from the Amazon sustainability data project. Yeah, exactly. And then just like open up the data. So the data party for her. So in a way there's more innovation coming, potentially. If you can get that thing going, right. Get the projects going. Exactly. >>And all this, actually our work is started because of that. Yes, exactly. So European space agency, they decided to hand out this compar program and the, the Sentinel satellites central one and two, which we have been working with, they are freely available. It started back in 2016, I think. Yeah. Uh, and because of that, that's why we have this work done during several years, without that data freely available, it wouldn't have happened. Yeah. I'm, I'm >>Pretty sure. Well, what's next for you guys? Tell, tell me what's happening. Here's the update put a plug in for the, for the group. What are you working on now? What's uh, what are you guys looking to accomplish? Take a minute to put a plug in for the opportunity. >>I would say scaling this scaling, moving outside. Sweden. Of course we see our model that they work in in us. We have tried them in Canada. We see that we work, we need to scale and do field validation in different regions. And then I would say go to the sustainability area. This goes there, there is a lot of great >>Potential international too is huge. >>Yeah. One area. I think that is really interesting is the combination of understanding the, like the carbon sink and the sequestration and trying to measure that. Uh, but also on top of that, trying to classify certain Keystone species habitats to understand if they have any space to live and how can we help that to sort of grow back again, uh, understanding the history of the, sort of the force. You have some date online, but trying to map out how much of, of this has been turned into agricultural fields, for example, how much, how much of the real old forest we have left that is really biodiverse? How much is just eight years young to understand that picture? How can we sort of move back towards that blueprint? We probably need to, yeah. And how can we digitize and change forestry and the more business models around that because you, you can do it in a different way, or you can do both some harvesting, but also, yeah, not sort of ruining the >>Whole process. They can be more efficient. You make it more productive, save some capital, reinvest it in better ways >>And you have robotics and that's not maybe something that we are not so active in, but I mean, starting to look at how can autonomy help forestry, uh, inventory damages flying over using drones and satellites. Uh, you have people looking into autonomous harvesting of trees, which is kind of insane as well, because they're pretty big <laugh> but this is also happening. Yeah. So I mean, what we're seeing here is basically, >>I mean, we, I made a story multiple times called on sale drone. One of my favorite stories, the drones that are just like getting Bob around in the ocean and they're getting great telemetry data, cuz they're indestructible, you know, they can just bounce around and then they just transmit data. Exactly. You guys are creating a opportunity. Some will say problem, but by opening up data, you're actually exposing opportunities that never have been seen before because you're like, it's that scene where that movie, Jody frost, a contact where open up one little piece of information. And now you're seeing a bunch of new information. You know, you look at this large scale data, that's gonna open up new opportunities to solve problems that were never seen before. Exactly. You don't, you can't automate what you can't see. No. Right. That's the thing. So no, we >>Haven't even thought that these problems can be solved. It's basically, this is how the world works now. Because before, when you did remote sensing, you need to be out there. You need to fly with a helicopter or you put your boots on out and go out. Now you don't need that anymore. Yeah. Which opened up that you could be, >>You can move your creativity in another problem. Now you open up another problem space. So again, I like the problem solving vibe of the, it's not like, oh, catastrophic. Well, well, well the earth is on a catastrophic trajectory. It's like, oh, we'll agree to that. But it's not done deal yet. <laugh> I got plenty of time. Right. So like the let's get these problems on the table. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is, this is the new method. Well, thanks so much for coming on the queue. Really appreciate the conversation. Thanks a lot. Love it. Opening up new world opportunities, challenges. There's always opportunities. When you have challenges, you guys are in the middle of it. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks guys. Okay. Cap Gemini in the cube part of cap Gemini. Um, so Getty part of cap Gemini here in the cube. I'm John furrier, the host we're right back with more after this short break.

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's covering of AWS Public Sector Summit. In-person here in Washington, DC. I'm John Furrier, your host, great to be back face to face. We've got a great, special guest Clint Crosier, who is the Director of AWS' Aerospace & Satellite. Major General of The Air Force/Space Force. Retired. Great to see you in person again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. >> First of all, props to you for doing a great job at Amazon, bringing all your knowledge from Space Force and Air Force into the cloud. >> Thank you. >> So that's great, historical context. >> It's been valuable and it's provided a whole lot of insight into what we're building with the AWS space team, for sure. >> So number one question I get a lot is: We want more space content. What's the coolest thing going on in space? Is there a really a satellite behind the moon there, hidden there somewhere? What's the coolest thing going on in space? >> Well, the coolest thing that's going on in space, I think is you're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, I mean, to me. I've been in the space industry for 34 years now, and there have been periods where we projected lots of growth and activity and it just didn't really come about, especially in the 80's and the 90's. But what we're seeing today is that growth is taking place. Whether it's the numbers of satellites that are being launched around the globe every year, there's some 3,000 objects on orbit today. Estimates are that there'll be 30,000 objects at the end of the decade, or the number of new companies, or the number of global spinning. It is just happening right now, and it's really exciting. >> So, when people say or hear space, there's a lot of economic changes in terms of the cost structures of how to get things deployed into space. That brings up the question of: Is space an opportunity? Is it a threat vector? What about congestion and security? >> Yeah, well three great things, absolutely an opportunity. We're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, and we're seeing more commercialization than ever before. In my whole career, The Air Force or, NASA, or the NRO would sort of, hold things and do them themselves Today, you're seeing commercial contracts going out from the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, from The Air Force, from the Space Force. So lots of opportunity for commercial companies. Security. Absolutely, priority number one should be security is baked into everything we do at AWS. And our customers, our Government classified customers tell us the reason they came to AWS is our security is top notch and certified for all their workloads. And as you well know, we have from unclassified all the way up to top secret capabilities on the AWS cloud. So just powerful opportunities for our customers. >> Yeah. And a lot of competitors will throw foot on that. I know, I've reported on some of that and not a lot of people have that same credential. >> Sure. >> Compared to the competition. >> Sure. >> Now I have to ask you, now that you have the top secret, all these clouds that are very tailorable, flexible with space: How are you helping customers with this Aerospace Division? Is it is a commercial? In the public sector together? What's the... >> All of the above. >> Take us through the value proposition. >> Yeah, happy to do this. So what we recognized over the last two years or so we, at AWS, recognized all this rapid growth that we're talking about within the space industry. Every sector from launch to on-orbit activities, to space exploration, all of it. And so AWS saw that and we looked at ourselves and said: "Do we have the right organization and expertise in place really to help our customers lean into that?" And the answer was: we decided to build a team that had deep experience in space, and that was the team that we grew because our thesis was: If you have a deep experience in space, a deep experience in cloud, you bring those two together and it's a powerful contribution. And so we've assembled a team with more than 500 years of collective hands-on experience, flying satellites, launching rockets. And when we sit down with our customers to innovate on their behalf, we're able to come up with some incredible solutions and I'm happy to talk about those. >> I'd love to, but tell you what, first of all, there's a lot of space nerds out there. I love space. I love space geeking out on the technology, but take us through the year you had, you've had a pretty incredible year with some results. You have that brain trust there. I know you're hiring. I know that people want to work for you. I'm sure the resumes are flying in, a lot of action. >> There is. >> What are the highlights from this year? >> So the highlights I think is, we've built a team that the industry is telling us was needed. Again, there was no organization that really served the space cloud industry. And so we're kind of building this industry within the industry, the space cloud industry. And so number one, just establishing that team and leaning into that industry has been valuable. The other thing that we're real proud of is we built a global team, because space is a global enterprise. We have teams in Europe and in Asia and South America here in the U.S., so we built a global team. One of the things that we did right up front, we weren't even six months old, when we envisioned the idea of doing the AWS Space Accelerator. And some of the folks told me: "Clint, six months under your belt, maybe you ought to get your feet under you." And I said: "No, no. We move fast to support our customers." And so we made a call for any space startup that wanted to come on board with AWS and go through our four week Space Accelerator. We partnered with Sarah from Capital. And the idea was: if you're a small company that wants to grow and build and learn how you can use the cloud to gain competitive advantage, come with us. And so John, I would have been happy if we had 50 companies applied, we had 194 companies across 44 countries that applied to our accelerator. We had to down select a 10, but that was a tremendous accomplishment, two of those are speaking this afternoon, where they met each other at our accelerator and now have formed a partnership: Ursa Space and HawkEye 360 on how they build on the cloud together. Fascinating. >> Well, I love that story. First of all, I love the military mindset. No, we're not going to wait. >> Move it out. >> It's not take that hill, it's take that planet. >> Our customers won't wait, innovation, doesn't wait, the future doesn't wait. We have to move out. >> So, this brings up the entrepreneurship angle. We got there a little early, but I want to talk about it because it's super important. There's an entrepreneurial culture happening right now in the space community >> There is. At large, and it's getting bigger and wider. >> Bigger every day. >> What is that? What if someone says: "Hey, what's going on with entrepreneurship in this space? What are the key dynamics? What's the power dynamics?" It's not money, there's money out there, but like what's the structural thing happening? >> The key dynamic, I think, is we're seeing that we can unlock things that we could never do before. And one of our goals is: the more space data we can make more accessible to more people around the world. It unlocks things we couldn't do. We're working with space companies who are using space data to track endangered whales off the coast of California. We're working with companies that are using space data to measure thermal and greenhouse emissions for climate change and climate management. We're working with one company, Edgybees, who has a small satellite constellation, and they're using it to build satellite based, augmented reality, to provide it to first responders as they go into a disaster response area. And they get a 3D-view of what they're going into. None of those workloads were possible five years ago. And the cloud and cloud-based technologies are really what opens those kinds of workloads up. >> What kind of higher level services do you see emerging from space cloud? Because you know, obviously you have to have some infrastructure. >> Absolutely. Got to put some stuff into space. That's a supply chain, reliability, also threat. I mean, I can have a satellite attack, another satellite, or I'm just making that up, but I'm sure there's other scenarios that the generals are thinking about. >> So space security and cyberspace security is critical. And as I said, it's built into everything we do in all of our platforms, so you're absolutely right about that, but when we think about the entrepreneurship, you know, what we're seeing is, and I'll give you a good example of why the industry is growing so fast and why cloud. So one company we work with, LeoLabs. So Leo identified the growth in the LEO: Low Earth Orbit segment. 3,000 objects on orbit today, 30,000 tomorrow. Who's going to do the space traffic management for 30,000 objects in space that are all in the same orbital regime? And so LeoLabs built a process to do space traffic management, collision avoidance. They were running it on premises. It took them eight hours to do a single run for a single satellite conjunction. We got them to help understand how to use the cloud. They moved all that to AWS. Now that same run they do in 10 seconds. Eight hours to 10 seconds. Those are the kind of workloads as space proliferates in and we grow, that we just can't execute without cloud and cloud-based technologies. >> It's interesting, you know, the cloud has that same kind of line: move your workloads to the cloud and then refactor. >> Yeah. So space workloads are coming to the cloud. >> They are. >> Just changing the culture. So I have to ask you, I know there's a lot of young people out there looking for careers and interests. I mean, Cal poly is going into the high school now offering classes. >> Yeah So high school, there's so much interest in space and technology. What is the cultural mindset to be successful? Andy Jassy last year, reading and talk about the mindset of the builder and the enterprise CXO: "Get off your butt and start building" There's a space ethos going on. What is the mindset? Would you share your view on it? >> The mindset is innovation and moving fast, right? We, we lived, most of my career, in the time where we had an unlimited amount of money and unlimited amount of time. And so we were really slow and deliberate about how we built things. The future won't wait, whether it's commercial application, or military application, we have to move fast. And so the culture is: the faster we can move, The more we'll succeed, and there's no way to move faster than when you're building on the AWS cloud. Ground station is a good example. You know, the proposition of the cloud is: Don't invest your limited resources in your own infrastructure that doesn't differentiate your capability. And so we did that same thing with ground station. And we've said to companies: "Don't spend millions of dollars on developing your own ground station infrastructure, pay by the minute to use AWS's and focus your limited resources back in your product, which differentiate your space mission." and that's just been power. >> How is that going from customer perspective? >> Great. It's going great. We continue to grow. We added another location recently. And just in the last week we announced a licensed accelerator. One of the things our customers told us is it takes too long to work with global governments to get licensed, to operate around the world. And we know that's been the case. So we put together a team that leaned in to solve that problem, and we just announced the licensed accelerator, where we will work with companies to walk them through that process, and we can shave an 18 month process into a three or four month process. And that's been... we've gotten great response on that from our company. >> I've always said: >> I remember when you were hired and the whole space thing was happening. I remember saying to myself: "Man, if democratization can bring, come to space" >> And we're seeing that happening >> You guys started it and you guys, props to your team. >> Making space available to more and more people, and they'll dazzle us with the innovative ways we use space. 10 years ago, we couldn't have envisioned those things I told you about earlier. Now, we're opening up all sorts of workloads and John, real quick, one of the reasons is, in the past, you had to have a specific forte or expertise in working with space data, 'cause it was so unique and formatted and in pipeline systems. We're making that democratized. So it's just like any other data, like apps on your phone. If you can build apps for your phone and manage data, we want to make it that easy to operate with space data, and that's going to change the way the industry operates. >> And that's fundamentally, that's great innovation because you're enabling that. That's why I have to ask you on that note Of the innovation trends that you see or activities: What excites you the most? >> So a lot of things, but I'll give you two examples very quickly: One is high-performance compute. We're seeing more and more companies really lean in to understanding how fast they can go on AWS. I told you about LeoLabs, eight hours to 10 seconds. But that high-performance computes going to be a game changer. The other thing is: oh, and real quick, I want to tell you, Descartes Labs. So Descartes Labs came to us and said: "We want to compete in the Annual Global Top 500 supercomputer challenge" And so we worked with them for a couple of weeks. We built a workload on the AWS standard platform. We came in number 40 in the globe for the Top 500 super computer lists, just by building some workloads on our standard platform. That's powerful, high-performance compute. But the second example I wanted to give you is: digital modeling, digital simulation, digital engineering. Boom Aerospace is a company, Boom, that we work with. Boom decided to build their entire supersonic commercial, supersonic aircraft, digital engineering on the AWS cloud. In the last three years, John, they've executed 6,000 years of high-performance compute in the last three years. How do you do 6,000 years in compute in three years? You spin up thousands of AWS servers simultaneously, let them do your digital management, digital analysis, digital design, bring back a million different perturbations of a wing structure and then pick the one that's best and then come back tomorrow and run it again. That's powerful. >> And that was not even possible, years ago. >> Not at that speed, no, not at that speed. And that's what it's really opening up in terms of innovation. >> So now you've done it so much in your career, okay? Now you're here with Amazon. Looking back on this past year or so, What's the learnings for you? >> The learning is, truly how valuable cloud can be to the space industry, I'll admit to you most people in the space industry and especially in the government space industry. If you ask us a year ago, two years ago: "Hey, what do you think about cloud?" We would have said: "Well, you know, I hear people talk about the cloud. There's probably some value. We should probably look at that" And I was in the same boat, but now that I've dug deeply into the cloud and understand the value of artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data analytics, a ground station infrastructure, all those things, I'm more excited than ever before about what the space industry can benefit from cloud computing, and so bringing that, customer by customer is just a really fulfilling way to continue to be part of the space industry. Even though I retired from government service. >> Is there a... I'm just curious because you brought it up. Is there a lot of people coming in from the old, the space industry from public sector? Are they coming into commercial? >> Absolutely. >> Commercial rising up and there's, I mean, I know there's a lot of public/private partnerships, What's the current situation? >> Yeah, lots of partnerships, but we're seeing an interesting trend. You know, it used to be that NASA led the way in science and technology, or the military led the way in science and technology, and they still do in some areas. And then the commercial industry would follow along. We're seeing that's reversed. There's so much growth in the commercial industry. So much money, venture capital being poured in and so many innovative solutions being built, for instance, on the cloud that now the commercial industry is leading technology and building new technology trends that the military and the DOD and their government are trying to take advantage of. And that's why you're seeing all these commercial contracts being led from Air Force, Space Force, NASA, and NRO. To take advantage of that commercialization. >> You like your job. >> I love my job. (laughing) -I can tell, >> I love my job. >> I mean, it is a cool job. I kind of want to work for you. >> So John, space is cool. That's our tagline: space is cool. >> Space is cool. Space equals ratings in the digital TV realm, it is really, super exciting a lot of young people are interested, I mean, robotics clubs in high schools are now varsity sports, eSports, all blend together. >> Space, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced analytics. It's all becoming a singular sector today and it's open to more people than ever before, for the reasons we talked about. >> Big wave and you guys are building the surf boards, everyone a ride it, congratulations. Great to see you in person. >> Thank you. Again, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate that. >> Thanks for having us. >> Clint Crosier is the Director of AWS Aerospace & Satellite. Legend in the industry. Now at AWS. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got three great guests here to talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI operations. Laura Guio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Angelstad, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada, Financial Services. And Kuberan Kandasamy, VP of Personal Insurance at Economical Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE, this great panel on Cloud Satellite and AI ops. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John, good to see you. >> Well, first, let's start with you. There's the General Manager for the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined that's the standard and multicloud is right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical. And so, obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. >> Absolutely, so John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around a supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kyndryl, our spin-off of what we were previously calling NewCo, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our Satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all of this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So, we're super excited about this. >> Real quick while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points. I just want to get to, I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NewCo and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really the center of that equation. How does that relate into all that? >> So, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing, and you know, we've got a client here with us today, Kuberan who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client. What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software, managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco couple together, really great value. >> Kuberan, you got teed up beautifully there. So, I want to go to you and then I'll go to Matthew after. But, okay, tell us more about this IBM-Cisco dynamic. You guys are a hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post-pandemic is looking good too. So, take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. >> Sure. Sure, John, thank you. You know, to appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us, let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet, an MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated, direct-to-customer digital channel, where customers can quote and buy home and auto policies online without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vyne, another MVP. Vyne is our simplified self-serve and digitized broker channel, where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers, again, without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Both Sonnet and Vyne have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And, you know, we maintain the platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered desired results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vyne platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level, so that we can monitor the pulse of, you know, every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vyne, and we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. >> On that vision real quick. How does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth in the IPO, you think in automation, I'm assuming, can you elaborate quickly? >> Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get, like it's all digitized, so we have a lot of data in there. And this is where, you know, the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting, having predictability and all that, that's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. >> Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the Financial Services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? >> Yeah, absolutely. And Kuberan was touching on this from Economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in Vyne with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So, our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multicloud and AI. >> So, if you don't mind, if you don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, this was based, again, on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then the unique to what Kuberan in Economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here, is a market-leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So, you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application, all the way through the technical infrastructure. And it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >> So, AppD and these IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's. >> Absolutely, and that's, the point is bringing together the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. >> Well, we'll talk about the dynamics again. This is, again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. (laughs) I mean, you got the Cloud Satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and maybe even Laura can add as needed. But from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid multicloud world. So, we've really evolved whether it's IBM Cloud, AWS, as some of our clients, including Economical and others. Microsoft Azure, Google. It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together. And again, stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM and our partner ecosystem, and the evolution of IBM services as well. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring the elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security. And then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for the client. >> I love the end-to-end story. I see hybrid as distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multicloud as subsystems and all is going to have to be operated together. And the software that makes that happen. And I can see tons of head room opportunity there. Kuberan, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now. Because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for a business solution. And, you know, the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster. It's helping us to reduce defect linkage through our quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together. And our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So, you know, to be able to have a robust self-healing capability. And this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability, because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with AppDynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Sonnet and Vyne, where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for, excuse me, for our customers. Right? So, hopefully that kind of stitches the picture for you. >> That's awesome, great insight. Laura, Matthew, Kuberan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the Cloud Satellite and AI. What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >> So, as IBM invest more and more in these strategic hybrid cloud solutions industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. >> All right. Matthew? >> Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, Economical in this case, to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan has stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. >> Kuberan, take us home, final word. >> Thank you. What I would say is, what we've learned from this is really standing this stuff in more like a garage style kind of a situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So, that's the benefit I've seen. >> Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco better together. This ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John. >> Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (cheerful music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I have two IBM alumni with me here today. Please welcome Briana Frank, the Director of Product Management at IBM and Jason McGee is here as well, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO of the,IBM Cloud Platform. Brianna and Jason. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> You guys were here a couple of months ago but I know there's been a whole bunch of things going on. So Brianna, we'll start with you. What's new? what's new with IBM Cloud? >> We--it's just, it's been such a rush of announcements lately, but one of my favorite announcements is the IBM Cloud Satellite product. We went GA back in March and this has been one of the most fun projects to work on as a product manager. Because it's all about our clients coming to us and saying, "Hey, look, we're having, these are the problems that we're really facing with as we move to cloud and our journey to cloud and can you help us solve them?" And I think this has been just an exciting place to be in terms of distributed cloud. This new category that's really emerging where we've taken the IBM Cloud but we've distributed into lots of different locations on-prem, at the edge and on other public clouds. And it's been a really fun journey and it's such a great fulfilling thing to see it come to life and see clients using it and getting feedback from analysts and the industry. So it's been a great a few months. >> That's good. Lots of excitement going on. Jason talk to me a little bit about, kind of unpack the cloud satellite from your seat which is flashing in Jason's background as an IBM Cloud Satellite neon sign I love that. But talk to me a little bit about the genesis of it. What were some of the things that customers were asking for? >> Yeah, absolutely. So okay I think as we've talked about a lot at IBM as people have gone on their journey to cloud and moving workloads in the cloud over the last few years. Not all workloads have moved, maybe 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud and that remaining 80%, sometimes the thing that's inhibiting that is regulation, compliance, data latency, where my data lives. And so people have been kind of struggling with how do I get the kind of benefits and speed and agility to public cloud, but apply it to all of these applications that maybe need to live in my data center or need to live on the edge of the network, close to my users or need to live where the data is being generated or in a certain country. And so the genesis of satellite was really to take our hybrid strategy and combine it with the public cloud consumption model and really allow you to have public cloud anywhere you needed it. Bring those public cloud services into your data center or bring them to the edge of the network where your data is being generated and let you get the best of both. And we think that really will unlock the next wave of applications to be able to get the advantages of as a service kind of public cloud consumption while retaining the flexibility to run wherever you need. >> Curious station. Did you see any particular industries in the last year of I don't want to say mayhem, but mayhem taking the lead and the edge in wanting to work with you guys to understand how to really facilitate digital business transformation because we saw a lot of acceleration going on last year. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting cloud is fundamentally a pretty horizontal technology. It applies to lots of industries. But I think this past year especially with COVID and lockdowns and changes in how we all work have accelerated massively clients adoption of cloud. And they've been looking for ways to apply those benefits across more of what they do. And I think there's different drivers there's security compliance drivers maybe in places like the financial services industry but there's also industries like manufacturing and retail that have, they have a geographic footprint like where things run matters to them. And so they're like, "Well, how do I get that kind of remote cloud benefit in all those places too? And so, I've seen some acceleration in those areas. >> And one of the interesting things that I thought has emerged from industry focus is this concept of our FS cloud control. So we have specific control and compliance built into the IBM Cloud. And one of the most prevalent questions I get from clients is "When can I get those FS cloud controls in satellite, in all of these different locations?" And so we've built that in that's coming later this year but I was really surprised to hear every industry. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised I mean, every industry is trading money. So it's important to keep things secure but those FS cloud controls being extended into the satellite location is something I hear it constantly as a need no matter the industry, whether it's retail or insurance et cetera. So I think that the security concerns and being able to offload the burden and chores of security is huge. >> One of the things we saw a lot last year and along the security lines was ransomware. Booming ransomware as a service ransomware getting more personal. I talked to a lot of customers and to your point in different industries that are really focused on, it's not if we get hit by ransomware, it's when. so I'm wondering if that, if some of the things that we saw last year, or maybe why you're seeing this being so such a pervasive need across industries. What do you think? >> Absolutely. I think that it's something that you really have to concentrate on full time and it has to be something you're just maniacally focused on. And we have all kinds of frameworks and actually groups where we're looking at shaping regulation and compliance and it's really something that we study. So if, when we can pass on that expertise to our clients. And again, offload them. So not everyone can be an expert in these areas. I find that relieving. Our clients have these operational and security chores allows them to get back to what they want to do. Which is actually just keep inventing and building better technology for their business. >> I think that's such a-- I think that's such an important point that Briana is bringing it up too that was like part of the value of something like satellite is that we can run these technology platforms as a service. And well, what does as a service means? It means you can tap into a team of people who are the industry's best at building and operating that technology platform. Like maybe you've decided that Kubernetes and OpenShift is your go-forward platform as a business. But do you have the team and skills that you need to operate that yourself? You want to use AI. You probably don't want to become an expert in how to run like whatever the latest and greatest AI framework is. You want to actually like figure out how to apply that to your business. And so we think that part of what's really attracting people to solutions like satellite, especially now with with like the threats you described is that they can tap into this expertise by consuming things as a service instead of figuring out how to run it all themselves. >> Yeah. To that point. A lot of times we see really talented developers. I really like talking to incubation teams where they're building new and they're just trying to figure out how to create the next new thing. And it's not that they're not talented enough. They could do whatever they put their mind to. It's just that they don't have enough time. And they, then it just becomes, comes down to what do you really want to spend your time doing? Is it security and operational chores or is it inventing the next the big thing for your business? And I think that that's where we're seeing the market really shift is that, it's not efficient or a great idea and no one really wants to do that. So if we can offload those chores then that becomes really powerful. >> It does. Resource allocation is key to let those businesses to your point. We're going to focus on their core competencies innovating new products, new services, meeting customers where they are as customers like us become more and more demanding of things they are readily available. I do want to understand a little bit, Jason, help me understand. How this service is differentiated from some of the competitors in the market? >> Yeah. It's a totally fair question. So I would answer that in a couple of ways. First off, anytime you're talking about extending a cloud into some other environment you obviously need some infrastructure for that application to run. And whether that infrastructure is in your data center or at the edge or somewhere else. And one of the things that we've been able to do is by leveraging our hybrid cloud platform by leveraging things like OpenShift and Linux, we've been able to build satellite in a way where you can bring almost any-- infrastructure to the table and use it to run satellite. So we don't require you to buy a certain rack of hardware or a particular gear from us. You don't have to replace all your infrastructure. You can kind of use what you have and extend the cloud. And that to me is all about, if the goal is to help people build things more quickly and consume cloud, like you don't want step one to be like wheel in a whole new data center full hardware before you can get started. The second thing I would say is, we have built our whole cloud on this containerized technology on Kubernetes and OpenShift which means that we're able to deliver more of our portfolio through satellite. We can deliver application platforms and databases and Dev tools and AI and security functions all as a service via satellite. And so the breadth of cloud capability that we think we can deliver in this model is much higher than what I think our competitors are going to be able to do. And then finally, I would say the tie to kind of IBM's view of enterprise and regulated industries, the work Briana mentioned around things like FS cloud the work we're doing in telco. Like we spend a lot of our energy on like, how do we help enterprises regulated industries take advantage of cloud. And we're extending all of that work outside of our cloud data centers with satellite to all these other places. And so you really can move those mission critical applications into a cloud environment when you do it with us. >> Let's talk about some successes. Brianna, tell me about some of the customers that are getting some pretty big business outcomes. And this is a new service. And talk to me about how it's being used, consumed and the benefits. >> Absolutely. What I find a trend that I'm seeing is really the cloud being distributed to the edge. And there are so many interesting use cases I hear every single day about how to really use machine learning and AI at the edge. And so, maybe it's something as simple as a worker safety app or you're making sure that workers are safe using video cameras in an office building and alerting someone if they're going into a construction area and you're using the AI and all of the images that's coming, they're coming in through the security cameras you're doing some analysis and saying, all right this person is wearing a hard hat or not and warning them. But those use cases can be changed so quickly. And we've seen that. And I think I've talked about it before with COVID you changed that to masks. You could change that you could hook up the application of thermal devices. We've seen situations where machine learning is used at the manufacturing edge. So you can determine if there's an issue with your production of in a factory we're seeing as use cases in hospitals in terms of keeping the waiting room sanitized because of over usage. So there's all kinds of just really interesting solutions. And I think this is kind of the next area where we're really able to, and even partner with folks that have extraordinary vertical expertise in a specific area and bringing that to life at the edge and being able to really process that data at the edge so that there's very little latency. And then also you're able to change those use cases so quickly because you're really consuming cloud native best practices in cloud. Cloud services at the edge. So you're not having to install and manage and operate those services at the edge it's done for you. >> I'd mentioned changing the ability to change use cases so quickly in a year that plus that we've seen so much dynamics and pivoting is really key for businesses in any industry Brianna. >> I agree. And that's the thing. There hasn't been one particular industry. I think of course we do see a lot in the financial services industry, just probably cause we're IBM, but in every industry, we see retail, it's interesting to see sporting goods companies want to have pop-up shops at a specific sporting events. And how do you have a van that is a sporting good shop but it's just there temporarily. And how do you have a satellite location in the van? So there's really interesting use cases that have emerge just over time due to the need to have this capability at the edge. >> Yeah. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say right? Well, thank you both so much for stopping by and sharing what's going on with IBM Cloud Satellite, the new service, the new offerings, the opportunities in it for customers. I'm sure it's going to be another exciting year for IBM cause you clearly have been very busy. Thank you both for stopping by the program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much Lisa. >> For Briana Frank and Jason McGee. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. Live coverage of IBM Think. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And it's theCUBE Virtual and Uli Homann who's here, Corporate Vice President of Cloud & AI at Microsoft. Thanks for comin' on. I love this session. Obviously, Microsoft one of the big clouds. Awesome. You guys partnering with IBM here, at IBM Think. I remember during the client-server days in the '80s, late '80s to early '90s the open systems interconnect was a big part of opening up the computer industry. That was networking, intra-networking and really created more LANs and more connections for PCs et cetera, and the world just went on from there. Similar now with hybrid cloud, you're seeing that same kind of vibe, right? You're seeing that same kind of alignment with distributed computing architectures for businesses. Where now you have, it's not just networking and plumbing, and connecting, you know, LANs and PCs, and printers, it's connecting everything. It's kind of almost a whole 'nother world, but similar movie, if you will. So this is really going to be good for people who understand that market. IBM does, you guys do. Talk about the alignment between IBM and Microsoft in this new hybrid cloud space. It's really kind of now standardized, but yet it's just now coming. >> Yeah, so again, fantastic question. So the way I think about this is first of all, Microsoft and IBM are philosophically very much aligned. We're both investing in key open source initiatives like the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, CNCF, something that we both believe in. We're both partnering with the Red Hat organization so Red Hat forms a common bond, if you so want to, between Microsoft and IBM. And again, part of this is how can we establish a system of capabilities that every client has access to, and then build on top of that stack. And again, IBM does this very well with their Cloud Paks which are coming out now with data and AI, and others. So open source, open standards are key elements and then you mentioned something critical which I believe is not under, misunderstood, but certainly not appreciated enough is this is about connectivity between businesses and so part of the power of the IBM perspective together with Microsoft is bringing together key business applications for health care, for retail, for manufacturing and really make them work together so that our clients that are-- critical scenarios get the support they need from both IBM as well as Microsoft on top of this common foundation of the CNCF and other open standards. >> You know, it's interesting, I love that point. I'm going to double-down and amplify that and continue to bring it up. Connecting between businesses is one thread but now, people, because you have an edge that's also industrial, business, but also people. People are also participating in open source, people have wearables, people are connected so they can, and also they're connecting with collaboration. So this kind of brings a whole 'nother architecture which I want to get into the solutions with you on on how you see that playing out. But first, I know, you know, you're a veteran with Microsoft for many, many years, for decades. Microsoft's core competency has been ecosystems, developer ecosystems, customer ecosystems. Today, that the services motion is build around ecosystems. You guys have that playbook, IBM's well versed in it, as well. How does that impact your partnerships, your solutions, and how you deal with down this open marketplace? >> Well, let's start with the obvious. Obviously, Microsoft and IBM will work together in common ecosystems. Again, I'm going to reference the CNCF again as the foundation for a lot of these initiatives. But then we are also working together in the Red Hat ecosystem because Red Hat has built an ecosystem that Microsoft and IBM are players in that ecosystem. However, we also are looking higher level 'cause a lot of times when people think ecosystems, it's fairly low-level technology. But Microsoft and IBM are talking about partnerships that are focused on industry scenarios. Again, retail for example, or health care and others where we're building on top of these lower-level ecosystem capabilities and then bringing together the solution scenarios where the strength of IBM capabilities is coupled with Microsoft capabilities to drive this very famous one plus one equals three. And then the other piece that I think we both agree on is the open source ecosystem for software development and software development collaboration. And GitHub is a common anchor that we both believe can feed the world's economy with respect to the software solutions that are needed to really, yeah, bring the capabilities forward, help improve the world's economy and so forth by effectively bringing together brilliant minds across the ecosystem and again, just Microsoft and IBM bringing some people, but the rest of the world obviously participating in that, as well. So thinking again, open source, open standards, and then industry-specific collaboration and capabilities being a key part. You mentioned people. We certainly believe that people play a key role, software developers and the GitHub notion being a key one. But there are others where again, Microsoft with Microsoft 365 has a lot of capabilities in connecting people within the organization and across organizations. And while we're using Zoom, here, a lot of people are utilizing Teams 'cause Teams is on the one side of collaboration platform, but on the other side is also an application host. And so bringing together people collaboration supported and powered by applications from IBM, from Microsoft and others, is going to be, I think, a huge differentiation in terms of how people interact with software in the future. >> Yeah, and I think that whole joint development is a big part of this new people equation where it's not just partnering in market, it's also at the tech, and you've got open source, and it's a just phenomenal innovation formula, there. So let's ask what solutions, here. I want to get into some of the top solutions you're doing that Microsoft that maybe with IBM. But your title as the Corporate Vice President Cloud & AI, c'mon, could you get a better department? I mean, more relevant than that? I mean, it's exciting. You know, cloud scale is driving tons of innovation, AI is eating software or changing the software paradigm. We're going to see that playing out. I've done dozens of interviews just in this past month on how AI's a more, certainly with machine learning, and having a control plane with data, changing the game. So tell us, what are the hot solutions for hybrid cloud and why is this a different ballgame than say, public cloud? >> Well, so first of all, let's talk a little bit about the AI capabilities and data because I think they're two categories. You are seeing an evolution of AI capabilities that are coming out. And again, I just read IBM's announcement about integrating the Cloud Pak with IBM Satellite. I think that's a key capability that IBM is putting out there and we are partnering with IBM in two directions, there. IBM has done a fantastic job to build AI capabilities that are relevant for industries, health care being a very good example, again, retail being another one. And I believe Microsoft and IBM will work on both partnership on the technology side as well as the AI usage in specific verticals. Microsoft is doing similar things. Within our Dynamics product line, we're using AI for business applications, for planning, scheduling, optimizations, risk assessments, those kind of scenarios. And of course, we're using those in the Microsoft 365 environment, as well. I always joke that despite my 30 years at Microsoft, I still don't know how to really use PowerPoint and I can't do a PowerPoint slide for the life of me, but with a new designer, I can actually get help from the system to make beautiful PowerPoint happen. So bringing AI into real life usage I think is the key part. The hybrid scenario is critical here, as well, especially when you start to think about real life scenarios like safety, worker safety in a critical environment, freshness of product. We're seeing retailers deploying cameras and AI inside the retail stores to effectively make sure that the shelves are stocked, that the quality of the vegetables, for example, continues to be high and monitored. And previously, people would do this on an occasional basis running around in the store. Now the store is monitored 24/7 and people get notified when things need fixing. Another really cool scenario set is quality. We are working with a Finnish steel producer that effectively is looking at the stainless steel as it's being produced and they have cameras on this steel that look at specific marks. And if these marks show up then they know that the stainless steel will be bad. And I don't know if you have looked at a manufacturing process, but the earlier they can get failures detected, the better it is because they can most likely, or more often than not, return the product back into the beginning of the funnel and start over. And that's what they're using. So you can see molten steel, logically speaking, with a camera and AI. And previously, humans did this which is obviously A, less reliable and B, dangerous because this is very, very hot, this is very glowing steel. And so increasing safety while at the same time improving the quality is something that we see in hybrid scenarios. Again, autonomous driving, another great scenario where perception AI is going to be utilized. So there's a bunch of capabilities out there that really are hybrid in nature and will help us move forward with key scenarios, safety, quality, and autonomous behaviors like driving and so forth. >> Uli, great, great insight. Great product vision. Great alignment with IBM's hybrid cloud space what all customers are lookin' for, now. And certainly multicloud around the horizon. So great to have you on. Great agility, and congratulations for your continued success. You've got a great area, cloud and AI, and we'll be keeping in touch. I'd love to do a deep dive, sometime. Thanks for coming on. >> John, thank you very much for the invitation and great questions, great interview. Love it, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. Okay, theCUBE coverage here, at IBM Think 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music) ♪ Dah-De-Da ♪ ♪ Dah-De ♪

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. We're not yet in real life. We're doing another remote interviews with two great guests Cube Alumni. Of course, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've got Jason McGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM's cloud platform and Octavian the Nazis senior vice president Hybrid Cloud engineering at NetApp. Both Cube alumni, is great to see you both. Thanks for coming on theCUBE >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we were just talking before we came on camera that, it feels like we've had this conversation, a long time ago we have, Hybrid Cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys in many times on theCUBE. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world. Everyone gets it. There's no real debate. Now multicloud that's people are debating that which means that's right around the corner. So Hybrid Cloud is here and now Jason this is really the focus. And this is also brings together the NetApp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with Hybrid Cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, you know look we've talked a number of times together. I think in the industry, maybe a few years ago people were debating whether Hybrid Cloud was a real thing. We don't have that conversation anymore. I think, you know, enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of COVID and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on-prem and off-prem systems probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers. And what they're looking for now is how do I do that? And how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in? And then how do I get more and more of my workload into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first waves of cloud were infrastructure centric and externally application focused they were easier things. And now we're moving into more mission critical more stateful, more data oriented workloads. And that brings with a new challenges on where applications run and how we leverage the club. >> Octavian, you guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years, data centric company NetApp has always been great engineering team. You're on the cloud, Hybrid Cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship. Give us an update on how it's vectoring into the Hybrid Cloud since you're a senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud engineering. >> Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM. I think NetApp and IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers. And we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong joint Hybrid Cloud value proposition for customers on NetApps storage and data services compliment what IBM does in terms of products and solutions both for on-premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions, solutions that span data mobility, data governance for the new workrooms that Jason has talked about. >> And how has some of the customer challenges that you're seeing obviously software defined networking software defined storage, DevOps is now turned into DevSecOps. So you have now that programmability requirement with for dynamic applications, applications driven, infrastructure, all these buzz words point to one thing, the infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >> Yeah, I would say infrastructure will continue to be top of mind for everybody, whether they're building a private cloud or whether they we're trying to leverage, something like IBM cloud. I think, you know, people want to consume, infrastructure is an API. I think they want to simplicity, security. I think they want to manage their costs very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM cloud to build such capabilities. >> Jason how are you guys helping some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and refactoring previous stuff during transforming, but also innovating at the same time. There's a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the Hybrid challenges? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of dimensions to that problem but the one that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how kind of the consumption model of public cloud, API driven, self service, capabilities operated for you how that consumption model is starting to spread because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these, more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that application to the public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network, closer to my end users. So, you know, out where data is being generated, maybe in an IOT context and when you had those requirements you had to kind of switch operating models. You, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model. And we have a common platform and things like open shift that can run everywhere but the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere? And so recently we launched this thing called IBM been satellite, which we've been working with Octavian and his team on, on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center, out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption. And when you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment. You have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with like multi-tiered applications you know, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this complex environment. >> Here we've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade as the evolution goes. Octavian, I got to ask you this is critical path for companies. They want the storage ready infrastructure. You guys have been doing that for many decades pardon me with IBM, for sure. But now they're all getting Hybrid Cloud big time and it's not, it's attributed computing. It's what it is. It's the operating model. When someone asks you guys what your capabilities are how do you answer that in today's world? Because you have storage as well known. You got a great product people know that. But what is NetApp's capabilities? When I say I'm going all in and Hybrid Cloud complete changeover. >> So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. The software-defined has been definitely one of the key design points. The second is the Hybrid Cloud in the containerization of our operating systems. So they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do it's enabled the speed of scale. And that has been by building, you know intrinsically in the product, both support or in also using Kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility, that scale. >> So how about this data fabric vision? Because to me, this is comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners the number one problem at their, and problem that they're to solve in the conversation tends to I hear what was that control plane Kubernetes, horizontally scalable this all points to data being available., So how do you create that availability? What is data fabric mean? What does all this mean in a hybrid context? >> Well if you think about it, data fabric it's a Hybrid Cloud concept, right? This is about enabling data governance, data, mobility data security in an environment where some of the applications were run on premises or at the edge or the smart edge and many of the, perhaps data links and analytics, and services, rich services will be in a central locations or many or perhaps some large know data centers. So you need to have, the type of capabilities data services to enable that mobility that governance, that security across this continuum that spans the edge, the core and the cloud. >> Jason, you mentioned satellite before Cloud Satellite. Could you go into more detail on that? I know it's kind of a new product, what is that about and tell me what's the benefits and why is it exist and what problems does it solve? >> Yeah, so in the most simple terms, Cloud Satellite is the capability to extend IBM's, public cloud into on-prem infrastructure at the edge or in a multicloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build your application, OpenShift as a service database, as DevTools, AI capabilities instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's re you know, cloud regions you can now add your private data center or add your Metro provider, or add your AWS or Azure accounts and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. And that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public cloud with kind of location independence you see in hybrid and lets us solve new problems. Like, you know, it's really interesting. We're seeing like AI and data being a primary driver. You know I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like, in a Metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region. And so it lets you extend out in that way. And when you do that, of course, you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with NetApp on how do we then expose NetApp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center or I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well, how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think John, at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of, things are becoming more application centric, right? And we're trying to run a IT architecture that's more centered around the application. Well, by combining clouds knowledge of kind of where everything's running with that common platform like OpenShift with Kubernetes aware of data fabric and storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >> Yeah, I'm want to come back to that whole impact on IT because this has come up as a major theme here. Think at the it transformation is going to be more about cloud scale, but I want to get to Octavian on the satellite on NetApp's role and how you compliment that. How do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with Cloud Satellite. Obviously this looks like an operating model. How does NetApp fit in. >> Simply put we extend and enable the capabilities that IBM satellite platform provides. I think Jason referred to the storage aspects and you know what we are doing it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around new theory based on temperature, or replicated snapshots or capabilities around, you know, caching, high availability, encryption and so forth. So we believe that our technology integrate very well with red hat openShift and the Kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility in that translation of really distributed computing at scale, from the traditional data center to the edge and to the massive Ops that IBM is building. >> You know, I got to say, but watching you guys work together for many decades now and covering you with theCUBE for the past 10 years or 11 years now been a great partnership. I got to say one thing, that's obvious to me and our team and mainly the world is now you've got a new CEO over at IBM you have a Cloud Focus that's on unwavering. Arvind loves the cloud we all know that. Ecosystems are changing without, you already had a big ecosystem and partnerships. Now it seems to be moving to a level where you got to have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud. So I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes. If you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM NetApp relationship in the new context of this new partnership new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together. >> Yeah, I mean, I could start, I mean I think you're right, that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment people operate in and the ecosystem is really critical. And I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean, IBM and NetApp, as we said I've been working together for a long time. We rely on them all in our public cloud, for example, in our storage tiers. But with the kind of idea of distributed cloud in the boundaries of public cloud spreading to all of these new environments, those were just new places where we can build really interesting valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with data, deal with these more complex apps, in all the places that they exist. So I think it's been actually really exciting to kind of leverage that opportunity to find, new ways to work together and deliver solutions for our clients. >> Octavian. >> I will say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there's more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center be it in the cloud or at the edge. So our mission is to enable that, Hybrid Cloud or data mobility and enabled persistence rich data, storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform, comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM's services at the edge and or a remote office and I think that's very exciting. >> You guys are both experts and solely season executives to DevOps, DevSecOps, DataOps, whatever you want to call data's here, ecosystems. Guys thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate the insight. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, IBM Think CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (tranquil music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual, I'm John Furry hosts of theCube, Cube Virtual. We're remote, we're not in person this year. Like last year, soon, we'll be back in person. We've got a great guest here, Mark Potts, managing director at Accenture for the Red Hat relationship. Mark, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Hey, thanks for having me John. I really appreciate it. >> Yeah, we've been covering pretty extensively throughout this event, as well as you know the many, many years, the impact of cloud computing. Obviously, you guys have a really big strategic relation with IBM and now Red Hat, Red Hat's part of IBM. It's pretty clear that, you know, that Red Hats got this operating system mindset of open source and, you know, innovation. It's extending into cloud, cloud native, and edge, distributed computing. That's kind of in their DNA if you will, distributed computing and system software and open source, kind of the perfect storm. So, really interesting as this enables new services you guys are on the front lines working with the biggest companies in the world as the global businesses is changing. So, I want to get your take on Red Hat and what you guys are doing together, but first give a quick overview of the center role with Red Hat, your role there and what you do. >> Yeah, thanks. Perfect John. So Mark Potts, as you mentioned I'm the managing director responsible for our global business with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. As you probably saw in our announcements last Fall, around the September timeframe, Accenture made a very large, bold announcement about forming a new cloud first business unit within Accenture. And so we're going to invest $3 billion into that business unit. We're going to dedicate 70 over 70,000 people worldwide to that business unit and that cloud first initiative. And as part of that cloud fishing first initiative we've also developed our new hybrid cloud strategy. And we're looking for new partners and existing partners to help us grow in that hybrid cloud strategy, not hybrid cloud business. We see Red Hat as a very important partner in that business. And as you mentioned there, they've also been, you know, in the distributed computing for a long time. We also see them as a partner for clients that are lifting and shifting and migrating to the cloud on RHEL, like SAP and other workloads like that. And I'm excited to talk to you today about OpenShift, and Ansible, and all those great technologies that Red Hat brings to the table for our hybrid cloud approach and strategy. >> That's awesome. Great investment. And I love Paul coming in that you were saying on his keynote, you know, every CIO should be a cloud operator. I mean, running business at scale this is what hybrid cloud is all about. And so with your new hybrid cloud strategy and the formation of the new business group at Accenture what kind of challenges are you guys looking to solve? What are the opportunities that you're seeing for companies? How do you guys solve those challenges? What do you, what are you guys looking at right now? >> Yeah, that's a great question. As you mentioned, the keynote. So, Karthik Laredo actually runs our cloud first business was actually part of that keynote with Larry Slack as well, or Larry Stack, sorry, as well. And so he mentioned in his keynote something called the cloud continuum, right? And so historically Accenture has been working with our partner on cloud native development moving to about 20 to 25% of the existing workloads in the data center, the easy stuff to the cloud, right? But now we realize that there's a need for the hybrid cloud. There's a need to modernize, maybe on premise, there's a need to maybe modernize in the cloud one way or the other. And then we also look at the holistic view of cloud, on-prem, edge. And that's what Karthik is talking about when he's talking about the, the cloud continuum. And that's a very important part of our strategy within Accenture, and OpenShift really helps us meet those needs. So if a client is a little bit nervous about taking some of those complex workloads but they want a modernize and they want to use the latest and greatest cloud native technologies but they want to do it on-prem and move to the cloud a little bit later they can do that with OpenShift, right? And Red Hat. That's a great platform for that. Maybe it's a client that wants to lift and shift and get to the cloud as soon as possible, close their data centers save that cost of money and then modernize later, but they don't want to necessarily be locked and want to be locked into one cloud provider. Again, OpenShift is great for that. Take those legacy workloads that you move to the public cloud, modernize them on Red Hat OpenShift maybe it's Rosa on AWS, maybe it's aro on Azure. And then when you're ready to you can move those to any other public cloud, if you'd like to, when, when you're ready to, right. And that whole control plan as we call it, being able to see across public cloud, on-prem, the edge is really important for our story and our strategy, and Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat Satellite. And those technologies bring a lot to the table for us to meet those needs of our clients and our customers. >> That's great insight there, Mark. I really appreciate that. And one of the things brought up when he was saying that I was thinking to myself, okay, the cloud conversation has many evolutions and, you know, go back five years. It was all moved to the cloud. Everyone was moving to the cloud. That was the big discussion point. Now it's, you know, enterprise ready the cloud get that next level of scale. And as you know, in the enterprise everything we do all everything complicated is a lot of legacy and is existing stuff. So this, you know, this, this is the next enterprise at scale is the conversation that includes hybrid multi-cloud or running on that, on the horizon. So with that, can you expand on what you mean by this cloud continuum that you refer to, that essentially refers to and what is needed to make it a reality for customers? >> Yeah, I mean, what's really needed is the latest greatest in hybrid cloud technology like OpenShift and what Red Hat brings to the table, right. It's also new skills and new capabilities, and, and policy management and those types of things that are important for our company to decide when they're ready to move those workloads to the cloud, right. They need the ability to see across their entire infrastructure. Like I mentioned earlier, whether that be a public cloud provider, whether that in their existing data center, in a colo, or on the, in the edge, like in a retail store or something like that, they need, we need the ability to see across those, that seeing all that infrastructure is a single control plane. So we can manage and know where things are to feel confident about security and everything with our clients. The other big thing that we need is skills. Skills to, you know, build the migration, the modernization, and more importantly, the interaction and integration into legacy workloads like the mainframe, for example, Accentures got a lot of use cases, leveraging Red Hat OpenShift for our cloud coupling solution, where we interact and build new applications that connect to the mainframe sitting right next to the mainframe but their new digital mobile applications, web applications that can be quickly modified and deployed in, into production at a rapid pace. Right, and so when we look at everything that's needed, it's skills, it's technology partners like Red Hat, and then it's, it's really building assets and offerings to help make that journey for our clients better, and, and secure. >> We just found out here at the event that you guys at Accenture had been recognized as Red Hats, global systems integrated partner of the year for North America, congratulations on that. What do you see as some of the key reasons for the recognition? Was there anything that they called out in particular? Obviously you guys have a great track record well-known brand you've known for, you know, creating a lot of value for companies as they do digital transformation. What's the, what's the recognition for this year? >> Yeah, we're super excited about this, right. I mean, this is, we've been partners with Red Hat for a long time. I think we were one of the first system integrators, if not the first system integrators to partner with Red Hat many years ago. Right, so, to get this award, and get it for the first time, is super exciting for us. Right, and so we're very grateful for that recognition and opportunity. You know, I think what really, what really, what got us the recognition for this award was really the effort we put into our partnership over the last 12 to 24 months, right. We had had a really big business in Europe with GDPR and, and the risk averse of going to the public cloud in Europe. OpenShift and Red Hat really had taken off. In North America our business was lagging behind Europe and we significantly invested with Red Hat and new offerings and new clients and new people, right. New talent to build a better business and partnership in North America. You know, I think a lot of the things that we got recognized with were what I mentioned earlier some of our cloud coupling solutions for an insurance client in North America where we're building cloud native applications on Red Hat OpenShift sitting next to the mainframe we're building new cloud, cloud native applications for our transportation company in, in the South region of the US right? So it's really that business transformation work that we're doing working with the legacy, but building new core applications for our customers that are truly portable, nimble and agile, and they can use to get speeds to the market and get to the cloud. >> Cloud first organization you guys are investing billions of dollars, 3 billion. That was referenced. I saw an article. I think we covered it as well on (mumbles). Congratulations, cloud first also implies that cloud native is going to be there. Mark, in all your years in the industry talk about from your personal perspective and even from Accentures, the, the shift that's happening because it's almost mind blowing what's going on in the sense of so fast this is accelerated, even the pandemic exactly accelerate even further. The opportunities that were, that are available now that weren't there before and what it's done to the project timelines and what it's done as a forcing function. Could you share your view on the reality of the current situation and opportunities for companies to take advantage of that wave? >> Yeah, and, and I think Accentures done a great job talking about this recently, even from our C-suite down, right. And Karthik we'll mention, has mentioned this as well in his keynote. I mean, we are seeing an acceleration to get to the cloud that was completely unplanned for us. I think the, the numbers I heard was we thought most clients are going to get to the cloud in eight to 10 years and be fully in the cloud in eight to 10 years. But that's accelerated with COVID and the pandemic, right. We're looking at four to five years we think most of our clients will be in a majority of their, their infrastructure and everything, a new, a new applications and legacy applications will be in the cloud. Right, so the, the, the change and the impact of the pandemic had, had a significant impact on our customers and their need to, to, to get to the cloud. We've even seen those that were leaders in the cloud journey accelerate even more, right. And, and they're being rewarded for that acceleration. Right, a lot of our customers that were first to cloud are seeing the benefits and seeing the, the, the ability to scale and for the pandemic, like, like a lot of our customers in the, in the US in particular. And I think OpenShift is going to help them, help us with that, right, And, and Red Hat in particular. And let's not be lost on the fact that Realms is a great product out there as well. We have many of our clients that are running SAP on Realm and that lift and shift and moving SAP to Azure or AWS or Google or something like that is, is a viable solution for our, to help accelerate our customers as they expand, right. We've seen internationally a lot of our customers that have been really focused just in their local region are now expanding their business outwards, and now they need to get to the clouds to be able to expand those businesses. >> You know it's interesting Mark, just as we're talking, just, you know thinking about my experience over the years in the computer industry everything had to display something else, disrupt something, you know, the mainframes were disrupted by client server. Now we're living in an era where with the containers and microservices and service meshes and cloud native technologies you can embrace existing legacy and abstract away some of the complexity on the integration side, right? So you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. And I think this phenomenon has opened up a new class of services and, you know the people I talk to and interview the leaders in the industry all have the same kind of view. And the ones that stand out are the ones that recognize that the operating system of business will be software. And that software hasn't yet been built in clouds. The beginning, it's not just one cloud. So I think what's interesting about Red Hat is that their operating system people you almost to see, you know, Arvin kind of snapping the lines and kind of cornering the market on the operating system for business and applications then are a thousand flowers that bloom from that. So, very interesting take here again. That's my opinion. I don't think they've said that formally but if you look at it, that's kind of what's going on. What's your reaction to that? >> I think you're a hundred percent, right. I mean, it, you know, I, I also carry a little bit of the responsibility on the IBM side. And you mentioned mainframe and I've mentioned mainframe a handful of times, right? There's a lot of customers that have this legacy estate like the mainframe in particular but they need to be nimble. Right, they need to be agile and mainframe is a challenge sometimes around that. Right, and so to your point creating those applications that participate with the mainframe allowed the mainframe to participate better with these cloud native applications and these new digital transformation applications is a very key component to it. And so I, a hundred percent agree with with everything you said. And I think, I think we're going to see more around this operating system type software. And I, you almost, to an extent, you you kind of view Red Hat OpenShift as kind of that new operating system, right? And you look at some of the announcements that Red Hat has made around Palentier, right, and adding Palentier and ISV to their marketplace to allow customers that are bought OpenShift or make it easy for clients to buy Red Hat OpenShift, and then bring in these ISVs that have been certified, they're secure, they're easy to consume and buy it through Red Hats marketplaces is very exciting and very interesting, and very easy to do, right. Once you get that Red Hat OpenShift layer in there, that operating system and now you're bringing in products all over the place, right. And, and all the new stuff. And I think we're going to see a lot more of those announcements during summit as well. >> Yeah, I think it was a 20 year run here. It's trillions of dollars as it's been forecasted. Mark, great to have you on. Super valuable resource. Great insight! While we got you here let's get a quick free consulting a minute here for the customers watching. What's your advice. I need some help here. I'm going to go to the cloud. I want a good, I want enough headroom so I can grow into I want to foreclose any opportunities. I want to move to the cloud. I want to have a hybrid distributed computing architecture. I want to program my business. I want infrastructure as code. I want dev sec ops. What's my playbook? What should I do? >> So Accenture's got a real smart approach and strategy around us. We leveraged an, an assessment approach really to look at what's in your what's in your data center today and what, what you have from an infrastructure and application standpoint, there should be-- We have a seminar where it's can completely rewrite an application, and we would apply those six hours or seven hours to that assessment to help you figure out the disposition of your applications and your infrastructure to figure out what is the right cloud. What's the right journey. I mean, we talked about, you know the mainframe and mainframe being an anchor in a lot of our client's data centers, right. How do we move those applications that have data gravity challenges to those legacy applications, to the cloud. How do we consider that? So the right way to do it is take a holistic approach. Do the assessment, do the disposition of your applications. And then let's let Accenture put together a full plan of how we would migrate you incidents into the public cloud. >> Mark FOS, managing director of Accenture. Congratulations on your North America award, partner of the year. And also awesome to hear. And we've been covering again cloud first. Totally believe it, great investment. That's going to pay back huge dividends for you guys and you know, having the hybrid, which is pretty much determined as a fact now in the industry. Congratulations, thanks for coming on. >> Perfect, thanks, and thanks for having me, and thank you Red Hat for the award. Really appreciate it. And look forward to talking to you soon. >> All right, this is theCubes coverage of Red Hat summit, 2021, virtual. This is the Cube virtual, I'm John Furry, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of IBM. Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And this is theCUBE virtual and Uli Homann who's here Corporate Vice President, of cloud and AI at Microsoft. Thanks for coming on. I love this session, obviously, Microsoft one of the big clouds. Awesome. You guys partnering with IBM here at IBM Think. First of all, congratulations on all the success with Azure and just the transformation of IBM. I mean, Microsoft's Cloud has been phenomenal and hybrid is spinning perfectly into the vision of what enterprises want. And this has certainly been a great tailwind for everybody. So congratulations. So for first question, thanks for coming on and tell us the vision for hybrid cloud for Microsoft. It's almost like a perfect storm. >> Yeah. Thank you, John. I really appreciate you hosting me here and asking some great questions. We certainly appreciate it being part of IBM Think 2021 virtual. Although I do wish to see some people again, at some point. From our perspective, hybrid computing has always been part of the strategy that Microsoft as policed. We didn't think that public cloud was the answer to all questions. We always believed that there is multiple scenarios where either safety latency or other key capabilities impeded the usage of public cloud. Although we will see more public cloud scenarios with 5G and other capabilities coming along. Hybrid computing will still be something that is important. And Microsoft has been building capabilities on our own as a first party solution like Azure Stack and other capabilities. But we also partnering with VMware and others to effectively enable investment usage of capabilities that our clients have invested in to bring them forward into a cloud native application and compute model. So Microsoft is continuing investing in hybrid computing and we're taking more and more Azure capabilities and making them available in a hybrid scenario. For example, we took our entire database Stack SQL Server PostgreSQL and recently our Azure machine learning capabilities and make them available on a platform so that clients can run them where they need them in a factory in on-premise environment or in another cloud for example, because they trust the Microsoft investments in relational technology or machine learning. And we're also extending our management capabilities that Azure provides and make them available for Kubernetes virtual machine and other environments wherever they might run. So we believe that bringing Azure capabilities into our clients is important and taking also the capabilities that our clients are using into Azure and make it available so that they can manage them end to end is a key element of our strategy. >> Yeah. Thanks Uli for sharing that, I really appreciate that. You and I have been in this industry for a while. And you guys have a good view on this how Microsoft's got perspective riding the wave from the original computer industry. I remember during the client server days in the 80s, late 80s to early 90s the open systems interconnect was a big part of opening up the computer industry that was networking, internetworking and really created more lans and more connections for PCs, et cetera. And the world just went on from there. Similar now with hybrid cloud you're seeing that same kind of vibe. You seeing the same kind of alignment with distributed computing architectures for businesses where now you have, it's not just networking and plumbing and connecting lans and PCs and printers. It's connecting everything. It's almost kind of a whole another world but similar movie, if you will. So this is really going to be good for people who understand that market. IBM does, you guys do. Talk about the alignment between IBM and Microsoft in this new hybrid cloud space? It's really kind of now standardized but yet it's just now coming. >> Yeah. So again, fantastic question. So the way I think about this is first of all, Microsoft and IBM are philosophically very much aligned. We're both investing in key open source initiatives like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF something that we both believe in. We are both partnering with the Red Hat organizations. So Red Hat forms a common bond if you still want to between Microsoft and IBM. And again, part of this is how can we establish a system of capabilities that every client has access to and then build on top of that stack. And again, IBM does this very well with their cloud packs which are coming out now with data and AI and others. And again, as I mentioned before we're investing in similar capabilities to make sure that core Azure functions are available on that CNCF cloud environment. So open source, open standards are key elements. And then you mentioned something critical which I believe is misunderstood but certainly not appreciated enough is, this is about connectivity between businesses. And so part of the power of the IBM perspective together with Microsoft is bringing together key business applications for healthcare, for retail, for manufacturing and really make them work together so that our clients that are critical scenarios get the support they need from both IBM as well as Microsoft on top of this common foundation of the CNCF and other open standards. >> It's interesting. I love that point. I'm going to double down and amplify that late and continue to bring it up. Connecting between businesses is one thread. But now people, because you have an edge, that's also industrial business but also people. People are participating in open source. People have wearables, people are connected. And also they're connecting with collaboration. So this kind of brings a whole 'nother architecture which I want to get into the solutions with you on on how you see that playing out. But first I know, you're a veteran with Microsoft for many, many years of decades. Microsoft's core competency has been ecosystems developer ecosystems, customer ecosystems. Today, that the services motion is built around ecosystems. You guys have that playbook IBM's well versed in it as well. How does that impact your partnerships, your solutions and how you deal with down this open marketplace? >> Well, let's start with the obvious. Obviously Microsoft and IBM will work together in common ecosystem. Again, I'm going to reference the CNCF again as the foundation for a lot of these initiatives. But then we're also working together in the ed hat ecosystem because Red Hat has built an ecosystem and Microsoft and IBM are players in that ecosystem. However, we also are looking a higher level there's a lot of times when people think ecosystems it's fairly low level technology. But Microsoft and IBM are talking about partnerships that are focused on industry scenarios. Again retail, for example, or healthcare and others where we're building on top of these lower level ecosystem capabilities and then bringing together the solution scenarios where the strength of IBM capabilities is coupled with Microsoft capabilities to drive this very famous one plus one equals three. And then the other piece that I think we both agree on is the open source ecosystem for software development and software development collaboration and GitHub is a common anchor that we both believe can feed the world's economy with respect to the software solutions that are needed to really bring the capabilities forward, help improve the wealth economy and so forth by effectively bringing together brilliant minds across the ecosystem. And again, just Microsoft and IBM bringing some people but the rest of the world obviously participating in that as well. So thinking again, open source, open standards and then industry specific collaboration and capabilities being a key part. You mentioned people. We certainly believe that people play a key role in software developers and the get hub notion being a key one. But there are others where, again, Microsoft with Microsoft 365 has a lot of capabilities in connecting people within the organization and across organizations. And while we're using zoom here, a lot of people are utilizing teams because teams is on the one side of collaboration platform. But on the other side is also an application host. And so bringing together people collaboration supported and powered by applications from IBM from Microsoft and others is going to be, I think a huge differentiation in terms of how people interact with software in the future. >> Yeah, and I think that whole joint development is a big part of this new people equation where it's not just partnering in market, it's also at the tech and you got open source and just phenomenal innovation, a formula there. So let's ask what solutions here. I want to get into some of the top solutions you're doing with Microsoft and maybe with IBM, but your title is corporate vice president of cloud and AI come on, cause you get a better department. I mean, more relevant than that. I mean, it's exciting. Your cloud-scale is driving tons of innovation. AI is eating software, changing the software paradigm. We can see that playing out. I've done dozens of interviews just in this past month on how AI is more certainly with machine learning and having a control plane with data, changing the game. So tell us what are the hot solutions for hybrid cloud? And why is this a different ball game than say public cloud? >> Well, so first of all let's talk a little bit about the AI capabilities and data because I think there are two categories. You're seeing an evolution of AI capabilities that are coming out. And again, I just read IBM's announcement about integrating the cloud pack with IBM Satellite. I think that's a key capability that IBM is putting out there and we're partnering with IBM in two directions there. Making it run very well on Azure with our Red Hat partners. But on the other side, also thinking through how we can optimize the experience for clients that choose Azure as their platform and IBM cloud Pak for data and AI as their technology, but that's a technology play. And then the next layer up is again, IBM has done a fantastic job to build AI capabilities that are relevant for industries. Healthcare being a very good example. Again, retail being another one. And I believe Microsoft and IBM will work on both partnerships on the technology side as well as the AI usage in specific verticals. Microsoft is doing similar things within our dynamics product line. We're using AI for business applications for planning, scheduling, optimizations, risk assessments those kinds of scenarios. And of course we're using those in the Microsoft 365 environment as well. I always joke that despite my 30 years at Microsoft, I still don't know how to read or use PowerPoint. And I can't do a PowerPoint slide for the life of me but with a new designer, I can actually get help from the system to make beautiful PowerPoint happen. So bringing AI into real life usage I think is the key part. The hybrid scenario is critical here as well. And especially when you start to think about real life scenarios, like safety, worker safety in a critical environment, freshness of product we're seeing retailers deploying cameras and AI inside the retail stores to effectively make sure that the shelves are stocked. That the quality of the vegetables for example, continues to be high and monitored. And previously people would do this on a occasional basis running around in the store. Now the store is monitored 24/7 and people get notified when things need fixing. Another really cool scenario set, is quality. We're working with a finished steel producer that effectively is looking at the stainless steel as it's being produced. And they have cameras on this steel that look at specific marks. And if these marks show up, then they know that the stainless steel will be bad. And I don't know if you've looked at a manufacturing process, but the earlier they can get a failure detected the better it is because they can most likely or more often than not return the product back into the beginning of the funnel and start over. And that's what they're using. So you can see molten steel, logically speaking with a camera and AI. And previously humans did this which is obviously a less reliable and be dangerous because this is very, very hot. This is very blowing steel. And so increasing safety while at the same time, improving the quality is something that we see hybrid scenarios. Again, autonomous driving, another great scenario where perception AI is going to be utilized. So there's a bunch of capabilities out there that really are hybrid in nature and will help us move forward with key scenarios, safety, quality and autonomous behaviors like driving and so forth. >> Uli, great insight, great product vision great alignment with IBM's hybrid cloud space with all customers are looking for now and certainly multi-cloud around the horizon. So great to have you on, great agility and congratulations for your continued success. You got great area cloud and AI and we'll be keeping in touch. I'd love to do a deep dive sometime. Thanks for coming on. >> John, thank you very much for the invitation and great questions. Great interview. Love it. Appreciate it. >> Okay, CUBE coverage here at IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from >>around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of IBM Think >>2021 >>brought to you by IBM. >>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm lisa martin, I have to IBM alumni with me here today please welcome Brianna frank the director of product management at IBM and Jason McGee is here as well. IBM fellow VP and Cto of the IBM cloud platform, Brianna and Jason welcome back to the cube. >>Thank you so much for having us, >>you guys were here a couple months ago, but I know there's been a whole bunch of things going on. So Brianna, we'll start with you, what's new, what's new with IBM cloud? >>We are, it's just, it's been such a rush of announcements lately, but one of my favorite announcements uh, is the IBM cloud satellite product. We went g a back in March and you know, this has been one of the most fun projects to work on as a product manager because you know, it's all about our clients coming to us and saying, hey look, we're having these are the problems that we're really facing with as we, as we move to cloud in our journey to cloud and can you help us solve them? And I think this has been just an exciting place to be in terms of distributed cloud, this new category that's really emerging where we've taken the IBM cloud, but we've distributed into lots of different locations on prem at the edge and on other public clouds. And it's been a really fun journey and it's such a great fulfilling thing to see it come to life and see clients using it and getting feedback from analysts and um in the industry. So it's been a, it's been a great, you know, a few months. >>That's good. Lots of excitement going on. Jason talk to me a little bit about kind of unpack uh, the cloud satellite from, you see what flashing in Jason's background is an IBM cloud satellite. Me, I'm sorry, I love that. You talk to me a little bit about the genesis of it. What were some of the things that customers were asking for? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so, so look, I think as we've talked about a lot of IBM, you know, as as people have gone on their journey to cloud and been moving workloads in the cloud over the last few years, um, you know, not all workloads have moved right. Maybe 20 of workloads have moved to the cloud and that remaining 80% sometimes that thing that's inhibiting that is regulation compliance data late and see where my data lives. And so people have been kind of struggling with, how do I get the kind of benefits and speed and agility to public cloud, But apply it to all these applications that maybe need to live in my data center or need to live on the edge of the network close to my users or need to live where the data is being generated or in a certain country. And so the genesis of satellite was really to take our hybrid strategy and combine it with the public cloud consumption model and really allow you to have public cloud anywhere you needed it, bring those public cloud services into your data center or bring them to the edge of the network where your data is being generated and let you get the best of both. And we think that really will unlock, you know, the next wave of applications to be able to get the advantages of as a service kind of public consumption um, while retaining the flexibility to run wherever you need, >>curious station, did you see any particular industries in the last year of, I don't want to say mayhem, but you know, mayhem taking really the lead and the edge in wanting to work with you guys to understand how to really facilitate digital business transformation, because we saw a lot of acceleration going on last year. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting. Cloud is fundamentally pretty horizontal technology. It applies to lots of industries, but I think the past year, especially, um, with, you know, Covid and lockdowns and changes in how we all work have accelerated massively, um, clients adoption of cloud. Um, and they've they've been looking for ways to apply those benefits across more of what they do. All right. And, and I think there's different drivers, you know, there's, you know, security compliance drivers, maybe in, in places like the financial services industry, but there's also the industries like manufacturing and retail that have, you know, they have a geographic footprint, like where things run matters to them. And so they're like, well, how do I get that kind of remote cloud benefit in all those places too. And so I've seen some acceleration in those areas. >>And one of the interesting things that I thought has emerged from an industry focus is this concept of RFs file control. So we have specific control and compliance built into the IBM cloud and one of the most prevalent questions I get from clients, you know, when can I get this FSL controls in satellite, you know, in all of these different locations. And so we built that in that's coming later this year. But I was really surprised to hear every industry and I guess it shouldn't be surprised. I mean every, every industry is trading money so it's important to keep things secure. But those fs cloud controls being extended into the satellite location is something I hear constantly as a need no matter the industry, whether it's, you know, retail or insurance, you know, etcetera. So I think that the security concerns and being able to offload the burden and chores of security is, is huge. >>One of the things we saw a lot last year, Brianna along the security lines is was ransomware booming, ransomware is a service, ransomware getting more personal. Talk to a lot of customers and to your point in different industries that are really focused on, it's not if we get hit by ransomware, it's when. So I'm wondering if that if some of the things that we saw last year or maybe why you're saying this being so such a pervasive need across industries, what do you think? >>Absolutely. I think that it's something that you really have to concentrate on full time and you know, it has to be something you're just maniacally focused on. And we have all kinds of frameworks and actually, uh, groups where we're looking at shaping regulation and compliance and it's really something that we study. Um, so if when we can pass on that expertise to our clients and again offload them. So, you know, not everyone can be an expert in these areas. I find that, you know, relieving, you know, our clients of these operational security tours allows them to get back to what they want to do, which is actually just keep inventing and building better technology for their business. >>I think that's such a, I think that's such an important point that brand is bringing up to those like part of the value of something like satellite is that we can we can run these technology platforms as a service. Right. And well, what does that? The service means? It means you can tap into a team of people who are the industry's best at building and operating that technology platform, right? Like maybe you've decided that, you know, kubernetes and open shift is your go for or platform as a business, but do you have the team and the skills that you need to operate that yourself? You know, you want to use a I you probably don't want to become an expert in how to run like whatever the latest and greatest ai framework is, you want to actually like figure out how to apply that to your business. And so we think that part of what's really attracting people to solutions like satellite, especially now with the threat you described is that they can tap into this expertise by consuming things as a service instead of figuring out how to round all themselves >>to that point. A lot of times we see really talented developers, I really like talking to incubation teams where there, you know, they're building new and they're just trying to figure out how to create, you know, the next new thing and um, it's not that they're not talented enough, they could do whatever they put their mind to, it's just that they don't have enough time and they, you know, then it just becomes too, comes down to, you know, what do you really want to spend your time doing? Is it, you know, security and operational chores, or is it inventing the next big thing for your business? And I think that that's where we're seeing the market really shift, is that, you know, it's not efficient or you know, um you know, a great idea and really no one wants to do that, you know, so we can over, if we can offload those chores, then that becomes really powerful. >>It does resource allocation is key to let those businesses to your point, we're gonna focus on their core competencies, innovating new products, new services, meeting customers where they are as customers like us become more and more demanding of things being readily available. I do want to understand a little bit, Jason, help me understand how this service is differentiated from some of the competitors in the market. >>Yeah, it's a it's a totally fair question. Um so I would answer that in a couple of ways. Um first off, you know, anytime you're talking about extending a cloud into some other environment, you obviously need some infrastructure for that application to run on whether the infrastructure is in your data center or at the edge or somewhere else. And one of the things that we've been able to is by leveraging our hybrid cloud platform by leveraging things like open shift and Lennox, we've been able to build satellite in a way where you can bring almost any clinics infrastructure to the table and use it to run satellite. So we don't require you to buy a certain lack of hardware or particular gear from us. You don't have to replace all your infrastructure. You can kind of use what you have and extend the cloud and that to me is all about, you know, if the goal is to help people build things more quickly and consume cloud, like you don't want step one to be like wheel in a whole new data center full of hardware before you get started. Um the second thing I would say is we have built our whole cloud um on this, this containerized technology, on kubernetes and open ship, which means that we're able to deliver more of our portfolio through satellite. We can deliver application platforms and databases and Deb tools and ai and security functions all as a service via satellite. So the breath of cloud capability that we think we can deliver in this model is much higher than what I think our competitors are going to be able to do. And then finally, I would say the tide to kind of IBM view of enterprise and regulated industries, you know, the work brand I mentioned around things like FS cloud, the work we're doing in telco, like we spent a lot of our energy, I'm like, how do we help, you know, enterprises regulated industries take advantage of cut and we're extending all of that work outside of our cloud data centers with satellite to all these other places. And so you really can move those mission critical applications into a cot environment when you do it with us. >>Let's talk about some successes Brianna tell me about some of the customers that are getting some pretty big business outcomes and this is a new service to talk to me about how it's being used consumed in the benefits. >>Absolutely. You know what I I find a trend that I'm seeing is really uh the cloud being distributed to the edge and there's so many interesting use cases I hear every single day about how to really use machine learning and ai at the edge. And so you know, maybe it's something as simple as, you know, a worker safety app or you're you know, making sure that workers are safe using video cameras in an office building and alerting someone if they're going into a construction area and you're using the Ai and although the the images that's coming, they're coming in through the security cameras, you're doing some analysis and saying this person is wearing a hard hat or not and warning them, but that those use cases can be changed so quickly. And you know, we've we've seen that, I think I've talked about it before with Covid you change that to masks. Um you could change that. You could hook up the application of thermal devices. We've seen situations where you know, um machine learning is used at the manufacturing edge. So you can determine if there's an issue with your um production of, you know, in a factory there's we're seeing uh edge use cases and hospitals in terms of, you know, keeping the waiting room sanitized because of, you know, over usage. So there's all kinds of just really interesting solutions and I think this is kind of the next area where we're really able to um and even partner with folks that have extraordinary vertical expertise in a specific area and you know, bringing that to life at the edge and being able to really process that data at the edge. So there's very little latency and then also you're able to change those use cases so quickly because you're really consuming cloud native best practices in cloud cloud services at the end. So you're not having to install and and manage and operate those services at the edge. It's done for you >>imagine changing the ability to change use cases so quickly in a year that plus that we've seen so much dynamics and pivoting is really key for businesses in any industry Brianna. >>I agree. And that's the thing. You know, there hasn't been one particular industry I think, you know, of course we do see a lot in the financial services industry just probably because we're IBM, but in every industry, you know, we see, you know retail, it's interesting to see sporting goods companies want to have pop up shops in a specific sporting events and how do you, you know, have a van that is a sporting goods shop, but it's just there temporarily. And how do you have a satellite location at, in the van? So there's really interesting use cases that, you know, have emerged, um, you know, just over time due to, um, you know, the need to have this capability at the edge. >>Yeah, it's necessity is the mother of invention as they say, right, well thank you both so much for stopping by sharing what's going on with IBM Cloud Satellite, the new service, the new offerings, the opportunities in it for customers. I'm sure it's going to be another exciting year for IBM because you clearly have been very busy. Thank you both for stopping by the program. >>Thanks. Thanks so much lisa >>for Brianna frank and Jason McGee. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cube live coverage of IBM, think. >>Mm

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBES coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. We're not yet in real life, we're doing another remote interviews with two great guests CUBI alumni. Of course, I'm John for your host of theCUBE. We got Jason MacGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM's cloud platform and Octavian Tanase senior vice president Hybrid Cloud Engineering at NetApp both CUBE alumni, it's great to see you both. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we were just talking before we came on camera that we it feels like we've had this conversation a long time ago we have. Hybrid cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys and many times on theCUBE. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world, everyone gets it, there's no real debate, now multicloud, people are debating that which means that's right around the corner. So hybrid cloud is here now, Jason this is really the focus and this is also brings together the NetApp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, look we've talked a number of times together I think in the industry. Maybe a few years ago people were debating whether hybrid cloud was a real thing, we don't have that conversation anymore. I think enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of COVID and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on-prem and off-prem systems probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers. And what they're looking for now is how do I do that? And how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in? And then how do I get more and more of my workload into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first waves of cloud where infrastructure centric and externally application focused, they were easier things, and now we're moving into more mission critical more stateful, more data oriented workloads, and that brings with it new challenges on where applications run and how we leverage the club. >> Octavian, you guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years data centric company, NetApp has always been great engineering team, you're on the hybrid cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship, give us an update on how the it's vectoring into the hybrid cloud since you're senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud Engineering. >> Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM. I think NetApp have been IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers, and we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong joint hybrid cloud value proposition for customers on NetApp storage and data services compliment. What IBM does in terms of products and solutions both for on-premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions that span data mobility, data governance for the new workrooms that Jason has talked about. >> And how has some of the customer challenges that you're seeing obviously software defined networking software defined storage, DevOps is now turned into DevSecOps. So you have now that programmability requirement with for dynamic applications, application driven infrastructure, all these buzz words point to one thing. The infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >> I would say infrastructure will continue to be a top of mind for everybody, whether they're building a private cloud or whether they're trying to leverage something like IBM Cloud. I think people want to consume infrastructure as an API, I think they want a simplicity, security, I think they want to manage their costs very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM Cloud to build such capabilities. >> Jason how are you guys helping some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and refactoring previous stuff during transforming but also innovating at the same time. There's a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the hybrid challenges? >> Yeah, I mean there's a lot of dimensions to that problem but the one that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how kind of the consumption model public cloud, API driven self service, capabilities operated for you. How that consumption model is starting to spread. Because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that application to the public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network closer to my end users, so out where data is being generated maybe in an IoT context. And when you had those requirements you had to kind of switch operating models, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model, and we have a common platform and things like OpenShift that can run everywhere but the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere? And so recently we launched this thing called IBM Cloud Satellite which we've been working with Octavian and his team on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption. And when you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment, you have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with like multi-tiered applications, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this more complex environment. >> We've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade as the evolution goes. Octavian, I got to ask you this is critical path for companies, they want the storage ready infrastructure, you guys have been doing that for many decades partnering with IBM for sure but now they're all getting hybrid cloud big time and it's attributed computing is what it is, it's the operating model. When someone asks you guys what your capabilities are, how do you answer that in today's world? Because you have storage as well knowing you got a great product people know that, but what is NetApp's capabilities when I say I'm going all in a hybrid cloud complete changeover. >> So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. The software defined has been definitely one of the key design points, the second is the hybrid cloud in the containerization of our operating systems so they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do it's enabled the speed of scale and that has been by building intrinsically in the product both support or in also using Kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility that scale. >> So how about this data fabric vision? Because to me, this is comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners, the number one problem that they're solving to solve in the conversation tends to, I hear words like control plane, Kubernetes, horizontally scalable, this all points to data being available. So how do you create that availability? What does data fabric mean? What does all this mean in a hybrid context? >> Well, if you think about it data fabric it's a hybrid cloud concept, this is about enabling data governance, data mobility, data security in an environment where some of the applications were run on premises or at the edge or the smart edge and many of the perhaps data lakes and analytics, and services, rich services will be in a central locations or on many or perhaps some large data centers. So you need to have the type of capabilities data services to enable that mobility that governance that security across this continuum that spans the edge the core and the cloud. >> Jason, you mentioned satellite before cloud satellite. Could you go into more detail on that? I know it's kind of a new product, what is that about, and tell me what's the benefits and why is it exist and what problems does it solve? >> Yeah, so in the most simple terms, cloud satellite is the capability to extend IBM's public cloud into on-prem infrastructure at the edge or in a multicloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build their application, OpenShift as a service database, as DevTools, AI capabilities instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's cloud regions you can now add your private data center or add your Metro provider or add your AWS or Azure accounts and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. And that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public cloud with the kind of location independence you see in hybrid and lets us solve new problems. It's really interesting we're seeing like AI and data being a primary driver. I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like in a Metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region now. And so it lets you extend out in that way. And when you do that, of course, you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with NetApp on how do we then expose NetApp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center or I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well, how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think John, at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of things are becoming more application centric, right? And we're trying to run IT architecture that's more centered around the application. Well, by combining clouds knowledge of kind of where everything's running with that common platform like OpenShift with a Kubernetes aware data fabric and storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >> Yeah, I want to come back to that whole impact on IT because this has come up as a major theme here. Think that the IT transformation is going to be more about cloud scale, but I want to get to Octavian on the satellite on NetApp's role and how you compliment that, how do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with cloud satellite, obviously this was like an operating model. How does that fit in? >> Simply we extend and enable the capabilities that IBM satellite platform provides. I think Jason referred to the storage aspects and what we are doing it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around peering based on temperature or replicated snapshots or capabilities around caching, high availability, encryption and so forth. So we believe that our technology integrate very well with Red Hat OpenShift and the Kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility and in that translation of really distributed computing at scale from the traditional data center to the edge and to the massive hubs that IBM is building. >> You know, I got to say but watching you guys work together for many decades now and covering you with theCUBE for the past 10 years or 11 years now been a great partnership. I got to say one thing that's obviously too obvious to me and our team and mainly the world is now you've got a new CEO over at IBM, you have a cloud focus that's on unwavering, Octavian loves the cloud we all know that. Ecosystems are changing, IBM already had a big ecosystem and partnerships. Now it seems to be moving to a level where you got to have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud, so I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes if you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM NetApp relationship in the new context of this new partnership a new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together? >> Yeah, I mean I think you're right that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment people operate in and the ecosystem is really critical. And I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean, IBM and NetApp, as we set up, been working together for a long time we rely on the MoD in our public cloud, for example, in our storage tiers, but with the kind of idea of distributed cloud and the boundaries of public cloud spreading to all these new environments those are just new places where we can build really interesting valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with data, deal with these more complex apps in all the places that they exist. So I think it's been actually really exciting to kind of leverage that opportunity to find new ways to work together and deliver solutions for our clients. >> Octavian. >> I will say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there's more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center be it in the cloud or at the edge. So our mission is to enable that hybrid cloud or that data mobility and enable know persistence rich data storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM's services at the edge and or remote office and I think that's very exciting. >> You guys are both experts and solely seasoned executives to DevOps, DevSecOps, DevDataOps, what are we going to call data's here ecosystems. Guys, thanks for coming on the queue, really appreciate the insight. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, IBM, Think CUBE coverage, I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's The Cube, presenting Cube on Cloud, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. >> Welcome back to Cube on Cloud. I'm Paul Gillin, enterprise editor of SiliconANGLE. As we look ahead at what is in store for the cloud this year, one of the intriguing possibilities that has emerged is the rise of vertical clouds. IBM has been a leader in this area with its launch in late '19 of the IBM Financial Services cloud. That's a services-ready public cloud with exceptional security, as well as a policy framework for certifying compliance and services from the IBM subsidiary, Promontory. Now, with the IBM Financial Services cloud, that has been a major focus of our next guest, Hillery Hunter. She is the Vice President and CTO of IBM Cloud, an IBM Fellow, and a veteran of, I believe, three previous appearances on The Cube. Am I right, Hillery? >> Yep, sounds about right. Great to be back here today. >> Thanks for joining us. So let's start with getting an update on the IBM Financial Services cloud. What progress have you made in signing up customers and your ecosystem of partners? >> Yeah, we've made really significant progress advancing the IBM Cloud for Financial Services since we last talked, and we're really at that place of establishing a trusted platform for the industry. Just in some specifics, in addition to Bank of America which we had talked about as our U.S. anchor partner for the program, we've announced several global banks that are partnering with us for the global expansion of the program, including BNP party bar, which is one of Europe's largest banks. More than 70 ASVs are signed up with us now as part of the program and adopting IBM Cloud for Financial Services. This level of ecosystem is exciting because it means that banks will have the opportunity to transform what they're doing, but do so in a way which is driven by security and compliance so that they can be confident in those deployments on IBM Cloud for Financial Services. We also released the IBM Cloud policy framework for Financial Services. This is both the security and compliance posture of the environment, as well as guidance on controls, reference architectures, automation to help people onboard. And so both ISVs and banks now are able to onboard to this environment, and offer their wares and deploy their workloads. So it's a really exciting state for us on the program, and we're really in a place where there'll be an ongoing cadence of additional releases and announcements of additional partnerships and clients. So it's an exciting time in the program. >> One of the distinctive features, I think, of this launch is that you're working actively with your customers. They're working with you on building policy frameworks, as well as, I imagine, the features that you're offering on the cloud. How do you orchestrate all of these different customers and get them involved in, actually, co-development. >> Yeah, the ecosystem conversation and the partnership conversation are two of the fundamental aspects of the program. Like you said, this isn't just us sitting off in a bubble and inventing the future. We're working internally with partners within IBM, like IBM Promontory, which is a consultancy that has deep, deep regulatory expertise in jurisdictions globally, with IBM Security Services, and then with these individual partners and banks and clients. One of the ways that we bring everything together is through our council. So our council, our Cloud Council for Financial Services, is where we have global, systemically important financial institutions partnered with us and working together with one another, and that covers CIOs, it covers chief security officers, risk officers, et cetera. So we have some formality around how we work with all of these partners, really, as a body and as a group. >> And what have you learned from this experience? If you were to go into other vertical clouds, what have been the lessons? >> Ecosystem is so important. As I look at this space, I see that everyone has an existing business. They have a platform they're running, they have clients they're trying to service, but the software providers into this space are looking, themselves, to transform. They're looking to transform from being software vendors to being SaaS providers. The banks and financial institutions themselves are looking to transform from working on their own premises to benefit from the elasticity and the scale and the optionality that being in public cloud provides. So there's a lot of parties themselves that are trying to transform, and a lot of vendors into the financial space that are looking to transform. And in that time of a lot of change, ecosystem is absolutely key. And so the ISE and SaaS providers providing their wares on the cloud for financial services is really just as important as those financial services institutions, so that everyone can make that transition together, and so that banks that are looking to digitally transform can leverage partners that are really at the forefront of that change and that innovation in platforms for the industry. >> Would you say that there are- Is this the first of many? Are there going to be other vertical IBM clouds, or is the range of industries that really need that kind of specificity, limited? I think it's actually not limited, though I will say that within the space of industries that are heavily regulated, there's obviously a deeper need for specific cloud embodiments and cloud implementation, so regulated industries like insurance, like telco, health care, et cetera, these are the ones, I think, where there's the greatest opportunity to do verticals that are specific to industry. But as we look at this, this is absolutely part of an IBM Cloud strategy to deliver industry-specific clouds. And this comes from our decades of expertise. Even in financial services, being able to leverage those other entities within IBM that I mentioned, our regulatory background with companies, having helped them address regulatory needs for specific industries, and then translating that into cloud and cloud technologies. And then coming up from the other side, in terms of the technologies themselves, we've partnered with key industries to deliver security, and data protection, and cryptography technologies, and such, on premises, and we're contextualizing that now for cloud and public cloud deployments. And so it brings together the pieces of decades of expertise in platforms, and technology, and regulations, and contextualizes it into cloud, and I absolutely think that's an opportunity for other industries as well. >> Can you give us a bit of a preview? Do you have specific industries in mind? Is there a timeframe? >> Yeah, so late last year we did announce a second industry-specific cloud initiative, and that was IBM Cloud for Telco. So we have in that ecosystem, now, over 40 partners that are now, that are working with IBM and with Red Hat, especially with clients and partners that are looking to help with that transition into 5G and increasing use of IOT. 5G is really this disruptive opportunity for that industry, and also just for many other different types of companies and institutions that are looking to deploy with more efficiency, better operational efficiency, deploy with AI capabilities, really being able to do things at cellular network EDGE, and the places that they're doing business using IOT devices, and 5G will enable much of that to really transform and flourish. So a couple of the partners, initially, in addition to that ecosystem that I mentioned in Cloud for Telco, we've got Samsung working with us, Nokia, AT&T, et cetera, and so these partnerships and capabilities around network EDGE and specific capabilities in Cloud for Telco are that second public announcement that we've made around industry-specific cloud. >> And as far as your competitive position is concerned, are you taking away business from your competitors when you partner with these telcos and these banks, or is this an entirely new line of business that was not previously in the cloud? >> Yeah, these are really, I think, in, by and large, new opportunities. As we look at, for example, how we, as customers, expect to engage with our bank, we are looking to increasingly engage with a bank in a digital way, use our applications, use mobile devices. We're looking for individual bank outlets, branch outlets of a banking institution, to be increasingly smart, to service our needs more quickly, et cetera. And so as we look at 5G and telco EDGE, it's about delivery of smarter capabilities and such. I think much of it really is about, in this digital transformation space, about creating new capabilities, creating new experiences, creating new ways of engagement, and engagement and opportunity to customize and personalize, I think most of those are new experiences and new capabilities for most companies. >> So speak about IBM's positioning right now. You're not one of the big three cloud providers, unlikely to become one, but you do have a big cloud business, and you've got the verticals, you've got the multicloud. I know IBM has been a big champion of multicloud. How is IBM distinctively positioned in the cloud market right now? >> Yeah, we are all-in on hybrid cloud and AI, and if you listen to our CEO and chairman, you'll hear that. It is a really consistent message since he came into his role as as our CEO. So being all-in on hybrid cloud and AI, we really are looking to help our clients transform into holistic cloud architecture. So when I say all-in on hybrid cloud, I mean that there's been a lot of, I jokingly say, random acts of cloud usage. People have ended up using cloud because there's some SaaS function that they want, or some particular line of business has been highly motivated to pursue some service on a particular cloud. And hybrid cloud is really about taking a step back, having a holistic architecture for cloud consumption. And in that sense, clouds are IBM's partners. And we're really looking to enable our clients to have consistency in their deployments, to consolidate across their IT estate and across their cloud deployments so that they can have a common platform, so they can have efficiency in how their developers deploy capabilities, so they can deploy more quickly with security and compliance patterns, and have oversight over everything that's going on in a consistent way that really enables them to have that velocity in their business. And so when we then position things like industry cloud, we're leveraging IBM-specific technologies to deliver differentiated capabilities in data privacy, data protection, security and compliance, for these industries, in public cloud, yes, but it's in the context of helping our clients overall across all the different things, some of which may not need all of that data privacy or be leveraging particular SaaS content. We're looking to help them really have cloud architecture, have a holistic conversation across hybrid cloud, and yet to still be able to choose particular cloud deployments on our cloud for industries that enables data protection and policy for the most sensitive and enterprise grade things that they're looking to do at the core of their business. >> So speaking of hybrid hybrid cloud, the major cloud providers, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle's another one, all have on-premises offerings right now. Several of them are working with telcos to expand their reach out into co-location and into telecom data centers, all of this being to enable this distributed cloud fabric, a hybrid cloud fabric. What's IBM's play in this area? Do you have a similar strategy or is it different? >> Yeah, I really think, and I think you maybe wanted to get a little bit into trends and predictions here in this conversation, and we absolutely see that need for distributed cloud, for cloud to really be alive in all the places where it needs to be, in all the places that someone is doing business, and in a consistent way across cloud environments, to be one of those major trends that's emerging as a really hot conversation. We have introduced IBM Cloud Satellite, that is IBM's hybrid cloud, as a service platform. It enables our clients to leverage OpenShift and Kubernetes environments, developer tooling, consistency in a cloud catalog, visibility and control over all their resources across different environments, and to be able to run end-to-end with consistency from on-premises, to EDGE, to different public cloud providers, and this is absolutely something that, across industries but within, also, those industries, that we're focused on in particular, that we're seeing a lot of interesting conversations emerge, because if cloud is everywhere, if cloud is distributed and can be on premises and in public cloud, it enables this consistency and this parity, really that brings together that seamlessness, not just the random acts of cloud usage. It means that using cloud can be something that drives speed of release of new product. It means that you can deliver more capability and functionality into a retail outlet where you're doing business, or a banking brick-and-mortar location. You can have AI for IT ops and understand what's going on across those different environments, and ensure things are kept secure, and patched, and updated, and you're responding to incidents in efficient ways. And so, really, having a consistent cloud environment and a distributed cloud environment across different locations, it's really key to leveraging the promises of what everyone had originally hoped to get out of cloud computing. >> And of course, one of IBM's distinctive advantages in this area is, you've got a huge hardware install base out there. How do all those 360 mainframes figure into this? >> Yeah, with the OpenShift capabilities and our (audio skips) relations with Red Hat in this area, we are able to actually help our clients leverage Kubernetes, and Linux, and all those things, even on the mainframe. So across the mainframe family, the IBM power family, where folks may also have AIX or IBM i deployments, people can now do Linux, they can do OpenShift, they can do Kubernetes, and we have core technologies that enable that really to be stitched together, and I think that's one of the unique perspectives that IBM has in this whole conversation about hybrid cloud. There are many different definitions of hybrid cloud, but we really view it as stretching from the traditional enterprise IT, like you said, there's a lot of IT out there, and being able to also incorporate OpenShift and Kubernetes in a common cloud platform, on traditional enterprise IT, on private cloud, on fresh deployments, on private cloud, Amazon public cloud, that really is the whole IT estate. So when we talk about hybrid cloud, when we talk about distributed cloud, we're really talking about the entirety of the IT state, not just new deployments of SaaS, or something like that. >> So as someone who's on the front lines of what customers are asking about cloud, do you see customer, the questions that they're asking, changing? Are their decision criteria changing for how they choose a cloud provider? >> Yeah, I think that there's definitely a lot more conversation, and especially in this current era where there's an accelerated rate of cloud adoption, there's a lot more conversation around things like security, data protection, data privacy, being able to run in an environment that you trust not just, is it a cloud and what does it do, but can I trust it? Do I understand how my data is protected, how my workloads are secured? That's really why we started Cloud for Financial Services, because that industry shepherds such vital data, so the reason that they are highly regulated is because of the importance of what they are stewarding, very important data and financial information. So we began there with the Cloud for Regulated Industries, there with with Financial Services, but I see that across all industries. I was participating on a panel with a bunch of CIOs, and I was there interviewing some CIOs who were from a much more consumer-facing, and also from from foods industry, et cetera, and their conversation was exactly the same as I have with many other clients, which is that their cloud choices, their efficiency in cloud deployment, now are largely driven by the ability to get to a secure posture and the ability to demonstrate to their internal security and risk teams that they understand their data protection and data privacy posture. So we are seeing lots of pickup and conversation opportunity around confidential computing, specifically, and that's really about enabling our clients to have full authority and privacy in their computing, in their code, in their data, even when running in a cloud environment. And so I do see a shift. Everyone's more concerned about security, and I think we have great technologies, and we've been working with core partners to establish, and harden, and create generations of technology that can really answer those questions. >> I have to ask you about that term, confidential computing. I haven't heard that before. What does that involve? >> Yeah, it is a buzzword to watch out here for in 2021. So confidential computing means being able to run in an environment where there are others, in a cloud computing environment, for example, but still have full privacy and authority over what you're doing. So you are effectively in an enclave. Imagine yourself protected and secured. And so our confidential computing technology is, we're actually on, basically, our fourth generation of the hardware and software technologies to create that strong degree of isolation. This enables us to deliver a really rich portfolio, frankly, the richest portfolio in the industry, of actual services delivered using confidential computing and secure enclaves. And so we can enable our customers to solution things in a way, for example, where their data can not even be visible to our cloud operators, or where they retain full control over a database, and have full privacy as they're running in that environment. These are really great considerations, but they impact everything from health care, financial services. We have other partners and clients who are working to protect consumer data through these means, et cetera. And so across different industries, everyone's really looking at this topic of data privacy and data protection. And so we have a whole suite and a whole family of confidential computing-based services that we're able to offer, to offer those assurances and that privacy to them in their cloud computing. >> I do have to ask you about the multicloud, because this is a topic of constant debate in the industry of whether customers want to shift workloads across multiple clouds to protect themselves from lock-in. Is that a fantasy? Is that too restrictive? This has been a key part of IBM strategy is enabling the multicloud. How do you see customer attitudes developing right now? How do they want to use multiple clouds, or, in fact, do they? Are they concentrating perhaps more of their workloads in one or two? >> Yeah, we believe vendor lock-in goes against the true spirit of hybrid cloud, that desire to have consistency across environments, that desire to- and the business need to have continuity and resiliency and operations, et cetera, and so I do see this as a really important topic. From the perspective of managing environments, I think in multicloud, I think folks are starting to realize that multicloud isn't necessarily a strategy, it's a reality. People have deployments in lots of different cloud environments that happen somewhat organically, in many cases, and so the key question is how to then get to visibility and control over those resources. I think two of the core topics in that are multicloud management, being able to understand clusters, and virtual machines, and other things that are deployed across different environments, and manage them with a common set of policies, for example. And then, in addition to multicloud management, AI for IT operations is another really important topic in multicloud, being able to respond to incidents, understand and analyze and leverage AI for understanding what's going on across those environments is another really core topic. And then as you said, distributed cloud is a means of getting that consistency. Having a common control and deployment plane across those different environments can help it not just be accidental usage of multiple cloud environments, but very intentional deployment, based on the needs of particular workloads to the environment that they're best suited to. And that's really what you want to aim for. Not that multicloud is necessarily, I guess I would say, is a- It is a complexity that is manageable through these new types of technologies and multicloud management, and such like that, and distributed cloud. >> Well, Hillery 'tis the season for predictions, it's January. Everyone's prognosticating about what the future will look like. What do you think are going to be the main trend lines in cloud this year? >> Yeah, I sprinkled a few in there as we were talking, but I really do think that the conversation around hybrid cloud, number one, how to have an open innovation ecosystem for cloud, where you have consistency across environments, not just random acts of cloud usage, but intentional and holistic architecture. I really see that as the transition, as the second wave of of cloud adoption. And then, secondly, is we were talking earlier about security. Everyone is wondering about data policy, data privacy. We've always taken a strong stance that our client's data is their data. We are not going to be using their data to further develop our AI services on our cloud, or something. We have deployed technologies in confidential computing that enable them to keep full control over their keys so that even our cloud operators don't have access to data, computing in secure enclaves where they have a strong degree of isolation and full privacy and authority over their workload. I really think these two topics, open and secure hybrid computing and with consistency across environments, with distributed cloud technology, and secondly, security. I think these are really important topics for 2021. And they may seem a little bit obvious, but I think it's important as people look at this to look for technologies that are multiple generations into this journey, partner with folks who are committed very clearly to an open ecosystem and open source innovation on the one hand, and secondly, when we talk about security and data protection, you want to know that that provider is several generations into that journey so you really know that that technology has been vetted out, is at production scale, and has a stable basis. And so I think this is the year when folks are transitioning from cloud adoption to consistency in cloud, and security and privacy in cloud. >> A final question, and it has nothing to do with cloud. You're an IBM Fellow, and I see that term turn up occasionally with other other people I've spoken to from IBM. What is an IBM Fellow, how do you become one, and what privileges and responsibilities does it entail? >> Yeah, it's an exciting opportunity to be an IBM Fellow. There's about a hundred active IBM Fellows right now, so there aren't too many of us, but there is a small community of us. IBM Fellow is IBM's highest technical designation within our technical population, so I do have a role within our cloud business, but as one of our technical leaders, get to interact with the other Fellows, work on strategy for IBM in technology overall as a company, and I also get to be a trusted advisor to many of our clients, and so I get to work with CTOs and CIOs and VP of Application Development profiles, and VP of IT, and things like that, in our different clients, and really help them wrestle through those struggles of future IT transformation. And so part of what I enjoy most about the role, and the Fellow role, is being able to be that trusted advisor to many of our clients. There's been so much change in this last year for everyone, and being able to also help our technical population through that, in various means, and then help our clients through all of that change, and really being able to take and grasp onto the opportunities that this last year has had in the way that we work has changed, and the way that companies are looking to deliver capabilities has changed. So that's, for me, the exciting part of the role. >> Well, you're one in a hundred, then, and you do a great job of articulating the IBM strategy, and also the cloud landscape. Hillery Hunter, VP and CTO, excuse me, CTO of IBM Cloud, thank you so much for joining us today on Cube on Cloud. >> Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure. >> I'm Paul Gillin, stick with us. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. Today we're going to have a CUBE conversation really about this kind of ongoing evolution of cloud, and it was a huge deal, and AWS came on the scene and really launched kind of the public cloud evolution, which not only was a different technology stack, but really a different way to think about things, a different way to think about workloads. And that has evolved to hybrid cloud and multicloud, and it just continues to evolve over time. So we're going to get some of the experts in from IBM to talk about their perspective and what they're doing all about it. So we're excited to invite our next guest. She is Briana Frank. She's the director of product management for IBM. Briana, good to see you. Where are you joining us from today? >> I am joining you from Wake Forest, North Carolina. And as you can see, I'm from my home office, but always busy working and fun doing things in the cloud and thinking about new technologies even when we're at home. >> Excellent. And also joining us, many-time CUBE alumni Jason McGee, IBM fellow, vice president and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform. Jason, great to see you again. I looked it up before we turned on the cameras. I think you've been on, like, eight times. So you're definitely a VIP in the CUBE alumni world. Where are you joining us from today? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm in Apex, which is outside of Raleigh, and great to be here again. It's always fun to talk to you guys. It's been a little while, but great to be back. >> Yeah, so let's just jump into it, right? You've all seen the memes revolving around what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CIO, or COVID? And we all know the answer to the question. It's really been an interesting time, right? It was kind of a light switch moment in mid-March. And then people are saying, you know, years and years of digital transformation kind of suddenly compressed into this light switch moment. But now we're months and months and months later, we're in October, and it's clear that this is not just a a one-time fix and wait till we all go back to work. This is going to continue for a while. And cloud is such a huge enabler. Had this happened five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the ability for information workers, like the businesses that we're in, would've been much more difficult. So acknowledging that there's still a lot of people hurting, a lot, hospitality industry, restaurant industry, sports places that aggregate people, concerts. We're fortunate we're in the information industry. And I'd just love to get your perspective, Jason, on cloud as an enabling platform and really an enabling way of thinking about things that have made this transition a little bit less painful than it otherwise would've been. >> Yeah, that's a great point, Jeff, and I think on one hand it's been pretty amazing to see how much our industry in technology and IT has been able to kind of adapt to COVID, adapt to working at home, adapt to these kinds of changing models. But what's been really interesting is as someone who spends all their time thinking about cloud every day, it's been really incredible to see how much it's accelerated people's adoption of cloud. Like, obviously everyone was leveraging cloud. They had plans to move more and more workloads to cloud. But I think over the last six months we've really seen a massive acceleration, and I also think kind of a mindset shift that maybe before there was some hesitation and conversation about what things move to cloud and what things don't, and that seems to have kind of gone away, and everyone's like, this is the model that not only will carry us through moments like this, but we have newfound confidence that it's the right model for us to move the majority of our businesses to. >> Right. >> So really massive acceleration. >> Massive acceleration. And Briana, get your take, 'cause you're a product manager, so you're in the weeds on the speeds and feeds and the features and functions. Cloud as a concept sounds kind of simple, but the execution is not so simple. And we've seen kind of this morphing from moving your test dev maybe to a public cloud, IBM has a cloud, to there's some stuff that just can't go on the cloud or shouldn't go to the cloud or I'm not sure if it should go in the cloud. So now we're hearing talk of hybrid cloud and multicloud, and we're hearing pieces of public cloud in my own data center and pieces of my own data center in a public cloud. It's a pretty complicated space. I wonder if you can kind of share your perspective as this thing morphs from kind of a simple concept and a beautiful little icon to a much more complex execution in the real world. >> Well, great question and insights. And I think, building off of what Jason said, I think the most important shift I've seen is really a mind shift, a mindset shift. And there's so much more empathy that I'm seeing across the board, whether it's children running in the background or cats and pets, there's a lot more tolerance for work-life balance and a lot more empathy for how people are getting through this really challenging pandemic. And what I think is interesting is that kind of carries over into the technology. And so now where some of our clients were solving problems like keeping their workforce safe by using video analytics to see if someone's using or wearing maybe a hard hat in a construction zone. Now that use case has sort of shifted, and now it's is someone wearing a mask? Do they have a temperature? How do we make sure that the office areas are sanitized and clean so that when people go back to work, they'll be working in a safe environment? So I think that the mindset shift is really driving a lot of these technology innovations. And then of course you need cloud to make those real. So I think that's the kind of aha moment I've seen is that people are leading with empathy and that's driving kind of the next wave of innovation that I'm seeing. >> I have to say I've been doing these many, many years, and Briana, I don't think anyone has brought up empathy at the at the head end of the open. And I love that 'cause I think that's a way to think about it, right? 'Cause these are people trying to execute business activities, and it's not easy. And that's a really great take. Jason, I want to go back to you and talk about one of the things we talked about the cloud, but really it's about enabling applications, right? And really, the application now has become this first class citizen where it's, this is the app I want. Cloud enables me to use whatever infrastructure I need versus this is the infrastructure I have. Hm, what can I put on this app? So I'd love to get your take. As you said, you think about cloud all the time, but really, cloud is an app enabler. And how has, as that capability has been gifted to people, how has that made the the cloud execution a lot more complex? >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think you're hitting on a really key transformation that's happened in cloud over the last few years, which is that it's gone from infrastructure kind of cost optimization to an application delivery accelerator. And what I think that's caused is everyone's starting to kind of move their thinking up the stack in cloud, and you see the rise of technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift as a platform that enables application developers to build applications and deliver them more quickly. I think the acceleration that we've been talking about here has cemented that. At the end of the day, we're all trying to figure out in our businesses how to adapt to change. We have some new changes this year that maybe we didn't predict we would have last year. We're trying to figure out how to adapt to those to deliver new capabilities, to maybe build a digital experience for something that we didn't have a digital experience for before, 'cause now nobody is face to face. And that requires cloud to be much more application-centric. It requires cloud, you alluded to this kind of evolution. I think it's starting to drive cloud into more places. Cloud isn't about just getting into some big cloud data center somewhere. Cloud is about a style of working and a set of technologies that I want to be able to consume wherever I need them. So that kind of application-centric capability and the rise of cloud-native technologies I think go hand in hand. >> Right, so it got to us from a simple dev swiping a credit card to do a little project on Amazon to now enterprising having very complex ecosystems, right? Very complex situation because they've got lots of different clouds and lots of different apps running on lots of different clouds, and the application and the control of those is now much more complicated than probably when you just had it all in your own data center or if you're some cloud data organization and you grew up on the public cloud and you really are kind of a single app that happens to be a big one in hyperscale. So I'm curious, Briana, you guys have a ton of customers. What are they telling you about what they're doing with hybrid cloud, managing hybrid cloud, trying to get back to some of the simplicity and kind of the simplistic vision and execution when what's happening is probably increasing complexity as different apps are running on different clouds, different places. >> Yeah, great question. You know, I think that what we're hearing from our clients is really a couple of things. One is that they have to find ways to unburden their teams. They only have limited resources and the sky's the limit in terms of what's possible. So they need to be able to innovate faster, but they have to unburden the team. So the rise of "as a service" I think is really coming into its own because teams don't have time to manage things like Kubernetes. They have to go higher in the stack and really start to build and innovate for their own business differentiation. But another I think really important thing that we're hearing from our clients is that we have to meet them where they are in their journey. So what you said was great. A lot of our clients are using five to nine different clouds today, and that's extraordinarily fragmented, and being able to manage and have one way to see what workload is running where and what is running on that workload is really important. And having kind of one single pane of glass where they can manage everything is one of the single most important features that I hear that is needed. And I think the other thing that I hear a lot from clients is they need flexibility. They need flexibility for, you know, where they are in their journey. Some folks, they need to be able to deploy to existing infrastructure that they have in their data center, and others need to be able to deploy to another public cloud. And having the flexibility to run anywhere is one of the more common themes that I'm seeing. >> Right, so, and you guys built something to help with that, right? It's the IBM cloud satellite. So you just basically outlined the customer challenge, so what did you have to do to enable them to have a single pane of glass, to have more control across these disparate projects running in disparate clouds. >> Well, so one of the things that we found is our clients really, all of the agility that they need to adopt cloud data best practices, really comes from the public cloud. The public cloud services, DevOps, all the tools that allow you to really run and move faster and innovate faster, but they needed that ability to consume those public cloud services anywhere. So at the edge, on another public cloud, or in their existing infrastructure. And of course there's tons of infrastructure options. We have infrastructure for our clients that they can use. We have turnkey appliances. But really having that public cloud, cloud-native agility, but really bringing that anywhere that our clients want to run it is the key to satellite. >> Right, right. So it's not kind of what would be typically thought of as a hybrid cloud solution per se, but it's really almost kind of a level up, if I'm hearing you correctly, in controlling all the different kind of instances or instantiations of your cloud execution. That'd be accurate, Jason? >> Yeah, well, or maybe another way to think about it is it's a way of consuming hybrid, right? It's a way of consuming these hybrid cloud capabilities. Hybrid starts with a common platform, and this idea that we are using things like OpenShift as that common technology platform that enables customers to build applications once and run them anywhere. What satellite brings to the table is it takes that base technology platform and it delivers it as a cloud service, and a cloud service that's flexible enough to be anywhere. And so you kind of combine the best of both. You combine a common technology approach and you combine the as a service API-based consumption model of public cloud to get a hybrid strategy that's super flexible, right? And now really lets customers focus on the work that they're doing going faster. And at IBM, we've been pretty clear that we think the future of hybrid cloud computing is rooted in technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift, that that's the platform of the future. The acquisition of Red Hat was motivated by that strategy. Our public cloud for the last three-plus years has been built internally on top of the same technologies. And so what we've done with satellite from a technology perspective is we've taken the things that we do in our cloud and we've used the power of of Kubernetes and OpenShift to deliver those anywhere, right? And to give customers that same experience on their infrastructure or on some other public cloud. >> Right. I love it because it's kind of cloud on cloud, if you will, but it really supports this notion of the customer experience, and even more importantly in some ways, the developer experience to make sure that your developers inside the house are feeling good, have a great productive environment so they can do a better job with what they're working on. And that that sounds like something they would really, really enjoy and be native to the way they're used to working already. >> It's interesting too, one of the kind of interesting, I don't know, adoption trends we're starting to see with approaches like satellite is if you think about cloud, I'll oversimplify, but you could say there's kind of two big transformations. One is move my workload to a public cloud, and the other is change how my team works, right? Adopt cloud-native, agile best practices. And often to get to the culture change of the team, you had to start with moving the app, but that's hard, especially for the kind of 80% of workloads that we're seeing move to cloud now where they're complex. They have lots of ties into data that you have in your data center. So it's hard to move them sometimes. So with approaches like satellite, you can kind of flip the order. You can bring the cloud in house, if you will. You can start to adopt self-service and API-based consumption and DevOps and change how your teams work and make them more efficient without moving the applications. And then later, if it makes sense to move them, you can, right? And I think that's really powerful. >> Right, right. Briana, I want to go back to you on kind of the nuts and bolts. 'Cause I don't know if you've read "Innovator's Dilemma" by Christian Clayton. You should if you haven't. But one of the things is how do you prioritize what you're building? How do you prioritize your feature stack? Because you have to, right? You have to put one in front of the other, and it's going to drive your design decisions and what you ultimately ship. So as you were thinking about satellite, what were kind of your top-level design priorities that you're really building this towards that you wanted to make sure you really nailed? >> Oh, what a great question. I love that question. I'm so passionate about product and design and I think we take it very seriously at IBM, and it's, we have an amazing design department, if you will, at IBM. And one of the things we do is just relentlessly interview our clients, and we really try to understand what their main issues are. And one of the first use cases that we we looked at was actually in the financial industry, which was, in the financial services industry, the differentiation is really all about the technology itself, and so they're constantly having to innovate at a faster pace so they can bring new features and functions to their clients but they have this dilemma where they have to, in some cases, in many cases, keep the data on-prem in a specific location. And that starts to get really interesting, because sometimes the regulations, it could be country, it could be a compliance thing, but for whatever reason, there is a specific requirement, and sometimes that comes with a fine if that data doesn't reside in that location. So having the ability to move at an incredibly fast pace and keep innovating, but keep that data on-prem and offload the management of Kubernetes and the services that allow them to move fast. That was one of the first use cases that we tackled. And I think that's a pretty important one, because if you can get that right, that starts to permeate all other industries, because you want to, you have to be secure. You have to make sure that the data resides and is on-prem and in a specific location and that it's auditable. So I think that was one of our first use cases, and that has served us really well. We also, one of the things that we do inside of IBM is that we co-develop using our own internal workloads. And so we use the data and AI team within IBM will GA with us when we GA IBM Cloud Satellite, and so their workloads are running on top of satellite. And I think that's a great way to come to market because when you're delivering an MVP, but if you can deliver an MVP that's already running a really complex AI workload, that's a pretty impressive MVP, if you ask me. So we try to do that whenever we release new products, and I think that has served us very well because it really forces us to solve the really hard problems first. We don't have a choice. We have to be able to make some pretty strategic choices upfront to be able to deliver something like that. >> That's great. Jason, I want to go back to you and talk about a little bit beyond the cloud, but things that are really interesting and happening, right? You already talked about this big enabler with containers and Kubernetes, but this next thing that's coming, right, is just edge, which is an extension of the cloud, an outpost to the cloud, but this whole concept of getting outside of the data center but actually now starting to bring the compute to the devices that generate the data as well as need that. How do you see that kind of impacting your cloud thoughts? I love that you're thinking cloud all the time. And the other piece, keying off of what Briana just said, is applied AI, right? I mean, I think we all would agree that AI and machine learning as kind of a standard, generic thing is okay, but really the application of the AI and the machine learning for specific use cases is where we're seeing huge, huge benefit. And I would imagine there's many, many kind of areas within cloud execution that AI and machine learning can start to add even more and more and more efficiencies and automation. >> Sure, sure. So maybe a couple comments. I mean, I think the edge thing is so interesting because if you really kind of step back and think about what we were talking about with cloud, what is a cloud is becoming much more diverse. Started as it's these three regions and it's becoming everybody's data centers plus on-prem, and then it's becoming edge, large edge locations, and then it's becoming devices. So clouds are becoming pervasive as a concept across all IT consumption models. And there's core technologies, even, like containers that we think apply at all those levels. They apply in the core cloud, in the data center, at the edge, in a device. And so things like satellite certainly give us a mechanism to push that boundary, to push closer to the end user. And there's a ton of scenarios motivating that. 5G telecommunications and high-speed networking for mobile devices is necessitating pushing closer to where the data's getting generated. IoT, same thing. If you think about the IoT edge case, that's massive data generation. You don't necessarily want to backhaul that all the way back to a central cloud. You want to be able to do AI and training and inferencing on that data close to where it lives. And so you need this whole idea of cloud to kind of expand, and if it doesn't, then what happens is all of these different use cases become like different technology stacks or different operational models and you get tons of complexity. So it's this really interesting intersection, and I think we're getting much more complex in how we deploy, but we're trying to put common ideas over the top of it to simplify, and I think that's pretty interesting. On the AI question, you're right, there's tons of places where AI, applied AI will come into the picture. At IBM, we're doing a ton of work on AI for IT operations and how do we apply AI modeling to monitoring, to resiliency, even to workload placement. I mean, just think about the world we just described. As a customer, maybe I have IBM cloud and I have 20 satellite locations in all our fun places in the world, and now I have to make decisions about what runs where and where should I deploy my workloads and what's the most efficient way to place workloads to get availability or better performance, and AI plays a role there. So I see a really bright future as we build out this infrastructure to then use AI as a mechanism to further simplify the customer's consumption of cloud. >> Yeah, that's great. So I want to give you both the last word before we sign off, and that was a good summary, Jason. Cloud's been around for a while and it gets tossed around, and again, now we have hybrid and multi and all these different flavors. You guys are in the weeds and you're seeing down the road a little bit. What is it about cloud that most people probably aren't talking about when you kind of look in your crystal ball, obviously don't share any secrets that you can't share, that gets you excited and makes you think, wow, we're still really, hard to believe, but really in the early days of what this really, the kind of opportunities that this opens up. And I'll go with you first, Briana. >> Well, that's a great question. I think we're already starting to see that with the example of all of the work that we're seeing in the COVID space. It just feels like whatever challenge that might lie ahead in our future, we have an ability to quickly iterate and change and adapt. It's so interesting to see how fast we can roll out new technologies and new ideas. Things that would take years to put together you can kind of put together in a week or so with a quick POC. And that's really an exciting kind of place to be that you can adapt and change so quickly. So I think that's one. And I do think your point about edge is really an important one. There's more and more opportunities to distribute workloads closer to, compute goes closer to where the users are, so therefore you're reducing latency, so you're getting instant feedback. And I think that's really going to be interesting. And then I think the third element, again, is like security and compliance. How do you know exactly that your data stays exactly where you want it to, and you can have proof and you can audit that data. I think that's really where the future's headed. >> Yeah, that's great. And Jason, to you, what's getting you up in the morning today? >> Oh, you don't want to know what gets me up today. But if we talk about what's coming, so for me, my whole career, I've really been thinking about applications. And I think one of the kind of macro trends that everyone doesn't always see that's going on in cloud is we're switching from an IT infrastructure-centric view of computing to an application-centric view. And all of these things we've been talking about are kind of steps along that journey. We're getting to a point where I can build applications, I can build them in a consistent way, I can deploy them anywhere in the world on this incredibly diverse infrastructure. As a developer, I have simple, immediate access to world-class capabilities, to specialized hardware. We are really in the midst of a transformation on how we build computing technology and really a democratization of that technology that 10 or 15 years ago you wouldn't have had the, most people would not have had the funds to stand up the technology they needed to build these things. And that's what really gets me excited, because I think about, well, then what's all the innovation that's going to come from that? As more and more developers have access to this powerful infrastructure in these diverse ways, what are they going to create? And that's what's, I think, going on under the covers. I think we're in the middle of a generational transformation of technology that will result in things we can't predict today because we'll open up so many people's ability to leverage that platform. >> What a great thought to close on, Jason, 'cause I think we hear that consistently all the time. What's the key to innovation? Give more people the access to the tools, give more people access to the data and more people the power to do something with it and create. And we hear all the time about the disadvantaged classes of people that just didn't get the opportunity, and if all those people had the same school, the same education, and now the same basically infinite compute power at their disposal, what are they going to invent? And I think it's an exciting future, and I think that's a great place to close. So we'll leave it at that. I want to thank you both for checking in. Briana, great to meet you, and Jason, always good to see you, as well. >> Yeah, nice to meet you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thank you. >> All right, thanks a lot and have a great day. >> Thank you. >> All right, that was Briana and Jason. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> From ''theCUBE studios,'' in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is ''theCUBE Conversation.'' >> Hi, I'm John Walls. And as we're all aware, technology continues to evolve these days at an incredible pace and it's changing the way industries are doing their business all over the world and that's certainly true in telecommunications, CSPs all around the globe are developing plans on how to leverage the power of 5G technology and their network operations are certainly central to that mission. That is the genesis of ''IBM's Cloud for Telecommunications Service.'' That's a unified open hybrid architecture, that was recently launched and was developed to provide telecoms with the solutions they need to meet their very unique network demands and needs. I want us to talk more about that. I'm joined by Steve Canepa, who is the Global GM and Managing Director of the communication sector at IBM. Steve, good to see you today. >> Yeah, you too, John. >> And Jeffrey Hammond. So, he's the Principal Analyst and Vice President at Forrester. Jeffrey, thank you for your time as well today. Good to see you. >> Thanks a lot. It's great to be here. >> Yeah, Steve, let's just jump right in. First off, I mean, to me, the overarching question is, why telecom, I know that IBM has been very focused on providing these kinds of industries specific services, you've done very well in finance, now you're shifting over to telecom. What was the driver there? >> First, great to be with you today, John, and, you know, if we look at the marketplace, especially in 2020, I think the one thing that's, everyone can agree with, is that the rate and pace of change is just really accelerating and is a very, very dynamic marketplace. And so, if we look at the way both our personal lives are now guided by connectivity, and the use of multiple devices throughout the day, the same with our professional lives. So, connectivity really sits at the heart of how value and solutions are delivered and for businesses, this is becoming a critical issue. So, as we work with the telecommunication providers around the world, we're helping them transform their business to make it much more agile, to make it open and make them deliver new services much more quickly and to engage digitally with their clients to bring that kind of experience that we all expect now, so, that the rate pace of change, and the need for the telecommunications industry to bring new value, is really driving a tremendous opportunity for us to work with them. >> Jeffrey what's happening in the telecom space? That, I mean, these aren't just small trends, right? These are tectonic shifts that are going on in terms of their new capabilities and their needs. I'm sure this digital transformation has been driven in some part by COVID, but there are other forces going on here, I would assume too. What do you see from your analyst seat? >> Yeah, I look at it, you know, from a glass half full and a glass half empty approach. From a half empty approach, the shifts to remote work and remote learning, and from traditional retail channels, brick and mortar channels to digital ones, have really put a strain on the existing networking infrastructure, especially, at the Edge, but they've also demonstrated just how critical it is to get that right. You know, as an example, I'm actually talking to you today over my hotspot on my iPhone. So, I think a lot more about the performance of my local cell tower now than I ever did a year ago. and I want it to be as good as it can possibly be and give me as many capabilities as it can. From a glass half full perspective, the opportunities that a modernized network infrastructure gives us are, I think, more readily apparent than ever, you know, most of my wife's doctor's appointments have shifted to remote appointments and every time she calls up to connect, I kind of cringe in the other room and it's like, are they going to get video working? Are they going to get audio working? Are they actually going to have to shift to an old-style phone call to make this happen? Well, things like 5G really are poised to solve those kinds of challenges. They promise, 5G promises, exponential improvements in connectivity speed, capacity, and reductions in latency that are going to allow us to look at some really interesting workloads, IOT workloads, automation workloads, and a lot of Edge use cases. I think 5G sets the stage or Edge compute. Expanding Edge compute scenarios, make it possible to distribute data and services where businesses can best optimize their outcomes, whether it's IOT enabled assets, whether it's connected environments, whether it's personalization, whether it's rich content, AI, or even extended reality workloads. So, you might seem like, that's what a little over the horizon, but it's actually not that far away. And as companies gain the ability to manage and analyze and localize their data, and unlocks real-time insights in a way that they just haven't had before, it can drive expanded engagement and automation in close proximity to the end point devices and customers. And none of that happens without the telco providers and the infrastructure that they own being on board and providing the capabilities for developers like me to take advantage of the infrastructure that they've put in place. So, my perspective on it is, that transformation, that digital transformation, is not going to happen on its own. Someone's got to provision the infrastructure, someone's got to write the code, someone's got to get the services as close to my cell tower or to the Edge as possible and so, that's one of the reasons that when we ask decision makers in the telco space about their priorities from a business perspective, what they tell us is, one of their top three priorities is, we need to improve our ability to innovate and the other two are, we need to grow our revenue and we need to improve our product and services. What's going on from a software perspective in the telco space, is set to make all three of those possible, from my perspective. >> You know, Steve, Jeffrey just unpacked an awful lot there, did a really nice job of that. So, let's talk about first off, that telco relationship IBM's had, or has. You work with data, the 10 largest communication service providers in the world, and I'm sure you're on this journey with them, right? They've been telling you about their challenges and you recognize their needs. This is, you have had maybe some specific examples of that dialogue, that has progressed as your relationship has matured and you provide a different service to them. What are they telling you? What did they tell you say, '' This is where we have got to get better. We've got to get a little sharper, a little leaner.'' And then how did IBM respond to that? >> Yeah, I mean, critical to what Jeffrey just shared is under the covers. You know, 5G is going to take five times the cost that 4G took to deploy. So, if you're a telco, you have to get much more efficient. You have to drive a much more effective TCO into cost of deploying and managing and running that network architecture. When the network becomes a software defined platform, it opens up the opportunity to use open source, open technology, and to drive a tremendous ecosystem of innovation that you can then capture that value onto that open software network. And as the Edge emerged as compute and storage and connectivity, both to the Edge as Jeffrey described, then the opportunity to deliver B2B use cases to take advantage of the latency improvements with 5G, take advantage of the bandwidth capabilities that you have moving video and AI out to the Edge, so, you can create insights as a service. These are the underlying transformations that the telcos are making right now to capture this value. And in fact, we have an institute for business value on our website. You can see some of the surveys and analysis we've done but 84% of the telco clients say, you know, '' Improving the automation and the intelligence of this network platform becomes critical.'' So, from our standpoint, we see a tremendous opportunity to create an open architecture to allow the telcos to regain control of their architecture so that they can pick the solutions and services that work best for them to create value for their customers and then allows them to deploy them incredibly quickly. In fact, just this last week, we announced a milestone with Bharti, a project that we're doing in India, already has over 300 million subscribers. We've taken their ability to deploy their run environment, one of the core domains of the network, where you actually do the access over the cell towers. We've improved that from weeks down to a few days. In fact, our objective is to get to a few minutes. Applying that kind of automation dramatically improves the kind of service they can deliver. When we talk about relationships we have with Vodafone, AT$T, Verizon, about working with them on their mobile Edge compute platforms, it will allow them to extend their network. In fact, with our cloud announcement that you highlighted at the top, we announced a capability called the IBM Cloud Satellite and what IBM Cloud Satellite does is, it's built with Red Hat, so, it's open architecture, it takes advantage of the millions and millions of upstream developers, that are developing every single day to build a foundational shift architecture that allows us to deploy these services so quickly and we can move that capability right now to the Edge. What that means for a telco, is they can deploy those services wherever they want to deploy them, on their private infrastructure or on a public cloud, on a customer's premise, that gives them the flexibility. The automation allows them to do it smartly and very quickly and then in partnering with clients, they can create new end Edge services, things like, you know, manufacturing 4.0 you may have heard of or as you mentioned, advanced healthcare services. Every single industry is going to take advantage of these changes and we're really excited about the opportunity to work in combination with the telcos and speed the pace of innovation in the market. >> Jeffrey, I'd like to go back to the Bharti there. I was going to get into it a little bit later but Steve brought it up. This major Indian CSP, as you mentioned, 300 million subs, 400 million around the world. What does that say to you in terms of its commitment and its, the needs that are being addressed and how it's going to fundamentally change the way it is doing business as far as setting the pace in the telecom industry? >> Well, I think, one of the things that highlights it is, you know, this isn't just a U.S phenomenon or a European phenomenon. Indeed, in some cases we're seeing countries outside the U.S in advance, moving faster, Switzerland, as an example. We expect 90% of the population in Germany to be covered by 5G By 2025, we expect 90% of the population in South Korea to be covered by 2026, 160 million connections in in China as well. So, in some ways, what's happening in the telco world is mirroring what has happened in the public cloud world, which is the world's gone flat. And that's great from a developer perspective because that means that I don't have to learn specialized technologies or specialized services, in order to look at these network infrastructure platforms as part of the addressable surface that I have. That's one of the things that I think has always held the larger developer population back and has kept them from taking advantage of the telco networks. Is, they've always been bit of a black box to the vast majority of developers, you know, IP goes in, IP comes out but that's about all the control I have, unless I want to go and dig deep into those, you know, industry specific specifications. I was cleaning out my office last week because I'm in the process of moving and I came across my '' IMS Explained Handbook from 2006,'' and I remember going deep into that because, you know, we were told that that's going to make it so that IT infrastructure and telco infrastructure is going to converge and it did to a little bit, but not in a way that all the developers out there could really take advantage of telco infrastructure. And then I remember the next thing was like, well, '' Java Amiens on the front end with mobile clients, that's going to make everything different and we're going to be able to build apps everywhere.'' What ended up being was we would write once and test everywhere, across all the different devices that we had to support. And you know, what really drove you equity? Was the iPhone and apps that we could use HTML like technology or that we could use Java to build and it exploded. And we got millions of applications on the front end of the network. What I see potentially happening now, is the same thing on the backend infrastructure side, because the reality is for any developer that is trying to build modern applications, that's trying to take advantage of cloud native technologies, things start with containers and specifically, OCI compliant containers. That is the basis for how we think about building services and handing them off to operators to run them for us. And with what's going on here, by building on top of OpenShift, you take that, you know, essentially de facto standard of containers as the way that we communicate on the infrastructure side globally, from a software development perspective and you make that the entry point for developers into the modern telco outcome system. And so, basically, it means that if I want to push all the way out to the Edge and I want to get as close as I possibly can, as long as I can give you a container to execute that capability, I'm well on the way to making that a reality, that's a game changer in my opinion. >> Yeah, I was on. >> Just to pick it, just if I could, just to pick up on that because I think Jeffrey made a really important point. So, it's kind of like, in a way, an auntie to the ball here is this open architecture because it empowers the entire ecosystem and it allows the telcos to take advantage of enormous innovation that's happening in the marketplace. And that's why, you know, the 35 ecosystem partners that we announced when we announced the IBM Cloud for telco, that's why they're so important because it allows you to have choice. But the other piece, which he hinted at, I wanted to just underscore, is today, in it kind of the first wave of cloud, only about 20% of the applications move to cloud. They were mostly funny digital applications. In fact, we moved our funny digital applications as well into Watson, we have over 1.5 billion customers of telcos today around the world that can access Watson, through our various chatbot and call center or an agent assist solutions we've deployed. But the 80% of applications that haven't moved yet, haven't moved because it's tough to move them, because they're mission critical, they need, you know, regulatory controls, they have to have world-class security, they need to be able to provide data sovereignty as you're operating in different countries around the world and you have to make sure that you have the data in places that you need, these are the attributes, that kind of open up the opportunity for all these other workloads to move. And those are the exact kind of capabilities that we've built into the IBM Cloud for telco, so that we can enable telcos to move their applications into this environment safely, securely, and do it, as Jeffrey described, on an open architecture that gives them that agility and flexibility. And we're seeing it happen real time, you know, I'll just give you another quick example, Vodafone India, their CTO has said publicly and moving to this cloud architecture, he sees it as a universal cloud architecture, so, they're going to run not just their internal it workloads, not just their network services, their voice data and multimedia network services workloads, but also their B2B enterprise workloads, as Jeffrey was starting to describe. Those workloads that are going to move out to the Edge. And by being able to run on a common platform, he's said publicly that they're seeing an 80% improvement in their CapEx, a 50% improvement in their OPEX, and then 90% improvement in the cost to get productions and services deployed. So, the ability to embrace this open architecture and to have the underlying capabilities and attributes in a cloud platform that responds to the specific needs of telco and enterprise workloads, we think is a really powerful combination. >> Steve, the ecosystem, Jeffrey, you brought it up as well. So, I'd like, just to give you a moment to talk about that a little bit, not a small point, by any means you have nearly 40 partners lined up in this respect, from a hardware vendor, software vendors, SAS providers. I mean, it's a pretty impressive lineup and what kind of a statement is that in your, from your perspective, that you're making to the marketplace when you bring that kind of breadth and depth, that kind of bench, basically the game? >> From our view, it's exciting, and we're only getting started. I mean, we literally have not made the announcement, just a matter of a couple of months ago, and every day that passes, we have additional partners that see the power in joining this open architecture approach that we've put in place. The reason that it delivers such values for all the players, you know, one of the hallmarks of a platform approach is that for every player that joins the platform, it brings value to all the players on the cloud. So as we build this ecosystem and we take the leverage of the open source community, and we build on the power of OpenShift and containers, as Jeffrey was saying, we're creating momentum in the marketplace and back to my very first point I made, when the market's moving really quickly, you've got to be agile. And to be agile in today's market, you have to infuse automation at scale, you have to infuse security at scale and you have to infuse intelligence at scale. And that's exactly what we can help the telcos do, and do it in partnership with these enterprise clients. Instinctively >> One of the values of that is that, you know, we're seeing the larger trend in the cloud native space of folks that used to build packaged software services, is essentially taking advantage of these architectural capabilities and containerizing their applications as part of their future strategy. I mean, just two weeks ago, Salesforce basically said, we're reinvisioning Salesforce as a set of containerized workloads that we deliver, SAP is going in very much the same direction. So as you think about these business workloads, where you get data coming from the infrastructure and you want to go all the way back to the back office and you want to make sure that data gets updated in your supply chain management system, being able to do that with a consistent architecture makes these integration challenges just an order of magnitude easier. I actually want to drill in on that data point for a minute because I think that that's also key to understanding what's going on here, because, you know, during the early days of the public cloud and even WebDuo before that, one of the things that drove WebDuo was the idea that data is the new Intel inside and in some ways that was around centralized data because we had 40 or 50 years to get all the data into the data centers and into the, and then put it in the public cloud. But that's not what is happening today. So much of the new data is actually originating at the Edge and increasingly it needs to stay at the Edge if for no other reason than to make sure that the folks that are trying to use it well aren't running up huge ingestion costs, trying to move it all back to the public cloud providers, analyze it and then push it back out and do that within the realm of the laws of physics. So, you know, one of the big things that's driving the Edge is, in the move toward the Edge, and the interest in 5G is that allows us to do more with data where the data originates. So, as an example, a manufacturer that I've been working with that basically came across exactly that problem, as they stood up more and more connected devices, they were seeing their data ingestion volume spiking and kind of running ahead of their budgets for data ingestion but they were like, well, we can't just leave this data and discard it at the Edge, because what happens if it turns out to be valuable for the maintenance, preventative maintenance use cases that we want to run, or for the machine wear characteristics that we want to run. So, we need to find a way to get our models out close to the data so we don't have to bring it all back to the core. In retailing, personalization is something that a lot of folks are looking at right now and even clientelling and that's, again, another situation where you want to get the data close to where the customer actually lives from a geographic basis and into the hands of the person that's in the store but you don't want to necessarily have to go and install a lot of complex hardware in the retail outlet because then somebody has to manage, you know, those servers and manage all those capabilities. So, you know, in the case of the retailer that I was working with, what they wanted was to get that capability as close as possible to the store, but no closer. And the idea of essentially a virtual back office that they could stand up whenever they opened up a new retail outlet, or even had a franchisee open up an outlet, was an extremely powerful concept and that's the kind of thing that you can do when you're saying,'' Well it's just a set of containers and if I have a, you know, essentially a control plane that I deploy it to, then I can do that on top of that telco provider that they sign up to be a strategic services provider.'' There are lots of other interesting scenarios, tourism, if you think about, you know, the tourist economies that we have around the world and the data that, you know, mobile devices throw off that let us get anonymized information about who's coming, where they're going, what they're spending, how long they're staying, there's a huge set of data there that you can use to grow revenue. You know, other types of use cases, transportation? We see, you know, municipal governments kind of looking at how they can use anonymized data around commute patterns to impact their planning. That's all data that's coming from the the telco infrastructure. >> You know, when we're talking about these massive advantages, right, as this hybrid cloud approach about skill ones, build one's, easy management, efficient management, all of these things, Steve, I think we almost, we'd be derelict to duty if we didn't talk about security a little bit. Just ultimately at the end of the day, you've got to provide this as you pointed out, world-class secure environment. And so, in terms of the hybrid approach, what kind of considerations do you have to make that are special to that and that are being deployed and have been considered >> You know, that's a great point. One of the benefits to Comms from moving to an open architecture, is that you componentize the framework of that architecture, and you have suppliers supplying applications for the various different services that we just talked through. And the ability then to integrate security is essentially a foundational element to the entire Premack architecture. We've stayed very compliant with the Nanci framework architecture and the way that we've worked with the telcos and bringing forth a solution, because we specifically want them to have the choice but how is that choice being married with the kind of security you just talked about. And to Jeffrey's point, you know, when you move those applications out to the Edge and that data, you know, many of the analysts are saying now by 2025, as much as 75% of the data created in the world will happen at the Edge. So, this is a massive shift. And when that shift occurs, you have to have the security to make sure that you're going to take care of that data in the way that it should be and that meets all regulatory, you know, governance already rules and regulations. So, that becomes really critical. The other piece though, is just the amount of value that gets created. The reason that data is at the Edge is because now you can act on it at the Edge, you can extract insights and in fact, most of the analysts will say,'' In the next three years, we'll see $675 billion of new value created at the Edge with these kinds of applications.'' And going back on the manufacturing example, I mean, we're already working today with manufacturers and they already had, you know, hundreds of IOT sensors deployed in the factory and we have an Edge application manager that extends right out to the far Edge, if you will, right out onto that factory floor to help get intelligence from those devices. But now think about adding to that the AI capabilities, the video capabilities, watching that manufacturing line to make sure every product that comes off that line is absolutely perfect, Watching the employees to make sure they're staying in safety zones, you know, watching the actual equipment itself to make sure it is performing the way it's supposed to, maybe using an analytics and AI capabilities to predict, you know, issues that might arise before they even happen, so you can take preventative action. This kind of intelligence, you know, makes the business run smarter, faster, more effective. So, that's where we see tremendous service. So, it's not just the fact that data will be created and it will be higher fidelity data to include the analytics, AI, you don't include unstructured data like video data and image data, audio data, but the ability to then extract insights and value out of it. And this is why we believe the ecosystem we talked about earlier, our partnership with the telco's and the ability to bring ecosystem partners and they can add value is just a tremendous momentum that we're going to build. >> Well, the market opportunity is certainly great. As you pointed out, a lot of additional value yet to be created, significant value and obviously, a lot of money to be spent as well by telcos, by some estimates, a hundred billion plus, just by the year 2022 and getting this new software defined platforms up and running. So, congratulations to IBM for this launch and we wish you continued success, Steve, in that endeavor and thank you for your time and Jeffrey, thank you as well for your insights from Forester. >> Always a pleasure. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE. In this special power panel we're going to dig into and take a peek at the future of cloud. You know a lot has transpired in the last decade. The cloud itself, we've seen a data explosion. The AI winter turned into machine intelligence going mainstream. We've seen the emergence of As-a-Service models. And as we look forward to the next 10 years we see the whole idea of cloud expanding, new definitions occurring. Yes, the world is hybrid but the situation is more nuanced than that. You've got remote locations, smaller data centers, clandestine facilities, oil rigs, autonomous vehicles, windmills, you name it. Technology is connecting our world, data is flowing through the pipes like water, and AI is helping us make sense of the noise. All of this, and more is driving a new digital economy. And with me to talk about these topics are three great guests from IBM. Maia Sisk is the Director of SaaS Offering Management, at IBM Data and AI. And she's within the IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software Group. Stephanie Walter is the Program Director for data and AI Offering Management, same group IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software. And Daniel Berg is a Distinguished Engineer. He's focused on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. He's in the Cloud Organization. And he's going to talk today a lot about IBM's cloud Satellite and of course Containers. Wow, two girls, two boys on a panel, we did it. Folks welcome to theCUBE. (chuckles) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> So Maia, I want to start with you and have some other folks chime in here. And really want to dig into the problem statement and what you're seeing with customers and you know, what are some of the challenges that you're hearing from customers? >> Yeah, I think a big challenge that we face is, (indistinct) talked about it earlier just data is everywhere. And when we look at opportunities to apply the cloud and apply an As-a-Service model, one of the challenges that we typically face is that the data isn't all nice cleanly package where you can bring it all together, and you know, one AI models on it, run analytics on it, get it in an easy and clean way. It's messy. And what we're finding is that customers are challenged with the problem of having to bring all of the data together on a single cloud in order to leverage it. So we're now looking at IBM and how we flip that paradigm around. And instead of bringing the data to the cloud bring the cloud to the data , in order to help clients manage that challenge and really harness the value of the data, regardless of where you live. >> I love that because data is distributed by its very nature it's silo, Daniel, anything you'd add? >> Yeah, I mean, I would definitely echo that, what Maia was saying, because we're seeing this with a number of customers that they have certain amount of data that while they're strategically looking that moving to the cloud, there's data that for various reasons they can not move itself into the cloud. And in order to reduce latency and get the fastest amount of processing time, they going to move the processing closer to that data. And that's something that we're looking at providing for our customers as well. The other services within IBM Cloud, through our notion of IBM Cloud Satellite. How to help teams and organizations get processing power manage them to service, but closer to where their data may reside. >> And just to play off of that with one other comment. Then the other thing I think we see a lot today is heightened concerned about risks, about data security, about data privacy. And you're trying to figure out how to manage that challenge of especially when you start sending data over the wire, wanting to make sure that it is still safe, it is still secure and it is still resident in the appropriate places. And that kind of need to manage the governance of the data kind of adds an additional layer of complexity. >> Right, if it's not secure, it's a, non-starter, Stephanie let's bring you into the conversation and talk about, you know, some of the waves that you're seeing. Maybe some of the trends, we've certainly seen digital accelerate as a result of the pandemic. It's no longer I'll get to that someday. It's really, it become a mandate you're out of business, if you don't have a digital business. What are some of the markets shifts that you're seeing? >> Well, I mean, really at the end of the day our clients want to infuse AI into their organizations. And so, you know, really the goal is to achieve ambient AI, AI that's just running in the background unchoosibly helping our clients make these really important business decisions. They're also really focused on trust. That's a big issue here. They're really focused on, you know, being able to explain how their AI is making these decisions and also being able to feel confident that they're not introducing harmful biases into their decision-making. So I say that because when you think about, you know digital organization going digital, that's what our customers want to focus on. They don't want to focus on managing IT. They don't want to focus on managing software. They don't want to to have to focus on, you know, patching and upgrading. And so we're seeing more of a move to manage services As-a-Service technologies, where the clients can really focus on their business problems and using The technologies like AI, to help improve their businesses. And not have to worry so much about building them from the ground up. >> So let's stay on that for a minute. And maybe Maia, Daniel, you can comment. So you, Stephanie, you said that customers want to infuse AI and kind of gave some reasons why, but I want to stay on that for a minute. That, what is that really that main outcome that they're looking for? Maybe there are several, they're trying to get to insight. You mentioned that trynna be more efficient it sounds like they're trynna automate governance and compliance, Maia, Daniel can you sort of add anything to this conversation? >> Yeah, well, I would, I would definitely say that, you know at the end of the day, customers are looking to use the data that they have to make smarter decisions. And in order to make smarter decisions it's not enough to just have the insight. The insight has to, you know, meet the business person that needs it, you know in the context, you know, in the application, in the customer interaction. So I think that that's really important. And then everything else becomes like the the superstructure that helps power, that decision and the decision being embedded in the business process. So we at IBM talk a lot about a concept we call the Ladder to AI. And the the short tagline is there is no AI without IA. You know, there is no Artificial Intelligence without Information Architecture. It is so critical, you know, Maia's version this is the garbage in garbage out. You have to have high quality data. You have to have that data be well-organized and well-managed so that you're using it appropriately. And all of that is just, you know then becomes the fuel that powers your AI. But if you have the AI without having that super structure, you know, you're going to end up making, get bad decisions. And ultimately, you know our customers making their customers experience less than it could and should be. And in a digital world, that's, you know, at the end of the day, it's all about digitizing that interaction with whoever the end customer whoever the end consumer is and making that experience the best it can be, because that's what fuels innovation and growth. >> Okay. So we've heard Arvind Krishna talk about, he actually made this statement IBM has to win the architectural battle for cloud. And I'm wondering maybe Daniel you can comment, on what that architectural framework looks like. I mean Maia just talked about the Information Architecture. You can't have AI without that foundation but we know what does Arvind mean by that? How is IBM thinking about that? >> Yeah, I mean, this is where we're really striving to allow our customers really focusing on their business and focusing on the goals that they're trying to achieve without forcing them to worry as much about the IT and the infrastructure and the platform for which they're going to run. Typically, if you're anchored by your data and the data is not able to move into the cloud, generally we would say that you don't have access to cloud services. You must go and install and run and operate your own software to perform the duties or the processing that you require. And that's a huge burden to push onto a customer because they couldn't move their data to your cloud. Now you're pushing a lot of responsibilities back onto them. So what we're really striving for here is, how can we give them that cloud experience where they can process their data? They can run their run book. They can have all of that managed As-a-Service so that they could focus on their business but get that closer to where the data actually resides. And that's what we're really striving for as far as the architecture is concerned. So with IBM Cloud Satellite, we're pushing the core platform and the platform services that we support in IBM Cloud outside of our data centers and into locations where it's closer to your data. And all of that is underpinned by Containerizations, Containers, Kubernetes and OpenShift. Is fundamentally the platform for which we're building upon. >> Okay. So that, so really it's still it's always a data problem, right? Data is you don't want to move it if you don't have to. Right. So it's, so Stephanie, should we think about this as a new emergent data architecture I guess that's what IA is all about. How do you see that evolving? >> Well I mean, I see it evolving as, I mean, first of all our clients, you know, we know that data is the lifeblood of AI. We know the vast majority of our clients are using more than one cloud. And we know that the client's data may be located in different clouds, and that could be due to costs, that could be due to location. So we have to ask the question, how are our clients supposed to deal with this? This is incredibly complex environments they're are incredibly complex reasons sometimes for the data to be where it is. It can include anything from costs to laws, that our clients have to abide by. So what we need to do, is we need to adapt to these different environments and provide clients with the consistent experience and lower complexity to be able to handle data and be able to use AI in these complex environments. And so, you know, we know data, we also know data science talent is scarce. And if each one of these environments have their own tools that need to be used, depending on where the data is located, that's a huge time sink, for these data scientist and our clients don't want to waste their talents time on problems like this. So what we're seeing is, we're seeing more of a acceptance and realization that this is what our clients are dealing with. We have to make it easier. We have to do Innovative things like figure out how to bring the AI to the data, how to bring the AI to where the clients need it and make it much easier and accessible for them to take advantage of. >> And I think there's an additional point to make on this one, which is it's not just easy and accessible but it's also unified. I mean, one of the challenges that customers face in this multicloud environment and many customers are multicloud, you know, not necessarily by intent but just because of how, you know, businesses have adopted as a service. But to then have all of that experience be fragmented and have different tools not just of data, but different pools of, again catalog, different pools of data science it's extremely complex to manage. So I think one of the powerful things that we're doing here, is we're kind of bringing those multiple clouds together, into more of an integrated or a unified, you know window into the client's data in AI state. So not only does the end-user not have to worry about you know, the technologies of dealing with multiple individual clouds, but also, you know it all comes together in one place. So it can be give managed in a more unified way so that assets can be shared across, and it becomes more of a unified approach. The way I like to think of it is, you know, it's true hybrid multicloud, in that it is all connected as opposed to multi-cloud, but it's pools of multiple clouds, one cloud at a time. >> So it can we stay on that for a second because it's, you're saying it's unified but the data stays where it is. The data is distributed by nature. So it's unified logically, but it's decentralized. Is that, am I getting that right? Correct. Okay. Correct. All right. I'm really interested in how you do this. And maybe we can talk about maybe the approach that you take for some of your offerings and maybe get specific on that. So maybe Stephanie, why don't you start, you know, Yes so, what do you have in your basket? Like Cloud Pak So what we have in our basket I mean lets talk about that. >> We have, so Cloud Pak for Data as a Service. This is our premier data and AI platform. It's offered as a service, its fully managed, and there's roughly, there's 30 services integrated services in our services catalog and growing. So we have services to help you through the entire AI life cycle from preparing your data, which is Maia was saying it's very, very, very important. It's critical to any successful AI project. From building your models, from running the models and then monitoring them to make sure that as I was saying before, you can trust them. You don't have to make sure that, you need to make sure that there's not biased. You need to be able to manage these models and then the life cycle them retrain them if needed. So our platform handles all of that. It's hosted on IBM Cloud. And what we're doing now, which is really exciting, is we're going to use, and you mentioned before IBM Cloud Satellite, as a way for us to send our AI to data that perhaps is located on another cloud or another environment. So how this would work is that the services that are integrated with Cloud Pak for Data as a Service they'll be able to use satellite locations to send their AI workloads, to run next to the data. And this means that the data doesn't need to be moved. You don't have to worry about high egress charges. You can see, you can reduce latency and see much stronger performance by running these AI workloads where it counts. We're really excited to to add this capability to our platform. Because, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about earlier all of these challenges that our clients have and this is going to make a big difference in helping them overcome them. Okay. So Daniel, how to Containers fit in? I mean, obviously the Red Hat acquisition was so strategic. We're seeing the real, the ascendancy of OpenShift in particular. Talk about Containers and where it fits into the IBM Cloud Satellite strategy. >> Yeah. So a lot of this builds on top of how we run our cloud business today. Today the vast majority of the services that are available in IBM cloud catalog, actually runs as Containers, runs in a Kubernetes based environment and runs on top of the services that we provide to our customers. So the Container Platform that we provide to our customers is the same one that we're using to run our own cloud services. And those are underpinned with Containers, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. And IBM cloud satellite, based on the way that the designed our Container Platform using Kubernetes and Containers and OpenShift, allows us to take that same design and the same principles and extended outside of our data centers with user provided infrastructure. And this, this goes back to what Stephanie was saying is a satellite location. So using that technology, that same technology and the fact that we've already containerized many of our services and run them on our own platform, we are now distributing our platform outside of IBM Cloud Data Centers using satellite locations and making those available for our cloud service teams, to make their services available in those locations. >> I see and Maia, this, it is as a service. It's a OPEX. Is that right? Absolutely Okay. Absolutely >> Yeah, it's with the two different options on how we can run. One is we can leverage IBM Cloud Satellite and reach into a customer's operating environment. They provide the infrastructure, but we've provide the As-a-Service experience for the Container on up. The other option that we have is for some of our capabilities like our data science capability, where, you know customer might need something a little bit more turnkey because it's, you know, more of a business person or somebody in the CTO's office consuming the As-a-Service. We'll also offer select workloads in an IBM own satellite and environment. I, you know, so that it kind of soup to nuts managed by us. But that is the key is that other than, you know providing the operating environment and then connecting what we do to, you know, their data sources, really the rest is up to us. We're responsible for, you know everything that you would expect in an As-a-Service environment. That things are running, that they're updated, that they're secure, that they're compliant, that's all part of our responsibility. >> Yeah. So a lot of options for customers and it's kind of the way they want to consume. Let's talk about the business impact. You know, you guys, IBM, very consultative selling, you know, tight relationships with customers. What's the business case look like when you go into a client? What's the conversation like? What's possible? What can you share? Stephanie, can you maybe start things off there? Any examples, use-cases, business case, help us understand the metrics. >> Yeah. I mean, so let's talk about a couple of use cases here. So let's say I'm an investment firm, and I'm using data points from all kinds of data sources right? To use AI, to create models to inform my investment decisions. So I'm going to be using, I may be using data sources you know, like regulatory filings, newspaper articles that are pretty standard. I may also be using things like satellite data that monitors parking lots or maybe even weather data, weather forecast data. And all of this data is coming together and being, it needs to be used for models to predict, you know when to buy, sell, trade, however, due to costs, due to just availability of the data they may be located on completely different clouds. You know, and we know that especially capital markets things are fast, fast, fast. So I need to bring my AI to my data, and need to do it quickly so that I can build these models where the data resides, and then be able to make my investment decisions, very fast. And these models get updated often because conditions change, markets change. And this is one way to provide a unified set of AI tools that my data scientists can use. We don't have to be trained on I'm told depending on what cloud the data is stored on. And they can actually build these models much faster and even cheaper. If you would take into egress charges into consideration, you know, moving all the all this data around. Another use case that we're seeing is you know, something like let's say, a multinational telecommunications company that has locations in multiple countries and maybe they want to reduce their customer churn. So they have say customer data that it's stored in different countries and different countries may have different regulations, or the company may have policies that, that data can't be moved out to those country. So what can we do? Again, what we can do is we can send our AI to this data. We can make a customer churn prediction model, that when my customer service representative is on the phone with a customer, and put their information, and see how likely they are to stop using my service and tailor my phone interaction and the offers that I would offer them as this customer service representative to them. If there's a high likelihood that they're going to churn I will probably sweeten the deal. And I can do all that while I'm being fast, right. Because we know that these interactions need to happen quickly. But also while complying with whatever policies or even regulations that are in place for my multinational company. So you know, if you think back to the use cases that I was just talking about you know, latency, performance, reducing costs and also being able to comply with any policy or regulations that our customers might have are really, are really the key pieces of the use cases that we've been seeing. >> Yeah. So Maia there's a theme here. I bring five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data kind of thing. And so Stephanie was talking about speed. There's a an inherent compliance and governance piece. It's it sounds like it's not a bolt on, it's not an afterthought, it's fundamental. So maybe you could add to the conversation, just specifically interested in, you know, what should a client expect? I mean, you're putting data in the hands of you know domain experts in the line of business. There's a self-serve component here, presumably. So there's cross selling is what I heard in some of what Stephanie was just talking about. So it was revenue, there's cost cutting, there's risk reduction, that I'm seeing the business case form. What can you add? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that the only other thing I would add, is going back to the conversation that we had about, Oh you know, a lot of this is being driven by, you know the digitization of business and you know even moreso this year. You know, at the end of the day there's a lot of costs benefits to leveraging and As-a-Service model, you know, to leveraging that experience in economies of scale from a service provider, as well as, you know leveraging satellite kind of takes that to the next level of, you know, reducing some other costs. But I always go back to, you know at the end of the day, this is about customer experience. It's about revenue creation, and it's about, you know, creating, you know enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. So there's a top-line benefits here, you know, of having the best possible AI, you know plugging that into the customer experience, the application where that application resides. So it's not just about where the data resides. You can also put it on the other side and say, you know, we're bringing the AI, we're bringing the machine learning model to the application so that the experiences at excellent the application is responsive there's less latency and that can help clients then leverage AI to create those revenue benefits, you know, of having the the satisfied customer and of having the, you know the right decision at the right time in order to, you know propel them to, to spend and spend more. >> So Daniel bring us home. I mean, there's a lot of engineering going on here. There's the technology, the people in the process if I'm a client, I'm going to say, okay, I'm going to rely on IBM R&D to cut my labor costs, to drive automation, to help me, you know, automate governance and reduce my risks, you know, take care of the technology. You know, I'll focus my efforts on my process, my people but it's a journey. So how do you see that shaping out in the next, you know several years or, or the coming decade, bring us home. >> Yeah. I mean what we're seeing here is that there's a realization that customers have highly skilled individuals. And we're not saying that these highly skilled individuals couldn't run and operate these platforms and the software themselves, they absolutely could. In some cases, maybe they can't but in many cases they could. But we're also talking about these are they're highly skilled individuals that are focusing on platform and platform services and not their business. And the realization here is that companies want their best and brightest focused on their business, not the platform. If they can get that platform from another vendor that they rely on and can provide the necessary compute services, in a timely and available fashion. The other aspect of this is, people have grown to appreciate those cloud services. They like that on demand experience. And they want that in almost every aspect of what they're working on. And the problem is, sometimes you have to have that experience in localities that are remote. They're very difficult. There's no cloud in some of these remote parts of the world. You might think that clouds everywhere, but it's not. It's actually in very specific locations across the world, but there are many remote locations that they want and need these services from the cloud that they can get. Something like IBM Cloud Satellite. That is what we're pursuing here, is being able to bring that cloud experience into these remote locations where you can't get it today. And that's where you can run your AI workloads. You don't have to run it yourself, we will run it and you can put it in those remote locations. And remote locations don't actually have to be like in the middle of a jungle, they could be in your, on your plant floor or within a port that you have across the world, right? It could be in a warehouse. I mean, there's lots of areas where there's data that needs to be processed quickly, and you want to have that cloud experience, that usage pay model for that processing. And that's exactly what we're trying to achieve with IBM Cloud Satellite and what we're trying to achieve with the IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service as well. Running on satellite is to give you those cloud experiences. Those services managed as a service in those remote locations that you absolutely need them and want them. >> Well, you guys are making a lot of progress in the next decade is not going to look like the last decade. I can pretty confident in that prediction. Guys thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your insights, really great conversation. >> Absolutely. Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from the cube. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from around the globe it's thecube covering space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly hello everyone welcome to the space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together i'm john furrier your host with thecube here in california i want to welcome our featured guest lieutenant general john f thompson with the united states space force approach to cyber security that's the topic of this session and of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in los angeles air force base also heading up space force general thank you for coming on really appreciate you kicking this off welcome to the symposium hey so uh thank you very much john for that very kind introduction also uh very much thank you to cal poly uh for this opportunity to speak to this audience today also a special shout out to one of the organizers uh dustin brun for all of his work uh helping uh get us uh to this point uh ladies and gentlemen as uh as uh john mentioned uh i'm jt thompson uh i lead the 6 000 men and women of the united states space forces space and missile system center which is headquartered here at los angeles air force base in el segundo if you're not quite sure where that's at it's about a mile and a half from lax this is our main operating location but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country with about 500 people at kirtland air force base in albuquerque new mexico uh and about another 500 people on the front range of the rockies uh between colorado springs and uh and denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide uh we're responsible for uh acquiring developing and sustaining the united states space force's critical space assets that includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites and we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the u.s space force and a number of our critical mission partners across the uh department of defense and the intelligence community um just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustained the 31 satellite gps constellation that satellite constellation while originally intended to help with global navigation those gps signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy uh over the past three decades i mean gps is everywhere i think everybody realizes that agriculture banking the stock market the airline industry uh separate and distinct navigation systems it's really pervasive across both the capabilities for our department of defense and capabilities for our economy and and individuals billions of individuals across our country and the planet some of the other work we do for instance in the communications sector uh secure communications satellites that we design and build that link america's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real-time support and comms for our deployed forces and those of our allies we also acquire uh infrared missile warning satellites uh that monitor the planet for missile launches and provide advanced warning uh to the u.s homeland and to our allies uh in case some of those missile launches are uh nefarious um on a note that's probably a lot closer to home maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of california in 2018 smc jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy uh to partner with the u.s forest service during the two of the largest wildfires in the state's history the camp and woolsey fires in northern california as those fires spread out of control we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet and we collaborated with the us forest service so that firefighters on the ground uh could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading thereby saving lives and and property by identifying hot spots and flare-ups for firefighters that data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the u.s forest service and authorities here in california was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters it was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread we've continued uh that involvement in recent years using multiple systems to support firefighters across the western u.s this fall as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue working together with the u.s forest service and with other partners uh we like to make uh we like to think that we made a difference here but there's still a lot more work to go and i think that we should always be asking ourselves uh what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to uh stakeholders so that they can use it for for purposes of good if you will how else can we protect our nation how else can we protect our friends and allies um i think a major component of the of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly um just over the past few years uh john and i were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have uh space programs 80 nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet um if you just look at one mission area that uh the department of defense is interested in and that's small launch there are currently over a hundred different small launch companies uh within the u.s industrial base vying for commercial dod and civil uh payload capabilities uh mostly to low earth orbit it's it's just truly a remarkable time if you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning um where we're revolutionary revolutionizing really uh the ways that we generate process and use data i mean it's really remarkable in 2016 so if you think about this four years ago uh nasa estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day and that was four years ago um uh obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience of this congress or in this conference uh we need to work with big thinkers like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data we need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge edge theories of data mining cyber behaviorism and internet of things 2.0 it's just truly a remarkable time uh to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the states of the space business are truly truly daunting and important to uh to all of us um integrating cyber security into our space systems both commercial and government is a mandate um it's no longer just a nice to have as the us space force and department of the air force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years space is becoming congested and contested and that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security uh in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on uh cyber security day in and day out the value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer from the ground control segments associated with it and this value is not just military it's also economic and it's not just american it's also a value for the entire world particularly particularly our allies as we all depend upon space and space systems your neighbors and friends here in california that are employed at the space and missile system center uh work with network defenders we work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers um our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global commons of space free and open for exploration and for commerce um as john and i were talking earlier before we came online there's an aspect of cyber security for space systems especially for some of our legacy systems that's more how do we bolt this on because we fielded those space systems a number of years ago and the the challenges of cyber security in the space domain have grown so we have a part that we have to worry about bolting it on but then we have to worry about building it in as we as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that that realizes that the cyber threat or the cyber security landscape will evolve over time it's not just going to be stagnant there will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we always have to look at look uh as secretary barrett who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning the american way of life really depends on space and as part of the united states space force we work with defense leaders our congress joint and international military teammates and industry to ensure american leadership in space i really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today john and thanks so much to cal poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event i really look forward to this for uh several months and so with that i look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here general thank you very much for the awesome uh introductory statement uh for the folks watching on the stream brigadier general carthan is going to be in the chat answering any questions feel free to chat away he's the vice commander of space and missile systems center he'll be available um a couple comments from your keynote before i get to my questions because it just jumped in my head you mentioned the benefits of say space but the fires in california we're living that here that's really real time that's a benefit you also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space and i only imagine moore's law smaller faster cheaper applies to rockets too so i'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned so you know is it going to be more rules around that i mean this is an interesting question because it's exciting space force but for all the good there is potentially bad out there yeah so i i john i think the uh i think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space what kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps deorbit themselves what kind of basic protections does do all satellites should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space i think those are all fantastic questions and i know that u.s and many uh allied policy makers are looking very very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we uh you know how how we field and field is the military term but you know how we uh populate uh using civil or uh commercial terms uh that space layer at different altitudes uh low earth orbit mid mid-earth orbit geosynchronous earth orbit different kinds of orbits uh what the kind of mission areas we accomplish from space that's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as uh as the place gets a little bit not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out well i'm super excited for space force i know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging changing great space the focus here at this conference is space and cyber security intersection i'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that space force is taking to cyber security and how it impacts our national goals here in the united states yeah yeah so that's a that's a great question john let me let me talk about in two uh two basic ways but number one is and and i know um some people in the audience this might make them a little bit uncomfortable but i have to talk about the threat right um and then relative to that threat i really have to talk about the importance of uh of cyber and specifically cyber security as it relates to that threat um the threats that we face um really represent a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber uh we've seen a lot of action in recent months uh from certain countries notably china and russia uh that have threatened what i referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space for example uh it through many unclassified sources and media sources everybody should understand that um uh the russians have been testing on orbit uh anti-satellite capabilities it's been very clear if you were following just the week before last the department of defense released its uh 2020 military and security developments involving the people's republic of china um uh and uh it was very clear that china is developing asats electronic jammers directed energy weapons and most relevant to today's discussion offensive cyber uh capabilities there are kinetic threats uh that are very very easy to see but a cyber attack against a critical uh command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of gps and important to note that that gps system also impacts many civilians who are dependent upon those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to a system to mislead operators so that they send emergency services personnel to the to the wrong address right attacks on spacecraft on orbit whether directly via a network of intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the systems production uh while we're building the satellite can [ __ ] or corrupt the data denial of service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control i mean if gps went down i you know i hesitate to say it this way because we might elicit some screams from the audience but if gps went down a starbucks wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you and domino's certainly certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less right so with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek there from a military operations perspective it's dead serious um uh we have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like lance ransomware and malware and those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems however what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled if you will to use against our national security space systems uh day in and day out um as i said during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity if commanders in the field uh firefighters in california or baristas in in starbucks can't trust the data they see they're receiving then that really harms their decision-making capabilities one of the big trends we've recently seen is the mood move towards proliferated leo uh uh constellations obviously uh spacex's uh starlink uh on the commercial side and on the military side the work that darpa and my organization smc are doing on blackjack and casino as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionize how we plan and field warfighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems but they're also heavily reliant on cyber security uh we've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage uh loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from uh you know satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning on board spacecraft or at the edge our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector they're basically flying boxes full of software right and we need to ensure the data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms govern governing the right actions and that those uh that those systems are impervious to the extent possible uh to nefarious uh modifications so in summation a cyber security is vital element of everything in our national security space goals and i would argue for our national uh goals uh writ large including uh economic and information uh uh dimensions uh the space force leadership at all levels uh from uh some of the brand new second lieutenants that general raymond uh swore into the space force this morning uh ceremonially from the uh air force association's air space and cyberspace conference uh to the various highest levels general raymond uh general d t thompson myself and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise we've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems because it they absolutely depend on it you know you mentioned uh hardware software threats opportunities challenges i want to ask you because you you got me thinking of the minute there around infrastructure i mean we've heard critical infrastructure you know grids here on on earth you're talking about critical infrastructure a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is an extension of what we have so i'd love to get your thoughts about space force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors because you know the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyber space oh yeah threat vectors they're always increasing the surface area well if the surface area is from space it's an unlimited surface area so you got different vectors so you got new critical infrastructure developing real time really fast and you got an expanded threat vector landscape putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues how would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things well so i tell you um i just like um uh just like uh i'm sure people in the security side or the cyber security side of the business in the banking industry feel they feel like it's uh all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system to the financial sector on the department of defense side we've got to have sort of the same mindset um that threat vector from to and through space against critical space systems ground segments the launch enterprise or transportation uh to orbit and the various different uh domains within uh within space itself like i mentioned before uh leo mio and geo-based satellites with different orbits all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that i mentioned earlier some that i didn't mention like weather tactical or wide band communications uh various new features of space control all of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security uh threat perspective and it's a it's a daunting challenge right now right yeah it's awesome and one of the things we've been following on the hardware side here in the on the ground is the supply chain we've seen you know malware being you know really put into really obscure hardware who manufactures it as being outsourced obviously government has restrictions but with the private sector uh you mentioned china and and the us kind of working together across these these peaceful areas but you got to look at the supply chain how does the supply chain the security aspect impact the mission of the u.s space force yeah yeah so so um how about another um just in terms of an example another kind of california-based historical example right um the very first u.s satellite uh explorer one was built by uh the jet propulsion uh laboratory folks uh not far from here in el segundo up in uh up in pasadena um that satellite when it was first built in the late 50s uh weighed a little bit over 30 pounds and i'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by u.s companies fast forward to today the global supply chain is so tightly coupled and frankly many industries are so specialized almost specialized regionally around the planet we focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the the heritage if you will of some of the parts that are used the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized right the space industry especially uh national security space sector um uh is relatively small compared to other commercial industries and we're moving to towards using more and more parts uh from non-us companies uh cyber security and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily um understand 100 percent like an explorer one uh the the lineage of that particular part the environmental difficulties in space are well known the radiation environment the temperature extremes the vacuum those require specialized component and the us military is not the only uh customer in that space in fact we're definitely not the dominant customer uh in space anymore all those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains from a quality perspective a security perspective and availability um there's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from um many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of uh you know compromised patches if you will and our adversaries are aware of these techniques as i mentioned earlier with other forms of attack considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries so we have to uh take that threat seriously um between the government and industry sectors here in the u.s we're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities last fall we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at space and missile system center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio and it sounds really kind of you know businessy geeky if you will you know hey we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cyber security as dynamically as we possibly could and so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts to require system developers to implement some more advanced uh protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment so that data handling and supply chain perspective uh protections um from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account uh cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now it's as important as the the mission performance of the system it's as important as cost it's as important as schedule because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost uh it can perform that missile warning or that communications mis mission perfectly but it's not cyber secure if it doesn't have cyber protections built into it or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber uh threats then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the k the the war fighter or the nation uh any good um supply chain risk management is a is a major challenge for us uh we're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners uh we're all facing it head on uh to try and build secure and trusted components uh that keep our confidence as leaders firefighters and baristas uh as the case may be uh but it is a challenge and we're trying to rise to that challenge you know this so exciting this new area because it really touches everything you know talk about geeking out on on the tech the hardware the systems but also you put your kind of mba hat on you go what's the roi of the extra development and how you how things get built because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like you're building cool stuff people love it's it's exciting but you still have to build and cyber security has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture so you're still building things which means you've got to acquire things you got to acquire parts you got to acquire build software and and sustain it how is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space yeah from initial development uh through planning for the acquisition design development fielding or production fielding and sustainment it impacts all aspects of of the life cycle john uh we simply especially from the concept of baking in cyber security uh we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure so we've moved way further uh towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cyber security from the very beginning of a system's development cyber security and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute as i mentioned earlier equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance we like to talk in uh in the space world about uh mission assurance and mission assurance has always you know sort of taken us as we as we technically geek out right mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space right can it work in a vacuum can it work in you know as it as it uh you know transfers through uh the van allen radiation belt or through the the um the southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly right will it work out in space and now from a resiliency perspective yeah it has to work in space it's got to be functional in space but it's also got to be resistant to these cyber security threats it's it's not just i think uh general dt thompson quoted this term it's not just widget assurance anymore it's mission assurance um uh how does that satellite uh operator that ground control segment operate while under attack so let me break your question a little bit uh just for purposes of discussion into into really two parts uh cyber uh for cyber security for systems that are new and cyber security uh for systems that are in sustainment or kind of old and legacy um obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threaten both and we really have to employ different strategies for for defense of of each one for new systems uh we're desperately trying to implement across the department of defense in particular in the space world a kind of a devsecops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems here at smc we have a program called enterprise ground services which is a tool kit basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems egs as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of of bad behavior malicious behavior if you will um uh it's rudimentary at this point but because we're using devsecops and that incremental development approach as we scale it it just becomes more and more capable you know every every product increment that we field here at uh at uh la air force base uh uh we have the united space space forces west coast software factory which we've dubbed kobayashi maru they're using those agile devops uh software development practices uh to deliver uh space awareness software uh to the combined space operations center uh affectionately called the csp that c-spock is just down the road uh from cal poly uh there in san luis obispo at vandenberg air force base they've securely linked the c-spock with other space operation centers around the planet our allies australia canada and the uk uh we're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations so lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development uh capabilities for our our space systems but as i mentioned earlier we've got large constellations on satellite of satellites on orbit right now some of them are well in excess of a decade or more old on orbit and so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old and so but we still have to worry about them because they're critical to our space capabilities um we've been working with an air force materiel command organization uh called crows which stands for the cyber resiliency office for uh weapon systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to to live through this increasingly cyber security uh concerned era that we currently live in our industry partners have been critical to to both of those different avenues both new systems and legacy systems we're working closely with them to defend and upgrade uh national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with uh with new national assets coming online the vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threaten the way we've done business in the past both militarily and in the case of gps economically the impacts of that cyber security risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes but i've got to tell you it that as the threat vectors change as the vulnerabilities change we've got to be nimble enough agile enough to be able to bounce back and forth we can't just say uh many people in the audience are probably familiar with the rmf or the risk management framework approach to um to reviewing uh the cyber security of a system we can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an rmf on a system and then hey high five we're all good uh it's a journey not a destination that's cyber security and it's a constant battle rhythm throughout a weapon systems life cycle not just a single event i want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question but before i go there you mentioned the agile and i see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles you've got to be faster and we saw this in the computer industry mainframes mini computers and then when you started getting beyond me when the internet hit and pcs came out you saw the big enterprises the banks and and government start to work with startups it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that you know there's no way if you're a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise now that used to be for public sector and certainly uh for you guys so as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved i'm sure would love to love to have a contract with space force there's an roi calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view edit software you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you uh whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile but they might not be that big company we are john that's a fantastic question we are desperately trying to reach out to to those new space advocates to those startups to those um what we sometimes refer to within the department of defense those non-traditional uh defense contractors a couple of things just for uh thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight um uh three years ago we created here at uh space and missile system center uh the space enterprise consortium uh to provide a platform uh a contractual vehicle really to enable us to rapidly prototype uh development of space systems and to collaborate uh between the u.s space force uh traditional defense contractors non-traditional vendors like startups and even some academic institutions uh spec as we call it space enterprise consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts uh awarded quickly many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements and that's what spec is based on and so far in just three years spec has awarded 75 different uh prototyping contracts worth over 800 million dollars with a 36 reduction in time to award and because it's a consortium based competition for um for these kinds of prototyping efforts the barrier to entry for small and non-traditional for startups even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototypings is really lowered right um uh these types of partnerships uh that we've been working through on spec uh have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security uh for their systems both their developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build we want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together and support um uh kind of mutually beneficial uh relationships between all um recently uh at the annual air force association uh conference that i mentioned earlier i moderated a panel with several space industry leaders uh all from big traditional defense contractors by the way and they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships uh between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrants uh and that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those uh larger contractors uh that we rely on day in and day out advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that i think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations as i mentioned earlier the spec has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values and it's just going to get better right there's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium 80 of them are non-traditional kinds of vendors and we just love working with them another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators uh if you will and innovators that include uh cyber security experts is our space pitch day events right so we held our first event last november in san francisco uh where we awarded over a two-day period about 46 million dollars to 30 different companies um that had potentially game-changing ideas these were phase two small business innovative research efforts uh that we awarded with cash on the spot uh we're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. uh we're planning on doing it right here in los angeles uh covent 19 environment permitting um and we think that these are you know fantastic uh uh venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups startups and small businesses who are interested in uh really truly partnering with the us air force it's a as i said before it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business uh and working with the innovation economy uh is something that the department of defense uh really needs to do in that um the innovation that we used to think was ours you know that 80 percent of the industrial-based innovation that came from the department of defense uh the the script has been flipped there and so now more than 70 percent uh particularly in space innovation uh comes from the commercial sector not from uh not from the defense business itself and so um that's a tsunami of uh investment and a tsunami of uh capability and i need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it you know what i mean yeah i mean it's one of those things where the flip the script has been flipped but it's exciting because it's impacting everything are you talking about systems architecture you're talking about software you're talking about a business model you talk about devsecops from a technical perspective but now you have a business model innovation all the theaters of uh are exploding in innovation technical business personnel this brings up the workforce challenge you've got the cyber needs for the u.s space force there's probably a great roi model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts that's a entrepreneurial innovation you got the the business model theater you've got the personnel how does the industry adopt and change you guys are clearly driving this how does the industry adjust to you yeah so um i think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the u.s space force from a from an acquisition perspective and in this particular case from a from a cyber security perspective as i mentioned earlier it's the most exciting time to be in space programs uh really since the days of apollo um uh you know just to put it in terms that you know maybe have an impact with the audience uh from 1957 until today approximately 9 000 satellites uh have been launched from the various space faring countries around the planet uh less than two thousand of those nine thousand are still up on orbit and operational and yet in the new space regime um players like spacex have plans to launch you know 12 000 satellites for some of their constellations alone it really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities whether they're commercial civil or defense are going to require appropriate cyber security uh protections it's just a really exciting time uh to be working in stuff like this and so uh folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cyber security are just the kind of people that we want to work with because we need to make sure our systems are are secure and resilient we need folks that have technical and computing expertise engineering skills to be able to design cybersecure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks uh but we also as you alluded to we need people that have that business and um you know business acumen human networking background so that we can launch the startups and work with the non-traditional businesses uh help to bring them on board help to secure both their data and our data and uh and and make sure our processes and systems are are free as much as possible from uh uh from attack um for preparation for for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this uh trade space um you gotta be smart on digital networking uh you gotta understand basic internet protocols concepts uh programming languages uh database design uh learn what you can from penetration or vulnerability testing and and uh risk assessment i will tell you this and i don't think he will i know he will not mind me telling you this but you've got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago i'm at home one evening and i get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss the commander of air force space command uh general j raymond who is now currently the chief of space operations and he is on temporary duty flying overseas he lands where he's going and he first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes jt um while i was traveling um i noticed that there were e-books available on the commercial airliner i was traveling on and there was an e-book on something called scrumming and agile devsecops and i read it have you read it um and i said no sir but if you tell me what the title of the book is i will read it and so i got to go to my staff meeting um you know the very next week the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the stab meeting hey if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming then i'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our gs13s all of our government employees can get smart on uh the scrumming development process and interestingly as another side i had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays where he was trying to take some leave and i said sir what are you up to today are you are you you know making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever and the chief of space operations told me no i'm trying to teach myself python i'm at lesson two and it's not going so well but i'm i'm gonna figure this out and so that kind of thing if the chief of staff or the you know the the the chief of space operations can prioritize scrumming and python language and innovation in his daily schedule then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that and we'll just say lower levels of rank uh throughout our entire space force enterprise um look i i we don't need to need people that can code a satellite from scratch but we need to know we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cyber security requirements and that can turn those things into into meaningful actions obviously in the space domain things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important uh space is not an intuitive uh domain so under understanding how things survive uh on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions and you know i know there's probably a lot because of this conference i know there's a probably a whole lot of high-speed cyber security experts out in the audience and i need those people in the u.s space force the the country is counting on it but i wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy right i have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers and they don't have to be high-end cyber security experts but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections um into our space system so the skill set is is really really broad um our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into uh define designing uh and fielding offensive and destructive space cyber security weapons right they've repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit and the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that as i mentioned before peaceful uh global commons of space we really need all hands on deck if you're interested in helping in uniform if you're interested in helping uh not in uniform uh but as a government employee a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important uh or more cape more able to be developed for our space systems then we'd really love to uh to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems lieutenant general john thompson great insight thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too and motivation for the young next generation the united states space force approach of cyber security really amazing talk thank you for your time final parting question is as you look out and you had your magic wand what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish it's a super exciting time what do you hope for so um um first of all john thanks to you and and thanks to cal poly uh for the invitation and and thanks to everybody for uh for their interest in cyber security especially as it relates to space systems that's here at the conference um uh there's a quote and i'll read it here uh from uh bernard schriever who was the uh the founder if you will uh a legend in uh dod space the founder of the western development division which was a predecessor organization to space and missile systems center general shrever i think captures the essence of what how we see the next couple of years the world has an ample supply of people who can always come up with a dozen good reasons why new ideas will not work and should not be tried but the people who produce progress are breed apart they have the imagination the courage and the persistence to find solutions and so i think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cyber security innovation are going to be a pony ride at the county fair then perhaps you should look for another line of work because i think the next few years in space and cyber security innovation are going to be more like a rodeo um and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes it is a an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem it's really an honor for me to um to be able to play some small role uh in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it uh while i'm trying to improve the chances of uh of the united states of america in a uh in a space war fighting uh uh environment um and so i thank all of you for uh participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you thank you sir thank you for your leadership and thank you for the for the time for this awesome event space and cyber security symposium 2020 i'm john furrier on behalf of cal poly thanks for watching [Music]