>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital version of IBM Think and theCUBE is pleased to be providing the wall-to-wall coverage as we have physically for so many years at big IBM events. Jesus Mantas is here, he's the managing partner for Global Strategy for IBM and the Global Business Services. Jesus, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here, Dave. >> So, every guest that we've talked to this week, really, we've talked about COVID but just briefly. Here, we're going to do a bigger drill down and really try to get, Jesus your perspectives as an IBM's point of view on what's going on here. So let me start with, we've never seen anything like this before, obviously. I mean, there are some examples you got to go back to 1918, try to get some similarities, but 1918 is a long long time ago, so, what's different about this? What are the similarities? >> Yeah, it's, you know what Mark Twain used to say that history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes. I think there are similarities of what we are experiencing right now in this pandemic with other pandemics like Spanish flu. I think the situation is unique in terms of the impact, and the synchronicity of that impact, right? So we can go back, whether if you want, economic crisis, or our society crisis, where you have either one country or one aspect being disrupted. But this is really society being interrupted, on a global scale. So its impact is unprecedented in that perspective in modern time, and I think all of us are adjusting to it. >> I want to ask you about digital transformation, because I've made the point that, while a lot of people talk digital transformation, there's been a lot of complacency, people say, not my lifetime, we're a bank, we're making a lot of money, we're doing okay. How do you think COVID-19 will sort of change that complacency and really accelerate digital transformation as a mindset and actually turn it into action? >> Yeah, I think the best way to put it is digital transformation five months ago was about obtaining competitive advantage and digital transformation today in many industries is about survival. That is how big of a change it is. The need for efficiency and cost savings, the need for resiliency that we have talked about, the need to be able to drive agility, to be able to switch and adapt, the need to make hyper local decisions, right, to use data, none of that can be done unless you have fully digitized processes, you are consuming local data and you have trained the people to really operate in those new, more intelligent processes. So, it has gone from optionality is okay, you can do okay but if you digitize you're going to do better to unless you digitize your business may not exist next year. I think that's the change, the change is, I think now is widely understood that the majority of our digitization processes have to be accelerated, and I would say there is a great statistic that when we go back in history, and there has been many, as I mentioned, of this crisis. You can look back at the two behaviors that businesses have, one is, to play defense and then what happens two years later, and the other one is, okay, you defense but you immediately switch to offense and then what happens two year later. Those companies that use this time to just defend and hunker down, history said in a couple of years later, 21% of them outperform. But those businesses that they shift from defense to offense and actually accelerate in these cases, programs like digitalization, 37% outperform. So, there is a premium for businesses that right now actually immediately switch to offense, focus on this set of digitalization and empowering cloud, managing data, ensuring the skills of the people, they're more likely not only to survive, but thrive in the next few years than those that just use this time to defend. >> To your point, it's about survival, it's not about, not getting disrupted, 'cause you're going to get disrupted, it's almost a certainty, and so in order to survive, you've got to digitally transform. Your final thoughts on digital transformation, then I want to ask you if there's a silver lining in all this. >> I think, what we do, we can't change the context. But we cannot let the context define who we are either as individuals or as company. What we can do, is to choose how do we act on that context. I would say, those organizations and those individuals that take advantage of the situation to understand that some of these behaviors are going to change, understand that the more that we shift technology to the cloud, the more that we shift work close to the cloud, the more that we use technologies like artificial intelligence and drive nonlinear decisions that massively optimize everything we do from the way that we deliver health care, to the way that we manage supply chains, to the way that we secure food, frankly, to the way that we protect the environment, there is a silver lining that technology it is one of those solutions that can help in all of these areas, and the silver lining of this is, hopefully, let's use this time to get better prepared for the next pandemia, to get better prepared for the next crisis, to implement technologies that drive efficiency faster, that create new jobs, that protect the environment, and while we cannot change the fact that we have COVID-19, we can change what happens after COVID-19, so what we return to is something better that what we enter before COVID-19. >> Very thoughtful commentary, Jesus. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, blessings to your family and yourself. >> Appreciated Dave, thank you, and thank you for everything you do to keep everybody informed. >> Really a pleasure. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020 the digital event, to be right back right after the short break. (upbeat music)