from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM hi buddy we're back this is Dave Volante and you're watching the cubes coverage of the IBM think 20/20 digital event experience wall-to-wall coverage of course in the remote cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston Grendel Greg lot Co is here he's with Broadcom he's a senior vice president and general manager of the Broadcom mainframe division Greg great to see you thanks for coming on hey good seeing you too happy to be here hey let's talk Z you know I gotta say when Broadcom made a nearly nineteen billion dollar acquisition of ca many people myself included said huh I don't really get it but might as you start to see what's happening the massive CA install base and the cross selling opportunities that have come to Broadcom you start to connect the dots and say uh maybe this does make some sense but you know how does it how's it going how's the acquisition been it's been you know what two years since that that move yeah we're coming up on two years I think it kind of shocked the world right I mean there's a lot of value there and the customers that have been using the mainframe and running their core businesses for many many years they knew this right so Broadcom came in and said hey you know I don't think this is the cash cow that others maybe have been treating it as you know we absolutely believed with some investment that you could actually drive greater value to customers and you know what a novel concept great you know expand expense invest drive greater volley value and that would be the way you'd expand revenue and profit yeah I mean I think generally the mainframe market is misunderstood it obviously goes in cycles I did a report a couple months ago on really focusing on z15 extras last summer and how historically IBM performance overall as a company is really driven still by mainframe cycles because it still drags so much software and services and so we're in the in the midst of a z15 tailwind and and so of course in that the Cova changes everything but nonetheless it's a it's a good business IBM's a dominant player in that business customers it'll continue to buy mainframes because it just works it's too risky to rip them out people say oh I want to get rid of the mainframe no way customers are going to do that's running their business so it's just a it's a fabulous business you know if you have a play there and clearly da yeah and if you think about those cycles that's largely driven by the hardware right as each generation comes out and if you look at traditional pricing metrics that really look at using that capacity or even using full capacity that's what caused us equality with the software as well but you know there's a lot a lot of changes even in that space I mean with us with mainframe consumption licensing from from Broadcom with IBM doing tailor-fit pricing you know the idea that you can have that Headroom on the hardware and then pay as you go pay as you grow I think that actually will smooth out and remove some of that psychology from the software space and as you said correctly you look at the the kovat stuff going on I mean there's an awful lot of transactions going on online people are obviously checking their financials with the economics going on the shipping companies are booming with with what they have to do so that's actually driving transactions up as well to use that capacity that's in the boxes yeah and financial services is actually and really good know the the stocks have been hit but the liquidity and the banks is very very strong because of the 2009 crisis though the fiscal policy sort of you know dictated that or you know the public policy dictated that so so the band the banks are here we see huge consumers of mainframe one of the things that that IBM did years ago was it sort of embraced Linux was one of its first moves to open up the mainframe but it's much more than just Linux I wonder if you could talk about so your point of view on open meets mainframe yeah so open is way more than just Linux right I mean Linux Linux is good running around the mainframe I mean that's that's absolutely an open paradigm from the operating system but open is also about opening up the API is opening up the connectivity so that it's easier to interact with the platform and you know sometimes people think open is just about dealing with open source certainly we've made a lot of investments there we contributed the command line interphase and actually a little more than 50% of the original contribution to the Zoe Project under the OMP the open mainframe project so that was about allowing open source technologies that interact with distributed and cloud technologies to now interact with that mainframe so it's it's not just the open source technologies but opening up the API so you can then connect the cross technologies that are on the platform or off platform so what about the developer community I mean it's obviously a lot of talk in the industry about about DevOps how does DevOps fit into the mainframe world Oh what about innovations like agile and you know sort of beyond DevOps if you will can you comment on that yeah absolutely I mean you can bring all those paradigms all those capabilities to the mainframe now with opening up those api's so I mean we had a large European retail bank that is actually used the it bridge that we work with providing you know through Zoe to connect into endeavor so they could leverage all the investments they have made in that existing technology over the years but actually used the same kind of see ICD pipeline the same interaction that they do across distributed platforms and mainframe together and open up that experience across their development community with that really means is you're using the same concepts the same tools that they maybe became comfortable with in university or on different platforms to then interact with the mainframe and it's not that you're doing anything that you know takes away from core capabilities of the mainframe you're still leveraging the stability the really resiliency this the throughput the serviceability but you're pressing down on it and interacting with it just like you do with other platform so it's it's really cool and and that goes beyond Linux right Fisher you're interacting with capabilities and technologies that are on the mainframe and z/os environment yeah in the end the hardened security as well as another you know key absolutely let's talk about cloud where does weird a lot of people talk about cloud cloud first multi cloud where does the mainframe fit in the cloud world so there's a lot of definitions of cloud out there right I mean people will talk about private cloud public cloud hybrid cloud across multiple private clouds they'll talk about you know this multi cloud we we actually talk about it a little differently we think about the customers cloud environment you know our our institution that we're dealing with say it's a financial institution to their end customers their cloud is however you interact and you think about it if you're if you're checking an account balance if you're depositing in a check if you're doing any of these interactions you're probably picking up a mobile device or a PC you're dealing with an edge server you're going back into distributed servers and you're eventually interacting with the mainframe and then that's got to come all the way back out to you that is our customers cloud so we talk about their cloud environment and you have to think about this paradigm of allowing the mainframe to connect through and to all of that while you hit it preserving the security so we think of cloud as being much more expansive and the mainframe is an integral part of that absolutely yeah I've seen some of your your discussions where you've talked about it sort of laid out look you know the mainframe sits behind all this other infrastructure that you know ultimately the consumer on his or her mobile phone you know it goes through a gateway it goes to you know some kind of site to buy something you know ends up ultimately doing a transaction and in that transaction you want to be you know secure you want it to be accurate and then how do how does that happen the majority of the world's transactions are you know running on some kind of you know IBM mainframe somewhere in some way touches that transaction so it's a you know as the world gets more complex that that mainframe is that I called it sort of the hardened you know sort of back-end and that has to evolve to be able to adapt to the changes at the front end and that's really kind of what's happening whether it's cloud whether it's mobile whether it's you know Linux and other open source so it's right it's it's fabulous that the mainframe has you know IO rates and throughput that no other platform and match but if you can't connect that to the transactions that the customer is driving to it then you're not leveraging the value right so you really have to think about it from a perspective of how do you open up everything you possibly can on the mainframe while preserving that theory I want to end with just talking about the the Broadcom portfolio when you hit the the Broadcom mainframe site it's it's actually quite mind-boggling the dozens and dozens of services and software capabilities that you provide how would you describe that that portfolio and what do you see is the vision for that portfolio going forward yeah so when people normally say portfolio they're thinking software products and we have hundreds of software products but we're looking at our portfolio as more than just the software sometimes people talk about hey let me just talk to you about my latest and greatest product one of the things we were really afforded the opportunity to do with Broadcom acquiring us was to reinvest to double down on core products that customers have had for many years and we know that they want to be able to count on for many years to come but the other really important thing we believe about driving value to our customers was those offerings and capabilities that you put around that you know think about the idea of if you want to migrate off of a competitive product or if you want to adopt an additional product that have the ability to tie these together often in our customer shops they don't have all the skills that they need or they just don't have the capacity to do it so we've been investing in partnership you know we kept our services business from at least that resources the people from CA we rolled them directly into the division and we're investing them in true partnership working side-by-side with our customers to help them deploy these capabilities get up and running and be successful and and we believe that's the the value of a true partnership to invest side-by-side to have them be successful with the software and their capabilities and their operation well like I said I caught a lot of people myself included by surprised that acquisition it was a big number but you can see it you know the outcomes performance post you know the July 2018 acquisition done quite well obviously co vid is affected you know much of the market but seems to be paying off Greg thanks so much for coming to the Kuban sharing your insights and best of luck going forward stay safe pleasure being here everybody you yourself and everybody out there be safe be well take care and thank you for everybody for watching this is the cubes coverage of the IBM think 20/20 digital event experience we right back right after this short break you're watching the cube [Music]