>> 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. I'm John Furrier, you host of theCUBE. We're here with Howard Boville who's the Head of Hybrid Cloud Platform for IBM. He's been in the industry for many, many decades as a practitioner. Heading up organizations now at IBM, heading up the hybrid cloud. Howard, great to have you on theCUBE. >> Pleased to be here, John. Thank you for your time. >> Can you tell us a little bit about the digital transformation trends that you've seen over the past year as they have clearly shook the industry? Certainly, COVID. No one would have predicted provisioning VPN access or remote access for all the employees. I'm sure that wasn't on anyone's radar, but many more other disruptions and opportunities for accelerating these new, what are now obvious benefits. Can you take your time to explain what you've seen? >> Yeah, sure. So been a huge amount of acceleration of digital transformation. So VPN projects, as you mentioned, the people working from home, projects that, in the past, were taking many, many years to work through, then got done literally in weeks. And they're very complex when you get under the skin of them. And companies, therefore saw confidence in that and started to look at broader digital transformations. And you can kind of think about them in terms of their successes and their failures, or the lessons learned from them. So when it's done right, what I've observed from companies that have done it right, they've done it from a business process perspective. They've looked at their business processes that they want to transform as opposed to just the underpinning technology. But the companies that have been around for a while have also been understood that legacy's a problem. So God created the Earth is seven, or the world in seven days, but that's because He didn't have any legacy to deal with. So as companies have taken the confidence for the smaller projects to work through, they've found in these larger ones, where they've got legacy environments to work through, digital transformation's still very important but it's not as straightforward as they thought it might be. >> You know, one of the things that's coming out of the hybrid cloud discussion is a couple of things. One is everyone now agrees that this is the standard and multicloud's soon around the corner. Hybrid cloud is an operating model and it's a new kind of operating system with the ability to use Kubernetes and containers and microservices and other service meshes to integrate legacy. This is huge. What's the biggest pain points that you're seeing from an adoption standpoint that are blockers from clients? What's gettin' in the way of the obvious, now, path with hybrid cloud? >> Well actually, the first and foremost, the position that IBM's created by kind of calling it a hybrid cloud where companies will be on-premise and off-premise because of legacy, gives CIOs around the world a huge sigh of relief. And having sat in their seats, I've often thought I must be the dumbest person in the room because I don't understand this full on public cloud model because I can't see the benefits to my shareholders that that would deliver. I could see it to the pure player cloud service providers, but not to myself. So talking to CIOs, I think thank heavens for that. We're no longer as seen as Arondight when we're explaining that we'll be on-premise and off-premise, and it'll be heterogeneous environments we're operating within. But the simple way to think about the blockers and actually, you've done a nice job, yourself, John, in terms of explaining this, is cloud is just simply another resource pool that you use to run your applications or your datasets on. And in the past, you had a nicely curated environments when it was in your own environments but there are benefits that you can get by using more immersing technologies like cloud, particularly around developed productivity. But in chapter one of cloud with a pure player cloud providers, it was kind of a carbuncle that you kind of put onto the side of your organization which then became very difficult to this kind of Frankenstein's monster of piece parts to put together from an IT operations and a cyber security perspective. >> Okay, so you talk about this Franken-cloud model, before. I've heard that come from you. What is this about? You just referenced it, there. What is the Franken-cloud? >> Yeah, it's the simple way to think about it is in the old world when you ran all of your applications, your datasets, your developers, in your own data centers, you would create a curated model that would allow you to run it very strongly from an architectural perspective. Lots of different legacy environments, but the actual architecture you'd put around it would be clean and the IT operational environments would be clean, and the actually cyber security controls. You put on a third party capability whether that's a cloud service provider or a software as a service provider and you add a world of complexity where you have no controls over those environments, and you're certainly not driving the architectural standards. So you're putting together these piece parts in the same way as Dr. Frankenstein put together the monster that he created. And ultimately, that will turn upon you. It will create technical operational issues, it will create economic issues, and it absolutely will create cyber security issues. So the important thing to think about on these digital transformations is the architecture in a hybrid context is one that will work for you with a multicloud environment, whether that's from a software as a service provider or from a cloud service provider. >> It's interesting you bring up these other turning on you kind of the Franken-cloud, I get that. But let's bring that up to the positive. A client customer might say hey, you know, I did a great job of moving into the public cloud, I brought some stuff on hybrid. Oh my god, look at them pushin' some new stuff. And then they push new code and then things break. They call this day 2 operations or as you guys are referring to, AI ops. These are opportunities. So how does a company get their arms around that because that's going to be the next progression. Okay, I'm operating on a distributed basis. All right, great. I got an Edge, data center, whatever, but now I'm pushin' code all the time. I don't want it to break. >> I mean, most of my comments, John, are based upon the experiences and mistakes that I've made in my career. So that element that you talked about there, that day 2 operations, not only are we going through an inflection point in terms of the technologies that are used, and the architectures at a technical level you have to put together, the silicon that you think about, you got to really think about the carbon, the people, and the IT operating model that you have. 'Cause a lot of the actual manual work you did, previously, we'll be doing it in an automated fashion, so an AI fashion. So any transformation program needs to look at the actual transformation of the skills of the people that you have working for you. And the shouldn't feel fearful that it's a place where they actually won't have a role, they just won't have a role with the current skillset they've got. But there are adjacent skillset that you an have that they can actually get trained into or get on assignments where they get the experience to operate in that fashion. >> Hey, I'd love to get the comment on the Edge with the S system on a chip, SOC as it's called, as more and more capabilities are going to be at the Edge. But I want to stay on this quick cloud thing on Franken-cloud, because you know, one of the things that I see with the positives of cloud is that okay, get me more agile, but then I get worried that if I'm going too fast, I might break something or get fired. I got all this compliance, I don't want to get sued or you know, there's all kinds of regulations now, and compliance around distributed clouds, globally. So what's your take on that? What specific challenges do these companies face when they're either in regulated industries or don't want to go too fast? They got to watch that data and make sure it's not going to be misused. >> Yeah, so the philosophy that we have at IBM is different to chapter one in the pure player cloud providers which is we believe if you build the actual compliance controls in from the outset and have them as a standard of consumption for all customers, they can actual accelerate their adoption of cloud. So they can actually get to the benefits of cloud productivity, innovation far more quickly. And that's been evidenced by chapter one where all large institutions in multiple-year programs spend tens of millions of dollars and are building the compliance controls, themselves. You don't do that with IBM. You get that out of the box for the entire industry. We keep that fresh and current, and vibrant going forward so those non-functional requirements are no longer a consideration for you, and you can then focus your energy, your developers in terms of the actual point of innovation on the functional capabilities that you can provide. >> I want to get your reaction to something and a comment, if you don't mind. I mean, there's been a big trend of data clouds built on other people's clouds, and you got the needs of specialty in industries or critical needs. Do you see the need or do you see a path for specialty clouds or vertical clouds, specifically, as these, the AI in data can be relative to these verticals but you want, at the same time, horizontal scalability for a data plane or data access. What's your take on specialty clouds or vertical clouds? >> Yeah, I mean, that's at the heart of the thesis and the idea that we have here, at IBM, which is there is a need for specialty clouds in particular industries and their workloads. And really, as kind of people look back in the very near future, they'll say that's an evident thing because again, in the old world when it was in your own data center, you would have build types for specific types of applications and the processes that it supported and the risk posture of that, and then your associated datasets. So the capabilities that we build within our global availability zones is for the large enterprises and that's an area that's obviously at IBM's heritage. And then it's not just the software level, it's the hardware it runs on. So IBM provides the hardware from a mainframe power X86 so through all those kind of form factors, and then at an operating system level, obviously if you're Linux in terms of the capabilities that we have. So we can meet all of that stack but build them specifically for the applications and the datasets for the industries that we serve, and the AI capabilities necessary. >> That's great stuff. I want to get your take and shift gears to cyber security. I mean, every time you look, there's a headline of a breach. SolarWinds had more implications than anyone could imagine. Do you hire more firefighters to put out the fire? Do you make fire resistant materials? I mean, there's an optimization balance. What do you think is the best way we prevent cyber breaches goin' forward? What's your take on this? I'm sure you've had a perfect-- >> So in the world of cyber security, it's all of the above and then many more because you've got to put checks and balances in terms of every capability having kind of come from an environment where my old bank was named after the country that it was in, and therefore, nations states were to correct the light in terms of trying to breach the area. So all of those controls are necessary as you put them in. But the other element to think about on digital supply chains is again, if you actually have your supply chain on a cloud that has the compliance controls built in, they benefit in a Herodot, as well. Whereas, if you don't, you've got to actually ensure that they are actually attesting to the controls. The cloud that we built here, at IBM, give you continuous monitoring to ensure that those software as a service providers are actually adhering to the controls you want in real time. That is a massive game-changer in terms of the then logging information we can provide to customers to assure that their digital supply chain does not become compromised. >> Real quick while I got you here, as cyber standards become around hybrid, the early responses were specialized on AWS, Azure, or Google, and they pick one, I have a backup cloud, and then build your teams around that, your developer teams. Does that shift with hybrid? How does CSOs change with hybrid? >> So the benefit in terms of the entry to IBM has in the cloud space which is probably in terms of the current variants, two years old, is that we're not dealing with legacy. So we're kind of learning from the mistakes that these older cloud providers that have got a wealth of legacy in their environments both for the actual hardware level, but also at the code-base level, some more so than others in terms of the issues they have with their code bearers. And therefore, with the AI ops and the actual cyber security tools that we put in place we're building upon the bad experiences they've had but also other intelligence that we get in terms of threat factors as they come through, John. >> Howard, and the last question to end this segment, you've led a lot of digital transformation initiatives through your career. What have you found has been the best practice as that applies now, as companies are coming out of COVID, they want to have a growth strategy, they want to make sure the foundation's in place that's solid, that they can build upon. What's your lessons learned? What's your best practice advice? >> So you've got to deal with the difficult problems first, that sometimes are fundamental to get to pace. So controls appears to be a fairly mundane topic but unless you can deal with the controls, you can't actually get the accelerated pace. And then when you do these transformations you have to bring your people along with you at the same time as you're transforming the technology. So you need the silicon to be allied with the carbon and then you get people that are actually change hungry as opposed to change resistant. >> Howard Boville, thanks for comin' on theCUBE. Head of Hybrid Cloud Platforms at IBM. Thanks for joining us, today. >> You're welcome, thank you, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE for IBM Think 2021 coverage. Thanks for watching. (soft music) ♪ Dah de dah ♪ ♪ Dah ♪

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM >>Think 2020 >>one brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 john for your host of the cube we're here. Howard Belleville is the head of hybrid cloud platform for IBM been in the industry for many, many decades as a practitioner heading up organizations now at IBM heading up the hybrid cloud. Howard, great to have you on the cube. >>Pleased to be here, john thank you for your time. Can >>you tell us a little about the digital transformation trends that you've seen in the past year as they have clearly shook the industry? Certainly Covid no one would have predicted provisioning VPN access or remote access for all the employees. I'm sure that wasn't on anyone's radar but many more other disruptions and opportunities for accelerating these new what are now obvious benefits. Can you take your time to explain what you're seeing? >>Yeah, sure. So there's been a huge amount of acceleration of digital transformation. So VPN projects, as you mentioned, the people working from home projects that in the past were taking many, many years to work through then got done literally in weeks, um and they're very complex when you get under the skin of them. Um and companies therefore saw confidence in that and start to look at broader digital transformations um and you can kind of think about in terms of the successes and their failures or the lessons learned from them. So when it's done right, what I've observed from companies that have been it right, they've done it from a business process perspective, they looked at their business processes that they want to transform as opposed to just the independent technology, um but the companies that have been around for a while, I've also been understood that legacy is a problem. So God created the Earth in seven of the world in seven days, but that's because he didn't have any legacy to deal with. So as companies have taken the confidence for the smaller projects to work through, they found in these larger ones where they've got legacy environments to work through. Digital transformation is still very important, but it's not as straightforward as they thought it might be. >>You know, one of the things that's coming out of the hybrid cloud um, discussion is a couple of things. One is everyone now agrees that this is the standard and multi cloud soon around the corner. Um, Hybrid clouds and operating model. Um, and it's a new kind of operating system with with the ability to use kubernetes and containers and microservices and other service message to to integrate legacy. This is huge. What's the biggest pain points that you're seeing from an adoption standpoint that our blockers from clients, What's getting in the way of the obvious now path with hybrid cloud? >>Well actually the first and foremost the position that IBM is created by kind of calling out hybrid cloud where companies will be on premise and off premise because the legacy IFC IOS around the world, the huge sigh of relief and having sat in their seats, I often thought I must be the dumbest person in the room because I don't understand this full on public cloud model because I can't see the benefits to my shareholders that that would deliver. I could see it to the pure play cloud service providers but not to to myself. So talking to C I O S I think thank heavens for that were no longer seen as a Luddite when we're explaining that we'll be on premise and off premise and it'll be heterogeneous environments were operating with within the simple way to think about the blockers and actually done a nice job yourself, john in terms of explaining this is cloud, is is simply another resource tool that you use to run your applications or your data sets on and in the past you had nicely curated environment within it was in your own environment, but there are benefits that you can get by using more innocent technologies like cloud, particularly around developed productivity. But in chapter one of cloud with a pure flare cloud providers, it was kind of a carbuncle that you kind of put onto the side of your organization, which then became very difficult. This kind of Frankenstein's monster of piece parts to put together from an IT operations and cyber security perspective. >>Okay, so you talk about this Franken cloud model before, I've heard heard that come from you. What is this about? You just referenced it there. What is the Franken cloud? >>Yeah, that's the simple way to think about it is um, in the old world, when you run all of your applications, your data sets, your developers in your own data sensors, you would create a curated model that would allow you to very strongly from an architectural perspective, lots of different legacy environments. But the actual architecture put around it would be clean and the operational environment will be clean and the actual Cyprus security controls, you put on a third party capability, whether that's a cloud service provider or a software as a service provider. And you had a world of complexity where you have no control over those environments and you're certainly not driving the architectural standards. So you're putting together these peace parts in the same way as dr Frankenstein put together the monster he created and ultimately, that will turn upon you. It will create technical operational issues that will create economic issues and it absolutely will create cybersecurity issues. So the important thing to think about on these digital transformations is the architecture in a hybrid context is one that will work for you with a multi cloud environment, whether that's from a software as a service provider or from the cloud service >>provider. It's interesting you bring up these other turning on you kind of the Franken cloud. I get that. But let's bring that up to the positive a client customer might say, hey, you know, I did a great job of moving into the public cloud. I brought some stuff on hybrid. Oh my God, look at the push some new stuff and then I pushed new new code and then things breaks. They call this day to operations. Or as you guys are referring to a I ops. These are opportunities. So how does the company get their arms around that? Because that's gonna be the next progression. Okay. I'm operating on distributed basis. Alright, great. I got an edge data center, whatever. But now I'm pushing code all the time. I don't want it to break. >>Yeah, I mean most of my comments are based upon the experiences and the mistakes that I've made in my career. So that element that you talked about there that day to operations, not only are we going through an inflection point in terms of the technologies that are used and the architecture is at a technical level, you have to put together the silicon that you think about. You're going to really think about the carbon, the people and the operating model that you have because a lot of the actual manual work you did previously will be done in a in an automated fashion. So an Ai fashion. So any transformation program needs to look at the actual transformation of the skills of the people you have working for you and they shouldn't feel fearful that it's a place where they actually won't have a role. They just won't have a role with the current skill sets they've got. But there are adjacent skill sets that you can have that they can actually be trained into or get an assignment where they get the experience to operate in that fashion. >>I'd love to get the comment on the edge with this system on a chip soc as it's called As more and more capabilities are going to be at the edge. But I want to stay on this quick cloud thing on Franken cloud because you know, one of the things that I see with the positives of cloud is is that okay? Can be more agile. But then I get worried that if I'm going too fast, I might break something. I get fired. I got all this compliance, don't get sued or you know, there's all kinds of regulations now and compliance around distributed clouds globally. So what's your take on that? What specific challenges do these companies face when they're either in regulated industries or don't want to go too fast? I gotta, I gotta watch that day to make sure it's not gonna be misused. >>Yeah. So the, so the philosophy that we have at IBM is different to Chapter one and the pure player cloud providers, which is, we believe if you build the actual compliance controls in from the outset and have them as a standard of consumption for all customers, they can actually accelerate their adoption of cloud so they can actually get to the benefits of cloud productivity innovation far more quickly. And that's been evidenced by Chapter one where all large institutions in multiple year programs spend tens of millions of dollars and are building the compliance controls themselves. You don't do that with IBM, you get that out of the box for the entire industry. We keep that fresh and current and vibrant going forward. So there's non functional requirements and no longer a consideration for you and you can then focus your energy, your developers in terms of the actual points of innovation, on the functional capabilities that you can provide. >>I want to get your reaction to something and you comment if you don't mind. I mean, there's been a big trend of data clouds built on other people's clouds and you've got the needs of special specialty and industries or vertical needs. Do you see the need or you see a path for specialty clouds or vertical clouds? Specifically as these? The A. I. And data can be relative to these verticals but you want at the same time horizontal scalability for data plane or data access. What's your take on specialty clouds? >>That's at the heart of the thesis. And the idea that we have here at IBM, which is there is a need for specialty clouds of particular industries and their their workloads. And really it's kind of people look back in the very near future. That's a that's an evident thing because again in the old world when it was in your own data center, you would have build types for specific types of applications and the processes that are supported and the risk posture of that and then the associated data sets. Um so the capabilities that we built within our global availability zones is for the large enterprises and that's an area that's obviously being heritage and then it's not just the software level, it's the hardware it runs on. So IBM provides the hardware from a mainframe power X 86. So for all those kind of form factors and an operating system level, obviously through Lennox in terms of the capabilities that we have so we can meet all of that stack but build them specifically for the applications and the data sets for the industries that we serve and the capabilities necessary. >>That's great stuff. I want to take your take shift gears to cybersecurity. I mean every time you look at the headline of a breach, solar winds had more implications than anyone could imagine. You do you hire more firefighters to put out the fire? Do you make fire resistant materials? I mean, there's optimization balance. What do you think is the best way to prevent cyber breaches going forward? What's your take on this? I'm sure you have >>a person, the world world of cyber security, it's all of the above and them anymore because you've got to put checks and balances in terms of every capability having kind of come from an environment where my old bank was named after the country it was in and therefore Nation state to take great delight in terms of trying to breach the area. So all of those controls are necessary um as you, as you put them in the other element to think about on digital supply chains is again, if you actually have your supply chain on a cloud that has the compliance controls built in, they benefit and inherit that as well. Whereas if you don't, you got to actually ensure that they are actually attesting to the controls. The cloud that we built here at IBM gives you continuous monitoring to sure that those software as a service providers are actually adhering to the controls you want in real time. That is a massive game changer. In terms of the, the logging information we can provide to customers to ensure that their digital supply chain does not become compromised >>real quick. While I've got you here as cyber standards become around hybrid. Uh, the early responses were specialized on AWS as your google and they pick one to have a backup cloud and build your teams around that your developer teams. Does that shift with hybrid? How does seesaws change with hybrid? >>Yeah. So, the benefit in terms of the entry to IBM has in the cloud space, which is probably in terms of the current variants, two years old is that we're not dealing with legacy. Um so we're kind of learning from the mistakes of these older cloud providers that have got a wealth of legacy and their environments, both at the actual hardware level, but also the code base level, some more so than others in terms of the issues they have with their code base um and therefore with the ai ops and the actual cyber security tools that we put employers were building upon, the bad experiences they've had, but also other intelligence that we get in terms of threat vectors as they come through, john >>howard. In the last question to end the segment, you've led a lot of digital transformation initiatives through your career. What have you found has been the best practice as that applies now as companies are coming out of covid, they wanna have a growth strategy. You want to make sure the foundations in place, that's solid that they can build upon. What's your, what's your lessons to learn, What's your best practice advice. >>So you've got to deal with the difficult problems first that sometimes a fundamental to get to pierce. So controls appears to be a fairly mundane topic. But unless you can deal with the controls, you can't actually get the accelerated pierce. And when you do these transformations, you have to bring your people along with you at the same time as your transfer transforming the technology. So you need the silicon to be allied with the carbon and then you get people are actually change Hungary as opposed to change resistant. >>Howard bravo. Thanks for coming on the cube head of hybrid cloud platforms at IBM. Thanks for joining us today. >>You're welcome. Thank you, john. >>Okay. I'm John Free with the Cube for IBM think 2021 coverage. Thanks for watching. Mhm Yeah.