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

>> From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Cloud Analyst Summit, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, I'm Wikibon's Peter Burris. Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of IBM Innovation Day, here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Great series of conversations, and this next one also is going to be a great conversation, with Jason McGee, who's an IBM Fellow, VP and CTO of Cloud Platform here at IBM. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we've had a lot of great conversations about what does open mean, where is the cloud going, what is the role of developers in this whole thing, but I want to dig a little bit deeper into this kind of core question. The cloud suggests a new model for computing. I would also think that would mean that there's a new model for development on the horizon. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Can you talk to us a little bit about that? >> Yeah, sure, I mean, I think that's absolutely true. I think one of the core things that people are trying to get out of cloud these days is development velocity, you know. For many years, of course, one of the key pressures in IT has been how do I do stuff more quickly, and that's gone through many iterations over time, but I think cloud today, people are really trying to figure out how to leverage cloud as a platform for speed of development, and the combination of services on cloud, and new development models like microservices, and new technologies like containers are all kind of contributing elements in helping people solve this problem, how do I build stuff more quickly. >> So, with all that new technology, is a new mindset required? Does somebody think about the problem differently, does somebody break the problem down differently? How do you start with that notion of looking at a business requirement or business outcome, and translate it into the technology? We used to just create code. Now we're doing something different. >> Yeah, I think the first thing you have to do is think about how to organize people. You know, software development at the end of the day is a sport amongst people and you have to think about how to break up the problem, and so, like microservices, a lot of us think of microservices as a technology. It's not really a technology, it's really a philosophy about how to attack a problem with a group of people, it's about how to organize, and its fundamental idea is break it into independent parts, and allow a small team of people to not only develop that part but to own it end-to-end, you know, like the old development model was development, test, production, hand it over the wall to operations. The new model is break it into small problems and then have a team own the whole thing end-to-end, and with that new organizational philosophy comes new architectures for apps, new technologies to help you do that, and new platforms to run things on. >> So, as we think about that, that suggests that the approach to software from a licensing standpoint, from what are you buying, what are you installing is also going to change. How do you foresee, and what is IBM preparing customers for in this kind of new world where software is a service coming from a lot of different places as opposed to a license with, you know, 800 million lines of code or eight billion lines of code behind it? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think these new ideas are enabled by things like cloud. Part of the reason that cloud has enabled this new model to be feasible is because you get, for example, consumption-based pricing. You can use a wide variety of technologies, you can pick the right tool for the job, you can pay for just what you use, and therefore, the old models of static software licensing and big platforms can start to fade away as these small teams are able to kind of pick the right tool for the job, and that wouldn't be possible in a world without like, as a service delivery, and meter pricing, and things like that, because you would have to consolidate to fewer choices and buy bigger chunks of things. >> As you said, microservices is more of a philosophical approach to how you think about software, and it's also predicated on that wonderful notion of REST. A great paper was written a number of years ago on APIs. IBM has kind of an interesting role in the industry, though. IBM has got to bring a whole bunch of customers with highly stateful applications forward into the cloud. Kubernetes, great for stateful. How are we going to address that tension between the stateless world of greenfield applications and the stateful legacy that has to move into this new world? >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, I think a lot of times new trends emerge and it's easy to ignore the past, but the lesson I've learnt in over 20 years in IT is like, nothing ever goes away, right, and so you have to not only define the future, but you have to figure out how to help people get there. I actually think part of the reason technologies like Kubernetes are so dominant right now is because they actually do a reasonable job at both. You know, Kubernetes and containers are a great platform for the kind of new architectures and for adopting these new methodologies we're talking about, but they can also accommodate the existing apps, and you can move existing apps into these new platforms, and so, that helps give people a path. They can move something they have and then slowly re-factor it, or they can move something they have and build new things around it, and they could do all that with platforms like Kubernetes as an enabler, right? And it's been interesting to watch. Like, at IBM, we obviously make Kubernetes available, both in our public and private clouds, but we're also big users, and we run all of our cloud services on that platform. Stateful databases, AI and machine learning workloads, analytics platforms, stateless web apps, like, the whole lot, we've been able to run on a platform like that. >> Talk to me a little bit about this notion of cloud operating model and how we manage that, because it seems to me as though the user adoption of a lot of these new technologies are going to be facilitated if we can put forward a management platform that uses those technologies to manage those technologies. What's the relationship there between the evolution of management? Is that a leading edge of how we are going to see people adopt some of these technologies? >> It's certainly a very kind of critical component of the story. I mean, if you really believe in the idea that where we want to move to is this kind of microservice model of small teams that run things themselves, then you get into the question of, all right, well, if you have eight people whose job is to run something in production, they need to be able to do that efficiently, right? You can't have complex operational processes, you need a lot of really good tools, it needs to be really easy for them, 'cause you're asking people to have a really vast set of knowledge, and so, it's driving the evolution of management philosophies. You're seeing new technologies, like SDO, for example, emerge, which are allowing like an application person to define policy about security, and access, and networking that normally would've required like a network expert to go to. >> And more, which makes it a very powerful platform. >> Powerful platform, right, but I think it's coming out of this realization that like, if that small team of people ever want to sleep, and when they have to run things, they're going to need tools to help them do that. So it's been interesting to watch that kind of circular evolution of these different domains. >> So, 20 years of experience from web-sphere forward. Let's think about the next five years. Where is the biggest innovation going to happen in software? >> Well, I mean, there's the obvious stuff around the application of AI, but the part that I'm most excited about is I think we've been on an arc over the last 20 years, to make the application the center of IT. You know, historically, infrastructure has been the center of IT. You start a project, you buy a server, you install an operating system, you set up management tools. >> That's been a big asset. >> The center has been the infrastructure and you build your way up. And I think as velocity has become dominant, we've been trying to flip it and say, I'm building an app. Let me focus on the app, and focus on what the app needs, and drive the requirements down, and I don't think we're done yet. I think there's a lot more to do there, but that's the path we're on. I think over the next five years, we'll really get there, where as an app team, I don't really have to think about infrastructure, and I can have the system adapt to the needs of the application. >> Do you foresee a point where the data and the application are increasingly and further broken apart? >> The data and the application? I don't know that they're going to be further broken apart, but I think we'll see more kind of intelligent scheduling and combinations of those things, like there are cases where the data needs to be king, and the application needs to come to the data, and vice versa, and historically, the data world and the app world have been pretty separate, right, and you know, again, if we think teams are going to run their things, then just like they're doing ops and dev, they're going to have to do apps and data, right, and so, there's an opportunity there to bring those worlds closer. I see some of it, but, you know, Kubernetes as an example, as a common operational platform for both kinds of systems, but there's more, for sure. >> So bring it together when it makes the most amount of sense, keep it separate when other people need to use the data. >> Stop assuming you have specialists in every technology, and assume you have a multi-disciplinary team that has to run it all. >> All right, Jason, one more question. February, San Francisco, IBM takes it over with IBM Think. A lot of users, a lot of new questions being raised, a lot of opportunity for learning, a lot of opportunity for networking. What are you hoping to accomplish? What conversations do you want to have at Think? >> Yeah, I'm really excited, I think, to have conversations with clients about how they're actually adapting to this new world. I think sometimes the biggest challenge is not technology, but how organizations assimilate these ideas, and so, I'm excited for the conversations with customers about what problems they're solving, sharing those experiences with each other, and also practitioners. I think we've moved into a world where IT is dominated by the people who actually do the work, by the practitioners, and I really hope to see a lot of them show up at Think in February and share with us what they're doing. >> Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, VP, CTO, Cloud Platform here at IBM. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And once again, this is Peter Burris from the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. You've been watching theCUBE. Stay tuned. (techno music)