(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with coverage of SUSECON Digital. Brought to you by SUSE. >> Stu: Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Apeda Welcome to the program Vincente Moranta, who is the Vice President of Offer Management of Enterprise Linux Workloads on Power. Vincente, pleasure to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Vincente: Hey Stu and thank you for having me. >> All right, so we know that SUSE lives on a lot of platforms. We're going to talk a bit about applications specifically, primarily SAP. Give us a little bit, Vincente, about what you're working on, and the relevance to the partnership with SUSE. >> Sure, absolutely. So, the last five years I've been responsible for offering management at IBM. Focused on solutions that live on IBM powered systems. In particular, we started with SAP HANA, and obviously SAP and SUSE, with their fantastic relationship, was a big part of that and continues to be as we have grown the platform for the last five years. >> Excellent. So, SAP of course, critical workload, we've been seeing SAP go through those transformation. So, help us understand what work needs to be done to integrate these things? Make sure that companies can run their business. >> Yeah, I think primarily as clients are making their transition from a traditional type of an ERP, CRM, and even BW type workloads, they're looking for a way to make those transitions. Really get in to the whole digital transformation and all of the spaces of being able to leverage technology in a way that creates value to the client, in almost real time. But they want to do it with technology partners that are going to enable the client to do it with minimal risk, with high flexibility and with partners who are there for them to, in some cases, do things that are not necessarily all too forwarded or ready to go yet. But really giving the customer the ability to adapt to things. And when we started with SAP HANA, as I mentioned, the customers in the market who were doing HANA on X86 platforms were limited to certain set of capabilities, certain set of support statements, and things like that. And a big part of that was bare metal implementations which still to this day remain the most popular way to deploy HANA in an X86 environment. But when we got together with SUSE and with SAP and we started the partnership around HANA, the thing that became very clear was that customers needed flexibility. They needed to be able to adapt to changing environments, very interesting challenges that they were trying to tackle with these HANA projects. But the capabilities of the servers that they were using, were not allowing them to have that flexibility. And then, even if SUSE was trying to do certain things and give some flexibility to those clients, if the infrastructure cannot handle it, or vice verse, it really just is a one-party trick and it doesn't work. So the focus with SUSE, almost from the beginning, has been on tool innovation. And we've been able to accomplish really amazing things together with them and SAP. Things that could not have been possible without that very strong collaboration. And one of them that is very recent, is shared processor pool. Right? In a world where HANA is deployed bare-metal systems, IBM Power is always doing virtualization, and together with SUSE, we were able to come up with a solution. And with SAP, obviously. That allowed customers to share source in a virtual way across many HANA instances. So completely revolutionizing the DCO and the ROI for clients working with HANA. Without trading out any of the resiliency, any of the performance, and everything else. So, that's the balance that a lot of these customers are looking for is flexibility, and better returns, especially now more than ever. Without trading out all of the things that they need for an S/4 HANA project or an ERP or a BW project. >> You talked about the flexibility and the returns that customers get on this. I wonder if you step back for a second, where is this hitting on a CIO's priority list? What has changed in today's Cloud era? Couple weeks ago, IBM Think was going on, heard a lot about customers, how they're going through their journey in the cloud. We know there's a lot of options there so. SAP solutions specifically, there's a lot of ways that we can do this. So how does a CIO figure out what the best solution for their skill-set and the technology partner that they work with. >> Yeah, I think at a high-level where the CIO's are basing nowadays, is kind of, it's a good time to be a CIO, I think, because you get a chance to have a broad range of deployment options. Without having to trade out from the features. I'm sure some CIO's will disagree and will say there's plenty of other challenges that are making their lives complicated. But if we just focus on the fact that you can deploy HANA - you can deploy it in the cloud, you can deploy it in hybrid, you can deploy it on premises. And the largest then, and especially with our capabilities, and together with SUSE, the CIO doesn't have to make a choice on trade out of things that they have to lose if they make one of the other. I think that is what helps them to feel comfortable to go in to SAP and being able to adapt. If a project becomes too large or the data transfer requirements become too complicated or too expensive, it's easy enough to bring it back and to maybe leave dev test in a cloud and move the rest of the production environment to on premise. Through a number of partnerships that we have done over the last few years, there's a number of very large MSP's and CSP's including SAP HANA Enterprise Crowd - HEC - and very soon IBM cloud as well. Who can provide all of these capabilities that SUSE and Empower allow for a HANA deployment to be done in a Cloud. So from our perspective, even though I'm a hardware guy, and some people may think I only care about on premises business, the reality is when a customer says, or a CIO as you were asking. When a CIO is trying to make a decision we don't want that CIO to be thinking they have to make a decision between IBM supporting them only if it's on premises or only if it's on Cloud. We can do both. And they don't have to do, it's not a hard trade off to decide. You can start with one, you can go to the other one. We can have capacity for them like we're doing with SAP HEC today, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. They're using Power9 technology. The customers benefit in regardless of which deployment option they choose. Both with SUSE underneath it. I think we're trying to make it simpler for them to make those choices without infrastructure becoming the sticky point. >> Yeah, and you talked about the support that users can get, of course, from IBM. At SUSECON, a lot of the discussion about the community there. >> Absolutely. >> So, what can you tell us about, you've got thousands of customers that are running SAP HANA on Power, how do you help them rally together and be part of (muted). >> Yeah, so, you and I have known each other for a while and I think when we started working together at a prior company it was around communities practice. And the organizational network and social network. A big part of what we have done is just going to that same approach. Of just connecting people with people. Right? Connecting people from SUSE with people from IBM, with clients and trying to foster valuable interaction between those clients. Whether it's TechU, IBM TechU Conferences, SAP TechEd, SUSECON, you name it. We're always kind of looking for ways to bring people together. And I'll put in a plug for a client entity, a client council called the SAP Power Customer Council, which is a group of clients that decided on their own to get together and bring other customers who are doing SAP deployments on AIX, on Linux, obviously with SUSE and HANA, and come together once a year. We also have almost monthly interlock and workshops with them. But that is one way where the SUSE folks, IBM Power, SAP Development, all come together with a whole bunch of clients and they're giving us feedback. But also identifying things for us to work on next. From a support perspective, as you said, we have thousands of clients nowadays, and the really fantastic thing has been very few issues and the issues that we have had, SUSE, SAP and IBM, all three of us together, have been able to resolve them to the customers satisfaction. So it just kind of demonstrates that regardless of where something is invented SUSE with SLES, SAP with HANA, us with our hardware and our hypervisors, when it comes to the clients we all work very closely together for their success. >> Great. Those feedback loops are so critically important to everyone involved. I guess last thing, maybe if you've got a customer example that might highlight the partnership between IBM and SUSE? >> Yeah, there's a number of them and we have, I think it's over 60 public references together with SUSE of clients who are doing an SAP HANA with SUSE Empower. But a couple that come to mind, obviously Robert Bosch is a fantastic client for all of us. A fantastic partner. And they've been with us almost from the very beginning, together with SUSE and together with us. And they helped us to identify early on some things that they would like to be able to see supported. Some capabilities that they expected to be able to have, especially given that Bosch had a strong knowledge of IBM technology, IBM product. And they wanted to be able to apply some of the same capabilities around Live Partition Mobility and large size L-bars for HANA and things like that. And they worked very closely with SUSE and with us, and with SAP, to not just give us the requirement, but really help us to identify okay, how should this work? Right, it's not just creating the technology and adding more and more features but how do we integrate it, how do we integrate it in to Bosch, who had created a fantastic self-provisioning type of a portal for all of their clients, all of their internal entities around the world. That was really cool and it really kind of helped us to highlight how we could integrate into tools, monetary, and reporting, etc that our clients have. Another example if I can, is Richemont. Richemont International is based in Geneva. Luxury brand. And Helga Delterad who was the Director of Idea at the time, kind of came to me and gave me a challenge. He said, "Look, I love HANA Power. I love that we can do all of these things with it. But I really would like be able to share processors across multiple HANA instances. That would really reduce the bill. It would really reduce the cost. And Richemont would be able to achieve a much quicker return on investment than we had anticipated." So, he gave us a challenge. The challenge went to everybody. It went to SUSE, to us and to SAP, we all got together and again with Helga being the executive sponsor on the client side, he really kind of worked with all of us. Brought us together and it was a power of the possible type of situation that now is generally available to all clients. And it's thanks to Helga, thanks to Richemont, who brought us together and gave us that challenge. >> Excellent. Well Vincenta Morante, great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for sharing the update on IBM Power and the partnership with SUSE. >> Thanks Stu. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music plays)

(bright music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another special digital community event, brought to you by theCUBE and Wikibon. We've got a great session planned for the next hour or so. Specifically, we're gonna talk about the journey to the data-driven multi-cloud. Sponsored by IBM, with a lot of great thought leadership content from IBM guests. Now, what we'll do is, we'll introduce some of these topics, we'll have these conversations, and at the end, this is gonna be an opportunity for you to participate, as a community, in a crowd chat, so that you can ask questions, voice your opinions, hear what others have to say about this crucial issue. Now why is this so important? Well Wikibon believes very strongly that one of the seminal features of the transition to digital business, driving new-type AI classes of applications, et cetera, is the ability of using flash-based storage systems and related software, to do a better job of delivering data to more complex, richer applications, faster, and that's catalyzing a lot of the transformation that we're talking about. So let me introduce our first guest. Eric Herzog is the CMO and VP Worldwide Storage Channels at IBM. Eric, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great, well thank you Peter. We love coming to theCUBE, and most importantly, it's what you guys can do to help educate all the end-users and the resellers that sell to them, and that's very, very valuable and we've had good feedback from clients and partners, that, hey, we heard you guys on theCUBE, and very interesting, so I really appreciate all the work you guys do. >> Oh, thank you very much. We've got a lot of great things to talk about today. First, and I want to start it off, kick off the proceedings for the next hour or so by addressing the most important issue here. Data-driven. Now Wikibon believes that digital transformation means something, it's the process by which a business treats data as an asset, and re-institutionalizes its work and changes the way it engages with customers, et cetera. But this notion of data-driven is especially important because it elevates the role that storage is gonna play within an organization. Sometimes I think maybe we shouldn't even call it storage. Talk to us a little bit about data-driven and how that concept is driving some of the concepts in innovation that are represented in this and future IBM products. >> Sure. So I think the first thing, it is all about the data, and it doesn't matter whether you're a small company, like Herzog's Bar and Grill, or the largest Fortune 500 in the world. The bottom line is, your most valuable asset is you data, whether that's customer data, supply chain data, partner data that comes to you, that you use, services data, the data you guys sell, right? You're an analysis firm, so you've got data, and you use that data to create you analysis, and then you use that as a product. So, data is the most critical asset. At the same time, data always goes onto storage. So if that foundation of storage is not resilient, is not available, is not performant, then either A, it's totally unavailable, right, you can't get to the customer data. B, there's a problem with the data, okay, so you're doing supply chain and if the storage corrupts the data, then guess what? You can't send out the T-shirts to the right retail location, or have it available online if you're an online retailer. >> Or you sent 200,000 instead of 20, and you get stuck with the bill. >> Right, exactly. So data is that incredible asset and then underneath, think of storage as the foundation of a building. Data is your building, okay, and all the various aspects of that data, customer data, your data, internal data, everything you're doing, that's the building. If the foundation of the building isn't rock solid the building falls down. Whether your building is big or small, and that's what storage does, and then storage can also optimize the building above it. So think of it more than just the foundation but the foundation if you will, that almost has like a tree, and has got things that come up from the bottom and have that beautiful image, and storage can help you out. For example, metadata. Metadata which is data about data could be used by analytics, package them, well guess what? The metadata about data could be exposed by the storage company. So that's why data-driven is so important from an end-user perspective and why storage is that foundation underneath a data-driven enterprise. >> Now we've seen a lot of folks talk about how cloud is the centerpiece of thinking about infrastructure. You're suggesting that data is the centerpiece of infrastructure, and cloud is gonna be an implementation decision. Where do I put the workloads, costs, all the other elements associated with it. But it suggests ultimately that data is not gonna end up in one place. We have to think about data as being where it needs to be to perform the work. That suggests multi-cloud, multi-premise. Talk to us a little bit about the role that storage and multi-cloud play together. >> So let's take multi-cloud first and peel that away. So multi-cloud, we see a couple of different things. So first of all, certain companies don't want to use a public cloud. Whether it's a security issue, and actually some people have found out that public cloud providers, no matter who the vendor is, sort of is a razor in a razor blade. Very cheap to put the storage out there but we want certain SLAs, guess what? The cloud vendors charge more. If you move data around a lot, in and out as you were describing, it's really that valuable, guess what? On ingress and egress gets you charges for that. The cloud provider. So it's almost the razor and the razor blades. So A, there's a cost factor in public only. B, you've got people that have security issues. C, what we've seen is, in many cases, hybrid. So certain datasets go out to the cloud and other datasets stay on the premises. So you've got that aspect of multi, which is public, private or hybrid. The second aspect, which is very common in bigger companies that are either divisionalized or large geographically, is literally the usage, in a hybrid or a public cloud environment, of multiple cloud vendors. So for example, in several countries the data has to physically stay within the confines of that country. So if you're a big enterprise and you've got offices in 200 different, well not 200, but 100 different countries, and 20 of 'em you have to keep in that country by law. If your cloud provider doesn't have a data center there you need to use a different cloud provider. So you've got that. And you also have, I would argue that the cloud is not new anymore. The internet is the original cloud. So it's really old. >> Cloud in many respects is the programming model, or the mature programming model for the internet-based programming applications. >> I'd agree with that. So what that means is, as it gets more mature, from the mid-sized company up, all of a sudden procurement's involved. So think about the way networking, storage and servers, and sometimes even software was bought. The IT guy, the CIO, the line of business might specify, I want to use it but then it goes to procurement. In the mid to big company it's like, great, are we getting three bids on that? So we've also seen that happen, particularly with larger enterprise where, well you were using IBM cloud, that's great, but you are getting a quote from Microsoft or Amazon right? So those are the two aspects we see in multi-cloud, and by the way, that can be a very complex situation dealing with big companies. So the key thing that we do at IBM, is make sure that whichever model you take, public, private or hybrid, or multiple public clouds, or multiple public cloud providers, using a hybrid configuration, that we can support that. So things like our transparent cloud tiering, we've also recently created some solution blueprints for multi-clouds. So these things allow you to simply and easily deploy. Storage has to be viewed as transparent to a cloud. You've gotta be able to move the data back and forth, whether that be backing the data up, or archiving the data, or secondary data usage, or whatever that may be. And so storage really is, gotta be multi-cloud and we've been doing those solutions already and in fact, but honestly for the software side of the IBM portfolio for storage, we have hundreds of cloud providers mid, big and small, that use our storage software to offer backup as a service or storage as a service, and we're again the software foundation underneath what an end-user would buy as a service from those cloud providers. >> So I want to pick up on a word you used, simplicity. So, you and I are old infrastructure hacks and for many years I used to tell my management, infrastructure must do no harm. That's the best way to think about infrastructure. Simplicity is the new value proposition, complexity remains the killer. Talk to us a little bit about the role that simplicity in packaging and service delivery and everything else is again, shaping the way you guys, IBM, think about what products, what systems and when. >> So I think there's a couple of things. First of all, it's all about the right tool for the right job. So you don't want to over-sell and sell a big, giant piece of high-end all-flash array, for example, to a small company. They're not gonna buy that. So we have created a portfolio of which our FlashSystem 9100 is our newest product, but we've got a whole set of portfolios from the entry space to the mid range to the high end. We also have stuff that's tuned for applications, so for example, our lasting storage server which comes in an all-flash configuration is ideal for big data analytics workloads. Our DS8000 family of flash is ideal for mainframe attach, and in fact we have close to 65% of all mainframe attached storage, is from IBM. But you have the right tool for the right job, so that's item number one. The second thing you want to do is easier and easier to use. Whether that be configuring the physical entity itself, so how do you cable, how do you rack and stack it, make sure that it easily integrates into whatever else they're putting together in their data center, but it a cloud data center, a traditional on-premises data center, it doesn't matter. The third thing is all about the software. So how do you have software that makes the array easier and easier to use, and is heavily automated based on AI. So the old automation way, and we've both been in that era, was you set policies. Policy-based management, and when it came out 10 years ago, it was a transformational event. Now it's all about using AI in your infrastructure. Not only does your storage need to be right to enable AI at the server workload level, but we're saying, we've actually deployed AI inside of our storage, making it easier for the storage manager or the IT manager, and in some cases even the app owner to configure the storage 'cause it's automated. >> Going back to that notion that the storage knows something about the metadata, too. >> Right, exactly, exactly. So the last thing is our multi-cloud blueprint. So in those cases, what we've done is create these multi-cloud blueprints. For example, disaster recovery and business continuity using a public cloud. Or secondary data use in a public cloud. How do you go ahead and take a snapshot, a replica or a backup, and use it for dev-ops or test or analytics? And by the way, our Spectrum copy data management software allows you, but you need a blueprint so that it's easy for the end user, or for those end users who buy through our partners, our partners then have this recipe book, these blueprints, you put them together, use the software that happens to come embedded in our new FlashSystem 9100 and then they use that and create all these various different recipes. Almost, I hate to say it, like a baker would do. They use some base ingredients in baking but you can make cookies, candies, all kinds of stuff, like a donut is essentially a baked good that's fried. So all these things use the same base ingredients and that software that comes with the FlashSystem 9100, are those base ingredients, reformulated in different models to give all these multi-cloud blueprints. >> And we've gotta learn more about vegetables so we can talk about salad in that metaphor, (Eric laughing) you and I. Eric once again. >> Great, thank you. >> Thank you so much for joining us here on the CUBE. >> Great, thank you. >> Alright, so let's hear this come to life in the form of a product video from IBM on the FlashSystem 9100. >> Some things change so quickly, it's impossible to track with the naked eye. The speed of change in your business can be just as sudden and requires the ability to rapidly analyze the details of your data. The new, IBM FlashSystem 9100, accelerates your ability to obtain real-time value from that information, and rapidly evolve to a multi-cloud infrastructure, fueled by NVMe technology. In one powerful platform. IBM FlashSystem 9100, combines the performance, of IBM FlashCore technology. The efficiency of IBM Spectrum Virtualize. The IBM software solutions, to speed your multi-cloud deployments, reduce overall costs, plan for performance and capacity, and simplify support using cloud-based IBM storage insights to provide AI-powered predictive analytics, and simplify data protection with a storage solution that's flexible, modern, and agile. It's time to re-think your data infrastructure. (upbeat music) >> Great to hear about the IBM FlashSystem 9100 but let's get some more details. To help us with that, we've got Bina Hallman who's the Vice President Offering Management at IBM Storage. Bina, welcome to theCUBE. >> Well, thanks for having me. It's an exciting even, we're looking forward to it. >> So Bina, I want to build on some of the stuff that we talked to Eric about. Eric did a good job of articulating the overall customer challenge. As IBM conceives how it's going to approach customers and help them solve these challenges, let's talk about some of the core values that IBM brings to bear. What would you say would be one of the, say three, what are the three things that IBM really focuses on, as it thinks about its core values to approach these challenges? >> Sure, sure. It's really around helping the client, providing a simple one-stop shopping approach, ensuring that we're doing all the right things to bring the capabilities together so that clients don't have to take different component technologies and put them together themselves. They can focus on providing business value. And it's really around, delivering the economic benefits around CapEx and OpEx, delivering a set of capabilities that help them move on their journey to a data-driven, multi-cloud. Make it easier and make it simpler. >> So, making sure that it's one place they can go where they can get the solution. But IBM has a long history of engineering. Are you doing anything special in terms of pre-testing, pre-packaging some of these things to make it easier? >> Yeah, we over the years have worked with many of our clients around the world and helping them achieve their vision and their strategy around multi-cloud, and in that journey and those set of experiences, we've identified some key solutions that really do make it easier. And so we're leveraging the breadth of IBM, the power of IBM, making those investment to deliver a set of solutions that are pre-tested, they are supported at the solutions level. Really focusing on delivering and underpinning the solutions with blueprints. Step-by-step documentation, and as clients deploy these solutions, they run into challenges, having IBM support to assist. Really bringing it all together. This notion of a multi-cloud architecture, around delivering modern infrastructure capabilities, NVMe acceleration, but also some of our really core differentiation that we deliver through FlashCore data reduction capabilities, along with things like modern data protection. That segment is changing and we really want to enable clients, their IT, and their line of business to really free them up and focus on a business value, versus putting these components together. So it's really around taking those complex things and make them easier for clients. Get improved RPO, RTO, get improved performance, get improved costs, but also flexibility and agility are very critical. >> That sounds like therefore, I mean the history of storage has been trade-offs that you, this can only go that fast, and that tape can only go that fast but now when we start thinking about flash, NVMe, the trade-offs are not as acute as they used to be. Is IBM's engineering chops capable of pointing how you can in fact have almost all of this at one time? >> Oh absolutely. The breadth and the capabilities in our R and D and the research capabilities, also our experiences that I talked about, engagements, putting all of that together to deliver some key solutions and capabilities. Like, look, everybody needs backup and archive. Backup to recover your data in case of a disaster occurs, archive for long-term retention. That data management, the data protection segment, it's going through a transformation. New emerging capabilities, new ways to do backup. And what we're doing is, pulling all of that together, with things that we introduced, for example, our Protect Plus in the fourth quarter, along with this FS 9100 and the cloud capabilities, to deliver a solution around data protection, data reuse, so that you have a modern backup approach for both virtual and physical environments that is really based on things like snapshots and mountable copies, So you're not using that traditional approach to recovering your copy from a backup by bringing it back. Instead, all you're doing is mounting one of those copies and instantly getting your application back and running for operational recovery. >> So to summarize some of those value, once stop, pre-tested, advanced technologies, smartly engineered. You guys did something interesting on July 10th. Why don't you talk about how those values, and the understanding of the problem, manifested so fast. Kind of an exciting set of new products that you guys introduced on July 10th. >> Absolutely. On July 10th we not only introduced our flagship FlashSystem, the FS 9100, which delivers some amazing client value around the economic benefits of CapEx, OpEx reduction, but also seamless data mobility, data reuse, security. All the things that are important for a client on their cloud journey. In addition to that, we infused that offering with AI-based predictive analytics and of course that performance and NVMe acceleration is really key, but in addition to doing that, we've also introduced some very exciting solutions. Really three key solutions. One around data protection, data reuse, to enable clients to get that agility, and second is around business continuity and data reuse. To be able to really reduce the expense of having business continuity in today's environment. It's a high-risk environment, it's inevitable to have disruptions but really being prepared to mitigate some of those risks and having operational continuity is important and by doing things like leveraging the public cloud for your DR capabilities. That's very important, so we introduced a solution around that. And the third is around private cloud. Taking your IBM storage, your FS 9100, along with the heterogeneous environment you have, and making it cloud-ready. Getting the cloud efficiencies. Making it to where you can use it for environments to create things like native cloud applications that are portable, from on-prem and into the cloud. So those are some of the key ways that we brought this together to really deliver on client value. >> So could you give us just one quick use case of your clients that are applying these technologies to solve their problems? >> Yeah, so let me use the first one that I talked about, the data protection and data reuse. So to be able to take your on-premise environment, really apply an abstraction layer, set up catalogs, set up SLAs and access control, but then be able to step away and manage that storage all through API bays. We have a lot of clients that are doing that and then taking that, making the snapshots, using those copies for things like, whether it's the disaster recovery or secondary use cases like analytics, dev-ops. You know, dev-ops is a really important use case and our clients are really leveraging some of these capabilities for it because you want to make sure that, as application developers are developing their applications, they're working with the latest data and making sure that the testing they're doing is meaningful in finding the maximum number of defects so you get the highest quality of code coming out of them and being able to do that, in a self-service driven way so that they're not having to slow down their innovation. We have clients leveraging our capabilities for those kinds of use cases. >> It's great to hear about the FlashSystem 9100 but let's hear what customers have to say about it. Not too long ago, IBM convened a customer panel to discuss many aspects of this announcement. So let's hear what some of the customers had to say about the FlashSystem 9100. >> Now Owen, you've used just about every flash system that IBM has made. Tell us, what excites you about this announcement of our new FlashSystem 9100. >> Well, let's start with the hardware. The fact that they took the big modules from the older systems, and collapsed that down to a two-and-a-half inch form-factor NVMe drive is mind-blowing. And to do it with the full speed compression as well. When the compression was first announced, for the last FlashSystem 900, I didn't think it was possible. We tested it, I was proven wrong. (laughing) It's entirely possible. And to do that on a small form-factor NVMe drive is just astounding. Now to layer on the full software stack, get all those features, and the possibilities for your business, and what we can do, and leverage those systems and technologies, and take the snapshots in the replication and the insights into what our system's doing, it is really mind-blowing what's coming out today and I cannot wait to just kick those tires. There's more. So with that real-world compression ratio, that we can validate on the new 900, and it's the same in this new system, which is astounding, but we can get more, and just the amount of storage you get in this really small footprint. Like, two rack units is nothing. Half our services are two rack units, which is absolutely astounding, to get that much data in such a very small package, like, 460 terabytes is phenomenal, with all these features. The full solution is amazing, but what else can we do with it? And especially as they've said, if it's for a comparable price as what we've bought before, and we're getting the full solution with the software, the hardware, the extremely small form-factor, what else can you do? What workloads can you pull forward? So where our backup systems weren't on the super fast storage like our production systems are, now we can pull those forward and they can give the same performance as production to run the back-end of the company, which I can't wait to test. >> It's great to hear from customers. The centerpiece of the Wikibon community. But let's also get the analyst's perspective. Let's hear from Eric Burgener, who's the Research Vice President for Storage at IDC. >> Thanks very much Peter, good to be back. >> So we've heard a lot from a number of folks today about some of the changes that are happening in the industry and I want to amplify some things and get the analyst's perspective. So Wikibon, as a fellow analyst, Wikibon believes pretty strongly that the emergence of flash-based storage systems is one of the catalyst technologies that's driving a lot of the changes. If only because, old storage technologies are focused on persisting data. Disc, slow, but at least it was there. Flash systems allow a bit flip, they allow you to think about delivering data to anywhere in your organization. Different applications, without a lot of complexity, but it's gotta be more than that. What else is crucial, to making sure that these systems in fact are enabling the types of applications that customers are trying to deliver today. >> Yeah, so actually there's an emerging technology that provides the perfect answer to that, which is NVMe. If you look at most of the all-flash systems that have shipped so far, they've been based around SCSI. SCSI was a protocol designed for hard disk drives, not flash, even though you can use it with flash. NVMe is specifically designed for flash and that's really gonna open up the ability to get the full value of the performance, the capacity utilization, and the efficiencies, that all-flash arrays can bring to the market. And in this era of big data, more than ever, we need to unlock that performance capability. >> So as we think about the big data, AI, that's gonna have a significant impact overall in the market and how a lot of different vendors are jockeying for position. When IDC looks at the impact of flash, NVMe, and the reemergence of some traditional big vendors, how do you think the market landscape's gonna be changing over the next few years? >> Yeah, how this market has developed, really the NVMe-based all-flash arrays are gonna be a carve-out from the primary storage market which are SCSI-based AFAs today. So we're gonna see that start to grow over time, it's just emerging. We had startups begin to ship NVMe-based arrays back in 2016. This year we've actually got several of the majors who've got products based around their flagship platforms that are optimized for NVMe. So very quickly we're gonna move to a situation where we've got a number of options from both startups and major players available, with the NVMe technology as the core. >> And as you think about NVMe, at the core, it also means that we can do more with software, closer to the data. So that's gotta be another feature of how the market's gonna evolve over the next couple of years, wouldn't you say? >> Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the data services that generate latencies, like in-line data reduction, encryption and that type of thing, we can run those with less impact on the application side when we have much more performant storage on the back-end. But I have to mention one other thing. To really get all that NVMe performance all the way to the application side, you've gotta have an NVMe Over Fabric connection. So it's not enough to just have NVMe in the back-end array but you need that RDMA connection to the hosts and that's what NVMe Over Fabric provides for you. >> Great, so that's what's happening on the technology-product-vendor side, but ultimately the goal here is to enable enterprises to do something different. So what's gonna be the impact on the enterprise over the next few years? >> Yeah, so we believe that SCSI clearly will get replaced in the primary storage space, by NVMe over time. In fact, we've predicted that by 2021, we think that over 50% of all the external, primary storage revenue, will be generated by these end-to-end NVMe-based systems. So we see that transition happening over the course of the next two to three years. Probably by the end of this year, we'll have NVMe-based offerings, with NVMe Over Fabric front ends, available from six of the established storage providers, as well as a number of smaller startups. >> We've come a long way from the brown, spinning stuff, haven't we? >> (laughing) Absolutely. >> Alright, Eric Burgener, thank you very much. IDC Research Vice President, great once again to have you in theCUBE. >> Thanks Peter. >> Always great to get the analyst's perspective, but let's get back to the customer perspective. Again, from that same panel that we saw before, here's some highlights of what customers had to say about IBM's Spectrum family of software. (upbeat music) We love hearing those customer highlights but let's get into some of the overall storage trends and to do that we've asked Eric Herzog and Bina Hallman back to theCUBE. Eric, Bina, thanks again for coming back. So, what I want to do now is, I want to talk a little bit about some trends within the storage world and what the next few years are gonna mean, but Eric, I want to start with you. I was recently at IBM Think, and Ginni Rometty talked about the idea of putting smart to work. Now, I can tell you, that means something to me because the whole notion of how data gets used, how work gets institutionalized around your data, what does storage do in that context? To put smart to work. >> Well I think there's a couple of things. First we've gotta realize that it's not about storage, it's about the data and the information that happens to sit on the storage. So you have to have storage that's always available, always resilient, is incredibly fast, and as I said earlier, transparently moves things in and out of the cloud, automatically, so that the user doesn't have to do it. Second thing that's critical is the integration of AI, artificial intelligence. Both into the storage solution itself, of what the storage does, how you do it, and how it plays with the data, but also, if you're gonna do AI on a broad scale, and for example we're working with a customer right now and their AI configuration in 100 petabytes. Leveraging our storage underneath the hood of that big, giant AI analytics workload. So that's why they have to both think of it in the storage to make the storage better and more productive with the data and the information that it has, but then also as the undercurrent for any AI solution that anyone wants to employ, big, medium or small. >> So Bina, I want to pick up on that because there are gonna be some, there's some advanced technologies that are being exploited within storage right now, to achieve what Eric's talking about, but there's gonna be a lot more. And there's gonna be more intensive application utilizations of some of those technologies. What are some of the technologies that are becoming increasingly important, from a storage standpoint, that people have to think about as they try to achieve their digital transformation objectives. >> That's right, I mean Peter, in addition to some of the basics around making sure your infrastructure is enabled to handle the SLAs and the level of performance that's required by these AI workloads, when you think about what Eric said, this data's gonna reside, it's gonna reside on-premise, it's gonna be behind a firewall, potentially in the cloud, or multiple public clouds. How do you manage that data? How do you get visibility to that data? And then be able to leverage that data for your analytics. And so data management is going to be very important but also, being able to understand what that data contains and be able to run the analytics and be able to do things like tagging the metadata and then doing some specialized analytics around that is going to be very important. The fabric to move that data, data portability from on-prem into the cloud, and back and forth, bidirectionally, is gonna be very important as you look into the future. >> And obviously things like IOT's gonna mean bigger, more, more available. So a lot of technologies, in a big picture, are gonna become more closely associated with storage. I like to say that, at some point in time we've gotta stop thinking about calling stuff storage because it's gonna be so central to the fabric of how data works within a business. But Eric, I want to come back to you and say, those are some of the big picture technologies but what are some of the little picture technologies? That none-the-less are really central to being able to build up this vision over the course of the next few years? >> Well a couple of things. One is the move to NVMe, so we've integrated NVMe into our FLashSystem 9100, we have fabric support, we already announced back in February actually, fabric support for NVMe over an InfiniBand infrastructure with our FlashSystem 900 and we're extending that to all of the other inter-connects from a fabric perspective for NVMe, whether that be ethernet or whether that be fiber channel and we put NVMe in the system. We also have integrated our custom flash models, our FlashCore technology allows us to take raw flash and create, if you will, a custom SSD. Why does that matter? We can get better resiliency, we can get incredibly better performance, which is very tied in to your applications workloads and use cases, especially in data-driven multi-cloud environment. It's critical that the flash is incredibly fast and it really matters. And resilient, what do you do? You try to move it to the cloud and you lose your data. So if you don't have that resiliency and availability, that's a big issue. I think the third thing is, what I call the cloud-ification of software. All of IBM's storage software is cloud-ified. We can move things simultaneously into the cloud. It's all automated. We can move data around all over the place. Not only our data, not only to our boxes, we could actually move other people's array's data around for them and we can do it with our storage software. So it's really critical to have this cloud-ification. It's really cool to have this now technology, NVMe from an end-to-end perspective for fabric and then inside the system, to get the right resiliency, the right availability, the right performance for your applications, workloads and use cases, and you've gotta make sure that everything is cloud-ified and portable, and mobile, and we've done that with the solutions that are wrapped into our FlashSystem 9100 that we launched a couple of weeks ago. >> So you are both though leaders in the storage industry. I think that's very clear, and the whole notion of storage technology, and you work with a lot of customers, you see a lot of use cases. So I want to ask you one quick question, to close here. And that is, if there was one thing that you would tell a storage leader, a CIO or someone who things about storage in a broad way, one mindset change that they have to make, to start this journey and get it going so that it's gonna be successful. What would that one mindset change be? Bina, what do you think? >> You know, I think it's really around, there's a lot of capabilities out there. It's really around simplifying your environment and making sure that, as you're deploying these new solutions or new capabilities, that you've really got a partnership with a vendor that's gonna help you make it easier. Take those complex tasks, make them easier, deliver those step-by-step instructions and documentation and be right there when you need their assistance. So I think that's gonna be really important. >> So look at it from a portfolio perspective, where best of breed is still important, but it's gotta work together because it leverages itself. >> It's gotta work together, absolutely. >> Eric, what would you say? >> Well I think the key thing is, people think storage is storage. All storage is not the same and one of the central tenets at IBM storage is to make sure that we're integrated with the cloud. We can move data around transparently, easily, simply, Bina pointed out the simplicity. If you can't support the cloud, then you're really just a storage box, and that's not what IBM does. Over 40% of what we sell is actually storage software and all that software works with all of our competitors' gear. And in fact our Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, for example, can simultaneously have datasets sitting in a cloud instantiation, and sitting on premises, and then we can use our copy data management to take advantage of that secondary copy. That's all because we're so cloud-ified from a software perspective, so all storage is not the same, and you can't think of storage as, I need the cheapest storage. It's gotta be, how does it drive business value for my oceans of data? That's what matters most, and by the way, we're very cost-effective anyway, especially because of our custom flash model which allows us to have a real price advantage. >> You ain't doing business at a level of 100 petabytes if you're not cost effective. >> Right, so those are the things that we see as really critical, is storage is not storage. Storage is about data and information. >> So let me summarize your point then, if I can really quickly. That in other words, that we have to think about storage as the first step to great data management. >> Absolutely, absolutely Peter. >> Eric, Bina, great conversation. >> Thank you. >> So we've heard a lot of great thought leaderships comments on the data-driven journey with multi-cloud and some great product announcements. But now, let's do the crowd chat. This is your opportunity to participate in this proceedings. It's the centerpiece of the digital community event. What questions do you have? What comments do you have? What answers might you provide to your peers? This is an opportunity for all of us collectively to engage and have those crucial conversations that are gonna allow you to, from a storage perspective, drive business value in your digital business transformations. So, let's get straight to the crowd chat. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us, Manager of ECM Solutions at Auto-Owners Insurance Company, Ryan, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. And Michelle Christensen is here as well, VP of Enterprise Report Management Practice at enChoice, Michelle, it's good to have you on the program. >> Thank you. Thank you. So let's, Ryan let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of enChoice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about Auto-Owners Company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders but give us an overview of Auto-Owners Insurance. >> Sure. So Auto-Owners Insurance is an insurance company that's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Despite our name being Auto-Owners Insurance, which is how we started, we write all personal lines, commercial lines, and also have a life insurance company. >> So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about enChoice. I know this, you guys are an IBM Gold Business Partner but this is enChoice's first time on the Cube, so give us a background. >> Sure, sure, great. So enChoice are an IBM Gold Business Partner. We have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas of Austin, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton, Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM Digital Business Automation Space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped through the years and we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM Solutions. >> And talk to me a little bit Michelle about how it is that you work with with Auto-Owners. >> So we assisted Auto-Owners recently in their digital transformations journey and they were dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get moving forward, you know provide a better customer satisfaction experience for their client's agents, and so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on-demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM Digital Business Automation Portfolio. >> Excellent, Ryan Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. >> Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about Auto-Owners, your relationship with IBM and enChoice and how is it helping you to address some of the challenges in the market today? >> Sure. So Auto-Owners has a long-term relationship with IBM originally starting back years ago as a mainframe customer and then, you know more recently helping us with different modern technology initiatives. They were instrumental in the nineties when we redid our initial web offerings, and then more recently they've been helping us with our Digital Business Automation which has helped us to mature our content offering at Owners. >> So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM, Ryan, and then you mentioned the nineties at a time when we didn't have to wear masks on our faces. (laughing) So a couple of decades it goes back, yeah? >> Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that, that, you know back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things. >> The seventies, another good time. (laughing) All right. So Michelle, talk to me a little bit about what enChoice is doing with IBM Solutions to help Auto-Owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said this is a company that was founded in 1916, and I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation. It's a lot harder than it sounds. >> Well, that's correct. Yes. As I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategy, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like Auto-Owners with their journey, by first realizing their existing digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need, and then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and processizations and finally we re-invent their strategic offering with modern capabilities. So we're focused on technologies like RPA, machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure, so any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go for it. So this offers us, our clients smarter and more intuitive interfaces creating basically a better user experience, and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. >> Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we re-invent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice has helped Auto-Owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern, and I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >> Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at Auto-Owners with IBM. When I started the team about seven years ago we originally started using file NATS and data cap, and case manager, and content aggregator as our first movement from a traditional platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform, and that helped us a lot to improve our business process, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable. More recently, we've been working with Michelle and the enChoice team on our migration to a content management on-demand platform, and that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills to our agents and customers, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are important for our customers to be able to see it, to engage with Auto-Owners in a, in a digital era. >> So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that, is that is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents, so a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how that like content manager on-demand, for example and what you're doing with ECF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >> Sure. So, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management on-demand journey. One is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided, and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Specifically, some functionality around searching and searchability of our content that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, ability to implement records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, as well as some different options to be able to present the content to our customers and agents in a in a better and more modern way and enChoice's role in that has really been to guide us on that journey to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >> Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about Hybrid Cloud AI Data a big theme of IBM Think this year. How is enChoice using Hybrid Cloud and AI? You mentioned some of the other ways but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like Auto-Owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. >> Well, sure, sure. So of course with the Cloud Pak offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the Cloud Pak for automation, several of those offerings are some of them are built specifically to survive or to to be hosted in a hybrid environment, and as we're working with Auto-Owners transforming their platforms going forward for example, they just invested in, in a, a I just lost the word here. They just invested in a, a new platform, mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats, and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. So Ryan mentioned some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers in a particular that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to manage it. And of course, just that whole, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner, we work with these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those. It's great to take advantage of the new stuff but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. And so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs, tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those. >> Excellent leading edge. Ryan, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, sorry an insurance company from the early 1900's moving into the using container technology. I love stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about Hybrid Cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation, and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from from your policy holders. >> Yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, we were a Red Hat OpenShift customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to move to a Cloud Pak and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. At the end of last year, we updated our licensing so that we can move in that direction, and we're starting to deploy digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability, just a lot of ease of use things for my team to make their jobs easier but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. There's also a number of products that are in the containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing to name a couple. And those are both things that we're looking at Auto-Owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents to continue to grow the business. >> Very forward-thinking, awesome Ryan. Thanks for sharing with us what Auto-Owners Insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from enChoice's perspective in terms of your digital transformation. >> Well, we have been a hundred percent focused on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know helping transform our client's experience such that you know customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. >> That is good. It sounds like the last year has been very fruitful for you, and I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes. I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM Solutions, the transformation that both of your companies are on and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for Ryan Dennings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think The Digital Experience. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Las Vegas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for our exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect 2016. This is theCUBE, SiliconAngle's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest Kevin Eagan, general manager of IBM Digital. We're all digital right here all the time, real time, in a cognitive mode, Kevin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey, I really appreciate that, John, Dave, I love theCUBE. >> Oh, thanks for coming on. >> It's an honor to be here and look forward to going and watching myself on digital TV. >> Well, hopefully we get some CUBE gems out of this 'cause they'll be on Twitter immediately. Digital's obviously the big topic, digital transformation. We were talking yesterday about the slogan really should be digitize everything 'cause we are moving to a complete digitized world where data is the asset. And that kind of sounds easy to think about, but what does it mean to put it in practice because digital assets are shifting to be more interactive, less static, more dynamic, what's your thoughts on that? >> Well, first off, you're exactly right, the explosion of data has created the opportunity to create assets. Assets though are only a piece of it, until you unlock inside out of those assets towards the outcome of establishing trust with the client, solutions, helping to make decisions, you really haven't created a platform. So as we've seen the explosion of big data, one of the challenges that our clients have, and the customers, in fact, even inside of IBM we have this, how do you make sense of that so that you can construct thoughtful friction-free customer journeys. That as people are inspired by what they see, what they hear about at events, they can have a personalized journey that removes the roadblocks, brings in social content, brings in the best of industry expertise and unlocks the power and potential of doing digital in the transformative way no matter what your industry is. And so at IBM, we formed a digital unit across the company over the last year to help tie together this explosion of content that's happened, and I got to tell you, it's been a big year. A year ago at InterConnect, had you left the event and done a Google search to try to find what was announced a year ago, you would've seen the beginning of a narrative, but certainly not a journey that was leading towards a destination of transformation and great outcomes. This InterConnect, this is our first major event where work with companies like yours, working with our partners, you'll have a great experience whether you're here or you're at home or you're at work next week, bringing together the content, the insights, the social and a digital experience that frankly, behind it is a marketplace of content, ideas and solutions built on the IBM cloud that's going to accelerate our client's ability to make sense of all of this and get to the journey they want. >> Yeah, but you've seen the journey of digital from the Web 1.0 days or Web 0.5, however you want to look at it. You know, you're involved inside one of the first digital cities, community kind of things, evolving now. It's been a real interesting journey, but I want to get your thoughts on a concept called the user's preferred experience. That's the future experience that they want or hoping for, not what they get today. You mentioned Google, great example, you go to Google News, it's the same story, oh, VMware this and that, announcement, very news driven. There's no real discovery aspect of it. What is the mind of the consumer right now? From an experience standpoint, what are they looking for, and obviously, real time's a big part of it, what are your thoughts, you guys talk about this, you must have an opinion on this, I'm sure. >> Well, you know, what we're finding, we say users, we say clients, let's first talk about how, in our industry, in IT and in the big B2B spaces, the big change that's happened is we no longer think of the client as an organization. We've now made the full shift that our organizations that we serve are made up of individuals who are complex in their information needs. Different stages of mastery. They all have time compression, and they're so used to that digital experience that they're familiar with now from the consumer side of the world, as they've seen transportation being disrupted with Uber, as they've seen travel being disrupted by digital agencies. Every part of the consumer experience now informs those professionals at work to expect a seamless, user directed, instant and always available experience. So applying that consumerization of IT and the explosion of marketplaces that take the incumbents that have taken a vendor-centric approach and just absolutely disrupt them and almost make them obsolete, we see the opportunity to apply those best in class consumer experiences to give our customers, professionals in every industry, control of their journey, to inform that journey by their own profile, their preferences, their industry context and combine that with the world of social expertise and industry expertise that IBM's uniquely able to bring to the market, and use great platforms like IBM's own cloud, cognitive solutions and cognitive APIs from Watson, and you'll start to see this as an IBM client and be able to apply it in your own companies that you can simplify your own clients' journeys, your employees' journeys, and activate a new wave of productivity that I don't think we've seen for decades. We're really at the era of tremendous progress brought about by cloud platforms, cognitive solutions and marketplaces that bring industry expertise all together. >> Well, that narrative brings up so many thoughts, but I wanted to pick up, so IBM calls them clients, you use the terms users which sometimes is viewed as a pejorative, right. I like the terms digital doers, right, so we're seeing this new era of individuals who are trying to get digital content out to their customers, trying to build digital platforms. Who are these digital doers, obviously you got the digital natives, those have been untethered for life. But we got a big spectrum, how is IBM approaching the personas of digital doers? >> And so you're exactly right. We're in an era where professionals that have come out of technology and software engineering have become the modern builders of business process, the modern builders of customer experience. And so the word that I would use is we have to serve builders in industry. Builders as individuals and builders as organizations. To help them have the data, the tools, the platforms, the expertise so that they can build businesses, transform their business models, and frankly grow awareness of what the value is that they bring to the table. So this class of builders has a few things in common. First off, it's grown out of old school software engineering, and so increasingly in roles from marketing to IT, understanding the basics of software engineering is critical. And so at the heart of that IBM has a platform for builders. Whether you're a low level systems programmer or you're a high end frontend developer that brings the full spectrum of developer potential to life through Bluemix. Augment that with the communities that we've established through developer works, together with the ecosystem of partners who are bringing their components, their offerings, like the announcement of GitHub Enterprise, and you begin to get a critical mass of the solutions so that builders of modern business can come to IBM, experience and have a custom journey of content, learning and mastery, connected to a marketplace where the tools, the APIs, the datasets are there for them to fast forward from concept to outcome in a timeframe that, in the past, was measured by months or years, it's now hours, days and weeks for really fundamental outcomes. >> Talk about the community aspect, 'cause that's a really awesome vision, and the things that we talk about, we have free content, as well as paid subscription with Wikibon, but most to the point, we want to share as much content as possible. Spray it around the web, shoot it everywhere, but if you look at the developer, software developer, they have GitHub, they can store code, they have communities like Stack Exchange and these other sites for advocacy. Is that the model for content development? I mean, 'cause that open source ethos, if you make it so that everyone's connected, they're using open source tooling, this community contribution piece, how does that fit in, is this open marketplace, what's your vision on this 'cause the open piece might be a critical piece of that, how open, how IBM-centric is it, and vice versa? >> Well, I don't think that there's any sense in trying to put the genie back in the bottle of the open transformation that we're seeing. While some vendors would love to have virtual or digital walls that separate out the ability for content assets and learning to be unique to them, it's very clear that the technology has created an over the top transformation. That any attempt to lock up content that's a value to users is met with an over the top marketplace that aggregates, indexes, synthesizes. If a content creator in the old industry of television tried to lock up their content inside of their network website, we see the emergence of marketplaces that can over the top. Netflix, Amazon Video. And so applying that concept of marketplace aggregation of the content that has value, rich data personalization around what people are looking for, you begin today to be able to construct a marketplace that aggregates content from multiple sources. Now, even though there's content being sprayed, as you said, everywhere, it's frankly overwhelming when we listen to what our customers, what these builders tell us. That the ability to find information about blockchain, to find information that might be relevant in their industry, is so overwhelming that we go to the ultimate open source tool, the Internet, and we just go to search and we type in Google. But frankly, that experience has its limitations. And we think there is a better way than simply going to Google to find industry expertise and insight. And so our strategy for IBM's marketplace-centric strategy, for digital and for cognitive, is to aggregate together the catalogs of content, user profiles, industry expertise, and connect it to a marketplace of products, solutions, APIs and data sets, so that as I'm consuming content in that discovery and engagement stage, I'm always one click away from a trusted marketplace that can do key provisioning for APIs, give me access to tools, even connect me to human powered services in terms of being able to get me, get a physical buyer and a physical expert together. That kind of full wrapping of value around what businesses really need to drive digital and cognitive transformation, that's at the heart of what we're doing with IBM Digital. >> So I love the business impact discussion. We like to have that discourse. You talked about productivity. John's in Silicon Valley, we're bi-coastal, I'm on the East Coast. Silicon Valley's a little nervous right now, but we feel like we're on the cusp of a productivity boom, a renaissance in productivity, really two things going on there, one is productivity of individuals and the other is of assets, I mean, physical assets, whether it's parking meters or automobiles, they're becoming digitized. So talk a little bit about the business impacts of this digital transformation. >> First off, if you're not feeling the disruption of digital transformation in your business, then you should be worried, because this is where a case where the paranoid and the self-aware will survive. Every industry, every sector, from the biggest companies to the smallest companies, is having to fundamentally change the definition of who their customers are, how they reach them and how they create new business models and offerings to reach them. Now, for IT business, the way of building solutions is fundamentally changing, because small teams now with small starting budgets can rapidly prototype, compose, get proof of concepts. Use digital marketing tools to refine and pivot the value proposition through A/B testing. And so the world of engineering, the world of marketing are being collided together in an air of productivity that's powered by cloud-based digital platforms, connected to marketplaces and rich data that help create custom experiences for that professional. Now, productivity means that I no longer feel that, if I'm inside of a large company, that I'm beholden to a limited sandbox of what I can use, what I can experiment with, how I can explore. The top down model, which was command and control, is now being served by a model built on hybrid cloud with security that meets the needs of the strictest corporations, but unlocks personal productivity for this next generation of builders. So having an IBM account inside of an organization means that your employees have access to Bluemix, can connect to communities on developer works, have access to the content including, without sending all of your employees necessarily to this event next week, they can log on to IBM Go, experience the keynotes, see the workshops, connect that back to social networks on IBM, and enter into a marketplace-centric journey that leads to experimentation, higher productivity and faster pivoting as companies are trying to build next generation products and new business models. >> So obviously you're right on the edge there, you see the path, the vision and the future. Can I get your thoughts on the old way versus the new way? 'Cause this is an interesting topic, opt-in. If you have personalization, you have data and you have over the top aggregation now as a platform called the Internet, and you certainly have gated content, the notion of gated stuff. Google's organic search results, pay stuff, click, go to a forum, get access to content. That's an opt-in for the user. What is the new gated formula, what does opt-in mean now, because if you have access to all the data, the endgame is to get that user to what you just said, which is I just want to roll my own, get content, learn, connect to the others. But with personalization, there is no opt-in, you either know or you don't, so the goal should be no opt-in, I mean, I'm just trying to get your thoughts on this, 'cause it's one of those gray areas where a lot of people are working on stuff, and if you get it wrong, you lost. >> You're so right about that, because just a few years ago, it was considered digital acceptable practice that if you activated great content marketing and you were building rich assets, case studies, that you would tease those out on social media, you'd tease those in email. But before delivering any real value to the client, you used that bait to put right in their face that gate. Basically a DNA test of phone, address, date of birth. Frankly, in a world of immediate access-- >> And if you're from Canada. (laughter) >> I got to tell you, it created this, it created this expectation that the only purpose of digital marketing was to capture information to then hand off into the old school way of engagement. Which is offline human based followup, not on the buyer's terms, not on the client's terms, but when an agency decided or when a sales team decided that you were qualified. Now, that's a big, IBM fell into that camp a few years ago. But today I'm looking forward from 2016 on. IBM's philosophy around building value for clients is that content exists to help inform our client's journey, and the last thing we want to do is to gate content right at the moment when a customer is at that point of aha. Where the case study, where the CEO keynote, where the sample code is what they need to be inspired to take the commitment step. And so the concept of opt-in versus opt-out is being replaced with progressive profiling as a method that, at the point of value delivery, you have an identity system, you have anonymous and known data systems that come together. So that what required log in and authorization two years ago, today we can do a better job than that with anonymous validation of behaviors and patters. When you do get the customer identified, there's a new range of tools that require us to deliver even more value to the customer. So building value into your IBM Digital relationship means that by offering your identity, in addition to the highly optimized anonymous content we can serve you, we can now help you build a history across your devices, across time. In fact, just this last month on ibm.com, we've introduced My IBM. A service that, for the client who wants to log in and create an IBM account, ties together their experiences across over 150 IBM products so that you can manage entitlements, perform upgrades, look at time remaining in trials. And it beings to unlock the value of the silos of IBM's solutions, the silos of our partners' ecosystems and their products, and brings it together into a unified experience. >> This is so refreshing because you're right, the whole opt-in, fill out this form, basically says, I don't really, I don't know anything about you so just tell me 'cause I can't figure it out without that. And in reality, what's happening in consumers have all this information, there used to be an asymmetry of information, we knew, brands knew so much about the buyer, and now the buyer has the pricing power, so what are brands trying to do, they're trying to regain some of that knowledge, and so asking the customer, okay, fill out a form is just so, I don't know, 90s, 80s. >> That's an offline world too where, when you fill out a form, there's this expectation that you've just ceded control to someone else to decide, are you qualified? Now, while it's true that we do use advanced marketing automation systems, scoring platforms, lead management systems that flow into CRM, increasingly the customer-centric digital journey, instead of a form, it's a human being that's one click away to chat, to call, to even do video. So that the customer stays in control of the conversation. And as the value goes up-- >> You have a relationship with the customer, it's not like trap the user, to Dave's point, tell me so I can do something offline and maybe get a lead. It's like, okay, it's a historical relationship that has a series of value transfers. That's a social equation. >> It's social, it's on the buyer's terms and it's on demand. And so in the past, where registration forms played a key part of the customer qualification process for offline physical sales followup, the modern sales forces, the modern digital journey brings value without gating the content at the moment when a customer is needing assistance, increasingly chat, click to call, scheduled events, to keep the customer in control, are a much more powerful way to build trust and relationship and to deliver value. >> When you guys did IBM Go last year for the first time, one of the things that we were really hardcore on was ungate everything, let it all fly around, but use that all access gate as a context switch for value, if people want to go there, the value should be stacked up. That's IBM's opportunity, that's not the crowd. So gates are okay if the user goes there. In other words, if it's part of their journey, I mean, that's kind of the philosophy, right. I mean, you want to-- >> What's happening in just this year that this philosophy has accelerated is, by taking these principles of customer-centered experiences, content that comes from multiple sources and buyer journeys that lead to a unified marketplace, we've seen metrics that are the leading indicators of growth, of value, both for IBM and for our partners and clients. We saw the largest increase in unique visitor traffic from both a percentage and absolute number term we've ever seen beginning in Q4 of last year. >> IBM has got good brand value, people want to have a relationship with IBM. >> They do, but IBM also has the challenge of its business model being limited to the largest, the most substantial clients. As IBM brings a digital platform to go to market and works together with partners, IBM becomes accessible to a whole new range of business. Rather than being the largest enterprise, IBM becomes the platform company with cloud platform and cognitive solutions for businesses of every size, and while it may not always be the IBM Digital seller at the end of every conversation, it creates opportunities for our channel partners, for our ecosystem, and I think this is the productivity engine that we're all looking for-- >> So how are you going to do it then? >> What does that do for the 10? I mean, that just explodes the total market, right? >> You no longer need to have hundreds of thousands of face to face sales people in order to serve the largest clients, because digital takes you into every organization, and you're no longer limited to only large clients if you're a company like IBM because digital allows you to achieve reach and scale to clients of all sizes. >> Digital transformation, Kevin, thanks so much for spending the time to coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Give me the final word, what's the vibe of the show this year, obviously digital transformation. I mean, is it a new IBM, new spring in their step? What's the vibe of the show? >> I think the biggest exciting thing this year, and it started with customers actually telling the story of IBM, as we have a story now that might've been parts of the narrative a year ago, now it's crystal clear that IBM solutions that span from hybrid cloud to cognitive solutions are tangible, they're ready for the mainstream, and this is the first time that I've, I'm relatively new to IBM, as you know, only a year, that IBM now has a relevance and immediacy that works for clients of all sizes. So that energy is, I'm not just coming here to learn, I'm coming here to go back and do. >> And the cloud certainly going to be a big accelerator of that. Awesome, Kevin Eagan, digital manager at IBM Digital. Digital transformation from data to user experience all cutting in between great opportunities, thanks for sharing your thoughts and commentary on theCUBE. Be right back with more after this short break. And remember, March 15th is CUBE madness, that's when all of our guests stack up in the brackets and get voted on, we'll see who comes to the end, of course it turns into a hackathon because that's what people do, they stuff the ballots. We'll see who's got the best hacks, CUBE madness, go to siliconangle.tv, we'll be right back after this short break. (calm music)