(upbeat music) [Announcer] From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE conversation from our studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. One of the biggest challenges that every user faces is how are they going to arrange their resources that are responsible for storing, managing, delivering, and protecting data. And that's a significant challenge, but it gets even worse when we start talking about multi-cloud. So, today we've got Eric Herzog who's the CMO and VP of Worldwide Storage Channels at IBM Storage to talk a bit about the evolving relationship of what constitutes a modern, comprehensive storage portfolio and multi-cloud. Eric, welcome to theCUBE. >> Peter, Thank you, thank you. >> So, start off, what's happening with IBM Storage these days, and let's get into this kind of how multi-cloud is affecting some of your decisions, and some of your customer's decisions. >> So, what we've done, is we've started talking about multi-cloud over two years ago. When Ed Walsh joined the company as a general manager, we went on an analyst roadshow, in fact, we came here to theCUBE and shot a video, and we talked about how the IBM Storage Division is all about multi-cloud. And we look about that in three ways. First of all, if you are creating a private cloud, we work with you. From a container, whether you're Vmware based, whether you are doing a more traditional cloud- private cloud. Now the modern private cloud, all container based. Second is Hybrid Cloud, data on parem, out to a public cloud provider. And the third aspect, and in fact, you guys have written about it in one of your studies is that no one is going to use one public cloud provider, they're going to use multiple cloud providers. So whether that be IBM Cloud, which of course we love because we're IBM shareholders, but we work with Amazon, we work with Google, and in fact we work with any cloud provider. Our Spectrum Protect backup product, which is one of the most awarded enterprise backup packages can backup to any cloud. In fact, over 350 small to medium cloud providers, the engine for their backup as a service, is Spectrum Protect. Again, completely heterogeneous, we don't care what cloud you use, we support everyone. And we started that mantra two and a half years ago, when Ed first joined the company. >> Now, I remember when you came on, we talked a lot about this notion of data first and the idea that data driven was what we talked about >> Right, data driven. >> And increasingly, we talked about, or we made the observation that enterprises were going to take a look at the natural arrangement of their data, and that was going to influence a lot of their cloud, a lot of their architecture, and certainly a lot of their storage divisions or decisions. How is that playing out? Is that still obtaining? Are you still seeing more enterprises taking this kind of data driven approach to thinking about their overall cloud architectures? >> Well the world is absolutely data-centric. Where does the data go? What are security issues with that data? How is it close to the compute when I need it? How do I archive I, how do I back it up? How do I protect it? We're here in Silicon Valley. I'm a native Palo Alton, by the way, and we really do have earthquakes here, and they really do have earthquakes in Japan and China and there is all kinds of natural disasters. And of course as you guys have pointed out, as have almost all of the analysts, the number one cause of data loss besides humans is actually still fire. Even with fire suppressant data centers. >> And we have fires out here in Northern California too. >> That's true. So, you've got to make sure that you're backing up that data, you're archiving the data. Cloud could be part of that strategy. When does it need to be on parem, when does it need to be off parem? So, it's all about being a data-driven, and companies look at the data, profile the date and time, What sort of storage do I need? Can I go high end, mid-range and entry, profile that data, figure that out, what they need to do. And then do the same thing now with on parem and off parem. For certain data sets, for security reasons, legal reasons you probably are not going to put it out into a public cloud provider. But other data sets are ideal for that and so all of those decisions that are being made by: What's the security of the data? What's the legality of that data? What's the performance I need of that data? And, how often do I need the data? If you're going to constantly go back and forth, pull data back in, going to a public cloud provider, which charge both for in and out of the data, that actually may cost more than buying an Array on parem. And so, everyone's using that data-centricity to figure out how do they spend their money, and how do they optimize the data to use it in their applications, workloads and use cases. >> So, if you think about it, the reality is by application, workload, location, regulatory issues, we're seeing enterprises start to recognize and increase specialization of their data assets. And that's going to lead to a degree of specializations in the classes of data management and storage technologies that they utilize. Now, what is the challenge of choosing a specific solution versus looking at more of a portfolio of solutions, that perhaps provide a little bit more commonality? How are customers, how are the IMB customer base dealing with that question. >> Well, for us the good thing was to have a broad portfolio. When you look at the base storage Arrays we have file, block and object, they're all award winning. We can go big, we can go medium, and we can go small. And because of what we do with our Array family we have products that tend to be expensive because of what they do, products that mid-price and products that are perfect for Herzog's Bar and Grill. Or maybe for 5,000 different bank branches, 'cause that bank is not going to buy expensive storage for every branch. They have a small Array there in case core goes down, of course. When you or I go in to get a check or transact, if the core data center is down, that Wells Fargo, BofA, Bank of Tokyo. >> Still has to do business. >> They are all transacting. There's a small Array there. Well you don't want to spend a lot of money for that, you need a good, reliable all flash Array with the right RAS capability, right? The availability, capability, that's what you need, And we can do that. The other thing we do is, we have very much, cloud-ified everything we do. We can tier to the cloud, we can backup to the cloud. With object storage we can place it in the cloud. So we've made the cloud, if you will, a seamless tier to the storage infrastructure for our customers. Whether that be backup data, archive data, primary data, and made it so it's very easy to do. Remember, with that downturn in '08 and '09 a lot of storage people left their job. And while IT headcount is back up to where it used to be, in fact it's actually exceeded, if there was 50 storage guys at Company X, and they had to let go 25 of them, they didn't hire 25 storage guys now, but they got 10 times the data. So they probably have 2 more storage guys, they're from 25 to 27, except they're managing 10 times the data, so automation, seamless integration with clouds, and being multi-cloud, supporting hybrid clouds is a critical thing in today's storage world. >> So you've talked a little bit about format, data format issues still impact storage decisions. You've talked about how disasters or availability still impact storage decisions, certainly cost does. But you've also talked about some of the innovative things that are happening, security, encryption, evolved backup and and restore capabilities, AI and how that's going to play, what are some of the key thing that your customer base is asking for that's really driving some of your portfolio decisions? >> Sure, well when we look beyond making sure we integrate with every cloud and make it seamless, the other aspect is AI. AI has taken off, machine learning, big data, all those. And there it's all about having the right platform from an Array perspective, but then marrying it with the right software. So for example, our scale-out file system, Spectrum Scale can go to Exabyte Class, in fact the two fastest super computers on this planet have almost half an exabyte of IBM Spectrum Scale for big data, analytics, and machine learning workloads. At the same time you need to have Object Store. If you're generating that huge amount of data set in AI world, you want to be able to put it out. We also now have Spectrum discover, which allows you to use Metadata, which is the data about the data, and allow and AI app, a machine learning app, or an analytics app to actually access the metadata through an API. So that's one area, so cloud, then AI, is a very important aspect. And of course, cyber resiliency, and cyber security is critical. Everyone thinks, I got to call a security company, so the IBM Security Division, RSA, Check Point, Symantec, McAfee, all of these things. But the reality is, as you guys have noted, 98% of all enterprises are going to get broken into. So while they're in your house, they can steal you blind. Before the cops show up, like the old movie, what are they doing? They're loading up the truck before the cops show up. Well guess what, what if that happened, cops didn't show up for 20 minutes, but they couldn't steal anything, or the TV was tied to your fingerprint? So guess what, they couldn't use the TV, so they couldn't steal it, that's what we've done. So, whether it be encryption everywhere, we can encrypt backup sets, we can encrypt data at rest, we can even encrypt Arrays that aren't ours with our Spectrum Virtualize family. Air gapping, so that if you have ransomware or malware you can air-gap to tape. We've actually created air gapping out with a cloud snapshot. We have a product called Safeguard Copy which creates what I'll call a faux air gap in the mainframe space, but allows that protection so it's almost as if it was air gapped even though it's on an Array. So that's a ransomware and malware, being able to detect that, our backup products when they see an unusual activity will flag the backup restore jam and say there is unusual activity. Why, because ransomware and malware generate unusual activity on back up data sets in particular, so it's flaky. Now we don't go out and say, "By the way, that's Herzog ransomware, or "Peter Burris ransomware." But we do say "something is wrong, you need to take a look." So, integrating that sort of cyber resiliency and cyber security into the entire storage portfolio doesn't mean we solve everything. Which is why when you get an overall security strategy, you've got that Great Wall of China to keep the enemy out, you've got the what I call, chase software to get the bad guy once he's in the house, the cops that are coming to get the bad guy. But you've got to be able to lock everything down, you'll do it. So a comprehensive security strategy, and resiliency strategy involves not only your security vendor, but actually your storage vendor. And IBM's got the right cyber resiliency and security technology on the storage side to marry up, regardless of which security vendor they choose. >> Now you mention a number of things that are associated with how an enterprise is going to generate greater leverage, greater value out of data that you already know. So, you mentioned, you know, encryption end to end, you mention being able to look at metadata for AI applications. As we move to a software driven world of storage where physical volumes can still be made more virtual so you can move them around to different workloads. >> Right. >> And associate the data more easily, tell us a little bit about how data movement becomes an issue in the storage world, because the storage has already been associated with it's here. But increasingly, because of automation, because of AI, because of what businesses are trying to do, it's becoming more associated with intelligent, smart, secure, optimized movement of data. How is that starting to impact the portfolio? >> So we look at that really as data mobility. And data mobility can be another number of different things, for example, we already mentioned, we treat clouds as transparent tiers. We can backup to cloud, that's data mobility. We also tier data, we can tier data within an Array, or the Spectrum Virtualize product. We can tier data, block data cross 450 Arrays, most of which aren't IBM logo'd. We can tier from IBM to EMC, EMC can then tier to HDS, HDS can tier to Hitachi, and we do that on Arrays that aren't ours. So in that case what you're doing is looking for the optimal price point, whether it be- >> And feature set. >> And feature sets, and you move things, data around all transparently, so it's all got to be automated, that's another thing, in the old days we thought we had Nirvana when the tiering was automatically moved the data when it's 30 days old. What if we automatically move data with our Easy Tier technology through AI, when the data is hot moves it to the hottest tier, when the data is cold it puts it out to the lowest cost tier. That's real automation leveraging AI technology. Same thing, something simple, migration. How much money have all the storage companies made on migration services? What if you could do transparent block migration in the background on the fly, without ever taking your servers down, we can do that. And what we do is, it's so intelligent we always favor the data set, so when the data is being worked on, migration slows down. When the data set slows down, guess what? Migration picks up. But the point is, data mobility, in this case from an old Array to an new Array. So whether it be migrating data, whether it be tiering data, whether you're moving data out to the cloud, whether it be primary data or backup data, or object data for archive, the bottom line is we've infused not only the cloudification of our storage portfolio, but the mobility aspects of the portfolio. Which does of course include cloud. But all tiering more likely is on premise. You could tier to the cloud, but all flash Array to a cheap 7200 RPM Array, you save a lot of money and we can do that using AI technology with Easy Tier. All examples of moving data around transparently, quickly, efficiently, to save cost both in CapEx, using 7200 RPM Arrays of course to cut costs, but actually OpEx the storage admin, there aren't a hundred storage admins at Burris Incorporated. You had to let them go, you've hired 100 of the people back, but you hired them all for DevOps so you have 50 guys in storage >> Actually there are, but I'm a lousy businessman so I'm not going to be in business long. (laughing) One more question, Eric. I mean look you're an old style road warrior, you're out with customers a lot. Increasingly, and I know this because we've talked about it, you're finding yourself trying to explain to business people, not just IT people how digital business, data and storage come together. When you're having these conversations with executives on the business side, how does this notion of data services get discussed? What are some of the conversations like? >> Well I think the key thing you got to point out is storage guys love to talk speeds and feeds. I'm so old I can still talk TPI and BPI on hard drives and no one does that anymore, right? But, when you're talking to the CEO or the CFO or the business owner, it's all about delivering data at the right performance level you need for your applications, workloads and use cases, your right resiliency for applications, workloads and use cases, your right availability, so it's all about application, workloads, and use cases. So you don't talk about storage speeds and feeds that you would with Storage Admin, or maybe in the VP of infrastructure in the Fortune 500, you'd talk about it's all about the data, keeping the data secure, keeping the data reliable, keeping it at right performance. So if it's on the type of workload that needs performance, for example, let's take the easy one, Flash. Why do I need Flash? Well, Mr. CEO, do you use logistics? Of course we do! Who do you use, SAP. Oh, how long does that logistics workload take? Oh, it takes like 24 hours to run. What if I told you you could run that every night, in an hour? That's the power of Flash. So you translate what you and I are used to, storage nerdiness, we translate it into businessfied, in this case, running that SAP workload in an hour vs. 24 has a real business impact. And that's the way you got to talk about storage these days. When you're out talking to a storage admin, with the admin, yes, you want to talk latency and IOPS and bandwidth. But the CEO is just going to turn his nose up. But when you say I can run the MongoDB workload, or I can do this or do that, and I can do it. What was 24 hours in an hour, or half an hour. That translates to real data, and real value out of that data. And that's what they're looking for, is how to extract value from the data. If the data isn't performant, you get less value. If the data isn't there, you clearly have no value. And if the data isn't available enough so that it's down part time, if you are doing truly digital business. So, if Herzog's Bar and Grill, actually everything is done digitally, so before you get that pizza, or before you get that cigar, you have to order it online. If my website, which has a database underneath, of course, so I can handle the transactions right, I got to take the credit card, I got to get the orders right. If that is down half the time, my business is down, and that's an example of taking IT and translating it to something as simple as a Bar and Grill. And everyone is doing it these days. So when you talk about, do you want that website up all the time? Do you need your order entry system up all the time? Do you need your this or that? Then they actually get it, and then obviously, making sure that the applications run quickly, swiftly, and smoothly. And storage is, if you will, that critical foundation underneath everything. It's not the fancy windows, it's not the fancy paint. But if that foundation isn't right, what happens? The whole building falls down. And that's exactly what storage delivers regardless of the application workload. That right critical foundation of performance, availability, reliability. That's what they need, when you have that all applications run better, and your business runs better. >> Yeah, and the one thing I'd add to that, Eric, is increasingly the conversations that we're having is options. And one of the advantages of a large portfolio or a platform approach is that the things you're doing today, you'll discover new things that you didn't anticipate, and you want the option to be able to do them quickly. >> Absolutely. >> Very, very important thing. So, applications, workload, use cases, multi-cloud storage portfolio. Eric, thanks again for coming on theCUBE, always love having you. >> Great, thank you. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris, talking with Eric Herzog, CMO, VP of Worldwide Storage Channels at IBM Storage. Thanks again for watching this CUBE conversation, until next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman analyst at Wikibon, covering networking storage and all infrastructure cloud. Stu Miniman, Stu. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at IBM Storage Systems. Eric, CUBE alumni, he's been on so many times I can't even count. You get the special VIP badge. We're here breaking down all the top stories at Cisco Live in Europe, kicking off 2018. Although it's the European show, not the big show, certainly kicking off the year with a lot of new concepts that aren't necessarily new, but they're innovative. Eric, welcome to theCUBE again. >> Well, thank you. We always love participating in theCUBE. IBM is a strong supporter of theCUBE and all the things you do for us, so thank you very much for having us again. >> A lot of great thought leadership from IBM, really appreciate you guys' support over the years. But now we're in a sea change. IBM had their first quarter of great results, and that will be well-reported on SiliconANGLE, but the sea change is happening. You've been living this generation, you've seen couple cycles in the past. Cisco putting forth a vision of the future, which is pretty right on. They were right on Internet of Things ten years ago, they had it all right, but they're a networking company that's transformed up the stack over the years. Now on the front lines of no perimeter, okay, more security challenges, cloud big whales with no networking and storage. You're in the middle of it. Break it down. Why is Cisco Live so important now than ever before? >> Well, for us it's very important because one, we have a strategic relationship with Cisco, the Storage Division does a product with Cisco called the VersaStack, converged infrastructure, and in fact one of our key constituents for the VersaStack are MSPs and CSPs, which is a key constituent of Cisco, especially with their emphasis on the cloud. Second thing for us is IBM storage has gone heavily cloud. So going heavily cloud with our software, in addition to what we do with our solutions as a foundation for CSPs and MSPs. Just what we've integrated into our software-defined storage for cloud makes Cisco Live an ideal venue for us, and Cisco an ideal partner. >> So I've got to ask you, we've had conversations on theCUBE before, they're all on youtube.com/siliconangle, just search Eric Herzog, you'll find them. But I want to recycle this one point and get your comments and reaction here in Barcelona. You guys have transformed with software at IBM big-time with storage. Okay, you're positioned well for the cloud. What's the most important thing that companies have to do, like IBM and Cisco, to play an innovator role in the cloud game as we have software at the center of the value proposition? >> Well I think the key thing is, when you look at cloud infrastructure, first of all, the cloud's got to run on something. So you need some sort of structural, infrastructure foundation. Servers, networking, and compute. So at IBM and with Cisco, we're positioning ourselves as the ideal rock-solid foundation for the cloud building, if you will. So that's item number one. Item number two, our software in particular can survive, not only on premises, but can bridge and go from on-premise to a public cloud, creating a hybrid infrastructure, and that allows us to also run cloud instantiation. Several of our products are available from IBM Cloud Division, Amazon offers some of the IBM storage software, over three hundred cloud service providers, smaller ones, offer IBM Spectrum Protect as a back-up service. So we've already morphed into storage software, either A, bridging the cloud in a hybrid config, or being used by cloud providers as some of their storage offerings for end-users and businesses. >> Eric, wanted to get to, one of the partnership areas that you've talked about with Cisco is VersaStack. We've talked with you a number of times about converged infrastructure, that partnership, Cisco UCS taking all the virtualization. The buzz in the market, there's a lot of discussion, oh it's hyper-converged, it's cloud. Why is converged infrastructure still relevant today? >> Well, when you look at the analysts that track the numbers, you can see that the overall converged market is growing and hyper-converged is viewed as a subset. When you look at those numbers, this year close to 17 billion US, about 75% of it is still standard converged versus hyper-converged. One of the other differences, it's the right tool for the right job. So customers need to go in eyes open. So when you do a hyper-converged infrastructure, by the way IBM offers a hyper-converged infrastructure currently with Nutanix, so we actually have both, the Nutanix partnership offering hyper-converged and a partnership with Cisco on standard converged. It's really, how do you size the right tool for the right job? And one of the negatives of hyper-converged, very easy to deploy, that's great, but one of the negatives is every time you need more storage, you have to add more server. Every time you need more server, you add more storage. With this traditional converged infrastructure, you can add servers only, or networking only, or storage only. So I think when you're in certain configurations, workloads, and applications, hyper-converged is the right solution, IBM's got a solution. In other situations, particularly as your middle-sized and bigger apps, regular converged is better 'cause you can basically parse and size up or down compute, networking, and the storage independent of each other, whereas in hyper-converged you have to do it at the same time. And that's a negative where you're either over-buying your storage when you don't need it, or you're over-buying your compute when you don't need it. With standard converged, you don't have that issue. You buy what you need when you need it. But I think most big companies, for sure, have certain workloads that are best with hyper-converged, and we've got that, and other workloads that are best with converged, and we have that as well. >> Okay, the other big growth area in storage for the last bunch of years has been flash. IBM's got a strong position in all-flash arrays. What's new there, how are some of the technologies changing? Any impact on the network that we should be really understanding at this show? >> Sure, so couple things. So first of all, we just brought out some very high-density all-flash arrays in Q4. We can put 220 terabytes in two rack U, which is a building block that we use in several different of our all-flash configurations, including our all-flash VersaStack. The other thing we do is we embed software-defined storage on our, software-defined storage actually on our physical all-flash arrays. Most companies don't do that, so they've got an all-flash offering and if they have a software-defined offering it's actually a different piece of software. For us it's the same, so it's easier to deploy, it's easier to train, it's easier to license, it's easier for a reseller to sell if you happen to be using a reseller. And the other thing is it's battle-hardened, because it's not only standalone software, but it's actually on the arrays as well. So from a test infrastructure quality issue, versus other vendors that have certain software that goes on their all-flash array, and then a different set of software for all software-defined. It doesn't make logical sense when you can cover it with one thing. So that's an important difference for us, and a big innovator. I think the last thing you're going to see that does impact networking is the rise of NVMe over fabrics. IBM did a statement of direction last May outlining what we're doing. We did a public demonstration of an InfiniBand fabric at the AI summit in New York in December, and we will be having an announcement around NVMe fabrics on the 20th of February. So stay tuned to hear us then. We'll be launching some more NVMe with fabric infrastructure at that time. >> Eric, I just, people that have been watching, there's been a lot of discussion about NVMe for a number of years, and NVMe over fabric more recently. How big a deal is this for the industry? You've seen many of these waves. Is this transformational or is it, you know, every storage company I talk to is working on this, so how's it going to be differentiated? What should users be looking to be able to, who do they partner with, how do they choose that solution, and when's it going to be ready? >> So first of all, I view it as an evolution, okay. If you take storage in general, arrays, you know we used to do punch cards. I'm old enough I remember using punch cards at the University of California. Then, it all went to tape. And if you look at old Schwarzenegger movies from the 80s, I love Schwarzenegger spy movies, what's there? IBM systems with big IBM tape, and not for back-up, for primary storage. Then in the late-80s, early-90s, IBM and a few other vendors came out with hard drive-based arrays that got hooked up to mainframes and then obviously into minis and to the rise of the LAN. Those have given away to all-flash arrays. From a connectivity perspective, you've had SCSI, you had ultra SCSI, you had ultra fast SCSI, ultra fast wide SCSI. Then you had fiber channel. So now as an infrastructure both in an array, as a connectivity between storage and the CPUs used in an array system, will be NVMe, and then you're going to have NVMe running over fabrics. So I view this as an evolution, right? >> John: What's the driver, performance or flexibility? >> A little bit of both. So from the in-box perspective, inside of an array solution, the major chip manufacturers are putting NVMe to increase the speed from storage going into the CPUs. So that will benefit the performance to the end-user for applications, workloads, and use cases. Then what they've done is Intel has pushed, with all the industry, IBM's a member of the NVMe consortium as well, has pushed using the NVMe protocol over fabrics, which also gives some added performance over fabric networks as well. So you've got it, but again I view this again as evolution, because punch cards, tape was faster, hard drive arrays were faster than tape, then flash arrays are faster, now you're going to have NVMe in the flash array, and also NVMe over fabric with connecting all-flash array. >> So I have to ask you the real question that's on everyone's mind that's out there, because storage is one of those areas that you never see it stopping. There's always venture back start-ups, you see new hot start-ups coming out of the woodwork, and there's been some failures lately and some blame NVMe's innovation to kind of killing some start-ups, I won't name names. But the real issue is the lines that were once blurred are now forming, and there's the wrong side of history and the right side of history. So I've got to ask you, what's going to be the right side of history in the storage architecture that people need to get onto to win in the future? >> So, there's a couple key points. One, all storage infrastructure and storage software needs to interface with cloud infrastructure. Got to be hybrid, if you have a software play like we do, where the software, such as our Spectrum Scale or our Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus, can exist as a cloud service through a service rider, that's where you want to be. You don't want to have just a standard array and that's all you sell. So you want to have an array business, you want to make sure that's highly performant, you want to make sure that's the position, and the infrastructure underneath clouds, which means not only very fast, but also incredibly resilient. And that includes both cloud configs and AI. If you're going to do real-time AI, if you're going to do dark trading on Wall Street using AI instead of human beings, A, if the storage isn't really fast you're going to miss a 10 million dollar, hundred million dollar transaction. Second thing, if it's not resilient and always available, you're really in trouble. And god forbid when they bring AI to healthcare, and I mean AI in the operating room, boy if that storage fails when I'm on the table, wow. That's not going to be good. So those are the things you got to integrate with in the future. AI and cloud, whether it's software-defined in the array space, or if you're like IBM in both markets. >> John: Performance and resilient. >> Performance and resiliency is critical. >> All right, so Eric I have a non-storage question for you. >> Eric: Absolutely. >> So you've got the CMO hat for a division of IBM. You've been CMO of a start-up, you've been in this industry for a while. What's the changing role of the CMO in today's digital world? >> So I think the key thing is digital is a critical method of the overall marketing mix. And everything needs to reinforce everything. So let's take an example. One of the large storage websites and magazines recently announced that IBM is a finalist for four product-of-the-year awards. Two for all-flash arrays and two for software-defined storage. So guess what we've done? We've amplified it over LinkedIn, over IBM Facebook, through our Twitter handle, we leverage that. We use it at trade shows. So digital is A, the first foray, right? People look on your website and look at what you're doing socially before they even decide, should I really call them up, or should I really go to their booth a trade show? >> So discovery and learning is happening online. >> Discovery and learning, but even progression. We just, I just happened to tweet and LinkedIn this morning, Clarinet, a large European cloud MSP and CSP, just selected IBM all-flash arrays, IBM Spectrum Protect, and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for their cloud infrastructure. And obviously their target, they sell to end-users and companies, right? But the key thing is we tweeted it, we linked it in, we're going to use it here at the show, we're going to use it in PR efforts. So digital is a critical element of the marketing mix, it's not a fad. It also can be a lead dog. So if you're going to a trade show, you should tweet about it and link it in, just the way you guys do. We all knew you were coming to this show, we know you're going to IBM Think, we know you're going to VM World and Oracle, all these great shows. How do we find out? We follow you on social media and on the digital market space, so it's critical. >> And video, video a big role in - >> Video is critical. We use your videos all the time, obviously. I always tweet them and link them in once I'm posted. >> Clip and stick is the new buzzword. Clip 'em and stick 'em. Our new clipper tool, you've seen that. >> (laughs) Yes, I have. So it's really critical, though, that, you can, and remember, I'm like one of the oldest guys in the storage business, I'm 60 years old, I've been doing this 32 years, seven start-ups, EMC, IBM twice, Mac store Seagate, so I've done big and small. This is a sea change transformation in marketing. The key thing is you have to make it not stand on its own, integrate everything. PR, analyst relations, digital in everything you do, digital with shows and how you integrate the whole buyer's journey, and put it together. And people are using digital more and more, in fact I saw a survey from a biz school, 75% of people are looking at you digitally before they ever even call you up or call one of your resellers if you use the channel, to talk about your products. That's a sea change. >> You guys do a great job with content marketing, hats off to you guys. All right, final question for you, take a minute to just quickly explain the relationship that IBM has with Cisco and the importance of it, specifically what you guys are doing with them, how you guys go on to market to customers, and what's the impact to the customer. >> So, first of all, we have a very broad relationship with Cisco, Obviously I'm the CMO of the Storage Division, so I focus on storage, but several other divisions of IBM have powerful relationships. The IoT group, the Collaboration group. Cisco's one of our valued partners. We don't have networking products, so our Global Technology Services Division is one of the largest resellers of Cisco in the world, whether it be networking, servers, converge, what-have-you, so it's a strong, powerful relationship. From an end-user perspective, the importance is they know that the two companies are working together hand-in-glove. Sometimes you have two companies where you buy solutions from the A and B, and A and B don't even talk to each other, and yes they both go to the PlugFest or the Compatibility Lab, but they don't really work together, and their technology doesn't work together. IBM and Cisco have gone well beyond that to make sure that we work closely together in all of the divisions, including the storage division, with our Cisco-validated designs. And then lastly, whether it's delivered through the direct sales model or through the valued business partners that IBM and Cisco share, it's critical the end-user know, and the partners know, they're getting something that works together and doesn't just have the works option. It's tightly-honed and finely-integrated, whether it be storage or the IoT Division, the Collaboration Division, Cisco is a heavy proponent of IBM Security Division. >> Product teams work together? >> Yeah, all the product teams work together, trade APIs back and forth, not just doing the, and let's go do a test, compatibility test. Which everybody does that, but we go well beyond that with IBM and Cisco together. >> And it's a key relationship for you guys? >> Key relationship for the Storage Division, as well as for many of the other divisions of IBM, it's a critical relationship with Cisco. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer for the Storage Systems group at IBM. It's theCUBE live coverage in Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more from Barcelona Cisco Live Europe after this short break. (upbeat techno music)