>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis", with Dave Vellante. >> The recent security breach of an Okta third party supplier has been widely reported. The criticisms of Okta's response have been harsh, and the impact on Okta's value has been obvious, investors shaved about $6 billion off the company's market cap during the week the hack was made public. We believe Okta's claim that the customer technical impact was, "Near zero," may be semantically correct. However, based on customer data, we feel Okta has a blind spot. There are customer ripple effects that require clear action which are missed in Okta's public statements, in our view. Okta's product portfolio remains solid, it's a clear leader in the identity space. But in our view, one part of the long journey back to credibility requires Okta to fully understand and recognize the true scope of this breach on its customers. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon "CUBE Insights", powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we welcome our ETR colleague, Erik Bradley, to share new data from the community. Erik, welcome. >> Thank you, Dave, always enjoy being on the show, particularly when we get to talk about a topic that's not being well covered in the mainstream media in my opinion. >> Yeah, I agree, you've got some new data, and we're going to share some of that today. Let's first review the timeline of this hack. On January 20th this year, Okta got an alert that something was amiss at one of its partners, a company called Sitel, that provides low-level contact center support for Okta. The next day, Sitel retained a forensic firm to investigate, which was completed, that investigation was completed on February 28th. A report dated March 10th was created, and Okta received a summary of that from Sitel on March 17th. Five days later, Lapsus$ posted the infamous screenshots on Twitter. And later that day, sheesh, Okta got the full report from Sitel, and then responded publicly. Then the media frenzy in the back and forth ensued. So Erik, you know, there's so much wrong with this timeline, it's been picked apart by the media. But I will say this, what appeared to be a benign incident and generally has turned into a PR disaster for Okta, and I imagine Sitel as well. Who I reached out to by the way, but they did not provide a comment, whereas Okta did. We'll share that later. I mean, where do we start on this, Erik? >> It's a great question, "Where do we start?" As you know, our motto here is opinions only exist due to a lack of data, so I'm going to start with the data. What we were able to do is because we had a survey that was in the field when the news broke, is that we were able to observe the data in realtime. So we sequestered the data up until that moment when it was announced, so before March 23rd and then after March 23rd. And although most of the responses came in prior, so it wasn't as much of an end as we would've liked. It really was telling to see the difference of how the survey responses changed from before the breach was announced to after, and we can get into a little bit more- >> So let's... Sorry, sorry to interrupt, let's bring that up, let's look at some of that data. And as followers of this program know... Let me just set it up, Erik. Every quarter, ETR, they have a proprietary net score methodology to determine customer spending momentum, and that's what we're talking about here. Essentially measuring the net number of customers spending more on a particular product or platform. So apologize for interrupting, but you're on this data right here. >> Not at all. >> So take us through this. >> Yeah, so again, let's caveat. Okta is still a premier company in our work. Top five in overall security, not just in their niche, and they still remained extremely strong at the end of the survey. However, when you kind of look at that at a more of a micro analysis, what you noticed was a true difference between before March 23rd and after. Overall, their cumulative net score or proprietary spending intention score that we use, was 56% prior. That dropped to 44% during the time period after, that is a significant drop. Even a little bit more telling, and again, small sample size, I want to be very fair about that. Before March 23rd, only three of our community members indicated any indication of replacing Okta. That number went to eight afterwards. So again, small number, but a big difference when you're talking about a percentage change. >> Yeah, so that's that sort of green line that was shown there. You know, not too damaging, but definitely a noticeable downturn with the caveat that it's a small end. But here's the thing that I love working with you, we didn't stop there. You went out, you talked to customers, I talked to a number of customers. You actually organized a panel. This week, Erik hosted a deep dive on the topic with CISOs. And we have, if we could bring up that next slide, Alex. These are some of the top CISOs in the community, and I'm going to just summarize the comments and then turn it over to you, Erik. The first one was really concerning, "We heard about this in the media," ooh, ooh, ouch. Next one, "Not a huge hit, but loss of trust." "We can't just shut Okta off like SolarWinds." So there's definitely a lock in effect there. "We may need to hire new people," i.e, "There's a business impact to us beyond the technical impact." "We're rethinking contract negotiations with Okta." And bottom line, "It's still a strong solution." "We're not really worried about our Okta environment, but this is a trust and communications issue." Erik, these are painful to read, and in the end of the day, Okta has to own this. Todd McKinnon did acknowledge this. As I said at the top, there are domino business impacts that Okta may not be seeing. What are your thoughts? >> There's a lot we're going to need to get into in a little bit, and I think you were spot on earlier, when McKinnon said there was no impact. And that's not actually true, there's a lot of peripheral, derivative impact that was brought up in our panel. Before we even did the panel though, I do want to say we went out quickly to about 20 customers and asked them if they were willing to give an opinion. And it was sort of split down the middle where about, you know, half of them were saying, "You know, this is okay. We're going to stand by 'em, Okta's the best in the industry." A few were cautious, "Opinion's unchanged, but we're going to take a look deeper." And then another 40% were just flat out negative. And again, small sample size, but you don't want to see that. It's indicative of reputational damage right away. That was what led us to say, "You know what, let's go do this panel." And as you know, from reading it and looking at the panel, well, a lot of topics were brought up about the derivative impact of it. And whether that's your own, you know, having to hire people to go look into your backend to deal with and manage Okta. Whether it's cyber insurance ramifications down the road, there's a lot of aspects that need to be discussed about this. >> Yeah now, so before I go on... And by the way, I've spent a fair amount of time just parsing, listening very carefully to Todd McKinnon's commentary. He did an interview with Emily Chang, it was quite useful. But before I go on, I reached out to Okta, and they were super responsive and I appreciate that. And I do believe they're taking this seriously, here's a statement they provided to theCUBE. Quote, "As a global leader in identity, we recognize the critical role Okta plays for our customers and our customers' end users. Okta has a culture of learning and improving, and we are taking the steps to prevent this from happening again. We know trust is earned, and building back our customers' trust in Okta through our actions and our ongoing support as their secure identity partner is our top priority." Okay, so look, you know, what are you going to say, right? I mean, I think they do own it. Again, the concern is the blind spots. So we put together this visual to try to explain how Okta is describing the impact, and maybe another way to look at it. So let me walk you through this. Here's a simple way in which organizations think about the impact of a breach. What's the probability of a breach, that's the vertical axis, and what's the impact on the horizontal. Now I feel as though business impact really is the financial, you know, condition. But we've narrowed this to map to Todd McKinnon's statements of the technical impact. And they've said the technical impact in terms of things customers need to do or change, is near zero, and that's the red dot that you see there. Look, the fact is, that Okta has more than 15,000 customers, and at most, 366 were directly impacted by this. That's less than 3% of the base, and it's probably less than that, they're just being conservative. And the technical impact which Todd McKinnon described in an interview, again, with Emily Chang, was near zero in terms of actions the customers had to take on things like reporting and changes and remediation. Basically negligible. But based on the customer feedback outside of that 366, that's what we're calling that blind spot and that bracket. And then we list the items that we are hearing from customers on things that they have to do now, despite that minimal exposure. Erik, this is new information that we've uncovered through the ETR process, and there's a long list of collateral impacts that you just referred to before, actions that customers have to take, right? >> Yeah, there's a lot, and the panel really brought that to life even more than I expected to be quite honest. First of all, you're right, most of them believe that this was a minimal impact. The true damage here was reputational, and the derivatives that come from it. We had one panelist say that they now have to go hire people, because, and I hate to say this, but Okta isn't known for their best professional support. So they have to go get people now in to kind of do that themselves and manage that. That's obviously not the easiest thing to do in this environment. We had other ones express concern about, "Hey I'm an Okta customer. When I have to do my cyber insurance renewal, is my policy going to go up? Is my premium going to go up?" And it's not something that they even want to have to handle, but they do. There were a lot of concerns. One particular person didn't think the impact was minimal, and I just think it's worth bringing up. There was no demand for ransom here. So there were only two and a half percent of Okta customers that were hit, but we don't know what the second play is, right, this could just be stage one. And I think that there was one particular person on the panel who truly believes that, that could be the case, that this was just the first step. And in his opinion, there wasn't anything specific about those 366 customers that made him feel like the bad actor was targeting them. So he does believe that this might be a step one of a step two situation. Now that's a, you know, bit of an alarmist opinion and the rest of the panel didn't really echo it, but it is something that's kind of worth bringing up out there. >> Well, you know, it just pays to be paranoid. I mean, you know, it was reported that supposedly, this hack was done by a 16-year-old in England, out of his, you know, mother's house, but who knows? You know, other actors might have paid that individual to see what they could do. It could have been a little bit of reconnaissance, throw the pawn in there and see how, you know, what the response is like. So I want to parse some of Todd McKinnon's statements from that Bloomberg interview. Look, we've always, you and I both have been impressed with Okta, and Todd McKinnon's management. His decisions, execution, leadership, super impressive individual. You know, big fans of the company. And in the interview, it looked like (chuckles) the guy hadn't slept in three weeks, so really you have to feel for him. But I think there are some statements that have to be unpacked. The first one, McKinnon took responsibility and talked about how they'll be transparent about steps they're taking in the future to avoid you know, similar problems. We talked about the near-zero technical impact, we don't need to go there anymore. But Erik, the two things that struck me as communication misfires were the last two. Especially the penultimate statement there, quote, "The competitor product was at fault for this breach." You know, by the way, I believe this to be true. Evidently, Sitel was not using Okta as its identity access platform. You know, we're all trying to figure out who that is. I can tell you it definitely was not CyberArk, we're still digging to find out who. But you know, you can't say in my view, "We are taking responsibility," and then later say it was the competitor's fault. And I know that's not what he meant, but that's kind of how it came across. And even if it's true, you just don't say that later in a conversation after saying that, "We own it." Now on the last point, love your thoughts on this, Erik? My first reaction was Okta's throwing Sitel under the bus. You know, Okta's asking for forgiveness from its customers, but it just shot its partner, and I kind of get it. This shows that they're taking action but I would've preferred something like, "Look, we've suspended our use of Sitel for the time being pending a more detailed review. We've shut down that relationship to block any exposures. Our focus right now is on customers, and we'll take a look at that down the road." But I have to say in looking at the timeline, it looks like Sitel did hide the ball a little bit, and so you can't blame 'em. And you know, what are your thoughts on that? >> Well, I'll go back to my panelists again, who unanimously agreed this was a masterclass on how not to handle crisis management. And I do feel for 'em, they're a fantastic management team. The acquisition of Auth0 alone, was just such a brilliant move that you have to kind of wonder what went wrong here, they clearly were blindsided. I agree with you that Sitel was not forthcoming quickly enough, and I have a feeling that, that's what got them in this position, in a bad PR. However, you can't go ahead and fire your partner and then turn around and ask other people not to fire you. Particularly until a very thorough investigation and a root cause analysis has been released to everyone. And the customers that I have spoken to don't believe that, that is done yet. Now, when I ask them directly, "Would you consider leaving Okta?" Their answers were, "No, it is not easy to rip and replace, and we're not done doing our due diligence." So it's interesting that Okta's customers are giving them that benefit of the doubt, but we haven't seen it, you know, flow the other way with Okta's partner. >> Yeah, and that's why I would've preferred a different public posture, because who knows? I mean, is Sitel the only partner that's not using Okta as its identity management, who knows? I'd like to learn more about that. And to your point, you know, maybe Okta's got to vertically integrate here and start, you know, supporting the lower level stuff directly itself, you know, and/or tightening up those partnerships. Now of course, the impact on Okta obviously has been really serious, big hit on the stock. You know, they're piling on inflation and quantitative tightening and rate hikes. But the real damage, as we've said, is trust and reputation, which Okta has earned, and now it has to work hard to earn back. And it's unfortunate. Look, Okta was founded in 2009 and in over a decade, you know, by my count, there have been no major incidents that are obvious. And we've seen the damage that hackers can do by going after the digital supply chain and third and fourth party providers. You know, rules on disclosure is still not tight and that maybe is part of the problem here. Perhaps the new law The House just sent over to President Biden, is going to help. But the point, Erik, is Okta is not alone here. It feels like they got what looked like a benign alert. Sitel wasn't fully transparent, and Okta is kind of fumbling on the comms, which creates this spiraling effect. Look, we're going to have to wait for the real near-term and midterm impacts, but longterm, I personally believe Okta is going to be fine. But they're going to have to sacrifice some margin possibly in the near to midterm, and go through more pain to regain the loyalty of its customers. And I really would like to hear from Okta that they understand that customers, the impact of this breach to customers, actually does go beyond the 366 that were possibly compromised. Erik, I'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there if I can have a moment, and yes, Okta... Well, there was a great quote, one of the guys said, "Okta's built like a tank, but they just gave the keys to a 16 year old valet." So he said, "There is some concern here." But yes, they are best of breed, they are the leader, but there is some concern. And every one of the guys I spoke to, all CISOs, said, "This is going to come up at renewal time. At a minimum, this is leverage. I have to ask them to audit their third parties and their partners. I have to bring this up when it comes time." And then the other one that's a little bit of a concern is data-wise. We saw Ping Identity jump big, from 9% net score to 24% net score. Don't know if it's causative or correlated, but it did happen. Another thing to be concerned about out there, is Microsoft is making absolutely massive strides in security. And all four of the panelists said, "Hey, I've got an E5 license, why don't I get the most out of it? I'm at least going to look." So for Okta to say, you know, "Hey, there's no impact here," it's just not true, there is an impact, they're saying what they need to say. But there's more to this, you know, their market cap definitely got hit. But you know, I think over time if the market stabilized, we could see that recover. It's a great management team, but they did just open the door for a big, big player like Microsoft. And you and I also both know that there's a lot of emerging names out there too, that would like to, you know, take a little bit of that share. >> And you know, but here's the thing, I want to keep going here for a minute. Microsoft got hit by lapses, Nvidia got hit by lapses. But I think, Erik, I feel like people, "Oh yeah, Microsoft, they get hit all the time." They're kind of used to it with Microsoft, right? So that's why I'm saying, it's really interesting here. Customers want to consolidate their security portfolio and the number of tools that they have, you know. But then you look at something like this and you say, "Okay, we're narrowing the blast radius. You know, maybe we have to rethink that and that creates more complexity," and so it's a very complicated situation. But you know, your point about Microsoft is ironic, right. Because you know, when you see Microsoft, Amazon, you know, customers get hit all the time and it's oftentimes the fault of the customer, or the partner. And so it seems like, again, coming back to the comms of this, is that really is the one thing that they just didn't get right. >> Yeah, the biggest takeaway from this without a doubt is it's not the impact of the breach, it was the impact of their delay and how they handled it and how they managed it. That's through the course of 25 CISOs I've spoken to now, that's unanimous. It's not about that this was a huge damaging hit, but the damage really came from their reaction or lack thereof. >> Yeah, and it's unfortunate, 'cause it feels like a lot of it was sort of, I want to say out of their control because obviously they could have audited the partners. But still, I feel like they got thrown a curve ball that they really had a, you know, difficult time, you know, parsing through that. All right, hey, we got to leave it there for now. Thank you, Erik Bradley, appreciate you coming on, It's always a pleasure to have you >> Always good talking to you too, Dave, thanks a lot. >> ETR team, you guys are amazing, do some great work. I want to thank Stephanie Chan, who helps me with background research for "Breaking Analysis". Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, help get the word out, as do some others. Alex Myerson on production, Alex, thank you. And Rob Hof, is our EIC at SiliconANGLE. Remember, all these episodes, they are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search, "Breaking Analysis podcast." I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai, it's the best in the business for real customer data real-time, near real-time, awesome platform. You can reach out to me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, or @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante, for Erik Bradley, and "theCUBE Insights", powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, be well, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's >>the cube >>with digital >>coverage of IBM >>Think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here virtual again in real life soon is right around the corner but we got a great guest here, Cameron art managing director at A T and T for IBM. Cameron manages the A T and T global account for IBM camera. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thank you very much, john it's great to be >>Here. Uh, can almost imagine how complicated and big and large a TNT is with respect to IBM in the history and 18 very large company. What's the relationship with I B M and A T and T over the years? How has that evolved? And what, how do you approach that role as the managing director? >>Well, it's been fascinating. Um as you said, we've got to large complex companies but also to brand names that are synonymous for innovation, whether it be in in compute or technology or communications. But the most fascinating thing is if you look back at our relationship and this is two brands that have been around for well over 100 years. Our relationship actually has some fascinating backdrop to it. My favorite is in 1924, A T and T sent a picture of thomas Watson sr over a telephone wire to IBM and thomas Watson said they sent this over the telephone. We are united in a community of interest. They want to make it easier for businesses to transact as do I. We need to work together. And since then, there has been a number of advanced advances that both of us have driven collectively and individually. And it's been a it's been a long running and treasured relationship in the IBM company. >>It's such a storied relationship on both sides. I mean, the history is just amazing. They could do a whole History Channel segment on both 18 T N I B M. Uh but together, it's kind of the better together story, as you pointed out from that example, going back to sending a picture with the phone lines, like, oh my God, that's instagram on the internet um, happening. But how are they responding to the relationship now? I'll see with cloud, um Native exploding with the ability to get more access and you're seeing a lot more things evolved, more complexity is emerging. That needs to be abstracted away. You're seeing businesses saying, hey, I can do more with less, I can connect more more access. But then that also services more potential opportunities and challenges. How are you responding with a T and T? How are they responding to that dynamic with you guys? >>Yeah, I think it's fascinating because when I originally approached this relationship and I've been doing this for 12 months now, a little over 12 months and when I originally approach it as with anything else, many times, you're trying to enter something that is quite special and make it even better. And my approach at least initially with AT and T was very much one of, we're going to provide even better service. We're going to jointly grow together in the market and strengthen each of our businesses and we're gonna work for something broader than ourselves. And I'll get into a little more of the last point later. But those first two things from an A T T response perspective, and I think this is a common perspective among many clients is we'll see if your actions follow your words. And so it's been a process. We've gone through to understand that I'm a champion for A T and T inside of IBM and those interests that we share individually and collectively will be represented at the highest levels. And we will mature this relationship into one of not just kind of supply chain partners because we're very complementary to each other, but more ecosystem partners and my belief in my core. And you see this much with many of the business strategies that are out there. The ecosystem strategy, this sum is greater than the parts, it's not a zero sum game is something that's absolutely blooming in the market. >>Yeah, that ecosystem message is one of the things that's resonating and coming clearly out of IBM think 2021 this year and in the industry is seeing the success of network effects, ecosystem changes is the constant that's happening. Certainly the pandemic and now coming out of it, people want to have a growth strategy that's gonna be relevant, current and impactful. And you you pointed that out growth with each other is interesting. And you you shared some perspective on this just recently with an example of what is underway there where you heading with that? I mean talk more about this growth with each other because that really is an ecosystem dynamic. What is underway and where are you heading? >>It's a fascinating ecosystem dynamic and it's something that we've adopted wholeheartedly within AT and T in terms of not only how we work. So there are very basic examples examples like we, rather than answering our PS and responding to uh to requirements, we're co creating with our clients, we have multiple cloud garages going with a T and T. Where we identify outcomes that we believe could be possible and then we show and allow the client to experience the outcome of that rather than a power point slides. So there's this kind of base of how do you work with each other? But then much more broadly in the market, it didn't take long for us to realize that, you know, the addressable market, if if I were selling A T and T, everything I could ever sell them and at and T was selling IBM everything they could ever sell us. The addressable market is, let's say $10 billion. But the moment at which we pointed ourselves outside to the external market, we realize that that market opportunity expands by a factor of 20 or by a factor of 50, we have the opportunity to create unique value together. And I think that kind of comes from the core of how we work together. >>I'm also intrigued by your comments about working together for a greater purpose. You said you'd address that later. What do you mean by that? I mean that's a little bit very higher purpose. Um North Star and as you mentioned, you know, working together in the ecosystem that kind of seems tactical and strategic as well. But what's this greater purpose? What does that mean? >>Well, my belief and it's something I learned actually, as I got indoctrinated into the work that 18 T does the work that IBM does and how we do it. But we share many common purposes in terms of what we believe on the whole, in terms of progress in society. So for example, equality in the workplace. We hosted a women's day lunch and actually multiple women stays lunch days luncheons across the United States, where we had hundreds of female leaders from both IBM and AT and T. Collaborating together talking about how tips and tricks for how they continue to advance in the workplace. Another example is in equality and diversity and inclusion. Both A T and T and IBM have a strong commitment and if you'll see IBM just published, just published their diversity and inclusion study where we actually demonstrate here the numbers, here's our targets, here's where we want to get 18 T has exactly that same belief. Finally, in stem education for educating our future leaders in science and technology, engineering and math. Both 18 T and IBM for our future, need those skills showing up in the marketplace and Corey Anthony is just a quick spot for any of you would think cory cory Anthony who see it diversity and development Officer at AT and T is going to give a great presentation on A. T. N. T. S work in stem for younger generations. So there are many things that are, I would say societal on a broader purpose statement that we share a belief in together, >>that's awesome people and also people want to work on a team that's mission driven, has impact beyond just the profit and loss me, I love capitalism personally myself, I'm an entrepreneur but been there done that, but we're living in a cultural shift. Now we're starting to see a remote work. You're starting to see virtual teams, new use cases that have different expectations and experiences um, in the work place and also at home. So you know, with mobile that could be on the side of the soccer fields or you know, skiing or running or jogging and take a message to pull over to a chat, jump into an audio chat, listen to a podcast, engage. So we're all tethered now, this is exchanging the experiences and this is going to change the game for how you work together. >>100%. And by the way, we're all teller tethered hopefully through a T and T mobile connectivity devices, it was kind of amusing how much that has become a part of our lives and the core value, one of the core value propositions of AT and T is obviously connecting businesses to each other, but also consumers through their mobile brand, but also then to entertainment. I will say when I was in Augusta at the Masters, you know, people that have been there know that you're not allowed to have cell phones. It was amazing just in conversations how often whoever was I was having a conversation with and myself would say, well I'd like to look that up, hold on, can I get that statistic and and we we realized we're missing a big part of our of our lives in terms of communication. But those requirements of connecting people in new ways and in their homes were remotely actually only reinforce this shared value proposition of when you have the technology and you have it securely between our company IBM and A T and T. We play a massive part in that and it's something I'm quite proud of. >>You guys have a really interesting position there with the history of with the relationship and as you pointed out, A T and T has to be in the forefront of cutting edge user experience technology bringing. I mean, they are the edge. I mean they ultimately from base station down to the device to the person to the account you're talking about a real edge there, that's a person's consumer. Um They got to provide these new services. So I gotta ask you, you mentioned at the top of this interview that your goal is to provide even better service to a T and T. A pretty big pressure point for IBM. You know, you gotta deliver step up and their expectations must be high. Can you take us through perspectives on that kind of even better service when you've got a client that's on the cutting edge of having to deliver new kinds of things like better notifications. Smarter devices, Smarter software, more fault tolerant, highly available services. These are things that, you know, there's a lot of pressure take us through that what's it like? >>There is a lot of pressure, but there's a lot of consistency in terms of expectations and it's something that both of us understand very well and I would argue that it's probably the reason we work so well together, Both 18 T and IBM for years uh namely 50 hundreds of years have understood that if we're transacting for business, were transaction transacting on something that has to get done so on both sides of the equation. Not only do we push the edge of what can be done technically or for business, but we also understand the expectations of the business clients that are, it works every time and it works in every way I needed to. So for us, when we work together, I think that healthy balance of uh part musician, part engineer uh comes out very, very strongly in both teams, >>camera great insight and great to talk to you. I love to get the perspective on, you know, the kind of challenges and opportunities that you're um seizing at IBM with A T and T. Again, the history is amazing. Um the impact of the industry at both levels you mentioned Tom Watson senior than you got Junior. That in that generation just carries forward. You got that vibe back now with hybrid cloud. Arvin loves clouds. So, you know, you got a lot of things happening and it's really strong over at IBM and the theme this year generally is better together. So awesome, awesome work. Congratulations. >>Thank you very much. I will tell you, I don't want to I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk a bit about the future because from an A T and T and IBM perspective, we're doing a load of work around private five G or five G in general. This is something that provides an absolutely low latency, huge band with with a lot of actually characteristics from a business perspective that are manageable and it will enable. What I believe is another big wave in the technology and business industry, which is new business models very similar to that of the Internet. Originally, it allows with IBM technology and 18 T technology, they have something called multi access. Such compute these are absolutely blazing fast. Five G boxes that will be in not only businesses but universities, sports stadiums, you name that, you name it, changing the experience of how people consume technology or the benefits of technology, which I couldn't be more excited about >>awesome future ahead. Great. There's a big wave certainly away we've never seen before. Cameron, art managing Director at A T and T at IBM. Great insight. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks john >>Okay, Cube coverage of IBM think 2021. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mm. Mhm. Mhm.

>> From around the globe, It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier host of the CUBE. We got a great guest here. Brian Bouchard is the co-founder president and CEO of Alacrinet. Brian great to see you remoting in all the way from Puerto Rico to Palo Alto. >> That's right. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for First of all, thanks John, for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. >> Yeah, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. First of all, before we get into what you guys do and and how this all ties in to Think. What do you guys do at Alacrinet? Why the name? A it's good you're at the top of the list and alphabetically, but tell us the, the, the the secret behind the name and what you guys do. >> So, first of all Alacrinet is based on the root word alacrity which means a prompt and willing, a prompt a joyous prompt to, excuse me, to achieve a common goal. So we ultimately are a network of individuals with the traits of alacrity. So Alacrinet. So that's our name. >> Great. So what's your relationship with IBM and how you guys have been able to leverage the partnership program in the marketplace? Take us through the relationship. >> So, well, first of all Alacrinet is a platinum IBM business partner and it was awarded recently the 2020 IBM North American partner of the year award. And we were selected amongst 1600 other business partners across North America. We've been actually a consulting, an IT consulting company for almost 20 years now. And we were founded in 2002 in Palo Alto and we have focused specifically on cyber security since 2013. And then as part, go ahead. >> What are some of the things that you guys are working on? Because obviously, you know, the business is hot right now. Everyone's kind of looking at COVID saying we're going to double down on the most critical projects and no time for leisurely activities when it comes to IT. And cloud scale projects, you know mission critical stuff's happening what are you guys working on? >> So we're, we're focused on cybersecurity, our security services really compliment IBM's suite of security solutions and cover the full spectrum from our research and penetration testing, which helps identify vulnerabilities before a breach occurs. And we also have managed security services which helps prevent, detect and remediate attacks in real time. And then finally, we also have a security staffing division and a software resell division, which kind of rounds out the full amount of offerings that we have to provide protection for our clients. >> What are some of the biggest challenges you guys have as a business, and how's IBM helping you address those? >> Well, as you know, John, we all know the importance of cybersecurity in today's world, right? So it's increasing in both demand and importance and it's not expected to wane anytime soon. Cyber attacks are on the rise and there's no there's no expected end in sight to this. And in fact, just this week on 60 minutes, Jay Powell, the chairman of the federal reserve board he noted that cyber attacks were the number one threat to the stability of the US economy. Also this week, a public school in Buffalo New York was hacked with ransomware and the school you know, this, the school district is just contemplating you know, paying the ransom to the hackers. So there's literally thousands of these attacks happening every day, whether it's in local school district or a state government, or an enterprise even if you don't hear about them, they're happening In adding to the complexity that the cyber attackers pose is the complexity of the actual cybersecurity tools themselves. There isn't a single solution provider or a single technology, that can ensure a company's security. Our customers need to work with many different companies and disconnected tools and processes to build an individual strategy that can adequately protect their organizations. >> You know, I love this conversation whenever I talk to practitioners on cybersecurity, you know that first of all, they're super smart, usually cyber punks and they also have some kinds of eclectic backgrounds, but more importantly is that there's different approaches in terms of what you hear. Do you, do you put more if you add more firefighters, so to speak to put out the fires and solve the problems? Or do you spend your time preventing the fires from happening in the first place? You know, and you know, the buildings are burning down don't make fire fire, don't make wood make fire resistance, you know, more of a priority. So there's less fires needing firefighters So it's that balance. You throw more firefighters at the problem or do you make the supply or the material the business fireproof, what's your take on that? >> Yeah, well, it kind of works both ways. I mean, we've seen customers want it. They really want choice. They want to, in some cases they want to be the firefighter. And in some cases they want the firefighter to come in and solve their problems. So, the common problem set that we're seeing with our that our customers encounter is that they struggle one, with too many disparate tools. And then they also have too much data being collected by all these disparate tools. And then they have a lack of talent in their environment to manage their environments. So what we've done at Alacrinet is we've taken our cybersecurity practice and we've really specifically tailored our offerings to address these core challenges. So first, to address the too many disparate tools problem, we've been recommending that our clients look at security platforms like the IBM Cloud Pak for security the IBM Cloud Pak for security is built on a security platform that allows interoperability across various security tools using open standards. So our customers have been responding extremely positively to this approach and look at it as a way to future-proof their investments and begin taking advantage of interoperability with, and, tools integration. >> How about where you see your business going with this because, you know, there's not a shortage of need or demand How are you guys flexing with the market? What's the strategy? Are you going to use technology enablement? You're going to more human driven. Brian, how do you see your business unfolding? >> Well, actually really good. We're doing very well. I mean, obviously we made the, the top the business partner for IBM in 2020. They have some significant growth and a lot of interest. I think we really attack the market in a, in a with a good strategy which was to help defragment the market if you will. There's a lot of point solutions and a lot of point vendors that various, you know, they they spent specialized in one piece of the whole problem. And what we've decided to do is find them the highest priority list, every CSO and CIO has a tick list. So that how that, you know, first thing we need we need a SIM, we need an EDR, we need a managed service. We need, what's the third solution that we're doing? So we, we need some new talent in-house. So we actually have added that as well. So we added a security staffing division to help that piece of it as well. So to give you an idea of the cybersecurity market size it was valued at 150 billion in 2019 and that is expected to grow to 300 billion by 2027. And Alacrinet is well-positioned to consolidate the many fragmented aspects of the security marketplace and offer our customers more integrated and easier to manage solutions. And we will continue to help our customers select the best suite of solutions to address all types of cybersecurity, cybersecurity threats. >> You know, it's it's such a really important point you're making because you know, the tools just have piled up in the tool shed. I call it like that. It's like, it's like you don't even know what's in there anymore. And then you've got to support them. Then the world's changed. You get cloud native, the service areas increasing and then the CSOs are also challenged. Do I, how many CLAWs do I build on? Do I optimize my development teams for AWS or Azure? I mean, now that's kind of a factor. So, you have all this tooling going on they're building their own stuff they're building their own core competency. And yet the CSO still needs to be like maintaining kind of like a relevance list. That's almost like a a stock market for the for the products. You're providing that it sounds like you're providing that kind of service as well, right? >> Yeah, well, we, we distill all of the products that are out there. There's thousands of cybersecurity products out there in the marketplace and we kind of do all that distillation for the customer. We find using, you know, using a combination of things. We use Forrester and Gartner and all the market analysts to shortlist our proposed solutions that we offer customers. But then we also use our experience. And so since 2013, we've been deploying these solutions across organizations and corporations across America and we've, we've gained a large body of experience and we can take that experience and knowledge to our customers and help them, you know, make make some good decisions. So they don't have to, you know, make them go through the pitfalls that many companies do when selecting these types of solutions. >> Well congratulations, you've got a great business and you know, that's just a basic search making things easier for the CSO, more so they can be safe and secure in their environment. It's funny, you know, cyber warfare, you know the private companies have to fight their own battles got to build their own armies. Certainly the government's not helping them. And then they're confused even with how to handle all this stuff. So they need, they need your service. I'm just curious as this continues to unfold and you start to see much more of a holistic view, what's the IBM angle in here? How, why are you such a big partner of theirs? Is it because their customers are working with you they're bringing you into business? Is it because you have an affinity towards some of their products? What's the connection with IBM? >> All of the above. (chuckles) So I think it probably started with our affinity to IBM QRadar product. And we have, we have a lot of expertise in that and that solution. So that's, that's where it started. And then I think IBM's leadership in this space has been remarkable, really. So like what's happening now with the IBM Cloud Pak for security you know, building up a security platform to allow all these point solutions to work together. That's the roadmap we want to put our customers on because we believe that's the that's the future for this, this, this marketplace. >> Yeah. And the vision of hybrid cloud having that underpinning be with Red Hat it's a Linux kernel, model of all things >> Yeah. Super NetEase. >> Locked in >> It's portable, multiple, you can run it on Azure. IBM Cloud, AWS. It's portable. I mean, yeah, all this openness, as you probably know cyber security is really a laggard in the security in the information technology space as far as adopting open standards. And IBM is I think leading that charge and you'll be able to have a force multiplier with the open standards in this space. >> Open innovation with open source is incredible. I mean, if you, if, if if open source can embrace a common platform and build that kind of control plane and openness to allow thriving companies to just build out then you have an entire hybrid distributed architecture. >> Yeah. Well, I think companies want to use the best in breed. So when we, when we show these solutions to customers they want the best in breed. They always say, I don't, when it comes to security they don't want second best. They want the best it's out there because they're securing their crown jewels. So that makes sense. So the problem with, you know having all these different disparate solutions that are all top in their category none of them talk to each other. So we need to address that problem because without that being solved, this is just going to be more it's going to compound the complexity of the problems we solve day to day. >> Awesome. Congratulations, Brian, great story. You know entrepreneur built a great business over the years. I think the product's amazing. I think that's exactly what the market needs and just shows you what the ecosystem is all about. This is the power of the ecosystem. You know, a thousand flowers are blooming. You got a great product. IBM is helping as well. Good partnership, network effects built in and and still a lot more to do. Congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> Okay. >> Thank you very much >> Brian Bouchard >> Made my impression. I appreciate that >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier with IBM thinks 2021 virtual coverage. Thanks for watching. (outro music plays)

>>from >>around the >>globe, it's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM, >>Think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube, had a great line up here talking sustainability. Kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains, career great to see you and wayne both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you. What's driving? IBMS investment sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>you know, johN what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM is 100 10 year old company. We've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation, that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental, our stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. C. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense. It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson that IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error. How is that evolved in today's focus? Because you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have uh A I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So, you know, these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that. And that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they say, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. We supported the Paris agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council, which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term >>action. That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna. We leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you've got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're in the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right? Is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, all of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and the context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those needs. >>You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because this waste involved is also disruption to business a security issues. But when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne? Because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right? So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network, where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you onboard them and off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A. I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours, he uses maximum to really focus on the maintenance and sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection, actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging ai to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed um for our clients. >>It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, It's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh, how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now, thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation, which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, NGos and Academia. Some examples. There's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zar in that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment programs science policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'm just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under Call for Code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much, Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being in what we like to turn clients zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing, that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative. Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> (Narrator) From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. Soon we'll be back in person in real life, but this year again it's a virtual conference. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube for more cube coverage. We've got a great guest here, Debbie Vavangas, Global Garage Lead for IBM Services. Global Garage, great program. Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we've covered the Garage a lot on theCUBE in the past, and a success, everyone loves the Garage. Things are born in the Garage, entrepreneurship, innovation, has been kind of categorically known for, kind of, the Garage startup. >> Absolutely. >> But also, it's become known for, really, agility, which has been a cloud phenomenon, DevOps. Now we're seeing dev SecOps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So, I've got to ask you, how is Garage doing with the pandemic? Obviously, I can almost imagine people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online? What's going on with the Garage? How has your transformation journey been with COVID? >> Well, John, COVID has been the leveler for us all, right? There isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to And that includes our clients. And I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM Garage, because it is so digitally native, when the COVID pandemic has struck around the world every single one of our Garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail, without a single days lost productivity. And that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredibly time-sensitive journey. And so, we've seen as a result of COVID actually there are a huge acceleration in Garages, for two reasons. So, number one, from a virtualization perspective, actually it's much easier when everybodies together in the same space. So everybody's together virtually in the same space, and we've seen, you know, acceleration in our velocity, in our collaboration, because everybody is really learning how to work in that same space. But two, because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our client's needs to make decisions fast, know not guess, really be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff, the Garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise, you know, we've gone from in 2019 to just a few hundred garages, to finishing 2020 with over two and a half thousand garages. And it being embedded across services and with the goal of being the primary way our clients experience it. So COVID has been a big accelerator. >> Sorry, Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that, I missed that. >> Sure, sure. >> I did a double take on the numbers. (Debbie laughs) >> So then, we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages, and we finished 2020 with just over two and a half thousand. So, we've had a huge growth, and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're serving with our clients, and how we're collaborating with our clients, and the topics we're unpacking that has really broadened. >> Yeah, I mean I covered, and we've reported on the Garage on theCUBE and also on www.siliconangle.com in the past things and through your news coverage, but that's amazing growth. I got to believe the tailwind from COVID and just the energy around it has energized you. I want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, what we've reported on in the past has been about design thinking, human-centered design, all of those beautiful things that come with cloud-scale, right? You know, you're moving faster, you're innovating, and so that's been kind of there. But what you're getting at with this growth is, and with COVID has proven, and again, we've been pointing this out, you're seeing the pattern, it's clear. Companies are either retrenching, okay, which is refactoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out of COVID with a growth strategy, and you're seeing other companies build net new innovations. So, they're building new capabilities, because COVID's shown them, kind of pulled back the curtain if you will on where the action is. So, this means there's two threads going on. You've got, "Okay, I've got to transform my business, and I got to refactor', or 'Hey, we got net new business models'. These are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? >> And I think that my comment on it is that is the sweet spot that Garage comes into its own, right? You mentioned lots of things in there. You talked about design thinking, and agility, and, you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time, and Garage of course is synonymous with those. Of course, Garage uses the best design thinking, and AGILE practices, and all of those things that absolutely call to what we do. DevOps, even through down to DesignOps. You know, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is. But, I think what is really happening now is that innovation being something separate is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes, and your business outcomes. Regardless of whether that is in refactoring and modernizing your existing estate, or diversifying, creating new ecosystems, new platforms, new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your core business. I mean, it's a well known fact, John, right? Like 75% of transformation programs fail to deliver an impact to the business performance, right? And in the same period of time there's been huge cuts in innovation funding, and that's because for the same reason, because they don't deliver the impact to the business performance. And that's why Garage is unique, because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? We're using user research, through design thinking of course, using agile to deliver it at speed, and all of those other things. But, it's focused on value, on benefits realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation, rather than it being something separate. >> Debbie, I saw you gave a talk called 'Innovation is Dead'. Obviously, that's a provocative title, that's an attention-getter. Tell me what you mean by that. Because it seems to be a setup. >> I mean, if the innovation is dead, >> Of course. was it with a question mark? Were you, kind of, trying to highlight that innovation is transformation? >> So, the full title was 'Innovation is dead and transformation is pointless'. And, of course, it's meant to be an eye-catching title so people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But, the reality is I mean it most sincerely, it's back to that stat. 75% of these transformation programs fail to deliver the impact, and I speculate that that is for a few reasons. Because, the idea itself wasn't a good one, or wasn't at the right time. Because, you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like, and therefore just being able to create that path. And, in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic. And it's those three things, that I think amongst the whole myriad of others, that are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what Garage does, is it breaks that. By putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise, and by using data-driven value orchestration, that means that we don't guess where the value to be gained is, we know. It's no longer chucking ideas at the wall to see what sticks, it's meaningful research. This is my favorite quote from my dear friend, Courtney Noll, who says, "It's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack, it's using your research in order to de-risk your investment, and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes." And so, if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree, I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. >> Yeah, exactly. And, you know, of course we're on the writing side, we love titles like, 'Innovation is dead, long live innovation'. So, it's classic, you know, to get your attention. >> Exactly, exactly. And of course, what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity. >> Totally. >> There's no longer relevance for a company to make sure they achieve their business outcomes. >> Well, this is what I wanted to just double-click on that with you on is that you look at transformation. You guys are essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the Garage philosophy, if I get that right. >> Yep >> And it's interesting, and we've experienced this here with theCUBE, we're theCUBE virtual, we're not at IBM Think, there is no physical game day like some of us normally do. >> Well, as you can see, I'm at my house. (Debbie laughs) And so, I was talking to a CEO and I said, "Hey, you guys are doing really, really good. We had to pivot with the cube", and he goes, "You guys did a good pivot yourself". He goes, "No, John, we did not pivot. We actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension, so, technically, we're going to bring that business back when COVID has gone and come back to real life, so it's technically not a pivot, we're not pivoting our business, we've created new functionality." Through the innovations that they were doing. So, this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. Share your thoughts on that. >> To me, it's about people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so, be really clear on what you're doing, and why. And the outcomes can be really broad, so instead of saying, "We're all going to implement a new ERP, or build a new mobile app". That's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is, "What we're trying to achieve is a 10 percent growth in net promoter score in China, right? In this group." Or whatever it is we were trying to achieve, right? Or, "We want to make a 25% reduction in our operating cost base by simplifying our estate". Whatever those outcomes are, that's the starting point, and then driving that to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value, and fast, right? Garage delivers three to five times faster than other models and at a reduced delivery cost, and so it's all about that speed. Speed of decision, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills, and speed to outcomes. >> Well, Debbie, you did a great job, love what you're doing, and Garage has got a great model. Congratulations on the growth, love this intersection, or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation, and vice versa, this interplay going on there. >> Exactly. >> I think COVID has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the garage, what's going on. How many practitioners do you guys have there now at IBM? You've got growth, are you adding more people in? Obviously, Virtual First, COVID, is there still centers of design? Take us through what's going on at Garage. >> Certainly, so like, I think I mentioned it right up front. Our goal is to make IBM Garage the primary way our clients experience us. We've proven in that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get a really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so, in order for us to deliver on that promise we have to be enabled across IBM to deliver to it, right? So, over the last 18 months or so we've had a whole range of training programs in Enable, we've had a whole badging and certification program, we have all the skills, and the pathways, and the career pathways to find. But Garage is for everybody, right? And so, it isn't about creating a select group that can do this across IBM. This is about making all of services capable. So, in 2020 we trained over 28,000 people, in all the different skills that are needed, from selling, to execution, to QA, to user research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our Garage Skills Academy, which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So, you know, we've got hundreds of thousands. >> And talk about the footprint on the global side, because, again, not to bring up global, but global is what is in your title. >> Yep. >> Companies need to be global, because now with virtual workforces you're seeing much more tapped creativity and ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? >> Well, so it's global in two perspectives, right? So, number one, we have Garages all around the world, right? It isn't just the market of, you know, our most developed nations in Americas and Europe, it is everywhere, we see it in all emerging markets. From Latin America, through to all parts of eastern Europe, which are really beginning to come into their own. So, we see all these different Garages at different scales and opportunities. So, definitely global from that image. But, what virtualization has also enabled is truly global teams. Because, it's really easy to go, "Oh, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert, and I need an AI expert, and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is." And you can quickly gather them around the virtual table, you know, faster than you can in a physical table. But, we still leverage the global communities with those physical. >> It's an expert network. You have an expert network there at IBM. >> We have a huge network, yeah. And both within IBM, and of course a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work with. >> Well, Debbie, I'm really excited. Congratulations on the growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate in a social construct. >> Absolutely. >> It's a great program, thanks for sharing. >> My pleasure, it's been great to be here, thank you. >> Okay, IBM's Global Garage Lead, Debbie Vavangas, who's here on theCUBE with IBM Services. A phenomenon, it's a social construct that's helping companies with digital transformation. Intersecting, with innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with Kirsten Craft, who's the global head of business development and marketing at Prolifics. Kirsten, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much, John. It's great to be here. >> I love the fact that we're getting the content out there. We're still remote. Soon in real life's coming back, but what a time it's been in the past year and a half or so. A lot of change, a lot of action. You guys are in the middle of it here at IBM Think. Let's get into it. But first, take a minute to explain what you guys do at Prolifics, and your business model. >> Sure. So thanks, John. So Prolifics... We've been in business, actually, for over 40 years, which is pretty amazing when you think about technology and everything that's happened in 40 years. We are a global service provider. We've got over 1,000 people worldwide. And we are 100% focused on software, and almost 100% focused on IBM, right? Of course, nobody's focused on a single technology stack these days, so we work with our customers across many different products, but we've been with IBM for a very long time. When we look at our business model, when we talk with our clients, we find that organizations today, they've got really complex challenges, especially now, right, in what all is happening right now. They've got a lot of really interesting opportunities, as well as problems that they have to solve in front of them. And those types of situations, they can't just be addressed by just buying a product. And Prolifics' approach is we work with our clients to get really above the technology conversation, and to really understand what are they trying to accomplish, right? At the end of the day, why is this an important initiative for you? And we help them develop roadmaps, and then we help them get there. So of course we're selling technology along the way, and in that implementation path. So I would say from a business model perspective, we're very services focused. We're very consultative. And of course our resulting technologies are running on IBM. >> About eight years ago, Dave Vellante and I started a little small little section of SiliconANGLE called ServicesANGLE, and our premise was is that services were going to be a big driver. Now, what we missed was cloud had to set up first, and it did, and now we're seeing a boom in services, but cloud services, you're seeing new kinds of services with the edge and other things. So what's your take on this? Because now IBM has this global view. The pandemic has proven that the scale of virtual and digital is so much more compelling. No one's going back. The economics are too good. The value is being realized as clear visibility and to unit economics of projects. Projects, some are obvious double down on. Some not to, maybe. So a lot of these things are going on. What's your take on all this? >> So it is interesting, cause that is both an opportunity as well as a challenge, right, for clients. At Prolifics, we've been-- We were actually pretty blessed because we're very virtual. We're a virtual company anyway, right? So we didn't have one facility where all of our developers are housed. So it was really kind of business as usual for us in terms of how we work with our customers, with the exception of the fact we couldn't go into their offices, right, anymore, which is a bit of a challenge. But as they look at how do they really harness the cloud, how do they harness those technologies? IBM, as well as business partners like Prolifics, we're in a great position to help them with that, because a lot of where IBM is going with cloud packs and containerization, that's where our customers want to be. Now, some of them are a little bit more aggressive than others in terms of how quickly they want to adopt that technology, which is where road mapping comes into place, and helping them really set up, not just for short-term, how do they solve what's in front of their face, but let's look a year or two years down the line. How do you make sure that you're really building an agile type of environment that's going to work across data, which is really the center of all things nowadays, as well as working across other systems. >> I've been covering IBM for very long time. Actually was once an employee as a co-op student back in college. Remember those glory days. (chuckles) And you mentioned you guys have been with IBM for a very, very long time. You got to.... They've always had a business focus. They've always had great technology. They got great technologists and experts there, but I think now more than ever you're seeing the theme at the show this year as hybrid cloud edge data AI as a kind of a underlying system software for business. So you're starting to see a new era of software driving business at a level that's been completely transformed. As an IBM platform software provider, you've been there for all the IBM over the years. What's it like? What's your... What's your take on this? What opportunities do you see with the hybrid cloud? You got Red Hat now under the covers. You've got, you mentioned, containers. Is it a pinch-me moment where people were like, "Wow. There's so much here to integrate," or cloud is going to provide a new clean sheet of paper to do things. What's your... What's the vibe? What's the sentiment? >> It's interesting. We're actually seeing more customers starting to look at themselves as technology companies. So even companies that don't think that historically they're not in a technology industry, they're now identifying internally. They're talking to their staff about... We don't sell widgets. We're a technology company that happens to sell widgets. So it's really an interesting dynamic, and I would also mention that one of the themes we're seeing across a lot of customers, almost all of our customers, is this insane focus on data. I say insane in like a good way, right? So how do we use our data to help inform our processes? How do we make sure that we're sharing data effectively and efficiently with all of our trading partners? We're seeing a lot of modernization when it comes to integration, but again, integration is all about exchanging data. We're seeing customers start to dabble more with AI in terms of how can we get smarter by using the data that we have available to us? Again, I think that's going to be the next wave, because we're seeing a lot of our customers start to dabble in that but not fully embrace it just yet. But they really want to get that underlying platform around data and integration ready to go so that they can do some amazing things in the future. >> How is the hybrid cloud and data impacting Prolifics business? Where does this take you guys for the next chapter? >> Well, it's actually... (chuckles) It's actually perfect for us, because that's almost 100% of what we do. So we... As I mentioned earlier, we are 100% focused on software, right? Software and software-based solutions. We're not a hardware provider. We don't have a data center, but we help customers design and implement software-based systems. And our expertise is squarely in data, business intelligence, analytics, AI, and also integration and business process automation. Those are really our core, especially as it comes to IBM technology. Now, we also have a testing practice, which is technology agnostic, but it's really critical as you... Especially as you look at rapid development cycles, cause that's another theme we're seeing with customers, right? Nobody's got the patience to go through a long waterfall model, right? You've got to get into production. It's the Apple model, right? Get it into production, get feedback, make modifications, and go. But if it gets out there and it's completely broken. Guess what? You just stepped all over yourself. So we integrate testing into everything that we do as well. But the data and the hybrid cloud message, and all of the innovation that IBM is doing, it fits perfectly in with what we're seeing with our customers and where we've invested for so long as far as skills and expertise. >> That testing example really kind of speaks to what's state-of-the-art right now, because people can get into production with the cloud and then they realize that they're adding services pretty quickly and things break. They call it "day-two operations," is a term that there've been kicking around. I call it essentially DevSecOps, but there's a lot of kind of new things that you just got to kind of watch, which recently, IT-like functions that are now cloud ops, cloud operations, so super new. How are you guys seeing that with the customer base that you guys have? As they start to see benefits, does it impact their staffing, their support levels? What's the impact to the customer when they start to realize some of these benefits, but then understanding that with scale comes a whole nother set of operating challenges. >> Yeah. It is interesting. With that scale, it does... It does present other challenges, as you mentioned, from an operations perspective. And we have seen customers that go out there, go live. Well, you remember the commercial? I think there was a commercial many, many years ago back when the internet was kind of a new thing where it was a startup company, and they put an e-commerce site out there, right? And they were like, "Oh, yay! We got our first order." And they're like, "Yay! We have 10. Oh, crap! We have 10,000." Right? So you see customers like this, they get excited to put something out there, but they haven't fully performance tested it, right? So that's... That's also where we try to help our customers take that step back and say, "Okay. How are you going to actually plan, not just for day one, to get it out there, but longer term?" And that's where we also put our performance testing as a part of all of our solutions, because you know that yes, it's a good problem to have, but you really don't want to have that problem in the first place, so how do you make sure that you plan and prepare for that, and incrementally deploy, and make sure that your underlying technology is prepared to support that kind of volume. >> So Kirsten, I want to ask you kind of the important question this day and age in the modern era with cloud and now this new cloud scale, and it's always kind of been true in the past. But now more than ever you're starting to see the role of the ecosystem of partners as super important, because now integrations are happening. You're bringing point solutions into a platform where tools are integrating with other tools. So as a partner of IBM, how is the ecosystem role that you guys are playing, and how important is that, and what are the new things that are needed to be successful in the ecosystem with the premise that rising tide floats all boats, which is kind of... Well, we're seeing that happen now. Certainly, coming out of the pandemic it's going to be a whole new game, but there are ecosystems that are now evolving around IBM, around these big mega trends like cloud edge and data. What's your take? >> Mm-hm. Mm-hm. So first of all, you mentioned IBM's focus on ecosystem, right? And so Arvind has been very vocal about the importance of the ecosystem and how he really wants to change IBM's model out there to embrace partners. And I have to say, I think that's... That's one of the smartest things I think I've heard IBM say in years. And I know that that sounds self-serving because we are a partner, but the reality is there's several different layers where that's really important. One is the value of the partner. And you mentioned that there's a need to integrate across different systems, right? So IBM is not... Gone are the days when customers only have IBM technology. It's just not a thing. And so partners have the ability to work across different vendors, very hybrid, very unique types of environments, and make sure that the IBM interest, the IBM footprint, is well-deployed, well-represented, and set up for future success so that customer's going to want to buy more in the future, but in the context of what that customer's overall landscape is. So that's a big reason why IBM wants business partners involved with customers, and we're a little bit more... Or at least we can work with customers from a consultative perspective, right, and make sure that they are comfortable with the decisions that they're making. That isn't just the manufacturer telling them to buy our stuff. From a partners perspective, one of the biggest things that we struggle with in the marketplace is being known, right? I mean, we're... We're a decent-sized partner with over 1,000 employees, but at the end of the day, how many people know Prolifics as a brand name versus how many people know IBM? So opening those doors, partnering with the IBM sellers that have kind of an easier way in to introduce a partner and give us the credibility that, "Hey. We know Prolifics. We've seen them be successful and help very large companies that are just like you be successful with our technology. Let them help you end to end," is a... It's just a really good synergy as far as how you can actually, how IBM can scale with their customers, and how customers can realize that benefit of a broader ecosystem as well, and skillsets. >> Yeah. Great point. Arvind is very savvy on cloud. I know he loves hybrid cloud. He loves the cloud model. He's changing it with Red Hat. I think you're so smart and accurate on this whole changeover around network effects, organic ecosystems playing a power dynamic in how people buy and nurture themselves. So I think there's going to be a nice change over there. I think you're onto something pretty big with that, because look it, it's multi-vendor at many levels now. IBM has to integrate here, and you're a partner. You're well-known now. You're on theCUBE. So we're going to get the word out here. But it's- (chuckles) You're on a team. It's a group. It's not just... It's about the customer. This is now a different mindset. This is what customers want, because they're out in the organic field too. They're not just getting the emails sent to them. They're out and engaging. This is a new model. >> And one of the things that's interesting that we're seeing from our customers as well is they're no longer looking to buy a product and then have somebody come in, install, and implement. They're actually looking for guidance, right? They want ideas. "Here's what I'm trying to do with my business. How can you help me?" They're looking for an answer to that, and that requires a very different skillset, right? It's not just somebody who knows how to come in and spin up CDs and do some configurations. It's somebody who's worked in their industry before, has worked with similar types of customers, has a little bit of that road rash, can provide some of that guidance. And in order to really do that, you can't find that just in one organization. So I would tell you, actually, I mean Prolifics is a... We're a pretty good-sized company with a wide skillset, but even we partner. We also partner with other partners to help complement our skills when there's a particular expertise that's needed. So it really is a very interesting ecosystem development, and a different way of thinking, that it's not just about you and being able to do everything. It's about you being able to bring the right solution and the right ideas to a customer, and to help them be successful for the long-term. >> Awesome insight, Kirsten Craft, global head of business development and marketing at Prolifics. Great to have you on, and power of networks, power of partnerships, power of the ecosystem. The new world is here. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Okay. This is IBM Think 2021 coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (smooth music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. I've got a great guest here Robin Hernandez, vice president Hybrid Cloud Management and Watson AIOps. Robin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having me, John. >> You know, Hybrid Cloud, the CEO of IBM Arvind loves Cloud. We know that we've talked to him all the time about it. And Cloud is now part of the entire DNA of the company. Hybrid Cloud is validated multi clouds around the corner. This is the underlying pinnings of the new operating system of business. And with that, that's massive change that we've seen IT move to large scale. You're seeing transformation, driving innovation, driving scale, and AI is the center of it. So AIOps is a huge topic. I want to jump right into it. Can you just tell me about your day to day IT operations teams what you guys are doing? How are you guys organized? How you guys bring in value to the customers? What are your teams responsible for? >> Yeah, so for a few years we've been working with our IT customers, our enterprise customers in this transformation that they're going through. As they move more workloads to cloud, and they still have some of their workloads on premise, or they have a strategy of using multiple public clouds, each of those cloud vendors have different tools. And so they're forced with, how do I keep up with the changing rate and pace of this technology? How do I build skills on a particular public cloud vendor when, you know, maybe six months from now we'll have another cloud vendor that will be introduced or another technology that will be introduced. And it's almost impossible for an it team to keep up with the rate and pace of the change. So we've really been working with IT operations in transforming their processes and their skills within their teams and that looking at what tools do they use to move to this cloud operations model. And then as part of that, how do they leverage the benefits of AI and make that practical and purposeful in this new mode of cloud operations >> And the trend that's been booming is this idea of a site reliability engineer. It's really an IT operations role. It's become kind of a new mix between engineering and IT and development. I mean, classic DevOps, we've seen, you know dev and ops, right? You got to operate the developers and the software modern apps are coming in that's infrastructure as course has been around for a while. But now as the materialization of things like Kubernetes and microservices, people are programming the infrastructure. And so the scale is there, and that's been around for a while. Now it's going to go to a whole enterprise level with containers and other things. How is the site reliability engineering persona if you will, or ITOps changed specifically because that's where the action is. And that's where you hear things like observability and I need more data, break down the silos. What's this all about? What's your view? >> Yeah, so site reliability engineering or SRE practices as we call it has really not changed the processes per se that IT has to do, but it's more accelerated at an enormous rate and pace. Those processes and the tools as you mentioned, the cloud native tools like Kubernetes have accelerated how those processes are executed. Everything from releasing new code and how they work with development to actually code the infrastructure and the policies in that development process to maintaining and observing over the life cycle of an application, the performance, the availability, the response time, and the customer experience. All of those processes that used to happen in silos with separate teams and sort of a waterfall approach, with SRE practices now, they're happening instantaneously. They're being scaled out. They're being... Failback is happening much more quickly so that applications didn't do not have outages. And the rate and pace of this has just accelerated so quickly. This is the transformation of what we call cloud operations. And we believe that as IT teams work more closely with developers and they moved towards this SRE model, that they cannot just do this with their personnel and changing skills and changing tools. They have to do this with modernized tools like AI. And this is where we are recommending applying AI to those processes so that you can then get automation out of the back end that you would not think about in a traditional IT operations, or even in an SRE practice. You have to leverage capabilities and new technologies like AI to even accelerate further. >> Let's unpack the AI operations piece because I think that's where I think I'm in hearing. I'd love you to clarify this because it becomes I think the key important point but also kind of confusing to some folks because IT operations people see that changing. You just pointed out why, honestly, the tools and the culture is changing, but AI becomes a scale point because of the automation piece you mentioned. How does that thread together? How does AIOps specifically change the customer's approach in terms of how they work with their teams and how that automation is being applied? 'Cause I think that's the key thread, right? 'Cause everyone kind of gets the cultural shifts and the tools, if they're not living it and putting it in place, but now they want to scale it. That's where automation comes in. Is that right? Is that the right way to think about it? What's your view on this? This is important. >> It's absolutely right. And I always like to talk about AI in other industries before we apply it to IT to help IT understand. Because a lot of times, IT looks at AI as a buzzword and they say, "Oh, you know, yes, sure. "This is going to help me." But if you think about... We've been doing AI for a long time at many different companies not just at IBM, but if you think about the other industries where we've applied it, healthcare in particular is so tangible for most people, right? It didn't replace a doctor but it helps a doctor see the things that would take them weeks and months of studying and analyzing different patients to say, "Hey, John, I think this may be a symptom "that we overlooked or didn't think about "or a diagnosis that we didn't think about," without manually looking at all this research. AI can accelerate that so rapidly for a doctor, the same notion for IT. If we apply AI properly to IT, we can accelerate things like remediating incidents or finding a performance problem that may take your eye months or weeks or even hours to find, AI applied properly find those issues and diagnose just like they could in healthcare it diagnoses issues correctly much more rapidly. >> Now again, I want to get your thoughts on something while you're here 'cause you've been in the business for many, many decades 20 years experience, you know, cloud cold, you know the new modern area you're managing it now. Clients are having a scenario where they, "Okay, I'm changing over the culture." I'm "Okay, I got some cloud, I got some public "and I got some hybrid and man, "we did some agile things. "We're provisioned, it's all done. "It's out there." And all of a sudden someone adds something new and it crashes (chuckles) And now I've got to get in, "Where's the risks? where's the security holes?" They're seeing this kind of day two operations as some people call, another buzz word but it's becoming more of, "Okay, we got it up and running "but we still now going to still push some code "and things are starting to break. "and that's net new thing." So it's kind of like they're out of their comfort zone. This is where I kind of see the AIOps evolving quickly because there's kind of a DevSecOps piece. There's also data involved, observability. How do you talk to that scenario? Where, okay, you sold me on cloud, I've been doing it. I did some projects. We're not been running. We got a production system and we added something new. Something maybe trivial and it breaks stuff? >> Yes. Yeah, so with the new cloud operations and SRE, the IT teams are much more responsible for business outcomes. And not just as you say, the application being deployed and the application being available, but the life cycle of that application and the results that it's bringing to the end users and the business. And what this means is that it needs to partner much more closely with development. And it is hard for them to keep up with the tools that are being used and the new code and the architectures of microservices that developers are using. So we like to apply AI on what we call the change risk management process. And so everyone's familiar with change management that means a new piece of code is being released. You have to maintain where that code is being released to was part of the application architecture and make sure that it's scaled out and rolled out properly within your enterprise policies. When we apply AI, we then apply what we call a risk factor to that change because we know so often, application outages occur not something new within the environment. So by applying AI, we can then give you a risk rating that says, "There's an 80% probability "that this change that you're about to roll out, "a code change is going to cause a problem "in this application." So it allows you to then go back and work with the development team and say, "Hey, how do we reduce this risk?" Or decide to take that calculated risk and put into the visibility of where those risks may occur. So this is a great example, change risk management of how applying AI can make you more intelligent in your decisions much more tied to the business and tied to the application release team. >> That's awesome. Well, I got you here on this point of change management. The term "Shift Left" has come up a lot in the industry. I'd love to get your quick definition of what that is in your mind. What does Shift Left mean for Ops teams with AIOps? >> Yeah, so in the early days of IT there was a hard line definitely between your development and IT team. It was kind of we always said throwing it over the fence, right? The developers would throw the code over the fence and say, good luck IT, you know, figure out how to deploy it where it needs to be deployed and cross your fingers that nothing bad happens. Well, Shift Left is really about a breaking down that fence. And if you think of your developers on your left-hand side you'd being the IT team, it's really shifting more towards that development team and getting involved in that code release process, getting involved in their CI/CD pipeline to make sure that all of your enterprise policies and what that code needs to run effectively in your enterprise application and architecture, those pieces are coded ahead of time with the developer. So it's really about partnering between it and development, shifting left to have a more collaboration versus throwing things over the fence and playing the blame game, which is what happens a lot in the early days IT. >> Yeah, and you get a smarter team out of it, great point. That's great insight. Thanks for sharing that. I think it's super relevant. That's the hot trend right now making dealers more productive, building security from the beginning. While they're doing it code it right in, make it a security proof if you will. I got to ask you one of the organizational questions as IBM leader. What are some of the roadblocks that you see in organizations that when they embrace AIOps, are trying to embrace AI ops are trying to scale it and how they can overcome those blockers. What are some of the things you're seeing that you could share with other folks that are maybe watching and trying to solve this problem? >> Yeah, so you know, AI in any industry or discipline is only as good as the data you feed it. AI is about learning from past trends and creating a normal baseline for what is normal in your environment. What is most optimal in your environment this being your enterprise application running in steady state. And so if you think back to the healthcare example, if we only have five or six pieces of patient data that we feed the AI, then the AI recommendation to the doctor is going to be pretty limited. We need a broad set of use cases across a wide demographic of people in the healthcare example, it's the same with IT, applying AI to IT. You need a broad set of data. So one of the roadblocks that we hear from many customers is, well I using an analytics tool already and I'm not really getting a lot of good recommendations or automation out of that analytics tool. And we often find it's because they're pulling data from one source, likely they're pulling data from performance metrics, performance of what's happening with the infrastructure, CPU utilization or memory utilization, storage utilization. And those are all good metrics, but without the context of everything else in your environment, without pulling in data from what's happening in your logs, pulling in data from unstructured data, from things like collaboration tools, what are your team saying? What are the customers saying about the experience with your application? You have to pull in many different data sets across IT and the business in order to make that AI recommendation the most useful. And so we recommend a more holistic true AI platform versus a very segregated data approach to applying and eating the analytics or AI engine. >> That's awesome, it's like a masterclass right there. Robin, great stuff. Great insight. We'll quickly wrap. I would love to you to take a quick minute to explain and share what are some of the use cases to get started and really get into AIOps system successes for people that want to explore more, dig in, and get into this fast, what are some use case, what's some low hanging fruit? What would you share? >> Yeah, we know that IT teams like to see results and they hate black boxes. They like to see into everything that's happening and understand deeply. And so this is one of our major focus areas as we do. We say, we're making AI purposeful for IT teams but some of the low hanging fruits, we have visions. And lots of our enterprise customers have visions of applying AI to everything from a customer experience of the application, costs management of the application and infrastructure in many different aspects. But some of the low hanging fruit is really expanding the availability and the service level agreements of your applications. So many people will say, you know I have a 93% uptime availability or an agreement with my business that this application will be up 93% of the time. Applying AI, we can increase those numbers to 99.9% of the time because it learns from past problems and it creates that baseline of what's normal in your environment. And then we'll tell you before an application outage occurs. So avoiding application outages, and then improving performance, recommendations and scalability. What's the number of users coming in versus your normal scale rate and automating that scalability. So, performance improvements and scalability is another low-hanging fruit area where many IT teams are starting. >> Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you want to have the AIOps? They're totally cool, very relevant. You know, you're seeing hybrid cloud, standardized all across business. You've got to have that data and you got to have that incident management work there. Robin, great insight. Thank you for sharing. Robin Hernandez, vice president of Hybrid Cloud Management in Watson AIOps. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me John. >> Okay, this theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome to the Cube's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Joining me next is Dave Marmer, the vice president offering management for the cognos analytics, planning analytics and regtech portfolios at IBM. Dave, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having us today. >> So lots of change in the last year, that's an Epic understatement, right? But I'm curious some of the things that you've seen from a customer's perspective, how are they utilizing planning and reporting technology and analytics to adapt to such a disruptive market? >> Quick question, the pandemic was truly a test for these organizations in terms of their resiliency and agility. But fortunately our clients were able to leverage our planning and reporting technology to do several things. They were able to re-plan their financials to integrate and reset operational areas and planning. They were able to create multiple scenarios as disruptions continue to occur and they were able to maintain confidence in insights for collaborative decision-making at truly an enterprise scale. They were easily able to increase the frequency of their planning process, moving from quarterly to monthly to even daily for their operational areas such as supply and sales. And this was really far reaching for customers like ranging from people like Perona who focuses on private employment to Vasan who is one of the largest bakeries in Europe and ancestry.com, which are the world's largest online family history resource. They're all were able to successfully navigate the radical changes in demand and in workflow and in cashflow. >> That's impressive considering things were in such a mess and still are in somewhat state of flux which is obviously different globally. You talked about the collaboration. That's one of the things that we saw so much change going on in the last year, but this dependence on technology to facilitate collaboration. Talk to me a little bit about how you've helped. Maybe those same customers that you mentioned be able to collaborate collectively across the organizations. >> So the concept that we follow which is sort of this extending planning and analysis model is this concept of decisions, financial decisions, or finance decisions being moved outside of the operational areas, the office of finance, into the areas of supply chain, into sales, into workforce management. These all had to come together far more agilely and far more connected than they ever were before. Decisions that one organization was going to make was going to impact others. And they need to bring in additional exogenous data to kind of augment the decisions they were already doing. So it came very collaborative and high participation for the people closest to the decisions. >> Excellent. So when you look at some of the things that have in the last year, what are some of your observations, that kind of things that surprised you in terms of how companies have evolved their planning and forecasting strategy in such a dynamic market? >> Well, the biggest surprise, and I guess it shouldn't be a surprise, but historical trends that they had been counting on for their planning activity, taking last year's activities and actuals and using those to plan out what would happen. Those were sort of out the window and data sources and drivers, new drivers to their business had to be considered. They hadn't had to deal with this in the past. Like our clients were kind of pleasantly surprised that they're moved to extended planning and analysis. When planning is adopted outside of the office of finance stood up to the global disruption. You know, for example, ancestry had already adopted a enterprise planning platform as a reaction to phenomenal growth they experienced years back as they were first launching their DNA product. This put them in really good shape for what happened more really recently. This allowed them to run multiple scenarios to the impact of their supply chain all the way through the labs and back to the clients. And so when the pandemic hit, the facilities were impacted but they will have to make those adjustments at quarterly and keep up a high level of customer service. >> So these seems like ancestry was already in a really good position to be able to navigate some of the massive disruption that happened so quickly. How have you helped other customers that maybe weren't as far along to do that as well and to be able to forecast and plan in a dynamic time? >> So a customer like the sun, I mentioned, they were like, one of Europe's largest bakeries, right? They live in a world of just hours, right? You're creating product that has a shelf life, a realistic shelf life. And they have much demand changes for their facilities, but also to the stores and their frozen food products that they provide in addition to how they provide them the daily fresh stuff that they do. They're very known for their rye bread, their sourdough those type of things. But they had to make a lot of changes based on what they were seeing and take into consideration, even margin. So they've been evolving and taking more advantage of AI in augmenting their human intelligence in this way. They've been able to use very sophisticated algorithms with planning analytics to allow them to plan for things like energy consumption where they calculate the expected outside temperatures and the need for the facilities, because where they are based in the Nordics, they face freezing temperatures where, you know, the facility subs health have, because there's a lot of fluctuation in seasonality to that. And so they need to adjust for that. They also really use this to take a look at the product life cycles that they had been using to get a better longterm estimate of what people would be buying instead of using human intuition, because as they said, you can get sort of into this methodical radar listening model of looking at what had occurred in the past. And they were able to start to see things months earlier that they would have normally not been able to see if they'd not augmented their human intelligence with artificial intelligence. And I think the third thing they started to use was customer purchasing behavior where they actually were just starting to see actual patterns of things that were changing. And the expected propensity was changing for repeat purchases and cross sell purchases. And they're able to make adjustments on their offerings as a result. >> If we talk about AI to augment human intelligence to empower decision making, that's a great example of that that you talked about. What's the adoption been like that around different industries and different countries in the last year? >> So we see this universally happening that there's an adoption occurring. Certain industries are definitely moving faster. It's happening in the sales and operations planning area more so than the traditional places like the financial and planning and analysis areas. So once you get into the areas like supply chain and demand planning, you know, we generally see retail and distribution, you know, companies, a high adoption of this because of the sensitivity of making sure the right product is there at the right time. We see this near a customer service. And we definitely see this as I mentioned in workforce analytics. This pandemic brought large disruption to people who had to exit the normal facilities and work in different alternative locations. And then this idea of how do we bring them back in a very managed way is a universal problem that everyone is facing and they're all starting to adopt that. So we're seeing adoptions on many of these things across all the different industries, but I'd say the ones I mentioned were certainly highly sensitive to the immediate problems that we all personally experienced. >> Right. In your opinion based on just what you've observed, what do you think the true value of integrated planning field Bay by AI? What's the true business value there? >> It's a great question. I think in business terms, the predictive capabilities like the algorithmic forecasting is really helping companies more accurately forecast their demand. And while prescriptive capabilities like decision optimization, help them determine the best way to meet that demand, typically decision optimization excels at developing scenarios and considering constraints such as time prices, cost and capacities. And those are pulled in to help augment the decisions. Whereas predictive capability really helps the forecast demand as an example, you know, man changes by season by day by hour, the prescriptive capabilities, like this is an optimization, help determine the best plan for meeting the demand. But if you think about the energy example I gave before, you have to consider things like, is it hydro? Is it coal? Is it nuclear? One of those types of things that are involved because each method has a different cost and a different capacity. So they kind of work together in that way. >> When you're having customer conversations. I'm curious what the perspective is of customers understanding the obvious business value of integrating AI with integrated planning. Is that something that they get right away? What kinds of questions do they have for you? >> Again, I think they understand the concept or scenario planning and the fact of building different scenario modeling. I think what they're getting accustomed to is the superpower that we get to augment these humans with an intent to work against their intuition. We've seen this time and time again where project planning for, you know, one of our customers who manages on behalf of the government certain projects that they would look at it and say, if it wasn't for AI, we wouldn't have detected these issues and some of the project scope, because we look at managing them in a certain way based on historical patterns. So you almost have to unlearn their historical patterns that's had to accept what the data is telling you and you're really matching properlistic and deterministic information together to get a more accurate and an informed decision to help you move and progress further. >> So for businesses, I'm curious to get your advice here. For companies that are in this state of flux as we all are and varying degrees of that across the globe, what advice do you have for those companies that are looking into utilizing planning and reporting technology to really fine tune their business performance but they don't really know where to start? >> Yeah, so from a very high level, the advice I would say is first you've got to examine your current planning process and really identify what's working well and what business questions need to be answered. Then you have to understand that planning is primarily driver-based. And because it's driver-based, you really have to understand and take a look at your current financial reports to see what's really making up the bulk of your business, what's really driving revenue, what's really driving expenses and really focusing on the drivers that have material impact. Probably you've that 80, 20 rule. What is 80% of our costs and revenues coming from? And then you need to understand the level of granularity that you need in your data to really develop the appropriate values that you want to plan again and set those targets. And you should refer to the existing spreadsheets. They have lots of value just to understand the sources of data, the calculations that get used, what's effective and not effective across the different functions and how they link together. And then you really need to determine your planning horizon. You need to understand who's going to be contributing to the plan who hasn't been doing this before, because you want people closest to the processes and the decisions to do that. And what's the frequency? As I mentioned, people moved from quarterly to monthly as a matter of fact, in a rolling forecast and they started moving to daily and you got to understand when do you recommend this kind of a model for what businesses and what's that, how much attention do you want to give to those plans on a regular basis? >> One more question for you, Dave. When you're in those customer conversations, I'm curious, is this a C-level conversation now in terms of, "Hey, we need to be able to utilize AI and predictive for planning technology and reporting technology", Has that elevated in conversation within the organization? >> So yes, the pandemic has opened up, and just disruptions in general have opened up the conversation around about the importance of better planning and business continuity and building resilience into an organization. That is a boardroom conversation that's very important. So it is definitely raised up into that level. As planning starts to sprawl outside of just the office of finance into these operational areas, those line of business executives are getting very involved and saying, you know, we need to plan to perform and setting that conversation up and using these types of new technologies and capabilities that we're kind of replacing what can't be automated by human beings, right? Or just can't be done with the amount of manual work involved. And we see this today, just the amount of sheer number of data, the amount of volume and the amount of data intersections that have to occur. You need the capabilities of something like planet windows with Watson to go to deliver something like that. >> Awesome. Well, Dave, thanks so much for joining me today sharing what you've seen in the last year and how some of the customers have been very successful at adapting to a pretty dynamic time. We appreciate you coming on the show. >> Thank you very much. I appreciate this. >> Bye Dave Marmer. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the cubes coverage of IBM Think. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, joined next by Peter Morrow the VP of sales and marketing at IBM partner, TRM. Peter, welcome to the program. >> Hi, thank you. Happy to be here. >> Tell me a little bit about yourself and TRM before we dig in. >> Well, TRM is a long time business partner for IBM. We for about 30 years, specialize in helping IBM customers implement Maximo and have a lot of deep technology expertise and in Maximo and related software in the enterprise asset management industry. I'm the VP of sales and marketing, I've been at TRM for about 10 years and I'm proud to lead our talented sales teams and our sole mission is to help our customers get value out of their EAM solutions. And we're really excited about recent developments in AI and bringing value to a lot of our customers and their organization, and finally get ROI out of their long time investments in the EAM. >> Let's dig in a bit more to the IBM relationship. I know TRM is a gold partner, but talk to me about that and how TRM has leveraged that partnership with IBM to help your customers be successful. >> Sure. Now, we're a little bit of a unique partner with IBM for a long time. We've been pure resell and implementation services. And recently we've transitioned into an OEM relationship with IBM where we actually embed IBM products into broader TRM offerings. And this relationship that we have with IBM is really important as IBM is the dominant player in EAM and AI and hybrid cloud it's really a natural fit for us to leverage those really mature solutions and build on top of them TRMs deep expertise and the technology and the reliability side to offer more of an end to end solution to our customers. >> Got it. So the last year or so we've seen a lot of market dynamics. Talk to me about the EAM market what's going on there. What are some of the changes? >> Well, there's a couple of key changes that we see, one of the biggest changes I think that impacts our business and IBM is that customers really don't have an appetite for long expensive implementations of custom solutions. They're really looking for more turnkey solutions that have proven value already and very mature. They've already spent tens of millions of dollars implementing Maximo or related EAM solution. They really don't want to embark on this really expensive long journey to get to that next level. And so to meet this requirement we've been focused for the past couple of years on developing much more turnkey solutions. One of which is one that we call TRMs Maximo AAM, solution and that's built on Maximo, but it's also layered with IBM's new AI solution for Maximo customers. And we marry that with our deep reliability expertise and we're really excited about being able to roll it out in literally weeks instead of months or years for a lot of new customers. And that's a really short time to value and ROI is something that's pretty much unheard of until now in this industry. >> Talk to me about some of the advantages that your customers are getting like on a general level from AI, from hybrid cloud, from data. >> I mean, it's this really groundbreaking. What we're finding is that there's, until very recently AI was really not embraced as a practical solution to a lot of maintenance problems. You're looking at a community of pretty old school mindsets and maintenance and reliability where, it's a very, RCM is a very structured methodology for breaking down equipment and failure types and solutions, ways to predict those failures. And for a long time RCM specialists didn't really feel like AI was a solution that was the answer. And what we're finding is that, with the maturity level of IBM's products, it is now at a point where AI is a great fit and you take a experienced reliability specialist and you've armed them with AI tools like IBM's asset monitor and Maximo health and predict and you give them those tools and they can roll out predictive solutions that scale like really they've never had the chance to before. >> And talk to me about some of the adaptations that TRM has made in the last year or so as the market has been so much influx and so many dynamics going on, how have you adapted to that to really help those customers take advantage of the latest technologies? And for example, use AI. >> The big thing for us is recognizing that customers really aren't interested in a long expensive, drawn out solution. They recognize they have problems, but until you can come to table with something that they can digest in small bites. And that is at a price point that isn't over the top they're really happy staying with the status quo, at least until the solutions can be delivered and like that very bite-sized implementation programs. So we've spent a lot of time trying to make our solutions more turnkey, packaging up offerings in a way that you can start small, but all that effort you put in on a small scale, you can ramp up and scale enterprise wide without making a huge investment. And it doesn't take years to roll it out. You can really do something and make an impact within a couple of weeks or months, rather than you know, many months and years down the road. >> That time to value is key. Especially I think we've learned in the last year that real time is so essential for so many things. I'm just curious if any industries in particular that TRM and IBM are really helping transform like energy, for example, give me some examples of industries that are really moving forward with your technologies. >> It's really the classic asset intensive industries. Utilities are really big maximum users in there. They're the ones that, they've embraced Maximo for many, many years. They're hungry for innovative technology, but still cautious about moving forward on a large scale but we're able to get them excited with the programs that we're offering. And the same goes with oil and gas. That's another big user of Maximo, asset intensive organization and manufacturing definitely big Maximo users, all three have been very interested in moving forward with the AI for maintenance solutions that TRM and IBM are together bringing to the market. >> We summed up across the oil and gas, energy utilities, as you mentioned what are some of the biggest things that you hear in terms of demands from customers when you're in sales meetings? What are they looking for problems they need you to help solve? >> You know, it's honestly, it's the classic problems that we've been working with them for 20 years and really have they haven't been able to solve effectively where they're talking about critical assets that break down on expectedly, maintenance teams, running around doing a lot of maintenance on assets. That's in perfect health, making big promises on transforming maintenance, massively reducing maintenance budgets. And it really hasn't happened. And there's really been until now no real solution that solves those problems directly. And we believe the combination of AI and reliability engineering and in the key EAM fundamental principles is what's going to help our customer base really get value and really solve the problems that they really suffered from all these years. >> It's interesting that you say that it really they haven't been able to solve those problems but from a technological perspective the technology is there now to help them do that. What's the time window when you're talking with customers especially given the market dynamics that we're still living in, are they coming to you saying help us within a week, two weeks, we got to turn this around? >> I mean, the ones that are approaching this with an open mind, we can communicate to them that a huge undertaking is not required. They can get started on a small project, select one critical asset and then begin to plug in some data, around that asset that they know is related to equipment failures. We can get that data connected with the maximum asset monitor and within weeks they begin monitoring that asset health. They do some anomaly detection and it does not require of big long-term investment. And so for somebody who is willing to keep an open mind about AI and really wants to give it a try, that sales cycle is very short. They're willing to get going relatively quickly. We do find that many organizations want to step back take it slow, assess other options. And for them that's that aligns more with the classic, big bang type of implementation project, where that takes months of planning, budget planning approvals. And that goes into that 12, 18 month sales cycle or project planning phase, that's fine. And at the end of that, it's a big project but we really do recommend starting small. It is definitely possible to see some early quick wins and then roll out on a larger scale. And frankly, you could have something deployed at scale within that entire period of planning that they would otherwise naturally do on their own. >> Take us out of here Peter, with some predictions, some thoughts, maybe a crystal ball on where you see the EAM market going, the rest of this year and what TRM is planning to do to help customers really leverage opportunities and growth. >> You know I really do believe we're at a tipping point where there's been a lot of anticipation leading up to the release of Maximo and the Maximo eight and the Maximo application suite. There's the AI apps that are in the suite like asset monitor and health and predict that they really are mature products. There's not, I think until now there's the customer base has viewed AI as more of a like a fantasy or science fiction as it relates to maintenance, but these products are real. And I think with a lot of spending having been on hold over the past year, there's a lot of interest in learning more trying to test the waters. I really think that we're going to see a lot of interest in predictive solutions, a lot of interest in IOT projects. And, we're in a position where we're ready to begin rolling these out and it's really exciting. >> Yeah, the maturation is there, the technology is the customer interest is there certainly the opportunities are there. Peter takes out with where can customers go to learn more information about your solutions? >> I mean the best places to check us out on our website, www.trmnet.com. We're also on LinkedIn. We do a lot of blogs. We do a lot of webinars, we're out in front and trying to make the market aware of our thought leadership and deep expertise in Maximo and EAM and in predictive solutions we've got a YouTube channel where we post demos and all of our webinars. So we're trying to push information out there happy to, we look forward to interacting with prospects and customers about how our solutions can impact them. >> Excellent, Peter, thanks for stopping by and sharing with us more about the TRM IBM relationship, the opportunities in the EAM market and the appetite for AI that your customers and very big industries are having. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. >> Me too, for Peter Morrow, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of IBM Think 2021. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. >> (upbeat music) It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back everyone to the Cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of the cube. Got a great guest, Rick Smith, CTO of IBM Anthem client team. Rick. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Yeah. Thank you, John. Nice to see you as well, virtually. >> First introduce yourself, what you do there, what's going on on your plate these days, honestly, COVID, we're coming out of it soon. Take a minute to introduce yourself. >> Yeah, so I've got about 15 years in the seat with Anthem. Previous to that I worked at Pretty university as the CTO in Indiana. So haven't really left, but started working with Anthem as a technical architect, eventually moved into the CTO role and have been part of, you know, a long journey with them that started at a managed services agreement in 2005. And here we are in 2021. So I've been through a lot of changes they've made to improve themselves and move into digitalization. And certainly the changes we've made too to accommodate that as we went through the years. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for that setup. I really want to dig into this expansion of project Cirrus. You guys have had a multi decade partnership with IBM and then last year you launched this expansion, project Cirrus. Can you describe this project? And what does it mean? And this new term I've heard, enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. Sounds very interesting. >> Yeah. So that's my term. I'm hoping you made it patent or something like that. But the reality is you hear our CEO talk and say that 75% of corporate workloads are not in the cloud yet. Right? And Anthem is no different, right? So they starting to go into cloud and those kinds of things. But they said to us, you know, "Hey, we've got a long series of excellence with you from a delivery perspective, reliability perspective is kind of the bedrock of what we do, but we don't want to be in the data center business, right? And we want to transform and move to cloud. We want to become a more of an AI company and these kinds of things. And we said, well, we think we can actually put together a program... Excuse me, program for you to allow you to do that, right? And so we formed something called project Cirrus which is really an expansion of our partnership. So if I look back, John, we did about 80% of the end-to-end delivery for Anthem from a managed services perspective. In other words, they did a few pieces and we said, we think we could improve that if we had the entire 100%. And so project Cirrus was about, you know, extending from 80% to 100%. It was also about taking a series of applications that were important to them and actually say, we'll actually take them on and transform them 100% all the way to cloud and take advantage of new things. It was about a commitment to closing those data centers, right? So they have five strategic data centers. And about 24,000 hosts that we said we will actually commit to getting those, you know, getting you out of the data centers and moving those to either IBM cloud or close to IBM cloud if you will, I'll come back to that in a minute. And we'll also build something called ATEC, Anthem Technology Excellent Center, if you will. And that's near and dear to my heart because that's sort of my baby, right? So it's a transformation engine and we can talk a little bit more about that in a second. But he said the key to this for us is that, if we look at our trend line, John, over the number of years with Anthem, when we started about 2007 looking at this data, we've grown the number of hosts. We've had to manage, over 600% during that time period. But we've driven down high priority incidents by over 90%. So think about that. You know, this is really important for them to have resiliency and stability in their organization. You know, huge acceleration number of hosts, but drive down the a P zero incidents, if you will. And they said, we need to maintain that and continue to improve upon that. Right? >> Yeah. >> So Cirrus was a commitment to take that further, right? Start driving AAN, AI into the operations, if you will in everything that we do. So Anthem is transforming to do AI and machine learning for their members. We're committed to transforming and doing the same kind of thing on our operational side if you will. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And I think one of the things that's interesting that jumps out at me just as you're talking, first of all super exciting that project you got out there, a lot going on to unpack, but let's do that. I mean, what I hear you saying which is getting me kind of all triggered in a good way is you got transformation going on and innovation same time. You're innovating with this new enterprise hybrid clouds of service concept. You take in more efficiency, you're doing the classic transformational things, making things more efficient, all that good stuff for agility, but it's actually innovative. So this idea of an enterprise hybrid cloud as a service is pretty innovative because now you're talking about things with AI and scale that come into play, right? So you got the setup, you got it moving into being innovative but scales right there. What is this enterprise hybrid cloud as a service? Because is it just agility, is it the AI piece? Where do you see that going? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Right? And you're a great stuff, man, Johnson. (Smith laughs) So again, Anthem's not ready to move all of their workload to cloud, right? And we recognize (indistinct)is going to be out of the data center business. So how can we take non traditional workloads, right? Get them close to cloud, right? Get them very close to cloud, get us out of the managing the data center and actually allow us to move seamlessly from non traditional workloads into cloud. And so what we did was something we think is very innovative. This is the enterprise hybrid cloud piece for me, right? 'Cause normally hybrid cloud says, you have a client data center location and you have cloud. We marry the two together. We said, you're not going to have a data center location anymore. We're going to have our data centers, you know, IBM cloud. And we're actually going to put some dedicated space right next to cloud. And when I say next to cloud, I literally mean within a few feet. And we're going to bring these non traditional workloads there, we're going to take the network operation brain and bring it there. And we're going to allow you then to basically be able to move seamlessly from that to directly into cloud and improve operations at the same time. There's other a side benefit to this too. The other unintended sort of benefit is that what any organization, right? That you find stuff in the data center that hasn't been looked at for a long period of time, right? Application teams haven't looked at it, et cetera, et cetera. We're literally touching every single host. Right? So this gives us an opportunity to also work with our teams and find things that really can just be thrown away. Right? And this is great because we're actually making them more efficient, optimizing the cost structures as we go about it. >> Yeah. I mean the operational model changes me. You mentioned that just that whole point about you're kind of doing some discovery on apps, this becomes kind of sets the table for AI ops which is just code word for day two operations or full cloud native environments, which now you're seeing cloud native include legacy. Yes. Because you can put containers into the mix and you can then create these integration points that you don't have to kind of get rid of the old to bring in the new. So the dimension of what's going on here is pretty interesting, right? When you start thinking about that, "Okay. I can modernize the same time as connect two existing systems." >> That's exactly right. And we put the things very close to one another. And if there's any concerns over data security compliance or healthcare regulated industry, of course, we can have the workloads located in the best location to ensure that security is in place. Right? So that's what's beautiful about it, right? We can kind of hit every layer that's possible from having it just as secure as completely privatized to going directly over to public cloud or connecting the two together as we go along. >> Well, you're definitely a pioneer. I love that enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. I think that's something that's relevant. We're living in a hybrid world. I mean, the cube, we used to go to events now it's virtual events, but when now the events come back, they're hybrid events. Every company is experiencing this phenomenon on hybrid something, not just technology. The ops got to adapt, so super cool. You mentioned something that was your baby. I want to get back to you. And you said you want to talk about, I want to just bring that up. This Anthem technology excellence center is your baby. ATech I think you said for short. >> Yeah. We call it Atech for short. And really, John, we said that it's got to be more than just taking that other 20% that we don't run today. And we're doing some very innovative things moving non-traditional workloads. Like I said, all that kind of stuff was very cool, right? But we need a transformation engine, right? And we need the ability to transform skills. Like upscale the people at Anthem as well as IBM, right there on the account team, it's a big account. We want to think of new ways to work together. Right? Traditional managed services is like, what? Someone cuts a ticket and says, "Give me X by her seat." Right? That's the traditional model. And we said, that's not good enough. We need to collaborate better together. And we are willing to redefining how we form our teams to work with Anthem. Right? So if we want to form, for example, a product ownership team that builds it, runs it, maintains it. And that team has Anthem plus IBM together. we're going to use ATEC as a vehicle to design that and drive it and make sure they have all the skills they need within that group to do that. Right? That's new ways of working together. And it's also to drive things like site reliability engineering, right? Cloud service management operations, make sure that Anthem has the right training, make sure we work together on these kinds of things. So it's really kind of an exciting thing. And it's intended to be a co-created model, right? So we actually work with the Anthem, we co-create using IBM garage methodologies and then the idea is to coast staff it, but it's tended to be a thin layer of world-class engineering. That's really the whole point of it. And yeah, I'm super excited about that. As you move forward, yeah. >> While you're speaking our language, the cube we'd love the co-creation we do with media. It's always fun to create content together. And sometimes in real time put it together like we're doing now. And it creates a bond. I mean, I got to bring this up because this is becoming more and more obvious. And now mainstream, the notion of co-creation, the notion of ecosystems and ecosystems really meaning network effect and integrating with other parties, right? Companies and our systems. If you look at the underlying business model as a systems management software bottle. Okay. So with that, these ecosystems, the network effect. If you build together, you stay together. I mean, this is a different mindset. It's different dynamic. It's a different relationship that companies are now looking for in what used to be called suppliers. Are you supplying something? Are you building together? Right. So this seems to be the theme. Can you expand on this new trend? >> Right. And get away from the strict racing, this person does, this person does that. Instead, we build a team together that has all the skills necessary and that team owns a product life cycle. They build it, run it and maintain it. And that's changing the way we deliver services from IBM perspective significantly, right? Because that's not our traditional model but that's what we're doing. So we're really out in the front end, on the front edge if you will. Changing that model completely. And it's one of the most exciting things for me, you know, as far as going forward. >> You know, this whole idea of partnerships has always kind of been there but now it gets modernized and uplifted if you will, to a new level. And it really is about watching each other's backs too when you have that kind of... 'Cause we're talking about like pushing the envelope on probably the biggest confluence of tech trends I've ever seen in my career. And I've seen many big waves, you know, from the different revolutions and inflection points. Now it's sort of all coming together, right? At scale too, it's happening very fast. I mean, the change over is happening in years that once you took decades before. So it's really is a team approach. >> Yeah. There's no doubt about it. And I see it every day in the work we're doing. And it's like, for example, at Atech where we're working with the data scientists at the Anthem, we're thinking of new ways to build things they've never done before. We're hoping to enable their science, enable the things they want to do for digitization standpoint, the same token I'm taking, you know, a data scientist and putting them on the operation side too. Right? So we're doing both these kinds of things together. And really I didn't say this before, but this whole thing is about driving automation, right? Driving down, no human touch, soft service, automation. That is kind of been the linchpin of this. And I also want to say John, that doing this all during a pandemic, you know, we signed our new agreement together with them at a quarter, at the end of March in 2020. And we went live in August 1st with all the changes, the extra 20% capacity to over 300 plus applications completely, started Atech from co-creation in a pandemic. And we both agreed as a company, I give great credit to our client and to the numbers involved that everyone set up front and during March. The pandemic's not an excuse to get anything done. So, we're going to go forward and make it happen. That's probably the thing I'm most proud about. That was just... It's crazy when you think of how big the project was and do pull it off during a pandemic. >> Yeah. There's going to be two sides of the street and this one, this pandemics over the ones who made it through and refactored and or innovated. Cause it's not just about being and having a tale, it's about taking advantage of the situation and the ones who didn't do anything. Whether they were in the cloud or not, that's not to me. That's not the issue of you're in the cloud you had an advantage. >> It's not. Right. >> But there's going to be two sides of the streets. And I think the one thing that the pandemic has shown us and I'd love to get your reaction as a final comment here is that when you pull back when the pandemic, it showed all the scabs, it shows everything. And you can see what's obvious and it becomes a forcing function. Necessity's the mother of all invention as expression goes so you can see what's worth doubling down on and you can see the productivity gains and that becomes clear. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's good and bad with everything, right? Pros and cons, like you said, and you know, one of the cons I think is the having to schedule all interactions is definitely a con, right? Because when you spend time not only with the client virtually but in person, you do get the advantage of having, you know, chalk talks and things like that. They're not scheduled. Right? So that's definitely one of the cons side, but one of the pro side is it did provide some focus, right? Kind of extreme focus and on what's important and allowed us to, you know, I think dove some bonds with the Anthem leadership team and the application teams doing it virtually over cameras like this that maybe happen at a larger scale than they might have normally been because the pandemic kind of allowed us to do that and made that happen. >> Great stuff, Rick, great insight. Great to have you on the cube as always. Great to talk tech, talk business, talk about the transformation and innovation and the cloud scale. Thanks for coming on Rick Smith, CTO of the IBM Anthem client team. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> You're welcome. Thanks John. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John. For your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music) (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Mark Foster, Senior Vice President of IBM Services and IBM's Global Business Services. It's a global landscape, the world's changing, it's going hybrid. Mark, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you, John, good to be with you. >> You know, the theme this year is all about hybrid cloud. Global transformation is the innovation at scale. That's the discussion, that's the way I see it. The question I have for you to start right away is how has the last year in particular changed businesses as they're leveraging the tech? You know, they want to solve their critical problems and transform themselves, the pandemic has forced them to look at this. How has this last year changed the way businesses are leveraging tech? >> Well, there's definitely been an acceleration in the digital transformations across all of our clients around the world. They have been compelled to leverage technology to connect with their customers in these unique times. They've been forced to use technology tools to allow their teams to connect and operate around the world. And all of this has reinforced also the opportunity to leverage things like extreme automation, AI, and the leverage of things like the cloud to deal with the virtual and more remote nature of working around the world. >> How much of the change last year do you think's going to to be temporary or long lasting. What's not going to be given up? (laughs) What are people realizing? Is it temporary or is it long lasting? What's your take? >> Well, I think we have to recognize that we are moving into a genuinely hybrid world, well, hybrid insofar as I think that some of the lessons we've learned over this past period are going to durably change the way we work, but we're also going to have a certain amount of back to the future, as well, as we try and put back some of the aspects of physical interaction, the ways of actually bringing empathy, creativity together through being together in groups. But I do think also we're going to take a number of these areas of acceleration and they're going to be extrapolated out to genuinely lead to an acceleration of what might've taken place over over five years taking place over a lot shorter period. >> You know, I think that group dynamic is really a big deal. I think that's going to be something that, to me, jumps out at this transformation. People want to work together. They want to be part of something, totally right on. With that, I got to ask you, now that we have this kind of new virtual experience, we're remote, we're not in person, wish we were, but even when we are in personal, it'll still be hybrid virtual experience events means we're still going to act as a group. This kind of brings up the idea of a virtual enterprise. You kind of mentioned that. What you mean and how do you define a virtual enterprise? >> Well, I think a virtual enterprise for us is an extension of the thought process we've had before around how technology is transforming the way all businesses operate. If you do apply, you know, the power of technology to build new business platforms and think about new ways of applying technology to transform your business processes, you think about the way that all of us are reinventing the relationship between people and technology in our organizations, the virtual enterprise just takes that to the next level. It recognizes that if you are able to take a location out of the equation, if you're able to leverage ecosystems more completely through connecting through networks of organizations, all of this extends the vision that we have of how the cognitive enterprise of the past comes to life. And we create this even more connected, even more expansive vision of business which is of course able to leverage technology within its own four walls. It's able to leverage it powerfully with its business partners. But then finally, it's about how you create the platforms upon which you create new ecosystems for competition and new markets that can be created in that way. >> That's really compelling insight right there. I think that's right on the money. I have to ask you, what do you think the differentiating characteristics are for this enterprise? What's going to be the differentiator, what's going to make it work? What do you need- >> I think what's going to make it work first of all, I think we think there's going to be a sort of a golden thread of what you might call an extended intelligent workflow that runs through the enterprise and its partners. And the power of that sort of thread of core processes and core differentiation to be brought to life by the mutual leverage of technology through partnerships is going to be a hugely powerful. So therefore all the partners' ability to embrace those technologies to embrace the vision for how those workflows come together is going to be very important. I think it's going to be very important that actually the ecosystem and its success becomes the strategy of the of the participants as opposed to being something that they happened to be going along with. So it becomes the strategy of the organization. And I think finally, there's a huge amount around here around how you leverage and think about the power of your people, the culture that you create to be inclusive and expansive in terms of applying new talent, building new talent, to allow this virtual enterprise to thrive. >> That's actually brilliant. You know, ecosystem is part of it, not an afterthought or a marketing gimmick. It's got to be part of it, that's awesome. Let's bring that to the next level. The role of the ecosystems are taking a bigger role for you, as you said, what specifically can you point to that has a change that's made in the ecosystem that you can point to, says that's an impactful change, this is a table stake, this is a guaranteed continuing practice. Can you give an example? >> Well, I think what we can see around the world in terms of how the world has solved for something like you're getting vaccines created and distributed on the back of the COVID crisis, that's taken an ecosystem coming together to work in completely different ways in an accelerated way to deliver on very big outcomes. Well, we can also see, you know, clients who are developing their strategies to try and connect the dots across different players to position their business as a platform upon which others bring their parts, their organizations to bear. And I think that we can see therefore that this idea of ecosystems is being used to solve really big problems, but it's also potentially a model that can be used to actually define really big market opportunities as well. And when you can connect the dots and you can expand your market footprint by combining with other key players at scale and also create a way that smaller organizations can come and sit upon the platforms that you create and leverage those capabilities, then the opportunity to actually use that to really expand your horizons of where your business can go are very real. >> You know, that's a really interesting, mind blowing concept. You think about the idea of a network effect or ecosystems, and integration, and collective intelligence. These are paradigms that have been around for awhile, at least past 10 years. It was the Holy Grail, let's hope we get to that. It seems like that's happening right now. And I think more than ever, it can be harnessed. And so I think you starting to see that with the hybrid cloud and it's not just tech, it's societal impact, it's impacting people, their jobs, and their ability to contribute and work. So this is a huge concept. So really excited this conversation. I guess the next question I have for you, Mark, is how do you bring clients this value? How do they create value? And how do they take this and transform their business with it? What's the playbook? >> Well, I think for clients, the first thing for them to recognize is to understand that this is the world that they are operating in. And I think that from a playbook point of view, the first thing I would say is you do need to think about which ecosystems do I want to play in? How do I think I could win by being a part of, or shaping an ecosystem? I think, secondly, there's the opportunity to think about how you use all the data that's out there in the world to be a stronger source of innovation across an ecosystem, to think about how your products and services could be modernized to succeed in that world. How you build those innovations into this new vision of an extended workflow or process view that binds the players of your ecosystem together. And you're really thinking about how to reinvent the way work gets done. Apply automation, apply AI, apply blockchain, apply IoT to transform those workflows is a massive, massive opportunity. To recognize that actually by the power of that, you're able to have significantly more impact than before. So make sure you're setting your ambitions high enough around the impact the change you're trying to drive can bring, and then I think also just making sure you're thinking all the time about what this means for the culture of your organizations, the workforce you want to connect with, how you want to access talent and bring it to bear across this new extended value chain? You know, who do you need to employ, versus who do you need to contract with, versus who do you need to make sure are participating in the processes that you're driving? And then finally, how do you make sure that you have the infrastructure, and the systems, and the applications that are open enough to allow you to really bring this vision to life? So the underlying hybrid cloud, hybrid architectures that you have and the networks you have that bind you together become fundamental. >> That's awesome. Great insight there. I guess my final question is how has your personal outlook changed in the past year when everyone is working from home? And now we're starting to see the pandemic, you know, light at the end of the tunnel from this pandemic, once we emerge out of it, people want to have a growth strategy, want to get back to real life. Any words of advice for our viewers on your personal outlook and as we come out of the pandemic and they can participate- >> Well, I think the first thing to recognize is we all have a collective wish around the world, probably for the first time for a long time, I think pretty much most people in humanity are sharing a shared view about a desire to have a more expansive horizon than the one that's outside the window of their kitchen, which I'm looking out of right now, and being able to get out and about, and engage in some more aspects that of normal life. And I do think that we're all looking forward to that opportunity. I think we're going to have to recognize that we're probably all going to also adapt our behaviors, going forward, but there's almost an enormous amount of exciting things that we've all got pent up we want to go and do, and I think, you know, the critical thing for us all is to hopefully approach that world safely. But at the same time, recognize that there is hope, we are working our way through this as a world. And as long as we try and make sure we do that in a way that is actually equitable, and that we do make sure that all boats are lifted as we return here, then I think that's a really positive view of how the future will be for all of us. So we should all look forward to that. >> Mark, it's great to have you on theCUBE. I love the insight, I love your message. It's right on, it's relevant, and super cool because that's what people want. They want to collaborate and be with people. I guess with the final minute we have left, share an observation from the past year and a half. Something that surprised you that happened in the industry, something that you didn't expect or something that you did expect that's positive that we can look to and say, "That's a good thing, we want to double down on that." >> Well, I think the positive thing that I think we can double down on is that we have all actually learned to be perhaps more open to interacting with people who we wouldn't otherwise have interacted with through this medium, that actually I have found that I've broadened my network of people that I've been engaging with through the fact that it has been actually relatively easy to connect even at high levels with people, but all the people have been able to connect in a strange way with a bigger group of connections than you would have done through the normal physical constraints of flying somewhere, seeing someone, meeting someone, and how you use your time to do that. So I would say one of the positive things is actually how open people have been to start new relationships over this virtual medium. Of course, the trick is going to be, can we build on those virtual relationships we've created and make them more sustainable once we're back to a more normal life and they become, you know, the new friendships, the new business relationships and networks that we can thrive on for the future? >> That's genius, love it. I agree. CUBE Virtual's here doing it. We're trying content, community, collaboration, connection, friendships, new things, touch someone with a click and engage. Mark Foster here, clicking into our CUBE Virtual for IBM Think. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music) ♪ Dah, deeah ♪ ♪ Dah, dee ♪ (chimes ringing)

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> And welcome back here on theCUBE. John Walls, your host with you as we continue our IBM Think 2021 initiative. Been talking a lot about IBM's assistance in terms of what it's doing for its client-base. We're going to talk about partnerships today, a little bit with Bill Patterson who is the EVP and General Manager of CRM Applications at Salesforce who has a really good partnership in great practice right now, with IBM. And Bill, thanks for the time today. Lookin' forward to spending some time with you, here. >> Yeah, thank you John, thanks for having me today. >> You bet. Well, let's just jump right in. First off, let's share with the viewers about your core responsibilities at Salesforce. We talked about CRM, what your engagement is there, but if you would just kind of of give us an idea of the kind of things that you're handling on a day-to-day basis. >> Well, I am responsible for our CRM applications here, at Salesforce, which are our sales cloud technologies to help organizations get back to growth, our service cloud technologies which are really helping organizations to take care of their customers, you know, through all moments of the digital lifecycle, our small business solutions, so to help growing organizations thrive, and our Work.com and vaccine management solutions which are helping the economy safely reopen through the crisis modes that we've all been living in. So broad range responsibilities and my day-to-day is nothing like it was a year ago. >> Yeah and I could only imagine, especially when you throw that last component in, COVID, which hopefully, we'll have time to talk about just because, I think, people are so are taken to the subject now and obviously it's impacting business on so many different levels. But let's talk, first off, about IBM and your partnership with them, kind of the genesis of that, how that came about, and maybe how you're working together. How are you integrated these days with IBM? >> Well, you know, one of the things at Salesforce that are key value as an organization is is to establish trust around the transformation of organizations across the world. And when you think about brands that you can trust to drive transformations with, IBM and Salesforce really stand apart. So IBM is an incredible partner for us on the technology side, on a service delivery side, and in an innovation side for us to create new solutions to help our clients really go in this from-to state of how their businesses used to operate to how they need to operate in the future. I loved working with the IBM team. We have a lot of great values that are shared across our two organizations. But most fundamentally, those values are deeply rooted in customer success. And I think that that is one of the things that really draws me too, working with such a great partner here. >> Go into the process a little bit, if you will. So if I'm a prospective client of yours and I come to you with some cloud needs, you know, again, whether it's storage or whether it's applications or whether it's Edge, whatever it is I'm coming to you for, how do you then translate that to IBM and how does IBM come into play, where do the boundaries kind of start and stop or do they? Or is it a complete mesh? >> Yeah, well I think one of the things that's sort of unique about today's climate is people aren't just looking to solve technology problems, they're looking to solve business problems. And what we really do at Salesforce is lead with the business transformation opportunity and deeply partner with IBM on a number of fronts to really go help those opportunities become realized. The first is in the services line. IBM has great partnerships with Salesforce around the transformation about core business processes, configuration, integration services. That's one of the dimensions that we work together on. We also work together on areas of artificial intelligence and how we help businesses become smart in their operations every day to empower their workforce to really achieve more. And finally, you know that you mentioned about core technology, you know, oftentimes, the business requirements translate into great technology transformation. And that's what we do deeply with the IBM team is really outlining a blueprint and a roadmap for modernizing the technical infrastructure to help organizations move fast, increase their operational agility, and run at such scale and safely in today in the modern world that we all operate in on. So through all those facets of the lifecycle, IBM continues to be one of our leading partners, globally, to help clients, you know, not just here, in the United States, but around the world to think about how they need to maximize their transformational abilities. >> Yeah, and you touched on this at the outset of the interview. We were talking about IBM and the impact and obviously, the great association relationship that you have with them and the value in that. I'd like you to amplify on that a little bit more in terms of, specifically, what are you getting out of it you think, from a Salesforce perspective to have kind of the power and the weight and the bench, basically, that IBM provides. >> Well you think about transformation and you know, you read a lot about digital transformation online, that means so many different things to so many different businesses. Businesses, not just, like I said, here in one country, but globally, the transformational needs really need to come with incredible bench and domain expertise by industry, by geography, even by some micro-regions in those geographies given what we've been experiencing here, in the public sector in the United States with this COVID response activity we've been doing with the IBM team. And so when you talk about the deep bench, what I love about working with IBM on is, again, commanding just great industry insights and knowledge of where industries are heading and also cross-industry insights so that you can really bring great best practices from say, one industry to another. Second is that real understanding of the global nature of business today. And I don't think the one thing that's fascinating about digital, it is not a sovereign identity, today. Digital really means that you need to understand how to operate in every country, every region, every location, you know, safely. And so IBM has incredible depth in bench of experiences to help our clients truly transform those areas. Maybe another area that I really have appreciated working with IBM on is that deep technical understanding and deep technical domain of excellence maybe in the area of artificial intelligence. And our partnership is quite unique between Salesforce and IBM. Not only do we work together for external clients but inside of IBM, IBM is using Salesforce today to run a lot of your core operations. And so the partnership we work with, not only IBM as a kind of delivery excellence, but internally as a customer, is really helping IBM transform its operations from service to sales to marketing all around the world. So I think this partnership is one that is deeply rooted in working together and really, like I mentioned before, finding the right path to drive the outcomes of tomorrow. >> You know, you mentioned COVID and so we'd like to touch on that. But I assume that's a big part of your current relationship, if you will, in terms of the partnership goes. What, specifically, are you doing with IBM in that space and what have you done, and then what are you continuing to do as we go through now, the vaccination process and the variant identification processes and all these things? So maybe you can share with our viewers a little bit about the kinds of things that you have been working on together and the kind of progress that you've been making. >> Well, back a year ago, you know, when the world was really at a standstill, Salesforce created a solution called Work.com which was to engineer new technologies to help businesses kind of deal with the reality of a hard shutdown to business in the, say, private sector and then in the public sector, to really create new innovation around key solutions like contact tracing that you might have needed to track, you know, kind of outbreak and the rate of progression of the virus. And what we did with the IBM team, working with clients around the world first was work together to deploy those technologies rapidly into the hands of our customers. Through those moments of opportunity and realization, you know, working with our clients, we also started to hear of, you know, kind of about where we find ourselves today, this mass vaccination wave of where our citizens and societies are kind of on the recovery journey. And the work that we did with IBM was to start to plan out the next wave of recovery options around vaccine managements, Salesforce creating a core vaccine scheduling, distribution, and administration management services and IBM focusing on more of that credentialing and vaccination state of how someone has gone from receiving a shot in arm to now having a trusted profile of which vaccines, when did you receive them, are they still accurate and valid around those solutions. So where we're working with the IBM team most acutely on COVID now is in the vaccine credential management side through Watson Health. >> Well, can you give us an idea now, let's see if we can dig in a little deeper on some of those other things you talked about to about core technologies, you talked about, I mentioned Edge, you know, and that's people tryin' to figure out how they integrate these Edge technologies into their primary systems, now. So can you give us some examples, some specific examples of some things that you're actually collaborating on today in those areas or maybe another that comes to mind? >> Yeah, Edge computing is probably one of the other more exciting things that we're doing with the IBM team and I think you find that really working with our field service business and IBM cloud services, you know, globally speaking. On the Edge, as devices become smarter and more digital, they have a lot of signals that organizations can now tap into, not only for real-time intelligence but also fault intelligence when a device is starting to need repair or preventative maintenance around the solutions that kind of need to be administered. And the work that we're doing to really broker this connected, not just enterprise, but connected sort of experiences with IBM, super powerful here, because the IBM Edge services are now helping us get into anomaly detection. Those anomaly detections are automatically routing to workers who use the Salesforce field service capabilities, and now we can help organizations stay running safely and with continuity which is really all our customers are asking us for. So the ability for us to be creative and understand, you know, our parts of the picture together are really the things that I think are most exciting for what we're doing for clients around the world. >> Yeah, you mentioned continuity, kind of a cousin to that, I think, is security in a way because you're-- >> Absolutely. >> So what are you hearing from your customer-base these days with regard to security? You know, a lot of high profile instances certainly from bad state actors, as we well know. But what are you hearing in terms of security that you're looking at and maybe cooperating or collaborating with IBM on to make sure that those concerns are being addressed? >> Yeah, you know, I think, well, first off, security is on the top of minds for all decision-makers, executives, today. It's the number one threat that a lot of companies are really needed to respond to given what we've seen in the geo-political world that we're in. And security isn't just about securing your servers, it's also about securing every operational touchpoint that you might have with, you know, your every end-user or even every customer that's inter-operating with your services that you project as an organization. And what I love about working with the IBM team is, as we mentioned, you know, such great insights across all parts of technology infrastructure to really help understand both the threat level, how to contain that threat level, and more importantly, how to engineer with, you know, great solutions all the way into the hands of customers so they become safe and easy for all actors in your environment to really operate with. And that's where, again, you know, you think about a solution like mobile sales professionals, they're out traveling around the world on mobile devices, sometimes, their AG even brought their own personal devices into the enterprise. And so IBM is a great partner for ours just to help us understand the overall threat level of every device every moment that an employee might have within their organizational data, and really help create great solutions to help keep organizations running safely. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting you tell about people bringing their own devices on, back when, I remember that acronym, BYOB was like a huge thing, right? (chuckling) And this major problem or conundrum and now it's almost like an afterthought, you've got it solved, you've got it well taken care of. >> Well you think about, again, devices in the enterprise and how much we've been able to achieve with the BYOB becoming commonplace and norm, even today, the workman place from home kind of environment that we're in. I mean, who would have thought a year ago that most of our operations can be conducted safely from our home offices, not just our regional or corporate offices? And again, that's the kind of thing that working with IBM has been such a great value for our clients because no one could have forecasted that the contact center would've had to moved to your kitchen last year. And yet, we had to really go achieve that in this time and working with great partners like IBM, it became not just a conversation but real practice. >> By the way, I think I said BYOB. I meant BYOD, so you know where my mind's at, right? (chuckling) >> I wasn't going to correct you. >> Hey thanks, Bill, I appreciate that. It just kind of hit me. I think that that just, that was a Freudian slip, certainly. Hey Bill, thanks for the time. I certainly do appreciate and thanks for shining a light on this really good partnership between Salesforce and IBM. And we wish you continued success down the road with that, as well. >> Yeah, thanks again. And again, love being your partner and love the impact we're having together. >> Great, thank you very much. Bill Patterson joining us, the EVP work in CRM at Salesforce talking about IBM and that relationship that they're putting into practice for their client-base. John Walls reporting here, on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us with more on IBM Think. (soft music) ♪ Dah de dah ♪ ♪ Dah ♪

>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube ricardo for lenses here with me is the global managing director for IBM at Citigroup recorded. Great to see you. Thank you for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me. >>You're the team leader for Citigroup Managing Director um, a lot going on in the world of finance, Fintech technology, scale transformation. All this is happening. Always a leading edge indicator give us your perspective on the market right now on the, on that vertical and in general because there's so much scale is so much machine learning, so much going on, so much competitive advantages. Give us an overview of the industry, how you see them. >>So john I had the good fortune of working essentially around the world of work in europe in Asia in Australia, back here in north America. And I'll tell you what, there are some, some uh, dynamics are specific to a market. There are also a lot of common threads, right? You know, a lot of common threads right? As you know, my industry, financial services in the middle of uh great disruption right from payments to a global wealth to understand exactly. Not to reposition yourself is a, is a startup. Oftentimes looking time to be dis intimidated by many of the context. I have found that many financial institutions are very adept, a change in the way they operate a lot more nimble than they had been in the past. And they found ways to incorporate a lot of the techniques that some of the Frontex operate with. So they all have shark tanks, they all find a way to uh progress investments that they get to a point of uh, failing fast, right, more are some more adept than others. But for the most part, I'd say that everyone in the market is looking to beef up their, their core competences. >>And, you know, the financial, um, industry has never been shy of using technology ever. They've always poured it on. They always want to get more edge. Um, what's your, what is the edge now in the industry for, um, financial and, and in general, businesses who were learning how to be agile? What's the edge? >>I think the edges really finding a way to be ambidextrous, right? Because in many respects that you don't want to hold on to a franchise to what got you to a level of success. It's oftentimes it's in the case of my client is to be in good stead for more than 100 years, Right? So you don't want to let that go. But you also want to grow a new set of skills and grow competences that they need to take into the future. I have found that in many respects that many of my clients are remind me of what lookers and one said maybe 2025 years ago, our former Ceo and chairman, who said the last thing that IBM needs is a strategy. In fact, I think that many of our financial institutions that don't need a strategy, they just need the competences to innovate and executed scale and it's a lot easier said than that >>card. I want to get your perspective before we move on to some of the initiatives and work at city, which is probably compelling. But I want to get your expert opinion on a question that comes up all the time with customers and that are going post pandemic and looking at growth strategies. The idea of the unit economics of their business models tend to change with more data, more digital acceleration. Is there any observations that you could share for leaders who are looking to get that financial mindset or how the business is changing with whether it's copies or business models. Because at the end of the day, the financial upside of what we're seeing with digital is pretty significant. The economics are seem to be a real game changer on these, these conversations about acceleration, but also the results are business results are money. >>Absolutely, john, as a matter of fact, that I'd argue that while it's true that the common theme, so many and that several of our financial institutions are growing a skill in, in a, in a uh, approaching problems in a different fashion is also true that there's been a lot of redistribution of wealth across financial enterprises, Right? So it's not lost on all of us. Right. The security look at market globalization of the financial institutions, on the work. They really come all over the place with the clear winners in several sectors, site in Asia and europe as quality of North America. So what I argue is that while I think we're all tired of hearing the data is the new oil, right? It's also true that we need to find a way to finally harness the power of it. Right? And that's what I think IBM is more more adept at, right, argue that many of the common threads that we've seen across the financial institutions and back to the, to the measures of success you would indicate in a minute ago, not really around cloud, right around data and around digital transformation. Right? So our approach to cloud, for instance is unique, right? While there are a number of uh very competent hyper scholars, we've taken a different approach to it, right? We've taken our approach is more than after other highly specialized regulated workloads, right. Organ after the layer that allows you to port application seamlessly based on regulation costs and competition across multiple platforms. Right? So this hybrid concept has only been at the center of our strategy and that's the one that mama is is delivering our clients greatest value. Tell you what. I think one client told me once after hearing our hybrid story that while there were many cloud providers, there wasn't anyone that could help them out as much as I B. M. Dealing with your legacy and in all candor. I think it's fair to say that legacy is here to say well past our investment horizon. Right? So that level of self awareness, I think ended up believe forming our collaborations for years to come. >>You know, I'm a big believer and I've reported this and certainly talked to Arvin when um he was on the cube about this microservices, containers, kubernetes, these kinds of new technologies really allow for legacy to integrate well into the new modern era of computing in hybrid cloud. So totally agree. And that is really key tailwind for for innovation and these transformations. I have to ask you ricardo what's going on at city and IBM tell us take us through some things that you're working on, some of the exciting projects that you're driving. >>So the disclaimer is that I started this well three months ago, so I'll try to do my my team proud here. But what I'll tell you is that the teams you talk about are alive and well, it's sitting right? So on the cloudfront we are doing exactly that. We're focusing on on on being uh cities partner on the heavy cloud deployment, acknowledging that higher Ecologist is an ecosystem of participants, right? Technology that IBM s dominance in on prime computing. We'll go through a very different face going forward. We not only a comfortable with it, but we are trying to accelerate its deployment. Right? So you mentioned communities, you mentioned containers, Hence a redhead acquisition, right? Which has been central to the collaboration that we've uh we've established the city and we look at the broad, I'm also gonna go back to data and I will tell you that, uh, you know, uh, cities in the midst of a transformation journey of their own right. It's also the middle of a regulatory challenge. That's second to none. Right. With with the zero cc. Findings that then led to a financial remediation plan that the bank has put in place over the past two months. With that in mind we are looking to help the bank make a make a good crisis make the most of the crisis, right? And so helping, for instance, Mark Sabino, the head of Innovation City, find ways to infuse Ai into their internal Codec practices doing that. It's just smart business. The results in much better outcome at a lower cost and it's something that can scale because it's all seen before. Oftentimes our solutions have lacked the ability to scale to really keep up with them in >>ricardo. The relationship between IBM and city has been long standing. I believe. I read somewhere you're celebrating 100 year partnership. Is that true? If so. I mean, it's a huge milestone. What's the take us through the history and where this is going as a partnership? >>I've heard as a matter of fact is that as I first came on board that in fact our companies have been added for more than 100 years and someone showed me an actual document 100 years old, there was proof positive of that. So I'll tell you, I know that our firms would be added again 100 years from now. I will probably not be here to toast to it but I'm certain they will continue to collaborate and for the strong is this is my responsibility. I'll do whatever I can to help you continue to grow. We're only going to focus on three things I spoke about every cloud. Would you also want to be the partner? Is the bank transforms its operations right and infuse in it. Our Ai and process, information skills and capabilities. I think if we do that, we'll continue to collaborate and will continue to have our partnership fully rests on two pillars that is always independent, which are really innovation can trust >>great commentary, great uh an account that you're leading probably a great team behind how many people are on this team must be pretty massive and I'd love to see that document by the way, was it a memo? Was that type written was a handwritten? You know, it was a P. O. >>It was an Akron document and I get your copy. >>Uh so historic. I love those history. I love the IBM culture longstanding relationships. Final question for you. You've been in the industry for a while, you've seen many waves of innovation if you're talking to a customer, your friend or colleague and they had asked you ricardo, why is this wave so big and so important? What would you tell them, >>john I think at the heart of this transformation, the evolution, the way they should call it is not the intellectual products, the international new processes but entire no value chains that are being established by players that in many cases need need each other to coexist. This is hardly been the case in the past. I think IBM will form a great example of it, right? And so I do think that this is far more disruptive than what we have witnessed in years past and I can't wait to get get in it and my part to lead us through it >>ricardo, great insight, totally agree. This is a time of open collaboration, an ecosystem you're seeing in the ecosystem and network effect where people are integrating together in this new connected distributed economy. Global economy, thank you for coming on the cube, appreciate your >>time. Thank you so much for having me. >>Okay, Ricardo for Relenza, Global managing director for IBM at Citigroup. This is the Cube coverage of IBM think 2021. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>>from around the globe, it's >>the cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM Hello welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube had a great conversation here about cloud data, AI and all things. C X O from KPMG is Vinod Swaminathan who's the strategy head of strategy of Ai data and cloud as well as the C. I. O advisory at KPMG you know thanks for coming on the cube. >>My pleasure jOHn thanks for having me. >>So you guys have an interesting perspective, you sit between the business value being created from technology and the clients trying to put it to work um and KPMG impeccable reputation over the years obviously bringing great business value to clients. You guys do that. Um you're in the middle of the hot stuff cloud data and Ai um Ai is great if you have the data and the architecture do that in cloud scale brings so many new good things to the table. Um how is this playing out right now in your mind because we're here at IBM think where the story is transformed, transformation is the innovation. Innovation does set the table for net new capabilities at scale. This seems to be a common thread here. What's your take on the current situation? >>Well, let me start with the fundamental premise that we're seeing playing out with many of our clients and that is, clients are beginning to connect the different silos within their business to better respond to what their customers are asking for. Um you know, we we tend to work with large enterprises, very well established businesses and we're also fortunate to serve the needs of high growth companies as well. So we're in a very unique position as a trusted advisor to both legacy companies transforming and high growth companies looking to drive the transformation in the industry as well. So there are a few things that we're seeing right the first and foremost is responding quickly and effectively to very rapidly changing customer needs. And I think the pandemic really you know put a spotlight on how fast organizations had to pivot and I have to commend a lot of these organizations and doing a phenomenal job, I would argue, spit band aiding and gluing together a response to what their customers expected. Right? So as I look at post pandemic, we're seeing a lot of clients now looking to take stock of things that they did during the pandemic, how they address customer demand to really smooth them out and streamline as a strategy, how they're going to become more customer driven at KPMG. We call this the connected enterprise where you really work effectively across the front, middle and back office in an enterprise to seamlessly address the client. Right? Anything you do in finance really is driven by what your customers want. It's no longer, hey finance sit in the back office, right. Anything you do in marketing is no longer hey I'm doing it just to address the demand side of the equation, right? It's very integral to connect marketing with fulfillment. Right? So we call this the connected enterprise. So that transformation is only possible if customers and our clients are able to effectively leverage cloud from an architectural perspective. And when I say cloud, what we're seeing, smarter clients of ours start to think about is cloud in its entirety. So it's not just the public cloud, it's the cloud architecture, right? The ability to scale up scale out right scale down, right, irrespective of where all of this sits from an infrastructure perspective. So cloud is very critical for becoming that connected enterprise. Uh The data pieces integral, I think the data business today represents trillions of dollars. I think everybody has bought into the fact that data is the new oil and all of that good stuff that we've heard. Uh but it really is a trillion dollar business and it has some unique challenges. So being connected requires, right? That are that an enterprise become very data driven? I think it's hard to escape ai it's everywhere. To the point where we don't even uh we're not even conscious of ai at work, Right? So I think uh five years ago a I was a novel concept today. It's the expectation of customers who interact with big brands that ai is an integral part of how they are being served. Right, So cloud data ai architecture sort of the ingredients if you will. And then cool technology really starts to bring this connected concept together and post pandemic. We're going to start to see a lot of rationalization uh and big investments and moving forward in this trajectory. >>It's interesting cloud data now you, the way you talk about it makes me think about like just the constant of the old Os I stack right? You have infrastructure and cloud, you have data in the middle layer and then A. I. Is that that wonder area where the upside takes advantage of that data? Um Very cool insight. You know. Thanks for sharing that. The question I have for you put the pandemic I want to get your reaction to some conversations I've had in the industry and they tend to go like this. Um When we come out of the pandemic this is like a C X. O. Talking to Ceo. Or C. I. O. Or C. So when we come out of the pandemic we need a growth strategy, we need to be hidden, we need to be on the upswing, okay, not on the downswing or still trying to figure it out. Um And and that's a cool conversation because there's been to use cases that we've identified companies that had no has had a headwind because of the pandemic, either because of business disruption or the second categories, they've had a tail when they had a business opportunity. So the ones that had a headwind, they would retool, they used the pandemic to retool and the ones that had the tailwind would use the pandemic to either bring net new capabilities or or transform and innovate. So either way that's a successful use case. The ones who didn't do anything aren't going to survive much. We know that, but in those two cases they're not mutually exclusive. That's what the smart money's been doing. The smart teams. What's your advice now that we're in that mode where we're coming around the corner? How do companies get on that uptick? What have you guys advise into clients? What are you hearing and what, what's your reaction to that concept? >>Well, I think every company that is going to be on the survivors list post pandemic actually has digitally transformed, um, you know, even if they don't want to acknowledge it right in a lot of different ways. Um, so I think that's here to stay. Um, what I, and I'll give you a simple example, um, you know, I, I belong to a local club, you know, kitchen shut down, you know, no activities. I was amazed that it took them only four days John four days to actually bring a digital reservation system online through their mobile app. So in the past, the mobile app was simply for me to go look at the directory. But now I can do so many more things. Right? And I was talking to my club CI. All right. I mean, really not a C I. O. But you know, it was uh, it was, it was a staff member who was charged with driving the digital transformation. So there you go >>right to consult you, you know. >>Um, but what he talked to me about was fascinating. And this is what we're going to see, right? So first he said, another was so easy to bring some of those, you know, interactive experience type capabilities online to serve our customer base. It made us think, why the hell didn't we do it before? Alright, so, back to your question, I think post pandemic, we're going to see a lot of companies recognizing that low code, no code, right? Cloud AI capabilities are very much within the reach of the average business user, right? In companies like IBM have done a phenomenal job of demystifying the technology and trying to make it much more accessible for the business user. We're going to see continued momentum, right? And adopting these kinds of simple technologies to transform right business processes, customer interaction, so on and so forth. Right? So we we see that coming out of the pandemic, there's no stopping that. I think the second thing we see is a very firm commitment at the leadership level um that you know, stopping or slowing down these kinds of activities is a non starter at the board level. That's a nonstarter at the management committee level, right? Don't come to me saying we need to slow down things. Come to me saying we need to speed up things, right? But that said, we're seeing rationalization, conversations begin to happen and that starts with the strategy, right, tailwind or headwind, irrespective of which side of the equation you fell right in that, in that dynamic, what we're seeing is clients coming back and saying, all right, we know our strategy needs to be different. Let's make sure that we have a strategy that aligns better with um where our customers want to go, where the industry is headed. And let's acknowledge that there are technological capabilities now, but actually turbocharge the execution of the strategy. Technology is not the strategy, it's still connected enterprise thought, How do I serve my customers whose expectations have dramatically changed coming out of the pandemic? And that's why I gave you the club example. I never want to call anybody to make a reservation anymore. I mean even the local hair salon has a queuing system and a reservation system because you know, that's just the way it is. Right? So there are some simple things that have happened on the customer side of uh, you know, the equation, which is forcing a lot of our clients to start, you know, accelerating their digital investments. Um, you know, rather than decelerating, >>it's interesting. That's great insight. I think just to summarize that, I think you're pointing out is the obvious, hey, it works the indifference of the digital to go the next level and see X. O. S and C I. O. S have had, you know, either politics or blockers or just will it work? And I think with the pandemic necessity is the mother of all inventions. You say, hey, we got to get back on business that the economics and the user experience is more than acceptable. It's actually preferred. I think that club example really highlights that expectation change and I >>think that's an interesting architecture discussion right? And I don't mean that technically I think businesses are starting to think about how are they architected, right. And this is where the connected enterprise concept from KPMG is resonating because now you know, we see our clients no longer thinking about finance, sales, marketing, right? And fulfillment right? That's how the architect of their business. Before now they're realizing that they need to sort of put it on its side. Right, I love the cube analogy, I'm going to borrow it, they're flipping the cube on the side and pulling out a whole new business architecture which by the way is enabled and supported by an underlying technology architecture that's very different. Right? So I think businesses are going to get re architected in technology companies like IBM and Red Hot are going to be right there helping clients go through that re architected along with partners like us, >>the script has been flipped, the cube has been turned and I think this was the revelation. The economics are clear. So I gotta ask you, I mean I've always been I've been joking with IBM the president like it, but I've been saying that, you know, business now is software enabled and the operating systems, distributed computing. As you mentioned, these subsystems are part of this fabric and red hat there and operating systems company. Um, so kind of in a good position with what Marvin's doing. If you think about if you look at squint through and connect the dots, I mean you're looking at an underlying operating system that's open and connected to business, it's not just software apps that run something like an ear piece system, it's an business software model for the entire company completely instrumented. This is what hybrid cloud is. Could you, could you take a few minutes to talk about the relationship that you guys have with IBM on how you guys are working together to bring this hybrid cloud vision to their customers into the market. >>So KPMG and IBM go back about 20 plus years long standing relationship. Um in fact, I kid around with many of my fellow partners here at KPMG that IBM is the only relationship that we did not divest off when we went through our let's flip management consulting off from our accounting business, so on and so forth that everybody went through. Right? So very long standing relationship, you know, we're a trusted partner of IBM but we're very different from a lot of the partners that IBM has were business consultants, right? We don't have, you know, we help clients think through their business first before we get into the technology implementation. So I don't have armies of IBM certified engineers sitting on the bench looking for work to do. It's actually the other way around. Right? So it's been a great marriage when IBM has phenomenal technology in this case, you know, they have been leaders in AI, we've got an AI based relationship now going back five years, um you know, where we consumed Watson proved to ourselves and the world that it can be done very innovatively supporting business transformation. And now we're able to together with IBM effectively have that conversation with clients, right? Because we're client number zero, uh we're big into a hybrid, multi cloud, um you know, we're big red hat customers. Uh you know, we use red hat in our own modernization of several different workloads. So our relationship with IBM is very strong, were a good supplier to them as well, so we help them with their strategy and go to market as well. So an interesting sort of relationship. Um look when we work with clients, we typically tend to, you know, take a trusted advisor role with clients. Our brand speaks to the trust that we're able to bring when we talk to clients. Uh I kid around um you know, when you're going through a transformation, you probably want the town skeptic holding your hand. That's us, right? We're very risk averse. We like working with clients who you know, kind of want that, you know, critical look when they're investing in technology driven transformation. Um you know, some of the things that IBM has done is pretty phenomenal. Right? So for example, I don't see um you know, I don't see a lot of providers out there who give clients the kind of options that IBM gives with their multi cloud capabilities. Right? So show me conversational ai capability that can run on private cloud, that can run on google amazon IBM and a whole bunch of other cloud providers. Right, So I think as IBM invests in that open right philosophy and obviously the Red hat acquisition only further enhances that. Right, um it's a great opportunity for us to be able to take very powerful KPMG value propositions um you know, enabled by this kind of IBM technology. Right, so that's how we tend to go to market. Um one of the solutions were offering with IBM is called the KPMG data mesh. It's built on IBM cloud pack for data, which is enabled by red hats open shift and it's a very innovative solution in the marketplace that fundamentally asked the question to clients, why are you spending inordinate amount of time and resources moving data around in order to become data driven? Uh it just amazes me john how much money is being thrown at, you know, moving data around, particularly as you get into this complex hybrid, multi cloud world. Right. How many times am I going to move data from, you know, a mainframe database into my, you know, cloud repository before I can start doing uh, you know, real higher value work. Right, So KPMG data mesh enabled by the IBM cloud back, the data says, hey, legal data, wherever it is. You know, we can take up to 30 of costs out and really get you on this journey to become data driven without spending the first nine months of every project building a data warehouse or building an expensive data where data lake. Right? Because all of those, frankly our 20th century mindset, right? So if I can leave the data where it is your favorite terminology virtually is the data and really focus on what do I do with the data as opposed to you know, how do I move the data? Right. It really starts to change the mindset around becoming data driven. Right, so that's a great example of a solution where we've married our value proposition to clients around connected and trusted and leveraged IBM technology right? In a hybrid multi cloud >>but no great insight. Love the focus. Hybrid cloud, congratulations on your KPMG mesh solution. Their cloud mesh awesome. Taking advantage of the IBM work and love your perspective on the industry. I think you you called it right. I think that's a great perspective. That's the way we're on big transformation innovation wave. Thanks for coming on the key. Appreciate it. >>Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me have a good day. >>Okay, Cube coverage of IBM think 2021. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM >>Think 2021 brought to you >>by IBM. Welcome back everyone to the cube coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual um john for your host of the cube. Our next guest taylor Holloway. Chief technology officer at advent one. Tyler welcome to the cube from down under in Australia and we're in Palo alto California. How are you? >>Well thanks john thanks very much. Glad to be glad to be on here. >>Love love the virtual cube of the virtual events. We can get to talk to people really quickly with click um great conversation here around hybrid cloud, multi cloud and all things software enterprise before we get started. I wanna take a minute to explain what you guys do at advent one. What's the main focus? >>Yeah. So look we have a lot of customers in different verticals. Um so you know generally what we provide depends on the particular industry the customers in. But generally speaking we see a lot of demand for operational efficiency, helping our clients tackle cyber security risks, adopt cloud and set them up to modernize the applications. >>And this is this has been a big wave coming in for sure with you know, cloud and scale. So I gotta ask you, what are the main challenges that you guys are solvent for your customers um and how are you helping them overcome come that way and transformative innovative way? >>Yeah, look, I think helping our clients um improve their security posture is a big one. We're finding as well that our customers are gaining a lot of operational efficiency by adopting sort of open source technology red huts an important partner of ours as his IBM um and we're seeing them sort of move away from some more proprietary solutions. Automation is a big focus for us as well. We've had some great outcomes with our clients or helping them automate um and you know, to live up um you know the stand up and data operations of environments a lot quickly a lot more easily and uh and to be able to sort of apply some standards across multiple sort of areas of their I. T. Estate. >>What are some of the solutions that you guys are doing with IBM's portfolio on the infrastructure side, you got red hat, you've got a lot of open source stuff to meet the needs of clients. What do you mean? What's the mean? >>Uh Yeah I think on the storage side will probably help our clients sort of tackle the expanding data in structured and particularly unstructured data they're trying to take control of so you know, looking at spectrum scale and those type of products from an audio perspective for unstructured data is a good example. And so they're flush systems for more block storage and more run of the mill sort of sort of environments. We have helped our clients consolidate and modernize on IBM power systems. Having Red Hat is both a Lynx operating system and having open shift as a container platform. Um really helps there. And Red Hat also provides management overlay, which has been great on what we do with IBM power systems. We've been working on a few different sort of use cases on power in particular. More recently, SAP Hana is a big one where we've had some success with our clients migrating Muhanna on to onto IBM power systems. And we've also helped our customers, you know, improve some um some environments on the other end of the side, such as IBM I, we still have a large number of customers with, with IBM I and and you know how do we help them? You know some of them are moving to cloud in one way or another others are consuming some kind of IRS and we can sort of wrap around a managed service to to help them through. >>So I gotta ask you the question, you know U C T. Oh you played a lot of technologies kubernetes just become this lingua franca for this kind of like I'll call a middleware kind of orchestration layer uh containers. Also you're awesome but I gotta ask you when you walk into a client's environment you have to name names but you know usually you see kind of two pictures man, they need some serious help or they got their act together. So either way they're both opportunities for Hybrid cloud. How do you how do you how do you evaluate the environment when you go in, when you walk into those two scenarios? What goes through your mind? What some of the conversations that you guys have with those clients. Can you take me through a kind of day in the life of both scenarios? The ones that are like I can't get the job done, I'm so close in on the right team and the other ones, like we're grooving, we're kicking butt. >>Yeah. So look, let's start well, I supposed to start off with you try and take somewhat of a technology agnostic view and just sort of sit down and listen to what they're trying to achieve, how they're going for customers who have got it. You know, as you say, all nailed down things are going really well. Um it's just really understanding what what can we do to help. Is there an opportunity for us to help at all like there? Um, you know, generally speaking, there's always going to be something and it may be, you know, we don't try and if someone is going really well, they might just want someone to help with a bespoke use case or something very specific where they need help. On the other end of the scale where a customer is sort of pretty early on and starting to struggle. We generally try and help them not boil the ocean at once. Just try and get some winds, pick some key use cases, you know, deliver some value back and then sort of growing from there rather than trying to go into a customer and trying to do everything at once tends to be a challenge. Just understand what the priorities are and help them get going. >>What's the impact been for red hat? Um, in your customer base, a lot of overlap. Some overlap, no overlap coming together. What's the general trend that you're seeing? What's the reaction been? >>Yeah I think it's been really good. Obviously IBM have a lot of focus on cloud packs where they're bringing their software on red hat open shift that will run on multiple clouds. So I think that's one that we'll see a lot more of overtime. Um Also helping customers automate their I. T. Operations with answerable is one we do quite a lot of um and there's some really bespoke use cases we've done with that as well as some standardized one. So helping with day two operations and all that sort of thing. But there's also some really sort of out there things customers have needed to automate that's been a challenge for them and being able to use open source tools to do it has worked really well. We've had some good wins there, >>you know, I want to ask you about the architecture and I'm just some simplify it real. Just for the sake of devops, um you know, segmentation, you got hybrid clouds, take a programmable infrastructure and then you've got modern applications that need to have a I some have said I've even sit on the cube and other broadcast that if you don't have a I you're gonna be at a handicap some machine learning, some data has to be in there. You can probably see ai and mostly everything as you go in and try to architect that out for customers um and help them get to a hybrid cloud infrastructure with real modern application front end with using data. What's what's the playbook? Do you have any best practices or examples you can share or scenarios or visions that you see uh playing >>out? I think you're the first one is obviously making sure customers data is in the right place. So if they might be wanting to use um some machine learning in one particular cloud provider and they've got a lot of their applications and data in another, you know, how do we help them make it mobile and able to move data from one cloud to another or back into court data center? So there's a lot of that. I think that we spend a lot of time with customers to try and get a right architecture and also how do we make sure it's secure from end to end. So if they're moving things from into multiple one or more public clouds as well as maybe in their own data center, making sure connectivity is all set up properly. All the security requirements are met. So I think we sort of look at it from a from a high level design point of view, we look at obviously what the target state is going to be versus the current state that really take into account security, performance, connectivity or those sort of things to make sure that they're going to have a good result. >>You know, one of the things you mentioned and this comes up a lot of my interviews with partners of IBM is they always comment about their credibility and all the other than the normal stuff. But one of the things that comes out a lot pretty much consistently is their experience in verticals. Uh they have such a track record in verticals and this is where AI and machine learning data has to be very much scoped in on the vertical. You can't generalize and have a general purpose data plane inside of vertically specialized kind of focus. How how do you see that evolving, how does IBM play there with this kind of the horizontally scalable mindset of a hybrid model, both on premise in the cloud, but that's still saying provide that intimacy with the data to fuel the machine learning or NLP or power that ai which seems to be critical. >>Yeah, I think there's a lot of services where you know, public cloud providers are bringing out new services all the time and some of it is pre can and easy to consume. I think what IBM from what I've observed, being really good at is handling some of those really bespoke use cases. So if you have a particular vertical with a challenge, um you know, there's going to be sort of things that are pre can that you can go and consume. But if you need to do something custom that could be quite challenging. How do they sort of build something that could be quite specific for a particular industry and then obviously being able to repeat that afterwards for us, that's obviously something we're very interested in. >>Yeah, tell I love chatting whether you love getting the low down also, people might not know your co author of a book performance guy with IBM Power Systems, So I gotta ask you, since I got you here and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but if you can just share your vision or any kind of anecdotal observation as people start to put together their architecture and again, you know, Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, every environment is different. But still, hybrid, distributed concept is distributed computing. Is there a KPI is there a best practice on as a manager or systems architect to kind of keep an eye on what what good is and how how good becomes better because the day to operations becomes a super important concept. We're seeing some called Ai ops where okay, I'm provisioning stuff out on a hybrid Cloud operational environment. But now day two hits are things happen as more stuff entered into the equation. What's your vision on KPs and management? What to keep tracking? >>Yeah, I think obviously attention to detail is really important to be able to build things properly. A good KPI particularly managed service area that I'm curious that understanding is how often do you actually have to log into the systems that you're managing? So if you're logging in and recitation into servers and all this sort of stuff all the time, all of your automation and configuration management is not set up properly. So, really a good KPI an interesting one is how often do you log into things all the time? If something went wrong, would you sooner go and build another one and shoot the one that failed or go and restore from backup? So thinking about how well things are automated. If things are immutable using infrastructure as code, those are things that I think are really important when you look at, how is something going to be scalable and easy to manage going forward. What I hate to see is where, you know, someone build something and automates it all in the first place and they're too scared to run it again afterwards in case it breaks something. >>It's funny the next generation of leaders probably won't even know like, hey, yeah, taylor and john they had to log into systems back in the day. You know, I mean, I could be like a story they tell their kids. Uh but no, that's a good Metro. This is this automation. So it's on the next level. Let's go the next level automation. Um what's the low hanging fruit for automation? Because you're getting at really the kind of the killer app there, which is, you know, self healing systems, good networks that are programmable but automation will define more value. What's your take? >>I think the main thing is where you start to move from a model of being able to start small and automate individual things which could be patching or system provisioning or anything like that. But what you really want to get to is to be able to drive everything through, get So instead of having a written up paper, change request, I'm going to change your system and all the rest of it. It really should be driven through a pull request and have things through it and and build pipelines to go and go and make a change running in development, make sure it's successful and then it goes and gets pushed into production. That's really where I think you want to get to and you can start to have a lot of people collaborating really well on this particular project or a customer that also have some sort of guard rails around what happens in some level of governance rather than being a free for all. >>Okay, final question. Where do you see event one headed? What's your future plans to continue to be a leader? I. T. Service leader for this guy? BMS Infrastructure portfolio? >>I think it comes down to people in the end, so really making sure that we partner with our clients and to be well positioned to understand what they want to achieve and and have the expertise in our team to bring to the table to help them do it. I think open source is a key enabler to help our clients adopt a hybrid cloud model to sort of touched on earlier uh as well as be able to make use of multiple clouds where it makes sense from a managed service perspective. I think everyone is really considering themselves and next year managed service provider. But what that means for us is to provide a different, differentiated managed service and also have the strong technical expertise to back it up. >>Taylor Holloway, chief technology officer advent one remote videoing in from down under in Australia. I'm john ferrier and Palo alto with cube coverage of IBM thing. Taylor, thanks for joining me today from the cube. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay, cube coverage. Thanks for watching ever. Mhm mm

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got three great guests here to talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI operations. Laura Guio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Angelstad, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada, Financial Services. And Kuberan Kandasamy, VP of Personal Insurance at Economical Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE, this great panel on Cloud Satellite and AI ops. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John, good to see you. >> Well, first, let's start with you. There's the General Manager for the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined that's the standard and multicloud is right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical. And so, obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. >> Absolutely, so John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around a supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kyndryl, our spin-off of what we were previously calling NewCo, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our Satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all of this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So, we're super excited about this. >> Real quick while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points. I just want to get to, I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NewCo and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really the center of that equation. How does that relate into all that? >> So, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing, and you know, we've got a client here with us today, Kuberan who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client. What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software, managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco couple together, really great value. >> Kuberan, you got teed up beautifully there. So, I want to go to you and then I'll go to Matthew after. But, okay, tell us more about this IBM-Cisco dynamic. You guys are a hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post-pandemic is looking good too. So, take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. >> Sure. Sure, John, thank you. You know, to appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us, let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet, an MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated, direct-to-customer digital channel, where customers can quote and buy home and auto policies online without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vyne, another MVP. Vyne is our simplified self-serve and digitized broker channel, where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers, again, without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Both Sonnet and Vyne have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And, you know, we maintain the platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered desired results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vyne platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level, so that we can monitor the pulse of, you know, every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vyne, and we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. >> On that vision real quick. How does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth in the IPO, you think in automation, I'm assuming, can you elaborate quickly? >> Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get, like it's all digitized, so we have a lot of data in there. And this is where, you know, the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting, having predictability and all that, that's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. >> Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the Financial Services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? >> Yeah, absolutely. And Kuberan was touching on this from Economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in Vyne with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So, our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multicloud and AI. >> So, if you don't mind, if you don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, this was based, again, on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then the unique to what Kuberan in Economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here, is a market-leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So, you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application, all the way through the technical infrastructure. And it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >> So, AppD and these IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's. >> Absolutely, and that's, the point is bringing together the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. >> Well, we'll talk about the dynamics again. This is, again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. (laughs) I mean, you got the Cloud Satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and maybe even Laura can add as needed. But from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid multicloud world. So, we've really evolved whether it's IBM Cloud, AWS, as some of our clients, including Economical and others. Microsoft Azure, Google. It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together. And again, stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM and our partner ecosystem, and the evolution of IBM services as well. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring the elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security. And then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for the client. >> I love the end-to-end story. I see hybrid as distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multicloud as subsystems and all is going to have to be operated together. And the software that makes that happen. And I can see tons of head room opportunity there. Kuberan, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now. Because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for a business solution. And, you know, the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster. It's helping us to reduce defect linkage through our quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together. And our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So, you know, to be able to have a robust self-healing capability. And this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability, because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with AppDynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Sonnet and Vyne, where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for, excuse me, for our customers. Right? So, hopefully that kind of stitches the picture for you. >> That's awesome, great insight. Laura, Matthew, Kuberan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the Cloud Satellite and AI. What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >> So, as IBM invest more and more in these strategic hybrid cloud solutions industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. >> All right. Matthew? >> Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, Economical in this case, to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan has stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. >> Kuberan, take us home, final word. >> Thank you. What I would say is, what we've learned from this is really standing this stuff in more like a garage style kind of a situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So, that's the benefit I've seen. >> Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco better together. This ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John. >> Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (cheerful music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE.  With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> 'Kay. Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of the theCUBE. We here with a great guest, Maria Winans who's the CMO of the new spin-out, the name, Kyndryl. Maria, great to see you, CUBE alumni, thanks for comin' on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Yes, no, thank you. Happy to be here. >> So, I was really excited about this because the new name has been announced of the spin-out, Kyndryl it's the name. It's been some time. What's been the reception? Well, the strategy and the reception. I want to get into this, the brand. But what's been the reception so far of the name Kyndryl? >> Yeah. So, let me, so, let me start by saying that, really, again, excited to be here. This is Think 2021. And excited to kind of tell you a little bit about Kyndryl. Kyndryl, we announced it on April 12th. It was our reveal of the name, been long anticipated. So, I think the response has been positive. It's been long anticipated and it was very well received by the market, and by our own kind of internal employees that are part of Kyndryl. And the reason being that it's very different, it's very new. And it also signals directly where this company is going, and what this company is about. Because the underlining of the word Kyndryl is twofold. One, it's "kin," which is, stands for kinship. So, it's about partnerships, it's about the relationships, it's about the enduring and nurture relationships that we have work with our customers, as well as our employees, and the way that we work. And "dryl" is from tendril. Tendril is about growth. It's about new growth. It's about continuous growth. So, it's the growth that we want to set this company for, but more importantly, the growth around, you know, in conjunction with our customers. So, kinship, tendril, Kyndryl. And at the heart of our company, it's all about the people. And the relationships with our customers. >> Wow. That's awesome. Well, thanks for giving us some insight into the name. I was going to ask that question but you nailed it. So, I like this because the theme here, "Think" this year. And this is an industry theme, but it's really prominent how you guys are executing with the whole IBM red hat and the whole system coming together with hybrid cloud is, the word ecosystem is, has kind of this new meaning and this vibe of working together in a network effect, creating integrations, so it's like up and down the stack, whether it's technical or personal relationships, or business relationships, there's a communal effect here, whether it's API is integrating together. >> Right. >> Or relationships. So, I love the name. What was the process? I'm always curious like, how long does it take? (chuckles) Sure, it's like. >> Yeah! No, no, no, it's a great question, 'cause it's not like, it's not like we hate you like naming anything, right? It's not like naming your dog like somebody says it's, the corporate naming process is very rigorous. It has been a journey for us like any other corporate business that's naming you know, their strategy, their brand strategy. And we worked with, as you can imagine, with our legal teams, with our regulatory teams, we looked at linguistics. We worked with linguistic experts from around the world, over 70 because we're global company. So, it was very important for us, not only to understand how Kyndryl would land in our global markets, but more importantly also, is what it would stand for. And so we did a lot of interviews with our employees, we did interviews with obviously, with our customers and prospects. We looked at trends, we looked at our competitors, we did market research. And what, you know, and within that, we wanted to land on something that really was at the heart of what this company was about. And after all of those kind of legalities that we went to, it was, we were very, very fortunate that at the top of our list, was actually one of our favorites from the beginning. And that was Kyndryl because at the heart of Kyndryl, it really is about our people. And that's what really what we wanted this company to stand for. This is a business, that in a company, that at its foothold, is 90,000 experts in their field that are going to be part of this amazing company. And what we wanted to do is speak to what was that the kind of at the core of the idea behind this brand. What did we want to stand for and what were we going to be. And that it was that we were going to be a brand that stood at the heart of progress. That's our brand idea for not only the businesses that we are part of or with, but at the heart of progress, and at the core was our people and the work that we do. The work that we do for our customers. So, it's super exciting to be able to land on something that really can represent that and also differentiates us from the rest of our competitors in the market. >> So, I love the overview. Just real quick question on the language thing, was there, does it mean the same thing in different languages? >> Yeah, and that's something that now is what we're working on is, how do we land it into all the different markets in the appropriate meaning, again, that stands for relationships and growth. Relationships and growth. And that's the work that we have to do across all of our major markets where we do business. And that's the exciting part, to kind of work with our local teams. Because this company at its foothold, is what the work that we do in the markets that we compete with our people, and with our customers. >> You know, got to ask, you know what, I remember I look at some of the branding exercises that I've been involved in and talk to experts because I'm not a brand expert, but I see a lot of like, there's a lot of work that goes into it. You mentioned a little bit, insight into how that is there. Is there like an architecture for the brand strategy, 'cause you, at a high level, I love what you're bringing in, kind of the purpose of the brand. What's the brand strategy for Kyndryl? You mentioned some of the core principles, first principles. Is there like an architecture where here's the purpose, here's our mission, and here's like the founding principles. Take us through the brand strategy of Kyndryl. >> Yeah. Well, and at the heart, there is a brand idea, right? It is a little bit of what I talked about. The brand idea is that we are at the heart of progress. The people and the work that we do. And so, one of the things that we wanted to do is really look at the art and the science, bring humanity into the way that we were going to activate this brand. And that really is where our brand idea came about which is at the heart of progress. At the heart of progress because our purpose as a brand is that together, and that is at all levels together, each of us, you know, advances the vital systems that power human progress. Together, each of us advance the vital systems that power human progress. That is our purpose as a company. And the idea, the brand idea is that, you know, at a nutshell, we're at the heart of progress for our customers, for each other. And underlining that, it's about the beliefs. We want to really look at how do we instill this healthy digital economy to ensure that we accelerate humanity's progress. You know, and so that's, you know, the whole idea of healthy relationships, purposeful relationships that are about long-term and sustainability with our customers. The openness that we want to encourage in the diverse perspectives across our company. To promote stronger partnerships with our customers and with our strategic partners. And then more importantly, it really had to represent the belief that the right people, the right teams with the right mindset can do anything. And you know, that they want, anything can be accomplished. Again, at the heart where the people. But what was also important in this, is that we worked on our brand strategy and our purpose, our brand ideas, and what were going to be our beliefs around enduring relationships, open partnerships, right skills, right people. But at the same time, there was a culture platform. We wanted to be everything that we have been at IBM, brought the greatness of being part of the IBM company, but more importantly, and what our customers look to us for, but then more importantly, what is it that we want to lean into as we move forward? And what was very important was, how do we activate our experts and really bring the continuum that what our customers expect from us, the expertise, and that we're about with our people, and lean into this, we want to have and activate a culture where our people continue to be these devoted experts that are all about how they're focused and committed to shared success with our customers. We're empathetic and curious about really understanding where our customers are today, and where they want to go tomorrow. We're restless. And that's another word that we want to really activate in our culture was, we're restless. And that means we are continuously improving ourselves, our skills, and focused on the opportunity, and every opportunity with bringing energy and bringing excitement to the work that we do. And then we're anticipating, we're anticipating the what next. Bringing insights and looking at making these kind of connections outside of where our customers may be today, opportunities for tomorrow. And that really is at the heart of our culture platform that we developed in conjunction with our brand strategy in support of continuing to do business with our customers in the way that we have been and what they expect from us coming from IBM, but the platform that we're setting forward. >> That's a great master class gem you dropped there in terms of brand architecture and vision, great culture. I love the progress because it feels like that's what people want. They want to move faster and they want a positive future. And I think this idea of, you know, open, innovation, progress, inclusiveness, inclusion, diversity, community, it's the new way of working. What's, what do you look for in the future as this all comes together? What's most exciting to you? About the future- >> Yeah, what's exciting is that this company is about the service and our people. You know, so as part of any new independent company, at the heart of what we do, is, and really our offering, or the people. And that's why it's super important that here we are a company that is at the heart of progress because of the people and the work that we do. We design, we run, we manage the most modern, you know, efficient, and reliable technology that our customers expect from us. And they run crucial, crucial parts of their organizations, their business. You know, we're the heart and lungs, we're essential to these customers. And that's the opportunity ahead, is how do we continue to build those enduring relationships, and more importantly, what excites me as CMO for this brand is that the heart of what I get to do is really, our brand is our people. And how do we best show up, every single day. And how do we build a culture because building a culture is how you show up for each other, how you show up for your customers, and how you continuously improve and lean on each other in the way that we kind of have set ourselves forward. So, that to me is exciting to really work at the heart of progress because of the people, and then the work that we do for our customers. >> That's super exciting. I love that cultural vibe because what that is, is that's the future. And now, as people are connected, whether they're go back to hybrid office or remote, the working together progress creates bonds of creation. This co-creation, somethin' that we love here at theCUBE, we love working with you guys, co-creating content together. These experiences of the creation together, the solutions for the future really makes a big difference. This is game-changing as a psychology, also people want to be part of that. And that creates these expert, network, it creates the people value, the inclusiveness. If you can thread that needle, it's a magical formula. Don't you agree? >> Right. No, totally agree, it creates belief. And as much as that we like to say, we're super excited about the name, we're super, super excited about the way we're showing up. I don't know if you've seen even the brand creative, very different colors, very different twist on the way that our brand's written in a very warm red. That what's exciting about it is, you know, is the best of companies are not just the brand and the logo. It's really the brand experience. And that is the way that we need to show up with our best of service with the customer, you know, interactions that are best in class. And a culture platform that really you know, provides that experience and shows up as a company that Kyndryl has the opportunity to be and grow to be. >> Maria Winans, CMO, Kyndryl, great to talk to you. What a great career you've having, what a run. You're on a great wave here with a great brand, great brand promise. Love the progress, love the culture, love the name. Congratulations, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> No, thank you, and thank you for having me here. Appreciate it. >> Okay. This is IBM Think 2021 Cube coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (techno music) ♪ Da di ya ♪ ♪ Da ♪ ♪ Di ♪ (graphics tinkle)

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm john for the host of the cube here for virtual event Cameron Siva who's here with corporate vice president with a M. D. Uh CVP and business development. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Nice to be. It's an honor to be here. >>You know, love A. M. D. Love the growth, love the processors. Epic 7000 and three series was just launched. Its out in the field. Give us a quick overview of the of the of the processor, how it's doing and how it's going to help us in the data center and the edge >>for sure. No this is uh this is an exciting time for A. M. D. This is probably one of the most exciting times uh to be honest and in my 2020 plus years of uh working in sex industry, I think I've never been this excited about a new product as I am about the the third generation ethic processor that were just announced. Um So the Epic 7003, what we're calling it a series processor. It's just a fantastic product. We not only have the fastest server processor in the world with the AMG Epic 7763 but we also have the fastest CPU core so that the process of being the complete package to complete socket and then we also the fastest poor in the world with the the Epic um 72 F three for frequency. So that one runs run super fast on each core. And then we also have 64 cores in the CPU. So it's it's addressing both kind of what we call scale up and scale out. So it's overall overall just just an enormous, enormous product line that that I think um you know, we'll be we'll be amazing within within IBM IBM cloud. Um The processor itself includes 256 megabytes of L three cache, um you know, cash is super important for a variety of workloads in the large cache size. We have shown our we've seen scale in particular cloud applications, but across the board, um you know, database, uh java all sorts of things. This processor is also based on the Zen three core, which is basically 19% more instructions per cycle relative to ours, N two. So that was the prior generation, the second generation Epic Force, which is called Rome. So this this new CPU is actually quite a bit more capable. It runs also at a higher frequency with both the 64 4 and the frequency optimized device. Um and finally, we have um what we call all in features. So rather than kind of segment our product line and charge you for every little, you know, little thing you turn on or off. We actually have all in features includes, you know, really importantly security, which is becoming a big, big team and something that we're partnering with IBM very closely on um and then also things like 628 lanes of pc I E gen four, um are your faces that grew up to four terabytes so you can do these big large uh large um in memory databases. The pc I interfaces gives you lots and lots of storage capability so all in all super products um and we're super excited to be working with IBM honest. >>Well let's get into some of the details on this impact because obviously it's not just one place where these processes are going to live. You're seeing a distributed surface area core to edge um, cloud and hybrid is now in play. It's pretty much standard now. Multi cloud on the horizon. Company's gonna start realizing, okay, I gotta put this to work and I want to get more insights out of the data and civilian applications that are evolving on this. But you guys have seen some growth in the cloud with the Epic processors, what can customers expect and why our cloud providers choosing Epic processors, >>you know, a big part of this is actually the fact that I that am be um delivers upon our roadmap. So we, we kind of do what we say and say what we do and we delivered on time. Um so we actually announced I think was back in august of 2019, their second generation, Epic part and then now in March, we are now in the third generation. Very much on schedule. Very much um, intern expectations and meeting the performance that we had told the industry and told our customers that we're going to meet back then. So it's a really super important pieces that our customers are now learning to expect performance, jenin, Jenin and on time from A. M. D, which is, which is uh, I think really a big part of our success. The second thing is, I think, you know, we are, we are a leader in terms of the core density that we provide and cloud in particular really values high density. So the 64 cores is absolutely unique today in the industry and that it has the ability to be offered both in uh bare metal. Um, as we have been deployed in uh, in IBM cloud and also in virtualized type environment. So it has that ability to spend a lot of different use cases. Um and you can, you know, you can run each core uh really fast, But then also have the scale out and then be able to take advantage of all 64 cores. Each core has two threads up to 128 threads per socket. It's a super powerful uh CPU and it has a lot of value for um for the for the cloud cloud provider, they're actually about over 400 total instances by the way of A. M. D processors out there. And that's all the flavors, of course, not just that they're generation, but still it's it's starting to really proliferate. We're trying to see uh M d I think all across the cloud, >>more cores, more threads all goodness. I gotta ask you, you know, I interviewed Arvin the ceo of IBM before he was Ceo at a conference and you know, he's always been, I know him, he's always loved cloud, right? So, um, but he sees a little bit differently than just being like copying the clouds. He sees it as we see it unfolding here, I think Hybrid. Um, and so I can almost see the playbook evolving. You know, Red has an operating system, Cloud and Edge is a distributed system, it's got that vibe of a system architecture, almost got processors everywhere. Could you give us a sense of the over an overview of the work you're doing with IBM Cloud and what a M. D s role is there? And I'm curious, could you share for the folks watching too? >>For sure. For sure. By the way, IBM cloud is a fantastic partner to work with. So, so, first off you talked about about the hybrid, hybrid cloud is a really important thing for us and that's um that's an area that we are definitely focused in on. Uh but in terms of our specific joint partnerships and we do have an announcement last year. Um so it's it's it's somewhat public, but we are working together on Ai where IBM is a is an undisputed leader with Watson and some of the technologies that you guys bring there. So we're bringing together, you know, it's kind of this real hard work goodness with IBM problems and know how on the AI side. In addition, IBM is also known for um you know, really enterprise grade, yeah, security and working with some of the key sectors that need and value, reliability, security, availability, um in those areas. Uh and so I think that partnership, we have quite a bit of uh quite a strong relationship and partnership around working together on security and doing confidential computer. >>Tell us more about the confidential computing. This is a joint development agreement, is a joint venture joint development agreement. Give us more detail on this. Tell us more about this announcement with IBM cloud, an AMG confidential computing. >>So that's right. So so what uh you know, there's some key pillars to this. One of this is being able to to work together, define open standards, open architecture. Um so jointly with an IBM and also pulling in something assets in terms of red hat to be able to work together and pull together a confidential computer that can so some some key ideas here, we can work with work within a hybrid cloud. We can work within the IBM cloud and to be able to provide you with, provide, provide our joint customers are and customers with uh with unprecedented security and reliability uh in the cloud, >>what's the future of processors, I mean, what should people think when they expect to see innovation? Um Certainly data centers are evolving with core core features to work with hybrid operating model in the cloud. People are getting that edge relationship basically the data centers a large edge, but now you've got the other edges, we got industrial edges, you got consumers, people wearables, you're gonna have more and more devices big and small. Um what's the what's the road map look like? How do you describe the future of a. M. D. In in the IBM world? >>I think I think R I B M M D partnership is bright, future is bright for sure, and I think there's there's a lot of key pieces there. Uh you know, I think IBM brings a lot of value in terms of being able to take on those up earlier, upper uh layers of software and that and the full stack um so IBM strength has really been, you know, as a systems company and as a software company. Right, So combining that with the Andes Silicon, uh divided and see few devices really really is is it's a great combination, I see, you know, I see um growth in uh you know, obviously in in deploying kind of this, this scale out model where we have these very large uh large core count Cpus I see that trend continuing for sure. Uh you know, I think that that is gonna, that is sort of the way of the future that you want cloud data applications that can scale across multi multiple cores within the socket and then across clusters of Cpus with within the data center um and IBM is in a really good position to take advantage of that to go to, to to drive that within the cloud. That income combination with IBM s presence on prem uh and so that's that's where the hybrid hybrid cloud value proposition comes in um and so we actually see ourselves uh you know, playing in both sides, so we do have a very strong presence now and increasingly so on premises as well. And we we partner we were very interested in working with IBM on the on on premises uh with some of some of the key customers and then offering that hybrid connectivity onto, onto the the IBM cloud as well. >>I B M and M. D. Great partnership, great for clarifying and and sharing that insight come, I appreciate it. Thanks for for coming on the cube, I do want to ask you while I got you here. Um kind of a curveball question if you don't mind. As you see hybrid cloud developing one of the big trends is this ecosystem play right? So you're seeing connections between IBM and their and their partners being much more integrated. So cloud has been a big KPI kind of model. You connect people through a. P. I. S. There's a big trend that we're seeing and we're seeing this really in our reporting on silicon angle the rise of a cloud service provider within these ecosystems where hey, I could build on top of IBM cloud and build a great business. Um and as I do that, I might want to look at an architecture like an AMG, how does that fit into to your view as a doing business development over at A. M. D. I mean because because people are building on top of these ecosystems are building their own clouds on top of cloud, you're seeing data. Cloud, just seeing these kinds of clouds, specialty clouds. So I mean we could have a cute cloud on top of IBM maybe someday. So, so I might want to build out a whole, I might be a cloud. So that's more processors needed for you. So how do you see this enablement? Because IBM is going to want to do that, it's kind of like, I'm kind of connecting the dots here in real time, but what's your, what's your take on that? What's your reaction? >>I think, I think that's I think that's right and I think m d isn't, it isn't a pretty good position with IBM to be able to, to enable that. Um we do have some very significant osD partnerships, a lot of which that are leveraged into IBM um such as Red hat of course, but also like VM ware and Nutanix. Um this provide these always V partners provide kind of the base level infrastructure that we can then build upon and then have that have that A P I. And be able to build build um uh the the multi cloud environments that you're talking about. Um and I think that, I think that's right. I think that is that is one of the uh you know, kind of future trends that that we will see uh you know, services that are offered on top of IBM cloud that take advantage of the the capabilities of the platform that come with it. Um and you know, the bare metal offerings that that IBM offer on their cloud is also quite unique um and hyper very performance. Um and so this actually gives um I think uh the the kind of uh call the medic cloud that unique ability to kind of go in and take advantage of the M. D. Hardware at a performance level and at a um uh to take advantage of that infrastructure better than they could in another cloud environments. I think that's that's that's actually very key and very uh one of the one of the features of the IBM problems that differentiates it >>so much headroom there corns really appreciate you sharing that. I think it's a great opportunity. As I say, if you're you want to build and compete. Finally, there's no with the white space with no competition or be better than the competition. So as they say in business, thank you for coming on sharing. Great great future ahead for all builders out there. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks thank you very much. >>Okay. IBM think cube coverage here. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Mm

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

>> (soft music) >> Presenter: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm your host, John furry with theCUBE. Our next guest Manish Chawla who's the industry general manager of energy, resources and manufacturing, a great guest to break down this next generation of infrastructure modern applications and changing the business in the super important areas he's regulated verticals. Manish, it's great to see you. Thank you for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you John. Good to meet you. >> You know, this is the area where I've been saying for years the cloud brings great scale horizontally scalable data, but at the end of the day, AI and automation really has to be specialized in the verticals. In this we're going to see the action the ecosystems for connecting. This is a big deal here I think this year, transformation is the innovation, innovation at scale. This seems to be the underlying theme that we've been reporting on. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see this Fourth Industrial Revolution as you say, coming about. Can you define for us what that means? And when you say that, what does it mean for customers? >> Yeah, sure, sure. So, you know, in sort of simple terms all the technologies that we see around us, whether it's AI we talk about AI, we talk about 5G, we talk about Edge Cloud Robotics. So the application of those to the physical world in some sense in the industrial world is what we define as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Essentially, it's the convergence between the humans, the physical aspect, like the machines and the cyber either digital aspects, bringing that together. So companies can unlock the value from the terabytes and petabytes of data that our connected world is now able to produce. >> How does the IOT world come in? We've been again, I did a panel I think two years ago called you know the industrial IOT Armageddon. And it was really kind of pointing. It was kind of provocative title, but the point was you know, the industrial connections are all devices now and they're connected to the network security super important. This industrial revolution includes this new edge. >> It's got to be smarter and intelligent. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, absolutely. It is about the edge. It's about devices. It's about delivering capturing the data from the umpteen devices. You know, we've recently heard about the chip shortage which gives you an idea that there is so much utilization of compute power everywhere in the world. And the world is becoming very software defined. So whether it's software defined machines software defined products, the washing machines that we use at home, the cars we use home, everything is gradually becoming, not gradually I'd say rapidly becoming intelligent. And so that edge or IOT is the foundation stone of everything we're talking about. >> Well, you mentioned software on a chip SOC that's a huge mega wave coming. That's going to bring so much more compute into smaller form factors which leads me to my next question, which kind of, I'm kind of answering for myself but I'm not a manufacturing company but why should they care about this trend from a business perspective besides the obvious new connection points? What's really in it for them? >> Yeah. So big topic right now is this topic of resilience, right? So that's one aspect. This, the pandemic has taught us that resilience is a core objective. The second objective, which is front and center of all CEOs or CEOs is out-performance. And so what we're seeing is out-performance are investing in technology for many goals, right? So it's either sustainability which is a big topic these days, and a huge priority. It's about efficiency. It's about productivity. It's also now more and more about delivering a much stronger customer experience, right? Making your products easier to use much easily consumable as well. So if you, when you pull it all together it's an end to end thinking about using data to drive those objectives of out-performance as well as resilience. >> What's the progress being made so far on the manufacturing industry on this front? I mean, is it moving faster or you mentioned accelerating but where is the progress bar right now? >> So I think as we came into 2020, I would have described it as we were starting to enter the chapter two where companies were moving from experimentation to really thinking of scaling this. And what we found is the pandemic really caused a big focus on these, as Winston Churchill has been attributed the quote "Never waste a good crisis." A lot of CEOs, a lot of executives and leadership really put their energy into accelerating digital transformation. I think we really, two thirds have been able to accelerate their digital transformation. So the good news is, you know companies don't have to be convinced about this anymore. They're really, their focus is on where should I start? Where should I focus? And what should I do next? Right, is really the focus. And they are investing in sort of two types of technologies is the way we see it. What I would call foundational technologies because there's a recognition that to apply the differentiating technologies like AI and capturing and taking value of the data you need a strong architectural foundation. So whether it's cybersecurity, it's what we call ITOT integration connecting the devices back to the mothership. And it's also applying cloud but cloud in this context is not about typically what we think as public cloud or a central spot. It's really bringing cloud-like technologies also to the edge or to the plant or to the device itself whether it's a mobile device or a physical device. And that foundation is that recognition that you've got to have the foundation that you can build your capabilities on top. Whether it's for customers or clients or colleagues. >> That's a great insight on the architecture. I think that's a successful playbook. It sounds so easy. I do agree with you. I think people have said this is a standard now hybrid cloud, the edge pretty clear visibility on the architecture of what to do or what needs to be done, how to do it, all other story. So I have to ask you, we hear of these barriers. There's always blockers. I think COVID's released some of those relieved some of those blockers because people have to force their way into the transformation but what are those barriers that are stopping the acceleration for customers to achieve the benefits that they need to see? >> Yeah. So I think one or one key barrier is a recognition that most of our plants or manufacturing facilities or supply chains really run in a brownfield manner. I, there's so many machines so many facilities that have been built over decades. So there's a proliferation of different ages of devices, machines, et cetera. So making sure that there is a focus on laying out a foundation, that's a key barrier. There is also a concern that, you know the companies have around cybersecurity. The more you connect the more you increase the attack surface. And we know that that hacks and so on are, are a dominant issue now whether it's for ransomware or for other malicious reasons. And so modernizing the foundation and making sure you're doing it in a secure way those are the key concerns that executives have. And then another key barrier I see is making sure that you have a key, key core objective and not making too many different varied experimentation beds. So keeping a focus on what's the core use case of benefit you're after and then what's the foundation to make sure that you're going after it. Like I said, whether it's quality or productivity or such like. >> So the keys to success, if I get this right is you have the right framework for this as you say, industry 4.0 you got to understand the collaborative dynamics and then have an ecosystem. >> Yeah. Can you unpack those three things? Because take me through that. You got to the framework, the collaboration and the ecosystem. What does that mean specifically? >> So the way I take the simplest way to think of it is the amount of work and effort that all companies have to put in, is so great in front of them. The opportunities are so great as well that nobody can hire all the smart people that are needed to achieve the goals. Everybody has their own specific I would say focus and capabilities they bring to bear. So the collaboration between manufacturers the collaboration between operational technology companies like the Siemens, ABB, Schlumberger, et cetera and IT technology companies like ourselves that three-part collaboration is sort of the heart of what I see as ecosystems coming together. The other dimensionality of ecosystems is also looking at it from a supply chain or a value chain perspective cause how something becomes more intelligent or smarter or more effective is also being able to work across the supply chain or value chain. So those are our key focus areas make sure we are collaborating across value chains and supply chains, as well as collaborating with manufacturers and OT, operational technology companies to be able to bring these digital capabilities with the right capabilities of operational technology companies into the manufacturers. >> If I asked you, how are you doing that? What specifically would you say? I mean, how are you collaborating? What's some examples give some examples of this enaction. >> Certainly. So we recently announced over the last say, nine months or so three strategic, very transformative partnerships. The first one I'll share with you is with Schlumberger. Schlumberger is the world's largest oil field services company. And now also the world's largest distill technology company for the oil and gas industry. So we've collaborated with them to bring hybrid cloud to the digital platform so they now can deploy their capabilities to any customer regardless of whether they want it in country or on a public cloud. Another example is we've established a data platform with Schlumberger for the oil and gas industry, to be able to bring again that data platform to any location around the world. The advantage of hybrid, the advantage of AI. With EVB, what we've done is we've taken our smart sync IT security connected with their products and capabilities for operational systems. And now are delivering an end to end solution that you can get cyber alerts or issues coming from manufacturing systems dry down to right up to an IT command center where you're seeing all the events and alerts so that they can be acted upon right away. So that's a great example of collaborating with IT from a security point of view. The third one is industrial IOT with Siemens and we've partnered with Siemens to deliver the MindSphere private cloud edition. Delivered on our red hat hybrid cloud. So this is an example where we are able to take our horizontal technologies, apply it with their verticals smarts and deep industry context put our services capabilities on top of it so they can deliver their innovations anywhere >> Manish is such an expert on this such a great leader on this area and I have to ask you you know, you've been in this mode of evangelizing and leading teams and building solutions around digital re platforming or whatever you want to call it, renovations. >> Manish: Right >> What's the big deal now, if you had to, I mean, it seems like it's all coming together with red hat under the covers, you get distributed networks with the Edge. It's all kind of coming together now for the verticals because you got the best of both worlds. Programmable scalable infrastructure with modern software applications on top. I mean, you've been even in the industry for many many waves, why is this wave so big and important? >> So I think there is no longer the big reason why it's important is I think there's no reason why companies have to be convinced now that the clarity is there that this needs to happen so that's one. The second is, I think there's a high degree of expectation among consumers, among employees and among customers as well, that everything that we touch will be intelligent. So these technologies really unlock the value unlock the value, and they can be deployed at scale that's really, I think what we're seeing as the focus now. And being able to deliver the innovation anywhere whether someone wants it at the Edge next to a machine that's operating, or be able to look at how a manufacturing facility or different product portfolio is doing in the boardroom. It's all available. And so that shop floor, the top floor connection is what everybody's aiming for but we also now call it Edge to enterprise. >> And everything works better, the employees are happy people are happy, stakeholders are happy. Manish great insight. Thank you for sharing here on theCUBE for Think 2021. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Absolutely thanks John for having me. >> Okay. I'm John Furry host theCUBE for IBM Think 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft music)