>> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (electronic music flourish) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando Florida. Joining me, my co-host for this segment Dave Vellante sitting in for John Furrier and happy to welcome to the program Jeff Eckard, who's the Vice President of Storage Solutions at IBM. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, good to see you guys. >> All right, and 26,000 people here. It'd been many years since I'd been to Cisco Live. There's some things that are same, many of the same faces, but a lot of new jobs, a lot of buzz going on. What's your impression been of the show this week? >> Yeah, it's been an interesting, great show for IBM and our presence, but it's a very large ecosystem of Cisco partners, a lot of their, our joint end users and a lot of focus on multi-cloud. You've consistently heard that as a theme from Cisco as well as IBM since last fall at their partner forum and they've continued it here with a lot of focus on being able to take tools and capabilities and enabling enterprises to manage data where they want to manage it. And it's really interesting, from traditional systems vendors like Cisco, to see that focus particularly around developers. >> It's been fascinating for me to watch. Jeff, you and I have some background in the storage and storage networking piece, specifically, where it was like, OK, where I sit in the stack and I've got a couple of integrations, and we work on our standards here. It's much broader. >> Oh, absolutely. The things that we're working on. We're talking about cloud. There's a lot of software that flows. Data and applications are critically important. Talk a little bit about some of that transformation and how you're seeing the expansion, and-- >> Yeah, no, it's a interesting time. If you think about the opportunities and challenges facing all enterprises, data is at the core of digital transformation, digital enhancement, whatever term you wanna use with it. Typically, it's focused in on wanting to provide realtime insights so that you make better decisions against threats or opportunities. Being able to deliver personalized services to your clients, and then also improving your internal processes and business outcomes. And so data is core for digital transformation, and you kinda see, kind of this web of what we're talking about here and then what we're doing with clients as well. >> You know, Jeff, you talk about multi-cloud, you've been in the business for a while, and throughout your career you've tried to help customers simplify their lives, and everybody felt, I thought, OK, I'm gonna put stuff in the cloud, it's gonna get simpler, and now you see this spate of clouds, whether it's infrastructures of service, private clouds, SaaS, and complexity is, in some regards, never have been higher, particularly as it relates to the data. >> That's right. >> You've gotta figure out, where do you put this stuff? How do you protect it, what about governance? Even if you think security's better in the cloud, it might be different for every cloud. So how is IBM approaching, generally in your team, specifically approaching simplifying the complex of this multi-cloud world? >> Sure, so from an IBM Perspective, at the top level we approached it with innovative technology and a lot of industry expertise, whether it's in financial services or healthcare, cloud and what we do with the public IBM cloud is really important around the services we provide there, data and AI, and then as you come down from that, modern infrastructure is key because modern infrastructure supports the data. So when you look at 80% of enterprises are intending to be multi-cloud. Something like 70% already are, right? Because of what you referenced with the consumption of SaaS. So, multi-cloud is the defacto operating model for applications and then, therefore, for the data. So from an IBM storage and SDI perspective, we kind of view... There are three primary adoption patterns that we're seeing with our clients. The first is around modernizing traditional applications or workloads, which also drags modern infrastructure, flash-based systems, leveraging more of storage efficiency technologies, like compression and dedupe, being able to protect that data, whether it's in a traditional VMware environment or the emerging containers environment. So, yeah, data's at the core. The partnership that we have with Cisco around VersaStack enables us to support traditional private clouds, whether those are built on the VMware set of tools or now, as last week we announced, the VersaStack for IBM Cloud Private. IBM Cloud Private is an enterprise platform for developers to leverage microservices and containerized IBM Middleware Services, whether that's WebSphere or MQ or Microservices Builder, as well as a whole catalog of open source technologies and tools to get agility out of the DevOps process and then also layer on analytics on top of that. >> So customers, they're gonna want consistency across all those clouds. So what role do you guys bring? Are you trying to be a platform of platforms, or is that too aspirational? Obviously, you can't have 100% market shares, so that's not practical. But to the extent that people adopt your technologies, is that how we should be thinking of about it? >> Well, so IBM Cloud Private is an open platform. It's built on Docker runtimes and Kubernetes orchestration. It's open to where you can leverage things like Red Hat OpenShift if you've chosen them for your containers platform, and then we also support the traditional Private Clouds with VMware. So, there's a whole set of tools in there. What we're trying to do from a data management perspective is protect it, whether that's backup and recovery, morphing into this new category of secondary data reuse. So, for instance, from a traditional workflow of just doing backup and recovery, we can now take native format copies of the data, whether that's in Oracle or SQL Server database, et cetera, and take that data to the Public Cloud, where different personas and use cases can act on that data. So you can spin up a VM from that Native format within our tools in the IBM cloud. So that's from a data protection standpoint. On data management, we have, later this year, we'll talk more formally about programs that we have around metadata management. That's where you can index and classify, for instance, unstructured or structured data, and act on that in terms of, where was it last accessed? Who should be accessing it? Is it personally identifiable information? Do I wanna run analytics on it? So the metadata management is an opportunity to plug in to broader IBM things, whether it's Watson data platform or information governance catalogs, to provide that kind of uber across cloud infrastructure management. >> And that's a machine sort of intelligence, automation component, that scale, right? >> It could absolutely be used for augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, some of the machine learning pieces as well. >> Jeff, Jeff, I'm wondering if you could give us a little insight of some of the places that customers are falling down. We were just talking to a systems integrator before you came on and he said, "Well, sometimes I take a virtualized environment "and I move it and it's not really geared "for this modern platform." Containerization can help in a lot of these environments, so when you talk about the pattern we've seen that works many times is you modernize the platform, and then I can modernize the application, start pulling things apart, start refactoring, start playing with some of these environments because I can't just... Lift and shift can help, but it can't be that's the only move. There's a lot of work that needs to get done, and a lot of time that's underestimated. >> Right, well it's not a panacea, but there is a key tool called Transformation Advisor that is part of the IBM cloud platform. It's intended to assist with the challenge that you just stated, which is, OK, how do I take a traditional workload, determine if it's ready to be containerized, and then start the process of containerization. You can go back to some of the VM migration pieces, too. There's a whole set of tools that enterprises have used. Transformation Advisor is one tooling example of what we can do in the platform. And then we obviously have services through Global Services that can help at a large scale for enterprises to kinda make that step. >> You bring up a good point there, 'cause we always struggle with some of these tool transformations, but if you go back to virtualization it was really some of the organizational things that had to shift. Wonder if you can talk about some of the things that are changing here. This show, we've spent a lot of time talking about Cisco's moving up the stack, network people are much more closer tied to some of those new application development, especially with things like intent-based networking. >> Well, it's a interesting reminder that we get often from clients, 'cause you're really touching at some of the remember the operational steps, things like containerization are interesting new technologies, and there's a lot of advantages to them. But just going back a minute, of the heritage with what we've been doing with Cisco around VersaStack, leveraging it on a VMware environment, we hear a lot from customers that their operational practices really are set around Vmware and the VMware tooling. So one of the things that we did with IBM Cloud Private is, it can run on top of VMware. So as customers want to take a kind of transitive step towards microservices, they can continue to leverage their operational practices around VMware. So it's important to, it sometimes takes enterprises a little bit longer than you may guess, right, to embrace the new set of things. Our product portfolio and our directions are set where they can leverage some of the operational pieces they already have. >> Well, just for our viewers who may not know, I mean, the recent history of IBM and Cisco is quite interesting. IBM at one point purchased a company called BNT, which got sold as part of the X86 sale to Lenovo. That opened up a huge opportunity for IBM and Cisco to partner because it was very clear swim lanes. And that sorta catalyzed a relationship that from your standpoint, VersaStack was sort of the first instantiation of that relationship. So, take us through, sort of, where you guys are in the partnership and where you see it going. >> Sure, yeah, so VersaStack, for folks who may not be familiar, it's a Converge System, right? So it's IBM storage, flash or otherwise, leverages Cisco UCS servers, and then their Nexus and MDS Switching. So it's integrated, validated as a single solution to, as the name implies, to be very versatile and provide agility and flexibility. And so, through our routes to market, either with distribution or resellers or system integrators, it is a way that we can address platforms that matter to our joint customers. We've talked about IBM Cloud Private. A lot of heritage around VMware and SQL server and Oracle and a lot of focus around SAP HANA. So, we typically will partner around which enterprise platforms are we going, and then we also partner, in general, around MDS Switching with Cisco, and we'll talk more about that in months to come as we enhance that relationship. >> So, the solutions part of your title, you just mentioned VMware, Oracle, SAP HANA, there may be others. How do you guys approach solutions? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so a solution, at a PetaLogic level, is a successful repeatable outcome. And what we focus on, then, are the integrations that matter. Those could be, integrations with IBM tools, like we talked about with IBM Cloud Private. Could be the integrations that we do jointly with Cisco through the validated design process for some of these applications or databases. And so we have teams that do the validation work and figure out how we marry IBM capabilities with ecosystem capabilities. And there's a whole, whether we're automating private clouds or accelerating workloads including the partnership that IBM and Cisco have with Horton Works. And then in industry context as well, particularly in healthcare and financial services. We'll pick the platforms that really matter and then do the integrations that enable us to take, whether it's our systems or our software or IBM level capabilities to market. >> I wanna come back to this simplicity theme, specifically in the context of data protection. With all this multi-cloud, data protection has become a really hot topic. You guys have dramatically simplified your data protection offering with Spectra Protect Plus. Talk about data protection, how it's changing from where it used to be just, OK, it's a virtualized world. We kind of understand the challenges of virtual data protection. That has played itself out, and now there's a whole new wave coming. What's your perspective on this? >> Well, I don't know if the virtual is play, I mean, the virtualized environment is still kind of paying the freight, if you will. >> Yeah, played out in terms of-- >> Yes, no, no, yeah, right. >> We understand what had to change. >> Right. And customers have made that change >> Yeah, and your simplicity point on that is really key. So one of the enhancements that we announced last year at VMWorld was Spectrum Protect Plus. So that's an agent list, OVA based, VM based backup and recovery tool. And it's very simple to use. The trick is that we've focused its capabilities around secondary data re-use. So I mentioned earlier, that whole workflow has evolved to where the data has increasing value beyond its primary use, right? So backup and recover, but then we can leverage those native format copies. Spectrum Protect Plus is available either on a bring your own license or a monthly subscription in the IBM cloud, other clouds over time. And so we enable enterprises to not only do the traditional backup and protection, but very simply, move that data to either a secondary or tertiary data center, if that's still a part of their backup architecture, or into the public cloud. And so the simplicity factor comes in, again, that it's agent lists. There's a catalog of where all your copies are, and you can reuse that data for whether it's DevOps or DevTest or analytics purposes. >> OK, so that's helpful. So what I'm trying to get to was sort of the enablers, maybe from a technology standpoint, because in the virtualization world, it was all about efficiency because you didn't have the underutilized physical resources anymore. >> Yep, right. >> All the servers utilized 10%. (chuckles) Well, I got rid of a lot of those physical servers, and the one job that needed that power was backup, so I needed a new way to approach it. What I'm hearing is, in this multi-cloud world, it's a focus on simplicity. I'm inferring from that, a cloud-like experience, maybe some other capabilities that you guys are-- >> Yeah, so. >> Doing away with. >> The containers are a progression. I mean, VMware came around to maximize your CPU and storage utilization. Containers provide yet another level of efficiency on top of that. They bring with them the need for changes in your data protection. And so we, at Think in March, we talked about our directions around container aware data protection and container aware snapshots. Most vendors will use snapshots and then volume level controls of how we've traditionally done backup. We have a progression, and we'll talk more about it later in the year, of how we do snapshots, again, that are container aware. They leverage our tools, such as Spectrum Copy Data Management, Spectrum Protect Plus, integrate with our arrays. But they'll bring the same level of capability that we've had traditionally in a virtualized environment to also support data protection in a container world. >> Well, it's an interesting landscape right now in data protection. >> Oh, it's awesome! There's so many new tools, and it's great to be able, (Dave chuckling) like we talked about earlier, to partner with Cisco around some of this as well. >> Great, Jeff, I wanna give you the final word, as if, for those that couldn't make it to the show, either share key conversation you're having, you're hearing from customers, or a big takeaway from the show that you'd like to share. >> Sure, yeah, we've had a lot of customers come up and wanna know, OK, well, how do you start, right? And we talked about, there are three primary adoption patterns, whether it's modernizing, and typically it will start with modernizing traditional workloads. 70% of private cloud usage is for that particular use case. Well, you can pretty quickly show them, then, the progression to, OK, they wanna be more agile. They wanna go cloud-native. From that private cloud infrastructure, you can do that, and then you can have a consistent way that you interact around services in the public cloud. And so that's what we've been talking to clients about. They wanted to know, how do I start with what I have, and then how do I get to this better future? And how do I leverage your tools and capabilities? And so whether that's with IBM systems components or what we do with our partnership with Cisco, we're showing them how we, collectively, can help them on that journey. >> All right, Jeff, I really appreciate all the updates. Dave, thanks so much for joining me for this segment. >> Yeah, thank you. >> We still have a full day here, three days wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, Cisco Live 2018. Thanks so much for watching. (techno musical flourish)