>> Las Vegas. Extensive signal from the noise. It's the Q covering interconnect 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Now your host, John Hurry and Dave Ilan. >> Okay, Welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for exclusive coverage of IBM interconnect 2016. This is Silicon Angles. The Q. That's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Ferrier with my Coast Day Volante. Our next guest, Steve Robinson News. The GM of client technical engagement before that, in the cloud doing all the blue mix now has the army of technical soldiers out there doing all the action because it's so much robust. So much demand for horizontally scale. The sluices with vertically targeted, prepackaged application development. That's horrible. First you name it big data. Welcome back. Good to see you, John. Thanks. Good to be with you again. Always, like great to have you on because you got a great perspective. You understand the executive viewpoint. A 20 mile stare in the industry. But also you got the in the nuts and bolts in under the hood. >> That's right. A >> lot of action happening under the hood. So let's get that right away. Blue, Mrs Hot Night. Now it's about the developers. What's going on under the hood right now that customers are caring about? >> I always love the Cube. You guys were like one of the first guys talking to us two years ago when we just launched a blue makes on stage. We walked off, got in front of cameras here, and it was great. Over the past year, it's been it's been outstanding. We we're writing about 20,000 folks toe blue mix right now on public, we came out with dedicated and then what people had really been warning was local blue mix as well. So we finally have full hybrid chain that goes from behind the firewall to a single client dedicated cloud all the way up to the public as well. So we've been building that out with service is as well, so have over 106 service is on top of it. You'll see things like Watson, which is unique, our Dash CB analytics, which is unique Internet of things coming in as well. So it's been a great year old building it out and getting more clients on top of it, >> it's like really trying to change the airplane engine in 30,000 feet. Or, in your case, you guys were taken off and from the runway. How has that been? It's been growing pains, of course. Unlearning What? What's going on? What have you learned? Give us the update on >> changing the engine while the plane is flying, and we've used that analogy quite a bit in the labs and way have to show relevance in this market. You know, this market is probably the fastest face technical market I think I've ever been in, and it's moving at such a rapid pace. We had to ship a lot of technology out last year is well, we have every new middleware group in IBM. Putting service is on top of blue mix, so let's get it out there. Let's get it out fast. Now, of course, this year we're gonna harden it up a little bit as well. So more architectures, more points of view. Better look on how this stuff works together hardening up our container strategy, pulling it all the way back to the virtual machine. So both continue to expand it out but let's make it enterprise grade at the same time. >> And also, some differentiation with Watts has been a big play around Catnip. Yeah, really is different because right now with the quote, um, market the way it is court monetization is on number one's mind. Start from startups to enterprises. If you're in business, you want you're top line if you're starting to get monetization. So there's a little bit of IBM in here for people to take in. Well, >> you know, if you look at Watson, you know, when we first started with it, you know, it was this very large big chunk of software that she had to buy. And and we work with Mike Rodents Team toe. Can we chop it up into a set of service is Let's really make this a set of AP eyes, and we started noticing, you know, you saw in Main stage the other day out from Otis. You know, this was a pure startup. He's started picking up the social semantics. Let's pick up the you know, some of the works to text etcetera, conversions, and all of a sudden they're starting to add it in. They said they would have never had access to this technology before way Have that a P I said. Not growing up to 28 we announced a couple cool things this morning. We even showed how would improve your dating life. Probably need some of that with my wife is well to translate between the sexes there, but what people are doing with it now, it's kind of like blowing people. His mind is far beyond what the initial exception waas. >> So your team of your niche is when they get right. It's a large team. It's, but it's a new initiative. New Justice unit, New role for you Talk about that >> way. Kinda had >> a couple pockets of this, but way clearly found that getting clients to the cloud is both a technology challenge as well as a cultural challenge as well. So he brought together some technical experts to kind of help through that entire life chain help up front. You know, many clients are trying to figure out what their overall cloud strategy is, where they truly today and where do they want to get to be? And how can we help him with a road map? That kind of helps them through the transition. Many accounts are very comfortable with the only wanting to be private and only glimpsing forward Thio Public Cloud Helping us bridge across that as well. Then we have the lab service's teams and these air the rial ninjas, the Navy seals. They go as low as you can go and what they're helping. A good way. Yeah, that's good. That's good. That's why they're helping with this very specific technical issue. Technical deployments. A lot of our dedicated local environment. These guys, they're they're really helping it wire in a cz Well, and then we have the garages, you know, we're up Thio. Five of those were going. We announced four new Blockchain garages as well. And this is where firms air coming in to kind of explore do the innovative type project as well. So I think all the way from the initial inception through rolling it out into production, having that team to be able to support him across the >> board. And so this capability existed in IBM previously, But it existed in a sort of bespoke fashion that coordinated >> couple pockets here and there. We always have supports. We had various pockets a lap service's. But we won't really wanna have the capability of seeing that client all the way through their journey, bringing it all under me. We now can easily pass the baton, Handoff says. We need to have that consistent skill there with the clients all the way through their >> journey and is the What's the life cycle of these service is? Is it Is it both pre sales in and post there? Just posted >> many times we'll get involved like our cloud advisers would get involved. Presale. They'll say a specific workload wants to go to the cloud. What are the steps we need to take to make that happen? A CZ well, with our Laps Service's teams, you know, we kind of have, you know, anywhere from a 4 to 6 week engagement. Thio do a specific technology. Let's get it in place. Let's get it wired in et cetera, and then in the garage is you know, we could just take a very novel idea and get it up to, ah, minimal viable product in about a six week period. So again, we're not doing dance lessons for life but strategically placing key skills in with accounts toe. Help him get over that next hump of their journey. >> Steve, when you look at the spectrum from from public all the way down to private and everything in between are you, I wonder if you could describe the level of capability that you are able to achieve with the best practice on Prem with regard to cloud ability. It's service is all the wonderful attributes of child that we've come to know and love. Are you able to, you know, somewhat replicate that roughly replicate that largely replicate, exactly. Replicate that. Where are we today? >> Yeah, I think >> it's a great question. I think. You know, I think most of the clients that we're dealing with have been dealing with some virtualized infrastructure, probably more VMC as they as they've been kind of progressing. That story. One of the things we did it IBM is Could we bring a true cloud infrastructure back behind the firewall? Could we bring an open stack? We bring a cloud foundry base past all the way back through because the goal, of course, is if we could have the same infrastructure private, dedicated and public as they continue to grow and got more comfortable with the public cloud that could start taking work clothes that they had built in one location and start to migrate it out with you. That that local cloud the Maur used for EJ cases. So taking that system of record and building a p i's and allowing to do extensions to that allowing you access into data records that you have today dealing with a lot of extension type cases, you know the core application still needs to be federally regulated. It needs to be under compliance domain. It's gotta be under audit. But maybe I wantto connect it in with a Fitbit or connected in with with a lot Soon are connected in with the Internet of things sensor. I gotta go public cloud for that as well. So locally we can bring that same infrastructure in and then they could doom or service. Is that extended out in the hybrid scenario >> code basis? Because this has come up. Oracle claims this is their big claim to fame. That code base is the same on premise hybrid public. Is that an issue with that? Is that just their marketing, or does it matter what's IBM take on this? >> But we've done ah lot of work with the open standard communities to let's get to a true reference implementation. So on open Stack, we've been doing a lot of work with them, and this is one of the reasons we picked up the Blue box acquisition. Could we really provide a standard open stack locally and also replicate that dedicated and, of course, have it match a reference architecture in public as well? We've also done the same thing with clout. Foundry worked with Sam Ram G to be one of the first vendors, have a certified cloud. Foundry instance is the same local dedicated in public. I think that's kind of the Holy Grail. If you could get the same infrastructural base across all, three, magic can happen. >> But management's important and integration piece becomes the new complexity. I mean, I would say it sounds easy, but it's really hard. Okay, developing in the clouds. Easy, easier ways always used to be right, right well, but not for large enterprises. The integration becomes that new kind of like criteria, right? That separates kind of the junior from the senior type players. I mean do you see the same thing and what we believe >> we do? I think there's usually two issues. We start to see that this model looks great. Let's have the same code base across all three environments. What things? We noticed that a lot of folks, when you get into Private Cloud, had tried to roll their own. You know, open Stack is an open source Project clout. Foundry is an open source project. Let's pull it down and let's see units roll it out and manage it ourselves. These air a little bit you they're very dynamic environments, and they're also a bit punishing if you don't stay current with them, both of them update on a very regular basis. And we found a lot of firms once they applied tenor well, folks to it, they just could not keep up with the right pace of change. So when the technologies we invented was a notion called relay on, this allowed us to actually to use the public cloud is our master copy and then we could provide updates to get down to the dedicated environment and down to the local. This takes the headache completely away from the firm's on trying to keep that local version current. It's not manage service, but it's kind of a new way that we can provide manage patches down to that environment. >> So one of the problems we hear in our community is and presume IBM has some visibility on this. I'm thinking about last year, John, we're at the IBM Z announcement in January, rose 1,000,000 company talked a lot about bringing transaction analytic capabilities together. But one of the problems that our community has practitioners in our community course the data for analytics. A lot of it's in the cloud and a lot of transaction data sitting, you know, on the mainframe, something. How do they bring those two together? Do I remove the data into the data center? Do I do I move pieces in how you see >> we're seeing a lot of that. A lot of it was. Bring the technology down to where the data is, and and now you know the three amount of integration you can do with public data sources, private data sources, et cetera. We're seeing a lot more of the compute want to go out to the cloud as well. You know, we've done some things like around the dash, CB Service's et cetera, where I can start to extract some of that transactional data, but maybe only need a few pieces to really make the data set. That is important to me as I move it out, so I can actually, you know, extract that record. I can actually mask it into being something brand new, and then I could minute we mix it with public data tohave. It do brand new things as well, so I think you're gonna see a lot of dynamic capability across that with or cloud computing technologies coming back behind the firewall and then more ability to release that data be intermixed with public data as well. >> What's the number one thing that you're seeing from customers that you guys were executing on? There's always the low hanging fruit for the easy winds from bringing a team of street team, if you will out. Technical service is out to clients where they really putting that gather, not their five year plans, but their one year. Of course, there's a lot of that agile going on right now. New technologies. You can't isolate one thing and break everything. Za new model. What a customer is caring about, right? What's that? What's the common thing? I think >> over there in 2015 I think the discussion changed and went from Are we going to go to the cloud or we're going to the cloud now? How are we going to do it? And the nice thing about I think a lot of enterprise architecture groups kind of took a step back to say, What do we truly have to do? What is a common platform? What is an integration layer? How do we take some of our old applications and decomposed those into a set of AP eyes? How can we then mix that with public AP eyes? So probably taking one or two projects to be proof points so they could say, this thing really has the magic associated with it. We can really build stuff fast. If we do it the right way, it's gonna be in a catalyst to have the I t. Organization now take the tough steps in what's gonna be the commonality? What common service is are we going to use and how do we start breaking up >> around things you know, we have our own data science and our backcourt operation and one of the things that we always looked at with bloom. It's way start our Amazon. But now, with blue mix, you have a couple things kind of coming together in real time. You said it's getting hard, but those hardened areas are important identity. For instance, where's the data is an instruction and structure. I want a little mongo year or something over there, but with blue mix and compose, I oh, really has a nice fit. I want to explain to the folks we talked before he came on about this new dynamic of composed Io and some of the things that are gluing around blue mix. Could you share this >> William Davis King right? And I think people look to the Cloud Data Service is air. Probably it's the most critical, the most visible, and the one we have to harden up the most is well, even though IBM has been well known for D. B two and we've been a >> wire composed right >> that we did Cognos first, and then we followed up with composed by you because recent waded about, we did compose. I know about eight months ago what we liked about it was all of your favorite flavors, you know? So your your progress, your mongo, you're you're ready. But really having it behave like Like what you would want an enterprise database to do. You can back it up. You can have multiple versions of it. We can replicate itself >> is a perfect cloud need of civic >> class. It has all the cloud properties to it and all the enterprise. Great capabilities with it. Yeah, we've got that now in public, and then you're gonna start seeing dedicated, and you want >> to go bare metal, Just go to soft layer. It's not required right on these things where this will work in the cloud, and then you get the bare metal object you want pushed up the bare metal. No problem. Well, I think >> you know it. Almost hybrid is not gonna get a new definition around it. So it's all gonna be around control and automation, more automation. You need to go all the way up to a cloud foundry where it's managing all the health, checking and keeping your apple. I've etcetera. If you want to go all the way down to bare metal so you can tune it audited et cetera. You can do that as well. I think I've got one of the broader spectrum, is there? >> I'm impressed with the composer. I got to say, Go ahead, get hotel Excited by what? I get excited by just about every way. Just love the whole Dev Ops has been just a game changer in extras. Code has been around for a while, but it's actually going totally mainstream. That's right. The benefits are just off the charts. With Mobile, we have the mobile first guys on. Earlier in the Swift, we had 10 made 12 year old kid. I mean, it's just really amazing. Now that the APS themselves aren't the discussion, it's the under the hood. That's right, so you can have an app look and feel like it's targeted for a vertical, say, retail or whatever. But the actions under the hood yeah, yeah, more than ever. Now >> it's, you know it's funny this year, you know, Dick Tino to the Devil Obsession yesterday and you're the amount of proof points we had around it last year. We were scrambling a little bit and this year it's just we always had to thin out. That's how many guys were having great success with this stuff is coming into its own. >> It totally is. And you guys are give you guys Props were running as fast as you can and you're working hard. And it's not just talk. Yeah, it's It's it's legit. I'm gonna ask you a question. What's the big learnings from last year? This year? What's happened? What do you look back and say? Wow, we really learned a lot or something that might have been Magda ified for you in this journey this past year. >> A lot of it goes back to, you know, this changing culture at IBM, you know, the amount of code we put out in two years was just just unbelievable. But I think also the IBM becoming a true cloud company. Some of that we did with our own shop some, but we did through injecting it with acquisitions. You know, like to compose Io the cloud and team, the blue box guys, et cetera. I think we got the chops now to play it play pro ball way worked very hard, Teoh. How many folks, Can we attract the blue mix? We're getting up to 20,000 week. Right now. We're starting. Get some great recognition and the successes are rolling in as well. So a lot of hard work and a lot of busted knuckles. A lot of guys are tired. Definitely, definitely straight in the game now. >> Ready for the crow bait? Taking the pro GameCube madness starts on cute madness. There were, you know, keep matched all the brackets of the Cube alumni and vote on it turns into a hack a phone because everyone stuffed the ballots. Let's talk about pro ball for next year, a CZ. You guys continue? Sure. The theme here obviously is developer. I mean, the show could be dedicated 100%. The blooming LeBlanc up there kind of going fast at the end of this booth on the clock anymore. Time >> right. Like the Star Wars trailer we had >> going up, he needed more time. So it's good props you got for this year. What's going on the road map this year? What if some of the critical goals that you guys see on your group and then just in general for the thing a >> lot of the activities were gonna be doing again is hardening the stack. I've got a brand new team now called a Solution Architecture, where we're looking at it from top to bottom, taking customer scenarios and really testing it out. How do you do? Back up. How do you do? Disaster recovery? How do you do? Multi geography, You know, things like PC I compliance. The rial enterprise problems are now coming to the class global and their global. And with security and compliance, they're changing in a very dynamic fashion. We have to show how you can do those in the cloud. You'd be amazed on how many conversations we have with Si SOS every single week. Is the cloud secure? How do we do enterprise? Great workloads. IBM is bringing that story to the cloud as well. That's the story of >> a potato that content >> Curation is unbelievable, right? That's the hardest part. And it's not that we have it fixed either. But you were doing more of aggregating it together so that we can really pull it all together. I call it the diamond Mine versus the jewelry store. You know, we always have really did you got yet? The great answers out there somewhere. But if you don't start to pull it together into a single place So one of things we did this year was launched the blue mixed garage methodology where we took all of our best practices. We took text test cases, even sample code, and brought it into a single methodology site where people start to go out, pull it down, use it, etcetera. Previously, we had it scattered all over the place, and we're gonna be doing more things like that. Bring in the assets to the programmers, things that we've tried, things we've tested being more open about it, putting in a single location. >> Well, we certainly would like to help promote that. Any kind of those kind of customer reference architectures. Happy to pump on silicon angle with the bond outlook for the vibe. I'm sorry. Five for the show things year. What's the vibe this year? You know, I think I've >> been very impressed with it, and I think, you know, I've been stepping up its game If you go down to the blue. Mixed garages are motives. A motorcycle on stage, you know, kind of getting a little more hip and happening as well. But I think the clients here and this is always about the customer stories and some of the things that we're hearing from the three guys start ups that are doing GPS logistical management 22 to the big accounts, and the big banks that you really see have embraced the cloud and doing great stories on it as well. I think people come to this show so they see what their peers were doing. And they definitely walk away with a sense that the cloud Israel it's happening and 2016. It is really going to driving it home. That has to be part of everybody. Strategy motorcycles I had put on the Harley Man. We'll take it for a spin guarantee. Come on down >> and give my wife. When I got married, it was terms of conditions. That's right. That's right. Last, Watson that Yeah, Thanks, Steve. Thanks. Taking the time and great to see you again. Congratulations. What? They get technical engagement team that you have all the work that you did that blue mix noted certainly by the cube. Congratulations and continued success with Loomis congratulating >> you guys. Well, always a pleasure. >> Okay. Cube Madness, March 15th Cube Gems go to Twitter. And speaking of jewelry, we have Cube gems hashtag Cube gems. That's the highlights of the videos up there. Real time. And, of course, we're gonna get that TV for all. All the action videos are up there right now. I'll be right back with more coverage after this short break here in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas expensing the signal from the noise it's the kue covering you interconnect 2016 brought to you by IBM now your host John hurry and Dave vellante okay welcome back everyone we are live here in Las Vegas this is silicon angles the cube our flagship program when we go out to the events and extract the signal annoys we are at IBM interconnect 2016 it's our fifth year now doing all the IV meds now interconnecting out the cloud show I'm John furrier with my coach Dave vellante our next guest is Eric Herzog vice president of storage and software-defined at IBM welcome back you belong great to see you great thank you very much always loved helping guys out of the cube thank you very much for including us pleasure we are very cognitive today we get cognition going on the cube we have all kinds of real-time we've got api's and notifications or and we're going to stract some insight and predictive and prescriptive analytics from you right first what's going on with storage and software obviously storage right now you're seeing huge change Dell buying EMC which you know a lot about emc IBM buys the weather company two contrasting strategies but Stewart still it's the center of the value proposition we also heard Robert de Blanc say on stage today cheap compute he didn't say cheap storage storage visited it did he didn't say so long about cheap storage okay I stand corrected but you talk about a commoditization of resource still valuable I always said what's wrong with cheap compute want more of it I want more and more compute so storage does he changing the software values their last time we spoke about that what's the update in context to cloud what's the storage equation was a storage angle well for us there's a huge value proposition when both the cognitive side and in the cloud infrastructure side obviously with the tumultuous change in storage both from just where the world is going we believe that you ride the wave a flash and software-defined and that is our mantra as you know one of the industry analyst firms who tracks the numbers we were number one in flash capacity shift and number one in flash units last year are all flash and we've been number one several years in row and software-defined storage so while the storage envelope is changing if you open up that envelope we're writing the change inside that omelet which is flash software to find converged infrastructure with our pure power product and also with our partnership with Cisco on the verses stack that's two years in a row for flash leadership right yes charge same thing with software to bunt well the good thing is well the other guy leads in revenue we believe in a fair price for an outstanding award-winning product line on the software value now the cell where that fits in we had multiple guests on today we had you know Jamie Thomas former GM and storage now thinking a more systems view its horizontally composable infrastructure now our dead loss infrastructure as code how does that change the equation certainly we want storage but now you've got software driving the change where's the wisdom value points there well when you look at the software-defined infrastructure the magic fairy dust is in the software so we can work with our own hardware we can work with our competitors hardware over 300 different raise from our competitors are completely compatible with our software to find solutions for storage and we can use with white box if one of our channel partners our end users would rather have a white box storage bear hard drives from seagate OWD and some some flash and just a wrapper of metal we are software provides the value add for integration into hybrid cloud configurations in the cognitive configurations into the oceans of data and big data and into analytic environments all powered by software-defined storage ok so you've been on less than a year now all right you came on last summer right yes mid year so what nine months roughly yes inland what are the big learnings that you've encountered and then we'll start from there and then we're going to get into result are you going to transfer yeah I think the big learning is the world is evolving and a lot of the customer base hasn't gotten there yet so we're going to take them on that journey with flash software-defined converged infrastructure so we're going to lead that charge we're going to ride the wave not fight the wave sometimes iBM has fought the wave we've changed that in the storage world so we're going to be a leader we're are a leader in flash we're leader and software-defined are converged infrastructure particularly with Cisco had an incredible year last year you know for our first year we had over 250 customers over 400 units sold and while there are others who are bigger in our first year that was one of the best first years in the converging instructor of any vendor and that's the power of our software to find portfolio our flash portfolio and the things we deliver from a storage perspective that helps customers they convert either the software-defined infrastructure or converged infrastructure so that case so that sort of answers the question as to how you're going to deal with immediate it's not unique you got old stuff that's declining you got new stuff that's growing like crazy but still not big enough to offset the decline of the old stuff you got currency headwinds but the there's light at the end of the tunnel in terms of that transformation to those newer architectures is that fair yes absolutely last year if you look whether it was in the channel with our award from computer reseller news as the best enterprise storage provider in the world and that was in the fall of 2015 so when you look at the channel and what they're looking for from their provider unlike the guys in hopkinton in Austin who are merging they didn't win that IBM one that so great solution for our Channel Partner base we've won awards for software-defined for all flash we did very well in the hybrid or a category last year with several product of the Year awards so again yes we have an older installed base one of our big goals this year is to refresh that installed base with software-defined with all flash with a comprehensive family of hybrid raise to make sure that people understand this is where the market is going this is where you need to go to drive cognitive value hybrid cloud value quite honestly it's all about applications workloads and use cases and even though I've done storage for 31 years let's face it most CEOs can't stand storage have to put it in the language that they understand which is software value-add and how it can enhance their ability to meet the business SLA s that the CIO is under pressure from the VP of Operations the VP of Marketing the finance side and of course ultimately the CEO so in this business I've been in the business maybe not 31 years but maybe 35 okay so the product portfolio is very very important one of the criticisms I've had of IBM over the years has been just not enough product innovation coming out great R&D but doesn't hit the pipeline so when you came to see us in Boston you showed us a little you know glimpse of the roadmap and it's very clear that's accelerating I wonder if you could talk about that what can you share with our audience sure we've done it we've done a couple things first of all we have the flash religion we acquired a flash company get started but so did several of our competitors in addition to spending money on that acquisition we've invested over a billion dollars in engineering resources on the flash site software-defined we're spending a billion dollars in that as you know we recently bought the award-winning and market-leading object storage technology with clever safe and we spent money on that so IBM is putting its money where its mouth is its focus is on storage and how storage enhances hybrid clouds cognitive big data analytics and you know deals with these oceans of data that our customers are facing and how do you manage that and how do you make the data more valuable and more productive to the business because that's what about it's not about storage it's about the management that data to optimize our customers business and how we can deliver that with effective cost so clever save was mentioned in the keynote in context to LeBlanc's reference to the digital transport transit of you know new stream the video stuff interesting how he plugged in clever see how it is that relate I mean honestly I know it's a recent acquisition is it's just the objects towards an unstructured data why is clever stay plugged into that kind of portfolio of those four companies you mentioned around you know is when you develop that type of technology you end up with incredible amounts of data and an object store is designed to handle exabytes of capacity and exabytes of information it doesn't necessarily have to be fast for example video surveillance data and all kinds of other data may be hot for a while and one of the values of clever say for example is on our spectrum scale product which is our scale out network attached storage actually will automatically cheer too clever safe we're in a public beta right now our spectrum protect product we've also talked about is going to support clever safe either as an source so you could back it up but more importantly as a target so you could take gobs of data and back it up into a clever safe repository when you've got oceans of data and people are generating exabytes and exabytes of data what you can get with clever safe on premises or in a cloud configuration allows you to handle this extensive data growth cost-effectively and in an easy to manage and configure way about the end where relationship with storage obviously there in an announcement today with IBM EMC recently had an announcement with VMware and VX rail rom and the big debate was I see his hybrid cloud was deposition using their software stack to be a glue and into the hybrid cloud journey but one of the comments that we made note of that we captured on the prowl chat was from Keith Townsend one of our members of our community he wrote it took Netflix seven years to move to the public cloud meaning everything all flash they had one of the first all flesh implementations that Amazon ever rolled out what does that mean for the average VMware customer in this case IBM customer from a product perspective so you got you know your relationship VMware you have this notion of hybrid cloud right it took Netflix seven years there in the cutting edge what does that mean for the average customer this whole notion of using software in storage plugging the hybrid cloud it took them seven years was it 70 years for an average company well you've got to remember that that started a while ago and the move to the hybrid cloud is just accelerated dramatically so our spectrum scale product our spectrum accelerate product our spectrum protect product all are designed for hybrid cloud configurations right this minute they're easy to employ they're easy to use they're all available in softlayer they're also filled with other cloud providers spectrum protect as close to a hundred different msps and csps who provide backup and archive services with award-winning spectrum protect so our specialist families and I've different than it was seven years ago today actually its accelerated easy-to-deploy it's easy to use you have a wide choice of msps and csps to use whether it's soft layer or other providers in the industry and our software-defined storage supports all of that vendor base regardless of whether it's IBM SoftLayer or other cloud providers as well well you could argue to Netflix did it at a time when it was early days right it was near the Pioneer they were they were final trees hack and you know right they're the ones with the arrows in motion tracking chaos monkeys everywhere so so Tommy you guys okay all right sorry John I want to talk about the state of the industry it's a lot of interesting stuff going on even in the business for four decades you understand some of the trends you've seen a lot of the ebb and the flow how would you describe where we're at right now seems like an uncertain time so storage is incredibly tumultuous right now one of the good things about storage it's constantly filled with innovation as you know from my past I've done seven startups thank God five have been acquired so I can wear a Hawaiian shirt they're expensive these days ISA why insurance so every five six years you have a wave of startups of the storage business that's not common in most other segments of the IT market space but in storage it is so you have a constant wave of startups that happens on a normal basis and we're in one of those phases right now at the same time you have massive change in the Tier one vendor base EMC and Dell emerging HP splits into two network appliance which had been an incredibly great company it's fast has now missed their numbers almost eight quarters in Rowan just last week announced they're laying off 1500 people so the world is changing dramatically also the applications workloads and use cases are changing dramatically so you've gone to a cognitive ear you don't have cereal management of data you now have parallel management of data you don't want databases that react or let's say a data warehouse it takes 30 hours to run a report you want the report to run in one so if you will real-time cognitive data availability and ability to analyze that data and that is dramatically changing what startups are out how successful they'll be how the tier 1 vendors are reacting you know for example one of the great things about IBM is we are focused on flash which is the fastest grain storage systems market and software to find which was one of the fastest growing storage software markets and we're leaders in both market spaces so when you open up the envelope of what's inside storage it's a slow growth market three to four percent per year is all it's growing but certain segments are growing rapidly and IBM focuses on those rapid growth segments now but the cloud piece right so you make you guys are talking about clever safe before I was thought that was a cloud acquisition which it was in part right but it's also something that falls into the storage portfolio right and that's because clever safe can be configured in a number of different ways on-premises only cloud only or hybrid configuration we can have an on-premises clever safe configuration talking to a cloud-based configuration so again part of IBM strategy to make sure that from a storage perspective all of our software to find infrastructure and what we acquired with clever safe are designed for hybrid cloud configurations or private cloud configurations or public again our spectrum family is used by hundreds of public cloud service writers to deliver a backup service for example a spectrum protect so the reason my question was this very clearly in effect on that you talked about three percent or whatever you know the the latest numbers are it's flat Marcus gases and flat is flat but the cloud market of course is growing like that from a smaller base but it's clearly having an impact on demand is that a fair statement yeah I think what's happening when you look at it from a storage perspective where you're really having the biggest impact on cloud is in the lower end in the entry space yes the capacity is growing exponentially but whether it's the department level of a giant at global fortune 500 whether it's Herzog's bar and grill or a midsize company when they need a small array a lot of times are going to a public cloud configuration so that low end of the market is shrinking at the same time when you do software-defined if you're one of the tier 1 vendors the storage could come from off-the-shelf hard drives so the values in the software but that also delivers a revenue hit to the vendor base and Ashley when you think about how would you get incredible performance five or six years ago you would have bought an array that was five to eight million dollars best case if not closer to 10 you'd be lucky if you could get 200,000 I ops maybe you could get five milliseconds latency today at an average sale place of 300,000 dollars we can deliver over a million I ops and sub hundred micro center and latency so you don't need to buy your big iron at five eight 10 million you can do it with something for three hundred thousand dollars huge the bottleneck John okay I mean this is back to our kena brian.krall from Apple was on stage another great company leaders in the delivering great value but he made a comment I want to get your reaction to because I know it's a phone analogy but I want to bring into storage if the values and the software and all flash is the bet you guys are making the numbers are impressive in terms of performance in terms of I ops throughput and and cost per puss per megabyte he said you got to get closer to the hardware to write your native apps and he's referring to the iphone software app using Swift and xcode to the hardware so in storage look different how does the software piece take advantage of the hardware and is that built-in is an obstacle the customer because we're seeing this notion of okay take care of it take advantage of the hardware so what was how do you reconcile the we've done some very strong things there so let's take for example our spectrum virtualized software spectrum virtualize allows enterprise class data services across heterogeneous storage environments hours our competitors and anything that's white box over 300 arrays we have taken the spectrum virtualized platform and integrate it into our v nine thousand flash systems all-flash array into our mid tier storwize v7000 and our mid tier storwize v5000 which we just launched last week three new configurations we also have the sand volume controller but what we've done is integrate that spectrum virtualized software which rides a virtual back end of all storage not just our own provides a single way to replicate a single way to snapshot transparent block migration on the fly and integrate that right into flash systems and storwize as a software comes as a hard annick Stauffer comes with it exactly it's built into the size of Jeff managed as a code or estructuras code like an apple programa billion native app to the iphone what does that develop or doing with you guys is it through that software layer or how they could be right i mean the key thing when you look from a DevOps perspective they want to quickly be able to provision storage okay and with things like all the spectrum family and with the gooeys we've implemented into our store wise our XIV and all of our storage products it's very easy to deploy storage you can do it in minutes so whether the DevOps guy does or where the deadlock flight calls the storage guy the bottom line is they can get the storage up and running in a virtual environment a containerized environment in a matter of minutes and from a DevOps perspective that's what they want so we're able to meet the needs of the DevOps guy but also the traditional storage vendor as well don't get one last question for me for the henna we've run out of time they might have one more but I want to get your take on this because it's really been an interesting industry chess game with VCE and VMware and EMC doing the hyper converged x4 star calling it this hyper conversion without Cisco right this is because no longer you mentioned you in partnership with Cisco so VCC and bx rails was talked about last week what's going on with VCE is it still going to be around you see you're taking multiple forms is the increased breadth of solution is going to be multi-vendor what's your in it what you're taking on so you were at IBM cell you have relationship with cisco has that how does that what a customer's deal and what does the customer do because they're like okay who do I so I think there's a couple things that customers to look at first of all there's going to be a transformation VCE as it was originally constructed a partnership with cisco EMC and VMware will not exist after the acquisition this is my theory what will happen this distinctive sorry Cisco is go in there's no luck involved so all happen is those Cisco servers will be transitioned now and dell servers will be tradition did it's exactly what's going to happen so cisco is aware of this and cisco has been engaging with other partners like i mentioned the vs. tak had the best first year of any converged infrastructure in the history within its first year why well in the middle of last year what happened Dell an EMC an announced a merger so a lot of the business partners a lot of the end users there's cause for concern and EMC is already taken Cisco out of a number of configurations and there's a number of things for an end-user to think about one look at the development budgets what was the EMC development budget what's the dell development budget and substantially lower EMC did an outstanding job of acquiring startups with the debt load that's been written about publicly not just in the storage fresh but really in the financial press will be able to afford to buy a bunch of cool startups like EMC used to do the old days hard to say an EMC well I thought of stata domain was a great acquisition for uniting isilon same thing will they be able to continue to do that and like IBM EMC has a pretty good reputation for support and service that's not really reputation of the guys in Austin their reputation is cost-effective rapid delivery not necessarily the best important service the enterprise side people looking for that enterprise-class important service so those the questions that a customer needs to ask at the end user level where a channel partner use a civ as this merger goes for how's it going to impact the roadmap for the future the development expense my support capability those are things that have different models in those two companies so being should see how it pans out unfortunately we're out of time because we could do a whole cube second just on that area thanks for coming by give you the last word what does the digital transformation for the customer of IBM the buyer when they talked to you in the elevator and they say hey what's the storage angle on this digital treasure where the stores fit into my digital transformation what's the what's the bumper sticker what's the value proposition well the key thing digital transformation is a different sort of data it's been data for years and years and years data has to sit on storage the better the storage is your better the digital environment is the faster it is things like flash systems or our spectrum scale for cognitive the better that date is going to be so the digital era is powered by storage underneath it's like the foundation of a home good foundation great home good foundation great digital data great foundation the cube day one here more foundational coverage tomorrow the cube conversation will continue tomorrow day two we had more interviews today but tomorrow a lot of big names the biggest names in tech most powerful people here IBM interconnect is the cube we right back with more coverage here on day ones wrap up after the short break

from Las Vegas accepting the signal from the noise it's the kue coverage interconnect 2016 brought to you by IBM now your host John hurry and Dave vellante okay welcome back around we are here live in Las Vegas for IBM interconnect 2016 special presentation of the cube our flagship program would go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise I'm John forreal echoes gave a lot they are next guest pricing Kohler who's the chief information technology officer and I'm saying this for the first time on the cube the weather company and IBM business welcome back to the cube thank you very much glad to be back last time you weren't an IBM business we were just the weather company were just the weather company so congratulations on your success want to say we really big fans of it but what Papa Chiana the team have done is visionary bold and very relevant so congratulations hey how's it feel it is grateful din we are really excited the opportunity with the IBM platform and you know the reach and the capabilities I mean it it really helps accelerate what we were trying to get done as the weather company you know as our own standalone business um and you know as you try to prepare and protect the entire planet all of its people and all of its businesses prepare and protect them for tomorrow which is really what the weather is company is all about finding that intersection of consumer behavior helping prepare and protect you as a in your personal life and your family but also you as a business owner how do we prepare and protect you to do better tomorrow because of the weather and the insights that we can provide fit straight into the work the Bob picciano in team have been doing with the insights you know economy with Watson and analytics with insights as a service all of that just kind of plugs together in it it really is a natural fit it's interesting to see IBM's move we were asked to guess on from IBM earlier and Jamie Thomas said it's all open source we want to get in early so this is an early bet for IBM certainly a bold move with the weather company but it's interesting the scuttlebutt as we talk to our sources inside the company close to the company have telling us that the weather companies is infiltrating and affecting the DNA IBM in a good way and you guys have always been a large scale data company and that is what all businesses are striving to digitize everything yes and so take us through that I mean one I think it's fair to say that you guys are kind of infecting I play in a positive way the mindset of being large-scale data yeah well why is that so compelling and how did you guys get here obviously whether the big data problem share some commentary around where it all came from well i think you know it's in my DNA first of all and it's in our company's DNA it's are no teams DNA you know I'm a change agent you would not want to hire me to maintain something good if you want to hire me to you know to break something and rebuild it better that's I'm your guy so you know I think when you look at the movement from you know the kind of the movement over time of IBM and you know the constant evolution that IBM goes through time is ripe when you take the cloud capabilities and you take data and you take analytics and the whole concept and capabilities of Watson Watson gets smarter as it learns more Watson can only be as smart as the data you feed it and so for Watson to continue to learn and continue to solve new problems and continue to expand its capability set we do have to feed it more data and and so you know looking at whether whether it was the original big data problem ever since the first mainframe the first you know application ever written on a mainframe was a weather forecast and ever since then everybody's been trying to figure out how to make the forecast more accurate and a lot of that comes from more data the more data you have the more accurate your forecast is going to be so we've been trying to solve this big data problem Walt and Dave talks about it was saw earlier in the opening about digital assets and in this digital transformation companies have to create more digital assets that's just dating yeah in this new model so when you look at the data aspect you say whether also is a use case where people are familiar with we were talking before we went on camera that people can understand the geekiness of whether it's different they're familiar with it but also highlights a real-life use case and the IOT Internet of Things wearables we heard you have sports guys on here tracking sensors this brings up that digital digitizing is going to be everything not just IT right it makes it real right if I think about my parents right we've been talking about IOT hey dad you're gonna have a connected refrigerator why does he care what do I need a connected refrigerator for but as you start to bring these insights to life and you make them real and you say you know what if I actually understand the humidity levels in your house and I can get that off the sensor on the air intake of your refrigerator I can now correlate that the humidity level outside of your house and I might be able to actually tweak your HVAC and I can make that run efficiently and I can now you know cut thirty percent of your cooling costs and all of these you know examples they're integrated they become real yeah and and I think weather is great because everybody checks their weather app the weather channel app or the weather underground app every day they're always looking at it and you know we get it right seventy-eight percent of the time we'd get it wrong sometimes we're constantly working to maintain our number-one position and data accuracy on weather forecasting and you know the more data we have the more accurate we can make it and so we've got any safer to you think just think about the use cases of people's lives slippery rose you know events correct I mean it's all tied in no goes back to another you know if I understand what's going on with the anti-lock braking system of a car and I already have a communication vehicle into everybody in that car which is our appt in their pocket I can alert them if the car is up ahead are having here are their abs activated and if all of the cars up ahead are having their abs activated I could alert them two miles back and say hey get ready slow down it's real it's not forecasted it's real data I'm giving you a real alert you should really take action and you know as we move from you know weather-alerts that we're looking out forward in time many hours as we're now doing rain alerts where we tell you it's going to start raining in the next seven minutes ten minutes people love those because it's right now and I can make a decision right now lightning strikes are always fascinating oh god because I gotta see crisis so last fall at IBM insight we interviewed David Kinney death your CEO and then right after I think was the week after I was watching some you know I was in Boston watching some sports program and there's bill belichick complaining about the in accuracy of whether i'll try that whether some reporter asked him about you know you factor in the weather i don't even pay attention i look at the weather forecast they're always wrong as a wait a minute I just I just interviewed David Kennedy he was bragging on the weather is the accuracy and how much it's improved so helping you mentioned seventy-eight percent of the time it's it's gotten better over time it has it still got rooms we're not perfect so so talk about that progression it is the data but how much better are you over time where is that better is it just short term or is it longer term at so color to that it's a great question and it's a fair point I think one of the biggest changes we've made in the last three years that the weather company is we've taken our forecast from what was roughly 2 million locations where we would do a forecast two million locations around the globe and today we we create a forecast for 2.2 billion locations around the globe because the weather is different at Fenway then Boston Logan it's just different than the the start time of rain the start time of a thunderstorm you know that's gonna be different now maybe five minutes but it's different the temperature the wind it's different and so as we've increased the accuracy and granularity of ours are our locations we've also done that from a time perspective as well so we used to produce a forecast every four to six hours depending upon how fast the models ran and did they run and complete successfully we now update our forecast every 15 minutes and so we we've increased the the you know all aspects of that and when you when you now think about getting your weather forecast you can no longer just type in BOS for your airport code and say i want to know what the weather is at boston logan if you're you know if you're in cambridge the boston logan forecast is not accurate for you you know five years ago every that was fine for everybody right right and so we have to retrain people to think about and make sure that when they're looking for a forecast and they're using our apps they can get a very specific forecast for where they are whatever point on the globe they are and and don't have you know Boston you know Logan as your you know favorite for your city if you're sitting in Cambridge or your you know you know it in Andover further outside where I am now where you gonna be my guess I gotta get so different you leverage the gps capabilities get that pinpoint location it will improve what the forecast is telling so I feel like this is one of those omni headed acquisition monsters for lack of a better term because when the acquisition was first announced is huh wow really interesting remember my line Dell's by an emc IBM is buying the weather company oh how intriguing it's a contrast it's all about the data the Dane is a service and then somebody whispered in my ear well you know there's like 800 Rockstar data scientists that come along with that act like wow it's all about the data scientists and then on IBM's earnings call i hear the weather company will provide the basis for our IOT platform like okay there's another one so we're take uh uh well i think IBM made a very smart move i'm slightly biased on that opinion but I think I be made a very smart move at very forward-looking move and one built on a cloud foundation not kind of a legacy foundation and when you think about IOT data sets we ingest 100 terabytes of data a day i ingest 62 different types of data at the weather company i ingest this data and then i distributed it massive volumes so what we had fundamentally built was the world's you know largest cloud-based iot data platform and you know IBM has many capabilities of their own and as we bring these things together and create a true next-gen cloud-based IOT data engine the ability for IBM to become smarter for Watson to become smarter than all of IBM's customers and clients to to become smarter with better applications better alerts better triggers and that alerts if you think about alerting my capability to alert hundreds of millions of people weather-alerts whether that's a lightning alert a rain alert a tornado warning whatever it is that's not really any different than me being able to alert a store clerk a night stock clerk at the local you know warehouse club that they need a stock you know aisle three differently put a different in cap on because we now have a new insight we have a new insight for what demand is going to be tomorrow and how do we shift what's going on that alert going down to a handheld device on the guy driving the four club yeah it's no different skoda tato yeah the capability to ingest transform store do analytics lon provide alerting on and then distribute data at massive scale that's what we do we talk about is what happened when Home Depot gets a big truck comes in a bunch of fans and say we know where this know the weather company did for you yeah we don't understand you'll understand you'll fake it later they file a big on the top of it so I OT as well as markets where people don't can't understand that some people don't know it means being like what's IOT Internet of Things I don't get it explain to them some little use cases that you guys are involved in today and some of these new areas that you're highlighting with with learning somehow see real life examples for for businesses and users there is a smarter planet kind of you know safe society kind of angle to it but it's also there's a nuts-and-bolts kind of practical if business value saving money saving lives changing you know maintenance what are some of the things share the IOT so there's there's only two things there so one is what is IOT and IOT really is is sensor data at the end of the day computers sensors electronic equipment has a sensor in it usually that sensor is there to do its job it's there to make a decision for what if it's a thermostat it has a sensor in it what's the temperature you know and so there are sensors in everything today things have become digitized and so those sensors are there as next as those next evolutions have come online those those sensors got connected to the Internet why because it was easier than to manage and monitor you know you know here we are at the mandalay bay how many thermostat sensors do you think this hotel casino complex has thousands and so you can't walk around and look at each one to understand well how's the temperature doing they all needed to be shipped back to a central room so that the in a building manager could actually do his job more efficiently those things then got connected so you could look at it on a smartphone those things they continued to get connected to make those jobs easier that first version of all of those things it was siloed that data SAT within just this hotel but now as we move forward we have the ability to take that data and merge it with other data sets there's actually a personal a Weather Underground personal weather station on the roof of the Mandalay Bay and it's actually collecting weather data every three seconds sending it back to us we have a very accurate understanding of the state of the Earth's atmosphere right atop this building having those throws is very good for the weather data but now how does the weather data impact a business that cares about the weather that has there we understand what the Sun load is on the top of this building and so we can go ahead and pre-heat your pre cool rooms get ahead of what's changing out sign that will have an impact here inside we have sensors on aircraft today that are collecting telemetry from aircraft turbulence data that helps us understand exactly what's going on with that airplane and as that's fed in real-time back down to the earth we process that and then send it back to the plane behind it and let that plane behind it know that it needs to alter it course change its flight plan automatically and update the pilots that they need to change course to a smoother altitude so gone are the days of the pilot having to radio down and fall around his body it's bumpy to get these through there anywhere machines can can can do this in real time collected and synthesize it from hundreds of aircraft that have been flying in that same route now we can actually take that and produce a better you know in flight plan for those for those machines we do that with with advertising so you know when you think about advertising you be easy the easy example is hey we know that you're going to sell more of X product when y weather condition happens that's easy but what if I also help you know when not to run an ad how do I help save you money you know if I know that there's no way for me to actually impact demand of your product up or down because we know over the course of time looking at your skew data and weather data that no matter what what we do weathers gonna have this impact on your product save your money don't run an ad tomorrow because it doesn't matter what you do you're not going to actually move your product more that's great and it's much business intelligence it's all the above its contextual data help people get insights in subjective and prescriptive analytics all rolled into one in a tool that alerts the actual person may explain to people out they were predictive versus prescriptive means a lot people get those confused what's your how would you prescriptive is you know where we want data that just tell us what to do based upon historic looking trends so i can take ten years of weather data and I can marry that up with ten years of some other data set and I can come up with you know a trend based upon the past and with that then I could prescribe what you should do in the future hey looks like general trend bring an umbrella tomorrow it's good it might rain but if I get into predictive analytics now I can start to understand by looking at forward-looking data things that haven't happened yet or new data sets that I'm merging in in real time oh wait a minute we thought that every time it rained more people went to this gas station to fill up but wait a minute today there's an accident on the road and people no matter what we do they're not going to go to that gas station because they're not even going to drive by it so being able to predict based upon feet of our real-time data but also forward-looking data the predictive analytics is really around the insights that we want to guess I got to ask you one question about the IBM situation and I want you to kind of reflect get him get you know all right philosophical for a second what's the learning that you've had over the past few weeks months post-acquisition inside IBM is there a learning that you to kind of hit you that you didn't expect there's something you'd expect what sure what was your big takeaway from this experience personally and you had some great success in the business now integrated into IBM what's the learning that cuz that's comes out of this for you I am really proud of the team at the weather company you know I I think what we have been able to accomplish as a small company you know comparative to my four hundred and sixty-eight thousand colleagues at IBM yeah what we've been able to accomplish what we've been able to do is really you know it's impressive and I've been proud of my team I'm proud of our company I'm proud of what we were able to get done as a company and you know the reflection really is as you bring that into IBM how do you make sure that you can you can now scale that to benefit such a large organization and and so while we were great at doing it for ourselves and we built an amazing business with amazing growth you know attracted lots of people that looked at buying us and obviously IBM executing on that I think that's amazing and I'm proud of that but I think my biggest reflection is that doesn't necessarily equate to success at IBM and we now have to retool and retrans form ourselves again to be able to take what we know how to do really well which is build great capabilities build big data platforms build analytics engines and inside engines and then armed a sea of developers to use our API we can't just take what we've done and go mate rest on your laurels you gotta go reinvent so I think my biggest you know real learning and take away from the kind of integration process is well we have a lot to learn and we have a lot of change we need to do so that we can actually now adapt and and continue to be us but do it in a way that works as an IBM ER and and that's that's there's there's going to be an art to this and we've got a ways to learn so I'm going in while eyes wide open around what I have to learn but I also am very reflective on on how proud I am as a leader of the team that you know has created you know such an amazing capability acquisition is done you savor it you come in you get blue washed and I hope I had a Saturday afternoon where I say okay got all like what is this gonna think so and then okay so you you wake up in the morning and you sort of described at a high level you know what you're doing but top three things that you're focused on the next you know 12 12 months so so you know the biggest thing that I'm focused on number one is making sure that we protect the weather company culture and how we know how to do and build great things and so I've got to lead us through obviously becoming integrated with IBM but not losing who we are and IBM is very supportive of that you know Bob picciano his team have been awesome and you know John Kelly and team have been awesome everybody that we have worked with has been so supportive of Bryson please make sure you find the right way through this we don't want to break you and I think that's natural for any acquisition for any yeah but you guys aren't dogmatic you were very candid saying we're gonna transform ourselves and adapt absolutely and so and so so we've got that on wrestling on my mind how do we go find immediate wins there's there's a a million different ways for us to win there's thousands of IBM sales teams that are out in front of clients it's just today with new problems how do we quickly adapt what we've been good at doing and help solve new problems very quickly so that's on my mind and then you know wrapping that in a way that becomes self service we can't I don't want to scale my team through people to solve all these problems I want to find a way to make sure that all these capabilities new data sets new insights new capabilities that we bring the life I want to do that in a self-service way I want to make sure that our technology the way we interact with developers the developer community that we bring in to kind of work on our behalf to make this happen I don't want to solve all these problems I want to enable others to solve the problems and so we're very focused on the self service aspect which i think is very new prices thank you so much taking the time out of your busy schedule to see with us in the queue good to see you again or any congratulations IOT everything's a sensor that we're a sense are here in the cube and we sense that it's time to go to SiliconANGLE DV and check out all the videos we have a purpose our sensor is to get the data to share that out with you thanks for the commentary and insight appreciate it whether company great success weather effects of song could affect stock prices all kinds of things in the real world so we had a lot of a lot of big data thank you very much look you here live in Las Vegas right back more coverage at this short break