(dramatic music) >> Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at IBM Think 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're in San Francisco this year at the newly rejuved Moscone Center. Welcoming to theCUBE for the first time, Jozef de Vries, Director of IBM Cloud Databases. Jozef, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you very much, great to be here, great to be here. >> So as we were talking before we went live, this is, I was asking what you're excited about for this year's IBM Think. >> Yeah. >> Only the second annual IBM Think. >> Right. >> This big merger of a number of shows. >> Sure, you're right. >> Day minus one, team minus one, >> Yeah. >> everything really kicks off tomorrow. Talk to us about some of the things that you're working on. You've been at IBM for a long time. >> Mmm hmm. >> But cloud managed databases, let's talk value there for the customers. >> Yeah, definitely. Cloud managed databases really, at its core, it's about simplifying adoption of cloud provided services and reducing the capital expense that comes along with developing applications. Fundamentally what we're trying to do is abstract the overhead that is associated with running your own systems. Whether it's the infrastructure management, whether it's the network management, whether it's the configuration and deployment of you databases. Our collection of services really is about streamlining time to value of accessing and building against your databases. So we are really focused on is allowing the developer to focus on their business critical applications, their objectives, and really what they're paid for. They're paid to build applications, not paid to maintain systems. When we talk about the CIO office, the CTO office, they are looking at cost, they're looking at ways to reduce overall expenditures. And what we're able to provide with cloud managed databases is the ability not to have to staff an IT team, not to have to maintain and pay for infrastructure, not have to procure licenses, what have you, everything that goes into standing up the managing those systems yourself, we provide that and we provide the consumption based methods. So you basically pay for what you use, and we have various ways in which you can interact with your databases and the charges that are associated with that. But it really is again about alleviating all of that overhead and that expense that is associated with running systems yourself. >> 15 years ago, you're back to, before you started with IBM, >> Yeah. >> There was obviously IBM DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, >> SQL Server. >> I guess MySQL is around >> Mm hmm. >> back then, LabStack was building out the internet. But databases are pretty boring >> Yeah. >> back then. And then all of a sudden, it exploded. >> Right. >> And the NoSQL movement happened in a huge way. >> Mm hmm. >> Coincided with the big data movement. What happened? >> Yeah, I think as we saw the space of this technology evolve, and a variety of different kind of use cases cropping up. The development community kind of respond to that. And really what we try to do with our portfolio is provide that variety of database technology solutions. To me, not any number of different use cases. And we like to think about it broken down into two categories. Your primary data stores. This is where your applications are writing and reading the data that has been stored. And then particularly to your point, this is where we call the auxiliary data services, for example. These are your in memory caches, your message brokers, your search index, what have you. There is a plethora of different database technologies out there today that plug into any number of different use cases and application developers are attempting to fill. And more often than not, they're using more than one database at a time. And really what we're trying to do at IBM with our cloud managed database offering is provide a variety of those data services and database technologies to meet a variety of those use cases, whether they're mixing and matching, or different kind of applications workloads or what have you. We'd like to provide our customers with the choices that are out there today in the community at large. >> So many choices. >> Yeah. >> Am I hearing that its kind of horses for courses? I mean, you get things like, even niches like Cumulo with fine grain security. >> Yeah. >> Or Couchbase, obviously. >> Mm hmm. This one scales. And then this one is easy to use. You take Mongo, for text, really easy to use >> Yeah exactly. >> Sort of different specialized use cases. How do you squint through, and how does IBM match the right characteristics with the right technology? >> It's really, it's two-pronged. It's about understanding the user base. Understanding and listening to your customers. And really internalizing what are the use cases that they are looking to fulfill? It's also being in tune with the database technology in the market today. It's understanding where there are trends. Understanding where there are new use cases cropping up. And it's about building a deep enough engineering operations team where we can quickly spin up these new offerings. And again provide that technology to our end customers. And it's about working with our customers as well. And understanding the use cases and then sometimes making recommendations on what database technology or combination of databases would be best suited for their objectives. >> I'm curious. One of the things that you mentioned in terms of what the developer's day-to-day job should be, is this almost IBM's approach to aligning with the developer role and enabling it in new ways? >> It is really about, I think, having sympathy in delivering on solutions in regards that is simply for the pains that they had otherwise endured 10, 15 years ago. When the notion of cloud managed anything really wasn't a thing yet. Or was just starting to emerge. IBM in houses runs their own systems for years and years obviously and the folks on my team, they have come from other companies, they know that the pain, what pain is involved in trying to run services. So like I said it's a little bit out of sympathy, it's a bit out of knowing what your users need in a cloud managed service. Whether again it's security, or availability, or redundancy, you name it. It's about coming around to the other side of the table and I sat where you once sat. And we know what you need out of your data services. So trusting us to provide that for you. >> How are the requirements different? Things like recovery and resiliency. Do I need asset compliance in this new world? May be you could. >> Yeah. It's funny, that's a good question in that we don't necessarily deal so much with database specific requirements. Again as I mention we try to provide a variety of different database technologies. And by and large the users are going to know what they need, what combinations that they will need. And we'll work with them if they're navigating their way through it. Really what we see more the requirements these days are around the management characteristics. As you cited, are they highly available? Are they backed up? What's your disaster recovery policy? What security policies do you have in place? what compliance, so on and so forth. It's really about presenting the overall package of that managed solution. Not so much, whether the database is going to be high available verses consistent replication or what have you. I mean that's in there, and it's part of what we engage with our customers about, but also what we'd like to put a lot of emphasis is on providing those recognized database technologies so that there is a community behind and there's opportunity for the users to understand what it is that they need beyond just what we can sell them. It's really about selling the value proposition of again, the management characteristics of the services. >> So who do you see as the competition? Obviously the other big, the two big cloud providers, AWS and Azure. >> Yep. >> You're competing with them. >> Definitely. >> Quality of offerings. May be talk about how you fit. >> And Google's another one. Or Oracle is another emerging one. Even Alibaba is catching up quite a bit. It really feels like a neck-to-neck race in our day after day. The way we try to approach our portfolio is focusing on deep, broad and secure. Deep being that there're a core set of database technologies. We're building the database itself. Db2, Cloudant which is based off of Couchbase. Excuse me, CouchDB. And then broad. Again as I've been mentioning, having a variety of different database technologies. And they're secure across the board. Whether it's secure in how we run the systems, secure on how we certify them through external compliance certifications. Or secure in how we integrate with security based tooling that our users can take advantage of. Regarding our competitors, it really is one week it may be a new big data at scale type of database technology. Another day it may be, or another week it might be deeper integrations into the platform. It might be new open source database technologies. It might be a new proprietary database technology. But we're, it's a constant, like I say, race to who got the most robust portfolio. >> Developers are like teenagers. They're fickle. >> Yeah, that too, that too. We got to be quick in order to respond to those demands. >> In this age of hybrid multi-cloud, where the average company has five plus private cloud, public cloud, through inertia, through acquisition, et cetera. Where's IBM's advantage there as companies are, I think we heard a stat the other day, Dave, that in 2018, 80% of the companies migrated data and apps from public cloud. In terms of this reality that companies live in this multi-cloud, where is IBM's advantage there? And where does your approach to cloud managed services really differentiate IBM's capabilities? >> Really there's, for the last couple of years, a tremendous amount of investment on building on the Kubernetes open source platform. And even in particular to our cloud managed database services, we have been developing and have been recently releasing a number of different databases that run on a platform that we've developed against Kubernetes. It's a platform that allows us to orchestrate deployments, deletions of databases, backups, high availability, platform level integrations, all, a number of different things. What that has allowed us to do when concerning a hybrid type of strategy is it makes our platform more portable. So Kubernetes is something that can run on the cloud. It can run in a private cloud. It can run on premise. And this platform we're developing is something that can be deployed, which we do today for private, public cloud consumption, which can also be packaged up and deploy into a private cloud type environment. And ultimately it's portable and it's leveraging of that Kubernetes technology itself. So we're not hamstringing ourselves to purely public cloud type services, or only private cloud type services. We want to have something that is abstracted enough that again it can move around to these different kind of environments. >> How important is open source and how important is it for you to commit to the different open source projects? There are so many, >> Yeah. >> And you have limited resources. So how do you manage that? >> Open source is really critical both in what we're building and what we're also offering. As we've talked about our users out there, they know what they often want or sometimes we nudge them to the right or to the left, but generally speaking it's around all the open source technologies and whatever may be trending for that current month is often times what we're getting requested for. It could be a Postgres. It could be a RabbitMQ. It could be ElasticSearch. What have you. And really we put a lot of emphasis on embracing the open source community, providing those database technologies to our customers. And then it allows our customers to benefit from the community at large too. We don't become again the sole provider of education and information about that technology. We're able to expose the whole community to our customers and they're able to take advantage of that. >> I hear a lot of complaints sometimes, particularly from folks that might list themselves in a marketplace for one cloud or another, that they feel like the primary cloud vendor might be nudging the customer into their proprietary database. What's IBM's position on that? Is that fair? Is that overblown? >> We obviously have proprietary tech, particularly the Db2. And that's something we're continue investing in. It's what we view as one of our strategic top priority database technologies. We are very active developers in the Couch community as well. I wouldn't consider that proprietary, but again back to the point of-- >> CouchDB. You're as the steward of CouchDB. >> Exactly. >> Right. >> Right, exactly. But again, firm believers in open source. We want to give those opportunities to our customers to avoid those vendor lock-in type situations. We actually have quite a lot of interests from our EU customer base. And by and large EU policies are around anti-trust and what have you. They tend to gravitate towards open source technology because they know it's again portable. They can be used in Postgres by IBM one month and if they no longer are satisfied with that, they can take their Postgres workloads and move them into another cloud provider. Ideally they're coming from the other cloud providers onto IBM. >> Well I should be actually more specific, in fairness, Dynamo's often cited. I supposed Google's Spanner although that's sort of a more of a niche, >> Mm hmm. >> specialized database. If I understand it correctly, Db2, that's a hard core transaction >> Sure. >> system. You're not going to confused that with, I don't think, anyway CouchDB. Although, who knows? May be there are some use cases there. But it sounds like you're not nudging them to your proprietary, certainly Db2 is proprietary. CouchDB is one of many options that you offer. >> Certainly Db2 is one of our core products for our database portfolio. And we do want to push our customers to Db2 where-- >> If it makes sense. >> Exactly, where it makes sense. And where there's demand for it. If it doesn't make sense so there's not demand we will offer up any number of the other databases that we also offer. >> Excellent, here's our last question.As >> Sure. >> As IBM Think the 2nd annual kicks off really tomorrow. For this developer audience that you were talking about a lot in our conversation, what are some of the exciting things that they're going to you? Any sort of obviously not breaking news, but >> Mmm hmm. >> Where would you advise the developer community, who's attending IBM Think to go to learn more about cloud managed databases? And how they can really become far more efficient to do their jobs better. >> Sure. Databases are hard, plain and simple. They are particularly hard to run, and developers who are not necessarily database admins, they're not database operators, that they want to focus on building the applications, are going to want to find solutions that alleviate that overhead of running those systems themselves. So to your question we've got sessions all throughout the week where we're talking about our Cloudant offerings and the future of where we're going with that. We've got a couple of different sessions around our IBM cloud database portfolio. This is a lot of the open source database technology we're running. We have demos in the solution center and Db2's strided all around the conference as well. So there's lots of different sessions focused on talking the value proposition of IBM's cloud managed database portfolio across the board. >> A lot of opportunities for learning. Well, Jozef de Vries, Thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCube this afternoon. >> Thank you very much, it was great. And for Dave Vallente, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube, live from IBM Think 2019. Day 1 stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)