okay we're back live day 1 of IBM's information on demand this is silicon angles the cube our flagship program we'd go out the advanced district is stealing from the noise I'm John forums with my co-host de Valle ante as usual we are here to break down and extract the signal from the noise and share that with you and we'd love to have analysts ha we had Judith Horowitz on she's trending on the Twitter board and one other person who's also trending is merv adrian with Gardner Keeble um very authoritative in space welcome to have you great to have you back on the cube again seems like we just did this last week last week in big data NYC our event that was going on around strata conference on hadoop world kind of geeky hadoop meets business mainstream here at IBM what's your take on sleeve sat through the sessions we were following your tweets and just what's what's your what's your report card day one for IBM as always overwhelmingly large 13,000 i think is the number here it has to be seen to be believed if you've never been to one of these events and and you have some idea of the scale of these these venues in Vegas but you come out of an event room you come out of a ballroom you and you can't move in the hallway for three or four minutes subway is it is extraordinary the number of people who are here so those of us who've done it a few times have learned a few of the back ways through the garage up over the roof here way down the sounding lobes yeah but it's it's an amazing crowd it's an extraordinarily mixed crowd to your point John there's a lot of suits here a lot more suits in there were at strata a lot of people who are very interested in the business side and even in a session that I just SAT through that was talking about competitive displacements by IBM two of the people on the panel basically said look I didn't really want to hear too much about the technology it was as much about my relationship with the vendors I was working with as it was about the technology and that's always been one of IBM strengths is that they have a lifetime view of customer value and a they cultivate their relationship very carefully over the years so they do very well within their base their bigger challenge and what we're seeing here is how do they reach outside of that how do they reach the folks that are not already blue stack loyalists and get them to come over because they talk about how they're reaching out beyond that base but it's come correct and the ninety percent of the business if not more is with the blue stack is that a fair assertion I think the numbers are that something like eighty percent of IBM's revenue comes from twenty percent of IBM's customers yeah so right there even within their own base you're seeing a very strong concentration clearly they have a strong base in companies that have the highest of mainstream requirements for security and reliability the big banks and so on and that remains true but they're they're big focus in several of the speeches here was ease and simplicity and that's a story that has to be told with pictures and they didn't do that effectively today they did not do that effectively today if you want to tell me about how simple your GUI is and how easy it is to use your product for discovery then don't use five thousand words to do it put five pictures on the stage and show me family right they didn't do it ServiceNow tableau splunk listen there's it there's a great tool here called discover which IBM has that is a marvelous way for an entry point into the unstructured and new data that people are trying to work with that gives you a way to go play with it find something useful then persist something that will be of value which is the next the inevitable next step of most people's early Big Data experiments and right now that's an area where the Big Data community in general all those folks we saw at strata last week this is where things begin to break down for them right it's great for those first few experiments then you're going to make some architectural choices where am I going to persist the stuff that I'm going to use next week and the week after that and IBM has a great portfolio of pieces that can be put together to tell that story that's what they need to be doing and today I heard about the portfolio I didn't hear about that story I didn't I didn't hear a narrative and and the narrative is there to be told so I think they'll get better at me I think I think one thing that seems awkward but I mean seems really relevant but awkward the way there there we get this tomorrow maybe is the social business is a great story I mean that that kind of Tamia is the the face of the analytics which is geeky you know value chain process improvement but the social business kind of hits the rubber meets the road it's the user shaking their smartphone and getting analytics women you know some chat application or you know the real change is on the society did they tease that out today are they saving that no I think they get it very very effectively in multiple places in financial services in health care in smart metered solutions for the industrial Internet the same things we're hearing elsewhere what they're doing very effectively is pulling out the stories where people have had that kind of an impact again the challenge is to show people you can do this too so that was one of the best things said from the from the podium by our host today the guy from the National Geographic his name escapes me jhon Jason fake yes shake Jake poorly horwich he was wonderful he did a great opening and he put up some wonderful visualizations and he said you know this is about big dad look at how they've combined this data with geography you know wouldn't it be great if you can do it too you can do it too I was it was good perfectly staged he just conveyed it very very lawful school PowerPoint users are you know still clutched to text and seven bullets in the title and you know 14 fonts just make him 24 point please yeah no more than five so Ashley it's a tough story to tell I mean to me my takeaway I want to get your opinion on this from both you guys this is a complex story to tell talking about big data analytics gonna do from everything else under the covers blu acceleration you got cloud and mobile which are under the hood a lot of technology issues their nuances data governance information government and the social business as a paradigm mind-blowing paradigm shift to try to tell that together as hard the same time they get customers deploying this stuff and giving successes on top of it so that's of a business outcomes that consultative journey and the implementation at productions scale I need all those things Janet the one makes for a hard story well at evens it depends on how you tell it if you tell it as a story and if you abstract away from the complexities of of an extraordinarily large product portfolio then there's a message to be told there then there's another message to be told when you do get into the details of the product portfolio iBM has to do both and sometimes they seemed caught between skills and crackers you know right by half pregnant you know stuck in the middle what everyone say yeah you feel that that day one kind of stuck in the middle or I think they hit elements of both ends of the spectrum but spend a lot of time kind of in between them not quite doing enough on either end that said I think it all depends on what you bring to the conversation I I wandered in really not intentionally to one of the enterprise content management sessions that's not really my sweet spot but it was a great discussion and it was a discussion that as they discussed unstructured data sounded very much like what us db8 style geeks are talking about over on the on the Hadoop side of the house with a different set of business issues but being realized and driving value at least if not more effectively and especially with the connection to the social side of things so they've got the story we were talking about the 8020 before yeah 90 10 or whatever it is Desai him actually have to move beyond that base to succeed I mean most businesses if less their startups get most of their business from their existing customers sure it's a great question what's your definition of success and I talked to the guys in the various Wall Street firms all the time and they're always worried about the change in the slope of the curve it's the area under the curve that matters right there's a lot of money down there underneath that line there's a lot of customer value there's a lot of recurring revenue and IBM's doing just fine there do they need to have a much larger user base of lots and lots of new users today well I don't think so but it wouldn't hurt what and it and it's awfully nice to be able to position yourself as leading people into the future as opposed to being the place where they'll go when they grow up and I think a lot of people today as their systems do mature and require these these more significant enterprise class features will inevitably migrated to my IBM technologies that can answer us but the area under the curve dilemma right you get Amazon it makes last quarter made seven million dollars in a 70 75 million dollar billion-dollar company maybe seven million in profit and the stock goes up by IBM throws off you know more cash free cash flow than an IBM said from the stage today that their bare metal implementation performs twice as well as Amazon's and now I haven't benchmark that but that's a nice assertion to be a munich performance is that why people go to the cloud though right that's probably not where they go there at first of an interesting data point gotta but I put but your performance is a second-order variable meeting if everything's equal first I first I explore I discover I find value once i do and i put this into production then I start thinking about how can I do this more cost-effectively how can I do it with better performance how can I make it more stable secure reliable that's when people come to IBM and there's still well positioned for answering those questions when those questions come up competition out there for these guys obviously we were talking about softlayer as a bolt-on try to figure out cloud damn I on it I'm not what's your take on their moves in the cloud and just cut their relative to their competition not my sweet spot but i think that IBM has the assets and the and the spread and the portfolio to be a formidable competitor there if they choose to go there the interesting challenge for anybody who wants to compete with Amazon is Amazon stated mission right we will be the low-margin supplier can you think of another I tea vendor who says that yeah and advil and by the way and by the way they're innovating yeah and they're disrupting and innovating and we'll go push to commoditize margin to them to the close to zero I think their margins are a lot higher than people may realize too much well their shift in the margins they seem to be able to drop their prices pretty frequently go crisscross doesn't everybody Merv they just don't announce that they don't market the fact right Evan doesn't doesn't everybody's price drop every quarter no no in a word with the cost of a choose a new product and increase my boss to compute and storage drops every quarter saying they don't pass it on to customers shocking isn't it you guys kept him honest on them yeah we tried they tried we do our best but then there's always new features they can add to the product and charge for okay remember we got to wrap up we'd have just got started you all right now you have you on the cube okay hey Lucy tomorrow I'm sure this huge segment we've ever done referred that's okay I know we haven't we had the pressure because the analysts dinner from in he chew it wants to come on and me for your tight defer to the lady anytime she's a rock star and the cube alumni she's been on more times than you but all you're catching up to her yeah I'm with my best you know I'm trending thanks guys Merv Adrian analyst at gardner bender on the block seeing many many cycles excited about what iBM has needs to kind of clean up their their position get more data and products don't get stuck in the middle and just good stuff though IBM got good review from Merv here on the cube we'll be right back after this short break with our next guest the cube