>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Chief Data Officer Summit, brought to you by IBM. (upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We are joined by Jim Kavanaugh. He is the Senior Vice President transformation and operations at IBM. And Inderpal Bhandari he is the chief, the global chief data officer at IBM. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Happy to be here. >> So, you both spoke in the key note today and Jim, you were talking about how we're in a real seminal moment for businesses with this digital, this explosion in digital and data. CEOs get this obviously, but how do you think, do companies in general get it? What's the buy-in, in terms of understanding just how big a moment we're in? >> Well, as I said in the key note, to your point, I truly believe that all businesses in every industry are in a true, seminal moment. Why? Because this phenomenon, the digital disruption, is impacting everything, changing the nature of competition, altering industry structures, and forcing companies to really rethink to design a business at its core. And that's what we've been doin' here at IBM, trying to understand how we transition from an old world of going after pure efficiency just by gettin' after economies of scale, process standardization, to really know, how do you drive efficiency to enable you to get competitive advantage? And that has been the essence of what we've been trying to do at IBM to really reinvent our company from the core. >> So most people today have multiple jobs. You guys, of course, have multiple jobs. You've got an internal facing and an external facing so you come to events like this and you share knowledge. Inderpal, when we first met last year, you had a lot of knowledge up here, but you didn't have the cognitive blueprint, ya know, so you were sharing your experiences, but, year plus in now, you've developed this cognitive blueprint that you're sharing customers. So talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah so, we are internally transforming IBM to become a cognitive enterprise. And that just makes for a tremendous showcase for our enterprise customers like the large enterprises that are like IBM. They look at what we're doing internally and then they're able to understand what it means to create a cognitive enterprise. So we've now created a blueprint, a cognitive enterprise blueprint. Which really has four pillars, which we understand by now, given our own experience, that that's going to be relevant as you try to move forward and create a cognitive enterprise. They're around technology, organization considerations, and cultural considerations, data, and also business process. So we're not just documenting that. We're actually sharing not just those documents, but the architecture, the strategies, pretty much all our failures as we're learning going forward with this, in terms of, developing our own recipes as we eat our own cooking. We're sharing that with our clients and customers as a starting point. So you can imagine the acceleration that that's affording them to be able to get to process transformation which, as Jim mentioned, that's eventually where there's value to be created. >> And you talked about transparency being an important part of that. So Jim, you talked about three fundamentals shifts going on that are relevant, obviously, for IBM and your clients, data, cloud, and engagement, but you're really talking about consumerization. And then you shared with us the results of a 4,000 CXO survey where they said technology was the key to sustainable business over the next four or five years. What I want to ask you, square the circle for me, data warehouse used to be the king. I remember those days, (laughing) it was tough, and technology was very difficult, but now you're saying process is the king, but the technology is largely plentiful and not mysterious as it is anymore. The process is kind of the unknown. What do you take away from that survey? Is it the application of technology, the people and process? How does that fit into that transformation that you talked about? >> Well, the survey that you talked about came from our global businesses services organization that we went out and we interviewed 4,000 CXOs around the world and we asked one fundamental question which is, what is number one factor concerning your long term sustainability of your business? And for the first time ever, technology factors came out as the number one risk to identify. And it goes back to, what we see, as those three fundamental shifts all converging and occurring at the same time. Data, cloud, engagement. Each of those impacting how you have to rethink your design of business and drive competitive advantage going forward. So underneath that, the data architecture, we always start, as you stated, prior, this was around data warehouse technology, et cetera. You applied technology to drive efficiency and productivity back into your business. I think it's fundamentally changed now. When we look at IBM internally, I always build the blueprint that Inderpal has talked about, which everything starts with a foundation of your data architecture, strategy governance, and then business process optimization, and then determining your system's architecture. So as we're looking inside of IBM and redesigning IBM around enabling end-to-end process optimization, quote-to-cash, source to pay, hire to exit. Many different horizontal process orientation. We are first gettin' after, with Inderpal, with the cognitive enterprise data platform what is that standard data architecture, so then we can transform the business process. And just to tie this all together to your question earlier, we have not only the responsibility of transforming IBM, to improve our competitiveness and deliver value, we actually are becoming the showcase for our commercialized entities of software solutions, hardware, and services. To go sell that value back to clients over all. >> And part of that is responsibility for data ownership. Who owns the data. You talked about the West Coast, the unnamed West Coast companies which I of course tweeted out to talk about Google and Amazon. And, but I want to press on that a little bit because data scientists, you guys know a lot of them especially acquiring The Weather Company They will use data to train models. Those models, IP data seeps into those models. How do you protect your clients from that IP, ya know, seepage? Maybe you could talk about that. >> Talk about trust as a service and what it means. >> Yeah, ya know, I mentioned that in my talk at the key note, this is a critical, critical point with regard to these intelligent systems, AI systems, cognitive systems, in that, they end up capturing a lot of the intellectual capital that the company has that goes to the core of the value that the company brings to it's clients and customers. So, in our mind, we're very clear, that the client's data is their data. But not only that, but if there's insights drawn from that data, that insight too belongs to them. And so, we are very clear about that. It's architected into our setup, you know, our cloud is architected from the ground up to be able to support that. And we've thought that through very deeply. To some extent, you know, one would argue that that's taken us some time to do that, but these are very deep and fundamental issues and we had to get them right. And now, of course, we feel very confident that that's something that we are able to actually protect on the behalf of our clients, and to move forward and enable them to truly become cognitive enterprises, taking that concern off the table. >> And that is what it's all about, is helping other companies move to become cognitive enterprises as you say. >> Based on trust, at the end of the day, at the heart of our data responsibility at IBM, it's around a trusted partner, right, to protect their data, to protect their insights. And we firmly believe, companies like IBM that capture data, store data, process data, have an obligation to responsibly handle that data, and that's what Jenny Rometty has just published around data responsibility at IBM. >> Great, well thank you so much Inderpal, Jim. We really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> [Jim and Inderpal] Thank you. >> We will have more from the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, just after this. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The technology spending outlook is not pretty and very much unpredictable right now. The negative sentiment is of course being driven by the macroeconomic factors in earnings forecasts that have been coming down all year in an environment of rising interest rates. And what's worse, is many people think earnings estimates are still too high. But it's understandable why there's so much uncertainty. I mean, technology is still booming, digital transformations are happening in earnest, leading companies have momentum and they got cash runways. And moreover, the CEOs of these leading companies are still really optimistic. But strong guidance in an environment of uncertainty is somewhat risky. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we share takeaways from ETR'S latest spending survey, which was released to their private clients on October 21st. Today, we're going to review the macro spending data. We're going to share where CIOs think their cloud spend is headed. We're going to look at the actions that organizations are taking to manage uncertainty and then review some of the technology companies that have the most positive and negative outlooks in the ETR data set. Let's first look at the sample makeup from the latest ETR survey. ETR captured more than 1300 respondents in this latest survey. Its highest figure for the year and the quality and seniority of respondents just keeps going up each time we dig into the data. We've got large contributions as you can see here from sea level executives in a broad industry focus. Now the survey is still North America centric with 20% of the respondents coming from overseas and there is a bias toward larger organizations. And nonetheless, we're still talking well over 400 respondents coming from SMBs. Now ETR for those of you who don't know, conducts a quarterly spending intention survey and they also do periodic drilldowns. So just by the way of review, let's take a look at the expectations in the latest drilldown survey for IT spending. Before we look at the broader technology spending intentions survey data, followers of this program know that we reported on this a couple of weeks ago, spending expectations that peaked last December at 8.3% are now down to 5.5% with a slight uptick expected for next year as shown here. Now one CIO in the ETR community said these figures could be understated because of inflation. Now that's an interesting comment. Real GDP in the US is forecast to be around 1.5% in 2022. So these figures are significantly ahead of that. Nominal GDP is forecast to be significantly higher than what is shown in that slide. It was over 9% in June for example. And one would interpret that survey respondents are talking about real dollars which reflects inflationary factors in IT spend. So you might say, well if nominal GDP is in the high single digits this means that IT spending is below GDP which is usually not the case. But the flip side of that is technology tends to be deflationary because prices come down over time on a per unit basis, so this would be a normal and even positive trend. But it's mixed right now with prices on hard to find hardware, they're holding more firms. Software, you know, software tends to be driven by lock in and competition and switching costs. So you have those countervailing factors. Services can be inflationary, especially now as wages rise but certain sectors like laptops and semis and NAND are seeing less demand and maybe even some oversupply. So the way to look at this data is on a relative basis. In other words, IT buyers are reporting 280 basis point drop in spending sentiment from the end of last year. Now, something that we haven't shared from the latest drilldown survey which we will now is how IT bar buyers are thinking about cloud adoption. This chart shows responses from 419 IT execs from that drilldown and depicts the percentage of workloads their organizations have in the cloud today and what the expectation is through years from now. And you can see it's 27% today and it's nearly 50% in three years. Now the nuance is if you look at the question, that ETRS, it's they asked about IaaS and PaaS, which to some could include on-prem. Now, let me come back to that. In particular, financial services, IT, telco and retail and services industry cited expectations for the future for three years out that we're well above the average of the mean adoption levels. Regardless of how you interpret this data there's most certainly plenty of public cloud in the numbers. And whether you believe cloud is an operating environment or a place out there in the cloud, there's plenty of room for workloads to move into a cloud model well beyond mid this decade. So you know, as ho hum as we've been toward recent as-a-service models announced from the likes of HPE with GreenLake and Dell with APEX, the timing of those offerings may be pretty good actually. Now let's expand on some of the data that we showed a couple weeks ago. This chart shows responses from 282 execs on actions their organizations are taking over the next three months. And the Deltas are quite traumatic from the early part of this charter than the left hand side. The brown line is hiring freezes, the black line is freezing IT projects, and the green line is hiring increases and that red line is layoffs. And we put a box around the sort of general area of the isolation economy timeframe. And you can see the wild swings on this chart. By mid last summer, people were kickstarting things and more hiring was going on and the black line shows IT project freezes, you know, came way down. And now, or on the way back up as our hiring freezes. So we're seeing these wild swings in organizational actions and strategies which underscores the lack of predictability. As with supply chains around the world, this is likely due to the fact that organizations, pre pandemic they were optimized for efficiency, not a lot of waste rather than business resilience. Meaning, you know, there's again not a lot of fluff in the system or if there was it got flushed out during the pandemic. And so the need for productivity and automation is becoming increasingly important, especially as actions that solely rely on headcount changes are very, very difficult to manage. Now, let's dig into some of the vendor commentary and take a look at some of the names that have momentum and some of the others possibly facing headwinds. Here's a list of companies that stand out in the ETR survey. Snowflake, once again leads the pack with a positive spending outlook. HashiCorp, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Freshworks and ServiceNow, they round out the top six. Microsoft, they seem to always be in the mix, as do a number of other security and related companies including CyberArk, Zscaler, CloudFlare, Elastic, Datadog, Fortinet, Tenable and to a certain extent Akamai, you can kind of put them sort of in that group. You know, CDN, they got to worry about security. Everybody worries about security, but especially the CDNs. Now the other software names that are highlighted here include Workday and Salesforce. On the negative side, you can see Dynatrace saw some negatives in the latest survey especially around its analytics business. Security is generally holding up better than other sectors but it's still seeing greater levels of pressure than it had previously. So lower spend. And defections relative to its observability peers, that's really for Dynatrace. Now the other one that was somewhat surprising is IBM. You see the IBM was sort of in that negative realm here but IBM reported an outstanding quarter this past week with double digit revenue growth, strong momentum in software, consulting, mainframes and other infrastructure like storage. It's benefiting from the Kyndryl restructuring and it's on track IBM to deliver 10 billion in free cash flow this year. Red Hat is performing exceedingly well and growing in the very high teens. And so look, IBM is in the midst of a major transformation and it seems like a company that is really focused now with hybrid cloud being powered by Red Hat and consulting and a decade plus of AI investments finally paying off. Now the other big thing we'll add is, IBM was once an outstanding acquire of companies and it seems to be really getting its act together on the M&A front. Yes, Red Hat was a big pill to swallow but IBM has done a number of smaller acquisitions, I think seven this year. Like for example, Turbonomic, which is starting to pay off. Arvind Krishna has the company focused once again. And he and Jim J. Kavanaugh, IBM CFO, seem to be very confident on the guidance that they're giving in their business. So that's a real positive in our view for the industry. Okay, the last thing we'd like to do is take 12 of the companies from the previous chart and plot them in context. Now these companies don't necessarily compete with each other, some do. But they are standouts in the ETR survey and in the market. What we're showing here is a view that we like to often show, it's net score or spending velocity on the vertical axis. And it's a measure, that's a measure of the net percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular platform. So ETR asks, are you spending more or less? They subtract less from the mores. I mean I'm simplifying, but that's what net score is. Now in the horizontal axis, that is a measure of overlap which is which measures presence or pervasiveness in the dataset. So bigger the better. We've inserted a table that informs how the dots in the companies are positioned. These companies are all in the green in terms of net score. And that right most column in the table insert is indicative of their presence in the dataset, the end. So higher, again, is better for both columns. Two other notes, the red dotted line there you see at 40%. Anything over that indicates an highly elevated spending momentum for a given platform. And we purposefully took Microsoft out of the mix in this chart because it skews the data due to its large size. Everybody else would cluster on the left and Microsoft would be all alone in the right. So we take them out. Now as we noted earlier, Snowflake once again leads with a net score of 64%, well above the 40% line. Having said that, while adoption rates for Snowflake remains strong the company's spending velocity in the survey has come down to Earth. And many more customers are shifting from where they were last year and the year before in growth mode i.e. spending more year to year with Snowflake to now shifting more toward flat spending. So a plus or minus 5%. So that puts pressure on Snowflake's net score, just based on the math as to how ETR calculates, its proprietary net score methodology. So Snowflake is by no means insulated completely to the macro factors. And this was seen especially in the data in the Fortune 500 cut of the survey for Snowflake. We didn't show that here, just giving you anecdotal commentary from the survey which is backed up by data. So, it showed steeper declines in the Fortune 500 momentum. But overall, Snowflake, very impressive. Now what's more, note the position of Streamlit relative to Databricks. Streamlit is an open source python framework for developing data driven, data science oriented apps. And it's ironic that it's net score and shared in is almost identical to those of data bricks, as the aspirations of Snowflake and Databricks are beginning to collide. Now, however, the Databricks net score has held up very well over the past year and is in the 92nd percentile of its machine learning and AI peers. And while it's seeing some softness, like Snowflake in the Fortune 500, Databricks has steadily moved to the right on the X axis over the last several surveys even though it was unable to get to the public markets and do an IPO during the lockdown tech bubble. Let's come back to the chart. ServiceNow is impressive because it's well above the 40% mark and it has 437 shared in on this cut, the largest of any company that we chose to plot here. The only real negative on ServiceNow is, more large customers are keeping spending levels flat. That's putting a little bit pressure on its net score, but that's just conservatives. It's kind of like Snowflakes, you know, same thing but in a larger scale. But it's defections, the ServiceNow as in Snowflake as well. It's defections remain very, very low, really low churn below 2% for ServiceNow, in fact, within the dataset. Now it's interesting to also see Freshworks hit the list. You can see them as one of the few ITSM vendors that has momentum and can potentially take on ServiceNow. Workday, on this chart, it's the other big app player that's above the 40% line and we're only showing Workday HCM, FYI, in this graphic. It's Workday Financials, that offering, is below the 40% line just for reference. Now let's talk about CrowdStrike. We attended Falcon last month, CrowdStrike's user conference and we're very impressed with the product visio, the company's execution, it's growing partnerships. And you can see in this graphic, the ETR survey data confirms the company's stellar performance with a net score at 50%, well above the 40% mark. And importantly, more than 300 mentions. That's second only to ServiceNow, amongst the 12 companies that we've chosen to highlight here. Only Microsoft, which is not shown here, has a higher net score in the security space than CrowdStrike. And when it comes to presence, CrowdStrike now has caught up to Splunk in terms of pervasion in the survey. Now CyberArk and Zscaler are the other two security firms that are right at that 40% red dotted line. CyberArk for names with over a hundred citations in the security sector, is only behind Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Zscaler for its part in the survey is seeing strong momentum in the Fortune 500, unlike what we said for Snowflake. And its pervasion on the X-axis has been steadily increasing. Again, not that Snowflake and CrowdStrike compete with each other but they're too prominent names and it's just interesting to compare peers and business models. Cloudflare, Elastic and Datadog are slightly below the 40% mark but they made the sort of top 12 that we showed to highlight here and they continue to have positive sentiment in the survey. So, what are the big takeaways from this latest survey, this really quick snapshot that we've taken. As you know, over the next several weeks we're going to dig into it more and more. As we've previously reported, the tide is going out and it's taking virtually all the tech ships with it. But in many ways the current market is a story of heightened expectations coming down to Earth, miscalculations about the economic patterns and the swings and imperfect visibility. Leading Barclays analyst, Ramo Limchao ask the question to guide or not to guide in a recent research note he wrote. His point being, should companies guide or should they be more cautious? Many companies, if not most companies, are actually giving guidance. Indeed, when companies like Oracle and IBM are emphatic about their near term outlook and their visibility, it gives one confidence. On the other hand, reasonable people are asking, will the red hot valuations that we saw over the last two years from the likes of Snowflake, CrowdStrike, MongoDB, Okta, Zscaler, and others. Will they return? Or are we in for a long, drawn out, sideways exercise before we see sustained momentum? And to that uncertainty, we add elections and public policy. It's very hard to predict right now. I'm sorry to be like a two-handed lawyer, you know. On the one hand, on the other hand. But that's just the way it is. Let's just say for our part, we think that once it's clear that interest rates are on their way back down and we'll stabilize it under 4% and we have clarity on the direction of inflation, wages, unemployment and geopolitics, the wild swings and sentiment will subside. But when that happens is anyone's guess. If I had to peg, I'd say 18 months, which puts us at least into the spring of 2024. What's your prediction? You know, it's almost that time of year. Let's hear it. Please keep in touch and let us know what you think. Okay, that's it for now. Many thanks to Alex Myerson. He is on production and he manages the podcast for us. Ken Schiffman as well is our newest addition to the Boston Studio. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoff is our EIC, editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE. He does some wonderful editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes, they are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante. Or feel free to comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. If you haven't checked that out, you should. It'll give you an advantage. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (soft upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome back a long time Cube alum, Jim Whitehurst, who's the president of IBM. And I'll call him chief cultural evangelist, welcome Jim. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks so much for having me. >> Yeah, it's really our pleasure. And I want to start off, it's just over a year as president of IBM. And I wonder, you know, when you're a little kid or, you know, early in your career, computer science class, did you ever think you'd be president of a company that was founded in 1911? I mean, amazing. I wonder if you could share what's the most important thing you've learned in your first year? >> Well, look, I mean, as you said, I would've never thought it. Yeah, I was the first kid to have an IBM PC on the block and was always into technology but never saw myself as like, you know, running a big tech company. So it is humbling. I would say that there are tons of lessons in the first year. I guess the two that strike me most is one is just related to strategy and that's, you know, Red Hat and most technology companies, we're very customer focused. But it's around whatever technology we're bringing to market where IBM has fundamentally transitioned. And kind of transformed itself over time to make sure it can meet customer needs. So it's sold off businesses, it's bought other businesses, it's created new businesses. So it really shows the kind of the focus and value on serving our customers and doing whatever it takes to do it. And that's been a fundamental kind of different strategy than most companies have had. I think one of the reasons that we've been around for over a 100 years. The second is I'm deeply into culture and I've talked a lot about the difference of running Red Hat, it's all about innovation versus Delta Airlines where I was before, which is driving efficiency. IBM is both and so really trying to think through how you run an organization that needs to run the financial systems of the world, that extraordinary reliability and drive roadmaps on things like quantum computing. At the same time be able to innovate iteratively with our customers and in open source communities. And kind of getting that balance right as a leader. It's, you're kind of doing what we did at Red Hat and what we did at Delta but kind of doing it together. And I think that stretched me as a leader and kind of taught me a lot about how we're thinking about continuing to evolve the culture at IBM. >> Now, of course, you do this leadership series, you put out things out on LinkedIn and words matter. And that's what I take away from a lot of the little short hits that you do, which I really appreciate. My stuff that I put Jim on LinkedIn, it's just, you got to invest like 15, 20 minutes. So I really appreciate the short hits. But you do that regular series and I'm curious do you do that to reach more IBM people? Are you an open source culture? You're trying to help others. And I'm curious as to sort of why that platform as opposed to sending around an internal thing an IBM. And I'm wondering if your principles and how they've evolved kind of post pandemic. >> Well, so first off, maybe that comes from Red Hat but I think IBM shares that it's if you have something really, really valuable, you want to share it. And look, when I am out talking to our customers, CEOs and some of the biggest companies in the world, honestly we rarely talk about technology 'cause other people are more detailed or deep in that. We primarily do talk about culture. And how you think about again, how do you take an organization that's been built to drive efficiency and scale on a global basis and make it able to be more nimble and more innovative? And so, and obviously, hopefully that's all with IBM and Red Hat technologies. But ultimately most of my conversations at a senior leadership level are about culture and leadership style to drive that. And so if that's valuable for CEOs of some of the world's largest companies, it's valuable to leaders kind of across all spectrums, all sizes. And so I think LinkedIn is a good way to kind of take some of those messages and make sure we were able to share those much more broadly. So certainly I spend more time talking about it inside of IBM and I spend a lot of time with our clients talking about it. But I think many of the lessons are applicable more broadly. And so why not share them? And LinkedIn's a great platform to be able to do that. >> How about you, how have your principles, how have your principles sort of changed and how have they evolved post pandemic? >> Well, I think a couple things, so one is the pandemic kind of forces you to get more precise about it. And what I mean by that is so much of leadership is about building credibility and trust and influence. And when you're seeing someone in 3D live, visual cues can kind of mean a lot in the water cooler conversations. Or who you run into in the hall can all help kind of create that level of trust. But you can't do that in 2D. As great as Zoom and other platforms are, you just can't quite do it. And so you have to be much more thoughtful in how you're creating opportunities to kind of create trust. So I'd say I've gotten more surgical in thinking about kind of what those elements of leadership are that do that. I think the second thing I've really learned at IBM again is back to this. We have to be able to do both, drive a future state in a known world as well as, I call it seek a future state in an unknown world. So driving a roadmap for quantum computing takes a number of different technologies coming together in one year, in two years, in five years. And that really does have to be pre-planned, which is very very different, that I'll call the iterative innovation approach that we use at Red Hat and open source communities and working with our clients. And we have to do both. And so as a leader you really have to understand the problem you're trying to solve and apply slightly different kind of leadership tactics against that. So when you're executing a known versus you are trying to create something in an unknown, does require different approaches and we have to do both in IBM. And I think that's the struggle a lot of companies have, every company needs to do that. If you're Delta Airlines, you don't want anybody innovating on the safety procedures before your flight. Yet you want a lot of innovation happening on your website and your mobile app. So how do you bring those together? And as a leader you can have a common set of values, but recognize you have to bring different tools to the table, depending on the context in which you're leading. And so I learned a lot more and gotten a lot crisper with that since being at IBM. >> Interesting, I mean, the pandemic, we all know it's been terrible but one of the upshots has been we had a glimpse of the future sort of shoved into a forced march of digital in 2020. And so obviously the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last 10 years. And one of the things we've been talking about is ecosystems and partnerships and the power and leverage that you can get from those. And Arvin has said, laid it out, we are returning to growth company. And so I wonder if you could talk to how partnerships and ecosystems play into that return to growth for IBM. >> Well, first off a key part of our strategy we talk about hybrid cloud and AI. It's not just about, hey, a platform that runs across all the different deployment models is convenient. It's also because innovation is coming from so many sources today. It's coming from a by-product from the web 2.0 companies, it's coming from open source. It's coming from an explosion of startups because of the amount of capital in venture capital. It's coming from traditional software companies. It's coming from our clients who are participating in open source. And so you have so many sources of innovation. Much of what we're doing is landing a platform that allows you to consume innovation safely and reliably from wherever it's coming from. So a core part of a platform by definition is the ecosystem around it. Having a platform that runs everywhere is great but if you don't have any applications that run on it who cares. And so ecosystem and partners have always been important to IBM, but for this strategy of this horizontal platform oriented strategy, it is critical to our success because much of the platform is the ecosystem. And so we've already talked about investing a billion dollars in that ecosystem to get ISVs and other partners on our platform, again, to ultimately kind of create that kind of horizontal layer where I can run anything that I want to on it and I can run that anywhere I want to. And so the two sides of that so all the innovation happening on top and making sure it runs everywhere is what really unlocks the freedom of choice. That reduces friction to innovation, which allows everybody in the ecosystem from our clients to ISVs to hardware partners to innovate more quickly. And that's what we really see as the benefit of our platform. It's not a horizontal stove pipe, come innovate in this one place. It's recognizing innovation's happening in so many places. And the only way we're going to be able to allow people to ingest that is to have a horizontal platform that everyone's participating in. Which is why partners and ecosystem are so important, not only to the success of our platform, but to the, I'd say, as a success of this next generation of computing. These horizontal fabrics that require an ecosystem kind of built around them. >> I think that's an important nuance that maybe people don't understand that yes, you have a platform. Obviously, OpenShift is a linchpin but it's an enabler for people to build other platforms. It's not the be all, end all platform that's sort of ultimately becomes another Island. And so that is a key part of the growth strategy and presumably expand your total available market. >> Oh, absolutely and so this is the key is we can talk about great IBM technologies. We're doing amazing things in security and AI and natural language processing and all these other areas. But the platform is a recognition that we're not going to do everything for everybody anymore. There's just the democratization of technology means that there is so many sources of innovation. And so first and foremost, we have to land a platform so you can consume anything from anywhere. And then of course, we'll drive our own pace of innovation both in hardware and software around that platform. But we are just a player on that platform, which we're really instantiating for really anybody to be able to reach customers or customers to reach sources of innovation. >> I know sustainability is a passion of yours, that it's obviously a hot topic right now. Oftentimes I joke tongue in cheek, Milton Friedman's rolling over in his grave with all this ESG talk. And I know you just posted recently on LinkedIn. And of course I went right down to Kavanaugh because my premise is not only is sustainability the right thing to do, it's also good business. But I wonder if you could give us your perspectives on this. >> Yeah, well, so first off, I mean, as a large global citizen as IDM I think this is an important role that we play and look, this isn't new to IBM. We came out with our first statements around environment in 1970. We put out our first report that's become our environmental impact report in 1990. We've been talking about climate since the early two thousands. So we've been involved in this for a long, long time because I do think it's important broadly. But there's also a specific role I think IBM can play beyond just our own individual actions to reduce our own footprint. Because of some of the extraordinary technologies that IBM has worked on in the years especially around semiconductors, we have just an amazing amount of technology, expertise, intellectual property around material science. And so just a couple of examples of those that relate to the environment. We in doing some other work realized that we had a way to be able to recycle PET plastic, which is a real problem because so many clothes and other things are now made out of PET. And it's really hard to recycle but a by-product of other work we're doing realized we could do that. And so we've formed a JV and we're funding that to not profit from it but to make sure that much more of the world's PET is recycled. Or the work that we're doing on batteries, where using ocean water instead of rare earth minerals to make batteries that not only are cleaner but last longer. Those are kind of byproducts of our kind of core business. The areas that we can see the benefits of innovation and material science being able to impact the world. I am hopeful that we'll be able to play a role with all of that in clear air carbon capture. I mean, that's still far further away but I do think IBM has a unique role that we can play because of our deep expertise in, again, material science, quantum computing, and modeling that put us in a unique position to have a major impact on the world. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about sort of IBM and its technology bets. And I've made the point a number of times in my writing that IBM's R and D spend has been about pretty constant, about $6 billion a year. But as IBM is jettison certain businesses got out of the x86 server business and it got out of the Foundry business with micro electronics. Now it's spinning out NewCo. What happens, the effect is that R and D as a percent of revenue goes way, way up. And my premise has always been that allows IBM to be more focused. So whether it's hybrid cloud, AI, quantum, Edge where are you placing your technology bets and maybe give us a sense of how you ranked them, some of your favorites. >> Yeah, so, look, that's exactly right. I mean, we are one of the few places that still invest a massive amount in R and D, especially in fundamental research. And so I'll kind of break down kind of the core areas. So first off, what I'd say is part of the hybrid cloud platform is recognizing we don't need to do everything for everyone. There is great open source technology. There are great other vendors that are doing things that we can enable our customers to access via the platform. So we're not trying to do everything for everybody in the way maybe 40 years ago we did. Because we understand there's so much great other technology out there that we're going to make sure that we expose. So we're investing in areas where we think we can uniquely add value that need to happen that others aren't doing. So AI, let me take that as an example. There's tremendous work happening in machine learning that we see every day because of Facebook and people trying to identify cats. And so I don't mean to trivialize it, there's a phenomenal work happening there. There's a lot less work being done on in AI on things where you have a lot less data. Or areas where you need explainable unbiased AI and the problem with machine learning engines is they're not auditable by definition. That's kind of a black box. And so we do a lot of work in areas like that. We do a lot of work in natural language processing. So we've had more of a as a kind of publicity kind of push the technology something called Project Debater. Where Watson can debate kind of champion debaters. That was mainly to make sure we can understand language in context, which allows for being able to better handle call centers in areas like that. Allows us to understand source code, which also is thinking about how you migrate applications from on-premise to the cloud. So we have a bunch of AI things that we are doing and is a core focus of what we're doing. But specifically we're investing in areas like anti-biased auditability, natural language processing, areas where others aren't. Which is unique and we can bring those capabilities together with what others are doing. Security, obviously, a huge, huge area where we've invested in quantum safe encryption. We've invested in confidential computing. In other words, even in compute mode your data is encrypted. So you can keep your own keys, so not even we on our cloud can see your data. So a lot of investments happening around security and that's going to continue to be an area as we know that's going to get more and more and more scrutiny. So heavy, heavy focus there. Heavily focused on technologies that help you kind of modernize your infrastructure. So automation tools, integration tools and areas around that. So on the software side, those are kind of the main areas. When you look on the hardware side, obviously quantum is a significant area where we have a leadership position we continue to drive. But even semiconductor research in kind of process technology. So we announced something with Intel to work with them to bring some of our process technologies. As we kind of go from 7 nanometers to 5 to 2 to ultimately 1. That set of technologies is an area where we have a real leadership position and we'll continue to work with now Intel. We continue to work with others to drive that forward. So whole bunch of areas both on the hardware and the software side that we continue to make progress on. >> Yeah, the Silicon piece is interesting. And when we saw that Arvin as part of the Intel announcements that we thought originally, oh, maybe it's just about quantum but it's really much more than that. You mentioned the process. We dug into it and we realized, wow, we said Power10 actually has the highest performance. And because of the way in which you are not to geek out but you're you dis-aggregate memory. And Pat Gelsinger talked about system on a package. It turns out folks that IBM is actually the leader in that type of capability. And also the way that systems on chips use memory is very inefficient but IBM has actually invented some techniques to make that much more efficient. That's sort of the future of semiconductors. And the reason why we spend so much time thinking about it is because it's of national interest. There's a huge chip shortage, which doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. So that's a critical part of national competitiveness and technology competitiveness going forward. >> Well, and the other interesting part about that, and you talked about Power10, going back to the hybrid cloud platform that we talked about. It's not just about running applications across wherever you want to run them. It also abstracts the chip architecture. So all of a sudden whether it's on the mainframe, it's on power, it's on ARM, it's on x86 and a whole bunch of other technologies that might get developed. We're making it much easier to kind of consume that specialization or variety at the hardware level. Recognize as Moore's law runs its course there's no longer this inevitability of everything's just going to go to x86. I think we are going to see more variety because we're going to have needs in the factory floor or in the automobile or with massive container as applications. Where you're going to need, whether it's kind of shared memory or different architectures all the way out to kind of low battery consumption. And that whole kind of breadth and our hybrid cloud platform enables that variability. And then IBM obviously has great technology to enable kind of building unique capability in hardware. So we kind of play on both sides of it, both kind of developing great technologies but then making it really easy for developers to consume and use those specialized features. >> I'm glad you brought that up, Jim. We mentioned Moore's law because we're all talking about how Moore's law is waning and it's quote, unquote dead. But the reality is, is the outcome of Moore's law which is the doubling of performance every two years is actually accelerating because of the common actuarial factors of CPU's and GPU's and NPUs and accelerators and DSPs. If you add all those up and actually, we're actually quadrupling every two years. So we have more processing power at much lower costs because of the volumes that you're seeing on things like ARM. So it's actually a very exciting time. We're entering an era that really, it's hard to get your mind around sometimes. So my question is how should we think about the future state of IBM? What does that look like? >> Well, so first off, the thing that I've found extraordinary about IBM kind of having been there now just a little over a year as an employee, a couple of years, I guess, when Red Hat was acquired. Is it is unique in fundamentally changing, again, who we are to kind of meet the needs going forward. And if you think about the needs in technology, recognize it was only like 20 years ago that Nicholas Carr wrote his famous article, IT Doesn't Matter, it's about back office. And in that world, IBM was really, really effective at building and running IT systems for our clients. We would come in, we would just kind of do everything for them. Today, technology is the forefront of developing or building competitive advantage for almost any business. And so nobody wants to kind of hand the keys, so we no longer are necessarily doing things for our clients. We're doing things with our clients. So there's a whole set of work, and we talked about how we engage with our clients, how we're much more collaborative and co-creative and our whole garage model to help build the capability to innovate with our clients is a key part of what we're doing. We'll continue to drive core technologies forward like quantum in key areas that require billions of dollars of research that frankly no one else is willing to do. And then we bring it all together with this hybrid cloud platform where we recognize it's no longer about us doing it all for you anymore. We're going to do the things where we can uniquely add value but then provide it all on a platform which allows you to consume from wherever, however you want to in a safe, secure, reliable way. So as we watch this next generation of computing unfold, cloud shouldn't end up being a bunch of vertical stove pipes. It truly needs to be kind of a horizontal platform that allows you to run any application anywhere in a safe, secure, reliable way and our architecture helps do that. So it's no longer able to do everything for you. It's we can do things uniquely on a platform and work with you to be able to help you kind of create your own pace of innovation, your own sources of advantage. And so that's the broad kind of direction that we're going, again, as enterprises move from consuming technology to be more efficient, to driving advantage with it. They need partners who understand that focused on their success and can innovate with them. And that's really where we're going with our technology, with our services capability and kind of our approach to how we work with our clients. >> Yeah, Jim, you just laid out the Holy grail of computing in the coming decade and with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat. And it really enables that vision and clearly the company is one of the top few that are in a position to do that. Jim Whitehurst, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to chat. >> All right and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more content of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition, be right back. (gentle music)

(bright music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome back a long time Cube alum, Jim Whitehurst, who's the president of IBM. And I'll call him chief cultural evangelist, welcome Jim. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks so much for having me. >> Yeah, it's really our pleasure. And I want to start off, it's just over a year as president of IBM. And I wonder, you know, when you're a little kid or, you know, early in your career, computer science class, did you ever think you'd be president of a company that was founded in 1911? I mean, amazing. I wonder if you could share what's the most important thing you've learned in your first year? >> Well, look, I mean, as you said, I would've never thought it. Yeah, I was the first kid to have an IBM PC on the block and was always into technology but never saw myself as like, you know, running a big tech company. So it is humbling. I would say that there are tons of lessons in the first year. I guess the two that strike me most is one is just related to strategy and that's, you know, Red Hat and most technology companies, we're very customer focused. But it's around whatever technology we're bringing to market where IBM has fundamentally transitioned. And kind of transformed itself over time to make sure it can meet customer needs. So it's sold off businesses, it's bought other businesses, it's created new businesses. So it really shows the kind of the focus and value on serving our customers and doing whatever it takes to do it. And that's been a fundamental kind of different strategy than most companies have had. I think one of the reasons that we've been around for over a 100 years. The second is I'm deeply into culture and I've talked a lot about the difference of running Red Hat, it's all about innovation versus Delta Airlines where I was before, which is driving efficiency. IBM is both and so really trying to think through how you run an organization that needs to run the financial systems of the world, that extraordinary reliability and drive roadmaps on things like quantum computing. At the same time be able to innovate iteratively with our customers and in open source communities. And kind of getting that balance right as a leader. It's, you're kind of doing what we did at Red Hat and what we did at Delta but kind of doing it together. And I think that stretched me as a leader and kind of taught me a lot about how we're thinking about continuing to evolve the culture at IBM. >> Now, of course, you do this leadership series, you put out things out on LinkedIn and words matter. And that's what I take away from a lot of the little short hits that you do, which I really appreciate. My stuff that I put Jim on LinkedIn, it's just, you got to invest like 15, 20 minutes. So I really appreciate the short hits. But you do that regular series and I'm curious do you do that to reach more IBM people? Are you an open source culture? You're trying to help others. And I'm curious as to sort of why that platform as opposed to sending around an internal thing an IBM. And I'm wondering if your principles and how they've evolved kind of post pandemic. >> Well, so first off, maybe that comes from Red Hat but I think IBM shares that it's if you have something really, really valuable, you want to share it. And look, when I am out talking to our customers, CEOs and some of the biggest companies in the world, honestly we rarely talk about technology 'cause other people are more detailed or deep in that. We primarily do talk about culture. And how you think about again, how do you take an organization that's been built to drive efficiency and scale on a global basis and make it able to be more nimble and more innovative? And so, and obviously, hopefully that's all with IBM and Red Hat technologies. But ultimately most of my conversations at a senior leadership level are about culture and leadership style to drive that. And so if that's valuable for CEOs of some of the world's largest companies, it's valuable to leaders kind of across all spectrums, all sizes. And so I think LinkedIn is a good way to kind of take some of those messages and make sure we were able to share those much more broadly. So certainly I spend more time talking about it inside of IBM and I spend a lot of time with our clients talking about it. But I think many of the lessons are applicable more broadly. And so why not share them? And LinkedIn's a great platform to be able to do that. >> How about you, how have your principles, how have your principles sort of changed and how have they evolved post pandemic? >> Well, I think a couple things, so one is the pandemic kind of forces you to get more precise about it. And what I mean by that is so much of leadership is about building credibility and trust and influence. And when you're seeing someone in 3D live, visual cues can kind of mean a lot in the water cooler conversations. Or who you run into in the hall can all help kind of create that level of trust. But you can't do that in 2D. As great as Zoom and other platforms are, you just can't quite do it. And so you have to be much more thoughtful in how you're creating opportunities to kind of create trust. So I'd say I've gotten more surgical in thinking about kind of what those elements of leadership are that do that. I think the second thing I've really learned at IBM again is back to this. We have to be able to do both, drive a future state in a known world as well as, I call it seek a future state in an unknown world. So driving a roadmap for quantum computing takes a number of different technologies coming together in one year, in two years, in five years. And that really does have to be pre-planned, which is very very different, that I'll call the iterative innovation approach that we use at Red Hat and open source communities and working with our clients. And we have to do both. And so as a leader you really have to understand the problem you're trying to solve and apply slightly different kind of leadership tactics against that. So when you're executing a known versus you are trying to create something in an unknown, does require different approaches and we have to do both in IBM. And I think that's the struggle a lot of companies have, every company needs to do that. If you're Delta Airlines, you don't want anybody innovating on the safety procedures before your flight. Yet you want a lot of innovation happening on your website and your mobile app. So how do you bring those together? And as a leader you can have a common set of values, but recognize you have to bring different tools to the table, depending on the context in which you're leading. And so I learned a lot more and gotten a lot crisper with that since being at IBM. >> Interesting, I mean, the pandemic, we all know it's been terrible but one of the upshots has been we had a glimpse of the future sort of shoved into a forced march of digital in 2020. And so obviously the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last 10 years. And one of the things we've been talking about is ecosystems and partnerships and the power and leverage that you can get from those. And Arvin has said, laid it out, we are returning to growth company. And so I wonder if you could talk to how partnerships and ecosystems play into that return to growth for IBM. >> Well, first off a key part of our strategy we talk about hybrid cloud and AI. It's not just about, hey, a platform that runs across all the different deployment models is convenient. It's also because innovation is coming from so many sources today. It's coming from a by-product from the web 2.0 companies, it's coming from open source. It's coming from an explosion of startups because of the amount of capital in venture capital. It's coming from traditional software companies. It's coming from our clients who are participating in open source. And so you have so many sources of innovation. Much of what we're doing is landing a platform that allows you to consume innovation safely and reliably from wherever it's coming from. So a core part of a platform by definition is the ecosystem around it. Having a platform that runs everywhere is great but if you don't have any applications that run on it who cares. And so ecosystem and partners have always been important to IBM, but for this strategy of this horizontal platform oriented strategy, it is critical to our success because much of the platform is the ecosystem. And so we've already talked about investing a billion dollars in that ecosystem to get ISBS and other partners on our platform, again, to ultimately kind of create that kind of horizontal layer where I can run anything that I want to on it and I can run that anywhere I want to. And so the two sides of that so all the innovation happening on top and making sure it runs everywhere is what really unlocks the freedom of choice. That reduces friction to innovation, which allows everybody in the ecosystem from our clients to ISVs to hardware partners to innovate more quickly. And that's what we really see as the benefit of our platform. It's not a horizontal stove pipe, come innovate in this one place. It's recognizing innovation's happening in so many places. And the only way we're going to be able to allow people to ingest that is to have a horizontal platform that everyone's participating in. Which is why partners and ecosystem are so important, not only to the success of our platform, but to the, I'd say, as a success of this next generation of computing. These horizontal fabrics that require an ecosystem kind of built around them. >> I think that's an important nuance that maybe people don't understand that yes, you have a platform. Obviously, OpenShift is a linchpin but it's an enabler for people to build other platforms. It's not the be all, end all platform that's sort of ultimately becomes another Island. And so that is a key part of the growth strategy and presumably expand your total available market. >> Oh, absolutely and so this is the key is we can talk about great IBM technologies. We're doing amazing things in security and AI and natural language processing and all these other areas. But the platform is a recognition that we're not going to do everything for everybody anymore. There's just the democratization of technology means that there is so many sources of innovation. And so first and foremost, we have to land a platform so you can consume anything from anywhere. And then of course, we'll drive our own pace of innovation both in hardware and software around that platform. But we are just a player on that platform, which we're really instantiating for really anybody to be able to reach customers or customers to reach sources of innovation. >> I know sustainability is a passion of yours, that it's obviously a hot topic right now. Oftentimes I joke tongue in cheek, Milton Friedman's rolling over in his grave with all this ESG talk. And I know you just posted recently on LinkedIn. And of course I went right down to Kavanaugh because my premise is not only is sustainability the right thing to do, it's also good business. But I wonder if you could give us your perspectives on this. >> Yeah, well, so first off, I mean, as a large global citizen as IDM I think this is an important role that we play and look, this isn't new to IBM. We came out with our first statements around environment in 1970. We put out our first report that's become our environmental impact report in 1990. We've been talking about climate since the early two thousands. So we've been involved in this for a long, long time because I do think it's important broadly. But there's also a specific role I think IBM can play beyond just our own individual actions to reduce our own footprint. Because of some of the extraordinary technologies that IBM has worked on in the years especially around semiconductors, we have just an amazing amount of technology, expertise, intellectual property around material science. And so just a couple of examples of those that relate to the environment. We in doing some other work realized that we had a way to be able to recycle PET plastic, which is a real problem because so many clothes and other things are now made out of PET. And it's really hard to recycle but a by-product of other work we're doing realized we could do that. And so we've formed a JV and we're funding that to not profit from it but to make sure that much more of the world's PET is recycled. Or the work that we're doing on batteries, where using ocean water instead of rare earth minerals to make batteries that not only are cleaner but last longer. Those are kind of byproducts of our kind of core business. The areas that we can see the benefits of innovation and material science being able to impact the world. I am hopeful that we'll be able to play a role with all of that in clear air carbon capture. I mean, that's still far further away but I do think IBM has a unique role that we can play because of our deep expertise in, again, material science, quantum computing, and modeling that put us in a unique position to have a major impact on the world. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about sort of IBM and its technology bets. And I've made the point a number of times in my writing that IBM's R and D spend has been about pretty constant, about $6 billion a year. But as IBM is jettison certain businesses got out of the x86 server business and it got out of the Foundry business with micro electronics. Now it's spinning out NewCo. What happens, the effect is that R and D as a percent of revenue goes way, way up. And my premise has always been that allows IBM to be more focused. So whether it's hybrid cloud, AI, quantum, Edge where are you placing your technology bets and maybe give us a sense of how you ranked them, some of your favorites. >> Yeah, so, look, that's exactly right. I mean, we are one of the few places that still invest a massive amount in R and D, especially in fundamental research. And so I'll kind of break down kind of the core areas. So first off, what I'd say is part of the hybrid cloud platform is recognizing we don't need to do everything for everyone. There is great open source technology. There are great other vendors that are doing things that we can enable our customers to access via the platform. So we're not trying to do everything for everybody in the way maybe 40 years ago we did. Because we understand there's so much great other technology out there that we're going to make sure that we expose. So we're investing in areas where we think we can uniquely add value that need to happen that others aren't doing. So AI, let me take that as an example. There's tremendous work happening in machine learning that we see every day because of Facebook and people trying to identify cats. And so I don't mean to trivialize it, there's a phenomenal work happening there. There's a lot less work being done on in AI on things where you have a lot less data. Or areas where you need explainable unbiased AI and the problem with machine learning engines is they're not auditable by definition. That's kind of a black box. And so we do a lot of work in areas like that. We do a lot of work in natural language processing. So we've had more of a as a kind of publicity kind of push the technology something called Project Debater. Where Watson can debate kind of champion debaters. That was mainly to make sure we can understand language in context, which allows for being able to better handle call centers in areas like that. Allows us to understand source code, which also is thinking about how you migrate applications from on-premise to the cloud. So we have a bunch of AI things that we are doing and is a core focus of what we're doing. But in specifically we're investing in areas like anti-biased auditability, natural language processing, areas where others aren't. Which is unique and we can bring those capabilities together with what others are doing. Security, obviously, a huge, huge area where we've invested in quantum safe encryption. We've invested in confidential computing. In other words, even in compute mode your data is encrypted. So you can keep your own keys, so not even we on our cloud can see your data. So a lot of investments happening around security and that's going to continue to be an area as we know that's going to get more and more and more scrutiny. So heavy, heavy focus there. Heavily focused on technologies that help you kind of modernize your infrastructure. So automation tools, integration tools and areas around that. So on the software side, those are kind of the main areas. When you look on the hardware side, obviously quantum is a significant area where we have a leadership position we continue to drive. But even semiconductor research in kind of process technology. So we announced something with Intel to work with them to bring some of our process technologies. As we kind of go from 7 nanometers to 5 to 2 to ultimately 1. That set of technologies is an area where we have a real leadership position and we'll continue to work with now Intel. We continue to work with others to drive that forward. So whole bunch of areas both on the hardware and the software side that we continue to make progress on. >> Yeah, the Silicon piece is interesting. And when we saw that Arvin as part of the Intel announcements that we thought originally, oh, maybe it's just about quantum but it's really much more than that. You mentioned the process. We dug into it and we realized, wow, we said Power10 actually has the highest performance. And because of the way in which you are not to geek out but you're you dis-aggregate memory. And Pat Gelsinger talked about system on a package. It turns out folks that IBM is actually the leader in that type of capability. And also the way that systems on chips use memory is very inefficient but IBM has actually invented some techniques to make that much more efficient. That's sort of the future of semiconductors. And the reason why we spend so much time thinking about it is because it's of national interest. There's a huge chip shortage, which doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. So that's a critical part of national competitiveness and technology competitiveness going forward. >> Well, and the other interesting part about that, and you talked about Power10, going back to the hybrid cloud platform that we talked about. It's not just about running applications across wherever you want to run them. It also abstracts the chip architecture. So all of a sudden whether it's on the mainframe, it's on power, it's on ARM, it's on x86 and a whole bunch of other technologies that might get developed. We're making it much easier to kind of consume that specialization or variety at the hardware level. Recognize as Moore's law runs its course there's no longer this inevitability of everything's just going to go to x86. I think we are going to see more variety because we're going to have needs in the factory floor or in the automobile or with massive container as applications. Where you're going to need, whether it's kind of shared memory or different architectures all the way out to kind of low battery consumption. And that whole kind of breadth and our hybrid cloud platform enables that variability. And then IBM obviously has great technology to enable kind of building unique capability in hardware. So we kind of play on both sides of it, both kind of developing great technologies but then making it really easy for developers to consume and use those specialized features. >> I'm glad you brought that up, Jim. We mentioned Moore's law because we're all talking about how Moore's law is waning and it's quote, unquote dead. But the reality is, is the outcome of Moore's law which is the doubling of performance every two years is actually accelerating because of the common actuarial factors of CPU's and GPU's and NPUs and accelerators and DSPs. If you add all those up and actually, we're actually quadrupling every two years. So we have more processing power at much lower costs because of the volumes that you're seeing on things like ARM. So it's actually a very exciting time. We're entering an era that really, it's hard to get your mind around sometimes. So my question is how should we think about the future state of IBM? What does that look like? >> Well, so first off, the thing that I've found extraordinary about IBM kind of having been there now just a little over a year as an employee, a couple of years, I guess, when Red Hat was acquired. Is it is unique in fundamentally changing, again, who we are to kind of meet the needs going forward. And if you think about the needs in technology, recognize it was only like 20 years ago that Nicholas Carr wrote his famous article, IT Doesn't Matter, it's about back office. And in that world, IBM was really, really effective at building and running IT systems for our clients. We would come in, we would just kind of do everything for them. Today, technology is the forefront of developing or building competitive advantage for almost any business. And so nobody wants to kind of hand the keys, so we no longer are necessarily doing things for our clients. We're doing things with our clients. So there's a whole set of work, and we talked about how we engage with our clients, how we're much more collaborative and co-creative and our whole garage model to help build the capability to innovate with our clients is a key part of what we're doing. We'll continue to drive core technologies forward like quantum in key areas that require billions of dollars of research that frankly no one else is willing to do. And then we bring it all together with this hybrid cloud platform where we recognize it's no longer about us doing it all for you anymore. We're going to do the things where we can uniquely add value but then provide it all on a platform which allows you to consume from wherever, however you want to in a safe, secure, reliable way. So as we watch this next generation of computing unfold, cloud shouldn't end up being a bunch of vertical stove pipes. It truly needs to be kind of a horizontal platform that allows you to run any application anywhere in a safe, secure, reliable way and our architecture helps do that. So it's no longer able to do everything for you. It's we can do things uniquely on a platform and work with you to be able to help you kind of create your own pace of innovation, your own sources of advantage. And so that's the broad kind of direction that we're going, again, as enterprises move from consuming technology to be more efficient, to driving advantage with it. They need partners who understand that focused on their success and can innovate with them. And that's really where we're going with our technology, with our services capability and kind of our approach to how we work with our clients. >> Yeah, Jim, you just laid out the Holy grail of computing in the coming decade and with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat. And it really enables that vision and clearly the company is one of the top few that are in a position to do that. Jim Whitehurst, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to chat. >> All right and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more content of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition, be right back. (gentle music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all >>around the world. This is a cube conversation, Everyone. Welcome to this week's Cube insights, powered by ET are My name is Dave Volante, and we've been reporting every week really on the code. 19. Impact on Budgets Docker Korakia is back in with me soccer. It's great to see you really >>again for having >>your very welcome. Soccer is, of course, the director of research, that we are our data partner and man. I mean, you guys have just been digging into the data or a court reiterate We're down, you know, roughly around minus 5% for the year. The thing about what we're doing here and where they want to stress in the audience that that's going to change. The key point is we don't just do ah, placeholder and update you in December. Every time we get new information, we're going to convey it to you. So let's get right into it. What we want to do today is you kind of part two from the takeaways that we did last week. So let's start with the macro guys. If you bring up the first chart, take us through kind of the top three takeaways. And just to reiterate where we're at >>Yeah, no problem. And look, as you mentioned, uh, what we're doing right now is we're collecting the pulse of CIOs. And so things change on and we continue to expect them to change, you know, in the next few weeks, in the next few months, as things change with it. So just kind of give a recap of the survey and then kind of going through some of our top macro takeaways. So in March mid March, we launched our Technology Spending Intention Survey. We had 1250 CIOs approximately. Take that survey. They provided their updated 2020 verse 2019 spending intentions, right? So effectively, they first Davis, those 20 21st 19 spending intentions in January. And then they went ahead and up state of those based on what happened with move it and then in tandem with that, we did this kind of over 19 drill down survey where we asked CEOs to estimate the budget impact off overnight in versus what they originally forecast in the year. And so that leads us to our first take away here, where we essentially aggregated the data from all these CIOs in that Logan 19 drill down survey. And we saw a revision of 900 basis points so down to a decline of 5%. And so coming into the year, the consensus was about 4% growth. Ah, and now you can see we're down about 5% for the year. And again, that's subject to change. And we're going again re measure that a Z kind of get into June July and we have a couple of months under our belt with the folks at night. The second big take away here is, you know, the industries that are really indicating those declines and spend retail, consumer airlines, financials, telco I key services in consulting. Those are the verticals, as we mentioned last week, that we're really seeing some of the largest Pullbacks and spend from consumers and businesses. So it makes sense that they are revising their budgets downwards the most. And then finally, the last thing we captured that we spoke about last week as well as a few weeks before that, and I think that's really been playing out the last kind of week in 1/2 earnings is CIOs are continuing to press the pedal on digital transformation. Right? We saw that with Microsoft, with service now last night, right, those companies continued the post good numbers and you see good demand, what we're seeing and where those declines that we just mentioned earlier are coming from. It's it's the legacy that's the on premise that your place there's such a concentration of loss and deceleration within some of those companies. And we'll kind of get into that more a Z go through more slides. But that's really what kind of here, you know, that's really what we need to focus on is the declines are coming from very select vendors. >>Yeah, and of course you know where we were in earning season now, and we're paying close attention to that. A lot of people say I just ignore the earnings here, you know, you got the over 19 Mulligan, but But that's really not right. I mean, obviously you want to look at balance sheets, you want to look at cash flows, but also we're squinting through some of the data your point about I t services and insulting is interesting. I saw another research firm put out that you know, services and consulting was going to be OK. Our data does, you know, different. Uh, and we're watching. For instance, Jim Kavanaugh on IBM's earnings call was very specific about the metrics that they're watching. They're obviously very concerned about pricing and their ability. The book business. There we saw the cloud guys announced Google was up in the strong fifties. The estimate is DCP was even higher up in the 80% range. Azure, you know, we'll talk about this killing it. I mean, you guys have been all over of Microsoft and its presence, you know, high fifties aws solid at around 34% growth from a larger base. But as we've been reporting, you know, downturns. They've been they've been good to cloud. >>That's right. And I think, you know, based on the data that we've captured, um, you know, it's people are really pressing the pedal on cloud and SAS with this much remote work, you need to have you know, that structure in place to maintain productivity. >>Okay, let's bring up the next slide. Now. We've been reporting a lot on this sort of next generation work loads Bob one Dato all about storage and infrastructures of service. Compute. There's an obviously some database, but there's a new analytics workload emerging. Uh, and it's kind of replacing, or at least disinter mediating or disrupting the traditional e d ws. I've said for years. CDW is failed to live up to its expectations of 360 degree insights and real time data, and that's really what we're showing here is some of the traditional CDW guys are getting hit on Some of the emerging guys, um, are looking pretty good. So take us through what we're looking at here. Soccer. >>Yeah, no problem. So we're looking at the database data warehousing sector. What you're looking at here is replacement rates. Um And so, as example, if you see up in with roughly 20% replacement, what that means is one out of five people who took the survey for that particular sector for that vendor indicated that they were replacing, and so you can see here for their data. Cloudera, IBM, Oracle. They have very elevated and accelerating replacement rates. And so when we kind of think about this space. You can really see the bifurcation, right? Look how well positioned the Microsoft AWS is. Google Mongo, Snowflake, low replacements, right low, consistent replacements. And then, of course, on the left hand side of the screen, you're really seeing elevated, accelerating. And so this space is It kind of goes with that theme that we've been talking about that we covered last week by application, right when you think about the declines that you're seeing and spend again, it's very targeted for a lot of these kind of legacy legacy vendors. And we're again. We're seeing a lot of the next gen players that Microsoft AWS in your post very strong data. And so here, looking within database, it's very clear as to which vendors are well positioned for 2020 and which ones look like they're being ripped out and swapped out in the next few months. >>So this to me, is really interesting. So you know, you you've certainly reported on the impact that snowflake is having on Terra data. And in some of IBM's business, the old man, he's a business. You can see that here. You know, it's interesting. During the Hadoop days, Cloudera Horton works when they realize that it didn't really make money on Hadoop. They sort of getting the data management and data database and you're seeing that is under pressure. It's kind of interesting to me. Oracle, you know, is still not what we're seeing with terror data, right, Because they've got a stranglehold on the marketplace That's right, hanging in there. Right? But that snowflake would no replacements is very impressive. Mongo consistent performer. And in Google aws, Microsoft AWS supports with Red Shift. They did a one time license with Park Cell, which was an MPP database. They totally retooled a thing. And now they're sort of interestingly copycatting snowflake separating compute from storage and doing some other moves. And yet they're really strong partners. So interesting >>is going on and even, you know, red shift dynamodb all. They all look good. All these all these AWS products continue screen Very well. Ah, in the data warehousing space, So yeah, to your point, there's a clear divergence of which products CIOs want to use and which ones they no longer want in their stack. >>Yeah, the database market is very much now fragment that it used to be in an Oracle db two sequel server. As you mentioned, you got a lot of choices. The Amazon. I think I counted, you know, 10 data stores, maybe more. Dynamodb Aurora, Red shift on and on and on. So a really interesting space, a lot of activity in that new workload that I'm talking about taking, Ah, analytic databases, bringing data science, pooling into that space and really driving these real time insights that we've been reporting on. So that's that's quite an exciting space. Let's talk about this whole workflow. I t s m a service now. Just just announced, uh, we've been consistently crushing it. The Cube has been following them for many, many years, whether, you know, from the early days of Fred Luddy, Bruce Lukman, the short time John Donahoe. And now Bill McDermott is the CEO, but consistent performance since the AIPO. But what are we actually showing here? Saga? Yeah, You bring up that slot. Thank you. >>So our key take away on kind of the i t m m i t s m i t workflow spaces. Look, it's best in breed, which is service now, or some of the lower cost providers. Right There's really no room for middle of the pack, so >>this is an >>interesting charts. And so what you're looking at here, there's a few directives, so kind of walk you through it and then I'll walk through. The actual results is we're looking within service now accounts. And so we're seeing how these companies are doing within or among customers that are using service. Now, today, where you're looking at on the ex, access is essentially shared market share our shared customers, and then on the Y axis you're seeing essentially the spend velocity off those vendors within service. Now's outs, right? So if the vendor was doing well, you would see them moving up into the right, right? That means they're having more customer overlap with service now, and they're also accelerating Spend, but you can see if you will get zendesk. If you look at BMC, it's a managed right. You can see there either losing market share and spend within service now accounts or they're losing spend right and zendesk is another example Here, Um, and what's actually interesting is, and we've had a lot of anecdotal evidence from CIOs is that look they start with service. Now it's best in breed, but a few of them have said, Look, it's got expensive, Um, and so they would move over Rezendes. And then they would look at it versus a conference that last year, and we had a few CEO say, Look at last quarter of the price of zendesk. Andi moved away from Zendesk and subsequently well, with last year. And so it's just it's interesting that, you know, during these times where you know CIOs are reducing their budgets on that look, it's either best of breed or low cost. There's really no room in the middle, and so it's actually kind of interesting. In this space, it's It's an interesting dynamic and being usually it's best of breed or low cost. Rarely do you kind of see both win, and I think that's what kind of makes the space interesting. >>I've been following service now for a number of years. I just make a few comments there. First of all, you know, workday was the gold standard in enterprise software for the longest time and, you know, company and and and I I always considered service now to be kind of part of that you know Silicon Valley Mafia with Frank's Loop. But what's happened is, you know, Sluman did a masterful job of identifying the total available market and executing with demand, and now you know, his successors have picking it beyond there. You know, service now has a market cap that's not quite double, but I mean, I think workday last I checked was in the mid thirties. Service now is market valuation is up in the 60 billion range. I mean, they announced, um uh, just recently, very interestingly, they be expectations. They lowered their guidance relative to consensus guide, but I think the street hose, first of all, they beat their numbers and they've got that SAS model, that very predictable model. And I think people are saying, Look there, just leaving meat on the bone so they can continue to be because that's been their sort of m o these last several years. So you got to like their positioning and you get to talk to customers. They are pricey. You do hear complaints about that, and they've got a strong lock spec. But generally I got my experiences. If people can identify business value and clear productivity, they work through the lock in, you know, they'll just fight it out in the negotiations with procurement. >>That's right, and two things on that. So with service now and and even Salesforce, right, they are a platform like approach type of vendors right where you build on them. And that's what makes them such break companies, right? Even if they have, you know, little nicks and knacks here and there. When they report people see past that right, they understand their best of breed. You build your companies on the service now's and the sales forces of the world. And to the second point, you're exactly right. Businesses want to maintain consistent productivity on, and I think that, you know, is it kind of resonates with the theme, right, doubling down on Cloud and sas. Um, as as you have all this remote work, as you have kind of, you know, questionable are curating marquee a macro environment organizations want to make sure that their employees continue to execute that they're generating consistent productivity. And using these kind of best of breed tools is the way to go. >>It's interesting you mentioned, uh, salesforce and service now for years I've been saying they're on a collision course we haven't seen yet because they're both platforms. I still, uh I'm waiting for that to happen. Let's bring up the next card and let's get into networking way talk. Um Ah. Couple of weeks ago, about the whole shift from traditional Mpls moving to SD win. And this sort of really lays it out. Take us through the data here, please. >>Yeah, no problem. So we're just looking at a handful of vendors here. Really? We're looking at networking vendors that have the highest adoption rates within cloud accounts. And so what we did was we looked inside of aws azure GCC, right. We essentially isolated just those customers. And then we said which networking vendors are seeing the best spend data and the most adoptions within those cloud accounts. And so you get you can kind of see some, uh, some themes here, right? SD lan. Right. You can see Iraqi their VM. Where nsx. You see some next gen load balance saying are they're on the cdn side right then. And so you're seeing a theme here of more next gen players on You're not really seeing a lot of the mpls vendors here, right? They're the ones that have more flattening, decreasing and replacing data. And so the reason just kind of going on this slide is you know, when you kind of think about the networking space as a whole, this is where adoptions are going. This is this is where spends billing and expanded, arise it. And what we just talked about >>your networking such a fascinating space to me because you got you got the leader and Cisco That has helped 2/3 of the market for the longest time, despite competitors like Arista, Juniper and others trying to get in the Air Force and NSX. And the big Neisseria acquisition, you know, kind of potentially disrupted that. But you can see, you know, Cisco, they don't go down without a fight. And ah, there, let's take a look at the next card on Cdn. You know, this is interesting. Uh, you know, you think with all this activity around work from home and remote offices, there's a hot area, But what are we looking at here? >>Yeah, no problem. And that's right, right? You would think. And so we're looking at Cdn players here you would think with the uptake in traffic, you would see fantastic. That scores right for all the cdn vendor. So what you're looking at here and again there's a few lenses on here, so I kind of walk. You kind of walk the audience through here is first we isolated only those individuals that were accelerating their budgets due to work from home. Right. So we've had this conversation now for a few weeks where support employees working from home. You did see a decent number of organizations. I think it was 20 or 30% of organizations at the per server that indicated they're actually accelerate instead. So we're looking at those individuals. And then what we're doing is we're seeing how are how's Cloudflare and aka my performing within those accounts, right? And so we're looking at those specific customers and you could just see within Cloudflare and we practice and security and networking which by more the Cdn piece, How consistent elevated the date is right? This is spend in density, right? Not overall market share is obviously aka my you know, their brand father CD ends. They have the most market share and if you look at optimized to the right. Now you can see the spend velocity is not very good. It's actually negative across boats sector. So you know it's not. We're not saying that. Look, there's a changing of the guard that's occurring right now. We're still relatively small compared talk my But there's just such a start on trust here and again, it kind of goes to what we're talking about. Our macro themes, right? CIOs are continuing to invest in next gen Technologies, and better technologies on that is having an impact on some of these legacy. And, you know, grandfather providers. >>Well, I mean, I think as we enter this again, I've said a number of times. It's ironic overhead coming into a new decade. And you're seeing this throughout the I T. Stack, where you've got a lot of disruptors and you've got companies with large install bases, lot of on Prem or a lot of historical legacy. Yeah, and it's very hard for them to show growth. They often times squeeze R and D because they gotta serve Wall Street. And this is the kind of dilemma they're in, and the only good news with a comma here is there is less bad security go from negative 20% to a negative 8% net score. Um, but wow, what a what a contrast, but to your point, much, much smaller base, but still very relevant. We've seen this movie before. Let's let's wrap with another area that we've talked about. What is virtualization? Desktop virtualization? Beady eye again. A beneficiary of the work from home pivot. Um, And we're focused here, right on Fortune 500 net scores. But give us the low down on this start. >>Yeah, So this is something that look, I think it's it's pretty obvious to into the market you're seeing an uptake and spend across the board versus three months ago in a year ago and spending, etc. Among your desktop virtualization players, there's FBI, right? So that's gonna be your VPN right now. Obviously, they reported pretty good numbers there, so this is an obvious slide, but we wanted to kind of throw it in there. Just say, look, you know, these organizations are seeing nice upticks incent, you know, within the virtualization sectors, specifically within Fortune 500 again, that's kind of, you know, work from home spend that we're seeing here, >>right? So, I mean, this is really a 100% net score in the Fortune 500 for workspaces is pretty amazing. And I think the shared in on this that the end was actually quite large. It wasn't like single digits, Many dozens. I remember when Workspaces first came out, it maybe wasn't ready for prime time. But clearly there's momentum there, and we're seeing this across the board saga. Thanks so much for coming in this week. Really appreciate it. We're gonna be in touch with with you with the TR. We're gonna continue to report on this, but start Dr stay safe. And thanks again. >>Thanks again. Appreciate it. Looking for to do another one. >>All right. Thank you. Everybody for watching this Cube insights Powered by ET are this is Dave Volante for Dr Sadaaki. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. I published weekly on wiki bond dot com Uh, and also on silicon angle dot com Don't forget tr dot Plus, Check out all the action there. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (dramatic music) >> Hi, everyone, welcome to this week's Breaking Analysis. It's Friday, October 18th, and this is theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Today, ETR had its conference call, its webcast. It was in a quiet period, and it dropped this tome. I have spent the last several hours going through this dataset. It's just unbelievable. It's the fresh data from the October survey, and I'm going to share just some highlights with you. I wish I had a couple hours to go through all this stuff, but I'm going to just pull out some of the key points. Spending is flattening. We've talked about this in previous discussions with you. But, things are still healthy. We're just reverting back to pre 2018 levels and, obviously, keeping a very close eye on the spending data and the sectors. There is some uncertainty heading into Q four. It's not only tariffs, you know. 2020's an election year, so that causes some uncertainty and some concerns for people. But, the big theme from ETR is there's less experimentation going on. The last several years have been ones where we're pushing out digital initiatives, and there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of redundancy. So, I'm going to talk more about that. I'm going to focus on a couple of sectors. I'm going to share with you there's the overall sector analysis. Then, I'm going to focus in on Microsoft and AWS and talk a little bit about the cloud. Then, I'm going to give some other highlights and, particularly, around enterprise software. The other thing I'll say is that the folks from ETR are going to be in the Bay Area on October 28th through the 30th, and I would encourage you to spend some time with them. If you want to meet them, just, you know, contact me @dvellante on Twitter or David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. I have no dog in this fight. I get no money from these guys. We're just partners and friends, but I love their data. And, they've given me access to it, and it's great because I can share it with you, our community. So, let's get right into it. Alex, if you just bring up the first slide, what I want to show is the ETR pulse check survey demographics, so every quarter, ETR does these surveys. They've got a dataset comprising 4500 members, panelists if you will, that they survey each quarter. In this survey, 1336 responded, representing 457 billion in spending power, and you can see from this slide, you know, it's got a nice mix of large companies. Very heavily weighted toward North America, but you're talking about, you know, 12% AMIA out of 1300. Certainly substantial and statistically significant to get some trends overseas. You can see across all industries. And then, job titles, a lot of C level executives, VPs, architects, people who know what the spending climate looks like, so I really like the mix of data. Let me make some overall comments, and, Alex, the next slide sort of gives some snapshot here. The big theme is that there's a compression in tech spending, as they say. It's very tough to compare to compare to 2018, which was just a phenomenal year. I mentioned the tariffs. It was an election year. Election years bring uncertainty. Uncertainty brings conservatism, so that's something, obviously, that's weighing, I think, on buyers' minds. And, I'll give you some anecdotal comments in a moment that will underscore that. There's less redundancy in spending. This has been a theme of ETR's for quite some time now. The last few years have been a try everything type of mode. Digital initiatives were launched, let's say, starting in 2016. ETR called this, I love this, Tom DelVecchio, the CEO of ETR, called it a giant IT bake off where you were looking at, okay, cloud versus on prem or SaaS versus conventional models, new databases versus legacy databases, legacy storage versus sort of modern storage stacks. So, you had this big bake off going on. And, what's happening now is you're seeing less experimentation so less adoption of new technologies, and replacements are on the rise. So, people are making their bets. They're saying, "Okay, these technologies "are the ones we're going to bet on, "these emerging disruptive technologies." So, they're narrowing their scope of emerging technologies, and they're saying, "Okay, now, "we're going to replace the legacy stuff." So, you're seeing these new stacks emerging. I mentioned some others before, but things like cloud native versus legacy waterfall approaches. And, these new stacks are hitting both legacy and disruptive companies for the reasons that I mentioned before because we're replacing legacy, but at the same time, we're narrowing the scope of the new stuff. This is not necessarily good for the disruptors. Downturns, sometimes, are good for legacy because they're perceived as a safer bet. So, what I want to do, right now, is share with you some of the anecdotals from the survey, and I'll just, you know, call out some things. By the way, the first thing I would note is, you know, ETR did sort of an analysis of frequency of terms. Cloud, cost, replacing, change, moving, consolidation, migration, and contract were the big ones that stood out. But, let me just call a couple of the anecdotals. When they do these surveys, they'll ask open ended questions, and so these kind of give you a good idea as to how people are thinking. "We're projecting a hold based on impacts from tariffs. "Situation could change if tariff relief is reached. "We're really concerned about EU." Another one, "Shift to SaaS is accelerating "and driving TCO down. "Investing in 2019, we're implementing "and retiring old technologies in 2020. "There's an active effort to consolidate "the number of security vendor solutions. "We're doing more Microsoft." Let's see, "We have moved "to a completely outsourced infrastructure model, "so no longer purchasing storage," interesting. "In general, we're trying to reduce spending "based on current market conditions." So, people, again, are concerned. Storage, as a category, is way down. "We're moving from Teradata to AWS and a data lake." I'll make some comments, as well, later on about EDW and Snowflake in particular, who, you know, remains very healthy. "We're moving our data to G Suite and AWS. "We're migrating our SaaS offering to elastic. "We're sunsetting Cognos," which, of course, is owned by IBM. "Talend, we decided to drop after evaluating. "Tableau, we've decided to not integrate anymore," even though Tableau is, actually, looking very strong subsequent to the sales force acquisition. So, there's some comments there that people, again, are replacing and they're narrowing some of their focus on spending. All right, Alex, bring up the next slide. I want to share with you the sector momentum. So, we've talked about this methodology of net score. Every time ETR does one of these pulse surveys, they ask, "Are you spending more or are you spending less? "Or, are you spending the same?" And then, essentially, they subtract the spending less from the spending more, and the spending more included new adoptions. The spending less includes replacements. And, that comes out with a net score, and that net score is an indicator of momentum. And, what you can see here is, the momentum I've highlighted in red, is container orchestration, the container platforms, machine learning, AI, automation, big theme. We were just at the UiPath conference, huge theme on automation. And, of course, robotic process automation, RPA. Cloud computing remains very strong. This dotted red line that I put in there, that's at the, you know, 30%, 35% level. You kind of want to be above that line to really show momentum. Anything below that line is either holding serve, holding steady, but well below that line, when you start getting into the low 20s and the teens, is a red zone. That's a danger zone. You could see data warehouse software is kind of on that cusp. and I'm not, you know, a huge fan of the sector in general, but I love Snowflake and what they're doing and the share gains that are going on there. So, when you're below that red line, it's a game of share gain. Storage, same thing we've talked about. The overall storage sector is down. It's being pressured by cloud, as that anectdotal suggested. It's also being pressured by the fact that so much flash has been injected into the data center over the last couple of years. That given headroom for buyers. They don't need as much storage, so overall, the sector is soft. But then, you see companies, like Pure, continuing to gain share, so they're actually quite strong in this quarter survey. So, you could see some various sectors here. IT consulting and outsourced IT not looking strong, data center consolidation. By the way, you saw, in IBM's recent earnings, Jim Kavanaugh pointed to their outsourcing business as a real drag, you know. Some of these other sectors, you could see, actually, PC laptop, this is obviously a big impact for Dell and HP, you know, kind of holding steady. Actually, better than storage, so, you know, for that large of a segment, not necessarily such a bad thing. Okay, now, what I want to do, I want to shift focus and make some comments on Microsoft, specifically, and AWS. So, here's just some high level points on this slide on Microsoft. The N out of that total was 1200, so very large proportion of the survey is weighted toward Microsoft. So, a good observation space for Microsoft. Extremely positive spending outlook for this company. There's a lot of ways to get to Microsoft. You want cloud, there's Azure, you know. Visualization, you got Power BI. Collaboration, there's Teams. Of course, email and calendaring is Office 365. You need hiring data? Well, we just bought LinkedIn. CRM, ERP, there's Microsoft Dynamics. So, Microsoft is a lot of roads, to spend with Microsoft. Windows is not the future of Microsoft. Satya Nadella and company have done a great job of sort of getting out of that dogma and really expanding their TAM. You're seeing acceleration from Microsoft across all key sectors, cloud, apps, containers, MI, or machine intelligence, AI and ML, analytics, infrastructure software, data warehousing, servers, GitHub is strong, collaboration, as I mentioned. So, really, across the board, this portfolio of offerings powered by the scale of Azure is very strong. Microsoft has great velocity in the cloud, and it's a key bellwether. Now, the next slide, what it does is compares the cloud computing big three in the US, Azure, AWS, and GCP, Google Cloud Platform. This is, again, net score. This is infrastructure as a service, and so you can see here the yellow is Microsoft, that darker line is AWS, and GCP is that blue line down below. All three are actually showing great strength in the spending data. Azure has more momentum than AWS, so it's growing faster. We've seen this for a while, but I want to make a point here that didn't come up on the ETR call. But, AWS is probably two and a half to three times larger in infrastructure as a service than is Microsoft Azure, so remember, AWS has a $35 billion at least run rate business in infrastructure as a service. And, as I say, it's two and a half to three times, at least, larger than Microsoft, which is probably a run rate of, let's call it, 10 to 12 billion, okay. So, it's quite amazing that AWS is holding at that 66 to now dropping to 63% net score given that it's so large. And, of course, way behind is GCP, much smaller share. In fact, I think, probably, Alibaba has surpassed GCP in terms of overall market share. So, at any rate, you could see all three, strong momentum. The cloud continues its march. I'll make some comments on that a little bit later. But, Azure has really strong momentum. Let's talk, next slide if you will, Alex, about AWS. Smaller sample size, 731 out of the total, which is not surprising, right. Microsoft's been around a lot longer and plays in a lot more sectors. ETR has a positive to neutral outlook on AWS. Now, you have to be careful here because, remember, what ETR is doing is they're looking at the spending momentum and comparing that to consensus estimates, okay. So, ETR's business is helping, largely, Wall Street, you know, buy side analysts make bets, and so it's not only about how much money they make or what kind of momentum they have in aggregate. It's about how they're doing relative to expectation, something that I explained on the last Breaking Analysis. Spending on AWS continues to be very robust. They've got that flywheel effect. Make no mistake that this positive to neutral outlook is relative to expectations. Relative to overall market, AWS is, you know, kicking butt. Cloud, analytics, big data, data warehousing, containers, machine intelligence, even virtualization. AWS is growing and gaining share. My view, AWS will continue to outperform the marketplace for quite some time now, and it's gaining share from legacy players. Who's it hurting? You're seeing the companies within AWS's sort of sphere that are getting impacted by AWS. Oracle, IBM, SAP, you know, cloud Arrow, which we mentioned last time is at all time lows, Teradata. These accounts, inside of AWS respondents, are losing share. Now, who's gaining share? Snowflake is on a tear. Mongo is very strong. Microsoft, interestingly, remains strong in AWS. In fact, AWS runs a lot of Microsoft workloads. That's, you know, fairly well known. But, again, Snowflake, very strong inside of AWS accounts. There's no indication that, despite AWS's emphasis on database and, of course, data warehouse, that Snowflake's being impacted by that. The reverse, Snowflake is taking advantage of cloud momentum. The only real negative you can say about AWS is that Microsoft is accelerating faster than AWS, so that might upset Andy Jassy. But, he'll point out, I guess, what I pointed out before, that they're much larger. Take a look at AWS on this next slide. The net score across all AWS sectors, the ones I mentioned. And, this is the growth in Fortune 500, so you can see, very steady in the large accounts. That's that blue line, you know, dipped in the October 18 survey, but look at how strong it is, holding 67% in Fortune 500 accounts. And then, you can see, the yellow line is the market share. AWS continues to gain share in those large accounts when you weight that out in terms of spending. That's why I say AWS is going to continue to do very well in this overall market. So, just some, you know, comments on cloud. As I said, it continues to march, it continues to really be the watchword, the fundamental operating model. Microsoft, very strong, expanding its TAM everywhere, I mean, affecting, potentially, Slack, Box, Dropbox, New Relic, Splunk, IBM, and Security, Elastic. So, Microsoft, very strong here. AWS continues to grow, not as strong as '18, but much stronger than its peers, very well positioned in database and artificial intelligence. And so, not a lot of softness in AWS. I mentioned on one of the previous Breaking Analysis, Kubernetes', actually, container's a little soft, so we always keep an eye on that one. And, Google, again, struggling to make gains in cloud. One of the comments I made before is that the long term surveys for Google looked positive, but that's not showing up yet in the near term market shares. All right, Alex, if you want to bring up the next slide, I want to make some quick comments before I close, on enterprise software. There was a big workday scare this week. They kind of guided that their core HR business was not going to be as robust as it had been previously, so this pulled back all the SaaS vendors. And, you know, the stock got crushed, Salesforce got hit, ServiceNow got hit, Splunk got hit. But, I tell you, you look at the data in this massive dataset, ServiceNow remains strong, Salesforce looks, very slight deceleration, but very sound, especially in the Fortune 100 in that GPP, the giant public and private companies that I talked about on an earlier call. That's one of the best indicators of strength. Tableau, actually, very strong, especially in large accounts, so Salesforce seems to be doing a good job of integrating there. Splunk, (mumbles) coming up shortly, I think this month. Securities, the category is very strong, lifting all ships. Splunk looks really good. Despite some of the possible competition from Microsoft, there's no indication that Splunk is slowing. There's some anecdotal issues about pricing that I talked about before, but I think Splunk is really dealing with those. UiPath's another company. We were just out there this past week at the UiPath Forward conference. UiPath, in this dataset, when you take out some of the smaller respondents, smaller number of respondents, UiPath has one of the highest net scores in the entire sample. UiPath is on a tear. I talked to dozens of customers this week. Very strong momentum, and then moving into, got new areas, and I'll be focusing on the RPA sector a little later on. But, automation, in general, really has some tailwinds in the marketplace. And, you know, the other comment I'll make about RPA is a downturn actually could help RPA vendors, who, by the way, all the RPA vendors look strong. Automation Anywhere, UiPath, I mentioned, Blue Prism, you know, even some of the legacy companies like Pega look, actually, very strong. A downturn in the economy could help some of the RPA vendors because would be looking to do more with less, and automation, you know, could be something that they're looking toward. Snowflake I mentioned, again, they continue their tear. A very strong share in expansion. Slightly lower than previous quarters in terms of the spending momentum, but the previous quarters were off the charts. So, also very strong in large companies. All right, so let me wrap. So, buyers are planning for a slowdown. I mean, there's no doubt about that. It's something that we have to pay very close attention to, and I think the marker expects that. And, I think, you know, it's okay. There's less spaghetti against the wall, we're going to try everything, and that's having a moderating effect on spending, as is the less redundancy. People were running systems in parallel. As they say, they're placing bets, now, on both disruptive tech and on legacy tech, so they're replacing both in some cases. Or, they're not investing in some of the disruptive stuff because they're narrowing their investments in disruptive technologies, and they're also replacing some legacy. We're clearly seeing new adoptions down, according to ETR, and replacements up, and that's going to affect both legacy and disruptive vendors. So, caution is the watchword, but, overall, the market remains healthy. Okay, so thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching this Breaking Analysis. We'll see you next time. (dramatic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante here with Stu Miniman. We're here to unpack the recent acquisition that IBM announced of Red Hat. $34 billon acquisition financed with cash and debt. And Stu, let me get us started. Why would IBM spend $34 billion on Red Hat? Its largest acquisition to date of a software company had been Cognos at $5 billion. This is a massive move. IBM's Ginni Rometty called this a game changer. And essentially, my take is that they're pivoting. Their public cloud strategy was not living up to expectations. They're pivoting to hybrid cloud. Their hybrid cloud strategy was limited because they didn't really have strong developer mojo, their Bluemix PaaS layer had really failed. And so they really needed to make a big move here, and this is a big move. And so IBM's intent, and Ginni Rometty laid out the strategy, is to become number one in hybrid cloud, the undisputed leader. And so we'll talk about that. But Stu, from Red Hat's perspective, it's a company you're very close to and you've observed for a number of years, Red Hat was on a path touting a $5 billion revenue plan, what happened? Why would they capitulate? >> Yeah Dave, on the face of it, Red Hat says that IBM will help it further its mission. We just listened to Arvin Krishna from IBM talking with Paul Cormier at Red Hat, and they talked about how they were gonna keep the Red Hat brand alive. IBM has a long history with open source. As you mentioned, I've been working with Red Hat, gosh, almost 20 years now, and we all think back to two decades ago, when IBM put a billion dollars into Linux and really pushed on open source. So these are not strangers, they know each other really well. Part of me looks at these from a cynicism standpoint. Somebody on Twitter said that Red Hat is hitting it at the peak of Kubernetes hype. And therefore, they're gonna get maximum valuation for where the stock is. Red Hat has positioned itself rather well in the hybrid cloud world, really the multicloud world, when you go to AWS, when you go to the Microsoft Azure environment, you talk to Google. Open source fits into that environment and Red Hat products specifically tie into those environments. Remember last year, in Boston, there's a video of Andy Jassy talking about a partnership with Red Hat. This year, up on stage, Microsoft with Azure partnering deeply with Red Hat. So Red Hat has done a nice job of moving beyond Linux. But Linux is still at its core. There definitely is concern that the operating system is less important today than it was in the past. It was actually Red Hat's acquisition of CoreOS for about $250 million earlier this year that really put a fine point on it. CoreOS was launched to be just enough Linux to live in this kind of container and Kubernetes world. And Red Hat, of course, like we've seen often, the company that is saying, "We're going to kill you", well you go and you buy them. So Red Hat wasn't looking to kill IBM, but definitely we've seen this trend of softwares eating the world, and open sources eating software. So IBM, hopefully, is a embracing that open source ethos. I have to say, Dave, for myself, a little sad to see the news. Red Hat being the paragon of open source. The one that we always go to for winning in this space. So we hope that they will be able to keep their culture. We've had a chance, many times, to interview Jim Whitehurst, really respected CEO. One that we think should stay involved in IBM deeply for this. But if they can keep and grow the culture, then it's a win for Red Hat. But still sorting through everything, and it feels like a little bit of a capitulation that Red Hat decides to sell off rather than keep its mission of getting to five billion and beyond, and be the leading company in the space. >> Well I think it is a bit of a capitulation. Because look, Red Hat is roughly a $3 billion company, growing at 20% a year, had that vision of five billion Its stock, in June, had hit $175. So while IBM's paying a 60% premium off of its current price, it's really only about 8 or 9% higher than where Red Hat was just a few months ago. And so I think, there's an old saying on Wall Street, the first disappointment is never the last. And so I think that Red Hat was looking at a long slog. They reduced expectations, they guided lower, and they were looking at the 90-day shot clock. And this probably wasn't going to be a good 'nother couple of years for Red Hat. And they're selling at the peak of the market, or roughly the peak of the market. They probably figured, hey, the window is closing, potentially, to do this deal. Maybe not such a bad time to get out, as opposed to trying to slog it out. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, Dave, I think you're absolutely right. When you look at where Red Hat is winning, they've done great in OpenStack but there's not a lot of excitement around OpenStack. Kubernetes was talked about lots in the announcement, in the briefings, and everything like that. I was actually surprised you didn't hear as much about just the core business. You would think you would be hearing about all the companies using Red Hat Enterprise Linux around the world. That ratable model that Red Hat really has a nice base of their environment. It was talking more about the future and where Kubernetes, and cloud-native, and all of that development will go. IBM has done middling okay with developers. They have a strong history in middleware, which is where a lot of the Red Hat development activity has been heading. It was interesting to hear, on the call, it's like, oh well, what about the customers that are using IBM too say, "Oh well, if customers want that, we'll still do it." What about IBM with Cloud Foundry? Well absolutely, if customers wanna still be doing it, they'll do that. So you don't hear the typical, "Oh well, we're going to take Red Hat technology "and push it through all of IBM's channel." This is in the IBM cloud group, and that's really their focus, as it is. I feel like they're almost limiting the potential for growth for Red Hat. >> Well so IBM's gonna pay for this, as I said, it's an all cash deal. IBM's got about 14 and a half billion dollars on the balance sheet. And so they gotta take out some debt. S&P downgraded IBM's rating from an A+ to an A. And so the ratings agency is going to be watching IBM's growth. IBM said this will add 200 basis points of revenue growth over the five year CAGR. But that means we're really not gonna see that for six, seven years. And Ginni Rometty stressed this is not a backend loaded thing. We're gonna find revenue opportunities through cross-selling and go-to-market. But we have a lot of questions on this deal, Stu. And I wanna sorta get into that. So first of all, again, I think it's the right move for IBM. It's a big move for IBM. Rumors were that Cisco might have been interested. I'm not sure if Microsoft was in the mix. So IBM went for it and, as I said, didn't pay a huge premium over where their stock was back in June. Now of course, back in June, the market was kind of inflated. But nonetheless, the strategy now is to go multi-cloud. The number one in the multi-cloud world. What is that multi-cloud leadership? How are we gonna measure multi-cloud? Is IBM, now, the steward of open source for the industry? To your point earlier, you're sad, Stu, I know. >> You bring up a great point. So I think back to three years ago, with the Wikibon we put together, our true private cloud forecast. And when we built that, we said, "Okay, here's the hardware, and software, "and services in private cloud." And we said, "Well let's try to measure hybrid cloud." And we spent like, six months looking at this. And it's like, well what is hybrid cloud? I've got my public cloud pieces, and I've got my private cloud pieces. Well there's some management layers and things that go in between. Do I count things like PaaS? So do you save people like Pivotal and Red Hat's OpenShift? Are those hybrid cloud? Well but they live either here or there. They're not usually necessarily helping with the migration and moving around. I can live in multiple environments. So Linux and containers live in the public, they live in the private, they don't just fly around in the ether. So measuring hybrid cloud, I think is really tough. Does IBM plus Red Hat make them a top leader in this hybrid multi-cloud world? Absolutely, they should be mentioned a lot more. When I go to the cloud shows, the public cloud shows, IBM isn't one of the first peak companies you think about. Red Hat absolutely is in the conversation. It actually should raise the profile of Red Hat because, while Red Hat plays in a lot of the conversations, they're also not the first company that comes to mind when you talk about them. Microsoft, middle of hybrid cloud. Oracle, positioning their applications in this multi-cloud world. Of course you can't talk about cloud, any cloud, without talking about Amazon's position in the marketplace. And SAS is the real place that it plays. So IBM, one of their biggest strengths is that they have applications. Dave, you know the space really well. What does this mean vis-à-vis Oracle? >> Well let's see, so Oracle, I think, is looking at this, saying, alright. I would say IBM is Oracle's number one competitor in the enterprise. You got SAP, and Amazon obviously in cloud, et cetera, et cetera. But let me put it this way, I think Oracle is IBM's number one competitor. Whether Oracle sees it that way or not. But they're clearly similar companies, in terms of their vertical integration. I think Oracle's looking at this, saying, hey. There's no way Oracle was gonna spend $34 billion on Red Hat. And I don't think they were interested in really spending any money on the alternatives. But does this put Canonical and SUSE in play? I think Oracle's gonna look at this and sort of message to its customers, "We're already number one in our world in hybrid cloud." But I wanna come back to the deal. I'm actually optimistic on the deal, from the standpoint of, I think IBM had to make a big move like this. Because it was largely just bumping along. But I'm not buying the narrative from Jim Whitehurst that, "Well we had to do this to scale." Why couldn't they scale with partners? I just don't understand that. They're open. This is largely, to me, a services deal. This is a big boon for IBM Services business. In fact, Jim Whitehurst, and Ginni even said that today on the financial analyst call, Jim said, "Our big constraint was "services scale and the industry expertise there." So what was that constraint? Why couldn't they partner with Accenture, and Ernie Young, and PwC, and the likes of Deloitte, to scale and preserve greater independence? And I think that the reason is, IBM sees an opportunity and they're going hard after it. So how will, or will, IBM change its posture relative to some of those big services plays? >> Yeah, Dave, I think you're absolutely right there. Because Red Hat should've been able to scale there. I wonder if it's just that all of those big service system integrators, they're working really closely with the public cloud providers. And while Red Hat was a piece of it, it wasn't the big piece of it. And therefore, I'm worried on the application migration. I'm worried about the adoption of infrastructure as a service. And Red Hat might be a piece in the puzzle, but it wasn't the driver for that change, and the move, and the modernization activities that were going on. That being said, OpenShift was a great opportunity. It plays in a lot of these environments. It'll be really interesting to see. And a huge opportunity for IBM to take and accelerate that business. From a services standpoint, do you think it'll change their position with regard to the SIs? >> I don't. I think IBM's gonna try to present, preserve Red Hat as an independent company. I would love to see IBM do what EMC did years ago with VMware, and float some portion of the company, and truly have it at least be quasi-independent. With an independent operating structure, and reporting structure from the standpoint of a public company. That would really signal to the partners that IBM's serious about maintaining independence. >> Yeah now, look Dave, IBM has said they will keep the brand, they will keep the products. Of all the companies that would buy Red Hat, I'm not super worried about kinda polluting open source. It was kinda nice that Jim Whitehurst would say, if it's a Red Hat thing, it is 100% open source. And IBM plays in a lot of these environments. A friend of mine on Twitter was like, "Oh hey, IBM's coming back to OpenDaylight or things like that." Because they'd been part of Cloud Foundry, they'd been part of OpenDaylight. There's certain ones that they are part of it and then they step back. So IBM, credibly open source space, if they can let Red Hat people still do their thing. But the concern is that lots of other companies are gonna be calling up project leads, and contributors in the open source community that might've felt that Red Hat was ideal place to live, and now they might go get their paycheck somewhere else. >> There's rumors that Jim Whitehurst eventually will take over IBM. I don't see it, I just don't think Jim Whitehurst wants to run Z mainframes and Services. That doesn't make any sense to me. Ginni's getting to the age where IBM CEOs typically retire, within the next couple of years. And so I think that it's more likely they'll bring in somebody from internally. Whether it's Arvin or, more likely, Jim Kavanaugh 'cause he's got the relationship with Wall Street. Let's talk about winners and losers. It's just, again, a huge strategic move for IBM. Frankly, I see the big winners is IBM and Red Hat. Because as we described before, IBM was struggling with its execution, and Red Hat was just basically, finally hitting a wall after 60-plus quarters of growth. And so the question is, will its customers win? The big concern I have for the customers is, IBM has this nasty habit of raising prices when it does acquisitions. We've seen it a number of times. And so you keep an eye on it, if I were a Red Hat customer, I'd be locking in some attractive pricing, longterm. And I would also be calling Mark Shuttleworth, and get his take, and get that Amdahl coffee cup on my desk, as it were. Other winners and losers, your thoughts on some of the partners, and the ecosystem. >> Yeah, when I look at this and say, compare it to Microsoft buying GitHub. We're all wondering, is this a real game changer for IBM? And if they embrace the direction. It's not like Red Hat culture is going to just take over IBM. In the Q&A with IBM, they said, "Will there be influence? Absolutely. "Is this a marriage of equals? No. "We're buying Red Hat and we will be "communicating and working together on this" But you can see how this can help IBM, as to the direction. Open source and the multi-cloud world is a huge, important piece. Cisco, I think, could've made a move like this. I would've been a little bit more worried about maintaining open source purity, if it was somebody like Cisco. There's other acquisitions, you mentioned Canonical and SUSE are out there. If somebody wanted to do this, the role of the operating system is much less important than it is today. You wouldn't have seen Microsoft up on stage at Red Hat Summit this year if Windows was the driver for Microsoft going forward. The cloud companies out there, to be honest, it really cements their presence out there. I don't think AWS is sitting there saying, "Oh jeez, we need to worry." They're saying, "Well IBM's capitulated." Realizing that, "Sure they have their own cloud, "and their environment, but they're going to be "successful only when they live in, "and around, and amongst our platform of Amazon." And Azure's gonna feel the same way, and same about Google. So there's that dynamic there. >> What about VMware? >> So I think VMware absolutely is a loser here. When I went back to say one of the biggest strengths of IBM is that they have applications. When you talk about Red Hat, they're really working, not only at the infrastructure layer, but working with developers, and working in that environment. The biggest weakness of VMware, is they don't own the applications. I'm paying licenses to VMware. And in a multi-cloud world, why do I need VMware? As opposed to Red Hat and IBM, or Amazon, or Microsoft, have a much more natural affinity for the applications and the data in the future. >> And what about the arms dealers? HPE and Dell, in particular, and of course, Lenovo. Wouldn't they prefer Red Hat being independent? >> Absolutely, they would prefer that they're gonna stay independent. As long as it doesn't seem to customers that IBM is trying to twist everybody's arms, and get you on to Z, or Power, or something like that. And continues to allow partnerships with the HPEs, Dells, Lenovos of the world. I think they'll be okay. So I'd say middling to impact. But absolutely, Red Hat, as an independent, was really the Switzerland of the marketplace. >> Ginni Rometty had sited three growth areas. One was Red Hat scale and go-to-market. I think there's no question about that. IBM could help with Red Hat's go-to-market. The other growth vector was IBM's products and software on the Red Hat stack. I'm less optimistic there, because I think that it's the strength of IBM's products, in and of themselves, that are largely gonna determine that success. And then the third was Services. I think IBM Services is a huge winner here. Having the bat phone into Red Hat is a big win for IBM Services. They can now differentiate. And this is where I think it's gonna be really interesting to see the posture of Accenture and those other big guys. I think IBM can now somewhat differentiate from those guys, saying, "Well wait, "we have exclusive, or not exclusive, "but inside baseball access to Red Hat." So that's gonna be an interesting dynamic to watch. Your final thoughts here. >> Yeah, yeah, Dave, absolutely. On the product integration piece, the question would be, you're gonna have OpenAPIs. This is all gonna work with the entire ecosystem. Couldn't IBM have done more of this without having to pay $34 billion and put things together? Services, absolutely, will be the measurement as to whether this is successful or not. That's probably gonna be the line out of them in financials, that we're gonna have to look at. Because, Dave, going back to, what is hybrid, and how do we measure it? What is success for this whole acquisition down the line? Any final pieces to what we should watch and how we measure that? >> So I think that, first of all, IBM's really good with acquisitions, so keep an eye on that. I'm not so concerned about the debt. IBM's got strong free cash flow. Red Hat throws off a billion dollars a year in free cash flow. This should be an accretive acquisition. In terms of operating profits, it might take a couple of years. But certainly from a standpoint of free cash flow and revenue growth, I think it's gonna help near-term. If it doesn't, that's something that's really important to watch. And then the last thing is culture. You know a lot of people at these companies. I know a lot of people at these companies. Look, the Red Hat culture drinks the Kool-Aid of open. You know this. Do they see IBM as the steward of open, and are they gonna face a brain drain? That's why it's no coincidence that Whitehurst and Rometty were down in North Carolina today. And Arvin and Paul Cormier were in Boston today. This is where a lot of employees are for Red Hat. And they're messaging. And so that's very, very important. IBM's not foolish. So that, to me, Stu, is a huge thing, is the culture. Dave, IBM is no longer the navy suit with the red tie, and everybody buttoned down. People are concerned about like, oh, IBM's gonna give the Red Hat people a dress code. Sure, the typical IBMer is not in a graphic tee and a hoodie. But, Dave, you've seen such a transformation in IBM over the last couple of decades. >> Yeah, definitely. And I think this really does, in my view, cement, now, the legacy of Ginny Rometty, which was kinda hanging on Watson, and Cognitive, and this sort of bespoke set of capabilities, and the SoftLayer acquisition. It, now, all comes together. This is a major pivot by IBM. I think, strategically, it's the right move for IBM. And I think, if in fact, IBM can maintain Red Hat's independence and that posture, and maintain its culture and employee base, I think it does change the game for IBM. So I would say, smart move, good move. Expensive but probably worth it. >> Yeah, where else would they have put their money, Dave? >> Yeah, right. Alright, Stu, thank you very much for unpacking this announcement. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. (mellow electronic music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Micron Insight 2018. It's just wrapping up behind us. It's a day long of thought-leading content around AI, AI for good, how it's affecting the human condition and healthcare and the future of AI. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Peter Burris and that's the Golden Gate Bridge over there. You used to live right up that hill over there. >> I did. >> Dee Mooney is here. >> Until they kicked me out. >> Dee Mooney is here. She's the Executive Director of the Micron Foundation. Dee, thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule and coming on theCUBE. >> You bet, I'm very pleased to be here with you today. >> So, you guys had some hard news today. We heard about the 100 million dollar fund that you're launching, but you also had some news around the Foundation. >> That's right. >> The grant, you announced two winners of the grant. Tell us about that. >> That's right. So, it was a great opportunity for Micron to showcase its goodness and what a great platform for us to be able to launch the Advancing Curiosity grant. It is all around really focusing on that, on advancing curiosity, in the hopes that we can think about how might AI help for good, whether that's in business and health or life, and it's really a great platform for us to be able to be a part of today. >> So, what are the specifics? It was a million dollar grant? >> So, it was a million dollar fund and today we announced our first recipients. It was to the Berkeley College of Engineering, specifically their BAIR, which is Berkeley A, Artificial Intelligence Research lab, then also Stanford PHIND lab, which is the Precision, Health and Integrated Diagnostics lab. And then also a non-profit called AI For All, and really their focus is to get the next generation excited about AI and really help the underrepresented groups be exposed to the field. >> So with AI For All, so underrepresented groups as in the diversity culture-- >> Females, underrepresented groups that might not actually get the exposure to this type of math and science in schools and so they do summer camps and we are helping to send students there next summer. >> How do you decide, what are the criteria around which you decide who gets the grants, and take us through that process. >> Today, because we are all about goodness and trying to enhance and improve our communities, this was all around how can AI do some good. So, we are taking a look at what problems can be solved utilizing AI. The second thing we're taking a look at is the type of technology. We want students and our researchers to take a good look at how the technology can work. Then also, what groups are being represented. We want a very diverse group that bring different perspectives and we really think that's our true ability to innovate. >> Well, there's some real research that suggests a more diverse organization solves problems differently, gets to more creativity and actually has business outcomes. That may not be the objective here, but certainly it's a message for organizations worldwide. >> We certainly think so. The more people that are being involved in a conversation, we think the richer the ideas that come out of it. One more thing that we are taking a look at in this grant is we'd like the recipients to think about the data collection, the privacy issues, the ethical issues that go along with collecting such massive amounts of data, so that's also something that we want people to consider when they're applying. >> One of the challenges in any ethical framework is that the individuals that get to write the ethical framework or test the ethical framework, the ethics always works for them. One of the big issues that you just raised is that there is research that shows that if you put a certain class of people and make them responsible for training the AI system, that their biases will absolutely dominate the AI system. So these issues of diversity are really important, not just from a how does it work for them, but also from a very starting point of what should go into the definition of the problem, the approach and solution, how you train it. Are you going the full scope or are you looking at just segments of that problem? >> We'll take a look at, we hope to solve the problems eventually, but right now, just to start with, it's the first announcement of the fund. It's a million dollars, like we mentioned. The first three recipients were announced today. The other recipients that come along, we're really excited to see what comes out of that because maybe there will be some very unique approaches to solving problems utilizing AI. >> What other areas might you look at? How do you determine, curiosity and AI, how'd you come up with that and how do you determine the topics in the areas that you go after? >> The Micron Foundation's mission is to enhance our lives through our people and our philanthropy and we focus on stem and also basic human needs. So, when Micron is engaged in large business endeavors like today, talking about AI, it was the perfect opportunity for us to bring our goodness and focus on AI and the problems that can be solved utilizing it. >> Pretty good day today, I thought. >> Oh, yeah. >> I have to say, I've followed Micron for awhile and you guys can get pretty down and dirty on the technical side, but it was an up-level conversation today. The last speaker in particular really made us think a little bit, talking about are we going to get people to refer-- >> Max Tegmark, right? >> Was that Max Tegmark? Yeah. >> I think that's the name. I didn't catch his name, I popped in late. But he was talking about artificial general intelligence >> I know. >> Reaching, I guess a singularity and then, what struck me is he had a panel of AI researchers, all male, by the way, I think >> Yes. >> I noticed that. >> Yes, we did too. >> The last one, which was Elon Musk, who of course we all know, thinks that there's going to be artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, and he asked every single panel member, will we achieve that, and they all unanimously said yes. So, either they're all dead wrong or the world is going to be a scary place in 20, 30, 50 years. >> Right, right. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, it was certainly thought-provoking to think about all the good things that AI can do, but also maybe the other side and I'm actually glad that we concluded with that, because that is an element of our fund. We want the people that apply to it or that we'll work with to think about those other sides. If these certain problems are solved, is there a down side as well, so that is definitely where we want that diverse thinking to come in, so we can approach the problems in a good way that helps us all. >> Limited time left, let's talk a little bit about women in tech. In California, Jerry Brown just signed a law into effect that, I believe it's any public company, has to have a woman >> On the Board? >> on the Board. What do you think about that? >> Well, personally, I think that's fantastic. >> Well, you're biased. (laughs) >> I might be a little biased. I guess it's a little unfortunate we now have to have laws for this because maybe there's not enough, I'm not exactly sure, 6but I think it's a step in the right direction. That really aligns well with what we try to do, bring diversity into the workplace, diversity into the conversation, so I think it's a good step in the right direction. >> You know, let's face it, this industry had a lack, really, of women leaders. We lost Meg Whitman in a huge Fortune 50 company, in terms of a woman leader, replaced by Antonio Neri, great guy, know him well, but that was one, if you're counting, one down. Ginni Rometty, obviously, huge presence in the industry. I want to ask you, what do you think about, I don't want to use the word quotas, I hate to use it, but if you don't have quotas, what's the answer? >> I don't know about quotas either. We do know that we help, our Foundation grants span the pipeline from young students all the way up through college and we see this pipeline. It starts leaking along the way. Fifth grade, we start seeing girls fall out. Eighth grade is another big-- >> In the U.S. >> In the U.S. >> Not so much in other countries, which is pretty fascinating. >> We are a global foundation and when we talk with our other partners, they're also interested in having stem outreach into their schools because they want to bring in the critical thinking and problem-solving skills, so, I used to think it was quite just a U.S. problem, but now being exposed to other cultures and countries, definitely they have a different approach, but I think it's a problem that we all strive to overcome. >> Well, it's pretty good research that shows that governance that includes women is generally more successful. It reaches better decisions, it reaches decisions that lead to, in the case of Boards, greater profitability, more success, so if you can't convince people with data, you have to convince them with law. At the end of the day, it would be nice if people recognized that a diverse approach to governance usually ends up with a better result but if you can't, you got to hit 'em over the head. >> I guess so, I guess so. >> Well, obviously, with the Kavanaugh confirmation, there's been a lot of talk about this lately. There's been some pretty interesting stuff. I've got two daughters, you have a daughter. Some pretty interesting stuff in our family chat that's been floating around. I saw, I think it was yesterday, my wife sent me a little ditty by a young woman who was singing a song about how tough it is for men, sort of tongue-in-cheek and singing things like, I can't open the door in my pajamas, I can't walk down the street on my phone at night, I can't leave my drink unattended, so tough for men, so tough for men, so on the one hand, you have the Me Too movement, you have a lot more, since Satya Nadella put his foot in his mouth at the Grace Opera event, I don't know if you saw that, he said-- >> I didn't. >> He said, a couple years ago >> He's the CEO of Microsoft. >> Said a couple years ago, a woman in the audience, Grace Opera, big conference for women, asked, "If we're underpaid, should we say anything?" and he said, no, that's bad kharma, you should wait and be patient, and then of course, he got a lot of you know what for that. >> That probably didn't work for them. And then, he apologized for it, he did the right thing. He said, you know what, I'm way off base and then he took proactive action. But, since then, you feel like there's been certainly much more attention paid to it, the Google debacle of last summer with the employee that wrote that Jerry Maguire tome. >> Right, right. >> Now the Me Too movement, then you see the reaction of women from the Kavanaugh appointment. Do you feel like we've made a lot of progress, but then you go, well, hmm, maybe we haven't. >> It sometimes feels like that. It sometimes feels like that. In my career, over 20 years, I have had a very positive experience working with men, women alike and have been very supported and I hope that we can continue to have the conversations and raise awareness, that everyone can feel good in their workplace, walking down the street and, like you mentioned, I think that it's very important that we all have a voice and all of us bring a different, unique perspective to the table. >> So do you feel that it's two steps forward, Dee, and maybe one step back every now and then, or are we making constant progress? >> It kind of feels like that right now. I'm not sure exactly why, but it seems like we're talking a lot about it more now and maybe just with a lot more attention on it, that's why it's seeming like we're taking a step back, but I think progress has been made and we have to continue to improve that. >> Yeah, I think if you strip out the politics of the Kavanaugh situation and then focus on the impact on women, I think you take a different perspective. I think that's a discussion that's worth having. On theCUBE last week, I interviewed somebody, she called herself, "I'm a Fixer," and I said, "You know, here's some adjectives I think of in a fixer, is a good listener, somebody who's a leader, somebody who's assertive, somebody who takes action quickly. Were those the adjectives that were described about you throughout your career, and the answer was, not always. Sometimes it was aggressive or right? >> True, true. >> That whole thing, when a woman takes swift action and is a leader, sometimes she's called derogatory names. When a man does it, he's seen as a great leader. So there's still that bias that you see out there, so two steps forward, one step back maybe. Well Dee, last thoughts on today and your mission. >> Well, we really hope to encourage the next generation to pursue math and science degrees, whether they are female or male or however they identify, and we want them to do great and hopefully have a great career in technology. >> I'm glad you mentioned that, 'cause it's not just about women, it's about people of color and however you identify. So, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. >> You bet, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Micron Insight 2018 from San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE, covering IBM Chief Data Officer Summit, brought to you by IBM. (soft electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Chief Data Strategy Officer Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting here today with Dave Vellante. >> Hey, Rebecca. >> Great to be working with you again. >> Good to see you again. It's been a while. >> It has. >> Last summer, in the heat of New York. >> That's right, and now here we are in the dreariness of Boston. Dave, we just finished up the keynote. As you said, it's a meaty keynote. It's a seminal time for Chief Data Officers at companies. What did you hear? What most interested you about what Joe Kavanaugh said? >> Well, a couple things. I think it's worthwhile going back a few years. The ascendancy of the Chief Data Officer as a role and a title kind of emerged from the back-office records management side of the house. It really started in regulated industries. Financial services, healthcare, and government. For obvious reasons. These are data-oriented companies. They're highly regulated. There's a lot of risk. So, there's really sort of a risk-first approach. Then, that sort of coincided with the big data meme exploding. Then, this whole discussion of is data an asset or a liability? Increasingly, organizations are looking at it, as we know, as an asset. So, the Chief Data Officer has emerged as the individual who is responsible for the data architecture of the company, trying to figure out how to monetize data. Not necessarily monetize explicitly the data, but how data contributes to the monetization of the organization. That has a lot of ripple effects, Rebecca, in terms of technology implications, skillsets, obviously security, relationships with line of business, and fundamentally the organization and the mission of the company. So, IBM has been pretty leading and aggressive about going after the Chief Data Officer role, and has events like this, the Chief Data Officer Summit. They do them, kind of signature moments, and these little its and bit events. I don't know how many people you think are here. >> 150, I think. >> 150? Okay. And they're the data-rowdy of the Boston community. They're chartered with figuring out what the data strategy is. How to value data and how to put data front and center. Everybody talks about being a data-driven organization, but most organizations-- Everybody talks about becoming a digital business, but a digital business means that you are data driven. The data is first. You understand how to monetize data. You know how to value data. Your decisions are data-driven. I would say that less than 10% of the organizations that we work with are of that ilk. So, it's early days still. What was interesting about what Jim Kavanaugh says, they put forth this cognitive blueprint that Inderpal Bhandari, who'll be on theCUBE later, envisioned and has brought to life in his two years as the Chief Data Officer here at IBM. Now, what I like about what IBM is doing is they're sharing their dog food experience with their clients. He talked about that enterprise blueprint architecture but he also talked about what IBM is doing to transform. So, James Kavanaugh is the Senior Vice President of Transformation at IBM, and works directly for Jenny Remetti. He fundamentally talked about IBM as an organization that is data-first, cloud, and consumerization was the other big trend. Now, I don't know if IBM's hit on all three of those yet but they're certainly working to get there. The other thing that was interesting is they talked about the data warehouse as the former king, and now process is king. What I think is interesting about that, I want to explore this with those guys, is that technology largely is well known today. People have access to technology. You can get security from-- You can log in with Twitter linked in our Facebook. You can-- Look at Uber and Waze. They're really software companies but they're built on other platforms, like the cloud, for example. These horizontal platforms. It's the processes that are new and unknown. You know, when you look at these emerging companies like Air BnB and Uber and Waze, and so forth, the processes by which consumers interact with businesses are totally changed. >> Exactly. That is what Jim and James and Inderpal were saying is that this explosion in data is really forcing companies to rethink their business models. And it's-- Their reporting structures, how they innovate, the kinds of things that they're working on, the kinds of risks that are keeping them up at night. >> Yeah, Kavanaugh cited a study for 4,000 CXOs and they said the number one factor impacting business sustainability in the next five years are technology-related. Which again, I want to poke at that a little bit, because to me technology is not the problem. It's process and skill sets and people are the really big challenges. But, I think really what I interpret from that data, what the CXOs are saying, the challenge is applying technology to create a business capability that involves all the process changes, the organizational changes, the people and skills set issues. Of course, they threw in a little fear, uncertainty, and doubt with GDPR, the recent breaches. The other big thing that you hear from IBM at these events is that IBM is a steward of your data. That it's your data, we're not going to-- They have this notion of data responsibility. He didn't mention-- He said the unnamed west coast companies. Of course, he's talking about Google and Amazon, who are sucking in our data and then advertising to us and telling us, hey there's a special and what to buy and what movie to watch, and so forth. That's not IBM's business. But, there's a nuance there that again, I want to explore with these guys if we have time is, while IBM is not taking your data and then turning it into business through advertising, IBM is training models. I'm interested in hearing IBM's response about where's the dividing line between the model-- sorry, the data, and the model. If the data is informing the model, the model then becomes IP. What happens to that IP? Does it get shared across the client base within an industry? So, I really want to understand that better. >> Right, and that is one thing that Jim Kavanaugh will talk about, definitely, is the responsibility that IBM has in terms of our data and protecting it and keeping it private. >> Yeah, so what I like about these events is they're intimate. We get into it with the CDOs. We got CDOs at banks, we have the influencer panel coming on, a lot are data practitioners. And, so much has changed over the last three or four years that we're happy to be here with the CUBE. >> It is. It's going to be a great day. So, we will have much more here at the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vallante. Stay tuned. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit Spring 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick with theCUBE, along with Peter Burris from Wikibon. We are in Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco at the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit Spring 2017. Coming to the end of a busy day, running out of steam. Blah, blah, blah. I need more water. But Joe's going to take us home. We're joined by Joe Selle. He is the global operations analytic solution lead for IBM. Joe, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> So you've been in sessions all day. I'm just curious to get kind of your general impressions of the event and any surprises or kind of validations that are coming out of these sessions. >> Well, general impression is that everybody is thrilled to be here and the participants, the speakers, the audience members all know that they're at the cusp of a moment in business history of great change. And that is as we graduate from regular analytics which are descriptive and dashboarding into the world of cognitive which is taking the capabilities to a whole other level. Many levels actually advanced from the basic things. >> And you're in a really interesting position because IBM has accepted the charter of basically consuming your own champagne, drinking your own champagne, whatever expression you want to use. >> I'm so glad you said that cause most people say eating your dog food. >> Well, if we were in Germany we'd talk about beer, but you know, we'll stick with the champagne analogy. But really, trying to build, not only to build and demonstrate the values that you're trying to sell to your customers within IBM but then actually documenting it and delivering it basically, it's called the blueprint, in October. We've already been told it's coming in October. So what a great opportunity. >> Part of that is the fact that Ginni Rometty, our CEO, had her start in IBM in the consulting part of IBM, GBS, Global Business Services. She was all about consulting to clients and creating big change in other organizations. Then she went through a series of job roles and now she's CEO and she's driving two things. One is the internal transformation of IBM, which is where I am, part of my role is, I should say. Reporting to the chief data officer and the chief analytics officer and their jobs are to accelerate the transformation of big blue into the cognitive era. And Ginni also talks about showcasing what we're doing internally for the rest of the world and the rest of the economy to see because parts of this other companies can do. They can emulate our road map, the blueprint rather, sorry, that Inderpal introduced, is going to be presented in the fall. That's our own blueprint for how we've been transforming ourselves so, some part of that blueprint is going to be valid and relevant for other companies. >> So you have a dual reporting relationship, you said. The chief data officer, which is this group, but also the chief analytics officer. What's the difference between the Chief data officer, the chief data analytics officer and how does that combination drive your mission? >> Well, the difference really is the chief data officer is in charge of making some very long-term investments, including short-term investments, but let me talk about the long-term investment. Anything around an enterprise data lake would be considered a long-term investment. This is where you're creating an environment where users can go in, these would be internal to IBM or whatever client company we're talking about, where they can use some themes around self-service, get out this information, create analysis, everything's available to them. They can grab external data. They can grab internal data. They can observe Twitter feeds. They can look at weather company information. In our case we get that because we're partnered with the weather company. That's the long-term vision of the chief data officer is to create a data lake environment that serves to democratize all of this for users within a company, within IBM. The chief analytics officer has the responsibility to deliver projects that are sort of the leading projects that prove out the value of analytics. So on that side of my dual relationship, we're forming projects that can deliver a result literally in a 10 or a 12 week time period. Or a half a year. Not a year and a half but short term and we're sprinting to the finish, we're delivering something. It's quite minimally scaled. The first project is always a minimally viable product or project. It's using as few data sources as we can and still getting a notable result. >> The chief analytics officer is at the vanguard of helping the business think about use cases, going after those use cases, asking problems the right way, finding data with effectiveness as well as efficiency and leading the charge. And then the Chief data officer is helping to accrete that experience and institutionalize it in the technology, the practices, the people, et cetera. So the business builds a capability over time. >> Yes, scalable. It's sort of an issue of it can scale. Once Inderpal and the Chief data officer come to the equation, we're going to scale this thing massively. So, high volume, high speed, that's all coming from a data lake and the early wins and the medium term wins maybe will be more in the realm of the chief analytics officer. So on your first summary a second ago, you're right in that the chief analytics officer is going around, and the team that I'm working with is doing this, to each functional group of IBM. HR, Legal, Supply Chain, Finance, you name it, and we're engaging in cognitive discovery sessions with them. You know, what is your roadmap? You're doing some dashboarding now, you're doing some first generation analytics or something but, what is your roadmap for getting cognitive? So we're helping to burst the boundaries of what their roadmap is, really build it out into something that was bigger then they had been conceiving of it. Adding the cognitive projects and then, program managing this giant portfolio so that we're making some progress and milestones that we can report to various stake holders like Ginni Rometty or Jim Kavanaugh who are driving this from a senior senior executive standpoint. We need to be able to tell them, in one case, every couple of weeks, what have you gotten done. Which is a terrible cadence, by the way, it's too fast. >> So in many Respects-- >> But we have to get there every couple of weeks we've got to deliver another few nuggets. >> So in many respects, analytics becomes the capability and data becomes the asset. >> Yes, that's true. Analytics has assets as well though. >> Paul: Sure, of course. >> Because we have models and we have techniques and we bake the models into a business process to make it real so people actually use it. It doesn't just sit over there as this really nifty science experiment. >> Right but kind of where are we on the journey? It's real still early days, right? Because, you know, we hear all the time about machine learning and deep learning and AI and VR and AI and all this stuff. >> We're patchy, every organization is patchy even IBM, but I'm learning from being here, so this is end of day one, I'm learning. I'm getting a little more perspective on the fact that we at IBM are actually, 'cause we've been investing in this heavily for a number of years. I came through the ranks and supply chain. We've been investing in these capabilities for six or seven years. We were some of the early adopters within IBM. But, I would say that maybe 10% of the people at this conference are sort of in the category of I'm running fast and I'm doing things. So that's 10%. Then there's maybe another 30% that are jogging or fast walking. And then there's the rest of them, so maybe 50%, if my math is right, it's been a long day. Are kind of looking and saying, yeah, I got to get that going at some point and I have two or three initiatives but I'm really looking forward to scaling it at some point. >> Right. >> I've just painted a picture to you of the fact that the industry in general is just starting this whole journey and the big potential is still in front of us. >> And then on the Champagne. So you've got the cognitive, you've got the brute and then you've got the Watson. And you know, there's a lot of, from the outside looking in at IBM, there's a lot of messaging about Watson and a lot of messaging about cognitive. How the two mesh and do they mesh within some of the projects that you're working on? Or how should people think of the two of them? >> Well, people should know that Watson is a brand and there are many specific technologies under the Watson brand. So, and then, think of it more as capabilities instead of technologies. Things like being able to absorb unstructured information. So you've heard, if you've been to any conferences, whether they're analytics or data, any company, any industry, 80% of your data is unstructured and invisible and you're probably working with 20% of your data on an active basis. So, do you want to go the 80%-- >> With 40% shrinking. >> As a percentage. >> That's true. >> As a percentage. >> Yeah because the volumes are growing. >> Tripling in size but shrinking as a percentage. >> Right, right. So, just, you know, think about that. >> Is Watson really then kind of the packaging of cognitive, more specific application? Because we're walking for health or. >> I'll tell you, Watson is a mechanism and a tool to achieve the outcome of cognitive business. That's a good way to think of it. And Watson capabilities that I was just about to get to are things like reading, if you will. In Watson Health, he reads oncology articles and they know, once one of them has been read, it's never forgotten. And by the way, you can read 200 a week and you can create the smartest doctor that there is on oncology. So, a Watson capability is absorbing information, reading. It's in an automated fashion, improving its abilities. So these are concepts around deep learning and machine learning. So the algorithms are either self correcting or people are providing feedback to correct them. So there's two forms of learning in there. >> Right, right. >> But these are kind of capabilities all around Watson. I mean, there are so many more. Optical, character recognition. >> Right. >> Retrieve and rank. >> Right. >> So giving me a strategy and telling me there's an 85% chance, Joe, that you're best move right now, given all these factors is to do x. And then I can say, well, x wouldn't work because of this other constraint which maybe the system didn't know about. >> Jeff: Right. >> Then the system will tell me, in that case, you should consider y and it's still an 81% chance of success verses the first which was at 85. >> Jeff: Right. >> So retrieving and ranking, these are capabilities that we call Watson. >> Jeff: Okay. >> And we try to work those in to all the job roles. >> Jeff: Okay. >> So again, whether you're in HR, legal, intellectual property management, environmental compliance. You know, regulations around the globe are changing all the time. Trade compliance. And if you violate some of these rules and regs, then you're prohibited from doing business in a certain geography. >> Jeff: Right. >> It's devastating. The stakes are really high. So these are the kind of tools we want. >> So I'm just curious, from your perspective, you've got a corporate edict behind you at the highest level, and your customers, your internal customers, have that same edict to go execute quickly. So given that you're not in that kind of slow moving or walking or observing half, what are the biggest challenges that you have to overcome even given the fact that you've got the highest level most senior edict both behind you as well as your internal customers. >> Yeah, well it, guess what, it comes down to data. Often, a lot of times, it comes to data. We can put together an example of a solution that is a minimally viable solution which might have only three or four or five different pieces of data and that's pretty neat and we can deliver a good result. But if we want to scale it and really move the needle so that it's something that Ginni Rometty sees and cares about, or a shareholder, then we have to scale. Then we need a lot of data, so then we come back to Inderpal, and the chief data officer role. So the constraint is on many of the programs and projects is if you want to get beyond the initial proof of concept, >> Jeff: Right. >> You need to access and be able to manipulate the big data and then you need to train these cognitive systems. This is the other area that's taking a lot of time. And I think we're going to have some technology and innovation here, but you have to train a cognitive system. You don't program it. You do some painstaking back and forth. You take a room full of your best experts in whatever the process is and they interact with the system. They provide input, yes, no. They rank the efficacy of the recommendations coming out of the system and the system improves. But it takes months. >> That's even the starting point. >> Joe: That's a problem. >> And then you trade it over often, an extended period of time. >> Joe: A lot of it gets better over time. >> Exactly. >> As long as you use this thing, like a corpus of information is built and then you can mine the corpus. >> But a lot of people seem to believe that you roll all this data, you run a bunch of algorithms and suddenly, boom, you've got this new way of doing things. And it is a very very deep set of relationships between people who are being given recommendations as you said, weighing them, voting them, voting on them, et cetera. This is a highly interactive process. >> Yeah, it is. If you're expecting lightning fast results, you're really talking about a more deterministic kind of solution. You know, if/then. If this is, then that's the answer. But we're talking about systems that understand and they reason and they tap you on the shoulder with a recommendation and tell you that there's an 85% chance that this is what you should do. And you can talk back to the system, like my story a minute ago, and you can say, well it makes sense, but, or great, thanks very much Watson, and then go ahead and do it. Those systems that are expert systems that have expertise just woven through them, you cannot just turn those on. But, as I was saying, one of the things we talked about on some of the panels today, was there's new techniques around training. There's new techniques around working with these corpuses of information. Actually, I'm not sure what the plural of corpus. Corpi? It's not Corpi. >> Jeff: I can look that up. >> Yeah, somebody look that up. >> It's not corpi. >> So anyway, I want to give you the last word, Jeff. So you've been doing this for a while, what advice would you give to someone kind of in your role at another company who's trying to be the catalyst to get these things moving. What kind of tips and tricks would you share, you know, having gone through it and working on this for a while? >> Sure. I would, the first thing I would do is, in your first move, keep the projects tightly defined and small with a minimum of input and keep, contain your risk and your risk of failure, and make sure that if you do three projects, at least one of them is going to be a hands down winner. And then once you have a winner, tout it through your organization. A lot of folks get so enamored with the technology that they start talking more about the technology than the business impact. And what you should be touting and bragging about is not the fact that I was able to simultaneously read 5,000 procurement contracts with this tool, you should be saying, it used to take us three weeks in a conference room with a team of one dozen lawyers and now we can do that whole thing in one week with six lawyers. That's what you should talk about, not the technology piece of it. >> Great, great. Well thank you very much for sharing and I'm glad to hear the conference is going so well. Thank you. >> And it's Corpa. >> Corpa? >> The answer to the question? Corpa. >> Peter: Not corpuses. >> With Joe, Peter, and Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back from the IBM chief data operator's strategy summit. Thanks for watching.