>> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for IBM Think 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Stu, it's been a great day. We're on our fourth day of four days of wall to wall coverage. A theme of AI, large scale compute with Cloud and data that's great. Great topics. Got two great guests here. Rohit Badlaney, who's the director of IBM Z As a Service, IBM Systems. Real great to see you. And Nataraj Nagaratnam, Distinguished Engineer and CTO and Director of Cloud Security at IBM and Hybrid Cloud, thanks for joining us. >> Glad to be here. >> So, the subtext to all the big messaging around AI and multi-cloud is that you need power to run this. Horsepower, you need big iron, you need the servers, you need the storage, but software is in the heart of all this. So you guys had some big announcements around capabilities. The Hyper Protect was a big one on the securities side but now you've got Z As a Service. We've seen Linux come on Z. So it's just another network now. It's just network computing is now tied in with cloud. Explain the offering. What's the big news? >> Sure, so two major announcements for us this week. One's around our private cloud capabilities on the platform. So we announced our IBM Cloud Private set of products fully supported on our LinuxOne systems, and what we've also announced is the extensions of those around hyper-secure workloads through a capability called the Secure Services Container, as well as giving our traditional z/OS clients cloud consumption through a capability called the z/OS Cloud Broker. So it's really looking at how do we cloudify the platform for our existing base, as well as clients looking to do digital transformation projects on-premise. How do we help them? >> This has been a key part of this. I want to just drill down this cloudification because we've been talking about how you guys are positioned for growth. All the REORG's are done. >> Sure, yeah >> The table's all set. Products have been modernized, upgraded. Now the path is pretty clear. Kind of like what Microsoft's playbook was. Build the core cloudification. Get your core set of products cloudified. Target your base of customers. Grow that and expand into the modern era. This is a key part of the strategy, right? >> Absolutely right. A key part of our private cloud strategy is targeted to our existing base and moving them forward on their cloud journey, whether they're looking to modernize parts of their application. Can we start first with where they are on-premise is really what we're after. >> Alright, also you have the Hyper Protect. >> Correct. >> What is that announcement? Can you explain Hyper Protect? >> Absolutely. Like Rohit talked about, taking our LinuxOne capabilities, now that enterprise trusts the level of assurance, the level of security that they're dependent on, on-premise and now in private cloud. We are taking that further into the public cloud offering as Hyper Protect services. So these are set of services that leverage the underlyings of security hardening that nobody else has the level of control that you can get and offering that as a service so you don't need to know Z or LinuxOne from a consumption perspective. So I'll take two examples. Hyper Protect Crypto Service is about exposing the level of control. That you can manage they keys. What we call "keep your own keys" because encryption is out there but it's all about key management so we provide that with the highest level of security that LinuxOne servers from us offer. Another example is database as a service, which runs in this Hyper Secure environment. Not only encryption and keys, but leveraging down the line pervasive encryption capabilities so nobody can even get into the box, so to say. >> Okay, so I get the encryption piece. That's solid, great. Internet encryption is always good. Containers, there's been discussions at the CNCF about containers not being part of the security boundaries and putting a VMware around it. Different schools of thought there. How do you guys look at the containerization? Does that fit into Secure Protect? Talk about that dynamic because encryption I get, but are you getting containers? >> Great question because it's about the workload, right? When people are modernizing their apps or building cloud-native apps, it's built on Kubernetes and containers. What we have done, the fantastic work across both the IBM Cloud Private on Z, as well as Hyper Protect, underlying it's all about containers, right? So as we deliver these services and for customers also to build data services as containers or VM's, they can deploy on this environment or consume these as a compute. So fundamentally it's kubernetes everywhere. That's a foundational focus for us. When it can go public, private and multicloud, and we are taking that journey into the most austere environment with a performance and scale of Z and LinuxONE. >> Alright, so Rohit, help bring us up to date. We've been talking about this hybrid and multi-cloud stuff for a number of years, and the idea we've heard for many years is, "I want to have the same stack on both ends. I want encryption all the way down to the chip set." I've heard of companies like Oracle, like IBM say, "We have resources in both. We want to do this." We understand kubernetes is not a magic layer, it takes care of a certain piece you know and we've been digging in that quite a bit. Super important, but there's more than that and there still are differences between what I'm doing in the private cloud and public cloud just naturally. Public cloud, I'm really limited to how many data centers, private cloud, everything's different. Help us understand what's the same, what's different. How do we sort that out in 2019? >> Sure, from a brand perspective we're looking at private cloud in our IBM Cloud Private set of products and standardizing on that from a kubernetes perspective, but also in a public cloud, we're standardizing on kubernetes. The key secret source is our Secure Services Container under there. It's the same technology that we use under our Blockchain Platform. Right, it brings the Z differentiation for hyper-security, lockdown, where you can run the most secure workloads, and we're standardizing that on both public and private cloud. Now, of course, there are key differences, right? We're standardizing on a different set of workloads on-premise. We're focusing on containerizing on-premise. That journey to move for the public cloud, we still need to get there. >> And the container piece is super important. Can you explain the piece around, if I've got multi-cloud going on, Z becomes a critical node on the network because if you have an on-premise base, Z's been very popular, LinuxONE has been really popular, but it's been for the big banks, and it seems like the big, you know, it's big ire, it's IBM, right? But it's not just the mainframe. It's not proprietary software anymore, it's essentially large-scale capability. >> Right. >> So now, when that gets factored into the pool of resources and cloud, how should customers look at Z? How should they look at the equation? Because this seems to me like an interesting vector into adding more head room for you guys, at least on the product side, but for a customer, it's not just a use case for the big banks, or doing big backups, it seems to have more legs now. Can you explain where this fits into the big picture? Because why wouldn't someone want to have a high performant? >> Why don't I use a customer example? I had a great session this morning with Brad Chun from Shuttle Fund, who joined us on stage. They know financial industry. They are building a Fintech capability called Digital Asset Custody Services. It's about how you digitize your asset, how do you tokenize them, how you secure it. So when they look at it from that perspective, they've been partnering with us, it's a classic hybrid workload where they've deployed some of the apps on the private cloud and on-premise with Z/LinuxONE and reaching out to the cloud using the Hyper Protect services. So when they bring this together, built on Blockchain under the covers, they're bringing the capability being agile to the market, the ability for them to innovate and deliver with speed, but with the level of capability. So from that perspective, it's a Fintech, but they are not the largest banks that you may know of, but that's the kind of innovation it enables, even if you don't have quote, unquote a mainframe or a Z. >> This gives you guys more power, and literally, sense of pretty more reach in the market because what containers and now these kubernetes, for example, Ginni Rometty said "kubernetes" twice in her keynote. I'm like, "Oh my God. The CEO of IBM said 'kubernetes' twice." We used to joke about it. Only geeks know about kubernetes. Here she is talking about kubernetes. Containers, kubernetes, and now service missions around the corner give you guys reach into the public cloud to extend the Z capability without foreclosing the benefits of Z. So that seems to be a trend. Who's the target for that? Give me an example of who's the customer or use case? What's the situation that would allow me to take advantage of cloud and extend the capability to Z? >> If you just step back, what we're really trying to do is create a higher shorten zone in our cloud called Hyper Protect. It's targeted to our existing Z base, who want to move on this enterprise out journey, but it's also targeted to clients like Shuttle Fund and DAX that Raj talked about that are building these hyper secure apps in the cloud and want the capabilities of the platform, but wanted more cloud-native style. It's the breadth of moving our existing base to the cloud, but also these new security developers who want to do enterprise development in the cloud. >> Security is key. That's the big drive. >> And that's the beauty of Z. That's what it brings to the table. And to a cloud is the hyper lockdown, the scale, the performance, all those characteristics. >> We know that security is always an on-going journey, but one of the ones that has a lot of people concerned is when we start adding IoT into the mix. It increased the surface area by orders of magnitude. How do those type of applications fit into these offerings? >> Great question. As a matter of fact, I didn't give you the question by the way, but this morning, KONE joined me on stage. >> We actually talked about it on Twitter. (laughs) >> KONE joined us on stage. It's about in the residential workflow, how they're enabling here their integration, access, and identity into that. As an example, they're building on our IoT platform and then they integrate with security services. That's the beauty of this. Rohit talked about developers, right? So when developers build it, our mission is to make it simple for a developer to build secure applications. With security skill shortage, you can't expect every developer to be a security geek, right? So we're making it simple, so that you can kind of connect your IoT to your business process and your back-end application seamlessly in a multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud fashion. That's where both from a cloud native perspective comes in, and building some of these sensitive applications on Hyper Protect or Z/LinuxONE and private cloud enables that end to end. >> I want to get you guys take while you're here because one of the things I've observed here at Think, which is clearly the theme is Cloud AI and developers all kind of coming together. I mean, AI, Amazon's event, AI, AI, AI, in cloud scale, you guys don't have that. But developer angle is really interesting. And you guys have a product called IBM Cloud Private, which seems to be a very big centerpiece of the strategy. What is this product? Why is it important? It seems to be part of all the key innovative parts that we see evolving out of the thing. Can you explain what is the IBM Cloud Private and how does it fit into the puzzle? >> Let me take a pass at it Raj. In a way it is, well, we really see IBM Cloud Private as that key linchpin on-premise. It's a Platform as a Service product on-premise, it's built on kubernetes and darker containers, but what it really brings is that standardized cloud consumption for containerized apps on-premise. We've expanded that, of course, to our Z footprint, and let me give you a use case of clients and how they use it. We're working with a very big, regulated bank that's looking to modernize a massive monolithic piece of WebSphere application server on-premise and break it down into micro-services. They're doing that on IBM Cloud Private. They've containerized big parts of the application on WebSphere on-premise. Now they've not made that journey to the cloud, to the public cloud, but they are using... How do you modernize your existing footprint into a more containerized micro-services one? >> So this is the trend we're seeing, the decomposition of monolithic apps on-premise is step one. Let's get that down, get the culture, and attract the new, younger people who come in, not the older guys like me, mini-computer days. Really make it ready, composable, then they're ready to go to the cloud. This seems to be the steps. Talk about that dynamic, Raj, from a technical perspective. How hard is it to do that? Is it a heavy lift? Is it pretty straight-forward? >> Great question. IBM, we're all about open, right? So when it comes to our cloud strategy open is the centerpiece offered, that's why we have banked on kubernetes and containers as that standardization layer. This way you can move a workflow from private to public, even ICP can be on other cloud vendors as well, not just IBM Cloud. So it's a private cloud that customers can manage, or in the public cloud or IBM kubernetes that we manage for them. Then it's about the app, the containerized app that can be moved around and that's where our announcements about Multicloud Manager, that we made late last year come into play, which helps you seamlessly move and integrate applications that are deployed on communities across private, public or multicloud. So that abstraction venire enables that to happen and that's why the open... >> So it's an operational construct? Not an IBM product, per say, if you think about it that way. So the question I have for you, I know Stu wants to jump in, he's got some questions. I want to get to this new mindset. The world's flipped upside down. The applications and workloads are dictating architecture and programmability to the DevOps, or infrastructure, in this case, Z or cloud. This is changing the game on how the cloud selection is. So we've been having a debate on theCUBE here, publicly, that in some cases it's the best cloud for the job decision, not a procurement, "I need multi-vendor cloud," versus I have a workload that runs best with this cloud. And it might be as if you're running 365, or G Suite as Google, Amazon's got something so it seems to be the trend. Do you agree with that? And certainly, there'll be many clouds. We think that's true, it's already happened. Your thoughts on this workload driving the requirements for the cloud? Whether it's a sole purpose cloud, meaning for the app. >> That's right. I'll start and Rohit will add in as well. That's where this chapter two comes into play, as we call Chapter Two of Cloud because it is about how do you take enterprise applications, the mission-critical complex workloads, and then look for the enablers. How do you make that modernization seamless? How do you make the cloud native seamless? So in that particular journey, is where IBM cloud and our Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud strategy come into play to make that transition happen and provide the set of capabilities that enterprises are looking for to move their critical workloads across private and public in bit much more assurance and performance and scale, and that's where the work that we are doing with Z, LinuxONE set of as an underpinning to embark on the journey to move those critical workloads to their cloud. So you're absolutely right. When they look at which cloud to go, it's about capabilities, the tools, the management orchestration layers that a cloud provider or a cloud vendor provide and it's not only just about IBM Public Cloud, but it's about enabling the enterprises to provide them the choice and then offer. >> So it's not multicloud for multicloud sake, it's multicloud, that's the reality. Workload drives the functionality. >> Absolutely. We see that as well. >> Validated on theCUBE by the gurus of IBM. The cloud for the job is the best solution. >> So I guess to kind of put a bow on this, the journey we're having is talking about distributed architectures, and you know, we're down on the weeds, we've got micro-services architectures, containerization, and we're working at making those things more secure. Obviously, there's still a little bit more work to do there, but what's next is we look forward, what are the challenges customers have. They live in this, you know, heterogeneous multicloud world. What do we have to do as an industry? Where is IBM making sure that they have a leadership position? >> From my perspective, I think really the next big wave of cloud is going to be looking at those enterprise workloads. It's funny, I was just having a conversation with a very big bank in the Netherlands, and they were, of course, a very big Z client, and asking us about the breadth of our cloud strategy and how they can move forward. Really looking at a private cloud strategy helping them modernize, and then looking at which targeted workloads they could move to public cloud is going to be the next frontier. And those 80 percent of workloads that haven't moved. >> An integration is key, and for you guys competitive strategy-wise, you've got a lot of business applications running on IBM's huge customer base. Focus on those. >> Yes. >> And then give them the path to the cloud. The integration piece is where the linchpin is and OSSI secure. >> Enterprise out guys. >> Love encryption, love to follow up more on the secure container thing, I think that's a great topic. We'll follow-up after this show Raj. Thanks for coming on. theCUBE coverage here. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Live coverage, day four, here live in San Francisco for IBM Think 2019. Stay with us more. Our next guests will be here right after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Male Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by, IBM. >> Welcome back, we're live here in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE's coverage of InterConnect, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante my co-host. Our next guest is Deon Newman, CMO of IBM Watson IoT, and Slava Rubin, the founder and Chief Business Officer of Indiegogo, great keynote today, you're on stage. Welcome to theCUBE. Deon, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I got to first set the context. Indiegogo, very successful crowd-funder, you guys pioneered. It's pretty obvious now looking back, this has created so much opportunity for people starting companies, whether it's a labor of love or growing into a great business, so congratulations on your success. What's the IBM connection? Because I don't want, you know, there was some stuff on the tweets, I don't want to break the news, but you guys are here. Share the connection. What's the packaging, why is IMB and Indigogo working together? >> Yeah, so back up to 2008. We launched to be able to get people access to funding. And over the last several years, we've done a pretty good job of that. Sending over a billion dollars to over half a million entrepreneurs around the world. And more recently, we've had a lot more requests of Indiegogo can you do more? And we knew that we couldn't do it all on our own. So we partnered first with Arrow to be able to bring these ideas more into reality around components and engineering and supply chain. And we knew we needed more in terms of these IoT products, so they need to be smart and they need software. So we were really excited to be able to announce today, the partnership with IBM, around everything IoT Cloud, security, and being able to provide all the block chain and any other elements that we need. >> Deon I want to ask you, get your thoughts on, we had the Watson data platform guys on earlier in the segment, and the composability is now the norm around data. This brings the hacker-maker culture to IoT. Which if you think about it as a sweet-spot for some of the innovations. They can start small and grow big. Is that part of the plan? >> Yeah, I mean, if you look at what's going on we have about 6000 clients already with us in the IoT space. They tend to be the big end of town, you know whether it be a Daimler or an Airbus or whether it be a Kone, the world's biggest elevator company. Or ISS, the world's biggest facilities management company. So we were doing a lot of work up there really around optimizing their operations, connecting products, wrapping services around them so they can create new revenue streams. But where we didn't have an offering that was being used extensively, was in the start-up space. And you know when we saw what Indiegogo had been doing in the marketplace, and when our partner Arrow, who as Slava has said, has really built up an engineering capability and a component capability to support these makers. It was just a match made in heaven. You know, for an entrepreneur who needs to find a way to capture data, make that data valuable, you know, we can do that. We have the Cloud platform, we have the AI, et cetera. >> It's interesting, we just hit the stride of dude, we have our big data Silicon Valley event just last week, and the big thing that come out of that event is finally the revelation, this is probably not new to Slava and what you're doing, it that, the production under-the-hood hard stuff that's being done is some ways stunting the creativity around some of the cooler stuff. Like whether it's data analytics or in this case, starting a company. So, Slava I want to get your thought on, your views on how the world is becoming democratized. Because if you think about the entrepreneurship trend that you're riding, is the democratization of invention. Alright, there's a democracy, this is the creative, it's the innovation, but yet it's all this hard stuff, like what's called production or under-the-hood that IBM's bringing in. What do you expect that to fuel up? What's your vision of this democratization culture? >> I mean, it's my favorite thing that's happening. I think whether it's YouTube democratizing access to content or Indiegogo democratizing access to capital. The idea of democratizing access to entrepreneurship between our partnership, just really makes me smile. I think that capital is just one of those first points and now they're starting to get the money but lots of other things are hard. When you can actually get artificial intelligence, get Cloud capabilities, get security capabilities, put it into a service so you don't need to figure all those things out on your own so you can go from a small little idea to actually start scaling pretty rapidly, that's super exciting. When you can be on Indiegogo and in four weeks get 30,000 backers of demand across 100 countries, and people are saying, we want this, you know it's good to know you don't need to start ramping up your own dev team to figure out how to create a Cloud on your own, or create your own AI, you can tap right into a server that's provided. Which is really revolutionizing how quickly a small company can scale. So it proliferates more entrepreneurs starting because they know there's more accessibility. Plus it improves their potential for success, which in the long run just means there's more swings at the bat to be able to have and entrepreneur succeed, which I think all of us want. >> Explain to the audience how it works a little bit. You got the global platform that you built up. Arrow brings it's resources and ideation. IBM brings the IoT, the cognitive platform. Talk about how that all comes together and how people take advantage of it? >> Sure, I mean you can look at it as one example, like Water Buy. So Water Buy is an actual sensor that you can deploy against your water system to be able to detect whether or not your water that you're drinking is healthy. You're getting real-time data across your system and for some reason it's telling you that you have issues, you can react accordingly. So that was an idea. You go on Indiegogo, they post that idea and they're able to get the world to start funding it. You get customer engagement. You get actual market validation. And you get funding. Well now you actually need to make these sensors, you need to make these products, so now you get the partnership with Arrow which is really helpful cause they're helping you with the engineering, the design, the components. Now you want to be able to figure out how you can store all that data. So it's not just your own house, maybe you're evaluating across an entire neighborhood. Or as a State you want to see how the water is for the whole entire State. You put all of that data up into the Cloud, you want to be able to analyze the data rapidly through AI, and similarly this is highly sensitive data so you want it to be secure. If Water Buy on their own, had to build out all of this infrastructure, we're talking about dozens, hundreds, who knows how many people they would need? But here through the partnership you get the benefit of Indiegogo to get the brilliant idea to actually get validated, Arrow to bring your idea from the back of a napkin into reality, and then you get IBM Watson to help with all the software components and Cloud that we just talked about. >> And how did this get started? How did you guys, you know, fall into this, and how did it manifest itself? >> So can I tell the story? >> Go for it. >> So I love this story, so as Slava's explained at the front end of this it was really a partnership of Arrow and Indiegogo that came out of the need of entrepreneurs to actually build their stuff. You know, you get it funded and then you say, oh boy, now I've got a bunch of orders how do I now make this stuff? And so Arrow had a capability of looking at the way you designed, you know looking at it deeply with their engineers, sourcing the components, putting it together, maybe white-boxing it even for you. So they put that together. Now, we're all seeing that IoT and the connective products are moving for disconnection, which is actually generating data and that data having value. And so Arrow didn't have that capability, we were great partners with Arrow, you know when we all looked at it, the need for AI coming into all these products, the need for security around the connection, the platform that could actually do that connection, we were a logical map here. So we're another set of components, not the physical. You know, we're the Cloud-based components and services that enable these connected devices. >> If you think about like the impact, and it's mind-boggling what the alternative is. You mentioned that the example you gave, they probably might have abandoned the project. So if you think about the scale of these opportunities what the alternative would have been without an Indiegogo, you probably have some anecdotal kind of feeling on this. But any thoughts on what data you can share around, do you have kind of reference point of, okay, we've funded all this and 90% wouldn't have been done or 70% wouldn't have been done. Do you have any flavor for? >> It's hard to know exactly. Obviously many of these folks that come to Indiegogo, if they could've gotten funded on another path earlier in the process, they would have. Indiegogo became really a great choice. Now you're seeing instead of being the last resort, Indiegogo is becoming the first resort because they're getting so much validation and market data. The incredible thing is not to think about it at scale when you think about 500 or 700 thousand entrepreneurs, or over a billion dollars, and it's in virtually every country in the world. If you really just look at it as one product. So like, Flow Hive is just one example. They've revolutionized how honey gets harvested. That product was bought in almost 170 countries around the world and it's something that hadn't been changed in over 150 years. And it's just so interesting to see that if it wasn't for Indiegogo that idea would not go from the back of a napkin to getting funded. And now through these partnerships they're able to realize so much more of their potential. >> So it's interesting, the machine learning piece is interesting to me because you take the seed-funding which is great product-market fit as they say in the entrepreneurial culture, is validated. So that's cool. But it could be in some cases, small amounts of cash before the next milestone. But if you think about the creativity impact that machine learning can give the entrepreneur, with through in their discovery process, early stage, that's an added benefit to the entrepreneur. >> Absolutely. Yeah, a great example there is against SmartPlate. SmartPlate is trying to use a combination of a weight-sensing plate as well with photo-detection, image detection software. The more data it can feed its image detection, the more qualified it can know, is that a strawberry or a cherry, or is that beef? And we take that for granted that our eyes can detect all that, but it's really remarkable to think about instead of having to journal everything by hand or make sure you pick with your finger what's the right product and how many ounces, you can take a photo of something and now you'll know what you're eating, how much you're eating and what is the food composition? And this all requires significant data, significant processing. >> I'm really pumped about that, congratulations to you on a great deal. I love the creativity and I think the impact to the globe is just phenomenal. Thinking about the game-changing things that are coming up, Slava I've got to ask you, and Deon if you could weigh in too, maybe you have some, your favorites. You're craziest thing that you've seen funded and the coolest thing you've seen funded. (laughter) >> I mean, who is hard because it's kind of like asking well who's your favorite child? I have like 700,000 children, I'm not even Wilt Chamberlain (laughter) and I like them all. But you know it's everything from an activity tracker to security devices, to being able to see what the trend is 24, 36 months ahead. Before things become mainstream today, we're seeing these things 3, 5 years ago. Things are showing up at CES, and you know these are things we get to see in advance. In terms of something crazy, it's not quite IoT but I remember when a young woman tried to raise $200,000 to be able to get enough money for her and Justin Bieber to fly to the moon. (laughter) >> That's crazy. >> That didn't quite get enough funding. But something that's fresh right now is Nimuno Loops is getting funded right now on Indiegogo live. And they just posted less than seven days ago and they have Lego-compatible tape. So it's something that you can tape onto any surface and the other side is actually Lego-compatible so you actually put Legos onto that tape. So imagine instead of only a flat surface to do Legos, you could do Legos on any surface even your jacket. It's not the most IoT-esque product right now but you just asked for something creative. >> That's the creative. >> I think once you got Wilt Chamberlain and Justin Bieber in the conversation, I'm out. (laughter) (crosstalk) >> Well now, how does Indiegogo sustain itself? Does it take a piece of the action? Does it have other funding mechanisms for? >> Yeah, and that's the beautiful thing about Indiegogo. It's a platform and it's all about supply and demand. So supply is the ideas and the entrepreneurs and the demand is the funders. It's totally free to use the website and as long as you're able to get money in your pocket, then we take a percentage. If you're not taking any money into your pocket, then we get no money. As part of the process, you might benefit from actually not receiving money. You might try to raise a hundred grand, only raise thirty-one and learn that your price-point is wrong, your target audience is wrong, your color is wrong, you're bottom cost it too high. All this feedback is super valuable. You just saved yourself a lot of pain. So really it's about building the marketplace we're a platform, we started out just with funding, we're really becoming now a springboard for entrepreneurs. We can't do it all ourselves which is why we're bringing on these great partners. >> You know we've done, just to add to that, I think it's a relevant part here too. We've actually announced a premium-based service for the entrepreneurs to get onto the Cloud, to access the AI, to access the services as a starting point to the complete premium model so they can get started very low barrier to entry and overseeing scale as they grow. >> What do you call that? Is it IBM IoT Premium or? >> It hasn't got a name specifically to the premium element of the, it's just the Watson IoT platform. Available on Blue Mist. >> So it's a Watson sort of, right. So it's like a community edition of Watson. So Deon, new chapter for you. You know I saw a good quarter for mainframes, last quarter. It's still drafting off your great work and now you've shifted to this whole new IoT role, what's that been like? Relatively new initiative for IBM, building on some historical expertise. But give us the update on your business. >> Yes, so about 15 months ago, we announced a global headquarters that we were going to open in Munich, and we announced the Watson IT business. Which brought together a lot of IBM's expertise and a lot of our experience over the years through smarter cities, through the smarter planet initiative. You know we've been working The Internet Of Things, but we made a 3-billion dollar commitment to that marketplace, that we were going to go big and go strong. We've built out a horizontal platform, the Watson IoT platform. On top of that we've got market-leading enterprise asset management software, the Maximo portfolio, TRIRIGA for facilities management. And then we have a whole set of engineering software for designing connected products as well. So we've built out a very comprehensive industry-vertical-aligned IoT business. We added last year, we went from about 4000 to about 6000 clients. So we had a very good year in terms of real enterprises getting real outcomes. We continue to bring out new industry solutions around both connected products and then operations like retail, manufacturing, building management, telco, transportation. We're building out solutions and use-cases to leverage all that software. So business is going well. We officially the Watson IoT headquarters three weeks ago in Munich. And we're jam packed with clients coming through that building, building with us. We've got a lot of clients who've actually taken space in the building. And their using it as a co-laboratory with us to work on PSE's and see the outcomes they can drive. >> Alright, Deon Newman with IoT Watson, and IoT platforms. Slava Rubin, founder of Indiegogo, collective intelligence is cultural shift happening. Congratulations outsourcing and using all that crowdfunding. It's real good data, not just getting the entrepreneur innovations funded but really using that data and your wheelhouse IoT. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you John. >> More live coverage after this short break, with theCUBE live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect. We'll be right back, stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> OK, welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE's coverage of InterConnect. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, my co-host. Our next guest is Deon Newman, CMO of IBM Watson IoT, and Slava Rubin, the founder and Chief Business Officer of Indiegogo. Great keynote today, you're on stage, welcome to theCUBE. Deon, great to see you. >> Thanks for havin' me. >> I got to first set the context. Indiegogo, very successful crowdfunder you guys pioneered. It's pretty obvious now, looking back, this creates so much opportunity for people starting companies, whether it's a labor of love or growing into a great business, so congratulations on your success. What's the IBM connection? Because there was some stuff on the tweets, I don't want to break the news, but you guys are here, share the connection. What's the packaging? Why is IBM and Indiegogo working together? >> Yes, so back up to 2008, we launched to be able to get people access to funding and over the last several years, we've done a pretty good job of that, sending over a billion dollars to over a half a million entrepreneurs around the world, and more recently, we've had a lot more requests of Indiegogo, can you do more? And we knew we couldn't do it all on our own, so we partnered first with Arrow, to be able to bring these ideas more into reality around components and engineering and supply chain, and we knew we needed more in terms of these IoT products, so they need to be smart and they need software, so we were really excited to be able to announce today the partnership with IBM, around everything IoT, clouds, security, and being able to provide all the block chain and any other elements that we need. >> Deon, I want to ask you or get your thoughts on, we have the Watson data platform guys on earlier in the segments, and the composability is now the normal around data, brings the hacker-maker culture to IoT, which, if you think about it, is a sweet spot for some of the innovations. They can start small and grow big. Is that part of the plan? >> I mean, if you look at what's going on, we have about 6,000 clients already working with us in the IoT space. They tend to be the big end of town, whether it be a Daimler or a Airbus, whether it be a KONE, the world's biggest elevator company, or ISS, the world's biggest facilities management company, so we were doin' a lot of work up there, really around optimizing their operations, connecting products, wrapping services around them so that they can create new revenue streams, but where we didn't have an offering that was being used extensively was in the start-ups place, and when we saw what Indiegogo had been doing in the marketplace, and when our partner, Arrow, who, as Slava said, has really built up an engineering capability and a component capability to support these makers, it was just a match made in heaven. For an entrepreneur who needs to find a way to capture data, make that data valuable, we can do that. We have the cloud platform, we have the AI, et cetera. >> It's interesting, we just had the Strata Hadoop, we have our own big data Silicon Valley event last week and the big thing that came out of that event, finally, the revelation, this is probably not new to Slava, what you're doin' is that the production under the hood hard stuff that's being done is, in some ways stunting the creativity around some of the cooler stuff, like whether it's data analytics, or in this case, the startin' a company, so, Slava, I want to get your thoughts on your views on how the world is becoming democratized, because if you think about the entrepreneurship trend that you're riding, there's a democratization of invention. This is the creative, it's the innovation, but yet, there's all this hard stuff, that's called, like, production, or under-the-hood, that IBM's bringin'. What do you expect that to feel up? What's your vision of this democratization culture? >> It's my favorite thing that's happening. I think, whether it's YouTube democratizing access to content, or Indiegogo democratizing access to capital, the idea of democratizing access to entrepreneurship between our partnership, just really makes me smile. I think that capital is just one of those first points and now they're starting to get the money, but lots of other things are hard. When you can actually get artificial intelligence, get cloud capabilities, get security capabilities, put it into a service, so you don't need to figure all those things out on your own, so you can go from a small little idea to actually start scaling pretty rapidly, that's super exciting. When you can be on Indiegogo, and in four weeks, get 30,000 backers of demand across 100 countries, and people are saying, "We want this," it's good to know that you don't need to start ramping up your own dev team to figure out how to create a cloud on your own, or create your own AI, you can tap right into a server that's provided, which has really revolutionizing how quickly a small company can scale, so it proliferates more entrepreneurs starting, 'cause they know there's more accessibility, plus it improves their potential for success, which in the long run, just means there's more swings at the bat to be able to have an entrepreneur succeed, which I think all of us want. >> Explain for the audience how it works a little bit. You got the global platform that you built out, Arrow brings its resources and ideation, IBM brings the IoT, the cognitive platform. Talk about how that all comes together and how people take advantage of it. >> Sure, I mean you can look at it as, one example like WaterBot. So WaterBot is an actual sensor that you can deploy against your water system to be able to detect whether or not your water that you're drinking is healthy. You're getting real-time data across your system and for some reason, it's telling you you have issues, you can react accordingly. So that was an idea. You go on Indiegogo, they post that idea, and they're able to get the world to start funding it. You get customer engagement, you get actual market validation, and you get funding. Well now you actually need to make these sensors, you need to make these products, so now you get the partnership with Arrow, which is really helpful, 'cause they're helping you with the engineering, the design, the components. Now you want to be able to figure out how you can store all that data, so it's not just your own house, maybe you're evaluating across an entire neighborhood, or as a state, you want to see how the water is for the whole entire state. You put all that data up into the cloud, you want to be able to analyze the data rapidly through AI, and similarly, this is highly sensitive data, so you want it to be secure. If WaterBot, on their own, had to build out all this infrastructure, we're talking about dozens, hundreds, who knows how many people they would need, but here, through the partnership, you get the benefit of Indiegogo to get the brilliant idea to actually get validated, Arrow, to bring your idea from back of the napkin into reality, and then you get IBM Watson to help with all of the software components and cloud that we just talked about. >> Great, and how did this get started? How did you guys fall into this and how did it manifest itself? >> Take it, I tell the story? >> Go for it. >> So, I love this story. So, Slava's explained that the front end of this, it was really a partnership of Arrow and Indiegogo that came out of the need of entrepreneurs to actually build their stuff. You know, you get it funded, and then you say, "Oh boy," now I've got a bunch of orders, how do I now make this stuff? And so, Arrow had a capability; of looking at the way you designed, looking deeply with their engineers, sourcing the components, putting together, maybe whiteboxing it even for you, and so, they put that together. Now, we'll all seeing that IoT and the connected products are moving for disconnection, it's actually generating data and that data having value. And so Arrow didn't have that capability, we were great partners with Arrow, you know, when we all looked at it, you know, the need for AI coming into all these products, the need for security around the connection platform, that can actually do that connection, we were a logical map here, so we're another set of components, not the physical. We're the cloud-based components and services that enable these connected devices to sync. >> If you think about the impact, it's mind-boggling with the alternative. You mentioned, the example you gave, they probably might have abandoned the project, so if you think about the scale of these opportunities, what the alternative would have been without an Indiegogo, you probably have some anecdotal feeling on this. Any thoughts on what data you can share, do you have any kind of reference point of like, OK, we funded all this and 90% wouldn't have been done, or 70% wouldn't have been done, do you have any flavor for what's... >> Hard to know exactly. Obviously, many of these folks that came to Indiegogo, if they could have gotten funded on another path, earlier in the process, they would have. Indiegogo became really a great choice. Now you're seeing, instead of being the last resort, Indiegogo's becoming the first resort because they're getting so much validation and market data. The incredible thing is not the thing that adds scale, when you think about 500 or 700,000 entrepreneurs or over a billion dollars and it's in virtually every country in the world, if you really just look at it as one product. So, like, Flow Hive is just one example. They've revolutionized how honey gets harvested. That product was bought in almost 170 countries around the world, and it's something that hasn't been changed in over 150 years, and it's just so interesting to see that, if it wasn't for Indiegogo, that idea would not go from the back of the napkin to getting funded, and now, through these partnerships, they're able to really realize so much more of their potential. >> So, it's interesting, the machine learning piece is interesting to me, because you take the seed funding, which is great, and product market fit as they say in the entrepreneurial culture, is validated, so that's cool, but it could be, in some cases, small amounts of cash before the next milestone, but if you think about the creativity impact that machine learning can give the entrepreneur. >> Slava: Right. >> On their discovery process, early stage, that's an added benefit to the entrepreneur. >> Absolutely. Yeah, a great example bears against SmartPlate. SmartPlate is trying to use the combination of weight sensing plate, as well with photo detection, image detection, and software. The more data it can feed its image detection, the more qualified it can know, "Is that a strawberry or a cherry or is that beef?" Right? And we take that for granted that our eyes can detect all that, but it's really remarkable to think about that instead of having to journal everything by hand or make sure you pick with your finger what's the right product, how many ounces, you can take a photo of something and now it'll know what you're eating, how much you're eating and what is the food composition? And this all requires significant data, significant processing. >> Well, I'm really pumped about that, congratulations, Deon, on a great deal. I love the creativity. I think the impact to the globe is just phenomenal. I mean, by what the game-changing things that are coming out. Slava, I got to ask you, and Deon, if you could weigh in, too, maybe you have some, your favorites, the craziest thing you've seen funded, and the coolest thing you've seen funded. >> Cool is hard, because it's kind of like asking, "Well, who's your favorite child?" I have like 700,000 children, not even Wilt Chamberlain, (laughing) and I like them all. But, you know, it's everything from an activity tracker to security devices, to be able to see what the trend is 24, 36 months ahead. Before things become mainstream today, we're seeing these things three, five years ago. Things are showing up at CES, and these are things we get to see in advance. In terms of something crazy, it's not quite IoT, but I remember when a young woman tried to raise $200,000 to be able to get enough money for her and Justin Bieber to fly to the moon. (laughter) >> That's crazy. >> That didn't get quite enough funding, but something's that flush right now is Nimuno Loops is getting funded right now on Indiegogo Live, and they just posted less than seven days ago and they have Lego-compatible tape, so it's something that you can tape onto any surface, and then the other side is actually Lego-compatible, so you're actually putting Legos onto that tape. So, imagine, instead of only a flat surface to do Legos, you could do Legos on any surfacing, even your jacket. It's not the most IoT-esque product right now, but you just asked for something creative, there you go. >> That's a creative. >> I think once you got Wilt Chamberlain and Justin Bieber in conversation, I am out. (laughter) >> Keepin' it fresh. (voices overlapping) >> Slava, how does Indiegogo sustain itself? Does it take a piece of the action? Does it have other funding mechanisms for... >> The beautiful thing about Indiegogo is, it's a platform and it's all about supply-and-demand, so supply is the ideas and the entrepreneurs, and demand is the funders. It's totally free to use the website and as long as you're able to get money in your pocket, then we take a percentage. If you're not taking any money into your pocket, then we get no money. As part of the process, you might benefit from actually not receiving money. You might try to raise 100 grand, only raise 31, and learn that your price point is wrong, your target audience is wrong, your color is wrong, your bond cost is too high. All this feedback is super value. You just saved yourself a lot of pain, so really it's about building the marketplace. We're a platform, we started out just with funding, we're really becoming now a springboard for entrepreneurs, we can't do it all ourselves, which is why we're bringing on these great partners. >> And you know, we've done, just to add to that, I think it's a relevant part here, too. We've actually announced a freemium-based service for the entrepreneurs to get onto the cloud access, the AI, or to access the services as a starting point, it's a complete freemium model, so that they can get started, very low barrier to entry and obviously, scale as they grow. >> What do you call that? Is it IBM IoT Freemium or is it? >> Hasn't been a name specifically to the Freemium element of it, it's what in IoT platform, available on Bluemix. >> So, it's like a community addition of lots of, so Deon, a new chapter for you, >> Yeah. >> I saw a good quarter for mainframes last quarter, still drafting off your great work, and now you've shifted to this whole new IoT role. What's that been like, relatively new initiative for IBM, building up on some historical expertise, but give us the update on your business. >> It's about 15 months ago, we announced a global headquarters that we're going to open in Munich and we announced the Watson IoT business, which brought together a lot of IBM's expertise and a lot of our experience over the years through Smarter Cities, through the Smarter Planet Initiative, we'd been working the Internet of Things. We'd made a three billion dollar commitment to that marketplace, though we were going to go big and go strong. We've built out a horizontal platform, the Watson IoT platform. On top of that, we've got market-leading enterprise SF management software, the Maximo portfolio, TRIRIGA for facilities management, and then we have a whole set of engineering software for designing connected products as well. So we've built out a very comprehensive industry, vertical-aligned IoT business. We added, last year, we went from about 4,000 to about 6,000 plants, so we had a very good year, in terms of real enterprises getting real outcomes. We continued to bring out new industry solutions around both connected products and then, operations like retail, manufacturing, building management, Tokyo, transportation. We're building out solutions and use-cases to leverage all that software, so business is going well, we officially opened the Watson IoT headquarters three weeks ago in Munich, and we're jampacked with clients coming through that building, building with us. We've got a lot of clients who've actually taken space in the building, and they're using the co-laboratory with us to work on PSEs and see the outcomes they can drive. >> Deon Newman, with Watson IoT platforms. Slava Rubin, founder of Indiegogo. Collective intelligence as cultural shift happening. Congratulations. Crowdsourcing and using all that crowdfunding. It's really good data, not just getting the entrepreneur innovations funded, but really using that data and way in your wheelhouse, IoT. >> Yeah. >> John: Thanks for joining us in theCUBE, appreciate it. More live coverage after this short break. It's theCUBE, live in Las Vegas, for IBM InterConnect. We'll be right back. Stay with us. (theCUBE jingle)