Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, we're back. And this is theCUBE, and we're covering IBM Think 2020, the Digital Think, and we are covering wall-to-wall. We're here with Keith Dyer, who's the Vice President of Sales and Channels at Cisco, and Laura Guio, long-time friend to CUBE Alum, she's the General Manager of the Global Cisco Alliance, and California Senior State Exec. Folks, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Nice to see you, Dave. >> Good to see you too, Dave. >> Hey, I got to ask you, Laura, what's this California Senior State Executive into your title? Tell me about that. >> So, I'm responsible for all of the IBM population here in the state of California, and during this time of COVID-19, it's been very interesting, so I manage all the, as I call it, care and feeding of the employees up and down the state, and how we're responding to the shelter-in-place orders, and how IBM is responding from an employee perspective. >> Yeah, you know, I've interviewed a number of CXOs, some from both your companies, and that's the theme that we keep hearing, Keith, is: Number one is the health and wellbeing and safety of our employees, and then once that's confirmed, get to work. >> Yeah, it's a completely different environment that we're in, and I mean, Cisco and IBM both being big global companies, coming from being in offices and in environments of working closely with one another to sheltering in  home and working out of our home offices, I think the thing that both of our companies have the ability to do is to empower our folks to do that. And we're doing that, we're doing that both from an individual perspective, with our tools and our technologies, but we're also doing that together, with a lot of the things that this partnership and this alliance brings to this, which is really, you know, being able to provide IT services to remote workers and to be able to still keep this economy moving along. >> Yeah, along with our data partner, ETR, we were one of the first to report that sort of work-from-home offset, how budgets are shifting, in fact, 20% of the CIOs that we surveyed, 1200 CIOs, said their budgets were actually increasing. So, I wonder, Laura, if you could talk about the, you guys had a relationship with Cisco and IBM for a long time. Maybe, talk about some of the go-to-market highlights, and I want to double-click on that. >> Yeah, so we've had a long-standing relationship, over 20 years, that we've partnered together in the marketplace. And because of that long-standing relationship, it gives us an opportunity, not at just the very senior levels of this relationship, but all the way out to the field in the sellers, on what's needed out there from a client perspective. We're constantly coming out with new, integrated solutions, things that answer the questions and the problems that our customers are trying to solve. One in particular, right now, is called Private Cloud Infrastructures as a Service. This with Cisco Technology, and IBM Technology and Services gives the client an answer on how to get that private Cloud in their facility and not have to have the CAPEC question on getting that server portion of that in there. Cisco has a unique opportunity with IBM, to offer that customer. >> So Keith, one of the things I'd like to talk about with any go-to-market strategies is, you get together when you get a market partner and you try to identify the ideal customer, what's the right profile, What's the value proposition. And I'm wondering, just generally, what does that look like for you guys, and then specifically, how has that changed, or has that changed as a result of COVID-19? >> Well, I think a couple of things: One, one of the things where Cisco and IBM have long been partners together has been from a security perspective, and as we move into this new class of workers that are working remotely, and that are working in environments where security is paramount, and one of the work that we've done together around threat management and the way we both have put security measures and security products in place and solutions to help remote workers to be able to work with security into their networks. >> Yeah, so in our reporting, we've noted that it's not just video collaboration tools that are on the uptake, it is things like, whether it's VPNs, networking bandwidth, wide area networks, securing that remote infrastructure. So Laura, maybe, you could help us understand what IBM's bringing to the table, and maybe we can talk about what Cisco's bringing to the table here. >> Well, when you look at it from an IBM perspective, our huge client base out there from a services perspective. Generally, where we start, those customers are looking for end-to-end solutions. So when you take technologies like Cisco has, and combine it with the breadth of technology, around Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Security, that gives the ability to a client to come to one place, get that end-to-end solution, and feel secure that it is an enterprise-quality solution, that they don't have to worry about all the other part pieces they have to plug in there. >> Yeah, one of the things we've been talking about is: I was just talking to Rob Thomas about this, he said, "You know, Dave, I don't know if anything's "going to really dramatically change with COVID-19, "maybe, it is, maybe it isn't, "but definitely some things are being accelerated. "And when you think about the acceleration to Cloud, talking about the industry angle, Laura, Edge, IOT, I wonder if you guys could talk a little bit about, maybe, start with Keith, do you see there are some learnings here in this period, during this pandemic, that maybe will accelerate, sort of some of those Edge discussions, or the things that we've learned that maybe, would have taken longer to put into practice? Let us start with Keith. >> Yeah, I think first and foremost, it's just getting at the data, and being able to have that data to a decision faster, and that's the whole reason we're really investing around Edge technologies, so that we can take that data in, we can hope it helps us make decisions faster, and get to outcomes for customers better, and a part of that becomes around having the right security postures, but also then being able to link up back to the data center, which is what we do with IBM around HyperCloud. >> Laura, anything you'd add to that from an industry perspective? >> Yeah, I think that the technology that Cisco brings to the table really it helps accelerate that solution, and get what the client's looking for. We had a recent example, well, at the end of last year; we met with a number of manufacturing customers in Europe. And we took them through a solution that we have with the Edge and Security that Cisco offers, the pieces that IBM brings to the table, but the manufacturers really looked at this and said, "Wow! This really gives me that Edge technology that I need, "it provides all the security that I'm looking for, "and allows this manufacturing to line autonomously, "run without having to have that intervention "that a number of other solutions would require." >> You know, it's kind of a sensitive topic when I talk to executives, and when we talk to the CIOs and CSOs with ETR in the roundtable, there was a sensitivity to, and sort of a negative sensitivity to so-called "the ambulance chasing." And so what they don't want is, "Hey, here's a free trial for, you know, "but you got to swipe your credit card, "you have to promise to sign something. "We just don't have time for that." I bring that up because Cisco and IBM came up in this roundtable as two companies, there were others, too, by the way, that were really responding well from the customer perspective. And these were industries that were hard-hit, you know, we're talking about airlines, we're talking about hospitality, really hard-hit types of industries, and they called out IBM, Cisco, and as I say, seven or eight other companies, so I think the industry, because you guys are large companies, established companies, they expect more of you. They expect kind of adult supervision, if you will, in the room. I wonder if you could talk about, maybe, some of the other things that, but first of all, react to that, and tell me the other things, Laura, that, maybe, you guys have done, either as individual companies or jointly. >> Yeah, I'll start and I'll let Keith answer here. So, I liked the comment, "the adults in the room". What we're finding as customers are coming to companies like Cisco and IBM and saying, "Look, I need a solid enterprise solution. "I'm looking for somebody who's tested it, tried-and-true, "that you've got recognition in the industry, "that you're going to bring a complete, "solid solution forward." And so we are being tapped into as two companies, to really bring us two to the clients, they don't have a whole lot of time right now to go figure it out, and they believe in us, and what we've been able to provide for the market. >> Yeah, and one of the things that I would add to that was that the investment that both of our companies are making, really just in our customers, and helping them get through this journey. You know, we both have fantastic CEOs, who are really visionaries, and who are really beginning to look at, and how they can help accelerate our customers, so that when we get on the other side we're stronger and we're able to deliver technology, and be able to deliver to our customers. You know, Laura and I, we're inundated, almost on a daily basis of requests and support. And we've actually had a grassroots effort that really kind of bore up through our sales teams are providing education and providing services in the education sector, using IBM technology, and using Cisco Webex Technology. We've been partnering with other partners, such as Samsung and Apple, to deliver those on devices, and you know, these aren't necessarily things that came out of the CEO offices, these were solutions and efforts that are grassrooted up through our organization, because of the strong partnership that we have in the industry. >> I love that, because, I mean, we've all been touched by education, kids' remote learning, healthcare's another one. I mean, everybody knows somebody, you know, a nurse, or now the first responders, "the today's heroes", that are having to really risk their lives, literally, every day when they go into work, and that is happening on the front lines, so Keith, I appreciate your comment, that it's a grassroots effort and Laura, you got a new CEO, you know, Arvind, stepped into this and I'm excited to talk to him about his first moves, but any other color you can add to that, or other initiatives that you've seen in the field? >> Yeah, so Keith touched on it just a moment ago there, you talk about the ICUs in the hospitals. Almost a month ago when this all started, I sat there watching the news, watching people dying in the hospital without a chance to really talk to their family members, and the burden that it was putting onto the health care professionals. We came up with, I said, there's a solution there, went to Keith, said, "You know, we've got Webex, "we've got other things in the portfolio," went to Samsung, they have devices that are military-grade, that'll work there. We were able to put a solution together pretty quickly. We've got a number of hospitals that are evaluating it right now, we're almost ready to roll this out, but that just goes to a mature company that has all this security and interactions with other companies that have the part pieces that you need, and then test it, make sure it's secure, that it's enterprise-grade, and get it out there. There's not many companies in the world that can do that. >> Well, I think that goes to what you were saying before, I called it "adult supervision," but I talked to Sri Srinivasan, who runs Cisco's Collaboration division, and as they say, the CIOs told us, "You know, we're really off-put "by people trying to sell us," but what Sri told me was that Cisco made a free-offering, no swipe of the credit card, "Hey, if you buy something down the road that's fine, "if you don't, you know, doesn't matter." And that's the kind of leadership that I think people expect from companies like IBM and Cisco, quite frankly. >> Yeah, and you know, Dave, what Sri and what Chuck did there, you know, that wasn't easy to do, I mean, we've essentially doubled and almost tripled our capacity of Webex as we've gone through this, and we were just absolutely, that organization that is working well overtime, overtime, overtime. Laura and I were able to take that, take some of that technology, be able to get out in the front, and truly it's not about creating revenue right now, it's about helping get our customers through this crisis together. We'll worry about, you know, commercial opportunities that come down the road. >> Yeah, and those will happen, those are going to be outcomes of your business practices, and talking to Rob Thomas, and again, and he'd been the data angle here, all the data, the data sources, the data quality, you're seeing it. You see even the maps, you see even the real-time updates, I mean, things change, literally, on a day-to-day basis, and that's kind of IBM's wheelhouse, really. >> Yeah, yeah. And we're addressing a lot of that with what we're doing here between our two companies, and providing that solution, getting to that data, get it securely where it needs to be. We've been on the forefront of providing from an IBM perspective, around the COVID information that's being used around the world through our weather company application that we have out there. We've offered up the mainframe technologies, and our supercomputers around, be able to help hospitals and those that are working on vaccines and all of that information, so you've got to have the networking piece of that, you've got to have the technology that it works on, and then you've got to have that data that you can access and manipulate quickly to get those answers out. >> Yeah, and Cisco, IBM, it's been a partnership that made a lot of sense, there's not a ton of overlap in your portfolios, which is quite amazing given the size of your companies. You know, there is some, but generally speaking, it's been a pretty productive partnership. Keith, Laura, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, sharing a little bit of information, and thanks for what you're doing during this crisis. Stay safe. >> Thanks Dave. Thanks Dave. >> All right, you're welcome. And thank you for watching. Everybody, this is Dave Vellante, our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM's Digital Think 2020. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got three great guests here to talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI operations. Laura Guio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Angelstad, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada, Financial Services. And Kuberan Kandasamy, VP of Personal Insurance at Economical Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE, this great panel on Cloud Satellite and AI ops. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John, good to see you. >> Well, first, let's start with you. There's the General Manager for the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined that's the standard and multicloud is right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical. And so, obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. >> Absolutely, so John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around a supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kyndryl, our spin-off of what we were previously calling NewCo, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our Satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all of this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So, we're super excited about this. >> Real quick while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points. I just want to get to, I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NewCo and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really the center of that equation. How does that relate into all that? >> So, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing, and you know, we've got a client here with us today, Kuberan who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client. What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software, managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco couple together, really great value. >> Kuberan, you got teed up beautifully there. So, I want to go to you and then I'll go to Matthew after. But, okay, tell us more about this IBM-Cisco dynamic. You guys are a hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post-pandemic is looking good too. So, take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. >> Sure. Sure, John, thank you. You know, to appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us, let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet, an MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated, direct-to-customer digital channel, where customers can quote and buy home and auto policies online without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vyne, another MVP. Vyne is our simplified self-serve and digitized broker channel, where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers, again, without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Both Sonnet and Vyne have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And, you know, we maintain the platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered desired results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vyne platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level, so that we can monitor the pulse of, you know, every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vyne, and we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. >> On that vision real quick. How does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth in the IPO, you think in automation, I'm assuming, can you elaborate quickly? >> Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get, like it's all digitized, so we have a lot of data in there. And this is where, you know, the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting, having predictability and all that, that's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. >> Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the Financial Services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? >> Yeah, absolutely. And Kuberan was touching on this from Economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in Vyne with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So, our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multicloud and AI. >> So, if you don't mind, if you don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, this was based, again, on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then the unique to what Kuberan in Economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here, is a market-leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So, you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application, all the way through the technical infrastructure. And it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >> So, AppD and these IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's. >> Absolutely, and that's, the point is bringing together the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. >> Well, we'll talk about the dynamics again. This is, again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. (laughs) I mean, you got the Cloud Satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and maybe even Laura can add as needed. But from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid multicloud world. So, we've really evolved whether it's IBM Cloud, AWS, as some of our clients, including Economical and others. Microsoft Azure, Google. It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together. And again, stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM and our partner ecosystem, and the evolution of IBM services as well. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring the elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security. And then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for the client. >> I love the end-to-end story. I see hybrid as distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multicloud as subsystems and all is going to have to be operated together. And the software that makes that happen. And I can see tons of head room opportunity there. Kuberan, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now. Because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for a business solution. And, you know, the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster. It's helping us to reduce defect linkage through our quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together. And our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So, you know, to be able to have a robust self-healing capability. And this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability, because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with AppDynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Sonnet and Vyne, where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for, excuse me, for our customers. Right? So, hopefully that kind of stitches the picture for you. >> That's awesome, great insight. Laura, Matthew, Kuberan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the Cloud Satellite and AI. What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >> So, as IBM invest more and more in these strategic hybrid cloud solutions industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. >> All right. Matthew? >> Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, Economical in this case, to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan has stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. >> Kuberan, take us home, final word. >> Thank you. What I would say is, what we've learned from this is really standing this stuff in more like a garage style kind of a situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So, that's the benefit I've seen. >> Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco better together. This ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John. >> Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (cheerful music)