>> Announcer: Live from Boston Massachusets it's The Cube covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cubes coverage of the Red Hat Summit, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Jim Wasko, he is the vice president of Open Systems at IBM. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, before we get into the new ways in which IBM and Red Hat are working together, give us a little history on the IBM, Red Hat alliance and contextualize things for us. >> Oh sure, sure, so we started with Linux back in the very late '90's as a strategic initiative for IBM, and so Red Hat was one of the key players at that time. We worked with other Linux vendors who no longer exist. Linux Care was one of the companies we worked with, Mandrake, things along those lines. But Red Hat has been a constant through all of that. So we started in the very early days with Red Hat and we had an X86 line at the time, and then as well as Power NZ, and even in the very early days, we had ports of Red Hat running on IBM, all of IBM's hardware. >> And the alliance is going strong today? >> Yes it is, yes it is. So we have that long history and then as Red Hat transformed as a company into their enterprise software and REL in particular, that really matured, as far as our relationship was concerned, and I'm the engineering VP with Red Hat, and we just had a very strong collaborative relationship. We know how to work upstream, they obviously work very well upstream. We've worked in the Fedora Project, as a staging area for our platforms and so, yeah, we've known each other very well. I've been working on Linux at IBM since November of 2000. >> Jim, so IBM, long history with Open Source, I remember when it was the billion dollars invested in Linux. We covered on The Cube when Power became Open Power. Companies like Google endorsing Open Power. Bring us up to speed as to Open Power, how that fits with what you're doing with Red Hat and what you're talking about on the show here. >> Oh yeah, so Open Power was really about opening up hardware architecture as well as the operating system and firmware. And so, as that's progressed Red Hat has also joined in that Open Power initiative. If you look at when we started, just a small group of companies kicked it off, and today we're over 300 companies, including Red Hat as a part of Open Power foundation. They're also board members, so as a key partner in strategic partner of ours, they've recognized that it's an ecosystem that is worth participating in, because it's very disruptive, and they've been very quick to join us. >> That's good, we've talked to Jim Lighthurst about how they choose and they look for communities that are going to do good things for the industry, for the world, for the users, so, it's a nice endorsement to have Red Hat participate, I would think. >> Oh, it is, they don't enter into anything lightly. And so, their participation really is a signal, I think, in the marketplace, that this is a good strategic initiative for the industry. >> Where do you see as the biggest opportunities for growth, going forward. >> Opportunities for growth, there's quite a few. A lot of people don't realize that Linux is really the underlying engine for so many things that we do in the technology world. It's everything from embedded into the automotive industry, if you've got Onboard computer, which most new cars do, 80% of those are Linux. If you talked about web serving, websites, front ends, it's Linux, you know. I know with my mom, she's like "What do you work on?" and I say Linux you know, and she's like "Is that like Windows?" and I'm like "No." And then I tell her, you know Mom you've used it, probably a dozen times today, and then I give her examples. And so, all the new innovation tends to happen on Linux. If we look at HyperLedger, and Blockchain in particular, good example, that's one that takes a lot of collaboration, a lot of coordination if it's going to have a meaningful impact on the world. And so, it starts with Linux as foundation to it. So, any of those new technologies, if you look at what we're doing with quantum computing for example, it takes a traditional computer to feed it, and a tradition computer for the output, and we don't have time to go into details behind that but, Linux fed, as a part of it, because really that's where the innovation is taking place. >> Jim, could you expand a little bit more on the Hyperledger and Blockchain piece? A lot of people still, I think they understand BitCoin and digital currency there, but it's really some of the distributed and open source capabilities that these technologies deliver to the market, have some interest and use cases, what's the update on that? >> Oh that's a good question. So, a lot of people think of BitCoin and that says a very limited use case. As we look at Hyperledger, we notice that it could be applied in so many more ways than just a financial kind of way. Where we've done, it is logistics, and supply chain, we've implemented it at IBM for our supply chain and we've taken data from Weather.com, company that we've acquired, and we use that for our logistics for end of quarter for example. So that's something that was easier for us to implement, because it's all within our company. But then we are expanding that through partners. So that's an example where you could do supply chain logistics, you could do financials. But really, in order for that to work 'cause it's a distributed ledger, you need everybody in the ecosystem to participate. It can't be one company, can't be two companies. And so, that's why very early on we recognized we should jointly start up a project that the Linux Foundation, called Hyperledger, to look at what's the best and how could we all collaborate because we're all going to benefit from it, and it will be transformative. >> So what are you doing there, because as you said, these do present big challenges because there has to buy in from everyone? >> Yeah so if I look at the Hyperledger project specifically at the Linux Foundation, we've got customers of ours like JPMC for example, founding member and participant, we've got a distribution partners, we've got technology partners all there and so we contributed early code. Stuff we'd done in research, as kind of like a building block. And then we have members, both from research and product development side of the house, that are constantly working in that upstream community on the source code. >> And continually contributing, and okay... >> Yeah, well continually contributing, that's on the technology side. On the business side we're doing early proof of concepts, so we worked early with a company called Everledger that looks at the history of diamonds and tracks them beginning to end, and the ultimate goal of that is to eliminate blood diamonds from the marketplace and so if you know, it's also a very good market to begin because it's a limited set of players. So you can implement the technology, you can do the business processes behind it and then demonstrate the value. So that's an early project. Most of the financial institutions are doing stuff, whether it's stock trading or what have you. And so we're doing early proof of concept, so we're taking both technology and business, you marry 'em together as Jim Whitehurst said the other day you know, what's the minimal viable product, lets get that out there, lets try it out, lets learn. >> Release early release often. >> Yes, and then modify quickly, don't start with something you think is overly baked, and find that you have to shelf it in order to kind of back track and make corrections. >> And what is like to mesh those two cultures, the technology and the business? I mean, do you find that there is a clash? >> We have not. Now at IBM it was not a simple transition back in the late '90's. There were people that thought Open Source would be just a flash in the pan, and here we are so many years later, that's not true. And so early on, like I said, there were a lot of internal kind of debates, but that debate is long since settled, so we don't have that. And if you look across our different business divisions, even within our company, whether its Cloud, whether it's Cognitive, whether it's systems business, all use Open Source. Whether we contribute everything externally and we're using third party packaged, or we consume it ourselves. And we see that as happening across industry, even with out clients. Some that you might think are very traditional, they recognize that's where the innovation is taking place. And so, you always look at balancing is this viable, is that healthy? Or is still the commercially available stuff the better stuff? Just a quick story, I had a development team and we were doing Agile and we needed a tool to do to track our sprints and everything like that, and so, all of my developers were Open Source developers, and so that's their bias. If we're going to use software, it has to be Open Source, they went and evaluated a couple projects and they found Open Source software that had been abandoned, they were smart enough to recognize we also acquired a company called Rational, and Rational Team Concert does this, but it's proprietary. And so they initially resisted it, but then they looked at these Open Source project and saw, if we picked up that code, we maintain it forever, and we're alone. That is as worthless, as it can be, because there's no benefit. Doing Open Source, where you have multiple people contributing, you give an added benefit. So they went with our in house stuff, Rational Team Concert. Just showed the maturity of the team that even though they think Open Source is really the best thing in life, you've got to balance the business with it. >> Jim, so we look at the adoption of Open Source, it took many years to mature. Today, you talk about things like Cognitive, it's racing so fast, give us a little bit of look forward, you know, what's changing your space? What are you looking forward to? What would we expect to see from you by the time we come back next year? >> Sure, so a lot of what you've heard here at the conference so a lot of things that we're doing, are often offered in a Cloud platform, or as a hosted service, or as a service. So, for example, we do have Blockchain as a service available today. And it's running the back end is on mainframe cloud, for example, running Linux. Other examples of that, looking at new applications for quantum computing. Well that requires severengic freezing in order to keep those cubits alive. And so that's a hosted thing, and we actually have that available online, people can use that today. So I think that you're going to see a lot of early access, even for commercial applications. Early access so people can try it, and then based on their business model, like we've heard from clients this week, sometimes they'll need it on prem, and for various business reasons, and other times they can do it on the cloud and we'll be able to provide that. But we give them early access via cloud and as a service. And I think that's what you're going to see a lot in the industry. >> And it's this hybrid mix, as you said, some on prem, some off prem, okay. >> Jim: Yes. >> Well Jim, thanks so much for joining us, we really appreciate you sitting down with us. >> You're welcome, and thanks for your time. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we'll have more from the Red Hat Summit after this. (upbeat electronic music)