(soft electronic music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to Miami. I feel like I should be singing that song. Lisa Martin here live with theCUBE at IFS Unleashed. We've been here all day having great conversations with IFS executives, their customers, their partners, lots a... You can hear probably the buzz behind me at the vibe here. Lot of great folks, 1500 plus here. People are excited to be back and to see what IFS has been up to the last few years. I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni who was here with us last time we covered IFS, Marne Martin joins us. The president, Service Management, EAM and Global Industry at IFS. Marne, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, I'm so happy to be here, and thanks for joining us in Miami. Last time it was Boston. >> That's right. >> So definitely much warmer climate this time. >> Much warmer. (Marne laughs) Yes, much warmer. And people here are just smiles on faces. People are excited to be back. There's... But I shouldn't elude that IFS slow down at all during the pandemic. You did not. I was looking at the first half, 2022 financials that came out over the summer and AR are up 33%. So much recurring revenue as well. So your... The business is doing incredibly well. You've pivoted beautifully during the pandemic. Customers are happy. There's a lot of customers here. You guys talk a lot about the moment of service. I love that. Talk to the audience about what that is, and how you're enabling your customers to deliver that to their customers. >> Definitely. So, you know, it's amazing when you have these inflection points and it's a good opportunity, world conference to world conference to celebrate that. We've grown a lot, and the number of customers we've brought in, in tier one global customers as well as in our variety of the various regions around the world and different industry verticals is amazing. And, you know, the participation is what's making IFS be a better company, a better technology vendor as we focus on these industries. So is understanding moment of service. You know, we talk a lot, and certainly CIOs and IT buyers will talk about technology, but putting the technology to work has to be meaningful, not only to the returns that go to shareholders, but what it matters, what matters to the end customers, of our customers. And when we started thinking about the new branding of IFS, because we also rebranded in this time, we thought, "How does that mission crystallize in what we're doing for our customers, and how do we really start put bringing technology to life?" And that is where moment of service came. So it's very rare in our world that you actually come up with a sort of slogan or an objective as a company that not only mobilizes what we do internally here at IFS, delivering great moments of service to our customers, but also that tells a story of the customers to the end customer. You know, service, an area that I work in a lot, it's very obvious that you... We all know when we get a great moment of service, or sometimes a bad moment of service. So if you talk to service organizations, field service organizations, they understand what a moment of service is. But it's also thinking about how we enable the people delivering that great moment of service. Not just like doing a survey or what have you, but what are the digital tools that help them to deliver better moments of service proactively. >> Right. >> One of my pet peeves was always that even like, if you have a voice of the customer program or what have you, that you may get that reactive feedback perhaps to a CMO in an organization, but the insights don't really get actioned. So here, across the line of business applications that we sell, ERP Service Management, EAM, ITSM, or ESM, we're really thinking about with that moment of service, the objective of putting the technology to work. How do we facilitate that alongside the business growth of our customers, but also how do we take the insights they get from their end customers into the business models as well as the functional design, what we develop. So moment of service has become, say the heart of IFS as well as a way of understanding our customers better. >> Really understanding them at much deeper level- >> Correct. Correct. >> And a lot of organizations. Give me some examples of some of the insights that IFS has gleaned from its customers. How you've brought them internally to really evolve the technology. >> So I think what's important is a lot of times technology vendors may say they know their customers, right? If you think about what technology vendor we know with the 360 view of the customer. You know, understanding the customer is a lot more than understanding their renewal date as a software vendor. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> So we have to really think about the moments of service on what matters most at that point of service, right? And it will vary certainly by industry, but there also will be certain things that are very much the same. Like for example, if we, as a customer, can have an asset or a piece of equipment that never breaks, we're a happier customer. If it does break, we, of course, want it to be fixed the first time someone shows up. So those are the obvious things. But how you then fix or manifest that into a different way of utilizing and implementing the technology. Thinking also about taking the operational insights that you have on driving, what we call preventative or predictive maintenance, or maximizing what's called a first time fixed resolution. You know, being able to marry best practices with at times artificial intelligence and machine learning information, with also the operational and personal insights of the people doing the work really enriches the quality of the insights you have around that moment of service and how to recreate a great moment of service, or lessen a poor moment of service. >> Yeah. >> And it also changes a view of what are often IT-driven projects into what's the user feedback that also matters most to enable that. You know, with the talent shortage that we're seeing, you know, customer expectations have only increased. >> Yes. >> So we all know, and customers want great moments of service, but how do we enable the frontline workers, whether they're field service workers or others, to deliver against these expectations when they might be harried, and you know, having to do a lot more work because of talent shortage. So we want to think about what their needs are in a way that's more focused towards delivering that moment of service, that great customer experience. And of course, that always feeds back into brand loyalty, selling more profits, but really getting into it. And you know, the advantage of IFS is that we understand the domain expertise to do things from a UI UX, a business process, but also thinking about how we're developing, to answer your question, the artificial intelligence machine learning. Even thinking about how you put IoT to work in ways that really matter, because there's a lot of money spent on IT projects that actually don't deliver great moments of service, let alone actual business value. >> Right. I love the vertical specialization that IFS has. I was interviewing Darren Roos, your CEO, a little bit earlier today and I said, "You know, we see so many companies... So many vendors, like some of your competitors in the ERP Space, which whom you're outgrowing or growing faster than, or horizontally focused. And the vertical specialization that he was kind of describing how long it's been here really allows IFS to focus on its core competencies. But another thing that I'm hearing throughout the interviews I'm having today, and you just said the same thing, is that you're not just, "We need to meet the customer where they are." Everyone talks about that. You've actually getting the... You're developing and fostering the domain expertise. >> Yes. >> So whether you're talking with an energy company, aerospace and defense company, manufacturing, there's that one to one knowledge within IFS and its customer, or based in that industry that it can only imagine is maybe part of what's leading to, you know, that big increase in ARR that I talked about, the recurring revenue being so high. That domain expertise seems to be a differentiator from my lens. >> Well, let's even talk about how people build relationships, right? You know, we're having a conversation, so we're already having a higher value relationship, right? And that comes through with how vendors engage with their customers. You know, when you have seen your executives like Darren and myself, and Michael and Christian, who still care and really focus on what is most impactful. What is that moment of service? I'm sure Darren talked about the great moment of service book that we just released. >> Yes. >> So understanding at a more visceral and may I say, intimate moment with the customers, what matters most to them. And really working with what are developing, what we call the digital dream team within these customers that understand enough of where they're going in the objective, enables us to do a better job. And it's also where then, it's not only how we're partnering in the sales process implementation in the conventional ways, but product management. What is the most meaningful? How can we prioritize what makes the most impact? Obviously, there's cool stuff we want to do too, but you know, we really think about understanding the verticals and understanding where they're going. And you see that, for example, we're an absolute leader in mobile workforce management specifically, where we have what's called real time optimization. Super hard to do. No one else does it anymore except us. Great. There's other things where you'd say that, "Hey, some of the other vendors talk about this, right?" APM as a performance management or other things, but because they lack the true vertical specialization and the use cases and the ease to put it in, the adoption rate is low. >> Yeah. >> So, you know, in that case, APM might not be something we do only, but if we can actually help commercialize this, something that has a great deal of value in a superior way in that focus verticals, that's what it means to have industry specialization. Because if you spread yourself too thin, you know then, you'll end up with an AI or machine learning platform or something like that that you know, most companies don't have five years to try and configure, build out a Watson or something like that. I mean, most companies in this day and age, with the requirements of competitive pressure and supply chain pressures have to be nimble and have to be getting results fast. So the closest with the customers, the domain expertise, the understanding of what matters most, helps us to be faster to the value outcomes that our customers needs. It helps us to be more focused in what we're developing and also how we're developing. And ultimately, that does benefit us that, you know, we want to make sure that we're not only leading today, but you know, staying ahead of the game in the next 5 to 10 years, which will help us to grow. You know, we're certainly not a small company anymore. We're at a billion in revenue looking to be 2 billion and eventually 5 billion in revenue. >> Okay. >> So that already, you know, puts us well beyond unicorn status into one of the very few. But, you know, we want to take a different track even of how a service now or a sales force or SAP or even, you know, to some degree workday grew by making sure that we remain focused on these key verticals and not lose our focus. And they're plenty big enough verticals for us to achieve our growth goals. >> Well the growth has been impressive, as I mentioned the ARR app in the first half, and I was chatting with Darren earlier as I said, and I said, "Can you gimme any nuggets for a second half?" I imagine the trajectory is up onto the right. And he alluded to the fact that things are going quite well, but the focus there that you have with customers. Also, you talked about this and I had several customers on the program today. Rolls-Royce was here. Aston Martin was here. And it's very obvious that there is a... There was a uniqueness about the relationship that I saw- >> Yes. >> Especially with Rolls-Royce that I thought was quite, I mean, you talked about kind of that customer intimacy and that personalization, which people used to tolerate fragmented experiences. We don't tolerate those anymore. >> No. >> Nobody has the patience for that. >> No. And it's also, you know, this business isn't easy for a lot of these customers to stay ahead, right? You know, especially if you think about a tier one customer that's at the top of their category. How did they continue to innovate? And Rolls Royce and Aston Martin are really cool customers. You know, but we're also thinking about, you know, what are the up-and-comers? Or you know, we also get customers that have come to us because they've started falling behind in their sector because they haven't been able to digitalize and grow forward. You know, we work a lot with SAP customers. Darren, of course, came from SAP. But in that ecosystem and especially in the areas I work in a lot with service management, SAP customers, you know, that are focusing on ERP, you know, SAP hasn't been a great enabler of service management for them. So the SAP customers have actually fallen behind. And the ability to come to a lot of these new type of digitally based value-based service offerings really make aftermarket service revenues a lifeblood of their company. So even there where, you know, we might have in a different ERP choice, we're able to provide what's really the missing link for these tier one companies that they can't get anywhere else. And we see this also, you know, you've obviously Salesforce and CRM. A lot of Salesforce CRM customers. Microsoft with Dynamics also primarily ERP. But the focus and the specialization that we have is rare in the industry, but it's so impactful. >> Yeah. >> And you know, I would even venture to say that there's not a tier one company that has a lot of aftermarket service revenue, or attention on service revenue, or even that is trying to monetize their connected asset or IoT investment that can ignore IFS. >> Yeah. >> Because we are unique enough in our focus verticals that if they want to continue growing and that is a cornerstone of their growth, their customer, their moment of service, then they definitely need to look at IFS. >> Absolutely. Does IFS care that it's not as well known of a brand? I mean, I mentioned you guys are growing. Maybe I didn't mention this, number three in ERP, you are growing faster than the top two biggest competitors, which you mentioned SAP, Oracle as well, but those implementations can be quite complex. Does IFS care that you're doing so well? Darren talked about where you're winning, how you're being competitive, where you went. Do they care about being a big name brand, or is that really kind of not as important nearly as delivering those moments of service? >> So, you know, it's a mirrored question that you asked me, and therefore, I'll give you a multifaceted answer. (Lisa laughs) You know, ERP, we're very proud to be a top three vendor and I think over time we'll continue to dislodge SAP and Oracle in ERP, where companies want to make a different ERP choice, or they're consolidating or whatever. I think already in field service management, we're by far the number one and will continue to be that. And you actually see a lot of our ERP competitors that are dropping down and you seem a... There's not really a lot of what I'd call best-of-breed options other than IFS as well. So... And then enterprise asset management, I really think the opportunity for IFS is how we put technology to work in some of these advanced capabilities in ways that can be automated that is, for example, in IBM Maximo or Watson or what have you haven't been able to be. And then you have some other best-of-breed EAM customers that have kind of not continued innovating and things like that. So the lines where we are really building the brand recognition with the largest companies in the world might be anchored for now more around field service management, enterprise asset management. But of course that brand recognition comes back into ERP. >> Yeah. >> And there will be, you know, as we continue to innovate, as people make ERP decisions every 5, 7, 10 years as those buying cycles are, then it's important that we're using the leadership positions we have. And especially, you know, thinking about these verticals where the asset centric service nature is paramount to them either to meet their moment of service, or to meet their aftermarket service revenue goals that we get the recognition of IFS as being the leader. And all the, you know... And this is where I'll go to the next layer of your question that building that is something I pride myself on and I'll say that we're building the IFS brand recognition at three different levels. >> Okay. >> There's the C-level and the board level, which I'd say my top participation in Darren's keynote this morning was more targeted to messages that would go, you know, "How are you a smarter digital business? How does IFS help you to be that?" >> Yeah. >> Okay. Then we have the operational or kind of the doers in a digital dream team that are below C-level, maybe VPs or directors or SVPs, that actually have the objective of bringing in the new business models, the operational change, the new technology, putting it to work. And there, you know, you have aspects of what do they need now versus how do they change and how do they continue innovating in a way that is easy as possible. >> Yeah. >> And then you definitely need to focus also on the people that are hands-on with those end customers. >> The practitioners. Yeah. >> The people that not only are told about the moment of service, but live the moment of service, right? The actual users in the field. Maybe the dispatchers, you know, the people that are doing the maintenance or the service or things like that. So the domain expertise in how we build the brand recognition has to be in all those three constituencies. We want to make sure that the CEO and the board members know who IFS is. We want to make sure that the operational leaders and the IT leaders who actually are delivering the project trust us to deliver. >> Right. >> And are confident in our ability to deliver with our ecosystem. And then we want to make sure that we're delighting those users of the software that they can deliver the moment of service, not just the business value that we all want from technology, but really that we're enabling them to have a solution that they love. That they can enjoy doing their job, or at least feel that they're doing their job in a way that's helpful to them. >> Right. >> And that ties into the end customers getting the moment of service that we all want. >> Absolutely. Well, very much aligned with what I heard today. It sounds like there's a rock solid strategy across the board at IFS and you... Congratulations on the work that you've done to help put that in place and how it's been evolving. I can only imagine that those second half numbers are going to be fantastic. So we'll have to have you back on the show next year (Marne laughs) to see what else is new. >> Yeah, I can't wait. It's an absolute pleasure and- >> Likewise. >> You know, and really, we're so passionate about what we do here. >> Yes. >> You know, I think just as a final note, as we grow, we want to make sure that doubling the company, doubling the number of customers, that our customers still feel that intimacy and that care. >> Yes. >> Right? >> Yes. >> That they can access senior executives that aren't clueless about their used cases and their vertical and actually have the ability to help them. You know, one of the things I pride myself on is that we... Okay, ideally people choose IFS in the first instance. We have successful projects and move on. Sometimes though, we're taking failed projects from other vendors. >> Yes, right. >> And what I pride myself on, and we all do here at IFS, is that we get those projects live, with those customers live. You know, we have the grit. We have the domain expertise, we see it through. And that even if customers have failed to get the business value or the transformation, you know, in the areas that we specialize at IFS, they can come here and we get it done. >> Right, you got a trusted partner. >> And that's something- Yes, and that, you know, I know every vendor says that- >> They do, but- >> But the reality is that we live it. >> Yeah. >> And it doesn't mean we're perfect. No vendor's perfect. But you know, we have the dedication and the focus and the domain expertise to get it done. And that's what's ultimately driving us into these leadership positions, changing how IFS is viewed. You know, we have people now that are coming to IFS that are saying, "IFS is the only choice in service management if you really want to do this work." And, you know, again, we have to keep earning it. But that's great. >> Exactly. Well, congratulations on all of that. That customer intimacy is a unique differentiator, and it's something that is... It's very... It's a flywheel, right? It's very synergistic. We appreciate your time and your insights for joining us on the program today. Thank you, Marne. >> Absolutely a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming. >> Mine as well. For Marne Martin, I'm Lisa Martin. No relation. (Marne laughs) You're watching theCUBE live from Miami at IFS Unleashed. I'll be back after a short break, so don't go too far. (soft electronic music) (soft electronic music continues)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCube's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube, wall-to-wall coverage in-person and hybrid. The two great guests here, Manu Parbhakar, worldwide Leader, Linux and IBM Software Partnership at AWS, and Mike Evans, Vice President of Technical Business Development at Red Hat. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCube. Love this conversation, bringing Red Hat and AWS together. Two great companies, great technologies. It really is about software in the cloud, Cloud-Scale. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John. >> So get us into the partnership. Okay. This is super important. Red Hat, well known open source as cloud needs to become clear, doing an amazing work. Amazon, Cloud-Scale, Data is a big part of it. Modern software. Tell us about the partnership. >> Thanks John. Super excited to share about our partnership. As we have been partnering for almost 14 years together. We started in the very early days of AWS. And now we have tens of thousands of customers that are running RHEL on EC2. If you look at over the last three years, the pace of innovation for our joint partnership has only increased. It has manifested in three key formats. The first one is the pace at which RHEL supports new EC2 instances like Arm, Graviton. You know, think a lot of features like Nitro. The second is just the portfolio of new RHEL offerings that we have launched over the last three years. We started with RHEL for sequel, RHEL high availability, RHEL for SAP, and then only last month, we've launched the support for knowledge base for RHEL customers. Mike, you want to talk about what you're doing with OpenShift and Ansible as well? >> Yeah, it's good to be here. It's fascinating to me cause I've been at Red Hat for 21 years now. And vividly remember the start of working with AWS back in 2008, when the cloud was kind of a wild idea with a whole bunch of doubters. And it's been an interesting time, but I feel the next 14 years are going to be exciting in a different way. We now have a very large customer base from almost every industry in the world built on RHEL, and running on AWS. And our goal now is to continue to add additional elements to our offerings, to build upon that and extend it. The largest addition which we're going to be talking a lot about here at the re:Invent show was the partnership in April this year when we launched the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS as a managed version of OpenShift for containers based workloads. And we're seeing a lot of the customers that have standardized on RHEL on EC2, or ones that are using OpenShift on-premise deployments, as the early adopters of ROSA, but we're also seeing a huge number of new customers who never purchased anything from Red Hat. So, in addition to the customers, we're getting great feedback from systems integrators and ISV partners who are looking to have a software application run both on-premise and in AWS, and with OpenShift being one of the pioneers in enabling both container and harnessing Kubernetes where ROSA is just a really exciting area for us to track and continue to advance together with AWS. >> It's very interesting. Before I get to ROSA, I want to just get the update on Red Hat and IBM, obviously the acquisition part of IBM, how is that impacting the partnership? You can just quickly touch on that. >> Sure. I'll start off and, I mean, Red Hat went from a company that was about 15,000 employees competing with a lot of really large technology companies and we added more than 100,000 field oriented people when IBM acquired Red Hat to help magnify the Red Hat solutions, and the global scale and coverage of IBM is incredible. I like to give two simple examples of people. One is, I remember our salesforce in EMEA telling me they got a $4 million order from a country in Africa theydidn't even know existed. And IBM had 100 people in it, or AT&T is one of Red Hat's largest accounts, and I think at one point we had seven full-time people on it and AT&T is one of IBM's largest accounts and they had two seven storey buildings full of people working with AT&T. So RHELative to AWS, we now also see IBM embracing AWS more with both software, and services, in the magnification of Red Hat based solutions, combined with that embrace should be, create some great growth. And I think IBM is pretty excited about being able to sell Red Hat software as well. >> Yeah, go ahead. >> And Manu I think you have, yeah. >> Yeah. I think there's also, it is definitely very positive John. >> Yeah. >> You know, just the joint work that Red Hat and AWS have done for the last 14 years, working in the trenches supporting our end customers is now also providing lot of Tailwinds for the IBM software partnership. We have done some incredible work over the last 12 months around three broad categories. The first one is around product, what we're doing around customer success, and then what we're doing around sales and marketing. So on the product side, we have listed about 15 products on Marketplace over the course of the last 12 to 15 months. And our goal is to launch all of the IBM Cloud Paks. These are containerized versions of IBM software on Marketplace by the first half of next year. The other feedback that we are getting from our customers is that, hey, we love IBM software running at Amazon, but we like to have a cloud native SaaS version of the software. So there's a lot of work that's going on right now, to make sure that many of these offerings are available in a cloud-native manner. And you're not talking with Db2 Cognos, Maximo, (indistinct), on EC2. The second thing that we're doing is making sure that many of these large enterprise customers are running IBM software, are successful. So our technical teams are attached to the hip, working on the ground floor in making customers like Delta successful in running IBM software on them. I think the third piece around sales and marketing just filing up a vibrant ecosystem, rather how do we modernize and migrate this IBM software on Cloud Paks on AWS? So there's a huge push going on here. So (indistinct), you know, the Red Hat partnership is providing a lot of Tailwinds to accelerate our partnership with IBM software. >> You know, I always, I've been saying all this year in Red Hat summit, as well as Ansible Fest that, distributed computing is coming to large scale. And that's really the, what's happening. I mean, you looking at what you guys are doing cause it's amazing. ROSA Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, very notable to use the term on AWS, which actually means something in the partnership as we learned over the years. How is that going Mike because you launched on theCube in April, ROSA, it had great traction going in. It's in the Marketplace. You've got some integration. It's really a hand in glove situation with Cloud-Scale. Take us through what's the update? >> Yeah, let me, let me let Manu speak first to his AWS view and then I'll add the Red Hat picture. >> Thanks Mike. John for ROSA is part of an entire container portfolio. So if you look at it, so we have ECS, EKS, the managed Kubernetes service. We have the serverless containers with Fargate. We launched ECS case anywhere. And then ROSA is part of an entire portfolio of container services. As you know, two thirds of all container workloads run on AWS. And a big function of that is because we (indistinct) from our customer and then sold them what the requirements are. There are two sets of key customers that are driving the demand and the early adoption of ROSA. The first set of customers that have standardized on OpenShift on-premises. They love the fact that everything that comes out of the box and they would love to use it on Arm. So that's the first (indistinct). The second set of customers are, you know, the large RHEL users on EC2. The tens of thousands of customers that we've talked about that want to move from VM to containers, and want to do DevOps. So it's this set of two customers that are informing our roadmap, as well as our investments around ROSA. We are seeing solid adoption, both in terms of adoption by a customer, as well as the partners and helping, and how our partners are helping our customers in modernizing from VMs to containers. So it's a, it's a huge, it's a huge priority for our container service. And over the next few years, we continue to see, to increase our investment on the product road map here. >> Yeah, from my perspective, first off at the high level in mind, my one of the most interesting parts of ROSA is being integrated in the AWS console and not just for the, you know, where it shows up on the screen, but also all the work behind what that took to get there and why we did it. And we did it because customers were asking both of us, we're saying, look, OpenShift is a platform. We're going to be building and deploying serious applications at incredible scale on it. And it's really got to have joint high-quality support, joint high-quality engineering. It's got to be rock solid. And so we came to agreement with AWS. That was the best way to do that, was to build it in the console, you know, integrated in, into the core of an AWS engineering team with Red Hat engineers, Arm and Arms. So that's, that's a very unique service and it's not like a high level SaaS application that runs above everything, it's down in the bowels and, and really is, needs to be rock solid. So we're seeing, we're seeing great interest, both from end users, as I mentioned, existing customers, new customers, the partner base, you know, how the systems integrators are coming on board. There's lots of business and money to be made in modernizing applications as well as building new cloud native applications. People can, you know, between Red Hat and AWS, we've got some, some models around supporting POCs and customer migrations. We've got some joint investments. it's a really ripe area. >> Yeah. That's good stuff. Real quick. what do you think of ROSA versus EKS and ECS? What's, how should people think about that Mike? (indistinct) >> You got to go for it Manu. Your job is to position all these (indistinct). (indistinct) >> John, ROSA is part of our container portfolio services along with EKS, ECS, Fargate, and any (indistinct) services that we just launched earlier this year. There are, you know, set of customers both that are running OpenShift on-premises that are standardized on ROSA. And then there are large set of RHEL customers that are running RHEL on EC2, that want to use the ROSA service. So, you know, both AWS and Red Hat are now continuing to invest in accelerating the roadmap of the service on our platform. You know, we are working on improving the console experience. Also one of the things we just launched recently is the Amazon controller to Kubernetes, or what , you know, service operators for S3. So over the next few years you will see, you know, significant investment from both Red Hat and AWS in this joint service. And this is an integral part of our overall container portfolio. >> And great stuff to get in the console. That's great, great integration. That's the future. I got to ask about the graviton instances. It's been one of the most biggest success stories, I think we believe in Amazon history in the acquisition of Annapurna, has really created great differentiation. And anyone who's in the software knows if you have good chips powering apps, they go faster. And if the chips are good, they're less expensive. And that's the innovation. We saw that RHEL now supports graviton instances. Tell us more about the Red Hat strategy with graviton and Arms specifically, has that impact your (indistinct) development, and what does it mean for customers? >> Sure. Yeah, it's pretty, it's a pretty fascinating area for me. As I said, I've been a Red Hat for 21 years and my job is actually looking at new markets and new technologies now for Red Hat and work with our largest partners. So, I've been tracking the Arm dynamics for awhile, and we've been working with AWS for over two years, supporting graviton. And it's, I'm seeing more enthusiasm now in terms of developers and, especially for very horizontal, large scale applications. And we're excited to be working with AWS directly on it. And I think it's going to be a fascinating next two years on Arm, personally. >> Many of the specialized processors for training and instances, all that stuff, can be applied to web services and automation like cloud native services, right? Is that, it sounds like a good direction. Take us through that. >> John, on our partnership with Red Hat, we are continuing to iterate, as Mike mentioned, the stuff that we've done around graviton, both the last two years is pretty incredible. And the pace at which we are innovating is improving. Around the (indistinct) and the inferential instances, we are continuing to work with Red Hat and, you know, the support for RHEL should come shortly, very soon. >> Well, my prediction is that the graviton success was going to be applied to every single category. You can get that kind of innovation with this on the software side, just really kind of just, that's the magical, that's the, that's the proven form of software, right? We've been there. Good software powering with some great performance. Manu, Mike, thank you for coming on and sharing the, the news and the partnership update. Congratulations on the partnership. Really good. Thank you. >> Excellent John. Incredible (indistinct). >> Yeah, this is the future software as we see, it's all coming together. Here on theCube, we're bringing all the action, software being powered by chips, is theCube coverage of AWS re:invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, joined next by Peter Morrow the VP of sales and marketing at IBM partner, TRM. Peter, welcome to the program. >> Hi, thank you. Happy to be here. >> Tell me a little bit about yourself and TRM before we dig in. >> Well, TRM is a long time business partner for IBM. We for about 30 years, specialize in helping IBM customers implement Maximo and have a lot of deep technology expertise and in Maximo and related software in the enterprise asset management industry. I'm the VP of sales and marketing, I've been at TRM for about 10 years and I'm proud to lead our talented sales teams and our sole mission is to help our customers get value out of their EAM solutions. And we're really excited about recent developments in AI and bringing value to a lot of our customers and their organization, and finally get ROI out of their long time investments in the EAM. >> Let's dig in a bit more to the IBM relationship. I know TRM is a gold partner, but talk to me about that and how TRM has leveraged that partnership with IBM to help your customers be successful. >> Sure. Now, we're a little bit of a unique partner with IBM for a long time. We've been pure resell and implementation services. And recently we've transitioned into an OEM relationship with IBM where we actually embed IBM products into broader TRM offerings. And this relationship that we have with IBM is really important as IBM is the dominant player in EAM and AI and hybrid cloud it's really a natural fit for us to leverage those really mature solutions and build on top of them TRMs deep expertise and the technology and the reliability side to offer more of an end to end solution to our customers. >> Got it. So the last year or so we've seen a lot of market dynamics. Talk to me about the EAM market what's going on there. What are some of the changes? >> Well, there's a couple of key changes that we see, one of the biggest changes I think that impacts our business and IBM is that customers really don't have an appetite for long expensive implementations of custom solutions. They're really looking for more turnkey solutions that have proven value already and very mature. They've already spent tens of millions of dollars implementing Maximo or related EAM solution. They really don't want to embark on this really expensive long journey to get to that next level. And so to meet this requirement we've been focused for the past couple of years on developing much more turnkey solutions. One of which is one that we call TRMs Maximo AAM, solution and that's built on Maximo, but it's also layered with IBM's new AI solution for Maximo customers. And we marry that with our deep reliability expertise and we're really excited about being able to roll it out in literally weeks instead of months or years for a lot of new customers. And that's a really short time to value and ROI is something that's pretty much unheard of until now in this industry. >> Talk to me about some of the advantages that your customers are getting like on a general level from AI, from hybrid cloud, from data. >> I mean, it's this really groundbreaking. What we're finding is that there's, until very recently AI was really not embraced as a practical solution to a lot of maintenance problems. You're looking at a community of pretty old school mindsets and maintenance and reliability where, it's a very, RCM is a very structured methodology for breaking down equipment and failure types and solutions, ways to predict those failures. And for a long time RCM specialists didn't really feel like AI was a solution that was the answer. And what we're finding is that, with the maturity level of IBM's products, it is now at a point where AI is a great fit and you take a experienced reliability specialist and you've armed them with AI tools like IBM's asset monitor and Maximo health and predict and you give them those tools and they can roll out predictive solutions that scale like really they've never had the chance to before. >> And talk to me about some of the adaptations that TRM has made in the last year or so as the market has been so much influx and so many dynamics going on, how have you adapted to that to really help those customers take advantage of the latest technologies? And for example, use AI. >> The big thing for us is recognizing that customers really aren't interested in a long expensive, drawn out solution. They recognize they have problems, but until you can come to table with something that they can digest in small bites. And that is at a price point that isn't over the top they're really happy staying with the status quo, at least until the solutions can be delivered and like that very bite-sized implementation programs. So we've spent a lot of time trying to make our solutions more turnkey, packaging up offerings in a way that you can start small, but all that effort you put in on a small scale, you can ramp up and scale enterprise wide without making a huge investment. And it doesn't take years to roll it out. You can really do something and make an impact within a couple of weeks or months, rather than you know, many months and years down the road. >> That time to value is key. Especially I think we've learned in the last year that real time is so essential for so many things. I'm just curious if any industries in particular that TRM and IBM are really helping transform like energy, for example, give me some examples of industries that are really moving forward with your technologies. >> It's really the classic asset intensive industries. Utilities are really big maximum users in there. They're the ones that, they've embraced Maximo for many, many years. They're hungry for innovative technology, but still cautious about moving forward on a large scale but we're able to get them excited with the programs that we're offering. And the same goes with oil and gas. That's another big user of Maximo, asset intensive organization and manufacturing definitely big Maximo users, all three have been very interested in moving forward with the AI for maintenance solutions that TRM and IBM are together bringing to the market. >> We summed up across the oil and gas, energy utilities, as you mentioned what are some of the biggest things that you hear in terms of demands from customers when you're in sales meetings? What are they looking for problems they need you to help solve? >> You know, it's honestly, it's the classic problems that we've been working with them for 20 years and really have they haven't been able to solve effectively where they're talking about critical assets that break down on expectedly, maintenance teams, running around doing a lot of maintenance on assets. That's in perfect health, making big promises on transforming maintenance, massively reducing maintenance budgets. And it really hasn't happened. And there's really been until now no real solution that solves those problems directly. And we believe the combination of AI and reliability engineering and in the key EAM fundamental principles is what's going to help our customer base really get value and really solve the problems that they really suffered from all these years. >> It's interesting that you say that it really they haven't been able to solve those problems but from a technological perspective the technology is there now to help them do that. What's the time window when you're talking with customers especially given the market dynamics that we're still living in, are they coming to you saying help us within a week, two weeks, we got to turn this around? >> I mean, the ones that are approaching this with an open mind, we can communicate to them that a huge undertaking is not required. They can get started on a small project, select one critical asset and then begin to plug in some data, around that asset that they know is related to equipment failures. We can get that data connected with the maximum asset monitor and within weeks they begin monitoring that asset health. They do some anomaly detection and it does not require of big long-term investment. And so for somebody who is willing to keep an open mind about AI and really wants to give it a try, that sales cycle is very short. They're willing to get going relatively quickly. We do find that many organizations want to step back take it slow, assess other options. And for them that's that aligns more with the classic, big bang type of implementation project, where that takes months of planning, budget planning approvals. And that goes into that 12, 18 month sales cycle or project planning phase, that's fine. And at the end of that, it's a big project but we really do recommend starting small. It is definitely possible to see some early quick wins and then roll out on a larger scale. And frankly, you could have something deployed at scale within that entire period of planning that they would otherwise naturally do on their own. >> Take us out of here Peter, with some predictions, some thoughts, maybe a crystal ball on where you see the EAM market going, the rest of this year and what TRM is planning to do to help customers really leverage opportunities and growth. >> You know I really do believe we're at a tipping point where there's been a lot of anticipation leading up to the release of Maximo and the Maximo eight and the Maximo application suite. There's the AI apps that are in the suite like asset monitor and health and predict that they really are mature products. There's not, I think until now there's the customer base has viewed AI as more of a like a fantasy or science fiction as it relates to maintenance, but these products are real. And I think with a lot of spending having been on hold over the past year, there's a lot of interest in learning more trying to test the waters. I really think that we're going to see a lot of interest in predictive solutions, a lot of interest in IOT projects. And, we're in a position where we're ready to begin rolling these out and it's really exciting. >> Yeah, the maturation is there, the technology is the customer interest is there certainly the opportunities are there. Peter takes out with where can customers go to learn more information about your solutions? >> I mean the best places to check us out on our website, www.trmnet.com. We're also on LinkedIn. We do a lot of blogs. We do a lot of webinars, we're out in front and trying to make the market aware of our thought leadership and deep expertise in Maximo and EAM and in predictive solutions we've got a YouTube channel where we post demos and all of our webinars. So we're trying to push information out there happy to, we look forward to interacting with prospects and customers about how our solutions can impact them. >> Excellent, Peter, thanks for stopping by and sharing with us more about the TRM IBM relationship, the opportunities in the EAM market and the appetite for AI that your customers and very big industries are having. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. >> Me too, for Peter Morrow, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of IBM Think 2021. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is the cubes ongoing coverage. We go out to the events. Of course, in this case we do so virtually, to extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and now we're going to talk about the intersection of business success and sustainability. It's hot topic. We have a great panel for you. With me are Ally Karmali, Sustainability and Climate Practice Lead at IBM Canada. Lucy Baunay is a Senior Consultant in Customer Experience and Sustainability Strategy, also from IBM Canada, and Keric Morris, Executive Partner, Enterprise Strategy Global Energy and Sustainability Lead, IBM UK. Folks, welcome to the panel. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Maybe Lucy, you could kick it off to talk about what is sustainability and how has it all of a sudden become such a hot topic amongst leadership? >> Yeah, sure. So first off, it's actually my pleasure that sustainability has finally become a trendy topic, and is now a key imperative in the business world. The pandemic really played a role in it, as it made people realize that there's an intricate link between global scale events, like the climate crisis, leading to the acceleration of viruses spreads and their own personal health or of their business. So sustainability really means that you're addressing the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. To do so, companies use different frameworks and standards including ESG, standing for environmental, social, and governance criteria to really assess their progress on their journey to sustainability. It comes with many metrics that they track, or should track and choose to disclose for the greater benefit of all. One prerequisite I'd say to really building a successful sustainable company, is really the need for a new form of leadership style. One that is purpose driven, that really focuses on doing well, while doing the right thing. And I mean, you might need examples here to illustrate what I'm saying. You could take a Unilever, and the really radical transformation of the Palm oil industry they're leading. If Unilever did nothing, serious risk would really be posed in a few years on their whole business. So, the company has started working with all actors across its value chain, from training farmers, to building alliances with competitors and stakeholders. And you know, what Unilever is doing for the palm industry is actually cementing its reputation as an innovator. And they're already reaping the benefits of having, you know, being first movers. >> Dave: Right. Kerick, Lucy talked about an imperative, so take away there, it's not a checkbox, it's something that's sort of designed in. I wonder if you could, you could talk to that. >> Yeah. And I mean, sustainability at the end of the day now, it's built into every decision every process, every system, and you know, and leadership role in that space is about, you know, kind of developing new corporate strategies, new cultures, new approaches, which are around, you know, actually how do I sort of do this? This it's a real paradigm shift. It's not, it's not something you add to your business. It's something that needs to be core to your business. And then, you know, and that's requiring us to kind of re-imagining how we sort of go to work, how we do business, the processes, developing new products, leveraging new technologies. It's putting all of those pieces in and sort of making them work. And, and the key part of that is how do you do this in a way where we're not forcing people to make a choice between sustainability and profitability. Sustainability and, you know, and a way of quality of life. So there's how you kind of build that into kind of the core products and services. And again, use that ingenuity to kind of develop those, and sort of develop the components that you need to as part of that process. The other part of this is then sort of getting into, well actually from a leadership perspective, now how do I then change, and the way that I sort of work with with partners, with suppliers, with competitors. So it's, it's really fundamentally changing the way the business itself works as well. >> Dave: Yeah. Thank you. You know, Ally I, when I talk about ESG, I sometimes tongue in cheek say Milton Friedman's probably rolling over in his grave, cause he's the economist who said that the only job of a company is to make profits and drive shareholder value. And so that's a, I mean, that's a historical challenge, but there's, there's actually a business case for this. It's actually a good business. And we'll talk about that, but maybe you could address some of the challenges that organizations are facing to really lean in and address ESG. >> Yeah, that's right. You know, there are a lot of components that go into this. So then, as Lucy mentioned and Keric mentioned, the complexities that come with that, are a lot. They're significant. And so I'd say that the first challenge that I see is in regards to the alignment and integration of sustainability strategy within the organization's business model. So if we take a look at the typical life cycle, which includes sourcing, production, operations, distribution, and then end of life and recycling, each of these components must consider the conduits for driving positive social impact and environmental stewardship. But that also, as you said, drives opportunity and economic benefits for the organization. So these are components that could fall into three categories. The first one is what is the journey to net zero look like for you? How will I transform my operations, my strategy, my business models to achieve a net zero emission? What is circularity in the context of my business? How do I orchestrate for zero waste and include reuse regenerative processes restorative processes? And then how do I build in principles of sustainability into the design so that I integrate those components into the ways of working within this new world of sustainability that we're seeing? It's also the what and the how coming together to enable long-term value creation for the company. The second challenge that I see is around the performance monitoring and management. And as they say, you can't manage what you can't measure. And so many organizations might not have the complexity roadmap laid out for the systems and data that's required in order to enable a transparent and quality reporting. We think about data and knowing what you have, versus what you don't, data management, capturing and transforming that data, integrating that data in a way that has a simple but effective use of methodologies, as well as benchmarking. And then having a reporting system that allows you to see everything, almost a control tower of your E, your S, and your G. And then finally we see sustainability has become a board level priority. It is a hot topic, but it's not always properly understood below the board level. So senior executives sometimes approach the conformance to change in the way that we normally approach things like regulation. But I think in this case, it's quite, it's quite different. Because it is a bit of a shift to the person with a purpose, as the center leaders must lead, they must hire they must think design and share. You must meet the (indistinct) paradigms for diversity inclusion. And I think at the same time, encourage diversity, but also divergence where it needs to be. They have to have the head space to accept the truth, and the collaboration with all stakeholders. So I think there are ways for companies to do this and, and for them to be successful. And I think IBM is one of them >> Dave: For sure. And I think Keric, that sort of leads me to it from what Ally was saying about, you know, IBM, big company, has a big ecosystem. There are other large leaders within industry's that can leverage ecosystems, and then maybe set the tone and show the, point the way for the long tail of smaller companies. But maybe you could talk about that ecosystem flywheel. >> What we are also seeing is it's actually sort of quite a lot of differences between the way organizations are addressing this. And you are seen as leaders in this space. Then you ask these people, you're taking a stand around these components and actually trying to shape just not only what they do, but also what organizations do around them. Now, I mean, you know, and if you kind of look at this, there's almost kind of three categories to that, there are organizations that are sort of seeing this as an existential change, you know, if I'm looking at sort of mining, I'm looking at oil and gas I'm looking at travel and transport. Now what you're still seeing there is a fundamental shift in their business. That's requiring them to rethink how they do things in a very structured and actually quite an extended way. You know, if I'm looking at other organizations like retailers, it's actually a little less of of an existential change, it's more of an incremental one. But even so they still have to change all that they do, but they can do it in a, probably a more, staged approach. And then you've got influencers around that as well. So governments, financial services, players, et cetera, who are sort of shaping the agenda and who need help, and support around and thinking through how they kind of measure the change, how they sort of make sure the funding is seeing the right things, how they make, how they make sure they're actually still getting returns they expect. And actually, you know, the sustainability components are actually being driven by that. But I think that's, that's kind of sort sort of where an organization like IBM comes in. There's a lot of technical change in here. There's a lot of data change in here. And actually, these are the sorts of things that, you know, from a sustainability perspective are going to help to drive this in a more seamless and an achievable way, if you will. And so there's an awful lot that we're looking to try to do to enable that quickly to kind of take things off the shelf to, to rapidly test and to actually sort of show people both what, what can be done and the value that you then can create by sort of going down the sustainability journey. >> Okay, got it. Thank you. And Lucy, you touched on some examples at a high level in your opening remarks, and I'm interested in, kind of the starting point that you see companies, you know, taking and what's the right regime? I mean, you've got to put somebody, if somebody's going to be accountable for the measurements and the, and the, the cultural changes, but, but where do we start? >> Right. So one starting point is definitely to be looking at your data right? And, you know, it's, it's really tempting to forget when you're building products, or you're creating experiences, it's tempting to forget thinking about their repercussions on the environment, on communities, and on society. Their impact is, is made invisible for the sake of immediate user satisfaction, and short-term business value. And, you know, although 60% of executives consider sustainability to be an essential competitive advantage, 80% actually, other products ecological impacts are locked in at the design phase. So that's why, you know, with a team of four IBM superstars we've created the sustainable design thinking toolkit that was just launched and is in the process being integrated into the official IBM design thinking site. And that's really a great start, because it's meant to help design thinking practitioners take responsibility on making that impact visible from the very start of the process. And we've used it with multiple clients and for internal products and it's really helped infuse a sustainable mindset throughout the workflows. And, and actually from the very, very start of it. One recent example was in the CPG industry where we've applied our new sustainable design thinking activities to the problem at hand, to get consumers to recycle more by enhancing their recycling experience. And what it allowed us to do, is really to make sure that, you know, the prioritization process, as the first ideas that emerged, included sustainable value into the mix, so that the impact on the planet and communities wasn't a blind spot anymore. >> Dave : So, thank you for that Lucy, Keric I wonder, you know Lucy was talking about, you start with the data and that, that's cool. Sometimes, I get worried though, there's going to be analysis by paralysis and overthinking the strategy. Are there ways to, are there ways to get in and, and take smaller bites and iterate? What do, what are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there absolutely are, you know, with, with lots of organizations, they really have to kind of feel their way into this, this, this new approach. You know, you actually kind of have to learn both what sustainability means, but also sort of what it can deliver. So, you know, usually what we're sort of seeing is those organizations will start off with things which are under their control. So how can I change my manufacturing processes? How can I change some of the internal components of what it is that we do, to make them more sustainable, to, to reduce waste, to reduce sort of, kind of, the energy usage components, which associates with it, and those, that's quite a nice controlled starting point, using, you know, leveraging things like sort of manufacturing 4.0 intelligence processes, you know, (indistinct) sorry, Maximo Asset Management type approaches. The second step we're sort of seeing with lots of organizations. Is that they're then moving into, kind of their own ecosystem if you will. So, you know, actually, how do I manage my supply chain more effectively? How do I drive transparency? How do I, sort of also, drive efficiency and carbon management from that sort of perspective? but also, how do I sort of highlight the sustainable gains I'm making on my products and get those messages to customers and highlights of what we're doing with both new products and services, but also, with existing products and services. And then sort of your, your, kind of your final piece, then actually, this depends on, and it kind of goes back to what I was saying before, about what industry you're in, but, you know, a lot of industries are also having to, kind of, face the challenge of, I need to change fundamentally. You know, the business I'm in is not, not going to work the way it works in a sustainable world. So, so actually, how do I kind of build an ecosystem based approach? How do I kind of work with other partners? How do I kind of work with suppliers? How do I work with competitors? And actually, how do I build something at scale around a platform? And it will just be able to deliver these types of things? And at IBM, we've been kind of creating some of those, those platforms, and then scaling them quite rapidly, sort of across a variety of different sectors. >> Dave: Yeah, and that's where you're going to see the measurable impact. Ally, do you have a framework for what's, what a successful outcome looks like? Are there, are there companies that are sort of models of success? I mean, I think IBM is one of them, but maybe you could talk to that. >> Yeah. There are definitely companies to emulate, and companies have really started to think about the, the connection point between the value that's driven by their business model, as well as the effort and the impact that's being driven by their ESG, their ESG focus. And so, while there might be components of success, I think getting, getting it all together and all right is going to take time. And it's going to be a bit of a sequence. But a bit of a thought experiment, If you could sit into a boardroom, or at a senior level executive discussion, when you think about success, would you hear things or discussions around how the company is building the environmental and social inputs to its products and services? And what does that sound like? Are they tangible? Are they realistic? And what are the methods and the tools that they're using? Would you hear conversations about how the company is evaluating or infusing sustainability across the value chain from procurement all the way to end of life? Or how about the participation of the company into other ecosystems that's driving value into other industries? And we see the force multiplier effect that comes with that when, when companies partner together, because we are either vendors or providers, or consumers of every other product or service. And then I think lastly, would organizations start to think about how to generate value closer to home and how that value can be driven into communities, into where their employees are based. And those elements really, really improve the social elements. So what say lasts is there are elements of what good and success looks like when it comes to sustainability, but I think organizations can set their targets and meet industry benchmarks and frameworks which already exist and are really well established, but continuously increase their own targets to set better and more ambitious goals for themselves, to move beyond, to leverage technology, and be innovative and, and apply these, these tools and best practices in order to get there. And I think, and I think, I think we'll get there over time. So I'm really encouraged by the progress that we're seeing and, and, we hope at IBM to help accelerate that journey. >> Thank you. And Lucy, one of the things I'm excited about is the tech because this is where I think, you know, this business does meet sustainability. I mean, green tech, E.V. I mean, if I'm a nation, I want to be on top of that. If I'm a company, I think there's opportunities for invention and innovation. Can you talk about some of those innovative techs that we're likely to see? >> Right. Well, yeah, to piggy back on what Alex was just saying, and, you know, I think success can, can come in very different ways and forms, you know, be it creating entirely new business models, like, you know, some clients we help in the oil and gas industry, taking really bold commitments to shift to energy, electric energy. Or, you know significantly cutting costs such as, you know, those brands in the CPG industry that are doing amazing things to optimize their supply chains and make them more efficient, more transparent, more secure. Or, you know also protecting brand reputation and mitigating risks, or gaining market share by creating, differentiating value. You might've heard about L'Oreal taking really bold moves, and switching all their products to 95% renewable plant sources and circular processes. You know, it, it, can also be about capturing value, by charging a premium for sustainable products. Think about Tesla or whole foods, for example. I mean there's so many great examples out there already. >> Dave: Excellent. So we got to wrap it, so my last question, and I want to start with Ally, and then we'll go to Keric, and then Lucy, you can bring us home. Talk about why, you were talking about ESG reporting and transparency, and how it's, you know, great for the future and the economy and so forth. Why is this not going to be a fad? Why is it going to be sustainable? The sustainability, the sustainability of sustainable. Ally, please kick it off. And then we'll go to Keric and then Lucy >> You're right. You know, this is a big change for organizations. And I think naturally they're, you know, they're corporate social responsibility and, and, sustainability reports have really been externally focused. And I think that has been a great step in the right direction, but I think what's happening now is, is this convergence of sustainable material and transparent reporting, that is equivalent to material financial reporting that we're seeing. And, and eventually I think the end goal would be to be able to read a sustainable report and understand, and quantify, as well as qualify how much impact is an organization making year to year? And what are some of the initiatives that's driving what we have begun to see as a sustainable business strategy that is also a competitive advantage for organizations. So I think, the, the benefit in the long-term is going to create a lot of value for not just the shareholder but for the stakeholders like employees, like the communities in which these companies operate, like regulatory agencies, as well as municipal, federal governments, and state governments. So I think this is a step in the right direction for providing a very clear direction on their sustainable initiatives. >> Dave: Thank you. Thank you, Ally. Keric, could you weigh in here please? >> Yeah, I mean, I agree with all Ally said there, and I think with the stakeholders, the end of the day, this, this is a collective responsibility. You know, we have one planet, one rock we all live on, and we all need to be part of the process of actually sort of making it, making a change. And, and, you can't, you can't sort of change what you can't measure. So they're kind of holding people to account being able to share sort of the data that we've got, making sure everybody understands what the position is, how we're contributing and the role that we're actually still playing, is going to be an incredibly important part of collectively coming together, then making this change happen, and making this change happen quickly. Which is what it needs to do. >> Dave: Hey, Lucy, your passion shines through here. So it's appropriate that you, you close it out. >> Yeah, well, it all comes down to, you know, do you want your business to still exist in a hundred years from now? And you know, it does require courage and determination, but we all have it in ourselves. You know, trying to find the ways that we can change things for the greater good, find the energy in yourself to inspire others to act. That's why, you know, leaders with purpose and ingenuity are so, so, important today. Thank you. >> Folks, thanks so much for the perspectives you guys doing a great work. Really appreciate your time on the Cube today. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right. It's been our pleasure and thank you for watching. This is the Cube's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. We'll be right back. (cheerful music)

(soft music) >> Voice Over: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back everyone. To theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the power of hybrid cloud and AI. And I'm excited to have Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM's cloud and Data platform, CUBE alumni. Been on going back years and years talking about data. Rob, great to see you, a leader at IBM. Thanks for joining. >> John. Great to see you hope everybody is safe and well and great to be with you again. >> Yeah, love the progress, love the Hybrid Cloud distributed computing, meets operating systems, meets modern applications at the center of it is the new cloud equation. And of course data continues to be the value proposition as the platform. And as you quoted many times and I love your favorite quote. There's no AI without IA. So you got to have the architecture. So that still rings true today and it's just so evergreen and so relevant and cooler than ever with machine learning and AI operations. So let's just jump in. IBM's announced, host a new products and updates at Think. Tell us what you're most excited about and what should people pay attention to. >> Maybe I'll connect two thoughts here. There is no AI without IA, still true today. Meaning, customers that want to do AI need an information architecture. There was an IDC report just last year that said, "Despite all the progress on data, still 90% of data in organizations is either unused or underutilized." So what's amazing is after all the time we've been talking John, we're still really just getting started. Then that kind of connects to another thought, which is I still believe that AI is not going to replace managers, but managers that use AI will replace the managers that do not. And I'd say that's the backdrop for all the announcements that we're doing this week. It's things like auto SQL. How do you actually automate the creation of SQL queries in a large distributed data warehouse? It's never been done before, now we're doing it. It's things like Watson Orchestrate which is super powers in the hands of any business user, just to ask for something to get done. Just ask for a task to get completed. Watson Orchestrator will do that for you. It's Maximo Mbo. So anybody working in the field now has access to an AI system on their device for how they're managing their assets. So this is all about empowering people and users that use these products are going to have an advantage over the users that are not, that's what I'm really excited about. >> So one of the things that's coming out as Cloud Pak for Data, AI powered automation these are kind of two that you kind of touched upon the SQL thing their. Cloud Pak is there, you got it for Data and this automation trend. What is that about? Why is it important? Can you share with us the relevance of those two things? >> Let's talk broadly about automation. There's two huge markets here. There's the market for RPA business process, $30 billion market. There's the market for AIOps, which is growing 22%, that's on its way to $40 billion. These are enormous markets. Probably the biggest bet IBM has made in the last year is in automation. Explicitly in Watson AIOps. Last June in Think we announced Watson AIOps, then we did the acquisition of Instana, then we announced our intent to acquire Turbonomic. At this point, we're the only company that has all the pieces for automating how you run your IT systems. That's what I mean when I say AIOps. So really pleased with the progress that we've made there. But again, we're just getting started. >> Yeah. Congratulations on the Turbonomic. I was just commenting on that when that announced. IBM buying into the Cloud and the Hybrid cloud is interesting because the shift has happened. It's Public Cloud, it's on premises as Edge. Those two things as a system, it's more important ever than the modernization of the apps that you guys are talking about and having the under the cover capabilities. So as Cloud and Data merge, this kind of control plane concept, this architecture, as you'd said IA. You can't have AI without IA. What is that architecture look like? Can you break down the elements of what's involved? I know there's predictive analytics, there's automation and security. What are the pillars of this architecture? What are the four concepts? If you can explain that. >> Yeah, let's start with the basics. So Hybrid Cloud is about you build your software runs once and you run it anywhere you want, any public cloud,any private cloud. That assumes containers are important to the future of software. We are a hundred percent convinced that is true. OpenShift is the platform that we build on and that many software companies in the world are now building on because it gives you portability for your applications. So then you start to think about if you have that common fabric for Hybrid Cloud, how do you deliver value to customers in addition to the platform? To me, that's four big things. It's automation, we talked about that. It's security, it's predictions. How do you actually make predictions on your data? And then it's modernization. Meaning, how do you actually help customers modernize their applications and get to the Cloud? So those are the things we always talk about, automate, secure, modernize, predict. I think those are the four most important things for every company that's thinking about Cloud and AI. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I love the security side is one of the big conversations in AIOps and day two operations or whatever it's called is shifting left, getting security into the Cloud native kind of development pipeline. But speaking of secure, you have a customer that was talking about this Dow Chemical. About IB empowering Dow zero trust architecture. Could you explain that deal and how that's working? Because that's again, huge enterprise customer, very big scale at scale, zero trust is big, part of it. What is this? >> Let's start with the basics. So what is zero trust mean? It means to have a secure business, you have to start with the assumption that nothing can be trusted. That means you have to think about all aspects of your security practice. How do you align on a security strategy? How do you protect your data assets? How do you manage security threats? So we always talk about a line, protect, manage back to modernize, which is how do you bring all your systems forward to do this? That's exactly what we're doing with the Dow as you heard in that session, which is they've kind of done that whole journey from how they built a security strategy that was designed with zero trust in mind, they're protecting data assets, they're managing cyber threats in real time with a relatively low number of false positives which are the issue that most companies have. They're a tremendous example of a company that jumped on this and has had a really big impact. And they've done it without interfering with their business operations, meaning anybody can lock everything down but then you can't really run your business if you're doing that. They've done it, I think in a really intelligent way. >> That's awesome. We always talk about the big waves. You always give great color commentary on the trends. Right now though, the tsunami seems to be a confluence of many things coming together. What are some of the big trends in waves you're seeing now specifically on the tech side, on the technology side, as well as the business side right now? 'Cause coming out of post COVID, it's pretty clear cloud-native is powering a new growth strategy for customers. Dow was one of them, you just commented on it but there's a bigger wave happening here, both on the tech theater and in the business theater. Can you share your views on and your opinions and envision on these trends? >> I think there's three profound trends that are actually pretty simple to understand. One is, technology is going to decentralize again. We've always gone from centralized architectures to decentralized. Mainframe was centralized, internet mobile decentralized. The first version of public cloud was centralized, meaning bringing everything to one place. Technology is decentralized and again, with Hybrid Cloud, with Edge, pretty straight forward I think that's a trend that we can ride and lead for the next decade. Next is around automation that we talked about. There was a McKinsey report that said, "120 billion hours a year are going to be automated with things like Watson Orchestrator, Watson AIOps." What we're doing around Cloud Pak for automation, we think that time is now. We think you can start to automate in your business today and you may have seen the C QVS example where we're doing customer care and they're now automating 70% of their inbound customer inquiries. It's really amazing. And then the third is around data. The classical problem, I mentioned 90% is still unused or underutilized. This trend on data is not about the slow down because the data being collected is still multiplying 10 X every year and companies have to find a way to organize that data as they collected. So that's going to be a trend that continues. >> You know, I just kind of pinched myself sometimes and hearing you talk with some of our earlier conversations in theCUBE, people who have been on this data mindset have really been successful because it's evolving and growing and it's changing and it's adding more input into the system and the technology is getting better. There's more cloud scales. You mentioned automation and scale are huge. And I think this really kind of wakes everyone up. And certainly the pandemic has woken everyone up to the fact that this is driving new experiences for users and businesses, right? So this is, and then those experiences become expectations. This is the classic UX paradigm that grows from new things. So I got to ask you, with the pandemic what is the been the most compelling ways you seen people operate, create new expectations? Because new things are coming, new big things, and new incremental things are happening. So evolution and revolutionary capabilities. Can you share some examples and your thoughts? >> We've collected a decent bit of data on this. And what's interesting is how much AI has accelerated since the pandemic started. And it's really in five areas, it's customer care that we talked about, virtual agents, customer service, how you do that. It's employee experience. So somewhere to customer care but how do you take care of your employees using AI? Third is around AIOps, we talked about that. Fourth is around regulatory compliance and fifth is around financial planning and budgeting. These are the five major use cases of AI that are getting into production in companies over the last year that's going to continue to accelerate. So I think it's actually fairly clarifying now that we really understand these are the five big things. I encourage anybody watching, pick one of these, get started, then pick the second, then pick the third. If you are not doing all five of these, 12, 18, 24 months from now, you are going to be behind. >> So give us an example of some things that have surprised you in the pandemic and things that blew you away. Like, wow, I didn't see that coming. Can you share on things that you've seen evolve? Cause you're a year ahead of the business units of Cloud and Data, big part of IBM and you see customer examples. Just quickly share some notable use cases or just anecdotal examples of just things that jumped out at you that said, "Wow, that's going to be a double-down moment or that's not going to be anymore." Exposes, the pandemic exposes the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, people got caught off guard, some got a tailwind, some had a headwind, some are retooling. What's your thoughts on what you can you share any examples? >> Like everybody, many things have surprised me in the last year. I am encouraged at how fast many companies were able to adjust and adapt for this world. So that's a credit to all the resiliency that they built into their processes, their systems and their people over time. Related to that, the thing that really sticks out to me again, is this idea of using AI to serve your customers and to serve your employees. We had a hundred customers that went live with one of those two use cases in the first 35 days of the pandemic. Just think about that acceleration. I think without the pandemic, for those hundred it might've taken three years and it happened in 35 days. It's proof that the technology today is so powerful. Sometimes it just takes the initiative to get started and to do something. And all those companies have really benefited from this. So it's great to see. >> Great. Rob, great to have you on. Great to have your commentary on theCUBE. Could you just quickly share in 30 seconds, what is the most important thing people should pay attention to and Think this year from your perspective? What's the big aha moment that you think they could walk away with? >> We have intentionally made this a very technology centric event. Just go look at the demos, play with the technology. I think you will be impressed and start to see, let's say a bit of a new IBM in terms of how we're making technology accessible and easy for anybody to use. >> All right. Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM cloud and Data platform. Great to have you on and looking forward to seeing more of you this year and hopefully in person. Thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Keep coverage of IBM Think 2021. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

>>from around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of >>IBM. think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm lisa martin joined next by Peter morrow, the VP of sales and marketing at IBM partner TRM. Peter welcome to the program. >>I thank you. Happy to be here. >>Tell me a little bit about yourself and TRM before we dig in. >>Um Well Trn is a longtime business partner for IBM, we for about 30 years have specialized in helping IBM customers implement maximo and um have a lot of deep technology expertise and in maximo and and related um software and the enterprise asset management industry um On the VP of sales and marketing. I've been at TRM for about 10 years and I'm I'm proud to lead our talented sales teams and our sole mission is to help our customers get value out of their am solutions and and we're really excited about recent developments in Ai and and bringing value um to a lot of our customers and their organization and finally get our ally out of their longtime investments in the am. >>Let's dig in a bit more to the IBM relationship, I know TRM as a gold partner, but talk to me about that and how TRM has leveraged that partnership with IBM to help your customers be successful. >>Um sure, now, you know, we're a little bit of a unique partner with IBM for a long time, we've been pure resell and implementation services and and recently we've transitioned into an O E M relationship with IBM where we actually embed IBM products into broader TRM offerings. And I, you know, this, this relationship that we have with with IBM is really important as IBM is the, is the dominant player in the A, m and A I and and hybrid cloud. It's really a natural fit for us to leverage those really mature solutions and build on top of them. Uh, TRS deep expertise and the technology and the reliability side to offer more of an end to end solution to our customers. >>Got it. So the last year or so we've seen a lot of market dynamics. Talk to me about the E a M, market, what's going on there? What are some of the changes? >>Um well, there's a couple of key changes that that we see. Um one of the biggest changes I think that impacts our business and IBM is that customers really don't have an appetite for long expensive implementations of custom solutions. They're really looking for more turnkey solutions that have proven value already and and very mature. You know, they've already spent tens of millions of dollars implementing, you know, maximo or related E AM solution. They really don't want to embark on, you know, this really expensive long journey um to get to that next level. And so to me this requirement, we've been focused for the past couple years on developing much more turnkey solutions, one of which is is one that we call TRM maximo A. M solution and that's built on maximum, but it's also layered with IBM's new AI solution for maximo customers. And you know, we marry that with our deep reliability expertise and you know, we're really excited about being able to roll it out and in literally weeks instead of months or years for a lot of new customers and you know, that's a really short time to value. And our ally, it's something that's pretty much unheard of until now in this industry. >>Talk to me about some of the advantages that your customers are getting like on a general level from ai from hybrid cloud from data. >>Um I mean this is really groundbreaking. What we're finding is that there's, you know, until very recently, a I was really not embraced as a practical solution to a lot of maintenance problems. You know, you're looking at a community of of pretty old school mindsets and maintenance and reliability where you know, it's a very, you know, R. C. M is a very structured methodology for breaking down um equipment and failure types and and and solutions, you know, ways to predict those failures and you know, for a long time RCM specialists didn't really feel like a I was a solution that that was the answer. And what we're finding is that, you know, with the maturity level of IBMS products, it is now at a point where a I is a great fit and you take an experienced reliability specialist and you arm them with A. I tools like like IBM is asset monitor and maximum health and predict and you give them those tools and they can, they can roll out predictive solutions that scale like like really they've never had the chance to before >>and talk to me about some of the the adaptations that TRM has made in the last year or so as the market has been so much in flux and so many dynamics going on. How have you adapted to that to really help those customers take advantage of the latest technologies and for example use aI >>you know, well the big thing for us is recognizing that that customers really aren't interested in a long expensive, drawn out solution. You know, they recognize they have problems but until you can come to the table with something that they can digest in in small bites and that, is that a price point that isn't over the top there really happy staying with the status quo at least until the solutions, you know, can be delivered in like that, you know, very um bite sized um implementation program. So we've, we've spent a lot of time trying to make our solutions more turnkey, packaging up offerings in a way that you can start small, but all that effort you put in on a small scale, you can ramp up and scale enterprise wide without making a huge investment and it doesn't take years to roll it out. You can really do something and make an impact within a couple of weeks or months rather than many months and years down the road. >>That time to value is key, especially I think we've learned in the last year that that real time is so essential for so many things. I'm just curious of any industries in particular that TRM and IBM are really helping transform energy, for example, give me some examples of industries that are really moving forward with your technologies. >>It's really the classic asset intensive industries, utilities are really big maximum users and they're they're the ones that, you know, they um there embraced, they've embraced maximum for many, many years, they're hungry for innovative technology, but still, you know, cautious about moving forward on a large scale, but we're able to get them excited with the programs that we're offering and the same goes with oil and gas, that's another big user of maximum, you know, asset intensive organization and you know, manufacturing, you know, definitely big maximo users, all three have been, you know, very interested in moving forward with, you know, the ai for maintenance solutions that, you know, TRM and and IBM are together bringing to the market, >>You summed up, you know, across the oil and gas energy utilities, as you mentioned, what are some of the biggest things that you hear in terms of demands from customers when you're in sales meetings, what are they looking for problems they need you to help solve? >>You know, it's honestly, it's it's the classic problems that we've been working with them for 20 years and really have, they haven't been able to solve effectively, you know, where they're talking about, you know, critical assets that break down unexpectedly, you know, maintenance teams running around doing a lot of maintenance on assets that's in perfect health, um making big promises on transforming maintenance, you know, massively reducing maintenance budgets and it really hasn't happened. And there's really been until now no real solution that solves those problems directly. And we believe the combination of Ai and reliability engineering and in the key e A. M fundamental principles is what's going to help our customer base really get value and really solve the problems that they really suffered from all these years. >>It's interesting that you say that it really they haven't been able to solve those problems and but from a technological perspective, the technology is there now to help them do that. What's the time window when you're talking with customers, especially given the market dynamics that were still living in, are they coming to you saying help us? You know, within a week two weeks we've got to turn this around. >>I mean the ones that are approaching this with an open mind, you know, we can we can communicate to them that a huge undertaking is not required. They can they can get started on a small project, select one critical asset and then begin to plug in some data, um, you know, around that asset that they know is related to equipment failures. We can get that data connected with the maximum asset monitor and you know, within weeks they begin monitoring that asset health, They do some anomaly detection and it does not require a big long term investment. And so for somebody who is willing to keep an open mind about AI and and really wants to give it a try, you know, that sale cycle is very short. They're willing to get going relatively quickly. You know, we do find that many organizations want to step back, take it slow, assess other options. And for them, that's that aligns more with the classic, you know, big bang type of implementation project where that takes months of planning, you know, budget planning approvals and and that goes into that 12, 18 months sales cycle or project planning phase that, you know, that's fine. And at the end of that, you know, it's a big project but we really do recommend starting small, it is definitely possible to see some early quick winds and then roll out on a larger scale and you know, frankly you could have something deployed at scale within that entire period of planning that they would otherwise naturally do on their own. >>Take us out here peter with some predictions, some thoughts maybe a crystal ball on where you see the ea m market going the rest of this year and what TRM is planning to do to help customers really leverage opportunities and growth. >>You know, I really do believe we're at a tipping point where there's been a lot of anticipation leading up to um the release of maximo and the max maximum eight and the maximum application suite. There's the Ai apps that are in the sweet like asset monitor and health and predict that they really are mature products. There's not, you know, I think until now there's the customer base has, has viewed ai as more of like a fantasy or science fiction as it relates to two maintenance. But you know, these products are real and I think with a lot of spending having been on hold over the past year, there's a lot of interest in learning more, trying to test the waters. I really think that we're going to see a lot of interest in predictive solutions, a lot of interest in IOT projects and you know, we're in a position where we're ready to begin rolling these out and it's really exciting. >>Yeah, the maturation is there, the technology is the customer interest is there? Certainly the opportunities in there. Peter take us out with customers, go to learn more information about your solutions. >>I mean, the best places to check us out on our website, W W W dot TRM net dot com were also on linked in. We do a lot of blogs, we do a lot of webinars, you know, we're out in front and trying to make um, you know, the market aware of our thought leadership and deep expertise in, you know, maximo and e a M and and in predictive solutions. Um We've got a Youtube channel where we post demos and, you know, all of our webinars, so we're, you know, we're trying to push information out there, um you know, happy to, you know, we look forward to interacting with prospects and customers about how our solutions can impact them. >>Excellent. Peter thanks for stopping by and sharing with us more about the TRM IBM relationship, the opportunities in the A. M. Market and the appetite for AI that >>your customers and >>very big industries are having. We appreciate your time. >>Hey, thank you very much. I enjoyed it. >>Two for Peter Morrow. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021 Yeah.

>> 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)