>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is IBM's Cloud show and, now, data show. This is theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Meg Swanson, VP of Marketing for Bluemix, the whole kit and caboodle, SoftLayer of Bluemix. Now you get to watch some data platform, IOT. The Cloud's growing up. How you doing? Good to see you again. >> It's good. Good to see you guys. Every time we get together, it's just huge growth. Every time, every month to month. Under Bluemix, we've pulled together infrastructure. The area that was called SoftLayer. And because we had developers that absolutely you need a provision down to bare metal servers, all the way up to applications. So we pulled the infrastructure together with the developer services, together with our VMware partnership, all in a single console. Continuing to work on, with clients, on just having a unified experience. That's why we have it under the Bluemix brand. >> You knew us when we were just getting theCUBE started. We knew you when you were kicking off the developer program, with Bluemix, was announced here in theCUBE. Seems like 10 dog years ago, which is about 50 years, no, that was, what, four years ago now? Are you four years in? >> I think so. Yeah, 'cause I remember running from the Hakkasan club, we had just ended a virtual reality session, and I had to run, and then I sat down, and we started immediately talking about Bluemix 'cause we just launched it. >> So here's the update. You guys have been making a lot of progress, and we've been watching you. It's been fantastic, 'cause you really had to run fast and get this stuff built out, 'cause Cloud Native, it wasn't called Cloud Native back then, it was just called Cloud. But, essentially, it was the Cloud Native vision. Services, microservices, APIs, things, we've talked about that. What's the progress? Give us the update and the status, and where are you? >> Yeah, obviously just massive growth in services and our partners. When you look at, we had Twitter up with us today, we've had continual growth in the technology partners that we bring to bear, and then also definitely Cloud Native. But then also helping clients that have existing workloads and how to migrate. So, massive partnerships with VMware. We also just announced partnership with Intel HyTrust on secure cloud optimization. When we first met, we talked so much about you're going to win this with an ecosystem. And the coolest thing is seeing that pay off every day with the number of partners that we've been so blessed to have coming to us and working together with us to build out this ecosystem for our clients. >> And what's the differentiator, because what's happening now is you're starting to see the clear line of sight from the big cloud players. You have you guys, you have Oracle, you see Microsoft, you see SAP, you all got the version of the cloud. And it's not a winner-take-all market, it's a multi-cloud world, as we're seeing. Certainly open-source is driving that. How do you guys differentiate, and is it the same message? What's new in terms of IBM's differentiators? What's the key message? >> That we're absolutely staying core to the reason we went into this business. We are looking at, what are the challenges that our clients are looking to solve? How do we build out the right solutions for them? And look at the technologies they're using today, and not have them just forklift everything to a public cloud, but walk with them every step of the way. It's absolutely been about uncovering the partnerships between on-premises and the Cloud, how you make that seamless, how you make those migrations in minutes versus hours and days. The growth that we've seen is around helping clients get to that journey faster, or, if they're not meant to go fully public Cloud, that's okay, too. We've been absolutely expanding our data centers, making sure we have everything lined up from a compliance standpoint. Because country to country, we have so many regulations that we need to make sure we're protecting our clients in. >> I want to ask you, and David Kenny referenced it a little bit today, talked about we built this for the enterprise, it didn't stem out of a retailer or a search. I don't know who he was talking about, but Martin Schroeter, on the IBM earnings call, said something that I want to get your comment on, and if we can unpack a little bit. He said, "Importantly, we've designed Watson "on the IBM Cloud to allow our clients "to retain control of their data and their insights, "rather than using client data "to educate a central knowledge graph." That's a nuance, but it's a really big statement. And what's behind that, if I can infer, is use the data to inform the model, but we're not going to take your data IP and give it to your competitors. Can you explain that a little bit, and what the philosophy is there? >> Yeah, absolutely. That is a core tenet of what we do. It's all about clients will bring their data to us to learn, to go to school, but then it goes home. We don't keep client data, that's critical to us that everything is completely within the client's infrastructure, within their data privacy and protection. We are simply applying our cognitive, artificial intelligence machine learning to help them advance faster. It's not about taking their insights in learning and fueling them into our Cloud to then resell to other teams. That, absolutely, it's great that you bring up that very nuanced point, but that's really important. In today's day and age, your data is your lifeblood as a company, and you have to trust where it's going, you have to know where it's going, and you have to trust that those machine learnings aren't going to be helping other clients that are possibly on the same cloud. >> Is it your contention that others don't make that promise, or you don't know, or you're just making that promise? >> We're making that promise. It's our contention that the data is the client's data. You look at the partnerships that we've made throughout Cloud, throughout Watson, it's really companies that have come to us to solve problems. You look at the healthcare industry, you look at all these partnerships that we have. Everything that we've built out on the IBM Cloud and within Watson has been to help advance client cases. You rarely see us launching something that's completely unique to IBM that hasn't been built together with a client, with a partner. Versus, there are other companies out there in this market where they're constantly providing infrastructure to run their own business, maybe their own retail store, and their own search engine. And they will continue to do that, and they absolutely should, but at the end of the day, when you're a client, what do you want to do? Are you trying to build somebody else's business, or do you want someone who's going to be all in on your business and helping you advance everything that you need to do. >> Well, it seems like the market has glombed on to public data plus automation. But you're trying to solve a harder problem. Explain that. >> When you look at the clients that we're working with and the data that we're working with, it's not just information that's out there to work in a sandbox environment and it's available to anyone, baseball statistics or something that's just out there in the wild. Every client engagement we're in, this is their critical data. You look at financial services. We just launched the great financial services solutions for developers. You look at those areas, and, oh my word, you cannot share that data, yet those clients, you look at the work we're doing with H&R Block, you have to look at, that is absolutely proprietary data, but how do we send in cognitive to help us learn, to help teach it, help teach them alongside, for the H&R Block example, the tax advisor. So we're helping them make their business better. It's not as if we ingested all of the tax data to then run a tax solution service from IBM. It's a nuance, but it's an important nuance of how we run this company. >> So seven years ago, I met this guy, and he said, the 2010 John, you said, "Data is the new development kit." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" But now we see this persona of data scientist and data engineer and the developer persona evolving. How are you redefining the developer? >> Yeah, it's a great point, because we see cognitive artificial intelligence machine learning development in developers really emerging strong as a career path. We see data scientists, especially where as you're building out any application, any solution, data is at the core. So, you had it 10 years ago, right? (laughs) >> (mumbles) But I did pitch it to Dave when I first met him in 2010. No, but this is the premise, right? Back then, web infrastructure, web scale guys were doing their own stuff. The data needs to be programmable. We've been riffing on this concept, and I want to get your thoughts on this. What DevOps was for infrastructurous code, we see a vision in our research at Wikibon that data as code, meaning developers just want to program and get data. They don't want to deal with all the under-the-hood production, complicated stuff like datasets, the databases. Maybe the wrangling could be done by another process. There's all this production heavy lifting that goes on. And then there's the creativity and coolness of building apps. So now you have those worlds starting to stabilize a bit. Your thoughts and commentary on that vision? >> Yeah, that's absolutely where it has been heading and is continuing to head. And as you look at all the platforms that developers get to work in right now. So you have augmented reality, virtual reality are not just being segmented off into a gaming environment, but it's absolutely mainstream. So you see where developers absolutely are looking for. What is a low-code environment for? I'd say more the productivity. How do I make this app more productive? But when it comes to innovation, that's where you see, that's where the data scientist is emerging more and more every day in a role. You see those cognitive developers emerging more and more because that's where you want to spend all your time. My developers have spent the weekend, came back on Monday, and I said, "What'd you do?" "I wrote this whole Getting Started guide "for this Watson cognitive service." "That's not your job." "Yeah, but it's fun." >> Yeah, they're geeking out on the weekends, having some beer and doing some hackathons. >> It's so exciting to see. That's where, that innovation side, that's where we're seeing, absolutely, the growth. One of the partnerships that we announced earlier today is around our investment in just that training and learning. With Galvanize. >> What was the number? How much? >> 10 million dollars. >> Evangelizing and getting, soften the ground up, getting people trained on cognitive AI. >> Yeah, so it's really about making an impactful investment in the work that we started, actually a couple years ago when we were talking, we started building out these Garages. The concept was, we have startup companies, we starting partnering with Galvanize, who has an incredible footprint across the globe. And when you look at what they were building, we started embedding our developers in those offices, calling them Garages because that is your workshop. That's where you bring in companies that want to start building applications quickly. And you saw a number of the clients we had on stage today consistently, started in the Garage, started in the Garage, started in the Garage. >> Yeah, we had one just on theCUBE earlier. >> Yeah, exactly, so they start with us in the Garage. And then we wanted to make sure we're continuing to fuel that environment because it's been so successful for our clients. We're pouring into Galvanize and companies in training, and making sure these areas that are really in their pioneering stages, like artificial intelligence, cognitive, machine learning. >> On that point, you bring up startups and Garage, two-prong question. We're putting together, I'm putting together an enterprise-readiness matrix. So you have startups who are building on the Cloud, who want to sell to the enterprise. And then you have enterprises themselves who are adopting Hybrid Cloud or a combination of public, private. What does enterprise-readiness mean to you guys? 'Cause you guys have a lot of experience. Google next, they said, "We're enterprising." They're really not. They're not ready yet, but they're going that way. You guys are there. What is enterprise-readiness? >> Yeah, and I see a lot of companies have ambitions to do that, which is what we need them to do. 'Cause as you mentioned, it's a multi-cloud environment for clients, and so we need clouds to be enterprise-ready. And that really comes down to security, compliance, scalability, multiple zones. It comes down to making sure you don't have just five developers that can work on something, but how do you scale that to 500? How do you scale that to 500,000? You've got these companies that you have to be able to ensure that developers can immediately interact with each other. You need to make sure that you've got the right compliance by that country, the data leaving that country. And it's why you see such a focus from us on industry. Because enterprise-grade is one thing. Understanding an industry top to bottom, when it comes to cloud compliance is a whole other level. And that's where we're at. >> It's really hard. Most people oversimplify Cloud, but it's extremely difficult. >> It is, 'cause it's not just announcing a healthcare practice for Cloud doesn't mean you just put everybody in lab coats and send out new digital material. It is you have to make sure you've got partnerships with the right companies, you understand all the compliance regulations, and you've built everything and designed it for them. And then you've brought in all the partner services that they need, and you've built that in a private and a public cloud environment. And that's what we've done in healthcare, that's what we're doing in finance, you see all the work we're doing with Blockchain. We are just going industry by industry and making sure that when a company comes to us in an industry like retail, or you saw American Airlines on stage with us today. We're so proud to be working with them. And looking at everything that they need to cover, from regulation, uptime, maintenance, and ensuring that we know and understand that industry and can help, guide, and work alongside of them. >> In healthcare and financial services, the number of permutations are mind-boggling. So, what are you doing? You're pointing Watson to help solve those problems, and you're codifying that and automating that and running that on the Cloud? >> That's a part of it. A part of it is absolutely learning. The whole data comes to school with us to learn, and then it goes back home. That's absolutely part of it, is the cognitive learning. The other part of it is ensuring you understand the infrastructure. What are the on-premises, servers that that industry has? How many transactions per second, per nanosecond, are happening? What's the uptime around that? How do you make sure that what points you're exposing? What's the security baked into all of that? So, it's absolutely, cognitive is a massive part of it, but it is walking all the way through every part of their IT environment. >> Well, Meg, thanks for spending the time and coming on theCUBE and giving us the update. We'll certainly see you out in the field as we cover more and more developer events. We're going to be doing most, if not all, of the Linux foundation stuff. Working a lot with Intel and a bunch of other folks that you're partnering with. So, we'll see you guys out at all the events. DockerCon, you name it, they're all there. >> We'll be there, too, right with them. >> Microservices, we didn't even get to Kubernetes, we could have another session on containers and microservices. Meg Swanson, here inside theCUBE, Vice President of Bluemix Marketing. It's theCUBE, with more coverage after this short break. Stay with us, more coverage from Las Vegas. (techno music)

>>Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the queue at IBM interconnect 2015 brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. >>Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas. This is the cube Silicon angle's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John furrier with Dave Alante host. Our next guest is Meg Swanson, director of marketing for IBM blue mix and with psyched to have her back on the cube last year we interviewed you one year ago in blue mix got kicked off. It was just a beta. Now it's blowing up huge and all the great success. Welcome back and congratulations. Right. >>Thank you. It's been a, it's been quite a year of Steve Robinson says if we kind of count these and joggers feels a bit like seven and it's been absolutely exciting. So we've in a span of a year, cause when we met at polls we were just at beta, you know we were, we were onboarding developers, getting feedback and now we have over 102 services on the platforms. They're rolling out rapidly and we have the deployment models with public, private and then we announced local at the show and it's just been, it's been tremendous. >>But before we get into some of the details, there's a lot of things to highlight. I want to just say congratulations because we cover a lot of companies you want to win when we meet people and they say they're going to do something and then they do it and do more and over and over achieve on the, on the mission. Cause you guys were very cautious at first you got Bloomix out there and then the wind was your back. The CEO says we need to win cloud. Right? And so you get the little reorg going on. Nancy Pearson was on yesterday, shows a little, a little bit of color on that and now you've got developers, you've got resources at your disposal. So take us through that. What happened? I mean I'll see blue mix hit a nerve obviously right out of the gate the signups were pretty strong, but we didn't hit that tipping point. When did you take us through the tipping point? When did it go? Oh my God, we've got a tiger by the tail. It was when the resources came in, was it before or after? >>It has a bit before that. So it's really your middle of, of last year. So as we, we had incredible adoption early on. So really building Bloomix from an open source perspective, building on cloud Foundry, strong partnerships with cloud Foundry and the team. And then just onboarding service after service. It truly owned reticent and all the different partners that we've had. And then around October was when we brought the Watson services on and we had been steadily growing, you know, the developer following and the babies that was pre yes. And uh, and the teams have always a mix is a platform that we're serving up. Um, you know, the IBM, uh, services plus our third party and open source. So we, even though we asked, we just reorganized, we've been working across the team since day one because we have the internet of things services, which are fantastic. Those are taking off really well. And we have the Watson teams, we have the mobile teams, the DevOps teams. So we're constantly working across and now we're reorganized into the cloud unit, which is fantastic because it just helps accelerate even more so >>you know, any, any agile business that has continuous integration like the cloud internally, you have to kind of think that way. And we're hearing that I internally at IBM does a transformation to be more agile, to go faster, which everyone's saying go fast. Everyone wants you to go fast. The CEOs, they said that yesterday, um, was, it was the tipping point that you had success and you doubled down on it was there, the proof point was Watson says, Hey look it, we can do this. Was that the key enabler? >>Yeah, the tipping point for us was really in the early stages, listening to developer feedback and making sure that we were re architecting and designing the product, that we have an incredible onboarding experience. So it developers where we know from marketing standpoint, we were getting the word out and really focusing on building community. So, you know, a few months into the year we started just very small grassroots meetup groups. Right now we have 71 countries every other week having meetups for their building applications on Bloomix. So for us it was, it was getting that community started and then having the community realize that we were taking their feedback on board and we would get, even on our Twitter handle, we'd get updates saying, Whoa, thanks Bloomix didn't, didn't realize you were listing to a, to the feedback and they, and they would mentioned what they had, you know, tweeted at us as far as um, input and how we'd made the change. And so every other day we're posting, you know, blog posts with updates on how we're working with developers. Just to make it a lot easier. >>Matt, can you talk about your open source strategy and how it's evolved as a company? I mean, IBM was, I think the first large enterprise company to get dive into open source and you went in big billion dollar investment way back when the Linux stories were now, but it's really evolved. Um, you use your, your muscle, your money and your vision and, and your open source of history, you know, in the community. How has it evolved? How is it changing? >>IBM for over 20 years we've been driving and fueling and having engineers really involved in open source community and helping to move that community along lifted up and and really anything that you're doing, especially from a hybrid cloud standpoint, you have to have open standards, you have to build an open architecture, you have to be embracing, you know, all the various open source technologies that are out there. You saw the work that we're doing and you spoke with the Docker team yesterday and, and so from our perspective is there's, there's no other way it is open by design. So all of our teams are very focused on making sure that we're working with the cloud Foundry foundation and getting input from all of the companies that are involved in that foundation. Because together we are going to create, you know, open standards and drive and momentum. Because if you're an independent developer or even if you're a large enterprise acting at the speed of an independent developer like we saw yesterday with city, you've got to be able to move and be portable. And if you're locked into proprietary standards, you're, you're just really, there's, there's nowhere you to go in this new world and this all the integration that you need. >>Okay. But there's another nuance there that I want to explore with you is that in the old days, it used to be you'd have a committee, right? Right. Everybody would maybe pay to get into the committee and they'd set a bunch of standards. Nine times out of 10 or 99 out of a hundred that it would flop. Right. And people, a lot of people said that would happen. For instance, with cloud Foundry, you guys came in and gave it a big lift. They're talking to that way around the open data platform now. So what's the difference? Is it just that there's an open source component to it? Is it that simple? >>Is the community, so, I mean, open source is successful because of the community. Listening to the community and sharing the community has a voice. And then the companies that are involved at, you know, at maybe more of a, you'll see that the table from a leadership perspective with the foundations, it's their, their role and their mission to be listening to the community and bring those forward. If any of those fail and you know, the companies involved aren't listening to the community or the community's not engaged and doesn't feel engaged and they're not innovating the platform, it's not going to work. So that's why we're very focused on building the sense of community, listening to what's out there and then enhancing. So you on the announcement with the Docker around enterprise grade containers, we were very specific with the way we approached that and named that. And you look at your, the secure gateway that needs to be added. You look at, um, the enhancements we've made from cloud Foundry on auto scaling. So really looking at what is the community looking for and then how do we then pay it back. >>So what's the message to developers? I mean, it sounds awesome. It's not easy. What you just described. Just Oh yeah, let's get the community. Well, it's hard to build community. So what's the message to developers? They have a lot of choices, a lot of options, and they spend time in various areas. What's the message to them from IBM, >>from an over an open source standpoint, just to be involved, be committed, be any, there are projects every day within the open source community where you can contribute code and you can be involved. And it's really about being very active and vocal and having, having a seat at the table. So I mean our teams, we're constantly looking through stack overflow in the feedback that we see their feedback on Reddit, feedback on get hub, you know, how, how often is the code being for blood? What kind of adoption metrics are we seeing? So from a developer standpoint, I would say, you know, it's time to lean in and be very involved because I mean not just IBM, but all the companies that we're working with across absolutely listening. And I mean this is such an era for developers where they, they have a seat at, at this big community table. It's not easy, but it's the right thing to do. The >>Docker and the register, this is modern stuff that developers want doctors. The hottest trend, you know, I was talking to dr folks, we interviewed Solomon years or couple of years ago in the cube before they changed their name even it was like, and we're so excited and all of a sudden they're now the bell of the ball. As you say, everyone wants to get married with Docker. Red is also is compelling node. These are cutting edge technologies that are part of the integrated stack. So how do you guys talk about that? In contrast to say Amazon, because Amazon and developers are used to these things. Elastic means stuff. They have auto-scaling. What do you guys have now that's direct, directly competitive with Amazon? >>Well, from a, from an application development standpoint, I see where we've gotten advantage is you look at the history of IBM around dev ops, right? So bringing together development operations in this continuous delivery life cycle and really looking at how are you going to quickly build an application and then that's, that's not the end of it, right? You now have to make sure from a security standpoint or you know, and you've heard from Mark Zonoff yesterday and the team on how are we providing strong security tools where you can do, you know in process application scanning and then you've got to deploy, you've got to auto scale, you've got to bring it back and you've got maybe an issue you've got to remediate and then redeploy. So for us it's really looking at at mobile app development and web development in that developer life cycle. And then in our conversations with our partners, the open source community, it's ensuring that we are helping to accelerate that every step of the way. >>I mean the announcement around API harmony, great example where we've got kind of the era of the impatient developer and we're all of us where you don't want to spend time writing a line of code if it's already been written. You don't want to spend time, you know, creating integration and creating API APIs if they're already out there. What you need are the tools at your fingertips where you can quickly build an application, search all the API APIs that are available and your private API APIs, you know, connect that into your mobile applications so you're to market faster. And then it's about you're enhancing and uh, you know, and, and really bringing different, yeah. >>So what do you say the developer out there that's watching this gives it the profile. Yeah, I'm comfortable. Amazon, I'm not sure I should go on blue mix. Maybe I should, maybe the best move was not to move or maybe they have something I want that I don't know about. So talk about those two scenarios. Cause like they're comfortable, they're like, okay, I, I'm fearful of moving over cause I'm comfortable over here with my tooling. Um, you know, developers are cause you work with them and then there's also the fear of missing out. Like, can I do better on Bloomex? So that's a common theme that we're hearing on developers. So how do you, how do you talk to those specifics? >>Yeah, and we, uh, we have those conversations, uh, quite a bit. And it's really about looking ahead at your strategy and at what point, especially for uh, developers within large enterprises. At what point do you need to connect with the backend systems? At what point do you need to ensure that you've got secure connectors? Our European clients are Latin American clients. They had concerns around data privacy, right? And so how are you sure that even the data centers that it's hosted in, you know, we have 40 data centers within software and growing every day and those are owned by IBM. Those are secured and it's really looking at where are you going to go as you expand your application. And do you have the right partner in place, the right steps along the way that you can, and more importantly, that you're not locked in. Because as much as, I mean, we have a lot of heart for Bloomex and what we're building, we want to ensure that we've built it to be open because we also want to have know low barrier exit. We want to make sure it's a great experience and it's our job to make sure that we've got the right services. The right time. >>So you don't, they don't feel locked in. So lock in is the lock in is a satisfaction >>yeah. Experience. It's not a, Oh I can't move because it's going to be too expensive to, you know. Right. And then there is a sense of, of expense that we're starting to see around the hidden cost of data. And as you may have walked into what you thought was a freemium model with some of the providers that are out there and you're scaling and now you have an ornament amount of data coming in and you're looking to store and provision that we are hearing, I mean the, there are hidden costs there that are also going to opening the door to other players that we've, we've, we know that we understand, uh, what you're gonna be facing down the road. So we've built the, the pricing, the application, the platform to allow for that. Whereas there are other platforms that haven't, because it is, you know, working at that kind of volume and scales a bit bit new to them and having to move that >>data is a problem too. So you mentioned 40 data centers, the more the merrier. I say here's some of the statistics. What's happening? How many services we did a little bit yesterday. Go a little deeper. What's exciting? What are the, the, the proud pieces of the, the platform that you can share with the developers? >>Yeah, it's been the integration. It's high integration between the design teams and in listening to developer feedback and then constantly designing the platform to have an amazing onboarding experience. So we announced yesterday the, uh, the Watson zones and the internet of things zone. And these are really designed to be, uh, a way to onboard into blue mix for developers that give you all the tools and resources and training that you need in order to start using cognitive applications like Watson. Because it is as exciting as the Watson services are, you do have a moment where you sit back and think, how am I going to use the power of Watson in my application? So we're creating these onboarding zones. So that's been huge advancement. Really excited about that. You're gonna see a lot more zones come out from us this year. And then the area of internet of things. So we have our, our IOT services. You had Nigel and Ian on yesterday from silver Hawk and power boat racing with internet things. They're fantastic. >>How about business outcomes? Get to finish the race and when you know the stories to the monitors, so you know if your heart rates going over right, >>that's pretty important data. And uh, so, so what we've seen to the exciting areas are really the zones and then the adoption and growth around internet of things space. And, uh, it's, it's a funny art. Our teams of developers that are out working with clients and out working with startups. If you open up their bags, they're probably gonna find a light bulb, a pebble watch. Um, but to connectors, I'm surprised anybody can get their report security nowadays that's on our team because we have all these demonstrations that we're doing with clients of, you know, imagine if you have, if you're trying to create a smart building for your employees and you have their mobile devices that are sensing and, and pinging the, um, the thermostat system, the lighting system. I'm the office. And as they're driving in and getting in proximity, things start turning on inside the office. So we do downloads with light bulbs and watches and, and really are starting to think through this smarter planet and smarter cities initiative with internet of things. And how are you using Bloomix and the power of cloud to now bring that to life within, uh, within cities and within enterprises? >>Go ahead. What's the developer persona look like these days when you're talking about the startup she talked to you? Think of the hoodies you think about the enterprise guys. So those two worlds coming together, >>they are in, in the fact that a lot of large enterprises are building innovation centers inside of themselves. And so they have, um, whether it's, if they have foundries or innovation centers or groups of developers, they're really looking to harness that, that speed and uh, an innovation that we've seen from, you know, some of the enterprise developers. And then also the big advancement that we've seen is the continual growth of the hackathons. So, you know, we know city we've been partnering with at and T as well on, on creating as many opportunities for their internal developers and external ecosystem of developers to be bringing forward new ideas to them. And then what we, we don't talk about as much publicly are the internal hackathons we do inside of large corporations. So we work with the CIO, his office, we go in 24 hour period and their developers are working on Bloomex within 24 hours. Well, depending on the number of, of it of developers they have, we'll have, you know, 50 75 a hundred mobile apps that are built. And then shark tank style, you know, they pitch the apps to their CIO and we vote on them together, you know, with the company. And then that's the roadmap for, you know, their 2015 plan and what applications they're going to bring tomorrow market. >>So talk about the geekiness of IBM and we were talking about this on the intro about what IBM should be doing, obviously where we're editorializing and pining, but um, it's known as kind of like the big company is slow old IBM, big blue, big iron and you guys are trying to be cool to see the keynotes out here. We may see that, but you guys actually have a geeky kind of community going out with this dev thing, which we've been following the past couple of years. It's pretty cool. Um, IBM is a geek culture. I mean it's got a lot of geeks that IBM, and that's a bad word we heard in New York, but a lot of computer science is um, technical people, very awesome bench of talent and patents. Right? So I'll ask, coming to bear, we're hearing, so share with the folks out there that are watching, what's it like at IBM? It's geeky. Is it? Is it, you said they carry gadgets around, I mean, is that the way people are at IBM? I mean, what's the culture like? Your group is, I think one of the ones that are kind of the edgiest. I think it's definitely not a mall culture. >>This multiple pockets. You've got a conservative customer base, but the average to be good, you gotta be, >>yeah, you gotta be kidding. It's about being authentic. So we're not trying to be anything. We're not. And when you look at me, you met, you know, the teams that I've gone through. We've got Jeff's lawyer and Marvin Goldman running around on our teams and, and we have massive development labs, you know, OBS, developers within, you know, high fund, our, our London facilities. And this is going on every day. So we're not putting on airs. You're not pretending. This is truly what our teams are doing. So we have, you know, Joshua Carr in the UK is constantly with, um, you know, with, with children in schools, showing them how to fly a drone with a banana, right where you do the device connectors. That wasn't because it was a stunt that we were trying to pull. It's just truly what they do. And we're very involved in the STEM initiatives for schools. >>I'm very involved in, you know, our distinguished engineers working through. So, but to attract developers and to get them in gray shade into your platform on board, you're judged by the company kids, they want to see themselves there. Right? So that's, there's a culture of developers now, I don't want to say brogrammers but like in this, the youngest guns are like, they've never loaded Linux on machines. They always say what bloats off where it's all cloud to them. So you're born in the cloud. So that's just a complete cultural shift, right, to talk about you guys have that mojo internally or, yes, it's about, it's about taking what we know inside the company and exposing that to developers and creating that developer to develop our connection. And you mentioned programmers. I mean we have Lauren Schaffer, we have a number of female developers on our teams and we are very much focused on ensuring that we're leading and making sure that we are creating a very balanced on environment of developers and leading in that area of making sure we have a lot of diversity. >>And so it's really about, from a marketing standpoint, it's, you know, you don't market to developers. Yeah, no, your technical chops or what's the market and you make sure that what they're interested in and what thereafter we're going to connect them with an IBM development team or is somebody else in the community through developer works that's working on it as well. And it's that local community. There's local connections headfake developers as we learned that. No, and my team, my marketing team, it's half developers, half data analysts. I mean we are, I mean EDC shifts inside of IBM marketing. I mean it's all data driven. I'm using the entire portfolio SAS portfolio we have with, you know, Unica, Coremetrics and, and then every day giving developers more trends and more technologies to play with your kid in the candy store. They ask you the, um, the question that's on my mind is what was the big learnings over the year that you guys walked away? >>What was magnified this year? Y'all see, you launched it a year ago, you have some growth, right? What's the learnings that was magnified for your team and the whole group? I'd say the speed. Um, so when you talked about, you know, agile development, agile delivery, you look at going from, you know, a few services to 102, you now have to re reinvent the way product development is done inside the company. So it's cloud versus mobile first. And it's really looking at across all the services we have, how long can they be a beta, how long, you know, are we going to do testing? What is the beta to general availability, onboarding for developers and migration path. Because a lot of companies will launch a beta, you're using the beta, you're embedded in it, and then all of a sudden it goes generally available and you have to rip and replace. Like that's horrible. And you know, experience. So we've, the biggest change I've seen is just the agile delivery and the speed at which internally to IBM we're working and learning from our partners that we're onboarding, bringing more and more partners every day. >>We got a break, but I want to ask you one final question. What's the coolest thing that you guys have done with Blumix internally? >>So internally it's been the Watson services and the Watson hackathons. So, uh, we are doing message resonance and sentiment analysis, so you can actually take a memos that are written or uh, or external documentation, run it through message resonance and, and start creating profiles of, of messaging. So it's been a, so you've got traditional writers, you know, geeking out of it and now they're uploading their content into the mobile applications and, uh, and you're then changing the way that, >>yeah, we had, we did a test, Adam sent us a link for the beta with the blue mix and we took all our chats and the social group has an amazing crowd chats, a zillion people on it and it's a huge transcript. I just cut and paste the transcript into the site and it spit out like the top things. And it was like, you know, openness cause it's a, it's a Twitter, Twitter, Twitter chat and they gave it a little, all the sentiment. I was like, wow, this is awesome so we could see where this going. So, um, that's cool. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming on the cube again. Great to see you. Congratulations and keep us posted and we'll bull up. Keep checking in with you on the progress. This is the cube. We'll be right back live in Las Vegas after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the wrap-up of IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier. My co-host this week, my partner in crime, co-CEO, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media Inc. with myself, Dave Vellante. Dave, it's been a great week. I just feel like I have been Watsonized and Blockchained and cloud all week. As we wrap up InterConnect, I want to get your thoughts on IBM, the cloud business, the big data marketplace, some of the things that we're seeing at the 100 of events we go to. We've got our events coming up, we're going to be in Munich next month, we got DockerCon, but a lot of developer events coming up, but in general, we get to see the landscape, in some cases, that others don't see. Let's talk about that, so before we get into the landscape, let's about IBM, IBM's prospects. This show, just quick stat, almost double the online traffic we're seeing on IBMGO than World of Watson, which was the biggest show we've ever done with theCUBE that we've seen. So, an interest, it's a data point. Unpack the data, you can see that there's a lot of global interest in what IBM is doing right now with the cloud and with Watson, and certainly with Blockchain you add another disruptive enabler potentially to what will either be a brilliant IBM strategy or a complete crash and burn. I think this is an IBM go big or go home moment with Ginni Rometty. I love her messaging, I love her three pillars, enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core. That is solid messaging, all three pillars. To me, it's clear. IBM is at a reinvention moment, it's all coming together, but it's a go big or go home moment for them. >> Well, you know, John, I mean, Ginni when she took over, sorry, she was running strategy before she became CEO, I mean, IBM had a choice, they could go double down on infrastructure and go knock it out with Dell and EMC and HP, or they could go up the value chain. And my ongoing joke is Dell bought EMC, IBM buys some other company, and that to me underscores the differentiation in thinking. Oracle, I think, is a little different, but Oracle and IBM are somewhat similar, I think you'd agree, in that they've got a big SaaS portfolio, they're trying to vertically integrate, they're trying to drive high value margin businesses. The difference is IBM's much more services oriented than, say, an Oracle, and that's still, as I say, a big challenge for IBM. But I'm more, I'm a bull on IBM. >> Why is that? >> I think the strategy is, number one, they're relevant. We talked for years about how we weren't that excited about Microsoft because they weren't relevant. Satya Nadella came in, all of a sudden, they're relevant again. I think IBM is highly relevant in the minds of CEOs, CIOs, CCOs, CDOs, all the C-suite, IBM is super relevant there, just as are Accenture and Ernie Young and all the big SIs. But IBM's got tons of products beneath it, number one. Number two, despite the fact that, you called it out several years ago, they bought software for 2.4 billion, it was a bare metal hosting company, alright, but IBM's turning that into >> Bluemix. >> a cloud business with Bluemix, right. And they're building, bringing in acquisitions like Cleversafe, like Aspera, like Ustream, and others, where they're bringing services that are differentiated. You can only get Watson on IBM's cloud, you can only get IBM's Blockchain on IBM's cloud, so they're bringing in value-added services, and there's only one place you can get them, and I think that's a viable strategy that's going to throw off a lot of cash, and it's going to lead to success. >> And by the way, they're also continuing to invest in open source. So, again, that's-- >> That's the other piece. I wanted to talk to you, and this is your wheelhouse. IBM's open source mojo is not just lip service, alright. They have deep-rooted DNA in open source and their strategy around it, and they've proven that they can monetize open source. What's their model, I mean, explain the model because I think it's instructive. >> I mean, open source, there's a lot of different models. Red Hat-- >> For IBM, I mean. >> IBM's model of open source is very clear. If you look at what they've done with just Blockchain as a great example, they have mobilized their company, and they did it with Bluemix as well with the cloud, once they said, "We want to get in the cloud game," once, "We want to do Blockchain," they go open source at the core, then they get their entire brain trust workin' on it. It's not just a hand wave, some division, they're kind of reorganizing on the fly, they're kind of agile organization, which some may read as chaotic, but to me, I think that's just good management practice in this day and age. They get an open source project, and they drive that home, and they have people contributing and giving that to the community, and then adding value on top and differentiating. It's just classic 101, create some value, and create some differentiation with your products, and by the way, if you don't want to use our products, build your own, or hey, use the open source code. That's pretty much an over-simplified version of open source. >> But Blockchain's a great example of this, right? So, they see the leverage in open source project, they put all these resources in, and they say, okay, now let's build our product on top of that, let's get the open source community leverage and this is, let me ask you this, does IBM, so several years ago when IBM announced Bluemix, you were pretty critical. >> John: I was very critical. >> IBM has to win the developer audience or it's cooked in this game. >> That's what I said. >> How is it done, how would you grade them? >> I think they're doing very well. I think IBM is, again, to use your word, they're not putting lip service in it. So, I was joking with Meg Swanson last night, I saw Adam Gunther when they interviewed on theCUBE, and I was critical. I didn't say that their cloud was bad, I was just saying it's just not as, just got a lot of work to do, Amazon's kickin' ass, which we now know that happened, right. But they've done well. They've done well, they've ran hard, they've gone the table stakes on the enterprise. I still think they got some more work to do, we can analyze, I'm putting out my cloud ratings matrix, I'm going to put IBM on that list, I have Google and Amazon done. I'm going to add Microsoft Azure and IBM onto the mix in the comparison matrix. But IBM has done good with the developers. They've just invested 10 million in this announcement, and they're ramping up. I wouldn't say they're throwing just money at it, they got people, so I would give them, I'd give them a B-plus, A-minus score because they're hustlin', they're doing it. Are they totally blowing it out of the water? No, I don't think they're pushing hard enough there. I think they could give it some more gas, I think they could do more with it, personally thinking. But you know, Dr. Angel Diaz was on earlier today. They're going at their own pace. >> But you agree they're in the game. >> Oh, totally. >> Making good progress. >> They're totally, IBM is totally in the cloud game, and they don't get a lot of credit for it. Either does Oracle, by the way. Somehow, people seem to talk about Azure and Google. Google is so far behind, in my opinion, they're not even close. I think it's Amazon, Azure, IBM and Oracle and Google all kind of in that-- >> Juxtapose Oracle's developer cred, even though it owns Java, with IBM's. How would you compare the two? >> Very similar, I think. Different approaches, but again, to your point, IBM's relevant, Oracle's relevant. We had this question about VMware when they did the deal with AWS. They have customers and they have cash, so they're not going anywhere. It's not like IBM's a sinking ship. It's not like Oracle's a sinking ship. Now, that being said, there's a huge shift in the business, and I would say in that scenario, Google is in a very good position, so I've been very critical on Google only because they're trying to be acting like they're an enterprise flag. They're not, I mean, Google's got great tech, TensorFlow, machine learning. Google has great cloud tech, but in that game, they're up in the number one, two spot. But in the enterprise side, they're not close. They're workin' on that. So, that's my critique of Google. Microsoft has got the DNA for the enterprise, so Microsoft and Oracle to me are more similar than comparing IBM and Oracle. I'd say IBM is a lot more like Google and Amazon, kind of in-between, but Oracle and Microsoft look the same to me. Big install base, highly differentiated, stacks aren't perfect, but it looks good on paper, and they're gettin' business. And Oracle's earnings, by the way, were very explosive due to the cloud growth. >> Another question I like to ask sometimes is, okay, what would you have done differently if you had a choice? Like when Gerstner was running IBM, he chose to consolidate the company, essentially, not consolidate, but focus on services, one throat to choke, single-faced IBM. Great customer service and build the services business, buy-in, PWC, et cetera, that was the key. What could you have done differently that could've said, well-- >> John: For IBM? >> Yeah, at the time, you could have said, "We're spin out different product groups. "We're going to be the best at microprocessors, "or disk drives, or database, or software." >> I think IBM moved too slow. >> That's a historical example. Given what IBM's doing today, what would you have done differently if you were Ginni Rometty five or six years ago? >> I would've done what they're doing now three years ago. We were, when we started working with them with CUBE, IOD events, and Pulse. >> Dave: Information on Demand. >> You had a lot of silence. I think, if I had to go back and get a mulligan, if I was Ginni Rometty, I would've moved faster. >> Dave: Done that faster. >> Hindsight's 20-20 on that, but it wasn't that clear. But again, it's the big aircraft carrier, it can only move so fast. I think what they're doing now is good strategy, and they're price strong, data force, cognitive to the core is a good strategy. Now, cognitive is words for AI, and that's their word, cognitive 'cause of Watson, but essentially, machine learning and AI is going to be a big pillar there, and then, the data first is more of an architectural component that's very good. But in general, Dave, the cloud is, this is what's going on in my find. It's so obvious to me. The big data marketplace that was we defined by Cloudera and Hadoop and Hortonworks just never panned out. It morphed into a bigger picture, and so, Hadoop is part of, now, a bigger ecosystem. Cloud was growing very fast. Those two worlds are coming together and growing very rapidly independent with big data, with machine learning, AI, and IOT. They're coming together. The intersection of the big data and the cloud. >> Cloud-mapping data. That was Yuri Burton from 2005. >> But it's coming together really fast, and the IOT is the real business driver. I know there's not a lot of stuff shipping yet in the sim stuff out there, but merging IOT into IT into business process and into developer mindset, whether it's an Indiegogo up to full-on developers is the accelerant that's going to fuel the AI value. To me, that's the intersection point of big data and cloud, and that is the home run, that's the holy grail, and that's going to be disrupting some preexisting decisions by big vendors who made bets, and I'm talkin' about bets made in the past five years, not like bets made 20 years ago or 10 years ago. I think the IOT is going to really shape the game. The other thing I worry about now, in my opinion, is a lot of AI-washing. People say, "Oh, AI." You see people on the stage, "Oh, we did this with AI." There's no AI, it's augmented intelligence, which is basically predictive analytics. You know, true AI is not yet here, it's a little bit hyped up, not that I mind that. I think that the machine learning is the real meat on the bone right now, I think that's the core enabler. Machine learning is by far the most important trend in the computer science world today as it relates to integrating that capability into cloud native, microservices, and overall application. >> I agree, I mean, AI is still a heavy lift, but to me, the key, I go back to something you were saying, is developers. That's the lever that's going to give you the ability to move large mountains. If you don't have that developer community, and you don't have open source chops, you're going to struggle a little bit. You're going to be either in a swim lane like Oracle with its database and its red stack, and maybe you can break out of that, but I'm not sure it wants to. Or you're going to be stuck in infrastructure lane. >> Yeah, but the developers are driving all the action right now. My point about machine learning, if you look at the shows just recently, and certainly we have the history of the past year, machine learning is the sexiest trend in every show. Last show was Google Next, machine learning with TensorFlow, both open source. Machine learning's not new, it's just now accelerating the developer. The developers want to move faster, and I think things like machine learning, things like cognitive that IBM puts out there, are great catalysts. That's going to be a big thing we're going to watch, obviously, we have a big developer community at SiliconANGLE, so something to watch. >> What's next? We've got a chief data scientist summit next week in Silicon Valley, we're going to be at the-- >> Let's look at my Friday show this week. Every Friday I do the Silicon Valley Friday show with me and guests, we got that goin' on, so always check that out on soundcloud.com/johnfurrier, or check out my Facebook feed, facebook.com/johnfurrier. But in terms of CUBE events, we've got DataWorks in Munich on April 2nd, DockerCon in Austin, Oracle Marketing Sum Experience, Red Hat, Dell EMC World, Service Now, Open Stack, Big Data in London. >> It's going to be a busy spring. >> Lot of stuff going on. Great stuff. >> Deb, we'll see you in July. >> In bumper sticker, Dave, this show, encapsulate your thoughts. >> Well, I think it's all about cloud, data, and cognitive coming together in a way that allows business value and differentiation through the end customer. That's what this show is about to me. It's not about infrastructure, cloud and infrastructure, that's kind of table stakes. It's all about differentiation up the stack, creating, enabling new business models. >> My encapsulation is the enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core message that Ginni said, that translates into IBM's shoring up their base products and putting an innovation strategy around Blockchain and soon to be cognitive computing at a whole 'nother level, and I think they're going to have a real innovation strategy and continue to use what they did with Watson, the winning formula. Put something out there that's a guiding principle and draft the company behind it. I think that, to me, is my big walk away, and I think Blockchain will potentially level, has game-changing capabilities, and if that plays out like Watson's playing out, then IBM could be in great shape on both shoring up the base in cloud and their business and having an innovation strategy that extends them out. That to me is the reason why I'm bullish on them. So, great show, Dave Vellante. Thanks to the guys, thanks for everyone watching. That's it for us here in theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante wrapping up IBM InterConnect 2017. Thanks for watching, stay with us, and follow us at theCUBE on Twitter and siliconangle.tv on the web. Thanks for watching. (electronic keyboard music)