perfect all right we're good uh muhammad you ready yeah i have a watery eyes always so i always tell my interviewers or the producers that sometimes it shouldn't there shouldn't be a problem in the 10-minute window but well yeah so do that while i'm talking you'll see it on the return feed it's a little delayed but and most people have tears when they see dave vellante yeah i i have that effect on people thanks for that okay we all said we good leonard why don't you go alex bye-bye yeah alex got the i just got the thumbs up we're good okay muhammad here we go on dave in five four three we continue now with the network powering hybrid work now we just heard from lawrence wang on the rapid move to wi-fi 6e which is going to increase wi-fi efficiency enable routers and devices to more efficiently use bandwidth and that additional spectrum that lawrence talked about that means more wi-fi channels which is really going to help reduce overlap between networks and make a noticeable difference especially in crowded places we're here now with muhammad imam who's senior director of product management for catalyst switching this is a multi-billion dollar business for cisco if you ever listen to cisco's earnings calls you'll hear the cfo scott heron he'll talk about the catalyst 9000 and double-digit growth and switching this is the fastest ramping product in cisco's history so muhammad that's got to make you feel pretty good yes indeed thank you david and thank you for having me here yeah great to have you so uh look catalyst 9000 it's been really successful what does the 9000x bring to the table for your customers yeah absolutely and um indeed the catalyst 9000 family of switches have been extremely popular with our customers as you said fastest ramping product in cisco's history and the last four or five years we have really evolved the catalyst 9000 family of switches to a very comprehensive product portfolio um addressing the various enterprise use cases that that we that we address but now we see increase in demand on the networks and that really stems from some of the most recent trends that we are seeing right part of it is hybrid workspaces is going to be a video dominant hybrid workspace right a lot of cases is going to be high definition 4k 8k videos we are seeing cloud-based applications everywhere right my spreadsheet is used to be on excel sheet now it's either an office 365 or smartsheets my files used to be on my computer now it's on in the dropbox right so these are trends that are really uh putting pressure on our networks we are also seeing trends where vr headsets are becoming common they are being used for trainings and education use cases webex hologram in certain industries we are seeing robotics are becoming more and more popular and they come with a lot of um applications that are very latency sensitive and as lawrence mentioned earlier wi-fi 6e is really making over the year multi gigabit wi-fi possible right and for all of these different trends and the recent technologies that that are evolving we really need the network that can really address and deliver for these applications and that's where we are bringing the catalyst 9000 x that addresses the increase in network demand we are expanding the catalyst 9000 family with top-of-line premium introductions in the access layer of the switches of the network as well as in the aggregation and core layers so we are bringing 400 gig high-speed core and enterprise core and edge layers of the network we are bringing point-to-point ip ipsec security which will give you 100 gig of ipsec encryption um high density of multi-gigabit which is becoming very common as we evolve our wi-fi networks because we don't want our wired infrastructure to be the bottleneck when the wireless infrastructure is capable of going more than a gig high density of 90 watt powering the smart buildings use cases right right um these are all different use cases that are being enabled by the catalyst 9000 and the new getless 9000x family is really addressing some of these new trends and applications well it's good because the metaverse is coming too and we're going to need some help with that right who knows how much bandwidth will need for metabolism absolutely yeah guarantee will be a lot more but so i want to i want to hear more about the the new products that you've just launched and maybe how these offerings are going to help with this new hybrid work model that we've just been discussing absolutely so let me start with the catalyst 9300 we are introducing the catalyst 9300x which is the highest density full multi-gigabit platform with 100 gig uplinks and 90 watt of power on every port available right that's an industry first that we are bringing on the catalyst 9300 family it is also capable of one terabit per second of a stacking which is also unheard of in the industry this will serve our customers with all the new trends that we talked about including the hybrid world um and some of the new trends that are going to come in the next decade but 9300x is not just a high-end campus switch it can also be a lean branch and a box solution where you don't really need an sd van but you do need an encryption point to point from the catalyst 93 from your front branch with the catalyst 9300x to the data center or to the cloud so for the first time we are introducing the ipsec based encryption natively in the hardware and that means no compromise on performance and you can get up to 100 gig of encrypted traffic with the catalyst 9300x second is the catalyst 9400 we are introducing soup 2 and soup 2 xl with 100 gig uplinks enhancing and the the scale and performance giving our customers options for fully loaded line rate multi give it board on a 10 slot chassis right it will give you two to three times bandwidth boost to your existing line cards since it completely removes the over subscriptions and you know the soup 2 on the catalyst 9400 is coming up with the version of the asic that we used in the past on the catalyst 9600 that means it's also bringing the core capabilities that we used that we today have on 9600 on the catalyst 9400 and that brings high density 10 gig um ports on the catalyst 9400 without over subscription right with the core capabilities then we have the catalyst 9600 where we are introducing is supervisor 2 which really triples the bandwidth per slot on the catalyst 98600 it introduces 400 gig uplink and truly drives the transition to 200 gig in the core get 6k customers uh with excel scale requirements now they can transition to the cat 9k with soup 2. and by the way we are also introducing a combo line card on the catalyst 9600 which means now you don't have to burn a whole slot for your uplink pores in fact you can get up to 400 gig of uplink with this new line card um so that's that's a bunch of things that we are bringing on the catalyst 9600 in line with catalyst 9600 we are also introducing catalyst 9500x 100 gig box with 400 gig uplinks in a fixed form factor and all the benefits that i just talked about on the on the supervisor 2 and 9600 it's also available in a fixed form factor on catalyst 9500x got it so that's in summary kind of the multiple uh product lines that we are introducing yeah it's a lot to unpack there i mean your the big theme there of course is optionality you got a lot of choices for customers i love the encrypt everything without a trade-off you know no performance impact and anytime you can reduce my oversubscription it's going to make me happy you know muhammad we've reported in our breaking analysis segments the importance of custom silicon and not every company has the resources or the expertise to develop their own silicon cisco of course does catalyst 9k is bringing silicon 1 based products with this launch tell us more about that why is this important yeah that's really exciting development that we have on the cad 9k family because you know the silicon one is a powerful asic that enables high performance and high scale with modern silicon architecture bringing the architect a converged architecture for switching as well as routing cad 9k as we know has been running on a uadp asic which has been a programmable asic it has served us really well so far on the cat9k family but with the silicon one we are taking it to another level silicon one brings the capabilities of uadp asic and unlocks the excel scale and high performance in the enterprise switches this is a critical and foundational element to meet the core requirement for the next ticket silicon one is a 12.8 terabits per second chip supports up to 10 million routes supports much deeper buffers brings multi-slice voq architectures with this new architecture silicon 1a6 has paved the way to transition the cad 6k xl deployments to cat 9k right so that's kind of the the um the silicon one uh importance in the ket99k family that we are bringing now yeah and it brings differentiation a lot of people kind of sometimes don't appreciate that but but when you have the control like that you can do things that you might not be able to do with off-the-shelf silicon but so but i i want to ask you what about customers that previously purchased from you as you evolve the portfolio to 9k x how do you protect their investment yeah thank you for asking that question because when we started building the cad 9k we always thought about investment protection for our customers so if you buy today how you will have a very long life for that for that product and you will be able to unlock new powers on that platform that you have purchased maybe five years back right that's exactly what we are doing with the catalyst 199000x talking about modular right on the modular side the supervisors that that that we are introducing now are backward compatible with the line cars that you already have in some cases the lime card throughput is doubling and tripling because now you have a new machine that is going to power these line cards right so you don't have to change your line card you just change your supervisor and you have much higher performance and scale with this new supervisor similarly on the stackables you can stack with the existing catalyst 9300s for example and you will be able to you don't have to rip and replace everything it's not a forklift upgrade for our customers you can continue benefiting from your existing catalyst 9000 deployments and add to the power with the catalyst 9000x components as well as new platforms that we are introducing nice that's key this just speaks to the software content that you guys i know you have a lot of software engineers running around and this is welcome to the 2020s folks new world you know i i muhammad zero trust was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic but it's really become a mainstream topic today we talked about the infrastructure we know security has to be built in from the start it can't be bolted on and zero trust is really top of mind for customers how are their security requirements changing as a result of hybrid work and and how do you make sure that as we shift to hybrid that these new security requirements are addressed what are you doing there absolutely and we know as you said security is top of mind for our customers in fact security has been highlighted as the number one reason why a lot of customers pick cisco and cat9k we have a comprehensive zero truss architecture with software defined access where we started with segmentation and expanded into endpoint classification and visibility now we are taking that to the next level and we are introducing talus powered truss assessment for unmanaged endpoints to further make the the workplace is stronger with zero trust and software defined access truss analytics it detects traffic from end points that are exhibiting unusual um behavior by pretending to be um using a mag spoofing or probe is spoofing or man the metal techniques when truss analytics detects such anomalies it signals endpoint analytics to lower the trusted score so we have a trusted score system when when the trusted score goes down it shows up on the dashboard and the network admin can completely deny or limit the access to the network from these endpoints from other security aspect that we are introducing and i touched on that briefly earlier is um for non-sdvan internet only branches where we are where where services security services might be in the cloud right that's a trend that we are seeing to secure that connectivity from a lean branch to the cloud we are introducing the ipsec capability with the catalyst 9300x and that's built in as as we just talked about and as far as the automation is concerned for these use cases they are we are bringing those automation with our command center the cisco dna center and we are bringing the full life cycle of automation as well as assurance for the secure connectivity that is being provided with the with the cisco dna center well a couple takeaways there for me i mean endpoint security has really become much more important up for obvious reasons when you have remote workers the built-in ipsec just that really emphasizes that you got to have it you know built in from the ground up you can't just bolt it on and the automation is key the number one problem that csos face is you know lack of talent so automation you know definitely helps helps with that so okay muhammad thank you so much really appreciate you coming on in a moment we'll look at private 5g and what's been happening at mobile world congress you're watching cube's coverage of the network powering hybrid work made possible by cisco

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders >>all around the world. >>This is a cube conversation. Hi, and welcome to a special production of the Cube. We're talking to the Amazon Web services, public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host stew minimum, and we're digging in on education is one of the sectors. Of course, public sector looks at non profits. It looks at the government sectors. Education, Of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with a global pandemic so happy to welcome to the program. We have two guests. First of all, we're representing the award winning company Mohammad. He is the co founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with Lumen and joining his one of his customers, Damien Doyle, who is the associate vice president of Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, or UMBC. As it's known, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>Alright. First of all, Mohammed, congratulations. As I said in my intro, you know, such an important topic and I have two Children that are, you know, dealing with remote learning have lots of friends that were in higher education and, you know, in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS Public Sector Award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition on. Of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit. You know, you are the co founder. So would love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background and Ellis about what differentiates the looming >>sure loom in we provide ah manage products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology. Resource is, of course, content course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use, you know, whatever device they have wherever they are, um so and have access to those applications that are required for completing that force work they could be in, you know, in at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop on the side of a mountain in the Middle East wherever they may be. But leveling that playing fears playing field so that they could access, um, have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're You know, What our goal is is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >>Fantastic. Damien, If if we could turn to you, then atyou NBC, maybe if you could give our audience Ah, thumbnail of you know, the university and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about the learning. But maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre cove it and, uh, you know what? What you were faced in and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >>Sure be happy to So where you? NBC is a mid sized public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the stem disciplines. And so pre cove, it very based in collaborative environments, active learning but but hands on. So a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that. We leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in whether it's an engineering biology, any of those kinds of programs. Uh huh. As you said that the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scatter shot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're gonna have access to and, um, and the abilities and connectivity they're gonna have. So this this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >>Excellent. Mohammed, Were you working with you, NBC before the current move toe Go, go remote. Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >>I believe, actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damien and his team reached out to loom in looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs. But with ah the change and not having to access those labs anymore needed a remote learning solution. A remote access solution for being able to access those high compute high graphics processing or memory intensive applications through the cloud. Taking into account the fact that you know, students won't have you know, that the highest end computer laptop, you know, they probably be working on a chromebook or a lower and machine, but need that compute power on. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, you know, schools were shutting down, essentially physically started shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. Coursework? >>Yeah, Dave and I like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit that time frames, you know, how fast did you go from? Oh, my gosh, We need this. We need proposals. We need to roll this out, and we need to have students. Ah, in teachers back up and running. >>Well, you know, I think the one thing from our side we had already known of element and we've been looking at that pre cove it. We knew we needed a product that that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they need it. So once we identify that, the thing that was amazing to me is is we moved from our existing system over to production illumination. It was about 2.5 weeks sort of start to finish and, you know, to get all the images to get all the technology running tested and everything up and running in 2.5 weeks for a full solution for a campus is was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw was going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of code as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >>Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could Damien a little bit, you know, help us understand. How much are you using A cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that, you know, in the you know, I guess if we say postcode world, you would probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say, >>Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of virtual computing solution in the cloud. But it wasn't that extensive. And a lot of our individual programs chemical engineering, geography and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of scheduled times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Uh, coming out of this, we fully expect if, if we're going on extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of cove it they're not gonna want to go back to that model where they're asking, you know, they have to get permission and go in and limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now. >>Yeah, this is I mean, they've gotten a taste essentially, and so, you know, they they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >>Mohammed, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there, Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great if in the future you still want to leverage the solution. But you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of you know how aws arc. It actually supports what you're doing and, you know, just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment. And however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that, >>right? I mean, so, you know, with the AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed. But we we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of, um, students scheduling. So if we've got, of course, that we know that is running from 10 AM to 11 AM Your prior to that core starting will scale the environment up so that it's available for those students. If it's not, you know, more of, ah, in course, lab session, um, and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have that those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. You know, physical environment. You know, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things. Uh, you know, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for a student usage, you know, off hours overnight take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running, running all the time. >>And this is one of the biggest differentiators so many times in higher ed. We struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very. We're very different from corporations and other other verticals with the bloomin solution and the capabilities in AWS. But we're really having this Taylor to our students schedules to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us. But it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of push back from the academic side because it is really Taylor to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing, marketing and acceptance standpoint. Yeah, >>Dave and I'm curious. Once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educators side as well as student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use thing. That sounds great, but do you have to change, you know, office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that I'm just trying to understand the you know, the ripple effect of what you're doing? >>No, it's It's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we with students? If there is a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively. They're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is is reached out to all of our faculty that were training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and try to work with them to understand what the solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taking a approach of rather than said everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab. They're moving some of this team or a synchronous so that the students can serve, work at their own pace and rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking off this. But it the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing. We're always trying to do >>excellent, Mohammed. I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what what's been happening Obviously, I'm sure you've been quite busy and responding to things. You know, what's been the impact on your business, how as a ws been as a partner to support the needs of what you're doing. >>Well, as you can imagine, the other things that just really blown up, Um, in terms of demand and being able to again through the plant power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment, you know, as we talk about earlier this deployment was, you know, 2 2.5 weeks from start to finish. Being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been, um, critical and moving things forward. >>Excellent. Uh, Damien, it's a sit back to you on this. You know, obviously, if you had had, you know, more time be able to plan this out if there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give, uh, you know, as you've moved through this this rapid acceleration of the move to remote >>you Certainly. I think we would have certainly done some things differently. But we have been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of Covitz. So for us it wasn't. It wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you how you deploy and how you think. Think through that for us. We deployed one way because we could do it very quickly. And then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents you like this method or do you like some of the other, possibly some of the other possibilities and see which user experience they liked more? And then we're able to work with illumination, and they've been ableto very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would have done that testing ahead of time. But that's a very minor thing. These air really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier. Not fundamental differences in the what we're providing. >>Yeah, I'm Damien. What? One last question if I could, um sorry. Sorry, Mohammed. Just I'm curious from the financial standpoint, you know how much you felt that you understood what costs would be in some of the levers as to what are you using in the impact there? We've seen, you know, great maturation over the last handful of years. As toe. Yeah, you know, transparency and understanding how cloud actually is build. But I'm just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece things, seeing that, it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. Yeah, >>it wasn't. That's very true. But we also knew that it was essential so that what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We've moved to this would have to see what adoption was but be able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammed and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect. But on the weekends it was in the evenings. Nobody, nobody is logging on Saturday or Sunday morning. But boy at eight PM there's a good bit of usage so we could tailor and do some of that off hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we have to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the If you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it. Get it out. Excellent. Mohammad, I >>want you to kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously, it's a technology space. You've been in. Ah, and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned advice you would give Teoh, you know, other companies of the universities and education No facilities out there, >>Right? And, you know, this is again speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of that one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. It's name and saying was saying, You know, we went back kind of analyze what we were staying in after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted, based based off of that. According to that, taking and feedback from faculty members on how they were using a system in tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud being able to adjust on the fly. You're not. You don't have to be committed to every single bit there. Uh, and being able to change it on the fly is is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >>Excellent. Well, thank you both. So much for joining us, Damien. Thank you for joining and moving forward. Sharing your story. I wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammed Big. Congratulations on winning. You know, super important category. Especially here in 20. Funny congratulations to you and the team. >>Thank you. >>Yeah, Thank you. Alright, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector is their partner awards program. I'm Stew men a man And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> From Bahrain, it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public Sector, Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome to the Cube here in Bahrain, for AWS in the Middle East, Manama Summit. I'm John for the Cube coverage. It's cloud computing, new Amazon region, a lot of innovation. But two great guests we have, Huda Ahmed Mohsen, who's the Chief of Information Technology and the Ministry of Information and Authority. Welcome to the Cube. And Sameera Mohammed Al Atawi. You are the Information and Communication Technology Director at the American University in Bahrain. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having me here. >> Great to have you on. The ministries are mandated to move to the cloud, Huda, so we know what's coming for you, 2020. The goal is cloud first in Bahrain. We covered this last year. How's that going? On plan? >> It is on plan and is in the process. We start in November 2017. We start our journey with the clouds. We start moving our load smoothly. We're planners. Face a lot of challenge in the beginning, of course, as all of the ministries. Then with help the IGA with our governments, we move smoothly. I think now we reach a good position that we can reach our vision in Salah. >> Well, it's great that the government in Bahrain has a mandate for all the ministries to move to the cloud. I have to ask you, share with the folks watching, why the move to the cloud? What was the big reason why the cloud first was in place? >> See, technology's moving fast now, and the speed and security and the availability is very important to us as a ministry, especially for ministry information. That's why we decide, and as a government, vision, of course, we did decide to move to the cloud. >> A lot of integration from the old way to the new way. What are some of your observations between the two? >> Of course, a lot of changing, a lot of difference, because if you need to just establish any projects in an a normal way, how much time you will have spent, and how much resources you will have spent? And a cloud, you can just imagine. It is with a click. >> Sameera, you're in a new role. Talk about your new role where you were before. This is not new to you, the cloud. You've had your toe in the water before. You've been playing around with the cloud. Now with the American University in Bahrain, full steam ahead, a lot of pressure, lot of need, desire? >> I think, yes, it is not new for me. I'm in the IT field like know for ages. I wouldn't say the years. But then, yes, it's not new, but in Bahrain polytechnic we are having the same journey, like migrating to the cloud. It's a new challenge in the American University of Bahrain. It's a new startup, entrepreneur university. But then the interesting thing that I have joined them like three weeks ago and now the IT is up and running within two weeks. So with the help of the cloud and AWS, our servers now all up and running. By the way, this is our first day in school. So our students there just taking their formal classes as per today. So this is a very proud moment. >> And the servers are on the cloud, powering everything? >> Yes, we have more data on the cloud at the moment, and we have also 5365, and we have our ERPC Stem, as well. It's all in the cloud. So within two weeks, that's an amazing story to be told. >> Versus the old way was months, years? >> Well, actually, it's for every institution there are some challenges and there are some pros and cons, but I think the most beautiful thing about Bahrain polytechnic that everybody was working as a team and we understand each others issues. So regardless the time, there always been a support and faith and trust in IT just to deliver the organization mission and vision. This is the same with the American University of Bahrain. There is a huge trust and faith in IT that they will derive the trust formation, or the change to the future. Ironically, the future's here. >> Yeah, and the cloud region is beautiful out here. The impact academic is something that we're going to be watching closely, because the training is coming too. We're seeing that in the announcements here around a cloud computing degree, more skill development. But I have to ask you from a business standpoint in the academic area, what's the main use cases for cloud? Is it the curriculum? Is it the operations? What is some of the key cloud areas you're innovating on? >> Very interesting question. I think we have like a blend of use cases. We have the operational use cases, and we have the academic use cases as well. I mean, the most important for us is in the university is the academic. Now how we can empower our students to face the challenges of the future and the market demand. So we are sensing a lot of interest about the artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, and this morning when I was just scrolling down the menu of AWS, I've been seeing this a lot. So how we can imbed this technology or the reading material like an AWS educate in our courses and material, versus the operational use cases, how we can deliver the business objective in an entire mode and in a most efficient way. You know, like in university, we have so much critical time that we don't afford losing IT, like exams, posting grades, even for our students graduation projects. It's become easier and easier for the business, however with the aid of IT. >> And the agility is very important because the expectation from the students is high. >> It's way high. I mean, the expectation and the use is already there. So, not like before, not like my age, you know, like students, they get to introduce technology when they got to the university. Now all of our students, they already know and use the technology before they join. >> Huda, talk about the ministry, because you guys on the government side, very progressive, doing new things. You got Amazon's region here, which is going to create a revitalization. You're in the middle of it. What are some of your observations on the things that are going on that are new for you guys that are a positive? >> Seeing now a cloud maybe as a ministries and as a government project, the most new thing that we get that the new environment. This is totally new environment. You know if you just have any new thing or any new environment, you have resistance from everyone, because it's a new thing. >> People fear change. >> Yes. >> They don't want to change. >> Of course. Even sometimes the change is good, but this is the mentality of people to resist a change. As a government because we have one vision, which is all the ministries working within this vision. We really plan it well, I think. And we do it well. As you see now in Bahrain, the time that they establish the cloud until now, you can see how many projects in the process, how many project already done. >> You know, cultural change, we cover this. We go to hundreds of events. We cover all around the world, mostly in the United States, but culture's number one. People always want to push back against change. However, the benefits that you were pointing out, Sameera, are undeniable. Two weeks, talk about standing up critical infrastructure for whether it's curriculum or for services for citizens. It's hard to debate, to justify the old way. It's pretty hard. (chuckles) Maybe some political in there, but, I mean, ultimately, the proof is there. That has to be factored in. How do you guys do that? Do you just show people the data? Look what we did. Is that how you get things through? Is it more cultural? >> I think we just discuss in a panel about even let's talk about only the part of the financially thing. Before I was in IT, if you want to just make anything, and data sent out on any projects, how much time you will have spent to bring the devices, to bring the servers, to connect it, to do it. How much time you will have spent, even in the financially procedures, as a government, of course? Now it is, if you have any problem or any projects, you just by click finish it and done. >> I'm very impressed with Iran, second year the Cube's been here. The things we've talked about last year have been executed. They're executing. The region's up and running. The cryptocurreny is in place. We covered that just now. We're going to hear about some curriculum for degrees. But last year, you mentioned the panel. You guys were just on the AWS We Power Tech. Last year, Teresa Cross hosted a big breakfast, and I was lucky enough to attend that. I actually got kicked out of my seat, because with so many women that wanted to sit down, I happily gave up my seat for that. It was a packed house. Women in tech is very real and growing. You guys were just on a great panel talking about this. What was going on in the panel? What was the key topic? >> Well, actually, the key topic is celebrating women in IT. And I think women now they are flourishing in the IT field. We're showing lots of power and strength. Also I think women in nature, we are dealing with problem solving like in a natural way, as well as team buildings. So it comes with our genes. On top of that, the technical power and the technical thinking and the experience in the IT field, of course it adds a lot of confidence when we are presenting our plans. And we see that society is welcoming the woman workforce in IT field more and more every day. So I think this is something that we should celebrate and we should put a lot of highlight on it. Knowing that the value of woman is really growing. >> You were just talking about the time change, how things are faster. Things are getting done much faster, so things are accelerating, and combined with more job openings, more roles are opening. It's not just coding. It's creative, design thinking. So you're seeing a surface area of opportunities. Huda, you're seeing this as well in the government. This is a bigger field now. Your thoughts on how you see the panel. >> Yes, but maybe Sameera will have more experience in this area. >> On the skill gaps question that comes up a lot, there's so many job openings coming. There's a region here, there's entrepreneurs and startups. What are some of the new skills that folks are trying to learn? What do you guys think? >> Well, actually on that, coming from an educational field, we know that cloud computing is like number one set of skills that is on demand for the coming few years. But again, knowing that, it will be as essential as we should not think about it. It just will be transforming as a very catalyst. The way that we're thinking of electricity. At the beginning it was a big deal. Later on, it just there, and it has to be there for us to move as a society, for us to move as an economy. Then we're moving to the real things as, for example, blockchains and we're talking about artificial intelligence. And the technology itself is just not as important unless it has some feed in the economy development or in the society change. So I think this is how we can see that happening. >> So overall, you both think that cloud computing is going to revitalize the area? >> Definitely. >> Of course. >> Definitely, in a big way. I mean, the market, the first skill set is looked at in the IT field and is how many training, how many certificates have you taken in cloud computing? On top of that, robotics, big data, but the most important thing, how to make the technology benefit the citizens. In our case, the students, how we can deliver our classes in a better way. How we can transform the business of university from on campus to study from anywhere. Though we have a very amazing campus in American University of Bahrain. >> Looking forward to covering you guys. Final question for you guys. What's next? What do you guys have coming up in this next year? A lot of activities? What are the goals? What are some of the things you're trying to accomplish? >> Our next thing that we are planning to complete on this cloud project, to shift all our environment to the cloud to success in this, and to implement it in a good way that we can really use it in a good way, because you know, sometimes you will see the cloud and do lose it, but you cannot use it and really benefit way that you can get all the benefit from it. So it show our religion now and our next step to use it inventory. >> I think for us and the American University of Bahrain, we had yesterday an amazing meeting with Teresa, and having our CEO, Dr. Susan in the meeting as well. And I think there is a lot of great anticipation of what we can do together. So something that is put on the table that we want to sort of strengthen this relationship in terms of integrating our courses with AWS, as well as looking forward for new opportunities like training and certificate in the field and so forth. >> This is super exciting, benefits the citizens, students, new educational opportunities, new jobs, new services, whole new oasis. >> I think this is all, it's all about... >> The cloud oasis. This is the Cube coverage. We are here in Bahrain for AWS Summit here. I'm John Furrier, be back with more after this short break.

(tech music) >> Live, from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our live coverage here in Bahrain for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Summit here in the Middle East in the region. Our first time here, lots of observations, lots of learnings, and also great people we're meeting. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Our next guest is Mohammed Ali Al Qaed, who is the Chief Executive of the Information E-Government Authority, also known as IGA. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, thank you for hosting me. >> Saw you last night at dinner. We were talking about all the opportunities. So the first question I have to ask you is, as you guys are bringing in the digital transformation, which is happening, you now have Amazon here with the region, how is that changing things? >> Of course, always we try to innovate, and the technology, if you don't innovate, if you don't make sure that you are ready for the changes coming, it is very difficult. When we announced our first strategy in 2007, we delivered it in 2010 becoming the leader in the region, delivering 200 services over four channels. But as you mentioned, usually in the technology, the longest cycle is the infrastructure and servers and configurations, buying things and configuring. And with the leadership vision of transforming the country the vision 2030, transformations happening in the judicial system and to the commercial legislations and to the customs and to health and education, the pace of change required and the ambition is very much, much higher. And particularly, when you develop something and you were successful. So our leaders say, we are a bit slow. We need to fast things up. So then we looked into the Amazon and the cloud. How it can help us. And usually, in Bahrain, we don't have the luxury of trial and error. Trying things and if it works, you know, try multiple things. So we have to study it well. This is why we looked into the cloud, what it can bring to the country, the agility, the time to market. And when we put the strategy forward, it was a comprehensive one. The leaders decided to go cloud-first policy. Everybody should move. Because that's the way forward, that's the way that the Kingdom can deliver its vision-- >> And the cloud-first decision, when was that made? >> That was last year. And, when it was made, it's not a piece of strategy. You have to look at it in a comprehensive way. >> Yeah. >> You have to look into your laws, legislations, compliance, >> Yeah. >> audits, architectures, unit policies, skills sets available, the procurement process, the tendering process, and you have to review all of that-- >> Yeah. >> and make sure that there is no show blockers or barriers for the implementation. Otherwise, it will take a long time. >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> This is why, in a year's time, we managed to migrate huge workloads to the cloud. >> We were talking last night about how hard it is just to figure out the future, never mind provisioning all the gear you got to do, and the training, and so this cloud-first is very interesting. But I also want to just tell you that we talked about, also, how hard it is. So when I say, oh, go cloud-first, it's so easy! Right? No, it isn't. There's a lot of work involved. >> Yes. >> Take us through some of the things that you guys have done, your learnings prior to cloud-first. And the key learnings now that cloud-first has been under your belt for over a year. >> Of course, always with the governments, the biggest challenge will happen about the security. How I am going to move losing the control, putting my processing and storage outside the government. How I'm going to protect it, somebody else is there. That's the biggest challenge. That's number one. Number two, people doesn't understand, they think it's processing. So okay, I have my processing power, I will save some money, that's not much. >> Yeah. >> But they don't think about the ultimate goal. About the time to market. >> Yeah. >> When you have a new vision, when you have a new service to be delivered, you cannot wait for 18, 24 months for the infrastructure-- >> Yeah. >> Getting there, idle for a couple of years until you know the full utilization of them. So this is why the ultimate goal is much, much bigger. >> Yeah. >> And the thing about the issue, of somebody else, looking into-- >> So speed is critical. >> Yeah. >> And you guys have speed under your belt. You did a Formula One racetrack in what, 14 months I heard, very fast construction. The Amazon region is going up in record time. Is this a cultural thing? Just go fast? People like speed? The need for speed? >> We like that, you know the Formula One, of course that's just part of our DNA. Our leaders always push the citizens. And that's the Bahraini culture. >> Yeah, the other thing, too, about the application, now to get back to our serious conversation, to have innovation, you need to have software development go on in a way that's not the 24-month, oh we built it, and you don't know if you tested it or not. But you got to built the dev-ops model infrastructure as code. How far along are you on the infrastructure as code? Because the developer side is going to be very great. >> [Mohammed Ali Al Qaed] Yeah. >> Amazon's proven that developers love it, easy to get going, lower cost to test, agility, time to market, time to value. The setup for you guys is a little bit different. You've got infrastructure as code-- >> Yeah. >> You're not a startup. But you want to act like one, but what are you going to do for the infrastructure? >> Of course, the infrastructure in terms of processing, that's easy because it's been migrated, most of it's been migrated, our ports, our channels, our mobile channels. >> The networks, you have 5G, do you have 5G here yet? >> We are already experimenting, ready for it. The frequency's already freed up for the telco's to utilize them. It's already there for the 5G. Of course, fiber is everywhere, all the government entities are connected to the fiber. High speed, we have 100-meg, we have a gig, we have 10 gig, we have all kinds of speed available. >> No problem for bandwidth in the country. >> I don't think so. We don't have an issue about the bandwidth. And the processing power, once moved, then the optimization, which already happened. But as you mentioned, coming to the development, we started already, developing into the serverless, using the lamdas, using born-in-the-cloud concepts, that was not there once we started. But now we are already educating and training our employees. >> What's the reaction to it? >> The reaction is excellent. I give an example today about the fingerprint authentication. That's a basic service, but it requires a huge demand return from all the telco's, all transactions happen in telco's, private hospitals, the banking are coming. >> Yeah. >> Any authentication happens, it has to happen in a second. >> Yeah. >> So that requires a huge, massive infrastructure. Once we built it, at the beginning, for only a few customers-- >> Yeah. >> we invested about 250,000 dinar at that time. Now, I think, it's being moved completely to serverless-- >> Yeah. >> Concept, a new development. >> Yeah. >> So... >> A simple idea, hard to implement in the old way, but the new way, you got to wire API's around, sling API's, and connect devices, telco's, environments quickly. So this brings up the integration, this is the benefit of the cloud. >> [Mohammed Ali Al Qaed] Exactly. >> The glue layer is, what, microservices? Is it API's? How are you making that lambda function...? >> You know, that API's, and, just, you call the service and it gets you online and you go back to the storage. I mean, a basic thing. >> Yeah. >> Initially, you know, you need a testing environment, a development environment, a lot of infrastructure, and then you have to secure all of that, secure your data. >> Yeah. >> Now, it's a fraction of that cost and much faster to go to market. >> I'm a huge believer in the services model, and this is why microservices is a big deal right now in clouds, if you look at all the cloud-native conversations, it's containers, we're using it, no problem, very good to use containers. They're great. Kubernetes, now, orchestration. But deal with state and stateless applications is now the new challenge because there are so many new services that are spinning up. Soon, you're going to be like, ordering McDonald's, you know, I'll have a microservice over here, so this is the world we're moving to. This is the services. >> Exactly. And we would like to build a center of excellence, you know? Because we get into this journey, we looked into all our legislations and the ecosystem, trained our employees, their skillset is very important, with the program, with Tamkeen. We looked into the training strategy, all the portfolio training, making sure that our Bahrainees have the ability to develop, to operate, databases and all aspects, even the planning of it. Then institutes, partners, to be ready to train the private sector and everybody. >> You know, Mohammed, I'm really impressed with the entrepreneurial people that I've met. They've got a good mojo to them, because they're kind of cocky, which I love about them, but they're not arrogant. They're like, they're smart, and I so I got a... I see a good community there. The question for you is, as you move to cloud-native, how is that transition? The young kids get it. I mean, it's no problem. >> Yeah. >> Where's the progress on the skillset gap? I've heard that conversation. I just don't see it being a problem if the young kids are eating up the cloud stuff like it's nobody's business. >> Yeah. >> Then I don't see a problem. What's your take on this skills gap thing? I mean, the guys I met, and the entrepreneurs, they're like, they want more action. >> Exactly. The point is the current employees that we have already. Hundreds of government employees that have been trained in a different environment with different technologies. I get a couple of questions from some of the professionals in the market, private sector and government sector: how we can benefit out of that? How we can help? We are experts in the field, but cloud for us is a new thing. So as you mentioned, for them it might be a bit more difficult. So what we did, and the IGA, we created a taskforce of the most brilliant team, and told them okay, you have to migrate the workloads, train, we'll give you the training, and you have to migrate. >> Go. >> Next, you have now to optimize. Give the task of migration to somebody else, a new team, and the old team, they have to optimize. Third, now you have to work on, bore on the cloud, develop on the cloud, create the environment of the cloud, a new concept. So that's how we take-- >> So you're spreading the work around through hands-on training? >> Of course. You train, and then you get them into the action, hands, on, and so on, one by one. But, eventually, the university's already working on training their students. So we want to make sure that part of the curriculum, the cloud is there for the new generations to take it from day one. >> You know, you guys are a learning culture, my observation, first time here, very impressed. Very friendly, which is always cool. But, it's a multilingual culture. So, if you add source code to the new lingua, coding is going to be critical. Are you guys getting at the younger generation really when they're young? How young are you going in terms of the new language, software... Thoughts on that? Where do you see that going? >> Starting from school-- >> Elementary school? >> From elementary school, trying to get them in to coding. Universities as well. >> So you are teaching kids to code? >> Of course. And you know, any citizen they can get any certifications free of charge, according to the agreement with Tamkeen Labor Fund. They are willing to train any Bahrainian on any certifications, professional certifications, free of charge. >> That's great. >> To be ready for the next, and making Bahrainians-- >> So there's no excuses. >> Of course. >> There it is. >> We want to give Bahrainians a choice for employment. >> Yeah. >> You know? If that's the future, we have to make them ready for the future. >> That's great. And the cloud's going to give you all that energy. Talk about the relationship with Amazon a bit, Amazon Web Services. Obviously, Teresa Carlson, really behind this, the whole team. I talk about the whole company, I see them getting behind this and partnering with you guys. They're not just coming in here and being Amazon. There's a real co-development ethos. Talk about the relationship you have with... >> Amazon is impressive. I mean, the way that we work, in a partnership way, everybody should think about the long-term, not the short-term part of the partnership. That they should help the economy, the Bahrainis for employment, making sure that the economy will benefit out of this move to Bahrain. And as well, we have to help with the registrations, with the regulations, with any infrastructure connectivity to the international links. Whatever they need, we try to help them because we believe that eventually it will create the ecosystem for the market. >> I know they open up a lot of doors for you guys, and then for us as well. They attracted us to come and cover the territory here, so we're super excited. And I'm so glad we came because I learned a lot. >> Thank you. >> It's been fantastic. Okay, your big idea... Final question. What's your big idea that's going to come out of the cloud? It doesn't have to be the complete... Your idea, in your personal opinion, what is going to happen five years down the road? What is it going to look like? What will this new magic look like? What's the outcome? >> I think it will be a major restructure and reform in the government. So most of the people working into the routine work of buying and configuring, buying and configuring, they can be more focused into the real problem about the innovation, trying to bring solutions to the problems and issues in the country. Trying to develop software that will help the economy to foster, and to look at what is required, what is the vision of the leaders, try to implement those. So most of the people think business. Before, it was isolation. The technical people only, they had their territory, their environment looking at the wires and hardware and configurations, and somebody else looking into the development and a third group of people who are looking strategically, analytics, and how to utilize it. So, I think what we'll have, we'll merge those people, thinking only about the solutions, and how to analyze and how to come with new solutions out of those analytics. >> And that model has been consolidated, those silos have been broken down. With the cloud, it brings it all together. Developers are now on the front lines. >> Of course. And those-- >> And they're driving the business. >> They're driving the business. >> Mohammed, great to have you on, great to see you. Thanks for sharing your insight. And congratulations. Looking forward to tracking all the great coverage. Amazing opportunity here for everyone in the country, and also for Amazon and for us. Great to meet new people. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. You can reach me on Twitter @Furrier, F-U-R-R-I-E-R, or just search, I'm open. All my channels are open, Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, you name it. Say hello, reach out. Stay with us, more all-day coverage after this short break. (tech music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris, this is day three of our coverage. Mohammad Farooq is here, he's the general manager of Brokerage Services GTS at IBM. Mohammad, great to see you again, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, appreciate for having me here. >> You're very welcome. So, big show. All the clients come together in one big tent. >> Yes. >> What do you think? >> It's very exciting. I think we're doing some interesting things with our technology. We have learned a lot from our clients the last two years. We are working very closely with our partners because we believe not one company can do everything in this massive transformation that's underway. So, working with our partners, with our clients on new technologies to specifically accelerate enterprized option of the cloud model and that's exciting for us. >> Partnering, it seems to have new, energized momentum at IBM. I sense a change, is it palpable? I mean, how can you comment on that? >> I think partnering is critical for everybody's success because the industry itself is transforming, and one company cannot achieve all the requirements that clients are asking for, and we have our core competencies. Service Now, our VMWare, our Amazon, our Azure They have their core competencies. But IBM, as a company, is a company that enterprisers trust to move them to cloud and operate them in the cloud. So what we are doing is, to keep that goal in mind, we are saying okay, we are going to take a client from point A, which is non-cloud, to point B, which is cloud native, and in that journey, we will take everybody our partners helped to get there. So that's why, based on client request, we are leveraging our partners, and it has a special meaning for us because it makes our clients successful. >> OK, so, describe exactly what brokerage services does. Is it your job to get people to the cloud? But talk more about that; add some color please. >> I think the brokerage has evolved since I last talked to you a year ago. At this conference, right? A lot of people think brokerage is arbitrage. >> Peter: Is what? >> Arbitrage of services from one provider to the other, that's the limited definition of brokerage. So what we're really calling it is Hybrid Cloud Management System, not brokerage. Brokerage is one part of it. So the Hybrid Cloud Management System is the go-forward strategy of IBM in 2019, 2018 and beyond. Which includes three, four components. One is: how do you bring the entire cloud ecosystem into a federated management maodel? Which includes: business management of IT and cloud, our hybrid. Consumption: a standard consumption model through one point of access to all clouds, internal or external. Third: delivery, how do we deliver services, either automated or workflow? Bi-model, as Gartner calls it, in one model. And four: operations management across public, private, hybrid, internal or external. >> Let me make sure I got this, so, business services in the sense of running IT more like a business, >> Mohammad: Right! >> A consumption model in terms of presenting this in a way that's simple and easy for a business-person to use, a delivery model, in the sense that it's very simple and straightforward and fast to deliver, and then an operations model which makes sure that everything above it works well. >> Yes, and the consumers, in this case, are developers, IT operations people, and DevApp teams, and from a delivery perspective, it is automated or people-work-flow, so you support both, so bringing this federated model together is a very complex undertaking, and IBM services is the strategic partner clients are asking to take them on this journey. Hey, bring this together for us. It's very complex at all layers. It's not a simple thing, and in that bringing it together, partners have a big role to play. Azure, Amazon, Google, Service Now, VMWare, Cisco, they all have critical pieces of it that make this model work, and clients have made choices. Clients already have VMWare. Clients already have Service Now Clients already have Amazon, Azure. But there is no system that brings it together and manages it on an ongoing basis, and the important thing is, the clouds keep changing very fast, and keeping up with the clouds, leveraging the power of the clouds to the right teams within the enterprise to deliver new digital apps, to delivery revenue, is what IBM is enabling our clients to do. >> So wikibot has actually done a fair amount of research around what we call the cloud operating model, we call the Digital Business Platform. AWS has an example of that, as you mention. They all have their approaches to handle those four things that you mentioned. >> Mohammad: Yes! >> But when you get to a customer, who also has to marry across these clouds, sustain some on-premises assets, perhaps some near-premises assets within the cost-service provider, it's what you're trying to do is ensure that they have their operating model that is the appropriate mix of all these different capabilities for their business, we got that right? >> Exactly, you got it. So what we said was every cloud provider, internal or external, or even hosting cloud providers, IBM is a hosting cloud provider. >> Right! >> With the adjustment of business. They had their own model across those four things: Business, consumption, delivery, operations. Now, we cannot operate four silos. Every enterprise is using Amazon, every enterprise has Google, every enterprise has VMWare, every enterprise has IBM. We cannot have four models. >> Dave: Right! >> So what we have done is we have created one standard consistent target operating model. We have integrated all these offerings within that so clients don't have to do it. We offer services to create extensions to it based on variations clients might have, and then operate it as a service for them, so that their path to cloud gets accelerated, and they start leveraging the power of what's good today inside the data centers, and what's available outside in public clouds, in a very secure way. So that is the business IBM is in moving forward, which we are calling it, we are transforming our offerings portfolio, we are calling it: Hybrid Cloud Services Business >> OK so you've got this hybrid operating model, IT operating model that you're envisioning, you're letting the cloud partners do what they do best, >> Mohammad: Right. >> Including your IBM cloud partners, >> Mohammad: Including our operating partners, >> And then you guys are bringing it all together in a framework, in an operating model, That actually can drive business value. >> Exactly, that's what we're doing. We are giving them ease of access from one place, choice of delivery platform, choice of delivery models from one place. Single visibility into how they're running, performing, help, and diagnostics from one place, and then, one billing and payment model, not four. So when I pay monthly bills, I pay based on usage, qualification of that usage across everybody, and then reconciling with my ERP systems, and making the payments. So the CFO has a standard way to manage payments. So that's what IBM is bringing to the table. >> How far could you take this? Could you take this into my SAS portfolio as well, Or is that sort of next step? >> What right now we are doing InfoSecure as a service and platform as a service. Our goal is in '18 and '19 to move to software as a service, because software as a service is much easier because we don't own the infrastructure or the service, we just consume it as electricity, utility. So that we discover the usage of SAS and meter it for usage against our billing model that we have to as B2B contract between a SAS provider and an enterprise and then make sure we've done the license management right. So there's companies like Flexera and others who do that For SAS management there's companies like Skyhigh Networks that recently got acquired, we're bringing those companies in to give us that component. >> But doing that level of brokering amongst the different services, while very useful, valuable, especially if you can provide greater visibility in the cost, because this becomes an increasing feature of COGs in a digital business, right? You still got to do a lot about the people stuff. A lot of folks are focused on ITIL, ITSM, automation at that level. Describe how you'll work with an IT organization and a business to evolve its underlying principals for how the operating model is going to work. >> I think that's probably a more difficult challenge than the technology itself, and if you look at our business, it was a people, it is a people business with GTS. We're more than 90,000 to 100,000 employees babysitting infrastructure for major fortune 500 corporations, and InfoSecure is more into software-defined, that means that we are moving from configuration skills to programming skills, where your programming API is in Amazon to provision infrastructure and deploy, so the skillsets have to definitely move. They have to move to infrastructure teams now have to become programming teams, which they have not been used to. They used to go to VMWare, vSphere, vCenter and configure VMs and deploy VMs. Now they have the right programs to drive and provision infrastructure, so that's one part of it. Second, the process was you do development and then your throw it over to operations, and they'll go configure and deploy production. Now, when you're programming infrastructure. Second, you're doing it in collaboration with developers, because developers are defining their own infrastructure in the cloud. So the process is different. The skills are different, and the process you are to operate in is not the same, it's different. Third, the technologies are different that you work with. So there is change at all levels and what GTS has done is we have put a massive goal in place to re-scale our workforce to take our people and re-scale them in the new process, the new technology and the new roles and that's a very big challenge I think the industry is facing: we don't have enough people who know this. A lot of these people are in Netflix, Facebook, Google, in Silicon Valley, and now, it takes time, it has happened before. The training and the transfer of knowledge, all of that is going on right now. So right now we have a crunch, And the second thing that is becoming more difficult is there's a lot of data coming out of these systems. The volume of data is unbelievable. Like if you look at Splunk and other tools and platforms, they collect a lot of log data. So all these cloud platforms spit out a lot of machine data. Humans cannot comprehend that. It's incomprehensible. So we need machine learning skills and data science skills to understand how these systems are performing. >> Peter: And tools. >> And tools. So we need the AI skills, the data science skills, in addition to the infrastructure design architecture and programming skills. So we really have a challenge on our hands as an industry to kind of effectively build the next-gen management systems. >> Right and we've got, so we've got all these clouds, the ascendancy of clouds has brought cloud creep, >> Mohammad: Right. >> All these bespoke tools along with them, all these different operating models. You're clearly solving a problem there. What's the go-to-market model with all these partners that you've mentioned? You've got cloud, you got PRAM, eventually SAS, >> Yeah, so our cloud go-to-market is three ways We see clients adopting cloud in three ways. One is digital initiatives: They want to go build new IOD apps or mobile apps and they want to put it in production that drive revenue, okay? So we are creating offerings around the DevApps model. We'll say like look, the biggest challenge that our folks have is how to put a app that you build in production. I built a new feature, how can I get it to my client as soon as possible, in a secure way, that can scale and perform, that is the biggest problem with app developers. I can develop anywhere, it's all open-source. I'm not living in, and I can spin up a VM or a container in Amazon and develop a service in two days. But to put it in production, it takes a long time. How can we make offerings that accelerate that? Through our DevApp CICD automation process I was talking about, that's our revenue play. So our go-to-market is driven by how we can generate revenue for our clients through agile offerings for DevApps, that's one go-to-market. Second go-to-market is CIOs are saying like look, I'm spending a lot of money managing my current infrasatructure and my current app portfolio, and I can take money out of the system through cost reductions, so what is my migration and modernization path for my existing portfolio? >> Well, slightly differently, I used to get I used to get my eight to nine percent that I gave back to the business every year simply by following hardware price performance. >> Mohammad: That's exactly right. >> That's not available in the same way. I have to do it through process and automation. >> All automation right? So then we have to look at everything. What part of the portfolio can move to Amazon or cannot? What other refactoring I have to do to microservices and containers to build portability to move to the cloud? So we have created a migration, a global migration practice at IBM in a factory in India and in the US where we have created offerings to work with the CIO right from planning, cost planning, portfolio planning, application design planning and design review, to lift-and-shift, to deploy in cloud and operate it. So we have a series of offerings that track the life-cycle of migration. So that's our second go-to-market path. Our third go-to-market path is: Hey, my business per units are shadow IT; they're already in the cloud, now my CEO is telling me: Hey mister CIO, you make sure they all work and they're secure, and there's no loss in data. And this infrastructure is now in cloud and on-prem. So how do I provide, manage service, to manage your infrastructure and workloads in the cloud? IBM has offerings that will directly provide you multi-cloud management as managed service. So we are taking three client journeys and we are building go-to-market offerings around those three, and we have built, we have re-designed IBM portfolio to operate on those lines. >> Do the digital initiatives, chief digital officer, obviously, target their CIO for the portfolio rationalization optimization and line of business through the shadow IT? >> Right! >> And you bring those together with a constant consistent operating model? >> Exactly, so all three journeys lead to one operating model. >> Dave: Yeah! >> But going back to what Dave said, and we have time for just a little bit more, is, is, no offense, there's no way you can do it all by yourself. >> Mohammad: You cannot. >> So what are some of the core, what are some of the most important partnerships that users need to be looking to? >> I think we have defined what's goal to us. Not always go back to, if you are clearly going to market, what is the core competency of IBM? Okay, with (mumbles) we're going to service this company for a long time, right? We made sure we are, we bring the complexity and control and we manage the complexity; that's our core business. We had mainframe business, we had software business, and a very profitable software business. So we've done all three, hardware, software, and services. As we go forward, cloud services, cloud managed services, our IBM services, is a core competency for us, which is planning, design, managed services, and services integration, to bring these tool sets together from different partners, and operationalizing it, and babysitting it and offering it as a service. So services business is our core offering. Now in the software space, which is the management software, which is service now, (mumbles) Cisco, there there is many layers to it, as I talked about the four things: consumption, operations management, business management, >> And service delivery >> And service delivery. And in service delivery we have three choices: we have VMWare, we have Microsoft and we have IBM. We have stitched it together in a federated framework. The stitching together is our core competence. Okay, Operations management. We have created a federated data lake because data will drive everything going forward. So we own the data lake as our core competency and Watson driving intelligence. But some of the monitoring tools like AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk, that collect the data, those are our partners. We're integrating that into our Watson framework. So we're looking at core versus non-core in all four layers, and wherever there's a overlap, we're creating unique vertical go-to-market strategies. Here, for this segment, we overlap with you, we agree to compete, to your clients you can lead with that, for our clients we'll lead with ours, so we agree to disagree, but we are going to stick to the target operating model, so that our clients are successful. So there's no confusion we are creating in their minds. So its a very complex dance at this point. >> But you laid it out and it's coherent. >> Right. >> It's got to start there. >> The most important thing is we need to tell our clients what is our core, and what is the core we're going to stand behind? And that core delivers them bottom-line value to move from point A to point B and be successful in the cloud. >> Well Mohammad, I think you've defined those swim lanes, you obviously trust and you've got the trust of your partners, trust of your customers. Like you say, you agree to compete where it makes sense, and you bring core competency and value to differentiate from your competition, so, >> Right. >> Dave: Congratulations on laying that out. We really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Think 2018, we'll be right back. >> Mohammad: Thank you very much. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's live coverage from Nutanix .NEXT in Nice, France. Always love when we get to dig in of some of the practitioners, the users at this conference 'cause a lot of 'em have shown up for this show. Happen to welcome to the program first time guest Mohammed Ibrahim, who's the head of IT with Securities and Investment Company or SICO headquartered out of Bahrain. Great to see you Hello, how are you? Good to see you, too. It's really my pleasure to participate and to be here and joining the .NEXT Conference. I'm very lucky to be here. Thank you so much. And you've been at both of the European shows? Exactly, I have attended last year in Vienna, and that was really good as well. And this year I really see a very big development and enhancement and the difference between this year and last year which is a very good progress. So, Mohammed, first tell us about SICO. How long's the company been around? Kind of the breadth of coverage and locations and the like. Yeah, SICO, it's actually, it's a wholesale bank headquartered in Bahrain, and we are a premiere wholesale bank in the region, Middle East and North Africa. We do business in two different lines like asset management because we manage more than one billion US dollar as asset management and portfolio managers, and we are also a custodian house. And the brokerage business, this is one of our main business lines as well because we are brokers and we started as brokers, and now we are a wholesale bank. Our coverage as I said is MENA, Middle East and North Africa, and we have our also subsidiary brokerage arm in United Arab Emirates. It's SICO UAE. It's our brokerage arm there, and they are also working under SICO. You were telling me SICO's been around since 1995. Give us a little bit of your background. How long have you been on there? Actually, yeah, SICO established in 1995, and I joined SICO in 2007, and since that time I'm at SICO, I started as the head of infrastructure, and now I am the head of IT looking after the whole IT and services in SICO. Maybe explain to us those roles, infrastructure and IT, and kind of how many people, how many data centers, that kind of stuff. We have actually one data center which is on the main side, and we have another data center in our DR side, that's the recovery side. And yeah, it's very, very sophisticated because we are operating as a bank and we have a core banking system. We have a trading platform. We are serving more than 1,900 customers, and our customers are government, pension fund, high-worth net individuals, corporates, so we have fund managers. This all our customers, and this is actually very critical customers for us. We are in IT of course. We have couple of units. We have the infrastructure and application. I was actually entitled for the infrastructure, looking after the platform and security network, and recently from couple of years back, I have been promoted to be the head of IT and looking after the applications as well as the infrastructure. Great, and you've got security under your preview which I have to imagine is taking a lot of time and budget these days. Exactly, it was a very, again, critical task and a critical position because handling the security, it was really important for the business and for our data and our confidentiality. So, it was really a good practice and a good experience. And now we are actually enhancing more in our information security policy because as you know, cyber security is one of the important topics, especially when you go to the digitalization. And this is our main purpose and our main target, is to do digitalization automation and enhancing this domain, plus ensuring the security is very standard, very high level, matching the whole expectations, the fund regulator, as well as the worldwide standards. Brought up a great point, Mohammed, there. I want you to explain to our audience what is digitization mean to SICO? For us, digitalization is actually, it's more than giving online services. Automation for our services as well. Make it easy because the wholesale bank actually have different line of services, and getting into access to your data, to your portfolio managing your orders, placing your orders, getting your positions, guaranteeing your cash statements, this is all actually, transferring your cash, this is all something that it's very important for the customer. And in many places, even in the Gulf, even in the area, it happens manually, so we are trying to be more automated, more smart, and this is for us, is the digitalization in the time being. Okay, so let's dig into the part of your job but your whole job too, the infrastructure itself. What's the role of infrastructure when you're doing the digitalization? You've probably gone through some transformations there. If you can tell us a little bit about kind of what it was like, and kind of what led to where you are and where you're going? Mainly, this is a very important question actually, and I love to answer it because when I joined SICO, it was a traditional infrastructure. As many people did, it's a physical implementation. You have servers, you have network switches, so it was a very traditional. And this was actually the challenge is to move SICO from the traditional way of the infrastructure into very simple way and very standard way, allowing you to grow, allowing you to add more applications, allowing you to really develop and focus more on the functionalities other than infrastructure. Since you also have limited resources in terms of IT resources, so you need really to think about simple infrastructure giving you the functionalities you expect, giving you the stability, that resiliency, and as well as giving you the opportunity to add more sort of critical applications on top of that. So I have to imagine in your time virtualization played a role in this, and when did Nutanix come into the picture? Actually, Nutanix came into the picture when we decided to go with our online and trading platform, SICO Life. SICO Life, it's actually a very important and critical product for us because it allows our customers to get the direct market access, and we are currently online with seven markets, and we are going for the globe as well because we are planning to go for Europe and US markets. So to build this kind of critical system you have to have a cloud. You have to think about virtualization because again, following the traditional implementation of infrastructure, it will not help you. And it will take a long, long time, and it will be very complex in terms of administration and support. For this reason, we have to had actually our private cloud, because again, you will stuck with the regulator if you go with the public cloud. If you tell him I'm going for a public cloud, he will tell you it's against confidentiality. You cannot take the customer information and put it somewhere. So we said, okay, we will go for our private cloud, and this was a challenge. We need a hyper-converged infrastructure. We need infrastructure that is smart enough to be hosting all our VMs with a central monitoring, central sort of administration, and easy as well. So we have converted more than couple of solutions around the world, and Nutanix was one of the proposed solutions coming to us. And we have done a very sophisticated vendor selection, and I think we have taken the right decision when we have selected Nutanix to be our infrastructure for a trading platform. Before I get into the Nutanix a little bit more, some people when they hear I built a private cloud, they say, well, you virtualized some environment, you did some things. What were your internal requirement? What makes it a cloud versus just okay, I've automated some things, or I've done some things? Did you have certain criteria that you went through or what did you do? Did you benchmark yourselves against the public cloud from kind of the usage and the agility? How do you sort that out? Again, it's very important, the question, because this was the strategy when I joined SICO from the beginning. As I said, we have or we had actually, a traditional infrastructure and the market, and the standards was ahead actually. So you have to bring SICO infrastructure into the standards. Traditional infrastructure, it doesn't give you that facility to grow and to add more sort of systems. It's very difficult, so this was actually the criteria and the requirements from our side. We need to have a simple infrastructure where we can add additional servers seamlessly. We can grow, we can expand, we can add more resources without rebuilding the whole infrastructure because the physical implementation, if you're stuck with the capacity, you have to shut down the server, bring a new server, do another implementation, bring everybody involved to do the new implementation. But with the virtualization, it's easy. It's a virtual server. It's a data, you take it somewhere. Just only you need to provide the infrastructure that can host it. And with the Nutanix or with the hyper-converged infrastructure, you can whenever you need additional resources, you can add resources, and you can keep your application running as is. You can keep your data as is, and without interrupting the business, without interrupting the operation, and without interrupting customers as well. And this was actually the criteria when we selected and when we decided to go with our hybrid-converged infrastructure. Okay, that's great. Do you have any metrics as to kind of operations or how many headcount you have working on things? What's been the impact of the planned Nutanix? This what we have done actually. I told you we did like a vendor selection, and we compared two different vendors. And actually, to be more honest, four vendors actually. Monitoring and developing and comparing different technologies. So if you go with the traditional infrastructure and implementation, how it will go in terms of support, in terms of implementation, timelines, the cost, post-implementation, support, even with the converged infrastructure because I remember in that time we had a converged infrastructure where some people like well-known companies were talking about converged infrastructure. And we had the hyper-converged infrastructure solution, which was a very a new into the market. For this reason, we had taken, I think, a decision where everybody said, Mohammed and SICO, I think you are taking a very what you can say? It's a very new decision. It's something that is-- Say it's risky? Exactly, some people consider it a little bit risky because you are doing something, it's still not yet many people did it, especially in the financial services and the banking sector. But as I told you, it was a challenge that you had to take and you had to go through because you have to have your own private cloud. Why, because you have to host whatever VMs you need. Whenever you need to add a VM, it will be very easy for you. Whenever you want to expand, it will be also easy for you. And with your resources, current IT resources, you can still handle this sophisticated systems and the critical systems. And this was a challenge because again every time you implement a new system, you add to payroll additional resources and you hire more resources. The business will be killed. You said something I've heard lots from financial markets these days is, the business is changing, so you need to have the agility to be able to respond and deliver what you need. And to be honest, again, I will tell you frankly speaking, now the management and the business decision makers, they look to the IT that they have a buttons. When I tell you something, you should press the button and bring it to me. They don't actually think about how much sophisticated that your system have already in the background. So they don't care about the technicality. They care more about the functionality and the deliverables. IT, it's very now challenging and the decision makers and the IT management and the technical resources we have a very challenge, a very high challenge, that whenever they get the requirements and a lot of priorities are coming from the business, they have to be always ready. So if you don't have a simple and a proper infrastructure that can really flexible, help you achieve all of these kind of deliverables, then you will stuck. And people will look at you like you are in 19th century. So we are now in 91, we are growing. We have to grow. We have to be very fast like others. It sounds like your saying Nutanix provides the easy button for the infrastructure. From my experience and from the implementation we have done, I think Nutanix, with our systems, it could really achieve our target. And we could really implement the trading platform in a very good time as we expected, even less. And we could really do this kind of performance. We could really achieve the deliverables as we expected. We have more than expected performance. We have the right choice in terms of expansion. We have also good support from Nutanix, which is really helping a lot in terms of critical systems because it's a 24 by 7. I cannot actually afford a couple minutes even downtime. It's the markets. I'm accessing the markets, so I'm placing orders, and these orders are money. And if the customer while placing the order his order did not reach the market because of the system, he will kill us. (laughs) Exactly, this is how much, and actually it's seconds because the price in the markets is changing, and the customer is placing the order. So if I did not give him the very stable platform that he can really place the order into the market with this moment and then it got delayed, then he will lose money. And I will lose the customer, and I will lose the business. For this reason, it's very critical and it's very important to have such a simple, flexible, reliable solution for your system. Mohammed Ibrahim, really appreciate the updates on what SICO has been doing. Thank you so much and best of luck. We'll be back with lots more programming here from theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas. We're here at the Mandalay Bay hotel. This place is packed. We're right by the escalators, jamming all day, roughly 20,000 people here. Mohammed Farooq is with me. He's the GM of the cloud brokerage services under the GTS division of IBM. Mohammed, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate for having me here. >> You're welcome. We were talking, having a great conversation off camera about your history, coming over from India, getting an education in Oklahoma, doing startups, selling companies and ultimately ending up at IBM. Let's start where you are today. Your role as GM of brokerage, cloud brokerage services. What does that entail? What does that mean, cloud brokerage services? >> Two things here, right? My role at IBM is one part of the question and what is cloud brokerage is the second part. I'll start with cloud brokerage. Cloud brokerage is the concept that has emerged in the last five years where as cloud services became one of the choices for consuming IT, the role of enterprise IT had to change from being a manager of technology to brokering what services businesses use either from internal IT or from external cloud providers. The CIOs and ITO organization had to take on the role of a broker. To play, effectively to play the role of IT broker, you need to really change the current IT model, which is people process technology. That had to be automated into a new platform that gave birth to the new requirement that you need a broker via technology in a platform where you can connect demand to supply. Demand can come from any business unit, either for infrastructure or applications or managed services, and you can connect it to the right supplier, just like manufacturing, just in time. The CIO would optimize the demand and supply and make sure the right services are available to be pulled at the right time for the right user. This is what Amazon has done. This is was Azure is doing. This is what SoftLayer has done. Give access to IT services on demand. But can you aggregate that and provide a standard consumption operating model for the enterprise? That is the new broker role and the broker's platform from IBM basically enables that role for the enterprise. >> Is that software? Is that an abstraction layer, a manger of managers, or is it people in process? >> It is both. It is an abstraction layer that connects to all cloud providers, internal or external. It has automated new processors for consumption, service management and governance, and it creates new roles in the enterprise for IT organizations and business users. It's a complete rethink of how IT operates, but importantly, it connects to the current processors. That's where you can run hybrid IT. You can connect to service now, to the current i2 processors in the enterprise. You can connect to the current governance dashboards and you can connect to the current data centers. We do have current applications on. It connects to the current and it connects to the new world of automated self-service and brings it together. >> So, you go back 20, 25 years, this business that you're in now was a break-fix business. It's totally transformed. Talk about the CIO. What's on his or her mind today? What should they be focused on? >> I think the CIO's role changes every two to three years. The areas of focus changes. Previously, they were in the business of building applications and managing it and managing the infrastructure. Then the packaged applications came, SAP Oracle. Then they were in the business of implementing. Then they started building web applications again for awhile and managing it. Now we have SAS, software as a service, so you can just rent an application. You have a pass. You don't have to build a bigger web. You can rent it. You have infrastructure, you can rent it. Excuse me. The CIO's role now, the CIO's role now is how do I govern it? That's the priority. I don't have to go build it. I need to govern what I have, but effectively. Second, I need to provide access to services that my business needs, and I need to do that at speed. Third, I need to be able to manage it security wise, compliance wise, whether the data is staying in the right places. It's not being exposed because data breach is a big issue. My infrastructure doesn't have holes for security. It can scale. So the concerns of the CIO are now different. The risks are different and that's a new role the broker is taking on. The most important role for the CIO right now is give me visibility into where my stuff is. It's in Amazon, Azure, SoftLayer. I've lost control of it. Tell me where it is and it's very complex, simplify this for me. >> It's interesting to hear you, Mohammed, talk about the CIO used to develop apps and then commercial, off-the-shelf applications came and then the web apps, they started developing apps again, et cetera, that progression. Now there's SAS. I wonder if I can get your comment on this. The other sort of trend that we see, we talk about it all the time, is that the, the companies talk about digital transformation all the time, part of that digital transformation is becoming SAS companies. Every company's becoming a SAS company. What's the role of a CIO in this new-- I think Benioff said it. There'll be more SAS companies for non-tech companies than tech companies. What's the role of a CIO in that world? >> If you look at it, the differentiation that a corporation has today is the digital experiences it requires either on the supply chain side or it's customers. Those applications are custom SAS applications that they're building. The CIO's role is to make sure it becomes the operator of SAS apps. Right? >> Interviewer: Whether internal-- >> Internal or external. So if his business units develop custom SAS apps, either mobile apps or social media apps or analytics apps, those apps should be available and running and scalable in the cloud 24 seven. Basically, he becomes a SAS operator. When you're a SAS operator, you're also a governor. Industry is calling it hybrid cloud, many clouds, multi-clouds and the role of the CIO is to operate them and make sure they're governed. Third, that it's business get access to the right services at the right time because that time is very critical. The connected stakes of an operator and governor is real-time access to services, continuous innovation and speed, and control. >> This is a huge skilling issue for CIOs. Is it not? The skills transformation, you're going from provisioning LUNs to being a cloud broker. How's that going for your clients and how are you helping? >> That's where IBM comes in. IBM is saying for us to play a role in a digital world we have to change the way our relationship work with our customers. So if the CIO is becoming a broker, then what is my relationship with a cloud broker in the enterprise? As adoption is stating now, in the beginning, there's no skillset in the enterprise to operate this model. IBM has developed the technology and the skills and telling the CIO we can build this and operate it for you. And when you are assured, we can transfer this to you. It's a build, operate, transform relationship that we are building so that the CIOs in Fortune 500 can strategically partner with IBM and take this journey together. The role of a broker will be different in every enterprise, customized to that enterprise based on it's priorities. IBM is basically redefining the experience and the relationship to it's customers. In turn, we are enabling our customers to transform faster, develop value to it's business faster and become digital faster. >> Let's talk about IBM's business GTS specifically. I said off camera and I'll say it again, many people may not realize 60% of IBM's business is still services, combined GTS and the consulting services, about 30% is software, but only about 10% is hardware these days, including the operating systems. It's quite a transformation that Ginni has effected. I certainly remember the days of John Akers when IBM was splitting apart and trying to focus on different parts of the industry and Gertsner said no, single point of contact for the customer, we will become a global service provider, very successful strategy. Now we're entering this cognitive age. What's the strategy, specifically with regard to GTS? Are you trying to codify that deep expertise and put into software, like that abstraction layer we talked about? It is sort of a hybrid model? I wonder if you could summarize. >> Two things. What was true when Lou Gertsner said we want to provide a single point of contact and we're going to put this together, that was systems integration business. We will take all the piece parts for the customer and we will take the responsibility to deliver it reliably and make sure it's available and it's performing. The large corporations will depend on us to run their enterprise IT systems. Fast forward 2017, we are now a service integration business. We are integrating services from cloud providers, either internal or external. We're still playing the same role. We are the single point of consumption and integration and delivery for the new supply chain. The supply chain now is 100 times more fragmented than it was before. >> Interviewer: It's way more complex. >> It's more complex. >> Yeah, this is a huge opportunity. >> This is the biggest opportunity, again, for IBM and we are practically going after that opportunity. Hey, our role is the same. We are the single point of consumption and delivery and governance for our service integration and service delivery. That's how IBM is defining it's role, again, in the services era from a systems era. Second, how does it impact our revenue? We have a massive opportunity, every dollar spent on cloud services, customers have to spend money on managing it, integrating it, operating it and enhancing it. We are building offerings that provide value on top of the cloud providers in all these areas and we manage it. We see significant revenue opportunities. The way you distributed the revenue structure of IBM, we see a 10x opportunity for us doing that. >> Well, so there was a while where people thought that, that to the extent that you could automate, it would eat into the services business. That's not happening you're saying. >> Right, so two things are happening, right? That is happening, but we see a tremendous opportunity there for IBM because IBM has invested significantly in automation and big data software and cognitive. Basically, what we're saying is, yes our core business is getting commoditized, our basic business, but we are adding higher value at your services in software. We are becoming a software plus services business, practically. From a software side, on GTS, we will drive higher margin revenues and differentiation in higher value added services that are digital. We'll complement that with our services business that can scale at volume. In effect, we are creating a hybrid business model for the software plus services era for IBM. >> You're becoming a software company like everybody else. >> Mohammed: Yes. >> Right? >> Right. And IBM has, IBM has seen it and IBM has responded to it. IBM is invested in it, so we are building the ideas of service platform. We have invested in it. We're delivering to the market. We are re-skilling our workforce and we are creating a superior method of delivery for the cognitive era using a cognitive technology services delivery platform. >> You actually have a, as a service component of software in your PNL, is that right? >> Mohammed: Exactly. >> And that's the growing part of your business? >> Mohammed: We're tracking that line item as software as a service. >> We have to break, but I just want to spend a minute on your personal story. You came from India. You were highly educated, both in India and in this country, and now you're a senior executive at IBM. Quick story about your journey 'cause I love it. >> My journey started in India. I was always fascinated with technology in the United States because when I grew up, the United States was the country that put the man on the moon. We always looked at, I always looked at the United States as, as the pioneer in technology and I wanted to see how I could learn from it. How could I professionally grow from it? I did not know how, but a life is a journey. It got me to Oklahoma on a scholarship from a Master's program in operations research and computer science and then an MBA in finance. I move to Austin looking for a job, from Oklahoma. I worked for the government, the governor's office for a while, almost three years and then in the dotcom wave, I wanted to be in giving birth to new technology. I joined a startup in Austin that got acquired by Commerce One. From there, the journey took me to working with SAP, to building their middleware platform and then brought me back to Austin as a CTO for Texas again where I worked very closely with IBM for managing the state's data centers and building the software platform using the soul from our client and the software portfolio from IBM. What I realized during that time is really, the nature of IT services, consumption and delivery will change with cloud and it needs a new operating model of CIOs and CTOs. I created a company by CIOs for CIOs of how they would operate in a new utility model of it's combined cutbacks and outbacks and it's unified consumption across a very diverse supply chain. >> This is 2007 timeframe, right? >> Mohammed: 2007 timeframe. >> Just before the downturn. Perfect timing. >> Right, so leverage the tailwinds of cloud to build an operating model for hybrid, which is not being called hybrid, but was really a consumption centric model and a supply chain model from manufacturing that I learned at Commerce One and SAP. I said the supply chain concepts are very true for IT now because every unit within the supply chain is a service. >> The vision was to transform IT consumption. >> To transform IT consumption, delivery and governance in the enterprise. That led to Gravitant and the brokerage platform that IBM acquired in 2015. Currently my role at IBM is to drive this transformation into the enterprise and in turn, transform the delivery model for GTS. >> Well that's where we started. We'll have to leave it there, Mohammed. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. >> Mohammed: Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to meet you today. >> Okay, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. It's theCUBE. We're live from InterConnect.

>>Mm. >>Okay. Hello, and welcome to the Cubes Coverage of the International Women in Tech Showcase featuring National Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We have a great guest here of any theory a PJ head of aerospace and satellite for A W S A P J s Asia Pacific in Japan. Great to have you on many thanks for joining us. Talk about Space and International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. >>So obviously, aerospace space satellite is an area that's growing. It's changing. AWS has made a lot of strides closure, and I had a conversation last year about this. Remember when Andy Jassy told me about this initiative to 2.5 years or so ago? It was like, Wow, that makes a lot of sense Ground station, etcetera. So it just makes a lot of sense, a lot of heavy lifting, as they say in the satellite aerospace business. So you're leading the charge over there in a p J. And you're leading women in space and beyond. Tell us what's the Storey? How did you get there? What's going on. >>Thanks, John. Uh, yes. So I need the Asia Pacific business for Clint, um, as part of Amazon Web services, you know, that we have in industry business vertical that's dedicated to looking after our space and space customers. Uh, my journey began really? Three or four years ago when I started with a W s. I was based out of Australia. Uh, and Australia had a space agency that was being literally being born. Um, and I had the great privilege of meeting the country's chief scientist. At that point. That was Dr Alan Finkel. Uh, and we're having a conversation. It was really actually an education conference. And it was focused on youth and inspiring the next generation of students. Uh, and we hit upon space. Um, and we had this conversation, and at that stage, we didn't have a dedicated industry business vertical at A W s well supported space customers as much as we did many other customers in the sector, innovative customers. And after the conversation with Dr Finkel, um, he offered to introduce me, uh, to Megan Clark, who was back back then the first CEO of the Australian Space Agency. So that's literally how my journey into space started. We had a conversation. We worked out how we could possibly support the Australian Space Agency's remit and roadmap as they started growing the industry. Uh, and then a whole industry whole vertical was set up, clinic came on board. I have now a global team of experts around me. Um, you know, they've pretty much got experience from everything creating building a satellite, launching a satellite, working out how to down link process all those amazing imagery that we see because, you know, um, contrary to what a lot of people think, Uh, space is not just technology for a galaxy far, far away. It is very much tackling complex issues on earth. Um, and transforming lives with information. Um, you know, arranges for everything from wildfire detection to saving lives. Um, smart, smart agriculture for for farmers. So the time of different things that we're doing, Um, and as part of the Asia Pacific sector, uh, my task here is really just to grow the ecosystem. Women are an important part of that. We've got some stellar women out here in region, both within the AWS team, but also in our customer and partner sectors. So it's a really interesting space to be. There's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of opportunities and there's an incredible amount of growth so specific, exciting space to be >>Well, I gotta say I'm super inspired by that. One of the things that we've been talking about the Cuban I was talking to my co host for many, many years has been the democratisation of digital transformation. Cloud computing and cloud scale has democratised and change and level the playing field for many. And now space, which was it's a very complex area is being I want kind of democratised. It's easier to get access. You can launch a satellite for very low cost compared to what it was before getting access to some of the technology and with open source and with software, you now have more space computing things going on that's not out of reach. So for the people watching, share your thoughts on on that dynamic and also how people can get involved because there are real world problems to solve that can be solved now. That might have been out of reach, but now it's cloud. Can you share your thoughts. >>That's right. So you're right, John. Satellites orbiting There's more and more satellites being launched every day. The sensors are becoming more sophisticated. So we're collecting huge amounts of data. Um, one of our customers to cut lab tell us that we're collecting today three million square kilometres a day. That's gonna increase to about three billion over the next five years. So we're already reaching a point where it's impossible to store, analyse and make sense of such massive amounts of data without cloud computing. So we have services which play a very critical role. You know, technologies like artificial intelligence machine learning. Help us help these customers build up products and solutions, which then allows us to generate intelligence that's serving a lot of other sectors. So it could be agriculture. It could be disaster response and recovery. Um, it could be military intelligence. I'll give you an example of something that's very relevant, and that's happening in the last couple of weeks. So we have some amazing customers. We have Max our technologies. They use a W S to store their 100 petabytes imagery library, and they have daily collection, so they're using our ground station to gather insight about a lot of changing conditions on Earth. Usually Earth observation. That's, you know, tracking water pollution, water levels of air pollution. But they're also just tracking, um, intelligence of things like military build up in certain areas. Capella space is another one of our customers who do that. So over the last couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, uh, we've been watching, uh, images that have been collected by these commercial satellites, and they've been chronicling the build up, for instance, of Russian forces on Ukraine's borders and the ongoing invasion. They're providing intelligence that was previously only available from government sources. So when you talk about the democratisation of space, high resolution satellite images are becoming more and more ridiculous. Um, I saw the other day there was, uh, Anderson Cooper, CNN and then behind him, a screenshot from Capella, which is satellite imagery, which is very visible, high resolution transparency, which gives, um, respected journalists and media organisations regular contact with intelligence, direct intelligence which can help support media storytelling and help with the general public understanding of the crisis like what's happening in Ukraine. And >>I think on that point is, people can relate to it. And if you think about other things with computer vision, technology is getting so much stronger. Also, there's also metadata involved. So one of the things that's coming out of this Ukraine situation not only is tracking movements with the satellites in real time, but also misinformation and disinformation. Um, that's another big area because you can, uh, it's not just the pictures, it's what they mean. So it's well beyond just satellite >>well, beyond just satellite. Yeah, and you know, not to focus on just a crisis that's happening at the moment. There's 100 other use cases which were helping with customers around the globe. I want to give you a couple of other examples because I really want people to be inspired by what we're doing with space technology. So right here in Singapore, I have a company called Hero Factory. Um, now they use AI based on Earth observation. They have an analytics platform that basically help authorities around the region make key decisions to drive sustainable practises. So change detection for shipping Singapore is, you know, it's lots of traffic. And so if there's oil spills, that can be detected and remedy from space. Um, crop productivity, fruit picking, um, even just crop cover around urban areas. You know, climate change is an increasing and another increasing, uh, challenges global challenge that we need to tackle and space space technology actually makes it possible 15 50% of what they call e CVS. Essential climate variables can only be measured from space. So we have companies like satellite through, uh, one of our UK customers who are measuring, um, uh, carbon emissions. And so the you know, the range of opportunities that are out there, like you said previously untouched. We've just opened up doors for all sorts of innovations to become possible. >>It totally is intoxicating. Some of the fun things you can discuss with not only the future but solving today's problems. So it's definitely next level kind of things happening with space and space talent. So this is where you start to get into the conversation like I know some people in these major technical instance here in the US as sophomore second year is getting job offers. So there's a There's a there's a space race for talent if you will, um and women talent in particular is there on the table to So how How can you share that discussion? Because inspiration is one thing. But then people want to know what to do to get in. So how do you, um how do you handle the recruiting and motivating and or working with organisations to just pipeline interest? Because space is one of the things you get addicted to. >>Yeah. So I'm a huge advocate for science, technology, engineering, math. We you know, we highlights them as a pathway into space into technology. And I truly believe the next generation of talent will contribute to the grand challenges of our time. Whether that climate change or sustainability, Um, it's gonna come from them. I think I think that now we at Amazon Web services. We have several programmes that we're working on to engage kids and especially girls to be equipped with the latest cloud skills. So one of the programmes that we're delivering this year across Singapore Australia uh, we're partnering with an organisation called the Institute for Space Science, Exploration and Technology and we're launching a programme called Mission Discovery. It's basically students get together with an astronaut, NASA researcher, technology experts and they get an opportunity to work with these amazing characters, too. Create and design their own project and then the winning project will be launched will be taken up to the International space station. So it's a combination of technology skills, problem solving, confidence building. It's a it's a whole range and that's you know, we that's for kids from 14 to about 18. But actually it, in fact, because the pipeline build is so important not just for Amazon Web services but for industry sector for the growth of the overall industry sector. Uh, there's several programmes that were involved in and they range from sophomore is like you said all the way to to high school college a number of different programmes. So in Singapore, specifically, we have something called cloud Ready with Amazon Web services. It's a very holistic clouds killing programme that's curated for students from primary school, high school fresh graduates and then even earlier careers. So we're really determined to work together closely and it the lines really well with the Singapore government's economic national agenda, um so that that's one way and and then we have a tonne of other programmes specifically designed for women. So last year we launched a programme called She Does It's a Free online training learning programme, and the idea is really to inspire professional women to consider a career in the technology industry and show them pathways, support them through that learning process, bring them on board, help drive a community spirit. And, you know, we have a lot of affinity groups within Amazon, whether that's women in tech or a lot of affinity groups catering for a very specific niches. And all of those we find, uh, really working well to encourage that pipeline development that you talk about and bring me people that I can work with to develop and build these amazing solutions. >>Well, you've got so much passion. And by the way, if you have, if you're interested in a track on women in space, would be happy to to support that on our site, send us storeys, we'll we'll get We'll get them documented so super important to get the voices out there. Um and we really believe in it. So we love that. I have to ask you as the head of a PJ for a W S uh aerospace and satellite. You've you've seen You've been on a bunch of missions in the space programmes of the technologies. Are you seeing how that's trajectory coming to today and now you mentioned new generation. What problems do you see that need to be solved for this next generation? What opportunities are out there that are new? Because you've got the lens of the past? You're managing a big part of this new growing emerging business for us. But you clearly see the future. And you know, the younger generation is going to solve these problems and take the opportunities. What? What are they? >>Yes, Sometimes I think we're leaving a lot, uh, to solve. And then other times, I think, Well, we started some of those conversations. We started those discussions and it's a combination of policy technology. We do a lot of business coaching, so it's not just it's not just about the technology. We do think about the broader picture. Um, technology is transferring. We know that technology is transforming economies. We know that the future is digital and that diverse backgrounds, perspective, skills and experiences, particularly those of women minority, the youth must be part of the design creation and the management of the future roadmaps. Um, in terms of how do I see this going? Well, it's been sort of we've had under representation of women and perhaps youth. We we just haven't taken that into consideration for for a long time now. Now that gap is slowly becoming. It's getting closer and closer to being closed. Overall, we're still underrepresented. But I take heart from the fact that if we look at an agency like the US Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, that's a relatively young space agency in your A. I think they've got about three or 400 people working for them at this point in time, and the average age of that cohort John, is 28. Some 40% of its engineers and scientists are women. Um, this year, NASA is looking to recruit more female astronauts. Um, they're looking to recruit more people with disabilities. So in terms of changing in terms of solving those problems, whatever those problems are, we started the I guess we started the right representation mix, so it doesn't matter. Bring it on, you know, whether it is climate change or this ongoing crisis, productive. Um, global crisis around the world is going to require a lot more than just a single shot answer. And I think having diversity and having that representation, we know that it makes a difference to innovation outputs. We know that it makes a difference to productivity, growth, profit. But it's also just the right thing to do for so long. We haven't got it right, and I think if we can get this right, we will be able to solve the majority of some of the biggest things that we're looking at today. >>And the diversity of problems in the diversity of talent are two different things. But they come together because you're right. It's not about technology. It's about all fields of study sociology. It could be political science. Obviously you mentioned from the situation we have now. It could be cybersecurity. Space is highly contested. We dated long chat about that on the Last Cube interview with AWS. There's all these new new problems and so problem solving skills. You don't need to have a pedigree from Ivy League school to get into space. This is a great opportunity for anyone who can solve problems because their new No one's seen them before. >>That's exactly right. And you know, every time we go out, we have sessions with students or we're at universities. We tell them, Raise your voices. Don't be afraid to use your voice. It doesn't matter what you're studying. If you think you have something of value to say, say it. You know, by pushing your own limits, you push other people's limits, and you may just introduce something that simply hasn't been part of before. So your voice is important, and we do a lot of lot of coaching encouraging, getting people just to >>talk. >>And that in itself is a great start. I think >>you're in a very complex sector, your senior leader at AWS Amazon Web services in a really fun, exciting area, aerospace and satellite. And for the young people watching out there or who may see this video, what advice would you have for the young people who are trying to navigate through the complexities of now? Third year covid. You know, seeing all the global changes, um, seeing that massive technology acceleration with digital transformation, digitisation it's here, digital world we're in. >>It could >>be confusing. It could be weird. And so how would you talk to that person and say, Hey, it's gonna be okay? And what advice would you give? >>It is absolutely going to be okay. Look, from what I know, the next general are far more fluent in digital than I am. I mean, they speak nerd. They were born speaking nerd, so I don't have any. I can't possibly tell them what to do as far as technology is concerned because they're so gung ho about it. But I would advise them to spend time with people, explore new perspectives, understand what the other is trying to do or achieve, and investing times in a time in new relationships, people with different backgrounds and experience, they almost always have something to teach you. I mean, I am constantly learning Space tech is, um it's so complicated. Um, I can't possibly learn everything I have to buy myself just by researching and studying. I am totally reliant on my community of experts to help me learn. So my advice to the next generation kids is always always in this time in relationships. And the second thing is, don't be disheartened, You know, Um this has happened for millennia. Yes, we go up, then we come down. But there's always hope. You know, there there is always that we shape the future that we want. So there's no failure. We just have to learn to be resilient. Um, yeah, it's all a learning experience. So stay positive and chin up, because we can. We can do it. >>That's awesome. You know, when you mentioned the Ukraine in the Russian situation, you know, one of the things they did they cut the Internet off and all telecommunications and Elon Musk launched a star linked and gives them access, sending them terminals again. Just another illustration. That space can help. Um, and these in any situation, whether it's conflict or peace and so Well, I have you here, I have to ask you, what is the most important? Uh uh, storeys that are being talked about or not being talked about are both that people should pay attention to. And they look at the future of what aerospace satellite these emerging technologies can do for the world. What's your How would you kind of what are the most important things to pay attention to that either known or maybe not being talked about. >>They have been talked about John, but I'd love to see more prominent. I'd love to see more conversations about stirring the amazing work that's being done in our research communities. The research communities, you know, they work in a vast area of areas and using satellite imagery, for instance, to look at climate change across the world is efforts that are going into understanding how we tackle such a global issue. But the commercialisation that comes from the research community that's pretty slow. And and the reason it's loads because one is academics, academics churning out research papers. The linkage back into industry and industry is very, um, I guess we're always looking for how fast can it be done? And what sort of marginal profit am I gonna make for it? So there's not a lot of patients there for research that has to mature, generate outputs that you get that have a meaningful value for both sides. So, um, supporting our research communities to output some of these essential pieces of research that can Dr Impact for society as a whole, Um, maybe for industry to partner even more, I mean, and we and we do that all the time. But even more focus even more. Focus on. And I'll give you a small example last last year and it culminated this earlier this month, we signed an agreement with the ministry of With the Space Office in Singapore. Uh, so it's an MOU between AWS and the Singapore government, and we are determined to help them aligned to their national agenda around space around building an ecosystem. How do we support their space builders? What can we do to create more training pathways? What credits can we give? How do we use open datasets to support Singaporeans issues? And that could be claimed? That could be kind of change. It could be, um, productivity. Farming could be a whole range of things, but there's a lot that's happening that is not highlighted because it's not sexy specific, right? It's not the Mars mission, and it's not the next lunar mission, But these things are just as important. They're just focused more on earth rather than out there. >>Yeah, and I just said everyone speaking nerd these days are born with it, the next generations here, A lot of use cases. A lot of exciting areas. You get the big headlines, you know, the space launches, but also a lot of great research. As you mentioned, that's, uh, that people are doing amazing work, and it's now available open source. Cloud computing. All this is bringing to bear great conversation. Great inspiration. Great chatting with you. Love your enthusiasm for for the opportunity. And thanks for sharing your storey. Appreciate it. >>It's a pleasure to be with you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay. >>Thanks, Manny. The women in tech showcase here, the Cube is presenting International Women's Day celebration. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mm mm.

(uplifting music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. In this segment, we're going to talk about the future of IoT and the critical role semiconductor technology plays in shaping this exciting space. As we've reported on our Breaking Analysis segments, the fabulous chip company enabled by the ARM ecosystem has permanently changed the semiconductor industry. Intel's fateful decision in the mid-2000s to pass on the chip design for the Apple iPhone was an ironic reminder of IBM's decision to outsource the microprocessor for the original IBM PC to Intel. In both cases, the market leader didn't appreciate the tectonic industry shifts that were possible, and importantly, the impact that volume economics would have on the power structure of the entire industry. Now fast forward today, and we believe ARM wafer volumes are 10X those of the general purpose x86. This means that the ARM ecosystem is on a cost curve that is unmatched in the business. Moreover, as we've reported, the ARM ecosystem is blowing away the historical performance curves that we've seen in the chip industry, AKA Moore's law. Whereas for years, the x86 performance curve grew roughly at 40% per annum has now moderated to the low thirties. Over the past five years, as evidenced by the progression of Apple's A series chip, based on ARM, when you observe the combined performance of the CPU, the GPU, the NPU, the XPU, DSPs, accelerators, et cetera, the alternative processors in combination have driven the average annual performance improvement to over a hundred percent per year. This is an astounding achievement. Why is this so important to IoT? Well, the edge is projected to be the next trillion dollar market. We believe we'll see a world with more than a trillion devices. And as we've reported, IoT use cases are going to require specialized and distributed processing power. And lots of it. AI Inference at the edge will enable real-time action and embedding intelligence in the chips that when the edge will be high performance, low power, inexpensive, and programmable with a much faster time to market profile than historical semiconductor cycles. We're already seeing that with companies like AWS, Apple, Tesla, and peer, and others going from design to tape out and under two years versus the historical norm of let's say four years to be generous. And with me to discuss innovation in IoT and some big news from the 2021 ARM's summit is Mohamed Awad, who is the vice president of IoT and embedded at ARM Mohamed. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Thanks. I really appreciate the opportunity to have you. >> So, You're welcome. So tell us about your, your role at ARM. I know you were responsible for infrastructure previously and now sort of extended to, to IoT and embedded. Tell us more about. >> Yeah, sure. So I've been with ARM for a little over three years now. I started working with the infrastructure team when I was, we worked on a lot of different initiatives and one of the things that we launched was on Neo verse. And we went on to do some interesting things there, as, as I mentioned, we're making some great traction in the infrastructure space, but a year ago I took on the role to you ought to head up arms IOT and embedded business. And, you know, it's, it's interesting because my, my career really started in IOT and embedded. I was in the Boston area working for companies like Lucent Nortel, and then eventually I remembered very early IOT startup. So that was, that was 25 years ago now. But, but I still got roots in the Boston area. So I like your, like your hat in the back now. >> Yeah. Right. Go, go Sox. >> Go Sox. >> So how did we get here, you mean, you've had a lot of experience in embedded IOT, which is relatively new term to most people. It sort of evolved from a period of, you know, you had instrumentation for at least some components of, of the system. And then we focused on conductivity. But as I was saying in my upfront narrative, we're really now embedding AI and it's it's intelligence, but so there's phases. How do you see the progression in terms of how we got to where ARM is today in IOT? >> Yeah, it's really interesting because if you think about, if you think about ARM, then you really just think about IOT, you know, as you said, IOT started off with, Hey, let's, let's stick a microcontroller in everyday devices, you know, stick a micro controller to something like a vending machine, and then we went on and said, well, hey, what if we could remotely control that device for gathering data from that device, and then we, so we entered this phase of, you know, what we like to call interconnectivity, right, And that was all about, you know, connecting these devices with, with things like, you know, low power Bluetooth, or, you know, even now low latency 5G. And what's interesting is that, you know, together the work of the Arm ecosystem has done over the years has really solved the problems of how to add microcontrollers that connects the devices. I mean, that those problems have largely been solved for a lot of the reasons that you described earlier, which is, you know, we focused on lowering the barrier for folks to come in and innovate around sort of a core technology and, and lots of innovation happened as a result of that. We're entering this new phase now, which is really about, you know, you've got all these devices out there which can easily be connected, they've got microcontrollers or, or, or technology in them, which allows them to, to be intelligent. But how do we really extract the level of kind of AI intelligence out of those devices? Ultimately, what we're trying to do is, is, you know, the industry needs to figure out how to derive intelligence from the smallest sensor, all the way up to the largest cloud data center, you know, and, and, and that means local intelligence. It means regional intelligence, and it means global intelligence, you know, the potential is enormous, but the challenge is pretty enormous as well because of all those diversified use cases, all the diversified devices, all the, all of the sort of scale sort of number of platforms that we're talking about, and that that's really what, we're, what we're excited to kind of go work on, work on that. >> It is exciting. I mean, just the it's mind boggling the, the capabilities, the processing capabilities of this distributed world that we're, we're, we're evolving towards. Let's talk about the hard news of why are you announcing what you're announcing, I mean, what are the trends that are sort of informing that maybe you could hit some of the highlights of the announcement and give us a key details? >> Yeah, sure. So, so when we announced his ARM, total solutions for IOT, and that's really made up of three things, my favorite part is on virtual hardware. Our virtual hardware is all about making available a virtual representation of, of devices in the cloud for lots of developers to use. And I'll, I'll get to that in a minute, but I think, you know, in order to understand that you have to kind of understand the broader context of what ARM total solutions are. It starts with pre-integrated pre verified IP package. You talked earlier about how design cycles we're looking to accelerate people were looking to develop a Silicon much faster. Part of what we were doing at ARM is we're actually taking, you know, pre-integrated pre verified IP packages and call those ARM corstone. We're making those available to the market. So we give those to our Silicon partners, and then they can use that. They might include an neuro processing unit, a CPU. They might include the interconnect, all the, kind of the base IP. And then our Silicon partners can use that as a jumping off point so that they can quickly get Silicon to market. That's the first part of the news, which is, you know, we're doubling down on that too. Now, you know, in the last three years, we've had over 150 different designs, which have used our ARM core stone products. So moving forward, we're going to make that foundational to how we deliver IOT technology to the market. But the second part of it, which is, which is super exciting, is that not only are we going to accelerate the time to market for our Silicon partners, we're also making a virtual representation of that underlying core stone design available in the cloud for software developers all around the world to use at the same time that IP is ready. So at the same time, we hand IP to our Silicon partners. We're making a virtual representation in the cloud. So software developers can start. Now, let me just take a step back here and make sure that, you know, everyone kind of understands how, how big of a deal this is, right before the way this used to work, I would hand the IP to a Silicon partner. It would take them, you know, 18 months, maybe two years to get a piece of Silicon in market. And then a board manufacturer would have to go off. And then only maybe three or four years later, could the software developers start five years to get a product to market what we're doing here with ARM total solutions. We cut that five years down to three years, so we can massively accelerate time to market. And then the third part of what ARM total solution is, is something we call projects Centaury Project Centaury is about putting in place a set of standards to it's an ecosystem initiative, which puts in place a set of standards, reference software and, and specifications around things like security and how devices should communicate with, with, you know, the operating system or cloud service providers that allows that allows software developers to get a level of reuse and leverage. So, you know, today in the IOT, every time you develop a piece of software, you're going to develop it over and over again. But what we're talking about here is they can develop it once and, and be able to apply. And we use a lot of that software over and over again, the same way they do in other markets like infrastructure. >> Love it. So, okay. I want to ask you if that, if there's a blueprint there that we can, we can learn from, but before we do that. So if I, if I go back to the three items that you mentioned, so for example, one of your licensees can say, okay, I want to take just the standard components, the CPU, whatever, but I might want to customize the neural processing unit, as you said, and they have the flexibility to do that at the same time when they, when they bring it to the Foundry, because it's a standard platform that, you know, what's going to work, that's kind of a nuance that maybe people maybe don't fully appreciate, but am I getting that right? That standard platform has dramatically changed the industry. >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, the idea is, is that, you know, we take these, these IPS, we integrate them together. We verify them, we designed it as a subsystem. We target specific use cases, and then we make them available. Our partners are certainly free to go off and make modifications to it. They see fit. But when we hand it to them, it's ready to go. And that's the idea. >> Yeah. And then the point about the being able to, to give developers access in the cloud, and we've often said that, you know, the developers are going to shape IOT. And so I think what you're saying is essentially instead of this linear process, where you can get dependent on the previous one being done, you're actually parallelizing. If you will, the innovation. >> Yeah. That's exactly right. And I, and I'd actually take it one step forward. There's a, there's a subtlety there, which I didn't comment on, which I think it's important to call out, which is not only are we parallelize them, but we're enabling what I'll call modern development methodology. Right. You know, the way that development is done in areas like mobile and the cloud data centers, they use agile workflows, things like continuous integration, you know, broad-based testing as they go along. That's very different than the way that embedded development is done today. Embedded development today is done the same way. It was 25 years ago. You get a board on your desk, you mess around with a bunch of jumpers and cables and wires, hope you did it right. And then you write your software and you hope the hardware guy doesn't want to revise the hardware because then you're going to start all over again. Right. You know, the last thing that you'd want to do is set up a hardware form, right? Lots and lots of different hardware to go off and test over and over again. Now with virtual hardware, you can move all of that to the cloud. All that complexity goes away and you've massively reduced the investment required for software developers to get going and allow them to take on these more modern techniques. >> Well, Mohammed, thank you for clarity clarifying that, that nuance, because we're going to see a Renaissance in the way that that embedded development occurs. And I'm curious as to how you think about that in terms of you, because you're going to have a whole new breed of developers come in with, you know, the cloud developers, if you will. They have, they see IOT as a massive opportunity as well. You're going to see the, I would presume the embedded ecosystem. Up-skill a much in the same way you're seeing, you know, ops dev or dev ops or IT people, you know, learn Python to you know, to up-skill. And so you're going to see like a two vectors of innovation in terms of developers coming together. How do you see that? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's exactly what we're driving to. And when we talk about this, we talk about changing the economics of IOT. That's exactly why, because what we, what we're saying is that, Hey, you can have all this massive innovation that can be unleashed from all these developers that didn't have access to these devices before. And you can also take all these embedded devices, embedded developers and make them so much more efficient with these new modern, modern development methodologies. A combination of those two things is going to, you know, not only is it going to lower the cost of development, but it's going to spur a massive amount of new innovation and all, you know, all new products and services, right. We really think can unleash the potential of IoT. >> So step back a little bit, help us understand kind of how you came to this, your strategy. You mean, what were the friction points or what are the friction points that you see in IOT and embedded in terms of being able to, to, to, to scale this capability? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a good, it's a great question. And I got to tell you, we, we, when so when we, when I came, when I came into this role, you know, the first thing you do is you go off and talk to customers and partners, and you try to understand how people are using. But most of the time, when people think of ARM, they think of us as, Hey, they're the guys that are off talking to the Silicon partners are talking to the hardware guys. And we absolutely do. We have strong relationships with all of the Silicon partners, but because of our place in the ecosystem, you know, as a, as a company, which, you know, we've got shipped over 70 billion cortex spend devices today, you know, we underpinned, you know, the IOT basically runs on us. And so a lot of what we do too, is we talked to the software ecosystem. We talked to OEMs, and we talked to service providers looking to capitalize on all of that, you know, on the, on the depth and breadth of our ecosystem. And when I talked to OEMs, and when I talked to software service providers, two things became really clear. The OEM is wanting to find a faster path to market. They're like, it just takes too long for us to get our products to market. We need to figure out how to streamline it. So that was one. When I talked to the software service providers, they came to us with a little bit of a different problem. What they said is like, Hey, we really want to deploy software and services across this, this IOT edge space, but it's just so diverse. And so massively complex, you know, everybody's got a different view on thing. Can you help us, like, where's the, your, the common denominator, can you help us figure out how to attack this problem? And that's really what drove, what drove us. Right. >> Awesome. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the announcement, details, project Centaury particular, what are some of the things that you want people to really appreciate, and specifically, what does it mean to the ecosystem? I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but I don't know if you have any examples or customers and, and, and maybe also Mohamed, if you could help us understand how it relates to other arm projects like Cassini. >> Yeah, sure. So project, so, so, so two things. So first of all, let me just talk to what, what, what projects Centaury. So project Centaury is really looking to, you know, help enable a level of, of software leverage across that diverse M class devices that are out there in class with our microcontroller devices that are out there. And so it's really made up of 3, 3, 3 parts. One part is, is all about security. So it uses a PSA and our PSA certified framework, including TFM trusted firmware. So this is our security framework that we've put forward. And then our, the PSA standards initiative that's out there in the marketplace, you know, in all of the efforts that we bring to bear on that, the second part of it is, is around open CMSIS, and, and open CDI CMSIS, which is really, which is really about standardizing aspects about how software is delivered to an IOT device packaged and delivered. It's also about things like how any our thoughts. So any real-time operating system or any cloud service provider, you know, can be accessed from the device. So the idea is, is that a, you know, today, if you think about the way that this works, if you're a Silicon provider, you're a fiber manufacturer, you have to go off and support multiple different clubs, service providers. You may want to support multiple different operating systems, depending on you know, which, which, you know, which particular OS you're interested in. And, and what we're trying to do with, with, with, with projects Centaury is to specify key attributes of the services that exist down on your, on your Silicon, so that you can more easily integrate with, you know, whatever OS you want, whatever service provider you want on whatever hardware you want. It's still allowing plenty of differentiation. So it's not like we're saying, Hey, this is how you actually do over the air updates. For example, rather, what it's saying is that, Hey, this device supports over the updates. If you're going to ask for that service, here's how you present yourself. And that allows a level of software portability that you just didn't have in the IOT space previously. >> Right. And then the licensee can tune that to their specific use case and add their own value. Right. And so, again, go back to the thing we talked about before they, they know what's going to work and they can give it to the, Foundry and say, make this according to the spec and the Foundry's ready for it. That's how we've seen such massive volumes. I want to ask you about security. You, you touched on that. Do you leverage realms in this, or is that not in scope? Is that like. >> No, that's more of a, that right now, that's more focused on our A-class and V9 stuff. And you actually asked about project Cassini a little bit earlier. You know, project Cassini is really our initiative, which is focused on our A-class devices. So our A-class devices typically run a, you know, what I'll call a rich OS like a Linux or whatever. And it's really designed for allowing the level of virtualization and allowing a level of, of, of, of, of shared resources between different containers on, on an A-class type system that you can easily deploy and, and leverage the A-class device resources from, by, by different, by different workloads. >> The reason I asked, I'm trying to Mohamed connect the dots between mobile as kind of a blueprint, which can occur for IOT. I think that's maybe, but even some of the stuff that's going on in the data center, it's particularly as it relates to data intensive workloads, some of the work that we've seen that, you know, AWS do, and, you know, offloads, we're seeing, you know, all the new, like all the modern storage and networking and security offloads in the data center are moving to ARM. And it just seems like the use cases for ARM are exploding. And I'm wonder if he can help us connect the dots into IOT, which could, which could do or follow all of these markets. >> Yeah. I mean, what's interesting what we saw happen in mobile and what we saw happen in the infrastructure, what we see happening in both of those markets is that by creating a level of consistency in how software can be deployed on these devices, whether that's with the, you know, with the mobile phone and the ARM ecosystem and a mobile phone, or all the way through to the data center, what you've done is you unleashed a tremendous amount of innovation, you know, in the mobile space. There's something like 3 million apps out there today, right. And thousands of different smartphone models, you know, could you imagine if every one of those app developers had to test their application on every mobile phone in order to be sure that it worked, you know, you'd have a lot less innovation, a lot less, you know, a lot less, a lot less scale and a lot less, a lot less applications. So what we're talking about here is trying to unleash that same amount of value by creating that consistent. So that's a clear lesson we learned from, from both mobile and from, from infrastructure. The other thing that's clear is that a lot of these markets you've got, back to the idea of, of parallelized development flows and, and subsystems, and that's directly kind of what we're seeing in, in what we're putting forth in, with, ARM total solutions. >> Yeah. You know, it's kind of buzz wordy and people who watch my program know I'm a kind of a fan of the R model, but, but you talk about the new IOT economy. In my view, you're actually an underpinning of that economy. I mean, everybody talks about it, this multi-trillion dollar opportunity, but, but how do you think about this, this new economy? And we've obviously touched on it, but IOT, the edge it's really taking, taking shape now and becoming real. >> Yeah. I, I think that the idea here, when we talk about a new IOT economy, very clearly what I'm referring to is this idea that, you know, you've got today, you've got a lot of potential, which is lost because, you know, your you're limited to just the, a vertically integrated solution. Software is vertically integrated on the, on the specific hardware and the, the barriers and the cost to investing in that hardware from a software perspective is just, it's just too high given, given the sort of scale that you get with that software after the fact. So we're addressing that in two vectors or simplifying it, so that lots of different developers, you know, that developer that's sitting at the coffee shop can spin up an AWS instance with our ARM virtual hardware on it and write an app while they're sitting there. And at the same time, they can access a much broader set of devices than they would've been able to otherwise, if it's not, you know, it's not dissimilar, you know, I hate to keep going back to mobile, but it's not dissimilar from the mobile space where if you think about 15 years ago, when all of the applications that were written on your mobile phone were written by the phone manufacturer, you had a limited number of applications, and sure a phones were a great thing, but it was nothing like it is today. It was a mobile phone economy. Today, when you think about mobile, you know, mobile really underpins the financial economy. It underpins, you know, transport, the transportation economy. It underpins how we communicate with everybody, with social networks and it, and it's really taken a sort of life of its own in lots of different ways. It's not really a mobile economy. It is the economy. And we think IOT can be even larger than that. Right? >> Yeah. You know what I mean? Our industry has a tendency to hype a lot of new waves, but they certainly didn't, over-hype mobile. I mean, everybody, you know, migrated toward mobile. That's why I think it's such a relevant conversation. And so adaptable to IOT at the cloud as well, data as well. You know, they, they were probably under hyped. If anything, social, maybe we can put over here in a bucket, there's a lot, a lot of Friction. But those other three in terms of sort of enterprise and the edge. And I think, you know, from, from what we can see ARM has really in the ecosystem has, has completely and permanently altered the shape of the industry. It's a very exciting time. And I think the best is yet to come Mohamed. I really appreciate you coming to the cube. Thanks so much. >> No, I, I really, I really appreciate, I think thanks for taking the time. All right. >> Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (casual uplifting music)

>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Bahrain in the Middle East. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, here for the first time, covering Amazon Web Services, AWS' Public Sector, and the breaking news around their new region that they announced a while ago, going to be deployed here in the early 2019 time frame. An Amazon region really is the power source of digital. It has a track record of creating so much value and innovation. And I'm here with Teresa Carlson, who's the head-- she's the chief of public sectors, she's the head of Amazon Web Services' Public Sector globally, except for China but that's a different territory. Teresa Carlson, it's great to see you. >> It's so great to have you here with us, oh my goodness. >> So I got to say, you told me a few years ago we're going to really go international, we're doubling down outside North America, we're going to have regions, Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, said the same. This is the strategy of Amazon. But the Middle East was your baby. This was something that you did spend a lot of time on, and a lot of decisions. Everyone wants to know why Bahrain? Why did you choose this region? And what do you see happening? And how's it going? >> Well, you know, it's interesting because, well I have had a lot of people say why Bahrain as the first region that you've put in the Middle East? Because it doesn't seem like the first place somebody would choose. And the thing that kept coming back to me is Jeff has always said we're willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. And I think this is probably one of those times where people just didn't quite understand why Bahrain. Well, here's why. I met the Crown Prince, we talked about digital innovation and the economy here and he immediately got that they needed to go through a digital transformation. They are not a country that has a lot of oil. They are a smaller country and they really are a working class country that is looking for how do they have sustainment? And they've done things in the past around financial services that really got them going. They would spear head things. And I think he saw the opportunity that this could help them jump-start the economy and they could kind of be a hub for innovation. So they created the right policies around Cloud First. They created the right telecommunications policy. They were one of the first to deregulate. They had good pricing for utilities. They were friendly toward businesses. And they had a culture that we felt could fit well with us, as well as our partner community. >> Couple of observations, being the first time here, so thank you for inviting us and allowing us to cover you here. One, they're a learning culture, they speak multiple languages, why not add programming to it, software? Two, they like to move fast. They just built a track in 14 months, they're not afraid to go faster. >> They go fast. >> That's Amazon. Amazon, you guys move at a speed of a whole 'nother cadence. And then, my observation again, compared to other areas as I look around is that the percentage of the population of Bahrainians is large, is a lot of people live here, that are native, and they're talented. >> Well, one of the things you said that I think is key is that they move fast, they're used to being frugal on how they do things and they're very scrappy. And that really fits with their culture because, again, they have to do things different than some of the other minimalist countries who are-- they're not quite as rich. But they have this culture of really moving fast and they took down blockers like crazy. I mean, as we came in and were making a decision on-- >> What were some of those blockers? Like, stumbling blocks, are they more hurdles? What were they? >> They were stumbling blocks but they were-- we had to really come in and talk about why telecommunications, policies and pricing had to change because in an old-school model of Telco, there's a lot of big charges. And when you have a digital economy coming in, if you think about, you have a few transactions for a lot of money in an old-school. In a new-school world, you have millions of transactions for a little bit, 'cause you've got to be able to transact a lot, and that's why your telecommunications industry's got to be set up as well as you want it deregulated. They'd already deregulated it so they worked with us to open it up, to set the policies, and now Batelco, who is one of our major telecommunications partners here, is doing manage services on AWS, they've gotten all kinds of people trained. And it's just an example of how they look at an opportunity and say we have got to innovate and make changes if we want to have a sustainment in the 21st century economy. >> And you guys are bringing a lot of goodness to the table, they're quick learners, they're smart, they've got their entrepreneurial vibe. They're not afraid to put some funds of funds together and get some professional investment going on. So that's going to level up the entrepreneurship base. The question is when will the region be ready? How's that going? It's under construction. We've been hearing it's been impacting and, frankly, bringing in to this country an agenda item of sustainability and sustainable energy. Well, why would they need sustainable energy if they've got oil? >> Well they-- (laughs) [John] - Why burn it if you can sell it? That's what the British Prime Minister-- >> Well they do and they've had a new find but I think they have to get to the new oil that they've found but they're not-- I think, what I understand, they're not banking on that, they're going to bank on a digital economy. So they know this is kind of a guaranteed way to really grow what they're doing and bringing out outside others. There's two big elements they're doing. One is they're creating policies for data that allows other countries to put their data here safely and with the right laws. That is game changing. So that's one big thing they're doing. The second thing is they have the spirit of teaching and training so they're getting other countries to come in and talk to them about what they're doing. And remember, John, they're already moving the government to the Cloud and they don't even have their Cloud here yet. So they've done all their homework and they're already moving more work loads into the Cloud that they don't feel need to be here. But they've looked at security design, compliance practices, and they're like, we're moving, we're not waiting. >> They're Cloud First. >> They're Cloud First. >> Okay, so when do you expect the construction to be ready? Ballpark, I know you can't probably give an exact date but when-- >> We expect it'll be ready by Q1 of 2019 and we're excited. It's going to be one of the most innovative regions. And by the way, I dunno if you saw, I had a big star on the map today in my presentation. We have literally, at AWS, had a big hole in the world with no region in the Middle East or Africa, and now we are going to have this region so it is exciting, and I know that the region itself is really anxious to get going. >> Well not only are you an amazing executive, I've seen you work, I've seen what you've done, checking the boxes, doing the hard work, getting down and dirty and doing hustling and scrapping, but you also made some good strategic bets. This one really is successful because I think, two things, you bring a region to the area for AWS but you guys are doing it in a way that's partnering with the government, you're actually-- as industry contributing. I think that's a case there that's going to probably be recognized down the road when people figure that out. But that's going to be a great one. But the cultural win, for you, is pretty amazing and I have to say, yesterday I went to the women breakfast that you hosted and I've never been at a women breakfast, and I've been to a lot of them because I like to be involved, where I got kicked out of a table because they need the space, so it was so crowded. Sorry guys, you're out, I got booted. I didn't leave the room, I had to just move, because they had workshops. Take a minute to explain the women breakfast you had because I think that was extraordinary and a proof point that the narrative of the region, women don't go to school, all this nonsense that's out there, take a minute to clarify this, this is a cultural shift. There might be some cultural things going on. >> Well, the women are here, #SmartIsBeautiful. They are amazing. And they are very educated and in fact, 53% of the government work force here are females at high level jobs too, they're not just low level. And I actually met with the King this week who told me that he was able-- he has the first Supreme Court Justice, that's a female, in the Middle East. And he said it was against culture but he did it because he said this woman was so amazing and she was so talented and she fit the role, she had the job description down. And he said it's gone great, so the women here are smart, they're talented, they're educated, and they actually get degrees in Computer Science. Here in Bahrain, 60% of the Computer Science students are females. Now, what is not happening, is their not always getting out and getting these jobs. And the second thing is, right now, we're still working with them to teach the right skills. A lot of skills are actually outdated tech skills and I know, John, you see this too, even in the US. You have universities that are still teaching the wrong skills for Cloud, so we are working with them at the university and the high school level that actually teach and certify on the right skills. But the women are talented, they're amazing. There are some cultural things that we're going to work together on but there's really no reason we can't have an amazing and talented workforce of women here in the Middle East. >> We had Mohammed on, who's the chief executive of the IGA, the Information e-Government Authority. He told me that any citizen can get a certification for free in this country. >> Yes! Oh my gosh, so I've never seen this. So our partner here, Tamkeen, who's like The Labour Fund, about a year and a half ago, agreed that any citizen that got a certification on AWS, it would be 100% paid for. And then we just announced today that they're actually also going to pay 100% of Bahraini companies that want to move to the Cloud. They're serious about this, they are serious. And they are being a role model and, again John, why are they doing it? They are doing it because they realize that they want to be a true digital economy and grow their businesses here and create new. They got to move faster because they're smaller. They've got to be scrappier, they got to move faster, they got to do things a little bit different. >> The other thing I want to point out, you can't really see it on the camera, but behind us you have, essentially, a mix of commercial and public sector. The show here is so, so crowded, couldn't get into the keynote speech, overflow of room was packed, this is attracting everyone from the Gulf region here. Not just public sector, but commercial businesses. This is not a one time thing, this is a-- the pent-up demand is here. What do you expect is going to happen when the region gets here built out? >> Well, if you look at all the partners around, I mean you have Trend Micro over here, and others, many of them have come because they're excited about us putting a region here. And Andy Jassy and I both have had many of our partners say when are you going to have a region in the Middle East? So we expect a lot more partners are going to come. Just like you they're going to see the value of being here. But, additionally, I don't know what we're going to do for our conference, our summit, because we've already out-grown this space and you're right, we have delegates here from Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, of course Bahrain, Kuwait, the US. So many different groups are being represented here and I think also South Africa, we have some folks from South Africa. >> Well theCUBE is here, we're making great observations and great commentary. I got to say that you're even attracting amazing talent from the US, besides theCUBE. General Keith Alexander was here. >> Yes he was. >> John Wood from Telos, and all these partners, all visionaries who see the opportunity. This is important, you're not being misunderstood by the people who know Amazon. >> No, I agree. And you made a point earlier that I think is important. Even though I'm kind of here for this conference, leading it, this is not a public sector conference, it's a AWS Summit. It has tons of commercial, tons of public sector. The thing that's a little bit different when you get to some of these countries is they are more government lead, so that is the reason it's important to have this relationship with government if you really want to, but you don't want to surprise them. And you want to work with them to help make sure that they and the country are successful. >> Well Teresa, it's been fun to observe and watch your successes continue to raise the bar here in your job. This is a whole 'nother level when you talk about really filling a hole, you see a hole, you fill it. >> Yep, find a whole, fill it (laughs). >> I heard someone say that once in a motivation speech. Oh, that was you, "You see a hole you fill it. "Oh, we got to hole in the Middle East, fill it!" You have a region here, you've got great success in Washington, DC, CIA, other governments. Congratulations, and thanks for all your support-- >> Thank you John for being here, thank you. >> Thank you, live coverage here. We are here in Bahrain in the Middle East of CUBE's first time. I'm John Furrier, your host here, covering the exclusive Amazon Web Services Summit, and covering the historic launch of the new region in the Middle East. This should change the game, this is going to be a digital hub. It's going to have impact to entrepreneurship, economics and society. We'll be covering it at theCUBE. Stay with us for more after this short break. (jubilant music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we are live here at the Mandalay Bay for exclusive CUBE three-day coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante for all three days, we're on day three, winding down, great show, our next guest is Justin Youngblood, VP of Hybrid Cloud Management with IBM, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Great to have you on, because a lot of the talk, obviously, cloud, we could blockchain, but a lot of under-the-hood production workload stuff still needs to manage with all this stuff. You guys had an announcement on day one on the cloud automation management. Big part of the keynote, so it was kind of a primetime spot. Can you share us, well, why'd you get that great slot, how did you get the great slot, and what's the impact? >> Well, it really all starts with what's happening in the market, and the team's been working hard inside of IBM, we announced IBM Cloud Automation Manager, it was elevated to a tier-one offering, very strategic space for IBM in multi-cloud management. What we know is, every enterprise is now moving towards multi-cloud environments, cloud adoption is well into its maturity, and really, it's 71% of enterprises have three or more clouds, and they need to manage those clouds with a common management platform, and that's what cloud-- >> And it's big paying point too, it's one of those non-sexy items like blockchain, it's like, AI and blockchain took the headlines, but a lot of the blocking and tackling is going on in hybrid right now, so you see that orchestration piece between multi-cloud, little things like latency, security, workload migration, this is what you guys are doing, bringing the IT operations to a modern level, is that kind of the main thing? >> That's exactly right, and there're really two entry points to this, because on the one hand, it is that IT team, when you think of the modern enterprise, every modern enterprise is trying to move faster, trying to get applications out faster, trying to better engage with their customers, essentially trying to digitally transform, be the disruptor instead of the disrupted, and often, they'll look at their IT team and say, "You're not keeping up, you're too slow," so this is an automation and orchestration tool that allows the IT teams to rapidly deploy applications and infrastructure to the line of business and to their devops teams. >> Well, that's the thing, you got developers, not just IT, you got developers and the line of business who have a financial stakeholder, the top line revenue, to make it happen, and you got the movement to true private cloud happening. What's different now for you guys with automation? What's the key unique thing in this announcement that makes it go to the next level? >> Several things there, but no solution is complete from IBM these days without cognitive, and so bringing in those cognitive services and insights to analyze and help optimize the performance of workloads on any cloud environment, and also really to provide an advisor role, prescriptive guidance and recommendations on where to place workloads to optimize performance, cost, compliance right within company policy and security and regulatory environments. >> So we had Mohammed Farooq on earlier, and he was talking about cloud brokerage services, and I wonder, as you enter this market, if you're starting to see different KPIs emerge, the traditional IT operations KPIs, okay, the light on the server's on, it's uptime, planned downtime, unplanned downtime, percentage of my backups that fail, whatever it is, are there new KPIs emerging as people become cloud brokers? >> Yeah, absolutely, and Mohammed's a good friend, we're both Austenites, right, in the same building. >> Dave: Another Austenite! Austin's dominating theCUBE this week! >> We talk regularly, and really, we see a nice synergy because the cloud brokerage tool, which is brokering across the application readiness assessments of putting workloads onto the cloud and then planning and cost analysis and so on, and then the orchestration of actually deploying those workloads, so there's a nice synergy, and then, really, the third leg of the stool in my mind then plays into service management, and having the integration across all those pieces is really important, so being both cloud agnostic for multi-cloud environments, but then also having an open API, an ecosystem that you can enable and plug in with existing tools. >> Now, there was a period of time where IT was almost afraid of automation, but then this cloud thing sweeps over them, are we past that now? >> We are past that, and it's a great point, because sometimes, IT can be afraid of automation, 'cause they can think, "That's threatening my job." But we've got client success stories where we're running our cloud orchestration and hybrid cloud management solutions at massive scale, literally saving dozens of full-time equivalent hours, and what we're finding is these enterprisers saying, "Finally! "Now I can get to the innovation "and the transformative projects "that are on the strategic agenda "rather than working within manual IT processes," so it's really been a win-win. >> And when you talk about that average stat, the average enterprise has, you said three clouds? >> Three or more clouds, 71% of enterprises have three or more clouds. >> Are you excluding SaaS in that number? 'Cause-- >> Excluding SaaS, because you think about-- >> Dave: Alright, so that's infrastructure clouds, right? >> Absolutely, private clouds, public clouds, and a lot of departmental clouds or shadow IT where different cloud services are being consumed even if the IT team may not be managing it. >> So that brings the question, then, where does SaaS play, if I'm a cloud broker, and I've got these corporate edicts, and I've got these KPIs around running the business and transforming the business. How do I apply those edicts to SaaS, and can you help me do that? Is that futures, or is that just sort of a separate island? >> Yeah, it's a little bit futures right now, many times with the cloud management platforms in particular, these tools are used to automate the deployment of the infrastructure, and what's unique in our solution is the full stack application and even the day two operations, but the SaaS applications are tending to come in through a slightly different channel now, over time, I think what we're going to see is all applications, whether they're delivered by the IT team, or from the cloud, need to come into a common-- >> And should CIOs be worried about that? Because each SaaS provider has different infrastructure, some of the different availability profiles, different definitions, different SLAs, that's a whole 'nother problem area to be attacked, I guess. >> No, it is a concern, just the application sprawl, infrastructure sprawls, cloud sprawl, and this is why I think any time we're entering into a new industry, we're going to see that expanse and then back to a convergence, and honestly, I presented with Dave Bartoletti from Forrester this week, and a lot of his insights and things that he writes about and what I spoke about, and what my team did in our sessions was the need for a common management platform because of that sprawl, it's reining in the chaos. >> What are some of your favorite examples, customer case, the early wins? >> Yeah, so a great case study is that Swiss Re, large global insurance company, 60 global offices, this is a company that uses our cloud orchestrator solution with business process manager, their environment includes WebSphere, but also Microsoft Active Directory, ServiceNow, Puppet, et cetera. When they came and used our solution to, really, to automate the deployment of applications to put applications and IT as a service into a self-service catalog for their line of business and development users, at the end of the day, they have automated 45,000 processes executed each month, and literally dozens of offerings into the service catalog now. >> So the IT service management business has been evolving very rapidly, cloud has impacted that, the on-premise ratios are going to probably shift a little bit, but not radically, but then again, the use cases for public cloud are going to be dependent upon the workload, so that's kind of well-defined and discussed. The question I have for you is, from a customer standpoint, the number one competition we're having, and we're seeing, digitally at least, on Twitter and theCUBE is, what does enterprise readiness mean? So I'm an enterprise, and I want to go to the cloud. I have to then evaluate which cloud is best for which workload, but then I also have to put it through the prism of readiness, their table stakes, do they have the table stakes? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Google's got some great machine learning, but the SLAs might not match up, or Amazon's got some great Kinesis for analytics, but I can't run my other thing on that. That's comes up a readiness problem. >> It is a readiness, and I would say, there is no single cloud that is purpose-built for all workloads, and a lot of the messages you heard here at InterConnect this week, even from Ginni Rometty herself, where IBM has the enterprise-ready cloud, and a lot of data points to back that up, including every enterprise that's going to be cognitive, and the way we think about that is cloud and cognitive are two sides of the same coin, a famous quote also from Ginni. But now we're getting into trusted networks and Hyperledger and blockchain, I don't want to get too far offtrack, but it's some-- >> But they'll all bent the change on the disruption side, on the innovation side, and honestly impact some of the blocking and tackling table stakes. >> The blocking and tackling, so that gets down to some of the regulatory concerns and other pieces, which is why we've invested now to have 51 data centers around the world, because of data locality and security concerns that companies have, so there's a lot-- >> Well, I love her line, she's the best, I got to say, very memorable, enterprise strong, made me think of the whole Boston strong thing instilled in my head, 'cause, being from that area. Enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core, those are the three pillars, you can unpack that in every different way, so you guys have to bring that into your offering, so I get the enterprise strong. Data first, how are you guys using the cognitive piece, specifically, in this? Data first, is that an architectural thing? And then where's the cognitive piece fit in? >> Yeah, perfect, so as we architected this solution, it was really important to us to put cognitive at the core. And really, two use cases, primarily, the first is around, as companies go deploying their applications and workloads on the cloud, every application is going to have its downtimes, its slowdowns, its outages, and that impacts end user experience, that's why it matters, it can impact revenue or NPS scores for the company. So the first is a cognitive operations capability, and you can think of that analytics moving from log analytics to quickly pinpoint the root cause of issues, up through predictive analytics to prevent an outage or an issue before it impacts your end users, ultimately into the cognitive domain, which is a true machine learning, and the capabilities that we're working on on our labs now, and that we demonstrated this week at InterConnect, we actually have a chat ops interface for the IT operator to come and interact with a cognitive system that's part of Cloud Automation Manager, and get prescriptive guidance and confidence levels-- >> Going to be a voice-activated Watson, basically, in the future. "Hey, move to cloud nine!" >> So that's the differentiation, right, if I were to push you on that, it's trust, everybody's going to say they have cloud, but like you said, it's a multi-cloud world, and it's the cognitive piece, is that right? It's really the trust and the cognitive piece. >> The cognitive piece is absolutely the number one piece of differentiation that no one has. >> Because a lot of big enterprise hardware and software companies are going to say, "You trust us," people do trust us, that's how they got to be multi billion dollar companies, but talk a little bit more about the differentiation with respect to cognitive. >> Yeah, so that's one aspect of it, and that's just cognitive operations management, and even that is that one level of value. Where I think there's additional value is getting into really letting Watson, and cognitive services, become an advisor to your business, so imagine your smartest IT operator in the business, if Watson can learn from that person, Sally or Jeff, whoever it is, learn from that, and help every IT operator in your business always make the best decision as smart as the smartest subject matter expert is in IT operations, and so this is the learning aspect of cognitive, and in that advisor role now, all of a sudden, a cognitive chat ops interface can begin to provide prescriptive guidance when there's an outage. Or imagine an application or workload going down, and Watson taking automatic action to redeploy the workload on a different cloud that has not been impacted, no interruption of service to the end user, and then come back and say, now let's pinpoint the root cause of the problem and fix that, but I've already address the main point, so-- >> And what's key about that is it's a learning machine model, so you have the domain expertise of the specific use cases, it's not trying to use some sort of vocabulary and map that on through an infrastructure environment or software environment. >> Very plain language, natural language understanding, and it's really, really powerful capability. >> Alright, so the question is, how do customers get access to this, Bluemix storage, is there IBM.com, what's the vehicles for getting this in the hands of customers? >> The easiest way is at IBM.biz/tryibmCAM, so if you go there, it'll take you right into our Bluemix service, and customers can get started right away, we have a free addition that allows customers to get started with the-- >> I know this is a tough personal question, but I'll ask anyway, no one likes to pick who their favorite child is, but what's most exciting about the product from your standpoint, looking at the success of the announcement, obviously, primetime on the keynote, congratulations, but what's the one thing that you get most excited about the product? >> Yeah, the most exciting thing is, it's all about the application. It's all about the application and digital transformation, so, certainly, the cognitive piece, and we've talked about that, but I want to highlight one other thing, which is, we in IBM are providing pre-built automation content from the infrastructure up through full-stack applications and getting into the day two operations, the monitoring, the backup, et cetera, we can orchestrate that end-to-end, unlike anyone in the industry. >> End-to-end is the key word. This is now big part of the architecture. End-to-end cross vendor. >> Exactly. >> And opensource. >> Yep. >> That's kind of the big-- >> Dave: That's what you call automation packs? >> These are the cloud automation packs, exactly, in the past, we called them patterns, we're moving to an open-pattern technology base, and we call 'em cloud automation packs. And I'll just say more about that, we're going to make them available in a marketplace, in the IBM cloud marketplace so clients can come, learn about, discover, try, and buy these automation-- >> Alright, so here's the hard question for you. Well, might be easy for you, hard for me, but as you go end-to-end, which is totally the right way, I believe, that's what everyone wants, end-to-end, but you're crossing horizontal and vertical specialty across multiple vendors, and new things coming, so now 5G comes enables autonomous vehicles, now you got smart cities, now you got Watson trying to learn new environments that I've never seen before in IT. How do you guys prepare for that, what are you guys doing to get out in front of that next wave? >> Yeah, so in the past, I think a lot of applications, and even management tools have been built as monolithic applications. With the Cloud Automation Manager, we built it from the ground up, it's cloud-native, microservices-based, just like a lot of applications out there in the enterprise are bring run, that allows us to be much more composable and flexible than we've ever been in the past, and we augment that with a set of open APIs to integrate with clients' existing tools, you heard me mention the example of integrating with ServiceNow, of course, we can integrate with UrbanCode or other devops tools, APM and monitoring tools, et cetera. >> That's the key, integration is the new table stake. >> That is the new table stake. >> Justin Youngblood, thanks for coming on theCUBE, great, congratulations on the success of your launch, and good luck with the adoption, and we'll see ya out in the marketplace, thanks for coming on theCUBE, Justin, the VP of Cloud Management inside theCUBE, more cloud action, more data action, more predictive content here on theCUBE, more great interviews coming, stay with us, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back. We're here live in Las Vegas from Mandalay Bay for the IBM InterConnect 2017, this is Cube's exclusive coverage with SiliconANGLE media. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante here all week. We missed our kickoff this morning on day two and, because the keynotes went long with Ginni Rometty. Great star line up, you had Marc Benioff, the CEO of AT&T, and CEO of H&R Block, which I love their ad with Mad Men's guy in there. Dave let's wrap up day two. Big day, I mean traffic on the digital site, ibmgo.com was off the charts and the site just performed extremely well, excited about that. Also the keynote from the CEO of IBM, Ginni, really kind of brings us themes we've been talking about on theCUBE. I want to get your reaction to that, which is social good is now a purpose that's now becoming a generational theme, and it's not just social good in terms of equality of pay for women, which is great and of course more STEM, it's everything, it's society's global impact but also the tagline is very tight. Enterprise strong, has a Boston strong feeling to it. Enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core, pretty much hits their sweet spot. What did you think of her keynote presentation? >> I thought Ginni Rometty nailed it. I've always been a huge fan of hers, I first met her when she was running strategy, and you know the question you used to always get because IBM 19 quarters of straight declining revenue, how long is Ginni going to get? How long is Ginni going to get? You know when is her tenure going to be up? My answer's always been the same. (laughs) Long enough to prove that she was right. And I think, I just love her presentation today, I thought she was on, she was engaging, she's a real pro and she stressed the innovation that IBM is going through. And this was the strategy that she laid out, you know, five, six years ago and it's really coming to fruition and it was always interesting to me that she never spoke at these conferences and she didn't speak at these conferences 'cause the story was not great you know, it was coming together the big data piece or the analyst piece was not formed yet. >> So you think she didn't come to these events because the story wasn't done? >> Yeah, I think she was not-- >> That is not a fact, you believe that. >> No, this is my belief. She was not ready to showcase you know, the greatness of IBM and I said about a year ago, I said you watch this whole strategy is coming together. You are going to see a lot more of Ginni Rometty than you've seen in the past. You started to see her on CNBC much more, we saw her at the Women in Tech Conference, at the Grace Hopper Conference, we saw her at World of Watson and now we see her here at InterConnect and she's very good on stage. She's extremely engaging, I thought she was good at World of Watson, I thought she was even better today. And a couple of notable things, took a swipe at both AWS and maybe a little bit at HPE, I'm not so sure that they worry about HPE. Sam Palmisano, before he left on a Wall Street Journal interview, said "I don't worry about HPE, they don't invest in RND. "I worry about Oracle." But nonetheless, she said, it's not just a new way, cloud is not just a new way to deliver IT. Right that's the Amazon you know. >> HP. >> And certainly new way of you style by IT. >> You style by IT. >> Is Meg's line. She also took a swipe at Google basically saying, look we're not taking your data to inform some knowledge draft that we're going to take your IP and give it to the rest of the world. We're going to protect your data, we're going to protect your models. They're really making a strong statement in that regard which I think is really important for CIOs and CDOs and CEOs today. Thoughts? >> I agree. I first of all am a big fan of Ginni, I always kind of question whether she came in, I never put it together like you intuitively around her not seeing the story but you go to all the analyists thing, so I think that's legit I would say that I would buy that argument. Here's what I like. Her soundbite is enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core. It's kind of gimmicky, but it hits all their points. Enterprise strong is core in the conversations with customers right now. We see it in theCUBE all the time. Certainly Google Nexus was one event we saw this clearly. Having enterprise readiness is not easy and so that's a really tough code to crack. Oracle and Microsoft have cracked that code. So has IBM of the history. Amazon is getting faster to the Enterprise, some of the things they are doing. Google has no clue on the Enterprise, they're trying to do it their way. So you have kind of different dimensions. So that's the Enterprise, very hard to do, table stakes are different than having pure cloud native all the time 100%, lift and shift, rip and replace, whatever you want to call it. Data First is compelling because they have a core data strategy analytics but I thought it was interesting that they had this notion of you own your own data, which implies you're renting everything else, so if you're renting everything else, infrastructure (laughs) and facilities and reducing the cost of doing business, the only thing you really got is data, highlighted by Blockchain. So Blockchain becomes a critical announcement there. Again, that was the key announcement here at the show is Blockchain. IOT kind of a sub-text to the whole show but it's supported through the Data First. And finally Cognitive to the Core is where the AI is going to kind of be the shiny, silly marketing piece with I am Watson, I'm going to solve all your health problems. Kind of showing the futuristic aspect of that but under the hood there is machine learning, under that is a real analytics algorithms that they're going to integrate across their business whether it's a line of business in verticals, and they're going to cross pollinate data. So I think those three pillars, she is a genius (laughs) in strategy 'cause she can hit all three. What I just said is a chockfull of strategy and a chockfull execution. If they can do that then they will have a great run. >> So I go back to Palmisano's statement before Ginni took over and it was a very candid interview that he gave. And as they say, you look at when he left IBM, it was this next wave was coming like a freight train that was going to completely disrupt IBM's business, so it was, it's been a long turn around and they've done it with sort of tax rates, (laughs) stock buybacks, and all kinds of financial engineering that have held the company's stock price up, (laughs) and cash flow has been very strong and so now I really believe they're in a good position. You know to get critical for just a second, yes there's no growth but look who else isn't growing. HPE's not growing, Oracle's not growing, Tennsco's not growing, Cisco's not growing, Microsoft's not growing. The only two companies really in the cartel that are growing showing any growth really are Intel a little bit and SAP. The rest of the cartel is flat (laughs) to down. >> Well they got to get on new markets and I mean the thing is new market penetration is interesting so Blockchain could be an enabler. I think it's going to be some resistance to Blockchain, my gut tells me that but the innovative entrepreneur side of me says I love Blockchain. I would be all over Blockchain if I was an entrepreneur because that really would change the game on identity and value and all that great stuff. That's a good opportunity to take the data in. >> Well the thing I like is IBM's making bets, big bets, Blockchain, quantum computing, we'll see where that goes, cloud, clearly we could talk about, you know you said it (laughs) InterConnect two or three years ago you know SoftLayer's kind of hosting. True, but Blu makes the investments hoping-- >> SoftLayer's is not all Blu makes. >> That's right, well yeah so but any rate, the two billion dollar bet that they made on SoftLayer has allowed them to go to clients and say we have cloud. Watson, NAI, Analytics, IOT these are big bets which I think are going to pay off. You know, we'll see if quantum pays off in the year term, we'll see about Blockchain, I think a lot of the bets they've been making are going to pay off, Stark, et cetera. >> So let's talk about theCUBE interviews Dave, what got your attention? I'll start while you dig up something good from your notes. I loved Willie Tejada talked about this, they're putting in these clouds journey pieces which is not a best practice it's not a reference architecture but it's actually showing the use cases of people who are taking a cross functional journey of architecture and cloud solutions. I love the quantum computing conversation we had with believe it or not the tape person. And so from the tape whatever it was, GS. >> GS8000. >> GS8000. >> It's a storage engineering team. >> But in terms of key points, modernizing IOT relevance was a theme that popped out at me. It didn't come out directly. You start to see IOT be a proof point of operationalizing data. Let me explain, IOT right now is out there. People are focused on it because it's got real business impact, because it's either facilities, it's industrial or customer connected in some sort. That puts the pressure to operationalize that data, and I think that flushes out all the cloud washing and all the data washing, people who don't have any solutions there. So I think the operationalizing of the data with IOT is going to force people to come out with real solutions. And if you don't, you're gone, so that's, you're dead. The cultural issue is interesting. Trust as now table stakes in the equation of whether it's product trusts, operational trusts, and process trusts. That's something I saw very clearly. And of course I always get excited about DevOps and cloud native, as you know. And some of the stuff we did with data as an asset from the chief data architect. >> A couple I would add from yesterday, Indiegogo who I thought had a great case study, and then Mohammed Farooq, talking about cloud brokering. 60% of IBM's business is still services. Services is very very important. And I think that when I look at IBM's big challenge, to me, John, it's when you take that deep industry expertise that they have that competes with Accenture and ENY and Deloitte and PWC. Can you take that deep industry expertise and codify it in software and transform into a more software-oriented company? That's what IBM's doing, trying to do anyway, and challenging. To me it's all about differentiation. IBM has a substantially differentiated cloud strategy that allows them not to have to go head to head with Amazon, even though Amazon is a huge factor. And the last thing I want to say is, it's what IBM calls the clients. It's the customers. They have a logo slide, they bring up the CEOs of these companies, and it's very very impressive, almost in the same way that Amazon does at its conferences. They bring up great customers. IBM brings in the C-Suite. They're hugging Ginni. You know, it was a hug fest today. Betty up on stage. It was a pretty impressive lineup of partners and customers. >> I didn't know AT&T and IBM were that close. That was a surprise for me. And seeing the CEO of AT&T up there really tees it out. And I think AT&T's interesting, and Mobile World Congress, one of the things that we covered at that event was the over the top Telco guys got to get their act together, and that's clear that 5G and wireless over the top is going to power the sensors everywhere. So the IOT on cars, for instance, and life, is going to be a great opportunity for, but Telco has to finally get a business model. So it's interesting to see his view of digital services from a Telco standpoint. The question I have for AT&T is, are they going to be dumped pipes or are they actually going to move up the stand and add value? Interesting to see who's the master in that relationship. IBM with cognitive, or AT&T with the pipes. >> And, you know, you're in Silicon Valley so you hear all the talk from the Silicon Valley elites. "Oh well, Apple and Amazon "and Google and Facebook, "much better AI than Watson." I don't know, maybe. But IBM's messaging-- >> Yes. >> Okay, so yes, fine. But IBM's messaging and positioning in the enterprise to apply their deep industry knowledge and bring services to bear and solve real problems, and protect the data and protect the models. That is so differentiable, and that is a winning strategy. >> Yeah but Dave, everyone who's doing-- >> Despite the technical. >> Anyone who's doing serious AI attempts, first of all, this whole bastardized definition. It's really machine learning that's driving it and data. Anyone who's doing any serious direction to AI is using machine learning and writing their own code. They're doing it on their own before they go to Watson. So Watson is not super baked when it comes to AI. So what I would say is, Watson has libraries and things that could augment traditional custom-built AI as a kernel. Our 13-year-old guest Tanmay was on. He's doing his own customizing, then bring it to Watson. So I don't see Watson being a mutually exclusive, Watson or nothing else. Watson right now has a lot of things that adds to the value but it's not the Holy Grail for all things AI, in my opinion. The innovation's going to come from the outside and meet up with Watson. That to me is the formula. >> Going back to Mohammed Farooq yesterday, he made the statement, roughly, don't quote me on these numbers, I'll quote myself, for every dollar spent on technology, 10 dollars are going to be spent on services. That's a huge opportunity for IBM, and that's where they're going to make Watson work. >> If I'm IBM and Watson team, and I'm an executive there and engineering lead, I'm like, look it, what I would do is target the fusion aspect of connecting with their customers data. And I think that's what they're kind of teasing out. I don't know if they're completely saying that, but I want to bring my own machine learning to the table, or my own custom stuff, 'cause it's my solution. If Watson can connect with that and handshake with the data, then you got the governance problem solved. So I think Seth, the CDO, is kind of connecting the dots there, and I think that's still unknown, but that's the direction that I see. >> And services, it remains critical because of the complexity of IBM's portfolio, but complexity has always been the friend of services. But at the same time, IBM's going to transform its services business and become more software-like, and that is the winning formula. At the end of the day, from a financial perspective, to me it's cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. And this company is still a cash flow cow. >> So the other thing that surprised me, and this is something we can kind of end the segment on is, IBM just reorganized. So that's been reported. The games, people shift it a little bit, but it's still the same game. They kind of consolidated the messaging a little bit, but I think the proof point is that the traffic for on the digital side, for this show, is 2X World of Watson. The lines to get into keynotes yesterday and today were massive. So there's more interest in InterConnect than World of Watson. >> Well we just did. >> Amazing, isn't it? >> Well then that was a huge show, so what that means is, this is hitting an interest point. Cloud and data coming together. And again, I said it on the intro yesterday. IOT is the forcing function. That to me is bringing the big data world. We just had Strata Hadoop and R event at BigDataSV. That's not Hadoop anymore, it's data and cloud coming together. And that's going to be hitting IOT and this cognitive piece. So I think certainly it's going to accelerate at IBM. >> And IBM's bringing some outside talent. Look at Harry Green who came from Thomas Cook, Michelle Peluso. Marketing chops. They sort of shuffled the deck with some of their larger businesses. Put Arvind Krishna in charge. Brought in David Kenny from the Weather Company. Moved Bob Picciano to the cognitive systems business. So as you say, shuffle things around. Still a lot of the same players, but sometimes the organization-- >> By the way, we forgot to talk about Don Tapscott who came on, my favorite of the day. >> Another highlight. >> Blockchain Revolution, but we interviewed him. Check out his book, Blockchain can be great. Tomorrow we got a big lineup as well. We're going to have some great interviews all day, going right up to 5:30 tomorrow for day three coverage. This is theCUBE, here at the Mandalay Bay for IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Stay with us, join us tomorrow, Wednesday, for our third day of exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017, thanks for watching.