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

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And it's theCUBE Virtual and Uli Homann who's here, Corporate Vice President of Cloud & AI at Microsoft. Thanks for comin' on. I love this session. Obviously, Microsoft one of the big clouds. Awesome. You guys partnering with IBM here, at IBM Think. I remember during the client-server days in the '80s, late '80s to early '90s the open systems interconnect was a big part of opening up the computer industry. That was networking, intra-networking and really created more LANs and more connections for PCs et cetera, and the world just went on from there. Similar now with hybrid cloud, you're seeing that same kind of vibe, right? You're seeing that same kind of alignment with distributed computing architectures for businesses. Where now you have, it's not just networking and plumbing, and connecting, you know, LANs and PCs, and printers, it's connecting everything. It's kind of almost a whole 'nother world, but similar movie, if you will. So this is really going to be good for people who understand that market. IBM does, you guys do. Talk about the alignment between IBM and Microsoft in this new hybrid cloud space. It's really kind of now standardized, but yet it's just now coming. >> Yeah, so again, fantastic question. So the way I think about this is first of all, Microsoft and IBM are philosophically very much aligned. We're both investing in key open source initiatives like the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, CNCF, something that we both believe in. We're both partnering with the Red Hat organization so Red Hat forms a common bond, if you so want to, between Microsoft and IBM. And again, part of this is how can we establish a system of capabilities that every client has access to, and then build on top of that stack. And again, IBM does this very well with their Cloud Paks which are coming out now with data and AI, and others. So open source, open standards are key elements and then you mentioned something critical which I believe is not under, misunderstood, but certainly not appreciated enough is this is about connectivity between businesses and so part of the power of the IBM perspective together with Microsoft is bringing together key business applications for health care, for retail, for manufacturing and really make them work together so that our clients that are-- critical scenarios get the support they need from both IBM as well as Microsoft on top of this common foundation of the CNCF and other open standards. >> You know, it's interesting, I love that point. I'm going to double-down and amplify that and continue to bring it up. Connecting between businesses is one thread but now, people, because you have an edge that's also industrial, business, but also people. People are also participating in open source, people have wearables, people are connected so they can, and also they're connecting with collaboration. So this kind of brings a whole 'nother architecture which I want to get into the solutions with you on on how you see that playing out. But first, I know, you know, you're a veteran with Microsoft for many, many years, for decades. Microsoft's core competency has been ecosystems, developer ecosystems, customer ecosystems. Today, that the services motion is build around ecosystems. You guys have that playbook, IBM's well versed in it, as well. How does that impact your partnerships, your solutions, and how you deal with down this open marketplace? >> Well, let's start with the obvious. Obviously, Microsoft and IBM will work together in common ecosystems. Again, I'm going to reference the CNCF again as the foundation for a lot of these initiatives. But then we are also working together in the Red Hat ecosystem because Red Hat has built an ecosystem that Microsoft and IBM are players in that ecosystem. However, we also are looking higher level 'cause a lot of times when people think ecosystems, it's fairly low-level technology. But Microsoft and IBM are talking about partnerships that are focused on industry scenarios. Again, retail for example, or health care and others where we're building on top of these lower-level ecosystem capabilities and then bringing together the solution scenarios where the strength of IBM capabilities is coupled with Microsoft capabilities to drive this very famous one plus one equals three. And then the other piece that I think we both agree on is the open source ecosystem for software development and software development collaboration. And GitHub is a common anchor that we both believe can feed the world's economy with respect to the software solutions that are needed to really, yeah, bring the capabilities forward, help improve the world's economy and so forth by effectively bringing together brilliant minds across the ecosystem and again, just Microsoft and IBM bringing some people, but the rest of the world obviously participating in that, as well. So thinking again, open source, open standards, and then industry-specific collaboration and capabilities being a key part. You mentioned people. We certainly believe that people play a key role, software developers and the GitHub notion being a key one. But there are others where again, Microsoft with Microsoft 365 has a lot of capabilities in connecting people within the organization and across organizations. And while we're using Zoom, here, a lot of people are utilizing Teams 'cause Teams is on the one side of collaboration platform, but on the other side is also an application host. And so bringing together people collaboration supported and powered by applications from IBM, from Microsoft and others, is going to be, I think, a huge differentiation in terms of how people interact with software in the future. >> Yeah, and I think that whole joint development is a big part of this new people equation where it's not just partnering in market, it's also at the tech, and you've got open source, and it's a just phenomenal innovation formula, there. So let's ask what solutions, here. I want to get into some of the top solutions you're doing that Microsoft that maybe with IBM. But your title as the Corporate Vice President Cloud & AI, c'mon, could you get a better department? I mean, more relevant than that? I mean, it's exciting. You know, cloud scale is driving tons of innovation, AI is eating software or changing the software paradigm. We're going to see that playing out. I've done dozens of interviews just in this past month on how AI's a more, certainly with machine learning, and having a control plane with data, changing the game. So tell us, what are the hot solutions for hybrid cloud and why is this a different ballgame than say, public cloud? >> Well, so first of all, let's talk a little bit about the AI capabilities and data because I think they're two categories. You are seeing an evolution of AI capabilities that are coming out. And again, I just read IBM's announcement about integrating the Cloud Pak with IBM Satellite. I think that's a key capability that IBM is putting out there and we are partnering with IBM in two directions, there. IBM has done a fantastic job to build AI capabilities that are relevant for industries, health care being a very good example, again, retail being another one. And I believe Microsoft and IBM will work on both partnership on the technology side as well as the AI usage in specific verticals. Microsoft is doing similar things. Within our Dynamics product line, we're using AI for business applications, for planning, scheduling, optimizations, risk assessments, those kind of scenarios. And of course, we're using those in the Microsoft 365 environment, as well. I always joke that despite my 30 years at Microsoft, I still don't know how to really use PowerPoint and I can't do a PowerPoint slide for the life of me, but with a new designer, I can actually get help from the system to make beautiful PowerPoint happen. So bringing AI into real life usage I think is the key part. The hybrid scenario is critical here, as well, especially when you start to think about real life scenarios like safety, worker safety in a critical environment, freshness of product. We're seeing retailers deploying cameras and AI inside the retail stores to effectively make sure that the shelves are stocked, that the quality of the vegetables, for example, continues to be high and monitored. And previously, people would do this on an occasional basis running around in the store. Now the store is monitored 24/7 and people get notified when things need fixing. Another really cool scenario set is quality. We are working with a Finnish steel producer that effectively is looking at the stainless steel as it's being produced and they have cameras on this steel that look at specific marks. And if these marks show up then they know that the stainless steel will be bad. And I don't know if you have looked at a manufacturing process, but the earlier they can get failures detected, the better it is because they can most likely, or more often than not, return the product back into the beginning of the funnel and start over. And that's what they're using. So you can see molten steel, logically speaking, with a camera and AI. And previously, humans did this which is obviously A, less reliable and B, dangerous because this is very, very hot, this is very glowing steel. And so increasing safety while at the same time improving the quality is something that we see in hybrid scenarios. Again, autonomous driving, another great scenario where perception AI is going to be utilized. So there's a bunch of capabilities out there that really are hybrid in nature and will help us move forward with key scenarios, safety, quality, and autonomous behaviors like driving and so forth. >> Uli, great, great insight. Great product vision. Great alignment with IBM's hybrid cloud space what all customers are lookin' for, now. And certainly multicloud around the horizon. So great to have you on. Great agility, and congratulations for your continued success. You've got a great area, cloud and AI, and we'll be keeping in touch. I'd love to do a deep dive, sometime. Thanks for coming on. >> John, thank you very much for the invitation and great questions, great interview. Love it, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. Okay, theCUBE coverage here, at IBM Think 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music) ♪ Dah-De-Da ♪ ♪ Dah-De ♪

>> Reporter: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 and our special coverage of APN partner experience. We are theCUBE virtual and I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today I'm joined by Mike Gilfix who is the Chief Product Officer for IBM Cloud Paks. Mike, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. Now, Cloud Paks is a new thing from IBM. I'm not particularly familiar with it, but it's related to IBM's partnership with AWS. So maybe you could just start us off quickly by explaining what is Cloud Paks and what's your role as Chief Product Officer there? >> Well, Cloud Paks is sort of our next generation platform. What we've been doing is bringing the power of IBM software really across the board and bringing it to a hybrid cloud environment. So making it really easy for our customers to consume it wherever they want, however, they want to choose to do it with a consistent skillset and making it really easy to kind of get those things up and running and deliver value quickly. And this is part of IBM's hybrid approach. So what we've seen is organizations that can leverage the same skillset and, you know basically take those workloads make them run where they need to yields about a two and a half times ROI and Caltech sit at the center of that running on the OpenShift platform. So they get consistent security, skills and powerful software to run their business running everywhere. And we've been partnering with AWS because we want to make sure that those customers that have made that choice, can get access to those capabilities easy and as fast as possible. >> Right. And the Cloud Paks and Built On the Red Hat open. Now, let me get this right. It's the open hybrid cloud platform. So is that OpenShift? >> It is OpenShift, yes. I mean IBM is incredibly committed to open software and OpenShift does provide that common layer. And the reason that's important is you want consistent security. You want to avoid lock-in, right? That gives you a very powerful platform, (indistinct) if you will, they can truly run anywhere with any workload. And we've been working very closely with AWS to make sure that is a premiere first-class experience on AWS. >> Yes so the OpenShift on AWS is relatively new from IBM. So could you explain what is OpenShift on AWS and how does that differ from the OpenShift that people may be already familiar with? Well, the kernel, if you will, is the same it's the same sort of central open source software but in working closely with AWS we're now making those things available as simple services that you can quickly provision and run. And that makes it really easy for people to get started, but again sort of carrying forward that same sort of skill sets. So that's kind of a key way in which we see that you can gain that sort of consistency, you know, no matter where you're running that workload. And we've been investing in that integration working closely with them, Amazon. >> Yeah, and we all know Red Hat's commitment to open source software in the open ecosystems. Red hat is rightly famous for it. And I am old enough to remember when it was a brand new thing, particularly in enterprise to allow open source to come in and have anything to do with workloads. And now it's all the rage and people are running quite critical workloads on it. So what are you seeing in the adoption within the enterprise of open software? >> The adoption is massive. I think, well first let me describe what's driving it. I mean, people want to tap into innovation and the beauty of open source is you're kind of crowdsourcing if you will, this massive community of developers that are creating just an incredible amount of innovation at incredible speed. And it's a great way to ensure that you avoid vendor lock-in. So enterprises of all types are looking to open solutions as a way, both of innovating faster and getting protection. And that commitment, is something certainly Red Hat has tapped into. It's behind the great success of Red Hat. And it's something that frankly is permeating throughout IBM in that we're very committed to driving this sort of open approach. And that means that, you know, we need to ensure that people can get access to the innovation they need, run it where they want and ensure that they feel that they have choice. >> And the choice I think is a key part of it that isn't really coming through in some of the narrative. There's a lot of discussion about how you should actually pick, should you go cloud? I remember when it was either you should stay on-site or should you go to cloud? And we had a long discussion there. Hybrid cloud really does seem to have come of age where it's a realistic kind of compromise is probably the wrong word, but it's a trade off between doing all the one thing or all another. And for most enterprises, that doesn't actually seem to be the choice that's actually viable for them. So hybrid seems like it's actually just the practical approach. Would that be accurate? >> Well our studies have shown that if you look statistically at the set of workload that's moved to cloud, you know something like 20% of workloads have only moved to cloud meaning the other 80% is experiencing barriers to move. And some of those barriers is figuring out what to do with all this data that's sitting on-prem or you know, these applications that have years and years of intelligence baked into them that can not easily be ported. And so organizations are looking at the hybrid approaches because they give them more choice. It helps them deal with fragmentation. Meaning as I move more workload, I have consistent skillset. It helps me extend my existing investments and bring it into the cloud world. And all those things again are done with consistent security. That's really important, right? Organizations need to make sure they're protecting their assets, their data throughout, you know leveraging a consistent platform. So that's really the benefit of the hybrid approach. It essentially is going to enable these organizations to unlock more workload and gain the acceleration and the transformative effect of cloud. And that's why it's becoming a necessity, right? Because they just can't get that 80% to move yet. >> Yeah and I've long said that the cloud is a state of mind rather than a particular location. It's more about an operational model of how you do things. So hearing that we've only got 20% of workloads have moved to this new way of doing things does rather suggest that there's a lot more work to be done. What, for those organizations that are just looking to do this now or they've done a bit of it and they're looking for those next new workloads, where do you see customers struggling the most and where do you think that IBM can help them there? >> Well,(indistinct) where are they struggling the most? First I think skills. I mean, they have to figure out a new set of technologies to go and transition from this old world to the new and at the heart of that is lots of really critical debates. Like how do they modernize the way that they do software delivery for many enterprises, right? Embrace new ways of doing software delivery. How do they deal with the data issues that arise from where the data sits, their obligations for data protection, what happens if the data spans multiple different places but you have to provide high quality performance and security. These are all parts of issues that, you know, span different environments. And so they have to figure out how to manage those kinds of things and make it work in one place. I think the benefit of partnering, you know, with Amazon is, clearly there's a huge customer base that's interested in Amazon. I think the benefit of the IBM partnership is, you know, we can help to go and unlock some of those new workloads and find ways to get that cloud benefit and help to move them to the cloud faster again with that consistency of experience. And that's why I think it's a good match partnership where we're giving more customers choice. We're helping them to unlock innovation substantially faster. >> Right. And so for people who might want to just get started without it, how would they approach this? People might have some experience with AWS, it's almost difficult not to these days, but for those who aren't familiar with the Red Hat on AWS with OpenShift on AWS, how would they get started with you to explore what's possible? >> Well, one of the things that we're offering to our clients is a service that we refer to as IBM garage. It's, you know, an engagement model if you will, within IBM, where we work with our clients and we really help them to do co-creation so help to understand their business problem or, you know, the target state of where they want their IT to get to. And in working with them in co-creation, you know, we help them to affect that transition. Let's say that it's about delivering business applications faster. Let's say it's about modernizing the applications they have or offering new services, new business models, again all in the spirit of co-creation. And we found that to be really popular. It's a great way to get started. We've leveraged design thinking and approach. They can think about the customer experience and their outcome. If they're creating new business processes, new applications, and then really help them to uplift their skills and, you know, get ready to adopt cloud technology and everything that they do. >> It sounds like this is a lot of established workloads that people already have in their organizations. It's already there, it's generating real money. It's not those experimental workloads that we saw early on which was a, well let's try this. Cloud is a fabulous way where we can run some experiments. And if it doesn't work, we just turn it off again. These sound like a lot more workloads are kind of more important to the business. Is that be true? >> Yeah. I think that's true. Now I wouldn't say they're just existing workloads because I think there's lots of new business innovation that many of our, you know, clients want to go and launch. And so this gives them an opportunity to do that new innovation, but not forget the past meaning they can bring it forward and bring it forward into an integrated experience. I mean, that's what everyone demands of a true digital business, right? They expect that your experience is integrated, that it's responsive, that it's targeted and personalized. And the only way to do that is to allow for experimentation that integrates in with the, you know, standard business processes and things that you did before. And so you need to be able to connect those things together seamlessly. >> Right. So it sounds like it's a transition more than creating new thing completely from scratch. It's well, look, we've done a lot of innovation over the past decade or so in cloud, we know what works but we still have workloads that people clearly know and value. How do we put those things together and do it in such a way that we maintain the flexibility to be able to make new changes as we learn new things. >> Yeah, leverage what you've got play to your strengths. I mean that's how you create speed. If you have to reinvent the wheel every time it's going to be a slow roll. >> Yeah and that does seem like an area where an organization probably at this point should be looking to partner with other people who have done the hard yards. They've already figured this out. Well, as you say, why can't we make all of these obvious areas yourself when you're starting from scratch, when there's a wealth of experience out there and particularly this whole ecosystem that exists around the open software? In fact maybe you could tell us a little bit about the ecosystem opportunities that are there because Red Hat has been part of this for a very long time. AWS has a very broad ecosystem as we're all familiar with being here at re:Invent yet again. How does that ecosystem play into what's possible? >> Well, let me explain why I think IBM brings a different dimension to that trio, right? IBM brings deep industry expertise. I mean, we've long worked with all of our clients, our partners on solving some of their biggest business problems and being embedded in the thing that they do. So we have deep knowledge of their enterprise challenges, deep knowledge of their business processes. deep knowledge of their business processes. We are able to bring that industry know how mixed with, you know, Red Hat's approach to an open foundational platform, coupled with, you know, the great infrastructure you can get from Amazon and, you know, that's a great sort of powerful combination that we can bring to each of our clients. And, you know, maybe just to bring it back a little bit to that idea, okay so what's the role in Cloud Paks in that? I mean, Cloud Paks are the kind of software that we've built to enable enterprises to run their essential business processes, right? In the central digital operations that they run everything from security to protecting their data or giving them powerful data tools to implement AI and you know, to implement AI algorithms in the heart of their business or giving them powerful automation capabilities so they can digitize their operations. And also we make sure those things are going to run effectively. It's those kinds of capabilities that we're bringing in the form of Cloud Paks think of that as that substrate that runs a digital business that now can be brought through right? Running on AWS infrastructure through this integration that we've done. >> Right. So basically taking things as a pre-packaged module that we can just grab that module drop it in and start using it rather than having to build it ourselves from scratch. >> That's right. And they can leverage those powerful capabilities and get focused on innovating the things that matter, right? So the huge accelerant to getting business value. >> And it does sound a lot easier than trying to learn how to do the complex sort of deep learning and linear algorithms that they're involved in machine learning. I have looked into it a bit and trying to manage that sort of deep masses. I think I'd much rather just grab one off the shelf plug it in and just use it. >> Yeah. It's also better than writing assembler code which was some of my first programming experiences as well. So I think the software industry has moved on just a little bit since then. (chuckles) >> I think we have is that I do not miss the days of handwriting assembly at all. Sometimes for this (indistinct) reasons. But if we want to get things done, I think I'd much rather work in something a little higher level. (Mike laughing) So thank you very much for joining me. My guest Mike Gilfix there from IBM, sorry, from IBM cloud. And this has been, sorry, go ahead. We'll cut that. Can we cut and reedit this outro? >> Cameraman: Yeah, you guys can or you can just go ahead and just start over again. >> I'll just do, I'll just do the outro. Try it again. >> Cameraman: Yeah, sounds good. >> So thank you so much for my guests there Mike Gilfix, Chief Product Officer for IBM Cloud Paks from IBM. This has been theCUBES coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 and the APN partner experience. I've been your host, Justin Warren, make sure you come back and join us for more coverage later on.

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020, brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back. I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020. We wish everybody could join us in Boston, but instead we're doing it online this year, of course, and really excited. We're going to be digging into the value of data, how DataOps, data scientists are leveraging data. And joining me on the program, Scott Buckles, he's the North American Business Executive for database data science and DataOps with IBM, Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Stuart, thanks for having me, great to see you. >> Start with the Actifio-IBM partnership. Anyone that knows that Actifio knows that the IBM partnership is really the oldest one that they've had, either it's hardware through software, those joint solutions go together. So tell us about the partnership here in 2020. >> Sure. So it's been a fabulous partnership. In the DataOps world where we are looking to help, all of our customers gain efficiency and effectiveness in their data pipeline and getting value out of their data, Actifio really compliments a lot of the solutions that we have very well. So the folks from everybody from the up top, all the way through the engineering team, is a great team to work with. We're very, very fortunate to have them. How many or any specific examples or anonymized examples that you can share about joint (indistinct). >> I'm going to stay safe and go on the anonymized side. But we've had a lot of great wins, several significantly large wins, where we've had clients that have been struggling with their different data pipelines. And I say data pipeline, I mean getting value from understanding their data, to developing models and and doing the testing on that, and we can get into this in a minute, but those folks have really needed a solution where Actifio has stepped in and provided that solution. To do that at several of the largest banks in the world, including one that was a very recent merger down in the Southeast, where we were able to bring in the Actifio solution and address our, the customer's needs around how they were testing and how they were trying to really move through that testing cycle, because it was a very iterative process, a very sequential process, and they just weren't doing it fast enough, and Actifio stepped in and helped us deliver that in a much more effective way, in a much more efficient way, especially when you into a bank or two banks rather that are merging and have a lot of work to convert systems into one another and converge data, not an easy task. And that was one of the best wins that we've had in the recent months. And again, going back to the partnership, it was an awesome, awesome opportunity to work with them. >> Well, Scott, as I teed up for the beginning of the conversation, you've got data science and DataOps, help us understand how this isn't just a storage solution, when you're talking about BDP. How does DevOps fit into this? Talk a little bit about some of the constituents inside your customers that are engaging with the solution. >> Yeah. So we call it DataOps, and DataOps is both a methodology, which is really trying to combine the best of the way that we've transformed how we develop applications with DevOps and Agile Development. So going back 20 years ago, everything was a waterfall approach, everything was very slow , and then you had to wait a long time to figure out whether you had success or failure in the application that you had developed and whether it was the right application. And with the advent of DevOps and continuous delivery, the advent of things like Agile Development methodologies, DataOps is really converging that and applying that to our data pipelines. So when we look at the opportunity ahead of us, with the world exploding with data, we see it all the time. And it's not just structured data anymore, it's unstructured data, it's how do we take advantage of all the data that we have so that we can make that impact to our business. But oftentimes we are seeing where it's still a very slow process. Data scientists are struggling or business analysts are struggling to get the data in the right form so that they can create a model, and then they're having to go through a long process of trying to figure out whether that model that they've created in Python or R is an effective model. So DataOps is all about driving more efficiency, more speed to that process, and doing it in a much more effective manner. And we've had a lot of good success, and so it's part methodology, which is really cool, and applying that to certain use cases within the, in the data science world, and then it's also a part of how do we build our solutions within IBM, so that we are aligning with that methodology and taking advantage of it. So that we have the AI machine learning capabilities built in to increase that speed which is required by our customers. Because data science is great, AI is great, but you still have to have good data underneath and you have to do it at speed. Well, yeah, Scott, definitely a theme that I heard loud and clear read. IBM think this year, we do a lot of interviews with theCUBE there, it was helping with the tools, helping with the processes, and as you said, helping customers move fast. A big piece of IBM strategy there are the Cloud Paks. My understanding you've got an update with regards to BDP and Cloud Pak. So to tell us what the new releases here for the show. >> Yeah. So in our (indistinct) release that's coming up, we will be to launch BDP directly from Cloud Pak, so that you can take advantage of the Activio capabilities, which we call virtual data pipeline, straight from within Cloud Pak. So it's a native integration, and that's the first of many things to come with how we are tying those two capabilities and those two solutions more closely together. So we're excited about it and we're looking forward to getting it in our customer's hands. >> All right. And that's the Cloud Pak for Data, if I have that correct, right? >> That's called Cloud Pak for data, correct, sorry, yes. Absolutely, I should have been more clear. >> No, it's all right. It's, it's definitely, we've been watching that, those different solutions that IBM is building out with the Cloud Paks, and of course data, as we said, it's so important. Bring us inside a little bit, if you could, the customers. What are the use cases, those problems that you're helping your customers solve with these solution? >> Sure. So there's three primary use cases. One is about accelerating the development process. Getting into how do you take data from its raw form, which may or may not be usable, in a lot of cases it's not, and getting it to a business ready state, so that your data scientists, your business, your data models can take advantage of it, about speed. The second is about reducing storage costs. As data has exponentially grown so has storage costs. We've been in the test data management world for a number of years now. And our ability to help customers reduce that storage footprint is also tied to actually the acceleration piece, but helping them reduce that cost is a big part of it. And then the third part is about mitigating risk. With the amount of data security challenges that we've seen, customers are continuously looking for ways to mitigate their exposure to somebody manipulating data, accessing production data and manipulating production data, especially sensitive data. And by virtualizing that data, we really almost fully mitigate that risk of them being able to do that. Somebody either unintentionally or intentionally altering that data and exposing a client. >> Scott, I know IBM is speaking at the Data Driven event. I read through some of the pieces that they're talking about. It looks like really what you talk about accelerating customer outcomes, helping them be more productive, if you could, what, what are some of key measurements, KPIs that your customers have when they successfully deploy the solution? >> So when it comes to speed, it's really about, we're looking at about how are we reducing the time of that project, right? Are we able to have a material impact on the amount of time that we see clients get through a testing cycle, right? Are we taking them from months to days, are we taking them from weeks to hours? Having that type of material impact. The other piece on storage costs is certainly looking at what is the future growth? You're not necessarily going to reduce storage costs, but are you reducing the growth or the speed at which your storage costs are growing. And then the third piece is really looking at how are we minimizing the vulnerabilities that we have. And when you go through an audit, internally or externally around your data, understanding that the number of exposures and helping find a material impact there, those vulnerabilities are reduced. >> Scott, last question I have for you. You talk about making data scientists more efficient and the like, what are you seeing organizationally, have teams come together or are they planning together, who has the enablement to be able to leverage some of the more modern technologies out there? >> Well, that's a great question. And it varies. I think the organizations that we see that have the most impact are the ones that are most open to bringing their data science as close to the business as possible. The ones that are integrating their data organizations, either the CDO organization or wherever that may set it. Even if you don't have a CDO, that data organization and who owned those data scientists, and folding them and integrating them into the business so that they're an integral part of it, rather than a standalone organization. I think the ones that sort of weave them into the fabric of the business are the ones that get the most benefit and we've seen have the most success thus far. >> Well, Scott, absolutely. We know how important data is and getting full value out of those data scientists, critical initiative for customers. Thanks so much for joining us. Great to get the updates. >> Oh, thank you for having me. Greatly appreciated. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from Activio Data Driven 2020. I'm Stuart Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and back in 2013, when it was becoming pretty obvious that the cloud was going to have a major impact on our industry, the IT industry, I wrote at the time that the way incumbents were going to have to compete was to really go into vertical markets and build ecosystems for their own clouds, and that's exactly what IBM did late last year, when it announced a major partnership with Bank of America in the financial services cloud, and guess what, Hillery Hunter is back in the house, she's the vice president and CTO of the IBM cloud, and an IBM fellow, Hillery, great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> Thanks so much for having me again, always a pleasure to be here. >> So we had an awesome conversation, I think we got into the FS cloud a little bit, but as I was saying, you guys announced last year, Bank of America, but let me start here. Why does the industry need a financial services cloud? >> Yeah, you know, it's key that we ground ourselves in that question of why a financial services cloud, and I think it really goes back to the sensitivity of the workloads and the data that that industry stewards. The financial services industry stewards the data of millions and millions of customers, and they are heavily regulated because of that, and they handle very high value transactions, and being able to take that context and translate that into what does it mean to do high value transactions, sensitive data, consumer data computing, also with all those benefits of elasticity and the value proposition of different deployment locations, is really what financial cloud is about. And those needs of that industry are a little bit different, the regulations are higher, the bar and data protection is higher, and the need to interlock across workload characteristics and the cloud deployment is a bit different. And so, we are bringing what we know about that industry to bear in the context also of cloud computing. >> Okay, so you're making some new announcements, there's some hard news here, but I want to know, if you're an executive, or business leader in the financial services industry, what's in it for me in these announcements? >> Yeah, what's in it for you is that we are moving into the next phase of financial services cloud in making the policy framework that has been developed through an enormous amount of work available to additional industry participants, and we're also moving into a phase of global expansion, and so being able to take this value proposition of an end to end considered secure and confine environment for financial services, out to more players in the industry, out to additional geographies and deployment locations, it's an exciting moment because everyone's really not looking just for a cloud, but they're looking for a choice of deployment locations, they're looking to move more workload to the cloud, and this is really about providing a cloud solution that more workload can move to, not just the first couple phases of analytics and things like that, but also moving into more transformation of the core of banking and the core of banking business, so it is about getting more workload to the cloud, getting that done faster, and getting it done at a net improved security and compliance posture. >> Got it, so I want to ask you about some learnings, now you're the double whammy of learnings here. When you announced the collaboration with B of A, obviously one of the top banks of the world, you've obviously made some progress since then, but the other part of that whammy was COVID. So what did you learn from the collaboration with B of A, and have you guys, how have you expanded your thinking BC, from before COVID, versus AC, after COVID? >> Yeah, you know, the initial motivation for this program was about having trust and transparency in public cloud, and having a public cloud suited also to sensitive and even core banking workloads. We have seen this conversation and the need for it and the urgency for it only pick up since COVID. A lot of things in the world kind of took a pause, but cloud computing really accelerated. We're seeing that businesses need to digitally transform their banking, so core banking transformation is a very hot topic. They need to deal with elasticity, we worked with banks during COVID that were having to suddenly stand up their national equivalent of the Payroll Protection Program. Banks that had to suddenly have three times the elasticity, because all of a sudden consumers were interacting with them purely digitally. And cloud can enable all of those kind of things, and so COVID has really accelerated the motivation toward banking in the cloud, and also toward core banking transformation, which is at the heart of setting a very high security bar in public cloud, to be able to also enable those kind of workloads. >> Yeah, so many changes as a result of COVID, I mean the volume of loans, like you said, everything was digital. I know a lot of older people that always still like to go into the bank, that like to see people, and they knew people and people knew them, well they had no choice but to go digital, so that's huge, if you didn't have a digital solution, and cloud is fundamental in that equation. But let's get into it a little bit more. We talked a little about this at IBM Think, but what are the key attributes that make the IBM financial services cloud suitable for financial services, is it the certifications, I wonder if you could add some color there. >> Yeah, so the key elements of the financial services cloud program are number one, a policy framework, which is a set of controls that are customized to the financial services industry, so this isn't about some existing standard, this is a customization of controls and security for the financial services industry, and that's a major element of what we're announcing right now. In addition to the policy framework is also the way that the different elements of the industry and of regulatory expertise are coming together, so this cloud, and these public cloud offerings, were co-developed and co-designed with IBM Promontory, with IBM Security Services that work with banks, with our anchor partner, and moving forward, we'll be advised by an advisory council of CSOs who have that day to day experience with security and with regulations. And so that is also a very unique context for not this being just a point in time with a policy framework, but being an ongoing initiative that will stay up to date, as security concerns and as regulatory concerns change. And the third aspect is a really unique set of technologies that make all of that possible, so you have to define how the cloud is going to be secure, and then you have to actually do it, and the unique capabilities that we have in IBM public cloud that have enabled this program include a number of things, but amongst them, the industry's highest standard for data protection, with our FIPS-140-2 Level 4 based key protect service, it includes capabilities that we'll be releasing through our acquisition of Spanugo around cloud security and compliance posture management, mapped back to that context of financial services. And so it's really three things, it's a policy framework custom and optimized for the financial services industry, the forward evolution of that through industry expertise, and participation of multi parties in that, and then core technologies that enable folks to accomplish that security posture through data protection, through cloud security posture management, et cetera. >> I forgot about the Promontory, you guys made that acquisition several years ago, that's a nice little feature of the FS cloud. But I want to ask, how hard is it to get these certifications? I mean it's obviously not a layup. Lot of work, lot of time, my reason of my question, is this a moat for you, as you guys start to scale? How difficult is it? >> Yeah, so we have been putting in the time and effort, and so that's why this is an exciting moment for us with the initial work product of this effort. And so our intention really is not for that to be a moat, but for us having traversed the moat, to now have a bridge there through the methodology that we built, through the control framework that we built, for others to now get across that moat. And so this is really about taking what is an extensive amount of work, and an extensive amount of expertise, IBM Promontory, you just mentioned, but they monitor over 70 regulatory obligations in over 20 jurisdictions globally, right? I mean this is a tremendous depth of expertise, and so having crossed the moat, and having built the bridge across it, this is where we can then help others to save time in this process of adopting public cloud for further workloads. >> You've mentioned workloads, you've talked about core financial workloads, but maybe give us a little insight on what type of workloads are the most suitable for the financial services cloud, because let's face it, most of the hardcore mission-critical workloads haven't moved, actually probably none of 'em have moved to the cloud, you kind of referenced that before. Ginni Rometty talks about that all the time. But what are the right workload strategic fits for your cloud? >> Yeah, you know you mentioned Ginni Rometty, and so I'll take a quick note there from some of the language that you'll hear her use, she talks about, there was chapter one of the cloud journey, and stuff that was on less sensitive data, analytics, some things on public information, were certainly done, also in finance and also in regulated industries in the cloud. And she talks about chapter two, chapter two being mission-critical workloads. And this program really is the definition of chapter two for the financial services industry. It is the enabling expertise, the enabling control set, the enabling security technologies, the enabling cloud services, for that chapter two, right, for that next layer of adoption of things that had been kept behind the firewall, had been kept in a private cloud context, can now be considered also for public cloud. And so easing that adoption, streamlining that process, et cetera, is really what we're looking to accomplish. >> I mean obviously IBM, huge presence in the banking community, is this really for just big banks? What about the ecosystem, what do you got in there for ISVs and SaaS providers? >> Yeah, you know, you asked me a question at the beginning here about COVID and what's happened, and I think, the transformation of ISV providers to become SaaS providers, the expansion of their capabilities being needed in payments and digital client experiences and such, also for regionals and second and third tier banking institutions and such, is as much of what is happening right now as anything else, amongst the first tiers, because there's just as much pressure for transformation and digital consumer experience, and other things like that, also in the regionals and second and third tiers. So part of our announcement is around the ecosystem of partners that we have now for the financial services cloud program. And that includes ISVs and SaaS providers that are servicing many different types of needs of institutions large and small, so we're seeing those that are servicing core banking, and payments, those that are servicing analytics use cases for this industry, and even HR function, just because of that concern about stewarding data well for these industries and those first tier banks, and so that transition to digital, that drive to infuse AI capabilities, the need to transform core banking, is something that's very much also happening within the ISV and SaaS providers, and we're thrilled with the wide variety of partner base that we're seeing develop there within our ecosystem for this program. >> I was talking to a CIO friend of mine several years ago, and he said to me, "You know, this idea of lifting and shifting, "it's fine, you get little cost savings, maybe, "but unless you change your operating model "and you drive an innovation agenda, "you really aren't going to get the type "of telephone number returns from cloud "that you would want or expect." So my question is around innovation, and we've said many times in theCUBE that the new innovation cocktail, it's not Moore's law anymore, it's the combination of data applying machine intelligence and then the cloud, and the reason why the cloud is important is scale, okay, there's maybe a little bit of cost as well, but it's also innovation. It's the ability to attract people into an ecosystem, and that resonates with line of business. If your cloud is just about making IT's life better, well that's nice, but what's in this announcement and in this initiative for the line of business? >> Yeah, it is all about the workloads. I always say that to me the cloud journey is about, number one your platform, which is the thing onto which you modernize. It is what are you going to get out of moving to containers, what are you going to get out of moving to microservices, how does that help all of those cloud metrics that you mentioned? But number two, it's about the workload, right, which workloads are we talking about, how will they deliver, how will those workloads be able to because of cloud deliver not just TCO but improvement in customer experience, how will those workloads be able to meet elasticity, resiliency, cybersecurity concerns, changes in the way the workforce is working these days, et cetera. And from the line of business perspective, there is a tremendous need to consume, for example, fintech-based innovation. But a lot of folks have struggled to move past POCs because of concerns about security and compliance, for those deployment scenarios, and so being able to bring the ISVs and SaaS providers, and then also fintechs into an ecosystem with a prescriptive and proactive security and compliance context is really what we're all about here. And that will enable a flourishing of adoption of innovation. >> You know, I always love to talk about the competition on these episodes. But I want to ask differentiation, how different is this, can I just go to any cloud supplier and get this, will I eventually be able to, what's IBM's differentiation, Hillery? >> Yeah, so you want to think of it that, in financial services, you are concerned, and you have to be concerned about everything. You have to be concerned about things into the details of the cloud itself, you have to be concerned about things that are related to the behavior and the permissions of your developers in that environment. Financial services cloud really has to be an end to end, soup to nuts conversation, and so this is a program of our public cloud, where end to end, we can stand behind and provide trust and resiliency and this policy framework, end to end within an environment that can be trusted for mission-critical workload. And so when we look at differentiation, our investments are in bringing together IBM's expertise all the way going back to regulations and security consulting that we've been doing for decades in this industry, applying that to that cloud context, taking capabilities that are developed all the way down into the transistors, investments we've made even into the silicon around how cryptography is done, bringing that into the cloud context. And so having brought those things together into our public cloud context, that's how we're able to solution this in a different way, because it really is end to end about the expertise, from all of that regulatory advising, that security context, all the way down into the silicon and the transistors, and I think that's a very unique value proposition, as a cloud provider, it's a tremendous opportunity for us to bring together those pieces. And to continue to be a trusted partner to these companies that we have long been a trusted partner of. >> Now of course you guys have a relationship with VMware, you were the first, actually, to announce a VMware cloud relationship. And so let's say, okay, I got some VMware workloads, I move 'em into your FS cloud. Make sure that I've got the security and compliance checked. Six months down the road, so I've done that sort of first step, what's next for me, is that the end, or are there other things on my journey? >> Yeah, so absolutely, I mean VMware is part of what we are solution financial services clients to, but also cloud-native, and OpenShift, containerization, that modernization journey, is an ongoing journey for everyone, and so to your point of what's next, we're seeing a continual conversation of balancing lift and shift and modernization across workloads, and there are different reasons at different points in time, for people to consider that. I think the key is that they trust where they are taking that data, and whatever the form is that the workload goes, it needs to be in the context of that trust around the data in a security context, and so we're absolutely seeing everything, honestly, from financial services institutions looking to engage with us, also in our new research innovation lab, where we're engaging directly with financial services clients that are trying to work through this differentiation, is it virtualization, is it containerization, is it even serverless? What is the right and most effective balance of how workloads are programmed and run for the next generation of banking. >> You know, Hillery, I've been doing a lot of interviews in the last decade, and it's been interesting to see the ascendancy of cloud, of course, but also the change in perception, particularly in financial services, in the early days of cloud, cloud was an evil word. The C that should not be named. And so I want to understand if I'm, and of course COVID has also changed the perception, because if you weren't digital and you didn't have cloud, you couldn't really transact businesses as well, you didn't have that business resiliency. So, what if I'm a financial services person now, okay, I'm through the knothole, I want to get started, where do I start? >> Yeah, well call us first, but past that, I think that the conversations, the first conversations that we're having with our clients are, number one, do you have an architecture? So is cloud not just a place, like I like to say, but is cloud a plan, is there an architectural plan to enable you to have consistency, for example, in your developer experience between your private cloud environment and your public cloud environment? Architecturally are there those foundational choices around common services about being able to deploy capabilities in one location, and develop them in another, et cetera. All those value propositions of what we have been creating around OpenShift and Cloud Paks in our public cloud, and consistency across different environments and such, I think that's the first thing to start with is architecting a cloud, not accidental usage of multiple environments, but architecting use of multiple environments. And then I think the second conversation is to make a security and compliance plan that is going to be robust enough to withstand even the intense scrutiny of a regulated industry CCO and risk team, and so that's the other foundational conversation that we're having with our clients, and helping them with, so we can provide services and reference architectures, and all that other kind of thing, to enable them to stabilize planning on both fronts, both architecturally for what cloud means in its entirety, not just a cloud, but in its entirety, all clouds, multicloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera. And then secondly, then, a comprehensive security plan for that public cloud choice, and that's what we're really locking down with this policy framework, is bringing standardization on that for public cloud. >> Well, lot of innovation for the financial services community, which is again your wheelhouse. I wrote a piece right around Think that IBM's future rests on its innovation agenda, and I'm glad you brought up the notion of private, public, and then the whole hybrid thing, because I see OpenShift as a key, and RedHat as a key enabler of that across whether it's cloud, on-prem, edge, across multiple clouds. That's an ambitious agenda, as somebody who's responsible for cloud. That is something that is real innovation, and really differentiable I think, in the marketplace, and probably pretty expensive to build out across all those different platforms. >> Yeah, it is, but I think on the word innovation, my mind, as an IBMer, goes to the IBM research division. Thousands of researchers globally, and they've very much been a part of this journey with us. The journey with us on containerization, the journey on workload modernization from monolith to microservices, the journey of our public cloud, and now also very much a part of our work in financial services, so our research division is this incredible gift and asset that we have, that is working with us also on our cloud security and compliance posture management, that security and compliance control center that we're talking about in this announcement, et cetera, and so them being a part of this innovation stream for us is a really exciting part, again, of bringing together all these different pieces that IBM has to offer in this space to make it all stack up, to be a cloud for financial services. >> I got a couple of little housekeeping items before we close here. This is announced for the US first, right? What about other regions, first of all, is that correct, and what about other regions? >> That's correct, and we are also announcing additional participation of global banking partners as well in this announcement. And so this is also again our initial public statement of our expansion past the US. >> Last question, so just give us a glimpse of the future, where do you want to be in a few years, thinking about let's say three years down the road, what's that outcome look like? >> Yeah, you know I think that three years from now, we would love to see that people are able to make a decision, going back to your question about the line of business owners, make a decision about what they're trying to accomplish with a workload, and not be held back by security and compliance concerns in terms of putting that workload where it needs to be, where it will be most efficient, and where it can be embraced by a set of cloud capabilities that enable it to move in a competitive pace forward, infusing AI into everything that is done. Leveraging the latest in technologies, and serverless computing and all these other kind of things that can facilitate a line of business delivering more value so that cloud really continues, but also realizes its promises in that chapter two version of the story, also for regulated industries and also for their mission-critical workloads. >> Well Hillery, good luck with this, I mean congratulations on the progress that you've made, really since you guys announced this late last year, and really excited to see this start to take off, and you're a great guest, love having you on, thank you so much. >> Thanks so much for having me, pleasure talking to you as always. >> All right, cheers. And thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, there, this is Dave Vellante. We're back at the IBM Think 2020 Digital Event Experience are socially responsible and distant. I'm here in the studios in Marlborough, our team in Palo Alto. We've been going wall to wall coverage of IBM Think, Kit Chee here is the Vice President, and general manager of Cloud and Enterprise sales at Intel. Kit, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. Thank you for having me on. >> You're welcome, and Evaristus Mainsah, Mainsah is here. Mainsah, he is the general manager of the IBM Cloud Pack Ecosystem for the IBM Cloud. Evaristus, it's good to see you again. Thank you very much, I appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, so Kit, let me start with you. How are you guys doing? You know, there's this pandemic, never seen it before. How're things where you are? >> Yeah, so we were quite fortunate. Intel's had an epidemic leadership team. For about 15 years now, we have a team consisting of medical safety and operational professionals, and this same team has, who has navigated as across several other health issues like bad flu, Ebola, Zika and each one and one virus then navigating us at this point with this pandemic. Obviously, our top priority as it would be for IBM is protecting the health and well being of employees while keeping the business running for our customers. The company has taken the following measures to take care of it direct and indirect workforce, Dave and to ensure business continuity throughout the developing situation. They're from areas like work from home policies, keeping hourly workers home and reimbursing for daycare, elderly care, helping with WiFi policies. So that's been what we've been up to Intel's manufacturing and supply chain operations around the world world are working hard to meet demand and we are collaborating with supply pains of our customers and partners globally as well. And more recently, we have about $16 Million to support communities, from frontline health care workers and technology initiatives like online education, telemedicine and compute need to research. So that's what we've been up to date. Pretty much, you know, busy. >> You know, every society that come to you, I have to say my entire career have been in the technology business and you know, sometimes you hear negative toward the big tech but, but I got to say, just as Kit was saying, big tech has really stepped up in this crisis. IBM has been no different and, you know, tech for good and I was actually I'm really proud. How are you doing in New York City? >> Evaristus: No, thank you, Dave, for that, you know, we are, we're doing great and, and our focus has been absolutely the same, so obviously, because we provide services to clients. At a time like this, your clients need you even more, but we need to focus on our employees to make sure that their health and their safety and their well being is protected. And so we've taken this really seriously, and actually, we have two ways of doing this. One of them is just on to purpose as a, as a company, on our clients, but the other is trying to activate the ecosystem because problems of this magnitude require you to work across a broad ecosystem to, to bring forth in a solution that are long lasting, for example, we have a call for code, which where we go out and we ask developers to use their skills and open source technologies to help solve some technical problems. This year, the focus was per AVADA initiatives around computing resources, how you track the Coronavirus and other services that are provided free of charge to our clients. Let me give you a bit more color, so, so IBM recently formed the high performance computing consortium made up of the feYderal government industry and academic leaders focus on providing high performance computing to solve the COVID-19 problem. So we're currently we have 33 members, now we have 27 active products, deploying something like 400 teraflops as our petaflop 400 petaflops of compute to solve the problem. >> Well, it certainly is challenging times, but at the same time, you're both in the, in the sweet spot, which is Cloud. I've talked to a number of CIOs who have said, you know, this is really, we had a cloud strategy before but we're really accelerating our cloud strategy now and, and we see this as sort of a permanent effect. I mean, Kit, you guys, big, big on ecosystem, you, you want frankly, a level playing field, the more optionality that you can give to customers, you know, the better and Cloud is really been exploding and you guys are powering, you know, all the world's Clouds. >> We are, Dave and honestly, that's a huge responsibility that we undertake. Before the pandemic, we saw the market through the lens of four key mega trends and the experiences we are all having currently now deepens our belief in the importance of addressing these mega trends, but specifically, we see marketplace needs around key areas of cloudification of everything below point, the amount of online activities that have spiked just in the last 60 days. It's a testimony of that. Pervasive AI is the second big area that we have seen and we are now resolute on investments in that area, 5G network transformation and the edge build out. Applications run the business and we know enterprise IT faces challenges when deploying applications that require data movement between Clouds and Cloud native technologies like containers and Kubernetes will be key enablers in delivering end to end data analytics, AI, machine learning and other critical workloads and Cloud environments at the edge. Pairing Intel's data centric portfolio, including Intel's obtain SSPs with Red Hat, Openshift, and IBM Cloud Paks, enterprise can now break through storage bottlenecks and have unconstrained data availability in the hybrid and multicloud environments, so we're pretty happy with the progress we're making that together with IBM. >> Yeah, Evaristus, I mean, you guys are making some big bets. I've, you know, written and discussed in my breaking analysis, I think a lot of people misunderstand IBM Cloud, Ginni Rometty arm and a bow said, hey, you know, we're after only 20% of the workloads are in cloud, we're going after the really difficult to move workloads and the hybrid workloads, that's really the fourth foundation that Arvin you know, talks about, that you and IBM has built, you know, your mainframes, you have middleware services, and in hybrid Cloud is really that fourth sort of platform that you're building out, but you're making some bets in AI. You got other services in the Cloud like, like blockchain, you know, quantum, we've been having really interesting discussions around quantum, so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about sort of where you're allocating resources, some of the big bets that, that you're making for the next decade. >> Well, thank you very much, Dave, for that. I think what we're seeing with clients is that there's increasing focus on and, and really an acceptance, that the best way to take advantage of the Cloud is through a hybrid cloud strategy, infused with data, so it's not just the Cloud itself, but actually what you need to do to data in order to make sure that you can really, truly transform yourself digitally, to enable you to, to improve your operations, and in use your data to improve the way that you work and improve the way that you serve your clients. And what we see is and you see studies out there that say that if you adopt a hybrid cloud strategy, instead of 2.5 times more effective than a public cloud only strategy, and Why is that? Well, you get thi6ngs such as you know, the opportunity to move your application, the extent to which you move your applications to the Cloud. You get things such as you know, reduction in, in, in risk, you, you get a more flexible architecture, especially if you focus on open certification, reduction and certification reduction, some of the tools that you use, and so we see clients looking at that. The other thing that's really important, especially in this moment is business agility, and resilience. Our business agility says that if my customers used to come in, now, they can't come in anymore, because we need them to stay at home, we still need to figure out a way to serve them and we write our applications quickly enough in order to serve this new client, service client in a new way. And well, if your applications haven't been modernized, even if you've moved to the Cloud, you don't have the opportunity to do that and so many clients that have made that transformation, figure out they're much more agile, they can move more easily in this environment, and we're seeing the whole for clients saying yes, I do need to move to the Cloud, but I need somebody to help improve my business agility, so that I can transform, I can change with the needs of my clients, and with the demands of competition and this leads you then to, you know, what sort of platform do you need to enable you to do this, it's something that's open, so that you can write that application once you can run it anywhere, which is why I think the IBM position with our ecosystem and Red Hat with this open container Kubernetes environment that allows you to write application once and deploy it anywhere, is really important for clients in this environment, especially, and the Cloud Paks which is developed, which I, you know, General Manager of the Cloud Pak Ecosystem, the logic of the Cloud Paks is exactly that you'll want plans and want to modernize one, write the applications that are cloud native so that they can react more quickly to market conditions, they can react more quickly to what the clients need and they, but if they do so, they're not unlocked in a specific infrastructure that keeps them away from some of the technologies that may be available in other Clouds. So we have talked about it blockchain, we've got, you know, Watson AI, AI technologies, which is available on our Cloud. We've got the weather, company assets, those are key asset for, for many, many clients, because weather influences more than we realize, so, but if you are locked in a Cloud that didn't give you access to any of those, because you hadn't written on the same platform, you know, that's not something that you you want to support. So Red Hat's platform, which is our platform, which is open, allows you to write your application once and deploy it anyways, particularly our customers in this particular environment together with the data pieces that come on top of that, so that you can scale, scale, because, you know, you've got six people, but you need 600 of them. How do you scale them or they can use data and AI in it? >> Okay, this must be music to your ears, this whole notion of you know, multicloud because, you know, Intel's pervasive and so, because the more Clouds that are out there, the better for you, better for your customers, as I said before, the more optionality. Can you6 talk a little bit about the rela6tionship today between IBM and Intel because it's obviously evolved over the years, PC, servers, you know, other collaboration, nearly the Cloud is, you know, the latest 6and probably the most rel6evant, you know, part of your, your collaboration, but, but talk more about what that's like you guys are doing together that's, that'6s interesting and relevant. >> You know, IBM and Intel have had a very rich history of collaboration starting with the invention of the PC. So for those of us who may take a PC for granted, that was an invention over 40 years ago, between the two companies, all the way to optimizing leadership, IBM software like BB2 to run the best on Intel's data center products today, right? But what's more germane today is the Red Hat piece of the study and how that plays into a partnership with IBM going forward, Intel was one of Red Hat's earliest investors back in 1998, again, something that most people may not realize that we were in early investment with Red Hat. And we've been a longtime pioneer of open source. In fact, Levin Shenoy, Intel's Executive Vice President of Data Platforms Group was part of COBOL Commies pick up a Red Hat summit just last week, you should definitely go listen to that session, but in summary, together Intel and Red Hat have made commercial open source viable and enterprise and worldwide competing globally. Basically, now we've65 used by nearly every vertical and horizontal industr6y. We are bringing our customers choice, scalability and speed of innovation for key technologies today, such as security, Telco, NFV, and containers, or even at ease and most recently Red Hat Openshift. We're very excited to see IBM Cloud Packs, for example, standardized on top of Openshift as that builds the foundation for IBM chapter two, and allows for Intel's value to scale to the Cloud packs and ultimately IBM customers. Intel began partnering with IBM on what is now called Pax over two years ago and we 6are committed to that success and scaling that, try ecosystem, hardware partners, ISVs and our channel. >> Yeah, so theCUBE by the way, covered Red Hat summit last week, Steve Minima and I did a detailed analysis. It was awesome, like if we do say so ourselves, but awesome in the sense of, it allowed us to really sort of unpack what's going on at Red Hat and what's happening at IBM. Evaristus, so I want to come back to you on this Cloud Pack, you got, it's, it's the kind of brand that you guys have, you got Cloud Packs all over the place, you got Cloud Packs for applications, data, integration, automation, multicloud management, what do we need to know about Cloud pack? What are the relevant components there? >> Evaristus: I think the key components is so this is think of this as you know, software that is designed that is Cloud native is designed for specific core use cases and it's built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat Openshift container Kubernetes environment, and then on top of that, so you get a set of common services that look right across all of them and then on top of that, you've got specific both open source and IBM software that deals with specific plant situations. So if you're dealing with applications, for example, the open source and IBM software would be the run times that you need to write and, and to blow applications to have setups. If you're dealing with data, then you've got Cloud Pack to data. The foundation is still Red Hat Enterprise Linux sitting on top of with Red Hat Openshift container Kubernetes environment sitting on top of that providing you with a set of common services and then you'll get a combination of IBM zone open, so IBM software as well as open source will have third party software that sits on top of that, as well as all of our AI infrastructure that sits on top of that and machine learning, to enable you to do everything that you need to do, data to get insights updates, you've got automation to speed up and to enable us to do work more efficiently, more effectively, to make your smart workers better, to make management easier, to help management manage work and processes, and then you've got multicloud management that allows you to see from a single pane, all of your applications that you've deployed in the different Cloud, because the idea here, of course, is that not all sitting in the same Cloud. Some of it is on prem, some of it is in other Cloud, and you want to be able to see and deploy applications across all of those. And then you've got the Cloud Pack to security, which has a combination of third party offerings, as well as ISV offerings, as well as AI offerings. Again, the structure is the same, REL, Red Hat Openshift and then you've got the software that enables you to manage all aspects of security and to deal with incidents when, when they arise. So that gives you data applications and then there's integration, as every time you start writing an application, you need to integrate, you need to access data security from someplace, you need to bring two pipes together for them to communicate and we use a Cloud Pack for integration to allow us to do that. You can open up API's and expose those API so others writing application and gain access to those API's. And again, this idea of resilience, this idea of agility, so you can make changes and you can adapt data things about it. So that's what the Cloud Pack provides for you and Intel has been an absolutely fantastic partner for us. One of the things that we do with Intel, of course, is to, to work on the reference architectures to help our certification program for our hardware OEMs so that we can scale that process, get many more OEMs adopt and be ready for the Cloud Packs and then we work with them on some of the ISV partners and then right up front. >> Got it, let's talk about the edge. Kity, you mentioned 5G. I mean it's a really exciting time, (laughs) You got windmills, you got autonomous vehicles, you got factories, you got to ship, you know, shipping containers. I mean, everything's getting instrumented, data everywhere and so I'm interested in, let's start with Intel's point of view on the edge, how that's going to evolve, you know what it means to Cloud. >> You know, Dave, it's, its definitely the future and we're excited to partner with IBM here. In addition to enterprise edge, the communication service providers think of the Telcos and take advantage of running standardized open software at the Telco edge, enabling a range of new workloads via scalable services, something that, you know, didn't happen in the past, right? Earlier this year, Intel announced a new C on second generation, scalable, atom based processes targeting the 5G radio access network, so this is a new area for us, in terms of investments going to 5G ran by deploying these new technologies, with Cloud native platforms like Red Hat Openshift and IBM Cloud Packs, comm service providers can now make full use of their network investments and bring new services such as Artificial Intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality and gaming to the market. We've only touched the surface as it comes to 5G and Telco but IBM Red Hat and Intel compute together that I would say, you know, this space is super, super interesting, as more developed with just getting started. >> Evaristus, what do you think this means for Cloud and how that will evolve? Is this sort of a new Cloud that will form at the edge? Obviously, a lot of data is going to stay at the edge, probably new architectures are going to emerge and again, to me, it's all about data, you can create more data, push more data back to the Cloud, so you can model it. Some of the data is going to have to be done in real time at the edge, but it just really extends the network to new horizons. >> Evaristus: It does exactly that, Dave and we think of it and which is why I thought it will impact the same, right? You wouldn't be surprised to see that the platform is based on open containers and that Kubernetes is container environment provided by Red Hat and so whether your data ends up living at the edge or your data lives in a private data center, or it lives in some public Cloud, and how it flows between all of them. We want to make it easy for our clients to be able to do that. So this is very exciting for us. We just announced IBM Edge Application Manager that allows you to basically deploy and manage applications at endpoints of all these devices. So we're not talking about 2030, we're talking about thousands or hundreds of thousands. And in fact, we're working with, we're getting divided Intel's device onboarding, which will enable us to use that because you can get that and you can onboard devices very, very easily at scale, which if you get that combined with IBM Edge Application Manager, then it helps you onboard the devices and it helps you divide both central devices. So we think this is really important. We see lots of work that moving on the edge devices, many of these devices and endpoints now have sufficient compute to be able to run them, but right now, if they are IoT devices, the data has been transferred to hundreds of miles away to some data center to be processed and enormous pass and then only 1% of that actually is useful, right? 99% of it gets thrown away. Some of that actually has data residency requirements, so you may not be able to move the data to process, so why wouldn't you just process the data where the data is created around your analytics where the data is spread, or you have situations that are disconnected as well. So you can't actually do that. You don't want to stop this still in the supermarket, because there's, you lost connectivity with your data center and so the importance of being able to work offline and IBM Edge Application Manager actually allows you so it's tournament so you can do all of this without using lots of people because it's a process that is all sort or automated, but you can work whether you're connected or you're disconnected, and then you get replication when you get really, really powerful for. >> All right, I think the developer model is going to be really interesting here. There's so many new use cases and applications. Of course, Intel's always had a very strong developer ecosystem. You know, IBM understands the importance of developers. Guys, we've got to wrap up, but I wonder if you could each, maybe start with Kit. Give us your sense as to where you want to see this, this partnership go, what can we expect over the next, you know, two to five years and beyond? >> I think it's just the area of, you know, 5G, and how that plays out in terms of edge build out that we just touched on. I think that's a really interesting space, what Evaristus has said is spot on, you know, the processing, and the analytics at the edge is still fairly nascent today and that's growing. So that's one area, building out the Cloud for the different enterprise applications is the other one and obviously, it's going to be a hybrid world. It's not just a public Cloud world on prem world. So the whole hybrid build out What I call hybrid to DoD zero, it's a policy and so the, the work that both of us need to do IBM and Intel will be critical to ensure that, you know, enterprise IT, it has solutions across the hybrid sector. >> Great. Evaristus, give us the last word, bring us home. >> Evaristus: And I would agree with that as well, Kit. I will say this work that you do around the Intel's market ready solutions, right, where we can bring our ecosystem together to do even more on Edge, some of these use cases, this work that we're doing around blockchain, which I think you know, again, another important piece of work and, and I think what we really need to do is to focus on helping clients because many of them are working through those early cases right now, identify use cases that work and without commitment to open standards, using exactly the same standard across like what you've got on your open retail initiative, which we're going to do, I think is going to be really important to help you out scale, but I wanted to just add one more thing, Dave, if you if you permit me. >> Yeah. >> Evaristus: In this COVID era, one of the things that we've been able to do for customers, which has been really helpful, is providing free technology for 90 days to enable them to work in an offline situation to work away from the office. One example, for example, is the just the ability to transfer files and bandwidth, new bandwidth is an issue because the parents and the kids are all working from home, we have a protocol, IBM Aspera, which will make available customers for 90 days at no cost. You don't need to give us your credit card, just log on and use it to improve the way that you work. So your bandwidth feels as if you are in the office. We have what's an assistant that is now helping clients in more than 18 countries that keep the same thing, basically providing COVID information. So those are all available. There's a slew of offerings that we have. We just want listeners to know that they can go on the IBM website and they can gain those offerings they can deploy and use them now. >> That's huge. I knew about the 90 day program, I didn't realize a sparrow was part of that and that's really important because you're like, Okay, how am I going to get this file there? And so thank you for, for sharing that and guys, great conversation. You know, hopefully next year, we could be face to face even if we still have to be socially distant, but it was really a pleasure having you on. Thanks so much. Stay safe, and good stuff. I appreciate it. >> Evaristus: Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you, Kit. Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE, our wall to wall coverage of the IBM Think 2020 Digital Event Experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. Welcome to the program, Dinesh Nirmal, who's the chief product officer for Cloud Paks inside IBM. Dinesh, nice to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, really appreciate you taking the time. >> All right, so, I've been to many IBM shows, and of course, I'm an analyst in the cloud space, so I'm familiar with IBM Cloud Paks, but maybe just refresh our audience minds here, what they are, how long have they been around for, what clouds do they live on, and maybe what's new in 2020 that if somebody had looked at this in the past that they might not know about IBM Cloud Pak? >> Yeah, so thanks Stu. So to start with, let me say that Cloud Paks are cloud agnostic. So, the whole goal is that you build once and it can run anywhere. That is the basic mantra, or principle, that we want to build Cloud Paks with. So they are, look at them as a set of micro services containerized in a form that it can run on any public cloud or behind a firewall. So that's the whole premise of Cloud Paks. So, when you go back to Cloud Paks, it's an integrated set of services that solve a specific set of business problems and also accelerates building each set of applications and solutions. That's what Cloud Paks brings. So, especially in this environment Stu, think about it. If I'm an enterprise, my goal is how can I accelerate and how can I automate? Those are the two key things that comes to my mind if I am a C-level exec at an enterprise. So, Cloud Paks enables that, meaning you already have a set of stitched together services that accelerates the application development. It automates a lot of things for you. So you today have a lot of applications running on multiple clouds or behind the firewall. How do you manage those, right? Cloud Paks will help. So, let me give you one example since you asked specifically on Cloud Paks. Let's take Cloud Pak for Data. The set of services that is available in Cloud Pak for Data will make it easier for all the way from ingest to visualization. There's a set of services that you can use, so you don't have to go build a service or a product or user product for ingest, then use another product for ETL, use another product for building models, another product to manage those models. The Cloud Pak for Data will solve all the problems end to end. It's a rich set of services that will give you all the value that you need all the way from ingest to visualization. And with any personas, whether you are a data engineer, data scientist, or you are a business analyst, you all can collaborate through the Cloud Paks. So that's the two minute answer to your question what Cloud Paks is. >> Awesome, thanks Dinesh. Yeah, I guess you pointed out something right at the beginning there. I hear IBM Cloud Pak and I think IBM Cloud. But you said specifically this is really cloud agnostic. So this week is Think, last week I was covering Red Hat Summit, so I heard a lot about multicloud deployments, talked to the rail team, talked to the open chip team. So, help me understand where do Cloud Pak fit when we're talking about these multicloud employments? And is there some connection with the partnership that, of course, IBM has with Red Hat? >> Of course, so all Cloud Paks are optimized for OpenShift, meaning how do we use the set of services that OpenShift gives, the container management that OpenShift provides? So as we build containers or micro services, how do we make sure that we are optimizing or taking advantage of OpenShift? So, for example, the set of services like logging, monitoring, security, all those services metering that comes from OpenShift is what we are using as Cloud Pak. So Cloud Paks are optimized for OpenShift. From an automation perspective, how do we use Ansible, right? So, all the value that Red Hat and OpenShift brings is what Cloud Pak is built on. So if you look at as a layer as a Lego, the base Lego is OpenShift and rail. And then on top of it sit Cloud Paks, and applications and solutions on top of it. So it's, if I look at layer base, the base Lego layer is OpenShift and Red Hat rail. >> Well, great, that's super important because, one of the things we've been looking at for a while is, you talk about hybrid cloud, you talk about multicloud, and often it's not that platform, that infrastructure discussion, but the biggest challenge for companies today is how do I build new applications, how do I modernize what I have? So, sounds like this is exactly where you're targeting to help people through that transformation that they're going through. >> Yeah, exactly Stu, because if you look at it, in the past products were siloed. You build a product, you use a set of specs to build it. It was siloed. And customers becomes the software integrators, or system integrators, where they have to take the different products, put it together. So even if I am focused on the data space, or AI space, before I had to bring in three or four or five different products, make it all work together to build a model, deploy the model, manage the model, the lifecycle of the model, the lifecycle of the data. But the Cloud Paks bring it all in one box, where out of the box you are ready to go. So your time to value is much more higher with Cloud Paks because you already get a set of stitched together services that gets working right out of the box. >> So, I love the idea of out of the box. When I think of cloud native, modern application development, simplicity is not the first thing I think of, Dinesh. So, help me understand. So many customers, it's the tools, the skillsets, they don't necessarily have the experience. How is what your product set and your team's doing, help customers that deal with the ever-changing landscape and the complexity that they are faced with? >> Yeah, so the honest truth, Stu, is that enterprise applications are not an app that you create and put it on iPhone, right? I mean, it is much more complex, because it's dealing with hundreds of millions of people trying to transact with the system. You need to make sure there is a disaster recovery backup, scalability, elasticity, all those things, security, obviously, very critical piece, and multitenancy. All those things has to come together in an enterprise application. So, when people talk about simplicity, it comes at a price. So, what Cloud Paks has done, is that we have really focused on the user experience and design piece. So, you as an end-user has a great experience using the integrated set of services. The complexity piece will still be there, to some extent, because you're building a very complex multitenant enterprise application, but how do we make it easier for a developer or a data scientist to collaborate or reuse the assets, find the data much more easier, or trust the data much more easier than before? Use AI to predict a lot of the things, including bias detection, all those things. So, we are making a lot of the development, automation and acceleration easier. The complexity part will be there still, because enterprise applications tend to be complex by nature. But we are making it much more easier for you to develop, deploy, manage and govern what you are building. >> Yeah, so, how does Cloud Paks allow you to really work with the customers, focus on things like innovation, showing them the latest in the IBM software portfolio? >> Yeah, so the first piece is that we made it much more easier for the different personas to collaborate. So in the past, what is the biggest challenge, me as a data scientist had? Me as a data scientist, the biggest challenge was that getting access to the data, trusted data. Now we have put some governance around it, where by which you can get data, trusted data, much more easier using Cloud Pak for Data. Governance around the data, meaning if you have a CDO, you want to see who is using the data, how clean is the data, right? A lot of times he data might not be clean, so we want to make sure we can help with that. Now, let me move into the the line of business piece, not just the data. If I am an LOB, and I want to use, automate a lot of the process I have in today, in my enterprise, and not go through the every process automation, and go through your superior or supervisor to get approval, how do we use AI in the business process automation also? So those kind of things, you will get through Cloud Paks. Now, the other piece of Cloud Pak, if I am an IT space, right? The day-two operations, scalability, security, delivery of the software, backup and restore, how do we automate and help with that, the storage layer? Those are day-two operations. So, we are taking it all the way from day one, meaning the whole experience of setting it up, to day two, where enterprise is really worried about, making it seamless and easy using Cloud Paks, I go back to what I said in the beginning, which is out of the accelerate and automate, a lot of the work that enterprise have to do today, much more easier. >> Okay, we talked earlier in the discussion about that this can be used across multiple clouded environments. My understanding, you mentioned one of the IBM Cloud Paks, one for data. There's a number of different Cloud Paks out there. How does that work from a customer's standpoint? Do I have to choose a Cloud Pak or a specific cloud? Is it a license that goes across all of my environments? Help me understand how this deployment mechanism and its support and maintenance works. >> Right, so we have the base, obviously. I said look at it as a modular Lego model. The base is obviously open chipped and rail. On top of its cells sits a bedrock, we call, which is a common set of services and the logic to expand. On top of it sits Cloud Pak for Data, Cloud Pak for Security, Cloud Pak for Applications, there's Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, there's Cloud Pak for Integration. So there is total of six Cloud Paks that's available, but you can pick and choose which Cloud Pak you want. So let's say you are a CDO, or you are an enterprise who want to focus on data and AI, you can just pick Cloud Pak for Data. Or let's say you are a Cloud Pak based on processes, BPM decision rules, you can go without platform automation, which gives you the set of tools. But the biggest benefits too, is that all these Cloud Paks are a set of integrated services that can all work together, sits optimized on top of open chipped. So, all of a sudden, you'll need Cloud Pak for Data, and now you want to do data, but now you want to expand it into your line of business, and you want Cloud Pak for Automation, you can bring that in. Now those two Cloud Paks works together well. Now you want to bring in Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, because you have data, or applications running on multiple clouds, so now you can bring Cloud Pak for MCM, which is multicloud management, and those three work together. So it's all a set of integrated set of services that is optimized on top of OpenShift, which makes it much more easier for customers to bring the rich set of services together and accelerate and automate their lifecycle journey within the enterprise. >> Great, last question for you Dinesh. What new in 2020, what should customers be looking at today? Would love if you can give a little bit of guidance as to where customers should be looking at for things that might be coming a little bit down the line here, and if they want to learn more about IBM Cloud Paks, where should they be looking? >> Yeah, they want to learn more, there's www.ibm.com/cloudpaks. There's a place to go. There, all the details around Cloud Paks are there. You can also get in touch with me, and I can definitely take you to more detail. But what is coming is that, look, so we have a set of Cloud Paks, but we want to expand and make it extensible. So how do we, already it's built on an open platform, but how do we make sure our partners and ISPs can come and build on top of the base-cloud part? So that's the focus going to be, as each Cloud Pak innovate and add more value within those Cloud Paks. We also want to expand it so that our partners and our ISPs and GSIs can build on top of it. So this year, the focus is continuously innovate across the Cloud Paks, but also make it much more extensible for third parties to come and build more value on top of the Cloud Pak itself. That's one area we are focusing on. The other area's MCM, right? Multicloud management, because there is tremendous appetite for customers to move data or applications on cloud, and not only on one cloud, hybrid cloud. So how do you manage that, right? So multicloud management definitely helps on that perspective. So our focus this year is going to be one, make it extensible, make it more open, but at the same time continuously innovate on every single Cloud Pak to make that journey for customers on automating and accelerating application development easier. >> All right, well Dinesh, thank you so much. Yeah, the things that you talked about, that absolutely top of mind for customers that we talked to. Multicloud management, as you said, it was the ACM, the Advanced Cluster Management, that we heard about from the Red Hat team last week at Summit. So thank you so much for the updates. Definitely exciting to watch Cloud Pak, how you're helping customers deal with that huge, it's the opportunity but also the challenge of building their next applications, modernizing what they're doing without, still having to think about what they have from (faintly speaking), so thanks so much, great to talk with you. >> Well, thanks Stu, great talking. >> All right, lots more coverage from IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, CUBE's live coverage for VMworld 2019 in Moscone North, in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, our 10 years, we have Eric Herzog, the CMO and vice president of Global Storage Channels at IBM. CUBE alum, this is his 11th appearance on theCUBE at VMworld. That's the number one position. >> Dave: It's just at VMworld. >> Congratulations, welcome back. >> Well, thank you very much. Always love to come to theCUBE. >> John: Sporting the nice shirt and the IBM badge, well done. >> Thank you, thank you. >> What's going on with IBM in VMworld? First, get the news out. What's happening for you guys here? >> So for us, we just had a big launch actually in July. That was all about big data, storage for big data and AI, and also storage for cyber-resiliency. So we just had a big launch in July, so we're just sort of continuing that momentum. We have some exciting things coming out on September 12th in the high end of our storage product line, and then some additional things very heavily around containers at the end of October. >> So the open shift is the first question I have that pops into my head. You know, I think of IBM, I think of IBM Storage, I think of Red Hat, the acquisition, OpenShift's been very successful. Pat Gelsinger was talking containers, Kubernetes-- >> Eric: Right. >> OpenShift has been a big part of Red Hat's offering, now part of IBM. Has that Red Shift, I mean OpenShift's come in, to your world, and how do you guys view that? I mean, it's containers, obviously, is there any impact there at all? >> So from a storage perspective, no. IBM storage has been working with Red Hat for over 15 years, way before the company ever thought about buying them. So we went to the old Red Hat Summits, it was two guys, a dog, and a note, and IBM was there. So we've been supporting Red Hat for years, and years, and years. So for the storage division, it's probably one of the least changes to the direction, compared to the rest of IBM 'cause we were already doing so much with Red Hat. >> You guys were present at the creation of the whole Red Hat movement. >> Yeah, I mean we were-- >> We've seen the summits, but I was kind of teeing up the question, but legitimately though, now that you have that relationship under your belt-- >> Eric: Right. >> And IBM's into creating OpenShift in all the services, you're starting to see Red Hat being an integral part across IBM-- >> Eric: Right. >> Does that impact you guys at all? >> So we've already talked about our support for Red Hat OpenShift. We do support it. We also support any sort of container environment. So we've made sure that if it's not OpenShift and someone's going to leverage something else, that our storage will work with it. We've had support for containers now for two and half years. We also support the CSI Standard. We publicly announced that earlier in the year, that we'd be having products at the end of the year and into the next year around the CSI specification. So, we're working on that as well. And then, IBM also came out with a thing that are called the Cloud Paks. These Cloud Paks are built around Red Hat. These are add-ons that across multiple divisions, and from that perspective, we're positioned as, you know, really that ideal rock solid foundation underneath any of those Cloud Paks with our support for Red Hat and the container world. >> How about protecting containers? I mean, you guys obviously have a lot of history in data protection of containers. They're more complicated. There's lots of them. You spin 'em up, spin 'em down. If they don't spin 'em down, they're an attack point. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, first thing I'd say is stay tuned for the 22nd of October 'cause we will be doing a big announcement around what we're doing for modern data protection in the container space. We've already publicly stated we would be doing stuff. Right, already said we'd be having stuff either the end of this year in Q4 or in Q1. So, we'll be doing actually our formal launch on the 22nd of October from Prague. And we'll be talking much more detail about what we're doing for modern data protection in the container space. >> Now, why Prague? What's your thinking? >> Oh, IBM has a big event called TechU, it's a Technical University, and there'll be about 2,000 people there. So, we'll be doing our launch as part of the TechU process. So, Ed Walsh, who you both know well and myself will be doing a joint keynote at that event on the 22nd. >> So, talk a little bit more about multi-cloud. You hear all kinds of stuff on multi-cloud here, and we've been talkin' on theCUBE for a while. It's like you got IBM Red Hat, you got Google, CISCO's throwin' a hat in the ring. Obviously, VMware has designs on it. You guys are an arms dealer, but of course, you're, at the same time, IBM. IBM just bought Red Hat so what are your thoughts on multi-cloud? First, how real is it? Sizeable opportunity, and from a storage perspective, storage divisions perspective, what's your strategy there? >> Well, from our strategy, we've already been takin' hybrid multi-cloud for several years. In fact, we came to Wikibon, your sister entity, and actually, Ed and I did a presentation to you in July of 2017. I looked it up, the title says hybrid multi-cloud. (Dave laughs) Storage for hybrid multi-cloud. So, before IBM started talkin' about it, as a company, which now is, of course, our official line hybrid multi-cloud, the IBM storage division was supporting that. So, we've been supporting all sorts of cloud now for several years. What we have called transparent cloud tiering where we basically just see cloud as a tier. Just the way Flash would see hard drive or tape as a tier, we now see cloud as a tier, and our spectrum virtualized for cloud sits in a VM either in Amazon or in IBM Cloud, and then, several of our software products the Spectrum line, Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Scale, are available on the AWS Marketplace as well as the IBM Cloud Marketplace. So, for us, we see multi-cloud from a software perspective where the cloud providers offer it on their marketplaces, our solutions, and we have several, got some stuff with Google as well. So, we don't really care what cloud, and it's all about choice, and customers are going to make that choice. There's been surveys done. You know, you guys have talked about it that certainly in the enterprise space, you're not going to use one cloud. You use multiple clouds, three, four, five, seven, so we're not going to care what cloud you use, whether it be the big four, right? Google, IBM, Amazon, or Azure. Could it be NTT in Japan? We have over 400 small and medium cloud providers that use our Spectrum Protect as the engine for their backup as a service. We love all 400 of them. By the way, there's another 400 we'd like to start selling Spectrum Protect as a service. So, from our perspective, we will work with any cloud provider, big, medium, and small, and believe that that's where the end users are going is to use not just one cloud provider but several. So, we want to be the storage connected. >> That's a good bet, and again, you bring up a good point, which I'll just highlight for everyone watching, you guys have made really good bets early, kind of like we were just talking to Pat Gelsinger. He was making some great bets. You guys have made some, the right calls on a lot of things. Sometimes, you know, Dave's critical of things in there that I don't really have visibility in the storage analyst he is, but generally speaking, you, Red Hat, software, the systems group made it software. How would you describe the benefits of those bets paying off today for customers? You mentioned versatility, all these different partners. Why is IBM relevant now, and from those bets that you've made, what's the benefit to the customers? How would you talk about that? Because it's kind of a big message. You got a lot going on at IBM Storage, but you've made some good bets that turned out to be on the right side of tech history. What are those bets? And what are they materializing into? >> Sure, well, the key thing is you know I always wear a Hawaiian shirt on theCUBE. I think once maybe I haven't. >> You were forced to wear a white shirt. You were forced to wear the-- >> Yes, an IBM white shirt, and once, I actually had a shirt from when I used to work for Pat at the EMC, but in general, Hawaiian shirt, and why? Because you don't fight the wave, you ride the wave, and we've been riding the wave of technology. First, it was all about AI and automation inside of storage. Our easy tier product automatically tiers. You don't have, all you do is set it up once, and after that, it automatically moves data back and forth, not only to our arrays, but over 450 arrays that aren't ours, and the data that's hottest goes to the fastest tier. If you have 15,000 RPM drives, that's your fastest, it automatically knows that and moves data back and forth between hot, fast, and cold. So, one was putting AI and automation in storage. Second wave we've been following was clearly Flash. It's all about Flash. We create our own Flash, we buy raw Flash, create our own modules. They are in the industry standard form factor, but we do things, for example, like embed encryption with no performance hit into the Flash. Latency as low as 20 microseconds, things that we can do because we take the Flash and customize it, although it is in industry standard form factor. The other one is clearly storage software and software-defined storage. All of our arrays come with software. We don't sell hardware. We sell a storage solution. They either come with Spectrum Virtualize or Spectrum Scale, but those packages are also available stand-alone. If you want to go to your reseller or your distributor and buy off-the-shelf white-box componentry, storage-rich servers, you can create your own array with Spectrum Virtualize for block, Spectrum Scale for File, IBM Object Storage for Cloud. So, if someone wants to buy software only, just the way Pat was talking about software-defined networking, we'll sell 'em software for file blocker object, and they don't buy any infrastructure from us. They only buy the software, so-- >> So, is that why you have a large customer base? Is that why there's so much, diverse set of implementations? >> Well, we've got our customers that are system-oriented, right, some you have Flash system. Got other customers that say, "Look, I just want to buy Spectrum Scale. "I don't want to buy your infrastructure. "Just I'll build my own," and we're fine with that. And the other aspect we have, of course, is we've got the modern data protection with Spectrum Protect. So, you've got a lot of vendors out on the floor. They only sell backup. That's all they sell, and you got other people on the floor, they only sell an array. They have nice little arrays, but they can't do an array and software-defined storage and modern data protection one throat to choke, one tech support, entity to deal with one set of business partners to deal with, and we can do that, which is why it's so diverse. We have people who don't have any of IBM storage at all, but they back up everything with Spectrum Protect. We have other customers who have Flash systems, but they use backup from one of our competitors, and that's okay 'cause we'll always get a PO one way or another, right? >> So, you want the choice as factor. >> Right. >> Question on the ecosystem and your relationship with VMware. As John said, 10th year at VMworld, if you go back 10 years, storage, VMware storage was limited. They had very few resources. They were throwin' out APIs to the storage industry and sayin' here, you guys, fix this problem, and you had this cartel, you know, it was EMC, IBM was certainly in there, and NetApp, a couple others, HPE, HP at the time, Dell, I don't know, I'm not sure if Dell was there. They probably were, but you had the big Cos that actually got the SDK early, and then, you'd go off and try to sell all the storage problems. Of course, EMC at the time was sort of puttin' the brakes on VMware. Now, it's totally different. You've got, actually similar cartel. Although, you've got different ownership structure with Dell, EMC, and you got (mumbles) VMwware's doin' its own software finally. The cuffs are off. So, your thoughts on the changes that have gone on in the ecosystem. IBM's sort of position and your relationship with VMware, how that's evolved. >> So, the relationship for us is very tight. Whether it be the old days of VASA, VAAI, V-center op support, right, then-- >> Dave: V-Vault, yeah yeah. >> Now, V-Vault two so we've been there every single time, and again, we don't fight the wave, we ride the wave. Virtualization's a wave. It's swept the industry. It swept the end users. It's swept every aspect of compute. We just were riding that wave and making sure our storage always worked with it with VMware, as well as other hypervisors as well, but we always supported VMware first. VMware also has a strong relationship with the cloud division, as you know, they've now solved all kinds of different things with IBM Cloud so we're making sure that we stay there with them and are always up front and center. We are riding all the waves that they start. We're not fighting it. We ride it. >> You got the Hawaiian shirt. You're riding the waves. You're hanging 10, as you used to say. Toes on the nose, as the expression goes. As Pat Gelsinger says, ride the new wave, you're a driftwood. Eric, great to see you, CMO of IBM Storage, great to have you all these years and interviewing you, and gettin' the knowledge. You're a walking storage encyclopedia, Wikipedia, thanks for comin' on. >> Great, thank you. >> All right, it's more CUBE coverage here live in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier for Dave Vellante, stay with us. I got Sanjay Putin coming up, and we have all the big executives who run the different divisions. We're going to dig into them. We're going to get the data, share with you. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)