>> Announcer: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the CUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Barcelona, Spain, this is the CUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host Stuart Miniman, Analyst at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Shaun Coulson, who's the Vice President of Storage for IBM Europe. He is the one on the ground, leading the team for IBM and the Cisco relationship. Driving the storage, which is driving the cloud, and servers and everything else. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, and welcome to Barcelona. >> Thank you very much, great to have you. Want to get, you're close to the front lines, driving all the business for IBM storage. Congratulations, you had a great year. How's business going in Europe, what's the scene like here? Give a little color, and what's goin' on in Europe. >> Okay, yeah. 2017 was a bumpy year for IBM storage, across the board, across all, both our software and our hardware portfolios, but also our go-to-market with our partners as well, and Cisco's clearly one of those partners. We're in the setup mode for 2018. My worldwide boss would probably say, "We're already setup, Shaun, and you're behind, because it's nearly the end of January." So, it's a vibrant time. Ginni Rometty, mentioned storage specifically in her Address the Nation and the 2017 results and that's partly down to the work that we did in Europe. So, I'm pretty proud of where we're at right now and what we've done. >> Wow, good re-tooling of the product over the years, and now, sales are up, what's the driver of the business right now? We here Cloud, we here On-Premises, Private Cloud, True Private Cloud, as we keep on reports. Certainly Hybrid is there, what's the key customer success driver that you guys are having? >> I think the key success is really, you're correct, everybody's talking about Cloud. Mainly, the main driver in my view, is how do they prepare for Cloud? And that's a Hybrid solution, and, with that, you've also then got the On-Prem. The refresh, the technology Transform and Modernize, is a massive program for us and our customers right now. I was in the Nordics, just before Christmas, and I went to one of the big financial institutions, and they have a Cisco/IMB VersaStack solution there, and I said to them, what was they main reason you chose that, and why did you go with IBM, 'cause, they weren't an IBM customer before, so it was a big win-back account for us. And he was about reduction of risk, reduction of cost, and allowing me to transfer some of my operational skills to new work-loads and prepare myself for the cloud. And I think that message has been driven pretty hard by all our customer sales. >> The refresh is interesting, I didn't look at that angle, but, you can see the Digital Transformation story that we've been talking on the Cube for multiple years, playing out because people now see no perimeter with their networks, they're seeing real-time demands from applications. Now IOT. They had to modernize, right, I mean, this is the era of (laughs) not just PO's slappin' down storage, back-room, stack em' rack 'em, it's a new storage paradigm. >> I don't think I've ever been in the era where I sat by the fax machine and the orders come in, but, maybe one day >> What's a fax machine, what's a fax machine again? >> maybe one day (laughing) >> Ask a millennial, they don't even know how to use a fax machine. >> So coming back to this discussion in the Nordics, they really talked about the technology of Flash, the UCS server stacking and the network from Cisco how did that allow them to move some of their resource, reduce on their cost, and it was all around, every month they do net software patches from Microsoft. They used to have a team of 8 people that would take up to 5 working days, fully, to transform that. That, with the introduction of the system the UCS and the Flash, has gone from a 8 team to 2 team and it's done in 2 days. That's a massive reduction in cost but at the same time allowing them to move to that net-new. >> Shaun, bring us in to customers a little bit, 'cause, we've been tracking Converge since that wave started, a lot of it was just organizationally getting set because, I have a server refresh, I have the storage refresh, how do I get budgets, who owns it, but it's that simplicity that you mention, which is you know, we know if I can put it all together, you're talking the networking team. The networking team often doesn't update their code. They put it in, saying like, okay, it's all working, don't breathe on it, but when I go to Converge, really, it makes it easier for me to refresh, with security top of mind for almost every customer that I talk to, they need to stay more up-to-date and they need to, what we have said at Wikibon is, you need to be able to shift to platforms and partners to be able to take some of that burden off, I can't have 6 months of testing every time I need to roll something out, so, where are the customers in Europe, how are they doing along that journey, organizational dynamics you can share. >> I go to a Entertainment customer in the UK. They've taken, they integrated Stack and their deployment of systems out into the field has reduced by 90%. That is a real benefit, and then, we come back to that, how do you maintain, how do you drive, there's one single point, you can drive it through. It's done, it's moved on and I think there is a huge opportunity of customers starting to look at that simplicity because, that's the transformation that's the, I think for a long time this industry has, and the storage business has tried to make things complex. Because that's part of the art of where we've looked to sell, you know, "It's hard, it's not easy guys, therefore, you need us" and I think there's a massive switch away to that simplified model. >> How do customers think of their data center in the context of Cloud in the industry there's been all this argument, what is Private Cloud? Virtualization? I talk to most customers, they have a cloud strategy and their doing Saas, their doing some Public Cloud, they think about their own data center, they don't get caught over the terms, but, I'm curious how they define it, how they do it do they have initiatives on codifying what they do? >> I think any large customer or small customer would be crazy not to have a cloud strategy some way, shape, or form and I think that has been going on for the last 2 to 3 years with all our major customers. Some are further down the track where everything is going to be Cloud on all their systems, especially the newer, more agile customers but there's also a lot of customers that, for security reasons, financial regulation reasons, are never going to be that far down the track on Cloud, so, I think it's a mixed bag. I think, while their is that transformation and that journey, there's opportunity for everybody and I think that's the bit that we see, where we have the skill set to help our customers going forward. >> I'm curious, usually when I come talk to a European audience, the governance is, a major sticking point has been one of the headwinds against moving to public cloud, we see the big public cloud players putting data centers in every country that they can, but is it still kind of challenge today? >> I think there will always be that concern from the regulatory authorities. And I think if you take the first uptake in Europe of what customers that really moved to the cloud. Then I would say it was the more commercial, mid-size customers that saw the attraction, especially the ability to have the variable cost rate that they can associate with the cloud. But, I think there are also parts of the larger government organizations that are now looking at what applications what workloads they can actually put on the cloud, where there is no regulatory governance to be followed. So, I think it's a bit of both. >> Shaun, talk about the European differences by country, because we've been covering the GDPR pretty hard, that deadline's coming up, that's going to have an impact on storage, obviously, and then also, networking, IP addresses can determine which country you're from, 'cause now each country will have their own little nuances. What is the impact to your job and as you execute your mission what does it mean for the customer? Because, a lot of people don't just live in one country, or work in one country. They span multiple regions. >> And you think of it, most international customers have offices in probably 20 or 30 of the countries that we cover in Europe. I think you can have a view from a technology point of view that some people will be early adopters and some people will be slower adopters. And what you can do, and what is very prevalent in the European marketplace is taking those learning lessons from the early adopters, finessing them, and then driving them out to the other ones, so, I would say for example, the Nordics, again, are probably an early adopter of a lot of the new technologies. They're very happy to try and drive and yet, some of the more traditional ones will wait and see and then think it through a little bit more carefully. But that's the beauty of the nature of Europe. >> What's the big change that you've seen over the past couple years? Obviously, software's at the center of it. Any observations that you can share that's different in the market for buyers? >> I think from a technology point of view, the indoctrination of Flash and there I say the commoditization of Flash has been prolific over the last 18 months. From the price point that it initially started to where we are today has meant that it has become more and more accessible for a lot more of the customer sets that we work with. And especially when you look at performance price point, it starts to become a no-brainer. I'm not sure, when we look at some of the stats in 4th quarter, we actually sold more core Flash modules than we did revenue-wise on traditional SSDs. Which is a kind of indication of where we've gone with the price performance. >> Any trends and patterns that you've seen with buyers that you can, that you see happening, what's the big takeaway? >> I think the big takeaway is storage is alive and kicking. The cloud is formed on the use of data. The use of data means you got to have good storage systems to go and drive that. And I think that is a major theme that runs through all our customer sets. >> And that's trying the modernization, big time. >> Shaun, are there any verticals that you're finding that are leading the charge in some of this transformation of data, leveraging data more than others. >> I think a lot of the smaller organizations which have more agility, they're actually leading in terms of willing to put their first foot forward, but, I think what happens is, then, once that is proven, then the larger organizations come in and work it, so, you're always going to have the big Toco, media companies that are always at forefront of technology. You'll also have the financial organizations that are looking at, where Cloud's good, where's not, block change, GDPR that we talked about earlier, and I think that is traditionally IBM's strength in those kind of marketplaces. >> Shaun, thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate the commentary and insight to Europe, congratulations-- >> Thank you. >> on your sales. Shaun Coulson is the Vice President of IBM Europe Storage. This is the Cube breaking down the European show for Cisco Live 2018, Europe, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more after this short break.