[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM hi I'm Stu Minuteman and this is the cubes coverage of IBM think 2020 the digital experience we talked to IBM executives their partners and their customers really thrilled to welcome back one of our cube alumni he has a new role since the last time he was on the cube at an event Jim white Hersey is now the president of IBM of course former CEO of Red Hat Jim pleasure to see you thanks so much for joining us hey it's great to be back hope you're doing well we are all trying to stay safe we miss seeing you and the team in person had a great digital event with the Red Hat team last week for summit of course I love you know either going to San Francisco or my backyard here in Boston from it but the thing we've been saying is we are now together even when we're apart so so many changes going on of course the global pandemic impacting everyone and the keynote you and the other IBM executive talking about you know really how it's helping IBM solidify what they believe their their decisions are and the technology direction so you know not a big vivid or change but Jim really want to get your feedback as to what advice you have for your customers where should they be investing worst they be slowing down how should they be thinking about their IP spend in today's world yeah so first off you know our hybrid cloud strategy which IBM and you know Red Hat now combined have been on for quite a long time has been all about flexibility resilience in an unknown future I think there were ever a time where having flexibility is important it's now so you know we have had clients saying hey I can use the cloud because all of a sudden with work at home I have huge increases in demand we find others that say wow I was using the cloud but I have a reduction in absolute demand so I want to pull those workloads back I'm gonna run premises say the marginal dollars so you have people kind of doing very different things than we thought we would be doing this month and going forward through the year and so having an architecture that's built for change it's certainly hybrid cloud architectures a part of that is I think being born out here as people are trying to understand new ways of working and certainly with IBM you know with some of the technologies we have around AI with helping various industries as they're all volumes increased as people are you know changing tickets or have more questions and our ability to help people scale up AI to address those so they're not trying to add people in a very difficult time you know just broadly you know our platforms run some of the most mission critical systems so keeping those systems up going and being resilient and with thousands of things CEOs and CIOs have to worry about you know knowing that you have a partner that's gonna keep your most important systems up and running are all things that we do every day and I think that value shows through even more right now yeah absolutely we've been hearing plenty of reports customers as they you know might have been thinking about how fast they move or how do they leverage cloud pods an important piece of what they need to be doing how does the combination of IBM and Red Hat differentiate from some of the other cloud offerings both cloud Nai across the industry today yeah sure well let me start off with cloud and then I'll talk about how AI complements and accelerates that that strategy so what's different about what IBM is doing is we have a vision that the best architecture is a choice full horizontal architecture where you can run your application anywhere but it's not just about running it now you know clouds are now becoming internet themselves a source of innovation via various api's with functionality behind those so in order to consume innovation learn ever it might come from you have to have flexibility to be able to move your work and so IBM is unique in saying hey we're not just a cloud provider we're actually providing a platform that runs across any of the major cloud providers and so we make that real by having the Red Hat platform OpenShift is a core part of what we do I think secondly as having the platform's great but it's all about having the platform so you can consume innovation to deliver business value and iBM has injected that with a whole series of capabilities whether that's being able to pull data and information out of you know existing workloads to the whole AI portfolio to help people really build a cognitive Enterprise and inject intelligence and AI into business processes so they can build you know a different intelligent kind of AI infused set of business processes or in our new businesses so the combination of a horizontal platform going to run anywhere with the ability whether it's with software or with services capability to add on top we can now help you leverage that we can help you take that Ferrari he built out for a drive to help you build new sources of value right one of the big discussion points this week has been edge computing a lot of discussion it's you know much earlier in the adoption and maturation of the ecosystems compared to what we were talking about for cloud so what's important with edge how our BM and RedHat going to extend what they've been doing to edge type of deployment well edge becomes an extension of the data center you know I think there was a period of time when we thought about computers as individual things and now we've had this idea of a data center is where computing happens and then they're you know thin devices like phones or whatever kind of out in the ether the tether back but you know as the Internet of Things continues to expand as the ability of computing technology towards the edge you know continues to grow with technology advances as 5g continues to expand out and you know abroad the ability to have use cases of computing at the edge just increase it increases so whether that's autonomous driving is an obvious major use case where they'll be massive amounts of you that you can't handle the latency of taking all that compute back to the data center to you know how you're making sure the paint finish that a factory is putting on a you know a piece of metal is being done you know correctly and optimally and environmentally efficiently all those things are far sensing at the edge and computing at the edge to be economic but here's the issue you don't want to have to develop a whole new infrastructure of software and you'll be able to do that a whole different set of developers with different skill sets and different rules on different infrastructure so what we're doing with this platform I talked about when I said this platform runs everywhere it's not just that it runs on the major public clouds or in your data center or bare metal or virtualized it runs all the way out to the edge now as soon as you get out to the edge you have a whole new set of management challenges because the types of applications are different how they temper hether back are different so we are working with large enterprises and with telcos not only on Bhaiji rollout but also edge infrastructure and the management tooling to be able to have an application run in the factory in an effective efficient safe way but then be able to be tethered all the way back to bringing data back for analytics in the data center so we've made some really exciting announcements on what we're doing with both industrial enterprise customers on edge computing and then how we're working with telcos to bring that to life because a lot of that obviously gets integrated back into the core telco infrastructure so this idea of edge computing and mobile edge computing are critical to the future of you know of computing but importantly they're critical to the future of how enterprises are going to operate that value going forward and so you know we've taken a real leadership position around that given that we have the core infrastructure but we also understand you know our clients and you know industry verticals and business processes so we could kind of come at it from both angles and really bring that value quickly to our all right and Jim what's the role of open source there you know one of the bigger points that was talked about at Summit last week was the I believe it's the advanced cluster management for cloud and it was some IBM people and some IBM technology came in to Red Hat and they've opened forced it we're just talking about edge computing and telecommunications service providers I remember talking with you and the team you know back at OpenStack summits with network functions fertilization open source was a big piece of it so where does open play in these ecosystem discussions well I should say this is one of the really exciting things about the the marriage of Red Hat and IBM is in Red Hat has deep capability and open source and delivering open source platforms and has been doing that for two decades now in IBM's always been a large participant in open source but has never really delivered platforms right it's always infused open source components in other kind of solutions and so by bringing the two together we can truly leverage the power of open source to help enterprises and telcos consume open source at scale to really be able to take advantage of this massive innovation is happening and so in particular you know we're seeing in telco exactly what we saw happened in the data center which is people did have these vertical stacks and the data center it was the unix's you know of the past where applications were tied to the operating systems tied to the hardware the same thing exists in telco infrastructure now and the telcos understand this idea the value of a horizontal platform so how do you have a commodity yet infrastructure underneath so hardware with an open source infrastructure so people can feel confident they're not locked into one vendor so also can feel confident that they can drive feature set that they need into these platforms and so the idea that open kind of almost think of it as Oh Linux but for data centers are now Linux for a 5g which is a combination of OpenStack on the virtualized side OpenShift brunetti ECM containers from a container of perspective be able to bring that to telcos and 5g rollouts allows them to separate the in functionality which sits in an application whether that's a virtualized application or a container and be able to confidently be able to run that on open infrastructure is something that open-source is doing today in telco and the same way it disrupted you know traditional data center infrastructure over the last couple decades and then IBM can both bring that with services capability as well as a whole set of value-added services kind of further up the stack which makes the open source infrastructure usable you know in a manageable cost-effective way today and so that's why we're so excited about especially what we could do with edge because we're bringing the same disruption we brought to the data center 20 years ago and we can do it in a safe secure reliable and manageable way all right well Jim thank you so much for the updates congratulations on all the accomplishments of the Red Hat team last week and the IBM team this week great thank you it's great to be back and I look forward to seeing you again live in the not-too-distant future absolutely until we're back in person the cube bringing you IBM think the digital experience on Stu minimun and as always thank you for watching the queue [Music] you

if Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cute conversation hi I'm Stu minuteman and welcome to a special cube conversation we've been talking to leaders around the industry about how they are helping their organizations and their customers in these challenging time with Kovac 19 really happy to bring back to the program one of our cube alumni he also has a new title Paul Cormier is now the president and CEO of Red Hat Paul it is great to see you we live geographically not too far apart normally we would be getting together person for summit of course that event happening digitally but thanks so much for joining us all right so Paul you have you know storied history at Red Hat you know I've sat through many keynotes where you walk through the product in portfolio looked at the acquisitions looked at the strategic direction moves taking the new job as CEO is a big move in regular times of course we're not in regular times we're in rather unique times here so let's start there what does it mean about coming into this new role in the times that we are facing you know you know as I see it considering the times here I think it's probably one of the biggest decisions I have made in my career to take on this new job only because don't as you know Stu talked a lot I've been here from certainly the beginning of our move to the enterprise in 19 years I was played 120 or so and and I think I actually think that we brought such a big value our customers I think that customers actually going to see even more value as we come out of this because than they have in the past for one thing with the combination of IBM were able to reach a wider set of customers out there if we can bring into the Linux world where all the innovations happening so I think I think our customers we've treated this our product line is an enterprise-grade product line since the beginning since day one we're literally helping our customers eat their businesses running at this point on our product lines because of you know everything we've done the victim enterprise-class you know so Paul some previous you know challenges in my my career you talk about whether financial you know whether it is natural disasters or 9/11 you know the technical industry needs to kind of rally together but you know one of the things that is different about this is the impact that has on every employee I wasn't surprised to see that the letter that you sent out to all of the associates was you know posted on the Red Hat site it didn't need to be leaked or anything like that so you know the transparency always is appreciated but bring us inside a little bit the organization you know how are you you know helping your employees and making sure that they can deal with all the personal things that they need to deal with while still being there for your customers your I mean well first of all first of all one of the things is you know we're sort of used to working remotely when the need arises even full-time for that case a big percentage of our associates are work remotely 1% of the time we've always had the philosophy in that we especially in engineering where we go after the best possible talent and the unique part of being 100 percent open-source focus is that our engineers know the other engineers that are working in our communities whether they know them better met them face to face they certainly know them very well on a professional level so a lot of our people were used to working remotely the other thing the other thing is most of Red Hat is type A personality type people so that's that's a good thing on some days and may be a tough thing on other days but but what that means is everybody works from home at some period whether it's you know they go to the office all day and wake up at midnight and do some more or that's Saturday or Sunday we're all pretty much you know set up to do that so our IT department has been you know they've been fabulous through this you know we've had you know a gazillion more hours of both VPN and video hours and it's just all work but they've had a great test bed for all these years so from from that standpoint from that technical standpoint worked very well from from the employee standpoint we've really we've really picked up the video All Hands videoconferencing from once a quarter every two weeks and so you know I had an All Hands meeting two days ago three days ago when I was announced on my new role and I committed to them we're gonna we're gonna have it all hands every two weeks come in talk we'll give you the updates etc so I think that's one thing you can't over communicate that I like this and I think the third thing that my I guess that's to say my former products for now but you know I still I still love those guys buying my form proved the products group they actually had a very great idea they're holding virtual office hours for their for their colleagues in the field once a week and we're actually holding once in the morning once later at night for the people in asia-pacific actual hours with a product managers in the engineers except for getting on videoconference to integrate and in talk with the folks out in the field about what we're doing in the products and in what's going on and what's upcoming and hear their issues as well I think this serves as two things the first thing that serves a certainly it keeps people engaged but secondly you know our people love the technology and so to some extent with everything going on around kovin and how serious it is in every country it almost gives our our people almost an escape from that to really spend an hour or two a day on this and just really have conversations with each other about the business and the products and the technology so that's become a really big hit inside as well yeah you know definitely there are some things that just get amplified you talked about you know we're used to being able to be on or join meetings you know regardless of the time of day amateur your team plenty of blue jeans and zoom meetings before this but it has taken a slightly different tone now with you know you've now got everybody at home you know and managing you know other personal relationships and things that are happening on the outside you you are still holding red hat summit at the end of April you think there's there's a real strong you know push from your team to you know balance and make sure that you're there for your customers but it's it's not going to be as much of the hoopla there's not that you know the slag and the announcements that are going on why is it important to still bring the community together and you know meet with your partners and customers you know rather than push it off to later this year you know it's a great question you know I said anyone know that when I stand up on stage for my keynote at the summit every year even though I'm so many year I don't know me son it's 1314 something like that even when even it's such a rush because we really do stand there you know Jim talked about this on our internal handoff where he said you know remember Paul and I on a ballroom with one of the first summits at some hotel we look behind the curtain and I said to him there's 300 people out there and you know last year in Boston I looked out and said wow there's 10,000 people here it's amazing so it really started as a as a way to really talk to an interact with both our customers and our community as well but it turned into a celebration and not just a celebration of internal RedHat people a celebration of the whole ecosystem and partners and customers and upstream people of how far open-source and linux has come and we didn't think that celebration part this year was really appropriate considering where we were but but we all still have a job to do we're all doing him remotely and as I said we're running made our customers business so we felt it was really important to put this out there to have our customers understand where we're going in the coming year the new some of the new products that we have coming and how we can help them and so that's really more of the tone this year and we feel that still important we all have a big job right now in coming out of this we're even going to have bigger jobs and how we re-entry into this and balance that so that's really the focus this year how we can continue to help with the technology we brought to the enterprise for the last 19 years yeah Paul the last question I have for you you know I think back to summit last year Satya Nadella was on stage Jenny Jenny Rometty was up on stage of course Red Hat you know tightly tied into you know abroad community and ecosystem network out there so as the leader of Red Hat you know how are you you know in contact and working with you know the communities and the partner ecosystem to both manage through and be ready for the other side of today I mean in one regard especially with many it's almost more at this point I mean that the partners in the ecosystems are really important many of the partners especially the smaller partners they look to us for leadership so so we still have communication with them and partly the summit is is for them as well well some of the larger partners like that you mentioned Microsoft a certainly IBM and an Amazon and Google and others we actually communicate almost more now that we're all working from home because as I said earlier the same goes outside as it does in inside you just can't and over communicate this environment and you know as you know sue the tech industry looks like this giant industry but it really is kind of a small industry and a lot of us know each other from for many years and so that communication is going on we're comparing notes actually in many cases we're comparing notes maybe even more than we might have in the past well no what are you guys doing at your company the plan for this is and I've actually seen some of the partners who focus on proprietary technologies even become a more bit more open on those discussions now so I think maybe that could be if there's any good outcome of this that could be one of the outcomes that's slightly positive all right well Paul thank you so much for the update congratulations on your new role we absolutely are looking forward to the summit at the end of the month thanks again always great to see you soon thanks very much all right be sure to check out the cube dotnet where you can see the the preview of Red Hat summit as well as the guests that we will have there we will have Paul Stephanie Matt Hicks lots of the Red Hat executives their customers and partners I'm Stu minimun and thank you for watching the cube [Music]

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Minuteman and we are live on day one of Enterprise Connect 2019. You can hear a ton of people behind us at the expo centers it's getting busier and busier throughout the day. We're welcoming to theCube, for the first time, John Bourne, the Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances at Verint. John thanks for joining us on theCube this afternoon. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I know we're in Five9's booth, so graciously hosting us this week. Verint is a partner of Five9, which we'll get into in a second. But give us a little bit about who Verint is, what your main brand is and how you're helping customers. >> Sure, so you know Verint has branded itself as a customer engagement company. We do employee and customer engagement solutions. We sit on top of CaaS like Five9, although Five9 is probably our biggest and most strategic partner in the space. And we provide everything end-to-end including work for software optimization, which was our legacy, but now we also provide digital feedback and outbound surveys and bots and AI and all the other things everyone else is talking about here as well. But the thing that makes us different is we're completely agnostic to the infrastructure that we sit on top of. And we'll mix and match pieces of our portfolio with the vendors pieces as well. And so we have an IVR but we don't use our IVR with CaaS vendors, for example, we use theirs. Just an example. >> What a pivot on the word legacy that you mentioned, because you have been to this event, which has been around for a very long time. Many, many years back when it was VoiceCon, so you've seen a lot of vendors that, probably, weren't even here five or 10 years ago. Tell us a little about the evolution and communication and customer experience as table stakes for a business. >> Let me talk about the industry for bit, because I'm fascinated by this. As an English guy, we don't get excited very often, but let me tell ya, it's really exciting times to be in this industry. I remember when we went from TDM to voiceover IP and that was the biggest thing that ever happened. If you think back to that, what's happening now, it's unreal. There are more vendors, more players, more solutions, more, more good stories that are talking about real customer outcomes today than there ever were before. You have to remember our industry is quite conservative. We're sort of laggers, quite conservative. We build bulletproof systems that work. And the phone always worked and dial tone was always there, but it's a whole new world, as you know. >> John, you bring up some great points here. I think about networking and telecommunications, we used to measure these things, you'd put it out in the decade of change. >> Absolutely. >> We'd go through this and then the standard rolls out and then the customer adoption. But you brought up this excitement here. When I look at my career, you scroll back a couple of decades ago, the importance of data, the importance of intelligence of the systems, we actually talked about some of those terms. It's different now. >> Very different. >> Maybe explain a little bit why it's so much different. Billions of customers out there, but why is it so exciting today. >> So, if you look at our industry, as far as- and even true for us, right? We really didn't even know who the customer was. We only cared about the interaction and we were building systems that would optimize the performance of the agent. Or we'd make sure there were enough agents with the right skills at the right time. It was all about agents and interactions. Now, we're seeing the confluence of customer engagement management, which means we're more integrated with CRM systems, we care about the customer's journey. So our perspective has changed, it's much more than just the agent. But we're not forgetting the agent. So, customer experience is very important, obviously, but so is the employee experience as well. It's both. We cater to both sides of that. >> When you're having customer conversations, I'm curious, where does that come up in terms of pivoting, or maybe over rotating towards improving customer experience? Because we have spent, historically, time ensuring that the agents are properly trained. Are they kind of over rotating back? Because they're so closely related. >> That's a great questions. Let's talk about how the buyer's changed, right? And you'll remember this. In the old days, you were selling to the techies or IT. Especially true with Five9 and many others, we're now selling to the business, we're selling business outcomes. They don't want to know about the technology underneath, they want to know what sort of experience their customer's going to have when they interact with them as a businesses. Providing the seamless journey regardless of the channel they're using. Voice is obviously still big, voice is not going away, no matter what anyone may tell you. Voice conversations are getting more complex but they're so much more self service now, both reactive and proactive. It's fun, but tying it all together, it's hard, it's hard. >> One of the things in this space, these are not push button simple solutions that are rolling out. When I talked to Five9 getting ready for this, they said, look, it's in the cloud and could someone do this on there, sure. But we white glove it, we really engage there. As a key partner of yours, how do you see that? Where does that tie into what Verint's doing? >> What we do with Five9, all of that technology is deployed, collocated with Five9's environment. It's the way we get the tighter integration. It's the way, when we're provisioning new tenets, so that everything gets done at the same time. It's not easier to do it that way. And again, I'll come back to the buyer, the buyer's the business and they're saying this is the outcome I want. And I just want to deal with one vendor and I want to pay per agent, per month for everything. That's the thing that's so different. It's an OpEx budget as well and that's where the world is going. I think perpetual licenses should be gone in the next two or three year, but they're still out there, they're still out there. >> One of the things I'm curious about is, we've been in this multichannel world, we're now in an omnichannel world that all of us as consumers are demanding. We want to be able to not just be able to talk to a contact center and agent on any channel we want, but want to have that conversation integrated so that there is progress from issue identification all the way to resolution. Where are businesses on that maturation of actually delivering an integrated omni channel experience? >> I think that's a really good question and I think that truth of it is it's still fairly early for most businesses. Because one, it's hard to do. If you look around the show, there are all sorts of vendors here who do one point solution, one piece. To make this work in a true integrated journey, the bots and the IVRs need to be communicating with the digital channels and email and chat and the self service channels on the web, as well as the voice. Because ultimately, what really matters to us as a consumer is when we do actually end up talking to an agent. We want them to know everything we've already done, and, quite frankly, we didn't really want to be talking to a live person unless we absolutely have to. Repeating all that is the biggest frustration out there. Getting all that tied together, that's what Verint does with Five9 together. That's really what makes us different and that's hard, it's hard. >> When you look at- these are business buyers, meaning to you, to deliver business outcomes, what are some of the key metrics that customers use? I mean when we think of context, we think of customer lifetime value, net promoter score. What are some of the key indicators that you help them? >> Those are exactly it. It's customer experience, it's however they decide to measure customer experience. It's like you said, some of them like a net promoter score, some of them have far more complex scenarios. It's all this stuff about average handle time, first time resolution, it's not important. It's all about what was the experience the customer had, was it seamless? Are they going to be loyal? But everybody measures it differently. It's not, from what I've seen anyway. >> John, one of the things I love coming to an event like this is you get to talk to some of the users and hear from some of the users. My understanding is Verint has some of your customers talking and sharing their journeys. Maybe give us a little insight into some of the flavor of what customers are going to be talking about here at the show this week. >> We have several customers that are doing sessions here. We've got, one of our customer's talking about what they're doing with speech analytics and the ability to understand the conversations that people are having. It wasn't that long ago you could go to our contact centers, supervisor, or a manager and say, well, what conversations are your agent having? I don't know, I don't care. That's all changed, now people really want to understand what are people talking about. The sentiment analysis is incredibly important, that's where things like speech analytics comes in. We've got other people here that are talking about the digital experiences, how they're marrying together the web interactions that customers have with their contact centers. A couple of years ago that never happened either. Contact centers were always very insular and were always the cost center. People of science realizing, intellectually they've always understood it, but somehow they haven't capitalized on the fact that the contact centers is the one place that is the face of the company for most consumers. And we need to get serious about them. >> Absolutely. Are you seeing this has a horizontal opportunity that lots of industries are taking advantage of? Or are there some early adopters who have really serious need to pivot quickly? >> Another really good questions. It is a very horizontal plane, but I'll tell you, the way the banks moved the big banks, the big insurance companies move, is different from maybe some of the smaller retail players. I think there are, even though the technology's the same, there still are some sweeps you can do. What people have on their desktop, what agents have on their desktops, for example, varies quite a bit. A lot of retail companies have Salesforce on their desktop, or Zendesk, or one of those types of products which, obviously, we all integrate with. The bigger companies are still running Legacy. The banks, the insurance companies, the telecos, they're running mainframes still in the background. There's all sorts of stuff on the agent's desktop. It's different, it's different. They're all active, I wouldn't tell you that there are any laggard industry verticals, but they're all coming at this at a different way. The banks especially need this. The insurance companies need this. Loyalty is so critical to them. And then retail, obviously they want to sell stuff. They want you to keep coming back and buy more stuff and they're competing with people like Amazon. Amazon does it really well. >> It's interesting, the question is, sometimes, if I'm a smaller or younger company that doesn't have all of the legacy, then a lot of times I have an opporutnity to be able to do things a new way. >> And that's the beauty about cloud, right? Now, probably for the first time ever I can be a relatively small contact center and I can get all this functionality and affordable price. I couldn't do that before because it was all premise based, it was big ticket, seven figure items, it's just not possible. Now, huge advantage for them now, huge advantage. >> Well John, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon and sharing what Verint is doing with Five9, and also the experiences and evolution that you're seeing in enterprise communication. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> For Stu Minuteman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)