>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's the theCUBE covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Valanti and welcome back to the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience. This is the afterglow, the after thoughts, the post halo effect. Mani Dasgupta is here. She's the Vice President of Brand and Product Marketing at IBM. Great to see you again, thanks for coming back on Mani. >> Thank you Dave, it's fantastic to be here after Think which has been super successful for us, so excited to have this chat. >> You know it's really nice, one of the silver linings of these digital events is you can actually have these kinds of conversations in an afterglow, so I want to get right into it. Mark Foster kind of set things up for the division and the service, he talked about a lot of customers. He talked about the cognitive enterprise, and he gave really three sort of arcs of his content discussion. One was the market making platforms, the second was intelligent work flows, and the third is the whole enterprise experience in humanity and he tied it in to the whole COVID-19 pandemic. I wonder if you could give us your thoughts, and maybe an example? >> Sure, absolutely, sure can. You know the cognitive enterprise is a framework that businesses can adapt as they go on forward with their business transformation journey. The market making platform is in simple terms, its how do you put yourself in the route for growth? Do you need to look for new customers, do you need to look for new markets? What's your competitive advantage? Build a platform, or create a platform which signifies competitive advantage for you. So that's the first piece of it. The second piece of it pertains to the operations of the company. How well are you run? How efficient are you? How effective are your processes? How have you been able to apply the latest and greatest in technologies? Edge, 5G, automation, artificial intelligence. How are you able to apply those technologies to make your processes work better for you? So that's the second big piece. And the third piece is keeping your customers at the core of whatever you do. So the experience of the customers, the updated and newer demands of the customers. How do you address that with the human at the center of it, right? The empathy that I was talking about when we spoke last, before and during Think. It's truly important especially in these times, every company is trying to figure out, in this scenario, how do they keep their business on the growth track? And the cognitive enterprise framework helps them on this journey. >> Was there an example that came out of Think that you can point to that is reflective of this? >> Absolutely, there were actually three great case studies that clients and colleagues who joined us during Think, we had the CEO of Yara, we had Shell and we had Frito Lay. A quick example is Frito Lay, and I bring them up because this is a brand that everybody recognizes, in fact they are now in 94% of all US households. And these are name brands like your chips, especially when we are all stuck at home during this pandemic they are a name that quite often comes to mind, Frito Lay. So a good example of what they are having to deal with. They haven't changed their transformation trajectory, they have sped it up. They have just become way more agile, teams that were in different locations are now all near shore. If you think about this scenario right now, everybody is working on Webex, everybody is getting distributed agile to work, so everybody, nobody is at a disadvantage because they are somewhere in India or they are somewhere in Mexico, or they are somewhere in the US, they are all together right now working together on the same digital platform. So actually everybody's near shore. So they have sped up their direct to consumer channel, in the past one month they have been able to quickly pivot and bring snacks.com to people, everybody across the US, that's a very good example of how you can apply the changes around you to your advantage, and make sure that this contributes to the growth and success of their business, and we had Frito join us live during Think, if you want to see it you can go live to our, now on our on demand platform and watch them. >> One of the things that Mark Foster mentioned in his remarks was that a lot of executives might have been thinking prior to COVID that they wanted to shake things up a little bit. But it's risky, you know they're kind of reticent to do that well, things have been shaken up. And now they've got you know the perfect reason to disrupt their own business. And organizations have been very tactical, focus on the customer, really trying to keep the lights on, managing cash, et cetera, but as we start to come out of this, they're beginning to think of the more midterm impacts, they're rethinking the ideal customer profile, and the value proposition in this new reality. So how should customers think about getting started on this journey of the cognitive enterprise if they haven't started already? >> You know it's, the good thing is the technology right now is available to us, even if people want to get started they can do it right now. One of the ways that we have been advising our clients to get started who haven't get started this journey, is to come together in a distributed agile framework, what we call the IBM Garage our Co-Creation Workshop, put the customer at the center of it and create an empathy map. Around what is the problem that we are trying to solve? What's the most important thing that that particular business is trying to solve? And for every business it may be a different answer, right? And so it's not prescriptive, its a place where you can come and lay out the cards on the table and figure out what's the right next step for your business, and then we can use the same model to unpack the problem into solvable components and apply technology to very quickly show results. The beauty of this is not just an MVP, this is actually solving real world problems, and it is doing it at global scale. That's the beauty of it and I think that's where we should start. >> You know a lot of these big events, the big physical events, of course we love them it's something theCUBE has been doing for 10 years, but the disappointing thing is oftentimes after the event everybody disappears, they go back to work and it's sort of forgotten. The great thing about these digital events is you can kind of continue the discussion, not unlike what we're doing now, but also you have these Think Summits, and you're going to be connecting the dots in the thread from Think all the way through until this thing ends and even beyond I would predict, that digital is here to stay, at least an event standpoint, and a hybrid, and other businesses. So give us the update on the Think Summits, how do we get more information, what are they all about? >> Absolutely, for more information is always available on our on demand platforms, so you can go onto IBM.com/think, but what you said Dave is so important. That this is not a one and done, we want to keep the conversations running, we want to keep engaging with everybody who has come last week to have an engaging discussion with us, we will continue this in June, in Europe, in different cities we have a number of Think Summits. This will be followed with other Think Summits across the globe. Now as IBM we feel we have a responsibility not just that we create content and thought leadership that is consumed by millions of people across the globe, we do it in a way that is global. So we want to make sure that you and I today are talking in English, that we are able to have our colleagues in China are able to have the same conversation in the language that they prefer, and so in Japan and so on and so forth, IBM being the truly global company that we are, we want to make sure that the conversations also have nuances that are impacting these countries in real time, in the situation that we are in, not all companies are in the same space in the curve, some are recovering, some are bouncing back, some are just getting into this scenario that's all around us. So the remedy and the routes that business will take, is also slightly different. So we want to make sure we are very customized, we want to make sure we are really very relevant to that audience. So follow us on the Think Summits across the globe, as the new dates are keeping on newer dates are getting announced on the Think platform, so that's ready to go. The one last thing I would also say Dave, is that at this time what's very important is that not all tech is created equal, and not all companies are created equal. What's the cost of bad advice and so I think it's very important to be mindful of who you engage with. And make sure that we are not taken advantage of in these kind of scenarios. Be very mindful of how how well your partner understands your business, how well your partner understands what could go wrong. And plan for it, and not just show but be there with your clients, with your customers throughout the journey, and take them back to the path of growth. >> Yeah that whole notion of business resilience and not only as a defensive move, but also something that you can lean into, really try to grow your business, there's a lot of learning going on, a lot of great content on the IBM Think Digital Experience site. Of course theCUBE.net. Mani, thanks so much for coming back on, and breaking down IBM Think, and giving us a forward look to the Think Summits. Great to have you. >> Absolutely my pleasure Dave, thank you. >> And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Valanti for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat instrumental music)