>> [] From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020. Virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and the ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe the virtual edition and you've reached the final stage. This is our last interview so hopefully, learned a lot talking to the CNCF members. We've had a few great practitioners, of course, some of the important vendors and startups in this space. And when we talk about what's happening in this, this cloud native space, one of the things that gets bandied about a lot is scale. What does that mean? You know, when it first rolled out, of course, there is only one Google out there, and only a handful of true hyperscalers. But there absolutely are some companies that really need scale, performance global and so happy to bring in he is the final boss. It is Alexandria McLean. He's a technical architect at Ubisoft. And yes, I do have a little bit of background in gaming. But here's someone that is helping enable in one of the largest gaming companies in the globe. So Alexandra, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, thanks for the invitation, happy to be here. >> All right, so you're no novice to this ecosystem. I know you and I have both been at many of the Docker cons, the KubeCons over the years. So if you could just give our audience a little bit of your background and what is your team responsible for Ubisoft? >> Okay, sure, so I am part of the one of the IT teams inside Ubisoft. So we're responsible mainly to provide cloud computing resources and Kubernetes infrastructure for the whole company. So again, and if you want to know more about basically, I've been, I've been leading the Kubernetes initiative, the past few years right now. So we started the journey maybe in 2016. We're already pretty busy, you know, working on the growth for the cloud, the cloud industry to stand Ubisoft, for the growth of the expansion, different data centers and supporting the needs of the different teams and development teams inside Ubisoft. And one thing we wanted to do back then was really to enable and accelerate the adoption of cloud native, the cloud native mindset and cloud native architectures. So what we did back then is did, we did a short analysis of our different technologies that was available at the time, and we decided to jump full head on Kubernetes and make this as the foundation for the different workloads, container workloads that will be that will enable drive adoption inside Ubisoft to grow and boost the productivity of many things. >> Alright, I'm really glad you brought up that cloud native mindset, if you could just up-level a little bit for, you know, the business leaders out there, they hear about, you know, Kubernetes and they won't know how to spell it. They hear something like a cloud native mindset, and they say, you know, I don't understand, what does this mean for our business? So what architecturally are you doing and what does that mean for you know, your games and ultimately your end users? >> Yeah, so I would say that basically, I mean, if you want to have a cloud native architecture, really want to make your application, first of all, very portable, very easy to deploy and manageable, and at the same time very resilient to failure. So you want to make sure that your application once it's deployed, that it's highly resilient to failure, that it was built for failures and that you can manage the project and the service to meet the expectation of either the gamers or the service owners basically. >> Yeah, you know, absolutely. I'm curious, here in 2020, we see the ripple effects of what the global pandemic has. I have to imagine that from a gaming standpoint, that has had an impact. So maybe if we use that as an analogy, if it's valid from your standpoint, I have to imagine more people are using it. What did this mean to your infrastructure? How were you ready from an IT's perspective to support that, you know, increased usage, kind of rippling around the globe as more people are home all the time? >> Hmm, yeah, that's a good question I guess. I mean, we really have like two kind of, I would say, audience inside Ubisoft in the IT team that I serve. So we have the people who are building the softwares and the applications to help the developers to, I mean the game developers in general, so we have different services, internal services, and tooling that needs to be hosted somewhere. And we need to enable these people in these teams to have a way to manage applications efficiently. And the other side we are looking at right now, I mean, we the game server and the gaming industry, is really, I think there's a shift right now in the way that she prefer doing, the way that you're going to manage the game servers in the future. And I would say that back then, there was a lot of in house tooling, things that were really, I mean, appropriately proprietary to each gaming company. But right now, what we wanted to do in the past few years, we work for instance on a solution called hygienist. So we were involved in the beginning to design this kind of next gen game server, dedicated server hosting infrastructure that was all built around communities. So, in the future, we were already started to work on that, and the next gen of games are going to be difficult to stay on top of Kubernetes, which is going to enable a lot more efficiency of resource usage and now at the same time, we'd say manageability and the profitability about all these services. Because I think that one key thing about cloud native and Kubernetes is that, once you know Kubernetes, I mean, basically, it's very easy to onboard new people in the team, the project, because they know what is Kubernetes how to operate it. So it will be much more efficient in the future for all the workflows that we have internally and the next game server infrastructure as well to be hosted in Kubernetes, it's going to be much more easy to standardize and unify that whole stack. >> Well, the skill sets are so critically important. And it's great to hear you say that onboarding somebody in Kubernetes, is easier than it might have been a couple of years ago. If you could bring us inside a little bit, you know, what's your stack look like? You know, you know, can you say what cloud or cloud you use? When it comes to Kubernetes, you know, what are the key tools that you're using and partners that you have? >> Yeah, sure. So early on, I would say, almost 10 years ago, we really started to focus on adding on prem cloud infrastructure and the technology that we chose back then was OpenStack. So we have a large footprint of OpenStack called install, installed internally and different data centers all over the world so people and different teams and anyone at Ubisoft can easily have computers or compute resources available for them. And with Kubernetes, we initially we wanted to have, you know, to make your Kubernetes a commodity. We wanted to ask people be very I mean in a position to easily experiment new things, new applications on top of Kubernetes. And for that we decided to go with Rancher. So Rancher is an open source solution made by Rancher labs, and we, initially after we started to build and in our solution, the first year because we talked back then the landscape was quite different and we thought it was the best choice for us to do. But we realized shortly after, I mean, when Rancher 2.2 came out, I think it was in something like April 2018, that we will benefit a lot go with this kind of solution which was open sourced, there was a lot of traction behind it and it will enable us to I mean, accelerate, accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes and cloud native in general, much more faster, than the you know solutions that we had built at that time. So we went with Rancher and right now we have, I would say, I mean, we have maybe 10 data centers with the cloud installed on top of it, much more data centers was going to grow in the next couple of months and years, and we have over 200 clusters and 1000 nodes that are managed by Rancher and people can just deploy on demand, to own Kubernetes cluster and get started with it if they want to. >> Okay, so if I heard you right, it's Rancher on top of the OpenStack solution in your data centers. >> Yes. >> You talk about how many clusters you have, you know, what's the state of managing those environments? You said, you're using Rancher that's one of the things we've seen a lot of discussion over the last couple of years is you know, went from managing containers to managing you know, part or cluster to now, multi clusters around multi sites, you know, what's the maturity today? Anything that you're looking for that would make your life easier to manage such a broad environment? >> Yeah, well, I would say that's one of the drawback, I mean, when we enabled that solution with Rancher we didn't see, I mean, here's the views of launching provisioning new clusters, is that right now, we have a lot of clusters, maybe too many, because we try to consolidate, I mean, the next, the next logical step for us is we try to consolidate the workloads maybe as much as possible, and see if there's really a need for people to have their own dedicated cluster for them. And initially, there was a lot of demand for that, because people basically they came to us and they said, you know, we want to use Kubernetes. And what we want to do is we want to have films which we have access to it, we want to be able to do whatever we want with it, upgrade it at our own pace. And I don't want to have any neighbor on it. I want to be completely isolated in terms of computer resources. So we said all right, we're going to make a solution that is going to provision new clusters on demand for everyone. And the intro stuff may very well. But now, after a while some people and we as especially as an IT provider and operator, we realized that, you know, maybe people don't have to be completing alone to cluster, maybe we should try to consolidate that a little bit. So we're trying to migrate workloads from certain services and tooling and say maybe you can, instead of running your own cluster, you can use this one that is going to be shared. And there will be a team dedicated I mean dedicated to support and operate is faster for you because we want to in the end, we want to offload the burden of infrastructure and Kubernetes although it's I mean, it brings a lot of abstraction in simplicity, you still have to manage your cluster in the end. So we'd rather have people focus on the application side than on the Kubernetes infrastructure side. So we will start a path of maybe try to consolidated friend workloads, and see if we can reduce the amount of clusters that we have and also to unify the way that people are using the different providers because although we have, a huge open OpenStack cloud offering internally on prem, there are still people who need to use GKE or EKS and a couple of other external cloud providers. So for these people, some of them are not using really Rancher, although it's possible with Rancher to just directly using the providers. But what we want to do is try to unify the way that you're going to get access to this cluster, try to make a central governance model for people to pass through a central team to get access and prevent the cluster. So they will be standardized, we will be able to add more maybe security policies and compliance and rules and everything. So the cluster will be created in certain ways and that too much fragmented as they are today. >> Yeah, that's ultimately what I was trying to understand is most customers I talked to, they have hybrid environments, they're using multiple clouds, if you're using Kubernetes you know, how do you get your arms around that. So I'd love to get your viewpoint just 'cause you've been involved since, kind of the early Kubernetes days, you know, what's, what's better now than it was a few years ago? You know, I heard you say that you looked at possibly, you know, creating a solution to yourself so a company like Rancher helps simplify things. So when you look at the maturity, you know, how happy are you with what you have now? And are there any things that you say, boy, I'd love my team to not have to worry about this. You know, maybe the industry as a whole would be able to, you know, standardize or make things simpler? >> Well, you know, when we started to use Rancher maybe there were a couple of things that we wanted to simplify for the users because what Rancher does is essentially is that, there's a lot of configuration options. It's very flexible because it's first mining providers. So the first few things that we did was try to simplify the user experience who we will extend we modified ventures in some ways to make It's simpler to be consumed. And also, the experience is much more simpler than it was, let's say two years ago when we started, we still want to simplify it even further, we want to ideally provide a fully manage experience. So peoples don't even have to worry about the control plane components that is currently being deployed with their competitors clusters. We want to remove that away from them so that we, once again fully focus on the application side of development. And I think one other aspect that we need to maybe improve in the future is that, when you want to deploy your application and make it resilient and geographically distributed, then you need to manage multiple clusters, and you need to deploy your applications and performance cluster. So, the whole multi cluster aspect of things like, how do I deploy my application from a version? How do I make it like consistent between the different clusters that where it needs to be deployed. How do I make service discovery possible? Or do I mesh everything all the application together to make sure that it's easy to operate, it's easy for the developers, and that it's resilient in the end. So we will start to look at the, I mean, the multi cluster multi region aspect for Kubernetes. Because that's a big challenge to us. >> All right, well, Alexandre, want to shift for a second, let's talk about the conference, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, obviously, it's virtual this year, so there is a little bit of shift but you know, you've attended many of these in the past. What are their projects that you're interested in learning more or are there you know, peers of yours that you're looking to collaborate with? What have you seen in the past that that you're hoping you still get, from a virtual event like we have this year? >> Well, you know, I think that it has become so big, it's hard to keep up with everything that's happening at the same time, you know, nowadays, but, things that we're looking at really, is maybe like, I think chapters maybe, in terms of service mesh to a lot of technologies, I think it's maturing slowly. So we'll have, we'll always try to have a look about what is the most, the best fit for us and the use cases that we have. And some people thought you're using Kubernetes, some other people are using, you know more traditional stacks, So we try to bridge that together and see what's possible to migrate the existing workloads from the traditional cloud VMs, and call applications toward Kubernetes and everything. So maybe try to see if it's possible to bridge that path and migrate gradually for the users that we have. And other things in general, I think that it will be very interesting to see the whole bear setups, I mean, evolving to run out and see are we can try to add conformance and compliance rules to different clusters that we have to manage to make sure that it's no longer like, just add a matter of I want to create a cluster, I get access to it. We need to centralize the governance. We need to centralize that, the rules of our everything's going to be managing the end and make sure that security is a big aspect to it so make sure that there's no vulnerabilities and everything's being audited. And especially for the game students is going to be a big factor for us. So we definitely our interested into all the security discussion that's happening right now. >> All right, no shortage of lots of information. Alexandre, by the way, that there's no way that anybody can keep up on everything that's happening in this very robust community. But thank you so much for sharing your journey. It's always great to hear from the practitioner. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, awesome. >> All right, and thank you for joining us, for all the coverage. Be sure to go to theCUBE.net, you can see not only all the interviews from this show, you can go search find previous shows as well as see what events we will be at, of course right now all virtually, so, am Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive, three days of coverage here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier co-host with Dave Vellante, hosting three days and next is Joel Horowitz, Vice President Strategic Partnerships and Offering, of The Digital Business Group. >> Thanks. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me here. >> Thanks for coming on. >> You've been on theCUBE, probably so many times, talking big data, talking analytics, now, in your new role in The Digital Group, the digital transformation. I really want to just ask you right off the bat about your new role, and how it relates to the changing ecosystem. >> Joel: Yeah. >> All of these markets are changing big time, the role of the ecosystem, the leverage that they have with technology and the value propositions, whether it's decentralized applications in Blockchain to storage and infrastructure, and big data. What is your role, take a minute to explain what you're doing, because you have a unique position, because this demand for partnerships, this demand for collaboration at many levels. What's the latest? >> So I would describe my role as being a champion of our partners, for sure. I look at, you know, I take, a very outside in perspective on IBM. Joining just over three years ago now, I came in, really through analytics, as you know, focused on machine learning, data science, and the growth of A.I. at that time. Last year I was part of the corporate development team over there. So looking, really, at a lot of the industry trends and what's going on, as well, in analytics, data, and A.I. This year, you know, we recognize that we're only going to do so many strategic partnerships a year, right, where there's probably a handful that we're going to work with. For example, last year we did a great partnership with Lightbend to bring their reactive platform to IBM, and we launched the iPhone 10, with Verizon on Lightbend's platform. But, these days, my team, can't be everywhere, obviously, and part of the value of digital, and that route to market is really the idea that partner should be able to self service. So, you know, my job this year, is frankly to put myself out of a job, right. Meaning, if I can get, you know, 70% of the work my team does, right, contracting, legal, setting up, provisioning, all of that on our cloud, and partners can just do that themselves. Then we'll capture a much larger swath of the emerging A.I., data, and cloud market. >> I want to talk about the killer app creating value and then the role the market place is playing. You mentioned self service. I want to kind of go down that. Before we get there, I want to get your thoughts on this because I noticed, in your role you're covering, it's cutting across a lot of different things, and you know we've been talking about cloud, as a horizontally disrupting technology, >> Joel: Yeah. >> Certainly in the data space you saw that. And stacks will be horizontally scalable with the cloud. >> Yeah. >> But you could be vertical specialization in the applications. So I noticed you're covering analytics, Watson, Cloud, hybrid cloud, emerging technologies. >> Yeah. >> Blockchain, and many others. >> Yeah. >> So talk about, it's obvious you guys are now cutting across, horizontally, across the different IBM divisions. Is that by design? >> Yeah. >> What's the impact of the ecosystem and partners for that horizontally cut over? >> Yeah, I know, I mean it's a great question, I think. Look, there are some specific design patterns that we see across every technology, across every, you know, business at IBM. One design pattern is pretty obvious, you saw it with the launch of the IBM cloud private data. Following up on last years IBM Cloud Private. And that design pattern is really about people containerizing applications. And so, at the end of the week, we have the business partner, or PartnerWorld Leadership conference. Excuse me. Where a number of our partners really are looking at how do I bring that work load to the cloud. And it's not so much the cloud is the end point. That's really the starting off point to A; Get much wider distribution and B; Be able to take advantage of a lot of these emerging technologies, like Blockchain, like A.I. Like IOT, and numerous others, Quantum, et cetera, they'll just keep coming. So really cloud to me is just a way for us to open the door to a lot of the technology that's flooding the market. >> Dave: Joel, can you talk about partnership, you mentioned before that you guys are kind of selective, John calls them Barney deals, ya know. I love you, you love me. You guys sound like you don't look for those, not volume, it's quality. >> Yeah. >> What are the criteria that you're looking for? How do you get value out of those? How do you measure that value out of the partnerships? If someone is a prospective partner out there, how should I be interacting with you? >> Yeah, I think, there's probably two steps. I think one is really recognizing that, in my own personal view, is that we really want to partner with folks who embrace open standards. Now I'm not going to like go as far to say open source, 'cause I think there is a lot that goes into that. But I will say open standards, meaning, not these like large monolithic applications, but can you actually integrate with us in some meaningful way? And to do that, that's why we actually started on this new platform that we are launching today. Called IBM Partner Self-service. Is the ability to first integrate with IBM. So, if you can demonstrate that you can build with IBM first, whether that's a startup, an ISV, a business partner. Like that's criteria number one. Criteria number two is are you a trusted partner? So, do you actually have the same level of competency that we would expect from, frankly, our own sellers, and our own people. And so, to do that, we've also launched new competency paths for business partners and partners as well. So, those are the two major criterias. And then the third one, which I think is kind of the holy grail, is selling with IBM. So we also launched a sell with path today where you can actually list in our marketplace. And then we will actually help you reach new markets. And then demonstrate there's clients, there's a client need that really wants our joint solution, right? And so, to me, those are the three things, to re-state. Like, you know, building with us, having a level of competency with us, and then demonstrating client success with us. >> Okay, so, integrate, you really don't need you guys to do that. I can just dive in and do that. Bake it out a little bit, and then approach you. What kind of help do you give? Do you have programs once you get by those gates? >> So, you know, I would categorize into two groups, I think we have a ton of online support. So, you know, we even embrace Slack at IBM. If you're not aware of that, we have Slack everywhere. And, so, for a self service, I want to say, look, what does zero touch mean, right, in this day and age, for a partner. And so, they can go to our site today, and actually get, you know, sign up for Slack, and talk directly to our technical specialist as well as to our developer advocates. And so, on the enablement and integration side, my colleague, Angel Diaz and team, have done a great job of launching hundreds of IBM code patterns. So that you can just pick these artifacts up, these assets up, and leverage them to integrate all sorts of capabilities into your product. >> You know, Dave, I want to get your thoughts on this, because you and I have been talking about the API integration, and I want to get back to Joel's point in a second because I think this is critical for startups and ecosystem partners. API's are the (speaking quickly) for developers right now, so if I don't want to take a big chance on being all in on IBM, say I want to kick the tires, API's are critical. So the question is, are you seeing that traction on your side of the house, in terms of the end now, since the level of API integration, is that the touchpoint? Is it like the beginning phases? And what level of commitment that you're seeing with people. >> Well, John, to me it comes down to innovation, and it's interesting because Joel came out of the data world. To me, the innovation in the next 10 years starts with data. The second component of that innovation, I think, over the next decade or so is going to be, really, A.I., whether you call it cognitive or machine intelligence or artificial intelligence. And then third, I think is cloud economics and that's really where the API economy fits in. You got to have API'S to integrate, as Joel was saying. You've got to have marginal... You've got to have scale, marginal costs go to zero eventually. You've got to have network effects and you've got to be able to track startups, which is another question I have. >> Now Joel, back to you, on the start on the integration, whether it's a startup or a big company. It used to be, the old days, you got to go all in. You've got to get the developer kit, >> Joel: Yeah. >> Download it, line it to a swim lane, get deeper, prove your value. >> Yeah. >> Find the value's faster; what's the first hurdle if someone wants, hey I want to give IBM a shot here? Love the sell, holy grail option, is it API'S, can people integration on their own? Talk about that specific first step because some people might open up the door and go whoa! There's more here than I thought. Or, wow, there's some real tech. Or, I don't want to use IBM tech, I want to use some of mine. There's that first indifference point. >> Yeah, I think there are areas where we've seen dramatic customer experience improvements. So to give one example, as we've partnered with Ubisoft, Redstorm last year around a new title game that they released called Star Trek Bridge Crew, and so, you know, to me, we went on our own merit, and I think that publisher chose IBM because Watson Conversation is absolutely the best on the market. And so what that did is it enabled game players, their end customer, their end user, to speak into a VR headset and just give commands, as you would naturally. And so, I think a lot of, as you think about IBM, it's, yeah, we've made it completely easy to access our API'S. I think, there's a great quote from the founder of Flickr that I read years ago, I'll go dig it up for you guys later, but it was along the lines of business development means, today is exposing your API'S, like, that's it! And, on the other side of it, we give a lot away in terms of cloud credits, right, and so, today, if you go and sign up on our self service platform, we'll give you $10,000 a month in free cloud credits to build and build quickly. Because, at the end of the day, if it's not self service, if it requires more heavy lifting, then, frankly, we're not doing our jobs. And so that's my commitment, is to make sure that is available, is accessible, and there's experts there that can help you on your journey. >> So that attracts startups, obviously, 10K a month is a honey pot for those guys. What about existing IBM clients that want to get to the cloud. Migrate to the cloud. How do you help those guys? >> Yeah, so, in the migration front, we have a great team in place with IBM services, who basically have set up a migration factor, if you will, and there are numerous ways to chart your course to the cloud. Whether it's, you know, full cloud or hybrid cloud, or some offloading, some aspects to the cloud. There's a lot of different paths you can take and so to do that, we're offering $50,000 in migration credits for the first couple months. We're also offering 35% off for professional services. So, we have a great offer going on over the next few months to help people make that first step. >> Incentives are key. >> And, look, we're here with you so it's not like, here, throwing it over the fence, and good luck! You know, tweet at me, instant message me, I'm around. And I will be absolutely committed to partner success. >> Yeah, you know, incentives are critical, that's going to get the market going. But, the end of the day, it's the type of value, and I want to get your thoughts, it's something that's come up that I've heard people talk about in the hallways and other conferences. They kind of chirp about "Hey, you know, "I'd like to get this, from suppliers. "I want to see more tools, more programs "to help me get more customers, to get more value. "I'm building apps, but also got a business to run." What are some of the conversations you've had over the past year with customers and partners? Stack rank the top three or four things that they talk about, either their pain points or things that are on their mind, that's worth noting? >> I mean, I would say first and foremost, I mean, me, myself, being in a startup at H2O. Three, four years ago. We used to walk in there and sell into the data scientists, right, so if you don't know H2O, they're a great company, a machine learning company, but we would get the data scientists really excited about working with our product, and then lo and behold, we'd get to the CIO office saying, "Hey, what is this stuff? "Get it out of here." You know, Hadoop was the same way, by the way, 2010 working at AVG, like, we'd bring in Hadoop. Like what is this data like thing? There's no governance, it's a mess. Where they could really, you know, work with IBM, where they see value from IBM is when we go into the CIO office together and say, look, we've demonstrated that there's value here. We've demonstrated that there's actual customer need. We can create a lot of help in terms of getting the rest of the organization bought in. Put in the right governance around it. Because, look, I mean GDPR is real, it's a big deal. Like, data privacy, is huge. So, you know, Rob Thomas likes to say, "You can't have good A.I. without I.A." I think that's a great information architecture. So, I agree, and so I think that's what the number one benefit is. Really get in there, move quickly, demonstrate value, and then when you're ready to make that next step of how you roll that out to the rest of the enterprise, that's when IBM becomes a huge help. >> You know, you mentioned GDPR. With regulatory issues now are becoming criteria for a lot of application developers that are small that may not have the resources to handle the right to get your name out of a database or other tools, and other regulations, certainly. Decentralize applications with Blockchain, another regulatory challenge-- >> Yep. >> Opportunity as well. Are you guys having those kinds of conversations, like putting specific things in place beyond GDPR, and if so what regulatory and legal things do you see out there that could be blockers for customers, that you guys hope to go after? >> I mean, I don't think there's a one word answer here. I do think that you take it on a case by case basis. I think you're seeing different countries adopt GDPR differently. Germany, obviously, being a very strict kind of country in doing that. So, you know, IBM services, as well as our analytics team, are really focused on that. I think, like I said, what you saw with ICP data coming out this week, I think that's a really important way to look at it. My own personal view, I think, for sure there's a lot of compliance, They have to look at, and understand the workflow, workflows of how people are using that data, as well as application architecture is big. And those are all the considerations, I think, that you are going to see as people move. I read a statistic that 40% of all CSP'S, MSP'S, are moving, are growing, like it's 40% growth from IBC, 50% of all developers are now embedding A.I. So, this market is growing and growing fast. But, you're right. If folks out there aren't really taking GDPR seriously, you can get yourself into some hot water. >> Well, we've observed that scale matters, certainly, whether it's a partner or cloud, that gets, that helps people. >> Yeah. >> Joel, well, thanks for coming onto theCUBE, we really appreciate it. >> Yeah, my pleasure. >> Before we end, I want to get your thoughts, just share with the folks that are watching. What kind of deals do you want to do? What's on your radar? What's the priorities for you? From a strategic business development standpoint. To develop across that horizontally scalable, IBM division space, as well as technology space? >> You know, it's not what deals I want to do, it's really what deals our partners want to do. >> Come on, your in charge, come on. >> It's really what deals our partners want to do, ya know. I mean, look, I get excited about transforming industries, I really do, so I look at, not what's the transactional partnership, like go, we'll do something, and there's some revenue, or something. I look at how do we transform an industry? >> Let me rephrase the question. What's on the priority list for you guys, from a transformational area, that's important for your partners. >> Yeah, I would say for sure, obviously, A.I. is huge. Obviously data is huge, obviously cloud is huge. But, looking really specific, I think you just add tech after each industry. So Addtech, Fintech, Healthtech obviously. Game tech and, I think, probably the last one, to me personally, is the most exciting. We signed an amazing deal with Unity at the end of last year, the start of this year. In fact GDC game developer conference is going on as we speak in San Francisco. So half my team right now is over there, demonstrating Watson as like VR, AR, and it's not just for games, right. It's like with BMW and VW doing some cool stuff there as well. So, I'm really excited about the, AR, VR, industry growing, especially with our partner Unity. >> There's a new creative out there-- >> Can I jump in before you exit? I want to ask you a follow up on that, because if transformation is sort of the target for your partnerships. Healthcare is an area that should be transformed. But, needs to be transformed, but it's hard to transform healthcare. >> Joel: It is, yeah. >> Do you feel like you could start moving the needle from a partnership perspective? Or is that going to take some more time? >> You know, I think there's a lot of great work being done there. I do believe... Look, in general, I think we can move a lot faster with partners, in fact, I like to call it like the Nordstrom model. Right? Like IBM in the past has been Barney's of New York, forever, right? From a branding and from how we partner with folks, like I think we need to move more to a Nordstrom, like, yeah, we'll sell our own offerings off the rack, but then we need to help partners come in and create the right styles for the right need and the right industry. >> Yeah and then there's a Nordstrom Rack you're going to need to put that on. (laughing) Over technology goes the Nordstrom Rack. Joel Horowitz, thanks for coming out. Vice President Strategic Partnerships and Offerings, here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, with three days of IBM Think live streaming, all of the videos will be up on thecube.net sports live now. Youtube.com/siliconangle for all the ondemands when the show's over. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (light techno music)