(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering DockercCon 2017. Brought to you by Docker and support from Asseco System Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Mittleman, with my co-host, Jim Kobielus. Happy to have on the program, I'm shocked to say a first time guest. Someone that I've known in the community here for many years, but Michael Ducy, who is Director of Product Marketing at Chef Software. Not a chef. Maybe you might-- >> Not a chef, although I do cook at home (laughing). >> Maybe in Chef. Not a puppeteer. >> Not a puppeteer. >> But you work for Chef Software. So thank you so much for joining us. >> Yes, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Michael, for the audience that doesn't know you... I think a lot of people here in the community would know you. I've known you through Twitter for many years. What's your role at Chef? What do you work on? What's your passion? >> Sure, so right now I do product marketing for our open source projects. So Chef Software actually has a commercial product, and then we also have three open source projects that we maintain. The first was the original one that we're named after, which is Chef, which is open source automation or configuration management. The second one being Inspect, which is all about how do you basically write compliance rules as code. And then third one, as you can see from my shirt, is called Habitat. So Habitat is a new way of thinking about how do you package up automation for your application. And then how can you easily export that application and the automation into something like a container. I've had various roles at Chef though over the four years that I've worked for them. My passion's always kind of been open source communities, an involvement in open source communities and helping grow those communities. >> Yeah, and people send you lots of stuff about goats. >> People send me lots of stuff about goats (laughing). There was a joke that was made at a conference about waking up next to a goat. This was a conference in Amsterdam, which is I'm sure I wouldn't be the first one that woke up next to a goat in Amsterdam (laughing). But since then, the whole goat thing kind of took off after that. >> Yeah, so, Chef, you understand many things about Docker. So one of the things, we come in and we talk about there's Docker, the company, there's Docker, the community. A lot of what was talked about in the keynote today was about open source. >> Umm-hmm. >> So how's Docker doing? What interested you in the keynote? How do you as an individual in Chef see what's going on in the Docker ecosystem? And what do you think? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So we've been put in a little bit of an interesting position as Chef, the company. And not only has Chef, the company, been put in this position, but all of our competitors have as well. So there's been a movement as Docker and containers got more popular that the idea that configuration management is no longer needed. And from a inside the container perspective, configuration management really isn't needed. But what you do end up realizing is that there's this whole idea of what you need to actually run a container in production effectively, that still needs to go into that container. And we kind of call it The Learning Cliff of Containers. And I tweeted out an image about... that why co-worker draw on a whiteboard. That shows in development you just have Docker and it's really easy, but then when you move it to production there's this whole other stack of concerns. And Docker or your container runtime is just one of them. And so, we've been focusing more on kind of shifting into those ideas of how do you actually run containers effectively in production. What we saw in the keynote today is more of an emphasis on things like security, right. That's definitely been an area that we're interested in, especially from a compliance perspective, and doing work around having our open source projects, being able to scan containers for compliance. >> Yeah, it's funny before the keynote they have this fun little thing. They have this 8-bit video game playing. >> Right. >> And it was like they were collecting coins and they were leveling up, but they kept hitting lots of bombs (laughing) and things were exploding all the time. And everybody was joking online. It was like, Oh, it's like putting Docker in production. I will level up (laughing) and I will get past everything, but, Boy, I'm going to have lots of bombs going off and things-- >> Sure. >> And things that I'll have to deal with, and there were lots of fun little comments that they threw out there. It's like, Checking documentation. Oh, documentation says you don't have documentation. (laughing) So just fun stuff like that. But it's challenging. Solomon says, We want this put in deployment, but as we know it's not quite there yet. There's lots of things, that's where you guys fit in. >> Umm-hmm. >> A lot of the ecosystem helps to solidify that about you here. >> Michael, what are those concerns that you allude to? There's security, and what other concerns are there for containers in production that need to be represented in the configuration management portfolio or profile you're describing? >> Sure, so there's the security aspects of it is focused on what vulnerabilities are in your container. >> Yeah. >> And there's been some interesting studies recently that showed 24% of the official images are shipping with some sort of a vulnerability. Some of that you have to accept, and then also realize can you do risk mitigation around that vulnerability. There's concerns about how the application is actually configured when you ship it as well. So am I doing things like storing secrets in config files. Am I disabling versions of ISOCELL that's no longer a best practice anymore because it's actually broken. And then there's other aspects around how do you things like service discovery, how do you do credentials or secrets. And how do you get them into the container securely. There's networking aspects. There's last malconfiguration of the application, so-- >> Right. >> If you take a container from one environment to another environment and kind of work it through a lifecycle. There are things at runtime that you have to change in its configuration to make it run in that particular environment. >> Right. >> So it's all of those little knobs that you still have to turn. And that's why-- >> The entire DevOps lifecycle essentially there's all those little knobs and... >> There's all these little knobs and this has always been a little bit of a frustration for me, in that PaaS sounds great, platform as a service sounds great. And this idea that you can just take this blob and go run it. But What people don't realize is there still are tons of knobs that you have to turn, and there are tons of concerns that you have to worry about as an operations person or as a DevOps person or as a developer when you actually are taking that code into production. >> Right. >> Michael, we've seen the cloud providers and some of the other open source providers kind of chipping away. Red Hat bought Ansible, every time I go to Amazon re:Invent or Google, it seems like they're trying to build more things up the stack and into their platforms. >> Umm-hmm. >> So what is Chef's position here? How do you guys play across all these environments and kind of maintain and grow what you're doing? >> Yeah, so we've started to take a little bit more of a different focus and... Well, not a different focus... A different focus for us. Traditionally, we focus on infrastructure and operations people and then as we moved up the stack and DevOps became more popular. We definitely focused on that because that's kind of our bread and butter. But what we started to do with Habitat is focus more on building a developer experience. So how can a developer take their code-- >> Yeah. >> Easily wrap automation around it, and then ship it out into production. And this is the new world for us, as coming from the operations side of things. And really starting to think about what does the developer tooling look like and the developer experience look like. We're taking source code, building that source code, and then deploying that source code to production. >> Yeah, and it's interesting, it sounds... We talk about Docker. They very much started out in the developer world, and then they're kind of moving to kind of the Op side more. >> Umm-hmm. >> And to the enterprise side more. You're almost going-- >> Michael: And we're kind of-- >> A little bit in reverse, huh. >> Yeah, going a little bit in reverse, yeah. >> Yeah, it's interesting because usually it's like, Okay, I start with developers, get them excited and then figure out to monetize. So, yeah, what are you seeing in your customer base? >> Sure. >> Who do you sell to in that aspect? Yeah, I'm just curiosity at some of the buyers. >> Well, so, traditionally, a tool like Chef or, even some of our competitors would be bought by what's called the Shared Services Team, right. And that Shared Services Team is going to take that and try and work economies of scale, right. And try and deploy that across all of the different BMs or machines that they have to manage, right. And we've seen this shift as we moved more up the stack and as the industry's shifted more up the stack. Of what the Shared Services Team actually needs to transform themselves into is more of a developer services team. So how can I offer the services that a developer can get via an API, to quickly deploy the application services that they need. And when I say application services, I'm thinking about all of the things that you need to actually go and persist the data. The business logic side of things are very easy to do in containers or PaaS. But when you're actually having to go and persist data in something like Red-S are Mongo or MySQL, that's a whole other area of concern that you have to worry about. So what we've actually had started to do is the core team that actually works on Habitat has a very, very big background in distributive systems. So what we've started to do is bake a lot of that foundational ideas about how you effectively run large-scale distributive systems into Habitat, which makes it very easy to then go and take that developer, take their source code, and deploy it using Habitat, using this knowledge that we have from distributive systems. So we actually see it as a benefit that we come from this infrastructure background because we have experience of actually running things in production, right. >> Umm-hmm, what do you see as some of the challenges that we still need to face in this kind of container ecosystem? I know one of the questions I have coming in is you talked about stateful applications. We know storage still needs some time to mature. Networking seems to be a little bit further along in what they're doing. >> Umm-hmm. >> What's your take as to what's doing well? What still needs some more work? >> Yeah, storage is one of those areas that... And persisting data is one of those areas that we're not able to get around, right. And if you look at some people's recommendations, so Pivotal, for example, recommends running persistent services on BMs, right. If you look at the Google approach or the Cuber-netee's approach, they actually recommend that you use a cloud provider services to go and run those data services for you, until you think you're good enough to actually go and run it like Google. (laughing) And they're also hedging on the fact that you'll probably never be good enough to run it like Google. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So, kind of building that expertise of running those distributive systems in an effective way is kind of the area in running those persistent data services in a highly scalable way is kind of the big challenge that operations still hasn't figured out. And developers also need work to... Need help to help figure that out as well. >> Yeah, the big theme this morning was really about scalability. When you talked to customers, what does scale mean to them? What are the limitations they're having? I loved when you talked about what you're doing with Habitat. Helping customers, so that they don't have to have the expertise to build distributive systems because that's the software challenge of our time-- >> Yeah. >> Is moving to that. What we talk at Wicky-bon, it's moving from the old enterprise where it was like kind of baked in the hardware to a distributive, where the software model, anything had failed, there's no single point of failure, I can scale. >> Yeah. >> What do you think? >> Well, to kind of paraphrase our CTO, Adam Jacob, he always likes to say ignore scaling problems because you don't have a scaling problem. (laughing) And you don't have a scaling problem until you have a scaling problem, right. So if you kind of look at where your time's most effectively spent, your time is more effectively spent at actually building an application that people want to use, and worry about the scaling problem when the scaling problem comes up, right. And the other thing is that you might never hit that scaling problem, so everyone wants to be the next Uber, everyone wants to be the next Netflix, and so forth. And so, if you go in as a startup or, even a startup inside of a large enterprise trying to do a new application. If you start by trying to solve the scaling problem out the door, then what you end up losing is a lot of development cycles that you could actually be spending on building something that people actually want to use. And then worrying about the scaling problem when you hit the scaling problem. >> So, Mike, last question I have for you. A month from now, you're going to be back in Austin. >> A month from now, I'm going to be back in Austin. >> So tell us about ChefConf. >> Yes. >> What can people expect? Give us a compare and contrast to kind of the communities, the type of people that attend. I expect we'll see more shorts because it's going to be a little bit warmer and more humid here in Austin (laughing). >> Yes, so we're back at Austin for the second ChefConf in Austin. We were here also last year. We were in Austin in July last year. >> Ooooh. >> Which was not a fun experience (laughing). The air conditioning was very nice. The pool was also very nice. (laughing) But what you can expect is more practical advice to how to actually run these things in production. We have a lot of talks about Habitat. I think we're going to have a lot... Nine talks on Habitat. We have a lot of talks from the Chef community about running actual systems in production in a lot of real world experience, which is something that we always try and hover into our conferences. We also have a day that's going to be focused on our open source community as well, so where our open source and contributors can get together to talk about problems that they're trying to solve in our open source communities as well. And then on the last day, of course, as every conference does we're going to have a hack day, where you can contribute to open source, our open source, or we can help you get started solving a problem that you have, but there'll be a lot of people there that can answer questions for you about the problems that you're trying to solve in running distributive systems. >> Alright, well, Michael Ducy, happy to welcoming you into the ranks of theCUBE alumni, finally. >> Yes, finally, thank you very much. >> And thank you for sharing all the updates with us. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic music) >> I remember...

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Interconnect 2017 everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Russ Kennedy is here. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy and Customer Success at IBM. Russ, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> So Russ, of course, you and I have known each other for years. >> Yes. >> From the Cleversafe. You guys came in from the Cleversafe acquisition-- >> Right. >> A phenomenal move for you guys. Great exit, awesome move for IBM. >> Yep. >> So we're now well over a year in. >> Umm-hmm. >> So the integration, you've been long past Blue Washing (laughing) you're now in, and you're integrating with other services. >> Right. >> You're embedded in the cloud, still selling on prem-- >> Right. >> Hybrid messaging, so give us the update. What's happening at Interconnect? >> Sure, well, thanks for having me on. >> Dave: You're welcome! >> It's great to see you again. And you're absolutely right. Things have been moving very rapidly since the acquisition. It's about 15 months since we've been part of IBM now. And we still have a very robust on prem business that was our heritage in the Cleversafe days, but now that we're part of IBM we're well entrenched in the cloud. We've got cloud services, object storage services in the cloud, and a variety of different flavors there. We announced a couple of new things this week that I think are very exciting for clients. I'm sure we'll get into that as we go through this discussion. And we have a hybrid combination, so if clients want to have some of their data on prem, some of their data in the cloud, we offer that hybridity as well. And I think that's very exciting for enterprises that are looking to figure out where their workloads run best, and be able to have that flexibility to move things back and forth if they need to. >> We were talking off-camera, I remember I was saying to you, Cleversafe was one of Wicky-Bon's first clients-- >> Umm-hmm. >> Back when we were tiny-- >> Umm-hmm. >> And you guys were just getting started and-- >> Right. >> I remember we were working with you guys, and sort of talking about some positioning and things like that, and I remember saying, Look, it's going to cloud! >> Russ: Right, right, right. >> It's all going there. And at the time, it was like, you guys were saying, Yeah, we think so, too, but it's just not here yet (laughing). >> Right. >> (laughing) And we're a small startup you got-- >> Yeah. >> And so, you have the conviction of belief that it's going to happen, but at the same time you have to survive-- >> Sure, sure! >> And you got investors and it's... >> Yep. >> But the growth of unstructured data and then all of a sudden the combination of that, plus cloud happened. And then boom that was a huge tailwind. >> Right. >> Talk about that. >> Right, right, no, you're exactly right. In the early days it was very, very difficult to get people to understand the value of object storage and understand the value of cloud. And we were out there pioneering discussions around this concept, but we knew that the wave was going to happen. The growth of unstructured data was already obvious. You had music services, you had video services, everything going online. People wanting to distribute information and share information, and so you knew that the wave was coming. It took a little bit longer than I think everybody thought. I think certainly success in other public cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft kind of helped drove that as well. But we were certainly there with leading technology, and as soon as people started to realize the benefits of object storage for storing large, unstructured data objects, it just took off. >> Well, you know, too, the cloud progression was really interesting. >> Umm-hmm. >> You're right. Amazon sort of popularized it. >> Yep. >> And then the downturn in 2007, 2008, caused a lot of CFOs to say, Hey, let's try this cloud thing. >> Exactly. >> And then they came out of it-- >> Russ: Exactly, yep. >> And said, Hey, this cloud thing's actually really cool. >> Russ: Umm-hmm, umm-hmm. >> Now, let's operationalize it (laughing). >> Right. >> And go mainstream. And so, and now you've got this big discussion going on around data value, right. >> Russ: Of course. >> Everybody's talking about the value of data and what it means-- >> Russ: Sure, sure. >> And moving conversations up the stack away from sort of bit slicing and-- >> Right, right (laughing). >> Object stores-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> And ups the data value. >> You're exactly right. >> What are you seeing here? >> I think that's another new interesting area that we're getting into. It's the value of information, and I think what's driven that is the tools and the technologies that are now available to analyze data in variety of formats, right. The whole analysis and analytics capability that exist in the marketplace today is giving organizations a reason to take a look at their data, and to leverage their data, and to use their data, to drive business outcomes, to be more competitive, to be more agile, to be more flexible. So they're using the information. They have tools now that can give them insight into all kinds of things, their own data, external sources of data, new data that's being generated through applications and those kinds of things. All that can come together and analysis can go on top of it, to give people really quick insights into how to drive their business. And I think that's the really exciting part about being part of IBM's cloud because IBM has all those tools. >> We've been having conversations now for... It's well over several months and going into years-- >> Umm-hmm. >> Where the CIO's not so much thinking about storage, and certainly not worried about the media. >> Right. >> But definitely talking about what services can I tap to enhance the value of my data? >> Sure. >> How do I monetize, not necessarily data itself, but how does data contribute to the monetization of my company? >> Umm-hmm. >> And you guys fit into that. >> Sure. >> So maybe talk about that a little bit-- >> Sure, well, we talked to clients all the time about the value of the data, regardless of what industry you're in, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, all of those types of organizations have information and it's information that can help them be more productive. It can help them be more agile. It can help them win in the marketplace. All they need to do is open it up and use it, leverage it, analyze it, look at it, look at it from a variety of different sources, and it can help them do a lot of things more efficiently, so we talked to clients all the time about the value of data. Storage is certainly something that makes that value realizable, and it's the interfaces between applications and tools that make the data usable. And we open that up to clients with our storage system very easily, whether it's on prem or it's in the cloud, and that's what they like. Now, we heard David Kenny on stage the other day-- >> Umm-hmm. >> He announced IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex-- >> Yes. >> And he said, We do have a marketing department, and yes, they did come up with that name. (laughing) A funny tongue-in-cheek moment. >> Yes, yes. >> But talk about Flex. What is it? And why is it relevant? >> So a lot of clients that we've engaged with recently have talked about... They love the cloud model. They certainly love the simplicity and the ease of growth and those kinds of things that cloud gives them. But they're a little confused about the pricing and they're worrying about whether they're paying too much for the workload that they have in the cloud. So we designed Flex as a way to look at storing data. First of all, it's a very low cost entry point for storing the data. And then it's designed for data where the workload may be unpredictable. It may be cold for some period of time, and then it may become very active for a period of time, and then go back to being cold again. What Flex does is it ensures that you don't overpay when you actually utilize that data, when it's very active, very hot, maybe you're running some sort of analytics against that data. Maybe it's some sort of cognitive recognition analytics process that you're running against the data. It makes it very usable, but yet, you're not paying too much to access that data. So Flex is designed for those kinds of uneven, varied workloads, or workloads where it's very cold for some period of time and very hot. Traditional tiers are designed for hot workloads, mid-level workloads, and very cold workloads. Flex actually covers the whole gamut, and it ensures that you're not paying too much for storing and using your data. >> So that's a problem that people have because-- >> Umm-hmm. >> They don't really understand how to optimize cost-- >> Right, right. >> If they don't understand their workloads. >> Right. >> They get the cloud bill at the end of the month. They go, Whoa-- >> Yep, exactly. >> What just happened? >> Exactly. >> It's complicated for people, there's a lot of times it's different APIs for different services. >> Russ: Sure, sure. >> So talk a little bit more about how customers... How you see customers deploying that and what it's going to mean to... >> Sure. >> What's the business impact? >> Yeah, no it's a great question. So Flex, first of all, you only have to remember four numbers. There's a number to store the data, a cost to store the data, a cost to retrieve the data, a cost for what we call Class A Operations, which are write operations and then Class B, which are read operations. Four numbers you have to remember. You know that you're not going to pay over a certain amount, regardless of how often you use the data, so it's very simple for people to understand. It's one set of numbers. It doesn't matter what the workload is. You know you're not going to be overcharged for that workload. >> You set a threshold. >> Exactly, you set a cap, you set a threshold. >> Yeah. >> And you're not going to pay over that amount, so it's very simple for them to utilize. Then, so they start to use it, and let's say that over a six-month period of time they start to understand their workload, and they know it's a very active workload. They can then change that data into maybe our standard tier, and actually even save more money because it's consistent, it's predictable when it's active, they'll actually lower their cost. And we're very open with clients about that because we want to take away that complexity of using the storage, and certainly the complexity of billing, like you talked about. And give clients a very easy transition into the cloud, and make sure that they can use it and leverage it the way they need to be more productive. >> So the key to that is transparency. >> Russ: Yes, absolutely. >> And control. And that's an elastic sort of dial-up, dial-down-- >> Absolutely. >> As you need it. >> Russ: Very, very much so. Yes, definitely. >> I wanted to ask you, so we've been obviously watching... IBM made the SoftLayer acquisition, it was like, Okay, we're going to buy this bare metal hosting company. >> Umm-hmm. >> And then they bring in Bluemix, and then they start bringing in applications. >> Yes, yes. >> And then all of a sudden it's like, IBM does what IBM does (laughing), and boom! Now, you've got this machine going. >> Yes. >> And so, several acquisitions that are relevant here, Aspera. >> Yes. >> Clearleap. >> Yes. >> UStream fits there because we know Ustream because we broadcast on UStream-- >> Russ: Yes, yes, uh-huh. >> And, of course, Cleversafe. >> Umm-hmm. >> Are you beginning to leverage those acquisitions and potentially others through Bluemix-- >> Yes. >> To create services and new value for clients? >> Yeah, so we're fully integrated with all those technologies, right, the object storage system through our APIs. Every single one of those technologies can leverage and utilize the storage system underneath. I'll give you an example, Aspera, as you mentioned, a very, prominent product in the marketplace. I think just about every company in media and entertainment and certainly any company that's dealing with unstructured data objects knows and uses Aspera. They have a service now in the cloud where you can actually move data very rapidly over their protocol, into the cloud, and then store it in the object storage system. That's easy, that's simple. That makes it easy to start to leverage cloud. UStream the same way, Clearleap the same way. All of this comes together in Bluemix. Bluemix is the glue, so to speak, so if you're developing new applications you have all of the Bluemix tools that you can use, and then you got all these technologies that are integrated, including the object storage system, which is the foundation, everything's going to... All the data's going to reside in an object storage system. That makes it all usable for clients, very simple, very easy. They have a whole portfolio of things that they can do. And it's all tied together through APIs. It's very, very nice-- >> And has that opened up when you're small startup... (laughing) You don't have all these resources-- >> Right. >> How has it opened up new opportunities for you guys? >> So we see a lot of new startups coming on board, and taking advantage of the storage system-- >> Right. >> And all the different services that sit on top. Many companies today are born on the cloud, or they're new applications that are being born on the cloud, and so, they have access to, not only infrastructure, like you said within Bluemix, they also have access to other services, video services, high-speed data transfer services, object storage services. So they're able to take advantage of all those different services, build applications very quickly. Another thing that's interesting about IBM, they have this concept, you may have heard of it, this Bluemix Garage concept-- >> Dave: Yeah, I have. >> Which is a rapid deployment, rapid application development, using design thinking and agile methodologies, to quickly develop a minimum viable product that now uses object storage as part of the services, right. So as a new client, you can come in, sit in the Bluemix Garage, work on the application, and have some really rapid prototyping going on, and leverage the storage system underneath. And that gets you started, gets you going. I can see a lot of new applications coming to market through that same-- >> So they're like seven garages, is that right around the world? >> Russ: Yes, yes. Yeah, they're around the world. And so, I didn't realize... So Cleversafe's a fundamental part of that, in the object storage. >> It is now. And we just announced it this week at Interconnect, but it is now. >> So what does that mean? So I go in and I can... It's basically a set of... Sets of best practices-- >> Correct, correct. >> And accelerance and-- >> Right. And obviously in the cloud world, you need a place to place your data, right. So the integration with Cloud Object Storage, Cleversafe now called Cloud Object Storage is now all part of that, so it's integrated into the app dev that's going on in those garages. And we're excited about that because I think we'll see a lot of new technologies coming through that methodology, and certainly ones that leverage our storage technology, for sure. >> What's it been like to go from relatively small Illinois-based startup. (laughing) And now you're in IBM. >> Right. >> What was the integration like (laughing)? Are you on the rocket ship now? You were kind of on it before, but now it's like, steep part of the S-curve-- >> Sure. >> With all these global resources. Describe that. >> Well, I think the biggest part that's happened to us as an organization is exposure to a number of different accounts that we as a small company may not have had access to, certainly in certain industries, IBM's in every part of the world, in every industry, and that exposure from IBM's go to market has been very, very exciting for us. And certainly, global now, right. As Cleversafe, we were only in North America and Europe, for example, and now we're all over the world, or had the chance to be all over the world, so that's been really exciting. And then on top of that the whole integration into the cloud, right, because IBM's cloud business unity is the one that drove the acquisition of Cleversafe because they wanted the technology in the cloud. And now that we're there, we can offer storage services, object storage services as a foundation to anyone all over the world. And I think that's really exciting, and it's the exposure to all kinds of different businesses that's been exciting since we've been part of-- >> Yeah, and the speed at which you can get to that object store as a service as opposed to-- >> Absolutely. >> As opposed to saying, Okay, knocking on-- >> Yes. >> All the cloud doors, (laughing) And, hey, do you want to buy my cloud? And like, Well, you know we got our own, or whatever it is. >> Right, right. >> And now it's just boom global-- >> It's shortened that sale cycle tremendously, right. People are up and running in a few days now, or even a few hours, whereas before it may take months or, even quarters, to get started. You can get started now just by going to the portal, signing up for object storage services, starting to write data into the cloud, starting to leverage these other services that we walked about. It's very simple-- >> And the commentorial effects of what we were talking about before with, like Aspera and UStream, and so fourth-- >> Russ: Umm-hmm, umm-hmm. >> Give you the ability to add even new services. IBM 's always been very good at-- >> Yes. >> Acquisitions. >> Yes. >> We forget that sometimes IBM... (laughing) >> Acquisitions are always hard-- >> Yeah. >> But we've been fortunate we've had a lot of support and a lot help in getting integrated into the various businesses, And I think it's been a good journey. >> So what should we look for? What kind of milestones? Can you show a little leg on futures (laughing)? What should we be paying attention to? >> Well, we're going to continue to do what clients are asking us to do. We're going to develop features and functions, both on prem and in the cloud. We're going to integrate with a lot of different technologies, both IBM technologies and other company technologies. You may have seen our announcements with NetApp and VERITAS this week. >> Yeah. >> So we're going to continue to expand our integration with other technologies that exist in the marketplace because that's what clients want. They want solutions. They want end-to-end solutions, both on on prem and in the cloud. So we're focused on that. We're going to continue to do that. We'll certainly integrate with other IBM services as they come to market in the cloud. That's a really exciting thing, so we're going to continue to focus on driving success for our clients. And that's exciting. >> Oh! Russ, belated congratulations on the acquisition, and going through the integration. I'm really happy for you guys, and excited for your future. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Alright, keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Interconnect 2017. Be right back! (electronic music)