>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020. It is the digital experience online so rather than all gathering together in San Francisco we're getting to talk to everybody where they are and we're happy to bring back one of our CUBE alums, it's actually been a little while since we've had them on the program. Willie Tejada, who is the general manager and Chief Developer Advocate with IBM. Willie, so great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Hey Stu, thanks for having me, it's good to be back, it's been too long. >> So, first thing, obviously we're all together while we're apart, because of the global pandemic, developers, I've had so many interviews I've done over the years talking about dispersed development, around the clock development, I had a great interview with a head of remote work in the developer community at the beginning of the year before everything happened, so, how's the community doing overall and how are you seeing them react to what's happening? >> In the developer community, I think one of the interesting parts is one, developers feel oftentimes that they can actually make a difference. Two, their work oftentimes happens remotely. And so, one of the things that we've seen is a lot of the interaction that we have when we're doing our developer advocacy work has just converted to digital. And there's some interesting dynamics that come about, just even in that, where if you were doing something like a meetup in New York that was attracting something like 50 people, to maybe 100, maybe the venue was limiting the number of people that you would actually have there if you had a popular topic or speaker. We've had meetups basically be as large as 500 plus people when we went to digital. So definitely some different dynamics as we actually talk about this new normal that we're in, and everybody utilizing digital vehicles to reach the people that they want to talk to. >> All right. So I know last time we talked with you a big topic we talked about was Call for Code, and something that IBM has done different initiatives there, and you've got a very relevant one so bring our audience up to speed, this year's Call for Code, what that would involve. >> Yeah Stu, thanks very much. The Call for Code initiative inside of IBM is now in its third year. We did it in 2018, the concept was fairly simple, developers always love to solve problems and we said what if we challenge the 24 million developers to come and take a crack at society's most pressing issues? And in the first two years we focused on natural disasters, all you had to do was take a look at the coverage prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and you had wildfires in Australia and in Northern California where my home actually is based, and you had tsunamis and hurricanes and floodings. And so the ability for us to actually bring the developer community to bear on some of society's most pressing issues was really kind of the concept upfront, and IBM would help by bringing subject matter experts together, making available tools, because we're thinking let's solve the problem exactly how we solve it when we apply business. You get an expert on supply chain, you get a user of supply chain, you bring them together, developer builds these things. Well, not all the time can you get an expert in disaster, a first responder, so we actually created a lot of that fusion from there. Then, over the course of the first two years, we've had over 210,000 developers participate over across 168 nations with over 8,000 applications submitted. So, wildly successful. Now this year, Stu to your point, we had something that we could really bear down on very heavily. We announced that we were taking on climate change kind of laddering up natural disasters was let's look at the root, climate change, and then the COVID pandemic came about. We said let's tilt people towards that and it's been a tremendous outcoming for it. We've asked the developers to focus on three areas: crisis communications, you may have been one of those folks that's on a conference call or emails that haven't been responded to, on wait times forever, so those communications systems how do we fortify them get them to scale? The second area is remote learning, really look at where all the students are actually these days and what they're doing there, not just teaching but basically how do you give them entertainment, how do you actually provide them some level of social interaction. And the third area with the COVID focus is community collaboration. We really want to try to make sure people's spirits are up and that really does require everybody leaning in, and again you look at the news and tremendous examples of community collaboration and where technology can help scale or broaden that, that's really where Call for Code actually comes into play. >> Yeah, maybe it would be helpful, tell us a little bit about some of the previous winners, what have been some of the outcomes, more than just rallying the community, what resources is IBM putting into this? >> So one of the things that makes it different is rather than it just being a regular hack, this is really a processing side of IBM that we've developed over the course of this last three years. Where the challenge is one piece, the Call for Code challenge, we also developed and rolled out and committed another 25 million, with Call for Code we committed 30 million over that five years and in the following year we recognized the need to see the solutions actually get deployed. And so we committed another $25 million for the fortification, testing, scaling and deployment. So when you win a Call for Code Global Challenge, you also get IBM's support around deployment, fortification, some counseling and relation basically from development, to architecture, to even the business side of it. In our first year, we had a team called Project Owl actually come out and win, and one of the first things that happens especially in hurricanes or these natural disasters, communication grids go down. So they developed a solution that could quickly establish an ad hoc communication grid, and anybody that had a typical cell phone could connect up to that Wi-Fi grid or that grid very similar to the way they actually connect into a Starbucks Wi-Fi system. And it would allow both the first responders to understand where folks were at, and then establish communications. So that was in the first year. The second year was a team called Prometeo, and in October we selected them as the Global Challenge winner, and they were a solution that was built by a firefighter, a nurse and a developer with this concept roughly of how do they monitor essentially a firefighter's situation when they're actually in the heat of battle to best allocate the resources to the people who need them most. Understanding a little bit about their environment, understanding a little bit about the health that's actually happening with the firefighter, and again it's one of those scenarios where you couldn't just build it from the firefighter's side, you couldn't just build it from the nurse's side, and a developer would have a difficult time building it just by themselves. So bringing those people together, a nurse, a firefighter and a developer, and creating a system like this is really really what we're aspiring to do. Now, they won in October, and in February, they're in a field deployment actually doing real testing in the field in some of the fields at Catalonia, Spain. So, we've seen it first-hand exactly what happens when they win, the Project Owl team actually did some hurricane deployment testing in Puerto Rico, that of course IBM helped fortify and build connections between the Puerto Rico government so that we're really seeing essentially the challenge winner see this type of deployment. >> Willie, I love it, it's even better than a punch line I could do, what do you get when you combine a firefighter, a nurse and a developer? The answer is you can positively impact the world so phenomenal there. >> Absolutely. >> I'm curious, where does open source play into this activity? We were just covering Red Hat Summit last week, of course, lots of open source, lots of community engagement in hearing how they are helping communities engage and of course open source has been a big rallying point, everything from 3D printing to other projects in the community. So where does open source fit into this initiative? >> 100%. The amazing part about activating developers these days is just the broad availability of the technologies. And it's certainly stimulated by the community aspect of open source, this idea that they democratize access to technology, and it's really community-centric, and folks can start building very quickly on open source technologies that are material. So number one, all the things that is part of Call for Code and what we actually deployed are based on open source technologies. Now, again one of the differences is how do we actually make those winners and those technology sets become real? And becoming real requires this idea of how do you actually build durable sustainable solutions. So each five of the winners every year have the opportunity essentially to go through the Linux Foundation and have their solutions established as a project with the idea of roughly that people can download it and fork it, people can actually fortify it, but it's available to the whole globe, everybody in the world, to help build upon and fortify and continue to innovate on. So open source is right at the root of it, not just from the technology side, but from the ecosystem and community side that open source was for. And so we've seen as an example the formal establishment of Project Owl's software being open sourced by the Linux Foundation. And it's been fantastic to see both the participation actually there and see how people are basically deriving it and using it exactly what we intended to see in the vision of Call for Code, and Code and Response. >> Well, that's phenomenal. We're huge fans of the community activity, of course open source is a great driver of everything you were talking about. So I'm curious, one of the things we're all looking at is where people are spending their time, how this global pandemic is impacting what people are doing. There's plenty of memes out there on social media, it doesn't mean that you all of a sudden are going to learn a new language, or learn to play an instrument because you have lots of time at home, but I'm curious from what you've seen so far, compared to previous years, how's the engagement? What's the numbers? What can you share? Is there a significant difference or change from previous years? >> Yeah, there's so much good will, I would say, that's been brought about around the world in what we're seeing around the COVID-19 pandemic. That the way I would describe it is the rate of submissions and interest that we've seen is 3x above what we've seen in the prior years. Now keep in mind, we're not even actually at the area where we see the most. So keep in mind, right now we tried to accelerate the time to highlight some of these solutions. So April 27th will be the first deadline for COVID-19 challenge, and we'll highlight some of the solutions on May 5th. Now, when we think about it basically from that standpoint we typically actually see people waiting until that submission timeframe. And so when you think of it from that standpoint you really oftentimes see this acceleration, right? At that submission deadline. But we're already seeing 3x what we've seen in the past in terms of participation just because of the amount of good will that's actually out there, and what people are trying to do in solving these problems. And developers, they're problem solvers overall, and putting out those three areas, community crisis communications, remote learning, and community collaboration, they'll see examples of what they see on the news and think they can actually do something better, and then express that in software. >> That's excellent. So, Willie, one of the things, we've been talking to leaders across the industry and one of things we don't know is how much of what we are going through is temporary, and how much will actually be long term. I'm curious if there's any patterns you're seeing out there, discussions you're having with developers, you talk about remote work, you talk about communication. Are there anything that you've seen so far that you think that this will fundamentally just alter the way things might've been in the past going forward? >> Developers are always actually looking for this idea of how they actually sharpen their skills, their craft, new languages that they actually know, new platforms, whatever it actually might be. And I think in the past there was probably, even from our perspective, this balance of face-to-face versus digital, and a mix of both, but I think what we'll find going forward is a more robust mix of that. Because you can't deny the power of reach that actually happens when you actually move something digital. And then I would say that think about how you at theCUBE have refined your studios in dealing with an interview like mine, it gets better and better, you refine it. How you do an online workshop and how you do a workshop on a steel service mesh, you get better and better about how you engage from real time, hands-on keyboard experience in what information, what chat, what community pieces do you put on the screen to stimulate these pieces, I think in general the industry and our company and our teams have gotten better even in this short amount of time. I think those things will be long-lasting. I think we're all humans, so I think they still want the physical face-to-face and community interaction and camaraderie that comes from being in that physical energy, but I do think it'll be complemented by the things that we refined through the digital delivery that's been refined during this situation. >> All right, so Willie, final thing of course, this week, the winners are all being announced, how about people that are watching this and say this sounds phenomenal, how do I learn more, if I didn't get to participate in some of the initial pieces what should I be looking for? And how can I contribute and participate even after Think? >> Well, number one keep in mind that the challenge for the year will still actually go all the way to October, and submissions for that whole Challenger Watch will go to February first. So that's number one. But number two, going to developer.ibm.com/callforcode you'll find all the resources, we have these things called starter kits that help developers actually get up and going very quickly, finding out more information about both the competition structure, and really how you become part of the movement, go there basically and answer the call. >> Awesome. Love it, Willie, thanks so much, pleasure to catch up with you and definitely looking forward to seeing all the outcome that the community is putting forth to focus on this really important challenge. >> Hey Stu, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. >> All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage from IBM Think, all the backlog we had to see Willie a couple years ago when he was on the program, and check out where we will be later in the year. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Interconnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in Las Vegas for the CUBE's coverage of Interconnect 2017. This is three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Stay with us for the entire event. This is day two. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante and Esques' Willie Tejada, who's the IBM chief developer advocate at IBM. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you, guys. I'm really pleased to be here. >> So, love to have you on because all we do is talk about developers and what's in it for them, who's doing what, who's got the better cloud, who's enterprise ready, all that good stuff, commentating. But I love Ginny Rometty's conversation today because we just had Google Next, covered Amazon events, all the cloud events, and the thing that's been on our agenda, we've been really looking at this, is cloud readiness in the enterprise. And this is really kind of fundamental, what she was talking about, enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core, which kind of is their three pillars, but this is the, where the action is right now. >> Yeah you know for developers that's exactly true. You know, what you outlined is really this idea of basically there's three kind of core architectures, right? It's cloud, number one, followed by data layered on top of that, and essentially AIR cognitive on top. And what that means actually for the developer communities is that there's a new set of skill sets that are probably moving faster than we have ever seen before, right? And a lot of it's actually driven by this explosion of data, and so um, one of the things that we think that there's going to be a huge shortage of and there is a huge shortage of, is data scientists and cognitive developers. Because in those layers, what we've seen is that more and more, you operate on a data first model and by that, by just that definition, what you need to know about data is pushing towards a practitioner level of data scientists and the reality is that we think that type of core skill sets going to be needed across all of the developer communities. >> So take a minute to describe what will define a cognitive developer >> Tajeda: Sure, >> And what that, and the nuance behind it, because obviously the developers are doing really cool creative things, and then you've got the heart under the hood, production work loads and IT so where is the cognitive developer fit in those spectrums and what is the core definition from your standpoint? >> Yeah you know, the cognitive developer really is a person who's actually participating in actually the generation of a system that's fully cognitive, so you know, adding a cognitive feature is one thing, but actually building a full cognitive system is something different. You know if I use a comparison, think about how some of these roles in big data came about big data came, but we didn't have things like a data scientist, we didn't have a data engineer, and it kind of came after the fact the roles that were actually defined. Now we're onto these new cognitive systems where everything from, you have to train the system you have to have explicit knowledge of what the APIs actually do and you have to have infrastructure that actually curates data that continues this training along those lines. So you know the cognitive developers, really one that's participating in that particular ecosystem now what's really important though about that is they are usually programming in the language that their usually programming in. Whether it be Java, data scientists are using r or they're using Python, but the reality is that a cognitive developer's is that one that's applying those cognitive properties to their system that they're developing. >> So this is interesting, you mentioned the cognitive develop new tools and stuff, but there's some really good trends out there that are, that's the wind at the back of the developer right now. Cloud native is a booming trend that's actually phenomenal, you're seeing container madness continue, you've got micro services, all with kubernetes under the hood so there's some cool exciting things in the trend lines, can you unpack that for us and what this means to the developers, how does it impact their world? I mean we hear composability, lego blocks most developers know API economy is here, but now you've got these new tail winds, these new trends, >> Tajeda: Yep >> What's the, what are they, add to at, what's the impact to the developer? >> Well we talked about the new container service based on kubernetes that's allowing us to actually build to tremendous scale, and really simplify that type of development actually when you're doing native cloud development. You know, probably the most important things for developers is just accessibility of all these pieces, of course it's driven by open source, but you know if you want to learn these technologies if you want to participate and experiment with these technologies, they've never been more available than they actually are today. >> Vellante: So if I may, so Tanmay is a good example of a cognitive developer >> Absolutely. >> He's all cloud native, he's all cognitive, >> Nice shout out from the CEO today >> Yeah. >> He's also an algoithmist, you know self declared algorithmist, >> I can't even say that, >> Okay so here's Tanmay, he's never going to know anything else, right? But now, of you're a sort of mainstream developer, what do you do, you know? Where do you get the skills, what do you recommend that that individual does, and how do they get up the ramp? >> So you know, lots of times as you know the developer's learnings is not like kind of a linear pattern, right? They go to blogs basically they go and pull basic a library for them to >> Vellante: They figure it out. >> Along those lines, they go to a meet up or a hack from that stand point that's based on cognitive development and you know, so they should just go about what they normally do kind of along those lines, and then you know I think basically there's am advancement because ultimately we're publishing these things called journeys, which are really kind of use cases in the cognitive based environment so as an example, we might publish a journey on a cognitive retail chat bot, and it will combine a variety of these micro services that Watson's actually built on but give them exploration as to how they use the chat bot, how they use a service called discovery, and how they use persistence basically so that essentially they can learn from the data that they actually have and then ultimately if what they want to do is get deeper into it, there's organizations that we partner with where we give them cognitive curricullum that allows them to experience these pieces like top coder you can go on and do a cognitive challenge, right on top coder or you can go to a a cognitive course designed by galvanized one of our partners in relation to skills development. >> So that's interesting about that journey, so when you think about big data we talked about big data before, the sort of point at which at a company like IBM would engage in that journey is somebody who's exploring and maybe kicking the tires a little bit or somebody at a data warehouse that was like killing them, right? Where is, obviously there's a part of that in the cognitive world which is experimental >> Tajeda: Yep >> Is there a sort of analog to the data warehouse sort of disaffection if you will. >> Yeah, you know one of the things that we spend a lot of time on is that every organization that's going to build a cognitive system is looking for cognitive developers and data scientists, you know so essentially, >> Furrier: It's across all industries by the way, >> Absolutely >> Cyber securities to, >> Absolutely so you know, one of the key pieces is what kind of tools do you actually give that data scientist, to mess around with that data set, we provide something called a data science experience, and the idea there is essentially how do you give them an environment that allows them essentially to look into the data very quickly actually have these sets, and really kind of explore the data in a way that they never were capable of actually doing that, you know, those are the types of things that we're actually trying to that a data scientist, so that you can bridge over if you were a data engineer, or you're a business analyst, and you're looking to actually get into data science, you can actually play with some of these big data sets and actually explore what things you can do. >> Willie, I couldn't agree with you more on the whole, how developers learn it's really not a course ware online and the fiscal classroom, maybe they're offering it in college but, it's the practitional world of non linear learning through experience and these journeys are super valuable, and just for a tactical question, where do they find the journeys, or URL? >> What you'll find basically, come April first, we're going to launch a number of them, on developer.ibm.com/accelerate so they'll be focused on several different categories, number one will be just developing in the cloud cloud native, what's a journeys basically that they're kind of like common set ups that you actually need, we'll do, next one's on cognitive analytics where you pull together a set of services along those lines, and as you heard Ginny talk about, you know it's really important that a cloud have knowledge about a domain or an industry and so we'll create some journeys that are actually very industry specific, you know we announced, >> Furrier: Like they're like templates bascially, >> They are, >> People jump start it, not so much a reference implementation, >> Exactly, >> You know what I'm saying, the old days >> But you know, what it's all about is you mentioned this non linear journey that developers don't actually learn fundamentally they have a core thing that they're trying to get actually get done which is, get you help me get my stuff done faster, right? And fundamentally, when you talk about cognitive or data science, we're trying to actually deliver them tool sets or examples that do that. >> So I now got to go to the next level with that question, because it's first of all it's awesome, now how do you intersect that with community? Because now, that's super important because and you might want to take a minute to just do a plug for IBM in terms of the open source goodness you guys are doing because you guys do a great job with open source. >> Tajeda: You know we just hosted a very large, what we believe is, one of the largest open tech meet ups, right before basically InterConnect started, and we had one of the ballrooms actually full, and we talked about our new service we had Jim Basic from the Linux Foundation actually come, he stated a stat which was really interesting in open source which IBM is a large contributor to, that I think the stat that he said was Linux basically has a project now, there's 10,800 new lines of code and 1,800 lines of code that are modified every day, right? >> Furrier: Yeah, >> And that's the community. >> And that's only going to get faster, if you think about like just, the physical media like ssds, in memory, which spark the kernal, >> Vellante: The quantum, >> Linux is going evolve in a radical and killer way I mean, this is just the beginning. >> And to your point about the community, when you think about that advancement at the pace by which basically that software's actually going to move, there's not one organization that can outpace that type of community in the way they actually do it, it doesn't matter what the services actually are so, >> Well the other interesting thing is the impact on human kind, you heard Benny Hoff and Ginny talking about this morning and they were both really emphasizing machine augmented, right? But, it's like a Pac Man device, I mean there's so much human interaction that's being automated today, >> Tajeda: Yeah, abslutely, >> So, and I know IBM obviously big believer in augmentation, but it's hard to predict what things human's are going to be do, be able to do that machine's can't do, any insight on that? >> Yeah you know, I think, we like to use the word cognitive assisted, So when you think about it, I'll give one example, let's say for example in the medical profession, so, if you look at it, in the healthcare industry, about 90 percent of the data in there is not structured data, right? It's all unstructured data, a lot of it is images, so if you take a look at someone basically that's in oncology work taking a look at things like melanoma, the amount of time I think the data set said the amount of time he needed to watch or get trained on to look at all the new papers that were ever published, was probably three weeks basically, if he's thinking about that in a month. The amount of time that that person allocates to actually keeping up with all these particular trade journals is a few hours a week, and so he's constantly behind, this where something like a watson enabled, or a cognitive enabled type of application can help him actually keep up to date with all the new findings and research papers in his particular field, and do something like ingest millions of documents and understand them but actually apply that to his work, so you know what you find is doctors actually utilizing a cognitive assistant powered by Watson to help him do a better diagnosis. >> Will you're an advocate for the chief developer advocate for IBM, talk about for the last couple minutes we have, what's on your plan, we just saw the news yesterday, the 10 million dollar investment to get education out there and bring this cognitive developer category, kind of lift that up and, with Galvanize which we've supported some of those signature moment events with the Cube, where are you going to be out in the field, what's some of your go to market activities how you going to do this, and then talk about the patterns you've seen in the developer make up. >> Yeah, >> Just over the past year, what's changed, what's notable? >> Yeah, so you know what, you know some of the things that we're actually doing is number one, we're we're taking up very large presence in probably nine cities around the world with a very big emphasis on building on data science and cognitive developers, so you know, there's kind of the usual suspects, the San Franciscos, the New Yorks, the Tokyos, the Londons, some presence in Sao Paulo, we're doing Beijing, we recently basically announced a partnership of how we can actually get presence actually there and through that, we're looking actually to bring, basically this presence into those communities, so this idea that we help, actually put forth these journeys but in many cases actually be right in the presence of things, we have, in some cases we have some programs that we're actually spinning up that are all about essentially how we actually do things like IOT Thursdays, or Cognitive Tuesdays where they can actually see actual experts in those particular areas, and just come do office assignments, >> Furrier: Do Throwback Thursday, you hack on a mainframe >> Tajeda: That's it! (laughter) >> That's what they're actually looking at from that standpoint so, so yeah a lot of this stuff basically is just actually getting to some of those folks in a very very intimate way, and like you said actually kind of populating these folks where kind of where they are, and really what that's all about is actually getting the tools and tool sets in the communities that they find and the peer learning that they do, which is real, >> Furrier: Well we'll see you at some of the Galvanize events you guys got goin on we'll certainly see you at Dockercon we got a lot of Cube line ups, for this Spring tour, and the Fall ton of developer activity, the Cloud Native stuff is really an intersection point with big data colliding with cloud IOT and AI and this cognitive is just an accelerant, >> Tajeda: Absolutely, absolutely >> For the cloud, the perfect storm is a good opportunity. >> There's never been more available time in terms of technology, and the technology never moved as fast, >> I was just saying to Tanmay when he was on yesterday, "I wish I could be 13 again", coding is so much more fun now than it was when we were doing it. Well great to have you on Willie, >> Hey thanks very much, it was actually very good visiting with you guys. >> Great insight, insight from the chief developer advocate here at IBM, I'm John Furrier, Steve Vellante stay with us for more coverage, great interviews all day today, and tomorrow, here live in Las Vegas, we'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back. We're here live in Las Vegas from Mandalay Bay for the IBM InterConnect 2017, this is Cube's exclusive coverage with SiliconANGLE media. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante here all week. We missed our kickoff this morning on day two and, because the keynotes went long with Ginni Rometty. Great star line up, you had Marc Benioff, the CEO of AT&T, and CEO of H&R Block, which I love their ad with Mad Men's guy in there. Dave let's wrap up day two. Big day, I mean traffic on the digital site, ibmgo.com was off the charts and the site just performed extremely well, excited about that. Also the keynote from the CEO of IBM, Ginni, really kind of brings us themes we've been talking about on theCUBE. I want to get your reaction to that, which is social good is now a purpose that's now becoming a generational theme, and it's not just social good in terms of equality of pay for women, which is great and of course more STEM, it's everything, it's society's global impact but also the tagline is very tight. Enterprise strong, has a Boston strong feeling to it. Enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core, pretty much hits their sweet spot. What did you think of her keynote presentation? >> I thought Ginni Rometty nailed it. I've always been a huge fan of hers, I first met her when she was running strategy, and you know the question you used to always get because IBM 19 quarters of straight declining revenue, how long is Ginni going to get? How long is Ginni going to get? You know when is her tenure going to be up? My answer's always been the same. (laughs) Long enough to prove that she was right. And I think, I just love her presentation today, I thought she was on, she was engaging, she's a real pro and she stressed the innovation that IBM is going through. And this was the strategy that she laid out, you know, five, six years ago and it's really coming to fruition and it was always interesting to me that she never spoke at these conferences and she didn't speak at these conferences 'cause the story was not great you know, it was coming together the big data piece or the analyst piece was not formed yet. >> So you think she didn't come to these events because the story wasn't done? >> Yeah, I think she was not-- >> That is not a fact, you believe that. >> No, this is my belief. She was not ready to showcase you know, the greatness of IBM and I said about a year ago, I said you watch this whole strategy is coming together. You are going to see a lot more of Ginni Rometty than you've seen in the past. You started to see her on CNBC much more, we saw her at the Women in Tech Conference, at the Grace Hopper Conference, we saw her at World of Watson and now we see her here at InterConnect and she's very good on stage. She's extremely engaging, I thought she was good at World of Watson, I thought she was even better today. And a couple of notable things, took a swipe at both AWS and maybe a little bit at HPE, I'm not so sure that they worry about HPE. Sam Palmisano, before he left on a Wall Street Journal interview, said "I don't worry about HPE, they don't invest in RND. "I worry about Oracle." But nonetheless, she said, it's not just a new way, cloud is not just a new way to deliver IT. Right that's the Amazon you know. >> HP. >> And certainly new way of you style by IT. >> You style by IT. >> Is Meg's line. She also took a swipe at Google basically saying, look we're not taking your data to inform some knowledge draft that we're going to take your IP and give it to the rest of the world. We're going to protect your data, we're going to protect your models. They're really making a strong statement in that regard which I think is really important for CIOs and CDOs and CEOs today. Thoughts? >> I agree. I first of all am a big fan of Ginni, I always kind of question whether she came in, I never put it together like you intuitively around her not seeing the story but you go to all the analyists thing, so I think that's legit I would say that I would buy that argument. Here's what I like. Her soundbite is enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core. It's kind of gimmicky, but it hits all their points. Enterprise strong is core in the conversations with customers right now. We see it in theCUBE all the time. Certainly Google Nexus was one event we saw this clearly. Having enterprise readiness is not easy and so that's a really tough code to crack. Oracle and Microsoft have cracked that code. So has IBM of the history. Amazon is getting faster to the Enterprise, some of the things they are doing. Google has no clue on the Enterprise, they're trying to do it their way. So you have kind of different dimensions. So that's the Enterprise, very hard to do, table stakes are different than having pure cloud native all the time 100%, lift and shift, rip and replace, whatever you want to call it. Data First is compelling because they have a core data strategy analytics but I thought it was interesting that they had this notion of you own your own data, which implies you're renting everything else, so if you're renting everything else, infrastructure (laughs) and facilities and reducing the cost of doing business, the only thing you really got is data, highlighted by Blockchain. So Blockchain becomes a critical announcement there. Again, that was the key announcement here at the show is Blockchain. IOT kind of a sub-text to the whole show but it's supported through the Data First. And finally Cognitive to the Core is where the AI is going to kind of be the shiny, silly marketing piece with I am Watson, I'm going to solve all your health problems. Kind of showing the futuristic aspect of that but under the hood there is machine learning, under that is a real analytics algorithms that they're going to integrate across their business whether it's a line of business in verticals, and they're going to cross pollinate data. So I think those three pillars, she is a genius (laughs) in strategy 'cause she can hit all three. What I just said is a chockfull of strategy and a chockfull execution. If they can do that then they will have a great run. >> So I go back to Palmisano's statement before Ginni took over and it was a very candid interview that he gave. And as they say, you look at when he left IBM, it was this next wave was coming like a freight train that was going to completely disrupt IBM's business, so it was, it's been a long turn around and they've done it with sort of tax rates, (laughs) stock buybacks, and all kinds of financial engineering that have held the company's stock price up, (laughs) and cash flow has been very strong and so now I really believe they're in a good position. You know to get critical for just a second, yes there's no growth but look who else isn't growing. HPE's not growing, Oracle's not growing, Tennsco's not growing, Cisco's not growing, Microsoft's not growing. The only two companies really in the cartel that are growing showing any growth really are Intel a little bit and SAP. The rest of the cartel is flat (laughs) to down. >> Well they got to get on new markets and I mean the thing is new market penetration is interesting so Blockchain could be an enabler. I think it's going to be some resistance to Blockchain, my gut tells me that but the innovative entrepreneur side of me says I love Blockchain. I would be all over Blockchain if I was an entrepreneur because that really would change the game on identity and value and all that great stuff. That's a good opportunity to take the data in. >> Well the thing I like is IBM's making bets, big bets, Blockchain, quantum computing, we'll see where that goes, cloud, clearly we could talk about, you know you said it (laughs) InterConnect two or three years ago you know SoftLayer's kind of hosting. True, but Blu makes the investments hoping-- >> SoftLayer's is not all Blu makes. >> That's right, well yeah so but any rate, the two billion dollar bet that they made on SoftLayer has allowed them to go to clients and say we have cloud. Watson, NAI, Analytics, IOT these are big bets which I think are going to pay off. You know, we'll see if quantum pays off in the year term, we'll see about Blockchain, I think a lot of the bets they've been making are going to pay off, Stark, et cetera. >> So let's talk about theCUBE interviews Dave, what got your attention? I'll start while you dig up something good from your notes. I loved Willie Tejada talked about this, they're putting in these clouds journey pieces which is not a best practice it's not a reference architecture but it's actually showing the use cases of people who are taking a cross functional journey of architecture and cloud solutions. I love the quantum computing conversation we had with believe it or not the tape person. And so from the tape whatever it was, GS. >> GS8000. >> GS8000. >> It's a storage engineering team. >> But in terms of key points, modernizing IOT relevance was a theme that popped out at me. It didn't come out directly. You start to see IOT be a proof point of operationalizing data. Let me explain, IOT right now is out there. People are focused on it because it's got real business impact, because it's either facilities, it's industrial or customer connected in some sort. That puts the pressure to operationalize that data, and I think that flushes out all the cloud washing and all the data washing, people who don't have any solutions there. So I think the operationalizing of the data with IOT is going to force people to come out with real solutions. And if you don't, you're gone, so that's, you're dead. The cultural issue is interesting. Trust as now table stakes in the equation of whether it's product trusts, operational trusts, and process trusts. That's something I saw very clearly. And of course I always get excited about DevOps and cloud native, as you know. And some of the stuff we did with data as an asset from the chief data architect. >> A couple I would add from yesterday, Indiegogo who I thought had a great case study, and then Mohammed Farooq, talking about cloud brokering. 60% of IBM's business is still services. Services is very very important. And I think that when I look at IBM's big challenge, to me, John, it's when you take that deep industry expertise that they have that competes with Accenture and ENY and Deloitte and PWC. Can you take that deep industry expertise and codify it in software and transform into a more software-oriented company? That's what IBM's doing, trying to do anyway, and challenging. To me it's all about differentiation. IBM has a substantially differentiated cloud strategy that allows them not to have to go head to head with Amazon, even though Amazon is a huge factor. And the last thing I want to say is, it's what IBM calls the clients. It's the customers. They have a logo slide, they bring up the CEOs of these companies, and it's very very impressive, almost in the same way that Amazon does at its conferences. They bring up great customers. IBM brings in the C-Suite. They're hugging Ginni. You know, it was a hug fest today. Betty up on stage. It was a pretty impressive lineup of partners and customers. >> I didn't know AT&T and IBM were that close. That was a surprise for me. And seeing the CEO of AT&T up there really tees it out. And I think AT&T's interesting, and Mobile World Congress, one of the things that we covered at that event was the over the top Telco guys got to get their act together, and that's clear that 5G and wireless over the top is going to power the sensors everywhere. So the IOT on cars, for instance, and life, is going to be a great opportunity for, but Telco has to finally get a business model. So it's interesting to see his view of digital services from a Telco standpoint. The question I have for AT&T is, are they going to be dumped pipes or are they actually going to move up the stand and add value? Interesting to see who's the master in that relationship. IBM with cognitive, or AT&T with the pipes. >> And, you know, you're in Silicon Valley so you hear all the talk from the Silicon Valley elites. "Oh well, Apple and Amazon "and Google and Facebook, "much better AI than Watson." I don't know, maybe. But IBM's messaging-- >> Yes. >> Okay, so yes, fine. But IBM's messaging and positioning in the enterprise to apply their deep industry knowledge and bring services to bear and solve real problems, and protect the data and protect the models. That is so differentiable, and that is a winning strategy. >> Yeah but Dave, everyone who's doing-- >> Despite the technical. >> Anyone who's doing serious AI attempts, first of all, this whole bastardized definition. It's really machine learning that's driving it and data. Anyone who's doing any serious direction to AI is using machine learning and writing their own code. They're doing it on their own before they go to Watson. So Watson is not super baked when it comes to AI. So what I would say is, Watson has libraries and things that could augment traditional custom-built AI as a kernel. Our 13-year-old guest Tanmay was on. He's doing his own customizing, then bring it to Watson. So I don't see Watson being a mutually exclusive, Watson or nothing else. Watson right now has a lot of things that adds to the value but it's not the Holy Grail for all things AI, in my opinion. The innovation's going to come from the outside and meet up with Watson. That to me is the formula. >> Going back to Mohammed Farooq yesterday, he made the statement, roughly, don't quote me on these numbers, I'll quote myself, for every dollar spent on technology, 10 dollars are going to be spent on services. That's a huge opportunity for IBM, and that's where they're going to make Watson work. >> If I'm IBM and Watson team, and I'm an executive there and engineering lead, I'm like, look it, what I would do is target the fusion aspect of connecting with their customers data. And I think that's what they're kind of teasing out. I don't know if they're completely saying that, but I want to bring my own machine learning to the table, or my own custom stuff, 'cause it's my solution. If Watson can connect with that and handshake with the data, then you got the governance problem solved. So I think Seth, the CDO, is kind of connecting the dots there, and I think that's still unknown, but that's the direction that I see. >> And services, it remains critical because of the complexity of IBM's portfolio, but complexity has always been the friend of services. But at the same time, IBM's going to transform its services business and become more software-like, and that is the winning formula. At the end of the day, from a financial perspective, to me it's cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. And this company is still a cash flow cow. >> So the other thing that surprised me, and this is something we can kind of end the segment on is, IBM just reorganized. So that's been reported. The games, people shift it a little bit, but it's still the same game. They kind of consolidated the messaging a little bit, but I think the proof point is that the traffic for on the digital side, for this show, is 2X World of Watson. The lines to get into keynotes yesterday and today were massive. So there's more interest in InterConnect than World of Watson. >> Well we just did. >> Amazing, isn't it? >> Well then that was a huge show, so what that means is, this is hitting an interest point. Cloud and data coming together. And again, I said it on the intro yesterday. IOT is the forcing function. That to me is bringing the big data world. We just had Strata Hadoop and R event at BigDataSV. That's not Hadoop anymore, it's data and cloud coming together. And that's going to be hitting IOT and this cognitive piece. So I think certainly it's going to accelerate at IBM. >> And IBM's bringing some outside talent. Look at Harry Green who came from Thomas Cook, Michelle Peluso. Marketing chops. They sort of shuffled the deck with some of their larger businesses. Put Arvind Krishna in charge. Brought in David Kenny from the Weather Company. Moved Bob Picciano to the cognitive systems business. So as you say, shuffle things around. Still a lot of the same players, but sometimes the organization-- >> By the way, we forgot to talk about Don Tapscott who came on, my favorite of the day. >> Another highlight. >> Blockchain Revolution, but we interviewed him. Check out his book, Blockchain can be great. Tomorrow we got a big lineup as well. We're going to have some great interviews all day, going right up to 5:30 tomorrow for day three coverage. This is theCUBE, here at the Mandalay Bay for IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Stay with us, join us tomorrow, Wednesday, for our third day of exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017, thanks for watching.