>> From Yorktown Heights New York It's theCUBE, covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome theCUBE. We're broadcasting today from IBM innovation day at the Thomas J. Watson research labs in Yorktown New York. Having a number of great conversations about what's going on with the industry, what's going on with the cloud, and to bring that further, Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz Associates, longtime analyst. Judith, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. Great to be here. So, Judith, I'll just open it up. What do you think are the two or three most important things that people should be thinking about right now? >> Well, I think as we look at the maturation of cloud and computing and the changes that we see, I think one of the most important things is the movement towards open and standards, because what customers really want is computing. They don't really care if you tell them "Well, that service runs over there and this one runs over here." They don't care about that. What they care about all of the workloads, all of the applications they need to get their jobs done just work. So if a workload needs to move, it should be able to move because it's less expensive or more efficient or it handles a workload better in terms of performance or security. Customers want the freedom to be able to do what they want when they want it, and not to be locked in. So openness is really becoming the battlecry for the cloud. >> You're talking about two things there. Let me parse them out. You're talking about the breaking of the natural relationship between where the resources are and where the value of the work is provided. >> Yes. >> And there is a degree of openness to that, but then there's also this notion of openness which is how fast innovation, what model are we going to use? Let's break those apart. Let's start with the idea of the cloud breaking the traditional mold of this workload here, that workload there. How is cloud doing that and what's the future for that flexibility look like? >> I think if we were having this conversation ten years from now we wouldn't be talking about cloud. We would be talking about the elasticity and the way we do computing so it really meets the needs of whatever business change you're experiencing. What's held companies back and what's held IT back is the idea that you're stuck with the platform or the application or the technology that you've always been using, and it makes change really hard. So, the more flexibility you can have, and the cloud in terms of elasticity, the way you can create new workloads using cloud native and microservices and leveraging containers, all of these techniques will lead us into a world where you can create a bunch of services and choose and pick the ones you want to get your job done and it really adds a level of innovation and speed that we've never seen before with IT. >> So let's build on that. One of the things we tell our clients is to focus on what we call plasticity. It's a physics term. Elasticity is a single workload, scale it up and down. Plasticity is new workload changes, transforms, leads, perturbs the infrastructure, the infrastructure reforms around it. One of the reasons why that concept becomes so important is precisely because of the rate of increase in innovation, as you said. So now tie open back to that. What is it about open, that's not just about making sure we have system software standards, but is actually doing a better job of turning business into software at a higher level. >> In a sense, it's what I would call service as software. If you can take the business process or how you want to interact with your customers, and you can turn those into software services that are malleable, that you can change and innovate on without having to go from top to bottom and recode everything, which is what's held companies back for probably 40 or 50 years. As you modularize things, you can, for example, simple idea like the way you would calculate a 30 year mortgage. In most companies over the years there were 30 different ways you could do that and each application had its own way. What if you could have a single service that did that that you could apply it no matter what the use case and what the business case was, apply that same concept to any business logic or any business strategy, that's where you get what you're calling- something that's very plastic, very malleable, and allows you to change, because in the past we've always written applications or written systems as though they were based on how we do business right now. And when you do that, you can't change. >> So one of the ways, again, if I were to describe some of the big changes and let me test this on you, is that I say for the first 50 years of computing it was known process unknown technology. We knew we were going to do accounting, we knew we were going to exchange titles, became supply chain, et cetera, we knew we were going to do HR. But we didn't know if it was going to run on a mainframe or how to run on a mainframe, or client server or the internet or whatever else it was. We're entering into a world now where it's unknown process, relatively known computing, or technology. We know it's going to be a cloud or cloudlike thing. When we think about that unknown process, more data first applications, data driven applications, where do you foresee some of these magnificent changes that are on the horizon? >> So, I think one of the most important changes is that we start leading with data rather than process, because if you lead with process, that's the past. If you lead with data, data will lead you to process. So if we have data driven organizations where the data, using it in a predictive analytics way, really using machine learning, algorithms, and some of the emerging AI techniques, we can begin to have data drive us to process. >> So, Judith, I know you've gone to IBM Think every year for a number of years now. Probably almost as long as I have. If you step back and say San Francisco, 2019, February, 30,000 plus people, what are you looking to get out of Think this year that builds upon what you've gotten out of it in the past? >> Well, what I really like about Think and about IBM events is that it brings together so many people, both IBMs fantastic technical leadership with business leadership, and it brings together the programmers. It brings together the IT leaders with business leaders, so it's a really coming together of the minds across business organizations, really collaborating together to really get to the heart of key business problems. >> Excellent. Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz and Associates, thanks for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And this is Peter Burris, we'll be back with more of theCUBE from IBM Innovation Day in a few minutes. (upbeat techno music)

>> From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris from Wikibon, and you're watching theCUBE being broadcast from IBM Innovation Day at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab in beautiful Yorktown, New York. And we've had a number of great conversations thus far, we've got some more on the horizon, stay with us. Now, we've got Jim Comfort. Jim Comfort is the General Manager of Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM. Jim, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter, glad to be here. >> So, Jim, what does Hybrid Cloud Services as a group do? >> Actually, we run infrastructure for clients. That's our business, but we help you advise, build and manage private cloud. Advise, build and manage consumption of public cloud, Azure, Google, IBM, and we help you manage and stitch all of that together. >> So a lot of people think of cloud and they think of this monolithic thing. "If I go to the cloud, suddenly my business has changed." But there's more to it than that. There's a number of different things that a business has to be successful at to succeed at getting to the cloud. What is your perspective on that? >> Well, I completely agree. And this is kind of my first conversation with clients is, you need a business strategy, but to execute that strategy you have to realize it will touch most everything in your business. It'll touch infrastructure, it'll touch applications, it'll touch your dev ops, or your development process morph to dev ops. It'll touch your operations very profoundly, this whole SRE thought, and it will test your data governance and management as well as your security and compliance. So that's the scope that you have to comprehend. >> But most people, they start with perhaps the infrastructure first and end up with the data last. Is that the right way to think about this? >> I agree, many do, and actually I have not seen many build-it-they-will-come strategies succeed. And so what I really look for is, do you understand the business drivers? Top-line revenue growth, new markets, new insights, new data, and from that can you derive a technology strategy? What I've seen happen in many cases is, if you start from the bottom up you'll be trapped in what I call the religious wars of technology that never end. >> And most people, a lot of folks start from the bottom up, because they start from the technology side of the business. >> Correct. >> Are you seeing more business people getting engaged, and conceptualizing what the strategy needs to be? >> I am, and it starts on both sides. The business people will say, "I need to move faster than you can move, so I'm going to do something different," and the IT people will say, "I can do that for you, here's what you need." The two signatures of the most successful transformations are does the line of business and the IT have the relationship to collaborate so they actually learn together? And then if they have that, have they actually created a team that understands the new as well as they understand the existing or the old, so they can actually understand what's real, what's not, where's the hype, what really happens. And then they get into the rational, real planning decision. >> So as you think about some of the assessment challenges, because you said you go through the assessment process, what are some of the key questions that a client should start with as they think about undertaking this journey? >> Well, number one is start with the business driver. I said that already, but you have to start with understanding what you're trying to accomplish so you can make choices. And the other is, start small enough and get to the end of something so that you know what the reality is, and that's where our, this is where we bring in our methods. When you hear us talk about the garage method, you hear us talk about MVPs and all the language everyone wants to use. We like to start with something, and start that iterative cycle of learning. That's the key. >> So with an iterative cycle of learning, in many respects this whole notion of agility is predicated on this idea of being agile or iterative. But it's also empirical, knowing what the data is, knowing what the data says, and being opportunistic. How does a customer balance that as they get going, say early on in the cloud journey? >> I think, again, most of what we're talking about in digital transformations is new insights that will help your business. That could be from data that you had, it could be new data. And if they think about it, what insights am I looking for? What new experience am I trying to create, and what do I need to do that? Then you start to get people to step back and think, well, what are all the possibilities? And now, how do we tackle that? So it starts from realizing, what insight am I looking for? >> So there's a lot of invention happening in the industry. >> Oh, yeah. >> And enormous new things being created. Customers are being overwhelmed at trying to adopt them. The innovation side, the social side of effecting a change in the business. You mentioned some of the markers for success and putting together the strategy. Go forward a little bit. What are some of the companies that have successfully gotten to that end stage maturity doing differently? >> We have a number of very good ones. I mean, a very clear one in my mind is American Airlines, where they were really trying to change the experience. They had three distinct things that had grown up over time, the mobile experience, the kiosk experience and the Web experience. Three completely different things. They brought it together, converged it, modernized it, and now completely changed the experience and the speed with which they can now act on what they see for their clients or for their customers, all of us. But also as they get new ideas, the speed and the velocity that they can bring those in is phenomenal. >> And that improves their ecosystem, their ability to work with a lot of others as well. >> Their ecosystem, how to work with others, how to bring in new ideas. And this is all, for them it's all about client satisfaction and service to their end client, to the end user. That's what it was. It had a lot of technology dimensions, but they were very clear the experience they were trying to attack. >> So next February, IBM Think, 30-plus thousand people descending upon San Francisco. You guys are taking it over. What kind of conversations are going to be on your agenda as you work with customers and partners to get this message out? >> Well, it's really two things. I often joke the blessing and curse of IBM is the breadth of our portfolio. It's a very large place, but we actually have a very simple, clear way to talk to, advise, move, build and manage. Those are the steps you need in your journey. Now, which journey for you, which type of thing. But that, we have clarity on that, and I think you'll see that displayed at Think and get to understand it. The other thing is that we have a lot of experiential and real practical, we've made this happen for many large clients at scale, and I think that what we want people to understand is we can help you that same way. It's really pretty simple. >> Jim Comfort, General Manager Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM. Thanks for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And we'll be back momentarily with more from theCUBE at IBM Innovation Day here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.

(technological music) >> From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and we are broadcasting theCUBE from IBM Innovation Day at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab in Yorktown, New York. We've got a great number of guests to talk about. We're going to start with Hillery Hunter, who's the CTO and vice-president of cloud infrastructure at IBM. Hillery, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. >> So, you're relatively new in your role. Tell us about some of the things that you're focusing on as the CTO of cloud infrastructure here at IBM. >> As CTO for cloud infrastructure, I'm focused on making our cloud the best possible place that it can be for people to bring their data, bring their applications, and overall, come into that modernization journey with us, the process of transforming to become a digital enterprise. >> So, one of the things that people talk about all the time is how fast data's being generated. Nobody seems to be talking about how fast software is being generated, and yet, that seems to be one of the advantages and potentially the liabilities of doing cloud wrong. Talk to us a little bit about how IBM sees the world of software changing as we move forward with the cloud. >> [Hillery] There are parts that are consistent with what we've seen for about the past 20 years in open source, and there are parts that certainly, we feel like are accelerating and changing. With regard to the pace of software and its change today, open source is clearly this innovation space. It's this playground where lots of people can go and can contribute. We can take... We're here at the IBM research facility. We can take the latest in innovations and math that helps us accomplish great AI and AI insights. We can take that into open source. We can take microservice integration capabilities and take it into open source and work there collaboratively with people across the industry. What we see, therefore, is a tremendous rate and pace in change of software and the capability of software and its ability to analyze data and bring insights to data and realize the promises of big data, of getting insight out of that data, is just really on a tremendous growth rate. When you move to cloud, you're not just doing what they used to say of converting capital expense on premises into opex and renting a server in the cloud. You're bringing your overall workload and modernizing it and bringing it into this era where you're able to apply through microservices and cloud-based programming methodology, you're able to bring the latest of software capability to your data and get more insights out of it. >> You're really able to alter the operating model of how not only your technology group works, but also how your business works. >> Absolutely. >> How does Red Hat play a role in this? >> We have shared principles with Red Hat. We both have been active in the open source communities. IBM famously had billion dollars of investment in LINUX going back 20 years ago, and Red Hat is a prominent name in open source. We have a shared understanding of the value of open source and the value of rate and pace of innovation that's commensurate with what open source provides. We have a shared value around what enterprises need and a shared client-centric view that you need support on your software, that you need certifications, that you expect security, those kind of things. There's tremendous amount of shared value proposition in what we see as the rate and pace of innovation as well as then moving that into an enterprise context. Enterprises make these choices very carefully. As consumers of enterprise capabilities, we expect them to guard our data, we expect them to do things on our data in a secure way, and there are many foundational elements in philosophy that are similar between the two of us. >> You mentioned that cloud started out as this notion of capex to opex, move all your data to a single place, let somebody else deal with it. Increasingly, enterprise is starting to recognize that their data may sometimes have to remain in place. We start talking about innovation, open source, these new classes of services. What is it going to mean to bring the cloud experience to the data from IBM's perspective? >> We really see that the data today exists in multiple places, that largely because of that, people are partway through their journey to overall modernization. They're partway through their journey to the cloud. We really think that the world is going to be hybrid, meaning that... Or, the world is hybrid, I guess I would say, meaning that there is data and there is cloud function needed on premises and in public clouds. There's a need for private, dedicated environments in the public cloud as well. There's a significant amount of IT that is currently traditional in that people are in the process of modernizing, and that may initially be through a private cloud context on the journey to overall workload modernization. We also see that the world is multi-cloud. People are using upwards of 9 clouds or more in many cases, and that, in a lot of cases, has to do with this intersection of function and data residency and being able to bring together all of those pieces of where the data needs to be or where the data currently is, and then bring software function to the data is something that we see as critically important. >> Without being too specific in the use of the word binding, today, the idea is you bring your data to a cloud supplier and then, you can run the services of that cloud supplier supplies on that data. Do you and IBM foresee a world in which the customer's going to be able to control their own data and then acquire the services from the cloud and bring it to their data? Is that the direction you think it's going to go? >> Not only do we see that it will be possible, we think that it is possible and we're putting things in market already today that enable people to bring cloud function to their data. The IBM Cloud private offerings and IBM Cloud private for data enable people to, in their environment, where their data resides, bring sophisticated data, warehousing data analytics and AI capabilities. Fundamentally, that process of workload modernization is a set of steps and it starts with data and it starts with modernization of that environment and it matures then into being able to get deep insights through the power of AI on that data. >> Let me ask you one more question. In February, IBM's going to host 30,000+ people in San Francisco. Unbelievable opportunity for networking, learning, and IBM Think. What kind of conversations do you expect that you're going to be having in Think in 2019? >> I think you hit at the heart of the conversations that we're going to be having at Think and our positioning of the hybrid multi-cloud environment. Our other core tenets there are open and open source and keeping up with the rate and pace of open source as an innovation stream, providing choice in how folks are deploying cloud and deploying systems. We also are going to be having conversations around security. That's a core enterprise value proposition and ultimately, management. You want to not just declare that the world is hybrid and multi-cloud, but provide solutions to that and we believe we have strong answers to how to bring these pieces together and enable people to successfully move at the rate and pace of innovation that they need, yet in a secure context, and leverage the ability to deploy cloud capabilities where their data currently is, be that on private or public context. >> Hillery Hunter, CTO and vice president of cloud infrastructure at IBM, thanks for talking to theCUBE here today at the IBM Innovation Day. >> Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. >> And, we will be back momentarily with more conversations at IBM Innovation Day.