>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is "theCUBE's" ongoing coverage, where we go out to the events, in this case, of course, virtually, to extract the signal from the noise. And now we're going to talk about the shifts in customer employee experiences and channels. The past year, obviously, has exposed gaps in both of those areas. The shift to digital channels, something that hit every industry. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So, there's huge demand for better, a.k.a. less frustrating, and hopefully superior, customer experiences. That's never been higher. It puts a lot of pressure on companies and their marketing departments to deliver. And with me to talk about these trends are two great guests. Alex Shootman, the General Manager of Adobe Workfront. Alex was CEO of Workfront, which Adobe acquired last year. And Matthew Candy, Global Managing Director of IBM iX. Gentleman, welcome. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> Matt, let's start with you. Maybe you could talk to the shifts that I talked about earlier, in the past year, and customers' expectations, and how they changed, and how you guys responded. >> Yes, so, Dave, I mean, it's been, my goodness, what a year, right? If we'd gone back and thought, we never would have seen this coming. And certainly, I guess, for the clients, I run the digital customer experience business, the services business, here at IBM, and certainly, we have been very busy helping clients, across just about every industry, accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And I think what has been absolutely clear, is digital, mobile, all of these ways of engaging with customers through channels, has been an absolutely critical way in which businesses have kept going, and survived over this time. And certainly, we've seen that transformation accelerate, right? And companies shifting from face-to-face interactions from a B2B sales perspective, into a kind of online B2B commerce, et cetera. So, really it's become digital by default. And I think customers really demanding personalized experiences, and wanting to make sure that these companies really know you in how they deal with you. >> You know Matt, I mean, our business, you think about our business, it was predominantly going out to events, live events, and then overnight, our entire industry had to shift to virtual. And what it was is, you had all these physical capabilities, and people trying to shove it into virtual, and it was really hard. There was a lot of unknowns, and really different. I imagine there's some parallels within marketing organizations. And I wonder if you could talk, Matt, about what kind of barriers you saw about delivering those kind of digital interactions and experiences. >> Yes. So, I guess, we've seen kind of five core challenges that companies have been facing. So, firstly, around volume and velocity of content. So, as we're putting more demand into organizations, right, for more content at a greater pace, right, this causes challenges for companies in terms of being able to get content out there, and surface it through their digital channels, right? Whether that's kiosks, or voice, web, mobile, et cetera. And that pace is not slowing down. Second thing is this demand for personalization. So, as companies and individuals are touching through all of these touch points across marketing sales and service, the need to be able to interact in the right way, showing that you know me, using personal data to match the right offer at the right time, critically important. Thirdly, the martech stack, right. Across many of these organizations, this explosion in marketing technology over the last 10 years has been absolutely incredible. And so one of the big challenges companies have is how we tie all of these different components of the stack together, to build this seamless experience. Fourth challenge, right? Additional communication channels. So, as we need more content and personalization, and we've got to join up across all these different systems, how do we make this consistent across all of these channels, right, whether it's digital or physical, is a true test of many organizations' ability to respond. And the fifth point is the coordination needed across departments within companies. And so, how the marketing department deals with legal, with regulatory approvals, with sales. How they go out to their agency partners. And this has certainly got a lot more complex across geographies, and across boundaries, within companies and outside. And so we see, absolutely, this need to put in place, basically, the marketing system of record that helps manage this. And this is where we see huge opportunity together with Adobe. >> Yeah, so, Alex, maybe you could talk about this a little bit. I mean, you guys are well-known for deep expertise and leadership, and orchestrating marketing workflows and the like. Matt talked about the martech stack. What's your take on this? And how are IBM iX and Adobe Workfront working together? >> What has occurred in response to what Matt talked about, is that companies started realizing that work was a tier one asset inside the marketing team. You know, they looked at, if you go back in time, and you look at financials in a company, people thought, "Wow, this is really important to us. We should put a system in place to manage financials." They realized their customers were really important, so they said, "We should put a system in place to manage our customers." People are important. They bought Workday to make sure that they could manage their people. And all of this complexity that Matt talked about caused enterprises to realize that the work of marketing was as important as some of those other activities in the organization. And so they started investing in a marketing system of record, like Workfront. >> You know, that's interesting. Just a quick aside. I mean, if you think about a lot of the problems we have in data and big data, typical to talk about stovepipe. You just mentioned three examples, finance, HR, and now marketing, where we've contextualized the system. In other words, the domain experts, the people in finance, and HR, and marketing, they're the ones who know the data the best. They don't have to go, necessarily, to some big data team, and data scientist, and all this stuff. They know what they want and they know it. And that's really what you guys are serving in your streamlining. This notion, Alex, of a marketing system of record is really interesting. I mean, it's relatively new, isn't it? So, why does it matter so much to marketers? >> Yeah, if you think about it, we've been able to serve 3,000 enterprises around the globe. We serve all 10 of the top 10 brands. Half of the Fortune 100. And what has created the need for the new, if you think about it, are the challenges that start arising when you implement the concepts that Matt talked about. Consider one of the largest private credit card issuers on the planet. And you think about delivering that personalized experience all the way to an end customer. You've got a private credit card issuer. They do business with hundreds of thousands of companies. Their account managers are interacting with those companies, and all of that lands back on a marketing organization that has to jointly plan promotions with those companies to drive the private credit card business. That marketing team needs visibility to the work that's happening. Or consider a major medical manufacturer who's trying to get medical products out the door. And the marketing team is trying to coordinate with the product team, with the regulatory team, with the supply chain team, with the legal team. And they're trying to orchestrate all of that work, so that they can get products out the door more quickly. Or maybe a financial services organization that's also trying to get new products out the door, and they're trying to get all the approval about the content that goes with those products, and it's all about speed to market. That's what's creating the need for the new, as you phrased it, Dave. >> Yes. Excellent. Thank you. So, then Matt, paint a picture. A lot of people may not be familiar with IBM iX. Maybe how you guys... You got creators, you got deep expertise in this area. So, maybe talk about where you add value, and how you work with Adobe. >> Okay, so IBM iX, so, we sit within the services business at IBM. As you said, Dave, right, we have designers, experienced strategists, engineers, basically able to deliver kind of end-to-end digital and customer experience solution, right from the creative, all the way through to the technology platforms, and the operations. Adobe is one of our key strategic partners across IBM, and certainly within my part of the business. And so, we couldn't have been more delighted when Workfront joined Adobe, through the acquisition there. So, we already had a strong relationship with the Workfront team. And so now seeing that as part of the Adobe platform and family there, really opens up massive opportunities. We're working with several major airlines, automotive companies, retailers, using Adobe technology to transform the customer experiences that they have. Putting in place new digital platforms, and new ways of engaging with those customers. But what is absolutely clear, as Alex was talking about, this need for a marketing systems of record, as this landscape becomes more complex, as the velocity of change increases the need to not just focus on the customer experience, and how a customer interacts with the brand, but the need to get the workflows and the processes within the organization that sit behind that, organized, executing in the correct way, in an efficient way, in order to make sure that you can deliver on that customer promise. And so this is absolutely critical, effectively, to drive this kind of workflow improvement, the productivity improvement, and put intelligence and automation into these processes, across the organization. So there is, certainly, we believe a huge opportunity together in the market, to help clients transform, and to deliver the value in this space. >> Got it. Alex, maybe you can just, at a high level, share some examples of how Adobe, and drawing on your experiences from Workfront, how you've helped companies where they had to get content out, they had to automate the processes, and the outcomes that you saw, that you hope to share with other clients. >> You know what, what Matt's talking about is the need for intelligent workflows within a marketing organization. Because a marketing organization is trying to solve one of two challenges. Either they're trying to be more efficient because they can't get more resources to do the work that they need to do, or they're trying to operate with speed. And so what our breakthrough thinking was, Dave, in terms of solving these problems, and then I'll give an example, is the realization that while it seemed like work should be different in different enterprises, ultimately, all work has five elements to it. The first thing is, you decide to do something, or I ask you to do something. So, we have to have the strategic planning around the intake of work. Then we have to plan out the work. Then we actually have to execute the work. We have to understand who's doing what. We have to have transparency to whether or not that work is getting done, or if people need help in that work. Then that work needs to be approved by somebody. And then finally, especially in marketing, then we have to actually deliver that work to a technology like ADM, where we're going to publish it on the web. So, if you take the case of a major financial, a financial company that serves consumers, that financial company is constantly bringing new products to market. Now, if you're bringing new products to market, if you think about the United States, you have to make sure that you have supported the regulatory approval that's necessary for a product. So, that product has to be able to go to the right investor. That product, if it's in a certain state, has to have oversight to it. So, now you're a marketing team, in a financial services organization that's supporting getting new product to market, and in a particular customer, it used to take 'em 63 days to go through all of the approvals necessary to just get content out the door. Now that they are effectively intaking the work, planning the work, executing the work reviewing the work, and delivering the work digitally, that's down to eight days. >> And with the martech platform, you have the data. So, you know what content you want to get out, and you can make decisions much better. I mean, my big takeaway is, you got the art of marketing, and those with the marketing DNA, I don't have that gene, but it's intersecting with the science and automation, and the data, and the workflows, and driving efficiency, and ultimately driving results and revenue. So, that's my big takeaway from this conversation, but Alex, maybe you could give us your takeaway, and then Matt, you can bring us home. >> Yeah. I mean, my takeaway is in this new economy, marketing is a tier one corporate activity. Marketing is a peer activity to manufacturing, to distribution, to sales, and to finance. And every one of those disciplines are managed with a system. Marketing needs its own system, because it's as important as any other organization. And so to me, Dave, it's no more complicated than that. That marketing is now as important as every other function. And it needs to be managed as every other function. And Workfront is the application that marketing manages the workflows, and the business of marketing. >> All right, Matt. Give us your final thoughts, please. >> Yep, no. My final thought, building on what Alex said, so, we've put together a joint point of view with Adobe, and with Workfront, called "Intelligent Content Transformation," right. That is our strategic framework to help clients accelerate on this journey, both of delivering these amazing customer outcomes, but how we transform the processes within the marketing organization. And I think that yes, you can continue to focus on delivering amazing digital experiences for customers, and it's absolutely critical, and that's critical to revenue growth, but actually, what's also critical, is to drive efficiency in these workflows across the enterprise, right? And that is not only going to enable the revenue growth, it's going to enable you to deliver on that promise. But it's also going to result in significant cost and efficiency improvements for these companies, by focusing on marketing in the same way as we have done for procurement transformation, supply chain transformation, finance transformation, HR transformation, right? There's a lot of effort gone into the efficiency of those workflows. We've got to do the same for marketing. So, massive opportunity, Dave, massive. >> It is massive. Every company has to, in some way, shape, or form, put high-quality content in front of their customers to engage with them. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right- >> See you again. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." You're watching IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. We'll be right back. (bright music) ♪ Da, de, de, da, da, de, da, la ♪ (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, It's The Cube. Covering KubeCon 2017 and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Lennox Foundation, and The Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Austin, Texas, this is The Cube's exclusive coverage of the CNCF CloudNativeCon which was yesterday, and today is KubeCon, for Kubernetes conference, and a little bit tomorrow as well, some sessions. Our next guest is Adrian Cockcroft, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, Amazon Web Services, and my co-host Stu Miniman. Obviously, Adrian, an industry legend on Twitter and the industry, formerly with Netflix, knows a lot about AWS, now VP of Cloud Architecture, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. >> This is your first time as an AWS employee on The Cube. You've been verified. >> I've been on The Cube before. >> Many times. You've been verified. What's going on now with you guys, obviously coming off a hugely successful reinvent, there's a ton of video of me ranting and raving about how you guys are winning, and there's no second place, in the rear-view mirror, certainly Amazon's doing great. But CloudNative's got the formula, here. This is a cultural shift. What is going on here that's similar to what you guys are doing architecturally, why are you guys here, are you evangelizing, are you recruiting, are you proposing anything? What's the story? >> Yeah, it's really all of those things. We've been doing CloudNative for a long time, and the key thing with AWS, we always listen to our customers, and go wherever they take us. That's a big piece of the way we've always managed to keep on top of everything. And in this case, the whole container industry, there's a whole whole market there, there's a lot of different pieces, we've been working on that for a long time, and we found more and more people interested in CNCF and Kubernetes, and really started to engage. Part of my role is to host the open source team that does outbound engagement with all the different open source communities. So I've hired a few people, I hired Arun Gupta, who's very active in CNCF earlier this year, and internally we were looking at, we need to join CNCF at some point. We got to do that eventually and venture in, let's go make it happen. So last summer we just did all the internal paperwork, and running around talking to people and got everyone on the same page. And then in August we announced, hey, we're joining. So we got that done. I'm on the board of CNCF, Arun's my alternate for the board and technical, running around, and really deeply involved in as much of the technology and everything. And then that was largely so that we could kind of get our contributions from engineering on a clear footing. We were starting to contribute to Kupernetes, like as an outsider to the whole thing. So that's why we're, what's going on here? So getting that in place was like the basis for getting the contributions in place, we start hiring, we get the teams in place, and then getting our ducks in a row, if you like. And then last week at Reinvent, we announced EKS, the EC2 Kubernete's Service. And this week, we all had to be here. Like last week after Reinvent, everyone at AWS wants to go and sleep for a week. But no, we're going to go to Austin, we're going to do this. So we have about 20 people here, we came in, I did a little keynote yesterday. I could talk through the different topics, there, but fundamentally we wanted to be here where we've got the engineering teams here, we've got the engineering managers, they're in full-on hiring mode, because we've got the basic teams in place, but there's a lot more we want to do, and we're just going out and engaging, really getting to know the customers in detail. So that's really what drives it. Customer interactions, little bit of hiring, and just being present in this community. >> Adrian, you're very well known in the open source community, everything that you've done. Netflix, when you were on the VC side, you evangelized a bunch of it, if I can use the term. Amazon, many of us from the outside looked and, trying to understand. Obviously Amazon used lots of open source, Amazon's participated in a number of open source. MXNet got a lot of attention, joining the CNCF is something, I know this community, it's been very positively received, everybody's been waiting for it. What can you tell us about how Amazon, how do they think about open source? Is that something that fits into the strategy, or is it a tactic? Obviously, you're building out your teams, that sends certain signals to market, but can you help clarify for those of us that are watching what Amazon thinks about when it comes to this space? >> I think we've been, so, we didn't really have a team focused on outbound communication of what we were doing in open source until I started building this team a year ago. I think that was the missing link. We were actually doing a lot more than most people realized. I'd summarize it as saying, we were doing more than most people expected, but less than we probably could have been given the scale of what we are, the scale that AWS is at. So part of what we're doing is unlocking some internal demand where engineering teams were going. We'd like to open source something, we don't know how to engage with the communities. We're trying to build trust with these communities, and I've hired a team, I've got several people now, who are mostly from the open source community, we were also was kind of interviewing people like crazy. That was our sourcing for this team. So we get these people in and then we kind of say, all right, we have somebody that understands how to build these communities, how to respond, how to engage with the open source community. It's a little different to a standard customer, enterprise, start up, those are different entities that you'd want to relate to. But from a customer point of view, being customer-obsessed as AWS is, how do we get AWS to listen to an open source community and work with them, and meet all their concerns. So we've been, I think, doing a better job of that now we've pretty much got the team in place. >> That's your point, is customer focus is the ethos there. The communities are your customers in this case. So you're formalizing, you're formalizing that for Amazon, which has been so busy building out, and contributing here and there, so it sounds like there was a lot of activity going on within AWS, it was just kind of like contributing, but so much work on building out cloud ... >> Well there's a lot going on, but if no one was out there telling the story, you didn't know about it. Actually one of the best analogies we have for the EKS is actually our EMR, our Hadoop service, which launched 2010 or something, 2009, we've had it forever. But from the first few years when we did EMR, it was actually in a fork. We kept just sort of building our own version of it to do things, but about three or four years ago, we started upstreaming everything, and it's a completely clean, upstreamed version of all the Hadoop and all the related projects. But you make one API call, a cluster appears. Hey, give me a Hadoop cluster. Voom, and I want Spark and I want all these other things on it. And we're basically taking Kubernetes, it's very similar, we're going to reduce that to a single API call, a cluster appears, and it's a fully upstreamed experience. So that's, in terms of an engineering relationship to open source, we've already got a pretty good success story that nobody really knew about. And we're following a very similar path. >> Adrian, can you help us kind of unpack the Amazon Kubernetes stack a little bit? One of the announcements had a lot of attention, definitely got our attention, Fargate, kind of sits underneath what Kubernetes is doing, my understanding. Where are you sitting with the service measures, kind of bring us through the Amazon stack. What does Amazon do on its own versus the open source, and how those all fit together. >> Yeah, so everyone knows Amazon is a place where you can get virtual machines. It's easy to get me a virtual machine from ten years ago, everyone gets that, right? And then about three years ago, I think it was three years ago, we announced Lambda - was that two or three years ago? I lose track of how many reinvents ago it was. But with Lambda it's like, well, just give me a function. But as a first class entity, there's a, give me a function, here's the code I want you to run. We've now added two new ways that you can deploy to, two things you can deploy to. One of them's bare metal, which is already announced, one of the many, many, many announcements last week that might have slipped by without you noticing, but Bare Metal is a service. People go, 'those machines are really big'. Yes, of course they're really big! You get the whole machine and you can be able to bring your own virtualization or run whatever you want. But you could launch, you could run Kubernetes on that if you wanted, but we don't really care what you run it on. So we had Bare Metal, and then we have container. So Fargate is container as a first class entity that you deploy to. So here's my container registry, point you at it, and run one of these for me. And you don't have to think about deploying the underlying machines it's running on, you don't have to think about what version of Lennox it is, you have to build an AMI, all of the agents and fussing around, and you can get it in much smaller chunks. So you can say you get a CPU and half a gig of ram, and have that as just a small container. So it becomes much more granular, and you can get a broader range of mixes. A lot of our instances are sort of powers of two of a ratio of CPU to memory, and with Fargate you can ask for a much broader ratio. So you can have more CPU, less memory, and go back the other way, as well. 'Cause we can mix it up more easily at the container level. So it gives you a lot more flexibility, and if you buy into this, basically you'll get to do a lot of cost reduction for the sort of smaller scale things that you're running. Maybe test environments, you could shrink them down to just the containers and not have a lot of wasted space where you're trying to, you have too many instances running that you want to put it in. So it's partly the finer grain giving you more ability to say -- >> John: Or consumption choice. >> Yeah, and the other thing that we did recently was move to per-second billing, after the first minute, it's per-second. So the granularity of Cloud is now getting to be extremely fine-grained, and Lambda is per hundred millisecond, so it's just a little bit -- >> $4.03 for your bill, I mean this is the key thing. You guys have simplified the consumption experience. Bare Metal, VM's, containers, and functions. I mean pick one. >> Or pick all of them, it's fine. And when you look at the way Fargate's deployed in ECS it's a mixture. It's not all one or all the other, you deploy a number of instances with your containers on them, plus Fargate to deploy some additional containers that maybe didn't fit those instances. Maybe you've got a fleet of GPU enhanced machines, but you want to run a bit of Logic around it, some other containers in the same execution environment, but these don't need to be on the GPU. That kind of thing, you can mix it up. The other part of the question was, so how does this play into Kubernetes, and the discussions are just that we had to release the thing first, and then we can start talking, okay, how does this fit. Parts of the model fit into Kubernetes, parts don't. So we have to expose some more functionality in Fargate for this to make sense, 'cause we've got a really minimal initial release right now, we're going to expose it and add some more features. And then we possibly have to look at ways that we mutate Kubernetes a little bit for it to fit. So the initial EKS release won't include Fargate, because we're just trying to get it out based on what everyone knows today, we'd rather get that out earlier. But we'll be doing development work in the meantime, so a subsequent release we'll have done the integration work, which will all happen in public, in discussion with the community, and we'll have a debate about, okay, this is the features Fargate needs to properly integrate into Kubernetes, and there are other similar services from other top providers that want to integrate to the same API. So it's all going to be done as a public development, how we architect this. >> I saw a tweet here, I want to hear your comments on, it's from your keynote, someone retweeted, "managing over 100,000 clusters on ACS, hashtag Fargate," integrated into ECS, your hashtag, open, ADM's open. What is that hundred thousand number. Is that the total number, is that an example? On elastic container service, what does that mean? >> So ECS is a very large scale, multi-tenant container operation service that we've had for several years. It's in production, if you compare it to Kubernetes it's running much larger clusters, and it's been running at production-grade for longer. So it's a little bit more robust and secure and all those kinds of things. So I think it's missing some Kubernetes features, and there's a few places where we want to bring in capabilities from Kubernetes and make ECS a better experience for people. Think of Kubernetes as some what optimized for the developer experience, and ECS for more the operations experience, and we're trying to bring all this together. It is operating over a hundred thousand clusters of containers, over a hundred thousand clusters. And I think the other number was hundreds of millions of new containers are launched every week, or something like that. I think it was hundreds of millions a week. So, it's a very large scale system that is already deployed, and we're running some extremely large customers on, like Expedia and Macbook. Macbook ... Mac Box. Some of these people are running tens of thousands of containers in production as a single, we have single clusters in the tens of thousands range. So it's a different beast, right? And it meets a certain need, and we're going to evolve it forwards, and Kubernetes is serving a very different purpose. If you look at our data science space, if you want exactly the same Hadoop thing, you can get that on prem, you can run EMR. But we have Athena and Red Shift and all these other ways that are more native to the way we think, where we can go iterate and build something very specific to AWS, so you blend these two together and it depends on what you're trying to achieve. >> Well Adrian, congratulations on a great opportunity, I think the world is excited to have you in your role, if you could clarify and just put the narrative around, what's actually happening in AWS, what's been happening, and what you guys are going to do forward. I'll give you the last minute to let folks know what your job is, what your objective is, what you're looking for to hire, and your philosophy in the open source for AWS. >> I think there's a couple of other projects, and we've talked, this is really all about containers. The other two key project areas that we've been looking at are deep learning frameworks, since all of the deep learning frameworks are open source. A lot of Kubernetes people are using it to run GPUs and do that kind of stuff. So Apache MXNet is another focus on my team. It went into the incubation phase last January, we're walking it through, helping it on its way. It's something where we're 30, 40% of that project is AWS contribution. So we're not dominating it, but we're one of its main sponsors, and we're working with other companies. There's joint work with, it's lots of open source projects around here. We're working with Microsoft on Gluon, we're working with Facebook and Microsoft on Onyx which is an open URL network exchange. There's a whole lot of things going on here. And I have somebody on my team who hasn't started yet, can't tell you who it is, but they're starting pretty soon, who's going to be focusing on that open source, deep learning AI space. And the final area I think is interesting is IOT, serverless, Edge, that whole space. One announcement recently is free AltOS. So again, we sort of acquired the founder of this thing, this free real-time operating system. Everything you have, you probably personally own hundreds of instances of this without knowing it, it's in everything. Just about every little thing that sits there, that runs itself, every light bulb, probably, in your house that has a processor in it, those are all free AltOS. So it's incredibly pervasive, and we did an open source announcement last week where we switched its license to be a pure MIT license, to be more friendly for the community, and announced an Amazon version of it with better Amazon integration, but also some upgrades to the open source version. So, again, we're pushing an open source platform, strategy, in the embedded and IOT space as well. >> And enabling people to build great software, take the software engineering hassles out for the application developers, while giving the software engineers more engineering opportunities to create some good stuff. Thanks for coming on The Cube and congratulations on your continued success, and looking forward to following up on the Amazon Web Services open source collaboration, contribution, and of course, innovation. The Cube doing it's part here with its open source content, three days of coverage of CloudNativeCon and KubeCon. It's our second day, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more live coverage in Austin, Texas, after this short break. >> Offscreen: Thank you.