he very beginning, it's always great to be back and you guys do an amazing job. So, it's wonderful. It's about connecting with people, and that really is what it's all about, having the conversations in a very social, collaborative way, and that's what makes it so exciting how people are watching. Hi, I'm Andrew Kreitzer, a business operations manager at LinkedIn, and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Chris Ellen, VP of Business Development for HP Big Data, and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Stacey Slaughter, Senior Vice President of Communications for the Giants. I'm in the garden at AT&T Park, and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Thomas Minnick, Business Intelligence Consultant within our works, and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, my name is David Tishkart, Director of Partner Marketing at Cloudera, and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Jim Yu, Founder and CEO of Bright Edge, and you're watching theCUBE. Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015, brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live inside theCUBE in Las Vegas for a special presentation at IBM Interconnect. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, then extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, our next guest, Eric Swain, who's the VP of Product at Mutual Mind, based out of Dallas. Great product, amazing visualization of analytics, powering all of the IBM big boards all over the show and on the big stage. Eric, great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE. It's my pleasure, thanks for having me. I mean, you guys saw Visualization as a pretty big deal a couple of years ago. We saw you guys, I think it was two years ago at an event, small little board inside a booth, now you're expanding, you're on the big stage. What's the life you get to make it work on the big stage? The data, you get the data backend done, but now you got to pipe that into it. Just share with folks what you guys have done here, what you're doing, and how did you do that big analytics board? Yeah, well I know I succeeded when I posted it on Facebook and my mom said, wow, that you actually do something, and she figured out what I actually do for a living. Yeah, we've got over 75 panels worth of Mutual Mind here at the conference, so this is a big coming out party for us, we're really excited. I mean, everything you see here is on IBM's soft layer, so we're running from, actually our offices are about a mile away from their headquarters in Dallas. We're very excited about what that offers in terms of bare metal plus public hybrid. We also are powering analytics behind the scenes to analyze the event and to provide social business team and others with insights about what's going on with the conference from a digital perspective. Okay, so you guys are obviously heavy software company, sort of off acid BI is really your focus, but a big part of what you do is design. Yes. I mean, the boards are gorgeous. Thanks, thanks. I know there's a big movement obviously to find developers who are also sort of artistic and designers. Can you talk about your culture in that regard, in that respect?  I mean, there's no one way or two ways about it. You have to jump in with both feet. We were really careful up front to set a clear design vocabulary for what we're going to build a board. So when new data, new data sources come in, we already know what our language is for how we're going to show that data on the screen. And our developers are just killer. They do the full stack front to back. We focus primarily on responsive web so that everything will work on every device and that automatically makes them design decisions for us as well. So when you say responsive web, but you off the area talked about having a mobile app as well. So, but their primary is a responsive design. So the mobile app you see is a web app and that's why we're able to push it out to multiple devices at once. So if you go to ibm.biz slash ibm engage, you'll see our mobile engagement center as compliant with iOS and Android, any of those browsers on those devices. Okay, but I can run that same URL if I run it on my laptop or my iPad, it's going to just respond to whatever dimension. But do you design for, so how do you make that trade off, right? Cause a lot of responsive designs are okay on a bigger screen and okay on mobile or they're really good on mobile, not so great on laptop. How do you balance that? It's a weird world. When we launched the engagement center in May of 2013, nobody asked about touch, nobody really cared. I think now the cost of touch screens has fallen so dramatically that we're getting that question a whole lot. So we said, first we're going to launch it on a mobile, in a mobile web app, then we're going to back that into the large screens because we wanted to learn our lessons on the small screen and then push them out to the big screens. So let's talk about data sources. Yeah. What are your data sources? A lot of people point to Twitter first. It's the fastest source of data we have. We are a plugged in partner with Gnip, which is Twitter's data arm. So we're part of about a dozen companies that have that status. We participate in pilot programs with them, help them optimize their services. We're very excited about that relationship with Twitter because it gives us such a rich data set. Full firehose. Full firehose access. Okay. We also have access to thousands of forums, blogs, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all of those at firehose levels. So we're able to bring in millions of data sources at once and bring them to bear. We even do international data sources like Sina Webo, Tencent Webo, VK, Naver out of South Korea. Basically I have a marketplace I can go to for data and we're very modular in consuming that data and from any source as possible. So we were at Oracle OpenWorld a couple of years ago and we watched Larry Ellison give a demo. And he talked about, it was a Twitter based demo.  And we were looking at saying, that's kind of cool, but is it real time? Yeah. No, it's not real time. Are you real time? Entirely so. In fact, the distance from tweet published to screen is about 12 seconds. Considering that tweet probably bounced off a satellite somewhere, that's pretty good. All right. How do you guys handle like spam and like spam filtering and fostering it? Yeah, so we have a lot of tools there. We have keyword based tools to filter out most of the bad language. Actually interesting, we partnered with a company also in Dallas called Image Vision that does image analytics.  So we have literally a nudity filter. I guess you could filter in nudity if you really wanted to, but we have a filter to remove out any images you might not want to see on the big screen. So you guys taking real time feeds and doing image recognition filtering that? Yeah, so we have our partner, Image Vision.  And then how do you determine, so I literally, I was staring at the board for, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes and I wish I had more time, I had to go, but so I'm looking at the leaderboard. What am I looking at? How do you determine, so I'm sure you have some algorithm, a clout-like thing maybe. We have a lot of options for how to do that. I mean, a lot of our customers are asking for different ways to measure influence. So we have all the raw metrics like clout score, following followers. What you saw there was more about volume of mentions, so we had different topics that were re-ranking. And then we're also working on tools to better understand influence. And that's where our work with IBM Watson comes in because we're analyzing personality traits using Watson personality insights to better understand not just an influential person, but is that the right person? I'm one of the websites, but maybe it was the board. I saw Watson sort of powered by Watson. What is the relationship between Watson and what you're doing? Right, we work very tightly with the Watson personality insights product team because we're bringing to market a solution. We've already brought to market our social portraits widget, which is what you saw, which you'll see at the conference here, which takes a group of influencers and displays their social portrait. Their realization of their personality vectors, as well as their influence in clout score distribution. So that's the clout score of their followers, which is interesting insight there. And also the topics that their followers most often talk about. But then also we're working on further into instigations where we can implement personality insights on a real-time level so that we can target individuals based off of not just clout score, following, and all those other lovely things, but also are they open to change? Do they have a degree of altruism? Are they analytical? They're purists, open-source purists. They have some interesting topics there. Is that a text analytics capability? Yeah, so the personality insights tool investigates your, basically last 200 tweets, and they use linguistics to determine how that text is indicative of your personality traits. So you can essentially build a persona. So we would be like bipolar. It's schizophrenic, bipolar. It's us who are all personalities up there. John's talking about open daylight and neutron, then talking about social business, what the hell's going on in your brain, driftwood? Data ocean. What's the coolest thing that you guys are doing on the graphics that people talk about the most? What's the sound? Yeah, I think one of the cool things we're doing is called the perspective motion widget. You'll see it out here as well. It's a 3D visualization. And what's cool about that is there's no software involved there as well. It's using a browser language called WebGL, which actually iOS 8 just brought that onto iOS devices. So the perspective motion widget lets you see basically kind of cards floating in a star field and they kind of swarm back and forth. So that was our first implementation of 3D. We'll be doing a lot more of that in the coming year as well. But it's amazing that browser technology has caught up to that level of almost game development. So talk about the size of the company, what you guys are doing. How big are you? Are you growing? What's the state of the funding? Sure. Growth, et cetera. We're actually a fairly, a company's been around for four years. We're a team of about a dozen people, which you consider what we're doing with a dozen people. We punch above our weight class pretty well. We actually have bootstrapped the company and angel funded. We're seeking rounds of investment, but we've been able to do a whole lot when very efficiently with our capital. And you know what, knowing you guys and have previous conversations folks out there, we've chatted before, want to tee that up. Because really being bootstrapped is a huge accomplishment. And in this market, you guys have a great product that certainly renders itself well. So congratulations. You know, I always say entrepreneurs that can bootstrap and grow without outside funding are the true tier one. Now you might need to get rocket fuel if you have that rocket ship all ready to go. That's right. Or everything's clean. Then you bring in the big money scale, ride the rocket ship. But you guys are building it out in real time. It's pretty phenomenal. Well, I think that this is the kind of moment that that type of fuel is necessary, right? I mean, we have shown a lot of capability at a lot of scale with IBM, literally in physical inches as far as the screens. Are they selling your product for you? Or are you guys joint sailing together? Is there a real business relationship? So we have a lot of relationships with IBM, both as a vendor and as a reseller. And those are continuing developments.  But they are reselling our tools or we're working on that solution. As well as we are a vendor to them so they use our tools for detecting them. Well, not just at events but also in the wild for detecting opportunities for social selling. So we're working on that project as well. We have a lot of those different types of relationships with IBM and so we're both vendor as well as reseller as well as partner. So how do you position with the sort of sentiment analysis guys?  So we have our own proprietary sentiment and analysis engine. But I think what's really powerful about our platform is we've built from the ground up with an integration mindset so we can bring in other external sources of enrichment. I mentioned image vision. You know, that plug in for that image analytics API was a week worth of coding for us. It's really amazing how quickly we can bring in someone that brings value to the table like Watson and use that to enrich the social data we already have. Well, what's the real time nature of what you do? I think differentiate you from some of the sort of gen one sentiment analysis guys that just sort of. You know, a lot of tools focused and my background is on agency side for 10 years running and leading social analytics teams before I came on here. In fact, I was a customer before I came part of the company. A lot of those tools are doing research and they're doing really well historically. But we realize that marketers now want not just impressions and volume and mentions. They want action. They want something now. So we've laser focused on the real time, visualizing it. And then we have an engine called adaptive listening. It's kind of like if this then that for social media. So you can say if cloud score above 50 and mentioned by brand and it's negative sentiment kick off a workflow task for Eric Swain because he better respond to that stuff like that. We see that as the moment that makes social business go. And you've got a killer API to go on with all this. Yeah, so if you're gonna dev.mutualmind.com our API documentations all public. We're very proud of that. We integrate with a lot of partners that use our tools for social listening or they have a box in their flow chart code social and they don't know what to do there and they plug us in. It's great. Eric, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We're getting the hook here. We've got to run social businesses about the data and visualizing it, taking action, the insights engines, IBM's all over this. And so we're in theCUBE and we'll be right back after the short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. It's one scene three. Open port 22017 on the firewall for customer DB access. Install version 2.3 of DB connector and ensure verbose flag is set in case of problems. Isn't the cloud supposed to make business easier? Get the one that can connect to the systems that you already have. Today there's a new way to work and it's made with IBM. theCUBE is a live mobile studio. We bring it to events and we say we extract the signal from the noise. What we do is we get the absolute best guests that are at those events. We bring them inside theCUBE and we talk to them. We have a conversation. I think the difference with theCUBE is that the interviewers are active participants in big data. So it's less about trying to explain what big data is and more about relating what's going on. So we're a big data driven organization. We have a data science team that allows us to see not only what's trending broadly with the public, but what's trending in very specific areas in our specialty in tech. That allows us to vector our analysis and relevance from our research and journalist team into everything that we do as a media company. We really want to make it fun, exciting, but more importantly, extract the data from the guests and extract that metadata and share it with the world so people can use that information to better themselves, better their companies. More importantly, connect with other people to do more business, to define more about the technology and for us, this is the future. I do a lot of these types of interviews. I spend a lot of time with the press and theCUBE's a lot of fun. It's ESPN for tech. I think tech's evolved to the point where people want to understand the personalities behind the technology, which probably wasn't that interesting 20 years ago. I think they made it a lot more entertaining, a lot more interesting, as well as putting some technical meat on the bones as well. The value of an independent news organization at an event is that it allows our audience to have a perspective that's balanced, that it's not just the vendors talking to them. It's the community. It's analysts, it's technologists, it's customers, practitioners. So they get a full perspective that's unfiltered. The benefit of theCUBE is a place for conversations with people to connect with each other and to learn about things and it's a revolution in media. We look at the technology and the people behind it as tech athletes. Those are the folks making the companies, making the technology, really creating the new value in this modern era and it's fun, it's exciting and more importantly, it's very social. These days, with social media, people looking to not just read articles, which are great, and obviously SiliconANGLE does a lot of that as well, but being able to see high definition video, very intimate interviews with entrepreneurs and operators, innovators in the industry, I think is really important. So the job you do in getting this out in a very timely way, I think is really important. We always know that your view is right until you hear a different perspective. So you're always interested and give me some neutral perspective, help me see it from a different light, and maybe ask a hard question or two that I might not have considered. You know, in that sense, write that independent voice that's always ability to write, have sort of independent, audited sort of perspective right out of the world. That's always just good. theCUBE has been called the ESPN of tech really our vision is to cover every event that's out there. We really truly wanna be a global organization that is at every event, extracting the signal from the noise, be on the ground, giving our audience a sense of what's happening at that event, but also providing analysis and insight worldwide, literally for every event that's out there. You know, I love it. I was actually telling John and Dave, every time I come back to theCUBE, you guys have new toys, new cameras, everything's getting bigger. So, you know, having been on it for several years, almost from the very beginning, it's always great to be back and you guys do an amazing job, so it's wonderful. It's about connecting with people, and that really is what it's all about, having the conversations in a very social, collaborative way, and that's what makes it so exciting how people are watching. Andrew Price, our business operations manager at LinkedIn, and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Chris Ellen, VP of business development for HP Big Data, and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Stacey Slaughter, Senior Vice President of Communications for the Giants. I'm in the garden at AT&T Park, and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Thomas Minnick, Business Intelligence Consultant within our works, and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, my name is David Tyshkar, Director of Partner Marketing at Cloudera, and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Jim Yu, Founder and CEO of Bright Edge, and you're watching theCUBE. Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. At IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live. This is theCUBE in Las Vegas with IBM Interconnect, a special presentation of theCUBE where we go out and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. Joe McCose, Dave Vellante, co-founder of MugiBond.org. Our next guest I'm super excited for because we talk all the time online. We don't see each other in person except at these events. It's good to have an intimate conversation. Next guest, Amber Armstrong, Program Director, IBM Social Business. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. theCUBE is one big crowd chat, but three of us. I'm hoping we really can't chat with anyone else, but there is a crowd chat online right now. So if you're watching, go to crowdchat.net slash IBM Interconnect, we'll be watching. Bring the questions in. Amber is probably the best power user we've seen on the crowd chat. Mainly because you guys are such a great community, but you guys are really doing well. And people who know me and Dave know that we love social business because it's not about the PR and the buzz and just talking to yourself. It's actually connecting with relationships and using that interaction engagement to create more attraction, more people interacting, to create data, to create engagement. And that's the holy grail right now.  How did you get here? And can you be prolific at the same time in creating value? Yeah, I think so. I don't know, I'll try. No, when we do the crowd chats, one of the big pieces that works for us most is we bring in our influencers. And you bring them in based on the topics.  And you bring in the right influencers and you run through the questions. We try to make our crowd chats really visual. And so we put the questions up with the tiles and we also try to get things so that they're also kind of pushing out to Twitter overall and try to bring as many people as we can into the conversation. What I really also love about it is it's activating. And I think the term I like to use is crowd activated innovation because what you're doing is, you're not selling anything.  So it kind of looks top down, structured, but the soil of organic growth is all going to be based upon the interaction, the topic. So it's truly the winning form in my opinion of what we call earned media. So I want to get your take on this. These are gonna be the old way. Webinar, we have a webinar. Give me your email address. Give me your first born. We're going to sell you something. Watch this video. There's no interaction. And maybe you can ask a question at the end. So that's webinars, the old way. How would you compare and contrast this new way of social? It's really about starting the conversations early, often really engaging with people so that when they think of social business, they think of how are they going to reach their customers? They're thinking about commerce. They automatically think of IBM and then they drive into our own channels to get the additional information and really start engaging with us. But we spend our full time providing value out to them. Even when we're not unsolicited, we're not trying to push them towards anything. But if we just push out value, then we believe that they will come back to us. And we're seeing a great increase on our website visits. We've done a lot of work with Ted at IBM. We just did the IBM verse launch and all these things, because the value we're providing to customers, we're seeing that land back on our own properties. So talk about the experience you've had with Ted at IBM and other chats you've done. That's the crowd chat thing we've been interacting on. But I bring it up to crowd chat because we've built it to be easy to stand up. What you're doing is you're standing up social programs, almost ad hoc but yet structured themes. This is the new way, this is the cloud way. Standing something up is a cloud geek term. Stand up for some new servers. So with the hashtags, they provide a great direct response opportunity vehicle. So hey, advertise the hashtag, direct response, I'm noticing you're doing that. And users are using hashtags to navigate. So this trend of the hashtags being a direct response vehicle for advertising an event, if you will, or chat. And then users navigating is the perfect storm for this innovation. Talk about how you guys did that, because at Ted at IBM, you guys executed with non-disruptive operations in your group. You just plugged in the social programs and things just kind of smooth. It's about building series of content. And so what we did is we started out with, we would have influencers come in, we would bring in our speakers that were gonna be at Ted, and we started months and months before Ted, where we would put together what we called smartpats. And it would be, we would do a tweet chat, we would have infographics blogs, and you put that content out there so that you're already building awareness for that speaker and people are interested. They're like, oh, we wanna come and talk to this person. And so it just kind of, you do it in a series so people get used to it. And now we switched it and we're doing the, because Ted at IBM happened last year, now we're on a new way to work. And so we do our new way to work, tweet chats. Same kind of thing. We put it out there. We did a great influencer event with Pure Matter and we filmed the influencers and we've now put out blogs, tweet chats. The same kind of process, just in a series that people learn to kind of constantly come back for it. So a couple of other things. Your Twitter stream is very visual, I noticed. 99% of what you tweet has a visual in there. Is that just based on you know that it plays better? Is it based on research that you guys did? Can you talk about that? Yeah, yeah, it's a rule. So we always use the visual. We actually use dynamic signal to a lot of our employee advocacy. And you have to have a visual in there. So that's one of the reasons you see when IBM employees are sharing, then it's because they're pulling it out of dynamic signal, getting it out to all their channels. But we also, we have rules about, if we're gonna put an image on there, we'd use it to the exact Twitter dimensions. Cause that can still play in Facebook and LinkedIn, but you gotta make it so that when someone's looking in that preview screen that they see the core message, or sometimes a couple of things I posted last night was I posted a picture of, it's really a silly example, but a cupcake that had a new way to work on it. And it was kind of this interesting image and I looked at the tweet stats on it today and 190 people looked at that image and it was just a cupcake. Images are fantastic. So the dynamic signals part of your workflow, it's a, I know a little bit about it, it's like an employee advocacy tool. Yeah, it's an employee advocacy tool and what it does is it allows our, we have about 500 employees that share very actively for a social business. IBM on whole has about 6,500 that are sharing our content all through dynamic signal. My team puts the content in there and then you go in and 10, 15 minutes a day, you can share out that content and you can automate it to go out. The way I tend to do it if you watch my stream is I tend to post things four times because it hits the different time zones. And then I've tried it out, I don't lose engagement by doing that. I get the same, sometimes the third time I post something it's when it gets the most engagement. And so it's really fun to kind of watch and just kind of see. That's interesting, so you're not worried about the repetition. Repetition is actually a good thing because you're going to hit different parts of your social graph. What about email marketing? Does that still fit into this whole social plan? Yeah, it does, it does. So one of the things that we just launched was IBM Burst and hopefully you guys are hearing a lot about IBM Burst here at the conference. And with Burst, we wanted to drive registrations. We wanted people to sign up for Burst. It's a premium, it's this great product, but we need names, email addresses, titles, all that kind of great stuff. So Burst is now being launched, we're starting to ramp people into it, but there's this whole timeframe from when we did the launch in November until now. And so we're just now starting to bring people in. We've been continuing that conversation via email. We've been giving people access to private content so it's unique, only registered people get to see it. And then we're pulling people into Burst based on some priority things. For example, people that attended ConnectEd, people that are registering here from Interconnect are also going to get prioritized. If I asked companies, let's say a year and a half ago, do you put Twitter handles in your CRM? I would say close to 100% would have said no. Right. And that's starting to change. If I ask you that, what's your, how are you using things like Twitter handles? I think we're still learning on it, but we are. We definitely do it. We also use a lot of tools. So an interesting kind of thing, a stat that I just looked at this morning is we use a tool called Mutual Mind. I think you guys just started talking to Mutual Mind, right? Yeah, so we use Mutual Mind. So we have all of our influencer handles, all of our employee advocacy handles. And I can tell you what percentage of the Twitter impressions were driven by those groups. So we've got 20 social influencers here, and yesterday that drove 35% of the impressions for the overall conference. And so being able to track those handles, it helps you understand how many, where are you getting the biggest impact? They're a small percentage of the overall population, yet they're driving. Yeah, they're 20 people. So maybe what? Okay, so I got to ask you the question, because I love this, this is my favorite. You know I love social. What does Join the Conversation mean? If you advertise Join the Conversation, where do I go? Is there like a website? Is there a Join the Conversation website? Do I go to Twitter? Or do I go to Tumblr? Do I go to Instagram? Is there a hashtag? You guys are figuring this out. I mean, honestly, it's a little biased with CrowdChat, but if this audience is generating 35% of the activity, they're essentially ginning up the conversations. How does someone join? The hashtag. The hashtag we're using is New Way to Work. So what you're seeing us do now, we've been having the first conversations on that hashtag. We've been talking about the future of work. We just launched a new website a couple days ago, IBM.com slash futurists. And all of our influencer content is there. You'll see all the videos, all of that stuff. So if someone can go there, then the actual conversations are happening on Twitter. Go in and we're now joining that New Way to Work conversation with the IBM Interconnect conversation by kind of merging those handles and helping those communities get to know each other. Yeah, I got to say, that is such a great strategy because with the CrowdChat, it's not a full in the wild. People love to go walk around the park, if you will, of the social web, which is Twitter, but in the moment, that's how you meet people. Then you can have structured conversations and record them. So what's the next thing that you're seeing is the next innovation beyond that? So I'm a user, I want to join the conversation. I dial up Twitter, that's the channel, New Way to Work, hashtag. I come in, there's a lot of noise in there. What are you guys doing? You can drive the websites, you've got CrowdChat, you've got your ambassadors.  And they don't do it on brands, they do it, you know, hopefully not terribly off brand, right, but- In their channel, what they like, shoot.  And so we're building relationships with all of these people and letting them tell their story that is really closely aligned to ours. And when you want to engage in that conversation, well, you go to the hashtag, of course. But you also go to the person that you know that you trust, right?  And there's no one answer.  So it's about horizontally scaling this conversation. Do you see it? Yeah, absolutely. And you go to your employees, right? Or our employees, but you go to your friend who works at IBM, you say, hey, I heard about this thing, you know? So it's all about finding what's the most trusted route and let those people tell the story. And then we are there to kind of catch and receive. Awesome. Well, I would like to just end the segment by saying thanks, great to work with you guys. Share with the folks out there, just best practice, philosophy. What's the new way to think around social? What's the new way to execute and bring some of these best practices into their company? So you think they can move social from a PR activity that no one really sees value other than creating a short-term buzz, splash in the pool, if you will. Or to take it to the next level, what's your advice, mindset-wise, how they should think, how they should work it, how they should build it, how they should execute it? I think everybody should have an employee advocacy program. It's astounding the amount of impact you can drive by doing that. And for companies that don't, I mean, it's so easy to start. And it makes such a huge impact. We started with 60 people. In one week, we drove 35,000 clicks. Right now, our advocates are driving 55,000 clicks. That's really impactful and it's working. And so to start with employee advocacy, as you start to ramp up, then you can build in more of this influencer piece and working with these external influencers. And then what I think the real magic is taking the external influencers and powering their content with your employee advocates and really merging those, you've got this kind of shared value overall. And it's been great. That's the owned, paid, and earned media coming together in a very clean, authentic, fully transparent way. And it's sharing the value. You know, there's a lot of different ways to share value across influencer channels, all the different channels. And so finding ways to really do that in meaningful ways that you can do with sponsorships, that sort of thing. There's a lot of different ways to get out of it. It's data-driven too, so it's all data-driven. Absolutely. Amber, you guys have lightning in a bottle. Congratulations, it's just the beginning. So I know it's going to morph and take a hold of the direction. I've always been a big fan of social business and I would just be in a long time IBM Observer. You know, back in the 90s, IBM pioneered e-business, which no one uses anymore. It's just called the web, it's called the internet, right? Now, social business is the same thing. So I really think you guys are honest with us as a company and when you're doing it, congratulations. This is theCUBE, sharing our social media view with Amber here, talking about the best practices, new way to work, new way to build, new way to collaborate, new way to engage, new way to measure it, new way to connect with customers through all this new great social media and social business. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. First time on theCUBE, it was fun. We'll do it again. We'll do it again. Yeah. I think what I've come to find, I think my second time on theCUBE is, I mean, it's just such a real-time, high-energy experience. It's very good because there's no filtering of questions. I was not practiced, other than saying, go and get up there. So it was quite good, it was part of the experience. I think what you're going to get is the real answer. You know, it's not scripted, it's authentic. It really allows you to communicate quickly, you know, your point of view about who knows what they're going to ask you. So I thought it was great. I mean, I didn't know what the questions were ahead of time. They asked some good ones. I think some ones that if it was an unbiased thing, I mean, a biased thing, I don't think we would have got it. And I think that's what people want. They want those questions and it's hard for us sometimes to ask them unbiased because you're biased by nature. So it's great to get those questions and you'll be able to answer them. Like I said, you know, I love the energy. I mean, these guys ask good questions and obviously not only them, it's the Twitter feeds coming in from questions from the audience. Sometimes it's a question nobody wants to ask but they're thinking, so it's good. It's a great way to sort of, you know, answer those tough questions. It gave me an opportunity to hopefully share with the people watching, you know, some of why we're doing what we're doing. Is a live mobile studio. Bring it to events and we say we extract the signal from the noise. What we do is we get the absolute best guests that are at those events. We bring them inside the cube and we talk to them. We have a conversation. I think the difference with the cube is that the interviewers are active participants in big data. So it's less about trying to explain what big data is and more about relating what's going on. So we're a big data driven organization. We have a data science team that allows us to see not only what's trending broadly with the public but what's trending in very specific areas in our specialty in tech. That allows us to vector our analysis and relevance from our research and journalist team into everything that we do as a media company. We really want to make it fun, exciting but more importantly extract the data from the guests and extract that metadata and share it with the world so people can use that information to better themselves, better their companies. More importantly connect with other people to do more business, to define more about the technology and for us this is the future. I do a lot of these types of interviews. I spend a lot of time with the press and cubes a lot of fun. It's ESPN for tech. I think tech's evolved to the point where people want to understand the personalities behind the technology, which probably wasn't that interesting 20 years ago and I think they made a lot more entertaining, a lot more interesting as well as putting some technical meat on the bones as well. The value of an independent news organization at an event is that it allows our audience to have a perspective that's a balance, that it's not just the vendors talking to them, it's the community, it's analysts, it's technologists, it's customers, practitioners, so they get a full perspective that's unfiltered. The benefit of the cube is place for conversations for people to connect with each other and to learn about things and it's a revolution in media. We look at the technology and the people behind it as tech athletes, those are the folks making the companies, making the technology, really creating the new value in this modern era and it's fun, it's exciting and more importantly, it's very social. These days, with social media, people looking to not just read articles, which are great and obviously SiliconANGLE does a lot of that as well, but being able to see high definition video, very intimate interviews with entrepreneurs and operators, innovators in the industry I think is really important. So the job you do in getting this out in a very timely way, I think is really important. We always know that your view is right until you hear a different perspective. So you're always interested in giving some neutral perspective, help me see it from a different light, and maybe ask a hard question or two that I might not have considered. On that sense, that independent voice that's always ability to have a sort of independent, audited sort of perspective right on the world is always just good. theCUBE has been called the ESPN of tech and really our vision is to cover every event that's out there. We really truly want to be a global organization that is at every event, extracting the signal from the noise, being on the ground, giving our audience a sense of what's happening at that event, but also providing analysis and insight worldwide, literally for every event that's out there. You know, I love it. I was actually telling John and Dave, every time I come back to theCUBE, you guys have new toys, new cameras, everything's getting bigger. So, you know, having been on it for several years, almost from the very beginning, it's always great to be back and you guys do an amazing job, so it's wonderful. It's about connecting with people, and that really is what it's all about, having the conversations in a very social, collaborative way, and that's what makes it so exciting because people are watching. This is a burrito made with chocolate, soybeans, and apricots. What kind of chef comes up with this? A chef working with IBM Watson on the cloud. Ingredients are just data. Watson turns big data into new ideas, and not just for food. Watson is working with doctors and bankers to help transform their industries. Today, there's a new way to work, and it's made with IBM. It's wherever this is. To get customers to come here and stay here, you're gonna need an app that connects to all your systems, so they can bank, shop, do what they need to do, and you've got to do it fast before the competition does. It's tough out here! You better be on the right cloud. Today, there's a new way to work, and it's made with IBM. Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Live inside The Cube, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. This is The Cube, our flagship program where we're out to the events to try to see through the noise. Our next guest is Phil Bucklow, VP of Enterprise Mobile of IBM. Welcome to The Cube. Oh, thank you, appreciate it. So, is mobile hot still? I mean, it's pretty explosive, you know? Tell us what's going on. Yeah, well, we see, you know, there's tons of things happening in the mobile space right now. Everybody is kind of realizing that mobile is helping change the way we all live, we work, we play. It's having big impacts on industries of all sizes, big and small, and companies that have figured out how to embrace mobile to change the way they interact with consumers or employees are really starting to see huge benefits in the way that they're getting their work done. Before you get into the IBM talk, I want to ask you one specific question. I was kind of, you know, joking a little bit. Of course, we know mobile's hot. Take a step back, because mobile's certain, give a reality check for the folks watching on how huge mobile has changed business from a sense of how customers are interacting, how apps are changing. I mean, mobile certainly has been like the major catalyst that's sliced through all the issues of, and it puts it right in front of the CEO's face and says, this is the new way that you need to be thinking. Well, everyone, this is the way we've all chosen to interact with everyone and everything. We don't want to wait anymore. We want instant gratification. When I have an idea, when I want to interact with a business, I want to do it right now in one of the 150 times a day I reach into my pocket to pull out my mobile device. And so that's why in so many, you know, the industries now, they've seen it. They've had a taste of mobile. Everybody's got one or two mobile apps out there and they started to see the impact it has on their business. And so now they're thinking about, okay, how do I get more of that? How do I scale that? How do I do more? Because there's so much opportunity. And the customers are connected. It's because the customers are connected to the mobile device. It's an innovative thing. And the mobile device, it's kind of a paradigm shift too because so much is different about mobile. You can deal with context. You can anticipate what your client wants based upon where they are or what they've done. And that really allows you to build experiences that are engaging and really interact with your customers in ways that you haven't before. And that drives a lot of change through the pipeline on the back. All right, so let's dig this in interconnect. Obviously, Blue Mix Cloud is a huge enabler for powering the edge of the network. We heard, you know, the speedboat racers using data with Blue Mix. So obviously under the hood, you got an engine of innovation with the cloud. Mobile's the touch point. What's going on here at Interconnect that's rocking with mobile? What's the key things that are trending? What conversations are you guys having that's top of mind? Well, what we've done is we've taken our technology and we've introduced a new platform. The mobile first platform is basically allowing us to help companies address all the challenges of mobile. We've made it more modular so companies can take only what they need. They don't have to start over. They can work with their existing apps, plug it in, and it gives them the management, the security so that they don't have to recreate the wheel every time they're dealing with a new mobile app. You know, one of the challenges that we see is that, you know, customers, they built a couple apps in the past, but in the next 12 months, they got to build six more. We did some research and said that 85% of them have a backlog of up to 20 apps.  I got to be able to connect to my back end. I need to be able to make these things better over and over again. And really, those are some of the changes that people are looking for and that's why we're so excited. So I got to ask you, the consumer trend drives a lot of action on the mobile side. It's pretty obvious Uber is a great poster child of what mobile can do with data and new business, new way to think about business model, a new way to work, a new way to interact. But also there's been failures. I mean, mobile first is not a guaranteed path to success. I mean, if you missed the mark on UX and design, you could die. I mean, the founder of Twitter, Vince Stone, he started a couple of companies, Kevin Rose, Jay, he started more, they failed. So it's not about being the best, I mean, they're smart guys, they're super smart, but it's just a misfire. If you missed the mark, it's hard to win. So many people underestimate what it takes to be successful in mobile. You have to be able to create engaging experiences that people want. And that's really the driver. And a lot of people look at mobile and they say, all right, I just want to build an app. And so everybody will build one app or two apps, but then they start to realize that there's so much more than that. And it's not a one, mobile's not one and done, like a lot of application and IT projects to past. You have to be continuing to invest. You have to continuously innovate. To your point, app stores have also magnified the success or the failure of any apps because people can respond immediately on whether or not the app is meeting their needs. So is the app, the mobile app, is it becoming disposable or is that a sign of a bad app? Or is that a sign of an, is that okay? The mobile apps are evolving fast because there's so much, there's so much in the industry where people realize they can gain a competitive advantage by adding new capabilities and new types of engagement through those mobile apps. And so you have to be ready to continuously iterate, you know, it's in this kind of gets to some of the challenges of two speed IT. In the mobile world, you need to be innovating your mobile apps every two to three months. Whereas in the traditional world, you know, you're in waterfall projects and these things are taking six, nine months. And so that's really one of the things that we've been working with our clients to help them address, to build a kind of a middle tier, you know, places to store your data that can take pieces of things from those systems of record that allow the mobile developers to iterate at mobile speed while you still connect because in order for an app to add value, it has to do something, has to connect to those backend systems. And so that's really a way that a lot of our clients have been excited about what we've been bringing to market. So how would you summarize IBM's mobile strategy, enterprise mobile strategy? Well, we've got really offerings that are tailored to the different roles that people have inside of the mobile space. You know, the top of the house, they're looking for transformation. How can I change the way work is done? And they're trying to figure out how they can put, you know, the best devices in the hands of their employees, recreate their business processes based upon location and the capabilities of the device. That really is at the heart of the Apple partnership, is how we can work together with the Apple teams to take their strength on the devices and user experience that and really create new ways to work on the employee side. And there's, you know, really tons of progress there. And so that's really one of the areas in the transformation side. There's a couple of other areas. We're working with chief marketing officers and digital officers to create engaging experiences. We're working with the information security officers to figure out how to protect and to make sure that we provide a secure experience. And then for the application development teams, that's where the mobile first platform comes in really to help you work off that backlog of apps that's coming from the business. So if I unpack what you just said from a strategy standpoint, you're going after big ROI hits. Transformation, reduced risk. The CMO piece, people say CMO is going to be spending more than the CIO on technology. So you're going after boardroom level transformations. Is that a fair assessment? There's a lot of different needs at one level, at the highest level, that's absolutely what you need. You got to recreate the way your business works. Take advantage of mobile and data and social and the other capabilities that exist today and redesign your processes to create a competitive advantage. That's really what the top of the house is after. At the same time, we're working with companies big and small to address their mobile challenges. Just being able to acquire devices, bring them in, secure them and manage them. All the capabilities that we have with MAS 360 that we're now calling the mobile first protect portfolio, that's really about helping companies of all size to get on board, to distribute apps to really to work their way through the process of having mobile in their environment. I feel like I got to ask you, let's talk about customer roadmap because, I mean, pretty much it's not everyone's boardroom conversation, top line, bottom line. So all kind of developer hires are coming. The tsunami of data, drowning in data is a top conversation people are having. So it's obvious that analytics can be a driver for success, having mobile success, cloud success, great. Assume that they all want to go there. What does a customer need to do? What's the roadmap? Do you go to web response first?  It's a Lego blog, how do you do an app within the app? I mean, this is like a complex roadmap. Sounds simple, go mobile first? Well, what's the roadmap? What have you learned? Well, a couple of things. So along the way, we've learned that developers often want to use the tools they want. So the conversation is really moving away from how do you build the app. With our mobile first platform, we offer a studio that helps organizations build cross-platform apps using the latest and greatest web technologies. At the same time, we've added support so that native developers can build their apps with the native tools that they're familiar with. And third-party tools can also be used to help build mobile apps. You mentioned data, and that's really at the heart of what's needed to build those engaging experiences. That's why we pulled in a data layer from cloud into our mobile first platform. And so what that allows us to do is to pull data from lots of sources, Internet of Things, as well as from backend systems of record. Mash that data up quickly. It's no sequel, so it's flexible, and you can change it quickly as you need to change your mobile apps at mobile speed, not like you would need to on the backend systems of record. And that's what we really believe will help you bring in those insights that give you those differentiated experience that will give you the business results that you need. So mobile, as you said before, sort of changed the nature in which we interact. So it was a new platform, changed virtually everything in terms of our daily lives. Will IoT have a similar effect? Is it an extension, an evolution of mobile? Is it orthogonal? I wonder if you could give us your perspectives on that. Well, in many ways, mobile is the touch point. It's the way that you interact with the things that are around you. It's much of the human interface. At the same time, a lot of the same technology that's needed for mobile first interactive experiences is this system of engagement. It's a way to set up logic in the cloud close to where the execution is needed, as well as being able to pull information from those internet of things capabilities so that you can interact with the world around you. We introduced some capability recently with our mobile first platform called Presence Insights that ties into sensors and Wi-Fi access points, beacons, so that you can understand where someone is as they navigate through a store or a campus location, a manufacturing site. And that's really a way to marry the world of the physical world with what we've got with mobile devices and the capability for mobile devices. Phil, so how does this change your backend? And how much time do you spend thinking about that? We spend a lot of time thinking about that. You know, a lot of the early pioneers in the mobile era, they would take their applications, they would build an app, and they would wire it straight in to a web API, to an API they created for the web days.  Then there would be these mobile demands that would spike and would hammer away at these backend systems. And the mobile developers, they wanted to iterate really fast. But the time it takes to go through the waterfall processes on these systems of record, that created this discontinuity. That's really why we've introduced the mobile first platform so that you can take the pieces of data you need from the backend, shard it, shadow it, put it in that system of engagement and then use that to interact and iterate with, quickly, with the mobile device. And that's what's allowed people to really move a lot faster than they have previously. So as John was saying at the top of the segment, it's very exciting, you know, it's a mobile's alluring. You just want to dive in, like you see, start building applications. Historically, I was complained about application creep, the application portfolio. We got to rationalize our application portfolio. Do you see, are any of the customers talking about? Is it too early? A backlash? Like application creep? Here's the way it impacts them. It impacts them because they start to see their ratings for the apps. Either in employee app stores or external consumer app stores, they see them start to drop because they're not able to keep up with the changes on the platform side. They're not able to iterate and add functionality as fast as they need to on the front end because they're dealing with a lot of challenges on the backend. And that's really a major part of our value proposition for the mobile first platform, is to take out all of that from their hands. Let us do the plumbing. Let us do the integration with the backend. Let us create that middle tier where you can iterate and move faster. Let us do the security between the device and the mobile first platform so that you can take your developers time and energy and focus on solving the business problem. And the customers that are really leading have been able to do that. That lets them work off this backlog of all the apps that are needed in terms of demand that's coming from the business. So as it relates to the Apple relationship, what's the, can you help us connect the dots which means you got IBM, you got Apple, you're talking about Apple providing the devices, you guys are providing that infrastructure and then connect us to the developer piece. Is that really where the rubber meets the road in terms of innovation? So absolutely, so the Apple teams obviously they make great devices. And so the partnership with Apple has been where we're working together to take some of our deep industry expertise, some of our knowledge of analytics, marry that with the device and create a set of mobile first solutions. In December, we released the first 10 of what will be over 100 mobile first for iOS solutions across a number of industries that really are targeted to make the employees life easier while solving a business problem and addressing those pain points using analytics and the full capabilities of the device. How about your non-IOS strategy? Where does that fit? iOS first platform? So from a platform perspective, we created a tailored version of the mobile first platform that ties directly back in to iOS. So native iOS, Swift developers can build the applications using all of their knowledge of the iOS platform and there's a very natural way to integrate back with our mobile first platform. And so that's been very well received as a way for organizations to build. It's basically the platform on which we're building these mobile first solutions. And so there are also individuals inside of companies that they'll want to do these things for their employees but they may have B2C type applications where they've got to support all of the platforms. And that's where the full mobile first platform provides that ability to link with all of the different major platforms in the world.  I can see some saying, okay, we want to go faster. IBM, great, you can help. We love the Apple relationship. I can see some others saying we dove in, we need help. We're a little over our heads, our strokes are not that good. Help us. We get that a lot. And so everybody's done some mobile development. It's so hot, everybody's done something. Maybe they haven't done it themselves and maybe they've hired some agency to build a mobile app for them. A lot of times that comes, it's sponsored by the business maybe not really well coordinated with the IT teams and they want to want you to gain control of those applications. That's why we took our portfolio and we came up with the SDKs. You can recompile those apps and then you'll get the analytics to be able to the ability to troubleshoot what's happening with the device to see how it's being used in the environment without needing to start over. So you can really bring in some of this management security and the integration capabilities that you need from where you are. And that's really what a lot of our clients have been very excited about because no one wants to kind of just throw away what they've done so far. They want to be able to progress and then add in capability as they go. So I got to ask you, do you like the term data lake or data ocean as a better metaphor for the future of big data? I mean a lake is bad, you can always go to the system of record but systems of engagement is about the front lines. It's about mobile. This is not my course set of expertise but what I'm excited about is what we have from IBM in this space. Being able to take a mobile system of engagement like what you have with cloud and use data works to be able to hook back to dash TV to get that refinery to cleanse all that data. That's why I'm so excited that mobile first is a part of the overall IBM story. You've heard about all the capabilities that we have with BlueMix to be able to run high-level cloud. So lake stream into the ocean. You could go there maybe with that. I think I'm all about the refinery. I'm all about cleansing the data and improving it because that's what gets you the outcomes that you need. Awesome, well first of all, congratulations on the success. Mobile is going to continue to be on the agenda items. It's not going away anytime soon. It's really harnessing everything else around it. It's the edge of the network. It is internet of things. I mean, it's right in the wheelhouse. A phone is approved. Mobile's mobile. Well, we're so excited. We feel like we've made such good progress. We're like a leader in 19 of the leading analyst reports and so we feel like we've made good progress. Our customers have got great deployments and so we just know that it's early and we've got so much more that can be done with mobile. You can bring a lot to the table right now. It's obvious, but share the last couple of seconds left of the segment. What's the vibe here at the event? For the folks, no, not here. What's it like? What's the vibe? What's the, are there people pumped up? What are they talking about? What are they most excited about? What's just a quick general sentiment of the event? The folks are really excited because they've started to see the results. They've started to see the impact. You know, we've got so many references and clients that are here speaking on our behalf. They've started to see, okay, well they were able to pull that off and they're seeing the success and they have this ROI and that's really what gets the people that I've spoken with really jazzed up because they know this is real and they know they can get some results right now. All right, Phil Bakalov, VP of Enterprise Mobile at IBM, congratulates inside theCUBE. We'll be right back after the short break. This is theCUBE, keep watching. I'm George Matthew, president and CEO of Altrix and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Dmitry Zemin. I'm the CTO and co-founder of StackStorm and you're watching theCUBE. Vice President of Product Strategy at QLogic. You're watching theCUBE. Hi, my name is Ben Jones, Senior Product Manager of Tableau Public, Tableau Software, you're watching theCUBE. Hi, this is Frostbough from Tableau and you're watching theCUBE. theCUBE is a live mobile studio. We bring it to events and we say we extract the signal from the noise. What we do is we get the absolute best guests that are at those events, we bring them inside theCUBE and we talk to them, we have a conversation. I think the difference with theCUBE is that the interviewers are active participants in big data. So it's less about trying to explain what big data is and more about relating what's going on. So we're a big data driven organization. We have a data science team that allows us to see not only what's trending broadly with the public but what's trending in very specific areas in our specialty in tech. That allows us to vector our analysis and relevance from our research and journalist team into everything that we do as a media company. We really wanna make it fun, exciting but more importantly, extract the data from the guests and extract that metadata and share it with the world so people can use that information to better themselves, better their companies, more importantly connect with other people to do more business, to define more about the technology and for us, this is the future. I do a lot of these types of interviews. I spend a lot of time with the press and theCUBE's a lot of fun. It's ESPN for tech. I think tech's evolved to the point where people wanna understand the personalities behind the technology, which probably wasn't that interesting 20 years ago and I think they made it a lot more entertaining, a lot more interesting as well as putting some technical meat on the bones as well. The value of an independent news organization at an event is that it allows our audience to have a perspective that's balanced, that it's not just the vendors talking to them, it's the community, it's analysts, it's technologists, it's customers, practitioners, so they get a full perspective that's unfiltered. The benefit of theCUBE is a place for conversations with people to connect with each other and to learn about things and it's a revolution in media. We look at the technology and the people behind it as tech athletes, those are the folks making the companies, making the technology, really creating the new value in this modern era and it's fun, it's exciting and more importantly, it's very social. These days, with social media, people looking to not just read articles, which are great and obviously SiliconANGLE does a lot of that as well, but being able to see high definition video, very intimate interviews with entrepreneurs and operators, innovators in the industry I think is really important. So the job you do in getting this out in a very timely way, I think is really important. We always know that your view is right until you hear a different perspective, so you're always interested and give me some neutral perspective, help me see it from a different light, and maybe ask a hard question or two that I might not have considered. In that sense, write that independent voice that's always ability to write, have sort of independent, audited sort of perspective right on the go, let's always just do it. theCUBE has been called the ESPN of tech and really our vision is to cover every event that's out there. We really truly want to be a global organization that is at every event, extracting the signal from the noise, being on the ground, giving our audience a sense of what's happening at that event, but also providing analysis and insight worldwide, literally, for every event that's out there. You know, I love it. I was actually telling John and Dave, every time I come back to theCUBE, you guys have new toys, new cameras, everything's getting bigger, so having been on it for several years, almost from the very beginning, it's always great to be back and you guys do an amazing job, so it's wonderful. It's about connecting with people, and that really is what it's all about, having the conversations in a very social, collaborative way, and that's what makes it so exciting when people are watching. Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015, brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, Joe Micos, Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon Research. It's exciting. It's live at IBM Interconnect, inside the Go Social, InterconnectGo.com, digital experience. The CUBE is here. The VIP is here. The executives are here. Again, we're bringing theCUBE action. Talk to the top players. Our next guest has been on theCUBE a bunch of times with EMC, Violin, Eric Herzog, VP of Storage Marketing at IBM. Just left Violin memory to come join and lead the IBM team. Congratulations. Welcome back to theCUBE. It's like New Jersey on the, they pulled the new sweater back on the Bruins Jersey again or it's not, it's the Rangers, I guess, New York. Meet the trade-off. Meet the trade-off deadline. So congratulations. Congratulations. Well thank you. As always, IBM loves to be part of theCUBE. And we want to thank you for working with us over all the years, Wikibon and everything you've done to help IBM Storage Systems Division. Yeah, so we've been tracking this. Edges coming up have been in multiple edges. IBM's had a rollercoaster day because it can go into a long list of where it's been, where it's going. But Jamie Thompson's just on. She just said, quote, we're serious about storage, billions of dollars of investments, zillion patents that take on a fresh focus.  What was their sales pitch to you? What got you excited to come in to IBM and help these guys drive this bus to their destination? Well I think the key thing is that IBM is sort of the understated member of the storage world. We have incredible technology, incredible customers, a great set of business partners across the globe. And we've sort of undersolded as a company. So as you remember back in the late 90s, early 2000s, the largest storage company in the world was IBM. IBM invented the disk drive. IBM was critical in the development of tape infrastructure. And now with software-defined storage with our spectrum release, our focus in all flash, and with our more traditional products, the DS8000, the store-wise products, emphasis on hybrid arrays leading with flash, we have a great opportunity to move the ball forward and reclaim what had been, for tens of years, really an IBM business in the market space. So we're going to work on that and move things forward. Take before I know these. No, no, no, no, I'm just taking the high-level questions, because I've only been involved in the storage group for about five, six years now. You've been watching the whole history. They seem to be doing really good things technically. They have a lot of chops, but they're inch by inch in a good, they do quality, moving the ball inch by inch down the field. They don't get credit for big moves. They have good technology. But now we're hearing big. So what's your take on this? Do you agree? What could they, what's your plan? What's your vision? You came here made a big career decision to come here. What's the big play for you here? With the idea, what's IBM's big play that got you excited to join your team? Well, I think the key thing is a recommitment to storage. A billion dollars invested in Flash, a billion dollars invested in the software-defined storage market space, continuing to invest in the traditional technologies, even the tape businesses. You know, from some of the analysts that do the numbers tracking, IBM is still number one in the tape space. And there's still an opportunity there. It's a large business. What's going to die for a tape or a spinning disk? No, tape's not going to die. We know that. Flash is hot. I mean, this is- Plus Flash is a winner. Mark my words. So the easy to your technology we've got, everything would dealt with our spectrum virtualized, the former sand volume controller, delivering enterprise class data services, not only to the IBM infrastructure that you just bought, but actually on your older legacy infrastructure because IBM with spectrum virtualized can virtualize that entire storage farm for you. Why not get a sync replication, synchronous replication, application consistent snapshotting, all from one console, whether it's IBM storage or your older heterogeneous technology. And IBM has done a mediocre job of pushing that technology into the market space and we're going to be much more aggressive in doing so. Well, so I want to ask you, so I mean, John's right, I got the history, I've watched it. IBM squeezed the R&D spigot for years in storage and you know, what that's like, you pay the price. And then, you know, made some acquisitions, AXIV bought TMS. And now it's taking the billion, I call it the billion dollar playbook. Let's put a billion dollars in software defined, let's put a billion dollars in clash, we understand how that works, we're committed. Okay, so you have sand volume controller, which was actually a bright spot in the R&D, right? That's worked out great.   Okay, so give me the IBM spin on that story. What's really happening there and where are you guys headed? Well, I think the key thing is on the all flash side in particular, which is a white hot market, flash is now at the same price of disk. And that means you've got to have the feature sets. You can't just walk in and say, hey, tier zero for that high performance SAP or Oracle workload. It's got to be now across the boat. We've got it in the edge. Zero, one, it's no longer niching, which means enterprise class data services with the latest release of the V9000, we have an integrated stack. You don't need a separate sand volume controller. The stack with TMS, the old TMS product, right? The, and the sand volume controller are now merged together in the V9000 family. You've got better performance metrics. You've got integrated enterprise class data services. When you move from tier zero into tier one and possibly even to the upper end of tier two, you've got to have those data services and IBM's through the older sand volume controller now spectrum virtualized is unmatched and delivering those data services. Now they're on flash and they're on flash with an integrated solution, not by the SVC and then put the 840 together. Now it's fully virtualized into integrated stack. Stack is critical, right? It's not just nice to have. Stack is critical. It is critical. Is it not? It is absolutely critical. You need to have that differentiation. You don't want to of course put all kinds of different appliances together and manage them separately, right? That's extra time and money for the IT team. And as you know, close to 40, 50% of storage these days in the enterprise being bought by line of business owners and app owners and they clearly just want shove it in and make it work. Which by the way is great for the software defined world as well our spectrum software launch which also was last week. We did two large launches last week. Okay, so how does your stack stack up to the competition? Well I think from the all flash array there's no close competitor. There's guys that have Ddupe. There's guys that have Ddupe with local replication. There's one of the largest competitors out there obviously one of the big boys in the industry. If you want to do everything we do with the V9000 you need to buy their base all flash array, then their recover point appliance and then their Vplex appliance to do everything that we can do with the V9000. So why would you put all those three pieces together? Loose parts flying in close formation. We get a tightly integrated home stack that integrates right up into the application layer with the V9000 on the all flash side. In the storage defined side we've got everything from protect. So we have the backup integration the archive integration. Again the same technology that's in the V9000 that's available as a software standalone software defined technology which allows them to use their existing physical server infrastructure as well as use existing storage infrastructure and buy just a software play. And that A is the way the world is going not just in storage but you've got software defined networking and other software defined technologies that are starting to take hold in the enterprise. So that launch allows us to execute on that strategy to again being a Californian don't fight the wave you ride the wave and we're going to ride the wave right to winning that surfing contest on the software defined side and on the all flash. I love waves, waves are on the ocean and the ocean's where the action is and so that you know, if you look at that wave what is that wave you're riding? Just flash, just software defined expand the difference between the two and what's the next wave behind that? So we see a couple of things. First of all we've also announced jointly with Cisco our versus stack technology and we will continue to focus on using that stack for a converged infrastructure play. We have talked about recently in the past about going to converge and then going beyond converged software defined storage allows you to move to converge and then into the hyperconverged marketplace. That's your hyperconverged play. You can use the software defined you can work with enough multitude of vendors that allows them to use off the shelf componentry by through a distributor or of course you could go to some of the big x86 vendors they could use our software create basically hyperconverged action take on some of the smaller startups that are trying to make a play in that market space. So I got to ask you, I asked Chairman Burton some questions and he did a crowd chat and asked me anything. I said what's the innovation, actually Ariana asked is our social engagement manager. What innovations are coming? He talked about in memory computing, real time apps, pretty obvious we know that's going around the corner. Data will be persistent from memory into server side flash. That's why they bought DSD, et cetera, et cetera and this is talking about the infinite address space concept. So real time, that's why I joke about the data ocean versus the data lake. Data lake's more batched, the warehouse is going to be smaller, slower. But when you're dealing with real time data, new types of data flying in the data tsunami or drowning in data as IBM sees clearly an opportunity. Customers are drowning in data. Absolutely, so we've got of course our scale technology spectrum scale, hundreds of petabytes of information that's available. It's perfect for big data analytics workloads or of course the old data warehouse, big data analytics to me is the new word for data warehouse. So whether it's a traditional data warehouse or big data analytics, whether that's a Hadoop infrastructure, a Mongo infrastructure, Cassandra infrastructure, we're ideal for that. If you're using the older Oracle or SQL or SAP or DB2 data warehouse, it's ideal for that technology as well. From the inline compute capability, as you're probably aware, all flash products are certified with SAP HANA. So if you go to the HANA certification table, you will see that all flash arrays are there. So one of the key things that's preventing some of the in-memory technology from taking off is of course the amount of physical server infrastructure, particularly DRAM you need and that's inhibiting it. That's a bottleneck or not. It's a cost bottleneck, it's a cost inhibitor. So now if you can go with a flash solution and that flash solution has almost a minimal impact on performance compared to DRAM, but much less expensive and have that be extensive of the original server DRAM cache into your all flash array with almost no performance hit, yet you dramatically reduce the hardware cost of getting into the space. It's all right to ask you a question, give you a breath there. On a kind of like a, outside the box conversation, like integrated stacks in the cloud, generate a lot of new opportunities. We just had a guy with mobile serif on talking about mobile apps and Dave was talking about, some apps are only used during like NCAAs. So we were bringing up this notion last night, Dave and I were talking about integrated apps. Most apps don't even share data, like even Twitter, Facebook, they hate each other on data. So like, you know, these kind of interoperable data models are emerging as a next opportunity. So if this integrated app concept happens, workloads will mix like currents in the ocean and what will happen is you'll see a new type of data sort of the tsunami of data. What is that opportunity like? That's beyond the data warehouse, that's beyond the systems of record. The amount of flash play, I mean flash plays a key role there because you don't have to make a zillion copies, you got to set up a metadata index. Yeah, flash is critical. That's awesome. Is that where the flash you see? So flash is in the traditional enterprise today. Tier zero, tier one and the upper end to tier two, it's at the same price of traditional enterprise upper end storage and the upper mid-range storage today. Flash is right there, okay. When you go to these concept of these incredible sets of merged infrastructure with large metadata, caches that you need, huge search engines that you need to do, all that can sit on the flash. And obviously now with the cost of flash with data reduction technology, such as our real-time compression, shrinking and being completely cost-effective, you could put a fair amount of these new, what I'll call these new world data structures or the merging of these data types onto all flash arrays. So it's critical because as you're putting that together, the last thing you want is the latency you see in a spinning media farm inhibiting the ability of these data types to work together. And so flash is critical in that infrastructure. You said new world data, so I love that term. So expand on that a little bit. You mean the confluence of this data thing in its own shapes. All these different data types coming together, right? Structured all kinds. Structured in a structured in a mixed configuration. Especially processed in real-time, manipulated and then integrated, right? So flash is critical there, and then obviously as these data types become larger and larger, okay? And you're starting getting exabytes and exabytes and exabytes and exabytes and having our spectrum scale technology allows you to use flash on the front side and be able to scale to the back and quite honestly, even in some of these areas, cheer it with our easy cheer technology right onto tape if that is something that- So spectrum scale is a data ocean product. Surf those big waves. It is. We are all about riding the waves and we will be the first to win the surfing contest in the storage business. So would you rather surf the ocean or lake? I mean Lake Tahoe's got some nice waves. So you wanted the longboard, is another big wave. John wants to know, data ocean or data lake? What's the better term? I actually would say it's a data ocean because the volume of data is growing so exponentially that when you think of a lake, even a big lake like the Great Lakes, I'm a native Californian, but I do know where the Great Lakes are. They still pale in comparison to the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean. So it is an ocean of data. It's growing exponentially. All data types, whether it's structured, whether it's unstructured, whether it's a hybrid. Speed, slow, tide pools, rip currents. I mean, it's a more better metaphor. A, flash, smooths out some of those rip tides. So that is a server infrastructure and cloud infrastructure is dealing with those data types, especially when you're going over the cloud. You are over the laws of physics over the network side. So when you land on the beach, you want the fastest possible storage solution and all flash or certainly hybrid arrays in the near term are what you need to have. Things that are just traditional spinning discs. So last week, the guy at Google, who's a tech geek, totally agree with you, is by the way, he said, if you can get your arms around the ocean, then you're, it's amazing, you're God, right? His name happened to be Eric Schmidt. His real name was Eric Schmidt. He wasn't a billionaire, but he said, he's in the data flow side of Hadoop, so he understands the large volumes of data. So what you're saying is, flash is that flexibility technology to smooth out those really powerful, potentially unexpected experiences. Well, remember what you're trying to do is, as those data types come together, you're processing the structured and unstructured data. And even with the power of today's server infrastructure and server farms, whether it be virtualized or unvirtualized, the problem is the enemy of all software is latency. And spinning disc has incredible latency, no matter when you short stroke it, even if you use some of the hybrids out there. So all flash is where the market is going. And in the short term, it's all flash and hybrids. And anything that's not a hybrid, really the customer should really think about what they're trying to do and why they're trying to manage with a technology that can't deliver and can't keep up with their new server and virtual server infrastructure, let alone what they're trying to do with cloud, be it private or hybrid. Right, it's just like, it's cheaper, but you got to be willing to go faster. And you need that speed. And again, all flash arrays today are basically certainly for zero one and at the upper end of the tier two and at the large global enterprises, it is at the same price. So there is no cost of moving. You know, it's interesting, it's moving fast. A year ago, I probably spoke like in 12-1-1, 15-1-1, 30-1, you know, roadshow type of thing, maybe 500 customers. Everyone I asked, who's got flash? Very, all flash, all flash arrays. Very few hands went up. It's changing just dramatically in the last year. Now it's like everybody's kicking the tires or actually putting in a production. So what do you see people doing with it? Obviously they're extending the life of their existing arrays with, you know, a flash front side, flash on the front side into tier and then tier it to. Right, okay, so that's happened. That's clued. They're reducing the number of cores that they need in database-intensive applications. Right. Cutting costs, moving faster. You hear people, some people talking about all flash data centers, right, maybe you heard that. We would see all flash data centers as coming into the foray this year. This year. This year, you're starting to see that. And again, I wouldn't say all flash all the way into the backup and archive tier clearly. But when I look at the primary storage tier for a larger global enterprise, thinking tier one for sure, tier zero where it's already been sitting and in the upper reaches of tier two and maybe even into all of tier two, given the cost structure of an all flash array configuration and for example, with our 9000V product, the ability to virtualize not only the existing storage infrastructure to optimize their investment in the past, tier off of that flash into what I'll call cheap and deep for certain functionality, but also when you go into zero and one and or sorry, when you go from zero to one and two, you better snapshot that data, you better replicate that data locally, better replicated asynchronous or remotely because earthquakes really happen in California and fire is still the number one cause of data loss other than in human beings and floods and all the other things that could happen in data center and the all flash arrays when they first came out were tier zero. So I was like, yeah, we use this, we'll use Oracle replication or we'll live without it and once you go into tier one and into the upper ends, you can't do that anymore. So enterprise data services which we have with our V product, we also have in our mid tier hybrid with of course with our store wise products, all those technologies are critical as flash be it a hybrid or clearly in the all flash space spreads its wings and takes more and more of the data center storage infrastructure. So everybody kind of gets this now.  There's nobody out there says oh, I don't really think flash is going to take off. Everybody's doing it. So my question is, is we probably talked about this before. Can the startups in the recent, you know, IPOs and the future IPOs, can they achieve what David Scott formerly of HP called escape velocity with all you big guys having flash strategies built out? So being a big guy but a guy who's also done seven storage startups, five of which have been acquired. You're qualified to answer the question. I can answer the question. So there'll be a couple that will hit escape velocity. The rest will falter. What'll happen in the tier one, existing tier one vendors like to call the big seven. What'll happen in the big seven is at least two of them will do a horrible job at it and their storage will decline. Two of them will do a great job and we think IBM is ideally positioned to do that right now. And it's proven it so far in our success in the all flash array space. And now with the V9000 and the 900 product we'll go to the next level of acceleration in our front. And obviously there'll be then three guys that'll do okay with it. And they'll be a player, they'll be around. There's just not enough seats at the table. I mean, if you're on the M&A side, if you don't make it public, I mean, it's the capacity. So what you'll see is a couple guys will go bankrupt since I've actually been there once in a startup. Thank God, not very often, but once of the seven. There'll be a couple guys that'll get acquired for low price depending on their value. I didn't even get one or two. That will get a good price with strong value. And then you'll get one or two that'll hit escape velocity. I mean, if you think about what happened in the backup space, who would have thought that Commvault would have hit escape velocity. And while they've had a couple rough quarters recently, you go back historically, no one thought Commvault was gonna make it. Look at them now. They've done pretty well. And so there'll be some other guys that do that will look at that. But I think that IBM is perfectly positioned in the software-defined space with everything we do, with our protection, with our tiering, with our virtual infrastructure, with our scalability to create these data oceans, not just the data lake, and with the all flash technology, and even in our traditional projects, switching everybody into a hybrid mode. All of those things position us to take advantage of these ways of flash, particularly all flash, but even flash in hybrids. And also this move to software-defined, which is attacking the data center, not just in storage, but in other areas like software-defined networking, for example. So this is the wave of the future. And again, IBM is on top of these waves. Historically, we didn't always do a great job with this. But we're there, and with these investments in a number of different areas, the acquisitions we've made, and just purely investing with our own software and hardware engineering resource to create fully home, tightly integrated solutions that attach to this application stack, we're there. And so we see a new era of IBM storage with what we're done in the last month, what we did last week, and what, of course, has happened since we've had new leadership with Jamie coming on board as the general manager of the storage division. So I've got to ask you that.  Software is the key value proposition. For many reasons, we don't want to go into too much detail. But bringing the systems and the software perspective to the storage, big iron, small appliances, hardware-focused kind of mindset, which is mostly storage in general, is a new change in the past couple of years. There's always been software, yeah, firmware, whatever, but real software, life cycle type stuff. So IBM storage is all about solutions. We're not a hardware company. We've got our software-defined storage, which will be software only, but even our existing products, the DS8000, the Storewise family. Storewise family is a tight integration of our sand volume controller, our Storewise technology, with our traditional hardware, into a full solution stack. And that's what's critical in storage. Because it's by solutions, not products. No one buys a product. And no one buys a family. Everyone buys solutions that meet the need of the data center, particularly meeting the SLAs of the application owners and the line of business owners. Remember, I've been around a long time. I know both of you guys have been around. Have you ever met a CIO who was a storage guy? I've yet to meet him. That's going to be now our cue. We will find one. That's a good mandate. So, okay, got to ask you. Now you knew the job. VP of marketing. What's your philosophy? Okay, share the world. Okay, you got the New Jersey on. You can put your running shoes on. You certainly can run right out of the box. Combine workout, pass. You're right in the field. Starting quarterback. VP of marketing. What's your plan? What are you going to do? Are you going to be more social? Are you going to do more stuff? You're obviously aggressive. What's just, what's the Eric playbook? What are you thinking about? So, first of all, we're going to leverage the IBM infrastructure. There's a strong infrastructure around social, mobile and cloud already that's been used by the other groups, the software teams, by the server divisions. We need to get on that train. We ourselves have been remiss. There's some of the stuff that we've put out to the field into our customer base and our client base. That's been a little speedsy and feedsy. It hasn't talked about application integration, solutions said it's been a little too hardware-centric. So, we're going to take a twist and be very solutions and application-centric and focused. Why is RRA the best product for SAP? Why is our best storage technology the best for DB2? Why is the best for hybrid and private cloud infrastructure? And we haven't done a good job of translating that stuff. We've done an okay job, but we're going to be more aggressive in positioning this incredible technology portfolio in the solution space because again, I've never yet met a CIO who ever started storage admin. So, it's all about meeting the application workloads, the SLAs, enabling their cloud infrastructure. How does storage make their mobile and social better? And guess what, it all sits on storage. And it sits on incredible gobs of storage. So, you've got to have that integration level and we're going to make sure that we talk about the things we're doing in all of those spaces.  Is there new opportunities to take advantage of these new meetings? Obviously, we're in this business too, so we try to manage that. You tweet, where do you see that? Is there meat on the bone there? Is there more of this bolt-on adjunct to existing programs? So, first of all, a lot of people who are not as old as me, which is almost 60, they're buying their technology in a new way. So, yes, you need a sales team to call on them, you need account reps, you need strong business partners. But as you guys know, especially since you're in this space, 50 to 70% of the research is done just by looking at blogs and Twitter feeds and going to the IBM website, friend references that they get from customers, right peer references, and it's all online. So we're going to optimize that. We've got a strong storage community online already involving our clients and our business partners. We'll continue to leverage that as we push forward and continue to push the envelope and do more and more in that space. And we've got a good start in that space to be honest with you. And IBM is a company beyond just our storage teams. Has done an excellent job in moving that world. We're going to move even stronger and harder in that space. And just saw as you expanding the organization, anything you're looking for for help? Well, right now I'm still assessing. I've been on the job for eight working days. So I've got to look and see what we have. We appear to have a pretty strong team. Needs to some tweaking again, mostly around the solution orientation, very strong at understanding the storage space. Now I need to twist that a little bit. How does that storage benefit that DB2 workload, that hybrid cloud workload? How does that benefit what someone's doing with mobile? That's the part we're doing okay with but we need to amp that up and we intend to do so. Did you inherit Spectrum? Did you, were you involved in that? I wasn't, I've only been here for eight days. I wasn't there yet. Good answer, we'll find out later. That's a good name, I actually like that. Do you know the reason why I came up Spectrum? No, I don't, I can see why. It's a spectrum of offerings. Protect, manage, scale, virtualize. So it's a spectrum of offerings. And I think that that was probably one of the key reasons but I'll have to check with my guys and get back to it. Competitive landscape, just give us your quick two cents. I mean, you mentioned it briefly with the startups, just on the big guys. I mean, how do you guys think you'll do, what do you think you'll need to do to be aggressive? So we're gonna wrestle them to the ground. As Dave pointed out, I get wrestling college. It's a street fighter. So we will wrestle them to the down. You know, IBM is up to the challenge. IBM has realized with all these investments, storage is a battlefield. Storage is not for the weak hearted. Storage is not for the faint. All areas of the IBM portfolio at a corporate level compete with plenty of competitors, whether that be DB2 competing with Oracle or SQL, whether that be, you know, the Z mainframe, although of course it's very much a dominant player there. Obviously with the open Linux and our power products, there's other guys in the space as well and we compete there. But, you know, from a storage perspective, it is the battlefield. Your position on hyperconverged infrastructure and also Oracle's engineered systems. Any comment on that? So we would see Oracle engineered systems as obviously competitor to the storage.  The good thing is with our all flash solutions, we have something that could go toe to toe with those sort of specialized plays. And there are some things that IBM has already previously announced in the converged infrastructure as well as with VersaStack that have some application integration. We're going to continue to push that forward. All right, Eric. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We have new IBM VP of Marketing for the storage group. Welcome back to theCUBE. Congratulations on your new job at IBM. Look forward to working with you and of course, we'll be keeping in touch. We are live in Las Vegas here on theCUBE, live in Las Vegas for IBM Interconnect, our special presentation. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break. This is a burrito made with chocolate, soybeans and apricots. What kind of chef comes up with this? A chef working with IBM Watson on the cloud. Ingredients are just data. Watson turns big data into new ideas. And not just for food. Watson is working with doctors and bankers to help transform their industries. Today, there's a new way to work and it's made with IBM. Location, location, location. Here's the location that matters the most. Here or here or here. It's wherever this is. To get customers to come here and stay here, you're going to need an app that connects to all your systems. So they can bank, shop, do what they need to do and you've got to do it fast before the competition does. It's tough out here. You better be on the right cloud. Today, there's a new way to work and it's made with IBM. Hi, I'm Andrew Kreitzer, a business operations manager at LinkedIn and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Chris Ellen, VP of Business Development for HP Big Data and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Stacey Slaughter, Senior Vice President of Communications for the Giants. I'm in the garden at AT&T Park and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Thomas Minnick, Business Intelligence Consultant within our works and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, my name is David Tischkart, Director of Partner Marketing at Cloudera and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Jim Yu, Founder and CEO of Bright Edge and you're watching theCUBE. So what's going on today? News or message. Email. Calendar updates. Most of us admit to being overwhelmed by informational work. That's why IBM created Verse. It uses powerful analytics to uncover hidden patterns in your email, calendars and social feeds. It continuously learns how you work and helps you prioritize the people and projects you need to focus on. There's a new way to work and it's made with IBM. You can bring back a lot of things from a trip around the world, but you can't always bring back customer data because many customers don't like it when their data moves around. Can I go now? If you're gonna do business globally, you need a cloud that can keep your data where it needs to be. Today there's a new way to work and it's made with IBM.  This guy could take down your entire company. Stay with me. On Thursday, a hamster video goes online. On Friday, it goes viral. A network choking phenomenon. Why do you care? He's on the same cloud as your business. The more hits he gets, the slower your business may get. Do you wanna share your cloud with a hamster? Today, there's a new way to work and it's made with IBM. Time on theCUBE, baby. Rock and roll. I think it's probably five or six times I've been on theCUBE now. Right, at first, the guys are just fun to work with. Pat, welcome back. Hey, always a pleasure to be in theCUBE. I am about a three-time veteran of being on theCUBE. I hope many, many more. Chad Sackets, Chad, welcome to theCUBE. Dave, John, it's great to be here, man. I keep coming back because great, insightful questions from John and from Dave. What face-melting action have you seen here at the event and I know there's a lot of it. It's a great vehicle to communicate with a broad audience, a lot of folks watch. Great to have you back. Good job. All right, Craig Nunez, VPA Marketing at HPStore. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. When people mention theCUBE, they're like, oh my God, I saw you on theCUBE and they're all excited about it. It's an experience, it's not just information. They experience kind of what's going on there. It's like real time, it's like they were there. That was like going to the gym. My pleasure. Boom, boom, boom. Gary I.V. Emmer, CEO of Symantec, and now CEO of Virtual Instrument. Great to have you on theCUBE. So for theCUBE to be here at a conference like this, it's got 15, 20,000 people and sharing that live around the world, that's consistent with the way the world is evolving. So it's a wonderful meeting. John and Dave are amazing. I don't know how they keep everything in their heads the way they do. It's a great format and we're obviously seeing that this notion of real time coverage and a real conversation is what's driving us as a company. I said very seriously when the questions and the comments that we hear from them and from all the different guests here are directly turned into the products that we build. Yeah, that was my first CUBE and I really enjoyed it. There was the rapid fire of questions. It made me think on my feet but they were very thought provoking and really got me going on analyzing the greatness of Arista and the greatness of theCUBE as well. John and Dave, the reason their approach works, they're not just guys reading down the question list. Right, okay, next one, next one. It's a conversation, right?  They're not gonna settle for the marketing hype and the BS and all that stuff that the industry throws around. Come on, you gotta hit them up on the HP question. A lot's changing HP, some turmoil at the top, obviously controversy. They're gonna hold you down to the real facts, compare you to the choices our users have and have you respond to it on the spot, right? Thinking real time and so that's real talk, not just kind of a paper interview, I think. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com and I'm here with Dave Vellante. We are inside theCUBE. theCUBE is our flagship telecast. We go out to the events, extract all the signal from the noise and share that with you and great guest lineups. We've got CEOs, CTOs, all the top executives, bloggers, thought leaders, venture capitalists. I'm absolutely stunned because I know it demands 100% attention for these guys to be up there talking to people about a wide variety of technology topics. I can't believe these guys can make it so many days in a row. So I'm wondering how long they're gonna go home and pass out for after this. But it was incredible. Just do a fantastic job. If you're not having a conversation, then you're very scripted and if you're scripted, then you might be getting the right words but you're often not getting the whole meaning and the whole depth of the conversation to the fullest extent. I think this is a heck of a lot more authentic. It comes straight from the heart and the brain. Sometimes you might forget to make some of your coins if you're not a real-time thinker but I think both from a participation and from a consuming point of view, it's much more real. Chris holds no punches. So I've been on theCUBE a number of times and I think the interesting thing about being in that particular venue in that format, they introduced me as, hey, half doesn't pull punches. Well, they don't either, right? They ask really difficult, uncomfortable questions sometimes and you can tell people and the positions and where they are in terms of what they're able or desires to speak of. You can tell where they are on that borderline between kind of just honestly answering questions versus kind of glossing over them. And I enjoy being there because I don't say I'm outspoken but I honestly answer questions with the full intent of being able to be respectful to the people that I bring solutions to, right?  So I like being asked tough questions. I like answering them honestly and that's a fantastic venue for doing it.  And this was my first time on theCUBE and I really got a chance to get to know John and Dave and they're really amazing guys. I mean, the knowledge that they come with, the topics that they could talk about, the people that they know and just bringing it all together in this live broadcasting forum, it's just fantastic. I mean, I just love it. I feel like a groupie or something, you know? Ha, ha, ha. In this environment, you know, the social environment, the real-time environment where we're in, right, people look through the marketing fluff very quickly and if it's not authentic, right, no, they don't trust it anymore. So in this environment, I think it's a growing trend. Yeah. I'm George Matthew, president, CEO of Altrix and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Dimitri Zemin. I'm the CTO and co-founder of Stackstorm and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Vice President of Product Strategy at QLogic. You're watching theCUBE. Hi, my name is Ben Jones, Senior Product Manager of Tableau Public, Tableau Software and you're watching theCUBE. Hi, this is Francois from Tableau and you're watching theCUBE. Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE and we're live at IBM Interconnect. We're at the Mandalay Bay. I'm really pleased to have Dion Newman, who's Vice President of Worldwide Z Marketing and also Ron Perry, who's the CEO of Radix International gentlemen. Welcome to theCUBE, it seems like just yesterday we were in New York City for the Z announcement. You know, it's great to be here. Thanks for having us. So that was a great event. We did it at Jazz at Lincoln Center. I'd never actually been inside. It was a phenomenal venue.  Excellent party, great announcement. Customers were pumped up. So you must have felt really good after the results came in on that show.   Very, very positive response. I think really a repositioning of what the platform's all about. Yeah, so, and Ron, we met actually at dinner before and we want to get into sort of the story, but from a customer perspective, what do you get out of an event like that? Well, I think we learned things, certainly, but beyond that, it helps us, it really reinforces the reasons we made the decision. You know, it was really just about three and a half, four months ago when we made the decision. We took the information we had, we went forward with it, and then to see all of the other implications. Very positive. So, mainframe cycles, a lot goes into it. I think hundreds of patents. Yeah, that's a lot of them, just a lot of years ago. 500 patents, just as part of this announcement, it's mind-boggling, a huge percentage of the customers running Linux, so it's the theme on open. So what does this announcement, this Z13 announcement, what's it mean for IBM's customers and IBM as a company? Well, I think, you know, let's sort of start at the beginning. This is a totally new system designed from the customer side. We spent about a billion dollars yet developing this new generation system. And, you know, it's really been over about five years. You know, these cycles, you know, we're in development of not just next generation, but the one after that. You know, we work with probably 60 clients in our leadership council who help prioritize where we invest and what we build. And it became pretty clear to us sort of two and a half, three years ago that there was this change going on driven by mobile technology. That mobile and the internet are things we're gonna drive massive transactional growth. And so this system is really built for, you know, that mobile scenario. But the other thing which is different here I think is the thing that's really resonating for clients is for the first time it's practical to do your analytics where you're doing your online transaction processing. We're bringing that together. And, you know, that's a game changer. You know, that really allows you to get to real-time analytics. It allows you to deliver better personalization in those mobile apps, better insight. And I think that's one of the things that's really exciting clients. Let me hit the other thought here, which is you mentioned, you know, Linux and you know, the take up of Linux. You know, on this new Z13, we can run 8,000 VMs on a single frame. You know, we just had a client, CCOV, the largest credit union in Brazil, 2.5 million clients. And that's saving 1.5 million dollars a year just on the energy bill. Little on the software savings that they're getting through consolidation of their servers. They had about 400 servers. They've consolidated all that up onto one Z system. The savings are phenomenal. So Z's alive and well. I want to dig into Ron's story now a little bit. I look at you as largely a data company. So you talk about analytics and transactions coming together. Talk a little bit about Radix. Let's remind our audience what you guys do. Sure. Radix is a company that provides a softwares of service to airlines. And that service really is airline reservation systems. So it's the core of the airlines distribution. And what we're doing is selling our services to airlines. So we're not a travel agent. We're not an intermediary for travel agents. We're providing the core systems to the airlines. We have about 40 of them all over the world on five continents. The vast majority are in the developing world. And if someone is flying one of our airlines, if they make a booking at their travel agent or they go online to make a booking or they check in with that airline, it all comes back to our computers in Orlando, Florida. Everything's handled there. So what I didn't realize before we spoke that night is how arcane the system is. When you get a ticket and you ticket on a different carrier, the data and information flow is so not real time. And the ability to monetize that information accurately and provide ancillary services around it, it really didn't exist before Eradics, right? That's what we're looking at. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, we implemented the first graphical interface, internet-based system back in the mid-90s, 95. And you really have in the industry two types of airlines right now. You have one type that uses a traditional business model. They have e-ticketing. They basically are dealing with paper tickets with their virtual so you don't see them. But the flow is the same. It's a very strange flow because a paper ticket had to be in one place at a time so we have an engine that simulates a paper ticket. It's like in the old days when people would just take their brochure and make a website out of it. Absolutely. We put our brochure up in a website. Then you have another type of airline that is purely ticketless. It's just an electronic transaction. It's just like booking a hotel or booking a car. We're somewhat unique in that we support both for one airline. So certain things they may want to distribute in a ticketless fashion, others using a traditional model. Now, when you started Radix, how long ago? We started in 1993. 93, you know a lot about mainframes. Yeah, my background was mainframes. Long history mainframes. And you chose to start on different infrastructure, non-mainframes, sort of so-called open infrastructure. Exactly. But if I understand it, you've swept the floor of that infrastructure now and are moving, have moved to a Z environment. Well, if you were to look at the early 90s, what you would have seen was communications was expensive. You had relatively little bandwidth available. And the degree to which someone was moving from mainframes to servers, basically we're looking at local area mainframes for place with local area servers, local area networks. And so early to mid-90s, we were still kind of in that frame. And software on the mainframes were very expensive. It was a very different world. And so we chose to develop something internet-based Windows front-end at that point and really attempting to build in a very different way. What we've seen though is building out with servers, you wind up getting to a point where the benefits begin to diminish because as you add more and more servers, the complexity increases. And you wind up with all of this multiplicity of multi-vendor components, constantly getting changes being made to them by their manufacturers. And then you're trying to manage that as if it's a single entity, very, very hard. Now you have a lot of custom code that you've developed on this. Oh yeah, we have many millions of lines of custom code. You've had to port that over to a Z environment. And so I think back to my days of consulting with large mainframe customers and one of the challenges that they always had was that if they had a lot of COBOL code, they couldn't, they had to freeze the code, but they didn't want to freeze the code. If they didn't freeze the code, they were in big trouble. All right, because by the time they migrated. So there was this endless loop. And so they said, all right, forget it. It's too complicated. You didn't run into those problems. So why? No, actually that was one of the most amazing things. Going from mainframes to servers was an 18 month to two year project, rewriting code and the rest. Now we're taking, we're running on Linux on the servers and we're running on the database running on Linux. And so we're just loading in more servers. They just happen to be inside of a Z box. And so instead of provisioning all those individual servers with all the wires, the routers and everything else, we're just duplicating or replicating the database and turning on the standpoint. This strikes to the heart of the Z strategy that was initiated many years ago. Right. Talk about that and why it's so important. So 14 years ago, we put Linux on the mainframe. It was a side project in Burblingham. They called us up and said, hey, we've put Linux on the mainframe. Why did you do that? Good idea. And so fast forward now, there's over 30 million MIPS that are out there from the capacity standpoint for mainframes. We're at a point where 27%, eight million MIPS now are Linux. 27% of all mainframe capacity is now Linux. Now that Linux is not a special mainframe Linux. It's Linux. It is Linux is Linux. And by the way, Java is Java. There's another six million MIPS. Some 20, 22% of all that mainframe capacity, which is Java. So we actually have the system where basically 50% of all mainframe workload now is either Java or Linux based. And that's bringing all sorts of workloads onto the mainframe. We see a lot of clients consolidating, lifting up big server farms and just pulling them in and dropping them on a mainframe. And the balance of those workloads are stuff that works. You don't want to mess with. It's secure, it's fast. I'm not going to touch that. So you're seeing new growth as a result of Linux, Java, modernization of the platform. Yeah, we're seeing in excess of about a 30% caga on Linux growth on the platform. We see big growth there. And the arguments are several. The first is you get the reliability of the Z system. The second is huge software savings. We're seeing consolidation down. We're able to probably on every IFL, we're able to bring across 40, 50 VMs on a single integrated facility for Linux. The maintenance becomes much easier. You don't have people running around with fixed packs and sort of fixing things that break and plugging new wires in and new routers in and connecting things up. It all happens and all of the management can be done within that single frame. Each space savings, big energy savings. So we're on, okay. So people say, well, aren't mainframes expensive? What are you finding? Well, actually, I mean, we approach things basically on a lease basis, typically. When we look at a three year horizon. And if you look in that three years and say, okay, we're going to buy this one box and we're going to, you know, we're going to spread out the cost over three years. And then you figure there'll be some additions during that time, but all inside the box. And you compare that to a server form where you're constantly adding servers and you're constantly dealing with the changes that come. And the servers that you added at the beginning may be from the same vendor, but they may be very different two years later. And so you're dealing not just with a multiple of your vendors, but you're at different versions and the rest of these servers, different internal drivers and the rest. You start adding that up. The expense is significantly greater. Well, that, something that space of the industry, the part that you sweep in the post, they're all sort of building what's so-called convert systems trying to build mainframes. Right, that's exactly right. Let's do it yourself, mainframes, no question. So I mean, what do you make of that trend, right? You see that coming in, you say, okay, that's validation, but you just got to compete with that. Well, let's, I mean, Ron, if you look at, you know, I went to ask you to talk financials, but if you were going to estimate your, you know, savings over that three year period, like what would be your estimate? In terms of actual dollars? No, in terms of percentage. It goes 35%. 35% reduction in total cost of ownership between what we have projected with the server farms and what we at this point are seeing with the Z. And some of the things were surprises. So for example, labor cost, it is so much easier to manage a Z than it is to manage a complex server form. And I mean, it's like fighting brush fires, getting reliability out of a server form. You're constantly dealing with little different things happening that you've got to face. Any time we've done a lot of TCO work in our day, we all have, obviously, the big nut is always labor. It's a very labor intensive business, the IT organizations. So it comes from labor savings. That's right. How do you quantify that? Is that a redeployment of labor? Do you not hire new people as a result of that? Do you actually reduce FTEs? Well, we're not going to reduce FTEs, but we are, there are hires we're not going to make and that's fairly easy for us to project because we knew what our plan was. We are redeploying some of our folks to areas that we wanted to address that we couldn't and that now we'll be able to. But labor really is just one piece of it. Where else? Well, power. So the total power of the Z right now, power consumption is roughly a third of what the servers are taking and that it's replacing. Okay, and we have our own data center at our headquarters. We also use space at a co-location center. The co-location center charges for power. So that's a significant factor when you're looking and then space, you know, I mean, as we grow, we had projected taking significantly more space. Now the space is inside the box. Well, what's your take on cloud? Well, I talked to a lot of CEOs and they said, I just want to outsource the whole darn thing. Well, I mean, I think that the logical point of delineation is the API. So from the API back, API database and so on data warehouse and all of our messaging, all of our payment processing communications and so on, that'll be the main thing. Anything in front of that, what I've been referred to as the systems of engagement in the cloud. Now we've already dabbled a little bit with the cloud but ultimately our plan is to move everything on the front end to the cloud. For us, it's very practical. We have airlines all over the world. If we can move the hosting of those systems and engagement close to those airlines, we can reduce the latency. Reduce the latency, you shorten the transaction time. You shorten the transaction time, you reduce the load on the systems of records. So in thinking about this nice 35% TCO savings, but if I compare that to what you just described as the business value, I would think the business value would deliver telephone numbers relative to the cost savings. Is that a fair assessment? I'm not sure I quite understand. The value that you're getting out of the reduced latency and productivity of the business and the dollar value that that delivers is I would think much greater. It's pretty substantial. Then the cost savings. Yeah, no question. I mean, when you start looking at increasing the performance, so much of what we see now is somebody with a cell phone who is trying to find out, am I onboard that flight? Did I get my seat upgrade? Checking in and doing any number of other things, but particularly when you get to the buy side where they're making the initial purchase, that's the difference between getting a booking or not. And since we charge a transaction fee, we're really just a large virtual airline that has 40 fulfillment partners all over the world. We want them to grow. We want them to get as many bookings as they can possibly get. And if the system is slow, there are fewer bookings. So the revenue side, that's not even taken into that TCO discussion. What more can you tell us about mobile? Let me actually start with the DM. Mobile's a big trust. IBM has a company, been specifically the Z Group. Talk a little bit about mobile. I want to understand, Ron, how it's affected your business, but what's the mobile trust? Well, at the end of the day, the new battleground is client experience. It's about being available always, always on. 24-7, 365, when I reach my firm, when I get out of bed and check my bank balance, or I decide that I want to buy something, if the site's not available, I'm going to go somewhere else. So there's a number of things that we see. You need speed. That's probably the first thing. You know, we expect that in one second or less that we'll get the response we're looking for. So when we go to that app, we hit the button, we want speed. Secondly, availability, that 24-7 that I was talking about. Then you start talking about differentiation as you deal with me. So the demographic of one. So think about personalization. And that's where this analytic story sort of comes in and why we brought the analytics together with the transaction speed, because you want to personalize the information. You treat me as a single customer who's got a history with you, who's got particular likes or dislikes in the travel industry. You know, maybe I like hotels downtown.   You know, maybe I have all of these preferences. Treat me as a customer. You don't treat me as some random person who got on my website. So personalization is really important. And then security.  So security, you know, matters here as well. So one more I want to give you is scalability. So I heard this great story about this bank in Australia and their marketing department deployed this app and I'll tell you a little bit about it in a second. But the backend guys, the guys in the glass house, they suddenly saw spikes on the system on Sunday night and they could not work out what was going on. Now they're running a Z which automatically just, you know, move more resource, you know, and manage the spike.  And so all of these people watching TV, you know, watching this high rating, you know, whatever the show was, we're sitting there shaking their phone and suddenly there were tens of thousands more transactions running through, you know, doing account balance checks.  So, you know, what we focus on in Z is delivering that performance so that it's feed. You know, we can do 30,000 transactions per second or two and a half billion a day. That's like a hundred cyber Mondays you can do on one of these Z13s. We're focused on availability, that's always been a hallmark of our platform, the best security in the industry, which is again a hallmark of Z. And then, you know, bringing this analytics in, that's about personalization. So, you know, we think we've designed something for the modern sort of digital economy and, you know, we think it's going to be very successful. Yeah, you're hitting a lot of those trends. I want to come back to the mobile piece and talk in the context of your industry. Your customers, they've gone through some tough times in the past decade, right? With fuel prices going through the roof. But now, they've seemed to rationalize their cost structures. Fuel prices have dropped dramatically and you're seeing the airline stocks are booming. All right, things are good. Now you have also mobile as a tailwind. The economy is obviously doing better than it was five years ago. What does that mean for your customer's business and obviously ultimately yours? Okay, what mobile means is massive additional demand on the systems of record, massive. And I'll give you a statistic. Okay, airlines talk about look to book ratio. So if you were to go back when bookings were made through the call center, the rule of thumb was three to four calls for one booking. So look to book ratio, let's say four. Today, two things are driving a massive look to book ratio. One is mobile, the other is the online travel agency. And the combination of those two on a typical day, we will see 200 or 300 looks to one book. On a sale day, it'll get to 2,000, sometimes more. We had one airline a few years back that gave away a million free seats in India. They had 70 million availability requests, which is a look. They got 85,000 bookings that day. So it's killing the normal ratios in your business. No question. But it's driving business to the room. And it's totally unpredictable because the difference is with mobile, it's unconstrained. When somebody had to go to a computer and sit down somewhere, that limited them in times of access. Now they're standing in a bus line, they're pretty much anywhere, and they're using our systems and spawning hundreds and thousands of transactions. This is a great story. So it just really underscores the tension in your business, how you can put it in infrastructure that doesn't matter. That's a big theme of IBM's at the show. Infrastructure matters. I'm an infrastructure guy, so I always help get matters. But so, it really matters when it doesn't work, say that. Yeah. So people notice. But your business would be quite a bit different without this transition. You'd have to pour a lot more, I'm hearing it, right? A lot more people. You'd have to deal with a lot more security issues. You'd have to spend a lot more money. Yeah, absolutely. That would be taking away from an opportunity that you see as a CEO. That's what you care about. Yeah, no question. Plus it creates a competitive advantage for us. People just intuitively know the mainframe is more reliable. They know it's more scalable without looking at any of the numbers. And so it's positioned us very differently. They have modern software running on a rock solid base. Well, Ron, it's a great case study, bringing that analytic piece into your business with the transactions, the volume. Deon, I'll give you the last word. What's the big themes that you want people to remember? I mean, you touched on a lot of them. We're here at Interconnect. We've got all kinds of action going on in cloud and mobile and analytics. So what's the final message? So I've talked a lot about mobile and I've talked a lot about analytics and we talked about Linux consolidations and a little bit about cloud. But there are a couple of other things which are worth mentioning, which are new news. We've done a lot around software pricing, really game-change stuff. So we've brought out what we call ICAP or it's basically containerized pricing for incremental workloads that co