Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017, our third year covering Informatica and more to come. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE theCUBE. My co-host, Peter Bursh, head of research for SiliconANGLE Media as well as general manager of wikibond.com. Check out the great research at wikibond. Some great stuff there on IoT Cloud, big data, great stuff. Of course, go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the coverage. YouTube.com slash SiliconANGLE for all the CUBE videos. Our next guest is Bruce Chisholm, board member of a lot of private companies, also special advisor at Informatica. You're on the board of Informatica, no? Or- Executive chair. Executive chair of Informatica, not only special advisor, executive chair. Welcome back, good to see you. Great to be here. You were on last year, great to have you back. One of the popular videos Jerry Held was on yesterday. Look at some board insights. So first question is, when do you go in public?  Got you. Warms you up and then, no. I mean, the performance is doing well. Give us a quick update on it. Company's doing well. Q4 was a good quarter, Q1 was a good quarter. I think we will be positioned to do something late 2018, early 2019. A lot depends on how the company continues to do. A lot depends on the market. The private equity investors are in no hurry, but it's always nice to have that option. So it's one of the things we, yeah, great option. Doing well, we heard that also from some of the management. We got Anil coming on. We'll press him on some of the performance side, but always had good product shots. We talked about it last year, but the industry's going through a massive transformation. You've seen many waves over the years. The waves are hitting. What's your perspective right now? I mean, it's a pretty big wave. You've got to get the surfboard out there. There's a set coming in. What's the big wave right now? Data is driving every transformation within every organization. Any company that is not using and taking advantage of data will be left behind. You look at how companies like Amazon and Google and now a lot of our customers like Schwab and Tesla and others, the way they're using data, that will allow them to continue to either be successful in the case of a Schwab or be a disruptor like somebody like Tesla. Fortunately for us at Informatica, we are helping to drive that digital transformation. One of the things that I always observed, younger than you are, I've only seen a few waves in my day, but in the waves that were the most, I think impactful in terms of creating wealth and opportunity and innovation has had a cool and relevant factor. Meaning, if you go back to the PC days, it was cool and relevant. You go back to mini computer, cool and relevant and it goes on and on and on and certainly internet, cool and relevant. But now, you mentioned Tesla. I'm test driving one on Friday and my kid's like, don't buy the Audi, buy the Tesla. What's with my kids? So it's a cooler, it's a spaceship, it's cooler than the other cars. Or an iPhone on wheels. A computer on wheels. Cool and relevant. Talk about what is the cool and relevant thing right now because you talk about user experience. I mean, that's one. Data's changing it. So how is data being the cool and relevant trend? Can you point to some things that? If you look at what's happening from the chip on up, everything, everything will be intelligent. And I hate to use the term internet of things but the reality is everything will have intelligence. And that intelligent information will be able to be taken advantage of because of the scale of the cloud which means that any company will be able to take information data, analyze it on the cloud and then use it to do something with. And it's happening now. Fortunately, Infamanica sits right in the middle of that because they're the ones who could rationalize that data on behalf of their customers. Because there's going to be a lot of it and somebody needs to govern it, secure it. Can you consider them an enabling platform? Absolutely, absolutely. I was joking, we just went through a rebranding exercise and it's kind of cute, we have a new logo and it's kind of bold and sleek and it shows we'll have a leader but it's a logo. But it's really around the messaging. We are finally getting across that we are the ones unleashing the power of data. That's what Infamanica does. We just never really told anybody about it. We were very product focused, not really helping customers understand how uniquely positioned the company was. And it's also, you guys have done some things. Let's just go back and look at the private, going private, brought a new management team, have product chops again. We've talked about that in previous years, last year in particular. It's okay, you got the wind at your back. Now you got Sally in as a CMO. Now you got to start being a humble braggart about the cool stuff you're doing. So which is marketing basically. But now it's digital. So what's the board conversation like you say? Here's, go, go build the brand. So first of all, being private is great because we get to do things you couldn't do as a public company. Where a lot of our customers want to buy the products and solutions via subscription that has huge impact to the P&L, especially in the short term, cash flows fine. So the PE guys are going, okay, it's great because we'll come out of this as a better company and our customers like it because that's the way they want to buy products. So that helps a lot. The conversation at the board level has been, wow, we're number one in every category in which we participate in everything from big data to cloud integration to traditional on-premise to real-time streaming and data security. By the way, you're only one of three vendors in the Google general availability of Spanner which went out yesterday. We covered that on SiliconANGLE. We're number one there. We had AWS speaker conference. We had Azure speaker conference. All of the cloud guys love Informatica because we are the ones who are uniquely positioned to deal with all this data on behalf of their customers. As a private company, we're able to take advantage of that spend some extra money on marketing. You know, a lot of our customers know about us but a lot more should know about us. So part of coming out, having a new logo, having a new digital campaign, changing the website that costs money, but as a private company we get to do that because the fruits of those efforts will end up occurring a couple of years down the road which is fine. So let me see if I can weave those two thoughts together and what I thought was an interesting way. Given that increasingly a lot of the data is going to be in the cloud and that's where the long-run analysis is going to be required that means a lot of the tools are going to have to be in the cloud. Amazon Marketplace is going to be a place where a lot of tools are going to be chosen. People are going to go into the Amazon Marketplace and see a lot of different options including some that are free. They may not work as well but they're free. You guys, what happens with marketing and what's happening with that kind of a trend is you need to bias customers to choose tools that are actually going to work to serve or to solve the problem or to do the work that they need them to perform. And so what Sally Jenkins CMO has done with this new branding is introduce the process of how do you bias more customers to choose the right tool to do the right job. Does that make sense to you? It makes absolute sense, free is good but be careful what you ask for. Sometimes you get what you pay for. You're talking about enterprise data. You want it to be governed. You want it to be secure. You want it to be accurate. Now there's laws coming out where you have to do it. You look at GDP, PR in Europe, the privacy issues. You look at what's happening with Facebook or what was reported today with France and how they're not happy with Facebook's privacy behaviors. It's an issue. It's an issue for anybody who does business anywhere, especially if you're a global company and you do business in Europe, you have to worry about corporate governance, data security, data governance, data security. That's infobanica. The other thing is while there will be some customers who will say, I'm going to AWS, there will be more customers who will either say, I have some legacy systems, then I'm going to leave on premise and new projects will be in the cloud. Or they're going to say, I'm moving everything to the cloud but I want to be held hostage by one cloud provider. And they're going to go with Amazon and Azure and Google and maybe Oracle and and and. And again, because infobanica is Swiss, we're able to provide them with a solution that allows them to accomplish their data needs. Well, congratulations on the performance. I want to get that out of the way but I want to ask you a specific question on kind of the historical holistic picture of infobanica. Going back, what were the key bets that you guys made? Because you guys sit around and you have the private equity now coming into the table. They have expectations but at the end of the day, you got to build a business, right? What were the key bets that is yielding the fruit that we're seeing? The number one bet was that the company had great products and a great R&D organization. We believe that and fortunately we got it right because if you don't have great products and passionate R&D organizations around the world, you can't make up for that. It doesn't make a difference how much you spend on marketing at least not in the business that we're in. So that was number one bet and that proved to play out well. The second thing was, this was a company that had done so well for so long that it never needed to change their business processes to behave like a billion, two billion, three billion, four billion dollar company. Many of their business processes were like that of a $200 million company and that's easier to fix. So things around back end, IT, legal, finance, go to the market, marketing, sales. And that's a risk from an investment standpoint. That's correct. So that's what we believed we were right and where we've been spending most of our energy and effort is helping the company through the new management team improve their business processes and they go to the market. So we had a critical analysis yesterday during our wrap up session and one of the comments I made, I want to get your reaction to this was, although impressive you're number one in all these gardener magic quadrant categories, but that's an old scoreboard. If we're really living in digital transformation, those shouldn't really be a tell sign for what the performance of the new KPIs or the new metrics are. And so we were pontificating and analyzing what that would be. Still unknown when to see it, but Peter had a good point. He said, in the day it's customer wins. Yeah, that's what I was, that was my reaction. It's like at the end of the day, all that matters to the customers. What's the scoreboard look for customer wins? I know you were at the executive summit they had yesterday at Intercontinental right around the corner. I had a chance to meet some of them at dinner in some conversation, but I want to get your perspective. What is the vibe of the customers? What are those customer wins? And how does that translate into future growth for Informatica? Any customer who's looking at data, data management strategically is going with Informatica. There are a number of competitors that we have who try to compete with Informatica at the product level and they end up doing okay through pricing, through better sales tactics, but when we have the opportunity to speak to the chief data officer, the CIO, the CEO, they go with Informatica. It's the reason why Tesla went with Informatica on their project where they're trying to tie together the auto business with the solar business, because if they get to know both sets of customers and are able to sync that up, one plus one will be greater than two for them and that's why they did that deal. Or it's why Amazon has chosen our MDM solution for their sales operations. So you look at leading companies who are able to look at the enterprise level, at the strategic level, they are going with Informatica. That's why we know we're winning. So Bruce, give us three sentences. What is strategic data management? Strategic data management is being able to take reams and reams of data from all different platforms, traditional legacy, big data, real time solutions, and data from the cloud, and be able to look at it intelligently, use artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to analyze that data in a more intelligent way and then act on it. So two questions on that point. I was going to ask you about the AI washing going on in the industry. Every event now is like, oh my God, AI, we got AI. That's not really AI. What is AI?  But what's your thoughts on how customers should look through the lens of BS to say, wow, that's real AI or real augmented intelligence? It doesn't do anything. That's the ultimately question that a chief data officer or a CIO or a CEO is something changing because of the artificial intelligence being applied. In the case of Informatica, we announced a AI platform called Clare, Clare of Orients, Artificial Intelligence. What is Clare? It allows you to develop solutions like our Enterprise Information Catalog where an organization has thousands and thousands of databases. It's able to look at the metadata within those databases and then over time keep disclosing more and more data appropriate to the information that you're looking for. So then if I'm an analyst or a business person or a marketing person or a sales person, I could take action on the right set of data. That's true artificial intelligence. Bruce, I want to get to one final point as we get way winding down here. Again, you've seen many ways, but I want to talk about the companies that are trying to get through the transition of this Transformation Informatica. Certainly clear the runway. They've got some things to work on, certainly brand building. See that as air cover and maybe rising tide will float a lot of boats in the ecosystem, but there are companies where they've been in the infrastructure business and the cloud is one big infrastructure. It's selling boxes and whatnot. Other companies have traditional software models download, whatever you want to call it on-prem license is not subscription. They're working hard. Your advice to them if you are on their board or as a friend, what do you say to them? What do they got to do to get through this? And how should customers look at who's winning and who's losing in terms of progress? The world of enterprise computing is moving to the cloud. Legacy systems will remain for a while. They need to figure out how to take their legacy solutions and make them relevant to the world of cloud computing. And if they can't do that, they should sell their company or get out of business. And certainly data is the goal, it's the lifeblood of an organization. And the organization, even in Informatica internally, we're using our own intelligent data platform to do our own marketing. Sally Jenkins is working closely with our CIO, Graham Thompson, on working on solutions where we could help better understand what our customers want and need so we could provide them with the right solution leveraging our intelligent data lake. Bruce, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insight. Again, you've seen a lot of ways. You've been in the industry a long time. You have great board presence as well as other companies. Thanks for sharing the insight and the data here on theCUBE. A lot of insights and analytics being extracted here and sharing it with you. Certainly we're not legacy. You don't need to sell our business. We're doing great. If you're not making the transition, good advice, thanks so much. Bruce Chisholm inside theCUBE here. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. Stay with us for more coverage after the short break.


Web 3.0, a fully decentralized internet built on the blockchain. Some say it is a far-fetched fantasy or even a scam. For others, it is the foundation of a new digital age that will unlock trillions of dollars in value. I would say today, no one can support a billing use, but no chain, no ecosystem. This industry still has 10x potential. Li Jian, CEO at Harmony, believes that connecting all existing blockchains is the only path towards the internet of the future. You should be able to move assets very easily from one chain to another chain with good prices, with good rates and very fast. How far are we from the creation of a decentralized internet? And what would it take to onboard the first billion users on Web 3? Welcome to our latest Cointelegraph interview. So I would like to start the conversation with a provocative question. One of the slogans of Harmony is one chain to rule them all. That seems to be quite in contradiction with the principles of interoperability and decentralization that should be at the foundation of the ideal of Web 3. So can you explain to us this discrepancy? Yeah, actually, I would like to first say that that's a community meme. It's not an official project slogan, but because we have the token Harmony 1, we actually have a lot of great taglines around the word one. And we don't say this as a project slogan, but we do think that we're one chain to bridge all other chains to bridge, whether it's Ethereum, Bitcoin. Our Ethereum bridge has been launched for the last year, more than a year, and we have bridges to Binance Smart Chain, to Terra, to a few other projects as well. And actually, our goal is to bridge all the layer one blockchains with us. So we're a layer one, but we think that the future is multi-chain, right? And it's cross-chain that you should be able to move assets very easily from one chain to another chain with good prices, with good rates, and very fast. So now let's get into the plans of Harmony for Building Web 3. So in a blog post that I recently read, you said that in 2026, Harmony is planning to become a unifying Web 3 platform. So can you expand a bit on this thought and tell us what you mean by unifying Web 3 platform? I think looking forward for the next four years, we still think that adoption, blockchain adoption is really at 1%. If you think about how many truly people are custodering their own funds using their own wallets, using blockchain every day, less than 1% of the world's population as a whole, right? And so the next four years is really about continuing the journey of keep building the infrastructure, keep building the ecosystem. Web 3 is just the catch-all word for blockchain, for decentralization, for the idea that you own your own beta and you own your own money. And so we want to be the platform that allows people to, allows the next billion users to come into the space, right? I would say today, no one can support a billion users, no chain, no ecosystem. But it requires innovation on the technology level. It requires bridging to other chains that we can keep making this infrastructure layer easy for whether it's NFT, games, DAOS, join in, DeFi, all of the above that you've been hearing about, which we just call the metaverse, all of that together. So that's the vision. The unifying Web 3 platform is a platform that allows the next billion users to come into Web 3. So I guess that one of the main challenges facing blockchain technology nowadays is the so-called blockchain trilemma. So the trilemma of scalability, decentralization and security. So each protocol comes up with its own solution for this problem. What is the harmony solution for the blockchain trilemma? Yes, so great question. And that's that's actually a key point because everyone has to choose certain design and tradeoffs. So what we've chosen is sharding and proof of stake. So these are these are not new ideas, by the way. These are ideas that have been around the Ethereum 2.0 design and community ever since, I would say, 2015, 2016, right? So what we've done is put those the best research into production and actually launched the first sharded and proof of stake. One of the first sharded proof of stake mainnet back in 2019. And it actually works really well because of those reasons and we'll continue to make it better.  So I would say that we're probably just even there's still a long story about sharding and proof of stake that we can continue to make it better and continue to allow the protocol to scale. So that's interesting because it's widely known that the trilemma basically forces protocols to sort of sacrifice one of these three components. So either security or decentralization or scalability for the sake of the other two. But in your opinion, you can preserve all the three at the same high level and just expand the triangle. Is that correct? Exactly, exactly. We expand the relationship still exists between the three components, right? Like they're all moving in relation but you can open, you can expand the overall as well. Like for example, we have two second finality while that's almost the fastest in the industry but we did that without trading off on decentralization or security. And so there are ways you can get even faster by sacrificing some of the other factors. So you could be sub one second if you choose to be more centralized. I mean, that's what let's say AWS is, right? So our goal is actually been pushing on all three at the same time through engineering and expanding all of it at the same time. So now I would like to touch upon one of the core aspects of harmony strategy for Web 3 which is based on DAOS or decentralized autonomous organization. So you dedicated $50 million out of a total $300 million fund for funding a number of DAOS. So can you tell us why DAOS plays such a crucial role in harmony strategy for Web 3 and what kind of DAOS are you funding at the moment? So essentially we think DAOS will replace companies and in the future countries. It's a way of organizing all human coordination and activity. So I think, you know, like think about countries and companies. These are all entities that we humans invented, designed in the first place, right? Like why do we have LLCs or, you know, corporations? And there was the East Dutch and India, India company. Like there are all these things that we basically made up, to be honest. And even countries, right? We made it up. Like someone won a war and it became a country. And so I think with Web 3, with the technology, with coordination that everyone can participate and there's a natural token incentive, you can design any way of coordinating humanity. And that's the future, right? And so people won't be starting companies anymore, people will start DAOS. And so that's why we think that almost everything can be done and created via a DAO at some level and it will be, as the world becomes even more global, it's a much better tool than an LLC or a corporation because those can't go across borders. It's very difficult. But DAOS is global, DAOS are everywhere. DAOS can provide incentives as soon as you join a DAO. It's just a much more flexible way of getting anything done. OK, so that's interesting. So can you give us some concrete examples of what DAOS are you involved in and basically what role they play in the harmonious ecosystem? Sure. We have some core DAOS that are our community DAO or a validated DAO. Community DAO is just about growing the community. So what's nice about that is instead of us trying to hire 10 more people on our team to try to coordinate and grow community and do social media, we have DAOS that do all this work and it's much easier. There's no management overhead. There's no coordination with the sub team.  It doesn't matter where they live, right? So we don't have to get, right now if you have a company and you want to hire someone in another country, you have to set up an entity in that country. You have to set up a bank account in that country. Then you have to send money to your entity in that country and then pay that person. So blockchain changes, all of that, right? Anybody can raise their hand and start. The DAO can be set up in one day, essentially. It's a multi-stake with nine people that consent to being there and then they can start doing the work. So that's how flexible it can be, right? So another DAO that we started with a good collaborator is the Harmony Africa DAO. And their goal is to cultivate and educate developers in Africa across different countries. There's five countries that they're targeting. If we tried to do that as our own team, that would have taken six months to a year to start, right? Again, all the entities, all the countries, all the local people. But as a DAO, it took a few weeks to get everybody organized and then we started. So that's the power. So now I would like to go deeper into your vision of Web3 and in particular your vision of the interaction between Layer 1 and Layer 2 protocols. So of course Harmony is a Layer 1 solution alternative to Ethereum. And you think that basically the capability of Harmony to create this bridge to Ethereum and the blockchain makes Harmony a more attractive solution than Layer 2 protocols. That seems to be in contradiction with what analysts at Coinbase say. So they believe that Ethereum will remain the dominant Layer 1. And that the combination of Layer 2 scaling solutions combined with upgrades like the Bitcoin chain, the Bitcoin chain merge and sharding could limit progress for alternative Layer 1s in their current form. So what do you think about this argument? The reason why we think we're Layer 1, like us, Harmony with a bridge to Ethereum is actually better because our bridge is much faster. You can transfer assets in two or three minutes versus Layer 2, there's a seven day settlement time for optimistic Layer 2 rollups. So there's a lot of different features that essentially you can use us as a scaling solution and transfer assets in the same way that you use Layer 2, but the experience is better. So I'm nothing against Layer 2. I just think the design is having a parallel Layer 1 that's connected because we can also connect to Bitcoin and Cosmos and other Layer 1s. It's just more flexible versus just being a Layer 2. You're actually only in that Layer 2. You can't even connect to other Layer 2s. I mean, it's hard. You have to go back to Ethereum and then go to a different Layer 2. So that's the reason why I think that Layer 1 is a better design as a bridge. And actually, we want Ethereum to grow. So if Ethereum grows 10 times bigger, hopefully we can get 10 times bigger along with the entire industry. So there's really no conflict. As long as we are in the right industry and as long as this industry still has 10x potential, which I think it does, hopefully in the next... Think about the market cap of all of crypto is about two trillion. It could easily be 20 trillion in a few years. Yeah, it seems that the trend is going in that direction. So now I would like just to clarify, it's clear your position towards Ethereum, but what about your view on the competition among different Layer 1 solutions that are competing with each other? Like for example, I was talking to the founder of Nier, another Layer 1 protocol alternative to Ethereum, who seemed to have a very similar vision to yours in terms of how he sees the development of Web 3 and specifically how he sees his own protocol. The role his protocol will play in this Web 3, so this bridge connecting all different blockchains. So I was wondering, what do you think? Why would we in the future need multiple Layer 1s? Why would we need a multitude of these bridges? Couldn't we just have one bridge that works very well? I would say that these ecosystems can all grow, and in fact, bridging to Nier is something that we will do. It's just a matter of time, right? Whether they do it or we do it or someone a new project does it, it will be bridged. And I think that we will live in that multi-chain world where there will be a few chains that will keep growing and keep growing, and there'll be some others that are slightly smaller that are still relevant. It's a very fluid landscape. It's not like, oh, there can be only, and it's not zero sum. It's not like, oh, this one chain has all this and then this other chain doesn't. There will be, if you see applications, right? They live on multiple chains now. Like sushi curve is on many, a number of different chains and that's how it will be instead of, and then there'll be native projects on every chain. So I think what's gonna happen is the blockchains that will grow are the ones that are great at cultivating their native projects. So for us, it's like, let's say DeFi Kingdoms or Tranquil. These are some great projects on Harmony that have hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in value and traction. So now let's talk about your visions for 2022. So we saw that Harmony experienced a massive growth in 2021 together with other layer one protocols because of on the wave of this bull market that we witnessed last year. So this year, the picture is a little bit less optimistic. We saw a huge drop in crypto prices not long ago. So what do you think? Can Harmony continue to grow at the same pace even in a bear market? I think that's a good question. I hope so. So I think obviously like bull market, everyone gets excited and inevitably, this happened last time too. In 2017, like the ICO cycle on Ethereum, it brought in a lot of people and then some percentage, let's say at that time, probably only 20% of people stayed, right? Cause the bear market was really long and crypto winter was really long.  So my only prediction, like, of course I have lots of theories about 2022 and let's say more DAOs, more tools, more builders, but my only thing that I think is actually more talent will come into Web3 this year. Like the best talent, like we see it everywhere. Honestly, I get pinged every day by people who say, I want a career in this space, I want to build something, I'm doing a new project. Like we have so many friends who are just coming in, like flooding in. That's final question. I would like to know what should we expect from this talent that is coming into the space in 2022? What are the milestones that we should look forward to happen in terms of the development of Web3 this year? Yeah, I think in general, my personally biggest hope is that Web3 make the user interface a lot easier for the average user so that we can onboard like the next 100 million people, right? So that means that wallets should be better, like all the tools. I mean, today if you wanna swap tokens, it's not necessarily that easy, right? You need to know how Uniswap or Sushi works and where the tokens go and how long it takes this transaction, you have to wait. Like all these should just be so abstracted that you can just buy some tokens on your wallet, on your phone, and then you can swap and trade like all of that is in the background. So I hope like as an industry, we make the experience easier for like your mom or my parents, you know, whoever, right? Like your like the non-crypto people. Awesome, thanks a lot, Lee. That was a great conversation. Thanks for coming on our show. Yeah, thank you very much. Had a great time.


Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Moscone, everybody. The new improved Shiny Moscone Center. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is day one of IBM Think, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Ed Walsh is here. He's the general manager of IBM Storage and Software Defined. Ed, great to see you again. Always a pleasure. Thanks very much. I love the venue, gets us out of Las Vegas. No offense to our friends in Vegas, but the Shiny, it's been a long time coming, Moscone, but it looks really good. I agree. 30,000 people expected, so you must be excited. No, I think we have a lot of things that you're going to see announcements. I also, I think you're going to see some refinement of the overall message. I think it's going to be exciting week. So it's kind of, I'm talking to you before all the keynotes, but it's an interesting week for sure. So tease a little bit. What can you tell us? Okay, so my background has been outside IBM, coming in to run storage, but I've heard, I've said it a couple of times, my strategy is to drive the overall storage, but also get more aligned with what we're trying to do overall IBM, because that's the strength of IBM, right? Really helping the clients move forward and infrastructure matters. And what you're seeing is, I think the market's coming in our direction at IBM. And I'll give you a couple of things. You're going to hear a lot about hybrid multi-clouding and say AI at scale, right? And you can see that messaging, but that's where the market's coming at us. You saw Red Hat talk about it, all of our competitors are now doing that as well. But when it comes to, once you start about hybrid multi-clouding, we think it's like, we're going to talk about the chapter two, right? Chapter one was the first 20% of workloads and it was all about these application-driven events and thing about Office 365, et cetera. But the 80% of the workloads are still on-premises and there's a reason they're on-premises, but what now is like the people that next phase are going to be leading by the organizations that have the mission critical data and how to do that. And there's a role for hybrid which plays perfectly for us. And can you help connect the dots for us? Because we've watched the software-defined wave come through storage, but still, many people on the outside, they'd be like, okay, well, storage is a bunch of boxes sitting in my data center and all my new apps are being built here or I'm sassifying things there and it feels like death by a thousand cuts to the traditional storage market. So help explain kind of what the modern storage market is. Data's at the center of everything so we know that that's a huge thing that's a good tailwind for storage, but help bring us inside your business. Yeah, so I think in general, everyone's trying to be data-driven and it's easy to say hard to do. And everyone's, the platform you're going to do that is a hybrid multi-cloud and hybrid being, the reason we're using that terminology as an industry, but it's also, there is a role for on-premises and how do you easily connect, but it's getting the same agility and performance and cost benefit on-prem and then extend at the right time for the cloud. So where you see us, we're looking, we focus on, we deal with a lot of different clients. Some are advanced and some, I would say, more laggards. And so we share a lot of stories where people are being successful being data-driven. And we see it fall into kind of three, what I'll say is we try to success criteria or areas, right? So one is people just modernizing, going from traditional to go private clouds, making sure they extend the use of benefits of public cloud and be more data-driven. So some people are spending money to save money and some people are spending money to make money. But even in traditional environments, you see the CIO having a bigger voice and we need to push them and show them how to do that, right? We also see another section of people really driving AI in general. And we see that in definitely a hybrid multi-cloud environment where we see a large on-premises, but you're always looking for the different data sets that are going to be in the multi-cloud that they need to bring it together. And we see that being a very interesting, and in fact, how do you start with someone doing, we believe we have the best storage for AI, but we can scale from the smallest to the biggest AI supercomputers in the world, right? Driving 1.5 terabytes a second. They're huge monsters, but you can start small. But what we find is people are just getting started and we have to meet clients where they are. So part of it in these different areas is meet them where they are and there are different parts of journey on AI and it's having them get going. But then really, how do you scale? You're going to hear a lot about this. How do you scale AI? Everyone has these random acts of AI or machine learning, but they can't scale them for the business, let alone across the enterprise, which is where everyone needs to get to. And that's where we're really focused on the offering set. So from a storage, that would be where we do the AI. And of course, the third one is just containers in general, which by the way, they intersect because a lot of things you're going to do in containers you're going to intersect with AI and especially when you go multi-cloud, but there's a whole different, hey, let me modernize my application infrastructure and it's a different conversation with clients. So we see people being very successful and that's where you're seeing from a storage development investments is we're going into that direction, helping clients with those different environments. Why is AI at scale so difficult? Is it the silo, data silo problem? So first of all, there's a little miss about AI. The one is a black box, it's mysterious, it's really just computer science. I mean, it's a process, especially when you're talking about machine learning, deep learning, it is you're doing stats, you're just driving it, you're being iterative with it, using customized silicon to do it faster, like GPUs. The other one is it's easy and it's not. So in infrastructure matters, so when you get going, what we see is people just give a particular data scientist an environment, just to say you bring the data in you need and we'll help you with the governance strategy, but it's typically getting something to just be valuable to the business. Then what happens is they see another random act of AI or another area that, and it becomes data silo, but they're trying their best to stay away from the data scientist, given the right support, which I think is the right thing, because the biggest thing is not have it all controlled and centralized, you want to let the business units drive. But then what happens is you have almost like data warehousing in the past, right? You have these islands and now you don't have any trusted true source of the truth and you don't have ability to get, you force everyone to do the hard bit. The hard bit is actually having the right data, do all the 80% of cleansing that data, having the right governance and security about that, and then you're adding to over time. What if you do a couple applications, and it's not the first one you do, but once you do the second, third, maybe fifth, definitely by the 18th application, you want to bring that together in a shared platform and that's where IBM Storage plays, and that's where we're truly differentiated compared to the storage industry. So we have assets that no one else has, like what we do is spectrum scale, where we can literally scale up from just an individual server to half rack, and we can take the same environment and do the largest AI sub-computers in the world. But the key thing is you need, you can't have AI without IA, information architecture, and that's on the software side, but it definitely has to be in the infrastructure. And we're doing it across hybrid multiclouds, so we're doing that on-prem, but trust me, AI is absolutely in the cloud, so we can extend those environments and run the same thing in any of the public clouds. And what's the storage enabler? Is it software defined, is it, you mentioned architecture, what is the linchpin there? Well, so one, it is a software defined, so in this particular area where we're helping people is our file system called Spectrum Scale, but it allows us to do from the very small to the largest environments, right? That allows you to scale, and it also runs all different assets, so it's unstructured.  The thing about AI is you go from, I want to collect the information, get after it. You also need metadata, so we have products like Spectrum Discover to show you the metadata so we can actually track it. So it doesn't become the junk drawer in the sky that we've seen with a lot of data lakes. But then it's interesting, you have to go in to actually do the training, and that's where you're using custom silicon GPUs. That dramatically changes the performance you require. So these GPUs used to run at 60 gigabytes a second. Now they're 150 gigabytes a second. We know storage, traditional storage that you get from the environment, we might get from PureNet app or EMC, they run at sub 20 gigabytes a second. So how do you do this? It's a different architecture. It's actually based upon a true scale out what we've seen in the largest supercomputers in the world, but you're able to bring that environment so we can actually do, bring in all the data works, get under one governance and strategy, but then you can actually keep up with the performance of the true inferencing and driving GPUs. Now once you have a trusted source, you can scale this out literally the largest AI supercomputer in the world. So we can show you scale on the exact same components, start off a half rack and go to the biggest thing that's in the world. But the key thing is you need to actually have the performance. So if you have this data backplane, if you call that, now people will still take a lot of the data, they'll bring it into the servers and they'll crunch it with GPUs. So they say, well, okay, your storage doesn't need to have that performance. But what you'll find is once you have a common backplane, which is how IBM did it, now you have different business units, almost hub and spoke grabbing the data, but they have one true source of data. They're able to get after it, they're able to get their other data that other groups are looking for, but now they're able to now scale it into the enterprise. Because some of it is just an AI call, right? API call. So you're doing applications and they just want to do an API call to the same environment. And those have to be fast because now you're inferencing, so it's sub seconds, but you need that performance. So what you need is by bringing it all together, you can either do data silos, which are easy upfront, but by the time you do the second and third, you're doing all that same work over and over and you don't have a trusted source, you got to bring it together, but you can't bring it together in any storage. And we don't bring it together on the same storage we do for VMware environments or others, it is different storage. And it's made specifically for this environment. And it's something that actually IBM is leaps and bounds above everyone. In fact, at Supercomputer, they do these type of analysis and we're like two X are best competitor in benchmarks. By the way, that competitor uses spectrum scale. But it is a different architecture. But if you don't put it together, and I would also say that when you get started, no one starts with the big. In fact, that's almost a mistake. What you want to do is let the data scientists have the creativity, drive it, get business outcome. But then you need to be thinking ahead, how do you bring it together so you have a shared? Because again, the way you're really going to drive it across the enterprise, all the different processes is actually having some API calls coming in, which are not going to be their own environments altogether. You make sense? Yeah, you've mentioned a couple of times infrastructure matters and I want to tie that into the 80%. It was at this very venue in 2009 when Paul Moritz said, as the CEO of VMware, we're going to run any workload, any application virtualized. And a lot of people were skeptical. And I remember the time thing, well, mainframes kind of did that. And now you're talking about the 80%. And VMware, I think, largely proved that you could run that at high performance, at least adequate performance. Now, you're seeing a similar discussion around cloud, but it's somewhat different because of some of the things that you were just mentioning. What does that world look like? Obviously, hybrid fits in. You mentioned the red hat acquisition. That's key part of IBM's go forward, multi-cloud strategy. So should we think about it? What's similar and what's different than the sort of VMware virtualization, mainframe virtualization days? Okay, that's interesting. And then you're tying into the cloud adoption as well. And we do think in this IDC, about 20% of the workloads have gone, about 80% are waiting. And I never thought of that way. It's a good analogy to virtualization. The easy stuff went first. And then what you have to do is have the databases. Remember, that was a big issue. You couldn't do that for years. But then all of a sudden you move it. It's like, why wouldn't you do it? But what's happening is what we're seeing is this the mission-critical workloads. And they're either regulated industries, but it's for different reasons. They're running it in different places. But it might be a security concern. It might be a scalability. It might be regulated industries. But there's reasons, or maybe you have to refactor the applications to actually run cloud-native. Because the lift and shift wasn't the same economics as you thought. So what we think is the next 80% is not going to be led by the application, or things like Office 365. We actually think it's going to be people building their real mission-critical workloads. And that's a different conversation. That's where we think the market's kind of playing to what we do at IBM and infrastructure, where you need to have the technology, but also the expertise and industry to move it. And then security becomes key concern. Yeah, so we mentioned Red Hat here. And I know you can't say too much, but we know about kind of the cloud-native modern, multi-cloud stuff. But Red Hat also has quite a bit of a storage portfolio. Seth and Gluster acquisitions open source. Wondering what you can just, as an IBMer, tell us about what you think of that portfolio. So we can't talk about what's going to happen afterwards, but also I think we made it very clear. We believe Red Hat is, and you used VMware, I think it's a good analogy. We're going to keep it, we're going to be independent, they serve a role, we're not going to change it. And I think that's a very important part of the message. But we can't talk about the assets. And I did my own kickoff to my team, my partners. And I used, I kid around, that was a storage acquisition. So it was my $34 billion, right? So, but I think it has a good play. It's completely complementary to what we do. They have some great technologies, but also we bring things to them that are interesting. But a conversation, when someone's trying to say, where am I going? And for strategy, we believe containers are critical. We believe Linux is critical. If you look at what people are doing on the cloud, it is, it's already crossed, it's mostly Linux, and the enterprises have chosen Red Hat. Now, if you think of what we can do with that particular environment, to have the conversation make relevance about what we can do to help you on-prem, but now you can run the same thing on-prem, you can put it literally anywhere. Now that's a strength of what Red Hat would bring us. On a storage side, they have great assets. I'm kind of salivating to help them out with that. Now, what they don't do is some of the things that we can add to them, right? So, and I don't think we're commenting on any roadmap. I think what they have and what we have is, to be honest, complimentary, if that makes sense. Well, and I think, you're familiar with our old true private cloud, no, it's evolving to true hybrid cloud. And what you just described is true hybrid cloud. Run it wherever you want. You're agnostic to where it runs, but you want that cloud operating model to be the underpinning of the experience. And you don't want to be locked in. So that's where I think if you look at hybrid, you want to make sure, I think Red Hat allows us to do that. I think IBM is synergistic to it. I think we can bring a lot of, how do you bring the integration capabilities that IBM brings on applications and help these mission-critical environments that need some industry expertise to do that, to bring them to the cloud itself. And maybe it doesn't matter where on the cloud. And one of the things we were commenting on the open is the hybrid, multi-cloud world. It's complicated, and IBM has a strong history with services to help drive that. Give us a little bit of your insight as to what IBM brings to kind of that multi-cloud environment. It's almost too much, right? So what we're doing is really working on the overall. How do we simplify it? So we're going to meet the client where they are. So everyone's at different, you have to almost find out where they are in the journey. And then even a particular client, you'll find different business units on different parts of the journey. So we can help them anywhere from helping figure out architect where they would go. We can help them move to the cloud. We can actually help them manage the cloud. And they're also going to meet them where they are. So we have, if you think about what we can do with AI, we have full AI stacks and enterprise capabilities, but some people choose to just use their own open source. And we can help them. In fact, you see our multi-cloud manager allows you to manage regardless of what you've done for your build environment. So what we're going to do is meet clients where they are and help them do the last mile. And then with service and support, we're able to, if you look at what we do with GTS, we're the largest Red Hat support organization. If you look at what we do with GBS, we can help people build out their own platforms and give an overall restriction and how to go drive AI at scale in their environments. So I think it does play to us. And I think the Red Hat acquisition just adds, I think one-on-one is three. So. Well, and I think, you know, we were talking in our open that just even IBM's giant application modernization opportunity, right?  And a lot of guys, you know, they don't want to go it alone with open source.   You know, we're excited about that next chapter. And think about Red Hat. Red Hat does a lot of consulting, but they have been disciplined. They help you get rail going. Once you start docking open stack, right? So, I was going to be, open shift, excuse me. Now that is a whole different way to look at your environment and your applications. And that takes a higher level. So it's like one-on-one is three. They don't do a lot of that now, right? Well, and it's instant developers, too. That's the other thing we said just that. Well, how many developers have Red Hat at 8 million?   Now, all of a sudden, you've got 8 million developers. It is, look, Red Hat Linux is running the internet. You know, we know this. So that's exciting. I want, my last question, Ed, is you've made a career, early part of your career, and taken startups, and getting them to a point where they could be acquired, and a very, very successful career there. Then you joined IBM, spent some time at MIT, you know, getting even smarter. When you sit back and look at the industry, the storage industry in particular, somehow, despite the trend toward cloud and bigger is better, you still see these specialists, you know, popping up all over the place.  And, you know, we saw that earlier with the compelents and the three-pars and the isolans. We said, okay, maybe this is the last wave. But somehow, storage innovation continues to occur. Do you think we're seeing sort of the end of that, sort of storage startup craze? Can independent storage companies continue to survive? What are your thoughts as an industry observer? So I think it's more difficult, but there's plenty of innovation. So you're seeing it as we just help people get to their journey. You're going to see different technologies at even IBM. You're going to see our portfolio change rather dramatically to keep up with the trends and you need to do it. So I don't think it's over with. So I never want to be quoted that I think there's no innovation left and there's a role for it. You saw storage, you know, grow last year, right? So it was, there's always been growth areas, but it's been flat. Also, it really took off. And a lot of that is because what we're doing on AI, which is not your average, it's definitely not what Pure does as far as for storage, right? But you're going to see, I think you're going to see innovation, I think you're going to see that continue. But I think it's harder and harder for these independent firms, mostly when they scale. I think it's the innovation piece and I think you're seeing guys like us and EMC and others innovate very quickly and if our innovation is speeding up with investment because we have to, our clients are demanding it. And the VCs keep pouring money in. I mean, you're seeing that in the data protection space and the others. Data protection is now cool, right? So we see them all the time. I think in general, if you look at data protection, it becomes now your secret weapon when you're talking about being data-driven in a classical environment. You can get copies of your data via APIs anywhere in the environment. So I think it's a really big play. So it opens up new opportunities beyond just backup, right? For whether it's DevOps or maybe disaster recovery or ransomware, even analytics because the backup corpus has all the data in it. So a lot of possibilities. Ed, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. We're going to see you also on Wednesday. And looking forward to that. So thank you. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from day one at IBM Think in Moscone. We'll be right back.