Welcome back, it's still the breakfast on Plus TV Africa and now to our first major conversation. The president of Guinea-Bissau, Umar-Ossi Soko and Balot has said many members of the country's security forces have been left dead after an attempted coup d'etat in the West African nation. Yesterday reports emerged of gunfire near a government building in the capital, Bissau, where the president was reportedly attending a cabinet meeting leading to fears of another military takeover in a region that has seen successive coups in recent months, however the president on Tuesday said the situation was under control, calling it a failed attack against democracy. He also said the well-prepared and organized attack, that's what he called it, a well-prepared and organized attack, could have been related to people involved in drug trafficking but he gave no further details. Mr. M. Balot won the December 2019 presidential election. He faced a last-minute standoff with parliament before taking office the following February. Now let's look at the return of military rule to some West African countries and of course let's also look at the implications for the stability on the continent. Want to welcome Mr. Paul Ijime, our guest on the breakfast this morning, he's an independent consultant on strategic corporate communications, peace and security in elections. Mr. Ijime, good morning, Tume, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. How did you feel when you first saw the news of gunfire in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau yesterday? It's becoming now predictable in West Africa and what you might call contagion or nominal effects. It was there in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and then you were asking which country next or which president next and that is because of the rush of democracy. President Ampado is talking about attack on democracy but it is the African leaders, in fact some people call them rulers that have attacked democracy and then the military is just because they have the guns that is why there appears to be very pronounced. But otherwise you will agree with me but that when you organize a fraud election or you take power or want to elongate your tenure by changing the constitution and not delivering and you cannot protect your people, you know, their lives and property, there is no benefit of democracy. You are also attacking democracy and I think it is these political rulers or leaders have brought this on themselves. Unfortunately, it is the common people, common man you call them, common woman that is evicted. Here was a man whose election, by the way, still under legal challenge that the Ekoas community caught because his opponents alleged that and that is true that he was sworn in when the Supreme Court had not certified his election and so they said it was a coup and this has now boiled into what is happening today and then look at the bloodshed, it is very bloody from what is I mentioned and that is not good, even though the country is known for instability of a NICUS assistant, independent from Portugal in 1974, he is also a former prime minister and me general, 49 by the way, so you will expect that he will do better. But here we are, these are who, the same thing the French will say, the more things change, the more they remain the same, but African leaders and I will have to check it, particularly in West Africa, about how do they deliver, perhaps the need to echo us is just, you know, stumbling about in the way handling the suspension sanctions, yes, but if you don't follow, if you don't look at the, these instruments that is there for you to use, like early warning system, this was then in coming since 2019 or 2020, that this has a legal, he talked about drug, yes, drug is an issue, but one cannot even know, will not know whether this was not organized to eliminate opponents and so that is what we have in Africa, all very, very questions about few answers. So that is what we have and so echo us, we have to go back to the drawing board. The leadership that echo us in the past 10 years has not covered the serving glory. I think that is the problem. They are not proactive, they have not shown some effectiveness in talking to themselves, to their fellow leaders about the way that they are attacking democracy themselves and not just when the military takes power, then everybody talks about condemnation and all that. First do your own part and then you can accuse or do something or whatever. That is not a justifying military rule, it is an aberration and should not allow, but when you make peaceful change impossible, you are inviting a violent change. Look at how many people have suffered, have died now because of power and ambition. So I think there has to be some reality check, otherwise you will say who is going to fall next. Okay, so let's also, I'd like us to, I know that in the course of this conversation you have mentioned one or two issues, but let's look at what could be the reason for this failed attempt in Guinea-Bissouar. I mean for the case of Bokina Faso, you would also want to argue with me that the issue of government failure to stabilize, I mean or the issue of the attacks of the jihadists at the time led to all of that. And you feel like the people are already accepted, it feels like the people are already supporting and chanting for military government to come into place. So but what could be the reason for this particular one that we're looking at, even though it did not succeed, it was a failed attempt and you want to also make reference to another time where there were several failed attempts at this point in time. So what could cause the failed attempt of coup in Guinea-Bissouar? Well, it is just, in fact, when was it, was it last year, 2020, 2021, there was the military had to address some people over a plot that failed plot. So it is not unusual in Guinea-Bissouar. And then you ask, what is the country of 1.9 or 1.6 million people, but has never done peace? Only, I think only one president has served them a complete term. That tells you a lot. And you have generals involved in drug trafficking. And they have really not, and by the way, ECOWAS had a military mission until when Ambalo himself took and decided to expel the ECOWAS, ECOMIG. So and now you ask, if they were there, like they had begun, probably this would not have happened. But I think he became, he thought he could do it. He could write the weather, the rough weather. It's not easy to govern when you are not obeying the rule. Like I said, his election is still in dispute. And ECOWAS said yesterday that this attempt happened. ECOWAS court was hearing the case and they had adjourned it. And so for somebody who has that legitimacy problem, you will think that he will, you know, trade them softly or be magnanimous. You know, walk on issues that it is not clear, like I said, it's still opaque to know whether this was not an attempt to eliminate opponents or was it a genuine frustration by those who think that he's not doing it's about governance. For a while now, he's there today giving me some, but he's across the region, where I just look the phone on Anglophone or Francophone. It is there. If you do not believe that, if you don't give the people the benefit of democracy, there will be dissatisfaction, there will be anger. And then if you add the anger to hunger and then in security, what do you have? And that is what is playing out in the whole of Sahel and West Africa, without exception. So the leaders or the rulers, they have themselves to blame. And until and unless they check this fragmented violation or constitution or, you know, of electoral framework and code, they will continue to have this type of, you know, assault or democracy. So it is actually the rulers that are the ones that are assaulting democracy. The military, because they have the coercive instruments, the coercive power, the weapon, that is when everybody starts shouting. But when a leader changes the constitution, like it has happened in Guinea, it has happened in the Côte d'Ivoire, when they do that or they lock up their openings or they fail to, you know, address in security. That is what happened in Mali, that the president then couldn't address the insecurity that has been there for a very long time. And then in Guinea, I've said that the president changed the constitution and then Burkina Faso, it is because Capone there, the president, has not been able to rein in these terrorist and jihadist groups, which he promised to do. So this is an, it's a cross if you go to come down, even in Ghana. Ghana recently was now deploying troops along his border with Burkina Faso because of, you know, these jihadists, they are there walking. Eco watch has what you called the early warning. And then it works with civil society to produce reports, daily reports, monthly, that has been warning against this type of, you know, the movement and then dangerous activities of these terrorist and jihadists. But Eco watch has refused to use that instrument to do what you call preventive diplomacy. You don't wait, you don't wait. Once the fire has taken off, that is not when you begin to fight it. You have to prevent it. Bring your fire extinguisher ready, understand how to put out fire. But not because once the fire is there, you don't know how long and how far it will go. This fire is the Eco watch region used to be known as the Kubert. And I think that in glorious past is now being reenacted, which is very unfortunate. Let everybody now, let Eco has used to have, let them bring all those instruments for the conflict management and prevention. And then, you know, how to manage crisis beginning from the country, from local, you know, national level. And then you bring it escalated to the to the regional level. OK. And make sure that you carry the people along. OK. And the people to the electorate is also a referendum on them. And they're choosing the right to put that will govern them. If they are not, let them take power back from this commission. They just put it in the case of formal French colonies. And three of them among this one, France also has a dubious rule. It has a military base. It is controlling the economy of these countries through the currency and then is exploiting them their resources. These are budgets because of the acquiescence, constricity of the African leaders. They have to come clean and govern. Let them show respect for and then for constitution, for rule of law and then for, you know, those deliver on the basics of democracy. They are not doing that. OK, Mr. Jimmy, yes, just follow up on your question about France. It's interesting when they're very, very great analysis, because a lot of people are using this as an opportunity to to to have a conversation or debate about the role of France in on the African continent. And of course, they are one of the major colonizers of African countries with still with great influence in in in in these African countries, suspicion that they're still collecting tax or whatever back to Paris. But are we not over, you know, flogging the issue with France? You know, putting too much blame on France when these countries are democracy democracies who they elect their presidents. You have a certain black one, Campoire in Burkina Faso, who became basically a dictator. I mean, he was just a amount of time, you know, people were not sure when he was going to leave. You have in Ivory Coast, you talked about what Tara also. I mean, he was brought in and someone was chased out, Laura Babu. And now he wants to remain the perpetually, for instance. And are we not not blaming France too much? Because yesterday or this last week or this week, France was able to conduct an operation in the northern part of Burkina Faso and they killed a lot of terrorists. We know how the role France has played in in Mali, you know, first of all against the Tuareg rebels. And then after the Tuareg rebels had to run to hide because of the jihadists. They've also been combating the jihadists as well, given the Malian government, a lot of support, you know. So are we not blaming France for too much with the current state of of of who's in West Africa? Let us unpack it and then because we can easily confuse issues. One is that there are, you know, local issues with, you know, the domestic government system that is not working. That is one. Then the other one is external influence. You cannot rule that out, particularly with French, former French colonies. When you have them, they are there to have them be given political independence without economic independence. Most of them are now using the CFA France. You can't see that it's a domiciled in the control by the French Treasury. When I have your money, it's like when I give you anything and controlling what you are doing. And then you talk about this issue of fighting terrorism. In France, when to Mali in 2013, you know, with the under the trying to support to help. OK, they've been there for how many years now, but also today plus another 15,000 EU troops or forces. Meanwhile, the government in Bamako cannot assess, cannot control things that are happening in Northern Mali. But France can do that. And not only is reaching in resources, and then you say, is it a ploy to just make that place of government so that the resources, their gold and others can be the people can continue to to exploit it. Or maybe that's not one issue. The other one is that France is now meddling in how Mali is conducting his own security. France does not want a competition. Mali has gone to Russia to ask for military support and France is against it. And here you have a co has also supported that kind of fair. And you say, can you really do that? Under what international instrument will you not that will you come in, you know, refuse a country from choosing whoever wants to do any business, be it on defense, on economy and all that. So because France is against that, a co has is also joining and that is part of the problem that a co has now has done for itself. Not being independent, not being seen to be independent. It appears that some of the decisions have been, you know, it is taken from Paris and that is dangerous. This is asking this is the same a co has and people used to know.  African leaders must now be independent and show that they are independent, but it's not showing in name in so many places because they are collaborating with foreign forces to lose their own country, to undermine their own citizens, undermine their own country because of self-interest and that is our ambition. If they want to stay, they will get support, military support from France. For instance, in Chad, Chad is a Central African. But then Idris Debbie was killed. He was a general that was elected. But you know what happened? It was a storm that took power when the Constitution had thought about the speaker of parliament taking over. France was the only, French president was the only president, the only head of state that went to the inauguration of Idris Debbie Stone, Muhammad. And so you see the contradiction. Here you are talking about bringing a fire and brimstone on Mali and other military, but a military boy has also taken power in succeeding his father. That is not democracy. So there is that contradiction all over in the French policy and that allows them to continue. But I agree with you that it is when the people in Africa, even Africans accept this kind of meddling or interference, that is when it will work. But otherwise, if they had come together to say, listen, you get out of this space, legally goes to manage our affairs, be it security, be it economy. But some of these countries are not as fragile and capable of doing it. So they need leaders, leaders that are visionary, leaders that can sacrifice, leaders that are patriotic to be able to remove all these external forces. But it is going to be tough because if you remember that if they come, they are afraid that they can be killed. But if you are leading in Africa and you are really a true leader, you must be ready to sacrifice your life because of your people. This group of leaders that we have today, they are not that type. They are, you know, they worry about themselves. They are family and then they are worse. We should also now try to wear out in foreign countries in France and other foreign capitals. And that is why it is difficult for them to act with some independent. But that should not be. So I hope that answers your... But remind you, too, that it's not only in France, in the Franco-Soviet countries, for instance, Guinea-Bissau is a little foreign. It was colonized by Portugal. So you will say it is more of a factor that has its causing problem there. Okay. Yes, you know, selling trafficking in drugs and there is poverty. There is unemployment and disaffection. So some people have argued that the current trend is yet different from what we experienced in the 70s and the 80s in terms of the coups that we are experiencing in Africa as a whole. I mean, if you want to even look at the statistics now with the recent happening. Now, others are also arguing that, you know, questioning the role of the African Union in all of this, that the African Union and other organizations just hold their arms and wait for these coups to actually happen before they begin to express their concern. But like you have mentioned that governance has always been a major issue. So, I mean, the governance of, you know, democratic dispensation in all these African countries where you have leaders elected and there are corrupt practices and unconstitutional behaviors, which is warranted, you know, the military takeover, which, of course, you would also agree that, you know, the military government is can never be, you know, the best form of governance, no matter the worst form of democracy. So the other question would not be what would be the best form, you know, that Africans need to begin to generate conversation to depend on their democracy. So it's all encompassing question. The trend that we're experiencing, which is almost different from what we experience during, you know, the 70s and the 80s in terms of coup and the role of the African Union in all of this. And what is the way forward? How do we deepen our democracy? Because this is issue is the issue of deficits, you know, the weakness in our democracy that constantly, you know, give rise to the need for military governance. Mercy, I hope you are not a lecturer, you know, because you are asking me to do analysis. I hope I have the time. Well, times and circumstances will be different. What we had in the past may not, but nobody would say that perhaps if we have managed to, you know, practice these democratic principles of the past 20 years, how come we are doing a bad job of it? In those days, remember that some of the countries we had just come out of independence when you had the coups, it was 70s and others. When independence came in the CCC and also part of the 70s. So, like I said, time and circumstances are different. But the basic are still there. It is about governance. When you do not deliver on what you promised on the benefits of governance, it will, you know, create happiness. There is so much that is happening. Then the other thing, I think I also agree with you that perhaps Africa can sit down, the intelligence and everybody sit down and talk about the kind of governance system. But like you said, too, democracy has been is preferred because it has the elements that allows you to change the government or people, those that are going through the ballot box. But what has happened is that Africans now the problem is that they have used those principles, holding periodic election, but elections have fraud in many cases. So the problem might probably not be with democracy, but with the practice, the practitioners, the politicians, what they do. If you go and democracy does not ask you to go and hire dogs, does not ask you to go and buy foods, does not ask you to change constitution illegally, does not ask you to to come too hard on your people, not respect their human rights and the rule of law. So these are the issues. And I think until and unless Africans now come back to begin to deliver, leadership is about service. It is not about being self. And that is the issue. African rulers or leaders are one people to serve them. Have you seen some of the the the motor case they use, the how they move, they live in large and so there is a disconnect between them and the people they are supposed to serve. And that was in the past or now. And it is even critical now you have the digital system in the past. Nobody you will probably take days or months to know what your leader is doing. But now everything is in the open space. You have the social media with all its negativity. But it shows that you cannot hide anymore. It's like you and the marketplace.  They will see you. So that is the issue. Let Africans play by the rule. The rule it is the lack of that commitment to play by the rule. That lack of that, you know, vision or when you are there. Because some of them have also made some gifts of some impressive exemplary. You saw the Zambian man man to fully and here and there. You find them sprinkling. But that is not what is required. It was there has to be this grand swell and then, you know, a grand offer. Those who think with democratically who obey the principles of democracy. Here it is being obeyed in breach. It is being observed in breach, the principles of democracy. They say we are democratic, but how democratic are we? So it's probably not the system by the operators. You're saying it's probably not the system by the operators. I may see you want to ask a follow-up question. Yeah, the follow-up question, because I was hoping that he answered. The role of African Union has also been queried in all of this. Yes, we know we had the regional body, which is echo was. But African Union, they have been accused of just standing and watching and not acting until things begin to happen. And some people say they are loyalty lies with the government of, you know, these African states. I mean, that will not be a wrong accusation. Because remember that this is an organization that succeeded the Organization of African Unity, which fought for the independence and liberation of Africa. You want that if these were the kind of organization you had during that colonial struggle. Well, that is who will be able to liberate Africa. My answer is no. And that is because they are not showing pan-Africanism. They are not showing the African spirit. They are not showing the zero to the. Instead, it becomes a club of all the colleagues who put themselves on the back, bring campaign and all that. Meanwhile, there are instruments to be used. They are not preventing is they are not proactive.  They are not or they are waiting until when a leader changes the constitution illegally. What are you supposed to do? There are instruments that on governance and democracy that the EU has. A government has its own. A supplementary protocol on democracy and good governance. But they are only concentrating on when there is cool. Meanwhile, these instruments have articles in them that talks about what a leader can do and cannot do. But when these leaders reach that protocol, nobody calls them to order. And you are right. Whether the EU, whether the ECOVAS, by the way, ECOVAS is one of the economic regional economic communities, I want to call them redneck. And it is supposed to be in your region. You have this type of a micro kind of innovation that we now because you sitting in this by the way, where they are in Ethiopia, they've not been able, can you believe that to stop the fight between the government of Ethiopia and the Tigray? Can you believe that? And that is their headquarters. So you say if you cannot remove that something in your eyes, I know you are looking to remove this back in your brother's eye, when you have it locked in your own eye. So they have failed. And then that is what let's twist it. They have failed Africans and they need to revend themselves. They need to be rescued like ECOVAS. ECOVAS used to be very, you know, it prided itself, it had an international claim as the organization that was very on top of crisis management. Look at Liberia, Seren, Guinea and then all of them have had their issues. But the leadership of ECOVAS in those days were able to manage it. How come these other ones are not doing the same? Yeah, talking about the past of the past reformers of the African Union or the OU as it was then known and ECOVAS. And the presidential former presidential aide Renault Mokri put out a tweet. He said, first Mali, then Burkina Faso, now Guinea-Bissau. The spit of coups in West Africa is disturbing. It starts as a trickle and may become a deluge with a domino effect, like you just mentioned, if we do nothing. And he went on to say, I urge West African leaders to do what Obasanjo did, and this is a question or the point I'd like you to comment on. I urge West African leaders to do what Obasanjo did when there was a coup in South Tome, and do you remember what Obasanjo did when there was a coup in South Tome? And is that a solution? Should that be an option at this point? It is about leadership. In those days, and that brings the question of Nigeria's rule. Now, we thought this is happening. I think Nigeria should be. Nigeria is not as powerful as it used to be. But remember that whatever happens in West, in the ECOVAS region, Nigeria will take the greatest hit. It has the more than half of the population and it contributes more than 60 to 70 percent of the project. So Nigeria should ask the question. You know, pay more attention to what is happening in the ECOVAS. Because otherwise it will, when it fails, if the ECOVAS fails, given the sacrifice that Nigeria has made over the years, it will amount to a failure by Nigeria. Forget the problems that we have at home. But imagine how many 200 million people in the other countries come in to compare what we have in Nigeria. Not in Nigeria's movie. But when all these other countries become uncomfortable and then you have refugees and displaced people, well, they are probably not being able to distinguish between the boundaries. So Nigeria, what do you do? In management, in crisis management, you have what you call the soft, you use soft power and then the hard power. Or this carrot and stick approach. But you have to balance it. There's a delicate balance knowing when to use all those powers. Calibrate it in a way that one does not, it doesn't put me around or become counterproductive. A passenger, we move. And actually, I have done that. All right, listen, I'm sorry. We really would love to take your comments on this. But we are out of time and we have to move so that we can. Yes, but it's been fantastic having you. And as usual, you're on the spot or your spot on analysis is always appreciated. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. Well, that's the much that we can take at this point. Thank you so much, Paulie Jema, for being part of the conversation. And as things constantly unfold in Africa and in West Africa, as regards the gun politics, we would definitely bring you up to speed with all of that. The breakfast will return tomorrow. The time is seven o'clock till nine in the meantime. If you've missed out on any part of the conversation, it's all right to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, what plus TV Africa and on YouTube, do subscribe at plus TV Africa and plus TV Africa Lifestyle. I am Messi Bopu. Have a fantastic day. And my name is Kofi Bartels. We'll see you tomorrow. Good morning.


Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015, brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. IBM Interconnect is a two hotel show at the MGM and here, people shuttling back and forth, keynotes are going on. Mike Kuhn is here, he's the Vice President of Flash Systems at IBM and he's joined by Tom Cook, CEO of Permabit. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to see you both again. Great to be here. Great to be here, Dennis. I have a big couple of weeks for you guys. You had a big announcement last week in Alvedin, you're here at Interconnect, giant cloud show, 20,000 customers, so give us the update since we last talked. I mean, a lot of things going on. Great, love to, you know, two big announcements last week, right? We started the first part of last week with our announcements around software-defined storage, launched the IBM Spectrum family, a lot of traction around, you know, where the marketplace is moving, how we're responding to that, a billion-dollar investment around that part of the business. And of course, as you know, we launched a billion-dollar investment around Flash the lesson two years ago. So, last week, end of the week, we launched our third-generation Flash system, our all-Flash array, enterprise storage solution, put the whole software stack on top of it, complete integrated solution, highly scalable, it's just really been an amazing week for us last week. Yeah, so Tom, what do you make of that?  You're making some investments yourself, maybe not quite a billion, but you've been at it now for a while with Permabit, really going after that data reduction space. Absolutely. Flash has been a big tailwind, talk about what's going on there. Certainly has been. We're probably the most focused organization in the world on data efficiency. More engineering resources going to it, bigger investment than anybody else. And because of that, we've been able to bring very high performance, very high-scale and very resource-efficient data deduplication compression to the marketplace. And we're happy to be partnering with IBM here on another offering, and that's what we wanted to talk about today. And you're right. Flash is, it's a big deal. The fastest growing products in the world today are all data efficiency enabled. And we think IBM has the best suite of attributes and the best suite of capabilities in the industry now. So before we get into the details of the relationship and the specifics, I want to step back a little bit and talk about some trends that you guys see. So our David Fleuer in 2009 did all these, he's a former IBMer, right?  So he's good at like log, log graphs and stuff like that. So he pulls out the data. 2009 he said, this is kind of an interesting trend. I think that Flash is going to actually be cheaper than high performance disk by 2014. So we wrote all this stuff up. People said we were nuts. And I don't think he missed it by that much. So we're kind of there, aren't we? I think we're there now. I think we're there right now. So he was right on.  Right. So, so we're seeing that high, that high, high performance disk is now an oxymoron. Right. So what does that mean? And what do we see for the rest of the market? So, so look, Flash is the, is the, is the fastest storage out there. Our clients are deploying about 20% of their data, their active primary data on Flash, the fastest tier of storage. And, and when we talk to them, we say, what's the other, you know, capacity layer? And the cheapest tier of storage they have is the storage they already own. And that's where our software defined strategy comes into play, right? So you can take our software defined capabilities, and you can, you can do better storage management, storage optimization on the storage they already own.  But clearly, you know, we reached the tipping point with our, with data reduction technology today around the Flash business. It truly is cheaper than high performance spinning disk at 50x you know, times performance. So it's truly changing the way clients think about it. Of course, it's a very transformational technology, right? We lead with not the speeds and feeds of Flash and not the economics of Flash. We lead with how this is transforming their business. So whether we're talking about healthcare or finance or retail, we're talking about how it's truly changing their business. And now the economics have changed. It's truly been taken off. Yeah. So and Tom, when you guys first got into the whole data reduction sort of OEMing business, if I will, it really started with the spinning disk side. And, you know, you got kind of a tepid response, people don't want to put anything in between there. Now Flash completely changed everything and became a tailwind for you guys. What have you seen there? Well, certainly there were some early stage companies that set the trend here and got out there and built data efficiency into their Flash solutions. And when Mike originally acquired TMS, it was kind of just a screaming fast box, a tier zero box. And he's transformed into fully with full management features and data reduction compression technology of theirs. And what we've seen is the whole market now because the floodgates open, the whole market wants data reduction technologies across the board because it's all relative. Your savings are relative, whether it's spinning disk or whether it's Flash. And we've brought Flash together with partners like IBM into the cost spectrum that now customers can afford it for tier zero, tier one and tier two. And Jamie Thomas talked a lot about that the other day in her address, talking about really opening up more workloads for customers. This is just win, win, win for customers. And that's a great thing. So Mike, you guys got kind of a secret weapon in real time compression. You made the acquisition a number of years ago in store wise and it's worked really well. What are you guys doing together? What are you just piling on now? Well, as you know, as you know, we have we have two solutions. We have our flash system v9000 or a flash system 900. So the nine the v9000 is our highly optimized stack, single integrated solution, highly scalable environment. And then we have the 900, which is just a screaming fast flash array, right? And a lot of clients have said, geez, I'd love to have that tier zero application still, or I'd love to have it deployed in a way where I can just have, you know, data reduction on top of it, right? Due duplication, you know, real time compression. And that's where the partnership, you know, with permit came in, right? So it's a meet in the market play. It's me and the channel play. I was out here in Las Vegas about two weeks ago at IBM's part of world event. We talked with many of our distributors who are planning to announce this very, very soon in terms of having the solution available to our end user clients. Well, it's huge news because the knock on the tier zero was always great performance, but it's expensive. So now you're really attacking that. So what are the economics look like? How should we be thinking about that? Economics are phenomenal. I mean, when you think about with our real time compression technology in our V9000 today, we're getting about a five to one, you know, data reduction, right? So those economics say that we get to below $2 a gigabyte with our V9000 solution. Now with 900, we're seeing we've done some testing with the sand blocks product from Permabit and we're seeing, you know, six to one when you combine both deduplication in their compression and their appliance. And so when you start looking at those price points, you're now saying this is now truly cheaper than spinning disk, you know, not only at the acquisition level, then you start adding in all the benefits of, you know, better energy efficiency, you know, better cooling, less density. It's a no brainer right now. So last year, clients were saying, you know, why flash kicking the tires, lots of POCs. Now it's like, why wouldn't I do flash, right? It's interesting. I mean, I was on a road show last year talking to customers and I'd ask them how many people are using an all flash array and very few actually hands went up. That's changed dramatically. I presume you've seen the same thing. What are you seeing in terms of all flash array adoption in the marketplace? This is certainly we're seeing growth in the marketplace. The top two products in the market over the last year have data efficiency. They're both flash products as well. And Mike's product is right up there. And we certainly think deduplication will help him get that in the highest growth factor in the industry. It's what customers want today. And it's really a no brainer as a customer because the latency is so manageable and so superior to other storage environments that with the data efficiency, you have an extremely cost affected but very high performance solution. So you're a technology provider, essentially to IBM. You've got a pure sort of OEM model. What does it take to actually integrate the technology? Can you talk about that a little bit? So it's really as simple as hooking this up with your fiber channel switch and carving out a line and optimizing that line through us. And we work side by side the full stack of Mike's product, which is just great. Sandbox works with any fiber channel products. And so the promises will just work and it really does just work. But we've been working with the IBM lab for more than labs going back three years. And so these partnerships take a while to create and they take a lot of trust during that period of time. We've shipped nearly 10,000 units into the marketplace through other partners of ours. So this is a really a tested solution that IBM customers can really rely upon and and like in his organization. And Mike, I want to come back to sort of the IBM strategy. You guys made the acquisition of TMS a couple of years ago. You've married that with SVC or V9000. Right? Am I getting my product numbers right? IBM spectrum virtualized. Previously. SVC code stack. Yes. But that was that the core code that came out of SVC. And that was the stack. You've married those together. Correct. Excellent solution. But you had to have an SVC. Now you've got a full stack solution and your new announcements. And you've got a partnership with Micron that you're talking about. You're doing the world tour now. That attacks cost. It's modern platform, efficiency, performance. Talk about sort of that whole product line and that integration. So when we acquired the technology from TMS, it was a highly optimized hardware IO, hardware management platform, ran extremely fast. As you know, we're not using commodity SSDs. We're using our micro latency module. We actually launched it as the IBM Flash Core Technology. That's what we're calling it now. This is not commodity SSDs. This is our IBM Flash Core Technology, which runs at, you know, as you know, the microsecond speeds. So now we've married that with all of our SVC code stack. The reason why we don't call it SVC is we've done so much that. Sure, that's a 15 year old tested proven software solution. But that's been optimized for flash has been integrated in their single management interface. Highly scalable, scale out, scale up design. A lot of our value around our IBM spectrum family now is available single price point in our flashes and v9000 solution. So that really is our tier one play right now. And of course, we're still selling a lot in the tier zero space. Our flash system 900, which does not have the software stack on there as integrated, but you can add it on obviously. But that's also been a hot shell or as well, especially with our power systems brand. So power eight nonster cappy interface, right? And so where they talk about having two terabytes of memory and power eight, you can now because this is an FPGA design in our flashes 900, you can have like 57 terabytes of memory here. This thing runs so fast that it acts like memory at a price point that is order of magnitude cheaper than memory. That's a memory extension can be heavy and it's a sort of eliminates not only the spinning disk, but the overhead of a storage protocol, right? Right? So that would not be sent attached. That would be direct attached to a cappy interface card in the power eight server, right? And so you can deploy it that way. You can deploy obviously the 900 as a sand attached. You can deploy that with a solution like sand blocks from permabit. And then of course you have the V 9000, which really is the full integrated, you know, software stack with our, with our array. And that's sort of a game changer right now to get us into the tier one space. What are you seeing, Tom, in terms of if you hear this talk about the all flash data center? Are you are you seeing that either directly or indirectly through your OEM customers? We're seeing some in cloud. We're seeing some in selected spots, yes, or major sections of real time processing that's going on and things like that. Absolutely. But what we're seeing more is hybrids are the predominant portion of sales today. And that just means that a company like IBM can handle everything all the way through the stack right on to tape. You guys even reminded of that, that of us, us of that the other day. You know, the other thing I think is really cool here that we haven't really talked about is scalability. And in Mike's product really can scale, which is very different than some of the upstarts in the marketplace who've been out there. And you know, that's where the rubber really meets the road for the IBM type customer who's got hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of information that they want. And they want to manage it in a as as Eric Herzog referred to as an ocean of data rather than a lake of data. So that's pretty clever analogy. I love what do you guys think about that data lake data ocean? I haven't talked about data lake. It's a data ocean. It's a current in an ocean, right? It's more dynamic. We're riding the wave, right? You can ride the waves. I mean, I guess you can ride waves in lakes, but then, you know, not really. Hey, just to spend a minute and key on what Tom just said on the scalability of the product, you know, a lot of people talk about they have a scalable solution. They kind of have a, you know, small, medium, large solution, you know, with with with our IBM v9000 solution. It's this. It's a scalability design where you can start with one, you can scale to two, you can scale to three. It's it's seamless. It's non disruptive. I mean, these are the things that you would expect, right? Everybody talks about having a scalable solution, but only a few people really deliver what we just talked about. So that's a real differentiator in the marketplace right now. And I think that sort of is the value of IBM around this technology is you know, we've got everything from concurrent code load, concurrent maintenance, encryption, all the enterprise reliability characteristics, which you would imagine, as well as a very robust software stack, which has been optimized to run on flash. So we're really excited about that. But just let me say one more thing on that. So and this is one of the areas where most data efficiency solutions fall down. They can handle up to 20 terabytes or 50 terabytes or something like that. You start going into hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of information and they fall over. And it's because they're very challenging thing to do. And this is where the marriage is really a good thing because our capabilities really match up extremely well with the customer base and the capabilities of Mike's product line. Well, it's a lot of religious, you know, discussions going on out there and architectures, but you know, we're in the scale out big data world so we can see the writing on the wall. So I mean, everybody's got to get there. I got a couple other questions. You mentioned tape. Do you spend time thinking about tape? Tape's having a revival. Absolutely. You talk about the all flash data center. There are clients right now talking about tears of flash, hot flash, cold flash, no pun intended, right? They're talking about tears of flash. Tape's making a comeback, right?  So it's having a revival tapes keep part of our our IBM storage solutions. And we're starting to see that that has some some longevity with it. Reason I ask is you're heavily involved in flash and the marriage of flash and tape is something that we've looked at now for a couple of years, right called the floor called the plate, kind of a silly term. But the idea being if you have metadata today that's locked inside of the tape and you can escalate that up onto a flash layer, you can actually write algorithms to optimize the seek on tape and tape with flash becomes high both higher performance and of course much lower cost than disk. So is that a pipe dream or do you actually see clients thinking about making that sort of tape flash layer the sort of, you know, new bit pocket? Not a pipe dream. We're seeing a lot of this with clients that do security work and defense work and we can't talk about specific agencies. They're all three letter agencies, a lot of video surveillance and things of that sort, right? So, you know, having access to the data off of tape is hard, right? So using flash as the layer for your metadata to do some editing to do some real time stuff. And then of course, you know, demoting it back to the cheapest tier of storage is having a big impact from an economic standpoint as well as it's a lot more flexible than it ever has been before. Well, people don't think of tape as actually potentially faster, but discs, just spending discs, just keep getting slower and slower and slower. You can't spin them faster. Correct. Physics don't let you do that. And nobody's investing money in disk heads anymore. Why would you? I mean, maybe there's a couple of guys up there. A couple of six-year-old technology. Right, you can't move the data any faster off the disk. So it's like a little straw going into the disk where as tape, you can do a lot of things. Each hard disk drive is giving you about 200 IOPS per second. Iowa's per second, right? That's slow, right? Some of these flash arrays that we talked about, this 2U flash system, 900, 1.1 million IOPS. This is like an order magnitude over a spinning disk drive. So I want to ask you a question. We asked John and I asked this a lot of folks. We've watched a lot of transitions in the storage business. You saw the virtualization trend. You guys acquired XIV. Tom, you saw it. You saw a three-part, huge exit. You certainly saw it with Isilon. Great. Nice. So we say, all right, is flash going to be the same? Or if you look at the big players, IBM, HP, EMC, they've got their flash strategies sort of laid out. Will the upstarts, in your opinion, like to bolt you away in here, will they be able to achieve escape velocity? Or have the big guys got it right this time? You first. Well, you know, that's a hard one, because when we first started looking at all the flash startups, we were tracking probably 30, 40 viable solutions, right? When you talk about escape velocity. They escaped, but in the wrong direction. Yeah, I think you're talking maybe one, maybe two, right? That's kind of what we see right now. I think a lot of bets have already been placed. I think right now it's scaling very, very fast. You know, we talked about the stack, we talked about the performance. There's still a lot of people that are on commodity SSDs. They have to do something. We were doing commodity SSDs in 2009. We knew that that was only going to take us so far. So that's why we made a big shift two years ago, right? A lot of other people are going to make that shift again. Then you have to talk about service and support. I mean, we do the best service and support, I think anybody in the industry, and we do it in 120 different languages. So that's the kind of scale that you need to kind of take this technology mainstream. I don't think there's too many that are going to have that kind of escape velocity that you talk about. That's right. So the transformation that's going on certainly is kind of transitioning from where we are today with a lot of on-premise to much more in the cloud too. It's only the largest companies in the world that can really do that and do that extremely well. And we're seeing that really shake out. I kind of wonder whether we're going to see a real bit of a gap develop here between what the big people can do, the tier one vendors can do in the flash space. And I think they're going to take back the space that the upstarts have done over the last few years because they have the ability to build in their management stack. They're building in mature data efficiency, whereas the upstarts are kind of struggling to do both right now. So I think we're going to see Mike's company and others like him take back share over the next year. So we're getting the break sign. And my last question for each of you. Everybody said for years, we saw flash changes everything, flash changes everything. We certainly believe that. When we look at a couple years, when we look back, what's the big thing, Tom, that you're going to say, OK, flash really changed X? What is that X? So I think IBM has it right, business insight. It's going to give us the ability to really accelerate what data coming in and how quickly that turns into information that I can help operate my business with, as well as then tear it out and get it to a cheap space. So I think underneath it all, the facilitating technology, one of the facilitating technologies is data efficiency and it's mission critical to bring down the economics that we can do that. So you second that, Mike? It's really the business outcome? Absolutely. Let me just give you a little broader perspective. You know, speed matters, access matters, right? So our strategy around software defined around flash is really about having access to all the data. Data is exploding, as you know. And it's about doing things in real time. So it's going to be about driving data into the insights, right, and doing it in real time. This is what's changing people's business model, whether it's healthcare, whether it's financial services, whether it's retail. It's about doing things in real time that they couldn't do before with all these massive amounts of data. It's a data ocean. We're riding the wave. Haha, awesome. Well, storage remains the linchpin. Flash is really at the center of that real time. Mr. Gentleman, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's always a pleasure seeing you. Thank you, David. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live from IBM Interconnect Mandalay Bay. Right back.


And here we have a terabyte SD card, SanDisk SD card on the market and a new format right here, CF Express for cameras. And hi, so who are you? Hi, my name is Trish and I work for Western Digital and we're here today at IFA and we're launching lots of different products, but in particular the two here that I have in my hand. We're now shipping the world's fastest UHS-1 SD card. And it's a one terabyte, so huge capacity on a small SD card format, 170 megabytes per second. So it's got just one stripe of connectors in the back, UHS-1. Yeah. And, but it goes really fast for UHS-1. Yes, it does. And it's got a huge capacity. Exactly, and 170 megabytes per second and one terabyte. So first to market and shipping this, so this is now available on the market in New York, Middle East and Africa, one terabyte SD card. And what's the other card you have here? This other card here is CF Express and it's our Extreme Pro card. So we launched this yesterday and this goes listering speeds of 1,700 megabytes per second. That's really fast. So is it a new standard, a new format? So it's a new format, yeah. So CF Express, if you look at six years ago, we launched CFast. And before CFast, we launched Compact Flash, which is a more popular format. But now we have the CF Express, which is backward compatible to XQD. And yesterday, Canon launched one of their pro cinema cameras that has two slots and both slots are CF Express. That's a C500-2. C500-2, yes, yep. And, but it looks like an XQD, so it has the same shape. Same shape, same format, but three times faster. Three times faster. 1,700 megabytes per second. How is that possible to do it three times faster? Is it different technology in there? Yes, so it's MVME technology inside. So we're using our experience on the SSD technology that we have to enable our cards to get faster speeds. So this is just a very small SSD? Great, using the same technology, but it's a CF Express format. And those connectors that are here that are the same as an XQD, but allow for a lot of data to go through? Correct, yes. What's the difference between, is it flash and MVME, right? Correct, yes. So what's the difference in this technology? Well, in MVME you can, it's much better ability from a video perspective. And with the speeds of 1,700 megabytes per second, you'll have a sustained, much better sustained read-write performance. Nice, 1,700, that sounds like a crazy high bit rate. Yes, really, really good for raw video and on rest for 6K. That's like nine gigabits or maybe even 10 gigabits or something like this, really high raw formats. And I guess some cameras might be coming with this kind of stuff. Yes, absolutely. And we have also seen that Nikon have released a couple of hours after Canon released their host device. Nikon released an announcement to say that they would be doing the same over the coming months and any manufacturer that launches the firmware will allow their cameras to become backward compatible for CF Express. And the XQD are using the flash technology, which is per gigabyte, could in theory be more expensive also? Or is it only a performance issue? Depending on, you know, it's first to market, so the product itself is retailing at approximately 700 euros for a 512, but it is for the pro market. So it is for the cinema photographer. So it is a high end for a high end camera. But I think now this could be like a really cool new format that potentially, it could be a slot on the side of the laptop. And you could add these. Now you have another product that you're showing off. Yeah, so I have here. Yeah, I can give it to you, so I can show you. You have the Xtreme Pro SSD. Xtreme Pro. Pro SSD, yes. High performance. High performance, yes, one gigabyte per second. So our previous product on this was 500 gigabytes per second. Sorry, 500 megabytes per second. And this product is one gigabyte per second.  And it's showing the speed of 930 megabytes to write and nearly the same to read. So what's the capacity, the price on these? So this one is available in up to four terabytes. Very small, but the four terabytes going to be a little bit expensive, right? Four terabytes, well, at the moment we're shipping 500 gig and one terabyte. And there's the prices on those? The prices on these ones, I have a list of prices. Don't have them off the top of my head. And this is the previous version? This is the previous version, yeah. This one is 500 megabytes per second. That's a little bit smaller, right? This one is, yes, and this one is one gigabyte per second. So if you can feel it, it's quite light. It has flesh technology inside. It has a forged aluminum casing around it. So it's very, very difficult to bend or break. What a proof, no. It is IP55, which is dust and water resistant. This pretty much can be thrown around and no problems with your wireless charger. So this here is the wireless charger, but it's not a new phenomenon in wireless chargers. This one also backs up at the same time. So if you have an Android or an Apple phone, you just place your phone on this at night time as you would do typical behavior for any smartphone owner, you plug in to charge, and it also backs up overnight. So backs up to this device. So inside this device is 128 gig and 256 gig. Well, it's a built-in storage. Built-in storage, and so you can charge and back up at the same time and have your own personal backup. And if you lose your phone, how do you get data off this one? There's a micro USB connector in the back here. And you just use a micro USB cable, hook it up to your laptop, and you can just take all of your original videos, photos, and contacts. So you install a little app on Android or iOS? Just a little app pops up, yeah. When you put your phone onto it, it detects it. Recognize the app? Pops up with a little app, and then it will do an auto backup for you. Only backs up to different files, right?  Like the ones that are having a room backed up in the previous days? Correct, yes, so, yes. And what are you showing over there? So over here, passport. It's a slimmer design, so you can see here much, much thinner than the previous versions. So thinner, but same kind of hard drive? It's hard drive inside, yeah. We've just taken the design to a different level. So you can see we have three different colors here. We have black, we have red, and we have blue. So the little ticker one goes to four and five terabytes? Correct, yes. And the small one? Well, the ticker one as well as USB-C as well. This one's USB-C. So these ones are for Mac, so the metallic ones are for Mac, this one and this one. All right, is this the same as the previous? So this is an SSD, this is a white passport, where is SSD? Yeah, the same from last year, right? With the SD card slot. Yes. And you can backup directly on the device. Yes, exactly. So it emits its own Wi-Fi signal. There's an SSD inside, so there is a 1.3 meter drop-resistant on it, so you can drop it because it's SSD inside. Nice, it's great for also photographers, videographers making backups on the go of their cards. You can also charge from that as well. Nice, and are these the same as last year, or something happened with these? Yes, all the same ranges from last year. We've got the MyCloud Home and the MyCloud Home Duo. Has the firmware updates done a bunch of stuff to these? Yeah, we constantly update the firmware on these to try and improve the user experience on the front end. I'm sure users want many things. They want to be able to backup to Google Drive, to Amazon, to everything as they want, you know? Yes, yes, exactly. So the pro series would have a lot more functionality than the MyCloud Home and the MyCloud Home Duo, but these are introductory personal cloud storage for the mass market.   And what are you showing over there? So this is WD Black. So this is a new design for our hard drive? So our WD Black is the hard drive is very, very popular with gamers. So what we've decided to do is we've decided to take the WD Black brand and do a gaming brand for our gamers. So pretty much what we have here is we've got portable hard drive. Yeah. And then we have SSD, portable SSD. And then we have desktop. This one is made for Xbox, and we have Xbox customers. This comes with three months of Game Pass Premium, which is worth about 30 euros. So we worked in conjunction with Microsoft to come out with this one. And then we also have the WD Black, the D10, which is desktop. There's a heat and cooling inside it. And this also comes with four months of Game Pass included, as well. And is it the same over here? It's actually the same over there, yeah. What's in the big one? It was just at Gamescom last week, or two weeks ago. And then this is just a computer that was built up for Gamescom last two weeks ago. And it just shows and situ all of the products that are built inside. What's happening over there? Is it just playing games? Yeah, they're just gaming, yeah, yeah. So there's some demos there. The guys can just play away, some of our gamers. And then here it just shows you what you get for the three months free on the Game Pass Premium. It just shows you there's over a hundred movies on the WD Black, P10 and D10.