 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is IBM's cloud show and now data show. This is theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Big Swanson, VP of Marketing for BlueMix, the whole kitten caboodle, soft layer, BlueMix. Now you get to watch some data platform, IoT, the cloud's growing up. How you doing? Good to see you again. It's good, good to see you guys. And so every time we get together, it's just huge growth, you know, every time, every month to month. So yes, so under BlueMix, we've pulled together infrastructure. So the area that was called soft layer and because we had developers that absolutely you need a provision down to bare metal servers, all the way up to applications. So we pulled the infrastructure together with the developer services, we pulled together with our VMware partnership. So all in a single console, you know, continuing to work on with clients on just having a unified experience. So that's why we have it under the BlueMix. You knew us when we were just getting theCUBE started. We knew you and you were kicking off the developer program. But BlueMix was announced here in theCUBE. Seems like dog years, 10 dog years ago, which is about 50 years. Now that was what, four years ago now? Are you four years in? Yeah, because I remember running from the Hakusun Club. We had just ended a virtual reality session and I had to run and then I sat down and we started immediately talking about BlueMix and we just launched it. So here's the update. You guys have been making a lot of progress and we've been watching you've been fantastic because you really had to run fast and get this stuff built out. Because CloudNative wasn't called CloudNative back. It was just called cloud. But essentially it was the CloudNative vision. Services, microservices, APIs, things we've talked about that. What's the progress? Give us the update and the status and where are you? Yeah, so obviously just massive growth in services and our partners. So when you look at, we had Twitter up with us today. We've had continual growth in the technology partners that we bring to bear. And then also definitely CloudNative but then also helping clients that have existing workloads on how to migrate. So massive partnerships with VMware. We also just announced partnership with Intel, high trust on secure cloud optimization. So we just absolutely, when we first met, we talked so much about you're going to win this with an ecosystem. And I mean the coolest thing is seeing that pay off every day with the number of partners that we've been so blessed to have, coming to us and working together with us to build out all this ecosystem for our clients. And what's the differentiator? Because it looks happening now as you start to see the clear line of sight from the big cloud players. You have you guys, you have Oracle, you see Microsoft, you see SAP. You all got the version of the cloud and it's not a winner take all market. It's a multi-cloud world as we're seeing certainly open source is driving that. How do you guys differentiate? And what's the, is it the same message? What's new in terms of IBM's differentiators? What's the key message? We're absolutely staying core to the reason we went into this business, right? And so we are looking at what are the challenges that our clients are looking to solve? How do we build out the right solutions for them? And look at the technologies they're using today and not have them just forklift everything to public cloud, but walk with them every step of the way. So it's absolutely been about uncovering the partnerships between on-premises and cloud, how you make that seamless, how you make those migrations in minutes versus hours and days. So it's really the growth that we've seen is around helping clients get to that journey faster or if they're not meant to go fully public cloud, that's okay too. So we've been absolutely expanding our data centers, making sure we have everything lined up from a compliance standpoint because country to country, we have so many regulations that we need to make sure we're protecting our clients in. You know, I want to ask you, and David Kenny referenced it a little bit today, sort of talked about, you know, we built this for the enterprise. It wasn't, didn't stem out of a retailer or a search. I don't know who he was talking about, but Martin Schroeder on the IBM earnings call said something that I wanted to get your comment on and if we can unpack a little bit. He said, importantly, we've designed Watson on the IBM cloud to allow our clients to retain control of their data and their insights rather than using client data to educate a central knowledge graph. Correct. That's a nuance, but it's a really big statement and what's behind that, if I can infer, is use the data to inform the model, but we're not going to take your data IP and give it to your competitors. Can you explain that a little bit and what the philosophy is there? Yeah, absolutely. That is a core tenant of what we do. So it's all about clients will bring their data to us to learn, to go to school, but then it goes home. So we don't keep client data. That's critical to us, that everything is completely within the client's infrastructure, within their data privacy and protection. We are simply applying our cognitive, artificial intelligence machine learning to help them advance faster. It's not about taking their insights and learning and fueling them into our cloud to then resell to other teams. So that, absolutely, it's great that you bring up that very nuanced point, but that's really important in today's day and age. Your data is your lifeblood as a company and you have to trust where it's going. You have to know where it's going and you have to trust that those machine learnings aren't going to be helping other clients that are possibly on the same cloud. Is it your contention that others don't make that promise or you don't know or you're just making that promise? We're making that promise. So it's our contention that the data is the client's data. I mean, you look at the partnerships that we've made throughout cloud, throughout Watson, it's really companies that have come to us to solve problems. So you look at the healthcare industry, you look at all these partnerships that we have, everything that we've built out on IBM Cloud and within Watson has been to help advance client cases. So you rarely see us launching something that's completely unique to IBM that hasn't been built together with a client, with a partner, versus there are other companies out there in this market where they're constantly providing infrastructure to run their own business, maybe their own retail store and their own search engine and they will continue to do that and they absolutely should. But at the end of the day, when you're a client, what do you want to do? Are you trying to build somebody else's business or do you want someone who's going to be all in on your business and helping you advance everything that you need to do? Well, it seems like the market has longed on to public data plus automation. But you're trying to solve a harder problem, explain that. Well, when you look at the clients that we're working with and the data that we're working with, it's not just information that's out there to work in a sandbox environment and it's available to anyone, like baseball statistics or something that's just out there in the wild. Every client engagement we're in, I mean, this is their critical data. So you look at financial services we just launched the great financial services solutions for developers, you look at those areas and oh my word, you cannot share that data. Yet those clients, you look at the work we're doing with H&R Block, you have to look at that is absolutely proprietary data but how do we send in cognitive to help us learn, to help teach it, help teach them alongside for the H&R Block example, the tax advisor. So we're helping them make their business better. It's not as if we ingested all of the tax data to then run a tax solution service from IBM. So it's just, it's a nuance but it's important nuance of how we run this company. So seven years ago I met this guy and he said, 2010 John, you said, data is the new development kit. And I was like, what are you talking about? But now we see this persona of data scientist and data engineer and the developer persona evolving. How are you redefining the developer? Yeah, it's a great point because we see cognitive, artificial intelligence, machine learning development and developers really emerging strong as a career path. We see data scientists, especially where as you're building out any application, any solution data is at the core. So you had it 10 years ago, right? She wrote the blog post in 2008 but I didn't mention the date when I first met him in 2010. No, but this is the premise, right? Back then because the web infrastructure, web-scale guys were doing their own stuff. So the data needs to be programmable. So we've been riffing on this concept and I want to get your thoughts on this. What DevOps was for infrastructure as code, we see a vision in our research at Wikibon that data as code, meaning developers just want to program and get data. They don't want to deal with all the under the hood production, complicated stuff like data sets, the databases and maybe the wrangling could be done by another process. So there's all this production heavy lifting that goes on and then there's the creativity and coolness of building apps. So now you have those worlds starting to stabilize a bit. Your thoughts and commentary on that vision. Yeah, I mean that's absolutely where it has been heading and is continuing to head and as you look at just all the platforms that developers get to work in right now. So you have augmented reality, virtual reality are not just being segmented off into a gaming environment but it's absolutely mainstream. So you see where developers absolutely are looking for what is a low code environment for. I'd say more the productivity. So how do I make this app more productive? But when it comes to innovation, that's where the data scientist is emerging more and more every day as a role. You see those cognitive developers emerging more and more because that's where you want to spend all your time. So my developers spent the weekend, came back on Monday and said, well what'd you do? So I wrote this whole getting started guide for this Watson Cognitive Service. I think that's not your job. Yeah, but it's fun. So I mean that's the- Yeah, they're geeking down on the weekends. Having some beer and doing some pac-a-phons. It's so exciting to see. So that's where that innovation side, that's where we're seeing absolutely the growth. And one of the partnerships that we announced earlier today is around our investment in just that training and learning. So with Galvanize- What was the number? How much? A $10 million. Good. Evangelizing and getting soft on the ground up. Getting people trained on cognitive AI. Yeah. So it's really about making an impactful investment in the work that we started. Actually a couple years ago when we were talking we started building out these garages. So the concept was we have startup companies. We started partnering with Galvanize who has an incredible footprint across the globe. And when you look at what they were building we started embedding our developers in those offices and calling them garages. And because that is your workshop that's where you bring in companies that want to start building applications quickly. And you saw a number of the clients we had on stage today consistently started in the garage. Started in the garage. Started in the garage. We had one just on the cube earlier. Yeah, exactly. So they start with us in the garage and then we wanted to make sure we're continuing to fuel that environment because it's been so successful for our clients. So we're pouring into Galvanize and companies in training and making sure these areas that are really in their pioneering stages like artificial intelligence, cognitive, machine learning. All right, so on that point you bring up startups in garage, two prong question. So I'll put it together. Enterprise readiness matrix. So you have startups who are building on the cloud who want to sell to the enterprise. Then you have enterprises themselves who are adopting hybrid cloud or combination of public private. What does enterprise readiness mean to you guys? So you guys have a lot of experience. I mean Google next, they said, oh, we're enterprise and they're really not, right? So they're not ready yet. So but they're going that way. You guys are there. What is enterprise readiness? Yeah, and I see a lot of companies have ambitions to do that, which is what we need them to do. Because as you mentioned, it's a multi-cloud environment for clients. And so we need clouds to be enterprise ready. And that really comes down to security, compliance, scalability, multiple zones. So it comes down to making sure you don't have just five developers that can work on something, but how do you scale that to 500? How do you scale that to 500,000? So you've got these companies that you have to be able to ensure that developers can immediately interact with each other. You need to make sure that you've got the right compliance by that country, the data leaving that country. And it's why you see such a focus from us on industry. Because enterprise grade is one thing. Understanding an industry top to bottom when it comes to cloud compliance is a whole other level. And that's where we're at. It's really hard too. I mean, most people over simplify cloud, but it's extremely difficult. It is, because it's not just announcing a healthcare practice for cloud. Doesn't mean you just put everybody in lab coats and send out new digital material. It is, you have to make sure you've got partnerships with the right companies. You understand all the compliance regulations and you've built everything and designed it for them. And then you've brought in all the partner services that they need. And you've built that in a private and a public cloud environment. And that's what we've done in healthcare. That's what we're doing on finance. You see all the work we're doing with blockchain. And we were just going industry by industry and making sure that an company comes to us in an industry like retail, or you saw American Airlines on stage with us today. We're so proud to be working with them and looking at everything that they need to cover from regulation, uptime, maintenance and ensuring that we know and understand that industry and can help guide and work alongside of them. Well, in healthcare and financial services, I mean, the number of permutations are mind boggling. So what are you doing? You're pointing Watson to help solve those problems and you're codifying that and automating that and running that on the cloud? That's a part of it. So a part of it is absolutely learning. So the whole data comes to school with us to learn and then it goes back home. So that's absolutely part of it is the cognitive learning. The other part of it is ensuring you understand infrastructure. So what are the on-premises servers that industry has? How many transactions per second, per nanosecond are happening? What's the uptime around that? How do you make sure that? What points are you exposing? What's the security baked into all of that? So it's absolutely cognitive is a massive part of it but it is walking all the way through every part of their IT environment. Well, Meg, thanks for spending the time coming on theCUBE and giving us the update. We'll certainly see you out in the field as we cover more and more developer events. We're going to be doing most of, not all of the Linux foundation stuff. We're going to lot with Intel and a bunch of other folks that you're partnering with. So we'll see you guys out at all the events, DockerCon, Unim, and they're all there. We'll be there too. Microservices, we even get to Kubernetes. We're going to have another session on containers and microservices. Meg Swanson here inside theCUBE, Vice President of BlueMix Marketing. It's theCUBE with more coverage after this short break. Stay with us. More coverage from Las Vegas.