 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we're welcoming a couple of guys to theCUBE. For the first time, we've got Craig Rees, Cisco Global Alliance Executive at IBM, and Jeff Gad's IBM Partner Alliance Executive at Cisco. All right guys, so this is not the first time that you've met, you guys have been working together for a very long time. Craig, let's start with you. As we look at this world that we're in today, you know, the average company has what, five different product clouds, public clouds. We're in this reality of hybrid multi-cloud. I read a stat the other day, Stu, that you shared with me that 80% of organizations in 2018 migrated data from, or apps, from public cloud. So there's this inherent challenging kind of complex situation that we live in. What is the hard truth that organizations have to go through or face about transacting business in a multi-cloud environment? Yeah, well it's as you described, it is a multi-cloud, so by definition it's complex. Two, you know, the kind of the easy things have been moved, right? Maybe only 20% of the workloads, the easy stuff is moved, now the hard stuff has to start, and how do you do that, right? How do you understand what those workloads are? How do you understand which cloud's the right cloud? If any cloud, maybe it needs to stay on premise, right? So as you're looking at private cloud, public cloud, on-prem, how do you get there, and who can help you get there? And that's where we believe we come in, both from a services provider, as well as a key technology partner, right? I mean, it's not just, the technology alone isn't enough, right? You have to be able to figure out how to have it work within the organization and have the technology work as well for you. And it's a balancing act, but we think that's where our strong suit is from an IBM services standpoint. Yeah, and I'd say that complexity, it almost leads to paralysis for a lot of businesses. They've done what they can do, that 80% becomes really difficult, and so they end up in a cycle of what's the right technology, what's the right solution, how do I move forward? And that's where Cisco looks at IBM services and says, okay, this is a partnership that allow our customers to more easily transition into that next phase of digitization. Yeah. So we were actually at Cisco Live in Barcelona two weeks ago when we heard a lot about multi-cloud and how those solutions fit together. Explain to our audience a little bit, what is the IBM plus Cisco? How does that go together? Both companies have a long history in the data center, IBM's got lots of applications, Cisco of course strong in the network, so explain where there's some of those deep intersection points and some of the services that come together. So if you start from a services or you start from the IBM Cisco relationship standpoint, we're not new kids on the block. We go back decades, two decades together in terms of IBM as a partner, deploying Cisco technologies, incorporating Cisco technologies in our customers. So we have a strong base of skills, we have a long history, but I think in this cloud world, we also have a shared perspective that it is a multi-cloud world. It's not, well, you're going to do this and we're going to do this. We do have a shared perspective of what our customers need and we believe that together we bring a unique proposition to them in the marketplace far different than maybe, I would say different than another Cisco partner, but also even just from a services integrator or an IT services integrator, which is really what we are. Well, and so just to parlay on that, because one of the things we really worked with with customers is there's a lot of different ways customers want to consume technology now, right? And so there's the standard systems integrator perspective, but really what we're seeing now is customers are a lot more interested in how do I offload IT and just go about the business of running what I'm good at. I want somebody else to do the thing that they're good at so I can do what I'm good at. And so when you look at as a managed service provider, what does that really mean, right? So is it just an as a service consumption model? Is that something more along the lines of take it over for me and manage everything together? And where we see really unique value where IBM's really investing that we're really excited about is in the automation and orchestration across the globe for their customers. So not just how do I provide hybrid cloud and multicloud but offer that in a way that is consumptive and then automated and orchestrated for them so that it really is just a turnkey easy button, if you will. Customers have gotten spoiled, right? It's easy, swipe a card and all of a sudden you're spun up. Well, now they're looking for that at a broader range across the enterprise and what Jeff just said, that's one where we think we can bring value to them and helping them get to that consumption model that they've gotten used to while they're still trying to do the hard stuff with the technology. So Craig, let's double click into that from a value perspective. Where does IBM and your services really shine here and help customers actually leverage what you're bringing to unlock the value of their data? So first off would be global, right? I mean, let's face it, we are a large company. Global presence both in terms of our skill base in terms of the management capabilities that Jeff talked about that we have. So we bring that global footprint, that global presence to be able to deploy, design, build, run, manage, kind of take them through their whole life cycle. And our offerings is kind of where we're going. We've gone from being a custom one off, custom two off to really looking at standardizing 80, 90% of this to drive the automation benefits, to drive the consistency and the delivery model to deliver the SLAs that they want out of this, all backed up by the business model of how they want to consume it. So it's a definite change in going down that path. You know, Jeff, you mentioned earlier that customers can just have paralysis based on there's so many choices out there. You know, here Craig talking about we need to get standardization. But that's one of the challenges today is there's so many options. It's nice if I just can consume something as a service, but oh, my business is a little bit different and I have special requirements. Something I heard a lot at the Cisco show and I'm hearing and hears, you need to meet them where they are. And at the Cisco show is the bridge to possible. It's like, where are you today and how do you get there? Hope gives a little bit of insight as to because, you know, today, you know, IT is, you know, in my words, I'll say it's a heterogeneous mess. You know, everybody, you know, it's like I built it based on what I need and inside I built, you know, temples of excellence or silos. So how do I get from that world before that was highly fragmented and very different to, you know, allowing it to be able to be scalable and grow and change faster? So virtualization becomes that double-edged sword, right? It gives us that flexibility, but it also causes that fragmentation across because I have so much more flexibility now. So I think that the generic 80-20 rule applies. Every customer, your mileage may vary, right? But you can get to a base standard of what is the right platform with which to provide the flexibility that individual customers need. And that's where the experience of IBM services, they've worked with every Fortune 1000 customer you can possibly imagine. So they've seen all the permutations that are out there, especially as it relates to deploying Cisco technology. So they understand what base they need going forward and then what parts are they going to have to tweak for those customers to really adopt and execute on their IT strategy? So when you're in customer conversations, and this is a question for both of you, so Craig will start with you. When we look at the data problem, it goes all the way up to the C level, right? To the board room because there's a tremendous amount of value that needs to be unlocked there. When you're having these conversations, especially the capabilities combined power that IBM and Cisco bring together, where are these conversations with customers? Are you starting at that C suite? Are you talking with the guys and the gals with the feet on the street that are living in this chaotic heterogeneity, I think that Stu called it? Where are those conversations begin, Craig? So I think it is at the C suite for a large portion of it. At least the direction maybe comes from the C suite. We need to do something different than how we did. Who could we talk to? Who can we bring in to have that conversation? Kind of may move down to the teams that are closer to the ground. And you start hearing themes that become kind of common. How do I deal with security? How do I deal with data privacy where I have those concerns? How do I determine what applications and workloads I should move where and what's the most cost effective place for those to run? So I think we can bring that expertise, we can bring that guidance, that consultative approach to those discussions with the customer. Not only us, but with the Cisco team as well. To really start getting to the point where we believe the offerings we have to move you to a hybrid cloud migration path or this type of offering, it does hit that 80%. And then we can hone in on what is that 20% that's unique for your business that we have to figure out maybe uniquely from a technology standpoint, from the services we offer, from the SLA, whatever it would be to really get them there. But I think it starts more at the top but works its way down, in my view anyway. I completely agree, the conversation starts at the C suite and then, but that tends to be relatively generic, right? In terms of this is our strategy and then it gets passed down and you get into that 20% which is the heavy lifting as soon as you get down to the next layer. But it does start from the top down and it has to these days. And I distinctly remember one customer we had where we did sit in a room, it started from the top and we had lots of smart people in the room and we had three possibilities on, they've sketched out on the whiteboard which one do we think really solves the problem here? Because there are multiple paths to go to get there and we have to pick the path we think makes the most sense and then convince the customer this is the right way to go and get them bought in. So one of the things that if you look at this, the transformation that people are going through in many ways that moved to from a CapEx model to an OpEx model is one of the things, the promise of the cloud. But you talk about struggles in the C suite. You know the CFO used to say here's your budget for the year and I can understand that and wait this is going to be uncertain and I'm not sure what that bill's going to be next month or a quarter from now or how do I do my planning? Give us a little bit of insight into that transformation. I tell you it's uncertain as a service provider too, right? So there's two sides to that. They just say well I want an SLA and I want a service and I want it to go infinitely up and infinitely down. So you have to sort of meet, de-risk each side where you pick your battles and get to a point where the customer believes the service is valuable from a business standpoint, from a productivity standpoint, from hitting the objectives that they set down from the C suite and you hopefully have a good partnering relationship, triangular customer partner service provider where you're having that ongoing dialogue, you're delivering on the value, you're helping to expand that and those risk issues go way over time. But the proof is always in the first six, 12 months of delivery. Yeah, I'll borrow your phrase of being customers where they're at, right? This idea of consumption, I think a lot of customers are very interested in it but there's a cost to that financial flexibility and so maybe it starts at a zero to 100 flexibility and it comes quickly down based on what you determine jointly between the three of us is really the right solution. So that's really where it's at in this as a service model. It makes a lot more sense, it's easier to do when it's purely software but as soon as you're on-premise, that becomes a slightly more challenging conversation and that's what this partnership does day in and day out. So as we wrap this up, one thing I want to kind of do is click into the customer experience a little bit more. You were talking, Craig, about, you know, a lot of companies have moved the easy stuff, right? They've pushed that easy button, they have a hybrid multi-cloud strategy that's effective for 20% of their business. But the other 80% are using where, I mean in any company, in any industries too, we know this as we talk to companies all over the globe, data is the lifeblood of any organization that has transformative power. But I'm curious in that journey to get a company from 20% to 30% to 40% where they're actually starting to have to tackle those more complex workloads, are you seeing any industries in particular that are, I don't want to say early adopters but are understanding the value that IBM services in Cisco are bringing together in order to facilitate the speed at which they have to transform? So I would say our customer base is cross industry. What I would say is the industry that seems to have the most questions, the most concerns, the most reservations is the financial services industry, and there they have to be very specific around what's my data privacy issue, where am I at with security? And I got to tell you, Cisco has some very strong customers in that space that really help in that partnership particularly around the financial services industry. They're the toughest ones I think at this point from my standpoint. Yeah, I mean financial services obviously where you and I engage a lot, but I would say the thing that's most exciting to me is that it's not just financial services. We are seeing it across the board. I wouldn't say there's an industry outside of industries or companies that are born in the cloud model, but the more legacies the wrong word, but traditional business models, they're all shifting because they have to to remain relevant. Exactly, they have to. Well, that just means plenty of opportunities for IBM services and Cisco. Gentlemen, thank you so much for chatting with Stu and me on the program today. We appreciate it, and congratulations, you're now a CUBE alumni. So you each get a worldwide, it's like a gold star, but it's a blue. Awesome, and I would like to thank Cisco for being a platinum partner here at IBM Think this week. We appreciate them being a partner here and in the partner showcase. Yeah, and for the folks that are here at the show, please come by, get your free pair of socks, and you can get signed up to win special prizes. Special prizes and socks, wow, you guys, that's- What more could you want? I'm speechless. Thanks so much, Craig and Jeff, I appreciate your time. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from day one coverage of IBM Think 2019. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.