 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE here in our Boston area studio. We're going to be talking about storage and SDI essentials. Happy to welcome back to the program, we're Andy Arsenault, and welcome to the program for a first time. Rob Coventry, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So, on theCUBE, we've been documenting it, so many shows and so many interviews, digital transformation, how everyone's going through various changes in the industry, and we're going to do a series of interviews here from our studio, talking about what IBM's doing about transformation and enablement. So, why don't we start there? Randy, we'll start with you. We've discussed many of these things with you. You're back to IBM, so give us what brought you back and what's changing at Big Blue. Yeah, thanks, it was great to be back. So, it's been an interesting site. I came back late last year, December last year, so I've had an opportunity to kind of come into this process that Robin and his team have been working on for a while, so I kind of got dropped in midstream, and it gave me sort of an interesting perspective on how things have changed, first of all, so there's been a fairly significant change in the way products are brought to market, the way we message, the way we communicate, the way we enable our sellers and partners, so it's been really interesting to kind of dive right in and get right into the meat of it. And I think Robin and his team have done a really good job of building a programmatic and systematic approach to delivering enablement and education to our sellers and our partners. So there's a whole process, a formalized process around how we create it, how we deliver it, I'll let Rob expand on that a little bit, but from my perspective, it's been interesting to be able to participate right from the beginning in kind of adding an outside in view since I'm sort of coming at it with fresh eyes, so I think it's been a really good collaboration working with the two teams coming together, so the process, I think Robin and his team, again, have really perfected the engine that we use to produce these things. Yeah, Rob, I'd love to get your viewpoint. I mean, industry watchers, I think back to even when I did my MBA or when I worked on the vendor side and as I've been an analyst, IBM's one of the companies that breaks the rules as to everything changes all the time, companies come and go, we're living here in Massachusetts, we've seen lots of brands come and go, IBM, stalwart in the industry, so give us a little insight as to what you're working on. Yeah, I mean, IBM is the survivor in that dinosaur game that we seem to manage to evolve constantly and the evolution is an important aspect of it and so one of the things that we did about a year and a half ago is we evolved our sales force in storage. We went from several different discrete roles to a single storage sales role. We knew what we had to do in that regard is to bring everybody up to speed to at least a minimum level in order to sell our entire portfolio and what its strengths brings to the table instead of just, you know, the products that they were familiar with, that they were comfortable with and that they had success with in the past. So one of the things that we did was we kind of observed how did we do transformation or education in the past and it was predominantly what I call a bottoms up approach. I have a product, it solves a set of problems, here's how to do it, here's how to sell it, here's what it does, here's how it competes. Works great in the industry. When you've got a large number of products you cannot educate people in the right amount of time following that bottoms up because by the time that you learn it we will move on to the next set of products and our competitors will outpace it. So what we did was we said, let's take a tops down approach and ask the question, what kind of conversations do our customers want to have that lead into the various solutions that we're trying to sell that'll give you an opportunity to have some credibility, solve the problems on your way in and let the conversation dictate which product it is. So we created a set of five conversations that focused on things like DevOps, modernization, resiliency, lifecycle management. You know, the kind of things that every IT department does and then go from there. And it's worked pretty well. But one of the things that we observed was we assumed a certain base knowledge when we put that enablement together and we realized there's a set of terms that I think that they're lacking that we need to help them with. Yeah, so that was kind of my first project when I came back was getting involved in the creation of these kind of streams and assets for this education in January. And it was delivered and it was successful and it was fairly detailed and pretty explicit. But it introduced a lot of terminology that we sort of presumed people were already familiar with and we found out that wasn't necessarily always the case. So the real goal of this session or the series is to kind of set the stage a little bit. So we almost think of this as kind of a prequel. This is really meant to functionally proceed what we did in January. So the goal is that once this is put together, folks will be able to go through this and then go re-consume or re-introduce themselves to the January content and have a much better sense for what the terminology is. Hopefully we can demystify some of the buzzwords and some of the industry lingo that they're hearing from clients and really provide a better framework in which to have the conversations that Rob was talking about. Yeah, it's fascinating. We talk sometimes the analogies you use is, are you talking the right language? For me, I think food comes to mind. It's like, well, okay, if I go to a foreign country and even if I don't speak the language they can point me towards, okay, here's the meat, here's the fish, here's the vegetable. And then I kind of know what I like but it's kind of nice if you know, oh, okay. Well, Portuguese food, I'm kind of going to be looking at this. So getting some of the basics down so I can understand and then participate and get deeper and involved. And the other challenge is that a lot of the terminology that we use has become very commoditized, right? They're words that every vendor in our space uses and uses and overuses. Things like agility and transformation and modernization and refactoring and containerization. These are all terms that our sellers and our clients and our partners see a million times every day. So not only do we need to understand at a fairly baseline foundational level what do those actually mean but what do they mean specifically in the context of our solution portfolio? So as we go talk to clients we can now translate from the very abstract sort of idea of refactoring for instance into a specific set of best practices and solutions that our clients can capitalize upon and use to achieve that goal. Yeah, Robin, I have to think that we've seen this transformation from the customers too. IT is not this silo that just, you know, wait for the business to come and well, now I can't do that or it'll take me six months. No, IT needs to be with the business, driving the business. So your sellers need to be aligned with that and helping is we're all in this journey to go. No doubt about it. In fact, one of the things that one of our primary goals here is to give their sellers context of, I call it the explain the hard candy shell that IT needs to look like. And don't worry about how everything inside of it works. The business looks at IT as that hard candy shell. They just want to consume simple things like flexibility and agility so that they can turn around and deliver the business that they need to deliver in the very competitive world that they live in. And we need to explain IT in all these terms in the context from the business person's perspective. And from that, then I think what it'll do is help them better use that in the context of their sales efforts. Yeah, and a lot of this is being driven by, so IBM every year does a C-level global survey which is a pretty big deal for the company. So this year, the 2018 version was published recently with a population of almost 13,000 C-level clients from around the world. So this is a pretty robust piece of research and a lot of the findings, probably not surprisingly, this year are focused on these concepts of agility, these concepts of rapid prototyping. There's three very specific best practices that are called out. Interrogate your environment. So constantly be on the lookout for opportunities, changes, threats, both from a business outside in perspective and also from an IT perspective in support of the business goals. Commit with frequency. So constantly be evaluating where you're investing, how you're prioritizing, where you're focusing your scarce IT resources and experiment deliberately. So do lots of pilot programs, lots of prototypes. Introduce things like DevOps and rapid development, which by the way, IBM has done. So one of the interesting things that's changed since I was here last time is internally within the spectrum portfolio we now have a fully agile workflow which is one of the reasons why the portfolio was so dramatically transformed over the last five years that I was elsewhere. So I find it interesting that we're living it internally but we're also able to communicate that to the outside world as well. Excellent, I'll take a large box of ready for the future. I have no idea what it will be and I can't ask you for it but I'll take three. All right. Well, and you might say that if you're a big company but we recognize that some of this sounds very big, very large enterprise and it may not apply to somebody that's small. And one of the things that I observed in the CXO study is I think it's applicable to no matter who you are in the value chain of some of these very large companies because there's a recognition that you have to operate in that orchestrated world that works with the supply chain that you're part of. And if you don't continually reinvent, continually evolve your IT to enable your business to keep pace with the expectations of that orchestrated business, then you're not going to be relevant in the future either. So we think that there's applicability here whether you're a large company or you're a small company and one of the things that we're going to try to do here is try to help our sellers understand that. Absolutely, great point is no matter whether you're big or small, everybody's being affected by a lot of these stressors, it's just order of magnitude for some. All right, Randy and Rob, thank you so much for helping us kick off the series, looking forward to digging into much more of it. Thank you so much, appreciate it. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.