 and that really is what it's all about. I am from Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for IBM Edge 2015. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Stu Miniman, our next guest is Stephanie Chiaras, Director of Scale Out Power Systems. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John, happy to be here. So you're the one who runs, I mean, we had all the execs on, but you're in the trenches, many things happen. What's going on? What's the big innovation? What's the transformational product? What's some of the examples of success as you guys are seeing? So as you can tell from the Power portfolio, we've made drastic changes since April of last year. We've changed the strategy. We've fully embraced open. That's been a big part of our shift in power. My portfolio is the Scale Out portfolio when we introduced Power 8 technology in the Scale Out portfolio in our one and two socket systems, a big shift for us, critical for cloud deployments. And today we're very pleased to be launching our Pure Power offering, which is our next generation to Pure Flex. So it's a rapid to deploy, fast time to client value, converged infrastructure offering built with Power 8 technology, leverages open APIs to allow flexibility going forward. So it's really taking our strategy and bringing converge to the next level. People like the simplicity of the converged approach as they can drop it in, but flexibility is one of the key criteria as well as software capability. What's some of the innovations on the software side? Is it the threading, is it the sockets? What are some of the sort of tech? Yeah, we're very proud of this next generation in the sense that we feel it's redefining the value proposition of converged. Clearly clients look for converge for rapid time to deployment, deploy an operating system in hours, not days. And we're fully committed to that on day one. But again, in our commitment to open, we leverage APIs that allow flexibility, building upon things like open stack, industry standard types of open, so that your flexibility is not just in what components you pick on day one and arrive to you on day one, but allows flexibility. IT is changing too fast these days. Clients need to keep up, their needs change, they need to be able to leverage that investment that they've made. So Stephanie, when I look at the converged infrastructure marketplace, virtualization is really the primary workload that we see there. Last year when Lenovo took over the X86 piece of the platform, they also got Pureflex, which surprised a lot of us because if you look at that full stack, parts of it were IBM, parts of it were Lenovo, we were trying to squint through and try to understand that. Can you help walk us through now kind of the Pureflex portfolio versus the Purepower and how IBM looks at this whole market and how does virtualization fit into that? So we, when we divested our system X business to Lenovo, as you mentioned Pureflex was split. It was a heterogeneous architecture. We are fully committed jointly with Lenovo to preserve the investment that clients have currently made in Pureflex. Clearly going forward, we are focused on bringing converged infrastructure onto our power platform. So we will, our next generation of Purepower is built upon power eight. It will support heterogeneous operating systems including Linux workloads as well as AIX workloads continuing forward, but we won't support the X86 architectures. Lenovo will be continuing their portion of a converged infrastructure going forward that X86 based architectures. And we will be loving virtualization within our portfolio because it is absolutely, as you said, it's too critical to cloud. Our first GA-1 will be supporting Power VM and we'll be virtualizing across leveraging our Power VM. So really focused on secure deployments. Okay, so we were talking right before we started the interview here. You've got scale out in your title. When I think of scale out, we really think, you know, hyperscale and you've got the soft layer acquisition. Can you talk a little bit about how, you know, power, the relationship between power and soft layer and power in kind of the Purepower, you know, the solution that you've got. Yeah, so we, as we move forward, the announcement has been made that Power will move into the soft layer portfolio. So we will be deploying that in second quarter, so bringing all the capabilities of power into the soft layer portfolio. As we move forward, there's been a lot of discussion about hybrid cloud and how best for clients to choose how they deploy their systems of record, their system of engagement. And as we move forward on hybrid, whether or not that's on-premise or whether or not you leverage it off-premise. So take data. We clearly believe that data is how businesses are going to differentiate. Some of that data you want to keep in your house. You want to keep it on-premise and Purepower is a great way to deploy that in-house. If you want to then leverage your systems of engagement, you can then link to the power architecture, keeping that same architecture across and leverage your Linux-based systems of engagement on soft layer. So it's the ability to bring that, what's on-premise, what's off-premise, leverage a hybrid cloud deployment, keeping your systems of record at home. We clearly support AIX. We have a statement of direction for flexibility to support IBMI that's announced as well. And then you can link into your Linux workloads as well, be it on-premise or on software. So I've got to ask you, what are the top conversations that you have with customers? We could like, we're all into joining the conversation. We're having a conversation. What conversations are you in, top three with customers when you talk about the powers, the scale out power? So clearly our commitment to Linux is one. We have fully embraced Linux since April of last year. We now have, not only in our technology, I came from the chip design team in power. So we're very proud of the capabilities we have. Industry first, leveraging both Big Indian and Little Indian capabilities for Linux. So prior where we had really been focused on the segment of the Linux ecosystem that was Big Indian, a large portion of the Linux ecosystem, a huge portion of it. We're playing Big Indian, I didn't even repeat all I might not know. I will. So Big Indian and Little Indian separates how you store your data. It's really as simple as the order of your bits. Do you support the biggest bit first in your eight that you send out to your data or do you store it last? And it's critical. Switching between the Indianness is not simple. So if an application is written in one, you store your data that way and you run your application that way. But now power eight supports in the hardware by Indian support. So whether or not you have an application that runs Big Indian or Little Indian, it can run on power eight. And what this does for us is makes us very relevant in that Little Indian ecosystem. So now if you have a application that runs on Little Indian today, that can migrate over to power and you can leverage the capabilities of power eight technology. Not a lot of rewriting. So from the perspective of the software, it doesn't matter. That's right. Whether or not it's a scripting language, a scripting language will lift and move over if it's a CC++, it will require a recompile. But we've seen great ability to be able to do a recompile and move it over to power. So we can migrate it over and then we can optimize. There's just our commitment to Linux is different. Linux and what are the other two? And so I want to extend the Linux to open. Our commitment to open is really what I view as revolutionary. We've now made power the most open platform, server platform in the industry. Our open power ecosystem, which I'm sure you all know, are well aware of that we launched back. We're over 120 members strong now. It's not even two years old. Not even two years old. Not even two years old. We had a really good discussion with Ken this morning, actually. Oh, good, good. On the open tower, talk about Google and Rackspace and everything there. I'm actually going to be the open stack summit next week in Vancouver. Can you maybe help connect the dots for our audience as to how this solution fits with open stack because still putting open stack and converged is a little bit new. It is a bit new. And it comes back to that redefining the value proposition of converged. It's on day one, given the flexibility of component choice and ease of rapid deployment, but continuing that choice going forward as your needs change. So we'll be leveraging Power VC for your virtualization control and that leverages open stack APIs. Our hardware monitoring will be done leveraging Nagios, which is also open. So really it allows a client to take what's deployed on day one and then extend it and can leverage those APIs going forward. So Stephanie, one of the big challenges in open is how do you control how you contribute to all of these things? How do you manage the outcomes? We've talked to Angel Diaz quite a bit about the global IBM initiatives around some of that, but speak to your group. Nagios, I heard last year at the Open Networking Summit was an interesting one. How do you decide there's so many different pieces out there where IBM helps contribute and what your group's involved with? And Open is not just a buzzword now. It's really a new mode of development. That's really what it is. It's allowing innovators to contribute at all different levels and as you said, how you encourage them to feed back into that is critical. So we work very closely with our Linux Technology Center. We have a team working on Nagios and it's equally important that they deliver value to our portfolio but deliver back and contribute to that ecosystem in order to feed that forward. There's also a trend I want to get your comments on where you used to have to be a real specialist to have to chip work and or do hardware. Now the trend is software is the majority of the budget for engineering but hardware's still growing. There's a lot more commodity, I don't want to say commodity or building a hardware. There's still hardware solutions out there but you don't have to have like the engineering excellence. Is this a trend that power takes advantage of it? Is it the hacker culture now? Well, I think it really feeds into that discussion of open as well. So years back we had that whole optimized solutions right where you had hardware that was workload optimized systems. And the challenge with that is you went after a pinpoint workload and you built this entire hardware in order for that one workload and boy you had to pick right. With open power what we've done is put in some baseline technology such as CAPI which allows accelerator attachments to be linked directly into the processor and leverage data in a coherent fashion. Very different. So now you will leverage that CAPI linkage and you can have all the open power partners build accelerators for any workload so a community, not just IBM but a community of innovators can bring accelerators to the platform. So hardware optimization is hard to beat from a performance level. But boy it's a huge investment to make that happen as you mentioned. Well it's hard to build but if you can open it up where there's a platform that's enabling other people to plug in. I mean we love all the work going on and with Facebook and on Microsoft as you're donating all this stuff to open compute for instance. That's right. I mean open compute is like the home brew club for servers and data centers. It's like people are really hacking with the hardware. It is. And you know we've really been able to open up, invite the innovators to participate. It's about moving quickly and leveraging innovations quickly into the platform. And hardware has always had a hard time doing that just because as you said the life cycle is very long. It's very arduous to build a new processor or things like that. But now we've put in some technologies and capabilities that allow a huge community. It allows someone as an entrepreneur who can do some engineering. That's right. Get a use case up and running. Get some traction. Maybe some transformational impact. And then get someone to build that scale in Asia. So one of the things we're focused on is tools. So if you look at the open power ecosystem you have companies that do small accelerator work for their particular application but our team is very focused on providing them tools. So it's easy for them to build up those accelerators. Our partners with Xilinx and Altera and their tool set. And how do we enable them to do that quickly and easily? Yeah and it's a great opportunity too because the old days you'd have to build a factory do the chip designers. You'd be working months and months. Wait a minute that workload's out of business or the market shifted. Or you picked the wrong one. But that's absolutely right. I mean that was the old way, right? All that testing. Absolutely. And now it's all about differentiation. And how do you provide differentiation in a way that's adaptable and easy to change so that you can keep up with the changing IT world? Yeah and I think cost gets driven down. Values increases. And then the converged infrastructure component of it is packaging, wouldn't you say? So that's kind of what you guys do on the system side there. It is. It's about packaging and allowing infrastructure management that allows clients ease of management, lowers your operational costs. It's really focused around that level of infrastructure management. And then you can take things. It will fit into our pure systems portfolio. There's a statement of direction from that pure application team. And pure application really brings it to another level to an application platform. So while pure power is very much focused on an infrastructure platform, PureApp or pure application system is really built as an application platform. So when will the pure system stuff be in pure power? Pure application, it's actually the opposite. I'm sorry, pure systems. Yes. Capabilities. Pure power will be brought into the pure application portfolio as the baseline infrastructure underlying it. I'm getting all the skewers. But they're announcing a statement of direction for second half. Okay. And that'll be announced here at Edge as well. Stephanie, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate it. Love the energy. Love the technology you guys are doing. Give you the final word. Share with the folks who aren't here. What's going on at the event? What would you want to share them about the stuff you're working on and the customer activity here? What's the big sound bite? Yeah, one of the exciting things here, and I came from the lab now here, you're surrounded by clients. It's about hearing the change. We started this journey with power back in April of last year. And now we're really starting to see the traction around our Linux, right? There's, we have now doing Linux like we've never done Linux before. We're committed to open with our 120 open power partners as part of that foundation. It's seeing the traction and the energy come back. It's all about being relevant in the industry and power's there. I love that. Doing Linux like Linux never before was great. I'm going to get that sound bite. Stephanie, thanks for joining theCUBE. We'll be right back. Live here in Las Vegas for IBM Edge 2015. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman, we'll be right back.