 from theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We're back at the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience, our socially responsible and distant. I'm here in the studios in Malboro, our team in Palo Alto. We've been going wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Think. Kit Chi is here. He's the vice president and general manager of cloud and enterprise sales at Intel. Kit, thanks for coming on, good to see you. Thank you Dave, thank you for having me on. You're welcome. And Everistus Mansaw is here. Mansaw, he is the general manager of the IBM CloudPak ecosystem for the IBM Cloud. Everistus, good to see you again. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. Thank you Dave, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So Kit, let me start with you. How are you guys doing? You know, this pandemic, never seen it before. How are things where you are? Yeah, so we were quite fortunate. Intel's had an epidemic leadership team for about 15 years now. We had a team consisting of medical safety and operational professionals. And this same team who has navigated this across several other health issues like birth, flu, Ebola, Zika and each one virus, they're navigating us at this point with this pandemic. Obviously our top priority as it would be for IBM is protecting the health and well-being of employees while keeping the business running for our customers. The company has taken the following measures to take care of a direct and indirect workforce, Dave, and to ensure business continuity throughout the developing situation. They're from areas like work from home policies, keeping hourly workers whole and reimbursing for daycare, elderly care, helping with Wi-Fi costs, et cetera, et cetera. So that's been what we've been up to. Intel's manufacturing and supply chain operations around the world are working hard to meet demand and we are collaborating with supply chains of our customers and partners globally as well. And more recently, we earmarked $60 million to support communities from frontline healthcare workers and technology initiatives like online education, telemedicine and compute needs research. So that's what we've been up to, Dave. You're pretty much busy. Everistus, I got to come to you. I have to say my entire career I've been in the technology business and sometimes you hear negative toward the big tech, but I got to say, just as Kit was saying, big tech has really stepped up in this crisis. IBM's been no different and tech for good. And it's actually, I'm really proud. How are you doing in New York City? No, thank you, Dave, for that. You know, we're doing great and our focus has been absolutely the same. So obviously, because we provide services to clients at a time like this, your clients need you even more, but we need the focus on our employees to make sure that their health and their safety and their wellbeing is protected. And so we've taken this really seriously and actually we had two ways of doing this. One of them is just our own focus as a company on our clients. But the other is trying to activate the ecosystem because problems of this magnitude require you to work across the broad ecosystem to bring forth solutions that are long lasting. For example, we have a call for code, which where we go out and we ask developers to use their skills and open those technologies to help some people problems. This year, the focus were of other initiatives around the computing resources, how you track the coronavirus and other services that are provided free of charge to our clients. Let me give you a bit more of a call. So IBM recently formed the high performance computing consortium made up of the federal government, industry and academic leaders focused on providing high performance computing to solve the COVID-19 problem. So currently we have 33 members and we have 27 active projects, deploying something like 400 teraflops, I saw a petaflops, 400 petaflops of compute to solve the problem. Well, certainly this is challenging times, but at the same time, you're both in a sweet spot, which is cloud. I've talked to a number of CIOs who have said, you know, this is really, we had a cloud strategy before, but we're really accelerating our cloud strategy now. And we see this as sort of a permanent effect. I mean, Kit, you guys, big on ecosystem, you want frankly a level playing field, the more optionality that you can give to customers, you know, the better and cloud has really been exploding and you guys are powering, you know, all the world's clouds. We are Dave. And honestly, that's a huge responsibility that we undertake. Before the pandemic, we saw the market through the lens of four e megatrends and the experiences we are all having currently now deepens our belief in the importance of addressing these megatrends. Specifically, we see marketplace needs around the areas of product creation of everything. The point, the amount of online activities that have spiked just in the last 60 days, it's a testimony of that. Pervasive AI is the second big area that we have seen and we are now resolute on investments in that area. 5G network transformation and the edge build out. Applications run the business and we know enterprise IT faces challenges when deploying applications that require data movement between clouds. And cloud-native technologies like containers and Kubernetes will be key enablers in delivering end-to-end data analytics, AI, machine learning and other critical workloads in cloud environments and at the edge. Pairing Intel's data-centric portfolio, including Intel's obtained SSDs with Red Hat, OpenShift and IBM cloud packs. Enterprise can now break through storage bottlenecks and have unconstrained data availability in the hybrid and multi-cloud environments. So we're pretty happy with the progress we're making together with IBM. Yeah, Varistas, I mean, you guys are making some big bets. I've written and discussed in my breaking analysis, I think a lot of people misunderstand IBM's cloud. Ginni Rametti, Arvin, have both said, hey, we're after only 20% of the workloads are in cloud, we're going after the really difficult to move workloads and the hybrid workloads. Really the fourth foundation that Arvin talks about that IBM has built, you know, you got mainframes, you got middleware services and then hybrid cloud is really that fourth sort of platform that you're building out. But you're making some bets in AI, you've got other services in the cloud like blockchain, you know, quantum. We've been having really interesting discussions around quantum. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about sort of where you're allocating resources, some of the big bets that you're making for the next decade. Well, thank you very much, Dave, for that. I think what we're seeing with clients is that there's an increasing focus and really an acceptance that the best way to take advantage of the cloud is through a hybrid cloud strategy infused with data. So it's not just the cloud itself, but actually what you need to do to data in order to make sure that you can really, truly transform yourself digitally to enable you to improve your operations and use your data to improve the way that you work and improve the way that you serve your clients. And what we see is, and you see studies out there that say that if you adopt a hybrid cloud strategy, it's sort of 2.5 times more effective than a public cloud-only strategy. And why is that? Well, you get things such as, you know, the opportunity to move your applications, the extent to which you move your applications to the cloud, you get things such as, you know, reduction in risk. You get a more flexible architecture, especially if you focus on open certification, reduction in certification, reduction in some of the tools that you use. And so we see clients looking at that. The other thing that's really important, especially in this moment, is business agility and resilience. And business agility says that if my customers used to come in, now they can't come in anymore because we need them to stay at home, we still need to figure out a way to serve them. And we write our applications quickly enough in order to serve this new client or to serve this client in a new way. Well, if your applications haven't been modernized, even if you move to the cloud, you don't have the opportunity to do that. And so many clients that have made that transformation figure out they're much more agile, they can move more easily in this environment. And we're seeing the call for clients and yes, I do need to move to the cloud, but I need somebody to help improve my business agility so that I can transform, I can change with the needs of my client and with the demands of the competition. And this leads you then to, what sort of platform do you need to enable you to do this? It's something that's open so that you can write that application once, you can run it anywhere, which is why I think the IBM's position with our ecosystem and Red Hat with this open container Kubernetes environment that allows you to write application once and deploy anywhere is really important for clients in this environment, especially at the cloud packs which you develop which I general manage the cloud pack ecosystem. The logic of the cloud packs is exactly that you'll want clients and want to modernize, you want to write the applications that are cloud native so that they can react more quickly to market conditions, they can react more quickly to what their clients need. And if they do so, they're not then locked in a specific infrastructure that keeps them away from some of the technologies that may be available in other clouds. So we have talked about it, blockchain. We've got Watson AI technology which is available in our cloud. We've got the weather company assets, those are key assets for many, many clients because weather influences more than we realize. So, but if you were locked in a cloud, I didn't give you access to any of those because you haven't written on the same platform. That's not something that you want to support. And so Red Hat's platform, which is our platform, which is open allows you to write your application once and it's open to customers anyway. It's particularly helpful for customers in this particular environment to get out of the data pieces that come on top of that so that you can scale, scale, right? Because you've got six people, but you need 600 of them. How do you scale them so they can use data and AI? Okay, this must be music to your ears, this whole notion of multi-cloud because Intel's pervasive. And so the more clouds that are out there, the better for you, better for your customers, as I said before, the more optionality. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship today between IBM and Intel? Because it's obviously evolved over the years, PCs, servers, other collaboration. Nearly the cloud is the latest and probably the most relevant part of your collaboration. But talk more about what that's like, what you guys are doing together that's interesting and relevant. You know, IBM and Intel have had a very rich history of collaboration, starting with the invention of the PC. So for those of us who may take the PC for granted, that was an invention over 40 years ago between the two companies, all the way to optimizing leadership IBM software like DB2 to run the best on Intel's data center products today, right? But what's more germane today is the Rithad piece of the story and how that plays into a partnership with IBM going forward. Intel was one of Rithad's earliest investors back in 1998. Again, something that most people may not realize that we were an early investor to Rithad. And we've been a long time pioneer of open source. In fact, Navin Chenoy, Intel's executive vice president of data platforms group was part of all Commies pick off at Rithad Summit just last week. You should definitely go listen to that session, but in summary, together Intel and Rithad have made commercial open source viable and enterprise and worldwide computing globally basically now used by nearly every vertical and horizontal industry. We are bringing our customers choice, scale of a living and speed of innovation for key technologies today, such as security, Calco, NLV and containers, Kubernetes and most recently Rithad OpenShift. We're very excited to see IBM CloudPacks, for example, standardized on top of OpenShift as that builds the foundation for IBM's chapter two and allows for Intel's value to scale to the CloudPacks and ultimately IBM's customers. Intel began partnering with IBM on what is now CloudPacks over two years ago and we are committed to that success and scaling that through our ecosystem, hardware partners, ISVs and our channel. Yeah, so the queue, by the way, covered Rithad Summit last week. Stu Miniman and I did a detailed analysis. It was awesome. If we do say so ourselves, but awesome in the sense that it allowed us to really sort of unpack what's going on at Rithad and what's happening at IBM. Eversus, I want to come back to you on this CloudPack. You got, it's the kind of brand that you guys have. You got CloudPacks all over the place. You got CloudPack for applications, data, integration, automation, multi-cloud management. What do we need to know about CloudPack? What are the relevant components there? I think the key components is, so this is, think of this as in a software that is designed, that is cloud native, is designed for specific core use cases. And it's built on Rithad Enterprise Linux with Rithad OpenShift Container Kubernetes environment. And then on top of that, so you get a set of common services that go right across all of them. And then on top of that, you've got specific, both open source and IBM software that deals with specific client situations. So if you're dealing with applications, for example, the open source and IBM software would be the runtimes that you need to write and deploy applications, DevSecOps. If you're dealing with data, then you've got CloudPack for data. The foundation is still Rithad Enterprise Linux sitting on top of, with Rithad OpenShift Container Kubernetes environment sitting on top of that, providing a set of common services. And then you've got a combination of IBM's own, IBM's own software as well as open source. And we have third party software that sits on top of that as well. And all of our AI infrastructure that sits on top of that and machine learning to enable you to do everything that you need to do data to get inside that data. You've got automation to speed up how and to enable us to do work more efficiently, more effectively, to make your smart workers better, to make management easy, to help management manage work and processes. And then you've got multi-cloud management that allows you to see from a single pane all of your applications that you've deployed in the different cloud because the idea here of course is they're not all sitting in the same cloud. Some of it is on-prem, some of it is in other cloud and you want to be able to see and deploy applications across all of those. And then you've got the cloud factor security which has a combination of third-party offerings as our ISV offerings as well as AI offerings. Again, the structure is the same, rail, right at OpenShift. And then you've got the software that enables you to manage all aspects of security and to deal with incidents when they arrive. So that gives you data applications and then there's integration. So every time you start writing an application, you need to integrate, you need to access data security from some place. You need to bring two pipes together for them to communicate. And we use the cloud pack for integration to allow us to do that. You can open up APIs and expose those APIs so others writing applications can gain access to those APIs. And again, this idea of resilience, this idea of agility, so you can make changes and you can adapt to pick up things from it. So that's what the cloud pack provides for you and Intel have been an absolutely fantastic partner for us. One of the things that we do with Intel, of course, is to work on the reference architecture to help our certification program for our hardware OEMs so that we can scale that process, get many more OEMs, adopt and be ready for the cloud packs. And then we work with some of the ISV partners and the variety of different. Got it. Let's talk about the edge. You mentioned 5G. I mean, it's a really exciting time. You got windmills, you got autonomous vehicles, you got factories, you got shipping containers. I mean, everything's getting instrumented. Data everywhere. And so I'm interested in, let's start with Intel's point of view on the edge, how that's going to evolve, what it means to cloud. You know, Dave, it is definitely the future and we're excited to partner with IBM here. In addition to enterprise edge, the communication service providers, think of the telcos, can take advantage of running standardized open software at the telco edge, enabling a range of new workloads via scalable services, something that, you know, couldn't happen in the past, right? Earlier this year, Intel announced new Xeon second generation scalable Atom-based processes, targeting the 5G radio access network. So this is a new area for us in terms of investments going into 5G brand. By deploying these new technologies with cloud-native platforms like Red Hat OpenShift and IBM CloudPact, com service providers can now make full use of their network investments and bring new services such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality and gaming for the market. We've only touched the surface as it comes to 5G and telco and what IBM, Red Hat and Intel can do together. So I would say, you know, this space is super, super interesting as more developed, we're just getting started. Hey, versus, what do you think this means for cloud and how that will evolve? Is this sort of a new cloud that'll form at the edge? Obviously, a lot of data is going to stay at the edge. Probably new architectures are going to emerge. And again, to me, it's all about data. You're going to create more data, push more data back to the cloud so you can model it. Some of the data is going to have to be done at real time at the edge, but it just really extends the network to new horizons. It does exactly that, Dave. And we think of it, which is why our platform is pretty much the same, right? You wouldn't be surprised to see that the platform is based on open containers and our Kubernetes container environment provided by Red Hat. And so whether your data ends up living at the edge or your data lives in a private data center or it lives in some public cloud and how it flows between all of them, we want to make it easy for our clients to be able to do that. So this is very exciting for us. We just announced our IBM Edge Application Manager that allows you to basically deploy and manage applications at endpoints of all these devices. So we're not talking about 2030, we're talking about thousands and hundreds of thousands of devices. And in fact, we're working with, we're getting device, Intel's device onboarding, which will enable us to use that because you can get that and you can onboard devices very, very easily at scale, which if you get that combined with IBM Edge Application Manager, then it helps you onboard the devices and it helps you to be able to send code on all the devices. So we think this is really important. We see lots of workload moving on to edge devices. Many of these devices and endpoints now have sufficient compute to be able to run them. But right now, if they're IoT devices, the data has been transferred to hundreds of miles away to some data center to be processed at enormous cost. And then only 1% of that actually is useful, right? 99% of it gets thrown away. Some of that actually has data residency requirements. So you may not be able to move the data to. So why wouldn't you just process the data, where the data is created, around your analytics, where the data is created? And you have situations that are disconnected as well. So you can't actually do that. You don't want to stop the slow in the supermarket because there's your lost connectivity with your data center. And so the importance of being able to work offline and IBM Edge application manager actually allows you. So it's autonomous, so you can do all of this without using lots of people because it's a process that is also sort of automated. But you can work whether you're connected or you're disconnected. And then you get replication when you get really powerful for us. I think the developer model is going to be really interesting here. Is there so many new use cases and applications? Of course, Intel's always had a very strong developer ecosystem, IBM understands the importance of developers. Guys, we've got to wrap, but I wonder if you could each maybe start with Kit. Give us your sense as to where you want to see this partnership go. What can we expect over the next two to five years and beyond? I think it's just the area of 5G and how that plays out in terms of Edge build out that we just touched on. Dave, that's a really interesting space. What Aristo said is spot on, the processing and the analytics of the Edge is still fairly nascent today and that's growing. So that's one area. Building out the cloud for the different enterprise applications is the other one. And obviously it's going to be a hybrid world. It's not just a public cloud world or an on-prem world. So the whole hybrid build out, or what I call hybrid 2.0 is upon us. And so the work that both of us need to do, IBM and Intel will be critical to ensure that enterprise, IT has solutions across the hybrid sector. Great, Everestus, give us the last word, bring us home. And I would agree with that as well, Kit. I would say there's work that you're doing around the Intel's market-ready solutions, right? Where we can bring our ecosystems together to do even more on Edge, some of these use cases. There's work that we're doing around blockchain which I think against another important area that both companies are working on. And I think what we really need to do is to focus on helping clients because many of them are working through those early cases right now to identify use cases that work. And with that commitment to open standards, using exactly the same standard across, like what you've got on your open retail initiative which we're going to do, I think it's going to be really important to helping out scale. But I wanted to just add one more thing, Dave, if you would commit me. The, in this COVID era, one of the things that we've been able to do for customers which has been really helpful is providing free technology for 90 days to enable them to work in an offline situation, to work away from the office. One example, for example, is just the ability to transfer files and bandwidth. You don't know bandwidth is an issue because the parents and the kids are all working from home. And we have a product called IBM Aspera which will make available to our customers for 90 days at no cost. You don't need to give us your credit card, just log on and use it to improve the way that you work. So your bandwidth feels as if you are in the office. We have Watson Assistant that is now helping clients coordinate in countries exactly the same thing, basically providing COVID information. So those are all available. There's a slew of offerings that we advertise. I just want listeners to know that they can go on the IBM website and they can gain those offerings that they can deploy and use them now. That's huge. I knew about the 90 day program. I didn't realize Aspera was part of that. And that's really important because you're like, okay, how am I going to get this file there? And so thank you for sharing that. And guys, great conversation. Hopefully next year we could be face-to-face, even if we still have to be socially distant, but it was really a pleasure having you on. Thanks so much. Stay safe and good stuff. Appreciate it. Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you, Kate. Thank you. Thank you. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, our wall-to-wall coverage of the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience. We'll be right back right after this short break.