 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Barcelona, Spain, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Stu Miniman, analyst at wukibond.com. Our next guest is Sean Coulson, who's the vice president of storage for IBM Europe. He is the one on the ground leading the team for IBM and Cisco relationship, driving the storage, which is driving the cloud and servers and everything else. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you and welcome to Barcelona. Thank you very much. Great to have you. Want to get, you're close to the front lines, driving all the business for IBM storage. Congratulations, you had a great year. How's business going in Europe? What's seen like here? Give it a little color and what's going on in Europe. Okay, yeah. So, I mean, 2017 was a bumpy year for IBM storage. Across the board, across all of both our software and our hardware portfolios. But also I'll go to market with our partners as well and Cisco is clearly one of those partners. We're in the setup mode for 2018. My worldwide boss would probably say we're already set up, Sean, and you're behind because it's nearly the end of January. So it's a vibrant time, you know. It's no, you know, Jenny Rometti mentioned storage specifically in address the nation and the 2017 results. And that's partly down to the work that we did in Europe. I'm pretty proud of where we're at right now and what we've done. Well, good retooling of the product over the years and now sales are up. What's the driver of the business right now? Because we hear cloud, we hear on-premises, private cloud, true private cloud, we keep on reports. Certainly hybrid is there. What's the key customer success driver that you guys are having? I think the key success is really you correct. Everybody's talking about cloud. Mainly, the main drive in my view is how do they prepare for cloud? And that's a hybrid solution. And with that, you've also then got the on-prem. You know, the refresh, the technology transform and modernize is a massive program for us and our customers right now. I was in the Nordics just before Christmas and I went to one of the big financial institutions and they have a Cisco slash IBM versus that solution now. And I said to them, what was the main reason you chose that and why did you go with IBM? Because they weren't an IBM customer before so it was a big win-back account for us. And he was about reduction of risk, reduction of cost and allowing me to transfer some of my operational skins to new workloads and prepare myself for the cloud. And I think that message has been driven pretty hard by all our customers. And the refresh is interesting. I didn't look at that angle but you can see the digital transformation story that we've been talking on theCUBE for multiple years, playing out because people now see no perimeter with their networks. They're seeing real-time demands from applications. Now IoT, they got to modernize, right? I mean, this is the era of not just, you know, PO slapping down storage, back room, stack on rack on, it's a new storage paradigm. Yeah, I don't think I've ever been in the era where I sat by the fax machine when the orders come in, but maybe one day. Maybe one day. Ask a millennial, they don't know how to use the fax machine. So coming back to this customer in the Nordics, you know, they really talked about, you know, the technology or flash, the UCS server stack and then the network from Cisco. How did that allow them to move some of their resource, reducing the cost? And it was all around, you know, every month they do net software patches from Microsoft. They used to have a team of eight people that would take up to five working days fully to transform that. That with the introduction of the system, the UCS and the flash has gone from an 18 to two team, and is done in two days. That's a massive reduction in cost, but at the same time allowing them to move to that net new. Yeah, Sean, bring us in customers a little bit because, you know, we've been tracking Converge since that wave started. A lot of it was just organizationally getting set because, you know, I have a server refresh or the storage refresh, how do I get budgets? Who owns it? But it's that simplicity that you mentioned, which is, you know, we know if I can put it all together, you know, you talk to the networking team, networking team often doesn't update their code. They put it in, say like, okay, it's all working, don't breathe on it, but when I go to Converge, really it makes it easier for me to refresh with security top of mind for almost every customer that I talk to, they need to stay more up to date. And they need to, you know, what we had said at Wikibon is you need to be able to shift to platforms and partners to be able to take some of that burden off. I can't have six months of testing every time I need to roll something out. So, you know, where are the customers in Europe? How are they doing along that journey? Organizational dynamics you can share. So, I go to a entertainment customer in the UK. You know, they've taken the integrated stack and their deployment of systems out into the field has reduced by 90%. You know, that is a real benefit. And then we come back to that. How do you maintain, how do you drive? There's one single point you can drive it through. It's done, it's moved on. And I think there is a huge opportunity of customers starting to look at that simplicity because that's the transformation. That's the, I think for a long time, this industry is, and the storage business has tried to make things complex because that's part of the art of where we've looked to sell. You know, it's hard, it's not easy guys, that's all you need us. And I think there's a massive switch away to that simplified model. Yeah, how do customers think of their data center in the context of cloud? You know, in the industry there's been all this argument, what is private cloud? You know, virtualization. I talk to most customers, they have a cloud strategy and they're doing SaaS, they're doing some public cloud, they think about their own data center. They don't get caught over the terms, but I'm curious how they define it, how they do it. Do they have initiatives on cloudifying, you know, what they do? I think any large customer or small customer will be crazy not to have a cloud strategy some way, shape or form. And I think that has been going on for the last two to three years with all our major customers. Some are further down the track where everything is going to be cloud and all their systems, especially the newer, more agile customers. But there's also a lot of customers that for security reasons, financial regulations reasons are never going to be that far down the track on cloud. So I think it's a mixed bag. I think while there is that transformation and that journey, there's opportunity for everybody. And I think that's the bit that we see where we have the skill set to help our customers going forward. Yeah, I'm curious, you know, usually when I come talk to a European audience, you know, the governance is what, you know, a major sticking point has been one of the, you know, headwinds against moving to public cloud. We see the big public cloud players, you know, putting data centers in every country that they can, but is it still kind of a challenge today? I think there will always be that concern from the regulatory authorities. And I think if you take the first uptake in Europe of what customers that really move to the cloud, then I would say it was the more commercial, mid-sized customers that saw the attraction, especially the ability to have the variable cost rate that they can associate with the cloud. But I think there are also parts of their larger government organizations that are now looking at what applications, what workloads they can actually put on the cloud, where there is no regulatory governance to be followed. So I think it's a bit of both. Sean, talk about the European differences by country, because we've been covering the GDPR pretty hard, that deadline's coming up. That's kind of an impact on storage, obviously. And then also networking IP addresses can determine which country you're from, because now each country will have their own little nuances. What is the impact to your job and as you execute your mission? What does it mean for the customer? Because a lot of people don't just live in one country or work in one country, they spend multiple regions. Yeah, and you think of it, most international customers are going to have offices in probably 20 or 30 of the countries that we cover in Europe. I think you can have a view from a technology point of view that some people will be early adopters and some people will be slower adopters. And what you can do and what is very prevalent in the European market places, taking those learning lessons from the early adopters, finessing them and then driving them out to the other ones. So I would say, for example, Nordics, again, are probably an early adopter of a lot of their new technologies. They're very happy to try and drive and yet some of the more traditional ones will wait and see and then think it through a little bit more carefully. And that's the beauty of the nature of Europe, you know. What's the big change that you've seen over the past? Couple of years, obviously, softwares are the center of it. Any observations that you could share that's different in the market from buyers? I think from a technology point of view, the indoctrination of flash and dare I say, the commoditization of flash has been prolific over the last 18 months, you know, from the price point that he initially started to where we are today has meant that it has become more and more accessible for a lot more of the customer sets that we work with. And especially when you look at a performance price point, it starts to become a no-brainer. And I'm not sure when we look at some of the stats in fourth quarter, we actually sold more core flash modules than we did revenue-wise on traditional SSDs, which is a kind of indication of where we've gone with the price performance. Any trends and patterns that you've seen with buyers that you can, that you see happening, what's the big takeaway? I think the big takeaway is, you know, storage is alive and kicking. You know, the cloud is formed on the use of data. The use of the data means you've got to have good storage systems to go and drive that. And I think that is a major theme that runs through all our customer sets. And that's driving the modernization part of it. Yeah, yeah. All right. Sean, are there any verticals that you're finding that are leading the charge in some of this transformation of data and leveraging data more than others? Yeah, I think a lot of the smaller organizations which have more agility, they're actually leading in terms of willing to put their first foot forward. But I think what happens is then, once that is proven, then the larger organizations come in and work it. So, you're always going to have the big telco or media companies that are always at the forefront of technology. You'll also have the financial organizations that are looking at where cloud's good, where it's not, blockchain, GDPR, that we talked about earlier. And I think that is, you know, traditionally IBM strength in those kind of marketplaces. Sean, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate the commentary and insight to Europe. Congratulations. Thank you. On your sales. Sean Coulson is the Vice President of IBM Europe Storage. It's theCUBE breaking down the European show for Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm Sean Forrest. Do a minute, a minute. We'll be back with more after this short break.