 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, host. Our next guest is Meg Swanson, director of marketing for IBM BlueMix. And we're psyched to have her back on theCUBE last year. We interviewed you one year ago when BlueMix got kicked off. It was just a beta, now it's blowing up huge and all the great success. Welcome back and congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It's been quite a year. Steve Robinson says we kind of count these in dog years. Feels a bit like seven. And it's been absolutely exciting. So we've, in the span of a year, because when we met at polls, we were just at beta. We were onboarding developers, getting feedback. And now we have over 102 services on the platform. So rolling out rapidly. And we have the deployment models with public, private, and then we announced local at the show. And it's just been tremendous. Well, before we get into some of the details, there's a lot of things to highlight. I want to just say congratulations, because we cover a lot of companies. And when we meet people and they say they're going to do something and then they do it and do more and overachieve on the mission. Because you guys were very cautious at first. You got BlueMix out there. And then the win was at your back. The CEO says, we need to win cloud, right? And so you get the little re-or going on. Nancy Pearson was on yesterday, shows a little bit of color on that. And now you got developers. You've got resources at your disposal. So take us through that. What happened? I mean, obviously, BlueMix hit a nerve. Obviously, right out of the gate, the scientists were pretty strong. But you didn't hit that tipping point. When did you take us through the tipping point? When did it go, oh my God, we got a tiger by the tails? Was it when the resources came in? Was it before or after? Yeah, it was a bit before that. So it was really in the middle of last year. So as we, we had incredible adoption early on. So really building BlueMix from an open source perspective, building on Cloud Foundry, strong partnerships with Cloud Foundry and the team, and then just onboarding service after service with Twilio and Redis and, and all the different partners that we've had. And then around October was when we brought the Watson services on. And we had been steadily growing, you know, the developer following and the base. Was that pre-re-order, post-free? That was pre, yes. And, and the teams have always, I mean, BlueMix is a platform that we're serving up, you know, the IBM services, plus our third priority in open source. So we, even though we asked to just reorganize, we've been working across the team since day one because we have the Internet of Things services, which are fantastic. Those are taking off really well. We have the Watson teams, we have the mobile teams, we have the DevOps teams. So we're constantly working across. And now we're reorganized into the Cloud unit, which is fantastic, because it just helps accelerate even more. So, you know, any agile business that has continuous integration like the Cloud, internally you have to kind of think that way and we're hearing that. Internally at IBM, there's a transformation to be more agile, to go faster, which everyone's saying, go faster, everyone wants you to go faster. I should've seen how Steve said that yesterday. Was it, was the tipping point that you had success and you doubled down on it? Was there, the proof point was Watson says, hey, look it, we can do this. Was that the key enabler? Yeah, the tipping point for us was really in the early stages, listening to developer feedback and making sure that we were re-architecting and designing the product that we have an incredible onboarding experience. So developers were, you know, from a marketing standpoint, we were getting the word out and really focusing on building community. So, you know, a few months into the year we started just very small grassroots meetup groups, right? Now we have 71 countries every other week having meetups where they're building applications on Bluemix. So for us, it was getting that community started and then having the community realize that we were taking their feedback on board and we would get, even on our Twitter handle, we'd get updates saying, whoa, thanks Bluemix. Didn't realize you were listening to the feedback and they would mention what they had tweeted at us as far as input and how we had made the change. And so every other day we're posting, you know, blog posts with updates on how we're working with developers just to make it a lot easier. Mike, can you talk about your open source strategy and how it's evolved as a company? I mean, IBM was, I think, the first large enterprise company to dive into open source we went in big billion dollar investment way back when the Linux story is renowned, but it's really evolved. You use your muscle, your money and your vision and your open source history, you know, in the community. How has it evolved, how is it changing? IBM for over 20 years, right? We've been driving and fueling and having engineers really involved in the open source community and helping to move that community along, lift it up and really anything you're doing, especially from a hybrid cloud standpoint, you have to have open standards. You have to build an open architecture. You have to be embracing all the various open source technologies that are out there. You saw the work that we're doing and you spoke with the Docker team yesterday. And so from our perspective is there's no other way. It is open by design. So all of our teams are very focused on making sure that we're working with the Cloud Foundry Foundation and getting input from all of the companies that are involved in that foundation because together we are going to create open standards and drive a momentum because if you're an independent developer or even if you're a large enterprise acting at the speed of an independent developer like we saw yesterday with Citi, you've got to be able to move and be portable. And if you're locked into proprietary standards, you're just really, there's nowhere for you to go in this new world and all the integration that you need to do. Okay, but there's another nuance there that I want to explore with you is that in the old days it used to be you'd have a committee. Right. Everybody would maybe pay to get into the committee and they'd set a bunch of standards and nine times out of 10 or 99 out of 100 it would flop. And a lot of people said that would happen for instance with Cloud Foundry, you guys came in and gave it a big lift. They're talking that way around the open data platform now. So what's the difference? Is it just that there's an open source component to it? Is it that simple? It's the community. So I mean open source is successful because of the community listening to the community ensuring the community has a voice and then the companies that are involved at maybe more of a seat at the table from a leadership perspective with the foundations, it's their role and their mission to be listening to the community and bring those forward. If any of those fail and the companies involved aren't listening to the community or the community's not engaged, it doesn't feel engaged and they're not innovating the platform, it's not going to work. So that's why we're very focused on building a sense of community, listening to what's out there and then enhancing. So the announcement with Docker around enterprise grade containers, we were very specific with the way we approached that and named that and you look at the secure gateway that needs to be added. You look at the enhancements we've made from Cloud Foundry on auto scaling. So really looking at what is the community looking for and then how do we then pay it back? So what's the message to developers? I mean, it sounds awesome. It's not easy what you just described. Just oh yeah, let's get the community. Well, it's hard to build community. So what's the message to developers? They have a lot of choices, a lot of options. They spend time in various areas. What's the message to them from IBM? From an open source standpoint, just to be involved, be committed, be, I mean, there are projects every day within the open source community where you can contribute code and you can be involved. And it's really about being very active and vocal and having a seat at the table. So, I mean, our teams were constantly looking through Stack Overflow and the feedback that we see there, feedback on Reddit, feedback on GitHub, how often is the code being forked? What kind of adoption metrics are we seeing? So from a developer standpoint, I would say it's time to lean in and be very involved because, I mean, not just IBM, but all the companies that we're working with across, absolutely listening. And I mean, this is such an era for developers where they have a seat at this big community table. It's not easy, but it's the right thing to do. So what about the Docker and the Redis? So this is modern stuff that developers want. Docker's the hottest trend. You know, it's talking to Docker folks. We interviewed Solomon years, a couple of years ago in the queue before they changed their name even, it was like, and we're so excited. And all of a sudden they're now the bell of the ball, as you say, everyone wants to get married with Docker. Redis also is compelling. Node, these are cutting edge technologies that are part of the integrated stack. So how do you guys talk about that in contrast to say Amazon, because Amazon and developers are used to these things, elastic, being so they have auto scaling. What do you guys have now that's directly competitive with Amazon? Well, from an application development standpoint, I think where we've gotten advantage is you look at the history of IBM around DevOps, right? So bringing together development operations in this continuous delivery life cycle and really looking at how are you going to quickly build an application. And then that's not the end of it, right? You now have to make sure from a security standpoint, or you know, and you've heard from Mark Vanzettahoff yesterday and the team on how are we providing strong security tools where you can do, you know, in process application scanning and then you've got to deploy, you've got to auto scale, you've got to bring it back and you've got maybe an issue, you've got to remediate and then redeploy. So for us, it's really looking at mobile app development and web development in that developer life cycle. And then in our conversations with our partners, the open source community, it's ensuring that we are helping to accelerate that every step of the way. I mean, the announcement around API harmony, great example where we've got kind of the era of the impatient developer, we're all of us, where you don't want to spend time writing a lot of code if it's already been written. You don't want to spend time creating integration and creating APIs if they're already out there. What you need are the tools at your fingertips where you can quickly build an application, search all the APIs that are available and your private APIs, you know, connect that into your mobile applications so you're to market faster. And then it's about enhancing and really bringing differentiation. So what do you say to the developer out there that's watching, just give the profile? Yeah, I'm comfortable with Amazon. I'm not sure I should go on Bluemix. Maybe the best move is not to move or maybe they have something I want that I don't know about. So talk about those two scenarios because they're comfortable. They're like, okay, I'm fearful of moving over because I'm comfortable over here with my tooling. You know how developers are as you work with them. And then there's also the fear of missing out, like, can I do better on Bluemix? So that's the common theme that we're hearing on developers. So how do you talk to those specific points? Yeah, and we have those conversations quite a bit and it's really about looking ahead at your strategy and at what point, especially for developers within large enterprises, at what point do you need to connect with the backend systems, at what point do you need to ensure that you've got secure connectors or European clients or Latin American clients, big concerns around data privacy, right? And so how are you sure that even the data centers that it's hosted in, we have 40 data centers within SoftLayer and growing every day and those are owned by IBM, those are secured and it's really looking at where are you gonna go as you expand your application and do you have the right partner in place, the right steps along the way that you can and more importantly that you're not locked in because as much as we have a lot of heart for Bluemix and what we're building, we want to ensure that we've built it to be open because we also want to have low barrier to exit. We want to make sure it's a great experience and it's our job to make sure that we've got the right services, the right technology, the right tools, the right services. They don't feel locked in. Absolutely. So the lock-in is a satisfaction, it's an experience. It's not a, oh I can't move because it's going to be too expensive to get out. Right. And there is a sense of expense that we're starting to see around the hidden cost of data and as you may have walked into what you thought was a freemium model with some of the providers that are out there and you're scaling and now you have an ornament amount of data coming in and you're looking to store and provision that, we are hearing that there are hidden costs there that are also kind of opening the door to other players that we know that. We understand what you're going to be facing down the road so we've built the pricing, the application, the platform to allow for that whereas there are other platforms that haven't because it is working at that kind of volume and scale is a bit new to them. Well, having to move that data is a problem too. That's what you mentioned. 40 data centers, the more the merrier I say. So give us some of the statistics. What's happened? How many services? A little bit yesterday. Go a little deeper. What's exciting? What are the proud pieces of the platform that you can share with the developers? Yeah, it's been the integration, the tight integration between the design teams and listening to developer feedback and then constantly designing the platform to have an amazing onboarding experience. So we announced yesterday the Watson Zones and the Internet of Things Zone. And these are really designed to be a way to onboard into Bluemix for developers that give you all the tools and resources and training that you need in order to start using cognitive applications like Watson because it is as exciting as the Watson services are, you do have a moment where you sit back and think, how am I going to use the power of Watson in my application? So we're creating these onboarding zones. So that's been a huge advancement. Really excited about that. You're going to see a lot more zones come out from us this year. And then the area of Internet of Things. So we have our IoT services. You had Nigel and Ian on yesterday from Silverhawk. Powerboat racing with Internet of Things. They're fantastic. Talk about business outcomes. Get to finish the race and win, you know? Win, but finish the race too. And you have the monitors on so you know if your heart rate's going over. Sorry, that may also be on slight. That's very important data. And so what we've seen, so the exciting areas are really the zones and then the adoption and growth around Internet of Things space. And it's funny, our teams of developers that are out working with clients and out working with startups. If you open up their bags, you're probably going to find a light bulb, a pebble watch, a bunch of connectors. I'm surprised anybody can get their security nowadays that's on our team. Because we have all these demonstrations that we're doing with clients of imagine if you're trying to create a smart building for your employees and you have their mobile devices that are sensing and pinging the thermostat system, the lighting system of the office. And as they're driving in and getting in proximity, things start turning on inside the office. So we do gem loads with light bulbs and watches and really you're starting to think through a smarter planet and smarter city's initiative with Internet of Things and how are you using Bluemix and the power of cloud to bring that to life within cities and within enterprises? That's crazy, go ahead. What's the developer persona look like these days? And you're talking about the startups, you're talking, you think of the hoodies, you think about the enterprise guys, are those two worlds coming together? They are in the fact that a lot of large enterprises are building innovation centers inside of themselves. And so they have, whether it's if they have foundries or innovation centers or groups of developers, they're really looking to harness that speed and innovation that we've seen from some of the enterprise developers. And then also the big advancement that we've seen is the continual growth of the hackathons. So we know city, we've been partnering with AT&T as well on creating as many opportunities for their internal developers and external ecosystem of developers to be bringing forward new ideas to them. And then what we don't talk about as much publicly are the internal hackathons we do inside of large corporations. So we work with the CIO's office, we go in 24 hour period and their developers are working on Bluemix within 24 hours, well, depending on the number of developers they have, we'll have 50, 75, 100 mobile apps that are built and then Shark Tank style, they pitch the apps to their CIO and we vote on them together with the company and then that's the roadmap for their 2015 plan and what applications they're going to bring to market. So talk about the geekiness of IBM and we were talking about this on the intro about what IBM should be doing, obviously we're editorializing and pining, but it's known as kind of like the big company, the slow, old IBM, big blue, big iron. And you guys are trying to be cool, see the keynotes out here, we see that. But you guys actually have a geeky kind of community going on with this dev thing, which we've been following for the past couple of years, pretty cool. IBM is a geek culture, I mean it's got a lot of geeks at IBM and that's a bad word we heard in New York, but a lot of computer scientists, technical people, very awesome bench of talent and patents, right? So all that's coming to bear we're hearing. So share with the folks out there that are watching, what's it like at IBM? It's geeky, you said they carry gadgets around. I mean, is that the way people are at IBM? I mean, what's the culture like? It is. Your group is, I think one of the ones that are kind of the edgiest I think. It's definitely not a monoculture at IBM. There's multiple pockets. You've got a conservative customer base, it's like to be good, you've got to be, got to be kind of geeky, I guess. It's about being authentic, so we're not trying to be anything, we're not. And when you look at, I mean you met the teams, Adam Gunther, we've got Jeff Sawyer, Marvin Goodman running around here on our teams, and we have massive development labs, of developers within, hi-fun, our London facilities, and this is going on every day. So we're not putting on airs, we're not pretending. This is truly what our teams are doing. So we have, you know, Joshua Carr in the UK is constantly with children in schools showing them how to fly a drone with a banana, right? Where you do the device connectors. That wasn't because it was a stunt that we were trying to pull, it's just truly what they do. And we're very involved in the STEM initiatives for schools, very involved in our distinguished engineers working through. But to attract developers and to get them ingratiated into your platform onboard, you're judged by the company, they want to see themselves there, right? So, there's a culture of developers now, I don't want to say brogrammers, but like the young guns are like, they've never loaded Linux on machines. They always say, wow, it loads off work. It's all cloud to them, so they're born in the cloud. So that's just a complete cultural shift. So talk about it, you guys have that mojo internally? Yes, it's about taking what we know inside the company and exposing that to developers and creating that developer-to-developer connection. And you mentioned brogrammers, I mean we have Lauren Schaefer, we have a number of female developers on our teams and we are very much focused on ensuring that we're leading in making sure that we are creating a very balanced STEM environment of developers and leading in that area of making sure we have a lot of diversity. And so it's really about, from a marketing standpoint, it's, you know, you don't market to developers, right? Yeah, no, your technical chops are what's the marketing. Right, and you make sure that what they're interested in and what they're after, we're going to connect them with an IBM development team or somebody else in the community, through developer works that's working on it as well. And it's that local community, there's local connections. You can't fake, you can't head fake developers, that's why we learned that. No, and my team, my marketing team, it's half developers, half data analysts. I mean we are, I mean EVC shifts inside of IBM marketing. I mean it's all data-driven. I'm using the entire portfolio, SaaS portfolio we have with you, you know, Unica and Chrometrix and every day. You can't go wrong by giving developers more tools and more technologies to play with. Right. Like a kid in the candy store. So I'm going to ask you the question that's on my mind is, what was the big learnings over the year that you guys walked away? What was magnified this year? Obviously you launched it a year ago, you have some growth. Right. What's the learnings that was magnified for your team and the whole group? I'd say the speed. So when you talked about, you know, agile development, agile delivery, you look at going from a few services to 102, you now have to reinvent the way product development is done inside the company. So it's cloud-first, it's mobile-first and it's really looking at across all the services we have, how long can they be a beta? How long, you know, are we going to do testing? What is the beta to general availability onboarding for developers in migration path? Because a lot of companies will launch a beta, you're using the beta, you're embedded in it and then all of a sudden it goes generally available and you have to rip and replace. Like that's horrible and, you know, inexperienced. So we've, the biggest change I've seen is just the agile delivery and the speed at which internally to IBM we're working and learning from our partners that we're onboarding and bringing more and more partners every day. We got a break, but I want to ask you one final question. What's the coolest thing you guys have done with Bluemix internally? So internally it's been the Watson services and the Watson hackathons. So we are doing message resonance and sentiment analysis so you can actually take memos that are written or external documentation, run it through message resonance and start creating profiles of messaging. So it's been, so you've got traditional writers, you know, geeking out of it in that they're uploading their content into the mobile applications and then changing the way that they're writing. We did a test, Adam sent us a link for the beta with Bluemix and we took all our crowd chats. The social group has an amazing crowd chat, a zillion people on it and it's a huge transcript. I just cut and paste the transcript into the site and it spit out like the top things and it was like, you know, openness because it's a Twitter chat and it gave a little, all the sentiment. It was like, wow, this is awesome. So we can see where this is going. So that's cool. Thanks for coming on theCUBE again. Great to see you. Congratulations and keep us posted and we'll keep checking in with you on the progress. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back live in Las Vegas after this short break.