 Okay, we're back here live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. We're here at IBM's information on demand conference, the hashtag, IBM IOD. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE. Our next guest is Dave Laverde, Vice President, Big Data Analytics overseeing, to go to market strategy, the marketing around the portfolio. Welcome to theCUBE. Great, thanks. So two big megatrends happening. Big Data Analytics and social business on the other. Both kind of go hand in hand. We're gonna hear a lot of that here at the conference. But Big Data and Analytics are obviously driving everything. How do you get your arms around that and explain to the folks that, okay, internally you don't have to communicate to customers who are looking for business outcomes fast and they need help doing it. So you need some educational, but yeah, they need kind of solutions right away. They do, John. I think the one thing that we're seeing is it's really, they don't, clients don't see this as two separate things. They really see there's a data element to it, analytic element, but really what they're after is the combination of both, which comes together in terms of what are the insight they can draw from it? How can they change their businesses? How can they really drive new initiatives based on this in terms of the insight that they can get in terms of the data in their organization? We've, this is our second year here at IOD, last year we're here, and we saw the coming together of IBM internally, just kind of messaging and kind of realizing, hey, we have, the whole future is kind of the new modern era of computing and software, kind of these, as they say, waves of innovation creates new value and new ways. You guys have all the pieces, so what we saw was, hey, we have all the pieces. This year it's much more coherent in the messaging. You're in that conversation, because you're in across that. What is the secret internally to bring that happen, and what does it take to kind of bring those together? Because you guys have so many businesses and so much technology. We do, but I think it really connects back to what are we trying to do as an organization? What does IBM turn and achieve, and we've picked really four major growth initiatives that we see for IBM, from cloud, mobile, social, social business, and big data and analytics. And they're also, you know, big initiatives going on in the market too. We know through some of the analyst firms, they've estimated that the big data and analytics market is a $212 billion market, and we've positioned ourselves to achieve roughly $20 billion by 2015. So it's a pretty big audacious goal. We're definitely on track. We've seen double digit growth in this market over the past couple of years. So it's something we're encouraged about, and this conference is all about this topic. And what we're seeing more and more, and our theme for this year's conference is really about how do you win big, how do you think about this in terms of how it can change your business? And we have hundreds and hundreds of customers who are presenting their use cases here to talk about how are they getting value out of their investments in big data and analytics? And very much that we're seeing now, many organizations are telling us it's no longer sort of down in the organization as a conversation. It's a boardroom level conversation. It's a CEO conversation, because they see it as a way to drive competitive advantage within their industry. They see it as a way to generate new revenue opportunities in their industries where the whole notion of monetizing data is starting to take hold. So it's an exciting time, it really is. Dave, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that market, $200 billion. So obviously huge, it's more than just Hadoop. I mean, when you look at the pure play Hadoop guys, you're talking about tens of millions of dollars being done, maybe if you throw in some of the visualization and other log analysis vendors, maybe it's a couple hundred million here, a couple hundred million, you're talking 200 billion. That's enormous. So what's in that $200 billion? Well, obviously it's a good combination, a good representation of software that you need to do these things, in terms of thinking of structured data that has to come into the equation, the unstructured side of the data where Hadoop plays a really big role in that. Really what's sort of at the forefront on the software side now is this whole notion of data in motion. There's sort of a theory out there that says at some point we're generating so much data that it sort of collapses under its own weight. And what's the next paradigm shift that we're going to see move toward? It's really this notion of data in motion and how do you start applying and bringing analytics closer to the data and to do this in a real-time fashion so that you're actually streaming information and you're driving analytics and predictive analytics based on those streams of information. So that's a big part of that 200 billion that we're headed toward. The other key piece of it is really the services dimension to this because organizations today don't necessarily have all the skills they need and are looking for help and looking for insight really on the business side to understand how they can be driving to be the best within their industry and understand what are the best practices and what are their competition and competitors doing that they need to be doing so they don't fall behind. That's probably one of the biggest concerns we see from clients today is I don't want to fall behind. I don't want to be behind the scene of this. I need to be at the forefront. So John, let's see, maybe two weeks ago now, two or three weeks ago, you did that great panel with Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE. So GE, machine data is really what they're pushing. What's your play there? Obviously, Smarter Planet talks to that, but GE, huge customer of IBMs. You guys becoming increasingly competitors or cooperators or anyway, where does that fit into the whole marketplace, that machine to machine? Yeah, I mean, it's a big part of it. It's one of the things we've announced today in terms of an offering that we have just in terms of how you start to look at machine data, network data. In fact, we had one of our clients consolidated communications on a panel with us today talking about how they're using it more effectively, monitoring machine data in network operations to really spot trends before things start to happen and issues start to develop and really to improve overall customer satisfaction because they're doing it. One of the things IBM's doing, we have many, many situations where we're using streaming data in the medical field as we start to take streams of information coming from bedside monitors and how we start to bring that information together and almost create sort of the early warning system for patient care to understand when things are starting to either go wrong or alarms are starting to happen and physicians can then intervene at an earlier stage. A very popular use case we talk about quite often is in the situation of child care with the University of Ontario for hospital for sick children in the neonatal care unit where we actually were monitoring information from many, many different devices. Prior to this sort of thing, devices or alarms would go off, nurses would go over every once or an hour or so and check on the baby's condition. Now with streaming analytics, essentially what happens is they know ahead of time if something changes, if something radical starts to change in that streaming level of information, they can predict with a certain degree of accuracy if the child is starting to see some duress or if there's an onset of infection starting to take place and they can predict this days before it actually takes place or happen and they can begin the treatment sooner. Do you see that machine data, the instrumentation of virtually everything, machines, people coming together with the traditional IT departments? Is that happening today in your world? Are there examples of that? Very much so. I mean, when you think about the application of all this, it really, in what we're seeing, it's both machine data, but it's also in the area of customer, what people are trying to do today to get to a higher level of personalization. So how do you take all these different types of data coming together and try and really sort of predict what's the next behavior? And how do you start to delight customers based on the information you have at hand and what you know and how you can better serve them? So there's a lot of hype around big data, but 200 billion sounds like it's more than just hype. What's your take on the whole big data meme? I mean, it's real. It is definitely real. As I mentioned before, you've got this desire from a very senior level from really board of director level to CEO saying, how do we monetize information? We're seeing it in the telco business. It's almost a race now where telecommunications companies are figuring ways to monetize that data, location data, and use it in a number of different applications. When we see how clients are starting to use this, it sort of falls into a number of different categories. One, it's around customer, how do organizations acquire, grow, and retain customers is a big piece of where we see big data and analytics coming together and being applied today. Another is around operations and optimizing operations and fraud and security. There's another big, big application of this data. We start to see that in commercial accounts, but also in the public sector when you think about what's happening to fight, how data is being used to fight crime, how it's being used to conserve energy. There's just so many applications today of how that information is starting to be used, and we've got a number of situations and cases where we see this come together. You guys also talk about enabling new business models. That's one of your big initiatives and imperatives. The but question is, but do you see companies actually organizing to be so-called data-driven? It's kind of a cliche, but if in fact data is the new source of competitive advantage, are companies really taking that seriously? I know some are, but across the board, and what do they have to do to really exploit that momentum? I mean, very much, we see organizations today starting to organize around this. I mean, one of the key indicators is the creation of the chief data officer, which is becoming a very popular term. Well, we're laughing, because we talk about a lot on theCUBE. I mean, it's a critical role. It is. But there's a lot of questions on how to roll that out. Some are afraid of being restricting innovation because if it becomes more like compliance, it's a security blanket or organic innovation. Is it an IT function? Is it outside the CIO's? It's a very unique role, and the people that I've talked to that are in that role, they are really, or see their role as a facilitator to really understand the value of the data that the organization has and how do you use it more effectively to put it in the hands of all the decision makers, but yet also maintain the governance over that information because it is an asset and it has to be protected. You have to think about the usage of it in terms of if you're dealing with personal data, who's protecting it? Because the reputation of the firm is at stake if that data were to fall into the wrong hands. So it's very much so becoming a very real role. In fact, they saw one stat that said, today probably 5% of organizations have a chief data officer growing to 50% of organizations having it by 2015. So you think about that rapid acceleration of organizations seeing we need that kind of stewardship over this information because it is now more than ever being seen as an asset to an organization. So we did a conference in July with MIT and it was a chief data officer symposium. We had the chief data officer of the Veterans Administration, TD Ameritrade, the Federal Reserve, a number of CDOs. Every single one of them said that the CDO should not report to the CIO. Now, when we got out of that environment, that very insulated MIT sort of environment academic, but still some practitioners, there was a backlash of that notion that it shouldn't be reporting to the CIO or maybe others said it's the CIO's job to be the chief data officer. What do you think about that? Well, let me take it home to my own situation. So I think I've been in marketing a long time and it's always been a debate. Who should own the customer data? Should it be marketing? Should it be the IT organization? And I think really where I've seen that play out the best, it's a collaboration between the two in terms of where it needs to. But the real time has changed that equation a bit recently from conversations we've had here in theCUBE is saying we're seeing the business units driving a lot more activity, whether that's application driven, which is integrated in the app that's dictated by the business unit or the marketing departments. You've seen the same thing and how do people figure that out? Because that's the challenge, you want speed. You do, you want speed and that's one of the keys to this, right? Because it's all about, ultimately it's all about how do you use the data more effectively that it grow the business or improve decision making. And there is a strong technical side to this. I mean, to really think about how to do this, what we're seeing is organizations need to think about a new architecture. How do you architect for the future? And it's really IT that has to play a key role in that. When you think of what organizations are dealing with today, it's thinking about all the variety of information that they have to bring into the organization. How does that data get aligned with existing enterprise data? So you start to take social feeds and unstructured information. How do you align that with a customer record? So you know how to associate the two and what information do you now have that you've gathered on that customer? It's really that integration of that data coming together, that's an important thing. So it becomes an IT function to really make this effective. I want to change gears for a second because we really are complimentary of your marketing. You guys do a good job. It's a tough story to tell you. Thank you. A lot of assets to do. Plus IBM has always been a great marketer in going back to its history. You do social well too. You have a good handle on social. So there's a lot of folks that are trying to get to be that good. What do you say to the folks out there? What's the strategy? Because you have very complex message that you use to simplify on that's relevant. Multiple technologies involved. Many use cases that are delivering business outcomes. Do you feature the customers? What's the overall marketing strategy? More awareness. I mean, how do you, what's the secret in terms of these? Yeah, at IBM it's no secret. I mean, we started this probably five years ago now with the whole notion of a smarter planet. And the things that we could do and that we saw that things were changing in the business. And when you think about how do we do that effectively and how do we get that message out, it really comes at a number of levels. It's thinking about thought leadership. And it's working with other thought leaders who really are sort of the trusted advisors to our clients. And working with them to understand their perspective and to have them understand our perspective on our point of view. And we take a lot of stride to really think hard about and develop our point of view and how we wanna establish that in the markets where we do business. So how do we get that consistency globally to speak with one voice around a specific topic? And it is about keeping it simple. That's probably the best advice I could give to other marketers when you're thinking about how do you take so much level of complexity, bring it together into a concise message, build a point of view that really can be substantiated in the market and that you have great references and great customer participation. A lot of people don't know that IBM has a real social DNA. I remember 2005, the guy who was running communications, the executive of his name was, he's now in the different group, but he was showing me that you guys had all hands meetings, company-wide online, internally on IBM, you had the blogging, employees are blogging. So you guys know social, down to, I mean, this is not like Johnny come lately. We're in the business. It's not Johnny come lately, social media. So what is the secret to social media? Because that's more challenging. You have omnidirectional channels of opportunity and customers and potential customers. Feedback to and from, how do you guys look at the social marketing initiatives? One of the key things that we really try very hard to do and that is align our subject matter experts. For the most part, what people wanna engage in is really good conversations with knowledgeable people on topics. So we do a lot to engage people throughout our organization to make them socially aware, to understand what are the conversations that are happening? Are they jumping on those conversations that are happening in a live way to make sure that we are getting our point of view into those conversations. So it's a key part of it. It's not dictating, right? No, not dictating. No, it's really, people use their own opinions, but we do training. So we do train people on how to be more social. We do a lot of our own company level training. We started an initiative within the organization called Think Fridays. And once a month, we pick a topic and we train 450,000 employees on that topic. And a lot of it is built in the conversations, connect and keep us moving, using our own tools, using connections to make sure that we keep those conversations. And the management also gets, executive management gets feedback from the employees in real time too, right? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. We know what they like and what they don't like in terms of what we're saying and how that gets communicated. And the social piece is interesting because as you're saying before, IBM does a really good job of being disciplined with a higher level messaging that evokes emotion and smart appliance, a great example of that. I can give you a great example. One thing we did about, it was about a month ago, we decided we had a new ad campaign hitting. So I said, well, let's blog about it and we'll show some of these ads. Well, you can't imagine the response. People have a very emotional reaction to like designing a website or hate it. Exactly, when you're asking their opinion on advertising, so all of a sudden, our whole social channel lit up with all kinds of opinions, good and bad. But what was great about it is it was instant feedback. Instant feedback on what was great. The old expression is, listen, listen. I remember back in the day, back in the 80s when I graduated college, it was like the marketing I taught you in business school was you had to listen to the customer. It was kind of like, yeah, everyone said, listen to the customer. And back then, you would like write it down and bring it back to the ranch. Decoded. I think they said this, now you can actually listen to the customer in real time. Yeah, one of my favorite expressions is my team. Here's us all the time. We have to think from the outside in. We're such a large organization. It's very easy to kind of get caught up on what we think is the right point of view. We need to listen to our customers and bring that conversation in. So another thread that you guys are good at is open source, right? And IBM has a history of being successful in open source and getting back to your social marketing. I want to get your thoughts on this because this has kind of not been unpacked publicly in the mainstream market is that the open source community of developers has always been transparent and projects will lose based on collaborative and communities have been a big part of marketing projects. Now the end user market seems to be community driven. With Twitter data, you guys have demonstrated some great social data up there. You can now talk to what's on people's minds in real time. And essentially the theme has been, the meme has been kicked around is that it's community marketing on steroids. Do you agree with that? And if so, how do you shift a traditionally big TV campaign driven approach and continue that kind of high level messaging and then go into kind of these many channels? Yeah, it's really, it's become more than ever a mix of everything, right? In terms of the audiences you need to appeal to, where you need to appear, where you need to be a part of these conversations, more and more of our demand generation activity is starting to come through social channels. And our thought around that is really, how do we connect people to high quality content, educational content, in terms of them being able to see us as a trusted source of good information to educate themselves on certain topics. So that's really where we've sort of come together to be able to marry the world of social and the world of marketing. So to come together, it's really through the creation of very sort of thought provoking content. Have you guys had any like internal conversations that says, hey, we want to trend on Twitter like if everyone just tweeted at once, you know, just send out, yeah. I mean, how many people, pretty much everyone tweeted. Pretty much everyone tweeted. Looking at my team here saying, oh, let's try that one. I think everyone tweets at IBM, pretty much, right? People are encouraged to be on Twitter. We do, we do, yeah. Just gave them an evil idea, but I'm only kidding, by the way, but it would work. Think and socialize parties. Social innovation right there. We're very ethical at IBM, I don't think we would do that. We know other companies that do that. We'll leave that for our competition. They knew who they are, too. We do. Okay, back to big data. Revealing your secrets over here. Oh, yeah, we have, yeah. I'm 27 people and that's a big trending item. We have crowd chats, though. How many 82 posts so far on crowd chats? 102 posts so far on crowd chat, which is actually kind of a tweet machine. We're into the collaboration. On the analytics side, that's been a challenge on social. So what do you guys look at that from an analytics standpoint? Getting the visualization and the dashboard. Because everyone's chasing the ROI equation on that, with analytics driving it. That's not people's mind. What's your thoughts with that? In terms of marketing, specifically. Yeah, marketing, turning it into customer feedback. Is there any visualization tools? How do you guys use your own big data to? I mean, we have a number of tools that we use today, a number of our own products, and we really try and sort of practice what we preach and using our own technology as best we can to enable and drive our organization to look at, are we being effective of the things that we're doing? Matter, of the conversations, and the topics that we're very passionate about, are we starting to see that come through? So, and again, we're very much an analytically driven company, all the way, through and through, in terms of every aspect of IBM now is very much focused on becoming an analytically driven company. My final question for you is, looking at the marketplace, the big data analytics marketplace, kind of looking over the portfolio of solutions you're talking to the customers, what are the biggest things that surprised you over the past couple of years? That kind of like, wow, I didn't think it would be that big, or I didn't think that, I thought that would be bigger. Is there anything you could share? And areas that surprised you, and then areas that didn't surprise you? Well, I think the one that surprised me the most is the interest level and excitement level around this topic, around big data, has not died down. Not from what we've seen. Everyone sort of said, wow, it's gonna be a passing fad, and it's gonna be the kind of thing that, we saw this before. See it go through the hype cycle, and it's gonna revert back to a BI conversation. Well, it's two years later, since this thing has really heated up, it's still a strong, and it's still, if anything, it's gotten even hotter, in terms of a topic. I know some major publications have actually established beat reporters, just associated with big data. So they really are pretty excited about this. Three years after we did it. Four years, technically. Take a bow, guys, take a bow. We're the first tech blog, or any publication that have cloud mobile and social editorial strategy. No, I think we'd agree. Final question to kind of give you the last word here for the folks watching who aren't here. What's IOD about this year? I mean, IBM's messaging, and what's the core thing that you would want someone to take away from the event this week? Yeah, I mean, this is a really great conference because it's extremely focused, and the people who attend this are very passionate about this topic, about big data analytics. We really let our customers be the voice of this. As I mentioned, you know, we've got many, many, many sessions, but half the sessions are being conducted by our customers because they want to share their stories. And other customers want to hear those best practices come together. So it's really, you know, you'll get the feel of the buzz just walking around the hallways here of the stories people are sharing and the excitement around this topic. It's phenomenal. We had an amazing interview this morning with Tim Buckman, amazing customer story. Just a kind of passion, because it's game changing and people need to feel it. Right. And it's awesome. Dave, thanks so much. Sighting times. Sighting times, Dave Leverdive. Thanks for coming on the queue. We'll be right back with our next guest live here in Las Vegas, IBM's information on demand, very focused, customers are doing the talking. But we want to interview the IBM executives as well. This is a big part of the trending stories of social business meets analytics and cloud mobile under the hood. We'll be right back with our next guest after the short break. Is a live mobile studio. We bring it to events and we say we extract the signal from the noise. What we do is we get the absolute best guests that are at those events. We bring them inside the queue and we talk to them. We have a conversation. We really want to make it fun, exciting, but more importantly, extract the data from the guests and extract that metadata and share it with the world so people can use that information to better themselves, better their companies. More importantly, connect with other people to do more business, to define more about the technology. And for us, this is the future. I watch many of the the CUBE interviews when you're handling other events. Oh good. It's both the combination of enjoyable and insightful. And what I like is the interactive banter back and forth, plus the fact that when I think about some of the conversations we have, they're not only deep, they're not only rich, but the audience themselves will really come to benefit from those conversations. When organizations bring the CUBE to an event, it just brings a whole new dimension. It adds a texture of not only independence, but also explodes content from their community into a much, much broader community. We tend to reach about 10 times the audience that's live at an event. So we're a big data-driven organization. We have a data science team that allows us to see not only what's trending broadly with the public, but what's trending in very specific areas in our specialty in tech. That allows us to vector our analysis and relevance from our research and journalist team into everything that we do as a media company. And really the benefit of the CUBE is it's a place for conversations with people to connect with each other and to learn about things. And it's a revolution in media. We look at the technology and the people behind it as tech athletes, those are the folks making the companies, making the technology, really creating the new value in this modern era, and it's fun, it's exciting, and more importantly, it's very social. The CUBE does an excellent job of taking this very, very broad platform and format and giving visibility to a very broad audience on each of the different key aspects of the technology, and it's a great environment for the broader community who couldn't be here today, have visibility into what we're doing, what each of the tracks are, and what are the sort of the core trends that are associated inside of Hadoop and given a very balanced view from multiple dimensions around it. I think that's invaluable for the community. We always know that your view is right until you hear a different perspective. So you're always interested in giving some neutral perspective, help me see it from a different light, and maybe ask a hard question or two that I might not have considered. In that sense, that independent voice that's always ability to have an independent, audited perspective of the world, it's always just good. So these guys bring an incredible wealth of knowledge from their own careers, they've been into a lot of different things in the industry, and they're independent. They're able to bring different points of view, and sometimes they ask really tough questions, too, the kinds of questions that maybe you don't want to answer. But it always gets to the heart of it, and we just love having them here. It's about connecting with people, and that really is what's all about having the conversations in a very social, collaborative way, and that's what makes it so exciting that people are watching. I think it's extremely valuable, and the independent parts, right? So they're not biased by having a sponsored kind of relationship for the specific segment, so that there is no, it essentially leads to kind of more of an unbiased conversation, and also leads to kind of like the no questions we left unasked, any question can be asked, because I'm not gonna ask you the question that might look you bad or might make you look good. The value of an independent news organization at an event is that it allows our audience to have a perspective that's balanced, that it's not just the vendors talking.