 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit. Brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts. Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back, welcome to Boston everybody. Stu and I are going to do a little riff on this week in Kube Land. And we're here at the Chief Data Officer Summit at IBM. Hashtag IBM CDO. We got a crowd chat going on, Stu, I believe. Crowdchat.net slash IBM CDO. Yup. Or a CDO summit? CDO, IBM CDO. Nice and simple. Okay, great, thank you. And Bert Lattimore's manning that. He's documenting what's being done on theCUBE. So thank you, Bert, for doing that. So Stu, we're going to take a little break from the CDO conversation. We'll come back to it, but there are three things that we've been covering this week. You and I were at IBM Edge on Monday and Tuesday while our colleagues on the West Coast, including Greg, who's now here, we're doing Oracle Open World on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And I want to talk about that and of course we're wrapping up the week here. So at Edge, it was interesting. Edge is an infrastructure show. We certainly heard IBM plugging its infrastructure story into Cognitive and so it's fitting that we're punctuating the week with an event around Chief Data Officer and Cognitive and Analytics. And so, you know, in thinking about Edge, sort of start there, IBM's kind of created three businesses for its systems division. The mainframe Z business, the power and the open power business, kind of call that the second one. And then of course the storage business. You got Z sort of managing the decline of that business and it's been in sort of flat the decline mode. Sometimes it grows when it's a product cycle for years, you seem to be doing a good job there. It also drives a lot of other IBM software and services business. The power is an exciting story, opening up that ecosystem. You know, we talked about the China angle. We can talk about that some more and then storage doing the software defined thing. So that's all sort of pretty clear. There's some gaps. We talked about the gaps and hyperconverged and the like. And then contrast that with Oracle, you know, who's got this vertically integrated approach. The both companies are chasing value, not volume, but Larry Ellison this week said, you know, look out Amazon, here I come. What do you make about of that statement? I mean, say that exactly. But basically saying we're going to bomb prices and infrastructures of service. Amazon's got a new competitor. We're going to take those guys on. We're going to be 20% less expensive, 10 times faster, five times better, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What are people saying about that? What's your take on that? Yeah, so Dave, I mean, we've seen this message from Oracle before you did an event last year, I think, where it was like infrastructure, we're going to be, you know, 50% less expensive than Cisco, EMC kind of going after, you know, the VCEV block, you know, market leader in the space, just like Amazon, market leader in the space, you know, $10 billion worth of revenue in the space. The last quarter, I think cloud revenue, I think was what, $150, $200 million from Oracle. So obviously they were small player, but you know, up, you know, we're going to be the cheapest and we're better. And we've got a 20 year lead on database. I'm like, look, number one, Oracle has the stickiest application in enterprise and they are doing a good job at switching a lot of their applications over to Sassify them over to cloud. But if we're talking, you know, infrastructure as a service, it's not just the, you know, price per CPU, you know, price per gigabyte out there. Amazon has built, you know, you know, we talked, is there a standard in the cloud? The line we had is, yes, there's a standard out there. It's called Amazon. You know, everybody writes to, you know, AWS S3. If you're not compatible with that, what are you doing? Because that's where the customers are. Customers such, Amazon is such a broad marketplace and ecosystem out there. That's where, you know, the developers are. That's where, you know, so much is happening there. So it's a little bit bombastic for Oracle to come out and say, you know, oh, we're just going to, you know, knock them aside over something like price. Yeah, so, and, you know, it's interesting, Oracle's really got nothing to lose by doing that, by saying that. So of course, it's going to, you know, take the bravado road. So that's kind of interesting. One of the things that I want to talk about, Stu, that we learned at this conference, and Gene Kolker just mentioned it, was how IBM's Global Services Division is trying to bring cognitive into its business. This was really fascinating to me and this is what I think everybody's missing about IBM. IBM's services company has been leading with services, but at the same time, IBM has always had a big R&D investment in technology, particularly in software, obviously infrastructure as well, but big, big investments in software, generally in cognitive specifically. It seems to me, Stu, we talk about this all the time, the curves, and if you go on Wikibon, you'll see all the discussion we have about what Amazon is doing to the technology provisioning, provisioning compute storage and networking, which used to be a very labor intensive activity. Now Amazon's automating that and it's driving their marginal costs down. IBM, to a certain extent, is trying to replicate that in its services business. It's like the nirvana of services. How do we replicate what we've done? And it's always been very, very difficult because things are so different and whether or not IBM can pull it off, we'll see, but I'm confident that it can do so in certain industries. So what it's doing is it's taking Watson and applying Watson into, let's say, healthcare, for example, it will do the same in financial services. It seems to be doing the same in its own services business. What that ostensibly could do for IBM is drive down the marginal cost and allow IBM to be more profitable at volume. I mean, the gross margin of IBM's business is not nearly as big, for example, as Microsoft's, despite the fact that IBM has a huge software business and it's because of the giant services content in IBM's business, you were at EMC for years. A hardware company like EMC in the enterprise can have 60% gross margins. EMC lived on 60 plus percent gross margins for years. The enterprise storage companies generally can achieve that. PC companies never got close, right? Dell's gross margins before it went private were in on the high teens. And so it's going to be interesting to see if IBM can take this services business and drive a new profitability model by taking its industry expertise, automating with cognitive many of the functions typically done by humans, Gene called the technology led and human assisted, that could be a sort of game changer from a profitability standpoint for IBM. Yeah, Dave, definitely. We talked before about if you take Dell and Dell plus EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and how little software they have. Doesn't mean they don't have any, but they divested themselves of all of the non-core software piece as opposed to IBM. IBM's got a lot of software in a lot of places, both things they've developed, as well as so many acquisitions. I mean, I feel like every single day IBM makes an acquisition. They're such a big company out there. However, unlike Oracle, which is, let's vertically integrate everything and bake it all into one piece, IBM, the services piece means we're going to work with you on our stuff. We're going to work with other things at IBM Edge this week. It's like, okay, you want to use Amazon? Great, we've got services to help you do that. They've got so many places that they can get into a customer and everything from, they can build the platforms for you, they can offer services for you. And there's just so many places that IBM can help your business. They're good at the thought leadership and moving people forward. The whole message around cognitive as a service seems to be resonating with the customers we're talking to and where things look to be going. So, and the challenge has always been profitability at scale. So we'll be paying close attention to that. Okay, I'm really stoked. Next week is big, big week for SiliconANGLE Media and theCUBE. We've got Splunk.conf. John Furrier is going to be down in Orlando with John Walls covering that event. It's a fantastic event. I'm disappointed that I can't be there, but I'm actually psyched that I'll be in New York with big data NYC, get that in a second. But the Splunk.conf is one of the best conferences that we do with theCUBE and what makes it so great is the customers. The customers bring content, they're passionate. Splunk has done a fantastic job taking this mundane notion of log files and bringing automation to IT, helping with security problems. It's really, really a great conference with some fantastic content. So John Furrier is going to be down there. That, I believe, is on Monday and Tuesday. We are running big data NYC as part of Data Week in New York City. It runs concurrent to Strada, which is at the Javis Center. We'll be at 37 Pillars, which is on 37th Street. Joke, it's a John Furrier or a John Greco. Seven Iron, for me, it's two drivers away from Javis. But it's a short walk and 37 Pillars is a fantastic location. We have three days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, no, four days of coverage. Four days at Big Data NYC, let me go through it. So Monday, we start off in the afternoon with NVIDIA. So NVIDIA is a super hot company that been doing cool stuff in AI and GPUs. And so, O'Reilly with Strada has added an AI day and deep learning, machine learning day to Strada. So Monday is deep learning day and we are partnering with NVIDIA to cover presentations and panels that cover those topics. And it's all about building the next generation of applications. So that's on Monday. And then Monday night, we got a party with NVIDIA, which is going to be awesome. And then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we have wall-to-wall coverage of Big Data with CUBE guests, dozens and dozens of practitioners and technologists. And we'll be really focusing on the next generation, sort of beyond Hadoop. Obviously a lot of talk on Spark, next generation apps. So that's all day, Tuesday, Tuesday night. We're doing, actually Tuesday afternoon, we're doing a mini event within an event with IBM talking about data science and data scientists. And then that evening, we're collaborating with IBM to have a second party at the Mercantile Exchange, which is just across the street and up the block from 37 pillars. So excited about that. And then Wednesday and Thursday, full day, all day coverage of what's going on at Strata, what innovations we're seeing. So we'll probably have 40 to 50 interviews, we'll be doing on the grounds at the IBM event in the evening. So super excited about that. You won't be there. You'll be, I think in, what are you? I've got an analyst event to go. Oh, okay, great. In North Carolina? Yep. Yeah, okay, good. So we'll miss you, but Jeff Frick will be there hosting, co-hosting with me, George Gilbert, Peter Burris will have the whole crew there. So if you're in New York City next week, definitely stop by, 37 pillars will be there from Monday afternoon on and would love to see you. So give you the last thought here on IBM CDO event. Yeah, the last thing that Dave, we mentioned it at the IBM Edge, so, but kudos to IBM for really some of the women in tech activities they're doing. It seems that the panel we had this morning over breakfast was really interesting. CDOs have a greater percentage of women than kind of tech in general. About 25% is, I think, the latest Gartner data on that. It's great if you look, we had six segments for the six. We have women on the program here, so it's always good to see. And naturally, in there, as you said, IBM from the top has the direction. They've got one of the most important women in tech as their CEO, and hopefully we'll have her on the program at either the Grace Hopper event or World of Watson. Well, hopefully both, yeah. Yeah, so Grace Hopper's coming up the second half of October. We've got so many events coming up. I can't keep them all in my head, but that week is sort of Texas week. You and I will be at Dell World, and then I'll be cruising over to Grace Hopper, the women in tech event, which we're really super excited about that. We've got our fellowship that we're doing, the partnership with the Ground Truth and theCUBE. We call it the Tech Truth, and it's all about training the next generation of journalists, which is super exciting. We've got three senior fellows, graduate students that are now in the process of doing background research. They're gonna be covering some key issues on women in tech, equality in terms of pay, how companies, how many startups are doing with regard to hiring women in tech. So we're gonna be digging into that and then covering that, obviously, at the Grace Hopper event. So lots coming up this fall. Check out siliconangle.tv for all the upcoming events. Check out wikibon.com for all the research, and siliconangle.com for all the news. All right, so that's a wrap for this segment. Stu and I will be back right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live from IBM's Chief Data Officer Summit in Boston. Right back. My name is Dave Vellante, and...