 Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jesse Proudman, IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of what is now the Bluemix Private Cloud product line. Wanted to spend some time today setting the context of the IBM Cloud strategy and then how the Bluemix Private Cloud product line fits into that. So I'll start talking through that strategy in the handoff to Asmire, who will talk through the Bluemix Private Cloud product. So if we think about cloud technologies now, if we back up, 2006 was really the start of programmable infrastructure with the rise of Amazon Web Services. And at the beginning, it was really just a matter of infrastructure of compute, networking, and storage. But over the last decade, that story has changed, where at this point in time, cloud really is a platform of composable services that is designed to make application development easier, and faster, and more efficient for engineers in your organization. So we're beyond just infrastructure. We've got to think about what are all of the components that can go into that platform as part of that engineering process? So things like developer tools, workflow, CICD, how do you deal with data and the database platforms that you're using, analytics, and what are the APIs that you're using to actually control and manage that footprint? So we think about it. We're sort of in this cloud 3.0 era, where the first variant was about infrastructure and it was about cost. That was the big differentiator. How do we move faster with time to market? And now with this platform world, we're thinking how do we actually innovate and build different technologies, different products? How do we approach business models in a new way? So we think about it. One third of the top 20 companies in every industry will be disrupted over the next three years. And we've seen that over the past five years in the private markets with companies like Uber and Airbnb. And this pattern, this trend is continuing. Mark Collier likes to say, software is eating the world. And the reality is a lot of these legacy organizations, their business models can be replicated and improved upon in software without having to actually own physical infrastructure. And so these new companies, they're disrupting the industries. And they're solving problems that the old companies didn't necessarily think about or experience. And they're doing that on new platforms. And so at IBM, this week, we've brought together all of our offerings under the IBM Bluemix brand. And so we believe that IBM Bluemix is the platform that enterprise developers will use for these next generation applications. Bluemix is the most advanced cloud platform that brings together that service catalog, things like Watson and API Explorer, the infrastructure, like Bluemix bare metal, and all your data services, like cloud it, into one unified platform. I think one of the compelling interesting things about IBM is that if you look at the spectrum of services that we provide, we start on the left with bare metal. So with the Bluemix bare metal service, you get true bare metal access, which gives you all the performance that you need out of the raw machine. As you move up the stack, we have flexibility in our virtual server platforms. We have a container platform for that type of development. And then we have a full pass offering our Cloud Foundry suite. And then lastly, over the last year or so, we've introduced serverless computing with our OpenWISC platform. So regardless of what technology stack you're using, we have the capability in the IBM Bluemix platform to service your needs. But again, it's not just about that infrastructure component. It's about the full service stack. And so at the bottom, we have Compute Storage Network, like every cloud provider does. We have the developer services and containers and Cloud Foundry and event-driven programming models. And then we're really thinking about that complete service catalog. So for example, Watson has 36 APIs that are exposed in the IBM Bluemix portfolio, meaning that ordinary developers or enterprise developers, anybody now, has access to that full suite of Watson services without having to buy an incredibly expensive on-premises implementation. And this is fundamentally a big change in how IBM has approached the market and how IBM has approached software stacks. So open technologies are a really important part of that. And IBM has been a leader in the open source community for many, many years. Obviously, at the base level, OpenStack is incredibly important. The IBM Private Cloud product line is powered by OpenStack. And IBM has been a contributor of OpenStack since the inception of the foundation. I think if you look at the last seven releases, we've been a top five contributor. We have over about 180 developers within the IBM organization that work on every OpenStack release. And there's more than 500 folks across the entire IBM portfolio that work on our OpenStack-based products. From a container's perspective, we're active contributors to the Docker project and to initiatives like Kubernetes. Cloud Foundry, big supporters of that foundation and involved in the development of that platform. And then OpenWISC was the serverless platform that we developed and open sourced. From an analytics perspective, from Spark to the OpenAPI initiative to the Node organizations. And obviously, IBM has had a long history in the Java world. So more importantly, I think if you think about global scale and data sovereignty concerns, that Bluemix platform is available around the globe in a consistent way in 48 different cloud data centers connected by this high-speed private network. So if you have a deployment in Seattle and you have a deployment in Germany, you can have interconnected private access between those two deployments without transiting the public internet. And that's a fundamentally unique component of the IBM offering that isn't available in other cloud providers. But more importantly, we're not just talking about public cloud when we think about this strategy. We recognize that there is a need based on data sovereignty concerns or regulatory requirements to be able to have a platform that can reside in other locations or have a platform that is isolated to a specific user or organization. And so while we certainly have the Bluemix public platforms, we have these two other offerings that are particularly interesting. And we call them dedicated and local. So our dedicated offerings are a single tenant implementation of many of these services that sit in a IBM cloud data center. But they belong and are allocated to a single user, so a single organization. So for example, the IBM Bluemix private cloud offering is a single tenant open stack installation that belongs to that one buyer. That one buyer gets full access to an API and an SLA without having to worry about the rest of the open stack installation. That's dedicated. And then local, the concept here is to take that same service catalog, that same capability, and bring it onto a customer's premise. So how do we take a little piece of IBM cloud and put it in a customer's data center? Well, again, alleviating all the operational concerns and burden that you would traditionally have by running this software on your own. So our goal is to provide back to these organizations that true cloud experience, but in a variety of consumption methodologies, whether it be public, dedicated, or local. So with that, I'm going to introduce Asmere. And he'll talk a little bit more about the IBM Bluemix offering, which again is our open stack powered product line. Thanks, Jesse. All right, thank you. So when I talk to customers and they're looking at private cloud, these are the things that come to mind, right? They obviously, they could be coming from a different variety of sources. They could be coming from bare metal, or they could be coming from a highly regulated industry. But sharing the infrastructure with another customer is not an option for them. So that's why really private cloud makes sense for them. But they're also a team that's focused on the application, right? They're a bunch of developers. They like the public cloud experience, but there's reasons they can't use it. And so, and also, they're looking at not just their development environment, CI CD, but also looking at how they scale out to go to production, right? So all these things around having dedicated resources, being able to triage where they need to go focus on versus someone else and a team that they can trust, plus the ability to scale when the time is right, is are the things that I internalize and try to put into the offering as a that's based around open stack. And so what we've done then is we've tried to deliver open stack, but we move the risk related to that. Those of you who've been in open stack for a while understand the early days, understand how we've grown by leaps and bounds, but also understand the focus of your organization, right? And so what we try to do is to sort of focus on the things that we as a team have built over the many years that we've run open stack clouds and then deliver that in a standardized way to all of our customers, right? I'll give you an example around releases. So we have one release for the almost 100 clouds that we support. And when we announce an update, we update those clouds within a four week period. So the ability for us to have all the clouds look standard, right? No snowflakes allows us to really provide this really safe environment where there's a lot of there's no guesswork, right? Everything that we do is times by 100. So we know exactly how each cloud is behaving because there's 99 other clouds that behave the exact same way. So we could deliver on performance. We deliver on cost. We deliver an elasticity, right? So we deliver both positive and negative elasticity. So when people need more capacity, we'll be able to deliver that. And also when people figure out they don't need it anymore, we can also subtract that out. So we give it both ways. Private and secure, right? By definition, every single cloud runs its own infrastructure. We don't share anything between two tenants. So that really helps. And there's 100% open stack, right? We take bits upstream. We're running on Mataka right now. I'll cover that in a second. And we use SAP on the back ends. We try to really keep a very open infrastructure to allow people to build their applications. And more importantly, if Bluebox isn't the right answer, they can migrate over. As you saw on the demo today, right? Our goal is to not pull people in. Our goal is to allow people to be portable because we know that we're not the only game in town. But having portability across the community really, really helps. And as Jesse mentioned, there's two ways for us to deliver this experience. I'll talk about Dedicated first. So Bluebox Dedicated runs in the IBM Cloud data centers. So for customers that no longer have a need for their own data centers, the ones that want to leverage the scale and capacity that IBM provides, Dedicated is what they would choose. The same customer or different customer may decide that they can't do that, right? They still require on-premise infrastructure. They require their teams to be able to manage some portion of their cloud. That's where local comes in. But in both cases, what we try to do is we try to provide that same consistent experience. We literally have the same bits, common services, common operational model. We have our tool that we use internally called BoxPanel. If you look at BoxPanel, a local cloud and a Dedicated cloud looks the same, right? So even our support staff manages these clouds the same way. But having this consistency allows you to do a bunch of other things around hybrid cloud, around workload portability, right? A lot of these things really matter when you look at it from a multi-cloud perspective. So how do we do this, right? So we focus on it all the way from the floor of the data center all the way up to the apps, right? So let's start with what we take on in the IBM Cloud data center. We standardize on the data center, the rack, the PDU, and the network. What that allows you to do is, for me, I can provide a template. And I can deploy that same template, that same cloud, in any IBM Cloud data center within three days, right? I know there's a bunch of disks, CPUs, network cards that's available everywhere. And so we have that. So we have customers that have two, three, four different clouds running in four different data centers. And we're able to stand them up in the same consistency because of the building blocks that we have. As you go further up the stack, we use Linux for our host OS. And we use Open Slack, obviously, for IaaS. And then we leverage whatever you want for automation data and apps. So people may bring in their own apps that they built in-house. They may bring in a software partners app. They may bring an IBM app, right? And we don't really distinguish between them because they're just workloads. And as long as the workloads are either cloud native or cloud ready, we're ready to go, right? And we're looking towards extending it out because, as you saw in the demo today, there are workloads that run best on bare metal, right? And Open Slack provides that capability for you to wrap that workload into. And the same thing as you go into with containers. So if you double-click into that, what we do at the Open Slack layer is we provide a lot of choice but a lot of consistency. So we'll call out a couple of things. So we have four different types of compute nodes. Some compute nodes have more cores. Some compute nodes use SSDs. Some communities use 10 gig versus 1 gig. So we try to take a balance between cost and portability. But you can use all four nodes in the same cloud, right? So we know that customers can't choose just one. They may want to mix and match at different times. And so we allow you to go do that. Same thing with block storage. We have a high-speed SSD-based block storage and one that uses spinning disk. You can mix them together. And I'll show you how we do that today. Object storage, dead-to-controllers. You can bring your own IP address space if you want. And this, again, we want to provide a lot more flexibility. And then in terms of services, we provide the same image repository by default, API compatibility, orchestration, single sign-on with Keystone Federation. We do live migration. We do upgrades. And so there's a bunch of things that we try to do. And again, all of these things here apply both to local and dedicated, right? Whether it runs in your data center or in a software data center. And the way that we build our offering is a scale-out approach. Everything that we do is a scale-out approach. So every compute node can be added. We have a high upper limit. We have a minimum limit. And as you go, you can add one, two, three, four, a dozen. Same thing with our block storage. Same thing with object storage. So we think of it this way. Take advantage of commodity hardware. Take advantage of the elastic software layer that Opensack provides. And it's been really great. What we've seen is customers tend to start with one type of architecture. And then we've seen that grow in different ways. Typical thing. People will start with our base cluster. Three nodes. We run a converged environment. And then we go and run through dedicated controllers, add block storage on the back end, connect multiple clouds together. So all those things happen in the course of people using more and more of their cloud. So we right now are running on Mataka. We moved to Mataka, I think, in June of this year. And what we tried to do, as I said, tried to keep very close to the community. And so we're looking at the Newton and the newer releases. And as we go along, what we do, we get two benefits out of that. One, obviously stability that's introduced in every single release. And then second would be key functionality that's new that wasn't there in the previous release. So I'm going to focus on a couple of things in Mataka. In terms of projects, is what we support today. And I want to share with you a little bit our philosophy on how we figure out which projects come in. Obviously, the first thing we look at is the Super User Survey. That gives us a pulse into what the community wants, what's being used, and potentially what the demand is. And then second is we have our own metrics around stability. We spend a lot of time validating projects. We've had projects that we've been testing for more than six months that we haven't productized that. The reason we don't productize things is because we maintain an SLA, a service level agreement. We actually pay customers back and give them a credit if we don't maintain our SLA. So it's very, very important for us to ensure that the cloud is always running. And it starts with how good is the software that you're introducing in that cloud. So we start with this. We expect to add more capabilities into this as the community hardens the software. So while we run OpenStack, we try to keep very close to the trunk. Another key element, as I said, is the SLA. Federated Keystone is something that we've briefly introduced. So we've always supported Keystone, but a majority of our customers run more than one cloud. And as you know, if you're not using Keystone Federation or some sort of central authentication, there's a lot of overhead related to maintaining identity across multiple clouds. So Federated Keystone has been a godsend through these customers, whether they're using Keystone to Keystone Federation or using some sort of backend authentication. And we see this a lot in terms of the management of the credentials. We see this a lot around the transparency or the fact that they don't say I have to send it to IDM. And also, as we all know, we have realities in terms of having to plug into an existing infrastructure, whether it's local or dedicated. So I would say Federated Identity is probably one of the fastest-adopting projects that we have at Bluebox. Another thing that we've done is we've introduced block storage pools. So as I said earlier, we've got two different kinds of block storage and there's a cost differential between them. SSDs tend to be the ones that provides you the ultimate performance, but at a higher cost compared to hybrid. Hybrid's based on spinning this architecture with a thin layer of cache. And up until our recent release, people have had to choose one or the other. And so, but with the changes in Open Slack, you now can create a volume and you can choose which one of these pools that you want to use. So customers don't have a choice, they just map the application relative to what the R-ups requirements are. Jesse mentioned that SoftLayer has a high-speed network and a variety of other services that's available. When we think about hybrid cloud, we think about how we can use Open Slack with these services that's there. So I'm gonna focus on networking and storage in this case. So by default, we install our clouds with APIs that are public-facing. You can add a VPN connection to there, but you're still going over the public internet. And a lot of customers don't want that, they want a direct connection in. That's what Direct Link is. You can tap into the SoftLayer network and your access inbound into the SoftLayer and through the BlueBox clouds are running at 10 gig. Global private network is another thing that people use. So this is an unmeasured network that connects all the SoftLayer data centers together. A key use case that people use for the private network is to do replication. So you can just imagine you've got data in San Jose that you want to send to Frankfurt, you would just use the high-speed private network to sort of send that data there, unmeasured. And same thing for bringing your own IP. Reality is that we want to use floating IPs and assign whatever it is, but there needs to be some management of them and you can bring your own IP address pool in to allow you to have your data center extension. Storage is another thing that we run into. So we have dedicated storage that is tied to the cloud, but people want to also use public, multi-tenant services such as public storage to store their backups, to store the image repository, to use something, maybe deliver a lower cost on storage. And we allow you to access the SoftLayer services such as their performance and endurance block storage, object storage, their backup services and really all this ties together because people then can mix and match what they want to do. Or of course they can also run their own services on top of their cloud. Switching gears to customers that want to look at a local deployment. As Jesse mentioned, we've rebranded a lot of products under the BlueMix umbrella. This product used to be called Pure App and it's now called BlueMix Local System. What's unique about it, it allows you to converge a variety of different workloads and infrastructure types onto the same hardware type. So you could run a BlueMix Paz, you could run OpenStack, you can run VMware all on the same bare metal. You can switch the allocation and resources back and forth. And so this gives you, for a lot of people, this gives you the pragmatic approach on how do I deploy my cloud native app versus my cloud ready app versus I just want a Paz or I want an IaaS. It gives you the flexibility to sort of flip and switch between those different requirements within the same box. So really flexible, a lot of software that just allows you to sort of think about the upper end of the stack as opposed to the infrastructure of managing the different components within the stack. But technology really isn't the winning recipe for cloud. What we found, and we found this as some of you may know, BlueBox was an independent company before we got acquired by IBM. But what we found in those early days is that we would stand up the cloud in three days and then we would hand it over to the customer and we'd check back in two weeks later, there would be no workloads on the cloud because they didn't know how to use it. They didn't know how to use Verizon, they didn't understand the concepts. So we actually provide a lot of onboarding support within the first 30 days and really try to get the customer to use, right? Our, while we pride ourselves in being able to bring up a cloud in record time anywhere in the world, it's also about usage of the cloud. And so we spend a lot of time educating people on different concepts. We provide documentation and videos to get them going and really check in with them over this month through six-week period. Really been, I would say, a differentiator in terms of what we do. And then around support and upgrades. So a lot of our customers tend to want to stay close to OpenStack and we have a quarterly release cycle. And so we try to add functionality at every release and so that's important. But we do that, what we do literally is ask for a window to your upgrades. Generally what we've seen, depending on the size of the cloud, your upgrades, we can do an upgrade in between 90 minutes to three hours. And that's it, that's the downtime and you'll get your new release, whether it's going from a kilo to a Taka or really going from a maintenance release up. And then we keep a month-to-month commit, right? So while our customers tend to sign longer contracts because they get a volume discount as a result, you can cancel after 30 days, right? And that allows, gives people a lot of flexibility, that experience that they see with cloud and that's something that just very, I think very current with how people are thinking in terms of their IT strategy. But it'll fail if there's no understanding with the customer and so we spend a lot of time talking to customers not only to educate them but also to find that line between what they wanna own and what we should own. And this is generally how it's playing out, right? We tend to focus on the hypervisor and the physical layer. The bits that people really don't have much interest in. That's really not where the innovation is. They don't wanna open stack, maintain the SLA, technical support, right? Securing the network, so volume release scanning. So those are the things that we take on and as I said earlier, we can do it very well because we've got 100 of these clouds under management. For the customer, what they get to focus on is the hypervisor and above, right? Virtual machines, the apps, the licensing, the backup, right? The things that they probably don't want us to touch anyway because it will probably go against the compliance requirements. And really, but also really allows them to focus on the innovation layer at the application and above, right? And so this is generally what we do and it's worked out really, really well in terms of letting people innovate. And the customer in this sense also could be an IBM team that's building on top of Bluebox. So if you saw in the demo today, if you were paying attention on the IBM part, that demo was being run on Bluebox and also Materna that was also in the keynote today, they're delivering software services on top of Bluebox, right? So again, this is generally how we've been putting this into action. Okay, that's great. So what I'm gonna close with are four different use cases that I wanna share with you and how people are using Bluebox and how that's transforming their business. So the first is a company that does casual games and really for them, they were a bunch of developers. They had no interest whatsoever dealing with OpenStack and the infrastructure under OpenStack and so that's really where we came in. We provided that, you know, the set up that was very close to where they were based. They're based in Seattle and we stood this up in San Jose and then they could use the knowledge that we had in OpenStack to go get this done. So they got their OpenStack cloud, they moved off of their commercial offering that they had been running in-house and they could scale out geographically because we could provide that same template of their cloud in many different places. A second customer was a company that ran concerts and so they would do, as you can say, there's a lot of build up to the concert. There's a lot of changes and the entire industry is changing where there's a lot more engagement with mobile devices and whatnot and so they were focused on SaaS as their offering which again required them not to focus too much on the infrastructure. This is where we came in again. We could spin up clusters quickly as they were thinking about doing music festivals in different parts of the world. We were able to support them and they could deliver their experience that they want globally. The next customer was a company that was helping students enter the job market, right? Those of you who were there recently or have young ones that are entering the job market, this is really a very confusing time for them and what this company was doing was to really try to provide that guidance but their challenge was they just couldn't provide the service, right? The infrastructure was not stable and they really needed something that was there so they could focus on the offering itself. Again, we came in, we focused on the things, hypervisor and below, allowed them to go rapidly deploy and really focus the IT team on the business. And again, as you can see over and over again, it's about, it's not about technology but it's about the business and the business value that providing and what we're trying to do is to really simplify the fiction that exists in this new cloud world where the oily bits there may not be of interest to the customer. And the final customer I wanna show is CloudSoft and they're an ISV so they're, if you will, the opposite of the first three, their business is technology and but they wanted to build their offering on an open platform, they had doubled down on it and they were also doing a lot of proof of concepts around the world so they have multiple clouds in three different geographies. We connect them using the private network. They do a lot of replication on that backbone and really I think for them is just making sure that when they need to go engage with the customer and do demos and whatnot, that the infrastructure is there and so that's what we've been doing. We have a lot of content on their use case and their success criteria. If you go to the IBM website, you'll be able to see a lot of info on CloudSoft and their use case. All right, so in summary, what we're seeing with IBM is really around these things here, choice and control, I think it's probably one of the key reasons why people come to IBM, as Jesse mentioned earlier, the different delivery models really helps people not lock themselves in. We focus a lot of our time on operational excellence, focus on the SLA and we've got skin in the game, right? We actually give you credits if the SLA is not met and we make it predictable, right? We have a quarterly release cycle. We try to keep our upgrades within a certain window. Our engagement is predominantly via chat and emails which is very simple and for you to get to us and we try to keep our cloud standard, right? And that really helps us run the business and helps us scale the business. Well with that, thank you for spending time with us today. I think we'll start back up again after lunch there'll be customer case studies coming in. So if you have any questions, come on up and I'll answer them otherwise have a good summit. Thank you very much.