 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, day three, we have had tremendous guests the last couple of days. And we're a lot of alumni, a lot of new guests. Another alumni joining us, Colleen Sanchez, Vice President of IBM Enterprise Systems Storage. Welcome back, Colleen, it's great to have you here. No, thank you very much for letting me be here. And I want to congratulate Colleen because she was just named for the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce 2018 Business Woman of the Year just a few weeks ago. Amazing. Loving Tucson, by the way. No, thank you. U of A. Yes. They're down. I appreciate the Wildcats reference, so no doubt. You do a lot of work with the community as well. Oh, I'm sorry. So this Saturday, the first game, so. My daughter is a freshman at U of A High Polar. I love you, baby. Good luck. You're going to crush it. I know you are. Oh, dad of the year going on here. So just before we get into all the storage stuff, they're honoring you just in about a month and a half or so with this? Yes. And I'm very excited about that. Just like you were saying with the community aspects, it's a high touch award. And I was very thankful for it because they gave me specific examples of what I've done in Southern Arizona in Tucson in particular that only, for instance, excite for girls and things like that. So girls in STEM, right? Congratulations. That's fantastic. Well, we need more, you know, more inspiration. So it's great that we can now count you as one of our distinguished alumni. So let's talk about what's going on in IBM. Here we are at VMworld 2018. We're here in Dave. Numbers of upwards of 21,000 people that have been here over the last few days. 100,000 more engaging with expected to engage with the live streaming and the on-demand experiences. What's going on with IBM, you know, from a revenue perspective, a growth perspective? What is exciting you about where you are today? So I will talk in particular about storage and I'm really, really proud about this being that we work in partnership with like Ed Walsh and then also Eric Herzog. They've inspired me to get closer to building solutions with our end users. So we meet and work with our clients to build up like cloud deployment solutions in partnership with VMware. And we enable things like, okay, so there's tape and then there's cloud to tier. So there's fundamental solutions and out there in the marketplace that we as developers want to go and play with. It's almost like a great big sandbox, so to speak. So I got to ask you because, I mean, everybody sort of says, well, tape, tape is dead and every time I see you, we talk about tape, we talk about Flap, we talk about innovations that are coming to tape. You're a technologist, right? You just said, as a developer, we love to dot, dot, dot. So what is it about things like tape, things like mainframe, DS8000, these technologies that have tried true running businesses, what is it about those that excite you as a developer? So everything old is new again. So we just go back to the basics of table stakes, right? Security is table stakes, right? Delivering on time quality releases with optimizers like tier to cloud and things like that. That's fundamental for us now as it relates to tape. So everything old is new again, like I mentioned a moment ago. Tape was the first device to fully encrypt. So every drive, if it fell off the truck, it was fully encrypted. So tape is actually training the rest of our portfolio and some of the skills on how we do the end-to-end encryption elements. So right now with DS8000, we're working in partnership with System Z to deliver pervasive encryption. I got to ask you so as a development executive, I see you at a lot of these shows. You like coming here? I mean, a lot of times development execs want to sort of stay in the lab but you're out and about talking to customers. What are you learning? What is that about you that draws you to these shows? Yeah, so I was afraid that we as a lab team would not be relevant unless we have conversations with end users, partners, to really substantiate what's possible from being innovative. So I would say number one is relevance. And I felt like I wanted to be more social because I'm definitely in some cases an introvert, though I'm looking above my shoes that I'm wearing. Well, that's the definition of an introvert and an extrovert in the tech world. You know what the difference is, right? I don't. An introvert looks at his or her own shoes. An extrovert looks at your shoes. There you go. Well, there you go. I have been looking at some shoes. All right, so you're extrovert oriented out here. What are you learning at VMworld? What are the customers saying? What are they asking you for? What are you going to take back to the lab? A single pane of glass is to see with what we intend with VStream or some of the aspects of automation with regards to cloud deployment to make it completely connected, so to speak. And what I think is really great about all of that is, I don't know, I hate to put it this way. It's very iTunes-like, where it's like sticky and it's easy to use or when, by the way, it's not so expensive at least to start up. So a lot of the discussions we've been having are with the various vendors on the expo floor that they want to build solutions. IBM Solutions, associate with the cloud and then the AWS guys, we meet with them and they're like, okay, well, how can we ensure that we live in an interconnected data-centric world? And so that's what I think is very exciting is that it's this idea of co-opposition. Let's all be well connected and do it well. Let's talk about the customer collaboration. As you mentioned, everything old is new again. We see that in every aspect of life. Tate, mainframe, but you talked about we need to be relevant, but also need to be developing solutions that your end-user customers need to solve their business problems. How are you collaborating with customers to stay relevant and to ensure that their businesses are able to take advantage of the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, AI, machine learning, emerging technologies? What's that collaboration like? So I would say the biggest collaborations that I've been participating recently is with cloud service providers and they appreciate the economics of physical media or tape. And so they think to themselves or they know the data. It's like, okay, less than a half cent per gig. That's a big deal, right? So, and then we have discussions about total cost of ownership, aspects like that. So the partnership is also how do we serve the data and really having discussions about the data and then evaluating the various work streams where we would want to serve appropriately based on whatever specific cloud infrastructure. And then also taking a step back, we have to be interconnected. There's no question. So there, I would say the number one set of skills or end users I'm working with right now have to be the cloud service providers. And what are some of the big business benefits that they're achieving? And we think new business models, new revenue streams, market expansion. What are some of the things that you're proud of that IBM Storage Solutions are helping your customers to deliver? So going to tape, it's the economics, yes. It's a security based on encryption, yes. And then also the other aspect of is we're serving big data. I mean, it's like, we're having discussions about they're going to grow to zettabytes by 2020 and things like that. I never thought in my life as an, especially as an engineering student or in computer science, I would ever be talking about this big of data. And now we're here. And so we're learning how to enable in partnership with clients like what would be the right or appropriate solution. So I'm searching our video library because somebody said this week something that was really interesting to me. And I wanted to get your perspective from a development mind and someone who's technical. We're hearing a lot about migrating to the cloud and how easy that is. And then I think it was Pat Kelsinger said there's three laws. There's the laws of physics, the laws of a company and the law of the land. And those are immutable generally. But I want to ask you about the laws of physics. So in terms of just moving data into the cloud, we talk about petabyte, exabytes, so much data. How feasible is it for a customer to move data and just stuff it all into the cloud? And what are you doing to either help them do that or bring the cloud experience to their data? All right, so depending on the client interest of on-prem, off-prem, or hybrid, right, we work to evaluate APIs and collaborations so we enable a streamline. So it's not only just understanding the components of the cloud deployment, but it's also partnering with all elements of the entire ecosystem stack. So it depends, but we really start with the clients and use case. What do you want? What kind of security do you want? Are you okay with off-prem, public clouds? Or maybe it's specific data. How do we go about managing the data so we secure it like we bucketize it? So those are some of the discussions we've been having on the floor here at VMworld but also like within our labs and also with the clients directly. You know what I love about that answer? I'll translate it. It's not a technical problem, Dave. It's a business problem. It's really what you're telling me. And that's a fundamental, you asked the question before. That's fundamentally why I'm here. If let's, I don't believe in, we can believe in living this world anymore where it's like we build it and then they come. You know the dreams does not exist anymore. Yeah. And so now we've got to have conversations with our end users to develop like what we're going to put on the roadmap. And so I always felt like, okay, well, when I'd see the roadmap in the lab, I'm like, okay, well, who wants this? Who asked for this? Right, and those ended up becoming some of my fundamental questions. So then I started to come here or conferences like this because I could have those conversations with the end users and partners. Well, that's interesting. Who wants this? Who needs this? What problems does it solve? Why us? Why now? Those are the kinds of things you're asking. Let's talk about why us. IBM has been around and very successful for a very long time. What do you think, again, in this got to be relevant? We need it to be really defined by customer needs and uses. Everything old is new again. What in your opinion makes, why should a customer go in my VM or environment? IBM. Okay, so I'm going to start with why I even personally want to remain with IBM. It's a great big candy store. And what I have to remind myself is just don't eat too much, right? And by the way, I still eat way too much. But what's great about it is the sandbox. So I can talk to software engineers one day who are telling me about certain APIs they're building in Python. Then, oh, by the way, I meet with a mechanical set of engineers because they want to enable robot arms. Oh, and by the way, should we have a discussion on microcode and firmware for the entire stack? And then so I take a step back and I'm thinking, wow, so the only set of conversations I really prior was not having is about services. And to me, like services is like the wrapping paper for a present that you're about to receive. And really understanding the overall end-to-end stack infrastructure. So I believe from an IBM perspective, it's the ecosystem. It's a great big candy store. Just don't eat too much. So how do you spend your time? Do you spend your time collaborating with a team on architectures, on vision, on North Star, writing code? How do you spend your time doing it? Can I say all of the above? And I would say the vast majority right now, it's like really just making sure we're relevant in the marketplace so that we refresh the right amount of cycles. So like right now, what we're going to be doing in 2019, we're going to be talking about it right now, architecting what the future looks like. And that's probably the reason why I'm here at VMworld 2018 is I'm wanting to verify my roadmap. Taking the right approach with the extended team. Because it is a team and I work with them. These engineers and scientists are so bright and they have great ideas. Let's just make sure they're great ideas that will keep us relevant and keep us paid. So have you gotten that validation in the last few days at VMworld? Give me one more day. Yeah. Well, Colleen, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing not only what IBM is doing to continue to innovate and stay relevant, but also what excites you about working for IBM. And again, congrats on getting the award. Yes, and thank you very much for highlighting that. Absolutely. I'm very excited as just an individual. It was unexpected. Well, you're representing women in tech, women in STEM. It's awesome. Congratulations, really happy. Thank you very much. By the way, I'll definitely reach out to your daughter at some point to say, hey, let's go to a tailgate. Love it. I won't corrupt. Fantastic, Colleen, thanks so much for your time. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are in day three of our continuing coverage from VMworld 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.