 Welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas, Rybian Pulse, this is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE. It's our flagship program, we go out to the events, they strike the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, joined by co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org, and our next guest is Peter McCaffrey, CUBE alumni, director of marketing for Rybian Pure Systems. Welcome back. Thanks, pleasure to be here. We chat with IOD, what's the news? Is there anything going on here with Softlayer? We've got a little bit of news. We're taking our pattern technology, which was originally deployed on our Pure Systems family, and we're moving it to Softlayer, giving clients the flexibility to deploy either on-premise or off-premise. I was kind of joking there, because really the Softlayer is the story. Cloud equals growth. It's a big message we're hearing across the board. Real rubber hitting the road, kind of like use cases. When we talked last, you mentioned the patterns. This came up at IOD, when we last chatted a couple years ago. It was like, wow, this is pretty cool. You can actually patternize things and roll it out, kind of as a prefabricated use case. Now that takes the whole other dimension when you put scale on top of it. So how does, explain to the Softlayer Pure integration? What does it mean? What are the benefits? What do we expect out of this integration? Well, it starts with the pattern itself. So if you think of a pattern, you can think of it almost as a blueprint for the application. So you're capturing that blueprint, you're capturing the configuration behind the application. And previously you would deploy that on-premise using a pure application system. Now what you're able to do is take that very same pattern and move it to an infrastructure that happens to run on Softlayer. And so it opens up some really interesting use cases. For example, many clients today have 10, 15 application instances on-premise. They could have an application instance for DevTest, QA testing, their production environments, of course, DR. And some of them are probably lightly utilized. And so what you can now do is really optimize the environment. You could take some of those instances that are lightly utilized, put them out onto the public cloud offering and just move the pattern back and forth. You write the pattern once, you deploy it where you need to. And so what a great way to capture and optimize existing applications. And that's just one use case. So Peter, talk a little bit about, since we last talked at IOD, what's changed in the whole integrated, you guys call it expert integrated systems. Others call it converged infrastructure. Sometimes at Wikibon, we call it a single managed entity. What's going on in that whole business that seems to be getting traction? You guys have announced actually that you're selling your x86 server business. So that somewhat affects, I think the expert integrated system, at least part of it goes over. So give us an update on the business. Well, so let me start with the integrated systems marketplace itself. The market is measured by IDC is growing, the last tracker that they did was in the third quarter of last year. And the market was growing at almost 70% year over year. IBM was growing within that market almost two and a half times that. And so we really established a great deal of momentum in that marketplace. And we continue to build on that momentum with the kinds of announcements that you're hearing here at Pulse. Now you're right, we did make a, IBM did make an announcement a little earlier that relative to our x86 business. If you look at pure systems and you break up the family, there's three offerings. There's our pure flex, our pure application system and our pure data system. Our pure application system and our pure data system will be unaffected unchanged as a result of this. Our pure flex, we have a couple of different models. We have an x86 based model. That would go to Lenovo if and when this acquisition closed. And we have a power based in what we call hybrid which is the combination of power and x86. Those would continue as part of the IBM Pure Systems family. And so what you see us doing is we continue to be very invested in the integrated systems market. We're continuing to focus what I call more the higher value offerings around big data and cloud. And not only do we have a full roadmap on those offerings but we're extending our capabilities to off-premise environment as well. So in the work that we've done at Wikibon talking to practitioners we found the greatest value is the more you can integrate up the stack the more value customers seem to achieve. Now that's not necessarily across the board but certainly within an application domain or a particular industry domain we've seen that pretty strongly. I'm wondering has your experiences borne that out? And what are you seeing in terms of the full stack integration versus just sort of the converged infrastructure at the infrastructure as a service layer, if you will. It's interesting. It is almost mirroring the cloud market itself. The cloud market, its origins were around infrastructure as a service and you've continued to see movement up the stack software as a service with the announcements here big focus around the developer and platform as a service. The same is kind of happening with the integrated systems market. There's a segment of that market that's very focused on integrated infrastructure kind of almost a next generation blade platform but there's also a fast growing segment of the market that's really about optimizing for the specific workload. That workload might be an analytics based workload which requires a different level of integration and content. It might be an application platform again which requires the right development environment and the underlying automation that goes with it. In many ways the integrated systems market is mirroring what we see in the cloud market overall. Do you see this market, you mentioned some of the IDC numbers, I mean enormous growth, 70%, you guys growing in the triple digits percentage. Do you see this as an evolution of the server business or is it more a disruptive revolution to that business? Well, you could probably say a little bit of each. It's certainly, if you look, you had one client tell me once who was in the healthcare business and they said, you know, I'm in the healthcare business but I feel like I'm in the manufacturing business because I have to take all of this componentry and run it through an assembly line that is my IT organization and it's fraught with risk and I just can't afford that model going forward. I need to be a lot more agile and a lot quicker to market so they see these systems as just a higher level building block. It's a different level of value, it's a better starting point and allows them to get to the end game that much quicker. And that end game is what? Focusing more on adding value, are they shifting skill sets as they do that sort of further up the application value layer? Well that is one of the consequences. If you look at a traditional IT organization today, many of the skills that are organized around the technology silos. You've got your server specialist, your middleware specialist. When you bring in something like an integrated system because a lot of those technology elements are integrated together, it really frees your staff to be a little bit more general in terms of the kinds of value that they can bring to the organization. They can focus a little higher up the stack trying to better serve the business as a whole and some of the things that the business is trying to accomplish as opposed to worrying constantly about maintaining that existing environment, dealing with the integration, dealing with fixed backs. Are you finding customers are actually qualified to focus on higher levels in the stack? Is there a lot of retraining going on? If somebody is expert at lawn management, for example, and now you come in with this integrated system and you say, okay, here's this block of infrastructure and maybe even some application intelligence as part of that, a lot of what you used to do is done, not completely, there's still some project work up front, but gone going, we're going to eliminate a lot of that. Are customers in a position to exploit that change? Well, they are, and you think about it. If somebody is an expert in lawn management, they're probably pretty smart. It's a lot easier to focus on value production. Really freeing them up from maintaining that existing environment really is, it can be very creative and inspiring for some of these guys. You look at other marketplaces, they don't have that guy. If you're looking at some of the growth areas, they don't have those types of skills walking around. So we're seeing a lot of, for example, a lot of momentum in some of the emerging marketplaces where those kinds of skills aren't available but it's a way to really get on top of a new generation infrastructure without necessary. Born of the web apps, the DevOps crowd. Absolutely. Okay, makes sense. So I want to ask about the developer equation because obviously the focus here is developers. How do you guys onboard the new developers as well as maintain the relationship with the guys who need to become new or the older developers, whatever you want to, however you want to, install-based developers. That will become CloudOps developers or DevOps developers. Because there's a lot more workload management that needs to be handled. Meaning it's not just clean sheet of paper or a green field like cloud build out, which is easy, right? I mean, how easy it's DevOps, not as many moving parts. So talk about that. Obviously, patterns are one way to get blueprints, get some leverage. But for my developers, how are you guys at IBM specifically going to nurture those developers and build the ecosystem? Well, we're really doing it by providing a continuum of capability. You have to have a way of bringing forward that existing application investment. There are trillions of dollars in existing applications and the people that build and support those applications. So it's just a huge investment that you want to bring forward. And as you point out at the same time, there's a whole new generation and set of applications that are being built, born on the cloud, that offer different types of tools. So part of what you're seeing here is with the patterns announcement, we're really providing that means to bring forward that existing workload. But with the blue mix announcement, we're really providing that next generation development platform that allows for those born on the cloud applications. And what you'll see over time is the continuous, you'll see us continue to bring those worlds together and bring all the developers. Okay, so what's your elevator pitch to the developer? You know, you come out of the event and you pop into the MGM elevator and the guy says, I want to be an IBM developer. I don't know how to. What's in it for me? Tell the developer, what's the sound bite? He's got to get to the 20th floor. Got an elevator pitch. What do you say to him? What's the bottom line for the developer? The biggest thing I think for the developers these days is because we're building this out on open technologies is the tools that you want, types of services that are important to you. We're supporting them, and particularly those that are built on open platforms. Cloud Foundry was a big example of that. And so we have what you want, and we make it very consumable and easy to use. I'll pretend I'm a developer again. Okay, what's in it for me? How much cash do I make? Okay, I buy the platform, okay, I buy that open, that's music to my ears, that's the language of love in today's developer community. DevOps, check the box there, good stuff. Okay, cash, I got to make some money. I want to stay in business. Well, they say that it's that developer that's going to have that next billion dollar idea. So at the end of... But go to market's important, you guys have customers, you guys have an ecosystem. What are you guys doing for the developer to keep them in business? Essentially just giving them what they need to be successful. Whether it's the right tooling, it's access to the right environments, it's giving them an opportunity to get out and deploy quickly, it's all about speed. If you have to get out there first, and as a developer, giving them an environment that allows them to get that application out there fast, it can make the difference. Okay, so I want to ask you a personal question. On the keynote this morning, actually it's an IBM that we've seen the hip for IBM in the past, but with Pulse at IOD, it still suits business, but it's got a hipster vibe, right? It's almost like it's the new cloud, got a band on stage, it was literally a packed house. What's your take on what's different right now? Well, the industry as a whole is going through such a transition right now. You can't walk anywhere, I've been around the industry for a lot of years, I've seen a lot of different shifts. I don't know that I've ever seen anything quite like this. There's so much energy and excitement in terms of really extending the enterprise onto the cloud and really make it real at this point. There's a sense that this is, wow, this is really happening. We're right in the middle of this transformation, and it's exciting. What's next for Pure? Tell us what's come around the corner. Well, we'll continue to obviously build out and support our on-premise solutions, but you're gonna see us more and more support that dynamic hybrid cloud environment. And I think that's something that can really help differentiate us from some of the competitors out there in the marketplace that may only have an on-premise capability. With IBM, you get that on-premise capability and that off-premise capability. And frankly, I think that makes a big difference in the market. Peter, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Appreciate it. I love this patterns thing. I always loved it when we first started talking about it. Patterns is essentially a blueprint for use cases. A lot of leverage, essentially it's a boilerplate, if you will, of code and other resources. Really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and tell us real quick what your plans are next year to direct your marketing. What are the things you're going to nail down next year for your goals? Well, we continue to build momentum in this marketplace. We've got over 500 client references out there today. And so success breeds success. We'll continue to get this story out there to our clients and we continue to grow this part of the market. Okay, so what's the bumper sticker that leaves Las Vegas on the car for Pure? What's it saying? Pure as a baby. Okay, we're here live in Las Vegas. A lot of new stuff happening, new capabilities. Cloud is the engine of growth. We're starting to see it integrated into the data center, internet of things, smarter planets, smarter computing. A lot of activity. Certainly the cloud is going to be hybrid. It will be developer-focused. We're here live with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.