 from theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. We talked to IBM executives, their partners and their customers, really thrilled to welcome back. One of our CUBE alumni, he has a new role since the last time he was on theCUBE at an event. Jim Whitehurst, he is now the president of IBM, of course, former CEO of Red Hat. Jim, pleasure to see you, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, it's great to be back, hope you're doing well. We are all trying to stay safe. We missed seeing you and the team in person, had a great digital event with the Red Hat team last week for Summit. Of course, I love either going to San Francisco or my backyard here in Boston from it, but the thing we've been saying is we are now together even when we're apart. So, so many changes going on. Of course, the global pandemic impacting everyone and the keynote, you and the other IBM executives talking about really how it's helping IBM solidify what they believe their decisions are and the technology direction. So, not a big pivot or change, but Jim, I really want to get your feedback as to what advice you have for your customers. Where should they be investing? Where should they be slowing down? How should they be thinking about their IT spend in today's world? Yeah, so first off, our hybrid cloud strategy, which IBM and Red Hat now combined have been on for quite a long time, has been all about flexibility, resilience in an unknown future. I think there were ever a time where having flexibility is important, it's now. So, we have had clients say, hey, I can use the cloud because all of a sudden with work at home, I have huge increases in demand. We've had others that say, wow, I was using the cloud, but I have a reduction in absolute demand. So I'm going to pull those workloads back and I'm going to run them on premise and save the marginal dollars. So you have people kind of doing very different things than we thought we would be doing this month and going forward through the year. And so having an architecture that's built for change, and certainly hybrid cloud architecture as a part of that is, I think, being born out here as people are trying to understand new ways of working. And certainly with IBM, with some of the technologies we have around AI, we're helping various industries as their all volumes increase, as people are changing tickets or have more questions and our ability to help people scale up AI to address those so they're not trying to add people in a very difficult time. Just broadly, our platforms run some of the most mission critical systems. So keeping those systems up going and being resilient and with the thousands of things CEOs and CIOs have to worry about, knowing that you have a partner that's going to keep your most important systems up and running are all things that we do every day. And I think that value shows through even more right now in a difficult time. Yeah, absolutely. We've been hearing plenty of reports, customers as they might have been thinking about how fast they move or how do they leverage cloud? That's an important piece of what they need to be doing. How does the combination of IBM and Red Hat differentiate from some of the other cloud offerings that both cloud and AI across the industry today? Yeah, sure. Well, let me start off with cloud and then I'll talk about how AI complements and accelerates that strategy. So what's different about what IBM's doing is we have a vision that the best architecture is a choiceful horizontal architecture where you can run your application anywhere, but it's not just about running it now. Clouds are now becoming in and of themselves a source of innovation via various APIs with functionality behind those. So in order to consume innovation wherever it might come from, you have to have flexibility to be able to move your workload. And so IBM is unique in saying, hey, we're not just a cloud provider. We're actually providing a platform that runs across any of the major cloud providers. And so we make that real by having the Red Hat platform open shift is a core part of what we do. And secondly is having the platforms great, but it's all about having the platform so you can consume innovation to deliver business value. And IBM has injected that with a whole series of capabilities, whether that's being able to pull data and information out of existing workloads to a whole AI portfolio to help people really build a cognitive enterprise and inject intelligence and AI into business processes. So they can build a different intelligent kind of AI infused set of business processes or inter-new businesses. So the combination of a horizontal platform that'll run anywhere with the ability whether it's with software or with services capability to add on top, we can now help you leverage that. We can help you take that Ferrari you built out for a drive to help you build new sources of value. Great, one of the big discussion points this week has been edge computing. A lot of discussion, it's much earlier in the adoption and maturation of the ecosystems compared to what we were talking about for cloud. So what's important with edge? How are IBM and Red Hat going to extend what they've been doing to edge type of deployment? Well, edge becomes an extension of the data center. I think there was a period of time when we thought about computers as individual things. And now we've had this idea of a data center is where computing happens. And then there are thin devices like phones or whatever kind of out in the ether that tether back. But as the internet of thing continues to expand as the ability of computing technology towards the edge continues to grow with technology advances as 5G continues to expand out and go broad the ability to have use cases of computing at the edge just increase and increase. And so whether that's autonomous driving is an obvious major use case where there'll be massive amounts of compute that you can't handle the latency of taking all that compute back to the data center to how you're making sure that paint finish that a factory is putting on a piece of metal is being done correctly and optimally and environmentally efficiently. All of those things require sensing at the edge and computing at the edge to be economic. But here's the issue. You don't want to have to develop a whole new infrastructure of software to go be able to do that a whole different set of developers with different skill sets and different tools on different infrastructure. So what we're doing with this platform I talked about when I said this platform runs everywhere it's not just that it runs on the major public clouds or in your data center or bare metal or virtualized it runs all the way out to the edge. Now, as soon as you get out to the edge you have a whole new set of management challenges because the types of applications are different and how they tether back are different. So we are working with large enterprises and with telcos not only on 5G rollouts but also edge infrastructure and the management tooling to be able to have an application run at the factory in an effective efficient safe way but then be able to be tethered all the way back to bringing data back for analytics in the data center. So we made some really exciting announcements on what we're doing with both industrial enterprise customers on edge computing and then how we're working with telcos to bring that to life because a lot of that obviously gets integrated back into the core telco infrastructure. So this idea of edge computing and mobile edge computing are critical to the future of computing but importantly they're critical to the future of how enterprises are going to operate that value going forward. And so we've taken a real leadership position around that given that we have the core infrastructure but we also understand our clients and industry verticals and business processes. So we can kind of come at it from both angles and really bring that value quickly to our customers. All right, and Jim, what's the role of open source there? You know, one of the bigger points that was talked about at summit last week was the advanced cluster management for cloud and it was some IBM people and some IBM technology came into Red Hat and they've open sourced it. We're just talking about edge computing and telecommunication service providers. I remember talking with you and the team, you know, back at OpenStack summits with network function fertilization open source was a big piece of it. So where does open play in these ecosystem discussions? Well, I should say this is one of the really exciting things about the marriage of Red Hat and IBM is, you know, Red Hat has deep capability in open source and delivering open source platforms and has been doing that for two decades now. IBM has always been a large participant in open source that has never really delivered platforms, right? It's always infused open source components in other kind of solutions. And so by bringing the two together, we can truly leverage the power of open source to help enterprises and telcos consume open source at scale to really be able to take advantage of this massive innovation that's happening. And so in particular, you know, we're seeing in telco exactly what we saw happen in the data center, which is people did have these vertical stacks and the data center it was the UNIX's, you know, of the past where applications were tied to the operating systems tied to the hardware. The same thing exists in telco infrastructure now and the telcos understand this idea of the value of a horizontal platform. So how do you have a commodity infrastructure underneath so hardware with an open source infrastructure so people could feel confident that they're not locked into one vendor though also can feel confident that they can try a feature set that they need into these platforms. And so the idea of that open kind of almost think of it as a Linux, but for data centers are now Linux for a 5G, which is a combination of open stack on the virtualized side, open shift, Kubernetes, you know, containers from a container perspective and be able to bring that to telcos and 5G rollouts allows them to separate the in functionality and sits in an application, whether that's a virtualized application or a container and be able to confidently be able to run that on open infrastructure is something that open source is doing today in telco in the same way it disrupted, you know, traditional data center infrastructure over the last couple of decades. And then IBM can bring that with services capability as well as a whole set of kind of value added services kind of further up the stack which makes the open source infrastructure, you know, usable, you know, in a manageable cost-effective way today. And so that's why we're so excited about, especially what we can do with Edge because we're bringing the same disruption we brought to the data center 20 years ago and we can do it in a safe, secure, reliable and manageable way. All right, well, Jim, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on all the accomplishments of the Red Hat team last week and the IBM team this week. Great, thank you, it's great to be back and I look forward to seeing you again live in the not too distant future. Absolutely, until we're back in person, theCUBE bringing you IBM Think, the digital experience, I'm Stu Miniman. And as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.