 Live from Las Vegas. Extracting the signal from noise. It's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back. And we are here live in Las Vegas for exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We'll go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. Our next guest is Cherie Bergeron, leader of client engagement and advocacy at IBM. You tell the stories, you work with the customers. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. So one of the big things here at InterConnect this year is the customer focus. I mean, IBM always has customers, so it's not like it's a new thing, but leading the keynotes, we saw them on stage. I mean, they kicked off the entire event with customers standing, talking to each other. I fell out on the street corner and like, hey, what's going on? Hey, what are you guys doing? So very telling. What's going on? And the voice of the way that our clients are using our technology is really the most impactful thing for customers to learn from customers. And the other thing that IBM does so much of is work with the academic community. And this story that we're going to talk about around the Ross Guild Music Festival is really about a collaboration between a music festival organization, a academic institution, the Copenhagen Business School and IBM and how we're making all that happen. Three diverse different kinds of groups. That's true. The music festival, the academic and the corporation. How does that work? A collaborative environment. Share some insight into that story. You know, the music festival is one of the largest in Europe. It's actually been around since 1971. 130,000 people descend on this small town in Denmark and they host artists like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, et cetera. The festival really knows how to put on a great event but they don't know a lot about technology. So they engage with the Copenhagen Business School to help understand how to get insights from their data so they can maximize the experience of the festival goers. And IBM loves to partner with companies that are doing cool new things with technology and so we partnered with the business school to help them dig into the real-time insights of the conference. IBM does get attracted to people who are doing a lot of forward things and they love to apply their technology whether it's a tennis match, golf tournament or in this case music because they want to get a real-life example. IBM seems to be very solutions oriented over the years and outcomes and not so much the speeds and speeds. Although they are geeky. IBM, a lot of geeks. We do have a lot of geeks. A lot of IBM fellows. But talk about the role that they're doing because I can imagine are they making it a smarter festival in the spirit of the smarter planet? Are they using the beacon stuff that's out there? What are some of the things that they're doing? Give some real examples of how they make the festival run better. So the festival itself, the attendees there camp out there. It's sort of like a cross between Woodstock and Burning Man-ish. It's very interesting. You'll have to see the video. I had to go somewhere. Yeah, you need a ticket for next year. But they consume 200 tons of food and there are 300 tons of waste. So the idea of how you can optimize this in a way that makes it better for the people there, you can imagine shortening food lines. You can imagine what's the safety? How about the best place to park and things like that? And so what they did was they had a real-time mobile app that they were analyzing the movements of the crowd. So they could say this, if you were interested in this artist, there was a high probability you'd be interested in this other. And so we need to manage for kind of that flow of people. And they have this incredible app that allowed you to see the kind of heat maps of people over time. This was only made possible working with IBM. We had a cloud-based technology where in a day they said they had a room with chairs. The next day they had a real-time data lab. They were able to crunch through all that information in real time. So talk about like obviously the technical challenges there. You need bandwidth. Is there Wi-Fi? Are they bringing in base stations? Are they using wireless? So it was all via the mobile phones that they were able to track the real-time movements of their crowds. They actually did a time lapse of it. It was 91 million rows of data equals one minute of information. That's a huge big data problem. That's a database schema problem too. And so they're able to empower these festival organizers with information. They never would have been able to know before about what are people really doing at the festival? How are they moving? Where are they getting log jammed and make it a better experience for them? What are the learnings that they come out? Can you share some specifics like they said, wow, without this, I wouldn't have known X? Well, for example, approximately 20% of the food is wasted at these conferences, at these festivals, which is very expensive. They were able to plot what times of the day certain kinds of food would be most popular and even based on weather conditions so that they could have the right food there at the right time. So for example, this wouldn't be too surprising. Strawberry smoothie in the morning was a recovery drink, which you can imagine. But they had a certain time of the day that a pork sandwich peaked. But if the temperature had been colder or higher, it would have been a completely different situation. So they're able to optimize those kinds of things. This is the weather data, interesting use case. Absolutely, it is. Also having inventory of umbrellas and other gear related if it's a weather issue. Anything on the safety side? Can I imagine that some of the beaconing technologies would be good around congestion, potentially medical and safety issues, anything in that area? The movement of crowds and the analysis of the affinity to different artists allowed them to get the right security and the right time to keep everybody moving and everybody safe. Does it trickle up to the band level? I mean, do the bands get data? Like, hey, what songs to play? Are they doing requests from the crowd? Well, you know, they were able to truly look at not only how many people started at a certain artist, but how many stayed at that artist. And so that information is going to fuel better planning for them in the future. They have 170 bands. And so they're constantly refining who they have come and who they pair next to one another. So Copenhagen Business School, we were gonna have that guest on. The client here was thinking about, there's a festival. What was the school's role in all this? The school was doing the work. So the festival's a nonprofit. They don't have the expertise and the resources to do this. So they partnered with, this became a PhD project actually. And so 25 business students who knew nothing about the technology were able to get up and running very quickly with Watson Analytics and the cloud data environment. It was great for IBM. So IBM gets a little bit of, you know, a bunch of people who are gonna come in and be a use case, test case for them. Absolutely. I don't like to use guinea pig, but you know, coming in and playing in and just like, you know, test driving it. It's a real time data lab for them. That's what they saw this festival as. And IBM loves to partner on things like that because it's really an impactful use of the technology and they were able to get up and running so quickly. So talk about the thought leader session that Pear talked about even Copenhagen Business School. What did he talk about to the folks in that room? Well, essentially what I've been talking about here, what the challenges were, what the big data challenges were and how they were really to bring all of this together for last year's festival and then how they're improving on this next year. So they're gonna take all of the learnings that they had and they're gonna refine it for this next year. So, you know, take all those algorithms, make them smarter to make better decisions. Cognitive, we got our cognition on. That was what Nancy Pearson was talking about earlier. So I gotta ask you the, since you're the customer advocacy side of things. I noticed that this is maybe more of an internal IBM question I want to explore with the audience here is IBM is in a big storytelling mode right now and it's not just customer testimonials. That's like the classic like corporate thing like customer testimonial, IBM runs great. It's kind of like boring. The storytelling is interesting now. I mean, they're cooler stories. Yes. Is that part of the plan? Is that like what the focus is and are there other cool stories you could share? You know, I think it's an evolution of where we are where, you know, IBM is classically working with a lot of the larger companies and they're also doing very innovative things but it's the startups who are also doing some cool things and our approach is to help empower those startups and give them a voice through one of the most recognized brands in the world. So I work with customers to help them figure out how we can support their messages instead of them supporting ours. Yeah, and gives them some promotion too. What is the big learnings that you've had over the past year in looking at the use cases and the customer success stories and their journeys? The progression, if you will. What is some of the patterns that are jumping out at you that you can share with the audience? The patterns are really how they are taking various pieces of our cloud-based technologies and combining them. So for example, in this case of Rossgill, they used an underlining database from us, SPSS, Watson Analytics. They were bringing all of the ADASH DB. They're bringing all of these things together to accomplish the ultimate objective and so I think that's really what we're trying to do. We're really integrating in disparate technologies. Well, and these are meant to be integrated, but really it's some of the most innovative clients that are starting to do that in practical terms. Where can people get some information that are watching here on some of these stories? IBM.com. Open for data. On IBM, open for data, search that, but also watch the sessions, that day one general session with Rossgill. Go to IBM.go.com if you want to see all the replays. That's the site for the event. On these success stories. Any other things you'd like to share? Some of the things that you've observed. Coolest thing you've seen. Two, craziest thing you've seen. Some of the amazing things that were also in that session was around the USA Team Cycling, the Team Pursuit Cycling. Take a look at that. That's fantastic. As well as what Epson Seiko's doing around improving people's golf swing. You've got to catch that session. I got an M Tracer. They gave me one. Fantastic. Well, then I think what we'd like to see is you test out a swing. The guest was awesome on it. He's like, well, people have a golf swing that they think they have. We show them what they really have. And you know what? I'm living like I'm an 18 year old to me. I'm like, thinner, big turn, not anymore. Could be a painful exercise, I suppose. Let's try another sport. Kiri, thank you for sharing the story. Congratulations on the successes with your clients. Thank you. IBM is telling the stories using cognitive, using big data. We're here exclusive, sharing the data on theCUBE here. We'll be right back with more exclusive coverage from IBM Interconnect 2016 after this short break.