 Live from Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Insight 2015, brought to you by IBM. We're back at IBM Insight, everybody. This is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Check out ibmgo.com. It's the social experience for IBM Insight. There are crowd chats there. Join the conversation at crowdchat.net slash ibminsight or go to ibmgo.com. Suzanne Hupfers here. She's with the IBM Center for Applied Insights. Phil Buckaloo is hung tough. Phil, thank you for staying on. Vice President of Enterprise Mobility at IBM. Suzanne, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you, nice to be here. So tell us about the IBM Center for Applied Insights. What is that? So we're an organization with an IBM that's focused on thought leadership. So we're asked by various parts of the company to do primary research studies on technology topics. So we're out there gathering a lot of data via interviews with business and technology leaders or doing surveys of them. And then we gather lots of data on technology topics, analyze it to try to figure out what some of the trends are there on technology. But specifically with a focus to bring back insights that can be applied to business that are actionable that we can turn into recommendations for business and IT leaders. So help us understand sort of how you approach it because I'm thinking about these books that get written and the professor at MIT or wherever goes out and interviews a bunch of companies and gathers data. Is that the method or do you also do larger surveys or how do you approach your methodology? We actually have a few different ways that we work but the two primary ways are either to interview leaders, business and technology leaders via phone interviews. And that's one way that we gather data. Another way that I'm pretty familiar with is to go out and do these worldwide studies of IT and line of business leaders, decision makers. And that typically could be a study that ranges anywhere from like a few hundred up to maybe a thousand respondents. So we go out and interview these people via survey methodologies all over the world and bring back lots of data and then start analyzing it. Well, Phil, it's interesting to hear Suzanne talking about IT and line of business. I mean, with mobile driving such change, I mean, it's the line of business user, it's either the consumer or the line of business user that's sort of maybe not necessarily dictating but if collectively they're dictating, what are you seeing in terms of that? Absolutely. Then let's see what the data says. The line of business is really so important in mobile because mobile is about changing the experience of the end user or of the employee and it's a way to get all this insight and data into their hands from the mobile devices in a way that is actionable because it's in your hand, you can actually do something about it. It's really, we really see a lot of, previously the IT teams were the only teams involved, they did a lot of the back office stuff but now the touch points are just so much in the hands of those employees and those users that the line of business, they're also seeing the impact, they're seeing really outsized results and that's something that's driving them to get involved and try to help marshal those mobile decisions and get the resources behind it to make big change. So I presume you're doing research in this area so the drivers between line of business and the technology folks, what are you seeing there? Well actually what we found, we just completed a study on mobile application development where we went out to 585 developers and development managers who all had a mobile focus and the focus of that project was to figure out what are these folks doing in terms of mobile application development and what techniques are successful that lead to successful mobile active projects. So what'd you learn? So what we learned, we looked at all this data and found there are four key ways that mobile active projects are successful and I should start by saying one really surprising finding, we came up with a criteria of success that involves being on budget, on time for the project and meeting the primary project objective and when you use that as the criteria for success, only one third of mobile active projects are actually successful and two thirds are falling down on one of those criteria or possibly multiple. So what we found when we looked closely at the successful third of mobile active projects, we found that they're different from other projects in four key ways. Number one is that they focus on putting a really strong team together and they're looking for the right technical expertise and also the right business and industry expertise for their teams and they also put an emphasis on finding at least one developer on the team that has more than five years of mobile dev experience. So that's one way that they're set apart, a key foundational way and once they have the strong team in place, there's three ways that their approach to mobile active differs. One is a heavy emphasis on platforms, using cloud APIs and platforms for mobile active. A second one is an emphasis on collaborations. We found that successful projects are much more likely to have the development team collaborating really closely with folks that are not even on the development team like business stakeholders and the end user. That's really critical and they're more likely to collaborate with those others throughout the entire development process. And then the last key difference is a focus on user analytics. So the successful projects are more focused than other projects in analyzing what the users do with the app, you know, what features are popular, what are not so popular and also collecting social media analytics about the application. So the data said the third met those three criteria on budget on time and met the project objectives. I'm surprised, frankly, it was that high given, you know, and I mean, it's hard to find developers with more than five years of mobile expertise that are, you know, working at IBM or Google or Facebook or, right? I mean, how are companies, organizations dealing with that talent shortage? Are they proactively dealing with that or are they just paying more with brute force approaches? Do you have any insight to that? We didn't specifically ask how they're locating those people and, you know, the frequency stat from our finding was that it's true, a majority still have less than the five years of experience because it is very hard to have that under your belt. But, you know, it was very interesting that these successful projects are more likely to say they've got at least one person on the team that has the greater than five years of experience. So what are you seeing, Phil? I mean, that's key for your business. And that's an area where, you know, we see that you kind of need to have had some of the hard knocks of the mobile, you know, the mobile path in order to know how to kind of steer clear of them. And so that's really what a lot of our clients have been doing is trying to find those folks and sometimes it's hard because those skills are in demand. We've actually, you know, been working with a lot of our clients, you know, through our global business services teams to provide skill and staff, augmentation, people that have been down that road before and that can steer the teams away from the pitfalls. The other thing that I think is really important that Suzanne mentioned is you mentioned the business and the IT teams. There has to be a collaboration between those two in order to be successful. And really, you also need to focus on the end user because they're the one that can really shape how you build a transformative experience. And a lot of the work that we've been doing is a part of the Apple partnership with the Mobile First for iOS apps. We have focused on the individual to make sure that that person that's on the shop floor or the nurse or the other person that's really gonna be using the app is getting the experiences they need. But then you pair them with someone from the business that understands the pain point of that industry as well as the IT teams that know how to get that data out from the back end. Pulling that together, those are the successful teams that are able to build those really compelling experiences that are having a transformative impact. So that seems to me to be a pretty crucial piece, especially when you're talking about the skill sets. I mean, I could always just call up IBM and say, hey, I need to build a mobile app, come help me build it, you know, I could outsource it. But I've got to have continuous improvement, especially in this day of mobile where everything's going so fast. So what are you doing as far as sort of, what are you seeing anyway, as far as knowledge transfer from those core dev teams that might move on to other areas or maybe IBM is, you know, they're outsourcing the app development to you guys. How is that knowledge getting transferred so that there's continuous improvement? There's a couple things. So first of all, in the study, we realized that when we did the cross tabs of the successful guys versus the unsuccessful guys, we found that the successful ones that are hitting all those three criteria, they use a DevOps model. They take an agile approach. They're looking at the data, they're getting it back and they're re-spending their apps out. They're using flexible tools and platforms to get there. And that's, you know, really one of the ways that they're able to kind of pull all those pieces together to kind of give the results and have that outsize impact. So if they can do that piece, then they're able to build, typically the compelling experiences that will really be transformed and really have an impact on their users. So Suzanne, you mentioned that one A success criterion was the use of heavy use of platforms, cloud APIs, did you guys drill into that any further? Can you add color to that? Yeah, I mean, I can give you one of the stats is that we found that two thirds of the successful projects say that they're using cloud APIs to assemble their mobile applications. So, you know, very high usage of that. They're also more likely than the less successful projects of using mobile app dev platforms. So those are a couple of our key findings. So to build on that, kind of bring it back to your last point as well. You know, we look at Bluemix, it's our platform as a service. We put tons of different capabilities out on Bluemix. You know, cognitive services like Watson, we talk about 30 of those APIs that are available today, contextual services to let you see, that helps these developers assemble things. But you still have that gap with a lot of traditional companies that don't know how to work in that way. So we've come up with a concept called the garages. So we have these Bluemix garages, what we'll do pair programming with some of the people that know how to do these, to implement a DevOps tool chain, to implement these iterative approaches. And we can have members from our clients come in and join us in the garage to learn how they're doing it as well as getting an output, that first mobile app, that they can be used that, you know, where IBM again handles the plumbing because it's on our cloud and they're able to focus on the business value. Did you, Suzanne, did you get any insight as to what developers want from a partner like IBM? That's interesting, like what they want from a partner like IBM. I mean, we didn't specifically ask about, you know, who they're partnering with or whether they're partnering with IBM because they don't know that we ran the study, it's all anonymous. Generically, any inference that you can make from the data in terms of what the devs want? Well, I'll tell you one thing that they seem to want is, you know, they are partnering more with the business stakeholders, with the end users. And I think, again, you know, a key is that they're getting a lot of what they want by observing the end users. And we found that not only are they more likely to do user analytics, but they're also more likely than less successful projects to say that the analytics are inspiring the next round of app devs. So whether it's improving the application that they're working on now or even coming up with ideas for new and innovative applications. So I think, you know, that's one key piece is that they really put the emphasis on getting what they can from the end user. So Phil, let's riff on that for a minute. So we heard from Jonathan. He wants, he just wants infrastructure that works. Absolutely. And he doesn't want to have to call you every, you know, 15 minutes and say, hey, something's not working. So that's sort of table stakes. Absolutely. But developers also want, you know, rich sets of services, right? Maybe you could sort of answer color to that. There's a couple of things they want. First of all, they want it without a hassle. They want to be able to go to, to digitally discover what they need and be able to get access to the service and start using it. They want to leverage the latest and greatest technologies that are really important in the mobile space to give you that flexible data, like the cloud team is able to provide with a no sequel database as a service. They want to be able to do flexible logic. You know, Node.js has really taken off with mobile developers. They want to use those emerging technologies. That's one of the reasons behind our recent acquisition of Strongloop where we're able to bring enterprise gate grade management for capabilities like Strongloop. They want to be able to pull those things together, leverage Docker containers, for example, to be able to build their apps in the cloud, even if they're still for whatever compliance or PCI or HIPAA reason have to deploy, you know, behind their data center walls. That flexibility to build using the latest and greatest tools to have the flexible data so they can make changes right now, have them pushed into production before the end of the day. That's the kind of thing that we're really getting a really strong response from guys like Jonathan that was here earlier and other clients as well. And then analytics obviously plays into this. I mean, you know, developers are moving toward building this end data pipeline and analytics factory, if you will, so they can drive it operationally into their business. Can you comment on that? And that's really important to drive those analytics at build time. So if you just let the developer use our SDKs that has the analytics built in, oh, by the way, it has a lot of security and other reliability characteristics built in as well, but that analytics will give them the insight into who's using their app where, what are the features and function they're using here and there. Be able to get sentiment analysis from the app stores, pull all of that data into consideration so that they can continuously improve. And that was another thing I think we saw in the study was around being able to look at the data, see the analytics and use it to continually iterate and continue to make their mobile applications better. All right, we're almost out of time, but Suzanne, what's next for you guys? What exciting things are on your horizon? We have, our center has a lot of different projects in the pipeline. We're also looking at clouds, specifically hybrid cloud. We're looking at cognitive technologies. So that's going to be a really hot area for us to look at in the coming months. Now, when you guys published this research, where do you publish it? How can people get access to it? We put it up on our website, which is ibmcai.com. You can- IBM C-A-I, Center for Applied Insights.com. IBM's, so it's ibm.com slash or no, it's ibmcai.com- C-A-I.com. Because you guys are kind of independent, right? Not tainted by the tendency to a lot of companies they want to put sort of, what are they saying about us? You guys really approach this sort of blind survey and making sure that- It's anonymous. It's anonymous, great. All right, well Suzanne, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Phil, good to see you again. Appreciate your time. Thanks for having us. All right, keep right there, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from IBM Insight at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, we'll be right back.