 Live from Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise, it's the Cube! Covering IBM Insight 2015. Brought to you by IBM. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillan. Welcome back, this is Dave Vellante called Paul Gillan wrapping up two days of wall-to-wall coverage at IBM Insight. Some of the things that we take away from this conference is I go back to some of the things I said a couple years ago, IBM has taken this analytics portfolio and has just driven a truck through the big data business, they don't use that term, we do. And has emerged number one, 17 billion dollar business, I'm saying it's well over 20 by the end of this year. It's still a collection of myriad products and services and consulting parts of the organization, but it is a massive portfolio and pretty much any problem that somebody has, IBM's got an answer. And it's very impressive. I think the other thing is we heard a lot about Watson. Watson is really hitting its stride. Watson has gone from sort of interesting, I say gimmick, it was always more than a gimmick, but interesting experiment to something that's really impacting all facets of IBM's business and directly into customers' businesses, demand seems very, very high. Big emphasis on open source and technologies like Spark. Obviously, IBM always talking about business outcomes, that's their wheelhouse. This was a good conference in the standpoint of you. Walk around the hallways here, you see business getting done. Sales guys are here, they're on their game, a lot of suits, a lot of big companies. We also heard, you know, which is unique for IBM, some startup action going on, some folks from the cloud community coming in, Radpad as an example, and a couple of others. So, you know, pretty impressive, 15,000, 20,000 people, one of the biggest big data shows on the planet. What are your closing thoughts? You know, I've been following this company for 30 years, more than 30 years, and the thing that's always impressed me about IBM is its capacity for reinvention. The pundits have said last rights over this company several times, the time I've been watching them, and IBM always seems to find a way to duck the grim reaper, if you will. And, you know, I got an email this morning from a colleague of mine who's been in technology, media for a long time, followed IBM for about as long as I have, and he said, when are they going to boot Rometti? This company is screwed, you know, 14 straight quarters of declining earnings, and my response was, I think they're doing all the right things. You know, Wall Street is, really, you can't look at stock price and make decisions about things like a massive turnaround like this. As you said, as we've been saying throughout this event, this company is executing very well on some strategic initiatives that are differentiated. They have a direction, they have a purpose. Unlike some companies out there in their space, I think they have the ability to execute, they have the portfolio in place. And I was actually impressed with our last guest here, Andrew Juarez from Coca-Cola, who talked about IBM as a strategic partner. IBM is our partner, he said. Well, when you have companies like Coca-Cola who call you a partner, you're doing something right. And that is an asset that, you know, no cloud startup has that. So I think that this company is, they're just methodically executing on a strategy that I think is going to bear fruit for them, and we're seeing them. Seeing the analytics business, $20 billion business this year becoming really a really strategic differentiator for them. Yeah, I mean, you're right. IBM's not fumbling. They're not head faking. They're not announcing things. And then, you know, it's a big, huge strategic initiative and pulling them back. I mean, I hate to say it, my friends at HP, they do that. They announce the public cloud and they pull it back. And you're really not sure what direction they're going. What is HP all about these days? Well, I think the split of HP is a big move. I think it was inevitable and it had to happen, so that gives focus. And I think, you know, I'm more familiar with HP Enterprise, and I think that, you know, we'll see. But I do think that gives the company more focus and it allows them to actually develop a business model that doesn't have the distraction of trying to market end-to-end because that really was not their strength. And let, you know, HP Inc. go knockheads with Dell. I think it's going to be interesting. HP, you know, still has a big supply chain. We'll see if they can get costs down. It's still a great channel and people want them to win. But from a strategy and product standpoint, it's not nearly, I mean, you compare HP to IBM and IBM's got really crisp, clear strategy. It comes across, you know, very, very strong. I would say the same is true for Oracle. You know, you listen to Larry Ellison's keynotes and it's very impressive what Oracle is doing. Really crisp, right? It's not ambiguous what they're doing. You don't walk away saying, what is their cloud all about? And there's still parts of that, by the way, inside of IBM, but particularly in cloud, but they're really getting their cloud act together. They were behind in cloud. They had to make the software layer acquisition and they're catching, they're playing catch up. And it's hard to catch up with Amazon because Amazon's running out faster than everybody else. So the key to competing with Amazon is you've got to have differentiation. Oracle, we've talked about this a number of times, has differentiation. IBM, let's bring it back to IBM. IBM clearly has differentiation. Analytics is a big differentiation play there. Applications up the stack. Watson is the secret weapon. So all those things I think bode well over time for IBM. I really agree with you. It's going to happen for IBM. The managed decline businesses are going to hit bottom and stabilize and the new growth businesses which are growing at 20, 25, 30% a year are going to overtake those. And so IBM, classic fashion, turning the cruise ship and then, but focused and making big bets in areas that are not only high growth, but transformative. Anybody can make bets. I mean, EMC made a lot of bets in high growth areas. Cloud, big data, software defined. Okay, well, turns out those bets didn't pay off in time. It still remains to be seen whether they will for IBM, but IBM is not following the pack. They're leading into these new transformative areas. And they've taken their medicine. And getting rid of Lenovo, getting rid of the X86 business was not easy. Having to pay to get rid of the semiconductor business was not easy, but that was a matter of taking their medicine and seeing that the short-term pain was worth the long-term gain. Yeah, and I think that, you do hear that a lot about, you know, Ginny's got to go. And I don't think Ginny has to go. I think Ginny is representative of the diversity at IBM. They're, you know, promote women in tech. And she came out of the strategy role. She owns this strategy. And I think IBM board wants to see this through. And so, you know, 14 quarters sounds like a long time. It kind of feels like a long time. But look at HP. Meg Whitman, when she took that job over, said, it's going to be a five-year turnaround. And now what is that? 20 quarters. Three years into that five-year turnaround, the split is happening. You would have thought that would have happened in year one or two. Now we're into year three. It's going to be another, you know, I don't know, 12, 18 months before you see that take shape. Whereas IBM, we're well into the turnaround. But you just get a feeling that they've, like you said, jettisoned some of those businesses that were, you know, albatrosses. The microelectronics business was another one. You know, their storage business was one that I'm quite familiar with, which struggled for a number of years. But they're even streamlining that, moving toward a software-defined place, making the hard decisions. So, of course, what we don't see at these conferences is what's happening at the street level. So what are the global services, the sales force, the people who deal with the business partners, the people who really are responsible for selling the products, is the message trickling down to them. And that's something that you can't come out of a conference like this with answers. But I think it is, it was impressive for me to walk in the first day and see that they needed a basketball arena to hold the crowd here. Right, you feel like you're in the Boston Garden. A lot of people were here. And they were cheering and clapping and they were excited. Yeah, so, okay. Let's wrap here, Paul. I think that, so it's been a big week, big month for theCUBE. Obviously, we're here at IBM Insight. We've got, we've had four days of coverage at Oracle OpenWorld. I'm heading out there tomorrow. We're at the main stage, the official sort of Oracle OpenWorld broadcast on Howard Street. We're also on the ground inside the show floor at the Cisco booth. You know, talking to one of Oracle's partners. So a lot of action going on in, at Moscone that we're going to go check out. All right, so check out ibmgo.com. You can go there for all the on-demand videos. A ton of research on there. A lot of social action, social engagement. You'll see the keynotes. You'll see all the CUBE videos. Check out wikibon.com for all the research, siliconangle.com. Has all the videos of this show and other shows that we do. Check out crowdchat.net slash IBM Insight. That's also part of the ibmgo experience. A lot of content out there. Thanks to everybody. Andrew, great job today. Alex, Sam, and all the team. Bert, really appreciate all your efforts on, on CrowdChat helping us to, to document these events. It's really, really helpful to, so that we can fossilize Google's crawlers and see it, you know, back, when we back to the back of the office and write our analysis. So thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE. We're out from IBM Insight. See you next time.