 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hi everybody, welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of this event. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We've been doing that virtually for the better part of 14 months now. We're going to get deeper into application modernization. Maria Ashway is here. She's the director of marketing at Mainline Information Systems and David Burrows is an account executive at Mainline. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Great to have you on today. Thank you, nice to be here. Maria, I want to start with Mainline. People might not be familiar with Mainline, but you've transformed over the past five years. I wonder if you could describe that for our audience. Yes, we have, indeed we have. Mainline is a 30 plus year company. And for 30 odd years, we had really been focused a lot in hardware, right, hardware reselling. That's what the market needed. That's what we did a lot of. But then in the past, I would say five to eight years, maybe even 10 years, we started on this transformation project for the business where we started transforming ourselves into really systems integrators versus just hardware reseller. So now we can go to a client and we can say, hey, you know, what are you struggling with, right? What are your business challenges? And then from there we can integrate a solution that might be hardware, it might be software, it might be some services, it could be managed services, it could be staffing services, could be a number of different things and put all that together and then deliver a complete solution that helps them with their business requirements. Well, David, that must have been an interesting transition because what Maria just described is it used to be every opportunity was a nail and whatever box you were selling was the hammer. And that has changed dramatically, of course. So I wonder what that discussion was like with clients. You must have heard that early on and said, uh-oh, this cloud thing is happening, the world is changing, we've got a change too. I wonder if you could chime in on that transformation. Yes, as our clients have been changing, what we've been doing is, you know, making sure that we fully understand what's available not only in the marketplace, but the competition and what each industry segment, for example, banking versus insurance versus a utility may be facing during this time. And so, you know, being able to transform as an account executive, we've been able to indicate and provide solutions as Marie indicated, the large focus over the last five years has been networking security. As we move more compute to the edge, close to the edge, security has been predominant. And so, you know, hardware is really almost commoditized through and through with the exception of, you know, IBM Z and Power. And so, you know, we've had to really sellers, you know, focus on what customers are dealing with and how they transition. And as we, you know, through COVID, it's actually been a bigger challenge and bigger focus on security. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later in more detail. Well, let's do that now. So Marie, maybe at a high level, you could talk about those challenges that your clients are facing. And then we can sort of double click on how that was exacerbated by COVID. And I'm really interested in your perspectives on sort of the post isolation economy and how those challenges are going to shift. But Marie, maybe kick us off at the high level if you could. Sure, so, you know, people, companies were moving toward the whole digital transformation, right? Probably for the past three to four years, we started seeing more and more that constantly, everybody sees those buzzwords all the time. So clients were shifting in that direction and we were shifting to try to satisfy them with their needs, with those solutions, but then came COVID. And all of a sudden, right, what people were planning on doing for the next, let's say, five years, I mean, most CIOs would say, yeah, we're gonna get there in five years. Well, that had to happen, right? It had to have breaks went on and it had to happen instantaneously. So that put a big change in focus, a big change in direction for not only our clients, right? But for our own folks, folks like David, who are trying to service these clients with having to bring them these solutions that we're gonna solve their digital business needs today and not five years from now. Yeah, so David, let's talk about that. I mean, what Marie just described, I call it the force march to digital because as Marie, as you were saying, people were on a digital transformation but there was a little bit of complacency, you know, okay, we'll get there, we're really busy doing some other stuff. And then all of a sudden, you've probably seen the meme of the COVID wrecking ball coming into the building, the office building and saying, you know, well, what are we doing fine? And all of a sudden, boom, the force COVID comes in. So how did that affect your clients and how did you respond? I mean, they're asking for VDI, give me some laptops, I need endpoint security. And so how did that affect the application modernization efforts? And David, maybe you could comment on that. So I think for me, the biggest challenge was all business, the competition within business to survive COVID, you know, they had to put in, first thing was, how do we get our customer supported correctly and how do we get our workers supported working at home? So the very first thing we did over the initial six months was most companies had to transform immediately within the first 30 to 90 days to allow their workforce to work them home. That happened throughout my customer base, both in the center of California was customers really focused on how do we do business process? How do we compete in this marketplace and get return on investments? Speak, you know, time to value of what we invest in these COVID times so that we can compete with other businesses that are trying to stay alive through this transition. And now that we're seeing on the backend that time to value in terms of investment is even more important because some businesses that have been significantly impacted from not only cash flow, but certainly in terms of profitability during this time. Makes sense. And so now Marie, so we were talking earlier about the sort of the initial path to digital transformation. And I wonder, that's got to be course corrected, I would think. We were forced in to compress the digital reality and I guess in a way that's good. But in a way it was, we probably made a lot of mistakes. It was a bit of a Petri dish. So now as we begin to knock wood exit COVID, you would think those imperatives adjust and they start to become aligned. What's your take on that? Especially as it relates to application and infrastructure modernization. So I would agree with that. I think that there's definitely has to be a little bit of a realignment happening. And I know recently I read that 2021 is expected to be a very large year in IT spend because all of those initiatives that CIOs and others were going after pre-COVID kind of got put on hold, right? So they could then go focus on all of those digital means that were needed like the CDI, work at home, all the security stuff for that. So I think we're gonna see, I'm thinking we're gonna see a shift again now and maybe businesses are gonna go back and kind of pick up where they were prior to COVID and now start working on more of really of the application modernization initiatives that were in mind. And I know we wanted to talk about that as well because David's been working on quite a bit of application modernization with a few of his clients as we're seeing again, businesses change and I don't know that all of that change is because of COVID. I think all of that change was for their competitiveness to get there anyway. So I think that's going to start, as you said before, David, I think it's going to start now having to kind of re-think up. It reminds me of traffic on the M4, David, if you've ever been to driving in London when it's slingshots, right? It's that's what COVID was like. Marie, you're absolutely right. Last year, IT spend was down four to 5% this year. I mean, our prediction is going to be in the six to 7% range, which kind of aligns with where Gartner and IDCR based on our surveys. But back in April, like I think the 16th of April, it was a headline in the Wall Street Journal that China grew 18% GDP in the quarter. So it's very hard to predict, but it's coming back. We can see that, David. And so spending is really going to accelerate. There's probably some pent up demand for that application modernization. Maybe it's been a little bit neglected as we've done, as Marie was saying, and you were saying the work from home. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the modernization aspects. And maybe I'm really interested in the things that you guys deliver in your portfolio with IBM. Sure. So what, I have customers in multiple phases within this current digital transformation. They're customer moving everything to next gen development, which is fully containerized code, being able to, you know, swiftly go through their development tests and hybrid cloud environments where they haven't made an investment yet, but they're sampling what it might be like to change into that world. And then there are customers who are still in the typical environment, the traditional environment, and they're looking at what the solutions as far as packages are available for them moving forward so they can kind of skip over any kind of development and be able to leverage what I call next gen development or next gen systems immediately. And so, you know, you asked, you know, what are the systems that are available? IBM's cloud pack solution set provides a portfolio of capabilities both in the application suite, database suite, security. I have customers today leveraging that. And so that is one of the first, you know, pieces that the customers I see who are on the leading edge who are also kind of trailing are looking at these cloud packs to be able to go time to market and time the value quickly. Yeah, so when I look at your portfolio, I just sort of scan the web. David just mentioned Marie cloud pack. I mean, we're talking software here. You guys do have a lot of expertise in Z, Z Linux power. You mentioned is not a commodity. It's one of the few pieces of hardware that in Z. They're not a commodity storage. I would think business resiliency fits in there beyond disaster recovery. You know, Red Hat, we're talking, you know, things like open shift and Ansible for automation. So these are not your grandfather's mainline. These are toolkits or you know, parts of the tool bag that you bring to bear to focus on client outcomes and solutions. Am I getting that right? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And again, right, that goes back to the original opening comment about how we've transformed as a business, right, to become an integrator, putting all of these different pieces together. I mean, I know that something that David recently had worked on. Oh my goodness, if you would have looked at the list of pieces of elements to that solution, it was really quite incredible between open source stuff, you know, and a bunch of IBM stuff. Yes, it was some storage and yeah, there was some power. Yes, there was Red Hat, right? But then there was other stuff. There was VMware. There was some things that I can never remember. Now all the names to all the components, but it was a laundry list, right? And so that's where the mainline stepped in and put the pieces together for the customer so that the customer then can get done what they need to get done, which was really solve their business problem, which was trying to become more competitive in their market space. Okay, David, so what Maria was just saying was basically my takeaway is as a system integrator, you've got all these piece parts with these technologies, you've got virtualization, you've got automation, you've got containers, and so forth, and yes, there's hardware, but there's this integration that has to occur. And your job is to abstract that complexity, that underlying complexity away so that the customers can focus on the outcome. Maybe you could talk about that and how you do that. Sure, I'll give you a good example of a recent customer that we worked with who was basically running a consider an enterprise data platform that was going to rework their entire data warehouse into something that had governance surrounding it where they could validate all the data that was coming into their warehouse. And so we underpinned that with an infrastructure of power, we're running obviously IBM's cloud pack for data with DB2 warehouse. We use a combination of that with cloud data flow through IBM with confidence streaming and the governance, IBM governance catalog piece which is lots of knowledge catalog. So we've been able to take not only what their base requirements were but all the microservices that are packaged in with cloud pack, all running on OpenShift which was a great acquisition that IBM did last year. And then they also required other microservices outside to support that environment. Paint a picture for us as to what the future looks like. It's much different than the past 30 years and bring us home please. Sure, so I think the future for us is to continue to find all of the solutions that will help our customers get to their next steps. And as you know, there's lots of solutions out there. There's lots of new companies that are popping up all the time. Inherently, Mainline is an IBM partner. We've been an IBM partner for 30 plus years since our inception. And that's the base of our business is IBM. But there are other requirements that are needed by businesses, by our customers. And that's where we reach out and partner up. We probably have, oh my goodness, 200 plus partnerships with various companies, various technology companies that we can then lean on and pull in those ancillary solutions to complete that solution for the customer. So I think we're gonna continue going down that path. We're gonna continue making sure that we're partnered with the leading technology companies so we can build that IBM solution for our customer and bolt on the other pieces that are needed. We're gonna continue to grow and enhance our services business because we've got quite a large services business, whether it's implementation services, we do managed services, we have staffing services. I think you're gonna see if we're still gonna continue to grow that business because that is a piece where companies, they don't wanna worry about running all of that stuff. They wanna know that their system's gonna be running 24 seven and if there's a bump or a burp or something happens, hey, they can pick up the phone, they can call Mainline, we can help them get things corrected. So I think we're gonna still see a lot of that going on as well within our offerings. Excellent, well, congratulations for making it through that not every hardware seller, reseller made it through and you guys transformed. It's an inspiring story. Maria, David, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're really welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante and our continuous coverage in theCUBE of IBM Think 2021. Keep it right there.