 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to IBM Think, everybody. My name's Dave Filante. I'm here with Peter Beres. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our day three. We're wrapping up wall-to-wall coverage of IBM's inaugural Think Conference 30 of 40,000 people. Too many people to count. I've been joking all week. Sam Warner is here as the VP of offering management for software-defined storage at IBM. Sam, good to see you again. And Steve Keniston is joining him, otherwise known as the Storage Alchemist. Steven, great to see you again. Thanks, Dave. All right, Sam, let's get right into it. All right. What is the state of data protection today and what's IBM's point of view? Well, I think anybody who's been following the conference and saw Ginny's keynote, which was fantastic, I think you walked away knowing how important data is in the future, right? The way you get a competitive edge is to unlock insights from data. So if data's so important, you've got to be able to protect that data. But you're forced to protect all this data. It's very expensive to back up all this data. You have to do it. You got to keep it safe. How can you actually use that backup data to perform analytics and gain some insights of that data that's sitting still behind the scenes? So that's what it's really all about. It's about making sure your data's safe. You're not going to lose it. That big, big competitive advantage you have in that data, this is the year of the incumbent because the incumbent can start unlocking value of the data, so. So Steve, we've talked about this many times. We've talked about the state of data protection, the challenges of sort of bolting on data protection as an afterthought, the sort of one size fits all problem where you're either under protected or spending too much and being over protected. So have we solved that problem? You know, what is next generation data protection? What does it look like? Yeah, I think that's a great question, Dave. I think what you end up seeing a lot. We talk at IBM about the modernizing transform a lot, right? And what I've started to try to do is boil it down almost at a product level, or at least an industry level. Why modernize your data protection environment, right? Well, if you look at a lot of the new technologies that are out there, costs have come way down, right? Performance is way up and by performance around data protection, we talk RPOs and RTOs. Management has become a lot simple, a lot of design thinking put in the interfaces making the OPEX job a lot easier around protecting information. A lot of the newer technologies are connected to the cloud, right? A lot simpler and then you also have the ability to do what Sam just mentioned, which is now unlock that business value, right? How do I take the data that I'm protecting? We talk a lot about data reuse and how do I use that data for multiple business purposes and kind of unhinge the IT organization from being the people that stumble and trying to provide that data out there to the line of business, but actually automate that a little bit more with some of the new solutions. So that's what it means to me for a next generation protection environment. So it used to be sort of, okay, I got an application, I got to install it on a server, you'd be talking about this earlier, I get a database, put some middleware on, oh yeah, I got to back it up. And then you had sort of these silos emerge. Virtualization came in, that obviously changed the whole backup. Paradigm, now you've got cloud. What's your point of view on cloud? Everybody's going after this multi-cloud thing, protecting SAS data on-prem, hybrid, off-prem. What are you guys doing there? So, I believe you spoke to Ed Walsher this week. We have very much believed in the multi-cloud strategy. We were very excited on Monday to go live with Spectrum Protect Plus on IBM's cloud. So it's now available to back up workloads on IBM cloud. And what's even more exciting about it is, if you're running Spectrum Protect Plus on-premises, you can actually replicate that data to the version running in the IBM cloud. So now you have the ability, not only to back up your data to IBM cloud, back up your data in IBM cloud, where you're running applications there, but also be able to migrate workloads back and forth using this capability. And our plan is to continue to expand that to other clouds following our multi-cloud strategy. What's the plus? What's the, what's, why the plus? What is that about? That's the magic. You can't tell. That's what you're talking about. It's like AI, it's a black box. Well, I will answer that question seriously though. IBM's been a leader in data protection for many years. We've been in the Gartner's leader's quadrant for 11 years straight with Spectrum Protect. And Spectrum Protect Plus is an extension to that bringing this new modern approach to back up. So it extends the value of our core capability, which, you know, enterprises all over the world are using today to keep their data safe. So it's, it's what we do so well, plus more. Plus more? Plus more. So, Steve, I wonder if you could talk about the heat in the data protection space. When we were at VMworld last year, I mean, it was, that was all the buzz. I mean, it was probably the most trafficked booth area. You see tons of VC money that have poured in several years ago that has started to take shape. It seems like some of these, these upstarts are taking, taking share, growing, you know, a lot of money in, big valuations. What are your thoughts on what's that trend? What's happening there? How do you guys compete with these upstarts? Yeah, so I think that is another really good question. So I think even Ed talks a little bit about a third of the technology money in 2017 went to data protection. So there's a lot of money being poured in. There's a lot of interest, a lot of renewed interest in it. I think what you're seeing because it's now from that next generation topic we just talked about, it's now evolving. And that evolution is it's not, it's no longer just about backup. It's about data reuse, data access, and the ability to extract value from that data. Now all of a sudden, if you're doing data protection right, you're backing up 100% of your data. So somewhere in a repository, all my data is sitting. Now, what are the tools I can use to extract the value out of that data? So there used to be a lot of different point products and now what folks are saying is well look, I'm already backing it up and putting it in this data silo, so to speak, how do I get the value out of it? And so what we've done with Plus and why we've kind of leapfrogged ourselves here with from going from protect to protect Plus is to be able to now take that repository. What we're seeing from customers is there's definitely a need for backup, but now we're seeing customers lead with this operational recovery. I want operational recovery and I want data access. So now what Spectrum Protect Plus does is it provides that access, we can do automation, we can provide self-service, it's all REST API driven, and then what we still do is we can offload that data to Spectrum Protect, our great product, and then what ends up happening is the long-term retention capabilities of corporate compliance or corporate governance. I have that, I'm protecting my business, I feel safe, but now I'm actually getting a lot more value out of that silo of data now. Well, one of the challenges, especially as we start moving to an AI analytics world, is that it's becoming increasingly clear that backing up the data, 100% of the data, is may not be capturing all the value because we're increasingly creating new models and relationships amongst data that aren't necessarily defined by an application. They're transient, they're temporal, they come up, they come down. How does a protection plane handle not only the data that's known from sources that are known, but also identifying patterns of how data relationships are being created, staging it to the appropriate place. It seems as though it's going to become an increasingly important feature of any protection scheme. I think a lot of, you bring up a good topic, Peter. I think a lot of the new protection solutions that are all REST API driven now have the capability to actually reach out to these other APIs and of course we have our whole Watson platform, our analytics platform that can now analyze that information. But a core part and the reason why I think, back to your previous question about this investment in some of these newer technologies, the legacy technologies didn't have the metadata plane, for example, the catalog. Of course you had a backup catalog, but did you have an intelligent backup catalog with Spectrum Protect Plus catalog? We now have all of this metadata information about the data that you're backing up. Now if I create a snapshot or a reuse situation where, to your point, Peter, I want to spin something back up, that catalog keeps track of it now. We have full knowledge of what's going on. You might not have chosen to, again, back that new snap up, but we know it's out there. Now we can understand how people are using the data, what are they using the data for, what is the longevity of how we need to keep that data. Now all of a sudden there's a lot more intelligence on the backup. And again, the earlier question, I think that's why there's this renewed interest in kind of the evolution. Well, at the same point, you really can't do that multi-cloud without that capability. I wanted to ask you about something else, could you basically put forth a scenario or a premise that it's not just about backup, it's not just about insurance, my words, there's other value that you could extract. I want to bring up ransomware. Everybody talks about air gaps, David Florida brings that up a lot, and then I watched certain shows, like I don't know if you saw the Zero Days documentary, where they said, we laugh at air gaps. I'm like, oh, really? Yeah, we get through air gaps, no problem. I'm sure they put physical humans in, and in fact, so the point I'm getting to is there's other ways to protect against ransomware, and part of that is analytics around the data, and all the data's, in theory anyway, in the backup store. So what's going on with ransomware? How are you guys approaching that problem? Where do analytics fit? A big chewy question, but how about it? Yeah, I'm actually very glad you asked that question. We just actually released a new version of our Core Spectrum Protect product, and we actually introduced ransomware detection. So if you think about it, we bring in all of your data constantly. We do change block updates, so every time you change files, it updates our database, and we can actually detect things that have changed in the pattern. So for example, if your D-dup rate starts going down, we can't D-dup data that's encrypted. So if all of a sudden, the rate of D-duplication starts going down, that would indicate the data's starting to be encrypted, and we'll actually alert the user that something's happening. Another example would be, all of a sudden a significant amount of changes start happening into a data set, much higher than the normal rate of change. We will alert a user. It doesn't have to be ransomware. It could be ransomware. It could be some other kind of malicious activity. It could be an employee doing something they shouldn't be accessing data that's not supposed to be accessed, so we'll alert the user. So this kind of intelligence is what we continue to try to build in. IBM's the leader in analytics, and we're bringing those skills and applying it to all of our different software. Okay, so you're inspecting that corpus of backup data, looking for anomalous behavior. You're saying you're bringing in IBM analytics and also presumably some security capabilities from IBM, is that right? That's right, absolutely. We work very closely with our security team to ensure that all the solutions we provide tie in very well with the rest of our capabilities in IBM. One other thing that I'll mention is our cloud object storage. Getting a little bit away from our backup software for a second, but object storage is used often. But it's exciting. It is exciting. It's one of my favorite parts of the portfolio. It's a place where a lot of people are storing backup and archive data, and we recently introduced worm capability, which means write once, read many. So once it's been written, it can't be changed. It's usually used for compliance purposes, but it's also being used as an air gap capability. If the data can't be changed, then essentially it can't be encrypted or attacked by ransomware. And we have certification on this as well. So we're SEC compliant. It can be used in regulated industries. So as we're able to, in our data protection software, offload data into a object store, which we have the capability, you can actually give it this worm protection so that you know your backup data is always safe and can always be recovered. We can still do this live detection and we can also ensure your backup is safe. That's great. I'm glad to hear that, because I feel like in the old days, had I asked you that question about ransomware, I'd be, well, we're working on that. And then two years later, you'd come up with a solution. What's the vibe inside of IBM and the storage group? I mean, it seems like there's this renewed energy. Obviously growth helps. Like winning, you know, brings in the fans. But what's your take, Steve, and I'll close with Sam. I would almost want to ask you the same question. You've been interviewing a lot of the folks from the storage division that have come up here today and taught you. I mean, you must hear the enthusiasm, the excitement. Yeah, definitely. People are pumped up. I've rejoined IBM, Sam has rejoined IBM, right? And I think what we're finding inside is there used to be a lot of this, ah yeah, we'll eventually get there. In other words, like I said, next year, next year, next quarter, next third quarter, right? And now it's, how do we get it done? People are excited. They want to, they see all the changes going on. We've done a lot to, I don't want to say sort out the portfolio, I think the portfolio's been good, but now there's like, there's a clean, crisp, clear story around the portfolio, how they fit together, why they're supposed to, and people are rallying behind that. And we're seeing customer. We were voted by ADC, the number one in the storage software business this year. I think people are really getting behind. You want to work for a winning team and we're winning and people are getting excited about it. Yeah, I think there's a sense of urgency. A little startup mojo is back, so love that. Sam, I'll give you the last word before we wrap. Thoughts on Think, thoughts on the market? I got to tell you, I think it's been crazy. It's been a lot of fun so far. I got to tell you, I've never seen so much excitement around our storage portfolio from customers. These were the easiest customer discussions I've ever had in one of these conferences, so they're really excited about what they're doing and they're excited about the direction we're moving in. Guys, awesome seeing you. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE, both of you. It was really a pleasure. All right, thank you for watching. This is a wrap from IBM Think 2018. Guys, thanks for helping us close that up here. Thank you for helping the co-host this week. John Furrier was unbelievable with the pop-up Cube. Really phenomenal job, John and the crew. Guys, great, great job. Really appreciate you guys coming in from wherever you were. Puerto Rico, Bahamas, I can't keep track of you anymore. And go to siliconangle.com, check out all the news. TheCube.net is where all these videos will be and wikibon.com for all the research, which Peter's group has been doing great work there. We're out, we'll see you next time.