 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at IBM Edge 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is The Cube. The Cube's our live mobile studio, Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Stu and I are pleased to have Stephen Jones here. He's the CTO of Tridatum. We always love to talk to CTOs. In particular, we're going to talk about mobile, mobility, and Tridatum. Stephen, welcome to The Cube. Thank you. So tell us about Tridatum. What do you guys do? You're sort of this hybrid firm. Take us through what you guys are all about. So we help our customers rethink the conventional ways of doing things. Refine what exists. And then help them to transition to this concept of always on productivity by helping them mobilize not only their workforces, but also their workloads. So I would imagine you're not having to drag people kicking and screaming, right? Doesn't everybody want to go mobile? Or is it a case that they don't know how? Or maybe they don't realize they need to do it. Well, the challenge is the cloud, big data, mobile, social. They're all buzzwords. They're not products. There are technologies behind them. And from what we're seeing, people don't really care about technologies as much anymore. They're more looking for functionalities, capabilities. So you're not going to hear somebody ask, can I buy mobile from you or can I buy the cloud from you? It's more of a what can you do to address the issues that I have from a functionality or capability perspective? And then I don't really care what you use to deliver. Obviously, it's technology, but I'm not really concerned about who it comes from, where it lives, in many cases. Are you discerning patterns or clear patterns for requirements and ideal outcomes? Or is it all over the place? Now, I think it's very clear. There are a couple of things to me that are very clear. One, the definition of a user is changing. It's no longer just a person. It's now also the line of business applications. And they all want access to data. And the way they go about getting access to this data is always on type 24 by 7 productivity manner. Mobility, which is also being redefined, it's not just the device. It's the workloads. So how do I shift this workload here to accommodate X, Y, or Z, or whether it be a disaster or a temporary requirement for running reports once a month or whatever the case may be? We're seeing this shift towards more of a, everything tends to be centered around that. But then you have to use the cloud, VDI, analytics comes into play, social, all these different buzzwords that have technologies behind them. Regardless of what's going on, it tends to be centered around that. Hardware isn't going away. It's just nobody really wants to have conversations about server storage, whatever. They want to have more conversations about what the server storage applications can do for them. Some people still want to hug it, so you will have on-prem. But a lot of people are trying to move those workloads somewhere else so that they can enable this capability or functionality that they're trying to. All right. So Stephen, I wonder if you could help us unpack that mobility a little bit. So I think a few years back, VDI was all the buzzword. And too often that kind of monolithic desktop and just making that available other places didn't meet a lot of users there. There were certain use cases that were great for that. I've heard from a lot of companies that it's like, I just want to enable a mobile workforce. Maybe I really need kind of an enterprise version of the app store. Can you walk us through, what are you seeing on that trend? Do you guys as a managed service provider help companies build that kind of application portfolio for the enterprise? Yeah. How would you describe it? I think when you look at what with respect to your question, there's an internal aspect and then there's an external aspect. And from an external standpoint, it begins with securing that device and the data that lives on it, right? So we begin there, which is where the FibreLink mass 360 piece plays a major role from an IBM perspective. Then people want to either deliver the desktop in a virtual manner or the application in a virtual manner. And you're correct in that VDI didn't catch on the way it should have in the past. The primary reason was the cost, the hard cost. We could all justify soft cost, but it was hard to justify the hard cost. But technologies have come along now to where we can deduplicate at a higher level, which now allows us to push more or less down to the block. I can get far more efficient, so I can now drive down up to 95% of my storage requirements, which means VDI now becomes affordable. So I think you're going to see it's going to re-energize because that virtualization of the desktop on app is a part of the puzzle. And then the concept of a private drop box. I mean, we want to secure the data that lives there, but we also need to share not just what's in the cloud or however that's defined, I will say off-prem, but also connecting to our on-prem or current investments in the NAS infrastructures. How do we now bring them together to deliver this concept of a private drop box? I think rounds out the external side. So if I hear you right, you're saying VDI, due to the latest advances in things like flash and storage efficiency and dedupe, that the storage might have been holding us back from a cost perspective, but you expect to see some significant growth there. Yes, and let me clarify. Not dedupe at the block, dedupe higher up the stack, more in memory. So once I have to send it to storage, if I'm going to dedupe there, it's going to be cost prohibitive anyway. Question from the crowd here, Stu and Steven. What is a company's greatest struggle in going mobile? This is from GP Stu. I think it's twofold. I think the first lies in confidence with respect to security, unless you're able to now deliver BYOD or whatever the new acronym is, unless you're able to deliver in a way where you can subscribe on unsubscribed devices, which now allows me to essentially create containers on these devices that my data lives in. So if a device is lost or you're fired or for whatever reason I need to remove my content, it's secured in my corporate container, which now means the issues, perceived issues with respect to security are no manageable. Secondly, I think ultimately it's about accessing data and the ability to share in a private manner access to this data, either by the user being a person or a user being a line of business application. The ability to deliver that is the second biggest inhibitor, I think. So what are you doing at Edge? My IBM Edge, what's your reason for coming here? When I looked at launching Tridatum, it was very clear to me that the days of you partnering with multiple people, major vendors, those days are over. You had to pick one. And it came down to HP and IBM for me. And in my opinion, IBM was less confused than HP. And then when I dug deeper, I realized that the perception, the confusion was more based on perception versus reality. I think they're very clear on where they're going with respect to software, enabling the software to find world that we're moving towards. But with every change comes a lot of confusion, right? So we selected IBM because I think based on their strategic acquisitions, their development, they're starting to do things themselves again. In my opinion, IBM was the best choice. So as a result, we participate in just about everything IBM does. I'm here doing, I was a part of a panel this morning and I'm doing a couple other things as well. Okay, so it's not so much of a storage angle, it's more of an adjacency with mobility and bring your own devices. Well, it's all of it above. Yeah. The server storage networking, it doesn't go away. Software defined, all it does is help break the barriers, break down the silos, makes it easier for us to connect things, but they're still interrelated. So you have to be involved in a full ecosystem. So do you think we're going to have, put your crystal ball out, make your crystal ball, put the telescope on? Do you think we're going to have software defined silos or will we actually be able to achieve interoperability with all the software defined means? Yes and yes. Yes and yes? So I think, yeah. I think it will be, we have a better chance of getting there and definitely from a technology standpoint it's possible, from a political standpoint, maybe not so much. We'll see. We'll see. But from a technology standpoint, absolutely. Yeah. So Steven, one of the biggest challenges, I think IT's faced with this whole mobility is kind of the, what the user wants and what they're doing with stealth IT, you mentioned like Dropbox and the like, versus what IT can deliver. What are you seeing the customers you're working with? Is IT stepping up to the plate? Are they actually delivering this or are they telling people still? It's going to take us six to 12 months to deploy this. What are you seeing in the field? I'm seeing a mixture. I think there's still some IT folks that want to hug and hold and maintain control when their business is asking for them to now transition themselves to become more of an enabler for, right? So deliver to us the IT as a service. Which is where I think everybody will go, but obviously for various reasons it's not moving as quicker as it should, but it has to get there. So Steve, if you're part mobile catalyst, change agent, partner, and also part managed service provider, what you take in the public cloud, what do you make of things like, you know, Amazon announces VDI for the cloud, you know, workspaces or whatever they call it? Where's the public cloud fit into your customer strategies? So from what we're seeing, the cloud is becoming more and more commoditized. And people want choice. And they want choice not just based on the traditional ways of thinking, but they absolutely want choice in terms of the different providers. I don't think on-prem is done. I think they also want choices with respect to data centers that they're on-prem, so to speak, assets live, right? So I believe it will function more as an enabler for different workloads, for different requirements, IT requirements that will be more aligned with the partners or the public cloud providers that do those specific things well, because they don't all do all things well. So I think you'll see more of a brokering of these commoditized public cloud offerings with appropriate alignment of workloads with the ones that do those different things well. So you're not telling your clients don't use public cloud infrastructure. You're saying use it as another arrow in the quiver. I'm saying it's one of the options. The public cloud is no longer as unsecured as it was once perceived to be. It never really was, but now the perception of the public finds it a little more secured, and I think there's a place for workloads to live there. I think there's a place for private clouds that may not physically live in one of those providers that you mentioned, but it could live on a floor that's not in their building, and then there's a place for workloads that have to live within their building. So building an ecosystem that enables the appropriate alignment of workloads according to your business objectives is where it's at. So let me say that in more of a colloquial way. So the, you know, talk about workloads. The average age of an enterprise application is probably close to 20 years. So that stuff probably doesn't go into the public cloud, but all the cool stuff does. All your mobile apps, all your web scale apps. At some point, don't they overwhelm sort of the amount of value being created, or is that not the case in your view? I don't think it's the case, because I don't think everything that can be mobilized belongs in a public cloud. And there's some people, some do belong in a public cloud, but the decision makers just can't wrap their heads around the fact that it can live in a public cloud. But it's not reasons for security, as you said before. What is it? What's the decision point for a customer to stay on-premise with those sort of mobile apps or other apps? I think it's perception of security, not the reality of security. One, there's still some people that want to own and have full control. Comfort level. Exactly. Besides that, there's really no other. No real difference, yeah, okay. So, but there is a reality of flexibility, my flexibility, I mean, in terms of the choices that you have with security in the public cloud. Here it is. Well, can I change that? No. Can I change that? Exactly, so for the workloads that require the ability to change that, and the answer is no, then it doesn't belong there, but there may be another cloud provider that says, yes, you can, so maybe that workload can live there. All right, Steven, we've got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to meet you, and I appreciate your time and your perspectives. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Steven and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from IBM Edge in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back. Bye.