 Winston Edmonds in here for Studio B. Now I've got another conversation. You know these product experts are my favorite conversations because they know so much. So much knowledge. Got Randy Arsena, who's going to give me some information. What is your favorite topic right now? You've got so many trends. What are you following closely? Thanks, Winston. So I think the things that we're most excited about right now, and you're hearing a lot about it at the show here is certainly flash storage, right? We made a big announcement in April about IBM flash systems where we're really driving the economics forward on flash. So we're going beyond the pure performance benefits to really talk about the value proposition of flash from an economic perspective, which we think is going to be pretty fundamentally disruptive this year for the remainder of this year. The other thing that we're getting a lot of airtime with is the store-wise family. So we've got this whole family of products now that share common functionality, a common code stack, and a service level that sits on top of these products that enables from very small to very large configurations to be implemented, common services, common user interface, very easy for customers to expand as they need it. So I think those are the two things right now that we're getting a lot of airtime on. Pretty exciting. Let's talk about flash for a little bit. You talked about transition, just kind of the way we think about it. I mean, it can have such an economic impact. Tell us a little bit about what you've seen in terms of economics. Yeah, so flash, everyone pretty much knows that flash is a very high performance tier. So we recognize that there are performance benefits, but of course what's held it back from being deployed more widely is the cost. I mean, relative to spinning disk, it's still very expensive. But what we're finding with these new flash systems, these shareable devices that can be put on a sand fabric or put behind SVC and presented as a high performance tier, the utilization levels go up really high. So we get very high utilization with the same extreme performance, sub microsecond performance or microsecond level performance. So you get all the benefits of the performance characteristics, but you're also now unburdening the CPUs, right? So the CPU, if you think about all of the elements of the stack, processors, networks, interconnects, everything has accelerated dramatically over the last couple of decades, except disk. Disk has had a very, very nominal increase in speed. So now when you introduce this ultra high performance storage tier, it sort of changes the way you think about architecting applications. So not only are you able to leverage processor horsepower better and more effectively, so that drives down licensing costs you save on software. We can dramatically reduce footprint, right? Physical footprint. So power cooling becomes dramatically lower. So we're actually seeing much more economic parity now with all flash systems as compared to hybrid systems of flash and spinning disk. No, it sounds like that kind of requires a bird's eye view of the entire IT scenario. How difficult is that when you're speaking to CTOs and of course they can look at a very general look and it still seems, doesn't seem cost effective, but so how difficult is it to show them that value? Well, I think that's one of the areas in which IBM is actually very uniquely positioned in the industry because our perspective as a full solution provider, full stack services, hardware, software, best practices, we gather lots of industry and survey data from our customers and from the industry at large. So we have a very clear picture in many cases on an industry by industry basis and a use case by use case basis, the things that work, the things that don't work as well, where we can get those best practices and those economies of scale and we engineer that into the solution. So when we go have that discussion with a CIO or a CTO or a VP of infrastructure, we are bringing to that discussion a level of experiential data and expertise that most organizations, most other vendors don't have. So we can make pretty bold but very defensible claims about the sort of economic benefits that you're likely to get and we've got data to back that up from assessments and other customer engagements. Even so though, because you are offering this product, sometimes it's still, you're the salesman. Is that the secret of IBM Edge and that you have partners and customers all here, all sharing best practices and there's learning happening. Is that the secret of this event? It really is, I think. This is first and foremost, I mean it's a marketing event obviously but there is an incredible educational component to it. If you look at the tracks and all the, so there's essentially three simultaneous events going on. There's executive edge, winning edge for our business partners and technical edge which is a more purely technically focused track. There are hundreds and hundreds of sessions. So if you come here as a participant, whether you're a business partner or a customer, you can consume vast amounts of education in one place at one time and it's a fantastic resource for both our business partners and our customers because it's an opportunity for them to not only get refreshed on what IBM is doing and our point of view and our strategy going forward but to get a deeper level of expertise on existing products that they may not be fully familiar with. So it's a great opportunity to do that. You know, I know when I need information I go straight to you because you've got it ready for me but some of these customers as I'm talking to them, they really are leaning on other customers that they've met here and it's like they understand how this solution worked. It's pretty incredible to watch, kind of the domino effect with customers. Yeah, and one of the things that's most exciting for me is when we get customers to come to events like this and present, right? They're sharing their experiences and from my perspective as an IBM person, I think they're inherently more credible than I am because they actually spent money to buy these solutions so they've invested in this technology. They're getting value from it every day. They're driving business benefit and competitive advantage. So their perspective, I think, is immensely valuable because when they share their experience with their peers, their industry cohorts, they have very real world context for how they're using these solutions, which is tremendous. And actually this event is really a hallmark in that regard and that we have, I think we have about 100 customers who are actually presenting at this event, which is remarkable, so. Let's jump in the time machine and take us forward because as excited we are to educate customers on the here and the now, there are things that are happening and the future products that are poised to be versatile enough to handle whatever the future throws at us, but kind of tell us what to expect and the types of solutions that can weather those future storms. That's a great question and one of the questions we get most frequently from our customers is that all sounds great. I mean, you've painted a picture that sounds very appealing. I understand the compelling economic advantages. I understand the operational benefits I can get. So how do I start? Where do I begin? So we've developed actually a pretty pragmatic approach to helping customers go through this journey of getting from where they are today to getting to a more highly optimized, smarter storage infrastructure. And it's a very practical path. Again, going back to what I said earlier, based on best practices and the lessons learned from thousands of customer engagements all over the world, so we've been able to be very proactive and pragmatic about how we recommend implementing these solutions. So we'll say, for example, identify your high value workloads that are the most IO constrained or the most performance sensitive and migrate those onto one of these new IBM Flash systems. It's simple, it's non-disruptive, it's transparent, and you'll get immediate benefits with no architectural changes required. Then once you get to that step, you can then move logically to the next step. You can start looking at reclassifying data. You can look at virtualization. You can look at some of the other advanced services and you can sort of get yourself along that path without having to make a sort of big bang approach. You don't have to go sweep the floor and replace everything you have today with new stuff. You can do it in a very pragmatic, very economically viable way. Now here at IBM Mint, we've got a lot of IBM personnel running around just sources of knowledge. We've got customers, we have partners. And then we have a third party analysis here at Silicon Angle. Just ask your opinion, how important is it to have kind of a separate entity, these very curious individuals that we are in, but at the same time, we call it as we see it? How important is it to have that third party? I personally think it's extremely important. I mean, one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing in my role is working with analysts and communicating outside of IBM. So not just to customers, but to business partners to analysts like yourself. So I think it's immensely important. From our perspective, it gives us additional information to help drive our strategy. We get information obviously from our customers. We have our own ideas about where we think the industry is going and how we think our portfolio is evolving to accommodate these changing workloads and changing environments. But I think where the analyst community is immensely valuable is, as you said, you bring an objective, a very broad base of information. So we find that to be incredibly useful. I mean, as we're making strategic decisions, we need to understand what's going on in the industry outside of IBM that we may not be as in tune to. So I think it's immensely valuable. We've had theCUBE now and I think all of our major events for the last couple of years, it's become kind of a fixture here. So we think it's a great resource, not just for us, but for our customers who aren't able to be here. For example, they're watching streaming content from theCUBE. They'll, we'll repurpose some of this as we go around the world and sort of franchise this event and other geographies. So it's tremendously valuable. I think we've developed a really good partnership with Wikibon and SiliconANGLE, so. Fantastic. Now you're my go-to guy for all things IBM and the future of storage. For folks that maybe want to tap into some of that knowledge, is there a way to follow you on Twitter or do you have a blog or anything? There is, I have a, I'm ramping up Twitter a bit more. I've been on a bunch of projects, so I've been a little bit Twitter averse, but truth in storage is my Twitter handle. I would also recommend people look at the storage Alchemist, which is my colleague, Steve Keniston, has a blog. He's more, he's very active and has been for many years. You can follow IBM Storage, has a half a dozen different feeds that are very, very active. So yeah, there's a lot of resources. And in fact, if you're on Twitter, we're hashtagging everything here with IBM Edge, so you can get on some of those streams and you'll get some good follow recommendations there as well. There you go. Really appreciate you joining us. Okay, thank you, Winston. Appreciate it.