 I'm deeply involved with our efforts on AI and Gen AI as a company. I break this down in kind of phases, right? So we're doing a lot of, I would say work in our cloud infrastructure to enable workloads to run, to enable Gen AI workloads to run, right? And our big push as a company on Gen AI is a whole portfolio that we've launched called WatsonX. Hi, this is your Supreme Bhartiya and welcome to your partner's room. And today we have with us Rohit Badlani, General Manager for IBM Cloud Product and Industry Platforms. Rohit is great to have you on the show. Thank you, Swapnil. It's great to be here. We are supposed to meet at VMware Word and discuss what work you folks are doing together. So let's just do a recap. Talk a bit about the announcement because you folks made a lot of so, your team made at the VMware Explorer in Las Vegas this year. And just talk about, of course, sometimes these companies do work together for a long time, but let's focus on this one. What are the ideas that you folks are either extending your partnership or opening some new doors? Thanks for the opportunity, Swapnil. So yeah, I mean, look, we've had a 20 plus year partnership with VMware, but having been the cloud for VMware for many, many clients, we continued kind of our partnership with them at VMware Explorer this year, where we announced a few things, right? One was around making sure that we're accelerating the modernization of kind of the combined power of IBM and VMware Hybrid Cloud, right? So due to support that, we've been building with them IBM Cloud VMware as a service. It complements our portfolio of kind of do it yourself set of VMware offerings, where we're building this with a cloud managed multi-tenant, we cloud director solution, and we're expanding that to our fleet of worldwide multi-zones. We also announced that to help our mutual clients, IBM will be the first public cloud provider to launch a new partner managed service based on VMware cloud additions as part of this VMware cross-managed service initiative. The forthcoming service that's coming out will provide customers with a hybrid cloud aligned with the NIST validated framework differentiation and allows clients ease of migration workloads from on-premise to IBM cloud environments with the correct TCO to help them kind of build and modernize. And now we on the IBM cloud side have added tremendous amount of differentiation working very closely with the financial services industry, but we believe 100 plus financial services clients where IBM does really well, but we believe the differentiation around security or hyper security as I refer to it and compliance and controls work that we've added into our offerings help any landing zones on our cloud to be validated against regulatory requirements. And so this is a very strong partnership with VMware on product to continue to help the thousands of clients that we already have on our cloud and new clients, right? A few of the other announcements we had were also ecosystem-centric. So Dizian, which is a digital workspaces provider, we've been working with them and VMware and we launched their VDI solutions on the IBM cloud built with the security and compliance capabilities that I just talked about to focus on super mission critical workloads on our cloud. And we provide them with the resiliency, the performance, the cost of ownership to demonstrate regulatory compliance. We also announced at this conference a key SI partner HCL tech as part of our ecosystem is launching a shared data center as a service offering built with IBM cloud for VMware solutions. And then finally, we announced a primary IO. They announced an availability of a disaster recovery as a service platform on IBM cloud called Protect IO. And it's exclusively for IBM cloud and consumable through our catalog again for a VMware set of clients. So you see, we've been building this portfolio where we've got thousands of clients on jointly, of course, close, close research and development and go to market partnership with VMware over the last several years, but now broadening the portfolio to if a client wants to do it yourself, you can. If you want to consume VMware as a true managed service, you can as well, well plugged into the joint go to markets, but a strong ecosystem of providers around backup, disaster recovery, workload placement like Disney in, and then a strong ecosystem of GSI partners on top of that. Ever since you folks came out with your cloud, VMware, some of these companies kind of pioneer some of even the whole virtualization technologies. I want to hear from you how you have seen the evolution of the cloud. Mostly companies talk about the big threes, of course AWS is there, Azure is there and then GCP is there, but there are a lot of other players as well. Sometimes it's like different needs. We talk about multicloud, we talk about hybrid cloud. So talk about how do you see the evolution of cloud and what role do you see of IBM cloud and this partnership with VMware is going to play in this space? If you reverse back a few years, right? And you look at the journey on cloud, you'd hear a lot of, I would say tech evangelists say public clouds the answer, what's the question, right? And you're gonna find that I think there's unanimous agreement right now in clients that hybrid clouds here, hybrid clouds here to stay and especially with things around regulations and risk. I see clients choosing not one, but many cloud providers. So there's a market for many providers as you're saying and it primarily is driven by things like concentration risk, by risk to the ecosystem for the client around data protection on the more complex workloads. I would say the lala phase of clouds gone, right? And you're now focusing on more mission critical workloads and many of those run a hybrid. So from moving from public clouds, the answer, what's the question, we've moved into a phase of hybrid clouds here, it's hybrid multicloud and I may choose a cloud provider for a unique capability or a unique set of workloads. I also see clients getting a lot more mature in their cloud journey and their thinking. So instead of going all in on, I'm gonna move workloads, they're way more thoughtful right now on defining landing zones, looking at which workloads that they can lift and shift, which VMware has done a fabulous job at, which workloads they need to modernize and which workloads they need to put in place because there are cost and financial implications of rewriting a lot of applications. So I do see in at least the biggest clients I serve, a well taught through journey being taught off with that's complimented by skills and IBM does really well and IBM and VMware together. And that's why this partnership works with thousands of clients is, we serve hybrid clients and we help them on the journey to cloud, thinking through the entire life cycle of their workload and the implications to their organizations and their regulators. Can you also talk as you're saying that there was a time when the cloud is here, that is the reality and what Apollo is solving, back in those days when we used to look at the cloud, it was like it's a magical place. Once you move to the cloud, all your problems are gone. Look at the CNC of landscape cloud native, you cannot even go through all the logos on a 12K monitor, you need a bigger screen for that. The point is that there is a complexity that comes to the cloud and the fact is that this complexity is not going to go away. All we can do is to help customers deal with it. So can you also talk about, let's just stick with this collaboration, how you folks are making it easier for customers to leverage some of these technologies or to focus on what they were meant to be doing. They should not get over, their developer team should not be stuck with the word we call it plumbing, all those unnecessary things. So talk about how you enable them. So once again, they can focus on what they can move fast, they can stay secure. You also talk about some security features also there. You also talk about backup and recovery there. So let's look at the bigger picture here. Our philosophy has been to make sure we think through the entire lifecycle of the end client and their workloads. So we've really focused our cloud efforts around key workloads, whether it's VMware and how we drive hybrid journeys or SAP or with a big partnership with them around financial services, business processes, like trade finance or payments or those kinds of heavy duty business processes that run across organizations. And our philosophy all along has been, we, in my view, all the cloud providers are kind of the same. They provide a catalog, they provide a set of services, and then you kind of build on top to your point, but it gets really complex from a manageability from a day to operations perspective. So what are we doing is, a core of our cloud is built with Red Hat. So as you look at standardization of container, F containerization technologies across a hybrid estate, and actually even hyperscalers, like we can land Red Hat instances on a hyperscaler using our edge capabilities like satellite that provide you that single management control plane so that you unlock your developers from doing innovation. And under it to your point of plumbing, we approach everything as a managed service. So we manage the life cycle off VMR as a service or Red Hat as a service. And under the cloud, we have hyper-secured it with controls that the regulators and the regulatory clients need, and with compliance and auditability so the developer can focus on innovation. They don't have to work about the plumbing. And that's the uniqueness about the IBM cloud that we've been working with partners like VMware, of course, Red Hat being an IBM company with Red Hat, et cetera. From the cloud's perspective, what scope do you see of generative AI there now? When I talk about a scope, I am looking at two things. One is generative AI as a workload. And secondly, generative AI helping some of the tools and products that you folks are working on. I'm deeply involved with our efforts on AI and gen AI as a company. I break this down in kind of phases. So we're doing a lot of, I would say, work in our cloud infrastructure to enable Gen AI workloads to run. And our big push as a company on Gen AI is a whole portfolio that we've launched called WatsonX. Think of it as the tooling needed to develop large language models, the data capabilities, the governance around AI which people seem to forget. It's a very important aspect of, is your data safe? Are you auditing it? Is it ready for Gen AI? So we've got a holistic portfolio around that. We are, of course, putting a huge amount of focus on generating our own language models. So think language models for code. We just announced this last week. Think code translation from 115 languages or driving the efficiency of documentation in code. So normally, are we launching our own trusted models? We're eating our own cooking. We're using it for our own developers. We are applying it to our own HR processes to your point on use cases. We are applying it to our own customer service and client service teams. And we have a whole consulting practice that is helping clients with these use cases around generative AI. So IBM's end-to-end across our infrastructure team, across our software teams on the tooling and the capability, and our consulting team. This is, I mean, which other provider to provide AI for enterprises than IBM? And we're all in on that. Last question before we wrap this up is KubeCon is almost here. I mean, it's still one month, but it is almost here. Talk a bit about what we can expect from IBM Cloud at KubeCon. Of course, there are things that you folks will be announcing at the event, but just give us a glimpse, just tease us. KubeCon's a very important event for us. I'm not going to give you all the announcements. You'll have to wait for a month. But we're doing a lot of work around AI, as you said. We're doing a lot of work in our platform as a service layer around distributed cloud. Think of it as, for use cases, off edge. A lot of work around our developer ecosystem. So you would expect announcements in those arenas. And of course, we work very closely with Red Hat. So the capabilities we talked about on making sure you have a hybrid cloud platform consistent across expect announcements around those spaces. Rohit, thank you so much for taking time out today. And of course, walk us through not only the collaboration between you folks and VMware, but also in general, where we are heading, not only with cloud, but also AI ML. Oh, not AI ML, like that's additional. Like, Genity, thanks for all those insights. And I would love to chat with you and also see your team at KubeCon. Thank you. Sounds good, Swapnel. Thank you so much.