 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Now, welcome back here on theCUBE. John Wall is your host with you as we continue our IBM Think initiative. We're talking a lot about IBM's assistance in terms of what it's doing for its client base. We're going to talk about partnerships today a little bit with Bill Patterson who is the EVP and general manager of CRM applications at Salesforce who has a really good partnership in great practice right now with IBM and Bill. Thanks for the time today. Looking forward to spending some time with you here. Yeah, thank you, John. Thanks for having me today. You bet. Well, let's just jump right in. First off, let's share with the viewers about your core responsibilities at Salesforce. We talked about CRM, what your engagement is there. But if you would just kind of give us an idea of the kind of things that you're handling on a day to day basis. Well, I am responsible for our CRM applications here at Salesforce, which are our sales cloud technologies to help organizations get back to growth. Our service cloud technologies which are really helping organizations to take care of their customers through all moments of the digital lifecycle. Our small business solutions so to help growing organizations thrive and our work.com and vaccine management solutions which are helping the economy safely reopen through the crisis modes that we've all been living in. So broad range responsibilities in my day to day is nothing like it was a year ago. Yeah, I could only imagine, especially when you throw that last component in COVID which hopefully we'll have some time to talk about just because people are so taken to the subject now and obviously it's an impacting business on so many different levels. But let's talk first off about IBM and your partnership with them, kind of the genesis of that, how that came about and maybe how you're working together. How are you integrated these days with IBM? Well, one of the things that Salesforce that our key value as an organization is is to establish trust around the transformation of organizations across the world. And when you think about brands that you can trust to drive transformation with, IBM and Salesforce really stand apart. So IBM is an incredible partner for us on the technology side, on the service delivery side and an innovation side for us to create new solutions to help our clients really go in this from to state of how their business is used to operate to how they need to operate in the future. I love working with the IBM team. We have a lot of great values that are shared across our two organizations but most fundamentally those values are deeply rooted in customer success. And I think that that is one of the things that really draws me to working with such a great partner here. Yeah, go into the process a little bit if you will. So if I'm a prospective client of yours and I come to you with some cloud needs, again, whether it's storage or whether it's applications or whether it's Edge, whatever it is you I'm coming to you for. How do you then translate that to IBM and how does IBM come into play? Where do the boundaries kind of start and stop or do they, is it a complete mesh? Yeah, well, I think one of the things that's sort of unique about today is climate is people aren't just looking to solve technology problems they're looking to solve business problems. And what we really do at Salesforce is lead with the business transformation opportunity and deeply partner with IBM on a number of fronts to really go help those opportunities become realized. The first is in the services line. IBM has great partnerships with Salesforce around the transformation about core business processes, configuration, integration services. That's one of the dimensions that we work together on. We also work together on the areas of artificial intelligence and how we help businesses become smart in their operations every day to empower their workforce to really achieve more. And finally, that you mentioned about core technology oftentimes the business requirements translate into great technology transformation. And that's what we do deeply with the IBM team is really outline a blueprint and a roadmap for modernizing the technical infrastructure to help organizations move fast, increase their operational agility and run at such scale and safely today in the modern world that we all operate in on. So through all those facets of the lifecycle IBM continues to be one of our leading partners globally to help clients not just here in the United States but around the world to think about how they need to maximize their transformational abilities. Yeah, and you touched on this of the outset of the interview we were talking about IBM and the impact and obviously the great association relationship that you have with them and the value in that. I like to amplify on that a little bit more in terms of specifically what are you getting out of it? You think from a Salesforce perspective to have kind of the power and the weight and the bench basically that IBM provides. Yeah, well you think about transformation and you read a lot about digital transformation online. That means so many different things to so many different businesses. Not just like I said here in one country but globally the transformational needs really need to come with incredible bench and domain expertise by industry, by geography. Even by some micro regions in those geographies given what we've been experiencing here in the public sector in the United States with this COVID response activity we've been doing with the IBM team. And so when you talk about the deep bench what I love about working with IBM on is again commanding just great industry insights and knowledge of where industries are heading and also cross industry insights so that it can really bring great best practices from say one industry to another. Second is that real understanding of the global nature of business today. And I don't think the one thing that's really fascinating about digital it is not a sovereign identity today. If digital really means that you need to understand how to operate in every country, every region, every location, safely. And so IBM has incredible depth and bench of experiences to help our clients truly transform those areas. Maybe another area that I really have appreciated working with IBM on is that deep technical understanding and deep technical domain of excellence maybe in the area of artificial intelligence. And our partnership is quite unique between Salesforce and IBM. Not only do we work together for external clients but inside of IBM, IBM is using Salesforce today to run a lot of your core operations. And so the partnership we work with not only IBM as a kind of delivery excellence but internally as a customer is really helping IBM transform its operations from service to sales to marketing all around the world. So I think this partnership is one that is deeply rooted in working together. And really, like I mentioned before finding the right path to drive the outcomes of tomorrow. You mentioned COVID and so I would like to touch on that but I assume that's a big part of your current relationship if you will in terms of the partnership goes. What specifically are you doing with IBM in that space or what have you done? And then what are you continuing to do as we go through now the vaccination process and the variant identification processes and all these things. So maybe you can share with our viewers a little bit about the kinds of things that you have been working on together and the kind of progress that you've been making. Yeah, well back a year ago when the world was really at a standstill Salesforce created a solution called work.com which was to engineer new technologies to help businesses kind of deal with the reality of a hard shutdown to business in the say private sector and in the public sector to really create new innovation around key solutions like contact tracing that you might have needed to track kind of outbreak and the rate of progression of the virus. And what we did with the IBM team working with clients around the world first was work together to deploy those technologies rapidly into the hands of our customers. Through those moments of opportunity and realization working with our clients that we also started here kind of about where we find ourselves today this mass vaccination wave of where our citizens and societies are kind of on the recovery journey. And the work that we did with IBM was to start to plan out the next wave of recovery options around vaccine management. Salesforce creating the core vaccine scheduling distribution and administration management services in IBM focusing on more of that credentialing and vaccination state of how someone has gone from receiving a shot in the arm to now having a trusted profile of which vaccines when did you receive them? Are they still accurate and valid around those solutions? So where we're working with the IBM team most acutely on COVID now is in the vaccine credential management side through Watson Health. Well, can you give us an idea now? Let's say if we could dig in a little deeper on some other things you talked about talk about core technologies we talked about. I mentioned edge, you know people are trying to figure out how to integrate these edge technologies into their primary systems now. So can you give us some examples, some specific examples of some things that you're actually collaborating on today in those areas or maybe another that comes to mind? Yeah, edge computing is probably one of the other more exciting things that we're doing with the IBM team. And I think you find that really working with our field service business and IBM cloud services globally speaking. On the edge, you know, as devices may become smarter and more digital they have a lot of signals that organizations can now tap into not only for real-time intelligence but also fault intelligence. When a device actually is starting to need repair or preventative maintenance around the solutions that kind of need to be administered. And the work that we're doing to really broker this connected, not just enterprise but connected set of experiences with IBM super powerful here because the IBM Edge services are now helping us get into anomaly detection. Those anomaly detections are automatically routing to workers who use the Salesforce field service capabilities. And now we can help organizations stay running safely and with continuity which is really all our customers are asking us for. So the ability for us to be creative and understand our parts of the picture together are really the things that I think are most exciting for what we're doing for clients around the world. And you mentioned continuity, kind of a cousin of that, I think a security right in a way because- Absolutely. You know, so what are you hearing from your customer base these days with regard to security? You know, a lot of very high profile instances certainly from bad state actors as we well know. But what are you hearing in terms of security that you're looking at and maybe cooperating or collaborating with IBM on to make sure that those concerns are being addressed? Yeah, you know, I think, well first off security is on the top of minds, you know for all decision makers, executives today. It's the number one threat that a lot of companies are really needing to respond to given what we've seen, you know in the geopolitical world that we're in. And security isn't just about securing your servers it's also about securing every operational touch point that you might have with, you know your every end user or even every customer that's interacting with your services that you project as an organization. And what I love about working with the IBM team is as we mentioned, you know just such great insights across all parts of a technology infrastructure to really help understand both the threat level the how to contain that threat level and more importantly how to engineer, you know with, you know great solutions all the way into the hands of customers so they become safe and easy for all actors in your environment to really operate with. And that's where, you know again you think about a solution like mobile sales professionals, you know they're out traveling around the world on mobile devices sometimes they're actually even brought you know their own personal devices into the enterprise. And so IBM is a great partner for us just to help us understand, you know the overall threat level of every device every moment that an employee might have with their organizational data and really help create great solutions to keep organizations running safely. Yeah, I think it's an interesting you talk about people bringing their own devices on back when I remember that it back when BYUB was like a huge thing, right? And this major problem or conundrum and now it's almost like an afterthought, right? You've got it solved, we've got it well taken care of. Well, you think about, you know again devices in the enterprise and how much we've been able to achieve with the BYUB becoming commonplace norm. Even today the work of a place from home kind of environment that we're in. I mean, who would have thought a year ago that most of our operations could conduct it safely from our home offices not just our regional or corporate offices. And again, that's the kind of thing that working with IBM, you know has been such a great value for our clients because you know, no one could have forecasted that the contact center would have had to move to your kitchen last year. And yet, you know, we had to really go achieve that in this time and work with great partners like IBM it became not just a conversation, but real practice. Right. By the way, I think I said BYUB, I meant BYUD so you know where my mind's at, right? Oh my God. I wasn't going to correct you. Thanks Bill, I appreciate that. It's just kind of hit me. I think that just, that was a 40 and slipped certainly. Hey Bill, thanks for the time. I certainly do appreciate it. Thanks for shining light on this really good partnership between Salesforce and IBM. And we wish you continued success down the road with that as well. Yeah, thanks again. And again, love being your partner and love the impact we're having together. Great, thank you very much. Bill Patterson joining us at EVP. I work in CRM at Salesforce talking about IBM and that relationship that they're putting into the practice for their client base. John Walls reporting here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us with more on IBM thing.