 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for a special presentation of theCUBE, IBM Interconnect. This is our CUBE special program where we go out and they start to see the noise. Our next guest is Steve Robinson, GM of Cloud Platform Services with IBM. He's a blue mix guy. We interviewed him last year when he came off the stage announcing blue mix. Welcome back. Great to see you. Thanks guys. It's always good to see you and always good to have you at our show as well. Thanks. So, you know, are you in a pinch me moment? Like am I dreaming? Cause when we interview, you came right off stage. It's like, okay, we're doing blue mix. We're all behind it. Go. You know, that was our beta event. You know, at that point we barely knew what we had. We had our cloud found reversion. We'd collected a handful of services and then we're like, let's go. So you guys have been successful. So just a quick update. I was a great journey, a lot of speed, a lot of rapid acceleration on your end. Yeah, so we launched it in beta. We got commercial terms around it at the end of June. We announced this week 100 services on top of the platform. So we've taken every piece of middleware within IBM. We've converted it into a set of services. We've got some great unique ones like Watson. In November, we announced dedicated blue mix. So software's got a great thing where you can do single tenant private resource. So we can now drop blue mix on top of that. And then we gave a sneak preview on stage on Monday, local blue mix. So now local dedicated public. We now have a complete hybrid mechanism to really get the enterprise account charged up. So I want you to answer the questions. Not for me, I'm just paraphrasing what the sentiment is. Ah, IBM, blue mix, that's cloud foundry. They're really not committed to the cloud with blue mix pass. I mean, you guys have been successful. You have the proof points internally. What's it been like? It's been pretty much game on internally. It's been unbelievable. And what have you guys nailed down this year? Share with y'all to answer that question. Well, I think the key thing you find is, from the chairman down, we're 100% committed on the cloud right now. From the acquisition of software, to the rollout of the data center, 40 data centers we're going to put this thing on. And just from where we were in February to where we are today, we had an estimation that we probably have 20,000 apps up and running on blue mix by the end of the year. 200,000 is what we've been into. We expanded that out to London. We've got it coming into AP. The amount of enterprises that have been excited around the dedicated piece has been unbelievable. The support from IBM and also the support from the community, the momentum behind the cloud foundry piece, we've seen the acceleration unlike anything we've ever seen. We have one of your customers in here. The Nigel who said, without blue mix, he wouldn't have finished the races. Really impacted his business. I mean, this is like 100 million miles an hour in the ocean. Okay. He's trying to get to 210. So blue mix is working. It's you shipping code. I think what it's done embedded in it. And I think what you're seeing is that, it's bringing this, I think other paths that had kind of opened up the opportunity to really do innovation and really do it at speed. And most enterprises had held back a little bit from that as well. But now with the IBM name behind it, plus the type of services that we're putting on top of blue mix, they see their favorite type of middleware starting to come. They see capability and enterprise grade software that they know and love. And now they're putting their toe in the water as well. Guys like Silverhook, when you're racing 200 miles an hour offshore, sensors all over the place, virtual reality around the thing, they get all the pieces together to do that. Yeah, this is not an R and D project. Blue mix out, delivering value. It's all about the integration. I mean, to me that's a key part of it, right? Because people don't wake up and say, oh, I'm going to get me some pass. Yeah. They want a solution. Well, it was funny. We had Jim Dieter's on stage with us this morning and Jim does the pure startups. And for a lot of the smaller companies that are doing pass for the first time, it's naturally where you go. I'm going to run on the cloud and I'm going to have an environment that brings services to me as well. Our enterprise accounts though, they've got a large set of kind of crown jewels back behind the firewall as well. And they're waiting for somebody to say, how can I use those in the equation? Some of the cloud vendors say, well, just port it. Some of these environments, they've been running for years and decades. They're not going to undertake a port. But how do you bring that to the case? So one of the things we announced this week as well was a secure gateway. So let me kind of use my mainframe environment. Let me use my on-premise environment. Let me bridge that back out to the cloud. Brand new API management set of services as well that lets me better wrapper those and be able to integrate it. And then also kind of a federated catalog. So I can actually use some services local where it makes sense and I've got latency concerns, security concerns. But then I can use all these great public APIs with it at the same time. So we're getting a lot of novelty on how we're bringing the cloud down to where they are today plus giving them the option to reach out as well. So what's going on in the app? You've mentioned a number of applications like hundreds of thousands. Talk, give us some sample. How would you categorize them? How should we be thinking of that? I think with the PAS is, I think most firms are finding that it's almost a programmer's renaissance right now. So for one, it's such an easy environment to get up and going. It's almost like you have unlimited data resources. You've got unlimited compute resources. And now you can play with middleware that you would have never had exposure to as well. So we see tremendous amount of exploration going on. So we got one partner working with us and they started working on how do we bring technology into a retail store experience to kind of augment what the customer deals with. So traditionally we're bringing plasmas in and they could actually tell if you're male or female. And they were using it initially for like a bike store to see, help me pick out what kind of bike you'd use. We launched the Watson services and one of the things we have in Watson is we can analyze your past 100 Twitter feeds and come up with the five personality traits that you have. And so they played around with that and they got some cute feedback from it. And they said, nice parlor trick. But then a large car company saw that and said, hey, maybe we could use that in the dealership. Individual walks in, gives me their Twitter handle. Maybe I could use that to help assign the salesperson to them to increase the sales in the dealership as well. No one had that on the radar screen but because the ease of use of playing with these services, things are just popping up all over the place. Is that now a new product? Is that, was that productized? Or is that just more of an anecdotal evolution? Well, the company that sells IQ, that's a reference of ours, you know, they've already have stood up the Watson services and they launched it at South by Southwest last year and now they're playing around with other opportunities. But we were talking to Docker earlier with this word stand up is a cloud term, right? Stand up from servers. You know, which means not provision it, take weeks to provision. That's a cloud term, but that's now proliferating to social media, to business. Standing up fast is a cloud DNA. You know, I spent five years at Rational and you know, we were dealing with more traditional style of development. And you know, it was unfortunate, but you know, you said we look at old software projects, 68% of them never saw the light of day. It wasn't because we had bad programmers, but to do a project, you had to allocate the hardware, you had to allocate the middleware. Sometimes it took six months to lay out web sphere and MQ and whatever you're going to put on top of it as well. Then you build the app, then you have to test it. Then you got to fight with the CIO to get on the production schedule and oh, they're upgrading SAP that year. You're off the table. You're off the table. When we might replace our Francisco routers, that's about a 12 week just assessment. Took all the budget immediately. So we're at a point, now we're seeing guys, you know, programmers, it's like in a candy store. They're now saying, I can launch a basic application and I may do a version for East Coast. I may do another version for West Coast. I may do one for a subset region. They can now explore and try things that were just completely unthinkable. The creativity is on the table. Pretty much, that's what you're saying. Well, we've actually have stood up. We've got two of these Bluemix garages up and going. I've got one in San Francisco and we opened up the second one in London as well. And we kind of have it as an innovation center. So customers can come in and we actually located these on startup campuses. So we're at Galvanize in San Francisco and at level 39 in London. So a lot of companies are saying, let's figure out how to kind of build my first born-on-the-web application. So they come in, we help them with design thinking, we help them with a consulting practice. Within four weeks, they've got that application up and running on Bluemix and Softleer. Now, while we based it in the startup communities, we thought our first clients were all going to be startups, which we've had good luck with them, but it's the enterprises. It's the big insurance companies, the big banks, the big retailers that are coming in. They all want to act like a startup. So what are those guys doing? Are they writing Greenfield apps? Are they deploying mobile apps? Are they sort of refreshing older parts of their portfolio, all of the above? It's a mix. I think many of them are, key thing on their list is they're trying to look at one, their core businesses, and where could they be disrupted? I had one that came to me, said we better disrupt ourselves before we get disrupted by a startup. Because in all these campuses, you got hundreds of guys that are just figuring out how to take a pot shot at these big enterprises. I was sitting yesterday saying people need banking, they don't need banks. No, I need banking, I don't need brick and mortar. So some of them are saying let's look at our core businesses and see how we can augment that. How can we get better reach into our client base? We had one client who brought us the problem that they wanted to sell insurance to a category user that they had never touched. It was the guy that never did financial planning, never saved money for college, but they had no way to reach him. So they used Bluemix to build almost a video game where he inputted just five basic financial goals. We put some great graphics around so it looked like a video game, et cetera. We really didn't think it was much of an app the guy collected five data points. They were thrilled. This was five data points on a constituency group that they were blind to, completely in the dark. So just getting access to them, getting insight, extending existing applications, it's wide open. So talk about the big picture for customers, right? Because there's a lot of noise in the market right now. A big variety of reasons, exploding in value. And some lanes are forming. We're seeing consolidation in the open stack market, for instance, break it down. Open stack, the past layers, the variety of different flavors where Bluemix is playing and then I'll see mobile first or anything else on top of the stack. Big data and whatnot, Tom Watson. Yeah, and I think we've learned a lot in the past year as well. When we first built Bluemix, one of the reasons we had developed it on Cloud Foundry is we wanted to leave the option open that should we put it on multiple infrastructures that we could easily use the portability of Foundry to be able to do that. And then kind of around the first half of the year, it was clear that this was going to be a deep pocket full stack play from top to bottom. And that's when we really started using on optimizing the full software stack up and down. I think the challenge for most public clouds, you're playing almost a three-dimensional game here. So one is to get your global coverage as right as possible. So how can you quickly, are you going to go with a mega data center or are you going to go with as many data centers as possible? We're going to go as many as possible. So we've got 40 in the works right now. We announced four new ones this week and how we have those communicate, how easy it is to move data, how easy it is for enterprises to deal with data privacy and locality issues, et cetera. So that's going to be how quickly can you provide a world wide support. And then you go deep. And I think what most firms are looking at is can you provide me a robust infrastructure that lets me do things public, do things in a more private fashion and then do things local for me as well. So things like OpenStack then gives you that consistent infrastructure. So software, I can go with the software infrastructure public, software infrastructure dedicated. When it's back on the clients machines, it's within their firewall itself. I've got to have some good rock solid base to do that on. OpenStack is the perfect choice. Remember the old OSI interconnect models? So is that what you mean by going deep, that you're essentially forming, not like layers like that, but like similar stacks of private, hybrid, public, I mean. Right, you want to make sure you've got at least enough common architecture so that what you build on that environment may have legs and you can actually do something else with it. So that's what you mean by going deep? Yeah, going deep. So being deep, being deep in functionality stack for the apps, global is more of an infrastructure play. Across the board. Okay, and that's where- Because case in point, if you look at it right now, I'll talk to a typical enterprise account and are you going to go cloud? And I'll all say, yep. How about public cloud? And they're like, nope. Or they'll say, you know, in eight years, I plan to have 50 to 65% of my workloads on the public cloud. You're ready to do that today? I'm nervous. Nervous about security and nervous about multi-tenant and I'm nervous about the noisy neighbor. But how about if I give you a local instance today to let me start building, and once we get you more comfortable with this model, you could actually take those components, move that application with no change to a dedicated environment. Sounds good to me. And maybe down the road, you want to take part of that and move it to a public environment. That sounds fabulous. So it's a GPS problem. They know where they are today. They kind of know where they want to go, but nobody's providing them the road network to get between point A and point B. You know, I'd argue that, you know, Amazon might say, hey, we're winning the enterprise. We just scored the CIA, we supply the government, we're going into the enterprise. The CIA was a little bit hauled back. I haven't heard any more of that as well. But part of their challenge, you know, is definitely public is the way to go. But that's their messaging. They're saying, you know, we could do both. Security's not a problem. They answer the security, so. Well, public college to them is a hammer and every opportunity is a nail. That's it, we've run into that as well. But the CIA deal is interesting. To me, it was a wake-up call. You guys woke up before that, but IBM's a lot like Abe Lincoln, right? Seriously. It's a battleship, but it will turn. Right, Abe Lincoln took forever to make decisions. He's honest, smart, but once he made a decision, boy, all right, focused. That's who the IBM is. Well, we're 100% behind him. Whether it was a wake-up call, I'll give you points on that one, but we're fully behind this thing. Well, yeah, again, I think, I'm sure, internally, you know, he's going out anywhere. Well, listen, I think the challenge, I think a lot of these pure, pure cloud, pure public cloud guys, you know, we've been around, a few people say, you know, IBM's been a little bit slow to the game. I think what they don't realize is, you know, we've been doing enterprise grade development for decades. We've been doing enterprise middleware for decades. You put a problem to us, IBM just does not blink. We've seen it all before. Yeah, it's totally true. You know, from, you know, applaud work between the government, but you know, IBM made its name back when we did the first census, right? We did the NASA program. You know, we've done federal projects before. Yeah, it really becomes a product issue. It's like, okay, that's a focus. Customers want that. Yeah. Once that snail, it's an engineer, you have all the engineering, you have the software. And I think what you're going to find is, some enterprises, you know, some of their environment that they would like to extend portions of it out will never be ported. You know, these systems are so tuned and they're so optimized and they're so audited and they're under so much regulatory control that keeping those closed, keeping those local is exactly where they need to be. But to be able to extend those out and be able to use those in new ways in fashion, I think IBM has a very unique opportunity to do that. Yes, and I think though, I think that for a long time, companies like IBM and others, you weren't alone in the enterprise, used that as a wet blanket to say, okay, we can just sort of do our private cloud thing. And then, boom, you had to internally make the decision to take all those capabilities and assets you had and cloudify them. You made some acquisitions, which were key. And then, boom, now it's a whole different landscape. So we're getting the hook here, but I do want to get some, couple of last questions in quickly. Comment on, everyone big wants to be small, small wants to be big. That's the thing we've heard, you mentioned it. But entrepreneurship is thriving, right? You were, you've been talking about it, the show here. Entrepreneurship startups, there's a huge opportunity for collaboration. You guys are working with startups in the cloud. You're also IBM. But what's your advice? What's your directional view of the startup landscape and the enterprise and opportunities for entrepreneurship? You know, I think we're going to see models there that just would have been unimagined prior. Like you said, you're seeing, you know, you're seeing the cats and dogs lying down together here. You're seeing the enterprises not only being attracted to the startups, but how do they start to include them in the ecosystem as well? We had city on stage, as you said, yesterday as well. We're working with them to sponsor a national hackathon where they open up APIs. We bring Bluemix to the table with all of our services. We're getting other sponsors to bring their APIs. And who are they opening it up to? Not to city developers, but to the startup community. So they would love the startups in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, et cetera, to see what can they now build with this wide swath? So do you see the success of Docker and open source with developers, which is obviously collaborative? Now moving over to the business, technical business model side of it, with startups, because if the new way to work or the new way to think is to be collaborative and in the open with big data, everything's being watched out in the open, is there a new model of startup collaboration with the big companies that are out there? In a way, it's kind of like that model of open source. It's all going to be community-based. The more guys you have around it, the more numerous companies, the more innovation, the more long-standing. A lot of the guys on the West Coast will, I'm open source, I put my code out in the open. But unless you have multiple people contributing to it, it's not going to be a standard that lives longer term. So I think companies are seeing that as well. If they want to be viable long-term, can they be attracted to a wider community of technology providers and also bringing their ideas to the table as well? That's how you differentiate, that's how you keep from being disruptive. A new way to do business, new business models. Steve, thanks so much for coming. You went over a little bit. I wanted to get that entrepreneurial angle in, to know it's near and dear to your heart, as well as the cloud here at IBM. We are theCUBE, broadcasting live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.