 From Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering InterConnect 2016, brought to you by IBM. Now your host, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect 2016. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Steve Robinson, who's the GM of client technical engagement. Before that, in the cloud, doing all the blue mix. Now has the army of technical soldiers out there doing all the action because it's so much robust, so much demand for horizontally scalable solutions with vertically targeted, pre-packaged application development, mobile furs. You name it, big data. Welcome back. Good to see you. Thanks John, it's good to be with you again. Always great to have you on because you got a great perspective. You understand the executive viewpoint, the 20 mile stare in the industry, but also you got in the nuts and bolts under the hood. That's right. A lot of action happening under the hood. So let's get that right away. Blue mix is hot right now. It's about the developers. What's going on under the hood right now that customers are caring about? Well I always love theCUBE. You guys were like one of the first guys talking to us two years ago when we just launched the blue mix on stage. We walked off, got in front of the cameras here and it was great. You know over the past year, it's been outstanding. We're adding about 20,000 folks to blue mix right now on public. We came out with dedicated and then what people had really been wanting was local blue mix as well. So we finally have a full hybrid chain that goes from behind the firewall to a single client dedicated cloud all the way up to the public as well. So we've been building that out with services as well. So we have over 106 services on top of it. You'll see things like Watson, which is unique, or DashDB analytics which is unique, our internet of things coming in as well. So it's been a great year on building it out and getting more clients on top of it. It's like really trying to change the airplane engine in 30,000 feet or in your case, you guys were taken off and from the runway. How has that been? I mean, it's been some growing pains. Well of course. There's been some learnings. What's going on? What have you guys learned and give us the update on status? Changing the engine while the plane is flying. We've used that analogy quite a bit in the labs. And we have to show relevance in this market. This market is probably the fastest-paced technical market I think I've ever been in. And it's moving at such a rapid pace. We had to ship a lot of technology out last year as well. We have every new middleware group in IBM putting services on top of Bluemix. So let's get it out there. Let's get it out fast. Now of course, this year we've got to harden it up a little bit as well. So more architectures, more points of view, better look on how this stuff works together, hardening up our container strategy, pulling it all the way back to the virtual machines. So both continue to expand it out, but let's make it enterprise-grade at the same time. And also some differentiation with Watson's been a big... Oh, it's a huge speciation. Sandy's car... You said you're starting to play around a little bit. Coder calls it catnip. It really is some nice differential because right now with the quote, mark it the way it is, monetization is on number one's mind. Start from startups to enterprises. If you're in business, you want your top line. If you're a starter, you got to get monetization. So there's a little bit of IBM in here for people to take and... Well, if you look at Watson, when we first started with it, it was this very large, big chunk of software that you had to buy. And we worked with Mike Rodensteem to, can we chop it up into a set of services? Let's really make this a set of APIs. And we started noticing, you saw on MainStage the other day, Alphamotus. This was a pure startup who started picking up the social semantics. Let's pick up some of the words to text, et cetera, conversions, and all of a sudden, they're starting to add it in. They said they would have never had access to this technology before. We have that API set now growing up to 28. We announced a couple cool ones this morning. We even showed it how it improved your dating life. I probably need some of that with my wife as well to translate between the sexes there. But what people are doing with it now is kind of like blowing people's mind. It's far beyond what the initial inception was. So your team of, you know, your Ninjas, whatever they are. Yeah, right. So it's a large team, but it's a new initiative, right? I mean, new business unit, new role for you, right? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, we kind of had a couple pockets of this, but we clearly found that getting clients to the cloud is both a technology challenge as well as a cultural challenge as well. So we brought together some technical experts to kind of help through that entire life chain. Help up front. You know, many clients are trying to figure out what their overall cloud strategy is. Where are they truly today and where do they want to get to be? And how can we help them with a roadmap that kind of helps them through the transition? You know, many accounts are very comfortable with only wanting to be private and only glimpsing forward to public cloud, helping us bridge across that as well. Then we have the lab services teams. And these are the real Ninjas, the Navy SEALs. They go as low as you can go. And what they're helping with. In a good way. Yeah, that's good, that's good. So what they're helping with is very specific technical issue, technical deployments, a lot of our dedicated and local environments, these guys are there really helping it wire in as well. And then we have the garages. You know, we're up to five of those. We announced four new blockchain garages as well. And this is where firms are coming in to kind of explore, do the innovative type project as well. So I think all the way from the initial inception through rolling it out into production, having that team to be able to support them across the board. And so this capability existed in IBM previously, but it existed in a sort of bespoke fashion. That's right. It wasn't coordinated. A couple of pockets here and there. We always had supports. We had various pockets of lab services, but we really want to have the capability of seeing that client all the way through their journey, bringing it all under me. We now can easily pass the baton handoff since we need to have that consistent skill there with the clients all the way through their journey. And what's the life cycle of these services? Is it both pre-sales and post, or just post? Yeah, many times we'll get involved, like our cloud advisors will get involved pre-sale. You know, they'll say, you know, a specific workload wants to go to the cloud. What are the steps we need to take to make that happen as well? With our lab services teams, you know, we kind of have, you know, anywhere from a four to six week engagement to do a specific technology. Let's get it in place. Let's get it wired in, et cetera. And then in the garages, you know, we can just take a very novel idea and get it up to a minimal viable product in about a six week period. So again, we're not doing dance lessons for life, but strategically placing key skills in with accounts to help them get over that next hump of their journey. Steve, when you look at the sort of spectrum, you know, from public all the way down to, you know, private and everything in between, are you, I wonder if you could describe the level of capability that you are able to achieve with the best practice on-prem. With regard to cloud ability, its services, all the wonderful attributes of cloud that we've come to know and love. Are you able to, you know, somewhat replicate that, roughly replicate that, largely replicate, exactly replicate that? Where are we today? Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think, you know, I think most of the clients that we're dealing with have, you know, been dealing with some virtualized infrastructure, probably more VMs as they've been kind of progressing that story. One of the unique things we did at IBM is could we bring a true cloud infrastructure back behind the firewall? Could we bring an open stack? Could we bring a cloud foundry-based pass all the way back through? Because the goal, of course, is if we could have the same infrastructure, private, dedicated, and public, as they continue to grow and got more comfortable with the public cloud, they could start taking workloads that they had built in one location and start to migrate it out. We view that local cloud more used for edge cases. So taking that system of record and building APIs and allowing you to do extensions to that, allowing you access into data records that you have today, you know, dealing with a lot of extension type cases. You know, the core application still needs to be federally regulated. It needs to be under compliance domain. It's got to be under audit. But maybe I want to connect it in with a Fitbit or connect it in with a Watson or connect it in with a Internet of Things sensor. I got to go public cloud for that as well. So locally, we can bring that same infrastructure in and then they can do more services as they extend it out in the hybrid scenario. What about code bases? Because this has come up Oracle claims. This is their big claim to fame. That code base is the same on premise hybrid public. Is that an issue or is that just their marketing or does it matter what's IBM's take on this? Well, we've done a lot of work with the open standard communities to let's get to a true reference implementation. So on OpenStack, we've been doing a lot of work with them and this is one of the reasons we picked up the blue box acquisition. Could we really provide a standard OpenStack locally and also replicate that dedicated and of course have it match a reference architecture in public as well. We've also done the same thing with Cloud Foundry. We worked with Sam Ramsey to be one of the first vendors to have a certified Cloud Foundry instance. It's the same local dedicated in public. I think that's kind of the holy grail. If you can get the same infrastructural base across all three, magic can happen. But management's important in all this, right? The integration piece becomes the new complexity. I mean, I wouldn't say it sounds easy, but no, it's really hard. It's okay. Developing in the cloud is easier than we could know. It used to be, right, right, yeah? Well, but not for large enterprises. The integration becomes that new kind of like criteria that separates the junior from the senior type players. I mean, do you see the same thing? I mean, what do we do? I think there's usually two issues we start to see. This model looks great. Let's have the same code base across all three environments. One of the things we noticed that a lot of folks when you get into private cloud had tried to roll their own. You know, OpenStack is an open source project. Cloud Foundry is an open source project. Let's pull it down and let's roll it out and manage it ourselves. These are a little bit, they're very dynamic environments and they're also a bit punishing if you don't stay current with them. Both of them update on a very regular basis. And we found a lot of firms, once they applied 10 or 12 folks to it, they just could not keep up with the rate and pace of change. So one of the technologies we invented was a notion called Relay. And this allowed us to actually use the public cloud as our master copy and then we could provide updates to it down to the dedicated environment and down to the local. This takes the headache completely away from the firms on trying to keep that local version current. It's not managed service, but it's kind of a new way that we can provide managed patches down to that environment. So one of the problems we hear in our community is, and I presume IBM has some visibility on this. I'm thinking about last year, John, we were at the IBM Z announcement in January and Rossimilian company talked a lot about bringing transaction and analytic capabilities together. But one of the problems that our community has, practitioners in our community, the data for analytics, a lot of it's in the cloud and a lot of the transaction data sitting on a mainframe somewhere. How do they bring those two together? Do I move the data into the data center? Do I move pieces in? How are you seeing? We're seeing a lot of that. A lot of it was bring the technology down to where the data is and now the amount of integration you can do with public data sources, private data sources, et cetera. We're seeing a lot more of the compute want to go out to the cloud as well. We've done some things like around the dash DB services, et cetera, where I can start to extract some of that transactional data, but maybe I only need a few pieces to really make the data set that is important to me as I move it out. So I can actually extract that record, I can actually mask it into being something brand new and then I can mix it with public data to have it do brand new things as well. So I think you're going to see a lot of dynamic capability across that with more cloud computing technologies coming back behind the firewall and then more ability to release that data to be intermixed with public data as well. What's the number one thing that you're seeing from customers that you guys are executing on? And there's always the low hanging fruit, the easy wins from bringing a team, a street team if you will, out technical services out to clients where they're really putting that together. Not their five year plan, but their one year plan. There's a lot of that agile going on right now. There's now new technologies. You can't isolate one thing, you got to break everything because it's a new model. What are customers caring about right now? What's the common thing here? I think over there, in 2015, I think the discussion changed. It went from are we going to go to the cloud or we're going to the cloud. Now how are we going to do it? And the nice thing about it, I think a lot of enterprise architecture groups kind of took a step back to say, what do we truly have to do? What is a common platform? What is an integration layer? How do we take some of our old applications and decompose those into a set of APIs? How can we then mix that with public APIs? So we've probably taken one or two projects to be proof points so they can say, this thing really has the magic associated with it. We can really build stuff fast if we do it the right way. It's going to be in a catalyst to have the IT organization now take the tough steps in what's going to be the commonality, what common services are we going to use and how do we start breaking up around this? As you know, we have our own data science and our kind of backend operation. And one of the things that we always looked at with Bluemix, because we started on Amazon, but now with Bluemix, you've got a couple things kind of coming together in real time, you said it's getting hardened, but those harden areas are important. Identity, for instance, where's the data? Is it unstructured and structured? I want to put a little Mongo here or something over there, but with Bluemix and Compose.io really has a nice fit. I want you to explain to the folks, we talked before we came on about this new dynamic of Compose.io and some of the things that are gluing around Bluemix, could you share this? Well, you know, Data's King, right? And I think as people look to the cloud, data services are probably, you know, it's the most critical, the most visible and the one we have to harden up the most as well. Even though IBM's been well-known for DB2 and we've been- You guys acquired Compose, right? Yeah, we did Cognos first and then we followed it up with Compose.io as well. When was that? We did Compose.io about eight months ago. Eight months ago, okay. Eight months ago. The thing about it was all of your favorite flavors, you know, so your Progress, your Mongo, your Redis, but really having it behave like what you would want an enterprise database to do. You can back it up, you can have multiple versions of it, it can replicate itself. It's perfect for cloud-native stuff. It's a fit cloud. So it has all the cloud properties to it and all the enterprise-grade capabilities with it at the same time. So we've got that now in public and then you're going to start seeing dedicated and local versions of this one. And then if you want to go bare metal, just go to Softlayer. It's not required, right? It's one of these things where this will work in the cloud and then you get the bare metal option if you want to push stuff to bare metal, no problem. Well, I think, you know, almost hybrid is not going to get a new definition around it. So it's all going to be around control and automation. You know, the more automation you need, you can go all the way up to a cloud foundry where it's managing all the health checking and keeping your app alive, et cetera. If you want to go all the way down to bare metal so you can tune it, audit it, et cetera, you can do that as well. I think IBM's got one of the broadest spectrums there. I'm impressed with the Compose.io. I've got to say Google.io there to get you, tell, I'm excited by it, what I get excited by. How you get excited about everything, this is good. I mean, we just love the whole dev ops has been just a game changer. Infrastructure as code has been around for a while, but it's actually going totally mainstream. That's right. The benefits are just off the charts with mobile. We had the mobile first guys on earlier and the Swift. We had, you know, 10 May, 12 year old kid. I mean, it's just really amazing now that the apps themselves aren't the discussion. It's the under the hood. That's right. You can have an app look and feel like it's targeted for a vertical, say retail or whatever, but the action's under the hood. Yeah, yeah. More than ever. You know, it's funny this year, I did the keynote to the dev ops session yesterday and you're the amount of proof points we had around it. You know, last year we were scrambling a little bit and this year it's just, we almost had to thin out as to how many guys were having great success with this stuff as well. It's coming into its own. It totally is. And you guys are giving you guys props for running as fast as you can. And you're working hard and it's not just talk. It's legit. So I'm going to ask you the question. What's the big learnings from last year or this year? What's happened? What do you look back and say, wow, we really learned a lot or something that might have been magnified for you in this journey this past year? You know, a lot of it goes back to, you know, this changing culture at IBM. You know, the amount of code we put out in two years was just unbelievable. But I think also the IBM becoming a true cloud company. Some of that we did with our own shop. Some of it we did through injecting it with acquisitions, you know, like the Compose IO, the Cloud and Team, the Blue Box guys, et cetera. I think we've got the chops now to play pro ball. You know, we worked very hard to, how many folks can we attract to Bluemix? We're getting up to 20,000 a week right now. We're starting to get some great recognition and the successes are rolling in as well. So a lot of hard work. I think we've got a lot of busted knuckles that a lot of guys are tired, but we're definitely straight in the game now. You're ready for the pro game. Cube Madness starts on March 15th. He's going to plug for Cube Madness. There we go. Cube Madness with all the brackets of the Cube alumni and the vote on. It turns into a hackathon because everyone stuffs the ballots. Let's talk about pro ball for next year as you guys continue. The theme here obviously is developer. I mean, the show could be dedicated 100% to Bluemix. You got it. I mean, you saw LeBlanc up there kind of going fast at the end. He had to get his all. Bluemix, Bluemix, Bluemix, Bluemix, Bluemix. It plays on the clock. I think he needed more time. Right, you like the Star Wars trailer we had going up there as well. He needed more time. So it's good props to you guys for this year. What's going on in the roadmap this year? What are some of the critical goals that you guys see on your group and then just in general for the... I think a lot of the activities we're going to be doing again is hardening the stack. I've got a brand new team now called Solution Architecture where we're looking at it from top to bottom, taking customer scenarios and really testing it out. How do you do backup? How do you do disaster recovery? How do you do multi-geography? How do you do things like PCI compliance? The real enterprise problems are now coming to the cloud and they're global and with security and compliance they're changing in a very dynamic fashion. We have to show how you can do those in the cloud. You'd be amazed on how many conversations we have with CISOs every single week. Is the cloud secure? How do we do enterprise-grade workloads? IBM is bringing that story to the cloud as well. That's the story we put in place this year. How do you update all that content? Curation is unbelievable, right? That's the hardest part and it's not that we have it fixed either but we're doing more of aggregating it together so that we can really pull it all together. I call it the diamond mind versus the jewelry store. We always have... Who used that too? You really did it. It's a jewelry. Yeah, you got the great answers out there somewhere but if you don't start to pull it together into a single place. So one of the things we did this year was launch the BlueMix Garage methodology where we took all of our best practices, we took test cases, even sample code and brought it into a single methodology site where people would start to go out, pull it down, use it, et cetera. Previously we had it scattered all over the place and we're going to be doing more things like that, bringing the assets to the programmers, things that we've tried, things that we've tested, being more open about it, but putting it in a single location. Well, we certainly would like to help promote that, any kind of customer-election, reference to architectures, happy to pump on SiliconANGLE, Mookie Bond. Outlook for the vibe this... I'm sorry, vibe for the show this year. What's the vibe this year? I think I've been very impressed with it. I think I've been stepping up this game. If you go down to the BlueMix Garage you see our motorcycle on stage, kind of getting a little more hip and happening as well but I think the clients here, this is always about the customer's stories and some of the things that we're hearing from the three guy startups that are doing GPS logistical management to the big accounts and the big banks that you really see have embraced the cloud and doing great stories on it as well. I think people come to this show so they see what their peers are doing and they definitely walk away with a sense that the cloud is real, it's happening and 2016 is really going to be driving at home that it has to be part of everybody's strategy. You ride motorcycles? I had to get them. We'll put you on the Harley, man. Can you take it for a spin? Guaranteed, come on down. I can ride, let's say, on my bike. I had to give up my motorcycle. Why put your bike on? When I got married, that was my terms of condition. That's right, that's right. I'll ask Watson that, see what he thinks about that. Steve, thanks for taking the time and great to see you again. Congratulations with the technical engagement team that you have and all the work that you did at BlueMix noted certainly by theCUBE. Congratulations and continued success with the BlueMix. Congratulations, thank you. Thank you guys as well, always a pleasure. Okay, Cube Madness March 15th, Cube Gems, go to Twitter and speaking of jewelry, we have Cube Gems, hashtag Cube Gems. That's the highlights of the videos up there in real time. And of course, go to SiliconANGLE.tv for all the action videos are up there right now. Be right back with more coverage after this short break here in Las Vegas. Right. Here.