 Okay, welcome back, we're live in Las Vegas, we're all the action, this is theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events, distract and see them from the noise, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm joined by my co-host, Paul Gillan, the SiliconANGLE, my co-host here, and now we're live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact, our next guest is Scott Francis, CTO of BP3 for Business Process Improvements. Scott, welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you, glad to be here. So what do you think about IBM Impact, what's your take real quick? You're our first guest, you're out in the wild there, what's going on? Well, this has been a great conference for us for the last, we've been coming, I think this is our fifth time coming to Impact, and every year we've increased our investment in the conference, it's a great set of community and customers, a lot of our customers come to the conference, so it's a great time to reconnect, but it's also a great time to reconnect with IBM partners of ours, IBMers that we work with who are all over the world come to Impact to meet with their customers, so it's really just a great time for us to be here. Scott, the theme of this conference, the kickoff of this morning's keynote was all about business reinvention, it was about really changing the way your business is organized, to constantly respond to changes in the marketplace, how does that relate to what the work you do with customers? Well, we think about major themes in technology, like mobile and cloud and on-demand deployment of infrastructure, but at the end of the day, our job is to help customers, and their job is to help their customers, right? And so at the end of the day, the business process is sort of the value that flows through those mobile applications and flows through those cloud deployments, so to us it's what gives meaning to all this interesting infrastructure from hardware up to software, really what adds value to it is your business process. So it seems to me that IBM is talking about something more transformational here, more than just business as usual or continual improvement, it's talking about really changing the way your organization is structured, is that what you took away? Yeah, no, that's definitely what they're talking about, I think it reflects, sort of not just looking at incremental improvement, but really reexamining how you deliver your products and services to your customers. Many people tend to look at business processes sort of incremental change, but if you take a step back and you apply design thinking to your approach to your customers, to their customer experience, you'll find that their whole business process is you don't have deployed in your enterprise that need to be created from scratch, and that technology has really enabled different ways of engaging in your processes, different ways of engaging with customers that weren't possible 10 years ago, five years ago, and so you have to constantly re-evaluate what's possible, they are to the possible for your customers, and you have to re-evaluate what matters to your customers as the market changes. Scott, talk about the enterprise story around cloud, hybrid cloud in particular, with DevOps, IBM is clearly all in at the false conference week, at the blue mix story introduced, now kind of like in terms of rolling it out, there's a build, grow kind of mentality going on right now. How far along are the enterprises really with DevOps? I mean, is it like, hey, we see it, the roadmap, we know where cloud is, what is it, is there a clear roadmap and what kinds of things do you need to put in place with the customers around the prophecies? Is it awareness, is it education, is there actually meat on the bone with the DevOps story? Right, well I think that depending on which part of the enterprise you're talking about, there's a different level of maturity with respect to putting ops in the cloud and their DevOps, and so what we've observed is just over time, you know, BPM business processes being one of the core assets of the company, a lot of companies have been reluctant to put those assets in the cloud, but gradually that's changing because the other assets that the business processes are interacting with are in the cloud, and so just gradually there's this sort of inevitable pull toward the cloud, toward cloud deployment, either as a way to manage infrastructure or as a way to unlock value and services you just can't get to in your private business. What inning are we in? What inning are we in with DevOps? Top of the first, national anthem, I think we're a second or third inning at best. I think there's a long way to go with this, and people underestimate how big that still private hosting, internal hardware ecosystem is, and I think all of that eventually is moving to the cloud. Paul and I were talking on the intro segment around a term he called whiplash, which is, and I call it the airbags kind of deploying, I mean, are the enterprises, is it shocked to them? Is it they feel good about it? Is there a whiplash component with the cloud? How disruptive is this cloud analytics component to the processes internally? Right, I think that there are probably some businesses where it does feel a bit like whiplash, but I think that those businesses have been disrupted the most, been disrupted by an Amazon, for example, with respect to how they sell and disrupting retailers. That's where the sort of whiplash has really been, but when it comes to more traditional businesses, banking and insurance companies and things like that, hasn't been so much whiplash, but this sort of realization that a really new round of investment and really rethinking their business processes is called for. Scott, I'm sorry, Amazon has clearly been the first mover and sort of the renegade in the cloud business. Do you think IBM has a differentiated, IBM's cloud stories differentiated enough to appeal to the enterprise customers? Absolutely, if you're an enterprise customer of IBM and you're using IBM software and services, you're going to find the experience of deploying IBM software on IBM software on the cloud to be a smoother experience and transition than if you're switching to a whole new technology staff. And at PP3, we've had some experience deploying IBM software on multiple systems, so whether it's a Rackspace software or we used GoGrid once and we've used Amazon. With software, there's definitely an additional level of support and interference where we can talk to software and they'll actually get involved in the deployment. If you're deploying on some of these systems, it's well, good luck. How about the hybrid cloud story? IBM is currently using it as the comeback to Amazon, the market's going to hybrid clouds. Is that what you see happening as well? Well, I think that's the transition, right? It is that there will be a lot of hybrid solutions across the boundaries between cloud and internal systems and you need a trusted partner to help you make sure that that's set up right. So I think it's a good strategy for IBM to both preserve the investment their customers have made, not just abandon that investment, but also provide them a path forward as they move individual pieces of their infrastructure and solutions to the cloud. Scott, talk about my final questions. I know we're tight on time, but is really around, can you share with the folks out, what's the mindset in the marketplace, in the trenches on the front lines around developers? Obviously, enterprise developers have been around for decades and decades, going back to the mainframe 50 years ago, but now you're seeing, with Agile, a new developer growth cycle, where it's just a little different. What's your take on the current developer mindset, the current conditions in the marketplace? Right, well, there's so much more possible as a developer in terms of what you can build easily. Whether that's on the IBM stack or not, the tools have just gotten so much better. Even just in terms of take something simple like JavaScript, the tooling for JavaScript has improved dramatically over the last four or five years. So, we're doing things on the IBM BPM stack with JavaScript libraries that I didn't think were possible two years ago and weren't possible five years ago. So, that attitude, developers have an immense sort of optimism about the problems they can solve with software today. And I think it's really inspiring. And the database too, the SQL database, they'll open the door up significantly in the analytics side and so on and so forth. That's right, and being able to deploy those assets quickly in the cloud without a whole lot of headaches where developers really understand, certainly in my case and in our team's case, we understand the code and we understand how to write it. But the things where we may not have expertise or a developer may not have the expertise is how to get a database up and running quickly and set up right for HA and things like disaster recovery. And that's all so much easier in the cloud. So, people are mostly in architectural phases right now really kind of identifying the key areas that they want to deploy on cloud? Yeah, I think that's sort of what people are facing right now. But for developers, it's becoming a lot easier to prototype, like basically build out the solution using the cloud as the way to prototype the whole thing for a customer. And then, when the customer says, well, some of this stuff has to be inside my infrastructure. Some of it can be in the cloud or all of it in cloud, all of it in the internal infrastructure. At least you have the whole stack proved out and then you can go through the process of reconciling. Hey, at least you can get a prototype out the door before it's PowerPoint slides, right? Exactly, exactly. Scott, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Super busy here. We're live on the ground here at IBM Impact in Las Vegas. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. I'm John Flynn. Paul Geeling, right back after this short break.