 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events extracted from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host, Paul Gillan, with SiliconANGLE, my co-host. Live at IBM Impact, we're in Las Vegas where all the actions happen here. For IBM, their customers, their technology, it's all kind of coming together. And our next guest is Keith Brooks, social strategist and social business practice manager at ThinkRight. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks guys, happy to be here. So you're out in the trenches, you work with IBM and you have an application that's targeted on the sales folks and people mobile, applications basically as well. So before we get into that, I want to get your impression of IBM. Paul and I were talking on our intro. IBM's on all the right fault lines of the tectonic shifts and the messaging is great, right? So we're all, where's the meat on the bone is what we're seeking? Where's the action? What's the enterprise story? How's it related to traction? So we want to dig into that a little bit as we start. But first I'd like you to give us the impressions of last year to this year. What's the big aha change from IBM and their products, what they're showing, the vibe from last year to this year? Well, last year was my first time at IBM Impact. Historically, I come from the ICS side and IBM Connect and Lotusphere. And so I came out here and I was very impressed by the size of this show and all that and where we were going. But I also felt last year, we were kind of looking at the past and looking at the future, but weren't quite ready to get there yet. This morning's OGS was definitely a definitive step in a direction with everybody following. Mobile obviously is a strong point, but not just mobile, the integration of the customer experience, the analysis, the behind the scenes things to make life easier, not just for the developers, but for the customer and management to get a dashboard and know what's going on. And it just seemed like everything kind of gel together for IBM to sit there and say, we get it, we now know where we're going with everything and we're not what you thought we were last year or a few years back where we weren't quite on a path that we can lead people. This morning definitely was a leading path that I saw. How you're talking about analytics and clearly that was a clear focus this morning. I think IBM says it's spent $25 billion investing in analytics over the last few years. You've got a position stake out in this market. In an area of analytics I really haven't thought of as letting itself to analysis. Tell us about that. Right, so ThinkWrite as a company, we're working on a product to take your conference calls, your meetings and pull analysis out of those meetings for you. So let me give you an example. So we have a product called the ThinkWrite Assistant which is available on the app stores and you can pull that down and what it does is it looks at your schedule, finds all your meetings and then notifies you a few minutes in advance to say hey, you have a little conference call coming up, here's the bridge number, here's the web meeting number and a third thing which pops up to let you take notes during the call. And then you click on the thing and poof, you're doing your meeting, your web meeting, you can have a go to your iPad instead of your laptop. All that is fine and good and nice. You know, the quick to call part. But what we do on the back end is we now have your attendee list. We provide you the contact details for that attendee list. We then, at the end of that, you can take all those notes, save them, send them to whoever you want. And what we're trying to do is basically come to people and say, your sales guys, your sales people spend hours of meetings, hours of time on calls and doing meetings with people. Are they really being useful? Are they hitting their quota? Should they spend two hours or five hours a day? Should they not spend any time? And if you take that a further step of, you know, Joe brings in Fred all the time and Steve and Terry bring in Fred, but all the other ones never bring in Fred, but it seems all the ones who brought in Fred all hit quota this year. So we're trying to find, you know, who in your business is maybe the key point that you don't think about as yourselves, but as the helper. And as, of course you can see corollaries outside of meetings, right? I mean, this could be used really at a macro HR level to identify who are your top performers. I think of the guy on the basketball team who nobody pays any attention to, but every team he's with wins. Is it that kind of, do we see that kind of an image? It's exactly that kind of idea. I'm from Miami, so right now, I'm all four of them. Yeah, you win a lot, right? But, you know, the coach, Eric Spoltzer says that, you know, you may sit there and say, well, you know, Chris Boston didn't score any points, but where we needed him was to be on the defense side. And we needed him to get that rebound to cover this one guy. We didn't need him to get points that day. That's missing in companies. They can't really say who is that person who just gets stuff done or makes that connection, but isn't really obviously the person in line. You know, you and I may know who that is because we work with them, but the guy at the other office, they don't have maybe an idea of who they should be with. And so cutting down to the chase and finding that analysis is really helpful in the grand scheme of that team effort. And HR, of course, for better or for worse, can use that detail as well. So this way it goes beyond meetings or sales effectiveness. It goes to changing the way you think about your human resources, which historically has not been an asset that we have applied analytics to. Right. And HR, in my view, has always missed that point of what makes you special that we should either hire you, keep you or fire you. That part is always lost in HR because they never see it. They never hear about it. Unless you are the best person in the company, that's the only time they hear you for the worst. But if you're that middle, 80% of the company, HR doesn't have a great way to really do any analysis on you. So I'm thinking of some companies we hear applying cloud scores to their hiring criteria, which I think personally is disgusting, but are you seeing your- You remember how close about cloud sucks, huh? Yeah, that's one way to put it. Are you seeing technology- I'll retweet that. Being applied to the personnel process on a large scale, is this, are we beginning to open the floodgates to a new way to approach hiring and staff with one? Well, you know, cloud serves one purpose. And that is if I'm very social, I have a cloud score, pretty much, you know, whether you're 50, 60, 70, 20, it's because of where you are on your score. You know, when you look at like what Andrew Drill did with Fred, it was more about how you influence the people around you, not just I post and I'm people repost me. So if we can take the analysis from your meetings and from your sales quotas and all this stuff and pull it back in from your CRM with your average inbox and make that stuff work, we can take you out and really find that person and provide possibly a linkage to say, we're looking for someone who has this type of background, this view of the world and can get out there more. And among companies, the research that you've done, what kind of productivity improvements can you see, do you think companies can obtain by deploying their people assets more effectively? Well, I think in the long run, you're going to see a much leaner company. You're going to see people really get down to who really solves their problems, who helps us get the sale, who is the person with the knowledge. And it's not always going to be the person you expect, but you're also going to find people are going to be very niche in their company now. So you might be the person who really isn't great at sales, integrated tech, but for whatever reason, you're really good with customers in helping them bridge that gap between the two sides or maybe between executives and in technology. And if that's what you do and we provide that is what's needed in every sale, then that's what we need. And IBM has a long history of having not just salespeople and tech people, but also that middle ground person that's the only out to see that customer. Keith, I want to ask you some kind of environmental kind of marketplace questions around the market, what the landscape looks like. I mean, we've all seen the voice over IP market really enable the democratization of collaboration. You mentioned same time, that goes back. Unified communications was a great market, but it seems to be old now. I mean, unified communication, what the hell does that mean, right? So you got all these new tools now with Twitter. You have a changing definition of presence, which is a core principle in unified communications. You have all this new stuff happening. So how is unified communications really evolving from the old definition to new, where these modern tools are just completely different platforms. The end goals the same, right? Collaboration is about sharing and connecting seamlessly, frictionlessly, getting job done. Not necessarily having baggage on your back in terms of old platforms. So how do we get this new modern error? How do we shift over this next wave? I think part of it is you have to understand your cell phone pretty much at this point is more powerful than your desk phone and your laptop in some ways. Because we do things with them differently than others, right? But at the same time, if I'm in my house or I'm at my office, I'm not probably using my cell phone to have my conference calls, right? And so there still is a delay point where we're not quite at that point where people are throwing out their phones or just using their cell phones for various reasons. But we don't see the UC world as going away. We just see it as expanding in different directions. It's changing, for sure. It's no longer just you're calling me and you're leaving me a voicemail. I almost never get voicemails and I almost never listen to them. The young generation doesn't even turn on voicemails. That's just for old people. Right, there's that too. I mean, I have voicemails when they come or people leave a message at my house, but the truth is most of my friends even jokingly say if they don't send to me on Twitter or Facebook, I won't see it or hear it. Which is only partially true. It's a user experience. It's a legitimate user experience, not making it standard, but it's diverse. It's just all new omnichannel communication. Right, you know, looking around here, there's 10,000 people or whatever there are, but we're all technology geeks, so we all do these things. But if you walk away from here and go back to everybody's company, 75% of those companies are not people who are doing these things. They don't want to touch all this stuff. They don't even know how to use a lot of it. They're happy when their phone just works, does what they want and goes forward. Should Twitter be a phone client? Should Facebook, since they bought WhatsApp, should it now make calls for you? Maybe it should and maybe it shouldn't. It's an open territory. It's an open question. Right, we still have QoS problems. Quality of service is still a problem. Skype calls, for instance, for me are not very good, but Google Voice is generally very solid. Just we'll get two different perspectives on the website. You mentioned sales, I know Paul's got a question before he gets to that question I wanted to ask you, because you mentioned sales professionals. And I was talking to a marketer and they hire a lot of young people right out of college and they're inside sales and some of them hit the road. Like, they don't even literally know how to use a phone probably, calling phone. And it's like, but they, the social sales prospecting, a lot of it's going on on Twitter, how people are connecting. Not to say it's killing and disrupting the old way, it's just adding to the pile of new stuff. Email marketing is not as effective as it used to be in the past. So there's new things that in the real time aspect of it creates a platform challenge. Well, okay, so I'll give you a different challenge to go with your platform challenge. Okay, we've got a challenge. The new people are much more social. They maybe are better at going out to meet people, no question, or how to interact with them on different levels. But there's a big chasm between doing that and then going back to your office and doing all the back office. That is missing immensely. Right now, when I meet some of the people who are coming into companies that I meet and people I know, and I'm amazed at their lack of ability to understand how to use their own computer, what are on their phone. So it's real good that they're real good at sales, but if you don't know how to use any of the other things on the back end, your CRM or even how to log your details so that when you get hit by a bus, someone else can take care of your stuff. There's a lot that's lacking on that back end because they just think, oh, it's somewhere out there and it'll be there. But it's just not. But John brings up a real interesting point, though, the evolution of unified communications. And we're talking about really, maybe this is the liberal arts major in me talking, but we're talking about being able to instrument people and understand better how people relate to an overall goal. And you can call it sort of the internet of folks, right? So are we looking at a revolution and how we measure the contribution of people to their organization thanks to instrumentation and being able to understand at a very granular level what they do and how it relates to outcomes? I think of the long run, the answer is yes. In the short term, it's a problem because unless I'm actually hitting my quota as a salesperson, you don't care how I'm doing it. You'd like to know, because you'd like to know if I'm doing it this way or that way, but when it comes down to it, you don't care how I hit my quota. At least very few managers have ever told me they care how their guys do it. But if you're a tech guy, I don't hit quotas, but you know if I did my job because that system works or it doesn't. There's no middle ground of, oh, I'm working on it. It's down or it's up. There is real no middle ground. So you've got one group of people who are taking a longer time to get that sales plan down and another group that's trying to cut it shorter, but are they really able to get there and provide that benefit at the company analysis level? I'm just not so sure that we're there today. Maybe in another year or two, that'll be a lot more cleaner. But I think today there's still a lot of, if it works, we're going with it and we're doing it, but the old stuff works too. Keith, I want to ask you a question, final questions we end the segment. I'll let you get the last word and share with the folks out there, why is this show so important? And for folks looking at the challenge of social business from a perspective that you can come from, what's their biggest thing that they should be focusing on paying attention to? Coming to impact, if you're working on massive transactional systems, whether it's e-business or telecoms or whatever it is, this is the confidence you want to be at because these systems are what run, I think, like five of the top 10 websites around the world and massive business transactions. And the people you're going to meet here have written most of it, have worked on it and are expanding those beyond it based on what you need in the field. Obviously you need developers to make it all work and put it all together, but the core underlined is here. And if you're not so sure what direction you want to take, definitely this morning we saw a great direction for people. So if you were questioning where you're going or here, you probably know where you want to go now. At a collaboration perspective and social side, I think this conference and the people at it have a little further to go than some of the other parts of IBM, like ICS, which has always been more collaborative. But they're getting there and they're interacting more. This year, I was not the only person tweeting the OGS compared to last year where I was one of the few. There were tons of people doing it, a lot more interactive. IBM is pursuing their own people to do it more. They're asking them not just to do it for themselves, but to do it for the company and work with others. So I think other companies will get there as well. We've talked a lot about collaboration. The last five years that all about collaboration. And it's sort of a motherhood thing. We believe the collaboration is good. But I think that what you're getting at is maybe the next level of this is being to measure collaboration and understand what about collaboration is good and what is just wasting time. Do you think that's where we're going? I think, ideally, that's what companies say they want, but you have to realize a little bit of my wasted time is a long-term benefit to someone out there who I'm working with. So this morning, I tweeted a lot about the OGS. Some of it was a little more fun than spitting out what we heard. And that's bringing people in to think about it also. I made fun of the Shake My iPad as an Etch-a-Sketch because there's an old Dilbore cartoon about that as well as a sign called episode. But it was just one example of like, it's not all a serious side. And not everybody out there really does business on a serious level. IBM writes things in a very certain way, but when you go to read books, do you want to read books like Technangels or whatever? No, you want to read books that are enjoyable for you to read. And so I think that in time, we're going to see people be a little more looser with how they interact and get over that, oh, they're just talking about sports all day or something. Because in the end of the day, if I'm not doing my job and getting things done, you're going to know that no matter what I'm doing. But to be fair, I also are going to go, maybe this is the best way for us to get rid of management. Because management usually is the bottleneck that we face when we look at the analytics. Keith, thanks so much for joining the queue. We're here live at IBM Impact. We are in the Social Impact Lounge. We're on the ground floor. We're right in the main area here at the Venetian Sands, the Palazzo. This is theCUBE, expecting the data, sharing that with you and getting a perspective on the real changes happening in IBM, but also in the marketplace, especially with social media, social data, making the user experience really fantastic. It's the key to success. Appreciate your perspective. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.