 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're at Moscone Center, the rejuvenated Moscone Center, welcoming a first-time guest to theCUBE, Matias Funka, director of offering management hybrid data management from IBM. Matias, thanks for joining us on the program. I'm glad to be here. So talk to us about what you're responsible for products and strategy for hybrid data management. Unpack that for us. Yeah, so my role in the business is to define the strategy for our hybrid data management offerings. So set the priorities and then very much focus on alignment across the different functions we have in the business in support of those priorities and the strategy. So think of marketing, sales, development, offering management all coming together and align themselves in support of those priorities. And then bring new capabilities and offerings to market together. Great, so Matias, we'd love to have you on because in our open this morning we were talking about, all the shows we go to, everybody talks about how important data is. Now of course the database is one of those places that data has always been and now we have things like AI and developers and everything else modernizing how we think about that sort of environment. Seems that's something that's central to what you're doing. Maybe you explain how some of these mega waves are impacting your products and your customers. So obviously, given my role, I believe in the importance of the database. I think it's at the core and the foundation of what we at IBM currently describe as the AI ladder. So anybody who wants to realize business benefits by delivering better insights on data to the business, differentiate themselves as a company to the competition, it all starts with data and the ability to collect data and bring it together and make it accessible for the business. So yeah, the role of the database cannot be underestimated in my opinion. There's so much we talk about this too at every event that we go to on theCUBE, the power of data, data is the new oil, et cetera. We also talk a lot about trust and how trust is essential. There are, what I think stat I saw the other days do is that 80% of the world's data is not searchable. Companies understand that data is valuable. It's liquid gold, for example. But extracting, finding that data, finding the insights rather in that data is hugely challenging. IBM is great at dealing with complexities. Talk to us about what IBM is doing to bring modern technologies like AI to the database, for example, to help customers start extracting quickly the value in these massive pools of data. Right, so first of all, I think we all live, I mean, at least on my side of the business, we sometimes tend to live in our own bubble. We believe that the world already embraced AI and embraced, everybody has embarked on a journey to AI. The reality is that many companies struggle. We did, there is a survey out there. I don't recall exactly the source, but like 49% of all the CIOs of the companies out there, they struggled in executing a strategy towards AI. If you think about Gardner as an analyst, Gardner would say today 60% of the companies have an AI strategy. In three years from now, 90% of all companies have an AI strategy. It's an expression of the importance of the data and an AI strategy for the respective businesses. But many companies are not there yet, right? So it's our job to help them get there. And yes, in the database and data management, the ability to collect data and make it accessible is key for success. When it comes to AI on the data layer, I look at it in two ways. So how do we bring intelligence into the database to make the life of the user, the DBA, the database administrator easier, right? Automate things, reduce the amount of labor, reduce the skills required to operate a database. And the other angle is, how do you help people build intelligent applications with database, right? And simplify the access to the data. Yeah, you bring up some great points there. We love talking about the role of what's happening inside of jobs today. Used to be the DBA was kind of, they had their own silo there, they would manage everything else. The whole wave of big data was, I should be able to have almost anybody in the business should be able to access data and be able to leverage it. Help connect the dots with us as we go to this AI world. Where does the DBA sit compared to the rest of the business? How is their world different today than it was just a few years ago? Right, so in order to democratize access to data and make it available, the cloud has promised a lot. We have public cloud, we have private cloud. At the end of the day, the expectation is that you reduce the number of dependencies that the end user who wants to deal with the data has on other or different people in the organization. The DBA plays a core role in making sure that the data is available, especially in traditional on premises environments, but also in the private cloud. When it comes to public cloud, often that role is now delegated to the public cloud provider. You're thinking about public managed database services, so you delegate that role. But still, you know, that job is to make sure that data is available, that queries perform in an efficient way, and you know, so the business can depend on those data sets being available and those queries to run every day, day in and day out. Yeah, absolutely. When we look at a hybrid world, so much of what IT specifically is asked for, they now need to manage a bunch of stuff that's outside of their purview. So I've got the stuff that I own plus everything else, so what does a hybrid data management solution look like for customers? Yeah, it's a huge challenge because think about different heterogeneous repositories, data sets, designing different locations. How do you abstract that to the user or the application that you have in the organization? All right, so data virtualization is a term that comes up quite often in this context, but how do you virtualize all that physical topology? How do you protect the investments that people make as they build, let's say, their solution on a certain data estate in one specific form factor, but then later on the side, we want to move that to a different form factor because of the economics. How do you preserve that investment? And the answer here is often well, you got to make sure that the integration points are consistent, the experience and the way you interact with those data management properties is consistent and unified across that hybrid environment. If you have data sets on premises or in the cloud or in the cloud, you want this all to look and feel the same, essentially. Do you have an example of some customers that you've worked with across the globe that, because you've been with IBM a long time, you said 21 years. Oh, I was hoping you would not say that. I'm sorry. You're a veteran, you're an expert on this. I'm curious, some of the evolution that you've witnessed, whether it's in the role of the database or the DBA, the administrative themselves, what are some of the trends that you have seen IBM really help to help companies achieve and be really successful across industries in the last 20 years? So I don't recall what happened 20 years ago, but I can give you some recent examples. And there is an insurance company that I've been working with for a while and the example that they always, or that they gave me at the time was, hey, it takes us, when we as a business user, when our business user, a business analyst, they have a new question to answer for the business. It takes them like eight to 10 weeks to actually get access to the data that allows them to answer the question. And by the time the data is available to them, the question has moved on. They have a different question to ask. And the reason it takes eight to 10 weeks is that there's so many different functions involved in the business to find where the data resides in the organization, how to bring it into the environment that these business users have access to. It's tremendous, the challenges that complex organizations face here. So IBM Cloud Private for Data, as an example, is our answer to, in delivering an experience that basically accelerates that whole workflow and skips or avoids dependencies between different persona types that are associated with that workflow. So simplify that journey, make it easy so that the business user feels fully empowered to access the data that they want to without depending on anyone else in the organization. Yeah, Matthias, one of the strengths that IBM has is just a long history of really owning that application and understanding the people that use it and how I get that all the way through the infrastructure, through the data in the piece. What should people be looking for? I know there'll be some announcements that we can't specifically talk about today, but what sort of thing should we be looking for from IBM? So I'm very excited about what's coming up later this week, what we will be talking about. We think it's disrupting 40 years of database technology in the way we ingest or infuse intelligence into our database to make the life of the different users easier. Also the way we bring different workload types together over a single copy of data that deals with all kinds of challenges that you have in complex data architectures, think about data latency, moving data from A to B, which is very costly. So how to avoid that and make it more effective or inefficient for the organization. So Matthias, you said disrupt 40 years of database. I've looked through my career, I've got a couple of years in the industry also. Intelligence and automation, things we've been talking about for a long time. Explain why 2019, we have the tools so that AI can actually offer up something disruptive that isn't just what we've been talking about for decades. Yeah, so the analogy I would use is the car industry. For 100 years we have been using combustion engines, right? And you have brought these engines, or consumed these engines in different form factors like a truck, like a regular car. And you make it available in different consumption models. Think about a taxi or Uber or you buy a car, right? But what happened with the engine is Tesla took that to the next level. They say, no, we go all electric. That's disruptive, right? We bring that back to IT and data management. The cost-based optimizer in a database has been there for 40 years. So the way people compile their queries, execute their query plans on data has been the same for 40 years. On Wednesday we'll be talking about a new method to do that. And it has tremendous gains in terms of performance, in terms of simplicity for the users. So I'm very excited about that. But that's just one aspect of what we're going to talk about on Wednesday. When you talk about disruptions, a word that's used a lot, but 40 years, four decades of, I won't say status quo, but I think you don't understand what I'm talking about. When IBM has a massive install base of big companies like IBM, what are, along the lines of this big disruption, things that we'll learn about in the next couple of days? What are some of the things that excite you about helping some of these massive companies, such as IBM, to actually embrace this disruption, leverage it for competitive advantage and be able to find new revenue streams? So yeah, that's a great question, Lisa, because you can have all kinds of innovative ideas and technologies. What matters is how you productize it, how you bring it, give it into the hands of your clients and how you help them gain value from that, right? So that's my job. That's why I get out of bed every day because I see this as a very exciting journey, a very exciting mission for myself and for our team at IBM. And seeing these clients then benefiting from it by saying, hey, we have reduced so much cost or we have gained new agility in the way we can bring new capabilities to our lines of businesses and become more competitive in the industry is really exciting. Excellent, well, Matias, thanks so much for joining Stu and me on the program this morning. We appreciate your time. Look forward to hearing some of these announcements coming out later this week. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are live, day one of IBM Think 2019. Stick around, our next guest will be joining us shortly.