 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I have two IBM alumni with me here today. Please welcome Brianna Frank, the director of product management at IBM. And Jason McGee is here as well, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO of the IBM Cloud Platform. Brianna and Jason, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you so much for having us. You guys were here a couple of months ago, but I know there's been a whole bunch of things going on. So Brianna, we'll start with you. What's new? What's new with IBM Cloud? We are, it's just, it's been such a rush of announcements lately, but one of my favorite announcements is the IBM Cloud Satellite product. We went GA back in March, and this has been one of the most fun projects to work on as a product manager, because it's all about our clients coming to us and saying, hey, look, we're having, these are the problems that we're really facing with as we move to cloud and our journey to cloud, and can you help us solve them? And I think this has been just an exciting place to be in terms of distributed cloud, this new category that's really emerging where we've taken the IBM Cloud, but we've distributed it into lots of different locations on-prem at the edge and on other public clouds. And it's been a really fun journey, and it's such a great fulfilling thing to see it come to life and see clients using it and getting feedback from analysts and in the industry. So it's been a, it's been a great, you know, a few months. That's good, lots of excitement going on. Jason, talk to me a little bit about, kind of unpack the Cloud Satellite for me. I see what's flashing in Jason's background is an IBM Cloud Satellite. Me, I'm sorry, I love that. But talk to me a little bit about the genesis of it. What were some of the things that customers were asking for? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so look, I think as we've talked about a lot at IBM, you know, as people have gone on their journey to Cloud and been moving workloads in the Cloud over the last few years, you know, not all workloads have moved, right? Maybe 20% of workloads have moved to the Cloud. And that remaining 80%, sometimes the thing that's inhibiting that is, you know, regulation, compliance, data latency, where my data lives. And so people have been kind of struggling with how do I get the kind of benefits and speed and agility of public Cloud, but apply it to all of these applications that maybe need to live in my data center or need to live on the edge of the network close to my users or need to live where the data is being generated or in a certain country. And so the genesis of Satellite was really to take our hybrid strategy and combine it with the public Cloud consumption model and really allow you to have public Cloud anywhere you needed it. You know, bring those public Cloud services into your data center or bring them to the edge of the network where your data is being generated and let you get the best of both. And we think that really will unlock, you know, the next wave of applications to be able to get the advantages of as a service kind of public Cloud consumption while retaining the flexibility to run wherever you need. Curious station, did you see any particular industries in the last year of, I don't want to say mayhem, but you know, mayhem, taking the lead and the edge in wanting to work with you guys to understand how to really facilitate digital business transformation because we saw a lot of acceleration going on last year. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting. Cloud is fundamentally a pretty horizontal technology. It applies to lots of industries, but I think this past year especially with, you know, COVID and lockdowns and changes in how we all work have accelerated massively clients adoption of Cloud. And they've been looking for ways to apply those benefits across more of what they do, all right? And I think there's different drivers, you know, there's, you know, security and compliance drivers maybe in places like the financial services industry, but there's also industries like manufacturing and retail that have, you know, they have a geographic footprint like where things run matters to them. And so they're like, well, how do I get that kind of remote Cloud benefit in all those places too? And so, you know, I've seen some acceleration in those areas. And one of the interesting things I thought has emerged from an industry focus is this concept of our FS Cloud Control. So we have specific control and compliance built into the IBM Cloud. And one of the most prevalent questions I get from clients, you know, is when can I get those FS Cloud Controls in satellite, you know, in all of these different locations? And so we built that in, that's coming later this year, but I was really surprised to hear every industry. And I guess it shouldn't be surprised. I mean, every industry is trading money, so it's important to keep things secure. But those FS Cloud Controls being extended into the satellite location is something I hear constantly as a need, no matter the industry, whether it's, you know, retail or insurance, you know, et cetera. So I think that, you know, the security concerns and being able to offload the burden and chores of security is huge. One of the things we saw a lot last year, Brianna, along the security lines was ransomware. Booming ransomware is a service, ransomware getting more personal. I'll talk to a lot of customers, to your point, in different industries that are really focused on, it's not if we get hit by ransomware, it's when. So I'm wondering if some of the things that we saw last year or maybe why you're saying this being so such a pervasive need across industries. What do you think? Absolutely, I think that it's something that you really have to concentrate on full-time and, you know, it has to be something you're just momentarily focused on. And we have all kinds of frameworks and actually groups where we're looking at shaping regulation and compliance and it's really something that we study. So when we can pass on that expertise to our clients and again, offload them, so, you know, not everyone can be an expert in these areas, I find that, you know, relieving, you know, our clients of these operational and security chores allows them to, you know, get back to what they want to do, which is actually just keep inventing and building better technology for their business. I think that's such an important point that Brevyn is bringing up too though, is like part of the value of something like satellite is that we can run these technology platforms as a service, right? And well, what does as a service means? It means you can tap into a team of people who are the industry's best at building and operating that technology platform, right? Like maybe you've decided that, you know, Kubernetes and OpenShift is your go forward platform as a business, but do you have the team and the skills that you need to operate that yourself? You know, you want to use AI, you probably don't want to become an expert in how to run like whatever the latest and greatest AI framework is, you want to actually like figure out how to apply that to your business. And so we think that part of what's really attracting people to solutions like satellite, especially now with like the threats you describe is that they can tap into this expertise by consuming things as a service instead of figuring out how to run it all themselves. Yeah, to that point, a lot of times we see really talented developers. I really like talking to incubation teams where they're building new and they're just trying to figure out how to create the next new thing. And it's not that they're not talented enough, they could do whatever they put their mind to, it's just that they don't have enough time. And then it just becomes down to, what do you really want to spend your time doing? Is it security and operational chores or is it inventing the next big thing for your business? And I think that that's where we're seeing the market really shift is that it's not efficient or a great idea, and really no one wants to do that. So if we can offload those chores, then that becomes really powerful. It does resource allocation is key to let those businesses to your point, we're going to focus on their core competencies, innovating new products, new services, meeting customers where they are as customers, like us become more and more demanding of things being readily available. I do want to understand a little bit, Jason, help me understand how this service is differentiated from some of the competitors in the market. Yeah, it's a totally fair question. So I would answer that in a couple of ways. First off, anytime you're talking about extending a cloud into some other environment, you obviously need some infrastructure for that application to run on, whether that infrastructure is in your data center or at the edge or somewhere else. And one of the things that we've been able to do is by leveraging our hybrid cloud platform, by leveraging things like OpenShift and Linux, we've been able to build satellite in a way where you can bring almost any Linux infrastructure to the table and use it to run satellite. So we don't require you to buy a certain rack of hardware or a particular gear from us. You don't have to replace all your infrastructure. You can kind of use what you have and extend the cloud. And that to me is all about, if the goal is to help people build things more quickly and consume cloud, like you don't want step one to be like wheel in a whole new data center for a hardware before you get started. The second thing I would say is we have built our whole cloud on this containerized technology on Kubernetes and OpenShift, which means that we're able to deliver more of our portfolio through satellite. We can deliver application platforms and databases and dev tools and AI and security functions all as a service via satellite. And so the breadth of cloud capability that we think we can deliver in this model is much higher than what I think our competitors are going to be able to do. And then finally, I would say the tie to kind of IBM's view of enterprise and regulated industries, the work Brana mentioned around things like FS cloud, the work we're doing in Telco, like we spent a lot of our energy on like how do we help the enterprises, regulated industries take advantage of cloud and we're extending all of that work outside of our cloud data centers with satellite to all these other places. And so you really can move those mission critical applications into a cloud environment when you do it with us. Let's talk about some successes. Brana, tell me about some of the customers that are getting some pretty big business outcomes. And this is a new service. Talk to me about how it's being used, consumed and the benefits. Absolutely. You know what I find a trend that I'm seeing is really the cloud being distributed to the edge. And there's so many interesting use cases I hear every single day about how to really use machine learning and AI at the edge. And so maybe it's something as simple as a worker safety app where you're making sure that workers are safe using video cameras in an office building and alerting someone if they're going into a construction area and you're using the AI and all of the images that's coming that are coming in through the security cameras, you're doing some analysis and saying, all right, this person is wearing a hard hat or not and warning them. But those use cases gonna be changed so quickly. And we've seen that and I think I've talked about it before with COVID, you changed that to masks. You could change that. You could hook up the application of thermal devices. We've seen situations where machine learning is used at the manufacturing edge. So you can determine if there's an issue with your production of, you know, in a factory. We're seeing edge use cases in hospitals in terms of keeping the waiting room sanitized because of over usage. So there's all kinds of just really interesting solutions. And I think this is kind of the next area where we're really able to, and even partner with folks that have extraordinary vertical expertise in a specific area and bringing that to life at the edge and being able to really process that data at the edge so that there's very little latency. And then also you're able to change those use cases so quickly because you're really consuming cloud native best practices in cloud, cloud services at the edge. So you're not having to install and manage and operate those services at the edge. It's done for you. I want to mention changing the ability to change use cases so quickly in a year that plus that we've seen so much dynamics and pivoting is really key for businesses in any industry, Brianna. I agree. And that's the thing, you know, there hasn't been one particular industry. I think, you know, of course, we do see a lot in the financial services industry just probably because we're IBM, but in every industry, you know, we see, you know, retail, it's interesting to see sporting goods companies want to have pop-up shops in a specific sporting events. And how do you, you know, have a van that is a sporting goods shop, but it's just there temporarily and how do you have a, you know, satellite location in the van? So there's really interesting use cases that, you know, have emerged, you know, just over time due to, you know, the need to have this capability at the edge. Yeah, it's necessities the mother of invention as they say, right? Well, thank you both so much for stopping by sharing what's going on with IBM Cloud Satellite, the new service, the new offerings, the opportunities in it for customers. I'm sure it's going to be another exciting year for IBM because you clearly have been very busy. Thank you both for stopping by the program. Thank you. Thanks so much, Lisa. For Brianna Frank and Jason McGee, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, I've coverage of IBM Think.