 The Cube at IBM Impact 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Paul Gillin. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect to see the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. My guest here is Michelle Rajpal, general manager of IBM, NBU, Cloud Mobile Connectivity, BPM, big title, welcome to The Cube. Thank you, John. We were chatting earlier about all the cloud action. So what's your take of the show right now? Give a quick update on your views here at Impact. Well, I've been at Impact for the last 10, close to 10 years every year. And every year when I come here, it's exciting. But when I see what's happening this year, I think this is more than exciting. There are so many announcements, so many interesting innovations, so many organizations sharing their success stories about how they leverage cloud, mobile, big data. So a lot of things to learn from a attendance perspective, for the customers, for the various folks who are here. A lot of good things for the technologists in the field to learn from. So I would say now it's time well spent over here at the event. So talk about proficient in your company. What you guys do and how do you relate to what's going on in Impact? So proficient, we are a US based integrator. We help our customers in their technology initiatives, tied to BPM, tied to mobile, tied to cloud, big data. And how basically to get these technologies adopted in their organizations to address the business challenges they are seeing in their industry. And all the integrities which are involved, the best practices which are involved in building these solutions as you see them. You know a demo which you see on the stage today which takes about a few minutes to showcase really takes some smart minds in the background to build. So we are the smart minds at times helping our customers build these solutions. They're always saying the demo version always looks better than in real life. And that old joke in IT, you know, you have heaven and hell, hey, you know, the heaven looks, hell looks great, how come it's all fire? Well, that was the demo version. You know, that's still the expression. But now things are getting fast. On an all serious note, it's like, talk about the business perspective, what's going on in the process improvements? Because with cloud, with big data and with mobile, these new user experiences and new business experiences are being enabled. So okay, that's disruptive. What's being disrupted from your perspective? When you go out in the field and talk to, rolling out solutions and customers, what are the key things that's being disrupted from a value creation standpoint? So it's an interesting question, right? So if you look at a typical business, right, today, as they are dealing, as they're working in their day to day, right? They have their lights to be on, they have their existing apps, they have their existing technology solutions, all need to be up and running. And all these disruptives, as we say, the nexus of technology, right? Cloud, mobile, big data, all these things coming to them from the outside and businesses going out to their technology teams and asking them about ways they could build new systems, new processes, new things inside their organization. And very quickly, so as they see all this request coming in, they're trying to figure out how do we adapt and they're trying to leverage the offerings which are coming out from these different technologies, changes in the market. And like leveraging cloud, for instance, as you were talking about earlier, cloud gives them a way to really put a platform in place and try something out from a new business perspective for a new area, a new technology solution which is targeting a new market segment, basically looking at what the customer wants to see from their organization. And building the rich user interfaces which are needed by today's generation as they use mobile devices to access every piece of information that you have to offer. So what are the customers focusing on? Obviously they get excited, they see the demo, they see the promised land, all the economic benefits of cloud, but they have this legacy environment. What do you find as a practitioner out there, how come they're customers, is the things that they go to first? What's the low hanging fruit that they focus on first? So, you know, in some ways, different industries are different, different organizations are different. But if you look at organizations who are leading the technology solution industry are more innovative, they are trying to see how they can leverage some of these technologies to reduce their costs. So, you know, which gives them more bang for their buck as from their IT budgets perspective. So, things like if they are starting a new venture, let's say in a certain geography today, you know, they could really latch on to cloud because that gives them a way to get into a new market without having a data center, without having an operation in that market. So, things which give them more ROI is what they are looking for, right? So, that's what they're leveraging on as low hanging fruit. And in some cases, let's say a retail customer, they are looking for a way to get to that segment of the customer, which is mobile. Right when they're walking across a mall, across a certain store, how do they get that customer in their store to buy some products which they want to sell? So, these are mobile and cloud are offering some mechanisms for organizations to grab this low hanging fruit, to increase their revenue, improve their profitability, which is what the ultimate goal for everybody says. So, when you talk to a customer, let's take efficiency is a big thing. Efficiency is huge on their plate right now. Okay, I got to do things better, faster, smarter. WebSphere has been out there for a while, you know a lot about that. And they build out their e-commerce, they build out their web presence there, they have some scale, they see some leverage in the investment. Now, they're saying, great, take this and put it on mobile. Sounds easy. Take us through the sausage factory, if you will, make the sausage. It's almost sounds easy, but that's the business outcome. Okay, I want to have agile, I want to have my business logic from the website in mobile, but there's different conditions in mobile, right? You have people on the go, there's personalization. What has to happen next? Take us through that. So, mobile is a- I don't mean to put you on the spot, but that's kind of what people think about. It's an interesting change, right? In most organizations, when they started looking at mobile, they would start looking at it as a smaller real state of browser and try to adapt their systems to fit that. So, mobile is a different ball game. You really have to use that piece of real state, which you get in a way that you get the maximum benefit, you get the best interface for your users. So, as I work with our customers who are trying to think about how to leverage mobile, I tell them, some of the recommendations we give them is try to find a trusted player who's been there, done that, and look at mobile first, which is what basically most of, the first challenge that most organizations deal with, they look at mobile as after the fact, right? They have their existing system. No, they want to put a mobile front end. The next thing they want to do is get a developer to make a mobile site out of it, and that's not how you do it. You really have to look at the experience, the user-centric design, on how you will build this experience so that your customers who spend some time on your mobile device, on your site, they stay on there. I think most of the challenges which we have seen at large retailers is they build this mobile site, and the experience, the user experience is not that great, which takes them off the site and they lose their traffic, which they could capitalize on. So, that whole finding the trusted partner who has experienced, who has been there, done that for multiple retailers, multiple customers in their industry, really helps them get that leverage that experience and put their best practices into their systems as they build it. I was talking with Kristin Lauria, who's a VP of marketing and mobile first, and she's awesome, she had a great conversation. But the real time is a huge deal with mobile. She was given an example of how IBM at Mobile World Congress was changing the content, and she's a marketing person, she's a marketing example of using data. They were changing the content on the billboards and the bus stops and changing the bus schedules based on what the behavior of the crowd was doing, which is a great example of tapping some big data, but using mobile as a vehicle to crowdsource some data and then change user experience. So, in a way, this is really a shining example of kind of this path of, okay, mobile first means something that might not have been possible with web. Web is more like, you know, bigger screen, you can do more, but mobile's got to be a little bit different. So, if that's the preferred mobile first environment, what's the culture have to be like at a company? Because, I mean, it's kind of a no brain, oh yeah, I want real time, actual insights. It sounds good on paper, but there has to be a cultural mindset we've heard from others today. What's your take on that and what is the cultural mindset of an executive that says, I want this on my iPad, I want this on my phones, go do it. Is it as easy as, is it hurting the cats? I mean, what's the big critical success factors, I guess? So, it's a very interesting question, right? A cultural mindset, you know, most organizations have a lot of inertia. The people who work in those organizations know to do things a certain way. And in some ways, when you start with, you know, area like mobile or any other new technology, innovative area, you've got to find people in the organization who look at that area and are ready to absorb, you know, embed themselves in that mindset, understand the experience of what goes on in the mind of a customer who's using the technology from an end user perspective. So, what we have seen is, as an organization starts an initiative in this area, bringing someone in who has gone through that exercise of, you know, changing their mindset a little from a traditional web-based user experience to a mobile user experience. What kind of things should they watch for and how should they really adapt their mindset and thinking to looking at a 20-year-old or a 25-year-old or maybe our kids who are, you know, my son, when he looks at a game on his tablet or on my phone. Playing Minecraft, by the way. Yeah, they're all Minecraft. Oh my God, you know, the amount of time they've spent on Minecraft. Especially programming training, basically, in my mind. So, if you look at it, that experience which Minecraft provides to them retains them on those devices and gets locks them in and that's the mindset which really keeps them. So, you've got to go on the other side, look at and understand how you can retain your customers, your users using the right things from a technology perspective, user experience perspective and adapt your businesses for them rather than adapt. And they're different too. I saw in a Todd Moore earlier, he's done the dev at Impact and other developer folks around open technologies and we were talking about the millennials were born on the web IBM. I guess the politically correct ones born on the web basically means you were born after 95. But that born on the web mentality, they're not loading Linux patches. I mean, they're like Lego block guys. They're like, they're thinking, hey, if it's not in my fingertips, if I'm not making my meal with it, if I'm not cooking in oil, I'm not going to use it. I mean, that's the new reality for developers. Are you seeing that in the enterprises now? I mean, is that permeated where the enterprises have a lot of born on the web developers? Is that, I mean, obviously they want to hire them, but what's your take on that? I mean, in the enterprise, certainly in the consumer side, people want to be the next WhatsApp or the next Facebook. Yeah, so there's different, again, there's different organizations who have different ways to address that challenge, right? In some cases, you see organizations who have teams who are the 20 to 25-year-olds using them to understand how would they build a system? And there are some innovative experience folks who come from those millennial ages, which we talk about, where they have tried to adapt their thinking to how the newer generation would think about using technology. So it's a challenge leveraging the same team members as you have for building these new systems because there's a lot of background they have from their previous development environments which they bring to the table, and it's sometimes challenging to get them to adjust to the new one as a challenge. So what we see is if we have a mixed team of some experts who have come from those web era and some good experts who are coming from the mobile era to combine their forces together, combine their brains together, the culture, the knowledge sharing which happens really helps build the best systems which can be used and consumed by the users. So we get some commentary on the crowd chat and the question is, cloud gives way to a new markets without building a data center. That's somewhat true. The question is, what kind of examples are you seeing out there where new markets are being exploited because of the new capability? Can you share any examples of work you've worked on with customers where they had the aha moment where they had from web sphere, for instance, to mobile or an environment where they moved to mobile and generated new revenue streams or new business models? So I'll give an example of Blue Shield California where they leveraged pure app instance to pure app application to build their next generation portal. And we were actually nominated for the Innovation Award around Pure Systems yesterday and we wanted for the work which we did with them. Now, they were looking for a way to get, to expand their market share, provide a better reach user experience to their users, to the consumers for dealing with the health insurance information which they are looking at. So, you know, it's very interesting, right? A large organization trying to build something very quickly and trying to figure out how do you do this with the technologies which are available today? So they looked at pure app and they initially when they looked at it, they looked at it with a skeptical eye. They were like, well, it will just address our challenges. But as they understood the system more and they understood the ROI, the speed with which they could build this new system for them, they really adopted it and we helped them build that solution for them. And that's how they addressed their challenges in this area. So I got to ask you about being an IBM partner. What's it like being an IBM partner? Are they tied into the culture? And you can be honest now, because we're an IBM band, you can be critical a little bit. You can don't have to give them an A plus. You know, if they deserve an A plus, give them an A plus. But you know, are they culturally relevant in your mind? Are they really helping you drive the business? And what are some of the things that IBM is doing with the, to support the business partners? And what can they do better? So what, you know, the IBM relationship that you've had has really been something that has been built over the years. And the way I see it, right? When we started, it was, as IBM brings this new technology offerings to the market, they really get us involved. Like, for example, PR app, I'll go back to that instance again. When IBM came out with PR, they literally brought us in to, you know, what are the best features which you can put in this product? How would we market this product? How would it appeal to our customers? And can you use this product for some time and help us get the feedback which is needed to make this usable for the customers? And that's the big thing which has helped us. We understand this technology as they come in and we absorb the details needed and provide the feedback which we get from our customers to help these products get better. And this continuous feedback loop, which I'm talking about, really has helped this relationship get stronger and helped us build these solutions for customers faster. We're here at IBM Impact, we are the CUBE, our flagship program, we've got the Advanced Extracted System from the Noise. We are in the Social Impact Lounge on the ground floor talking to all these people that have the signal from the noise. We want to share that with you, executives, startups, partners, practitioners, Vishal is with me here. Just, I want you to just share a personal reflection to the folks out there, to the camera and share with the folks that are watching and explain to them in your own words, why is this point in time in history of the computer revolution so important? Why is this moment, what are the forces, why is the game changing so fast and then ever before? Right, so it's interesting, right? If I look at my history, there's been two or three interesting moments of time when I look at how things change in the IT industry. One was the mainframes to the web transition and the web to a SOAL, middle tier, three tier architecture. And now we are at this juncture where we have had, as I said, the three or four different nexuses of cloud, mobile, social, big data, all coming together and as an organization from a technology perspective, they are looking at all these changes and trying to absorb them and how to use them in their organizations. And as you see, so many technology challenges coming together, it's an interesting time and you probably will see, I don't know, we have seen too big, I've seen too big happening in my lifetime in this industry. So it's a very interesting time and it gives an organization to really leverage these technologies and move fast with their technology initiatives, which was not possible earlier. When was it possible to build an environment for, to be consumed in a matter of hours? I mean, I come from this, it used to take weeks to build such a system. Now, if you are trying to build it. Weeks was lucky. Yeah, weeks was lucky. You know, it was not repeatable. Now you have a way to take a pattern from pure app and in a repeatable way, have a system up and running in a matter of hours and really try to build that next innovative solution which will help you in your business in a matter of weeks. That repeatable message with Steve Mills really drilled home because you have essentially linear cost. They don't really go scale incrementally with the value you're creating. And repeatable is also a theme, Vishal, that we see in open source. And if you look at Linux as a generation point in time, and you can argue which point of generation of open source it was, we're certainly beyond that now into kind of the next generation. Open source now has permeated the enterprise and impacted big time. So it's not like it sneaks in and it's lower cost alternative. It's first class citizen. So openness has become a big thing. So my question for you is, from a practitioner on the field, how has open source changed the services business in the game of deploying solutions? Certainly repeatable, building on the shoulders of giants, modular composite applications. These are all the buzzwords. This is an action that we're seeing. Right, so open source has always been there in the market. But as we advise our customers, as our organizations who are looking to leverage these open source technologies, there's a good amount of things in there which help you build a solution pretty quickly. But then there are challenges to the adoption of the technology, right? There's finding the right talent in the market who has the skills in that space. Then making it scalable to be used by an organization of your size to the level of, to the load you anticipate from on your website. So I think the best way to leverage open source technologies is bring it in areas where you really see that as a good fit for your organization and mix it with other technologies which are available from the larger vendors which have been proven and trusted and combine the best of beat technologies from both sides to build solutions which you need for your organization. What success best practices can you share with the audience, folks out there? Could be a CIO, could be another practitioner that you've learned in swimming in this massive sea change. Right, so as leaders of an organization, right? One thing which I would suggest is to look at these technologies with an open mind. I mean, I used to be in situations in conversations with CIO, CDOs who used to look at cloud and say, oh my God, I couldn't bring cloud in my environment. I'm so worried about security. I'm so worried about how we would, how different parts of our organization would react. But looking at it with an open mind and trying to understand the technology, seeing where the technology can be applied in an organization. There's always the right fit for a technology and the wrong use of a technology. You've got to understand it. You've got to figure out have your leaders in the organization and look at it from an open mindset. And once you go behind the technology initiative, whether it's a large migration or innovation, you need to be an executive sponsor, support it right from the start to the finish. And try to see how you can get the hurdles out of the way for your team by bringing in people who have the experience in building such systems. How has collaboration changed your business, if any? Has it yet tapped into your business? Because we're talking about open stores. What we're really talking about is like the work environment's changing. So everyone's been buzzing about, oh, social collaboration. IBM talks about social business, which I think is a great pillar to build on, absolutely. But it's still early days and collaboration has always been web-based tools, right? So now you've got mobile collaboration. You have connected workforce. You have connected consumers. This is a huge, huge game changer. What's your take on that? And how has that affected your ability to do your job? So this has been definitely very helpful for our teams as I look at it, right? We have a pretty large organization, people working on various technologies in different parts of the country. And as we work on a technology initiative, as you run into a problem, we leverage this collaboration very effectively inside to deal with technology challenges. Let's say I have a person in California working on a project and dealing with a certain challenge. What we have is a system in place which lets them talk about their problem with all the employees in an organization in a matter of a minute. And we use a tool called Yammer over there for finding ways to reach out to everybody. And you will be surprised. Somebody in California having a problem and trying to resolve it in a matter of hours is now possible because somebody in DC has had the same problem and knows how to fix it. So this collaboration is really helping share our assets, share our knowledge, share our expertise across our organization and help deal with challenges in a much faster way. Bishal has been great talking to you. I want to get you to the final word here. And if the culture, as the culture evolves, what one, two, or three things that are you looking at and watching very closely from a trend perspective that's relevant? Well, I am very interested in seeing how organizations adapt to all these changes which are happening, right? Which is around cloud, around mobile, around social. And some of it has been going on for some time. But what's next over here? It's sometimes so interesting to look 10 years, 15 years down the path in the past and look at two years, three years in the future and see where we came from and where we have been and what this ultimate future is going to be. I mean, if you look at how much technology you use today, how much you rely on your smartphones or smart devices which you use for your day-to-day things, I mean, what is the next, what is the future in a whole for you? So that's the real thing which you've got to watch out for. And as I said, right? Look at technologies, keep an open mind and try to embrace it and adopt it and use it so that you're more efficient in your day-to-day operation. We shall Rajpal here inside theCUBE at the IBM Impact Social Impact Lounge. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest at this short break. Thanks for joining us and sharing your perspective. Social business, cloud mobile, it's transforming. We've got it all covered here at theCUBE. We'll be right back. Thank you, John.