 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE. I'm with Wikibon.org. I'm here with at Stu Miniman, who's also with Wikibon. SiliconANGLE goes to events like this. We're at IBM Edge. This is our second day here. We're giving you wall-to-wall coverage of this conference. We're here at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Chris O'Connor is here. He's the Vice President of Development for the Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure Group, the group formerly known as Tivoli. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. What's your role? Let's start there. Inside of this newly named group, Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure, I want to actually ask you about that name, but what's your role? So my role is taking an engineering-oriented view and a strategic-oriented view to where our clients are going with their infrastructures, how they're using new structures, and then what capabilities do I deliver to them to be able to get the most amount of benefit, the most amount of client-derived value, and the most amount of optimization from those resources, servers, storage, networking devices, applications. How do I help them do all of that better and faster and more cleanly for their end-business goals? Yes. So you guys decided to retire the name, not the name Tivoli, I'm sure you'll still use it, but you're not calling the group that anymore. It was interesting because it's really sort of product-centric. IBM is not really a product-centric company, so I guess that was probably a long-time company, but cloud and smarter infrastructure. So what should people infer from that phrase? Well, let's think about what's happening in the environment today. When you think about systems management, as it started maybe 15, 20 years ago as a discipline, it was about a growing set of these things that we called routers, and a growing set of these things that we call client and server environments proliferating, and people needed to know basics, were they up, were they down, how do I put things on them on a very occasional basis to be able to manage them. And when you think about where we were, that was the value of what we delivered at the time. When you think about where the environment's going, the environment's going to a connected services-oriented infrastructure. It's about being able to take what you have and what you can rent or what you can buy from others, and be able to blend that together to deliver whatever the business outcome is that you want, whether you're a bank trying to deliver financial services, whether you're a car manufacturer trying to deliver a manufacturer at automobiles, whether you're an online retailer trying to connect to your clients, those are the outcomes you want and you want to use your infrastructure to collect that together. So cloud is about that connected structure and tissue that we see taking place, whether it's your private cloud, the usage of cloud, or how you construct and organize your own devices. And when you think about smart infrastructure, it's about that optimization for value that we want to be able to drive, and so we felt it was time to upgrade to be with the times. So Chris, what do you see is happening in the cut-base? I mean, you've got obviously a lot going on with the client, you know, finally, you think it was a buzzword, it was sort of a pejorative to a lot of customers, but I think we're beyond that now, I think well beyond that. So what are you seeing within client environments? Client environments today are under two sets of pressure points. They're under a pressure point to figure out what the balance is between OPEX and CAPEX from a budgetary point of view. They're looking at how can I derive the most amount of money, the most amount of value from the money that I have from an operational point of view versus large capital intensive projects. So if you look inside the data center or the IT structure, they're looking at how do I maximize that value without always having to purchase those structures, what can I rent, what can I borrow, and how can I optimize what I have. The second major thrust that I see going on is that clients are looking increasingly to be led by the line of business derived need. What's the application? What exactly does it need to support it? Not can I make a generic structure or can I virtualize everything, but can I actually connect to what that application looks like, that I'm going to be using to deliver value for whatever it is I sell or I manufacture and be able to get there. So there's a line of business pressure and there's a CAPEX, OPEX switch pressure that we see taking place in dramatic ways with our clients. So how- Go ahead, Steve. Chris, I was wondering if I can drill in on that because what you said really resonates for me when I think about big data or modern applications, especially kind of those new web scale applications. Do you see enterprises really having traditional things like email and database and things like that being driven by the line of business? Are they also going through that transition or is there a demarcation between those two in your mind? When you see a basic set of services, the basic set of services, when you think about the same way we all have offices and we have furniture, you think about that same basic service level. You look at that as getting a lot of OPEX pressure. So out of those being capital-intensive pressures, it becomes an operational expense and you see a lot of derived pressure or pressure to push towards that operational expense. And so if you can rent it, if you can borrow it, if you can web service it, if you can software as a service it, those all become very attractive solutions to be able to go after. And how you understand that and monitor that and provide service levels on that becomes a new trick and that's part of our focus, obviously, is what we do as we evolve from Tivoli to CSI. The second part of it is that when you move to value-oriented apps, we see people wanting to get in that composable service-oriented model. They want to be able to rapidly build, explore, and then expand that model based on the new connected services community. And actually use that connected service community as a way to reach new markets and new buyers. Okay, I wonder if I can get your opinion. When we talk about cloud adoption, we believe hybrid cloud is really the model that a lot of customers are adopting. But if we drill into that, if you talk about hybrid cloud and what is it, it's some applications are living off-site. You might have SaaS or infrastructure service or others there. And others I'm going to have inside. But truly federated applications seems to be a unicorn for most environments. What do you see? Are there real kind of bursting or workload mobilities that you're seeing out there? Or is it still kind of the spanning workloads and management helps me choose where the things go? So it's a great question. Along the classic apps, the same way we have furniture and offices type of applications, they're definitely unicorns to use your analogy in terms of they aren't moving into that connected services environment. However, we do see, for example, in the areas of retail and commerce, that people are taking back-end transactional engines and they're taking back-end information repositories and customer repositories, connecting them to perform larger sets of information. And then connecting them to their constituencies, their customer sets, either in new markets, new geographies, or in new initiatives using that connected services oriented programming model to build the app, the front end of how either maybe one of their partners, maybe one of their business lines, or maybe how even consumers could see, get to the web presence or connect to that at the same time. And we do see that blended model taking place as you go look at certain markets like retail and consumer based, for example. So infrastructures continues to get more complex and we talked about simplifying IT and kind of failed at doing that. It just keeps getting more complex. So that's why products like Tibley are so important because it does help us simplify. Can you talk about analytics and the role that analytics plays in play in terms of helping us understand what's going on in our infrastructure? How will we leverage analytics going forward? So we've touched a little bit on big data. We've touched a little bit on the whole notion of being able to go to that services oriented environment, which means that the information that comes off of that versus the infrastructure you control is going to be king. And when you think about the information that you're gathering off of that total set of environment, the ability to organize it, to be able to put a model on top of it from a technology point of view that represents what you're trying to accomplish and then take action that reduces that complexity to a simple set of actions. We see that as the key role of what analytics is going to do, not just to have really good technology and smartest researcher in the room type of stuff who can say, I can understand that information. But it's the take action part of it, the simple take action of whether your line of business is going to be able to deliver its value, whether your customer is going to be able to get to the site, whether we're going to have an order fulfillment problem, or we're going to have a transactional runtime problem. Those are things that you can often see in the footprint of all the information that is laid down by these services and what they do and leave, whether it's one that you own or that you lease or that you borrow. And the analytics will provide the model for being able to see those patterns and reduce it to something an operator can actually do something about. Because if it doesn't reduce it, we've only done half the value with analytics. And so our goal with analytics is not just to digest and consume the information, but to reduce it to something the operators can actually attack from an execution point of view at the same time. Do you think we'll get to the day in our lifetimes where you'll actually be able to reduce it to something that the system can act on and full automation? So when we get to full automation, there are parts of the environment where you can say it runs on automation today. Full automation. I think you're always going to have a paradigm where you decide on the relative order of the business app or the relative priority of what the system tells you in terms of where you might bring in a person. But yes, you're going to see large percentages of the environment run off of a very analytic driven, organized set of processing procedures where it self-corrects and self-heals. And accept in those places where you shouldn't be taking the human out of the equation. That's right. That's correct. Let's talk about infrastructure management as a service. Can you deliver as a service today? Are you getting pressured to deliver as a service? Talk about that a little bit. Infrastructure management as a service. Yes, you can deliver it today as a service. And sure, there is a lot of experimentation and pressure going on in the market to do that as a service. We have areas around asset management and around our control desk and help desk capabilities where we're already delivering that as a service. We have other areas that very shortly will be coming out as a service at the same time. And we see that as a fundamental paradigm shift that we're working and we see others in the industry working at the same time. To the degree that you can make it seamless, that'll be the winners and losers and how they work. Yeah, so that's a real development challenge I would imagine. So how do you do that? Without, you know, it's like changing the engine in mid-flight. So how do you do that? When you think around the basics of what many of our clients do today, we think about how you take what they already collect in the way of information. And you start to take how you analyze the information and you start to look at that perhaps in a set of offline services without changing their fundamental infrastructure so you don't have to stop the car to change the engine, so to speak. You put a new antenna up or you're painting the car while it's moving versus changing the wheels. You go after things such as the ability to open and close how you work with your clients and how you work with the problems and the tickets. You go after new clients and new ventures in terms of developing the model out from an internal point of view, which is one of the things we're doing heavily. As we work with new clients, we're offering them new business paradigm shifts and that gives us the ability to then come back to existing clients and show them how to go do this. So there's a variety of techniques that you can use on that. Can you tell, last question, because we're running out of time here, can you just talk about kind of the priorities of your organization? Well, let's say we're here a year from now. What should observers be watching in terms of progress, indicators of progress that you guys are making, milestones that you want to hit? Talk about that a little bit. I think key progress that we're trying to make sure we understand is how do we go about helping our clients with that OPEX-CAPEX shift? How do we go about showing them how to digest more by the drip versus by the large capital-intensive project, the progress that they make in their own infrastructures and environment? And we think that's real and that's measurable to be able to see, not just from the money point of view, but the way they run and manage their products. We think that the ability to move forward on analytics and the ability to do more with mobile are all areas that we can watch and that we can measure demonstrable projects. And then, of course, software as a service, the ability to move less on-prem and do more off-prem as a part of how we deliver and how we provide value. Excellent. Chris O'Connor, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you and appreciate your insights. Thank you very much. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back from Edge, live from IBM Edge at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.