 Live from downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit 2018, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at the Park 55 in San Francisco covering the IBM CDO Strategy Summit. I'm here with Joel Horowitz, who's the vice president of digital partnerships and offerings at IBM. Good to see you again, Joel. Thanks, great to be here. So it was just, you're very welcome. It was just, let's see, was it last month, I think? Yeah, it's hard to contract, right? And we were talking about your new role, the importance of partnerships. One of the things I want to, well, let's talk about your role, but I really want to get into its innovation. And we talked about this, I think, because it's so critical, in my opinion, anyway, that you can attract partnerships, innovation partnerships, startups, established companies, et cetera, to really help drive that innovation, right? It takes a team of people. IBM can't do it on its own. Yeah, I mean, look, IBM is the leader in innovation, as we all know. We're the market leader for patents that we put out each year. And how you get that technology in the hands of the real innovators, the developers, the long tail ISVs, our partners out there, that's the challenging part at times. And so what we've been up to is, really looking at how we make it easier for partners to partner with IBM, how we make it easier for developers to work with IBM. So we have a number of areas that we've been adding. So for example, we've added a whole IBM code portal. So if you go to developers.ibm.com, forward slash code, you can actually see hundreds of code patterns that we've created to help really any client, any partner get started using IBM's technology and innovate. Yeah, so, and that's critical. I mean, you're right, because to me, innovation is a combination of invention, which is what you guys do really well. And then it's adoption, which is what your customers are all about. You come from the data science world. We're here at the Chief Data Officer Summit. What's the intersection between data science and CDOs? What are you seeing there? Yeah, I mean, so when I was here last, it was about two years ago, in 2015, actually maybe three years ago. Man, time flies when you're having fun. Yeah, the Spark Technology Center and the Spark Summit and I was here at the Chief Data Officer Summit and it was great. And at that time, I think a lot of the conversation was really not that different than what I'm seeing today, which is, how do you manage all of your data assets? I think a big part of doing good data science, which is my kind of background, is really having a good understanding of what your data governance is, what your data catalog is. So, we introduced the Watson Studio at Think, and actually what's nice about that is it brings a lot of this together. So, if you look in the market and the data market today, we used to segment it by a few things, like data gravity, data movement, data science, right, and data governance. And those are kind of the four themes that I continue to see. And so, outside of IBM, I would contend that those are relatively separate kind of tools that are disconnected. In fact, Dinesh Nirmal, who's our engineer on the analytics side, head of development there, he wrote a great blog just recently about how you can have some great machine learning, you can have some great data, but if you can't operationalize that, then really, you can't put it to use. And so, it's funny to me because we've been focused on this challenge, and IBM is making the right steps, it might be, I mean, I'm obviously biased, but we're making some great strides toward unifying this tool chain, which is data management, to data science, to operationalizing machine learning. So that's what we're starting to see with Watson Studio. Well, I always push Dinesh on this. I'm like, okay, you've got a collection of tools, but are you bringing those together? And he flat out says, no, we developed this, a lot of this from scratch. Yes, we bring in the best of the knowledge that we have there, but we're not trying to just cobble together a bunch of disparate tools with a UI layer. It's really a fundamental foundation that you're trying to build. Well, what's really interesting about that piece is that, yeah, I think a lot of folks have cobbled together a UI layer. So we formed a partnership, coming back to the partnership of you is with a company called Lightbend, who's based here in San Francisco as well as in Europe. And the reason why we did that wasn't just because of the fact that reactive development, if you're not familiar with reactive, it's essentially Scala, Aaka, Play, this whole framework, that basically allows developers to write once and it kind of scales up with demand. In fact, Verizon actually used our platform with Lightbend to launch the iPhone 10. They showed dramatic improvements. Now, what's exciting about Lightbend is the fact that application developers are developing with reactive, but if you turn around, you'll also now be able to operationalize models with reactive as well, because it's basically a single platform to move between these two worlds. So what we've continued to see is data science kind of separate from the application world, right? Really kind of AI and cloud as different universes. The reality is that for any enterprise or any company to really innovate, you have to find a way to bring those two worlds together to get the most use out of it. Furrier always says data is the new development kid. He said this, I think, five or six years ago and it's barely becoming true. I mean, you guys have tried to make an attempt and have done a pretty good job of trying to bring those worlds together in a single platform. What do you call it, the Watson data platform? Yeah, Watson data platform, I'm now Watson studio and I think the other, so one side of it is us trying to, not really trying, but us actually bringing together these disparate systems, right? I mean, we are kind of a systems company, we're IT, but not only that, but bringing our trained algorithms and our trained models to the developers. So for example, we also did a partnership with Unity at the end of last year that's now just reaching some pretty good growth in terms of bringing the Watson SDK to game developers on the Unity platform. So again, it's this idea of bringing the game developer, the application developer in closer contact with these trained models and these trained algorithms and that's where you're seeing incredible things happen. So for example, Star Trek Bridge Crew, which I don't know how many Trekkies we have here at the CDO Summit. A few over here probably. Yeah, a couple. They're using our SDK in Unity to basically allow a gamer to use voice commands through the headset, through a VR headset to talk to other players in the virtual game. So we're going to see more. I can't really disclose too much what we're doing there, but there's some cool stuff coming out of that partnership. Real immersive experience driving a lot of data. Now you're part of the digital business group. I like the term digital business because we talk about it all the time. Digital business, what's the difference between a digital business and a business? What's to how they use data? You're a data person. What does that mean to you're part of the digital business group? Is that an internal facing thing, an external facing thing, both? It's really both. I mean, so our chief digital officer, Bob Lord, he has a presentation that he'll give where he starts out and he goes, when I tell people I'm the chief digital officer, they usually think I just manage the website. I think that's probably, if I tell people I'm a chief data officer, it means I manage our data in governance over here. The reality is that I think these chief digital officer, chief data officers, I mean, they're really response for business transformation, right? And so if you actually look at what we're doing, I think on both sides is we're using data, we're using marketing technology, MarTech, like Optimizely, like Segment, like some of these great partners of ours, to really look at how we can quickly A-B test, get user feedback, to look at how we actually test different offerings in market. And so really what we're doing is we're setting up a testing platform to bring, not only our traditional offers to market, like DB2, mainframe, et cetera, but also bring new offers to market, like Blockchain and Quantum and others, and actually figure out how we get better product market fit. What actually, one thing, one story that comes to mind is if you've seen the movie Hidden Figures, there's this scene where Kevin Costner, I know this is going to look not great for IBM, but I'm going to say it anyways, which is, Kevin Costner has like a sledgehammer, and he's like trying to break down the wall to get the mainframe in a room. I mean, that's what it feels like sometimes, because we create the best technology, but we forget sometimes about the last mile, like we got to break down the wall. Where am I going to put it? To get it in the room. So honestly, I think that's a lot of what we're doing. We're bridging that last mile between these different audiences. So between developers, between ISVs, between commercial buyers, like how do we actually make this technology not just accessible to large enterprise, which are our main clients, but also to the other ecosystems and other audiences out there? Well, so that's interesting, Joel, because as a potential partner of IBM, they want, obviously, your go-to-market, massive company and great distribution channel, but at the same time, you want more than that. You want to have a closer, IBM always focuses on partnerships that have intrinsic value. So you talked about offerings, you're talking about quantum, blockchain, off camera, talking about cloud, containers. I'd say cloud and containers, maybe a little closer than those others, but those others are going to take a lot of market development. So what are the offerings that you guys are bringing? How do they get into the hands of your partners? I mean, the commonality with all of these, all the emerging offerings, if you ask me, is the distributed nature of the offerings. So if you look at blockchain, it's a distributed ledger, right? It's a distributed transaction chain that's secure. If you look at data, really, and we can hark back to say Hadoop before object storage, it's distributed storage. So it's not just storing on your hard drive locally, it's storing on a distributed network of servers that are all over the world in data centers. If you look at cloud and containers, what you're really doing is not running your application on individual server that can go down. You're using containers because you want to distribute that application over a large network of servers so that if one server goes down, you're not going to be hosed. And so I think the fundamental shift that you're seeing is this distributed nature, which in essence is cloud. So I think cloud is just kind of a synonym, in my opinion, for distributed nature of our business. That's interesting, and that brings up, you're right, cloud and big data slash Hadoop, we don't talk about Hadoop much anymore, but it kind of got it all started with that notion of leave the data where it is. That's right. And it's the same thing with cloud. You can't just stuff your business into the public cloud. You got to bring the cloud to your data. That's right. But that brings up a whole new set of challenges, which obviously you're in a position to help solve performance, latency, physics, come into play. Yeah, physics is a rough one. It's kind of hard to avoid that one. Here are your best people are working on it, though. Some other partnerships that you want to sort of... Yeah, I know. I mean, we have some really great... So I think the key kind of partnership, I would say area that I would allude to is one of the things, and you kind of reference this, a lot of our partners, big or small, want to work with our top clients. So they want to work with our top banking clients. Because these are, if you look at, for example, Merisk and what we're doing with them around blockchain, and frankly, you talk about innovation, they're innovating containers for real, not virtual containers. And that's a joint venture, right? Yeah, it is. And so it's exciting because what we're bringing to market is I also lead our startup programs called the Global Entrepreneurship Program. And so what I'm focused on doing, and you'll probably see more to come this quarter, is how do we actually bridge that end-to-end? How do you, if you're a startup or a small business, ultimately reach that kind of global business partner level, right? And so kind of bridging that end-to-end. So we're starting to bring out a number of different incentives for partners, like co-marketing, so we'll help startups when they're early, like figure out product market fit. We'll give you free credits to use our innovative technology and we'll also bring you into a number of clients to basically help you not burn all of your cash on creating your own marketing channel. God knows I did that when I was at a startup. So I think we're doing a lot to kind of bridge that end-to-end and help any partner kind of come in and then grow with IBM. I think that's where we're headed. I think that's a critical part of your job because obviously IBM's known for its global 2000 big enterprise presence, but startups, again, fuel that innovation fire. So being able to attract them, which you're proving you can, providing whatever it is, access, early access to cloud services or like you say, these other offerings that you're producing in addition to that go-to market. Because you look, it's funny, we always talk about how efficient, capital efficient software is. But then you have these companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars, why? Because they got to do promotion, marketing, sales, go-to-market. Yeah, it's really expensive. I mean you look at most startups, like their biggest ticket item is usually marketing and sales, right? And building channels. And so yeah, if you're, we're talking to a number of partners who want to work with us because of the fact that it's not just like the direct kind of channel, it's also, as you kind of mentioned, like there's other challenges that you have to overcome when you're working with a larger company. For example, like security is a big one. GDPR compliance now is a big one. And just making sure that things don't fall over is a big one. And so a lot of partners work with us because ultimately a number of the decision makers in these larger enterprises are going, well, I trust IBM and if IBM says you're good, then I believe you. And so that's where we're kind of starting to pull partners in and pull an ecosystem towards us because of the fact that we can take them through that level of certification. So we have a number of free online courses. So if you go to partners, excuse me, IBM.com forward slash partners forward slash learn, there's a number of blockchain courses that you can learn today. And we'll actually give you a digital certificate that's actually certified on our own blockchain, which we're actually a first of a kind to do that, which I think is pretty slick and it's accredited at some of the universities. So I think that's where people are looking to IBM and other leaders in this industry is to help them become experts in this technology and especially in this emerging technology. I love that blockchain actually because it means it's such a growing and interesting and innovative field but it needs players like IBM that can bring credibility, enterprise grade, whether it's security or just, as I say, credibility because there's so much of negative connotations associated with blockchain and crypto but companies like IBM coming to the table, enterprise companies and building that ecosystem out is my view crucial. Yeah, no, it takes a village. I mean, there's a lot of folks. I mean, that's a big reason why I came to IBM three, four years ago was because when I was in startup land, I used to work for H2O and work for Alpine Data Labs, Datamir back in the Hadoop days and what I realized was that it's an opportunity cost so you can't really drive true global innovation, transformation and some of these bigger companies because there's only so much that you can really kind of bite off and so at IBM it's been a really rewarding experience because we have done things like, for example, we partnered with Girls Who Code, Treehouse, Udacity. So there's a number of early educators that we've partnered with to bring code to, to bring technology to that frankly would never have access to some of this stuff, some of this technology if we didn't form these alliances and if we didn't join these partners, these partnerships. So I'm very excited about the future of IBM and I'm very excited about the future of what our partners are doing with IBM because geez, the cloud and everything that we're doing to make this accessible is bar none. I mean, it's great. Well, I can tell you're excited, you know, spring in your step, always a lot of energy, Joel. Really appreciate you coming onto theCUBE. Great to see you again. Yeah, thanks Dave. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. We're at the IBM CDO Strategy Summit in San Francisco, you're watching theCUBE.