 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with two great guests, Andrew Cowherj, the GM, software-defined networking at IBM and Caroline Chappelle Research Director, Cloud and Platform Services at Analysis Mason. Folks, thanks for coming on, Caroline. Good to see you, Andrew. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. You're welcome. It's nice to be here. Thank you. So software-defined networking, love it. Software-defined data center, software-defined cloud, all that has been pointing to what is now a reality, which is hybrid cloud and the edge and soon to be multi-cloud. This kind of makes networking, again, at the center pieces has been this way for now, at least for five hardcore years at the center of the value proposition and discussion and certainly networking is super relevant. Why is networking now more important than ever for IBM? Well, to your point, I think networking's weaved into pretty much everything we touch from Red Hat Linux, through to analytics, machine learning tools, security, cloud services, and so on. And the networking business is changing very radically at the moment. We're going through a massive shift, not just the cloud, but the disaggregation of networking products that you think has been very tight and integrated are actually being separated into their constituent parts. Distribution of applications and data across multiple clouds, ensuring that the products really have industry-leading capabilities so that networking is weaved into what they do. The other thing, and this is kind of scary numbers, right? But there's now over 15 billion network-capable devices out there with general capabilities. And so I don't mean like really dumb things, but things that are now will be called smart, like a smart car, a medical center that's got applications that even your fridge now has general compute capabilities. And all of those are expected to connect into a public or private cloud. And so how they connect, where data moves across that are really on the critical concern to everything that we at IBM do. So I have to ask you, I love the word radical change. It gets my attention for certain. What specifically are you referring to in radical change? Because I mean, I would, I mean, I'm pretty radical that COVID has hit everybody. And I think everyone woke up and never thought 100% of the workforce would be working remotely. So there is radical kind of macro conditions. What specifically though about networking would you say is radical? How does it impact the enterprise? Well, right. I think it's about how computers are shifting and how network has to follow. We've been speaking with lots of enterprise accounts and customers. And through COVID and over the last year, we've seen that the ongoing migration into not just one cloud, but many clouds. And you'd think the enterprise could stop and say, two clouds is enough, we're gonna be here and we're gonna be over there. That's not happening. There is no limit to the number of clouds that each enterprise is going into. And it's not a coordinated decision. So the radicalness of this is that the network guys, the cloud architects are being left to pick up the pieces. And their job now is to kind of join together applications and data that might be spread in three or four different locations. And that's really, really challenging. And nobody's thinking about things like latency, connectivity, data portability when these decisions are made. And it's kind of like the business units are allowed to make their own decisions here, but the corporate itself then has to figure out how all this stuff works. And that's creating a lot of headaches. Caroline, if you could chime in on this, because this is kind of what we're hearing. What's your thoughts? Because I mean, the platform's shifting. I mean, five years ago it goes, oh, go move to the cloud, lift and shift. Now the conversation is hyper focused on cloud integration at scale with kind of the features that enterprise really need. That's the confusion. What's your take on all this radical change? Well, I'd like to talk about another aspect of the sort of radical change here, which I think is part of the story, which is the radical change for the network. So the network itself is, as Andrew said, becoming disaggregated into hardware and software and really becoming a software application, if you think about it, that runs on the cloud itself. And that means you can distribute the network in a very different way than you could in the past. And what that's really affecting is who can provide a network, how they can provide it and what services, what network services they can provide. And I think that is changing the decision points for enterprises. They're being faced with a very big choice about who will provide their connectivity services. Will it be an SD-WAN vendor who's not necessarily a traditional operator? Will it be a SASE player that's basically just operating out of the cloud? And if you look at the services themselves, there's the opportunity for enterprises to build really kind of rich, bespoke connectivity on demand in a way that they've never had before. And I think that choice is obviously wonderful in one sense, but in another sense, it's pretty scary. And as Andrew said, it's not these decisions are not being taken particularly in a coordinated way. You'll have your traditional network guys often very embedded with the lines of business. And then you'll have the IT guys all going to the cloud. And these two parts of an enterprise don't necessarily even talk to each other in terms of how they're procuring their network services. So a lot of choice, a lot of moving parts, a lot of change. And I think that's contributing to the situation we're finding ourselves in. So first of all, great insight. I want to just double down on that one point around radical change because what you just laid out is kind of the institutional lock-in or the way they've been operating things before. You mentioned lines of business being embedded with the network guys. So okay, you have radical change. So that's a disruption. So what's the disruption look like from your perspective? Because now you've got more choice but it's been operationalized. What are the best practices? Is it net new? Is it net new? How do I do security? This is all now new questions. So I got to ask you, what's the disruption? And what's it mean for the enterprise networks over the next couple of years going forward? Well, I think that there are a lot of disruptions but I think one of the, and ones that I haven't even mentioned. So I think a lot of things are going to go, for example, I think that the idea of the network as being something fixed, persistent with fixed persistent connections is changing. So a lot of enterprises I've talked to have said that the corporate networks, of course they will need corporate networks with fixed VPNs between locations because they've got an awful lot of legacy they've got to support. But a lot of the new stuff that's coming along with the IoT driven stuff, a lot of the changes around the edge and operational process automation and that kind of thing will actually be more on demand. We'll ask for on demand connectivity. A lot of it is, the applications themselves will run on the cloud and not just on one cloud, but as Andrew said, on many, many distributed clouds. So you've got to think about zero trust security because you are basically spinning up these connections on demand. A lot of mobile will come in, 5G we know is going to be very important to operators in the future. So I think enterprises have got to deal with that data and security and all their best practices have got to shift to a much more dynamic connectivity world where they've got to sort of play off what's deterministic and what's a network that's just going to be on demand there when they need it and shut down when they don't. That's a great point, Andrew. I want you to weigh in on the IBM impact because what we just heard was application driven, that's DevOps, that's programmability, that's what we had hoped. Now you got DevSecOps, all this is now the requirements. What's the bet on IBM side? You've got to make it happen. You've got to bring the customers a solution and make it scale and be responsive to those new dynamically flexible agile networks. Well, that's right. So the bet is that these applications are being split up, they're being containerized and they're being separated into these clouds. And connecting those is what we as IBM have to do. And so kind of an example of that, kind of looking at the medical world, right? You think of an application that would today monitor a patient and what's going on with that patient in all of the senses and so on. Well, the way we see it, the monitor itself that might be monitoring temperature and heart rate, et cetera, what actually happens on that device might change moment to moment depending on the patient's condition. That's one part of the application, another part of that application may live in private data center. And a third part of that application may live in the cloud. And depending on what's going on with that patient and what's going on with the ward and everything else, those things may shift and move around. So where does that data, where's that data allowed to move to and from? And what are the boundary points for that? How is the reliability resiliency of that system guaranteed across many disparate parts of what's going on there? All of those things end up being, a very vertically integrated solution. But fundamentally, we've got a very different way and new ways of being able to react dynamically to both the network, the application and ultimately the end user application in this case is case and that's what kind of is the benefit or the outcome if you like for moving to this new world. So what are the implications then of the changes? These are massive changes for the better. We're seeing that kind of innovation come from this transformational change. Hybrid cloud and edge is coming. You mentioned Caroline talked about that too. What do you guys think about the implications and how enterprises specifically can prepare for these changes? Okay, well, I can pick that up. I think what enterprises are looking for at the moment is how do they get a holistic view of everything that's underneath them? I mean, I think the cloud providers individually are abstracting away as much of the network as they possibly can. They want it to appear to developers just as some kind of plumbing. And it's very easy now for enterprises to through APIs. You know, we've got a very API driven world. So it's very easy to say, okay, I want this service and I'm just going to go through the API and connect to it. And that's why you get to the situation of multiple, multiple clouds. Now you've got this situation where you've got some companies are talking about needing 50 to 10,000 micro data centers, broom closet data centers, if you like, to support some of the things that they want to do, like to pick up telemetry from rental cars, for example. So what they really need is to look at all that connectivity just as plumbing, just as we don't sort of worry about how electricity is being delivered to us. That's kind of how they want to do connectivity. So I think they want that view. They want that, okay, I want to treat my network as one virtual thing, no matter how many different points of plumbing there are underneath. And it's getting to that point that I think they've really got to think about and plan for, you know, how do we get that view? What's going to provide us with that holistic way that we can put a policy into our plumbing and it proliferates across all our applications and so on. I think that's a very difficult thing to achieve at the moment, but it's certainly the way enterprises need to start thinking about things. Andrew, you know, when Caroline's talking, I can't help but kind of throw back to my days of the telephone closet, you know, back in the analog switches. But no, we're talking about a footprint, radical footprint change too. You know, you need plumbing. Obviously that's a network. It's distributed. We just talked about that the top of this interview. Now you have the plumbing. You've got the footprint and data center could be in a closet, AKA, you know, a couple of devices powering an edge and the edge could be big, small, medium, extra large, right? I mean, it's all now radically changed. This is reality now. What's your take on these implications and how do people prepare? Well, that's right. It's really the computer is generalized in its everywhere. And yes, it's in the closet. But as I say, it's also in your fridge. It's also in your medical center and what loads and what runs on that is very intertwined with the network. And Lament, if you like, the network architects, the cloud architects have today is that they feel like they've lost control. They feel like lost control of exactly what different business groups are doing, how these applications are playing out. And the shout out to them, I guess for them is really that they need to be involved from a very early date of how these services are supposed to look. Just the latency implications, the data where the data is supposed to live, where it's allowed to move to, all of those are deeply regulated and deeply controlled. And so making sure that that's aligned with how these applications will actually live and work in a regular basis is something that has to be thought about now and planned for so that we can get to the there and not trip up along the way. And if it's bad enough now with all the different clouds, it's going to be much worse when everything can run a different workload on a minute by minute basis, right? But that's the world we have to plan for. Okay, Andrew, Caroline, thank you for your insight. I really appreciate it coming on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, this is theCUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.