 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. This is theCUBE where we extract the signal from the noise, bringing the smartest guests that we can find. We're here at the HackReduce launch in Cambridge with Rob Thomas of IBM, a multi-time Cube guest, Rob. Welcome back. Hey, great to be here. Great to be here at the College Game Day of Tech in another town and another week. It's great. So this is like College Game Day, you know? We're the ESPN of Tech. We're here at HackReduce. So you're a sponsor of HackReduce. You know, why, why did you get involved? When did you get involved? Talk about that a little bit. Also, it's interesting. I got to know Chris a number of years ago when he was with Vertica. We kept in touch through the years and he called me up and he said, I'm thinking about doing this thing up in Boston. What do you think? And IBM has a huge commitment to state of Massachusetts. We built a big development lab here. We've acquired a bunch of companies here. As Chris kind of described the vision, I thought was this is something we want to be involved in. So it's great to be here and great to be a sponsor. Yeah, so what do you think about the big data activity that's going on? I mean, I see it as obviously Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston seem to be the three areas really vying for talent and innovation. What's your take on that? No question. I think one thing I regret for Boston is I think Boston kind of missed out on the last decade of real innovation, new companies. And you know, 80s and 90s, Boston owned. And then they kind of missed this middle year, social, mobile, all that kind of stuff. But this big data is right in the sweet spot for what the universities produce here in terms of talent. It's right what the venture firms know. So I do think this is a new opportunity for kind of a rebirth in Boston around big data. What are you seeing as the really interesting trends that in big data that catch your attention as a corporate development individual? You know, as you and I have talked about before, big data is much more than Hadoop in my view. So you need tooling, you need streaming analytics, you need use cases, applications on top of big data. You need security for big data. So we think much broader than Hadoop. And as I look at the kind of companies that Chris is involved with, companies in Boston, they're thinking about this the right way, which was with an enterprise mindset, which is obviously what we care about. Well, I want to talk about that a little bit because my observation, Rob, is that I look at sort of the way in which companies go to market in this big data space. And on the one hand, you got the Hadoop guys, the startups, and they're talking about, you know, really nitty gritty Hadoop stuff, MapReduce, and they're talking about all kinds of, you know, things that are very focused on Hadoop, Hortonworks, versus Cloudera, Apache, et cetera. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got the traditional enterprise guys that are basically saying, look, use Hadoop for batch, use us for real time. IBM doesn't get down in those weeds. IBM comes to market and says, it's all about business value. And you guys really try to demonstrate that by industry. That's unique, in my opinion. Where did that come from? Because I would say a year ago, IBM was kind of all over the place in big data and you've really honed your story in the use cases in the last 12 months. Can you talk about that a little bit, how that happened? Sure, I mean, like everybody else, we started experimenting a few years ago. We made the decision about a year ago that we were going to be distribution agnostic. We're going to have our own Apache Hadoop distribution. We're going to partner with other distribution partners. Our view is value for the enterprise is up the staff. It's integration. It's making sure that big data doesn't become a silo. It's building line of business applications and use cases. That's where clients, the kind of clients that we sell to will get value out of big data. So our view was we love the plumbing. We're glad there's plumbing. We'll do our own version of it. But we also don't mind partnering for some of that. But we want to deliver full suite solutions to clients which is integrated with their existing infrastructure. And you also have a big industry focus too, I've noticed. I mean, you're really driving use cases by industry. No question. And, you know, it's actually brought IBM into industries where IBM has not always been traditionally the strongest. Places like Energy and Utilities. You know, we had Conoco Phillips up at our IOD conference where you were there talking about what they're doing with us around big data. We're doing it in things like wind energy. We're doing it in retail. We're doing it in industries where we haven't always had a big footprint. But I think those companies see us as leading and making big data consumable. And I think that's the biggest challenge right now with big data. Is it consumable for an enterprise that does not have all the right skills? So obviously IBM does a ton of R&D but you also do great acquisitions. IBM's probably the most disciplined company in the industry when it comes to acquisitions. So it's a balance. Can you talk about your M&A strategy and the big data space to the extent that you can share with us? Sure, I mean, we have a big team doing our own organic development but we acquire for two reasons. We acquire for revenue growth and it's also time to market. You know, we can, I believe we can build almost anything but we can't build it as fast as somebody that's already built it. And so we acquired a company by the name of Avisimo about five months ago based in Pittsburgh. That was a key part of big data for us which was big data indexing. How do you let enterprises access all their data across different repositories and we'll continue to look at different things that can complement what we're doing. Yeah, Avisimo came out of CMU. We had him on theCUBE, very interesting company. All right, Rob, listen, thanks for spending some time on us, always great to see you. Great to see you, I appreciate it. I take care, keep it right there, we're right back from HackReduce. This is Dave Vellante, this is theCUBE.