 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at IBM Edge 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Hey, welcome back everyone. Day two of the Cube here live in Las Vegas for IBM Edge 2014. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the ceiling from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. My co-host Dave Vellante here to kick off day one. Wall-to-wall coverage, two days of coverage where infrastructure matters. Dave, great to see you again. It's been a while. Stu's filled in a few times. I'm back at a personal issue yesterday. Thanks for covering for me. You know, really, Dave, I got to say, IBM's transformation back in the saddle. We talked at Pulse and Impact about the low-end servers going to Lenovo. We saw some folks last night. I'm pretty excited about that. Not a lot of sales being lost from what we're hearing on that piece, but in general, you're seeing infrastructure still at the value proposition of companies. And with all the hyper-clouds, certainly at OpenStack and all the shows we go to, the hybrid cloud is the future. But at the end of the day, the software-defined data center is the battleground. That's what customers are looking for, for the innovation and the innovation strategy by CIOs and enterprises and service providers are around software. But the road leads back to the data center, Dave. And I got to get your take on this because we were having some conversations last night with some industry luminaries and some insiders and at the end of the day, they love the cloud, they love the economics and certainly public cloud has some nice things to throw out there. But at the end of the day, the transformation for a large enterprise is not that easy, it's hard, it's difficult and the infrastructure does matter, it's not going away. I want to get your take on that. VisaV interviews yesterday and looking back at the shows and what do you expect to hear more from IBM here? Well, I think it starts at the top, John. And last week, we saw Ginny Rometti, the CEO of IBM, was addressing the financial analysts, she was on CNBC for an interview. She was sharp, she was cogent, she was confident. Essentially talking about the transition that IBM is making and the investments that IBM is making, particularly in cloud and mobile and big data and how they're really putting a lot of resources into those areas. Word is, John, that when she was doing one of her reviews with the storage team, she was blown away by the amount of IP and stuff that was in the portfolio and they started to talk about, okay, how do we put this together, how do we really go to market with this stuff and make a big splash. IBM last week was in Boston sort of packaging up the messaging and the new products, the new portfolios, they brought in people from the labs, from Haifa. And essentially what you're seeing, John, is IBM is writing the coattails of Watson for a portion of their storage strategy and they're driving a software defined storage approach that is heavily reliant on OpenStack and also other technologies that they have in their portfolio, not the least of which is the sand volume controller and other virtualization technologies which will allow customers to go from point A to point B without a giant disruption. They're also putting in pieces of GPFS. So they're pulling little pieces and parts of IBM together into sort of the new software defined strategy that we're seeing. And they're on a collision course with other folks in the industry, most notably John EMC, which we've heard a whole lot of stuff on software defined. So IBM's approach is I think a little different and some could argue even quite a bit different, but there are also a lot of similarities, particularly in terms of how they transition from old legacy sort of data platforms into the new. The big difference really is around how much emphasis IBM is putting on OpenStack and how much resource IBM is putting on OpenStack versus EMC's more dipping its toe in the water. Well, we're excited to be here and hear from IBM. I'm certainly a big player, Dave, in the industry. Obviously the big whale and what they do is a bellwether and certainly we want to extract that signal from the noise. Go to crowdchat.net slash IBM Edge. That's our innovative engagement container. We'll be following that to stream for the IBM Edge. All the comments there are threaded and put to the hashtag of IBM Edge. So come and sign in and join the conversation. Ask us questions, we'll be looking for your comments. And certainly, if you've got any questions you want to ask the IBM Executive, we're certainly glad to ask them. But Dave, getting back to kind of some of the things that we want to see, one of the things I'm looking for is customers, right? Because at the end of the day, when you have the hype cycle and the trough of disillusionment, as Gardner says, and then really the real deal, the growth in the market's going to be down to what the customer's doing. So I'm really interested to get your take on what you think the customers are doing and also don't forget the channel, the indirect sales forces that are in place, that reach a lot of the customers indirectly and certainly on the direct side. And that sales motion of what's going on certainly is to me the telltale sign of where the traction is. You know, the companies like IBM and folks like that can retool all they want, talk to transformation. They got to deliver the product to the market with buyers. That to me is the validation. And that to me is what we need to look for. I want to get your take, Dave. What do you think customers are doing and some of the conversations that you heard yesterday and what do you expect to hear from today? Because at the end of the day, that's the meat on the bone. Well, we heard from Mike Smith yesterday. He was a CIO at Lee Memorial Hospital talking about what changes are occurring in his business and how infrastructure plays. I mean, he fully admitted, look, as a CIO, I don't want to be thinking about infrastructure all night, but when it breaks, I think about it. So I want my infrastructure to just work. Well, we heard this morning from Mike North on the keynotes and we also had him on yesterday from the NFL about how the permutations of scheduling that they're doing has changed as a result of infrastructure. And also we had to hear Ali on who was the director of enterprise technology at the city of Hope, talking again about the medical practice that they're running. Now they have a little different business, but again, infrastructure was a key part of how they're putting their investments forward, not only running the business, but trying to transform it. So, and we've got, I think, 10 customers this week at Edge, John, which is probably a new record for any IBM event. So that's great. We love talking to customers. At the end of the day, what they do sets the table. Also the use cases, Dave. We want to look at that and look at it from the perspective of, okay, where's the action technically? What's going on in the marketplace and the business model transformation is something that we always like to poke at because at the end of the day, the business model innovates is around the new technology and the disruption, ultimately turned into the client value which gets passed on to the customers. This is what theCUBE does. We're going to explore that all day long. We're going to talk to the leaders of IBM, their customers, and find out what use cases truly make infrastructure matter. We want to know is it software, is it flash, et cetera? And that's what we're going to do. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest at the short break, day two coverage here inside theCUBE.