 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is live exclusive coverage from Silicon Angles, theCUBE, our flagship program. When we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. So my co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. Go to Silicon Angles for all the reference point for tech innovation. Go to Wikibon for free research. Our next guest is Adam Gunther, program director, cloud offerings of IBM. Welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. You've been involved in WebSphere and going back in your early career with IBM and the blue mix part of that project here you were mentioned in the Liberty profile. You have a lot of worker developers. You've been a computer scientist yourself. Big news here. I see developer focus, but on the business side, cloud equals growth. Big story. You guys are putting out numbers like $7 billion by 2015 as a company. 70% of the attendees here are first timers. So you're attracting some new talent, new eyeballs and new people in the show. You have Dev at Pulse going on here. Simultaneous which is kind of like an open, I want to say hackathon meets party for developers. No strings attached. I would add it's not part of the conference per se, but it is a free event. Kind of your first foray into a bear hugging the developer community in a very open way. You've always been open, not that you haven't been open, but like for DevOps at least. So give us a scoop. Where's this coming from? The vision behind cloud operations, cloud offering. It's about programming at the end of the day. It's about writing code, infrastructure as code, scale, tooling, all the above. Give us a snapshot of kind of where we're at and kind of where we're going. Yeah, I mean, it comes from a simple starting point and that is developers are where innovation happens and it starts with one developer sitting behind a desk somewhere having his coffee, coming up with an idea. But when you have a small idea like that, how do you quickly iterate on it and turn it into business value? How do you start and build from systems that you have today and make it a more engaging experience? And that's really where we started with Bluemix, is how do we build a platform where developers can rapidly iterate, have a large variety of services, of runtimes, of choice to build on top of what's out there today, to get at that backend data and then develop real value. And that's where the billion dollar ideas come from, that's where innovation comes from. And it's as simple as that, but it really is about the developers and those ideas. I mean, you really couldn't ask for a perfect storm of PR, WhatsApp gets bought for $19 billion, a soft layer customer. It's apps like that. I mean, that's the Kool-Aid that people are drinking right now, saying, hey, that could be me. You know, I mean, it's a jaw-dropping number. Granted, it's a black swan, unicorn, whatever you want to call it. But yet, that's the opportunity. Couple guys in their 40s could knock down an app like that, hits a lucky strike, builds a good app, people love it, they download it, scales up. I mean, to put that together in the old days would have been a huge task. So that's a good benchmark for an enterprise who's kind of on a similar situation. They're in their 40s, you know, in their price and they have some old technology. They have to make something happen fast and they need scale that pops. Yeah, and it's the building off of things that makes things exciting. So let me give an example that people want to do today. Let's just pick insurance industry, I've got sales people in the field today, they're trying to close deals and they want to know, okay, I talked to somebody and maybe they went onto Twitter and they had a negative experience and they complained. Very simple requirement of I want to be able to understand when that happens as a business and send a push notification to, you know, that employee sales person's cell phone to say, hey, you talked to this person earlier today and they had a bad experience and you better reach back out and try to fix that connection. Now, when you think about what has to happen to do that, you need access to Twitter, you need to be able to do analytics on that, you need access to backend systems, you need maybe access to Salesforce, you know, that could be where you are storing your customer leads and then you need to be able to build the mobile application and do a push notification. And that's really the types of use cases we're thinking of with Bluemix is, how do I build that quickly? So with Bluemix, having the connectors built in as part of the vision for cloud integration to be able to quickly get a Twitter, to be able to quickly expose backend systems as APIs, as services, connect to that, you know, build on the API economy and then, you know, a developer to create the API and then be able to share that because maybe you have a mobile developer in line of business that's going to compose that mobile application. Using the mobile services that we have in the platform, combination of IBM, open source and then be able to consume that API and deploy that application and that's so you can really quickly do that. You don't have to know all the backend systems. We had Mike Gill fix on earlier, director of mobile first platform and analytics, he's out of Austin, we talk about mobile. One of the things that he hit on that was really kind of made us go, wow, this is Amazon like, is the integrated stack, right? It's integrating code revisions. So a developer doesn't have to worry about, okay, I didn't write that node piece. I'm doing the reddest piece or I'm doing this over here with Bluemix. Having something where it's automatic, all the revisions, all the patches are loaded. I mean, who loads software anymore? That paradigm is moving into the cloud. So there's a lot of nuance there. Can you explain how cool it is and what the upside is of having this all integrated together? Oh, it's really cool. And if you think about vision, imagine talking to the next generation in 40 years and they may not even understand the concept of installing software. It's just there and I use it. So, I mean, exactly. And it builds on the story that I told before. Being able at your fingertips to get at APIs and build APIs and that's really what it's about is the API economy to compose those applications and it's the collaboration around it. So it's the DevOps tools to help with continuous delivery. It is the ability to have one developer in your enterprise create an API and expose it to other developers in your enterprise. And then when they log into a platform, they should be able to see the APIs available to my enterprise, the APIs that have been custom built for me and the things that are meant for me to use and not have a mess of everyone else. What's the sort of go back to the origins of Bluemix and where to come from? How much of the web sphere DNA is in there? How much did you learn from the web sphere experience even though it's decade plus ago that you can build on and what's significantly different? Yeah, and conceptually what we did with web sphere 15 years ago for the web was help the enterprise get from their backend systems and get into the web. And what we're doing now with the cloud is the same thing, taking them to the next generation and being able to extend and build on what you have today. Because that's what they want, right? You always hear that from the other. I'm here, I want to get here, I don't want to rip and replace, I don't know why I do it. So that's the philosophy behind it, right? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right because those systems that are there today are great systems and they do a lot of good and you're not just going to tear it down and throw it in the cloud. And a lot of times I talk to customers and they get scared of cloud because they say, I can't just throw everything in there and I've got data concerns and privacy concerns and it's really about hybrid and about integration and about how do I take new services in the cloud and use it with systems on the backend and concert to build a new engaging experience. In terms of where we started off with, one of the things that we're doing is we're not just taking a bunch of IBM software and throwing it in the cloud as is. So when you hear about IBM as a service, what that is is it's taking things from our history, from our knowledge but making sure that it is ready for a cloud environment. So you started off and you mentioned the Liberty Profile which I've been a part of. Webster application server is a great product and it will be here for years to come running lots of workloads. But when we started to look at the cloud, especially in a platform as a service environment, the architecture just isn't designed for that. So we created the Liberty Profile for Java Runtimes which is architected, designed to be composable modular in the cloud. So the container is small and it scales up. So that's our Java Runtime in Bluemix. If you look in the beta, there's a service from IBM called Elastic MQ. We looked at our WebSphere MQ heritage. It's the same team that's building that but they're taking that knowledge and architecting it for the cloud. Because we really want this to be a cloud platform next generation and not just, oh let's just get a bunch of services running in here that aren't going to work well. So if I look at the WebSphere history and the evolution of things like message queuing and transaction processing and other components, you're saying you're basically fast-forwarding those into Bluemix with sort of modern design and clean sheet of paper with a lot of experience. Modern design, modern APIs, modern SDKs for the developers, the architecture so you can stand it up and run it in a multi-tenant environment with a background and it can scale and in everything that you need to run. Not what people are used to today on-premise, they may scale to thousands of servers. In the cloud, the number of connections from mobile devices, I mean think about this conference, you have 10,000 people that each one has a cell phone, they have laptops, they have tablets. Now think of Internet of Things and you start to have connected devices everywhere. The number of connections on those systems, you're going to have to scale at magnitudes that we haven't seen before and the architecture has to support that. So when you think about WebSphere, what it did for IBM and e-business and e-commerce, that gives you a lot of confidence that you got the model right, IBM has sort of learned pretty well in the last two decades how to execute, right? Whether it's acquisitions, whether it's plunking down a billion dollars and actually getting a lot of return out of it and now you take something like Bluemix building on your WebSphere heritage. So that's got to give you a lot of confidence. Where do you think the blind spots are? I mean they're blind spots so you don't know where they are but what is it up at night and you say, I don't really know this. This is sort of an unknown to me. Where are those things? Well, let me tell you what we're doing to find our blind spots because I think that's what's more important is how do you discover what you don't know? So Phil Gilbert and IBM Design have been doing some really, really great things and helping us think through how do we develop software from a user perspective and how do we connect with people? So this is one of the signature products where with Bluemix we are following the design process. We have a great team of designers working on it and with that we have about a dozen or so and it's growing sponsor clients. So these are customers ranging from companies of three people to large enterprises with tens of thousands of employees that we meet with on a weekly basis and we play back our designs. We play back our architecture. We understand our feedback so we could hear from them right now in development what those blind spots are. So it's been really good and we really want to get inside the heads of not just the developers, but the operations people, the consumers of it, the IT managers, the auditors that are going to have to deal with the platforms and really understand what it is they need to make sure we're addressing that. So if you're a solutions architect, what do you mean, what's the update for them, okay? I'm like, pretend I'm a solutions architect for a second. I'm not my head in the sand for about a year on vacation, taking care of my personal stuff, doing my job, making sure backups are going on, making sure all the lights are running. Now I wake up and damn, cloud error, I got to get moving on this. What should I pay attention to? What would you point out as key dependencies around this architecture? What would you say to me and say, hey, John, pay attention to X, Y, and Z? What would it be? And especially for people that are used to administering the back end systems, what I challenge them to think about is, okay, you are now exposing these systems so people can use them in the cloud. We talked about cloud integration a few moments ago. Once you've done that and you have new APIs and mobile devices and your back end systems are getting used in ways you didn't think of before, how does that back end system scale to all the new traffic and transactions that are now running? So, and there's different ways you can handle that. So depending if it's a data system, do I want to put a cache there? Do I need to, if I've got a traditional Webster cluster, do I need to create more servers? If I need to grow that, do I want to burst onto the cloud? Do I want to look at something like a pure application system? There's lots of ways to scale on-premise, but I think people need to think about the load on the back end that all these new systems and devices are going to drive through the cloud. Talk about the, well, let me step back. Question I've been getting on Twitter and commenting is, what the hell is Database as a service? Okay, get cloud and part of Bluemix messaging. Obviously it's a new breed. We know that I've been following that company since it got founded. My friend Rich Leventhoff was the original investor. Remember those guys who were just kicking the tires? Just starting out, biting their teeth into some cloud. What is Database as a service? And why is it important? Why should I pay attention to it? Yeah, sure. I mean, so Database as a service, like anything as a service, is Database, you know, basically expose their APIs that I can call in the cloud very easily. So I don't have to set up a database. I don't have to administer it. I don't need a database administrator. I don't have to go get a bunch of hardware and deploy it. And more importantly, I don't have to worry about how do I scale the database infrastructure? That's a challenge. And it's really, you know, the whole as a service model is, you know, I just want to read and write to a database. I want to deploy tables. I want to do that and just help me do that. Now, with cloud, what we're really excited about, so being a no SQL database, especially when you're talking about- Schema issues. Yeah, schema issues. And, you know, a lot of things on the web is just passing JSON across and doing basic crud operations. And, you know, things like no JS with no SQL, just scale better than Java would do to do that. There's certain workloads, though, that, you know, Java is going to scale better for. And really what Bluemix is about, and any platform should be about, is freedom of choice, polyglot languages, so you can pick the right tool for the right job. You know, in my garage, I've got four different saws. I've got one that cuts wood. I've got one that cuts metal. I'm not going to use the same saw for everything. You don't use the same programming language for everything. I don't use the same database for everything. Sometimes I want to use no SQL. Sometimes I want to use SQL. Sometimes it's just going to be a preference. And that's really what we're trying to do with databases as a service and anything as a service. Well, why wouldn't you always want it as a service going forward? You know, I think that that's a great question. I think there's going to be companies that say I always wanted it as a service. There's some that want to be able to have high levels of customization and control. They want knobs. They want knobs. And, you know, with a platform as a service, you lose some of those knobs and you get benefits for that. Now, you still may want to deploy things, you know, straight on software infrastructure as a service or deploy your own clouds on premise. So there's other ways. And I think we're still evolving here in the industry. A lot of businesses are just starting to play with cloud and, you know, it'll be interesting to see where we take it. Talk about the workload management aspect of it. You're seeing like a lot of emphasis on workload. But in context to open technologies, because that's a key theme with Blue Mix is open. So what's open? What's IBM? And these new workloads, whether as you mentioned Node.js is a great example, right? I need some fast JavaScript on the server side. I want to have an IO app, you know, something on the web. Maybe it's that Twitter thing you were mentioning. Something that's very IO intensive. I'm going to need to have a fully integrated stack. I need to have, I don't want to be looking at log files but for bugs. You have this leaky node connection. Yeah, I got web sockets. And these are stuff, this is old web stuff. I mean, web sockets. Are back. Yeah. And popular, yeah. And popular, but still. I mean, debugging that's pain in the ass. So database challenges, storing the data. I mean, how do you talk about the workloads and what's open and how do you guys manage it? What's your plans? Yeah, so I mean, the workloads, it's elasticity is the name of the game. That's what people want. They don't want to have to worry about it. I want to deploy an application and be able to say, you know, here's my memory requirements. You know, here's my CPU thresholds that I need for this application. And, you know, don't go bigger than this number of instances or smaller than this number of instances. You want to just say that and let it run. And that's the beauty of platform as a service. It's the beauty of Cloud Foundry. The fact that, you know, we have the ability to just do those types of things, you know, as we get down the road. In terms of platform itself, Cloud Foundry, open technology, open source. We're very excited about the new foundation, all the companies that are partnering around that and really getting a good governance model. It's been a great partnership with Pivotal and everyone so far. It's still early though. I mean, Cloud Foundry's just kind of getting their C legs. It's still early and, you know, I still like to dabble on the code and the developers will say, you know, from week to week to week, there's major changes in the architecture that you have to respond to. So, you know, and that's going to happen with any new technology. It's just a natural cycle. And then on top of that, in the platform today in the beta, you'll see a number of IBM services. You'll see a number of community services pulling in, you know, everything that's in the Cloud Foundry community and others and you'll see third party things like Tulio. So right next to, I talked about Elastic MQ before from IBM. You've got Rabbit MQ also right next to it. And it's really a mixture around that. And again, it's different tools for different jobs. So Adam, we had David Pogon before. He's a tech guy, I would say, right? And he said, I don't get pass. You know, I just, that's not my domain. I don't get it. But a lot of people say that because they question. I wonder if you can help us squint through this issue. A lot of people say, well, look, you've got sort of infrastructure as a service plus. And then you've got sort of the SaaS minus. Uh-huh. And then you've got this whole spate of people trying to sort of force pass on the marketplace. Why is there a need for that pass layer? Can you help us articulate? So force pass versus a need, I think, is a different. And I'm glad that you brought up IaaS plus and Has minus and all that. I'm personally trying to get away from those terms because I look at it as a cloud platform. And what is it that people need to do? They need services in there to get infrastructure. There's use cases. And maybe it's the camp of people that say, I don't want to, pass is not for me. Just give me some VMs, give me compute network storage. Maybe give me some easy orchestration so I can deploy some network on it. And then I just want to do what I'm used to doing. Great. Okay, no, I don't want to muck with that. I just want to focus on my application. I want to compose services. I don't want to ever think about the infrastructure underneath it. I know lots of developers that feel that way and that's the past market. But again, it's all about coming together with a cloud platform where I can say, okay, for this job I want infrastructure, for this job I want platform. And that's really where it's not just IBM but the industry as a whole. You see a lot of convergence around that. All right, so roadmap, let's talk about roadmap in your mind from an engineering perspective, developer perspective, dev at pulse. You got cloud foundry. Some will say it's early in a fat past layer, someone thinner than that. I think that's a good debate. That'll shake itself out. We'll see uptake and we'll see some evolution, certainly. The traction is significant. You get open stack right out there. What's the plan? How do you see this thing shaping out over the next few months a year? Yeah, I mean, well, it's all about services. I mean, at the end of the day, the platform is a service. You can debate which one's better than the other. Everyone's gonna feel theirs is the best. But it's about what are the runtimes and services that you provide to the developer to use on top? And it's about how easy is it for developers to pick up and get started with it? So if you log into the beta and you go to bloomix.net and sign up, you see what I consider a small list of services. And you heard visions and statements about IBM as a service. We've got a lot of capability that we're still excited and want to bring to market. And it's about filling out that portfolio and doing it in a way. So go back to my Twitter example. I can use things from big data, from DevOps, from databases as a service to the runtime and how easy is it to use them together. Some of the beginnings we have in the beta, if I want to bind a database service to my runtime, it just happens automatically things we've built into the build pack. And that's what we need to do is what makes things easy, quick. It goes back to that single idea the developer wants to turn into a billion dollar idea. All right, final question. Then we'll end this segment. We're on time. Check here is advice to CIOs out there or hiring managers. Cause we're talking about a new breed of developer. You're part of that young gun class. You've been there from a computer science standpoint. You were talking, you know, Web 1.0. Now we're in Web 3.0 colleges for a benchmark. What advice do you have in hiring? Cause there's a huge need. Talent need, profile skills set. What's your advice to CIOs or hiring managers saying, hey, I need to hire DevOps, these DevOps guys. Yeah, and my advice, and I've been a development manager in the past. So I've hired engineers and it's going to be independent of technology but it comes down to enthusiasm. You know, obviously there's got to be some technical skills there but get somebody who's enthusiastic has a passion and wants to build things and experiment and play. And that's really, you know, the developers that are going to go into these platforms and look at these combinations of services and think of new things that no one's ever thought of. And that's really what people want. How do I innovate and move my business forward? Okay, that's a wrap, Adam. Thanks for joining theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest. Stay tuned. All day live coverage, exclusive SiliconANGLE theCUBE all day today, tomorrow blanket coverage of IBM Pulse live in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.