 Live from Munich, Germany. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Fast Track Your Data. Brought to you by IBM. Welcome to Fast Track Your Data, everybody. Welcome to Munich, Germany. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Jim Kobielus. Dinesh Nirmalis here. He's the vice president of IBM Analytics Development, of course, at IBM. And he's joined by Roland Valskow, who was the portfolio executive at T Systems, which is a division of Deutsche Telekom. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Dinesh, good to see you again. Thank you. Roland, let me start with you. So your role inside T Systems. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, we have. So thank you for being here. At T Systems, we serve our customers with all kinds of hosting services, from infrastructure up to application services. And we have recently, let's say five years ago, started to standardize our offerings as a product portfolio. And are now focusing, coming from the infrastructure and infrastructure as a service offerings. We are now putting a strong effort in the virtualization container virtualization to be able to move complete application landscapes from different platforms, from T Systems, or between T Systems platforms. The goal is to enable customers to talk with us about their application needs, their business process needs, and have everything which is related to the right place to run the application will be managed automatically by our intelligent platform, which will decide in a multi-platform environment if a business-critical application runs on a high available private cloud or a test-dev environment, for example, could run on a public cloud. So the customer should not need to deal with these kind of technology questions anymore. So we want to cover the application needs and have the rest automated. We're seeing a massive trend in our community for organizations like yours to try to eliminate wherever possible undifferentiated infrastructure management and provisioning of hardware and LUN management and those things that really don't add value to the business trying to support their digital transformations and raise it up a little bit. And that's clearly what you just described, right? Exactly. Okay, in one of those areas that companies want to invest, of course, is data. You guys are here in Munich, he chose this for a reason, but Dinesh, give us the update on what's going on in your world and what you're doing here and fast-track your data. Right. So actually, myself and Roland was talking about this yesterday. One of the challenges our clients' customers have is the hybrid data management. So how do you make sure your data, whether it's on premise or on cloud, you have a seamless way to interact with the data, manage the data, govern the data, and that's the biggest challenge. I mean, a lot of customers want to move to the cloud, but their critical transactional data sits still on prem. So that's one area that we are focusing in Munich here, is like, especially with GDPR coming in 2018, how do we help our customers manage the data and govern the data all through the lifecycle of the data? Okay, well, how do you do that? I mean, it's a multi-cloud world. I mean, most customers have, yeah, they might have some Blue Mix, they might have some Amazon, they have a lot of on prem, they got mainframe, they got all kinds of new things happening, like containers and microservices. Some are in the cloud, some are on prem, but generally speaking, what I just described is a series of stovepipes. They each have their different lifecycle and data lifecycle and management frameworks. Is it your vision to bring all of those together in a single management framework and maybe share with us where you are on that journey and where you're going? Exactly, that's exactly our effort right now to bring every application service which we provide to our customers into containerized version, which we can move across our platforms, which we can also transform from external platforms from competition platforms and onboard them into T-Systems when we acquire new customers. It's also a reality that customers work with different platforms, so we want to be the integrator. And so we would like to expand our product portfolio as an application portfolio and bring new applications, new attractive applications into our application catalog, which is the containerized application catalog. And so here comes the cooperation with IBM, so we are already a partner with IBM DB2 and we are now happy to talk about expanding the partnership into hosting the analytics portfolio of IBM. So we bring the strength of both companies together, the market access, credibility, security in terms of European data law, 40 systems, 50 systems and a very attractive analytics portfolio of IBM, so we can bring the best pieces together to have a very attractive offering to the market. So Dinesh, how does IBM fulfill that vision? Is it a product? Is it a set of services, frameworks, series of products? Maybe you could describe in some more depth. Yeah, it all has to start with the platform, right? So you have the underlying platform, then you build what you talked about, the container services on top of it to meet the needs of our enterprise customers. And then the biggest challenge is that how do you govern the data through the lifecycle of that data, right? Because the data could be sitting on-prem, data could be sitting on-cloud, on a private cloud. How do you make sure that you can take that data, who touched the data, where did that data went? And not just the data, but the analytical assets, right? So if you have models built, when was it deployed, where was it deployed, was it deployed in QA, was it deployed in development? All those things has to be governed so that you have one governance policy, or one governance console that you can go as a CDO to make sure that you can see where the data is moving and where the data is managed. So that's the biggest challenge. And that's what we are trying to make sure that to our enterprise customers, we solve that problem. So IBM has announced at this show a unified governance catalog. Is that an enabler for this capability you're describing here? Oh yeah, I mean that is the key piece of all of this would be the unified governance, which is you have one place to go govern the data as the CDO. And you've mentioned, as has Roland, the containerization of applications now. I know that DB2 Developer Community Edition, the latest version announced at this show, has the ability to orchestrate containerized applications through Kubernetes. Can you describe how that particular tool might be useful in this context? And how it might play DB2 Developer Community Edition in an environment where you're using the catalog to manage all the layers of data or metadata or so forth associated with these applications. So it goes back to Dave's question, right? I mean, how do you manage the new products that's coming? So our goal is to make every product a container, a containerized way to deliver. So that way, you have a Docker registry where you can go see what the updates are, you can update it when you're ready, all those things. But once you containerize the product and put it out there, then you can obviously have the governing infrastructures that sits on top of it to make sure all those containerized products are being managed. So that's one step towards that. But to go back to your Community Edition, DB2 Community Edition, our goal here is to, how do we simplify our products for our customers? So if you're a developer, how can we make it easy enough for you to assemble your applications in a matter of minutes? Or so that's our goal, simplify, be seamless, and be able to scale. So those are the three things that we focused on the DB2 Community Edition. So in terms of the simplicity aspect of the tool, can you describe a few features or capabilities of the developer edition, the Community Edition, that are simpler than in the previous version? Because I believe you've had a Community Edition for DB2 for developers for at least a year or two. Describe the simplifications that are introduced in this lead version. So one I will give you is the JSON support, right? So today, you want to combine the unstructured data with structured data. I mean, it's simple. I mean, we have a demo coming up in our main tent where as a developer, you can easily go get a JSON document, put it in there, combine with your structured data, unstructured data, and you're ready to go. So that's a great example where we are making it really easy, simple. The other example is download and go, where you can easily download in less than five clicks, less than 10 minutes, the product is up and running. So those are a couple of things that we are doing to make sure that it's much more simpler, seamless, and scalable for our customers. And what is Project Event Store? Share with us whatever you can about that. You're doing a demo here, I think, and what is it and why is it important? Yeah, yeah, so we are going to do a quick demo at the main tent on Project Event Store. It's about combining the strength of IBM innovation with the power of open source. So it's about how do we do fast ingest inserts into an object store, for example, and be able to do analytics on it. So now you have the strength of not only bringing data at very high speed or volume, but now you can do analytics on it. So for example, just to give you a very high level number, right? I mean, we can do more than one million inserts per second, more than one million. And our closest competition is at 30,000 inserts per second. So that's huge for us. So use cases at the edge, obviously, could take advantage of something like this. Is that sort of where it's targeted? Oh yeah, so let's say, I'll give you a couple of examples. So let's say you're a hospital chain. You want the patient data coming in real time, streaming the data coming in. You want to do analytics on it. That's one example. Or let's say you're a department store. You want to see all the traffic that goes into your stores, and you want to do analytics on how well your campaign did on the traffic that came in. Or let's say you're an airline. You have IoT data that's streaming or coming in, you know, millions of inserts per second. How do you do analytics? So this is a, I mean, I would say this is a great innovation that will help all kind of industries going forward. And this IBM has had streaming products for quite a while, and fairly mature ones, like IBM streams, but also the structured streaming capability of Spark, and you've got a strong Spark portfolio. Is there any connection between Project Event Store and these other established IBM offerings? No, so what we have done is, like I said, took the power of open source. So Spark becomes obviously the execution engine. We're going to use something called a parquet format where the data can be stored, you know, or, and then we obviously have our own proprietary ingest mechanism that brings in. So some similarity, but this is a brand new work that we have done between IBM research, and it has been in the works for the last 12 to 18 months. Now we're ready to bring it into the market. So we're about out of time, but Roland, I want to end with you and give us the perspective on Europe and European customers. In particular, Rob Thomas was saying to us that, that part of the reason why IBM came here is because they noticed that 10 of the top companies that were outperforming the S&P 500 were US companies and they were data-driven. And they, and IBM kind of wanted to shake up, you know, Europe a little bit and say, hey guys, it's, you know, time to get on board. What do you see here in Europe? Obviously there are companies like Spotify, which are European based that are very data-driven, but from your perspective, what are you seeing in Europe in terms of adoption of these sort of data-driven technologies and, you know, to use that buzzword? Yeah, so the, I think we are in an early stage of adoption of these data-driven applications and analytics and the European companies are certainly very careful and cautious about and sensitive about their data security. So whenever there's news about another data leakage, everyone is becoming more cautious. And so here comes the unique, one of the unique positions of T-Systems, which has a history and credibility in the market for data protection and uninterrupted service for our customers, so that we have achieved a number of corporations, especially also with American companies, where we do a giant approach to the European markets. So as I said, we bring the strengths of T-Systems to the table, plus the very competitive application portfolio, analytics portfolio in this case, from our partner IBM, and have the best worlds together for our customers. All right, we have to leave it there. Thank you, Roland, very much for coming on. Dinesh, great to see you again. All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, buddy. Jim and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Munich, Germany at Fast Track Your Data. Right back.