 From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to theCUBE. We're broadcasting today from IBM Innovation Day at the Thomas J. Watson Research Labs in Yorktown, New York. Having a number of great conversations about what's going on with the industry, what's going on with the cloud, and to bring that further, Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz Associates, longtime analyst, Judith, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Peter, great to be here. So Judith, I'll just open it up. Okay. What do you think are the two or three most important things that people should be thinking about right now? Well, I think as we look at the maturation of cloud and computing and the changes that we see, I think one of the most important things is the movement towards open and standards, because what customers really want is computing. They don't really care if you tell them, well, that service runs over there, and this one runs over here. They don't care about that. What they care about, all of the workloads, all of the applications they need to get their jobs done just work. So if a workload needs to move, it should be able to move because it's less expensive or more efficient, or it handles a workload better in terms of performance or security. Customers want the freedom to be able to do what they want when they want it and not to be locked in. So openness is really becoming the battle cry for the cloud. Well, you're talking about two things there. Let me parse them out. You're talking about the breaking of the natural relationship between where the resources are and where the work, or the value of the work is provided, and there is a degree of openness to that, but then there's also this notion of openness, which is how fast innovation, what model are we going to use? So let's break those apart. So let's start with the idea of the cloud breaking the traditional mold of this workload here, that workload there. How is cloud doing that, and what's the future for that flexibility look like? So I think if we were having this conversation 10 years from now, we wouldn't be talking about cloud. We would be talking about the elasticity and the way we do computing so it really meets the needs of whatever business change you're experiencing. What's held companies back and what's held IT back is the idea that you're stuck with the platform or the application or the technology that you've always been using, and it makes change really hard. So the more flexibility you can have and the cloud in terms of elasticity, the way you can create new workloads using cloud native and microservices and leveraging containers, all of these techniques will lead us into a world where you can create a bunch of services and choose and pick the ones you want to get your job done, and it really adds a level of innovation and speed that we've never seen before with IT. So let's build on that. So one of the things that we tell our clients is to focus on what we call plasticity. It's a physical, it's a physics term where elasticity is a single workload, scale it up and down, plasticity is new workload changes, transforms, leads, perturbs the infrastructure, the infrastructure reforms around it. One of the reasons why that concept becomes so important is precisely because of this rate of increase in innovation, as you said. So now tie open back to that. What is it about open? It's not just about making sure we have system software standards, but it's actually doing a better job of turning business into software at a higher level. In a sense, it's what I would call services software. So if you can take the business process or how you want to interact with your customers and you can turn those into software services that are malleable that you can change and innovate on without having to go from top to bottom and recode everything, which is what's held companies back for probably 40 or 50 years. So as you modularize things, you can, for example, simple idea like the way you would calculate a 30-year mortgage. In most companies over the years, there were 30 different ways you could do that. And each application had its own way. What if you could have a single service that did that, that you could apply it no matter what the use case and what the business case was, apply that same concept to any business logic or any business strategy, that's where you get what you're calling something that's very plastic, very malleable and allows you to change. Because in the past, we've always written applications or written systems as though they were based on how we do business right now. And when you do that, you can't change. So one of the ways, again, if I were to describe some of the big changes, let me test this on you, is that I say for the first 50 years of computing, it was known process, unknown technology. We knew we were going to do accounting, we knew we were going to do exchange titles, became supply chain, et cetera. We knew we were going to do HR, but we didn't know if it was going to run on a mainframe or how to run on a mainframe or client server or the internet or whatever else it was. We're entering into a world now where it's unknown process, relatively known computing or technology. We know it's going to be a cloud or cloud-like thing. When we think about that unknown process, more data-first applications, data-driven applications, where do you foresee some of these magnificent changes that are on the horizon? So I think one of the most important changes is that we start leading with data rather than process, because if you lead with process, that's the past. If you lead with data, data will lead you to process. So if we have data-driven organizations where the data, using it in a predictive analytics way, really using machine learning algorithms and some of the emerging AI techniques, we can begin to have data drive us to process. So Judith, I know you've gone to IBM Think every year for a number of years now. Probably almost as long as I have. So if you step back and say San Francisco 2019, February 30 plus thousand people, what are you looking to get out of Think this year that builds upon what you've gotten out of it in the past? Well, what I really like about Think and about IBM events is that it brings together so many people, both IBM's fantastic technical leadership with business leadership, and it brings together the programmers, it brings together the IT leaders with business leaders. So it's a really coming together of the minds across business organizations, really collaborating together to really get to the heart of key business problems. Excellent, Judith Hurwitz, President of Hurwitz & Associates, thanks for being on theCUBE. Thank you. And this is Peter Burris, we'll be back with more of theCUBE from IBM Innovation Day in a few minutes.