 Welcome back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS 2021. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. My name is Dave Vellante. Really excited to have Bob Breitel here. He's the director of SAP Global Alliances at IBM. And Manu Prabhakar, Prabhakar. I'm going to try that again, Prabhakar. Is that correct? Prabhakar, head of Linux and IBM Alliances at AWS. Manu, I'm sorry for botching your name, but at least I got it right. Guys, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. And I'm actually now AWS partnership. I had SAP before, so it's great. Oh, sorry. My first reinvest, so I'm excited to be here. I have an old DNA in my title. That's great. Sorry, I was asking about Philly before. Yes. You don't have the accent, though, Bob. I'm not a Philly native. SoCal, boy. All right. But I do have the SAP connection there. IBM, AWS, it's like, whoa, what's going on here? Well, maybe I'll start and then have Manu make some comments. And I'll just start by just, we're real excited to be here. IBM's a diamond sponsor at Reinvent, and it's great to be in person, and we really appreciate AWS being able to put this event on this week and get us back in person. It really makes a difference. I know there's a lot of people virtually as well, but IBM and AWS have worked together for a number of years. Maybe we could characterize it more opportunistically prior, but in the last 12, 18 months, I think there's been a lot of developments that have really made us come together strategically as partners. I know we'll talk a little bit about Red Hat during the course of the conversation, but with IBM's... When you say opportunistically, you mean in the field? In the field in the past. And now it's moving to a more strategic relationship. More strategic, and with IBM's open hybrid cloud strategy, and with so many of our clients preferring AWS as their cloud, we are working together now to meet clients where they're at, to help them get the value of the cloud. And we're talking a little bit about coming out of the pandemic before this. And one of the things that we're seeing with our clients at IBM is a lot of that low hanging fruit of the cloud was achieved. Maybe the lift and shift or doing some SaaS based applications, but now it's even more important to rapidly adopt hybrid cloud and cloud technologies to provide your business with flexible innovation, transformation, all of those things. So that's why it has been important for us to partner with AWS strategically. Our clients are telling us that when they do move those heavier workloads to the cloud and do it in a hybrid model, they see about two and a half times the value. So with that, our partnership is multi-dimensional. We're doing a lot with IBM Consulting. Manu will talk a little bit about IBM Software and Red Hat. Just one example, Dave, with IBM Consulting, we now are up to almost 10,000 certifications and 10 plus AWS competencies. So that competency chart that shows we're knocking them all out on the checkerboard there to get them to IBM Consulting competencies. And we just had the energy one announced this week. So IBM Consulting is an area software is big too. And Manu's been helping us with that part of the partnership. Well, to your point, you can't pick whatever cliche you want. You can't fight fashion. A trend is your friend. You know, a lot of people want to be on AWS. So rather than fighting, ah, we have our own cloud. No, you've got to meet customers where they are. Right, Manu? And David, this is where this takes us. You know, the analogy we use between Bob and I. IBM, Bob spoke about IBM Consulting, which we know has been a strategic partnership for the last two and a half years. I think I'm going to share the best kept secret in the cloud space right now. IBM software and AWS now are working together. The analogy we use is IBM software and AWS are like peanut butter and jelly, better together. And over the last 12 months, the two companies have accelerated working together around three key dimensions. Number one, around product. Number two, around making sure our customers, joint customers successful. And number three, around building a robust ecosystem of partners. One thing that we have realized is just helping customers modernize, migrate, it's challenging. Around the product side, now we have about 15 products on AWS Marketplace. I think about trustier, verify and security, cloud pack for data, cognose, data stage. Over the next 12 months, we plan to land all of the cloud packs. These are containerized version of IBM software on AWS on the Marketplace. In addition, many of our customers are now using the Managed Red Hat OpenShift Service. We launched it earlier in April this year. We are seeing tremendous customer feedback, tremendous growth there. That is also informing that customers really like the OpenShift model. Managed services, one click deployment. And so our goal is over the next 12 months, launch many more IBM software as a managed service offering. So that's kind of like what we're doing on the product side. On the customer success, a great example is Shlumberj. Shlumberj is helping big oil and gas customers manage through this energy transition that we're working through. Shlumberj software around simulation runs on OpenShift on Amazon in a hybrid environment, especially critical as we have a lot of oil and gas data that needs to have, maybe sit on premises because of data residency requirements. I think the third piece is around building an ecosystem of partners. For our Red Hat OpenShift Service, which we launched in April, we already have 30 partners that are helping customers not only to modernize, but to migrate on AWS. We know modernization is challenging. Moving to containers is difficult. So we need this robust ecosystem of partners. And Bob and I and the IBM and AWS team are investing heavily. We have cash credit to do financial incentives, plus also technical content so that our customers, so that our partners can help customers to be successful. Yeah, so the cloud packs are cool. That makes a lot of sense. And now the acquisition of Red Hat makes it easier. It's a catalyst, gets IBM much more closely aligned to developers and it makes it easier for things like cloud packs to be migrated to the cloud and be running cloud native. How did that acquisition affect from your standpoint, Manu and Bob? Love your thoughts and your relationship. The Red Hat acquisition by IBM is a net positive. Red Hat and AWS have been working together for 14 years now. And we have tens of thousands of customers that are running mission-critical workloads such as SAP Oracle Databases. And there's a lot of trust that is engendered by working in the field for 14 years, supporting mission-critical customers, mission-critical workloads. And so that relationship has provided a lot of tailwinds to our partnership with IBM software. I think a lot of the stuff we spoke about, a lot of the progress we have made in the last six to eight to 12 months, a big function is that the trust that we have engendered working together with Red Hat. Yeah, I'll add, Dave, that I agree with Manu's comments on the Red Hat. Red Hat really is the epitome of openness, right? Of open source software and the history that Manu described with AWS. There's been excellent adoption of Red Hat on AWS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and then most recently Red Hat OpenShift on AWS. And just to give another example to the ecosystem point, just this morning Red Hat with IBM with a major ISV named Solonus announced that Solonus will be running one of their key applications and releasing it on Rosa on AWS. And all this means for our clients is faster adoption and acceleration and being able to innovate in a hybrid way. So that's really the value that Red Hat is helping to bring to the table and our cloud packs are available on OpenShift and Rosa as an option as well. So we're excited about the Red Hat partnership. It's really essential to our partnership and to our hybrid cloud strategy. Yeah, Bob, and you mentioned up front, you know, happy that AWS decided to have this show. Of course, a lot of people watching online and you can get massive scale online, but there's nothing like a live event, you know? And when you make announcements at a live event, there's a little buzz going on, you get feedback. So are you making any hard news here? What announcements can you share? Yeah, well, the one we had on Solonus earlier with Red Hat to do Rosa on top of Red Hat was one. And there's just an advance of re-invent. We announced something in the data in AI space. So that's another big area of our partnership is data and AI. So we announced that in the oil industry and in that area that we are partnering together with AWS to be able to get insights on data so that we could get clean and reusable energy solutions out there. And there's so much untapped data. We know data is such an important resource that that's an area that we're going to partner on with our cloud pack for data on AWS. And of course, underlying everything is OpenShift. So that's one big announcement. We're also doing a lot in security for IBM and Manu's been working closely with this. So Manu, I know you're close to the integrations we're doing with AWS. So I'll let you comment maybe on some of the things in security. Yeah, I'd love to hear that. I mean, everybody's a security company these days, right? I mean, we continue to work in making sure that a lot of the IBM security products are integrating with our native services so the customers have a seamless experience. And I see you'll see a lot of the same investments happening over 2022 as we grow the partnership. So what, like a Q-Radar or something like that? Q-Radar, for example, integrating with Security Hub. That would be a great example. Yeah, I mean, it's the number one topic for CIOs. It has been for a while and still will be. Okay, so give us a little roadmap. You know, maybe Bob, you could start. Where do you want to see this relationship go? What can we expect in the coming 12 months? Yeah, well, again, we're super excited about our partnership with AWS. I think we're just scratching the surface of how we're going to add value to our clients on this hybrid cloud journey that they're all going through. And IBM, and this has been in our financial reports and in our earnings and everything, we're investing over a billion dollars in the ecosystem. And so partners like AWS are critical to provide that platform of growth for our clients and innovation for our clients. So all of the things that I talked about and Manu talked about today, whether it be our IBM consulting capabilities or our IBM software, our Red Hat, we're going to continue to invest. We talked about the Red Hat acquisition. IBM's made a few other acquisitions that help drive this partnership and drive value to our clients for adoption from Instana to Turbonomics to some really innovative cloud consulting companies like NorCloud and Taos. So we're going to continue to make investments. And I think we're just on the tip of the iceberg and we invite everybody at Reinvent, either in person, which is exciting or virtually to learn more about our partnership and how we can help you. And Manu, any additional comments to that? Yeah, thanks Bob. We have a golden child here with Red Hat OpenShift on Amazon that we launched in April. We are seeing tremendous customer adoption. So we suspect that in next year we will continue to see solid adoption around Red Hat OpenShift. That workload is also informing how customers want a more native experience for IBM software on AWS. And so we are targeting to launch many more IBM software in a native format on AWS. So that would be the big theme for next year. In addition, again, I'll call to action to our partner community. There's a huge opportunity to help our joint customers to modernize and migrate on AWS. We are both IBM and AWS are leaning in. We have cash credit to give financial incentives to partners to help our customers to migrate and modernize. As well as we are also creating a lot of technical content that is now freely available so that a lot of our partners can start this IBM focus on AWS practice. Great, I love it. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations and look at, you know, I often say the next 10 years not going to be like the last 10 years. The cloud is expanding. Here's a really good example. So thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. All right, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage at AWS re-invent 2021.