 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, live here in Las Vegas for IBM Edge, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the sims and the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, Joe Michael, Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon, Dave. Our next guest is Jeff Gunther, Director of Solutions Architecture at CMI, Cube alum, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you guys. So tell the folks out there, what's going on here for you guys at CMI? Talk about what the action is here at IBM Edge. We'll go into some really specific questions that Dave and I want to hammer you on. In a nice way. Hammer, you guys are brutal. No, no, no, we've had great segments with end users, so we've had a lot of data, great data. Go ahead, share the folks out there. So for us, Edge is a premier event. You know, it's morphed from a storage conference into compute and big data, which is a hot topic. It's hard to get into some of the sessions now on software to find storage on Flash, just because they're so hot. I love the story this morning with the NFL. I saw you guys had the folks from the NFL on yesterday by scheduling is amazing. We see a lot of that actually now in our client base in terms of ingesting data, making useful insights out of it and how do you do that? What's the best architecture? And so there's a lot of questions that start to pop up, right, so we bring our architects to Edge to get even more deeper ingrained into the IBM technology, but also to meet other vendors that are here that we have partnerships with as well. So this is just a great spot to be. We've got clients here and we connect with IBM, so it's a great event for us. So I got to ask you about the transformation. Obviously, IBM is, I mean, the word pivot you don't use in big companies. It's called move to aircraft carrier one page. Yeah, you can change the engines while they're playing to client, right? Startups they pivot because they go out of business. IBM is clearly not going to, but you certainly look at the refresh, pretty impressive time turnaround on what they're doing. Flash is there. So they're moving lightning speed, but the customers out there that are deploying IT, you're looking at their IT strategy, have a much longer view, they have legacy. You guys are in that business, so translate the speeds and feeds of what's going on in the industry, which is really amazing in terms of what we've seen in the past to the reality of what's in the trenches. I mean, it's slower, but it's still legacy based. True, so sometimes you have to slow down to go fast, right? But I know you guys are familiar with us and what we're doing. So we're in this really interesting in time because we've grown up providing systems integration, experience, infrastructure optimization to all of our clients. That's what we're really known for. And then as you said, John, kind of pivoting and moving into tangential areas like more software and more services, big data flash cloud. So we've got these three practice areas which we feel are gonna, they're relevant now, but they're going to continue to be relevant, right? So it's data management, convergence and cloud. And when you look at it from that perspective, these three things really create this nice pyramid and you can go have these very meaningful conversations, not only with IT, but with lines of business, right? So yes, there is a pace. It is perhaps maybe moving faster than it was. Well, they're under a lot of pressure because the opportunity is there. They make a top line growth, not just server consolidation on these projects. Yeah, but even with our own customer base, I mean, it's really interesting for us. So we'd go talk to a CIO about six months ago and the CIO would say, hey, what's your cloud strategy? What do you guys think about cloud? What are you doing? Oh, you know, yeah, we'll get to it eventually, right? You come back six months later and the same CIO is pounding the table going, we got to go to cloud. Help, help, help, I'm tapping the mat. So now we're in these discussions because technology is frankly the easy part, right? You can get flash, you can optimize infrastructures, you can do that at scale and at an optimal price. The hard part is changing the culture and the people in the process and we're really fortunate that our CTO spent 30 years in IT working for multiple organizations and just came from an organization that was a $2 billion company and we did a lot of work with them and optimizing their infrastructure and putting them on this journey to a converged private cloud. And to your point, John, kind of dip in their toe in the water and starting slow but also they've got to accelerate the pace of change which means they've got to understand their people processes, make sure their cultural lines and then go back and talk to the lines of business to make sure that if they are on Amazon, there's this kind of, command is perhaps a bad word but just get visibility and insight into what's going on in the enterprise from a SaaS perspective or Amazon and we provide tools that allow them to do that so they can say yes more often than saying no. So these three lines of business, data management, convergence and cloud, there's a Venn diagram there, right? I think so. So there's a relationship. So I wonder if we could, from a customer standpoint, how do you describe those? What is each? What's in each? Yep, so really the beauty of the way we've architected how we're going to market now is that we can come in and have a discussion whether it's very strategic, with that CIO or somebody in the line of business or just extremely tactical that they know they want to make a change and we'll help them do that. So from a convergence standpoint, I heard you talking a couple minutes ago about it might be hard to really conceptualize this converged architecture now. I don't think so because I think IBM, Cisco, HP, DMC with VCE have all done this, beat the drum where convergence is a pretty well-known understood thing now. My point was it's hard to sell it because the organization's not ready for it. They'll get to your point, people in process, technology's there, but I got stovepipes of organizational roles, storage, compute, networking, they never talk. So that's a discussion that you don't have with the admins, right? You have it at the director level and the way we pitch it is that you've got resources now that are stovepiped, doing silos and maybe I have a storage admin, I have a VMware admin, I have a Windows admin and so what we're doing is through integrating things like smart cloud entry, for example, from IBM which is now Cloud Manager, which gives you this toe in the water to a private cloud, showing them how they can build templates and patterns and showing them that the resources you have today can still be the resources that you take forward. It's just that instead of having them siloed, they're all going to be doing the same thing. So now you've given yourself the ability to scale and do things faster and you can position the organization to take on more projects that are more strategic in nature. So that's usually how we go in and pitch it. It resonates. Sure, yeah. And we have workshops where we come in and talk to the clients about just that very topic and we've got a nice matrix that we use and we show them, okay, based on our methodologies and our thought process, where do you guys think you are, let them pick and then do the gap analysis and help them understand how we can get to the next top-down sell or middle-up, middle-down, yeah. Right, typically. You guys have been successful business partner for IBM, so I want to ask you a couple of questions. One is, you mentioned you had to go slow to go fast, so I want to ask you that usually you slow down around the curves and then you go speed on the straight and narrow, you've got it. But also you're talking about some of the tools and tooling that IBM provides. We're seeing more and more, for the first question, is seeing more and more from IBM around almost composite application development where now you have appliances, it's a toolbox. So I got to ask you, as a partner out there in the field, you got to put these solutions together. You got to wire it together, you got to build it out. So talk about the tooling and the toolbox of IBM. How has that helped you? What do they need to work on? Where is it solid? What have you had success with? And then the second question is, what is that straight and narrow that you've seen with customers that have really moved the needle where you can really gun it on the straight and narrow? You go slow down right now, I can see that. Go slow around the curves. Cloud is certainly one of them. But tooling from IBM, the toolbox, and then the straight and narrow. Sure. So we'll start with the tools. I love IBM strategy. We're going to have to watch this thing play out probably over the next five to seven years. Because what I mean by that is, you really have a choice now. You can go and you do native VMware, the whole cloud automation suite, right? VMware is an 85% of the customer base, so a logical progression for most clients is let's start with the VMware tool set and let's automate and orchestrate there. Makes a lot of sense. And we've got clients that we work with to do that. The other side of that coin is the open source coin, right? And so there's a lot of organizations in that 85% that need to look at alternatives because of cost, because they've got to build these cloud infrastructures. They want to do it in a hybrid fashion because they've got SaaS-based workloads out in Amazon or RAC, space or software, wherever it may be, but they've got to roll those back in the organization and to do it at scale costs a lot of money. And they want open source. And they want open source. And what kind of percentage do you think that is? Maybe 20? Right now it's small. 15? Yeah, 15, 20. But it's starting to accelerate in a very big way. See, I think actually that's pretty big foothold, but okay. I agree. Go ahead. So I just wanted to get another data point. No problem. So we're aligned there. Now, from an open stack standpoint, I think the newest developments with Cloud Manager and how the integration is really tight with Chef from an automation standpoint is huge because a lot of our customers in Northern California either do Chef or do the puppet, but we see a lot more Chef. So the fact that you can now as a client using Chef, go in and use it and automate and snap it right into IBM is huge. So those tool sets, John, I think that's where we are. VMware and then from an IBM standpoint. Your key is snapping it into IBM. It's not a mutually exclusive situation. They're completely plug and play. But they are, but also using open stack. We have the expertise to use open stack so we can develop and integrate anything. And that admittedly is harder to take open Chef, or excuse me, open source. Open Chef, that's a good problem. Open Chef, I like that. That was a good one, huh? Open Chef Labs. We just created a new term, Tweet it. But to take open stack, put it out there and really use it in an enterprise and doing it a meaningful way is tough because most organizations don't have a development staff that's robust enough to do that. Well, open stack is early too. It's early days for open stack, right? So that's going to get cleaner, certainly. I'm excited about it. So I think just continue development by IBM in the open source, open stack arena, integrating things like Chef, publishing the APIs in an open fashion so I can snap in security, monitoring, CCMBB, the whole stack and do it, is where it's going. And we wanted to see it continue to go. So that's the tooling side of it. And from our perspective, we've got a data center, executive briefing center where we've got the technologies up and running so we can bring clients in and show them the full picture and then we can break it down and start smaller. And so the tooling gives you the flexibility to build but also for the customer, you can be just transparent and say, look at where it's at. Absolutely. And customers do ask us. If they're with VMware and they're testing that toe on the water, they want to have a toe on the water in the open source community as well because being a CIO these days is extremely hard. So you've got to place some bets on the table and so you want to look at both directions. So VMware's obviously proven in the enterprise, open source is proven in the enterprise from a Linux standpoint, but open stack is still gaining ground to your point, right? So that's kind of the tools. And then where are we going as an organization? We're just, we're doubling down on that VIN diagram that you guys have where we're doing the data management, the convergence in cloud and bringing everything together and doing it in a smart way. And the way that the clients want. I got to ask you this is great. I just tweeted it. Being a CIO is very hard these days to expand on that. Why? I mean, I kind of have my own opinion, but I want to hear from you, you're in the trenches. What's, why is it so hard now? Because lines of business and primarily it's the marketing teams, the folks that want to do big data. They need stuff up quickly. Sales and marketing are the key drivers of most businesses now. And so we see in a lot of our enterprise customers and to some extent smaller customers depending on the business they're in, the lion's share of the IT budget is really driven toward marketing and better insights and analytics. And so if they can't be responsive enough to the organization, they go find a way to get it done without them. And that's very scary as a CIO because you lose control and you want to know what's going on, not to say no, but just to say hey. If they got responsive, they go shadow IT. Or in some cases, Dave, we were talking about OpenStack, the new trend is shadow cloud. Yeah. Which is, to get to shadow IT, let's put it. Very scary proposition as well, right? So, you know, dark cloud, we've talked about, remember, in 2009 concept, this is shadow clouds out there. I mean, people will circumvent to get the speed. You see that? Absolutely. Dave, that brings up a huge issue with all these security nightmares and stuff going on. And then the other side of that, just real quick, is we've got customers that have cloud-first strategies whether it Amazon or Rackspace or SoftLayer. And so they're trying to accelerate the pace of change while bringing the organization along and they've got legacy assets, infrastructure that needs to be improved and to build a hybrid strategy. So, either way you look at it as a CIO, you've got some challenges that you've got to face. And that those cloud-first guys, that's being driven by the IT organization because the lines of business have pushed so hard, they're embracing it, or is it really being driven by the line of business? See, in two ways. Mostly by engineering slash lines of business people, but also there are some forward-thinking organizations that really rely on IT and use it as a competitive advantage. And they have the cloud-first strategy as well. So, we see it in two flavors. Do you think that you're part of the world where you're selling to is more acutely aware of these emerging trends? I mean, every time I fly into SFO, when I fly into SFO a lot, it's a new billboard with a new buzzword on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that won't hit East Coast for three or four years. But so, do you think there's more awareness of these emerging trends in your part of the world? Or do you think it's more broadly based? That's an interesting question. I feel that way being there. But... No, let me ask it differently. Silicon Valley is just a hotbed of innovation from the supply side. Yeah. But increasingly, what customers do with IT seems to matter more than what the vendor community is doing with IT. I mean, look at Google. Look at Amazon, they've become a vendor, but do you think that the end customer in that part of the world is more sophisticated? Yes, I think they are. And so, I mean, you look at Walmart, you look at Johnson & Johnson, a couple of other companies, Samsung, they've actually moved out to Silicon Valley and they have their innovation labs in Silicon Valley. They have them out there for a reason because they're seeing these waves hit them across the world so fast, they've got to keep up and innovate and accelerate with the pace of change. So, having that presence there in Silicon Valley gives them that leg up. So, it is tough. We deal with very educated buyers that know IT and understand it very well. And it's exciting, but it's a challenge as well. How about the financial services guys? I mean, they must obviously be very, I mean, I know they're watching the hyperscale, they're trying to figure out how to scale. You seeing that similar dynamic with those guys? Yes, yeah, definitely. We are. But they also want some lockdown tight security as well, but they're doing things at scale with HPC and algorithms to make their trading floors move faster and you saw Flash Boys, Michael Lewis, I don't know if you're ready, it's a fascinating, fascinating story, right? So, yeah, it's definitely out there. On the conversion side, what are the top trends you're seeing right now cutting edge real time in terms of what customers are doing with the convergence? Is it network virtualization? Is it just the same old, same old stuff? Or what are you seeing there? SDN is a discussion we have, but it's not something that usually gets implemented. So, from a convergence standpoint. You have great meetings, but nothing ever gets deployed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds like deck in the old days. It's funny. When we implement convergence, we really take the x86 and if customers have power assets, we converge those together, but we also provide this platform through Pure and Flex, where we can give them the compute networking in this nice box. Yes, we can integrate the storage, but candidly guys, most of the time, at least the way we're implementing it, we believe in flexibility of choice and so we'll integrate storage into that architecture, but the storage will live outside the chassis. So, it's still integrated, I call it converged, but it doesn't live in the chassis and that seems to resonate really well and people like that idea. It gives you certainly more flexibility. So, you're saying that the networking in the compute really truly converged. Boom. And the storage has always been a fault, let's face it. Exactly, so we see that trend very real time. The other thing that we're seeing now is at least the way that we're addressing the market with convergence is, yes, we'll give them the building blocks, but we layer on the aspects of private cloud so we can start moving them in the direction so we can start to talk about people process change. That's the thing that's really happened in real time. The final question I want to ask you, I know we're tight on time, I want to get the big data, the data first question, Dave and I have been seeing this trend, it's certainly emerging fast, talking to the guys at Factual, friends of mine started that company, very data-centric company. Is there a data first strategy on the horizon for customers? Meaning, at some point you become data full, where you're not just looking at containers and software to manage data, you actually got to deal with data on a competitive advantage basis, there's compliance issues, there's a variety of different vectors on the data. Are you seeing the data first coming into the architecture as a variable? Yeah, we absolutely do. So, the way we see it though is kind of in two ways, the just straight into Hadoop and let's get it going, we see a lot of Hadoop in Silicon Valley, but the other side of it is we see these large companies, even IBM, TerraData, I mean you can just go down the list and those guys are being attacked on a constant basis because it can be expensive to deploy their architectures and infrastructures and so the Hadoops and the open source reality of dealing with big data becomes economical and we've got customers right now that are TerraData customers that are actively looking at doing Hadoop because their marketing initiatives drive the company and they have to have data at their fingertips in real time so they can make these decisions. So we see it all over the place. Do you think the big data market will be a fad or be just folded into the fabric of existing infrastructures or other sectors, if you will? Probably folded in and fit into the infrastructure and the thing that's got me really excited right now guys is Power8 but what they've done with Power8 in terms of CAPI and putting the interface right on the bus, right? So I know EMC acquired DSSD, right, scheme kind of concept that is going to turn the world on its head so you can take, here's a good example. So you can take a 2U system, Power8 that's optimized for Linux, you can take a Flash system, 840, optimized with CAPI, attach it to the system and so now you've got a 4U discrete building block that you can leverage Red Hat, Seuss, Ubuntu, you name it and you can put Redis is going to be the first thing that really comes to market. It's going to be a game changer so now I can create these discrete building blocks for big data and deploy them all over the place and do it at scale for normal costs. And it's essentially a single level store that's persistent. Bingo. With obviously no spinning disk but also no scuzzy protocol. No. So now you're talking about two orders of magnitude of least greater performance. Exactly. And the application value is going to be huge. You know the thing is we've been talking about this day, this is interesting, this is the new homebrew computer club mentality. You're seeing guys actually building stuff. Not just taking what the cards are dealt with by building large scale, hyper scale stuff in the enterprise. And this goes back down to the notion of I want to be like Facebook, I want to be like Amazon. I want to be like, well now you can. That's basically what you're saying. Exactly, absolutely. And the technologists that are emerging today out of schools, colleges, developers, programmers, they all understand this stuff, right? They understand Chef, they understand Puppet, they know about open source databases and they get it and it's happening really fast. And so organizations like IBM and Cisco and Cloud Era, I mean you name them, they're ingesting all of these people into the companies to keep up with the pace of change. Well Dave and I have personal experience actually with our crowd chat application. We've been testing first hand Redis, Glastic Beam, a lot of the cloud technologies because large scale is now the new cool. And building your own hyper scale infrastructure, whether it's open compute or taking ring with systems, it's actually, it's swinging back to us old guys. Anyone over 35 is the hot commodity right now. Yeah, someone came to me and they were talking about Chef and I know what they were talking about, but some people that were in the audience with me, they're like, are you talking about cooking? Like, what do you, Puppet, it's like a show, like. Yeah, so it's exciting. It's a very exciting time. It's also a very scary time to be in the market because it moves, it can move fast. You got open source, you got to have bulletproof systems in these enterprises. It's a real creative opportunity, but at the end of the day, it's got to be reliable. Ops is ops, even though it's dev ops, you still got to make it run. Jeff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. I'll give you the final word. Talk to the camera out there. And in your own words, share with the folks why this point in time in the technology business is so revolutionary. The thing for us is that you alluded to it, right? So the fact that you can go and you can build these infrastructures at a cost that makes sense without having to be tethered to big corporations, although Cisco, IBM, HP, everybody's got their strategy. So you can still invest in those companies, but you can layer in things that are open source like Linux, the ability to do big data, the ability to work with Flash. So you can get the best of both worlds. So that's why it's very exciting for us, but also scary because sometimes you might end up working with a company that you've never heard of before, but we'll start to gain traction and scale and be the next big thing. So that's why it's both exciting, but also very scary. Jeff, thanks for theCUBE interview. We appreciate your insights. Very exciting. We love having you back. Great commentary. You're out in the trenches. It's great data. We'd love sharing that data inside theCUBE, building a big base of data, sharing that with you free open source, Dave Vellante, Wikibon.org. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.