 from theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. Hello, everybody, we're back. And this is theCUBE, and we're covering IBM Think 2020, the digital thing. And we are covering wall to wall. We're here with Keith Dyer, who's the vice president of sales and channels at Cisco and Loric Geo. Long time friend, theCUBE alum. She's the general manager of the Global Cisco Alliance in California Senior State Exec. Folks, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Nice to see you, Dave. Good to see you too, Dave. Hey, I got to ask you, Laura, what's this California Senior State Executive in your title? Tell me about that. So I'm responsible for all of the IBM population here in the state of California. And during this time of COVID-19, it's been very interesting. So I manage all the, as I call it here and feeding of the employees up and down the state, and how we're responding to the shelter in place orders and how IBM is responding from an employee perspective. Yeah, I've interviewed a number of CXOs, some from both your companies. And that's the theme that we keep hearing, Keith, is number one is the health and well-being and safety of our employees. And then once that's confirmed, it gets to work. Yeah, it's a completely different environment that we're in. I mean, we're Cisco being a good, and IBM both being global companies, coming from being in offices and in environments of working closely with one another to sheltering home and working out of our home offices. I think the thing that we, both of our companies have the ability to do is to empower our folks to do that. And we're doing that. We're doing that both from an individual perspective with our tools and our technologies, but we're also doing that together with a lot of the things that this partnership and this alliance brings to this, which is really being able to provide IT services to remote workers and to be able to still keep this economy moving along. Yeah, along with our data partner, ETR, we were one of the first to report that sort of work from home offset, how budgets are shifting. In fact, 20% of the CIOs that we surveyed, 1200 CIOs, said their budgets are actually increasing. So I wonder, Laura, if you could talk about the, you guys had a relationship with Cisco and IBM for a long time. Maybe talk about some of the go-to-market highlights, and I want to double click on that. Yeah, so we've had a long-standing relationship over 20 years that we've partnered together in the marketplace. And because of that long-standing relationship, it gives us an opportunity, not at just the very senior levels of this relationship, but all the way out to the field and the sellers on what's needed out there from a client perspective. We're constantly coming out with new integrated solutions, things that answer the questions and the problems that our customers are trying to solve. One in particular right now is called a private cloud infrastructure as a service. This with Cisco technology and IBM technology and services gives the client an answer on how to get that private cloud in their facility and not have to have the CAPEX question on getting that server portion of that in there. Cisco has a unique opportunity with IBM to offer that customer. So Keith, one of the things that I like to talk about when with any go-to-market strategies is you get together with your go-to-market partner and you try to identify the ideal customer, what's the right profile? What's the value proposition? And I'm wondering just generally, what does that look like for you guys? And then specifically, how has that changed or has that changed as a result of COVID-19? Well, I think a couple of things. One of the things where Cisco and IBM have long been partners together has been from a security perspective. And as we move into this new class of workers that are working remotely and that are working in environments, the security is paramount. And a lot of the work that we've done together around threat management and the way we both have put security measures and security products in place and solutions to help promote workers to be able to work with security into their networks. Yeah, so in our reporting, we've noted that it's not just collaboration, video collaboration tools that are on the uptick, it is things like whether it's VPNs, networking bandwidth, wide area networks, securing that remote infrastructure. So Laura, maybe you could help us understand what IBM is bringing to the table and maybe we'll talk about what Cisco is bringing to the table here. Well, when you look at from an IBM perspective, our huge client base out there from a services perspective, generally where we start, those customers are looking for end-end solution. So when you take technologies like Cisco has and combine it with the breadth of technology around cloud, hybrid cloud, security, that gives the ability to a client come to one place, get that end-end solution and feel secure that it is an enterprise quality solution that they don't have to worry about all the other hurt pieces they have to plug in there. One of the things that we've been talking about is, I was just talking to Rob Thomas about this. He said, you know, Dave, I don't know if anything's going to really, you know, dramatically change with COVID-19. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but definitely some things are being accelerated. And when you think about, you know, the acceleration to cloud, talking about the industry of angle, Laura, Edge, IoT, I wonder if you guys could talk a little bit about maybe start with Keith, do you see there are some learnings here in this period during this pandemic that maybe will accelerate sort of some of those Edge discussions or things that we've learned that maybe would have taken longer to put into practice, start with Keith. Yeah, I think first and foremost is just getting at the data and being able to have that data to a decision faster. And that's the whole reason we're really investing around Edge technologies is so that we can take that data in, we can help it help us make decisions faster and get to outcomes for customers better. You know, and a part of that becomes, you know, around having the right security postures, but also then being able to link up back to the data center, which is what we do with IBM around hybrid cloud. Laura, anything you'd add for that from an industry perspective? Yeah, I just, I think the technology that Cisco brings to the table really helps accelerate that solution and get what the client's looking for. Had a recent example, well, at the end of last year, met with a number of manufacturing customers in Europe and we took them through a solution that we have with the Edge and security that Cisco offers, the pieces that IBM bring to the table. But the manufacturers really looked at this, said, wow, this gives me that Edge technology that I need. It provides all of this security that I'm looking for and allows this manufacturing to line autonomously run without having to have that intervention that a number of other solutions would require. You know, it's kind of a sensitive topic when I talk to executives and when we talk to the CIOs and CISOs with ETR and the round table, there was a sensitivity to, and sort of a negative sensitivity to so-called ambulance chasing. And so they don't, what they don't want is, hey, here's a free trial for, you know, but you got to swipe your credit card or you have to promise to sign something, they just don't have time for that. I bring that up because Cisco and IBM came up in this round table as two companies, there were others too, by the way, that were really responding well from the customer perspective. And these were industries that were a hard hit. You know, we're talking about airlines, we're talking about hospitality, really hard hit types of industries. And they called out IBM, Cisco, and as they say, seven or eight other companies. So it's, I think the industry, because you guys are large companies, established companies, they expect more of you. They expect kind of an adult supervision, if you will, in the room. I wonder if you could talk about maybe some of the other things that, but first of all, react to that. And some of the other things, Laura, that maybe you guys have done either as individual companies or jointly. Yeah, I'll start and I'll let Keith answer here. So I'd like to comment the adults in the room. What we're finding as customers are coming to companies like Cisco and IBM and saying, look, I need a solid enterprise solution. I'm looking for somebody who's tested it. It's tried and true that you've got recognition in the industry that you're going to bring a complete solid solution forward. And so we are being tapped into as two companies to really bring those to the clients. They don't have a whole lot of time right now to go figure it out. And they believe in us in what we've been able to provide to the market. Yeah, and one of the things I would echo is that the investment that both of our companies are making, really just in our customers and helping them get through this journey. We both have fantastic CEOs who are really visionaries and they're really beginning to look at and how they can help accelerate our customers so that when we get on the other side, we're stronger and we're able to deliver technology and be able to deliver to our customers. Laura and I have, we're inundated almost on a daily basis of request and support. And we've actually had a grassroots effort that really kind of bore up through our sales teams of providing education and providing services to in the education sector using IBM technology and using Cisco WebEx technology. We've been partnering with other partners such as Samsung and Apple to deliver those on devices. And these aren't necessarily things that came out of the CEO offices. These were solutions and efforts that are grass-rooted up through our organization because of the strong partnership that we have in the industry. Well, I love that because, I mean, we've all been touched by, I mean, education, kids remote learning, healthcare is another one. I mean, everybody knows somebody, a nurse or now the first responders, today's heroes, that are having to really risk their lives, literally, every day when they go into work. And that is happening on the front line. So Keith, I appreciate your comment that it's a grassroots effort. And Laura, you got a new CEO and Arvin stepped into this and I'm excited to talk to him about one of his first moves, but any other color you can add to that or other sort of initiatives that you've seen in the field. Yeah, so, you know, Keith touched on it just a moment there, a moment ago there, you talk about the ICUs in the hospitals. Almost a month ago, when this all started, I sat there watching the news, watching people dying in the hospital without a chance to really talk to family members and the burden that it was putting on to the healthcare professionals. We came up with, I said, there's a solution there. Went to Keith said, you know, we've got WebEx, we've got other things in the portfolio. Went to Samsung, they have devices that are military grade that'll work there. We were able to put a solution together pretty quickly. We've got a number of hospitals that are evaluating it right now. We're almost ready to roll this out. But that just goes to a mature company that has all the security and interactions with other companies that have the part pieces that you need and then test it, make sure it's secure, that it's enterprise grade and get it out there. It's not many companies in the world that can do that. Well, it goes to what you were saying before. I called the DELP supervision, but I talked to Sri Srinivasan who runs Cisco's collaboration division. And as they say, the CIOs told us, we really off put by people trying to sell us. So what Sri told me was that Cisco made a free offering, no swipe of the credit card. Hey, if you buy something down the road, that's fine. It doesn't matter. And that's the kind of leadership that I think people expect from companies like IBM and Cisco, quite frankly. Yeah, and Dave, what Sri and what Chuck did there, that wasn't easy to do. I mean, we've essentially doubled and almost tripled our capacity of WebEx as we've gone through this. I mean, we're just absolutely, that that organization is working well over time, over time, over time. But then we were able to, Laura and I able to take that, take some of that technology, be able to get out in front. And it's really not about, it's not about creating revenue right now. It's about helping get our customers through this crisis together. We'll worry about where commercial opportunities come down the road. Yeah, and those will happen. I mean, those are going to be outcomes of your business practices. And Laura from, you know, we're talking to Rob Thomas again, and he, I mean, the data angle here, all the data, the data sources, the data quality you're seeing, you see it in the maps, you see it in the real-time updates. I mean, things change literally on a day-to-day basis. And that's kind of, you know, IBM's wheelhouse, really. Yeah, yeah. And we're addressing, you know, a lot of that with what we're doing here in our two companies and providing that solution, get at that data, get it securely where it needs to be. We've been on the forefront of providing from an IBM perspective around the COVID information that's being used around the world through our weather company application that we have out there. We've offered up the mainframe technologies and our supercomputers around helping, be able to help hospitals and those that are working on vaccines and all of that information. So, you know, you've got to have the networking piece of that, you've got to have the technology that it works on and then you've got to have that data that you can access and manipulate quickly to get those answers out. Yeah, and Cisco, IBM, it's been a partnership that made a lot of sense. There's not a ton of overlap in your portfolios, which is quite amazing given the size of your companies. You know, there is some, but generally speaking, it's been a pretty productive partnership. Keith, Laura, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, sharing a little bit of information and thanks for what you're doing during this crisis. Stay safe. Thanks Dave. Thanks Dave. All right, you're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM's Digital Think 2020. You're watching theCUBE.