 Hi, I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to another CUBE conversation from our beautiful studio here in Palo Alto, California. And once again, I'm joined by Eric Herzog. Eric is the CMO and vice president of channels in IBM Storage Group. Eric. Well, thank you. We love coming to see theCUBE. And by the way, I'm a Palo Alto native. Yeah, I've heard that. You know, I don't think we're going to get into that today. Maybe somebody, Tommy, could talk about that. But what I do want to talk about is storage has historically been way down in the food chain of strategy, of business strategy. Now we're talking about digital business. And digital business, at least from our perspective, and I think you would agree, is predicated on the idea that you use data as an asset. In fact, Wikibon says that the difference between business and digital business is digital businesses use data as an asset. Now, since storage is where you put that data and is responsible for availability, throughput, reliability, flexibility and how you do things differently with data, that kind of elevates storage's position as part of a strategic digital business capability, but nobody talks about it. So as a smart guy in the storage community, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about that. First off, you agree with my proposition? Yeah, I would posit that in today's digital business world built around private clouds, storage is, if not the critical foundation, one of the top two critical foundations you have to rely for your digital business. So if you're the CEO or you're the CFO and you know you're gone digital business, if the storage goes down or the storage is slow, your digital business and the value of that data you're driving both internally and for your customers just dramatically shrank. So it's critical, critical, just as when you're building a giant building in downtown San Francisco or downtown New York or downtown Singapore. If you don't have that foundation right, the building literally can fall right down. And in San Francisco, one of the big buildings is actually starting to lean about two or three degrees. There's got a bunch of people pretty freaked out. But let's talk about therefore, what are the strategic digital business capabilities that are associated with storage? That's CXOs have to start thinking about. You mentioned one, we call a true private cloud. The idea that you're still going to need some capacity where the data has to be because you're not going to be able to put everything in the public cloud. So true private cloud is going to be one of them. What's another one? So I think the big thing here is modern data protection. In the modern data protection scheme, because you're a digital business, which means you probably have test guys, you have some DevOps guys inside that are constantly playing with your own code or commercial code that you buy to optimize for your digital business. You've got to be able to give them real, real data sets to work with. Now that doesn't mean you can't track it in case there's a data leak or whatever. But the bottom line is you want those developers A, always be able to get it. B, have it to be self-service because the IT guys are keeping your digital business up and going. They can't be bothered with, hey, can you get me real data set? The quality of the data that those developers produce for you goes way up. So you have less downtime, which by the way, if you're a digital business, you don't want to have any downtime. And it gets it faster. So if you're playing with some commercial software writing your own that you're using in a digital business, you want to get there before your competitors do. So you want those DevOps guys constantly working and you want to be able to do that. Yet at the same time, the IT guy can focus on what they need to do. And by the way, they can track where all those copies of the real data sets are. So everybody wins and it makes it work well. So in many respects, what you're saying is that availability, which used to be associated with the performance of an individual application, is now associated with digital business strategy because you need to be able to test new business ideas, pursue new business ideas, be fast in bringing things to market. And the whole notion of availability extends beyond just making sure the data is where the application says it needs to be, to now using availability as a metric for ensuring that the data can be where it needs to be within the business so the business can make the appropriate changes and adjustments and extensions to what its strategy is. Well, think of this as you've got a data set. The more you use that data set, not just for the primary storage that gets used by the end users that are coming to your digital business, for everything else, back it up. Okay, great, check box. Okay, interface with common API so the DevOps guys can use it, another check box. Making sure that the test guys can test real data sets, not faux ones. Guess what, faster test time, more accurate test time, boom, better impact for your digital business. So extending the value of the data from just primary storage throughout your entire digital software development process is critical. And in today's world that's what you can do with the modern data protection that for example we have with our IBM solution. So let me build on top of that because I think another capability might be increasingly associated with speed of development. It used to be, again, that storage was very closely aligned with what your server needed. Increasingly we're starting to see the concept of data protection and the concept of data availability actually start to mean something very, very different to developers. Are we now seeing developers and the developer ecosystem start to drive more of what's required in storage? Well you've got to look at it, the developer wants to be able to spin things up quickly on their own. So in the old world you do a ticket, you give it to the VMware guy, the Hyper-V guy, the IT guy, it takes a week or so. You don't want to do that. So with our stuff for example you can check in and check out. It integrates with all their APIs. They can quickly do their work. It's a real data set not using fake data so that makes it better from a reliability perspective and it gets done faster and they know how it really is going to work when you deploy that in your digital business. They can check it in and check it out themselves so it happens way faster. So all that means for you as a digital business guy is better time and faster time to market with more reliable products for your end users. And that's kind of the key. That's kind of what the goal is. So we've got three this far. This notion of true private cloud where we need resources where the data demands, this notion of modern data protection which is to say that the notion of availability is beyond just backup and restore. It's now the multiple ways to use it. New communities that are going to be more closely associated with storage capabilities like the developer world. Are there multi-cloud? Are there other kind of strategic business capabilities at CXOs I have to think about as they envision their digital business strategy and the role that storage is going to play in either constraining it or facilitating it? Well, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, you can look at it in three buckets. Item one is that your storage infrastructure, you still may have some of your older stuff. You still may be using Oracle, not yet using Hadoop and you're using an Oracle data warehouse versus Hadoop big data analytic workload. I hear there's some customers out there that still have Z series installed running things. So you've got to be able to take the thing and cut costs on your traditional infrastructure and your traditional applications, workloads and use cases while you're going to the next generation and modernizing. So you want to be able to handle the older workloads and cut their costs. At the same time, invest more in things like Hadoop and Spark and Mongo, okay? And Cassandra, you want to be able to do both. At the same time as you create your private cloud infrastructure, you want to be able to use new paradigms such as containers. And if you're going to do that, you want a set of storage solutions, both software and array infrastructure that can support that. And that's a critical element is being able to A, modernize and cut costs of your older while you're moving to the new. For all your new stuff, you want to be able to that it's optimized and the DevOps guys can work it and you got all the right APIs. And then for the true private cloud, you're going to containerize model just like the public cloud guys do because you want every advantage for your own digital business that the public clouds and we can do all of that. But it's critical that you do all of that continuum from the newest of the new to the application in the middle, but you still have the old stuff while you're getting the new stuff up and running. So it's critical if I'm the CEO to make sure that my storage does all of that because if I fall down on the old stuff, well, that's a problem. I can't bill, I can't invoice, I can't ship things. If I fall down on the new stuff, guess what? I'm completely uncompetitive, right? And when I fail on the container world, what I'll call the refactoring of my infrastructure, I've totally lost the game because I'm not making it fast. I'm not making resilient. I'm not cutting my cost because everything is cost competitive. And if data is the value, everything's built around that data. That doesn't mean you want your data to be super expensive. Got to figure a way to do it cost effectively, yet still deliver the value in your digital business that the end user wants to see. And it's got to be flexibility across the board. Okay, so we've got some strategic capabilities that CXOs have to think about that storage is going to enable. February 2018, we're looking at say October 2019, next 18 months. What's going to be the one or two biggest changes in the storage world, do you think? Okay, first thing is going to be the automation of storage software across the board, not just for the storage guy, not that all storage companies don't love the storage guy, but increasingly there's a move to DevOps and other functions. So while each company is managing eons and eons and eons of more storage capacity, they're not adding eons and eons of storage admins. So you've got to have the Docker guy, you've got to have the application guy, be able to back up, be able to optimize their workloads, be able to go ahead and spin up a new container without calling the IT guy, because the IT guys are overworked. So that's item one is integration with all the coming APIs, automation, self-service are critical. The more it's automated, the more self-service is, the more you can factor in the non-storage guys into creating a true digital business. So that's item number one. Second thing you've got is there's a new technology known as NVMe. This is a very high-performance storage interface. It's new to the market. All the big storage vendors are working on, including IBM. We did an announcement on February 20th all about NVMe. The value there is more and more applications and workloads because the performance of the system itself, which is already highly resistant, highly available and highly capable of handling any failure mode, is it's super fast, which means you can put more and more applications and workloads on a physical infrastructure, which saves you time and saves you money. So those are two critical things. The rise of this automation paradigm and the self-service paradigm across all of your storage software and integrating it with your application layer, be able to use real datasets as modern data. And then this new high-performance storage interface that will dramatically allow more workloads for every ounce of storage you buy, saving you money, and also making it highly performant to meet your digital business SLAs. I think those are two great ones. I'm going to add one more and I'm sure we're going to be talking more about this. I think over the course of the next year and a half, we're going to see even greater understanding over the relationship between storage and data and new rules, new conventions, new approaches to how to think about that relationship. So that all of this great stuff that's happening within storage actually does become a strategic business capability. Yeah, you could say that storage management software will morph into data management or at least a hybrid of partial managing the storage, but actually also managing the data and things like what is the metadata and how can you use metadata more effectively manage your business? And we're doing a whole bunch of that with IBM and we've already announced several things around that. So that's an actually great observation. And it's not too far from there to say digital asset management. Not in the traditional, not in the marketing sense, but overall how it works. Eric Herzog, CMO, Vice President of Channels, IBM Storage. Once again, thanks for coming on theCUBE and talking to us about some of the things that are going to happen over the next 18 months in the storage world. Great, thank you very much. We always appreciate being with you and thanks again. I'm Peter Burris. Once again, this has been a CUBE conversation from our Palo Alto studios with Eric Herzog of IBM. Until next time.