 Welcome back everyone. Day two of IBM's information on demand. This is theCUBE. This is Silicon Angle and Wikibon's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. Day one was amazing yesterday. We talked about big data analytics. We had a lot of customers on. We had the top analysts. We had Merv Adrian from Gartner on. Ray Wang from Constellation Research. And then of course my co-host Dave Vellante. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle and my co-host. Again, day two for wall-to-wall coverage of information on demand by IBM's Dave Vellante. Dave, yesterday we heard about big data analytics. Today we're going to hear about social business. And as we were commenting yesterday, it was certainly exciting to see the coming together of the technologies in IBM under the hood or the applications, the killer app of analytics, in big data and insights and all that great stuff about visualization. But at the end of the day, under the hood is the technology of cloud, cloud infrastructure, mobile computing, and that's great under the hood. But what really makes data work is the business users. And social business is now the paradigm that's become legitimate in the sense that most executives that we talk to recognize the sea change of their business change. And that is how they talk to their customers, employees, and interact in the world and in the wild is going to happen on Twitter, Facebook, social networks on mobile devices. So the social business market is certainly changing radically. Society is changing, we're seeing the advent of hashtags. We're running a crowd chat right now which I'll explain in a minute. But the technology is moving very, very fast. More importantly, businesses are adopting, looking for road maps. So we're going to hear about social business today. It should be exciting. But I want to first ask you what you thought about day one yesterday and what you expect to hear day two here. Well, John, first of all, IBM's done a masterful job of really re-architecting IOD. IOD in the previous years was this collection of different business units. I mean, it involved information management, certainly the old Cognos business unit. I mean, even last year, there was a fair amount of flavor from Pure. Even though those guys are still here, Pure and other sort of ancillary or adjacent businesses. And even though last year we talked about how IBM had super-glued its analytics business to the big data theme, there was still some remnants of those old businesses, seeping through the messaging. This year, there's no mistake about it. The 13,000 people in attendance here are hearing big data and analytics and social analytics. It's very clear all the wood is behind one arrow to use a borrow phrase from the 80s, if you will. And it's impressive. So I didn't sit in the keynotes yesterday. I listened to them remotely. Today, I decided to go into the auditorium. It's extremely packed in there. There's 13,000 people. Probably the auditorium maybe holds 20,000, but they've cordoned off certain sections of it. So it's really full. And the content was great. We saw a demo of Project Neo. So IBM is getting into the biz-biz, John. And essentially, this is a key strategy, in my view, in order to reach the line of business executives and to permeate more users than just the hardcore analytics users. For instance, if you look at the Cognos business and the traditional BI business, there are professionals, they're analysts, they're real, heavy power users that can build things like cubes and take three-dimensional views of data and set up structures and schemas, work very closely with the business to determine what the needs are. The problem with these cubes is they're very rigid, they're not flexible, they're hard to change. And so what big data is really all about, in many cases, is bringing different types of data to the user audience. And visualization is the key aspect of that. So Project Neo gets IBM into the heart of the visualization business, really a territory that's been dominated by the likes of Tableau and ClickTech and others. So I'm very curious just to see what the feedback is from customers on Neo, what the feedback is from the marketplace. Neo is, as we were joking last week, AC, after cutting. So it's been designed with the knowledge of Hadoop and function shipping and all that other cool stuff that we always talk about on theCUBE. So that was one thing. We also heard Jeff Jonas essentially describing how he's helping fix the broken voter registration system. We're gonna have Jeff Jonas on later today and we're gonna ask him about that. We heard a presentation on Watson. You know, Watson, I think, is entering a new phase here, John, you know, Watson went from sort of, you know, really impressive victory in the Jeopardy situation to start contemplating how Watson's gonna be used and basic in various use cases, healthcare and the like. And now IBM's sort of putting forth a vision of the potential of Watson and where this can go, you know, around cognitive computing. You know, the idea that, you know, computers can start reasoning and thinking more and more and more and ultimately, as we've talked about many times in theCUBE, you can't take the humans out of the equation. Humans are sort of the last mile or maybe it's the last eighth of the mile, but you can radically compress the decision-making timeframe and increase the probability of better decisions and better outcomes. And that's really what IBM's talking about here. So I expect to hear more about that today and also we're gonna hear a lot about social analytics for business. That's something that IBM's really driving hard on. I'm really interested in learning more about that strategy. So that's gonna be a drill-down focus of our guests on theCUBE today, John. Well, we have a smarter plan in action. I was just doing a tweet on our crowd chat. So the folks out there watching, go to crowdchat.net slash IBM IOD. This is our new selected, directed availability public beta of our crowd chat application. It's an engagement platform with an integrated application. That's really designed, it's free. It's designed for community leaders. It's designed for a great end user experience. All comments go to the hashtag on Twitter or IBM IOD or on LinkedIn or Facebook. And the idea is to have a conversation publicly in an environment that provides threading and readability. So go to crowdchat.net. We're showing some folks here and obviously we're top of mind around social business. We believe that people want to connect with others, do business, do commerce, and connect in real life, whether that's gonna be at an emotional level, at a physical level, or just in business. So exchanging currency is a concept of social currency, ideas, and also real hard cash buying things. So at the end of the day, David, that's what businesses wanna do. They wanna do commerce, do their thing, and their outcome is simple. Make money, support their shareholders, and support their profits. So that's what crowd chat's all about. Go to crowdchat.net, join the conversation. Lots of news to be announced today. We have our folks coming in, the crowd captain there. We have Isabel, we have Grant Case again in on this. So thanks for watching. And go to crowdchat. Ask us questions. Do you have anything particularly you wanna talk about? Just ask us anything, and we'll respond, and we'll bring that in. But I'm gonna be really, really excited to hear how IBM's changed their social business landscape. And IBM is no stranger to collaboration. Obviously they've been in the computer business for many, many decades, and with Lotus, that kind of DNA has been in the company. So we're gonna hear from Jeff Schick, who's gonna come on theCUBE. We're gonna hear from all their leaders. We're gonna hear from Brene, who's a leader on that side of the house. But the key thing, Dave, is that right now the market wants new ways of doing things, not the old ways. So I'm really gonna ask the hard questions around what's different? What's different from the old IBM's version of social business? And how has it changed? How is it relevant today? Big data is real. It's here to stay as Judah said yesterday. Judith Horowitz from Horowitz Associates. Big data is here to stay and the killer app is analytics. Just like email is the killer app for the internet, analytics is the killer app for big data. That is going to create a massive explosion, I believe, will enable this connected devices like mobile and cloud computing, low cost, high performance infrastructure to provide business outcomes. And the businesses are changing their plans, re-engineering, doing deals with companies like IBM and others, to essentially be ready for social business. So it's really, I mean, the national anthem is being sung in this, the first inning's not even even started in my opinion. So I want to hear what's new. That's going to be my focus. So we're going to have some good times, we have some great guests. We'll ask the right questions and hear about the news. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after the short break. For day two of wall-to-wall coverage, this is theCUBE, we'll be right back.