 Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angles, the CUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and get the best technology coverage on the planet. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante, the co-founder of Wikibon.org, and we are here live in Las Vegas for IBM's big cloud show, IBM Pulse. Huge event for IBM, massive amounts of earth shattering news here with global impact around IBM's future. It's all about cloud computing. IBM Pulse is the show live in Las Vegas, over 9,000 attendees. 70% of the attendees are first-time attendees. This is the CUBE. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. Dave, a transformation for IBM. I mean, IBM obviously bought SoftLayer and we were pretty critical. I mean, I was pretty critical of the SoftLayer acquisition at Amazon Web Services Reinvent Conference saying that, you know, SoftLayer is a bunch of bare metal. What are they doing with it? We were speculating that's not really cloud. Obviously, IBM has plans for that. We're seeing SoftLayer at the center of the acquisition conversation here with software. But this show really is about cloud as a growth driver for IBM. A lot of different capabilities they're launching today. Ton of news to get to. Quickly, your take on the keynotes and what you expect to see here at IBM Pulse. Well, I remember that discussion, John. We were at IOD. We were talking about the SoftLayer. We had some diverging opinions on that. I go back to prior to the SoftLayer acquisition and IBM, like many of its traditional IT company colleagues was struggling I think with its cloud strategy. I would put IBM in that camp, HP. I mean, certainly, you know, EMC and VMware had great marketing, but when you really peeled back the onion and looked at what they were doing in terms of self-service, in terms of pricing transparency, in terms of agility, in terms of service offerings, they were lacking. And I think the SoftLayer acquisition was really a big move by IBM to combine that with another $1.2 billion in data center expansion and combine that with another $7 billion over the last several years of SAS applications that IBM can now bring into its portfolio. And voila, John, it's in the cloud. It's focusing on the hybrid cloud. It's focusing on, obviously, its strengths and insecurity. But IBM's known for making billion dollar plus investments. And the other interesting thing I'd note, IBM is throwing a shot across the bow at Amazon playing the open card, playing the open stack card, playing the cloud foundry card, saying that closed, proprietary public clouds will not win in this game. So it's game on in the enterprise. It's totally game on in the cloud. Here's my take in watching the cloud over the years, going back even five years ago, Dave, looking at the cloud washing that's gone over the years, even IBM's been accused of cloud washing and some are even throwing that kind of fud out IBM. But here's what's happening. Just like in the big data space, we're seeing real growth. We're seeing real businesses deploying real capital. I think what's different about right now with IBM and what you're seeing with Pivotal and the cloud foundry spin out as an independent organization and the momentum of open stack is that there is real dollars to be spent. There's real build up going on and it's a real sea change as actually rubber is hitting the road. And that's the key story here. And what we're going to hear from IBM and in the industry, this next chapter of innovation is around really delivering value. And that's around cloud equals growth for not only the companies that are selling the wares and software, but in an open framework, the customers are going to grow. Soft layer is going to come into its own here as a key part of the strategy, but not just soft layer. It's going to be IBM retooling around soft layer providing kind of the middleware and kind of new software architectures that kind of brings in the open frameworks. And again, the modern operating system, the modern infrastructure, huge software investment. Again, the change around how software is developer, developers are developing. DevOps is winning the day and it's winning big. The cloud found just having a good day today and that's a testament to that. And the cloud acquisition speaks to that. And the hybrid cloud, as Pat Gelsinger said at VMware, is really not a halfway house. It's the destination of the customers on premise with hybrid. That is the private cloud focus. Private cloud essentially goes away in my book and that's as more of a data center play. And ultimately cloud, mobile and social where you're seeing the consumerization of IT being transaction driven around consumerization stuff. That's mobile, that's software, that's the user experiences, that's the expectations. And finally, new class of developers. This DevOps breed or cloud developers are new school developers. A new breed, not the old DB2 guys, not the old guys like us who are back in the old days. It's a transformation of developers from old to new and old becoming more skilled. And finally my prediction is the Watson is going to be the secret weapon here. I think the cognitive computing story is going to be overlaying on the cloud. So it's going to be an interesting time as we see on the big data day if the swim lanes are taking place, the big guys are taking their position. You've seen some consolidation around core things like the OpenStack Foundation and Cloud Foundry in particular. It's just a good time right now and there's a lot of money on the table to be had here. Let me add a couple of things to that, John. So I think my wild card is developers and I tweeted out this morning that IBM has developer juice it has for a while and you really can't be in this cloud game in my opinion, John, without having the mind share with developers. So who has that? Obviously IBM has that. Obviously Amazon has done a great job with developers. Google, Apple has mind share with developers. And there are others. I mean the OpenStack community in general, we've talked on theCUBE about HP's lack of a developer community. In fact, we talked to Robert Youngjohns about that. And so that's a big gap in their portfolio and Microsoft of course obviously has the developer community. So you've got to have the developer eyes and ears in order to win in the cloud game. So that's a key criterion. The other thing we've been tracking is some announcements. So the blue mix pass that IBM announced today in partnership with Cloud Foundry, they gave a nice demo. Basically they showed Twilio spinning up an app, literally using Node.js in about five minutes, pushing an app live or retail app. That was pretty impressive. And then the other big announcement, John, is IBM acquired Cloud and a NoSQL database as a service and we've tracked at Wikibon, the NoSQL and the SQL market, particularly in the big data space, they're both exploding, big move by IBM to pick up a NoSQL player. Well, we got all live coverage here for two days here in Las Vegas covering the IBM pulse. This is theCUBE. We're going to be doing a special two day broadcast here. We're going to talk to the CEO, software. We're going to have you, David Pogon from now at Yahoo, formerly the New York Times. That should be very entertaining. We're going to have a lot of top executives. We're going to hear from them on what they think is going on in the market, the product, the technology, hopefully benefit for customers. And of course, we are on all the social channels, but go to crowdchat.net slash IBM pulse. We set up an always on public timeline. I mean, IBM has their own kind of propaganda going on, they're curated tweets. Go check those out. If you want to see what the crowd is saying, go to crowdchat.net slash IBM pulse. Log in, sign in, be part of the record. There'll be a transcript from that chat. This is theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas. We'll be right back with our first guest here at IBM pulse right after this break.