 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Edge 2016, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back, Juhi McClellan is here. She's the Vice President of Technology Support Services for IBM and you're watching theCUBE. Juhi, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. My pleasure, it's good to be here. So, tell us about technology support services. I think we know what they are, but give us in your words, what that's all about. Ah, sure, so we, Technology Support Services is part of Global Technology Services, which is, you know, all the, we are the women and men that build the infrastructure and support the infrastructure that the world economy runs on. That's our mantra and our vision. And so, technology support services, within that, we're focused on supporting IBM products, IBM hardware and software, as well as very strong multi-vendor services practice where we support more than 30,000 non-IBM products. Okay, so obviously cloud is, hybrid cloud is hot right now, right? That's got to be one of the big trends. What other trends are you seeing that you're getting dragged into to solve problems? Yeah, so I think like from a client point of view, many of our clients are being asked to adopt hybrid cloud, right? And so they're looking for a starting point. They want to build it on open standards. And the technology is all, like they were so used to buying power systems, as you were just talking to Doug or Mainframe. And now suddenly they have a mix of all kinds of technologies. Some from very mainstream vendors like IBM and some from, you know, companies that might not even exist in a couple of years. So the product's outlasting the companies. So for them to have this internet of things like capabilities, hybrid cloud and all of this together, they are looking for a reliable partner that can be with them to support these devices, whether they're in a data center or latched onto a refrigerator in a retail store or on an ATM. So just this whole mix of technology and especially the proliferation outside the data center is causing a lot of angst to a lot of CIOs. And they're really looking for some company that can be a consolidation point to help them scale up, scale down, mobile, you know, IoT in a non-mobile setting. So we have a lot of CIOs who I talk to and most of it is around that. And none of their budgets are going up, right? So they all have to do it within the existing operating expense. You have to imagine things like IoT will put some unique challenges on your organization. How are you keeping ahead of that and managing that diverse world of IoT and beyond? Yeah, it's very interesting. I think there's a couple of, as I talk to clients, a couple of things that really come out from an IoT point of view, which make our job of supporting just the traditional data center and it totally changes how we support stuff. These IoT devices are very small in value, right? They're like a couple hundred bucks. So how do you support a couple hundred buck device which could be spread anywhere? The other thing is they don't have keyboards and screens. So how do you configure? How do you monitor these? So I think the things that we're doing, we have sort of a tiered approach for IoT support. We offer them more and more remote support and remote monitoring, which makes it more economical, right? Because when you send somebody to fix a problem, it costs a lot of money. But there are these devices that are also very proliferated because they are very spread out and many times the clients don't even know where they are. So we do supplement remote support and remote monitoring with physical humans. Technology support services has 19,000 people in 200 countries. So we can actually support them if a physical intervention is required. And also the value of these devices being so low, many times rip and replace is the best support that you can offer. So we have several depots around the world and stocking locations. So in some cases, if the device value is really low, we just keep spare parts and send a new part when it's needed. And put them in the shredder. Yeah, well, we try to get whatever sense on the dollar that we can get, but pretty much what you said, exactly. So it's been really exciting. Drew, as far as the organization goes, your group sits within the systems organization or is it part of the global service? We're part of global technology services. But we do work a lot with the systems group because we support all the system group products. So I spend a lot of time with our friends and systems and then a lot of times. Clarify this, are you only supporting blue or I mean the GTS obviously supports anything. Got a problem, we got the answer. But your group supports all IBM? Technology's correct or? No, we support all IBM, but we also support all multi-vendor environments. So we support, yeah, pretty much all servers, X86, we support Linux, we support OpenStack, we support Hybrid Cloud. We pretty much support networking from Cisco, Juniper, F5, Riverbed, the whole gamut. The whole idea is the client should have an infrastructure availability. They're not looking for product uptime, they're looking for their entire infrastructure to be up and running. And is it a tip of the spear? I mean is there consulting involved up front or is it just sort of deployment services and management services? What's the spectrum of services? Yeah, we do have clients who are looking for help on more like predictive and cognitive support. So we do provide consulting if a client's looking to embed cognitive and Watson into their support strategy. We have deployed Watson within IBM, so we definitely see that side. But on the other side, it's more providing technical support for Hybrid Cloud, for IoT, for software, everything. And what about architectural services? Architecting a Hybrid Cloud, is that something that you guys would provide? It is provided by the bigger global technology services groups, so we have several service lines like networking, system services, mobility. And we work very closely with them where they do re-architect the entire client's infrastructure, whether it's a network transformation project or service provider transformation. So you might come into the tail end of a consulting phase of an engagement and there's a knowledge transfer and then you have the responsibility for making it all work. Yes, and keeping it running. And then I was going to ask you, you provide the management as well. Yes, as long as they want to keep the products and the infrastructure. And there's a lot of change, right? There's constantly products going into service and new products coming. And we're really excited about Watson because in this multi-vendor services business, we support more than 30,000 non-IBM products, right? And for our agents and our service engineers to learn about all these technologies that are so spread out and so different and varied, it's very difficult to be an expert in everything but we're expected to be an expert in everything. So we've really adopted Watson very seriously and heavily in our centers. So we're using Watson to make our engineers be smarter. We're also allowing clients to interact with Watson on our support portal. If they have any problem, instead of talking to a human, they can just interact with Watson and get solutions. So... Yes, so where will things like cognitive, all this analytics that we were talking about that's pervasive, that sounds like it's pretty transformational to your business, both to kind of help people today, but how much will it allow for self-service or will it be taking jobs away from some of that? No, that's a great question. I think really from our client point of view, we're investing in three areas. One is predictive maintenance. So we want to predict failures before they happen and that's the best solution for most of our clients and for us and then we're using cognitive to help the client solve the problem themselves. There will always be a time when they need an engineer to fix things for them but it's not really replacing. We always, as Ginny says, we think of Watson as man, woman and machine, not a replacement of the machine. So we're looking for it to help us. And then lastly, we're using blockchain. As you can imagine, we interact a lot with the clients on service levels, on billing, and there's a lot of back and forth with the clients, a lot of interactions. So we're trying to put all of that in a blockchain framework and use hyperledger and technologies like that to make it simple. So the Watson P, the cognitive is both self-serve for the client and it's sort of a deep dive into the technology services domain. Like you think of Watson as, all right, we're going to point Watson at health care and help doctors or we're going to point it at food and come up with recipes. Okay, so you pointed Watson at technical support. Exactly, exactly. And when did that start? It started 18 months ago before exposing it to our clients. We wanted to make sure we're really good because failure can cost our clients a lot of money. So we spent a lot of time doing it ourselves, making our agents do it and now we're comfortable to open it up on our support portal and allow clients to use Watson, natural language questions. Hey, my hard disk is not rebooting. And then the Watson dialogues with the client. What's the same real lightening? Yeah, exactly, exactly. What has the business impact been for your organization of that? Really positive clients of, you know, they do want to help themselves more. They want to do more portals and forums rather than traditional way of calling somebody and talking to them. They still want that number to call, but we're seeing more and more. We get almost 50,000 incidents a month. And out of that, many of them are solved by the client themselves, which then helps them reduce the support costs, right? So their IT is growing, the complexity is growing, but the costs also have to be managed. So as it's proliferating within that same budget, now because of Watson and technologies like predicting failures, we're able to support more stuff for almost the same amount of money for them. So we sometimes call it dog-fooding. Some people prefer drinking your own champagne, but you guys are doing some of that. And are you referenced for account for some of your other customers? Like how can I apply Watson? How can I apply analytics for predictive maintenance? So the sales guys knocking on your door saying, Nick, can you be a reference for my account? Absolutely, yeah. So to your point, we've tried it on ourselves and it took us a while and now we've gotten really good. So we have quantitative data that shows how many problems can we solve in the first time fix, which saves us, saves the clients a lot of money because they don't have to stay on the phone for a long period of time. So now we're sharing it with our clients who are looking to provide cognitive support on their products. So we work with several companies in the networking space and the PC space. PC margins are so thin, whatever cost they can take out of their support, they really value it with the mobility customers. So yeah, it's a great way to use it and then share it with the industry. Excellent. All right, Ju, we have to go. Wrapping up here, day two of Edge. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. We're live from IBM Edge in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.