 It's theCUBE, covering IBM World of Watson 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at the world of Watson, the world with Watson. However you look at it, it's Watson all the time. It's theCUBE, theCUBE Watson. SmartCube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and he, Chusa and Jens Meagers. Welcome to the theCUBE SVP of Cisco Collaboration and IBM, another partnership. So again, he talked about the relationship with Cisco because collaboration, you got to move the packets across the network, you can move from point A to point B. Yeah, you know, when I think about the way people work, they want to work in teams, they want to surface content, they want to progress a business objective or process and throughout that, people are going to want to interact in real time. And when I look at the landscape of potential partners and leadership vendors, it was for me very clear in terms of the spectrum of all that Cisco provides across unified communications or across next generation of telepresence, across audio, video, voice and thinking through even the elements of Webex and web conferencing, how do we integrate that with everyday workplace applications such as email, calendaring, document creation and editing. And on top of that, actually infuse Watson. Okay, so Cisco has a lot of points up and down the stack. So as Cisco's been moving up the stack, as everyone is enabling that, what's the relationship now on the collaboration side? Because we talked about messaging before we came on camera. So what is the integration design point? Can you guys share what you guys are doing together? Sure, basically when you just look at the customers that we have today and our existing customers with our existing offerings, they basically, our product portfolio is highly complementary, right? So IBM provides email, they provide social, we provide real time meetings, messaging and chat. And so we basically were listening to our customers and said, the guys, you have to integrate better. So that's when we started talking to any in our team. And then when we started working together, we got more and more ideas what we can do. We really figured out that we can do more than just integrating, like bringing cognitive intelligence in there and making the portfolio much, much better. And that's what we're doing right now. Is it all the collaboration products and this partnership or is there set partnerships? Yeah, it's worth thinking holistically about the collaboration products across both companies. And as Yen said, step one is integrate the existing applications that exist in our clients environment. And then step two is how do we innovate and take them to the next level? The other piece we are doing is we are actually going jointly to market to clients together to say, hey, X industry, CIOs, Chief Workplace Application Leaders, if you're thinking about that end-to-end experience, we're going to design for it in a way that makes these pieces all work together really well. So you're marketing a joint solution in that case? Yes, well. So what does that solution look like or does it sort of depend? It's really like the best of email, this IBM voice, and the best of social but the best of meetings was Bebex. And it's incredible. The feedback that we get from our customers who basically have either one of these solutions, they accept what we need, they're very happy. Take us to an example of your favorite use case. By the way, we're a customer of WebEx too. So doggie sign and WebEx. We run on all those great SaaS products. Well, maybe I'll start with just a simple example. So think about if you're starting in a connections community and you've got a sub-community in there where it's a team around the topic and it's your marketing team and you're thinking about your next customer event like this and you see the members of the community and you realize you need to talk to them very quickly in real time. Being able with one click initiate a web conference scenario would be one example of the thing that we're designing for. But when you're in the web conference scenario, wouldn't it be great rather than the individual having the burden to think about away what version of the document did we use? Can we make that presence aware to say, hey, by the way, here are the last three files and this is the most recent one as you're in that conference so that the right people are actually integrating. Another area that we're thinking about is time and time management. So when you look at email and calendaring, it's such an area that can be so disruptive in a great way with cognitive and you marry that with making a verse and our verse calendaring experience, presence aware of all of the details for WebEx and vice versa. And then when we think about also next generation of what Cisco is doing with Spark and the possibility of infusing Watson and we've talked about like virtual assistance, right? And bots and expert advisors surfacing, it just makes that end to end experience for an end user so much better. It feels great what you're doing with the group in here because the whole communication, unified communication space really grew out of voiceover IP, which you guys know a lot about. You get into telepresence, okay? It's a great solution. But now integrating that in with the web and mobile technology in the cloud supercharges it. So I can imagine that this is going to change the game a lot to get both of your comments on the notion of presence because telepresence I see with videos in the name but the presence of the human, where are they, are they mobile, they have a wearable? What's going on with cognitive? Are they have cognition enabled? What's going on with Watson's bots over here? So this kind of changes the game radically on presence. Totally changes the game. Here's the thing, when you look at it realistically, the tools that you just mentioned, even IP telephony, email, telepresence when I came out in 2005, once we had like flat screens, right? At enabled telepresence. These were tools that were basically designed mostly in the 90s, right? And now in the digital transformation, we need new tools. And we are at this very exciting time in this industry right now, we're at this breakthrough basically where we're creating complete new tool sets for this next generation of work. So this is what I like about it. From the ground up with the modern existing, so presence, messaging you mentioned earlier, what are the presence things should people take advantage of? Because there's a lot of data out there that could impact your life around presence. Like I'm here, I'm in Vegas, I'm not in Palo Alto. So is there what's cool going on? What's new? Any new things happening? Well I think one of the first things, I mean if you can marry the physical and virtual in a very simple way. So, and then let me take it to the next level of this notion of applying Watson. Of course you have weather in there too. And weather in terms of disrupting services. But if we were having a conference, let's say the four of us, then we're also having one or two other people join. And maybe they're joining either via audio or via web. And you had both in the experience a way where there's a virtual assistant that's actually taking tasks and actions from the meeting. It's presence aware because it knows who said what because it can begin to recognize who's talking potentially in the room. And then when the actions are assigned was it John you taking the to-do action to calendar or was it Dave? Or was it my responsibility to send the document or file to the next team? So these things you start to rethink the way people can work in terms of freeing up their capacity to focus on higher, let's say more difficult challenges that you know and our creativity on doing other things. Yeah and some function in productivity that you just described. And then if I can, if I don't know if you can help me solve this problem. If I can go back and look at that corpus of data or somehow investigate it, right? And say okay, I know we said it at that meeting. What was that nugget that we're looking for in that 45 minute FX that we just had? Can you help me solve that problem? Yeah, well and I think one of the things that Cisco is doing a very great job on is the intersection between collaboration and IoT and other applications and Jens in particular has been really driving all of the collaboration innovations but the possibility of machines and systems and devices and things with people interaction, it's going to be huge. Interactivity is always hard not to crack with video. You'd have a video app and then you'd have some sort of jammed in, chat app or this over here. And now with APIs, the integration points are different. It is. So you guys are doing that with Workspace but I understand it correctly. You're going to say okay, we'll take this in, integrate it in so it's modular in the sense of the composability on. That's right. Yeah, I think we're entering an API, well we've been in an API economy but this notion of microservices and maybe it's microprocess steps and elements but the APIs, we want them to be open. API economy, David and I talk about notification economy which really is the interruption economy. We have been interrupted with notifications. Well to your point, you're interrupted with notifications you're in the middle of work and then all of a sudden you're over here. There's a lot of this non-linear. When it comes to this like look, what will you have to solve for is to create experience that are extremely simple. Because right now the biggest problem with all of this APIs, interruptions, you mentioned presence, is that stuff is not simple enough. We really want collaboration to be magical and I think with the integration that we're doing and the cognitive and AI technologies there's a lot of stuff that can be done to actually really solve these problems and I think it's exciting. This is going to be really big. You mentioned magic. You're kind of exploring the FM category, FM magic we sometimes say. Okay, but so, sorry. So lay out the vision, Cisco's vision for collaboration in the future. Very, very simple, basically. What we want to do is we want to create an incredible collaboration experience from every mode of communication, from the smartphone all the way up to the boardroom. And then we want to do this in a very simple way. Want to have magical experiences and want it to be open. And so that is the core of everything we're doing here at Cisco, magical experiences in an open environment. Okay, I want to get the developer questioning because I've been asking all, because this is all goodness on the developer side with the cloud. Really great environment, we're seeing some startups here at World of Watson coming out of the woodwork and that's a good sign. You start to see pure startups coming in and using Watson. If I'm a developer, how do I get involved? What can I do? How do you guys see that holistic relationship between Cisco because now if I'm a developer I care about DevOps, I care about policy-based, whatever that is, now I can do all kinds of cool things with Cisco and with the data and Watson. What are the opportunities for developers? Well, here for every attendee, but those that are watching, we recommend you go to IBM Bluemix and also the Watson Developer Cloud. And that's where we're exposing both the variety of Watson APIs, like conversation, alchemy APIs, classification, different ontologies, image analytics, within it we're exposing the Watson Work Services API, which is a summarization action service. So that's an API that you can put on all kinds of third-party applications. It doesn't have to be just one that we're using within IBM. I happen to be looking at APIs as we build them, we're gonna use it and we're gonna build on top of it to train it and test the system and then we wanna expose that as well. So that puts the rigor in the engineering accountability, but for us as well as for the opportunity for developers. For the developers, what we found is with our collaboration suite, Cisco Spark, one size never fits all. So we have tons of developers that come to us, hey, look, I wanna integrate your technology in my app. And we support that. I think that's very, very important in the future. So that's why we basically launched developers.syscospark.com where we basically have developers.syscospark.com. Okay, CiscoSpark.com, okay, developers. And so basically we have about 200,000 developers for just that they basically use our APIs and use our SDKs to integrate either their technology with us or embed our technology into their apps. And also you get the Blue Mix now renamed with SoftLayer underneath that. So Blue Mix is the brand. No, Blue Mix is the brand. SoftLayer got put under Blue Mix or Sunsetted. Inhe, final question I'll go to you is, personal question, I know you just moved to Palo Alto so congratulations on it, Silicon Valley. You're in your new role now. You were doing BizDev, business development, now a general manager of this really transformative space with existing customers, existing products, kind of creating a clean sheet of paper for the future. A lot of great partnerships, a lot of success, congratulations. What's the big learnings that you've had? Looking back now as you look back through the first run of this, what did you learn? What's the big learnings for you? Technology-wise, what's been an observation? Can you share any insight? Yeah, there are a few. Thanks for asking. The last 10 years I have been deep in all aspects of data and analytics. You guys know that in a variety of different roles in offering management, product, BizDev, strategy. And one of the things that has always been a hurdle is we've applied analytics to enterprise structured data, enterprise data. We're starting to put analytics on data outside the enterprise, AKA Twitter, Weather. Now what I consider this is almost this last model of putting analytics on people and people interaction, which is actually the last hard piece because it's a lot of dark data as people talk about it. It's a cognition load that kind of impedes faster ways in which people can connect and work. And so being able to do that with this team is really exciting. So infusing cognitive to everyday email, everyday social networks, to blogs, to documents, to creations, new media content, like video is really exciting. And my fundamental belief in all of this is similar to what Jenny said in the Watson keynote was, look, Watson is something that we want to share with everybody. It is not just an IBM thing, and it's something that we believe is an open approach for the entire ecosystem and it'll be embedded in many places and we want people to creatively design their applications around it. So that's how we're thinking about it and that's why we're being so proactive in our partnerships with Box, Cisco, DocuSign, Apple, Code, and with everyone. So biggest surprise for you, just an observation like something you didn't expect in the venue. Oh, in the valley, oh, by the way, as Tom was alluding to, I just moved to California in the last two months as of August, so I've officially left New York to California. We're welcome, you're welcome. Okay, something local, interesting. You know what? I had to take the driver's license test, so I had to study a little bit. You didn't look at the manual, they tell you not to look at it when you're taking the test. But it was good, you know, the biking community in California is pretty awesome, so I had to kind of like get right up on that and the food obviously is awesome, wine selection is great, weather can't complain. So you're official now, you're not keeping that New York license, great. It's done, not only a new license, I'm fully registered to vote. Paying more taxes in California, obviously, so welcome to California, hello to California. Eddie, thank you so much, Jens, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, the Cisco IVM partnership, it's all about Watson, congratulations on collaboration. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante with REC with more after this short break.