 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back here. We are live here at the Mandalay Bay for exclusive theCUBE three-day coverage of IBM Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante for all three days. We're on day three winding down, great show. Our next guest is Justin Youngblood VP of Hybrid Cloud Management with IBM. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Great to have you on because a lot of the talk, obviously cloud, we hit blockchain, but a lot of under-the-hood production workload stuff still needs to manage with all this stuff. You guys had an announcement on day one on the cloud automation management. Big part of the keynote. So it was kind of a prime time spot. Can you share, well, why did you get that great slot? How did you get the great slot? And what's the impact? Well, it really all starts with what's happening in the market and the team's been working hard inside of IBM. We announced IBM Cloud Automation Manager. It was elevated to a tier one offering, very strategic space for IBM in multi-cloud management. What we know is every enterprise is now moving towards multi-cloud environments. Cloud adoption is well into its maturity and really it's 71% of enterprises have three or more clouds and they need to manage those clouds with a common management platform and that's what cloud automation is called out. And it's a big pain point too. I mean, it's one of those non-sexy items like blockchain. It's like off AI and blockchain to hit the headlines but a lot of the blocking and tackling is going on in hybrid right now. So you see that orchestration feast between multi-cloud, little things like latency, security, workload, migration. I mean, this is what you guys are doing, bringing the IT operations to a modern level. Is that kind of the main thing? That's exactly right. And there are really two entry points to this because on the one hand it is that IT team. When you think of the modern enterprise, every modern enterprise is trying to move faster, trying to get applications out faster, trying to better engage with their customers, essentially trying to digitally transform, be the disruptor instead of the disrupted. And often they'll look at their IT team and say you're not keeping up, you're too slow. So this is an automation and orchestration tool that allows the IT teams to rapidly deploy applications and infrastructure to the line of business and to their DevOps teams. Well, that's the thing, I mean, you got developers, not just IT, you got developers and the line of business who have a financial stake over the top line revenue. Absolutely. Right, so you make it happen and you get the movement to true private cloud happening. What's different now for you guys with automation? What's the key unique thing in this announcement that makes it go to the next level? Yeah, several things there, but no solution is complete from IBM these days without cognitive, right? And so bringing in those cognitive services and insights to analyze and help optimize the performance of workloads on any cloud environment, and also really to provide an advisor role, prescriptive guidance and recommendations on where to place workloads to optimize performance, cost, compliance, right, within company policy and security and regulatory environments. So we had Mohamed Farouk on earlier and he was talking about cloud brokerage services. And I wonder, as you enter this market, if you're starting to see different KPIs emerging, right? The traditional IT operations, KPIs, okay, the light on the servers, huh? You know, it's uptime, planned downtime, unplanned downtime. You know, percentage of my backups that failed, whatever it is, are there new KPIs emerging as people become cloud brokers? Yeah, absolutely. And Mohamed's a good friend. We're both Austinites right in the same building. Another Austinite. Austin's dominating theCUBE this week. We talk regularly and really we see a nice synergy between the cloud brokerage tool, which is brokering across the application readiness assessments of putting workloads onto the cloud and then planning and cost analysis and so on, and then the orchestration of actually deploying those workloads. And so there's a nice synergy and then really the third leg of the stool in my mind then plays into service management and having the integration across all those pieces is really important. So being both cloud agnostic for multi-cloud environments, but then also having an open API and ecosystem that you can enable and plug in with existing tools. And there was a period of time where IT was almost afraid of automation, but then this cloud thing sweeps over them. Are we past that now? We are past that and it's a great point, right? Because sometimes IT can be afraid of automation because they can think that's threatening my job, right? But we've got client success stories where we're running our cloud orchestration and hybrid cloud management solutions at massive scale, literally saving dozens of full-time equivalent hours. And what we're finding is these enterprises are saying, finally, now I can get to the innovation and the transformative projects that are on the strategic agenda rather than working within manual IT processes. So it's really been a win-win. And when you talk about that average, the average enterprise has, you said three clouds? Three more clouds. 71% of enterprises have three or more. I mean, are you excluding SaaS? And that number? You're excluding SaaS because you think about private clouds. That's infrastructure clouds, right? Absolutely, private clouds, public clouds, and a lot of departmental clouds are shadow IT where different cloud services are being consumed even if the IT team may not be managing it. So that brings the question in, where does SaaS play if I'm a cloud broker and I've got these corporate edicts and I've got these KPIs around running the business and transforming the business? How do I apply those edicts to SaaS and can you help me do that? Is that futures or is that just sort of a separate island? Yeah, it's a little bit futures right now. Many times with these, with the cloud management platforms in particular, these tools are used to automate the deployment of the infrastructure and what's unique in our solution is the full stack application and even the day two operations. But the SaaS applications are tending to come in through a slightly different channel now. Over time, I think what we're going to see is all applications, whether they're delivered by the IT team or from the cloud need to come into a comprehensive platform. And should CIOs be worried about that? Because each SaaS provider has different infrastructure. You know, some of the different availability profiles, different definitions, different SLAs. I mean, that's a whole nother problem area to be attacked, I guess. Yeah, no, it is a concern. I mean, just the application sprawl, right? Infrastructure sprawls, cloud sprawl. And this is why, you know, I think anytime we're entering into a new industry, we're going to see that expanse and then back to a convergence. And honestly, I presented with Dave Bartoletti from Forrester this week and a lot of his insights and things that he writes about and what I spoke about and my team did in our sessions was the need for a common management platform because of that sprawl, it's raining in the chaos. What are some of your favorite examples, you know, customer case that early wins? Yeah, so a great case study is at Swiss Re, right? Large global insurance company, 60 global offices. This is a company that uses our cloud orchestrator solution with business process manager. Their environment includes WebSphere but also Microsoft Active Directory, ServiceNow, Puppet, et cetera. When they came and used our solution to really to automate the deployment of applications, to put applications and IT as a service into a self-service catalog for their line of business and development users, at the end of the day, they have automated 45,000 processes executed each month and literally dozens of offerings into the service catalog now. So the IT service management business has been evolving very rapidly. Cloud has impacted that. The on-premise ratios are going to probably shift a little bit, but not radically. But then again, the use cases for public cloud are going to be dependent on the workload, right? So that's kind of well defined and discussed. Question I have for you is from a customer standpoint, the number one conversation we're having and we're seeing digitally at least on Twitter and in the Cube is what does enterprise readiness mean? So I'm an enterprise and I want to go to the cloud. I have to then evaluate which cloud is best for which workload, but then I also have to put it through the prism of readiness. Their table stakes, do they have the table stakes? I mean, Google's got some great machine learning, but the SLAs might not match up or Amazon's got some great kinesis for analytics, but I can't run my other thing on that. That comes up a readiness problem. It is a readiness and I would say there is no single cloud that is purpose built for all workloads, right? And a lot of the messages you heard here at Interconnect this week, even from Jenny Rametti herself, where IBM has the enterprise ready cloud and a lot of data points to back that up, including every enterprise is going to be cognitive and the way we think about that is cloud and cognitive are two sides of the same coin, a famous quote also from Jenny. But now we're getting into trusted networks and hyper ledger and blockchain. I don't want to get too far off track, but it's some of those- They'll augment the change on the disruption side on the innovation side, not necessarily impact some of the blocking and tackling table stakes. The blocking and tackling, so that gets down to some of the regulatory concerns and other pieces, which is why we've invested now to have 51 data centers around the world because of data locality and security concerns that companies have. So there's a lot to do. I love her line. She's the best. I got to say, very memorable. Enterprise strong, maybe if I got the whole Boston strong thing is still in my head because being from that area. Enterprise strong, data first, cognitive at the core. I mean, those are the three pillars. You can unpack that in every different way. So you guys have to bring that into your offering. So I get the enterprise strong, data first. How are you guys using the cognitive piece specifically in this? So data first is an architectural thing and then where's the cognitive piece fit in? Yeah, perfect. So as we architected this solution, it was really important to us to put cognitive at the core and really two use cases primarily. The first is around as companies go deploying their applications and workloads on the cloud, every application is going to have its down times, its slow downs, its outages and that impacts end user experience. That's why it matters. It can impact revenue or NPS scores for the company. So the first is a cognitive operations capability and you can think of that analytics moving from log analytics to quickly pinpoint the root cause of issues up through predictive analytics to prevent an outage or an issue before it impacts your end users ultimately into the cognitive domain, which is a true machine learning and the capabilities that we're working on in our labs now and that we demonstrated this week at InterConnect, we actually have a chat ops interface for the IT operator to come and interact with a cognitive system that's part of Cloud Automation Manager and get prescriptive guidance and confidence levels around this. We'll be voice activity once basically in the future. Hey, move to cloud nine. So that's the differentiation, right? I mean, if I were to push you on that, it's trust, I mean, everybody's going to say they have cloud, but you know, like you said, it's a multi cloud world and it's the cognitive piece. Is that right? It's really the trust and the cognitive piece. The cognitive piece is absolutely the number one piece of differentiation that no one has. Because a lot of big enterprise hardware and software companies are going to say, you trust us. People do trust them and that's how they got to be multi billion dollar companies, but talk a little bit more about the differentiation with respect to cognitive. Yeah, so that's one aspect of it and that's just cognitive operations management, right? And even that is at one level of value where I think there's additional value is getting into really letting Watson and cognitive services become an advisor to your business. So imagine your smartest IT operator in the business if Watson can learn from that person, right? Sally or Jeff, whoever it is, learn from that and help every IT operator in your business always make the best decision as smart as the smartest subject matter expert is in IT operations and so this is the learning aspect of cognitive and in that advisor role now, all of a sudden, a cognitive chat ops interface can begin to provide prescriptive guidance when there's an outage or imagine an application or workload going down and Watson taking automatic action to redeploy the workload on a different cloud that has not been impacted, no interruption of service to the end user and then come back and say, now let's pinpoint the root cause of the problem and fix that but I've already addressed the main point. And what's key about that is it's a learning machine model so if you have the domain expertise of the specific use cases, it's not trying to use some sort of vocabulary and map that onto an infrastructure environment or software environment. Very plain language, natural language understanding and it's really, really powerful capability. All right, so the question is how do customers get access to this? Blue Mix Garage, is there IBM.com and what's the vehicles for getting this in the hands of customers? Yeah, the easiest way is at ibm.biz forward slash try ibm cam. So if you go there, it'll take you right into our Blue Mix service and customers could get started right away. We have a free addition that allows customers to get started with the offer. All right, I know this is a tough personal question but I'll ask it anyway. No one likes to pick their best, who their favorite child is but what's most exciting about the product for your standpoint? Looking at the success of the announcement, obviously prime time on the keynote, congratulations. But what's the one thing that you get most excited about the product? Yeah, the most exciting thing is it's all about the application, right? It's all about the application and digital transformation. So certainly the cognitive piece and we've talked about that but I want to highlight one other thing which is we in IBM are providing pre-built automation content from the infrastructure up through full stack applications and getting into the day two operations, the monitoring, the backup, et cetera. We can orchestrate that end to end unlike anyone in the industry. End to end is the key word. This is now a big part of the architecture. End to end cross vendor. Exactly. And open source. Yep. That's kind of the big, that's what you call automation packs? Is that right? These are the cloud automation packs exactly. In the past we've called them patterns, we're moving to an open pattern technology base and we call them cloud automation packs. I don't just say more about that. We're going to make them available in a marketplace, in the IBM cloud marketplace so clients can come, learn about, discover, try and buy these automation packs. All right, so here's the hard question for you. Well, it might be easy for you, hard for me but as you go end to end which is totally the right way I believe is that's where everyone wants end to end. But you're crossing horizontal and vertical at specialty across multiple vendors and new things coming. So now 5G comes to Naples, autonomous vehicles, now you got smart cities, now you got Watson trying to learn new environments that I've never seen before in IT. How do you guys prepare for that? What are you guys doing to get out in front of that next wave? Yeah, so in the past I think a lot of applications and even management tools have been built as monolithic applications. With the cloud automation manager, we built it from the ground up. It's cloud native, microservices based, just like a lot of applications out there in the enterprise are being run. That allows us to be much more composable and flexible than we've ever been in the past. And we augment that with a set of open APIs to integrate with clients' existing tools. You heard me mention the example of integrating with service now. Of course, we can integrate with Urban Code or other DevOps tools, APM and monitoring tools, et cetera. That's the key integration is the new table state. That is the new table. Justin Youngblunt, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great, congratulations on the success of your launch and good luck with the adoption. It was the out in the marketplace. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Justin, the VP of cloud management inside theCUBE. More cloud action, more data action, more predictive content here on theCUBE. More great interviews coming. Stay with us. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.