 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. You are watching theCUBE, our flagship programs from SiliconANGLE Media, Wikibon theCUBE, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, join my co-host Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon. Our next guest is Douglas Soltis, senior editor of Mobile Syrup, who's been around the block, knows Mobile up and down. I mean, you know, back in the old Blackberry days, everyone had to crackberry now. It's like the iPhone comes out, the whole world changing, now it's Internet of Things. Guy from Boston earlier said there's zillions of connected devices, they don't know where they're going to start. Mobile has highlighted the tsunami of user meets developer meets app value. We see this kind of intersection of, I can stand something up in the cloud, touch a user and get massive distribution, great utility, Mobile has highlighted to everybody, analytics, utility. It's been some amazing eight years since the iPhone and certainly before that, but what you're taking on this? It's the opportunity and the concern, right? Because every device is a touch point for access to that information and control of it. So you have these companies figuring out a way to manage that on the back end for the user and then you have the security concerns of making sure that information is secure or contained within the certain requirements of the company, right? What's your take on IBM's place right now? Obviously, IBM's got a good direction, they've done their homework, they have, it all hangs together, the strategy, cloud mobile, social, enterprise now is hot, they got a deal with Apple, they have a deal with Twitter, they're getting modern, Redis is here, Docker's here, you're hearing all this cool stuff. Where are they? What's your take on that? Well, I think this event so far has been an example of kind of that convergence where they're understanding, it's not just about mobile, it's not just about the cloud, it's not just about the developer stuff, it's about how all those things are coming together. I think the partnership with Apple's really smart, they already have, I think, 10 apps out already, looking for 100, Twitter deal is great. I think with some of the partners that they had in the keynotes today, it's demonstrating that these established enterprises are starting to think and speak and act like entrepreneurs when you have a leader of city banks saying that they understand that their customers require banking services but don't require a bank, that should be kind of, that's a dog whistle to everyone that they're really paying attention to how to build that out. Douglas, talk about the difference between user experience, user interface versus user expectation. Okay, so I think one of the biggest issues with mobile is that it's as such a powerful tool in trying to solve these problems. There's a lot of work around passing off the difficulty to the user rather than solving problems for them. Mobile is something where you need exactly what you want in the moment, presented in the perfect way and nothing else. It's that powerful that the context has to be working. So developers really struggle managing that expectation of delivering information in real time, delivering it simply without presenting it in a way where it's too unweldly for the user, too complicated. And I actually wrote an article for IBM leading up the conference about collective user grown, whereas the first time or second time they use an app that doesn't present them what they need in the moment and they turn that app off to go back to their desk to use their laptop, they're never opening that app again. That's because that app didn't try to solve a problem for them on their device. And I think that's the real issue that developers have to work on is how do they simplify but keep powerful? So I live in Palo Alto, Dave is in the East Coast. We always compare and contrast, you know, and then Steve Jobs obviously was in Palo Alto and Apple. And we always joke about, oh yeah, being more hype up on the mobile. But Steve, to quote Steve Jobs, he said, in this reality distortion field, our users don't know yet what they want and we have to build them that. And that's awesome, right? But this brings up the point. They don't know what they want, but they know what they don't like. They know what they hate. Expand on that. What does that mean for Opportunity? Because the enterprise is now faced with real surge of build more apps faster now, mobile, first being key. They have to see this new thing. How do you advise them? What's your advice for folks? And what are you seeing out in the field for how people deal with that one question? Because if you misfire with mobile, you're dead. I mean, look, the founder of Twitter started a bunch of mobile apps and they all failed. So it's hit or miss. I think it's following the example of what we've seen the past few years in the bring your own services space with applications like Dropbox, Slack, Yammer, things like that that were built for small business or enterprise but designed for the standard consumer experience. It was meant to be simple and easy to use like any consumer app. It just happened to have enterprise functionality. I think mobile makes that not simply a nice to have but a fundamental requirement. Because in that way they're not going to spend time working with an app that's difficult to use when they're on the go in the field. Like they just need it to work. And what's your feeling for developers in the enterprise? Mobile developers tend to be a little snobby. They like Amazon. They might not be attracted to a blue mix. I mean, there's a gen one kind of like born in the cloud. That's pretty much Amazon. I think all developers like to choose their tools and fight for them. I think with what we're seeing here with some of the announcements that IBM is making where all these services are being kind of unbundled and packaged up and distributed through the cloud so developers can kind of pick and choose what they want to work with to make it happen is important but at the end of the day the developers are there to solve a problem for the user not present what is easiest for them to manage. So if they're focused on the user experience they will be successful. Even if it means pain for them they just can't push it off to the user. Can we go back to the IBM Apple deal? I want to get your take on that. When it first came out, it sounds good. IBM Apple, that's great. A lot of the skeptics said, oh, Apple's got all the hot products. IBM's got the distribution channel. It's just sort of a distribution deal for IBM. But my understanding is it's actually more than that. They're actually developing unique apps. And that's what's exciting about it. You mentioned 10, what's your take on the arrangement, the partnership? What excites you, what are the challenges that you see that they're going to have to get through? So I think it's a blending of cultures beyond just the distribution arrangement where you see Apple does something really well which is build great hardware. And that hardware is being dragged more and more into the enterprise which they don't necessarily understand. And then you have a company like IBM who has these enterprise services but needs to stay in that 21st century modality of making sure that they're simple, connected. All the things that Apple really excels at from an experience standpoint. So I think them working together to build these services satisfies the requirements that they both kind of innately know and care about without having to figure out the things that aren't core competencies for them. I think it's more than just distribution. I think it's both companies growing. Well, and so IBM's putting a lot of the code in, the juice for the application itself. But to your point earlier, it's you mentioned guys like Dropbox, Slack, Yammer, consumer guys coming into the enterprise. Does IBM have the consumer chops to be able to do that? Or have we evolved to the point where the skill sets are available? I think so. I think there are 21,000 people here. A lot of them are developers. A lot of the applications that are being worked on here, like the partner that's just during the mobile keynote a few minutes ago, I think it was ICICI Bank in India, deciding instead of ignoring a demographic that they had previously left underserved, created a product specifically for youth around mobile. Like, that's new, that's significant. And working with IBM to do that, I think that's a big change. I feel like, I wonder if you could comment on this too, Douglas, I feel like the market's really bifurcated. You get like a lot of really good, a handful of really good mobile apps. And you know it when you see it. Yes, totally. This is a great mobile app. And then you get others that don't even try. Yeah. And it's the tweeners. And most of them right now are either tweeners or they don't even try. So it seems like there's a lot of upside. What's your prediction in terms of how fast that goes? How fast the stratification between those? No, how fast that gap closes, sorry. Oh, I don't think it's a matter of closing. I think it's constantly evolving as the needs of mobile change, right? Because you know, we were talking about Blackberry. I spent three years at Blackberry. The most important thing at that point was the ability to send a message to one another. That was an amazing thing, real time. That was a killer app. Then it was multimedia, video, photos. Now we're talking about like huge, huge amounts of information not only being presented to you on your device, but you being able to inform it and have access to it. Like an entire fleet of truck drivers being able to send real time feedback on decisions being deployed to them. Like what's gonna happen in the next few years and what's necessary? I have no idea, but I know that that battle for making the answers very simple and powerful will continue to play out. Because the apps that you don't like using, the apps that don't make sense, are the ones where you can't trust them to do that one thing really, really well. Yeah, is that your advice? Is focus on doing that one thing really, really well? Yeah. I think if you probably, how many apps do you have on your phone right now? Dozens. How many do you use? Maybe a dozen. Yeah. And I'm sure that with each application you go to that app for a specific purpose. I think that, so I have these apps. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. No question. I have them because I was forced to use them. How many apps do you don't use? I mean, like I have a ton of stuff this season. But I've used them all once because I was forced to use it, but the utility of going back doesn't exist. Maybe there's a dozen. Well, the March Madness one's only good during March, right, then you don't use that one. You got the NFL one, you got ESPN, you got Twitter, I use that all the time. So this comes down to utility, right? Yeah. So there's silo data apps, right? This is a data question. We've been talking about this all the time. Where's the data? Where's the data in the apps? So is there going to be data traversal and whatnot? So you see apps come and go. Secret. Went up, failed. I mean, these apps are, yo, yikes out there, but apps can be successful and die very quickly. Well, I think apps can have a lot of hype around them and there's a hype cycle around that and that hype cycle can die. When you're talking about, say, March Madness or different sports that are seasonal, there's a great app out of Canada called The Score which allows you to kind of customize and personalize your sports experience by season. So you're always using that app maybe for a different sport at different times. I can watch the Masters, I can watch football. That's right. That is a great experience. Well, Cup comes in and the app changes for you based upon that season or your interest. Doug, summarize this segment of it. What's up for the customers? Talk to the customers out there. Tell them what should they be doing? Why IBM? Why here? Why now? Why even enterprise, mobile? What's the key walk away? I think they should be paying attention to the fact that the leaders in this space in enterprise are speaking as if they were young, up-and-coming entrepreneurs and recognizing that they need to make new choices to kind of to satisfy their customers going forward because the institutional ownership that they might have isn't necessarily guaranteed and they're using mobile specifically to do that powered by the cloud. And then that requires you to really think about security and how that's deployed. So... Doug, with Soltis here in the Cube with mobile serif influencer, writer, covering mobile again. Looking at the landscape, certainly changed. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We are here live in Las Vegas, the Cube. Inside the Go Social Lounge, bringing you all the action to you. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.