 From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and we are broadcasting theCUBE from IBM Innovation Day, the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab in Yorktown, New York. Got a great number of guests to talk about. We're going to start with Hillary Hunter, who's the CTO and Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure at IBM. Hillary, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. So you're relatively new in your role. Tell us about some of the things that you're focusing on as a CTO of Cloud Infrastructure here at IBM. Yeah, so as CTO for Cloud Infrastructure, I'm focused on making our cloud the best possible place that it can be for people to bring their data, bring their applications, and overall come into that modernization journey with us, the process of transforming to become a digital enterprise. So one of the things that people talk about all the time is how fast data is being generated. Nobody seems to be talking about how fast software is being generated. And yet that seems to be one of the advantages and potentially the liabilities of doing cloud wrong. Talk to us a little bit about how IBM sees the role of software changing as we move forward with the cloud. Yeah, you know, there are parts that are consistent with what we've seen for about the past 20 years in open source, and there are parts that certainly we feel like are accelerating and changing. So with regard to the pace of software and its change today, open source is clearly this innovation space. It's this playground where lots of people can go and can contribute. You know, we can take, we're here at the IBM research facility. We can take the latest in innovations and, you know, math that helps us accomplish great AI and AI insights. And we can take that into open source. We can take, you know, microservice integration capabilities and take it into open source and work there collaboratively with people across the industry. And, you know, what we see there for is a tremendous rate in pace in change of software and the capability of software and its ability to analyze data and bring insights to data and realize the promises of big data, of getting insight out of that data is just really on a tremendous growth rate. And when you move to cloud, you're not just, you know, doing what they used to say of converting, you know, capital expense on premises into OpEx and renting a server in the cloud, you're bringing your overall workload and modernizing it and bringing it into this era where you're able to apply through microservices and cloud-based programming methodology, you're able to bring the latest of software capability to your data and get more insights out of it. You're really able to alter the operating model of how your technology group works but also how your business works. Absolutely. How does Red Hat play a role in this? Well, you know, we have shared principles with Red Hat. You know, we both have been active in the open source communities. You know, IBM famously had, you know, billion dollars of investment in Linux going back 20 years ago. And Red Hat is a prominent aim in open source. So we have a shared understanding of the value of open source and the value of a rate in pace of innovation that's commensurate with what open source provides. We have a shared value around what enterprises need and a shared client-centric view that you need support on your software, that you need certifications, that you expect security, those kind of things. And so there's tremendous amount of shared value proposition in what we see as the rate in pace of innovation as well as then moving that into an enterprise context. Enterprises make these choices very carefully. And as consumers of enterprise capabilities, we expect them to guard our data. They expect them to do things on our data in a secure way. And there are many foundational elements in philosophy that are similar between the two of us. So you mentioned that cloud started out as kind of this notion of capex to op-ex, move all your data to a single place that somebody else deal with it. But increasingly enterprises are starting to recognize that their data may sometimes have to remain in place. We start talking about innovation, open source, these new classes of services. What is it going to mean to bring the cloud experience to the data from IBM's perspective? Well, we really see that the data today exists in multiple places that largely because of that, people are part way through their journey to overall modernization. They're part way through their journey to the cloud. And we really think that the world is going to be hybrid, meaning that, or that the world is hybrid, I guess I would say, meaning that there is data and there is cloud function needed on premises and in public clouds. There's a need for private dedicated environments in the public cloud as well. And there's a significant amount of IT that is currently traditional and that people are in the process of modernizing and that may initially be through a private cloud context on the journey to overall workload modernization. We also see that the world is multi-cloud. People are using upwards of nine clouds or more in many cases and that in a lot of cases has to do with this intersection of function and data residency and being able to bring together all those pieces of where the data needs to be or where the data currently is and then bring software function to the data is something that we see as critically important. So without being too specific in the use of the word binding, today the idea is you bring your data to a cloud supplier and then you can run the services of that cloud supplier supplies on that data. Do you and IBM foresee a world in which the customer is going to be able to control their own data and then acquire the services from the cloud and bring it to their data? Is that kind of the direction you think it's going to go? Not only do we see that it will be possible, we think that it is possible and we're putting things in market already today that enable people to bring cloud function to their data. The IBM cloud private offerings and IBM cloud private for data enable people to in their environment where their data resides, bring sophisticated data warehousing data analytics and AI capabilities and fundamentally that process of workload modernization is a set of steps and it starts with data and it starts with modernization of that environment and it matures then into being able to get deep insights through the power of AI on that data. Let me ask you one more question. In February, IBM is going to host 30,000 plus people in San Francisco, unbelievable opportunity for networking, learning at IBM Think. What kind of conversations do you expect that you are going to be having at Think in 2019? You know, I think you hit at the heart of the conversations that we're going to be having at Think in our positioning of the hybrid multi-cloud environment. Our other core tenants there are open and open source and keeping up with the rate and pace of open source as an innovation stream, providing choice in how folks are deploying cloud and deploying systems. We also are going to be having conversations about security, that's a core enterprise value proposition and ultimately management. You know, you want to not just declare that the world is hybrid and multi-cloud but provide solutions to that and we believe we have strong answers to how to bring these pieces together and enable people to successfully move at the rate and pace of innovation that they need, yet in a secure context and leverage the ability to deploy cloud capabilities where their data currently is, be that on private or public context. Hillary Hunter, CTO and Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure at IBM, thanks for talking us to theCUBE here today at the IBM Innovation Day. Thank you so much for having me, it was a pleasure. And we will be back more momentarily with more conversations at IBM Innovation Day.