 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. Virtual, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the power of hybrid cloud and AI. And I'm excited to have Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM's cloud and data platform, CUBE alumni. Been on going back years and years, talking about data. Rob, great to see you, leader at IBM. Thanks for joining. John, great to see you. Hope everybody is safe and well and great to be with you again. Yeah, love the progress. Love the hybrid cloud distributed computing meets operating systems meets modern applications. At the center of it is the new cloud equation. And of course, data continues to be the value proposition as the platform. And as you quoted many times, and I love your favorite quote, there's no AI without IA. So you got to have the architecture. You know, that still rings true today. And it's just so evergreen and so, so relevant and cooler than ever with machine learning and AI operations. So let's just jump in. IBM has announced host of new products and updates at Think. Tell us what you're most excited about and what should people pay attention to? Maybe I'll connect to two thoughts here. There's no AI without IA, still true today, meaning customers that want to do AI need an information architecture. There was an IDC report just last year that said, despite all the progress on data, still 90% of data in organizations is either unused or underutilized. So what's amazing is after all the time we've been talking, John, we're still really just getting started. Then that kind of connects to another thought, which is I still believe that AI is not going to replace managers, but managers that use AI will replace the managers that do not. And I'd say that's the backdrop for all the announcements that we're doing this week. It's things like auto SQL. How do you actually automate the creation of SQL queries in a large distributed data warehouse? It's never been done before. Now we're doing it. It's things like Watson orchestrate, which is superpowers in the hands of any business user just ask for something to get done. Just ask for a task to get completed. Watson orchestrator will do that for you. It's Maximo Mobile. So anybody working in the field now has access to an AI system on their device for how they're managing their assets. So this is all about empowering people. And users that use these products are going to have an advantage over the users that are not. That's what I'm really excited about. So one of the things that's coming out is cloud pack for data, AI powered automation. These are kind of too, you kind of touched upon the SQL thing there. Cloud pack is there. You got it for data and this automation trend. What is that about? Why is it important? Can you share with us the relevance of those two things? Let's talk broadly about automation. There's two huge markets here. There's the market for RPA business process, $30 billion market. There's the market for AI ops, which is growing 22% that's on its way to $40 billion. These are enormous markets. Probably the biggest bet IBM has made in the last year is in automation explicitly in Watson AI ops. Last June and think we announced Watson AI ops. Then we did the acquisition of Instana. Then we announced our intent to acquire Turbonomic. At this point, we're the only company that has all the pieces for automating how you run your IT systems. That's what I mean when I say AI ops. So really pleased with the progress that we've made there. But again, we're just getting started. Yeah, congratulations on the Turbonomic. I was just commenting on that one that announced, IBM buying into the cloud and the hybrid cloud is interesting because the shift has happened. It's public cloud, it's on-premises, it's edge. Those two things as a system, it's more important ever than the modernization of the apps that you guys are talking about and having the under the cover capabilities. So as cloud and data merge, this kind of control plane concept, this architecture as you said, IA. You can't have AI without IA. What is that architecture look like? Can you break down the elements of what's involved? I know there's predictive analytics, there's automation and security. What are the pillars of this architecture? What are the four concepts if you can explain that? Let's start with the basics. So hybrid cloud is about you build your software runs once and you run it anywhere you want. Any public cloud, any private cloud that assumes containers are important to the future of software. We are 100% convinced that is true. OpenShift is the platform that we build on and that many software companies in the world are now building on because it gives you portability for your applications. So then you start to think about if you have that common fabric for hybrid cloud, how do you deliver value to customers in addition to the platform? For me, that's four big things. It's automation, we talked about that. It's security, it's predictions. How do you actually make predictions on your data? And then it's modernization, meaning how do you actually help customers modernize their applications and get to the cloud? So those are the things we always talk about. Automate, secure, modernize, predict. I think those are the four most important things for every company that's thinking about cloud and AI. It's interesting. I love the security side because one of the big conversations is AI ops and day two operations or whatever it's called is shifting left, getting security into the cloud native kind of development pipeline. Speaking of secure, you have a customer that was talking about this DAO chemical about IBM powering DAO zero trust architecture. Could you explain that deal and how that's working? Because that's again, huge enterprise customer, very big at scale, zero trust is big part of it. What is this? Let's start with the basics. So what does zero trust mean? It means to have a secure business. You have to start with the assumption that nothing can be trusted. That means you have to think about all aspects of your security practice. How do you align on a security strategy? How do you protect your data assets? How do you manage security threats? So we always talk about align, protect, manage back to modernize, which is how do you bring all your systems forward to do this? That's exactly what we're doing with DAO as you heard in that session, which is they've kind of done the whole journey from how they built a security strategy that was designed with zero trust in mind. They're protecting data assets. They're managing cyber threats in real time with a relatively low number of false positives, which is the issue that most companies have. They're a tremendous example of a company that jumped on this and has had a really big impact. And they've done it without interfering with their business operations, meaning anybody can lock everything down, but then you can't really run your business if you're doing that. They've done it, I think, in a really intelligent way. That's awesome. We always talk about the big waves. You always get great color commentary on the trends. Right now, though, the tsunami seems to be a confidence of many things coming together. What are some of the big trends and waves you're seeing now specifically on the tech side, on the technology side, as well as the business side right now? Because coming out of post-COVID, it's pretty clear. CloudNate is powering a new growth strategy for customers. Dad was one of them, you just commented on it. But there's a bigger wave happening here, both on the tech theater and in the business theater. Can you share your views on and your opinions and vision on these trends? I think there's three profound trends that are actually pretty simple to understand. One is technology is going to decentralize again. We've always gone from centralized architectures to decentralized mainframe was centralized, internet mobile decentralized. The first version of public cloud was centralized, meaning bring everything to one place. Technology is decentralizing again, with hybrid cloud, with edge, pretty straightforward. I think that's a trend that we can ride and lead for the next decade. Next is around automation that we talked about. There was a McKinsey report that said 120 billion hours a year are going to be automated with things like Watson orchestrator, Watson AI ops, what we're doing around cloud pack for automation. We think that time is now. We think you can start to automate in your business today. And you may have seen the CVS example where we're doing customer care and they're now automating 70% of their inbound customer inquiries. It's really amazing. And then the third is around data, the classical problem. I mentioned 90% is still unused or underutilized. This trend on data is not about the slowdown because the data being collected is still multiplying 10X every year. And companies have to find a way to organize that data as they collect it. So that's going to be a trend that continues. You know, I just kind of pinched myself sometimes in hearing you talk with some of our earlier conversations on theCUBE. People who have been on this data mindset have really been successful because it's evolving and growing and it's changing and it's adding more input into the system and the technology is getting better. There's more cloud scales. You mentioned automation and scale are huge. And I think this really kind of wakes everyone up. And certainly the pandemic has woken everyone up to the fact that this is driving new experiences for users and businesses, right? So this is, and then those experiences become expectations. This is the classic UX paradigm that grows from new things. So I got to ask you, you know, with the pandemic, you know, what has been the most compelling ways you've seen people operate, create new expectations? Cause new things are coming, new big things and new incremental things are happening. So evolution and revolutionary capabilities. Can you share some examples and your thoughts? We collected a decent bit of data on this. And what's interesting is how much AI has accelerated since the pandemic started. And it's really in five areas. It's customer care that we talked about, virtual agents, customer service, how you do that. It's employee experience. So similar to customer care by how do you take care of your employees using AI? Third is around AI ops, we talked about that. Fourth is around regulatory compliance. And fifth is around financial planning and budgeting. These are the five major use cases of AI that are getting into production in companies over the last year. That's going to continue to accelerate. So I think it's actually fairly clarifying now that we really understand these are the five big things. I encourage anybody watching, pick one of these, get started, then pick the second, then pick the third. If you are not doing all five of these, you know, 12, 18, 24 months from now you are going to be behind. So give us an example of some things that have surprised you in the pandemic and things that blew you away. Like, wow, I didn't see that coming. Can you share things that you've seen evolve? Because you're ahead of the business units of cloud and data, big part of IBM. You see customer examples. Just quickly share some notable use cases or just anecdotal examples of just things that jumped out at you that said, wow, that's going to be a double down moment or that's not going to be anymore. Because it exposes, the pandemic exposes the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, people got caught off guard. Some got a tailwind. Some had a tailwind. Some are retooling. What's your thoughts? Can you share any examples? I think, like everybody, many things have surprised me in the last year. I am encouraged at how fast many companies were able to adjust and adapt for this world. So that's a credit to all the resiliency that they've built into their processes, their systems and their people over time. Related to that, the thing that really sticks out to me again is this idea of using AI to serve your customers and to serve your employees. We had a hundred customers that went live with one of those two use cases in the first 35 days of the pandemic. Just think about that acceleration. I think without the pandemic, for those hundred, it might have taken three years and it happened in 35 days. It's proof that the technology today is so powerful. Sometimes it just takes the initiative to get started and to do something. And all those companies have really benefited from this, so it's great to see. Great. Rob, great to have you on. Great to have your commentary and commentary on theCUBE. Could you just quickly share in 30 seconds what is the most important thing people should pay attention to and think this year from your perspective? What's the big aha moment that you think they should walk away with? We have intentionally made this a very technology-centric event. Just go look at the demos, play with the technology. I think you will be impressed and start to see, let's say, a bit of a new IBM in terms of how we're making technology accessible and easy for anybody to use. All right, Rob Thomas, senior vice president of IBM Cloud and Data Platform, CUBE alumni. Great to have you on and looking forward to seeing more of you this year and hopefully in person. Thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual. Thanks, John. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. CUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021. Thank you for watching.