 The Cube at IBM Impact 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Paul Gillan. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is Silicon Angles, The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and expect to see the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of Silicon Angles, Joe Mycoz, Paul Gillan of Silicon Angle. We're live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact and our next guest here to break down in the analysis is Maribel Lopez from Lopez Research. Maribel, welcome to The Cube. Thank you, happy to be here. First time on The Cube, great to have you on. We've seen each other a lot of the events around, around mobile, cloud, social. The past few years, a lot's happening. So at first I got to ask you, what's your take of the cloud, mobile, social, tsunami trend and IBM's role in that here at Impact? Yeah, so first of all, those used to be discrete trends. If you go back a year or two ago, it was very silent. If we talked about mobile, if we talked about cloud, big data wasn't really on the thing yet. Now they're all coming together. So I think one of the real challenges I talk to organizations about is the fact that they're coming together. So it's good that IBM is actually trying to put out some thought leadership and vision around what that transition looks like. What are you seeing in the market right now? I know you're writing a book, we'll get at that in a second. We were talking before you came on about some of the trends you're tracking. Data is obviously the key value proposition. Analytics has changed in the game at many levels, but mobile in particular, what's your take on what's happening in the market right now? Yeah, so we've done lots of surveys over this. So we've actually been watching people as they progress through this and they started out talking about BYOD, and then became BYOA, BYOS. What we see now is everybody's accepted that mobile is a hot topic. It's the number two topic behind big data and analytics in terms of IT leader's concerns, right? And the difference between those two is big data and analytics is number one. They're not really spending the money on it yet because they don't know what to do. Mobilizing the business is number two and they're really finally starting to spend some money on it. We have, and what does that mean? What does spending money mean? It means that this year, 74% of the companies we interviewed said that they would be mobile enabling five or more applications. So if you go back a year and a half ago, people were doing BYOD, people were doing corporate libel, it was really BlackBerry 3.0, just email and calendar. Now we're talking about mobile enabling workflows. So it's a big, big shift, I think, in the industry and a pretty time-compressed shift going from last year still being about BYOD, email and calendar, this year being all about mobile apps. Well, let me tell you what I hear from a lot of B2B companies. So they say, well, we don't really need a mobile strategy because we already know who all our customers are. They're using the phone, they use their desktop computers. We don't need to have a mobile strategy. What do you say to them? Oh, if you don't have a mobile strategy in this day and age, you're going to get buried. And I think the problem with people's mobile strategies, they think of it exactly as that. It's a mobile strategy. It's this other thing that we do over there, right? Mobile really is the business and the business is mobile. It's like saying, you're not going to have a mobile strategy, you're not going to have a cloud strategy. If you don't have either of these, you're fundamentally not going to be able to operate in the new world. And I think the challenge around that is people haven't really grappled with the fact that mobile and cloud change our business processes. They change what we connect, how we connect, how we engage and transact. And that's a big, scary deal for people. And that's why they don't want to have a mobile strategy because it means they have to really think about changing business processes. What they think of mobile strategy as being, well, I'll have an HTML5 enabled website. And so that's my mobile strategy. I think you're thinking of it much more in terms of transformational perspective. The change is the way you do business. How does it change the way you do business? Let's pick up for a second on this concept of is HTML5 enough, right? So I think where people start the dialogue is, I don't know what to do because it's so complicated. And then they come up with, well, I'll just sprinkle some HTML5 pixie dust on it and it'll all be fine, right? What I mean by changing business processes is, what do people do when they're sitting at a laptop versus what do they do when they're on the go, right? What's the essence of what they're trying to complete? And that's the change because we've got these applications that are great, they're fully featured, they're bloated, they're unusable. You're not going to sit here and do eight clicks on a device. That's not mobile enabled. That just means you took something that was on this and you moved it to something like that. So that's probably the first change is just trying to figure out what people want to do. And you got to throw out a lot of baby with the bathwater to get there, you know? A lot of years of code. Well, let me sort of build on that. Something John Warnock said, was quoted saying last year that apps are not a solution, apps are not a solution to anything. They're just a way station on the way to fully, to mobile enabled interaction so that you don't need an app. That apps are artificial. Do you agree with that or are apps, we're going to look back 10 years from now and say apps were stupid? No, I think if there's one thing I've learned in the past 10 years, it's that nothing's stupid and nothing goes away. I think what happens is it's a degree of everything. I will admit, we are a bit app happy at the moment. Particularly on the consumer side, you know, the concept of the micro app has really taken hold. Listen, you need apps, but if you approach the problem to say, I need a mobile app, you've kind of lost the battle before you've even begun. You don't know what you're trying to do, so you can't make a decision about should this be HTML5, should this be an app, how much of whatever this thing it should be is. So. And it's different context too. I mean, I talk to folks all the time, mobile apps are different than having a web responsive app, meaning it's on web end mobile versus a pure mobile app, which could get you out of your skis. And I've heard people say, hey, I built a mobile app, I launched it, people downloaded, then we had iteration, and people weren't downloading the updates. But a lot of mobile apps just enable you to do something that you should be able to do on the website anyway. Right, and this gets into what's different about mobile, right? Which is exactly where you're going with that. What's special about it? What makes it that you need a mobile app, right? Things like location, things like voice browsing, things like taking an image. And people think of image and voice and all this stuff only in B to C. It's highly applicable in B to B as well, right? So if you are out as an insurance adjuster taking photos of those claims, if you are a field service person trying to take images of what water heater you've installed to keep into the record system for CRM. So there's a lot of contextual elements that mobility provides, and that's the real change. And that's what mobile enablement is. It's not the decision of I need an app. It's because the reality is you need HTML5, you need hybrid, and you need native, right? It's all of the above. So it's a matter of what the balance is. And the balance can only be determined by understanding what you're trying to do. So what's your biggest advice to the folks out there? And potentially IBM customers here. I mean, well, let me back. Let's first analyze the IBM situation. Mobile's obviously a big part of the matter. We were talking on the intro. What's your take on it? Meet on the bone, looking good off the tee, middle of the fairway, how would you classify the current mobile? Yeah, okay. I don't want to lead you into that thing. In the hole, game over. No, it went sort of hard. I say they're in the middle of the fairway now, but it's a long way to the end of the golf game. And let me explain what I mean by that. I really applaud the fact that mobile didn't have a vision, right? There's a lot of companies that were doing piece parts of it. IBM decided to stand up and say, hey, listen, this is everything you need in mobile. And this is the big mobile first chart. But when they rolled out that vision, there wasn't a lot there there, right? Now we're at the point where they've made a ton of acquisitions to fill in the little, there's something in each of the blocks now, right? So first of all, A, they need a vision. The industry need a vision, they have one. They're starting to execute on that vision. So that kind of puts them into that fairway, but it's a lot of acquisitions. It's a lot of stuff to integrate. It's a lot of stuff to keep momentum on at the same time, right? So there's always been that concept if a big company buys a small company, do you still get that benefit of that innovative spirit and the next level of things? And we really need to get to the next level in mobile. We're not there yet. So no matter who you are, we're not there yet. You know, I always prefer to contrast the early adopters who would drive in pioneering change to the Larry Ellison of the world as to my spectrum, right? Ah, Cloud's stupid. Who needs to work on the Cloud and they're doing, they're great, that's what Oracle does. They see a trend, they get on it, it's all speed ahead. And then the whole shit gets- He called it time sharing. Yeah, he gets, but he executes. He puts the wood behind the arrow and it's like, we're doing it and people live or die based on how well they do on that. IBM seems to be in that kind of mode where I won't say fast follower, but like they're not leading the DevOps world, certainly. However, they have all the right packages together. So they've still got a lot to do. So, but IBM is like an Oracle where they have such big customers that they'll get there in my opinion. But the question is, where are they on that spectrum? In your tank, from BlueMix to DevOps to mobile, being a real supplier to the customers? I think they're at phase two of what's, or we're inning two, what's, you know, a long baseball game for lack of a better word. They have assembled a bunch of the pieces. They're just now starting to integrate. I mean, this is the first conference where they really had the integration story come out. So last year it was a slide with a bunch of logos on it and it was just the mobile stuff and it didn't connect to the cloud stuff. So this year we've got mobile and cloud analytics connecting loosely. We've stood up some serious cloud services around mobile. But, you know, make no bones about it. It's a highly iterative time. So they're at the beginning of this process. I will say, you know, I try to compare them to some other companies to sort of give some frame of reference, right? Because they're big, they're bigger than a lot of the other people we speak about, right? So, you know, SAP, another great example. They were focused on mobile, then they defocused a little. They've got this cloud, big data analytics thing all going at the same time. They don't have as much in the DevOps space. You know, this is a clash of the Titans kind of game right now. So what was startup heaven last year is now big boys, right? CAs in it, Gs in it, SAPs in it. Everybody's got their own version of how this is rolling down. So I think it's a chaotic time. I mean, they're in there, but no one's run away with the vision yet. So we've both been on analysts, meetings with SAP and others, where they've laid out their mobile thing, mobile developers. Developers are a big part of the whole mobile equation. And there's been some misfires from other vendors. Where is IBM with the developer side of it? You don't see the major development kits. You see development friendly activities going on here. Do they have a mobile developer mind share? Or is it on their agenda? What's your assessment of that? It's on the agenda. I wouldn't say they have a mobile developer mind share, but I mean, truly, I don't think anybody has a mobile developer mind share right now. I mean, I think there was some logical candidates for that that haven't happened yet. You know, Microsoft strikes you as a logical candidate, but they've got other issues, right? In terms of where their mobile operating systems and other things, next PC generation operating system has gone. Before Paul gets to his question, I know he wants to ask questions. There's a question from the crowd chat here. Tim Crawford asked, how should organizations change their thinking about mobile and apps then? How should they change their thinking about mobile and apps then? How can IBM help change organizations' thinking around mobile beyond tech apps? And what should orgs do to change their thinking around mobile and apps? Yeah, I think this concept of the composable business that they rolled out, which is sort of the next evolution of service oriented architecture and opt to go into programming and only taken from a business level is a really good way of thinking about it. The thing that I see is different is in yesterday's world, you build an app, you stood it up, it was done for a year, maybe two years, maybe more, maybe you threw more functionality onto it. In this world, your app's never done, right? So the best thing you can do if you're thinking of yourself as a business is to act like Google and think it's always a beta, right? Every six weeks, every 12 weeks, every nine months, something major has to be happening or you're going to fall behind. Google has a lot of failed products under their belt too as well. So Larry Page in an interview just said that the vision of Google is to build apps that people can't live without. Right. So that's kind of their guiding principle now. If you look at some of the misfires, now that he's taking over the helm. So in a way, the apps for enterprises should think the same way, don't you agree? They should. I would say there's one difference between the way Google does it and the way enterprises should do it. And that's that Google's great at coming up with ideas and throwing them against the wall and sort of seeing if they stick. They're not really good at productizing anything. And this is where I think the rigor of IT can come in and is still valuable. The concept that there is a process and that you are always advancing and that there is a feedback loop. So I'm not saying there isn't a feedback loop in Google, but I think the real difference is for businesses, you have to be fast and you have to always be iterating and think it's not done. Right now, they desperately want it to just be done and they desperately want it to just need to only be done one way with one set of tools, which is not the reality of the universe right now. So. As a loyal user of Google Reader for many years, I'm not always crazy about the way they pull the plug on the product. What is that, too? I'm thinking about the next generation beyond mobile. We think now mobile very much as the device, as the phone, as the tablet, but of course we have this whole tsunami of wearable and embedded sensors in trucks and trains and whatever coming along. How should companies be prepared for the next wave of mobile when it goes beyond the handheld device? Yeah, so I think even the word mobile is kind of dead in a way, right? Because what we're really talking about is just connected devices, big ones, small ones. And then it's just what kind of software stack you can run on those and what kind of sensor data they feed you. So I think the first thing you have to think about is how are you going to collect all that data which gets us into big data and analytics? How are you going to inject that data into business processes? Because right now, you know, your basic business process doesn't even have something as simple as location in it, let alone that you move, that your temperature is X, right? So there's all these motion environmental conditions, all these new data points you can build into your applications that I think are really critical. And, you know, I call this, I've got a book coming out in October on what I call Right Time Experiences. It's giving people the right information on the right device at the right moment, right? So that's a big difference from what we do today because that assumes that you can switch up what that is because right now you design an app, it gives you X. Well, if I happen to need Y, that app's going to have to adapt to me at some point and give me Y when I need it. So a survey came out a couple of weeks ago and said, I think it was a Pew Research Survey, said 90% of online Americans don't trust marketers and sales organizations with their private data. A lot of these applications we're talking about are delivering data at the right time in the right place, rely upon having private data about you. Is that a big hurdle for companies to overcome in really taking advantage of real time data? Yeah, it's a huge hurdle, but it's largely a hurdle of the way we've implemented it, right? So everybody thinks that the killer contextual app for mobiles that I can give you the right ad. It's like, okay, that's great, but is that really value to me? Well, it assumes you want the ad. Yeah, it assumes you want the ad. Maybe I want information that says the store is closing early today. That's more valuable to me, right? So this is why getting people the right, relevant information, which is an analytics problem, by the way, a complex event processing problem, we're not there yet where people are really giving you something valuable, which is why it's annoying and why it's a privacy concern. So there's a bit of a chicken and an egg here. There's also who they trust. They trust new world companies for some reason more than old world companies. AT&T can't do the same things as Facebook can. It's just the reality. Part of it is what you pay for, right? I get this extra value, but I didn't pay for it. So it's like, okay, I've done an idea exchange. That whole data is the new oil thing. Consumers will wise up to the fact that their data is valuable. And I think we've got a whole new marketplace of opportunity that's around how we deal with data. And of course your relationship with the company defines the value that you get from mobility. So if an app can tell me where the closest free wifi signal is, that has value to me, even though that provider may be a company that is an online company. Right, so it's more about fulfilling needs than reinforcing brand. And we're not, I think part of the problem with needs is there's needs that give you money and needs that don't. So it's balancing that so that you get money but that you're also giving people value with things that they don't necessarily pay for. Mira, let's talk about what you're working on right now. You mentioned the book, Right Time Experiences. Share with us, some of them, you're writing a new book, you're ahead of the curve, you've always been ahead of the curve. So share with us, give us some teases a little bit on some of that, the breadcrumbs around some of your work around this. Right time, right place, because that's about real time analytics, it's about using data, personalization, I can only imagine the book. But I haven't heard anything about it. Right, okay, so the first thing is that people are going to phase into mobility through extend, enhance, transform, right? Extending is just putting your stuff on the devices, we're doing that now. Enhancing is where we start getting into what I talked about about this. How do you incorporate data into the business processes? How do you incorporate location, time of day? You start to use some analytics, you get analytics even in your apps so that you know what's going wrong, right? The transform phase, you're just doing different things than you've done before. Tesco, a train station in Korea, things like what Square was showing today on stage, or Uber being able to give you the taxi ride when you need it, using location and ease of payment, right? This is just changing the experience from what we have today, and we're starting to see some early examples of people making that transition. But what is really important is, you have to figure out how to mobile enable the business, so that means a couple of different style of development models. You have to figure out what kind of databases you want to have and what kind of analytics you want to have on top of that, and then you got to have a cloud versus on-prem mix. A lot of people are struggling right now with I got data locked in my backend systems on-prem. That's not very cloud friendly, how do I do that? So right time experiences is the, thinking about the processes differently and building an architectural strategy to make that happen. How about use of internal mobility? Is this the story that's not being told, really? How companies can enable their sales people to deliver personalized quotes on the spot, or deliver the latest collateral constantly to their iPad? Is that sort of the untold story of mobility now? I think that's what ends up paying for mobility at the end of the day, right? We've got some massive efficiency gains that just right out of the gate. I call these the quick wins. These are the paper replacement apps. These are the quicker time to cash apps, right? And those are the things that enterprises are looking at and saying, that's a reason for me to go mobile because if I just give you the HR app on a mobile device that hasn't really bought me anything or got me anything different than what I have today, right? If you can, you know, docusign work with Comcast and tablets. Comcast is now signing their deals two days faster than they used to, right? It's a big deal, right? If you send somebody a contract right there, they sign it, they're done, right? This is a type of efficiency gain. Any final words you want to share with the audience about why impact is so important? Name of the book again? Right Time Experiences. Right Time Experiences. So it didn't say mobile in the title. No, because it's about mobile, big data, and analytics. It's about them all coming together. And is there any right sizing involved in this? I had to get that in there. Couldn't resist. Come on, I'm an IT geek sometimes. Right sizing, right time experiences. Real time is great. Share with the folks out there. Final comment, I'll give you the final word. Share with the folks out there. Why is impact so important right now for IBM and their customers? What are the key things that does IBM have to do to be successful? Impact's important because people really need to get to the next level of what their Dev and Cloud strategy is, right? We've been thinking about it as efficiencies. We've been thinking about it as replicating the things that we've done in the past. There are actually customers here that are talking about how they're changing their business by using mobile and cloud. And they have real hard examples of changing the customer experience, changing the revenue model, and people desperately need vision, right? They need to see that somebody's done it, that it works, and that they can do it too. And that's what I think impact is about. Maribel Lopez, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'd like to spend more time with you. We should definitely do another segment. One thing we didn't get to that I wanted to touch upon. Maybe we could follow up on another time is culture. There's a lot of cultural change going on around this major ways of innovation. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back. Our culture is more guests, more guests, more guests. Two days of live coverage. We'll be right back after this short break.