 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back here to San Francisco. We're at Moscone Center right now and for VMworld 2019, gorgeous day outside, by the way. Great to be here on the West Coast. We're with Sam Warner right now as the Vice President of Offering Management of Storage at IBM, and I'm joined by Stu Miniman as well. Good to see you, Stu. I haven't seen you in a long time. Great to see you, John. And yeah, beautiful day outside. If we were in Vegas, I'm sure it would be sunny, but we sure wouldn't be outside. No, no, no. Love it here. Sam, thanks for joining us. Glad to have you here on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. We were kind of joking before we came on about how you said, you know, I'm into storage, but you have to be very careful about how you describe that to some people because they want to get a literal unit from you. That's right. So we know what storage, what side of that helmet we're talking about here. Let's just talk about the big picture right now that just in terms of what's going on in terms of storage, some of the, I guess larger concerns that you have these days is people go multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. It presents a whole different array of challenges for you and your team, I would assume. That's right. You know, you often hear people talking about modernizing their applications for the cloud world, and they're focused on how do they, you know, rebuild and refactor their applications for the future. The other thing they really need to think about is how do they modernize their data protection? You have to think about how you're going to manage that data in a multi-cloud world. Is your data protected on-premises and in the cloud? You have to think about new threats that are emerging, organized crime is behind a lot of these data breaches you see, and the malware attacks. So you have to think about that. And then you always hear about AI and trying to unlock all of the data to get valuable insights for an organization. How can you leverage that data that in the past has just been a backup there to protect you? Now how can you use it for valuable insights for your business? Modernizing data protection, that's spent a lot of time talking about these days. Yeah, Sam, VMworld has always been a great ecosystem show and over the years, certain things have been front and center. I remember when they launched NSX, networking was there, many years, people called the storage world. I walked through the expo floor and you could almost say, you know, this is data protection world. I saw big booths, I see lots of pomp and circumstance, you know, big companies like IBM, of course, have a strong presence there, and a whole lot of startups. Maybe give us a little context as to why there's so much on data protection because it's not like this is a new thing, but definitely is more hot and buzzier than it has been in a long time. Yeah, it's a really interesting observation, actually. We used to call this the biggest storage show there was and now, when I walked in today to the expo floor, it was every data protection company, just big and bright, and I'll tell you, it's all the things that I mentioned, right? Everybody has to back up their data. If something happens, you need to be able to recover, so it's really important, and the CEO of IBM, Jenny Rometti, always talks about data as the next goal, the best resource, right? If you can unlock that data, you get a competitive advantage, so obviously you have to protect it. I think that there's this big revolution going on in data protection because of all the additional value you can get out of that data. The one thing I always have to remind clients, you'll see a lot of startups when you walk out on the expo floor, but it's not just your new applications that need to be backed up, it's your entire enterprise of data. When you think about AI, it's about harvesting value from all those legacy applications as well, so I think you got to have a full suite of data protection. You hit on something that I'm sure your colleagues throughout the industry also deal with, talk about cyber resiliency, and making sure that you have the best protections against what are becoming increasingly more complex, sophisticated intrusions, so how has that evolved, say over the last three, four, five years to where we are now in terms of putting up that safeguard against malevolent actors and knowing that the stakes are that much higher now than they might have been in the past? Right, and IBM's always been a leader in this space. When you think about the strongest protection against cyber attacks, it's tape. You can actually air gap your data, you move it offline completely, you put it on tape and the data is safe. By the way, our tape business is growing like crazy because as data grows, you need somewhere to put it, and the best economics in the most safe place to store it is actually on tape. But what you see happening, the changes coming is really about adding more intelligence in the software because you need a certain amount of your data online. So how do you keep that data online and keep it safe? You have to be able to detect attacks and you have to have software in your system that can actually protect the data in real time. So I think you're seeing a lot more intelligence, we'd call it AI-driven data protection and that's some of the stuff we're working on in our data protection portfolio. Yeah, Sam, I wonder if you can help us unpack that a little bit, because when we look at machine learning or AI out there, we've talked about intelligence and automation in the storage world for decades. But data is very much dispersed and I think part of it is people alone could not manage this environment that it's no longer something I can just turn a key and lock it and keep it in there. It's now, as you said, it's multi-cloud and I've got SaaS applications in everywhere. So where is that AI going to help and what has IBM got available today to help? Right, great question. So first of all, the great thing about focusing on the data protection part of it is it is part of your whole data strategy. It needs to be at least. If it's not, you have a problem you're exposed with Spectrum Protect, we'll actually show you which of your data is exposed and not being protected, giving you a holistic view of your environment. For example, in a VMware environment, we'll show you all of your VMs and show you which ones aren't protected, so you know. And then what we do, giving you real world examples, since we understand what's happening at the data in real time, if we see something like the deduplication rate change, so you typically get a certain amount of data deduplicated and all of a sudden that rate changes, something might be going on. So we'll notify the administrator. Let's say that all of a sudden lots of data starts changing outside the normal pattern. We'll alert an administrator and let them know that there might be some bad actors. So those are the types of things we can see in real time and since we're part of all of the data because you have to back up your data, we have a holistic view of the environment. Sam, IBM has a long, long partnership with VMware. One of the things that really struck me leading up to the show and even in the keynote is the VM isn't necessarily what we're talking about anymore. I joked, VMware's actually done some advertising at some shows where they put containerware and you look at all the acquisitions they've done, put things together. You talked about cloud native pieces, so where's the relationship that IBM has with VMware? Where is that going and how are you ready for that containerized, microservice, multi-cloud world that we're all heading towards? Yeah, that's a great question. And by the way, if you talk to customers, I would guess 80% plus of them will tell you that their biggest concern for their container environment is how to do data protection. And it's certainly immature compared to the ecosystems that are built up around VMware. However, there's a lot of focus on it. We're focusing on it, IBM research is focusing on it, and we're building drivers that go underneath that actually do that data protection and we'll be coming out with application-aware data protection for containers over the next quarter and years to come. That's one of our big focus areas and it has to be for both on-premises, on your private cloud and also going into the public cloud. As you said, you need one holistic way of doing data protection across both. How has the nature of attacks changed in terms of the intrusions that you're detecting now? I mean, how has that morphed as technologies advance that I'm sure the offense, if you will, has advanced as well? Significantly, I mean, they've become significantly more sophisticated, of course. And you see them everywhere. And in fact, some of the more recent ones, I'm not going to name any names, are even happening in the cloud, right? So you fail to properly deploy an application in the cloud, it's not the cloud's fault necessarily, it's how it's being used, and you leave a back door open. And there's armies of people that are being paid a lot of money to find those gaps and go after them. So it's near impossible to close all those gaps. So you need intelligence running underneath that can detect these intrusions without proper awareness and protection. Some of these things can go six months to a year without being detected. So you got to be more on top of it than you have on the cloud. How exhausting is that? I mean, just in terms of sheer brain power, if you will, but it's just the fact that you have to play defense all the time. You don't get to throw the long ball yourself, right? You have to be on the safeguard. You have to be on the defensive, and I'm sure you'd like to be on the other side of the fence every once in a while, right? And play a little offense, but you can't. So how literally, how tiring is that to have to be on the defensive like that? When you talk to a C-suite person in the company, this is what's keeping them up at night. They don't want to be the next one on the news. And it is daunting. Do I have an application out there with some kind of exposure? And they come to IBM because we have the experience dealing with it. We've got decades of experience dealing with security, and we have led the way in a lot of the things you can do around data breaches and protecting your data. So they come to us as a reliable partner that has the experience. There's a lot of startups out there that are entering the space. I don't think that they bring the same level of experience that we have to be able to detect and respond to those problems. So Sam, we talked about the show floor. There's a lot going on there. Your team doing a lot of the show, maybe give us a little sneak peek for those people that aren't here at the show as to what they're missing if they didn't come to check out all that IBM's doing. We're doing so much exciting stuff. We've got a heavy focus on cyber analysis we've talked about and data protection. We're also doing a lot around cognitive and AI and helping customers accelerate the insights they can get. We help create an end-to-end data pipeline for your data. One of the big challenges for AI is bringing the data together. Lot of copying of data and it slows it down and also prevents an enterprise from deploying the actual models into production so they can gain insights in real time. We actually help streamline that data pipeline. Of course, we're doing a lot around hybrid multi-cloud as a company. The acquisition we recently made of Red Hat, we're bringing those pieces together and providing customers with a real way to manage, they're modernizing, managing their applications in a hybrid multi-cloud world. Yeah, data management, that's a whole different slice, is it not, that people might be very focused in some respects on security and protection, but now you've got to manage all that stuff too in a multi-cloud environment and a hybrid environment, whole new levels of complexities. Right, and containers really start providing you with the ability to modernize your application, deploy it on-premises, or give you a consistent way to deploy it on the cloud. One of the things we do in our software-defined storage portfolio is provide you one common management data plane that extends from on-premises to the cloud so you can really create data portability for your application as you modernize it. Yeah, Sam, one of the things I heard very loud and clear from VMware is, we're going to give you everything from where you are today to where you want to go. I think IBM's got a little bit of legacy experience with doing those kind of solutions. That's right, and we've been doing it for quite some time, and that's a big focus area for us. I was joking that in the keynote this morning, a lot of it sounded very familiar to me. It's things that we've been talking about for a while. I'm excited about where VMware is going because I think it's very consistent with our strategy as a company, as an IBM company. Well, thanks for the time. Glad to have you here on theCUBE. Good luck with the move to North Carolina. New York guy headed to Raleigh, so you'll love it, though, great city. Sam Werner joining us here on theCUBE, back with more live from San Francisco right after this time out.