 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here virtual again in real life soon. It's right around the corner, but we got a great guest here, Cameron Art, managing director at AT&T for IBM. Cameron manages the AT&T global account for IBM. Cameron, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much, John. It's great to be here. I can almost imagine how complicated and big and large AT&T is with respect to IBM and the history and AT&T is a very large company. What's the relationship with IBM and AT&T over the years? How has that evolved and how do you approach that role as the managing director? Well, it's been fascinating. As you said, we've got two large, complex companies, but also two brand names that are synonymous for innovation, whether it be in compute or technology or communications. But the most fascinating thing is if you look back at our relationship, and this is two brands that have been around for well over 100 years, our relationship actually has some fascinating backdrop to it. My favorite is in 1924, AT&T sent a picture of Thomas Watson Sr. over a telephone wire to IBM. And Thomas Watson said, they sent this over the telephone? We are united in a community of interest. They want to make it easier for businesses to transact as do I, we need to work together. And since then, there's been a number of advances that both of us have driven collectively and individually. And it's been a long running and treasured relationship in the IBM company. It's such a storied relationship on both sides. I mean, the history is just amazing. They can do a whole history channel segment on both AT&T and IBM. But together, it's kind of the better together story as you pointed out from that example, going back to sending a picture with a phone line. It's like, oh my God, that's Instagram on the internet. It's happening. But how are they responding to the relationship now? I'll see with cloud native exploding with the ability to get more access. And you're seeing a lot more things evolve, more complexities emerging, that needs to be abstracted away. You're seeing businesses saying, hey, I can do more with less. I can connect more, it's more access. But then that also services more potential opportunities and challenges. How are you responding with AT&T? How are they responding to that dynamic with you guys? Yeah, I think it's fascinating because when I originally approached this relationship and I've been doing this for 12 months now, a little over 12 months. And when I originally approached it, as with anything else, many times you're trying to enter something that is quite special and make it even better. And my approach, at least initially with AT&T was very much one of, we're gonna provide even better service. We're gonna jointly grow together in the market and strengthen each of our businesses. And we're gonna work for something broader than ourselves. And I'll get into a little more of the last point later. But those first two things from an AT&T response perspective, and I think this is a common perspective among many clients is, we'll see if your actions follow your words. And so it's been a process we've gone through to understand that I'm a champion for AT&T inside of IBM and those interests that we share individually and collectively will be represented at the highest levels. And we will mature this relationship into one of not just kind of supply chain partners because we're very complimentary to each other, but more of ecosystem partners. And my belief in my core, and you see this much with many of the business strategies that are out there, the ecosystem strategy, this sum is greater than the parts. It's not a zero sum game. It's something that's absolutely blooming in the market. Yeah, that ecosystem message is one of the things that's resonating and coming clearly out of IBM Think 2021 this year and in the industry is seeing the success of network effects, ecosystem changes is the constant that's happening, certainly with the pandemic and now coming out of it, people wanna have a growth strategy that's gonna be relevant, current and impactful. And you pointed that out growth with each other is interesting and you shared some perspective on this just recently with an example of what is underway there. Where are you heading with that? I mean, talk more about this growth with each other because that's really is an ecosystem dynamic. What is underway and where are you heading? It's a fascinating ecosystem dynamic and it's something that we've adopted wholeheartedly within AT&T in terms of not only how we work. So there are very basic examples, like we rather than answering RFPs and responding to requirements, we're co-creating with our clients. We have multiple cloud garages going with AT&T where we identify outcomes that we believe could be possible and then we show and allow the client to experience the outcome of that rather than a PowerPoint slide. So there's this kind of base of how do you work with each other? But then much more broadly in the market, it didn't take long for us to realize that the addressable market, if I were selling AT&T, everything I could ever sell them. And AT&T was selling IBM, everything they could ever sell us. The addressable market is let's say $10 billion. But the moment at which we pointed ourselves outside to the external market, we realize that that market opportunity expands by a factor of 20 or by a factor of 50. We have the opportunity to create unique value together. And I think that kind of comes from the core of how we work together. I'm also intrigued by your comments about working together for a greater purpose. You said you'd address that later. What do you mean by that? I mean, that's a little bit of a higher purpose North Star. And as you mentioned, working together in the ecosystem, that's kind of seems tactical and strategic as well. But what's this greater purpose? What does that mean? Well, my belief, and it's something I learned actually as I got indoctrinated into the work that AT&T does, the work that IBM does and how we do it. But we share many common purposes in terms of what we believe on the whole, in terms of progress in society. So for example, equality in the workplace, we posted a women's day luncheon, actually multiple women's days luncheons across the United States, where we had hundreds of female leaders from both IBM and AT&T collaborating together, talking about how tips and tricks for how they continue to advance in the workplace. Another example is inequality and diversity and inclusion. Both AT&T and IBM have a strong commitment. And if you'll see, IBM just published their diversity and inclusion study where we actually demonstrate here the numbers, here's our targets, here's where we want to get. AT&T has exactly that same belief. Finally, in STEM education for educating our future leaders in science and technology, engineering and math, both AT&T and IBM for our future, need those skills showing up in the marketplace. And Corey Anthony, just a quick spot for any of you would think, Corey Anthony who's the diversity and development officer at AT&T is going to give a great presentation on AT&T's work in STEM for younger generations. So there are many things that are, I would say societal on a broader purpose statement that we share a belief in together. That's awesome. And also people want to work on a team that's mission-driven, has impact beyond just the profit and loss. I mean, I love capitalism personally myself. I'm an entrepreneur, but been there, done that. But we're living in a cultural shift now. We're starting to see remote work. You're starting to see virtual teams, new use cases that have different expectations and experiences in the workplace and also at home. So, with mobile, I could be on the side of the soccer fields or skiing or running or jogging and take a message to pull over, do a chat, jump into an audio chat, listen to a podcast, engage. So we're all tethered now. This is exchanging these experiences and this is going to change the game for how you work together. 100%. And by the way, we're all tethered hopefully through AT&T mobile connectivity devices. It was kind of amusing how much that has become a part of our lives and the core value, one of the core value propositions of AT&T is obviously connecting businesses to each other but also consumers through their mobile brand but also then to entertainment. I will say, when I was in Augusta at the Masters, people that have been there know that you're not allowed to have cell phones. It was amazing just in conversations, how often whoever it was I was having a conversation with and myself would say, well, I'd like to look that up. Hold on, can I get that statistic? And we realized we're missing a big part of our lives in terms of the communication. But those requirements of connecting people in new ways and in their homes or remotely, actually only reinforce this shared value proposition of when you have the technology and you have it securely. Between our company, IBM and AT&T, we play a massive part in that. And it's something I'm quite proud of. Yeah, and you guys have a really interesting position there with the history, with the relationship. And as you pointed out, AT&T has to be on the forefront of cutting edge, user experience, technology, they're bringing, I mean, they are the edge. I mean, they ultimately from base station down to the device, to the person, to the account, you're talking about a real edge there. That's a person's consumer. They got to provide these new services. So I got to ask you, you mentioned at the top of this interview that your goal is to provide even better service to AT&T. Pretty big pressure point for IBM. You got to deliver, step up and their expectations must be high. Can you take us through perspectives on that kind of even better service when you got a client that's on the cutting edge of having to deliver new kinds of things like better notifications, smarter devices, smarter software, more fault tolerant, highly available services. These are things that, there's a lot of pressure. Take us through that, what's it like? There is a lot of pressure, but there's a lot of consistency in terms of expectations. And it's something that both of us understand very well. And I would argue that it's probably the reason we work so well together. Both AT&T and IBM for years, namely 50 hundreds of years have understood that if we're transacting for business, we're transacting on something that has to get done. So on both sides of the equation, not only do we push the edge of what can be done technically or for business, but we also understand the expectations of the business clients that are, it works every time and it works in every way I needed to. So for us, when we work together, I think that healthy balance of part musician, part engineer comes out very, very strongly in both teams. Cameron, great insight and great to talk to you. I love to get the perspective on the kind of challenges and opportunities that you're seizing at IBM with AT&T. Again, the history is amazing. The impact of the industry at both levels, you mentioned Tom Watson, senior, then you got junior. That generation just carries forward. You got that vibe back now with hybrid cloud. Arvin loves cloud. So you got a lot of things happening that's really strong over at IBM and the theme this year generally is better together. So awesome, awesome work, congratulations. Thank you very much. I will tell you, I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk a bit about the future because from an AT&T and IBM perspective, we're doing a load of work around private 5G or 5G in general. This is something that provides an absolutely low latency, huge bandwidth with a lot of actually characteristics from a business perspective that are manageable and it will enable what I believe is another big wave in the technology and business industry, which is new business models, very similar to that of the internet originally. It allows with IBM technology and AT&T technology, they have something called multi-access edge compute. These are absolutely blazing fast 5G boxes that will be in not only businesses, but universities, sports stadiums, you name that, you name it, changing the experience of how people consume technology or the benefits of technology, which I couldn't be more excited about. Awesome future ahead, great, it's a big wave, certainly a wave we've never seen before, Cameron R, managing director at AT&T, at IBM, great insight, thanks for sharing, thanks for coming on. Thanks, John. Okay, CUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.