 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to IBM Edge 2015. This is theCUBE. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Kirk Ziranti is here. He's the vice president of LogiCalice and IBM partner. Kirk, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you for the invite. Appreciate it. So tell us about LogiCalice. I wasn't familiar with it. We're a large firm. So more wide. We're a multinational corporation. We operate in 24 countries around the globe and we take a services look and a services focus with our customers, with the common services platform across all those geographies. So with that, we can deliver services in any of the countries in the same manner to meet our customers' needs. So you got that consistency of delivery. Sounds easy. How did you get to that point? I mean, that's a challenge to have that, I think of the restaurant business, like a restaurant chain and how variable it is every time you go into a different one. How were you able to achieve that consistency? So we, about three years ago, decided to embark on a transformation journey for our firm. We watched the change that was going on in the marketplace, but most importantly, we listened to what our customers were looking for. And we had many customers that were asking us to provide solutions, not only here in the U.S., but across the globe. So about three years ago, we first embarked on a cloud strategy and we built our logicalis cloud to take to market. And we've had great success with our IBM Power Cloud across all of our geographies. That has been one of the three prongs of our power strategy going forward. We really have focused and laid a playbook in place about 15 years ago with the Power brand. And we've taken our clients on a journey from power four through power five, six, seven, and now to power eight. And we've done this by clearly understanding our clients' needs and their changing needs. And the Power platform has allowed us to deliver what the customers wanted. So is there a fair amount of consistency in your customer base, or is there like great diversity and power is able to handle that? I wonder if you could comment. So there is great diversity across the industries with power. When we take a look, we've had great success in the healthcare space and healthcare makes up about 25% of our overall revenues. Here in the U.S., we believe that the Power platform though transcends across all of the industries. And as we built that consistent playbook, we've been able to help our installed customers deliver on that. Our second part of the Power strategy really focuses on new clients and attacking that marketplace. And we found with some of the new solutions from IBM, Linux on Power, also taking a look at where we can use analytics and analytics on power. We see the big move to data and the growth in the data space and power being the engine for that data space going forward. So in addition to that, in the white space, we've also looked at ISVs and MSPs and using power to be the backbone for those ISVs and MSPs to bring those solutions to market. Great, go ahead. Sorry, Kirk, you talked about solutions there. I wonder if you can talk about kind of your journey with IBM moving from kind of point product sales to solutions. IBM's been in the converged infrastructure space for a while this week at the show. They announced the Pure Power solutions. Is that something that you're partnering with IBM on and it gives a feel for how you look at that expanding? So let me help you a little bit with this. We really, we have partnered with IBM for over 15 years in the Power brand. And we very closely work with our IBM client exec, the brand teams, and then the field teams to deliver these solutions to our client. So we've been in lockstep with IBM on delivering the power solutions. We utilize IBM's briefing center in Austin, Texas. We use our BPIC to deliver these solutions and together with the IBM team, we bring the best solutions to the marketplace. Okay, so if I look at IBM's portfolio, they actually had the Pure Flex that's kind of now mostly Lenovo, but still some IBM. There's the VersaStack, which is IBM plus Cisco. And then you've got the new Pure solution, which is really kind of a full stack. Are you doing all those? You know, which ones do you kind of focus on? We're focused on the Pure App solution combining the software solution with the hardware solution to meet our client's needs. And then with the new announcement with Cisco of the VersaStack, we're working very closely with the Cisco team to deliver one message to the clients on how converged works for them in their infrastructure. So you said you've been made a bet 15 years ago on power. Lots changed in 15 years. How has Logicalis transformed? How are you helping your customers transform and what role has IBM played in that? Yeah, we, you know, that's a great question. And transformation, I think is, you know, it's the buzzword of the day, but let's make no mistake. Transformation is just another change in the technology marketplace. And as you transform your firm, one of the key areas to look at is doing assessment of your skills, because skills are really the true differentiator in the market. So we've gone, we've looked at our skills and we put a very focused education plan in place for our teams to build the new skills they'll need in the marketplace. And we've not only put the education plan in place, we built our own internal certifications for our sales and technical teams so they can deliver the new solutions to the marketplace. It is not an easy journey and it's not one that everybody will make, but we want to make sure that we're arming our folks with the best tools in the industry to go forward. So you think about, you know, that Chinese proverb may you live in interesting times. You know, clearly we do. When you think about the customers that are transformations, so much going on. You know, IBM talks about cloud and big data and mobile and certainly securities evolving. We see Uber, we see Airbnb, Facebook's the biggest content company in the world. It doesn't produce any content. And you know, Instagram far, far larger than Kodak from a market value standpoint Kodak and Instagram and Facebook. Amazing changes going on. So we hear a lot about digital transformation, the digital economy. Are your customers driving that or are they getting pulled into it? Is it a push or is it a pull? Is it really happening? Is it happening fast enough in your opinion? What's your perspective on that? So what I would say is it's no different than any other transformation. The market leaders are leading this and the others are following. And when I say they're leading it, they're making the move into digital. They're making the move into mobile. They're making the move into analytics. Cloud kind of wraps this and security is a must going forward. So we really see our clients driving this and what we've done is we've put together a number of workshops and assessments for those clients to go in and take a look at these different areas of the business that they want to explore and also kind of prompt them a little bit. Maybe you want to look at this. Here's what's going on in the industry. Here's where we see some successes. So we're really being driven by our clients and working hand in hand. You've got a lot of smart people in your organization who can go in and lead a discussion like that. They've got street credibility. They're not just somebody off the street. So you're able to capture, seeing your audience and say, okay, here's where you are, here's where you can potentially get to based on our experience, based on a maturity model. What's the bell curve look like? Is it, the leaders are by definition not 60, 70% of the marketplace. What is it? 10% of the firms? I would say it's probably 10 to 20% of the firms. But I would tell you that the game changes every week. It changes every month. And those who are leading have to continue to focus on keeping the lead. So we're seeing more companies jump on board. As you said earlier, they're all new firms coming into the marketplace with new solutions. You can't rest on your laurels. You can't rest on what you did yesterday. So is there brainpower going into trying to figure out who their competition is or what their next opportunity is? They're both. I think there's a little bit of both. And I think the true leaders in the business are not going to just meet the competition. They're going to look for a solution that leapfrogs the competition. And we're seeing a number of clients do that today. So Edge, let's see, this is our fourth edge. You've been to Edge before? Been to Edge multiple times, yes. So you like the show? It seems like a different show this year. It's not just a storage show. More Z, more power, a lot of middleware. A lot of thought leaders, you know, speaking on the stage this morning. What's your take on Edge? And you know, what do you get out of these events? I would tell you that what we get out of Edge is what we look for when we come to an IBM seminar. And what that is, is building the technical skills, clearly understanding the marketplace, understanding the new solutions going forward. And if we're able to accomplish that at the same time, bringing our clients here, so they hear that message, it confirms what we're telling them in the marketplace and then together we go and work on those solutions. All right Kirk, well thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story. Really interesting. So, and we'll see you next time maybe at Edge. Looking forward to it, thanks very much. Keep right there, everybody. Stu and I will be right back after this brief word. This is theCUBE, we're live from IBM Edge 2015, right back.