 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 day two live coverage at IBM Impact. We're live in Las Vegas to cover all the action. This is The Cube, it's our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the sealant from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm Joe Mike Coase, Paul Gillan, SiliconANGLE. And our next guest is Mike Swanson, director of Blue Mix Marketing at IBM, back on Cube alumni, recently hot off the Pulse tour. We were broadcasting live, welcome back. Thank you, it's good to be here. We had such a great conversation because Blue Mix was the big launch at Pulse. Now it's impact to the customers. So I got to ask you, you know, you feel pretty good about Blue Mix right now. I mean, coming out, you had a lot of registrations on the launch. Right. Okay, let's get to the reality now, where are we at? Yeah, so we've had, it's hard to believe that Pulse was just a few weeks ago, right, and we had just launched it. We were getting so many registrations in on the beta. So we've had three, you know, big things from momentum standpoint with Blue Mix. So one has just been the sheer signups and registrations and then immediately seeing the real-time analytics on the applications that are being built. The second thing that's been huge for us is the ecosystem. So you saw Square on stage today. We launched with Twilio at Pulse and just having this entire ecosystem of organizations come through. And then the rapidity at which we're able to add the services. So we were announcing, you know, 30 services here and we're just every single week. It's your agile, we're continuous delivery. So we're adding more and more services. And I don't think at Pulse, we thought we would be at as fast a clip level as we are now. You know, IBM, we were commenting yesterday about, you know, how you guys have such muscle in this. It's not about if IBM can do it. It's if they decide to do something, they get behind it. They have the war chest of technology to pull from as well as now you have now more of an open model with developers. So, you know, that's the challenge. So the question I ask you is, are you guys still in the high where blue mix, we're number two and trying harder kind of mentality? Or are you guys don't even ignore that and just going to go straight ahead and just keep on building? Yeah, I think going in has really not been the number two. It's been about figuring out the developers and then designing a platform for them. So when you look at, you know, what Bill Gilbert who leads our design team and Damien Hradia is really looking at how developers are using development platforms today. And how can we prepackage services? How can we offer the open source, you know, a third party all together? And around areas like, you know, we're talking earlier, the big data analytics, the mobile services, we're even bringing in Watson services. So it's really been about understanding the behavior and continuing to in the beta and designing for that. Quick update, what's been announced? So what's new with Pulse before we get into some of the questions that you guys have announced? Anything new, elastic, auto scaling you mentioned? Is that new announcement? So give us the update on what's new. Yeah, so new announcements for impact. So we have the application auto scaling. So what we found is obviously as you're building out a mobile application and then you start getting your users, you have to scale up and that can't be a manual process in today's day and age has to be, you know, an automatic process. So that is a new service. I'll launch a lot of more DevOps capabilities. So how do we go across the entire developer life cycle around your testing remediation? And you saw some of that on main stage here around our mobile quality assurance and take peaks there. Definitely, you know, big pusher on big data and some of the new projects that we're rolling out there. And also in cloud integration. So as we look at working with our clients as they're building out mobile apps, they have to tie back to their back end systems. So they have to tie back to their CRM systems. So integration, cloud integration, automatically scaling those apps. Those are a lot of the services that we're excited to be announcing and continuing to roll out on a weekly basis. IBM has a huge base of web sphere customers. What kind of questions are you getting from them about BlueMix? It's really been rapid adoption. So that's what's so exciting about this conference is as we've had the webster base, you know, obviously huge mobile play. And you saw on stage we had IQ, which is one of our startups with the global entrepreneur program. And what IQ does is they take up the online retail experience, how when I log into a website, it recognizes me and it serves up personalized content. They bring that in the store to a physical location where it recognizes your face and traffic from your phone and it'll start serving up customized data. So you think about the webspere users who have built mobile applications for those online retailers. Now, huge opportunity with a disruptor like IQ, who now they can build those applications for in-store and take a lot of what they've been doing on the web for physical locations. And we're seeing a lot of great startups and companies that are allowing even the webspere user base to expand on in a more traditional environment. You led with Square yesterday as a reference platform. What kind of effort do you have underway to recruit these kind of new age, you know, born in the cloud companies to endorse Bluemix? Yeah, and it's just a partnership. So it's just been really incredible to see as we look across the span of what developers are looking to use. They need mobile payment. They need a communication. So how do you extend the mobile app beyond your IBM services? And as we ask clients, we ask them, what are you using? What do you want to use? What companies are you with? Obviously, Twilio and Square came up as loud and clear as companies you want to work with. We have a broad ecosystem as IBM where we have relationships with these companies. And so it's a natural fit to pull them into the platform, co-launch campaigns together and really extend out the services that we have to the startup with companies that are coming more from the startup community. Meg, one of the things I want to ask you is Dave Vellante is actually in San Francisco right now at another cube. We're doing simultaneous with ServiceNow and he's interviewing the investor, Doug Leone from Sequoia Capital. And one of the hot conversations and I asked him to ask a specific question, which I'm going to ask you is in the startup community, there's a big focus on consumer obviously with all the big WhatsApp, which was on software, which we documented. But now that bubble is kind of popping if you, I want to say popping, but you can see that there's only a few winners, but there's still a lot of development going on DevOps. A lot of enterprise focus. So the question we're going to ask Doug Leone is, and we asked Steve Mills yesterday too, is what's different about enterprise startups? Meaning it's just a little bit of a different mix. There's certain little things like audit, compliance. I mean, DevOps is all about not knowing about stuff and letting it automate away like network infrastructure and storage. What are you guys doing with enterprise specific developers? And talk about the difference between a developer who says, hey, I understand the consumerization trend, but I don't want to be just a consumer app. I want to be consumer and business for social business, cloud business, whatever you want to call it, cloud-first, mobile-first, data-first. What does BlueMix do that's different for those enterprise companies? Yeah, for the large enterprises, when we meet with them, a lot of what they see with the consumerization of IT is speed, right? So when we sit down with them, they'll say, I have four developers today that can build at that pace and rate that we see from the consumer IT. I have 40,000 developers on staff, so help me get from these four rockstars who can do this and scale your application building and the speed you need across these large organizations. So that's where BlueMix comes in, is, you know, repackaging the services, making the app development easier, but then to your point, making sure we have the security, we have the DevOps, we have the remediation, and if you're a CIO of one of these large enterprises, you have to be able to see across your entire organization every mobile app, you know, how they're trending, you know, how everything's doing, and get that visibility through. You know, we were talking yesterday about data scientists, and this kind of brings up the DevOps question, because DevOps are perceived as very difficult positions. Like, DevOps guys are those unique Navy SEALs, the unicorns, the black swans, whatever you want to call them, but, you know, because of the Facebooks of the world, these guys were heavy hitters, but now in an organization, not everyone can be a DevOps guy, like a data scientist. So the answer was on the data science side, is that there will be no shortage of data scientists because automation and tooling will abstract the way they're complexity. So the question to you is, how do you turn those four DevOps guys, or one DevOps guy in an organization, and enable others to be DevOps guys or gals in the sense of new automation, because not everyone can be super DevOps, Superman, but in a way, the automation piece. So talk about what you guys are doing around that particular area of automation, and these of use. Yeah, and it goes back to, I mean, we have our, you know, broad rational portfolio and just a real focus on the developer lifecycle, right, within IBM products and then third parties that we partner with. So it's really about packaging, you know, how you do with the entire developer lifecycle, and then to your point, all the data that's coming in. So you have, you know, the Internet of Things, the wearables, you have just the proliferation of data. So how do we create services that, you know, we'll watch that on a time series, we'll watch that, you know, from a geospatial standpoint, so the developers can pull in all that data in an easy way to develop their application. So we're looking more at what's the problem we're trying to solve. How do we pre-package to build services that you can pull into your mobile application to, you know, extend, get insights out of that data, solve the problems, and then, you know, remediate and ensure that, you know, the app's going to. But is that part of the guiding principles of the team to basically make it easier? I mean, what, and what things are you doing to make it easier? What specific features? So it's, when you look at a lot of the platforms out today, the benefit of them is the breadth of services, right? The downside is the breadth of services. So we talk to a lot of startups, and they say, you know, we really, you know, want to go build a mobile app, but we've got your 12 different offerings to choose from. We don't know which companies are the best. So we've really built in, you know, taking a look at the different services, certifying them, pre-packaging them into bundles where you could have, if you're looking to, you know, perform in a, you know, a big data analytics sort of way, if you're looking to perform, you know, around any of our other areas, we pre-packaged and bundled and tested the services. So we offer that kind of ease of app development for the developer, which takes you from the four to the 40,000. We were talking yesterday about WorkLite and how that's your big play in the mobile market. How are you dovetailing your work with BlueMix with the WorkLite platform? Yeah, the team works extremely closely together. So you saw Mike Gilfix on stage yesterday from the mobile team, come out and do the demo of BlueFix, it's seamless. So that's the, you know, fabulous thing about BlueMix with an IBM, is that we have the data team, the WorkLite team, the mobile team, all working together. So, you know, we're constantly looking at what services do we have, you know, traditionally as IBM, that we can pull through through BlueMix. What's the value add? Is there customization that we do to serve it up to that client? So the teams are working very closely together on an hourly basis, checks on the weekends, we do a lot of integration. If I buy WorkLite services, what do I get, what aspect of BlueMix do I get? So when you're, you know, developing the app within BlueMix, it's really about what's the use case that you're looking to do within, you know, the mobile extension, and then pulling in, you know, is it the mobile quality assurance, you know, what are the different services that you would pull from to use for that, for the different scenario. What are you doing to court the developer audience? I know at Pulse you had a parallel, you had sort of a parallel developer conference. Right. Is that planned for future events or? It's here, so we have Devon Impact here, I mean, you'll see around the corner, we've got the Oculus Rift Kits, the Raspberry Pi, the SportTac going on. It's more integrated at this point. Absolutely. Yeah, and because this has traditionally had a larger developer audience as part of this show. And then on the fifth floor, we start in, I think, right now, they kick off a track with Angel Diaz from the open source community. So absolutely within the IBM conferences is expanding out to developers. But I'll tell you, we talked about, you know, the scale and adoption that we've seen since Pulse. We launched, you know, BlueMix on meetups.com where you can just have a quick meeting to talk about BlueMix. We took it live a week and a half ago. We're in six countries, you know, a couple thousand people. We, last week, we ran, you know, running a series of events called BlueMix Days. We originally had scheduled for a hundred BlueMix Days. We're now at 200 and counting. So they were sending me photos. Yeah, from Indy, we had 3,000 developers lined up trying to get in. So it's been absolutely incredible, the adoption and the pace that we're seeing, you know, within the development community. And then we also launched the BlueMix Garage at this show. And that's really about being, not bringing startups to, you know, to an IBM facility, but being true in their community. So living in the startup community in the incubators, being there to mentor, ask questions, get them on BlueMix and really be a team, you know, a team member with them. So all, you know, kind of the whole spectrum of the IBM specific events, embedding in the startups, and then enabling our 80,000 developers across IBM to, you know, reach out, have a meetup, and start working closely with the community. Block going on. Meg, we got a question from the Twitter sphere in the crowd chat. Tim Crawford asks, does BlueMix enable more nimble framework for organization and insights? And if so, how? Yes, so it's really about harnessing the data and the information for an organization. So, you know, we were looking earlier at some of the apps here and how you do something simple, like Twitter sentiment analysis. So let's say you've got the marketing team and they see BlueMix trending, we want to see what's going on. It's simple to build a custom mobile app. You can start seeing how the data and information's trending and that's transparent across your entire organization. We can quickly build the applications, you know, retool them to the kinds of insights and data that you need. And so that's how we're at least scaling across. What is the biggest thing you've learned on the developer outreach? I know when we talked at Pulse, winning the developers what everyone's trying to do, and you really just can't win them. You got to earn it, right? You can't just, developers will smell, you know, IBM's agenda or IBM centric messaging. So, I mean, that's a big, that's come up a lot on theCUBE, you know. Oh, that's IBM centric. And then IBM's moving away from that IBM centric, certainly with the folks like theCUBE here, us, the crowd chat and the open power stuff's going on. This is an open culture at IBM. So, what have you learned and how are you winning? And where do you win with the developers? Yeah, and as we talked about before, you don't win, right? It's a partnership, it's a relationship, it's a lot of the feedback. So, within the beta, we're getting constant feedback on, you know, let's rename the service, let's retool how this works. And so it's really, you know, being in the GitHub community is being in Stack Overflow. We have a whole dev-to-dev community where if you have a question in the product, you just post it on our dev-to-dev community and IBM developers are responding right away. So, it's really about understanding and listening and then retooling the product and the outreach for the developer audience. And, you know, even if it may be conflicts with something that may be more IBM centric, right? And just listening and making sure that we're, you know, we're constantly in tune with that audience. A lot of interest in using Watson for vertical applications. How is Watson folded into the Blue Mix? Yes, it's really around, you know, pulling together, you know, big insights from a lot of data, right? So, we saw on stage today when you start looking within the healthcare organizations, when you start looking in these different communities, you have all this unstructured data. And so, Watson is just absolutely brilliant at pulling together and packaging that data. So, we're working with the team on a lot of analytic services, you know, Q&A services that will start surfacing more through Blue Mix. And so, it's really been, you see the Watson mobile challenge. We've had hundreds of entries. And if you go to the website, you'll see these companies and the kinds of applications that they're looking to build with the analytics and insight we get from Watson are really powerful. And so, it's a real close partnership between Watson, mobile developer community, the Blue Mix community to see how we can, you know, harness some of the data and analytics into applications that the developers can use to build mobile apps. Meg, talk about Amazon. You must get a lot of things. Well, I'm on Amazon. We were talking prior to our crowd shots on Amazon. I'm going to try to poke at Blue Mix and see what's there. And also OpenStack. We've got the OpenStack Summit coming up this month. A lot of developers there in the platform as a service. So, talk about Amazon and OpenStack and what are some of the objections or inhibitors or opportunities you get vis-a-vis those two environments. Yeah, and, you know, we're a partnership company, right? So, it's hard to talk about competition because we partner with so many communities. Not hard for us. But really, when you look at the ease of use. So, as we talk with developers, we look at what are you using today? You know, even if they're competitive products, what are the goods? What are the bads? And how can we restructure Blue Mix so that it takes the benefit of what you've seen in other platforms and then harness that through Blue Mix? So, actually, a lot of the build packs that we see companies bring on to Blue Mix are from competitors. And they're just seeing that we have an easier platform to work with. And then, clearly, OpenStack. I mean, we're committed to the open-source community. We're built on Cloud Foundry. You know, huge partnership. Is Cloud Foundry your force and OpenStack? Or is that you guys have your own specific initiatives going on there? It's a lot of tight partnership with the Cloud Foundry team and the Cloud Foundry initiative and the foundation that Angel Diaz leads from an open standards. Because you heard from Doug yesterday on, you know, the power side. I mean, IBM's 20-year history committed to open-source. But you guys also have a conflict built into this because the red hat's been a big part of the ecosystem at OpenStack with Linux and your investment in Linux. Open-source is getting a lot of traction. So, how do they fit into the mix? Yeah, I think it plays back to what you said about winning the developer community, right? There are different use cases and different models and why developers are going to use different platforms. So it's our job to figure out, you know, what is the strongest use case and, you know, the way we can build ease of use and development and provide the strongest services, you know, IBM and partnerships out to the ecosystem so that, you know, we're the platform that they want to use. Will you guys be at OpenStack? Absolutely. Okay, so we're going to have the cube there. So we should get some IBM folks on as well. Just talking to one of your biggest partners and he said there was some debate yesterday about whether yesterday's announcement was more about the exchange, about the marketplace or about Bluemix. How are you differentiating those two or clarifying them to the market? It was really delivering IBM as a service, right? So, you know, Bluemix is a specific, you know, platform as a service development platform. And when you look at, you know, broader IBM across, you know, the line of business across IT, across developers, there's a need to consume IBM as a service, which is the overall marketplace. So they're absolutely in combination with each other. It's just based on what is your role in the organization? How are you going to engage with IBM? And then, you know, are you going to engage through the marketplace or are you a developer that engages through Bluemix? But if you look at the way they're designed, they all seamlessly tie together. And so it's all one strategy. So the idea that Bluemix is sort of a subset of the marketplace and the services that you deliver through Bluemix will also be available in the marketplace? Exactly, yeah. So it all works together where the platform is a service and then you have the overall marketplace. Meg, I wish we had more time. We'd love talking with you because Bluemix is hot. It's a shiny new toy within the portfolio. Steve Mills was pumping it hard yesterday. That's obviously developer focus. It's kind of business tie-in. It's got to all the things that gets our attention. So I'll give you the final word. Tell the folks out there, you know, the bumper sticker for Bluemix, what's going on and what they expect in the open source and open stack community. Yeah, absolutely. And the first thing, just go to Bluemix.net and sign up. You'll be, we had a great post on Twitter yesterday, developers that I logged in a couple of minutes later. I'm in. I'm using the services. A couple of minutes. I'm building my app. So very easy platform to log into. And then if you're looking for, you know, a quick meetup on Bluemix to hear more, go to bluemix.meetup.com. You know, I'm going to be at the Facebook event tomorrow for their developers and they have philosophy build, grow and monetize. So you guys certainly can bring a lot of monetization muscle to developers and with the marketplace. So congratulations. We're here at theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact. This is theCUBE. John Furrier, Paul Gill, and we'll be right back.