 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, covering day one of Cisco Live from sunny San Diego. We're pleased to welcome back a couple of our alumni. To my right, Eric Herzog, CMO of IBM Storage. Eric, it's always great to have you and your fashion choices on theCUBE. Always wear a Hawaiian shirt for theCUBE. I know, it's a thing. And we've also got Everest's main, so a general manager of IBM Cloud Private Ecosystem. Everest, it's great to have you back on the program. Thank you very much. Delighted to be here. So guys, here we are, we're in the DevNet zone. Lots of collaboration, lots of conversations. Day one of Cisco Live, but this event's been around for 30 years. Long time. I think Chuck Robbins said this morning, what also turns 30 this year is Tetris. Anybody a big fan of Tetris? So much progress, so much change. I know you've seen a lot of it. Eric, let's start with you. The global economy, what are the impacts it's having on IT? Well, I'd say the number one thing is everyone is recognized and the most valuable asset is data. It's not gold, it's not silver, it's not plutonium, it definitely isn't oil, it's all about data. And whether it be a global Fortune 500, a mid-sized company or Herzog's barn grill, data is your most valuable asset. So at IBM Storage, what we've done is making sure that our focus is on being data-driven. It's all about solutions. It's not about speeds and feeds. Of course, having done this for 35 years, like KOWACS, Poetic Revan, speeds and feeds, and even have some speeds and feeds that Stu may not even remember anymore. That said, it's really about data. It's not about storage speeds and feeds. How, really, storage is that critical foundation for applications, workloads and use cases. And that's what's most important. Yeah, so Eric, when they rolled out on stage this morning that 30-year-old box with ribbon cable, yeah, that predated a little bit when I was looking at IT. But I remember when I started in IT, when we talked about security, the main thing was lock the door of the cabinet that everything was in there because it was kind of self-contained. Security's gone through a few changes in the last, you know, 20, 25 years though. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that kind of security resiliency. Obviously, something that's impacted the network for a long time, something that IBM sees. Well, I think the big deal is what most people think when they think of securities, I got to buy security software. So I got to call up IBM Security or RSA or the Intel Security Division and buy some security software. And while that's great, the reality is as many people have written about, in fact, Wikibon SiliconANGLE's written about it, close to 98% of all enterprises, and I mean big enterprises are going to get broken into. And you've seen this all over the news. So the key thing is once they're inside, storage can help you with a cyber resiliency play. And at IBM storage, would that be data rest encryption, would that be malware ransomware protection? We put together a whole set of technology that when the bad guys in the house, they can't steal the TV because we've locked it down. It's almost as if it was in a safe. Maybe it's almost like the cloak in science fiction where you can't even see the Romulan ship because it's cloaked. Well, guess what? That's what IBM storage can do for your data and it is your most valuable asset. So critical to cyber resiliency. So helping customers go from reactive to this expectation breaches happen very frequently every few seconds to being proactive? Eventually predictive? Well, what we do is, for example, with our Spectrum Protect software, when there's a malware ransomware attack, what happens is they always go after your secondary data sets first. I know that sounds weird, but they go after your backups, your snapshots, and your replicas. Because when they attack your primary data, if you can just recover from a backup, they can't hold you for $10 million a ransom. So our Spectrum Protect software, for example, when it sees anomalous activity in backup data sets, sends an email and a warning out to all the admins that says, you have weird activity going on, you might want to check it out. And that way you would know because secondary data is attacked first in a cyber resiliency strategy. The other thing we're seeing a lot is just the scope of what's happening in IT when you talk about things like scale and you talk about edge computing and so much change going on. There's got to be AI in there or machine learning to help us because humans alone can't keep up with what's going on here. Tell us a little bit about that. So big data and AI is like the hot topic right now. Cyber resiliency is important because people obviously have been buying security software for a while. So what we do is really an adjunct to that. In the case of big data, it's a brand new open field. Everyone is looking for solutions in both of those spaces. We have created a complete set of data infrastructure. We call the AI pipeline. It involves not only physical storage arrays but a whole bunch of software. In fact, our Spectrum Discover software which allows you to create metadata catalogs about file and object data is being expanded. And we already publicly said this in the second half to include EMC and NetApp and AWS, not just IBM storage. So it's a critical thing. You've got to make sure. The other thing is when you're using AI, let's say you're going to use AI to run a factory. If the storage goes down, those robots aren't working. So storage is that critical underlying foundation. A, in a big data network load to be able to have this pipeline to get the data. But if you don't have the resiliency, the performance and the availability of the underlying storage, everything shuts down if the storage fails because the AI software won't run. So that's how we see fitting into there both a critical foundation and also this AI data pipeline with all of our software. So before we get into the Cisco partnership with Everest, it's one more question, Eric, for you. As chief marketing officer, you talk with customers all of the time. In that example that you just gave about the criticality of storage for AI, where are you having conversations within customer organizations? Is it at the level of the storage goals and guides or has it gone up to lines of business, to executives? Yeah, so from an AI perspective, it runs a gamut. It could be sometimes the storage people, sometimes the infrastructure people. A lot of times it's actually in the line of business or at the data scientist level. On the big data side, it's a little bit more mature so people know they need to do analytics versus AI. And so when you look at it from that perspective, on that side it's often the storage guy, but it's also the data scientist as well. So that's who we talk to to get things rolling. We don't just talk to the storage admin for either of them because they're both so new and they have such a big impact on the data scientists and the analytic engine communities inside of those giant enterprises. And I can imagine eventually maybe it's a question for you of that conversation elevating up to this week because if you can't access the data that can't be protected, what good is it, right? It's really, to say it's the lifeblood is a silly thing we say it all the time but it's critical, it's table stakes. Well, one of the things that's interesting is I just got my Fortune 500 magazine at home that had the Fortune 500 list in it and there was an interesting article on AI and the enterprise and they did a survey according to Fortune magazine, 50% of the CIOs that are in the Fortune 500 said they're using AI and big data of some type. So it's sweeping the world and started of course in HPC and the academics but now it's going into all enterprises of all types. All right, so we've talked for a few years about the VersaStack partnership but the last year or so we've really been talking about where hybrid cloud, multi-cloud fit in this. We talked a little bit at IBM Think. Everest, as we talked in another show about some of the IBM cloud private. Give us the update where we are with customers and how that fits. Eric, let's start with you and Everest, just go into the partnership. Sure, so from a storage region perspective, we've been talking about hybrid multi-cloud now for several years and in fact, I did a presentation two years ago at Cisco Live on hybrid cloud using the VersaStack. Today I gave one on data driven enterprise and why hybrid multi-cloud is important to you. So that was the 30 minute presentation I did today. So I think the key thing is we make sure that we, A, are hybrid. It's not going to be all public or all private. We can move data seamlessly back and forth and then also multi-cloud. When you look at enterprise shops, they're not going to use just IBM cloud. I wish they would, I'm an IBM shareholder but they're not. They use IBM, they're going to use AWS, they're going to use Amazon and in many cases they're going to use some smaller cloud providers. So we make sure that we can move data around across any multi-cloud of various different providers to a company but also hybrid cloud as well. So the status, talk to us about, you know, from a partnership Cisco IBM cloud private perspective. What's going on there, Everest? Thank you very much. Well, IBM and Cisco have been partners for a long, long time. And what we're doing now is giving the realities of the fact that most clients have found themselves in a multi-cloud environment, hybrid multi-cloud environment. What we can do to help clients so they can develop, they can test, they can manage the applications in a consistent manner, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. And there are a couple of initiatives that we are announcing. One of them is that IBM cloud private is going to run on Hyperflex, so Cisco's Hyperflex, as well as Hyperflex hyperconversion for structure. What it means is a client who currently has Hyperflex can have IBM cloud private on it, which effectively means they have themselves a private cloud environment that also connects to other public cloud environments and allows you to really begin to work within a hybrid cloud environment the way that most clients need to. The second initiative is that we will have ACI pods, V pods, or virtual ACI running in the IBM public cloud, which basically means that again, Cisco customers, ACI network customers, who currently use a product on-prem, will be able to use exactly the same control pane to manage their deployments and to manage their security preferences on-prem as they do in their cloud. And this again, it's not running in the public cloud, it's running on bare metal in the IBM cloud. All right. Eversus, can you bring us inside a little bit the applications? Eric talked about data we know is so important. Really, it's the applications that are driving that. It's where we're seeing the most change in customers as to how they're moving or building new applications. And in hybrid cloud, it's one of the biggest questions for customers is what do they do with that application portfolio? Yeah, so what we're seeing is clearly because clients have now lots of different public clouds. They also have private clouds to deal with them. They have lots of applications that are currently that need to move, right? We believe 20% of those applications have moved. We're remaining 80% that still on-prem. And so the trend that we're really seeing is applications moving to the cloud. In the two ways of doing it, you could do this by simply lifting and shifting on the end. You get the contraction benefit of your stack, right? So you get some cost impacts. But the really interesting way that you see lots of clients moving is modernizing the applications because the real value driver we think for the cloud is not so much cost as innovation. And when you convert those applications into microservices and ride them around them in containers, it gives you plenty of flexibility. And we see lots of clients that want to use IBM Cloud Private as a platform to enable that modernization journey. So as every industry is living in this hybrid multi-cloud world for many reasons, but it sounds like to me is that the IBM Cisco relationship is deepening as a result to enable these organizations that are in these very amorphous environments. As we see the explosion of edge and mobile. That's what it sounds like to me is that this long-standing partnership is getting deeper and maybe a stronger foundation to help customers not just live in this hybrid multi-cloud world, but be successful so that their businesses gain competitive advantage. They can identify new products and services and revenue streams. Yeah, I think multi-cloud and hybrid cloud actually requires partnerships. Because as Eric said later on, of course you'd like everybody to be on the IBM Cloud and it's a great cloud. But we recognize that many clients will have a variety of different clients to deal with. They have a variety of different infrastructures. And that's why when you look at IBM Cloud Private, which is our offering that really enables that hybrid cloud, it is designed to manage that. So it is multimodal. So if you want to run it as a VM, you can. You want to run the containers. You can run serverless. You can run bare metal. But also it supports a range of different infrastructures. So not only does it run on Z, it runs on power. It runs in spectrum storage. We announced we're running now on Hyperflex. It also runs on other people's public cloud. So it runs on Azure. It runs on Amazon Web Services. It runs on Google Cloud Platform. It runs on IBM Cloud. And the intent here is to enable clients to basically manage and work with that infrastructure as if it was born the way that Stu said in a data center where you lock everything up where it's not like that anymore. But the most that we can do is to enable clients to treat all of that infrastructure as born. And that's what we sort of aim to do without platforms. All right, I guess last question I'd like to get both of your comments on is your advice for customers? Customers have that they have a lot of existing things that they have to deal with that they're looking to modernize. What advice do you give them? Where do you start them? I guess one of the things, you're starting where they are but what are some of those first steps and recommendations that you have for customers today? We have a process that works really well which is called the IBM Garage. Which is effectively a way that we use to co-create with our clients to solve their immediate problems. So a client, for example, who is looking at app modernization but isn't sure where to start. Which app? What we do is we get their teams together with our teams, line of business together with IT and our teams and we spend a couple of days in a design thinking workshop to identify a minimum viable product. Which is something that solves the problem. Not big enough that it will take forever but big enough to matter. Then we get our teams who work side by side. We code it, we test it, we deploy it, we run it in the IBM Cloud, we manage it. Like in one week sprints and then we spend another few days at the end of week four or five to do a retrospective, see whether it solved the problem as you expected. And if it did, you pick the next piece of work to continue your journey. So before you know five weeks in, you have your first application modernized or you have your first cloud native application written. Now from a storage perspective, it's a little bit easier. We supported storage on bare metal. We supported storage in all the virtual environments. KVM, OVM, obviously VMware and Hyper-V. And now we've been supporting containers for over two years. So what we say is leave no data behind. If certain data needs to stay on bare metal, that's fine, we can support that. But we can also transparently migrate data back and forth between the various tiers of container-based, virtualization-based or the old-style bare metal. So from our perspective, we help them move data around where they need it. And if they're still running in a hybridized world, in this case, containers, virtual and bare metal, that's fine. They just go containers, that's fine. If they just go virtual, it's fine. So for us, because of what we've been supporting now for several years, we can help them on that journey and traverse from any one of those three layers, which is where data sits in today's data centers and cloud environments. So overall, a lot of collaboration, a lot of customer choice. Gentlemen, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon. Great to have you back. Great, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. Oh, our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from day one of our coverage of Cisco Live. Thanks for watching.