 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for theCUBE, a special presentation at IBM's Interconnect conference. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANG. And so my co is Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon Research. Our next guest is Peter McCaffrey, Director of Application Platform Marketing at IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE. We interviewed you when it was an IOD. Information on demand, I believe, in a couple of other conferences years ago. Now there's two conferences. They're all the mega, big tent, main tent kind of conference. Welcome back. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Fewer trips to Vegas now, but still get it all done. And then there are bigger, better, more parties, more dinners to do. 20,000 people, that's a good number. Yeah, it's really important. It is a great number, and it was funny. I came over with a client on the bus going back and forth, so I got a chance. What's it like going back and forth? It's not too bad. It's been going good. And I said, well, what's your area specialty? Because it used to be three conferences down to one. And he told me that it was a Maximo customer, but he also had Rational. They were very interested in cloud. It goes for him. It was perfect because he could get it all in one place where before he was getting little bits and pieces. And now people are all online, so the big tent events are good because they can get all their connection to do on a physical face-to-face. There's a lot of virtual activities, a lot of digital experiences that go social. So that's changed the game. Have you noticed anything different with the experience, with the agenda? Cloud, is there integrations, or the themes kind of overlap nicely? There's a lot of synergy. Really honestly today, everything involves cloud and data at some level. And for a lot of our clients, it's about leveraging what they've got. They want to protect their investments, leverage it forward into cloud. They're pushing more and more capability to the client through enhanced online experience. So you've been in the pure side before, your application platform, marketing. So I got to ask you, platforms are everything, but in this new cloud era, there's some, you don't need to sell a platform right away. You can have an integrated tool that a customer can buy and try as they go. So you don't have to go sell the big platforms and more because we hear customers tell us all the time when we do the research, like if someone sells me another, tries to pitch me a platform, sell me a platform, I'm going to run away. There's too many, too much platforms out there. You're absolutely right. People want to use what they want to use. They want to run applications where they want to run applications. And where it makes the most sense for them and they don't want to start over. And so when we talk about platform, it's really about enabling choice. So if I'm a mobile-based developer and I want to use Node as my development platform, great, have at it. How do we make that easy for you? How do we make it easy for you to tie back into your existing systems and do that level of integration to ultimately push the data that is needed at the right to the client experience? So in a way, it's almost a commoditization with cloud of tools of the new platform. It's a good way to think about it. So platforms that can be more big, more open, open-source certainly change the game on that. And it's interesting, the tools, there used to be a startup thing where VCs would invest if you had a platform. Now you're seeing tools get beach head that have platform-native capabilities that can sequence and become platform-like when they take hold. Is that what customers want? Is that just symptomatic of cloud? Or bold? I think it's symptomatic of the thought of ecosystem, right? And so the notion of community and ecosystem become very important because there's all these elements out there now that you want to be able to leverage and build upon and to compose and bring together. And so that's what we're really trying to help our developers do. And at the same time, when they do those things and they connect them back into the enterprise, it just puts tremendous pressure on the enterprise. And so there's still this need for, there's a need for speed, but there's also a need for governance control security. So what's the conversation like with customers? Because I feel like the C-suite, as I just put it in the cloud, we've had this conversation for years now. And so like the CIO's job to make sure that the organization doesn't get blindsided from a compliance and security standpoint. But at the same time, cloud feels like it's much more real than when we first started having these conversations. So what's the conversation, what's the meme like today when you're talking to customers? Well, you know, the common denominator when you talk to particularly a CIO is they need to go faster, right? And so the conversation very much here has been about business transformation. Behind that conversation is they got to go a lot faster. And so what you're finding and you're starting to see some dialogue around is the solution. So can you say that again? I want to write that down. Business transformation, what was the other one? And they need to go faster. It needs to go faster. It needs to accelerate. They need to go faster. And so a lot of the conversation I'm hearing is a little bit more about is this notion of two speeds, right? So you want to be able to enable quick innovation, but at the same time, there's a level of governance, security, and control that's equally important. And you may need to go at a slightly different pace there to ensure that you're not compromising some things. So part of what we're doing in our application platform is trying to accelerate the notion of application delivery, whether it's a system of record, whether it's a front end customer experience, mobile environment, how do you do both? How do you do both faster? How do you deploy it on-prem, off-prem, or a combination thereof? And so I was like, go faster and then slow down. Just leave the apartment and slow down. I was like, this is it. Dave, what do you think? I mean, you brought this up. Go fast, go fast, don't compromise the brand, don't compromise my customers. Go faster, go too fast you're on your own. I mean, or- No, that's the only thing. Go fast, but not too fast. Yeah, go as fast as you can, but not too fast. So what comprises the application platform? How should we think about the offering? You know, there's a couple of core pieces. It starts with the run times and being able to support different languages, different run times, and that's where some of the flexibility and choice comes in. People are going to develop in what they want to develop. And so for something like a Bluemix environment, for example, we're putting a lot of the run times right into our Bluemix platform to give people that choice. The other aspect there is whatever I develop, I need flexibility in terms of where I deploy. We have the client, for example, they want to go fast. They may start out on the cloud and they do some proof of concept, they do some continuous development, innovation, but they know in the back of their mind, when this thing is ready for prime time, prime time may mean deploying it back on prem behind their firewall. And so they want also the ability to be able to seamlessly move things back and forth. And so you hear a lot here about the notion of enterprise containers and actually what we've done with pure application system is sort of a predecessor of that, right? The ability to take an application pattern, build it once, want it either on prem or off prem, that concept. And then wrapped around that is a discipline that allows you to continuously deploy. And think about the DevOps principles coming to play there. And so having the right tools, having the right testing environment. This came out big in the Bluemix conversation. The tooling is critical for developers. Absolutely. They are number one fickle point that they get weird on quickly is when the tooling's really ambiguous and not clear and easy, they run for the hills. It's so true. And then probably the center of this all, center of the universe, so to speak, is the ability to integrate. I was just going to say that. Don't they want this integrated though? The ability to integrate. So when you look at the pieces, it's the run times, it's the valid days to deploy back and forth, but I got to be able to integrate. And you see a lot here on how to make that easier. You hear a lot about the past layer. You know, okay, I kind of get it. It looks good on a chart, but people want it integrated. They want it to be part of their infrastructure, part of their applications. Give me a solution. Well, they have so much intellectual property both on premise, but they're also trying to tap into other services. You know, there's this growing ecosystem of microservices out there. New business to business services, APIs. It's all part of the broad ecosystem. And I think you saw it on the main stage this morning in what city was doing. Yeah. That was cool. It really was cool. And I think it's an indicator of what's to come. Well, I was actually pretty forward thinking you wouldn't expect that out of a big bank. You think slow and stodging. Here they are doing cool stuff in Silicon Valley and attracting developers, talking about the API economy. How percent of your customers, your large customers actually have that mindset? That was a great presentation. And she had some proof points to go along with it. A lot of the clients that are here presenting this week, you're going to see a lot about API management, the ability to integrate back and forth. Hybrid cloud is really becoming ingrained within our customers that it really is. So I got to ask you, because I was probably on the spot, well, I wasn't put on the spot, I put Pat Gelsinger on the spot when he took over at his first CEO, at VMware, they launched their hybrid cloud. And I said, I had to probably take the better choice of words. Is hybrid cloud a halfway house to the final destination? He said, what, halfway house? He was like this. He was like this. But first of all, he said, way station would have been better way station. Halfway house implies, you know, recovering, you know, cloud addicts. I don't know how the hell's out there. But, but, but, but in a way, that was the old messaging was private cloud and public cloud. Public cloud was very early then. Still the innovation in the public cloud has really moved down the field since then. That was in 2012, when we were talking about IOD. Private cloud is still basically the data center and all those governance issues. But now hybrid has become an interesting middle layer kind of model. So it's not necessarily a halfway house. It's almost like the stack, right? It really is. I mean, can you explain what's going on there? You know, it varies business to business. What you want to be able to do is, so if you've got a newer business, they might start out a little more on the cloud, on the public cloud, and they may put more of their application base there. But they're still going to tie into other people's services. Take another company, more of a traditional enterprise company that has so much invested on prem. The opposite may be true. They're going to continue to nurture that investment. They're going to integrate more and more things. But they're going to start to put some services out on the public cloud. And so to me, it's really, comes back to this notion, you know, I want to be able to tap in to the universe of things wherever that may be and have the ability to run things where I want to or it makes the most sense for my business. And there's no one right or wrong answer. I think you're going to find a balance point. It's evolving in real time. In fact, I was saying earlier that I think this whole systems of engagement is such a land grab and unexplored territory. Yeah, there's some persona, 360 view of the customer. That's easy low hanging fruit, but still there's going to be a whole nother territory. Which brings me up to the app question, because we had the mobile guy on earlier with mobile search. I'm not absolutely all about it. Typical mobile app conversation. But we were just talking to Eric Herzog about, you know, the day that's diversity. You know, people use the term data lake. We talk about data oceans, which we're putting out there for conversations. Two different things, different animals, different lakes, different systems or lake ocean, obviously different. We talk about the apps. We talk about integrated apps. I talk about integrated apps, meaning I download the NCAA app in March. I never use it again. Goes away from my iPhone. Some apps, I like that. Some die, some come, some use as a utility. Because they don't share data. You don't really see a lot of integrated apps. So the question is, we were talking with this last night, and this morning, it's okay, if you have integrated stacks, concept in the platform, things like Blue Mix is doing, Live Sync, you know, auto managing, version control, all those great things. What's the integrated app vision? Because apps have to integrate by, if you just go to the corollary, if integrated stacks are going to proliferate, integrated apps must come out of that. That no one's talking about this. So what this means is, okay, apps have to integrate naturally with each other. How does that happen? I'm a software developer and I'm born in the cloud. Is it Docker? Is it? Well, I mean, I think it's, again, it comes back to, you know, you got tools, you got containers, you've got this API economy, you're going to tap into this stuff, and you're going to figure it out. You can say, John, you're just whacked, you're all whacked. There's no such thing as integrated apps. Yeah, but this is something we're trying to tease out because a lot of things is like that. I think the concept of integration is so important, because what are you trying to do? You're connecting capabilities with data. Back to your NCAA example, it's a fairly static environment. It does one thing, and at that moment in time, it's like surfs up in the data ocean for that day, that small time. So how do you keep me interested? How do you keep me engaged? You got to continually add value to me. You got to make the experience worth coming back for. And I think the way businesses are doing that is they're putting more and more into their application to keep you coming back. The integration thing is really important. And you know, Dave and I have a slogan that we talked about within our SiliconANGLE groups. We have research, TV, and the publishing. Unification, integration, and growth. Kind of tying together. So you guys have been in the unified communication business as a company. Some will argue where that's going. It used to be voice over IP was considered unified communication. Unification, yeah, sure. Now it's like, what? That's dead, so okay. Integration's hard. I mean, it's easier with, in some ways, it's easier with people in some ways it's not. But I mean, integrating an application suite. Yeah. I mean, look, how long are we going to take Oracle, the so-called integrate fusion? Eight years. I mean, it's got similar challenges with its application portfolio. You bought a lot of SaaS companies. How do you approach that? How do you approach integration? You know, it's something that we've evolved over a period of time, right? First, the first challenge we had was integrating the enterprise itself. And we took a so-based approach in doing just that. It's that same sort of concept, but now extended out over a hybrid landscape. For SOA in the cloud, three territories, private, product data, sort of the three things. I mean, we're back to SOA again. Well, it was a different twist, right? It's that concept, right? And there's some pieces in between. You're going to go through gateways. You're going to look to make that a lot easier, right? So- Different form factor of hardware. I mean, system Z screams Java. Java runs Java like lightning fast. Fast is in the industry, but that's good for that use case, workloads. But then I might have some commodity servers over here running something else. So again, apps shouldn't care, right? I mean- That's right. And so you want to take what was originally a core set of enterprise integration services and really extend that notion, but now it's hybrid integration. And we're building a lot of those capabilities again right into our Bluemix platform. And that's where some of the speed and simplicity come into play. So how do we dumb down integration? Yeah, so Bluemix hides some of that complexity, right? There's still a lot of R&D that has to go into it as well. Some heavy lifting around there. So what should we expect in terms of integration going forward? I think integration, for me, back to your integrated app slot, I think integration is really going to enable that next wave of fun, innovative, new application. And it's going to be very much enterprise driven. I really believe that because they're going to unleash all of their intellectual properties and capabilities on the mobile world and integration makes that possible. You know, that's really interesting. I think we just kind of rift on a concept that we've just been kicking around and you kind of crystallize it for me. The enterprise has always been integrated. Out on the web, it's never been integrated. So an app like Secret can explode and die in a matter of six months. It's on its own. It's on its own. And then everyone's like, this is supposed to be a nightclub. It's hot and then it closes down, right? Yeah. It can stay on, same drinks every time. You know, so like, I mean, but they have no integration. You know, Twitter, and Snapchat. You know, I love Twitter. I know you use a relationship with Twitter. We use Twitter with our crowd chat, but Snapchat is sucking all the oxygen out of the room and they got movies and stories lines now. So it's very interesting, you know, these apps. But if they don't, LinkedIn's kind of out there. They're siloed data models. They don't talk to each other. Well, and it's what makes some of these partnerships very interesting. The IBM, Twitter relationship, the IBM, Apple relationship. It's kind of, you know, it's a way of kind of bringing sort of the, a lot of the key vendors out there in the market. I think those are two really amazing relationships. Apple, certainly on the enterprise side, is awesome both ways. BYOD to whatever app running on awesome systems. The Twitter stuff with analytics. You guys can own the enterprise with analytics with social data. Again, engagement systems includes things, internet of things, which people are things, right? I mean, a mobile device is potentially a human, right? And I'll put a little plug in for our app integration keynote at Tuesday at two o'clock where we'll share a demonstration of one of the Apple applications and how it integrates back into a traditional enterprise middleware environment. So give it a little teaser on this. Explain a little bit more. So the application. What time is the keynote, and then day? It's Tuesday at two o'clock. It's the app integration and infrastructure keynote. It's called digital transformation, the era of hybrid cloud. Is it on our schedule? Irish grandma, whose D.P. have been middleware. Marie Week. Marie Week, who's coming on theCUBE later. Marie will be kicking it off. Don Booyah is going to be on there. He's the head of cloud services. Talking about hybrid integration. A Dell from Pure. Yeah, talking about hybrid integration. He'll be doing a live demo on how to put it all together. So the schedule is on Interconnect Go, Dave? Yeah, it's on Interconnect Go, two o'clock on Tuesday. Just go to Interconnect Go. It's called Schedule Main Tent. Yeah, Schedule Main Tent. InterconnectGo.com, Main Tent, scroll down. Two o'clock. Yeah, I think that's a huge deal. And I'm obviously bullish on this weird thing as well. I'm going to lead off with one of the, it's around the airline industry, but we'll lead off with one of the applications as part of the Apple IBM partnership and show how it all ties back. Oh, cool, okay. Yeah, we were talking about that earlier with one of the, yeah. Peter, it's been great to have you on again. It's always my pleasure. Interesting conversation. Provocative, obviously for teasing out this new concept. We just teased out integrated apps. We did talk about a new world data structures that Eric Herzog brought up. So the final question I got to ask you, do you like Data Lake or Data Ocean as a better description of the drowning data problem customers have? They both co-exist, you don't have to pick a side, but which one do you like better? You know, I'm an ocean kind of guy. You know, I grew up in Massachusetts. It's like the Cape. It's all about the ocean. You can surf the waves on the ocean, but you can drink the lake. That's for the money, right? So, you know, you can't drink the salt water. No, but again, ocean is much more bullish on the ocean. Thanks for the perspective. Peter McCaffrey, director of application platform marketing. You get your arms around the ocean, certain inflashes, a great solution there. Software's eating the world. This is theCUBE, sharing that. We're a data ocean of content. Just the tsunami of interviews coming here at the event. Three days of wall-to-wall covers. This is day one. I'm John Furrier, day one. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.