 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're virtual this year, in real life soon, right around the corner as we come out of COVID. We've got a great guest, a CUBE alumni, Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow, VP, CTO for IBM Automation. Jerry, great to see you. Been on since the early days of the CUBE. Good to see you. Yeah, John, thrilled to be back again. Thank you. What I love about our conversations, one is you're super technical. You've got patents under your belt, you're on the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You're constantly riding the wave. And also you're a creator of a great podcast called The Art of Automation, which is the subject of this discussion. As automation becomes central in cloud operations and hybrid cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry. So great to see you. First, give us a little background for the folks that may not know you about your history with IBM and who you are. Yeah, so thanks, John. So I'm Jerry Cuomo. I've been with IBM for about three decades. And I started my career at IBM Research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet. And I've been incredibly fortunate, as you mentioned, to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades, internet software, middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of WebSphere software. I recently helped launch the IBM Blockchain Initiative and now all about AI powered automation, which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI in graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, you know, really enjoying the topic. You know, it's funny you mentioned AI in graduate school. I was really kind of into AI when I was an undergraduate and get a master's degree in computer science. I kind of went the MBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the 80s during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you got this confluence of computer science and engineering, aka now DevOps, DevSecOps coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts, whether it's AI and systems and computer science and engineering into automation. Could you share your view on this? Because you're in a unique position. You've been there, done that, now you're in the cutting edge. What's your thoughts? Yeah, absolutely John. And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new. Literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era, right? So automation has been around. And in its simplest form, automation, whether it was back then, whether it was in the 80s or today, it's about applying technology that performs, that uses like technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us humans, right? So, but now what we're seeing is AI coming into the picture and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, automation is this two-step dance of both eliminating repetitive mundane tasks that help reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time, but also helps, it's not about taking jobs away. At that point, as I said, it's a two-step dance. That's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills, right? And to use automation to help augment our skills. And we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with AI, automation is evolving with technology. And it's interesting too. It's, as a student of the history of the computer industry as you are, and now a creator with your podcast, which we'll get to in a second, you're starting to see the intersection of these concepts to not be spoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation, digital transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts, they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone, but they work better together. Transformation is the innovation. Innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skillset into higher integrated areas. Can you share your? Yeah, no, right on there. When you talk about transformation, geez, look around us. The pandemic has made transformation and specifically digital transformation the default. So everything is digital, whether it's ordering a pizza, visiting a doctor through telemedicine or this Zoom, WebEx based workplace that we live in. But picture a telemedicine environment, talking about transformation and going digital. With 10x more users, they can't hire 10x more support staff and think about it. I forgot my password. Does this work on my version of the Apple iPhone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks are lit up, right? So as they scale digitally, automation is the relief that comes into play, which is just in time, right? So the digital transformation needs automation. And John, I think about it like this. Businesses like cars have become computers, right? So they're programmable. So automation software, just like in the cars, it makes the car self-driving. I think about the Tesla Model 3, which I recently test drove. So with this digital acceleration, digital opens the door for automation. And now we can muse about a self-driving business. We can muse about maybe that's step one, right? That's the remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot. So it doesn't need us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate. Digital is the peanut butter, automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. You know, that's a really interesting insight. And I will just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self-driving business, you're implying, you said the computer, the business is a computer. So if you just think about that mind blowing concept for a second, if it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So okay, let's go in the old days at a windows machine and you had office, which was a system software, application software construct. Okay, if you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red Hat and IBM kind of come working together, kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hat could be because they're an operating system company. So if hybrid cloud is the system and hybrid, then you got the application suite all software for the business. That's right, that's right. And if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands for, it's hybrid cloud and think Red Hat as kind of the core element of that with OpenShift and AI, right? And both of those really matter in terms of automation. And maybe I'll come back to the hybrid cloud and Red Hat thing in a second, but let's just talk about Watson and AI, which is the application. And you mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. AI could help scale automation. And the trick is that automation sometimes gets stuck, right? It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured, right? So there's a lot of structured data in your organization. And with that, we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data, unstructured, noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what AI can start to do, AI, and it's subordinate, it's machine learning, natural language, processing, computer vision, we can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward, right? So that's the AI part. You mentioned Red Hat and hybrid cloud part. Well, think about it this way. When you shop, how many stores do you, you don't just shop in one store, right? You go to specialty stores to pick up that special ketchup, I don't know, or must store and maybe do shopping in another store. Customers using clouds, John, aren't very different. They have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads in Google involving search and AI related to search, right? And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things, right? So from that perspective, that's a view of hybrid. Customers today, take that shopping analogy, they're going to be using Salesforce or ServiceNow. IBM cloud, they have a private cloud, right? So when you think about automating that world, right? It's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud, right? So the hybrid cloud is a reality. And how do you make sense of that, right? Because when an average customer has five clouds, how do you deal with five things, right? How do you make it easy, normalize? And that's what Red Hat really does. Yeah, it's interesting. I'll just share with you, though, when I interviewed Arvin, who is now the CEO of IBM, when he was at Red Hat Summit in 2019 in San Francisco before he made the acquisition, he had that, I was peppering with questions like, you know, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves cloud. So he was smiling and he just wanted to say it. He wanted to just say it. And I think Red Hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the OS. Of the middleware, which is now software, which is software-defined business. And this kind of is the talk of your views. Now you have a podcast called Art of Automation. I want to get that in there for the folks watching. Search for the podcast Art of Automation. This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories from this phenomenon. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customers. So we're hearing from customers that AI and automation is where they're investing in 2021. For all the reasons we briefly mentioned. And IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made AI powered automation a priority. But John, in the pursuit of making it a priority, I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion and their stories. And I said, we can't keep this to ourselves. We can't keep this locked away. We have to share it. We have to let it out. So basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside, starting with customers. We had Klaus Jensen, who is the CIO of Memorial Clones Kettering Hospital to talk about automation and healthcare. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them about, automation is not going to take the place of doctors, but automation will help better read X-rays and look at those shades of gray on the X-ray and interpret it much better than we can. And be able to ingest all of the up-to-date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment, right? So the two working together are better than any individual. Carol Polson recently joined me to talk, and she's the CIO for cooperators to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories too. So John, with that, a bunch of IBM, great IBM fellows like Rama Agaraju, who is one of Forbes's top 20 women in AI research talking about AI ops. And also Ruchir Puri talking, and Ruchir has been working on Watson since Jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching AI to code in all the modern programming languages and really automating application modernization and the like. Four key episodes in, we have those under our belt, about $6,000 in downloads so far. So it's coming along pretty well. Thanks for asking, John. I'll look at the word out, and then the key is you're a content creator now as well as a fellow. And this is democratization, as we say, direct to audience, share those stories. Also here, I think you released an e-book. Tell us a little quickly about that. We got one minute left. Give a quick plug for the e-book. The book echoes the podcast chapters relate to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts. And I really suggest you go out and check it out. All right, Jerry Cuomo, IBM fellow VPCT-IBM automation. Also a content creator, podcast art of automation. Jerry, we're going to list it on our Silicon angle and our cube sites. Get you some extra love on that. Love the podcast. Love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me again, John. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here for IBM Think 2021. Thanks for watching.