 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive three days of coverage here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furry Koski with Dave Vellante, hosting three days, and next is Joel Holwitz, who is the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Offering of the Digital Business Group. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. Good to see you guys, thanks for having me here. Thanks for coming on. I've been on theCUBE probably so many times, talking big data, talking analytics, now in your new role in the digital group, the digital transformation. I really want to just ask you right off the bat about your new role and how it relates to the changing ecosystem. All these markets are changing big time. The role of the ecosystem, the leverage that they have with technology and the value propositions, whether it's decentralized applications in blockchain to storage infrastructure and big data. What is your role? Take a minute to explain what you're doing because you have a unique position because this demand for partnerships is demand for collaboration at many levels. What's the latest? So I would describe my role as being a champion of our partners, for sure. I look at, I take a very outside in perspective on IBM. Joining just over three years ago now, I came in really through analytics, as you know, focused on machine learning, data science, and the growth of AI at that time. Last year, I was part of the corporate development team over there. So looking really at a lot of the industry trends and what's going on as well in analytics, data, and AI. This year, we recognize that we're only going to do so many strategic partnerships a year, right? Where's probably a handful that we're going to work with. For example, last year, we did a great partnership with Leipen to bring their reactive platform to IBM and we launched the iPhone 10 with Verizon on Leipen's platform. But these days, my team can't be everywhere, obviously. And part of the value of digital and that route to market is really the idea that partners should be able to self-service. So my job this year is frankly to put myself out of a job, right? Meaning, if I can get 70% of the work my team does, right, contracting, legal, setting up, provisioning, all of that on our cloud. And partners can just do that themselves. Then we'll capture a much larger swath of the emerging AI data and cloud market. I want to talk about the killer app being, creating value, and then the role of market places play. You mentioned self-service, I want to kind of go down that. Before we get there, I want to get your thoughts on this because I noticed in your role, when you're covering, is cutting across a lot of different things. And you know, we've been talking about cloud as a horizontally disrupting technology. Certainly in the data space you saw that. And stacks will be horizontally scalable with the cloud. But you could need vertical specialization in the applications. So I noticed you're covering analytics, Watson cloud, hybrid cloud, emerging technologies, blockchain, and many others. So talk about the, it's obvious you guys are now cutting across, horizontally across the different IBM divisions. Is that by design? What's the impact that the ecosystem and partners for that horizontally cut over? Yeah, no, I mean, it's a great question. I think, look, there are some specific design patterns that we see across every technology, across every business at IBM. One design pattern is pretty obvious. You saw it with the launch of the IBM cloud private data, following up on last year's IBM cloud private. And that design pattern is really about people containerizing applications. And so at the end of the week, we have the business partner, our partner world leadership conference, excuse me, where a number of our partners really are looking at, how do I bring that workload to the cloud? And it's not so much the cloud as the endpoint. That's really a starting off point to A, get much wider distribution. And B, be able to take advantage of a lot of these emerging technologies, like blockchain, like AI, like IoT, and numerous others, quantum, et cetera. They'll just keep coming. So really cloud to me is just a way for us to open the door to a lot of the technology that's flooding the market. Joe, can you talk about partnership? You mentioned before that you guys are kind of selective. John calls them Barney deals, you know, I love you, you love me. You guys, that sounds like you don't look for those, not volume, it's quality. What are the criteria that you're looking for? How do you get value out of those? How do you measure that value out of the partnerships? And if you're somebody who's a perspective partner out there, how should I be interacting with you? Yeah, I think probably there's probably two steps. I think one is really recognizing that in my own personal view is that we really want to partner with folks who embrace open standards. Now I'm not going to like go as far to say open source because I think there's a lot that goes into that. But I will say open standards, meaning not these like large monolithic applications, but can you actually integrate with us in some meaningful way? And to do that, that's why we actually started on this new platform that we are launching today called IBM Partner Self Service, is the ability to first integrate with IBM. And so if you can demonstrate that you can build with IBM first, whether that's a startup, an ISV, you know, a business partner, like that's criteria number one. Criteria number two is, you know, are you a trusted partner? So, you know, do you actually have the same level of competency that we would expect from frankly our own sellers and our own people? And so to do that, we've also launched new competency paths for business partners and partners as well. So those are the two major criterias. And then the third one, which I think is kind of the holy grail, is selling with IBM. And so we also launched a sell with path today where you can actually list in our marketplace and then we will actually help you reach new markets and then demonstrate like there's clients, there's a client need that really wants our joint solution, right? And so to me, those are the three things to restate. Like, you know, building with us, you know, having the level of competency with us and then demonstrating, you know, client success with us. Okay, so integrate, you really don't need you guys to do that, I can just dive in and do that, bake it out a little bit and then approach you. And what kind of help do you give? Do you have programs, you know, once you get by those gates? So, you know, I would categorize into two groups. I think we have a ton of online support. So, you know, we've embraced Slack at IBM, if you're not aware of that, but we have Slack everywhere. And so for our self-service, I want to say, look, what does zero touch mean, right? This day and age for a partner. And so they can go to our, you know, site today and actually get, you know, sign up for Slack and talk directly to our technical specialists as well as to our developer advocates. And so on the, you know, kind of the enablement, you know, integration side, you know, my colleague Angel Diaz and team have done a great job of launching hundreds of IBM code patterns so that you can just pick these artifacts up, these assets up, and leverage them to integrate all sorts of capabilities into your product. You know, Dave, I want to get your thoughts on this because you and I have been talking about the API integration and want to get back to Joel's point in a second, because I think this is critical for startups and ecosystem partners. APIs are the lingua franca for developers right now. So if I don't want to take a big chance on being all in an IBM, say I want to kick the tires, APIs are critical. So the question is, is that, you know, are you seeing that traction on your side, the house in terms of on the analysis of the level of API integration? Is that the touch point? Is it like the, the beginning phases and what level of commitment that you're seeing with people? Well, John, to me it comes down to innovation. And it's interesting because, you know, Joel came out of the data world. To me, the innovation in the next 10 years starts with data. The second component of that innovation, I think over the next decade or so, is going to be really AI, whether you call it cognitive or machine intelligence or artificial intelligence. And then I third to think is cloud economics. And that's really where the API economy fits in. You got to have, you know, APIs to integrate, as Joel was saying. You've got to have marginal, you know, scale, marginal costs go to zero eventually. You got to have network effects and you got to be able to track startups, which is another question I have. Now Joel, back to you. On the start, on the integration whether it's a startup or a big company. It used to be in the old days, you got to go all in, get the developer kit, download it, you know, line into a swim lane, get deeper, improve your value. Time to value is faster. What's the first hurdle if someone says, hey, you know, I want to give IBM a shot here. Love the sell holy grail option. Is it APIs? Is it, can people ingratiate it on their own? I'll talk about that specific first step because some people might open up the door and go, whoa, there's more here than I thought, or wow, there's some real tech, or I don't want to use IBM tech, I want to use some mine. There's that first indifference point. Yeah, I think there are areas where we've seen dramatic customer experience improvements. So to give one example, as we partner with Ubisoft Red Storm last year, around a new title, a game that they released called Star Trek Bridge Crew. And so to me, we win on our own merit. And I think that publisher chose IBM because Watson Conversation is absolutely the best on the market. And so what that did is it enabled game players, their end customer, their end user, to speak into a VR headset and just give commands as you would naturally. And so I think a lot of, as you think about IBM, it's yeah, like we've made it completely easy to access our APIs. I think there's a great quote from the founder of Flickr that I read years ago. I'll go dig it up for you guys later. But it was along the lines of business development means today is exposing your APIs, like that's it. And on the other side of it, we give a lot away in terms of cloud credits, right? And so today, if you go and sign up on our self-service platform, we'll give you $10,000 a month in free cloud credits to build and build quickly. Because at the end of the day, if it's not self-service, if it requires more heavy lifting, then frankly, we're not doing our jobs. And so that's my commitment, is to make sure that is available, it's accessible, and there's experts there that can help you on your journey. So that attracts startups, obviously. 10K a month is a honeypot for those guys. What about existing IBM clients that want to get to the cloud, migrate to the cloud? How do you help those guys? Yeah, so on the migration front, we have a great team in place with IBM services who basically have set up a migration factory, if you will. And there are numerous ways to chart your course to the cloud, whether it's full cloud or hybrid cloud or offloading some aspects of the cloud. There's a lot of different paths you can take. And so to do that, we're offering $50,000 in migration credits for the first couple of months. We're also offering 35% off our professional services. So we have a great offer going on over the next few months to help people make that first step. And look, we're here with you. So it's not like here throwing it over the fence and good luck, tweet at me, instant message me, I'm around. And I will be absolutely committed to partner success. And incentives are critical. I mean, that's going to get the market going. But at the end of the day, it's the time to value. And I want to get your thoughts, and this is something that's come up, I've heard people talk about in the hallways and other conferences, they kind of chirp about, hey, you know, I like to get this from the suppliers. I want to see more tools, more programs to help me get more customers, get more value. I'm building apps, but also got a business to run. What are some of the conversations that you've had over the past year with customers and partners? What are they look, what's stack ranked the top three or four things that they talk about, either their pain points or things that are on their mind that's worth noting. I mean, I would say first and foremost, I mean, me myself being in a startup at H2O three, four years ago, we used to walk in there and sell into the data scientists, right? So, you know, if you don't know H2O, they're a great company, machine learning company. But we would get the data scientists really excited about working with our product. And then lo and behold, we'd get to the CIO office and say, hey, what is this stuff? Get it out of here. Hadoop was the same way by the way in the early days. You know, working at AVG like we'd bring in Hadoop. Like what is this data lake thing? There's no governance. It's, you know, it's a mess. And so, you know, where they where they could really, you know, work with IBM, where they see value from IBM is when we go into the CIO office together and say look, we've demonstrated that there's value here. We've demonstrated that, you know, there's actual customer need. We can create a lot of, you know, help in terms of getting the rest of the organization kind of bought in, putting the right governance around it. Because look, I mean, GDPR is real, it's a big deal. Like data privacy is huge. So, you know, I think Rob Thomas likes to say you can't have good AI without IA. I think that's a great, you know, information architecture. So I agree. And so I think that's what the number one benefit is. You know, really get in there, move quickly, demonstrate value, and then when you're ready to make that next step of how do you roll that out to the rest of the enterprise, that's when IBM becomes a huge help. You mentioned GDPR, regulatory issues now are becoming criteria for a lot of application developers that are small. They might not have the resources to handle, you know, right to get your name out of a database or other tools and other regulations, certainly decentralized applications with blockchain, another regulatory challenge, opportunity as well. Are you guys having those kinds of conversations like putting specific things in place beyond GDPR? And if so, what regulatory and legal things do you see out there that could be blockers for customers that you guys hope to go after? I mean, I don't think there's like a one word answer here. I do think that you take it on a case-by-case basis. I think you're seeing different kind of countries adopt GDPR differently. Germany obviously being a very kind of, you know, strict kind of country doing that. So, you know, IBM services as well as our analytics team are really focused on that. I think like I said, what you saw with, you know, ICP data coming out this week, I think that's a really important way to look at it. In my own personal view, I think for sure there's a lot of compliance that you have to, you know, look at and understand the workflow, workflows of how people are using that data, as well as application architecture is big. And those are all the considerations, I think that you're going to see as people move. You know, I read a statistic that 40% of all CSPs, MSPs are moving, you know, are growing, like it's 40% growth from IDC. 50% of all developers are now embedding AI. And so this market is growing, growing fast. But you're right, I mean, if folks out there aren't really taking GDPR seriously, you can get yourself into some hot water. So- Well, we've observed that scale matters. Certainly whether it's a partner or cloud that gets, that helps people. Yeah. Joel, well thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Before we land, I want to get your thoughts, just share with the folks that are watching, what kind of deals do you want to do? What's on your radar? What's the priorities for you from a strategic business development standpoint to develop across that horizontally scalable IBM division space, as well as technology space? You know, it's not what deals I want to do. It's really what deals our partners- You're in charge, come on. It's really what deals our partners want to do. I mean, look, I get excited about, you know, transforming industries, I really do. And so I look at not like what's the transactional partnership, like, oh, like, we'll do something and there's some revenue or something. I look at, you know, how do we transform an industry together? Let me rephrase a question. What's on the priority list for you guys from a transformational area that's important for your partners? Yeah, I would say for sure. I mean, obviously AI is huge. Obviously data is huge. Obviously cloud is huge. But looking really specific, I mean, I think you just add tech after each industry. So add tech, you know, fin tech, health tech, obviously. You know, game tech. And I think probably the last one to me personally is the most exciting. We were signed up an amazing deal with Unity at the end of last year at the start of this year. In fact, GDC game developer conference is going on as we speak in San Francisco. So half my team right now is over there demonstrating Watson as like, you know, VR, AR. And it's not just for games, right? It's like with BMW and VW doing, you know, some cool stuff there as well. So I'm really excited about the AR, VR industry growing, especially with our partner Unity. There's a new creative out there. Can I jump in before you exit? I want to ask you a follow up on that. Because if transformation is sort of the target for your partnership, healthcare is an area that should be transformed. It needs to be transformed, but it's hard to transform healthcare. Do you feel like you can start moving the needle from a partnership perspective or is that going to take some more time? You know, I think there's a lot of great, there's a lot of great work being done there. I do believe we can look in general, I think we can move a lot faster with partners. In fact, I like to call it like the Nordstrom model, right? Like IBM in the past has been like Barneys of New York forever, right? From a branding and from how we partner with folks. Like, I think we need to move more to a Nordstrom. We're like, yeah, we'll sell our own offerings like off the rack, but then we need to help partners come in and create the right styles for the right need in the right industry. Yeah, and then there's a Nordstrom rack. You're going to need to put that on there. I'll go check now that you go to the Nordstrom rack. Joel Horowitz, thanks for coming on. Vice President, strategic partner, offers here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante for three days of IBM Think live streaming. All the videos will be up on thecube.net that's where it's live now. YouTube.com slash SiliconANG for all the on-demands. When the show's over, we'll be right back with more after this short break.