 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE live in Las Vegas for IBM Interconnect. This is theCUBE's special presentation. theCUBE is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the soothing noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Engine. I'm my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibond.org. And we are live in Las Vegas, talking about IBM Interconnect. Dave, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We are in the Go Social Lounge, the social media lounge where all the crowd is gathered, all the influencers, and of course we're broadcasting live, live commentary here inside theCUBE. Also the keynotes are on. The web, go to interconnectgo.com. That's a social media experience site that was put together for the crowd, with the crowd. It's all crowd sourced and was streaming the content there. Feel free to join the conversation and check out what the crowd's talking about. Dave, day two, day one was set in the table. Day two we have the shark tank here. We have IBM's key messaging. Obviously cloud is a big deal. Looking at the trending stories this morning. DevOps, cloud, Internet of Things, Bluemix, big data, Pure App, IBM cloud, commerce security storage, list goes on and on. Like the usual stuff at IBM, but really cloud is the show. Internet of Things is hot. So again, Internet of Things, Analytics, cloud, all intersecting together that's the key theme of the show. What's your take so far? And what are you expecting from today? Well, a couple things. One, I think the IoT angle, John, to me is all about developers. If you're a developer, you're interested in Internet of Things, if you're IBM, you're trying to attract developers, I think that's a great way to get them. I think they've got two angles there. One is IoT, the other of course is Watson. I think Watson, and you've mentioned this a number of times, is like IBM's secret weapon potentially for developers. So it has to be able to attract developers. That's a big part of the reason for Amazon's success. Of course, Microsoft is renowned in that regard as is Google and others. So IBM's got to play that card heavily. And I think it's got some assets to do that, but it's got some work to do as well. I think the second thing is, as we talked about yesterday, IBM has a $25 billion business, which comprises cloud, it's analytics business, all the hot stuff that's moving right now, the mobile pieces. And that's really, those strategic initiatives are really where IBM has to focus. That's the growth engine. It's got to get that investment going. And it is investing in that. It's got to keep it going and it's got to keep the momentum going. It must, in my opinion, John, grow that business between 10 to 20% a year so that it can offset the flatness and headwinds in other businesses like its hardware business. I think a mainframe cycle will help a lot as mainframes goes, IBM goes. But what that will do is the new mainframe cycle will buy IBM time to get these other businesses going and inject fuel into that race car, that $25 billion cloud, big data mobile business. Dave, what do you think about the social experience site, InterConnect Go? We've been talking about it. It's the first rev of really capturing the magic that IBM has put together over the years with social media, the VIP influences. I was talking to Amber Armstrong from the social business team. Social media is in the IBM's DNA and they're putting together a social experience with the folks who aren't here and it's InterConnectGo.com, trending stories, trending hashtags, VIP influencers, the folks that are on the ground sharing and broadcasting. And also experts, algorithms from the platform is showing new influencers. So you're seeing a lot of great stuff. I am super impressed with the VIP influence, so I'll tell you why. They make up almost two thirds of the activation offsite, meaning they are, they are internet of things in action. They're human beings out there who are experts, subject matter experts by genre. Some are geeky like Brian Fonso and some are looking at small business, more lifestyle, social like Marsha Collier and everything in between. That to me is the future of work, the idea of collaboration, having people who are trusted in the crowd really working on behalf and collaborating with IBM but also on behalf of the crowd. This to me strikes the new balance of social business. So that IBM is pioneering, we're a part of it on theCUBE, we activate as we do, but this is crowd activated innovation in action. I think this is the holy grail. I think what IBM is doing with social business around earned media, their own media and their paid media, so you get paid and owned, but now this earned component is allowing people to spread their wings, collaborate, share and more importantly broadcast what's happening and creating an interaction relationship and some engagement. This is what we were talking about yesterday with IBM, systems of engagement, systems of record and finally the system of insight from all that data. Well you asked me what I think of that, the Go site. I like it a lot, obviously I've been using it for a number of things. First of the schedule is really easy to follow. I love the three channels when you go to the Go TV page but the thing that impresses me most is these algorithmic feeds that are coming into the site. You know you walk around these shows and you see these social media dashboards with pretty pictures, you see them here at IBM, you see at HP shows, you see them at Dell World, I mean EMC's got them, they're kind of cool, but what I really like about these things is they're dynamic and they're put into context. So I love this leaderboard, I go there and check it out all the time. I can sort it by influence, I can sort it by activity, I can sort it by reach, so I'm sorting it by reach now. I see Veronica Belmont leads the leaderboard, she's got a massive cloud score of 85, she's got 101.7, three million followers. Interestingly she's only following 1,000 people. So she has a very small observation space, as Jeff Jonas would say, but nonetheless. But she has a lot of followers. She's a huge number of followers, so that's why she's number one in the leaderboard on reach, followed by Citi, Craig Brown, who's one of the VIP influencers, Glenn Gilmour is another VIP influencer. And then I can go and sort by activity, like who's really active? And I can see the API enterprise is really active. You know, path, I mean I don't even know the RNJazz, so these are kind of other sort of properties that are very active. And then you go to the influence, which is a combination I guess of an affinity rank algorithm, cloud score, obviously plays a part of that, but see Brian Fonzo up there. So you can see this really dynamic type of leaderboard. And then the other thing I like about this site is it's showing me sort of real time what's trending in the Interconnect Go community. So it's not just the hashtag, it's around cloud and DevOps. And you can see DevOps, cloud, internet of things, big data, Watson, those are the things that are trending. And then the other thing I really love is the trending stories. High fidelity stories that are relevant. So today's top stories really are, you know, big data why Facebook knows us better than our therapist. I mean, that's really sort of compelling. IBM embraces Docker, OpenStack, and Bluemix hybrid cloud plans. IBM wants you to make connected things faster than a coffee. IBM goes deep with cloud initiative, Sandy Carter is on Twitter, Major League Baseball spinning off its powerful streaming business. That's kind of interesting. Okay, this is coming from the crowd. So if you notice in the leaderboard, it's not about who has the best cloud score, who is the most followers. It's a semantic affinity ranking algorithm that we deploy on crowd chat that actually matches the cadence of what's going on at the event. And then matching influencers into that so people can meet influencers. It's not about influencers being, oh, buzz and promoting. That's one aspect of having influence. But the other is subject matter influence authority. And what's interesting about the new social business that IBM is taking is matching authority and knowledge and connections in a relationship based model to what's happening in the moment is valuable for getting a direction on things, figuring out what's going on in the moment, and more importantly, who to connect with. To me, the social business equation of the future is about connecting with people and actually building relationships and exchanging information. That's how people are making decisions now. You're buying a million dollar Z system or they cost more than that. You're going to talk around, you're going to ask people, hey, what do you think? You know, at Wikibon, you have a practitioner network. It's not about Google searching anymore. Web 1.0 is get a webpage, browse some information, gather the data. The data sharing is now done in the crowd with people and it's faster to touch someone now than ever before. And this is a data model that is going to be fantastic. And I think this is a wonderful thing. I think IBM's right on the trend line here and this is game changing. And again, systems of engagement is about engagement and that's data driven. Yeah, so this is why I really like about this site. It's the first that I've seen combining those three media types that you talked about, combining the algorithmic feeds and it's got great video content. There's some things I'd like to see improved. I mean, that I can sort of take offline, but I'm going to study it. I'm going to make my recommendations to IBM and you know, go from there. But I mean, the site's been very successful. It's a 25,000 people have signed up for it. And I mean, that's pretty good. And you know, less than a month. I mean, it's nice. Okay, we are kicking off day two of three days of wall to wall coverage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Again here, extracting the signal, sharing that data from that signal with you. And that's our job. We love doing it. It's an open source model. We activate, share, pump it out. We do our best to get that done. We're doing it in the go social lounge. We've got a lot of crowdchats going on. Crowd activated innovation is what social business is all about and meeting people and it's doing just sharing information. Information will drive the engagement. We love that model. Dave, we're going to be right back with our next guest after this short break.