 Winston Edmonton here at Studio B. Now, this is my first IBM Edge and I've got to say I've been blown away. Phenomenal presentation here. I've learned a lot and I'm lucky enough to have the individual that put this all together. Dion Newman, thanks for joining us. Winston, it's a pleasure. Now, tell me about, I mean really this is amazing what you've done and the energy is, I mean you can cut it with a knife. Tell me about what you've done here. Well you know Winston, a lot of people worked on this for a long time but you know this is a conference, it's about customer outcomes. You know we said it's about cloud and data but really what it's about is client results. It's about outcomes, it's about how they're getting a competitive edge in their business. So we're trying to make a lot of big announcements here. We're trying to get excited around a lot of really high growth areas in our portfolio, storage, pure systems, flash for example. A lot of great things going on there and clients are seeing the value and that's what this is about. We'll recap some of these big announcements. First I want to talk about what I've been hearing from partners and customers is that there's kind of a best practices camaraderie going on here where people are learning and it's really fascinating. Was that purposeful bringing the partners and the customers together? Yeah a couple of points I'd make. The first one is that we have 75 customers telling their stories here. So it's really peers talking to peers. Now on the partner side our philosophy is that a partner should come with a client and together they can see the latest and greatest and see all the new announcements and also see what results other clients are getting and then work on it together. It's really about solving problems. We then go into education for the partners so again they can deliver more value to their clients. And that's a very deliberate strategy. It really was genius because I've spoken with so many individuals that felt like they knew they had a handle on what their solution would look like. But then they heard another customer who had similar problems and that testimony. They realized they kind of opened their eyes to what more possibilities and now they're ready to kind of take some additional steps. So really that was a genius move. Great, well I appreciate it. Let's talk about some of the big announcements. What have you been most excited about in the news that we're breaking here? Yeah so there's probably three key areas that I'm excited about. Flash storage is probably the first one. I mean the economic benefits of flash. Not to mention some of the productivity benefits and some of the outcomes clients can get in faster analytics out of flash. But some of the cost savings, the reductions in software licensing, some of the maintenance costs and the space costs, reductions they can achieve. I mean it's very, very compelling. So that's exciting. We've got big announcements around store-wise. We've increased the capacity of that, the performance, the value proposition overall. And then the other big thing we're focused on here is around and it's really, you know there's a lot of buzz about converged infrastructure in the marketplace. It's a pure systems family. You know we've now shipped more than 4,000 of those units. Clients are seeing real value in that converged approach of network storage, compute and management, you know all from a single pane of glass. And so we're talking a lot about that at this event. Interesting. Let's talk about flash. Do you feel like we've kind of passed that threshold where that's what everyone, everyone's on the same page where you know that's where we're moving. Are we there yet? I think we're approaching that tipping point. So it's really an economic argument. If you can move from a petabyte taking up a huge amount of space in a data center to putting a petabyte on a single tile. That's a compelling space saving just there. We can argue with that. And so flash might on the surface look like it's more expensive technology. But just the savings, we're seeing clients say they're getting up to 30% savings when they move to a flash approach. And so that's compelling in performance. We have people like Sprint talking at this event, Kroger, Thomas Reuters who are saying they're going to need 10x performance improvements. Sprint said they got 40x performance improvement on accessing customer data. So it's compelling. Yeah, incredible. You can wrangle some of those guys over here so we can chat with them. We'd love to share those experiences too. So let's talk about attendance. Because when I look down the hall and I see it's, you know, I can barely shuffle my way down. It is packed. Compared to last year, what are the numbers look like? So we had about 2,040 people. When I say about, we had 2,040 people last year. We've got 4,700 people here this year. So yeah, very big growth. And I think, again, it's the philosophy of using clients to talk about what they're doing and how they're solving their problems. That's what's driving the growth. This is not an event where we're pushing product or spending a lot of time, you know, drilling, you know, marketing messages about product lines. It's really about how clients are solving business problems. And I think, you know, there's a demand for that. And that's exciting. There's a learning happening here that is not very common in a lot of the conferences that you see. I mean, just folks that are getting enlightened at what's happening out there. Yeah. Well, you know, with Jam Pacted, there's nearly 400 technical sessions at this event. On top of that, we have an executive program, three tracks here. One which is really around cloud. One which is around big data and analytics and sort of optimizing systems to support that. And then we've got a track that is around the product lines that the execs, if they want to get into, you know, different product releases and talk about, you know, products that can do that. So there's a lot of opportunity to get learning. And we also have a little bit of fun here as well. You know, we've got a lot of entertainment here which people are enjoying. Yeah, no, it's been a lot of fun. A lot of humor. Everyone seems to have a great sense of humor. Let me ask you about the folks that just weren't able to make it, unfortunately. And, wow, I mean, I've learned so much. I wish they could have made it. But for the folks that are at home or in their offices, they just couldn't make it. What kind of resources are you offering as far as capturing some of this? Capturing the essence, the spirit, the talks themselves and rolling that out. Do you have some of that? Yeah. So we have a really extensive web plan to sort of provide that material to clients. So the first is we're live streaming from the event, you know, over the whole week. So, you know, live stream is going right now. You know, people can tune into some of the different executive sessions. We've got technical sessions being live streamed. And then on the website, which is IBM.com slash Edge, all of those videos will be up on that side and accessible there as well. So, you know, clients who couldn't make it can catch up and see what they missed and maybe they'll be here next year. Right. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing like being here in person. So you should have been here, but fear not. If you couldn't make it, you can have access to some of this great content. Let's talk about the future. I mean, this was, you know, the growth that you're talking about. I would anticipate, I would bet that next year's event, you might just continue with this trend and double where we are today. Tell us about next year. Some of these plans are actually taking shape already. Yeah. You know, we're going to be at the Venetian next year, May 19 to 23. And yeah, you know, we're, I mean, I, numbers, you know, we're expecting about 6,000 plus next year, but you know, maybe just raise my quarter and we'll see what it looks like. But, you know, we definitely, I think there'll be growth and everyone I'm talking to is excited about what's going on, excited about what they're seeing and hearing. So, you know, we're going to continue on that path of trying to deliver value, focus on solutions and client outcomes. That's what it's about. Very good. You know, I spoke with a lot of partners that received awards and recognition. You deserve one, definitely, for what you've done here. So, appreciate the time and I appreciate what you've put together. Thank you, sir. Hey, Winston, thank you for the time. Appreciate it. Winston Edmondson Studio B, signing out.