 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's Boston Area Studio Habitat. Welcome back to the program, Randy Arsenal and Steve Kenison, gentlemen. We're back! It seems like only minutes ago we were here. How can I miss you if you don't go away? No, gentlemen, thank you so much. We've been docking storage and SDI, which of course is software-defined infrastructure essentials. We're going to dig inside. Steve, let's start with, you know, we sometimes we argue over definitional things. And when you hear, you know, software-defined, oh, it's about software. And especially, you know, when you talk about the storage world, it's like, wait, there's always been software when we talk about storage. Explain why it's a little bit different now than what we were doing, you know, even five years ago. Sure things do. I think one of the number one things that we run into a lot of that we hear, you know, conversationally, it's storage and it's software. And now we're hearing a lot more about data services, right? The ability to connect data. So forget the physical storage for a second. Connect the data to the people, right? Because as we've been talking all along today, right? This evolutionary platform is being able to provide more people access to more data than they've ever had before in a very secure way, right? Such that they can actually not only get their jobs done, get them done better, get them done stronger, get them done faster. Without all the, as my boss likes to say, bougie bougie, dealing with having to get at that data. So if I look at before and after, right? If I look at the before aspect that dealt with, you know, how do I get to my data, right? Or how do I get access to that data from a developer of five years ago, right? It ends up being, and you can attest to this and please do, right? A conversation between the developer and IT. And then it becomes a myriad of questions back and forth about why do you need it? What do you need it for? How much do you need? Where does it need to live? How fast does it need to be? All of the things that you can get today program, right? Into a programmable infrastructure. And just say, click, let me provide that to you, right? So before it was all these conversations and then I got to buy it, then I got to procure it, then I got to secure it, and then I got to know how many lunge you need, I know how fast it is, and then I got to provision that out to you, right? I go, okay, and then you say, well, now I need that. Then the next conversation is well, I can't get to it with this application, which is on this server, which is now it's another whole, you know, before a developer can start working, it could be a month. Whereas afterwards, it should be, if you have a good programmable infrastructure, I have my application, like a chef or a popper or an ansible, and I push a button and it says, okay, I need this particular data set, and then you just have these set of services that needs to be this available, it needs to perform this fast. I need to be able to make these types of copies, click, go, right? That's kind of where we're at today with what we're hoping the software can do for you. Yeah, I always worry, sometimes we try to oversimplify things and we miss kind of the why. So one of my favorite jokes we all had is, you know, there is no cloud, it's just a computer somewhere else because it was like, no, no, wait, there's still gear underneath it. But it missed the, but why does that matter? It's like, oh wait, now I've got order of magnitude more, you know, that I can access for short periods of time and therefore I can do things that I couldn't do before. And when I think about data, it's, you know, you know, big data, you know, massive data, things like, no, no, no, no. It's not just storing a bunch of bits somewhere in case I need them for a regulatory thing because I've got to do governance compliance, blah, blah, blah and everything. But it's like, wow, you know, data is, you know, driver for business and therefore, you know, data services that allow me to protect and secure and access all those data is so super important. Absolutely. And there's another analog, I think, is it's, if you think about data services as we're talking about it right now, it's becoming more of, and the self-service metaphor is a very important one, I think, because this is the earlier point. In the old world, you know, you used to have to go through this complicated workflow and checkpoints and sign-offs and all these procedural, you know, loopholes you'd have to jump through in order to provision something which by the time it became available to you was probably outdated, right? So you were constantly behind, right? Now at the pace of global business and digital business and the importance of data as a driver of global business, you just don't have that luxury anymore. You can't afford to be waiting on the availability of that piece of information. So not only does the immediacy of it improve the actual value of the data because there's always a temporal element of value for that data and every second you waste is potentially value that's diminished from data. So not only do we now reduce that kind of latency, we also provide much better reuse. So we talk about this idea of incremental value, right? So you can take the same data element or data construct and now instantaneously repurpose it in multiple ways to extract additional maybe unforeseen value from it, right? So we've gotten away from the concept of these kind of siloed systems that are, you know, this is my production system, this is my OLAP system, my reporting system. We now have this convergence and cross-pollination of data that flows between and among all these systems, which can now be made available via something like a data services platform or a fill in the blank as a service type platform in a self-service mode where it can be used by any number of different applications and users for any number of different purposes. Yeah, and what I like about it when I hear from customers is it used to be you had to have the budget of a nation or a team of PhDs to try to figure this out. And as you say, when there's cross-pollination, when I get the data versus when I'm going to need the data, yes, there's the temporal piece, but sometimes it's, I might be doing it for a different purpose or I'm not sure and things are changing all the time. So that going back to our initial conversation, that agility and flexibility, be able to access and tie into that data and have very services is so critically important. Well, that's a good comment, right? I need to have a budget of a nation in order to do this. And then along came all the cloud providers and said, no, you don't swipe your credit card and start working, right? The tricky part for me, the consumer of that, great. Now I've got the processing power I need, but I need my data to build my particular application. And I love sort of to finish that, all right? In order to build the right application to make sure it works for what I'm going to do because at some point, right? And I know Dave likes to talk about this a lot. I need to be able to integrate it into my existing systems. And if the performance is the same, that's what I'm going to probably run into a lot of buggy stuff over here, right? So I need to be careful with that. So what I think is interesting is, and I love to use the analogy, think of the first bank that came out with the application where I could snap a picture of my check, right? I bet the CIO of the competitive company went to his development team the next morning after seeing that commercial and said, I want one of those. Do you think, I mean, if you broke, and I don't always like to use particular verticals, right? Because I think this conversation extends across all applications. But if you had to break down, what does one banking customer cost a bank over time, right? And then you said for every day I'm late, I lose five customers. And you had to go through that whole lengthy process just to get started for the development team to start working on something like that with their data, right? I got to make sure that the data fits into how does the deposit work? How does it transact? How does it show? When does it show? How does stuff matter to my data, right? I need to put that underneath. But now I can do it. If I can do it programmatically or provide the infrastructure as a service, hit a button, and I don't have to be a rocket scientist, right? I can just do it for my application. Now I'm off and running. Well, and flipping it and looking at it from the provider's perspective. So if I'm the consumer of those data services, it's great for me. If I'm the provider of those services, it's also very beneficial to me because now having that elasticity and that fractional consumption model where I can offer you exactly as much compute or storage or analytic horsepower you need for your particular use case and environment for as long as you need it, that gives me a tremendous value proposition that I can then provide to you. So it's really mutually beneficial on both the supply and the demand side, if you think about it. Actually, so David Fleuer from our team had done lots of research talking about just real business value that can be driven back when I can leverage that data. It's like, oh wait, now I have things like Flash that allow me very fast to make snaps and then wait, I have real, this is the actual data and then I can test on that and then how fast can I get that back into production if I need be. There's a lot of things we can do now that just those enablers of the new technology at scale. Well, and I also think it's pretty interesting. We talked earlier about our three patterns, right? The modernized transform and the next gen. If you think about the next gen, right? That's, now what I want to do as a corporation is I want to bring on new people and I want to do some data analytics. That data analytics is going to allow me to learn stuff about my business and I'm going to want to start to do stuff in a new way. I'm going to want to stuff to do stuff in a new way today, right? I don't want to wait and say, okay, now that I know I think what I want to do is X and wait six months for the infrastructure to be there to start programming against it. No, I want to make real time decisions that I want to do real time things today. That's how that evolution starts to happen and it needs to be fast for those people. One of the promises is, right, cloud computing. When I need it, it's there. I don't need to worry about what's available. Talk to me about what is scale and that speed mean to your customers? What kind of architectures do they need to go to to be able to have that kind of experience no matter where they are? Yeah, I think you're starting to boil it down into products and while that's good, right? New technologies and new capabilities like Flash and NVMe and that sort of thing, that's just the raw performance. That's the engine of the car, right? But you start thinking about all the telemetry data that racers collect to then tweak the car, not just the engine, but the car and the foils and that sort of thing in order to get the maximum amount of speed out of the car, that's really the performance stuff that we're talking about and that's all the instrumentation around the different products and that sort of thing that sit within the portfolio that enable things like self-service. It enables things like, which is speed in its own way, right? It's data protection and it's faster RPOs and RTOs, different type of protection sets of services. It's disaster recovery, faster replication, replication to the cloud, lower cost, right? Replication into the cloud, maybe not necessarily another data center. All of those things in the portfolio equal speed, whether speed be raw performance getting from A to B or speed of business, which means I can be doing whatever that thing is that makes me more competitive quicker than the other guy can do it. Yeah, and when you have these services which are much more encapsulated and kind of to use a very old term kind of self-documenting in a way, if you think about taking a data element or a data structure or some piece of knowledge or information that we're going to do some kind of processing on and you load that with as many definitional characteristics as you can without A slowing it down or B making it too expensive, then you inherently improve the value of that thing, whatever that is, right? So, great, there's a million examples, the picture of the check is a good one, telemetry coming from delivery trucks for FedEx or UPF, there's a million examples where the ability to gather data which would be gathered anyway and used for some other purpose, but now you layer on some of these additional service and characteristics and dimensions to it and it becomes a whole new entity that now has a whole other set of values that can be expanded upon. So it's really this multiplicative effect that we see that allows you to take your data which is our most valuable asset typically and leverage it across multiple use cases and in multiple dimensions. Yeah, so Steve, when I think about data services, you know, if the old world was rather fixed and the new world is, you know, where are we today and what's kind of the near future look like? Help us walk through that a little bit. Yeah, I think you painted it very well at the beginning, right? We always like to look out front and say, this is Utopia, this is where we're going. Where are people today? I think there are a lot of technologies out there that if you're starting to modernize and I think we're in that modernization trend right now where a lot of the newer technologies or even some of the older technologies that you might have installed in your environment are building out a robust API set because the new stuff is all API driven. So if I'm an incumbent and I'm in a data center and I wanna maintain my hold and my footprint, I need to start working with other things. Newer versions of a lot of the incumbent technologies building in RESTful APIs. Now you're bringing in newer technologies, maybe a chef or puppet sitting on top of your infrastructure, that has RESTful APIs. The trick for the infrastructure, for the IT team, is to slowly evolve into that infrastructure developer that we talked about. Now they're learning how to connect those two, right? And as I'm learning how to connect those two, I'm also learning about how to make that data available in other locations or how to make those applications talk in other locations that don't impact my production, right? So where are we today? I think we're slowly starting to understand what these API connectivities are. And if there isn't that connectivity, I think folks are really starting to look at what do I replace that incumbent with to make sure that I'm getting that out of what I'm gonna need for the future. So I'd say we're 20% down the road, right? But things are moving fast. I mean, as time moves forward, it goes faster and faster and faster. And a year from today, we might be at 50%, right? Or 60. Yeah, and I would just add to that that the level of integration that exists between the products and the spectrum portfolio is very foundational and it's a very intricate structure, right? So as we evolve products and solutions, we just had an announcement this week of the new Flash platform on the hardware side. So as these things become available, they start to then elevate the value and improve the capabilities of other parts of the portfolio as well. So there's this kind of platform story that you start to be able to tell. And that's really what this series has been about and what the follow-on sessions will be about drilling into specific solutions at a lower level of detail is, how do we build the information platform of the future for our clients? Yeah, great, and I know there's more coming in the future, but the last thing I wanted to ask you here is we had a while that we were saying, well, we're just going to simplify everything. Well, public cloud is cheap and easy and hyperconverged is going to boil everything down and it's just like this one box. Well, and if you look at both of those spaces, they've evolved that now, the line I've used, I think if I was going to build compute an Amazon or go buy a server from pick your favorite OEM of choice, the cloud probably has more options and is more complicated to buy. We'll figure out how the pricing is depending on whether you buy the three years reserved instances or anything like that. But customers, the paradox of choice is really tough for people as they do. So how do you balance that flexibility but still trying to make it easier because staffing, I can't have engineers dedicated helping to try to figure this out and the next release comes out in a month and everything I learned is already old. Oh, I'd appreciate your input and feedback on that because what I'm about to say is I think easy is relative, right? And it's relative to the person who needs to access the systems of the data or the equipment or that sort of thing, right? So if I'm someone who's graduated from college and looking to join the IT workforce today or in the next few years, right? To me, simple means, right? A myriad of things, right? And I might have been trained on and educated on but I'm gonna stay in that world. Why do you continually buy an iPhone and don't switch over to Android? Why? Or why does someone do it the other way, right? It doesn't matter, you pick one and that's what you know and that becomes easy for you, right? And then as you're learning, so let's say I pick AWS, right? As I start to continue to learn and they come out with new things and that's what I pay attention to, I find these new things that plug in, right? And it's only when vendors come to you and talk about not just, not just, hey, I've got this new fidget spinner, right? Or whiz bang technology, it's, I know how to integrate with your platforms to make your life easier. Those are the conversations that actually pick Peel's head up and go, okay, that does make my life easier, right? That's exactly what I was just gonna say. We talked earlier about this whole concept of kind of integrate and automate versus rip and replace, innovate as opposed to institutionalize. So this is exactly that. This is we as trusted advisors and integrators in effect are able to go to our clients and say, look, you have typically a complex environment that has multiple different platforms and stacks that you're working with. You may be able to standardize on a common model or a common platform portfolio structure for everything. Not likely though, you're probably gonna continue to have different pieces of the puzzle. We, it's our job and our seller's job and our partner's job to develop an integration strategy and an automation strategy that exploits each of those that are in place to the best of their current ability and provides a path forward. So to your point, eventually will all things live in the cloud and will the cloud become so self-aware and so sophisticated that it's able to provision itself and manage itself and write your apps for you? Perhaps, probably not in our lifetime. So in the meantime, large organizations and small organizations still have to get from point A to point B. They have to run their business. They can't afford to spend a king's ransom on IT. But they also have to be secure and reliable and perform, et cetera. So we provide a portfolio of solutions that plugs into existing infrastructure, augments it, maybe replaces it, but not necessarily, and helps our clients get between here and there and provides them the headroom to grow into the future as well. What's your answer to the simple and easy? Yeah, well, first of all, right. I think just on the definitional piece, we'll all be living in the cloud when we've just redefined that means it's hooked up to the internet. It means that it's cloud because everything is, and here's the challenge of the day. No one can keep up on everything. I've had the pleasure to talk to some of the smartest dang people in this industry. And even the ones, absolutely, but the people that are creating new stuff and whatever it is, they're like, I can't keep up with my own firm. How do you have time to learn? It's like, they say the doctor would need, every week would need 1,000 hours to read up on everything in their specialty. But it doesn't mean that we're out of jobs. Actually, we've got lots of new jobs because we've done some events with MIT where it's racing with machines. People plus machines. Automation does not get rid of your job. What it hopefully gets rid of is the crap you didn't want to deal with anyway. What we saw for a while, we wanted to get rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting. Well, let's hope that, as we've talked to the IT people, it's like the thing that you look at every month and say like, oh God, I have to do that. Well, can't you automate that piece of it? And it actually raises a really interesting point and we haven't touched on it, I don't think up to this point, but this is another one of the areas where IBM is uniquely positioned in this discussion and in this space to bring to bear a level of sophistication and advanced artificial intelligence, cognitive capability, machine learning. We are today delivering the world's most sophisticated, powerful, capable solutions in that space. And not surprisingly, that technology is imbuing everything that we do. So our entire portfolio is interspersed with very sophisticated AI capabilities and analytic capabilities for self-adaptation, self-learning, self-healing. So it gives us, again, a competitive advantage, I think, as we take these solutions to market that they are imbued with this very sophisticated level of advanced processing. Yeah, and the other thing I'd say, and if Steve, you brought it up in one of our discussions there, IBM's a lot of partners. I never look at IBM saying, we are the only one, we are the be-all and end-all, whatever everything, no, the CIs and the MSPs and the CSPs and software partners and everything like that. You mentioned competitive environment. I think the first time I heard the word cooperative was almost always about IBM, because yes, IBM probably has a product that does something along those lines, but they know they're not the only ones and they'll continue to partner to make sure that customers get the solutions they need. Right. All right. Final words you wanna leave on this segment, gentlemen? I wanna thank you very much for hosting us for this event. Indeed, yeah, thank you for your insights, too. We appreciate it. It's always important for us to not read our own press clippings too much. It's important to get the external viewpoint and get the outside perspective, so we appreciate your input. Well, hey, and thank you so much for bringing both of you. We've worked with you for many years, always appreciate your viewpoints and look forward to continuing the conversation. All right, and thank you so much. I was always, give us any feedback if you have. Check out thecube.net for all the websites. Randy Arsenault, Steve Kenneson, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching The Cube.