 from theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. Happy to welcome to the program, Dinesh Nirmal who's the Chief Product Officer for CloudPaks inside IBM. Dinesh, nice to see you, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu, really appreciate you taking the time. All right, so I've been to many IBM shows and of course I'm an analyst in the cloud space so I'm familiar with IBM CloudPaks, but maybe just refresh our audience minds here, what they are, how long have they been around for, what clouds do they live on and maybe what's new in 2020 that if somebody had looked at this in the past that they might not know about IBM CloudPaks. Yeah, so thanks Stu. So to start with, let me say that CloudPaks are cloud agnostic. So the whole goal is that you build once and it can run anywhere. That is the basic mantra or principle that we want to build CloudPaks with. So they are look at them as a set of microservices containerized in a form that it can run on any public cloud or behind the firewall. So that's the whole premise of CloudPaks. So when you go back to CloudPaks it's an integrator set of services that solve a specific set of business problems and also accelerates building which set of applications and solutions. That's what CloudPaks brings. So, especially in this environments, do think about it, if I'm an enterprise my goal is how can I accelerate and how can I automate? Those are the two key things that comes to my mind if I am a C-level exec at an enterprise. So CloudPaks enables that, meaning you already have a set of stitched together services that accelerates the application development. It automates a lot of things for you. So you today have a lot of applications running on multiple clouds or behind the firewall. How do you manage those, right? CloudPaks will help. So let me give you one example since you are specifically on CloudPaks. Let's take CloudPaks for data. The set of services that is available in CloudPaks for data will make it easier for all the way from ingest to visualization there's a set of services that you can use. So you don't have to go build a service or a product or use a product for ingest then use another product for ETL use another product for building models another product to manage those models. The CloudPaks for data will solve all the problems end to end. It's a rich set of services that will give you all the value that you need all the way from ingest to visualization. And with any personas, whether you are a data engineer, data scientist or you are a business analyst you all can collaborate through the CloudPaks. So that's the two minute answer to your question what CloudPaks is. Awesome. Thanks, Anash. Yeah, I guess you pointed out something right at the beginning there. I hear IBM CloudPak and I think IBM Cloud but you said specifically this is really cloud agnostic. So, you know, this week is think last week I was covering Red Hat Summit. So I heard a lot about multi-cloud deployments you know, talk to the rail team talk to the open shift team. So help me understand, you know, where do CloudPaks fit when we're talking about you know, these multi-cloud employments, you know and is there some connection with the partnership that of course IBM has with Red Hat? Oh, of course. I mean, so all CloudPaks are optimized for open shift meaning, you know, how do we use the set of services that open shift gives that container management that open shift provides. So as we build containers or microservices how do we make sure that we are optimizing or taking advantage of open shift? So for example, the set of services like logging, monitoring, security all those services meet ring that comes from open shift is what we are using as CloudPaks. So CloudPaks are optimized for open shift, you know from an automation perspective how do we use Ansible, right? So all the value that Red Hat and open shift brings is what CloudPaks is built on. So if you look at as a layer, as a Lego the base Lego is open shift and rail and then on top of it sit CloudPaks and applications and solutions on top of it. So it's, if I look at layer base the base Lego layer is open shift and Red Hat well. Well, great, that's super important because you know, one of the things we've been looking at for a while is you talk about hybrid cloud you talk about multi-cloud and often it's that platform that infrastructure discussion but the biggest challenge for companies today is you know, how do I build new applications? How do I modernize what I have? So sounds like this is exactly, you know where you're targeting to help people, you know through that transformation that they're going through. Yeah, exactly, it's too because if you look at it, you know in the past products were siloed. I mean, you know, you build a product you use a set of specs to build it. It was siloed and customers becomes the software integrators or system integrators where they have to take the different products put it together. So even if I am, you know focused on the data space or AI space before I had to bring in three or four or five different products make it all work together to build the model deploy the model, manage the model the lifecycle of the model, the lifecycle of the data but the cloud packs bring it all in one box where out of the box you're ready to go. So your time to value is much more higher with cloud packs because you already get a set of stitched together services that gets working right out of the box. So I love the idea of out of the box when I think of cloud native modern application development simplicity is not the first thing I think of Dinesh. So help me understand, you know so many customers it's, you know the tools, the skill sets, you know they don't necessarily have the experience how is what, you know your product set and your teams doing help customers that deal with you know the ever changing landscape and the complexity that they're faced with. Yeah, so the the honest truths too is that enterprise applications are not an app that you create and put it on iPhone, right? I mean, it is much more complex because it's dealing with you know hundreds of millions of people trying to transact with the system you need to make sure there is a disaster recovery backup scalability, elasticity I mean, all those things security I mean obviously very critical piece and multi-tenancy all those things has to come together in an enterprise application. So when people talk about, you know simplicity it comes at a price. So what cloud packs has done is that you know we have really focused on the user experience and design piece so you as an end user has a great experience using the integrated set of services. The complexity piece will still be there to some extent because you're building a very complex you know multi-tenant application enterprise application but how do we make it easier for a developer or a data scientist to collaborate or reuse the assets find the data much more easier or trusted data much more easier than before use AI you know to predict a lot of the things including you know bias detection all those things. So we are making a lot of the development automation and acceleration easier. The complexity part will be there still because you know enterprise applications tend to be complex by nature but we are making it much more easier for you to develop, deploy, manage and govern what you're building. Yeah so how does cloud packs allow you to really you know work with the customers focus on you know things like innovation showing them the latest in the IBM software portfolio? Yeah so the first piece is that we made it much more easier for the different personas to collaborate. So in the past you know what is the biggest challenge me as a data scientist had me as a data scientist the biggest challenge was that getting access to the data trusted data now you know we have put some governance around it whereby which you can get you know data trusted data much more easier using cloud practical data. Governance around the data meaning if you have a CDO you want to see who is using the data how clean is the data right? I mean a lot of times the data might not be clean so we want to make sure we can help with that. Now let me move into the you know the line of business piece not just the data if I am you know a LOB and I want to use automate a lot of the process I have in today in my enterprise and not go through the every process automation and go through your superior or supervisor to get approval. How do we use AI in the business process automation also? So those kind of things you will get through cloud facts. Now the other piece of cloud if I am an IT space right? The day to operations, scalability, security, delivery of the software backup and restore how do we automate and help with that the storage layer those are day to operations. So we are taking it all the way from day one meaning the whole experience of setting it up to day two where enterprises really worry about making it seamless and easy using cloud facts. I go back to what I said in the beginning which is how do we accelerate and automate a lot of the work that enterprise have to do today much more easier. Okay, we talked earlier in the discussion about that this can be used across multiple cloud environments. My understanding you mentioned one of the IBM cloud packs one for data there's a number of different cloud packs out there. How does that work from a customer standpoint? Do I have to choose a cloud pack for specific cloud? Is it a license that goes across all of my environments? Help me understand how this deployment mechanism and support and maintenance works. Right, so we have the base obviously I said you know look at us a modular Lego model. The base is obviously open shift and rail. On top of it sells sits a bedrock vehicle which is a common set of services and the logic to expand. On top of it sits cloud pack for data, cloud pack for security, cloud pack for applications. There's cloud pack for multi-cloud management. There's cloud pack for integration. So there's total of six cloud packs that's available but you can pick and choose which cloud pack you want. So let's say you are a CDO or you are an enterprise who want to focus on data and AI. You can just pick cloud pack for data. Or let's say you are a cloud pack you know based on processes BPM decision rules you can go with cloud pack for automation which gives you the set of tools. But the biggest benefits to is that all these cloud packs are a set of integrated services that can all work together sits optimized on top of open shift. So all of a sudden you only bought cloud pack for data and now you want to do data but now you want to expand it into your line of business and you want cloud pack for automation you can bring that in. Now those two cloud packs works together well. Now you want to bring in cloud pack for multi-cloud management because you have data or applications running on multiple clouds. So now you can bring cloud pack for MCM which is multi-cloud management and those three work together. So it's all a set of integrated set of services that is optimized on top of open shift which makes it much more easier for customers to bring the rich set of services together and accelerate and automate their lifecycle journey within the enterprise. Great, last question for you Dinesh. What new in 2020? What should customers be looking at today? Would love if you can give a little bit of guidance as to where customers should be looking at for things that might be coming a little bit down the line here and if they want to learn more about IBM cloud backs where should they be looking? Yeah, if they want to learn more there's www.ibm.com slash cloud packs. That's a place to go. There are all the details around cloud packs are there. You can also get in touch with me and I can definitely take you through in much more detail. But what is coming is that look, so we have a set of cloud packs but we want to expand and make it extensible. So how do we, you know, already it's built on an open platform but how do we make sure our partners and ISPs can come and build on top of the base cloud pack? So that's the focus going to be as each cloud pack innovate and add more value in within those cloud packs we also want to expand it so that, you know, our partners and our ISPs and GSIs can build on top of it. So this year the focus is continuously innovate across the cloud packs but also make it much more extensible for third parties to come and build more value on top of the cloud pack itself. That's the, you know, that's one area we are focusing on. The other area is MCM, right? Multi-cloud management because there is tremendous appetite for customers to move data or applications on cloud and not only on one cloud, hybrid cloud. So how do you manage that, right? So multi-cloud management definitely helps from that perspective. So our focus this year is going to be one make it extensible, make it more open but at the same time continuously innovate on every single cloud pack to make that journey for customers on automating and accelerating of application element easier. All right, well, Dinesh, thank you so much. Yeah, the things that you talked about that absolutely, you know, top of mind for customers that we talked to multi-cloud management as you said, it was the ACM the advanced cluster management that we heard about from the Red Hat team last week at Summit. So thank you so much for the updates. Definitely exciting to watch cloud pack how you're helping customers, you know deal with that huge, it's the opportunity but also the challenge of building their next applications modernizing what they're doing without, you know still having to think about what they have from their existing environment. So thanks so much. Great to talk to you. Well, thanks Stu, great talking to you. All right, lots more coverage from IBM Think 2020 the digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE.