 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. And welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think Virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Got three great guests here. Talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI Operations. Lori, Gio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Engelstead, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada Financial Services and Kuberan Kandasami, VP of Personal Insurance at Economic Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. This great panel on Cloud Satellite and AIOps. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, John. Thank you, John. Good to see you. Well, first, let's start with you. There's the general manager for the IBM Cisco Strategic Partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined. That's the standard and multi-clouds right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical and so obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM Cisco Strategic Partnership. Absolutely. So John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kendral, our spinoff of what we were previously calling NUCO, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So we're super excited about this. Real quick, while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points I just want to get to. I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NUCO and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really a bit center of that equation. How does that relate to all that? So these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing and we've got a client here with us today, Kubram, who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology, but really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client? What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco coupled together really bring value. Kubram, you got teed up beautifully there. So I want to go to you and then I go to Matthew after, but okay, tell us more about this IBM Cisco dynamic. You guys are hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post pandemic it's looking good too. So take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. Sure, sure, John. Thank you. To appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us. Let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet and MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated direct to customer digital channel where our customers can quote and buy home and order please online without the need to engage anyone at economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vine, another MVP. Vine is our simplified self serve and digitized broker channel where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers again without the need to engage anyone at economical. Both Sonnet and Vine have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. After launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements and issues. And we maintained platform level, monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered design results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vine platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level so that we can monitor the pulse of every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vine. And we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. And that vision real quick, how does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth on the IPO, you're thinking automation, I'm assuming. Can you elaborate quickly? Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get. Like it's all digitized. So we have a lot of data in there. And this is where the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting having predictability and all that. That's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the financial services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? Yeah, absolutely. And Gubran was touching on this from economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side and Vine with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year or so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multi-cloud and AI. So if you don't mind, I don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? Yeah, absolutely. So first off, this was based again on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then unique to what Gubran and economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure, architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here is a market leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application all the way through the technical infrastructure and it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. So AppD and this IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's- Absolutely, and that's the point is bringing to bear the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this is where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. Laura, talk about the dynamics again. This highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. I mean, you got the cloud satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? Yeah, absolutely. I'll start and maybe even Laura can add as needed but from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid and multi-cloud world. So we've really evolved whether it's IBM, cloud, AWS as some of our clients, including economical and others, Microsoft Azure, Google, it is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform but understanding how the applications play together and again stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM in our partner ecosystem and the evolution of IBM services as well. Awesome. Yeah, and if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security and then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture and a solution for a client. I love the end-to-end story. Obviously, hybrid is a distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multi-clubs, just subsystems and all going to have to be operated together and the software all makes that happen. I can see tons of headroom opportunity there. Kuberon, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore. It's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? Yeah, absolutely. What's awesome about all of this is, first of all, in a very short time, the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for our business solution. And the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive. And it is also helping us to complete group cause analysis faster. It's helping us reduce defect leakage through our quality assurance practices. So for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is supported. It has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together and our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So to be able to have a robust self-healing capability and this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with it, app dynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit, and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Summit and Wine where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for our customers. So hopefully that changes the picture for you. That's awesome, great insight. Laura Matthew Goran, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the cloud satellite and AIS? What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? So as IBM invests more and more in these strategic cloud, hybrid cloud solutions, industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. All right, Matthew. Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients economically in this case to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan had stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. Kuberan, take us home. Final word. Thank you. What I would say is what we've learned from this is really standing this up in more like a garage-style kind of situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So that's the benefit I've seen. Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco, better together this ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects, is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks a lot, John. Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching.