 TheCube at IBM Impact 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Paul Gillan. Okay, welcome back everyone here live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. This is TheCube, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the ceiling from the noise. Join with Paul Gillan, my co-host. Our next guest is Kristen Lauria, Vice President of Marketing for IBM Mobile. First, welcome to TheCube. Thank you. Great to have you on. A lot of activity in mobile, we talked about security, big data, we talked about streaming with the social data, we've talked about a lot of things, but mobile's on the hot list with Blue Mix and Cloud. Cloud and mobile are really going hand in glove. So give us your take on the mobile first. Because some are saying it's not mobile first anymore. It's cloud first. Is it cloud first or mobile first? I think it's sort of a chicken and eggs conversation really. Cloud and mobile go hand in hand, whether the workload is driving the infrastructure and how you get there, you can't do it either way, right? You have to have them both together. You need, mobile is driving new forms of engagement in the marketplace. And at the same time, it's you got to reach everybody anywhere, anytime with the right offerings. And we talked about the iterative life cycle and how fast the speed of change is happening. I don't know how you get there without the cloud. So mobile developers are kind of fickle when you talk to them. They're all consumer guys, consumer, but with bring your own device to work on the iPad, the iPad has kind of woke up the enterprise and the C-level saying, I want my app on this. And that kind of spawned this movement of saying, we got to have mobile for the enterprise. And so how do you talk to customers and how do you split the differences and how do you reconcile, oh, consumer app, consumer for the enterprise? Because that's a hot area right now. Yeah, I think when you talk to enterprise clients, it's really about four areas that we talk about. How do you better engage with your marketplace? How do you build out a platform that is actually going to deliver front screen apps that actually deliver an ROI? On the flip side, how do you protect? How do you protect all layers of the organization, whether it's your data, whether it's the device, whether it's the application. And then of course, talking to the enterprise versus talking to consumer apps, this is really about process transformation and rethinking the way that you go to market. So the enterprise is slightly different because you've got to think through the business processes. How do you reach more people and serve more markets? Chris, there's no doubt that IBM is going to be strong in the enterprise, but how about the new class of so-called collaboration economy companies like Uber, like Airbnb, like the whole host of companies that are born in the cloud and where mobility is part of the service, is essential part of the service. What are you going to do to reach those companies? We launched our Bluemix platform, and I think that, and the cloud marketplace, and those companies are going to be able to interact with us through those means. So absolutely, I think that's part of the play. So it's not just reaching the large enterprise clients, but how do we help them offer services on our platform, and how do we integrate their services into what we do? So is Bluemix really the leader for Mobile First, or are you leading with Mobile First? So this week, you heard us announce a total Mobile First application development portfolio, and there's three layers of that portfolio. There is the Worklight platform, there are the Bluemix services, as well as our place around cloud. So Bluemix, whether you're a cloud developer, whether you're doing mobile in the cloud, or whether you're doing it on-prem, or a combination of both, the Mobile First portfolio is going to have the totality of that. And how about SoftLayer? Where does that fit in the stack? SoftLayer is part of the cloud play, so we will also make many of our software offerings available on SoftLayer. All right, Worklight on SoftLayer, so it's part of the stack. So again, you started out with, does a cloud or is it mobile? They go hand in hand, and any client that's going to engage with us is going to need both the host of Mobile and Cloud. Are you guys coordinating the developer outreach efforts? Because that's a hot area. I mean, right now, Kid Relafors is a contested part of the marketplace. Everyone wants to win the developers, and it's hard, it's hard to win the developers. I think it's hard to win the developers, but because we use words like developers, and I think developers are our people, and we're starting to understand what is the segmentation of the different developers. But it is, developers are people, right? You got to reach the developer as a human being, as a person. You're going to see a lot of coordination in this space. We do understand, though, that the services that are being pulled up, Lumix, the hot services that are out there right now are the mobile services. So I do believe the combination of the mobile play and the Lumix developer are absolutely going to go hand in hand. Yeah, I think developers are the key to success. Developers are people. Hey, developers. You're a human being, too. We keep saying developers, and I think we need to start talking about what is going to change. Let's talk about the psychology of a developer, right? So they have natural hierarchy of needs. One of my wife was sharing some on Facebook, had Mazzo's hierarchy of needs in the bottom, and said, before, you know, the physical, it says Wi-Fi, which was kind of a geek joke, but the developers want validation. It's kind of artistic in the sense of their work. They want validation around their peers, certainly open source, makes it much more community-based, but they want distribution. They want to make some sort of value, whether it's for nonprofit or for profit. They got to have that marketplace, if you will. That's your marketplace, but they got to see the fruits of their labor have a distribution. So do you see that, too, and what are you guys doing to help that? Yeah, I think absolutely, how we make the developers successful in the industries that are there and are going to be the winning plays. We are working on programs now to understand that, but I think the thing that IBM can offer is portfolios of capabilities that are absolutely suited for the enterprise, suited for what they need to do, will help developers in the mobile space develop front-screen apps that actually deliver ROI. So yeah, we see the same thing, and that is what we're working on right now. Are you considering something like an Intel inside of a campaign where mobile developers would be branding their apps with a Blumex or with the IBM brand? Right now, I'm going to answer that in terms of we have our Made with IBM campaign. Not quite Intel inside from a branding perspective, but yeah, absolutely. We want developers out there understanding and talking about what they have brought to market through Made with IBM, or through IBM, and you will see the developers, a key component of that Made with IBM campaign. Maybe the IBM is sort of an overarching campaign, though, are you looking something more specifically to the mobile market? We are looking at something more specific to the developer market, and how do we pull that thought process, not an advertising campaign per se, but how do you pull that Made with IBM forward for the developers to leverage, so. And mobile is already a part of the Made with IBM campaign. What do you think about the, I like this developers' people on a riff on that a little bit further. On the Smarter Planet campaign, we're talking to Dave about the masters golf tournament, really about highlighting people, right? You mentioned segmentation. How do you look at that as a marketer? Okay, I mean, segmentation certainly has traditional practices, but now with the internet, we were just talking about some big data techniques. Digital marketing is a big part of this, because they're all on GitHub, they're all online, they're all on Hacker News, they're all over the place, they're in forums, so there's a lot of peer-to-peer communications going on in the developer community. How do you segment the market? I mean, how do you approach that? Yeah, I think the market segmentation is shifting from more of a traditional approach on even age or where people work to really, how do people make decisions? And that's where I think looking at the developer community and understanding them as a people, or a riff on people. It's really understanding how a developer makes decisions, what is important to the developer. We talked about getting a developer who might start out with one tool. What makes a developer, what makes people make the next decision for the next tool? So I think the segmentation is shifting more from how do you make decisions, how do you segment by age, you know, different groups and corporate structures to what are we trying to get done and why do you do what you do? Talk a little bit about what you're working on right now. Obviously, mobile is an area that's crowded, but it's growing, the thermal, as we say in the markets, is creating massive opportunities and growth. We're still kind of in the build-out phase, but people are still growing within that. What are some of the things you're working on that you can share? Yeah, so it's really about the totality of capabilities, but understanding the entry points and how clients are getting started. We are seeing the breadth of our mobile portfolio being picked up in every different industry, right? You saw many of the different clients on stage, healthcare, retail, financial services. So what we're really thinking about now is how do we bring that portfolio together in a way that it's simple to consume for the enterprise, but also working through a whole set of skills and services to say where do clients want to get started and what are those patterns of adoption in the marketplace? Bapachiana had a great line on my notes here. He said, 80% of the data is unstructured, not always tied to business outcomes as the senior vice president, so business outcomes is always coming out of his mouth. But he said, interesting, data, the key to data is automation, pushing it into the application. Mobile data is a big part of that, geolocation data. You have all kinds of innovations around data. How do you guys weave that into the storyline and into the product portfolio? Yeah, absolutely. The analytics are absolutely a part of the play in terms of developing the application itself. And you saw some of the data, the analytics and sentiment analysis go right back into the app with Maria and Mike Gilfix on stage yesterday. But sentiment analysis in general in the marketplace and understanding the experience of your marketplace, your users, whoever it may be, it's absolutely one of the key differentiators. When we talk about our point of view in mobile, what IBM brings to the table is really around how do you secure the transactions, not just about information sharing, but you've got to get to the transacting layer. The second piece is what we heard a lot about in the past couple of days around the approach to development and operations, being very iterative and very fast. And then on the third piece, it's really leveraging analytics back into the platform to be able to adjust and adjust real time in terms of that life cycle. Maribel Lopez was on theCUBE yesterday and she had an interesting quote. She says, she thinks that internal mobile applications are actually funding external mobile applications. In other words, the ROI is really coming from the internal stuff right now. Are you seeing that? I think we're seeing a mix of both. And I think we're seeing increasingly more applications on more entry points on the external side. The internal side, absolutely, people are working that. I think we saw this a lot in other shifts in the marketplace, but how you engage differently with your marketplace and your consumers, your clients, I think it's 50-50 right now. I don't think it's one driving the other. What do your developers ask you about embedded devices, about going beyond the phone and the tablet? Are they seriously looking at whether it's Google Glass or whether it's Fitbit or whether it's something more focused, application specific? Yeah, I think the market for the internet of things and other types of devices is absolutely just starting to hit us now, but I think that's all about understanding the data from the different devices. The smartphone is one form factor, but I think that's changing over the long term. So it really is understanding all the different connected devices in the marketplace. How do you bring that together into an application that anybody will be able to leverage inside your organization? So I've got to ask, are you guys coming out with an IBM phone? Of course not. I couldn't help but resist. Well, Microsoft just closed Nokia, right? So this is a method to the madness of the question. Last year we went to MarketAid. It's not about the device, it's about the data between them. Of course, if you were going to make a phone, that might not be your call, it might be the powers that be, Ginny, but more seriously, Microsoft has Nokia and they're in an innovator's dilemma right now because they have a cloud strategy. They have the legacy software business tied to the desktop, but you have, as you were trying to be a cloud player, and they have their own phone. So can you be pure phone player and win the cloud, or do you win the cloud and support all the phones out there? If you win a cloud and you support all the devices out there. I think the form factor changes over time, so do the operating systems, and I think the winning play is to support. So the strategy in the developer front, the guy would agree, I think for the audience, you got a business school and you can learn that. But the strategy to support all these frameworks out there are challenging. So how do you deal with versioning control? Is that part of Bluemix's role? Does that go into the front end of the cloud or in the phone? How do you manage all the different? The versioning control, I think that's absolutely part of the work-life platform. And we're offering the work-life platform as an on-prem solution, and you're also going to see different services from work-life in the cloud as well. So that is one of the key differentiators of the work-life platform. How about internal IBM applications? Your Lotus Notes, your Cognos, your suite of marketing apps, what are you doing to make those proof of concept for excellence in mobility? We absolutely have efforts underway. All of our SaaS portfolio is, we're offering through mobile applications as well. And any applications that we're developing, we're developing them on our platform inside of IBM as well, so. And will you have any marketing programs around those applications to showcase their capabilities? Absolutely, absolutely. We will be bringing those forward. Okay, we have some questions from the crowd chat out there. Ashley, thanks for sending them every interview, pretty much had some questions. So the question is to you, Kristen, how is mobile first, hashtag, good job Bert, and Bluemix, hashtag, Bluemix, supporting Watson's on the mobile contest. Do you see Watson playing into the mobile experience? Yeah, so at Mobile World Congress, we announced the Watson mobile developer challenge, and I think I've already heard Mike wrote it on stage. We have 400 final, we have 400 people submit concepts that were mobile applications that were written with calls back to Watson, and we're going to be developing that over the next few months and announcing winners soon. And what's the number, can you share some stats again? What was it in total? It was 100,000 people had viewed the challenge and about 400 actual concepts were actually put out there, so. That's crowdsourcing, R&D right there. Crowdsourcing, and then 25 semi-finalists. So social business has been a big part of IBM's theme. How does social business come in with the mobile? I see mobile's real time, you're moving around with it, but people also have iPads and phones and desktops. So like the internet of things is out there too. So is that part of mobile? Do you look at mobile as all edge devices at this point or are you strictly focused on the phone? We are not strictly focused on the phone. The phone right now is a means out there, but in terms of hospital settings, there are all sorts of mobile devices that are not a phone. It's just internet of things, basically. It is the internet of things, they are absolutely related. The phone is a personal access point to reach clients in certain industries for your employees, but in other industries, there are many other mobile devices. Mobile first is a relatively new organization within IBM, but a year and a half old, I believe, right? Can you give us some idea of the resources that IBM is committing in terms of personnel? Yeah, we absolutely have the mobile first organization, but this is pulling through many different organizations, but we have just announced the mobile first studios as well where we are putting consultants, our services personnel, connecting it with our design lab. So we have many, many people involved. It's not just the mobile first organization. So it really reaches into the entire team across the software teams, the services teams, and the global technology services as well as GBS. Meg Swanson was on with us earlier today and she was talking about how BlueMix is leveraging Meetup as a platform to get developers involved on a one-on-one basis and get IBMers out there into these Meetups. Are you piggybacking onto those efforts? Absolutely, Meg and I are working hand-in-hand on those Meetups. So we're starting a day really at the end of the segment with the remaining time, we'll talk about digital marketing, because that's a big part of big data right now and we were talking prior about some of the things. How do you, as a marketer with mobile out there, of the connected consumers, clearly a new variable in the marketing mix, you know? And so how does that change your job? I mean, as a marketer, as an IBM executive, as someone who's been in the business before there's a before and after movie that's going on here, right? We're in the really first generation of consumers that are fully connected to the net where you can do a lot of cool things with them, what are- Do a lot of cool things, but it's absolutely about understanding the information and putting the information in context. Many people think about marketing changing in terms of how do you drive campaigns and where do you do media buys, but I think it goes much, much beyond that. At Mobile World Congress this year, it was even about understanding on the floor, designing a pet and how do you in real time change that content that you have on the show floor. And we were doing this through mobile apps, right? We had many, many walls going on of information. We were watching what was trending and then we were pushing new content out on the spot through a mobile app sitting in the pet. So it's not just the campaigns, it's really the integrated loop around content and getting content in motion. You've built engagement native into the experience. That's what you're basically saying. That's awesome. Music to our ears, you know how we feel, Paul, about this stuff. Paul and I had geeked out about social yesterday with the Sandy Carter and we love it, so. Yeah. You see a lot of apps from a lot of developers. What's something really cool you've seen lately? I'm a marketing person and what I thought was cool was when we were at Mobile World Congress and we were changing things on the sides of bus stops in real time because of things that were trending inside the conference itself. All, like I said, through a mobile device. In real time, we didn't have to go and wait and do the assessment, call back to home, but I think that is absolutely amazing. People are walking around getting the information as they need it. You see, is that a near field communication type of app? Is that what you were using? So you're wire sending transmissions to the physical ad unit based upon the contextual data from the behavior of the crowd. Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. I couldn't resist. That's so good. Imagine we're on a one-to-one basis, on a personal basis in the retail environment. Or in groups, you know, like we're doing in crowd chat. I mean, this is the future. I mean, this is about tailoring the personalization. Marissa Mayer at Yahoo is all about personalization and that's ultimately the end game, right? I mean, if you know what people want, you could actually create a better experience. Absolutely. Kristen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Any final words for the folks out there about why impact, what's going on an impact, what's the big theme that you'd like to share with folks? I think impact is really about bringing together cloud, mobile, social, big data, and understanding these shifts in the marketplace. And I don't think there's any other company out there that's going to understand the ecosystem as well as all the technology and how that's going to make a difference in the marketplace. That's what impact's all about. Couldn't have said it better. That was awesome. Well done. This is theCUBE at IBM Impact Live. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.