 In fact, this is Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. I'm here with that Stu Miniman, who's also with Wikibon. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship continuous production of Edge. We're going wall to wall. This is day two. We're here live at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Deepak Advani is here. He's the general manager of cloud and smarter infrastructure at IBM. Relatively new name for a group and with expanding portfolios. Congratulations and welcome to theCUBE Deepak. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be here. So it's good to see Edge have folks attend, participate from IBM like yourself. So it's not just a hardware show, not just a storage show. We heard on Bush Goyal yesterday say, you know, it's not about storage. It's about the data and you know, we like that message. But so talk about why you're here and what you're doing, what your message is to customers. Yeah, I know it's great to be here. It's great to interact with my colleagues and with clients and with partners. And you know, at the end of the day, what I'm here to do is to convey to our clients our point of view on things like cloud. You know, the world is getting smarter. Infrastructure is getting instrumented, it's becoming smarter. And how do our clients create value by partnering with IBM in the areas of cloud and smarter infrastructure? Yeah, so let's unpack some of those a little bit. So cloud is just this, I've been watching this since day one and you know, the Berkeley paper came out and the IT industry in general, the enterprise IT players said, hey, we can play in cloud too. Yeah, yeah. And so you had the CIO's head was in a vice. You know, it was coming at him or her from all angles. And generally they've responded pretty well with the help of companies like IBM. But so where are we in cloud? I mean, most of the emphasis has of course been on the private cloud. And that's starting to extend, most customers will now, first of all, I'll tell you, cloud is real. It's no longer a buzzword. The second thing they'll tell you is, we're just, we're looking at hybrid models. We're not just going to put it all in AWS. We want to have some kind of hybrid and they're starting to affect those strategies. Where do you see the customer base at in terms of cloud adoption? Yeah, you know, I think it's really important to sort of step back and look at why is cloud really resonating, right? I mean, more and more you're seeing CIO's and IT departments are under tremendous pressure to do more with less. You know, the budgets are going down year after year. The percentage of the budget that goes towards keeping the lights on keeps increasing every year. And at the same time, line of business is saying, do things faster for me. You know, and so they're under a lot of pressure and cloud really enables the IT organizations to do a couple of things. One is optimize their infrastructure and by freeing up resources and capacity and bandwidth they can accelerate innovation which they're being asked from the business to do. So creating this balance of optimization and accelerating innovation is something that cloud is enabling them to do. And that's why I think there's so much interest and is it private? Is it public? Look, our point of view in this is the world is hybrid and world is going to remain hybrid. And you got to come at it from a workload point of view. Some workloads are ideal for a private cloud. Why? Because maybe you've got some security or compliance reasons why you don't want the data to leave your enterprise. Why? Maybe because there's enough scale you have within your enterprise that you can achieve all the economics of scale and efficiency and utilization and rapid provisioning, all those benefits by having a private cloud. And in some cases, public cloud may make more sense because maybe the data you're trying to analyze is machine to machine data or social media data. It's data that's born outside the enterprise to begin with. Makes sense to analyze that in a public cloud. So we strongly believe that you got to look at and understand the workloads and you got to pick a model that is supporting of the hybrid world. So you support public and private workloads and provide the ability to migrate workloads from private to public, public to public. And that's where standards come in. Yeah, well, and so you guys just made the big acquisition or announced anyway, you're going to acquire a software, two billion dollar acquisition. Actually, the number wasn't reported but that's what everybody else was reporting. I think you guys mentioned it, but, and that's not part of your division. However, that brings opportunity for you to orchestrate across those various different clouds, doesn't it? Absolutely it does because, you know, but software, you know, they're the largest privately held public cloud infrastructure as a service provider. 21,000 clients, 13 data centers and radical ease of use and simplicity and they cater a lot to companies that are born in the web. So it's a really great solution for them. And when you couple that with the strengths that IBM has with their smart cloud offerings, focusing on born in the enterprise type workloads and companies, it really provides their clients the ultimate choice. Because at the end of the day, some clients are saying, you know, I've got hardware, I've already made a decision on that. Give me the software that enables me to build private clouds. Well, we've got our offerings called smart cloud foundation that lets you do just that. Other clients are saying, well, I want time to value. Can you package in your expertise around workloads in an integrated system? So we have a family of systems called pure systems that lets you do that. Others will say, look, just host everything for me or give me a cloud offering, public cloud offering and for that, we have a soft layer. So we've got a very broad set of offerings. Well, the other soft layer is amazing automation. I mean, they are the best at automation. And interesting, I don't know if a lot of people know this, they do a lot of dedicated hosting. They do a lot of bare metal, which is somewhat surprising, right? And so, but a lot of the clients are saying, hey, we just want the dedicated hosting, whether it's for security reasons or maybe even performance reasons. They don't want the multi-tenancy piece, which is kind of fascinating in this day and age, a company who's grown very nicely with that model. It gives people a choice. You know, you can get dedicated hardware, you can get shared hardware, you can physical, you got virtual, you know, sort of like Burger King, having your way. You know, depends on the client, depends on the workload, but you've got the ultimate choice. And the automation piece, again, is key. We watch, of course, I'm sure you do too, the hyperscale guys and what they're doing and the innovations that they're bringing. And that's clearly seeping into the enterprise. And again, I think it's a great opportunity for a company like IBM. Well, it goes down to, you know, people are looking for efficiencies. If you can run and optimize your infrastructure that frees up resources that you can then apply to accelerate innovation. And by standardizing standard operating procedures and automating, think about it. I mean, used to be an administrator would tweak the system and, you know, change some configuration parameters, set things up and that institutional knowledge would be stored in their head. Now you have the ability to capture that. As Joe. As Joe, as Joe knows. But now you have the ability to capture that, whether it's using, you know, de facto industry standards like chef and chef recipes or building your own pure patterns. But the ability to capture that expertise and automate it is how you get efficiencies that enable you to accelerate innovation. Yeah, so Deepak, question I have for you is if we look at kind of the cloud discussion that's been going on for at least the last five, six years. Management and security have kind of been the two challenges that people have said, kind of holding back some of that adoption. As we said, clouds much beyond kind of the buzzword. But, you know, where would you grade the industry? How do you think kind of IVM and the industry as a whole are doing it solving, especially that management challenge? Yeah, I mean, you know what? I think things are starting to accelerate in a big way when it comes to that. And I think a lot of it is because of standards. Because at the end of the day, I think industry is doing a decent job of coming up with proprietary solutions that solve a particular problem with certain asset of clients. One of the things that we have very deep conviction in is the support of open standards and partnering with the community. And that's really how you accelerate things. So, you know, when we announce the support for OpenStack, you know, OpenStack to us is a really big deal because it enables our clients to have a choice of hypervisors first and foremost. It gives them that choice. But it also gives you the ability to do things in a really industry standard way. Build a software-defined environment. You know, for compute, for storage, for networking. And what that enables you to do is do a much better job of automation and also orchestrating your workloads. So one of the key products we came out with, Smart Cloud Orchestrator, enables someone to do an outstanding job of defining a workload, not just only how to provision it. But if you want to do things like failover and other type of things, how can you automate the orchestration of that workload so it truly is optimized? That type of innovation is possible now because of supporting standards in a big way. Okay, the other thing I want to poke on, you talked about Chef. And if we look at things like Chef and Puppet out there, you've got a certain class of customers that are going to be comfortable with having people that can program their environments and tweak it and play with it. And then there's the other set of environments that just, they want a solution. They want you to do the automation. You know, where do you see those lines in the industry? Yeah, so basically what we think is, you know, when you have things like Chef and you know, Tosca, another emerging standard from Oasis on defining these patterns, the reason this becomes really important is because you've got the practitioners that are creating content. You know, so whether they're cookbooks or whether they're patterns, you're creating this catalog of automation that others who just want a solution can now pick and choose from. And the power of bringing open source and communities together is everyone then starts to develop a set of, you know, sort of packages, if you will, that are very reusable. And it sort of starts serving both of the markets really well. On one hand, you've got practitioners capturing their expertise in a catalog. On another hand, you can start packaging it together in a turnkey solution that gives others time to bag. Okay, I'm wondering if you could bring that home for us with pure systems. There's that expert integration knowledge. How does that play with what you were just talking about? Absolutely. So you know, so one of the key things that we do in the lab is we've got some pretty smart people at IBM. And we've got the ability to tune and optimize these workloads. And what we've been asked for years by our clients is can you bottle that expertise up? So I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time I buy something, right? So pure is the ultimate manifestation of not just simplicity and time to value, but there's whole notion of understanding and optimizing the workloads and capturing that expertise in a pattern that there's a lot of work that happens in the labs to develop that IP. But that enables our clients to get optimized systems and get them up and running quickly. Yeah, so OpenStack is obviously very exciting. You know, for years you guys obviously participate in adding value to whomever's hypervisor was out there, but you couldn't directly participate in the code. And you guys have hopped on this with others. But IBM is one of the top contributors. Red Hat, obviously, HP clearly, and some others. But talk about how that changes the competitive dynamic in the industry. Yeah, it's very interesting, right? Because at the end of the day, we've got 500 people working with communities on cloud-related open source projects. Half of them, around 250 are around OpenStack because that's the best replacing. And what OpenStack really does is, you know, we believe that it's a good thing to have choice of hypervisors out there. You know, some clients want VMware, some clients want Hyper-V, some want KVM, some want PowerVM coming from IBM, some want it on the mainframe. That's great. And the same thing with storage. You know, you can have a choice of hypervisors. So OpenStack enables you to have that choice, which at the hypervisor level is good. But also what OpenStack enables you to do is to start building out the software-defined environment on top of which you can start doing things like orchestration and automate a lot of management. And that's very, very powerful. Yeah, so, obviously, you got big contributions. So where do you see this coming? OpenStack seems like it's got a lot of momentum. It's still a little bit early. Most of the deployments are within, you know, cloud service providers. But, you know, we love open source here at SiliconANGLE Wikibon. We always have said open source long-term wins. So how do you see that evolving? Is this a 10-year journey? Do you see, you know, major deployments in nearer term, like within the next 18 to 24 months? Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, the whole thing you're right. It's like, you know, three years ago, people weren't talking about OpenStack a year ago. People weren't talking as much about it as they are now. And so the momentum is accelerating for sure. We actually have already shipped a product that includes OpenStack, that bundles OpenStack. It's called Smart Cloud Orchestrator. And we have dozens of clients, early clients, who've been looking at it and kicking the tires on it. My prediction is this is going to accelerate faster than any of us realize. And the reason for that is because the value is there. You know, the economic value that's being driven to clients is there. And because of that, it's just going to take off. Yeah, awesome. All right, T-Pack, we're getting the hook. I really appreciate you coming by, sharing your perspectives. And it is an exciting time. And good luck with the initiatives. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. All right, guys, keep it right there. We will be right back after this word. We're live from Edge. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.