 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Interconnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas with the Mandalay Bay for the exclusive CUBE coverage for three days for IBM Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Ed Walls, General Manager of Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure at IBM. Welcome back. That was a mouthful, wasn't it? Welcome back to theCUBE, welcome back to the fold. Thank you very much. At IBM, so you're- Always good. You're leading up a big initiative. Take a quick second to talk about what you're the general manager of. Scope-wise, and then we'll jump right in. Yeah, so I run basically the Storage Division, which has all of our storage from mainframe to open systems, tape, software-defined storage, and software-defined compute, but it's all under our storage portfolio. So, development, sales, run the Pino. Great, and the new innovations that are coming out, what's your eye on, what's your goal, you get a spring in your step, what's the objective? So, what we talked, probably in October, I was 90 days in, so now I'm a whopping eight months in. I think we kind of talked about it. I kind of, my hypothesis for coming here was, look at it, clients are going through this big change, and some of your write-ups lately about the true private cloud and how they're trying to go from where they are now to where they're trying to get to, and that confusion needs some leadership, so it was a confusion. IBM has the right vision, but it's on cloud and cognitive, it's as much on-prem, so we have the right vision to help them get through that, and we have a history of doing that, and the second one was that we have a portfolio that's pretty broad, so we almost have an embarrassment of riches of what we can do with someone when they're really trying to look to modernize environments or transform, we can help them from anything from the biggest and baddest, but it really doesn't matter, the broad portfolio allows us to engage and bring it forward and then get them to the, whatever their path forward is, but we can give them that vision. And then, the one thing I was really talking about is if you could bring in IBM, what would be, if I could bring in IBM, the greater IBM, the true cognitive, the analytic team, and bring that together to bear for our infrastructure clients or inside storage itself, that would be where we'd have the trifecta and it taken off, so we're in the middle of that transformation going very well, but along the same lines, I have a fantastic product line, we're going to continue, in fact we're putting more investments on that, not only on the hardware arrays, but as much on software to find and going all flash, just because of a lot of operational benefits, but then really what we're able to do by bringing that large IBM behind us, IBM also did some interesting organizational changes in January, Ivan and Chris is now running hybrid cloud and research for IBM, so it's bringing the growth of IBM behind what's on-prem hybrid into the cloud, so it allows us to play a very strategic role, so. So, a couple of Wikibon buzzwords, right, the true private cloud that we talk about server sand, which is really sort of an instantiation of software to find. Really the impetus is that customers on-prem want to run like the public cloud, with that kind of agility and automation, so what are you seeing, what is IBM delivering to support that, first of all, are you seeing that? So it's kind of funny so that I do talk about a study a lot because I thought the true product cloud, the way you coined it is the right way to almost just say it's not what you're thinking I'm about to say, so it allows the study actually kind of, it's everything you get in the public cloud and you want to bring it on-prem, all the flexibility, all the development models, right, how you engage developers, but all the financial models as well, but bring that and then easily extend to the hybrid cloud. When you start going through that clients, that's every one of our clients, you know, we engage, they understand the value of cloud, they're at different maturity levels of how they're using cloud, but it's all in their vision, so it's about, we do a lot of work to help people bridge, so where are you now, let's talk about where you need to get to and have some meaningful steps to get there, so the true private cloud resonates with them and then what we're doing is launching, in fact we launched this week with Cisco, so we have a converge offering with Cisco called VersaStag, but what we're bringing on is how do you make a private cloud as agile and has the same use cases, specifically for developers or DBAs that you have in the public cloud and we're bringing those into the offering set for a converge offering, so what we do around on API layer, so key use case would be, to do that would be why do people go to the public cloud, business units like it because the developers, it's easy to use, they have true DevOps capabilities, they're able to swipe or credit card, single line of code, spin up an environment, single line of code, spin it down, they don't have to talk to an IT guy, they don't have to wait three weeks or do a ticket system, so how do you do that on-prem, so what we have now in market is imagine an API abstraction layer that for storage allows all the orchestration and all the DevOps tools to literally do these axing thing on-prem, so once you set it up, it allows the IT team, it's called spectrum copy data management, allow the IT team to set up templates, but through roles-based access, allow a developer or a DevOps tools like Chef or Puppet, so literally infrastructure is code, single line of code, spin up a whole environment, an environment would be let's say three or four VMs, last good snapshot, maybe data masked or not, most of the time it's data masked and bring up an offense network, but literally it goes from on-prem, I just can't get it done, it takes me two or three weeks, so that's why I go to the public cloud for other reasons, I can literally choose where I put it, where it's the right place to do, but I can give them the exact same use case on-prem by just doing the API calls and they use exactly the same tools for development they use in the cloud, like Chef Puppet, Urban Code, Python Strips. How's the reaction been to that? Give us some anecdotal. So once you have that conversation, that's just one of the things we're doing to make the true private cloud come to life, of course the extension is software and other clouds to get the people, all of a sudden they see a path forward, it's not as easy to, you have to explain it, how it works, but the fact of the matter is they don't have a lot of tools now to make, we can bring down costs, give you a little bit more efficiency, consolidate it, but that's not really how a true private cloud is, you need the automation. So they're responding to it well, in fact it's the number one demo on the floor for us as far as systems, people trying to figure out actually how to do the DevOps on the-prem, so. It's awesome, awesome. Talk more about this Cisco relationship. Yeah, sure. It's a lot of interesting things going on in the storage business, your consolidation, and the whole VCE thing, and then Cisco looking for partners, you guys selling off BNT opens up the whole new partnership potential. So how has that evolved, and where do you want to take it? So I think match being heaven between us, especially in storage and Cisco, if you look at the overall environment conversion, I have a conversion account for about third of the storage industry, so we play well, there's no overlap between us and Cisco, it's great, we're after the exact same account, and actually from a, you know, you think of the very top level organization all the way down, the two companies have a lot of the same cultures, and to be honest, we're very tight. So it allows us to have a great relationship, we've already had a good relationship, about 25,000 joint clients, which is amazing, and then what we're doing with Versacex specifically is we're putting the next generation, so we have a great converge offering that has all our flash storage, but also software defined, but what we added is we brought in what they did with our clicker acquisition, which is called Cloud Center, and you add that on top, make it single click, deploy an application anywhere, both on-prem and the different clouds, and it makes it very simple for developers. We talked about the API layer, you bring that into DevOps and the environment, so we feel really strong as far as if you look into bringing in a true private cloud, probably the best answer that we can do is what we do with Versacex, and we just announced it this week, and also we gave a preview, it's Cisco Live in Melbourne a week ago, but I think it's been a good uptake, but it kind of plays to, when you know what people are trying to do, but you need to bring the automation, you got to make it self-service, and that really drives, for the business units as well as developers, that drove what we brought into Versacex, we brought different assets in it from Cisco and IBM to make that kind of a reality. John and I were talking earlier in theCUBE this week, and somebody brought up, yeah, the CIO, they really don't think about storage, they certainly don't want to be thinking about the media, and the conversation has shifted way off the media, even flash now, it's like, oh yeah, yeah, we get it. But you mentioned something earlier, which is, and this is very relevant to CIOs, they want to get from point A to point B with this minimal disruption, they don't want to have to buy a boatload of services to get it done, so, and now you're talking about things like automation and self-service, how are you, what are the discussions like with senior IT executives, and how are you helping them get from point A to point B with minimum disruption? So the good thing about, you know, you think about the IBM brand as much about trust and helping people through it, so people give us just the credit to say I can engage with them, we get the innovation, but also we've been through these eras, so a lot of times we're asking how are we doing it, how are we transforming our company, how are we doing it internally, and then if you just kind of common sense walk them through, because the broadness of our portfolio, we don't just have this point solution and every answer is, oh, you buy this box, right? We're able to have that conversation, and when you get the broader IBM together, that's where we're kind of differentiated, so they love it. Now I've been to a lot of, what I'll say, IBM friendly accounts, which is great, but also some people that have never dealt with us are eyes wide open, because it's a new day. People are struggling with this big transfer, right? How do you get from now to where you want to go in cloud as a big change? Those new customers, what are they getting wide eyed about? What are they focusing on? What's the big focus? So we'll talk about what would be a true product cloud, but really what you can do as far as data and what we're doing around cognitive is really telling, right? So, you know, the ability to actually show them with symbol API calls to get more aware with it, you know, so I have a cognitive conversation that's an industry specific conversation really gets people lit up. Then in the end it ends up being, okay, I see the are the possible, then how do I get from here to there? And typically it doesn't start, well I'm just going to go directly that direction, it's how do I, help me with a multi-year plan to get to there? While I'm taking out costs, adding agility over time, but I would say the cognitive conversations are especially with an industry lens, which is what IBM brings to it, is really telling. So I got to ask you about the conversion infrastructure marker because the hot trend that's in the cloud native world is serverless. So is there a storage list version? Because what you're basically saying with the true private cloud is you're essentially doing serverless, storageless philosophy. Is that, I mean, how do you guys rationalize the serverless trend? The servers and storage are basically the same things in my mind these days, but I mean, you might disagree, but I mean. No, I think in general people aren't looking to the different components, they're looking for a way to operate in their environment that's more efficient. They're looking for use cases. They're also trying to have IT not be in the way of what they're trying to do development, but actually give them the right tools. So that's why, to be honest, go back to your true private cloud. I've been using it a lot, because it really resonates with people. It's how do you get that same experience but on-prem, because there's different reasons beyond-prem. It's like cloud native on-prem. You can get all the benefits of what serverless promotes, which is here's an unlimited pool of resources. The software will just take care of it for you. That's DevOps. And doing true DevOps, ChefPuppet, no compromise is exactly how you do it. So you change nothing for your developers, but now you're running on-prem or in a hybrid cloud because there's a lot of good use cases for hybrid cloud. If even if it's born in the cloud application, you're making a web application or iPhone application, the fact of the matter is, you might want to test it against the back end. So be able to do a hybrid cloud, bring the system of record data there to be able to do DevOps on what production looked like maybe last night or a week ago. It's much different than the current DevOps model. What's a good strategy too, if you think about the true private cloud, the way you're looking at it, which I think is the right way, is a lot of the things that we look at on theCUBE and talk about is three areas, product gaps, organizational gaps and process gaps. The number one thing is organizational gaps. So when you have that true private cloud on-prem, it's not a big leap to go cloud native public. Right. It's seamless in fact, right? Yeah, it's totally seamless. And on that case, a lot of the software talk about is we help people modernize and transform the environment. And the message is all about optimization on the traditional application environment. It's all about freeing up the resources. A lot of the stuff we do. That's the innovation strategy. That's the creativity, that's the development. And if you don't free up your key resources, they can't be on the digital transformation and without the right skillset because they're kind of trapped in operation. So a lot of the automation things we're doing are things that, to be honest, the storage team or the admin team would be doing. It's manual error prone, but take it away, but also you free up the team. So it kind of plays to all those, it's as much. That must really resonate with the CIO at least. I mean, I would imagine CXO goes, okay, I can have cloud up on-prem and then train my organization to then start thinking hybrid workloads as they start moving hybrid pretty quickly. And here's the thing, what do you have to change from developers? Tell me what I have to get by the developers or DBAs. And the answer is nothing. Use the exact same tools. So on stage it will only show me how Chef or Puppet, they're not doing trouble tickets or spinning things up, down. But same thing with deploying applications. It's a cloud center application. Set up the stack and deploy it either on-prem, different architectures, both converged and non-converged or in different clouds, and they allow you to just one click and deploy it and they deal with all those differences. But that's how you want to make it, you use it services. They don't have to worry about the infrastructure, but also we're freeing up the team. So Ed, I got to ask you, maybe end on a sort of personal note. I mean, I've followed your career for a long time. John and I, we call you the five tool star. You've had the startup experience, you got technical chops. You did a stint at IBM. You went to MIT and came back with that big brain, big MIT brain, brought it to IBM. So pretty awesome career. And by no means even close to over. What have you brought to IBM? I think I've known every GM of storage since the first GM of storage at IBM. What specific changes have you brought and what's the vision and the direction that you want to take this organization? Yeah, so it's a great culture, a great history of storage. So I guess that would be the first outsider coming into storage. But I don't think it's any different. I just have been in storage my entire career. I understand it. Some of it is optimizing the current model, the particular portfolio and what we're doing. Some of it is just making sure we have the right things in the sales and working with channels, which one of my companies was an excellent channel partner. So I think it's just a perspective of maybe a fresher look. But again, we have a great team, great portfolio. We're quietly number two in storage hardware software. Don't tell anyone. We don't do a good job of getting the news out. But the fact of the matter is- No, we'll tell everyone. You say don't tell anyone. We're telling everybody. When you sell stuff to tell everyone, we don't tell anyone. But we still get people, are you guys still doing storage? Literally, we're number two by revenue. If you, and this is the IBM Gartner software hardware. So we are a player in the space. We have a lot of technology. I guess what I'm bringing is just maybe a little, you know, spice of vision and then really bringing- Well, you guys have a strategy that's unique and different, but aligned with the mega trend. That to me, I think is something that's been in the works for a while. It's been cobbled together. Dave always points it out how the storage groups change. But the game is still the same, right? I mean, ultimately it's about storage. Now the market conditions are changing on the organizational side. That seems to be the thing. Of all, flash is a product thing. Yeah, but also what we're going to be, you're going to start seeing is bringing cognitive capabilities. So we're not going to call it lots of our storage, but imagine bringing lots in the storage, right? Think of all the metadata we have. So not only for support, but kind of insight. You can all start doing more cognitive data management and not only look at metadata but taking action on them, using Watson to look at images. So very interesting use cases that I think only IBM can cover. I mean, I could just vision a day where I just always activate Watson. Spin me up, more servers. And provision all flash, header byte, done. It's a, believe it or not, we can do a chat, but we have that working. But we're looking for applicability of that. And then Watson would tell me, well, you can't right now. You're not authorizing it. You're going to grab the Watson for storage URL. He's been grabbing URLs all day. I'm no daddy. And thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on kicking names, the kicking butt storage and the strategy. True private cloud. A good one. Love that research again from Wikibon. You know, kind of new, but different, but relevant. Very relevant. Thanks so much. So thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay, live coverage here at Mandalay Bay here at IBM Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More coverage coming up after this short break.