 The Cube 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. We're here live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact. This is Silicon Angles The Cube. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle, and I'm joined with Dave Lavery, VP of marketing and big data and analytics at IBM Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Great to see you. Big data analytics, obviously a big part of the story, underpinning everything around what's going on, what's the solutions and outcomes today. So I got to get your take on, IBM's no stranger to big data. And data in general, we just had Bob Pachiano on talking about his 27 years at IBM. But it's changed. So I want to first talk to you about something around the skills and roles. Always seems to be a data scientist for hire somewhere. DBAs are supposedly going to be going out of business, that's what people say, but the role of the DBA is changing, right? That's necessarily going to go anywhere soon. The analyst is changing, the role of an analyst, a business analyst. And now at the C level, at the CEO and CIO level there. So there's a lot of interactions going on that was siloed in the past within companies. So I want you to talk about the skills out there that you see that are developing. And the gaps between them. Yeah, if you think about, maybe the way to start this is to think about what do we see happening right now? And especially on this topic. And you've been talking about this topic around big data and analytics for quite some time. It has not died down, you know that. If anything, it's probably gotten even more intense. And what we're seeing in the clients that we're talking to, and I'm sure Bob touched on this, is that it's happening at every level. The CEO's boardroom level conversations around data and big data. And you got to say, well, why is that? You know, why has that become such a hot issue now at that high level? It's really because organizations are seeing that they can drive competitive advantage. They can really think about this in terms of greater insight that they can start to bring into their organizations. They can create new businesses around data. So it's changing the face of business in many, many, many ways. You know, and some of the, when you think about this, okay, so if it's dramatically changing business, what's supporting that? And what's happening around that? What are the skill sets needed? And if you think about some of the things we cited through a bunch of research that are out there, I'll just cite a couple of facts. 70% of CEOs are prioritizing competitive or thinking about the perspective of consumer and customer insight as a number one priority. 73% of CEOs see customer insight as one of their major competitive advantages. Think about that. Think about the data that has to sit behind that to make that happen. 82% of CMOs are increasing their use of social media. 75% of CIOs see mobile solutions as a key part of their strategy going forward across all industries. So when you think about this, another key one, COOs, 70% of them need more visibility into their supply chain. All of that is data dependent, right? So that's what's driving this need. They're running their business. They're running their business. But they're finally waking up to the fact that this data is now a real asset to them and either they're going to take advantage of this from a competitor standpoint or their competitor is going to do it and they're going to find themselves behind. You know, I've always admired IBM as one of the best marketing companies on the planet. It's just historically always been a really market-driven company. Even go back to the roots of the founders and smarter plan out so you get a lot of awards and genius, but I think the social business angle is really interesting to me because you mentioned social media. People look at social media as a gimmick. Some look at it as a gimmick. Oh, I'm not in social, but you're talking about social when they say customer insights. That's essentially saying, in my opinion, the CIO or CEO saying, I have big data. I have connected consumers. Why not actually talk to them and find out what the hell they want? Exactly. Exactly. And find out how best we can organize our business models to serve them. I mean, that's basic, you know, MBA 101 or even, you know, business one on one. And that is one of the hottest topics here at this conference, right? I mean, a lot of what we just talked about is this whole notion of real-time, actionable insight with customers. In terms of how do you start to capture that notion of in the moment? What's happening now? How do you change that? How do you- How do you record it? Perfect behavior. How do you report on it? How do you take advantage of that notion of in the moment? And, you know, back to the kind of the topic here around skills is the key is organizations need the people to do this. Gartner, one of Gartner's cited that by 2015, there are roughly four and a half million roles needed in the marketplace around this whole notion of big data. Roughly half of those are data scientists and it's people who really understand kind of that whole model of how do you understand the context of the business and also understand what's needed behind it and the technology that you need to deploy to best use that data effectively in an organization. So, Dave, let's pivot off the skills gap and the skillset area and go into more of the outcomes because this is what Bob was talking about. You mentioned some of the things that you found. So, I want to ask you the question. So, if every CEO or CIO or CMO, whatever it's digital marketing to run in the business, says, hey, I was told by the CUBE interview that I can instrument my business 100% and wire it together so that I can look at everything. Hiring practices, supply chain, IT, how do I do it? What do I do? But don't, you can't say call IBM because of course they're going to call IBM, but seriously, what advice should you say? I want that product, I want the architecture, I want that ability to write code and write software packages or applications. I mean, there's no simple answer to this mainly because it's all happening so fast. But the way we're approaching it and one of the things that I think has really helped us and is driving us in this direction is we've built now really a volume of what we refer to as use cases. So, given the breadth of capability we do have because we've got the services capability, we've certainly got breadth of capability in our products and in our offerings. Cutting across all dimensions of this from data, from analytics, from social, from mobile, from our cloud offerings and now building all of that in terms of service offerings where you can compose services together to build the right applications. It's taking these use cases and we've got over 70 of these documented now by industry where we've worked with probably 40 to 50,000 different engagements now globally over the past five years in profile, these use cases, so that we've got hard examples of where other organizations are proving out how to take advantage of data in these models. What are the right technologies that need to be applied and how do you fast track? How do you get there quickly? So, it really is kind of that bleeding edge expertise that you bring to the table of where it's been tried and proven by these industry leaders that are doing this today. So, give me some examples. What customers are saying here at the show and from the folks that you've talked about in the field about big data and how they're putting into practice. Can you give some examples? Yeah, I mean, it's across every industry, right? I mean, if you think about retail, retail's a great example. We all live this, you know, traditional retail versus what's happening today on the internet, yes, beyond easy convenience, you know, price, convenience, compare and shop, but think about all the data that's being collected on the back end. It's not just what you buy, but it's what you browse for and didn't buy and knowing how the opinions of others start to affect what you do. And we're working with dozens of retailers today to build that model. Macy's is a great example of one we're working with to build out that model, to really get to that point of what is kind of true desire. What's your next action? What do you really want to see? What do you really want to understand? Think about it in a commercial sense of what's happening today, what everything be coming, the datification of everything, everything from, you know, aircraft engines to appliances to cars. We're working with a number of major car manufacturers now in the whole notion of predictive maintenance and how that's having a dramatic effect on customer satisfaction because they can anticipate things happening much sooner. You know, you bring up a good point. I want to, it made me, I just wrote a tweet on the crowd chat about it because I think this highlights a trend that's emerging. Big data was really great and analytics and visualization was the instant killer app, right, I can see the data. But I'm hearing more and more of this show about the back end. The back end is much more of an architectural conversation, meaning it's not just have a scale of back end, this multiple back end site, you're using multiple data source that could be on no sequel data, structured data, external customer partner data, crowd source data. Now that is causing this back end conversation, back end systems meaning? Yes. What are those engagement systems? So what's your take on that and how do you talk to customers about that trend? Is that, that's in your wheelhouse? Well, absolutely. One of the things that we have done, we created this thing called Watson Foundations, which is bring together all the capabilities that we have that apply to big data and analytics. One element of that is another initiative we created or a view, an architecture, which we're calling a zone architecture, which is really a way to think about all the various types of data that a company has to think about today, structured unstructured data in the form of text data, video feeds, really anything that they need to think about. And then, how do you best manage that and think of it almost like, you know, zones within a manufacturing operation where you have some that are focused around typical transaction data. And it's how do you ingest that information? How do you structure that information? How do you govern that information? Another area focused around real time. What are the things that you really need to put a perspective on in terms of that data from a real time perspective and how do you manage it and how do you bring analytics close to that data so you can really determine as things are happening what's changing, right? So another zone. Another one really is around exploration. So how do you use Hadoop effectively to ingest some of this information, do some rough exploration of what's of value and what's not? And then take what is of value, bring it into a structured warehouse or a data mark to then do, you know, a deeper level of analysis, potentially develop, you know, kind of standard reporting against it and that sort of thing. And all of this sort of underlying it, what have you put in place around a governance, integration and governance layer to secure and protect that information? So that whole notion of an architecture we've hardened now is playing very well with clients in terms of making sense of all this and how the IT organizations have to start to think about this in a logical way to serve the needs of the business, right? I'm smiling because you just make it sound, I mean, what you just said is very complex. I mean, you're inside the factory of IBM so you've got a good lay of the land, that's really, really hard to do, I mean, you know. But you know, if you start from, what are the applications you're trying to create? That's where it starts. And think about all the data sources you have, how do you best deal with that? And that's the new landscape that technology leaders and CIOs, IT organizations, have really got to start to think about it, right? Our job is to make that simple for them and figure out whether it's an on-prem environment, whether it's a cloud environment or whether it's a hybrid environment. And that's really where IBM shines, right? We don't get the zone, where can I find more information about these zones, concept, architecture? Is it Watson? If you Google Watson Foundations, you'll see all that information come together. Got it, okay. So check out Watson Foundation, I'm going to explore that area. I want to ask you about the visualization market. It continues to be hot. Visualization is the eye candy behind the data. It beloved eye candy, but it's also communication opportunity. What's your take on that marketplace and how is that interacting with your business? Yeah, in a huge way. I mean, visualization's a big part of it. One of the things that we talked about today is kind of this future world that we see. Our view is around this notion of blue insight, which is sort of this, if you think about Bluemix that we have been talking about for a while, we announced new offerings on Bluemix, which is really focused around the developer and having all the data and analytics services available. What we see is this next wave, and Bob probably hit on some of this as well in terms of blue insight, which is really this new environment set up to service the knowledge worker, to simplify all those data integration, connectivity, governance issues, and challenges that exist today, and provide also a really compelling visualization experience to bring that data together and draw insight from that data that's not obvious. Just by the standard way you might look at things and kind of siloed approaches, right? How do you bring it together? How do you correlate that data together to really kind of come up with that new insight that you've never had thought of before? Yeah, I mean, the breaking down the silos is a very key message here. So I want to ask you what's going on with your business. Tell us a little bit about what's happening with you guys, performance-wise, the team, exciting projects you're working on. One of the real exciting projects, again, I'm a marketing guy, through and through, you know that. One of the things we launched back about two weeks ago, three weeks ago now, was we kicked off this major advertising campaign and focus around made with IBM. And it really spotlights across industries, across different roles and functions, how IBM is helping organizations transform, mainly transforming around data, around cloud, and around engagement, as it relates to mobile and social technology. And citing, really, hundreds of examples. I mean, one of the cool things we did at the Masters is we ran over 60 different commercials, never with the same one repeated, to tell this story. That was a great campaign, by the way. How IBM is really helping organizations transform around some of these major elements of what's changing in the industry. So was that made with IBM? Was that part of the Smarter Planet campaign, or was it more of the outcome focus? It is actually all part of Smarter Planet. It's kind of like the new twist to Smarter Planet, in terms of now going deeper in these areas. We started conceptually around what's changing in the world, and that's what Smarter Planet was about. Now it's down to, okay, that was five years ago, where are we today, and how are leaders really transforming around data, cloud, and engagement? You know what's brilliant about that? First of all, Smarter Planet's just changed, it's very high level, it's more of an, I call it the air show of marketing. You're laying out the vision, it's really brilliant. But what you guys did at the match is you humanized it. You really brought it down. Look, these are real people. And you guys have done that before, but it was really impactful, because it didn't sound like scary, like, you know what I'm saying. We profiled everything from how people are using it to produce eggs, manage zoos, and make chocolate. So really, really, really fascinating. I got to ask you a marketing question so I'm curious. Maybe people might be me, I may not be interested in this, but you guys have central marketing. So Smarter Planet's controlled by, like, isn't that like a big marketing group? What do you do for a marketing, what do you have control of? Can you pull the trigger on an ad campaign? Well, you know, really the creative work around all of this, and our CMO, John Iwata, is one of the probably smartest marketing people I've ever met. Obviously, I mean, he's really got a very, very good, creative mind and a strong business sense of where this is going. So, you know, we've put a lot of effort in, but every organization sort of contributes to this. My role is I run marketing for our data and analytics initiative, which is a pretty good portion of our business. I have counterparts running the other major initiatives for this. You coordinate up through this, the marketing teams, make sure everything's in. We're serving up ideas and thoughts, our customer stories to bring it all together. It really is a team collaborative effort of what produce IBM. Everyone kind of sluts the same flag, has cadence around Smarter Planet, but yes, has some freedom to do some things in there. Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And now, you know, we're taking that campaign down to the next level to tell more and more of these stories. I remember back in the, of almost 10 years, or maybe less than, just about 10 years ago when, I think John was at communications. Was he like doing the comms? He came out of the communication side of the business, right? And he did something I thought was pretty amazing back then, which was he had these think Fridays or flash mobs with the employees. Yes, we're actually doing those now. That was like pretty radical back then. And all the employees would jump on and they would hold executive meetings, basically all hands meetings. Actually, where we are today, every month, the beginning of every month, usually the first Friday of every month, we run a think Friday. And it's all designed to educate all 430,000 IBMers around the globe on a particular topic and get them engaged. So we, you know, as the marketing teams, typically build a lot of that content, but it really is about enlistment of every role in the company of how they can better understand these topics. I think he deserves some props for that. Obviously he's in CMO now, so we've got to get the social, probably get social pretty well. Obviously social works here. But I got to ask you as a marketing person, this is really a big cultural question that big data hits because digital marketing is a big part of the big data growth right now, is balancing the top down, you know, here's our message and here's our goals, go team with the bottom up innovation that comes out of these kinds of activities, like the flash mobbing of ideas. I mean, companies are looking at the balance and how do you want to have a culture of top down, bottom up management, not mutually exclusive. I mean, it's a combination. You can actually do both. So what's your take on that? Because that seems to be the common thread among successful executives these days is they could actually do that. So what's your take on that and how do more executives, how do they do that better? I think the way to do it is you've got to create a vision. You have to create a vision that people buy into and feel like they're a part of. And if it's progressive and exciting, people want to be there. People want to follow and people want to jump on and that's how you get the creative energy flowing. People look at the idea. They think, hey, here's how I can contribute to that. Here's some ideas and things that I could bring to the table and they want to be heard. So as a leader, I think you have to encourage that kind of environment for people to be open, collaborative, you want to listen and really create that whole brainstorming initiative and idea. Well, we built our own crowd chat product which actually listens and monitors the conversation and records the conversation. We have some commentary coming in, question to you. So this is to you. We have blue mix, blue acceleration, now blue insight. So why is system Z black, not blue? Why is system Z not blue? Well, I think- I think it's a good point. System Z is blue as blue can be. It's all about not how you look. It's how you, what's on the inside. Exactly. It's blue on the inside. Okay, so Bert, your question. I guess we're going to put that up as feedback. Thank you very much. Just some snarky comments. That's a good question. It's more of an aesthetic question. But packaging is an interesting conversation. I mean, everyone wants to be the next Apple in the marketplace. Apple's done great with industrial design. Do you guys think about stuff like that when you do a lot of the packaging and the products? Well, a big part of what we're doing now, if you take a look at what we announced here in terms of IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Marketplace and Blue Mix, a lot of design effort went into that to simplify it, to make it a really easy environment to navigate, whether you want to think about it by role, by function, by projects that you're trying to create, all of that coming together in a very simple environment. To do something very complex when you think about it in terms of creating applications or using applications. We're really trying to simplify that for not only the knowledge worker, business user, but also for developers. Can't help but just, I'm still thinking about this whole blue concept, but you guys still go by big blue. You like that word, don't you? No, but you guys used to be called, I used to work for IBM back in the 80s. I was a co-op. Now it all comes out. So there's some blue here. I lie down on the couch, you could be my psychiatrist. No, but big blue is what everyone called IBM, big blue. Is that used anymore or is that kind of like, it's unsetted? It's not really used internally. It's not really used internally. It's not in the messaging at all. Not at all. It's just old, it's been, yeah. So blues, there is some meaning to the word blue in the IBM. Definitely has an association with IBM. IBM, excuse me, but don't be a big blue. Okay, final question. Just share the folks out there from a marketplace standpoint. Why this point in time and impact with your customers? Why is it so compelling right now? Why is everyone so excited? Why is it so bubbly? Why is it so frothy? Why are these valuations out of control? Why is this inflection point important for folks like this? It's the reason we have 9,000 people here at this conference. It's the reason why, you know, at a conference like I managed for IBM around the information on demand conference, we're now going to start calling that insight. The reason we get 13,000 people to show up for that, it's because people want to learn, they're hungry for new ideas and how these new concepts are transforming around data, around cloud, around engagement with social and mobile. How these new concepts are transforming business. It's not just a technology conversation anymore. It truly is a conversation about how businesses are changing, how industries are transforming. Through a lot of the examples I just cited. So IOD is going to be called Insights? It is. Insight. Insight, okay. Insight 2014. Last week of October. Hope to see you there. Well thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. This is theCUBE doing our part in social, asking all the tough questions. I didn't really ask you anything. Next time we'll get you a hard question. The blue one was a hard one, I got that one. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after the next, get to the short break. Thank you.