 From Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering IBM World of Watson 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas in Mandalay Bay for the IBM World of Watson. This is the new rebrand of IBM Insight and they brought together all the big data, all the cloud, all the analytics. And certainly, Watson is the headline brand and certainly driving a lot of activity around the future of analytics, whether that's big data in software or IoT or connected device or AI. It's all great stuff, a lot of interest. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante, our next guest, Jason McGee, who's the IBM Fellow VP and CT of IBM Cloud Platform at IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Yeah, good to be here again. So a couple of big news, get out of the way. We just put a blog post that SoftLayer is now being sun-setted for the Bluemix brand. The Bluemix will be the main brand SoftLayer will just be infrastructure to service or IaaS. But Bluemix is cool, that's where the action is and that's where you're seeing the most traction and certainly you're doing a lot of work in the air. We've been covering Bluemix, both on SiliconANGLE and our analyst group at Wikibon and we launched it on theCUBE a couple of years ago. Yeah, years ago, yeah. Meg Swanson on and Adam Gunther saying, hey, here's Bluemix and then record downloads and then the rest has been history, huge growth. What's the update? What's this current state of the union? I'll say the Bluemix brand, what's the big update? Yeah, so first just a touch on the SoftLayer thing. I mean, we've been on this journey for a year now to kind of bring the properties together. You know, we believe really firmly that cloud is a platform that spans infrastructure all the way up through these high level domain services like Watson. You know, building apps I think is where it's all at. You know, infrastructure is an incredibly important part of running workloads, but you really need those higher level services. If I look at what's going on with Bluemix today, being here at Watson I think is really appropriate because those high level services like Cognitive and what we're doing at IoT, those are driving huge developer interest, some amazing applications on Bluemix that are getting built and so that kind of breadth of the platform and having all of those APIs is really driving so much excitement around the Bluemix. So the announcement is a branding, a rebranding? It's more than a rebranding. So certainly from a branding perspective we're consolidating on Bluemix as the IBM Cloud platform brand, but it also is bringing the properties together. So one user experience for our clients, one portal, one identity to log in with. It's a cloud. Oh, it didn't work like that already? Right, of course it did, but I don't know what you're talking about. So the experience is getting much better. That all launched on Sunday, so now we have a much more consistent platform for people to build that platform. I want to drill down on the point you made about Watson because I think Watson, and we always said this on theCUBE, gives a face to some of the realities and problems and opportunities that people can write software for or build SaaS applications. So it's nice to see that, I won't say pie in the sky, but a clear, straight, narrow path to value. And so Bluemix is getting accelerated because of what Watson I know is available on Bluemix. That's driving a lot of developer adoption. So what are the top, so given that the context, you're seeing a lot of business opportunity, a lot more developers are getting on the front lines in the business conversation. What are some of the hot areas that you're seeing right now for activity in that specific build out phase of cloud apps, certainly SaaS certification apps? Yeah, it's interesting. I think if you look at the Watson angle first, I mean, I think a lot of people at first think it's like, some experimental space, but it's been incredible to me how many real applications people are building doing. I had a session that I did yesterday where we talked about some of those use cases where people are doing drones with video recognition to actually do in the field maintenance and mapping. And that's not some experiment, but it's like real stuff that they're doing that are taking people off of towers and replacing them with devices. All the speech recognition capabilities certainly are real. And I think having that in the bigger platform of Bluemix has been really powerful because you put those apps together, of course you need containers and you need data services and you need analytics. You need to be able to bring all those pieces together to build a real solution. And Bluemix kind of provides that foundation for them to do that. We all had kind of a wake up call last week with the hacks that shut down, not shut down, but slowed down a lot of them. And the culprit was like DVRs and IP cameras that had factory settings and passwords. And so when you think about some of these emerging applications, of course security becomes a part of that. How are you dealing with that challenge? Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting, right? How no matter what error we're in, we seem to make the same mistakes on security over and over again. And so now you have this incredible wave of devices out there that are, as you say, kind of fundamentally insecure because people don't even think to manage them, right? It's not even in their mindset. I change the password out of the box. I just plug the thing into my house and I don't even know how it works, right? And so I think as a call provider, certainly there's a challenge there on both helping people building, let's say IOT applications, to be able to manage those from us, to manage those devices. A big part of I think the IOT space is how do you actually manage all the devices that are connecting into the applications on the cloud? And of course there's a network and security dimension too, is how do we build a resilient platform that can resist those kinds of attacks? But it's a real challenge, I think, for the whole industry and certainly it pushes on some weak points in the internet around DNS and how to secure that space. Well, this brings up the service area and this is something that's been in tired conversations on theCUBE, certainly, but we've always said IOT increases your service area. There is no perimeter. This is case in point. Absolutely the default password is one. But also the notion of patching and updating becomes an issue. And this is something that doesn't, it's nuanced a little bit, we all know that patch upgrades is where people attack. Right, absolutely. People are lazy, generally speaking. So this is where Agile is interesting. So what's your take on this as a CTO? This is one of the benefits of auto provisioning. Absolutely, yeah. This is one of the benefits of revision management of Agile. Is this going to be an opportunity to close that gap there as a key vector of security? Yeah, I certainly think it's one of those watershed moments that I think will drive some of the conversation forward. I mean, if I look at the space that we all like to call cognitive, which is a little bit of a buzzword, but that whole space is really driven by some of these ideas of how do I get a proper CI-CD pipeline in place? If you'll get things like containers and the emergence of containers, I think part of what's underlying that is getting away from this patch and upgrade maintenance model for software and getting to a model where things are more replaceable, easily provisionable. And that helps with these kinds of problems. It doesn't solve it, you still have to update things but the pain and the cost of doing those upgrades and keeping up to date on your software is the heck of a lot easier. Well, this is where the cognitive engine can come in. So for instance, if there's analytics on devices that are connected to the network, if there's default passwords that aren't changed, for instance, that should notify. And those spaces are exactly where we're working. So for example, in our container space, we've been doing a lot of work around scanning analytics on the container contents, the actual software that's running in those containers to give people insight into vulnerabilities and problems. And the next step of that journey is actually watching the runtime behavior and using cognitive capabilities to actually analyze that execution time behavior of applications and give people insights on, you have this problem of vulnerability or this behavior pattern that's hitting your app that I haven't seen before. So I think there's huge opportunity to kind of apply these techniques. Okay, so to connect with doctors, the hard question I want to bring in the heat here on the fastball to you is, companies are looking for a state-of-the-art cloud because IoT connects to the cloud, data at the edge, which you're saying the goodness of the cognitive is really cool. I totally agree with that. But at the end of the day, the customers see the security hack go, whoa, put the brakes on. So the mindset is, great, I need state-of-the-art cloud to enable my edge of the network to be completely secure. What are some of the criteria for customers as they evaluate state-of-the-art cloud to enable pure security? I mean, so I think first and foremost, state-of-the-art cloud means that that cloud platform has a perspective on how to move forward with building applications. Security is part of that story, right? How we manage the platform, the network has to be ingrained in the kind of cloud-native platform that you're building on. And so I think you have to look for what characteristics of security have been embedded in that platform? Was it an afterthought? Is it a built-in? Are the policies there? Is the visibility built into the platform? It's in the design class, not an afterthought. In the design, it's not an afterthought in the cloud, right? And you see that in lots of ways. You see that in features that exhibit themselves in the platform. You see that in how the system is managed. Some of these challenges, just like the one we saw last week, those are big, hard challenges. That was a pretty impactful event across the whole internet. And the places in the internet that did survive mostly survived because they were in attack. Not because they did something better. They just happened not to be the target that day. DDoS is like a port scan these days. It's a kiddie script or kind of a hacks, but it's at scale is an interesting problem. It's an interesting problem. So if they're doing DDoS's now, they got a slew of other potential opportunities. This is where the action is. Containers and microservices really play here. Can you expand your thoughts on where, why that's important to have a container and a strong microservices strategy? Yeah, I think there's, to me, there's three things. I mean, first off, everyone's always after, how can I build things faster? And I really think, we've been incrementally working that problem for many years, but I think the whole phenomenon around containers and microservice based development is a step function in speed of development, right? But on top of that, you get this whole scale problem. Like not only do I have to build fast, but then I need to be able to scale quickly, right? And I think in today's world, with everyone being digital and connected, the odds of you, if you hit success growing to scale quickly, are much higher than they've ever been. You don't get this nice, slow ramp. And I think containers enable an architecture to help that. And then the final thing is, at the end of the day, cloud is about rental economics. And so you always want to run with just the minimum amount of resource you need for right now. And so those architectural patterns enable that. You can run just as much resource. So I think those three things combine to really drive that foundation. Can we talk about paths to the cloud for your customers? I mean, you got sort of infrastructure as a service. I guess formerly known as software. You got obviously the blue mix piece and you have this collection of SaaS sort of riding above. How are you advising customers to get to the cloud? What are the different options? Everybody's talking about hybrid, but clearly everybody wants a cloud strategy. So what's my path to get there? Yeah, so our view is a couple of things. One, there's a breadth of workload, a multiple entry points that you have to deal with. So there's a strong kind of new application to develop and trend like we were just talking about with containers and microservices. There's also a lift and shift, if you will, or bring existing workloads to the cloud path. So for example, our partnership with VMware is a good manifestation of that where we can help clients take all these existing workloads and bring them into the cloud relatively unchanged and give them that on-ramp. So part of it is just about breadth and having different entry points for people depending on what their motivations are and where their journey is, but then delivering in a way that's connected so that you can cross those boundaries and you can move from one scenario to the next. And so we've been focused on that breadth and then the other dimension has been delivery models. Public cloud, local on-premise cloud and dedicated models and being able to mix and match those as you see fit and as you have different kind of regulatory and policy. And we talked earlier about the sort of, the experience coming together is the, from an on-prem and public, are you trying to get that experience to be similar or is it partially similar? You used to be involved in pure systems, I think. That business has somewhat changed when you guys sold the X86 business, but what's that experience like? That's one of the areas where I think we've done really well in the market, is that we have a consistent story with Bluemix across public, dedicated, local where it's the same experience, it's the same services. They're all delivered as a service even on-prem so it's still a cloud service model, not a software delivery model. And so you really do get that same experience across all those systems or all those paths without having to kind of know how to manage it, interact with it differently, set it up differently. And that's very different than what our competitors are doing. Okay, and then you mentioned the VMware partnership and then AWS and VMware did a partnership last week. The narrative in the trade press was, oh, this Trump's IBM's deal, what's your response to that? Yeah, I don't see it that way at all. I mean, one, it's a competitive market. It's going to happen with multiple players. We're in market now. We have over a thousand clients now. We have at least seven more months before they have anything out there. And I think more importantly, we have the relationships with the clients who find that solution valuable. And it was interesting, you know, they did that announcement, VMworld, Barcelona happened last week, you know, anecdotally, you look at the traffic at Amazon's booth, paired to ours. It was night and day. I mean, we're doing real work with that VMware partnership today that Amazon is striving to get to in the future. Well, a year from now, they'll have another one. Yeah, a year from now, they'll have something. But that, why would- You have Apple hidden gem in there too. It's the Apple deal last year on stage was a huge differentiator. And cognitive, right? So that's your big differentiator in your club. Why wouldn't any large cloud player want to do some kind of deal like that with VMware that has this huge enterprise footprint? But ultimately, isn't it a trip into the public cloud? Yeah, yeah, ultimately it is. It is about kind of moving those workloads into a public cloud context. And I do think, you know, that's why Amazon and Google tried and everyone has wanted those models because there's an endemic workload there that people are trying to get to the cloud. Just don't see how that's a losing proposition for any cloud provider, not just IBM. And, you know, we were there first. We have that capability now. So that absolutely provides some advantage. And you got a World of Watson developer event coming up that's going to be in San Francisco on November 9th. Let's just give Meg Swanson her team a plug on that. If you're in San Francisco, I want to check it out. But I'll bring up the enterprise developer cloud. Because I think there's a huge opportunity that no one's talking about. We're seeing it in our Wikibon research team who have identified that a new persona has emerged. A new psychographic profile that did not exist until this generation. And that is a business-minded developer. And the reason is, many things, one, is more focused on entrepreneurship. They see all these companies going public, all the unicorns. But more importantly, with digital transformation, the role of the developers on the front lines, more and more, portion of the developer community have to be aware of what CAPX is, what OPEX is, buzzwords and business models. But yet they don't want to get an MBA. So we're seeing this new business-minded developer. So the enterprise is actually creating this new class of developer. And the question is, you guys are adding 20, the question to you is, as you guys see your traction, which is from my notes talking to the folks in strategy, is 20,000 developers a week you're adding. That's pretty freaking impressive. A million over the past year, you're onboarding a lot of developers. I know it's a corporate focus, there's a lot of marketing behind that. But you got meat on the bone with Bluemix. What's this, can you share any insights around this new persona, around this business-minded developer? Because again, the apps are the business now. Yeah, to me, I think that the emergence of that persona is actually kind of a manifestation of the complexity of building these solutions going down. I mean, you look at call platform, I talked about this in my talk yesterday, like there's such amazing innovation, like from five years ago to today, on hardware, on services, I mean, all the AI stuff we're doing in Watson, like try to do that five years ago, and now it's an API call. And so I think the bar to build these solutions has gone down so much, that it's allowed all these developers to not think about the technology and not think about the infrastructure, but actually think about, well, what problem can I solve? And, you know, from a disruption mindset, like you can disrupt somebody's business model with much less cost and investment than it's ever taken in the past. And so I think- The speed of getting a valued product out is fast. It's fast. And the cost is low. They're driving the bus. So it's just like how do I compose these things together and I can do it relatively cheaply, very quickly, and experiment with something in the market. So I just think it drives, you know, there's more time to spend your energies on innovating and being entrepreneurial. So I love the business value discussion and I don't usually like to get in the weeds too much, but we have some experience with the IBM cloud. We have some experience with AWS. We use multiple clouds. Monitoring tools to understand sort of what's happening. You know, where are you with that maturity? Should we be using third-party tools, like New Relic, for example, or are there native tools that we should be using? Our developers say, okay, maybe it's a learning curve thing for them, but give us the update there. So there are certainly native tools that are built in around log collection analytics and metrics monitoring that are part of the platform. We think that's a really important part of the platform. There's also, of course, integrations with some of the other players, like New Relics, Data Dogs, and others that have great products that really give you some great insights. I think there's some untapped spaces still. An obvious one to me is microservices. You know, if you really build a microservice app, actually understanding how all these pieces are talking to each other and connected in the failure modes, that's a pretty nascent area in the monitoring space that I think needs lots of investment. For everybody, right, for everybody, right. That, you know, I think you'll see some focus from us over the coming months on, you know, giving people that insight as you adopt those kinds of models. So, you know, to stay in the weeds, because you're a CTO, and you're a fellow, so the comment that was pitched to me, I didn't necessarily agree with it, but I think it's relevant. Lumix is the cloud's first public cloud option targeting developers to build new cloud-native workloads. True, but not the only. But not, I agree with that. But, again, but if you take on what you guys are doing, Visa, Visa, Amazon, web services, you have a lot of experience working with other vendors, so what's interesting to me, and you certainly had the Apple announcement last year, was a huge differentiator. I want to ask about that a little bit later, but you have validation with AT&T, it did a deal with them. Box.net, or now Box.com, Workday, all IBM-exclusive deals, and again, this is the multi-vendor strategy, rendering itself out, so how do you talk about that, because that's different than AWS. But the developers still want to do native cloud, but might want to integrate Box, or Workday, or something. So I think, you know, look, I guess that our strategy is about breadth, choice with consistency, having those different entry points. You know, we firmly believe we have to have a world-class cloud-native platform, that's where people want to build going forward, but lots of people are not there, and there's all these other scenarios that have to be dealt with today, and those deals with guys like Box and Workday, you know, we think we have some real value to bring to them, and our global footprint, and bringing them into other geographies, and they also, frankly, teach us a lot, right? I mean, there's a great synergy there, where we bring those workloads into our cloud, they teach us a lot about different kinds of workloads that scale to help improve the platform. I just want to get into operational questions. We were talking before we came on camera here about IBM Go, which is our new software we push for the IBM events, and it's all on a new API, new CMS with APIs. On software, we ported it from Amazon, so all cool. But what's interesting is we're talking about how now the new developer architecture is slinging APIs around. Why would I want to go build a monolithic software application when I can build a cloud-native workload on BlueMix? That's a SaaS app, but then dealing with other services like Box, right, for file sharing and collaboration, potentially, or Workday for HR, I'm connecting to them just, I don't, it's easy. Yeah, it is. We're just slinging APIs around. Yeah, I think that kind of compositional style is how new apps are built, right? Like, if you're building something new, you're going to build it with containers and microservices and APIs and connecting APIs together. I mean, that's just how I think things are going to get built. Now, there's lots of existing stuff you have to connect to that you have to transform and you have to move and there's capability needed for that, but the new stuff I think that style that we're seeing emerge is there for a reason because you can do some powerful things. And you know, I told a story yesterday about a partnership we did with the USA Cycling and the Rio Olympics. And you know, that solution like brought together Watson IoT and Spark and Node.js and Cloudants and, you know, composed all those things together in, I mean, the team had that up and running in like six weeks and had a solution, you know, all the way from the bike. That's exactly what Blumix is sexier than Softlayer in my opinion. What I loved, yeah, no doubt. What I loved about that story is the athlete was saying, we used to have all this data. We just, we couldn't get, make sense out of it and we couldn't get it in real time. Yeah, they got it the next morning. The cloud totally changed that experience in real time and allowed us to change our behavior. And in some non-obvious ways too, like one of the big things for them was the whole solution was in the cloud. So when they went from venue to venue at competitions, all they had to do was bring the bike with the phone on the back. They didn't need anything else. They had no servers to set up and drag with them. They just brought the bike and did their thing and they all got beamed back to Blumix and they could get that out. Real-time feedback as opposed to go faster. Right, right, exactly, go faster. Jason, great to see you. CTO of the IBM cloud and IBM Fellow loves to go on the weed. So ping him on Twitter, what's your Twitter handle? J.R. McGee. J.R. McGee, great, great guest. Thanks for sharing your insight. Yeah, great to be here. IBM cloud, we were there from the beginning with Blumix and 20,000 developers a week. Congratulations, great success. Again, this enterprise is creating a whole new persona and a lot of opportunities. We'll be back with more live coverage from World of Watson after this short break.