 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015, brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and expect to see the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and we are here live at the IBM Interconnect show inside the social lounge, GoSocial, InterconnectGo.com. Come, it's a social experience. Come engage, read what's going on in the crowd. We have VIP influences, keynotes, everything's there. Of course theCUBE will be broadcasting our commentary and having some fun. Our next guest, CUBE alumni, Sandy Carter, general manager of cloud ecosystem developer evangelism and I think I might have missed something. They welcome back. That's good. Thank you. It's such a thrill to be back. I love theCUBE. I follow you guys all the time. So thanks so much for having me. Thanks for spending some time. I know you're super busy and thanks for coming over. So I just want to get your take on this new way. Love the slogan because you can fill in the blank. A new way to work, new way to build, new way to engage. And you guys are doing a lot of crowd chats. You guys have a huge engagement organization. I've never seen anyone with so many employees Twitter on their own handles. So it's really, that's awesome. But you have a huge community that you've been part of that social business transformation. So here's an update. Where you guys have come from, where you're going on this new way to blank? Well, I think, you know, one of the ones that we should talk about is a new way to social. So you recognize that we've got lots of IBM employees out there. And we found that one of the biggest influencers of the brand is your employee, right? So the new way to work is employees are your ambassadors, along with your clients. But those employees are the most, most influential folks with your brand. So having so many IBMers out there, you know, blogging and tweeting and snap chatting really makes a huge difference in the impact on house on the brand. And if you think about it, you know, that's really word of mouth at its finest having IBM employees talk about the new trends and what's happening in the marketplace. It's a great way to engage. So a lot of companies try to do that, what you just described, but they fall down. Why do you feel that you've been successful? How are you able to create a climate in which the employees felt comfortable? Obviously, the employees that many companies are passionate about their companies or they wouldn't be working there. But how did you sort of entice them? What was the sort of secret to get them to participate? Well, you know, I think there's a lot of things I think the top things were first we train the employees so that they would feel comfortable. In fact, we have a social network inside of IBM. So it's like a great training ground, right? How do you do, you know, Bluetooth instead of YouTube? And so you get practice doing tweets and videos and all that inside. That makes people comfortable and confident, right? And I think the second big thing is in addition to the training is we also have a great set of guidelines. So we tell the employees right up front, here's what you can do and what you can't do. And I think it's quite interesting. There was a piece of survey that was done about kids in a playground. And if kids are in a playground, and you put them in the center of the playground, and there is no fence in the playground, the kids will stay kind of hunkered in the center because they don't know where they go, they don't know where the boundaries are. If you have the same playground, and you put the fence out, they'll go to the edges of the fence, they'll push the boundaries. So in reality, what it says is that having some sort of boundary actually helps your employees push the edge, push the limits. And that's what we did right up front is had a set of guidelines. And then the third one, I think is just encouragement from the very top, you know, you know, doing leaderboards, doing encouraging rockster contest, gamifying it, sitting folks out on missions. I mean, it's just now part of our culture. So how did you get through the top ROI? Right? What's the ROI? Why are we spending all the time? I mean, going back maybe five, six years. So how did you get through that? And I assume it existed? Well, I don't know if you know IBM that we measure everything, right? And so one of the things that we did is we partnered with the MIT. And we took a look at 2200 IBMers. And we we said, what happens if they're out there in social? And we actually looked at the impact of them connecting socially. And that means actually actively connecting socially with other executives and other companies, and them connecting with other people and other companies. And what we found is that those employees who connected produce more revenue for IBM than those who did not. And then came the unleashing. And the the reason is, you know, if you think about it, your customers are in the driver's seat, your customers are the ones who really today are controlling the environment. If you have a relationship with them, which is all social is, of course, you're going to buy from someone you trust and someone you know. So the executives realized that that that social was a natural extension of those relationships. And it was kind of a return on instinct at the time. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now it's turned into actually something you can measure. Yeah, that's fantastic. Talk about the new way to build and how that relates to new way to social, because we've done a couple of crowd shats were titled new way to engage new way to social, new way to build a new way to work kind of slogan. But you're now in a new role. I want to get you to explain that specifically because building things is what people are jazzed about. I just talked to the guys who race boats at 150 miles an hour and use blue mix. In Watson, the guy's like Watson's on the top of the bridge. I'm like, I think is it a person? So like they're jazzed data is changing everything, right? So building stuff's important. But the collaborative piece of the people involved now also increases. So talk about this new way to social new way to engage meets building. And you know, yeah, so my new role, I think I have the best job at IBM. I don't know if anybody else has told you that, but I do. I am helping to craft the cloud ecosystem. And when I say craft, what I mean is that we're engaging the community of developers of entrepreneurs and startups of digital agencies. Everyone who's involved in making the cloud successful. And so it involves going digital and engaging those developers where they live. 67% of developers engagement is digital. So it's figuring out ways to better engage them doing the A B testing, you know, getting things, not just a B testing to test a against B, but really to create this culture of experimentation that these guys love. So we've been trying out a lot of great stuff. We've we've sponsored Girls Who Code to get more women and girls coding that gets us into one part of the community. We've done a lot with different cities. So we've recently done digital dot NYC, which is pretty amazing. It helps bring together entrepreneurs, investors, developers, digital agencies altogether. And I think the really cool thing is that we are a member of the community. We're not taking over the community. We are part of the community. And here at this conference, we announced with Citibank, the Citibank mobile challenge. They decided to be part of that community, and we're helping to build up the fintech community, the financial technology community of developers. And it's quite cool because they're going to base it all on Bluemix. We're going to provide mentors and we're going to do this starting in Europe. We're going to go around to Asia and Latin America. So anyway, you can tell I'm really passionate. The city story is fantastic. I mean, the keynote the other day was wonderful. Heather is right on. Yeah, she was amazing. So this developer actions, everyone knows when the developers you win when when the win the battle, if you will. We learned that the last time we were on with IBM was developers are people. They're not just when you don't win the developers when when the people they're human beings, right? Social is very important. How do you win the audience? How do you win the crowd? How do you win the people in a way that's an extension of what you guys are used to, you know, owned media, paid media. We've been talking about this new concept of paid owned and it's not new to us in the business, but like, you buy ads to advertise stuff, you own your content, you guys create a lot of content within IBM. But you guys are doing some really amazing things with social that's opening up this new way to earn and win the crowd. Earn media, can you explain like what that means and how you, and how do you do it cause developers, you have to earn it. Yeah, and developers you don't market to, right? I mean that's not what they want as people that not something that's top of their mind for them. I think the great thing about developers is it's really about that developer to developer conversation, right? They want to talk to someone who's like them. They don't want to talk to a marketing person when they're developing a code. So a lot of our engagement has been looking at ways that we can engage them in their local environment in the wild. So we do a lot of things with GitHub and Stack Overflow. And when I say do a lot of things, it means getting our ambassadors inside of IBM, our technical folks into the communities, into GitHub, into Stack Overflow and making that real for them. It means being engaged in things that they're interested in, like the city mobile challenge that we're doing. That's something that the developers around the world wanted to do. They want to transform banking. And so we're engaging with them where they are. So there's so much action going on in Silicon Valley, but it's like a little slice of the world. You talk to VCs and they say, oh yes, all our developers develop on this platform or that platform. It's like one tenth of one percent of the entire marketplace. I'm interested and intrigued by what you're doing in New York in particular. There's such a vibrant community going on in New York. So I wonder if you could talk about sort of that world outside of Silicon Valley and how you're specifically targeting that crowd. Yeah, you know, it's really fascinating. New York, by the way, has the fastest growing startup community in the U.S. So Silicon Valley's bigger. New York is growing faster. I'm at Boston. I'm jealous. Yeah, Boston's next. But the really interesting thing about the city approach is that developers in these communities are very local. And so New York is very focused on development and entrepreneurship in retail and financial services. And so we meet the developers where they are there. In fact, the New York Tech Meetup has 42,000 developers that are engaged in that community. And financial service has always been a leader in tech, right? Yeah, yeah. And then you go, you know, if you go then to Boston, we see developers there who are biotech, who are healthcare focused. And so the great thing is that we're very flexible, we're experimenting, we're leveraging social to get into the communities and to deliver value where we are. So in Boston, we really hone and focus in on healthcare and biotechnology, education, universities that are really important there. And we're doing the same thing across the world. So in London, you know, they have a set of things that they love, right? In New York City, for instance, we partnered with the mayor's office and the Economic Development Center because that's who the developers and the entrepreneurs trust. We would never do that in San Francisco, right? We would go with another row. Same as true in Singapore, right? There's two or three groups. It's a global landscape. It's a global landscape. It's global, but every community is local. Okay, we're getting the hook you, but I want to just give you a chance to explain to folks some of the stats here. I saw a great tweet yesterday, 21,000, and some numbers you shared or retweeted from from someone who's I but you came up on the radar. What else is going on here at Interconnect? Share some stats, share some of the cool things that are going on here, the awesomeness at the event, and what your plans are in your new role this next year. What are your key things you're going to focus on, high level, to build that community up and win those people over? Well, here, of course, we've got 21,000 people here all across the board. One of the things I love is that 45 percent of them are brand new, first time at an IBM conference, and I love DevAT. If you haven't been over to the MGM, we've got a whole section of DevAT Interconnect, which is just for developers. We have about 2,000 developers there, and they're tinkering and playing. In fact, one of them said yesterday, you know, he's naked without his coat, so he runs over to the DevAT so he can code, code, code away. So, so many exciting things. In fact, later today, I'm going to be doing growth hacking for the entrepreneur and the startup business. So, at DevAT, and you're broadcasting the DevAT on the DevAT channel. If you go to the Go TV and the main tent, you'll see that we have three channels. The third is the DevAT, so we're broadcasting all day today and tomorrow. So we'll have your talk going on there as well. Sandy, thanks for spending the time with us. Sandy Carter, live inside the Cube, sharing the data with you and being authentic, as usual, great social mojo at IBM. We love working with you guys. Congratulations on your success and continue as we keep learning more and more about the social business equation. And it's early, early days. This is the Cube doing our share. Dave Vellante, John Furrier. We write back after this short break.