 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Hey, welcome back everyone, you are watching theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm sure that my co-host, Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon. Our next guest is excited to be here. We're excited for her to be here. Jamie Thomas, GM of the storage and software to find you with an IBM. Great to see you, welcome back. Yes, thank you. It's always good to talk with you guys. We always say, we want to make people feel comfortable with people. Whenever you're around, we always feel comfortable. You're a great person in the interview. I always enjoy the talks and have a great time. And storage is one of those topics that is so fun to talk about because it's the center of the value proposition. Some may not think that's the case, but we like storage. So a couple of things. Storage and software to find is certainly the middle of the action. A lot of opportunity in data center. Clouds, storage and data is always growing. See that, analytics. We're talking about people are drowning in data. That's a big problem that's been part of the conversation. What's going on? I mean, what's the update for you guys with technology, you got flash, you got software, software's eating the world? What's new? Well, I think you're exactly right. These tectonic shifts have really driven storage in a new direction. It's really time for a modern storage infrastructure, if you will, to really support this more effectively for clients to get the benefits and the economic returns that they want to have. And so last year, as you recall, we spoke at last year, we really embarked on this journey around to focus on software to find storage and flash. And really the impetus for us was to create a landscape where through intelligent software, we can enable clients to really get more effective storage management and optimization. And we firmly believe that the new hardware form factor in the future is flash because it not only returns benefits to our clients from a performance perspective, but it also solves a lot of operational problems around space and energy consumption. But last week, we made a critical set of announcements on this journey to software to find storage. And we announced a new family of offerings called IBM Spectrum Storage, all software to find offerings that really allow our clients to both manage heterogeneous storage hardware environments but also optimize these infrastructures of the future, if you will. And what do you mean by optimizing? Tying into, integrating, unifying? Well, we have three main capabilities we think about in terms of optimization. And really the key difference here is we really unleashed the software from the traditional hardware-based appliance, if you will, allowing clients to deploy these capabilities as software with hardware as an appliance, if that's what they want, and also on the cloud, on software in a pay-as-you-go model. But the three capabilities are, first and foremost, virtualization, which we've had for a while, the ability to virtualize storage environments and really improve the efficiency and utilization of these environments, which in many cases are highly underutilized. The second capability we actually did ship last year is called Spectrum Scale. It's about being able to support big data and analytics environments and do that in a cost-effective way, but whether you're doing scientific computing or just simply managing data that really is maybe for an SAP supply chain type application more effectively. And then we announced a new capability which is absolutely critical for cloud-based storage called Accelerate. And this is where we've extracted the software intelligence from our XIV appliance, which is a very popular appliance worldwide. It's used by over 100,000 different server implementations and with clients like Netflix. But we've really abstracted the software layer, and that allows our clients now to deploy this capability in a matter of minutes instead of what was months in terms of getting the hardware appliance into their data center and connecting it into the network. It's also allowing them to make use of the commodity-based hardware that they've got so they can manage their hardware life cycles in a different way. And it comes with all the benefits that that appliance came with, frankly, from an ease of management that's manifested in the software itself. Yeah, so a year ago in the summer you guys announced sort of the direction. Yes. And now the spectrum is really the culmination of that. Yes, absolutely. At times like virtualization, there's a little GPFS. Yeah. The ease of use piece I didn't really get at the time, but that's really coming out of XIV. Yeah, yeah. And now it comes together. You're a software exec by background. It's clear that this is the future. What does that product look like? And you mentioned sort of pay as you go. How do you sort of package that for the marketplace? Well, I mean, if we look at our new product, Spectrum Accelerate, we're first and foremost delivering it as a new software offering which will be orderable and have all the licensing terms like all IBM software. So it'll go through that ordering system. But then some of our clients will choose to also continue to buy the asset with the fit for purpose appliance model. But in the case of our cloud-based pricing which we'll announce later, the clients will be able to buy in a terabyte-based pricing model but in a pay-as-you-go model. So they'll be able to ascertain what they need. And on a monthly basis, basically purchase the storage that they need. And this will allow our clients to have a lot more flexibility. And we actually did that with our scale offering last year on software. And we've gained a lot of experience for how clients want to purchase that type of capability. Well, and clients have been sort of hinting that they're going to be demanding that for. And now they're starting to demand it. Do you see that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, I think a lot of our clients are still trying to understand what their data, lifecycle management policy will look like, where they will actually have data today and in the future. But first and foremost, they need to have flexibility of choice. So whether they choose to have this data on-prem or off-prem in the future, we believe we have to provide a storage architecture that allows them to do that easily. And you mentioned heterogeneous before. That's, again, if we go back to the heritage of the sand volume controller, SVC, and store-wise, and now it's integrated into Spectrum, that was everybody else's storage, and IBM's storage. It was anybody's storage. So that's not just lip service. That's something that you guys have always- Right. We support more than 260 different hardware storage devices. And that's the foundational element of both our virtualization capability and our control capability, to build so you manage a very heterogeneous environment. So you've backed that up. It's kind of the heritage. You will go to market and say, okay, whatever storage you want to put on there, great, if you don't want to buy the appliance model, go for it. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And a lot of our clients, when we embarked on this journey around unharnessing the software, if you will, the software intelligence that was resident in the XIV appliance, some of them said, I have hundreds and thousands of commodity-based servers already in my enterprise, and I understand how to manage the high availability aspects of those servers. So if you provide the software to me, then I'll have the flexibility in terms of how I deploy that on the hardware. And that's really the genesis of why we did this. But give them choice. They want- Give them choice. And they wanted to then use that in what context, mix and matching across systems, or just between applications and work loads or both? It allows them to deal with this dichotomy between CAPEX and OPEX, to also be able to manage that hardware lifecycle independent of having it attached to this appliance for life, right? Well, yeah. When I think about the storage business for decades, it's been, here's a box. All the metadata is locked inside that box. You're basically stuck with that box. And if you want to migrate, good luck. And essentially, you're taking a different approach. Again, as a software executive, are you kind of struggling to say, well, why wouldn't you do it this way? I mean... Well, I think that if you look at it from the perspective of our experience with middleware, databases, application servers, and things like that, this is really somewhat no different, right? It's about providing the capability of software, then allowing customers through a prescribed set of best practices to understand how to deploy the capability. But we had great experiences with our beta program. We actually started a beta program of this product last fall, and across financial services, energy concerns, service providers. We had a variety of experiences. In many cases, these clients did get the beta, and they had it up and running in a matter of like 30 minutes. So it was really a good experience. And what were they installing? It was a software? They were just installing software on the hardware that they already had. And they brought their... They brought their own hardware? They brought their own hardware to the table. What else did you learn in that process? I mean, obviously, there's little bugs here and there. You're working that out. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, well, that's the advantage of a beta, right? I mean, they give you feedback. They gave us a lot of feedback about wanting to have a central dashboard. So we have a dashboard that really manifested what we already had with the appliance. But now we can, certainly we run it on mobile devices or the form factor that they'd like. It's a dashboard that allows them with a glance to see the performance of not just only that particular appliance, if you will, but if they, in the future, have it running in a hybrid model, they'll be able to see the performance of that entire infrastructure. So for customers that aren't in the weeds on all of the nuances, and they're just dealing with their operations, yeah, the cat-packs, the hot-packs thing going on. What's the message to the CIO and the folks in there about the new approach? Is it choice? What's the high-level message? And why should they be paying attention? And what does it mean for their business as they go forward in terms of their journey with data center, private, hybrid, and public cloud? I think there's two main things. It's about flexibility. So many of our clients don't exactly know the model that they will use for particular applications or workloads today, where the data will reside. So they need to have the flexibility for the future to make the right choice in the future, and economics. I mean, this does change the economics equation in many different ways. It simplifies the acquisition. It simplifies how you're able to use what you've already invested in from a hardware perspective. It really changes economics, I think, in a big way. So when you came into the division, obviously you do what any executive does, you sort of learn what's going on, you do your deep dives, but then you have to place bets. So it sounds like you're placing them on software defined and flash. Yes. We're placing those bets, and we're definitely taking advantage of flash capability, not only within our flash system product, which I know my colleagues will talk more to you about today, but we're also infusing flash into our existing product lines. So our high-end storage, we shipped flash enclosures last year. So we think flash is a dominant hardware form factor for storage going forward. So yeah, we're placing these bets. How does it, specifically with regard to spectrum and software defined, how does it change the sort of resource requirements that you have as an executive, the skill sets that you need? Where do you, obviously, big company, can you talk about that challenge as a head of storage? Right, well, we made some important organizational changes earlier this year, where we actually brought together the storage capabilities that were in our traditional hardware unit with the storage capabilities in our software unit, and now we're in the integrated unit, and that also gives us the advantage of an integrated sales force. And it brought a lot of software skills to our business, where we now have a worldwide storage software sales force to enable us to embark on this agenda. And I think it's important to note that even with our flash offerings, the value of those offerings have largely always been about the state of innovation around the hardware engineering, combined with really, really good software engineering in that box, in that system. Well, it's interesting because I would imagine that most of the engineers in the hardware groups these days are software developers anyway. Yeah, there's a lot of software in everything that we do, absolutely. So the competition is always out there doing their thing. They always say, power the portfolio. I think you know what I'm talking about. So EMC, for instance, they always talk about the portfolio of storage. You guys are within a big, broader IBM. Big data's huge, gotta be storage. What are the key things that you're looking at in terms of new ground to take for the storage group? Obviously, you have the old spinning disk, you got flash, you got tape out there. We always joke what's going to die for a spinning disk or tape, and tape's still hanging around, but you have to reinvent the future and create that and get in front of that next wave. What is that next wave for you guys? Well, I definitely think that there's a tight integration that needs to occur between the storage layer and many of these killer applications, if you will. And so to that end, last year, we integrated and we shipped our software-defined storage with Big Insights, which is IBM's Hadoop-based distribution. We also see a lot of value with software-defined storage to improve the performance and economics of things like enterprise content management systems. So I think that there's a number of ISV applications and other what I call killer applications that are in this information management and analytics world where this marriage of software-defined storage is going to be critical, the marriage of the two assets together will be critical, create solutions, exactly. So the marketing buzzwords out there are Data Lake. I introduced the concept of data ocean, which is getting a lot of traction, trending on Twitter. Lake seems batch. It seems like it had big lakes. You have Lake Tahoe. The waves can be as high as six feet, but the ocean's different. Dynamic, that's more real-time. So some say it's web-scale, it's got unpredictability. That's the new data model that the future's around the corner. What do you think about those two terms, Data Lake? What does that mean to you? Is this data fabric that's going on? Because that seems to be where storage software is getting a lot of action in terms of where people are making bets on. Software-defined storage and software systems are all about managing low-latency data, bringing it from the data warehouse, putting it into real-time. You guys got some amazing in-memory stuff happening. So software's going to be smart, but also it's going to move data around. Well, I think one of the key factors that a lot of our clients desire, though, is the ability to extract intelligence from this data without moving it around. Because moving it around really is taking up an incredible amount of network bandwidth. I've been in meetings where the network guy's saying, wait a minute, this has got to stop. So... You mean the data moving around? Yeah, the data moving around is taking up enormous bandwidth and actually slowing down the processing. Is that the approach? Well, the approach we took with our scale product is really about the ability to ingest the data wherever it resides, right? So the ability to access that data, whether it's on a disk-based system or a tape-based system and do that in a seamless way. And we created that approach and that really was derived from investments we made over a period of years to power things like Watson, right? It's incredible ability to ingest data, gain insight from it, which, as I said before, is valuable in scientific computing and there's many examples of that in life sciences and things like that, but also in just applications where there's a huge amount of data that's perhaps going through a supply chain, like an SAP application, right? Well, that's your file system expertise that allows you to do that as a critical piece of what you're doing now. Okay, let's look out nine to 18 months. What do you want to accomplish with this group? What should we be watching as observers? Well, I think that our key focus right now is working with our clients to make sure they get value out of what we've announced. We've announced a very rich set of capability in both software to find and flash. We want to enable our clients across many industries to get what we think are enormous benefits, both in cost savings and business performance. And today I talked about some really cool examples of that in my presentation, both in the gaming industry and in the insurance industry and that's really going to be a big part of our focus now that we've rolled this out. Now over the year, we'll continue to evolve the spectrum storage family. We intend to deliver a cloud-based gateway capability which we announced in alpha form and also some additional analytics that we'll be shipping on top of software later this year. So the family, the beauty of this, the family is because of the way we've designed it, we can more easily ship capability as it gets through its beta test and is ready to go to market, we'll be able to pull it down. So spectrum is the family name, right? Spectrum is the family name. Marker behind that, more software defined. And make customers choose is the key strategy. Yeah. Okay. And it scales, layering, I'm hearing layering features and functions as you go on. Now I have to reinvent the wheel every time. Exactly. Slow down R&D. Yeah, we really are wanting to, one of the things we know we needed to focus on was agility, right? Agility, but with the right meeting the expectations of our clients in the same time. And so this agenda is really all about delivering the code as early as possible to them, getting their feedback, turning the crank on it and then getting it out to clients when we think it's ready. So does the software awake the sleeping storage giant inside of IBM? What's your? I think that IBM is all behind storage. They're really across the geographies across all of our client and our sales teams. I think it's really renewed the focus on storage and really brought to the forefront of everyone's mind how important it is for the infrastructure of the future because it really is key. It really is key to cloud as well as big data and analytics. It's really, really key. It's a center of the value problem. Yes, yeah. The last question to end the segment is for the folks out there that storage is top of mind because it really is front and center and it's really in the center of the action and conversations. What should folks know about IBM that they may not be paying attention to what you guys are doing with storage? What's the message to the folks that they share with them the bottom line, hey, hit the shakes, hey, what's going on with IBM? Tell them what's happening. Well, I think first and foremost they need to understand that we are really serious about this agenda and that we are investing enormously. We announced a billion dollar investment in software to find storage but this family encapsulates and ships more than 700 innovations and patents that we've created over a period of time and that through the investments we made in our applied research laboratories which are critical for things like Flash, this is an important endeavor for us and we see it as an important part of our overall cloud agenda. Whether it's a data lake or data ocean, storage needs to be in there. Jamie, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate you. It's great to talk with you again. Thank you, congratulations on the new staff. We're just looking forward to talking to the Flash, your new Flash guy Eric in a second. This is theCUBE extracting the signal, storing the signal, sharing it with you. It's on demand, it's live with theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.