 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Hello and welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 and our special coverage of APN partner experience. We are theCUBE virtual and I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today I'm joined by Mike Gilfix who is the Chief Product Officer for IBM CloudPacks. Mike, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. Now, CloudPacks is a new thing from IBM. I'm not particularly familiar with it, but it's related to IBM's partnership with AWS. So maybe you could just start us off quickly by explaining what is CloudPacks and what's your role as Chief Product Officer there? Well, CloudPacks is sort of our next generation platform. What we've been doing is bringing the power of IBM software, really across the board, and bringing it to a hybrid cloud environment. So making it really easy for our customers to consume it wherever, wherever they want, however they want to choose to do it with a consistent skill set and making it really easy to kind of get those things up and running and deliver value quickly. And this is part of IBM's hybrid approach. So what we've seen is organizations that can leverage the same skill set and basically take those workloads, make them run where they need to, yield about a two and a half times ROI. And CloudPacks sit at the center of that running on the OpenShift platform so they get consistent security, skills and powerful software to run their business, running everywhere. And we've been partnering with AWS because we wanna make sure that those customers that have made that choice can get access to those capabilities easy and as fast as possible. Right, and the CloudPacks are built on the Red Hat Open, now let me get this right, it's the Open Hybrid Cloud Platform. So is that OpenShift? It is OpenShift, yes. I mean, IBM is incredibly committed to open software and OpenShift does provide that common layer. And the reason that's important is you want consistent security, you wanna avoid lock-in, right? That gives you a very powerful platform, a fabric if you will, that can truly run anywhere with any workload. And we've been working very closely with AWS to make sure that is a premier first-class experience on AWS. Yeah, so the OpenShift on AWS is relatively new from IBM. So could you explain what is OpenShift on AWS and how does that differ from the OpenShift that people may be already familiar with? Well, the kernel, if you will, is the same. It's the same sort of central open-source software, but in working closely with AWS, we're now making those things available as simple services that you can quickly provision and run. And that makes it really easy for people to get started, but again, sort of carrying forward that same sort of skill set. So that's kind of a key way in which we see that you can gain that sort of consistency, no matter where you're running that workload. And we've been investing in that integration working closely with Amazon. Right, and we all know Red Hat's commitment to open-source software and the OpenEco systems, Red Hat is rightly famous for it. And I am old enough to remember when it was a brand new thing, particularly in enterprise, to allow open-source to come in and have anything to do with workloads. And now it's all the rage and people are running quite critical workloads on it. So what are you seeing in the adoption within the enterprise of open software? The adoption is massive. I think, well, first let me describe what's driving it. I mean, people want to tap into innovation. And the beauty of open-source is you're kind of crowdsourcing, if you will, this massive community of developers that are creating just an incredible amount of innovation at incredible speed. And it's a great way to ensure that you avoid vendor lock-in. So enterprises of all types are looking to open solutions as a way both of innovating faster and getting protection. And that commitment is something certainly Red Hat has tapped into. It's behind the great success of Red Hat. And it's something that, frankly, is permeating throughout IBM and that we're very committed to driving this sort of open approach. And that means that we need to ensure that people can get access to the innovation they need, run it where they want, and ensure that they feel that they have choice. And the choice, I think, is a key part of it that isn't really coming through in some of the narrative. There's a lot of discussion about how you should actually pick, should you go cloud? I remember when it was either you should stay on site or should you go to cloud? And we had a long discussion there. Hybrid cloud really does seem to have come of age where it's a realistic kind of compromise is probably the wrong word, but it's a trade-off between doing all the one thing or all another. And for most enterprises, that doesn't actually seem to be the choice that's actually viable for them. So hybrid seems like it's actually just the practical approach and would that be accurate? Well, our studies have shown that if you look statistically at the set of workload that's moved to cloud, something like 20% of workloads have only moved to cloud, meaning the other 80% is experiencing barriers to move. And some of those barriers is figuring out what to do with all this data that's sitting on-prem or these applications that have years and years of intelligence baked into them that cannot easily be ported. And so organizations are looking at the hybrid approaches because they give them more choice. It helps them deal with fragmentation, meaning as I move more workload, I have consistent skill set. It helps me extend my existing investments and bring it into the cloud world. And all those things, again, are done with consistent security. That's really important, right? Organizations need to make sure they're protecting their assets, their data throughout, leveraging a consistent platform. So that's really the benefit of the hybrid approach. It essentially is gonna enable these organizations to unlock more workload and gain the acceleration and the transformative effect of cloud. And that's why I think they're really, that's why it's becoming a necessity, right? Because they just can't get that 80% to move yet. Yeah, and I've long said that the cloud is a state of mind rather than a particular location. It's more about an operational model of how you do things. So hearing that we've only got 20% of workloads have moved to this new way of doing things does rather suggest that there's a lot more work to be done. What, for those organizations that are just looking to do this now or they've done a bit of it and they're looking for those next new workloads, where do you see customers struggling the most and where do you think that IBM can help them there? Well, boy, where are they struggling the most? First, I think skills. I mean, they have to figure out a new set of technologies to go and transition from this old world to the new. And at the heart of that is lots of really critical debates. Like, how do they modernize the way that they do software delivery for many enterprises, right? Embrace new ways of doing software delivery. How do they deal with the data issues that arise? From where the data sits, their obligations for data protection, what happens if the data spans multiple different places but you have to provide high quality performance and security. These are all parts of issues that span different environments. And so they have to figure out how to manage those kinds of things and make it work in one place. I think the benefit of partnering with Amazon is clearly there's a huge customer base that's interested in Amazon. I think the benefit of the IBM partnership is we can help to go and unlock some of those new workloads and find ways to get that cloud benefit and help to move them to the cloud faster. Again, with that consistency of experience. And that's why I think it's a good match partnership. We're giving more customers choice. We're helping them to unlock innovation substantially faster. Right. And so for people who might want to just get started without it, how would they approach this? Do you think people might have some experience with AWS? It's almost difficult not to these days. But for those who aren't familiar with the Red Hat on AWS, with OpenShift on AWS, how would they get started with you to explore what's possible? Well, one of the things that we're offering to our clients is a service that we refer to as IBM Garage. It's an engagement model, if you will, within IBM where we work with our clients and we really help them to do co-creation. So help to understand their business problem or the target state of where they want their IT to get to. And in working with them in co-creation, we help them to affect that transition. Let's say that it's about delivering business applications faster. Let's say it's about modernizing the applications they have or offering new services, new business models. Again, all in the spirit of co-creation. We found that to be really popular. It's a great way to get started. We leveraged a design thinking approach so they can think about the customer experience and their outcome, if they're creating new business processes, new applications, and then really help them to uplift their skills and get ready to adopt cloud technology and everything that they do. It sounds like this is a lot of established workloads that people already have in their organizations. It's already there, it's generating real money. It's not those experimental workloads that we saw early on, which was a, well, let's try this. Cloud is a fabulous way where we can run some experiments and if it doesn't work, we just turn it off again. These sound like a lot more workloads that are kind of more important to the business. Is that true? Yeah, I think that's true. Now, I wouldn't say they're just existing workloads because I think there's lots of new business innovation that many of our clients want to go and launch. And so this gives them an opportunity to do that new innovation, but not forget the past. Meaning they can bring it forward and bring it forward into an integrated experience. I mean, that's what everyone demands of a true digital business, right? They expect that your experience is integrated, that it's responsive, that it's targeted and personalized. And the only way to do that is to allow for experimentation that integrates in with the standard business processes and things that you did before. And so you need to be able to connect those things together seamlessly. Right, so it sounds like it's a transition more than creating new thing completely from scratch. It's, well, look, we've done a lot of innovation over the past decade or so in cloud. We know what works, but we still have workloads that people clearly know and value. How do we put those things together and do it in such a way that we maintain the flexibility to be able to make new changes as we learn new things? Yeah, leverage what you've got, play to your strengths. I mean, that's how you create speed. If you have to reinvent the wheel every time, it's gonna be a slow roll. Yeah, and that does seem like an area where an organization probably at this point should be looking to partner with other people who have done the hard yards. They've already figured this out. What, as you say, why can't we make all of these obvious errors yourself when you're starting from scratch when there's a wealth of experience out there and particularly this whole ecosystem that exists around open software? In fact, maybe you could tell us a little bit about the ecosystem opportunities that are there because Red Hat's been part of this for a very long time. AWS has a very broad ecosystem as we're all familiar with being here at Reinvent yet again. How does that ecosystem play into what's possible? Well, let me explain why I think IBM brings a different dimension to that trio, right? IBM brings deep industry expertise. I mean, we've long worked with all of our clients, our partners on solving some of their biggest business problems and being embedded in the thing that they do. So we have deep knowledge of their enterprise challenges, where they're trying to take them, deep knowledge of their business processes. We're able to bring that industry know-how mixed with Red Hat's approach to an open foundational platform coupled with the great infrastructure you can get from Amazon. And that's a great sort of powerful combination that we can bring to each of our clients. And maybe just to bring it back a little bit to that idea of okay, so what's the role in cloud packs in that? I mean, cloud packs are the kind of software that we've built to enable enterprises to run their essential business processes, right, and the essential digital operations that they run. Everything from security to protecting their data or giving them powerful data tools to implement AI algorithms in the heart of their business or giving them powerful automation capabilities so they can digitize their operations and also make sure those things are going to run effectively. It's those kinds of capabilities that we're bringing in the form of cloud packs. Think of that as that substrate that runs a digital business that now can be brought through, right, running on AWS infrastructure through this integration that we've done. Right, so basically taking things that are as a pre-packaged module that we can just grab that module, drop it in and start using it rather than having to build it ourselves from scratch. That's right, and they can leverage those powerful capabilities and get focused on innovating the things that matter, right? So it's a huge accelerant to getting business value. It does sound a lot easier than trying to learn how to do the complex sort of deep learning and linear algorithms that are involved in machine learning. I have looked into it a bit and trying to manage that sort of deep math. I think I'd much rather just grab one off the shelf, plug it in and just use it. Yeah, it's also better than writing a template code, which was some of my first programming experiences as well. So I think the software industry has moved on just a little bit since then. I think we have. You say, I do not miss the days of handwriting assembly at all. Sometimes for nostalgia reasons, but if we want to get things done, I think I'd much rather work in something a little higher level. I think Ricky. So thank you so much for my guests there. Mike Gilfix, Chief Product Officer for IBM Cloud Packs from IBM. This has been theCUBE's coverage of AWS. Reinvent 2020 and the APN partner experience. I've been your host, Justin Warren. Make sure you come back and join us for more coverage later on.