 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, joined next by Peter Morrow, the VP of Sales and Marketing at IBM Partner, TRM. Peter, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you, happy to be here. Tell me a little bit about yourself and TRM before we dig in. Well, TRM is a long time business partner for IBM. We, for about 30 years have specialized in helping IBM customers implement Maximo and have a lot of deep technology expertise in Maximo and related software in the enterprise asset management industry. I'm the VP of Sales and Marketing. I've been at TRM for about 10 years and I'm proud to lead our talented sales teams. And our sole mission is to help our customers get value out of their EAM solutions. And we're really excited about recent developments in AI and bringing value to a lot of our customers and their organization and finally get ROI out of their long-time investments in EAM. Let's take in a bit more to the IBM relationship. I know TRM is a gold partner, talk to me about that and how TRM has leveraged that partnership with IBM to help your customers be successful. Sure, now we're a little bit of a unique partner with IBM for a long time. We've been pure resell and implementation services and recently we've transitioned into an OEM relationship with IBM where we actually embed IBM products into broader TRM offerings. And this relationship that we have with IBM is really important as IBM is the dominant player in EAM and AI and hybrid cloud. It's really a natural fit for us to leverage those really mature solutions and build on top of them, TRM's deep expertise and the technology and the reliability side to offer more of an end-to-end solution to our customers. Got it, so the last year or so we've seen a lot of market dynamics. Talk to me about the EAM market, what's going on there? What are some of the changes? Well, there's a couple of key changes that we see. One of the biggest changes I think that impacts our business and IBM is that customers really don't have an appetite for long expensive implementations of custom solutions. They're really looking for more turnkey solutions that have proven value already and very mature. They've already spent tens of millions of dollars implementing Maximo or a related EAM solution. They really don't want to embark on this really expensive long journey to get to that next level. And so to meet this requirement, we've been focused for the past couple of years on developing much more turnkey solutions. One of which is one that we call TRM's Maximo AAM solution and that's built on Maximo, but it's also layered with IBM's new AI solution for Maximo customers. And we marry that with our deep reliability expertise and we're really excited about being able to roll it out in literally weeks instead of months or years for a lot of new customers. And that's a really short time to value an ROI. It's something that's pretty much unheard of until now in this industry. Talk to me about some of the advantages that your customers are getting like an in general level from AI, from hybrid cloud, from data. I mean, this is really groundbreaking. What we're finding is that there's, until very recently AI was really not embraced as a practical solution to a lot of maintenance problems. You're looking at a community of pretty old school mindsets and maintenance and reliability where it's a very, RCM is a very structured methodology for breaking down equipment and failure types and solutions, ways to predict those failures. And for a long time, RCM specialists didn't really feel like AI was a solution that was the answer. And what we're finding is that with the maturity level of IBM's products, it is now at a point where AI is a great fit and you take an experienced reliability specialist and you arm them with AI tools like IBM's asset monitor and Maximo Health and predict. And you give them those tools and they can roll out predictive solutions at scale like really they've never had the chance to before. And talk to me about some of the adaptations that TRM has made in the last year or so as the market has been so much in flux and so many dynamics going on. How have you adapted to that to really help those customers take advantage of the latest technologies and for example, use AI? You know, well, the big thing for us is recognizing that customers really aren't interested in a long expensive drawn out solution. You know, they recognize they have problems but until you can come to the table with something that they can digest in small bites and that is at a price point that isn't over the top, they're really happy staying with the status quo. At least until the solutions can be delivered and like that very bite-sized implementation program. So we've spent a lot of time trying to make our solutions more turnkey, packaging up offerings in a way that you can start small but all that effort you put in on a small scale you can ramp up and scale enterprise wide without making a huge investment and it doesn't take years to roll it out. You can really do something and make an impact within a couple of weeks or months rather than many months and years down the road. That time to value is key, especially I think we've learned in the last year that real time is so essential for so many things. I'm just curious of any industries in particular that TRM and IBM are really helping transform energy for example, give me some examples of industries that are really moving forward with your technologies. It's really the classic asset intensive industries. Utilities are really big maximal users and they're the ones that they've embraced Maximo for many, many years. They're hungry for innovative technology but still cautious about moving forward on a large scale but we're able to get them excited with the programs that we're offering and the same goes with oil and gas that's another big user of Maximo, asset intensive organization and manufacturing, definitely big maximal users. All three have been very interested in moving forward with the AI for maintenance solutions that TRM and IBM are together bringing to the market. You summed up across the oil and gas, energy utilities as you mentioned, what are some of the biggest things that you hear in terms of demands from customers when you're in sales meetings? What are they looking for problems they need you to help solve? You know, honestly, it's the classic problems that we've been working with them for 20 years and really they haven't been able to solve effectively. We're talking about critical assets that break down unexpectedly. Maintenance teams running around doing a lot of maintenance on assets in perfect health, making big promises on transforming maintenance, you know, massively reducing maintenance budgets and it really hasn't happened. And there's really been until now, no real solution that solves those problems directly. And we believe the combination of AI and reliability engineering and in the key EAM fundamental principles is what's going to help our customer base really get value and really solve the problems that they've really suffered from all these years. It's interesting that you say that it really, they haven't been able to solve those problems. And but from a technological perspective, the technology is there now to help them do that. What's the time window when you're talking with customers, especially given the market dynamics that we're still living in, are they coming to you saying, help us, you know, within a week, two weeks, we got to turn this around? I mean, the ones that are approaching this with an open mind, you know, we can communicate to them that a huge undertaking is not required. They can get started on a small project, select one critical asset and then begin to plug in some data, you know, around that asset that they know is related to equipment failures. We can get that data connected with the maximal asset monitor. And, you know, within weeks, they begin monitoring that asset health. They do some anomaly detection and it does not require a big long-term investment. And so for somebody who is willing to keep an open mind about AI and really wants to give it a try, you know, that sales cycle is very short. They're willing to get going relatively quickly. You know, we do find that many organizations want to step back, take it slow, assess other options. And for them, that aligns more with the classic, you know, big bang type of implementation project where that takes months of planning, you know, budget planning approvals. And that goes into that 12, 18 month sales cycle or project planning phase that, you know, that's fine. And at the end of that, you know, it's a big project, but we really do recommend starting small. It is definitely possible to see some, you know, early quick wins and then roll out on a larger scale. And, you know, frankly, you could have something deployed at scale within that entire period of planning that they would otherwise naturally do on their own. Take us out here, Peter, with some predictions, some thoughts, maybe a crystal ball on where you see the EAM market going the rest of this year and what TRM is planning to do to help customers really leverage opportunities and growth. You know, I really do believe we're at a tipping point where there's been a lot of anticipation leading up to the release of Maximo and the Maximo 8 and the Maximo application suite. There's the AI apps that are in the suite, like asset monitor and health and predict that they really are mature products. There's not, you know, I think until now there's the customer base has viewed AI as more of like a, you know, fantasy or science fiction as it relates to maintenance. But, you know, these products are real. And I think with a lot of spending having been on hold over the past year, there's a lot of interest in learning more, trying to test the waters. I really think that we're gonna see a lot of interest in predictive solutions, a lot of interest in IoT projects. And, you know, we're in a position where we're ready to begin rolling these out and it's really exciting. Yeah, the maturation is there, the technologies, the customer interests as there are certainly the opportunities in there. Peter, take us out with, where can customers go to learn more information about your solutions? I mean, the best place is to check us out on our website, www.trmnet.com. We're also on LinkedIn, we do a lot of blogs, we do a lot of webinars, you know, we are out in front and trying to make, you know, the market aware of our thought leadership and deep expertise in, you know, Maximo and EAM and in predictive solutions. We've got a YouTube channel where we post demos and, you know, all of our webinars. So we're, you know, we're trying to push information out there. You know, happy to, you know, we look forward to interacting with prospects and customers about how our solutions can impact them. Excellent. Peter, thanks for stopping by and sharing with us more about the TRM IBM relationship, the opportunities in the EAM market and the appetite for AI that your customers and very big industries are having. We appreciate your time. Hey, thank you very much. I enjoyed it. Me too. For Peter Morrow, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021.