 Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and this is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Think 2018. The inaugural event, IBM's consolidated a number of events here. I've been joking, there's too many people to count because between 30 and 40,000 people, Michelle Bukoff-Bidek is here. She's the vice president of global marketing. Michelle Beebe, a bit short, global marketing, business solutions at IBM, and John Bobo, who's the managing director of Racing Ops at NASCAR, gonna have a fun conversation. I think it's going to be a fun one. Michelle Beebe, start us off. Why is weather such a hot topic so important? Well, I think, as you know, we're both about to fly potentially into a snowstorm tonight. I mean, weather is a daily habit. 90% of all U.S. adults consume weather on a weekly basis, and at the weather company, which is part of IBM, an IBM business, we're helping millions of consumers anticipate, prepare for, and plan, not just in the severe, but also in the everyday. Do I carry an umbrella? What do I do? We are powering Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, so if you're getting your weather from those applications, you're getting it from us. And on average, we're reaching about 225 million consumers. But what's really interesting is, while we've got this tremendous consumer business and we're helping those millions of consumers, we're also helping businesses out there, right? So there isn't a business on the planet. We'll talk a little bit about NASCAR that isn't impacted by weather. I would argue that it is incredibly essential to business. There's something like a half a trillion dollars in economic impact from weather alone every single year here in the U.S. And so most businesses don't yet have a weather strategy and so what's really important is that we help them understand how to take weather insights and turn it into a business advantage. Well, let's talk about that. How does NASCAR take weather insights and turn it into a business advantage? What are you guys doing, John, with weather? It's very important to us. We're 38 weekends a year. We're probably one of the longest seasons in professional sports. We produce over 500 hours of live television just in our top tier series a year. We're a sport, we're a business, we're an entertainment property and we're entertaining hundreds of thousands of people live at an event and then millions of people at home who are watching us over the internet or watching us on television through our broadcast partners. Unlike other racing properties, open-willed racing, it's a lot of downforce they can race in the rain. A 3,500-pound stock car cannot race in the rain is highly dangerous. So rain alone is gonna have to postpone the event, delay the event, and that's a multi-million dollar decision. And so what we're doing with Weather Channel and is we're getting real-time information, hyper-localized models designed around our event within four kilometers of every venue. And remember, we're at a different venue every week across the country. Last week, we're in the Los Angeles market. Next week, we're gonna be in Martinsville, Virginia. It also provides us a level of consistency as placed we go. And knowing that we can pick up the phone and get decision support from the weather desk and they know us and they care as much about us as we do and what we need to do, it's been a big help and a big confidence builder. So NASCAR fans are some of the most fanatic fans, a fan, of course, short for fanatic. They love the sport, they show up. What happens when, give us the before and after. Before you kind of used all this weather data, what was it like before? What was the fan impact? And how is that different now? Going back when NASCAR first started getting on television, the solution was we would send people out in cars with pay phone money. And they would watch for weather all directions and then they would call it in and say, the store's about 10 miles out. Then when it went to the bulky cell phones that were about as big as a bread box, we would give them to them and then they would be in the pullover lane and kind of follow the storm in and call race control to let us know. It has three big impacts. First is safety of the fans and safety of our competitors through every event. The second impact is on the competition itself, whether the grip of the tires, the engine temperature, how the wind is going to affect the aerodynamics of the car. And the third is on the industry. We've got a tremendous industry that travels and what we're going to have to do to move that industry around by a different day. So we couldn't be more grateful for where we're able to make smarter decisions. So how do you guys work together? Maybe talk about that. So I think one of the things that John alluded to that's so important is that they do have the most accurate precise data out there, right? So when we talk about accuracy, a single model or the best model in the world isn't going to produce the best forecast. It's actually a blend of 162 models and we take the output of that and we're providing a forecast for anywhere that you are and it's specific to you and it's weighted differently based on where you are. And then we talk about that precision which gets down to that four kilometer space that John alluded to that is so incredibly important because one of the things we know is that weather is in fact hyper local, right? If you are within two kilometers of a weather reporting station, your weather report is going to be 15% more accurate. Now think about that from an analytics perspective, right? When you can get 15% more accuracy, you're going to have a much better output. And so that precision point is important and then there's the scale. John talks about having 38 race weekends and sanctioning 1200 races but also we've got millions of consumers that are asking us for weather data on a daily basis producing 25 billion forecasts for all of those folks. Again, 2.2 billion locations around the world at that half a kilometer resolution. And so what this means is that we're able to give John and his racing operations team the best, most accurate forecast on the planet and not just the raw data, but the insight. So what we've built in partnership with Flagship, one of our business partners is the NASCAR weather track. And this is a race operations dashboard that is very specific to NASCAR and the elements that are most important to them, what they need to see right there, visible. And then when they have a question, they can call right into a meteorologist who is on hand 24 seven from the Wednesday leading up to a race all the way till that checkered flag goes down providing them with any insight, right? So we always have that human intelligence because while the forecast is great, you always want somebody making that important decision that is in fact a multi-million dollar one. John, can you take us through the anatomy of how you get from data to insight? I mean, you got this amazing application here. You got the edge, you got the cloud, you got your operations center. When do you start? How do you get the data? Who analyzes the data? How do you get to decision-making? We're data hogs in every aspect of the sport, whether it's our cars, our events, or even our own operations. We get through flagship solutions and they do a fantastic job through a weather dashboard. The different solution, we start getting reports on Monday for the week ahead. And so we're tracking it. And in fact, it adds some drama to the event, especially as we're looking at the forecast for Martinsville this upcoming weekend. We work closely with our broadcast partners, our track partners. We don't own the venues of where we go. We're the sports league. So we're working with broadcasts. We're working with our track venues. And then we're also working with everyone in the industry and all our other official sponsors and people that come to an event to have a great time. Sometimes we're making those decisions in the event itself while the race is going on, as things may pop up, pop up storms, things may change. But whether it's their advice on how to create our policy and be smarter about that, whether it's the real-time data that makes us smarter or just being able to pick up the phone and discuss the various multi-variables that we see occurring in a situation and what we need to do live to do. And it's important to us. So has it changed the way, sometimes you might have to cancel an event, obviously. So has it changed the way in which you've made that decision and communicate to your customers, your fans? Yeah, absolutely. It's made a lot of us smarter going into a weekend. You know, whether it's something everybody has an opinion about. And so we feel grateful that we can get our opinion from the best place in the country. And then what we do with that is we can either move an event up, we can delay an event, and it helps us make those smarter decisions. And we never like to cancel an event because it's important in the competition. We may postpone it a day, run a race on a Monday or Tuesday. But you know, a 10, 11 o'clock race on a Monday is not the best viewership for our broadcast partners. So we're doing everything we can to get the race in that day. Yeah, so it's got to be a pretty radical condition to cancel a race. But then, so what you'll do is you'll predict, you'll pull out the yellow flag, everybody slows down, and you'll be able to anticipate when you're going to have to do that, is that right? Versus having people calling on the block phones. Or if we say, let's start the race two hours early and that's good for the track, it's good for our broadcast partners, and we can get the race in before the bad weather occurs, we're going to do that. Okay, and then, so where are you taking this thing, Michelle? I mean, what is John asking you for? How are you responding? Maybe talk about the partnership with him. Yeah, so the good news is that we're a year into this partnership and I think it's been fantastic. And our goal is to continue to provide the best weather insights. And I think what we will be looking at are things like scenario planning. So as we start to look longer range, what are some of the things that we can do to better anticipate not just the here and now, but how do we plan for scenarios? We've been looking at severe weather playbooks too. So what is our plan for severe weather that we can share across the organization? And then I think too, it's understanding potentially how can we create a better fan experience and how can we get some of this weather insight out to the fans themselves so that they can see what's going to happen with the weather and better prepare. It's, NASCAR is such a tremendous partner for us because they're showcasing the power of these weather insights. But there isn't a business on the planet that isn't impacted. I mean, we're working with 140 airlines. We're working with utility companies that need to know how much power is going to be consumed on the grid tomorrow. It'll care as much about a temperature. They want to know how much power is going to be consumed. So when you think about the decisions that these companies have to make, yes, the forecast is great and it's important, but it really is what are the insights that I can derive from all of that data that are going to make a big difference. Investors. Oh, absolutely. Airlines. Airlines, utility companies, retailers. Logistics. You know, and you think about insurance companies, right? There's a billion dollars in damage every single year from hail. Proper property damage. And so when you think about these organizations where every single week, we just did this great weather study and I have to get you a copy of it, but the Institute of Business Value at IBM did a weather study and we surveyed 1,000 sea level executives. Every single one of them said that weather had an impact on at least one revenue metric. Every 100% and 93% of them said that if they had better weather insights, it would have a positive impact on their business. So we know that weather is important and what we've got to do is really figure out how we can help companies better harness it, but nobody's doing it better than these guys. I want to share a stat that we talked about off camera. Sure. Because we all travel. I would say it's on the store of my daughter. I got her flight canceled. Very frustrating, but I like it because at least you now know you can plan at home, but you had a stat that it's actually improved the situation. Can you share that? Yes, so nobody likes to have their flights canceled. And we know that 70% of all airline delays are due to weather. But one of the things we talked about is, is our flight going to go out? Well, airlines are now operating with a greater degree of confidence and so what they're doing is they trust the forecast more. So they're able to cancel flights sooner. And by doing so, and I know nobody really likes to have their flight canceled, but by doing so when we know sooner, we are now able to return those airlines to normal operations even faster and reduce cancellations in total by about 11%. That's huge. And so I think that when you look at the business impact that these weather insights can have across all of these industries, it's just tremendous. So if you're a business traveler you're going to be better off in the long run. That's right, I promise. So John, I have to ask you about the data science. When IBM bought the weather company, a big part of the announcement was the number of data scientists that you guys brought to the table. There's an IoT aspect as well, which is very important. But from a data science standpoint, how much do you lean on IBM for the data science? Do you bring your own data scientists to the table? How do they collaborate? No, no, we lean totally on them. This is their expertise. Nobody's going to be better at it in the world than they are. But we know that at certain times, past data may be more predictive. We know that at different times, different data sets show different things and they show so much. We want to have cars race. We want to concentrate on officiating a race, putting on the best entertainment we can for sports fans. It's a joy to look at their data and pick up the phone and not have to figure this out for myself. Yeah, great. Well John, Michelle, thanks so much for coming out. I'll give you the last word, Michelle. IBM, thank the weather, make a prediction, whatever you like. Well, I just have to say, for all of you who are heading home tonight, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, so good luck there. And if you haven't, this is the one thing I have to say, if you haven't had the opportunity to go to announce car race, please do so. It is one of the most exciting experiences around. Oh, and I want to mention, I just downloaded this new app Storm Radar. Oh yes, please do. Storm Radar, so far, I mean, I've only checked it out a little bit, but it looks great. Very high ratings, 13,600 people have rated it. It's a five rating, five stars, so check it out, Storm Radar. Just check it out on your app store. So, thanks you guys. Thank you so much. All right, thank you for watching. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from, thank, 2018.