 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the wrap-up of IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier, my co-host this week, my partner in crime, co-CEO, co-founder SiliconANGLE Media Inc. with myself, Dave Vellante, Dave's been a great week. I mean, I just feel like I have been Watsonized and block chained and cloud all week. So as we wrap up InterConnect, I want to get your thoughts on IBM, the cloud business, the big data marketplace, some of the things that we're seeing at the hundred of events we go to, we got our events coming up, we're going to be in Munich next month, we got DockerCon, and a lot of developer events coming up, but in general, we get to see the landscape. In some cases, that others don't see. And let's talk about that. So before we get into the landscape, let's talk about IBM, IBM's prospects. This show, just quick stat, almost double the online traffic we're seeing on IBM Go than World of Watson, which was the biggest show we've ever done with theCUBE that we've seen. So an interest. So it's a data point, unpack the data. You can see that there's a lot of global interest in what IBM is doing right now with the cloud and with Watson, and certainly with Blockchain, you add another disruptive enabler potentially to what will either be a brilliant IBM strategy or a complete crash and burn. I think this is an IBM go big or go home moment with Ginny Rometti. I love her messaging, I love her three pillars, enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core. That is solid messaging, all three pillars. To me, it's clear. IBM is at a reinvention moment, it's all coming together, but it's a go big or go home moment for them. Well, you know, John, I mean, Ginny, when she took over, I say she was running strategy before she became CEO. I mean, IBM had a choice, they could go like double down on infrastructure and go knock it out with Dell and EMC and HPE or they could go up the value chain. And my ongoing joke is, Dell bought EMC, IBM buys the weather company. And that to me underscores the differentiation in thinking, Oracle I think is a little different, but Oracle and IBM are somewhat similar. I think you'd agree, in that they've got a big SaaS portfolio, they're trying to vertically integrate, they're trying to drive high value margin businesses. Now differences, IBM's much more services oriented than say in Oracle. And that's still, as I say, a big challenge for IBM, but I'm a bull on IBM. Why is that? Well, I think the strategy is, number one, they're relevant, right? I mean, we talked for years about how we weren't like that, excited about Microsoft because they weren't relevant, Satya Nadella came in, all of a sudden they're relevant again. I think IBM is highly relevant in the minds of CEOs, CIOs, CISOs, CDOs, all the C sweet. IBM is super relevant there, just as our Accenture and Ernie Young and all the big SIs, but IBM's got tons of products beneath it, number one. Number two, despite the fact that you called it out several years ago, they bought SoftLayer for 2.4 billion. It was a bare metal hosting company, right? But IBM is turning that into a cloud business with Blumex, right? And they're building, bringing in acquisitions like Cleversafe, like Espera, like Ustream and others where they're bringing services that are differentiated. You can only get Watson on IBM's cloud. You can only get the IBM's blockchain on IBM's cloud. So they're bringing in value added services and there's only one place you can get them. And I think that's a viable strategy that's going to throw off a lot of cash and it's going to lead to success. By the way, they're also continuing to invest in open source. So again, that's... Well, that's the other piece. I wanted to talk to you, and this is your wheelhouse. IBM's open source mojo is not just lip service, right? They have deep rooted DNA in open source and their strategy around, and they've proven that they can monetize open source. What's their model? I mean, explain the model because I think it's instructive. I mean, open source, there's a lot of different models. Red Hat is one. For IBM though, I mean. IBM's model open source is very clear. I mean, if you look at what they've done with just blockchain as a great example, they've mobilized their company and they did it with Blue Mix as well, the cloud. Once they said we want to get in the cloud game, once we want to do blockchain, they go open source at the core, then they get their entire brain trust working on it. So it's not just a hand wave, some division. They're kind of reorganizing on the fly. They're kind of agile organization, which some may read as chaotic, but to me, I think that's just good management practices in this day and age. They get an open source project and they drive that home and they have people contributing and giving that to the community. And then adding value on top and differentiating. It's just classic 101, create some value and create some differentiation with your products. And by the way, if you don't want to use our products, build your own or hey, use the open source code. So that's pretty much an oversimplified version of open source. But blockchain's a great example of this, right? So they get to see the hyper ledger. It's an open source project. They put all these resources in and they say, okay, now let's build our product on top of that. Let's get the open source community leverage. And this is, let me ask you this. Does IBM, so several years ago when IBM announced Bluemix, you were pretty critical. I was very critical. You said IBM has to win the developer audience or it's cooked in this game. That's what I said. How has it done? How would you grade them? I think they're doing very well. IBM is, again, to use your word, they're not putting lip service in it. So I was joking with Meg Swanson last night, so Adam Gunther, when they interviewed on theCUBE and I was critical. I didn't say that their cloud was bad. I was just saying it's just not as, it's got a lot of work to do. Amazon's kicking ass. Which we now know that happened, right? But they've done well. They've done well. They've ran hard. They've gone the table stakes on the enterprise. I still think they've got some more work to do. We can analyze and putting out my cloud readiness matrix. I'm going to put, I mean, IBM on that list. I have Google and Amazon done. I'm going to add Microsoft Azure and IBM on to the mix and my comparison matrix. But IBM has done good with the developers. They just invested 10 million on this announcement and they're ramping up. I wouldn't say they're throwing just money at it. They got people. So I would give them a B plus A minus score because they're hustling. They're doing it. Are they totally blowing it out of the water? No, I don't think they're pushing hard enough there. I think they could give it some more gas. I think they could do more with it, personally thinking. But you know, Dr. Angel Diaz was on early today. They're going at their own pace. But you agree they're in the game. Oh, totally. Making good progress. They're totally, IBM is totally in the cloud game. And they don't get a lot of credit for it. Either this Oracle, by the way. Somehow people seem to talk about Azure and Google. Google is so far behind, in my opinion. They're not even close. I think it's Amazon, Azure, IBM, and Oracle, and Google all kind of in that. Just suppose Oracle's developer cred, even though it owns Java, with IBMs. How would you compare the two? Very similar, I think. Different approaches. But again, to your point, IBM's relevant. Oracle's relevant. We had this discussion about VMware when they did the deal with AWS. They have customers and they have cash. So they're not going anywhere. It's not like IBM's a sinking ship. It's not like Oracle's a sinking ship. Now that being said, there's a huge shift in the business. And I would say, in that scenario, Google is in a very good position. So I've been very critical on Google, only because they're trying to be acting like they're in enterprise play. They're not. I mean, Google's got great tech, TensorFlow machine learning. Google has great cloud tech. But in that game, they're up in number one, two spot. But in the enterprise side, they're not close. They're working on that. So that's my critique of Google. Microsoft has got the DNA for the enterprise. So Microsoft and Oracle to me are more similar than comparing IBM and Oracle. I'd say IBM is a lot more like Google and Amazon kind of in between. But Oracle and Microsoft look the same to me. Big install base, highly differentiated. Stacks aren't perfect, but it looks good on paper. And they're getting business. And Oracle's earnings, by the way, were very explosive due to the cloud growth. Another question I like to ask sometimes is, okay, what would you have done differently if you had a choice? Like when Gershner was running IBM, he chose to consolidate the company, essentially not consolidate, but focus on services, one throat to choke, single faced IBM, great customer service and build the services business. Buy-in, PwC, et cetera. That was a key. What could you have done differently? They could have said, well. For IBM? Yeah, at the time, you could have said, we're going to spin out different product groups. We're going to be the best at microprocessors or disk drives or database or software. I think IBM moves too slow. So that's a historical example. Given what IBM's doing today, what would you have done differently if you were Ginny Rometti five or six years ago? I would have done what they're doing now like three years ago. We were, when we started working with them with CUBE at IOD events, you had Pulse. Information on demand. You had a lot of silos. I think just, if I had to go back and get a mulligan, if I was Ginny Rometti, I would have moved faster. Done that faster. Hindsight's 20-20 on that, but it wasn't that clear. But again, it's the big aircraft carrier. It can only move so fast. But I think what they're doing now is good strategy. Enterprise-strong data-first cognitive of the core is a good strategy. Now, cognitive is words for AI, and that's their word, cognitive is a Watson. But essentially, machine learning in AI is going to be a big pillar there. And then the data-first is more of an architectural component that's very good. But in general, Dave, the cloud, this is what's going on in my mind. It's so obvious to me. The big data marketplace that was, we defined by Cloudera and Hadoop and Hortonworks just never panned out. It morphed into a bigger picture. And so Hadoop is part of now a bigger ecosystem. Cloud was growing very fast. Those two worlds are coming together and growing very rapidly independent with big data, with machine learning, AI, and IoT. They're coming together. So the intersection of the big data in cloud. Cloud met big data. That was Jeremy Burton from. But it's coming together really fast. And the IoT is the real business driver. I know there's not a lot of stuff shipping yet and there's some stuff out there, but merging IoT into IT, into business process, and into developer mindset, whether it's an Indiegogo up to full-on developers, is the accelerant that's going to fuel the AI value. To me, that's the intersection point of big data in cloud. And that is the home run. That's the holy grail. And that's going to be disrupting some pre-existing decisions by big vendors who made bets. And I'm talking about bets made in the past five years, not like bets made 20 years ago or 10 years ago. So I think the IoT is going to really shape the game. The other thing I worry about now, in my opinion, is a lot of AI washing. People say, oh, AI, you see people on the stage. Oh, we did this with AI. There's no AI. It's augmented intelligence, which is basically predictive analytics. So true AI is not yet here. It's a little bit hyped up. Not that I mind that. I think that the machine learning is the real meat on the bone right now. I think that's the core enabler. Machine learning is, by far, the most important trend in the computer science world today, as it relates to integrating that capability into cloud-native microservices and an overall application. I agree. I mean, AI is still a heavy lift. But to me, the key I go back to something you were saying is developers. That's the lever that's going to give you the ability to move large mountains. If you don't have that developer community and you don't have open-source chops, you're going to struggle a little bit. You're going to be either in a swim lane, like Oracle with its database and its RedStack, and maybe it can break out of that, but I'm not sure it wants to. Or you're going to be stuck in infrastructure. Yeah, but the developers are driving all the action right now, and you asked about the developers. My point about machine learning, if you look at the shows just recently, and certainly we have the history of the past year, machine learning is the sexiest trend in every show. Last show was Google Next, machine learning with TensorFlow, both open-source. Machine learning is not new. It's just now accelerating the developer. The developers want to move faster. And I think things like machine learning, things like cognitive ID inputs out there are great catalysts. So that's going to be a big thing we're going to watch. Obviously, we have a big developer community at SiliconANGLE, so something to watch. So what's next? We got a Chief Data Scientist Summit next week in Silicon Valley. We're going to be at the... Silicon Valley Friday show. This week, every Friday I do the Silicon Valley Friday show with me and guests. We got that going on, so always check that out on soundcloud.com slash John Furrier, or check out my Facebook feed, facebook.com slash John Furrier. But in terms of CUBE events, we got data works in Munich on April 2nd, DockerCon in Austin, Oracle Marketing, some experience, Red Hat, Dell EMC World Service Now, OpenStack, big data in London. It's going to be a busy spring. A lot of stuff going on. Great stuff. We'll see you in July. In Pumper Sticker, Dave, this show, encapsulate your thoughts. Well, I think it's all about cloud data and cognitive coming together in a way that allows business value and differentiation through the end customer. That's what this show is about to me. It's not about infrastructure, cloud and infrastructure. That's kind of table stakes. It's all about differentiation up the stack, creating, enabling new business models. My encapsulation is the enterprise strong data first, cognitive to the core message that Ginny said, that translates into IBM's shoring up their base products and putting an innovation strategy around blockchain and soon to be cognitive computing at a whole nother level. And I think they're going to have a real innovation strategy and continue to use what they did with Watson, the winning formula. Put something out there that's a guiding principle and draft the company behind it. I think that to me is my big walk away. And I think blockchain will potentially level, has game-changing capabilities. And if that plays out like Watson's playing out, then IBM could be in a great shape on both shoring up the base in cloud and their business and having an innovation strategy that extends them out. That to me is the reason why I'm bullish on them. So great show, Dave Vellante. Thanks to the guys. Thanks for watching. That's it for us here on theCUBE. I'm Java with Dave Vellante, wrapping up IBM Interconnect 2017. Thanks for watching. Be with us and follow us at theCUBE on Twitter and SiliconANGLE.tv on the web. Thanks for watching.