 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM EDGE 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick and we're here live at IBM EDGE. This is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage and this is theCUBE. theCUBE is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We've been talking about the channel quite a bit this week. We're talking to technologists, executives and really have a focus on the partners. The channel is vital. We've said a number of times on theCUBE that there is really a land grab going on for good channel partners. Not just people who can move hardware but people who can understand a customer's problem, understand business value and how to tap into that business value and help customers transform. Bill Jones is here. He is with Jessica. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So you've seen a number of changes over the years. You were an IBMer for a number of years. What do you make of all this? You've seen this transformation of the industry, transformation of IBM, your former company and I'm sure your new company has transformed as well. We are. It is pretty impressive that IBM is such a large company that in the past it seemed like slow to change but they are making a rapid transition into and actually leading the market instead of following the market. So this conference today and yesterday has been pretty eye-opening for me. Over the last couple of years we've seen acquisitions and divestitures from IBM even over the last decade but it's kind of hard to put it all together and really understand the value and where it's going. This conference the last couple of days has really opened my eyes in terms of why the transition, what the acquisitions and divestitures are kind of aligned to do and how IBM is going to address a rapidly changing market and not just follow it but lead it into that change. So talk a little bit about JustKel, your current firm. What's your focus and area of expertise? JustKel is a nearly 20 year old IBM reseller. We are focused on the federal marketplace about 70% of our business is federal. We do both, we sell IBM hardware and software but we also develop solutions and self-solutions into the federal space. So talk about some of the unique requirements of the federal marketplace. I mean, when the economy turned down, did your business turn up, for example? It certainly chugged along, it didn't turn down. It didn't get crushed. Well, I mean, you can look. I mean, the whole battle over the budget every year but the government spends a fair amount of money and when the times get tight the government tries to spend more money. So our business has been strong. We've had year-to-year growth for three of the last four years and this year it looks like another strong growth year for us. So yeah, sometimes your business is counter-cyclical, isn't it? It is, the government puts money in when no one else is invested to keep the economy rolling. So now one of the other things, of course, that you saw, I guess it was sort of mid-last decade. Maybe the middle, latter middle part of the decade was the sort of cloud first, right? Vivek Kundra came in and said, okay, we're going cloud, cloud, cloud. There was a bit of a backlash to that but it was an imperative that was put forth. So how is that sort of cloud mentality seeping into the solutions that you guys sell because not everybody wants to put all their data in the cloud. In fact, most people don't want to put all their data in the cloud. So how are your clients replicating that capability? Well, initially we saw customers that they had an issue. They really had to move three applications to the cloud. That was kind of the mandate. And they picked the three, two or three logical ones. They picked the email and they said, all right, we'll move the email. Everybody kind of jumped on that and moved quickly. They're kind of pulling back on moving to a public cloud. There is some interest in private cloud and right now the big focus is only to get cloud ready as opposed to, or cloud enabled as opposed to cloud deployed. I think we're going to see a move to private clouds. We saw a couple of large private cloud procurements this past year, but overall most customers are enabling themselves, not deploying it. Bill, can you dig down a little bit into that? What does that mean to be kind of taking the baby step to cloud? It sounds like, how do you start getting cloud enabled? What are some of the priorities or changes that they need to make? Well, so I'll take one step back and say some of it is more hype than it is substance. So they want to virtualize first and foremost. I mean, if you virtualize and you can say, okay, my application is virtualized and my infrastructure is virtualized, then I can deploy it in a virtualized cloud environment. So server virtualization kind of went early on. Today it's software virtualization and I think there's a big, people have large databases that are on proprietary architectures today and they realize to move into any kind of a cloud-based infrastructure that they need to get off of a proprietary hardware base and move into a virtualized environment. So software virtualization is the next big step that our customers are looking at. Some are starting to deploy it, some of them are still okay, I'm going to pay lip service to it, but they're getting there one step at a time. The government's not the fastest to transition, but they are moving. Yeah, and at the same time, the government, you talk about, some things are overblown, you're inside the Beltway. There's a lot of hype around government initiatives. We talked about cloud, but you know you had the sequester, everybody was freaking out about that. You got NSA and Snowden, now everybody's freaking out about that. You got the Affordable Care Act. How much of that is real versus just sort of press hype? Talk about that a little bit. The customers, the IT community kind of kept moving on. I mean, I don't think that there was, the boat didn't rock and nothing got knocked off the ship. So in general, it was a lot of noise around the community, but it really wasn't a big disruption to the community. So it really hasn't affected your business? It hasn't affected our business at all. We had, the sequesters are a little bit discharging, but they didn't last forever. So I mean, that was, as long as they move past those and they're not year-long events or six-long events. Now you guys also do some work in the high-performance computing area. I wonder if you could talk about that. It's an area that we look at because we see high-performance computing and the cloud and big data kind of coming together. What does that mean from your perspective? So we recently won a procurement at NOAA, the National National National Geographic and Atmospheric Administration, for a large-scale file system. And it's a total system solution sale that IBM has gone after a number of times in the past and Jaskiel went after in 2006, 2007 timeframe, all unsuccessful attempts because it's a very demanding spec and it's a very cost-competitive award. We won it in 2013 with support from IBM. It's a 62-petabyte file system, one of the largest file systems in the marketplace today. We install it, deploy it, it feeds. It's an interesting application because it collects all the weather data from all the sensors around the world and there's underwater sensors, there's buoy surface-based sensors, airborne sensors. It collects all that data and keeps it as a repository so that customers of NOAA who want to analyze their weather model going forward can go back, pull that data back and say, well, if I made this model looks this way, what would it have predicted and then can track against what it would have predicted versus what it actually happened. So it's a very significant program for the government and it's one that feeds a number of high-performance computing systems throughout the marketplace. So, Bill, we did a little research on you before you came on, right? And is that you're at IBM for 40-plus years, is that right? That's correct, yes. And now you're on the other side. I wonder if you can just share some perspective of, first off, I don't think anyone of my age is going to work anywhere for 40 years. It's just not in the cart. It's an admirable thing to have accomplished, but now you're on the other side. So talk a little bit about kind of the different perspective when you're, I don't know if it's one step closer to the customer or that kind of interim step. Well, you know, it's just a, it's a different environment. The decision-making is held within two or three people. So it's a quick decision process. The need for having a great business case and getting it presented to the company and getting it approved isn't there. It's a discussion that people sit around with and make decisions on it. It's a faster-paced environment from that standpoint. So, but it's very similar. I mean, the products that we sell are IBM products. The services that we sell are IBM services or services around IBM products. So it's just a smaller scale, same customer set, and same product set. So not a whole lot of difference. We have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's really a pleasure having you. And Jeff, thank you for co-hosting. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live. This is theCUBE. We're live from Las Vegas at IBM Edge. Right back.