 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. We are here in Las Vegas for a special presentation inside theCUBE, a special announcement. We have Mayor A.C. Warden, Mayor of Memphis, and Jen Crozer, who's the vice president at IBM Alliance, assistant alliance. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Mayor, Memphis, obviously renowned city, great culture. Smarter cities is a big thing right now, so talk about why Memphis, why IBM, why are you here? What's the big announcement? What's happening in Memphis? Well, it's a great day for Memphis, in addition to the grids that had slipped that in there. But one of just a handful of cities that are receiving what are known as IBM Smart Cities Challenge Grant, we pick a challenge we have, they help us come up with a solution to it. And it's not some abstract idea. In our case, it's how do we weed out the non-emergency calls from the true emergency calls in our EMS service, over 120,000 calls a year, about 25,000 of them are not truly emergency calls. So what that does is it takes valuable time and resources away from those true emergency calls that should be attended to on a priority basis. So I noticed you have a Twitter handle and you got a lot of followers. Is the tech culture in Memphis emerging? Describe to the folks out there, what's it like in Memphis from a tech perspective? Are there people who've moved over or there's rabbit? I know there's a lot of folks in town. Yes. Really talking about the tech community there. Even my generation, I'm on there, just to do a little quality checking. Also a double announcement, I'm still in this from Jen. We're one of the three cities that'll receive the Twitter grants, which will allow us to access this and get that out of there and use it as we make decisions. So that's really going to be unique from Memphis. So yes, Memphis is up to date. Jen, I got to ask you because one of the things that's near and dear to our heart in theCUBE is technology for the advancement, better signal, not noise, whether that's society, education. The Twitter data, and we've talked to InHeatYouSub about this, is that it's the signal of the humans. And this notion of smarter cities is bringing technology to impact the human lives, not just making people get an eye watch or whatever. There's some real benefits. Talk about the grants. Talk about what IBM's doing because this is real important stuff. I mean, smarter planets, the marketing slogan, but at the end of the day, technology can help people and talk about how that's part of the grant and why Memphis and what are these guys doing that's unique that could be a great case study for others? Well, when we started building a smarter planet, one of the things we had to think about was what was the active pressure point that would have the biggest ripple effects? And it's cities, right? More than half of the world's population lives in cities and that's growing by a multiplier every day. And so that's where we wanted to start. And we've been really gratified when we started Smarter Cities Challenge, which is a pro bono program. Give us your toughest problem. We will send you a team of six IBM executives for three weeks to help you solve it for free. We've had over 600 mayor's supply and we've delivered more than 115 teams. And in Memphis, I got to ask the question about how you look at the governing process. Now with mobile computing, you can hear everything. They're talking back in real time and this might not be as organized, certainly tweeting all over the place and kind of getting that data is really key. What's your vision? That's the key. We know Memphis. We know what information we have, what data we have, what in the world do you do with it? So what better partner than IBM? We know Memphis, but IBM knows the world. We're not the only one who's faced this challenge. So with this team of experts, the IBM professionals who will be on the ground there, they will then say, here's what you have. Here's the best way to use it. Here's what they did in Rome. Here's what they did in Berlin, London, New York, or wherever. So the key is not how much information do you have, but what in the world can you do with it in real day-to-day solutions to those everyday problems? And let me point this out. This is much more than just technology. With the process we're going to employ in Memphis, using nurses perhaps as dispatchers so that they can ask a few more questions when the call comes in. Or perhaps helping us set up a system in which nurses will go to the homes of the individuals who we call frequent flyers who often call when it's not truly an emergency. But this is, because life is on the line here, and you really have to have the ability to analyze in real time and apply the right solution. And this is why IBM's expertise on a worldwide basis is so critical as a system of a grant. We always talk about two aspects of real time, near real time, which is what people get today. It's close enough, but when you're in a self-driving car maybe, or an emergency situation, you want real time. So that's really the key here. That's the key. Real time information being employed in a real, real life situation, and that's what an emergency call, that's what it is. So I got to get under the hood a little bit because we like to go a little bit into the engine of the local environment. I mean, people who know life today, they got their cell phones, they think it's easy to call 911. It's not that easy. You have these old systems and the cell towers are connected to the municipal networks, and you got a lot of volume of calls coming in. That's a challenge for the local, the technology team. And with this new system, that's going to clear it up. So talk about how you guys go from this clogged, traffic calls to really segmenting the emergencies from the non-emergency. Again, that's another critical point. We're confident this is going to work, and it will somewhat de-clog, if that's the word, un-clog, because our experience, just without the grant, shows us that we could weed out so many of the other calls, they will not be coming in to your 911. So that's a big, big help right there is to make sure if we could weed out 25,000 calls, which is what we had last year, we're not truly emergency calls, you wouldn't speak in terms of a clogged 911 system. I was talking to a friend, they're like, give me an example of some of this clogged network stuff. I go, well, imagine your phone going off a million times a night, the notifications, because we're in a notification economy, that you have to kind of weed through that. So how are you guys using the data? What's the technology? Can you give some specifics to what's being implemented, the team, and how the local resources interact with IBM? Well, I think the mayor's called out this one source of data that he's getting, and mayors we know are getting multiple streams. So we have our intelligent operations center that IBM uses to create dashboards for mayors to see real-time data about several different industries or sources or areas that are important to them. But I think that your point about the humans talking is a really critical one, and I want to come back to that because it's easy for us to fixate on the technology. And I think one of the things we've seen in this program is the technology enabling city leaders to hear their constituents in new ways, what they're saying and what they're not saying, and also for them to communicate back with them and close the loop on feedback as policies and programs were enacted. And the thing about the presence of IBM is kind of like a good housekeeping. It will open up Memphis to resources from other national groups. As a matter of fact, we're already using funds from another entity to set up our dashboards for performance in all areas, including of the 911 calls. So IBM is like this huge magnet, but once folks see, hey, IBM is in there, others will come in and say, we're going to help Memphis as it develops this system. So Mayor, I have to ask you a question. If automation and technology helps abstract away a lot of the manual, clogged data, and understanding the signal from the noise, what's relevant, what's real-time, you have a lot more contextual visibility into your environment and the people. How would you envision the future organization of the government and education and police fire, et cetera, working together? What's the preferred future in your mind's eye as technology rolls out? The preferred future will be that when we come up with an innovation like this, it will be a non-event. It ought to be the order of the day. Government sometimes kind of lags behind. We want to get to the point where we're leading. Quite frankly, my vision is that this soon will become a non-event. It will become the order of the day. Humans, our citizens, will not be afraid of, oh, I bet not call, I'm going to get a computer on the end of the line, or they got a gadget down there that's going to try to interview me and see if I'm going to say, it will be the order of the day. That's what we're working for. And what we are emphasizing here is not what we are taking away, but what we are bringing additionally. Through this technology, we will actually be able to have a good diagnosis, a good case record built on what we call the frequent flyers. We know the people who call every two weeks, but they will feel so much better when two days before they usually call, a nurse will show up and say, came to check on you. And that's what's coming out of it. This will be the new norm. This is what this is all about. They're happy people, happy customers, happy voters. Hey, you nailed it. Barack Obama had put in for the first time a data scientist in the White House, DJ Patel, former entrepreneur, former venture capitalist. Data science is a big deal now. Are you guys seeing that role coming into the local presence as well? Yes, and it's so critical to government. In the private sector, if you come up with an item that's not producing the profit margin, you just shut it down. We can't do that in government. We, every service we provide, we're locked into that. I cannot say, well, the police department, we're not breaking even on that. Let's just shut that down. We won't run through shifts. Well, we'll cut out that third shift. So we have amended, it's an imperative. What we're doing here is not an option. This is an absolute essential. So you're excited for the grant. What's next after the announcement? What are you guys being doing together? Well, then we go to work. We've got 16 cities around the world who will be getting these teams. So it's time to schedule them and get started. And of the grant now, how many mayors applied and what was the numbers again? Over the life of the program, over 600 mayors have applied for this. This year it was just over 100. And we are sending teams to 16 cities this year. Well, you guys can get that technology going, Las Vegas more music pumping through the world. That's a great place. And obviously the technology helping the citizens. Thanks for sharing the great story. Congratulations. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, thanks for joining us on theCUBE. We'll be right back here in Las Vegas. You watching theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back.