 Hi, this is Dave Vellante. We're back here at 590 Madison Avenue. This is theCUBE, where we extract the signal from the noise, we try to bring you the best guests that we can find, and we're here with a great guest, Steve Mills, who really runs the software and systems business at IBM. Steve, great to see you. Good to be here. So big announcement today. Let's run through it. You guys are announcing a billion dollar investment in Flash, competency centers, you've rebranded the Texas memory systems. You're all in on this, aren't you? We're all in, absolutely. Yeah, this is important. So, we were talking earlier, and I seem to remember a few other billion dollar investments that you made. I go all the way back into the 90s when you guys invested in open source, which I think was a great move for IBM. But also, the analytics business. How does this compare? Well, you know, this is clearly one of those important inflection points. And I think, you know, open source was an inflection point in the industry. We saw the kind of compute power that became available by the mid point of the last decade as an inflection point for analytics. And now we believe that Flash will be transformative in terms of analytics, in terms of transaction systems, and really change the whole nature of the data center from what today is a massive sprawl of storage devices to something much more compact and efficient. How do you look at the storage business? I mean, the storage business for years has been, I call it the container business, and that's changing. What's your angle on that? Well, you know, the storage business is obviously a big business in the tech industry, and it's been a relatively booming business because businesses are being forced, in many cases, to store more information. You know, you think about just simply running your business efficiently, historical data, compliance, audit, regulators, companies are storing more and more data. Most CIOs are frustrated with the amount of their physical space, energy, and labor that they're giving up around storage, and they're looking for more efficient ways to be able to deal with it, manage it, and frankly, get the response time from the data that they need to serve real-time business needs. Yeah, so the announcements that you've made today, really emphasizing your commitment to Flash, and of course, the Texas Memory Systems acquisition is great, it's an all-Flash array, but there seems like there's a lot more potential with regard to developing sort of an end-to-end architecture, and it seems like IBM's in a pretty reasonably good position to do that. Can you talk about that a little bit and just share your vision as to how that evolves? Well, our view is that for anything that requires rapid response time, fast turnaround, response to users, customers, employees, that you're gonna have to bring the data closer to the computer, and a magnetic disk device in years to come will sort of look at it as a little bit of an antiquated thing of the past, just as we kind of view tape the same way today in the tech industry, and those a little older would view punch cards that way. Rotating disk is not the future for storing information. What solid state is, and those prices will come down. Bringing all that data close to the computer means I bring it close to where I do the calculation, the analysis, the understanding, the prediction. It's gonna change the entire landscape, and what today has been articulated as being I have my memory space, then I have my tier one, my tier two, my tier three. That mission-critical tier one, and even much of that tier two, we believe is gonna actually move into solid state devices. I look at the way that some of the web giants like a Google or a Facebook develop applications as a harbinger to the future. Maybe not for the entire traditional enterprise, but certainly for parts of it. Do you agree with that, and do you see that the way in which Flash enables new application development is gonna dramatically impact business productivity? Can you talk about that a little bit? One of the things that you see in today's IT shops, and you'd see it certainly, even in the born on the web companies, is that where you're using traditional rotating disk, your programmers and your operations people spend a lot of time figuring out, well, how do I lay out the data? How do I do this in a way where I can get performance? You bring in Flash and suddenly performance is a given. You're gonna get better performance. You don't have to make that immediate investment in the labor, the time, and so you get in the rotating disk world, you have this delay of implementation. In the solid state world, you're gonna go from your test processes right into production very, very quickly. So there's a speed of implementation. You know, it's important to note that there are many, many companies today that are already using Flash, at least as part of the environment that they deliver. It's popular amongst all the born on the web companies. We use it, banks are using it. You're gonna see this, I think, really accelerate in the next couple of years. Steve, the lines in your organization are becoming blurred. As I said, I personally don't see the storage business as a container business anymore. I mean, you're seeing Hadoop come in, which is essentially a new way to store data. You've got now an individual in charge of your storage business who helped build your analytics business. How is your organization changing, number one and two is, how are you affecting better synergies across that organization? Well, I think you're right. The future really is all about thinking about the way technology gets used. And hardware is what the computer is, software is what the computer does, but those two things in combination are required to deliver the value. Businesses want from us the value of something that solves a business problem. They want us to use our expertise in hardware and software together, match it to their needs and requirements and give them something that's built for purpose, built for the particular need and requirement they have. That's why I'm responsible for both hardware and software and why the teams have been integrated in a way to bring about new offerings. So you're all in, we heard that, billion dollar investment. How are you going to spend that billion dollars? Give us a glimpse. Well, we're clearly going to spend a whole bunch of it, R and D. So obviously you can't sit still. We know we have the industry's best technology today. We're going to keep advancing that. We're going to keep improving the way in which it integrates ease of use, ease of setup, ease of management. So a lot of money's going to go into R and D. You're going to see some pretty amazing things come out in the next four to five years. Behind that, there needs to be market-enabled and we've got to help the clients, our business partners use this technology and that's why part of this investments for our 12 centers around the world that are designed to help businesses and partners enable flash. Now does the TMS acquisition count as part of that billion? No, it's a going forward view. So it's an incremental, okay. Going forward view. A few bucks to spend there. And you've been known to acquire companies in the past. I presume you're not done. We're always looking. We're always looking. We like to shop. Great. Well, you've been a good chef, Steve, I must say. So thanks very much for spending some time with us. I know you're busy. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Good to see you again. All right, take care, everybody. We'll be right back. This is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE.