 That's your camera. Okay, gotcha. Okay, we're back here live at IBM's Information on Demand. This is SiliconANGLE.tv, SiliconANGLE.com's exclusive coverage, wall-to-wall coverage of Information on Demand. This is our flagship program, The Cube. We go out to the events to extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and I'm joined with my co-host, today, Volante of Wikibon.org. And we're here in Vegas at the Mandalay Bay. This is IOD, IBM's Information on Demand Conference. I'm here with Ken Bisconti. Ken Bisconti is the vice president of the enterprise content management business at IBM. He's focused on products and strategies for that part of the group. And Ken, welcome to The Cube. Great, thanks, David. Happy to be here. So, good to have you. Content management, it's a tried and true industry. It's been around forever. It's now coming together with big data, all kinds of mega trends going on. So this is your show. And this has been your show for a number of years. So, how do you feel and what's going on here? Well, we're excited, of course. We're really excited for most information professionals and businesses. Unstructured content is on average about 80% of their business information. And it's growing tremendously. It's growing on average according to an IDC, 44 times between now and 2020. People struggle with both how to manage it, how to capture it, how to put it into action in the context of business, how to achieve results, how to save money, how to deal with the growing cost and the regulatory compliance, legal discovery, how to clean inside out of it for improved business processes, fraud detection, consumer insight, et cetera. So it's an incredibly growing space and exciting. So take us through how we got here. So, post-Enron, there was obviously an increased focus on information risk. And certainly the federal rules of civil procedure in 2006 changed that. And then you had a period of time, and one could argue, you're still in that time, where the general counsel tail was wagging the dog, at the same time you have this new big data inflection point coming in. So is data and information, is it an asset or is it a liability? It's both, right? So it's data and information, it's an incredible asset. Organizations are really interested in how do I multiply the value of that data? So how do I, through insight, through putting it into action, how do I improve my customer experience? How do I improve the way I'm delivering services and products, et cetera? At the same time, it's an incredible cost, right? So information is growing, like I was saying earlier, usually double digit, often 40, 50, 60% year on year. And organizations, especially in regulated industries, financial services are storing everything. So you're not deleting anything, you see your information growth growing out of control, and organizations are afraid to delete anything because they can't get the general counsel, VP of records, RIM officer, CIO, IT group coordinated on can I delete the senior? I don't know, because we're a global organization spread across 45 different locations and 200 different departments that all have an opinion. It's hard to deal with. And it's different regulations per country. Different regulations per country, per province, per state, yes. So we've fallen back to this, all right, just keep it, just archive it, we know it's there if we need it. Why is that a risky strategy for organizations? So it's a risky strategy for several reasons. One reason is, okay, cost is growing, okay, cost is growing. Well, some would argue, yeah, but Silicon gets cheaper, it's cheaper to store, more and more megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, et cetera. On average, storage costs are going to continue to decrease 20% year on year. But again, if your information's growing 50, 60, 70% year on year, you have not just the storage cost, but the regulatory compliance, legal risk, litigation support costs, governance fines, et cetera. It's an incredibly difficult challenge for businesses. So there was a lot of focus, Ken, on solving the problem with email. Kind of the mid part of last decade. And you know, you did an okay job of that, I guess, since then there's been such an explosion of other content. So my question is, you know, beyond emails, which I think the industry generally has a decent handle on that, maybe you could comment or agree or disagree. But how do organizations defensively delete information? So what's really required is a holistic solution. So we've had records management, we've had classification, we've had email archive and the tools that can delete content. Problem is that organizations don't have the coordination, don't have the decision management and policy governance in place to be comfortable about pushing that delete button. It's organizational. It's organizational and you really need a holistic approach to this. We call this defensible disposal or information lifecycle governance. And it's comprised of content sources, whether those are document management repositories, email archives, et cetera. The ability to collect and records manage and reply retention instructions across that content execute. But just as importantly, if not more importantly, is the decision management layer, where I'm actually doing value-based retention decision making. Where I'm actually coordinating a global file plan because I have a solution that all the lines of business that have some responsibility can say, this is my content. This is its important, et cetera. We acquired a company, PSS Systems, two years ago, which had this incredible technology under a product named Atlas, which we have now evolved and integrated with our content management systems. We've syndicated instructions down to Optum for structured content, to SharePoint, to other solutions so that we can provide the soup to nuts decision and policy governance all the way to execution and content management. And you can automate those policies, right? Because humans just can't make these decisions because they won't be consistent. So can you talk about the human element? You can't eliminate the human element. So what role do humans play? What's IBM's sort of angle on that? So humans are absolutely a critical element to it. You need the tools, such as the policy and governance technology to be able to execute. But there's continuous churn and change in opinion on things like what is a record? What's the e-discovery approach for social media? So our involvement in that actually has been to, we championed an organization called the Compliance Governance Oversight Council, CGOC. PSS Systems helped found it. It's not anything that's owned or operated by IBM. There's, I think, 1700 legal professionals, records managers, general councils for Fortune 100 organizations. It is a self-managed organization, judges, federal judges, et cetera. But they're continuously talking about these topics and rendering opinion and best practice that we're using, that input, to then execute that in our own offerings. So talk about the, so let's go back to this sort of defensible disposal. And that seems to be sort of a hot trend in your world. Talk a little bit more about the ROI. So if I'm a customer, I hear, okay, yeah, I hear you. We maybe need to put in some systems to do this. What's the ROI of doing that? Is it just, is it risk avoidance? Or is there sort of a hard dollar ROI? Well, you know, there's definitely risk avoidance. Often what we run into is organizations will say, yeah, I agree that's risk avoidance. It's not my problem and it's somebody else's problem. And so that's a nice to have, but I'm not going to go spend this money to implement defensible disposal because of that. That, you know, the cost levers are storage, right? So storage is an incredible cost lever. In fact, we found, even in some of our most recent activities, organizations finding 50, 60% of their current information is of little or no business value. So you've got, you know, you've got storage costs. You've got operating and human costs around managing that information. I've got regulatory compliance costs, fines and other, you know, costs associated with being compliant in my industry. And I've got e-discovery. So I've got both litigation support. How can I reduce the e-discovery and litigation support costs, as well as what is the potential savings from not being sued or, you know, lowering my risk posture as an organization? Yeah, so of course, e-discovery is very volume driven. The more data you have, the more floors you've got to pay. And the number of active litigation cases that you have. We have customers that have on average 1,200 plus active points of litigation at any one point in time. So you can just imagine what the legal costs are associated with that and the business risk. So for a large organization, it's potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. Potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. We have some organizations we're working with now that forget the legal cost alone. They're looking at savings of hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three to five years through simply defensible disposal execution. Can talk about the role that technology is playing in defensible disposal? Because in a way, technology got us into this problem. Can technology help us get out of the problem? Talk about that a little bit. So technology can absolutely make it much more efficient to be able to coordinate and to execute those retention instructions to be able to do what we call content assessment. So we're using analytics to help assess what information do I have because I probably don't know. We're using that to execute retention instructions, both time based and event based instructions. And also, you know, using that to classify including automatically classify content by looking at using natural language processing to look at an email and say, oh, it goes in this bucket versus that. This is a record. This is junk email. This is discoverable. This is not. So technology is absolutely an assistant. But again, unless you have the holistic solution in place and unless you've sort of coupled that also with getting your GC or VP of records, your CIO coordinated, nobody pushes the button. So can obviously huge issues at risk here or on the table for CFO, General Counsel, you mentioned some of the key stakeholders. Not so much the CIO, although they're heavily involved. Oh no, no, for them too. Because they're the ones usually being challenged with you have to take tens of millions of dollars of cost out of your operating budget. The CFO and then the General Counsel saying, I don't want to get sued, store everything and be able to archive it really fast. Okay, got that. But now, let's talk about some of the dynamics in today's market, unstructured data. You mentioned that earlier, obviously huge tsunami happening on data, things like Hadoop are helping, you guys have analytic systems. Talk about what it means to be a social business around the business processes, instrumentation of processes and then the storage kind of compliance of that. So that's a great question, right? And social media, social capabilities are dramatically changing our industry. We were talking a little bit earlier about topics like, well, is ECM a space that's hot? Is it dead? It's been around for a while. We believe that many organizations use content management technologies and information for system of record. What was, this is the single source of the truth. This is the claim. This was the loan that we agreed to apply and give to this customer. But increasingly, we're now being asked to involve systems of engagement. So how do I move from just being a transactive relationship with my customer to forming a long term and high value engagement with them? How do I move from offering documents to communal content? How do I move from sort of simple tech search to all these forms of information across the universe? So we're applying social content services to customer care and insight, product and service innovation and workforce effectiveness and optimization. So bringing social content and social capabilities into the context of traditional lines of business to transform those opportunities. You know, it's interesting to hear you talk about the transition from a transactional world to an engagement-based world. I think it's, my point of view on that is it's a, or my angle on that, John. My silicon angle on that is, and I wonder if you could comment on this, is it's really, the end game is still a transaction, but it's more of an engagement-based, catalyzed transaction. Do you buy that or do you really see that the end game is the engagement? I think that we're seeing increasingly that customers recognize that transactions are a point in history in the customer conversation. So I'm more interested in managing the long-term customer conversation, you know, from this marketing interaction, this purchasing occasion, this support occasion, this service occasion. How am I providing multi-channel and end-to-end customer support and incredibly attractive customer experience to that client? The life cycle of that engagement. The life cycle of the customer. But doesn't that end in a sale? Ideally. Hopefully multiple sales. Hopefully this sale followed by that one and that cross-sale and that sales. And those sales are transactions, aren't they? They are. They are transactions. But you're saying you're wrapping around this engagement, this engagement wrapper around those sets of interactions that create a new experience. The reality is that today's consumer, let's just take a consumer experience. My expectation as a consumer is, look, I know you have a lot more, you as a provider have much more information about me than you ever did. You can comb social environments, you can comb LinkedIn, you can comb all these different sources of information to provide better insight to me. Better support for me, better marketing, tailored marketing to me. If you're not doing that and if you're not taking advantage of the social and collaborative capabilities also available to manage my long-term interaction with you, I'm going elsewhere. What up? That's definitely the trend, a big data. That's one of the promises of big data. Absolutely. One of the business benefits of big data. Then you have the legacy. Right, right, business benefit, but challenge, right? So every one of our customers here, I think, is thinking about how do I apply big data to make my organization more efficient, more optimal, better customer service, and more competitive? I saw recently, last week maybe, the week before Senator Rockefeller sort of went on what, some people call it a witch hunt, but a lot of consumers are happy about that he put forth, and Senate put forth an inquiry to a lot of these agencies like Experian and Equifax, a lot of the information that they're collecting on us. And they're asking what information are you collecting? This is an information management problem. People think they can just push a button and tell you, okay, this is what we have. What are your customers? How are they reacting to that trend? I know it's early, but under the whole rubric of privacy. So great question, right? So five years ago, nobody was asking us about privacy. They just simply asked about encryption, security, access control. All of a sudden, privacy is like up to the top, like okay, I need to manage privacy of information as well, right? And it includes everything from how I'm redacting social security numbers and keeping customer information secure and contained to how do I discover back to the content assessment process, how do I discover that I've actually got social security numbers in collaborative team rooms or that I have unique customer IDs sitting in file shares or email? I mean, this is privacy information that customers are much more attuned to and worried about than they ever were before. We started talking, it's interesting, some themes that came out in this segment. People say is ECM dead, is it still hot? We talked about information asset and liability management. People used to talk about decision support being sort of a boring market. And now it's called big data. Sure, big data analytics. But personally, I think that the whole information management space is just becoming more complex, there's more value there, there's more risk, it's just going to escalate as data grows, so it's a very hot space. But it's changing, isn't it? Talk about how it's changing and where you see it going. It's changing tremendously. So as an example, when I started in this part of our business almost five years ago now, we thought about content management, images, document management. Now today, just four years later, we've introduced new content analytics technology based on Watson research. We've introduced e-discovery and defensible disposal. We've introduced case management, complex and rich capture services. But even more important than that, this sort of ECM world has now collided with structured data, big data, cloud, social, mobile topics. One of the things that I found most interesting in my involvement, I'm on the board of the Association of Information Management Professionals AIM. We've been talking all the time about the recognition that there's a glut in the industry of information professionals. So just the ability to find and hire people that understand what technologies do I apply to this business problem. So my business problem is I want to reduce insurance claim fraud in the UK. It's okay, so what are my sources of information to go actually do that? What are the technologies I might imply? When would I use big data? When would I use predictive analytics? When would I use media streaming? When would I use unstructured content structured? So just to be able to understand how to apply those technologies and the methodology to apply those to a business problem, incredible challenge. And you're saying there's a glut of those individuals. And so what you need to do is change your title from I.M. professional to data scientist, take a tech analytics class, take a stats class, and you'll be double your salary at the spot. Well, this is the same organization. I have some personal involvement with they introduced a new certification, the certified information professional, a whole curriculum about these kind of topics. Just recognizing that organizations are looking for how do I find somebody that has a certification much like a project management certification would say, hey, this person knows the difference between privacy and access control, knows how to apply predictive analytics or social media analytics, et cetera. Well, two areas that weren't really hot in the past in terms of people jumping down, saying, you know, I'm in this role is obviously compliant information management and databases, right? Two of the hottest areas right now on the planet, both in terms of what you're working on and also on the database side, you know, it's cool to be a database geek now. You know, so it's like, I can say that I have a, you know, one of my degrees is in database design, but you know, you weren't telling people, hey, what do you do? Oh, I'm a database guy, whatever. Now it's the hottest thing, so data science is there. So my final question for you, Ken, is really more about back to the social business. I think everyone's recognizing, yeah, I'm seeing the debate tonight. I know what presidential election, governments are being overthrown by Twitter. The crowd is talking, that's measurable. I could maybe get that data, I could get the signal out of the noise and use it for my benefit. So I think there's kind of like a blue sky, like I see it, I don't know how to do it yet. There's a lot of barriers and I would agree with what you're saying. So share with us those barriers. What are the barriers for a business that says, you know, I want to instrument my business processes. I want to reduce the risk. I want to save those dollars and provide business value, hope a big data. So what are some of those key barriers right now? Well, you know, the key barrier, the key challenge that anybody has to deal with is the same kind of challenge that you deal with in any IT decision. How do I not get mired in technology and acronyms and bits and bytes and whatnot? How do I understand what business problem am I trying to solve? As I'm trying to solve that business problem, what are the goals and objectives and then what sort of technologies can be used to be applied to that business problem. And don't try to boil the ocean, try to pick a solution, try to, don't start with, hey, what I need is Hadoop. You know, and I've seen these scenarios where the customers, hey, this customer is building their own email archive solution in Hadoop. And I was, why are they doing that? That problem's been solved, right? So I would say, you know, look at the business problem you're trying to solve. Which is interesting and fun. It's not a bad thing, no, Hadoop is awesome. It's incredible for distributed processing, distributed file system capability. You know, like I was saying earlier, when you use big insights combined with our content analytics, web scale analytics, it's unbelievable. But don't get mired in the technology, start with the business problem, start by defining the goal and narrow yourself down to, this is what I need to do to solve that business problem. While I have some purview on what I might want to do in phases two, three, and four later. Ask the questions, then go for the solutions, then figure out the tech. Right, find yourself an information professional who can help you apply them insight. And then when it's really ready, get Watson to come on the case which we had earlier from you guys. So great, Ken Biscotti here inside theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is live in Las Vegas Information on Demand, IBM's premier conference about information and big data, and we'll be right back. Great.