 on the ground. Presented by theCUBE, here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE on the ground here in Seattle, Washington, the IBM Open Compute Architectural Summit, the day after Docker gone. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. We're here with Renee Bostic, who's the Vice President of Technical Cloud at IBM. Yes. So, the customer journey. What is the customer journey? Because there are many paths to the cloud. Certainly open source, collaboration, kicking the tires. How is the engagement with customers now changed? What's it like? Yes. Take us through an example. Okay, well, first I want to say it all starts with where the customer is coming into, as you said, into the journey. And we have at IBM a cloud capability maturity model. And what we do is we actually work with our clients and see do they know anything about a cloud today. And if they do, then we go on that path with them in order to explain the technology, understand their use case scenarios, right? Because you want to come from a solution perspective and not from a product or technology perspective, where they are, what their problems are. And then all the way to the end of the spectrum where customers have been on the cloud journey for some time. And now what they would like to do is they have a multi-cloud environment. How can they bring that all together in an integrated, interoperable environment? So the bigger customers more advanced have multiple clouds. But the early ones can need to understand the use cases that fit for their business. Correct. In the application environment. That's cool. Now I got to ask a different question, kind of going back to the client server days. It used to be a very simple formula. You do an audit, you get paid for that. You do a strategy session. You do a POC and then you go to production. Over months. Maybe a year, depending on how big it is. That's true, that's true. Now the cloud, they want stuff fast. Is it the same concept, that process, or is it happening differently, faster? Absolutely it's different. And the reason why it's different, back to your point, is we're now more in an agile environment. Back to your point that customers are leveraging methodologies like Scrum. And what they would like to do is, you know, back to understanding the use case scenario, be able to come to the market faster. You've heard the terminology disruptive innovation, right? So they want to be able to create new markets, or serve markets that they don't currently serve today. So they can't do it the way we've been doing it in the past. But what we found out is design is key. And so what we have done at IBM is we have a blue mix garage, where we have a design methodology and customers can come in and actually bring in their applications, their ideas and then we help them develop that. I got to ask you, is it chaotic for customers? Because I can only imagine the industry is chaotic. Cloud technology fabric is changing rapidly. The industry formation is changing rapidly. What are some of the patterns that you're seeing that are common amongst all customers? I mean, is it chaotic? Is it much more of their learning? Is it more advanced? What can you share? Any anecdotal color around the patterns that you're seeing in the customer environment? Right, I would say that customers are now learning. The lessons learned are now coming now, right? Because they've actually evolved. They're not at the exploratory kind of a phase in cloud anymore. So now what they're doing is they're saying, what are the lessons learned that we have? And what we're finding out is that customers are saying security, infrastructure, networking infrastructure, they are just as important as the cloud use cases that has lined itself. We just were at DockerCon for two days and we interviewed for two straight days wall-to-wall coverage. And one of the most interesting comments that I heard was from Scott Johnson, the COO of Docker. And I'm like, oh, this application craze and DevOps has gone mainstream. That's so amazing now that we have to operate it now. So now DevOps' success has changed to IT operations. And he goes, what's your thoughts? He goes, well, certainly no one's going to change their service level agreements. So you're seeing ops now accepting the DevOps ethos. But yet the standards are so high for security and operational SLAs on running the business. Do you see that area? What's your thoughts on this? This just seems to be a common thread that we're hearing. Okay, I've sold on DevOps, agile. Now I got to run it. What are the customers doing in this area? Well, what customers are really doing is they're looking for frameworks. And they want to make sure that we look at security if you will from doing everything on the glass, right? Making sure that we have single sign-on capabilities all the way to identify vulnerabilities within a cloud environment. What are some of the risks and threats? And so they truly are coming to IBM and saying, let's share with you our concerns and then we know you have a framework that you can address that. And back to your point, from a DevOps perspective, I mean it looks at the entire application lifecycle and that's why operations now is so entrenched in understanding that we are here to remove the right waste, make it more secure and have governance around it. So final question, what do you think about this open cloud architecture summit? What's this all about? Customers like it, they're embracing it, are they interested, fearful? Yes, yes, all of the above. And I would say because, and back to your point at the beginning with some multi-cloud environment, and customers want to know, I don't want them to lock in. They want to make sure that they remain open, open standards, and they want to make sure that they have things like cloud brokerage. They want to make sure that as they develop their architectures that they can actually have a platform, environments where they can have that interoperability. And it's going to become more and more better and more and more efficient over time. Open wins as we say, open source mainstream. Renee, thank you for sharing your insight. I'm John Furrier, we're here on the ground in Seattle, Washington at the IBM open cloud architecture summit. Thanks for watching.