 Okay, welcome back everyone, we are live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the event, extract the signal from the noise. It's our exclusive coverage of IBM Pulse, IBM's premier cloud event, new era for IBM in the cloud, Dave, and it's exciting. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, joined my co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of wukibon.org. Our next guest is Meg Swanson, director of marketing for BlueMix, which is the cloud action that's getting all the attention from the developers, also involved in Dev at Pulse. Really a great opportunity, Meg, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, you know, we go on two days live coverage. You bring a lot of energy. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. Plus, it's one of the hottest areas that we love the developers. I mean, first of all, IBM has done a good job with the cloud positioning, but developers' ecosystem is not a layup for IBM, although they have developers. It's a new developer, I'm not going to say a difficult community, but DevOps and the cloud, these guys want certain things a certain way. They don't want to have something jammed down their throat. So, it's going to be a challenge, but you're on the team and you're going to straighten out what's going on. Ellis, what's the story? Well, I mean, from IBM and developers, so we've got a great relationship with developers, both enterprise and born on the web through developer works. So we're four million strong in the outreach that we do with developer works. We have our own repository on GitHub, a lot of team members on Stack Overflow. So we've been with the development community for a while. And what's exciting about Bluemix is that we've done a lot of research with developers, with our beta clients and their large enterprise down to a two-person startup. So we've got all ranges. And we did just a lot of alphas and betas and open research to try and find out what's the optimal development platform. So it's huge to us that it's open standards, it's open source based. Huge that you can use the programming languages that you're used to. And we even, even in designing the product and then in the way that we name the different services, we made sure that we're using the names of services and the words that your developers are looking for. So that, you can approach it where companies may be pushing their software, but that's not going to come across as a very open and flexible platform. Open is the key. Open is the key. Exactly. Explain a little more about how the philosophy of open drives home here. How deep is it? Yeah, so we, I mean, IBM for about 20 years, we've been just driving support and influence to the open source community. And so Bluemix is based on Pivotal's Cloud Foundry. So completely huge community there that's been developing and writing code. And it's just core for what we do is that as we develop this platform, it absolutely had to be based on open standards and had to be not only as you go into the platform and you're developing and you choose your runtime and you choose your programming language, we wanted to make sure you could choose the best services that you want. And maybe those are IBM products and we're thrilled to have those in there. Maybe they're third party products. Maybe they're third party partners like Twilio that we announced yesterday and maybe they're open source technologies. So we just wanted to make sure that we have a rapid app development platform that includes all of those services together. So Meg, you spend a lot of time obviously hanging with developers. It's an interesting crowd and everybody wants the development community, right? So how do you sort of differentiate from everybody else who wants the mind share whether it's guys like Microsoft or who may have HPs trying to get into the business. Everybody wants to own that mind share. How does IBM differentiate from all the noise? You don't ever own the developer mind share, right? And I think that's the approach is that you listen to the development community and you provide, I mean, at the end of the day you have to provide the best content. You have to have the best platform and the fastest way to develop. And the companies that are going to step forward and do that and support the way and the model that developers want to work in are the ones that you don't win the community but you gain credibility and you start co-building together. So that's the great thing about announcing the open beta is we were very specific to not announce the full products and here it is and there are no changes. It's a beta and even when we do a full announce of it it still is going to be an iterative development process. So we're getting feedback from the developers and pulling in the services that they're asking for and changing even just things within the user interface to make it easier. So it's really about building community and listening and I think anyone who reaches out to the development community knows the second you show up as marketing, being in marketing, you've kind of lost and you've got to be very much organic and working with the developers and not trying to market to them because they know the kinds of services they want and if you just serve up here transparently what our product provides and that's a value then you've been able to get them to start using the platform and then grow and grow. Yes, people talk about learning experiences. This is an earning experience. Now, so you talked about you just can't show up as marketing and start doing all kinds of flashy things. So how do you make marketing a source of value to the developer community? It's being very transparent about the product and about what you can provide and offer and it's authenticity and not over-overselling what's in the offering. So what we're focusing a lot on is showing here are the applications that companies like you are doing. Here's transparently the kinds of time savings that they're having, kinds of cost savings that they get and we'd love for you to try it because it's an open beta, completely free and we're absolutely open to feedback. So it's about showing use cases of here are the different services available. Here are different applications that have been developed and then if that's of value to a developer in that industry and we're hearing it is, which is great news. And we just keep building on that and building on the feedback that we get from the community. Meg, I want to ask you about a comment or tell you about what Steve Mills said. So Steve Mills was on here, we talked about Bluemix. He was super excited, historical like memory lane about all the different transformations of IBM. But he said around Bluemix, creativity is the key. I want you to talk about that and what's coming out of DevEd Pulse. What are some of that creative coolness and greatness coming out of DevEd Pulse? Yeah, so we ran this two day developer focused kind of the happening, right? Because it's not a full conference. It's not a, we're not pitching products and it was very much about creating experiences where developers could have hands-on activities with not only our products but just kind of the latest and greatest that's out there. So we have the Oculus Rift headsets. We had Raspberry Pi, the drones and you could really get hands-on and start building technologies. So when you think about Bluemix and how we can spur creativity, our development teams are taking the Oculus Rift kits and thinking about how do we develop applications that can help you immerse yourself in that kind of environment that Oculus Rift has created and then taking a nod from the gaming community if you look at the kinds of research and user research and feedback that the gaming community pulls in, like a lot of our speakers at the conference are game designers and game developers and just really helping position the product design and product experience for developers in a way that's extremely relevant to them and that they see day-to-day within us. How about the data science aspect of it? I think big data, because there's a lot of big data going on here. How does that play into the whole Bluemix thing? Yeah, so big data analytics is massive, right? And so really what a lot of companies are looking at is how do they take the big data analytics and turn it into insights? And so making sure we have the right data services within Bluemix and within the applications you can build so that you can turn back to your company real-time analytics. So we've got a demo online right now that is just a very simple sentiment analysis through Twitter. But the example it shows is pouring your data, use, build an application where anybody in your company can clearly interpret the data and the customer records and the value it brings to the company and they built that app. So what's the next leg of the journey? You have to launch the open, you're open for business. Steve was on earlier. Steve Robinson was talking about you're now open for business and you got thousands of assignments overnight. For Bluemix. What's next? What's next leg of the journey? More thousands of sign-ups. But it's really feedback. So it's taking all the sign-ups that we've gotten and we've been so thrilled seeing the company names that have come across too. Because the company names as it's almost the startup environment, all of us on the product team we're getting real-time alerts and texts about oh this company's in, this company's in. And it's been really exciting to see companies that maybe traditionally wouldn't have been part of the day one announced for IBM to come through. And so that's been exciting. But the next step is listening to that feedback and building out more around internet of things, more around big data analytics, and continuing to build and deliver on our roadmap. Well Meg, we want to keep in touch with you. Obviously it's a hot area, we love it. We're going to be continuing to do more around the developers, certainly the platform as a service, the battleground, the middleware, a billion dollar investment from IBM, open technologies, it's a perfect storm of innovation. Hey, jockeying for growth is good for business, good for everyone. It's good for our media business, we're happy to cover it. We cover Cloud Foundry, we know the folks well are pivotal as well. So, and we'll be at the OpenStack Summit as well in Atlanta. So, platform as a service, Blue Mix, IBM's big move. Thanks so much, Meg, for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our show wrap-up after this short break.