 Okay, welcome back to our final segment, wrap up of day two. This is theCUBE, two days of wall-to-wall coverage. We go out to the events, extract the signal from noise. This is Wikibon and SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of IBM information on demand. Day two is our final wrap up. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante. And as usual, Jeff Kelly's coming in after scouring all the stories, talking to customers. Jeff Kelly, big data, leading big data analysts in the marketplace. Jeff, Dave, welcome to our final wrap up. Thank you, John. What a tight schedule. No breaks today. Again, theCUBE, just power through amazing interviews. Great job by the team. Great job by the team. Great, Dave, one comment I want to make about IBM IOD is that obviously IBM is a very professional blue chip company, but the guests are really smart. I mean, we're looking at the degrees, the pedigree, the experience. We have great educational backgrounds. We've got entrepreneurs who built companies up from the scratch. We've got M&A discussions. The Nile Factory, that was a great interview. Just amazing from Ireland. Just great conversations. Again, we learned a lot here. Let's get right into it, Dave. What did you learn today? Give a quick summary of day two. Well, today was a lot about the business of social analytics, overlaying social on top of applications. I mean, I've said for a while, I think this is what the direction is gonna be. It's gonna necessitate a change in user interface, user experience. It can be embedded essentially into every single app. And I think this is just the beginning. I think the other thing is, I think really IBM's done a good job of solidifying its position with IOD as the leading big data conference. This is the largest big data conference now on the planet. It's bigger than Hadoop World. It's bigger than GigAOM structure and any other event that's solely dedicated to big data analytics. So I think IBM did a good job overall, John. What do you think? Well, that last comment you made is interesting. Anybody talk about GigAOM structure and other events? I think what you're seeing is a direct business model. One of the things that James Kobiel has talked about is that the democratization continues with technology. The web was a direct business model with e-commerce and websites and now social with people. But the IBM's event here is a great example of what I feel will be the destruction of the conference business. I mean, how good can an independent media company try to lure customers in when you have this kind of power going direct? We had analysts working for IBM. But I think the main theme here at this show obviously is two things. The cloud with Amazon, Amazon going direct. You've got end user behavior with mobile going on. You have major, major focus on direct business model changes. A complete radical reconstruction of how people are gonna do business. The end user is all about social. The social is the environment. I don't mean social media using Twitter. I mean, people are connecting people's relationships with each other. The humanization of the internet where computer science meets social science. That humanization we heard from Marshall today. Big factor. So you put those two together. Those are the two mega trends I think IOD successfully vectored into. And that is big data analytics. Obviously the most trending topic right now in the tech business. The killer app. The killer app is analytics. We know that. End user is all about now. I want information on my mobile device. Now you're gonna have wearable computers. We've all been in reality. And it's the social. Okay, those are the two big things. And then under that, as under the hood is the engine of innovation. The innovation strategies around cognitive computing in memory, real time. The data monetization, SaaS, multi-function form for effort cloud. That's the geeky stuff under the hood. Virtualization that is unbelievably exciting if you're a tech geek. So again, you got a perfect storm. Technology changes that are just enabling massive scale. Enabling a direct business model. Changing the user experience and expectation. Which in essence changing society. And ultimately how the people buy, how they form relationships. So to me, I think IBM nailed, is nailing their strategy in terms of the vector they're taking. And then a big honking portfolio behind it. And then a giant services business that not a lot of people talk about. But it's like, we had, was it Fred Balboni on? Fred Balboni? I believe it was Fred Balboni. He was amazing, right? Just talking about what IBM services capabilities are. A lot of people criticize IBMs because oh, it's a services company. Wow, what a secret weapon that is. To be able to go into an industry with domain expertise and deliver on the promise, right? So we also heard some other concepts, Dave. We heard the sea change, killing the old business models and bringing the new attention. And time is the new currency. We had a blog post up on that. We heard about the cloud, multi-factor form factor on hybrid. And we heard from customers. And we heard a CIO come on board. And this is a trend I'm gonna bring it up because I've heard this before. IT is a profit center. I mean, that is a concept I see gaining traction. I think it's a little bit difficult to do when you look at the what's on the balance sheet relative to the data center and facilities and management. Dave, you and I talk about it all the time. You know, that's the Achilles heel of this entire data center businesses that right off is looming around the corner and what the hell are they gonna do with that? So, you know, when they take down the depreciation on the assets, what are they gonna do? So there's big cost structure involved there. The cloud turns IT cost into profits, right? That's what we heard. Jeff, what are you hearing, Jeff Kelly? What are you hearing out there? So you were out all day today talking to customers. You were getting briefings. What stories did you come back with? What insights can you share? Well, spoke with a handful of customers today, you know, all doing some really interesting things. Spoke with constant contact, doing some interesting things around really analyzing all that data related to, you know, the email newsletters their customers send, figuring out things like when's the best time of day to call, they're starting to, best time of day to send that email. They're starting to do some experiment with some analytics around what are some of the words, the key words in a subject line that's gonna get people to open up their newsletters. So they're starting to do some interesting things. You know, the kind of the core of what they're doing now is around netizen, data warehousing, but they're looking forward. So that's one of the themes, or one of the constants I think I saw around a lot of the customers I spoke to is, you know, they're one or two years behind the messaging and the vision that IBM is putting out there, which is not surprising. I mean, IBM is pushing their vision, their thought leadership, they're talking about, you know, the cutting edge things they can do with big data and analytics around streams, around embedding analytics into business processes. So it's not surprising that the customers are, you know, a couple of years behind that, but all the customers I talked to are very intrigued by what IBM's doing and the vision they're laying out, and they're getting good value from what they're doing right now. It might not be big data analytics in the sense that it's not Hadoop and it's not streaming real-time data, but they're doing some interesting things with large volumes of data that are actually moving the needle. You know, I spoke to a small company, Northwest Trek Wildlife Park, and Point Define Zoo and Aquarium I spoke to. 80 people in this company, they're doing things like just, now that you can buy your ticket with your mobile device, now they're collecting data, they know who their customers are. They can improve retention rates, they can start campaigns that actually personalize offers. So, you know, these are not, in some sense, not the most cutting edge, but they're doing interesting things that it's moving the needle. How big of an impact are they having? I see there are customers that are propped up there by IBM, so, you know, I don't want to say IBM propaganda because they're real customers, so it's not propaganda in the sense, it's just their customers that they're presenting forward. Did you get a sense of how real that was in terms of scale? Was it size, big size changes? Was it major? Well, I didn't get a sense that, like I said, you're right to point out it's IBM customers that IBM brings up. So, obviously. No, they're happy customers, it's blown the same way. When people are happy, they tell everybody. And that's, you know, that's great. But, you know, they were, they were, all the customers I spoke to were Frank, and, you know, I take them at their word, they were, you know, happy for the most part, but, you know, they did have some criticism of IBM, and I think the main criticism I heard from customers, some other attendees I spoke to, and IBM knows this, and we've been saying this as well, is that IBM needs to do a better job of telling the story, and less time spent talking about the point products. Now, I think IBM's come a long way in the last two years around this front, and in fact, I don't get that. I don't hear from competitors as much, for instance, that, you know, A, IBM's got this alphabet soup of products that's confusing, it's not good for customers, where you would see that. I would see that in briefings from IBM's competitors. They put up a slide with all these different products. IBM's doing a better job, but it's still a concern of customers, and IBM's acknowledged as much in our analyst as human aid with executives today. You know, they acknowledge that they need to continue to do a better job of telling that story around solutions, and less around, hey, my pure data box, or, you know, my cognitive implementation. So I've always said, that's why services is so important, because they can wrap that services wrapper around that portfolio and bring the solution to bear. And I think the other thing we started to hear more about was this whole internet of things. I think a year from now, John, you're gonna see a lot more in that space. I think we're just gonna start to see some real teeth. What are you excited about, John, based on what you saw here? I'm really excited by the social business story. I think it's not really coherent yet from IBM's standpoint. I think that it's an amazing conversation that everyone wants to have. I just think IBM doesn't have the seamless products together, they got a lot of legacy with Lotus and some other things that need to be cleaned up a bit, positioning-wise. But I'm really excited about some of the things they're doing around social, social business. I really think that they're on the right track. I think they got the experience. That really gets me excited. But I gotta say, Dave, the Cube here, the past two days, I was very excited by one great production, great event. But more importantly, you know how I feel about the CrowdChat, right? So CrowdChat applications, our integrated application, part of our CrowdSpots platform was a huge success here. We rolled out it to the hashtag IBM IOD. We had today 210 posts or tweets, business on LinkedIn as well, and 776,000 timeline impressions, 1,000 Uniques come in to see that. Yesterday we did only a two-hour CrowdChat. We had over a million timeline impressions. That means the CrowdChat's working. And when we weren't running the CrowdChat, I was here on the Cube, I felt it was different. I wanted the CrowdChat bot, I wanted it back because I just felt going to Twitter directly was awkward and I think that's an example of crowd-activated innovation that we rolled out and that's kind of in line with the theme of the show, which is social business. So the communication that the people want to have at these events is proof that IBM's social business strategy is right on the money because that is the future. The crowd consumer, qualified crowd, that's the new sales model, the new marketing model. So, you know, harnessing that and putting it into production for lines of business and IT, I think IBM is well ahead of the pack on that front. So I'm excited by that, I really am. Cube is a comfortable place and CrowdChat is a comfortable place. I think we're going to be running Cube interviews here with our guests. I like that format, no, I really do. I think running a CrowdChat throughout the day or the bulk of the day allows us to capture the essence of the Cube interviews. And one more thing I want to share by what I'm excited about is I'm excited about the fact that we're now in our fourth year at the Cube, the format works, right? We had CrowdChat's in there, by opening up the data, we are streaming data. We're, as we say, running data, we're streaming information and we're attracting great people, right? And again, a great lineup here, but yesterday kind of had that moment with the Cube where we had Merv, Adrian from Gartner and Ray Wang from the Constellation Group. We had James Kibolos today. We all the top analysts love to come here because you know why? Their data that they have in their head is gold and they are sharing it with the world. It's an amazing dynamic and I think that excites me, Dave, because the Cube is about sharing, it's about sharing information with the world and you get guys like Merv, Adrian out there and Ray Wang, they're sharing, they're open sourcing their mind and I think that creates great goodwill, social currency that comes back and spades for them on a 10X basis. So to me, love what we're doing. I'm excited by the CrowdChat, I try to buy social business. Re-invent next week, check out wikibond.org for all the free research, go to siliconangle.com, see all the blog posts associated with the Cube interviews today. Go to youtube.com slash siliconangle, check that out, you'll see the playlists of all the events that we do. Thanks for watching everybody. This is the Cube, social data, social business, IBM, IOD, exclusive coverage. We'll be back in our next show. Stay with us, I invent, we'll be back. Bye.