 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is theCUBE's ongoing coverage where we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, of course, virtually in this case. Now we're going to talk about ecosystems, partnerships and the flywheel they deliver in the technology business. And with me are Jason Kelly, the general manager global strategic partnerships, IBM Global Business Services and Mani Dasgupta, who's the vice president of marketing for IBM Global Business Services. Folks, it's great to see you again. I wish we were face-to-face, but this'll have to do. Good to see you, Dave. And same, I wish we were face-to-face, but we'll go with this. Soon, we're being patient. Jason, let's start with you. You have a partner strategy. I wonder if you could sort of summarize that and tell us more about it. So it's interesting that we start with the strategy because you said we have a partner strategy, Dave. And I'd say that the market has dictated back to us a partner strategy, something that we, it's not new and we didn't start it yesterday. It's something that we continue to evolve and build even stronger. This thought of a partner strategy is that nothing's better than the thought of a partnership. And people say, oh, well, you know, you gotta work together as one team and as a partner. And it sounds almost as a one-to-one type relationship. Our strategies is much different than that, Dave. And our execution is even better. And that execution is focused on now the requirement that the market, our clients are showing to us and our strategic partners that one player can't deliver all their needs. They can't design solution and deliver that from one place. It does take an ecosystem to the word that you called out, this thought of an ecosystem. And our strategy and execution is focused on that. And the reason why I say it evolves is because the market will continue to evolve and this thought of being able to look at a client's, let's call it a workflow, let's call it a value chain from one end to the other, wherever they start their process to wherever it ultimately hits that end user, it's going to take many players to cover that. And then we as IBM wanna make sure that we are the general contractor of that capability with the ability to convene the right strategic partners, bring out the best value for that outcome, not just technology for technology's sake, but the outcome that the end client is looking for so that we bring value to our strategic partners and that end client. Now I think about when you talk about the value chain, you know, I'm imagining, you know, the business books years ago where you'd see the conceptual value chain, you could certainly understand that and you could put processes together to connect them. And now you've got technology, I think of APIs, it's really supports that everything gets accelerated. And Mani, I wonder if you could address sort of the go to market, how this notion of ecosystem, which is so important is impacting the way in which you go to market. Absolutely. So modern business demands a new approach to working. The ecosystem thought that Jason was just alluding to, it's a mutual benefit of all these companies working together in the market. It's a mutual halo of the brands. So as responsible for the championship of the IBM and the global business services brand, I am very, very interested in this mutual working together. It should be a win, win, win, as we say in the market. It should be a win for our clients, first and foremost. It should be a win for our partners and it should be a win for IBM. And we are working together right now on an approach to bring this go to market strategy to life. So I wonder if we could maybe talk about how this actually works and pull in some examples. You must have some favorites that we can touch on. Is that fair? Can we name some names? Sure, names always work and Dave, you're right. And it's always in context of reality that we can talk about, as I said, this execution and not just a strategy. And I'll start with probably what's right in the front of many people's minds is we're doing this virtually because of what? Because of an unfortunate pandemic. This disastrous loss of life and things that have taken us down a path. We go, whoa, how do we address that? Well, anytime there's a tough task, IBM raises its hand first. You know, whether it was putting a person on the moon and bringing them home safely or standing up a system behind the current social security administration, you know, during the depression, you pick it. Well, here we are now and why not start with that as an example because I think it calls out just what we mentioned here first, Dave, this thought of an ecosystem because the first challenge, how do we create and address the biggest data puzzle of our lives, which is how do we get this vaccine created in record time, which it was, the fastest before that was four years. This was a matter of months. So Pfizer created the first one out and then had to get it out to distribution. Behind that is a wonderful partner of ours, SAP, trying to work with that. So us working with SAP, along with Pfizer, in order to figure out how to get that value chain and some would say supply chain, but I'll address that in a second, but there's many players there. And so we were in the middle of that with Pfizer, committed to saying, how do we do that with SAP? So now you see players working together as one ecosystem, but then think about the ecosystem that that's happening, where you have a federal government agency, a state, a local, you have healthcare, life science industry, you have consumer industry. Oh, wait a second, Dave, this is getting very complicated, right? Well, this is the thought of convening an ecosystem. And this is what I'm telling you is our execution and it has worked well. And so it's happening now and we see it still developing and being very productive in real time. But then I said there was another example and that's with me, you, Monty, whomever, you pick the consumer, ultimately we are that outcome of the value chain. That's why I said, I don't wanna just call it a supply chain because at the end is someone consuming and in this case, we need a shot. And so we partnered with Salesforce, IBM and Salesforce saying, wait a minute, that's not a small task. It's not just get the content there and put it in someone's arm. Instead, there's scheduling that must be done. There's follow up, an entire case management like system. Salesforce is a master at this. So work.com team with IBM. We said, now let's get that part done for the right type of UI, UX capability that user experience, user interaction interface. And then also in bringing another player in the ecosystem, one of ours, Watson Health, along with our blockchain team, we brought together something called a digital health pass. So I've just talked about two ecosystems, multiple ecosystems working together. So you think of an ecosystem of ecosystems. I called out blockchain technology and obviously supply chain, but there's also AI, IoT. So you start to see where look, this is truly an orchestration effort that has to happen with very well designed capability. And so of course we master in design and tying that entire ecosystem together and convening it so that we get to the right outcome. You, me, Monty, all getting in a shot being healthy. That's a real time example of us working with an ecosystem and teaming with key strategic partners. You know Monty, I mean, Jason, you're right. I mean, this pandemic's been horrible. I have to say, I'm really thankful it didn't happen 20 years ago because it would have been like, okay, here's some big PCs and a modem and go ahead and figure it out. So, I mean, the tech industry has saved business. I mean, with knowledge, we mentioned AI, automation, data, you know, even things, basic things, like, you know, security at the end point. I mean, so many things and you're right. I mean, IBM in particular, other large companies, you mentioned SAP, you have taken the lead. And it's really, Monty, I don't think the tech industry gets enough credit but I wonder if there's some of your favorite, you know, partnerships that you can talk about. Yeah, so I'm going to build on what you just said, Dave. IBM is in this unique position amongst this ecosystem, not only the fact that we have the world leading most innovative technologies to bring to bear, but we also have the consulting capabilities that go with it. Now, to make any of these technologies work towards the solution that Jason was referring to in this digital health class, it could be any other solution, you would need to connect these disparate systems sometimes, make them work towards a common outcome to provide value to the client. So I think our role as IBM within this ecosystem is pretty unique in that we are able to bring both of these capabilities to bear. In terms of, you know, you asked about favorites, there are, this is really a co-optition market where everybody has products, everybody has services. The most important thing is, how are we bringing them all together to serve the need or the need of the hour in this case. I would say one important thing in this as you observe how these stories are panning out in an ecosystem, in a partnership. It is about the value that we provide to our clients together. So it's almost like a sell with model from a go to market perspective. There is also a question of our products and services being delivered through our partners, right? So think about the span and scope of what we do here. And so that's the sell through. And then of course we have our products running within our partner companies and our partner products, for example, Salesforce, running within IBM. So this is a very interesting and a new way of doing business. I would say it's almost like the modern way of doing business with modern IT. Well, and you mentioned co-optition. I mean, look at it, you're a part of IBM that will work with anybody because you're a customer first. Whether it's AWS, Microsoft, I mean Oracle is a really tough competitor, but your customers use an Oracle and they use an IBM. So I mean, those are some good examples, I think, of your point about co-optition. Absolutely. If you pick on any other client, I'll mention in this case, Delta. Delta was working with us on moving, being more agile. Now this pandemic has impacted the airline sector particularly hard, right? With travel, stopping and anything. So they are trying to get to a model which will help them scale up, scale down, be more agile, be more secure, be closer to their customers, try and understand how they can provide value to their customers and customers better. So we are working with Delta on moving them to cloud, on the journey to cloud. Now that public cloud could be anything. The beauty of this model in a hybrid cloud approach is that you're able to put them on Red Hat OpenShift. You're able to do and package the services into a microservices kind of a model. You want to make sure all the applications are running on a portable, almost platform agnostic kind of a model. This is the beauty of this ecosystem that we are discussing is the ability to do what's right for the end customer at the end of the day. How about some of the like SaaS players? Like some of the more prominent ones. We watched the ascendancy of ServiceNow and Workday. You mentioned Salesforce. How do you work with those guys? Obviously there's an AI opportunity, but maybe you could add some color there. So I like the fact, Dave, that you call out the different hyperscalers, for example, whether it's AWS, whether it's Microsoft, knowing that they have their own cloud instances, for example. And when you mentioned, hey, I had this happen a long time ago, you started talking about the heft of the technology. I started thinking of all the truckloads of servers or whatever they'd have to pull up. We don't need that now because it can happen in the cloud. And you don't have to pick one cloud or the other. And so when people say hybrid cloud, that's what comes out. You start to think of what I call a hybrid of hybrids because I told you before, these roles are changing. People aren't just buyers or suppliers, they're both. And then you start to say, what are different people supplying? Well, in that ecosystem, we know there's not gonna be one player. There's gonna be multiple. So we partner by doing just what Monty called out is this thought of integrating in hybrid environments on hybrid platforms with hybrid clouds, multi clouds. Maybe I want something on my premises, something somewhere else. So in giving that capability, that flexibility, we empower, and this is what's doing, use that co-op petition, we empower our partners, our strategic partners. We want them to be better with us. And this is this thought of being able to actually bring more together and move faster, which is almost counterintuitive. You're like, wait a minute, you're adding more players but you're moving faster, exactly. Because we have the capability to integrate those technologies and get that outcome that Monty mentioned. I would add to this one, Jason, you mentioned something very, very interesting. I think if you want to go just fast, you go alone, but if you want to go further, you go together. And that is the core of our point of view in this case is that we want to go further and we want to create value that is long lasting. What about like, so I get the technology players and there's maybe things that you do that others don't or vice versa, so there's gap fillers, et cetera. But what about, maybe customers that they get involved, perhaps government agencies, maybe they'd be a customer or an NGO as another example. Are they part of this value chain, part of this ecosystem? Absolutely, I'll give you, I'll stick with the same example when I mentioned a digital health pass. That digital health pass is something that we have as IBM and it's a credential. Think of it as a health credential, not a vaccine pass person because it could be used for a test, for a negative test from COVID, it could be used for antibodies. So if you have this credential, it's something that we as IBM created years back and we're using it for learning. When you think of getting people certifications versus a four year diploma, how do we get people into the workforce? That was what was original. That was a Jenny Romini thought, let's focus on new collar workers. So we had this asset that we'd already created and then it said, wait, here's a place for it to work with health, with validation verification on someone's option. It's optional, they choose it. Hey, I want to do it this way. Well, the state of New York said that they want it to do it that way. And they said, listen, we are going to have a digital health pass for all of our New York citizens and we want to make sure that it's equitable. It could be printed or on a screen and we want it to be designed in this way and we want it to work on this platform and we want to be able to work with these strategic partners, A Sales Force, an SAP, an Orca. I mean, I can just keep going. And we said, okay, let's do this. And this is a thought of collaboration and doing it by design. So we haven't lost that, Dave. This only brings it to the forefront. Just as you said, yes, that is what we want. We want to make sure that in this ecosystem we have a way to ensure that we are bringing together, convening, not just point products or different service providers, but taking them together and getting the best outcome so that that end user can have it configured in the way that they want it. Guys, we got to leave it there, but it's clear you're helping your customers and your partners on this digital transformation journey that we all talk about. You get this massive portfolio of capabilities, deep, deep expertise. I love the hybrid cloud and AI focus. Jason and Monty, really appreciate you coming back on theCUBE. It's great to see you both. Thank you so much, Dave. Fantastic. Thank you. Great to be with you. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our continuous coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition, keep it right there.