 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer. I'm John Furrier with my host Dave Vellante. Two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. This is day two. Got a great guest, Scott Baker, CMO at IBM, VP of Infrastructure at IBM. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Hey, good to see you guys as well. It's always a pleasure. Good time last night at your event. Great time last night. It was really well attended. IBM always says it's the best food, so that was good. And great props, magicians, and it was really a lot of fun comedians. Good job. I'm really glad you came on. One of the things we were chatting before we came on camera was how much change. We've been covering IBM storage day back on the edge days and they had the event. Storage is the center of all the conversation. Cyber security, but it's not just pure cyber. It's still important there. And just data in the role of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud data and security are the two hottest areas that I won't say unresolved but are resolving themselves and people are talking about. It's the most highly discussed topics. And it sits all on storage. Yeah, it sure does. And in fact, what I would even go so far as to say is people are beginning to realize the importance that storage plays as the data custodian for the organization. Certainly you have humans that are involved in setting strategies but ultimately whatever those policies are that get applied have to be applied to a device that must act as a responsible custodian for the data it holds. So what's your role at IBM in the infrastructure team? Storage is only one of the areas where you're here at VMware Explorer. What's going on here with IBM? Take us through what you're doing there at IBM and then here at VMware, what's the conversations? Sure thing, I have the distinct pleasure to run both product marketing and strategy for a storage line. It's my primary focus but I also have responsibility for the mainframe software so the Z system line as well as our power server line and our technical support organization or at least the services side of our technical support organization. And one of the things that's going on here in the lab a lot of noise is going on. Is that a bird flying around? Yeah, it's what I'm doing. Yeah, we got fire trucks. What's changed? Because right now with VMware you're seeing what they're doing. I got the platform under the hood, developer focus. It's still an ops game. What's the relationship with VMware? What are you guys talking about here? What are some of the conversations you're having here in San Francisco? Right, well you know IBM has been a partner with VMware for at least the last 20 years and VMware does I think a really good job about trying to create a working space for everyone to be an equal partner with them. That can be challenging too if you want to throw out your unique value to a customer. So one of the things that we've really been working on is how do we partner much stronger? When we look at the customers that we support today what they're looking for isn't just a solid product they're looking for a solid ecosystem partnership. So we really lean in on that 20 years of partnership experience that we have with IBM so one of the things that we announced was actually being one of the first VMware partners to bring both a technical innovation delivery mechanism as well as technical services alongside VMware technologies. I would say that was one of the first things that we really leaned in on as we looked out at what customers are expecting from us. So I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about sort of the industry. I mean I've been following IBM since the early 80s right? I mean it's trained in the mainframe kind of market and so we've seen a lot of things you see come back to the mainframe but we won't go there. But prior to Arvin coming on it seemed like, okay storage infrastructure yeah it's good business and we'll let it throw off some margin that's fine but it's all about services and software, okay great. With Arvin and obviously Red Hat the whole focus shift to hybrid. We were talking I think yesterday about where did we first hear hybrid? Obviously we heard that a lot from VMware. I heard it actually first early on anyway from IBM talking hybrid some of the storage guys at the time. Okay so now all of a sudden there's the realization that to make hybrid work you need software and hardware working together, right? So it's now a much more fundamental part of the conversation so when you look out Scott at the trends you're seeing in the market when you talk to customers what are you seeing and how is that informing your strategy and how are you bringing together all the pieces? You know that's a really awesome question because it always depends on who within the organization you're speaking to. You know when you're inside the data center when you're talking to the architects and the administrators they understand the value and the necessity for a hybrid cloud architecture. Something that's consistent on the edge, on-prem, in the cloud. Something that allows them to expand the level of control that they have without having to specialize on equipment and having to redo things as you move from one medium to the next. As you go up stack in that conversation what I find really interesting is how leaders are beginning to realize that private cloud or on-prem, multi-cloud, super-cloud, whatever you call it, whatever's in the middle, those are just deployment mechanisms. What they're coming to understand is it's the applications and the data that's hybrid. And so what they're looking for IBM to deliver and something that we've really invested in on the infrastructure side is how do we create bi-directional application mobility? Making it easy for organizations whether they're using containers, virtual machines, just bare metal, how do they move that data back and forth as they need to and not just back and forth from on-prem to the cloud but effectively how do they go from cloud to cloud? Yeah, one of the things I noticed is your pin this. I love AI with the, you know, the eye of IBM and get those little signage there. AI, I remember the quote from IBM is you can't have AI without IA, information architecture. Right. Rob Thomas. Rob Thomas has the sound bites. But that brings up the point about machine learning and some of these things that are coming down. Like how is your area of devolving the smarts and the brains around leveraging the AI in the systems itself? We're hearing more and more software is being coded into the hardware. You see silicon advances. All this is kind of not changing but kind of bringing back the urgency of hardware matters. That's right. At the same time, it's still software too. That's right. Right, and so let's connect a couple of dots here, right? We talked a little bit about the importance of cyber resiliency and let's talk about a little bit on how we use AI and that matter. So if you look at the direct flash modules that are in the market today or the SSDs that are in the market today, just standard capacity drives. If you look at the flash core modules that IBM produces, we actually treat that as a computational storage offering where you store the data but it's got intelligence built into the processor to offload some of the responsibilities of the controller head. You know, the ability to do compression, single instancing, deduplication, you name it. But what if you can apply AI at the controller level so that signals that are being derived by the flash core module itself that look anomalous can be handed up to an intelligence to say, hey, I'm all of a sudden getting encrypted rights from a host that I've never gotten encrypted rights for. Maybe this could be a problem. And then imagine if you connect that inferencing engine to the rest of the IBM portfolio, hey, Q-Radar, hey, IBM, Guardian, what's going on on the network? Can we see some correlation here? So what you're gonna see IBM infrastructure continue to do is invest heavily into entropy and the ability to measure IO characteristics with respect to anomalous behavior and be able to report against that. And the trick here, because the array technically doesn't know if it's under attack or if the host just decided to turn on encryption, right? The trick here is using the IBM product relationships and ecosystem relationships to do correlation of data to determine what's actually happening to reduce your false positives. And then have that pattern of data too, it's all access to data too, big time. That's right. And that innovation comes out of IBM R&D, does it come out of the sort of product group? Is it IBM research that then trickles its way in? Is it the sort of the storage innovation? Where does that come from? Where does that bubble up? Well, you know, I got to tell you, it doesn't take very long in this industry before your counterpart, your competitor has a similar feature, right? So we're always looking for what's the next leg? What's the next advancement that we can make? We knew going into this process that we had plenty of computational power that was untapped on the FPGA, the process of running on the Flash Core module, right? So we thought, okay, well, what should we do next? And we thought, hey, why not just set this thing up to start watching IO patterns, do calculations, do trending and report that back? And what's great about what you brought up to, John, is that it doesn't stay on the box. We pushed that upstack through the AIOps architecture. So if you're using Turbonomic and you want to look application stacked down to know if you've got threat potential or your attack surface is open, you can make some changes there. If you want to look at it across your infrastructure landscape with like a storage insight, you could do that. But our goal here is to begin to make the machine smarter and aware of impacts on the data, not just on the data they hold onto, but usage to move it into the appropriate tier, different write activity or read activities or delete activities that could indicate malicious efforts that are underway, and then begin to start making more autonomous, how about managed autonomous responses? I don't want to turn this into a, oh, it's smart, you know, you just turn it on and walk away and it's good. I don't know that we'll ever get there just yet, but the important thing here is what we're looking at is how do we continually safeguard and protect that data and how do we drive features in the box that remove more and more of the day-to-day responsibility from the administrative staff who are technically hired really to service and solve for bigger problems in the enterprise, not to be a specialist and have to manage one box at a time. You know, Dave mentioned Arvin coming on, new CEO of IBM and the Red Hat acquisition and that change. I'd like to get your personal perspective or industry perspective. So take your IBM hat off for a second and put the Scott experience in the industry hat on. The transformation at the customer level right now is more robust to use that word. I don't want to say chaotic, but it is chaotic. They say chaos in the cloud here at VM where big part of their messaging. But it's changing the business model, how things are consumed, you're seeing new business models emerge. So IBM has this lot of storage, old systems. You're transforming, the company's transforming. Customers are also transforming. So that's going to change how people market products. For example, we know that developers in DevOps love self-service. Why? Because they don't want to install them. Let me go faster. And they want to get rid of it, doesn't work. Storage is infrastructure and still software. So how do you see in your mind's eye with all your experience, the vision of how to market products that are super important, that are infrastructure products that have to be put into play for like really new architectures that are going to transform businesses. It's not as easy as saying, oh we're going to go to market and sell something the old way. This shifting happening is, I don't know if it doesn't answer yet, but I want to get your perspective on that. Customers want to hear the storage message, but it might not be speeds and fees. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, maybe it's solutions, maybe it's security. There's multiple touch points now that you're dealing with at IBM for the customer without becoming just a storage thing or just hardware or hardware, it doesn't matter. No, you're absolutely right. And I think what complicates that too is if you look at the buying centers around a purchase decision, that's expanded as well. And so as you engage with a customer, you have to be sensitive to the message that you're telling so that it touches the needs or the desires of the people that are all sitting around the table. Generally what we like to do when we step in and we engage isn't so much to talk about the product. At some point, maybe later in the engagements, the importance of speeds, feeds, interconnectivity, et cetera, those do come up. Those are a part of the final decision, but early on it's really about outcomes. What outcomes are you delivering? This idea of being able to deliver, if you use the term zero trust or cyber resilient storage capability as a part of a broader security architecture that you're putting into place to help that organization, that certainly comes up. We also hear conversations with customers or requests from customers about how do the parts of IBM themselves work together? And I think a lot of that again continues to speak to what kind of outcome are you going to give to me? Here's a challenge that I have. How are you helping me overcome it? And that's a combination of IBM hardware, software, and the services side where we really have an opportunity to stand out. But the thing that I would tell you that's probably most important is the engagement that we have up and down the stack and the market perspective always starts with what's the outcome that you're going to deliver for me? And then that drags with it the story that would be specific to the gear. Okay, so let's say I'm a customer and I want to put forward a, you know, I'm buying it to zero trust, zero trust architecture, but it's going to be a somewhat of a long term sort of plan. But I have a tactical need. I'm really nervous about ransomware and I don't feel as though I'm prepared. And I want an outcome that protects me. What are you seeing? Are you seeing any patterns? I know it's going to vary, but are you seeing any patterns in terms of best practice to protect me? Man, the first thing that we wanted to do at IBM is divorce ourselves from the company as we thought through this. And what I mean by that is we wanted to do what's right on day zero for the customer. So we set back using the experience that we've been able to amass going through, you know, various recovery operations and helping customers get through a ransomware attack. And we realized, hey, what we should offer is a free cyber resilience assessment. So we like to you from the storage side, we'd like to look at what we offer to the customer as following the NIST framework. But most vendors will really lean in hard on the response and the recovery side of that, as you should. But that means that there's four other steps that need to be addressed. And that free cyber resilience assessment, it's a consultative engagement that we offer. What we're really looking at doing is helping you assess how vulnerable you are, how big is that attack surface. And coming out of that, we're going to give you a vendor agnostic report that says, you know, here's your situation, here's your sort of grade or your level of risk and vulnerability. And then here's a prioritized roadmap of where we would recommend that you go off and start solving to close up, you know, whatever the gaps or the risks are. Now, you could say, hey, thanks IBM, I appreciate that. I'm good with my storage vendor today. I'm going to go off and use it. Now, we may not get, you know, some kind of commission check. We might not sell the box. But what I do know is that you're going to walk away knowing the risks that you're in. And we're going to give you the recommendations to get started on closing those up. And that helps me sleep at nine. That's a nice freebie. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. Because you guys got deep expertise in that area. So take advantage of that. It's got great to have you on. Thanks for spending time out of your busy day. Final question, put a plug in for your group. What are you communicating to customers? Share with the audience here. You're here at VMware Explorer, the new rebranded, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud study state. There are three levels of transformation. Virtualization, hybrid cloud, DevOps now, multi-cloud. So they're in chapter three of their journey. That's right. Really innovative company, like IBM. So put the plug in, what's going on in your world. Take a minute to explain what you want. Right on. So here we are at VMware Explorer. Really excited to be here. We're showcasing two aspects of the IBM portfolio. All of the releases and announcements that we're making around the IBM cloud. In fact, you should come check out the product demonstration for the IBM cloud satellite. And I don't think they've coined it this, but I like to call it the VMware edition because it has all of the VMware services and tools built into it to make it easier to move your workloads around. We certainly have the infrastructure side on the storage talking about how we can help organizations not only accelerate their deployments in, let's say, Tanzu or containers, but even how we help them transform the application stack that's running on top of their virtualized environment in the most consistent and secure way possible. Multiple years of relationships with VMware, IBM, VMware together. Congratulations. That's right. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you. A lot more live coverage here at Moscote West. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. Two more days of wall-to-wall coverage continuing here. Stay tuned.