 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. Today we're going to have a CUBE Conversation really about this kind of ongoing evolution of cloud. And it was a huge deal when AWS came on the scene and really launched kind of the public cloud evolution, which not only was a different technology stack, but really a different way to think about things, a different way to think about workloads. And that has evolved to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, and it just continues to evolve over time. So we're going to get some of the experts in from IBM to talk about their perspective and what they're doing all about it. So we're excited to invite our next guest. She is Breonna Frank. She is the director of product management for IBM. Breanna, good to see you. Where are you joining us from today? I am joining you from Wake Forest, North Carolina. And as you can see, I'm from my home office, but always busy working and fun doing things in the, in the cloud and thinking about new technologies, even when we're at home. Excellent. And also joining us many time CUBE alumni, Jason McGee, IBM fellow vice president and CTO, IBM cloud platform. Jason, great to see you again. I looked it up before we turned on the cameras. I think you've been on like eight times. So you're definitely a VIP in the CUBE alumni world. Where are you joining us from today? Yeah, I'm in APEC, such as outside of Raleigh. And great to be here again. Always fun to talk to you guys. It's been a little while, but great to be back. Yeah. So let's just jump into it, right? You've all seen the memes. We've all been around, you know, what's driving your digital transformation? Is it the CEO, the CIO or COVID? And we all know the answer to the question. It's really been an interesting time, right? It was a kind of a light switch moment in mid-March. And then people are saying, you know, years and years of digital transformation kind of suddenly compressed into this light switch moment. But now we're months and months and months later, we're in October. And, you know, it's clear that this is not just a one-time fix and wait till we all go back to work. This is going to continue for a while. And cloud is such a huge enabler. Had this happened five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, the ability for information workers like the businesses that we're in would have been much more difficult. So, you know, acknowledging that there's still a lot of people hurting, a lot, hospitality industry, restaurant industry, sports, you know, places that aggregate people, concerts. We're fortunate we're in the information industry. And I just love to get your perspective, Jason, on cloud as an enabling platform and really an enabling way of thinking about things that have made this transition a little bit less painful than otherwise would have been. Yeah, it's a great point, Jeff. And I think on one hand, it's been pretty amazing to see how much our industry in technology and IT has been able to kind of adapt to COVID, adapt to working at home, adapt to these kind of changing models. But what's been really interesting as someone who spends all their time thinking about cloud every day, it's been really incredible to see how much it's accelerated people's adoption of cloud. Like, obviously, everyone was leveraging cloud. It had plans to move more and more workloads to cloud, but I think over the last six months, we've really seen a massive acceleration. And I also think kind of a mindset shift that maybe before there was some hesitation and conversation about what things move to cloud and what things don't. And that seems to have kind of gone away and everyone's like, this is the model that not only will carry us through moments like this, but we have newfound confidence that it's the right model for us to move the majority of our businesses to. So really massive acceleration. Mass acceleration. And Breanna, get your take, because you're a product manager, so you're in the weeds on the speeds and feeds and the features and functions. Cloud as a concept sounds kind of simple, but the execution is not so simple. And we've seen kind of this morphing from moving your test dev maybe to a public cloud, IBM has a cloud, to there's some stuff that just can't go on the cloud or shouldn't go to the cloud or I'm not sure if you should go to the cloud. So now we're hearing talk of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud and we're hearing pieces of public cloud in my own data center and pieces of my own data center in a public cloud. It's a pretty complicated space. I wonder if you can kind of share your perspective as this thing morphs from kind of a simple concept and a beautiful little icon to a much more complex execution in the real world. Well, great, great question and insights. And I think building off of what Jason said, I think the most important shift I've seen is really a mind shift, mindset shift. And there's so much more empathy that I'm seeing across the board, whether it's children running in the background or cats and pets, there's a lot more tolerance for work-life balance and a lot more empathy for how people are getting through this really challenging pandemic. And what I think is interesting is that kind of carries over into the technology. And so now where, some of our clients were solving problems like keeping their workforce safe by using video analytics to see if someone's using or wearing a head, maybe a hard hat in a construction zone. Now that use case has sort of shifted and now it's, is someone wearing a mask? Do they have a temperature? How do we make sure that office areas are sanitized and clean so that when people go back to work, they'll be working in a safe environment? So I think that the mindset shift is really driving a lot of these technology innovations. And then of course you need cloud to make those real. So I think that's the kind of aha moment I've seen is that people are leading with empathy and that's driving kind of the next wave of innovation that I'm seeing. I have to say I've been doing these many, many years and Brianna, I don't think anyone has brought up empathy at the head end of the open and I love that because I think that's the way to think about it, right? Because these are people trying to execute business activities and it's not easy and that's a really great take. Jason, I want to go back to you and talk about one of the cloud things. We talked about the cloud but really it's about enabling applications, right? And really the application now has become this first class citizen where this is the app I want. Cloud enables me to use whatever infrastructure I need versus this is the infrastructure I have. What can I put on this app? So I'd love to get your take. As you said, you think about cloud all the time but really cloud is an app enabler and how has that capability has been gifted to people? How has that made the cloud execution a lot more complex? Yeah, it's interesting. I think you're hitting on a really key transformation that's happened in cloud over the last few years which is that it's gone from infrastructure or kind of cost optimization to an application delivery accelerator. And what I think that's caused is everyone's starting to kind of move their thinking up the stack in cloud and you see the rise of technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift as a platform that enables application developers to build applications and deliver them more quickly. I think the acceleration that we've been talking about here has cemented that. At the end of the day we're all trying to figure out in our businesses how to adapt to change. We have some new changes this year that maybe we didn't predict we would have last year. We're trying to figure out how to adapt to those to deliver new capabilities to maybe build a digital experience for something that we didn't have a digital experience for before because now nobody is face-to-face. And that requires cloud to be much more application centric. It requires cloud, you alluded to this kind of evolution. I think it's starting to drive cloud into more places. Cloud isn't about getting in, just getting into some big cloud data center somewhere. Cloud is about a style of working and a set of technologies that I want to be able to consume wherever I need them. So that kind of application centric capability and the rise of cloud native technologies I think I'll go hand in hand. Right. So it got this from a simple dev swiping a credit card to do a little project on Amazon to now enterprising having very complex ecosystems, right, very complex situations because they've got lots of different clouds and lots of different apps running on lots of different clouds and the application and the control of those is now much more complicated than probably when you just had it all in your own data center or if you're some cloud native organization and you grew up on the public cloud and you really are kind of a single app that happens to be a big one in hyperscale. So I'm curious, Brianna, you guys have a ton of customers. What are they telling you about, you know what they're doing with hybrid cloud, managing hybrid cloud trying to get back to some of the simplicity and kind of the simplistic vision and execution when what's happening is probably increasing complexity as different apps are running on different clouds, different places. Yeah, the great question. You know, I think that what we're hearing from our clients is really a couple of things. One is that they have to find ways to unburden their teams. You know, they only have limited resources and the sky's the limit in terms of what's possible. So they need to be able to innovate faster but they have to unburden the teams. So, you know, the rise of as a service I think is really coming into its own because teams don't have time to manage things like Kubernetes. They have to go higher in the stack and really start to build and innovate for their own business differentiation. But another I think really important thing that we're hearing from our clients is that, you know, we have to meet them where they are in their journey. So what you said was great. You know, a lot of our clients are using five to nine different clouds today and that's extraordinarily fragmented and being able to manage and have one way to see what workload is running where and what is running on that workload is really important. And having kind of one single pane of glass where they can manage everything is one of the single most important features that I hear that is needed. And I think the other thing that I hear a lot from clients is they need flexibility. They need flexibility for, you know, where they are in their journey. Some folks, they need to be able to deploy to existing infrastructure that they have in their data center and others need to be able to deploy to, you know, another public cloud and having the flexibility to, you know, run anywhere is one of the more common games that I'm seeing. Right. So, and you guys built something to help with that, right? It's the IBM cloud satellite. So, you know, you just basically outlined the customer challenge. So what did you have to do to enable them to have a single pane of glass, to have more control across these disparate projects running in disparate clouds? Well, so one of the things that we found is our clients really, all of the agility that they need to, you know, adopt cloud-native best practices really comes from, you know, the public cloud, the public cloud services, DevOps, you know, all the tools that allow you to really run and move faster and innovate faster. But they needed that ability to, you know, consume those public cloud services anywhere. So at the edge on another public cloud or in their existing infrastructure. And of course there's, you know, tons of infrastructure options. You know, we have infrastructure for our clients that they can use. We have turnkey appliances. But really having that public cloud, cloud-native agility, but really bringing that anywhere that our clients want to run it is the key to satellite. Right, right. So it's not, you know, kind of what would be typically thought of as a hybrid cloud solution per se, but it's really almost kind of a level up if I'm hearing you correctly in controlling all the different kind of instances or instantiations of your cloud execution. That be accurate, Jason? Yeah, well, or maybe another way to think about it is it's a way of consuming hybrid, right? It's a way of consuming these hybrid cloud capabilities. You know, hybrid is starts with a common platform and this idea that we are, you know, using things like OpenShift as that common technology platform that enables customers to build applications once and run them anywhere. But satellite brings to the table is it takes that base technology platform and it delivers it as a cloud service and a cloud service that's flexible enough to be anywhere. And so you kind of combine the best of both. You combine a common technology approach and you combine the as-a-service API-based consumption model of public cloud to get a hybrid strategy that's super flexible, right? And that really lets customers focus on the work that they're doing and going faster. And you know, at IBM, we've been pretty clear that we think the future of hybrid cloud computing is rooted in technologies like Kubernetes and OpenShift, but that's the platform of the future. You know, the acquisition of Red Hat was motivated by that strategy. Our public cloud for the last three plus years has been built internally on top of the same technologies. And so what we've done with satellite from a technology perspective is we've taken the things that we do in our cloud and we've used the power of Kubernetes and OpenShift to deliver those anywhere, right? And to give customers that same experience on their infrastructure or on, you know, some other public cloud. Right. I love it because it's kind of cloud on cloud, if you will. But it really supports this notion of the customer experience and even more importantly in some ways the developer experience to make sure that your developers, you know, inside the house are feeling good, have a great productive environment so they can do a better job with what they're working on. And that sounds like something they would really, really enjoy and be native to the way they're used to working already. It's interesting too, one of the kind of interesting, I don't know, adoption trends we're starting to see with approaches like satellite is, if you think about cloud, I'll oversimplify, but like you could say there's kind of two big transformations. One is like move my workload to a public cloud. And the other is like change how my team works, right? Like adopt cloud native agile best practices. And often to get to the culture change of the team, you had to start with moving the app. But that's hard, especially for the kind of 80% of workloads that we're seeing move to cloud now, where they're complex, they have lots of ties into the data that you have in your data center. So it's hard to move them sometimes. So with approaches like satellite, you can kind of flip the order. You can bring the cloud in house, if you will. You can start to adopt self-service and API based consumption and DevOps and change how your teams work and make them more efficient without moving the applications. And then later, if it makes sense to move them, you can, right? And I think that's really powerful. Right, right. Brianna, I want to go back to you on kind of the nuts and bolts because I don't know if you've read innovators dilemma by Christian Clayton, you should if you haven't. But you know, one of the things is, how do you prioritize what you're building? You know, how do you prioritize your feature stack? Because you have to, right? You have to put one in front of the other and it's going to drive your design decisions and what you ultimately ship. So as you were thinking about satellite, what were kind of your top level design priorities that you were really building this towards that you wanted to make sure you really nailed? Oh, what a great question. I love that question. I'm so passionate about product and design. And, you know, I think we take it very seriously at IBM and it's, we have an amazing design department, if you will, at IBM. And one of the things we do is, you know, just relentlessly interview our clients and we really try to understand what their, you know, main issues are. And, you know, one of the first use cases that we looked at was actually in the financial industry, which was, you know, in the financial services industry, the differentiation is really all about the technology itself. And so they're constantly having to, you know, innovate at a faster pace so they can bring new features and functions to their clients, but they have this dilemma where they have to, in some cases, in many cases, keep the data on-prem in a specific location. And, you know, that starts to get really interesting because sometimes the regulations, it could be country, it could be a compliance thing, but for whatever reason, there is a specific requirement. And sometimes that comes with a fine if that data doesn't reside in that location. So having the ability to, you know, move at an incredibly fast pace and keep innovating, but keep that data on-prem and offload the, you know, the management of that, of Kubernetes and the services that allow them to move fast, that was one of the first use cases that we tackled. And I think that's a pretty important one because if you can get that right, that starts to permeate all other industries because, you know, you have to be secure. You have to make sure that the data resides and it's on-prem and in a specific location and that it's auditable. So I think that was one of our first use cases and that has served us really well. We also, one of the things that we do inside of IBM is that we co-develop using our own internal workloads. And so we use the data in AI team within IBM will GA with us when we GA IBM Cloud Satellite. And so their workloads are running on top of satellite. And I think that's a great way to come to market because, you know, when, you know, you're delivering an MVP, but if you can deliver an MVP that's already running a really complex AI workload, that's a pretty impressive MVP, if you ask me. So we try to do that whenever we release new products. And I think that has served us very well because it really forces us to solve the really hard problems first. We don't have a choice. So we have to be able to make some pretty strategic choices, you know, upfront to be able to deliver something like that. That's great. Jace, I want to go back to you and talk about a little bit beyond the cloud, but things that are really interesting and happening, right? You already talked about, you know, this big enabler with containers and Kubernetes, but this next thing that's coming, right, is just Edge, which is, you know, an extension of the cloud and outpost to the cloud. But you know, this whole concept of getting outside of the data center, but actually now starting to bring the compute to the devices that generate the data as well as need that. How do you see that, you know, kind of impacting your cloud thoughts? I love that you're, you know, thinking cloud all the time. And the other piece, keying off what Brianna just said, is applied AI, right? I mean, I think we all would agree that, you know, AI and machine learning as kind of a standard generic thing is okay, but really the application of the AI and the machine learning for specific use cases, you know, is where we're seeing huge, huge benefit. And I would imagine there's many, many kind of areas within cloud execution that AI and machine learning can start to add even more and more and more efficiencies in automation. Sure. Sure, so maybe a couple of comments. I mean, I think the edge thing is so interesting because, you know, if you really kind of step back and think about what we're talking about with cloud, like what is a cloud is becoming much more diverse, you know, started as it's these three regions and it's becoming like everybody's data centers plus on-prem and then it's becoming edge, like large edge locations and then it's becoming devices. So cloud's becoming pervasive as a concept across all IT consumption models. And there's core technologies, even like containers that we think apply at all those levels. They apply in the core cloud in the data center at the edge in the device. And so things like satellite certainly give us a mechanism to push that boundary, like to push closer to the end user. And there's a ton of scenarios motivating that, you know, 5G telecommunications and high-speed networking for mobile devices is necessitating pushing closer to where the data is getting generated. IoT, same thing, like if you think about the IoT edge case, that's massive data generation. You don't necessarily want to back call that all the way back to a cloud, a central cloud. You want to be able to do AI and training and inferencing on that data close to where it lives. And so you need this whole idea of cloud to kind of expand. And if it doesn't, then what happens is all of these different use cases become like different technology stacks or different operational models and you get tons of complexity. So it's like, it's this really interesting intersection. I think we're getting much more complex in how we deploy, but we're trying to put common ideas over the top of it to simplify. And I think that's pretty interesting. On the AI question, you're right. There's tons of places where AI, applied AI will come into the picture. At IBM, we're doing a ton of work on AI for IT operations and how do we apply AI modeling to monitoring, to resiliency, even to work with placement. I mean, just think about the world we just described. Like as a customer, maybe I have IBM, cloud and I have 20 satellite locations in all our fun places in the world. And now I have to make decisions about like, what runs where and where should I deploy my workloads and like what's the most efficient way to place workloads to get availability or better performance and AI plays a role there. So I see a really bright future as we build out this infrastructure to then use AI as a mechanism to further simplify the customer's consumption. Yeah, that's great. So I want to give you both the last word before we sign off and that was a good summary. Jason, cloud's been around for a while and it gets tossed around. And again, now we have hybrid and multi and all these different flavors. You guys are in the weeds and you're seeing down the road a little bit. What is it about cloud that most people probably aren't talking about when you kind of look in your crystal ball, obviously don't share any secrets that you can't share that gets you excited and makes you think, wow, we're still really hard to believe but really in the early days of what this really the kind of opportunities that this opens up. And I'll go with you first, Brianna. Well, that's a great question. I think we're already starting to see that, the example of all of the work that we're seeing in the COVID space, it just feels like whatever challenge that might lie ahead in our future, we have an ability to quickly iterate and change and adapt. It's so interesting to see how fast we can roll out new technologies and new ideas. Things that would take years to put together, you can kind of put together in a week or so with a quick POC. And that's really an exciting kind of place to be that you can adapt and change so quickly. So I think that's one and I do think your point about edge is really an important one. There's more and more opportunities to distribute workloads to closer to compute goes closer to where the users are. So therefore you're reducing latency. So you're getting in-state feedback. And I think that's really going to be interesting. And then I think the third element again is like security and compliance. Like how do you know exactly that your data stays exactly where you want it to and you can have proof and you can audit that data. I think that's really where the future is headed. Yeah, that's great. And Jason, to you, what's getting you up in the morning today? So you don't want to know it gets me up today, but if we talk about where it's coming. So, you know, for me, like my whole career, I've really been thinking about applications. And I think one of the kind of macro trends that everyone doesn't always see that's going on in cloud is we're switching from an IT infrastructure-centric view of computing to an application-centric view. And all of these things we've been talking about are kind of steps along that journey. Like we're getting to a point where I can build applications. I can build them in a consistent way. I can deploy them anywhere in the world on this like incredibly diverse infrastructure. As a developer, I have like simple immediate access to world-class capabilities, to specialized hardware. Like we are really in the midst of a transformation on how we build computing technology and really a democratization of that technology that 10 or 15 years ago, like you wouldn't have had the, most people would not have had the funds to stand up the technology they needed to build these things. And that's what really gets me excited because I think about, well, then what's all the innovation that's going to come from that? Like as more and more developers have access to this powerful infrastructure in these diverse ways, like what are they going to create? And that's what I think going on under the covers, I think we're in the middle of a generational transformation of technology that will result in things we can't predict today because we'll open up so many people's ability to leverage that platform. What a great thought to close on, Jason, because I think we hear that consistently all the time. What's the key to innovation? Give more people the access to the tools, give more people access to the data and more people the power to do something with it and create. And we hear all the time about the disadvantaged classes of people that just didn't get the opportunity and if all those people had the same school, the same education and now the same, basically infinite compute power at their disposal, what are they going to invent? And I think it's an exciting future and I think that's a great place to close. So we'll leave it at that. I want to thank you both for checking in. Brianna, great to meet you. And Jason, always good to see you as well. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks a lot and have a great day. Thank you. All right, that was Brianna and Jason. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.