 from the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio. We're talking about storage and SDI solutions, but before we get into SDI and all the industry buzzwords, we're going to talk a little bit about some of the real business drivers. And joining me for this segment, happy to welcome back Randy Arseneaux and Steve Kenniston. Gentlemen, great to see you. Thanks for being here, Stu. Thanks, Stu. Great to be here. Thank you. All right, so we've been talking about transformation. Customers are going through transformation. IBM's going through transformation. Everything's going in some kind of journey. But let's talk about, you know, used to be IT sat on the side. Randy, we talked about in the intro, you know, IT and the business, you know, wait, they actually need to talk, communicate, work together. What are some of the key drivers that you're here with your customers? So it's a good question. We talked a little bit about it in the previous segment, but I think what's really happening now is that a lot of the terms that our industry has kind of overused and commoditized have sort of become devalued, right? So they no longer really mean anything significant. Terms like agility and flexibility and IT business alignment and transformation, which we hear a million times every day, they've become just kind of background noise. But the reality is, especially now, in this era where, you know, information and data and analytics are driving businesses and they're no longer, you know, nice things to have for the super advanced, very sophisticated companies, they're table stakes. I mean, they're needed to survive in today's economy, global economy. So they've taken on a whole different meaning. So when we talk about agility, for instance, agility means something very specific in the context of IT business alignment and our solution stacks in particular. Generally speaking, kind of the way I like to think of it is I overuse sports analogies, but I think this one's relevant. So a good quarterback is able to read and react. So as the defense is shifting and, you know, making pre-snap adjustments, the quarterback views the field, sees what's happening and is able to very quickly develop or institute a new offensive play to take advantage of that situation. So that whole read and react idea is something that's very important for a business, especially now. So businesses are under constant pressure, competitive pressure, market pressure, compliance pressure to be able to exploit their own IP and their own data and their own information very, very quickly. So that's number one. By using things like integration and automation within their IT organization, as opposed to the old, you know, kind of vertical method of doing things, IT organizations are now able to respond to those rapid course corrections much more effectively. Same thing with flexibility. So when an organization needs to be flexible or wants to be flexible, to adapt to a very rapidly changing environment, things like, and this is really where Steve's product line is particularly relevant, things like data reuse, right? So we've got organizations that are running their business on this data, which is their most important asset. We're helping them develop new and creative ways to repurpose that data efficiently, quickly, cost-effectively so they can expand the value. So any given piece of data can now have a multiplicative value compared to its original form. Yeah, I think it's actually pretty important when we think about, we're out there talking about products, right? And a lot of vendors do this, right? Buy my product because you'll get agility or you'll get flexibility or that sort of thing, or maybe even more importantly, and a lot of the enablement we use to educate people on will say, you know, this product enables data reuse. Well, what does that really mean, right? What does that mean for the business, right? And when you say, okay, well, it makes the business more agile, well, how do you do that? Then it encompasses a whole breadth of solution sets around making that data available for the user, things like software to find stores, things like particular technologies that can do data reuse. So it kind of boils itself down in a stack, but to Randy's point, it's been so commoditized, the words that we don't really understand what they mean. And I think part of what we're trying to do is make sure when we talk agility, flexibility, or even our three patterns that we talked about, modernize and transform, what do they mean to us? What do they mean to you, the user? What do they mean? Because that's very important to connect those to. Yeah, and I love, because for a while we used to say, it used to be, well, do I get it faster, better, or cheaper, or maybe I can give you some combination? And there are certain customers you talk to is like, look, if you can just go faster, faster, faster, that's what I need. But it's not speed alone, like the differentiation for things like agility is, number one, we are all horrible at predicting. It's like, okay, I'm gonna buy this, I'm gonna use this for the next three to five years, and six months into it, I either greatly over underestimated or everything changed, we made an acquisition, competition came in, I need to be able to adjust to that. So that was, I love the sports analogy, we love sports analogies on the field. So that, if I planned for, this was the plan of the attack, and what do you know? They traded for a player the day before or their star quarterback went down and the backup, who I didn't train against, all of a sudden their offense is different and we get torn apart because we didn't plan, we couldn't react to it. You run back at halftime and try to adjust, but you need to be able to change. And again, I think another, from my perspective, from an IT business alignment, another metaphor that works well is kind of what I call the DevOpsification of business. So what's happening now, and it's interesting, I think, is that you're seeing some of the practices around DevOps and agile development, which by the way IBM uses for our own products, you're seeing that push upstream to the business. So the business is actually adopting DevOps-like methodologies for prototyping, testing hypotheses, you're doing interesting things that kind of grew out of that world. So if you think about, even 10 years ago, that would have been kind of unimaginable. You would always have the business applying pressure and projecting its requirements onto IT. Now you're seeing much more of a collaborative approach to attacking the market, gaining competitive advantage and succeeding financial. Yeah, and if people aren't really familiar with DevOps, the thing that I really like about it is, number one, it's no longer, we used to be on these release trains. Okay, everybody on board, the 18 to 24 month release train we're gonna plan. Up, wait, we didn't get this feature in, it'll be in the next one. We'll do a patch in six or eight months. No, no, no. There's the term CICD, continuous integration and just continuous deployment. It's push often, daily, if not hourly, if not more. And it's like, wait, what about security? What about all these things? No, no, no. If we actually plan and have a culture that buys in and understands and communicates when you've got proper automation, it's a game changer. All those things that used to be like, ah, I couldn't do it. Now it's like, no, we can do it. Well, the only thing constant in business these days is change. Absolutely. So if you know that and you have to be able to plan and articulate and be ready for change, how do you make sure that the underlying infrastructure is ready to kind of adapt to whatever request you may have of it, right? It's now alive, right? It's like a person, I wanna ask it a question and I need it to help respond quickly, right? And a lot of the focus of the series, as we talked about in the intro section, is our software-defined infrastructure portfolio, which in many ways is kind of the fabric upon which a lot of these things are being woven now, right? So we talk about DevOps, we talk about this rapid cycle and this continuous pace of change and adaptability adaptation. We're delivering solutions to market that really accelerate and enable that, right? So one of the things we wanna make sure we communicate both internally and externally is the connective tissue that exists between solutions, products, technology, capabilities on the software-defined infrastructure side and how that affects the business and how that allows the business to be more agile, to be more flexible, to transform the way it thinks about taking solutions to market, competing, opening up new markets, seizing opportunities in the marketplace. Yeah, if you think about, when you talk about strategy, smart companies, they've got feedback loops and strategy is something you revisit often and come back, leads to, when you talk about modernizing an environment, I always used to, you poke fun at marketing, oh, we're going to make you future ready. Well, when can I be in the future? Well, the future will be soon. Well, then when I get to there, am I now out of date because the future's not now? So what is modernized? What does that really mean and how does that fit in? Yeah, and it's a great point. And I think we look at modernization as kind of the constant retooling, right? So IT is constantly looking for ways to be more responsive, be more agile, be more closely aligned in a locked step with the business and the line of business. And again, we're trying to deliver solutions to market that enable them to do that effectively, cost effectively, quickly, get up to speed rapidly. There's another, so we talked a little bit in the intro section about the C-level survey, the study that was done globally by IBM. It's done every year, the 2018 one was introduced recently or published recently. Another one of the themes that was very important is that is this concept of innovate, don't institutionalize. And the idea is that old companies, slow moving companies, more traditional companies have a tendency to solve a problem or introduce and implement a system of some sort and be wed to it because they adapt all of the ancillary workflows and everything around it to fit that model, which may make sense the day that it implements, it goes live, but it almost immediately becomes obsolete or gets phased out. So you need to have the ability to integrate, automate, innovate, like constantly be changing and adapting. I love that actually, in the innovation communities, they say you don't want best practices, you want next practices because I always need to be able to look at how I can do, learn what works and share that information, but this is the way we were doing it and this is the way it must always be, so let it be written, so let it be done. No, we need to move and adjust. And I think if you think about these things as in the beginning of the year when IBM launched what we were finding was, when we launched kind of our educational context for our sellers in the beginning of the year, it was really three patterns, right? There was modernizing transform, next gen applications and then application refactoring and in the beginning when we started talking about, which I think is where 90% of the clients fall into, it's this modernizing transform, right? Easy to say, but what does it really mean? So if you break it down into the fact that we know what clients have today, right? We know VMware is big, KBM is big, SQL is big, Oracle is big, right? If that's foundationally who you're talking to on an everyday basis, how do you help them take that solution set? And don't start refactoring today, right? But take them to a point where when they start to do the refactoring, they're in their well positioned to do that simply and easily, right? So it's a long journey, but to get there, you really need to kind of free up and shake loose some of that, some of the bolts so that it's a lot more flexible over here. Yeah, so we were talking about things are changing all the time. Tell me, transformation, it's not about an end goal, it's about journeys and being ready, so help us close the loop on that. Yeah, so we talk a lot about that internally and again, transformation is another one of those kind of buzzwords that we're trying to sort of demystify because it can be applied in a million different ways and they're all relevant and valid, right? So transformation is a very broadly applicable term. When we talk about transformation, we're specifically talking about kind of the structural transformation of the infrastructure itself. So how are we making the storage and the compute more cloud-like, more flexible, more easily provisioned, more self-service? So there's kind of a foundational level piece at the infrastructure level. We talk about transformation at the workflow level, so things like DevOps, like continuous development and integration, how do we provide our clients with the material they need, the raw materials, whether it's software, technology, education, best practices, all of the above, to be able to implement these new ways of doing business. And then there's really transformation of the business itself. Now, a couple of those, the first two are kind of happening with NIT, but they are being driven by the transformation that the business is undergoing. So the business is constantly, again, if they're still around and they're prospering, they're constantly looking for new markets to reach into looking for ways to compete more effectively, looking for ways to gain and sustain competitive advantage in this very, very dynamic environment. So transformation touches all of those. They're all equally valid from our perspective, specifically as IBM. We're trying to tackle the sort of foundational level and then kind of by using assets like this, research that we do at the C level, we're trying to kind of build the connective tissue between the ground level IT stuff and how the business has changed. I mean, really as importantly, we're trying to build the foundation such that as we're thinking about the business, think taxis, transforming to I wanna be more Uber-like or think even automotive industries wanting to be more Uber-like. I read an interesting article about, auto manufacturers today are thinking about no more buying of cars. That's a transformation of my business. How do I do that? Now, a lot of it is, I get to set up the infrastructure, I get to set up people in process to do some of this, but the infrastructure has to adapt as well, right? And that's not gonna happen tomorrow, to your point, so I wanna design for tomorrow, then the next day, then the next day, then the future, when is the future, right? But I need to have an infrastructure that can evolve with me as my business evolves and I get to this goal. And the shifts are now happening, they're no longer kind of tectonic shifts, they're seismic, right? They're not gradual incremental, I mean, they are in some cases, but they're more often seismic changes and that's a great example. Uber burst onto the scene and fundamentally changed the way humans transport themselves from one place to another. And there's a million examples of that, right? There's in genomic research and even in media and entertainment, there's lots of ways and lots of places in which this shift towards more seismic change in the industry or in a particular use case is happening every day. Yeah, so I'd love your insight. When you talk about your partners, the old days were great where you used to just say, hey, you've got a problem, I've got a product that will solve what you need. Transaction, box, done. Now, it's like, we've been saying, when are we going to have that silver bolt in security? It's like, never. It's like, security is, it's a practice or it's a general theme that you have to do is like DevOps isn't a product, it's something we need to do. I heard a great line, it was like, oh, this whole AI stuff, well, can I have a box and a data scientist and I can solve this stuff? No, no, no, this is going to be an initiative and we're going to go through lots of iterations and there's lots of pieces. So it's a different world today. How do you help people through this as to what the relationship is now? No, it's very interesting and to your point, can I buy a box that does that, right? We were at Think this year and our security team was, or actually I think it was our blockchain team was up and I'm very interested in blockchain and what is it going to do for the community as we kind of grow and that sort of thing. And up on the chart they put this slide that had a million different, I mean, thousands of different partners that we partner with and we also enable to kind of deliver stuff. And in some cases we're competitive, in some cases it solves security, in some cases it does this. Now all of a sudden it's not one thing anymore. It's like, how does it fit into your infrastructure? But back to your point about partnerships, I think IBM has constantly looked to its partners because they have really that trusted value and trusted relationship with the client. And at the end of the day, for as much as we can come in and say, oh, this box will solve your problem, we don't really know what their problems are, right? It's the people who have those relationships that know where they're going along that evolutionary scale, that we really need to work and tie in with closely to make sure that the solutions we deliver on the underlying side are meeting their needs, which then in turn meet our client's needs. I think that's where we're going. And actually the blockchain is a great example of kind of building these vibrant ecosystems, right? Which is something else that large companies like IBM sometimes struggle with kind of building these very dynamic, very vibrant ecosystems. But I think IBM's very good at it and I think we've demonstrated that in a number of different places, blockchain being a recent example, but there are many others. And the SDI portfolio is no different, right? We've got strong partnerships across the board with other software providers, other go-to-market partners, other content, there's a million different angles that we were able to introduce into the conversation. So we think all of those things taken together allow our sellers and our partners to bring a solution to their clients, regardless of their industry or their size or their particular use case, that helps them optimize their performance in this new world of super agile, constantly changing continuous transformation and do so, we think better than anyone else in the industry. Constantly changing, distributed in nature. Sounds just like the blockchain itself. All right, Steve, Randy, thank you so much for helping us demystify some of these key business drivers that we're going to. Lots more we'll be covering on Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.