 Okay, we're back live for SiliconANGLE's Cube, exclusive coverage of IBM Pulse, IBM's premier cloud show. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante there. Special guest, Ray Wang, Principal Analyst, Chairman of Constellation Research, Entrepreneur, Jet Setter, Travel in the World. Ray, welcome back to theCUBE again. Always great to have you on. I know you're going a million miles an hour of one-on-one meetings, a lot of great stuff happening. What's your take on IBM's cloud strategy? Does it hang together? This is the coming out of the cloud. This is Blue Skies on Blue Mix on cloud. Blue Mix, past layer, a lot of battle ground in the middleware. I mean, Enterprise 2.0 is now full on cloud, hybrids, the big story, soft layer acquisition, good leverage there. IBM putting a wrapper around it with open standards, open technologies, and cloud foundry. Open stacks there. What's your take on that? Is it a fat layer? Is it going to work? No, I think it's really important. When we look at the B2C cloud, what we actually have are four winners, right? Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft. In the B2B world, it is wide open. And one of the things that's happening is, right, you've got HP with a Superdome, you've got Oracle building its kind of red stack, and we actually need a couple other players in the space, and that's where IBM's actually opening up a front. And we see Amazon on the other end, but it's just at the infrastructure as a service level, and so I think that's going to make a big difference. So the question is, how do we get this past layer up and running, and how do you get that past layer to be competitive? And I think everyone's using that as the battleground in the cloud as well as in the mobile. So there's comparisons with Linux, market IBM put billion dollars behind that, so it solidified that movement, and then it just grew like wildfire here, similar movement. But there's some people kind of in and out of this. You've got a rack space playing on the cloud foundry, but Red Hat, where are they? Where are they in all this? You know, I think you're going to see them being a player as a supplier to a bunch of other clouds. This is a game that requires lots of money, lots of scale, and I think there's only going to be about 10 or 12 players that can do this. So Ray, you see Amazon moving up the stack a little bit, things like Kinesis, Redshift, the marketplace bundling in, Amazon sort of strong-arming its ISV partners to list on the marketplace. So how far do you think they can go? I think they're going to hold at potentially where the platform as a service is, but you know, Redshift is still the big entry point for these guys. So I think there's a lot more tools that have to get into Amazon before they're going to be competitive head-to-head with an IBM or HPA or anyone else. So the IBM transformation in cloud has been pretty dramatic over the last two years. If you go back two years and they showed you their sort of cloud strategy, what was your reaction back then? I think back then we just looked at it as a bunch of disparate pieces that were just kind of being thrown in the cloud because cloud was cool. What we saw here is really the coming out of the full IBM cloud front attack. So this is really where Bluemix is the beginning of that conversation, but it's the recognition that cloud is going to be their entry point in. How important are the learnings from WebSphere and how do they apply to Bluemix? Oh, I think it's the same learnings. You got to get a developer ecosystem in place. You got to play a role in OEMs. You got to make sure that the partners are happy. I mean, these all come together and I think that's one of IBM's strong suits. So, but Bluemix, my understanding is Bluemix is sort of new, born in the cloud. Is that true from your take? Or is it a lot of WebSphere DNA? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? I think it's more than the WebSphere DNA. I think the acquisition of SoftLayer was the thing that actually opened up their eyes as to how much more they could do here. Right, okay, so now, Leigh and I, you talk about the horses on the track in the sort of consumer cloud, the public cloud. You got Oracle, you got IBM, you got HP, you got VMware. It really is wide open right now, right? It's wide open, Salesforce. And then the one thing is the telcos. How could the telcos miss another wave? Think about this. They have the infrastructure, they have the servers, they have the capacity, they own the network, and yet they've missed this again. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't look like they can see it. There's not even going to be a player in this. Okay, got to ask you about it. And it's global, it's not just U.S. I got to ask about the customer impact. Obviously you've been doing a lot of stuff. We heard last night you mentioned customer roundtables, you've traveled around the world. You're also going to a lot of other shows, seeing a lot of other activity. What's the landscape look like vis-a-vis the other shows and other vendors and then the customer impact? Well, I'm going to start actually with our CIO survey. We're about to publish our new CIO survey and the interesting thing is we break CISers into four areas. Chief infrastructure officers, chief integration officers, chief intelligence officers, and chief innovation officers. And the chief infrastructure officers are looking at cloud as where they're going to get the cost savings. And that's their big piece. And they're looking at any vendor that can give in an opening to drive down costs. Whether it's app modernization, whether it's testing, whether it's integration, whether it's just taking my infrastructure and actually turning it around. They're looking at that piece. The chief innovation officers, they just happen to buy apps that are in the cloud, which is a very different game. And so I think it's important to segregate whether you're an app dev shop, a vendor management shop, or an innovation shop that's just buying cloud apps. What are you guys seeing with the new CIO, chief data officer? There's a premise out there that says that a data czar has to emerge. It's got to be independent of the CIO. MIT's done a lot of research on this, but it's been confined to financial services, government, maybe healthcare. What do you guys see as emerging as the chief data officer role? We actually see that fit within the chief intelligence officer. And I think part of it is the fact that information governments, all the pieces around data, security, privacy, data usage, data re-usage, it's sitting there. But there's also this other piece that's conflicting with the chief digital officer, right, the other CIO. Let's see how many we're acting as we can make up. But the other CIO, what's interesting there is because they're actually using the information streams of that data. That becomes the value of the company is really, what can we broker in terms of a stream of information that we can resell. And we see companies turning into like Alexis Nexas or Thompson Reuters. What's your take on the developer ecosystem? What does IBM have to do right now to win the developers over? Well, the two types of developers, if you want to get to the consumer, the edgy, the younger developers, it's got to be mobile first, right? Get them on the mobile, help them actually take a consumer grade experience and learn how to be a professional grade enterprise class developer. Because both are very different kinds of skill sets. You can get a wireframe up really quickly, but how do we get the management of the data, the role-based security, the identity, the scaling, all that's used in place? So if they can package that, I think on those developers that would be great. I think for the other developers, it's to show that there's a path, right? If I'm on IBM, I have a job path, a career path that goes out for the next three to five years. So in your view, does IBM have the developer juice in terms of what it takes to penetrate the cloud and actually dominate that market space? I think they do. I think they're going to be able to get there. Because look, who else is in the competition? Microsoft, that's a developer ecosystem that's definitely one to contend with. It's rich, but confined. But confined. And Amazon doesn't have that developer ecosystem yet. So they're building it on the AWS set, but it's very different than what you would see. So you would say they don't have that for the enterprise? For the enterprise. Okay, but they got it first. Salesforce and Oracle quickly set on bites on those guys and their prospects now. Oracle probably has the most integrated and developed backend right now. So I think from a head-to-head short-term, Oracle and IBM in that competition. But I think the bigger threat is going to be Amazon. Salesforce, I think the beauty of the Salesforce group is the customers of Salesforce are pioneers. They're early adopters. So they naturally go out and explore and experiment. And so that's a very different class of developers. And they're active too, very active. Very active. And you tweeted recently, you said Larry's focus is going to be on HCM and customer experience going forward. I mean, they are focused like a laser on that stuff. Oh, but he wants to be in every stack. I mean, look at the deal that they did with Azure to put database onto Azure. Right, right, right. I can expect to see a bunch of other deals where database shows on Azure from other players. Yeah, why not? So yeah. And they just bought the Blue Chi. Blue Chi, social software. What's the strategy with that, you think? That's mobile data management. The data management platforms are hot. So on the marketing side, how to connect with ad networks, real-time bidding, demand-side platforms. That's actually what they're kind of playing in is how to get that data actually pushed out there. Blue Chi is an aerospike backend, I think, John. It might be, actually. It might be, actually. Okay, Ray Wang here inside the cube, always great, quick stop-in, source of great knowledge. Ray Wang, constellation research. He's got an event coming up. Check out a CIO survey coming out. Ray, thank you for stopping by. I really appreciate it. It's the cube, exclusive coverage here at IBM Impact. We'll be right back.