 Welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas for IBM Pulse, IBM's exclusive coverage by SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise, and John John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, join me with my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibond.org, and we have one of the superstars on theCUBE, CUBE alumni, tech athlete, women in tech, leader of our playlists of all-time views. Inheach, you saw, thank you for coming back again. Oh, my pleasure. On theCUBE. I'm excited to be here. Thank you. Dave and I always perk up when you come on theCUBE because one, you're one of our favorite guests because you're dynamic, you're beautiful, and you're smart, and you're the GM. Keep going. Yeah. You're the GM of big data, and it's a hot area. I'll give you my cell phone, you can call my husband. That's how we meet that. He's watching right now. So tell us, what's up with you? We're excited to have you here. What's the update? What's going on? Big data, we're here at the Cloud Show. We've seen some big data messaging. Well, it's what it is. It's clients are first recognizing that data is transformative for their organizations. I mean, just new opportunity, new business models. Oh, that actually reminds me of a story. So we're gonna have to come back to this one. Cloud, the intersection of Cloud. Cloud's more transformative, not just from a delivery standpoint, but also fundamentally the expectation which gets into social, which is really the engagement side. People are all about being on demand. I mean, the days of just being able to do email is a little bit passe. People want to be on text, communicating real time in the personas that they represent. So it's not just your work persona, but let's say your personal hobbies. They want to be interacted with relevant in the time and context. And this big news, obviously, what's app got bought by Facebook for $19 billion, including the three billion retention bonus. That's, I mean, that's a game changer right there. Yes, absolutely. It's kind of a poster child for the massive, some say bubble, but some say sea change of what's going on in the world right now, which is anything could pop in terms of an application. Oh, yeah. You know, what it is is really the consumer aspects in terms of the consumer expectations of the interaction self-service, the quality, the fact that it's seamless and easy. You have that expectation, not just in terms of your personal life. You're actually bringing that expectation into the work life. And so there's a higher level of overall expectation around the experience that users have, business users have, technical users have, but now in the world of big data, the business users are saying, you know, I'd like access to the data. I would like to play with it. I don't necessarily want to have to wait until you give, get me a DBA who writes a JDBC driver's script to, you know, access that data and then the application guide that has to rewrite, you know, the application. People want it on demand. We had Lance Crosby on CEO software who's the center of all the attention. You know, at the cloud show and we asked him about what's that. He's like, it's disrupting $100 billion telco market. And so I want to get your perspective. Obviously the telco is an area where there's not a big data you're involved in. Mobile World Congress is going on. Mark Zuckerberg was giving the keynote and oh no, we're not trying to take over telco. Sure he is. But what's your take on that? I mean, telcos have been at the center of cloud, center of big data. They just seem to be late to the party every time. Is that the case? Or they just- You know what it is? I think it's both the opportunity of having, first of all, generating a ton of data. So a couple telcos both in the United States as well as internationally. Like one generates about 42 terabytes a day. Another is handling six billion called detail records a day. And just the sheer volume, they've got tons of infrastructure, right? Have invested a lot at all levels, BSS, OSS, as well as even trying to do more customer analytics in real time for not just quality of service, but now for marketing and campaign management and customer experience. But the challenge is, how do you do that in a much more effective way, more and more optimized way, more predictive way? And that's really the opportunity. And we actually acquired a company called the Now Factory in October, really around that end-to-end experience. So how do you quickly access the data in the networks? How do you actually process that and curate that in real time? And then consume it in terms of understanding the data models that are developed as well as running the analytics. And then act on it. Absolutely. It's a customer retention asset. What are they doing with the Now Factory? Oh, they're doing several different things. So let's say in the operators, network operators, the quality of the service calls, it's much more about how do I shift from a responsive, reactive kind of scenarios to be a little bit more proactive and also understand, hey, when a person was actually dropped from a call, when were they? Did they just board a flight? Then they landed, they landed, now they're checking their Facebook, Twitter accounts. What's the degree of activity? And you can see whether or not they're supposed to have a downfall or not based on the time. I mean, that's getting at a level of individual user and user access on a device. So the second question is, a lot of times folks aren't sure exactly what's wrong with the phone. Is it the battery? Is it the, you've got 15 applications running on it and it's dying. So understanding exactly where the quality of service and issues are, is important. They came on theCUBE. Now, Factory, I think we, let's get it. Oh, good, good. And this is a huge, huge aspect actually at Mobile World Congress. So tell us a story. You're, we had a great interview with you. You had great storytelling. Tell us a story. What's going on? That represents kind of the culture of what's happening in cloud and big data and the world. Well, you know, I had a, I had a really interesting, smile, I had a really interesting conversation with a couple clients. One in banking in, based in Europe and one in insurance based in the US. And they were commenting about, you know, customer retention is actually huge, both for revenue and profit. Revenue from a cross-seller products and profit because the longer you can retain the clients, it's better. So human logic or expectation is, hey, you know, if you want to retain a client, what do people think that they need to do? Maybe you get better products, higher levels of discount. One of the human behavior traits we discovered is if you actually lower the price points, i.e. change the rate, change the available prices for certain accounts and products, it actually causes the customer to leave. And the reason it causes them to leave, even though you would think it would cause them to stay. After it hits a certain threshold, what happens is the human nature says, oh, well maybe I might be more attractive to other vendors as well and they start going shopping. So one of the things we've started to look at, actually recently is looking at online dating surveys and information that's captured from online relationships because what people say that they're going to do and what people end up actually doing, sometimes aren't. It's not like the dating profile, the picture from like 20 years ago. Yeah, but you're actually starting to marry that kind of insight with more business type information to really understand human behavior traits. I mean, even though it's not intuitive, it actually makes sense because a lot of these decisions are emotional. It is. It's like going to the racetrack. I'm going to bet on that, you get to the window, I'm going to change my mind. And then you end up making a different decision based on something that some guy next door said, whatever it is, all kinds of information. Do you change your mind a lot at the window? I do, actually, it's not a good strategy. Actually staying away from the racetrack is a very good strategy, especially when you've got kids. I used to spend a lot of time there, but now that I have four kids, I have better things to spend my harder and money on. But that's a good story, right? And one is an example of some of the non-intuitive things that you find in the big data world when you actually have access to the data. Well, and also that you're marrying industry perspectives about people, profiles, entities to get a more comprehensive understanding that you wouldn't necessarily have ever thought to put an insurance company with data sets around personal preferences. Any, I got to ask you, what is the coolest thing you've seen here at IBM Pulse? Besides the Cube? Oh, of course, of course. Well, you know, I'm a little bit biased, I would have to say, but the announcement of Cloudint, you know, it's a really exciting announcement for us because it's about being present in the ways in which clients are actually developing the next generation of applications, especially at a serve for mobile applications as well as what they're doing in the cloud. And it's such a unique business model. Were you involved in that deal? Yes, it's part of, it actually sits within the information management organization, and that is run by our general manager, Bet Smith. And so, Sean Pooley, who's my peer, actually has that core responsibility for Cloudint. So this is a core part of the game for us. I know the founder, a friend of mine, Rich Leventoff, did the seed round. Those guys were MIT guys, did a good job. How big were they when you guys knew it? What's the size of them now? Well, we don't actually talk about it because it's a private... No, they're employees. Oh, oh, you know, you're a small team. Yeah, it's a small team. No, no, it's not huge. It's a small team, and actually what we have been, yeah, what we've been talking about really is more about kind of the, I know, I'm sure you can find out in a nanosecond there, is more about the clients and the clients that are actually using it. Both the clients that are actually paying for the set of capabilities as well as the clients that are just using the freemium versions. So, and that's actually quite high. That's almost like 20,000. So talk a little bit more about cloud. It's databases of service. It's no sequel. Talk a little bit more about what they do and then why it's important for a cloud-based offering. How are you going to bring it into SoftLayer, maybe discuss that? Yeah, so first of all, cloud has been a strategic partner with IBM on SoftLayer. It's actually the preferred for Cloudians to get started. Now, the thing that's been interesting for IBM in general is the innovations that are happening in the data world have spanning the spectrum from no sequel to not only sequel to sequel, right? It is all about clients wanting to both leverage new capabilities that allow application agility and flexibility. They want capabilities around enabling higher performance and speed and also cost reduction. And the pattern that I'm actually seeing is, for example, like even in the Hadoop world, a big movement toward being able to apply sequel, right? Because there aren't enough map-reduced programmers. And part of the value of also no sequel in areas like Cloudant is about allowing application developers to be able to write and quickly program things that they need without necessarily having to have the number of traditional resources. So this is all about speed. It's speed in terms of the data, speed in terms of the application agility. And flexibility too. You can store data and not knowing what you want to do with it. Yeah. No sequel's beautiful because you don't have to go into a schema design. That's right. And when you do know, you can just throw some sequel on it and apply that. Given no sequel's been popular with modern developers, it also has been a real boom for the social media world. So I want to get your take on social data. As it moves out from social media being kind of a promotional PR thing to actually more of an engagement. You guys are talking transactional. There's a lot of analytics. Watts has got this discovery capabilities. All this stuff's happening around big data, around social interaction. You mentioned human behavior with dating. You're seeing the humanization fusion of data. So I want to get your take on two things. Social media data. What that means for engagement. And the fusion of data. How does that get fused into practices? Okay. So, well, both questions a little bit loaded. I'm going to give you a real tangible example. One of the things we're really trying to do in the context of big data is that it's really about uncertain data and putting some degree of understanding around it. Not you don't have to necessarily know everything to the end of the degree, but it's some degree of order and indexing and searchability and discoverability. So one of the things we've been doing recently is, and we have a couple of examples of clients wanting to do this in healthcare as well as financial services sector, is most clients have what? An enterprise warehouse of some sort or transactional system that says, hey, you are in fact John and you are in fact Dave, but you may have 50 different social handles that are very different than an enterprise ID that says here's name, address, email. So we have a capability called Big Match which takes capabilities like probabilistic matching, traditionally found in master data management capabilities and enable that for you to apply with a higher degree of confidence to resolve entities and IDs of people even when their social IDs may not be apparent that they are in fact those individuals. And so we, yeah. You can infer from fuzzy information more about that individual. With a high degree of probability. A lot of people are working on that, that's a hard problem. Well, and I'm going to give you a data point. So we actually ran an internal task and we were able to identify 10 million IDs in one second on Hadoop. Wow. Yeah, yeah. So that's at the scale of several times faster than what you would expect out of not only traditional relational database management systems, but the degree of precision around knowing those entities is really exciting. That's called Big Match. It's called Big Match. And that's in production now? We do, we just delivered it in the fourth quarter and the original genesis of it was actually to use, you guys know Jeff Jonas too. Some of the capabilities. The puzzle piece, man. He's always talking puzzle pieces. Superman. It's all about what actually, and what Jeff and I recently had a conversation, we're actually calling this space in general around context computing is what we call it. So making sense, putting context to the data. It's an incremental programming thought which says every piece of data could actually cause you to step back and relook at your expectations or assumptions around the data set. And Big Match is just fantastic because it's about people that we're trying to not be found and now we're using that for areas that are for good. Not just that. So one big conversation here is the developer ecosystem. How does a startup that wants to work with IBM engage with you guys for big data? So say random, the next WhatsApp's potentially out there. You have six guys working on a product that's somewhat shipping and it's big data, social data. How do they engage with IBM? Is there a partnership program? Do you guys have an ecosystem? We do, we do. We actually have just launched BlueMix which I think everyone is aware of now. And also on software, we're enabling a lot of our middleware services capabilities on software. And we actually just enabled both BlueStratus which is our DB2 Blue acceleration capabilities or in memory capabilities on software. So really a self-service BI data warehousing capability. And then we're also enabling our big insights Hadoop services, so MapReduce on software as another capability. And we're very focused on an entire ecosystem. So the ecosystem is a set of clients and partners who want to expose particular APIs, who want to make certain sets of applications available as well as even data sets available for the marketplace. So I would think it's a big data exec. You want to bring as many big data services whether Hadoop or other into the cloud. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And most clients actually want to marry their data with third party data and another data set and derive some, you know, in public data to derive some meaningful insight. And to do that, it means that we've got to have a lot more common interfaces to be able to access the data and be able to also run analytics. So what should we expect there? The IBM Hadoop distro, I mean other analytics services. More services, you know, we're really shifting toward enabling agile analytics and we're also shifting toward what I consider more continuous insight and actionable insight in the middle of a process, right? In real time, in context. So what's the big milestones for you this year to knock down in terms of on the business front, partnerships, competition, landscape, revenue, projections, can you share some data? Oh, sure. So the biggest, I would say one of the biggest areas that I've interacted with clients recently is even in the telco space and financial services data monetization, like how do they do it? And one of the things that they've said is now I want privacy baked in into the capability. So historically you would have thought investments around privacy, security, governance where after thoughts are because of either breach or risk or, you know, risk. Now people are actually being much more proactive in saying I actually want to set money aside from a growth standpoint because I realize this has huge value. Is it an insurance policy or is it actual products they're buying? Oh, products, real products. So it's actually methods and products. So the method meaning what's the stewardship? What's the data steward role? What's the data officer, chief data officer role? Who actually has the rights on determining what data has, what value set? What are some of the techniques to apply in terms of user authentication and access? In terms of growth, my expectation is we're going to continue to see huge growth. We actually saw in some of our key technology areas over 100% growth last year. I mean, huge. So this is an exciting place. My expectation is I don't look at the competition maybe not the way everyone would expect, which is my belief is in the market right now because people are both understanding and trying to develop new applications and what some of the new technologies provide you is an opportunity to actually grow the entire market. So my preference is more programmers, more data developers actually engaging, actually drives a bigger market opportunity size for everybody. You mentioned the chief data officer. What are you seeing in terms of trends for the CDO? What industries are taking up the data czar, the CDO? And is that individual reporting into the CIO or is it a separate autonomous organization? So we've had, that's a good question. We've actually, and even Gartner's done a study on it recently, so this CDO role has been emerging almost growing at double digits, both at the C-suite level as well as one level below. In many cases, they're actually bridging between both either the IT organization or in the business organization. In some cases, they've actually pulled it out separately. I've seen it most in financial services sector, healthcare and government, mainly because it's highly regulated, right? Any industry that's highly regulated in terms of how that data is handled. The last piece too, in terms of the role is they really sit in between the organization, IT, technical and business and having an understanding of the key metrics and having the right people in the organization to say what are the key sources? What degree of control? What degree of sandbox experimentation that the provision for their multiple requests and teams become really important? Yeah, we're doing a conference in July with MIT. It's a CDO symposium. They're doing a lot of research in this area, so look for that. Inhi, I want to ask you a final question because we're on time here. Always great to have you. What are you personally excited about right now in the world with an IBM, outside IBM? What's got your attention right now? Probably the most exciting aspect is real time and context computing, the combination of the two. I mean, just being able to not only enable not just machine to machine and connected core type scenarios and deep industrial sector, asset heavy intensive industries with a lot of data, but it's actually also about enabling everyone. I mean, it's really democratizing the ability to have insight for everyone without necessarily all having to be a PhD or a data scientist or a big quant guy, right? So the thing that's exciting for me is- Liberation. Yeah, it really is about liberation. So it's being able to apply much more kind of insights at the moment at the right time context place for the individual, knowing the entity fully. And then the second is just enabling everybody, the masses, everybody to be able to play. I always said, you know, we are into crowdsourcing and crowd dynamics. We do a lot of research. It's about behavioral and contextual. The behavior is the crowd and the context is everything. So I love that context angle. I think that's really cool. I love the agile analytics. I think that is going to be like a search engine, you know, Watson-like. I mean, although Steve Mills was saying that Watson is going to be the source of truth. Dave was rolling his eyes. Dave was rolling his eyes. Cause we're always like, is there one version of the truth? And he's like, it's Watson. Yeah. I mean, Watson is absolutely phenomenal. It's just great humanization. He clarified it. Statistical version of the truth. Yeah, that's what he said. He had to back pedal. But it was a good conversation. Great to have you on theCUBE. Great to see you again. Thanks for meeting with us last night. It was always good to meet some of the team. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Exclusive coverage from Silicon Angles theCUBE here at IBM Pulse, IBM's premier cloud show. Cloud meets big data. IBM is on a roll. We'll be right back into the short break.