 From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. I'm Peter Burris of Wikibon. Welcome back to IBM Innovation Day, covered by theCUBE from beautiful Yorktown Heights, New York, Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Had a lot of great conversations about the journey to the cloud and what it means, and we're going to have another one here with Dennis Cannelly, who's the general manager of cloud integration at IBM. Dennis, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Peter. I'm welcome to Yorktown as well, sir. Oh, I love it here. So very quickly, what does the GM of cloud integration do? Yeah, so I suppose we start from the beginning, right? So I am responsible for a lot of what we call the traditional IBM middleware. So these are brands that are known to the industry and to our customers, things like WebSphere, MessageQ or MQ as we know it, which is kind of the core foundation stones for a lot of IT today that's out there in the industry. And it's not just about, sometimes people talk about this as legacy, but this is what all the systems run on today. And also I'm involved in the whole journey of moving that middleware to the cloud and enabling customers to get on that journey to cloud. And it's not just to A-cloud because your typical enterprise today has probably on average about five different clouds. And it's, clouds as we know them as the IaaS players or the Paz players, but also when we talk about cloud, we also think about things like SaaS properties and applications of that regard. So it's helping customers go from that traditional IT infrastructure and on their journey to the cloud. That's what I do. Utilizing these enterprise-ready technologies that are driven into the enterprise, bringing them to the cloud as services, but also making sure that the stuff that's currently installed can engage and integrate the cloud from a management and service standpoint as well. Absolutely, because customers have made a huge investment in this middleware. And a lot of the transactions and a lot of the security and a lot of the risks sit in these systems today and that have served us very well for many decades. Now as we start to move to the cloud, so it isn't a binary switch. It's going to be a transition over time. And today I think we're about 20% into that journey. I would say we've done some of the easier parts. Now we're getting into some of the more complex and some of the more difficult problems. And kind of one of the underlying pieces of technology we're using to enable customers to do that is container technology. So we've made a decision to use containers right across our middleware or our software. So what I mean by that is we've taken all our software and it's running on containers today. And that's a key enabling to make this happen because containers gives you that flexibility and that openness to run on different target environments and be able to run on different clouds at the end of the day. The model by which developers thought about integration would be through a transaction. Generally pretty stateful, so I'll put something in a queue, I'll wait for a response, guaranteed delivery. Now we're moving to a world containers, lot more reliance on stateless interactions means we're being driven mainly by events and thinking in terms of events. Talk about how that is changing the way we think about the role of middleware or the role of integration amongst all these different possible services. Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, so if you think about containers, we think about stateless and we think about microservices and we talk about event-based applications. So a lot of those front ends are on that today, right, and building on those technologies. So you gotta enable the new developers to build in that way. Now, how do you integrate that with that back end, right? Because at the end of the day, these transactions are running on the back end and you really want to enable as part of transformation, you wanna open up those back ends to those new developers and to those new customer insights because what is digital transformation is about putting the customer at the middle and enable insights on those customers and enable rapid development of those applications. So at the core of that is integration. And integration is not just message-based integration, it's been able to take those back end transactions and surface them up through APIs, not just the standard APIs as we think of maybe as web services but event-based program models and event-based APIs also. And doing that in a consistent and a secure manner because if you have all these complex transactional systems, who has access to that data, who has access to make those transactions, who can at certain clip levels, et cetera, I've been able to do that in a secure and a consistent manner across these environments is critical to what we do. So can you give us some examples of some customers that are successfully transitioning their back end systems to these new technologies in a way that protects the back end system, makes it economical to do so, in other words, it doesn't force change but can utilize some of these new integration technologies to make both the new investments more valuable but also the back ends more valuable too. Yeah, I mean, if you think of, I'll give you an example of a customer, American Airlines from the airline industry, right? So if you think about travel and airline travel, in times past, you made a reservation maybe through an agent and you booked a flight from A to B. Today, you have your cell phone, you get regular updates on your flights. If you're delayed, you're possibly offered, rerouting options, et cetera, right? So there's a classic example of how digital has transformed the airline industry and the airline booking industry. If your flight, if there's weather patterns, et cetera, how you can get real-time updates on your flights. So, okay, that's all happening on the front end in your cell phone or your pam held or whatever but the back end booking system is still a transactional based system that says Peter is on this flight going from A to B at this time, et cetera. So that's an example of how we've modernized an application and we have worked with American Airlines to make that happen to give you that kind of 360 view as the customer where you're bringing together flight information, weather information, rating information because we'll offer you different alternatives in terms of if you need to rebook in the event of something going on. And at the back end, there's still a transaction that says book Peter on this flight from A to B and that's a real-life example of how we've integrated those two worlds today. So as we go back five or six or more and at say 10, 15 years in the days of MQ, for example, the people who were developing and setting up those systems and administering and managing those systems were a relatively specialized group. Today, the whole concept of DevOps in many respects is borrowing from much of the stuff that those folks did many, many years ago as infrastructure builders or developers as I call them. How does that group move into this new world of integration in the cloud? Yeah, so I think, first of all, the rate and pace as it's multiplied, right? So the rate and pace of which we make changes to the system has multiplied. I mean, maybe traditionally we ran in changes maybe once a month. We had things like change control windows. Things were very well controlled, et cetera, right? But at the end of the day, it doesn't meet the needs of today and what we need to do in a digital world. So today we're running in changes on the hour. So now you're faced with a challenge, right? So when you make changes, how do you know that the system is still performing and still operating at the level you need to operate on? You start to think about security and you start to think about, okay, I've made a change. Have I introduced vulnerabilities into the system? You gotta, in the past, these were all separate groups in almost islands within the operation center where you had the developer who kind of overdo all the code and then operations, looked at it and see how it was performing and security check for compliance, et cetera. And they were kind of three different islands of personas or groups within the organization. Today that's really collapsing into one organization. The developer is responsible for making sure that change gets in, to making sure that change performs and it's also security compliant. And we call this the role of the SRE or the Systems Reliability Engineer and really bringing those two worlds together into one persona. And it's not just one persona but having the systems and the insight to make that to happen. And that's critical in how management is changing and the management of these systems is changing and how the skill level is needed in this new world. So Dennis, one more question. In a few months, IBM Think's gonna take over San Francisco, February 2019, 30,000 people. Talk to us a little bit about what gets you excited about Think and what kind of conversations you hope to be having while you're there. Yeah, well, this is the one time a year where all of IBM comes together and it's new issue that we're going to San Francisco and particularly in our cloud business which I'll talk about which really encompasses everything we're talking about here which is our middleware business and also how we move customers to the cloud and really engaging with customers in those conversations. And this is the one time a year where all of IBM comes together and where you can see the full breadth of our capabilities all the ways from our systems and the hardware and down at that level at the chip level right through to the middleware and the software to our cloud and actually engaging with customers and really understanding where the customer needs are and making sure that what we are working on is meeting those customer needs and of course if we need to adapt or change and take that feedback back into the organizations that we do that in real time. It's a very exciting time for us. It's a year or a week in the year that I really look forward to because that's where all of IBM comes together including our services, et cetera and where we actually have conversations with key customers and partners and really understanding what's going on in the industry and how we can help people on this journey to the cloud that I talk about. Dennis Canelli, IBM General Manager of Cloud Integration. Thanks very much for being on the queue. Thank you, Pete. And once again, this is Peter Burris. We're signing off from the IBM Innovation Day here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. Thank you very much for watching. Let's carry on those conversations about cloud and the future of computing.