 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Well, hi everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us here as we continue our initiative of IBM Think, a chance to look at what IBM thinks in terms of infrastructure, what you're talking to about hybrid cloud, kind of the new trend, the thought that's going to the hybrid cloud. What's the future look like? And to help us cover that waterfront, a couple of experts from Deloitte, Terry Cobb, the IBM Alliance Lead at Deloitte. Terry, thank you for joining us. So we look forward to this time together. Thank you so much for having me. You bet. And also I want to introduce Dave Knight quickly, your colleague who's a senior solution architect and IBM Alliance Cloud Leader at Deloitte. Dave, good to see you as well. Thanks for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, so maybe just for the two of you, set the table for our viewers here in terms of your specific roles at Deloitte. I know I talked about IBM and your connections there, but in terms of what you're doing there, how you work together and ultimately what kind of service you're trying to provide your clients. Terry, why don't you jump on that first? Sure. So I've been with Deloitte for 16 years, I believe, maybe a little longer and focusing on the IBM, like our strategic partnership. And so what that means is I work day in, day out with our practitioners to identify and understand where our clients, what are some of their critical business needs? And so I work with our leaders and collaborate with IBM and we look for ways to solve really unique critical business issues. And so part of my background, so I've come from like 30 year background in strategy management consulting. So it's really exciting. I get to use my consulting skills, my strategy skills to look at where we are in the market, what's happening in the market. COVID's a great example. There was a huge impact on how businesses work, how they work differently and how they handle their workforce. So it's a very interesting time. And so bringing these two great firms together to solve some of these critical business issues has, for me, it's critical and it has a positive impact for our clients. And Dave, from your side of the fence. Yeah, so I sit in a similar place within the firm. I actually joined Deloitte last century. I've been with the firm for 21 years so in a variety of roles, but all with sort of a technical slash solution architecture slant, right? So just like Terry mentioned in the Alliance function we try to find opportunities to work together specifically between IBM and the Deloitte, to go to market services. My role as a solution architect and then as the cloud lead is to make sure that we've got the right mix of technology that we solve the client's problems efficiently and cost effectively. And then sort of translate those business problems into technical solutions and then those technical solutions back into business solutions. So the business sees the value and it's valuable not only for Deloitte from a services perspective but also for IBM. You just almost, you know, just blew me away when you said you've been there since the last century, you know? I haven't heard it quite put that way and it's really, that was really good. 1999 to be fair, but still. It certainly implies a lot of experience, that's for sure, that's it. But that was a really, that was a unique twist. So kudos to you. Let's talk about your clients first a little bit. So you talk about problems and we're talking about obviously technology and deployments and what capabilities are. So today, right? You've got on-prem, you've got off-prem, you've got private cloud, you've got public cloud, you've got, you know, edge technologies. You've got this really this, this maelstrom basically of opportunity but also confusion a little bit, right? With different kinds of capabilities, different kinds of challenges. So Dave, if you would, you know, just look at it from the macro level then in terms of how you start dissecting these kinds of decisions that the CTOs and within your client list have to make and how you help them chart their course in terms of determining priorities and what the right steps are for them to take. Okay. So, I mean, you sort of summarized my points actually quite nicely. We help customers find their path, what's their right approach to their digital transformation journey. We do have assets that help them, you know, identify workloads where they might run the best. We certainly have approaches and experience in the market having done this for years. You know, it's the number one cloud professional services firm globally. We've garnered a lot of experience working with customers, again, helping them on this journey. What we've learned is that one size does not fit all. Clearly cloud and more specifically public cloud is a game changer, it's here to stay but it's not necessarily the right answer for every workload, for every customer even. And so what we're starting to see is a shift towards hybrid discussions and hybrid architecture discussions. And just as a quick, very simple example, you wouldn't go purchase a mainframe to be a web server, right? That's significant overkill. And similarly, the cloud is great for its, you know, capacity and all the things that come with it, economics, that sort of thing, but it's not necessarily the best platform for a credit card clearinghouse, right? The transactional volume just simply too great, right? So in that sort of very simplified example, hybrid we think is the answer. And we're seeing lots of customers now that they've shifted a lot of their workloads to cloud that are cloud suitable starting to ask us the more difficult questions, right? The core of my business, it's a high risk move. Can you help me sort this out? And in many cases, the answer is don't move it. It's too extended at the edge. It's to augment it with cloud technologies such as AI and enhance your service rather than replace it or move it to a different location. So you recently published a report that you did, the mainframe market poll survey where you're looking at really, I guess migration plans or an appetite, right? To make these evolutions, to explore this hybrid cloud model that you've already detailed for us. Give me an idea if you would and our viewers an idea a little bit about some of the key summaries of that in terms of what the appetite is for that, what the desires are, are we ready to cut the cord on the mainframe and let it go? Is there too much involved? We want to hang on. What's the mood out there right now? Yeah, so we commissioned the double blind survey. We had a belief that we really wanted to explore it further. And that belief was a little tongue in cheek. The death of the mainframe is greatly over exaggerated. And so again, this double blind survey, we commissioned it and we found a lot of interesting results. First and foremost, the mainframe for many customers is not going away. The vast majority of our survey respondents indicated that was the case. There was a couple of other interesting tidbits that we found in the results as well. The first one is this isn't just a technology issue. It's a human capital issue as well with the aging workforce, mainframe not being quite as sexy in the age of Java, but coming back to IBM's investments in the platform. And then another key point that we found was security continues to be a key concern of business IT and business owners. And that mainframe is seen as the pillar of security. Sort of they hold it up as sort of the example of security in the industry. Another interesting tidbit we found was that, one specific question asked about future growth plans and just under 60%. So over half answered three questions that most people would think are at odds with each other. And that is, are you expanding your mainframe? Over 60% said yes. Are you advancing it to cloud? Just under 60% said yes. And then there was a hybrid question which over half said they were going to look at hybrid. So that sort of marriage of mainframe and cloud in a hybrid way was an interesting thing that we weren't exactly expecting, but still quite interesting to explore. So Terry, when you hear this, right? About these, I mean, not conflicting, but certainly interesting survey findings. What do you make of that? What are you, how are you reading those tea leaves a little bit about what people are saying about not ready to leave, but yet they're interested and so the concerns that they've brought up about security, about the Asian workforce. I mean, a lot of challenging positions here that have to be considered for your clients. You know what, for me, it was very interesting and I believe one of the reasons we launched this survey was really to find out what is really going on with our clients. Because we're hearing a lot of, you know, there's a lot of news around clients migrating all their applications, I say all, to the cloud. And but yet we were spending a lot of time with clients that had mainframes and we were solving some of their mainframe issues. And so we were a little confused. So that was part of the impetus from really getting out into a market sensing and figure out what are clients really doing. And we didn't target, you know, the mainframe, you know, clients, we targeted mainframe clients, but we didn't target mainframe users. We were looking at really the business users of the mainframe and the executives that had mainframes. And so we were, it was surprising to get the information back and hear how important the mainframe still is. And then when you start digging, you know, a bit deeper into, you know, what does cloud really mean? You know, then hybrid cloud, you know, comes to the surface. And then you have people that have different meanings of hybrid cloud. So really understanding what does hybrid cloud really mean and what does it mean for your business? And that's what we're solving today. It's like, how do we, how do we get a market around hybrid cloud and what benefits does it have for our clients? Yeah, so Dave, yeah, to touch up on that, to follow up. I mean, so how are you at Deloitte then taking these results and kind of ingesting them and distilling them and deciding, all right, this is how we're gonna define hybrid cloud. Perhaps, I mean, I don't know if that's a, you know, bold assumption, but I think you're probably trying to draw some parameters around it, right? This is how our clients see it. So this is how we're gonna talk about it. And then this is how we're gonna take them on that journey. How instructive was this survey for that? And actually, what are you doing with it in terms of shaping your practice? Yeah, so great question. And it is driving, you know, not the survey by itself, but a lot of the market trends and including the surveys is driving some reevaluation and refocusing quite frankly on hybrid cloud as an offering within the firm, right? We define hybrid cloud generally is, you know, seamless integration of data and applications across on and off premise. And with the wave of 5G that's coming at us increasingly, we're looking at architectures that include edge into that hybrid definition. You know, I've said this to a lot of folks, for me, mainframe was the original cloud. So it's only natural that it should be part of solutions. Now, and what I mean by that is when it was released, it was virtualized, it was virtually unlimited, somebody else managed it for you. You know, we paid for what you use. Those are all characteristics of the cloud as we know it today, but those were implemented in the 70s in the mainframe. And so capturing those characteristics and newer technologies, and then integrating those into architectures, I think is going to be sort of the next wave of what we see in the industry. And Deloitte is certainly positioning to help our customers on that journey. And before we sign off, I do want to touch on security issue again, because you did bring it up a little bit earlier, but let's just talk about it holistically here. It depended upon where you are. It doesn't matter, right? Edge on off private public. I mean, security's got to be first and foremost. And so what are you suggesting or what are you saying to your clients, Terry and Dave on this in terms of their security concerns, the awareness they have to have in that and the allocation of resources to make sure that whatever solutions they deploy, they're credible, they have integrity and they're sustainable. So just let's hit on security before we head out. Terry, if you don't mind jumping in first. Well, I like to, I'll address security, but even stepping back a little bit. So as clients, we're looking at moving applications to the cloud or a hybrid cloud. It's really about making sure you have a strategy unless you address some of the underlying data infrastructure, you're going to end up with disparate data everywhere. And you're not going to be able to, you're going to have data silo issues. You're going to have security issues. You also have complex architecture issues. So some of the work that we're doing with IBM and internally with our firm is trying to help clients understand, take a step back and really evaluate their business requirements and making sure that they, and Dave can, it's found on this, but it's really making sure they have the right strategy in place to address their data, where their data sits, how to innovate some of these applications and of course security. Security is of a huge concern. We see that from all of our clients and needs to be on-prem and secure. Dave, I'll get to the final word. Yeah, thanks, just to add on to that. So security is absolutely critical. And as Terry mentioned, having a strategy is absolutely critical and having security be integral to that strategy is equally critical. As you said, it's everywhere, cloud, on-prem, on the edge. I would even go so far as to say, in your personal life, in your professional life, it should be as pervasive as we like to think it is. I think the reality is it maybe isn't, but that's part of the job of architects like me is to make sure that it gets built in at its core. It's not an afterthought, it's integral. IBM's got some fantastic technologies around that, specifically in the Z space. I don't want to get too wonky here, but FIPS 140-2 level four encryption, which is unique in the markets, data privacy passports, pervasive encryption. All these things, interestingly enough, live in the mainframe, but extended to IBM's cloud. And from my perspective, I think it's one of the unique connections, intersections, where mainframe could actually help drive the growth of cloud in that hybrid model. And even getting into future-looking things like homomorphic encryption. There's a raft of technologies coming out of IBM that help us ensure we have secure transactions, secure hybrid architectures, as you put it, right, security everywhere. Well, you can get a little wonky. That's okay. Okay. Hey, David Terry, thank you for the time today. We certainly appreciate it. And thanks for shining light on your work at Deloitte. And of course, that partnership you have, it's working so well with IBM. Thank you both. Thanks for having us. All right, we've been talking about hybrid cloud, the future of a hybrid cloud, and the mainframe, and it ain't dead yet. All right, John Walls, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE.