 Okay, we're back here live at, in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay, this is IBM's information on demand, hashtag, IBM IOD, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the ceiling from the noise, I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org, and also a big data analyst from Wikibon, Jeff Kelly. Guys, we're going to just do a breakdown. We had a great lineup this morning. We had top executives from IBM, we had some of the top customers passionate, articulate, really strong content. But Dave, we've gone to all these events. We just last week in New York City for big data NYC where we had Stratoconference and Hadoop World going on with us and that was a great event, more technical on theCUBE, here's a little bit more business, great conversations, we heard things like data flow, talking about data economy, talking about the business impact, what's your take so far? Well, John, it is interesting to juxtapose big data NYC and Hadoop World with what we're seeing at IOD. The content here from customers largely coming from practitioners, not IT practitioners necessarily, but business practitioners. We had healthcare professionals, doctors. We just had nationwide insurance on West Hunt, asked, where do you report into IT? No, I reported into marketing. So you're seeing clear examples of line of business executives that are driving big data innovations and driving spending. And that to me is the big difference. That's what IBM's all about. What do you think about last year we were here at IOD? We're also here at IBM Edge, the storage group, another IBM event. We have Pulse coming up, we're going to check that out and then another IBM event. But what I want to get your take, last year at IOD, and eventually I'm in this year, what's the comparison so far relative to position? Because last year you and I were commenting about it coming together. The disparate parts of IBM, huge asset base to get a treasure trove of technology, solutions and personnel. It's kind of like a combined workout. You bring them all together. What's your take this year from this year in terms of messaging, solution, and just overall? I think in 2010 IBM saw the whole Hadoop movement. Obviously, I've been participating there. Saw all the buzz being generated. And I think it spent 2011 trying to really craft its messaging, its strategy, figuring it out, where it fit relative to a smarter planet. And then last year at IOD, I felt like it was the coming out party for IBM's analytics business, dovetailing with big data. So IBM essentially, purposefully we heard from Anjul Bambri, purposely tried to go out and create this new category of big data analytics. I think it's clear that IBM has successfully done that, along with others, but IBM was really the first to really push those two together. And that's what we saw last year at IOD. I think this year at IOD, now you're seeing the practical application of those efforts, the technology, the services bringing it together, and the business value that's being driven out of those initiatives. You know, I got to say, one of the things I'm really impressed about IBM on is that they have the same philosophy we have here at theCUBE, and on SiliconANGLE is that, you know, when asked about how they're executing and with their customers and their communities, you know, David said, we want to align our subject matter experts with our audiences. Customer and industry partners. Dave Laverde said that, yeah. Yeah, Dave Laverde said that. And that's the key about IBM. There's a lot of people that don't know what they've been blogging as a company, going back to the original days. The company is very encouraging of social presence. They're respectful, professional, and so it's good to see that. And Jeff, I want to get your take on this because I'll just weave into my question for you, which is, you know, we were talking about big data analytics, obviously a space you're covering in depth is the leading analyst out there right now. But one element that IBM is doing here that's interesting that connects it is social business. You don't see a lot of the other events in tying the social business piece to it, which is essentially the outcome side of it. Dissect that for us, please. Well, I think they understand that they being IBM that big data and analytics doesn't live in a silo, and it really is critical to get the most out of your big data and your analytics projects to infuse those with social capabilities. Big data analytics is inherently a collaborative discipline. So the idea to bring those two areas together and start to merge those along with cloud, along with mobile. I mean, you really can't separate any of these out if you're, when you're talking about successful deployments inside an enterprise. You know, an isolated big data analytics project that doesn't bring in the collaboration capabilities to allow analytics to be infused throughout your organization. That doesn't bring in the mobile capabilities to really serve customers and serve frontline workers who need analytics, you know, where they work or where they engage with your brand, where they buy services online, whatever the case might be. And then, of course, cloud, where a lot of the technology can be complicated, can be complex, and in a lot of cases, it makes more sense from a TCO perspective to deploy those in the cloud. So you've got to bring all those together. I think IBM is one of the only companies that really gets that full message, and now they're starting to bring that together here at IOD, and to add on to Dave's response about what's different this year. I think last year, as Dave said, it was much more of a coming-out party, talking about some of the capabilities. This year, it's all about business value. I mean, we've heard from just, you know, we're halfway through day one, you know, we've heard from customers either on stage or here on theCUBE, Memorial Healthcare, Allied Irish Bank, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Emory University, Nationwide Insurance, Centerpoint Energy, Verizon, Optimal Labs, and then there's more. So they are clearly, you know, focused on delivering these capabilities to the enterprise in a way that they can consume them, and they're making it real. It's encouraging to see. Dave, I want to get your take on this, the rise of social business. You know, when I was co-moderating a panel with Jeffrey M.L., CEO of GE, with Vice Chairman of United Airlines, Statoil, Apache, St. Luke's, all these senior executives, the term that came out of their mouth the most was business outcomes. And, you know, they're all talking about this new wave of doing things with social data, machine data, human data, et cetera. And how does that tie in from your perspective? Because what we heard today was the classic breaking down the silos kind of narrative, which is, hey, we're now at a point now where we can actually go get data outside, customers can get data outside of their core markets to inject into their real-time or advanced analytics BI systems. It's a fundamental mindset shift plus technology. What's your take on that? You know, where we are, who are the players, how's IBM doing, and what's your take? Well, so a couple things there, John. One is, a lot of those companies that Jeff just mentioned are the IBM TrueBlue accounts, and the big question is, how can IBM expand its base beyond its core? In the crowd chat we had today, that was one of the questions that came up, Les Retchin, Anjul Bambri, Dave Laverde, they all were saying that we're doing that. I would still suspect, John, that 90% of IBM's businesses is within this big data analytics business is within their TrueBlue accounts. So your point about social is a really interesting one, and the point about the internet of things, if you will. These are opportunities for IBM to expand its footprint, and I think social is a means of doing that. You suggested, John, that IBM's actually quite prophetic in social media. They're doing some really advanced things, and you're seeing them out there. That's an opportunity for IBM to expand their base. The question I have for you is, is it working? Can it work? Can that allow IBM to grow beyond its core base, in your opinion? Dave, you and I both love the riff on this topic, but you know how I feel. Social data and social media is certainly changing. The societal changes around data is enormous. How people are doing things are completely different. Obviously the mobile devices, the smartphone, we'll say the iPhone was the Macintosh of its generation to create that smartphone movement where the edge of the network in the human sense was connected. So that's one massive driving force of society change, which we have crowd chats, we have crowd spots technology. We've built and the blogging, open source content. We're passionate about making information free to change people's lives. So let's check that box. To me, we've harbored on that. The big thing that I like right now in this market, in this show, and the shows we've gone to, is the business changes that are happening because of it, the visualization technology. Words like data processing or getting back into the event of vocabulary. Decision support systems, old mainframe like technologies and languages coming back, and that is because the enterprises are being smarter, they're smarter with technology. And I remember the term knowledge worker, we heard that this morning from one of the guests, I forget who said, we want to talk about knowledge workers. That term was so overused during the PC revolution. Okay, you can do a spreadsheet that I guess made people more knowledgeable, but now knowledge worker goes to a 10x level of impact. You're talking about engaged workforces, people understanding, talking to each other at a band. No controlled models, it's all transparent, democratization, harnessing the social data, connected systems. This is where I think the big data will shine. So putting the mobile device in the hands of a worker can make them, in my opinion, a knowledge worker. So I think this concept of knowledge worker will ultimately be the big data aha moment. And we always say the killer app of big data is analytics. So to me, it's very clear, the societal changes aside, which we love, the business impact's going to be the value changes, the instrumentation, but the knowledge worker is the guy in the trenches, the girl who's got the analytics going, who's the next Billy Bean, money ball in the organization. Doesn't have to be data science. So I think, you know, clear story last week really hit it home with me. Sharma Ella Mulligan, the CEO, ex-aster data executive, kind of showed the way. I think IBM is going down that path. Well, what I liked about what Sharma Ella was saying is she talked about intelligent data harmonization. Now, that's something that, you know, IBM can do through its portfolio of products, bringing a lot of services. So you're seeing some of these small startups trying to innovate and trying to replicate the capabilities of a large, large company like IBM in essentially a point product, which is what clear story has. So it's really interesting to me, John, to again juxtapose the two worlds. You know, we heard Abhimento last week talking about, you know, BC before cutting and AC after cutting. I would guess that well over half the people here don't know who Doug Cutting is. I don't know if that's true or not, but I guarantee you that 95% of the people at Hadoop World know who Doug Cutting is. But things that I think resonate, you know, Merv told us last week the big story here is choices. And IBM is clearly one of those choices. One of the things we heard last week, interestingly enough, at Hadoop World was the prominence, Jeff Kelly of IBM's big insights, a dupe distribution. We heard a lot of people surprised at how prominent that is in the space because we're always talking about Hortonworks and Cloudera. And then the other thing we heard last week, which I think is very consistent to what we're hearing here, is big data is challenging conventional thinking regarding how non-analytical business users will be using analytics. That's something that Bill Schmarzo wrote in his recent book. And you're clearly hearing that as a theme here. That to me, Jeff, is the holy grail of big data. Ken, in your opinion, this industry, get to the point where big data practitioners are not the only ones using big data, but it's users, it's business users. Isn't that really how this becomes a $200 billion marketplace? I think you're absolutely right. I think it's, and it's not just a business user with a visualization tool. It's a frontline worker, an operational worker, using applications that are infused with analytics to allow them to make better decisions in real time to do their frontline jobs. And it's applications that automate systems, automate decision making. Again, infused with analytics, real time analytics that build off historical deep batch type of analytics, infusing those into real time systems to make automated decisions. I think those two are really where the incredible productivity gains we're gonna see are gonna happen. There's still a lot of room for that big picture analytics for using your visualization tool about automation and infusing analytics into operational applications, I think is one area where you can see potential for a significant productivity gain. So John, you hear a lot about the data-driven organization and how it's changing everything. I feel like we're really just scratching the surface. I feel like the disruption has not come yet. Anywhere close. I think massive disruptions are coming. Yeah, I mean, to me, Joe Tucci at EMC and IBM executives talk about it all the time about the ways of changes, right? And, you know, reflection points, client server, PC revolution, client server, all that good history, but the internet, now it's the big data. And to me, I think, Dave, people are just rearranging the deck chairs, in my opinion, on what they think the next big 10x change is gonna be. You see it in the journalism business. You know, you and I were talking last night about Yahu's making it more some mayor. You can rearrange the tech chairs and hire journalists to do tech coverage in another area. That's the big story. But you can't just move someone around. There's a personnel change. It's like, you know, playing a sport differently. And I think the future of work is gonna be around collaboration. I think the new generation of workers are gonna be like first person shooter gamers, right? They're gonna be like collaborative, connected, communicating. They're gonna code Python on some levels. Some are gonna be, you know, shake your iPhone and get big data analytics. So I think the user interface is gonna change. So that's gonna require new disciplines and quite frankly, a new career path. So things like machine learning and things of that nature are gonna have new disciplines. So I think you're gonna see a sea change of personnel changes where you're gonna see a new type of tech athlete come out of the woodwork and say, okay, that's the new rock star. That's the new kind of profile. That's the new systems analyst. It's not just give me a data scientist because they did some BI and data warehouse work. I think you're gonna see, you know, those guys will kind of be in the machinery, kind of, you know, pushing buttons. But I think the breakout leadership and creation is gonna be from the people who are gonna look and think differently. I think that's gonna be the change. And that's gonna be guys who can grok math, creativity, user experience, machine learning, things of that nature. Yeah, I think you're right. I think there is a lot of, you know, paving the cart path, as our friend Paul Gillan might say, but at the same time, right? I mean, there's like a lot of checkbox items going on, but there's still a lot of core disruption coming in industry. So we're gonna be able to separate the pretenders. You heard Fred talk about Fred Delbonio. Talk about how one of his clients, one of the customers, wanted to take 200 million dollars off the ad budget. That was a great example. And they turned around and made 300 million in sales that Christmas season. That to me is the data economy. That's what he says to the data. I agree with him. That's the lever. It's like that movie for us old timers, Jody Foster Contact, you know, where she sees that one little guy, hears that one little, in the white noise, they hear that one little data, opens up this big plan. Well, what he didn't say though, John, and it very well may be happening. He didn't offer it. We should have followed up with him, but can they now instrument that business such that it can deliver those results on an ongoing basis, you know, by the minute, right? To optimize the spend. What Fred talked about was, you know, IBM built that model and then presented that model and then made some pretty substantive decisions. Now, the question is, can they integrate that into the business process? Well, that definitely can. I think what you're going to see is you're going to see these use cases. And we heard it from his service side. We're going to see essentially leveraged use cases that, as you said, code. Remember the old days, oh, best practice has a PowerPoint PDF file. I think now the best use case is going to be, here's actual code that's leveraged kind of an open source framework where the rising tide or standing on the shoulders of the others are before you. You're going to see an open source paradigm around best cases, whether it's pre-canned queries and technology. That's one thing. And the big data add budget thing was one. But the other data point that Jim said, Jim Bachman said, professor at Emory University of Medicine, he talked about the instrumentation of devices in the ER, right? And he said, there are so many alarms going off. To me, that's the secret in this market, Dave, is to figure out how to extract the signal from the noise, right? So if you have all these alarms going off, if everything's being instrumented, the thing that's the most valuable is what to pay attention to. That's what he was saying. So to me, I think that the insights, the insight side of the business is going to be really the biggest thing. If all these alarms are going off, which one matters? That's a search paradigm. So I think companies like Splunk, IBM have it here with their insights. These are the tech that's going to bring that semantic contextual relevance. Well, so the other thing too that I think gets lost in all this conversation is this is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. How do you do this? Do you do this with services? I mean, it's really, and who are the companies that can actually implement these types of services? Who has the domain expertise, the technical expertise, and the implementation chops to get it done? Obviously, IBM does, I would say Accenture, I say this all the time, Accenture, Deloitte, Ernie Young, IBM, PWC, those are the five that have that capability. And there's a lot of smaller companies that are not as prominent, but they're maybe more local in nature that can get parts of this done. But services is a key piece of the equation that doesn't get talked about. So folks out there watching, if you're watching theCUBE, this is theCUBE live from IBM in Las Vegas. We're going to have a couple more interviews coming in and round out with the analysts at the end of the day, Ray Wang, Mervager from Gardner, Ray Wang from Founder of Constellation, Judy Hurwitz from Hurwitz Associates. We're going to get the analysts on here, we're going to break that down. But I want to share with you a URL of a crowd chat that we did. Crowd chat is a new crowd activity innovation that was launched by CrowdSpots, saying this is a crowd chat application platform. New startup that essentially takes the Twitter concept, Twitter chat and brings it with the LinkedIn and Twitter, creates kind of a chat room to the hashtag to the public feed. Go to that chat, it's over now, but you can see the transcript of how it went down. Vote, you can retweet, a lot of great comments in there. And Dave, crowd chats is an example of social business. I mean, to me, that's a pristine crowd record. No storify, no manipulation, the record from the conversations. So go to crowdchat.net slash IBM IOD and retweet. You can't comment anymore because it's now closed. We'll open up another one later tomorrow. But crowd chat, Dave, is social innovation. To me, that's about getting people together. And The Wall Street Journal had a great article this morning talking about Twitter's value proposition. That's people, and that's the same for IBM. So like in the spirit of IBM, this is social business and retweet. What I like about it is you get a number of people who care about a topic together in a place that is not overwhelmingly noisy, but at the same time is public. So, it's a great vehicle. Got some great questions this morning from the crowd chat, from the crowd, Tim Crawford and others. So thank you for that. Jeff, Kelly, quick take on competition. This is obviously IBM's event. A lot of IBM propaganda being spewed around. And they're professional, they don't have fake anyone. We try to have a joke about them having a flash tweet mob. If IBM had every one of their employees tweet on any topic, it would be trending, it would be bigger than Justin Bieber. But they're professional organizations, not come doing it with a black hat. But Jeff, talk about the competition. IBM, obviously, putting a pretty good offering out there. Absolutely, I think when you're talking about kind of an end-to-end big data portfolio, both services and products, it's hard to compete with IBM just in terms of the breadth and depth of those products and services. But I think the big, long-term, the big challenge, I think, the big competitor for IBM or one of the big competitors is actually gonna be Amazon. We heard a decent amount of talk today about the cloud. So we know that IBM, essentially, is really moving everyone from their smart enterprise cloud to their software cloud. And they really made a few announcements today around blue acceleration, for example, on the software cloud. I think that going forward is really gonna be an area to watch. Amazon versus IBM in this cloud battle for kind of big data analytics. Then, of course, on a... That was huge white space for IBM. That's software. Dave, software. I mean, come on, that's a hosting company. Come on, how real of an acquisition is that? Let's be critical of that acquisition. It's not like $900 million for a hosting company. Well, still, it's a growing company, right? It does a lot of bare metal, which probably resonates well with some of the workloads that IBM's trying to deliver. And it was, like I said, it was a huge gap in IBM's portfolio. They needed that kind of capability to even start to compete for... So you think... I think if they're gonna keep their lead, you know, we've started this market. If IBM is gonna keep their lead in the next five, 10 years in this market, they have to build out an enterprise-grade cloud capability. Otherwise, I mean, that's where big data is going. That's where those workloads are going. Software cloud is just a hosting company. Well, look, they've got a lot of work to do. Pretorical question, you don't need to answer it. We're stuck on time right now. We've got our next guest here. A little midterm analysis here from Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. We'll be right back with our next guest here. Live in Las Vegas for IBM's information on demand. A lot of big data analytics, cloud mobile, and obviously social business. We're here covering a two days live exclusive coverage. SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, we'll be right back.