 from theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital version of IBM Think, and theCUBE is pleased to be providing the wall-to-wall coverage, as we have physically for so many years at big IBM events. Jesus Mentos is here. He's the managing partner for global strategy, for IBM and the global business services. Jesus, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to be here, Dave. So every guest that we've talked to this week really, we've talked about COVID, but just briefly. Here we're going to do a bigger drill down and really try to get Jesus, your perspectives and IBM's point of view on what's going on here. So let me start with, we've never seen anything like this before, obviously. I mean, there are some examples. You got to go back to 1918 to try to get some similarities, but in 1918, it was a long, long time ago. So what's different about this? What are the similarities? Yeah, it's, you know what Mark was saying, that history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes. I think there are similarities of what we are experiencing right now in this pandemic with other pandemics like Spanish flu. I think the situation is unique in terms of the impact and the synchronicity of that impact, right? So we can go back to other, if you want, economic crisis or a society crisis where you have either one country or one aspect being disrupted, but this is really a society being disrupted at a global scale. So its impact is unprecedented in that, in that perspective in modern time. And I think all of us are adjusting to it. I want to ask you about digital transformation because I've made the point that, you know, while a lot of people talk digital transformation, there's been a lot of complacency. People say, eh, not in my lifetime, eh, we're a bank, we're making a lot of money, we're doing okay. How do you think COVID-19 will sort of change that complacency and really accelerate digital transformation as a mindset and actually turn it into action? Yeah, I think the best way to put it is digital transformation five months ago was about obtaining a competitive advantage and digital transformation today in many industries is about survival. That is, that is how big of a change it is. The need for efficiency and cost savings, the need for resiliency that we have talked about, they need to be able to drive agility, to be able to switch and adapt. They need to make hyper-local decisions, right? To use data, none of that can be done unless you have fully digitized processes, you are consuming local data and you have trained the people to really operate in those new, more intelligent processes. So it has gone from optionality is okay, you can do okay, but if you digitize, you're going to do better to, unless you digitize, your business may not exist next year. I think that's the change. The change is, I think now is widely understood that the majority of our digitization processes have to be accelerated. And I would say that is a great statistic that when we go back in history, and there has been many as I mentioned of this crisis, you can look back at the two behaviors that businesses have. One is to play defense and then what happens two years later? And the other one is, okay, you defense, but you immediately switched to offense and then what happens two years later? Those companies that use this time to just defend and hand her down, history said in a couple of years later, 21% of them outperform, but those businesses that they shift from defense to offense and actually accelerate in these cases, programs like digitalization, 37% outperform. So very sub-premium for businesses that right now actually immediately switched to offense, focus on this set of digitalization and empowering cloud, managing data, and shooting the skills of the people, they're more likely not only to survive but thrive in the next few years, that those that just use this time to defend. To your point, it's about survival. It's not about not getting disrupted because you're going to get disrupted. It's almost a certainty. And so in order to survive, you've got to digitally transform. Your final thoughts on digital transformation, then I want to ask you if there's a silver lining in all this. I think what we do, we can change the context, but we cannot let the context define who we are either as individuals or as company. What we can do is to choose how do we act on that context. I would say those organizations and those individuals that take advantage of this situation to understand that some of these behaviors are going to change, understand that the more that we shift technology to the cloud, the more that we should work close to the cloud, the more that we use technologies like artificial intelligence and drive non-linear decisions that massively optimize everything we do from the way that we deliver healthcare to the way that we manage supply chains to the way that we secure food, frankly, to the way that we protect the environment. There is a silver lining that technology, it is one of those solutions that can help in all of these areas. And the silver lining of this is, hopefully let's use this time to get better prepared for the next pandemic, to get better prepared for the next crisis, to implement technologies that drive efficiency faster, that create new jobs, that protect the environment. And while we cannot change the fact that we have COVID-19, we can change what happens after COVID-19. So what we return to is something better than what we entered before COVID-19. Very thoughtful commentary, Jesus. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Blessings to your family and yourself. I appreciate it, Dave. Thank you and thank you for everything you do to keep everybody informed. I really are a pleasure. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital event, we'll be right back right after this short break.