>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE
with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021.
Brought to you by IBM.
>> And welcome back here on theCUBE.
John Walls, your host with you as we continue our
IBM Think 2021 initiative.
Been talking a lot about IBM's assistance
in terms of what it's doing for its client-base.
We're going to talk about partnerships today, a little bit
with Bill Patterson who is the EVP and General Manager
of CRM Applications at Salesforce
who has a really good partnership
in great practice right now, with IBM.
And Bill, thanks for the time today.
Lookin' forward to spending some time with you, here.
>> Yeah, thank you John, thanks for having me today.
>> You bet.
Well, let's just jump right in.
First off, let's share with the viewers
about your core responsibilities at Salesforce.
We talked about CRM, what your engagement is there,
but if you would just kind of of give us an idea
of the kind of things that you're handling
on a day-to-day basis.
>> Well, I am responsible for our CRM applications
here, at Salesforce, which are our sales cloud technologies
to help organizations get back to growth,
our service cloud technologies which are really helping
organizations to take care of their customers,
you know, through all moments of the digital lifecycle,
our small business solutions, so to help
growing organizations thrive, and our Work.com
and vaccine management solutions which are
helping the economy safely reopen
through the crisis modes that we've all been living in.
So broad range responsibilities and my day-to-day is
nothing like it was a year ago.
>> Yeah and I could only imagine, especially when you
throw that last component in, COVID,
which hopefully, we'll have time
to talk about just because, I think, people are so
are taken to the subject now and obviously
it's impacting business on so many different levels.
But let's talk, first off, about IBM
and your partnership with them,
kind of the genesis of that, how that came about,
and maybe how you're working together.
How are you integrated these days with IBM?
>> Well, you know, one of the things at Salesforce that
are key value as an organization is
is to establish trust around the transformation
of organizations across the world.
And when you think about brands that you can trust
to drive transformations with,
IBM and Salesforce really stand apart.
So IBM is an incredible partner for us
on the technology side, on a service delivery side,
and in an innovation side for us to create new solutions
to help our clients really go in this
from-to state of how their businesses used to operate
to how they need to operate in the future.
I loved working with the IBM team.
We have a lot of great values that are shared
across our two organizations.
But most fundamentally, those values are
deeply rooted in customer success.
And I think that that is one of the things that
really draws me too, working with such a great partner here.
>> Go into the process a little bit, if you will.
So if I'm a prospective client of yours
and I come to you with some cloud needs, you know,
again, whether it's storage or whether it's applications
or whether it's Edge, whatever it is
I'm coming to you for, how do you then translate that
to IBM and how does IBM come into play,
where do the boundaries kind of start and stop or do they?
Or is it a complete mesh?
>> Yeah, well I think one of the things that's
sort of unique about today's climate is
people aren't just looking to solve technology problems,
they're looking to solve business problems.
And what we really do at Salesforce is lead
with the business transformation opportunity
and deeply partner with IBM on a number of fronts
to really go help those opportunities become realized.
The first is in the services line.
IBM has great partnerships with Salesforce
around the transformation about core business processes,
configuration, integration services.
That's one of the dimensions that we work together on.
We also work together on areas of artificial intelligence
and how we help businesses become smart
in their operations every day
to empower their workforce to really achieve more.
And finally, you know that you mentioned
about core technology, you know, oftentimes,
the business requirements translate
into great technology transformation.
And that's what we do deeply with the IBM team
is really outlining a blueprint and a roadmap
for modernizing the technical infrastructure
to help organizations move fast,
increase their operational agility,
and run at such scale and safely in today
in the modern world that we all operate in on.
So through all those facets of the lifecycle,
IBM continues to be one of our leading partners, globally,
to help clients, you know, not just here,
in the United States, but around the world
to think about how they need to maximize
their transformational abilities.
>> Yeah, and you touched on this
at the outset of the interview.
We were talking about IBM and the impact
and obviously, the great association relationship that
you have with them and the value in that.
I'd like you to amplify on that a little bit more
in terms of, specifically, what are you getting out of it
you think, from a Salesforce perspective
to have kind of the power and the weight
and the bench, basically, that IBM provides.
>> Well you think about transformation and you know,
you read a lot about digital transformation online,
that means so many different things
to so many different businesses.
Businesses, not just, like I said,
here in one country, but globally,
the transformational needs really need
to come with incredible bench and domain expertise
by industry, by geography, even by some micro-regions
in those geographies given what we've been experiencing
here, in the public sector in the United States
with this COVID response activity we've been doing
with the IBM team.
And so when you talk about the deep bench,
what I love about working with IBM on is, again,
commanding just great industry insights
and knowledge of where industries are heading
and also cross-industry insights so that
you can really bring great best practices from say,
one industry to another.
Second is that real understanding
of the global nature of business today.
And I don't think the one thing that's fascinating
about digital, it is not a sovereign identity, today.
Digital really means that you need to understand
how to operate in every country, every region,
every location, you know, safely.
And so IBM has incredible depth in bench of experiences
to help our clients truly transform those areas.
Maybe another area that I really have appreciated
working with IBM on is that deep technical understanding
and deep technical domain of excellence
maybe in the area of artificial intelligence.
And our partnership is quite unique
between Salesforce and IBM.
Not only do we work together for external clients
but inside of IBM, IBM is using Salesforce today
to run a lot of your core operations.
And so the partnership we work with, not only IBM
as a kind of delivery excellence,
but internally as a customer,
is really helping IBM transform its operations
from service to sales to marketing all around the world.
So I think this partnership is one that is
deeply rooted in working together and really,
like I mentioned before, finding the right path
to drive the outcomes of tomorrow.
>> You know, you mentioned COVID and so we'd like
to touch on that.
But I assume that's a big part of your current
relationship, if you will, in terms of the partnership goes.
What, specifically, are you doing with IBM
in that space and what have you done,
and then what are you continuing to do
as we go through now, the vaccination process
and the variant identification processes
and all these things?
So maybe you can share with our viewers
a little bit about the kinds of things that
you have been working on together
and the kind of progress that you've been making.
>> Well, back a year ago, you know, when the world was
really at a standstill, Salesforce created a solution
called Work.com which was to engineer new technologies
to help businesses kind of deal with the reality
of a hard shutdown to business in the, say, private sector
and then in the public sector, to really create
new innovation around key solutions like contact tracing
that you might have needed to track, you know,
kind of outbreak and the rate of progression of the virus.
And what we did with the IBM team, working with clients
around the world first was work together
to deploy those technologies rapidly
into the hands of our customers.
Through those moments of opportunity and realization,
you know, working with our clients,
we also started to hear of, you know,
kind of about where we find ourselves today,
this mass vaccination wave of where our citizens
and societies are kind of on the recovery journey.
And the work that we did with IBM was to start
to plan out the next wave of recovery options
around vaccine managements,
Salesforce creating a core vaccine scheduling,
distribution, and administration management services
and IBM focusing on more of that credentialing
and vaccination state of how someone has gone
from receiving a shot in arm to now having
a trusted profile of which vaccines,
when did you receive them,
are they still accurate and valid around those solutions.
So where we're working with the IBM team most acutely
on COVID now is in the vaccine credential management side
through Watson Health.
>> Well, can you give us an idea now,
let's see if we can dig in a little deeper
on some of those other things you talked
about to about core technologies,
you talked about, I mentioned Edge, you know,
and that's people tryin' to figure out how they integrate
these Edge technologies into their primary systems, now.
So can you give us some examples, some specific examples
of some things that you're actually collaborating on today
in those areas or maybe another that comes to mind?
>> Yeah, Edge computing is probably one of the other
more exciting things that we're doing with the IBM team
and I think you find that really working
with our field service business and IBM cloud services,
you know, globally speaking.
On the Edge, as devices become smarter and more digital,
they have a lot of signals that organizations can now
tap into, not only for real-time intelligence
but also fault intelligence
when a device is starting to need repair
or preventative maintenance around the solutions that
kind of need to be administered.
And the work that we're doing to really broker this
connected, not just enterprise, but connected
sort of experiences with IBM, super powerful here,
because the IBM Edge services are now helping us get
into anomaly detection.
Those anomaly detections are automatically routing
to workers who use the Salesforce
field service capabilities, and now we can
help organizations stay running safely and with continuity
which is really all our customers are asking us for.
So the ability for us to be creative and understand,
you know, our parts of the picture together are
really the things that I think are most exciting
for what we're doing for clients around the world.
>> Yeah, you mentioned continuity,
kind of a cousin to that, I think, is security in a way
because you're-- >> Absolutely.
>> So what are you hearing from your customer-base these days
with regard to security?
You know, a lot of high profile instances
certainly from bad state actors, as we well know.
But what are you hearing in terms of security that
you're looking at and maybe cooperating
or collaborating with IBM on to make sure that
those concerns are being addressed?
>> Yeah, you know, I think,
well, first off, security is on the top of minds
for all decision-makers, executives, today.
It's the number one threat that a lot of companies
are really needed to respond to given what we've seen
in the geo-political world that we're in.
And security isn't just about securing your servers,
it's also about securing every operational touchpoint that
you might have with, you know, your every end-user
or even every customer that's inter-operating
with your services that you project as an organization.
And what I love about working with the IBM team is,
as we mentioned, you know, such great insights
across all parts of technology infrastructure
to really help understand both the threat level,
how to contain that threat level,
and more importantly, how to engineer with, you know,
great solutions all the way into the hands of customers
so they become safe and easy for all actors
in your environment to really operate with.
And that's where, again, you know, you think
about a solution like mobile sales professionals,
they're out traveling around the world on mobile devices,
sometimes, their AG even brought their own
personal devices into the enterprise.
And so IBM is a great partner for ours just to help us
understand the overall threat level of every device
every moment that an employee might have
within their organizational data,
and really help create great solutions
to help keep organizations running safely.
>> Yeah, I think it's interesting you tell about people
bringing their own devices on, back when,
I remember that acronym, BYOB was like a huge thing, right?
(chuckling) And this major problem or conundrum
and now it's almost like an afterthought,
you've got it solved, you've got it well taken care of.
>> Well you think about, again, devices in the enterprise
and how much we've been able to achieve with the BYOB
becoming commonplace and norm,
even today, the workman place from home kind
of environment that we're in.
I mean, who would have thought a year ago that most
of our operations can be conducted safely
from our home offices,
not just our regional or corporate offices?
And again, that's the kind of thing that working with IBM
has been such a great value for our clients
because no one could have forecasted that
the contact center would've had to moved
to your kitchen last year.
And yet, we had to really go achieve that in this time
and working with great partners like IBM,
it became not just a conversation but real practice.
>> By the way, I think I said BYOB.
I meant BYOD, so you know where my mind's at, right?
(chuckling)
>> I wasn't going to correct you.
>> Hey thanks, Bill, I appreciate that.
It just kind of hit me.
I think that that just, that was a Freudian slip, certainly.
Hey Bill, thanks for the time.
I certainly do appreciate and thanks for shining a light
on this really good partnership
between Salesforce and IBM.
And we wish you continued success
down the road with that, as well.
>> Yeah, thanks again.
And again, love being your partner
and love the impact we're having together.
>> Great, thank you very much.
Bill Patterson joining us, the EVP work in CRM at Salesforce
talking about IBM and that relationship that
they're putting into practice for their client-base.
John Walls reporting here, on theCUBE.
Thanks for joining us with more on IBM Think.
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