>> (Announcer) Live, from Las Vegas
it's the Cube.
Covering VM World 2018.
Brought to you by VM Ware
and it's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage
of VM World 2018, I'm Lisa Marin, with Dave Vellante
>> Hey, Lisa.
>> Dave, day three, we have had tremendous guests
the last couple of days.
And we're- a lot of alumni, a lot of new guests,
another alumni joining us, Calline Sanchez,
vice president of IMB Enterprise System Storage.
Welcome back, Calline,
it's great to have you here.
>> No, thank you very much
for letting me be here.
>> And I want to congratulate Calline, because
she was just named for the
Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce,
2018 Businesswoman of the Year.
Just a few weeks ago.
Amazing.
>> Lovin' Tucson, by the way.
>> Thank you.
>> U of A.
>> Yes.
>> Bear Down.
>> I appreciate the Wildcats reference, so,
>> Haha. >> No doubt.
And so, this Saturday,
oh, I'm sorry.
This Saturday, the first game, so-
>> My daughter is a freshman at U of A,
Hi, Pilar, I love you, baby.
Good luck.
You're going to crush it, I know you are.
>> Haha.
>> Dad of the year going on here.
So, just before we get into all the storage stuff-
>> Yeah.
>> They're doing a, they're honoring you,
just in about a month and a half or so, with this-
>> Yeah.
Yes, and I'm very excited about that.
Just like you were saying with the community aspect,
it's a high-touch award, and I was very thankful
for it, because they gave me specific examples of,
what I've done in Southern Arizona,
in Tucson in particular, that they'll name.
For instance, Excite for Girls, and things like that.
>> That's awesome.
>> Girls in STEM, right?
>> Congratulations, that's fantastic.
>> We need more inspiration, so, it's great that we,
>> Ah, thank you.
>> Now count you as one of our
distinguished alumni.
So, let's talk about what going on at IMB.
Here we are at VM World 2018,
we're hearing Dave, numbers of upwards of 21,000 people
that have been here the last few days.
100,000 more engaging with, expecting to engage with
the live streaming and the on demand experiences.
What's going on with IBM, you know,
from a revenue perspective, a growth perspective?
What is exciting you about where you are today?
>> So, I will talk in particular about storage.
I'm really, really proud about this,
being that we work in partnership with, like,
Ed Walsh, and then also Eric Herzog.
They've inspired me to get closer to
building solutions with our end users.
So we meet and work with our clients
to build up cloud deployment solutions,
in partnership with VM Ware,
and we enable things like, okay,
so there's tape, and then there's cloud-to-tier,
so there's fundamental solutions
out there in the marketplace that
we as developers want to go and
play with.
It's almost like a great big sandbox.
So to speak.
>> So, I've got to ask you, because, I mean,
everybody in storage says, well,
Tape, tape is dead.
And every time I see you we talk about tape.
We talk about FLAPE.
We talk about innovations that are coming to tape.
You're a technologist.
Right, you just said, as a developer
we love to- dot-dot-dot.
So, what is it about things like tape,
things like mainframe, DS8000,
these technologies that have,
tried, true, running businesses,
what is about those that excite you
as a developer?
>> Everything old is new again,
>> Yeah, right.
>> If we just go back to the basics of like,
table stakes, right?
Security is table stakes, right?
Delivering on-time quality releases with
optimizers like, tier-to-cloud,
things like that.
That's fundamental for us.
Now, as it relates to tape,
so, everything old is new again,
like I mentioned a moment ago.
Tape was the first device to fully encrypt.
So every drive, if it fell off the truck,
it was fully encrypted.
So, tape is actually training
the rest of our portfolio in similar skills,
on how we do the end-to-end encryption elements.
So, right now with DS8000, we're working in
partnership with system Z, to deliver
pervasive encryption.
>> I got to ask you, so
as a development executive, I see you
at a lot of these shows.
You like coming here?
A lot of times, development execs want to,
sort of, stay in the lab.
But you're out and about,
talking to customers.
What are you learning?
What is that about you that
draws you to these shows?
>> I was afraid that WE as a lab team
would not be relevant unless we have
conversations with end users, partners.
You know, to really substantiate
what's possible from being innovative.
So, I would say, number one is relevance,
and I felt like, I wanted to more social,
because, I'm definitely in some cases,
an introvert,
though I'm looking above my shoes.
That's I'm wearing-
>> That's the definition,
of an introvert and an extrovert
in the tech world.
You know that the difference is, right?
>> I don't.
>> An introvert looks at his or her
own shoes, an extrovert looks at your shoes.
>> Well, there you go.
I've been looking at some shoes-
>> Alright, so you're,
you're extrovert oriented out here,
what are you learning at VM World?
what are the customers saying?
What are they asking you for?
What are you going to take back to the lab?
>> A single pane of glass associated with
what we intend with like, v-stream,
or some of the aspects of automation,
with regards to cloud deployment,
to make it, like, completely-
connected.
If that, so to speak.
And what I think is really great about all of that is
I hate to put it this way,
it's very iTunes like.
Where it's like, sticky,
and it's easy to use, or and, by the way,
it's not so expensive, at least to start up.
So, a lot of the discussions we've been having
are with the various vendors on the expo floor,
that they want to build solutions.
IBM solutions associate with the cloud,
and then the AWS guys, we meet with them.
And they're like, well, how are,
how can we ensure that we live in an
interconnected data-centric world?
And so that's what I think is very
exciting is that,
it's this idea of coopetition.
Let's all be well connected, and
do it well.
>> Let's talk about the customer collaboration,
as you mentioned,
everything old is new again, we see that,
in every aspect of life.
Tape, mainframe, but you talked about
we need to be relevant, but
also need to developing solutions
that you end user customers need
to solve their business problems.
How are you collaborating with customers
to stay relevant, and to ensure
that their businesses are able to
take advantage of the super powers that
Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday,
AI, machine learning, emerging technologies,
what's that collaboration like?
>> I would say the biggest collaborations
that I've been participating recently
is with cloud servers providers.
And they appreciate the economics of
physical media, or tape.
And so, they think to themselves
or they know the data, it's like,
okay, less than a half-cent per gig,
that's a big deal, right?
So, and then we have discussions about
total cost of ownership, aspects like that.
So the partnership is also,
how do we serve the data?
And really having discussions about the data.
And then, if evaluating the various work streams
where, we would want to serve appropriately
based on whatever specific cloud infrastructure.
And then, also, taking a step back,
we have to be interconnected.
There's no question.
So, I would say the number one set of skills
our end users are working with right now
happen to be the cloud service providers.
>> What are some of the big business
benefits that they're achieving,
we think, new business models,
new revenue streams, market expansion.
What are some of the things that you're
proud of that IBM storage solutions are
helping your customers to deliver?
>> Going to tape, it's the economics, yes.
It's the security based on encryption, yes.
And then also, the other aspect of, is,
we're serving big data.
I mean, it's like we're having discussions about
they're going to grow to,
zettabytes by 2020, things like that.
I never thought in my life,
especially as an engineering student,
or in computer science,
I would ever be talking about this big of data.
And now we're here.
And so, we're learning how to enable
in partnership with clients,
what would be the right, or appropriate solution.
>> So, I'm searching our video library,
because somebody said this week
something that was really interesting to me
and I wanted to get your perspective
from a development mind, someone who's technical.
We're hearing a lot about
migrating to the cloud.
And how easy that is.
And then, I think it was Pat Gelsinger said,
there's three laws.
There's the law of physics, the laws of a company,
and the law of the land.
And, those are immutable, generally.
But I want to ask you about the laws of physics.
So, in terms of just moving data into the cloud,
we talk about petabyte, exabytes, there's so much data.
How feasible is it for a customer
to move data, and just stuff it all
into the cloud, and what are you doing
to either help them do that, or
bring the cloud experience to their data?
>> Depending on the client interests of
on-prem, off-prem, or hybrid, right?
We work to evaluate APIs in collaborations,
so we enable a streamline,
so it's not only just understanding the
components of the cloud deployment,
but it's also partnering with all elements
of the entire ecosystem's stack.
So, it depends but we really start with
the client's end use case.
What do you want?
What kind of security do you want?
Are you okay with off-prem, public clouds?
Or, maybe it's specific data,
how do we go about managing the data
so we secure it, like, we bucket-ize it.
So those are some of the discussions
we've been having on the floor, here,
at VM world, but also,
within our labs, and also with the clients directly.
>> You know what I love about that answer?
I'll translate it.
It's not a biz- it's not a technical problem, Dave,
it's a business problem,
>> Yes.
>> Is really what you're tell me.
>> And that's a fundament-
you asked the question before.
That's fundamentally why I am here.
>> Right.
>> I don't believe we can live in this world anymore,
where it's like, we build it, and then they come.
>> Field of Dreams does not exist anymore.
>> Yeah.
And so, now we've got to have conversations
with our end users, to develop,
what we've going to put on the roadmap.
And so I always felt like, okay, well,
when I'd see the roadmap in the lab, I'm like,
okay, well, who wants this?
Who asked for this, right?
And those ended up becoming some of my
fundamental questions.
So then, I started to come here,
or conferences like this, because I could
have those conversations with the end users
and partners.
>> That's interesting, who wants this?
Who needs this?
What problems does it solve?
Why us, why now?
Those are the kinds of things you're asking.
>> Let's talk about why us?
IBM has been around for a very long time.
What do you think, again, in this
got to be relevant, we need it to be
really defined by customer needs and uses.
Everything old is new again.
What, in your opinion, makes,
why should a customer go, in my VM environment,
IBM.
>> I'm going to start with why I even personally
want to remain with IBM.
It's a great big candy store.
>> Haha.
>> And what I have to remind myself is,
just don't eat too much, right?
And, by the way, I still eat way too much.
But what's great about it is,
it's a sandbox, so, I can talk to you
software engineers one day,
who are telling me about certain APIs
they're building in Python.
Then, oh, by the way,
I meet with a mechanical set of engineers,
cuz they want to enable robot arms.
Oh, and by the way,
should we have a discussion on
microcode and firmware for the entire stack.
So I take a step back, and I'm thinking,
Wow- the only set of conversation I really
prior was not having, is about services.
And to me, services is like the wrapping paper,
for a present that you're about to receive.
And really understanding the overall,
end-to-end stack infrastructure.
So, I believe from an IBM perspective,
it's the ecosystem.
It's a great big candy store.
Just don't eat too much.
>> Haha. So, how do you spend your time?
Do you spend your time thinking,
collaborating with team on,
architecture, on, vision,
on, northstar, writing code.
How do you spend your time day-to-day?
>> Can I say, all of the above?
And, the vast majority, right now,
really just making sure we're relevant
in the marketplace,
so that we re-fresh the right amount of cycles.
So, right now, what we're going to be doing
in 2019, we're going to be talking about it
right now.
Architecting what the future looks like.
And that's part of the reason
why I'm here at VM World 2018,
is I'm wanting to verify my roadmap.
Am I taking the right approach
with the extended team?
Cuz it is team, and I work with them.
These engineers and scientists
are so right, and have great ideas.
Let's just make sure they're great ideas that
will keep us relevant and keep us paid.
>> So, have you gotten that validation,
in the last few days at VM World?
>> Give me one more day.
>> Haha.
Well, Calline, thanks so much for
stopping by and sharing.
Not only what IBM is doing
to continue to innovate and stay relevant,
but also what's exciting to you-
>> Yeah.
>> About working for IBM, and again,
Congrats on getting the award.
>> Yes, and thank you very much
for highlighting that, cuz it's,
I'm very excited as just an individual,
it's like, it was unexpected.
>> Well, you're representing women in tech,
women in STEM, it's awesome, congratulations.
>> Thank you very much. >> We're really happy.
>> And, by the way, I'll definitely
reach out to your daughter at some point.
>> Oh, great.
>> Say, hey, let's go to a tailgate.
>> Love it.
>> I won't corrupt.
>> Haha.
Fantastic, Calline, thank you so much
for your time.
I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante.
We want to thank you for watching the Cube,
we are in day three of our continue coverage
from VM World 2018.
Stick around, we'll be right back
with our next guest.