>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE
covering IBM Think 2018.
Brought to you by IBM
>> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018,
you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.
My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host
Peter Burris, this is day three of our coverage.
Mohammad Farooq is here, he's the general manager
of Brokerage Services GTS at IBM.
Mohammad, great to see you again,
thanks for coming back on theCUBE.
>> Thank you very much, appreciate for having me here.
>> You're very welcome.
So, big show.
All the clients come together in one big tent.
>> Yes.
>> What do you think?
>> It's very exciting.
I think we're doing some
interesting things with our technology.
We have learned a lot from our clients the last two years.
We are working very closely with our partners
because we believe not one company can do everything
in this massive transformation that's underway.
So, working with our partners, with our clients
on new technologies to specifically accelerate
enterprized option of the cloud model
and that's exciting for us.
>> Partnering, it seems to have new,
energized momentum at IBM.
I sense a change, is it palpable?
I mean, how can you comment on that?
>> I think partnering is critical for everybody's success
because the industry itself is transforming,
and one company cannot achieve all the requirements
that clients are asking for,
and we have our core competencies.
Service Now, our VMWare, our Amazon, our Azure
They have their core competencies.
But IBM, as a company, is a company that
enterprisers trust to move them to cloud
and operate them in the cloud.
So what we are doing is, to keep that goal in mind,
we are saying okay, we are going to take a client
from point A, which is non-cloud,
to point B, which is cloud native,
and in that journey, we will take everybody
our partners helped to get there.
So that's why, based on client request,
we are leveraging our partners,
and it has a special meaning for us
because it makes our clients successful.
>> OK, so, describe exactly what brokerage services does.
Is it your job to get people to the cloud?
But talk more about that; add some color please.
>> I think the brokerage has evolved
since I last talked to you a year ago.
At this conference, right?
A lot of people think brokerage is arbitrage.
>> Peter: Is what?
>> Arbitrage of services from one pro to the other,
that's the limited definition of brokerage.
So what we're really calling it is
Hybrid Cloud Management System, not brokerage.
Brokerage is one part of it.
So the Hybrid Cloud Management System
is the go-forward strategy of IBM in 2019, 2018 and beyond.
Which includes three, four components.
One is: how do you bring the entire cloud ecosystem
into a federated management maodel?
Which includes: business management of IT
and cloud, our hybrid, consumption,
a standard consumption model through one point of access
to all clouds, internal or external.
Third: delivery, how do we deliver services,
either automated or workflow?
Bi-model, as Gartner calls it, in one model.
And four: operations management across public,
private, hybrid, internal or external.
>> Let me make sure I got this, so,
business services in the sense of
running IT more like a business,
>> Mohammad: Right!
>> A consumption model in terms of presenting this
in a way that's simple and easy for
a business-person to use, a delivery model,
in the sense that it's very simple
and straightforward and fast to deliver,
and then an operations model which makes sure
that everything above it works well.
>> Yes, and the consumers, in this case,
are developers, IT operations people,
and DevApp teams, and from a delivery perspective,
it is automated or people-work-flow,
so you support both, so bringing this
federated model together is a very complex undertaking,
and IBM services is the strategic partner
clients are asking to take them on this journey.
Hey, bring this together for us.
It's very complex at all layers.
It's not a simple thing, and in that
bringing it together, partners have a big role to play.
Azure, Amazon, Google, Service Now,
VMWare, Cisco, they all have
critical pieces of it that make this model work,
and clients have made choices.
Clients already have VMWare.
Clients already have Service Now
Clients already have Amazon, Azure.
But there is no system that brings it together
and manages it on an ongoing basis,
and the important thing is, the clouds
keep changing very fast, and keeping up with the clouds,
leveraging the power of the clouds to the right teams
within the enterprise to deliver new digital apps,
to delivery revenue, is what IBM is
enabling our clients to do.
>> So wikibot has actually done a fair amount of research
around what we call the cloud operating model,
we call the Digital Business Platform.
AWS has an example of that, as you mention.
They all have their approaches
to handle those four things that you mentioned.
>> Mohammad: Yes!
>> But when you get to a customer,
who also has to marry across these clouds,
sustain some on-premises assets,
perhaps some near-premises assets
within the cost-service provider,
it's what you're trying to do is
ensure that they have their operating model
that is the appropriate mix
of all these different capabilities
for their business, we got that right?
>> Exactly, you got it.
So what we said was every cloud provider,
internal or external, or even hosting cloud providers,
IBM is a hosting cloud provider.
>> Right!
>> With the adjustment of business.
They had their own model across those four things:
Business, consumption, delivery, operations.
Now, we cannot operate four silos.
Every enterprise is using Amazon,
every enterprise has Google,
every enterprise has VMWare,
every enterprise has IBM.
We cannot have four models.
>> Dave: Right!
>> So what we have done is we have created
one standard consistent target operating model.
We have integrated all these offerings within that
so clients don't have to do it.
We offer services to create extensions to it
based on variations clients might have,
and then operate it as a service for them,
so that their path to cloud gets accelerated,
and they start leveraging the power of what's good today
inside the data centers, and what's available
outside in public clouds, in a very secure way.
So that is the business IBM is in moving forward,
which we are calling it, we are transforming
our offerings portfolio, we are calling it:
Hybrid Cloud Services Business
>> OK so you've got this hybrid operating model,
IT operating model that you're envisioning,
you're letting the cloud partners do what they do best,
>> Mohammad: Right.
>> Including your IBM cloud partners,
>> Mohammad: Including our operating partners,
>> And then you guys are bringing it all together
in a framework, in an operating model,
That actually can drive business value.
>> Exactly, that's what we're doing.
We are giving them ease of access from one place,
choice of delivery platform, choice of
delivery models from one place.
Single visibility into how they're running,
performing, help, and diagnostics from one place,
and then, one billing and payment model, not four.
So when I pay monthly bills, I pay based on
usage, qualification of that usage across everybody,
and then reconciling with my ERP systems,
and making the payments.
So the CFO has a standard way to manage payments.
So that's what IBM is bringing to the table.
>> How far could you take this?
Could you take this into my SAS portfolio as well,
Or is that sort of next step?
>> What right now we are doing InfoSecure
as a service and platform as a service.
Our goal is in '18 and '19 to move to software as a service,
because software as a service is much easier
because we don't own the infrastructure or the service,
we just consume it as electricity, utility.
So that we discover the usage of SAS
and meter it for usage against our billing model
that we have to as B2B contract
between a SAS provider and an enterprise
and then make sure we've done the license management right.
So there's companies like Flexera and others who do that
For SAS management there's companies like
Skyhigh Networks that recently got acquired,
we're bringing those companies in
to give us that component.
>> But doing that level of brokering
amongst the different services,
while very useful, valuable, especially if you can
provide greater visibility in the cost,
because this becomes an increasing feature
of COGs in a digital business, right?
You still got to do a lot about the people stuff.
A lot of folks are focused on ITIL,
ITSM, automation at that level.
Describe how you'll work with
an IT organization and a business
to evolve its underlying principals
for how the operating model is going to work.
>> I think that's probably a more difficult challenge
than the technology itself, and if you look
at our business, it was a people,
it is a people business with GTS.
We're more than 90,000 to 100,000 employees
babysitting infrastructure for major
fortune 500 corporations, and InfoSecure is
more into software-defined, that means that
we are moving from configuration skills
to programming skills, where your programming API
is in Amazon to provision infrastructure
and deploy, so the skillsets have to definitely move.
They have to move to infrastructure teams
now have to become programming teams,
which they have not been used to.
They used to go to VMWare, vSphere, vCenter
and configure VMs and deploy VMs.
Now they have the right programs to drive
and provision infrastructure, so that's one part of it.
Second, the process was you do development
and then your throw it over to operations,
and they'll go configure and deploy production.
Now, when you're programming infrastructure.
Second, you're doing it in collaboration
with developers, because developers are
defining their own infrastructure in the cloud.
So the process is different.
The skills are different, and the process you are
to operate in is not the same, it's different.
Third, the technologies are different that you work with.
So there is change at all levels
and what GTS has done is we have
put a massive goal in place to re-scale our workforce
to take our people and re-scale them
in the new process, the new technology and the new roles
and that's a very big challenge I think the industry
is facing: we don't have enough people who know this.
A lot of these people are in Netflix,
Facebook, Google, in Silicon Valley,
and now, it takes time, it has happened before.
The training and the transfer of knowledge,
all of that is going on right now.
So right now we have a crunch,
And the second thing that is becoming more difficult is
there's a lot of data coming out of these systems.
The volume of data is unbelievable.
Like if you look at Splunk and other tools and platforms,
they collect a lot of log data.
So all these cloud platforms spit out a lot of machine data.
Humans cannot comprehend that.
It's incomprehensible.
So we need machine learning skills and data science skills
to understand how these systems are performing.
>> Peter: And tools.
>> And tools.
So we need the AI skills,
the data science skills, in addition to the
infrastructure design architecture and programming skills.
So we really have a challenge on our hands
as an industry to kind of effectively
build the next-gen management systems.
>> Right and we've got, so we've got all these clouds,
the ascendancy of clouds has brought cloud creep,
>> Mohammad: Right.
>> All these bespoke tools along with them,
all these different operating models.
You're clearly solving a problem there.
What's the go-to-market model with
all these partners that you've mentioned?
You've got cloud, you got PRAM, eventually SAS,
>> Yeah, so our cloud go-to-market is three ways
We see clients adopting cloud in three ways.
One is digital initiatives: They want to go build
new IOD apps or mobile apps and they want to
put it in production that drive revenue, okay?
So we are creating offerings around the DevApps model.
We'll say like look, the biggest challenge
that our folks have is how to put a app
that you build in production.
I built a new feature,
how can I get it to my client as soon as possible,
in a secure way, that can scale and perform,
that is the biggest problem with app developers.
I can develop anywhere, it's all open-source.
I'm not living in, and I can spin up a VM
or a container in Amazon and develop a service in two days.
But to put it in production, it takes a long time.
How can we make offerings that accelerate that?
Through our DevApp CICD automation process
I was talking about, that's our revenue play.
So our go-to-market is driven by how we can
generate revenue for our clients through agile offerings
for DevApps, that's one go-to-market.
Second go-to-market is CIOs are saying
like look, I'm spending a lot of money
managing my current infrasatructure
and my current app portfolio, and I can
take money out of the system through cost reductions,
so what is my migration and modernization path
for my existing portfolio?
>> Well, slightly differently, I used to get
I used to get my eight to nine percent
that I gave back to the business every year
simply by following hardware price performance.
>> Mohammad: That's exactly right.
>> That's not available in the same way.
I have to do it through process and automation.
>> All automation right?
So then we have to look at everything.
What part of the portfolio can move to Amazon or cannot?
What other refactoring I have to do to microservices
and containers to build portability to move to the cloud?
So we have created a migration,
a global migration practice at IBM
in a factory in India and in the US
where we have created offerings to work with the CIO
right from planning, cost planning,
portfolio planning, application design planning
and design review, to lift-and-shift,
to deploy in cloud and operate it.
So we have a series of offerings
that track the life-cycle of migration.
So that's our second go-to-market path.
Our third go-to-market path is:
Hey, my business per units are shadow IT;
they're already in the cloud, now my CEO is telling me:
Hey mister CIO, you make sure they all work
and they're secure, and there's no loss in data.
And this infrastructure is now in cloud and on-prem.
So how do I provide, manage service,
to manage your infrastructure and workloads in the cloud?
IBM has offerings that will directly provide you
multi-cloud management as managed service.
So we are taking three client journeys
and we are building go-to-market offerings
around those three, and we have built,
we have re-designed IBM portfolio to operate on those lines.
>> Do the digital initiatives, chief digital officer,
obviously, target their CIO for the
portfolio rationalization optimization and line of business
through the shadow IT?
>> Right!
>> And you bring those together
with a constant consistent operating model?
>> Exactly, so all three journeys
lead to one operating model.
>> Dave: Yeah!
>> But going back to what Dave said,
and we have time for just a little bit more, is, is,
no offense, there's no way you can do it all by yourself.
>> Mohammad: You cannot.
>> So what are some of the core,
what are some of the most important partnerships
that users need to be looking to?
>> I think we have defined what's goal to us.
Not always go back to, if you are clearly going to market,
what is the core competency of IBM?
Okay, with (mumbles) we're going to service this company
for a long time, right?
We made sure we are, we bring the complexity and control
and we manage the complexity; that's our core business.
We had mainframe business, we had software business,
and a very profitable software business.
So we've done all three, hardware, software, and services.
As we go forward, cloud services,
cloud managed services, our IBM services,
is a core competency for us, which is planning,
design, managed services, and services integration,
to bring these tool sets together
from different partners, and operationalizing it,
and babysitting it and offering it as a service.
So services business is our core offering.
Now in the software space, which is the management software,
which is service now, (mumbles) Cisco, there
there is many layers to it, as I talked about
the four things: consumption, operations management,
business management,
>> And service delivery >> And service delivery.
And in service delivery we have three choices:
we have VMWare, we have Microsoft and we have IBM.
We have stitched it together in a federated framework.
The stitching together is our core competence.
Okay, Operations management.
We have created a federated data lake
because data will drive everything going forward.
So we own the data lake as our core competency
and Watson driving intelligence.
But some of the monitoring tools like
AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk,
that collect the data, those are our partners.
We're integrating that into our Watson framework.
So we're looking at core versus non-core in all four layers,
and wherever there's a overlap,
we're creating unique vertical go-to-market strategies.
Here, for this segment, we overlap with you,
we agree to compete, to your clients you can lead with that,
for our clients we'll lead with ours,
so we agree to disagree, but we are going to
stick to the target operating model,
so that our clients are successful.
So there's no confusion we are creating in their minds.
So its a very complex dance at this point.
>> But you laid it out and it's coherent.
>> Right.
>> It's got to start there.
>> The most important thing is we need to tell our clients
what is our core, and what is the core
we're going to stand behind?
And that core delivers them bottom-line value
to move from point A to point B
and be successful in the cloud.
>> Well Mohammad, I think you've defined those swim lanes,
you obviously trust and you've got the trust
of your partners, trust of your customers.
Like you say, you agree to compete where it makes sense,
and you bring core competency and value
to differentiate from your competition, so,
>> Right.
>> Dave: Congratulations on laying that out.
We really appreciate you coming on theCUBE.
>> Thank you very much.
Appreciate it. >> You're welcome.
All right, keep it right there everybody,
we'll be back with our next guest.
You're watching theCUBE live
from Think 2018, we'll be right back.
>> Mohammad: Thank you very much.
(upbeat music)