>> Voice Over: From around the globe.
It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021
brought to you by IBM.
>> Okay. Welcome back everyone.
To theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual.
I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE.
We've got a great segment here
on the power of hybrid cloud and AI.
And I'm excited to have Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President
of IBM's cloud and Data platform, CUBE alumni.
Been on going back years and years talking about data.
Rob, great to see you, a leader at IBM.
Thanks for joining.
>> John. Great to see you hope everybody is safe
and well and great to be with you again.
>> Yeah, love the progress,
love the Hybrid Cloud distributed computing,
meets operating systems, meets modern applications
at the center of it is the new cloud equation.
And of course data continues
to be the value proposition as the platform.
And as you quoted many times
and I love your favorite quote.
There's no AI without IA.
So you got to have the architecture.
So that still rings true today
and it's just so evergreen and so relevant
and cooler than ever with machine learning
and AI operations.
So let's just jump in.
IBM's announced, host a new products and updates at Think.
Tell us what you're most excited about
and what should people pay attention to.
>> Maybe I'll connect two thoughts here.
There is no AI without IA, still true today.
Meaning, customers that want
to do AI need an information architecture.
There was an IDC report just last year that said,
"Despite all the progress on data,
still 90% of data in organizations is either unused
or underutilized."
So what's amazing is after all the time
we've been talking John,
we're still really just getting started.
Then that kind of connects to another thought,
which is I still believe
that AI is not going to replace managers,
but managers that use AI will replace the managers
that do not.
And I'd say that's the backdrop
for all the announcements that we're doing this week.
It's things like auto SQL.
How do you actually automate the creation
of SQL queries in a large distributed data warehouse?
It's never been done before, now we're doing it.
It's things like Watson Orchestrate
which is super powers in the hands of any business user,
just to ask for something to get done.
Just ask for a task to get completed.
Watson Orchestrator will do that for you.
It's Maximo Mbo.
So anybody working in the field now has access
to an AI system on their device
for how they're managing their assets.
So this is all about empowering people
and users that use these products
are going to have an advantage over the users that are not,
that's what I'm really excited about.
>> So one of the things that's coming
out as Cloud Pak for Data, AI powered automation
these are kind of two that you kind of touched upon
the SQL thing their.
Cloud Pak is there, you got it for Data
and this automation trend.
What is that about?
Why is it important?
Can you share with us the relevance of those two things?
>> Let's talk broadly about automation.
There's two huge markets here.
There's the market for RPA business process,
$30 billion market.
There's the market for AIOps, which is growing 22%,
that's on its way to $40 billion.
These are enormous markets.
Probably the biggest bet IBM has made in the last year
is in automation.
Explicitly in Watson AIOps.
Last June in Think we announced Watson AIOps,
then we did the acquisition of Instana,
then we announced our intent to acquire Turbonomic.
At this point, we're the only company
that has all the pieces
for automating how you run your IT systems.
That's what I mean when I say AIOps.
So really pleased with the progress that we've made there.
But again, we're just getting started.
>> Yeah. Congratulations on the Turbonomic.
I was just commenting on that when that announced.
IBM buying into the Cloud
and the Hybrid cloud is interesting
because the shift has happened.
It's Public Cloud, it's on premises as Edge.
Those two things as a system,
it's more important ever than the modernization
of the apps that you guys are talking about
and having the under the cover capabilities.
So as Cloud and Data merge,
this kind of control plane concept,
this architecture, as you'd said IA.
You can't have AI without IA.
What is that architecture look like?
Can you break down the elements of what's involved?
I know there's predictive analytics,
there's automation and security.
What are the pillars of this architecture?
What are the four concepts?
If you can explain that.
>> Yeah, let's start with the basics.
So Hybrid Cloud is about you build your software runs once
and you run it anywhere you want,
any public cloud,any private cloud.
That assumes containers are important
to the future of software.
We are a hundred percent convinced that is true.
OpenShift is the platform that we build on
and that many software companies
in the world are now building on
because it gives you portability for your applications.
So then you start to think about
if you have that common fabric for Hybrid Cloud,
how do you deliver value to customers
in addition to the platform?
To me, that's four big things.
It's automation, we talked about that.
It's security, it's predictions.
How do you actually make predictions on your data?
And then it's modernization.
Meaning, how do you actually help customers modernize
their applications and get to the Cloud?
So those are the things we always talk about,
automate, secure, modernize, predict.
I think those are the four most important things
for every company that's thinking about Cloud and AI.
>> Yeah, it's interesting. I love the security side is one
of the big conversations in AIOps and day two operations
or whatever it's called is shifting left,
getting security into the Cloud native
kind of development pipeline.
But speaking of secure,
you have a customer that was talking about
this Dow Chemical.
About IB empowering Dow zero trust architecture.
Could you explain that deal and how that's working?
Because that's again, huge enterprise customer,
very big scale at scale, zero trust is big, part of it.
What is this?
>> Let's start with the basics.
So what is zero trust mean?
It means to have a secure business,
you have to start with the assumption
that nothing can be trusted.
That means you have to think about all aspects
of your security practice.
How do you align on a security strategy?
How do you protect your data assets?
How do you manage security threats?
So we always talk about a line, protect,
manage back to modernize, which is how do you
bring all your systems forward to do this?
That's exactly what we're doing with the Dow
as you heard in that session, which is
they've kind of done that whole journey
from how they built a security strategy
that was designed with zero trust in mind,
they're protecting data assets,
they're managing cyber threats in real time
with a relatively low number of false positives
which are the issue that most companies have.
They're a tremendous example of a company
that jumped on this and has had a really big impact.
And they've done it
without interfering with their business operations,
meaning anybody can lock everything down
but then you can't really run your business
if you're doing that.
They've done it, I think in a really intelligent way.
>> That's awesome.
We always talk about the big waves.
You always give great color commentary on the trends.
Right now though, the tsunami seems to be a confluence
of many things coming together.
What are some of the big trends
in waves you're seeing now specifically on the tech side,
on the technology side,
as well as the business side right now?
'Cause coming out of post COVID,
it's pretty clear cloud-native is powering
a new growth strategy for customers.
Dow was one of them, you just commented on it
but there's a bigger wave happening here,
both on the tech theater and in the business theater.
Can you share your views on
and your opinions and envision on these trends?
>> I think there's three profound trends
that are actually pretty simple to understand.
One is, technology is going to decentralize again.
We've always gone from centralized architectures
to decentralized.
Mainframe was centralized, internet mobile decentralized.
The first version of public cloud was centralized,
meaning bringing everything to one place.
Technology is decentralized and again,
with Hybrid Cloud, with Edge, pretty straight forward
I think that's a trend that we can ride
and lead for the next decade.
Next is around automation that we talked about.
There was a McKinsey report that said,
"120 billion hours a year are going to be automated
with things like Watson Orchestrator, Watson AIOps."
What we're doing around Cloud Pak for automation,
we think that time is now.
We think you can start to automate in your business today
and you may have seen the C QVS example
where we're doing customer care
and they're now automating 70%
of their inbound customer inquiries.
It's really amazing.
And then the third is around data.
The classical problem,
I mentioned 90% is still unused or underutilized.
This trend on data is not about the slow down
because the data being collected
is still multiplying 10 X every year
and companies have to find a way to organize that data
as they collected.
So that's going to be a trend that continues.
>> You know, I just kind of pinched myself sometimes
and hearing you talk with some of our earlier conversations
in theCUBE, people who have been
on this data mindset have really been successful
because it's evolving and growing
and it's changing and it's adding more input
into the system and the technology is getting better.
There's more cloud scales.
You mentioned automation and scale are huge.
And I think this really kind of wakes everyone up.
And certainly the pandemic has woken everyone up
to the fact that this is driving new experiences
for users and businesses, right?
So this is, and then those experiences become expectations.
This is the classic UX paradigm that grows from new things.
So I got to ask you, with the pandemic
what is the been the most compelling ways
you seen people operate, create new expectations?
Because new things are coming, new big things,
and new incremental things are happening.
So evolution and revolutionary capabilities.
Can you share some examples and your thoughts?
>> We've collected a decent bit of data on this.
And what's interesting is how much AI has accelerated
since the pandemic started.
And it's really in five areas,
it's customer care that we talked about,
virtual agents, customer service, how you do that.
It's employee experience.
So somewhere to customer care
but how do you take care of your employees using AI?
Third is around AIOps, we talked about that.
Fourth is around regulatory compliance
and fifth is around financial planning and budgeting.
These are the five major use cases of AI
that are getting into production
in companies over the last year
that's going to continue to accelerate.
So I think it's actually fairly clarifying
now that we really understand these are the five big things.
I encourage anybody watching,
pick one of these, get started,
then pick the second, then pick the third.
If you are not doing all five of these,
12, 18, 24 months from now, you are going to be behind.
>> So give us an example of some things
that have surprised you in the pandemic
and things that blew you away.
Like, wow, I didn't see that coming.
Can you share on things that you've seen evolve?
Cause you're a year ahead of the business units
of Cloud and Data, big part of IBM
and you see customer examples.
Just quickly share some notable use cases
or just anecdotal examples
of just things that jumped out at you that said,
"Wow, that's going to be a double-down moment
or that's not going to be anymore."
Exposes, the pandemic exposes the good, bad and the ugly.
I mean, people got caught off guard,
some got a tailwind, some had a headwind,
some are retooling.
What's your thoughts on what you can you share any examples?
>> Like everybody, many things have surprised me
in the last year.
I am encouraged at how fast many companies were able
to adjust and adapt for this world.
So that's a credit to all the resiliency
that they built into their processes,
their systems and their people over time.
Related to that,
the thing that really sticks out to me again,
is this idea of using AI to serve your customers
and to serve your employees.
We had a hundred customers that went live
with one of those two use cases
in the first 35 days of the pandemic.
Just think about that acceleration.
I think without the pandemic,
for those hundred it might've taken three years
and it happened in 35 days.
It's proof that the technology today is so powerful.
Sometimes it just takes the initiative to get started
and to do something.
And all those companies have really benefited from this.
So it's great to see.
>> Great. Rob, great to have you on.
Great to have your commentary on theCUBE.
Could you just quickly share in 30 seconds,
what is the most important thing people should pay attention
to and Think this year from your perspective?
What's the big aha moment that you think they
could walk away with?
>> We have intentionally made this
a very technology centric event.
Just go look at the demos, play with the technology.
I think you will be impressed
and start to see, let's say a bit of a new IBM
in terms of how we're making technology accessible
and easy for anybody to use.
>> All right.
Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of IBM cloud
and Data platform.
Great to have you on
and looking forward to seeing more of you this year
and hopefully in person.
Thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual.
>> Thanks, John.
>> Okay. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE.
Keep coverage of IBM Think 2021.
Thank you for watching.
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