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>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston,
it's theCUBE!
Covering IBM Think.
Brought to you by IBM.
>> Hi, everybody, we're back.
This is Dave Vellante
and you're watching theCUBE's coverage
of the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience,
wall to wall coverage, of course
in the remote Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston.
Greg Lotko is here.
He's with Broadcom.
He's a senior vice president and general manager
of the Broadcom mainframe division.
Greg, great to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
>> Hey good seeing you too, happy to be here.
>> Hey, lets talk Z.
You know, I got to say
when Broadcom made a nearly 19 billion dollar acquisition
of CA, many people, myself included said,
"Huh? I don't really get it."
But as you start to see what's happening,
the massive CA install base
and the cross selling opportunities
that have come to Broadcom,
you start to connect the dots and say,
"Ah, maybe this does make some sense."
But you know, how's it going?
How's the acquisition been?
It's been, you know, what now, two years since that move?
>> Yeah we're coming up on two years.
I think it kind of shocked the world, right?
I mean, there is a lot of value there and the customers
that have been using the mainframe
and running their core businesses for many, many years,
they knew this, right?
So Broadcom came in and said,
"Hey, you know, I don't think this is the cash cow
"that others maybe have been treating it as."
You know, we absolutely believed with some investment
that you could actually drive greater value to customers
and you know, what a novel concept right?
You know, expand expense, invest,
drive greater value, and that would be the way
you'd expand revenue and profit.
>> Yeah, I mean I think generally,
the mainframe market is misunderstood.
It obviously goes in cycles.
I did a report, you know, a couple of months ago
on really focusing on Z15X, it was last summer.
And how historically, IBM performance overall
as a company is really driven still by mainframe cycles
because it all still drags so much software and services
and so we're in the midst
of a Z15 tailwind
and so, of course, the COVID changes everything.
But nonetheless it's a good business.
IBM's a dominant player in that business.
Customers continue to buy mainframes because it just works.
It's too risky to rip 'em out.
People say, "Oh, why don't you get rid of the mainframe?"
No way customers are going to do that.
It's running their business.
So it's a fabulous business if you have a play there
and clearly...
(poor internet connection interrupts Dave speaking)
>> Yeah, and if you think about those cycles
that's largely driven by the hardware, right?
As each generation comes out, and if you look
at traditional pricing metrics that really look
at using that capacity, or even using full capacity,
that's what caused this cyclicality
with the software as well but, you know,
there's a lot of changes even in that space.
I mean with us, with mainframe consumption licensing
from Broadcom, with IBM doing tailor fit pricing,
you know, the idea that you can have
that headroom on the hardware
and then pay as you go, pay as you grow.
I think that actually will smooth out and remove some
of that cyclicality from the software space.
And as you said, correctly, you look
at the COVID stuff going on, I mean there's an awful lot
of transactions going on online.
People are obviously checking their financials
with the economics going on.
The shipping companies are booming
with what they have to do,
so that's actually driving transactions up as well,
to use that capacity that's in the boxes.
>> Yeah, and financial services is actually in really good...
I know that the stocks have been hit,
but the liquidity in the banks is very, very strong
because of the 2009 crisis.
So the fiscal policy sort of, you know, dictated that
or, you know, the public policy dictated that.
And the banks are obviously huge consumers of mainframe.
>> Sure.
>> One of the things that IBM did years ago was
to sort of embrace Linux,
was one of its first moves to open up the mainframe.
But it's much more than just Linux.
I wonder if you could talk about sort of your point of view
on open meets mainframe.
>> Yeah, so open is way more than just Linux, right?
I mean Linux is good, running around the mainframe.
I mean that's absolutely an open paradigm
from the operating system, but open is also
about opening up the API's, opening up the connectivities
so that it's easier to interact with the platform.
And, you know, sometimes people think open is just
about dealing with open source.
Certainly we've made a lot of investments there.
We contributed the command line interface
and actually a little more than 50%
of the original contribution to the Zowe project,
under the OMP, the Open Mainframe Project.
So that was about allowing open source technologies
that interact with distributed and cloud technologies
to now interact with that mainframe.
So it's not just the open source technologies,
but opening up the API's, so you can then connect
across technologies that are
on the platform or off platform.
>> So what about the developer community?
I mean there's obviously a lot of talk
in the industry about DevOps.
How does DevOps fit into the mainframe world?
What about innovations like Agile?
And sort of beyond DevOps, if you will.
Can you comment on that?
>> Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can bring
all those paradigms, all those capabilities
to the mainframe now with opening up those API's.
So I mean we had a large European retail bank
that has actually used the Git Bridge that we work with
providing, you know, through Zowe, to connect into Endeavor,
so they could leverage all the investments they had made
in that existing technology over the years,
but actually use the same kind of CICD pipeline,
the same interaction that they do
across distributed platforms and mainframe together,
and open up that experience
across their development community.
What that really means is you're using the same concepts,
the same tools that they maybe became comfortable with
in university or on different platforms,
to then interact with the mainframe
and it's not that you're doing anything that, you know,
takes away from core capabilities of the mainframe.
You're still leveraging the stability,
the resiliency, the through put, the service ability.
But you're pressing down on it and interacting
with it just like you do with other platforms.
So it's really cool.
And that goes beyond Linux, right?
Because you're interacting with capabilities
and technologies that are on the mainframe
and ZOS environment.
>> Yeah, and the hardened security
as well, >> Absolutely.
>> is another key aspect of the mainframe.
Let's talk about cloud.
A lot of people talk about cloud,
cloud first, multicloud.
Where does the mainframe fit in the cloud world?
>> So, there's a lot of definitions
of cloud out there, right?
I mean people will talk about private cloud,
public cloud, hybrid cloud across multiple private clouds.
They'll talk about, you know, this multicloud.
We actually talk about it a little differently.
We think about the customer's cloud environment.
You know, our institution that we're dealing with,
say it's a financial institution,
to their end customers, their cloud is however you interact.
And you think about it.
If you're checking an account balance,
if you're depositing in a check,
if you're doing any of these interactions,
you're probably picking up a mobile device or a PC.
You're dealing with an edge server,
you're going back into distributed servers,
and you're eventually interacting with the mainframe
and then that's got to come all the way back out to you.
That is our customer's cloud.
So we talk about their cloud environment,
and you have to think about this paradigm
of allowing the mainframe to connect
through and to all of that while you hit it,
preserving the security.
So we think of cloud as being much more expansive
and the mainframe is an integral part of that, absolutely.
>> Yeah, and I've seen some of your discussions where
you've talked about and sort of laid out,
look, you know, the mainframe sits behind all
this other infrastructure that, you know,
ultimately the consumer on his or her mobile phone,
you know, goes through a gateway,
goes through, you know, some kind of site to buy something.
But, you know, ends up ultimately doing a transaction
and that transaction you want to be, you know, secure.
You want it to be accurate.
And then how does that happen?
The majority of the word's transactions
are running on some kind of,
you know, IBM mainframe somewhere,
in someway touches that transaction.
You know, as the world gets more complex,
that mainframe is...
I called it sort of the hardened,
you know, sort of back end.
And that has to evolve to be able to adapt
to the changes at the front end.
And that's really kind of what's happening,
whether it's cloud, whether it's mobile,
whether it's, you know, Linux,
and other open source technology.
>> Right, it's fabulous that the mainframe
has, you know, IO rates and throughput
that no other platform can match,
but if you can't connect that to the transactions
that the customer is driving to it,
then you're not leveraging the value, right?
So you really have to think about it
from a perspective of how do you open up
everything you possibly can on the mainframe
while preserving that security?
>> I want to end with just talking
about the Broadcom portfolio.
When you hit the Broadcom mainframe site,
it's actually quite mind boggling,
the dozens and dozens of services
and software capabilities that you provide.
How would you describe that portfolio
and what do you see as the vision
for that portfolio going forward?
>> Yeah, so when people normally say portfolio,
they're thinking software products,
and we have hundreds of software products.
But we're looking at our portfolio
as more than just the software.
Sometimes people talk about, hey let me just talk to you
about my latest and greatest product.
One of the things we were really afforded the opportunity
to do with Broadcom acquiring us
was to reinvest, to double down on core products
that customers have had for many years
and we know that they want to be able to count on
for many years to come.
But the other really important thing we believe
about driving value to our customers was those offerings
and capabilities that you put around that, you know?
Think about the idea of if you want to migrate off
of a competitive product, or if you want to adopt
an additional product that have the ability
to tie these together.
Often in our customer's shops,
they don't have all the skills that they need
or they just don't have the capacity to do it.
So we've been investing in partnership.
You know, we kept our services business from,
at least the resources, the people, from CA.
We rolled them directly into the division
and we're investing them in true partnership,
working side by side with our customers
to help them deploy these capabilities,
get up and running, and be successful.
And we believe that that's the value of a true partnership.
You invest side by side to have them be successful
with the software and the capabilities and their operation.
>> Well, like I said, it caught a lot of people,
myself included, by surprise that acquisition.
It was a big number, but you could see it,
you know, Broadcom's performance post.
You know, the July 2018 acquisition, done quite well.
Obviously COVID has affected, you know, much of the market,
but it seems to be paying off great.
Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE
and sharing your insights,
and best of luck going forward.
Stay safe.
>> Pleasure being here.
Everybody here, yourself, and everybody out there,
be safe, be well.
Take care.
>> And thank you for everybody for watching.
This is theCUBE's coverage
of the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience.
We'll be right back, right after this short break.
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