>> Man: Let me check.
>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube.
Covering InterConnect 20 17.
Brought to you by IBM.
>> Okay, welcome back everyone.
Day two, we are here live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect.
This is Silicon Angle's The Cube coverage
of IBM's cloud event.
The CEO, Ginni Rometty, was just on stage.
We're kickin' off wall to wall coverage for three days.
I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante,
here for all three days.
>> And, our next guest is Andy Lin,
who's the VP of (mumbles) Mark Three Systems.
A, 20 plus year IBM platinum partner.
Doin' some real cutting edge work with cognitive
as Ginny Rometty said cognitive to the core,
is IBM's core strategy.
Data first, enterprise strong is kind of the buzz words.
Andy, welcome to The Cube.
Appreciate you comin' on.
>> Thanks for havin' me.
>> So, obviously, enterprise strong, you know, it's,
it's a kind of whole nother, you know, conversation
that we can go deep on, but data first and cognitive to the
core is really kind of the things that you guys are really
getting into.
All kinds of data types.
Automating it and making it almost frictionless
to move insights out.
So, take a minute to explain what Mark Three's doing
and what your role is with the company.
>> Sure.
Absolutely.
So, I'm Vice President of strategy in Mark Three,
so I work sort of across all our initiatives,
especially areas that are emerging.
Just a little bit about Mark Three,
just historically for background purposes.
So, we're a 22 year IBM platinum partner,
as you pointed out.
We actually started in the mid 90's,
actually doing IT infrastructure around the IBM stack
at that time.
So, we sort of been with IBM over the last 20 years
since the beginning.
We've sort of grown up throughout the stack
as IBM's evolved over the last two decades.
About two and a half years ago,
we started a digital development unit, called BlueChasm.
And what BlueChasm does, is it basically builds open
digital and cognitive platforms on the IBM cloud
that are around a lot of services you pointed out.
And, we basically designed it based on use cases
that the ecosystem and our clients talk about.
And, to give you a couple examples, one of the,
one of the big ones that we're seeing a lot of interest
around is called video recon.
Video recon is a video analytics platform that's API enabled
and open at it's core.
So, regardless of where the video comes from,
if it's a content management system, if it's a camera,
we're able to basically take in that video,
basically watch and listen to the video using Watson
and some elements of our own intellectual property.
And, then basically return insights based on what it sees
and hears along with time stamps,
back to the user to actually take action.
>> Yeah.
I love the name BlueChasm.
It brings up, you know, Jeffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm.
Blue, IBM, big blue, so you know, it's a nice clever play.
The BlueChasm opportunity.
So, in your mind, for people watching,
squint through some of the trends and extract out where you
see these opportunities.
Because if you're talkin' about new opportunities are
emerging because of cloud horsepower and compute and storage
and all the greatness of cloud, and you got real time
analytics kind of really hittin' the main stream.
That's going to, that's highlighted by internet of things
is you can't go anywhere these days without hearing
about autonomous vehicles, industrial (mumbles) things, AI,
Mark Benioff was sayin', you know, we've seen the movies
like Terminator and we've all dreamed about AI,
so we can kind of get excited about the prospects.
But, the chasm you're talkin' about, this is where these
things that were ungettable before, unreachable new things,
what are some of those things that you guys are doin'
in that chasm?
>> Yeah, so I think some of the things that we're doing
are basically enabling, like I'll use video recon
as an example, right,
we're enabling a class to be able to get new insights
using basically computer vision,
but in an open and accessible way, that they've never had
been able to do before.
Vision itself, I don't think is new or revolutionary.
You know, a lot of folks are doing it, self driving cars,
etcetera.
>> John: Yeah.
>> But, I think what is new is being able to make it open
and easily accessible to the normal enterprise,
the normal service provider.
Up to now, it's been, you know you've had,
really had to have your own team of, you know,
really, really deep AI develops or PHD's
to be able to produce it for your own platform.
What we're trying to do is basically demarketize that.
>> John: Yeah.
>> So, to give you an example, some use cases that we're,
we're sort of working on today,
the ability to do things like read meters and gages,
as an example, with a camera.
That way you can avoid a situation where somebody has to
walk around all the time, you know, look at different things
that could be dangerous.
That there could be issues actually looking at what you see
from a metering perspective.
Or to be able to, for instance, for in the media
entertainment industry or the video production industry,
be able to do things like identify shot types,
be able to more quickly allow our enterprise users in that
particular space to be able to create video content quickly.
And, the underlying theme with all this,
I think it's really about speed to market.
And, how quickly can you iterate and please whatever your
customers in that particular space that you're in.
>> So with the video recon, so your, your videos
are searchable, essentially.
>> (Andy) Correct.
>> So, so what do you do?
Use Watson, natural language processing
to sort of translate them?
Now (mumbles), of course, you know, NLP is maybe I don't
know 75, 80 percent accurate, how do you close that gap?
>> Yeah, so video recon does both visual and audio.
So, the audio portion you are correct.
There is some degree of trade off in accuracy relative
to what I think the average human can do today.
Assuming the human is focused and able to really tag
these videos accurately.
So, we are able to train it based on things like
proper words and things that are enterprise focused.
Because I know there, there are a lot of different ways that
I think you can maybe attack this today from a video
analytics perspective,
where we're focused primarily just on the enterprise,
solving business problems with, with video analytics.
So, you know, taking advantage of if Watson improves,
cause we do use (mumbles) tech at it's core from,
on the audio perspective.
Applying some of our own techniques to basically improve
the accuracy of certain words that matter most
to the enterprise.
One of the things we've noticed is it's an entirely
collaborative relationship with our, with our, with our
enterprise clients but really partners.
Because what works well for one,
may not work well for another.
One thing about cognitive is it really depends on the end
user as to if this is a good idea or not.
Or if this will work for their use case,
just based on error, as you pointed out.
>> So, to your point, you're identifying enterprise use cases
and then tuning the system.
Building solutions, essentially, for those use cases.
>> Andy: Absolutely.
>> Now, you said 22 year IBM platinum partner,
so you obviously started well before this
so-called digital transformation.
>> Andy: Yes.
>> You see digital transformation as,
you know, revolutionary,
or is it more of an evolution of your business?
>> I'd definitely say it's an evolution.
I think, you know, a lot of the industry buzz words out
there are all around, you know,
transformation or transition,
but for us it's been completely additive.
You know, at the end of the day we're just doing what our
clients want, you know.
And, we're still continuing the core part of our business
around modernizing and optimizing IT infrastructure,
tech sacks in the data center,
also infrastructure service in the cloud.
Also, up through the middle where it's still really as
strong as ever.
I mean, in fact that business has actually been very much
reinforced by some of these capabilities that we brought in
on the digital development side.
Because, at the end of the day, you know, clients may have a
digital unit and they may have, you know, IT,
but they're really viewed sort of all in the same.
A lot of people try to put 'em in two different buckets
bimodal or whatever you want to use.
But, you know, inevitably, you know, clients just see a
business problem they want to address.
>> Yep.
>> And, they're saying how can I address it the fastest and
the most effectively as relative to what
their stakeholders want.
And, we just realized early on that we had to have that
development capability, be able to build platforms,
but also guide out clients.
If they don't want one of our platforms,
if they don't want video recon or cognitive call center
platform, that's perfectly fine.
We're more than happy to guide them on how to build
something similar for their developers with our developers
relative to their tech stack, you know,
hopefully on the IBM cloud.
>> Andy, one of the things you were pointing out
that I think is worth highlighting is the digital
transformation buzz word,
which has been around for a few years now,
really is in main stream right now.
>> Andy: Yes.
>> People are really working hard to figure this out.
We're seeing the disruption on the business model side.
You mentioned speed and time to market, that's agility.
That's not just a technical development term anymore.
It's actually business model.
It's business related.
>> Andy: Yes.
>> But there's two axes of things going on.
There's the under the hood, heavy lifting stuff that goes on
around getting stuff digitally to work.
That's IT, security, and you know, Ginni Rometty talks about
a lot of that on stage.
That's being enterprise grade or enterprise strong.
The other one is this digitization of the real world, right?
So, that's creative.
That requires insights.
That requires kind of a different,
it's actually probably maybe more fun for some people,
but I mean it depends on who your profile is,
but you have kind of two spectrums.
Cool and relevant and exciting and intoxicating, creative,
user experience driven.
You mentioned reading meters.
>> Andy: Yeah.
>> That's the analog world.
>> Andy: Yes.
>> That's actually space.
That's the world.
That's like, you got the sky you got the meter.
>> Andy: Yeah.
>> You got physical impressions.
This is the digitization of our world.
What's your perspective?
How do you talk to customers when they say,
"Hey I want to digitize my business."
>> Andy: Mm hmm.
>> How does it go?
What do you say?
I mean, do you break it down into those axes?
Do you go, did they see it that way?
Can you share some color on this digital transformation
of digitizing business?
>> Yeah, so I mean it really depends on, I think,
it normally it has to do with interacting with some other
stakeholders in a certain way, you know.
I think from our perspective it really is about, you know,
how they want to interface.
And, most of the time you pointed out speed.
Speed I think is the number one reason why people are doing
the digital transformation.
It's not really about cost or these other factors.
It's how quickly can I adjust my business model
so I can win in the market place?
And, you know, I think I pointed this earlier, but like,
you know IOT is huge now.
It covers what I call three out of the five senses
in my mind.
It covers basically touch, smell and taste in many ways.
And, for us, I think we're basically trying to help them
even get beyond IOT with video.
Video really covers, you know, sight and hearing as well.
It covers all the five senses.
And, then you take that and figure out how do I digitize
that experience and be able to allow you to interact
with your stakeholders.
Whether it be your customers, your suppliers or
your partners out in the market place.
And, then based on that we'll take these building blocks
on how we, you know, extend the experience,
and work with them on their specific use case.
>> So, you got to ingest the data, which is the, you know,
the images or data coming in.
>> Correct.
>> Then you got to prep it available for insights.
>> Correct.
>> And, produce them in, like really fast.
>> Andy: Yep.
>> That's hard.
>> Andy: It is, yeah.
>> It's not trivial.
>> No it is not, it's not a trivial problem.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity here
in the space over the next I think two to two to five years.
But you're absolutely right.
>> John: Yeah.
>> I mean it is, it is a challenging.
>> And, I want to get your thoughts too,
and if you can share your reaction to some of the trends
around machine learning, for instance.
It's really kind of fueling this democratization.
>> Andy: Yeah.
>> You mention in the old days it was really hard,
there was kind of a black art to, to machine learning
or unique special, specialties.
And, even data science that's at one level was really,
really hard.
Now you have common people doing things with visualization.
What's the same with machine learning?
I mean, you got more data sets coming in.
Do you see that trend relevant to what you guys
are working on in BlueChasm?
>> Absolutely.
I think at the core of it, and this wasn't our plan
initially three years ago,
we didn't realize that this was happen, but every single one
of the platforms or prototypes or apps we've built,
they all incorporate some degree of machine learning,
deep learning within it's core.
And, this is primarily just driven by I think what,
to give a client a unique platform
or a unique service on the market.
Because, much of the base digitization,
I mean Ginny likes to talk a lot about, you know,
the key to being, differentiating yourself from digital
world is being cognitive.
And, we've seen this really play out in practice.
And, I think what's changed, as you pointed out is,
that it's easily accessible now to sort of the common man,
as I put it.
In years past, you really had to have people
that are highly specialized.
You build your own product.
But now through open source-
>> There's building blocks out there.
>> Absolutely.
>> You can just take an open source library and say hey,
and then tweak the machine learning.
>> Absolutely.
And, the ramp up time has come down, you know,
dramatically, even for our developers.
Just watching them work.
I mean, the prototype to video recon was built over the
course of a weekend by one of our developers.
He just came in one Monday and said, you know,
is this, is this interesting?
>> He's fired.
>> Exactly.
And, we were like, yes I think this is interesting.
>> Well this is the whole inspiration thing
that I talk about, the creativity.
This is the two axes, right?
>> You try to do that in the old days,
I got to get a server provision.
>> Andy: Yeah.
>> I'm done.
>> Andy: Right.
>> You know, I'm going to go have a a beer.
Whatever.
I mean, there's almost an abandonment going on.
We talked to Indiegogo yesterday
about how they're funding companies.
>> Andy: Yeah.
>> You have this new creative action.
>> Andy: Mm hmm.
>> So you guys are seeing that.
Any other examples you can share in terms of color
around this kind of innovation?
>> Yeah, so we, at BlueChasm we try to let our developers
sort of have free reign over what they like to create.
So video recon was spawned literally by a,
on a side project, you know as with a lot of companies.
It was, you know, a platform that sort of evolved
into a commercial product, almost by accident, right?
And, we've had others that have been anchored by like what
clients had done, but like around the cognitive call center,
which basically takes phone calls that are recorded and then
basically transcribes and makes them easily searchable for
audit reasons, training reasons, etcetera.
Same kind of idea.
We built things around like cognitive drones.
A lot of folks are trying to do things with drones.
Drones themselves aren't really not novel anymore,
but being able to utilize them to collect data
in unique ways,
I think that industry is definitely evolving.
We've built other things like,
what I call the minority report board,
after the scene in the movie where the board sort of looks
at you and then based on what it sees of you,
of different data points,
it shows you an ad or shows you a piece of visual content
to allow you to interact.
>> John: Yeah.
>> I mean, these are, these are examples.
You know, we have others.
But, you know we've just seen like in this organization if
we allow creativity to sort of reign, you know,
have free reign.
We're able to sort of bring it back in along with some of
the strengths of core Mark Three about being (mumbles).
>> I mean the cognitive is really interesting.
It's a programmatic approach to life.
And, if you think about it, it's like if you have this
collective intelligence with the data,
you could offer an augmented reality experience-
>> Andy: Yes.
>> To anybody now, based upon what you're doin'.
>> Absolutely.
So I mean, I think that the toughest part I think right now
is figuring out which of the opportunities to pursue.
Because, there are so many out there and everyone has
some interest in some degree, you know.
You have to figure out how to prioritize about, you know,
which, which of the ones you want to address first.
>> John: Yeah.
>> And, in what order.
Because, what we've noticed is that a lot of these are
building blocks that lead to other greater and greater
platform concepts, and part of the challenge is figuring out
what order you want to actually build these into.
And, through you know, microservices through retainerization
all these, you know, awesome evolutions as far as like with
cloud and infrastructure technology,
you're really able to piece together these pieces
to build amazing (mumbles) quickly.
>> The cloud native stuff is booming right now.
>> Yeah.
>> It's really fun to watch.
Microservices, (mumbles), this orchestration,
composability is just kickin' ass.
>> Absolutely.
>> And, all your clients are basically becoming
software companies.
They're takin' your services and building out
their own sas capabilities.
>> Andy: Right.
>> Right?
>> Without a doubt.
I mean, you know the cloud (mumbles),
container revolution's been significant for us.
I mean we, we added the audio component to video recon
based on some of the work we've been doing
on the call center side.
It was almost by accident.
And, we were able to really put them together in a day
because we were able to basically easily compose the overall
platform at that time, or the prototype of the platform at
that time just by linking together those services.
So, we see this as a pattern moving forward.
>> Andy, thanks for coming on The Cube.
Really appreciate it.
In the quick 30 seconds,
what are you doin' here at the show?
What are you guys talkin' about?
What's some of the activity?
Coolest thing you're seeing?
Share some insight, what's going on here in Las Vegas.
Share some perspective.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So, we have a booth here in Vegas.
We're demoing some of the platforms we talked about:
video recon, cognitive call center.
We're at booth six 87,
which is toward the center back of the expo center.
We have four break outs that we'll be doing as well.
Talking about some of these concepts,
as well as some of our projects that involve, you know,
modernization of the data center as well.
So, the true what I call IBM full stack.
>> And, for the folks that aren't here watching,
is there, the website address?
Where can they go to get more information?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
You can go to Mark Three sys.
M A R K triple I S Y S dot com, which is our website.
If you want to learn a little bit more about video recon
you can go to video recon dot I O.
We have a very simple demo page, but you know,
if you're interested in learning more or you want to explore
if we can accommodate your specific use case,
please feel free to reach out to me.
Also, Mark Three systems, M A R K triple I systems
at Twitter as well, and I can get back to you.
>> Well, you know we're going to follow up with you.
Going to get all of our Cube videos into the cognitive era.
You'll be seeing us, pinging you online for that.
>> Yeah.
>> Love the video recon, just great.
BlueChasm, great, great initiative.
Congratulations on that.
>> Thank you.
>> Thanks for comin' on.
Its The Cube live here in Las Vegas.
Day two of coverage, wall to wall.
I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.
Stay with us.
More great interviews after this short break.