>> From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE,
covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day.
Brought to you by IBM.
>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris from Wikibon,
and you're watching theCUBE
being broadcast from IBM Innovation Day
at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab
in beautiful Yorktown, New York.
And we've had a number of great conversations thus far,
we've got some more on the horizon, stay with us.
Now, we've got Jim Comfort.
Jim Comfort is the General Manager
of Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM.
Jim, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Thank you, Peter, glad to be here.
>> So, Jim, what does Hybrid Cloud Services as a group do?
>> Actually, we run infrastructure for clients.
That's our business, but we help you advise,
build and manage private cloud.
Advise, build and manage consumption of public cloud,
Azure, Google, IBM,
and we help you manage and stitch all of that together.
>> So a lot of people think of cloud
and they think of this monolithic thing.
"If I go to the cloud, suddenly my business has changed."
But there's more to it than that.
There's a number of different things
that a business has to be successful at
to succeed at getting to the cloud.
What is your perspective on that?
>> Well, I completely agree.
And this is kind of my first conversation with clients is,
you need a business strategy,
but to execute that strategy you have to realize
it will touch most everything in your business.
It'll touch infrastructure, it'll touch applications,
it'll touch your dev ops,
or your development process morph to dev ops.
It'll touch your operations very profoundly,
this whole SRE thought,
and it will test your data governance and management
as well as your security and compliance.
So that's the scope that you have to comprehend.
>> But most people, they start with perhaps
the infrastructure first and end up with the data last.
Is that the right way to think about this?
>> I agree, many do, and actually I have not seen
many build-it-they-will-come strategies succeed.
And so what I really look for is,
do you understand the business drivers?
Top-line revenue growth, new markets,
new insights, new data,
and from that can you derive a technology strategy?
What I've seen happen in many cases is,
if you start from the bottom up you'll be trapped in
what I call the religious wars of technology that never end.
>> And most people, a lot of folks start from the bottom up,
because they start from the technology side of the business.
>> Correct.
>> Are you seeing more business people getting engaged,
and conceptualizing what the strategy needs to be?
>> I am, and it starts on both sides.
The business people will say,
"I need to move faster than you can move,
so I'm going to do something different,"
and the IT people will say,
"I can do that for you, here's what you need."
The two signatures of the most successful transformations
are does the line of business and the IT have
the relationship to collaborate
so they actually learn together?
And then if they have that,
have they actually created a team that understands the new
as well as they understand the existing or the old,
so they can actually understand what's real, what's not,
where's the hype, what really happens.
And then they get into the rational, real planning decision.
>> So as you think about some of the assessment challenges,
because you said you go through the assessment process,
what are some of the key questions that a client should
start with as they think about undertaking this journey?
>> Well, number one is start with the business driver.
I said that already, but you have to start with
understanding what you're trying to accomplish
so you can make choices.
And the other is, start small enough and get to the end
of something so that you know what the reality is,
and that's where our,
this is where we bring in our methods.
When you hear us talk about the garage method,
you hear us talk about MVPs
and all the language everyone wants to use.
We like to start with something,
and start that iterative cycle of learning.
That's the key.
>> So with an iterative cycle of learning,
in many respects this whole notion of agility
is predicated on this idea of being agile or iterative.
But it's also empirical, knowing what the data is,
knowing what the data says, and being opportunistic.
How does a customer balance that as they get going,
say early on in the cloud journey?
>> I think, again, most of what we're talking about
in digital transformations is new insights
that will help your business.
That could be from data that you had, it could be new data.
And if they think about it, what insights am I looking for?
What new experience am I trying to create,
and what do I need to do that?
Then you start to get people to step back and think,
well, what are all the possibilities?
And now, how do we tackle that?
So it starts from realizing, what insight am I looking for?
>> So there's a lot of invention happening in the industry.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> And enormous new things being created.
Customers are being overwhelmed at trying to adopt them.
The innovation side, the social side
of effecting a change in the business.
You mentioned some of the markers for success
and putting together the strategy.
Go forward a little bit.
What are some of the companies that have successfully
gotten to that end stage maturity doing differently?
>> We have a number of very good ones.
I mean, a very clear one in my mind is American Airlines,
where they were really trying to change the experience.
They had three distinct things that had grown up over time,
the mobile experience,
the kiosk experience and the Web experience.
Three completely different things.
They brought it together, converged it,
modernized it, and now completely changed the experience
and the speed with which they can now
act on what they see for their clients
or for their customers, all of us.
But also as they get new ideas,
the speed and the velocity
that they can bring those in is phenomenal.
>> And that improves their ecosystem,
their ability to work with a lot of others as well.
>> Their ecosystem, how to work with others,
how to bring in new ideas.
And this is all,
for them it's all about client satisfaction
and service to their end client, to the end user.
That's what it was.
It had a lot of technology dimensions,
but they were very clear
the experience they were trying to attack.
>> So next February, IBM Think,
30-plus thousand people descending upon San Francisco.
You guys are taking it over.
What kind of conversations are going to be on your agenda
as you work with customers and partners
to get this message out?
>> Well, it's really two things.
I often joke the blessing and curse of IBM
is the breadth of our portfolio.
It's a very large place, but we actually have a very simple,
clear way to talk to, advise, move, build and manage.
Those are the steps you need in your journey.
Now, which journey for you, which type of thing.
But that, we have clarity on that,
and I think you'll see that displayed
at Think and get to understand it.
The other thing is that we have
a lot of experiential and real practical,
we've made this happen for many large clients at scale,
and I think that what we want people to understand is
we can help you that same way.
It's really pretty simple.
>> Jim Comfort, General Manager Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM.
Thanks for being on theCUBE.
>> Thank you, Peter.
>> And we'll be back momentarily with more from theCUBE
at IBM Innovation Day here
at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.