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Well, hello everybody. Here we are in lovely San Francisco at the IBM Cloud Forum, and I've got two guests with me to talk about something that IBM came out with today, which is pretty exciting with all the cloud discussion that's been going on. And that's the sort of two types of smart cloud, if you will. Do you guys want to introduce yourselves?

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Sure, I'm Jan Jackman, and I lead our global cloud services as part of IBM Global Technology Service Division within IBM.

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And yourself.

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And I'm Craig Highmark. I'm one of the founders of Cohesive FT. We're one of the cloud partners of IBM.

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Like I said, you guys came out with two smart cloud offerings today, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, and I'm wondering if you can just give us an overview of what those offerings are.

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Sure. What we see in the marketplace is that most of our enterprise customers have a variety of workloads or applications that they need to run in the cloud environment and move to the cloud environment.

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And there are different characteristics that are required based on security, based on the type of workload, whether it's a bursty type of workload that runs within days or weeks, or if it's a long running production application that may run months or years.

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And so what we introduce today is the enterprise platform, which deals with the multi-tenant bursty type of workloads, so workloads that would be like the development of test environment or even applications that may run for a short period of time that could leverage this cloud and the associated surface level agreements with that type of workload.

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The enterprise plus really looks at a fully managed environment.

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So as clients move from doing a development and test and then may want to move the app into a production level environment that has higher security needs, higher SLA, higher isolation of different workloads, then we have the, you know, continuity of the platforms to be able to move from one environment to the other.

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So if you take dev test as a use case and take application lifecycle management, what you see is the need to be able to move between different cloud environments.

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So you may do development and test development on a private cloud behind your firewall.

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You may want to, for reasons of economics, do performance testing or simulations on the cloud to take advantage of the burst capability of the infrastructure.

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And then you may want to move it into a production environment.

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So what we see in order to implement these type of workloads with this example, it takes a number of capabilities from IBM, but also capabilities from our partners.

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And one of the things that I am starting to like about the enterprise and enterprise plus offerings or your guys' take on what the enterprising cloud is, if you will, is exactly what you're getting into that different workloads or applications or different stuff to really abstractize it, if you will, that you're running on the cloud sort of demands different handling in the cloud.

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And at some point you need to get above the cloud.

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And at some point you need to get above the level of, we're achieving all this cloud goodiness with standardization and things like that.

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But above that, there's still sort of, we don't want to all have the same application, I guess.

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Or we don't all have the same application that we can use.

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Right.

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Or the applications have different characteristics from a security or availability.

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Right, right.

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And to that end, I mean, how is Cohesive helping, Cohesive FT helping manage all those different workloads in the cloud?

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Well, instead of the technical term stuff or even more specific workloads, we tend to use the word application topologies.

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Right.

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Because the real unit of work at the enterprise level is actually the application topology.

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So typically a cluster of three to ten servers working together that provide some business functionality.

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And from the get-go, we were aimed at making these application topologies portable between different underlying virtualized infrastructures.

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So we targeted virtualization as a platform, but knew there were going to be many different flavors of virtualization.

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So VMware ESX behind your firewall, IBM's KPM format in their public cloud, Amazon's AMI format.

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And our technologies, what we do is we provide what we call secure cloud containers.

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And these containers abstract away the differences between these different production platforms.

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And underlying those secure cloud containers are three technologies.

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There's one that deals with different image types.

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So the different image types that are needed on the different platforms.

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Another one which deals with the virtual networking.

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So the ability to maintain a consistent address space and a consistent network space between your data center and IBM's cloud or Amazon's cloud or whomever.

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And is that your, the VPN stuff that you guys came out with?

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Yeah, that's called the VPN cute.

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Right.

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It is, even though it's called VPN cute, it's not a VPN alone because that's about securing the tunnel between your data center and the cloud.

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Right.

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It's actually a complete overlay network.

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So think of that as switches and routers, a complete networking infrastructure done in software.

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So you can run it on top of hardware that you don't own and is not dedicated to you.

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Right.

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What that allows you to do is it allows you to treat IBM's cloud as a node on your WAN.

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And the third technology that underlies our secure cloud containers is called context cube.

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And that is topology management, so portable topology management to maintain those relationships between the servers and the clusters that you're moving back and forth.

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Thinking about moving workloads around a lot.

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Like what are the, in the here and now, what are the things that you're finding people having success with moving the workloads around?

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What are those bursty things that they're using?

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Yeah.

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So typical web applications that you see, let's say a commerce application that is at Christmas that needs compute power over a period of time for a quick, you know, set of transactions that are happening.

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We're seeing examples of use cases that are even more traditional legacy capability.

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We have an insurance company that's doing a reinsurance application that has a set of analytics that they do, algorithms that they run in order to comply with the regulators.

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And so they're able to run that one week a month, make sure that they comply to the risk levels that the regulators require in their industry.

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And then it goes dormant for the next three weeks, right?

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And so this is a workload that's run for a period of time, goes down.

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And so it's very efficient to run in the smart cloud enterprise environment.

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As we start to look at enterprise plus, that's where we start to see needing to manage all the way up through the application.

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And so if you take certain processes, let's take SAP as an example, there are certain processes that are repeated as you deploy and update your SAP environment.

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These processes are perfectly suited for the cloud, but they typically will need to be run and managed in a fully managed environment.

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It makes me think of another area that I think both of you could address and that's, there's a whole lot of IT that's existed before cloud.

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I know a lot of, you know, cloud forward people might not be happy about that or acknowledge it.

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So you've sort of got legacy IT and then you've got all the new IT that's going on.

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And you described something very interesting there as far as, I guess to use another technical term, kind of decomposing an SAP application into the various services that you have.

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Right.

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And then figuring out, to use a highly technical term, how you can cloudize those different services or you can't.

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And I wonder, between the two enterprise clouds, how much of that decomposing of existing IT you guys are finding useful for people to do?

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I would say we're at the beginning of this journey, so we're learning, you know, and seeing the use cases that are applicable for both.

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As we go and we look at our client environments and look at what they're running today, what we're finding is there's probably 15, 20% of what they run today that is applicable to move to cloud and get the benefits of cloud.

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So it's not going to solve, you know, for highly customized, you know, enterprise apps, you're not going to be able to move those and get the benefit of cloud.

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But as we talked about with the SAP, there are certain processes that are very applicable to cloud.

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Right.

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And so what we see is that as SOA applications are being written, as mobility as a driver to be able to have more surface-oriented architectures, to be able to deploy on these new device and mobility attributes, that there are going to be more and more workloads that are very relevant for our cloud environment.

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So while you can start today, the growth of what we see that would apply in these two scenarios is going to continue to be a larger and more important part of the enterprise.

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Most of our clouds look at it from a cost perspective, you know, where can I take costs out and apply this with some of the applications that I'm running?

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Because if I lower my costs, I can do more new things as I migrate forward in a new IT environment.

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You can free up resources, essentially.

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And so what essentially, you know, cloud is a new way to deliver and consume IT.

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It's not new technology.

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It's really a new delivery methodology.

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And using the economics and scale, which is important, it allows you to leverage infrastructure in new ways and get much higher utilization.

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But more importantly, as you think about new business value, you're able to create new businesses that were not possible before because you didn't have instant access to the IT to be able to launch new services quickly.

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At Cohesive FT, you know, since not necessarily all of it, a lot of what you guys do is securing parts of the applications that are moving on or providing the scaffolding needed, if you will.

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Like, how would you answer that same question of sort of the types of applications, whether they're legacy or new, that you guys are seeing move into the cloud?

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The short answer is the cloud really is the new platform for production.

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So over time, as the tools and things develop, I think what we'll do is see most of the kinds of use cases moving to the cloud.

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Your earlier question about, well, what use cases are there that can only be done on the cloud are the kinds of very bursty types of applications, you know, the cyclicality of seasonality or, for example, the parallelization that is needed to do, you know, massive Monte Carlo simulations or something like that.

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Right.

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So those kinds of things really practically can't be done any place except the cloud today.

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But I think we've got to look at the cloud as a next generation IT platform.

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And, you know, we're seeing compelling evidence about the cost savings that people move, get realized by moving to the cloud.

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I think more important than any of that, actually, is the speed and the agility that the cloud enables.

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And what we see is that a typical corporate takes 90 days to requisition, stage, and deploy a physical server.

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Using our Elastic Server product, you can do the same thing in 15 minutes virtually.

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Right.

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And I actually am a former business guy that moved over to IT because IT was a constraint.

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And I think what you'll see is that over time the cloud infrastructure and the types of tools that go on it are going to eliminate that as the constraint to changing your business process.

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So enterprises that don't move in this direction are going to be at the risk of having much longer cycle time in changing their business processes.

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The conversation of cloud giving you agility, or I've enjoyed that recently because, you know, agility has been a word of something that we all want in IT forever.

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And I feel like it sort of hasn't been well defined with a credible technological basis, right?

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Whereas when you look at cloud, you can say, well, agility means doing things faster and therefore being able to do them more.

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So you're not sort of stuck into an old plan, if you will.

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And, you know, I think a lot of cloud technologies have demonstrated that you can actually achieve that.

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It's not just sort of like an aspirational promise that we all want to get towards, but it's something that has been demonstrated to actually work.

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So people are interested in this stuff, you know, for as many tangible benefits as the smart cloud and other clouds seem to offer.

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Where do they go to start getting it? Like what's the, like where can they go get this off the shelf?

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Great. Well, if you look at our smart cloud enterprise, you can go on the web today, you can sign up for it and test it out, right?

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It's available on the web. You can access it, provision servers and go and be able to test out these tools.

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Now, most of the enterprise customers really are looking for help for a roadmap.

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You know, how do I apply it correctly? Because if you just jump into this, you might be picking workloads that you get no value.

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So we have a set of consulting services and capabilities that really help enterprise customers take a look at the application environments they have,

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look at the workloads that are relevant for cloud and help them build a roadmap to being able to leverage.

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And it starts simple to get familiar with the cloud, overcome any concerns with security differences or, you know, where the management, the overall end-end management of their data sits, and then be able to progress down the roadmap.

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If you're using the cloud for a test environment, it's unlikely that the particular image type of that cloud is actually identical to the stuff you're running behind your firewall.

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So you describe this as a bridging technology. That's exactly right. So do your scalable testing in the cloud, and then if you want to run it behind your firewall using our technology, you can import it back and it will run

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and translate it automatically instead of doing yet another manual migration.

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I appreciate you guys taking all this time to go over this. It's fun to see IBM out with more cloud stuff.

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For as much cloud conversation as IBM and also cohesive FT gets involved in it, it's always good to see the equivalent of SKUs out there, actual products with that great simple name.

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It's always exciting when we see customers benefit from it.

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Oh, sure.

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So that's certainly our goal is to make sure that there's business value for our clients.

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Absolutely. Well, thanks again.

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All right, thank you.

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Thank you.