[ APPLAUSE ]
ROMETTY: Now, next expert up.
You met Jim Comfort in the video.
Jim, you're up with me now, and I want to go a bit different, go a little deeper now into this,
because I've hit on the words hybrid and described them to the best of my abilities;
I want you to talk a little bit more about this, because it's the reality.
Jim has made, I don't know, thousands of client meetings, truly, literally, and he's going,
and his team everyone crazy, that speaks to demand.
But also, I think when you get with a client and talk
about what we've got, wow, their eyes open up.
But this idea of the reality of real business and the enterprise
and hybrid and dynamic, go ahead.
COMFORT: It shows up all the time.
I love doing the calls, but there's...I always start in trying to get their attention
with this idea that you can move "the" enterprise -- your entire enterprise --
to "the" cloud, singular, is irrational.
ROMETTY: People say, "we're moving to the cloud."
COMFORT: It doesn't make any sense, so you have to say, which part of your business,
which part of your business are you trying to solve?
And that leads you down the path of, it will be some mix.
It will be a mix of things you have today versus things that are new;
it will be a mix of an external service be it a sales force
or one of our services and their internal capabilities.
And it's amazing, I mean, some clients are very sophisticated on this.
So, if they've thought this through and they've internalized this on their own,
then you can have a much faster conversation.
Others have been told by perhaps the CIO or a CEO "you must get to the cloud."
And believe it or not, today that conversation still starts at that very basic level.
And so, there it's helpful to have...not waste time on taxonomy, but just understand it's going
to be a mix and then try and get it down to, which problem are we solving today?
Because trying to solve everything at one time is impossible and that's
where you can often get lost in the weeds.
ROMETTY: So, what would be the turning point in most conversations?
Or I asked Lance the same question, kind of the misperceptions and concept.
You know, when you see light bulbs go on or points that ah, really?
COMFORT: There's two.
I had one in the video.
And I've done this with clients; I've done this with analysts.
And almost every time, there's an aha!
moment just because it helps them clarify.
And that is this issue that there are, what we will talk about as cloud-enabled systems --
traditional application, traditional application stack --
and a world that you're trying to modernize what you have
versus the cloud native or born on the cloud world.
And just, and there's many definitions.
There's enabled...
ROMETTY: Repeat that again.
Right? There's born on the cloud.
COMFORT: Born enabled or born on the cloud.
It's often related to traditionally application stack versus composable services --
we can have a more technical conversation on it.
And in many cases, your system of record, system of engagement slots, they line up.
It is not perfect, any one of those I can find examples that cross.
But recognizing, helping a client recognize that both of those conversations are important.
They're both cloud conversations.
The best examples I have are in very large clients I'll have one of those clients
with the CIO; the other conversation is going on with the line of business.
And it might be the line of business frustrated the CIO can't move fast enough
to solve the system of engagement problem, but the CIO is really talking
about a system of record problem.
So just separating the two and recognizing that they're not mutually exclusive.
It's not, you know, I have to do one or the other or only one is cloud.
They both are.
They're different conversations, you're solving different problems,
you're going to have a different conversation.
ROMETTY: And different capabilities.
COMFORT: And different capabilities,
and that's...our portfolio is built to solve both of those problems.
I think the story that we now is very coherent,
but you have to know which problem you're solving.
ROMETTY: But I think this is...I go back to, I said hybrid; Jim described it another way --
that we solve both problems, meaning, take, for example, all the systems you have already
and cloud enable them, expose them for a cloud environment.
Or, this...and really what Tery talked about, she put new things up here,
and that would be what you would call born on the cloud, systems of engagement.
They're built a new way right from the start.
COMFORT: Absolutely.
And the other change moment or epiphany with the clients is usually around,
they are rightfully very concerned about security.
They have a very narrow perception that cloud has all these problems.
And it ties to what Lance was talking about, that the only version
of cloud is a virtual shared instance.
When you start talking about SoftLayer and you have the ability to have both a private
and a shared environment or a dedicated and shared, that discussion becomes much easier.
"Public" and "private," the terms are very confused in the industry.
I try and simplify it: it's either dedicated or shared, my place or yours.
And then you can have the conversation, if I can do both dedicated and shared
in a hosted environment, then you can actually solve the security model problems
for most...for many cases in a much easier way and still enable a cloud.
So that discussion of, for the applications in which ever camp,
what security model are we really talking about?
And then have that, because that's what will get in the way in many cases.
ROMETTY: Tell the group, you told me a very interesting, I won't say "story"
because it's true, you told me of a very interesting experience,
because I think the best way to really internalize and feel this consumability,
ease of use, the dynamic we're speaking about, is just go out there and use SoftLayer.
But tell us about the client that you said no, no, we're not going to call
on you, you just go do it yourself.
COMFORT: Yes.
This was actually a case study in, does self-service really work
and will our enterprise clients embrace it?
And there was a lot of skepticism both at the client level and at the salesperson level.
So the dialogue was, salesperson listened to what we've tried to explain.
Told the client, get online, use the online chat.
You'll get answers to your questions, you'll be up in minutes.
The client said, I don't believe it.
Okay, so the client prepared 15 questions,
detailed technical questions that they wanted answered.
It was a test, they built their test.
And they got online and question after question was answered in detail, indepth, technical.
They solved the problem.
They were actually up and running, as Lance described, in about an hour.
And they sent back a note to the client rep saying, this is amazing.
I didn't think it would work but it did.
And the client note's rep back that I picked up on was, wow, this is like Easy Button for cloud.
And I love that phrase and I don't know that we can use it in external marketing, but...
[ LAUGHTER ]
...that you don't have to work so hard.
The transaction velocity is very, very fast.
ROMETTY: Yes, so let me, you know, I've set my ThinkPad down somewhere.
Hang on a minute.
I wanted to...I've got a lot of questions coming up.
I've been making them up, I haven't been able to see them all.
This is, let me just throw a couple out here before I move on over to Robert here.
How do you begin to price a cloud solution?
Can you determine a decent usage forecast?
This is like opposite of what you...but go ahead.
COMFORT: So from a pricing standpoint, certainly within SoftLayer,
everything is visible to either our sales rep or to the client, which ever way they go.
This is the beauty of the APIs that Lance is talking about.
That includes visibility to all pricing, that includes any combination of events.
And you can actually, once have you that set up, you can see your bill for the month,
you can see your pending bill for the next month.
You can extract that as an Excel file and you can repackage it differently if you want
to present it differently to a client.
So, the billing side is amazingly transformed in this world as well.
You know, because of the scale that we're offering it, the client should not have to worry
about the capacity side; we should worry about that and the analytics that we have to apply.
And we do that in both our SCE+ service as well as in SoftLayer.
There's tremendous analytics to understand, what are people ordering?
What is likely needed?
How do we address the capacity?
ROMETTY: All right, how about, here's one,
what is IBM's number one competitive differentiator in the cloud?
COMFORT: The breadth of solutions we can solve so that, one, we can solve almost every problem
in cloud that the enterprise has.
And from a technical standpoint, if I were to look at SoftLayer,
the breadth is in performance flexibility
and automation all the things that Lance talked about.
Clients are moving from alternative solutions to SoftLayer for one or all of those attributes.
ROMETTY: I think an important point to make on this is that we can,
because sometimes when people say we can solve everything, that equates to complexity.
This is not true.
COMFORT: This is not about complexity.
ROMETTY: We can actually solve everything in all of those attributes about cloud:
consumables, dynamic, et cetera, right?
COMFORT: Absolutely.
And even...we also have for those applications that belong in a much more secure environment
with a complete set of [ITIL] processes managed by IBM, we have an answer for that.
If you want to access it at the software...understanding the stack you've shown
and knowing where to point the client.
Sometimes I come in a CIO discussion, the business really wants to have a SaaS solution;
you need to be able to do that hand-off and understand enough of the portfolio to say,
when I listen to this problem, I can help with a piece of it but I know
where to go to get the other piece.
ROMETTY: So, let me end on this one question before I bring up Robert with me.
And really, Lance, you and Jim together, it's from Romania.
For my millennial friends who do not work for IBM --
okay, and I don't know if this is a millennial themself or their millennial friends --
that do not work for IBM, when I say cloud, they relate to some others.
What are the top things I can tell them about IBM's expertise around cloud
that will make them look at our capabilities in cloud in a different way?
Now, I mean, one comment, Lance, you made, was hey, 22,000 companies are up here, right?
Every new name you think of is using some piece of SoftLayer.
But what would be, what would you tell the millennials?
Any "factoids," as they call them, that you two would call out?
COMFORT: Well, the one you brought up...
ROMETTY: You go first, and then I'll...
COMFORT: If you look at the people who are using this platform,
it is something they touch every day.
And today, you know, IBM doesn't have that, that end consumer touch in many places,
but everybody that we serve with cloud is an end user touch.
So it's really, you know, we are behind many,
many of these transactions as we always have been.
And now we have a much more visible portal based way...
ROMETTY: You'd tell them many of the companies you work with...
COMFORT: That's what I say.
ROMETTY: ...that you as a millennial touch, it's actually us behind the scenes.
COMFORT: Yes, and so the story we just had, IBM behind the Miami Dolphins.
ROMETTY: Yes, go ahead, Lance.
Anything you'd add?
CROSBY: Yes, I would just add that being able to take public, private and bare metal
and use it all together because our most sophisticated users use all three types,
and then you wrap around all the ancillary services -- the storage, the firewalls,
the load balancers, everything delivered in minutes in real time either managed
through the portal or through the API, I mean, what more cloud like is that?
ROMETTY: Well, I think another great thing, remember, this discussion right
at this level was about Infrastructure as a Service, but any of your millennial friends
that are out there building apps, just tell them to go to SoftLayer.
Let it speak.
You don't have to put any words around it, just let them go out there and use it,
and then that will answer it all for themselves as they build their own apps.
CROSBY: In a word, speed.
ROMETTY: Speed.
That is a perfect answer, maybe that is the answer to tell them, is speed.
Okay. Now, let me thank Jim for coming up here and I'm going to wrap up.