Hyperscaling IBM Cloud's Growth Through the Data Center | Juniper Global Summit

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0:07 Hello, everyone.

0:08 My name is Manoj Leelanivas.

0:10 I'm the chief product officer at Juniper Networks.

0:13 Today, joining me is Ravi Amanaganti,

0:17 vice president/general manager of IBM Hybrid Cloud Network.

0:21 Ravi, welcome and delighted to have you to join us today.

0:25 Manoj, very nice to be with you,

0:28 and thanks a lot for the opportunity to speak with you.

0:32 Fresh from the press, so to speak,

0:34 IBM is the first company to announce an industry cloud financial services,

0:39 and you made a joint announcement with Bank of America.

0:41 Juniper is super proud to partner with IBM Cloud.

0:44 Tell us more about IBM Cloud offerings

0:47 and what you're offering to customers around the world, Ravi.

0:50 Manoj, thank you.

0:51 I think, first of all,

0:54 it's a great announcement that we made yesterday.

0:56 The partnership has been more than 12 months long,

1:00 and we're all excited at IBM Cloud and, hopefully,

1:03 it's exciting for our partners and customers as well.

1:07 Just taking a look back in terms of what IBM Cloud brings to the customers,

1:13 partners, and people who work with us very closely is we're looking at ourselves

1:19 as kind of catching up with the rest of the cloud space.

1:22 There is no way we can say we are being the first one

1:25 and the market has been set for us,

1:27 so we have to find really a different means to make a place for ourselves

1:32 and in order to do that,

1:33 it took quite a bit of an effort in terms of understanding

1:36 what is it we are trying to serve.

1:38 We did a research on most of the enterprise clients on

1:41 what problems are they trying to solve for their customers?

1:45 What is that they're trying to bring to the market?

1:48 How is that they're competing?

1:49 What trends are they following

1:51 and how can we make up name for ourselves in their journey?

1:55 Then we looked at that.

1:56 There were three problems that every enterprise is faced with.

2:00 They have got this pressure from the board

2:03 that they need to migrate to cloud and, obviously, this is there everywhere.

2:07 Second, they need to compete in the sector,

2:09 whichever vertical that they're participating,

2:11 and they have to always make sure they're getting their digital transformation done

2:16 and reduce the cost of the operations

2:19 because pretty much everything they need to digitize in order to compete.

2:23 The third, they have to bring the teams,

2:25 people along with them because it's changing the way people work,

2:29 especially with the way people are becoming.

2:33 Their jobs are digitized, their processes are digitized,

2:36 and the people have almost been trying to deal with so many technical transformations.

2:41 These are the three things when they get thrown at them,

2:44 and they always come to the vendors asking for,

2:49 "How can you solve them for us?"

2:50 When we look at IBM Cloud, we said, "Where can we help?"

2:54 Here is where we have built IBM Cloud.

2:57 Right now, we've got around 190-plus as a service offering

3:01 and that can span across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS,

3:05 and most of them are about providing these five value props.

3:09 One is about how do you really help the customer on their application modernization?

3:15 Everybody is in the mode of application modernization,

3:18 most of them have applications stand up in the 50% of their customer apps,

3:22 they've got 35% in pre-packaged apps, and 15% may be in the cloud.

3:28 You can wonder why the rest of the 85% is not in the cloud and this is the reason.

3:32 They've quoted, obviously, I've just been talking about what customers told us,

3:36 that they are worried about data governance, they're worried about security,

3:41 they're worried about really losing control of their data,

3:43 and that's one of the biggest concern.

3:45 The second, they really know that cloud journey is not a one-size-fits-all

3:51 so they always talk about multi-cloud approach

3:54 because they want to make sure they're managing their cloud journey very carefully

3:58 because they do not have all cloud-native applications.

4:01 That journey has to be clearly moderated.

4:03 The third, about while doing it they have to really,

4:06 really meet the governance and security and compliance postures

4:10 and regulations in each country because that's something

4:12 that they have to do otherwise they will not be able to compete effectively.

4:15 The last which is talent, people,

4:18 can they try to have the skills in order to do all these.

4:21 IBM Cloud really brings these things to the forefront

4:25 and we have really picked our niche in going about regulated industries

4:30 because that's one thing that we thought was the hardest problem to solve

4:33 and IBM has got a big brand with most of these financial insurers, healthcare manufacturing.

4:39 We believe that is the best place to start

4:42 and we wanted to really use that as an opportunity and build everything around it.

4:46 That's why we're talking about bringing AI to the market,

4:49 that's why we are talking about bringing quantum computing into the market.

4:51 You can think about those are the value props

4:55 but really 190 services that we offer to the customers.

4:59 Ravi, you covered a lot of ground there.

5:01 You covered the business outcomes you're drawing with your customers,

5:05 you've talked about digital transformation,

5:06 and then you talked about people, taking people forward.

5:10 Three different topics in-depth you covered.

5:14 When I talk to CIOs a year ago pre-COVID,

5:19 people were thinking in terms of digital transformation

5:21 and a journey for like three years.

5:23 Post-COVID the journey has become a three-month

5:27 or a six-month exercise for digital transformation, the big shift.

5:30 Data is continuing to explode, new services are coming online.

5:34 From an IBM perspective especially post-COVID,

5:37 I'm pretty sure that you built a pretty scalable network,

5:41 worked multiple data centers, 50 data centers across 18 regional zones.

5:45 What's your strategy,

5:47 what's IBM cloud strategy to keep up with the external growth driven by COVID

5:50 and all these new applications you said coming onboard?

5:54 Thank you, Manoj.

5:55 I think that question is timely mainly

5:57 because of the environment that we're all around.

5:59 Just imagine like the way we are talking to each other now from homes,

6:03 and this is something that I would have never expected,

6:05 especially for a global cloud summit, or maybe a customer summit.

6:09 I would be in a studio with you.

6:11 This itself is an extraordinary thing,

6:14 but when I think about digital transformation

6:17 this journey has been on even before COVID hit us.

6:20 COVID just transformed that and accelerated their journey.

6:24 I think, in my opinion,

6:26 what it really did is data has been growing significantly for the last five years,

6:30 and maybe even more, but just in the last one year,

6:33 it has probably grown even tremendously

6:36 because of this digital transformation that has accelerated.

6:40 When I look at that, what I really honed in on is not only data is exploding,

6:45 but it is structured data, it is unstructured data,

6:48 but the data silos it has created because of people's approach for multi-cloud

6:54 because the data is not in one location, and it is distributed.

6:58 This is where, really,

6:59 IBM strategy fits in straight there

7:02 because we were always being the champion of multi-cloud.

7:05 We've always wanted to go after this place where we know for sure it's not one-size-fits-all.

7:11 It's always multi-cloud.

7:12 How do you really support that coverage?

7:16 How do you provide the infrastructure across the globe,

7:19 where we build our network, our data centers,

7:22 where they are closest to the customer,

7:23 and provide the infrastructure, our VPC platform and all the services

7:27 that we have, 190-plus services,

7:29 make them available to the customers in that region?

7:32 Every year, we tend to add close to 12 data centers

7:36 that covers almost 3 to 4 regions.

7:39 We try to also bring very small footprints in the Edge

7:43 because we don't want to build data centers everywhere.

7:45 We want to use these Edge locations to bring the customer back into our cloud,

7:50 but really be the bridge to every other cloud that they want to participate with.

7:54 The last one is how do we really infuse this—

7:57 We talked about Cloud Pack for Data.

8:00 This is a software that we have, this is AI everywhere.

8:04 What it does is it really kind of simplifies and automates how we collect data,

8:09 organize the data, and process data and infuse AI to really bring insights for the enterprise

8:16 that they can be using them for their business outcomes.

8:19 In order to do that, we needed to have a couple of technologies,

8:22 so Red Hat is something that we have acquired,

8:25 and it absolutely gave us a great platform, OpenShift.

8:28 That OpenShift does a PaaS platform,

8:30 and we were able to really build this IBM Cloud Data Pack,

8:33 and that is the software.

8:35 We also use, another announcement

8:38 that probably you may have heard a month ago,

8:40 we talked about IBM Cloud satellite.

8:42 That's about distributing that AI service to wherever the customer needs that,

8:46 not really give the data, let the data come to the cloud,

8:50 let the data sit wherever it sits, take the service to where the data sits

8:54 and provide that AI and then really do that in a very secure

8:59 and provide that trust and compliance for the customer.

9:03 This is where we bring confidential computing to the customer.

9:06 Those are the real three elements as our strategy

9:09 that we use to support the customers on the data explosion management.

9:13 Great.

9:14 What I'm hearing from you is that, I think,

9:15 there is definitely two streams for you.

9:18 One stream is very focused on the hybrid cloud,

9:21 focusing from the centralized cloud to the near Edge,

9:24 to the far Edge, how do you make that hybrid cloud,

9:26 multi-cloud environment really happens.

9:28 The second one is the AI, AI-driven, cognitive AI enterprise,

9:34 where AI doesn't just happen in the cloud

9:36 but can happen wherever it needs to be.

9:38 Those are the two big sort of efforts and Red Hat plays into this in a big way.

9:42 Really great to know that.

9:45 Segueing a little bit into Juniper, you've heard of Juniper's direction,

9:50 our true north of Experience-First Networking.

9:53 At the end of the day, we want to provide simplified operations for our customers,

9:58 and a superior experience to our customers' customers.

10:02 We've been together as partners in this journey for a while now.

10:04 What does Experience-First mean to you,

10:08 for IBM and your customers, from a Juniper perspective?

10:11 Absolutely.

10:13 Great to just bring in Juniper into this conversation.

10:17 We have been partnering with Juniper since this cloud has started with SoftLayer,

10:21 way back when I was at Cisco.

10:23 I was not even at IBM Cloud, but SoftLayer was our customer as well.

10:28 I was mostly putting Cisco into data center

10:31 and Juniper was putting most of their stuff in the data center Edge,

10:34 as well as in the backbone, and also security, which obviously,

10:38 security has been the critical insertion point for Juniper as well.

10:42 We really need to scale the network, not only on the backbone

10:47 but at the Edge of the network,

10:48 but do it in a way that it really brings

10:50 that experience and availability to the customer.

10:54 Absolutely, I do think that we've got a great partnership

10:57 that we continue to take forward in expanding speeds and feeds

11:01 because right now we are running our backbone with a lot of 100 gig.

11:04 I think very soon, I see that growing into 400 gig

11:07 and even more, and trying to also deliver SLS on the backbone,

11:12 and doing that area effectively and then bring security.

11:16 As I said, it's all about making sure that data inflight

11:19 and data in motion or the data in motion, data at rest,

11:22 are all managed in a secure way.

11:24 That's the key value that we bring,

11:25 and we want to make sure we're partnering with Juniper on that journey.

11:29 I do want to take one other point on this particular question.

11:33 I really want to make sure that we are focused on very, very,

11:39 industry-focused cloud, which is financial services

11:43 because this is the one that has given us that edge in the market,

11:46 and we want to really use that as a way to establish IBM Cloud as a significant player,

11:52 and then expand it to other areas.

11:55 It's really important for us to stay focused in keeping

11:57 that journey to drive that outcomes and then expand out after.

12:02 Thank you, Ravi.

12:03 I think we're delighted with the partnership with IBM too.

12:06 I think this partnership has been going really well.

12:09 Now, I'm going to segue into a slightly different two-part question.

12:14 What keeps you up at night? That's one.

12:16 Number two, for a person who's managing such a complex network

12:20 that you have deployed, and you are calm and composed.

12:22 How do you do that? What's the secret, for the audience?

12:25 Manoj, first of all, thank you.

12:27 I may not be as calm and composed as I look today.

12:30 Generally, the job that I have is a very difficult one.

12:35 I think what keeps me up at night is,

12:37 "How do I stay as a leader and how do I provide the motivation

12:43 to the team knowing that we are not in the top three yet?"

12:46 When I think about the market space,

12:48 we have got a lot of passion to compete, we want to be in the top three.

12:52 We know that we are not there yet.

12:54 In order to get there, we have got a lot of great things going on our end.

12:58 Keeping the team motivated, that we can get there,

13:01 and keeping the team also know this is practical,

13:04 this is doable and this is something that they should believe in,

13:07 is where I lose most of my sleep.

13:09 It's not the technology.

13:10 It's mostly the people and how do I keep them at ease

13:13 and focus them to do the job.

13:16 Great, Ravi.

13:17 Thank you so much for your time and insight.

13:19 It was a pleasure to have you.

13:21 Thank you so much,

13:22 Manoj and it's been a great opportunity to speak with you today

13:25 and whoever is listening to us.

13:27 This is a great transformation that we're all going through

13:31 and I wish everyone the very best on their journeys as well.

13:35 Thank you so much, Ravi.

13:37 Thank you.

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