IBM: Future-Ready Storage That Redefines the Boundaries of the Data Center | New ways to optimize your IT budget

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Audrey O’Donnell

Product Manager, IBM FlashSystem

IBM

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of IBM’s ‘Future-Ready Storage’ event

With the integration of artificial intelligence into data management systems, IBM Corp.’s conversation around storage has shifted into a whole new gear.The company made a series of storage announcements during theCUBE and IBM’s “Future-Ready Storage Redefining Data Center Boundaries” event. A key element of the latest releases involved the inclusion of AI-powered predictive analytics and data placement for the IBM FlashSystem 5300, yet another example of how AI is reshaping the IT ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)“Generative AI has hit us as an industry,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage at IBM, during an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio

How IBM is helping orgs future-proof storage infrastructure while controlling costs

As the wave of artificial intelligence technology opens possibilities and constrains budgets, IBM Corp. is offering an IBM Storage Assurance Perpetual model, a price-protected subscription for businesses wanting modern storage without breaking the bank.“What’s really unique and awesome about this Perpetual model is that it’s on client-owned infrastructure … that’s what’s really exciting for clients here, is it’s assets that they own but still get that price protection flexibility on,” said Audrey O’Donnell (pictured), product manager of IBM FlashSystem at IBM Corp.IBM’s Audrey O’Donnell talks to theCUBE about new storage options and AI’s impact on company storage methods

play_circle_outline IBM Storage Assurance: Balancing Modernization and Budget Certainty for Storage Clients

play_circle_outline The three key pillars of the Storage Assurance program: hardware modernization, peace of mind, and contract and budget certainty

play_circle_outline Differentiation from other storage as a service programs, including full system upgrades

play_circle_outline Benefits of the program in relation to AI, including flexibility in TCO and staying modern.

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New ways to optimize your IT budget

Audrey O’Donnell

Product Manager, IBM FlashSystem IBM

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's Performance. Here we are in Palo Alto, bringing guests in remotely. We've got Watch Party all around the world for future-ready storage with IBM. I'm John Furrier, your host. Dave Vellante here with me. Audrey O'Donnell is here, product manager IBM Flash System. Audrey, great to have you. Thanks for coming in from North Carolina.

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Thanks so much for having me.

>> So we're going to get into the IBM Storage Assurance announcement, new ways to optimize the IT budget. Before we get started, why is there a need for Storage Assurance Perpetual, take us through the need.

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, so I think it was already hit on a bit with Dennis and Sam's intro, especially in the current need that we have around AI projects constraining IT budgets as well as just the need to stay modern and get out of this box mindset. But really, this is tackling an age-old problem that has always existed for storage clients around trying to balance the modernization and budget certainty and having price protection in the low TCO. Ultimately, clients need to stay modern. Today, it's really around cyber resiliency, but maybe it's around AI tomorrow. They need the latest infrastructure to keep up with their business needs and regulations, and yet they can't afford to refresh their equipment every couple of years. Hardware is naturally inflexible and doesn't want to be upgraded without a large rip-and-replace. So what can clients do in that scenario? That's what this program and this purchasing option is really here to address.

>> Audrey, I'd love to get into the differentiation a lot of stuff out there on whether it's storage as a service or different programs and sometimes it gets confusing. So maybe you can start with what exactly Storage Assurance is all about. What the program?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah. Absolutely. Storage Assurance Perpetual, we really do believe we've designed it in a very differentiated way to uniquely address client's needs, leaning into our specific flash system innovations that we have. But first let me just explain what is and what our approach is. IBM Storage Assurance Perpetual at the highest level is a higher-level maintenance contract that is a subscription to innovation as well to future software and hardware upgrades over time. So you purchase a box, you sign up for this high-level contract and you can have peace of mind and ease of management in your storage lifecycle. Not having to think about, When is my next refresh? What's the best time to balance my modernization needs and my budget risk and my lower TCO?This program has all of that built in for you. So if you could pull up slide 1, what it shows is we really built that around three key pillars. The first is all around hardware modernization. As I said, the goal of buying IT for life and staying modern forever with budget certainty really is hardest around the hardware part. Because hardware is inflexible, you either need to rip and replace the whole infrastructure or replace one part at a time, ultimately building some kind of Franken system after a certain period of time. So first, what we do in this program is we constantly allow clients to stay modern. Included in this program are automatic hardware refreshes around lifecycle SLAs wherein clients need those refreshes. So this is if you need more performance after year three, you're going to get it. This is if ever you are knocking the latest software upgrades, you're going to get a full system refresh in that scenario. If ever you're about to go end of support, you'll get a full system refresh before that happens. Or if ever you're desiring to do a capacity upgrade but the vendor doesn't have supply, you'll get a full system refresh. But we know the hardware piece of it, it's just one piece of it, right? You also need that peace of mind. So we want clients to be able to rest assured with this purchasing option by having higher level premium maintenance with a technical account manager meeting with them quarterly to be able to ensure they have proactive support and are on the correct modern hardware for their use case as well as non-disruptive migrations. That subscription to hardware innovation over time, we guarantee that we'll be non-disruptive from one system to another with our flash grid technology, which is really why we're releasing this program now and why it is so exciting to us. Finally, for clients that really care about sustainability, we guarantee energy efficiency. This means there's watts per terabyte you won't exceed for your product so you can know and plan for the highest your energy cost or carbon footprint would ever get. On top of that, the last piece is really around the contract. We know we need to provide all this with price protection and budget certainty for clients. And so what we do is we say, Okay, you can buy this in a four or an eight-year contract and pay upfront annually, quarterly, or monthly. And no matter which option you choose, you have price protection from day one inclusive of all these future hardware refreshes that you trigger through this program.This includes storage Insights Pro and Storage Virtualize and all the software and everything that you would need as well as this peace of mind through your storage life cycle and less overhead that you have to take on as a business to manage your storage life cycle. But you also need flexibility. So that's the last piece of this that I'll explain, which is at any time during the cycle if you would like to do an upgrade out of cycle, all your SLAs are being met, you are in support with premium level maintenance. You can get the latest software upgrades on your current existing device. You could upgrade your capacity if you wanted to, your performance. Your energy efficiency are being met, but you say, There's an innovation that they release that we need to have,you can do that. You can trade in your current system and get a discount or a new system out of cycle. Or you could also, if your workload changes, go from one generation to another to be able to get something that would satisfy your workload. So there's really those three key tenets, hardware pieces and refreshes over time, being able to have that rest assured peace of mind experience throughout your storage life cycle with that white glove-like treatment, and really contract budget certainty with flexibility to meet clientsneeds in a way that they can buy IT for life.

>> Thank you, Audrey, for that description. So as I said up front, there are a lot of different programs out there. I wonder if you could help us understand how you're different. I mean you hit on a lot of the benefits, but how is this program different from the several as a service programs that we've seen in the market over the last couple of years?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, great question. So as far as a service, really that is on a typically vendor-owned infrastructure. This is client-owned infrastructure where you are getting that higher level maintenance plus these future refreshes included. A lot of vendors do have solutions like this in the market. And what they typically do is after a certain time period, they will give you a controller only upgrade. You'll notice that that's not really what we said in this program. We said we were doing full system upgrades, which is extremely differentiated. Here's why we're doing that. It's because at the core, our approach to the flash storage market is differentiated. We don't just innovate in the software layer on top of industry standard components. We also innovate in our flash core module drives. That meant two things for designing this program for us. First and foremost, it meant that at the end of the day, our clients, in order to stay modern, want drive innovations over time included in any modernization program. And this is a great thing because they're not committed to the drive size they chose at day one. They get capacity consolidation, energy efficiency, rack space reduction included over time in this program, but also they get innovations like our inline threat detection, ransomware threat detection that we can deliver at the drive level, which is industry leading. But it also means a second thing. Because we innovate in the drives, one of the things that we do is we offload a lot of the compute intensive tasks like compression, like garbage collection onto the drives with computational storage. And so our controllers aren't constrained nearly as much as the industry standard flash storage architecture constrains of their controllers. If we replaced controllers over time, clients wouldn't see that much a performance bumper benefit because ultimately we scale our performance with our capacity as well as with the controllers. So what we did is we leaned into those innovations. We leaned into that differentiation we provide in the product, and what we've done is we say, With this program, because of our non-disruptive system to system migration capability, you can non-disruptively get hardware and software innovations over time in a full system sense instead of just ripping one part out and replacing it at a time.You're not going to eventually put a Ferrari engine in a Honda Civic. You are going to get true innovation and modernization over time and at the same competitive TCO that our competitors are providing your controller only refreshes because we are able to have industry leading price performance. Because of that computational storage offloading, our devices don't require as CPUs. So hopefully that explains some of our differentiation. The differentiation that we have in this program really is leaning into the differentiation that we have in our systems themselves, which I think is really exciting.

>> That's awesome. Thanks for that description, Audrey. We heard from Dennis at the top and the kickoff of this event around moving from a box-centric view into much more of a pools of storage. This kind of hits that point there that the consumption and all the upgrades are kind of turnkey. I could see this aligning well with the trend towards clustered systems and AI infrastructure where you just got to continue to move fast. So the question I would have is, okay, that checks the box. What does the contract look like for people who want to do this on the purchasing side? And then what does the capacity upgrades look like? Because now you're getting into, Okay, I'm procuring. I'm saving some time there with procurement. This is seamless from a consumption standpoint.How does it work? What's the contract look like? And am I really saving money here? What's the IT optimization piece of it? Can you tie those together?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, absolutely. So from a contract perspective, this is really that level maintenance. So you purchase a box and then you're able to get that four or eight-year, and it has flexibility built into how you can pay for that contract. So you can purchase it upfront, quarterly, monthly, annually, whatever is best for your business. So that has flexibility in your payment, but you have price protection from day one. So whatever you agreed to from day one, any refreshes that you get throughout that are included around these SLAs and guarantees, you will continue to have that flat rate. And at any point, if you need to break your contract and upgrade, again, you can. That is an additional fee, but you have that flexibility built in from day one. But I think on top of that, the capacity upgrade part of this is really exciting because this is how you can really lower your You lower your TCO because you don't have as much storage lifecycle overhead and you're able to get this subscription to innovation and hardware and software over time. this high level maintenance contract all bundled in together, it's basically like an insurance policy. It will pay out as much as needed. So you could really, really save yourself a lot there. But we also are differentiated in how we allow capacity upgrades, which lowers the on the clients. A lot of vendors in the market, especially in programs like this, you have to trade in your existing capacity and completely swap it for new capacity, which is disruptive, but also tends to cost a lot of money and disruption in your process because it is a contract breaking scenario. For us, you can buy as little as one drive at a time and add it to your existing system as long as you've got empty drive slots available, and that will fold right into your contract. There is no need to have to buy large drive packs, do a whole consolidation. You just fold that right in. So from day one, you don't have to over purchase. You can slowly add capacity as your capacity grows, which really is largely the key to optimizing your storage TCO. It's to not have to overpay for storage from day one and not have to overpay for storage as you modernize. So I think that's what makes this super exciting from a contract and capacity upgrade perspective.

>> So Audrey, I just want to have a follow-up question on the nuance. You mentioned this is for client-owned assets, right? So the program is specifically geared toward them. And that is different. Normally, it's the vendor taking the paper. And so that gives certain benefits to the customer, but also as you said, sometimes you can't get the full value. So I wanted to make sure that we understood that. And that is part of the differentiation, is it not?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, absolutely. So just to clarify, this is the new IBM Storage Assurance Perpetual purchasing option, which comes alongside our storage utility offering and our storage as a service offering for flash systems. So if as a service is the best option for your company, we still have that for our flash system devices. But what's really unique and awesome about this Perpetual model is that it's on client-owned infrastructure. So you're not basically renting the assets, you own the assets and you own the title to this even upon these modern refreshes. And so at the end of the day, this is things that you own. And you're not committing to some dollar per terabyte per month that could grow over time. This allows for more price protection because we're locking you in and having you allow that longer term contract for that price with the flexibility at any point to trade that out. But I think that's what's really exciting for clients here, is it's assets that they own but still get that price protection flexibility on.

>> It's classic the iceberg picture, what's under the water, you don't know the hidden costs. Shark fin is another metaphor we've seen in TCO. This is a visibility opportunity for your customers to say, Hey, we have full visibility into what's under the iceberg, so to speak.

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Absolutely.

>> Dave, this is the key to success. Final question for Audrey. As you look at this AI wave, how does this bring that into bear for the customer? What's the benefit to the customer as they have to move their resource to be much more scalable on the IT front, fill those skill gaps and then still ride the AI wave? What do you say to that question?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, absolutely. AI is the huge hot topic right now. I think investing in IBM Storage Assurance Perpetual helps you in two key ways around AI. The first is all around this flexibility in TCO conversation. Your budget is constrained. And this way you don't have to over purchase storage from day one, but you can easily grow as your storage needs grow, which is so crucial in these times as budgets are constrained and as you need that flexibility. But the second way is, AI is going to impact the storage industry that we play in, primary box storage. It already has with our ransomware threat detection AI enabled machine learning capabilities that they're going to touch on later today. And it will continue to be an innovative thing clients will desire to pick up. What this program allows you to do is get that modernization over time as we make those innovations in the software, in the hardware, which allows you to stay modern, but also have price protection and not have your TCO get blown out of the water, which I think is crucial as we enter this age of AI ruling off.

>> Audrey, thank you so much for coming on the program. That's awesome. Congratulations on your product success. It's positioned. Its future-ready for the rear customers. And having that agility and consumption flexibility and having visibility on the economics and costs is really going to be a big factor to helping people plan for the AI wave and AI systems that are being put together. So appreciate you. Thank you.

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

>> Okay. Coming up next, Mike Flint from District Store Systems on the Watch Party stream coming in. Stay with us for more Watch Party action. And what's going on with customersWhat do they think? And we'll hear from them.

New ways to optimize your IT budget

search

>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's Performance. Here we are in Palo Alto, bringing guests in remotely. We've got Watch Party all around the world for future-ready storage with IBM. I'm John Furrier, your host. Dave Vellante here with me. Audrey O'Donnell is here, product manager IBM Flash System. Audrey, great to have you. Thanks for coming in from North Carolina.

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Thanks so much for having me.

>> So we're going to get into the IBM Storage Assurance announcement, new ways to optimize the IT budget. Before we get started, why is there a need for Storage Assurance Perpetual, take us through the need.

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, so I think it was already hit on a bit with Dennis and Sam's intro, especially in the current need that we have around AI projects constraining IT budgets as well as just the need to stay modern and get out of this box mindset. But really, this is tackling an age-old problem that has always existed for storage clients around trying to balance the modernization and budget certainty and having price protection in the low TCO. Ultimately, clients need to stay modern. Today, it's really around cyber resiliency, but maybe it's around AI tomorrow. They need the latest infrastructure to keep up with their business needs and regulations, and yet they can't afford to refresh their equipment every couple of years. Hardware is naturally inflexible and doesn't want to be upgraded without a large rip-and-replace. So what can clients do in that scenario? That's what this program and this purchasing option is really here to address.

>> Audrey, I'd love to get into the differentiation a lot of stuff out there on whether it's storage as a service or different programs and sometimes it gets confusing. So maybe you can start with what exactly Storage Assurance is all about. What the program?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah. Absolutely. Storage Assurance Perpetual, we really do believe we've designed it in a very differentiated way to uniquely address client's needs, leaning into our specific flash system innovations that we have. But first let me just explain what is and what our approach is. IBM Storage Assurance Perpetual at the highest level is a higher-level maintenance contract that is a subscription to innovation as well to future software and hardware upgrades over time. So you purchase a box, you sign up for this high-level contract and you can have peace of mind and ease of management in your storage lifecycle. Not having to think about, When is my next refresh? What's the best time to balance my modernization needs and my budget risk and my lower TCO?This program has all of that built in for you. So if you could pull up slide 1, what it shows is we really built that around three key pillars. The first is all around hardware modernization. As I said, the goal of buying IT for life and staying modern forever with budget certainty really is hardest around the hardware part. Because hardware is inflexible, you either need to rip and replace the whole infrastructure or replace one part at a time, ultimately building some kind of Franken system after a certain period of time. So first, what we do in this program is we constantly allow clients to stay modern. Included in this program are automatic hardware refreshes around lifecycle SLAs wherein clients need those refreshes. So this is if you need more performance after year three, you're going to get it. This is if ever you are knocking the latest software upgrades, you're going to get a full system refresh in that scenario. If ever you're about to go end of support, you'll get a full system refresh before that happens. Or if ever you're desiring to do a capacity upgrade but the vendor doesn't have supply, you'll get a full system refresh. But we know the hardware piece of it, it's just one piece of it, right? You also need that peace of mind. So we want clients to be able to rest assured with this purchasing option by having higher level premium maintenance with a technical account manager meeting with them quarterly to be able to ensure they have proactive support and are on the correct modern hardware for their use case as well as non-disruptive migrations. That subscription to hardware innovation over time, we guarantee that we'll be non-disruptive from one system to another with our flash grid technology, which is really why we're releasing this program now and why it is so exciting to us. Finally, for clients that really care about sustainability, we guarantee energy efficiency. This means there's watts per terabyte you won't exceed for your product so you can know and plan for the highest your energy cost or carbon footprint would ever get. On top of that, the last piece is really around the contract. We know we need to provide all this with price protection and budget certainty for clients. And so what we do is we say, Okay, you can buy this in a four or an eight-year contract and pay upfront annually, quarterly, or monthly. And no matter which option you choose, you have price protection from day one inclusive of all these future hardware refreshes that you trigger through this program.This includes storage Insights Pro and Storage Virtualize and all the software and everything that you would need as well as this peace of mind through your storage life cycle and less overhead that you have to take on as a business to manage your storage life cycle. But you also need flexibility. So that's the last piece of this that I'll explain, which is at any time during the cycle if you would like to do an upgrade out of cycle, all your SLAs are being met, you are in support with premium level maintenance. You can get the latest software upgrades on your current existing device. You could upgrade your capacity if you wanted to, your performance. Your energy efficiency are being met, but you say, There's an innovation that they release that we need to have,you can do that. You can trade in your current system and get a discount or a new system out of cycle. Or you could also, if your workload changes, go from one generation to another to be able to get something that would satisfy your workload. So there's really those three key tenets, hardware pieces and refreshes over time, being able to have that rest assured peace of mind experience throughout your storage life cycle with that white glove-like treatment, and really contract budget certainty with flexibility to meet clientsneeds in a way that they can buy IT for life.

>> Thank you, Audrey, for that description. So as I said up front, there are a lot of different programs out there. I wonder if you could help us understand how you're different. I mean you hit on a lot of the benefits, but how is this program different from the several as a service programs that we've seen in the market over the last couple of years?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, great question. So as far as a service, really that is on a typically vendor-owned infrastructure. This is client-owned infrastructure where you are getting that higher level maintenance plus these future refreshes included. A lot of vendors do have solutions like this in the market. And what they typically do is after a certain time period, they will give you a controller only upgrade. You'll notice that that's not really what we said in this program. We said we were doing full system upgrades, which is extremely differentiated. Here's why we're doing that. It's because at the core, our approach to the flash storage market is differentiated. We don't just innovate in the software layer on top of industry standard components. We also innovate in our flash core module drives. That meant two things for designing this program for us. First and foremost, it meant that at the end of the day, our clients, in order to stay modern, want drive innovations over time included in any modernization program. And this is a great thing because they're not committed to the drive size they chose at day one. They get capacity consolidation, energy efficiency, rack space reduction included over time in this program, but also they get innovations like our inline threat detection, ransomware threat detection that we can deliver at the drive level, which is industry leading. But it also means a second thing. Because we innovate in the drives, one of the things that we do is we offload a lot of the compute intensive tasks like compression, like garbage collection onto the drives with computational storage. And so our controllers aren't constrained nearly as much as the industry standard flash storage architecture constrains of their controllers. If we replaced controllers over time, clients wouldn't see that much a performance bumper benefit because ultimately we scale our performance with our capacity as well as with the controllers. So what we did is we leaned into those innovations. We leaned into that differentiation we provide in the product, and what we've done is we say, With this program, because of our non-disruptive system to system migration capability, you can non-disruptively get hardware and software innovations over time in a full system sense instead of just ripping one part out and replacing it at a time.You're not going to eventually put a Ferrari engine in a Honda Civic. You are going to get true innovation and modernization over time and at the same competitive TCO that our competitors are providing your controller only refreshes because we are able to have industry leading price performance. Because of that computational storage offloading, our devices don't require as CPUs. So hopefully that explains some of our differentiation. The differentiation that we have in this program really is leaning into the differentiation that we have in our systems themselves, which I think is really exciting.

>> That's awesome. Thanks for that description, Audrey. We heard from Dennis at the top and the kickoff of this event around moving from a box-centric view into much more of a pools of storage. This kind of hits that point there that the consumption and all the upgrades are kind of turnkey. I could see this aligning well with the trend towards clustered systems and AI infrastructure where you just got to continue to move fast. So the question I would have is, okay, that checks the box. What does the contract look like for people who want to do this on the purchasing side? And then what does the capacity upgrades look like? Because now you're getting into, Okay, I'm procuring. I'm saving some time there with procurement. This is seamless from a consumption standpoint.How does it work? What's the contract look like? And am I really saving money here? What's the IT optimization piece of it? Can you tie those together?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, absolutely. So from a contract perspective, this is really that level maintenance. So you purchase a box and then you're able to get that four or eight-year, and it has flexibility built into how you can pay for that contract. So you can purchase it upfront, quarterly, monthly, annually, whatever is best for your business. So that has flexibility in your payment, but you have price protection from day one. So whatever you agreed to from day one, any refreshes that you get throughout that are included around these SLAs and guarantees, you will continue to have that flat rate. And at any point, if you need to break your contract and upgrade, again, you can. That is an additional fee, but you have that flexibility built in from day one. But I think on top of that, the capacity upgrade part of this is really exciting because this is how you can really lower your You lower your TCO because you don't have as much storage lifecycle overhead and you're able to get this subscription to innovation and hardware and software over time. this high level maintenance contract all bundled in together, it's basically like an insurance policy. It will pay out as much as needed. So you could really, really save yourself a lot there. But we also are differentiated in how we allow capacity upgrades, which lowers the on the clients. A lot of vendors in the market, especially in programs like this, you have to trade in your existing capacity and completely swap it for new capacity, which is disruptive, but also tends to cost a lot of money and disruption in your process because it is a contract breaking scenario. For us, you can buy as little as one drive at a time and add it to your existing system as long as you've got empty drive slots available, and that will fold right into your contract. There is no need to have to buy large drive packs, do a whole consolidation. You just fold that right in. So from day one, you don't have to over purchase. You can slowly add capacity as your capacity grows, which really is largely the key to optimizing your storage TCO. It's to not have to overpay for storage from day one and not have to overpay for storage as you modernize. So I think that's what makes this super exciting from a contract and capacity upgrade perspective.

>> So Audrey, I just want to have a follow-up question on the nuance. You mentioned this is for client-owned assets, right? So the program is specifically geared toward them. And that is different. Normally, it's the vendor taking the paper. And so that gives certain benefits to the customer, but also as you said, sometimes you can't get the full value. So I wanted to make sure that we understood that. And that is part of the differentiation, is it not?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, absolutely. So just to clarify, this is the new IBM Storage Assurance Perpetual purchasing option, which comes alongside our storage utility offering and our storage as a service offering for flash systems. So if as a service is the best option for your company, we still have that for our flash system devices. But what's really unique and awesome about this Perpetual model is that it's on client-owned infrastructure. So you're not basically renting the assets, you own the assets and you own the title to this even upon these modern refreshes. And so at the end of the day, this is things that you own. And you're not committing to some dollar per terabyte per month that could grow over time. This allows for more price protection because we're locking you in and having you allow that longer term contract for that price with the flexibility at any point to trade that out. But I think that's what's really exciting for clients here, is it's assets that they own but still get that price protection flexibility on.

>> It's classic the iceberg picture, what's under the water, you don't know the hidden costs. Shark fin is another metaphor we've seen in TCO. This is a visibility opportunity for your customers to say, Hey, we have full visibility into what's under the iceberg, so to speak.

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Absolutely.

>> Dave, this is the key to success. Final question for Audrey. As you look at this AI wave, how does this bring that into bear for the customer? What's the benefit to the customer as they have to move their resource to be much more scalable on the IT front, fill those skill gaps and then still ride the AI wave? What do you say to that question?

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, absolutely. AI is the huge hot topic right now. I think investing in IBM Storage Assurance Perpetual helps you in two key ways around AI. The first is all around this flexibility in TCO conversation. Your budget is constrained. And this way you don't have to over purchase storage from day one, but you can easily grow as your storage needs grow, which is so crucial in these times as budgets are constrained and as you need that flexibility. But the second way is, AI is going to impact the storage industry that we play in, primary box storage. It already has with our ransomware threat detection AI enabled machine learning capabilities that they're going to touch on later today. And it will continue to be an innovative thing clients will desire to pick up. What this program allows you to do is get that modernization over time as we make those innovations in the software, in the hardware, which allows you to stay modern, but also have price protection and not have your TCO get blown out of the water, which I think is crucial as we enter this age of AI ruling off.

>> Audrey, thank you so much for coming on the program. That's awesome. Congratulations on your product success. It's positioned. Its future-ready for the rear customers. And having that agility and consumption flexibility and having visibility on the economics and costs is really going to be a big factor to helping people plan for the AI wave and AI systems that are being put together. So appreciate you. Thank you.

Audrey O’Donnell

>> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

>> Okay. Coming up next, Mike Flint from District Store Systems on the Watch Party stream coming in. Stay with us for more Watch Party action. And what's going on with customersWhat do they think? And we'll hear from them.