Exclusive Coverage: theCUBE at IBM Think | Bill Lobig & Ajay Patel

Clips
News
More from Exclusive Coverage: theCUBE at IBM Think

Ajay Patel

General Manager

Apptio/IBM

William Lobig

VP & GM, In-Vehicle Operating System and Edge

IBM

IBM’s generative AI-powered application automation tool Concert is now generally available

IBM Corp. today announced the general availability of a new tool that’s designed to address application sprawl and boost the efficiency of business operations.It’s called IBM Concert, and it’s said to use generative artificial intelligence to streamline the way in which users can control how applications work, provide insights into connected apps and toolsets, and simplify compliance processes.The company unveiled IBM Concert at its annual IBM Think 2024 conference, which took place in Boston last month

IBM looks to save budgets with automation platform

With groundbreaking technology such as artificial intelligence and quantum emerging over the past couple years, one recurring question is how to afford it. IBM Corp. is addressing that issue head on with a new product lineup that keeps costs low.The company’s recent announcements include IBM Concert, an automation platform that helps users manage their AI applications, as well as other AI-powered automation tools aimed at reducing company spending.Ajay Patel and Bill Lobig of IBM discuss IBM’s new emphasis on financial operations practices in a conversation with theCUBE.“Cost is becoming a major constraint

play_circle_outline Importance of cost management in the era of public cloud

play_circle_outline Overview of IBM Concert as a management platform for automation

Info

Bill Lobig & Ajay Patel | IBM

Ajay Patel

General Manager Apptio/IBM

William Lobig

VP & GM, In-Vehicle Operating System and Edge IBM

>> Welcome back to Boston at IBM Think 2024. We're here inside the IBM Cube, the SiliconANGLE Cube, really excited to have a discussion about IBM automation. So much going on in that space. Ajay Patel is here. He is the General Manager of Apptio IBM, and Bill Lobig, the Vice President of Product Management for IBM Automation. Guys, thanks for coming inside the Cube.

Ajay Patel

>> Thanks.

William Lobig

>> Thanks, Dave.

Ajay Patel

>> Appreciate it.

>> Thanks for having us. Thanks for building this set. Okay. A lot of confusion out there. What is inside IBM's automation portfolio, Bill? Can you just break it down for us?

William Lobig

>> Yeah. So IBM automation is a set of technologies and solutions that help you do several things, optimize the value you get from your IT investments, and then manage the performance and health of those investments over time, across networking, IT operations, cost value management, and it's all optimized for IBM's HyperCloud strategy.

>> So the whole FinOps topic took off a couple of years ago. What catalyzed that? Was it just people realizing, "Well, maybe we over-rotated on cloud or we can't predict the cost," or maybe it was a little economic pressure? Why?

Ajay Patel

>> I think if you see the last couple of years with COVID, the momentum of public cloud just picked up.

>> Right.

Ajay Patel

>> But along with that, cost picked up.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

Ajay Patel

>> Now we're in that mode where cost is becoming a major constraint. IT budgets are competing for AI projects and everything else for keeping the lights on. And so the practice by how you get control of your costs is becoming critical. And so FinOps almost has a grassroots effort. Apptio was one of the founding members of FinOps. I don't know if you knew that. GR was part of the cloud ability team that started this-

>> I did not know that actually.

Ajay Patel

>> Yeah. So over the years, what's happened is it's really become a community effort. Now almost, I think 47 of the 50 Fortune 50 are on the FinOps community, and we have a groundswell of practitioners who are looking to see how do we bring the financial discipline to how do you manage costs? How do you move from being an esoteric approach to making it pervasive for developers to participate so that there are cost aware in all the businesses.

>> So you're talking about operationalizing it essentially?

Ajay Patel

>> Exactly.

>> And then where does watsonx fit into this? Because a lot of people say, "Well, here's an AI going to do that." Well, AI is just... It seems like magic, but it's not that easy.

William Lobig

>> I think we're a great example of an applied AI use case. We're applying AI to our products to make them better. I give you a few quick examples, but we also see AI and the investments in it as a natural extension of what we do today, which is we allow you to map the ROI and the value of your IT spend. And AI is just another one of those spends. So we see great opportunity there to bring App TCO and the cost and value of AI. If you look at how much money is being spent, the valuation of Nvidia and et cetera, it's not entirely obvious to me what the ROI that's being seen on the other end of that is, and that's what we do. We're also leveraging AI to make it easier to interact with our tools. You can ask questions versus having to look things up, and generally improve the experience and make it more frictionless.

>> Well, you mentioned that, there are some similar patterns emerging in the AI wave, the cloud wave. We lived through the dot-com. There's a lot of differences, but there are some similarities in that you have this small insulated ecosystem buying GPUs that people spending money to train those GPUs is very circular. And then there's some singles being hit in the enterprise AI. Now, big differences too. The CapEx is coming off the balance sheet, not from debt, from places like Enron and Global Crossing, but we keep an eye on that. But can you address the TAM for the space?

Ajay Patel

>> We often get categorized into what we call the ITOM market, IT operations management market. That market's very broad, but in specific, when I call the service addressable market that we focus on, we focus on three distinct market segments. IT financial management, how are you managing your technology cost and spending? Doesn't matter where. Whether it's people, resources, infrastructure, applications, software from IBM and others. Second one is the whole cloud cost, infrastructure now being bought through the cloud, often called cloud cost management, a CCMO as a market. And third one is observability. How do you observe and optimize what's going on in the infrastructure and the application? Those are three markets we play in. It is a multi-billion dollar market, anywhere from $10 billion to $12 billion as you and I were talking about earlier.

>> Yeah. So I wonder if you could talk about IBM Concert a little bit? I've been reading about that announcement. It looks like pretty comprehensive. Why don't you set it up? What is it? And then I have another follow-up.

Ajay Patel

>> So if you think about IBM, we're a platform company. And you know us for hybrid cloud and open shift is the solution for hybrid cloud. When you think about AI, you have watsonx. Given the breadth of the automation portfolio and the complexity and how they all need to come together and break the silos, it was important for us to start painting a vision and a brand that brought all our capabilities together. So the very top, think of Concert as the third platform for automation that IBM's building. Now, let's unpack that. What does that mean? It doesn't mean we're going to now go build and build this unified to singular platform and a capital P platform. We're going to take best-of-breed solutions in the three markets I talked about, but bring them together using an insights and action framework, using watsonx as the underlying GenAI technology to stitch together these three domains for use cases where we provide rich context for specific use cases for specific users, where you're a finance user, you're a CIO, you're a DevOps engineer, an SRE or an operator, you have specific use cases you're trying to solve for. Each of the solutions republishes data to an insights and an AI platform, but it's also a customer off of it as well.

>> Yes.

Ajay Patel

>> And the piece that stitches it all together is Concert. So Concert is the next generation management platform that brings best-of-breed solutions that's AI enabled and has an AI enabled action framework.

>> So is Concert the umbrella and something like Cloud Paks for AI ops ?

Ajay Patel

>> Those just fit into capabilities into the Concert solution.

>> I see.

William Lobig

>> Yes. It brings it all together. And the way I also think about it is applications are supported by many tools. No single tool supports an application. And how do you break down the barriers? And as Ajay mentioned, the silos to get contextual insights and actions at an application centric level.

>> Right.

William Lobig

>> And do that in a platform in a cohesive way. That's what we're focused on. That's what Concert is.

>> Is there a use case in your world around application rationalization? There's been a huge explosion of applications. And we go through these cycles, Y2K, explosion of apps, and then post-9/11, big rationalization exercise, financial crisis, big opportunity. COVID, you didn't have time because you were-

Ajay Patel

>> You were just going to shift it quickly.

>> You were forced to digital, right? So now you had more apps supporting remote workers. Does AI provide an opportunity to do a portfolio rationalization and do you guys fit in that?

Ajay Patel

>> Absolutely. So if you start at the very top, the first question I often ask a CIO is, "Do you know where your money is going?"

>> Fair question.

Ajay Patel

>> So the first question is, "How do I quickly discover where all my money is being spent and for what tools portfolio?" We call it portfolio management. So AI enables you to do automated discovery correlation because just knowing where you're spending the money, but how do you link it to the applications and the business value generated? How do you make decisions on kill this app, invest more in this app? This is the kind of stuff AI will enable, allow you to start understand your complex environment, link it to business value, start to decision provide you insights on how do you stack up against your competitors? Where are opportunities for scale? Where should you invest? What's the ROI or TCO for the solution? We're using GenAI and AI capability to bring that intelligence so you can start making those good business decisions.

>> So let's unpack that because I understand how you can provide visibility on the application estate, who's using what? How it ties the business process, which is critical, you've got IT infrastructure, you've got the apps on top, you got business process, you have multiple processes using apps and a lot of dependencies. How do you connect it to value? Do you look at usage? This gets very political.

Ajay Patel

>> 100%.

>> There's a P&L manager that says, "That's my app," even though there's only five people using it, and the CIO gets stuck paying for it. How do you rationalize that?

Ajay Patel

>> I think with these three basic steps we start with. Starts with just cost transparency. Typical basic is show back, charge back. I start sending you a bill. You see the bill and you go, "Why am I paying so much?" That starts the conversation about what is driving that bill? What applications are driving the bill? What are the results of it? And we continue to unpack this so you can start to have a dialogue with business because business is getting the value, IT is getting the bill. How are you starting to bring those two together with a financial savviness that a business needs to deliver value? So we're starting to provide a data-driven conversation that's linked to business value.

>> Is it a show back or a chargeback or depends?

Ajay Patel

>> It's usually starts from show back but eventually goes to unit economics. What's it costing me to serve that customer? I'll take my own example, right? Let's say I acquire you as a customer and you just continue to pay me $50,000 a year, but it cost me $50,000 to acquire you and cost me another $20,000 to support you. You're not a good customer. How do I know that? How do I get to economics so that I can serve you for cheap and maybe I can retain you and you're profitable? So we're starting to see product profitability. These are business conversations. Nowhere did I talk about technology or infrastructure or cloud. I started talking about what are my customers? Who are my customers? What's the right customer to service? At what unit economics, what unit costs? And we work with the business to define those metrics.

>> This is Barry Powell. What I used to do when I had a CIO consultant, we try to get everybody in the room-

Ajay Patel

>> Right.

>> And you would ask them questions that they really didn't know the answer to.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

>> They certainly didn't know the total cost of ownership and how to apply it. And they really didn't know how those apps supported revenue.

Ajay Patel

>> That's right.

>> And it was always a big argument of P&L managers and, "Go ahead, IT. You pay for it." You've streamlined that whole process.

Ajay Patel

>> Democratizing that information.

>> Yeah, democratizing is a good word because now you're taking the politics out of it.

Ajay Patel

>> Correct.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

>> And then if you have to, you can escalate it with data.

Ajay Patel

>> Correct.

>> And then everybody says, "Okay, let's calm down and make good business decisions for the company."

Ajay Patel

>> But the unique part about us is with the IBM acquisition and us coming together, we would as Apptio come and tell you, "Here's some interesting insights. Go figure out what to do about it." Now we can automate those actions.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

Ajay Patel

>> Right? We can close the loop, see whether the results actually happen. Many of my customers use me for budgeting and tracking and forecasting. How many of us said, "We'll move to the cloud, we'll save money?" 12 months in, our bills have gone up, nothing's been saved. So how do I provide visibility of is it really going as planned?

>> Or what value did I get out of that?

Ajay Patel

>> Or what value did I get out of it?

>> Does it warrant that ?

Ajay Patel

>> Exactly. And so that's the kind of conversation we're driving, which is why becoming so strategically important, both in terms of insight, but also how do we automate the actions to drive the savings you need?

>> Let's close with how you guys see the future of IT automation, specifically as it relates to GenAI. Bill, you start.

William Lobig

>> My vision for what we're doing to bring Apptio and IBM technology together is to empower the IT organization, the SREs, the DevOps, to be responsible stewards of the budgets that are empowered upon them and demonstrate how efficiently and productively they're doing that while maintaining the business KPIs and performance and SLAs that they're bestowed with. I like to say that if IT's prime objective was to save costs, they would just turn everything off. That's ridiculous.

Ajay Patel

>> It's easy. Kill the business.

William Lobig

>> Exactly. So their prime objective is to provide business applications to perform and generate this revenue. And by bringing Apptio together with the other technologies we have, powered by Concert, GenAI to bring that insights, it'll raise a level of awareness and all the constituents and help it build better outcomes for our customers.

>> We were laughing about, that was one of the tricks we used to use is what happens if the application gets shut down?

Ajay Patel

>> Nobody screams .

>> Right, exactly. Nobody said, "Well, nothing ."

William Lobig

>> That's one way to try it.

>> "Do something else. It's of equal value." All right. Ajay, bring us home.

Ajay Patel

>> So I would walk you with two or three key points. The world is moving to more real-time.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

Ajay Patel

>> The world is moving away from silos to continuous delivery. And in this world of continuous delivery, real-time, the world is proactive in automation. You cannot simply throw people at this problem. It's moving at the speed which you cannot control it. So we see a world, we need a management platform that's data-driven, that provides the business what they need, allows engineering to deliver effectiveness, control their cost, and operator proactively respond to incidents. All built around our AI-driven insight platform that uniquely delivers value to our customers.

>> I love that vision because we see the future of applications as intelligent applications in real-time.

Ajay Patel

>> Correct.

>> So many use cases in things like supply chains and logistics and many more, bringing transactions and analytics together. So you need that kind of IT automation underneath. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

William Lobig

>> Thanks, Dave.

>> Really appreciate your time.

Ajay Patel

>> Great.

>> Okay. And thank you for watching this special CUBE presentation, IBM Think 2024 from Boston. We'll be right back. This is Dave Vellante.

Bill Lobig & Ajay Patel | IBM

Ajay Patel

>> Thanks.

William Lobig

>> Thanks, Dave.

Ajay Patel

>> Appreciate it.

>> Thanks for having us. Thanks for building this set. Okay. A lot of confusion out there. What is inside IBM's automation portfolio, Bill? Can you just break it down for us?

William Lobig

Ajay Patel

>> I think if you see the last couple of years with COVID, the momentum of public cloud just picked up.

>> Right.

Ajay Patel

>> But along with that, cost picked up.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

Ajay Patel

>> I did not know that actually.

Ajay Patel

>> So you're talking about operationalizing it essentially?

Ajay Patel

>> Exactly.

>> And then where does watsonx fit into this? Because a lot of people say, "Well, here's an AI going to do that." Well, AI is just... It seems like magic, but it's not that easy.

William Lobig

Ajay Patel

>> Yes.

Ajay Patel

>> So is Concert the umbrella and something like Cloud Paks for AI ops ?

Ajay Patel

>> Those just fit into capabilities into the Concert solution.

>> I see.

William Lobig

>> Right.

William Lobig

>> And do that in a platform in a cohesive way. That's what we're focused on. That's what Concert is.

Ajay Patel

>> You were just going to shift it quickly.

>> You were forced to digital, right? So now you had more apps supporting remote workers. Does AI provide an opportunity to do a portfolio rationalization and do you guys fit in that?

Ajay Patel

>> Absolutely. So if you start at the very top, the first question I often ask a CIO is, "Do you know where your money is going?"

>> Fair question.

Ajay Patel

>> 100%.

>> There's a P&L manager that says, "That's my app," even though there's only five people using it, and the CIO gets stuck paying for it. How do you rationalize that?

Ajay Patel

>> Is it a show back or a chargeback or depends?

Ajay Patel

>> This is Barry Powell. What I used to do when I had a CIO consultant, we try to get everybody in the room-

Ajay Patel

>> Right.

>> And you would ask them questions that they really didn't know the answer to.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

>> They certainly didn't know the total cost of ownership and how to apply it. And they really didn't know how those apps supported revenue.

Ajay Patel

>> That's right.

>> And it was always a big argument of P&L managers and, "Go ahead, IT. You pay for it." You've streamlined that whole process.

Ajay Patel

>> Democratizing that information.

>> Yeah, democratizing is a good word because now you're taking the politics out of it.

Ajay Patel

>> Correct.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

>> And then if you have to, you can escalate it with data.

Ajay Patel

>> Correct.

>> And then everybody says, "Okay, let's calm down and make good business decisions for the company."

Ajay Patel

William Lobig

>> Yes.

Ajay Patel

>> Or what value did I get out of that?

Ajay Patel

>> Or what value did I get out of it?

>> Does it warrant that ?

Ajay Patel

>> Let's close with how you guys see the future of IT automation, specifically as it relates to GenAI. Bill, you start.

William Lobig

Ajay Patel

>> It's easy. Kill the business.

William Lobig

>> We were laughing about, that was one of the tricks we used to use is what happens if the application gets shut down?

Ajay Patel

>> Nobody screams .

>> Right, exactly. Nobody said, "Well, nothing ."

William Lobig

>> That's one way to try it.

>> "Do something else. It's of equal value." All right. Ajay, bring us home.

Ajay Patel

>> So I would walk you with two or three key points. The world is moving to more real-time.

William Lobig

>> Yes.

Ajay Patel

>> I love that vision because we see the future of applications as intelligent applications in real-time.

Ajay Patel

>> Correct.

William Lobig

>> Thanks, Dave.

>> Really appreciate your time.

Ajay Patel

>> Great.

>> Okay. And thank you for watching this special CUBE presentation, IBM Think 2024 from Boston. We'll be right back. This is Dave Vellante.