Jim Whitehurst, IBM | IBM Think 2021
[Music] from around the globe it's thecube with digital coverage of ibm think 2021 brought to you by ibm hello everybody welcome back to ibm think 2021 the virtual edition my name is dave vellante and i'm pleased to welcome back a long time cube alum jim whitehurst who's the president of ibm and i'll call chief cultural evangelist welcome jim great to see you again great to see you dave thanks so much for having me yeah it's really our pleasure and i want to start off it's just over a year uh as president of ibm and i i wonder you know when you're a little kid or you know early in your career computer science class you ever think you'd be president of a company that was founded in 1911. i mean amazing i wonder if you could share what's the most important thing you've learned in your first year well look i mean as you said i would have never thought it yeah i first kid to have an ibm pc on the block and was always into technology but never saw myself as like you know running a big tech company so uh it is humbling um i would say that there are tons of lessons in the first year i guess the two that strike me most is one is just related to strategy and that's you know red hat and most technology companies were very customer focused but it's around you know whatever technology we're bringing to market where ibm has fundamentally transitioned and you know kind of transformed itself over time to make sure it can meet customer needs so it's sold off businesses it's bought other businesses it's created new businesses so it really shows the kind of the the focus and value on serving our customers and doing whatever it takes to do it and that's been a fundamental kind of different strategy than most companies have have had i think one of the reasons that we've been around for over a hundred years the second is you know i'm deeply into culture and i've talked a lot about the difference of running red hat that's all about innovation versus you know delta airlines where i was before which is driving efficiency ibm is both and so really trying to think through how you run an organization that needs to run the financial systems of the world at extraordinary reliability and drive road maps on things like quantum computing at the same time be able to innovate iteratively you know with our customers and in open source communities and kind of getting that balance right as a leader it's a it's you know you're kind of doing what we did at red hat and what we did at delta but kind of doing it together and i think that stretched me as a leader and kind of taught me a lot about how we're thinking about continuing to evolve the culture at ibm now of course you do this leadership series you put out things out on linkedin and you know words matter and that's what i take away from a lot of the little short hits that you do which i really appreciate my stuff that i put jim on on linkedin is just you got to invest like 15 20 minutes so i really appreciate the short hits but but you do that regular series and i'm kind of curious do you do that to reach more ibm people do you are you open source culture you're trying to help others and i'm curious as to sort of why that platform as opposed to sending around an internal thing on ibm and and i and i'm wondering if your principles and how they've evolved kind of post-pandemic well look so first off um maybe that comes from red hat but i think ibm shares that it's you know if you have something really really valuable you want to share it and look when i am out talking to our customers ceos and some of the biggest companies of the world honestly we rarely talk about technology because other people are more detailed or deep in that we primarily do talk about culture and how you think about again how do you take an organization that's been built to drive efficiency and scale on a global basis and make it able to be more nimble and more innovative and so you know and obviously hopefully that's all with ibm and red hat technologies but ultimately most of my conversations at a senior leadership level are about culture and leadership style to drive that and so if that's valuable for ceos of some of the world's largest companies it's valuable to leaders you know kind of across all spectrums all sizes and so i think that linkedin is a good way to kind of take some of those messages uh and make sure we're able to share those much more broadly so certainly i spent more time talking about it inside of ibm and i spent a lot of time with our clients talking about it but i think those uh many of the lessons are uh applicable more broadly and so why not share them and linkedin is a great platform to be able to do that how about you how have your principles have your principles sort of changed and how they've evolved post-pandemic well i think a couple things so one is the pandemic kind of forces you to get more precise about it and what i mean by that is you know so much of leadership is about building credibility and trust and influence and you know when you're seeing someone in 3d live you know visual cues can kind of mean a lot in the water cooler conversations or you know who you run into in the hall can all help kind of create that level of trust and um but you can't do that in 2d you know as great as zoom and other platforms are you just can't quite do it and so you have to be much more thoughtful in how you're creating opportunities to kind of create trust so i'd say i've gotten more surgical in thinking about kind of what those elements of leadership are that do that i think the second thing i've really learned at ibm again is back to this you know we have to be able to do both kind of drive kind of a future state in a known world as well as i call it seek a future state in an unknown world so you know driving a road map for quantum computing takes a number of different technologies coming together in one year and two years and five years and that really does have to be pre-planned which is very very different than i'll call the iterative innovation approach that you know we use at red hat and open source communities and working with our clients and we have to do both and so as a leader you really have to understand the problem you're trying to solve and there and apply slightly different kind of leadership tactics against that so when you're executing a known versus you are trying to create something in an unknown does require different approaches and we have to do both in ibm and i think that's the struggle a lot of companies have every company needs to do that you know if you're delta airlines you don't want anybody innovating on the safety procedures before your flight yet you want a lot of innovation happening on your website and your mobile app so how do you bring those together and as a leader you can have a common set of values but recognize you have to bring different tools to the table depending on the context in which you're leading and so i've learned a lot more and gotten a lot crisper with that since being at ibm interesting i mean look at the pandemic we all know it's been terrible but but one of the the upshots has been we we had a glimpse of the future sort of shoved into a forced march of digital in in 2020 um and and and so you know obviously the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last 10 years and one of the things we've been talking about is ecosystems and partnerships and the power and leverage that you can get from those and arvin has said you know laid it out we are returning to growth company and so i wonder if you could talk to how partnerships and ecosystems play into that return to growth for ibm well you know first off a key part of our strategy we talked about hybrid cloud and ai it's not just about hey a platform that runs across you know all the different deployment models is convenient it's also because innovation is coming from so many sources today it's coming from you know a byproduct from the web 2.0 companies it's coming from open source it's coming from an explosion of startups because of the amount of capital in venture capital it's coming from traditional software companies it's coming from our clients who are participating in open source and so you have so many sources of innovation much of what we're doing is landing a platform that allows you to consume innovation safely and reliably from wherever it's coming from so core part of a platform by definition is the ecosystem around it you know having a platform that runs everywhere is great but if you don't have any applications that run on it you know who cares and so ecosystem and partners have always been important to ibm but for this strategy of this horizontal platform-oriented strategy it is critical to our success because much of the platform is the ecosystem and so you know we've already talked about you know investing a billion dollars in that ecosystem to get isvs and other partners on our platform again to ultimately kind of create that kind of horizontal layer where you know i can run anything that i want to on it and i can run that anywhere i want to and so the two sides of that so all the innovation happening on top and making sure it runs everywhere is what really unlocks the freedom of choice that reduces friction to innovation which allows everybody in the ecosystem from our clients to isvs to hardware partners to innovate more quickly and that's what we really see is the benefit of our platform it's not a horizontal stovepipe come innovate in this one place it's recognizing innovations happening so many places and the only way we're going to be able to allow people to ingest that is to have a horizontal platform that everyone's participating in which is why partners and ecosystem are so important not only to the success of our platform but to the let's say success of this next generation of computing these horizontal fabrics that require an ecosystem kind of built around them i think that's an important nuance that maybe people don't understand that that yes you have a platform obviously openshift is a linchpin but it's an enabler for people to build other platforms it's not the be all end-all platform that's sort of ultimately becomes you know another island and so that that is a key part of the growth strategy and presumably expands your total available market oh absolutely and so this is the key is you know we can talk about great ibm technologies you know we're doing amazing things in security and you know ai and you know natural language processing and all these other areas but the platform is a recognition that we're not going to do everything for everybody anymore there's just the democratization of technology means that there is so many sources of innovation and so first and foremost we have to land a platform so you can consume anything from anywhere and then of course we'll drive our own pace of innovation both in you know hardware and then software um around that platform but we are just a player against uh on that platform where which we're really instantiating for really anybody to be able to reach customers or customers to reach you know sources of innovation i know sustainability is a passion of yours and it's obviously a hot topic right now i oftentimes i joke tongue-in-cheek milton friedman's rolling over in his grave with all this esg talk and i know you just posted recently on linkedin and of course i went right down to kavanaugh because my premise is not only is sustainability the right thing to do it's also good business but i wonder if you could you know give us your perspectives on this yeah well so first off i mean as a large global citizen as ibm i think this is an important role that we play and look this isn't new to ibm we came out with our first statements around environment in 1970 we put out our first report that's become our environmental impact report in 1990 uh you know we've been talking about climate since the early 2000s so we've been involved in this for a long long time um because i do think it's important broadly but there's also a specific role i think ibm can play beyond you know just our own individual actions to reduce our own footprint yeah we because of some of the extraordinary technologies that ibm is has worked on in the years especially around semiconductors we have just a an amazing amount of technology expertise intellectual property around material science and so you know just a couple examples of those uh that relate to the environment we we in doing some other work realized that we had a way to be able to recycle p-e-t plastic which is a real problem because so many clothes and other things are now made out of p-e-t and it's really hard to recycle but a byproduct of other work we're doing we realized we could do that and so we formed a jv and we're funding that to you know not profit from it but to make sure that much more of the world's pet is recycled or the work that we're doing on batteries we're you know using ocean water instead of rare earth minerals uh to make batteries uh that uh not only are cleaner but last longer those are kind of byproducts of our kind of core business but areas that you know we can see the benefits of innovation and material science being able to impact the world i am hopeful that we'll be able to play a role with all of that in in clear air carbon capture i mean that's still far further away but i do think uh ibm has a unique role that we can play because of our deep expertise in again material science quantum computing and modeling um that put us in a unique position to have a major impact on the world i wonder if we could talk a little bit about sort of ibm and it's in its technology bets and i've made the point a number of years you know times in my writing that ibm's r d spend has been about pretty constant about six billion dollars a year but as ibm has jettisoned certain businesses got out of the x86 you know server business it got you know got out of the foundry business with microelectronics now it's spinning out newco what happens the effect is that r d as a percent of revenue goes way way up and my premise has always been that allows ibm to be more focused so whether it's hybrid cloud ai quantum edge where are you placing your technology bets and and maybe give us a sense of how you rank them some of your favorites yeah so that's exactly right i mean we are one of the few places that still invest a massive amount in r d especially in in fundamental research and so you know i've got to break down kind of the the core area so first off what i'd say is part of the hybrid cloud platform is recognizing we don't need to do everything for everyone there is great you know open source technology they're great other vendors that are doing things um that we can enable our our customers to access via the platform so you know we're not trying to do everything for everybody uh in the way maybe you know 40 years ago we did because we understand there's so much great other technology out there that we're going to make sure that we expose so we're investing in areas where we think we can uniquely add value that need to happen that others aren't doing um so ai let me take that as an example there's tremendous work happening in machine learning you know that we see every day because of you know facebook and people trying to identify cats and so you know when you trivialize it there's a phenomenal work happening there there's a lot less work being done on in ai on things where you have a lot less data or areas where you need explainable unbiased ai and the problem with machine learning engines is you know they're not auditable by definition it's kind of a black box and so we do a lot of work in areas like that we do a lot of work in natural language processing so you know we've had more of a as a kind of publicity kind of push the technology something called project debater where you know watson can debate kind of champion debaters that was mainly to make sure we can understand language and context um which allows for being able to better handle call centers in areas like that allows us to understand source code which helps us think about how you migrate applications from you know on-premise to the cloud so we have a bunch of ai things that we are doing and is a core focus of what we're doing but specifically we're investing in areas like anti-bias auditability natural language processing areas where others aren't uh which is unique and we can bring those capabilities together with what others are doing security obviously huge huge area where you know we've invested in you know quantum safe encryption we've invested in confidential computing in other words even in compute mode your data is uh is encrypted um so you can keep your own keys so not not even we on our cloud can see your data so a lot of investments happening around security and that's going to continue to be an area as we know that's going to get more and more and more scrutiny so heavy heavy focus there heavily focused on technologies that help you kind of modernize your infrastructure so automation tools you know integration tools and areas around that so on the software side those are kind of the main areas when you look on the hardware side obviously quantum uh is a significant area um where we have a leadership position we continue to drive but even semiconductor research uh in uh kind of process um technology so you know we announced something with intel to uh work with them to bring some of our process technologies as we kind of go from seven nanometer to five to two to ultimately one you know that set of technologies uh is an area where we have a real leadership position and you will continue to work with now intel to continue to work with others to to drive that forward um so a whole bunch of areas both on the hardware and the software side that we continue to make progress on yeah the silicon piece is interesting we saw that with arvind as part of the intel announcements that we thought originally oh maybe this is just about quantum but it's really much more than that you mentioned the process we dug into it and we realized wow we said power 10 actually has the highest performance and because of the way in which you are not to geek out but you disaggregate memory and pat gelsinger talked about system on a package it turns out folks that ibm is actually the leader in that type of capability now the way that systems on chips use memory is very inefficient but ibm has actually invented some techniques to make that much more efficient that sort of the future of semiconductors and the reason why we spend so much time thinking about it is because it's of national interest you know there's a huge chip shortage which doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon so that's a critical part of you know national competitiveness and technology competitiveness going forward well and the other interesting part about that you talked about power 10 you know going back to the hybrid cloud platform that we talked about it's not just about running applications across wherever you want to run them it also abstracts the chip architecture so all of a sudden whether it's on the mainframe it's on power it's on arm it's on x86 and a whole bunch of other technologies that might get developed we're making it much easier to kind of consume that specialization or variety at the hardware level recognize this moore's law runs its course there's no longer this inevitability of everything's just going to go to x86 i think we are going to see more variety because we're going to have needs not in the factory floor or in the automobile or with you know massive containers applications where you're going to need whether it's kind of shared memory or different architectures all the way out to kind of low battery uh consumption you know and that whole kind of breadth and our hybrid cloud platform enables that variability and then ibm obviously has great technology to enable kind of building unique capability and hardware so we kind of play on both sides of it both kind of developing great technologies but then making it really easy for developers to consume and use those specialized features i'm glad you brought that up jim you mentioned moore's law because we all talk about how moore's law is waning and it's quote-unquote dead but the reality is is the outcome of moore's law which is the doubling of performance every two years is actually accelerating because of the combinatorial factors of cpus and gpus and npus and accelerators and dsps if you add all those up and actually we're actually actually quadrupling every two years so we have more processing power at much lower cost because of the volumes that you're seeing on things like arm so it's actually a very exciting time we're entering an era that you know we really it's hard to get your mind around sometimes so so my question is what should we how should we think about the future uh uh state of ibm what does that look like well look you know so first off um the thing that i found extraordinary about ibm kind of having been there now just a little over a year as an employee a couple years i guess is when this red hat was was acquired is it is unique in fundamentally changing again who we are to kind of meet the needs going forward and if you think about the needs and technology recognize it was only like 20 years ago that nicholas carr wrote his famous article it doesn't matter it's about back office you know and in that world ibm was really really effective at building and running i.t systems for our clients right we'd come in we would just kind of do everything for uh for them today you know technology is at the forefront of developing or building competitive advantage for almost any business and so nobody wants to kind of hand the keys you know so we no longer necessarily doing things for our clients we're doing things with our clients so there's a whole set of work that we talked about about how we engage with our clients how we're much more collaborative and co-creative in our whole garage model to help build the capability to innovate you know kind of with our clients is a key part of what we're doing we'll continue to drive you know core technologies forward like quantum and and kind of key areas that require billions of dollars of research that frankly no one else is willing to do and then we bring it all together with this hybrid cloud platform where we recognize it's no longer about us do it at all for you anymore we're going to do the things where we can uniquely add value but then provide it all on a platform which allow you to consume from wherever however you want to in a safe secure reliable way so as we watch this next generation of computing unfold cloud shouldn't end up being a bunch of vertical stove pipes it truly needs to be kind of a horizontal platform that allows you to run any application anywhere in a safe secure reliable way and our architecture helps do that so it's no longer hey we'll do everything for you it's we can do things uniquely um on a platform and work with you to be able to help you kind of create your own pace of innovation your own sources of advantage and so that's the broad kind of uh direction that we're going again as enterprises move from consuming technology to be more efficient to driving advantage with it they need partners who understand that focused on their success and can innovate with them and that's really where we're going with our technology with our services capability and kind of our our approach to how we work with our clients yeah jim you just laid out the holy grail of computing in the next in the coming decade and with ibm's acquisition of red hat and it really enables that that vision and clearly the company is is one of the top few that are in a position to do that jim whitehurst thanks so much for coming back in the cube really appreciate your time thanks for having me it's great to chat all right and thank you for watching keep it right there for more content of the cube's coverage of ibm think 2021 the virtual edition be right back [Music] [Music] daddy you
2021-05-17 01:42
