Okay. Well, it's three minutespast the hour, so I think we should get started.Um,welcome everyone. I hope you're having a great time at a live event. So, finally we're able to meet with people again. Um, I hope you've been learning a lot about cloud and storage and infrastructureand AI because AI has been a hot topic. Uh, and if that's not the case, well, hopefully you're in the right place because today we're going to be talking a little bit about those things. My name is Manuel Himenez and as you might have already seen on the screen, I am the product manager for IBM cloud block and file storage. Okay, no one can deny that technology is changing our lives, right? And that's exactly the conversation I was having withmy grandpa a couple years back. And he wasn't buying it really. The first thing he told me is in this world, we need less smartphones and more smart people. And while I actually agree with him at some extent, I also believe that technology is changing our lives in positive ways, is helping us get smarter.So, think about how technology has changed your life over the past 10 years.Ready? I know I didn't give you a lot of time to think about it, but let me show you a couple pictures to help with that. So the first one is the pope election back in 2008. Pretty standard picture. A lot of people gathered just waiting to hear who the new pope was going to be. And then eight years later in 2013, they snapped the exact same picture, this the exact same event, but maybe even the same people, right? But at this time you can see how technology has impacted our lives and also our culture. So remember what we used to do when we used to go to concerts and our favorite artist could play a ballad. Every everyone could just take out the lighter and light it up here. What is people doing nowadays? Well, something similar, right? just taking out their cell phones and recording some video hoping that they can capture the moment for posterity.And with the rise of cloud, the internet of things, mobile, social, the data explosion is accelerating at a crazy rate. We all are generating a crazy amount of data. Just think about how many emails have you sent today, how many pictures have you taken, how many times you've seen your cell phone. And that's not going to slow down with the data generation. We are all going to keep generating more and more data. Um, and I don't know how if you guys have heard that data is the new world and Ibelieve in that. Uh, data is a huge opportunity nowadays, but it is also becoming a huge challenge and not only at a personal level, right? uh the way that enterprises are evolving and changing every day. We're living in a digital disruption era that is making everyone accelerate. Um think about Uber. That's the world's largest taxi company, yet they own no cars. What about Airbnb, world's largest accommodation provider, yet they own no real estate. And we could go on. I mean Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, I could go on all day and they all have something in common, right? They are all using technology to their advantage so that they can provide more value to their businesses and also the way that they are consuming technology is changing. Uh you know in the past we just used to buy some gear, put it in a room next door and there you have it. Now they have a lot more options. They can still buy the gear. They can rent. They can go to a public cloud. They can do a private cloud. Uh they can do self-managed services or they could also do provider managed services. And services. And all this is giving them a lot of agility while most of the time even reducing complexity and reducing cost. So this shift from traditional on-prem infrastructure into the cloud is a key moment in the digital transformation journey fororganization which it's not just a mere migration of your data and your applications to the cloud. It's actually a par paradigm shift in the way that they are operating and innovating that's opening the doors to unlimited scalability, flexibility and agility. And what I mean by that is that cloud is not just a destination, right? It's a dynamic force that's actually propelling those enterprises uh for a future where unlimited scalability, instant access, collaboration and datadriven insights are the key pillars to success. So bottom line, it is unavoidable. everyone's business is going to progress towards a hybrid cloud at some point. So remember I was talking about data being the new goal, right? And I do believe in that. I mean your data is more important than ever. And if we're going to talk about infrastructure, the first thing we really need to talk about is data. Because no matter what news feed I look at today, the dominant theme is always data.And to put things in perspective, um, for those on the oil and gas industry, I don't know if there's anyone here that works for an oil and gas company, but a single oil well can produce up to one terabyte of data a day. And we know that those guys don't only keep one oil well, right? U, I'm going to take a guess and say that almost everyone here flew into Vegas to be at the show. Did you guys notice how many security cameras they have at the airport? Have you noticed how many cameras they have at this show, at the casino, at the hotel? And all those cameras are creating a crazy amount of data every day. What about the different industry? What about banks? There are about 1.3 million financial transactions happening every minute in the world. And all those transactions have to be recorded somewhere. And all that data has to be stored somewhere, right? And the reality is that all the data that we're generating is useless unless we can extract its value to generate more business value. Right? Andthat's why we actually need to think about future ready infrastructure. How do we extract all that value from our data? How do we actually modernize our applications and have something that supports those applications through their throughout their modernization so that we can create all that new business value out of this new world that is data. And as we think about this, there are three things that we need to talk about to address this common conversation compre comprehensively. Everything that we are trying to do in modern IT intersects with infrastructure in three key areas. The first one of them being cyber security and cyber resiliency.What am I doing to protect my data? What am I going to do if I get a cyber attack and how am I going to recover from that? Then everyone is trying to figure out how to uh get insights from their AI, right? Well, no. Everyone's trying to get insights from their data using AI. And lastly,uh they are trying also to leverage AI in what has become a really distributed and fragmented cloud landscape. and how do we instead architect towards a more controllable and more consistent hybrid cloud?So, I'm guessing everyone here heard about what happened in Vegas a month or so ago. Uh certain hotel chains I'm not going to name had some cyber security issues.And I also don't know if you guys knew that IBM puts out a report every year and that report is made by the X Force team in IBM within our security division. They are basically IBM's SWAT team that helps our customers plan and prepare for such incidents as well as to how to respond to them. Uh that report is referred to as the cost of a databach survey. It's actually you can Google it. It's very well worth a good read. And every year what I really look forward into is how much has that number gone up. And what I mean by that is that they are able to quantify how much could a cyber incident cost to an enterprise if they are victims of that. And in 2023 that number was around four and a half millions. And not only that, but they're also able to quantify how much could that enterprise have saved if they had done the proper levels of incident response planning. And that number was about a million and a half dollars. And if you think about it, for very large enterprises, the loss of business continuity and the reputational damage that an incident like this canmake to them is far more than those numbers that I just was talking about. The key message I want to emphasize here is that you have to plan,and plan. And from an infrastructure perspective, we have a specific things to plan for in order to have a cyber secure and cyber resilient infrastructure. The first thing is encryption. You have to make sure that your data is encrypted end to end. You have to make sure that you're choosing the right cryptographical standards. And you also have to ensure that you have a good strategy around your key management. I don't know how many of you here have heard about quantum computers and quantum safe algorithms. Well, quantum safe is a conversation for a future where quantum computers might be able to easily decrypt existing crypto algorithms. And the beauty about this. So first IBM research in the IBM company has already been able to invent some of those quantum safe algorithms and not only that but they have also submitted some of those algorithms to NIS so that they can be standardized across the whole industry.And the beauty of this is that we have already been able to bake some of those algorithms into our IBM cloud products. If we take a IBM cloud storage for example, you can deploy encryption for your data end today and that encryption is quantum safe.We also have created services that help you with the process of managing your keys. uh sort of a decoder ring for all your data where if an attacker some sort of a snoops your data along the way, they won't have access. They won't be able to store your data and decrypt it later.And this enables you to create aunified key orchestration services where only you as a customer arethe ones that are able to access your data. The theme here has been like let's have consistency, visibility and control that helps our customers reduce the complexity and the risk of their cloud deployments. Youalso have to ensure that you have layer security that your network your compute your storage that there's compliance across your all state and that you have a comprehensive security and this can be mitigated by using our financial services controls for cloud on which I'm going to expand in a little bit but this enables you to have and to think comprehensively through your cloud house security strategy to ensure that you are compliant and you are also secure. And lastly, with regards to planning, ensuring that you can quickly recover from a cyber attack or an incident like this. Ransomware has been a hot topic nowadays because of obvious reasons. That's key to cyber secure and cyber resilient infrastructure. Okay, I was just I just mentioned about our financial services controls and we're going to talk about the financial services industry. uh we have to say that they are the ones that are facing the most disruptive forces right from rising regulatory pressure uh to cyber breaches uh to even demand from us their customers uh toget more innovative and new products andservices. So historically they've been the ones that have had the highest cost of cyber crime like malware, botn nets, fishing, social engineering, you name it. They have a huge target on their backs. uh they also been facing a strict regulatory enforcement where if theydon't comply with the regulation they will get a fine and that has forced them to have a very strict posture withregards to security so they can avoid that errors that have happened in the past also they're facing a lot of competition nowaday companies new fintexs that have very technologically ly advanced offerings and they are now new in the field and they are competing against financial institutions and at IBM we know that uh balancing innovation and compliance and risk can be very tricky and some sometimes more fail than succeed. There have been cases of misconfigured cloud environments that lead to breaches of hundreds of million of financial records which in the end lead to millions of dollars in losses. And I can say that at IBM our CEO has been very active in conversations with other CEOs and even the White House because cyber security has become a concern for everyone. Okay. But you might be asking, yeah, but financial services and cloud, what's with that, right? And I can say that IBM cloud for financial services is the first cloud that was built in collaboration with the industry. Uh what we did is basically we collaborated with top tier banks, regulators worldwide and IBM experts uh to create a reference architecture that help financial institution mitigate the risk. Not only that, but we are also part of the financial services council which is made of security officers, heads of IT and risk leader of institutions that have already embarked on this cloud uh journeyand that the aim of this council is actually to address the need of help that financial institutions have uh with the need to reduce the risk of cloud consumption.And thenice thing about this is that I've been mentioning four financial services way too many times right now, but this is not exclusive to the financial services industry. Any industry that has very stringent security requirements can leverage this framework because most of the time if the security is good enough for financial services it will be good enough for any other industry be it healthcare or insurance whichever industry if it's good for financial services it's good for all the other industriesokay let's now move on to AI which I don't know if you've been at the show floor, everyone's talking about this right now. And when we talk about AI, when I look at the press or in conversations that I have outside of work, everyone is kind of trying to understand the commercial and the social impact of AI, right? Everyone's trying tofigure out if this promise of a new technology going to change the way that we interact withcompanies today. Is it going to change the way I do my banking? Is it going to create hyperpersonalized uh experiences for me as a consumer? And I think what'smore important for us is and I didn't mean to pass the next one but whatI think it's mo more important to us is to take a step back from all those AI models all the foundational models and such and think about what's our responsibility as an infrastructure community as the folks actually doing the IT and the applications for the cloud. How do we make those capabilities available for those that are creating the AI? How do we deploy all this in a business context that helps them add value to their organizations?And we view that responsibility in our products to address different key aspects here. So first off, infrastructure is the heart of creating AI. I think we all can agree on that, right? And the infrastructure has to be performant. And that bring us again back to data because you know all those AI model ain't going to trim themselves. You have to feed them with data and the better the data that you feed them with the better the model will become.We also have to tackle the distribution of data especially uh in this era of foundational models where all the models encapsulate uh this new world in data and we also have to ensure that we have a comprehensive security strategy. IBM's strategy in this area is Watson X. I don't know if you guys have heard about Watson X before. Um, but basically what Watson X is, it's a platform that allows you to train, tune, and deploy AI across your business, leverage leveraging critical and trusted data, whatever that data is. As you can see on the screen, this platform has three different components. Uh, first, Watsonx.ai, which is a studio that you can use to train, tune, and deploy machine learning and foundational models. Then we have what's on x.data which make it possible for enterprises to scale their AI workloads using all of their data wherever that data is. And lastly we have what's next.governance which enables you to deploy all those models in a resp responsible way and with explainable AI workflows. When I was first learning about this platform,uh the easiest way for me to understand it was if I looked at what's on X as if it was a car. And for me, what's on X.AI would be the engine to that car. What's next data would be the gasoline that you put in the car so that's feeding the engine so that engine can run. And lastly, what's next? That governancecould be all the gauges that you have in your car that are telling you if that engine is running smoothly or if there's anything that you have to pay attention to.And butyou may say, oh, but th this is just a platform, right? And we're talking infrastructure here. And from an infrastructure perspective, we have the responsibility to provide performance so that all these kind of platforms can run smoothly. And we also have to ensure that we make things securely and resilient enough. Okay. So we've covered cyber security and cyber resilience. We briefly touch upon AI. Let'snow talk a little bit about hybrid cloud.So no matter the size of your enterprise, it could be a huge multinational with presence globally or it could be a small or midsize business. Some of us have already embarked in this journey and there are some others that will need to embark later. Uh the bottom line here and what I want to emphasize here is that resistance is futile. uh everyone's business is going uh to progress towards a hybrid cloud at some point and for those of us who have embarked on this journey already. A lot of us did just because someone told us to do so, right? Uh this was the new cool thing. This was the new shiny toy, so you have to use it. And we ended up with random acts of cloud usage. uh we basically built a franken cloud and what I mean by that is that in one hand we might have adopted a cloud-based software and on the other hand we said oh but for productivity purposes I have to boot up aprivate cloud so we end up with something that in reality doesn't have a lot of common commonality or continuity and what we really need to be thinking about is we need to have intentionality when we are creating a hybrid cloud environment uh we have to build towards something where ideas capability and especially data can be brought together and add value so thatpeople that's actually creating the AI and the fun stuff in the cloud uh don't have can have consistency andthey don't have tosort of learn different cloud type ofenvironments because thatwill add complexity to their day jobs. Okay. And from an infrastructure perspective, we also have some key considerations that we have to take into account for hybrid cloud infrastructure. Uh for me, data integration come first. I mean we are at a storage and data event. So data has to come first. Uh bringing together all that data from different environments that's key. uh also having consistency, having the visibility and the control across all your resources wherever those resources are and being able to configure uh use and monitor all your resources. That's also key. Um, from a system assurance point of view, adding locations to your IT landscape, uh, sometimes or most of the time helps improve, uh, high availability, disaster recovery, backup, and other topics that are actually key to system assurance. And when we look atall that from u across IBM cloud and our services, the first thing I want to point out here is consistency.How to reach out to that sort of utopian state of having visibility and control over all of our resources from a single pane of glass. And in IBM or more specifically with IBM satelliteuh which delivers Kubernetes or Open Shift as a service, that product gives you all the things that you need to build aproductive application deployment environment. Why did I go into the next one? So, and allthose things that I were talking aboutbeing able to see all your resources and use them acrossa hybrid cloud environment from a single pane of glass. All those things can be realized today through IBM cloud satellite.I also wanted to share some stats that were gathered by theForester group uh last year around uh have people moved to the cloud already to have they adopted a hybrid cloud environment? Are they confident that they picked theright strategy? They basically asked around 500 IT leaders andsome of the things that looked pretty interesting to me was that only 11% of the respondents say that they have completed already a digital transformation journey to towards hybrid cloud and only 21% of the respondents said that they were aware and they were confident that their current infrastructure deployments were going to be able to support their workloads in the future. And now that I just mentioned the word workloads, I think there are a couple workloads we need to talk about on this session. Uh the first one being SAP on IBM cloud and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail of on SAP on IBM cloud because I think Bradley is somewhere around here. He's the expert on SAP on IBM cloud and we just had a session on it a couple hours ago. So I'm not going to go into details but there are a couple things that Ireally want to mention here. So first we base SAP on IBM cloud on three key value pillars. Uh the first one is accelerating the time to value of SAP modernization. Then we have to derisk those SAP deployments to finally empower business transformation. Uh we have a very longstand standstanding relationship with SAP of over 50 years and we have SAP enabled expertise and an enterprisegradecloud platform that allows our customers accelerate their modernization no matter where they are currently deployed. And this is reflected on an IDC study that was done uh last year that found that customers that deployed SAP on IBM cloud were able to go to production 20% faster than those customers that deployed in a different public cloud. And I know that this sounds super interesting and it's all good things, right? But to make it more interesting, let's talk about areal life use case. How is people actually leveraging all this technology, right? And we had a customer,a bank more specifically, that wanted to create a chatbot that was the first line of communication when a customer requireduh customized dev payment plan. And what they did is theyleveraged Watson assistant on IBM cloud to be that first line of communication and to pull the customers uh records from SAP. Then they fed all that information into Watson X to leverage AI models within Watson X so that Watson X could craft those uh personalized payment plans for the customers. And since all those chatbot transactions and all thecustomized dev payment plans contain a lot of personal information, there was a security concern, right? So what they did to address that is that they took all that information and stored it in IBM cloud uh storage. Uh and not only that, but they use hyperprotect crypto services. And if we go back into the conversation that we were just having a couple minutes ago, that's quantum safe crypto. Sothat assured thiscustomer that therethat addressed everyconcern around security and that's a privacy and but this is SAP but we could also talk about BMware, right? So today there's an estimate that there's 85 million workloads virtualized using VMware in the world and only 20% of those workloads are living in the cloud and the aim of IBM cloud solutions for VMware is to refocus the VMware operations and development so that the customer can focus on what matter most right what's going to bring the most value to their company. So to make things more interesting here too, let let's talk about another use case and I'm going to keep any names out of this one just to leave any bias out. Uh the only thing I can say is that this is public information available at tybm.com.So if it's interesting enough, youcan actually Google it and see who the customer is. But we had an airline, a US-based airline that wanted to create a new application for their customers. So it was a customerf facing application. The problem theywere trying to solve is in the past when there was aweather event that disrupted operations where they had to cancel flights. What a customer had to do is if they wanted more options, they would have to call theservice line or go tothe to the airport to a gate agent and say, "Hey, I want to see more options." Because the way the algorithm used to work, it could just assign the passenger to the next available flight. And what this airline wanted to do was to provide a much better user experience, right? Uh theywanted to allow the customer to have more option at their fingertips. So they had a big uh VMware footprint on premise. They were thinking about migrating all that footprint into IBM cloud infrastructure. So for this specific application, what they did is they started all the development and operations in IBM cloud instead of just taking everything on premise having to buy more gear to support that new application. And that allowed them to go into production in only four and a half months. While if they had taken the traditional approach of doing everything on their premises, that would have taken up to a year to complete. Andafter those four and a half months, they were able to put this application in production in eight major airports in the US. And while everything was already in production in those eightairports, they continued developing new features and testing that application, they continued to deploy to all the other airports where they had presence. And not only that, but while all that was happening, they also started migrating theirwebsite and other BM BMware workloads that they had on premise to IBM cloud infrastructure. So Ithink that's a really cool use case of how uh SAP and VMware can help customers uh sort of change theway that they are doing things so they can make it better and they can keep adding more value to their business. Okay, we've covered a pretty broad span of how infrastructure meets the topics of the day from cyber security uh to consistency and visibility in your hybrid cloud so that we can make all that data available to AI so that it can use it and train their models. And as we wrap up, there's still one question I like to get answered and that's why IBM cloud, right? cloud, right? cloud, right? So there are key points I want to mention here. Uh first we have proven security, compliance and governance. We are the best cloud for regulated workloads. I mean we are the cloud for the financial services. Uh also with IBM cloud satellite you can build and run anywhere and with consistency and as we were just talking about we have a lot of industry experience on mission critical workloads like SAP, VMware, Kubernetes, you name it.We also have a very open and robust ecosystem ofpartners uh from application modernization to data and AI to risk management. Uh we've partnered with the best in each area so that we can provide the most value to our customers in our IBM cloud. Extra points for those who can find NetUP should be somewhere in there. We partnered with NetUP.is a good partner for us and we're also committed to continue delivering the best technology solutions. Uh we are leader in key areas of innovation and we've put enormous effort and investment towards the technologies of the future like high performance computing as a service or quantum computing both of which are available today at IBM cloud. So today any customer can go and leverage those new technologies of the future and all the hard work that we have put into developing these innovative technologies is reflected in the way that we have developed our cloud. So with that I hope that uh this session was helpful to you guys. I hope that there's something that you can take and implement across your IT estate. Um, we have a booth down there where we have a lot of experts that are willing to engage in conversations about cloud, storage, uh, AI, SAP, we have Bradley somewhere up somewhere there. So, you're welcome to come by andhave a conversation with us and we'll be happy to help. Uh with that I'd like to thank you all for coming to this session today and I guess there's still time and we can open it up for questions if there are anyquestions any questions I well at least I hope this was hope helpful to you guys. Uh thank you all for coming and we'll see you around. Enjoy the show. Thanks.