ESG's Christophe Bertrand discusses Data Protection topics with IBM's Sam Werner at IBM Think 2019.
Read the related ESG Blog: Talking Data Protection with IBM’s Sam Werner
Sam: So, I'm responsible for the storage software portfolio, as my title suggests, everything from software to find storage to data protection and storage management software.
And in my role, I'm responsible for our product strategies and roadmaps. I spend a ton of time with customers understanding their challenges around storage.
Christophe: Excellent. So, that's exactly what I wanted to talk about. So, what do you see as the next big thing in data protection or data management?
Sam: It's a very good question. In fact, data protection is going through a bit of a renaissance right now and it's not surprising with the amount of data growth that we've seen in the world. You know, you have much larger databases, recovering them takes a lot longer. I talk to customers who say it's taken them days to recover when there's been a problem. There's also... seems to be an increase in threats to data. We've seen a lot of very public cases of things like ransomware.
So, customers are looking to take a different approach which is really snapshot driven so we're leaning more towards operational recovery focus. There's another big piece of that which is around analytics and AI they want to build and we use that data for other purposes to gain insights from it and unlock value.
Christophe: That's exactly what we're looking at also at ESG. We call it data intelligence where you provide context and content to traditional data protection workloads to make their data more valuable and focus on business outcomes. What has been the highlight so far for you at Think 2019?
Sam: Well, I will tell you, I went to Ginni's keynote yesterday and I thought there were three messages I took away from it that were very powerful to me and I'm very excited about where we're going as a company. Number one, our true hybrid multi-cloud strategy, being able to run IBM everywhere. And number two, our focus on AI and real outcomes for industries. And number three, trust, and actually, that was the most important one to me, that IBM wants to be a company of good tech that you can trust with your biggest problems.
Sam: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time and thank you, everyone, for joining us.
