Jerry Cuomo, IBM | IBM Pulse 2014
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 25/02/2014

Jerry Cuomo, WebSphere, IBM, at IBM Pulse 2014 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante 

Jerry Cuomo, VP & WebSphere CTO with IBM, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE at IBM Pulse Conference in Las Vegas, to talk about Big Data, cloud and the focus on big applications.

The interview kicked off with a couple of references on the live coding demo, which took place that same day. For the first time in the history of IBM conferences, on day one, Jeff Lawson (CEO of Twilio) built an app that allowed placing a call, a demo performed in front of 11,000 people.

As Vellante noted, using BlueMix, “it took less than 10 minutes to write an app and push it live,” allowing for a text message to be sent to Robert LeBlanc (SVP Software and Cloud Solutions).

“The tooling and the platforms are maturing faster than in the past,” thinks Furrier. “What’s going on with BlueMix in this cloud market for developers?”

“I think it’s starting with the notion of ‘lean,’ and lean is about being fast,” reckons Cuomo. “There’s another notion of ‘MVP’ (minimal, viable, product). The V part (viable) does not just mean being fast; it means fast and awesome. But viable and awesome is about innovation. Environments like blueMix allow a person with an idea to fulfill it without stuff getting in the way. It allows developers to focus on the business value,” said Cuomo. “BlueMix is a platform to actually unleash innovation and leverage the cloud and the API economy.”
No room for lock-ins


Furrier then directed the discussion towards open source trends, which he credits with finding the right balance for all this innovation. As he put it, it’s creating the perfect environment for the best app to win.

“There’s no room for lock-in,” agreed Cuomo. “The first few years of the cloud were focused on ‘getting there’. Nowadays, with Cloud Foundry, is all about building around an open technology. The customers have freedom of choice.”

“Walk us through the history of the WebSphere,” requested Furrier.

“What WebSphere is to web, BlueMix is to cloud. It’s like our world of web and cloud is coming together in a pretty interesting way. For WebSphere we have the community around JEE, for cloud and BlueMix that community is around Cloud Foundry,” said Cuomo.

Reminiscing about computing in the ‘old days’, Furrier asked Cuomo what the new CS model was, in his opinion.

Cuomo mentioned “distributed computing and SOA (service-oriented architecture).”

“The new phrase is API economy. API is no longer a technical representation but a business representation,” believes Cuomo. “It’s about your company’s public persona.”

Citing a recent statistic, Cuomo relayed that most mobile applications today use anywhere from 5 to 12 third party APIs. “Think about the promise of SOA,” he prompted: “building applications and composition.”

“This is where the lean comes back, because now you are renting five to 12 things, that allows you to focus on how to differentiate and how to be awesome,” added Cuomo.

Furrier agreed that Web Servers always represented a great vision. SOA and cloud just amplifies that vision both economic wise and speed wise. “How does that change your view of the value, the game and the paradigm of going forward?” he asked.

“Cloud really plays into the whole notion of agile,” thinks Cuomo. “It allows you to focus on the application.”

“If you are the type of enterprise that typically hangs around companies like IBM,” explains Cuomo, “your profile is that you have 50+ employees, and the first thing that you’re going to come to grips with is ‘I’m in the cloud, but my stuff isn’t’. Your stuff is all over the place. Some of it is back home, some is behind an enterprise firewall, some of it is in SalesForce and all these other clouds.”
Seamless integration across the clouds


“Hybrid integration is one of the first challenges,” warns Cuomo. “Computer science has a significantly distributed role right now.”

Cuomo reiterated that the whole focus of the current IBM Pulse conference is the cloud integration.

As for the data economy that Furrier asked about, “it is everything from my car to the internet of things. We talked about mobile driving cloud and the data economy. The beautiful thing about them is that, for the first time, with distributed data, we don’t have to discriminate the data,” said Cuomo.


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