Ed Walsh, IBM | IBM Think 2020
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 05/05/2020

Ed Walsh, General Manage Storage, IBM sits down with Dave Vellante for IBM Think 2020.

#Think2020 #theCUBE

https://siliconangle.com/2020/05/05/ibm-leads-the-way-with-storage-and-z-hardware-despite-pandemic-challenges-think2020/

IBM leads the way with storage and Z hardware despite pandemic challenges

Leadership within a large enterprise is never easy, but in the midst of a global pandemic, it has been much more challenging. Yet IBM has faced these challenges with help from leaders such as Ed Walsh (pictured), general manager of storage of IBM Systems at IBM, and IBM continues to see growth in data storage and their IBM Z mainframe hardware, reporting a 19% growth in storage and over 60% growth in Z hardware for the first quarter of 2020 (Y/Y constant currency).

So what has leadership looked like during these unprecedented times as the world wrapped up its first quarter in the midst of a global pandemic? And how is IBM Systems’ portfolio playing into the first quarter of 2020 during a particularly volatile time?

“It’s different than … other crises, because it actually has to do with humans and lives,” Walsh said. “I’ll remember this quarter for a lot of different reasons.”

Walsh spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed IBM’s response to COVID-19, as well as new innovations in IBM Systems’ storage strategies. (* Disclosure below.)

Simplification, cyber resiliency essential in post-pandemic future
Looking back on the first quarter of 2020, at first IBM saw signs that something was amiss because of supply chain issues in China, Walsh explained. But as things quickly took a radical turn when Italy and Spain began shutting down, IBM took serious precautions to make sure that employees worldwide would be able to work remotely and be safe during what had become a pandemic. The company had to make sure its employees and their families were OK both mentally and physically through an extremely stressful time. And then, naturally, concern for its customers kicked in.

“I’ve been in a couple different companies, big and small,” Walsh said. “The IBM culture is one that I can look back in awe in this last quarter just because it’s very customer-intimate. If the customer is in trouble, you can’t stop them from running to help the client. … We at IBM made sure the employees were fine to have everyone at home, but we saw them quickly go after it.”

IBM Systems has made massive investments and completely refreshed offerings for every portfolio item across the board to meet the market and help customers progress to chapter two of their journey into the cloud and modernizing their environment. They looked out at the industry and thought that things were too complex, especially with storage offerings. Walsh believes that the world doesn’t need another storage array but it is looking for solutions around the storage challenges.

“We did a dramatic simplification on what would we do with storage Z, but also distribute storage and what we do for storage AI,” Walsh said. “We need one platform, one platform that allows … different price points up and down the stack from low end, mid range and high end, but without compromise.”

IBM’s goal is to modernize a company’s core infrastructure and free up its IT team so that they can innovate through storage via a hybrid multicloud fabric. And, they are building cyber resiliency from the ground up. The new normal is simple and remote-managed, and the company is embracing client feedback to continue to push forward tools that are really needed, which is powering innovation infrastructure for machine intelligence and really getting insights out of data scaling, according to Walsh.

“I don’t think people just want … the next flash array. I think they’re looking for solution sets and companies to help them get through and get to … the new normal,” Walsh concluded. “The new normal is going to be much faster. … That’s why I’m excited about what we’re doing at IBM in general, but also, the IBM storage is perfectly in line with that overall mission.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)