Darrin Nelson, VP of Solution Sales with Sirius Computer Solutions, among the largest IBM resellers in the world, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, during their exclusive live coverage of the IBM Information on Demand 2013 event in Las Vegas.

“I was IBM’s largest software reseller and systems integrator the north-eastern part of the US and they asked me to help transform the company to be more software and software services capable. In a three-year period we tripled IBM software business and became IBM’s largest software reseller on the planet,” boasted Nelson, providing viewers with some background on his business and relationship with IBM.

Big Data Analytics and Social Business: which one has the biggest traction? asked Furrier, calling out two of the four pillars IBM’s restructuring its messaging around this year.

“There is probably an equal amount of activity in both, but there’s more POs being cut for analytics and Big Data,” Nelson explained. “There’s a lot of interest and hype in Social, and customers are interested in how they can leverage these tools to augment the solutions that they bring in to their customers. People are not just investing in Social without it being part of some bigger solution.”

Proof of concept

“We are fortunate to work in an industry that is extremely dynamic. Every three months there’s some crazy buzz word that people start talking about (cloud, client server computing, Second Life) and Big Data and analytics fell into that,” noted Nelson. “After people started proving out that they actually were running a more profitable and more efficient business when they had facts based on how their businesses were performing they were starting to invest.

“Studies show that customers that are investing in analytics and using a fact-based business approach are twenty times more profitable than those that do not. It’s really become the price of entry at this point for those customers that are not investing in analytics and who are not making decisions based on facts; they’re behind the eight ball, being at a competitive disadvantage.”

The applications connect the infrastructure to the business, noted Vellante. What are you proposing as a whole?

“We’re seeing a lot of activity in the retailers’ around social analytics – really trying to understand customer sentiment, hot words trending, and being able to make very effective marketing decisions,” answered Nelson.

“Think about what it used to take to understand how the market was perceiving your brand or your customer service,” Nelson continued. “You needed to employ a third party to do some sort to study, and three months later you’d get an answer back and had to develop a plan. Right now our customers are enabled to take a look in real-time at how they’re trending, what the market is perceiving them to be in certain areas and be able to make marketing decisions or damage control decisions.”

The social perspective

Nelson moved on to explain the trend from a Social perspective: “People are now layering Social on top of Business areas/solutions to accelerate and increase the value of the solutions that they are providing.”

With a great deal of humor, personal charisma and use-cases, Nelson managed to explain the Tealeaf solutions. Tealeaf is a “customer experience analytics software that helps organizations to gain intelligence and react more swiftly to consumer trends in today’s digitally transformed marketplace.”

• The new BI

Talking about “traditional BI Business,” Vellante noted that “it gets a bad reputation” and asked Nelson for elaborate on the subject, explaining “how it is evolving to be more agile.”

“Obviously, I think ISVs are taking much more care in understanding that the user experience of those platforms is extremely important and we’ve seen a tremendous evolution in the ease of use of the products and in the integration of the products, so now you’re not just doing traditional reporting and dashboards, but you’re able to do predictive, planning and social, and have all that integrated under one user experience, has made this much more consumable by a larger percent of IT professionals and not just the PHDs out there. So I think the simplification of the platforms and the integration of the platforms and the robustness of the functions that are being provided has really started to enable this to reach a larger percent of the user base,” stated Nelson.

Dynamic mobility

“There’s an interesting dynamic in mobility,” Nelson started, tackling another pillar in IBM’s latest campaign. “We are seeing the commoditization and consumerization of certain IT applications. There are certain applications that customers are comfortable putting a black box around and pushing out in the cloud because there’s just not real value in implementing variants of that, and the cost of upgrading it in the future. Take e-commerce for example. Everyone used to have to do e-commerce on their own premise. From an analytics in the cloud perspective we’re not seeing as much comfort yet, because people to put their private information there.”

Vellante picked up on that, noting “conventional wisdom would suggest that cloud is perceived as less secure than on-premise.” But he’s talked to a lot of people and they all say that cloud is actually more secure than on-premise.

Nelson agreed too, saying “A high percentage of breaches are done from within inside your firewall. The SLAs are fine, but a lot of this perception is emotional. There’s just a gut comfort level having my stuff close to me and under my control. Putting critical information under someone else’s control is an emotional challenge. But that will attenuate over time.”