IBM Pulse, Big Blue’s premier Cloud conference, will be kicking off this Sunday, February 23, 2014 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.  The four-day event will center on how businesses and IT leaders leverage the cloud to innovate faster, optimize better, and gain a competitive edge against the competition.

WATCH LIVE! Exclusive interviews on theCUBE @ SiliconANGLE.tv

This year’s event will be hosted by Emmy award-winning tech correspondent David Pogue.  Keynote speakers include IBM Security Systems Division GM Brendan Hannigan, IBM Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure VP of Strategy & Engineering Chris O’Connor, IBM Software Group GM Craig Hayman, and GM of Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure and IBM Software Group Deepak Advani, to name a few.

Breaking Bad fans will ALSO be delighted as this year’s special guests Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, and Anna Gunn, the actress who plays Skyler White in the series.

Follow the event

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You can get the latest buzz from IBM Pulse on Facebook, Twitter – @ibmPulse, #ibmpulse, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, IBM Pulse blog, Instagram.

You can also watch the livestream of the event here.

SiliconANGLE’s theCube will be at IBM Pulse, extracting the signal from the noise to deliver the latest trends in the cloud.  You can follow theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante on Twitter, @furrier and @dvellante, or watch interviews with cloud experts at SiliconANGLE.tv.

Leveraging cloud as a growth engine

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IBM started 2014 with a bang by investing $1.2 billion to expand its global cloud footprint, which includes construction of 15 more data centers and doubling the capacity of its SoftLayer platform and network.

Earlier this month, Big Blue teamed up with Actifio to deliver a new cloud-based service that aims to help companies rein in on Big Data by reducing storage requirements to a minimum. These are only the latest in a series of investments and initiatives to grow its business around cloud, as IBM rivals take similar steps. The company claims $4 billion in cloud revenue for 2013, a number that Amazon disputes. But these competitors are viciously looking to establish their cloud services in the enterprise sector, redefining the very meaning of cloud along the way.

Research firm Wikibon says both IBM and Amazon Web Services have valid points with the above claims, given their efforts to redefine cloud for their business purposes. While IBM is expanding its definition of the cloud to encompass on-site architectures, AWS argues that this tactic is not a true-cloud offering. In turn, Amazon is narrowing the definition of cloud as the enterprise struggles to keep pace with innovative but relatively vulnerable technology.

• Transitioning clients to modern data centers

The debate won’t keep IBM from its goals to deliver cloud services to the enterprise, wholly reinventing clients’ businesses around cloud computing. This must also entail mobile security, analytics for better security, and smarter infrastructure (also tying in advanced analytics).

The challenge for IBM will be in providing a full stack designed around these new goals, and helping clients transition to the modern data center (hyperscale, energy efficient, scalable and automated). In essence, IBM and other traditional vendors like Hewlett-Packard and Dell will have to recreate the perks of AWS in order to make client transition a reality. AWS has effectively turned the data center into an API-driven model, building its own ecosystem with strategic partnerships. That means IBM will also need to appeal to developers, as software is leading the way to the data center of the future.