This week theCUBE will webcast two days of coverage of IBM Pulse 2014, which of all the IBM conferences (eight a year in the United States plus others worldwide) will be a defining event for the IT giant. Clearly if IBM is to have a future, a great deal of it will be providing cloud services to business, and this conference focuses on those services and the underlying infrastructure. In particular it covers IBM’s IaaS and PaaS, (SaaS is covered by IBM Connect in January) and its direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Last year on theCUBE at IBM Flash 2013, Steve Mills, SVP and group executive for software and systems, said “The future is all about thinking about the way technology is used.” (see video embedded below). At Pulse IBM needs to redefine how its technology will be used in the new millennium.

Because of this, CIOs, CFOs and other IT professionals and business leaders need to follow this conference. Nearly every business larger than midsized companies have a healthy population of IBM products, and IBM is aggressively competing in the SMB marketplace. In January it announced a $1.2 billion U.S. investment in expanding its cloud infrastructure worldwide, including plans to add 15 new data centers to its network.

In contrast to AWS, which serves all its customers from a very few mega-data centers, IBM’s strategy is to bring services closer to customers with a growing network of more normal sized data centers connected by the high-speed SoftLayer network. This allows it to certify, for instance, that sensitive and regulated data will stay in-country and that national data privacy and security regulations are being met, and it allows IBM to guarantee service levels, a weakness in the AWS service.

And theCUBE offers an excellent window into where IBM is going at this conference, based on the interviewee schedule. While the caveat here is that schedules can change at the last minute, here are the highlights of the schedule for today and tomorrow with notes on their significance (note: the conference takes place in Las Vegas and the times, therefore, are all PST):

Monday (February 24)

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10:00 AM PST: John Mason, General Manager, Mid-Market, IBM: IBM sees the mid-market as an important growth market. It has always been a large enterprise company, going back to the IBM 360 series in the 1960s. In the new century, it has been making a major push in terms of product development, marketing and sales, to penetrate the mid-market, and today it has products ranging from low-end PureSystems to cloud services priced for that market, down to small companies. Mason can be expected to talk about what is new for the mid-market and how its penetration of the midmarket is going.

IBM SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby examines servers at the IBM SoftLayer data center in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, January 17, 2014. IBM announced it is committing more than $1.2 billion to significantly expand its global network of cloud data centers.

10:30 AM PST: Lance Crosby, CEO, SoftLayer: IBM bought SoftLayer last year for a reported $2 billion. In its January announcement it made it clear that SoftLayer is a core underlying technology in the cloud infrastructure it is building worldwide. Crosby will discuss what SoftLayer adds and how that expansion is progressing.

11:00 AM PST: Mike Gilfix, Director, MobileFirst Platform & Analytics, IBM: MobileFirst is IBM’s elegant answer to BYOD environments. Rather than pushing a virtual desktop solution, which attempts to force Windows applications, designed for a keyboard/mouse interface, on tablets designed with a touch-screen interface, it allows enterprises and third-party software vendors to write applications once and export them as native code for iOS, Android, Windows 8 (RT and Pro), and Blackberry. It also provides unified management and security for the BYOD mixed environment.

11:30 AM PST: Peter McCaffrey, Director of Marketing, IBM PureSystems: While this conference does not cover hardware, PureSystems, IBM’s integrated (read converged) technology is the shining star in IBM’s hardware portfolio. Wikibon says that converged systems is the future of hardware in companies of all sizes, and IBM’s quarterly hardware sales numbers reinforce that pattern. McCaffrey will provide the latest information on PureSystems development and sales.

1:00 PM PST: Matt Cadieux, CIO, Red Bull Technology: A major IBM customer, Cadieux will talk about how the fast-growing and highly profitable soft drink company leverages IBM systems and services to maximize its efficiencies and create new products.

1:30 PM PST: Jason Gartner, VP, PureSystems Product Management, IBM: Always a good interview, Gartner will talk about the philosophy and success of PureSystems.

2:00 PM PST: Leslie Hand, Research Director, IDC: Leslie and Wikibon CEO and Cofounder David Vellante will discuss IBM’s future and put PureSystems and IBM’s cloud services strategy in perspective.

2:50 PM PST: Adam Gunther, Program Director, Cloud Offerings, IBM: Cloud is the future for IBM, and it has taken a very different approach from AWS. While Amazon has built a few super-sized data centers worldwide to support its services, IBM is building a network of smaller (but still large in normal corporate terms) data centers in large numbers of countries around the world. This year alone it will add 15 more to that network, covering every continent except Africa, which is rumored to be on the list for 2015. Gunther will talk about how IBM gains market differentiation from this strategy.

4:00 PM PST: Wing To, VP, Strategy and Product Management, Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure, IBM: To will discuss IBM’s direction and growing success in the cloud market. A key question will be whether IBM can grow its cloud business fast enough to make up for the rapid fall of its hardware sales. And can it catch up with the rapid growth rate of AWS and start to real Amazon in.

4:50 PM PST: Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst, ESG: Buffington will provide his projection of IBM’s chances of remaining a major force in the IT industry in the new century.

Tuesday (February 25):

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10:30 AM PST: Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and VP and WebSphere CTO, IBM: WebSphere, introduced around 1990, is core technology for Web development for IBM itself and its customers. Rebuilt on OpenStack in the last few years, it remains IBM’s lead technology for private and hybrid Web development. Cuomo will bring viewers up-to-date on WebSphere development and on its place in IBM’s cloud strategy.

11:00 AM PST: Chris O’Connor, VP of Strategy and Engineering, Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure, IBM:  He will discuss the direction of IBM cloud and Smarter Planet technology.

13:00 PM PST: Possible appearance by Steven A. Mills, SVP and Group Executive, Software & Systems: This is tentative, but Mills, who is one of the top executives and direct report to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, may appear on theCUBE at this time or later in the day. If so, he will discuss IBM’s overall business strategy, its place today in the market and where it is heading. This will be a must-see interview for IBM customers. (A video of Mills speaking on TheCUBE from IBM Flash 2013 is below.)

These and other IBM and customer executives will be interviewed by Wikibon CEO David Vellante and SiliconAngle CEO and Founder John Furrier, a team that has made its name for eliciting insights from industry figures from many important companies. This promises to be one of TheCUBE’s best events.