In Las Vegas, the IBM InterConnect event saw another day of presentations and discussions, including attendees looking for answers to find out how they could bring the displayed technologies to use in their own businesses.

Representing theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, were cohosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. They sat down to talk with Inhi Suh, recently appointed as general manager of collaboration solutions at IBM, about the parameters of her new position, IBM’s goals for cognitive services and several other hot topics.

Disruption with cognitive

Early in the conversation, Suh stated that for IBM, one goal “is to embed disruption in cognitive [tools]”, from increasing its usage in analytics to embedding its presence “down to the chip.”

Emphasizing the “tremendous partner bases that have built applications and workflows around various business flows,” Suh was highly enthused about the prospects for future development in this field, particularly in combining cognitive utilities with cloud, a pairing she described as “the two cornerstones” of IBM’s plans for the future.

“The thing that’s really exciting with cloud, that’s really disruptive, is that you can allow different levels of community … and begin to service content and data from wherever the user is,” Suh said, giving examples of personal bots designed to understand calendars and scheduling and being able to do it across multiple datasets simultaneously.

Building on clouds

Suh also gave some clues as to plans on the cloud side of things, underlining how dominant its relation to apps and other tools is becoming. “One of the things you’re going to see now in the business unit I have is more and more cloud-first services,” Suh stated, also discussing how they would be “using different kinds of analytics to enhance and augment the way we communicate.”

Making APIs easily accessible and composable was one more piece of the puzzle being put together by Suh and her team, but on the other side of the coin, designing “for an experience” was beginning to surface, in contrast to the traditional design priorities of “feature, function and product.”

Bringing enhancements to everyday tools

Speaking about her new team and their focus, Suh characterized their field as “a business unit that everyone can experience … mail, messaging, documents and so on,” driven by the question: “How do I improve, and how does the team begin to improve, personal productivity?”

Taking into account the needs of clients, markets, packaging, pricing, new area transitions, innovations, talent and culture, just to name a few priorities, Suh seemed more than ready to meet the challenges. Additional plans for the future were shared with theCUBE, such as doing a full review of all Watson capabilities suitable for the next generation’s content and creation, and integration with partners in the ecosystem in addition to existing IBM capabilities.

As Suh cheerfully put it, “We’re going to be busy with collaborations this year.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2016. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE