With the 2016 IBM InterConnect event in its final day, attendees were prioritizing their questions about the applications and utilities, putting their most pressing queries to IBM’s representatives to get a jump on using that data before the next conference comes around.

John Furrier, host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, was joined by Marie Wieck, GM of cloud integration at IBM, to discuss IBM’s approach to middleware, APIs, scalable systems and more.

Scope and bases

The conversation got off to a strong start, with Wieck outlining some of the base goals for her division at IBM. Chief among these was “leveraging cognitive to help all customers transform, with cloud as the base,” while she emphasized that “our whole focus is on making that hybrid-cloud seamless.”

Seamlessness also applied to accessibility, as she stated, “We want to make sure you can get access to any of our software, any of our middleware, wherever you are.” However, as recognized by some other guests of theCUBE during the event, not every company is looking to immediately jump into the cloud game.

Regulations and data locality can lead customers to decide to go on-premise, but even in these cases, there’s room for scaling to different scopes, taking things from public to local and dedicated environments. “Having that public cloud access is [desired] to have the reach [that comes with it].”

Digital engagement

Moving on to some of the other companies being discussed and represented at the event, Furrier and Wieck discussed some of the applications of Bitly using URLs as “another form of data … so you can know what your users are doing.” Wieck noted that more and more companies were “driving to that digital engagement model,” but that along with each one’s development was more openness to joining its tech services with those of other enterprises.

“It’s all about integration. No company today … is going to do everything by themselves,” Wieck stated. “You’re still going to rely on a lot of things from outside your company to provide an end-to-end experience for your customer.”

And for IBM, Wieck said, meeting the customer’s needs is top priority, but that requires listening to them and looking at their business model to find the best match of services. “At the end of the day, we see clients who are doing digital engagement … wanting to rely on as many integrated services as they can,” Wieck said. And to meet that sort of heterogeneous environment, “you have to have all of your back-end systems able to scale [at a model to match].”

For any company looking to modernize with cloud or similar utilities, Wieck said, there were three questions to consider: “Are you creating that compelling new content, are you really integrating it, and are you optimizing it?”

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