At this week’s IBM InterConnect, the company seared its new business model into attendees’ brains: “Enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core.”

It’s a great strategy except for one problem, said John Furrier (@furrier) (pictured, left) co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio: “I would have done what they’re doing now like three years ago.” (*Disclosure below.)

It’s expected that a huge, profitable company with tons of customers like IBM Corp. would move a bit slower than startups. “It’s the big aircraft carrier; it can only move so fast,” Furrier said.

IBM might not be the most relevant in the bleeding-edge, cloud-native sense, but it makes up for it with another kind of relevance, co-host Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (pictured) said: “IBM is highly relevant in the minds of CEOs, CIOs, CSOs, CDOs — all the C-suite,” he said, adding that this gives them rock-like stability in the enterprise market.

In enterprise, IBM is far ahead of some other cloud players. Furrier pointed out Google in particular: “They’re acting like they’re an enterprise play — they’re not,” he said of Google.

Google’s machine learning ace

The seesaw pivots in Google’s favor when it comes to white hot machine learning, Furrier said. There, they have more cutting-edge technology to offer, and the coveted developer market gravitates toward these spanking new tools.

“Machine learning [was] the sexiest trend in every show” in the last year, Furrier said.

Developers like machine learning because it helps them move faster. IBM’s cognitive platform Watson may give developers a jump, but if IBM wants to snag them, it has to offer more in machine learning and across the board, Furrier said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. (*Disclosure: SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE is a media partner at InterConnect. Neither IBM nor other conference sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE