Steve Robinson, General Manager of Cloud Platform Services with IBM, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE, during the last day of IBM Pulse 2014 Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The interview began with Furrier noting the modern era of enterprise, the importance of blending services and the relevance of agility, speed and cloud economics. His intuition regarding IBM’s strategy pointed towards middleware, with SoftLayer as the foundation. Steve Robinson didn’t deny it, describing a “rather organic path” for IBM and the requirements to make some fundamental decisions regarding what community groups to have constituency with.

“We made some key decisions along the way, but the goal was to build a good, solid, open platform that was attractive to the web shops and the enterprise developers at the same time,” he said.

“There’s a clear vote of confidence from the adoption side, but now there’s the developer aspect of it. The old tactics of competing is all about having a good product – both from the client adoption sales and winning the ecosystem. The lock-in spec is a thing of the past; talk about the Openness,” invited Furrier.

“We used to do lock-in and having a whole lot of proprietary stack all the way down,” admitted Robinson. “Customers want to make sure they have an angle they can move, should they want to, and the challenge for us is to offer a better value, a better hosting experience and a better support experience. The bar is set and we are going to break some of the old ways, moving towards the self-service type model with BlueMix and changing the support policy, opening some new ground,” Robinson promised.

“The old buzz words are still a relevant part of the equation,” added Furrier, clearly referring to web services and services around architecture. “I want to ask you about customer impact. What is the customer demand?”

“They see the opportunity of cloud and its impact on the data center. Most of the corporate accounts that we’re talking to today are going to be looking at ways of leveraging those resources,” said Robinson. “The public cloud is very appealing to them. We’ve reached the stage where data and elasticity that can be built with these types of public services are far beyond what could be imagined before. They see the advantages, but are still trying to figure out their transition and the way to take full advantage of the opportunities.”

“Will DB2 run on cloud in the future?” asked Furrier.

“We’ll have to do some API fronting and gateways. The strong demand is for taking what has been built and extending it out to the public community. It doesn’t mean you take that asset into a full relocation, but there’s various ways you can burst with it and move that asset forward,” explained Robinson.

The function of middle-ware

Vellante wanted to take Robinson back to the days of the WebSphere, asking him to elaborate on the purpose of middleware (hardware, apps, OS), explaining what exactly middleware comprises.

“Most data centers have a base set of services around all of their applications so you end up having to build a multiple platform approach to ‘how do I do consistent data across the board’ and ‘how do I do consistent system management and measuring the environment across the board’, ‘how do I lay out a consistent security policy across the board’ and ‘how do I lay out a consistent way to do transactions’ and other business applications as well,” detailed Robinson.

“So these are all services,” clarified theCUBE co-hosts.

“Even with traditional middle-ware, there have always been layers that I would put in my data centers to build up my overall architecture. Services would be used across multiple applications while also representing a foundation architecture for all the software,” added Robinson.

“How has that evolved into PaaS?” asked Vellante.

Robinson explained: “I’ve been in IT for over 30 years and some concepts are identical, while other areas are brand new. PaaS (Platform as a Service) is basically a capability to help you get an application framed out, get the services wired into it and then take the steps (that we never did with traditional development) to handle the deployment and the management of that application out on the public cloud domain.”

“So there’s a DevOps angle there,” noted Vellante.

“Traditional development always started with base requirement through performance testing and then you handed it over to a CIO to do the deployment. The life cycle is extending now all the way to the DevOps piece,” clarified Robinson.

Turning existing technologies into services

“Talk about the billion dollars investment,” asked Furrier. “That was a big news yesterday.”

“We see cloud as a critical part of IBM’s overall transition. Earlier we announced our decision to take over SoftLayer and expand out 30 to 40 pods worldwide, on top of the existing footprint,” answered Robinson. “With the blueMix announce we named a whole new focus: how to turn existing technologies into services. We also have new initiatives, like the Mobile Services that we announced yesterday and we have the team focusing on open standards,” said Robinson.

IBM as a Service

“The coined term is ‘IBM as a Service’,” joked Furrier. “Is there a cultural change? IBM has always had a good DNA and it seems it hadn’t lost its soul over the years.”

“It is a transformation for us. We do have a very aggressive business outlook, we buy companies, we do shift resources, we do business. We are very cautious, we don’t sit on our laurels and we watch all the new trends as they emerge. Cloud is going to be a key transformation and we will not miss it,” promised Steve Robinson.