The focus this year at IBM Interconnect, according Nancy Pearson, CMO of IBM Cloud, is cloud business applications. “We feature a lot about business applications and the IBM cloud marketplace,” she said. Excitedly, she added that though they announced the marketplace just last year, there are “now 400 applications between IBM and third parties.” This growth has been made possible due to “key relationships driving Bluemix” and both innovation and standardization on behalf of “large enterprises and lots of individual developers” on the IBM platform, she explained.

The Answer to Public Cloud

Pearson called out that she was particularly glad to see “hybrid cloud announcements around visibility and security.” It’s essential to be “able to leverage the requirement around flexibility,” she remarked. For many clients, IBM is the idea cloud provider — instead of Amazon — because they offer “visibility control” and the ability to move between legacy and cloud environments. One of IBM’s key announcements at IBM Interconnect, said Pearson, is “about bringing visibility control to hybrid cloud environments.”

The focus on hybrid cloud comes from the goal “to accelerate clients’ success with cloud,” said Pearson. The most direct way to achieve this goal is to understand the client’s position. Pearson shared IBM’s objective: “The question is, where are you in your journey and how can we help you accelerate it?”

Disrupting One’s Own Business Model

Instead of looking at disruption as tech-based alone, Pearson said that often the route to innovation is a “business model disruptor.” She cited an IBM aerospace customer, who came to the tech giant wondering what application they should make. What she explained to the company was that “you need to look at it as how can you leverage cloud to increase revenue streams around core competency.”

Specifically for the aerospace company, Person said she asked, “are you thinking about how to create augmented solutions and services around airline travel?” She suggested “coordinating multiple services around airline travel–” a la Uber’s testing around porting nurses to people’s house to give flue shots. “[Uber’s] core competency is transportation,” she said, but their leveraging it to break into their adjacent industries. She continued, saying that because businesses are transforming their own processes, “the barriers to entry in terms of expanding horizontally are much lower with cloud.”

IBM is “going for this digital transformation as well.”

In a way very similar to it’s clients, IBM is also undergoing a transformation as they turn to cloud. Pearson revealed that IBM created a “cloud unit” in order to get resources “focused in the same direction.” Simply put: “Ginny wants us to focus on cloud.” And in response, “marketing teams, development teams came together” in order to help IBM move faster towards cloud.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect.

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