With news of Watson, Spark-centric platforming and new data analytics innovations dominating attention at IBM Insight 2015, exploring these topics from the perspective of the customer base can help cut through some of the buzz to get to the business implications.

Beth Smith, GM of business analytics at IBM, sat down with Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to do just that. Some of the topics covered were the push to familiarize customers with open-source and hybrid solutions, establishing trusted channels for data handling and capitalizing on the fastest infrastructure available.

World of hybrid data

Speaking to goals of “how do we help clients along their journey … how do we help them embrace open source, how do we help them embrace hybrid and what that means, and do it in a trusted way?” Smith noted that customers want to be able to do things in a way that’s not moving the data to the analytics, but the analytics to the data. “If you’re not able to get the insights out of the data, then it really does become a burden to you at the end of the day,” he said.

Simplifying the virtualization of this data management is a high priority for IBM, but Smith felt that the difficulties in creating familiarity for clients in these fields were lower than with major tech changes of the past. “I think customers are moving or have an appetite for embracing cloud and open source much more quickly than in prior eras of technology disruptions,” she said.

The Spark core

Among the variety of cloud, on-premise and physical appliance options open to customers, Spark’s importance to IBM’s platform was a point of high importance.

“We need to embrace Spark, we need to innovate within the community and contribute back, and we need to then bring our analytics capability to it,” said Smith, moving on to some examples of its flexibility and power, such as cutting down necessary code to an eighth of its size or the cognitive tools of Datacap utilities.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Insight 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE