As cloud becomes increasingly accessible for businesses across the spectrum of industries, helping make smooth cloud transitions is becoming a focus in itself for the companies most engaged in the cloud systems, a particularly tricky effort when underlying information technology architectures are involved. To that end, IBM Corp. is doubling down on its hybrid cloud strategy.

“The growth that we’ve seen is about helping clients get to that journey faster, or, if they’re not meant to go fully public cloud, that’s OK too,” said Meg Swanson (pictured), vice president of marketing, Bluemix, at IBM.

Swanson joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live-streaming studio, during IBM InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas, NV. (*Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Meg Swanson is our Women In Tech feature.

During the interview, Swanson discussed the evolution of IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform, the growth of its ecosystems and how the company is serving its customers with those advances.

“Under Bluemix … because we had developers that absolutely needed provision down to bare-metal servers all the way up to applications … we pulled the infrastructure together with the developer services, together with our VMware partnerships … all in a single console, continuing to work with clients on just having a unified experience,” Swanson explained.

IBM is experiencing “continual growth” with its technology partners, as well as the rise of cloud-native builds in various fields. Swanson also discussed IBM’s successful partnerships with VMware Inc., as well as the company’s work with Intel, which focuses on “secure cloud optimization.”

“We’re absolutely staying core to the reason we went into this business,” Swanson said.

For IBM, solving clients challenges, building the right solutions and addressing the technologies clients are currently using are highly important, as is dissuading clients from simply forklifting everything to a public cloud.

“We’ll walk with them every step of the way,” she emphasized.

Security and insulation

IBM is also working to expand the presence of its data centers, as well as building compliance for each country in which the company has a presence, according to Swanson. And she also discussed the importance that IBM places on its customers’ data safety.

“It’s all about [how] clients will bring their data to us to learn, to school, but then it goes home. We don’t keep client data; that’s critical to us that everything is completely within the client’s infrastructure, within their data privacy and protection,” Swanson said.

IBM is applying its cognitive artificial intelligence machine learning to help organizations advance faster, she explained. “It’s not about taking their insights and learning and fueling them into our cloud to then resell to other teams,” Swanson stated.

But with the need to provide quick turnaround on any of these data treatments, “We need clouds to be enterprise-ready, and that really comes down to security, compliance, scalability in multiple zones,” Swanson said, giving an example of enabling scalability from the original five developers up to 500, or even 500,000.

“Enterprise-grade is one thing, [but] understanding an industry top to bottom when it comes to cloud compliance is a whole other level. And that’s where we’re at,” Swanson 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