During the IBM Think conference in San Francisco this week, IBM Corp. Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty declared that a combination of private data centers and cloud computing would result in a market worth $1 trillion by next year.

That’s the hybrid model reshaping the enterprise landscape, and IBM has clearly set its sights on becoming a key player in that transition.

“It’s not about cloud. It’s not about artificial intelligence. It’s not about security. It’s not about blockchain,” said Ray Wang (pictured), founder, chairman and principal analyst of Constellation Research Inc. “It’s really about companies that are actually building these digital networks, these business models, and they’re lighting them up. You see IBM everywhere in that network.”

Wang spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed recent news from IBM’s research division and the current competitive environment among cloud service providers. (* Disclosure below.)

Research on the upswing

This week, representatives from IBM Research outlined five innovations that could fuel the kind of hybrid market growth that Rometty envisioned. These included new advances in areas, such as plastics recycling, that detects food-borne pathogens using AI and end-to-end digitization of the agricultural industry.

Wang was impressed with what he saw from IBM’s research arm in San Francisco. “IBM Research, which is the heart of IBM, is coming up,” he said. “They’re going from concept to commercialization so much faster than they used to.”

Meanwhile, the competitive cloud market continues to bubble. On Tuesday, Thomas Kurian, former Oracle executive and newly named chief executive officer of Google Cloud, told analysts that the company would make larger investments in cloud sales and promised to compete aggressively for market share.

“The early reaction on Kurian at Google is good,” Wang said. “The developers are embracing him; he understands what the problems are.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s weeklong coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE was a media partner at IBM Think. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE