Seventy-one percent of enterprises now use three or more clouds, according to RightScale’s 2016 State of the Cloud Report. Add SaaS applications and “shadow clouds” to those, and they now have sprawl that can only be reigned in with automation, according to Justin Youngblood (pictured), vice president of hybrid cloud management at IBM Corp.

Information technology pros once felt conflicted about automation, fearing it may displace them, Youngblood said at IBM InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas, NV. “We are past that,” he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio  (*Disclosure below.)

Enterprises automating some portions of hybrid cloud management move their brains and talent to more stimulating and profitable areas, says Youngblood. “These enterprises are saying, ‘Finally, now I can get to the innovation and the transformative projects that are on the strategic agenda rather than working within manual IT processes,'” he said.

Automated advisor

But it isn’t just grunt work that machines can help with. At InterConnect, IBM demonstrated a chat ops interface it is perfecting for its Cloud Automation Manager. The tool can perform analytics and make preventative suggestions in natural language. It can also be trained to assist humans with intelligent suggestions, Youngblood explained.

“Imagine your smartest IT operator in the business. If Watson can learn from that person — Sally or Jeff, whoever it is — learn from that and help every IT operator in your business always make the best decision,” he said.

This Watson-powered “adviser” is also a doer; for example, if a one cloud is down, it can move applications to a different one with no service interruption to the end-user, he 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