Expect to hear plenty about hybrid clouds, Bluemix, open source, partnerships and, of course, Watson this week as IBM kicks off its InterConnect cloud computing conference in Las Vegas. The company will have plenty to talk about. In recent weeks it has acquired three digital advertising agencies as well as a healthcare analytics provider, teamed up with Bell Canada to deliver hybrid cloud services north of the border and even put down some coin on the blockchain protocol.

If the overarching strategy looks fragmented, that’s because IBM has so far not cleanly define how all these pieces fit together, if it even knows. It will have that opportunity this week as executives take the stage for keynote presentations entitled “Digital Business Transformation,” and “IT Transformation.” The message: The age of cloud is here, you must adapt your business to it and IBM will be with you every step of the way.

Hail hybrid

Expect to hear plenty about hybrid cloud, the meld of private and public computing that most analysts predict will make up the bulk of the infrastructure-as-a-service market for the next several years. IBM understands data centers better than anyone. It also gets the reluctance many of its big customers have to moving their operations wholesale to public cloud. Expect to see new products and services designed to make that transition easier as well as to enable customers to build workloads that advantage of both internal and external infrastructure simultaneously.

Bluemix will be a big part of that strategy. The Cloud Foundry-derived platform-as-a-service is central to IBM’s strategy of courting developers to its hybrid mission. IBM has been quiet about Bluemix in recent months, but it usually makes some noise around Interconnect time. Developers should expect at least a couple of new goodies, and bet on hearing a lot about open source.

A peek at the scheduled general-session speakers usually yields some insight into announcement plans. Joining the IBM execs on Monday will be Matthias Rebellius, CEO of Siemens AG’s Building Technologies Division and Carl Eschenbach President and COO of VMware Inc.

VMware’s presence is particularly interesting since the company competes with IBM in hybrid cloud. It’s clear that some kind of business relationship is in the offing, and it will be interesting to see how the companies balance cooperation and competing business interests.

Of Watson and things

A preponderance of Internet of things (Iot)-related speakers on Wednesday indicates that you should expect something new in that area. Just last week, IBM introduced Quarks, an open source development tool for IoT, and sensors are the focus of one of its growing portfolio of Watson-focused business units. The company hasn’t really defined a coherent IoT message, but that’s not for lack of activity. Wednesday’s keynote includes an appearance by Mark Josephson, CEO Bitly Inc. How that fits with the overarching theme of “Personal Transformation” isn’t clear

Speaking of Watson, you can almost count on IBM to move the ball forward in the Watson-focused area it calls “cognitive computing.” Company officials have recently talked about Watson’s strategic significance in the hybrid cloud because of its ability to understand many different data types. When IBM Watson was on Jeopardy in 2011, it could process five different types of data. Now it has 28 key modules, meaning that it can understand, interpret, and answer questions in a growing number of logical and useful ways. And unlike Microsoft’s parallel Cortana effort, those modules are open to developers.

If you can’t make it to the MGM Grand this week, not to worry. TheCUBE will be all over InterConnect,  live-streaming the main sessions and a continuous series of interviews with executives, customers and business partners. You can get the full rundown of scheduled guests at SiliconANGLE.tv. The best place to catch all the action is InterConnect on IBM Go.