International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session. In this digital series sponsored by IBM and Intel, we're looking at the industry and solution use cases from our partner perspective. What unifies all of the partners we invite to the series is that they build on top of IBM's Cloud Pak for Data, hybrid data and AI platform. Today's session features Portworx. Portworx is the container storage company enterprises rely on to manage mission-critical data services and containers. The 2 speakers you will be hearing from throughout this session is Michael Ferranti, Vice President of Product Marketing at Portworx; and Deepak Rangarao, IBM's Worldwide Technical Sales Leader for our Data and AI platform. And before we start today's session, I just need to quickly show you the legal disclaimer here from IBM.

Thank you, Anastasia, and Portworx' Michael, for making this happen. A quick introduction to Cloud Pak for Data before we get to Portworx. With Cloud Pak for Data, what we have is an open, extensible platform for data and AI. We understand that our customers have different types of data in different locations and want to have a choice of where they want to run their data and AI workloads. Cloud Pak for Data can run on-premise or on the public cloud, be it IBM or otherwise. It's based on the best-of-class enterprise-ready, cloud-native platform, Red Hat OpenShift, and has the capabilities that span across data management, data integration governance and analytics, reporting, dashboarding or statistical analysis or machine learning and AI. And it's geared to cater for all the different personas that you see on the row above. This includes all the way from developers, to data engineers, to data stewards and data scientists. And the idea is that we want to have a platform that brings all these personas together and fosters collaboration for the best outcome. We've taken a modular approach to give flexibility to our customers so that they can choose how and when they use the different services on the platform. So we have a control plane that caters for all the common functions, on top of which customers can choose to add the required services as and when the need arises. Data is the most important asset that can enable businesses to take care of their customers effectively and quickly. What you're seeing here is a typical enterprise landscape, with data located in different places on the left-hand side, and you have different consumers that would like to find this data and put it to good use. With Cloud Pak for Data, we have a governance catalog at the center of the platform. This acts as an index for all enterprise assets, allowing the different consumers to search for and find the data they need, understand the relationship between the different information assets and provide feedback and collaborate with the other consumers of this data. This ability of organizing the data helps not just with finding and using the data, but it also helps with preparedness for regulatory compliance. We have data management capabilities in the platform so customers can choose to host and manage their data workloads on the cloud-native platform. But we also understand that moving data to a new platform is not trivial, so customers can choose to keep the data where it is and use the capabilities in the platform by leveraging our data virtualization capability. Being a platform, we want to ensure our customers have a choice of services. This is both from IBM and otherwise that they can choose from. I spoke about a modular approach earlier. So the analogy here is the iPhone apps. The Cloud Pak for Data comes with a set of core services across data management, data integration governance and analytics. And these customers can choose to install one or more of these core services in any order as they see fit and then further extend the platform with partner-led services. Here's what our ecosystem looks like today. So this list is growing all the time so we can cater to our customers' needs. Here, we have partner-led services across different categories, all the way from AI to storage. And today's focus will be on Portworx, one of our premium partners for storage. We've been working with Portworx for a while now and they bring some very interesting and important capabilities to Cloud Pak for Data customers. Okay. With that, I'll hand off to Michael from Portworx to address how Portworx as the storage layer for Cloud Pak for Data will enable our customers. Michael?

Yes. Thank you so much, Deepak. I very much appreciate having the opportunity to present to IBM customers today. We're really excited to partner with IBM, and it's just so exciting to see all the innovation that's happening around machine learning and AI driven through Cloud Pak for Data. And really, what I want to share today is how customers can get the most out of those Cloud Pak for Data investments using Portworx, the #1 Kubernetes storage platform. This is such an important topic because data is at the heart of Cloud Pak investments, important to make sure that, that data is performance, protected and secure. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that in order for any app to run successfully on Cloud Pak for Data or OpenShift, you need several things, and these things are a collection of requirements for practically any modern enterprise application. You need fast, agile storage; you need backup and recovery; you need disaster recovery; you need to be able to move those applications between environments. I mean you need to be able to do so in a way that's secure, that makes sure that, that data is secure. You need to manage your infrastructure capacity as your application capacity scales up and down. I mean you need to be able to run those applications across any different environment. And one of the things that's powerful about Cloud Pak for Data is how you can have different teams that are delivering different parts of the stack for that AI ladder. I mean -- and some of these teams are going to have different requirements for others. But taken as a whole, any modern enterprise application needs to enable these types of requirements. It's exactly what Portworx does. Portworx delivers enterprise storage and data management solutions for the top Cloud Pak and OpenShift use cases. The customers that we work with are doing really exciting things around data analytics and artificial intelligence. They're building Enterprise Platform as a Service offerings. They're building edge and IoT use cases, SaaS applications. And many of them are looking to expand the data protection and availability that they can achieve on their OpenShift and Kubernetes platforms by adding on a layer of Kubernetes disaster recovery or Kubernetes backup. What Portworx delivers is a flawless operational experience for any stateful application running on Cloud Pak for Data in any cloud or data center using any underlying storage. The way that we do that is with the Portworx storage platform for Kubernetes, and I'll just mention that I'm using Kubernetes and OpenShift interchangeably. You're probably aware that OpenShift is based on Kubernetes. So everything that I'm describing in terms of doing for Kubernetes, we also do for OpenShift in a fully integrated manner. So the Portworx storage platform for Kubernetes delivers a number of capabilities designed to meet those core business requirements that I just shared. PX-Store provides high-performance, low-latency storage to any application running on Kubernetes, including high availability. PX-Secure delivers data security in the form of "bring your own key encryption," in the form of role-based access controls to make sure that even sensitive apps can run well on OpenShift. PX-Migrate enables you to easily move any application between any operating environment where you happen to be running OpenShift and even easily do things like upgrade from one version of OpenShift to another. PX-Backup delivers point-and-click backup and recovery solutions for all of your data protection and compliance use cases. PX-DR delivers up to Zero RPO disaster recovery and sub 1-minute RTO for any application running on Kubernetes. And PX-Autopilot delivers automated capacity management, making sure that as your application tier scales, your infrastructure tier scaled as well to keep up and make sure that you always have sufficient capacity. Portworx works with some of the largest and most sophisticated Kubernetes and OpenShift users on the planet. That's what informs our experience and that's what informs our product road map, delivering upon these business requirements that I've just noted. And we're really proud to be partnering with IBM and Red Hat or just continually in awe of the innovation and the sophistication of these customers. And so if you decide to use Portworx, rest assured that we worked with customers in similar industries on that similar scales and similar levels of complexity to address all of these top concerns. I'll mention that Portworx was recently ranked the #1 Kubernetes storage platform according to GigaOm Research. We're really proud of this achievement because it underscores the breadth of the solution and the ability to deliver it to large-scale enterprises. You might be saying, "Okay. All of that makes sense. I do need to provide for backup and recovery. I do need to provide for data security. I do need to provide for disaster recovery. But I've got a great enterprise-class storage system in my data center already. Can I just use that?" The short answer is that because Portworx was custom-built for workloads running on Kubernetes and OpenShift, we can provide a better experience for those applications running on Kubernetes and OpenShift than a system that was designed for and optimized for virtualized workloads. Other storage solutions that you may be encountering have limited scale for OpenShift in terms of number of nodes and amount of storage that can be used. They have limited capabilities for OpenShift in terms of lack of integrated disaster recovery, integrated backup and automated capacity management. And in some cases, they have limited production experience for OpenShift, whereas those storage arrays are very widely used within virtualized environments. When it comes to successfully running applications in production on OpenShift, they have less maturity and are not as battle-tested as Portworx, which was custom-designed for Kubernetes and OpenShift. Now you might ask, "Well, why would that be? What's so different about Kubernetes and traditional applications?" The answer is that traditional IT, and that could be in the cloud or on-prem, is really built around this idea of managing machines, managing servers. So everything that I'm going to do in IT ops is all about an application -- or excuse me, is all about a server. I'm going to back up a server, I'm going to migrate a server, I'm going to encrypt the server. Kubernetes flips things on its head. Kubernetes says, you know what, business value is all about managing applications. So what we want to do is we want to be able to migrate an application. We want to be able to migrate -- or excuse me, we want to be able to encrypt an application. We want to be able to back up, we want to be able to restore an application, not a machine, right? A machine is just something that we need to manage in order to manage what is the ultimate value, the app itself. So everything that Portworx does is all about direct application management. So we give you tools to back up and migrate apps, not servers; to encrypt apps, not servers; to set up DR on an application-specific basis, not on a server-by-server basis. By way of explaining kind of that next level of detail on our platform, I thought I would talk about a couple of customers who are successfully running mission-critical applications on Kubernetes and OpenShift in production today. This will give you a sense of what's possible and a sense of some of the capabilities that Portworx delivers to manage those types of applications. The first customer is Kroger. Kroger is one of the largest grocery store chains in the United States. In fact, I think they're the largest grocery store chain. And like many businesses, they wanted to improve their online presence. And so they launched a very ambitious project to improve the website search of 17 different brands that they operate across the United States, Kroger being the largest one, but they have many others. They call these brands banners. And so in less than 3 months, they completely redid the search experience on their websites, making it so that if you type the letter "T," it's going to say, "Are you searching for tomatoes, or are you searching for toilet paper," like typeahead search that we're all familiar with from a Google perspective, but they did that for their own websites in under 3 months, getting the first banner deployed. And they did that using a bunch of open-source data analytics solutions like those that you might be running on Cloud Pack for Data as part of your own data analytics and infrastructure pipeline. So they're using Kafka and MongoDB and Elasticsearch and Spark in order to deliver this service. Now how did Portworx help with that? Well, first thing that we provided is application-aware data orchestration for Kubernetes. And what this means is that each individual application component running in that stack gets its own data volume. That data volume is protected. That data volume is placed on a server with the right type of storage medium and right type of resources and the right type of capacity in order to meet the specific requirements of each app, like, Elasticsearch is very memory-hungry. It needs to be located on a server that has capacity that might be different from Postgres. I mean we enable them to do that at enormous scale. Portworx can scale up to 1,000 or more nodes in a single cluster, at tens of thousands of volumes in a single cluster. So we also provide enterprise-level high availability. That means that if any server in that cluster fails, Portworx can maintain a replica of that data somewhere else in the cluster and we can tell OpenShift where to reschedule that container to some other host in the cluster that has a local copy of the data to maintain application performance and application availability even in the name of -- even in the event of server failures. We also provide enterprise-level security. So it's no mystery that kind of nefarious actors, state and nonstate, are always trying to access enterprise data, right? It's a target. It's subject to ransomware attacks. And just because you need to move quickly because you need to get more out of your data, doesn't mean that you can neglect security. So Portworx provides "bring your own key encryption" for all of your Kubernetes and OpenShift data volumes, and we provide role-based access controls to complement those that are available on OpenShift, so that your -- only the people who you want to be able to access your data are actually able to. And finally, Portworx provides application-consistent snapshots and restores of entire applications. What do I mean by that? Well, modern applications are composed of multiple containers running across multiple hosts. And if I want to take a backup of one of those applications, I need to make sure that it's application-consistent, meaning I have a consistent snapshot or backup of that application running across many different servers. We provide an extensible way for any application running on OpenShift to be backed up in an application-consistent manner. And we can restore that entire application, including its configuration, just as easily. Another example is RBC. So RBC is a great use case because it shows just how easy it is to run truly mission-critical applications on OpenShift in Kubernetes with a modern storage platform like Portworx. RBC had an application that they thought would be a perfect fit for a containerized environment, except for one particular business requirement, Zero RPO failover between 2 completely separate data centers. They looked at how to address this business requirement, and they found out, with their existing infrastructure, they just couldn't do it. They couldn't figure out how to run 2 completely distinct OpenShift clusters, but make sure that each write to their primary data center was synchronously replicated to the secondary data center so that if they had a failover, they could simply flip their load balancer and not incur any data loss. Well, we're really proud that we were able to meet those requirements for RBC using our PX-DR module that I spoke about earlier. What we're able to do is we're able to take a single Portworx cluster and stretch it across 2 completely distinct data centers. In every write to data center 1, it synchronously replicated to data center number 2, and all of the Kubernetes objects that define that application are replicated between the 2 environments. So if I have a complete data center loss, then they can simply flip their load balancer and that traffic is now served from their DR site. That's really, really exciting. And if you combine that with point-and-click backup and recovery, with "bring your own key encryption" at a container granular level, with the ability to migrate applications easily between clusters as part of a scheduled migration or as part of an upgrade, if you add capacity management to that, you start to see how all of your data-rich applications, all of your analytics applications can now easily run on Cloud Pak for Data backed by OpenShift and you can have a single pane of glass for all of your data analytics applications in your enterprise. As an example of a way to show you how you can extend your Cloud Pak for Data investment to take on these additional type of applications, Portworx is enabling a lot of use cases for Cloud Pak for Data beyond just the kind of traditional AI/ML PaaS-type workloads. We're seeing customers using on-prem to cloud migrations, right? They're doing cost optimizations in the cloud through our ability to automatically scale up and scale down storage infrastructure. They are doing disaster recovery, running things like Db2 and MPP mode or running apps like MongoDB, Postgres, Kafka, in addition to Watson, in addition to Cognos, on Cloud Pak for Data. So I hope that was useful. If you want to reach out, if you want to learn more, please contact us at portworx.com. All IBM customers can use Portworx for free in your Cloud Pak for Data environment. We call that Portworx Essentials for IBM, and so we encourage you to try Portworx out, to use it and let us know how we can help. Thank you so much for giving me the time today. Over to you, Deepak.

Thank you, Michael; thank you, Deepak, for this great presentation today. And this concludes our session. Thanks, everyone, for attending, and see you in the next session from the series. Bye.