Just over a year ago, Howard Boville left his job as CTO at Bank of America to join IBM as senior VP of hybrid cloud. Boville joined Cloud Wars Live to discuss the big changes he’s been driving at IBM Cloud, the booming market for industry clouds that he’s been aggressively championing within IBM, and the colossal market for industry-specific solutions. A recurring theme for Boville throughout our conversation is the opening of Chapter 2 in the cloud story, where large enterprises that have been caught up in purely technology conversations have flipped the topic to the one that will drive real and meaningful transformation: business outcomes. Boville has not only some great insights to share, but he’s also a gifted speaker who employs colorful language and humor to drive home essential points.
The Big Themes:
- Servicing large enterprises for 100 years: So it’s just a natural motion to actually have this form factor there.
- Reimagining what you do: Everything has entropy, and they calcify and atrophy, so you forever have got to refresh this. But to do that, you’ve actually got to then deconstruct it.
- De-risking digital supply chains: Don’t just think about the cloud capabilities. Think about the compliance controls that we have built over the past two and half years.
- Living in the future: I was going through our quantum computing capability with them, because we’re going to put that onto our cloud at the end of the year.
The Big Quotes:
- “You’re liberating my ability to get to all of my data, irrespective as to where it may be, whether it’s on premise in the IBM Cloud or in another cloud as well – which again is unique to us.”
- “I guess imitation is the best form of flattery, but the ability to actually write once and run anywhere, again, is uniquely differentiated to us.”
- “If you’re a technologist, it’s kind of like a candy store with the best assets you could ever imagine.”
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