IBM + SAP: Experience = Speed | Howard Boville, SVP of IBM Hybrid Cloud

Jun 9, 2021

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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.

In this conversation, Boville shares his thoughts on the ongoing power of the IBM-SAP relationship, which is almost 50 years old, and on the essential need for deep industry knowledge.

The Big Themes:

We’ve done 6,500 projects: We’ve got 38,000 SAP practitioners. But we've actually got now the regulated cloud capabilities that allow customers to move forward with their projects.
They will run on different types of silicon: We have x86, we have Power, we have Z, and we also have Quantum, and that will become fully onboarded beyond research institutions onto our cloud at the end of this year.
You can start your digital transformation immediately: There are a lot of cases where we’ve taken two, three, four year projects down to two, three, four months.

The Big Quotes:

“But one other point I would make, which is again very important, is we don't see ourselves as competing head-to-head against the other cloud service providers.”

“The case of cybersecurity is that threat factor never stops, so you always need to be thinking through different ways to actually protect through breadth and in depth.”

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