Ed Walsh, VP Portfolio Strategy of IBM, recently sat down with Wikibon founder Dave Vellante to discuss the company’s infrastructure integration approach and its virtualization platform strategy.  It’s an important area of implementation for IBM as it straddles the cloud’s many outlets for storage, analysis and beyond.

Walsh highlighted various industries current trends about storage management, virtualization platform and infrastructure integration approach in a response to Vellante’s question on infrastructure developments are responding to current market demands.

“Companies can get better cost of ownership and more flexibility in infrastructure by integrating and bringing servers, storage, networking, virtualization, and management software together and create a robust platform,” Walsh said.

Walsh went on to talk about IBM’s Pureflex platform, an integrated system that brings together the infrastructure, systems management, networking, storage and application layer to create a cloud-ready, strong infrastructure platform. He notes that “IBM made a platform where you can run, compute, network, software management and also virtualization along with the appropriately configured operating system and middleware, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and PowerVM cloud environments.”

Virtualization combined with Integrated Service Management helps you manage your infrastructures efficiently, use your resources effectively, and gain the flexibility to meet ever changing business demands.

In a response to Vellante’s question on how IBM can virtualized external storage and improve automation, Walsh explains how IBM identifies patterns in workloads and applications, and codifies knowledge to automate systems and storage management. He said IBM automation tools can eliminate the need for a manual configuration of deployed workloads.

Walsh added that IBM optimized the entire system for the various components such as virtualization, network, systems etc., emphasizing that automation is driven by expert intelligence. He said IBM has a unique position for automation work, playing out where it’s most needed, like real time analytics of IO systems and SCG cash systems.

The addition of PureSystems using Pureflex technology offers a more efficient system design, plug-in capability to network based computing devices and automated system maintenance capabilities. The system creates its own built-in patterns, as well allowing independent software vendors to create patterns for data, software and other resources to be shared over a network.

IBM’s put a great deal of effort into its portfolio management tools, especially on the big data and mobile sectors with a few key acquisitions and product launches this year alone. PureSystem is one, delivering a PaaS environment for mobile management, while this week’s earlier acquisition of Tealeaf reiterates IBM’s dedicated interest in big data management and analysis tools.