With its debut this week, the IBM Edge conference in Orlando, FL is Big Blue’s opportunity to trumpet its storage offerings in an increasingly competitive market.  With EMC’s acquisition of Xtreme-IO rounding out the storage giant’s own flagship event last week at EMC World, IBM is finding itself in the necessary position to better market its storage solutions.  Here to discuss IBM’s goals around increased messaging for its new and existing products is Ed Walsh, who runs Storage Portfolio Strategy for the company.  Walsh stopped by theCube today with SiliconAngle founding editor John Furrier and Wikibon founder Dave Vellante to answer a few questions on IBM’s vision around storage, and how it fits into their larger, very broad portfolio of products and services (full video below).

“If you look at our porftofio, for analytics, big data, cloud, we’ve got it all,” Walsh exclaims.  “The challenge is, how do you pull it all together?  Edge is our premier storage event and how it interplays with the cloud and big data.  We’re working on how to get that message out.”

It’s a message that can get lost in the array of departments and product lines harbored under IBM’s capacious umbrella, and when it comes particularly to some of the rising trends around storage and big data, IBM lacks a central “figurehead” that’s leading the messaging around Big Blue’s market position.  The Edge event is an important step towards developing a soapbox for IBM’s messaging around storage in particular, but more importantly how storage plays with the rest of IBM’s portfolio.

To that end, IBM’s going after a coordinated cross-company play.  “Imagine what we can do around analytics and big data with our investment software,” Walsh says.  “That’s driven directly from the top.  What we’re seeing today is smarter storage, which plays upon our messaging around smarter planet and smarter computing, and showing how clients can use it.”

Smarter storage sounds like the perfect slogan to accompany Edge, but it’s at this point Vellante asks for an example product.  So Walsh explains:

“Smarter storage is efficient by design, self-optimizing and cloud agile.  Say you’re going to build a private cloud.  Where’s it come together for clients?  A good example is PreFlex.  Smarter storage is part of that overall offering.  To do that right is actually hard.  Everyone else took a shortcut.

“Clients asked to control and consolidate their environment.  What IBM did, which was a lot of hard work but answered the question, is allow you to bring in your environment, which could be VMware, Intel, etc., all with your interface.  A system, storage, a network, and management.”

Vellante acknowledges the importance of being able to bring together a series of sub-systems to address a client’s needs, as IBM’s massive lineup is much more extensive than just a hypervisor.  But will those capabilities offset how late IBM is to the game?

“I don’t think we’re late,” Walsh objects.  “Our marketing may be a little late.  We probably didn’t do the best getting the news out…we failed to make noise.  The key thing is we had it for the clients that needed it, and clients are raving.”

The conversation then turns to flash, another growing area of importance for the storage market.  With developments from Fusion-io, Violin and others, there’s an emergence of new flash architectures.  Furrier asks how this particular trend affects IBM’s vision for flash.

“Our vision is very clear.  Flash is gonna be everywhere.  Simultaneously in every tier of the architecture,” Walsh explains.  “The key thing is for software to do the core optimization of that.  You need coordination software across domains so if a server fails you don’t compromise data integrity.

“We see the same opportunity [as others], but we’re better positions.  We let you use whatever flash card you want, and we’ll do automatic optimization of the environment.”

To that end, IBM revealed a tier zero array that sits in the network, one of the first steps towards the company’s holistic approach to managing flash across the stack and enabling every tier to talk to each other in order to manage data storage, transfer, speed and backup.  Their Ultra SSD is IBM’s answer to Xtreme-IO, developed internally as a 12 terabyte device.  IBM’s ultimate goal is to not pigeonhole its clients around vendor-specific products.

Speaking on the larger trends in tech, which span the cloud, mobile, social and big data, Furrier then asks if IBM’s portfolio addresses “four horseman.”

“[We fit] into it all,” Walsh says resoundingly.  “Cloud first–this is where we’re gaining traction.  If you want to build a private cloud, you can do that.   In cloud, we have very strong offerings.

“Analytics–big data–we’re really tied together.  Flash is a natural extension of that…we have one of the biggest Hadoop offerings from our analytics team.  It’s not just about dropping off the software.  We’re helping you with applications and services and we’re the best positioned in the industry to do that.

“Mobile–that’s all about performance, scale and cost effectiveness.  We enable people to do cost-effective scaling.  For example, with flash we don’t build a separate card.  We leverage that [existing card].”

It’s evident that flash is going to be a big part of IBM’s storage offerings moving forward, so it’s not at all surprising that, when asked what his company’s plans are for the next 9-18 months, Walsh mentions flash and not much else.  “You’re going to see distributed flash offerings later this year,” he says.

“We’re going to help you around servers, networks and storage.  That same flash conversation plays into analytics and big data.  It’s not just the hardware guys, but how do you bring the whole idea together?”  Walsh hinted that we can expect related announcements in the coming months, especially towards the end of the year around December.